Storms 01 - Family Storms

out, I’m sure I would havehooked a real catch instead of a mediocre clod. Almost as soon as we married, your father began cheating on me. He was never much help taking care of you. He hated having to stay home, so he would pretend he had to meet someone for a little while, maybe to get a better-paying job, and then not return until the wee hours and sometimes not until morning, bathed in the scent of another woman.”
    “Why didn’t you go back to Portland?” I asked. “You said Mama Pearl’s sister still lived there. Wouldn’t she have helped you?”
    “She had her own troubles and was fifteen years older than my mother. She was an old lady, and my mother’s family wasn’t happy she had married my father. His family wasn’t happy he had married my mother. Everyone expects their children to make them happy,” she added with a maddening laugh that always ended with her starting to cry, making me feel bad that I had asked anything.
    By then, I was almost eleven. Daddy had just recently deserted us, but I was tired of hearing my mother complain about my father. It wasn’t that I wanted to defend him. Even when I was only seven, I realized my father was not like the fathers of other girls at school. For one thing, he never came to a single parents’ night and never seemed at all interested in my schoolwork. Sometimes I thought he wasn’t interested in me, period. Once, when he and my mother were having an argument, which was most of the time, I heard him say, “Children are punishment for sins committed earlier.”
    “That makes sense when it comes to your parents,” she told him. He never talked about his parents or his sister,and none of his family ever called or showed interest in him—or any of us, for that matter.
    Mama and Daddy’s fights usually ended with Daddy pounding a table or a wall and sometimes breaking something and then running out of the house with curses trailing behind him like ugly car exhaust.
    I’ll never forget the day we were evicted from our apartment. I was twelve, nearly thirteen, and home from school because I had a bad cough. We had no medical insurance, so Mama would always try to cure me with some over-the-counter medicines. More often than not, she would just tell me to take a nap or sit in the sun. She was in and out so much in those days that she hardly noticed when I was sick, and she was not taking very good care of herself, either. I knew she was with different men frequently and drinking too much. I hated it when she came home late at night and began babbling and crying. She would stumble and bang into things. I would bury my face in my pillow and refuse to help her.
    Eventually, her good looks began to fade like a week-old rose. Her hair lost its rich, soft look until it no longer flowed. The ends were always splitting, and she wasn’t keeping it clean. She finally decided to cut it herself. When she was done, it looked as if someone had hacked it with a bread knife, but even if she hadn’t done it while she was high on some cheap gin, she wouldn’t have done a good job.
    It wasn’t only her hair and her complexion that grew worse. Her figure seemed to stretch and bulge like the walls of a water-filled balloon. She couldn’t get into her jeans and had to wear baggy skirts. Because we didn’t have a car andshe couldn’t afford taxis, she walked so much in old shoes that her feet were always aching or blotched with ugly blisters. She took to wearing oversized sneakers.
    I remember once looking out the window and seeing a woman walking up the street, her eyes glassy, her gait uneven, and thinking,
How sad. Look at that bag lady.
When she drew close enough for me to realize it was my mother, I was stunned.
    But I was frightened more than anything. The little there was of my own world was falling apart. I had long since stopped having friends over to visit, and no one was inviting me. My attention span in school was bad. I dozed off too much and took little or no pride in my work. My grades were tanking. My teachers said I had attention deficit disorder, which only made me feel more different from the others. Teachers were constantly asking me to bring my mother to school. We had no phone by then, so they didn’t call, and letters were useless. She considered everything a bill and read nothing.
    Now that I think back, I realize my mother was really the one who was stunned. She must have woken one morning and realized just how badly off we were and how