Editor Note:
Families are messy. Families mess up. And the mess lasts a long time. Sent on an impromptu vacation from her dead-end job, Dee reflects on the choices her family made which sent a brother and nephew flying away like scattered leaves.
~
There are things you celebrate monthly, like first dates or an infant’s birthdays. Or yearly, wedding anniversaries, birthdays, and Mother’s Day. There are things you celebrate any time the local taqueria has half-priced margaritas, like Fridays or promotions or just being alive.
Celebrate is not the right word for some anniversaries though, and mine fall into that category. Mine are tainted days; days when I see them on the calendar, I turn away disgusted and come back later with a black marker to ink them into oblivion. The day my teenaged sister came home from the hospital with a nameless blue bundle. Cover it up. And then, seven days later when she called the hospital social worker to take him away again while our mother was gone at work. Ink it out. The day, just two years later, my mother swallowed a handful of pills, knowing it would be done and final before anyone could find her. Black it over. Strangely, those horrible things all fall within the last two weeks of July. It starts today.
~
Trevor’s voice booms over the P.A. as soon as I step through the automatic sliding doors. “Delores to the manager’s office.”
How many times do I have to ask these people to call me Dee? That’s what it says on my SavingsMart nametag. Right there in red letters between the smiley face and the unicorn sticker I’d thought was ironic.
I stop by the employee lounge, which smells like a mix between a urinal cake and pulled pork sandwiches, a slight improvement over the goods floor, to put on my smock before heading to the office.
Three minutes later, I clock out again and make the long trek across the parking lot to the bus-stop. In the interim, Trevor throws words at me like tennis balls lobbed from one of those machines, all the catch-phrases he gleaned from a corporate memo. Recession. Cut-backs. Skeleton crew through August. Fiscal Year. Un-paid vacation. Furloughed, not fired.
I manage one protest, punctuated by flicking Trevor’s keyboard to the floor, the ‘a’ and ‘e’ keys clattering against the wall. “But, you need me here. Without me....”
“Without you what? A monkey could do your job. I could walk out to that bus stop right now and find some shmuck who’d shit rainbows to work Housewares.”
So, I go back to the corner and wait for the Number 9, wondering which of the cigarette-smoking shmucks standing with me might have some rainbows up their asses. I realize I’m still wearing my tatty blue work smock, technically considered theft, which could get me fired plus a replacement fine of fifty bucks. But even better, I snagged those two keyboard letters off the floor. I reach into my pocket and jiggle them, two square gentle beads shifting around between my fingers in the safety of the smock pocket. I throw them into traffic. One gets crushed and the other just disappears.
~
The weekend passes pretty quick, but after that I’m twiddling my thumbs and spending hours readjusting the bunny ears on my television set. On Tuesday, my sister calls.
“Hello, Delores,” she says, “how are you doing?”
“Dee,” I say. “Please, Darlene. Jesus, who wants to go through life with a name that belongs stitched on a blue diner-waitress’s uniform?”
“Hon, really? You think Savingsmart is some kind of improvement? Mother named you Delores and I’m going to honor that name.”
I flick the sting of her jibe away like an annoying gnat ball circling the porch. I could point out that up until a couple years ago, she jockeyed a blue smock herself until Larry of Larry’s Used Steals and Deals talked her up during a check-out. Let it go, my mother’s voice says, she’s happier now. “Hey, you want me to watch the girls sometime?” I offer. “I’m off the next two weeks.”
“Nah,” Darlene says. “I appreciate it, but I’ve already paid up this month.”
“Carrie’s almost nine, Darlene, and you’re packing her off to play ring-around-the-rosey with a bunch of pant-crapping toddlers.”
“I tell her it’s summer camp,” Darlene says. “Besides, who else is there? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“They made me take vacation,” I say.
“Made you? How can anyone make you?”
“Well,” I say real slow. “I went to work on Saturday and Trevor said to go home. I said I didn’t want to, and he said do it or I’m replacing you with a rainbow-shitting shmuck.”
