“You know what kind of mother does that kind of thing? Your kind of mother. The kind of mother who didn’t want me in the first place and now can’t wait to get rid of me. The kind of mother you are. The kind of mother who only wants to hurt the daughter she didn’t want in the first place. A nothing kind of mother. A nothing. You’re a nothing.”
That was real. Those words happened. They spat themselves out of my mouth and into that dark, invisible air and I didn’t know how many more would have followed them except that there was a click, a tiny click, and then lamplight pooled on my mother’s face. She was sitting straight up in bed, that narrow twin bed she slept on as long as I could remember, and she was staring at me. Her eyes were dark lakes and her hands were hovering in the air, palms turned to each other, rising to cover her ears and then lowering. Trembling. I had never seen my mother’s hands tremble. I had never seen my mother with that look on her face. I had never seen my mother’s hands lift to her ears like that, trying to fend off words, sounds, rage, hurt.
Because she had never had to.
I had never spoken to her like that.
That was the image I couldn’t get out of my head. Those were the seventy words—I wrote them out once and counted them, like a Words by Winter assignment from hell—I could never take back. My mother, her trembling hands, the stricken look on her face that not once before or after that night did I ever see again.
* * *
Next morning she was gone before I got out of bed. In the kitchen there was no trace of her: no coffee mug, no bowl rinsed of Cheerios, no spoon laid to dry on a dish towel. The truck was gone too. None of this was unusual—sometimes, if the Dairylea trucks they wanted her to un-decal were hours away, she had to head out at dawn—but I crept through the house, all senses alert, like a detective at a crime scene.
Because that was what it was.
Once words have been raged at someone, they can’t be taken back. They enter into the body and heart of their victim, and they change the victim forever. What is not as commonly acknowledged is that they do the same to the one who screamed them out. Nothing was the same after that. We never spoke of what had happened between us on that dark night. Not then, and not ever.
From school that afternoon I walked into the village and headed south a mile out of town. Whenever a car approached I stepped carefully onto the narrow shoulder of the road, trying to avoid the ditch, which was deep and filled with snow and ice. My boots were heavy and I clutched my silver hammer earring in my mittened hand. It took a long time to reach the choir director’s trailer, where her Impala was parked in the driveway, which meant that she was home, and it took a while to get up the courage to knock on her door.
“Clara? Is everything okay?”
Which meant that she didn’t know what had gone down the night before. My mother hadn’t talked to her. This was clear from the easy worry on her face, the way she leaned against the doorframe and held the door open for me.
“What’s going on? Did something happen to Tamar?”
At that, I nodded. Yes. Something had happened to Tamar. The lightweight had come flying out of her corner, a demon of a fighter who hadn’t known she had it in her.
“What is it, Clara? Tell me what happened. Something to do with those goddamn decals? Did she fall off the ladder?”
I shook my head. She was losing patience, I could see. Worry and fear flitted across her wide face. “Clara. Talk to me.”
“Annabelle!” I cried, my voice strangled, and she caught me in her arms. It was the first time I had ever called her by name instead of Miss Lee. She held me, and I cried, and she asked me over and over what was wrong, what had happened, but all I said was that my mother was okay and that I was sorry, my mother was okay and I was sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. The smell of fried potatoes filled the air of her trailer. The miles back north that I walked later that afternoon were long and cold. Tamar didn’t look up when I walked into the house. She had already eaten, an empty can of SpaghettiOs filled with water and sitting in the sink.
Nothing could take those memories away. Facts for $2000, the Daily Double, bet small or bet it all.
The night I raged at my mother, the night that something broke inside both of us, was something that Sunshine and Brown didn’t know about. They knew that my mother had been resolute that I leave home, that I go far away for college, they knew that my high school boyfriend and I had split up and he had joined the army and died later in Afghanistan, but they didn’t know about that night. It was buried inside me, a shame too great to let surface.
* * *
I knew Asa Chamberlain from age twelve on, when he and his family moved to Sterns from Vermont. I knew him the way you knew someone who lived nearby, someone you rode the school bus with. We weren’t friends. He was two years older, and when you were growing up that was an unbridgeable gap a) unless you were next-door neighbors, which we weren’t, or b) until you got to high school, which we did. Asa was a senior and I was a sophomore when we started going out.
The bleachers at a football game was how it started. I had jumped down to look for my tiny silver hammer earring, which had fallen out of my hand and down between the seats into the depths. That was what we called it, my friends and I: The Depths. Who knew what you would find down there: trash, chewed gum, cigarette butts, condom wrappers, empty beer cans, dead mice or couples making out.
Not me, though. I didn’t make out with anyone. Not because I didn’t want to. Sometimes when a couple was down in The Depths making out during a game, or when I was at a party and the basement was dark and full of friends cradled together on chairs or the couch or the floor and the air was thick with beer and lust but I was upstairs with the ones who’d come up for air, drinking in the kitchen or eating chips in the living room, my whole body would spark and tingle with want. But there was no one for me. I was an island of one.
But that day, the day of Asa, I had jumped down from the bleachers and there I was, rooting around in the mess of thrown-away cups and bottles and Doritos bags and napkins. I had to find the earring. It was my old-man earring, the earring that the old man who looked after me when I was a child, whose trailer in Nine Mile Trailer Park I went to on Wednesday nights when my mother was at choir practice, had made for me. He was a metalworker, long gone now, the person who inspired my book, The Old Man. If the earring wasn’t in my ear it was in my pocket, the pocket of whatever I was wearing, and I wore nothing that didn’t have pockets, for that reason.