All the Roads That Lead From Home (11 page)

“I don’t
like people bugging me. If they think I’m dumb, they leave me alone,” Pinny
said.

“Don’t you
hate getting bad grades when you can get good ones?”

“I don’t
care about grades.”

“How about
being treated like an idiot?”

Pinny
shrugged.

“Melissa
Franks called you a moron when you answered wrong in Spanish, and you got all
red in the face. You dug your nails in your palm. I saw the marks,” the fat
girl said.

She had a
point, Pinny thought. A good one, too. She did hate being treated like an
idiot, especially by Carl Pratt.
You won’t get pregnant.
It takes
longer with thin girls.
After sitting in the same health class with her,
hearing the same words from their teacher, he still thought she didn’t get it.
In a way it was her fault for playing the part so well, but if he’d
cared—really cared—he’d have raised the issue first.

“What are
you doing?” the fat girl asked. Pinny had just taken Carl Pratt’s chain out of
her pocket and thrown it into the falls.

“Making a
wish. A reverse wish. To fix something I shouldn’t have done.”

“What?”

“Well, if
I tell you, it’ll hang on me forever.”

They
started back down. Pinny remembered a little blue stone bracelet she’d once
found in a store. It was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen. She’d begged and
begged for it, and her mother said it would get lost, or broken, and wasn’t the
kind of thing a child should wear. She’d cried for weeks and then one day she
just didn’t care about it anymore. Maybe that would happen with Carl Pratt.
Maybe all of a sudden the ache for him would just go away.

The fat
girl looked miserable. She had a film of sweat on her face that she wiped away
with the back of one hand. Then she stopped walking and pinched her stomach.

“Know
what?” she said.

“What?”

“I’m
really sick of candy.” She removed the last bar she had in her backpack and
threw it into the street where it got flattened by a car few minutes later.
That made them laugh so hard their eyes got wet.

They
laughed a lot that summer; at the way the stylist looked at the fat girl’s hair
when she went to get it done; at the fat girl’s little brother who learned to
talk in complete, bossy sentences; about the tie Pinny’s father bought with
pink and yellow dots. In quieter moments, as they reviewed the year behind and
looked to the year ahead, they promised never to be Pinny and the fat girl
again but only Penny and Eunice, and the whole time, as the heat rose and then
fell, they didn’t mention Carl Pratt once.

A silent winter gave way
to a violent spring. Shouts, slammed doors, then tears and bitter questions.
Are
you saying she’s better than I am? Are you?

Finally my
father left with his suitcase, and my mother went to lie down. Like she did all
those times we were supposed to go to the lake for a picnic, right at the last
minute, after I’d changed into my suit and he was already in the car, waiting.
I’d go out and say it was off, and he’d put the sandwiches he’d made back in
the refrigerator and go grade some more papers.

Such was
our life in Dunston—that town on a Finger Lake. With an Ivy League school. High
above blah blah blah’s waters.

They both
taught there. So did all the nerds they tried to impress with their dumb
cocktail parties, where my mother never sulked, but chatted and flitted about
like a nervous squirrel.

And for
what? Guys with chalky hands, wild hair, and crooked glasses sitting on the
couch, glad for the drink and bowl of nuts, talking their crap.
Dartmouth
made him an offer, don’t you know?

Good for Dartmouth. No one ever made me an offer, only a demand—
Amelia, go look for my slip in
the dryer,
and
Call my secretary and tell her to cancel my lecture. I
can’t teach those morons anything, anyway
.

With my
father gone, and money a problem, the idea of getting canned was usually enough
to get her on her feet. Then she stared a long time in the bathroom mirror, and
moaned about how awful she looked. She started wearing mascara and eye shadow
that made her look like a beat-up freak; floppy skirts, bright beads, long sweaters
that hung down to mid-thigh.

When I
described all this to my friend, Giselle, she said, “She’s just trying to
escape.”

“From
what?”

“How lame
she really is.”

That same
day a guy showed up to take my mother riding on the back of his motorcycle.

“It’s
absolutely amazing, darling! Really! All that guff about the wind in your hair,
well, it’s all true,” she said, after he’d roared away again. She smelled like
aftershave and gasoline. “Oh, by the way, he runs that shoe store downtown, you
know the one, Cosantinis?”

Motorcycle
Man improved her attitude so much she burbled through her lectures on the
bloody battles of the American Civil War, and even did a little soft shoe now
and then to amuse her students. The ones who weren’t amused complained to the
department chairman, and my mother was asked to consider all the eager young
beavers ready to take her place. “So, you know what I did?” she asked me.
“This.” She shoved out her top teeth and gnawed the air. The chairman told this
to another professor, who told his secretary, who told my father’s secretary,
who told my father that same afternoon, because even though everyone knew he’d
moved out, it was still sort of assumed he’d want to keep an eye on her. That
Sunday he took me out for ice cream, bought me vanilla although my favorite was
chocolate, and asked, “So, kiddo, how are things at home? Everything okay with
You Know Who?”

I stared
out the tall, dusty window at Route 13. A truck with the name
Bradford
,
a department store in Syracuse where my mother once took me to shop, rolled
through the green light and picked up speed as it gained the hill. I pushed
back my plastic cup of sloshy ice cream which said
Betty Lou’s Sweets and
Treats
in thick blue script.

“I think
she’s having a mid-life crisis,” I said.

He pulled
thoughtfully on the beard he’d grown to impress his girlfriend. “That’s what
she always accused me of having.”

