by Lynne Hugo
I hadn’t done it for a long time, but when Rog lifted the covers, I slid next to him and lay with my head in the hollow between his arm and shoulder and his arm around me. I put one of my arms across his chest and pulled myself close to him.
“Don’t go,” I whispered into his ear, maybe an inch from my mouth. “Please, Rog.” I began crying again, stifling it so as to remain as soundless as possible. I pressed as close to him as I could as though to attach him to me for the permanent alleviation of loneliness. Little did I know then that such a thing is not among the blessings available, no matter what anyone says.
Roger answered with a pressure as he moved his thumb on my upper arm and whispered an accompaniment to each thumb stroke, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” But I needed much more.
“Will you stay home?”
“Yes, Ruthie, yes. It’s okay, I’ll stay.” As the thumb stroke refrain became that specific, I started to relax. Finally, we were both quiet.
“You know, we can just stay together. We could, like, you know, get married and take care of her together.” I wasn’t in the least bit serious, not about the getting married part, anyway. The part that was serious was that there was no way out.
He knew what I meant. His voice was teasing, but I knew he knew what I meant. “Yeah, okay, great idea. We can…”
There was a slam and a click and the overhead light flooded the room. Mother stood in the doorway, her eyes and hair wild, her nightgown voluminous as though she could call down wind and storm at will. “Filthy children,” she shouted. “Filthy, filthy, filthy.” Instantly she had crossed the room and jerked me from the bed onto the floor. She kicked me and pointed to the door. “Get out of this room and don’t let me ever catch you here again.” I tried to scramble to my feet, but she kicked me again, and I toppled over. “Get out,” she screamed, and even as I tried to get up and out, she drew her foot back another time, and I knew this could go on forever.
3
I STILL LOOKED TO FIND A REASONto believe. And I clung to Roger’s promise, though after that night we rarely dared be alone or talk between ourselves. As the school year progressed, Roger stayed out more, but he still did his part with Mother, and I trusted him.
Roger and I had become less cheerful about all the moving Mother insisted on as we’d lurched further into our teens. God routinely wanted us to “strip down,” remain undistracted by material things, and Mother’s version of moving involved abandoning much of our property. The consistent exceptions were six cardboard boxes of hers, always carted place to place. They contained our heritage, she said, and that we’d understand someday. Maybe she’d really kept the found treasure collages we’d thought had been left behind in one move or another, or, Roger’s theory, they contained our fathers’ bones. Roger and I often knew nothing about a move until one morning, Mother would announce that we should bring everything home from school because we’d be moving that night.
Before the beginning of Roger’s senior year, The Word came down again and we moved over the Massachusetts line into rural northern Connecticut. Mother found us the bottom floor of an old house divided into two apartments by the elderly couple who owned it, and doubtless, needed the income. (Mother confided to people she met that she’d graciously taken in Mr. and Mrs. Jensen. I could read the confused expressions of the neighbors; Malone was a small town and Mr. and Mrs. Jensen had been in that house for most of their fifty-two married years.) The place had a certain run-down charm, with bay windows and front and back porches. The Jensens had old, white-painted rockers on the front porch, which was theirs to use, while we had the much tinier back porch. We occasionally sat out there in descending order on the steps, Mother above Roger, Roger above me, when August nights settled like a sticky quilt.
The inside floors—except for the chipped kitchen linoleum on which languished long-outdated appliances—were scuffed hardwood, which could have been spectacular if sanded and refinished, but Mother set down gray-blue rag rugs from Goodwill, which was also the source of our motley furniture collections. The main problem with the apartment was that none of the rooms downstairs had been intended as bedrooms, so we had neither privacy nor closet space. Mother had the frontmost area of the house, and her things went into a small, freestanding wardrobe in the room which also held her dresser and double bed. Roger and I slept on open-out couches in what had once been connected sitting rooms partially divided by open archways, but he and I might as well have slept on separate planets. Our clothes were kept neatly folded and stuffed behind our respective sleeping places. The only regular doors were on the bathroom, where a claw-foot bathtub stood on a carpet remnant aged to colorlessness and curled back as though recoiling from the drafty corners, and a swinging door Mother kept propped open into the kitchen. Mother’s room had a pocket door between it and the area where I slept. No need for secrets in our family, she said. There was no escaping one another. We were God’s found.
