Pieces of My Mother (6 page)

My dad stands in the doorway of my room, watching me as I rub an old dusting sock across the top of my dresser. I keep my back to him intentionally because I want to be by myself this morning and really hate it when he starts telling me
how
to clean my room. I know how to take care of my things.

“Whatcha up to?” my dad asks.

“Stuff,” I say without turning. I pick the root beer–colored glass horse up off the dresser top and polish its smooth body with the sock.

“I was wondering…” He pauses. “I was wondering if you'd like to come down to the shop with me for a couple of hours.” My dad rents a store now where he has a business stripping furniture and selling antiques. He transforms shabby old chairs, armoires, travel trunks, and writing desks into pieces of furniture fit for a queen.

I do love going to his shop, but not right now.

“No, that's okay,” I say.

“We could go to Perry's Deli for lunch. Get a BLT?”

“No thanks, Dad. I just want to stay home today.”

I ought to tell him that I already have my Saturday planned. I have a hundred knickknacks that need dusting and rearranging, and drawers out of order. I need to get out the pink Twinkle polish and shine the brass knobs on my bed too.

I continue to rub the root beer–colored glass horse, focusing on its delicate black hooves and the tiny bubbles trapped inside its see-through body. I silently chant to myself,
Go
away, Dad. Go away, go away.
And not to be mean. I just want to be by myself in my room. This is the place where I can hear myself—a ticktock pulse inside me, the sureness of my footsteps across the floor. Here in my room, I allow myself to time travel and even become other girls if I need to. Here I become the grand-prize winner in the International Room Cleaning Competition, my own private game in my own private world.

The IRCC is a very specific contest in room cleaning and, most importantly, design. The IRCC judges arrive wearing navy-blue suits. They carry clipboards with thick pads of yellow paper. They are immediately impressed with how I have so carefully arranged the things in my room. The striped bed quilt is stretched flat without a single crease. The window ledge is slick with Old English furniture polish—and each freshly polished brass knob on my bed practically winks at them.

I hear the judges chat among themselves as they point to my glass animal collection. They like that I have allowed the wild glass tigers to mingle with the domestic fan-tailed birds. They turn and admire the old chandelier crystal that hangs on clear fishing line in the window and makes a thousand rainbow prisms dance around the room when the afternoon sun comes in. They peer into the glass cabinet that holds many of my most valuable knickknacks. They give me high marks on attention to detail and arrangement.

One of the judges asks me to show them my most prized possession.

“There are so many,” I say. I look around, trying to remember what I showed them last time. I want to show them something they haven't seen before.

I open the lid of the leather box that belonged to my grandma Rita and take out a small red bean no bigger than one of my molars. I hold it up for the judges to examine. Attached to the top of the bean is a tiny rice-colored elephant. I carefully tug at the little carved elephant and the top of the bean comes off—revealing that it is hollow inside. Now comes the best part: I turn the bean upside down and spill into my palm seven of the teeniest elephants imaginable—all the color of rice and as small as typed letters. They lay flat, like sprinkled confetti in my hand. The judges nod their heads in approval over this herd of elephants living inside a hollow red bean.

“Show us more,” they say.

I feel certain that today is a perfect day to win another room-cleaning competition.

“Please…” I hear my dad say faintly. His voice is a whisper, a feather floating across the room toward me.

I turn to my dad framed in the doorway. There are tears in his eyes.

“Please? I need you to come with me.”

I feel something run up my spine and nestle itself underneath my hair. I touch the back of my head where it tingles.

“What's wrong, Dad?”

“I just don't want to be alone today. Please?”

The tears change everything. I don't know how to respond. I stare back down at my glass horse, suddenly wishing I could throw it against the hard surface of the floor and shatter it into jagged pieces. But as much as I want to break something, I can't. Just like Jamie says, I am a “chicken girl.”

Sometimes I want to be like Jamie. I want to know how it feels to throw glass bottles in street gutters, hurl eggs at Mr. Rivasplata's car, steal salami from the grocery store, hear the sound of my fist breaking through Sheetrock, and dodge the Novato police. But I can't. I'm the good one, the quiet one, the one who never gets into trouble. A skinny toothpick holding up the whole house. I am the one my dad counts on.

