The year I turned eleven, Mom started a new job as a clerk at the Onalaska Town Hall. She worked from seven-thirty until four during the day and then drove downtown, to her college classes, which sometimes lasted until eight. On weekends, she went shopping at department stores and brought home new clothes—gabardine slacks and silk blouses and three-inch pumps: work clothes, professional clothes. They suited her. From the way she held the pieces up, squinting as she examined herself in the mirror, I could see how happy they made her. She couldn’t wait until Monday to wear them.
Mom had her hair styled into a pixie cut, giving her face a sharp angular beauty. I almost couldn’t recognize her any longer. She had transformed, growing determined, more defiant. Despite Dad’s grumbling about money, she had bought herself a pair of sparkly diamond earrings for her thirtieth birthday. And she kept her job, no matter what Dad thought. When he said, “You don’t have any business working outside of this house,” my mother looked him over, careful about which battles she would fight, and walked away.
It seemed to me she was leaving us an inch at a time. Mornings, she walked down the driveway with us to the bus stop, where she left us loaded with lunch boxes and book bags. Kiss, hug, see you tonight! We
tucked our milk-money quarters in our pockets and waited for the school bus. Mom checked her watch, turned on her heel, and marched back up the driveway.
After school, when she was at work or her class, we let ourselves in the house through the garage door. The house was never locked. As we lived in the middle of nowhere, nobody would have thought of breaking in. If the door got latched by mistake, I would bust the door to the wood chute in the cellar and lower Matt down. At six, he was skinny enough to crawl through the narrow passageway. He would climb over the mossy logs, fearless, before running upstairs to the first floor, to let us inside.
One afternoon after school, when Mom and Dad were still at work and Kelly and Matt were toasting Pop-Tarts in the kitchen, I found Mom’s green canvas backpack, filled with her schoolbooks. Spreading the contents across the floor, I found accounting and business textbooks, a pack of mustard-yellow Bic pens, and a spiral notebook. I opened the notebook and saw Mom’s fat, loopy cursive writing. The top of each page had been marked with a date, and the middle of the page carried sentences peppered with the names Kelly, Matt, Danielle, and Dan. Reading it over, I realized I had found Mom’s diary. I read her account of my sister’s grades and my brother’s daredevil injuries. Matt was a package of unstoppable speed, running as fast as he could, never looking where he was going, and slamming into walls, knocking himself down: a manic, bloody windup toy. But she also wrote of wanting more than life had brought her. More time, more money, more love, more freedom.
Flipping through, I came across a page in the center of the notebook filled with colored bars. Looking more closely, I saw that Mom had made a chart. Our names were written down the left margin of the page, vertically, and the numbers ONE to TEN were written above, horizontally. The names and lines were arranged in a fashion that quantified how much Mom believed we loved her. She had shaded the line next to Kelly’s name all the way to the number NINE with blue pencil, signifying that she thought Kelly loved her 90 percent. Matt’s line had been shaded to a little over NINE in green pencil, just inching past Kelly’s line. My name, however, was colored only to FOUR, in red pencil, the same color as my father’s line, which was also shaded to the number FOUR.
I stared at Mom’s chart, feeling as if the wind had been punched out of me. I felt hurt by my mother’s assessment and surprised that I didn’t have a NINE like my sister and brother. But I also felt strangely proud to
have been given equal footing with Dad. It was the first time I saw proof that I was like him. We were Dan and Danielle, two perfectly matched, inadequate red fours in Mom’s life. I slapped the notebook shut, wishing I had not seen it. Mom had balanced the books, and two of us didn’t measure up.
ONE WINTER EVENING, WE WENT SLEDDING ON THE HILL BELOW THE garden. Kelly and I pulled Matt up the slope, poised our red plastic sled at the edge of gravity, and—one, two, three—we hopped on and skidded down, all the way to the clothesline near the porch. Dad walked outside jacketless, a cigarette hanging from his lips, wearing nothing warmer than a Hanes T-shirt, arms exposed to the wind. Grabbing a shovel, he cleared the sidewalk. Although it was freezing, he didn’t seem to notice. Our father had the constitution of a mule and never admitted to feeling pain. Despite his ulcer, and the steady stream of Turns he swallowed to soothe it, I rarely saw him sick. In the harsh beam of the floodlight, he shoveled a path through the snow, his breath freezing around him. When the sidewalk was cleared, he propped the shovel against the house. “Inside,” he barked. Kelly and Matt rushed to the house.
