Pieces of My Mother (9 page)

When I wake, it is black all around me. I am full of orange soda and have to pee badly. I recall my brother's words, “Hope you brought your shovel and some toilet paper.” But I didn't think about having to pee in the middle of the night.
I
can
hold
it
, I tell myself seven times in a row until I can't any longer.
Shoot, I'm not afraid of bears and wolves.

I get up as quietly as I can and edge myself down the ladder. I can see through the screen door.
Tiptoe, tiptoe, slow.
I grab onto the spring of the door so it won't creak as I open it, and I slip onto the porch.

I look up at the sky. There is a blanket of brilliant white stars—stars like I have never seen—and the moon is so big that it lights up the whole yard. The scent of ripe berries surrounds me. If only I didn't have to pee so badly.

I step off the porch. Where to go? My mom said to go into the woods, but even with the full moon, it is too dark in the thickness of the trees. I take a left toward the junkyard. Maybe I can find a place near the old bathtub.

And then I freeze. Something is coming at me from out of the shadows. Two beasts side by side. They are ready to attack. I can see it in their red eyes and puffed-up chests. It's George and Martha. The two geese stand in my path with their orange bills raised as high as my shoulders.

“Please, I have to pee,” I plead.

I take a step backward. They take a step forward.

I don't even need to look down. I know what are on my feet. I pulled them all the way up to my knees before going to sleep.
Red
socks.
Not just any red, but a bright neon red like a clown would wear. The one color the geese hate.

I run back toward the house. George and Martha honk and lunge at me. They continue to chase me—a chicken girl running through the night in red socks. Behind me, their big orange feet pound the earth like elephants'.

I jump onto the porch and turn around. They stop and glare at me. I want to be brave and kick them in the chest like Ray.

“Fine, you stupid geese,” I whisper. “I don't have to go anymore anyways.”

I slip back into the dark house and stand very still. I think the sound of my heart beating might wake someone but the lumps under the quilt are motionless. A sour milk smell fills my nose again. I tiptoe back up the ladder and crawl to my section of wood. I try crossing my legs together tightly. I try to get in my sleeping bag, but I can't. There are gallons of orange soda inside me. I sneak over to the far corner of the rafters, where the roof touches my backbone, and crouch down as low as I can.

I let it all out. So much inside me. It won't stop. It splatters on the wood, then seeps like hot tea into my red socks. It sounds like there is a faucet on, except this is the house with no running water. I close my eyes until it stops. It is not the smell of orange soda that fills this corner, but the distinct scent of boiled chard water.

Then I hear the worst sound of all—urine spilling through the wood slats and hitting the floor below like hard rain. I jump up and leap into my sleeping bag, tripping across Eden on the way. He stirs.

“What are you doing? What's going on?” he says.

“
Shhh
. Nothing. Go to sleep.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he says and rolls over.

I push as far into my sleeping bag as I can go. I peel off my wet socks. For all I know, I have peed on Ray's head. What if the paperback books got hit? For a second I feel safe in my sleeping bag, like I'm sealed in a cocoon. But I also have a terrible thought—
I
like
the
idea
that
I
may
have
peed
on
Ray's head.
Maybe he'll get so mad that he'll send us away to some motel. A cheap motel with a bathroom that works and no stupid geese. Maybe I will be sent back to California where I am safe with my dad. Maybe my mom will be so disgusted with Ray's peed-on head that she'll leave him.

Then I feel tugged the other way. I think about the sweet and sour huckleberries here in Chimacum, and how the baby goats aren't afraid to jump around and have a ball. Neither are my brothers. But I am. I am afraid of so much, and I don't want my mom to know that I am afraid of anything. Because if I'm afraid of her and Ray and the goats and this strange place, she might not let me come back.

Like the sea turtle at the aquarium, I pull my head out of my sleeping bag. I listen. Everything is quiet and still.

• • •

When I wake up in the morning, it feels like a jagged piece of glass is pressing against the inside of my cheek. I reach into my mouth. My baby tooth, clean and white, falls into my palm. I look down over the rafters. My mom is alone, sitting on the mattress with a book and a cigarette. Sheets of newspaper are spread out across the floor like a huge Chinese fan.

