“You girls know better. I didn’t know where you were. You know better.”
That was true and not true. We knew a lot, yet there was a lot we didn’t know.
chapter three
WE LEFT THE MECHANIC’S SHOP as he watched our mother starry-eyed. I stared after him, wondering whether it was possible that anybody would ever look at me that way. I’d seen men already look at Marilyn that way, but not me. Well, there was Tommy Dime, who had actually kissed me once, which made our glasses click together. His family was originally named Dimitrious, but they changed it to Dime after they moved to America. He wore glasses even stronger than mine, but I liked him anyway.
We stayed that night in another dive, where my mother fell asleep first and I fell asleep last. I figured my mother had nothing to think about, and that’s why she slept so easily. What I thought about that night was my father. See, first I thought about the bracelet Mom had worn that night, and that started me thinking about Mr. Bronson, who’d given her a bracelet that looked kind of similar, and then I thought about how Mr. Bronson always caused trouble with my mother, and then I thought about my own father. Jiro originally came from someplace called Wakayama-ken. In Japan, a ken was like a state. He visited me in Chicago now and then for one week, and he always said I could come stay the summer with him if I wanted, but I never wanted.
I guess I felt like my father was nice but kind of embarrassing. He had glasses even thicker than Tommy Dime’s. That alone was embarrassing. And every year he bought me a dress that was nothing like what I would wear. I didn’t know who would wear dresses like that, except maybe Millie Jamison from the class behind mine. Her mother made her dress like she was seventy years old. I still had last year’s dress from Jiro. My mother made me put it on for my school picture. I walked around that day feeling like I was an old lady.
Anyway, in the morning we set out again. In Utah we hunkered down and sped through the Great Salt Lake Desert. We had no idea precisely where the 1950s nuclear clouds had drifted into Utah, but we kept our windows shut, as if that would protect us from ambient radiation.
In Nevada we repeatedly ran from our hot car to the air-conditioned markets, where we put nickels into the slot machines. After losing a couple of dollars, the slots got boring and we planned to roar through Carson City, stopping only at the hot baths. Unfortunately, the baths made us so sluggish, we all fell asleep and almost drowned en masse. We spent the night at yet another cheap place, this one with a cheap casino downstairs. I watched while our mother got dressed. She was not slender and not fat. She was perfectly in between. If she weighed five pounds more or less, she wouldn’t have been perfect. Every day she weighed herself, and if she weighed four pounds off, she immediately adjusted her eating. Her skin wasn’t oily and it wasn’t dry. It was dewy. Even the skin on her arms and hands and neck seemed dewy. And she did just so much exercising and no more or no less. Every day she looked at herself in the mirror to make sure she was still perfect. When she felt one day that she was starting to look older, she changed the lightbulb. She couldn’t stand the thought of getting older. She was perfect now.
Watching her, I suddenly felt sad. “Mom, will you stay and watch TV with us?”
She seemed surprised. “TV?”
“Yeah. There’re good shows on.”
She rubbed my cheek like I was the cutest thing in the world. “You are so, so dear, Shelby! I think you’re my dearest daughter.”
She left then. We played gin rummy, and later we sat at the window looking down at the gaudy street. Colored lights decorated all the casinos. I wondered if I would see my mother walking with her arm laced through the arm of some rich guy. Then I started thinking of Tommy Dime and the way his shoes clicked on the sidewalk.
Then I started thinking about my father again, who was way off the U-scale in terms of being Uncool. For the past ten years he’d owned a small gum factory in Arkansas. Before that he’d owned a baseball cap factory, and before that he’d returned to Japan for a few years. He’d actually made a load of money once but had lost it all when he invested everything in trying to sell gum in Pakistan. I didn’t know whether I loved him, or whether he loved me, or whether I even cared that much one way or another about any of it. I asked my mother once where she met him, and she said, “At the airport. I don’t know what possessed me.” That told me she didn’t think much of him. I didn’t think much of him either, but it still hurt my feelings when she said that.
