Blueberry Hill: a Sister's Story(6)

A week later Daddy takes Mama to the doctor, and they come home with enough tranquilizers to put a horse to sleep. “If your mama doesn’t get some rest,” Daddy says, “she’s going to have a nervous breakdown.”

By that time the baby, who Mama had named Geri after herself, is five years old. While she doesn’t need diapering and feeding, she does need to be watched over and that becomes my job.

It’s the start of a very long six months.





The Prodigal Daughter




In time the Portsmouth, Virginia, police found Donna and sent her home. By then a full six months had rolled by and Mama was little more than a shell of her former self.

On the morning she left home, Donna had hitchhiked to Route 95 then caught a ride with a black family headed south. She didn’t know their names, where they came from, or where they were headed. She only knew they were willing to give her a ride and share the sandwiches they carried in a cooler.

Donna left home thinking she’d find a place to stay at our aunt’s house in Portsmouth, but before long she realized Mama would be the first one Aunt Ida called. Not good.

I wish I could tell you how my sister survived those first few days, but she never told us and we had no way of finding out. What we do know is that when the police located her, she was working at a barbeque stand and living in a furnished room she’d rented herself.

Anyone with a brain in their head would wonder why an employer would hire a girl who was barely sixteen, but Donna was tall, wide-shouldered, and brassy. Add that to her sashay and you couldn’t tell whether she was sixteen or thirty, so no one bothered to ask questions.

Donna returned home a different person. Before she left she would sneak an occasional cigarette, but now she smoked one after another and was openly defiant about it. Mama, who had gone through months and months of torture worrying about her middle child lying dead in a ditch, no longer argued. When Donna lit up Mama pinched her eyebrows together, then turned and looked the other way.

Without saying a single word, Donna had won the longstanding battle.

~

That six-month hole in our lives didn’t just change Donna; it changed us all. Before she ran off, we were a regular family with everyday differences of opinion and arguments. From time to time we might have exchanged a few sassy words or banged a door, but that was it. The next day we’d go about our business like nothing ever happened. Once Donna went missing, we became a house of sorrow. It was as if her body was in the living room cold as ice, and Mama wasn’t sure whether or not to bury her.

I thought after Donna came home we’d go back to being the way we were, but I was wrong. We just moved from being a family of sorrow to one of fear. It felt like there was a bomb strapped to each of us, and one wrong word would set off an explosion.

We didn’t argue about anything. You might think that’s good, but it’s not. When some people stop arguing, it means they’ve stopped caring. I don’t think we’d stopped caring. We were just too fearful to show it. Especially Mama.

From that time forward Mama was a smaller person, and she had little to say. More than anyone else Mama was afraid of those bombs. Anything from a harsh whisper to the bong of the doorbell could jangle her nerves and cause her to need another gulp of what she called her nerve medicine.

In truth it was rye whiskey she’d poured into a small plastic bottle. That bottle went everywhere Mama went, and if she left the house she carried it in her handbag. Sometimes when I leaned in to kiss her goodnight I caught the smell of whiskey on her breath.

Before the hole in our lives the only time I ever saw Mama take a drink was at a party, and then it was mixed with a tall glass of Coca Cola.

Daddy liked to drink on a regular basis, but Mama didn’t. When she pulled out the bottle and took a swallow, she scrunched up her face and drank it like medicine. I would have felt a lot better about her drinking whiskey if she’d enjoyed it the way Daddy did.

~

Once she came back home, Donna didn’t give school a second thought. Several times Daddy mentioned it but Mama, afraid Donna would run off again, just hushed him.

“Now, Sam,” Mama would say, “don’t go picking at Donna. She’ll go back to school when she’s ready to.”

Even a fool could see Donna wouldn’t ever go back to school. Mama saw it, but she didn’t want to risk losing her daughter over it. So that’s the way it went. When Mama or Daddy set a curfew time it whizzed right by Donna, and while she didn’t argue about it she didn’t abide by it either. For Donna there were no more rules. It was as if she’d crossed into adulthood when she’d crossed the state line.

~

Two weeks after she was sent home, Donna went out and got herself another job. This time it was working as a roller skating carhop at the root beer stand on Route 17. She wore what she called a uniform: white shorts and an orange tee shirt. The tee shirt was plenty snug, but the shorts were so skimpy they could easy as not be mistaken for underpants. Mama disapproved of both the job and the uniform, but she never said a word about either one.

The root beer stand was a half-hour drive from our house and when Donna first got the job she was three months shy of being old enough for a driver’s license, so Mama took her to work every day.

“You want me to pick you up at eleven?” Mama would ask.

Donna would shake her head. “I’ll catch a ride with friends,” she’d say without ever specifying who those friends were.