My carefully planned day slips away. I set the glass horse down and slide it across my dresser like I am making a well-thought-out move on a chessboard. I push its front hooves to the edge of the dresser and there it halts.

“It's okay, Dad. I'll go with you.”

“Thanks, darling.”

As I lace my shoes, I think about my dad's tears and the night he came home and told us his mom had died. I had so many questions about how she died but my dad wouldn't say. Jamie and Eden hadn't spent a lot of time with Grandma Rita, but I had. A year or two ago, my dad put me on a plane and I flew by myself from California to LaGuardia Airport to visit her. A driver picked me up to take me to her house in a town called Katonah.

Grandma Rita was in bed when I arrived. After I gave her a hug, she told me she'd always wished for a little girl but she only had sons. I sat beside her and we talked for a bit. Or rather she asked me lots of questions. I was terribly shy. I had so many thoughts that I couldn't get out of my mouth: What was I going to do while I was here? Why hadn't my brothers come? Why was she staying in bed? Where was I going to sleep?

I spent that night in the upstairs room, listening to the sound of the cicadas and the attic window rattling. What I remember most vividly about my visit is peering into her dining-room cabinet filled with beautiful china and glass objects. A red swan, hand-painted plates, and an ornate emerald egg perched on a gold stand.

When Grandma Rita died, my dad's tears startled me but they made sense. He was going to miss his mother. I'm guessing that my dad is upset now because his girlfriend broke up with him a few days ago. He's had a lot of girlfriends, but he never picks the marrying kind. Usually they are much younger than him and not interested in having three instant kids. Not that we're interested in a young mom who's not our mom anyway.

When my dad has a steady girlfriend, I feel like I can take a huge, deep breath and slip away from always having to pay attention, always trying to keep the peace. I hate being the only girl in a house of boys.

On the way to his antique shop, we stop at Perry's Deli and buy two Pepsis and BLTs.

My dad's shop is packed with antique furniture angled in every direction. I walk through the maze of desks, dressers, tables, cabinets, armoires, old-fashioned barber chairs with red velvet upholstery, and shelves full of green and pink Depression glass. The antique medical cabinets have thirty-five skinny oak drawers in different sizes made for doctors' scalpels and tools. I could hide a lot of treasures in a cabinet like this. I'd love to show it to the judges of the room competition.

But I can tell that I'm going miss out on the International Room Cleaning Competition, and the IRCC judges are going to pick someone else to win the grand prize today. I'm not certain when my mom will come next, but when she does, I'm going to make sure that my room is the best and most interesting place she's ever seen. She's going to be amazed—just like the judges of the IRCC.

My aunt Joanna taps on the bedroom door. “I'm going into town for an hour or so. Do you want to come with? You might find a treasure at a post-Christmas sale to bring back to the kids.” She's right. I'll need to bring something back to Bella and Dominic. But I can't focus on that right now.

“I think I'll stay here,” I say.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah. So-so.”

“It's just hard, isn't it? There's not a lot we can do, except be here with her.”

I nod. “I'd feel better just staying here.” She smiles in a way that tells me she understands. I watch from the upstairs window as she starts the car and drives down the gravel road.

I'm glad for time alone. It's deeply wired in me. The long stretches of time that I spent in my room as a young girl balanced me. In my room, the world felt small and manageable. Whenever the shouting between my dad and brothers escalated, I had a place to hide. And when Eden and Jamie fought after school (which seemed like every day), the pitch of Eden's piercing screams kept me in my room where I was safe. Jamie always preyed on Eden in the absence of adult supervision until he cried out “Mercy.” I felt sorry for Eden but I didn't know how to protect him.

As a mother now, I struggle to find a similar kind of solitude—and I desperately need it. I'd be more balanced, more patient, less stressed out with my children and husband if I gave myself a time-out in a room of my own. But I can't just say, “Hey kids, I need to go spend a couple hours—or a day—alone in my room.”

