Sometimes there’s a bottle of Hires Root Beer on the floor beside her outflung arm. Sometimes (but rarely, because this is before the days of serious drinking that are waiting around the corner) there’s a bottle of real beer, which smells and tastes so awful that he wonders why anyone would want it. But mostly there’s nothing, because by the time his mother gets home from Mickey’s Diner and Take Out she’s too tired even to make it to the fridge. She shucks off the uniform right there, by the couch-she has only two uniforms, and the washateria is too far away and too expensive for more than one trip per week. Besides, she doesn’t like doing laundry and waits until the last possible moment, a fact that will earn him certain unpleasant nicknames when he begins kindergarten next year. It’s his job to pick up the brown pants and tunic and hang them over the back of the couch. If the night is warm, she sleeps in her underwear. If not, he fetches her nightie for her. She wrestles with the worn cotton shift, which is getting tight under the arms. (His mother is involved in a long-drawn-out, losing battle with her weight.) Once it’s on, she thanks him with a hug for being her sweet boy. At those moments, her voice never fails to send a thrill through him. It’s the one part of his mother that’s more beautiful than Sleeping Beauty. Sometimes on the weekends, when she’s in a good mood, she sings to him about a lady with green sleeves, a song that she says is hundreds of years old. And, best of all, she reads to him.
The boy knows how to dress and undress himself, how to brush his teeth (which he does in the bathtub because he can’t reach the sink yet). He gets his own dinner, mostly cereal, which he has learned to eat dry on the days when they’re out of milk. If he feels ambitious, he’ll fix himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but he’s not too good at spreading the peanut butter and usually ends up tearing the bread. His mother eats at Mickey’s-one of the perks of working there-and sometimes she’s able to sneak home a hamburger or French fries or a bit of leftover pasta for him in the oversize tote she carries for that purpose.
The boy eats and watches his sleeping mother-the way her chest rises and falls with each breath, the line of hair that runs from her bra line, down her stomach, to the wavy elastic of her faded pink panties. Her body twitches from time to time like that of the animals he watches on the wildlife shows on TV. Those are his favorite shows, even more than Howdy Doody, and sometimes he and his friend Jimmy get into a fight about this. Should anyone ask him what he wants most in life, the boy wouldn’t hesitate. A dog, he would say-though this is not completely true. He would prefer a tiger. But already he has learned that some desires must be held unspoken in the dark core of one’s being.
When he is sure his mother has sunk into sleep, the boy will turn off the TV. Mostly she watches I Love Lucy, with its baffling jokes. (As he grows older, he will recognize this about himself: most things that people find funny fail to amuse him.) He’ll go to the old tape player with reels as big as his head and carefully rewind the tape that’s on it. He’ll curl up on the floor with his blanket and listen to Lassie Come Home, which his mother recorded for him one week when she hurt her foot and couldn’t go to work. There’s a bed in the other room, but he’d rather lie here so that he can keep an eye on that undependable breath of hers while he follows Lassie over a thousand dangerous miles, determined to find her little boy. In the middle, he’ll fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that before he wakes she would have concluded her quest.
Is the boy unhappy? No. When you’ve known only one thing all your life, you accept it as natural. It isn’t until Mary Lou brings them the stolen math workbook that he will figure out that happiness is a whole different feeling.
THE BOY’S MORNING MEMORIES ARE OF MARY LOU BANGING ON the door of the apartment, shouting his mother’s name- Hey Betsy, are you dead or what-and his mother stumbling bleary-eyed to the door, still in her underwear and cursing, but under her breath because she doesn’t want her son to pick up any bad words. Jimmy runs in through the crack of the open door, shouting, “LL, look what I got.”
In the background he can hear Mary Lou saying, “Shoot, girl, you look like death warmed over. You better go see the doctor.”
The boy’s chest hurts until his mother says: “Now don’t start, Mary Lou. Nothing wrong with me except too many hours at a crappy job.”
Jimmy pulls at his arm. “Look! look! You ain’t looking.”
Jimmy is here because the boy’s mother and Mary Lou, who lives a few apartments over and works in the cafeteria of their neighborhood elementary school, babysit for each other. The boy likes Jimmy. He’s fun to play with, even though he’s always wanting the boy to look at things the boy doesn’t find particularly interesting. Besides, Mary Lou, at whose apartment he eats dinner when his mother works overtime, is a great cook, and her lasagna (though the boy would never admit this, not even if someone tortured him using a cattle prod, like he once saw on Gunsmoke) is way better than anything the boy’s mother cooks. The boy’s mother, who is responsible for lunch, usually serves them canned soup and hot dogs wrapped in slices of white bread. Right after payday, they get real hot-dog buns, along with apples.
When the weather is good, the boy’s mother sends them out to play, warning them to stay where she can see them, to not venture off the sidewalk. Playing cops and robbers, the boy watches her watching them as she talks on the phone, smoking, although she’s told Mary Lou she really wants to quit. “Bang! Bang!” shouts Jimmy. “You’re dead.”
“Am not!”
“Are, too! I shot you in the head. Your brains are splattered all over the ground.”
On days when it’s too cold, they look at the books Mary Lou brings them from the school, claiming they’ve been discarded. “Yeah, right!” her mother says, though not in Mary Lou’s hearing. But she, too, likes the books. Sometimes between phone calls, she sits beside the boys on the couch and exclaims over things she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot of things. One day they go through a workbook titled Fun with Math, in which a chipmunk uses nuts to teach baby squirrels about addition and subtraction. The boy’s mother loses interest after two pages, Jimmy after five, but the boy is riveted. Inside his head, the numbers fall into place with little clicks. His body buzzes as though it is filled with electricity. The chipmunk fades away. He does not need it to understand what’s going on. He asks to keep the workbook, and that night, instead of listening to Lassie, he goes over multiplication and division. Though the terms are unfamiliar, within a few minutes he finds that he can work out the problems in his head long before he turns to the page where the chipmunk has written the answers on a blackboard hanging from a tree.
ON WEEKENDS THEY SLEEP LATE AND WHEN THEY WAKE, THE boy lying next to his mother in the bed in the back room, the two of them snuggled in a quilt with blue spouting whales on it, she reads to him. If they’ve had time to go to the library, she reads him new books. If not, as is more often the case, she reads to him from their dog-eared King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, a book that with its small print and no illustrations isn’t really for children. But he loves its complicated cat’s cradle of stories, loves how the familiar names roll off her tongue, Guinevere, Parsifal, Gawain, the sword Excalibur, the Questing Beast, the Chapel Dangerous, and, most of all, his own name. When she speaks it, she gives him a kiss.