The memory gets sharp when I pick up that Mexican vanilla bean she kept in a sort of glass test tube. I thought, Everybody else’s mom uses oleo. Oleo and that fake vanilla high school boys drink fast for a buzz. I hold that cool-feeling tube in my hand and study the bean. I’m trying to guess where Mother got such a thing. In the background, she’s telling Lecia about going to see Maria Callas at the Metropolitan Opera. The turntable plays “Parigi mi cara.” The vanilla bean in the tube is reddish black and wrinkled up like the snaky root of something, or a bird’s long claw. When I look past it, I see Mother’s face wearing that thousand-yard stare out the back door. Her jaw is jutting out and held tight to keep her East Coast lockjaw accent going.
The back door she’s staring through opens on a wet black night. You can smell banana from the tree she planted outside last summer (a plantain tree, really), and the thick sweet of honeysuckle. The cape jasmine bush has, for no reason at all, burst out these white waxy blooms. It’s winter and the bush shouldn’t be blooming at all.
Mother says the smell reminds her of the gardenia corsage she wore on her wrist that night she went to see Callas. She pulled up to the big fountain in a taxi behind a long black car with silver bud vases on the insides, next to the windows.
At this point, I pipe up that I’ve never seen a fountain, other than the water-drinking kind in school. And this whaps Mother loose from the memory for a second. She looks at me full in the face and asks is my childhood that deprived. Then Lecia says that I’m full of shit, that I’ve seen the fountain at the bank (the one high school kids are always putting soap bubbles in), and the other fountain at the Houston museum, not to mention umpteen-zillion fountains in books on Florentine architecture that Mother has dragged me through. Lecia says I’m just interrupting to hear myself talk and should shut up. And I say it’s Lecia who’s interrupting.
Mother finally sighs her stop-bickering sigh. For a minute she looks out the screen door at that big rectangle of semitropical night. We get quiet and watch her watching. Then the music surges a little, like a wave rising up, and she fades away from us, back into her Manhattan taxi outside the Metropolitan again.
She reminds us about the limo up ahead of her, and says that out of that limo comes a white satin high heel and the drapy tail end of a white sequined evening gown slipping under the hem of a coat that looked to her like sheared beaver dyed the color of cream. Then on top of that shoe and gown pours none other than Marlene Dietrich. (If Daddy had been present, he would have reminded us at length at this point that Dietrich had kissed him full on the mouth during a USO show. Hence my middle name: Marlene.) For a minute her eyes lock on Mother’s through the glass before the autograph hounds swooped around. Mother said that the wind had blown Dietrich’s white chiffon scarf over her mouth like a mask in that second, so at first all Mother could see was her red lipstick through the chiffon and her eyes peering out from above the scarf. “She had the loneliest eyes,” Mother said.
Then she gets the idea of showing me how to charcoal my eyes like Dietrich did. She strikes a big kitchen match off the rough underside of the table. She picks up my ice cream bowl and holds it up high and lets the match burn for a minute on the bottom, so there’s a gray smoke smudge on the crockery. Then she digs around in her pocketbook for the jar of Vaseline she always carries. She dabs a tiny sable brush in the Vaseline and swooshes it around in the soot on the bowl’s bottom.
She takes my chin in her left hand. She tells me to tilt my head back and make my eyes sleepy. Then she starts tickling at my eyelid with that brush. She goes on to say that I have the prettiest eyelashes in the universe. This matters to Mother because she’s only got lashes if she takes time to paste on false ones. “When I was pregnant with you, I didn’t care what sex you were, or if you had all your fingers and toes. I prayed to God you’d have long eyelashes.” She draws on her Salem for a minute, and we hang there in the smoke and the Shalimar and the vodka smell, waiting for her to exhale. She waves the smoke away from my face before she sets back to work on me, this time brushing at the hollow place above my eyeball in an arc. “My mother said God would send me a blue-headed baby with water on the brain for saying that kind of prayer. And I said, ‘Then that baby will have pretty eyelashes,’ and you did.” This is also the first time she’s said word one about Grandma since she came back. I try to cut my eyes over to Lecia to figure out what such a mention could mean.
