by Sara Taylor
The car looked even sadder when we came up on it like that, heeled over like a drunk, the paint flaking in places from salt and sun and too many rides. The man hooked it up and cranked it into the bed of the tow truck, took the white shirt from the window and hung it off the back end, commented, “Y’all sure make the most of your trunk space” as he started up the truck again, but still Ma was quiet, thinking, and I was worried that she wasn’t going to get us out of this, that it was Florida all over again and she’d be waitressing in sports bars for the next year while I struggled through school and tried not to die of boredom.
At the garage he left our car on the tow truck, went inside with Ma and filled in forms, looked over her registration, took her out back to show her the station wagon, then finalized things while I sat holding my breath in the lobby. At some point it had gotten to be mid-afternoon. I was hungry but didn’t want to say anything. I’d become resigned to the idea of outdoor sleeping when Ma asked to borrow the phone book, paged through the white pages, then took out her phone and dialed. The other end rung for a bit, then a voice came on the line.
“Margaret-Mary?” Ma’s voice was happy and nervous all at once. “Yeah, it’s me. Listen, I know it’s been a long time, but I need help. I’m stranded, just outside of . . .” She looked up at the mechanic.
“Gilead,” he supplied.
The voice on the other end was bright, enthusiastic, from what I could hear, and Ma’s face relaxed. The rest of the conversation on her end was a string of affirmative noises: “Uh-huh, yeah, sure, great. Thanks so much, I don’t know what all I’d do otherwise.” But when she hung up her expression was a bit grim.
“There’s a vending machine if you want something to tide you over, Alex,” she said as she plunked down in the chair next to me. “We might have a bit of a wait.”
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
“School friend of mine, giving us a ride to town.”
“She the person you thought would be keeping us company?”
“Nope. I wasn’t even planning on seeing her at all while we were here.”
I looked at her expectantly, but when she noticed she just shook her head.
“I’ll tell you everything once we’re out of here—you can’t keep a secret to save your life, kid. It shows all over your face.”
When Margaret-Mary—Mrs. Rue. to me—turned up to get us I was still sulking a bit over that comment, though I’d resigned myself to waiting for an explanation. We were both sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chairs, elbows resting on our knees, Ma skimming the paper but not really reading it—she’d been open to the stocks for fifteen minutes, her eyes fixed two inches above the top edge, unfocussed and flickering with the thoughts behind them. I sat facing her in the same position, working slowly on a bag of cheddar-cheese popcorn from the vending machine, letting each kernel stick to my tongue and melt slightly before chewing. Time had turned into lead. Then car tires crunched on asphalt and Ma looked up, and I twisted around in my seat to look, too.
A big van had pulled up, one of the ones that probably should take a special license to drive but is pretty much the biggest thing you can get before you need one. I could see the shadows of kids inside, looking at us, but they didn’t hop out, sat still, waiting. Ma creaked to her feet while the driver’s-side door creaked open, and as she stepped outside a tall, thin woman came around the front of the van, narrow hipped and narrow chested and wearing an ankle-length denim jumper despite the heat, her salt-and-pepper hair hanging long and braided down her back, a tiny lace bonnet pinned to the top of her head, and smiling all over her face. They collided in the parking lot, hugged and rocked and kissed on both cheeks, and I came out slow, suddenly shy, maybe of the tall strange woman but probably of all the little faces peering out the tinted windows of the van. They were talking a mile a minute, back and forth and all over each other, not bothering to finish whole sentences, and while Ma had been some nervous before all the tension was out of her shoulders now, like a cut rubber band. Then Mrs. Rue saw me over Ma’s shoulder.
“Glory, is that Alex?”
I nodded that it was, and she took hold of me and rattled on with all the things that people who haven’t seen you in a long while do: growth and how much like one or the other of your parents you look and how long it’s been since they saw you, and I just smiled and nodded like an idiot because I couldn’t for the life of me place this woman—which made sense when it came out that the last time she’d seen me I’d been naked except for diapers, into everything I could get my hands on, and shaved pretty much bald because of an outbreak of lice at the nursery I went to.
