The Hollow Ground: A Novel (16 page)

“You said you’d knock,” I accused.

Gram stepped in and looked suspiciously from me to the doll. “Twelve years old! Would you believe it?” Wearily she shook her head and sat on the lower bunk, my bunk, where she then gazed up at the empty space where Ma’s mattress used to be. She turned as best she could over her hump and clucked her tongue at Daddy’s werewolf poster as if she’d never seen it before. “I’ll tell you somethin’, girl. At twelve my mother wasn’t just hangin’ around playin’ with no doll. She was already out in the world earnin’ a livin’! Alone! The orphanage wouldn’t keep the girls past twelve years old. Twelve! There she was, just a young girl with no place to go. Nothin’ to eat. But she knew she had an aunt all the way over in Limerick. She was up near Dublin. That’s the other side of Ireland! Took her nearly a year of cleanin’ people’s houses to save the money to get there. And when she did, she knocked on her aunt’s door and told her aunt—her father’s
sister,
mind you—who she was, and as soon as she said her name, you know what that woman did?”

“No,” I said, but I already felt the hurt of it, even though I didn’t know Gram’s ma, my great-grandma at all.

“That woman, her father’s sister, acted like she had no idea who my mother was. Her own
niece.
Her brother’s
daughter
. ‘Mary Farmer?’ she said. ‘Don’t know that name at all.’ She called my mother a beggar and chased her off with a broom. A broom! And here you are with a doll. Doin’ who knows what when the door’s closed.”

Her eyes were full of blame as she looked down at my fingers poised in midstroke on the doll’s dress. Dumbfounded, I gazed down at my hand, wondering what terrible capabilities rested within it.

Just then Ma breezed in. “I need a nap, Brigid,” Ma said, acting as if Gram wasn’t even there. “So shut the door and don’t let nobody in.”

“Some people just don’t appreciate what they got,” Gram said, stomping her foot. She then walked out, leaving the door open so Ma would have to shut it, which Ma did with a slam. Ma sat on my mattress and wearily shook her head. Then her pretty face contorted in pain. She pointed at the doll. “Who told you to take her out?” In two quick paces Ma grabbed the doll. “I told you not to get her dirty. How can I return her if she looks all used?”

“Return her?” I cried. Ma placed the doll on my bunk and began to carefully place her back in the box. My voice didn’t sound like my own as I said, “But you gave her to me. You said she was mine.”

“Mine? Listen how selfish you sound.” Ma closed the box and the doll stared stone-facedly out at me through the little cellophane window. I tried to keep my voice calm, knowing it was the best way to handle Ma, but still I whined, “Please, Ma. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay in my room. I’ll do all the chores. I want to keep her so bad.”

But as soon as I said that last part about wanting, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. Ma often said she couldn’t stand it when I got impatient, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. We’d learned, Daddy and me especially, to pretend in front of Ma
not
to want what we wanted.
That’s
what she wanted—as confusing as that sounds.

“Keep your voice down,” Ma said. “You know we can’t afford no doll. Don’t act like you don’t know. I do the best I can. The. Best. I. Can.” With each word, Ma thrust her thumb at herself. Then she started to cry. She glanced at the door with as much disdain as if the rectangle of wood was Gram herself. “You think I’d be here if it wasn’t for you kids. I’m sacrificed so you kids have a roof. Your daddy don’t do that.
I
do that.”

She came at me and pinched my arm. Then she sat on the desk chair with the doll box resting on her lap. “Don’t you dare look at me like that. You know we don’t got the money for this. Don’t act like you thought you could keep her. Don’t make me feel bad when you knew it all along.”

My voice came out as thin as a trickle of water. “But you had the money for the deli food. The money to get your hair and nails done.”

“And don’t I work hard for that! Don’t I deserve something too?”

I backed up to the door. My chest felt all dense and tight and my voice came out in stops and starts. “I hate you. I hate you more than anything else in the world.”

Ma laughed. “Wait. Wait till you see the rest of the world. I ain’t that bad. Compared to the rest of it, I ain’t nothin’ at all.”

Out the door I ran, past Gramp and Daddy who were sitting on the plastic-covered couch watching TV. I ran outside and deep into the fire zone, hoping I’d trip on a borehole and break my neck and for the rest of her life Ma would have to be sorry for what she’d done.

