“You ought to go to bed now, too,” I said, resting my head against her soft breast. “You’re always tired.”
“I will, honey. Pretty quick. Sleep tight, now.” She kissed my hair, dismissing me.
In my dream I was a cecropia larva, trapped inside my cocoon. I chewed and clawed but I couldn’t rend the tough silk fiber I’d spun around myself. I awoke in a panic, the sheet twisted around my legs. Kicking free, I lay in the darkness with my eyes open, waiting for my thudding heart to return to normal.
A dim light still glowed through the open bedroom door. I gathered up the chenille spread from the foot of my bed and carried it into the living room.
My mother was asleep on the couch, snoring lightly, the empty wine bottle on the floor beneath her outstretched arm. A shaft of moonlight whitened the hourglass-shaped scar on the inside of her arm, a mark she would never explain. Her breathing didn’t change as I covered her legs and pulled the spread up to her chin.
My feet were cold when I crawled back in bed, and the knot behind my breastbone had returned. But this time I was angry at myself. For a moment that evening, driving home with my mother and the moonlight on my hands, I’d actually believed we might go shopping tomorrow.
CHAPTER 3
Shady River, 1974
Three, six, nine, the moose drank wine,
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. Line broke. Monkey got choked. All went to heaven in a little blue boat.
I was pretty good at jumping rope, Cincy was better, but Samantha never missed. Never. We had to make a new rule for her, or else it would have been her turn the entire recess. Lean and tall, with long red curls that thrashed about her head in rhythm to her pounding feet, Sam called out her own cadence without even panting. She said that after high school she was going to play ice hockey for a pro team in Canada.
Sam’s best friend was Patty Johnson. Patty had no coordination, but she had a wide, freckled face that laughed at everything, and besides, she brought the rope. The four of us met on the playground every recess of fifth grade. We’d chant the cadence, then count each rope-skip until the jumper missed—or Samantha reached a hundred. We knew half a dozen rhymes, but the moose one sounded so sophisticated and subversive it was our favorite. Years later, in college, I heard a jazz musician sing the same words and felt a thrill of kinship.
Occasionally, other girls joined us. When six or more of us stood in the circle, sounding off in unison like an army cadre, our blended voices drew a crowd of watchers. Those times were exciting, like having company. But I loved it best when it was just the four of us, carefree and comfortable together.
On the rare days I couldn’t go home with Cincy after school, my stomach began a queasy rolling as soon as the dismissal bell rang, as I wondered if my mother would be home yet, and in what condition. Usually she drank wine, which made her mellow and affectionate. If I targeted my requests for the third glass, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. Waiting past the third was successful but risky; the next day she’d deny giving permission. But on the rare occasions she drank whiskey, she got mean. Later on, as a budding high school scientist, I deduced that the different effects of wine and whiskey must be psychosomatic; alcohol was alcohol once it entered the bloodstream. Probably she drank wine when she was feeling gentle and whiskey when she felt mean. But in grade school, all I knew was that the only times Mom struck me were accompanied by the yeasty aroma of bourbon.
In the seventies, nobody thought a parental palm across the mouth of a sassy child constituted child abuse. Not even the child. Nevertheless, by age ten I’d learned to search the house when she wasn’t home and pour any hard liquor down the drain. I washed away the odor with plenty of water and replaced the empty bottle where I found it, so she’d think she drank it all the night before.
I left the wine alone. She was rather cheerless when she was sober, and she worried too much.
Even the wine didn’t help during the holidays. Mom began to get irritable around Thanksgiving and by Christmas she’d progress to morose. I had one hazy memory of a merry Christmas—Mom, Dad and me beside a sparkling tree; their laughter as I careened back and forth on a spring-mounted rocking horse necklaced with a red bow. The last Christmas we spent together, I was three. Every year, when the first tinsel and fake snow appeared in department store windows, I called up that memory and turned it over and over in my mind to keep it alive.
Mom always feigned good cheer as we opened our gifts, but there was no light in her eyes and they sagged at the corners like the cushions on our secondhand sofa. The only sparkle came when she opened my handmade gift.
Since I never had money to shop, I’d continued the tradition initiated by my first grade teacher, who helped us make a felt-wrapped, glitter-spangled pencil holder from an orange juice can. Mom had made a fuss over it—after I explained what it was—and her fate was sealed. In second grade, the homeroom mother provided red-and-green strips of polyester which I dutifully wove into a pot holder, perhaps the single ugliest handicraft ever committed. In third, we framed our school photos in plaster of paris, painted gold, and in fourth grade Mr. Burns helped us tie-dye T-shirts and print them with autumn leaves. Our fifth-grade teacher, an unartistic sort, abandoned us to our own devices. I panicked.
Cincy, as usual, provided the answer. From a high shelf in her cluttered closet, she produced a sand bucket full of tiny seashells. “I picked them up at the beach one summer when Mom and I went to the ocean,” Cincy told me. She dumped them onto the bedspread, sand and all.
In her mother’s sewing box, Cincy found a gold metallic string left over from the sixties when Lenora strung love beads. Cincy often wore them to school. Digging deeper in the box, I claimed a piece of thin black cord, soft and shiny like satin. It was the perfect contrast to the delicate chalkiness of the shells.
Every day that autumn, as the afternoons shortened and the evenings chilled, we sat cross-legged on Cincy’s bed and strung the scrolled, pastel treasures into necklaces for our moms. The project went slowly. Most shells required tiny holes bored with the tip of a screw before we could string them. Lenora accepted her banishment from the room with good humor, and I saw her only when we arrived after school or when she called us out for supper. It was that December, when we were almost eleven, that Cincy told me about her father.
Accustomed to an all-female world, I hadn’t thought to wonder about the missing male in her family. At my house, fathers were a taboo subject. But one evening as we prepared to work on the shell necklaces, Cincy moved a pile of rumpled clothes on her dresser and knocked over a picture of a man in camouflage clothes.
The picture bore an inscription at the lower right: “To Lenora, with love. PFC Harley Jaines.” I picked it up. “Who’s that?”
“That’s my dad,” Cincy said matter-of-factly. “He was killed in the Vietnam war.”
The young man in the photo was dark-complexioned, and even with his military haircut, I could tell his hair was ink-black. He stood against a backdrop of foliage as dense as the wilderness on Lenora’s sunporch.
“He kind of looks like you,” I said.
“He was half Cherokee. Which makes me one-quarter.”
“How did he get killed? I mean, was he shot?”
“Nobody knows,” she said. “He was reported missing in action. His body was never found.”
She laid the picture on the bed beside us while we bored and strung the tiny shells. PFC Harley Jaines smiled up at me, proud and straight, and I wished my father had been killed in a war, instead of deserting us. I had no photo of him.
“They went to college together, in California,” Cincy told me. “Mom’s parents divorced when she was in high school, and she got a job and lived by herself. She had a scholarship for college but she had to work, too. She was a waitress in the Student Union.”
I’d never heard of a Student Union, but I could hear the echo of