What I Saw and How I Lied

Chapter 3

When I got home, I slumped down on the glider on the porch, hoping my stepfather, Joe, would be there. I wanted someone to tell me I was beautiful, even if he was lying. I wanted to for­get that picture of Ruthie walking away, dragging her foot along so she wouldn't lose her shoe.

Of course, Margie had done a best friend's duty. She'd staked out my territory. Loyalty counted the most in my neighborhood. I should have felt lucky to have a best friend who would fight for me.

The door opened behind me, and Mom sat down on the stoop, her skirt billowing and then drifting down to her ankles. Unlike other moms, she wore her good clothes all the time and didn't care if she got them dirty.

My mother was beautiful. I always said that first, because it was the first thing everybody noticed. I took after my father.

You couldn't stop looking at her. She was a knockout. The way she held a cigarette, the way she danced in the kitchen, the way she could make supper with a cocktail glass in one hand — that was movie star glamour. You could almost forget she was just a housewife from Queens.

"In the dumps?" she asked me.

"I want to wear lipstick," I said.

She took a cigarette pack out of her apron pocket, then her gold lighter. She tapped out the cigarette, then placed it between her lips and lit it. She took a fleck of tobacco off her bottom lip. She was wearing Revlon's Fatal Apple lipstick — the most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam.

"Don't be in such a hurry to grow up, baby," she said, blowing a plume of smoke out toward Mrs. Carmody, who was sweeping her porch and pretending not to spy in windows as the lights came on. "It's not all polka dots and moonbeams, you know."

"It's got to be better than this," I said.

"You think so?"

A breeze ruffled her blond hair. She stared out into the air and flicked an ash off her cigarette.

I leaned backward over the glider and looked at her upside down. Her face seemed to assemble into something foreign. Her blue eyes looked like triangles, and I could see straight up her nostrils. It was strange how a face was just eyes, nose, and a mouth. It was how they were arranged that counted. I was cheered to dis­cover a position in which my mother was not quite so lovely.

Even though I didn't say a word, she knew. "You're too young for boys, anyway," she said.

"You got married when you were seventeen," I pointed out.

"Good Lord, Evie, you don't want to take after me. Anyway, I was a mature seventeen."

No kidding. I have one photograph of her and my father. She looked hubba-hubba even then, in a flowered dress, clutching the arm of my father, who was leaning back on his heels, like he wanted to fall backward into another life. Six months later, he did. He brought her a cup of coffee in bed, said he was going to California, and walked out. She was seventeen and already pregnant with me.

Now she looked at her watch, the one Joe had sur­prised her with for their anniversary last year, the one he'd bought in a fancy jewelry store on Fifth Avenue. ("You're crazy," she'd said. "We can't afford this.”

“Let me worry about it," he'd replied. "And I'm not worried.")

"Your father is late," she announced. "Again. Be prepared for a roast like a rock. I can’t wait to hear what Grandma Glad says."

My grandmother's name was Gladys, but Joe wanted us to call her Grandma Glad. Maybe it fit a vision of what he wanted her to be, the opposite of what she really was. She knew how to spread misery around.

Mom took a puff of her cigarette. "Maybe she'll break another tooth."

The living room window was open. "I'm not deaf yet!" Grandma Glad yelled.

Mom raised her eyebrows at me, and I had to slap a hand over my mouth to put the plug in my laughter.

So that's how we were: a mother and a daughter sit­ting on a porch, laughing as the tree shadows stretched toward the porch and lights came on in the houses. Sounds cozy. But it was just like buzz bombs—the V-2 rockets the Germans launched at London near the end of the war. You couldn't hear them, not even a whistle. Until your house blew up.