Close up I could see the stitching on the little gauze cap on her head, starched stiff as plastic or like it had been soaked in glue, carefully pinned in place but not serving any real purpose, as it was too sheer to keep the sun or rain off the little patch that it covered. The girls wore them, too. I got to sit in the back in the middle with them all looking but not looking at me, so I got a good chance to study them—the little hat things covered them better since they had smaller heads. The biggest was maybe eleven, the littlest chewed blocks and stared at me head on, so I guessed three or four, and I gathered from listening that the oldest three were back home still along with the youngest, who wasn’t walking yet. Ma didn’t have much to say—there were probably a lot of questions she didn’t want to answer—so she kept asking Mrs. Rue questions, and Mrs. Rue was more than happy to gush like a busted fire hydrant. They’d had their ups and downs, and two of the births had nearly killed her, one with pre-eclampsia and another with post-partum hemorrhage, but all had worked out for good. The younger ones got along so well and the older ones were such a help and her oldest daughter—seventeen, she was at home making dinner—was going to get married to the son of an elder in their church soon, which meant she’d have to go back to doing all the cooking and cleaning herself; the second daughter was eleven and clumsy-handed with it, but losing the help of the eldest was worth it for the grandchildren that would be coming. Life was all she’d ever wanted it to be.
The kids kept looking at me, side eyed or full on, depending on how old they were, and the little ones argued whether I was a boy or a girl. My boyness was proven in the eyes of some because I wore jeans, but my mother also wore jeans and she was most obviously not a boy because she had bosoms, though not much of them. And my hair was long like a girl’s—I hadn’t gotten around to asking Ma to prune it back in a while, was weighing the pros and cons of dreadlocks—and I didn’t have a beard, though that could just be, the oldest daughter proposed, because I wasn’t old enough to grow one yet.
I thought it might be fun to rock their world with the concept that boys could wear dresses, girls could wear pants, and it didn’t actually matter what a person had going on underneath their respective clothing, but I had a sense that sort of anarchy wouldn’t be tolerated by Mrs. Rue, and since we were somewhat reliant on her goodwill I decided to keep my mouth shut as much as possible.
Ma said it would be fine if Mrs. Rue just gave us a lift into town—she couldn’t guess how busy a full house must get and she didn’t want to foul up the routine—but it was coming up to dinnertime and Mrs. Rue insisted we stop over. We went through the town, which was small but spread out, as they talked about it, and Ma conceded to come to dinner as long as it really wasn’t a bother. I could feel my soul start crying as we passed a motel, I wanted to go to ground so badly. We came out the other end and went on and on, till we turned off at a mailbox and rattled down a long gravel driveway, and we were there.
I was done by then, over-tired, over-hungry, over-peopled and just ready for a shower and a real sleep, so I don’t remember much of that visit, other than feeling the agony of the seconds ticking by as though each one was being etched into my skull. They—all the kids—had chores to do, and buzzed around doing them. Ma and Mrs. Rue sat at the kitchen table, still talking but slower now, like Mrs. Rue was finally convinced that Ma wasn’t going to dis
appear, and drinking iced peppermint tea. The oldest daughter was cooking with the second one helping her—it was a big open kitchen—and every now and then Mrs. Rue would lean so as to get them in her line of sight and remind them how or when to do something. I didn’t know what to do so I sat in a corner of the kitchen with my back against the wall and carried on a one-sided conversation with the baby of the family, who was seemingly too young for a bonnet or to really be talking. None of the kids talked all that much, or if they did it wasn’t loud enough for me to hear. I imagine it was like snakes: they were more scared of me than I was of them, even though there were mobs more of them. So the kid just stood there in front of my tucked-up knees, staring at me and chewing her doll’s leg and no one seemed to think it was weird, or really even notice that I was there.
