"It's just going to be you and me," my mother said. "Just the two of us."
I smiled, looked at her with my head tilted to one side, and swung my legs back and forth under the dining room chair.
"What are Rikki and Joe gonna do?" I asked.
"They'll be here with Dad."
I didn't ask why I was chosen to take a ten-day trek across the East Coast with my mother. I assumed it was because we were pals. We watched Shirley Temple movies together on Sunday mornings, ate Reese's peanut butter cups after school, and went through a stack of magazines before bed each night: she reading them and me mostly looking at the pictures.
Rikki was my older sister. She was 16, anorexic, and suffering from intermittent bouts of depression. Joe was ten, two years younger than me. He was a chess genius, piano prodigy, and undergoing counseling for severe performance anxiety. And I was the middle child; the only family member not in therapy, and completely unremarkable in every way.
The morning that we were leaving, my father came in my room and handed me a paper bag.
"This is for you sweetheart," he said, ducking his head under the top bunk bed so that he could sit next to me on the lower one.
I opened the bag and pulled out a fabric-bound notebook. It was covered in a pinpoint floral print, and at the beginning of the first line of each page was fancy inch-high swirl, the shape of a twisted bobby pin. There were two pens inside the bag, too; one red and one black, ballpoint with a silver clicker on the ends. I put a pen in each hand and clicked them simultaneously.
"It's a travel diary," my dad said. "So you can write down all your adventures." He ran his hand through my hair—that was then the color of wheat—pulled me into him, and kissed me on my freckled forehead.
"I'm going to miss you," he said.
"I'm going to miss you too." I turned and hugged him, my face buried in his scratchy neck, which always smelled fresh and clean, and slightly tangy like the salt air.
My mother and I each wore a dress on the plane. Mine was sapphire-blue with an empire waist and a six-inch hem that my mother sewed in haste the night before our flight. Hers was a long batik sheath that hovered above her ankles. She had on wooden platform shoes with leather straps, and in her ears, poking out from her frizzy home-permed afro, were two silver-dollar sized gold hoop earrings. Her breasts were small, but I could see the tear-drop shaped mounds pressing against the fabric.
"Mom," I whispered in her ear, "you're not wearing a bra."
"Nope, and no underwear either." She winked at me with a lopsided smile. "I didn't even pack them. And what about you?"
"Shhh," I said, and quickly glanced across the aisle to see if anyone had overheard. It was not unusual for my mother to be unpredictable and spontaneous. What was unusual, however, was the electric buzz of happiness that seemed to surround her as if she had caught some sort of happy-flu. I was used to my mother lying on the couch and reading, lying in bed and watching movies, or locked behind her office door with the sound of the electric typewriter endlessly clacking away, letting us know that she should not be bothered. But from the moment we boarded the plane Mom seemed different, as if she herself were flying miles above the ground.
The seat next to us was unoccupied; my mother placed her heavy leather shoulder bag there, slouched and open, so I could dig into whenever I wanted. There were certain things that Mom always had in her purse: yellow Carefree sugarless gum, a box of black licorice drops, lipstick, patchouli oil, and a comb. I could have as much gum or licorice as I wanted, but I was only allowed to chew the gum a half-stick at a time.
"An entire stick is too much for a little mouth," she once said. "You'll look like a cow chewing her cud."
Once the plane was in the air, I pulled my travel diary and a pen from my mother's purse, sat with the book open on my lap and wrote the first entry.
Dear Diary,
Today I am on an airplane with Mom. We are flying to New York City. I am very hungry and they have not give us lunch yet. I will not miss Rikki or Joe because they were bugging me before I left. The stewardess gave me a pin shaped like wings. I was very embarrassed because those pins are for little kids. When I told Mom that I was mad abut the pin she said, "Well, you're a kid." And I said, "I'm almost a teenager, and I don't want to be a kid anymore." And she said, "Well then let's just pretend that we're sisters and you're a midget." And then she laughed, but I didn't laugh because I was still angry about that pin. That's all for now. Love, Jennifer.
The first thing I noticed, as we were waiting for our bags in New York City, was the variety of people; a variety that didn't seem to exist in our small Southern California town.