Our mother showed up at one in the morning and collapsed on her bed, exhausted. “If there’s one rich man in this whole rinky-dink town, I’d like to know where he is!” she said, and fell asleep in her pretty dress.
The next day we managed to get on the highway by noon. Early in the evening when we neared Green Valley, California, we stopped to rent a motel room so that we could all shower and put on dresses. My mother wore a simple cotton sheath and no apparent underwear. The air seemed to glitter around her because she was so excited to see Larry.
We ran out of gas outside Larry’s town, so we needed to call him. When we all turned to Maddie (who was in charge of our gas gauge), she giggled sheepishly and hid her face in her hands.
We stepped outside and listened to our mother’s voice quiver as she said into the pay phone, “Larry? It’s Helen. We’ve run out of gas.” I could tell she was concentrating hard on not withering in the heat, as though he would be able to tell over the phone if she were less than exquisite. I could almost see her straining as she focused on being gorgeous. For instance, she fanned herself with exactly the right effort, not so hard that the fanning would make her sweat more, but not so softly that she created no breeze. She checked her mirror repeatedly, and every time she looked beautiful.
My mother looked younger than her age—“That’s the single biggest advantage of Japanese blood. Are you memorizing this?”—and her skin was gold and flawless and radiated with what I can only call “invitation.”
We hung on her every word. Marilyn aspired to be exactly like our mother. Even I aspired to be just like my mother, but like I said, my mother did not always have high hopes for me because in addition to wearing glasses, I liked animals, which were “totally useless,” and because she and I held different views on manners. She practiced good manners—“A woman without good manners might as well be dead”—but she didn’t believe manners came from the heart, like I did. To her, manners were just a way of getting another bauble. I tried to have good manners all the time, but it was hard for me because I liked to feel it in my heart first. My mother said, “Feel what you will in your heart, Shelby, but catch your men with your guile.”
There were other things a woman might as well be dead without—namely, clear eyes that could lie without blinking and that certain curve at the waist. Marilyn and I wondered just when we might develop the coveted curve. But we were both skinny girls because both of our fathers were thin.
We waited out there for an hour and a half. Three trucks stopped for us, but my mother told the drivers that her husband was coming. She wore the wedding band she put on when she wanted to ward off men.
Larry arrived at sunset in a faded yellow pickup. He was tall, muscular, and endearingly nervous. He was the least quirky of the fathers. His only quirk was that he didn’t have any quirks like the other dads. When he got out of the truck, he and my mother stood for a full minute taking each other in before he leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. She flushed, and then he knelt in front of Lakey, her eyes blazing with pride that this handsome man was her father. He hugged her tight, and I thought I saw his eyes well up.
He’d brought us each a gift. Mine was a rock with a leaf imprint. Marilyn got perfume, and Lakey and Maddie got bugs suspended in amber. We stood in our sweaty dresses admiring our gifts. Then my mother threw her arms around him and they kissed underneath the disappearing evening sun. We sat down to wait. There were a couple of false alarms when we thought they were going to stop, but then they would start up again. The sun continued its
descent. They stopped kissing.
Larry had brought us a five-gallon can of gas. Once he’d poured it into the tank, we set off. Lakey got to ride with him, because she was his daughter, and the rest of us tossed a coin to win the privilege of sitting in his truck too. I won. I told him I would bring my maps to help guide him. My mother said, “Shelby, he doesn’t need a map. A man has natural instincts.” She’d told us earlier that if she ever married him, she would leave him alone to be himself. She quoted her heroine, Mae West: “Don’t marry a man to reform him—that’s what reform schools are for.” That was the first we’d heard of the possibility of marriage.
Lakey sat between him and me. She kept pulling on my arm and even pinching me, just because she was so excited to be with her dad.
Larry checked the rearview mirror. “I was real surprised when your mom told me she was bringing you all out,” he said. “Real surprised.”
