A Mother's Love (11 page)

Then I met Matthew. I wasn't drawn to him at first. We met at the art college where Dottie had sent me years before and where I returned to take courses from time to time. He was the second person—after Dottie—who'd taken an interest in my art. He commented on what he saw, telling me what he would change. How he thought I could improve a design. He made his suggestions simply, never pressing a point. Yet his instincts about my work were always right. We saw each other for weeks, often spending our time together at galleries and museums, before we went to bed.

When we began seeing each other, he was punctual, always on time. Within five minutes of when he said he'd be there, the buzzer would ring. If he was late, he'd phone with an explanation. This was important to me, because I never wondered in the early months whether he would show, whether he planned to leave.

But gradually, his behavior began to change and this tied me to him more and more. He arrived a little late. Ten minutes, half an hour. Then he'd show up on time. Then forty-five minutes late.
There were always good reasons—a car breaking down, a client's last-minute request. But I found myself at home, waiting to hear from him, afraid that he would not arrive. Fear began to rule my feelings. First I had wanted Matthew because I knew he would not leave me. Then I wanted him because I knew he would.

When Matthew decided to move east, I told him I wanted to go with him. Nothing was holding me in California. My father and Dottie had already moved outside of Tucson so that she could be close to her son, Jamie, a management consultant, and her grandchildren, twin boys. “Do you want me to come?” I asked Matthew. At times he said yes and at other times no. He was going, no matter what. In the end he told me, “It's a big decision. I want you to do what's right for you.”

We made the move smoothly enough. We put whatever mattered—a few duffels, cameras, tools, art supplies—into our two cars and caravaned across the United States. I liked traveling this way, actually; one of us was always just ahead of the other or just behind. We drove hundreds of miles a day, waving at each other. We used elaborate hand signals when we needed to stop for gas, to go to the bathroom, to rest. We signed to each other as I left behind everything I had known.

There is a moment when you drive through a rocky pass on the interstate and find yourself facing nothing but a thousand miles or more of flat,
yellow prairie, with the mountains now at your back. We reached that point—and the West was behind me. It was as if I had grown up while we traversed that divide, passed through a dimension of time, and I was surprised by how ready I was to give up all that had been my life. Still, the moment we arrived in New York, I wanted to leave. I felt certain it would never be a place I'd call home—not that I've ever had such a place.

Matthew has a spot he calls home. It is a red brick house on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of Minneapolis. It is here he claims that hell was played out in the form of an alcoholic, abusive father and a passive, ineffectual, but also alcoholic, mother. But Matthew has a fierce attachment to this house and this suburb, and on our drive east we went some five hundred miles out of our way to see his home.

We drove through Matthew's neighborhood, which looked as if it had become an extension of the inner city. The river that flowed through the back of the town was littered with debris. A garbage dump had appeared along its banks. The school Matthew had gone to was scarred with graffiti. Matthew was bewildered by what he saw.

The house itself was run-down, the shutters in need of painting and repair. Broken toys and pieces of a lawn mower were scattered across the lawn. A mangy dog lay on the porch, which was missing some boards. Matthew stood in front of
the house for a long time, looking toward the river, the river on which he had skated as a boy with his friends. He drew his strength, he told me as we leaned against a tree in front of the house, from here.

I have no such place filled with the images of my youth. No large tree with the boards of an old tree house in its branches, no broken-down school covered with racial slurs, no memory of a river to make it all seem real. There is no single place to which I can attach the importance of all that has been. Once in a while I used to stop near the bungalow in Venice where we lived for a few years, or drive past the Valley of Fire trailer park when we were in Vegas, but I always felt as if someone else had lived there.

My childhood was lived among rocks and insects, and under the canopy of stars. The strange, twisted cacti, the lizards who bite and will never let go unless you chop off their heads. I used to flick scorpions away with my fingers. There was a small bug I collected and kept in jars. The one everyone thought was poisonous, but it wasn't. Child of the Earth, it was called. It was a cricket, but it had the bald, smiling face of a child. When you stepped on it, it screamed. That was home to me.

