No knife-wielding maniac tonight. But then she hadn’t really expected one. Stories like that were mostly rumor grown to become urban legend.
As she drove away she glanced in the rearview mirror and thought she saw a shadowy form pass behind the car, very near. Though startled, she felt no fear. She simply stepped on the accelerator and instantly was away from any danger, real or imagined.
Imagined, she was sure, as she turned left from the parking lot onto the brightly lighted avenue.
Imagined.
Urban legend.
She switched on the radio and found music.
5
Mary’s mother, Angie, lived alone in a one-bedroom flat on Shenandoah Avenue in South St. Louis. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from Mary’s apartment on Utah, but Mary didn’t go home before stopping at a White Castle drive-through and picking up hamburgers, french fries, and Pepsi for supper. Home wasn’t a place she deliberately avoided, but also not one she yearned to experience. No home of Mary’s had ever been that to her.
Even the aromatic hamburgers couldn’t overcome the pungent, mingled cooking and cleaning scents of the flat as Mary shoved open the door with her hip and trudged up the wooden steps to the second floor. The upstairs hall smelled as if it had recently been fogged with perfumed insecticide.
Angie had heard her coming and was standing with the door open, waiting. She was barefoot and wearing her beige terrycloth robe, as if she’d just taken a shower, but her hair was dry. Her feet were old, with prominent tendons, yellowed nails, and talons for toes.
Angie was an older version of Mary, with red hair. Her features were haggard, with flesh as delicate and crinkled as worn folding money surrounding her eyes, and dark lines swooping from her nose to the corners of her thin, set lips. She’d borne Mary when she was thirty. She was sixty-five now; the skin beneath her jaw had become mottled, and fine veins had ruptured in her nose. Pain had moved into her eyes to live permanently.
Mary nodded a hello and edged past her into the apartment. The place was cheaply furnished but clean. A sofa draped with a pale green slipcover squatted against one wall on the imitation oriental rug. K-mart sheer curtains softened the illumination from the evening sun as it angled through the slanted Venetian blinds. The walls were bare except for a dime store print of two men playing cards at a table-a segment of a Rembrandt painting, Mary thought, but wasn’t sure-and a square, plastic frame containing a collage of black-and-white snapshots, some of which were of Mary as a child. Though the evening was cool, the window air-conditioner was humming away, blowing only neutral air. Angie had forgotten to turn it off after the heat of early afternoon. Angie often forgot things.
She closed the door and followed Mary into the tiny kitchen. “Been dancing?”
“Had a lesson,” Mary said, placing the White Castle bags on the Formica-topped table. She carefully drew the waxy, damp Pepsi cups out of their bag and poked straws through their rigid lids. The straws squealed on the plastic as they penetrated.
Angie said, “I dunno why you spend so much on that kinda thing. You got a good job, but it’s still too expensive. Go to work every day so you can learn how to put one foot in front of the other on the dance floor. Don’t make sense.”
They’d had this discussion before. “There’s a lot more to it than that, Angie.” Mary hadn’t called her mother anything other than ‘Angie’ for years. She glanced around the apartment. No bottle in view. No indication that Angie drank. And drank. Good. Though Mary knew about Angie’s ingenuity in hiding bottles, it was still nice not to see the trappings of alcoholism lying around. Their presence suggested a certain laxity, a hopelessness that was contagious.
Angie claimed not to have touched a drop of liquor before Duke Arlington, her husband and Mary’s father, died drunk in an auto accident speeding the wrong way on a Highway 70 exit ramp. Mary knew that wasn’t true. She remembered lying in bed as a child, listening to her mother and father in drunken, senseless arguments. She’d heard the slurred insults, heard Duke use his open hands on Angie, then his fists, his belt. She’d seen the welts and bruises on Angie. Angie occasionally talked about Duke abusing her. Her alcoholism, and Duke’s other familial indiscretions, she wouldn’t acknowledge at all, despite two stays in detoxification centers, despite the gin bottles tucked in the backs of the kitchen cabinets or in the bedroom closet.
Angie lived now on her Social Security checks, a small pension, and the interest from Duke’s insurance policy.
And she drank.
“I sure like these little bastards,” Angie said, dropping into a chair and picking up one of the greasy cardboard folders that held the aromatic hamburgers. White Castle hamburgers were inexpensive, small squares of beef and chopped onions on square little buns. They tasted like no other hamburgers and, for South St. Louisans, were addictive. Sometimes they were affectionately called Belly Bombers. Sometimes not affectionately.
Mary sat down opposite her mother and took a sip of Pepsi, began munching her crisp and salty french fries.
“Arlington women don’t have to worry none about their weight,” Angie said. “We can eat what the fuck we want.”
Mary thought, I dance it off, you drink it off. But she said nothing and chewed. Boris, Angie’s tiger-striped gray cat, padded silently into the kitchen, attracted by the scent of food. He glanced at Mary, then away, and passed out of sight. Mary could hear him purring as he rubbed against one of Angie’s legs. Or maybe he was licking her bare feet; Mary had seen him do that. Angie tore off a portion of hamburger and her hand disappeared beneath the table, an automatic, lonely offering to companionship. The purring stopped.
“Boris is scared of something,” Angie said.
“How do you know?”
“He got quiet, and I can feel him trembling up against my foot.”
“Maybe he heard a dog bark.”
“This cat ain’t scared of dogs.”
“I had a good lesson tonight,” Mary said, trying to change the subject. “Tango.”
“I read somewhere the instructors at them studios try to get the students sweet on ’em, so they’ll keep coming in and paying.”
“Some studios are that way, not this one. You’re getting cynical in your old age, Angie.”
“I been cynical quite some time, honey.”
Angie had to smile.
“That studio’s conning you outa your money,” Angie said. “Selling you an illusion.”
“I know it’s an illusion, but I like it. I need it.”
“You want illusion,” Angie said, “buy one of them lava lamps that throw dancing shadows on the walls.”
Mary gave up. She knew Angie wouldn’t understand, but now and then she tried to reach her mother anyway. Angie’s illusion was inside the bottle, but it was one she denied. Life was all about illusion, delusion; Mary had learned that. Reality was nothing more than how people saw things, and there were as many realities as there were people. And didn’t that explain everything? Wasn’t that the only explanation?
Angie was on her second hamburger. Her appetite was good, Mary noted. She must be exercising at least some control over the booze.
Staring at her with bloodshot blue eyes, Angie suddenly said, “Jake popped you one again, didn’t he.” Not a question, a statement. One combat veteran to another. Angie knew the signs.
“No, it was an accident. He was talking and flung his elbow out and caught me in the eye.”
“Bullshit, Mary.” Now Angie was grinning. “I know how it is. Oh, just how it is. We both know your late father sometimes lost his temper with me.”
“And with me,” Mary said, remembering the flushed face, the huge hands that trembled before they flew out of control and struck. She recalled most of all her father’s hands, the crescents of grit beneath the fingernails. Duke had driven a truck and was always tinkering with it, or adjusting something under the hood of the family’s old Dodge in the driveway, as if he might somehow fine-tune the mechanical trappings of his life and so make everything else perfect.