just something her family needed done.
“I was a peasant girl. You don’t know anything about that. I wanted to be wearing one of them navy-blue skirts and white-collared shirts, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen for me. But it’s going to happen for you. You’re going to be one of them navy-blue-skirt-white-collared-wearing girls going to school. I might not have been one of them myself, but I brought someone into the world who will be. I sure can be proud of that.”
I didn’t tell my mother they don’t wear uniforms in college here. I wanted her to have her dreams.
EVERY SATURDAY MORNING, I went back to that hog farm and picked those worms. The rest of the week, my mom went on her own and picked with the regulars. I got to be real good at it, but not like my mother. She really was a natural, if ever there was one. She didn’t pick like the others. For one thing, she was the only one who took off her shoes and went barefoot. She said, “I don’t like them rubber shoes. I know they can hear me coming. My feet don’t make noise at all this way.” Sometimes she even got to turning off her headlamp and feeling her way through the line. She knew where the worms were without having to see them, picking blind and bringing them back in large numbers. My mother called the worms “shit of the earth.” She would always say, “Man, I love shit of the earth,” after every pick we did.
When I got tired, she told me to take a break. I’d go sit in the car and watch her in the field. You wouldn’t know just by watching them that it was worms everyone was picking. From this distance, it looked like some rich woman had lost a diamond ring and everyone had been ordered to find it. I knew my mother was out there too, although I didn’t know where exactly, and I didn’t worry about her as it wouldn’t be too long before she emerged to hurriedly add to her worm count.
Whenever I had any time to myself, I often got to thinking of my father. You aren’t supposed to remember things from when you’re two, but I did. All we wanted was to live. To put it into words is to bring back what happened. He was there, his head above the water, pushing me and my mother across the river, and then I looked over and saw his head go under. He came back up once more, and his mouth opened, but he made no sound as he went under again. I couldn’t swim and my mother couldn’t either. But somehow she managed to steer us across, holding on to a rubber tire. Afterwards, my mother asked me if I saw what happened to my father, and I said I didn’t. I didn’t want her to know. Now I like to believe he ended up somewhere in Malaysia. Maybe he lost his memory and was living with a new family. Just to know he is living, that’s good enough for me.
The last sound he made wasn’t a sound, even.
I DIDN’T WANT to go to the school dance. But my mother insisted. She said I shouldn’t miss out on things in life. I knew it was a big deal for her. She made me a pink, bubbly dress, and I tried the thing on for her to get the fit right.
Some guy at school asked if he could take me to the dance. James was his name. I thought he was all right, I guess. He sat next to me in the classes we had together. I didn’t understand why. There were other seats free. He drew helicopters on the corner of my notebooks. When I asked why he went and did that for, he said, “So we can fly away together.” I erased or crossed them out. When it rained outside, he would turn to me and say, “It’s raining,” as if it was an important thing in his life, to see that it was raining and to have someone to tell about it.
He was around me a lot because we were paired together for this parenting unit in Family Studies. I didn’t want to be anyone’s partner. I wanted to raise the egg we were given on my own, but James said, “I’m not going to let you raise it alone.” I didn’t turn