Raven

Orphans #4
V.C. Andrews
Copyright (c) 1998
ISBN: 0671020315
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"I never asked to be born," I threw back at my mother when she complained about all the trouble I had caused her from the day I was born. The school had called, and the truancy officer had threatened to take Mama to court if I stayed home one more time. I hated my school. It was a hive of snobs buzzing around this queen bee or that and threatening to sting me if I so much as tried to enter their precious little social circles. My classes were so big most of my teachers didn't even know I existed anyway! If it wasn't for the new automated homeroom cards, no one would know I hadn't gone to school.

Mama kicked the refrigerator door closed with her bare foot and slapped a bottle of beer down so hard on the counter it almost shattered. She tore off the cap with her opener and stared at me, her eyes bloodshot. The truancy officer's phone call had jolted her out of a dead sleep. She brought the bottle to her lips and sucked on it, the muscles in her thin neck pulsating with the effort to get as much down her throat as she could in one gulp. Then she glared at me again. I saw she had a bruise on the bottom of her right forearm and a scraped elbow.

We were having one of those Indian summers The temperature had reached ninety today, and it was nearly October twenty-first. Mama's hair, just as black as mine, hung limply over her cheeks. Her bangs were too long and uneven. She pushed her lower lip out and blew up to sweep the strands out of her eyes. Once, she had been a very pretty woman with eyes that glittered like black pearls. She had a richly dark complexion with distinct, high cheekbones and perfect facial features. Women shot silicone into their lips to get the shape and fullness Mama's had naturally. I used to be flattered when people compared me to her in those days. All I ever dreamed of being was as pretty as my mother.

Now, I pretended I wasn't even related to her. Sometimes, I pretended she wasn't even there.
"How am I supposed to scratch out a living and watch a twelve-year-old, too? They should be giving me medals, not threats."
Mama's way of scratching out a living was working as a barmaid at a dump called Charlie Boy's in Newburgh, New York. Some nights, she didn't come home until nearly four in the morning, long after the bar had closed. If she wasn't drunk, she was high on something and would go stumbling around our one-bedroom apartment, knocking into furniture and dropping things
I slept on the pullout couch, so I usually woke up or heard her, but I always pretended I was still asleep. I hated talking to her when she was in that condition. Sometimes, I could smell her before I heard her. It was as if she had soaked her clothing in whiskey and beer.
Mama looked much older than her thirty-one years now. She had dark shadows under her eyes and wrinkles that looked like lines drawn with an eyebrow pencil at the corners. Her rich complexion had turned into a pasty, pale yellow, and her once silky hair looked like a mop made of piano wire. It was streaked with premature gray strands and always looked dirty and stringy to me.
Mama smoked and drank and didn't seem to care what man she went out with as long as he was willing to pay for what she wanted. I stopped keeping track of their names. Their faces had begun to merge into one, their red eyes peering at me with vague interest. Usually, I was just as much of a surprise to them as they were to me.
"You never said you had a daughter," most would remark.
Mama would shrug and reply, "Oh, didn't I? Well, I do. You have a problem with that?"
Some didn't say anything; some said no or shook their heads and laughed.
"You're the one with the problem," one man told her. That put her into a tirade about my father.
We rarely talked about him. Mama would say only that he was a handsome Latino but a
disappointment when it came to living up to his responsibilities.
"As are most men," she warned me.
She got me to believe that my real father's promises were like rainbows, beautiful while they lingered in the air but soon fading until they were only vague memories. And there was never a pot of gold! He would never come back, and he would never send us anything.
As long as I could remember, we lived in this small apartment in a building that looked as if a strong wind could knock it over. The walls in the corridors were chipped and gouged in places, as if some maddened creature had tried to dig its way out. The outside walls were scarred with graffiti, and the walkway was shattered so that there was just dirt in many sections where cement once had been. The small patch of lawn between the building and the street had turned sour years ago. The grass was a sickly pale green, and there was so much garbage in it that no one could run a lawn mower over it.
