A Mother's Love (6 page)

The Glass Slipper was made almost entirely of glass before such buildings were fashionable. It was shaped like a shoe, and we took an elevator in its heel straight to the Cinderella Lounge, where my mother hid us behind her as she gulped down a rum and Coke. Then she took us by the hand again into the casino, where my father dealt black-jack. She stormed up to the table and didn't seem to care that people were standing around. My father wore a neatly pressed white shirt and a bow tie. He had on red suspenders, and his coppery hair was combed flat to the side. For a moment I didn't recognize him. I just thought he was a handsome man.

As she pulled us to where he stood, my father's face went pale. “Howard, I cannot take it anymore.” She raised our fists into the air. “I simply cannot take it.”

People playing at my father's table slipped away. He gazed nervously around for his pit boss, then motioned for a standby to fill in. Putting his hand on my mother's shoulder, he took her off to a corner, where they seemed to forget about us. “Jessie,” I heard him say, his hand gripping her arm. She stared at him, her features all pinched together. Even when she was angry she was the most beautiful woman he could have found. But there was something strange about her features. With
her black hair, her white skin, and red lips, she never looked quite real. It was as if she were a Disney character, someone somebody had drawn.

“I cannot stand it,” she said emphatically.

Their voices faded, and I could only see their mouths moving. There was something in my father's face that made me know he was begging. They had forgotten we were there, I had forgotten about Sam. When I looked for her, she was gone. I looked everywhere, and then I saw her, standing in front of the bank of elevators, a little girl in a thin cotton dress. When the elevator opened, she got in. “Sam!” I shouted. “Don't do that!” But my voice was drowned out in the din of the casino, the whirling of wheels, the sound of chips dropping into palms. The doors closed and she was gone.

My parents must have looked my way and seen me frantically pounding on the elevator doors. My father dashed across the casino and began banging on the buttons. He was desperate, hitting at the elevators with his fists. “Why didn't you watch her?” my mother shouted at me. “Why did you let her go?” as if I were responsible.

Suddenly the elevator returned. Its doors opened and there, standing alone and bewildered, was Sam, tears sliding down her cheeks. My mother grabbed her, clutching her in her arms. She reached for me as well. “I'm sorry, Ivy,” she said, “I don't know what gets into me. I'm sorry.” My father put his arms around all of us and for a
moment we were entangled in one another's arms. Then he kissed my mother hard, letting his lips linger. “Wait up for me, all right?”

She smiled, nodding, looking as if she were falling asleep. “I will.”

She drove us back in silence to the trailer park. We drove down the rows of trailers, some with real yards and even trees in front, which made them look like homes. My father had bought our trailer for a thousand dollars from a former dealer who had moved to Arizona when his wife died. Many of the people who worked in Vegas and serviced the casinos lived in trailer parks on the outskirts of town, and my father had friends nearby, nice people who had kids. They liked to drop in and have a beer, though my mother did not approve of them and never offered them lemonade or “something a little stronger,” the way my father did. Our trailer had a porch with green outdoor carpeting and a barbecue. The windows on the side had green awnings to keep out the extreme heat. There were lounge chairs out front and a small yard where we could play.

Inside the trailer was another matter. Everything had a layer of grime or was falling apart. Things needed fixing. When we lived in California, my mother seemed to take care of the house. But once we reached Vegas, it all stopped as if she had gone on strike. Whatever it was, she had no interest, as other mothers seemed to have. Sometimes
Dottie, who lived next door, would wash our clothes for school or bring us a casserole for dinner. When Dottie came over, my mother perked up. Together they washed the dishes, straightened the house. Then they sat on the porch and smoked cigarettes and drank lemonade. My mother seemed happiest at those times, and sometimes she'd even call me to her and give me a hug for no reason at all.

