Buying a house and land were incredible accomplishments for a single mother with Mom’s salary. She made so little that I qualified for free milk at school, although when I noticed this and brought her the paperwork, she spurned it. “You’re not a free-milk kid,” she said. Looking back, I can see that part of the challenge of buying her own home was swallowing her pride to get that government loan, asking a faceless agency to officially designate us “low-income.”
Gwen was so proud of her for buying her own house. “You did it, Crystal! You did it all on your own,” she said. “See, you don’t need a man. Stay away from the men.” But Gwen’s outlook wasn’t really that different from Mom’s. All these years later, she tells me, “I wasn’t too thrilled with the location of that house. You were all alone out there in the woods, with those logging trucks driving by. All those men who could see you and your mother out on the lawn.”
There are dogs there now. A chain-link fence stands along the border of the front lawn, tracing the old police tape. Gwen tells me that the new owner raises German shepherds, and although I’ve never seen them there when I’ve passed, as she speaks I can hear them howling, I can see them rushing the fence, jaws open, coarse fur full of cold winter air. No one’s getting into that house now. Unless someone lets them in.
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We moved into the house in November, but even when early winter hung cold and still over the stripped trees, we took regular walks. Once or twice a week, we would head out on Route 93 toward town, moving along the quiet, forested road until the light started to fail and we turned around and headed back to our warmly lit house, the comforting hum of television. If we started early, we could turn left at the end of the road and walk all the way to the War Memorial, passing Linda’s house on the way. Once every few weeks, we would stop in to visit, and each time it felt like a special treat.
Linda didn’t have kids of her own, so she invested a lot of attention in me. She always had my latest school picture on her fridge, which she kept stocked with my favorite soda—Orange Crush—so I’d have something to sip while she and Mom drank coffee. She asked me a lot of questions, and seemed delighted by whatever I had to say. Around this time I started making beaded glass jewelry—lizard earrings were my specialty—and each time I made a pair for Mom, I made a pair for Linda, too. One night when Mom dropped me off at Grammy’s before going out, I presented her with matching ankle bracelets for the two of them; when Linda saw them, she insisted that they put them on right away and wear them out dancing.
Linda had a lot less responsibility than Mom—in addition to being childless, she’d never married—and could remind her to have fun, to unwind. Just as Linda could borrow motherhood for an afternoon, Mom could pretend that she inhabited Linda’s relatively relaxed life. More than once, I pictured the three of us living together, no men around, just a swirl of pop songs and perfume and laughter. I always felt so happy in the carefree aura of their friendship. Linda made Mom laugh, and it was her best laugh, the one where she threw back her head, exposing her pale, narrow throat.
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By midwinter, it was mostly dark when I got off the school bus around four o’clock, and black night would be coming down as Mom came in the door about half an hour later. Our walks suspended, we watched more television. Once or twice a week, we’d ride to the dusty, brightly lit Viewer’s Choice Video, at the bottom of Maine Hill, its angled red roof a reminder of the hot fudge sundaes we’d enjoyed there when I was very small and the building was still a Dairy Queen. We’d wander the aisles and pick out a VHS tape or two, then get dinner down the road at House of Pizza, a tiny place that had been there forever—even today, its counter is still green Formica, its menu board still written in white snap-on letters.
We loved romances, and would fantasize, side by side, about future boyfriends and weddings. We also watched a lot of horror films—The Shining, The Amityville Horror, Children of the Corn—staring rapt at the screen and then tiptoeing down the hall to our comfy beds when it was over. Mom let me watch almost anything, certainly some things that were too scary for me, but she loved a good thrill and wouldn’t watch alone. Scary things were fun for us back then. She couldn’t know that we would end up in a horror of our own, that fear would never again be fun for me.
Mom also read a lot of creepy books; she had a collection of old paperbacks about the Jonestown massacre, the Mansons, Ted Bundy. She banned me from these, but I’d sneak into her room when she was out and peek at the photo inserts. The pictures were ghastly: pools of blood showing black on the black-and-white page, thin girls in courtrooms with hypnotized eyes. Scariest of all were the ones where the bodies had been replaced with pure white, the detail cut out of the negative entirely, the person utterly erased.
Next to the thriller and crime novels stood a Time-Life series on the paranormal, tall, black books filled with mystical, silver-printed pictures. Magic took many forms in our house, from star charts to Mom’s tarot deck to the ESP experiments I subjected friends to on the rare nights I hosted sleepovers. I’d beg Mom to do a tarot reading with me or to hold a séance with her Ouija board, but she would always laugh me off. Still, she kept these things on her wicker bookshelf, next to a dusty Bible. She also loved traditional holidays, taking seriously the need to decorate for each; she taped paper cutouts of shamrocks on the windows for Saint Patrick’s Day, cherubs holding golden bows for Valentine’s. When I got a little older and cast doubt on the existence of Santa, she’d say, “C’mon, you can’t believe everything those other kids tell you. You know Santa exists!”
On Halloween, my mother’s sense of mystery and happy celebration came together. The first year we lived in our house, I was a pirate and she was a vampire, with a cape and fangs and full face makeup. We followed our annual ritual precisely; Dale had never come with us on Halloween night, so this was one holiday that we didn’t have to adapt, that remained perfectly the same even after we left him. We began by driving to Grammy’s, and she was happy and nice, vicariously playful. Our next stop was an assisted-living facility, where we walked along the warm corridors, knocking on door after door, collecting candy in my pumpkin-shaped bucket. Here we knew most people would be home, and would be happy for a moment of company. The old people loved us, a couple of girls dressed up silly and out on the town.
After the Home, as we called it, we drove along a few back roads looking for porch lights. “What do you think of this one?” Mom would ask as she slowed in front of a well-kept ranch house. “I don’t know,” I’d say. “Looks a bit dark. But they might have something fancy!” Sometimes when we knocked and no one came out, we could tell that people were hiding inside. We laughed at them, but Mom’s message was clear: Don’t grow up to be a jerk with no candy in the house on Halloween. Don’t be the kind of person who won’t even come to the door.
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