Rebecca Tiger
My mom’s given me a nickel for the jukebox, my second favorite thing about Shakey’s Pizza (my first being unlimited root beer). A large man is standing near it, yelling at a lumpy woman sitting on a bench. Back then, Shakey’s had long wooden tables, communal style eating now reserved for hip gastropubs. It was a loud place, kids screaming for thin pepperoni pizza served on large mishappen metal trays. The man tells the woman that she ruined their daughter’s life. “You ruined it!” he screams. The woman is crying in what looks like anger, not sadness.
I was used to this from my house: My parents fought a lot. My mother also cried, a kind of silent despair. She’d cover her reddening face with her hands. I cried like that almost a half century later when she died and the hospice nurse tried to comfort me. My father had a terrible temper that alcohol, ironically, cooled, so I learned to watch and wait, especially the shift from uptight to mellow as the first drink took effect, the knot in my stomach loosening. “Tell her to stop looking me!” my father yelled at my mother once. “She’s creepy, always staring.” It’s how I learned anything in a place where no one said what they really meant. It’s still how I learn anything in a world that’s pretty much the same.
“I ruined it? That’s rich coming from you!” the woman sobs. They are between me and my favorite song by Andy Gibb. I fucking loved Andy Gibb, his wispy feathered hair, aquiline nose, slender waist. He was the youngest, like me. He went out on a solo act and succeeded, had his own legitimate hits that propelled him to the same level of fame as his high-pitched brothers. When Casey Kasem announced that “Shadow Dancing” was the number one song for the third week in a row, I ran from my bedroom, where I was listening to my clock radio, to tell my mother. I was an emotional kid, so I probably had tears of joy in my eyes, though I spent a lot of my childhood crying, especially when my father would lose his temper and beat my older brother and chase me around the house. “That’s nice, honey,” my mother said. Or something like that. At that time, Andy’s victory felt like mine too. I was devastated when he died, though I didn’t find out until years later that it was of a drug overdose.
My mother calls my name, so I walk back to her. I have the nickel in my hand and unfurl my fingers to show her; it’s left an imprint on my moist palm. I tell her two people are fighting. She asks me if I know who the man is.
“No.”
She has a look of alarm mixed with annoyance. “It’s Samantha’s dad,” she says. “Mr. Gaffney.”
Samantha lived two houses down from me. I was often at her house, usually all weekend and some weekdays. Back then, I had this problem that if I saw someone out of context, I couldn’t place them. One evening, a classmate called our house–I had just started first grade–to invite me to her birthday party. “It’s Marta,” my mother said as she held the receiver out to me. “Who?” I asked. “Your friend, from school!” My father was staring at me like I was an alien. I shook my head. I had no idea who that person was. None. My mother said something into the phone, about how I was busy. The next day, I sat next to Marta, played with her during recess, ate lunch with her. We were best friends because we had almost matching green coats. But when I was at home, school didn’t exist. So Marta didn’t either. And when I was at Shakey’s, home didn’t exist, so neither did Samantha and Mr. Gaffney. I heard my father tell my mom that I did this on purpose, for attention. But she knew I wasn’t clever enough for that kind of deception. Back then, people didn’t really explore alternative explanations for a kid being dense. My parents left it at that.
“He looks angry,” my mother says.
“He is,” I tell her.
“What is he saying?” My mother liked my spying tendencies. She got information out of me that it would not be proper for her to find out herself. She pretended that she was above neighborhood gossip. Whenever I came back from Samantha’s, she usually asked a lot of questions about what happened and what I saw. Who was there. When I told her that Samantha and I watched TV in the living room with her parents, while they poured vodka into tall glasses filled with ice her father had us fetch from the basement freezer, she considered forbidding me from going there. But she also knew that the strangest house on our street, the one with kids and step kids, some over 18, loud cars, and the most decadent thing of all–a pool–needed someone to observe it, keep tabs on the comings and goings, of which there were many. She wanted to know what Mr. Gaffney and Mrs. Gaffney said to each other. I never really noticed them communicating so I said: Nothing.
“Who is he talking to?” she asks.
I have no idea, so I shrug.
“You’ve never seen her before?”
“Nope,” I say. I can tell she is wondering if I have but I can’t place her because we are at Shakey’s, a fifteen-minute drive from the context where I might have seen this woman in “that flop house” as my mother referred to Samantha’s large white newly built colonial. All the houses on the street were new, including ours. The neighborhood consisted mostly of Irish and Italian families. There were a few Black ones, Poles, Jews, which we were. It was a bunch of people climbing up, who put their savings down as a deposit on a plot of land which bought them the right to choose from seven models of homes with the names like Andover and Langley and Providence that would be theirs a year later in a development called Lakeside Gardens. People bought these houses, full of that hope called The American Dream. There weren’t any lakes nearby.
