He did it again and again, until the realization that he was rescuing me only to throw me back into the water took hold, and so, rather than reaching for Dad’s hands, I tried to get away from them. I kicked at him and pushed away through the water with my arms, and finally, I was able to propel myself beyond his grasp.
“You’re doing it, baby!” Dad shouted. “You’re swimming!”
I staggered out of the water and sat on the calcified rocks, my chest heaving. Dad came out of the water, too, and tried to hug me, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, or with Mom, who’d been floating on her back as if nothing were happening, or with Brian and Lori, who gathered around and were congratulating me. Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is. “If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.” What other reason, he asked, would possibly make him do this?
Once I got my breath back, I figured he must be right. There was no other way to explain it.
“BAD NEWS,” LORI SAID one day when I got home from exploring. “Dad lost his job.”
Dad had kept this job for nearly six months — longer than any other. I figured we were through with Battle Mountain and that within a few days, we’d be on the move again.
“I wonder where we’ll live next,” I said.
Lori shook her head. “We’re staying here,” she said. Dad insisted he hadn’t exactly lost his job. He had arranged to have himself fired because he wanted to spend more time looking for gold. He had all sorts of plans to make money, she added, inventions he was working on, odd jobs he had lined up. But for the time being, things might get a little tight around the house. “We all have to help out,” Lori said.
I thought of what I could do to contribute, besides collecting bottles and scrap metal. “I’ll cut the prices on my rocks,” I said.
Lori paused and looked down. “I don’t think that will be enough,” she said.
“I guess we can eat less,” I said.
“We have before,” Lori said. We did eat less. Once we lost our credit at the commissary, we quickly ran out of food. Sometimes one of Dad’s odd jobs would come through, or he’d win some money gambling, and we’d eat for a few days. Then the money would be gone and the refrigerator would be empty again.
Before, whenever we were out of food, Dad was always there, full of ideas and ingenuity. He’d find a can of tomatoes on the back of a shelf that everyone else had missed, or he’d go off for an hour and come back with an armful of vegetables — never telling us where he got them — and whip up a stew. But now he began disappearing a lot.
“Where Dad?” Maureen asked all the time. She was a year and a half old, and these were almost her first words.
“He’s out finding us food and looking for work,” I’d say. But I wondered if he didn’t really want to be around us unless he could provide for us. I tried to never complain.
If we asked Mom about food — in a casual way, because we didn’t want to cause any trouble — she’d simply shrug and say she couldn’t make something out of nothing. We kids usually kept our hunger to ourselves, but we were always thinking of food and how to get our hands on it. During recess at school, I’d slip back into the classroom and find something in some other kid’s lunch bag that wouldn’t be missed — a package of crackers, an apple — and I’d gulp it down so quickly I would barely be able to taste it. If I was playing in a friend’s yard, I’d ask if I could use the bathroom, and if no one was in the kitchen, I’d grab something out of the refrigerator or cupboard and take it into the bathroom and eat it there, always making a point of flushing the toilet before leaving.
Brian was scavenging, too. One day I discovered him upchucking behind our house. I wanted to know how he could be spewing like that when we hadn’t eaten in days. He told me he had broken into a neighbor’s house and stolen a gallon jar of pickles. The neighbor had caught him, but instead of reporting him to the cops, he made Brian eat the entire jarful as punishment. I had to swear I wouldn’t tell Dad.
A couple of months after Dad lost his job, he came home with a bag of groceries: a can of corn, a half gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, two tins of deviled ham, a sack of sugar, and a stick of margarine. The can of corn disappeared within minutes. Somebody in the family had stolen it, and no one except the thief knew who. But Dad was too busy making deviled-ham sandwiches to launch an investigation. We ate our fill that night, washing down the sandwiches with big glasses of milk. When I got back from school the next day, I found Lori in the kitchen eating something out of a cup with a spoon. I looked in the refrigerator. There was nothing inside but a half-gone stick of margarine.
“Lori, what are you eating?”
“Margarine,” she said.
I wrinkled my nose. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Mix it with sugar. Tastes just like frosting.”
I made some. It didn’t taste like frosting. It was sort of crunchy, because the sugar didn’t dissolve, and it was greasy and left a filmy coat in my mouth. But I ate it all anyway.
When Mom got home that evening, she looked in the refrigerator. “What happened to the stick of margarine?” she asked.
“We ate it,” I said.
Mom got angry. She was saving it, she said, to butter the bread. We already ate all the bread, I said. Mom said she was thinking of baking some bread if a neighbor would loan us some flour. I pointed out that the gas company had turned off our gas.
“Well,” Mom said. “We should have saved the margarine just in case the gas gets turned back on. Miracles happen, you know.” It was because of my and Lori’s selfishness, she said, that if we had any bread, we’d have to eat it without butter.
Mom wasn’t making any sense to me. I wondered if she had been looking forward to eating the margarine herself. And that made me wonder if she was the one who’d stolen the can of corn the night before, which got me a little mad. “It was the only thing to eat in the whole house,” I said. Raising my voice, I added. “I was hungry.”
Mom gave me a startled look. I’d broken one of our unspoken rules: We were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly fun adventure. She raised her hand, and I thought she was going to hit me, but then she sat down at the spool table and rested her head on her arms. Her shoulders started shaking. I went over and touched her arm. “Mom?” I said.
She shook off my hand, and when she raised her head, her face was swollen and red. “It’s not my fault if you’re hungry!” she shouted. “Don’t blame me. Do you think I like living like this? Do you?”
That night when Dad came home, he and Mom got into a big fight. Mom was screaming that she was tired of getting all the blame for everything that went wrong. “How did this become my problem?” she shouted. “Why aren’t you helping? You spend your whole day at the Owl Club. You act like it’s not your responsibility.”
Dad explained that he was out trying to earn money. He had all sorts of prospects that he was on the brink of realizing. Problem was, he needed cash to make them happen. There was a lot of gold in Battle Mountain, but it was trapped in the ore. It was not like there were gold nuggets lying around for the Prospector to sort through. He was perfecting a technique by which the gold could be leached out of the rock by processing it with a cyanide solution. But that took money. Dad told Mom she needed to ask her mother for the money to fund the cyanide-leaching process he was developing.