MOTHER HAD BEEN DEPRESSED for several weeks and life was hard. We were growing frightened; our jockeying to cheer her was either ineffectual or unaccountably worsening her mood day by day. I threw myself into being quietly helpful with whatever she roused herself to do, and the evening she decided to examine her life, as she put it, I was there to help. I was accustomed to spending weekend nights at home. Mother felt lonely and sad about how she’d been cheated out of a normal girlhood if I went out, and anyway, I was afraid of boys other than my brother, having been vigorously warned about their lack of awareness of the sacred spiritual nature of marital intimacy. Roger, who fit himself with friends more easily than I, was at the football game.
I couldn’t believe it when she took most of the oft-moved boxes that held our heritage from the hinged window seat beneath the bay windows. They were taped shut and even Roger had never had the nerve to snoop. He was going to be really ticked if I found out something about my father while he was at a football game.
She pulled the heavy tape off the boxes, the larger ones, and began opening them randomly. For the first time, I saw what they held: old clothes. Item by item, she took out each musty piece and told its story, ruminating about how awful she’d felt in one dress or another, like a fat hag, she said. “And I wasn’t, then,” she whispered, face quivering. I gleaned that she believed no one had told her she was beautiful and because of that, she’d missed the knowledge herself. She held dresses against her bodice and cried for the young woman who had missed her own loveliness. Tears rolled off her chin onto the tailored V necks tucked between the great padded shoulders of the forties. Things softened a bit when she got into the fifties’ printed shirtwaists with full skirts, and she wondered aloud if a few of these dresses weren’t still wearable. I’d worried she might come to that, doubting that any would fit her—she was overweight by a good sixty pounds. These wide-skirted dresses held more hope than any of the earlier, sleeker fashions, and I cast about for the one that looked largest. At the same time, she pulled out a long-sleeved, full-skirted chocolate-brown jersey dress with a strip of fluffy white fur all around the low-cut neckline.
This is the truth: even as I recognized that by normal standards she was overweight, I saw my mother as beautiful. Her body was, to me, in the way of a Botticelli painting, classically, truly beautiful. My own very thin, small-boned frame was compared unfavorably to hers by both of us; I was not “womanly,” which, roughly translated, meant I had negligible breasts. When she said she was too heavy, it was my job to disagree with her, and in a strange way, I was able to do this honestly, to tell her she was beautiful, I mean. She had short brown naturally wavy hair, unmarred complexion, blue eyes, straight white teeth and a voracious bosom, the inaccessibility of which, she claimed, put men into straitjackets of frustration. I glossed over her pinched nose and the way her chin led her face. Long after the last time I saw her, when I was grown and had gained a little weight, I began to like greenish eyes and the distinction of my red-soaked hair, but she was the standard of perfection then.
&n
bsp; This particular dress was horrible—the fur around the neckline a scant step above clownish—but this was the one she chose to try on. Stripping to her bra and underpants, she wrestled the material over her head and pulled the skirt over her substantial rear. The jersey clung to the rolls of flesh that obscured her waist, and the fur, resting midway down her cleavage looked absurdly out-of-place on a grown woman. She slipped on a pair of brown heels and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. I braced myself, but something that would have been bizarre had it not been so welcome happened then: my mother smiled.
“Well, maybe the old girl still has a little something left,” she said coquettishly twirling in front of the mirror, then looking back over her shoulder at me. Although Mother liked to test us, she’d been much too down for this to be a trick, and I quickly shifted into gear.
“Mother, you look stunning. You are so beautiful,” I said.
“Do I really look okay?”
“Not okay, Mother, beautiful, just beautiful.”
