Joy Enough

by Sarah McColl

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate when people say I’m like my mother.”

  But the night after she died, it came up again. “You look just like your mother,” her friend told me at the dinner table.

  For a long time before she died, she no longer looked like herself. Late one night, I found her distraught in the living room, flipping through old photo albums.

  “I wish there were more pictures of me,” she said, crying.

  When her friend says this, I know he is not only talking about our faces, but of something inexact and iterative—my echoed laugh, how my lipsticks also curl into the shape of a shepherd’s hook, or the way I absentmindedly stand with my hands on my hips like an angry teacher.

  “It’s like she’s still here,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, looking as if he wanted to kiss me.

  IN OUR HOUSE growing up, my mother’s bathroom had a wall of mirrors outlined by globe lights like a movie star’s dressing room. She seemed to take her time getting ready to go out. She might slick her lashes with mascara, then lean back, read a few pages of a novel, and smoke a cigarette in her long ivory robe. It had a ruffle at the neckline. Hot rollers, lipstick, the crossing and uncrossing of her legs. There were purple spots on them, small ones like starbursts, and thick, raised veins that looked like knotted shoelaces trapped beneath the skin.

  The morning after a party. “I looked so beautiful last night,” she said.

  I was six, eating cereal. “How did you know?”

  She looked pleased as she lifted the kettle off the burner and poured boiling water over a tea bag. “I could see it in the mirror, and in other people’s eyes,” she said.

  THE MOTHER-APPROVED facts as she reported them to me, the ones her mother had not told her:

  You are so beautiful, so intelligent, and so talented.

  And: Someone will always be more beautiful, more intelligent, more talented.

  And: Someone will always be less so, too.

  “I think the healthily vain woman looks at her bare, God-given physical self, accepts it, shows her love for herself by making the most of her best features, and then gets on with living.”

  So let’s get on with it—the rest of the story, every tangible desire these two women can have.

  THE U-HAUL STOOD in the morning shadows cast by the twin trees outside our house. My mother’s ring had been pawned. The expensive rugs, the green felt-covered pool table, the Irish wake table with a slab down the center as wide as a casket—all sold. Inside the moving truck were the basics: beds, sofas covered in blue and white ticking with spare white slipcovers, the Crock-Pot, our clothes.

  A stranger stood bowlegged in our driveway, squinting in the June sun and chewing tobacco. Doyle owed my mother’s friend a favor. It must have been a big one, since paying up required driving a forty-three-year-old woman and two children, five and ten, from Texas to Massachusetts. My mother let Duncan and Katy, both teenagers, stay in Dallas for the summer. Doyle could be trusted with what valuables remained.

  He was a painter but moved art for money. He wore a stiff white cowboy hat. From the iron-creased legs of his Wranglers emerged the pointed toes of snakeskin boots. My father said Howdy, pardner in the country and to certain folks downtown, but I had never seen a real cowboy, and the only adult I knew who called herself an artist was Lindsey Russell’s mom. Everything about Doyle was an enigma.

  He pulled the sliding metal door at the back of the truck down like he was closing up shop. The four of us slid onto the seat of the cab, Bliss and me in the middle, my mother by the window. We pulled away from the curb with the nose of the truck pointed north, and behind us, my mother’s white Ford Taurus dangling from the back hitch like a figure standing at the railing of a caboose.

  Doyle switched the radio on, traveling the analog dial from one end to another. Country music, static, off again. I asked if we could turn the air conditioner up. When the windows were down, the humidity was like another body crowding us. Bliss slid off the hot black plastic bench seat into the roomy dark of the floorboards. By my mother’s sandaled feet and red-painted toenails, his Power Rangers argued heatedly back and forth before crashing into each other until someone toppled. Bliss made an explosive sound.

  We reached the state line. Texarkana is perhaps best known for a 1946 serial killer who struck couples parked on lovers lanes. But I knew “Texarkana” as a word I heard my father use on the telephone when he talked about his cases—the literalness of the place caught in my ear like a dumb tune. Where are we? Half here, half there, and nowhere soon.

