All We Had (3 page)

But the only thing we took that I really wanted weighed a thousand pounds. In the patch of dirt and dead grass in front of Phil's building I'd found a cement statue of the Virgin Mary. She was lying on her back with bird shit on her forehead.

When I grow up, I want to be a preacher so I can set the record straight. Religion is a hoax and when I read the Bible, I really
did not
like it. The characters were all flat, the dialogue was bad, and the imbalance of power cheapened the plot. In my version, Mary would play a bigger role. She'd rise up, take control, and set the world straight. As it is, she's just written right out of the book, which for me was like killing off the movie star in the very first act. I wrote a paper on this topic for class and got an A-plus-plus on it.

I collected Mother Mary figurines. I had a string of plastic Mary lights that blinked on and off when you plugged them in. I found a porcelain one on the street in perfect condition, and I had a teeny-tiny hand-blown glass piece that I kept in a cardboard jewelry box. My favorite, though, was the Mary I had glued to our dashboard. Her eyes rolled back into her head as if she found life endlessly boring. There were others, but none as big as the one lying in our trunk.

The streetlight cast her cement-gray complexion a cold and stony blue. A swirl of lingering smoke drifted by her. A dog
barked in the distance. A breeze kicked up on the freeway behind us and sprinkled Mary with dust. I picked up a rock and threw it just to watch it sail through the air and hear it drop.

“I'm sorry, Ruthie.” My mother laid a hand on my shoulder. “But the weight of her is dragging us down.”

We left the Holy Mother facing the road. Backlit by a line of trees, her outline glowed. She gazed upward toward heaven—waiting, it seemed, for a ray of light to deliver her from evil and take her home.

CHAPTER THREE

Flesh

H
ours passed and we kept going. We made it to Utah that first day. It was almost midnight when my mother got off the highway and pulled over on an empty country road. She turned the key, the headlights went out and a slick of flat black inked out all the stars. Not a single pinprick of light showed through.

Halfway in a ditch, we'd spent the night at an angle and in the morning I was crammed up against my door. I sat up and looked around disoriented. An ancient billboard loomed in front of us, scraps of old ads peeling up in scales of faded color. Four rusted posts sat in hooves of crumbling cement like something prehistoric.

My mother was still sleeping when a dark cloud above us tore open and the rain fell. It surged and swelled and streaked across the sky in angled sheets of gray. But as quickly as it fell, it evaporated. Then it stopped. The road sizzled in its wake and a hush of steamy fog roamed across the earth. A flock of birds landed in the field next to us and started pecking for worms.

My mother finally woke. She stretched and yawned in her seat. When she was done, she tapped me on the thigh, as if to say she was glad to see me. With her foot, she pushed open her car door and got out.

She stood on the side of the road, looked out at the field, and stretched a bit more. She was wearing her usual outfit—tight jeans, high heels, and a tube top.

The first rays of sun pierced the clouds, she lifted her face and parted her lips as if trying to drink the light. She reached inside her pocket for a hair tie, twisted her hair into a bun, then hoisted up her tube top. When she stepped off the road, the birds rose up. Dipping their wings in unison, they banked in the air and in one synchronized motion, they landed on the edge of the billboard. Lifting their little rumps, they settled down, then looked around like they were bored.

My mother walked a few feet into the field. She unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them down, and squatted on the ground.

She and I almost never had privacy—from each other or anyone around us. The nicest place we ever lived had a shared bathroom without a door. She'd stopped caring about stuff like that. “Even the queen shits,” she'd said to me once when she was squatting in a bush.

My mother didn't know it, but she deserved a nice bathroom. If I could give one to her, it would be grand and made of marble, suitable for Cleopatra. Pillars would rise at the corners of a sunken tub. I would travel to the Dead Sea, by camel if I had to, just to bring her back an urn of healing salts—if only for twenty minutes, she could float weightless in a bath of warm water, relieved of all her pains.

A sliver of light cut across my mother's back. She reached
between her legs and pulled her tampon out. She flung it by the tail as if it were a rat and replaced it with a new one.

“Hey,” my mother said when she made it back to the car. “You ready?”

