There are millions of words in English which means there are potentially billions of sentences. Even so it’s not odd that the same sentences reincarnate so frequently but that they assume such new and different guises and the importance and meaning so mutates.
1973, Weokahatchee, AL. After a huge fight my mother has announced that she is leaving my father. I am terrified and have locked myself inside of her huge bathroom where I am crying my eyes out.
“Jon, baby… will you come out of there?”
Me: Just go if you’re going! Go on and go!
“Sweetheart come out here! Baby I need to talk to you! Honey I’m picking the lock!”
One lock picked with an unbent coat hanger letter, she opens the door to find the bathroom empty. I’m ‘hiding’ in a built in clothes hamper in the side wall, having opened the window to give a “possible escape route”. She sits down on an iron lawn chair next to the laundry hamper.
“Jon? Baby… come out here!” She lights a cigarette and pretends that I must have jumped out the window and run. “Well, I guess he jumped out the window and ran… or did he? I guess just in case I can talk to him and if he’s here he might can hear me. I don’t know if you’re still in there. But if you are I’d like to tell you something. I’m leaving soon, and I really need you to pick your favorite toys and your favorite books and your favorite dog and get ready.”
I come out of the laundry hamper. She acts suitably surprised, even though my crying has been audible probably from other rooms.
“Ready for what?”
“To come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe to Mustang and Meemaw’s, maybe to your Aunt Jackie’s, we’ll decide.”
“How long are we gonna stay there?”
“Well… until we’re not there. Until we get our own place.”
“We have our own place… here! We can’t have another place!”
“Yes we can. You don’t understand…”
“What about Kathy? And David?”
“Kathy’s coming. David wants to stay here for now.”
“And Daddy?”
“No. He’s the… well, he’s not coming.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated… but I want you to know he loves you. Don’t doubt that. He just… well, he’s just… honey, I love your Daddy, he made you, how could I not? But… well it’s just that at the moment I also happen to hate the sorry son of a bitch again and I hope he dies and burns in hell and takes his goddamned mother and all those cows with him! But I do love him because he gave me you and that’s what you need to know, and you do don’t you…”
“I think so…” and my voice chokes up so much that I can’t speak.
“What’s the matter?”
“I thou…. Tho…. You…. i… d”
“It’s okay. It’s okay… there, don’t try to talk, just take it easy. Here,* just hold my hand.* You know I love you don’t you? Just hold my hand… there… did you think I was going to leave you?”
I nod.
“Sweetheart… I’ll never leave you. You know… sugar, you’re a part of me. You’re not just a part of me, you’re the greatest part of me. I couldn’t leave you if I tried. Now stop that crying… you’ll have me doing it…” And she does suppress a sniffle while holding me in her lap. “Did I ever tell you about the day you were born? My aunt Caledonia came to see me in the hospital, and I was holding you and giving you your bottle. And she looked at me, and she said ‘Blanche, you look less like a new mama than any new mama I ever seen’. That’s how she talked, a tooth here and a tooth there. I said ‘Aunt Cal here’s the baby! And here’s me feeding him… and I couldn’t be happier… what are you talking about?’ and she said ‘That’s just it. You don’t look like a new mama, you look like a woman who’s in love.’ And I think she was right, cause you’re the best thing I ever did.” She hugs me painfully tight. “And you think I could leave you? Baby… I might be a lot of things and a lot of them aren’t good, but one thing I am is mama to you and that’s the best thing I am…. And we’ll always be together! Now stop crying! Sweetheart…” and her voice breaks just a bit. “I can’t promise you a lot because I don’t make promises I keep, but if I have anything to say about it, no matter where I go, you will always be with me. That I absolutely promise you and I wouldn’t promise it if it weren’t so.”
We have a Romper Room Pieta Like Moment for a moment. My mother and my father reconcile and go on making each other’s lives a merry hell for another decade. The 1980s come and things get bad, then they get really bad, then they colonize some new areas of bad, then the colony gets worse, and finally we live in Montgomery, just the two of us after a strange odyssey. 1987 is the first and the worst year of that.
We’re so broke that most things of any value are in the pawn shop. One of our pawned items is $100, which means that the interest is $20 per month, and to pay that interest we bring in the last few things of value we can find (a set of binoculars and some sterling silver forks) and pawn them for $25 (the extra $5 for gas, which by this time she has done the infamous selling of the wedding ring to do). While in the pawn shop getting the new ticket and renewing the other I notice the ring- a big ankh, heavy, 14kt gold I later learn. I’ve always loved Egyptian art, and I think this ring is beautiful. I show it to her much as I’d show her a lovely 32 carat pink diamond, because the ring is $120 and that might as well be $30,000. We’ve had to cash in pennies found in the sofas to get the quarter to put air in the tires of the Yugo (who goes “DING DING DING DING” constantly when you drive him because of a faulty wire left over from the huge accident he was in but that’s another story, though let me add that the DING DING DING DING constantly every 1.25 seconds could make you confess to conspiring to drop the Lindhberg baby off of the Chrystler Building to win a bet for 8 pounds of heroin with your Satanic high priest, but we get pretty good at ignoring it because we can’t afford to have it fixed and to take out the “DING DING” also kills the windshield wipers and interior lights. You’d think that a people who were so continually made the bitches of the nation that invented the Volkswagen and the Mercedes and the BMW would have learned at least how to stop a DING from DINGing (every 1.25 seconds- 20 years later I can still time 1.25 seconds by remembering that fecking DING).
