Our Crooked Hearts(10)
Sometimes she’s a stranger on a park bench, feeding her child from her fingers, the air between them so tender you could knead it like bread dough. Or a woman on the train, Coke in the sippy cup and yanking the kid’s arm until it cries. I’ve always liked to watch bad mothers.
A mother can be a paring knife, a chisel. She can shape and destroy. I never really thought I would become one.
There are things a daughter should know about the woman who’s raising her. If that woman had the courage. If she could say the words.
Let’s say you lie in bed at night and rehearse the things you’d tell her, if you could. This daughter of yours, infinitely unreachable and just across the hall. This deep into the disaster, what could you still say?
Where would you begin?
* * *
When I was five my dad lost his keys in the dark between the bar and our apartment. I was up on his hip, his breath painting beery clouds over the frozen air. We’d walked half a mile in the cold blowing in from the lake, him in his unzipped chore coat because he ran hot, me shivering in a Rainbow Brite windbreaker because he never remembered kids grow. It was always late November by the time I got a winter coat that fit me.
My dad’s good mood flipped like a card when we got to the street door and couldn’t unlock it. While he stabbed at the superintendent’s buzzer I wriggled out of his arms and started walking. Halfway back to the Green Man Tavern I swerved onto the black grass, plucking his keys from the hollow where they’d fallen.
When I was nine I put my fingers down a drain hole in the school washroom and got hold of a clasp I hadn’t actually seen, attached to a charm bracelet I didn’t know was there. Easel, candy cane, pointe shoe. I named each slimy charm before dropping the bracelet into the trash.
When I was twelve I walked home by myself one soft summer night. My dad was out and our apartment keys hung on a chain beneath my shirt. Up to the third floor, down the hall, then I stopped, staring at our closed apartment door. I heard nothing; there was nothing to hear. But quiet as I could I crept back to the street, then flew up the block to Fee and Uncle Nestor’s place. So it was my dad, not me, who opened the door an hour later to find the man in the shadows with a kitchen knife, his jeans unzipped. It was my dad who broke a brown-paper-wrapped bottle over his head and scared him away, leaving a path of bloodstains over the carpet that never washed out.
There were stories like this about my mom, too, what my dad said she’d called her guesses. But the way I described it to my best friend, Fee, the only one who ever asked, was that I could just feel things. Objects, places, the contours of them and how the air moved through. Think about standing in the center of your own room. Closing your eyes. Now feel the saturated tug of your diary beneath the mattress. The photo of your crush pinned to the corkboard among postcards and magazine pictures. The hidden place where you spilled nail polish and it stained the floor, so you pulled your bed a foot to the right.
That’s how I felt about the whole world. Or at least our little piece of it. We didn’t think it was weird, Fee and I. We didn’t even think it was special. Probably because she had her own thing: she always knew what people needed. Not their heads but their bodies. She was forever walking up to you with a glass of water, an apple, a bottle of Tylenol. She never stopped hassling my dad to eat a vegetable once in a while.
We were best friends who grew up like sisters, our world contained within the ten-block patch that spread like an oil stain around the street where we lived with our dads, two three-flats between our place and theirs. Our moms had been best friends, too, before dying a couple of years apart. We had this superstitious belief that the same thing would happen to us one day.
Our dads loved us, they tried, but they weren’t all there. Uncle Nestor was a good man who couldn’t look at his daughter without seeing his lost wife. And my dad ran like our bathroom faucet: wicked hot or freezing. I was his best girl or his heaviest burden, and I never could predict which it would be.
In a lot of ways we grew up fast—we were taking the train alone when we were eight, working part-time for our fathers at ten. I spent so much time haunting my dad’s local that I couldn’t actually remember when I had my first drink.
But in all the ways that counted, we were babies. We didn’t know how to dress right or act cool or talk to people who weren’t each other. My dad had told me, bluntly and early, why I should kick, scream, and run if a man ever tried to grab me, and I’d told Fee, so we had a cloudy understanding of sex. I wondered sometimes what our mothers would’ve wanted us to know, if they’d been around to teach us.
We made it all the way to fifteen this way. Who knows how much longer we might’ve gone if we hadn’t met Marion.
CHAPTER SIX
The suburbs
Right now
I woke in the predawn hour to the sound of Aunt Fee’s truck clearing its throat at the end of our drive. I listened for my mom’s step in the downstairs hall, the creak and sigh of the front door, the resettling of the house around her absence. An hour of quiet passed, then the familiar unfolding of my dad’s morning routine. Shower, NPR, coffee grinder. A band of thickening daylight crawled up my legs. When I heard the garage door close, I sat up.
Hank’s bed was empty. He must not have come home last night. Still I crossed the hall on tiptoe, stopping in front of my parents’ door. I tried to remember the last time I’d been inside. It gave me vertigo, straining to dredge up one memory of this room.