“When was the last time you talked?” I asked.
“Oh, we talk every week.”
“You do?” Lakey and I yelped in unison.
He drove so fast, it was like being on an amusement park ride. I instinctively hung on to the door handle. By the time we reached his house, our mother was furious at him.
“Someone needs to domesticate that man,” she said with admiration.
He lived in a modest house. We all knew immediately how much money people made from their houses. That was our mother’s training. But the truth is, while I loved a fancy house, I was more comfortable in a modest house. I didn’t like to worry about breaking or staining anything expensive.
chapter four
THE WHOLE TIME WE STAYED with Larry, Mom dressed in jeans and T-shirts and her makeup was subdued or absent altogether. During the days, we swam in a local swimming pool while Larry went to work building a deck. He hadn’t been able to get that week off. “I’m a working man,” he said, meaning that some of the other men in my mother’s life were not.
We girls liked to lie outside under the sun and keep a bucket of ice nearby to rub on ourselves. One day when the thermometer said it was ninety-three degrees, we lay on Larry’s deck while our mother attended a yoga class. Marilyn got dewy while the rest of us got sweaty. Sweat stung my eyes. When we’d become nicely burnished, we put flowers in our hair and powwowed.
“I wish she would marry him,” Lakey said softly. “We could live in California.”
I pressed my lips together. I wanted to say, I wish she loved my father, though I wasn’t sure whether I wished that or not. Nobody ever mentioned him except with a tone of sympathy for me.
“I wish Larry was my father,” Maddie said. I patted down her hair, but it bristled back up again around the cowlick on the top of her head. She also had slight buckteeth, but our mother hadn’t decided whether she would need braces or not. Mom said some girls looked cuter with buckteeth, and we would have to wait until Maddie got older to determine whether she was one of those girls.
At least I had straight teeth. I wiggled my feet in front of the fan. My toes were all the same length. That was an imperfection. It made me look like I had fins. I closed my eyes and let the fan blow on my iced-down face. With my eyes closed, I could see my mother and Larry kissing. I saw it so clearly that it was a little like spying. Maddie pressed against me to get some air from the fan. I fantasized that my mother was taking us to Disneyland. I’d always wanted to go there.
I smelled smoke and opened my eyes. Marilyn had lit a cigarette. Wow, that was pretty grown up. “Since when do you smoke?” I asked.
Marilyn said, “Since last week. I’ve been keeping it a secret. A guy gave me some Kools.”
Maddie wrinkled her nose. “Mom said some men don’t like smoke.”
“I know,” Marilyn said. “But I’ll quit before I get married.”
“I’ll quit when I meet my husband,” Maddie said.
I laughed. “You’re only six, and how can you quit something you never started?”
“I’ll start when I’m sixteen and quit when I’m eighteen.”
“I’m not getting married until I’m old, like twenty-five,” I said.
“Some women are divorced by then!” Marilyn exclaimed.
“Twenty-five!” Maddie said. “Marilyn, can I try your cigarette?”
Marilyn looked thoughtfully at her. “Just one puff,” she said.
Maddie took the cigarette but didn’t inhale, just blew out the smoke in what I guess she figured was a sophisticated manner. To me, she just looked like a little girl playing grown-up, but Marilyn said, “Good job, sweetie.”
I didn’t like to see Maddie playing grown-up. “Maddie, stop that,” I said. “Give it back to Marilyn.” She reluctantly handed Marilyn the cigarette.
“So why do you think we came here?” Lakey said.
None of us answered at first. Finally, I said, “Because Mom likes Larry so much and because Pierre was annoying her and because . . .” I lowered my voice for no reason. “And because Mr. Bronson is bothering her about custody.”
We all looked at Maddie. She said, “I don’t like my father.”
