For her part, Liza suspected that Selma was one of the ones who wouldn’t be helped or fixed. She doubted her mother would ever change, and Liza knew for a fact that she had neither the strength nor the will to force the issue. If Guy had offered to come home and help her? Maybe. But all on her own? No way.
As a teenager, Liza had dealt with the shame of how they lived—the grinding poverty and the utter filth of their existence—as best she could. She had put up with her mother’s ever-declining health and occassional screaming rages. Liza’s smallest efforts to clean anything up or throw away one of her mother’s broken treasures had been met with increasingly violent outbursts on her mother’s part. Liza understood now that she most likely wouldn’t have survived high school had it not been for the timely intervention of first one and subsequently several of her teachers.
It had been at the end of phys ed during the first week of her freshman year. After class, some of the girls had been taunting Liza about being dirty when Miss Rose had come into the locker room unannounced and heard what they were saying. She had told Liza’s tormentors to knock it off and had sent them packing. Ashamed to show her face, Liza had lingered behind, but when she came out of the locker room, Miss Rose had been waiting for her in the gym.
“How would you like a job?” she had asked.
“What do you mean, a job?” Liza had stammered.
“I need someone to come in after school each afternoon to wash and fold the towels,” Miss Rose said. “I couldn’t pay you much, say ten bucks a week or so, but you’d be able to shower by yourself and wash your own clothes along with the towels.”
That was all Miss Rose ever said about it. Liza didn’t know how Miss Rose had known so much about her situation. Maybe she had grown up in the same kind of squalor or with the same kind of mother. Not long after that, some of the coaches of the boys’ sports teams had asked Liza to handle their team laundry needs as well. Eventually she had been given her own key to both the gym and the laundry. She spent cold winter afternoons and hot spring days in the comforting damp warmth of the gym’s laundry room, doing her homework, turning jumbles of dirty towels and uniforms into neat stacks and washing her own clothing at the same time. As for the money she earned? The collective fifty dollars a week she got for her efforts from various teachers and coaches, all of it paid in cash, was money that Liza’s mother never knew about, and it made all the difference. It meant that Liza was able to eat breakfast and lunch in the school cafeteria rather than having to go hungry.
In the end, Liza had done the same thing her brother did—she left. But she didn’t go nearly as far as her brother’s hundred miles. Guy had been brilliant. Liza was not. Her mediocre grades weren’t good enough for the kind of scholarship help that would have made college possible, but her work record with the coaches and teachers had counted as enough of a reference that she’d been able to land a job in Candy’s, a local diner, the first week she was on her own. She had started out washing dishes and had worked her way up to waitress, hostess, and finally—for the last year—assistant manager. Candy had taught her enough about food handling that, in a pinch, she could serve as a passable short-order cook. She didn’t earn a lot of money, but it was enough to make her self-supporting.
Liza’s car was a ten-year-old rusted-out wreck of a Nissan, but it was paid for and it still ran. That was all she needed. Her home was a tiny upstairs apartment in an old house off Main Street in Great Barrington. It could be freezing cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer, as it was right now in this unseasonably late April heat wave, but the apartment was Liza’s and Liza’s alone, and she kept it immaculately clean.
She never left home in the morning without first washing and drying the dishes. Her bed was made as soon as she climbed out of it. Her dirty clothes went in a hamper, and when she came back from the Laundromat, her clean clothes went in dresser drawers or on hangers. Her floors were clean. Her trash always went out on time. There was never even so much as a hint of mouse droppings in the freshly laundered towels she took out of her tiny linen closet and held up to her face.