Bold as Can Be

~ I am 8 ~

My mother pulled up to Horace Drugs and shut off the engine. Then she mashed out her cigarette and turned to me. “There’s something you’re going to do in this store, girl, and you’re not going to like it. You’ll thank me for it someday though; trust me. It’ll keep you from growing up too timid and worrying about every little thing, which is the way you’re headed right now.” She sat still a moment and gave me a measuring look. “You’re going to walk into that store there, and you are going to get me a Melon Ice lipstick; only you’re not going to pay for it. Get it? You’re going to slip it inside this here pants pocket.” She patted my left leg. “Once you done that, you won’t be so afraid of everything else.”

            She paused, frowning at me. “Now don’t start bawling. It’s easy as pie. Kids and candy is what they watch for. An eight-year-old in the make-up aisle, who cares? Here’s what you do: you go to the candy by way of the makeup and—okay, forget the Melon Ice, just get me any old lipstick. Then you go and get yourself a Snickers or whatever, plain as day, and you pay for that like all’s right with the world. Here, take this quarter. Now get!”

~ 10 ~

            My mother spent days in bed doing nothing. She couldn’t go to her job at the yardage store anymore, didn’t want to see anyone. All because she was heartsick about my goodness, I guessed. She wanted me not to be afraid to be bad. “Be bold!” she’d tell me when she was feeling good. I tried harder. I tried pretending I wasn’t me, tried pretending I was her. I didn’t write my book report on Little Women, not even one word, even though I had it all written in my head and I’d thought of smart things to say. When all those colored folders were passed up to the front of the class, I sat there with my hands tucked under my legs. I stared at Frankie McCoy’s test paper long enough to burn a hole in it before the teacher finally noticed and sent me to the office. Another day at recess I called Marcy Fullmer an “evil fucking retard.” My mother didn’t even bother unfolding the notes I brought home. A few letters came; she didn’t open them. “They’re from the school,” she said, like that explained why.

            Sometimes I’d come home and she would be having a frenzy day—cutting the upholstery off the furniture or drawing birds all over the walls, burning up with a hard joy trapped inside her. My father had to stay home with her some of those days. He’d watch from the doorway saying, “Now Ava, let’s not.” Those times were scary but sometimes fun. Scary because they could end so quick and what came then was the worst of times. But when she was sparkly like that there was a chance she’d have a plan that included me. Sometimes even one that was all about me. Like staying up all night sewing costumes for my dolls, or drawing picture after picture of me wearing different clothes she invented in her head. She would talk and talk about me like I was some kind of shiny thing she’d won, the answer to her prayers. She’d fuss with my hair, say it was the color of mid-summer honey, say the boys would be lining up for dates. But she never forgot to tell me to get out there and grab the world by its fucking throat.

            I tried hard to be nervy. I took to spying on people and eavesdropping. I reported everything to her, but I could feel my face beat red when I told her I saw old Mr. Jorgensen’s weiner when he dropped his pajama bottoms and peed in his backyard. And when my uncle called, she knew I changed what my father said. “He told Uncle Howard we were all just fine, not to worry one bit,” I told her. She slapped me then, called me a liar.

            A liar, isn’t that what she wanted?

~ 12 ~

            One day I opened the front door and there was my aunt. She was still wearing her beauty shop uniform and rubber shoes. “Ssh,” she said, “Now don’t disturb your mother. You and me are going to the movies.” She took my hand and pulled me out the door. She’d never taken me anywhere before just her and me. We drove across town and watched a show about two dogs and a cat finding their way home. After, when she dropped me off, the house was a new kind of quiet. My mother was gone. Her blue bathrobe wasn’t hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and the things left behind, her birdsong diary, her hairbrush, her notebooks about the neighbors, told me she hadn’t packed herself.  

            My father called her every night. He waited while they tried to get her to come to the phone. If she did, he’d talk to her in a low murmury voice for a long time. I would sit beside him until I’d give up waiting and drift away. But he’d call for me before he hung up. “Come talk to your mama.”

            “Hello?” I’d say, and my heart would beat fast not knowing what would come back to me. Sometimes there’d just be breathing. There were a couple of times she’d say, “Oh baby, I miss you!” with a catch in her voice that made me feel like I swallowed a nail, but also made me glad. Too many times she’d say, “I am sorry” or “I miss you,” but her voice had no snap to it and she didn’t sound like my mother and she had nothing else to say. It made me remember that look in her eyes she got sometimes, like she couldn’t see me even though I was right there. Those times, when I sat next to her on the couch, she might put an arm around me, but it was heavy and still and it scared me.

            Then I found out where she’d gone. Karly and I rode our bikes to see her cousin in a basketball game at the Catholic school. Riding down a street I’d never been on, I saw my father’s burgundy Impala parked in front of a low stucco building with concrete paths curving through a big lawn. I told Karly to go on, I’d catch up. Then I swung my bike around and rode up to the car. My father’s jacket was in the backseat. I looked up the concrete path and saw a sign, Melrose Sanitarium. When I got home, I looked up the word.