Darlene sucks her teeth, which over the phone, sounds like a bunch of obnoxious static. “You should have gone out with him, given him a hand job. Didn’t I tell you? Had you heeded my advice, you would be working right now instead of sitting at home with a stack of bills that won’t get paid on time. Again.”
Heeded? “You sure have a prissy mouth for someone who’ll stick anything into it,” I say.
“Saleswoman of the month!” she sings out, reminding me that if it hadn’t been for her willingness to do things in the mechanic’s bay with the owner, she’d still be faxing lease and loan applications with the other receptionist.
Finally, I convince her to bring the girls over for a movie night. I’m thinking Wizard of Oz or maybe Alice in Wonderland. Something my older niece might have read.
~
On Wednesday, my sister shows up on time, like always. I wish she’d be like those other moms who are perpetually late because they had to change a diaper at the last second or the baby up-chucked pea soup as they were getting into the car. People come to count on those few extra minutes. Darlene’s the type who’d rather make her kids show up with vomit in their hair than be fifteen minutes late.
She hands me the baby and pushes her other daughter through the door. The baby is ten months old, always sticky, and has just learned to kiss. When Darlene says, “give your aunty a kiss, now,” she smashes her open mouth against my face and gums my cheek.
My other niece is eight. She wears glasses that take up half the real estate on her face. She’s got early onset acne and consumes books like air.
I hand her the movie. “See there, Carrie?” I say. “It’s based on the book.”
She squirrels onto the couch. “I bet the book is better. The books are always better.”
Darlene’s in the kitchen. Two plates of spaghetti spin round the dim interior of the microwave.
“Hey,” I say, gesturing at the oven. “I’m making pizza.” Thin wisps of smoke curl out around the edges of the door.
“I brought our own. I don’t trust anything that comes out of there,” Darlene says. She eyes me up and down, a disgusted look passing over her face. “God! Seriously?” She stole her smock and burned it.
“It’s actually quite handy.” I show her how I’ve put my chapstick and a nail file in one pocket, the remote in another, a spatula and the pizza roller in the third. She rolls her eyes in a way that means, handy or not, she wouldn’t be caught dead in it.
Settling onto the couch in front of the TV, I think to myself, how nice. Darlene and Carrie try to balance their dinners on their laps, but the pasta slides around the paper plates, threatening to noodle onto the carpet. The baby sits between Darlene and me. I feed her the burnt crust of my pizza and she grins after every bite, little black flecks clinging to her lips and gums.
“Anne of Green Gables,” Darlene says as the movie starts. “You remember watching this when we were little?”
“Of course. Mom’s rainy day movie.”
We both turn a little to look at the empty recliner. Over the years, the light and dust have faded the stain; you’d never know someone died in it. I brought it home after Mom’s funeral, the thing everyone else passed over, saying it was just too morbid. The baby climbs onto my lap, her bottom landing squarely on my plate, on the piece I’d saved for last. She takes my hand and pulls it toward her open mouth, closing her gums around my wrist.
“There’s two of us should be here.” I nod once at the recliner and once at the baby. “Do his parents still keep in touch? Send pictures and updates like they promised?”
Darlene stands. “This vacation is giving you entirely too much time to think. Go volunteer or something.” She begins to stack the plates and Carrie protests through a mouth full of food, hands trying to grab it back. “After Mother died, I told them not to bother. He’s their son, not mine.”
“Damn it, Darlene. He belonged to all of us, you know.”
Carrie turns around to shush us. It’s the part where Mathew brings Anne home in the wagon to meet Marilla and she sees the farm as they crest a hill, going all starry-eyed looking at her future.
From the kitchen Darlene says, “I made my choice, and Mother made hers.”
“Like mother, like daughter,” I say to the baby’s head. “Cause and effect.” She giggles as my breath ruffles her hair and turns toward me, slapping one sticky palm on each side of my face.
