who lent her small amounts of money and would soon buy me my first pair of sturdy shoes, was not present in any larger way. Her stepmother, Faye, would later babysit me sometimes, but did not like babies in her house, mussing up her furniture. Her older sister, Kathy, was also a single mother with a small baby, and her two younger sisters were starting their own lives. My mother felt deeply ashamed to be unmarried and felt herself cast out of society.
We passed the same hills we’d passed in the daytime, when they’d seemed smooth and benevolent like camel humps. Now they made desolate black curves below a dark sky. She cried harder, in round sobbing gasps. I was stoic and silent. An oncoming car approached from the other side of the freeway, and I glanced at her to see her face as the strip of light from the headlights fell on her for a moment.
“I think we missed the exit. I have no idea.” It rained harder and she turned the windshield wipers to high. The rain filled in the half-circles as soon as they were cleared.
“I don’t want this life,” she sobbed. “I want out. I’m sick of living. Fuuuuuck!” She screamed loud, a wail. A foghorn. I covered my ears. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” she screamed at the windshield. As if she were furious at the windshield.
I was four and strapped down by two belts in my car seat, facing forward beside her (this was before children sat in the backs of cars). In the cars that passed and the ones around us, I imagined peace, and I wished to be inside one of those cars instead. If only she would be the way she was before, in the daylight. One version of her was inaccessible to the other. As she was yelling, she said later, even if she could not stop herself, she was aware that I was old enough to remember this.
“I have nothing,” she said. “This life is shit. Shiiiiit.” She struggled to catch her breath. “I don’t want to live anymore! This shitty life. I haaaate this life!” Her throat was like gravel, her voice hoarse from yelling. “This hell life.”
She pushed hard on the pedal when she yelled, so the car leapt forward, ground down along the road, rain like spit flying, like she wanted the engine to be part of her voice.
“Fucking Time magazine. Fucking fucking fucker.” Fucker was sharper than fuck, had a spark at the end. It poked my sternum. She let out a yell, no words, shook her head side to side so her hair flew, bared her teeth, slapped the dash with the flat of her hand, made me jump.
“What?” she screamed at me, because I jumped. “Whaaaat?”
I remained stiff; I became the idea of a girl stiff in her car seat.
Suddenly she veered off the freeway with such violence I thought we were driving off the road to our death, but it was a ramp.
She pulled over, jammed on the brakes, and sobbed into her folded arms. Her back shook. Her sadness enveloped me, I could not escape it, nothing I could do would stop it. In a few minutes, she started driving again, took a freeway overpass toward another road. She continued to cry, but with less violence, and at some point I asked the cracked glass eye, the nick in the windshield where the pebble had hit, to watch the road for me, a kind of prayer, and I slept.
At the height of her hopelessness and noise, I’d felt a calm presence near us, even though I knew we were alone in the watery hell, the car jerking. Some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere, maybe sitting in the back seat. The presence could not stop it, could not help it, only watch and note it. I wondered later if it was a ghostly version of me now, accompanying my younger self and my mother in that car.
The next morning, the man who tended the bees wore a white crinkly suit with attached gloves and a hat with a net sewn in. The bees lived in a slatted box in the small backyard. From the side of the kitchen, an attachment at the back of the bungalow, we looked out at the yard. He called to me, motioning for me to come over and look.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.
“She’s fairly allergic to bees,” my mother called