Right Here in River City
I forget whose turn it is to yell, so I'll just start anywhere.
"You ungrateful thing," cries Martha grandmother. "To treat your own family like this. We should have been born strangers and saved ourselves the trouble."
"Here, take the rest of the dinner home," my mother says through her teeth. "Does Sally need some plates and silverware? How about a nice TV?"
"Don't talk like that to Grandmother," I cry, my hands fussing against my mother's leg, and meanwhile inside I'm saying ho hum, ho hum.
A girl friend of mine says her big sister told her that by something grade they'll tell us we're just genes. Like so tight-fitting you can't change. It's a free country but it's not a free home. I stride into my room where I can listen to it all- inside family, outside sirens - from in-between. I've had a sandwich life up to now. But even a burglar creeping into my room one night, ready to burgle me and take me where the jewelry is, couldn't solve my problems.
The voices eventually stop, just visitors, invited to come and go. I visit with the baby. My mother says she can see things in my face, in my eyes when I'm close to him. The twitch of a hand as I stare at him helpless in his crib. I've got some incredible self-control she tells her friends. The father? He's out there somewhere, floating in some kind of lost soup.
In the kitchen I ask if I can have five brownies. I smile sweetly letting my mouth agree with my little girl voice, batting my eyes. My mother laughs. It's hard for her to say no now and I've left plenty of room for less. Two or three will be all. I pretend I'm Grandmother. "Lydia, take five or six. Take them home with you." I've overdone it and we're mad again. I can't help myself. It happens all the time.
Sometimes he comes back to the house. Anthony, my mother's current. On again off again. He's actually her husband. When he blew out the last time, I sat her down. "No more men!" I said. I made it stern, trying to enunciate superbly. Then I printed it out and handed her the paper. She has a way of looking at me with eyes that say, what is this in front of me? She did that now. Then "Oh Lydia, Lydia" she says and her head goes from side to side. "Yes what," I say knowing that she will reveal nothing and just go on repeating my name forever. "Oh Louise, Louise," I finally say using big guns against her.
Yesterday he dropped off a puppy. "What am I going to do?" my mother asks.
"About what."
"About a house filled with living things."
She says Pepper, the puppy, is my baby. I've got mine and you've got yours. "I've only got so much affection," she says to an uncle over the phone, "and I draw the line at species." She hangs up and I hand her a piece of paper and ask her to draw it. She makes a long line with an arrow pointing off the page and places it in front of Pepper just sitting there quietly in his box.
"Don't do that!" I shout. She's sorry, she says so, taking me up to her like a baby. She lets me put my thumb in my mouth with my cheek up close where I can listen to her inside.
The phone rings again and it's another uncle. I've talked to about half of them so far. "We were at Grandmother's house," I tell him, "and Louise went BM in the living room after dinner."
There's a loud voice shouting words behind my left ear. "Tell him which Louise for crying out loud." She and my cousin have the same name.
"It was Mother," I say. She grabs the phone.
"It was baby Louise," she tells him. "Yes, well she's at that age where she thinks anything having to do with bodily functions is hilarious."
A little later my mother says something over the phone to my uncle. I think they were talking about TV shows. I grab the phone back and tell him that one of my friends said - she read it somewhere - that my mother is at that age when women like to say "puke" a lot.
"She just said it to me," he says.
My mother's baby, my brother, has got expressions. It's funny to watch until you realize how much better interruptions are. Anyway it's Sunday and my mother is on her knees in the living room, making those high soft coo coo coo sounds again, tilting her head to one side every time the baby grunts, when the doorbell rings. It's a short, nice-looking man with glasses. He looks like the kind of person who would walk around outside carrying a couple of fat books all weekend. Maybe I like people like that, I don't know. It turns out to be the landlord. He's very nice about wanting us to move out of the house. "I'll have people come to help you," he says.
"That's all right, we don't need help," my mother says. "Bye now."
"Don't worry honey," she says to me. "It'll take them three months to get us out of here legally."
Pepper walks up to the baby lying face up on the blanket. "Look, they're kissing," I say pointing.
"Get that damn dog out of here!" The baby equals Pepper plus the backyard. The baby never gets put out. He's just something that has faces and jerks.
The next day we throw ourselves, no nonsense style, at Welfare, or at least my mother does. I have to go to school. The main thing I learn, which I already knew, is that some people, like my teacher for example, have fat feet that overflow out of the top of their shoes. In the future I want to avoid being around this kind of thing, skin flopping over the edge of shiny black leather.
When I come home I always have to find out about myself because my mother's on the phone. "She's just got to have more structure in her life," she's saying to one of the uncles. I think some of them are inching closer, moving toward us on the map, but none have hit town yet. "She hasn't been in one school longer than four months." I'm drawing and thinking about color TVs.
"I don't think I've ever used more than four colors in one picture, have I mother?" I yell. Still talking into the phone. But she points to the very large painting on the wall next to the kitchen where as a fifth I painted a horseshoe river of pink running off the painting in two places. I yelled at her because I just wanted to see if she could do two things at once. It has something to do with being a concentrating person. The baby, meanwhile, is in a self-starter machine. It rocks and the baby keeps on jerking to the sound of invisible strings. I wake up Pepper and talk into his ear pretending he's a phone. My mother hangs up. It's beginning to look like another evening at home.