I didn’t follow them. My moon boots felt leaden, too heavy to lift over the snowdrifts, so I sat, letting snow fall upon my cheeks. Frozen air rose from my lips and disintegrated into the night. The sky was magnificent: black, threaded with stars. Spreading my arms and legs, I made an angel in the creaking snow. A fine-pared moon ascended from behind a hill, inching up. I didn’t want to go back indoors. It was clear to me that nothing had been right in our house for months. Mom was out again and Dad was grumpy, yet no one talked about it. It was as if a sheet of glass had fallen between my parents and us. We saw them and they saw us, but we could only watch as they drifted apart.
When I went inside, Kelly and Matt were thawing on the living room floor. Dad sat in a recliner, a drink in one hand, the remote control in the other. Dad didn’t know how to cook, so when we got hungry, he cracked walnuts, picking the meat with a steak knife and scattering the puckered nuts across the coffee table for us. We thought the walnuts looked like little brains, so we snatched them up and screamed, I’m eating your brain! Now you don’t have one! I’m eating Matt’s brain! Now he don’t have one! We chewed overdramatically, with mannered self-satisfied
chomps. Kelly cracked a can of Dr Pepper and gave me a swig. This was our dinner. When Mom got busy and didn’t have time to go shopping, the fridge would be empty and we would munch on whatever was left in the pantry from Mom’s last shopping trip. Peanut butter and apples. Rice Krispies soaked in Kool-Aid. Matt curled up with Tootsie, our fat calico cat, to share a pint of ice cream. Tootsie licked the spoon clean.
It was long past dark. At the window, Dad lifted the lace-trimmed curtains and peered out, looking for Mom’s car. Knocking the lip of his beer bottle against the glass, tap, tap, tap, tap, he looked like a deserted little boy. No matter how much he drank, Mom’s nights away from home didn’t sit easy. He would only go so far as to admit she was changing, now that she’d gotten a different set of friends and a paycheck she spent as she liked. “I’m not the kind of man who lets his wife run around,” he said, as he gazed through the window at the dark night. When I leaned against his arm, our pale reflections stood side by side. We were insubstantial, ghost people, waiting and waiting.
“Fuck a duck, I’m hungry!” Kelly said, bounding into the kitchen.
“Watch your language, young lady.”
“Where the heck is Mom, anyhow?” she asked, her finger shoved up her nose, but she already knew the answer: Mom was out with her friends. Or she was at her university lecture. Or she was at her aerobics class. Or she was at the mall. She was always somewhere else. We didn’t understand why she was never home or why we had been left to Dad, who couldn’t do anything as well as Mom did. We watched, waiting for him to figure out what to do, but he just sat—wounded and pissed off—as the ship sank. Dishes piled up, and Mom grew more daring in her escapes. Dirty laundry spilled from our bedrooms. The prow tipped and the cabin filled. The water rose higher and higher. Mom had jumped ship. Nothing we could do. Gurgle, gurgle.
At eleven years old, I did not see my mother’s nights out the way Dad must have seen them. It took me years to recognize what was happening in the months before she filed for divorce. Yes, I missed her. Yes, I felt let down that she wasn’t home to tuck me into bed. But I expected us all to be together forever. My father, however, knew he was losing her. All the signs were there, bright and flashy: new high-heeled shoes; fresh manicure; evasive, sullen, annoyed manner with us. And, of course, there was her growing absence. It was as if she had kept track of all the hours my father had left her at home alone over the years—his hours at
the bar, his hours on the job, his hours dillydallying with whatever woman caught his attention—and was taking them back, minute by minute, her due.
Maybe during the months my mother was building herself a new life, Dad could have changed things. Perhaps if he had talked to her, she would have stayed. But it was probably too late for talking. At that point, little could have been done. And besides, my father didn’t believe in negotiation. Jabbering doesn’t solve anything, he would say. He would never, for any reason, have admitted that he had driven her away.