Whenever I can, I steal stretches of time to be by myself. When my children were younger, I'd sometimes strap them into their car seats at night and drive until I could hear the silence of them sleeping. If they didn't fall asleep right away, I'd turn up the radio to quell the anger percolating inside me. I was tired and desperate for time to think, to be, to breathe by myself for a minute. In those moments, I couldn't help but resent my mom even more, imagining her driving off alone to wherever she wanted to travel after she left us, never having to think twice about anyone but herself.

Before I left home to come here to Olympia, I came across notes I'd scrawled in journals. These were thoughts that I intended to keep to myself.

Mom,

There are times I wish I could flee too. Even when the kids are their worst, I do not strike them. I never will. As I carried Dominic's tired and angry body up the stairs tonight, I felt the heaviness of love. This is the burden I choose. You know, Mom, you did not do the same. You left—you took the easy road out. I wish I could trust you. Sometimes I wish I had that mom—someone I could have curled up next to and felt completely safe.

Now, finally alone in the upstairs office bedroom, I sit and pull open the bottom drawer of my mom's metal filing cabinet. Inside a manila folder, I discover a colored-pencil drawing that is without a doubt my brother Jamie's work. It is an intricately drawn fish, a marlin I believe, with the word “MOM” woven into its black and blue scales. Jamie is the artistic one; he's never been able to stop drawing. That's what he did on the borders of his seventh-grade math homework papers instead of solving the problems and on every small scrap of paper he found in the house. The backs of the PG&E bills and the phone bills were covered with red-and-black ink-pen drawings. He even drew on the unfinished Sheetrock in his bedroom closet.

Much of what he chose to draw was strange. Creatures that were half-fish, half-men. Devil faces with distorted tongues and foreheads. Arms floating in the sea. Fish with sharp, vicious teeth. Men with scars all over their bodies. Hearts, bleeding or struck by lightning. But sometimes what he drew was beautiful. A rainbow trout jumping out of calm waters. A fish swimming inside another fish. Or this marlin decorated with a hundred shimmering scales. But Jamie didn't always like his drawings. He'd get mad and crumple them up or turn something nice into a screaming man with needles sticking out of his body.

I was jealous of how well Jamie could draw. I could only manage to draw flowers and stick people. Eden couldn't have cared less about Jamie's drawings. He was more interested in building model rockets and dissecting old circuit boards and CB radios. I remember my dad telling Jamie he was going to flunk out of school if he didn't shape up and stop goofing off with his doodling. But Jamie was so good with a pen that he could change his grades from Fs to Bs on his report card (at least until the parent-teacher conferences came up and my dad discovered the truth).

Regardless of what my father believed, Jamie had a gift. Once I asked him if he ever wanted to go to art school. He shrugged and said, “I don't want to go to any kind of stupid school. I just like to draw.”

As bizarre as some of his drawings were, something pulled me toward them and made me want to touch them. I kept a collection of Jamie's drawings hidden in my room. I'd find them crumpled up in the wastebasket and would smooth them flat and save them. I'd study them sometimes when I was alone because I was convinced there was a secret about Jamie hidden in his drawings. Between the dark ink lines and the scales of fish, there were stories he was trying to tell.

I'm worried about my brother. Beneath all his tattoos, I see the lost little boy he became so early in his life. I see the self-doubt he faces every day and the demons he wrestles endlessly.

Jamie is like me. Our early memories are as vivid and detailed as the lines on our palms. We both know how to don a beaming smile and say everything is okay, when we really mean “Everything is shit.”

I called him before I flew here to Olympia. He said there was no way he could leave his family or afford a plane ticket from Hawaii, where he lives now painting houses. But clearly he also couldn't handle seeing her so sick. As a kid, Jamie used to say that when Mom got old and gray, he was going to be the one to take care of her. I think he really wanted that. But he's having a hard time taking care of himself right now. Halfway through our phone conversation, I heard an odd raspy noise that sounded like the deep inhalation someone makes when smoking marijuana.

“Are you smoking a joint or something?” I asked him.