That night, I stay up watching the movie over and over until midnight. When the clock on my oven blinks 12:01, I finally shut ‘er down. Every Wednesday, same routine – up ‘til midnight no matter the shift I work the next day. That’s a lot of time to think about Wednesdays. Middle of the week. Middle of your life. It was a Wednesday when Darlene took my nephew out to a blue Chevy parked in the driveway and turned him over to the hospital social worker while Mom worked late at the DMV. On a Wednesday two years later, Mom drew the blanket she was knitting over her knees, tucking the needles down the sides, pushed play on the VCR, and opened bottle after bottle of pills. With those kinds of Wednesdays, is it any wonder I make sure I see it through to Thursday?
~
On Sunday the dirty phone calls start. It goes like this.
The phone rings and I answer. “Hello?”
The person on the other end breathes heavily.
“Hello?”
The breathing picks up, getting heavier and louder.
“Who is this?”
Each intake and exhale is punctuated by a raspiness, like an asthmatic at the finish line of a marathon.
I hang up.
He calls back two hours later.
“Listen, you pervert. I don’t know who you are, but this is not ok. Where is your mother?”
“Where is your mother,” the voice says and then he hangs up.
He calls back four hours later.
“What?” I say into the phone.
He begins to breathe.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Don’t you think I’ve got enough on my hands without you calling and breathing at me?” I’m really just scraping the dead skin off the side of my foot, but what’s he know?
The breathing falters.
“Fine,” I say. I turn on the movie, crank the volume as loud as it goes, and set the cordless down by the speaker. Girls, not so loud, my mother says, you’ll ruin your hearing.
When I come back, the breather is gone, his hacking, rasping breath replaced by the methodic pulsing of a busy dial tone. I wonder if my sister called.
~
On Monday I move all the furniture so I can vacuum in places that haven’t seen light since I moved in eight years ago. My mother’s chair is hardest of all to move, one of those heavy hydraulic things for little old ladies who can’t get up on their own anymore. It rises very very slowly and gently tilts the seat upwards, discharging its occupant safely onto her feet. It’s not like my mother needed it, not by a stretch, she had me and Darlene real young, but she found the chair at a garage sale. She was always on the lookout for bargains that would come in handy in the future.
Like I said, the chair’s been empty for years, ever since Mom sat in it last. As I move it, dust rises like a tiny mushroom cloud, probably toxic as old as it is. Under the magical wand of the vacuum attachment, the chair brightens, transforms into a whole different color and I finally remember what it looked like sitting next to Mom’s bay window. All except for the dark stain on the cushion, which has also reappeared.
Tired, I sit down. It takes me a minute to realize where I’m sitting, but instead of jumping back out, I settle deeper in, rub my hands up and down the chair’s arms. The fabric feels soft under my fingers, and when I shift my weight, I think I can almost smell her perfume rising from the cushions. It’s lopsided, though, and no matter how I arrange myself, I always end up slumped in the back right hand corner. I try to pull up the edge of the cushion, but it’s sewed into a panel that covers the lifting mechanism. No chance to turn it over and even it out. No chance to hide the resurrected stain.
~
We held the funeral at Mom’s house, as part of the last wishes she’d left on the notepad next to her chair, written just below the weekly grocery list. Someone, probably my Aunt Gracie, had tucked a navy blue towel over the cushion to cover the spot, but the fabric remained damp from stainlifter and vinegar, and the towel had darkened with little wet stars that resembled constellations I had once known but forgotten.
Darlene spent the day hiding out in the bathroom, rubbing Vitamin E oil on her belly and whispering encouragement to what would become my niece.
A young man, maybe a year or two older than Darlene, wandered in. He alternated between looking around at everyone and staring at his feet, avoiding anyone’s gaze. He was dressed better than any man I had seen before. He wore a suit clearly made for him, not found at the thrift store like my uncle’s tweed jacket with rolled sleeves. He walked over to my mother’s chair.