BY NINE O’CLOCK, KELLY HAD FALLEN ASLEEP ON THE COUCH AND MATT had curled up on the recliner, tucked under an afghan. The house was quiet, Mom-less. “Half brandy, half Coke,” Dad said, instructing me on how to make his drink. “And use the crushed ice, not the cubes.” He was particular about the strangest things—the brand of soda, the kind of ice in his glass—and I tried to be careful to get it right. I filled a tumbler with crushed ice, measured the brandy, and then the Coke. I carried his drink to the table, careful as I balanced the tumbler in the palm of my hand, feeling as though the fate of the world depended on getting it to him without spilling one drop.
“It’s like you don’t have a mother anymore,” Dad said, taking the drink from me.
“Maybe Mom just needs a vacation from us,” I said, sitting down next to him. Although I was trying to be reassuring, Dad got so angry I thought he’d knock me off my chair. He gritted his teeth. “Nobody takes a vacation from marriage.”
After a few more drinks, Dad picked up the phone, punched in some numbers, and handed the receiver to me. “Ask to speak to your mother,” he said, gruff.
I put the phone to my ear, confused. “But Mom’s at the mall.”
Dad stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “She’s not at the mall. The mall closed at nine. Do as I say.”
Before I had time to argue, a female voice answered. “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said, unsure of whom I was talking to or what I should say. “Is my mom there?”
The voice was as confused as I. “Well, I don’t know. Who is this?”
“Danielle,” I said, swallowing hard.
The voice repeated my name, and I recognized it. It was Sherry, my mom’s best friend. Sherry, who had a daughter my age, and invited me over to swim in her pool and drink bottles of Mountain Dew and watch Dance Party on cable. “Danielle?” Sherry said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that Mom’s late getting back from the mall. Is she over there? Can I talk to her?”
Sherry paused, and I heard (in the background) Mahogany, the golden retriever, clipping across the tiles of their kitchen. Sherry said, “She’s not here. I haven’t seen her all night. I hope everything’s OK.”
“Everything’s great,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t quiver. “Everything is just perfect.”
I hung up the phone, turned to Dad, and shrugged my shoulders, a what-can-we-do-she’s-not-there-who-knows-maybe-she’s-still-at-the-mall shrug. Dad’s face darkened, but he was not surprised. He put out his cigarette and chewed a Turns, then pulled a red address book from a drawer. Flipping through the pages, he began to dial numbers, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. We called Mom’s sisters, her friends, her parents. Dad dialed and I did the talking, feeling him behind me, listening: Is my mom with you? Have you seen her tonight? Do you know where she might be? I asked questions until I was on the verge of tears. When I was so worried I could not call another person, I looked at Dad and said, “What if Mom was in a car wreck? Should we call the hospital?”
Dad smirked, suppressing his anger as best he could. “She hasn’t been in any car wreck,” he said. “Don’t worry about your mom. I’ll track her down.”
Dad left Trussoni Court in his truck. I sat at the kitchen window, drawing spirals in the frosted-over glass. The taillights of the truck burned sharp and hot as Dad drove into the snowy night, hunting Mom.
WHEN MOM CAME HOME, TWO HOURS LATER, I KNEW SHE HAD NOT BEEN AT the mall. As she unwound a chenille scarf from her neck, the car keys jingling in her hand, I saw that she was too made up (with her lips and her fingernails painted sports-car red) to have been shopping, too beautiful for Sherry.
As Mom walked through the kitchen, Dad (who had passed out in his recliner with the walnut bowl in one hand and the steak knife in the other) woke suddenly, as if he’d been caught sleeping on guard.
“Where’ve you been?” he demanded, brushing his fingers over his shirt, to smooth it.
“Out,” she said, evasive.
“Out?” Dad repeated, as if he had never heard this word before, as if he had not used this same explanation for all his own late nights and lost weekends over the years. “I drove all over hell, looking for you.”
“I went …”—Mom paused, examining her drunk, disheveled, knife-holding husband—“shopping. With Sherry. You know that.”
It was obvious, by the way Mom carried herself and the fact that she had no packages to show for her trip, that she had not been shopping. She set her purse on the table and unbuttoned her long wool coat. “What, Dan?” she asked. “What do you want me to tell you?”
