Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (8 page)

In the salon I waited for Mom under a broken hair dryer and checked my own Joan-of-Arc haircut in the mirror. It had a gap in the front where I’d lopped off my bangs in an attempt to look like my sisters, who all wore their hair long and parted off-center. I smiled: more gaps where there had once been teeth. Humbled, I watched the owner wash Mom’s hair, coat it in goop, and wind it into tight curls, leaving pinwheels at her ears. She came out of the hair dryer talking: “As if the nuns weren’t enough, Ken, I tell you, it’s those priests ...” The hairdresser ratted Mom’s hair while she addressed him in the mirror, black frizzle shooting up from her scalp, the pin curls like quotation marks on either side of her mouth.

At the time I didn’t realize that Mom did not distinguish between hairdressers and confidants. I just assumed that everyone was her best friend. Ken was a middle-aged man buttoned into a barber’s tunic. His wife, Josie, worked at the next station, wearing her hair in a turban with a spray of curls poking out. Both hairdressers listened to Mom drone on about the Church. I’m not sure they were even Catholic, but they listened as if tuning in to their favorite sitcom.

“Those Jesuits are a bunch of damn liberals nowadays,” she said to Ken. “We send our boys to the Jesuits because they’re supposed to be the smartest, and they come home with a list of questions about God. I’ll be dipped! At least the Franciscans don’t
think
so much. They certainly don’t question God. That’s not what Catholics do. Question. No. Not my kind, anyway. Is that what we’re paying all this tuition for? Questions? If those Jesuits are so smart, why don’t they have answers?”

By the conclusion of her hour-long monologue, Mom’s hair had been swept into a ring of curls forming a crown. Her hair became her shield, which she would tap whenever she felt under attack. Rosa told me a few years later that secretly Mom sobbed in our laundry room about being pregnant again. I don’t know how many pregnancies Mom had cried over, but if one were to ask her how she felt, Mom would have said, “Fantastic!” Then she would have tapped her hair and muttered under her breath, “I shoulda been a nun.”

During this reception of Dad’s, Mom was confronted by a man she barely knew who took her hand, looked down at her pregnant stomach, and said, “Joy, don’t tell me you made
that
mistake again.”

The next day, on our screened-in porch, she recounted the story to Grandpa and Katie: “Mistake?” she told that man. “That’s right. The same one your mother made!” After a tap, she finished with a smile that showed off teeth that were a tad too large. Grandpa was dazzled by her gumption. (He had once showed up at the Russian Tea Room in a cowboy hat, pretending to be an oil-rich millionaire in order to get a table.)

With each baby came another eighteen years of servitude. Mom fought to hide her gloom over her tenth two-decade commitment, but couldn’t. The burden became so great that it meddled with even the tiniest of her promises. I learned then that once a person is in over her head, it is true that the small stuff is what takes her down. In Mom’s case, it was a movie.

Back in July, Mom had promised to take Liz, Frank, Ted, and me to see
The Sound of Music.
She was tense, trying to do forty things at once. Mom hadn’t been to a movie theater in years. She loved to watch oldies on television, chain-smoking and calling out the well-worn lines, but she disliked movie theaters, imagining them to be full of greasy popcorn, stray hairs, and filth. This movie took on such importance to her, though, that she would tough out her misgivings. How could she not go to a film involving a nun—one played by Julie Andrews—and Nazis? Mom loved a movie with Nazis.

That morning she tried to cram in a quick trip to the A&P. The temperature, which was well into the nineties, made the parking lot sizzle, and four of us crammed half our bodies through the car windows to gasp for air. We didn’t realize that we were blocking oxygen from the toddler, Matthew, who passed out in the backseat. I think it was Liz who glanced back and screamed, “Matthew!” Frank ran for Mom, who almost fainted when she found her baby unconscious. She zipped us over to our Aunt Margaret’s house, where Shirley, the level-headed babysitter who cared for us when our mothers had babies and had fifteen children of her own, was in charge that day. Carefully lowering Matthew into a bath of cool water, she revived him. Once Matthew was breathing regularly, Shirley calmed Mom down. We returned home and even though we missed the movie, we knew not to complain. In fact, we didn’t speak of that day afterward. To do so would have seemed like a betrayal.

I
n September, I entered first grade at the public school where, I was led to believe by my Catholic family, chaos ruled. Frankie was now going to Saint Vivian. I was lonely, and for company I turned to our mother, who was praying rosaries nightly and attending Mass every morning at six.

