Coal to Diamonds (4 page)

When I was around twelve, my mother had a boyfriend, Gary the sound man, who lived in mythical Little Rock, a place where people had universal indoor plumbing and private telephone lines. They were allowed to dance in Little Rock, unlike in Judsonia, where dancing had been outlawed a million years before and no one’s spirit was intact enough to challenge it. Judsonians danced in their rooms, or in the shower beneath the spray, or some of us snuck into the forest in search of an outlaw jukebox. Little Rock might as well have been New York City for all its comparative sophistication.

When Gary came to Judsonia for a visit it was like a living, breathing piece of cool came into our home. Everything looked small and shabby next to Gary, who twitched with unease in our seriously uncool house. The carpet felt more worn and everything seemed even less cool than it had been before Gary showed up. Maybe Gary was so powerfully cool he sucked the pathetic smidgeons of cool out of every lousy place he visited. Gary had
long hair like a Ramone and round glasses perched on his face. I wanted him to like me so badly, but he didn’t.

Gary was really into blues music, which was the first music I found myself crazy obsessed with. I was super into Lead Belly, who’d become king of twelve-string guitar playing in the brothels of Shreveport, Louisiana. Lead Belly had done time in the slammer, worked a chain gang for carrying a gun and stabbing a white guy in a brawl.
I was over in Arkansas
, he sang.
People ask me what you come here for
. Good question, Lead Belly!

I loved Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues. Ma Rainey might have even been the one who named the whole soul-creaking, heart-seizing style of sad, mad music “the blues.” She traveled the vaudeville circuit and was scandalously bisexual. In the ’20s she got arrested for throwing a wild party where all the ladies were naked with one another. I tried to impress Cool Gary from Little Rock with my vast knowledge of these important musicians, chattering on and on like a baby Ken Burns. Gary looked briefly at my mother and then fixed his gaze on me, asking,
Don’t you ever shut up?
I gave it a bit of serious thought. Did I ever shut up?

I don’t, actually
, I said truthfully.
I guess I don’t shut up
.

He scoffed at me and shook his head, his hair swinging up into his face. He cleaned his eyeglasses on his T-shirt and turned to my mother.
What’s there to do around here, huh?
Like a kid trapped visiting his parents in some dead-end suburb, Gary was over Judsonia and he was over me and my blues babbling.

And I was over Gary, no matter how cool he was, no matter how infused with big-city glamour, dancing and smoking and loud, loud music. His affair with my mother ended after his visit to Judsonia, and I wonder if the reality of my mother’s life—a future of inevitable visits back to soul-crushing Judsonia, where he’d be set upon by a gang of unruly brats—was just too much for him.

At first I was glad when Mom stopped seeing Gary and was spending more time at the house. When she left us alone my fear
of the dark, always strong and constant, flared wider, seemed to eat me whole. My fear of the dark is an honest-to-God phobia. My body forgets it knows how to breathe and the guillotine of panic comes down on all air passages. If I’m in a dark room and have to walk across the length of it to reach the light switch, I count the seconds in my head to try to calm myself. I can never believe how long it takes as the darkness pushes against the numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4. The phobia ruins my sleep, gets in the way of most anything that occurs at night. Having my mother back in the house was a comfort, but just because she wasn’t rushing off to Little Rock every night didn’t mean she’d initiated a new era of order and calm.

Mom’s dieting, a constant, got worse. My mother always suffered from a distorted body image. With Gary out of the picture and no new guy on the horizon, she fed herself less and less. She got bursts of high, manic energy as her body went into actual starvation—an evolutionary survival tweak designed to give you the gusto to go club a deer. My mother used it at work, making her rounds with a creepy speed and purpose, her body jutting and angular and increasingly unfamiliar. She grew more talkative but made less sense. Her body turned on itself, harvesting its own muscles for protein. People stopped telling her she looked great and started asking her if she was okay; their voices were concerned. It was a only matter of time before her body gave out beneath her, with no more evolutionary tricks up its sleeve. She collapsed one day and was taken to the hospital. My mother had always had a normal, healthy female body. But by the time she went to the hospital, her body had shrunk to something pitiful.

