Part 1 (2/2)
She sucks at being a mom. Emphatically.
She's so ridiculously irresponsible and socially dumber than Ricky-who is diagnosed with autism-but I still love her. I'm a sucker for love and having a mom in my life. Call me old-fas.h.i.+oned, maudlin, or mawkish.
When I hear h.e.l.lo Yellow's front door being keyed into, I freeze and hold my breath.
Should be Mom.
Must be Mom.
What if it's not Mom?
I'm in a creepy parking lot outside of town; it's full of eerily similar school buses parked in perfect lines. Too much symmetry can be daunting. There are train tracks on one side of the parking lot and creepy woods on the other. Bad stuff happens by train tracks and in woods, because some men are inherently evil, and left unchecked, these dudes will do bad hooey-at least according to such cool cats as Herman Melville, who ill.u.s.trated this exact point through that evil Claggart character from Billy Budd, which we just read in my Accelerated American Lit cla.s.s. The Handsome Sailor. Budd Boy spilling his soup on Claggart in the mess hall-when Billy does that, it's a metaphor for accidental h.o.m.os.e.xual e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n according to Mr. Doolin, who has coitus on the brain 24/7, and sees a s.e.xual metaphor in just about any old sentence. ”Handsome is as handsome did it too.” Herman Melville. Funny stuff. Truly. But being in a bus alone at night near train tracks and woods ain't so ha-ha, believe me.
Plus there have been a few rape-murders on the outskirts of town lately and the cops haven't caught the bad guy yet, which has lots of people freaked out and for good reason.
Madman nearby-beware!
Finally, I cannot take it and completely blow any chance I have of surviving an encounter with the local psychopath, mostly because I am only seventeen, and a chick, even if I am a junior now. ”Mom?” I say.
”Amber? Did I wake you up?”
Whew. It's Mom. ”No. Some crazy lumberjack train conductor was just about to abduct me and make me his slave, but you scared him off. Thanks.”
”That's not even remotely funny.”
”How was fis.h.i.+n' fo' men, any bites?”
”Nope. Nothing.”
”A good man is hard to find.”
”d.a.m.n skippy,” my mother says, like a used-up chippie who will never find her Prince Charming, but you can tell-by the tone of her voice-that Mom is faking something, trying to sound hopeful enough to make her daughter feel as though she will not be sleeping on a school bus forever, so I give her a little credit. She's had a harrowing life.
”Always tomorrow,” I say through the darkness, as my mom pats my forehead like I am Bobby Big Boy. I like dogs, so I do not take offense.
”Does your puppy need to go out before I hit the hay?”
”Bob probably could squirt a few drops.”
”Please don't call him Bob.”
”That's his name.”
”Your father was-best to forget him, and-”
”Well, Bob here has to take a squirt, and I have school tomorrow, so can we skip the broken-record talk and get doggie duty over with, please? I can't sleep without my pup.”
”Come on, little dog,” Mom says, clapping her hands. And Bob bursts forth from my pre-woman chest, widening the neck holes of-like-four s.h.i.+rts, and scratching the h.e.l.l out of my neck. He loves to p.i.s.s. It's his favorite.
”Use his leas.h.!.+” I yell, because I don't want 3B to get lost in the dark.
”Okay,” Mom says, but I know she doesn't use the leash, because I'm on it-it's under my b.u.t.t.
My mom lies to me all the time. She sorta has a problem. She is a fabricator of falsehoods. Or maybe she is just drunk again, which is no excuse.
Sometimes when I am losing faith in Mom-which is, like, all the time lately-I like to think about one of the top-seven all-time Amber-and-her-mom moments. These are little videos I have stored in my brain-all doc.u.menting the mom I knew before she sorta gave up on life, before Oliver broke Mom's spirit and got her drinking so heavily. Here's the number-seven all-time Amber-and-her-mom moment: Back in the 80s-when Mom was in high school-she was a big-time softball player who helped her team win a state champions.h.i.+p, which was the highlight of her entire life. She used to talk about softball all the time, and even used to play on a local bar team in a beer league. I used to go and watch Mom play softball against fat men with huge beer bellies and foul mouths. There were only a few other women who played in the league, and Mom was a million times better than all of them. Mom was better than most of the men too, for the record. She couldn't hit the ball that far, but she knew how to hit through the holes in the infield, and she was one h.e.l.l of a second-base woman-never making any errors.
Anyway, when I was a little girl, Mom got it in her head that she would train me and make me into a killer softball player just like her, so she took me to the sports store and bought me a glove and a bat and a ball and a hat and cleats and even a pair of batting gloves, even though I hadn't asked for any of these things. This was well after my dad took off on us, and we never had all that much money, so this purchase was sorta a big deal, which I understood even as a little girl, so I just went along with the idea, even though I really didn't want to play softball.
The next day, Mom took me and all of my new gear to the park. She showed me how to swing a bat and throw and catch a ball, but-even though she was a really good coach-I just couldn't get the hang of any of it, and trying made me feel like a complete idiot. For weeks I swung the bat and never hit any of the b.a.l.l.s Mom threw me; all of the b.a.l.l.s she hit went over my head, through my legs, and occasionally nailed me in the face or stomach, and all of my throws went to the right or left of Mom or hit her feet. Mom never yelled at me or anything like that, but after a few weeks of steady failure, after swinging the bat and missing for the bazillionth time, standing at home plate, I burst into tears.
Mom ran off the mound and toward me. She picked me up and kissed me on the cheek. ”Amber, this doesn't happen overnight-you have to work at it if you want to be a good softball player. It takes lots of practice. It took me years!”
”But I don't want to be a good softball player. I hate softball. I really do.”
Mom looked me in the eye, and I could tell that she was surprised by this news-I could tell she had never even once thought that maybe I wouldn't want to play softball.
”I never want to play softball ever again!” I yelled. ”Never again. I hate this! All of it!”
”Okay,” Mom said.
”What?” I said, shocked, because I thought that Mom would make me keep trying, because that's what adults usually do.
”Amber, it's just a game. I thought you might like it, but if you don't want to play, well then, you don't have to play softball.”
”You won't be mad at me?”
”Why would I be mad at you?” Mom said, and then laughed.
”Because you spent all that money on equipment, and now I don't want to play softball.”
”If you don't want to play, you don't want to play. It's okay.”
”Really?”
”Really.”
We left the field, got some Italian hoagies at the local deli, and ate by the lake sitting on a park bench. We fed parts of our rolls to ducks, and it was really nice to just sit with my mom after telling her how I felt. It was good to know that I could tell my mom what I truly felt inside and still be able to feed ducks with her afterward. I really love ducks. I like watching them waddle around on land, and their quacking noises crack me up. True.
I remember the sun reflected in the lake so brightly, it hurt to look at the orange water.
<script>