She settled in her seat, stuck the key into the ignition, looked at me, then stopped.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

A lump rose in my throat. My eyes welled. “I'm just hot.” If there was one thing my mother never wanted, it was pity.

“Here.” She reached over the seat, felt around, then pulled up a half-filled bottle of water and handed it to me. “Have some.”

She went to go turn the key again.

“Mom?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me.

I searched her face. The lines between her eyebrows were deeper than I remembered. Her lips were creased and chapped. Her red fingernail polish was almost all chipped off.

“Nothing.” I swallowed hard.

She glanced at me and sighed. She smiled just a bit. Then she reached across the seat and stroked my forehead.

“You'll cool off,” she said.

The wheels spun. The car rocked back and forth, and with a grinding grunt, we drove out from the ditch and into the sun.

The heat pummeled down in blistering rays. The earth looked left for dead. The “deluxe” air-conditioning in our car never worked. Even at sixty miles per hour, the wind through our open windows couldn't cool us off. The highway threaded through a quilt of bone-dry barren fields. Wavelengths of telephone wires
were punctuated with sickly looking birds.

We drove clear across Utah and through the mountains of Colorado. We slept on the side of the road or in rest areas. Twice the cops woke us up and told us to move on. We took sponge baths in gas-station bathrooms, we ate at McDonald's, and when we got sick of that we ate snack food: chips and Cheez-Its, Doritos and nuts. And always we drank Diet Cokes.

Halfway through Nebraska on I-80, my mother's toothache flared up. She'd had one on and off for months. When it hurt, it hurt so bad she had to wear sunglasses even in the dark. The toothache had always gone away, but this time was different. Her mouth was bleeding and the pain went all across her face.

She stuffed napkins and toilet paper inside her cheek. She stopped the car and lay across the seat with her head upside down out the door. We bought her bourbon and Advil—a combination, according to her, that could cure almost anything. But nothing could stop the bleeding, and the pain was only getting worse.

My mother found a gas station, parked the car, and pulled me into the dingy bathroom. She held the edge of the sink, squeezed her eyes shut, thrust her wide-open mouth at me, and waited there. I had no idea what she was doing until she opened one eye, then both, and said, “Don't just stand there. God help me and pull it out.”

Except to say things like “God, this sucks!” or “God, I hate this,” the only time my mother ever mentioned God was to say that he'd given her good teeth. Now it seemed she was losing even that.

“Ruthie,” she pleaded when I didn't move. She grabbed my hands and held them. “Please. I can't do this myself.”

Her face was swollen. Her cheek throbbed in and out. Her
eyes were bloodshot, her skin blotchy and red. There was a scab above her brow, from what, I couldn't remember.

She dropped my hands, opened her mouth, and squeezed her eyes shut again. And I realized I had no choice. I had to pull her tooth out and I had to do it fast.

I held my breath and looked inside her mouth. It was wet and red and her tongue was swollen. It smelled like cigarettes and bourbon and blood. My knees shook. My vision blurred. Her mouth zoomed in and out of focus, the scale of it shifted. It felt as if I might lose my balance and tumble deep down inside my mother's throat.

I steadied myself on the edge of the sink, closed my eyes, and swallowed. A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and settled in the corner of my eye. I pushed my sleeve up and like a farmer reaching inside a cow, I stuck my hand into my mother's mouth. The tooth was in the back. It was loose and slick with blood. The stench of someone else's bowel movement lingered in the stifling air.

“I'm sorry, Mom.” There were so many things to be sorry for. But this was how we lived—with pain and foul smells.

I clenched my jaw, held my breath, and dug my fingers underneath her gum. The tearing of her flesh was audible. My mother moaned. But I knew I couldn't stop. I braced a hand on her shoulder and yanked. The tooth flew out behind me. She stumbled backwards, hit the wall, slid down, and landed with her legs spread-eagle on the floor. Her eyes rolled back, her head fell forward. She took one long gasp of air. A line of bloody saliva ran down the corner of her mouth. The back of her head started bleeding where she'd hit the wall.

“Mom!” I fell to my knees in front of her and shook her, but
there was no response.

