In the dark living room with the yellowed, tearing wallpaper and dingy yellow curtains, I sat on the loveseat, a burgundy velvet, and tried not to look at my mother. My mother was at her most peaceful and happy while staring at the television. This was before the distractions of cell phones and computers, 1984. I was the oldest and allowed to stay up later than my sisters Kellie and Nichole, who were ten and six. I was twelve, in eighth grade, and my parents were going through an ugly divorce. There were fights in plain view in the driveway, things hurled from one person to another in bedrooms, words meant to wound spat through clenched jaws. As my mother and I sat in the living room, then, the reverberations of earlier in the day prickled in the house, an unsettling quiet after the swirling energies of violence, destruction, anger.
My dad had come to pick up me and my sisters in his little Nissan stick shift, to spend the weekend with him and his new girlfriend in Marshfield, about an hour away. Tina was red-headed and eager to please, buoyed by the good fortune of not only having a new man in her life but his three girls, too. She had had miscarriage after miscarriage and the void followed her around from job to job, car to car, marriage to marriage—she wanted to be a mother.
My dad arrived and after kissing my sisters and me on the forehead and giving us hugs, he opened a bag and gave each of us a present. My mom was still inside, seething. My mother didn’t know about the gifts yet, but she felt the raw rage of injustice and hurt at having sacrificed so much—her youth—from age 18 to 32, to a man who would betray her so many times. She was undereducated, not un-pretty but not confident, and besides she had let herself go a bit in the demands of caring for the well-being of three girls and their alcoholic father—at turns charming and romantic and then infuriating and impulsive. He left her with no money, a crooked, skeleton house she had secured with the help of her family, and these three girls—each with potential, wit, and kindness, who bore witness again and again to fights that ended or started with broken glass, pee-stained mattresses, locked doors, incessant words that rang in the ear: good for nothing, piece of shit, son of a bitch, selfish, bastard, louse—over and over words spoken from a heart trampled on by love, and sullied by unforgiveness. Truth was my mother did not ever learn how to love herself first, at least when we girls were young.
Each of us sisters took our present and opened it and found inside a jewelry box. Each played a song that was supposed to fit our personalities. To the oldest, me, he gave a small, round box with a tiny piano on it. When I turned the key at the bottom, it played the song, “The Entertainer.” I was in theatre and sang all the time. It was a lovely, extravagant thing, that jewelry box. I never received gifts of things of impractical use. Such was the legacy of poverty—clothes showed up in bags on our doorstep from well-meaning neighbors; I ducked my head at lunch and tried like mad to catch the eye of the lunch lady so I would not have to show her my Free Lunch card, and worst of all—cruel family members would make promises and not keep them. My uncle, never convicted for having an affair with a fourteen-year-old student in his art class, promised me horseback riding lessons one summer. The door to hope opened in my ten-year-old heart, and remained bruised by his unfulfilled promise. I was not so much jaded as pitying the men in my life who seemed disgusting in so many ways. I could not trust them and had to compensate for what they forgot or neglected. I didn’t understand how my mother or aunt could stand them. We sisters, despite a few close friends, lived an isolated life, stymied by poverty in a town of relative affluence and success and nuclear families. The shame draped over us like a heavy garment we could not shake loose.
The middle child, my sister Kellie, received a different music box which played a circus theme, for she was the lively, social, wise-cracking one. The youngest received an elegant box that played a piece of classical music we had never heard before, but later discovered was Chopin’s Nocturne No. 4 in F Major. The girls never figured out the connection, or what that particular piece of music might be saying about Nichole. But at six years old, she was overjoyed to receive such a beautiful, special present.
All us girls were still in the driveway in the late morning sun, the kind that is so filled with hope in New England, when the ground is still frozen deep down yet the warmth of spring has begun to release beauty once again into the haze and mist of winter. We were going to bring our boxes inside and leave them there before we left for the weekend to stay with my dad and Tina in Marshfield.
Our mother came outside after standing at the doorway, curious and still seething underneath her crossed arms. Her anger mangled her features and drew away whatever prettiness was left on her face. She saw that each of her girls was holding gifts, inspecting them up close and smiling, and filled with a momentary glee, a reprieve from their lives of want. It was too much that he was the cause of their joy. It was immediately apparent, too, that “she” had something to do with these presents. Their father was far too self-absorbed to give such a thoughtful gift as these music boxes. Tina must have picked them out.