But Lecia has Mother’s compact in one hand and her mascara wand in the other. And I can see she’s worrying the mascara onto her lashes. Lecia is easily as broke out in eyelashes as I am, but Mother said mine were prettiest. It’s my face Mother’s holding. (In fights Lecia and I have as grown-ups, she’ll scream at me, “You were always so fucking cute!” And I’ll scream back, “You were always so fucking competent!” Which sums up our respective jobs in the family.) Mother steers my chin away from trying to sneak a look at Lecia, then it’s just Mother and me again. I can feel her breath in light puffs on my nose. She rears back and looks at me, then starts to smudge at what she’s done with her thumb pad above my eyeball. She’s painted oil portraits of us before. We’ve sat in our Sunday clothes on the raised model’s platform in her studio, watching her step out from behind the easel and study us all cool-eyed, but this is different. This is up close. Her hands feel like kid gloves and she is working right on my face, like she’s using all her attention to paint me right into being. (I am Marlene Dietrich. I am the cathedral wall on which the painter Giotto outlines an angel.)
The memory turns to smoke right there. It floats out the door over the cape jasmine. But there were a lot of nights that winter when Lecia and I sat watching Mother drink and hearing her grieve for New York.
She always told us about famous people, though she was all we wanted to hear about. Instead, she described the Ink Spots swaying over a silver microphone in some Harlem nightclub, and how Bing Crosby once smoked marijuana on somebody’s penthouse terrace under a big, buttoned-up moon.
She liked to repeat a story about seeing Einstein lecture at Bell Labs (where she’d done some mechanical drawing in the war years—a detail it took us years to unearth). She swore that during the question period afterward, Einstein had to have some engineer in the auditorium explain an elementary law of mechanics to him. When the guy was shocked that the great physicist didn’t know such a simple thing, Einstein said, “I never bother to remember anything I can look up.” She loved that idea—a genius who couldn’t open a can of tuna fish but could order the entire universe in the caverns of his own skull. She also said that he bowed his head between questions like he was praying, then raised it up to give answers like those mechanical swamis wearing turbans that guessed your future for a quarter at Coney Island. At the crowded reception after the lecture, she claimed that nobody even tried to talk to him. He sat in a straight chair in the corner by himself looking like somebody’s daffy uncle.
The opera also tended to get Mother hauling out art books. I can still see them stacked on the plywood next to her Flintstone jelly jar of vodka, the gold names in square letters on the big leather spines: Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne. (The pictures themselves were being seared into my head with all the intensity of childhood. When I stumbled on the actual paintings years later in museums, I often lapsed into that feeling you get when stepping inside your old grade school, of being tiny again in a huge and uncontrollable world—and yet the low-slung water fountains tell you that you’re a giant now. Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, when I stood before it at eighteen, seemed ridiculously small, yet intensely familiar.)
Opera had a big downside, though. It could lead Mother straight into the worst sort of crying jag. Some Italian soprano would start caterwauling how she lived for art, or some tubercular female would rasp out (in Italian, of course) Come to Paris and be my breath to her old boyfriend, and Mother would go weepy. Her face would settle into a series of faint lines you normally didn’t see on her. Then she would bawl like a sick c
at, hanging her head in her hands, blowing her nose on toilet paper, and saying that we didn’t understand, and that it wasn’t our fault she was crying. Like we cared whose fault it was instead of just wanting it stopped.
Lecia didn’t exactly figure out how to stop it. She did learn how to lower the volume on it, though. She would lead Mother to bed when she got too slobbering and miserable. I don’t know how my sister knew to do this, but she moved with such certainty that Mother would often pad along behind her to that oceanic bed, where she’d collapse. Lecia would then rustle around in the pajama drawer, ignoring all the silky rivers of lingerie that I would have chosen in favor of some heavy flannel men’s pajamas that felt like sleep itself. Then she’d get a pitcher of ice and a big glass for Mother’s morning thirst, and a jar of orange baby aspirin for the headache.
