I had heard this story before.
“Fish sticks,” I mumbled.
“Fish sticks. Can you imagine? Such an easy thing to make. You’d think if he was rushing so much, it would at least be a steak. Ah, well, I didn’t care. He got his fish sticks.”
She looked at me playfully.
“And I got you.”
We took a few more steps. My forehead pounded. I rubbed it with the ball of my hand.
“What happened, Charley? Are you in pain?”
The question was so simple, it was impossible to answer. Pain? Where should I begin? The accident? The leap? The three-day bender? The wedding? My marriage? The depression? The last eight years? When was I not in pain?
“I haven’t been so good, Mom,” I said.
She kept on walking, inspecting the grass.
“You know, for three years after I married your father, I wished for a child. In those days, three years to get pregnant, that was a long time. People thought there was something wrong with me. So did I.”
She exhaled softly. “I couldn’t imagine a life without children. Once, I even...Wait. Let’s see.”
She guided me toward the large tree on the corner near our house.
“This was late one night, when I couldn’t sleep.” She rubbed her hand over the bark as if unearthing an old treasure. “Ah. Still there.”
I leaned in. The word PLEASE had been carved into the side. Small crooked letters. You had to look carefully, but there it was. PLEASE.
“You and Roberta weren’t the only ones who carved,” she said, smiling.
“What is it?”
“A prayer.”
“For a child?”
She nodded.
“For me?”
Another nod.
“On a tree?”
“Trees spend all day looking up at God.”
I made a face.
“I know.” She lifted her hands in surrender. “You’re so corny, Mom.”
She touched the bark again, then made a small hmm sound. She seemed to be considering everything that happened since the afternoon I came into the world. I wondered how that sound would change if she knew the whole story.
“So,” she said, moving away, “now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.”
She straightened and smoothed her coat. I wanted to cry. A wish granted? How long had it been since anyone referred to me as anything close to that? I should have been grateful. I should have been ashamed of how I’d turned my back on my life. Instead, I wanted a drink. I craved the darkness of a bar, the low-wattage bulbs, the taste of that numbing alcohol as I watched the glass empty, knowing the sooner it got in me, the sooner it would take me away.
I stepped toward her and put my hand on her shoulder; I half expected it to cut right through, like you see in ghost movies. But it didn’t. It rested there, and I felt her narrow bones beneath the fabric.
“You died,” I blurted out.
A sudden breeze blew leaves off a pile.
“You make too much of things,” she said.
POSEY BENETTO WAS a good talker, everybody said so. But, unlike a lot of good talkers, she was also a good listener. She listened to patients down at the hospital. She listened to neighbors in beach chairs on hot summer days. She loved jokes. She would push a hand into the shoulder of anyone who made her laugh. She was charming. That’s how people thought of her: Charming Posey.
Apparently, that was only as long as my father’s big hands were wrapped around her. Once she was divorced, freed of his grasp, other women didn’t want that charm anywhere near their husbands.
Thus my mother lost all of her friends. She might as well have had the plague. The card games she and my father used to play with neighbors? Finished. The invitations to birthday parties? Done. On the Fourth of July, you could smell charcoal everywhere—yet no one invited us to their cookout. At Christmastime, you would see cars in front of houses and mingling adults visible through the bay windows. But my mother would be in our kitchen, mixing cookie dough.
“Aren’t you going to that party?” we’d ask.
“We’re having a party right here,” she’d say.
She made it seem like her choice. Just the three of us. For a long time, I believed New Year’s Eve was a family event, meant for squeezing chocolate syrup on ice cream and tooting noisemakers by a TV set. It surprised me to learn that my teenaged friends used the night for raiding the family liquor cabinet, because their parents were dressed up and gone by eight o’clock.
“You mean you’re stuck with your mom on New Year’s?” they would ask.
“Yeah,” I’d moan.
But it was my charming mother who was stuck.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
I have already given up on Santa Claus by the time my old man leaves, but Roberta is only six, and she does the whole routine: leaving cookies, writing a note, sneaking to the window, pointing at stars and asking, “Is that a reindeer?”
The first December we are on our own, my mother wants to do something special. She finds a complete Santa outfit: the red jacket, red pants, boots, fake beard. On Christmas Eve, she tells Roberta to go to bed at nine thirty and to not, whatever she does, be anywhere near the living room at ten o’clock—which, of course, means Roberta is out of bed at five minutes to ten and watching like a hawk.
I follow behind her, carrying a flashlight. We sit on the staircase. Suddenly, the room goes dark, and we hear rustling. My sister gasps. I flick on my flashlight. Roberta whisper-screams, “No, Chick!” and I flick it off, but then, being that age, I flick it back on again and catch my mother in her Santa suit with a pillow sack. She turns and tries to bellow, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Who’s there?” My sister ducks, but for some reason I keep that light shining on my mother, right in her bearded face, so she has to shield her eyes with her free hand.
“Ho! Ho!” she tries again.
