Goodnight, Beautiful Women
Mom paces the living room, head down, arms to her sides, fingers curled in loose fists. Her mouth hangs open. This is her concentration face. She used to make it fingerpicking her guitar or changing lanes.
“How doin’, baby?” Bert says. I kiss her cheek at bedtime, slowing her.
She moves tentatively, like a blind woman whose furniture has been rearranged, trying to carve away the strangeness of new space. I fall asleep to her footsteps and wake in the night to creaking floorboards, the sound of her shuffling. I should be worried, I am, but it’s comforting too — ice caked against my windowsill, our two longhaired cats, mother and daughter, flanking me on both sides, the midnight routine of Bert stoking the woodstove, and her footsteps. I count them.
She walks the same course. A tight circle around the lamp, the length of the bookshelf, seven steps, the length of the fireplace, five.
In the morning I block her way and hug her. Her head tucks easily beneath my chin. She seems smaller all the time, but I am too tall, still growing, looming over her like the boys I dance with. We spin in a slow circle.
“If you had any idea how much we miss you,” she says. “Some days I’m so mad at your dad for paying your way out of here, even though it’s the one good thing he’s done. I know you’re better off studying, not growing up to live in a trailer in the front yard. But the horrible thing is I would rejoice to have you in that trailer.” She pulls away and shakes her hands like she’s drying them.
“Forget that,” she says. I wipe under her eyes with my thumb. The skin there is papery, dark as a bruised fruit. “I’ve got to get out of this house. This town, too. It’s just too fucking cold.”
For the past few years, since I’ve been in boarding school, she hasn’t gotten in a car except to drive to her appointments. Bert’s the one who does the grocery shopping. When she wants a vegetable he brings home frozen blocks of peas and goopy Vidalia onions. Last time Mom and I went on a trip I was in the fourth grade. We left Bert behind. My teacher made me keep a journal since Mom took me away during school. We drove to Vermont, so I filled the journal’s pages by gluing on dead leaves.
“Plus Bert’s never left Maine,” Mom says. “You can’t just never leave a place.”
Bert’s down on the floor, wrestling a strand of partially-swallowed tinsel from the cat’s mouth.
“Once they start swallowing it they just can’t stop,” he tells us.
“Tuscany,” Mom says. “Florida. Someplace sandy, maybe.”
“Kerguelen!” says Bert.
“No more,” Mom says. She lights a joint. “He’s obsessed.”
“Called Desolation Island,” he says, starting the burner under Jimmy Dean with tater tots, his specialty breakfast. “Fifty French scientists, three thousand miles from land. They eat cabbages and sheep. The island is crawling with feral cats.”
“We already live on desolation island,” Mom says. She’s throwing clothes from their hangers onto the bed.
“What can I do ya for, honey?” Bert yells.
“Will you tell him I don’t want anything?” she says to me, and I lean into the kitchen and tell him, “Make her an egg,” so he can say back, “Poof, she’s an egg,” and he does.
In the bedroom Mom’s standing in front of the mirror in her red cowboy boots. They’re crumpled, streaked with dust. She wore them for months after she left Dad. She wore them out dancing, brought men home in them. For a while before Bert, Mom and I lived in an Airstream by a rock quarry. Late at night I could hear the boot’s heels clicking sharply against the quarry’s pink granite.
She’s wearing the same clothes as the day before, her sweater slipping off one shoulder. “Well, would you look at her,” she says, stooping to spit shine the leather.
We take the white 1989 Volvo. Bert says it handles the road best of all our shit-box cars, even though the muffler’s on its way out and the horn’s busted. He keeps an air horn in the cup holder in case of emergencies.
On the way to the car Bert reaches into the garden’s winter tangle of weeds to rub the head of our Saint Francis statue for luck, but he’s the wrong saint. Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travel, and Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals.
We drive past the church and the library closed for winter, the gray harbor stripped of boats, and the mottled docks hauled up on the beach. The few remaining buoys bob on the choppy water.
I press my forehead to the cool window and let my shoulders drop with relief that I’m leaving. Going home is a terrible feeling. It’s like film moving backward, a butterfly’s blood sucked back to the center of its body with a swift collapse of wings, the return to the chrysalis. It makes me feel sick.
When I think of home I think of Mom where I usually find her, buried under blankets, cold cups of coffee leaving rings on her bedside table. I think of the doctor, who warned her at her last physical that her muscles are starting to atrophy. I’ve got to spend my life moving out, until that day when Bert’s artery clogs, or Mom finds a lump, and I move back in. But now she’s got her red boots propped up on the dashboard, and she’s singing along to the radio, and we’re squealing out onto Route 1.
By the time we cross the bridge out of state I’m up front and Mom’s crawled into the backseat to shut her eyes. She hugs an old sock monkey of mine. “I made it,” Bert says, thumping the broken horn in reflexive celebration. We cruise over the bridge at seventy, our tires singing on the grated iron.
“What do you say that is?” he asks me. “That little light, moving strange?” It’s four thirty, but the sun’s gone down and the moon is lost in cloud cover. The windows of homes across the bay are blinking on, yellow and small. A bright-blue dot bobs over the horizon.
“Sailboat mast.”
“Right again,” Bert says. “Thought I’d found a UFO.” He looks at me as he drives, weaving along the slushy center lane, talking theories about the end of the Mayan calendar. How aliens probably won’t come, but something bad will. The snow hisses under our wheels. Eyes flash from the ditches. Mom’s teeth make a stony sound as she grinds them in her sleep. Bert’s saying something about the sun’s orbit being like a carousel horse, going up and down as it circles the galaxy. And then he’s talking about the magnetic poles flipping, birds flying in the wrong direction, looting and mayhem, but I’m still thinking about a carousel horse, its teeth bared around the bit.
At the gas station we buy her presents. Bert picks the wrong things — Jujubee candies and Cadbury eggs with marshmallow cream centers — and I pick the right ones — salt and vinegar chips and bars of dark chocolate that she nibbles one square at a time.
“Ick,” she says of the Jujubees, shaking them into her hands. “But I do think they’re beautiful. When I was little, I wanted to change my name to Jujubee. I begged for it.”
“It’s not too late,” Bert says. He scoops the candies from her palm, throws the whole handful into his mouth. Melted color is left behind where she held them.
She gets out to stretch, staggers. Bert loops his arm around her waist, holding the belt buckle of her jeans.
“The boots?” I say.
“Meds. Throw off my inner ear.” She clicks the boots together like ruby slippers.
A pack of blondes tumbles from a green van, glancing at us.