“Sorry about your mom,” he said. “I’m Derek.”
“You knew my mother?”
“No.” He fiddled with his fingernails. “Sort of. Not really.” He pulled a card from his pocket and handed it to me. On the back he had written his home phone. Derek Tribinowski, it said, Attorney at Law, Specializing in Adoption.
My heart leapt into my throat. What, my blood thundered, had my sister done? It was not uncommon for her to get drunk and call me up with grand plans of hiring a lawyer and “getting him back.” But by morning, all those threats became only so much of last-night’s dinner swirling down the drain. “Is this about my sister?” I asked, “because, I mean, whatever she’s told you, she’s not serious. She knows she can’t get him back.”
“No,” he said, a surprised, then sad look passing over his face. “I guess you don’t know. Anyway, I’m sorry about your loss.” He shifted his weight, looked away.
He patted the armrest of the chair and moved off to make way for my Aunt Gracie, her mouth pressed into a thin line and her brow furrowed as though thinking she recognized him and not glad to see him again.
When I looked for Derek later, he had gone. His eyes were pale green, the color of baby cabbage leaves. A little paler than my mother’s eyes, but kind and crinkly at the corners, like hers had been. A week later, I caught my aunt burning an old box from the attic in the barrel out back. When I tried to wrest it away, it upended into the fire, and the last I saw before the flames turned everything into smoke was a white crocheted baby blanket with pale blue trimming. And that’s when the anger signed the lease on my life. And that’s when I understood. You can watch a movie over and over and over again, but not real life. In real life, sometimes you just have to fast forward to the end.
~
Darlene wakes me up late Tuesday night.
“Thanks a lot, Delores.” Her voice slips over the line, thick with her go-to - gin. “You’re a real big help, you know.”
“Darlene? God, I thought you were my breather.”
She sniffles, sets down the receiver, and blows her nose. “Carrie’s been having nightmares because of that damned Green Gables movie.”
“Nightmares?” I say. “Of what!”
“Yeah, well, she keeps accusing me of adopting her.” Darlene chortles. “Me!”
“Why are you still up?”
“Larry just dropped me off. We went on a date.”
“Date meaning he picked you up and drove you back to where you both work so you can fornicate on the copy machine?”
“Potato, potah-to.”
We chat for a little longer, about Carrie and about the baby. Darlene asks if I think she’s on the right developmental curve, a topic I know about as much of as trigonometry, so I say of course, that she is, in fact, smarter than any other 10-month old I know. Darlene wonders how he’s doing, says he must be heading into fifth grade. My throat tightens until words dry up like so much dust and my breath feels like wind across the desert. His parents live in Arizona, the social worker told Darlene, in Tucson.
After Darlene hangs up, I can’t sleep. I wander through the bathroom, pick up the pile of dirty underwear in the corner and add it to the pile in my bedroom. In the living room, I rewind the movie and start it over again.
I don’t want to sleep but I don’t want to be awake. Outside, rain begins to beat against the thin roof, and I wonder what my breather is doing right now; if he’s given up crank calls, or if he’s just given up crank-calling me. I wish I had used that thing where you can dial back the last person who called you, where the automated voice tells you their phone number. Then I could call and see what he’s up to.
~
On Thursday morning, it’s still raining and I wake to Darlene pounding on my door. I answer in my pajamas and smock, picking crumbs of sleep from my eyes.
Darlene shoves Carrie through the storm door and hands me the baby. “You deal with this,” she says.
Carrie flops onto the sofa and begins to cry into the cushions.
“Daycare won’t take them,” she continues, “because Carrie’s been telling all the kids they were probably adopted and they don’t even know it. Now the supervisor has to bring in a counselor to provide on-site therapy. She said she’s sending me a bill!” Darlene shakes out her tan dress jacket and sluices the water from her hair onto my carpet. “I can’t afford some quack at a hundred bucks an hour to convince a bunch of three year olds that they really did pop out of their mommy’s vaginas.”
