“I know that!” She leaned against the door so hard I thought she’d fall out. “Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I’ve suffered for that mistake every day?”
“Then how could you do it again?”
“Because”—she started to cry fiercely—“because she begged me. Because sometimes you just want to know that you can still make your child smile. You want to say yes to something.” Her voice cracked, and it was some time before she spoke again. “You wouldn’t understand what it’s like to have to win your children back.”
W
HEN WE PULLED INTO
our driveway, I kept my eyes closed and let Dad carry me to my room because I didn’t want to see Momma. He grunted as we went up the stairs, and held me too tight, like the anger had to grab hold of something. When we were halfway, I pretended to wake up. “I can go the rest myself,” I said, and he set me down, winded, and not in the mood to say anything comforting.
Phil waited at the top of the stairs. “Dad?”
“Not now, Phil,” he answered, already at the bottom again.
I walked into Phil’s room, only so far as the cans lying on his floor. I felt groggy but not as tired as I wanted to feel now that I could actually crawl into bed and forget about everything.
“Do you hear them fighting?” I said.
“Sure, I hear them.” He unplugged his rock tumbler. Now I heard the quiet buzz of his electric clock.
“I think this is it,” I said, my legs starting to shake.
“Good riddance.” He took the tumbler out of its frame, unscrewing the lid.
And now my teeth began to chatter. “Don’t you care if they break up?”
“Not particularly.” He kicked through the beer cans on his way to the bathroom sink, where he rinsed the polishing solution off the rocks.
He was good at this. He’d get calmer the more I got worked up. And then he could call me hysterical and needy, but I wasn’t going to let him trap me.
Swallow
, I told myself.
Just swallow!
I let myself imagine the end of their marriage as a relief. A chance to be free from Dad’s rules, to have a house of our own with bright colors and pictures on the wall again. We could drink soda whenever we wanted and spend evenings watching
Rhoda
.
When he came back into the room I said, “I guess we’ll live with Momma,” trying for a calm expression on my face.
“As her babysitters?”
“Stop being mean.” My body wouldn’t quit trembling.
“What? Do you think she’s going to get a job?”
“Of course she is!”
“And what job can she do from the couch?”
“Why do you always have to hurt her? She does so much, and you don’t appreciate any of it.”
“Does she cook or clean? Does she buy groceries?”
I tried to push him but missed, falling into the cans. “That’s not the only thing women can do.”
“Does she know the names of our teachers? Do you think she’s going to go to your stupid play?”
“Shut up!”
“All I’m saying is, she doesn’t do any of the things mothers do.”
My breathing got faster, my legs knocking beneath me as I tried to get up. I grabbed a pair of jeans out of his hamper, ready to strike.
And now he folded his arms and looked at me—hysterical, needy. I hated my brother for being so cruel. For being right. The lives we’d led outside the house—riding bikes, drinking Slurpees, and going to Pentagon picnics—never intersected with Momma’s world, even in conversation. You could not, no matter how hard you tried, imagine Momma buying groceries or cooking. You couldn’t imagine her getting dressed each day, or even answering the telephone.
I felt the sensation I used to feel before I cried—though I didn’t,
couldn’t
cry anymore—a tightness in my throat, my face scrunching and stretching against my will. She would never be like other moms. We both knew it.
“Jerk!” I yelled and swung the jeans at him, feeling, mid-movement, that I was too tired, too terribly tired to take another swing.
He grabbed a handful of polished rocks out of the tumbler and threw them at me. I ducked on his floor, covering my head. The rocks smacked against me and against the cans, and I let myself feel the only kind of pain I was certain would come to an end.
It was the drink Momma had given me that made me feel as if I was spinning. In the old house, when my hands were too weak to hold on to the cup, she would smile because I’d finally settled down. These were the thoughts I woke with, thoughts that seemed as unreal as a bad dream. I lifted my head, finding that I was still on my brother’s floor with a sweater over my shoulders. It was my father’s—the itchy one.