She sees me. “I'm sorry about not having a bathroom,” she says.

I want to pretend that I don't know what she's talking about or that one of my brothers must have peed in the night. But she points to the floor with her cigarette. “I threw down newspaper, same as you do with a puppy.”

I don't want to be the same as a puppy. I want to be her “Little Liddy Bumpkins.” As she looks up at me, I get the rules now. I won't drink soda at night. I won't wear red ever again. I'll study her hands and learn to cut the poppies. I'll be tough-skinned like my brothers.

“My tooth came out,” I say, excited that I have something to show her. I hold it up in the air like a pearl from an oyster.

She smiles up at me. Her eyes are as blue and open as the sky. “Lemme see, lemme see.”

This will be the first tooth of mine that she's ever seen.

I hold on tightly to my baby tooth as I climb barefoot down the ladder toward her.

Before boarding the plane to come here to Olympia, Bella told me that her tooth was loose. She always leaves a letter for the tooth fairy underneath her pillow, and her fairy replies with tiny handwritten notes as well as some kind of special treasure—a pearl, a fairy chandelier, an amethyst jewel, a rhinestone button, a crystal teardrop—mostly pieces that sparkle and are the proper size for a fairy to deliver. In my role as the tooth fairy, I revel in finding each treasure. I suppose it comes from what I might have liked as a young girl who believed in good fairies.

I think about calling Bella back to tell her I miss her. It's late. Maybe she's already gone to bed. And I should tell Dominic that I will make time to play cards or watch a movie with him when I get back. But how can I be a parent when I am such a child right now? All of my attention is focused on my mom. I am a small girl waiting for my mother to die.

• • •

I wait until all the lights are out in the house and then slide open the drawer of my mom's filing cabinet. Her letters are in no particular order and almost none of them are dated, though I'm piecing together a few that clearly date from before she left.

I'm absolutely batty in this sinkhole. Dirty diapers staining the floors, strained peas everywhere, and the washer's on the brink. J. is all up in arms because I would like to at least take a week by myself sometime. I can't see where it's such a weird idea. He ought to cut me some slack. I'm inclined to think he's worried about me having a rendezvous with W. and I can't scoff him on that point. But this affinity W. and I have is so totally unrealistic it's ridiculous!

“W”—I know this refers to Bill, a former “beau” and horse trainer from Texas that she loved and thought about over many years. I met him once when I was thirteen and was struck by how flirtatious my mom was with him. I want to understand how he fits into the timeline of my mom's life. So I read on.

J. is out with friends—probably drinking and having fun while I suffer the indignities of attending to numerous tots. We will take our vacation in two weeks. Ah, bliss. Only 6–7 days, but 6–7 days without babies is like 21 with. We'll probably go to Tahoe for a few days and then pan for gold and camp out. I would be so excited if I found a real gold nugget! And it does happen sometimes.

I don't know if this vacation ever happened or who we would have stayed with for those six to seven days. All I can concentrate on is her hope of finding “a real gold nugget”—so very Mom.

The next note is on composition paper.

I had an English professor once who started out giving me As on all my papers—a thing he didn't do often. Well, he got to know me and my work better, and then gave me Cs. As a way of explanation he called me after class one day in which we had been handed back tests. I had gotten an 86. He asked me if I had seen the movie The Hustler. I hadn't.

“Well,” he said. “It's about a pool shark, played by Paul Newman, who had so much skill it was hard to believe. He could sink a billiard ball anywhere on the table from any position. But he never won. He was a LOSER, and that's what you are. I'll be damned (he was getting pretty worked up) if it doesn't look like you wanted to keep yourself from getting an A. You sail through so many questions—beautiful, self-respecting, comprehensive answers. The way you did the one on Ophelia was close to brilliant. Then you completely foul up a few as if you thought you were going along too well—as if you weren't going to last. I don't know. We'll see you Thursday.”

Oh that man, if he ever realizes what he did to me…or for me?

