I came down with chills and a headache. I took one of my mother’s blankets and put it around me.
The only thing to do was to choose my mother’s side in absolutely everything. That has always been the answer to my problems. That was getting harder to do because all I could think about was turning 13 years old.
Chapter XVI: My Thirteenth Birthday
I smiled a lot and helped because I had to get my mother well so that she didn’t keep sliding back. My aunt calls every night still and she told me that I am a pessimist, which means hopeless. She says I am the moody type, and at my age I should be happy.
On my thirteenth birthday my mother gave me a birthday present and it was a beautiful red sweater for spring. She wished her parents had been that nice to her. My father sent me enough money to buy new shoes. Davey sent me a story that he had written about visiting a bakery with his class.
Since it was my birthday, my mother told me the story of my birth. After I was born, she told my father to take her home, but that the baby should stay in the hospital because “the mother does not feel well.” There was all of that burning and tiredness that a new mother gets. No one understands the way a woman who had gone through it would. “Whoever thinks of the mother at times like this?” The nuns were aflutter, saying, “You should want to take your baby home. Mothers want to take their babies home.”
My mother asked the nuns if when they go home at night they had to get up at midnight and take care of a crying baby? They went home and had the evenings to themselves, isn’t that right? Now what could the nuns say to that question? My mother had seen what caring for a baby all day and all night did to women. That kind of up-all-night exhaustion wasn’t going to happen to her.
My father visited me in the hospital every day for weeks, tapping on the maternity ward window. One day he brought me home when the nuns said he had to. My mother wasn’t ready for me. And I was spoiled, having been picked up by those nuns every time I peeped. And the vomiting to a point where she had to take me to the doctor and ask the doctor what was wrong with me. “All I do is clean up after her.” My mother laughed like she always does when she tells that story about when I was born. Like hearing that is a big gift for me.
I didn’t laugh this time. Something about how funny my mother thinks it is makes me mad. And how I have to clean up the coffee table after her now, but I can’t complain or else I’m not a big holy person. I keep sitting there looking at her, having secret not very nice thoughts.
Then my mother got mad at me. She threw me one of her Aunt Linda looks, all snippy and kissy. She looks like that girl at school who never talks to anyone except to be mad.
She really gets going. She talks about her life in Ambrose. There was nothing there, nothing but waiting for my father to come home, talking with those neighborhood women who were nothing but slaves to their husbands and children. Running here and there, baking, ironing, a roast in the oven and two vegetables on the stove, then the kids come crying in. Then my father comes home with bleeding trout wrapped in a newspaper and cleans them in the kitchen sink, which she had just spent the whole evening scouring the living daylights out of. “Never a thought to me. I will never return to that. And this, this, is what there is for a woman who will not put up with it any longer. I am striking a blow for women everywhere.”
My mother threw her arms out. “Who can leave me next? There’s no one left! Who can judge me now?” she says. “I’m at the bottom of the heap. I have been left, left sick, and left poor. I am what becomes of people who are left. Next it will be you.”
She said that to me, like I was the enemy again.
I went to the lookout for a cigarette and thought about the Project. How the kids called it “Chance Pants” and nobody said why. How even the grownups were afraid of The Office. How nobody talked about Cookie and whether she was alive. Nobody would tell me anything. Does that mean that everybody but me knows something? And Davey was a million miles away. But my mother was at our unit. I had to get myself in shape to be happy and do everything she said. But I didn’t and she could tell.
When I got back from the lookout, right away my mother said, “Some help you’ve been. Handing me a few crummy pills twice a day. You mope and complain and drag around here with that long look on your face. Everything has to center around you. Here I am with a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit.”
Then she said, “When was last time that you asked how Mother is? Go to your room and I’ll call you when I need you.”
That made me mad. I’m nothing but a helper who never gets any credit. I went to my room and for the first time lit up a cigarette there. I opened the window and blew smoke out of it. My mother yelled, “You serve at my pleasure, little girl.” That was my birthday.
It was getting hard to be good with my mother mad at me and saying mean things. I had this feeling of wanting to leave to go to the lookout all of the time.
My mother keeps saying, “You’re lucky you even have a place to live.”
I tried not to be scared but she is ready to kick me out any minute. My mother and my aunt say the same things over and over to me. I think that they are best friends against me.
Then, all of a sudden, that night, for my birthday, Susan brought me over my jeans and gave me a baggy sweatshirt like teenagers wear. I opened the door this time, and she said to come over and read magazines sometime. Then she whispered maybe I should go over there for dinner. She has another surprise for me. That’s what I wanted to do more than anything. I had to get over to Susan’s.
But my mother was wide awake so I couldn’t. She started yelling about my father bringing home a trout and who thinks about the mother at a time like this. She started talking about how Esther was going to visit her that night because she had a prediction and this one was a whopper.
To top things off, my aunt called and said, “You’re not forgetting to give her the medications are you? Because if you did she could have a seizure and die.”
So I said, “You do it” to my aunt.
