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Chapter One
How Mom Got a Life contains some "language" as you will soon see...
(Mom!!)
When it was all over and
Mom had proved her point or, as she liked to put it, pulled off her
“coup”, and we were telling people what she did, old Mrs. Simmons, who
lived next door and baby-sat us when we were little said, “It was faith
that did it! Faith, pure and simple.”
Mom’s brother, Paul, our
family’s candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records for skepticism
and whose favorite comment is, “If you believe that, you’ll believe pigs
fly over Times Square,” said, “You should see the pigs flying over the
square! Herds of them!”
And Mom, who after all
did it, said, “I kept telling you, you get what you think about. Maybe now
you’ll believe me.”
My sister, Mary, who was
painting her inch-long, fake nails a sickly mauve at that particular time,
said, “I thought you’d gone menopausal on us, I really did. That is,” she
hurried on, seeing Mom’s eyes narrow, “until you did it. Then, of course,
I knew right-off you’d just been thinking those good thoughts.”
“I thought you were
crazy,” I told her. “I mean really far out, earth-to-Mom, C-R-A-Z-Y.”
And I had. I mean,
mothers don’t go around doing what my mother did that day. Not any mothers
I know about anyway.
Before I
tell you what she did though, I need to tell you more about us so you’ll
know, like they say, where we’re coming from.
I guess you could say it all started back when Mom and Dad
got divorced. That’s all a long time ago now, I’ll be a college freshman
come September, but it was in the years right after the divorce that
things got really interesting and led to Mom pulling off her coup.
In those same years Dad went through so many new wives Mary
said it was a wonder the phone company didn’t charge him extra for listing
all the ex’s in the phone book. Weird how he stayed with Mom eighteen
years and didn’t make it eighteen months with any of the others. Going to
his weddings turned into an annual event for us kids, like Christmas. And
you should have seen some of the step brothers and sisters we picked up
along the way! Whoa! I’m not going to get into them though because they’re
not important to this story and because, like Mary always said, “They’re
temps! You know, here today and gone tomorrow. Just like the wives. Don’t
let ‘em get to you, kid.”
I was eleven
when Dad left. Mary, fifteen and Steve, my brother, sixteen.
I remember how we were all in the living room not looking
at one other the Sunday when, right after lunch, Dad went and packed a
suitcase, mumbled something about seeing us later, and walked out the door
just as if he was going off on another business trip. What really seemed
weird at the time was that we were in the living room at all because,
except for Christmas and when we had company, we never used it. But
anyway, maybe because it was in the front of the house and that’s as far
as we could go without going out and getting in the car with him, that’s
where we ended up, all of us sitting on the edges of chairs like we didn’t
belong there.
We heard his car roar up the street, heard him slam on the
brakes at the STOP sign at the top, then take off again. We listened till
the sound of the car’s motor faded into the usual sounds of a hot, Florida
Sunday afternoon: a lawn mower droning down the block a-ways, whoever
pushing it in no big hurry to finish; the roar of a Boston Whaler making a
fast turn out on the bayou back of our house, followed by screams and
laughter so you knew whoever was skiing off the back hadn’t made the turn.
I remember wondering how come other people’s lives seemed to be going on
like normal when it felt like ours was falling apart. And I wondered, too,
if Dad turned left or right up there at the STOP sign though I never have
thought to ask him.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Steve working a
swirling pattern in the old shag carpet with his bare toes and Mary’s
fingers busy tying knots in the tassels of a cushion she’d put on her lap.
My eyes blurred right about then though and everything went out of focus
and just when I thought the lump in my throat was going to choke me, I
heard a sound like a hiccup and looking up saw that Mom was crying and
must’ve been for quite a while from the look of her.
“Not,” she blubbered, seeing all of us staring at her,
“because this divorce is a bad thing. It isn’t. It’s for the best. People
change. Your father wants... That is... Times change. It’s just,” and
she’d rubbed at her eyes and blown her nose, “...it’s just the lost
dreams, you know? The goals we set that will never be met. It’s hard,
painful, to give them up even though you know you’ve outgrown them. Do you
understand what I’m saying?”
Steve and
Mary mumbled, “Yeah... Kind’ve...” and I sort of nodded though I have a
much better idea of what she meant now than I did back then.
Dad hadn’t
been gone half an hour than Mom started losing it over money. “We better
turn the A/C off,” she said, heading for the thermostat in the hall. I
heard the motor cut off with a thunk and I felt like a friend had just
died.
“It’s
ridiculous having the thing running night and day, day and night,” she’d
gone on, coming back into the room. “A little heat never hurt anyone. It
helps to remember that people lived for thousands of years before someone
got around to inventing air conditioning.”
“A little heat?” Mary groaned. “In Florida? In the summer
time? I think you’re a sadist. What about the humidity? Think about the
bugs!”
I thought
about the bugs and how dumb girls are getting so hyper over them. And
thinking about Mary screeching over every little one made me happier about
not having the air on. I even thought how it wouldn’t be that hard to help
the bug population along some in her room.