"What's wrong with that lady?" I asked my mother. She turned and stared at the ostrich shaped woman pacing back and forth in front of the baggage carousel. Her tiny head had small tufts of blond hair poking out like feathers, and she wore a pink tube-top that was slipping down her flat chest so that the edge of one pale dot of a nipple was beginning to peek out. The woman repeated over and over again, "Pretty please, pretty please with sugar on top, pretty please, pretty please with sugar on top..."
Mom pulled her owl-eyed sunglasses out of her purse so that she could stare at the woman without being seen.
"That woman's crazy," Mom laughed, and leaned her head near mine. "There're lots of crazy people in New York. You'll love it."
We took a taxi to midtown, where my parents' friends from college lived. In the back of the cab I stared out the window, leaning in close to my mother, as if what I saw could tear me away from her and suck me out of the cab. I tried to see through the broken boards on the windows of the dilapidated buildings; I thought they housed waifish kids: runaways and children of divorce.
Mom's friends, Dotty and Leon, lived on the fifth floor of a walk-up. The apartment was big with windows all around, but the large buildings surrounding it blocked the sun so that I felt trapped in a permanent shadow.
Leon was a director, working mostly on off-Broadway shows. My father was a director too. That year, he had lead the seventh and eighth graders of Conchita Junior High through the steps of such ambitious productions as "Mame" and "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." My mother refused to attend my father's shows. Once I overheard her through their bedroom door saying, "Look, I'm just not interested in seeing some pissy seventh grader who's never drank a cup of coffee in her life, shuffle across the stage singing 'if I can't take my coffee bread...'" My brother and I would attend all my father's productions. We'd sit in the wings, repeat the actors' lines in whispers, smile and blush whenever the junior high school "stars" spoke to us or asked us questions.
Dotty, like my mother, was a writer. Dotty wrote fiction, most of it unpublished. "She can only work when her head is clear," my mother told me in the cab ride to their house. "And her head is only clear when Leon's out of town. And Len is afraid to leave Manhattan, so she probably hasn't written anything in ten years."
My mother was a reporter for our local paper. Like everyone in town who worked with the public, Mom was somewhat of a celebrity. On the rare occasion that my best friend Amy's dad was home early from work, he would call me into the den where he sat in his corduroy easy-chair, slap the folded "Conchita Sun" against the ottoman and say, "That mother of yours is some wordsmith; she has got the beat of her beat."
Leon picked up our bags and led us down the narrow hallway, which reminded me of the inside of my closet with the light off. He opened the guest room door, walked three steps to the nightstand, pulled a chain a tiny, plastic desk lamp, and illuminated the room. A mass of cockroaches scattered outward across the bed like shattering black glass. I stood frozen with my mouth dropped open as if I had broken my jaw; then I stared up at my mother to see what she thought of our insect-infested sleeping quarters.
She was laughing, "Wow, I forgot all about the cockroaches!"
"Yeah, Leon thinks it's cruel to kill them," Dotty said, tossing a loopy, blond curl behind her ear. "And they don't spread germs anyway."
"I just think that it's a shame to murder anything that's been ingenious enough to survive the evolution of Earth since the time of the dinosaurs," Leon said. I thought he resembled a cockroach, wearing all black, with a skim coating of thin hair smoothed back from his forehead.
"He even leaves food out for them in the kitchen," Dotty said.
Mom laughed some more and said, "It's really great to see you guys."
Dotty ordered pizza for dinner, and we all sat in the living room, which was near empty, with only an orange, stiff couch and a low flat coffee table made from roped-together railroad ties. Leon lit a joint and passed it casually to my mother, holding his arm out, his face turned towards Dotty as he instructed her to open the window. I tried to hold my breath so that none of the smoke would go in me; and looked at my mother, hoping she'd do the same. Instead, she lifted the thin twisted-end to her mouth, and inhaled as if it were her last breath. I spent the evening slouched between my mother and the armrest of the couch, staring out the window that faced a brick wall, and listening to what seemed like an endless string of noise wafting into the apartment.
"Why is everyone honking their horn?" I asked, during a silent moment as the second joint—smoked down to the size and shape of a cockroach—was being passed from my mother to Dotty. Everyone looked at me and laughed; nobody answered. I decided not to speak again, and reminded myself that my practical father would quell any urges my mother may have for marijuana, should she become addicted after this one experience.
