“Why didn’t you go back to Portland?” I asked. “You said Mama Pearl’s sister still lived there. Wouldn’t she have helped you?”
“She had her own troubles and was fifteen years older than my mother. She was an old lady, and my mother’s family wasn’t happy she had married my father. His family wasn’t happy he had married my mother. Everyone expects their children to make them happy,” she added with a maddening laugh that always ended with her starting to cry, making me feel bad that I had asked anything.
By then, I was almost eleven. Daddy had just recently deserted us, but I was tired of hearing my mother complain about my father. It wasn’t that I wanted to defend him. Even when I was only seven, I realized my father was not like the fathers of other girls at school. For one thing, he never came to a single parents’ night and never seemed at all interested in my schoolwork. Sometimes I thought he wasn’t interested in me, period. Once, when he and my mother were having an argument, which was most of the time, I heard him say, “Children are punishment for sins committed earlier.”
“That makes sense when it comes to your parents,” she told him. He never talked about his parents or his sister, and none of his family ever called or show
ed interest in him—or any of us, for that matter.
Mama and Daddy’s fights usually ended with Daddy pounding a table or a wall and sometimes breaking something and then running out of the house with curses trailing behind him like ugly car exhaust.
I’ll never forget the day we were evicted from our apartment. I was twelve, nearly thirteen, and home from school because I had a bad cough. We had no medical insurance, so Mama would always try to cure me with some over-the-counter medicines. More often than not, she would just tell me to take a nap or sit in the sun. She was in and out so much in those days that she hardly noticed when I was sick, and she was not taking very good care of herself, either. I knew she was with different men frequently and drinking too much. I hated it when she came home late at night and began babbling and crying. She would stumble and bang into things. I would bury my face in my pillow and refuse to help her.
Eventually, her good looks began to fade like a week-old rose. Her hair lost its rich, soft look until it no longer flowed. The ends were always splitting, and she wasn’t keeping it clean. She finally decided to cut it herself. When she was done, it looked as if someone had hacked it with a bread knife, but even if she hadn’t done it while she was high on some cheap gin, she wouldn’t have done a good job.
It wasn’t only her hair and her complexion that grew worse. Her figure seemed to stretch and bulge like the walls of a water-filled balloon. She couldn’t get into her jeans and had to wear baggy skirts. Because we didn’t have a car and she couldn’t afford taxis, she walked so much in old shoes that her feet were always aching or blotched with ugly blisters. She took to wearing oversized sneakers.
I remember once looking out the window and seeing a woman walking up the street, her eyes glassy, her gait uneven, and thinking, How sad. Look at that bag lady. When she drew close enough for me to realize it was my mother, I was stunned.
But I was frightened more than anything. The little there was of my own world was falling apart. I had long since stopped having friends over to visit, and no one was inviting me. My attention span in school was bad. I dozed off too much and took little or no pride in my work. My grades were tanking. My teachers said I had attention deficit disorder, which only made me feel more different from the others. Teachers were constantly asking me to bring my mother to school. We had no phone by then, so they didn’t call, and letters were useless. She considered everything a bill and read nothing.
Now that I think back, I realize my mother was really the one who was stunned. She must have woken one morning and realized just how badly off we were and how helpless she was. Instead of the realization driving her to be more vigorous in search of solutions, it caused her to retreat to the gin and whiskey. It almost didn’t matter what it was as long as it was alcoholic and could jumble up her thoughts and fears to the point where nothing seemed to bother her.
However, to this day, I don’t think of her as having been an alcoholic. I believe she really could have stopped if she had wanted to stop. She didn’t have the courage to stop. It was ironically easier to look into the mirror and see someone she didn’t recognize. Otherwise, she would have committed suicide.
I suppose if we could have afforded psychoanalysis back then, she would have been diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic. Something that had begun too subtly for me to realize right away had been happening in her head. At times, I thought she was talking to someone else. At first, I thought that occurred only when she was drunk, but I quickly realized it was happening even when she was stone sober. I think the person she was talking to was herself before I was born, and even before she had met Daddy. From what I heard and could understand, she was warning her younger self not to leave home, that if she did, this could be how she would be.
Of course, it made no sense to me, and if I asked her what she was doing or whom she was talking to, she would look at me angrily, as if I were intruding on a very private conversation.
“None of your business,” she might say, or “It’s not for your ears.”
Whose ears is it for? I wanted to ask. There’s no one there. But I kept quiet. I was actually too frightened to push much further, anyway. Who knew what that might cause to happen, and enough had already happened.
She wasn’t home when the police came to the apartment the day we were evicted. The landlord had followed all of the necessary legal steps, but Mama had ignored it all. I was home sick. I opened the door and looked up at two burly sheriff’s deputies. One took off his hat and combed through his hair with his fingers as if he were searching for a lost thought. He looked sorrier than the other for what he was about to do.
“Your mother here?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Where is she?” the other deputy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and coughed so hard and long that they both stepped back, fearing infection.
“Jesus,” the first deputy muttered.
“Do you know when she’ll be back, at least?” the second deputy asked me.
I shook my head.
“We’ll wait in the car.”
They turned and went to their vehicle parked right outside our first-floor apartment. At the time, I didn’t know why they were there. I thought maybe they had found my father and needed to tell my mother.
After I closed the door, I went to the front window and waited, watching the street. Finally, I could see her coming. She didn’t look drunk. She was walking fast, swinging her arms, with her purse wrapped around the front of her body like some shield. She had told me she did that to avoid having it grabbed. “Not that I ever have much in it,” she’d added.
The deputies saw her heading our way and got out of their vehicle to approach her. She stood listening to them and then just nodded without comment and continued to the front door. When she entered, she saw me standing there and shook her head.
“You can thank your father someday for this,” she said. “Pack only what you really need. We can’t carry too much. I’m not spending money on a taxi.”