Wire Mesh Mothers (6 page)

Deidra looked back at the workbook. Her voice cooled. She knew she was being brushed off. "Call SCEA. They have strategies. Maybe something will fit in your case."
 

"You bet."

When Deidra left the lounge, Kate opened the window and poured the rest of her Pepsi out onto the grass. It sizzled, fizzled, and went flat in the grass. A well-bundled mother, crossing the parking lot to her car, turned at the sound of the opening window and squinted through the winter sunlight. Her perfectly round shades made her look like Little Orphan Annie.

With Donald’s income and the mortgage-less house on the hill, what was the point of continuing to teach? True, the
Harrolds
could and probably still would pursue legal avenues to hold her feet to the fire and make her pay for the attack on their sweet little child. But if she quit, she could spend the daylight hours hiding out in her sunroom, reading Anne Tyler, drinking Pepsi, and gazing at the collection of Patricia
Spilman
watercolors over the fireplace.

"Indeed," Kate said to the Little Orphan Annie mother, who was now in her car, turning over the engine. The car coughed, sputtered black exhaust, and then coasted away, out to the main road. "What's the point of staying, indeed? My illusion of doing something worthwhile has yet again been blown to the sky. Kate has failed once more. Big, fat, whooping surprise."

Went across the hall to the restroom. As she pushed open the door to go in, she glanced back toward the office, past Miriam who continued to pound delicately at the computer keys, to the little girl Mistie on the bench in her nightgown and borrowed cardigan sweater.
 

Alone, trembling slightly but seeming unaware of her discomfort. Her eyes flicking back and forth from the door to the ceiling to the floor to her hands. Her feet, wiggling in the cheap little shoes. She reminded Kate of a puppy she’d encountered once when she was in college, a puppy she’d watched shiver in the rain behind an apartment complex, no doghouse, no shelter, a chain so heavy it could hardly move, a collar so tight it was embedded in the flesh. But so accustomed to neglect that it didn’t even whine.

By the time Kate had to return to the cafeteria to gather the masses and take them back to class for math, a strange little seed of thought had found its way into Kate's mind. A painful seed, taunting, insistent, frightening. A course of action, a course of deliverance, void of the SCEA and Donald and Mr. Byron and Willie
Harrold's
parents.

Do it.

Don’t be ridiculous.

It’s not ridiculous. Do it. What the hell have you got to lose?

The students - sans Willie, for Willie had gone home with his daddy to plot the course of Ms. McDolen’s impending doom - were surprisingly somber and quiet as Kate wrote the first of the division problems on the board.

Of course it’s ridiculous. You’ve never had such an absurd idea in your life
.

Maybe. Maybe not.

As the rest of the afternoon stumbled along, the seed set out its probing web of rhizomes, irrevocably linking her to what she was going to do when the last bell of the day rang. Her heart lurched; her arm hairs stood at attention.

Do it. If you lived in Nazi Germany and had a chance to rescue one life, you would do it. You could be that hero. You will be that hero.

She forced herself to focus on the math problems, but beneath it all she'd never been so excited in her entire life.

"M
am," said Tony.

The woman on the sofa made a snuffling sound, then turned over, her face to the back, a filthy throw pillow clutched to her chest. She was dressed in sweatpants and t-shirt. Her hair, gray and long, was pulled back into a limp ponytail. She stunk like she was having her period.

"Mam!"

The woman said, "What you want? Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?"

"Darlene's out back playing in the sinkhole."

"So?"

"So you told her not to. You told her to keep her
nitty
head inside so the neighbors wouldn't think she was skipping out school again."

"She ain't hurting nothing. Mine yer own business."

"No problem," said Tony. She went back into the kitchen and pulled a beer from the refrigerator. She took a long swig then looked out the grease-iced kitchen window at her ten-year-old sister in the sinkhole. Darlene was digging with a tree branch. Going to China or something. Little puffs of frosty ground arched up and out of the hole every so often. Maybe she'd fall in and nobody would be able to get her out and the Chinamen would put her in prison and torture her and make her build fireworks for Americans. Tony smiled around the beer can.

