ACT I: The Best of Times Were Also the Worst of Times
“It’s a Saturday night and I’m completely flat broke!” Mom says gleefully. Her voice is loose and full of wild abandon. “I mean, literally. We have 32 cents to our name!” She laughs at the sky.
Her body language doesn’t make this look as desperate as it sounds. In fact, she throws her arms up as though tossing confetti, spilling into the air like everything coming out of the top of a blender without the lid on.
“Let’s celebrate! Go borrow five bucks from the neighbors, and we’ll go to The Smokehouse.”
I knock on Leda’s door, embarrassed to ask, but I can already taste the juicy perfection of the burger and the springy, white cushion of a bun in my mouth. My mouth is watering at the thought of a strawberry milkshake- a rare treat, as sugar is strictly illegal at almost all other times in our house. We don’t go to church or think there is a God, but sugar, my mother believes, is the Devil.
I mount the two, well-swept concrete steps and rap on the glass pane. When Leda appears in the frame wearing her apron, I can see that I have caught her off-guard. She is confused by my question at first, and I have to repeat it. It was hard enough to spit the words out the first time. “Sure. OK,” she says. She’s taken aback, but she doesn’t say no.
She disappears for minute into the darkness of the room behind her and I hear some shuffling as she explains to her husband what is happening in hushed tones. Leda is an amazing cook, and when she has babysat for me occasionally, I’ve eaten Greek food with names I can’t pronounce. I smell something simmering as I wait for her now.
When she returns and slips the worn paper bill into my small, waiting hand, the corners of her lips are pulled down tight. She leans the top half of her body out through the door to crane her neck at our house, where the truck is idling in the driveway. My mother smiles and waves through the closed window of the cab. Leda furrows her brow and lifts her hand robotically in response. I jump over the steps and land on the cracked, city sidewalk. There’s a bounce in my knees as I skip towards the rattle of the engine, and climb into the old green truck.
Our 1969 Toyota Hilux is grass green, except where the passenger side is patched with big swaths of beige colored Bondo, spread unevenly across the battle wounds from having once been severely creamed. My door doesn’t close properly since that event, and whenever we turn left, I have to hold it shut to keep it from flying open. “Turning left,” my mother will announce, and I reach to grip the handle without thinking. There are no seatbelts, and whenever we stop suddenly, her right arms flings out, just as reflexively, to hold me back against the seat.
Often the bed is piled high with brush that my mother has loaded up and cleared from someone’s yard when she is building a garden. Weed It and Reap, her business is called. The load is secured with a rope. On Saturdays, I am often dragged along to one of these jobs, where I spend hours bored out of my mind, hungrily looking for wild strawberries or plums I can pick, whining, pouting, or reading a library book in the truck. I am often called to help secure the rope, hooking and throwing it as hard as I can, back and forth over the load to my mother, who knows how to tie all kinds of different knots. This is always a good sign we will finally be leaving soon. The next morning, we will drive the ungainly pile to the dump. At the little booth, a man will give me a lollipop that my mother will frown at, and say I have to save for later.
The Smokehouse on Telegraph Avenue has been a Berkeley staple since 1951, and by the time I am a young child of five in 1980, it hasn’t changed its look one bit.
The squat red and white building has a walk-up window for ordering, and I don’t have to read the big menu posted on the exterior wall to know what I’ll ask for: a cheeseburger with a strawberry shake. We have to share the shake today, because we don’t have enough money for two.
My mom seems relaxed and happy, which is nice. And unusual. Her straight blonde hair falls around her ruddy, sunburnt neck, Little wisps, moved by the gentle breeze, try to fly into her mouth while she eats, and get caught up in the brown, greasy drips at the corners.
Act II: Oscars
There is another burger joint on Shattuck Avenue, about a mile from our house. If we are doing walking errands, like going to the post office or the library, or if we’re at the laundromat late, my mom will ask, “Should we get a burger?” Which just means, “Do you want to go to Oscars?” I say yes, but I always get a hot dog.
There is an orange countertop with hard plastic stools of the same color attached to the floor, making it slightly too far for me to reach. This separates the kitchen from the dining area. We sit there and I watch the fattest man in the world working over the grill. He uses the flat back of the spatula to press down on the meat every couple of minutes, causing tall flames to jump up from the dripping grease. Through the fiery heat he looks distorted, curvy, in the waves of hot air that rise and cause sweat to drip from the dark hair, barely contained by a little white cap at his temples. His white shirt is the size of a small bedsheet, with a double row of buttons, and is consistently stained with grease. I wonder if he is Oscar. My mother reads the San Francisco Chronicle and I spin around and around on my stool, squeaking the round plank on its base until I get dizzy. I drive my mother bananas, and she tells me to knock it off.
