The Hollow Ground: A Novel (20 page)

Uncle Jerry grunted agreement and at Ma’s request drove us first thing to the house Uncle Jerry’s friend was fixing up for us to rent. Ma had spent most of the bus ride talking about the white eyelet curtains she planned for the kitchen windows and the fluffy white towels she planned for the bath. “The whole place is getting redone, so as everything will be new. New stove, new carpet, new paint on the walls!”

The house was on Furlong Street, which consisted of several blocks of attached houses, all identical with yellow shingles and two front windows that stared out at us like blank eyes.

“The suburbs,” Ma whispered to me as Uncle Jerry walked ahead to unlock the door. “Don’t matter how bad our shit stinks, we’ll be middle class by Tuesday.”

As Uncle Jerry pushed open the door and stepped inside, he instructed us, “Don’t see it the way it is, picture it like it will be.”

There was a hole in the hall wall the size and shape of a cauliflower. A brown stain on the front carpet. The kitchen had one of those old double sinks with a sink and tub to scrub laundry in. The kitchen window that Ma had wanted to drape in eyelet curtains was repaired with a piece of cardboard.

Uncle Jerry slid the dead bolt open on the back door and we all stepped out onto a small concrete stoop. From the next yard we were greeted by a man whose face was all bandaged on one side. “My dog done bit me,” he said, talking out the side of his mouth.

Ma’s eyes were as dull as the cardboard taped to the window. “Ain’t that nice,” she said.

“Can I see?” Brother pleaded to the man, whose mouth, where it wasn’t bandaged, appeared to grin.

Uncle Jerry ushered us back inside. “After what the last tenants did to the place, Jimmy’s sure going to be glad to have you here. The guy he’s got working on it had a couple of delays. But by spring you won’t recognize it.” Uncle Jerry waved his hand like a wand at the linoleum floor that was burned where maybe a pot had dropped on it. “Can you picture it, Dolores? Can you?”

Ma had on her stoic “I’m tough as nails” expression, but her eyes were rolled up, looking at the kitchen globe that shook on the ceiling.

“We’re near the train,” Uncle Jerry explained. “So you’ll get a few vibrations. Big deal. Jimmy will let you have this place for a song. Don’t worry, Dolores. It’s all going to be fine. Things are working out with Adrian better than expected. You’d never think he’d been out of work at all. He just needed someone to believe in him. Give him his confidence back. Every man needs that.”

Ma’s brave face wobbled and she began to cry. “I tried. After I married him I tried. But how long can a girl be expected—”

“Sure, sure,” Uncle Jerry said, awkwardly patting her on the shoulder. “Of course, sure,” he repeated.

*   *   *

We found Daddy at the back of Uncle Jerry’s used car lot with his hands thrust deep into his coat pockets. He stared up at the frozen gray sky, which was tinted pink in the way that told of snow. Here and there a big wet flake stuck to his coat, then melted. “There you guys are,” he called. “Was getting worried.”

Daddy was quick to bring us inside the building. He introduced us to Norma, the office girl, the one we knew had the drunk father who locked her out and the boyfriend who she was afraid would never propose. “So this is Princess?” she said to me and though she winked, I couldn’t tell if she meant it nice or if she was making fun of me.

Brother reached for a seashell paperweight on Norma’s desk. “Put it down,” Daddy yelled but Norma just laughed. “He can keep it,” she said. “I got all I want now.” And then she showed us the ring on her finger. It had a bunch of little diamonds on it so small you had to squint to see them, but that didn’t stop Ma from declaring, “Every girl deserves a nice ring like that, don’t they, Adrian?” Ma looked right at Daddy who bobbed and weaved his head like Ma was throwing punches, not words. Ma added, “Your fiancé must love you a lot to give you a ring nice as that. Me, I never got a proper diamond ring, but then we all can’t get what we want, can we?”

No one dared respond and Uncle Jerry told Norma to go in the back room and make us all hot chocolate. At his desk he lifted a brown envelope from where it perched on top of a stack of papers. He hitched up his pants and handed the envelope to Ma with a smile that pushed out his mouth and made his cheeks bulge. “Here you go, Dolores. They’re all yours. I told Elsie to give me every last one she had. I told her not to hold anything back.”

Ma opened the envelope and slid out several dog-eared photos. Slowly Ma shuffled through them, her face reminding me of the frozen gray sky. “But there’s none of Ma,” Ma said. “And there ain’t none of me neither.”

