and cursed herself for not taking the time to push the cats into her bedroom before she had left the house that morning. Mouth, their female tiger cat, had a bladder problem. Sometimes, when she was excited or upset, she dribbled. And Mouth was wont to climb on the furniture, including the table. But I couldn’t put her in the bedroom—Bruiser doesn’t get along with her. And if I put Mouth in the bathroom and shut the door, Ma yells because she’s not sure if I’m in there or what, and Ma doesn’t want the cats in her room.
Anna made a break for the kitchen, mumbling, “I’ll go wipe it up,” but Ma blocked her way, lean arms crossed, elbows pointing out like the narrow ends of billy clubs. Anna backed up, intending to circle the table and edge into the kitchen behind Ma, but when she was halfway around the table Ma shifted position to further block her way. Shaking, Anna tried to squeeze past Ma anyhow, but her big bust got in the way, for Anna couldn’t press her right arm close enough to her body. When the elbow of her jacket grazed Ma’s pink nightgown, Ma pushed her into the small easy chair that sat near the opposite side of the kitchen doorway.
As her face hit the rounded back of the chair, hard, Anna told herself, Don’t cry out, for Chrissakes—she’ll only get angrier. My god, what has happened to us? We were actually happy here, just a couple of years ago.
“Get up and clean off that table.”
Later on, Anna wasn’t sure if it was the tone of Ma’s voice—more metallic than usual—or the cumulative effect of having that same voice shout out so many orders, curses, and insults over the past two years, the years of the old lady—
(“I wanted a daughter, a human being, not you!” “You clumsy moose, can’t you do anything without—” “You’re just like the old lady, just fuckin’ like her—and her crazy old man—”)
—but whatever it was, something in Anna snapped.
“No way.” Pressing herself into the chair, the cat dander on the throw tickling her nose, Anna looked up at her mother, whose forehead furrow grew impossibly black and deep, like a widening cleft in her very skull. Ma glared down at Anna.
“No, what?” One good thing, Ma wasn’t ripping skin off her lips, or tearing strips of skin off the sides of her fingernails, hurting herself in a seething rage that often boiled over to splatter her daughter. Anna slowly shifted until she had her feet on the floor and one hand stationed on the left armrest before saying, “I’m not cleaning up something you could have cleaned yourself. You know Mouth has accidents. A little cat pee won’t hurt anything.”
“Yes it will!” Ma pounded the table with her fist, shouting, “It hurts me! I’m sick of always cleaning up after the fucking cat! Isn’t it enough I had to pick up after the old lady almost all my life? Now it’s pick up after them! Not when I’m picking garbage to eat while they—” she pointed in the direction of Anna’s room “eat fancy fucking cat food!”
“But they eat garbage, too. That beef from when they get done grinding at—”
“Screw that! That’s not what I’m talking about!”
“What are you talking about, then? We just don’t always find cat food, that’s all—”
“Fuck finding the cat food!” Ma bellowed, kicking at Anna’s legs with her house-slippered bare feet, unconsciously mimicking the actions of her own mother when Ma was a girl. Ma’s thin toes hung far enough out of the yellow scuffs for the bones of her toes to connect ringingly with Anna’s tibia, but Ma didn’t feel the connection, for she kept on screaming, “Can’t you understand I’m tired of it all? Tired of waking up to find cat piss on the fucking table, tired of going garbage picking, tired of playing nursemaid and playmate to that crazy old lady, tired of listening to the old lady ask why her little Anna won’t come see her, just tired of it all!”
Anna didn’t know what to say. She never did know what to say when Ma started on an “I’m tired” tirade. It wasn’t as if Ma was the only one suffering in the house; at least she’d been married once, and had had a kid, which was enough to make her less of an object of ridicule. Anna was twenty-nine and had never so much as dated, or even been able to pay a guy to take her someplace. Not that there was any guy poor enough in town to need to accept date money from someone like Anna Sudek, descendant of the embarrassment of Ewerton. And after years of going without male companionship, Anna no longer wanted it or needed it—it was simply easier to give up the search without ever having really begun it in the first place. Even if it meant not being able to sweet-talk any of her former classmates into hiring her now.
Ma above all should have realized just how damned hard it would be for Anna to get anything more than menial jobs, despite her degree. No jobs would be forthcoming to Anna Sudek, any more than they were forthcoming for her mother, Tina Miner Sudek.
It was as if what had happened fifty-some years ago had occurred yesterday. People who had actually been there were mostly gone, but the memory lingered on, thanks to the oft-told tales. And with the memory came the smoldering rage that someone had dared to give Ewerton a bad name, had dared to do something embarrassing—and that the Miner-Sudek clan still had the audacity to remain in town.
Not that Anna and her mother actually wanted to remain in Ewerton. While free to go in one sense, they were chained in other, less obvious ways. Lack of money, for starters. Ma had managed to break free of town when she was a teenager—had made it all the way to neighboring Wright County, in fact—but her divorce had sent her scuttling back home, Anna in tow, to the bitter sanctity of the old lady’s house, to be her unpaid slave. And when things got to be too much there, she and Anna had pooled the money Anna had earned doing work study in college (said education paid for by Uncle Sam, thanks to Anna’s unacknowledged-at-EHS intelligence, and ability to supplement her grant with scholarships) with the little money she had, and moved halfway across town, to this ticky-tacky house on Wilkerson Avenue, close to the smelly paper mill.
When Ma and Anna had gone looking for work, no one had wanted to hire them, even though they weren’t the ultimate untouchables—out-of-towners. In Ma’s case they claimed she was under-qualified; in Anna’s that she was overqualified. Job Service wouldn’t touch them. Employers round-filed their applications. Scavenging took them through the first lean year—that and finding money on the streets, in the runner rims of the washing machines in the Super Suds Launderette, and in the many phone booths around town. They blew what money they held in reserve on bills, until the home cleaning service out in the hoity-toity Willow Hill section of town decided that they’d take a chance on the Sudeks, and offered them office cleaning jobs. (The service also handled in-home care for the elderly, but they were the ones who definitely remembered the Miner case.)
During the past six years, Ma had cleaned the FmHA and paper mill offices, while Anna cleaned the Super Suds and two insurance offices. They pulled down enough to keep them selves and their two cats from being kicked out of the county, and the adjusted mortgage on the house helped, too. Surprisingly, though, she and Ma had become friends, getting along better—for a few years, at least—than they had during all the years spent under the old lady’s thumb. But it wasn’t meant to last, this fragile sense of well-being in the Sudek household.
For Anna kept on getting older, and less marriageable by the year, just as their bills grew steadily thanks to inflation and rising costs, and eventually Ma fell victim to rages of angry words and tiny, self-inflicted wounds after the old lady had called their house two years ago, claiming to have fallen and hurt her hip.
“Claimed” was how Anna chose to think about it; it was funny how the old lady supposedly perked up after Ma resumed relations with her. Of course, Anna didn’t know for sure that the old lady had improved; after the fights that precipitated the exodus from the Miner house on Evans Street seven years back, Anna had refused to go see the old lady. Why, for four years she had refused to even speak on the phone with the old woman, when she had called her on little Anna’s birthdays.
But Ma had gone back, almost eagerly, thanks to the little gifts of money from the old lady, the latter’s little trick to make Ma obligated to do even more for her, to keep giving more and more of herself