There is a display of different kinds of chewing gum and mints for sale on a metal rack, on the counter near the register. When we are done with our meal, I run my fingers over the brightly colored wrappers, and ask for a pack of gum. “No. It rots your teeth.”
I don’t know what comes over me, but I can’t stop myself from swiping a pack. I’ve never thought of doing this before, but it’s clear that it would be so easy. No one is looking as I slip it into my hand, and conceal it just inside the base of my long sleeve. It’s that easy.
I turn around when my mother is finished paying and there is a policeman standing in line, right behind me. His legs in navy blue pants are anchored to his waist with a gun, and stand like tree trunks, planted into the brown tile floor in a wide stance. Towering above these, his arms are crossed over his enormous chest. At the tippy top of the stout pillar of him, there’s a shock of greying blonde hair. He steps aside, and his sagging cheeks lift a little as he nods, allowing my mother and I to pass. But for a second I am frozen in place, certain he has seen me steal the pack of JuicyFruit.
“Pardon us,” my mother says, reaching to grab my hand to lead us out onto the street. But it’s the hand holding the gum, so I don’t let her. My head is buzzing; I’m having a hard time hearing. With blood rushing in my ears I push through the glass doors onto the sidewalk, and for about five minutes I have no idea what my mother is saying.
Act III: Home Cooking
“I need you to go to the Penny Saver before it gets dark,” my mother says, lifting her head groggily from the kitchen table. She sat down there directly after work and fell asleep with her face on the calico placemat. Her boots are caked with mud under the table, which has dried, and crumbled into little bits around her chair. My eyes try to separate the clumps of dirt from the speckled pattern of the black and white linoleum.
“Get a half a pound of lean ground chuck.” We argue for a minute about whether I can get a popsicle, too, as a reward for doing the task.
“The reward is, you will get to eat dinner. Which is more than a lot of people in the world get tonight.” She hands me three folded dollar bills.
I slip out the door and down the steps, passing the familiar landmarks of the neighborhood. My mother has planted red geraniums in the dingy white concrete blockades at the end of our street, which prevent most cars from using it as a throughway. The occasional ambulance will squeak between the big cylindrical blocks, and at times, watching out for cops, so will the little green truck, if my mother is in a hurry.
I don’t know nearly as many of our neighbors on the Milvia Street side of our corner-positioned house as I do on Parker. There, I know everyone, and am in and out of all their homes all the time.
I walk the four blocks briskly, turning at all the right places to enter the doors of the corner market. I make my way to the butcher counter. The man doesn’t see me at first. I have to back up so he can spot me over the big glass curve of the display case that holds the various cuts of meat. He uses a metal tool like a chisel to separate a slab of hamburger meat from the big, long mound, and slaps it onto the butcher paper, deftly weighing it, and swaddling it like a small baby in one swift motion. He rips a piece of masking tape from a dispenser to secure it, scribbles a price on the paper with a black marker, and tries to hand it to me over the counter. But I am too short, so he has to come around to the front for the handoff.
I get in line to check out. I know all the clerks here, and I see that Marcella is working today. Her face is all business behind her dark mustache and short hair, and the shimmering gold chains that dangle from the arms of her big plastic glasses, across the dark peach fuzz on the back of her neck. She is busy bagging someone’s groceries with one hand as she uses the other to push buttons on the register. She doesn’t see me slip the candy bar under my shirt. I will eat it fast, on the way home, and leave the wrapper along the way.
When I get home, night is falling, and I am knocked down by the revolting smell of onions and mushrooms cooking as soon as I open the door to find my mother stirring the pan. She gets mad when I make a face about the smell. She’s been in a touchy mood lately. The heavy grease in the air chokes me, and my stomach hurts from eating the candy bar too fast.
The light of the kitchen casts a yellow hue, which creates a striking contrast against the deep indigo of twilight enclosing our home. The ceiling is littered with dried noodles, flung there, time after time, to see if dinner was done. If it sticks, we know it’s ready, and we sit beneath the abstract, almost artful mosaic, slurping pasta. It’s a family history of mealtimes, of sorts. A living document.
