2

 

 

 

 

2

 

 

My mom was fifteen years old when I arrived in her world, and the way she tells it, you’d swear there was never a sign for her that she was even pregnant.

“You gave me the worst cramps I ever had in my life,” she’s said to me. Like I was a forgotten tampon or a plate of bad seafood. “But when I first saw you, it made it all okay.”

I know it’s not okay, and she knows it’s not okay, but since so much of life is pretending what’s horribly wrong is actually really okay, maybe the truth doesn’t matter so much in the end.

Pretend okay. Real okay. Maybe there isn’t always a difference. A teenager gets pregnant, or not. A baby is born, or not. So many beautiful, terrible journeys leading out from so many different possibilities. Like a pane of glass cracking, fractures making fractures, a fragile crisscross of lines spreading out in a spiderweb shatter.

“When something scary happens, or something hurts you, you have to weigh the bad up against the good it gives,” she says. “You have to trust when you look back on it one day, you’ll see all the ways it was pretty. You have to look for the beauty, babe. It’s always there.”

I don’t remember where we were when we last had this conversation, but I see a lollipop in her mouth. I see her squint-smile, the one where her eyes get tiny and the dimples in her cheeks scoop hollows into her face. She presses the lollipop to her lower lip. Wet, electric red. It vanishes back into her mouth. A small red orb holding down her tongue.

What she doesn’t say. What I always think. Even if you do find a lot of good from something bad, nothing really makes it all the way okay. Scars, bruises, fears. They still happened. They’re still there. This is the truth nobody likes to look at, while they’re dewy-eyed talking about how grateful they are for some vicious event that damn-near destroyed them.

Bad things turn the good life that follows into a consolation prize. I guess this is what I am to her. Her consolation prize.

My mother doesn’t talk much about before I was born. She says as she is now, she can’t imagine being without me. She says this like nothing that came before me exists for her anymore. Like I wiped it out, shredded it into a fine mist. Those memories are wisps and ghosts hovering around her, half-complete. Not solid enough to take seriously.

“I didn’t have a reason for living before you,” she’s told me.

And.

“Becoming a mother is like dying in a car wreck and coming back a different person.”

And.

“Not all types of dying are bad.”

The part of her life before me, I don’t think any of it was particularly fair or easy. Not real okay, not pretend okay either.

“You don’t have to be what you grew up around,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not a part of you.”

I don’t remember where we were going when we had this conversation, but I see her behind the wheel of a car, driving us somewhere. The visors are down. Her sunglasses mask her eyes. The sun is bright and low against the horizon. Her forehead shines with sweat.

“It was just a small town, doll. One of a million. Nothing special about it. Believe me.”

She’s described it for me, though—the town and the hills surrounding it—a little place lost in the middle of rural nowhere, surrounded by woods and rocks, gathering up towards the mountains in thickening waves.

“They scared me as a kid,” she says. “Not the woods, but the mountains further out. Some of those mountains are shaped like tables. Big and wide and flat at the top, you know? I used to think giants lived out in the hills somewhere. I used to have nightmares about them coming at night and snatching people out of their beds. Using the mountains like furniture, sitting down at one of them like it was a dinner table. Laying their victims out, all tiny and screaming, all wriggling around on the plate. Sometimes in my dreams the giants even had cutlery—massive knives and forks that flashed silver and made sounds like thunder when they moved.”

I don’t think the giants lived in the hills. I think the giants were the hills. Mossy faces and broken teeth. A turned shoulder here, a bent knee there, making all those shapes.

“Yeah, it was full of monsters, all right,” Momma says.

I don’t remember where we were here either, but I see us sitting on the curve of a road at night. A hill stumbles down below us in a sheer and shadowed fall, soft with wild grass. Streetlights shine above and behind, picking up the diamond sequins on her denim jacket when she moves. I feel myself shivering in my skin. Shivering from the cold, or maybe for her.

“That man,” she says—her father, who she never calls father, who I’d never call grandfather—“He didn’t have a lot to give. Even if he did, he didn’t do a lot of giving.”

I guess she was poor or maybe it means he was selfish. My momma, she never talks about those details. She barely mentions her own mother at all.

“I don’t remember her, babe,” she says when I ask, tossing her hair over her shoulder so the streetlights ripple-shine through it. “So take a good look at me, huh? You should be so lucky.” Nudging me. “You got a mother and a best friend all in one, and I’m right here next to you.” Laughing. “Drink me in.” Looping her arm through mine. The diamonds on her shoulders flash again. Pressing a kiss to the side of my face. Her breath warm and sweet.

The way she talks about it, I imagine my mom’s room was all bare walls and a baseboard bed. She doesn’t have to describe it in exact words. The truths words make can be different to how a thing actually is. Dark places make dark pictures, and sometimes I think I see every corner.

The baseboard for her bed, the way I picture it, it was the splintery kind. She slept hard, when she slept. It toughened her skin, but not in a way you know by looking or touching. The curtains were smoke-stained, hanging from broken hooks so the light splashed down on her even when they were shut. I see a stash of sweets and a coil of junk necklaces she’s saved, hidden somewhere smart—a false floorboard or a hollow behind a loose section of skirting board. She’s good at hiding things, which is a talent more than a learned skill.

“I was a grownup way before I was supposed to be. Before I even knew it was supposed to be any different for kids,” she says. “But hey. People with easy childhoods grow up to be a bunch of clueless brats. You ever notice that?”

