I looked forward to my outings with Ruby. It was the only time I felt truly free and alive. For Ruby, there was always another adventure around the corner, while for my mother there was always another problem. I liked Ruby’s way of thinking better.
chapter 2
My mother was a woman of secrets. She kept the stories of her life to herself, hording them like precious jewels, doling them out over time depending on her mood. She had an air of mystery about her that made her all the more intriguing to people. Even though she seemed to enjoy talking to people, she rarely talked about herself and would evade their questions. This caused them to make up stories about who she really was and where she had come from. I’d sometimes overhear the neighbors talking about her:
“I heard she was married to a rich man but she just up and left him one day.”
“I heard she ran away from a rich family who tried to control her.”
“I heard her husband died, leaving her to raise her daughter all alone.”
All this speculation was the opposite of what she’d intended. She’d wanted to keep a low profile, to fit into this small town and not make any waves. But because she dressed like someone who had come from money, she stood out. There she was, a single mother living in a tiny apartment at Ruby’s court, working as a sales clerk at Thrifty drug store, but she had all this expensive jewelry and she always looked like someone from a fashion magazine.
She also stood out because of me.
“My goodness, isn’t she a little old to have a child?”
“She looks more like the child’s grandmother than her mother.”
“And where is the child’s father?”
The sad truth was that I didn’t know my mother much better than the neighbors did. I knew little of her life—her past or her present. She was an elusive ghost of a person, someone who lived a life separate from me and who could not or would not join me in mine.
My mother’s secrecy was calculated to protect herself, and, as I would learn much later, to protect me. It also lay at the very core of our misunderstandings. In her attempt to protect me, she alienated me. I interpreted her withholding of information the way I experienced her withholding of affection—as rejection.
I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t tell me about my father or my grandparents, or even about her childhood. Each time I asked her, she found another clever way to avoid answering me. She was a master at it.
“Mom, tell me about what it was like when you were growing up,” I once ventured to ask.
“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that,” she said. “There was nothing interesting about your ol’ mom’s childhood.”
If my mother was close-mouthed about her childhood, she was even more so about my father.
“Do I have a father?”
“Of course you do.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s dead.”
“Is he in heaven?”
“Yes, of course he is.”
“What was he like?”
“He was a nice man.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was a tall man, a big man. You resemble him.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a salesman. That’s enough questions for now. I’m tired, I’m going to take a nap.”
Like the neighbors I, too, sometimes wondered whether my mother was really my grandmother. After all, she had gray hair like an old lady and she was so much older than other kid’s mothers. Or maybe I was adopted. Surely she wasn’t my “real” mother.
I always had the nagging feeling that I had another mother somewhere. My real mother would be in the kitchen cooking some delicious dish, singing quietly to herself. She would smile sweetly when I came home from school—happy to see me. Then she would bend down and give me a big hug and kiss and ask me how my day had been at school.
This woman couldn’t be my mother—or anyone’s mother, for that matter. This woman hardly ever cooked and if she did she ended up burning the food because she wandered off to do something else. She didn’t smile when I came into the room; instead, she gave me either a blank look or an exasperated one. And she never asked me how school had been or what I was learning in school. She really didn’t seem to care.
Both of my grandparents had died before I was born so the only image I had of them came from my mother’s old photo album with its scallop-edged black-and-white and sepia photographs.
Every once in a while, usually on one of her days off when she had been drinking beer all afternoon, Momma would bring the photo album out of the bottom drawer of her bedroom chest where she kept it. I’d come sit next to her on the bed as she slowly turned the pages. She only had one picture of her mother and one of her father. Because it was all I had of my grandparents, I studied the photographs carefully, taking in every nuance, every detail of their faces and their postures.
The picture of her mother showed a beautiful woman with her hair swept up like my mother wore her hair. There was a warmth and openness to her face and a gentleness about her eyes and she was smiling sweetly. I liked her.
In the picture of her father, he is standing proudly in front of what Momma called “his masterpiece,” the stone house he’d built for his family with his bare hands. One hot summer day, several months after moving to Ruby’s, Momma was feeling especially sentimental and she explained to me how, one by one, he’d carried and stacked huge stones until the house was complete. She made a point of saying that he hadn’t used any mortar but instead fit each stone together, chipping at each one until it fit precisely next to the other. She sounded like she was proud of her father, and I wanted to like
