I didn’t get back to my mother’s until the evening of the next day with my record player and the Skip James album under my arm. Sally Enfield’s car was parked in my spot, so I parked in front of it. I went upstairs to lie down for a while. I heard them having their usual alcoholic conversation but didn’t quite catch what they were saying. I wanted to sleep, that was all. I was starting to have blurred vision, and I kept wanting to cry for no reason. I had to keep breathing in to fill my lungs and my body weighed a ton. I had never before known such tiredness. I looked for a long time at the photo of Skip James on the album sleeve. I would never have imagined I could be moved by music, let alone music by a black man. Not that I had anything against black people—I hadn’t met many of them in my life, except in Los Angeles when I lived briefly with my father. My father used to say, “The blues is like the soul gradually emptying,” and now for the first time I understood what he meant. So, contrary to what my mother claimed, I was capable of a kind of empathy for other people. She was hardly the one to lecture me about that, she never felt sorry for anyone. I fell asleep for half an hour before I was woken by the two women’s laughter. They were obviously at the height of their drunkenness. I could hear their vocal cords vibrating, obscured by booze and cigarettes, their alcoholic voices that made even laughter sound like a dirge. I switched on the record player and played the Skip James disc once. Then again, louder. The laughter had subsided. The third time, I raised the volume to maximum. I heard knocking on my floor with a broom. My mother started yelling. So I went down. The door was locked. I knocked. Neither of them came and opened up. I knocked louder. In desperation, I put my fist through one of the panes of glass and turned the key. They were both standing there with glasses in their hands, and the low table was covered in empty bottles.
“What the hell are you doing here, Al, can’t you see I’m with friends?”
I stared at her friend. “I know her. I know she only comes here to get plastered with you.” I pointed my finger at the woman. “What a petty little life that is, the life of Sally Enfield. When she’s dead, there’ll be nothing left of it, not even a dog to piss on her grave. Just like you, Ma.”
My mother’s features were distorted with rage. “If you don’t leave this room in one minute, Al, I’ll call the cops and tell them all about your past!”
Instead of leaving I went and sat down on the couch. I looked at Sally Enfield. “It’s past your bedtime, so go. I won’t say it again.”
“Stay!” my mother ordered.
“Didn’t you hear me, Sally? This is family business and you’re not family, the only ties you have with her are ties of booze, not ties of blood, so go back to your room before I lose my temper.”
“Don’t move, Sally!” my mother yelled.
“What I have to say to you doesn’t concern her,” I went on in a soft voice. “Unless you want me to reveal certain family secrets.”
She lowered her arms, and Sally Enfield headed for the guest room like a little girl who’s being punished. My mother took advantage of her departure to pour herself a drink and light one of her long menthol cigarettes. She didn’t know how to regain the edge.
“You’ll never again get the better of me, Ma, never. Now that we’re both here, talk to me. I know you’re going to tell me you have nothing to say, but I suspect that if you make the effort, I might start to understand you a little. I’m not talking about forgiveness, Ma, you don’t forgive your mother in return for words, you forgive her because she’s your mother and that’s all. But talk to me.”
For a while she didn’t say anything, just sipped at her drink and took such deep drags on her cigarette that her lungs must have been completely black. Her jaw was trembling, and so was the hand holding the glass. The ice cubes knocked against the sides of the glass, making a noise like hail.
“Why don’t you tell me about your father?”
“My father? What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Think carefully.”
“There’s nothing to think about.”
“When you made me sleep below your room in Montana, you told Dad one day that your father used to feel you up.”
She started laughing, pleased with herself. “I must have made it up, Al. Because it suited me. Sometimes when you live with somebody, you spice it up with something dramatic. I made it all up.”
“Are you sure your father didn’t abuse you?”
She laughed even louder. “Hell, no. My father would never have been capable of something like that. No, Al, you’re wrong, nothing like that ever happened. I swear on your dead sister’s grave.”
From my experience in the psychiatric hospital, I remembered that when you harped on about something that was really fundamental to a person’s life, that person changed color. The blotchy scarlet of her face hadn’t changed at all. Every gesture she made told me that she wasn’t lying.
“So talk to me.”
She looked at me, laughed like a madwoman, stopped abruptly, then said, “Don’t look elsewhere for what’s inside you, Al.”
She said that without much conviction but she said it several times, then, too exhausted to continue, she staggered to her room and closed the door without turning around in order not to meet my eyes. Just when I was least expecting it, she half opened the door again and said, “I have to put a stop to all this, Al, I have to tell them what kind of monster you are. The worst thing that could happen to me would be if you had a child. I don’t want to be responsible for the proliferation of evil. You understand what I mean, don’t you?”