“Do you like this dress?” she asked. “These shoes?”
Her father said, “It’s hard for me to see. My eye still hurts.” So she drove again, and she told her father what it was as they passed it, and in what connection to him were these women at the end of narrow drives in houses near the water. She spoke of aproned Annes and pretty Susies. “You knew them,” she told her father.
Her father said, “Did I?”
Her father said, “I don’t miss many people.”
She said, “I don’t understand how you can stay with a wife who beats you.” There, running after her father down the hallway in his story, was a small woman with a small head and a racket in her hand. Why did he stay with this woman? she wanted to know, and he never answered her, or not that she remembered. What could he have answered, besides, married to a woman such as this: marigoldy hair and bright mouth. After all those daughters, the wife still blushed. Some sweet name it was, flicked loose from the roll, a Cathy, a Jane, ring guards clanking on her wedding finger.
She said, “You should live with me.”
She said, “Maybe you don’t want to know this, but it doesn’t take much.” She was talking numbers — two and three a week, once that many in a day. “And I’m not very big,” she said. “A bigger woman could take more.”
“Once, here at the park,” she said, driving her father slowly through the main streets of the town, pointing out where she had been. Here, the last time, with some doper — boots and lots of hair — the two of them on the roof, overlooking the entire fucking wayward county. She said, “Oh, Dad, anyone with what we had could have seen everything, too.” Mother and one of her guys in her Mustang or her Bronco — the woman turning in cars as fast as she did men — grandfather and the uncles honking close behind. Keep your wallet shut; sign nothing; say you don’t speak the language. She said, “What do I care about those guys? They’re not looking out for me.”
“I know who lives there,” she said, and she pointed to insinuating driveways, raked gravel, money. She told her father she was easily coaxed into cars, at times even asking for it, waiting in obvious places for something to happen, in bedrooms and bathrooms, at doorways with lots of traffic. She said, “I can be dumb sometimes. I don’t always know what I am thinking.”
Look at the shoes she wore and the dresses.
Mother’s mother was still sewing flaps on the cups of the girl’s brassieres, so she would look flat, more boy-girl than girl, as if that were going to change things, as if there weren’t other ways to do it. “I know lots of ways,” she said to her father. “Look,” she said, and she lifted up her shirt. “Look at what the lawn did to my back.”
She showed her father something else that she had brought, but he said, “No.” Her father said, “I don’t feel like it today.”
T said, “The shit you deal wears off too fast.”
“What do I care?” she said. “There are always men somewhere with money. I’ve got my grandfather, remember. I’ve got my uncles.”
A friend of a friend had a place for them to go in a big-enough town where a lot went unnoticed, but her father said, “No. I don’t feel like it today.”
“No,” her father said. “No, I have no place to keep it. Just let me kiss you,” he said, which she did. Arms crossed and eyes shut tight in the cold of the car, she moved a little closer to him and waited for the blow.
THE SUMMER AFTER BARBARA CLAFFEY
I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck. This was at night, from my mother’s window. The man dropped the crooked end behind the woman’s neck and yanked just hard enough to get the woman walking to the car. I saw this and saw rain winking in the yard in the light around our house.
Our house has the streetlight.
Mother says, “Our house marks the start of this corny town,” and the two of us laugh at what it takes to be the start of something.
Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowy. And in the morning, here is Mother, first one up by hours and already in a swimsuit and weeding muddy beds on her hands and knees. She has mud on her back and in her hair, and streaks have dried behind an ear where Mother says she has been scratching. Her arms are scored with bleedy cuts, nails mud-dull and broken, and there are mean-looking bites on her back, white swellings she must not feel or will not yet give in to touching, brave as Mother says she is to get hold of what she wants. I have seen shaggy weed ends spooled around my mother’s hand rope-tight. “But look,” she says, and wags off dirt from balled-up roots the size of shrunken heads.
This is what I have found to show Mother from the garden: one of a pair, dime-store flip-flops, size large.
Mother frowns at it. “Not his,” she says. “This last Jack didn’t have feet.”
“Garbage, then,” I say, like all my other finds — an upper plate of teeth, scarves, umbrellas, pens, and once, in the middle of the driveway, a ruined shirt so flattened by the weight of cars driving over and over, it had taken on the shape of a dead thing, and I had carried it to Mother on a stick.
Mother is still on this last Jack and on all the things about him that were missing. “For that matter,” she says, “this last Jack didn’t have hands.” She says this with her hands under cold water, cutting off the ends of flowers. One end pellets off the wall, then rolls under the kitchen table. I watch where it goes, but I will not pick that up, please.
No, Mother.
No telling the things under there — oily tacks and combs, bread crusts and withered peas, always more, and furred with such a dust that I think they come alive at night and breed.
Mother says, “Don’t be such a ninny. Go and get it.”
But no amount of teasing will send me looking for the bits of flowers that fly out in her wild cutting.
“You put your scissors up too high,” I tell my mother.
I tell her something else she may or may not know: how we used to stand in line for it, me and Barbara Claffey, shivering in our new bodies and waiting our turn for instruction. Barbara Claffey swore the last Jack used his tongue.
Mother doesn’t believe this story. “So where was I?” she asks.
“Chawed grass,” I say. “That’s how he tasted.”
Mother smiles at me. “Just be glad you were there,” she says. “You are probably smarter for it.”
In and out of doors, I slug around the morning in my baby-dolls. I have nothing to hide, I tell my mother, although I don’t know what to play with anymore.
Mother says, “Bored, bored, what’s to be bored about?” and she moves from room to room, hitching rolled papers under her arm, clucking glasses in a grip — two, three, swiped off her bedside table in a motion. She uses water on the table and her nails to get up bottle rings of cough syrup that she says help when she can’t sleep. Snaking the vacuum under her bed, Mother snorts up Kleenex. “Last night was bad. Coughing,” she says, “and coughing.”
“I didn’t hear a thing,” I say. Right through the streetlight’s sudden extinction, the house went on sleeping with me.
Mother on her hands and knees, in the garden, is what I wake to, day after day, pressed out of doors by the midsummer heat rising in the houses of this hokey town. The Smiths across the street, the Dunphies next door, all the way to the end of the road — in what Mother calls a farm and Barbara Claffey calls a subdivision — are neighbors dressed in scant disguises. Too white. Mother says, or too fat for these clothes, but they don’t know any better. Mother calls our neighbors hicks and winces when she sees Junior Klenk cut through our yard. Ready for a girl, she says, if he knew what to do with one.