“Lovely,” I say.
“You made this mess, you fix it.” She goes to leave, but I grab her arm.
“Wait,” I say, “before you go, sit down here.” I lead her over to the recliner.
“No way. I’m not sitting in that.” She points at the stain.
“Come on, Darlene. I have to know why Mom loved a chair this damn uncomfortable.”
Darlene plants her feet and crosses her arms. “There’s a lot of questions I’d like to ask Mother too, but none of them are about this stupid chair.”
“Fine.” I give her back the baby and sit down. My weight immediately shifts to the back and there I am, disappearing into the corner of the chair. I lift the footrest and fall further in. “See?”
Darlene looks like she might throw up. “This is sick.” She cocks her head to the side, thinking. “Wait. You’re not sitting in it properly. Sit in it right. Like Mother.”
She moves to the couch to demonstrate. She tucks her feet under her butt, the tips of her shoes just showing from under her hips. That’s right. Mom never did use the footrest, she always sat with her legs tucked up. All her weight pushed down on one corner.
Darlene stands and smoothes out her skirt. “I should go. Ten minutes late and Larry will write me up. He treats me so unfairly. As if everyone doesn’t already know.” She holds her coat over her head to shield the rain. At the door, she turns to look at me from the dark cavern of her jacket. “Let her go, Dee,” she says.
The baby totters back and forth from me in the recliner to Carrie on the couch. She tries to climb up to sit with me, but her chubby little legs can’t raise high enough to gain any traction. She just stands beside the chair, bouncing up and down and gurgling words that occasionally sound like my name.
“You’re not adopted,” I say. “And neither are the kids at daycare.”
Carrie looks at me sidelong, face still pressed into the couch. “How do you know?”
“I know about you at least.”
My fridge is populated by moldy sandwich bread and month-old Chinese food. The girls and I decide on cheeseburgers and milkshakes for lunch.
On the way home, I stop at the video store and pick up Anne of Avonlea while the girls wait in the car. I heard once that if you’ve got a song stuck in your head, there’s two ways to get it out – play that song over and over or get a different, equally annoying song stuck instead. If my niece convinces herself she wants to be a boarding-school teacher and marry a man named Gill, I guess we’re moving in the right direction.
Carrie groans when the title appears on the screen in delicate Victorian script.
“It’s a different one,” I tell her. “A sequel.”
We’re at the part where the debonair older man asks Anne to marry him. And Anne loves him, she really does. But she loves Gill more and she just can’t sell out. If Derek were in this movie, he’d be that handsome older man, perfectly dressed. And I’m sad that Anne rejects him. Because he deserves to have the family he wants, even if she’s not quite sure.
Carrie takes a bite of burger and mayonnaise drips down her chin. “Why does Mommy cry,” she asks without turning away from the screen. “Sometimes Mommy sits at the kitchen table late at night, crying.”
I go to stack the plates. Carrie holds hers in both hands and shakes her head when I reach for it. “Is it because I’m adopted and she wishes she could give me back?”
Darlene got pregnant with Carrie a year and a half after the day Mom came home and found the house empty except for the two of us and the social worker’s business card, the hands she’d been holding out for him falling empty at her sides. Mom and I couldn’t fathom it, how Darlene could let it happen again, so soon. When Mom asked Darlene what she planned to do, she shrugged and said she hadn’t thought about it. My mother moved worms off the sidewalk, caught spiders in a jar and dropped them in the garden, fed the feral cats. On that day so many years ago, she walked round the table, placed one hand on my sister’s shoulder, and with the other, slapped Darlene hard across the face.
I guess when you’re shimmying out of your underwear in the back of somebody’s Taurus, you don’t realize how everyone else’s life gets flushed down the toilet along with yours.
“No,” I tell Carrie. “Your Mommy would never give you up. Not for a million dollars, not for anything.” Not even for a second chance with the first one.