In the darkened living room, by an upholstered chair under a crucifix, I’d lean on my one knee beside Mom, who knelt with her elbows pressed into the prayer chair and launched into
Ho
-
lee
-
Mar
-
ee
-
motherofGod
. Her words whirred like the static on Dad’s transistor during a thunderstorm. This prayer was taking Mom somewhere else, and I wanted to go there with her. If she wanted to be a nun, I would be one also. Holy Mary, Mother of God, would lift us up and fly us away. From the power of our faith, Mom and I might coast on devotion alone.

If only prayer were more than a string of syllables to me. I knew syllables. I was learning phonics. And these were just sounds, a buzzing blur. I’d look at Mom clutching the rosary to her lips, kissing it every time she said “Mary.” She’d cradle her head in her arms, the rosary spilling from her crown, beads jiggling. I didn’t get it. Sometimes I would touch her cheek to see if she was crying.

Later in my bed I’d run through my list of mothers to call upon in times of distress. Every one of them could fly: Mary Poppins, a “housewitch,” a genie, and a nun in an aerodynamic wimple
.
They would rescue Mom, whom I envisioned lumbering down to the main road, where she would step into P & G commuter traffic just before a flying nun plucked her from death.

The next night we’d be back at the prayer chair, Mom on her knees and me in my nightgown. Hovering over our right shoulders would be Jesus on his crucifix.
Our father, who art in Heav
e
n
...

There was a six-inch skirt around the bottom of our prayer chair, and I was able to fit my entire body—lying flat—underneath it and stay perfectly hidden beneath its pleats. I’d been practicing doing this since Rosa told me about Hitler. She said he’d put me in a shack with all the other crippled kids and blow it up. After that I would silently say to myself, “Under this chair is where I’ll be when the Nazis come for me.”

This was also the chair where my older sisters’ dates had to wait after they came through the front door. One night, as we finished the rosary, the doorbell rang. Mom answered it while I squiddled to the front hall to spy. I perched on the bottom step, staring at Bridget’s boyfriend standing in the foyer. He was all blue eyes and Irish features. I started for the landing and stopped because I was squiddling. This was one of the side effects of walking on legs—I became ashamed of squiddling.

As I tugged at the hem of my nightie, I wondered when someone would come to call on me. Mom ushered the boyfriend into the prayer chair and turned on the lamp, which required her to bend over him in her nightgown, and yelled right in his ear, “Dick! We have company.” Then she took off.

I squiddled to the top of the stairs and clamped my hands on the wrought-iron railing, where I could only see the boy’s shadow over the crucifix on the wall adjacent to him. Bridget opened her bedroom door and whispered to me, “That him?”

I loved being the go-to girl for my oldest sister. It made me feel like I actually knew something.

“What’s happening down there?” she asked.

“Mom’s getting Dad.”

“Oh, no!” She ripped at her curlers. Coiled brown ribbons fell. Her blue eyes were ablaze and her cheeks flushed because she was so easily embarrassed. I couldn’t wait to be a teenager. I figured it was all just like Patty Duke running in circles with a head full of curlers in a pair of tight pants. Meanwhile, Dad would be reluctantly setting his newspaper aside at the kitchen table. Seconds later he was in the living room, where we both knew that he would square off to the boyfriend in the opposing chair. The boy would have nowhere to turn to escape Dad’s fisheye except to that crucifix. I couldn’t wait for the day when Dad would stare down my dates.

I
n a year Bridget would leave for college. Someone else would launch just about every year after that. In the meantime, I still slept in a crib, which was lately in Frankie and Kevin’s room. My crib had been shifted from room to room as more babies arrived. I liked it here best, because Frankie was coaching me on how to survive the playground. In the dark we focused on how to kick or otherwise beat up a boy at school named Trent, who followed me everywhere and screamed, “Walkie-talkie legs, walkie-talkie legs!” It felt as if everyone on the playground knew this about Trent and me, and I worried that I’d have Trent stalking me until one of us drew our last breath. If that had to be the case, I was determined to have the last breath.

Sadly, my kick was not powerful enough to take Trent down. It was like leaning into one stilt while slapping an opponent with another stilt, and it was probably more dangerous to me than to Trent. I’d made it through fall by pacing the edges of the playground while Trent hounded me. Any other girl would have run away, but I was trapped. There was nowhere to hide on that stretch of asphalt, around which the school formed a horseshoe.