When we got home that evening, my mother paused in the kitchen to rinse out a glass so that she could pour herself a drink. The water streamed over the sinkful of dishes that were washed only when we needed them. Sometimes Sam and I would wash them, but this was just for fun. My mother sat down with her drink on the lopsided sofa in the dark and dreary living room. She fiddled with the antenna of the black and white TV, but she couldn't get a picture, so she gave up. She tapped her fingers on the table that held the lava lamp with its blue-and-gold undulating glob that my father loved and his collection of knickknacks—miniature glass horses, cats, odd things like that. When she got up, she went into their room, which was off the kitchen. She took her drink with her and she closed the door. We didn't dare disturb her when she did this.

I could hear the bed creak as she lay down. The only piece of furniture in their room, other than a reading lamp (though I don't recall ever seeing
anyone read), was the bed, which seemed to consume the room. I wondered how it had gotten in there at all, and it seemed to me to pose the same problem as a boat in a bottle. My parents' dresser had to be in the living room; often they walked naked to get their clothes. My mother never actually made the bed. If she bothered at all, she threw the covers together so that it was a series of lumps, giving the impression that someone or something was asleep in it. I got into the habit of being quiet whenever I passed their room for fear of waking whatever might be sleeping there.

Though we had not had our dinner yet, I took Sam into our room. It was always a mess, with clothes and toys strewn everywhere. I'm sure that in the years we lived there nobody bothered to pick anything up. Instead of playing, Sam and I sat quietly on my bed, listening. A little while later my mother came out with a glow on her cheeks, dressed in a sheer pink gown. “That's good,” she said, seeing us in our room. “Now I want you girls to hop straight into bed.”

She must have forgotten that we hadn't had supper, because she made us get into our pajamas and brush our teeth. I think it was more of an oversight than malice, but often we went to bed with an empty, hungry feeling inside. This night she put Sam right to bed, though Sam protested and whimpered. She told me to go to sleep as well,
but when she saw me staring at her from the door of my room, she said, “Come here, Ivy. Talk to me.” So I went to her.

“What do you want to talk about, Mom?”

“Oh, I don't know. I just hate not having someone to keep me company. Tell me about something.” So I told her about the math test I'd taken that day—how I'd gotten all the addition right, but hadn't done so well with the subtraction. “Oh,” she said. She banged a cigarette on the windowsill and lit it. Her face illumined like a Halloween mask, the lines deep around her eyes. “And who did you play with?”

I began to tell her that I'd played at recess with Anna, who also lived in Valley of Fire trailer park, but that Anna's brother was sick—he was always sick—and she had to go home early. My mother didn't ask me anything about my test or Anna's brother. She hummed songs from
South Pacific
while she stared out the window.

“If only we could go back to California,” she said. This is what they fought about mostly. “If we could go back to the sea, everything,” she said, “would be all right.” Actually we'd never lived by the sea, though to my mother I suppose we had. My father used to fold the laundry while my mother sat, dreamily contemplating the career she would have had in California. What she wanted more than anything was to be discovered. But my
father refused to return to where everything, she swore, would happen for her.

“Ivy,” my mother said. She liked to say my name; it was the name she'd given me. A fitting one, she used to say, for one who likes to cling. My father had wanted to call me something old-fashioned, like Emma or Sarah Jane. He never liked Ivy; he called me Lucky Red because of my hair and because when he gambled he claimed I brought him luck, like a rabbit's foot or a shiny penny found by the side of the road. He said he did better when I was there. “Ivy,” she said again. A car passed and she perked up, but it drove on, its lights reflecting on the stop sign across the street. She pressed me to her as if she would crush my bones. “We'll go home.”

Before moving to Vegas, we'd lived in a valley of smog in a trailer park, near San Bernardino, called the Desert Sands. Where we lived, it was verdant, but across the street, just on the other side of the road, the desert stretched before us, dusty and dry. We could have lived closer to the shore and to the hardware store on Melrose where my father carved the keys for the would-be actors, the wealthy ladies of society, the has-beens, and, on rare occasions, the stars, but he preferred the dry, inland air.