I took her head and with my bare hand, applied pressure where it was bleeding.

“Wake up, Mom. Please.” I cradled my mother and rocked her.

I did not believe in him, but God, they say, is everywhere. I looked around this nasty bathroom. “Please,” I prayed to him. I lived in fear of losing her. Every time she closed her eyes to sleep, I worried she'd stop breathing.

I was tough. I almost never cried, but when my mother groaned I started weeping.

“It's okay,” she said. She reached a hand up and held my cheek. “I'm here.”

I folded up some paper towel into a tight square and had her bite down hard on it. When the cut on the back of her head stopped bleeding, I helped her up and washed her hair.

She splashed her face with water and I rinsed mine, too. We braced ourselves on the edge of the sink.

“Come here,” she used to say when I was a kid. Pressing our cheeks together in front of a mirror, she'd first pucker up and examine her pout from all angles. Then she'd hold my face and study my lips.

“Yup, you got my mouth. And let me see those eyes.” I'd raise my eyebrows in an effort not to blink. “Yup,” she'd say, and drop my face. “When you get older we are going to look just like sisters.”

But I could never see it. She and I were opposites. I had short,
coarse hair; hers was long and silky. Her figure was curvaceous and feminine, mine was lean and hard. I wore jeans with high-tops and she wore hers with heels. But in the dismal light of that bathroom, as we looked at each other in the mirror, I saw a sadness in our eyes and a weariness around our lips that we shared.

We heard pounding at the door.

“What the hell is going on in there?” a woman yelled.

“Just a minute.” I tried to sound normal. I hurriedly wiped the blood off the floor.

“I'm going to call the police if you don't open up,” the voice outside shouted.

When we opened the door, a squat woman in a pleated skirt and wide-brimmed hat stood in front of us, fist raised mid-knock. With purse in hand, she clutched a small boy in front of her. He was wearing a Cub Scout uniform—kneesocks, suspenders, shorts, and a beanie.

“There's a line out here, you know!” the lady scolded, even though there wasn't.

I held my mother upright and guided her out the door.

“Trash,” the woman muttered as she steered the boy past us.

“Bitch,” I muttered back.

CHAPTER FOUR

Anger

O
n the outskirts of Chicago the miles of pitch-black highway divided and strip malls appeared on both sides. Neon signs streaked by like finger paints smeared on walls. A dazzle of reflections flew off the hood of the car. And as quickly as the carnival of color erupted, it faded and the world outside my window was cast again in shades of black and gray.

We crossed over Indiana through miles of brittle desolate earth. Every day when the sun went down it melted into a blazing pool of orange. It shimmered on the horizon and when it finally slipped away, a scar of bluish purple bruised the earth for hours. And the heat lingered on.

We spent a night behind a supermarket and in the morning, a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts was just sitting on the ground in front of us as if a fairy had left them there. The sun had even warmed them up.

By the time we reached Pennsylvania we'd been on the road for almost seven days. And all the things my mother usually did—tapping the steering wheel with her thumbs when she
liked a song, biting her bottom lip when she wasn't smoking—suddenly annoyed me. We tried playing Sister Sledge again, but the original effect of “We Are Family” had reversed itself. Now
the last thing we wanted to be was related. On top of that, something in the car smelled. We sniffed around but never found the source. We rolled the windows up and down—it was unpredictable, which made it worse. It could stink like blue cheese or baby vomit. When we finally entered New York State it smelled like both.

By ten
p.m.
we were hungry and tired and hot. We'd finished the last of our Pop-Tarts hours before. We needed air-conditioning and food.

A truck whizzed by towing a blinking traffic arrow. For twenty miles it was all we saw. The deserted highway went on and on forever. The posts on the guardrail
whooshed
as we passed them. A stone caught in our tire
tick-tick-ticked
against the pavement. I felt as if we were standing still and the landscape out my window was merely scrolling by.

“Look!” my mother said, pointing out the window. A glowing sign emerged from the darkness like a pool of water in the desert.
gas, food, lodging
,
it read, so we took the exit.

A heavyset, bucktoothed, chinless girl sat in the toll booth at the bottom of the ramp.

