Marrow (2 page)

I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE MEN COME FROM
. How they know to drive to 49 Wessex Street and park their cars in the shadow of the eating house. I don’t know how they know to walk the three cracked steps to the front door and stand under the bulb that never stops flickering. Or how they know to take the rusted brass knob in their hands and let themselves in. They were, perhaps, men who my mother knew in her former life. The life in which she wore pleated skirts and pantyhose, and caught the bus to work every day.

She briefly went to church in those days, lifting her hands during the music like she was catching God’s blessings in her palms and letting them swim there. Smiling teary-eyed when the pastor told the congregation that God would not forsake us in our darkest hour. And when our darkest hour came, and she lost her job, I’d come home from school to find her speaking in tongues at the kitchen sink, buried to her elbows in soapy water, her eyes shut tight during her onslaught of prayer. When she’d seen me standing in the kitchen doorway, my book bag slung over my shoulder, she’d smiled through her tears and beckoned me toward her. “We are under a spiritual attack,” she’d said, grasping my hands. “We need to pray against Satan and his demons.”

I’d latch on to her cold hands, squeezing my eyes shut like the quality of my prayer depended on how tightly I closed them, and prayed with her, our voices filling the eating house in a cacophony of urgent appeal. My voice had been aimless, blasting up, up, upward without any belief to keep it there. I preferred Destiny’s muted Catholicism where they ate body parts like decent, faith-driven zombies to this loud, demanding behavior my mother had adopted.
God, give me! Give me! I’m your child and thus you must give me!

She doesn’t believe in God anymore; she left him somewhere between losing her job and the first man she invited into her bed. I always thought her faith was flimsy—like paper—useful until you get it wet. I’ve heard her talking about religion with one of the men who comes—the one who laughs so boisterously my mother, who hates loud noises, is constantly shushing him. “If there is a God,” she’d said, “then I believe he’s more insulted by religion than he is by atheism.”

I do not believe in God either; I never have, not even when I’d squeezed my eyes shut and prayed with her in the kitchen, the soap from her hands running down my elbows. My mother doesn’t know that we share this similarity. She would know if she asked, but she never does. I believe in loneliness so deep and profound it has a physical presence. I believe in choices—hard ones that people in charge seldom seem to get right. I believe that everyone needs something: a woman’s touch, companionship, money, forgiveness. And to acquire those things a person will accumulate as much sin as they need to. I often look at my classmates and wonder what it is they’ll grow up to want, and what they’ll give up to have it

The men come two a night. It’s all a perfectly planned dance with never a moment of overlap. I don’t know if they know about each other, or if they believe themselves to be my mother’s only companion. She meets them at the door, her voice lilting and friendly, her red silk robe rippling around her like blood water. It is a fake her, not the blank-faced woman who stares for hours at the scratched, wooden floorboards, tilting bottles of pills down her throat. She asks how they are, then leads them up the stairs. They speak to her with familiarity, old friends, who call her Wendy and laugh at the things she says. I match their cars with their voices: the cornflower blue Volvo with a dent in the front bumper, a yellow Corvette with the disco ball hanging from the mirror, and the most frequent visitor, an old Mustang—not a beat up clunker either, but the restored kind, with bright, cherry red paint and custom plates that read LWMN. I never see his face—the Mustang guy, he’s always looking at the ground. Once I caught a glimpse of the back of his head as he was leaving my mother’s bedroom. He was bald, shoulders broad and curving forward. He left cigar smoke and the smell of cedar wood lingering in the hallways. On one occasion he left his watch behind on my mother’s dresser. A heavy thing with the symbol of a crown behind the glass face. I snuck into her room to look at it when she was asleep. Wondering how someone could stand to have something so heavy hanging from their wrist.
Like a ball and chain.
Where did I hear that? Must have been at Destiny’s house. The next night, when I went to look for the watch, it was gone.

I tell Destiny.

“The Mustang man probably came to get it while you was at school,” she tells me. “You know what that was right?” She has her hand on her hip, and her head is tilted to the side while she wears her signature you-don’t-know-shit face.

When I don’t answer her she continues.

“It was a Ro-lex,” she says. “Probably real. My uncle wears a fake one. You could have stolen that and pawned it for a bike or something. People will pay at least a hundred dollars for sumpin’ like that.”

“I don’t want a bike,” I say. What I want is my mother.

Destiny rolls her eyes, and then her hips as she turns away and walks to her dresser.

“I have to go,” I say, standing up. I feel anxious … devious for telling Destiny about the man and the watch.

“I thought we was gonna watch a movie.”

I sit back down. I can never say no to a movie. And there is always popcorn at her house. Her mother buys the value pack because she knows we like it. Destiny tells me that the popcorn in the movie theater tastes a million times better than the stuff she makes in her microwave. “And your fingers get all greasy from the butter…” she says.