Roberta is scrunched up like a bug, peeking over her fists. She whispers, “Chick, shut it off! You’ll scare him away!” But I can only see the absurdity of the situation, how we are going to have to fake everything from now on: fake a full dinner table, fake a female Santa Claus, fake being a family instead of three quarters of a family.
“It’s just Mom,” I say flatly.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” my mother says.
“It is not!” Roberta says.
“Yes it is, you twerp. It’s Mom. Santa Claus isn’t a girl, stupid.”
I keep that light on my mother and I see her posture change—her head drops back, her shoulders slump, like a fugitive Santa caught by the cops. Roberta starts crying. I can tell my mother wants to yell at me, but she can’t do that and blow her cover, so she stares me down between her stocking cap and her cotton beard, and I feel my father’s absence all over the room. Finally, she dumps the pillowcase of small presents onto the floor and walks out the front door without so much as another “ho, ho, ho.” My sister runs back to bed, howling with tears. I am left on the stairs with my flashlight, illuminating an empty room and a tree.
Rose
WE CONTINUED WALKING through the old neighborhood. By now I had settled into a foggy acceptance of this—what would you call it?—temporary insanity? I would go with my mother wherever she wanted to go until whatever I had done caught up with me. To be honest, not all of me wanted it to end. When a lost loved one appears before you, it’s your brain that fights it, not your heart.
Her first “appointment” lived in a small brick home in the middle of Lehigh Street, just two blocks from our house. There was a metal awning over the porch and a flower box filled with pebbles. The morning air seemed overly crisp now, and the light was strange, making the edges of the scenery too sharply defined, as if drawn in ink. I still had not seen another person, but it was midmorning and most folks would be working.
“Knock,” my mother told me.
I knocked.
/> “She’s hard of hearing. Knock louder.”
I rapped on the door.
“Knock again.”
I pounded.
“Not so hard,” she said.
Finally, the door opened. An elderly woman wearing a smock and holding a walker pushed her lips into a confused smile.
“Good morrrning, Rose,” my mother sang. “I brought a young man with me.”
“Oooh,” Rose said. Her voice was so high it was almost birdlike. “Yes, I see.”
“You remember my son, Charley?”
“Oooh. Yes. I see.”
She stepped back. “Come in. Come in.”
Her house was tidy, small, and seemingly frozen in the 1970s. The carpet was royal blue. The couches were covered in plastic. We followed her to the laundry room. Our steps were unnaturally small and slow, marching behind Rose and her walker.
“Having a good day, Rose?” my mother asked.
“Oooh, yes. Now that you’re here.”
“Do you remember my son, Charley?”
“Oooh, yes. Handsome.”
She said this with her back to me.
“And how are your children, Rose?”
“What’s that now?”
“Your children?”
“Oooh.” She waved her palm. “They check up on me once a week. Like a chore.”
I couldn’t tell, at that point, who or what Rose was. An apparition? A real person? Her house felt real enough. The heat was turned up, and the smell of toasted bread lingered from breakfast. We entered the laundry room where a chair was positioned by the sink. A radio was playing some big band song.
“Would you turn that off, young man?” Rose said, without turning around. “The radio. Sometimes I have it too loud.”
I found the volume knob and clicked it off.
“Terrible, did you hear?” Rose said. “An accident by the highway. They were talking about it on the news.”
I froze.
“A car hit a truck and crashed through a big sign. Knocked it right down. Terrible.”
I scanned my mother’s face, expecting her to turn and demand my confession. Admit what you did, Charley.
“Well, Rose, the news is depressing,” she said, still unpacking her bag.
“Oooh, yes,” Rose said. “So much so.”
Wait. They knew? They didn’t know? I had a cold flush of dread, as if someone were about to rap on the windows and demand I come out.
Instead, Rose turned her walker, then her knees, then her skinny shoulders in my direction.
“It’s nice that you spend a day with your mother,” she said. “Children should do it more often.”
She put a shaky hand on the back of the chair by the sink.
“Now, Posey,” she said, “can you still make me beautiful?”
MAYBE YOU’RE WONDERING how my mother came to be a hairdresser. As I mentioned, she had been a nurse, and she truly loved being a nurse. She had that deep well of patience to carefully dress bandages, draw blood, and answer endless worried questions with upbeat reassurances. The male patients liked having someone young and pretty around. And the female patients were grateful when she brushed out their hair or helped them put on lipstick. I doubt it was protocol back then, but my mother applied makeup to more than a few occupants of our county hospital. She believed it made them feel better. That was the point of a hospital stay, wasn’t it? “You’re not supposed to go there and rot,” she would say.
Sometimes, at the dinner table, she would get a faraway look and talk about “poor Mrs. Halverson” and her emphysema or “poor Roy Endicott” and his diabetes. Now and then, she would stop talking about a person, and my sister would ask, “What did the old lady Golinski do today?” and my mother would answer, “She went home, honey.” My father would lift his eyebrows and look at her, then go back to chewing his food. It was only when I got older that I realized “home” meant “dead.” That was usually when he changed the subject, anyhow.