The grownups seemed to be speaking in code, twisting their words into sentences that made no sense to me; speaking of a nameless man they called "the husband" and a nameless woman named "the wife". Eventually the drone of their voices fell into a flat hum and lulled me into sleep on the couch. My mother woke me in what seemed like the middle of the night. "Let's go to bed," she said, and she held my hand and dragged me toward the bathroom to brush my teeth. The sounds from outside seemed barely diminished, and I wondered how so many people could stay awake for so long.
"Will the cockroaches bite us?" I asked my mom as she turned on the light and we watched them scatter into unseen cracks and crevices.
"No, don't worry about it," my mother said. Her voice was slow, like a tape recorder with a dying battery.
"Will they come back and crawl all over us when you turn off the light?"
"No, they don't like people."
"Why not?"
"We use too much soap and perfume, the smell of perfume actually makes them nauseous." Mom turned out the light, crawled into the bed beside me, and immediately fell asleep. I lay there with my eyes wide open, staring through the soupy-grey light. All I could think was that I hadn't had a bath in two days, and I wasn't wearing perfume. I imagined thousands of slippery cockroaches smelling my mother's patchouli, taking refuge on my scentless body, and then vomiting.
I don't remember falling asleep, but I do remember waking up in the middle of the night. There was a grunting sound, and then a yell. I sat up in bed and looked down at my mother's face. She was shouting in her sleep. "MOTHER FUCKER," she said. Her eyes were shut, darting back and forth under the closed hoods. I imagine that there were cockroaches in her head, running in circles below the thin skin of her eyelids. "MOTHERFUCKER," she shouted again. I looked toward the door as if it would tell me whether or not Dotty and Len had heard her. My mother turned on her side and continued to sleep in silence. I examined the pillow for roaches before finally lying back down and returning to my own fitful sleep.
We stayed in New York for four days. During that time, Mother, Dotty and Leon smoked twelve joints and had food delivered five times. We went to three museums, five art galleries, and dinner one night in Chinatown—which I thought was so crowded and pungent that I imagined myself holding a giant hose and spritzing away the thick layer of rotted muck that seemed to cling to the sidewalks and buildings.
On the train en route to Boston, I pulled out my diary and wrote:
Dear Diary:
New York was very crowded and messy but exciting. Some people call it the Big Apple, but I m not sure why. I think D and L are a bad influence on Mom; but I'm sure she'll snap back to normal when we get back home. Now we are on our way to Boston because Mom wants to see a Matisse show at the Museum of Fine Arts. More to come later. Love, Jenny.
In Boston, we checked into an old hotel that had perhaps been elegant at one time, but now seemed to be melting and atrophying with the sad ugliness of an aging movie star. The carpet in our room was matted down flat and felt slightly damp all the time, as if it were so oily it could never really dry.
That evening, after tacos in a Happy Jose's, we each lay on our stomachs facing the foot of the bed. Mom was reading The Diary of Anais Nin, and I was watching television. After a few minutes, my mother tossed the book on the floor and went into the bathroom. The door was open, and I looked up and watched her brush her teeth as she stared at herself in the mirror.
"Je-y, co- he-," she suddenly turned and urgently whispered. Her white toothbrush was hanging out of her mouth like a cigarette, and a dollop of foam was dripping down her chin. I rushed into the bathroom, my mother spit into the sink and then handed me a drinking glass. She unwrapped a second glass from its paper cover, pressed the open side against the wall, and pushed her ear against the flat bottom.
"Do you hear the people next door?" she asked. "It sounds like they're planning on robbing a bank."
I gasped and pushed my glass against the wall between the toilet and the sink. My mother's glass was directly above mine, her body hovered over me.
"No, you get off at Cambridge," I heard a low, gravelly man's voice say. "Take the T to Cambridge."
"But I waa waa waa... not in Wellesley... route nine, not the T...," the second voice, also male, seemed to be saying.
"They were talking about guns before," my mother whispered. "Someone was shouting something about shooting the guard."
I listened intently, but all I ever heard were mumbled directions, and an argument about which route they would take. I began to get anxious that they would somehow find out that we were listening and shoot us through the wall.