Nothing but Phil’s electric clock could have told me it was morning. His room was always dark because of the flag covering his window, and there was no smell of eggs or toast cooking, no sound of rummaging in the kitchen. In the corner of the room, Phil tossed a can opener back and forth between his hands.
“Dad wants us to get our own breakfast this morning,” he said. “Here, have a fork.”
He opened two tins of ravioli, and we sat still between the beer cans, listening to the fight continue downstairs.
“It’s over, isn’t it?”
He shrugged like it was a stupid question to ask. There was such an ache in my gut, I couldn’t even think of eating.
“What’s going to happen to us?” I asked.
“We’ll live with one of them or the other.” He shoved two raviolis in his mouth at a time. Then, before he swallowed, he asked, “What was that thing Dad threw last night?”
“The cup Momma made me. Remember? With the rubies?”
“Yeah, I know the one.”
“Momma said you knew where it was all the time I’d been looking for it.”
“I didn’t know anyone considered it missing. I just packed it when I packed the rest of the stuff back at the old house.”
“You were the one who packed it?”
“It was one of the last things I found. It was under your bed, and I’d run out of newspaper to wrap things. There was only the cup and my model airplanes to go, so I packed the cup. It was already broken, so there wasn’t as much pressure to be careful with it.”
“You packed my cup instead of your models?”
“It’s okay. I don’t play with that kid stuff anymore.”
I thought to tell him that Dad broke the cup, and then I decided not to. I didn’t tell him about the bitter drink, either. He didn’t need to know everything.
“Here,” I said. “You can have my ravioli, if you want it.”
As he took it, our parents raised their voices again. I wrapped my arms around my legs. “If they split,” I said, “I’ll go where you go.”
He didn’t look up from his ravioli, but he stopped eating and nodded.
We tried to keep quiet and out of the way, but we were too distracted for books or music or the partly finished puzzle sitting downstairs on the dining room table. In the end, without either of us saying anything to the other, we started to pick up the cans.
At first, I put them neatly back on the shelf. Behind me, however, Phil dropped one can after another into the metal wastepaper basket, and when it began to overflow, he got a Hefty bag. We threw out every can—his Black Label, Genesee, Fyfe & Drum Extra Lyte, Schlitz “Tall Boy,” and even his Iron City Beer with the 1975 Super Bowl Championship Steelers on it. The sound was like shouting a secret we’d been warned not to tell, like we were agreeing about what that secret was, for once.
After we were done cleaning up the cans, Phil kept going. He threw away cards, dice, framed pictures, trophies, and his notebook filled with newspaper clippings, until his room had nothing in it but a bed, stereo, stack of library books, and a rock tumbler turning a new batch of rocks in wet sand.
Downstairs, Momma still wore the outfit from our shopping
trip. Dad had changed clothes but hadn’t shaved and didn’t look like he’d slept, either. They no longer bothered to lower their voices. And when I stood in the doorway to Dad’s bedroom, he seemed irritated to see me there.
“Tillie, this doesn’t involve you.”
But it
did
involve me. I had spent the last year, if not more, trying to help Momma get better, trying to protect her from harm, trying to keep her in my life. Every bit of this fight concerned me, though I no longer rooted for anyone or anything.
“Tillie, out,” Dad said.
“But I’m hungry.”
Briefly, I caught my mother’s eyes, full of disgrace, before she looked away.
“I said, ‘Out.’”
I went only so far as the puzzle around the corner and tried to find pieces that would fit together. They waited till they thought I was gone, then, exhausted, Momma said, “I can’t take any more of your lectures. You only want to point out what you think is wrong with me.”
“How can you even say that?” He threw or kicked something that landed with a thud on the carpet. “I’m trying to
help
you! Do you have any idea how much I’ve cooked and cleaned and looked after the kids so you can get better?”
She started bawling.
“Get up. Don’t lay on the floor when we’re talking!”
“Just say it,” she sobbed. “You were happier when I was locked away.”
“Fine. So tell me, what, if anything, will make you happy?”
“Well, it’s not living with a man who has always wanted me to be someone I’m not. You seem to want some officer’s wife in a nice suit, who can’t wait to spend the day cleaning house!”
