My mother had been born there, on an old kitchen table, but she saw it as an ordinary house on a dusty dead-end road off the highway, with a tavern on one side and the Land Bank on the other. It was out of the way, surrounded by unused land. She thought it was chance, bad luck that brought us here. She always meant to move.
For a while though, we rested. We lived with my grandmother.
One afternoon, like so many others, my mother and I lay together on our backs. The room was warm and swimming with light. I propped myself up on an elbow, watching her because I wasn’t tired. It took willpower for me to keep still. A smile formed slowly on her face until she was asleep and it seemed as unconscious and without meaning as a dolphin’s smile. I knew I shouldn’t wake her so I just waited, watching for her to blink her eyes open and remember me again.
Asleep on the white chenille bedspread, her hair fanned out over the pillow, my mother was almost beautiful, prettier than she was the seven or eight times a day she looked in the bathroom mirror. She thought her nose was too long and she wasn’t happy with her hair. But asleep, her features settled into a calm order. She had pale skin with freckles on her face and hands and arms and knees. Some of the freckles were much darker than the others, so it seemed you could see through her skin to deeper and deeper layers.
I crept off the bed and tiptoed to my mother’s makeup bag on the dresser and stole a brown sharpened pencil to draw freckles on my own arm. It took a long time to make them look real. I wanted to connect the dots on my mother’s knee, making pictures, the constellations of the stars, but I was afraid the pressure of the pencil would wake her up.
I was used to waiting. Our life in that house, where the furniture seemed to pin the floors to the ground and dense shafts of sunlight came alive with particles of dust, despite my grandmother’s conscientious cleaning, seemed to be a temporary arrangement, like an unscheduled delay in a remote train station, best slept through. My father had never wanted to be there. My mother didn’t want to stay either. They thought of it as a place to spend time we would forget about as soon as we left, as if it had never happened. I was the only one who liked it.
And I knew about losing time. Drawing freckles on my arm, I watched the clock on the dresser while my mother slept. I knew if she didn’t get up soon, there wouldn’t be time to go out and do anything. Then, as my mother’s breath stretched and seemed to enter a freer, wider plain of sleep, my grandmother knocked on the door.
“Come now, if you’re up. You can come in the kitchen and draw.”
I tiptoed out, glancing back at my mother, my head heavy and dizzy from lying down. While my grandmother played solitaire on the kitchen table, I sat on the floor in a rectangle of sun, drawing with my set of sixty-four crayons.
The house stayed quiet except for the hum of the wall clock and the slap and shuffle of my grandmother’s cards. I took all my crayons out of the box in direct disobedience of my mother’s instructions, to take out one at a time and then put it back. I had a plan for a city, and half of it was already made. I lifted my construction paper from the cupboard. My city had a population of sixty-four and it was somewhere in California. Every family had its own house and yard and every crayon drew its own room. Some of the crayons fell in love. The darkest red was the father of his family, the palest, his youngest child. The Lemon Yellow drew a school bus and was the bus driver every morning. On the side, he grew lemons. Sky Blue painted the sky and filled swimming pools in backyards. Greens worked as landscapers and park builders. They sodded everyone’s lawn and planted rows of palm trees on the streets. Shades of gray paved the highways and Yellow Orange painted the divider. Reds made chimneys and grew rose gardens.
I shaved bits from each crayon onto a sheet of wax paper. Today, my city needed a church. The grays made a stone building and I sharpened each crayon to contribute shavings for the windows. The crayons were getting haircuts.
When I had a colored honeycomb of shreds, I folded the wax paper and took it into the other room. I plugged in the iron. My mother’s breathing made a high uneven hum. That first year after my father left, she was always resting. Now that I was doing something, I didn’t want to wake her. I lay the iron on the wax paper and counted to one hundred. The sheet of paper felt warm and stiff when I lifted the iron. The colors had blurred and become transparent. I carried the paper back to the kitchen floor.
My grandmother looked down at me over her bifocals. “What all have you got there?”
I showed her roads, the school, the parks and the houses. “These are the stained glass windows for my church.” I traced the empty arched holes in the building.
Then, when I finished explaining, I stared down at the flecks of color in the linoleum floor. I was embarrassed. I knew I shouldn’t have told anyone. This wasn’t the way you were supposed to play with crayons.
My grandmother pushed her glasses on closer and looked down at my papers. They were just papers now and a mess of crayons. I scooped up the crayons from their seats on the school bus and started shoving them back in the box.
I turned and asked, “Do you think I’m dumb?”
My grandmother shook her head. “It’s good. It shows you have good imagination. I guess you’ll turn out smart like your mom and dad.”
That moment, relief spread from my chest like a pill finally dissolving. My back was warm. I just sat in the square of sun. I didn’t feel like drawing anymore, but I didn’t want to move. This was happiness, the warm sun on my bare legs. This was happiness. My grandmother went back to her cards, sweeping them together and shuffling the deck.
“Well, they all came out so it’s going to be a good day,” she said.
My mother slept. I didn’t want her to get up anymore. She could sleep until my father came back and kissed her eyes awake. I didn’t draw because I was afraid I would spoil it. I held up my windows to the real window; the sun came through, casting reflections on the white refrigerator door, the light sparking souls in all the colors.
