Melody (2 page)

“That's why I spend so much time on my hair and my nails, and that's why I have to spend so much money on these special skin creams,” she explained. She was always bringing home samples of shampoo and hair conditioners for me to use as well.

She brought home perfumed bath oils and would soak in our small tub for over an hour. I would wash her back or, when I was old enough to be trusted, polish her toenails while she manicured her fingernails. Occasionally, she did my toenails and styled my hair.

People said we looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. I had inherited her small facial features, especially her button nose, but my hair was a lighter shade of brown, hair the color of hay. Once, I asked her to dye my hair the same shade as hers, but she shook her head and told me to leave it be, that it was a pretty color. But I wasn't as confident about my looks as she was about hers, even though Daddy told me he rushed home from work because now he had two beautiful women at home waiting for him.

My daddy stood six foot three and weighed nearly one hundred and ninety pounds, all muscle from working in the mines so many years. Although there were times when he returned home after a very long day in the mines aching, and moving slowly, he didn't complain. When he set eyes on me, his face always burst out with happiness. No matter how tired those strong arms of his were, I could run into them and he'd lift me with ease into the air.

When I was little, I would anxiously wait for the sight of him lumbering up the chipped and cracked macadam that led from the mines to our home in Mineral Acres trailer park. Suddenly, his six feet three inches of height would lift that shock of light brown hair over the ridge and I would see him taking strides with those long legs. His face and hands would be streaked with coal dust. He looked like a soldier home from battle. Under his right arm, clutched like a football, was his lunch basket. He made his own sandwiches early in the morning because Mommy was always still asleep when he woke and got ready for work.

Sometimes, even before he reached the Mineral Acres gate after work, Daddy would lift his head and see me waving. Our trailer was close to the entrance and our front yard faced the road from Sewell. If he saw me, Daddy would speed up, swinging his coal miner's helmet like a flag. Until I was about twelve, I had to wait close to Papa George and Mama Arlene's trailer, because Mommy was usually not home from work yet herself. Many times, she would go someplace and not make it home in time for dinner. Usually, she went to Frankie's Bar and Grill with her co-workers and friends and listened to the juke box music. But Daddy was a very good cook and I got so I could do a lot of the cooking myself, too. He and I ended up eating alone more times than not.

Daddy didn't complain about Mommy's not being there. If I did, he urged me to be more understanding. “Your mother and I got married too young, Melody,” he told me.

“But weren't you terribly in love, Daddy?” I had read
Romeo and Juliet
and knew that if you were desperately in love, age didn't make a difference.

I told my best friend Alice Morgan that I would never marry anyone until I was so head-over-heels in love I couldn't breathe. She thought that was an exaggeration and I would probably fall in love many times before I was married.

Daddy's voice was wistful. “We were, but we didn't listen to older, wiser heads. We just ran off and eloped without thinking about the consequences. We were both very excited about it and didn't think hard about the future. It was easier for me. I was always more settled, but your mother soon felt she had missed out on things. She works in that beauty parlor and hears the rich ladies talking about their trips and their homes and she gets frustrated. We got to let her have some freedom so she doesn't feel trapped by all our love for her.”

“How can love trap someone, Daddy?” I asked.

He smiled his wide, soft smile. When he did that, his green eyes always got a hazy, faraway glint. He'd lift his gaze from my face to a window or sometimes just a wall as if he were seeing images from the mysterious past float by. “Well. . . if you love someone as much as we love Mommy, you want her around you all the time. It's like having a beautiful bird in a cage. You're afraid to let the bird free and yet you know, it would sing a sweeter song if it were.”

“Why doesn't she love us that much, too?” I demanded.

“She does, in her own way.” He smiled. “Your mother's the prettiest woman in this town—for miles and miles around it too—and I know she feels wasted sometimes. That's a hard thing to live with, Melody. People are always coming up to her and telling her she should be in the movies or on television or a model. She thinks time's flying by and soon it will be too late for her to be anything else but my wife and your mother.”

“I don't want her to be anything else, Daddy.”

“I know. She's enough for us. We're grateful, but she's always been restless and impulsive. She still has big dreams and one thing you never want to do to someone you love is kill her dreams.

“Of course,” he continued, smiling, “I have every reason to believe you're going to be the celebrity in this family. Look how well Papa George has taught you to play the fiddle! And you can sing, too. You're growing
into a beautiful young woman. Some talent scout's going to snap you up.”

“Oh Daddy, that's silly. No talent scouts come to the mining towns looking for stars.”

“So you'll go to college in New York City or in California,” he predicted. “That's my dream. So don't go dumping dirt on top of it, Melody.”

I laughed. I was too afraid to have such dreams for myself yet; I was too afraid of being frustrated and trapped like Mommy thought she now was.

I wondered why Daddy didn't feel trapped. No matter how hard things were, he would grin and bear it, and he never joined the other miners to drown his sorrows at the bar. He walked to and from work alone because the other miners lived in the shanties in town.

We lived in Sewell, which was a village born from the mine and built by the mining company in the lap of a small valley. Its main street had a church, a post office, a half dozen stores, two restaurants, a mortuary, and a movie theater open only on the weekends. The shanty homes were all the same pale brown color, built with board-and-batten siding and tar-paper roofs, but at least there were children my age there.

There were no other children near my age living in Mineral Acres trailer park. How I wished I had a brother or a sister to keep me company! When I told Mommy about that wish once, she grimaced and moaned that she was only a child herself when she had me.

“Barely nineteen! And it's not easy to bring children into the world. It's hard on your body and you have to worry about them getting sick and having enough to eat and having proper clothing, not to mention getting them an education. I rushed into motherhood. I should have waited.”

“Then I would never have been born!” I complained.

