On rainy mornings, with the car windows blurred with water, I never daydreamed about a house. That dream was too big. My dreams were about furniture. I imagined having a chair and a desk.
At night I placed a pillow over the hand brake so that the two front seats became one bed. In the dark space of the brake and accelerator pedals, I kept a pair of tennis shoes and sandals.
My books and comic books were laid out in short piles in a row along the dashboard and were warped from the sun shining down on them day after day.
We kept our groceries in the trunk and ate foods that didn’t need refrigeration.
Our clothing was folded into plastic supermarket bags.
In the glove compartment we kept our toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap. In this space my mother also kept the can of Raid Flying Insect Killer. Every night before we went to sleep, we closed the windows and doors and sprayed the inside of the car with the insecticide. Every morning as we stretched and yawned, the taste of Raid filled our mouths and mixed with the breakfast taste of Cheerios and powdered milk mixed with water.
In that car my mother taught me how to set a table and how to serve tea. She showed me how to make a bed using a dishcloth folded around a book.
My mother knew about these things because she was raised in a big house with a veranda and swimming pool and five bathrooms. She had servants and a playroom where she kept all her toys. She knew how to play the piano and how to speak French, because a French tutor came to her house twice a week during her childhood. When she was in a good mood, my mother’s talk always had French words in it. When she was seven, she was given a Shetland pony for her birthday.
My mother’s name was Margot, after Margot Fonteyn, the great ballerina. My mother was delicate and graceful. Her neck was even long and slim like a dancer’s. She had thin limbs, long fingers, and yellow hair that was spongy and made a yellow cloud all around her head.
By the time I was eleven, my mother and I were the same size and I never grew any taller.
You’re the apple on my apple tree, she said.
My mother named me Pearl because, she said, You were so white. You came from a place that is far away from any normal birthplace like a hospital or clinic.
She said, Nobody knew, and I gave you your birthday, to you all alone, by myself, in silence. I did not cry and you did not cry.
I used the bathroom near my bedroom because it had a long, wall-to-wall bathtub, she said. I had to think about everything I needed to do. I lay down in the bathtub like it was a bed. I placed towels down first and a blanket and then I lay down.
My mother was so small, a bathtub was the perfect size for her.
While I lay there, waiting for you to come to me, she said, I breathed in and out.
From the bathtub she could look out the window, through the palm trees of her family’s garden, at the sky.
While waiting for you I prayed the rosary, she said. When you pray the rosary your life stops.
She watched the sunset and sunrise.
And you came to me early with the birds, she said. I heard them outside the window.
After she’d cleaned her body, she washed me in the sink with a bar of Avon soap and patted me dry with Kleenex.
She said, You were so small. You fit inside a hand towel. You were so white. More like a pearl than skin. You were like ice or cloud, like a meringue. I could almost see inside your body. I looked at your pale-blue stone eyes and named you. Just that, she said.
I was a pearl. People stared at me. I didn’t know a different life. I didn’t know what it was like to walk around and not be noticed. They could think I was beautiful or ugly but, no matter what, everyone stared. Hands were always reaching out to touch my silver hair or the white glaze of my cheek.
You’re all luster, my mother said. Being with you is like wearing pretty earrings or a new dress.
My mother lived in her father’s house for two months after my birth without anyone knowing I was there.
She said, When I had to go to school or leave you to do something, I placed you in the closet in my room, all in the dark, all wrapped up. I made a bed for you on the shoe rack with towels and my sweaters. I nested you there like a kitten. I used paper towels from the kitchen as diapers. The house was so big, no one ever heard you cry.
You were born in a fairy tale, my mother said.
During the time my mother had been pregnant, she’d driven around in search of a place she could park the car and live with me while she looked for a job and a small place to rent. The trailer park was only forty minutes from her father’s house.
If you’re going to hide, hide close by, my mother said. Nobody thinks you’re going to hide in plain sight. There are over one hundred thousand people missing in this country. If they can’t find those people, how are they going to find us?
My mother picked this spot because it had a public recreational area with a bathroom. She always thought we would be there for only a few months.
We had a place to start our living together, my mother said. I cleaned it. And, over the months while I waited for your birth, I stole everything from my parents’ house I thought we might need.
Two months after my birth, two months before her exams, and two days before she was going to be seventeen, she drove away from home and never went back.
I didn’t look over my shoulder, she said. Don’t ever look over your shoulder, because it can make you want to walk backward. Don’t ever twist and turn and look over your shoulder, because you might break in two pieces. If anyone ever looked for me after I ran away, they didn’t look hard enough, because I was never found.
I never had a birth certificate. My mother falsified one copied from the Internet so that I could enroll at the local public school, but my birth was never registered.
Don’t worry about yourself, my mother said. You’ll never be found, because you’ve never been missing.
Every time she talked to me about my birth she said, That green-tiled bathroom with a toilet, bathtub, and sink was my manger.
One night, a few weeks after the appearance and death of the conjoined twin alligators, my mother and I were talking in the dark before going to sleep as we did most nights.
We almost always told each other about our day. I’d tell her about school, which was a forty-five-minute walk down the highway to the town, and my mother would recount her day at the veterans’ hospital.
Those men are hurt and angry, but they’re full of the national anthem, she said. Pearl, it’s important to know the world’s geography, because the vets hate it if people don’t know the places they’ve been to fight.
I knew the words “got some” meant the soldier had killed enemy combatants.
As my mother told me the stories she heard from the soldiers, the wars outside in the world came into our car.
My days at school were never as interesting, although there were often fights or kids being caught with cigarettes or a gun in their school bag. I kept to myself and didn’t have any close friends except for April May, who lived in our trailer park.
It didn’t take long for my mother to figure out what people thought about us. I’d guessed it on my very first days of school: if you were living in a car, it meant you were just pretending you were not a bag lady living under a bridge. People were always thinking homelessness was contagious.
Even with the Mercury’s doors closed and the windows rolled up with a tiny space open at the top for air, we could still hear the crickets outside. The croaking sound of frogs coming from the river mixed with the noise from cars and trucks driving up and down the highway.
My mother’s hand reached toward me, through the space between the door and seat, and softly rubbed my head.
I looked out the front window and my mother looked out the back window.
Do you see any stars? she asked after a while.
No. Can you?
The car windows were beginning to fog up.
No. There’re no stars tonight, not one, but I do feel them. They’re coming now.
What do you feel, Mother? Who’s coming?
Don’t you feel it? Indian ghosts are on the prowl tonight.
I don’t hear anything.
My mother stopped rubbing my head.
Feel it, she said. Close your eyes.
No. Nothing.
But don’t you feel it? They’re coming through the trees, from the dump, she said.
Yes. Maybe. No.
There’re two. Yes, two of them. Yes.
Are you sure?
Yes, I’m sure. They alight.
What?
Yes, they alight. They’ve come to take the spirit of those alligators away with them. Every time things go wrong on their land, they come. It’s the Great Brilliance.
How do you know?
Just feel it.
I closed my eyes but could hear only the rustle of my mother’s body in the backseat and hear her breath go out, out, out like a gentle pant. I never once heard her breathe in.
I closed my eyes and listened to the strange soft squeaks or sighs the car sometimes made when the air outside grew dense and cold.
I can see there’s no silver bullet to end this life, this one-dollar-bill lifestyle, my mother said. We must remember to buy a lottery ticket tomorrow. It hungers me just to think about it.
Yes, I said.
You know, my mother said after a few minutes. Sometimes I’m taken over by a great wish to start all over. I want to fall in love with my future again.
My mother was always full of birthday-candle wishes.