"Maybe we should go in the other room and shut the bathroom door," I said to my mom.
"You go ahead," she said. "I'll be out in a minute."
I went in the other room, leaving the door open so that I could keep an eye on Mom. She sat on the toilet, placed her elbow on the tank, and leaned the glass up against the wall. I pulled out my diary.
Dear Diary,
We are in Boston now. There are two bank robbers in the room next to us. Mom is listening to them through the wall. I hope she doesn't get shot. In case we are both killed tonight, here are the clues we heard that may lead police to the criminals: route nine, Wellesley, the T, Cambridge. And Mom heard something about shooting a security guard. This has been a very dangerous trip so far, I hope we make it home. Love, Jennifer.
I put the diary down and looked up; my mother was waving her arm, furiously beckoning me into the bathroom. I ran in and picked up the glass from the counter.
"In the drawer," I heard. "Just keep the fucking thing in the drawer."
"They're talking about the gun again," my mother whispered. "The one guy wants to sleep with it under his pillow, but the other one thinks that they should both have access to it, and that he should keep it in the drawer."
I listened for a few minutes longer and never heard mention of a gun. And then, finally, I heard someone say, "Wait a minute, how many bullets did you bring?" I felt dizzy, and nearly dropped the glass on the counter.
"I'm going to bed," I said.
She nodded her head without removing it from the glass, and waved her free had at me to signal "okay."
Sometime in
"FUCK YOU... MA'R FUCK," she was shouting again in the guttural, thick tone of sleep talking.
I sat up and placed a pillow in front of my chest to catch the bullets that I anticipated would soon be flying through the wall.
"FU' YOU," she shouted. With my pillow in front of me like a shield, I picked up the second pillow from my bed, very gingerly laid it on my mother's back and then crouched down on the floor beside her. My mother rolled over, shrugging the pillow of so it landed on my head, and continued her sleep.
When Mom's breathing sounded steady and deep, and the threat of gunfire seemed to have passed, I lay back down on my bed and let myself sleep.
Mom spent only a few minutes at the bathroom wall with her glass the following night. The criminals had moved out, and new people, a couple with two crying kids, had moved in. My mother clunked the glass on the counter next to the sink, threw her hands up in the air and stomped out of the bathroom saying, "Boring, boring, boring!"
Waiting in the train station on our way to Maine, my mother bought a pack of cigarettes from a vending machine.
"You don't smoke," I said to her.
"I do now," she said, tapping the top of the pack against her open, flat palm.
"You'll stop when we get home, won't you?"
"Everything will be different when we get home," she said.
We were going to visit he best friends from graduate school: Annie and Fritz.
Annie picked us up at the train station. She looked pretty, but thrown together like a collage. Her socks didn't match, her long rust-colored hair was fastened on top of her head with a chopstick, and her beige corduroy shorts were held together with a pink monkey-headed diaper pin. I sat in the back seat with our matching soft-grey suitcases, and my mother sat in the front as Annie zoomed her big blue station wagon down the empty roads toward her house. Trees were swooshing by outside my window, an endless smudge of green and brown.
Annie stopped the car at the mouth of a dirt road where a mailbox stood, perched at an angle as if it were trying to peer through the car window.
"This is the mailbox," she said. "It's a half-mile from the house; a nice run in the summer, and a giant pain in the ass in the winter."
"Look at that," my mother said, turning to me, " a mailbox half a mile from the house!"
We pulled in front of an old, white, clapboard Victorian with a wraparound porch and green shutters. Fritz was standing on the front porch wearing a flannel nightgown and playing the flute. Rays of sun seemed to glisten and quiver inside large droplets of sweat on the top of his bald head. As we stepped out of the car, he turned his eyes toward us and smiled under his moustache without releasing the pucker on his mouth. We stood at the base of the steps and listened until Fritz came to a flourishing end. He pulled the flute from his mouth and waved it up in the air so that his arms formed a V.
My mother clapped, and Fritz rushed down the stairs, hugging and kissing Mom before bending over and pulling me tight against his chest.
"Great nightgown," my mother said.
"That's all we wear up here," Fritz said. "Annie made one for each of you, too."
