Small Fry Page 6

  “Let’s not stop at the ATM,” I said. “Please.” But she stopped anyway, on our way out of town. No money came out of the machine, just a paper slip. She grabbed the slip, walked a few feet, and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to examine it, stricken. We went home. She did not answer my questions but told me to be quiet, and she went to her room for the rest of the day.

  “Go play,” she said. “I’m fine. Leave me alone, honey.”

  Drawing, sorting my clothing, arranging the mice in their cage, doing any ordinary thing at all, seemed risky, like simultaneously being in a little boat out in the middle of a storm. You couldn’t take your attention from it or it would tip when you didn’t expect.

  The next week Debbie took me over to the house where she lived with her parents in Menlo Park on Hobart Street. Her mother, blonde and plump with skin like parchment, was sitting in a breakfast nook wearing an apron, cutting rectangles out of colorful newsprint. The scissors made a pleasing rasp.

  I asked her what she was cutting.

  “Coupons,” she said. “I bring them to the store, and then I pay less.” She put each rectangle of paper into a partitioned section of a plastic box.

  There was a secret compartment inside one of Debbie’s dresser drawers. A drawer inside a drawer. “My family doesn’t even know about it,” she said, whispering and leaning down so her face was near mine. Inside was a jewelry case, and inside that was a necklace, the fine chain knotted.

  “I wonder if you can undo that with your little fingers,” she said. “If you can untie it, you can have it.” I sat on her bed and worked the filaments away from one another until each knot released.

  “Do you have a husband?” I asked her, as she fastened the necklace behind me.

  “Not yet,” she said. “But I will. I’ll be out walking, and bam, there he’ll be, around the next corner!”

  When we got back, my mother was in her painting clothes.

  “Look,” she said, gesturing to an almost-finished painting. Debbie went over to see it close up. “It’s amazing,” Debbie said. “I’ve never seen more beautiful artwork.” (Later Debbie said she wondered why we were poor when my mother had a talent like this. At the very least, she thought, my mother could hawk her artwork on the street. But my mother’s artwork didn’t make money except for a few illustration projects.)

  We all sat at the table, me on Debbie’s lap. At some point while they were talking I looked up and said, “Your teeth are white. My mom’s are yellow.” My mother shifted in her chair; she often complained about the way her teeth looked.

  “Debbie has no idea,” my mother said, after Debbie had left. “She’s phony and judgmental and she has no fucking idea.” It was true that Debbie judged her: at some point during the visit, Debbie noticed the dishes in the sink and a stain on our wall, left there by previous renters where a drink must have spilled. Over time the area had darkened like a shadow and Debbie had noticed it and wrinkled her nose.

  “She just prances in here and takes you away,” my mother went on, “and you’re a delight—and she judges me. When it’s because of all my work that you’re so great.”

  “I like her,” I said.

  “She’s not perfect, you know. She’s not happy all the time. She’s phony.”

  “You should clip coupons,” I told her.

  “No way,” she said. “It’s not the kind of person I am. Or ever want to be.”

  After that day, my mother no longer waited with me near the garage beside the front house by the circle of asphalt in the morning for Debbie’s arrival.

  One weekend a friend from school named Daniela and her parents took me to a musical concert. I wore heavy-gauge white wool tights. I had to pee in the middle of the performance but it wasn’t possible to leave. I held it for as long as I could, and then finally, not able to hold it any longer, I peed in my tights. (I was relieved to notice, when the lights turned on, that you couldn’t tell from looking that they were soaked).

  In the bathroom at intermission, I tried to flush the tights down the toilet. They gathered near the hole, stuck, a twirl of sodden fabric. When I left the stall, there was a line out of the bathroom; the next person in line, a woman, advanced toward the stall I left. “I don’t know if you want to use that one,” I said to her, using my best diction, as if she and I were conspirators. “There’s a pair of children’s tights in the toilet.” The woman gave me a strange look, and it was only after I walked out that I realized that I’d given myself away.

  After the show my mother took Daniela and me for pizza at Applewood, and as we walked back to the car, we took turns swinging her cloth purse by the long handle, making huge and violent circles above the sidewalk. Daniela whipped it around. An X-Acto blade my mother used for art projects must have made its way to the bottom, come uncapped, and poked through the fabric. The bottom of the bag brushed against the top of my wrist and slashed it open. Later, it developed into a scar an inch long, vertical, bisecting my forearm, an “I” shape that was not unattractive and that I have become used to. For a while she felt guilty and could hardly look at the scar. But then years later she would point and exclaim, “I signed you!” like I was her art.

  Sometimes my mother remarked how her own mother, Virginia, wouldn’t have done this or that: wouldn’t have taken her to a café to get cake, or intervened on her behalf in school, or brought her snacks in bed when she was hungry—and the summation of these small comments, as far as I understood, at the very least, was that her mother had withheld from her the elements of my own childhood that I liked the most.

  “When I was little,” she said, “my mother noticed I had artistic talent, and she went out and bought my sister Linda an easel and an elaborate paint set. Then she said I wasn’t allowed to touch it.”