Anyway, she insists that I try the ring on. I don’t know why- the reason she’s here is we’re penniless. There’s no hidden money, after this there’s nothing to pawn but the TV set which we’ve tried to hold off on since it’s the one means of entertainment, not that my mother ever gets to watch it. She works from 3 p.m. to 9 a.m. five days per week, catching 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep if she’s lucky, managing a group home for a corrupt and grossly mismanaged mental health agency, reporting to an incompetent and stark raving power mad musical-comedic self-impressed martinet of the sort who should be giving her husband hell about his bungling of Levy Pants and ordering him to bring home Miss Trixie). She makes 12,000 for 90 hour weeks in which a typical day includes wiping shitty asses and doing work she never required her maids to do in better times but, paying premiums on some off-brand FUH-KING-FUH-GADDABOUT HEALTH INSURANCE that doesn't pay off the only time she goes to the only doctor in town who takes it. But true child of the Depression that she is she does the work, somehow holds up, and is truly grateful to her employer for giving her a chance, for after years of looking for jobs only to hear "overqualified", "too old", "overqualified and too old", "you have a foreclosure and a repossession and an outstanding unsatisfied lien against you in your past year's credit history" and other damning items that drove her to alcoholism and attempted suicides she's absolutely thrilled to be working even if the overwork is taking a visible toll almost daily and I have fantasies of dragging her boss behind the DINGing Yugo (and still do), but between my hotel job and her executive asswiping job we're finally just finally starting to see a little tiny progress, but so far there has not been a dime of spare money at the end of the month and there's more ways to cook .29 leg quarters than you’d ever imagine. (Had both of us not eaten free most nights at our jobs we’d never have made it.) But she insists I try on the ring, and it fits, on my pinkie finger anyway, and of course she doesn’t buy it because she doesn’t have the money and she doesn’t have the hair to sell to raise it and if she did it wouldn’t go to something as “live without-able” as an ankh ring, a literal trinket. Damn it was pretty though.
Last Christmas (1986) was bad. The highlights included a subpoena a week before Christmas delivered by a snickering brat in the employee of my mother’s total bastard of a brother (may his shrieks from Hell reach netherworlds not yet even revealed) followed by a 97 year old breaking a hip one day and a repossession of the car and my mother’s arrest for wring a $5 bad check both on the next day, and that day Christmas Eve. Twasn’t good, but it’s behind us and now my mother and I both have jobs and the old lady is situated in a nursing home (an ordeal but necessary) and we’re in Montgomery in a shabby but okay apartment and we’re working and finally, months after the exchange in the pawn store, we have the makings of a minimalist but at least endurable Christmas for the first time in many bad years, and it would have been too had Mama not been arrested a week before Christmas for contempt of court in not paying a judgment against her for $1,208 in favor of her brother for the simple reason that she doesn’t have $1,208 or any way to get it. The asshole of a judge (still alive unfortunately though certain inquiries were made and he did at least get caught in a major child abuse scandal) let her remain in jail for a week before releasing her “as an act of Christian mercy” (his words) on Christmas Eve, another Christmas ruined.
And she had to damned near plead to keep her job and that hurt her more than anything. And it all hits her and she feels terrible for her failures to herself and to me even though I literally beg her not to, that she has not failed me in the least, that I couldn’t be prouder of her and I tell her I mean it and I tell her that because I mean it. And that Christmas she has to work and I have to work and the only time we see each other is during the 40 minutes between the ending of her shift and the beginning of mine (and we’re neither of us seeing relatives because we have no gifts to bring pah-romp-pah-pah-fuck to other relatives), and that’s spent in the Yugo, finally thank God no longer DINGing courtesy of a homeless mechanic who accepted $2 and a screwdriver as payment for doing something. And I give her my present, which I can’t remember what it was but it was cheap I’m sure, and she gives me her’s which is in a small white box and it’s the ankh ring, which she put on layaway and did everything from collect and crush and sell aluminum cans to buying the cheapest available whiskey instead of the already cheap Evan Williams she usually bought in order to have it out in time for Christmas (5 months to scrape together the $100 she haggled them down to- almost inconceivable now) and I am speechless. I almost cry, but I don’t. I haven’t cried since my father died and those tears weren’t genuine. My last real outpouring may actually have been when I thought she was leaving me when I was a kid- I’ve had tears come just enough times since then that I can vaguely remember what it feels like by 1987. I thank her profusely but sincerely, the ring not meaning a thousandth as much to me as the sacrifice behind it, and I love the ring.
“It…. It’s nothing… Oh God it’s nothing… I’m nothing… I… oh shit. Christmas 1980, I bought your sister a Pontiac, brand new off the showroom floor. I bought your brother a tailor made suit, 1981, he had no idea how I got his measurements… and you’re my… you’re the reason I live, and it takes me four months to save money to get you one little ring… and you’re not in college and it’s my fault because I can’t afford to help you even a penny’s worth and I just spent a week in jail because… if that .22 weren’t in hock I swear I’d kill that judge and that bastard brother may he rot in hell… and it. The whole fucking… I too. A ….”
The voice cracks and it’s a sickening, terrifying feral sound, a silence that precedes the tears of one who never cries, one who very nearly hates any show of weakness in others but more than hates any show of weakness in herself, as the tears flow like a saline stab wound onto cheeks that feel violated by the moist and a whole countenance that shakes with shame and fury at this betrayal of the emotion.
“Oh God you have no idea how I hate this… you are the polestar of my world and I can’t help you… here I am… I’m driving you to a shitty nothing job in a shitty nothing car until I have to go back to my own shitty nothing job in my shitty nothing life… I hate this…”
“I love it” I tell her, not joking.