“Go play,” she said. “I’m fine. Leave me alone, honey.”
Drawing, sorting my clothing, arranging the mice in their cage, doing any ordinary thing at all, seemed risky, like simultaneously being in a little boat out in the middle of a storm. You couldn’t take your attention from it or it would tip when you didn’t expect.
The next week Debbie took me over to the house where she lived with her parents in Menlo Park on Hobart Street. Her mother, blonde and plump with skin like parchment, was sitting in a breakfast nook wearing an apron, cutting rectangles out of colorful newsprint. The scissors made a pleasing rasp.
I asked her what she was cutting.
“Coupons,” she said. “I bring them to the store, and then I pay less.” She put each rectangle of paper into a partitioned section of a plastic box.
There was a secret compartment inside one of Debbie’s dresser drawers. A drawer inside a drawer. “My family doesn’t even know about it,” she said, whispering and leaning down so her face was near mine. Inside was a jewelry case, and inside that was a necklace, the fine chain knotted.
“I wonder if you can undo that with your little fingers,” she said. “If you can untie it, you can have it.” I sat on her bed and worked the filaments away from one another until each knot released.
“Do you have a husband?” I asked her, as she fastened the necklace behind me.
“Not yet,” she said. “But I will. I’ll be out walking, and bam, there he’ll be, around the next corner!”
When we got back, my mother was in her painting clothes.
“Look,” she said, gesturing to an almost-finished painting. Debbie went over to see it close up. “It’s amazing,” Debbie said. “I’ve never seen more beautiful artwork.” (Later Debbie said she wondered why we were poor when my mother had a talent like this. At the very least, she thought, my mother could hawk her artwork on the street. But my mother’s artwork didn’t make money except for a few illustration projects.)
We all sat at the table, me on Debbie’s lap. At some point while they were talking I looked up and said, “Your teeth are white. My mom’s are yellow.” My mother shifted in her chair; she often complained about the way her teeth looked.
“Debbie has no idea,” my mother said, after Debbie had left. “She’s phony and judgmental and she has no fucking idea.” It was true that Debbie judged her: at some point during the visit, Debbie noticed the dishes in the sink and a stain on our wall, left there by previous renters where a drink must have spilled. Over time the area had darkened like a shadow and Debbie had noticed it and wrinkled her nose.
“She just prances in here and takes you away,” my mother went on, “and you’re a delight—and she judges me. When it’s because of all my work that you’re so great.”
“I like her,” I said.
“She’s not perfect, you know. She’s not happy all the time. She’s phony.”
“You should clip coupons,” I told her.
“No way,” she said. “It’s not the kind of person I am. Or ever want to be.”
After that day, my mother no longer waited with me near the garage beside the front house by the circle of asphalt in the morning for Debbie’s arrival.
One weekend a friend from school named Daniela and her parents took me to a musical concert. I wore heavy-gauge white wool tights. I had to pee in the middle of the performance but it wasn’t possible to leave. I held it for as long as I could, and then finally, not able to hold it any longer, I peed in my tights. (I was relieved to notice, when the lights turned on, that you couldn’t tell from looking that they were soaked).
In the bathroom at intermission, I tried to flush the tights down the toilet. They gathered near the hole, stuck, a twirl of sodden fabric. When I left the stall, there was a line out of the bathroom; the next person in line, a woman, advanced toward the stall I left. “I don’t know if you want to use that one,” I said to her, using my best diction, as if she and I were conspirators. “There’s a pair of children’s tights in the toilet.” The woman gave me a strange look, and it was only after I walked out that I realized that I’d given myself away.
After the show my mother took Daniela and me for pizza at Applewood, and as we walked back to the car, we took turns swinging her cloth purse by the long handle, making huge and violent circles above the sidewalk. Daniela whipped it around. An X-Acto blade my mother used for art projects must have made its way to the bottom, come uncapped, and poked through the fabric. The bottom of the bag brushed against the top of my wrist and slashed it open. Later, it developed into a scar an inch long, vertical, bisecting my forearm, an “I” shape that was not unattractive and that I have become used to. For a while she felt guilty and could hardly look at the scar. But then years later she would point and exclaim, “I signed you!” like I was her art.
Sometimes my mother remarked how her own mother, Virginia, wouldn’t have done this or that: wouldn’t have taken her to a café to get cake, or intervened on her behalf in school, or brought her snacks in bed when she was hungry—and the summation of these small comments, as far as I understood, at the very least, was that her mother had withheld from her the elements of my own childhood that I liked the most.
“When I was little,” she said, “my mother noticed I had artistic talent, and she went out and bought my sister Linda an easel and an elaborate paint set. Then she said I wasn’t allowed to touch it.”
I wanted more stories like that one—stories of Virginia’s cruelty—but instead she mostly told me about how her mother was a great cook and had strung up fat hand-cut noodles around the kitchen to dry like socks, had insisted on buying feather duvets when this was not common. Once, on a snowy day, Virginia looked out the window and saw two bright-red cardinals sitting on a branch and decided she would buy herself a pair of red shoes, and did. Through Virginia, we were related to the late Branch Rickey, who was her great-uncle and the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the man who helped get Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball. It was important to defend Virginia, my mother implied, even before I knew what we were defending her against.
“My first memory was as a baby in my crib, looking around, noticing how meager the room was,” she said. “As if I’d come from some other place that was considerably nicer.” In her stories of childhood, she was sometimes defenseless and at other times powerful. She was required to wear skirts and flimsy coats to school in the freezing Ohio winters; she had the initiative and independence to save cereal tokens and trade them for binoculars and went wandering and bird-watching alone at dawn. Now she was looking for something much better than what she’d ever experienced before—she wanted it for both of us—something exquisite that she could imagine but that we hadn’t seen or tasted yet.
My mother and I went for a hike near Maryknoll Seminary, in a nature preserve of hilly grassland with a residence for retired missionary priests. We walked on a wide dirt path. Around us the grasses and nettles gave off a smell of incense and soap. The insects were loud, then all at once, they’d stop, like a drop in pressure, leaving the air empty, and then they’d start again, building up. This was snake weather. Snakes might sun themselves on paths.