Chapter 18

18

My mother couldn’t be in small spaces. The pantry closet in my childhood home was unused, the shelves dusty and scattered with turds from mice that had come for the stale peanuts and an old, open bag of sugar. The backyard shed was locked. The basement, with its low ceiling, was boarded up with three two-by-fours and rusty nails from the garage that Cecilia had hammered in herself.

When I was eight, on a deathly hot day in August, I sat outside our stifling home and watched my mother smoke at the plastic table on the rough, yellow grass that covered our yard from one rotting chain-link fence to the other. There was silence in the air, as though even the sounds from the neighborhood couldn’t travel through the thickness I could barely force into my lungs. Earlier that day I’d been at the Ellingtons’ house and Mrs. Ellington had sent us into the cold, dank basement for a reprieve. We’d pretended we were having a picnic down there. She brought us a blanket and boiled eggs and apple juice in paper cups with balloons on them, left over from Daniel’s birthday party. I asked my mother if we could go down to our basement, too. Couldn’t we take the boards off? Couldn’t we use the back side of the hammer to pull the nails out, like Dad did to fix the front porch last weekend?

“No,” she snapped. “Stop asking.”

“But, Mom, please, I feel sick. It’s too hot everywhere else but the basement.”

“Stop asking, Blythe. I’m warning you.”

“I’ll die out here thanks to you!”

She slapped me across the face but her hand slipped on the sweat of my cheek, so she wound up and hit me again. Only this time it was with a closed fist and right on the mouth. Square and firm. My tooth hit the back of my throat and I coughed speckles of blood on my T-shirt.

“It’s a baby tooth,” she said as I stared at it in my palm. “They all come out eventually anyway.” She put her cigarette out on a patch of dirt in the brittle grass. But I could see her disgust with herself in her twisted tangerine lips. She had never hit me before. And so I had never felt that particular collision of shame and self-pity and heartache. I went to my room and made an accordion fan with a grocery flyer from the mail and lay on the floor in my shirt and underwear. When she came in an hour later she took the fan from my hand and smoothed the creases and said she needed the coupon to buy chicken thighs.

She sat on my bed, something she rarely did. She couldn’t stand to be in my room for long. Her husky throat cleared.

“When I was your age, my mother did something very cruel to me. In the basement. So I can’t go down there.”

I didn’t move from the floor. I thought of the things I’d overheard late at night as she cried to my father. My face flushed with her secrets. I watched her bare feet rub against each other, her toes freshly polished in bright, cherry red.

“Why was she so cruel to you?” She could have seen my heart jumping under the bloodstains on my shirt.

“Something wasn’t right with her.” Her tone suggested the answer should have been obvious to me even then. She tore the chicken thigh coupon off the bottom of the flyer and folded the rest back into an accordion. I reached out to touch her toe, to feel the smooth polish, to feel her. I never touched her. She flinched, but she didn’t pull her foot away. We both stared at my finger on her nail.

“I’m sorry about your tooth,” she said and then stood up. I slowly took my hand away.

“It was starting to get loose anyway.”

It was the first time she told me herself about Etta. I think she might have regretted it afterward, because she was especially cold in the weeks that followed. But I remember wanting to touch her more, wanting to be near her. I remember standing at the side of her bed in the mornings to run my finger softly along her cheekbone, and then tiptoeing out when she started to stir.