“Maybe it’s the first wife,” my mother says. She often talked to me about things that now we might consider above a seven-year old’s purview. I guess I knew there was a first wife, which was scandalous back then in this neighborhood where most people were on their first marriages, presumably to be their only ones (another misconception borne of hope). Mr. Gaffney was older than the other dads on the street. Gruffer too. He was very manly. He never asked me any question unless they involved me getting him something, usually booze or a salty snack to go with it. And I liked being the little gofer girl because it meant Samantha and I could watch TV, something my father only allowed me to do at home in tiny increments, an hour over the entire week to be allocated by me, a child. I often miscalculated and had a show turned off in the middle once I hit the 60-minute mark. I never got to see the ending of a lot of my favorite programs. Maybe that’s why I still have trouble with endings, in my stories and in real life. At Samantha’s we’d watch J.R. Ewing and his wife Sue Ellen, who looked a lot like my own mother, eviscerate each other, a drink in hand, both ready with an acerbic comment. There was a steely glamour to how those two fought. Nothing like what I saw at home, with slammed doors and the silent treatment. I figured they did things differently in Texas than in Maryland.
Samantha had older siblings–a brother and a sister–that she referred to as “half,” but I never thought too much about it. What would make them half? Even though I creeped people out with my staring, I had an absence of curiosity about what I saw. I could report the facts but I didn’t interpret them, partly because I had no frame of reference. How was I to understand multiple kids from different parents living under the same roof? I didn’t even have cousins–my father was an only child and my mother never talked about her life growing up in Appalachia–so large families were mysterious to me but also uninteresting in the abstract. I was more focused on convincing my parents to expand our family with a dog, like Samantha had, a scrappy white fluffy thing that was always under foot.
But I was fascinated with Samantha’s older sister, Connie. She captivated me. She was 18 and glamorous, in part because she was that special category of adult that seemed simultaneously old and young. She would regale us with tales of dates then tell us to scram when we bored her. She wore light blue frosted eye shadow and red lipstick. She brushed her hair often and when she did, it was straight and silky, light brown with blonde highlights she got by spraying Sun-In on it and sitting by the pool, so unlike the frizzy mass of tangled hair I inherited from my father. Connie drove. She even had her own car, a Chevy Nova, though my mother wouldn’t let me go with her anywhere. Not that Connie wanted to drive two goobers around. She was always busy, going here, going there. Looking so pretty. She probably smoked though I don’t remember that detail. Samantha’s parents did, lighting the next cigarette on the one still burning. They were “chain smokers,” a term I knew because my grandparents were too. I do remember that Samantha’s mom had shaky hands. I could see her struggle to get the BIC lighter to her cigarette. One time, she had a soft cast on her wrist, a purple bruise under her eye. Kids back then didn’t ask adults stuff, we generally knew we should shut it. So later, I asked Samantha what happened. She made a fist and pretended to punch the air. “My dad did it,” she said. I wasn’t unfamiliar with violence: Mrs. Petricelli down the street always wore very large sunglasses, “to hide the bruises,” my mother told me. My dad regularly punched my brother’s face and made his nose bleed. For a long time, I assumed it was normal to live in fear, scared of the “man of the house,” until a therapist told me it wasn’t.
“Do you know what they are fighting about?” My mother wants the details.
I tell her that they seemed to be arguing about a girl.
“Probably Connie,” my mom says. “That must be Connie’s mom.”
This renewed my interest in the two people yelling at each other. Connie was less a real person than an idea for me. I spent more time thinking about how to pester her, be in her company, than I did in her actual presence, so maybe for this reason I remembered who she was, out of context, and suddenly understood this fight as having some relevance to me. I still had the coin in my hand.
“Should I try again?” I ask.
“Only if you want to, honey,” my mother says.
I want to! Not only for Andy Gibb. But for Connie. And Samantha. And my mom. And me. I walk back to the jukebox.
“It’s your fault. You did this to her.” The angry crying woman isn’t really crying anymore. “You messed it all up, so don’t accuse me now of ruining her life. You did it. YOU!”
Mr. Gaffney’s face is red with rage. He is a large, tall man with a thick neck. He is the type of person who you would think would die in his late 60s from a heart attack or a stroke. This did happen. But at this moment, he is full of life and anger and I see his arms flinch. Like he is going to sock this woman. But she just taunts him.
“You don’t get to anymore,” she says. “To me. But why to her? Why? She was just a kid. You are a monster.”
At this point, I’ve forgotten my task. I am just watching. The woman sees me standing there, mute. Mr. G, as I referred to him though to whom I don’t know because I never called him anything to his face, turns and sees me. There’s no flicker of recognition. I’m just some kid and he waves his hand to say as much, like, who cares about her? I wonder if he would recognize me anywhere, really. I was one of a stream of brats who entered his house, who he barely glanced at through a haze of smoke. He made a gaggle of people but took little interest in any of them or those of us who accompanied them. Samantha never had to ask for permission to invite me for a sleepover. It wasn’t that kind of house. Everyone did what they wanted and there were no discernible rules.