The first real city I ever saw was Milwaukee. My mother and Lolly drove there to go shopping and they took me along. In a huge department store, my mother found a pair of red children’s shoes, flat with pointed toes, Capezios just like her own. I wanted every thing of mine to be like hers. The three of us stood staring down at the shoes for a long time, but my mother wouldn’t buy them.
When we got home, I threw a tantrum. I felt nothing would be right again until I had those shoes. It was as if I’d lost something, although I’d never seen them before. I’d never imagined there were tall, peaked buildings, a place like Milwaukee. The next day I still felt agitated. I got up early from a bad night of sleep and dressed myself, tied my sneakers and said I was running away to Milwaukee to get my shoes.
“And how are you going to buy them when you get there? You’ve got no money,” my grandmother said. She stood in the kitchen ironing. The ironing board came down from the wall and blocked the doorway. I had to crawl under, brushing her nyloned legs, to get through. The stockings she wore were thicker and orange, you couldn’t see her skin.
“I’ll get some,” I said.
“Well, who do you think is going to give it to you? Sit down, why don’t you, and I’ll fix you an egg. And let me button your blouse on right.”
But nothing my grandmother said was consoling. My grandmother wouldn’t understand about fancy shoes. This was between my mother and me. I walked out the screen door and let it slam. A few minutes later, my mother stood on the porch. “Come back here! You get back here this instant!”
I marched over the lawn to the road. I was four years old, I don’t know where she thought I could have gone. Everyone on Lime Kiln Road knew me. But she came running across the yard, her bathrobe flapping open, and her fingernails bit into my arm.
“Come on, get back in there.” When she pushed me through the kitchen door, a box with the new shoes lay open on the table, the brown paper wrapping ripped apart.
“Are you happy now?”
I j
ust looked at the shoes, the shoes I was going to walk to Milwaukee for. There they were, mine. I was relieved and then they were just shoes again.
“Aren’t you going to say thank you, now that you got what you wanted?” My grandmother shook her head, ironing harder.
“You just can’t surprise her with anything, Mom, she just won’t wait.”
I began to know I’d done something wrong. I didn’t even want the shoes anymore.
“Well, you’ve got to teach her. You can’t give her every little thing she wants. Let her try and walk to Milwaukee once.”
“But then she cries.”
“Well let her cry.”
That day my mother drove past the dry cleaner’s to the edge of town by the river and stopped the car on the side of the road.
“We’re at the orphanage,” she said. It was a dark brick building with tiny windows at the top of a hill. My mother reached over and opened my door. There was a ditch full of waxy, perfect buttercups.
“I brought you here because I’m telling you, Honey, you can’t act the way you’ve been doing. I’m warning you. This is where you’ll end up if I can’t make you mind.”
I sat as long as I could, looking straight in front of me out the windshield, maybe a moment longer, and then my chin wobbled and I started to cry. My head was wet and in my sweatered arms. My mother reached over and tried to hug me in her lap, even though I was too big and she hurt my back against the steering wheel. She started to cry, too, and she kissed me. “Don’t worry, my Little Bit, I’ll never give you up. Don’t you ever worry.” Then it seemed as if all she’d ever wanted was to make me cry.
She reached over and closed my door again. The buttercups blurred together now in one smear of color and we could hear crickets starting. Lights came on in the orphanage’s small windows. Her face was over me. She looked down at me hard, as if she were looking at her own reflection in water. One of her tears dropped into my eye.
For the millionth time, when we were children, Benny started running through a field, shouting ah-a-ah-a-ah-a-ah-a-ah-a, with his arms out to the sides, until I couldn’t hear him anymore. My cousin Benny was always running, he ran anywhere, just to run. Later on, he rode snowmobiles, plows, dirt bikes, motorboats, and cars. I didn’t like him running away like that, but I didn’t want to scuff behind, looking down at the ground, so I ran too, as if I’d felt like running all along. But Benny could run forever and I got tired. I stopped in my grandmother’s yard and lay down to listen to the leaves.
Sometimes I thought I could hear the earth spin and I dug my hands into the ground and held on. The sound of the leaves there went on forever, but you had to run and then stop to hear it. The earth was like a shell you put your ear to. Then I turned over and looked straight up to the ceiling of leaves, big as hands, and the spots of blue sky between them. I even put my tongue out to taste the ground; it tasted like rusty metal. But that was as far as it went.
I always wanted more. I ended up running to Benny’s house to see if he was home yet. If he wasn’t there, I would have gone to look for my mother. The wind was always the same. It was like loving someone who didn’t know my name.
Aunt Carol said, yes, Benny was in his room, she would go get him. She opened the sliding glass door, asking would I like to come into the breezeway, but I said no, and leaned against the back of the house. The sky was enormous with pink and gold-veined clouds. It was almost suppertime. With Benny on his way to see me, walking through his house, I felt I didn’t need anyone, anymore. I didn’t mind being alone. I could look at other things. I suppose it would have been that way with my father, if he was there. I looked and as far as I could see, the sky was all there was. I imagined a whole continent of men, stopping and leaning on implements, looking up.