That night in bed Ma shook me and whispered, “Brigid? Did you have a nice birthday? Huh, honey? I need to know. Did you?”

I was lying on my side facing the wall. All I had to do was roll over and say “yes” and Ma’s love would have washed over me like sunshine, like rain. But I remained rigid, staring at the werewolf poster on the wall, thinking of Auntie’s story “The Great Forgetting.” I couldn’t wait for the day to come when me and Ma would pass each other on the street and not even know each other’s names, when we wouldn’t know each other at all.

Thirteen

Our lives changed once Daddy started working for Uncle Jerry. On Sunday evenings Daddy drove down to Allentown where he spent the week working for Uncle Jerry in his used car dealership and living in Uncle Jerry and Aunt Janice’s spare room.

“Calling it a closet would be a compliment,” Daddy said, referring to the spare room, which fit only a cot and a nightstand. “Calling it a closet would be an insult to closets all over the world.”

All week we looked forward to those Friday nights when Daddy came home. When he walked in the door with his jacket folded over his arm and his tie loose around his neck, he walked in a different man. That’s what Ma said. “Like he turned back to the way he used to be. Like whatever happened to him that day in the mine just disappeared. Like it hadn’t happened at all.”

We’d hold supper, sometimes not eating until eight or nine, until whatever Ma and Gram had cooked had dried out or cooled. We’d all sit around the kitchen table with the stove blasting out its warmth and the louvered window cracked for air. The lateness of the hour would give those evenings what Daddy called “night magic,” that mystic kind of feeling that comes sometimes with darkness and night.

Those evenings might have actually been magical in that Ma and Gram would use the kitchen together to prepare the meal. Sometimes they wouldn’t even be talking to each other and Gram would tell me to tell Ma that Ma’s water was boiling, and Ma would tell me to tell Gram that Gram’s gravy was sticking. Somehow, though, they always managed to pull off one of Daddy’s favorites: pot roast and biscuits, meat loaf with slightly burned oven-roasted potatoes, the salad done with petals of iceberg leaves cupping radish wedges that resembled the hearts of flowers.

Ma wore her hair up the way Daddy liked it and put on one of the dresses she’d made styled after one she’d seen Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy wearing in a magazine. As soon as Daddy walked in the door he’d wolf whistle and spin Ma around and tell her she was the prettiest girl in the world. And I think just like with Daddy, Ma turned back to the way she once was, the way I remembered before her heart turned bitter. Brother must have felt it too, even though he was too little to remember her back then. He’d cling to Ma, standing beside her chair and nuzzling into her armpit like a sad little calf. Sometimes he’d sit on her lap snoozing against her shoulder as if he was afraid that when he opened his eyes she’d be back to the bristly ma we’d all gotten used to.

On those nights Gramp, who usually went to bed at eight, would stay up no matter how late the hour and Gram would hold off putting her Friday-night curlers in until we’d sat long over dessert, listening to Daddy tell stories about the customers, and the other workers, and the people he met in Allentown. He told funny stories about something dumb someone said. And he’d tell sad stories about car accidents and deaths and divorces and bankruptcies that had made people lose their cars or need to buy a used one.

Most of Daddy’s job was making sure all the paperwork for the cars was in order and making sure the two men under him, Joe and Phil, had done their jobs, which was to clean and repair the cars. We knew all about Joe’s mother’s glaucoma and Joe’s hammertoes and about Phil’s wife who would sometimes leave the baby alone in the afternoon to go to the corner bar and how Joe would hear about it from neighbors and would have to give her the “what for” all over again.

Daddy was proud of how well the men liked him. “I tell them I don’t care if they take an extra five minutes here or there, as long as they get the cleanup and repairs done. I tell them flirt with Norma all you want. As long as your work gets done, it’s no skin off my nose.”

Norma was the office girl. She had a boyfriend who she was afraid was never going to propose and a father who was such a drunk he sometimes locked her out of the house because he didn’t recognize who she was. “She’s a bit of a ditz,” Daddy said. “But I never talk down to her. When I tell her to get my coffee, I always say please and thank you. A little politeness goes a long way. Especially with women.”

Daddy told us about the things they’d find in the cars: loose change, buttons, a baby’s shoe, the last page of a breakup letter, torn photos, shopping lists, shell casings, a box filled with potted meat. “And other things,” he said ominously. “Grownup things.” When I pleaded to know what those were, he winked and Ma and Gramp laughed. “Don’t you dare tell,” Gram said.