School
ended for the year. My report card saying I was in the ninety-sixth percentile
of my tenth-grade class got me a card from my father with a five-dollar bill
inside. Then he took the girlfriend camping in Minnesota.

“Minnesota? Who the hell goes to Minnesota, for Christ’s sake?” my mother said.

“That’s
where he’s from.”

“The man’s
insane.”

I poured
her another glass of iced tea. She stared at it, drank some, then gave me a
hard, probing look. “Are you all right, Amelia?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I don’t
know. You’ve been acting strange lately.”

“No, I
haven’t.”

“Well,
there’s definitely something different about you.”

No
shit, Sherlock!
My whole life was
different. One day everything’s fine, the next my father leaves, and my mother
gets even weirder.

“What
about that little friend of yours, Genevieve?” my mother said.

“Giselle.
What about her?”

“Why don’t
you call her up, get together. It’s nice to be with someone your own age.”

“She went
to France for the summer with her family.”

“Isn’t
she
a lucky girl.” In another minute my mother would say how much she wished she
could go somewhere fun, too, and probably never would, now that she was on her
own and struggling to make ends meet, so I went back to the safety of my room
and
Anna Karenina.
Now,
there
was someone who had it tough.

***

My mother saw a lot of
Motorcycle Man when she wasn’t teaching summer school. His name was Harv, short
for Harvey. He took her dancing at a bar that played country music. When they
got bored with dancing they went bowling. When Harv slipped a disk, my mother
went to his house every day and made him dinner.

Then,
during the weeks on his back, with nothing to do but think, he decided he’d
wasted his life. He’d always wanted to paint, and when he got on his feet he
sold his motorcycle, bought a van and drove to California with a bunch of blank
canvases. It all took him less than a week.

“First
your father, and now Harv. Just like that.” My mother snapped her fingers. “I’m
just not
interesting
enough. I’m not enough
fun
.” She rattled the
ice in her glass of tea and examined the fingernails of her left hand. “I’ve
got a lot more to offer than they think, and I can prove it, too.”

Later that
week I found her in the guest room, hanging a new pair of curtains. The shorts
she wore revealed a network of red blue veins on the backs of her thighs, like
a road map.

“Here,
hold that hem up for me,” she said.

“What’s
wrong with the old curtains?”

“These are
brighter and much more cheerful.” They were ugly was what they were, decorated
with daisies and some orange flower I didn’t recognize. My mother got off the
stepladder, stood back, and admired them.

“I’m sure
she’ll like them,” she said.

“Who?”

“The girl
who’ll be staying with us for a while.”

“What
girl? What are you talking about?”

“A nice
sixteen-year-old. She’s been having a little trouble at home, and we’re going
to try to help her.”

“But—”

“Her
mother remarried and she’s had some difficulty adjusting to a new person in her
life, I guess. She goes to Martha’s church, the mother, I mean, and they got to
talking. Martha said we had some extra room, and suggested the daughter stay
here for a little while, to give everyone a break, as it were.”

Martha was
my mother’s oldest friend, and one of the few people who called regularly after
my father left. She was one of the do-gooder types, always meddling in other
people’s problems. She’d come by our house more than once to look at me like
something under a microscope and ask how I was bearing up, if I was spending
enough time with friends.

“And you
just said ‘yes?’” I asked.

“Of
course. Why not?”

“Because I
don’t want anyone moving in!”

“Oh,
honestly, Amelia! You need to be more flexible, and accept new situations with
a positive attitude.”

Uh, huh.
Just yesterday we saw my father’s girlfriend in the grocery store buying a
frozen leg of lamb. My mother said she’d like to give her a good beating with
it, and wasn’t exactly quiet about it, either.

“It’ll be
good for you, having someone to talk to. And even if you don’t like her, I
expect you to be pleasant,” she said.

Suddenly I
felt tired, so tired I could lie down on the newly made bed and sleep for about
a year.

“Does this
someone have a name?”

“Mary.”

***

She got out of the car, a
beat-up station wagon with twine around the front bumper, wearing a sleeveless
blouse and a skirt, as if she were going to a job interview. Her suitcase had
brown tape along the sides. The driver of the car was a big man in a jean
jacket. His hair looked wet and shiny in the sun. When he tried to hug her
goodbye she pulled away. He seemed angry until he saw my mother coming down the
walk. He stepped back, grinned, and offered his hand. Mary saw me standing on
the porch, in front of the open door. She approached carrying her suitcase,
looking at the ground.

I thought
of the things I didn’t want her touching, like my silver dollar from 1922, or
the turquoise watch fob that had belonged to my great-grandfather, and of
course all my books, though she didn’t look like the kind of person who’d care
much for books. Her makeup had a distinctly orange tint, and her hair had tiny
flakes of dandruff scattered along her crown.

She
followed me across the screened-in porch, through the French doors into the
living room, and stopped in front of my father’s grand piano.

“Who
plays?” she asked.

“No one.”

“Maybe
I’ll learn.” No fucking way! I didn’t want to listen to her mindless plunking.
It was bad enough having her here. I stared at her feet. Her running shoes were
filthy and she didn’t have socks on.

She said,
“Look, I know my being here wasn’t your idea and—”

“It’s
fine.”

I brought
her down the hall, and opened the door to her room. It stank of the air freshener
my mother had sprayed earlier. Mary put her suitcase down, went to the window,
and looked out to where the man was still talking to my mother. She kept watch
until the car drove away. A few seconds later my mother opened the door.