Chapter 5
MY FATHER DIED THE SAME WEEKEND as my eleventh birthday. To this day, when I think of him, I taste Duncan Hines yellow cake, topped with sugary buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles. I smell the melting wax of my twin number-one birthday candles, shoved side by side into the top of my lopsided round cake. I hear music, “Happy Birthday,” to be exact. A song I’ve never sung to my own family and never will.
Motorcycle accident, it turned out. My father wasn’t wearing a helmet.
Darwinism, my mother would mutter, but her blue eyes were always drawn, her expression deeply saddened. My first experience that you can both hate a man and miss him terribly.
Losing a parent isn’t a great financial proposition. Up until that point, my father’s job as an electrician and my mother’s part-time work at the corner dry cleaners had kept us solidly blue collar. Cute little apartment in a working-class area of Boston. A single used POS car for my mom, the weekend motorcycle for my dad. We bought our clothes from J.C. Penney, or if my mother was feeling frisky, T.J. Maxx. I never worried about food on the table, or the roof over my head. My friends in the neighborhood were also working class, and if I didn’t have much, well, at least I had as much as they did.
Unfortunately, the working-class lifestyle generally leaves households with just enough income to meet monthly obligations, while not quite enough to fund such luxuries as savings accounts or, better yet, life insurance.
After my father died, my mother and I lost seventy percent of our family’s income. Social Security kicked in some survivor’s benefits, but not enough to bridge that gap. My mom went from part-time work to full-time hours. When that wasn’t enough, she started a cleaning service on the side. I’d go with her, two nights a week, plus every weekend, perfecting my own vacuuming, dusting and washing skills as we scoured our way toward one more meal on the table.
Good-bye, cute little apartment. Hello, one-bedroom subsidized living unit in a vast, soulless building where gunfire was a nightly occurrence and the cockroaches outnumbered the human occupants a thousand to one. On Friday nights, my mother would light the gas stove and I’d stand by with the can of Raid. We’d take out two to three dozen roaches at a time, then watch Seinfeld on a tiny black-and-white TV to celebrate.
Good times in the new world order.
I was lucky. My mom fought the good fight. Never gave in to hopelessness, at least not in front of me, though subsidized housing units have thin walls and many nights I woke up to the sound of her sobbing. Grief. Exhaustion. Stress. By rights, she was entitled to all three, and in the morning, I never spoke of it. Just got up, and continued on with the business of surviving.
I discovered art in high school. Had a great teacher, Mrs. Scribner, who wore bright-colored peasant skirts and stacks of silver and gold bracelets, as if a gypsy had gotten lost in inner-city Boston. Students made fun of her. But the second you entered her classroom, you couldn’t help but be transported. She covered the bone-white walls in Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Pollock’s splattered drips and Dali’s melting clocks. Color, flowers, shapes, patterns. The dingy halls and battered lockers and leaking drop ceilings of an underfunded public high school faded away. Her class became our refuge, and guided by her enthusiasm, we tried to find beauty in an existence that for most of us was harsh and, for many of us, tragically short.
When I told my mom I wanted to study art in college, I thought she was going to spit nails. Fine art, what kind of degree was fine art? For the love of God, at least study something practical like accounting, where one day I could get a real job, and earn enough money to get both of us out of this hellhole. Or, if I absolutely had to be creative, what about a marketing degree? But at least study something useful that would one day qualify me for doing more than asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
Mrs. Scribner brought her around. Not by arguing that I had talent worth pursuing, or dreams worth chasing, but by mentioning there were a number of scholarships available for inner-city youths. At that stage of the game, free money was the key to my mother’s heart. So I studied and painted and sculpted, exploring various artistic media, until one day I read about silver-infused clay and realized I could combine sculpting with jewelry design, the best of both worlds. My mother even liked it, because jewelry was tangible, something you could sell, maybe to some of her cleaning clients if it came down to it.
I got into college just in time for my mom to be diagnosed with lung cancer. Darwinism, she would mutter, while gazing longingly at her pack of cigarettes. She had options, but none that she pursued very hard. Honestly, I think she still missed my father. I think, nine years later, she just wanted to see him again.
I buried her my sophomore year. And just like that, I was twenty years old and alone in the world, armed with a college scholarship and the desperate need to create, to find some beauty in a world that was just so grim.
I did okay. My parents raised me right. By the time I met Justin, he marveled over both my innate resilience and inner vulnerability. I worked hard but accepted his helping hand. I never questioned his desire to work hundred-hour weeks, as long as he never questioned my need to be alone in an art studio, armed with precious-metal-infused clay. I never expected to be saved, you know, didn’t go looking for Prince Charming or think that once I met him, now I’d get to live happily ever after and never want for anything ever again.
And yet… I fell hard. Completely, passionately in love. And if this strong, handsome, incredibly hardworking guy wanted to give me the world, well, who was I to argue?
We had balance, I told myself. We had love, mutual respect and a whole lot of lust. Which was shortly followed by the Boston brownstone, the cars, the clothes, not to mention an entire lifestyle beyond my wildest dreams.
Then we had Ashlyn.
And if I’d once fallen hard for my husband, I fell even harder for my child. It was as if my entire life had been building to this one moment, my finest work, my greatest accomplishment, this tiny bundle of precious life.
That first night, her sleeping form bundled against my chest, I solemnly stroked her pudgy cheek, and shamelessly promised her the world. She would never want for anything—food, clothes, safety, security. She would not live forever haunted by the taste of birthday cake or the smell of melting wax. She would not fall asleep to pops of gunfire or wake up to the sound of her mother crying.
For her the skies would be bright, the horizon unlimited, the stars always within reach. Her parents would live forever. Her every need would be met.
This, and more, I promised her, my darling girl.
Back in the days when my husband and I were still in love and I was convinced that, together, we could handle anything.