“Sometimes, there are things you have to get done whether you like them or not.”
“I was spending every day doing only the things I hated. Instead of washing dishes and trying to make cakes shaped like wreaths, maybe I wanted to travel from town to town, wearing a gold sequined gown!”
“You’re impossible!”
“Why? Because I dream of doing something I love? Because I want to spend my days doing something I find important?”
“Do any of us count on your list of what’s important?”
I walked closer, listening for the answer. She didn’t have one.
“If you could just make some effort for us,” Dad said. “Just make us a priority. Make us more important than the television or a nap.”
I had to back into the dining room to avoid Momma as she hurried from the room. She cried out like a wounded animal and turned into the bathroom, slamming the door, though it didn’t latch the first time and she had to slam it again. I heard the lock slide into place.
Dad charged after her, shouting at the closed door. “That’s the question I want you to answer, Mara! Do we count? Does your being happy have anything to do with us?”
Water exploded from the faucet and let him know she wasn’t listening to him. With his face red and veins sticking out on his neck, he seemed to sense me there behind him. Without turning, he said, “Why don’t you make yourself some lunch?”
I could hear him swallowing hard as he came over to the table and pushed the chairs under it. Then he swept the puzzle pieces into the box.
“But Dad,” I said, “we were almost able to see the whole picture.”
“The picture’s on the lid,” he said, closing the top and handing it to me.
He went to another part of the house, looking for something to scrub clean, while I sat outside the bathroom door with the box in my lap, thinking I should say something. Feel something. After she turned off the water, there was no sound of splashing, no sound that she was moving at all. I sat there long enough to know that the water had turned cold, knowing she wanted someone to comfort her, but I couldn’t do it this time.
D
URING THE DAYS AND
nights of fighting, I didn’t seek out my mother. There were times I had to be in the same room with her, during painfully silent dinners or to retrieve a paper I needed for school, and if she made any move toward me I turned away. She seemed to accept this as her punishment.
I wandered our huge house the way I did on my first day here, desperately searching for everything I had lost. I wandered in and out of the rooms where I never played because they were cold and empty. I wandered up and down the stairs—close to and away from their battle.
I saw little of my brother, except for the evidence of where he’d been: a toilet seat left up, a carton of milk on the kitchen counter, and when I opened our front door to a blast of our neighbors’ power mowers and transistor radios, I found a bucket filled with river water on the porch.
Phil surprised me by catching the door behind me. He’d
been right on my heels. “I found these in your room,” he said, holding out a handful of the silver dollars I’d stolen from him.
“What were you doing in my room?” That was as close to an apology as he was going to get—the fact that I didn’t deny taking them. I hopped off the porch onto a thick tuft of crab grass.
“Did you really think you could run away with her?” he asked, pocketing the coins. “On less than twenty dollars?”
“I don’t know.” I could feel my face scrunching up and I turned away from him. “I just wanted to be able to see her every day.”
“Well, you got your wish,” he said, walking out onto our lawn.
“Why would you care? Maybe you knew she was locked in that room the whole time and just kept it to yourself.”
The toe of his shoe pushed the backs of my knees, and when my legs buckled, instead of trying to catch my balance, I went ahead and collapsed in the tall grass.
“I
didn’t
know she was in that room,” he said. “At first, I thought she went to the hospital. But it didn’t add up because we never visited. Eventually, I just figured she left us.”
“I don’t understand why you never missed her.”
He sat down beside me, pulling up handfuls of grass. “When we left the old house in the station wagon with a U-Haul attached to it,” he said, “Mom kept threatening to open her door and jump out while we were on the highway. Dad couldn’t calm her down.”
There was his story again, the one he tried to tell over and over. I didn’t interrupt him this time, just curled on to my side.
“We stopped at a motel, and she wouldn’t get out of the car. She just stayed there right outside our room, staring out the
window. I was afraid she was going crazy. But mostly I thought,
I’m not enough. I’m not important enough to make her come inside
.”