As my father stood before her, helpless, I remembered a trip Dad and I took the year I started kindergarten. We drove fast on two-lane country highways, as Dad chain-smoked and chewed Certs mints, the radio cranked. After ten minutes of driving, Dad parked in front of a house. It looked like nobody was home—the lights were off, and no car sat in the driveway—but a woman with red hair stepped from the door, as if she’d been waiting. She led me into her living room, set a bowl of pretzels before me, and turned the TV to Sesame Street. Then I was alone.
I wandered through the house, looking at crystal knickknacks (mice and kittens and clowns) and Hummel figurines displayed in a cabinet. Along one wall, a series of photographs had been hung; kids with the same auburn hair as the woman smiled from wooden frames. Where were these children? I wondered. Why weren’t they at home?
Letting myself out a sliding-glass door, I walked onto a deck. A bright blue inflatable kiddie pool sat at one end. Although it was October, the pool was full of water. Red and orange maple leaves floated upon its surface. I took off my shoes and stomped in the water, kicking the leaves. When Dad came downstairs, full of piss and vinegar, tucking in his shirt and checking his watch, he saw me and stopped in his tracks.
“What in the hell are you doing?”
I hopped out of the pool and stood, soaked, on the deck.
“What’s your mother going to say?”
“Better towel her off,” the woman said.
Upstairs, in the bathroom, the woman took a blow-dryer to me. She wrapped me in a towel and wrung out my clothes. I was too young to
fully understand what was happening, and I probably would not have remembered the incident at all—not the house or the kiddie pool—if it weren’t for the odd way the woman looked at me as she combed my hair. Something was wrong about her. She was too attentive, studying me as if looking for flaws. I was not used to such scrutiny. She squatted down, staring at me full in the face, and said, “She looks like her mother, doesn’t she.”
My father wasn’t paying any attention to the woman or to me; he was anxious to leave the scene of the crime. “Spitting image of her mother,” he mumbled. “Spitting image.”
I STOOD IN THE HALLWAY, WATCHING, AS MOM FOLDED HER CHENILLE SCARF and laid it on the kitchen table.
“Danielle called Sherry,” Dad said, his face growing red. “You sure as hell weren’t with her tonight.”
Mom paused, taken off guard. She set the car keys next to her scarf, too careful, too deliberate. “And just why was Danielle calling Sherry?”
Dad ignored her question. “First, you’re gone all day at that job of yours, and now you’re traipsing around all night. Look at this house. Do I work all day to come home to this? What’s next? You’re gone weekends, too?”
It was then that Mom noticed me, watching from the sidelines. She didn’t speak to me, and for a moment I thought she was angry that I had called Sherry. She pointed her long red fingernail in the direction of my bedroom and mouthed one word: Bed.
IT WAS SNOWING AGAIN. DRIFTS PILED UP INTO FROZEN WAVES OF WHITE, two feet high. When the snowplows didn’t come, we were all stuck inside, for a snow day. Dad didn’t work much from November to March, anyway—it was too cold for masonry—but Mom, who had grown to love her routine (up and out of the house by seven-thirty, work until four, off to the university, home by ten) didn’t know what to do with a snow day. She walked through the house, her lips pursed, forced to face our messy rooms, the mountains of unsorted socks, the catastrophe of unpaid bills and unmade beds. She stood at the window, watching the
snow barricade the road. Everything she wanted was on the other side of that glass. Finally, she changed out of her work clothes, tied a bandanna over her hair, and made us breakfast.
We were thrilled to have our mother all to ourselves, so we followed her around the house, bugging her. Oatmeal, pancakes, cookies—we wanted whatever she could give us. After breakfast, she set up our coloring books and paints on the living room floor and fell into a plush recliner near the window, a stack of Better Homes and Gardens magazines at her side, watching the snow fall. By lunchtime, she’d had enough. She sent us outside with pails and shovels to make a snow fort.
Winter was our native season. I was a winter baby, my first months of life filled with ice. Dad was born in a snowstorm. As my grandmother told it, she went into labor with my father three weeks early. No doctor would drive to Genoa on ice-covered roads, so they found a neighbor (a DeFlorian cousin) to assist with the birth. My father was born quickly, without complications, and although he had come ahead of schedule, he weighed over ten pounds. Grandma once said that his premature birth was an example of my father’s personality, his let’s get on with it approach to life.