Uncle Jerry noticeably swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there ain’t one of Ma. And there ain’t one of me. There’s one of Daddy. There’s a baby one of you. And these”—Ma fanned three photos—“I don’t know who these people are. I bet that bitch ripped up all the ones of Ma and me. I bet she wanted to get rid of any trace of us because we was her competition.”

Norma had stepped back into the room with a tray of mugs in her hands. “Where should I put these?” she said, holding the tray out from her as if it held something flammable.

“Bring them back later,” Uncle Jerry barked and Norma’s gaze slipped sideways to Daddy before she turned and left the room. Uncle Jerry took the photos from Ma’s hands and helplessly flipped through them. “I could have sworn we had some of Mama. I don’t know. I’m not sure anymore. I don’t know if we ever had any of you, Dolores.”

“Well, you must have. They were taken of me. I can tell you that. I remember one of them being taken anyways.” Ma stared at the little Christmas tree in the corner all lit with fat colored lights. “It was Christmastime. I remember because we made a trip special to Pittsburgh to visit Daddy’s sister. She had this beautiful house with the biggest tree I’d ever seen and they took a photo of me, Ma and Daddy standing in front of it.”

“Well, I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Uncle Jerry said as he kept flipping through the photos as if suddenly Ma’s face might magically appear within them. “Maybe Aunt Rose’s kids have that photo. If they took the photo there, they probably kept it.”

“No. If they’d kept it, how could I remember seeing it? I bet that bitch got rid of that photo because she didn’t like seeing me and Ma with Daddy. I bet she didn’t like having no reminder of me neither—seeing as what she done to me.”

Ma’s eyes lit with such a ferocious intensity that Uncle Jerry instinctively took a step back from her. He placed all the photos facedown on his desk. “Well, I’ll just ask her then. Next time I talk to her, I’ll ask if she remembers seeing any pictures of you or Mama.”

“Like the bitch would tell you if she did.” Ma folded her arms and hunched her shoulders.

“Well, then I’ll check the photo albums myself,” Uncle Jerry said. His eyes moved from one place in the room to another as if he was looking for the photos right on the walls of his office.

Daddy stepped closer to Ma and murmured her name but he knew not to touch her. When she was angry or near tears, a hug was the last thing she wanted. “Now I ain’t never gonna see no picture of myself,” Ma said. “I ain’t never going to see clear what Ma or me looked like. If only I could remember.” Then suddenly she lunged forward and gripped Uncle Jerry’s arm. “You must remember, don’t you? What I looked like?”

“I was so young, Dolores.” Uncle Jerry’s face had gone white as if Ma had gripped him so hard she’d stopped his blood flow.

“Nah, you weren’t that young,” Ma said. “Not much younger than John Patrick here.” Ma pointed at Brother who looked up guiltily from where he sat on the floor by the tree gazing into the paperweight as if it were a crystal ball.

“You had long braids,” Uncle Jerry said. “You dug in the mud pit with me.”

“Ah, the mud pit,” Ma said, her voice all hushed as if the pit had been something sacred. “I can see it almost. Sort of.” Ma turned to Daddy. “You was right. My mind was blocking me from it. Maybe more will come to me if I let it. Maybe I’ll remember it all.”

Ma turned to Uncle Jerry, but she wasn’t really looking at him. You could just see from the way her eyes went dark that she was looking deep into memory. Uncle Jerry gazed off at the wall above Brother’s head. “Maybe you will remember it,” he said with not a hint of belief.

“Why sure you will,” Daddy said, putting his good arm around Ma and kissing the side of her head. “If you want to remember, Lores, you will.”

Eighteen

Ma’s hometown of Loppsville, Pennsylvania, was on the other side of the state and Ma agonized about going there as if she had to walk the two hundred miles, and not merely drive. But Daddy told her she’d never have any peace until she finally went back and saw her stepma face-to-face. So on the Saturday before Christmas me and Ma made the trip. Uncle Jerry had given Daddy Saturday off so he could drive home Friday night so me and Ma could use the car early Saturday morning.

“You’ll be sorry,” Gram warned through the side porch window as me and Ma got in the car.

“One thing you don’t know nothing about, old lady, is being sorry,” Ma muttered but the windows were up on the car so Gram didn’t hear her. Daddy was still asleep and Brother was faking sleep and sulking because Ma said he was too little to come, so Gram’s words were the last ones we heard as we started our trip and they kind of got stuck, hanging there in the compartment of the car for us to ponder for all the hours Ma drove.