We went to school far away, in town. Benny was a year older, so he went first. A school bus came in the morning, and picked him up at the end of Lime Kiln Road.
On Benny’s sixth birthday, Carol wrote a note so I could go to school with him and safety-pinned it to my sleeve. That day the class made hats. I loved it. I glued a lace veil and plastic lilies of the valley to a blue construction paper oval. The boys made black top hats. We posed in the afternoon outside the school in our hats. In the photograph, we look old, like tiny country men and women.
Benny and I lay next to each other on our mats during rest period and when we woke up, the teacher brought out a cake in the shape of a lamb, with flaky coconut frosting. My grandmother had baked it that morning and driven it to the school in a box. The teacher passed around napkins with two tiny squares of cake on each one.
The first bite tasted better than anything, it was so sweet and soft. Then I remembered my mother and felt bad, so I wrapped my second piece carefully in the napkin and slipped it into my jacket pocket to take home to her. That day I didn’t mind parting with Benny at the edge of our lawns. I had gone somewhere too.
“Well, sit down and tell me what all you did.” My grandmother’s back was to me as she poured a glass of milk.
“We made hats.”
I was feeling the napkin in my pocket, trying to assure myself that the cake was still there. I’d held the piece inside my pocket all the way home on the school bus. I’d held it tight. I was worried now; the napkin was still there, but it seemed empty, the cake must have somehow slipped out. My fingers dug into the pocket, touching every part of the lining. It seemed amazing, impossible. It never occurred to me that I might have crumbled it, holding too hard. Finally, while my grandmother dealt cards for double solitaire, I took the napkin out under the table and spread it open on my thighs. There was nothing but a pile of crumbs.
While my grandmother shuffled, I got up and threw the napkin away. I had nothing to give my mother now, and I wasn’t even going to mention it. Without the cake, she wouldn’t understand.
The next year, when I started school, a hygienist came to my class and passed out new boxed toothbrushes.
“How many of you have your own toothbrush already?” she asked.
Most of us raised our hands. The few who didn’t kept their hands folded on their desk tops and looked down. But Theresa Griling was bold in her dumbness. She got into trouble because you couldn’t humiliate her. When people didn’t like her, she dared them.
“I got one that’s my brother’s, too. It used to be my papa’s,” she said.
The hygienist sucked in her breath and looked at Theresa Griling as if she’d said something so wrong that the best thing to do was to keep very, very quiet. She walked to Theresa Griling’s desk and stacked two more boxes of toothbrushes.
“Kin I have a red and a green instead of two greens?”
The hygienist silently made the exchange. “How many people are there in your family?” she said, then.
“Five, six counting my papa.”
“Four, five, six. There. You can give them each a present.”
“But my papa don’t use one no more.”
“Anymore,” the nun said gently, from the back of the room, her beads clicking softly in her hands.
The hygienist smiled enormously at Theresa. “Well, perhaps you can persuade him with your good example how important brushing is. He could lose his teeth prematurely.”
“He already did. That’s why he don’t brush.”
We laughed out loud and the hygienist looked around herself, touching her skirt, as if there were invisible flies. Theresa won that time; we could see it. The hygienist lost control. She walked to the front of the room and looked at Theresa with pure hate. The hygienist had huge, square teeth. She pointed to the blackboard where she’d drawn a picture of a cavity. Her face was perfectly colored with makeup. “I’ll get you in the end,” her large smile seemed to say. She was wearing a neat belted navy blue dress with matching navy blue shoes. Theresa’s blouse was yellowed and her gray anklets sank down below the heels of her shoes. I was thinking of Theresa at home, where we lived, the flat fields and long rails.
I told my mother about the h
ygienist that night. We were driving around by the river and her friend Lolly was in the car with us. “You watch out for those Griling kids, because they are filthy, let me tell you,” my mother said. “He is, Bub is. When their mother died and he just let them run around like they do, the city carne out and took them away. They put them in the orphanage.” She was talking to Lolly now, in the front seat. “And the nuns gave them baths and combed their hair; they said their hair was all matted and one of them had burrs in her skin. And they cleaned them all up and gave them new clothes and fixed their hair nice, you know how the nuns are, but the kids ran away and went home again. And when the social workers came to the house, the kids said they’d rather stay with their dad. No matter how terrible, kids just always want their parents.”
“Isn’t that funny,” Lolly said.
When we came home from Las Vegas, the winter I was seven, my mother seemed to lose interest in me. She spent more time with Lolly. I went outside after school, and stayed sometimes into the dark. I ran and played with the kids on Lime Kiln Road because of Benny. Benny was my cousin and that gave me something.
After school, I skidded into the kitchen, my grandmother flipped up the hood of my sweat shirt and then I ran through the yard to the fields. I met Benny and the other kids from our road down by the tracks where the rails were empty and dull silver as far as we could see. We got down on our heels and hit rocks on the rails while we thought about what we would do. We only played made-up games. We didn’t use anything bought. Around us, the country seemed so big. Later, when I moved to Carriage Court, the kids played sports on the street with names: Capture the Flag, Red Rover, Kick the Can.