“You’re lucky you even have a place to live. Now, if you can’t seem to hand Mother the phone, at least hand Mother her coffee.”
“Get your own.”
“You stay right where you are. You don’t go anywhere unless I say you do.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t call yourself ‘she’.”
I grabbed her pack of cigarettes away from her and went to the lookout to think about everything. I sat on the boulder and watched a plane take off. I twirled my hair around my finger a few hundred times. I wished I had a book so that I could diagram some sentences. Then I cried because this is where Davey told me about his house. And Cookie came here, too. And my father asked me about the lookout. And I had come here alone for a year.
I want to run away from the Project but I don’t know how. We don’t have a house anymore. My father might not come here. My mother talks to me but I hate what she says. Life was better in Ambrose, but I can’t go back and it’s not just because we don’t have a house. It’s that I live in the Project now. My mother needs someone to keep track of her medication and hand her stuff.
That’s when I decided to be Project and Ambrose, too.
Chapter XIX: Rebecca
When I was a kid growing up in Ambrose, all of the kids on the block would meet on our bikes right before dinnertime. We would ride up and down the street. We’d get going as fast as we could, lock up our pedals, stand ramrod straight with our knees locked and sing, “Come alive. Come alive. You’re in the Pepsi generation.” We would sing that over and over again.
But I’m Project now. When the teacher said for everybody who lives in the Project to raise their hands, I raised mine fast. I may have been the first person in the class with their hand up. I had a burning feeling in my stomach and I know my face turned red, but I felt brave, too.
A boy at school says that his mother said that Project girls will do anything to get out of the Project. I said, “You’re still such a baby that all you talk about is what your mother said.” He turned red like a tomato and ran away without saying anything. Then he said it again two days later: Project girls will do anything to get out of the Project.
I told him that that I may live in the Project but at least I don’t live next door to him. Every time I see him in the hall at school he gives me a dirty look. That’s because I won. I’m like my mother where you don’t know what I’ll say next.
I go over to Susan’s unit a lot. Her mother wouldn’t let her have her record player as long as she lived in the Project because it might lead her on to a worse life. So Susan snuck into her mother’s house when she wasn’t there and brought it home on the bus. Our whole point is to learn all of the words to every song on Rubber Soul and to save up money for Revolver and we don’t know what else next. New songs come out every week.
I still go to the lookout, which the City turned into a park where there are lots of people around. I like to sit on the boulder and think about life. When I first moved to the Project, I thought that hope was having a sunny disposition while you wait. But hope is worse than that. You have to actually do something that proves you have hope at exactly the time when you don’t. It’s never-ending.
Davey sent a postcard with a picture of the lake on the front. Water, pine trees, a canoe. I remember a day like that. Hunting for the monster on the other side of the lake. Sandwiches and pop from a cooler. Looking for my father so that I could tell him about the whole day. Davey wished I would come back. The deer laid down where they always did and licked the salt licks at night, just like always. When was I coming back? Did Mom find any rat poison the last time she went out? Did everyone still play on the monkey bars? Say hello to all the kids.
“He’s happy,” my mother said. “I want him to be happy.”
“Why don’t you ever care whether I am?” I was still just her slave.
She told me to sit down. “We’re going to have an adult conversation. I’m trying to teach you things that you’ll need as you get older. How to stand up for yourself and others. How to have a backbone and not let people run all over you. You pick a position and then you stay with it.”
I looked at her like she just told me something I didn’t know.
“That’s not the answer to life,” I said.
“It actually is. I promised myself that I would stay calm during this conversation.” She tried to light a cigarette and dropped it on the floor. She tried to lean over and pick it up but she couldn’t. I thought she was going to tell me to light Mother a cigarette, but she didn’t.
Then she said, “What is wrong with you?”
I said exactly how I felt. “I feel like a building has fallen down on me.”
She looked at me like she was a spy and then told me that when she was my age she had been a bobbysoxer who liked Frank Sinatra. She told me that when my grandmother was my age she was madly in love with Rudolf Valentino.
I looked at her in this deep way, and she looked like a crumpled up Kleenex and I felt sorry for her. I wanted to take it all back, everything I said in our fight, and never tell her anything that will ever hurt her feelings. That’s how I feel about my mother and I can’t help it how I do the opposite of what she wants me to do. I cried even though that is the opposite of what I meant to do. Then she cried.