The kitchen smelled odd—not bad, just like a blend of spices that I’d never smelled before—and when they gave me a drink the water tasted weird too. When Mr. Rue and the two older boys came in we sat down to eat and even the food tasted funny, cooked and seasoned in an unfamiliar way and everything just a tiny bit over-or under-done because it had all been made in these massive vats like school food had to be. The adults were talking now, about life and politics and what was going on in the world, but I didn’t listen because the kids—except the oldest four—were still staring at me, so I was conscious of every breath I took and how loud it was, how the food mushed as I chewed it—it was mostly pasta, cooked the American way so as to be too soft—and how hard it was to keep the stuff on the fork and get it into my mouth neatly, so I gave up halfway through even though I was still hungry, because I just couldn’t stand to eat anymore with them watching me like that, and then I became conscious of the conversation at the other end of the table, and realized that, even though it would just sound like careful politeness to most people, Ma was having a really tough time keeping a lid on herself, temper or opinion, probably both. She didn’t usually bother, but she seemed to have missed Mrs. Rue and, unless we wanted to walk the miles and miles back to town and then hitchhike to the mechanic’s later, we had to stay on her husband’s good side. So Ma kept quiet.
There wasn’t any dessert, which I was thankful for, and we only lingered in our seats for about half an hour—the kids all hopped up and cleared away the dishes, leaving me alone at their end of the table while the talking went on—before the offer was made for us to stay the night. I don’t know if Ma caught the panic on my face, but she refused politely a few times, then they offered to have the oldest boy take us back to town so we could stay in the motel, and I was so relieved at this that I was downright happy to be back in the van.
When we got onto the highway I could see his face reflected in the rearview mirror every time a streetlight flashed by, not stony but set firm, like he never spoke. He did answer Ma’s friendly conversation, which read more like an interrogation—she’d never been good at small talk—but he answered as briefly as humanly possible, so I was pretty sure that Ma was as relieved as I was when he pulled into the parking lot of the Lazy 8 Motel and we said goodnight.
I swiped oranges from the lobby while Ma checked us in, then made a beeline for the shower once our door was unlocked. I’d expected that Ma would want a shower, too, or would at least stay up long enough to chat, but when I came out she was dead asleep on top of the blankets on one of the beds, still fully dressed. I got into the other bed, sinking into the mattress like water, decided that not even sex could feel better at that moment, and fell asleep before I’d finished the thought.
I woke up in the middle of the night—we always say middle, but it was probably closer to two a.m.—in that sudden but complete way that I sometimes do that feels like I’ve never slept before in my life and never will again. Ma’s bed was empty, but the front door was open a crack, one of her shoes in the gap to keep it from locking her out. I peeled my socks off to keep them clean and padded out into the cool blue moonlight to stand next to her, the cement of the balcony—it was one of those motels with all the room doors on the outside and a balcony running the whole way around—rough and pebbly under my feet.
She was leaning with her elbows on the rail, also barefoot with her hair down and wild, her undershirt and jeans hanging loose on her so that I realized she’d lost weight since we left home. The dark pooled in her eye sockets and collarbones, and she dragged slowly on her cigarette and breathed out even more slowly. The darkness washed her black-and-white, so from the back she could have been mistaken for my age, the white in her hair transmuted to starlight.
I stood next to her for a bit, not saying anything, just enjoying the cool and relative silence—cities are never silent, nor is the country, so we had a tinny mix of both kinds of sound keeping us company, the darkness a barrier between us and whoever else might be awake, giving us a bubble of muffled privacy.
“So . . . How do you know Margaret-Mary?” I asked. And for once in my life, Ma gave me the answer that I wanted the first time that I asked for it.