  I wanted more stories like that one—stories of Virginia’s cruelty—but instead she mostly told me about how her mother was a great cook and had strung up fat hand-cut noodles around the kitchen to dry like socks, had insisted on buying feather duvets when this was not common. Once, on a snowy day, Virginia looked out the window and saw two bright-red cardinals sitting on a branch and decided she would buy herself a pair of red shoes, and did. Through Virginia, we were related to the late Branch Rickey, who was her great-uncle and the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the man who helped get Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball. It was important to defend Virginia, my mother implied, even before I knew what we were defending her against.

  “My first memory was as a baby in my crib, looking around, noticing how meager the room was,” she said. “As if I’d come from some other place that was considerably nicer.” In her stories of childhood, she was sometimes defenseless and at other times powerful. She was required to wear skirts and flimsy coats to school in the freezing Ohio winters; she had the initiative and independence to save cereal tokens and trade them for binoculars and went wandering and bird-watching alone at dawn. Now she was looking for something much better than what she’d ever experienced before—she wanted it for both of us—something exquisite that she could imagine but that we hadn’t seen or tasted yet.

  My mother and I went for a hike near Maryknoll Seminary, in a nature preserve of hilly grassland with a residence for retired missionary priests. We walked on a wide dirt path. Around us the grasses and nettles gave off a smell of incense and soap. The insects were loud, then all at once, they’d stop, like a drop in pressure, leaving the air empty, and then they’d start again, building up. This was snake weather. Snakes might sun themselves on paths.

  “In India, I saw a baby cobra,” she said. “It was blocking the path, rearing its head up.” She made an aspirated noise at the back of her throat. “They’re the worst. They don’t know their power yet; they release the venom all at once.” I did not picture my mother in her stories. Instead, I saw her stories from her perspective, as if I had been the one in India with the baby cobra.

  On the hill above us was a green cactus with bright red fruit. “Prickly p
ears,” my mother said. “I’ve been wanting to try one.”

  She began to climb, setting off little avalanches of dirt with her feet.

  “Mom, stop,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’re not my mother,” she said.

  “Let’s do it later,” I said.

  “Come on, Lisa. I’ve always wanted this.”

  “There’s spines,” I said.

  “I wasn’t born with yesterday’s rain,” she said, still climbing. She said this when I acted like a know-it-all. Rain was what we needed—we were in a drought, the worst one in a long time. We weren’t supposed to flush after we peed. The hillside was yellow, the sound of the grass crackly under her feet.

  She made it up to a higher point on the far side of the plant so she was reaching down from above it. The plant didn’t look real, but whimsical, jointed like a plastic doll.

  “Red is a dangerous color in nature,” she said, near the bright-red fruit. “It’s a warning color: ‘Poison—don’t eat me.’“

  She covered her hand with the edge of her shirt, sucked in her stomach, reached, and grabbed the top of the fruit and pulled. It did not snap off as she thought it would.

  She began to rotate it. “It’s fibrous,” she grunted. “It won’t come off.”

  I wanted to make her stop; she was acting crazy and I hated her. I knew everything. I was full of premonitions. The grasses hissed.

  Finally, she pried it off and brought it down to the path, where I stood.

  I said, “Let’s take it home and boil it.”

  “I want it now,” she said. “If I can just get the skin off.” She used her shirt to guard her hand while she peeled the skin down and then nibbled the flesh at the center, trying to avoid the skin. “Mmm. It’s good. Interesting. Want some?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  On the drive home, she began to moan.

  “My throat,” she said. “It hurts to swallow.”

  At a stoplight she pulled herself up in her seat, looked at her open mouth in the rearview mirror. Despite my resolve not to pity her, I was terrified.

  “I told you to wait,” I said.

  “I know. I can’t talk, Lisa, it hurts too much.” Small, transparent spines on the skin of the fruit must have lodged themselves along her throat.

  When we got home, her throat on fire, she went to get her clothes out of the dryer and found that she had accidentally shrunk her favorite angora sweater.

  “Damn,” she said. It had a row of mother-of-pearl buttons down the placket. “You can have it.”

  It fit me exactly, hitting just below my belly button, the sleeves at my wrists, the soft fabric and flower pattern in a sea of pink, as if it were made to be my size.

  In the few days leading up to the next excursion with Debbie, I was careful not to wear the shrunken sweater, which seemed to be something I had taken from my mother, part of the tide of good luck that flowed out to me, leaving her behind.

  A few days later she sat in her bedroom throwing three pennies at the carpet beside a book, a pen, and a piece of paper, consulting the I Ching. She sat in the corner, the lights off. It was daytime but it was dim in her bedroom. She leaned, her elbow on her knee and her brow in her hand. Strands of hair stuck along her cheek and fell over her ear.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I lost my twenties,” she said.

  She threw the pennies again, looked, jotted down ticks as thin as insect legs in a stack that ran down the page, riffled through a small book.

  “But you did have them,” I said.

  “You have it good,” she said. “You get to go out with Debbie and have fun. I don’t have anyone.”

  “You can come with us,” I said, although I knew this wasn’t what she wanted.