My grandmother said that in his first moments of life, he was silent, as if getting used to the idea of the world. He opened his large curious eyes and lifted his arm, experiencing gravity’s resistance. A rime of ice on the window comprised the lacy-white landscape of his first minute of sight. He was blood-coated and still warm from the womb. A cold draft reacted with his heat, and the tiniest bit of steam rose from him. He shivered, had his first notion of nostalgia, and screeched. The DeFlorian neighbor wiped the blood film from his bullfrog belly with a hot cloth, squeezed (dispersing pink into a porcelain basin), and gave him back to his mother, ready for the world.
When we came inside, Mom was cleaning our rooms. She picked the toys up from the floor, dusted and boxed them before brushing the vacuum over the rug.
It had only been half a year earlier, the previous spring, when Mom had been laid up in bed, stricken by a mysterious illness. Every day, when we got off the bus from school, we would walk through the unclean house, past Tootsie, to my parents’ bedroom. “Bring me a glass of tomato juice, would you?” Mom would say, and we’d sit at the foot of the bed, watching the tail end of The Bold and the Beautiful. My parents’
bedroom smelled warm and musty, as if something were decomposing under the bed. Matt would snuggle at Mom’s side, working his head under her armpit, his shoes crumbling mud on the sheets. Mom was pale; her eyes had dark rings under them.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” we asked.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just resting, that’s all.”
As I eased myself next to her, I felt safe and secure, as if nothing bad could happen. I ignored the fear I felt, seeing her sick. Mom wouldn’t lie to us. If she said nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong.
One day we came home from school to find her bedroom empty. Maureen O’Brian, our regular babysitter, sat in the kitchen, talking on the phone to her boyfriend. Maureen had had an accident the year before; she had fallen asleep driving and flipped her Pinto into a ditch. The window had been open, her arm resting on the ledge, and her left hand had been mangled in the crash; she always tucked this scarred fingerless hand under her armpit, so it looked like she was hugging herself.
Maureen finished her call and said, “Your mom is in the hospital. Your dad will be home in an hour or so. He’ll explain everything.”
When Dad came home, we ran down the driveway, meeting his truck. He climbed out, grabbed his toolbox, and walked inside to the kitchen, where he took a can of beer from the fridge, popped the top, and flicked it into the trash. Kelly and Matt and I gathered around him, barraging him with questions. Where is Mom? Why is she at the hospital? Is she sick?
Dad said, “I have some good news and some bad news.”
Good news first! Good news first!
“Good news: Your mom had a baby.”
Dad paused while Kelly, Matt, and I whooped and screamed. A baby? A boy or a girl? What’s its name? A baby!
Dad took a sip of his beer, waiting for us to quiet down.
“Bad news: It was born too soon and died.”
The three of us looked at our father, too stunned to speak. Dad leaned against the countertop and tapped a Pall Mall filterless from the maroon-and-white pack. He lit the cigarette and looked out the window. A slow, sickening sensation of loss grew in my body. A new baby had been given to us and taken away, all in five seconds. I hadn’t even known that Mom was pregnant—she had hidden herself in her bedroom and wasn’t far enough along to show, anyway. But now, knowing that a
baby had been on the way, I thought of it as stolen. It would have come home, wrapped in a white blanket, and I would’ve helped change and bathe it. I would’ve picked out a name and taken the stroller down Trussoni Court. Although I had never imagined another one of us before, now I felt robbed. An extra place setting formed at our table, another set of shoes appeared at our doorstep, one more giggly-voiced kid rode in the backseat of Mom’s car. A new face appeared in every family picture and then disappeared, leaving a blurry, indistinct hole. Maureen looked away, her hand tucked behind her, embarrassed and uncomfortable. Kelly’s eyes filled with tears. Matt said, “We can fix the baby, right? The doctor will make it better, right?”
Dad did not respond. Annoyed by our whining, he dug in his pocket for cash, which he gave to Maureen, her pay. Ignoring Kelly’s tears and Matt’s questions, he took one last swig of beer and walked to the front door. “I’m going to the hospital,” he said. “To bring your mom home.”
When Dad left, I took Kelly and Matt to the living room, where we sat cross-legged on the shag carpet.