Tony’s home was the yellow house on Rainbow Lane. A developer had bought a chunk of farmland off Donald McDolen and had put up a row of ten box houses. One was white, one pink. Another was blue, yellow, green, lavender, peach, aqua, gray, and teal. Each house had started out with chain link fencing, a small storage shed, and deck off the kitchen in the back. Now, the houses had taken on the personalities of the owners, much like dogs begin to look like their masters. Mrs. Sanford in the white house had maintained the fence and deck and had put in rose bushes and a gray stone patio.
 
The Campbell family in the teal house didn't have a fence or deck anymore. Their teenagers had torn it down. The lavender house belonged to the
Kesslers
, whose daughter did beauty pageants all over the state. And the peach house was now a crack house, with its ratty shades always drawn and a steady flow of customers coming and going in cars with smudged license plates and windows smoked over. People in the neighborhood tried to keep pets but as soon as Tony could get her hands on them, they would be sliced and diced and thrown out in the woods. Nobody knew she did it; everybody blamed the crack house customers.
 

There were two bedrooms in Tony's house. One was her mother's and Darlene’s, although
Lorilynn
Petinske
seemed to prefer the sofa in the living room. The other bedroom belonged to Tony and the nine-year-old disabled twins, Judy and Jody. Judy and Jody were disabled because they couldn't behave in school and so for the past year,
Lorilynn
Petinske
had gotten monthly checks for the girls to stay home. Tony didn't know where Judy and Jody were now, probably over at the pink house. The bedroom had a double bed where Judy and Jody slept and a cot where Tony slept. There was only enough walking room to sidle between the bed and cot to get to the closet or the dresser. The visible floor space was littered with dirty underwear and crumpled school papers.

"Angela," called Tony's mom.

Tony didn't answer. She refused to answer to that name.
 
Her mother knew it.

"Angela!"

Tony stepped across the tops of the cot and the bed, then dropped down to the floor in front of the closet. She wrangled back the warped sliding door. She had to have something that would make her unrecognizable at the Exxon. The thrill was to do it and to have everyone wonder and tremble, not to be caught. There were several old K-Mart cardboard storage crates in the closet that had
accordioned
with age and the weight of accumulated clothes and junk. These boxes held stuff that Tony’s mother considered valuable. Tony had been through them many times, had removed and sold a tarnished pocket watch, some costume jewelry, and an old black silk parasol that had belonged to Tony’s great-grandmother. She’d taken the Swiss army knife and stashed it in her dresser drawer beneath her jeans. She’d smashed and then burned the small collection of porno movies and
Playgirl
magazines she’d discovered at the bottom of the box, a collection that had clearly belonged to her mother.

Most of the stuff, however, was just clothes. Tony’s first school dress. Judy and Jody’s matching knit baby bonnets. A cotton apron Darlene had tried to hand-stitch when she’d been in Brownies for a half-year. Other assorted outgrown clothes that for some reason, Mam had felt were worth hanging on to.

One box was crammed with clothes that had belonged to Tony's grandfather. Her mother's father. Trousers, a pair of cracked and musty shoes, two flattened hats, a couple starched, faded shirts, a moth-chewed gray knit vest. They smelled of silverfish and thirty-year-old sweat. Mam, who wasn’t real crazy about Granddad, hadn't thrown them out because she said it was an insult to the dead to do that.

Tony pulled out Granddad’s box and tossed it onto the double bed. Granddad had not been a large man, unlike Buddy's Gramps who had a gut like a wheelbarrow and a beanbag butt. She put on the beige slacks and drew them up tightly with the old vinyl belt. She added a long-sleeved checkered shirt, the vest and the black shoes. Her feet swam in the shoes, so she found three pairs of socks in the dresser and put them on and tied up the black laces. The socks kept the shoes from slipping. She studied herself in the full mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and then pulled one of the flattened hats down over her eyes. She found the knife in the drawer beneath her jeans and stuck it in the side of her shoe, working the handle up under the leg of the trousers. She tore a strip of cloth off one of the blouses Darlene had left on the floor and used it to tie the handle in place, snug, against her ankle.