She began to walk like a model on a runway, back and forth from the full-length mirror in her bedroom into the living room and back to the mirror, where she would turn and examine herself again. Her face was lit by God’s lamp behind her eyes, and shoulders consciously back, she moved with an artful glide. I pushed on, sensing what she wanted.
“I don’t see how you could ever have missed that you were beautiful. You simply have to see it for yourself once and for all.”
“Yes, I guess I shouldn’t have needed people to tell me, should I?” This was a crucial spot. Now I know: I should have told her it wasn’t her fault, that her parents and the people around her had been cruelly insensitive, but she’d have to believe it now and recognize that she was still as beautiful as she had ever been. I missed the turn.
“No, you shouldn’t have needed people to tell you. I wish you’d looked in the mirror and seen how wrong they were.”
At first she liked that approach, affecting a childlike manner, wanting to be scolded for failing to recognize the inevitable link between Love and her own loveliness. Led on by my success, I continued in the same vein. Within ten minutes, a magical transformation had occurred. My mother had risen from the dead to laugh, smooth her hands over her breasts and hips and say the old girl’s still got it, and I was the witness God put there to say that not only did she have it, but she wasn’t old.
Then the phone rang, and Mother picked it up. I panicked when she sank into a chair, the lilt in her voice fading, and I realized it was Grandmother. I must have gone into overdrive, scowling, continuing to gesture and mouth the word beautiful to remind her that she’d wrongfully let people such as Grandmother cloud her vision.
At first it worked. She smiled and nodded at me and straightened in the chair. I should have stopped then, but I didn’t. A moment later, she thrust her arm at me, an angry, dismissive gesture, and shifted in the chair, swinging her back to my face.
Right then, Roger came in. I hadn’t even heard the car that left him off, nor sensed the deepening evening beyond our kitchen door. I could see him trying to read the situation, but it was much too complex. Mother slammed down the phone.
“I’m sorry, Mother, I just wanted you to remember…” was as far as I got.
“She’s berating me for something that wasn’t my fault,” she shouted to Roger.
“No, I was telling her she shouldn’t have listened to….” Desperately I tried to fill Roger in, which further enraged her.
“Listen to you, twisting the Truth. You’re just like everybody else, aren’t you? Leave me alone,” she screamed, tears streaming, and went into the kitchen.
I started to follow her, but Roger signaled me not to. I slunk back into the living room unbelieving the turn things had taken, hoping against all experience that I could still redeem the fleeting joy.
I heard her voice, agitated, and then the teakettle’s keening wail over it. I guessed Roger was making her a cup of cocoa, trying to settle her down. Outcast, I lit one of Mother’s votive candles, folded myself into a ragged Salvation Army chair and prayed. I prayed wildly and unreasonably, begging to cash in any chips I’d accumulated with God, that in a moment they’d come to get me, smiling, saying everything was all right.
I had begun pacing to the jerky cadence of Mother’s voice and the occasional soothing overtones of Roger’s soft baritone. When I couldn’t endure anymore, I crept to the kitchen door, which Roger had swung shut behind me, and felt its slight give as I put my ear against it.
“But Ruthie was just trying,” he was saying, “to help you realize…” He was interrupted by a long screech, chilling, a woman’s scream beyond rage to something otherworldly, an unidentifiable animal sound. I heard Mother’s heavy footsteps and jerked back a second before she crashed through the door, the teakettle in her hand. It trailed a hissing stream as she flung it at my head in the same instant Roger tried to grab her arm from behind. His lunge, and grip—though she tore loose easily—skewed her aim, and the kettle shattered the window behind me before it fell to the floor, spewing steaming water. The hand that had held the kettle continued the trajectory of its arc and Mother swung her body around after it, slamming Roger in the face with her wrist and hand.