“Ridiculous,” Mom said, opening windows and doors that
hadn’t been opened since winter. “Why, my goodness!” she exclaimed,
“There’s even a little breeze blowing. Come over here stand by the door
and you’ll feel it.”
“I’d break a
sweat walking that far,” Mary sighed, sitting not two feet away.
“I read somewhere that it costs more turning it off in the
day and on again at night than leaving it running with the thermostat set
a bit higher,” Steve said. “Why don’t we just put it up to eighty for a
few days and see how it goes?”
“But I don’t
plan to turn it back on at night,” Mom said, her voice going up along with
her eyebrows. “I’m turning it off. O-F-F.”
“Mo-om!” we
all groaned.
“Not in
August,” Mary gasped. “We’ll die in August.”
“In that
case,” Mom said, “we won’t have to worry about it, will we?”
Of course we lived through August and all the other months,
too, without the A/C because like Mom said, “May, August, October. What’s
the difference? It’s all the same here in Florida. Hot.”
She’s got
that right. It’s Sweat City all the way.
Anyway,
after she got through with the air and she was sure nothing any of us was
doing was costing money, like playing our stereos or watching TV - “It is
OK if we breathe, isn’t it?” Mary had wanted to know - she started
clipping coupons out of the paper to save on food and walking to save on
gas and sewing to save on clothes. And when she wasn’t doing any of those
things, she was trying to figure out other ways to save.
“She’s getting to be a real pain in the ass with all this
save, save, save,” Mary complained one afternoon when Mom had gone off to
the store with a wad of coupons big enough to choke a camel. “I’ll gag if
she cooks another one of those economy casseroles again tonight. We’d be
better off eating cat food right out of the can.”
“How about the Kool-Aid?” I said, sticking my tongue out
for them to see. “Look, my tongue’s permanently stained purple. We haven’t
even tasted Coke since Dad left.”
We were
staying cool the way we did every day, up to our necks in the bayou,
swimming some, but mostly just hanging on to our old canoe floating upside
down in the water.
“Yeah, well
you’d worry about money, too, if you were her and had three kids to
raise,” Steve told Mary. “Especially if one of them was like you.”
“Well, I
wouldn’t,” Mary said. “Worry, I mean. I never saw worry solve anything.
But if I was going to, I’d worry about my kids staying healthy without air
conditioning and neat food. Not about money. Money’s something you spend
until it’s gone. Then you can worry if you want. I mean, I just don’t see
the point.”
“You don’t
see the point in anything,” I told her, wondering how Steve could be so
patient with her when what I wanted to do was smack her over the head with
an oar.
“Shut your
mouth,” Mary said to me, and to Steve, “What I mean is, I don’t mind being
careful. Sort of... But shit, she doesn’t have to make a career out of it,
does she?”
“You’ve got to quit with the cussing,” Steve told her, but
he said it absent-mindedly, the way everybody does. Mary has cussed as
long as I can remember. Mom says she must’ve been a sailor or a gangster
in another life because she seems to have been born knowing all those
words. Anyway, “Mom’s scared,” Steve went on. “Scared half to death.”
“Don’t talk
dumb,” I said, remembering all the things Mom had taught me not to be
afraid of. “She’s not scared of anything. She used to look under my bed
for Dracula every night when I was a little kid. And once when I was with
her she yelled at a cop!”
“Not your
kind of scared, dummy,” Steve said. “I’m talking adult scared.”
“So tell us, Oh, Wise One,” Mary sneered. “What’s adult
scared?”
“Adults are
scared of things like financial ruin, dread diseases, major mechanical
breakdowns that cost mega-bucks to fix. And of their kids,” he looked
sideways at Mary, “running amok. And then there’s the IRS. And making all
her own decisions. She’s got to figure it all out by herself now.”
Mary made a
face and disappeared under the water, coming up far enough away that she
wouldn’t have to talk to us. Steve must’ve gotten to her though, because
she went in earlier than usual that day and I heard the vacuum going and
later horrendous crashing sounds that could only have meant she was
emptying the dishwasher.
“The year of
the big sweats,” we call that year now. We even think it was funny. Weird
how you laugh about stuff when it’s history. While it was going on I don’t
remember a whole lot of laughing going on.
We didn’t
get a rainy season that year either. “Even God’s dried up on us,” Mary
complained, helping me haul out our dirty bath water – after dark of
course - so the plants out front wouldn’t shrivel up and die and the
neighbors get the idea we were broke. Usually, we get big storms late in
the afternoons that time of year that cool things off and keep us green,
but not that summer. So with the hot days and sticky nights and all the
casseroles and Mom worrying, I was kind of looking forward to school
starting up again. We all were.
Turned out Mom was looking forward to it, too.
“I probably
won’t be here when you kids get home today,” she called out the day school
started when we were all crashing around trying to remember where we’d
dumped our school stuff back in June.
