The Hollow Ground: A Novel (27 page)

Ma shut her eyes and said, “Try to keep quiet, Brigid. I need to rest.”

So I did just that. I sat on the edge of Ma’s bed and looked from Ma to my reflection, vague and wavering in the darkness of the window. I wondered if Ma thought about how I looked like her daddy, how I had his way of looking. And I wondered if that was why she’d never loved me as much as she’d loved Brother.

*   *   *

The next day Aunt Janice got Ma an interview at the office where Aunt Janice used to work before she married Uncle Jerry. The job was to be a file clerk for two accountants. All Ma would have to do was keep track of their clients’ files, answer the phone, make appointments, and handle incoming and outgoing mail. From January until April fifteenth, Ma would have to work long hours. But otherwise she’d only have to work half days on Fridays.

I went with Ma to the interview and waited on a bench in the park across the street from the office. When Ma walked out, she teetered slightly, pointedly ignoring the man who stood by a parking meter looking her up and down.

As she neared the bench, she rolled her eyes and said, “What a bunch a retards they got running that place. Made me take a dumb test. Like I was a little kid! Wanted to see how I’d type a letter, they said. When things got busy they might need me to handle their correspondence, they said.” When Ma said
correspondence
her mouth turned downward in an ugly way. She lifted her hair and fanned the back of her neck with her scabbed-over hand. “They was all stuck up like Aunt Janice. But I convinced them by the end there was nothing to it. I can type good enough and what’s the big deal about answering the phone?”

By the following afternoon Ma was all agitated, waiting for the call. “They said they’d call today and now it’s after three o’clock and that dumb bitch ain’t been off the phone since she woke up!” Ma said about Aunt Janice. “I think she’s talking about me too. You hear how much she’s laughing?”

We were in the kitchen nosing through the refrigerator because Aunt Janice hadn’t bothered to make us lunch. Brother and Little Jerry were watching an old Western on the TV in the living room but still we were able to overhear Aunt Janice on the phone in the front hall. Laughing, Aunt Janice said, “Can you believe it, Linda? She actually handwrote part of the letter and some of the words are so badly misspelled you can’t even figure out what she meant. She thinks
could
is spelled c-l-u-o-d.”

Ma’s head swung up like she’d heard a gunshot and next thing I knew she was running down the hall. Aunt Janice, seated at the little telephone table, looked up and screamed as Ma rushed toward her and grabbed the letter from out of Aunt Janice’s hands. “How you even get this letter? Was it all just a joke? Were they serious at all?”

“Yes, they were serious. You should have told me you had no proper schooling. You know how embarrassed I am? You’re my husband’s sister. I recommended you.”

Ma held her hand like she’d claw Aunt Janice’s face and Aunt Janice leaned back until her head was touching the mirror hanging behind her.

“I had to handwrite it ’cause the cheap ribbon they gave me got all locked up,” Ma said. “Look at you with your bird’s nest hair and your phony way of talkin’. You’re the dumb bitch. If there’s any dumb bitch here, it’s you.”

Ma then pounded up the stairs, sobbing so hard that she fell down halfway up them and had to yank herself up by the rail. Aunt Janice hadn’t moved and all she did was blink as Brother started pelting her with his little plastic soldiers. “Take that!” he shouted. “And that!” Little Jerry then started throwing little plastic toys at her too.

“Shut up!” Aunt Janice screamed as I grabbed Brother and started dragging him up the stairs.

In Ma’s room me and Brother found Ma seated on the cot, staring at the wall. “She thinks she can treat me like shit and get away with it? I won’t let her, I won’t let her.” And Ma pounded her fist over and over into the bedspread.

And that was it. Ma packed her clothes and her ma’s things into Auntie’s old green valise. She had me shove Brother’s stuff into a couple of brown paper bags and within a half an hour we were standing out by the car and Uncle Jerry was handing us money. His mouth flexed like he was trying to form words but couldn’t. Finally he said, “Do you really have to go, Dolores?”

Ma squinted her eyes at the house where we could see Aunt Janice on the phone pacing back and forth behind the living-room picture window. Ma worked hard to hold her tongue but you could see it there poking out beneath her chipped eyetooth like it was scratching an itch. “Don’t you worry now, Bropey. I hate seeing you upset. I’ll manage. I always have.”