There isn’t a movie theater in the Bone. You have to catch the bus two towns over. Destiny’s dad takes her and her brothers all the time. I don’t even have a TV at the eating house, so watching movies while sitting on Destiny’s red-and-white striped couch is enough for me. We start to watch
Pretty Woman
, but halfway through I tell Destiny I have a stomachache. Julia Roberts’s character is too much like my mom—the toothy smile, the vulnerability.

I walk home in the rain, wishing I’d taken some popcorn. By the time I reach my front door, my white T-shirt is soaked through. I pull it over my head as soon as I get inside, failing to notice the car in the driveway. I walk toward the kitchen and stop short. A man is standing on the stairs looking at me. I gasp.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I clutch the shirt to my chest, but it’s twisted, and I can’t straighten it out to cover myself. I hear my mother’s voice.

“Robert…?” she says. I catch a glimpse of her red robe as I run for the kitchen. I find the laundry basket that I keep next to the washer and grab a clean shirt. As I’m struggling to get it over my head, she walks in.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

This is more than she’s said to me in six months.

“I-I didn’t see the car. I was wet…” I dip my head and swallow my shame.

“You embarrassed me,” she says between her teeth. “Walking through my house showing yourself like that.” She speaks of my body like it’s a thing of disgust. Something to be hidden and never shown.

I say nothing. My chest heaves. I hate myself. She swoops out as quickly as she swooped in—in a flurry of red silk and condemnation. I can smell her vanilla perfume as I begin to cry.

I want her back. I want to know what changed her so that I have somewhere to lay my blame. If there was a cause, I could stop blaming myself. I trace my memories, over and over, searching for the root—the moment, or month, or day she vanished.

From my mattress, I stare at the ceiling. Deep brown watermarks stain what was once cream paint. In those marks, I study our years in the eating house. The gradual recession of happiness. Your life can be nicked away so slowly that you don’t even notice it.

Her laughter went first, then her smiles, which were so deep they showed more gum than tooth. The last thing to go was her eyes—her brilliantly expressive eyes. They stopped looking and gazed right through. They stared at walls, and cabinets, and floors. They stared at everything except me. In the early days I’d tried everything to get her to look at me: drop a bowl of cereal and milk on the floor, right in front of her so that her toes were flecked with milk, or scribble all over my arms and legs with marker until I was as deeply blue as a Smurf. With grim determination, I lied to her face, broke her trinkets, swore loudly, and sang songs she hated at the top of my lungs. Hateful attempts met with milky-eyed ambivalence. She’s slowly dying, and I’m not sure she knows it.

FOLD YOUR HANDS IN YOUR LAP
. Smile. Don’t smile. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Pretend you don’t care. Study your shoes. Don’t smile … don’t ever smile. God.

I am fidgety and awkward. I never know what to do and when to do it. A boy smiled at me once; he was cute. He’d already passed by the time I smiled back. Too little too late. I couldn’t make my face move in time. School is a reprieve from home; home is a reprieve from school. I don’t belong anywhere, so I travel from place to place hoping no one notices me—but if they do, I hope they won’t be overly cruel. I think about the past. Days long gone.

Everything different, everything so strangely the same. People become different, I realize. It’s the landscape that never changes: the highway signs marred with graffiti, the pink and orange blended sunsets that kiss the top of the evergreens, even the line of cars waiting to turn into the Wal-Mart parking lot. That’s what jars me the most: same sky, same Bone, same house, different mother.

So I remember the old mother, tracing the past, recoloring the memories. The weight of bad memories blossoms and expands under the good memories. I try to think only of those—the good things that carve me into my childhood, not the ones that carve me out of it.

I think of the way my mother always had a leaf between her fingers. That’s what I remember most. She’d pull one from a bush or a tree and hold it between her fingers, compulsively rubbing little circles until the leaf was rubbed clean of its veins and membranes and her fingers were stained green. I liked when her fingers were green; it reminded me of the finger paints we used at school. It made her seem strange and fun, organically different from the other mothers who were always sour-faced and stiff. When we were outside, I’d study the way she’d examine the plants, mimicking her movements, wanting to be close to her, wanting to be her. And it was difficult because my mother carried her grace around her shoulders, a regal class that was almost impossible to imitate.

That was when I was real little and things were almost right. Before she lost her job at Markobs and Jacob, before she started smoking, before the men. Nowadays, my mother’s fingers are stained with nicotine. The smell rolls off her skin when she moves across a room—stale smoke and tobacco rot. Her shoulders hang from her neck like an old housecoat. When she stopped leaving the house a few years ago, she would send me out to buy cigarettes, the ones with the Indian chief on the carton, because they were healthier for you. Somewhere in between her smelling like the outdoors, and her smelling like an ashtray, I stopped wanting to be her. And during that same time, while she was shrugging off the mantle of parenting and becoming a stranger, she stopped saying my name.