  When we passed the birthplace of our new president, my mother and Doyle got to talking. Three hours in she still looked fresh, leaning her elbow next to the window of the sunbaked door, her red lipstick polished and the collar popped on her lavender polo shirt. She, for one, didn’t see Clinton’s sex appeal, she said. She’d met him at a campaign fund-raiser and found him red and sweaty. It was Al who was the real charmer, she said.

  Doyle laughed and pushed the gearshift forward, as long and black as a fire poker. The muscles in his forearms twitched. I had a yellow sports Walkman in my lap and the gray foam-lined headphones nestled on my ears. It looked like I was listening to REM’s Out of Time, but I had not hit play.

  In Tennessee, stopped at a gas station, the papers in the wire racks by the cash registers all said Conway Twitty had died. His hair was stiff and tall, as out of fashion as his name, I thought, with Elvis’s pomp but not at all handsome. Still, I was curious. I asked my mother to buy a copy.

  Doyle stood at the open driver’s side door with the creased map spread on his seat. His finger traced a line along the bottom of the state as he suggested something to my mother. That sounds good, she said, smiling. He refolded the map the right way, and my mother said I could have the window seat. They talked about the man who died and a woman he sang duets with. It was as if I’d entered a room to find people cleaning up after a party I wasn’t invited to.

  I had never seen a state like Tennessee. Even the long, flat stretches of interstate did not bore me, the medians flooded with yellow wildflowers. Texas in summer dries up like an insect husk, but Tennessee sighed its green warmth into the cab. I was quiet and daydreaming. One day I would be grown and decide things for myself. Tennessee was my favorite state so far.

  Late that afternoon, stopped at a brown, sun-bleak motel set in long afternoon shadows, my mother made tea in our room with her electric kettle while I sat alone on the edge of the turquoise pool, my feet dangling in. I so seldom felt weightless. The cement radiated the day’s heat through the seat of my shorts and on the backs of my legs. The tabloid was open beside me, and I was rapt with Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. Events of love and death were to me still sensation.

  It did not seem worth the trouble to change into my bathing suit only to swim alone. As much as I longed for solo girlhood adventures—I wanted to feel for myself the same independent pride I had for my favorite storybook heroines—at that time, I knew “alone” as an expression mostly of “forgotten” and also sometimes of “fear.”

  My mother and Doyle must have decided we weren’t in much of a hurry. We took the scenic route through the Smokys, the truck chugging up curvy roads that hugged the mountainsides. Clouds draped over the soft peaks, and we barreled in like children pushing through the back of a wardrobe.

  We stopped at McDonald’s.

  “I want a chef’s salad,” I said. My mother looked into my face, disapproving.

  “It’s too much,” she said. I didn’t know if she was talking about money or the amount of food.

  We sat in a booth by a window that looked out onto an empty parking lot. Bliss wore his Batman cape and handed my mother the toy from his Happy Meal. She opened the pouch and passed back the Joker and his purple roadster and kept talking with Doyle about Lonesome Dove. There was never an arc of quiet between the last word of her sentence and the first of his. I squeezed a packet of ranch dressing across the top of my salad in a zi
gzag. I thought this was how to get thin. Walking home at the end of the school year in my favorite lavender shorts, a boy I liked yelled “redwood thighs” up the street at me so everyone could hear. I loved trees, but I did not love that. Lunch seemed to last a long time. I ate each stick of ham, each piece of cheese, the gray-yolked hard-boiled egg.

  Each night we stopped at a single-story highway motel standing in the shadow of an overpass, the kind of place that cost thirty-nine dollars a night. The door to our room would spill into a parking lot. Did we only ever get one room? If the other bed was for Doyle, I never saw him in it. Mom, Bliss, and I lined up in one bed. I slept in a t-shirt that hung to my knees, and my mother wore her vanilla robe. Each night, she leaned against the headboard and raked an orange-paddled brush across her scalp. It pulled her loose curls into highlighted waves in the lamplight. The television hummed until sleep, laugh tracks and sitcom families seated close around a kitchen table. In the mornings, I opened my eyes to see Doyle silhouetted before the slats of the plastic blinds. The whole room was blue, his legs lean inside his starched jeans. His boots were already on.

  Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York. They discussed one book after another. Sophie’s Choice, A Bed by the Window, Anna Karenina, Beyond the Bedroom Wall. On I-95, The Prince of Tides sounded dark and thrilling. “What happened?” I asked. My mother shooed me out of the conversation. “It’s not age appropriate,” she said. Doyle looked at me with Sorry, kid sympathy, then continued with my mother. He had a red mustache, thick as a shortbread cookie.

  I stared back out the window, pretending I wasn’t watching myself in the side-view mirror. My face was round and ruddy, with a bob that fell to my chin and along my soft jawline. But my lips had a dark natural stain, noticeable enough that a teacher hissed at me in assembly to wipe off my lipstick. Along with red hair, it was what I had going for me. It wasn’t much.

  I counted billboards. Dollywood, divorce lawyers, injury lawyers, reminders from God, adoption hotlines, caverns ahead, country buffets now with salad bar. I hadn’t seen an armadillo since Arkansas but at night I loved the way the sharp smell of skunk entered through the air vents, shaking my senses awake like smelling salts. I didn’t want to miss anything. I saw a Volkswagen Beetle and punched Bliss in the arm. Slug bug red, I said. Slug bug white. The interstate traveled alongside oak forests and hardwood pine, black fences and paddocks with horses swishing their tails at glossy hindquarters. Branches of flowering dogwood reached toward the truck like an outstretched hand.

  In five days we crossed the country and arrived in another world. It was cool in the valley when we pulled into the driveway of my grandmother’s farm. Though the house was large, there was little room for us. Nanny had her hair done once a week on Spring Street, went to the Stop and Shop on Tuesdays, and said to keep our showers to three minutes. My uncle, who was brown from the haying, looked as if it pained the muscles in his face to smile at us. Doyle stacked our belongings in the fragrant barn, filling an empty stall where milk cows once slept. My grandmother cooked Italian sausages, tomatoes, and green peppers in a skillet, and we ate together at the kitchen table. The downstairs windows were open, and I wished I knew where my sweatshirt was packed. The air smelled mellow and green. We finished dinner in time for Nanny to watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. I lay on the deep carpet, sneaking one foil-wrapped chocolate after another out of a covered glass dish and reading People. On the cover, Shannen Doherty stared me down in stonewashed jeans and a black bra, a heavy cross hanging between her breasts. Her fiancé had filed papers with a judge saying she was so violent he feared for his life. That night, I slept with my mother in her childhood bedroom. Her senior portrait still hung on the wall.

  The next day my mother was driving Doyle to Boston, and because his return flight to Texas did not leave until the following day, he would stay overnight in a hotel. The round trip is really too long for a single day, my mother said. I saw her soft robe folded at the mouth of her unzipped bag. She would spend the night in Boston, too, she said.

  I sat on the stairs and watched the familiar parade of my mother walking from the kitchen to the car and back again. In our house, I had stayed in front of the television while Duncan left for pool halls. He returned with his jean pockets filled with rumpled twenty-dollar bills. When a car horn blared, Katy rushed out to a silver LeSabre driven by a senior girl with the top down, the words to “Roxanne” or “Red Red Wine” audible from inside. Each time the door slammed shut, I stayed home. Now Doyle had a knapsack over his shoulder, his hat on, and a thick hardcover book in his hand.

  “I dog-eared it,” he whispered, pushing the book across the step like he was passing me a note in class. “Don’t tell your mom.” I wrapped my arms around his neck. His whiskers were rough on my cheek.