I don’t know.

Maybe.

My mom, there’s a lot of things she notices. Since she had to grow up with nobody looking after her but herself, she’s sharper than most other people in a lot of ways. When I was younger, I thought there was nothing she didn’t know how to do. She can change a tire, jump-start a car, sew a button, roll a cigarette, make a meal out of near-nothing, put lipstick on without a mirror, and tie a cherry stalk with her tongue.

“It’s okay to ask for help the first time,” she says. “But then you pay attention. You watch. You remember. Then you’ll never have to ask again.”

If I think of her hometown, I imagine railway tracks for some reason, but this can’t be a real memory. Not of mine. It just feels that way—like metal and dust and iron lines slicing through soft earth. I think of That Man and her, together in his house, and then of me, a bud blooming in her belly. Me, rounding out so fast and tight she couldn’t push me flat with bandages, couldn’t smother me with loose fabric. Like I was a tumor, or maybe more like an earthquake rippling up against her surface, making new shapes under her skin. The damage getting harder for her to hide.

Slut. She says that man called her that when those oversized sport shirts and lumpy sweaters couldn’t hide me anymore.

Whore. He said that, too.

Fifteen years old, sobbing in her bedroom. I see her flat on her belly, her hair flung out onto her pillows. Or, no. She can’t have been flat on her belly, not with me in there. But I’m sure about the hair? Tangled, dirty. Darker than it is now.

“I was still myself,” she tells me. “I was still the same girl, only pregnant. But to everyone I’d ever known, I was now stained. Overnight, I was trash. People can be fucking awful when something they don’t like happens to you. Something they wouldn’t like happening to them, or to their family. You’re the one in front of them, so you’re the one they blame. Like demonizing you gives them some kind of protection. Next thing, you’ve got nobody close and nowhere to go. Know what I mean?”

I do know. Sort of. I don’t know. Not really. Especially since this is as much as she’ll say about the other people in this story. Nothing at all about my father, not a word about his own reaction to the news. Or if he was even still around.

Slut.

Whore.

The man who gave me half his genes, she’s never once said his name, which makes me wonder if she knows herself. Who was he? It’s like she has a list of possibilities, but none of them fit the idea in her head. So she’d rather say he’s Nobody. Like I was her own creation, her own conjuring. In a lot of ways, I guess I am.

“I grew up different too,” she says. “Worlds from that whole nuclear family bullshit. But even the way I grew up, I never had someone the way you have me. I wasn’t so lucky, babe.”

Her childhood home was a kind of chaos factory. A constant stream of people coming and going. Neighbors, strangers. Her father’s friends. His acquaintances. The back room kept dark, the windows opened to cracks behind heavy black curtains.

“It wasn’t a place for children,” she’s said.

The first time my mother got drunk, she was only about eight or nine.

“Some old dude kept giving me sips of his whiskey,” she smiles. Her bitter smile, when a memory is almost good but has a lot of bad around it too.

This conversation? I think we were at a bus depot, waiting to leave. Sitting on our bags outside the ticket office. Dawn was dragging night into day. The air was so fresh and so chill even our breaths were mist. We were huddled back against the cold brick wall with our arms locked around our legs. We’d taken some clothes out of our bags to lay over ourselves for extra warmth. The sky was a crisp ghost-blue, like when the day is warming up hot after a night full of ice.

“I remember feeling kinda giddy, like I’d been spinning around and my head hadn’t stopped swirling yet. I was happy—woozy-happy. I was stumbling all over the place. Bumping into everything. It can’t have been, you know. Safe.”

“No one helped you?” I said.

“Helped me? No babe. That Man and his friends, they thought it was funny. They all stood around and laughed at me. They gave me more. They gave me so much I threw up behind the television set. Then I got so scared of being punished for it that I peed, right there on the carpet. ‘This little thing hasn’t been house-trained yet’, one guy said. I remember, because I remember thinking ‘Thing’? And how awful that word felt, the way he was saying it. I was just a kid, drunk and confused and crying, with pee running down my legs and puke burning the back of my tongue, while they stood around and looked down at me, laughing.”

I see these strangers, looming over her. Big men with hands spaced wide on their hips, heads thrown back. I see her wide eyes and her soiled dress, the tip of her tongue between her teeth the way she does when she’s scared. I see her weaving on her feet.

The way my momma tells her bad memories, they always sound worse than mine.

I don’t know why there were so many people at her house—there always are, in all her stories—or what exactly That Man did for a living. I want to imagine a poker lounge, a kind of backyard gambling den. I’ve been in one or two before, so I know how they look. Cards and cigarette smoke and crumpled stacks of cash. Empty beer bottles cluttering the tables, lined up against the walls. Everything smelling sour like ash and days-old sweat. Unwashed hair and dirty shirts. It’s easy to see my mother in this place.

“That Man was useless,” my mother tells me. “Useless. He barely did anything except open and close the door to let those bozos in and out. And drink. And talk. Always, lots of talk. Like he was this incredible human being who knew everything better than anyone, though he hardly left the house. Mostly though, I guess he was just lazy. I once heard a woman talking about That Man, back when I was a little kid, younger than you are now. She was telling someone, ‘If there was work in the bedroom, he’d want to take a nap.’ The way she said it, I knew it was supposed to be funny, but it was years before I understood what it meant.”

My mother didn’t laugh when she first heard this saying, but I did when she first told it to me.

I guess, unlike her, I was old enough to get the joke.