THERE WAS ONLY one hospital in our county, and with my father out of the picture, my mother tried to work as many shifts as she could, meaning she couldn’t pick up my sister after school. So most days I would fetch Roberta, walk her home, then ride my bike back for baseball practice.
“Do you think Daddy will be there today?” she would ask.
“No, stupid,” I would say. “Why would he be there today?”
“Because the grass is high and he has to mow it,” she’d say. Or, “Because there are a lot of leaves to rake.” Or, “Because it’s Thursday, and Mommy makes lamb chops on Thursday.”
“I don’t think that’s a good reason,” I’d say.
She’d wait before asking the obvious follow-up.
“Then how come he left, Chick?”
“I dunno! He just did, OK?”
“That’s not a good reason, either,” she’d mumble.
One afternoon, when I was twelve and she was seven, my sister and I emerged from the schoolyard and heard a honking sound.
“It’s Mommy!” Roberta said, running ahead.
She didn’t get out of the car, which was strange. My mother thought it rude to honk for people; years later she would warn my sister that any boy who wouldn’t come to the front door was a boy not worth dating. But now here she was, staying in the car, so I followed after my sister and crossed the street and got in.
My mother did not look well. Her eyes were black below the lids, and she kept clearing her throat. She was not wearing her nursing whites.
“Why are you here?” I asked. That was how I was talking to her in those days.
“Give your mother a kiss,” she said.
I leaned my head across the seat and she kissed my hair.
“Did they let you out of work early?” Roberta asked.
“Yes, sweetie, something like that.”
She sniffed. She looked in the rearview mirror and wiped the black from around her eyes.
“How about some ice cream?” she said.
“Yeah! Yeah!” my sister said.
“I have practice,” I said.
“Oh, why don’t you skip the practice, OK?”
“No!” I protested. “You can’t skip practice; you have to go.”
“Says who?”
“The coaches and everyone.”
“I wanna go! I want a cone!” Roberta said.
“Just a fast ice cream?” my mother said.
“Gaw! No! OK?”
I lifted my head and looked straight at her. What I saw, I don’t think I had ever seen before. My mother looked lost.
I would later learn that she had been fired from the hospital. I would later learn that some staff members felt that she was too much of a distraction to the male doctors, now that she was single. I would later learn that there had been some incident with a senior member of the staff and my mother had complained about inappropriate behavior. Her reward for standing up for herself was the suggestion that “it isn’t going to work out anymore.”
And you know the weird thing? Somehow, I knew all this the moment I looked her in the eye. Not the details, of course. But lost is lost, and I knew that look because I’d worn it myself. I hated her for having it. I hated her for being as weak as I was.
I got out of the car and said, “I don’t want any ice cream. I’m going to practice.” As I crossed the street, my sister yelled out the window, “Do you want us to bring you a cone?” and I thought, You’re so stupid, Roberta, cones melt.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
She has found my cigarettes. They are in my sock drawer. I am fourteen years old.
“It’s my room!” I yell.
“Charley! We talked about this! I told you not to smoke! It’s the worst thing you can do! What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re a hypocrite!”
She stops. Her neck stiffens. “Don’t you use that word.”
“You smoke! You’re a hypocrite!”
“Don’t you use that word!”
&nb
sp; “Why not, Mom? You always want me to use big words in a sentence. There’s a sentence. You smoke. I can’t. My mother is a hypocrite!”
I am moving as I yell this, and the moving seems to give me strength, confidence, as if she can’t hit me. This is after she has taken a job at the beauty parlor, and instead of her nursing whites, she wears fashionable clothes to work—like the pedal pushers and turquoise blouse she is wearing now. These clothes show off her figure. I hate them.
“I am taking these away,” she yells, grabbing the cigarettes. “And you are not going out, mister!”
“I don’t care!” I glare at her. “And why do you have to dress like that? You make me sick!”
“I what?” Now she is on me, slapping my face. “I WHAT? I make you”—slap!—“sick? I make”—slap!—“you SICK?”—slap!—“Is that what you”—slap!—“said?”—slap, slap!—“Is it? Is that what you THINK OF ME?”
“No! No!” I yell. “Stop it!”
I cover my head and duck away. I run down the stairs and out the garage. I stay away until well past dark. When I finally come home, her bedroom door is closed and I think I hear her crying. I go to my room. The cigarettes are still there. I light one up and start crying myself.
Embarrassed Children
ROSE HAD HER HEAD TIPPED BACK in the sink, and my mother was gently spraying her with water from a faucet attachment. Apparently, they had a whole routine worked out. They propped pillows and towels until Rose’s head was just so, and my mother could run her free hand through Rose’s wet hair.
“Is that warm enough, hon?” my mother said.
“Oooh, yes, dear. It’s fine.” Rose closed her eyes. “You know, Charley, your mother has been doing my hair since I was a much younger woman.”
“You’re young at heart, Rose,” my mother said.
“That’s the only part.”
They laughed.
“When I went to the beauty parlor, I would only ask for Posey. If Posey wasn’t there, I would come back the next day. ‘Don’t you want someone else?’ they’d say. But I said, ‘Nobody touches me but Posey.’”