I never did see him on Thursday. I dropped his course. I wasn't going to mess around with someone who had me pegged. I had good excuses as I was two months' pregnant and didn't feel quite up to par when that eight o'clock class rolled around. But my beloved professor hit me right below the belt.

Her story devastates me. The thought of my mom, so young and pregnant, being pegged as a loser and feeling her only choice was to drop out of her first year of college. Surely this wasn't what she wanted. My mom was exceptionally bright, and both she and my aunt received high scores on their IQ tests as young girls. In hindsight, I think my dad often mentioned this detail about her IQ because he wanted us to understand that while our mother didn't always make the smartest decisions, she had the brains to do so.

While her sister went on to medical school to become a psychiatrist, my mom's college years ended when she got pregnant with Jamie. But even with an incomplete education, she was smarter than all of us—at least that was how I felt growing up. If someone asked me about my mom, one of the first things I always mentioned was that she was brilliant and had a very high IQ.

Mindfully, I sift through her letters. I find a letter my mom wrote to my father but never sent. It appears tear-stained and unfinished.

Dear Jimmy,

This is going to be a very difficult letter to write in as much as I really don't know what to say. You have been gone a month, and that's a very long time to the one left behind. You left me in a hell of a spot in more ways than one. To me you were off finding your mind—to everyone else you had dumped all your responsibilities and had tooted off to see the world. I sort of came to the conclusion that since you had placed yourself as a free and independent person, so would I. I'd get a job, do whatever I wanted to do—but Good Lord how could I with Jamie??

It startles me to remember that my dad left briefly too, disappearing for a month when Jamie was nine months old. My mom had been unfaithful to him, and in a fury he took off and hitchhiked out to California. As I only know this story from my father's telling of it, I eagerly keep reading.

Sure I could get a part-time job in the area while Jamie stayed at home but I don't want that. I don't want Jamie brought up by my parents or yours. I want him—but not on a “give him breakfast and kiss him good-night while he stays with some nanny all day” basis. So what can I do? It's been a case of deciding what's best for Jamie—to stay with him always and be miserable for lack of occupation, to get a job and subject him to no home life whatsoever, or give him up completely so he'll have a home and I'll spend the rest of my life wanting my little boy back.

Look, Jimmy, I failed you—failed you flat and, therefore, myself. I never made a pleasant home for you to come into, I've never taken the time to listen and understand your problems, I've never made an effort to help you with your work—I've never really, in a nutshell, tried. And you failed me in some ways, but not nearly as many. But my selfishness wouldn't let me bend one bit, though I often wanted to at times. As far as Bill—he's gone now. Just a memory to put in my memories—believe me. Over the summer I found that as long as I had other satisfactions—friends, job—to compensate for troubles on the home front, I didn't give a damn about William. It seems as if he's an escape—if I can think I still love him, I don't have to think that I've made such a mess of things for nothing. So there! Your payment for desertion. Do you know that I could have had you arrested?

So she was still thinking about Bill. And from what I know, my dad got to California and picked up a job driving a Buick Riviera for Frank Sinatra and his celebrity pals at the Cal Neva Casino. He'd drive around town with Sammy Davis Jr., Trini Lopez, Gordon MacRae, and Bing Crosby. The tips were fantastic and the parties outlandish—until Frank Sinatra and the Cal Neva were shut down overnight for their associations with Sam Giancana and the mob. That's when my dad headed back to New York, remorseful but committed to making things work out. Eden was born nine months later.

I need you to understand that things have to be different when you come back and that I very much want to learn how to do things through love and for love. Oh, there are so many things we both must understand and they can't all be explained in a letter. So Jamie and I await your arrival by the 13th. Jamie has been just fine except for last night when teeth kept the whole house up all night. These will be 7 and 8, you know! Even in a month he's gotten to be such a big boy.

This letter gives me such a rare glimpse into my mom and dad as a couple. It also turns my head and heart in different directions. I never knew that my mom called him Jimmy. In her own words, she claims she couldn't stand to have Jamie left with a nanny on an all-day basis. That if she gave him up, she'd spend the rest of her life wanting her little boy back. But could she have ever have imagined that she would someday leave three children behind? What caused her to break away from us and choose the path she did?