Pieces of My Mother (17 page)

I am underneath my Indian wool blanket. Sleeping. Dreaming, perhaps. My bedroom door opens and light from the hallway floods in. Her shadow approaches my bed and she sits heavily. I can smell her, my mother: smoke-drenched dungarees, red wine, Ysatis, and Amaretti di Saronno. She sits next to me and I don't feel like waking up. I hate these late night wake-ups. It's always something that could wait for morning.

“Darlin'? Darlin', I need to go,” she mumbles.

Her hands are cool and damp on my shoulder. She's not looking at me—just talking with her head drawn down, almost like she's talking to herself. Her voice is soft and garbled.

“I can't stay, darlin'. I just can't. I'd stay if I could, but I hate California, everything about it. There are too many people here, too many cars driving on the road. You can't understand how I hate it.”

I shift my body under the covers. “What time is it, Mom?”

“It's late, darlin'. Three a.m. or something.”

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going back to Washington. I'm better there. My friends are there.”

She fidgets with a set of jingly keys on her lap. “I'm sorry to wake you. I just wanted you to know.”

“It's okay, Mom. Maybe you'll feel better in the morning. We can get doughnuts.”

“No. I'm going to drive back tonight. I should make it as far as Eureka.”

I can see the edges of the taped-up cards and horse pictures on my bedroom walls behind her head. The ones I put up before she came back. The ones that were supposed to make her stay. She leans in and kisses my cheek. Her face is wet, her breath heavy with liquor.

“I'm so sorry, darlin'. I'll send you a letter soon.”

“It's okay, Mom,” I repeat. It's all I know how to say.

She stands slowly and walks out into the yellow halo of light coming through the doorway.

Somewhere inside me I have a voice that can scream out to her,
Please
don't go, Mom
.
You
can't leave again.
But instead, once again, I give her permission with the only words I can find—“It's okay, Mom.”

I don't even take my head off the pillow. I just watch her leave. I hear every sound: the front door opening, then clicking shut; her uneven footsteps descending the stairs; the creaking of her car door opening, then slamming with a finality.
Maybe
not
every
girl
needs
a
mother
, I say to myself.

I hear the engine rev and the wheels roll out of the driveway. I pull myself into a tight ball. I don't feel anything, not even the sheets against my skin. I am nowhere, with no one touching me, and she is gone.

Back upstairs, I reach for a letter scripted on white butcher paper that I figure must have been written sometime after she fled back to Washington.

Dear Melissa,

It is agony without you. Your wonderful letter filled me with equal amounts of longing, pride, and loving. What a kid! And with so little time left to be a kid. Especially when your very own mother compels you to deal with situations as disturbing as ours. I am very proud of you. You seem to be meeting the fact of our being apart with great strength. I just pray that in overcoming the pain you have not had to close off your emotional self—that you are keeping in touch with your soul. May it never be too painful for you to look inside and to share all that you find within. There is so much beauty in you that it would be selfish to lock it away. And beauty includes any pain or anger—all things must have balance.

I sit down on the hardwood floor to take in these beautiful, yearning words of hers. Here are her sincere wishes for me to find my voice. And I'm touched that she understands this piece of me that locks emotions away. She must have been sensing how difficult things were going to get for me heading into adolescence. Around this time, things did begin to unravel and lose their “balance.” My mom was back in Washington working as a cocktail waitress when I began to notice boys. She might have warned me about the trouble that was coming, and how awful kissing a boy could be.

When Charlie Ross came up to me at school and asked if I would go to the seventh-grade dance with him, I didn't even know who he was. I looked at him and felt my stomach do a flip turn. I shot my eyes both ways down the row of blue lockers to see if anyone was listening, or worse, playing some kind of joke. He asked again. Finally I mustered up, “I don't know,” and walked away, pressing my school binder against my chest. I should have said no.

“Are you crazy, Melissa?” my friend Lola said when I told her. “He is cute. You have to say yes.”

“Cute” had not crossed my mind. He had a shark tooth dangling from a thin, gold chain around his neck. He was skinny and pale. Feathered black hair, small dark eyes, and a mouth that seemed a size too big for his face. The way he stood in front of me with his chest pushed out made me think of our cocky rooster, Russell Sage, the one that bosses all the hens around in the pasture. I was more afraid than intrigued.

“You know he's sort of popular. I'm going to say yes for you,” Lola told me.

I wanted to fit in. I agreed because she said she would do the talking for me, and because I don't have any other friends like Lola—straight-A smart, funny, and confident talking to boys she hardly knows. Lola is pretty, but not stuck-up pretty. She wears glasses that magnify her dark chocolate eyes to the size of Junior Mints. Her hair is thick and shiny in a perfect Dorothy Hamill flip.

Lola is the one who told me that I needed to buy Sticky Fingers jeans as soon as possible. She always dresses in tight jeans and stretchy shirts that show off the fact that she has breasts. I do the opposite; I wear loose-fitting shirts because I don't have anything to show.

