she wouldn’t have us over. I’d have left myself just to get away from the mess.”
It was filthy. My mother stopped cleaning after she’d taken up assignment and we lived amid our trash. I only saw it clearly then, though, the blond hairs balled up in the corners of each room, the trash overflowing out of the kitchen to the living room, the brown of the toilet bowl. The dishes in the sink and how once they were dirty they were dead to us. We just didn’t use that dish anymore. Now, though, a smell had taken hold, my mother’s iceberg lettuce rotting on the countertop, the decay of stuck macaroni and cheese in a dish, cans left open and waiting for nothing. It was strange, I could not remember eating with my mother, only the image of her leaning over the sink, picking at things. Never cooking, just opening cans and handing them to me. Once she said to be careful not to cut myself on the sharp raw tin and it felt like a kind of care. I loved Spam and sardines and could imagine that she was cooking up delicacies, but now seeing the piles of cans on the floor I felt embarrassed for us.
CHERRY SMOKED A pink berry-scented Sweet Dream cigarette in the corner, muttering to herself. The smell of the Sweet Dreams covered the rot a bit, but meant a probable headache for me. Cherry told me I just had to get used to them and had offered me one in the living room a few nights before when I was sullen and it was agitating her. I smoked it and coughed and got a headache so bad I asked all night for God to take me in my sleep. I imagined telling Lyle about the cigarette to make him jealous or shocked, but something told me that it was like the dirty apartment, another thing to hide.
“Vern’s right,” Pearl said. “First thing to go is your obedience, then the church, then your community, then your ever-loving mind. And them witch women. That’s another story.”
Them witch women. I tried again to imagine who they were, how they’d poisoned my mother with their ways. It was clear something had happened to her working there. Something they said maybe, that slowly pulled her from faith. From me. Something that pushed her to start drinking again, and when the opportunity came, to run and not look back. It seemed likely that all of this was their fault, a curse we were under.
“You’re lucky you’ve got us around to keep guiding you,” Pearl said low. “Lyle said just the other day he was going to start coming by to help you in your Bible studies and whatever else.”
I looked at Lyle in the kitchen dumping my mother’s collection of colorful plastic forks and knives into a bag. He’d never shown me any attention before. The extent of our contact was rolling our eyes in solidarity when Cherry loaded stale years-old raisins into her special meat loaf for Sunday dinner. Pick them out and mouth gross.
As they worked, I pulled things from boxes, making my case for why they should stay out. I tried to create a pile of necessities for when my mother came back but Cherry put the pile in a garbage bag when I wasn’t looking and added it to the others. I touched my things on my small shelf by the bed. The costume jewelry she’d given me, my angel figurines. Who needed any of it now? I tossed it all in a garbage bag and then went into the tiny bathroom and took out my romance. I was deep into the story about the two fugitive lovers, how the whole time the reader knew that the woman had it out for the man, that she was the smarter one, and was biding her time. They did have romantics, though, for sometimes she gave in to her woman’s needs and the necessity of satisfaction.
Women’s needs had never been mentioned in the church, never mentioned by anyone that I could remember, and I lapped up any sign of them by instinct like a long-starved wolf. My mother had held this same book before me, but why hadn’t she ever told me she’d read it when she was my age? It felt like something I should know about her. All the things she’d never told me waited just under the surface of this world like untouched land mines.
Lyle