“Two fifty,” she said, too busy reading
People
magazine
to look at us. With her weight on one hip, she stuck her hand out and chomped on her gum. Her plump fingers wiggled impatiently as my mother dug inside her purse.

With a huff, the girl put her magazine down and rolled her eyes when my mother handed her a fistful of change.

“Pfft,” I said as we pulled away. “What was her problem?”

My mother wasn't listening. She was still pawing through her bag. “What happened to all our money?” she asked. “Here, you
look.” And she thrust the bag at me. “There's got to be at least another hundred in there somewhere.”

My mother's bag was more like a sac. It had no zippered compartments and looking into it was like looking into a black hole. The only way to find anything was to feel around at the bottom. So I yanked it open and shoved my hand in.

Neither one of us had kept track of our money, and my mother didn't use a wallet. She just took fistfuls of whatever change was handed to her and stuffed it in her purse.

Life took a nose dive when I couldn't feel a single coin.

“Dump it out,” she commanded.

“Seriously?”

“You heard me,” she said. “Just do it.” There was so much crap inside her bag it was scary. But she was in a frenzy. So I turned it over and a whole store of things spilled out.

lipstick

rouge

matches

cotton balls

fingernail polish and remover

fingernail clippers

cuticle trimmer

a toothbrush

a hairbrush

an eyebrow brush

a pad of paper

twelve paper clips

eight bobby pins

three hair clips

eight hair ties

an extension cord with a curling iron attached to it

several crushed cigarettes

three packs of matches

five Bic lighters

a blow dryer

two tubes of mascara

eyeliner

eyelash curler

three compacts

two packs of cigarettes

six plastic straws, two paper ones

two ketchup and three mustard packets

three plastic spoons and a stainless-steel fork

bottle caps

a street map of Orange, California

a crumpled-up Dunkin' Donuts napkin

numerous tampons both in and out of their wrappers

a tea bag

shoelaces

tweezers

a bottle opener

a can opener

a wine opener

a pair of scissors

travel-size shampoo and hand cream

Noxzema

a razor

Krazy Glue

wire cutters

a screwdriver

three pens, one magic marker, and six pencils

One by one, I cataloged each item and replaced them in her bag. My mother took quick sharp looks in my direction. “Keep going,” she snapped. “I know there's money in there somewhere.”

She'd been keeping an open bottle of bourbon between her legs ever since I pulled her tooth out. She'd sip it every time she felt pain. But now she swigged it with abandon. Her face glowed dim in the light of the dashboard. Beads of sweat glistened on her upper lip. She gripped the wheel, her knuckles turned white.

She was going to snap, and it was not going to be pretty. I unbuckled my seat belt, maneuvered to the back, and started scouring the seat and floor. I looked everywhere, and when I finished we had a twenty-dollar bill, two fives, four singles, and three dollars and thirty-eight cents in change.

“That can't be it,” my mother muttered. She swerved off the road and screeched to a stop. She got out, stomped around, and flung my door open.

“Move it!” She pulled my arm.

I jumped out and stood back. When she was like this I'd have to steel myself to get through it.

She pawed through the garbage on the floor. Paper cups, napkins, wrappers, empty Coke cans flew out behind her like dirt. When she started on the backseat, a barrage of Phil's crap sprayed the ground like bullets. One by one the diarrhea mugs went flying. “Piece of shit anyway,” my mother mumbled, whipping an ashtray to the ground behind her.

By the end, the only thing that survived was Phil's TV. She'd tried but couldn't get it out. Wedged between the back of her seat and the floor, she left it looking as if it needed an ambulance. The antenna was mangled, the screen all scratched up.

My mother stood up. She was wild-eyed and panting, her hair a furious mess. She tossed her hands up and shook them. “Fuuuuuuuuck!” she howled.

Then she stomped back to the driver's-side door, yanked it open, got in, and slammed it.

I stood next to the car, waiting, hoping she'd cool off a bit. There were no streetlights, but the moon glowed so bright it was almost garish.

“Get in!” she screamed.

I slid into my seat, squeezed the armrest on the door, and braced myself. And then it really started.

