That Christmas morning at Tootsie’s, I sat on the carpet near the tree, handing presents to the family. I opened mine as I encountered them, slowly, letting the boys open three in the time I took with one. Eventually I pulled out a solid rectangular gift that could have been a hardcover book. I flipped up the tag. TO: SARAH, it read. FROM: MOM.
I looked at Tootsie, who met my gaze with a small smile. I flicked my eyes back down to the package, then carefully pulled back the paper to reveal a solid brass frame, two-sided and folded like a book. Inside were six photographs of me and Mom, each carefully trimmed and set within the matting that came with the frame. On the right side was a five-by-seven, beautifully lit and composed, no doubt taken when Tootsie and Jimmy visited us when I was very small, as they were the only people in the family who owned a high-quality camera back then. In this photo, my mother and I sit in uneven sunlight. I’m about four years old. I hold a Barbie doll and look straight into the camera with a serious expression, blond hair in pigtails. It’s a face I still make—friends often recognize it when I show them this picture, laughing as they point it out in a chubby-cheeked kid. Behind me, my mother wears a flowing top in a 1980s calico print and her signature blue eyeliner. She is twenty-three.
As I sat next to that tree, I imagined Tootsie calling other family members so she could corral all the other pictures in the frame for me—snapshots from later eras that I knew she wouldn’t have owned. I thought of her hovering a pen tip over the gift tag, wondering what to write. And I wanted to thank her, but I didn’t know how. She had done a lovely thing for me, but hadn’t acknowledged that she had done it. We had no script for tenderness between us. I set the photo frame aside and dug through the presents, looking for something else to distract Alan and John.
I still have this frame; it is the first thing I unpack when I move, and if I go on a long trip I bring it with me. It’s heavy, but it has crossed many miles of land and ocean. There are five photos in addition to the one taken by Tootsie or Jimmy, all arranged in the left-hand side of the frame. A studio portrait of mother and infant, in sepia tones. A snapshot from the Halloween two years before Mom died: me as a princess, Mom as a gypsy. The two of us eating sandwiches on a stone wall, legs sticking straight out before us, then sitting on a sunny hillside surrounded by tangled blueberry bushes, wind blowing our hair. And then a moment from our final Christmas: Mom and me standing in front of a glowing tree at the last family party she would attend. In it, my mother is wearing the suit we selected for her funeral viewing, chosen for its solid structure and high neckline. Tootsie couldn’t have known this; she’d been absent from both the party and the funeral. That photo resonated differently for me than it did for her, like almost everything else.
25
* * *
before
I didn’t have the full picture regarding Denny, and Mom was too unsure to act on what she saw. A few months into their relationship, his temper got him fired from the Shop. I now know that he became more controlling after he left, perhaps because he couldn’t monitor Mom all day anymore. Her friend Sandy recently told me that she would often see him pull Mom aside, talking low into her ear and scowling while tears came to her eyes. Sandy couldn’t hear these exchanges, but she gathered that they were over little things: Crystal smiled at a male friend and Dennis took it the wrong way, or he was simply having a bad day and she hadn’t given him enough attention.
Shortly after he found a new job at an auto parts store, Sandy said, Dennis made Mom cut her hair. I was surprised to hear this; despite everything she put up with, it’s hard for me to imagine her taking such a specific order. But I admit I can see her giving in after he hounded her about it over and over, reasoning that, well, it’s just hair, after all, and hair grows. But her hair wasn’t just hair. Her hair was the most powerful emblem of her beauty, and it seems he wanted it reduced. He wanted to be the only one looking at her.
* * *
Soon after that, Mom realized that she had made a mistake getting involved with Dennis, that the relationship was unsalvageable. He kicked the side of our house so hard once that he broke the siding and had to replace it. Another night, he left our house so angry, he crashed and totaled his truck. He broke a shovel in half, wielding it aimlessly in a tantrum. He grabbed Mom’s arm once, hard—at least, once that I saw. She kept trying to leave him, but he kept pulling her back in. By early spring 1994, the Shop’s hand-sewers made a joke of checking Crystal’s finger for the engagement ring each morning—she pulled it off and pushed it back on that frequently.
Secretly, I had started to worry that Denny would go over the line, push one of his and Mom’s screaming matches too far. I thought of this line like a physical thing, a definitive landmark that I would recognize when we came to it. We had watched all those horror movies and made-for-TV dramas: I knew that violent men only got more so after marriage, after the woman was trapped, and that sometimes even nice guys turned out to be psychos. This fear stalked the edge of my mind.
But then he’d be back: the same funny, smart, cute guy I knew, arriving at lunch with flowers for her, maybe a stuffed animal for me. I knew he was the same man who yelled at Mom in the night, who called her a slut, who would furiously accuse her of not loving him enough, as though that were the worst possible sin. But in the daylight, it was hard to believe it.
So I kept renewing my faith in him, making excuses. Denny was under a lot of pressure, after all—he had wrecked his truck, and then sprained an ankle weeks later while running around playing tag with me in the yard. He was also having money troubles, although I didn’t know at the time that this was because he had gotten himself fired from the Shop. I thought it was possible Mom had gotten nervous after the engagement was official, might have become more exacting, harder to please. I knew how frustrating she could be, how stubborn. She never, ever said she was sorry for losing her temper.
I pushed away my concerns. You’ve watched too many movies, I’d say to myself. Denny will get better. Everything will get better. They just need more time.
But there was no time. On a Sunday in mid-May, the three of us celebrated Mother’s Day at my grandmother’s house. By Thursday Mom was dead, and Dennis became the prime suspect.
* * *