The sinks in our apartment always gave us trouble, dripping or clogging. I couldn't even guess how many times the toilet had overflowed. The nib was full of rust around the drain, and the shower dripped and usually ran out of hot water before I could finish or wash my hair. I know we had lots of mice, because I was always finding their droppings in drawers or under dressers and tables. Sometimes, I could hear them scurrying about, and a few times I saw one before it scurried under a piece of furniture. We put out traps and caught a couple, but for every one we trapped, there were ten to take its place.
Mama was always promising to get us out. A new apartment was just around the corner, just as soon as she saved another hundred for the deposit. But I knew that if she did get any spare money, she would spend it on whiskey, beer, or pot. One of her new boyfriends introduced her to cocaine, and she had some of that occasionally, but usually it was too expensive for her.
We had a television set that often lost its picture. I could get it back sometimes by knocking it hard on the side. Sometimes, Mama received a welfare check. I never understood why she did or didn't. She cursed the system and complained when there wasn't a check. If I got to it first, I would cash it at my mom's friend's convenience store, and get us some good groceries and some clothes for myself. If I didn't, she hid it or doled out some money to me in small dribs and drabs, and I had to make do with it.
I knew that other kids my age would steal what they couldn't afford, but that wasn't for me. There was a girl in my building, Lila Thomas, who went with some other girls from across town on weekends and raided malls. She had been caught shoplifting, but she didn't seem afraid of being caught again. She made fun of me all the time because I wouldn't go along. She called me "the girl scout" and told everyone I would end up selling cookies for a living.
I didn't care about not having her as a close friend. Most of the time, I was happy being with myself, reading a magazine or watching soaps whenever I could get the television set to work. I tried not to think about Mama sleeping late, maybe even with some new man in her room. I had gotten so I could look through people and pretend they weren't even there.
"You just better damn well go to school tomorrow, Raven. I don't need no government people coming around here and snooping," she muttered, and wiped strands of hair away from her cheek. "You listening to me?"
"Yes," I said.
She stared hard and drank some more of her beer. It was only nine-fifteen in the morning. I hated the taste of beer anyway, but just the thought of drinking it this early made my stomach chum. Mama suddenly realized what day it was and that I should be in school now, too. Her eyes popped.
"Why are you home today?" she cried.
"I had a stomachache," I said. "I'm getting my period. That's what the nurse told me in school when I had cramps and left class."
She looked at me with a cold glint in her dark eyes and nodded.
"Welcome to hell," she said. "You'll soon understand why parents give thanks when they have a boy. Men have it so much easier. You better watch yourself now," she warned, pointing the neck of the beer bottle at me.
"What do you mean?"
"What do I mean?" she mimicked. "I mean, if you got your period coming, you could get pregnant, Raven, and I won't be taking care of no baby, not me."
"I'm not getting pregnant, Mama," I said sharply.
She laughed. "That's what I said, and look at what happened."
"Well, why did you have me then?" I fired back at her. I was tired of hearing what a burden I was. I wasn't. I was the one who kept the apartment livable, cleaning up after her drunken rages, washing dishes, washing clothes, mopping the bathroom floors. I was the one who bought us food and cooked for us half the time. Sometimes, she brought food home from the restaurant, when she remembered, but it was usually cold and greasy by the time she got it home.
"Why'd I have you? Why'd I have you?" she muttered, and looked dazed, as if the question was too hard to answer. Her face brightened with rage. "I'll tell you why. Because your macho Cuban father was going to make us a home. He was positive you were going to be a boy. How could he have anything but boys? Not Mr. Macho. Then, when you were born.
"What?" I asked quickly. Getting her to tell me anything about my father or what things were like for her in those days was as hard as getting top government secrets.
"He ran. As soon as he set eyes on you, he grimaced ugly and said, 'It's a girl? Can't be mine ' And he ran. Ain't heard from him since," she muttered. She looked thoughtful for a moment and then turned back to me. "Let that be a lesson to you about men."