I didn’t like her to feel that way, but I couldn’t say anything because I didn’t think that much of her father either. He was such a KIA he even tried to get on Jeopardy! but didn’t make it. And once when Mr. Bronson came to our house to see Maddie, he scolded me for how short my skirt was. That made me mad. He wasn’t my father and didn’t have the right to scold me. But our mother said we were supposed to see the good in our fathers, because they were part of us. That may have been true, but it wasn’t our fathers who were raising us and it wasn’t our fathers we wanted to be like.
That night when Larry got home from work, he brought flowers that he said were for us, and they really were. The nice thing was that when he gave us girls flowers or gifts, he really did seem to be giving them to us. Sometimes some of my mother’s boyfriends brought us things, but though they were giving the presents to us, they were really giving them to impress our mother.
Another night Larry and Mom took us bowling. Usually they ate dinner out while we watched TV. The bowling alley was a huge forty-laner in the middle of nowhere. Only three of the lanes were being used.
The first game, I bowled a 24, Marilyn a 28, Lakey a 31, and Maddie a 9. My mother smiled proudly at us, as she often did. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she asked Larry, and he agreed. He bowled a 200. We bowled a couple more games, with similar results, and then Larry gave us a ten-dollar bill to get change so that we could monopolize the outdated jukebox. We played “American Pie” so many times in a row that the proprietor made us sit down and threatened to take the rest of our coins away.
The four of us sat in the hard chairs in the smoky alley and watched our mother and Larry act like two people in love. I could see that the few other people in the alley noticed. Some of them watched and smiled.
I said, “Someday if they get married, do you think we’ll all have the same last name?”
Maddie cuddled next to me. “I want to have the same last name as you.”
I hugged her to me. Then we sat quietly, listening to the sounds of pins falling and balls rolling as our mother and Larry bowled and kissed, bowled and kissed, until two in the morning. Maddie snored lightly as she lay against me, and I stayed still so as not to bother her. My arm started tingling and then fell asleep, but I didn’t move.
Finally, Larry and our mother were ready to leave. Larry carried Maddie, who could sleep through a tornado. The proprietor smiled as we walked past, then called out, “You two remind me of my husband and me when we were young!”
Outside, the trees were dark and beautiful. “Larry?” I said. “Are you happy?”
“About what?”
“Just in general.”
“I guess I’m happy most of the time. Why?”
“I don’t know. I feel happy right now.” I liked being up at two in the morning surrounded by my family.
At home that night, my mother followed Larry into the bedroom,
and later in their voices I heard how much they cared for each other. Lakey made us all pray that they would get married, and we did so.
Finally, everybody fell asleep except me. I lay there until the sun began to rise. My heart felt filled with yearning or sadness or something I didn’t understand. I heard Larry getting ready for work, and I smelled coffee. I got up and walked into the kitchen in my pajamas.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning!” he said. “What are you doing up so early?”
“I haven’t been to sleep yet.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Larry?”
“Uh-huh.” He sipped at his coffee.
“Do you love Mom?”
“Of course I do, sweetheart.”
“Everybody calls me ‘sweetie’ or ‘sweetheart.’ I think more people call me that than my name.”
“That’s because you’re very sweet.”
“I think it’s because I wear glasses.”
He laughed. “That too.” He drank more coffee.
“Larry?” I said.
“What’s on your mind, sweetheart?”
“I don’t know exactly. I was just—I felt sad or something.”
He set down his cup and looked at me seriously. “About what?”
“I don’t know . . . Mom can’t keep, like, living like this forever, can she?”
He picked up his cup again but just looked in it as if he were reading the way the cream swirled. Then he set down his cup again. “Here’s the thing. Even while you’re being young, you also have to be getting old at the same time. Do you see what I mean?”
And I did. “You mean Mom’s not doing that. She’s not getting old.”
He reached out and rubbed my cheek and smiled sadly. “She is getting older. We all are.”
“But you love her?”
“Of course I do.”
I looked at my funny toes. “Okay, I was just wondering.” I suddenly felt really sleepy.