Those were the opera nights. The jazz nights were a little worse, and worst of all were the nights when Daddy was home, and Mother put on the blues.
My birthday was such a night. Esther Phillips was moaning out “Misery” from the turntable: “Put no headstone on my grave. / All my life I been a slave.…” Those lyrics should have tipped me off to all that was coming. But Mother was baking me a lasagna, which smell I loved better than breath itself. I was also caught up playing with an old pair of army binoculars Daddy had given me that morning.
I stepped through the back screen door and held them up to my eyes. Through our fence slats, I could make out Mickey Heinz sitting on his fat knees next door, running his dump truck through the dirt. I could never see Mickey without a wince. I had once gotten him to smoke a cigarette made out of Nestlé’s Quik we’d rolled up in tissue paper. It burnt his tongue. In fact, he’d blistered it so bad that he’d run to show it to his mother, not considering how she and all his people belonged to one of those no-drinking, no-smoking, no-dancing churches. Mrs. Heinz whipped his butt bad with a hairbrush. We listened to the whole thing squatting right underneath the Heinzes’ bathroom window—the whap-whap of that plastic brush on Mickey’s blubbery little ass, him howling like a banshee.
That January morning, I watched Mickey through my birthday binoculars. I was halfway thinking maybe I’d trot over to his yard and get him to hide his eyes for hide-and-seek, then just go home and watch him look for me till he started snubbing. I had almost talked myself into doing this when I heard Daddy’s truck lunge into the garage.
I turned my glasses to the garage door and made out his big silver hard hat bobbing toward me. (Mercury’s helmet always put me in mind of that hard hat, for some reason—minus the wings, of course.) “How’s the birthday, Pokey?” he said. Then his hard hat left my field of vision. A second later his work boot scuffed the concrete step beside me. I lowered the glasses and looked up and said fine.
Except for the late-night visits he always made to double-tuck the covers under my chin, I hadn’t seen him much that January. The union’s contract with Gulf Oil had run out, and he’d been out on strike all month, along with everybody else in the county. When he wasn’t walking the picket line, he went shrimping or duck hunting—anything to put food on the table. Nights, he hung out at the union hall waiting for any news about the talks to trickle back. Like Mother, he’d become the sort of stranger I longed for a glimpse of without ever expecting to see up close.
But that morning he’d given me the binoculars and a new Archie comic all wrapped up before he headed off to the line. The sweetness of it had drawn tears from some deep sour place way behind my eyes. “Shit, don’t cry, Pokey,” he said with a wry grin. He’d finally promised to come home for supper and cake that evening if I’d stop crying so’s to break his heart.
Anyway, I’d been waiting on the back step the better part of the afternoon, holding back a floodgate of talk for him. When his shadow finally fell on me, I started to prattle about how I’d gone to Beaumont with Mother and Lecia that morning to buy my birthday dress.
It was a black crepe dress—the first black dress I’d owned. Just sitting in it made me feel like a movie star, I’d told him. We’d had hell finding a kid’s dress in black. But Mother had driven us all over the county. (Finding that dress, in fact, was about the first event other than an occasional meal that she’d gotten up for since coming back from the funeral.) We’d at last settled on an A-line dress that had a big white clown collar hanging all loose and drapy, with three bona fide rhinestone buttons down the front. The dress had been “cut on the bias,” according to the saleslady. Lecia took one look and said where’s the funeral, but I was already prissing in front of the three-part mirror. When I spun around, both dress and collar fanned out sideways in fluttery ripples. Mother thought I looked like the ballet dancer in my Japanese music box. She rolled her eyes and said, “What the hell,” when she handed the saleslady her charge plate. Not ten minutes later, she’d also bought Lecia a chemistry set from the toy department. On the way home, we’d stopped for shrimp rémoulade at Al’s Seafood, where Mother made quick work of two vodka martinis, to celebrate.
Daddy said the dress looked pretty while he wiped his feet. But he wasn’t even looking my way. He was being double-careful to worry all the mud off his boots and onto the black welcome mat. Then he slipped into the house.