She said she makes a point of ignoring snippy remarks from snippy little girls. “You make sure you give her enough medication,” my aunt said. And that’s when I had the idea.
Really nonchalantly, I gave my mother two orange and white pills and when she was half asleep, I gave her a third one, which the doctor never said to give her but never said I shouldn’t. After she fell asleep, I put on my jeans and new sweatshirt and went over to Susan’s for pizza and Coca Cola jello. I thought that was the surprise, but it got even better.
“Man,” Susan said, “You are ready for your haircut.” She pretended to have scissors in her hand and lifted my hair up and said “snip snip snip” and I can’t believe this is happening. She got out real scissors and told me I can’t watch in the mirror. I can feel her cutting, though, and my frizzy old hair is all over the kitchen floor. I closed my eyes when she pressed down on my forehead and she cut my bangs. I could actually feel it happening, becoming a teenager.
She handed me a mirror and there I was. She gave me exactly the haircut that we had planned for months. My forehead had long bangs and she cut off every single bit of frizziness all the way around my head. My hair was parted in the middle and then Susan said, “Well, there’s the proof. You are an official teenager now.” My hair looked exactly like the teenage beautician’s at the beauty school in Ambrose.
Susan came with me back to our unit to defend my hair but my mother was asleep. When I held the little purse mirror under her nose, it was foggy.
The next day Susan came over to look through our medical dictionary because she’s going to be a psychiatrist someday and figure out her persecutionist mother. My mother could hardly sit up. She was lying down but talking about the past like it’s now.
“Looking back,” my mother said, “I’d have to say that good health is a tyrant, and all of you people expected way too much of me, your father and you kids, the cat, everybody wanting something, open this door, open tha
t door, and then the nuns sent home mimeographed instructions about how every damn kid had to make a flower crown for the Holy Mother Mary of God statue. A head the size of a pin. And where was your father for that one? At the lake, of course. So there was Mom, up until midnight, winding teensy rose petals around a wire ring the size of a thimble so that her child could pop a crown on a statue during school prayers and get all the credit. The Mother of God didn’t care, but those nuns sure did. And who’d get the credit for it? The child. Never a thank you to the mother. No nod from the almighty pulpit.”
With no actual sound coming out of her mouth, Susan looked at me and said, “Man, she’s a stupid broken record.”
Later on I put on my jeans and sweatshirt and I went to the little store with the Project kids. The man who owned the grocery store told me that I had to go in with an adult escort, with him in fact, like all of the other Project kids. “You steal,” he said, “every last one of you.” I told him that I had special dispensation from him, remember, because I don’t look Project. “Well, you do now, you look damn Project. You wait to go in like the rest of them.”
I said, “I hate your stupid guts,” and I left.
It was worth it to get insulted over teenage clothes and hair. That made me happy because I was figuring out what to say. That was the Project’s fault and as long as I lived there, I was going to say stuff back.
Chapter XVII: Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens
“Light Mother a cigarette.” My mother pulled her bathrobe around her and pinched the top button. “By the way again, I don’t want you leaving the Project.”
“It’s safer to leave here than to be here.”
“Your hair is hanging in your eyes. We’ll get you a permanent and a haircut next week.”
“I like my hair the way it is. I’m not getting any more permanents. I’m having teenage hair from now on.” I lit her a cigarette and handed it to her.
“You’ll have the kind of hair that I say you’ll have. Little girls do not dictate to their mothers.”
“I’m not getting a permanent. You can’t make me because I will not go to a beauty school. If you make me go there, I will run away.”
“Oh, well, we can’t have that. That’s not a letter to your father you’re writing, I hope.”
“No, not anymore.”
“No. Not after all he’s done. And you writing to him like he’s Daddy Hero and you’re his little baby girl. Leaving your mother to fend for herself. A brain tumor the size of a grapefruit.”
That’s when it all boiled over in me. The whole year of being her slave and trying to make her happy. Which I never could do. She’s always mad at me and telling my aunt what a big failure I am.
“Man,” I said, “I am sick of your brain tumor.”
I stood up because I was ready to leave and go to the lookout.
My mother sat up kind of tall. “Stay put. You may be sick of my brain tumor, but not any sicker of it than I am.”
I sat down. “You love having a brain tumor.”
She blew out all of this smoke in this real mad way. “What has happened to you? You’re not even Rebecca anymore. Nobody talks to their mother that way, least of all you.”
“Nobody else has you for a mother.”
She jabbed her finger in the air. “For your own damn good, you’d better understand here and now that your mother doesn’t put up with guff from you or anybody else. What if I said I don’t want you and I put your things on the porch? Then where will you go?”
“I’ll run away back to Ambrose.”
“There is no ‘back to Ambrose.’ Your father sold the house.”
We didn’t have another home to move to anymore. “He sold our house?”
We didn’t have a real house anymore. I’m Project now. I go, “I’m Project now.”
“You have been for some time.”
Everyone will be laughing at me my whole life. I said, “People will call me ‘just Project’.”
“Well, that sure took the wind out of your sails.”