“You know,” she snarled. She twisted the rearview mirror so she could see herself, then tore her bag open on her lap and began rummaging through it. She pulled out her brush.
S
he whipped her head—
back and forth, back and forth—
and yanked her brush through her hair. “I don't know why I ever listen to you.” She pitched the brush back into her bag and fished out a compact. She popped it open, picked up the powder puff, and in a fury spanked it all over her face. She snapped the compact closed with one hand and exchanged it for another one. This time she stabbed a brush into the makeup, and with the same swinging head motion she turned her cheeks and swirled rouge on each one.

“We should have just stayed with Phil!” She'd unearthed her mascara and was pumping the little wand in and out frantically. “I mean, he had a
job
and a
yard
and a
home!”
She screamed all
the nouns, simultaneously jerking her head and shoving a wide-open eyeball up to the mirror, applying black to her lashes.

“I tell you, that is the last time I ever let you talk me into doing anything! Do you hear me? Do you?”

My face got hot; my ears were burning.

“You're all I've got to bank on,” she used to say to me. I hardly ever failed her, so when she talked to me like this, it hurt. I pinched my arm hard to keep from feeling anything.

She jammed the wand back inside its tube and pulled out her lipstick. In a sharp nasal tone, with her lips in an O, she mumbled a few more swears. She finally threw the last of her makeup back into the bag and flung it behind her where it hit the rear window with a
thud
. As she grabbed her cigarettes off the dashboard, her hands trembled. She broke the first two before she got one out. The third one quaked between her lips as she fumbled with her lighter.
Flick, flick,
flick
. When she finally lit it, she took one long drag and half the cigarette burned down. She tilted her head and through pinched angry lips she exhaled a line of smoke that bounced off the ceiling and engulfed her.

“You know what else?” she said smugly. “I'm sick of looking at that stupid nun on the dashboard.” She pointed at Mary. “It's Catholic-white-trashy and you should've outgrown it by now.”

Snap, snap, snap.
There was hardly anything left of them, but I gnawed at my fingernails anyway. She'd crossed a line and she knew it. I never believed in fairy tales or Santa Claus. I did not believe in God or Jesus. I believed in Mary.

I rummaged through the glove compartment and found some
gum. I crammed two pieces in my mouth and started chewing. But less than thirty seconds into it, I remembered: I hated gum. It was tiresome and tedious and the flavor never lasted. So I spit it out. I went through the whole pack that way, then crumpled up the empty wrapper and threw it on the floor.

My mother had blown off all her steam and was now acting as if nothing had happened. Her arm was draped casually out the window. Another cigarette dangled between her fingers. She eased up on the gas and her shoulders dropped. She swiped a wisp of hair from her forehead and tucked it behind her ear.

“Phew,” she said. Extending her arm, she let the wind snatch her cigarette butt. “Thank God.” She turned her palm faceup. “Finally . . . a breeze.”

My mother prattled on for at least a half hour about how dry and hot the summer was but I didn't listen. I stared out the window. The broken divider line stitched down the center of the road and the headlights pierced the darkness at always the same distance in front of us. In the heat the insects seemed to multiply, complaining loudly as they hit our windshield. My mother flicked the wipers on and smacked away their juice.

Then finally at a red light, the street ended.

“Hmm, let's see,” my mother mused, inching slowly forward. I looked at Mary and her eyes rolled back into her head, perfectly capturing my mood.

“If you were a 7-Eleven, which way would you be? Would you be right?” She sat up and looked past me out the window. “Or would you be left?” She turned and looked in the opposite direction.

welcome to fat river!
a sign exclaimed. Across from us the street was peppered with half-vacant storefronts.

“What do you think?” my mother asked.

The red light squeaked and swung on the wire overhead. An inflated Walmart bag skipped along the road on its handles, but not a single car went by.

“Huh?” she asked again, and for the first time since her fit, she glanced at me. “Hey.” She patted me on the leg as if she hadn't just been mad at me. “Don't be so glum. We'll be okay.”

The light turned green and my mother looked forward.

“I promise,” she added.

With her palm open on the steering wheel, she glided the car right, rounding the corner smoothly, as if she'd known all along exactly which way to go.