And Ma’s words set Uncle Jerry off and he sobbed again like he had at Pothole Park. His meaty red hands rubbed at the slobber on his face.

“Don’t worry,” Ma repeated. “I been on my own before. I been on my own practically from the start. I can do it again.”

“But
we’re
with you, Ma,” I said. “You’re not alone.” I touched her arm, wanting to hug her but there was something resistant in Ma when she was upset that wouldn’t let you near. It was like an invisible shield that kept us from touching her when
she
—when
we
—needed it the most.

Uncle Jerry sniffled. “You’re the strongest woman I know, Dolores. Maybe even the strongest man.” His face turned red and he swatted at the air like he was swatting at his words that didn’t make sense. He added, “You know what I mean.”

Ma’s glance toward Aunt Janice in the window could have sliced the woman in half. Ma tilted her chin proudly as if Uncle Jerry had been offering praise, but with the way his hands were clasped before him and his head was lowered, he reminded me of a mourner at a funeral. Ma’s strength was a kind of weakness for her, we all saw that. Maybe even Ma did because her eyes softened to a warm amber and she said, “I love you, Bropey. Thanks for taking me in.”

Then she closed her hand on the money and called us kids to the car and told us not to look back, not even once. “Because if you do,” she said, “it’ll burn your memory for the rest of your life.”

Twenty-four

We didn’t know where Ma went after she left Uncle Jerry’s. She’d brought me to the bus stop with enough money to buy my ticket and pay back Gram. She let Brother hug me first, then she squeezed me tight. “Don’t go worrying about us or making things worse than they are,” she said. “I got a friend I can go to. I’ll call you soon.”

But she didn’t. A full week went by before Uncle Jerry called saying she was in Easton and doing all right and he’d let us know if he heard anything else. He made me put Daddy on the phone and they spoke for several minutes, but all Daddy told me of the conversation was that Uncle Jerry was sorry for how it had all worked out.

“You think she’ll come back?” I asked, hardly able to look at Daddy since finding him at Star’s.

“Of course she will,” he said. “You know your ma.”

And that statement just hung there for a while for us both to ponder. Then Daddy said, “Listen, princess, it’s over. You know what I mean. I don’t want to talk about it again.” And then Daddy left the house but he didn’t stay out that late and when he greeted Mr. Smythe at 3:00
A.M.
his voice was only slightly slurred.

It was early July and warm but cooler than the hot spring had been. Fireflies lit up the dark hollows of the woods and no matter how bad things were, I couldn’t help but look on their glow as something magical. Sometimes late on clear nights after the fireflies quit their flashing I’d take a blanket into the backyard and lie down to star watch. Whenever a falling star shot a powdery white streak through the sky, I made a wish. Sometimes I wished something horrible would happen to Ma for all the hurt she’d brought us through, but mostly I wished we’d just all be together again and as happy as I’d always thought we’d one day be.

I felt the worst for Brother because I imagined he’d be scared in a strange place all alone with Ma and whenever he was scared he coped by hitting himself. I pictured his pink Kewpie-doll mouth swollen red and his peachy cheeks yellow with bruises and didn’t know how Ma could bear to make him suffer so.

Often I tried to do what Auntie had called “Mind Mail,” sending someone a happy memory or thought by imagining it into their brain. I’d picture Brother and then I’d think hard on the times we all picnicked at Culver Lake with Auntie or on all the quiet times me and Brother spent frog hunting up in East Woods, but of course I had no idea if my thoughts ever reached him.

Now when Gram lashed out at Ma I didn’t care. Maybe it was because Gram was so caught up in working on the paperwork for her Great Idea that even her attacks on Ma lacked their usual bite. She’d say something like, “Lots of people have worse lives than she got and they stick around for them.” But she’d say it almost offhand and I’d just shrug or agree. Maybe it was Gram’s progress with the Great Idea that had taken the edge off our anger toward Ma and made us less snippy in general. Gram had tracked down a company in Albany, New York, that specialized in moving houses and she’d made arrangements with the Redevelopment Authority that entailed them buying the house from her—which they were required to do now that our neighborhood had been declared a slum—but instead of simply wrecking the place, they’d sell it back to her. Then she’d be able to move the house.

