Mary Coin

by Marisa Silver

  “Maybe we ought to see if Trevor wants that chair,” Ellie said.

  “If you’d rather me die on one of your nice sofas, I won’t argue with you,” Mary said.

  Ellie clicked her tongue against the inside of her teeth the way she did when she won an argument she knew she’d really lost. Then she got back to work. She kept up her chatter as she packed the boxes, laughing at the ancient eggbeater Mary had brought from Tahlequah.

  “You don’t throw out anything, do you?” Ellie said, holding up an iron with a frayed cord.

  “Why should I throw that away?”

  “It’s cheaper to buy something new than get it fixed. With my discount I can get you a new iron for twenty dollars.”

  “It works fine.”

  “This cord will kill you.”

  “The cord isn’t what’s going to kill me, honey.”

  Ellie’s eyes filled. Suddenly, Mary saw her little girl standing before her, willing herself not to cry when Mary criticized her for not helping to put up the tent, or when she had to wear Trevor’s shoes. Ellie tried to gather herself, wondering out loud whether she had cinnamon at home or if they should take Mary’s jar even though it was probably ten years old, and how long did Mary think spices stayed fresh, anyway? Mary said there was something called advertising and that sell-by dates just made you buy more of whatever you already had enough of. Ellie said Mary was a paranoid old lady and Ellie wasn’t going to kill her kids on account of ten-year-old cinnamon. By then she was crying.

  “Come over here,” Mary said.

  Ellie didn’t move.

  “Sit right down,” Mary said, patting her knees.

  “Oh, Mama.”

  “Do what I say.”

  Ellie shook her head, but Mary insisted, and Ellie sat down on her lap. Mary felt a hard twisting in her belly and stifled a groan. She had lied to the doctor about the pain.

  “I can’t remember the last time I sat like this,” Ellie said.

  “Getting you to cuddle up was like trying to trap a fly.”

  “I didn’t want to be a baby.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m sorry about all this, Mama.”

  “I know that, too.”

  Trevor came by after his day at the garage, still wearing his coveralls. Mary liked seeing her children in their uniforms. She had raised them not to be afraid of hard work, and each one of them had a solid job. Not every mother could say that. Trevor stood in the bedroom doorway watching as Ellie packed Mary’s clothes, while Mary sat on the stripped bed, worrying a mattress button. It was a good bed, and she’d grown accustomed to its particular contours, but it would have to go to the dump. Goodwill wouldn’t take mattresses for fear of bedbugs or worse.

  “Looks like you two got everything squared away,” Trevor said. He had a habit of reminding people that he was of no use to them. He’d had one wife who left him and another who was about to do the same. He was aware that it was going to happen but didn’t do anything to stop it because he knew that, big as he was, he couldn’t stand in the way of his life.

  “Those dresses. They can go to Goodwill,” Mary said, eyeing the contents of her closet. “All of them.”

  “You ought to keep some,” Ellie said. “What if we go out to a nice dinner? What if my boys manage to graduate high school?”

  “They’ll graduate just the same whether I’m wearing a dress or not.”

  “I can’t believe you still have these!” Ellie said, holding up the white patent-leather shoes Mary had worn to Ellie’s wedding. The pumps had made Mary’s heels blister, and she’d finally taken them off and walked out of the church in her stocking feet, upsetting Valerio’s family who weren’t happy about their son marrying a white girl to begin with.

  “Those can go, too,” Mary said.

  “Will you look at this?” Ellie said, holding up a felt hat with plastic fruit glued to the band. “Where on earth . . . ?”

  Mary could still picture Doris’s embarrassment when Mr. Winkler saw her staring at the red velvet hat in the window of his store in Tahlequah. He crooked his finger like he meant to pull her inside with an invisible hook. Mary was surprised when Doris let him have his way. She had never once in her life seen her mother submit to vanity, and the idea that Doris might consider the purchase struck Mary as so irregular that she felt frightened. Doris bowed her head when Mr. Winkler placed the hat on her as if she were receiving his blessing. He adjusted the brim, saying a bissel this way and a bissel that way and how ele-kant she looked even though Doris told him that if he didn’t stop lying to her she wouldn’t buy anything at his store ever again and she had girls who would need wedding clothes. She stared at herself in the oval-shaped mirror that stood on the counter. She tilted her head in a way that was unfamiliar to Mary and that made her realize that Doris had once been someone besides her mother. Doris’s cheeks worked like she was having an argument with herself, knowing how much money the hat cost on the one hand and feeling the pull of a shameful and impractical yearning. Finally, she glared at Mr. Winkler and slapped her money on his counter as if she blamed him for her foolishness.