Lola also likes to talk about her Greek name. If a boy asks her name, she tells them the whole name, Lolita Constance Kalliope. I decide to go to the dance in hopes that some of her confidence will rub off on me. I decide to go because maybe Dylan Peters, the boy who smiled at me from across the gym, will be there.

But once I'm there, nothing is as I imagined it would be. Charlie Ross has edged me to the corner of the gym. He is holding me and pressing his skinny, flat chest against mine. He pushes his oversized lips against mine and sticks his tongue in my mouth—far into my mouth. I try to turn my head away, but he holds me firmly as he shoves his tongue back in. His tongue is doing a fast, gyrating dance all around inside my mouth. Orange and pink lights spin in circles on the floor. I don't recognize the music. I have never been kissed before…and it's
horrible
.

When the music slows down, he is like a huge dog on top of me, sweating and slobbering into my mouth. This cannot be normal. He pumps out what feels like a steady stream of warm sink water into my mouth. I cannot possibly swallow it. I push my lips against my shoulder and let it seep out into the sleeve of my gauze shirt. It's all I can do to keep from gagging before he shoves his tongue back in. I soak my sleeve over and over and wait for the lights to change, the music to stop.

Kissing, I thought, would be delicate. I thought it would taste like honeysuckle flowers. Who knew it involved this tongue business? I thought I would pause and smile between the kisses like they do on
The
Love
Boat
every Friday night.

I finally extract myself and shout over the music, “I need to get something to drink.”

Charlie Ross pulls me hard against him, and I feel how much stronger he is than me. I am the chicken girl. I am the small end of the wishbone after it snaps in two.

“Okay and then we come right back here,” he says.

I rush over to the lighted classroom that has been set up for drinks and snacks. Lola is sitting down with a Coke and the boy she came with. A couple of other kids are sitting with them. They are doing what Lola said we would be doing—hanging out and talking. I give Lola a “please rescue me” look, but she doesn't get it. She gives me a discreet thumbs-up. This is her idea of the road to popularity. She will tell me that making out with a boy at a dance puts me in a whole new category of popularity.

“What do you want?” Charlie Ross asks me.

I can hardly look at him in his tight, black disco pants. Instead I look at the array of candy and soda, and I want it all—Kit Kats, Butterfingers, Ding Dongs, Life Savers, Red Vines, Juicy Fruit gum, and Hostess CupCakes. I want to do nothing more than sit in this classroom and stuff myself with every kind of candy and soda imaginable.

“What do you want?” he asks me again.

I pick up the Hostess orange cream cupcakes with the white curlicues across the top.

“And Fresca,” I say.

I walk over to Lola and give her another look. I notice for the first time that she is wearing makeup—a smudge of blue powder across her eyelids. She whispers in my ear, “You are so lucky, Melissa.”

She has no idea.

I eat the cupcakes as slowly as I possibly can to stall going back to the dance floor. I peel off the flat layer of frosting and take tiny bites into the white curlicues. As thirsty as I am, I measure each sip. Charlie Ross stands up. He fidgets with his empty soda can.

“Come on. Let's go,” he says.

I cannot go back into the strobe lights where I don't know how to say no and he will shove himself against me and stick his tongue into my mouth.

Dylan Peters, with his waves of sun-bleached hair, walks into the room and stands in front of Charlie.

“Hey, dude,” he says with a nod. I stop eating. Dylan Peters glances at me and smirks. I have no idea what that means, but it is very different from the way he smiled at me across the gymnasium. It seems like a look of disappointment—like I'm one of those loose girls. Maybe he smiled at me before because he could tell I had yet to be kissed. Sick to my stomach, that's how I feel when Dylan Peters smirks at me.

At least now we are doing what Lola promised, hanging out together and talking in a group.

Charlie says, “Let's go,” for the third time.

Lola squints her big eyes at me all of a sudden. “Melissa, do you have something in your shirt pockets?”

“No. What are you talking about?” I say. But I know exactly what she is talking about.

“It just looks like you have something in your pockets.”

“No,” I say again, wishing I had my school binder to shove up against my chest. On a school day, I can cover the fact that I'm flat chested.

But I know exactly what Lola is seeing. Before the dance I folded thick squares of toilet paper into the two front pockets of my white gauze shirt. I was very careful to smooth each square out and measure it exactly. I picked the shirt out of my drawer because I saw its potential. I saw that the two front pockets were perfectly placed over where I had small budding lumps. If I could just pad the pockets a little, I thought it would make me appear more like a girl should at a seventh-grade dance.

Lola looks genuinely confused, but she's drawing too much attention to me. I turn my body away from the group.

“I'm going to the bathroom,” I say.

Charlie Ross lets out an obvious sigh.

In the girls' bathroom, I stand in front of the long mirror and look at the pockets on my shirt. The light at home was much different, not like the bright fluorescent glare of school lights. Now I can see the pockets are a different shade of white from the rest of the shirt and just how stupid it looks. Now what do I do? Take out the tissue or leave it? I'm busted either way. In the bathroom stall, I take out half of the tissue and leave the rest in case Lola asks me how come my pockets look so different all of a sudden.

