Now or Never (12 page)

“You know what they do,” he would say in his hoarse, menacing, cigarette-scarred voice. “They grip you with their muscles. Yeah, these.” He thrust his hand into her cruelly, and she muffled her terrified cries with the sheets, so as not to frighten her young daughter in the next room.

“You’re useless,” he snarled at her as he pounded futilely into her, blaming her for his own inadequacies. “You’re nothing, you hear me?
Nothing
. Nothing but a crazy woman.”

And then would come the sound of his hand striking her soft flesh. Mary Mallory heard it and her mother’s high wail of pain, even though she stuck her hands over her ears.

“Oh, God, oh, God, please don’t let him hurt her,” she would pray, jolting upright in bed. “Don’t let him hit her. Stop him, stop him.”

Sometimes her prayer would be answered. She would hear the bed squeak as her father swung himself to his feet, and the rustling of his clothes and the clink of the metal buckle on his belt as he fastened it; the thump of his boots on the floor and the squeak of the bedsprings as he sat down to put them on.

Then a long silence when she knew he was standing
there, looking at her mother. Mary Mallory crossed her fingers; she crossed her arms and her legs and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “Don’t hit her again,” she prayed. “Just don’t.”

Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. Afterward, she would hear the clump of his boots on the stairs, and the front door would slam so hard, it seemed to rock the flimsy little frame house on its foundations.

Mary Mallory froze, straining her ears. Only when the car’s engine started up did she sag with relief, sure they would not see him again that night.

She stared at the wall, hearing her mother’s muffled sobs, sharing her despair, not knowing what to do about it. She couldn’t go to her. She couldn’t throw her arms around her and comfort her. Things were not like that in their household.

No one ever spoke about their feelings and Mary Mallory had come to the conclusion that you weren’t meant to have them. In fact, no one spoke much at all in her house, except to say things like “pass the salt.”

Her mother seemed locked in her own private misery. She drifted around the tiny house in a faded pink cotton wrapper, like a woman in a dream. She would sit at the kitchen table for hours over a cup of coffee, staring vaguely in front of her, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

Mary Mallory would leave her there in the morning when she went off to school, and often she would still be there in the afternoon, when she got back. Still at the table, still with the coffee cup, still the cigarette.

“Mom,” she suggested tentatively, when her father was away on one of his long voyages and things were easier, “Why don’t we go to the movies? They say there’s a good one playing at the Rialto.”

Her mother’s dull eyes shifted onto her for a second. Her brows lifted as though she were surprised to see her there. “You go. There’s money in my purse.”

So she went to the movies alone, losing herself in the Technicolor glamour of the latest Hollywood musical, drinking in the music and the laughter and the wonderful dresses until she was practically living life up there onscreen with them. Only when the credits rolled and the lights came up did she return to the awful reality of being Mary Mallory Malone.

She saw everything that came to the Rialto, sometimes twice or even three times, sneaking in the side door on Saturday afternoons when she had no money, which was almost always, living vicariously and storing the images in her head so she could dream about them later in bed. Until she was twelve years old, she believed life really was like in the movies. It was just her own life that was different.

Except she had a problem with the love stories. She didn’t believe people really looked at each other like that, with their hearts in their eyes, that they hugged and kissed and said I love you. She knew her own parents did not love her and she wondered if it was because she was ugly. She was a mousy child, thin, with limp fair hair and myopic blue eyes hidden behind ugly, thick-lensed plastic glasses. In her whole life she could not remember either of them ever putting their arms around her, hugging her, kissing her. They never called her by affectionate pet names, never made her feel special.

When she was eleven, her father didn’t come home at the end of a voyage. A year passed, and suddenly one morning Mary Mallory came downstairs to find her mother sitting at the kitchen table, smoking as usual. Only this time she was clutching a letter. She held it nearsightedly to her blue eyes, scanning it over and over, her brows raised in perplexed surprise.

“Mary Mallory,” she said in a strange new voice, “it says here that we have defaulted on our mortage payments. It says here”—she put a trembling finger on the
line—“that we have ignored all their previous letters and that unless we vacate the premises by Saturday morning, the bailiffs will be sent to evict us.”

