RETURN
TO THE ATDC WRITINGS SECTION
COPYRIGHT 2003 ALEX THORN
AND THE TRUSTEES OF
The Love of a Woman
Part 1
Things were different after my father died. My
mother always told me, “We will survive; we’re the Cannings!”
But I’d heard the crying in her bedroom. It’s pretty to think, truly, the
efforts that I now know she went through to keep me happy and attempt to
restore some sort of normalcy to my life after my father – the fireman – died
doing what I wanted to do when I grew up.
Before my father died, my mother stayed home with
my sister and me and raised us. My sister and I would walk to school after my
mother had fixed for all three of us a breakfast of eggs and bacon and potatoes
and orange juice; my father would go to the station on the subway. While we
were gone, my mother used to clean the house, pay our family’s bills and
expenses, run errands, and knit for me and Kate sweaters to keep us warm.
That was then, though, when my father was there. He
was the keystone of our arch, the gum that bound us together and kept us
straight. After he died, the department continued to send my mother widow’s
fees, along with their form-letter, mannered condolences, but, after a while,
the money stopped coming. My mom was able to keep our life pretty much the same
for a bit – minus the actual presence of my father – from working shifts at the
textile factory on Lexington, but soon she needed more work. My mother took it
upon her to reverse my father’s death.
I was only 9 years old then, and I was lost. I
didn’t understand what it meant to work. And, even more, I couldn’t see that my
mother was killing herself to provide for my sister and me. So, I resented her
ceaseless efforts to buy the bacon for breakfast and the yarn to knit. I had
lost my father to a storm of flames and, somewhere in that tomb of an apartment
complex, I had lost my mother too. I had lost her to
her insatiable need to fill the void my father had left.
Because of my mother’s newfound absence, my sister
and I spent lonely hours in our home doing our homework and trying to give my
mother something to be proud of when she returned from the factory. We were
great kids. Soon, when the city stopped sending us checks, my mother had to
find more work during the afternoons and some nights so that she could make enough
money to feed and clothe us.
Part 2
The cold permeated my mittens and dug underneath my
skin as we walked back from school. As we passed around the corner at LeTorneau’s, we could see the front steps of our house, and
there was a man leaving – perhaps another one of the fire department representatives.
The evening was just starting to protrude back into the daytime and there were
beams of rose light casting the shadows of the trees across the street onto our
front steps.
I dropped my pack next to the kitchen table and
followed the sounds to my mother. She was in the bathroom, feverishly brushing
her teeth and trying to fix her hair, as it was full of static and misshapen.
It was 4.
“Hi mom! At recess today, I played basketball. And we won!”
“That sounds fun, Scott.” My mother didn’t turn to
me.
I paused. She had markings on her neck. “Who was
here earlier, mom?” I asked her. “Was it about Dad?”
My mother put down her tooth brush. “Yes baby, it
was one of the men from the fire department. He had to…” she looked at me,
“drop off some things of Dads.”
“Oh.” I knew it wasn’t true. And she knew that I
knew. I hadn’t seen anything new of Dads in the house and, even though I didn’t
know why, I could tell, that she was hiding something (now I know that it was
because she loved me so). I went back into the kitchen. I could hear my mother
brushing her teeth again. I sat down at the kitchen table and took out my math
homework – Kate helped me with my times tables. Kate went into a monologue
about 9x9 and I drifted off – born into some sort of day dream, staring at my
father’s picture in the center of the table beneath the white roses. He looked
back at me.
“Understand?” Kate shook me and returned me to my
work.
I hadn’t been listening. “Can you show me, though?”
Kate wrote out the answers for me.
My mother came into the kitchen, wearing different
clothes now, and opened the refrigerator. I watched as she began to make us
dinner – the light shone on her as if it were following her and everything else
was dark but her. I gazed as she worked mechanically, on a mission, to cook for
us. She must have been desperate. Her collar was turned up.
All of a sudden, she stopped – her back still
facing the oven away from Kate and me; her head no longer tilted down as it had
been to focus on her cooking, but now was angled above; she ran her fingers
through her hair and sighed.
“Kate, can you come into the bedroom with me for a
second? I need to talk to you.” She turned around. Kate nodded and followed my
mother down the hall and they talked behind the closed door. I tip toed down
the hall too, but I didn’t go in. I pressed my ear to the door, lightly at
first, as to not make noise, but, slowly, my whole body was leaning against it
towards the room and them.
“We’re short on money, Kate. I have to work
tonight. You are going to have to stay in and watch your brother. I’m sorry.”
Kate didn’t respond, but maybe she nodded. I ran back to the kitchen, making
immaturely loud stomping noises through the hall. When they returned to the
kitchen, I was doing holding my pencil to my math homework, pretending to work.
“Still doing that math, Scott?”
“Yes, mom.”
“Good boy.”
“Listen, Kate, the chicken is in the oven. I am
going to take a shower. If the buzzer rings, take the chicken out and put it on
top of the stove.”
“Okay, mom.” Kate smiled at me from across the kitchen table. I smiled back.
I could hear the water for the shower. I finished
my math homework, partly because Kate had done most of it for me, and went to
our room. I took out some of my toys – G.I. Joe and a superman action figure –
and brought them back into the kitchen. As my dad looked on from his framed
existence, Superman destroyed G.I. Joe for stealing his pencil. They battled,
and I made loud noises to simulate their every move.
A few minutes later, my mother came back into the
kitchen; she had a black skirt on and a white dress shirt. Her collar was down
and her neck was pale and still wet, as her black hair, its color accentuated
by the remaining wetness, dripped down her back.
“Why aren’t you wearing your factory uniform, Mom?”
I asked.
“Dinner is ready. Kate, can you help me set the
table, please?”
“Mom, why aren’t you wearing your factory stuff?” I
repeated, annoyed that she had ignored me.
“Because, Scott, tonight
is…” she looked at the picture of my father, “dress-up night at work.” She
laughed at herself as she said it. She had worked at the factory for a year,
since Dad died, and I never remembered there being a dress-up night before.
We ate.
Later, my mother left for work and Kate put me in
my bed. She told me that sometimes someone has to do something because she
loves others more than herself. I don’t know why she told me that: I was too
young to understand. I know now that, in fact, she was more so telling herself
that in my presence than telling me, because it made her feel better about our
whole situation.
I slept. Sometime after I fell asleep, I woke up to
the sound of the front door opening. I could hear my mom coming into the house.
By now, dawn was starting to shine through my window shades. It must have been
5 in the morning.
I could hear her brushing her teeth. I slid out of
bed and tip toed through the hall, past the bathroom, where my mom had turned
on the shower, and into the kitchen. I looked on top of the table, and there
was a large stack of wrinkled, used dollar bills next to my mother’s car keys.
RETURN TO THE ATDC WRITINGS SECTION
COPYRIGHT 2003 ALEX THORN
AND THE TRUSTEES OF