We walked into the kitchen and sat at the giant oak table. There was a wood-burning stove in one corner, and the floors were warped into gentle slopes that reminded me of wind-blown sand. The ceiling was covered, like a crisp, dry field, with swatches of twine-bound lavender. When I leaned my head back in my chair, I imagined that the lavender was growing from the ground, and I was floating in the sky.
"What about when your patients come?" I asked. Fritz and Annie were both psychiatrists. After hearing Annie explain the "layout" of their lives to my mother in the car, I knew that they each had an office in separate wings of the house.
"What about when my patients come?" Fritz asked. He leaned in toward me and put a thick freckled hand on my knee.
"Do you still wear your nightgown?"
"Of course! In fact, I encourage them to wear their nightgowns, or pajamas if they prefer."
"What about Annie?"
"You'll have to ask her yourself," Fritz said, winking slowly so that his thick moustache leaned up like a caterpillar inching toward his eye.
"Ask me what?" Annie said. She and my mother were already deep in conversation.
"Do you wear your nightgown when you meet with your patients?"
"Of course not!" she said. "I meet with them completely naked. And I urge them to do the same!"
My mother laughed, so I laughed along with her. But I wasn't sure whether we were laughing because it was true or because Annie was joking.
That evening before bed, Annie gave us each the flannel, foulard print nightgown she had sewn for us. It was a hot night, so I pulled the nightgown up around my waist and slept on my back with my legs spread so that each of my feet dangled off the edge of the single bed. A cool breeze sailed in through the window, tickled my toes and gently caressed me to sleep.
The next morning, I got out of bed, checked for my mother in her room, which adjoined mine, and then wandered around the house searching for the grown-ups. My bare feet were silent along the smooth, sloped floor, as I padded through several dusty rooms filled with overstuffed, half-broken furniture, boxes lined against walls, and books stacked in narrow piles, like the twisted, amorphous high-rises illustrated in Dr. Seuss books.
Fritz's office door was closed, but I could hear voices, and assumed he was with a patient. I wondered if they were wearing nightgowns. Outside the swinging kitchen door, I caught the end of a sentence from my mother, "...old enough to handle it." I leaned back against the hallway and waited to hear more.
"It's hard no matter what age they are," Annie said. "But your kids are all pretty well adjusted."
"I just wonder how it will affect Rikki's anorexia. She's doing so well now, eating every day." A cloud of smoke drifted out of the kitchen and tickled my nose. I could hear the smallest gasp from my mother as she exhaled.
"As long as they understand that it has nothing to do with them," Annie said, "then they'll be okay. Kids are resilient."
My stomach contracted and I felt slightly ill; I put one hand on the door frame, steadied myself, and then pushed open the door with a silent whoosh.
"Hi honey," my mother said, crushing her cigarette so it folded into the ashtray. She and Annie were both wearing their nightgowns. They were seated on opposite sides of the table, a giant beaker of coffee and a loaf of speckled, grainy bread on the table between them.
"Do you want some toast?" Annie asked. "Fritz baked the bread himself."
"No thanks," I said, and I slumped into a chair next to my mother, pulling my knees up under the nightgown so that I resembled a bumpy, flannel ball.
"Alice was just telling me," my mother said, "there are some farmers who live down the road. And one of them is married to his sister..."
"Stepsister," Annie said.
"Stepsister," my mother said. "And her sister is married to his cousin, and they all live together with something like thirteen kids..."
"Seven kids," Annie interrupted.
"Seven kids," my mother continued, "and all of them are sort of dopey looking."
I nodded my head and looked trance-like at the giant rock of bread in the middle of the table.
"So we were thinking that we'd take a walk after breakfast, and see if we can check out the farmer family."
"Are you going to wear your nightgowns?" I asked, without looking up.
"We'll do whatever you want," Mom said.
"No nightgowns," I said.
"Okay with me," my mother said. "Okay with you?" she turned to Annie.
"Fine with me," Annie said. "Fritz is the one who's hung up on wearing nightgowns anyway." My mother laughed, leaned back in her chair, struck a wooden match against the wrought-iron wood-stove, then lit up another cigarette.
That night, as I lay in bed listening to the hum of grown-up conversation down the hall, I pulled out my diary and made another entry.