Usually we eat silently, each behind the hard cover of a library book standing open between us, like double walls. Sometimes there is sauce. Sometimes, just parsley from the garden and butter. Sometimes just parsely. The pasta stuck on the ceiling has slowly browned through the years, and is set against a greasy background. At one point, an effort was made to clean it, but the task was abandoned at the halfway point. A line stops abruptly, separating the cleaner, pale cream color of the painted ceiling on one side, from the deeper, slightly fuzzy, golden hue of the dirty pasta-encrusted side on the other.
Noodles and burgers are our main fare. Once in a while, a pot of chicken or potato soup. Most nights, by dinnertime, my mother has already completed her predictable rotation of coming home and falling asleep, first at the table, and then in the tub, and has gone to bed. So I make myself Top Ramen. If it’s near our once-monthly grocery shopping trip, I pour some Rice Crispies. But those never last long enough. Whenever I can, I try to find myself at a neighbor’s house around supper time.
The burger cooks up too dry, and I can’t finish the hard hockey-puck of meat that sits congealing, with ketchup soggily ruining the slice of brown sandwich bread wrapped around it. My mother clutches her low back as she stands with a groan to clear her plate. “Finish your dinner, then do your homework.” She disappears into her room.
It seems so unfair to have homework after a whole day at school. I hate my teacher, and I hate school. Other third graders, the ones that live in the hills, bring Capri-Suns in their home packed lunches. The edges are cut carefully off of their wax paper-wrapped sandwiches, and they have little bags of goldfish crackers, and packages of chips and cookies.
My friend Jamillia brings a white bread sandwich with only bright yellow mustard between the two slices. I stayed over at her house once, and saw that her baby brother slept in a dresser drawer.
I eat Free Lunch, and the food is all from cans. Canned green beans. Canned corn. Canned peaches. And a mush of something like dry, pale spaghetti, all divided into little compartments on rigid plastic trays, handed off by women with hairnets.
Tonight, I sit at the table watching the sky darken the windows, swinging my legs above the crumbles of dried mud. I linger in the unvented haze of just-cooked meat, with the stench of onions and mushrooms still hanging thickly in the air. I try to nibble at the parts of the bread unstained by ketchup or burger grease. Faintly, I smell marijuana smoke coming from behind the closed door, and I hear the bathtub filling.
ACT IV: Self Sufficiency
After years of looking down her nose at Mc Donalds, it feels almost like Christmas when my mother pulls up to the curb outside of one, hands me a five dollar bill, and tells me to get myself some dinner here. She’ll circle the block and come back to pick me up. I can’t believe this concession. When she pulls back around and double parks the truck so I can climb back in, she is pissed that I bought an orange soda to go with my meal, but what’s done is done.
She hasn’t been in her right mind since the Lyme’s Disease. She can’t remember anything. The virus has tunneled into her brain and caused lesions, erasing her short term memory. Details like where she’s parked when she comes out of a building, or that she told me I could go out, just vanish into thin air. I’ve come home to find her giving the cops Missing Persons reports, and can see by the look on her face and the fear in her eyes that she has truly forgotten she’d sent me on an errand.
She also has no idea how little I go to school anymore. I used to stay home when I played hooky, but now, with her home sick so often, I have had to get creative. Sometimes I go to the library, but I’m often nervous someone will question why I am not at school. I’ve heard of truancy officers, and I’ve also known of some kids getting emancipated. I live somewhere between these two possibilities. I’ve made friends with other kids at Berkeley High who hang out across the street in Provo Park, smoking weed instead of going to class, and have become one of them, though I am usually the only Freshman out there.
I’ve been buying my own food with babysitting money for some time now, and keeping it in my room, hidden in a drawer. There is a bag of yogurt covered raisins, some goldfish crackers, a little tub of cake frosting, and a pregnancy test.
Another thing my mother doesn’t know is just how easy it is for me to go out my bedroom window at night, get on a BART train, and go see my boyfriend in Albany. I scale the wall at his house, holding onto a trellis, climb in through his window, and our respective mothers are none the wiser.
The fights have gotten really bad since she found the tick a few years back. They were always rough, but now, they are dangerous. So, her silence is the most frightening thing yet when I open the door. I find her sitting at the table, tapping her foot, her arms braced tightly across her chest. Her eyes are red and sunken. My secrets are all laid out on display: the cake frosting, the pregnancy test, my journal. She seems most upset about the cake frosting, and is cold as ice when she says she’s had it, and that I will be going to live with my father in Colorado.
Photo credit: https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1003/543566443_6a44715ced_z.jpg
Wow. I did not know your story. To think I was only 50 miles South of you, with bursting cabinets and a refrigerator full of everything you could imagine, where I would stuff myself out of loneliness and despair. Your writing is fire.
That's the stuff.