As simple as this sounded, it wasn’t. There were heaps of paperwork and permits and this or that signature or stamp required and Gram would sit there at the table with the black gas gauge meter in the corner ticking like a loud and persistent clock and say, “I tell you, all them authorities is workin’ in collision to make sure I can’t get this done.” Or “I bet they’re hopin’ the house gets wrecked ’fore you can get the permit to get the permit to get the darned thing moved!”

Once Edna Schwackhammer found out about Gram’s Great Idea she wanted to try and get her house moved too. Gram never said so but I could tell she regretted ever telling Mrs. Schwackhammer about her plans. Some nights a dazed Mrs. Schwackhammer would sit with Gram at the kitchen table so confused by all the legal issues that she’d cry, “I don’t know how to do any of this, Rowena. Otto did everything. Everything! You’ve got to help me. I don’t know how.”

“Well, ain’t that what you said about writin’ a check?” Gram would say. Or “Didn’t you say the same thing about nailin’ a dawggone nail in the wall? Yet you done both, Edna Jane. And now you done them so many times I bet you can’t even imagine not knowin’ how!” Then cagily Gram would suggest that it might be better to see what happened with Gram’s applications for getting the house moved before doing anything with Edna’s. Every now and then she’d add for good measure, “I’m the one who had the idea after all, Edna, sose if they only goin’ to let one of us go, it should be me.”

Then Mrs. Schwackhammer would cry that her house was slated for demolition sooner than Gram’s, so if anyone should get to move their house first, it should be her. Sometimes she’d even plead her case further by claiming her Otto’s spirit still rested within her house’s walls.

“Well, it’s both my spirit and my livin’ body that rests within
these
walls!” Gram would declare. “And I ain’t got no place else to go. You got three children could take you, Edna, and don’t you forget it!”

And then Gram would make a pot of tea and push aside the paperwork until Mrs. Schwackhammer left for the night.

Gram had quit holding prayer meetings because she said they got her “too danged depressed,” but she still said a prayer to Saint Jude each time she tackled some part of the Great Idea and she lovingly dusted her Saint Joseph statues every day. No matter how much filth managed to seep in from the dig out those statues stared cleanly out at you from every corner of the room.

“Out of your mind,” Daddy said when he first heard about the Great Idea from one of the men who worked for the Redevelopment Authority. “Once they buy it, you’ve got nothing but their word that they’ll sell it back. Even if they put it in writing, what good will that be? You think you can take the entire Redevelopment Authority to court?”

“Maybe I can,” Gram snapped. “Anyhows you got any better ideas? What you think is goin’ to happen once this house gets wrecked? You think some tramp’s goin’ to let you stay at her place? What about this girl here?” Gram stuck her arm straight out and pointed at me where I sat on the plastic-covered couch trying both to listen to them and read
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

“Christ,” Daddy said, rolling his eyes toward me and the mantel that still displayed all of Gramp’s mass cards.

“No takin’ the Lord!” Gram shouted, slamming her hand against the wall and knocking a Saint Brigid cross crooked from where it hung above the window.

Daddy took a deep breath and leveled his stare at Gram. “Tramps, Mother? Really? Now isn’t that the pot calling the kettle…”

He didn’t finish the saying but Gram’s eyes went as black with pain as if he had. And from that point on she not only hardly talked to Daddy, but she stopped doing any of his cooking, mending, or washing too.

For the most part Daddy ignored the fact that she ignored him and I started doing all of his washing and ironing and mending and cooking. I couldn’t turn my heart cold to him, no matter what he’d done to us. Ma and Gram could do that, but not me, and I was proud not to be like them in that way.

Sometimes when I looked at him his cheeks and eyes had a hollowness to them as if they’d caved in. Sometimes he didn’t even feel like he was my daddy, just someone who’d been sick a long time who slept in Daddy’s old room and drank the hot bitter coffee that he liked to brew two or three times a day. And as mad as I was at him for letting things get to where they were, my heart went out to him when I saw him like that and I’d make him his sunny-side up eggs and toast the way I used to do for him every day in Centrereach. I even started making him Auntie’s remedy for what she called the liquid devil for when he drank too much. It was black tea with skullcap and sage and in a way it was a remedy for me too because just in the making of it I felt near to Auntie, which made me think of Marisol saying that Auntie’s spirit was around me. Maybe I was no longer closed to her spirit the way Marisol had said I was. Maybe something in me had opened.