  Mary had no idea what had become of that particular hat, but when she saw the one in Ellie’s hand at a yard sale years ago, she bought it, put it in a box and stored it on a shelf in her closet. Now, watching Ellie place the hat on her head and pose, hands on hips in an unconscious mockery of Doris, Mary began to understand what it would mean to live under her daughter’s roof. There were certain stories she would never tell her children, parts of her history she would not give away. How could she explain that the original hat sat untouched in its box beneath her mother’s bed because to have worn it would have been a personal pleasure Doris would have considered weak? How could she make them understand that a person needed to know that desire was still alive even when there was no reason for it to flourish?

  “Give it away,” she said, waving her hand dismissively toward the hat.

  When they finished in the bedroom, Trevor went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for the Goodwill truck to arrive. Ellie sat at the small table in the trailer’s main room and filled a box with the items Mary had chosen to keep, wrapping picture frames in newspaper. Mary sat on the recliner, her eyes closed, depleted.

  “Will you look at this?” Ellie said.

  “Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” Mary said.

  “It just never ends,” Ellie said.

  Mary opened her eyes. Ellie was holding out a newspaper, and Mary took it from her. There was the photo, now as part of an advertisement for a museum exhibit in San Francisco. Vera Dare: Framing the Truth.

  “Doesn’t it just make you mad?” Ellie said.

  “Oh, I don’t know, honey.” Mary could not tell her daughter what she felt. Over the years, she had listened to her children fret about the picture, complaining that it made it seem like Mary never stopped living in a tent and eating dead birds when she was living in a nice trailer in a decent trailer park and each and every one of her kids had a high school diploma. Ray and June had two years of JC, and Della would have, too, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so early, but you could never regret children no matter when they came. Once Ellie had even convinced Mary to write a letter to a magazine to tell them to stop publishing the picture. Mary pretended to care because it seemed important to Ellie, but payment or the lack of it was not what she thought about when the subject of the picture came up. She never talked about the baby, and her children knew never to ask.

  • • •

  The cranking gears were so loud that Mary thought the Goodwill truck was going to plow right through the wall of the trailer. She let Ellie help her out of the chair and they walked outside where the activity had drawn some of the neighbor children away from their street games. Mary knew it was exciting to watch people move away. She remembered this from the camps. People moved because they
were either on their way up or on their way down, and watching a family lash rolled mattresses to running boards made a person feel lucky or left out.

  The Goodwill men carried furniture and boxes from the house to the truck. They nodded politely at Mary but betrayed nothing in their expressions. She was sure they were used to all sorts of situations—clearing out the houses of the dead or the divorced or of people who had reached the point where giving up their favorite set of dishes or their television console was worth it for the negligible tax break. One way or another, these men’s work came at the end of hard times, and she imagined they had perfected transparent expressions to avoid hurt feelings.

  When the men finished loading the truck and Ellie was signing their papers, Mary walked back into her empty home. The sun had slipped away without her realizing it, and the main room lay in shadows. She started for the light switch but changed her mind. This was no longer her home. It was four walls wrapped around nothing. She looked out a window. Ellie and Trevor were loading up their cars with her suitcases. The porch lights from other trailers glowed. She felt a chill. She remembered nights of slicing cold, her kids tucked up into every nook and cranny of her. They breathed one another’s exhalations. Sometimes, tired as she was, she would untangle herself from them and slip outside. She would listen to the cicadas scratch, to the sound of a night bird. She could sense the blood pulsing in her veins. At night she had been most certain that she would survive.

  The truck pulled away. The curious children scattered. Trevor turned and gave Mary a wave and climbed into his pickup for the drive to Ellie’s house.

  “You ready, Mama?” Ellie said, standing at the trailer door.

  Mary dreaded being swept up into a future she had no control over. She remembered storms from her childhood, when the lightning seized the sky and she would stare out the window, waiting for the following thunder. If it did not come, she was left with a feeling that she’d asked a question that never got answered.

  31.

  She was due to start again on the treatments the following week. As if her children sensed the worst, they began to visit. Ray’s girls were sweet but shy around their grandmother. They had been kept apart from the family by Ray’s wife, who considered the Coins too low-rent for her aspirations. The woman read copies of Ladies’ Home Journal and looked impatient to leave, but Mary said nothing because Ray’s life was his own. June and Della were tearful, and it had been good to hug them. She was happiest when James returned from the road, but it quickly became evident that his siblings had left him with the dirtiest job.

  “Sell my car?” she said. He had taken her to breakfast at a diner where she’d ordered coffee and toast. She didn’t want her children to spend money on her.

  “I don’t like to think of you driving,” he said.

  “Don’t think of it,” she said.

  “You know what I see out there, Mama? Kids with open bottles, high as a kite. I pass an accident nearly every day.”

  “Maybe I’m the one who should be worried about you.”

  “Come on, Mama.”

  “Do you know what would have happened to us all those years ago if we didn’t have a car? We would have died. A car saved our lives.”

  “You saved our lives, Mama.”

  “How will I get around with no car?” she said quietly.