“Why didn’t you do something when you could?”
Then my Aunt Linda came in through our door carrying two bags of groceries. “I can hear you two scrapping from the parking strip. You’d better pipe down because you won’t find me back at The Office fighting so that you have the privilege of staying here. My days with that are done.”
My mother said, “Oh, look who’s here. It’s Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens herself. Always the good one. Always the one who did everything right.”
My aunt whirled around on her. “Let me tell you something. You’ve been nothing but trouble from Day One. Even when we were kids I took the fall for you.”
“Always the perfect one, my older sister. But I hear from Esther how you run your life.”
“Who’s Esther?”
“She writes through me. I’m doing automatic writing. She tells me the terrible things that you and your husband do to get money and a big splashy house.”
“Well, if this Esther is saying such awful things, tell her to stop writing to you.” My aunt slammed a bottle of catsup on the table.
“She isn’t a pen pal, for God’s sakes, Linda. She’s a spirit who moves my hand. Something not of this world.”
I couldn’t believe she was telling Aunt Linda about Esther. It wasn’t going to help her win.
Then my aunt turned around real fast to my mother. She goes, “Oh no, you’re not. You’re not doing that. Our father did that baloney, all of these ghosts and goblins and running around town, making a fool of himself, getting his name in the newspaper. He couldn’t keep a job but he was so special that the ghost of some old dead French king spoke through him. Of all the people in the world, why would a French king pick him? He didn’t even have a job. You’re not doing this anymore. You’re not going to scare me with this malarkey.”
Esther scared my Aunt Linda. We were on the same side for once.
“I could use a little help here, Rebecca.” I jumped up. Man, I had been glued to my chair watching them.
“Don’t talk about our father that way.”
“You’re so much like him. Speaking up here and speaking up there. Everybody admires you because you’re outspoken. Always the biggest mouth in the room. Well, your big mouth landed you in a housing project.”
Aunt Linda was insulting my mother. It was my mother’s turn. So I looked over at her.
“I’m principled like our father. Ideas, ethics, he had a backbone, not like certain spineless people who need money every other minute. He stuck to what he believed in, no matter what. We didn’t have all those baton twirling and tiddlywinks lessons that your kids go to and we were just fine.”
“We weren’t just fine. Especially you. Now I’m heading back where I belong -- living it up in my view home. And you’re not invited.” My aunt left because she was so mad at us. My mother and I had a fight, a real knockdown dragout, she called it.
Chapter XVIII: The Fight
My mother and I sat there staring at each other at first. It was just me and her. I was in shock with my aunt being mad, but my mother was cracking up, which is the opposite of how I felt. She said, “You’ll have to forgive your aunt. She gets a little silly when she’s upset.”
“She’s gone for good. Who’s going to get groceries for us?”
One by one, my mother insults everybody, my father, The Office, my aunt. What if something went wrong? Who would bring groceries every week? Who would take her to the doctor? It was just me and my mom.
“Hand Mother her coffee.” She said that really casually.
“Get your own.” I said, “You hurt everybody’s feelings but you expect them to be good to you. When you insult everybody, they don’t want to help you.”
“I always win these kinds of arguments, in case you hadn’t noticed. Your Aunt Linda will be back bearing groceries next week at this time.”
“You didn’t win with my father.” Because it’s
true whether it hurts her feelings or not.
My mother pointed her finger at me. “Oh, blame it on the mother. You. You’re more like your father every day, selfish. Throwing over his own family. Never coming home. I stuck to my principles and I always will. When I left your father, I stood up for my kids. I took a stand for families everywhere.”
“Nobody even knows we’re here.”
“Don’t say anything more,” she hissed, “you.”
“I don’t care what anyone thinks of me anymore. Everybody feels sorry for you because you have a brain tumor. I don’t feel sorry for you. And don’t use the underdogs as an excuse. All you do is lay around and write to ghosts. Your big achievement for the day is moving spoons on the TV tray.”
She wasn’t cracking up anymore. She was mad and swishing around in her blankets. “I have special powers. It’s too bad for you, little girl, if you don’t believe in your own mother. If you don’t believe in me, what will you believe in? Nothing. And I feel sorry for you and what’s ahead. I have powers. Oh, you bet I do. I can see into the future, little girl, and yours is none too bright. Things will happen to you that you can’t predict. But I can.”
“If Esther knows everything ahead of time, why didn’t she tell you about Cookie? Why didn’t she tell you so that you could do something about it? Why doesn’t she tell you something that will help us?”
“Why don’t we just call The Office and ask about this Cookie. Hand Mother the phone.”
“Don’t bother The Office,” I said. “We’ll get kicked out.”
“They’re not going to kick me out. I just had brain surgery. If they tried something like that I’d call the newspaper, the Pope, and the President.”
She looked me up and down. Like she knows I could still be afraid of the irrigation ditch and the Project and even though I have teenage hair I am afraid.
Everything welled up inside of me like a wave that wouldn’t stop. I yelled, “I tried to be nice to you, and now I don’t care anymore.”