“Where did the baby go?” Kelly asked.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “The baby is in heaven. It’s OK. Don’t cry.”
Although I was as confused as they were, I felt it my duty to supply the words and the expressions and the gestures that Dad had withheld. I tried to explain. Lying to my sister and brother and to myself, I created a Dad code. I told them Dad’s annoyance meant he loved us more than words could express; his drinking meant he suffered more acutely than other people; his coldness was a cover for intense feeling. I apologized for Dad and forgave him in advance. I interpreted Dad and spoke for Dad. I convinced myself that I was capable of this. And sometimes I was.
AFTER THE MISCARRIAGE, WE ACTED AS IF IT HAD NOT HAPPENED. NOBODY spoke of the baby. Nobody mentioned that Mom had stopped doing all the things that made her Mom. This was when she started going out more than ever, and Dad turned mean. One evening, on her way out the door, Mom turned to me and said, “You’re in charge of cleaning your bedroom. It better be spotless when I get home.”
I looked out the window as Mom backed down the driveway, did a Y turn, and drove away.
Dad was sitting in the recliner, his feet up, the phone cord wrapped around his tube socks, on the phone with one of my uncles. I stood in the doorway, listening. I found her the other night at some bar with friends I didn’t know she had. This place is a goddamned pigsty. She’s got no time for us anymore. I told her she doesn’t need to work. She should be home, raising these kids. They run around like a pack of goddamned ragamuffins. There’s no discipline around here. Danielle and Kelly are the mouthiest little shits I’ve ever seen.
When Dad saw me in the doorway, he covered the phone with his hand and said, “Your mom told you to clean your room. Is it clean?”
I kicked the carpet with my sock. “Not yet.”
“Then get your ass in gear and clean it.”
I did not get my ass in gear. I squatted in the doorway, pulling strands of the shag carpet, eavesdropping. Dad smoked and looked into the distance, his eyes dark and intense. Dad’s eyes were the same color as mine, only a slight blue circle had developed around his brown iris, forming an off-colored ring. The ring was congenital, a genetic gift from my grandfather. Dad didn’t always have it. The ring came slowly, developing like a photograph under the spell of a chemical solution: The black edge of the eye dissolved into points of light, becoming the loveliest hazel (almost butterscotch), and then gunmetal gray, until the eye congealed into its final concentric composition. Dad’s doctor said the ring signified cholesterol, the accumulation of lipids under the slight membranes of the eye, but I always thought of it as a family mark. The day before Grandpa Trussoni died from cancer, when I went to his room to say goodbye and his oxygen tubes were at the side of his pillow and his skin had gone yellow, he looked at me and said, I’m always going to be watching over you, wherever I am, and I did not wonder where he was going or how he would get there. All I saw was the pretty blue ring around his black eyes.
Dad covered the phone with his hand and said, “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing much,” I said.
“I don’t need your lip. I told you to clean your room. Now go.”
But I did not go to my room. I tried on Mom’s shoes and kicked around in the hallway and was in the process of tap dancing in the kitchen (Mom’s Dr. Scholl’s clip-clopping on the yellow linoleum), when
I felt Dad’s hand grab the back of my neck. It was so sudden, so jarring, that I did not have time to scream or kick or protest as he dragged me to the hall toward my room.
“What did I tell you?” he said, as he lifted me above the carpeting with a firm grip. He held me by the neck with one hand and swiped with the other. Cold-hot slaps stung my legs, my thighs, my back, my face. I wiggled in his grip, unable to breathe. “Nobody gives a shit about this house,” he said. “It’s a goddamned pigsty. I work all day to come home to this. Go. Clean. Your. Room.”
For a moment, I was lost in the momentum of Dad’s anger. I was backpedaling, sinking. The hallway reeled from under me; it flashed black and brown and red. I tried to breathe but choked on the air. It was not until I stopped struggling that Dad dropped me to the floor. I looked up at my father, astonished. His body was taut, constricted, ready to come at me again. And then, when I began to cry, he transformed. It was as if he had surfaced from the depths of a dark dream. His body softened, and a look of recognition crossed his face: Don’t I know you? Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?
He turned on his heel and walked away, mumbling, “I don’t have time for your bullshit,” which meant (in Dad code) I love you.