Raven (Orphans 4)

"You just better damn well go to school tomorrow, Raven. I don't need no government people coming around here and snooping," she muttered, and wiped strands of hair away from her cheek. "You listening to me?"

"Yes," I said.

She stared hard and drank some more of her beer. It was only nine-fifteen in the morning. I hated the taste of beer anyway, but just the thought of drinking it this early made my stomach chum. Mama suddenly realized what day it was and that I should be in school now, too. Her eyes popped.

"Why are you home today?" she cried.

"I had a stomachache," I said. "I'm getting my period. That's what the nurse told me in school when I had cramps and left class."

She looked at me with a cold glint in her dark eyes and nodded.

"Welcome to hell," she said. "You'll soon understand why parents give thanks when they have a boy. Men have it so much easier. You better watch yourself now," she warned, pointing

the neck of the beer bottle at me.

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean?" she mimicked. "I mean, if you got your period coming, you could get pregnant, Raven, and I won't be taking care of no baby, not me."

"I'm not getting pregnant, Mama," I said sharply.

She laughed. "That's what I said, and look at what happened."

"Well, why did you have me then?" I fired back at her. I was tired of hearing what a burden I was. I wasn't. I was the one who kept the apartment livable, cleaning up after her drunken rages, washing dishes, washing clothes, mopping the bathroom floors. I was the one who bought us food and cooked for us half the time. Sometimes, she brought food home from the restaurant, when she remembered, but it was usually cold and greasy by the time she got it home.

"Why'd I have you? Why'd I have you?" she muttered, and looked dazed, as if the question was too hard to answer. Her face brightened with rage. "I'll tell you why. Because your macho Cuban father was going to make us a home. He was positive you were going to be a boy. How could he have anything but boys? Not Mr. Macho. Then, when you were born.

"What?" I asked quickly. Getting her to tell me anything about my father or what things were like for her in those days was as hard as getting top government secrets.

"He ran. As soon as he set eyes on you, he grimaced ugly and said, 'It's a girl? Can't be mine ' And he ran. Ain't heard from him since," she muttered. She looked thoughtful for a moment and then turned back to me. "Let that be a lesson to you about men."

What lesson? I wondered. How did she think it made me feel to learn that my father couldn't stand the sight of me, that my very birth sent him away? How did she think it made me feel to hear almost every day that she never asked to have me? Sometimes, she called me her punishment I was God's way of getting back at her, but what did she consider her sin? Not drinking or doing drugs or slumming about--oh, no. Her sin was trusting a man. Was she right? Was that the way all men would behave? Most of my mother's friends agreed with her about men, and many of my friends, who came from homes not much better than mine, had similar ideas taught to them by their mothers.

I felt more alone than ever. Getting older, developing as a woman, looking older than I was, all of it didn't make me feel more independent and stronger as much as it reminded me I really had no one but myself. I had many questions. I had lots of things troubling me, things a girl would want to ask her mother, but I was afraid to ask mine, and most of the time, I didn't think she could think clearly enough to answer them anyway.

"You got what you need?" she asked, dropping the empty beer bottle into the garbage.

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean is something to wear for protection. Didn't that school nurse tell you what you need?"

"Yes, Mama, I have what I need," I said.

I didn't.

What I needed was a real mother and a real father, for starters, but that was something I'd see only on television.

"I don't want to hear about you not going to school, Raven. If I do, I'm going to call your uncle Reuben," she warned. She often used her brother as a threat. She knew I never liked him, never liked being in his company. I didn't think his own children liked him, and I knew my aunt Clara was afraid of him I could see it in her eyes.

Mama returned to her bedroom and went back to sleep. I sat by the window and looked down at the street. Our apartment was on the third floor. There were no elevators, just a windy stairway that sounded as if it was about to collapse, especially when younger children ran down the steps or when Mr. Winecoup, the man who lived above us, walked up. He easily weighed three hundred pounds. The ceiling shook when he paced about in his apartment.

I looked beyond the street, out toward the mountains in the distance, and wondered what was beyond them. I dreamed of running off to find a place where the sun always shone, where houses were clean and smelled fresh, where parents laughed and loved their children, where there were fathers who cared and mothers who cared.

You might as well live in Disneyland, a voice told me. Stop dreaming.

I rose and began my day of solitude, finding something to eat, watching some television, waiting for Mama to wake so we could talk about dinner before she went off to her job. When she was rested and sobered up enough, she would sit before her vanity mirror and work on her hair and face enough to give others the illusion she was healthy and still attractive. While she did her makeup, she ranted and raved about her life and what she could have been if she hadn't fallen for the first good-looking man and believed his lies.

I tried to ask her questions about her own youth, but she hated answering questions about her family. Her parents had practically disowned her, and she had left home when she was eighteen, but she didn't realize any of her own dreams. The biggest and most exciting thing in her life was her small flirtation with becoming a model. Some department store manager had hired her to model in the women's department. "But then he wanted sexual favors, so I left," she told me. Once again, she went into one of her tirades about men.