When we finally arrived, Ma parked on a side street several blocks from the house because she didn’t want Stepma to see us coming. A layer of snow coated the street, a sight so rare in Barrendale where most snow melted on impact that me and Ma kicked and skidded in it, stretching our legs that were stiff from the long ride. There was a different feel to this side of Pennsylvania. Surrounding the town were mountains more jagged than any I’d ever seen. Glinting foil wreaths hung on most of the doors. Happy-looking paper Santas and reindeers were taped to windows. Wooden mangers adorned lawns. The wonderful, magical feeling of Christmas was alive here, not like it was in dreary Barrendale where the fire had burned out even the spirit of Christmas.

Ma twisted up her hair and stuck it under a knit hat that she pulled low on her forehead, saying she didn’t want to be recognized.

“Do you really think someone could recognize you, Ma?” I said. “You weren’t much older than Brother when you left. You must look different now.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We’re about to find out, though, ain’t we? Soon I’ll have a picture of myself in this very hand.” Ma opened her gloved hand and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else and she didn’t recognize it at all. Then she raised her head and sniffed the air as if she could find the house by smell. “This way,” she said, jabbing her thumb behind us.

As we crossed first Church, then River Street, Ma spoke about her memories of her stepma and her daddy. “My ma died in the spring,” she said, “and Daddy remarried by that summer. ‘Here’s your new stepma,’ he said and believe it or not, I was happy because she was nice to me. She held me and stroked my hair when I cried about my ma. My ma had been sick for so long, I was grateful, I guess. I wanted someone to take care of me.”

Out front of a white wooden building Ma stopped. The sign on the door said
KINLEY KINDERGARTEN
but when Ma went to school there it went up to the fourth grade. “Two grades per room,” Ma said. “I was in first grade so we sat on the left side of the room. Second grade sat on the right.”

She glanced over her shoulder as if she expected someone back there. “Everything feels different than it did. All them years at the orphanage waiting for my daddy to rescue me. What could stop a daddy from getting his little girl? What could that horrible woman have said to make him not come?”

Hand in hand we headed down a sloping snowy street that was crunchy with ashes and gravel that had been spread for traction. A bright sun took the bite off the air. I swung Ma’s arm and she swung back as we made fun of stupid things we saw on the houses we passed: a gate that wasn’t attached to a fence, a manger with an angel missing one of its wings. There was something so sweet and nice about Ma when she was hurting that I wanted us to keep walking around like that forever. We kicked through a crust of sparkly snow and I remembered something Auntie used to say about holding the good moments inside you so that you could pick through them later like a drawerful of tiny treasures. I was certain right then that that was a moment I’d be picking through years in the future when I was an old woman, and then I realized that by the time I was an old woman Ma would be dead. My chest got so tight it stopped my breath.

“Let’s go down every street in town, Ma,” I pleaded. “We can see if you remember anything else. Stepma can wait.”

But Ma didn’t respond. She turned a corner and stopped, staring at a narrow house with a flaking white porch at the street’s end. A white fence rimmed a yard that contained a shed and two large sycamores. The house’s lace-curtained front windows, upstairs and down, were parted to display tin wreaths. “That’s it,” Ma said.

“You sure?” I said. “That’s not how you described it.” And I went on to point out all the things it had different from Ma’s memory: it was white, not yellow, and had no porch swing or vegetable garden.

But Ma wasn’t interested in differences; her pretty eyes squinted as she stood there. “A white picket fence,” she said softly but the crisp snow-covered day seemed to broadcast her words and she covered her mouth and giggled. “I always loved white picket fences and never knew why. But I guess you remember home no matter what, no matter if you remember it at all.”

We crossed into the street and moved quickly to the front gate where Ma didn’t so much as pause. Swinging it open she stepped through into the yard and led me between the two sycamores, their trunks spotted brown and white. At the back of the shed was an ugly beige car seat beside a dented animal cage. Several yards out, a patch of woods harbored a rotting hunter’s blind.

“I remember that,” Ma said, pointing to the seat, which was the color of vomit. “Ugly as sin. My daddy would sit there smoking a pipe and looking at the cageful of rabbits. My pet rabbits. But then one day Daddy killed them. ‘Just ’cause they’re fluffy and cute don’t mean they ain’t fresh meat,’ he said. But I knew it was Stepma who’d put him up to it. He’d never had done that if my ma had been alive. For weeks I starved myself at dinner, afraid of what was on my plate.” Ma gripped her stomach and added, “Makes me sick just being back here.”