CHAPTER XIV
Ma met Margaret-Mary when she was called Mags, studied biology and gave herself bad perms in the bathroom of the freshman women’s dorm. She’d grown up in Nevada with very Catholic but very accepting parents, come back east to go to school, and liked girls about as much as she liked boys, but she kept that last fact under her hat pretty well until she knew that it was safe to mention it. She had short hair and dressed like Annie Hall and her favorite thing to do was kiss, though she didn’t go any farther than that with anyone because it would make the angels cry. She was a wide-eyed freshman the fall my mother came back from Michigan, and she was looked after for a year by Laura and Ma and the women they hung out with. Mags wasn’t a fool—she could handle herself in most rough situations—but she couldn’t take care of herself in the “Remember-to-eat-and-take-breaks-sometimes,-please,-for-the-love-of-good-sense,-Mags” way.
Then her dad died in a car accident.
She went home for the funeral, came back and tried to get on with work, and a few months later her mom kicked it, too. She had an older sister who handled the legal part of things, so all Mags had to do was handle herself, but she couldn’t quite manage that. They all tried to help her out, but there was only so much that they could do, so when she started going to church again they were relieved, because it meant that they weren’t the only people looking out for her. Even though she suddenly stopped talking to her then-girlfriend—who she’d gone much farther with than the minimum distance required to make the angels cry—they hoped church was helping, hoped that with enough church and crying and time she would find her feet and find a new normal.
It was only in retrospect that they could track the downward trajectory: Mass on Sunday became Mass and confession, then Mass, confession and Wednesday prayer meeting, which was when she cut her girlfriend out of the picture. Then morning Mass every day, and Bible studies and reading on her own, and it made sense because she’d grown up Catholic, all the religion was familiar and comforting, and making it to paradise was her only chance to see her parents again. Then, suddenly, Catholicism was not enough: Mary worship was idolatry, confession a replacement for Christ’s forgiveness; she had been wrong her whole life. The Catholics she knew were a bit stung by this, but they didn’t say anything; they were still hoping for a happy ending. No one knew that she’d stopped doing the assigned readings, stopped going to class, stopped sitting tests, stopped writing papers, stopped thinking about anything but death and God.
Mags started going to a different church, began wearing long skirts and covering her hair, and though she wouldn’t talk to them anymore they kept tabs on her as best they could, worried that she’d do something really stupid. They’d half expected her to become a nun.
Mr. Rue was touring churches, talking about the missionary work he managed—he didn’t go into the field himself, but sent people out and made sure they had a place to stay, the supplies and connections they needed. She fell for him like a house under the wrecking ball, and when he
went home to Texas she went with him.
After a few days of not seeing Mags leave her room her girlfriend went to the church, asked the right questions until a secretary told her that Mags had gotten engaged to a man of God and gone home with him to be married in the company of his people. They broke into her room that night, had enough of a rummage to determine that the important things—her Bible, her ID, the pictures of her parents that she stuck in the edge of her mirror frame—were missing. There was crying and wine, and talk of an intervention.
It was some months, though, before they managed, by saving a lot of their weed and movie budget and selling booze to underclassmen at a drastic markup, to get the cash together, to cram into my mother’s car and take the tediously long drive down to Texas. They didn’t have much time—it was spring break—and finding Margaret-Mary wasn’t easy. She wouldn’t talk to her girlfriend, at first wouldn’t talk to any of them as she’d been warned that her old life would try and call her back, that she would need to resist the temptations and the wiles of the evil one. Margaret-Mary was already pregnant with her first child—a son who had grown up and run away by the time we showed up, and so was not mentioned when we were introduced to them—and when they asked if she was happy she said that she was dying to self in hope of eternal life. Which didn’t sound like happy, but her husband didn’t hit her, even if he wouldn’t let her work outside the house or read anything that wasn’t about God, or wear trousers, or, the women suspected, say no to him about anything, so there wasn’t much they could do. It wasn’t nice, but they couldn’t find any definitive signs of cyanide in the Kool-Aid, so to speak, so they gave her copies of their phone numbers and home addresses, just in case, and left her where she insisted that she wanted to be left.