Dear Diary
Today Annie and Mom and I took a long walk. We were trying to find some loony family with a bunch of weird kids. Annie showed us the house but no one ever came out, so then she took us over to this nutty divorced lady's house. She said that we would love this woman because after her husband moved out, she never cleaned her house again and there was so much dirt and mold and rotten food and stuff, that if the town, or state, ever saw it, they would put her away. Well, the divorced lady wasn't home either so we didn't get inside her house. Mom was so curious that she snooped around and peered in all the windows. She was really freaking out when she looked in the kitchen window. She and Annie made a foothold with their hands, and I stood on them and looked through the window too. It was like looking into a garbage dumpster; except it's really someone's kitchen.
I have been feeling a little sick to my stomach all day. I told Fritz, and he said, your stomach is trying to tell you something. And I said, that I'm sick? And he said, no, something else, something that you don't want to think about. That's all. Love, Jennifer.
That night my mother was yelling again in her sleep. I turned the gumdrop-shaped knob on the light next to my bed and looked toward her room. The door was ajar, forming a narrow slat of blackness between our rooms.
"MOTHER FUCKER!" She pushed the words out as if they were torn from her gut, caught in her throat. I got out of bed and walked into my mother's room. She appeared small, almost childlike, her body the shape of a comma under the white sheet.
"Mom," I whispered. "Mom."
She didn't stir. I approached the bed and looked down at the mass of hair tangled around her head. It looked as if she had been riding in a car with the top down.
"Mom." I laid my hand on her shoulder and shook it gently.
"Huh..." She batted her eyes but did not open them.
"Mom, you were yelling in your sleep."
She opened her eyes and turned toward me.
"What?"
"You were yelling in your sleep."
"What'd I say?" she asked, reaching for my hand with hers, then holding my fingers loosely in her palm.
"You said 'Mother fucker'," I said, and started to cry.
"Come here, honey." My mother tugged my arm and I collapsed on the bed beside her, burying my face against her chest.
"It's alright," she said, stroking my hair, smoothing it with her fingers.
"Are you and dad getting divorced?" I stuttered the question through my tears.
"We're not sure," she said. "When we get back, I'm moving into an apartment downtown. Your dad and I just need a little break from each other."
"Why?" My voice screeched up as if a rope had been tightened around my diaphragm.
"It's very complicated," she said, "and I'll explain it to you another day when I understand it better. But it has nothing to do with you, or Rikki, or Joe."
"Where will we live?" I sobbed.
"You'll stay in the house with Dad. But I'll come over and see you every day when you get home from school. And I'll see Rikki and Joe all the time because I'll be taking them to the therapist, and piano lessons, and the chess club, and everything else.
"YOU'LL SEE ME WHILE YOU'RE WAITING FOR THEM IN THE CAR!" I screamed.
My mother tilted my head up, her hands on each of my ears and kissed me all over my wet, teary face.
"I'll get there as early as I can," she said. "I'll try to see you for as much time as I can before their appointments. I'm not leaving you; I'm leaving your dad."
I collapsed into her chest and cried until no sound came out and my body fell limp into sleep.
The next morning, I awoke thinking that my mother was still there. I opened my eyes and saw that I was alone with the woodsy-dark smell of her patchouli oil on the pillow.
Fritz was in his office again. I lingered outside the door for a moment, waiting for it to open and someone to emerge, so I could see for myself if he really treated his patients while wearing his nightgown. As I entered the kitchen, I found Annie and Mom at the table. Mom was pushing smoke out of her nose like a dragon, and Annie was pulling off morels of bread from the spaceship-shaped loaf in the center of the table and feeding them to herself like a bird feeding its chick.
"Guess what?" my mother asked, as I slumped into a chair.
"What?" I reached across the table and tore a chunk of bread from the loaf.
"The prison is having a craft fair today. Can you believe it? Annie read about it in the paper this morning..."
"Last week," Annie said.
"Last week," my mother said. "And we get to go. Isn't that great? I can't think of anything better than a prison craft fair."
"What kind of things do they sell?" I asked.
"I don't know, homemade knives? What do you think Annie?" Mother turned her head and took another puff of her cigarette.
"No, I think it's a lot of macrame, pottery, and stuff like that," Annie said.
Fritz emerged. He was wearing jeans and a grey tee-shirt.