Then Anthony shows up out of the night. I have cup-a-soup in my mouth when he comes in. I swallow, dip my peanut butter and pickle one more time and walk over to him chewing. It's politeness, a thing I'm supposed to be developing.
"Hi Anthony. Are you visiting?" He just looks at me with a sort of smile there silent beneath his moustache. "Mother's giving Sammy a bath," I say turning to shout toward the back of the house, "It's Anthony!"
She comes into the room all shy around her voice. It's very weird to see. "Hello Anthony. What a surprise. I was just giving..."
"Hi Spot." That's his name for her. She sometimes has this skin rash. They kiss. It's long. Their lips. "Where's Sluggo," he finally says. "Let me see my man."
We all go into the bathroom, Pepper and I bringing up the rear, an expression that makes me laugh. I can tell by the way he moves his arms and legs that Sammy, my brother, is probably going to be a great athlete when he gets big. The bathroom has gotten very crowded. I forget it and go back to my dinner.
It's no surprise when Anthony moves back in. It's like the rules of addition and subtraction after a while.
"The things I learn, Mommy, could feed every animal!"
"Be quiet honey and drink this."
I have 104 degrees talking. Anthony touches my forehead and then pulls it back like he just scalded himself on a burner. I laugh but then he says, "Ah, she's just faking. Trying to get out of school."
"Leave her alone," my mother says. "Why don't you go into the other room and make yourself breakfast."
"I'll just make myself scarce," he says and then he's out the front with a slam.
"Attention," my mother is grumbling. "Anybody doesn't want it is who I'll give it to."
"Na na na," I'm sneering at her meanwhile. It's not very intelligent but I'm too mad to be smart. Also the fever.
Evening comes and things have cooled down. Anthony's back and almost singing. "I'm going to have money honey rolling in just like good weather." Good weather means good money on a roof. He's a roofer. The phone rings. "Hello," Anthony says. No answer second time tonight. "Weatherman says three more days like today," Anthony keeps talking, "and that's only as far as he's looked. Who the hell you suppose keeps calling, Spot?"
My mother and I see uncles getting slowly into their cars, driving away into the night like arrows on a map pointing off the edge in all directions.
"I don't know," my mother says shrugging her shoulders, getting up to make more coffee.
"It's probably just the wind," I say. My mother cracks up, quickly cuts it short, but too late. Now Anthony knows something has been going on he doesn't know about.
He turns to steam and heads out of the house again, to a bar probably Mother says. "He'll be drunk next time we see him. Unless they have a cot in the back room at Hickey's."
"Oh," I say. "I know. Can he get sober inside the car?"
"You mean just sitting there?"
"Yeah."
"Letting time go by?"
I nod. "He could go to sleep there."
"You're all heart, Lydia. You made me laugh on purpose didn't you?"
I didn't of course. My mother gets weird sometimes. Like when we're over at Grandmother's for dinner. Grandmother is looking down on her. "When you're visiting somebody's home it's not very polite to go to sleep in their living room," she says.
"I'm not sleeping, I'm just resting my eyes," my mother answers mad, stretched out on the floor. "I had a hard day." Nobody says anything for a while. We're still watching TV when I ask her something, interfering with the big color one Grandmother has.
"Mother, did you drop me when I was a baby?" This girl at school had said that I acted like I had been dropped. "Like on my head or something?"
"No, of course not honey now hush."
"Oh yes you did," Grandmother says laughing. "Don't you remember that story you've told us about when you were carrying Lydia on the sidewalk and you tripped."
"That's right," my mother says. "You flew into the air but just before you hit the pavement I threw myself under you. You landed all safe on my tummy."
"Oh, OK."
"Why did you ask that," my mother asks.
"If it had been Sammy you never would have allowed yourself to even trip," Grandmother says. "You would have been too careful to have done whatever you did." I look for something to do. Big real Uncle Robbie is lying on his back asleep on the floor. He just spent a year in another country making lots of money and he's tired. There's a magazine on the table. I open it and stare into the page. My mother has already leapt up.
"What right do you have to say such things to me in front of Lydia!" she yells and then looks at me. I'm reading. "Lydia, why don't you go play in the other room."
"Oh great, everybody else gets to watch TV and I don't."
"Just let her be," Grandmother says.
"Why don't you mind your own business," my mother yells back.
"Don't talk to Grandmother like that," I cry.
Uncle Robbie jumps up suddenly with bright blue eyes that look like nightmares. "It's impossible to get any sleep around her with so many raving females around." He says it loud as he's walking out of the room. My mother goes over to Grandmother and takes my brother.
"Come on Lydia," she says, "get your coat on. We're going home."
But Uncle Robbie has gone to bed and Grandmother wont let us take the car. She can't see well enough to drive in the dark when she's tired so we don't go home that night and don't get home until sometime in the afternoon the next day. Anthony is stretched out on my mother's bed snoring real loud, sleeping off last week. I let Pepper in and spend some time pretending to teach him how to walk around on tiptoes.