  The car engine turned over, and I watched from the window as my mother and Doyle pulled onto the smooth blacktop of Sloan Road, edged in cattails and Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans. At the foot of the stairs, I split the book open on my lap to the single marked page of The Prince of Tides. The plastic library cover made a cellophane crinkle. Reading, I felt hot, panicked. My Barbie was having sex with Ken, but this was different. My eyes couldn’t follow the lines fast enough, and when I finished the scene, I read it again. Did I want it to stop or to go on? I wasn’t sure. All summer sounds—the low metallic rumble of my uncle’s tractor in the field, the gentle movement of the curtains, their pompoms bumping softly against the windowsill in the breeze, George Jones’s coaxing voice spilling out of the clock radio above the kitchen sink—all seemed suddenly vacuumed from the world. I was in on a secret I had wanted to know, and now I wanted to unknow it. That there was sex and then there was something else, and a man could wreck me in ways I hadn’t even known. A man could wreck anyone. I wanted to be noticed, but I didn’t want this.

  My mother returned from Boston the next day, breezy.

  THE JOB INTERVIEW parade required a costume for someplace darker, colder, fancier than home: sheer black stockings, low-heeled patent leather pumps, and a purple blazer with gold buttons. She returned in the evenings without the optimistic smile. I would live on white rice for a year, I said, if we could just move out of Nanny’s. We were both determined.

  With her first paycheck, we rented a little yellow house in town on Sabin Drive. It was a triumph. I slept in my own bedroom and liked to sit outside under the shady tree boughs that edged the property, brittle brown pine needles poking through my jeans.

  Then a boy dropped me off after the movies. We were “going out,” or “going,” as we had said in Texas. “This looks like a serial killer’s house,” he said, when his mother pulled into our driveway. That was the end of that sixth-grade romance.

  Yet I couldn’t unsee the paint peeling back from the white stucco in thin curls like pencil shavings; the ragged weeds that edged the front walk and driveway; the garage that stood agape, serving the neighborhood an unmerciful view of paint cans, bicycles, homeless furniture we couldn’t fit inside. The house itself was shaped like a trailer that had aspired to something more. Shame crept into our lives like algae bloom on a bay. The neighbors hated us, Nanny reported, and wondered whether they should call the police when Katy and I screamed at each other. Somehow I had only noticed the crab apple tree in the front yard with a rough, weathered rope swing, and how I could ride my bike to the library on Main Street, or walk to the end of our dead-end street, cut across a field, and arrive in the rear of the art museum. Free admission.

  My mother was less free to roam. Her long commute crossed a mountain range and was even slower in the snow. She counseled troubled kids, and then in the evenings, there we were: the TV on, the spaghetti pot in the sink, the bottle of Wild Turkey missing. Duncan’s cutting out pages from lingerie catalogs in the basement, and Katy’s running up the phone bill in her room. Bliss plays video games, Sarah chronicles prepubescence in a pastel diary with lock and key. My mother slides out of her shoes and sleeps on a bed tucked into the u
ninsulated landing of the back stairs. We are crowded, and we are lonely.

  She made lists for reassurance. Here’s all we needed: a table with a chair for each family member, a bed for each of us, too. Bicycles for those who wanted them, library cards. Her signature extras: red geraniums on the windowsills, a blue and white teapot. A tiny, framed watercolor landscape arrived in the mail painted by Doyle. By this count, we were doing all right.

  But by less material measure, I think if she had not had us, she would have laid down on that bed and never gotten up. I don’t remember her eating or laughing or smiling during this time—I don’t remember her much at all. Her presence moved through the house like a fog, appearing on Sunday nights in plastic containers filled with chicken Rice-A-Roni and steamed broccoli for us to reheat for dinner during the week, and in the unopened pack of toilet paper placed under the bathroom sink.

  POOR RICK, Nanny said. Marrying a woman with four children. He didn’t see it that way, so I think that reveals something about Nanny.

  My mother’s first love, a man with the bearing of a country veterinarian, was about to become her second husband. It snowed so wildly the night before the wedding, guests traveling from across the state were unsure they would arrive in time for the morning ceremony. We woke to a world shimmering and white, the streets blanketed and still.

  Her wedding suit was damask paisley in peacock blues and black with a soft velvet collar. Beneath the nip of her waist, the jacket flared into a peplum. She looked like a queen in her winter robes. I had wondered about her first wedding dress. She said it was green, but there were no photographs from the day she and my father eloped, and moths ravaged the gown until it was nothing but a fishing net.