“Slimy rubbers probably,” Marisol informed me when I asked what Daddy could be referring to. “I bet the seats are sticky from where people did it. I bet he’s found bloodstains and poo stains and who knows what else.”

I started picturing those cars as violent wrecks, horrible museum pieces of people’s lives. And I got worried for Daddy that something bad would happen to him.

When Daddy came home those Friday evenings, he didn’t only tell stories; he also did what Gram called “wicked imitations.” “Imitations that make you burn in hell, Adrian, if they weren’t so funny.” Legs crossed, Daddy would dangle his shoe off his foot and do Norma filing her nails or snapping her gum. He’d do Phil belting his wife and Joe hobbling around on his crooked toes. And he always did a rendition of Aunt Janice that would leave all of us—Gram especially, who’d never even met Aunt Janice—breathless.

“Little Jerry, Little Jerry,” Daddy called out, his voice high-pitched and quivering with tension. “You need help wiping your butt? Should I come up and wipe it for you?”

Trying to hold back the laugh, tears oozed out Gram’s eyes and even Gramp hacked out a chuckle. The only person Daddy never made fun of was Uncle Jerry. All his life Daddy was careful of the places where Ma was tender.

Sometimes it was close to midnight when Daddy finally fell quiet. He’d pick up Brother from where he’d be sleeping, either on Ma’s lap or curled up on the floor mat by the sink, and I’d be left to wash the dishes. Usually Ma would open the front door and stare out at West Mountain, which steamed worse in the cold weather, and tell Daddy how he’d nailed those people exact. “Feels like I know them already, Adrian. Like I known them all my life.”

On Friday night and Saturday night when Daddy was home, he slept with Ma in his and Uncle Frank’s old room and I was stuck having to sleep in Gramp’s smelly old Barcalounger. The first thing Daddy did in his old room was to move his mattress from the bottom bunk to the floor next to Ma’s mattress and the second thing he did was to pack into boxes all of Uncle Frank’s athletic trophies and photos. He even peeled off the werewolf poster, stuck to the wall by his bed, leaving a rectangle that was a much brighter shade of blue from the rest of the room.

“Burn it all, Adrian,” I heard Ma say about Uncle Frank’s photos and awards. “That’ll get her. That’s the only thing that hurts her—losing him.”

To Gram’s protests Daddy said, “Wasn’t any room to breathe in there, Mother. Much less room for the girls to put their things. But if you want, I’ll put it all back when we leave.”

“Leave? So you can be a used car salesman? Ain’t no one in the world trusts one of them. They cheat anybody, even their own people.”

Gramp spit into his can, making a hollow sound of agreement.

“He’s working a respectable job!” Ma shouted. “What more do you people want?”

“Well, at least he gets a paycheck,” Gram said. “That’s somethin’. But I’ll tell you, Dolores, you better make sure that brother of yours is on the up and up. You don’t know him from Adam. No tellin’ what reasons he got for wantin’ you down there.”

“What you mean what reason, Rowena?” Ma said. “What better reason than having his own sister back in his life. You’re just jealous ’cause there’s no one on this whole planet who’d want you anywhere.”

Then Gram said all sorts of stuff about how Ma should be grateful Gram took her in all those years ago when Ma had nothing to her name but the clothes on her back. “But I understood what it was to be an orphan, Dolores,” Gram said. “Didn’t I? How many mother-in-laws would a been as nice about that?”

“Nice about it? You call telling anybody who’d listen that my daddy gave me away,
nice
? You call promising me your grandma’s ring and then not giving it to me
, nice
?” Ma held her ring finger up like it was her middle finger and wiggled it at Gram. On that finger was the same plain silver ring she’d worn since she was married, the same silver ring she told people was white gold.

With a yelp like she’d been struck, Ma turned and ran into the bedroom. Me and Daddy followed and found her curled up on her mattress like a baby, bawling her eyes out. I was still so mad at Ma for taking back my doll that I just stood there, watching her, even though each sob raked me hard like a claw.

But Daddy knelt on the mattress and stroked her hair. “Mother wants to goad you, Lores. When will you learn that? You’re giving her exactly the reaction she wants.”

Ma sat up and wiped her nose against her arm. She looked like she had a cold, her face was so puffy and red. She spun her ring around her finger. “I told you no one will ever respect me if I don’t have a proper ring.”