"Ah ha!" I said. "You didn't meet with your patient in your nightgown!"
"Yes I did," he said, grinning with a crescent-moon smile. "But I got dressed after he left, so I can go to the prison craft fair with you."
"How do you know about the prison craft fair?"
"We were discussing it before you woke up." Fritz sat down and ripped off a hunk of bread the size of a baseball. "How's your stomach?" he asked.
"A little better, I guess."
"That's good," he said. "That's a start."
My mother let me sleep in bed with her for the remainder of our nights in Maine. She would stroke my hair with one hand and hold her book open with the other. I'd fall asleep buried under her arm, my face pressed against the fuzzy, flannel nightgown. She never yelled at night again, but she did flip around a lot, and I sense myself chasing her across the bed in my sleep as I tried to scoot closer and closer.
I opened the diary several times those last few days, but found I was unable to write. All I could think was that my mother was going to leave. To put it down on paper would seem to make her departure even more certain; and somehow I felt guilty for considering writing those words in the book that my father gave me.
Mom and Annie cried at the kitchen table our last morning in Maine. Fritz cancelled his appointment and made a special "goodbye breakfast" of homemade, whole wheat croissants, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and cream with blueberries purchased from a farm down the road. We sat around the table in our nightgowns, spooning up sugared blueberries, and chewing on rubbery croissants that tasted, to me, like wet cardboard. After breakfast, Annie gave me a tiny lace sachet filled with lavender from the garden.
"Fold the nightgown around the sachet," my mother said, when we were packing our bags. "Then when you wear it back home, it will smell like Maine and remind you of our trip." I started to do as she told me, but changed my mind after lifting the nightgown to my face and breathing in the scent of my mother. I tucked the diary into the lap of the nightgown, and pushed them both down deep into my bag.
Fritz and Annie dropped us off at the airport on their way to a "Primal Scream" conference in Bangor. Mom was wearing the same dress she wore on our flight out, and I had on my last pair of clean pants and a puffy-sleeved Mexican blouse.
"I'm still not wearing any underwear." Mom smiled and nudged me in the belly with her forefinger.
We had three hours before our flight; plenty of time to read magazines in the sundry store, and play a game that my mother invented, called "Find the Freak". Each person would try to find someone peculiar; the goal was to outdo the other person's last find. At one moment I looked up and saw a man in a suit motioning his thumb toward my mother and me as he leaned in to say something to a woman. I wondered if they were playing "Find the Freak" too.
While we were wandering, we came across an instant photo booth lined up with the newspaper and life-insurance stands.
"Let's take our picture," my mother said. She shook her purse with it tilted at an angle so that all the change would fall to the corner where she could find it without rummaging. After putting two quarters in the slot, my mother sat on the rotating cushioned stool in the small booth; I sat on one of her knees. She reached over and pulled the thick, burgundy drape shut so we'd be photographed in privacy.
"When that red light goes on, then it'll take the picture," she said.
"I can read the instructions too," I said, and my mother laughed just as the first flash blinded us.
I opened my mouth in a silent scream, Mom glanced at me quickly and did the same. We froze like statues until the second flash lit up our faces.
"Make a smoochie face," Mom commanded.
I puckered my lips, leaned in toward the glass that hid the camera, and shut my eyes to look like I was in love. The inside of my eyelids glowed as the flash went off.
"Okay, now serious face," she said before the fourth and final photo.
I turned my head and looked at her, my brow furrowed as I mocked a pondering face. She put her finger up to her chin as if she were thinking up something extraordinary; the flash exploded.
We waited patiently for the wet, bitter-smelling photos to be spit from a slot outside the booth. When they finally began to emerge, my mother grabbed the edges of the narrow strip and lowered her hand as the pictures slowly glided out of the machine. She squatted on the ground, and I leaned over her shoulder to examine our grey and white faces.
"Just think," my mother said, "there'll never be another moment in our lives when we are exactly as we are now."
"Yeah," I said, pointing a dull finger at the photos, "that's what we were like back then."
Jessica grew up in Santa Barbara, California. She received her BA from The University of California, Berkeley, and her MA from Johns Hopkins University. She lived in Canada for several years and now lives in Baltimore with her husband David and her daughters Madeline and Ella.