I run my fingertips along the rows of blue lockers as I wander back to the gymnasium. I think of ways to act, directions to run. I don't want to be attending dances or kissing boys. I want to be home in my room or up on the hay bales in the barn so I can think for a long time about everything that's happening.

I don't know which is the worse place to be now—under the lights where I am on display as the flat-chested girl who has stuffed her pockets with toilet paper, or in the dark corner where Charlie Ross will shove his tongue in my mouth. Someday I am going to clear all the gravel out of my throat. I am going to have a voice. I will be brave and I will say no.

But right now, I am going back to the queasy corner of the dance floor with Charlie Ross. I will spit into my sleeve and count the seconds until it is over. I will have Lola tell him at school on Monday that I have a boyfriend at another school. It is the only lie I can think of as Charlie Ross's tongue slips back into my mouth.

When I touch my mother's forearm at her bedside, it is damp with sweat. I want her to wake up. But she is in another world. My mom's husband, Kim, takes up the space next to her on the bed. He clicks the channel changer from station to station. The little dogs are tucked tightly against her body. I don't belong in the room right now.

I walk out to the living room and sink into the blue chair that once lived in our yellow house. It is worn and the springs underneath are shot. This blue chair belonged to Grandma Rita and came to us after she died. Many years later I learned that she had frozen to death in her own backyard.

“She had been drinking and slipped on the ice,” my dad tearfully told me one night. “There was no one there to help her back up.”

My father and his brothers flew to New York to divide up her belongings. When he returned, new pieces of furniture and antiques appeared throughout the rooms of our yellow house. For the first time, we had a cabinet filled with beautiful dishes, sterling silver spoons, and colorful glass objects. Finally, a feminine presence I had been longing for crept into the house and I felt connected to my grandmother through those lovely, tangible things in the china cabinet.

I'm thankful now for the comfort and familiarity of the blue chair's thick down cushions. The memories sewn into this chair are part of who I am and where I come from. This is the chair my grandmother held her babies in. This is the chair where she drank martinis to soothe her sorrows after her six-week-old baby boy died. This is the chair that landed upstairs in my dad's attic room for many years. It sat across from a small wood-burning stove and comforted many a drunk and stoned visitor.

This is the chair that I slept on when no one was home. The chair that I rescued from our yellow house. It traveled with me to a basement apartment in San Francisco. It slept in a Santa Rosa barn until I knew where I was going next. This is the chair that eventually moved to Los Angeles with me while I was in college. The chair I sat in while pregnant with my son. The chair that was too heavy to move to Boston and lived in a dark storage facility for two years. The chair I sat in and nursed my daughter. The chair my husband said was “ratty and falling apart.” He insisted that it was aggravating his allergies and that we needed to get rid of it.

Years ago, we helped my mom lift the chair into the back of her van, and she drove it here to her house in Olympia. Now it is covered with white dog hair and its upholstery is threadbare. But even with its broken springs, this chair is still the most comfortable chair in the whole world. This blue chair that now holds me in the house where my mom will die.

I feel my grandmother Rita's gaze on me. Or is it her hand resting on mine? I think about her butterfly collection that I tried to fix when I was ten. My dad brought it into my room one afternoon along with a handful of other treasures. There were dozens of butterflies in the collection, all crowded into a boxy acrylic frame. Their wings were attached to paper bodies in shades of pale green and yellow. The butterflies had shifted and migrated to one side of the frame. I could tell that the box had been improperly stored or shipped sideways. I tried to shift the butterflies back to the center of the frame with no luck. And so I pulled off the acrylic face of the box. This was my first mistake.

I laid out each butterfly on my bed. They were bright blue, lavender, and yellow; spotted, speckled, tangerine, and iridescent. Some had wings with visible veins like tiny rivers on an antique map. One had wings the color of Indian curry with inky black edges.

The butterflies were difficult to pick up, and the glue holding the paper bodies against their wings had turned brittle. I held a lemon-yellow and black butterfly between my fingers and studied it, unaware that my fingerprints would rub its colorful dust away. I set my favorite, a magnificent blue-and-black butterfly, in front of me. It shimmered like my mother's blue eye shadow and black lashes.

I attempted to fix the butterflies and put them back into the box in some kind of rational order. But the more I handled them, the more damaged they became. I set aside several with tattered wings and detached bodies. I wished then that I had just let them be.

I wanted to know my grandmother—and by loving her treasures, I thought I could at least connect with her sensibilities. I needed to take care of the things she had left behind.

Eventually, I lost my grandmother's collection of butterflies. I can't recall where or when they got lost but they are gone, along with most everything I ever had of hers. Over time, the pieces of my grandmother have been lost, stolen, and sold. I wonder if it will be like this with my mom too. What will I hang on to—to remember her?

I pull my knees up to my chest, close my eyes, and sink deeper into the blue chair. There was so much that happened inside and outside of our yellow house that she wasn't aware of. So much she missed.