A DIFFERENT WINTER AND a different kind of winter, the air peated with dark and me swimming through it, I saw, or thought I saw, the car’s red lights receding: good-bye, good-bye. By then Mother’s nose had been broken, so that whenever she spoke, she sounded stuffed up. “Good-bye, good-riddance,” she was saying to Walter when we were caught up in our Florida.
Mother promised that in our Florida, hers and mine, we would get a bird, a large, showy bird, a talker, someone who could say more than “hiya” and his name, but a sleek and brightly beaked bird—a talker, excited, scrabbling on the bar, saying, “Alice, Alice”—a bird that would live on and on, not some dumb Polly.
Mother promised that in Florida I could hold the hand mirror to the sun to start a fire; in Florida there would be no need of matches. “The heat,” she said, “the steamy heat, the pink sand. Try to imagine.”
Mother’s toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida. Her toenails were polished in a black-red put on thick. Her fingernails she wore as they were: skin-colored, square-cut, clear. The ragged moons on some nails she showed me signaled deprivations—not enough milk or an unrelieved fever—such losses, experienced in a mother’s womb, could be read on the teeth, Mother told me, when the teeth were discolored. She said, “Look at Walter.” Mother’s terrible Walter had grown up in a place always warm and yet his smile, Mother said, revealed his sorrows.
He covered up his teeth when he was smiling; he hid behind his hands. Caught chewing, he looked caught. He looked angry or dismayed. Walter frowned at me a lot, or that was how it seemed to me when Mother wasn’t home. With this Walter there were no foam drinks, no maraschino cherries, no promises and kisses. He brooded, he swore, he drank.
The day Walter left, the phone was ringing and the TV was never shut off. Lights came on. There was crying. Car doors slammed, cars started, high beams swept the drive. We might have been a TV show was how it looked to me from the window where I saw a woman in a nightgown prepared to stop the car by merely standing in front of it. Mother held out her arms and was, I thought, pleading please to stay or to take her, too, but please, not on any account, please not to leave. “No, no, no, no, no,” she was crying. “Please!”
Then Walter was yelling from the car at me, saying, “Your mother’s the one. She’s a crazy, bloody woman! She wants all of my money!”
“Get out!” I shouted, and then Mother shouted, too, “Get out, get out! Leave us alone!”