~
Darlene picks my nieces up very late. From her bloodshot eyes and smeared mascara, she’s been drinking and crying.
“Did you fix it?” she asks.
I shrug. “I tried.”
“Larry dumped me.” Darlene sits on the couch. Her hand drifts to the back of Carrie’s sleeping head, stroking her hair. “He thinks I need to focus on my family. Suggested I take some vacation to sort things out.”
“Vacation,” I say and nod. “Maybe the Grand Canyon? Mesa Verde?” Something in Arizona? Maybe I could drive?
“I was thinking Vegas,” Darlene says.
After they leave, I wander through the house, picking up leftover clutter. I find the baby’s left sock and one of Carrie’s library books. Carrie stuffed a wad of Kleenexes down the side of the couch. A stale fry peeks from beneath the recliner. I sat in it last.
I sit in my mother’s chair and tuck my legs up underneath. Earlier, when the movie ended, we let the tape keep running, all the way until it rewound itself and turned the VCR off, just white noise and snow falling on the screen. I push play and lean toward the couch to snatch my blanket. I wonder if my mom really liked this chair or if the world just stopped when she sat in it. I feel safe – no matter how far I lean to the sides, even over the back, the weight keeps me centered, grounded. I could stay here awhile.
When my legs tire of being all scrunched up, I stretch them out and push the button that raises the footrest inch by inch. I begin to fall again, but I think I can sleep. The phone rings.
“Darlene, just get some sleep,” I say by way of answering.
Deep, heavy breathing.
“It’s you,” I say. “I thought you were my sister.”
His breath rattles likes he’s juggling a ball of phlegm at the back of his throat. My mother hated noises like that, “mouth noises,” she called them. Smacking gum, smacking food, squishing a pocket of air between your teeth and cheek so bubbles come out the corner of your mouth, chewing.
“You’re making mouth noises,” I say. “Clear your throat.”
He does.
We sit on the phone together, neither of us saying anything, both of us just breathing, just being. Him somewhere in an apartment, a place I imagine as dark, perhaps a basement, with mildewy curtains and stacks of wrinkled nudey magazines. And me, in a little house across town with a yard the landlord won’t let me mow because of liability but won’t do himself because of laziness. Me in my mother’s chair, wearing a dirty blue smock under my blanket, watching a movie I can barely remember, a movie that used to be her favorite.
“Night-night,” he says and hangs up.
Darlene doesn’t call over the weekend, doesn’t show up at my door at seven in the morning. I don’t call her either. I sit in my mother’s chair. I wear my blue smock and tuck the cordless phone down into one of the deep pockets, the remote in the other. I walk to the corner store wearing it and when the clerk goes to bag up my chips and candy bars, I tell him thanks, but don’t bother. I slide everything down into those pockets and walk home through the rain.
The chair doesn’t smell like my mother anymore, if it ever really did. Now it smells like orange soda and pizza flavored potato chips where I’ve been wiping my fingers on the arms. It smells like SavingsMart and me.
I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake, the rain has stopped, but the yard is dotted with puddles and the gutter leaks rainwater that falls in two thin streams outside my front window. My hand, stuck far down between the armrest and cushion, fell sleep in the night. When I move my fingers, they tingle with the sharp, delicious sensation that hugs the border between pleasure and pain. As I pull my hand out, the acute slice of paper against flesh springs me awake. I reach in my other hand, expecting an empty chip bag or candy bar wrapper, but instead find a folded over business card clutched in my fist.
The raised black lettering on the front of the card has worn away, but on the back, folded safely inside, rests his phone number written in black ink. I slip the phone from my smock pocket and begin to dial.
A second chance with the first one. My mother’s eyes would be smiling.
Bio: Amy Foster lives, writes, and teaches in Portland, Oregon. Adoption has been a life-long theme in her life, from before her birth when her grandmother was forced to give up her son in the 40s to her own beautiful family through open adoption.