Suddenly it dawned on me that I wasn’t supposed to tell Daddy we’d charged stuff on Mother’s plates—the shrimp and the chemistry set and all, not to mention my dress, which cost sixty-three dollars. Nobody said it was secret. But he wasn’t drawing any pay, a fact he harped on more or less constantly. The image of him thumping the morning paper and talking about how Gulf Oil was trying to chicken-shit the working man out of a decent meal came to me. Not two days before he’d taken a box of canned goods and our outgrown clothes to the union hall. Kids in the big Catholic families were going hungry, he’d said. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that what we’d done that day—Mother, Lecia, and I—crossed some unspoken line between good times and bad behavior. I also knew that the black dress I had on crossed another line between an outfit and a get-up. I felt like a witch in church. And I kept feeling that way till the black dress was dangling on its hanger, and I was back in blue jeans.
Later, I was on the rug undressing Barbie for the umpteenth time when my parents’ mad voices floated back to me. Lecia was next to me, trying to pin her Barbie’s straw-colored hair into a French twist with a bobby pin. I couldn’t make out the words but the gist was plain. Mother roared and slammed kitchen cupboards. The screen banging closed finally signaled Daddy’s walking out. By this time, Daddy had adopted that mean dog Nipper, and he came out from under the house, yipping and lunging against his chain. Daddy’s boots scuffed down the steps. The screen banged again, and I heard what I quickly figured out was the glass lasagna casserole shattering on the patio after him. “It’s her birthday, you sonofabitch,” Mother yelled. Lecia just wound that French twist into a tight coil and said, “Tape Ten, Reel One Thousand: Happy Goddamn Birthday.”
Out in the kitchen, Mother stood at the sink, holding both wrists under running water. You could see a big splotch of red under her sharp cheekbone, like somebody had dabbed mad on her face with a paintbrush. “You want some aspirin?” she said to me, and I said no, thanks. Outside, Nipper was going yip yip yip. Mother tossed a handful of baby aspirin in her mouth, then dipped her head under the faucet to wash them down. She took the German chocolate cake down from the top of the fridge. “We can have this cake for supper,” she said. Lecia came in, bringing a warm space up close behind me. I told Mother that she could take the dress back, it was no big deal. “No I can’t,” she said. Then she started planting candles in the muddy top of the cake. The house still smelled of lasagna and of the fresh coconut she’d split and carved and grated for the cake. “Forget about the dress, for Christ’s sake,” she said.
I went outside, where Mickey was still visible in slices through the fence slats. He was sitting in the dirt like a plaster lawn figurine. He’d heard it all, of course. You could count on Mickey to run tattling t
o the whole neighborhood that Mother had called Daddy an SOB. I took a minute to wish his kneeling figure harm before picking my way around the glass and splattered lasagna.
In the garage, I could at first see the ruby end of Daddy’s cigarette and nothing else. After a second, my eyes adjusted. Then I could make out his white T-shirt and the glint of the bottle he lifted to his lips. “Daddy?” I said.
“Just go in the house,” he said. The cigarette brightened for a moment as he drew on it. “It don’t make a shit,” he said. Then a minute later, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Outside the locusts started whirring in their husks. That was the only sound till I heard somewhere in the high trees outside what I took for a bat screech. “That a bat?”
“Go in the house, Pokey,” he said. Then he said, almost like an afterthought, “Why don’t you go on in and ask your mother if she wants to head over to Bridge City for some barbecue crabs.”
Back in the house, the shattered lasagna dish sat in a dustpan on the sink’s edge. Mother was touching the last match to the last candle when I came in. The black fan sweeping past us made the candles fade and brighten on her face. Lecia’s face next to hers was as blank as a shovel. She said, go on and make a wish, you little turd. I squinted my eyes as hard as I could and wished silently to go and live some other where forever, with a brand-new family like on Leave. It to Beaver. Then I sucked up as much air as I could get and blew the whole house dark.
I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City café that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs, which is a shame, since I love those crabs for their sweet grease and liquid-smoke taste. I don’t remember how much Mother drank in that bayou café, where you could walk to the end of the dock after dinner and toss your leftover hush puppies to hungry alligators.