“Did you pick your song, honey?” My mother is by my side.
Mr. G looks at her.
“Well, hello, I didn’t know you were here too,” he says. He smiles widely at my mother. He runs his hand through his dark thick hair. He has an almost bashful look.
My mother was gorgeous, this I knew, and not just because she was my mother. When she was dying, I cleaned out her house and found photos of her from before I was born. They confirmed what I knew: She was stunning. She had a lovely wide smile. It pains me to see these photos now. To remember how much my father didn’t appreciate her. And it’s not like she deserved to be treated well because she was beautiful but as the years went past, I could see a disappointment settling into her face. As her beauty faded so did its possibilities. While my mother was still alive, but her mind was coming apart, the hospice nurse said to me, “Your mother must have been a very beautiful woman.” She could see it, even though my mother’s eyes had become glassy, her once smooth skin wrinkled. Her face had a perpetual look of confusion, like a lost chick, and some days, she couldn’t recognize me. The nurse’s use of past tense gutted me.
My mother smiles back at Mr. G, revealing a mouth full of white teeth, not too straight, with enough imperfections to make her seem both ethereal and attainable. She is like Sue Ellen smiling at her husband, during one of their détentes, a cocktail in hand. But we’re surrounded by screaming kids and the heavy smell of melting cheese and charring dough from the continuous rotation of pizzas that go in and out of the large brick oven, stale beer that’s spilled on the floor. And a scowling woman who is looking from Mr. G to my mother, back and forth, shaking her head, rolling her eyes.
My mother lowers her face and looks up at Mr. G. Her large round hazel eyes have a lightness to them I had never seen. I notice that they are almost green. She always looked worried at home. She had started talking to herself. One afternoon, I came home from school to find her in the same chair she was in when the school bus picked me up that morning. Her face was swollen from crying. She had a wad of damp tissues in her hand. I wanted a snack and she said she didn’t have the energy to get anything for me. She started going days without bathing; I could smell the sweat in her clothes, see the grease accumulating on her hair.
But today, her long auburn locks are pulled up in a chignon, held in place by large bobby pins, with a few strands coming down, framing her round face. She is smiling at Mr. G and he is smiling at her. I can sense that my mother’s attention, usually focused on me, is somewhere else. I have a weird feeling in my stomach. It’s as if my body is realizing something my mind isn’t ready for and there is a clash inside. My mother has the almost dreamy look Connie would get when she’d talk about her dates, boys Samantha and I never saw, so we had to rely on her descriptions. A few years later, we would find out that none of it was true. Connie was too damaged by her father to have anything resembling the life whose details, pilfered from Tiger Beat magazine, she doled out to us in crumbs. Hers were just one layer of the lies contained within the large white house with a pool that unfurled on the Lakeside Gardens stage, including a third wife that Mr. G was secretly married to at the same time as his second one. Mr. G moved this family to a larger house in a fancier neighborhood across a four-lane highway to escape the truth that had his neighbors saying: “I knew it all along!” as if these suspicions cleansed them of the transgressions that took place on their own quarter acre lots. But I remember when the fire trucks came and the ambulance took Connie’s body away, after Connie slipped into the garage one night as her father and the wife we knew about drank themselves comatose, as her younger half-sister and dumb friend from down the street were kissing the basement walls with lips stained crimson from pilfered cosmetics, after Connie closed the car door, locked herself in her Chevy Nova and turned the ignition key. The last time I saw Samantha was when she was driving with her mom away from the old house, presumably to the new one. She waved slowly to me and I could see a splint on her wrist. I never got to ask her what happened.
“He’s a dangerous man,” the woman says. She is looking directly at me.
“Who?” I ask.
“Ah, so you’re a fool too? Like mother, like daughter.”
My mother looks at me, as if she’s woken from a dream.
“Let’s go home now, honey.” She grabs my arm. She has long strong nails that she got filed and painted once a week at a nearby manicurist; I can feel them digging into my flesh. I gave her weekly manicures when she was in the memory care center, cutting her nails short so she wouldn’t get blood and shit, from her regular accidents, under them, painting them a pale pink called Mindful Meditation. She wanted me to get her some red polish for summer, but she didn’t last that long.
I haven’t gotten to play my song, but I know it’s time to leave. I console myself that I can listen to it on my record player in my room though it would have been more fun to sing along with everyone else at Shakey’s. I am nothing like my mother, I think. She is beautiful and elegant. She knows everything. And I am short and pudgy and dumb. My mother and I drive home in silence. I open the window, stick my hand out, pretend to catch the clouds while she drives with her large sunglasses on, the ones that cover half her face, basking in or maybe concealing some feeling.
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Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, Cowboy Jamboree, Ghost Parachute, Raw Lit, trampset, and elsewhere.