My father said to love whatever is there. Find the one thing that is good about even the worst and keep your sights on that. But what if the one good thing leaves? I think about Cookie. I walk to school alone. I accidently look for her in the hallways at school but since she’s gone from the Project she’s gone from school. I watch her unit just in case she comes back for something. I can’t help but watch and wait for her. I can’t sleep again and this time it’s not because of my mother’s predictions about the end of the world. I think about my mother who left in a different way.
My heart pulls and bangs. Bang bang bang in that abnormal way. I get sweaty. I think about Cookie and the mean boy and my mother even when I’m taking a test, even when I don’t mean to remember.
At night I look out the window at the moon. The moon changes but the Project always looks the same. I can count on it. Sometimes thinking about that makes me calm and I can fall asleep.
Deep down, I still want my father to come and get us. I think about that all the time. Come and make my mother better. We will all live at the lake. You never should have left me alone with my mother. No one will leave anyplace again. But then I remember that I’m a teenager, and I know that there isn’t a way to erase this year before I turned into one.
I think about this all of the time: you have to be real strong even when you don’t know what’s coming next. You have to care about some stuff and not care about other stuff. You have to figure things out at the drop of a hat. Knowing Cookie a long time ago means it’s time to take care of the world. That might be the one thing my mother ever said that helped me. That’s what being a teenager is.
Out of the blue a girl at school said her mother had a cousin who knew one of Cookie’s aunts. Cookie lived in one of her aunts’ house now, which was across town. Cookie and Georgie had been split up and Georgie was living with another aunt. Cookie was alive. I was happy because I knew that Cookie was somewhere other than the Project and she finally had a chance at life.
Somebody else was getting the benefit of her, and I wish it was me. But I think about her cuteness and I get the benefit of her from that.
The oldest Stimp girl climbed to the top of the monkey bars and sat alongside me. At first, I didn’t look at her because no one can substitute for Cookie. Then out of politeness I looked over at her. The sides of her mouth worked hard like she was lifting the sides of a mountain. She was trying to smile. Then she said she knew what Chance Pants meant because her father who was a kid in the Project told her. “Chance is that you never know how it’s going to turn out. Everybody wears pants, no matter where they live.” I could tell that she wanted to be friends.
I asked her if maybe someday she could snea
k away from their unit and drink Coca-Cola with me and Susan.
On the last day of school, when it was sunny and even the Project didn’t look bad, I walked through the park and then the courtyard. One little kid was sitting on the lowest bar of the monkey bars. Mrs. Stimp was looking out her window while the littlest Stimp kid pounded on the window. Susan was singing “I’m Looking Through You” at the top of her lungs. Big surprise, there was my mother, sitting on the steps outside our unit. She was wearing her gold-colored bathrobe and had her white terrycloth cap on her head. Her hair was growing back and stuck out of her cap like grass growing through a fence.
She said that one of these days when her legs got stronger, she was going for a walk around the garden estate grounds. She cracked up. My mother says that together we will to face what scourge life has handed us. We are a team, she said. Not even my aunt can join, she said, but we’ll let her bring groceries because Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens likes to drive up in her Cadillac.
“But for now, let’s hear it for Mom because she has gained a pound and now weighs the grand sum of 79 pounds. A real heavyweight. I’m tired, and I’ve had enough fresh air to last a month. I’m going inside to lay down.”
My mother grabbed onto the wood handrail with both hands and pulled herself up like it was hard for her. She turned on her toes and walked up two steps to the top. She stood still, her back to me. I looked up from the bottom step. Her gold shining bathrobe made her look like the candle my aunt put on her dining room table on holidays, the one we stand back away from and admire. She stood real stiff. She took a step forward like she had to think hard about it. Her fingertips touched the side of the porch wall to help her balance. “A certain somebody had better come inside and help her mother.” Then she closed our unit door behind her.
She had actually stood up from the steps and walked into our unit by herself.
“Rebecca, help me up,” said one of the little kids sitting alone on the first rung of the monkey bars. She needed a boost up.
I shoved myself off of the porch and ran to her.
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About the author:
Peggy West is a fiction writer, introducing herself to fiction readers through the coming-of-age novella, “Shoes on the Wire”. She also writes historical novels set in the Victorian Age.
Peggy lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest. Two cats and an Italian Greyhound act as her muses.
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