She lifted her eyes and looked astonished at her pale, bespectacled daughter standing by the door. It was as if she had suddenly seen the light at the end of the tunnel, the happy ending she had always been searching for. Galvanized out of her lethargy, she got briskly to her feet.

“You’ve got to help me,” she said, glancing wildly around the scabby little kitchen. “We need to pack. Dishes and stuff, and clothes.” She thought for a minute. “You know what this means, don’t you?” Her usually dull eyes alive with triumph. “We’ll never have to see your father again.”

It was sad that it had taken the repossession of her home to free her mother from the tyranny of her sadistic husband, but Mary Mallory didn’t think of that then. All she felt was relief. And after that, worry.

“But what shall we live on, Mom?” she asked, scared.

“I’ll get a job,” her mother said airily, opening a drawer and flinging a battered collection of dimestore cutlery into a plastic bag. “As a clerk in the supermarket, or a waitress maybe. Somethin’, anyhow.”

Mary Mallory didn’t think so, but she knew they couldn’t stay where they were. So she found a cardboard box and obediently filled it with their cheap dishes, stacking them neatly.

She stopped and looked uncertainly at her mother. She was humming tunelessly, and it occurred to Mary Mallory that she had never seen her mother excited before. She had just one question: “Mom, where shall we go?”

Her mother paused, thinking about it. “You know what? I’ve always wanted to live by the ocean.” She laughed, an alien sound that rippled through the sour old house like the fresh sea breeze she was dreaming about.

“Yes, that’s where we’ll go,” she said exultantly. “To the seaside.”

It was the only moment in her life that Mary Mallory caught a glimpse of the pretty girl her mother had once been. Before she married, and before the black depression had claimed her.

Her spirits rose to match her mother’s. She could almost believe that happiness lay ahead, there at the seaside, where the rainbow ended. And she laughed too, as she flung pots and pans into another cardboard box with a great clanging of metal.

“We’re off to the ocean!” she yelled, delighted. Closing her eyes, she breathed deeply as though she could already smell the salty spray and feel the tug of the wind in her hair, as though she could already taste their happy new life.

A couple of hours later, they had piled their few remaining worldly goods into the ancient turquoise Chevy with the chrome fins. Mary Mallory’s mother got behind the wheel and Mary Mallory reminded her that they had better fill up with gas since they were going on a long journey.

At the gas station her mother counted out the money carefully, then winked at her and went into the little store and bought her a Coke and a Snickers bar.

“Lunch,” she said cryptically, lighting a cigarette from a fresh pack of Marlboros as they drove off down the road.

It wasn’t until they were passing the place that Mary Mallory even remembered.

“Mom, what about school?” she asked, suddenly brought back to sober reality.

“There’ll be a new school,” her mother said, not bothering even to give it a glance.

“But shouldn’t we tell them or something?”

“Unh-unh.” She shook her head. “No need. Believe me, they won’t even notice you’re not there.”

Mary Mallory looked back at the ugly red-brick school she had attended for the past four years. She had no friends there; even the teachers had ignored her.

She knew she was different from the other children at school. She had seen their parents when they came to the meetings or the play at Christmastime. They were nice, ordinary smiling people who laughed and talked to each other and joked with their children and the teachers. The sort of people who linked arms or held hands as they walked across the schoolyard, leaning affectionately into each other, their heads together as they talked. Nobody ever
talked
at Mary Mallory’s house.

Her mother and father never came to the school, not once the whole time she was there. And the teachers never asked her about them. They just looked knowingly at each other when they saw Mary Mallory alone at a concert or on sports day.

The other children didn’t ignore her—they just never seemed to notice her, that’s all. Mary Mallory was like the runt of the litter, kept outside the pack to live or die as best she could.

She knew her mother was right—no one would even miss her. She hoped things would be different at her new school at the seaside.

They drove through pleasant countryside, and Mary Mallory gazed out at the black and white cows, and at chickens clucking in the barnyards, and once even a herd, or was it a flock, of pink piglets trotting along on delicate little hooves in wake of their enormous lumbering mother-sow.