My father worked in the back of a small appliance shop as a maker of keys, which he ground
until the fine metal dust settled into his lungs, leaving him asthmatic and wheezing for the rest of his days. He unlocked doors and repaired locks for people who lived in houses we could never imagine, and he'd come home with tales like the sailor back from the sea. He'd say how he'd made a key for a man who had white tigers roaming in his yard, or he'd changed a lock for a woman whose swimming pool had an underwater cave where tropical fish swam. When my father told us these stories—most of which I am certain he made up—he'd get a distant look in his eyes and the next day he'd take me into the dark, smoky bars with card rooms hidden behind closed doors or down to the bannered track, where I watched the prancing thoroughbreds in the paddock while he gambled our life away. It was his hobby, he told me, the way he liked to spend his time.

On Saturdays he would take me to the track. He'd stand by the paddock and study the horses as they paraded by. He watched their hooves and their mouths. He'd study the racing sheet and place his bets. For me, the track was one long wait. I never much enjoyed the time between races. My father would find his cronies, slumped over beers and the racing page. “Here,” he said, “look at this one, good on the turf, but not used to five and a half furlongs. He brought his own jockey down.” They'd congregate in the bar while I stared at the muddy track, furrowed with hoof prints.

When the bartender wasn't looking, my father took me with him into the bar, where the “boys,” as he called the aging men with potbellies, would tease me. “So, Lucky Red, who're you betting on in the seventh?” I'd bet on impulse if I liked the sound of a name. Dream Feathers to win, Time Flies to place. They laughed when I told them my favorites—these men who weighed each hot tip, studied their forms. But I seemed to win as often as they did.

The trumpet sounded and the horses headed into the paddock. My father kept me near him, his lucky charm, and I was happy being close to him. He chewed on his pencil or on a cigar and pointed to the horse that was going to win. Then they'd go to the gate. I liked the frisky ones that kicked and tossed their heads. When the bell went off, and we heard the pounding of hooves, he would clasp my hand, raising it higher and higher as the horses rounded the home stretch.

Sometimes we won, but mostly we lost, which I liked better. Because then my father took the colored betting tickets—those tickets in orange and blue and yellow and red, those tickets which came in a million colors—and he'd tear them into confetti, sprinkling them on my thick red hair. We'd drive home with the windows down, my hair filled with the confetti of losers' tickets that fluttered around the car like snow.

When I was five, my father gave in to his passion. He packed us up and moved us to Nevada, where legal gambling became what he did with his life. His dream was to become a partner in some business venture in Vegas. Real estate or the hotel industry. He said, “You'll see, it's the future of America. Right there in the desert.” My mother didn't believe him. To her, Nevada was just a desert, recently turned nuclear test site. But he believed—and he was right—that Vegas would see a big boom and its values soar. On moving to Vegas, he said, he would do things right. He made a promise that he would give up gambling, and during the time she lived with us, he kept his promise. Only once did he break it—when the Lions Club put three tons of ice in front of the Golden Nugget and took dollar bets on when it would melt.

The night we drove east along Route 66 into the cold desert, Sam and I huddled in the back under a scratchy blanket, our mother complaining the entire way. It was the first time I'd traveled on that road, but I knew it was the one my father had taken to come west. There was a moon, but nothing else to see, and I kept thinking that he was taking us to a place where we'd lose ourselves forever. I thought that the sound of coyotes, the sudden rise of hawks, the dry desert sand were all I'd ever know. That my life would be jackrabbits and tumbleweed and nothing more.

——

It was late when a set of headlights pulled up at last in front of our trailer. I don't know how long I'd been sitting at the window in my mother's clasp, but I felt as if I'd been holding my breath for a long time. Even though she'd said she wanted to talk, we had hardly spoken. Once or twice we'd blown our breath on the glass and written our names in its fog, but that was all. Now she loosened her grip as my father got out of the car and slammed the door. He glanced toward the trailer, looking first dejected, then eager as my mother waved. We both waved at him, but she patted me on the rear. “Go to sleep now, Ivy; go to bed.” But I wanted to stay where I was, nestled against her by the window, and then fly with her into my father's arms.