4 – Waiting

The house in Hadley is an old, rundown, one-story farmhouse surrounded by tobacco fields. Every room except the kitchen and the living room has been turned into a bedroom and rented out. My room is a sort of alcove, a place where the hall bulges out into a lump on the face of the house. It has a temporary wall that doesn’t quite reach the ceiling and an old India-print bedspread strung up across the doorway. In the room, I have a bed, my childhood dresser, a desk, a bookcase, and Josh’s rocking chair.  

Without a real door, I feel vulnerable in the room, exposed to everything that goes on in the house. I can hear Chip, the Vietnam vet, when he comes home from his night job as a janitor at the VA hospital. By nine in the morning, he’s drunk, stumbling and swearing, then passing out in his bedroom. I can hear Chip’s German shepherd puppies, when they yip and yip in the little room he shuts them in, and I can hear his friends when they sit on the porch and talk about guns. I can hear Vince, the bicycle freak, when he lets the water in the bathroom run and run as he shaves his legs in preparation for a race. I can hear Ed, the orderly, when he pounds his fists on the refrigerator and howls after another day of working at Belchertown State Hospital. Ed, with the staring eyes, who insists on reading to me out of a book about le Marquis de Sade. There’s another woman living in the house, named Julie, but she’s gone most of the time, and so stoned when she’s around that she doesn’t make much noise.

The kitchen is continually filling up with greasy hamburger pans, crusty hot cereal pots, cups of cold coffee, and plates of dried spaghetti sauce. Everyone jeers when I try to clean up.  Often, I just dump everything in the sink, run water over it, and leave it there to soak until someone wants to cook something new and is forced to wash at least a few of the dishes. One night the oil burner breaks down and the water in the sink, along with all the pots and pans and plates and cups and garbage, freezes into a gigantic icecube of filth. The radiator in the living room bursts and the water spreads out in long puddles all over the floor, like the puddles the puppies make.

In the bathroom, there’s urine crusting on the base of the toilet, clumps of hair sticking to the shower curtain, and an ever- increasing slime in the sink. Whenever I want to take a bath, I have to clean the tub first. Once, I borrow a red wash cloth from the linen closet. When I get into the tub with it, all of the water turns pink. The washcloth has never been laundered and now I’m sitting in a pool of red dye. I burst into tears.

Hadley is a small farming town near UMass. I graduated last spring, and since the fall I’ve been working part-time at the Finast supermarket out on Route 9. I got the job because I worked at the Finast in my hometown during high school. For a while, I was living with Josh in North Amherst. But we broke up in December, so now I’m living here because I don’t have a car, I can’t ask Josh to drive me to work anymore, and this house is within walking distance of my job.  

Some weeks I get as few as sixteen hours of work from Finast, where I’m a cashier. The supermarket is at one end of a mall and every couple of weeks I apply for jobs at places like Papa Gino’s and Marshall’s. They’re the only places to work that are close enough for me to walk to. I’m desperate for more work, but no one will hire me. They’re suspicious of me, a college graduate, applying for minimum wage jobs. What’s wrong with me? Most immediately, what’s wrong with me is that I’m hungry. After paying my rent and my share of the oil bill, I go to my jar and count out change to buy groceries. I’m practically living on Kraft’s Macaroni and Cheese Dinners, which are four for a dollar at Finast. I have some powdered milk, and I can sneak butter from one of the men in the house. Now and then, if I get more hours, I can buy some cans of tuna and a carton of orange juice.

Supposedly, I‘m working part-time so I can write. What I’m actually doing is waiting.  I’ve applied to MFA programs at state schools in California, Arizona, and Montana, and I’m waiting to hear from them. I’ve also applied to VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). I’ve been accepted, but they haven’t offered me any jobs I’ve liked yet, so I’m waiting to hear about their next opening.

I’m waiting for other things, too. Josh is unhappy with our breakup and wants me to move back in with him. But I can’t bear to continue our relationship unless he agrees to get married. Losing my relationship with my mother has left me so wounded and afraid that I need Josh to promise he’ll never leave me. For me, marriage is the only promise that matters. But Josh is a child of divorce – for him, marriage is a doomed choice that ends in pain. And my frantic clinging scares him. So I’m waiting for him to change his mind and he’s waiting for me to change mine.