No one, including her doctors, ever acknowledged that my mother was starving herself. My mother never realized what she was doing. Was it for the men? Because every single thing in this world sunk the message, deeply, that skinny was pretty, fat was ugly, and if you want a man—and Mom did—you’d better be skinny. Did it give her a sense of control to master deprivation? Did she get addicted to the secret rituals of starvation, feel proud
that at least one unruly thing in her life was under her management?

Or maybe my mother was simply used to putting herself last. A person can get used to taking nothing. My little brother used to save her the crusts of bread because he thought they were her favorite, but my mother just insisted on giving us everything she had and living on whatever was left over. Even hunger, acute hunger, can start to feel so normal you don’t notice it. I’ll never know why Mom let her body get so emaciated that it stopped working, because she doesn’t like to talk about that. All I know is that my mom continued to party once she got out of the hospital.

It was another couple of months before she settled down. There were a lot of whirlwind romances. Men came and went, which was fine for my mom, but it wasn’t so good for her daughters, who were right in the middle of their formative years.

Mornings brought their own discomfort as Mom, whose understanding of what was appropriate got messed up so young, recounted the details of her one-night stands as if Akasha and I were her girlfriends. We sat at the table one morning while a one-night stand dropped her off. We weren’t her daughters but her confidantes. I felt a nameless, itchy feeling—a bad one—that was all mixed up with another feeling: happy that my mother was happy, happy and home, not in the hospital, not away in the dark but there in the light with us. My mother’s attention was spread so thin that I never got much of it, so there was something perversely sweet about those mornings, acting like high school girls gossiping after a night of sneaking out to meet boys in the woods.

With my mother trying to reclaim some lost youth, and my sister and me aged by our own shitty circumstances, we met in some inappropriately teenage middle. My mom often flung herself into a kitchen chair, taking off her jacket to reveal just a bra underneath, worn like a shirt. I was always bleary from a night of bad
sleep, waking in the darkness only to have to fight off the terror of it. Now I felt myself resisting a different dark feeling—that it was wrong to know so much about what my mother was doing out there with the men she met.

This is where life got really confusing, where Mom’s coming and going turns into a blur. Too scared to sleep in the dark house without any grown-ups around, I stayed at Aunt Jannie’s more and more. Life got less and less stable, and I found myself living nowhere but staying everywhere: my mother’s house sometimes, Aunt Jannie’s sometimes, depending on how many others were staying; my dad Homer’s sometimes, when I could handle sleeping all the way out in Georgetown—so rural it made Judsonia look sophisticated. If you’re feeling confused about where I was when, believe me, so was I. I was a transient in my own family, often sleeping in a different house every night.

Moving back and forth among so many houses, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. If anyone asked me where I lived I didn’t know what to say.
Here and there, I guess
. There was nothing to anchor me to any house. I didn’t have a dresser anywhere, but it didn’t matter, since I didn’t own enough clothing to fill one. I remember one bountiful teenage Christmas getting a winter coat and a pair of jeans thanks to Aunt Jannie. They, along with my love-worn Pearl Jam T-shirt, were the only pieces of clothing I could truly call my own, since by that time my puffy-paint chanteuse shirt was too threadbare to wear and wound up shredded into cleaning rags, stored under Aunt Jannie’s kitchen sink. At the start of high school I really had nothing—no home, no clothes, and no idea how messed up my situation really was.

Every so often Mom would totally surprise me by deciding to act like a real mom. An overprotective-type mother who wanted me around, wanted to know where I was, kept an eye on things. Although I partly longed for that type of mothering, once I got it I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t trust it. I knew my mother would only be able to keep her motivation up for a minute, and then men, or life’s chaos, would take her attention back and I’d be left with less of her than before. And if my mother didn’t quite know how to be a mother, at that point I didn’t really know how to be a daughter.