M
UCH OF WHITE SANDS is a missile range that the army uses for target practice. Trinity Site, where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945, is here. So is a range of mountains called Jornada del Muerto, the Hills of the Dead. When you drive west from Alamagordo, you can hear missiles whizzing across the highway. But the day when we snuck in, it was quiet.

It was the summer my father locked the door of the trailer, saying he had to find work, but probably because he had to leave town. We spent much of the summer driving through the Southwest—into Arizona, across the Navajo and Apache and Zuñi reserves. My father was very good at fixing things—refrigerators, toasters, old TVs—and the Indians had plenty of those appliances, which they had picked up cheap from gringo traders and which often didn't work. We'd eat a meal of fry
bread and beans while he fixed a woman's washing machine. While my mother sat fanning herself in doorways, Sam and I played with the Indian children, who lived on dirt floors and had runny noses.

My father put a sign on the side of the Dodge sedan he drove, a car that probably had a hundred thousand miles on it when it finally gave out.
I CAN FIX ANYTHING
, it said. When we got into the car to leave Vegas, my mother had sneered at the sign. “You can fix anything except what matters,” she said.

It was stifling in the car. Sam and I tried counting red cars or blue cars, but lost ourselves past ten. Our mother sat in the passenger seat, which was not her preferred locale (since she was somewhat addicted to driving), smoking cigarettes in silence, letting the ashes blow into the back seat, where Sam and I batted at the dying embers. One landed on Sam's arm and left a small black burn. She rubbed it for miles.

A scorching breeze blew and we found respite for only a week when we moved into an abandoned Dairy Queen outside Rincon. Even in the heat of the summer, the freezer of the Dairy Queen where Sam and I slept was nice and cool. The freezer had had its door ripped off, and we could enter that soothing darkness whenever we wanted to rest. At night Sam and I cuddled in a
sleeping bag inside the freezer which smelled faintly of old chocolate and peppermint.

Sam and I loved the red and white of the Dairy Queen, the soda machines. We spent our afternoons pretending I was the soda jerk, since I was the older, and Sam was the customer. We asked our mother to be the customer, but she refused. Instead, she sat in a chair that had been left behind under a juniper tree, watching cars speed up and down the highway. She kept her hand over her eyes like a sea captain, searching for land as the cars disappeared, dwindling to nothing. The desert even looked like an ocean, a rippling sea. Once a man with his kids in the car, seeing us there, stopped. He was hot and desperate as he tried to order ice cream cones. “What flavor, mister?” my mother said as she laughed and laughed.

Sam ordered the usual things from me, like strawberry floats and black cows, which I pretended to make with complicated gestures. Sometimes I let Sam concoct things. We made a huge banana split in a boat with whipped cream heaped high like a castle, a rosy cherry bleeding from the top. This we brought out to our mother as she sat beneath the juniper tree. She stared into our empty hands. “There's nothing there,” she said.

“Yes,” Sam said. “It's a banana split with the works.”

Our mother sighed and took a bite with an imaginary spoon. “Oh, it's very good.” She took
another bite. “And cool.” She licked her fingers. She seemed to enjoy the taste. Then she gathered us into her arms. “My precious girls,” she said. “My precious little girls.”

White Sands wasn't far from the Dairy Queen, and one day my father took us there. He'd been out most of the day before, driving around looking for work. “Guess what?” he said when he came home. “I found something you girls are going to like.” There was a place along the highway where the sand had drifted. We pulled the car off the road, climbed over the fence, and raced across the ridges of what had once been the bottom of a gypsum sea.

Before us everything was bleached white with no trees, no animals, no signs of life. Nothing but this soft, pristine mattress of sand, where we leaped, tumbling head over heels, but never hurting ourselves. I have pictures from this day. We are sun-drenched, flaming children against the shimmering white sands. Our faces are full of laughter, without a hint of what lies ahead.

My mother is not in these photographs—though my father is, as he rolls down the dunes, his hair also blazing in the sun, sand flung around his face—so she must have taken them. The only trace of her is a shoulder turned away as she twists down an embankment.