  “Ellie can take you places after she’s finished work. Valerio is home Mondays. And those boys can drive you wherever you need to go if Ellie doesn’t need her car.”

  “You want me to be driven around by a couple of ignorant teenagers? They don’t even remember to brush their teeth unless you remind them.”

  He smiled sadly. There was probably no one in the world who understood her more than James.

  “All right,” she said.

  • • •

  The day before she was due for her first treatment at the clinic, she stood by the window, watching Ellie yell at the boys about being late for school. Mary had given away her home and now her car. It was only a matter of time before she would give away her life. Valerio had already returned from his shift and was asleep. The television in his and Ellie’s bedroom was turned up the way he needed it to be so that the buzzers and bells of game shows would block out human sounds that might wake him. After Ellie and the boys drove away, Mary ate a bowl of corn flakes. Then she got her purse and a sweater and left the house. The pain in her stomach was bearable if she sucked in her gut and walked slowly. She waited at the corner bus stop. When the bus arrived, she told the driver she had incurable cancer, and even though it was not a scheduled stop, he let her off directly in front of the Goodwill. The store didn’t open for another hour, and the parking lot was empty. Green garbage bags filled with donations sagged against the double glass doors like people hunkering against the early-morning chill. One of the bags had burst open, as if someone had thrown it there carelessly. Mary thought about what she must look like to the commuters driving down the boulevard: an old woman standing outside the Goodwill next to this spill of yellow and pink and overwashed red, as if she was just another cast-off.

  At nine o’clock, a girl with fiercely lined magenta lips unlocked the glass doors and allowed Mary inside. The only other person in the store was a man busily arranging clothing on a circular rack. Mary wandered up and down the aisles. There were so many things on display that no one needed in the first place: garden gnomes and tricolored whirligigs from children’s birthday parties, a fondue set and a heart-shaped waffle iron that were probably used only a handful of times by their owners. Goodwill was a place of once pressing and now useless desires in the form of salt and pepper shakers that looked like a copulating couple, and a Day-Glo lava lamp.

  As if her eyes had a homing instinct, she began to notice her former possessions. There were her kitchen table and chairs. There was the lamp that stood by her bed, a price tag dangling from the cream-colored shade. It was a strange feeling to see these things that had once belonged to her, that she had touched and used and sat on. And now they felt no more hers than any of the other items lining the shelves of the store. She realized how silly the idea of owning was in the end. Even with children. The belief that they belonged to you was a lie you told yourself to make sure you would protect them until they were old enough to take care of themselves. But they were never really yours, and the very things you had done to keep them safe might have hurt them in the end.

  She walked over to a clothing rack.

  “Can I help you, lady?” The man she’d noticed was practically shouting, and Mary realized that he was wrong in some way. His mouth was loose and his words came out smeared.

  “I gave some things to the Goodwill a few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought I might find them.”

  “You can’t have them back!” he said. “No Indian givers.”

  “You know, that’s not really true what they say about Indians,” she said. The man looked at her with alarm and went off in search of the girl with the red lips.

  Mary sorted through the racks until she found one of her good dresses, the one she had worn to the christening of June’s little boy. On a wrought-iron plant stand that served as a display rack for rows of creased and worn shoes, she found her white patent-leather pumps. The red hat sat nearby on the bald head of a mannequin. She bought that too.

  32.

  When she woke, the Greyhound bus was well beyond Santa Clarita and heading toward San Francisco. She was exhausted. The expedition to the Goodwill and then the bus station had worn her down. She hoped she would have the strength to do what she had planned. She looked out her window. Rows of crops were covered with protective tarps. Others were exposed, their leaves green and ready. The pickers were small dots in the distance that didn’t seem to be moving. But she knew those people were in constant motion. Pick, put it in the sack, move forward. Pick, put it in the sack, move forward.

  The bus pulled off the freeway
at a rest stop. Mary used the break to call Ellie at work, but the girl who answered the phone told her that Ellie had left early for an emergency. Mary called the house. When Ellie heard her mother’s voice, she screamed so loudly that the person making a call at the pay phone next to Mary’s looked over.

  “We just spent four hours driving all over creation looking for you,” Ellie said. “We were about to call the police and file a missing-persons report.”

  “I’m not missing,” Mary said. “I’m right here.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t be more clever than you are,” Mary said.

  “Mama,” Ellie said, with the false calm she used when she was angry with her boys, “you cannot just run out on me like that.”

  “Honey, I’m not running out on anybody. I’m just taking a little vacation.”

  “I’m gonna come get you. I’m gonna call the others . . . I’m gonna . . .”

  But Ellie would do nothing, because despite Mary’s age and her health, the rules of the family had been laid down long ago when her children’s lives depended on a mute submission to her sharp looks or warning words. When Ellie was finished exclaiming over all the things she was powerless to do to her mother, she let out a sigh of resignation.