What lesson? I wondered. How did she think it made me feel to learn that my father couldn't stand the sight of me, that my very birth sent him away? How did she think it made me feel to hear almost every day that she never asked to have me? Sometimes, she called me her punishment I was God's way of getting back at her, but what did she consider her sin? Not drinking or doing drugs or slumming about--oh, no. Her sin was trusting a man. Was she right? Was that the way all men would behave? Most of my mother's friends agreed with her about men, and many of my friends, who came from homes not much better than mine, had similar ideas taught to them by their mothers.
I felt more alone than ever. Getting older, developing as a woman, looking older than I was, all of it didn't make me feel more independent and stronger as much as it reminded me I really had no one but myself. I had many questions. I had lots of things troubling me, things a girl would want to ask her mother, but I was afraid to ask mine, and most of the time, I didn't think she could think clearly enough to answer them anyway.
"You got what you need?" she asked, dropping the empty beer bottle into the garbage.
"What do you mean?"
"What I mean is something to wear for protection. Didn't that school nurse tell you what you need?"
"Yes, Mama, I have what I need," I said.
I didn't.
What I needed was a real mother and a real father, for starters, but that was something I'd see only on television.
"I don't want to hear about you not going to school, Raven. If I do, I'm going to call your uncle Reuben," she warned. She often used her brother as a threat. She knew I never liked him, never liked being in his company. I didn't think his own children liked him, and I knew my aunt Clara was afraid of him I could see it in her eyes.
Mama returned to her bedroom and went back to sleep. I sat by the window and looked down at the street. Our apartment was on the third floor. There were no elevators, just a windy stairway that sounded as if it was about to collapse, especially when younger children ran down the steps or when Mr. Winecoup, the man who lived above us, walked up. He easily weighed three hundred pounds. The ceiling shook when he paced about in his apartment.
I looked beyond the street, out toward the mountains in the distance, and wondered what was beyond them. I dreamed of running off to find a place where the sun always shone, where houses were clean and smelled fresh, where parents laughed and loved their children, where there were fathers who cared and mothers who cared.
You might as well live in Disneyland,
a voice told me.
Stop dreaming.
I rose and began my day of solitude, finding something to eat, watching some television, waiting for Mama to wake so we could talk about dinner before she went off to her job. When she was rested and sobered up enough, she would sit before her vanity mirror and work on her hair and face enough to give others the illusion she was healthy and still attractive. While she did her makeup, she ranted and raved about her life and what she could have been if she hadn't fallen for the first good-looking man and believed his lies.
I tried to ask her questions about her own youth, but she hated answering questions about her family. Her parents had practically disowned her, and she had left home when she was eighteen, but she didn't realize any of her own dreams. The biggest and most exciting thing in her life was her small flirtation with becoming a model. Some department store manager had hired her to model in the women's department. "But then he wanted sexual favors, so I left," she told me. Once again, she went into one of her tirades about men.
"If you hate men so much," I asked her, "why do you go out with one almost every other night?"
"Don't have a smart mouth, Raven:' she fired back. She thought a moment and then shrugged. "I'm entitled to some fun, aren't I? Well? I work hard. Let them take me out and spend some money on me."
"Don't you ever want to meet anyone nice, Marna?" I asked. "Don't you ever want to get married again?"
She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes looked sad for a moment, and then she put on that angry look and spun on me.
"No!
I don't want to have no man lording over me again. And besides," she said, practically screaming, "I didn't get married. I never had a wedding, not even in a court."
"But I thought . . . my father . ."
"He was your father, but he wasn't my husband.
We just lived together," she said. She looked away.
"But I have his name . . Flores," I stuttered.
"It was just to save my reputation," she admitted.
She turned to me and smiled coldly. "You can call yourself whatever you want."
I stared, my heart quivering. I didn't even have a name?
When I looked in the mirror, whom did I see? No one, I thought.
I might as well be invisible, I concluded, and returned to my seat by the window, watching the gray clouds twirl toward the mountains, toward the promise of something better.
That promise.
It was all I had.