We followed the moving truck to our new house in our black Cadillac, the seats the color of red licorice. My mother thought black seats were classier, but my father got the red anyway.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” my mother mumbled. She turned a corner, and there was dead silence.
Our new house was an orange brick ranch. There was a pool in the backyard and a magnolia tree in the front. Unwilling to accommodate themselves to the grass, the tree’s roots radiated in all directions, sprawling under the concrete, strong enough to lift a slab of the driveway. My father had taken me to see the tree the week before we moved. “This is the most special tree in all of New Orleans,” he’d said. He hoisted me up, and I sat on his shoulders with my head amongst the leaves, imagining each broad leaf as a magic carpet.
My mother didn’t care about the tree the way my father did. She paraded right past it, unlocked the front door, marched through the living room, and stomped straight to the hallway. She flicked a switch, and we heard a humming sound. “It’ll cool off in here in no time,” she said.
I stood against the living room wall as she’d instructed and watched as two moving men fumbled like out of sync dance partners with our yellow velvet couch. It wasn’t long before the wall-to-wall green carpet was littered with boxes piled three high, and I pretended to be trapped by the barricade.
My mother bent to lift a box, but as she stood she let out a groan and cradled her pregnant stomach.
“Hold on,” one of the movers said. “Let me do that.” He looped his bare arm around her and led her to the couch. “You shouldn’t be carrying those heavy boxes.”
In spite of herself, my mother sighed as she sat. It wasn’t like her to show vulnerability, especially to a man.
Sweat dripped from the mover’s cap. He wiped his face with his shirt, and I studied his flexed arm, noticing that he was bigger than my father. He headed for his truck and returned with a thermos and two Dixie cups. He poured water from the thermos into the two cups and handed one to my mother. “Here. Drink this,” he said. He handed me a cup too. His fingers were rough, as if covered with dried glue.
“I’m fine,” my mother insisted. “Thank you for your concern.” She stood and began to unpack. “Look at this mess,” she said. “We’ll never get this place organized.”
My mother insisted it was a virtue to be methodical, and she extended this belief to every aspect of her life. In her desk drawer she kept a stapler, a pad of paper, and a pen. These items were always in the same place. My mother paid bills at that desk the way men serve in the army with honor and pride. She never paid late, and she called this her work. “How do you think soap gets into this house? It doesn’t just fly into the cabinet alongside the toothpaste and deodorant. And,” she continued, “did you ever, ever go to get toilet paper and there wasn’t any? Never,” she answered herself.
She opened the box I had drawn a smiley face on. “We’ll start unpacking in your room,” she said. The room had three windows, which allowed the sun great access, and the bed was queen-size. “For a queen,” my mother said. I stood on one side, she on the other, and we pulled the sheet tightly over the mattress.
Alphabetically, my mother lined up items in her medicine cabinet: Bayer, Colgate, Ponds, Right Guard, Q-tips, Tylenol.
“We shouldn’t have to do this alone,” she said. “Your father should be here. Can’t count on Aunt Susie, she’s busy with her own life. Ultimately,” she continued, “you have to depend on yourself. Can’t count on anybody else.”
My mother tried to mask her desperation, but sometimes her loneliness got the best of her. Swept up by my father’s charm, she married him at seventeen and was surprised to learn, six months into their marriage, that he wanted to move to New Orleans and open up an antiques store in the French Quarter more than he wanted to stay in New York and work with her father in his wholesale business as originally planned. Nine months later I came along.
“You’re a good girl, Callie,” she said. “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it, because I do.” She handed me a box of saltines and a couple of Oreos. “You’re the only thing keeping me sane.”
Recently, my mother confessed she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with me when I was born. So she hired a nurse—an old black woman named Jenny. My mother claimed Jenny took care of me better than she could, like a mother who gives up a child for adoption, insisting that the adoptive mother could do a better job. Jenny fed me, changed me, and sang to me for the first month of my life. And then, on the thirtieth day, because she had another job, she packed her bags and left.
“Your father warned me,” my mother chuckled. “He told me to practice taking care of you while Jenny was still there. But I couldn’t. When Jenny walked out, I wanted to walk out with her. I took a good look at you. ‘It’s you and me, kid,’ I said. I pulled you in close and cried.”
I imagined that moment—me pressed against her, our bodies resting on one another, moving like a river—and felt sad knowing those moments didn’t come often. It was as if my mother had missed hearing the rules to a game and then was forced to play.
Morning dragged on. I wished my father would come home. I wanted him to laugh with my mother and me like he did the last time the three of us played Monkey in the Middle. When my father was in the middle, he jumped up and down like a gorilla and scratched under his arms. When it was my mother’s turn to be in the middle, my father instructed me to throw the ball high. “She hasn’t got a shot,” he snickered. “She can’t jump with that belly.” My mother lasted five minutes before she excused herself, saying that this was no game for a big, fat pregnant lady.
“OK, you can quit if you want to,” my father said. “But then I win.” He strutted between her and me like a dancer on Soul Train. My mother laughed, and my father winked at her. “Would you like to dance?” he asked her in a fake English accent.
“I’d be delighted,” she said. And they danced the way couples do on their wedding night. For years, every time I thought of my childhood, I retrieved moments like this one, memories playing out like a fairy tale, one contrived scene after another. Because I so desperately wanted my parents to be happy, I developed a knack, an uncanny ability to deny and shut out any evidence that was contrary.
By late afternoon I was going crazy with boredom watching my mother unpack everything from our Shabbat candlesticks to my father’s underwear, but I knew better than to complain. I reached inside a box and fished out a teacup and saucer painted with red roses, and then I sat down for some imaginary tea. I extended my pinky and took a sip.
My mother came up behind me. “Callie!” she yelled. “Don’t touch that.” I jumped, and the teacup fell from my hand. It clanked on the saucer, and the handle broke off. “Now look what you’ve done,” she screamed, and even though my mother was only five foot one, she towered over me, full of rage, gigantic. I stayed out of her way for the rest of the day.
It was six o’clock when we heard my father sing, “I’m home.”
My mother crammed the last few albums into her Louis XIV armoire and mumbled, “It’s about time.”