To cut down on the amount of time I spent dodging Trent, I took long lunches with my new Maxwell Smart lunchbox. I’d begged Mom for it and this was one of the few things I owned that none of my older siblings had handed down to me.

One winter day, I spotted Trent waiting for me in the snow with his black hat, straps hanging loose at his chin, a faux-fur flap over menacing eyes. He was walking in circles, a madman, as far as I could tell.

The recess teacher, Mrs. Jarvis, was holding hands with two girls at a time while a crowd of girls waited their turn. Since I was too late to hold her hand, I tried to draw out my lunch, perspiring in my coat, but a lunch lady said, “You have to have recess.
Everyone
needs exercise. Now go on!”

Outside, I stepped onto a sheet of ice packed hard by children racing and skidding. The perspiration on my back chilled when it met the cold air. Trent’s eyes flashed as he started toward me. I’d never get Mrs. Jarvis’s attention, so I edged slowly toward the perimeter of the courtyard, into the shadows, clutching Maxwell Smart while Trent chanted at my back, “Walkie-talkie, walkie-talkie.” Suddenly, I found myself at the opening of the horseshoe, and without thinking, I hobbled—although I saw myself as making a mad dash—around the corner of the brick building, away from everyone and into an area that was off-limits. There, in the alley, I leaned against the doors, which remained locked until Mrs. Jarvis blew the whistle for lineup.

Just as I relaxed, Trent came whizzing around the corner and pinned me to the door. “Walkie-talkie, walkie-talkie, walkie-talkie!” Automatically my hand rose and fell as I clutched my lunchbox. Kaboom! I clocked Trent with Maxwell Smart, tin to nose, with an apple inside for leverage.

His nose bled into his gnashing teeth. I hadn’t meant to do
that
. I reached out but he took off, wailing as he rounded the corner headed right for Mrs. Jarvis, a trail of bloody snow in his wake. I lagged behind, fully expecting Mrs. Jarvis to give me a gold star for protecting myself. Instead, she took one look at Trent and dropped the girls’ hands, hustling to meet him. Trent sniffled. The loose straps from his hat rippled at his chin. He clapped a palm to his bloody nose and pointed back at me, while I limped fast toward her, weapon in hand.

Mrs. Jarvis looked up from Trent’s face. I could see from her narrowed eyes that she had no gold star for me. Stopping, I looked down at Maxwell Smart, my smoking gun.

In the principal’s office, Mrs. Jarvis did most of the talking. My lunchbox was confiscated. Maxwell Smart gone, “forever,” said the principal, dropping it into her trashcan.

The secretary called my home, and Candy tried to tell her that Mom was out and that she herself could not drive to pick me up. The secretary handed me the phone. “I don’t know what this colored woman is saying.” When I heard Candy’s wheezing breath I started bawling. She hummed in my ear, which calmed me down. Finally the receptionist yanked the receiver away. “Okay, go have a seat.”

Mom arrived at the office three hours later. She apologized to the principal on my behalf. In the car I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I was just trying to get away.”

“I know that, Eileen,” said Mom, backing onto Winton, a four-lane road. I’d never seen anyone back onto this bustling road. A car swerved and a bunch of other cars honked. I was more concerned about Maxwell Smart. Why had Mom let the principal take my lunchbox? I was sorry that I’d bloodied someone’s nose but, then again, not entirely. I still could not see any other way out.

That night, Frank and I went over the situation. Our focus in the past had been clocking Trent. We needed a new plan. Still, I loved that Frankie had tried. Primal instincts now off the table, Frankie came up with loftier plans: miracles.

Whether we liked it or not, Frankie and I were both serious candidates for the clergy. Any respectable Catholic family was expected to pony up one kid to the cloth. Logically it followed that with almost ten children, half girls and half boys, we should offer up at least one priest and one nun.

Frankie seemed content to become a priest, although he’d rather have been a professional basketball player. His athletic goals were sketchy at best. He could sink a ball from anywhere on the court—that was
if
he got his hands on it—but he was scrawny and not aggressive. Later, coaches would
bribe
Ted to join their teams; he would be Dad’s best hope for a football star, although his heart was buried in books. Frankie would have given his right eye for a fraction of Ted’s strength, but for all his coaching on how to beat up Trent, Frank was not himself a fighter.