That meant that the whole time Liza and Guy were in grade school, they had been forced to do their sponge-bath bathing at the kitchen sink. That was where they had hand-washed their clothing as well. All that had been doable until the hot water heater had given out, sometime during Liza’s last year of elementary school. After that it had been cold water only, because heating water on top of the stove for baths or for washing clothes had been deemed another extravagant waste of electricity and money.
Liza remembered all too well the jeering boys on the grade-school playground who had bullied her, calling her “stinky” and “dirty.” The stigma stayed with her. It was why, even now, she showered twice a day every day—once in the morning when she first got up, and again in the evening after she got home from work.
Gathering herself, Liza turned to face the back door of the house she hadn’t stepped inside for more than a decade, even though the place where she lived now was, as the crow flies, less than five miles away. Looking up, she noticed that, in places, the moss-covered roof was completely devoid of shingles. Just last year, Olivia Dexter, her landlady in town, had replaced the roof over Liza’s upstairs apartment in Great Barrington. That roof hadn’t been nearly as bad as this one was, but Liza had seen firsthand the damage a leaky roof could do to ceilings and walls and insulation. How, she wondered, had her mother made it through the harsh New England winter weather with no electricity and barely any roof ?
Liza’s mission today was in her mother’s kitchen, and that was where she would go. The disaster that inevitably awaited her in the rest of the house would have to be dealt with at a later time. She remembered all too well the narrow paths between towering stacks of newspapers and magazines that had filled the living room back when she was a girl. Maybe all those layers of paper had provided a modicum of insulation during the winters. Even so, Liza wasn’t ready to deal with any of that now, not yet.
Liza made her way up the stairs and then stood for a moment with her hand on the doorknob, willing herself to find the courage to open it. She knew how bad the place had been eleven years earlier, on that distant morning when she had finally had enough and fled the house. Rather than facing it, she paused, unable to imagine how much worse it would be now and allowing a kaleidoscope of unwelcome recollections to flash in and out of focus.
The memory of leaving home that day was still vivid in her mind and heart, even all these years later. Her mother had stood on the front porch screaming taunts and insults at Liza as she had walked away, carrying all her worldly possessions in a single paper grocery bag. She had walked down the half-mile-long driveway with her eyes straight ahead and her back ramrod straight. There were still times, when she awakened in the middle of the night, that she could hear echoes of her mother’s venomous shouts—worthless slut, no-good liar, thief. The ugly words had rained down steadily as she walked away until finally fading out of earshot.
Liza Machett had heard the old childhood rhyme often enough:
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words will never hurt me.
That was a lie. Being called names did hurt, and the wounds left behind never really healed over. Liza’s heart still bore the scars to prove it. She had learned through bitter experience that silence was the best way to deal with her mother’s periodic outbursts. The problem was, silence went only so far in guaranteeing her safety. There were times when even maintaining a discreet silence hadn’t been enough to protect Liza from her mother’s seething anger.
Liza understood that, on that fateful day, a pummeling from her mother’s fists would have come next had she not simply taken herself out of the equation. Their final confrontation had occurred just after sunrise on a warm day in May. It was the morning after Liza’s high school graduation, an event that had gone totally unacknowledged as far as Selma Machett was concerned. Liza’s mother, trapped in a debilitating web of ailments both real and imagined, hadn’t bestirred herself to attend. When Liza had returned home late that night, dropped off by one of her classmates after attending a graduation party, Selma had been waiting up and had been beyond enraged when Liza came in a little after three. Selma had claimed that Liza had never told her about the party and that she’d been up all night frantic with worry and convinced that Liza had really been out “sleeping around.”