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The small, yellow house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdivision called Green Meadows. It’s a nice little ranch-style house with a white wooden fence going across the front. Faye and her third husband, Johnny, bought it together shortly after they married. There is a piano in the living room that she also got in the settlement, and I wonder if she plays or if it is just for show. Rob, I finally discover, is husband number three’s brother, and I suspect one of the reasons for that split up. I bet Thanksgiving in this family is a whole bundle of happiness.
My mother is tucked into the bed in the guestroom, her lips parted, drool spilling onto the pillow. She sleeps, wrapped up like a kitten, purring lightly.
“She’ll feel better when she wakes up,” Faye says to me as she brushes past me, leaving my mother to sleep it off.
“Doubt it,” I say, but not until Faye has moved on down the hall and cannot hear me. I’m not sure I really want to cross her path right now. My cheek is still hot where her palm landed. But I know that when my mother wakes up, she will feel like shit and will wonder how the hell we got here. She will not remember the drunken, certainly pathetic phone call she placed, which resulted in our rescue. I stare down at her for quite some time, wondering how she will extract us from this situation. Will she confess that she doesn’t remember calling? Will she admit that she had any fault in the relationship falling apart? Will she present herself as a great victim and Mitch as a horrid, abusive man who took advantage of her generosity of spirit until she could stand it no more? It is impossible to say. I hope I’m here when she wakes up and wants to know where the fuck we are.
I finally leave the room and find Faye and Rob deep in conversation at the kitchen table. I stand at the sliding glass doors and stare out into the backyard. I refuse to make myself invisible. She forced me to be here, so she’s just going to have to look at me. She clearly mistakes my hostile silence for fear or worry, which it is not. I’m just numb, waiting for the day to move forward so my mother will call Mitch to come get us and we will go back to normal, whatever that is.
“Honey, I know you’re worried. She’ll be better when she doesn’t get treated like that anymore.” The concern in her voice must be for Rob’s benefit. She’s made it pretty clear how she feels about me, and concern isn’t high.
“Treated like what?” My voice ricochets off the glass, and I stare at my faint reflection. I purposefully keep my voice low and modulated, intentionally calm. Does she not understand that my mother likes to be treated like that? She likes drama and drunken brawls. She likes a man who will fight for her, with her. She likes it a little rough.
“You know how that man treats her.” I can hear her click her tongue on the roof of her mouth, something some of the girls at school do when they are stating the obvious.
“He doesn’t treat her badly,” I say, turning to face Mitch’s accusers. I mean, Mitch isn’t perfect, but he’s always been decent to me, and from what I’ve seen, he’s been decent to her. I wouldn’t put up with her if I didn’t have to. She picks most of the fights, or worse, alcohol picks them.
“Sometimes men don’t know how to express themselves, and they get a little too physical. You’re lucky you haven’t had to see any of it.” She is smug, sitting there, feeling that she has done her good deed for poor Alice.
“Seen what? You think he beats her? Is that what she tells you?” My voice rises, and I’m afraid for a second that it will shatter. It’s become crystalline and brittle. I remember the fist-sized bruise on her jawline and try to think back to other moments when I have seen bruises. I let out a strangled laugh and turn back to look out the window.
“You aren’t there all the time. Things happen. She tries so hard to shelter you from it.” Again, the vision of the mother, the protector, the shelterer. What a load of crap. She sips from her coffee. “She wants to make sure you are safe. Better to get you out of the environment while he moves on, rather than risk it.” She pauses, staring past me, out into the yard, “It’s not just the physical either. There’s emotional and psychological, too.” I can tell from her tone that she is thinking of herself now, of the abuse she has suffered. Why do people ever get together? It never ends well, and it’s not even good until it ends. “When you grow up a little more, maybe you’ll understand.” As if I were an idiot who she must help “to see.” I think Faye has read way too many self-help books for people with too many divorces. There is abuse in our house, that is true, but it is in the bottle, of the bottle, because of the bottle. It is the bottle.
I set my jaw and return her stare through the reflection of the door. I’ve seen a lot of their fights, and I’ve seen a lot of different occasions when I thought he’d haul off and smack her, but he never has, at least not in front of me. I’ve seen her strike out at him, and once I even saw her throw a knife at him. It wasn’t her fault, of course; she was drunk. That’s what he said to me later. But never once have I seen him raise a hand to her. Maybe he does, behind closed doors. But mostly I think he just leaves when he starts to feel like he wants to hit her, which is probably more effective. I think she wants him to hit her. I can hear it in the ways she picks and picks and picks. That’s probably a really horrible thing to think about somebody, that they want to get hit, but I think it all the same. She’s loved all of her men best after a good throw-down. When they made her feel their power over her. I don’t dare voice any of this to Faye.
