When she wasn’t cooking, she was in her room watching television. She had one friend in the neighborhood, a woman who’d married my mother’s distant cousin. They lived across the street. My mother’s cousin was struggling with drug addiction, so my mother bought his wife and family food sometimes, allowed her children to come inside our house when they came over to play. My mother had one close friend who was also her cousin, who’d moved away to Atlanta. Other than that, she was alone. Even as she nurtured a general suspicion of men, she saw the cunning, messy cruelty of women, too; the various women my father had affairs with, some of whom had been her friends, some of whom had known her since they’d been children, had gloried in my mother’s disgrace, had called her and told her: He doesn’t love you — he loves me. She didn’t trust women or men. Her children were her only company, but we were a boisterous, gregarious tribe she loved wholeheartedly yet had little patience for, since she had been raising children her entire life. All the choices and all the circumstance of her existence heated to a rolling boil that summer of 1990, boiled and bubbled over and burned her. It was too much for one person to bear. She stumbled.
When one of us did something wrong, like leaving our clothes on the bathroom floor one too many times after bathing, or getting into arguments with each other and fighting, she whipped all of us. Sometimes she used the short shaft of a wooden toy broom. When Joshua found it one day while she was at work, he snuck out into the woods and threw it away. She bought another one. After months of touching us only when she physically disciplined us, she switched to psychological tactics. One day she threatened to give us up for adoption, and when she heard me crying in our room late at night, she called me to her doorway and asked me why.
“Because you said you want to give us up,” I said.
“Maybe if y’all weren’t so bad,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to threaten y’all.”
And still we felt our behavior would never be good enough. I was failing her. Driven by her sense of isolation or loneliness or a desire to reveal something about her sense of discipline to me or to warn me against what she might have seen of her legacy coming to life in me, she parked her car in the carport after a trip to the store one day and told me brother and sisters to go inside, and then said to me: “Wait — stay here.” And then she did something that must have been incredibly hard for her since it was so opposite to her nature; she talked to me. She told me stories. “Mimi,” she said, “your father …” And then she opened herself up in ways she wouldn’t do for many years. She told me some things I understood at the time, and other things I wouldn’t understand until I was her age, and other things I still don’t understand, about how she grew up as the caretaker for her brothers and sisters, about her relationship with her mother, about how she loved her father and her husband and lost them both, again and again. At thirteen, I glimpsed something of what my mother had suffered. For an afternoon, I knew some of my mother’s burdens, some of which mirrored my own. For a moment, I felt keenly what it meant to be my mother’s daughter. For a little while, I was wiser than I had the maturity to be, and I did what I could. I listened.
And my mother listened too, when she could, to our furtive whisperings. We missed DeLisle, we said. We missed running barefoot along the dirt roads and eating blackberries, hot with juice and sugar and sun, and floating in the current of the river. We didn’t like walking in a little tight group down to Bel-Air Elementary in the summer to eat free lunch in the cafeteria, feeling awkward and poor. So she asked us: “Do y’all want to move back to DeLisle?” And we said yes.
My mother, frugal by necessity, had saved enough money to buy half an acre of land from her father’s sister. In the summer of 1990, she set out to clear it, armed with machetes and chainsaws along with her brothers. Sometimes she brought us along on her days off that summer before we moved, and sometimes she didn’t. On one of the days when she didn’t, Joshua and I left Nerissa and Charine in the house and walked back into the woods. If my mother knew, she’d be angry I left my two youngest siblings alone, but I wanted to see that cellar again. I needed to see if it still gaped in that small clearing. I didn’t fully understand that it had taken on a symbolic importance for me, a physical representation of all the hatred and loathing and sorrow I carried inside, the dark embodiment of all the times in Gulfport when I had been terrorized or sexually threatened. I didn’t understand that it had become an omen for me. When Joshua and I got there, we found the plywood that had covered the top of the cellar gone, so what remained was a large, open ditch lined with pine straw, perfectly square and dark. Somehow it was even more awful to see the dim recesses of that man-made hole, and my response was visceral. I felt as if I were down in it, as if my world had shrunk to its confines: the pine straw pricking my legs and arms, the walls a cavern around me, tall as a line of trees, the sky itself obscured. I couldn’t escape it. Its specter would follow me my entire life. Joshua and I stared into its maw without talking, and then left. I wonder if he felt something as well, standing there on the crumbling edge of that awful hole, of the awful future we would bear.
The house was messy. I was grateful that at least Nerissa and Charine hadn’t broken anything. I set Nerissa and Charine to small tasks, picking up their toys in the living room, while I washed dishes. Joshua was outside in the backyard. I walked to the window with wet and soapy hands to talk to him.
“Josh,” I said, “you need to come inside and take out the trash.”
“All right,” he said.
I washed a sinkful of cups and moved on to bowls. He still wasn’t inside. I walked to the window again.
“Josh!” I said. I was frustrated: I felt the weight of being a child with adult responsibilities. I was inadequate. I was failing.
My brother stood out in the yard, peering into the dark of the house. He wasn’t looking up at me, and I realized that he and I were the same height now. His hair was a sandy brown in the sun he squinted against, and his black T-shirt was fitted on his frame, pulled so by the way he was gaining weight at eleven. Joshua looked through the screen and it was as if he saw me clearly with my soapy hands, my wrinkled fingers, my jaw grinding with frustration and self-abasement, and he hated me. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.
Ronald Wayne Lizana. Born: September 20, 1983. Died: December 16, 2002
He’s going to be a heartbreaker when he grows up.
Ronald was nine then, and I was fifteen, but it was still evident even then, in his short, even-limbed frame, that he would grow yet more beautiful when he became older. He was light on his feet, seemed to be perpetually on his tiptoes, ready to prank, run, and disappear down the elementary school hallway. He reminded me of Joshua at that age. Ronald too was an only boy in a family of girls; I’d attended elementary school with his oldest sister. Teachers would stop his sister and me at play and ask if we were related. They’d say: Y’all look alike. Ronald looked even more like Josh standing next to my cousin Tony, who was also nine, but who was around three shades darker than Ronald.