Her mother's sunglasses were found on top of the fridge. She put them on. They were cheap and the bridge cut her nose.

“Angela, goddamn it!” called her mother from the living room.

Tony tried to see herself in the window glass over the sink. From what she could tell, she looked a little like herself, a lot like her father. That was good. Her father, Burton, had been a real man. He’d left when Tony was six but that was okay because he didn’t really want to, Mam had made him go. She had found a new boyfriend and told Burton to get out, she never wanted to see him again. Tony understood why he didn’t try to stay. Burton had been a real man and a real man could never have put up with the shit on the sofa in the living room.

Tony dumped her mother’s black vinyl purse out on the kitchen table and collected up the three tubes of Shop-Rite lipstick. These went into the shirt breast pocket. War paint for the Hot Heads.

“Angela, you’re in there, I hear you!”

Tony shoved a kitchen chair over to the stove and climbed up to get the shoebox from the back of the tiny cabinet over the stove. The box was covered with chew marks and inside were little black mouse
turds
. Also inside were Burton’s revolver and a small paper bag of bullets. Burton had lost the revolver in the divorce along with the sofa and his television. Tony had tried the weapon out several times in the woods behind the houses of Rainbow Lane, drilling holes in trees and downing groundhogs and starlings. It had a good feel to it, the wooden veneer on the handle slick and easy to grip. She put the revolver in pocket of the slacks and patted it. It felt like a hard-on. She grinned.

As she was pulling the small paper bag of bullets out of the cabinet, her fingers lost hold and the bag fell, bounced on stove, and the folded top popped open. The three bullets in the bag rolled out, skipped over the lip of the stove, and disappeared into the black maw of the crack between the stove and the solid sink counter.

“Fuck!” swore Tony. She grabbed at the air as if she might actually draw the bullets back out of their hiding place, but came up empty.

“Tony!” Mom at last relented, her voice dissolving, changing from demanding bitch to whiny child. “I need a beer, honey. Please?”

Tony tried to rock the stove to move it backward, but it was too heavy. She yanked the long-handled barbecue fork from the utensil drawer, got on her knees, and scraped the narrow space with the prongs. Nothing came out.

“Goddamn it!” Tony kicked the stove, tried to rock it again. It didn’t budge. She slammed both fists against the white enamel surface of the stove, and kicked it with her Granddad’s shoe.

“Tony, honey? You out there in the kitchen? Please bring me a beer. My throat’s so dry I can hardly breathe.”

Tony shoved the kitchen chair back into place and took another beer from the fridge. She popped the tab, then found the can of Bug-Be-Gone spray in the cabinet under the sink. She
spritzed
down the hole in the can, not too much, just enough to make Mam sick, then swirled it around and wiped the top with the wet dishrag.
 

You’re a fucking bug, Mam, a lazy ass mosquito, sucking everybody dry.

Tony took the can to Mam, who thanked her meekly, then left by the back door, stomping in Granddad’s shoes across the warping redwood deck and down the steps. Darlene glanced up from the sinkhole, stuck out her tongue, and kept on digging. Tony walked down the brown graveled drive to the road with the empty revolver in her pocket. It was already after three-thirty. Leroy and Buddy wouldn't be long.

As a sharp winter wind blew up around her legs, Tony wished she'd brought her heavy coat. But she wasn't going to go back into the house with that stinking new nigger. She wouldn't step foot inside that dump again until she’d done what she had to do.

She licked beer and salty sweat from her upper lip, jammed her hands into the trouser pockets, leaned against the yellow house's sagging chain link fence, and counted, counted, counted, until the Chevelle showed up.