Then I realized he's not smoking, he's sobbing.

I felt foolish for asking such an insensitive question. I know exactly what he's feeling as he attempts to hold it all in. All the grief and guilt over what is happening, and our utter lack of control over it. “I'm so sorry, Jamie.”

“Why does she have to die?” he asked. The simplicity and childlike quality of his question stunned me.

“I don't know, Jamie. But it's all going to be okay,” I lied.

Sitting here looking at my brother's drawing for my mom, I begin to cry. Not for Mom, but for Jamie's loss. He is the artist and the fisherman. He is my brother who could fall apart any day, my brother who always believed that
he
was the reason our mother left. There is no word, no bandage big enough for the size of his wound.

• • •

A photograph falls out of the second folder I've pulled from my mom's filing cabinet. I've seen this picture before. It's my mom in the West Indies. She's all of twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Several more photographs show her smiling in a blue swimsuit. The light in these photographs has a dreamlike quality—washed out, blue green, and slightly overexposed, making them seem like they are from some other part of the world where the light reflects off the ocean differently. In one of the photographs, a chocolate-skinned woman is standing next to Mom, holding a tray topped with a drink that has a pink umbrella sticking out over the rim.

I recognize this photo because my mother had it out during one of my visits a little over a year ago. I inquired about it because I couldn't comprehend how she had ended up in the West Indies, of all places, when she had three small children at home. When she was on her second glass of wine, I felt bold enough to ask her. Even though her health was starting to fail, I didn't try to stop her from drinking because I wanted the straight story, unblemished and from her mouth.

“My parents sent me there,” she said.

“For how long?”

“A month.”

“Why?”

“Because they didn't know what else to do, I guess. They were worried that I was going to have some kind of breakdown.”

I didn't say anything, sensing that I have caught her in a rare moment of revealing something about herself.

“They sent me to this very upscale resort so that I could have some time to think and figure out what I was going to do with myself. I was
not
well. I was having a hard time being a decent wife and a mother, and I needed to get away.”

She walked to the stove and clicked the burner until it lit up with a blue and orange flame. Then she held a cigarette against the fire 'til it caught and lifted it to her lips.

“So my parents came up with this ludicrous plan. My father dragged me down to a New York lawyer—a real stuffed shirt—and told me what was going to happen. After a week of being at the resort, the lawyer said all I needed to do was write a letter to your dad, begging him to come get me off the island. If I wrote a letter and your dad refused to come get me—which the lawyer assured me that your dad would do, since he had his job and you three kids to take care of—that could stand as grounds for me to divorce him and get custody of you kids.”

She stopped talking like she was suddenly caught back in that moment.

“It was god-awful sitting in that office wedged between my father and that slick lawyer. He looked at me like I was white trash and told me I was lucky because he would sort it all out for me.”

“But you ended up staying at the resort for a month, right? Dad never came to get you?”

“That's right.”

I was trying to imagine my mom there, lonely in her blue swimsuit, weighing all her choices. “So what did you do there all that time?”

“I partied.”

“You
what
?”

“I partied,” she confirmed.

I don't know why her answer startled me, but it did. I wanted a different explanation, even if it was a lie. I wanted her to say that she thought about us the whole time or that it was one of the most difficult periods of her life. I wanted her to sit down on that kitchen chair and tell me for once that she was sorry for what happened.

“I'm tired, darlin'—I gotta head to bed,” she said, throwing back the last sip of wine.

But I have one more question. “What about the letter? Did you ever send the letter to Dad?”

“No, I just couldn't do it. It was all so ridiculous.” She shrugged.

I watched her sway out of the room.

And that's when I understood the layers beneath her words. She didn't send the letter because it would have meant she was committed to coming back to us. And she wasn't. She needed the vacation but she didn't want custody of us.

The photograph of my mom in the West Indies looks different now that I take a second look at it. The ocean light is dirty, and my mom's smile and the drink with the pink umbrella are both empty. There is a quiet hum inside me, a familiar feeling of standing alone in a house and waiting for someone or something to walk back through the door.