“I know this is hard for you to understand, but sometimes people do bad things.”
“I’m not stupid, I know what you’re talking about, but Mitch didn’t do what you’re saying he did. I mean, I’ve seen her hit him, but never him hitting her.” I remember him saying “Elvis has left the building” with his best radio-announcer voice as he climbed into his truck. Then he would wink at me, and I always knew that everything would be okay. He would give her some time to calm down. He would come back. They would all apologize, and the cycle would begin all over again.
“Alison, you were not always there.”
Beat that dead horse. I am so tired of hearing her voice, wheedling, whiny. Pathetic.
“And you were never there, so what makes you think you know more about it than I do?” I step to the phone, dialing our number. The phone rings, but he doesn’t pick up. He isn’t there. If he does leave, I wonder if I could convince him to take me with him. Even as the thought crosses my mind, I know he never would, and I know I could never ask him. How could I? How could he? It would look too wrong. Anyway, what would I do, move in with him and Theresa? Now that would be something. I feel tears welling in my eyes, and I force them back down. I will not allow myself to cry in front of these people. I put the phone back in the cradle, and I wish I were over at Dylan’s, up in the loft. I leave Rob and Faye sitting at the table and retreat to the back deck, where I sit, watching a fly buzz over the grill.
The door creaks open, and I’m joined on the deck by Rob. His heft tilts the deck. “Alison?” He pauses. “Can I sit down?”
“You live here. I don’t.” My voice is rude, and I have a moment where I’m ashamed, but I close myself to the feeling and set my face with as much ice as I can muster.
He eases his rather large body into the other deck chair but doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then, “I know this is really tough on you.”
Why do adults say stuff like that? He’s never met me before, and here he is thinking he knows something about me. Jerk. I want to say that he doesn’t know anything about it so he just should stay out of it, but I keep my mouth shut.
He goes on. “We’re just trying to help. Your mom, she calls here all the time, crying about how miserable and scared she is. She wants to leave, but has no place to go. She’s tried to make him go, but he won’t. She’s very unhappy.”
I hadn’t known that mom called Faye all the time. I’m ashamed that she does, talking to people about things that aren’t any of their business. Does she really call them and say she is scared? Really?
“Then she should go. Mitch and I would be okay. I don’t want to leave. We get along fine.”
“Alison, you know you couldn’t stay there with just that man. What would people think?”
Suddenly I have the urge to laugh, loudly and hysterically, and I know that if I start, I will not stop. What do you think people think anyway? I want to ask. Apparently they think my mother is beaten regularly, and I am diddled by the nicest of the men my mother has ever brought home.
“That’s great, that everybody wants to help,” I say. “But I want to go home. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“When you talk to Mitch, you can work that out. But who knows when he’ll make it back? Come on, how about we go get something to eat?”
I can hear Faye working in the kitchen, and I realize that my stomach is empty, even though I’m not sure that I can think of eating.
When my mother wakes up, she joins us in the kitchen. Damn, I missed the waking. Dark circles rim her eyes, only some of it the flaky mascara left over from last night, and she looks like she has been crying. She and Faye talk in hushed tones, and I try to listen. I try to catch her words so I can contradict her or at least know for myself what she is saying. I can feel my mother looking at me, but I refuse to meet her eyes.
Tonight I sleep on the floor in the guest bedroom, my mother sleeps on the bed. I hear her get up twice in the night and unzip her bag. In the darkness I hear the clink of her rings against a glass bottle as she drinks. The faint odor of the vodka radiates through the room. When I wake the next morning the bottle is tucked under her pillow, the cap barely visible. The room is vaporous with the smell of it. Funny, scentless vodka. Maybe you can only really smell it after you’ve cleaned up somebody else’s vodka vomit. Maybe.
***
Around noon on Sunday, my mother calls Mitch. I hear her talking in her “I want to make peace” voice. She is meek and mild, seeking forgiveness. An hour later Mitch pulls into the drive to take us home. Faye does not come to the door to see us go. She does not help carry the many bags that my mother shunted from our trailer. Rob, who may actually be an okay guy, does help carry our stuff to the truck. He even shakes Mitch’s hand, comrades, fighting the good fight against all these crazy bitches. Faye thinks my mother is making a big mistake going back, and as we climb into the truck, she calls out through her screen door, “Alice, don’t call me if you aren’t willing to fix it. You hear me? Don’t call me.”