The one picture I have of my mother's face is on a passport. My father burned the rest. There are
two interesting things about the passport—other than the fact that it exists. The first is that my mother has lied about the date of her birth, making herself younger than her age, which wasn't that old to start with. The other is that it is a virgin passport, unblemished, devoid of marks. The clean, blank pages of an uneventful life.

Not many people can take a passport photo the way my mother did. She stares into the camera, dead on. Her dark eyes are set straight ahead as if she were daring the person to take her picture. An Ava Gardner lookalike, Dottie once said. A woman who could easily be mistaken for someone else. Sometimes I stare at the passport photo and try to decipher the enigma behind the eyes. I try to understand what moved her to get a passport anyway, when she was living in San Bernardino in a trailer with a small child, another on the way. Whatever could have prompted her to do such a thing, since she must have known she wouldn't be going anywhere. Not for a while.

In the photograph my mother still had long black hair. It was thick and silken, like the kind Rapunzel's knight used to climb the tower. At night she would sit in front of a small, misty mirror in her room of the trailer and brush her hair for hours. When she brushed it, she got a dreamy look, as if she were listening to something far away.

If I asked, she would let me brush it. “You can
do it tonight, Ivy. I'm so tired.” And she'd hand me her brush with the soft bristles. I ran the brush through over and over again and she closed her eyes as if she were starting to sleep. When I put down the brush and rubbed her scalp with my fingers, she'd tilt her head back and moan. I'd rub her cheeks, her jaw. My mother rarely liked me to crawl into bed with her or curl up in her lap, but she'd let me brush her hair and rub her scalp for a long time.

Once, in Vegas, Sam and I took all her barrettes and fine brushes and spent the afternoon fixing our hair the way she did. Often Sam and I did things we weren't supposed to do, like walk into the desert late in the day, thrusting sticks down the rattlesnake holes. But usually when we were caught and punished, it was for something insignificant—watching television after school or dressing up in our mother's clothes. Or using her combs and barrettes.

My mother got angry about little things—if we left the light on or didn't close a cupboard door. But what really enraged her was if we touched the objects that adorned her hair. For some reason Sam always got caught, and I seldom did. Sam would stand at the sink, tears streaming down her face, while our mother scolded her for something we both knew I'd done.

This time she scolded Sam for the barrettes and combs I'd put in her hair. Sam cried but did not
tell. I expected her to just blurt it out. Maybe she thought I'd confess. But Sam never told. She could fight for any resistance movement, I'm sure. Loyal, that's how I'd describe my sister.

As my mother stood over Sam, trying to make her confess, she held a spatula in her hand, not that she ever struck us—she wasn't that kind of mother—and stared a terrifying stare, not unlike the one in her passport photo. She said something like “You better tell me why you did this, young lady. You better have a good explanation.”

Suddenly, in the middle of her outburst, my mother sighed, as if she'd lost interest in what she thought Sam had done. As if none of it really mattered. And maybe it didn't. She lay down and asked us to bring her a wet washcloth. “This heat is killing me,” she said. We brought her a cloth, which she pressed to her forehead. After a while, she pulled back the curtain and gazed out into the desert. “Just look at that ocean, those city lights, the Avenue of the Stars.” Sam and I gazed with her down the empty streets of a dusty gambling town, watching the glamorous people my mother saw parading by.

One night shortly after we'd returned to Vegas from our summer on the road, I was brushing my mother's hair and she made me stop. She took the brush away and stared into the mirror as if she saw something that made her afraid. She ran her fingers over her eyes, her mouth. “I'm getting
old,” she said. I took back the brush and stroked her hair longer than before. I took thick strands, pinning them high on her head.

A few days later she came home with her hair cut off. It was up to her ears and there was nothing for me to brush or braid. She never again asked me to rub her head or touch her. Later it occurred to me that she had sold the hair—hair like hers still went for about $200 a braid, even then. It was the money that helped finance her escape.