She screamed and, clutching her wrist, kicked Roger in the groin. He doubled onto the floor, gasping and gagging. She turned then and spat at me, deliberately, as though in slow-motion. Time instantly leaped up again, frenetic and out of control. She pushed past me and out the back door, snatching her car keys from their hook on the kitchen wall. Only a moment later, I heard her tires spinning on the loose gravel of our driveway, then, out on the road, the accelerating roar of the engine gunning down the night. She did not come back until the next afternoon, but she did come back. She always did until the time she didn’t, but there was a lot of sky left to fall before then.
4
AFTER THAT, WHO COULD BLAME HIM for breaking his promise? Who except I, that is. Of course, Roger went. Mr. VanFrank, the guidance counselor for the senior class in our new school, had picked up right where Mrs. Klimm had left off, starting after Roger with his bewitching encouragement as soon as our transcripts arrived. I think Mrs. Klimm might have even called him, or maybe she sent a letter. Why else would he have come to talk to Mother, who smiled and nodded and agreed, and then disappeared for two days?
Buoyed by his first success, Mr. VanFrank came back with a financial aid form, filled it out for Mother by asking her questions and put it in front of her to sign. Because it came to seem inevitable, and because Mr. VanFrank cagily praised her for having done such a fine job preparing Roger for college and the lucrative employment opportunities that would follow, Mother slowly came around. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that the University of Colorado, which had the country’s only program in some esoteric combination of geology and engineering and a phenomenal grant package for Roger, was some eighteen hundred miles away. By the time his graduation was at hand and everything was settled, Mother had established that the brilliant notion of Roger’s higher education had been hers, and that she had insisted he apply, overcoming his objections to leaving home. When Mr. VanFrank was at the door to leave after visiting Mother to get the financial aid application filled out, he had turned and pointed his index finger at me.
“Keep those grades up,” he said, and winked. “You’re next.”
“When cows fly,” Mother had said to the door closed behind him, and shut herself in her room with a furious door-slam, a sound to splinter hope into equal shards of envy and resentment.
THOSE SHARDS WERE POKING sharply out of my heart when Roger left for the long drive across two-thirds of the country. Mr. VanFrank had talked to a car dealer who was in the Lion’s Club with him, and the money Roger had saved working the grill and fryer at the diner during his senior year was miraculously enough for a car that had been used as a repair loaner for five years. Its rivets were bulging; he’d crammed in everything he could, knowing Mother would abandon anythin
g he left behind if we moved. The car reminded me of the Oakies moving west in The Grapes of Wrath. Roger hugged me close to him but the shards jutted right through my skin, and I pulled away.
“I’m sorry, Ruthie,” he whispered, glancing sidelong to gauge Mother’s range of earshot. “I swear I’ll come back, we’ll stay together. You can call me.”
“Yeah, during the many hours when I can speak freely, I’ll call you.”
“Pay phone?” he whispered.
“With all my spare money.”
“I’ll send you money…” he said, and with that he was commandeered by Mother who was issuing her final instructions with tears and a cobra’s embrace. And then he was gone.
SEVERAL GRIM DAYS PASSED with Mother alternately banging throughout the house and setting objects down in a way to let me know she wanted to shatter them, and sliding, ghostlike, silent and sad, from bed to bathroom and back. Those days she had me call her students’ parents to tell them she was sick and cancel their lessons.
One morning in the fourth week of August she came into the kitchen and asked when school started.
“The day after Labor Day,” I replied, the same day school has started every year since kindergarten in every school I’ve ever been in, but I’d never have said the second part.
“Really? Good. Then we have time to get away on a little vacation.” She sounded cheerful. I would have climbed into the car without clothes or questions had she told me to, but she went on to fill me in. “Lorna Mack said that her brother-in-law is painting their house in Truro, that’s on Cape Cod, you know, and her husband can’t stand him, doesn’t get along with him at all, that’s why they came home early. The house is empty, because the brother-in-law lives in Provincetown. He’s just painting the outside, I guess. Anyway, she said we could use the house for a few days if we wanted.” Lorna Mack was the parent of Mother’s best student, Hannah, the one with actual talent, and Mother had brought her a good distance in the year we’d been there.