My mother’s mother, my Nana, is in and out of the hospital all the time and it seems clear that her long struggle with lymphoma is coming to an end. So I’m waiting for the phone call that tells me she’s gone.

There’s something else I’m waiting for, too – I’m waiting for my mother to love me again, to have room in her life for me again. Each time I try to connect with her and fail, I fall deeper into the hole I’m inside of, the hole I fell into the day she told me she wanted to disappear.

How can she turn away from me, her first born, her second set of hands? We’ve always been so close. Or is that the problem?

Have we been too close, too intertwined? Are we missing the normal boundaries that need to exist between mothers and daughters? Have we been doomed all along to a terrible rupture even without this mysterious illness?

She was still a child when she gave birth to me. Was I more of a playmate than a daughter? And as I grew and became her little helper, was I more of a sister or a friend than a daughter?

I know I need to separate from her to really grow up, but she’s beat me to it. She’s separated from me before I’ve had a chance to separate from her. She’s pushed me away before I’ve been able to pull away.

Dad defends her withdrawal, saying this is what she needs to do to survive her illness, to protect herself. He says she’s shutting everyone out, even him.

But I can’t imagine why she needs to protect herself from me. I’m her helper, her special one. Why doesn’t she make an exception for me? 

I feel the lack of her every second. I don’t know how to function without her loving gaze, her encouraging words. What if she never pulls me close again?

To help pass the time, I start flirting with a man at work named Kevin. He’s attending college part-time, studying business. He’ll be an accountant when he graduates.  He’s not my type in any way — he’s very conservative in his dress as well as in his politics and choice of career. But I’m bored and lonely. He teases me about my hair, which is so short that I have no part. He invites me to a party at his apartment. Clearly, he’s new to drinking and gives himself a case of dry heaves before the evening is over. He begs me to spend the night, which I do, but he never stops heaving, so nothing happens. Toward morning, I give up and walk home. I’m wearing a winter coat, but I have no hat or mittens.  Worse, I’m wearing a long skirt with just tights and green rubber boots on my feet. It’s a long walk back to my house in the frigid February sunrise.

By the time I get there, I can’t even feel my feet. I crawl into my bed with my coat still on, and pile every blanket I own on top of me, but I’m still so cold that I’m afraid to go to sleep.  I lie there and think about Josh, my sweet Josh, his yellow curls and small blue eyes, his long smooth back and muscled arms, the way he calls my name as he starts to cum. I love him with all the desperation of the motherless child I feel myself to be. When I finally warm up, I sleep until sunset. 

April comes, and with it my 22^nd birthday. I’ve been in the house since New Year’s, and the waiting has become unbearable. I pass as much time as I can reading, thumbing to the university to see dollar movies, and getting high with Julie. Sometimes  I call Josh. He feeds me dinner, I sleep beside his warm beloved body all night, and in the morning I take a shower in his clean bathroom. But then we have yet another painful discussion of my need for commitment and his inability to supply it, and I go back to the house in Hadley.

The week before my birthday, I finally hear from the schools: “We’re sorry to inform you…”, “The quality of your work does not…”, “Space is so limited that we…”.  Josh tells me that he’s taken a job at NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) in Wyoming and will be leaving in a few weeks.

Nana dies and we hold the wake on my birthday. I remember that when Gramma, my father’s mother, died, my father opened up about the way he’d never completely forgiven her for being mean to my mother when she got pregnant out of wedlock, and about the wall he’d built around himself, with only my mother on the inside. I think something similar will happen this time. I think my mother will open up, that she’ll talk to me the way she always used to, that she’ll bring me inside the wall she’s built around herself since she got sick. But when I put my arm around her as we stand before Nana’s casket, she pushes it away. I’m devastated. If she won’t let me close at a moment like this, I don’t believe she’ll ever let me close again.

When my father finds me crying later, he screams at me, “What are you crying about?  You have no problems, your mother’s the one with problems!”

I give up. I go back to the house in Hadley. I rock in Josh’s chair for hours, staring out the window. When the VISTA people call to see if I’m still interested, I tell them I’ll go anywhere.