  “I want my own friends, my own life.” On the word life, she threw down three pennies. We could not both be happy at once. Her eagerness—for more life, for fun, the prickly pear—felt to me like danger. My happiness had been pulled from the reserve of hers, a limited string we had to share. If she has it, I must not; if I have it, she must wilt. As if the emotional thrift of the world meant there was never enough for both of us at any one time.

  “You have friends,” I said.

  This made her sob. “I don’t have a man, a husband, a boyfriend, a relationship. Nothing.”

  The air in the bedroom was stale. “But I love you and I’m here for you.”

  “I try, but nothing works out for me,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I used to have these beautiful, strong hands.” She was crying so hard there was spit between her lips and she could hardly get the words out. “And do you know what Faye bought me for Christmas?” she said of her stepmother; it was Jim and Faye whom I called my grandparents because I’d seen Virginia only a couple of times.

  “She bought me an iron,” she said. “And do you know what she bought Linda?” Linda was her younger sister, the pretty one who’d gotten the paint set. Now Linda was managing several branches of Supercuts and dating a NASA physicist with a mustache and a hot tub.

  “A champagne bucket!” she said.

  I knew it was not the utility of the gifts—we used the iron and the ironing board that came with it for years, and later Linda would say it was not a champagne bucket but an ice bucket, and that she’d specifically asked for it, as my mother had asked for the iron—but the symbolism that made this gift so awful. But still I wanted her to tell Faye about the mistake and make Faye take it back and give her what she wanted.

  She got up, walked out of her bedroom, grabbed a pair of fabric scissors off her desk in the living room, went to her closet, and began jolting the hangers across the rail, pulling different shirts off hangers and throwing them into a pile.

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do. I have nothing to wear. Nothing.” She snipped the corner of an old gray shirt and then ripped it open, revealing a selvedge edge.

  “It’s the neckline. It’s terrible. I hate my clothes.” She sobbed, then growled. She cut a notch in the bottom of a T-shirt and then took it with both hands and ripped it across, bellowing with rage.

  She’d done the same with other clothes when she was angry, cut necklines, shortened shirts and sleeves, then never worn them again. Later, she would have to throw these clothes away, reducing further her already small collection.

  Around this time, my father threw a large and lavish thirtieth birthday party for himself. He invited my mother, and she planned to go, inviting Debbie to come along, but as the date approached, she began to waver. She couldn’t afford to buy a new dress. She would be ashamed to be there in rags, beside people in finery, celebrating him. She canceled at the last minute, leaving Debbie, who had pinned her hopes of finding a husband on the event, in the lurch. I was not aware of the party at the time, only of my mother’s shift into melancholy, and her increasing preoccupation with her wardrobe and her feeling of having lost her youth.

  I knew the things she didn’t like about herself—her thighs, her forehead, her teeth, the wrinkles above her lip—and that she believed these parts and old clothes meant she would not get what she wanted. In fact she was beautiful, her cheekbones high, a delicate nose. She said she, Linda, and Kathy were called the Forehead Sisters in high school, their hairlines starting too high up, but I liked her forehead, bare and smooth like part of an egg. Her figure was like a Rodin sketch I saw later of a woman facing forward looking back, every element feminine and in stunning proportion—back, butt, breasts. A small waist.

  That night as she made dinner, she washed the lentils, touching them slowly with the pads of her fingers, looking at them mournfully, as if she were in the process of losing some inestimable thing.

  When Debbie and I got back to the house one late afternoon, my mother was waiting for us in front of the garage. I could tell by the way she stood that something was wrong—she held her jaw tight and askew. She held her hand over her eyes to block the sun; I could see she’d been cry
ing.

  As soon as we got out of the car, she started talking. “You know what, I’m sick of this. How you think you’re better than I am.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Stop.”

  “Stay out of this, honey,” she said.

  Debbie looked innocent, shocked; she edged her way back toward her car door.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m saying,” my mother said.

  “I don’t—I really didn’t mean—” Debbie stuttered.

  “You wanted to just march into our lives and judge me in front of my daughter. And you think you’re perfect, when you’re really superficial, silly,” my mother said, through her teeth. There was some truth in what my mother said, which made her fury more terrifying.

  “You’re trying to insinuate yourself into Lisa’s life, to be better than her mother. It’s disgusting. Who the hell do you think you are? It’s like some kind of molestation.” She was yelling now. Her brow and her lips wrinkled like tinfoil, she bared her teeth, and Debbie, startled and balanced too high, her heels clicking, retreated, opening her car door.

  I was afraid Debbie would think of me as if I was my mother. I imagined others did not see us as separate but as the same person in two bodies.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Be quiet, Lisa,” she said.

  It was hard to move or think; shock felt like languor. I was ashamed of my mother. How scary she was when she yelled, snarling and unkempt. The scene unfolded like two ribbons, Debbie pleading, my mother responding, fluttering after her to yell more, Debbie retreating, slipping into her car, turning on the engine, and driving away. I never saw Debbie again.

  My mother was supposed to go on a first date with Ron.

  He would come to pick her up, meet me, and they would go to an early dinner. The neighbors were home if I needed anything. I was old enough now—seven—to stay alone in the house for two hours, but the details were still a negotiation.

  “And afterwards?”