She ate the Snickers bar in tiny little bites, making it last for a couple of hours, but by the time they hit the coast road, darkness was falling and she was starving.

“I’m hungry, Mom,” she said. “What are we going to do about dinner?”

Her mother glanced at the dashboard clock, “Goodness, is it that time already?” she said, surprised. She swung the wheel suddenly to the left, and the car skidded across the highway in front of a logging truck, into a gravel parking lot.

The sixteen-wheeler loaded with fresh-cut logs screeched to a halt behind them. “Goddamn women drivers!” the truck driver yelled, wiping his sweating brow. “You don’t learn to signal, lady, you’ll end up dead.”

Mary Mallory bit her lip anxiously, but her mother seemed not to have heard. “Sorry,” Mary Mallory mouthed to the driver, but he shook his head and glared menacingly at them.

“Come on,” her mother said, getting out of the car and heading for the brightly lit café.

She hurried after her. “Mom, don’t you think we’d better lock the car?”

“Lock it? But why?” She glanced back helplessly. Mary Mallory took the keys and ran back and locked the doors.

The truckstop café was fluorescent-bright, smoky, and crowded. It smelled of bacon and burgers and coffee. Music boomed from the jukebox in the corner, competing with the roar of conversation and the sizzling and clattering coming from the short-order kitchen.

Ignoring the other customers, her mother strode to the head of the line. She turned to look at Mary Mallory, who was hanging back nervously.

“A burger okay with you?” she called. Without waiting for an answer, she ordered two burgers and two root-beer floats.

She picked up her tray and, oblivious to the scathing comments of the irate truckers, stalked to a table near the window. Mary Mallory slunk after her, head down, hoping
no one would tell them off for pushing into the line like that.

She sat silently opposite her mother, eating her burger. She couldn’t remember the last time they had done this together, and her spirits rose. She began to believe there really was a new life awaiting them at the seaside. Her mother seemed so different—strong and purposeful, as though in ridding herself of her husband, she was leaving behind the terrible past and that other sad, frightened woman. Mary Mallory knew she would get a job. They would have a proper home and friends, and they would be happy.

Back in the car, she fell asleep. She didn’t move until her mother nudged her and said, “Wake up, Mary Mallory. I’ve found the seaside.”

They were high up on a cliff. In back of them stood a forest of trees, so tall they seemed to touch the clear night sky. And before them lay the ocean, eerily dark except for the clear silver path laid across it by the full moon.

Mary Mallory rolled down her window and poked her head out, breathing the cold fresh air. She stuck out her tongue, tasting the salt on the wind. The ocean surged restlessly, murmuring, groaning, hissing when it struck the rocks below, like some gigantic prehistoric beast.

“It’s the seaside all right, Mom,” she said.

Her mother yawned. “I guess we may as well spend the rest of the night here,” she said, sliding down in her seat and closing her eyes.

Mary Mallory glanced over her shoulder. The back of the car was piled with boxes and plastic bags and her mother’s scattered clothes. There was no room there for her to stretch out. She rolled up the window and slid down in her seat like her mother, shuffling until she arranged herself in a bearable position.

She smelled the salty ocean in her dreams that night, and when she awoke, the sun was dappling the trembling
ocean with flecks of gold. And her mother was fast asleep with her head on Mary Mallory’s shoulder.

It was the closest she could remember ever having been to her mother. She sat completely still, afraid of losing the contact, feeling the warmth of her mother’s soft cheek against her arm. She watched the colors of the sea change as clouds filled the sky, turning the innocent blue-green to carbon gray. A couple of squirrels scuttled past the car as the first drops of rain splattered onto the roof. The rain became a downpour, and the sea turned into a raging, roaring ocean, hurling itself at the cliff.

“Goodness, it’s raining,” her mother said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “We’d better get going, Mary Mallory. I need to make a pit stop.”

They bumped back down the slippery lane, through the forest onto the highway. The wipers swished uselessly back and forth in the deluge as her mother pointed the turquoise Chevy south, peering over the hood into the gloom.