~15~

            My father got used to me moping and crying whenever my mother had to go back to Melrose. I’d beg him to take me to see her and I didn’t believe him when he said the doctor thought it best to stay away. I stopped talking for three days once, thinking I’d get myself sent to Melrose, but my father just said, “Honey, it ain’t gonna work.” So instead I’d sneak out at night and ride my bike across town in the dark just for a chance to see her through the window. I believed her expression would tell me if the electric treatment was working. She would look like my beautiful, distracted mother, or she would look like the one who went away.

            But once I got to high school, my father had to beg me to visit her. Spell him a bit. She was in a different wing now, sent there by a judge after she drove two thousand miles in a dealership car she took for a test drive. Wanted to see Niagra Falls, she said. My father would remind me that it wasn’t her fault. He’d remind me how I used to love to dance with her when I was little. Of the tiny capes she sewed for every doll and stuffed animal I owned, each made of a different fancy fabric that she knew the name of, each fastened not with a tie but with a tiny button.

            My father didn’t realize that I was no longer that kid. I had my own life and it was going full tilt. I’d discovered boys, and they made me feel good. I made them feel good. It was simple, and being daring was easy once you didn’t care what people thought of you. “You don’t want to find yourself in trouble now,” my father said hopelessly.

            I didn’t know if my mother cared anymore if I was timid or bold or good or bad, but it was too late and I was what I was.

                                                                                ~ 18 ~

           The less I saw of my mother the more my father wanted to talk about her, to reminisce about what she used to be like. Before. How she had a sparkle like no one else, how he’d strut down the street with her on his arm not believing his luck. How exciting she was, and fun, and for that reason easy to forgive. “She had spirit, and oh my god was she beautiful. And funny? She made me laugh so hard once beer shot out my nose.” I heard it over and over. The stories where you definitely had to be there.

            I remembered my sparkle times with her, too. But there weren’t enough of them, and by now they were too far in the past. Things would have been easier if there’d been no good times; we wouldn’t have wasted so much time hoping for them to come back.

            Two weeks after I turned eighteen, as if he had been waiting for me to be an official adult, my father, with his boyish cowlick and not a single gray hair, was dead. A heart attack, a broken heart, how different were they? There was no one around to paint a rosy picture.   The house, the Impala, my mother, were left to me. All were in poor condition and each came with its own costs. Still, I knew how to get by in the world, and I had reason to want to. Maybe I had my mother to thank for that.

            A week or two after my father’s funeral, the doctor at Melrose asked me to approve some medical tests for my mother. She had lost weight and wasn’t eating. Called again when the results came back. It seemed my mother was sick in her body now too. “I’m afraid it isn’t treatable,” he said. “And growing quite fast.” The news softened me up some, let a few things come back to me. The scent of honeysuckle dusting powder on her blue bathrobe.

            I knew the shifts at Melrose, remembered the routine. I’d prowled the grounds plenty in my younger days when I dreamed of busting my mother out of her nut house. It was almost dark and the lights on inside made it easy to spot her glossy chestnut hair and that strong jaw of hers that looked like it was hinged. She was still dressed, in clothes that probably belonged to another patient—purple stretch pants and a yellow shirt. As soon as the orderly left I went in the front door and down the hall, head bent, in my all-white clothes, walking behind a woman pushing a cart with linens.

            My mother looked up when I walked into her room. She smiled, recognizing me without surprise. “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” she offered, proud of herself, as always.

            “I don’t care about that; you just come on,” I told her, putting my hand around her thin arm and pulling her toward the side door and down the path to the car. Her eyes glittered in the night air and her arm felt fragile, like it might snap if I squeezed harder.

            She recognized the Impala, rusty and dented as it was, and looked excited for a moment, as if she were going on vacation. Then she spotted my little girl in the backseat. “That’s Brenda, there,” I told her.

            I drove her to Horace Drugs for old time’s sake. Parked out front. Sat a minute. “Get you anything here?” I asked pointedly. She turned and looked at Brenda. “She’s only two,” I warned. “She doesn’t know how to steal.”

            I drove us to the beach, right past the sign that said closed at sunset, no dogs, no glass, no this, no that. Brendie ran around in the sand and my mother stood quiet, watching me set rocks in a circle and build a fire out of driftwood.

            I’d brought a bottle of vodka for her and we passed it back and forth in silence, like two hobos over a barrel fire. Brenda slumped against me, worn out, drowsy.

            I wondered what was going on back at the nut house, whether they’d found her missing yet. Funny how busting her out came so naturally to me. I was no longer timid; I didn’t care about trouble. But I was not my mother, with her moods and that disturbing happiness that came only now and then, and to her alone. Me, I shared my bright times.   I suppose it was her I had to thank that I had Brenda to share them with.

            I stroked Bren’s silky hair and looked over at my mother across the fire. She gazed into the flames, eyes shining with confused pleasure. Medicated, no doubt, and on the way to drunk. I wondered could I manage her. Should I keep her.

            Waves came closer, rough then quiet, with no real pattern, flowing around outcroppings, wearing rock to sand and marking its place with soft white froth. I closed my eyes and listened to the reliability of the waves. I could see the warm glow of the fire through my eyelids. And that was my mother now, humming.