My mother had a new friend from work, Jo Ann, who, seeing my mom struggle with her unruly kids, tried to help out the best way she knew how. Jo Ann set Mom up on a blind date with some guy named Mike. Two weeks after they met, I came home from school and watched him lugging his shit through my mother’s front door. I stopped in my tracks as I clambered off the school bus, watching the man’s movements, confused.
Is this the right house? Do I live here?
I was easily disoriented with all the moving
around. Then I saw Akasha and my brothers peeking out at the guy as he pulled trash bags and boxes over the threshold.

You comin’ or goin’?
asked the annoyed bus driver, and I climbed out of the bus and into my new family.

This is Mike
, Mom introduced him as I maneuvered my way around his stuff. Behind me Mike continued lugging his things into our home.

Later that night, Mike made us dinner. Spaghetti. It could have been homey, if it wasn’t so creepy. When you think about what teachers have to go through to work with kids, getting fingerprinted and whatnot, when you think about how a professional nanny arrives with references and background checks, it’s baffling that any lady can just move any old blind date into her home, a scant two weeks’ acquaintance suddenly stepdad to a posse of kids. Over my spaghetti I shot Mom a look that was stuffed with unspoken accusations and pissed-off bewilderment. She gave me a look in return and I dropped my gaze to my pasta. I knew what Mom’s look was telling me:
Dry it up
. That was her number-one favorite phrase. The mom who was so cool and understanding when my friends came over, freaking out about their fucked-up families, vanished when it came to her own kids. She shut herself down and demanded we do the same.
Dry it up
. I heard her voice in my head as easily as if she’d spoken out loud, but Mom wasn’t talking. She was controlling us kids with significant glances, picking at the edges of her spaghetti and smiling sweetly, thankfully, at Mike the Blind Date.

It was around this time that my mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn’t stick around too long, who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn’t have his blood. Now, you might think that finding out I was an illegitimate
child was a big deal, but there is so much mixing and matching where I come from, families spilling over into other people’s houses, what’s yours gets determined by what feels right, not by anything technical. Dad was the guy who’d been nicest: Homer Ditto.

Probably Mom would have let me think forever that Homer was my bio-dad if my actual birth father hadn’t stepped in with an out-of-the-blue desire to be paternal. The man lived in Rockford, Illinois, and when he’d asked my mother what sort of a gift I’d like, the first thing that popped into her mind was something from the Rockford Peaches, and a signed baseball showed up at our home soon thereafter.

One of my most favorite movies is
A League of Their Own
, about the Rockford Peaches, the first professional female baseball team. They were women in the 1940s who stepped up to play baseball while all the men were off fighting the war. Everyone thought they were big jokes. But they were tough and talented and knew there was no crying in baseball.

I was happy to have that signed baseball, but I—along with everyone else in my family—was not interested in letting my birth father back into my life.

The span of time my mom spent with my birth dad was a great and terrible era. Great because I was born. Terrible because the man who’d knocked Mom up was violent and awful. No one understood why my mother had left good-natured Homer to be with my bio-dad. He often took his fury out on my brothers, Homer’s kids. The constant meanness and physical brutality he’d inflicted on them as kids stuck in their minds. In my home his name invoked hatred, and suddenly he was trying to come back around, calling Mom on the phone and sending me the best gift I’d ever gotten.

It never made any sense for me to feel responsible for the abuse my brothers suffered. I was a newborn baby at the time, and who knows what crappy conditions I was suffering through,
long and blissfully forgotten. Still, the man who’d so famously hurt my brothers belonged to me. He was my birth father, and someone who was connected to me had done that. I felt ashamed, and scared. I didn’t want to be a traitor to my brothers. When my bio-dad called, I pretended I wasn’t home. I never called him back, and it didn’t take many dead ends for the guy to quit trying. Soon enough he was relegated to the land of bad memories, his name only uttered if needed, and always with venom. Homer was my dad anyway, in the real way that matters. I was happy to keep his name and he was happy to keep me as his daughter.