“Of course you would have been born, but you would have been born when things were better and not so hard for us. We were right in the middle of a major change in our lives. It was very difficult.”

Sometimes, she sounded as if she blamed me just for being born. It was as if she thought babies just floated around waiting to be conceived, and occasionally they got impatient and encouraged their parents to create them. That's what I had done.

I knew we had moved from Provincetown, Cape Cod, to Sewell in Monongalia County, West Virginia, before I was born, and we didn't have much at the time. Mommy did tell me that when they first arrived in Sewell as poor as they were, she was determined not to live in a shanty, so she and Daddy rented a mobile home in Mineral Acres, even though it was mostly populated by retired people like Papa George.

Papa George wasn't really my grandfather and Mama Arlene wasn't my real grandmother, but they were still like grandparents to me. Mama Arlene had often looked after me when I was a little girl. Papa George had been a coal miner and had retired on disability. He was suffering from black lung, which Daddy said was aggravated by his refusal to give up smoking. His illness made him look much older than his sixty-two years. His shoulders slumped, the lines in his pale, tired face were cut deep, and he was so thin Mama Arlene claimed she could weigh him down with a cable-knit sweater. Still, Papa George and I had the greatest of times when he helped teach me the fiddle.

He complained that it was Mama Arlene's nagging that wore him down. They always seemed to be bickering, but I didn't know any other two people as dedicated to each other as they were. Their arguments were never really mean either. They always ended up laughing.

Daddy loved talking with Papa George. On weekends especially, the two could often be found sitting in the rocking chairs on the cement patio under the metal awning, quietly discussing politics and the mining industry. Papa George was in Sewell during the violent times when the mining unions were being formed and he had lots of stories, which, according to Mama Arlene, were not fit for my ears.

“Why not?” he would protest. “She oughta know the truth about this place and the people who run it.”

“She got plenty of time to learn about the ugly things in this world, George O'Neil, without you rushing her into it. Hush up!”

He did, mumbling under his breath until she turned her fiery blue eyes on him, making him swallow the rest of his angry words.

But Daddy agreed with Papa George: the miners were being exploited. This was no life for anyone.

I never understood why Daddy, who was brought up on Cape Cod in a fisherman's family, ended up working in a place where he was shut away from the sun and the sky all day. I knew he missed the ocean, yet we never returned to the Cape and we had nothing to do with Daddy's family. I didn't even know how many cousins I had, or their names, and I had never met or spoken to my grandparents. All I had ever seen was a faded black and white photograph of them with Daddy's father seated and his mother standing beside his father, both looking unhappy about being photographed. His father had a beard and looked as big as Daddy is now. His mother was wispy looking, but with hard, cold eyes.

The family in Provincetown was something Daddy didn't discuss. He would always change the subject, just saying, “We just had differences. It's better we're apart. It's easier this way.”

I couldn't imagine why it was easier, but I saw it was painful for him to talk about it. Mommy never wanted to talk about it either. Just bringing up the family caused her to start crying and complaining to me that Daddy's family always thought little of her because she'd been an orphan. She told me she had been adopted by people who she said were too old to raise a child. They were both in their sixties when she was a teenager and they were very strict. She said she couldn't wait to get away from them.

I wanted to know more about them and about Daddy's family, too, but I was afraid it would start an
argument between her and Daddy, so after a while, I just stopped asking questions. But that didn't stop their arguments.

One night soon after I had gone to bed, I heard their voices rising against each other. They were in their bedroom, too. The trailer home had a small kitchen to the right of the main entrance, a little dinette and a living room. Down a narrow hallway was the bathroom. My bedroom was the first on the right and Daddy and Mommy's was at the end of the trailer.

“Don't tell me I'm imagining things,” Daddy warned, his voice cross. “The people dropping hints ain't liars, Haille,” he said. I sat up in bed and listened. It wasn't hard to hear normal conversation through those paper-thin trailer walls as it was, but with them yelling at each other, it was as if I were right in the room with them.

“They're not liars. They're busybodies with nothing else to do with their boring, worthless lives than manufacture tales about other people.”

“If you don't give them the chance . . .”

“What am I supposed to do, Chester? The man's the bartender at Frankie's. He talks to everyone, not just me,” she whined.

I knew they were arguing about Archie Marlin. I never mentioned it to Daddy, but twice that I knew of, Archie drove Mommy home. Archie had short orange-red hair and skin the shade of milkweed with freckles on his chin and forehead. Everyone said he looked ten years younger than he really was, although no one knew his exact age. No one knew very much about Archie Marlin. He never gave anyone a straight answer to questions about himself. He joked or shrugged and said something silly. Supposedly, he had been brought up in Michigan or Ohio, and had spent six months in jail for forging checks. I never understood why Mommy liked him. She said he was full of good stories and had been to lots of exciting places, like Las Vegas.

She said it again now during the argument in the bedroom.

“At least he's been places. I can learn about them from him,” she asserted.

“It's just talk. He hasn't been anywhere,” Daddy charged.

“How would you know it's just talk, Chester? You're the one who hasn't been anywhere but the Cape and this trap called Sewell. And you brought me to it!”

“You brought yourself, Haille,” he retorted, and suddenly she stopped arguing and started crying. Moments later, he was comforting her so softly I couldn't hear what he was saying and then they grew quiet.

I didn't understand what it all meant. How did Mommy bring herself here? Why would she bring herself to a place she didn't like?

I lay awake, thinking. There were always those deep silences between Mommy and Daddy, gaps they were both afraid to fill. Then the arguments would pass, just as this one did, and it would be as if nothing ever happened, nothing was ever said. It was as if they declared a truce over and over because both knew if they didn't, something terrible might happen, something terrible might be said.