“Where will
you be?” one of us called back.
“Out job
hunting! I’m going to get one too. The paper’s full of them. You just wait
and see. Things are going to be a lot different around here. We’ll turn
the air back on.”
“I’m coming
straight home, taking my clothes off and lying down under the vent,” Mary
said, adding, “In my room, morons,” when she saw Steve and me gagging.
“Maybe we’ll even go out to dinner,” Mom went
on dreamily.
“How about a
movie, too?” I suggested.
“Why not? A
movie, too.”
“Can we have
cokes and popcorn?”
“Of course.
Anything you want. Everything
you want.”
“Maybe she’s
human after all.” Mary said.
“I am,” Mom
said, handing us each a lunch bag.
“You’re
ruining my image with these tacky bags, you know,” Mary said, taking hers
with a scowl.
“Sweetheart,” Mom said, “an image as glorious as yours
cannot possibly be ruined by a mere paper bag.”
We were
watching for her out the front window when she came home that day. We’d
been there, waiting, since about four o’clock, showered, dressed-up, and
ready to go.
“She didn’t
get a job,” Steve said, watching her get out of her car and come up the
front walk.
“Oh, shit!”
Mary said. “That means no dinner, no movie, no damn nothing.”
“How do you
know?” I asked.
“Look at the
way she’s walking. Like she’s going to a funeral. One of ours. Act like
you don’t notice.”
“Hi,
sweethearts. My, how nice you all look,” Mom said, coming in the door with
a big fake smile.
“How’d it
go?” Steve asked.
“Oh, fine.
Just fine.”
“Cut the
crap and tell it like it is,” Mary snapped.
“Ma-ry,” we
all said, Steve and me mad, Mom with
a sigh.
Mom kicked
off her high heels and sort of folded into a chair. “It was awful,” she
sighed. “Just awful.”
“How was it
awful?”
“It was as
bad-as-it-can-get awful. I’m unemployable. A nothing. Quite worthless,
actually. I don’t know how to do anything anymore. Nobody wants me.” She
made a prissy face, put on a squeaky voice and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs.
Martin, but you’ve been away from the job market far too long to fill any
of our present needs.”
“Bunch of
jerks!” Mary scowled.
“Like, what
can’t you do?” Steve asked. “I mean, there’s got to be something out there
you can do. Look at all the stuff you do around here.”
“This has to
have been the most humiliating day of my life,” Mom went on with a
shudder. “I felt so... inept. Useless. Like a bad joke. I thought I’d be
able to get some kind of office job without even trying. After all, before
I met your father I did work for a huge global company. You have to be
pretty good to get that kind of job.”
“See. You do know how to do something.” Steve said. “Why
didn’t you go for that kind of job?”
“But I did! That’s what makes it so humiliating. Everywhere
I went I did just fine until it came to typing. But guess what? Surprise,
surprise! They don’t have typewriters anymore. They have computers... word
processors... whatever... I didn’t even know how to turn one on. Then,
when they showed me, I somehow kept hitting the wrong key and everything I
typed kept erasing itself. Poof! Gone! Oh, God! I was hopeless!”
She shrugged
and tried another smile that didn’t come off too good either. In fact it
looked like she did it because what her face really wanted to do was cry.
“Eighteen
years is too long to have been away from the job market,” she went
on. “So now I guess I have some catching up to do. I’ll have to rent one
of those awful computer things and learn how to use it. What upsets me
most is that I wasted the whole summer. What was I thinking about?”
“How to save
money,” Mary said sourly.
“But I have
to! Steve will be eighteen before we know it and ready for college. We’ve
got to have more money.”
“We’ll make
out fine, Mom,” Steve said. “Stop worrying. Look at all the money I’ve
made this summer mowing lawns and fixing docks. I can work and go to
college too. Other people do it all the time.”
“What’s the
big deal, Mom?” I asked. “We’ll all turn eighteen one day.”
“The big
deal,” she said with another awful smile, in fact the worst smile I’d ever
seen in my life, “is that when each of you reach the age of eighteen, I
lose your child support.”
“Oh,” we said. I mean, what else was there to say?
“Does this
mean we can’t go out to dinner and the movies?” Mary demanded to know,
hands on her hips, mad as all. “Because I think this family deserves a
break once in a while and I hurried home and did all the housework and I
was hot as hell the whole time and I didn’t start dinner because you
said... You told us... And if you think I’m...”
“Mary,
Mary,” Mom said. “Calm down! We’re going out to dinner. You’re right. We
do deserve a break. Just let me go change.”
“How about
the movies?” I called after her.
“You’ve got
it,” she called back. “Dinner. Movies. Cokes and popcorn. The whole nine
yards.”
“About damn time, too,” Mary said, looking happy for the
first time that whole entire summer.
End of Chapter 1 (of
22 total chapters)
How Mom Got a Life!
The latest title from Sheelagh Mawe, author of
Dandelion!
Paperback, 238 pages, $11.95
ORDER HERE!!
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