Grandma Zeena managed to go a decade without seeing her daughter. “Time just flew by,” I heard her say one Christmas to my mother. Zeena had flown in for the holiday then, just as she did this year, and the two of them were in the kitchen, peeling potatoes at the sink. I looked at those two women holding blunt roots in their hands, those women I’d issued directly from, and pictured Time as a mechanical sparrow with a little clock radio in its belly, whizzing back and forth between them.
When my mother finally flew at the end of that decade to Las Vegas, at the age of twenty, Zeena met her, according to my mother, with a plastic bag of gifts—a teddy bear, a charm bracelet—as if she were expecting the child she’d left in Ohio to step off that plane, unchanged, ten years later. My mother said she thought Zeena seemed a bit suspicious when she tapped her shoulder and said, “Mom, it’s me.”
“Who?” Zeena asked, the sound of coins slapping slot machines in the airport lobby—tinny, mechanical music.
Later, over margaritas in a casino, sitting at the bar while more machines whirred wildly behind them—nickels, wheels, whistles—Zeena told my mother that she’d never loved my mother’s father, that it was why she left. My grandmother’s eyes were aquamarine in the salt light of her margarita, the color of a couple of rhinestones dropped out of a showgirl’s tiara into dust.
She continued, “I was pregnant, you know. Kicked out of the house. Too young to know what else to do.” As she spoke, Zeena chewed a ragged fingernail, painted red—and, replaying the moment in her mind for many years, my mother would think of that hangnail as a bloody claw caught in her mother’s mouth. An owl’s claw, or a fishhook: Her mother had stuck it in her mouth herself, but she seemed snagged by it, helpless, there in Las Vegas.
“How is your father?” she asked, and before my mother could answer, Zeena added, “Now there’s a man who knows nothing about women.”
My mother never had a chance to answer because they had to hurry. Zeena’s new boyfriend, Roger, was picking them up outside the Lady Luck in his new convertible. They were going to show her the sights. “Bottoms up,” Zeena said, tipping her glass toward my mother’s, “time to fly.”
That last sip of margarita might have tasted like a man’s sweat in my mother’s mouth, and she felt nauseated, spongy. The Friday before, she’d graduated from college, and that afternoon she’d flown across the country. Zeena had sent her the ticket slipped into a card that said “CONGRATULATIONS” inside, but on the outside was a drawing of a couple kissing, not a diploma or a graduation cap, and when her father dropped her off at the airport he said, “Now don’t give her any money. She said this was a gift.”
It was the first plane ride of my mother’s life, and looking down on the country slipping under her like something spilled had made her sick. And as soon as she and Zeena stepped together out of the air-conditioned airport, the heat hit her with the weight of a burning wall, and Zeena said, “You know, I’ll have to borrow some money to pay a cab to get us back to the apartment. I spent every last dime on that plane ticket, Eve.” My mother fished around in her purse, and handed her mother twenty dollars. It was one hundred degrees out there in the blank heat of the desert under a flat, colorless sky. As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, my mother couldn’t stand on both feet for very long, the concrete boiling under the flimsy soles of her sandals. She had to keep switching feet as each one got too hot, and she felt like a bird in her white sundress—a big white chicken stranded in the desert, dancing on sand.
My mother told this story right in front of Zeena at Christmas dinner that year, and as she told it, Zeena laughed. She wore that same unapologetic expression she wore in the snapshot with the roulette wheel.
Even now, Zeena’s hair is blonde. She wears pencil-shaped skirts and thin knit sweaters, push-up bras. Her body is oddly solid, muscled—not like a young woman’s, but like a statue’s—though her face looks every year of her sixty-seven, half of them lived beneath a merciless Nevada sun, washing the sky with toxic light.
But her teeth are narrow and sharp. They are the teeth of a woman who could chew up carpet tacks and spit them out all over the house. It’s no wonder, I think, looking at her, that my mother was the kind of mother she was.
“Kat,” she asked me on Christmas Eve, sitting on the edge of my bed, leaning into me, “do you know where your mother is?”
“Grandma,” I said, sincerely shocked and sounding it, “do you think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”
Zeena swallowed that, and it looked like a spoonful of splinters going down.
“I guess you would,” Zeena said. Then she thought. “But your mother was a secretive girl. I suppose you could be, too. You know,” she looked down at her fingernails, which were long and painted mother-of-pearl, “that Detective What’s-his-shh called me again a few weeks ago to ask if I’d heard from Eve.”
“And?” I asked.
“And I told him, I said, ‘Pal, you might as well just close the case on this one. Hell will freeze over before that woman comes back. She’s my daughter, and she’s got running in her blood.’”
I swallowed.
I thought of Detective Scieziesciez’s back, his trench coat. Sometimes at night I’d still think of him. His rough face pressed between my legs. I’d imagine him pulling up in his dark car, as he did that one day, busting through the front door of our suburban home with his gun drawn, sweeping me up in his arms, throwing the frilly bedspread to the floor in one clean sweep. “Everything here looks perfectly normal,” he’d say, as he’d said then, but this time he’d be yanking my panties down to my knees as he said it.
I was hoping I’d get to see Detective Scieziesciez again at least once before he closed my mother’s case, and I hoped my grandmother hadn’t said anything to make the chances of that any slimmer than they already seemed.
Marilyn appeared in the doorway then, a red dressing gown loose and frilled around her ample hips and the big, generous, water balloons of her breasts, blocking the light from the hall. Unlike Zeena, Marilyn is soft—a garden of petunias after a long, hard, humid rain. Her hair is red. (“Not just dyed,” my father would say, “that hair is dead.”) She has been a widow longer than she was married, and loves everyone to distraction. Over and over she’ll say, “I love you,” or “I loved him,” eyes tearing up, “I just loved the hell out of your grandpa Sam”—who’d died one day of a stroke while Marilyn was frying pork cutlets, just dropped over on the kitchen floor as though someone had snuck up behind him and pulled a drawstring too tight around his neck—or, “I loved the stuffings out of every one of my sons.” By the time she’s done, you are embarrassed about how few and little you’ve loved, how stingy you’ve been with your affections.
“You’re so much like your mother,” Marilyn said. “It’s uncanny. The resemblance. It gives me the chills. I just loved your mother.”
She shuddered, to show us.
Outside, there was the sound of humming—power lines, or jets, or Santas cruising over us in their electric sleds.
THE PHONE RINGS IN THE MORNING AS I’M GETTING READY for school, pulling black tights up to my waist, doing a little dance in the bathroom to get them on.
Before I lost weight, I’d wear whatever was clean in my closet, whatever I could squeeze into, whatever I imagined my mother would not complain too much about when I emerged from my bedroom into her line of vision (“Jesus, Kat, you’re not going to wear that?”).