My mother uncrossed her arms and marched forward, unafraid of a confrontation. “What are these?” she spat, as her husband backed away and put his hands up as if he were being arrested.
“What do you think you’re doing? Trying to buy your way into their lives? Why don’t you go back to that fucking whore and she can clean your sheets and take care of your…I mean, what fucking nerve. Do you really think I want anything in my house from you and that…bitch you are sleeping with?”
The girls held their music boxes closer to their bodies. Is loving this thing betraying their mother? Is this what dad’s doing, trying to buy us?
“Susan,” he said, in that deep baritone DJ voice of his, “Enough.”
He knew, at least, that this kind of talk was not for children’s ears.
“It’s just a present, he said. “We just wanted to do something nice for the girls.”
We. He said we. The lid came off whatever control my mother had been exercising.
“Don’t you think I want to buy them presents?” said our mother, suddenly crying. “I have no money, Stephen. You left me with no money.”
This much was true. She was working full-time for eight dollars an hour at the town insurance agency. She chose that job to be near us girls even though she had to leave us alone anyway every afternoon until five o’clock after school. It was fine for the older ones, who had homework to do, but not for the youngest, who just wanted to play outside in the woods but was not old enough to go alone.
At this moment, I made the mistake of turning the key on my music box, and as the notes of the song rang out, my mother’s arm, seemingly entirely of its own volition, reached for the box as if were a bomb and hurled it fast and far, into the stone wall. There, the pieces of the box became unrecognizable and the sounds of the song played in an eerie dissonance as the broken family looked on in shock
My mother, always a believer in fairness, grabbed the boxes from the other two as the sisters all started wailing, our gifts now littering the lawn. Cars sped by, unaware of the wreckage taking place in the scene—five sets of eyes staring at the wall, faces with distorted features caught between horror and hope.
My father stood open-mouthed, grabbed his keys, and muttered “You’re fucking nuts, Susan,” under his breath. He said, “Really sick. You need help. Girls, I guess it’s not a good idea to pick you up today. I’ll come back next weekend. I will call you.”
With that, he backed out of the driveway, the two youngest girls holding hands and crying, me just staring, trying to disappear in plain sight. Our mother cleared her throat, hoarse from yelling and crying, and went inside to grab the basket of laundry that took her an hour to hang, just so, on the clothesline.
It was a Saturday in May, and the girls suddenly had nothing to do, nowhere to be, no one expecting them.
That night, during Magnum P.I., while my mother and I, her oldest daughter, sat in front of the TV with our buttered popcorn fresh off the stove, the energy shifted in the room. She grabbed the remote and turned down the TV and leaned back in her recliner.
“I hope you understand why I did that today,” she said.
I wriggled uncomfortably in my seat, looking askance and forcing the traces of a smile to my lips. “Yeah,” I muttered, almost inaudibly. How could I say I didn’t understand it, but only felt it? The hate. The rage. The shock. The sadness. Not being able to see my dad. Sitting here at twelve years old in this depressing house in the dark with my mother. If I knew I was going to be home I would have slept at Casey’s—her parents were together and stable and kind, and, though not rich, there was always ice cream in the fridge and no one counted how many bowls I ate.
After she spoke, after I said, “Yeah, I guess so…,” my mother reached down into her popcorn bowl and turned the TV up. Then, as if speaking to the room instead of to her daughter, my mother said, hand suspended in her popcorn bowl, “It’s the guilt, you know?”
My mother’s voice, so full of life and energy earlier in the day, seemed a thread unable to string together the thinnest cloth, though it stitched the hole in her daughter’s heart and stunned her with the gift of vulnerability, but I did not recognize it as such as the time. I did not know how to hug and comfort my mother, as she only touched me to check for ticks or occasionally slap me. I did know about guilt, and felt the weight of my mother’s, even as I wished I could turn the key and play the song, the ones whose notes fell clumsily on the rocks, where they would be buried over in moss and provide soft padding for the girls’ feet come summer.