Nine
I always wanted siblings when I was growing up. It didn’t seem fair that Lucy not only had a mother who baked for them, who
stayed at home, who attended every single thing at school, she also had two older brothers.
Her mother waited for us at the bus stop every day after school. There was a band of mothers who walked their kids to the
bus stop, long after their kids were old enough to walk themselves. They would still be in pajamas, sometimes a robe, shuffling
up the street in their slippers with large coffee mugs in hand, chatting about everything at the bus stop. The only one who
was never there was my mother.
After school, the same women would be waiting, this time in workout clothes, or shorts and T-shirts, bottles of water replacing
their coffee, gathering in the same group, breaking away as the bus approached, huge smiles on their faces as they greeted
us.
I had been adopted by all the mothers on the street.
When they brought snacks and juice boxes to the bus stop, they brought extra for me.
They never said it was because I was neglected, but occasionally I would catch them whispering to each other, would hear my mother’s name, see them look over at me with sympathy.
“Do you want to come to our house for dinner?” they would always ask, but I didn’t want to. I needed to be sure my mother
was okay. Sometimes, she was. Sometimes she was up, and dressed, and thrilled with the way her writing went that day. She
would have gone grocery shopping, buying raisins in tiny red boxes, Goldfish, artificially flavored yogurts in squeezy tubes
that I loved. She didn’t approve of anything unnatural, but this was, I think, a silent fuck you to my father, who would never
have anything in his home that he deemed fake food.
She wasn’t a great cook, but had a limited repertoire she did well, when she was up to cooking. Lasagna, topped with oozing
mozzarella cheese and garlicky breadcrumbs; spaghetti Bolognese, meat loaf made with Ritz crackers and Parmesan cheese, which
I only liked because of the egg hiding in the middle.
When she was up, and productive, and happy, I prayed it would last forever. It felt like a turning point, and even though
I lived with the fear that she would be back in bed, silent, depressed, soon, I always hoped I was wrong, that she had grown
out of whatever depression had ailed her.
The depression often went hand in hand with money worries. My mother always said my father didn’t pay nearly enough, but she
couldn’t afford to take him back to court. Instead, when her anxiety hit overload, she would phone him. “For God’s sake, Marty!”
Her voice would escalate, always ending up in her screaming down the phone, in him hanging up on her. “She’s your fucking
daughter. I’m not asking you for me, I’m asking for her.”
I hated hearing her curse when she referred to me.
It made me feel dirty. But sometimes it worked.
Sometimes, we would find a check in the mailbox the next day.
Five hundred dollars. Or a hundred. Other times there was nothing, her punishment for having the temerity to shout at him.
It all depended on his mood. Other times Marty would hang up on her, and refuse to take her calls.
This drove her into a frenzy. She would bang the phone down, picking it straight back up and dialing him again. And again. And again.
I was at his house a few times when she did this. I would feel intense anxiety at the tinny, echoey sound of my mother screaming
down the phone, but my father didn’t get riled up in the slightest. I could hear my mother frothing and spitting with rage,
her words becoming increasingly incoherent and vulgar, while my father watched me and smiled, the verbal attacks rolling off
his back. He was untouchable. Strong. My father would gently put the phone back in its cradle, and unplug the jack.
One day I got off the school bus to be greeted by the usual collection of mothers. I must have been around eleven. Lucy and
I skipped down the street, and I waved her goodbye, excited to be home for my mother had been at her best the last few weeks,
and today she had promised to take me to a movie and out for ice cream.
Ice cream was the treat usually reserved for my father. It was our special thing, but when my mother suggested it that morning,
I couldn’t say no, didn’t dare say anything that might push her back over the edge into what I always thought of as the darkness.
I opened the front door and stood, almost sniffing the air, able to tell immediately that the mood was grim. This was the
product of a volatile mother—I learned to take the temperature of a room before walking in. The temperature was cold, and
I fought the urge to creep back out the door, go to Lucy’s, put off having to deal with my mother falling back into the darkness.
“Missy?” My body tensed when I heard her voice. “Missy? Are you there? Come and see me.”
I walked slowly across the hallway, wanting to be anywhere but here.
Her bedroom was dark, always a bad sign.
The blinds drawn, the only light coming from a meager nightstand lamp.
In other circumstances, it might have been cozy, a refuge on a cold night, but this was no refuge—this room contained only trepidation and fear.
“Your fucking father,” she started. “Not a penny for three months. How are we expected to live? What am I supposed to do?
Does he want you to starve? Because I can’t afford to buy food. Selfish fucking asshole. He’s got all the money in the world
and he can’t spare a few hundred dollars a month to feed his daughter.”
“I can make dinner,” I said, trying to calm her down, appease her; trying to coax the tiger back into its cage.
“I don’t want fucking dinner!” she burst out. “I want to find a way to make your goddamned father take on his responsibilities.
Everywhere I look I see articles about the great Marty Cooke, billionaire, tech genius, man who has changed millions of lives,
but no one knows the truth; no one knows what a terrible fucking father he is, how he doesn’t pay a thing.”
He isn’t a terrible father, I wanted to say. I had spent last weekend at his house, and even though it was strange, the isolated
glass house hidden in the hills, I felt safe.
“I’m just going to the bathroom,” I said, backing out of the room and going downstairs.
Nasreen had recently installed a chicken coop in her backyard. “Babycakes, help yourself to eggs whenever you want,” she said.
There were four chickens that she called The Golden Girls, even though none of them were golden. Dorothy was a white leghorn,
Rose a Red Sex Link, Sophia a speckled Wyandotte, and Blanche was a Polish hen, with a huge feathered pouf around her head.
I walked down the garden to the chicken coop and opened the latch to the nesting boxes. Nasreen wasn’t as regular at collecting the eggs as she might have been; there were seven eggs. I took four, and left the rest for her.
Back in the apartment, I cracked the eggs into a bowl and whisked them with a fork, adding salt and pepper, just like Nasreen
had shown me. We had a loaf of bread in the cupboard, which had spots of blue mold dotted all over the crust. I did what my
mother told me to do, even though I refused to eat anything that had been touched by mold: I tried to pick out the mold, but
there was too much, so I took a sharp knife from the drawer and sliced off the outer crusts, before slicing off two pieces
and putting them in the toaster oven.
We had run out of butter, but there was olive oil. I put some in the pan, scrambled the eggs, and put half on the toast for
my mother, saving half for me for dinner.
We had an old painted wooden tray on the kitchen table, which held a Spanish ceramic bowl and a painted napkin holder. I took
everything off the tray and filled it with the plate of scrambled eggs and a folded linen napkin. The napkins were reserved
for company. We never used them. But the tray deserved more than a piece of paper towel.
There was still something missing. I went outside with a pair of scissors and cut some branches of the plumbago, filling a
mason jar with water to hold the tiny blue flowers. It looked beautiful. This surely would make my mother happy, put her in
a good mood. I picked up the tray and very carefully made my way to her bedroom.
“What’s that?” she snapped as I walked through the door.
“I thought you might be hungry.” I walked to her bed so she could see the tray, the effort I had been to. I wanted her to
see how grown-up I was! So grown-up I was now able to take care of her.
She looked dully at the tray. “I’m not hungry.
” I watched as her jaw set. “I’ll be honest, Missy, I don’t like how much time you’re spending with your father.
This weekend business has to stop. If he isn’t going to fucking pay for you, you’re not going to see him.
You shouldn’t even want to see him, Missy.
It’s the ultimate fucking betrayal.” Her voice was rising.
“How can you see him and love him when he does
fuck all for you?”
I left the tray on the bed and walked out the room, refusing to let her see my tears. The stained-glass window in the hallway
left colored shapes on the dusty floor. Usually I delighted in stepping into the pools of colored light, seeing my skin change
to blue and green, but that day, the colors were blurred through my tears.
I tipped my own scrambled eggs into the trash—my appetite had deserted me—and turned to see the old heavy cream telephone
on the wall in the kitchen. It didn’t have push buttons like the phones at my father’s office, but a dial, and an extralong
cord. In movies I had seen, particularly the old ones, this was to allow housewives to gossip with their friends while they
cooked, wandering round the kitchen chopping and mixing, the phone receiver tucked under their chin. Even though we were at
school together, once Lucy and I had separated, I would check to see if my mother was in bed, then call Lucy. My back would