Elizabeth Massie: Wire Mesh Mothers

Most of the stuff, however, was just clothes. Tony’s first school dress. Judy and Jody’s matching knit baby bonnets. A cotton apron Darlene had tried to hand-stitch when she’d been in Brownies for a half-year. Other assorted outgrown clothes that for some reason, Mam had felt were worth hanging on to.

One box was crammed with clothes that had belonged to Tony’s grandfather. Her mother’s father. Trousers, a pair of cracked and musty shoes, two flattened hats, a couple starched, faded shirts, a moth-chewed gray knit vest. They smelled of silverfish and thirty-year-old sweat. Mam, who wasn’t real crazy about Granddad, hadn’t thrown them out because she said it was an insult to the dead to do that.

Tony pulled out Granddad’s box and tossed it onto the double bed. Granddad had not been a large man, unlike Buddy’s Gramps who had a gut like a wheelbarrow and a beanbag butt. She put on the beige slacks and drew them up tightly with the old vinyl belt. She added a long-sleeved checkered shirt, the vest and the black shoes. Her feet swam in the shoes, so she found three pairs of socks in the dresser and put them on and tied up the black laces. The socks kept the shoes from slipping. She studied herself in the full mirror on the back of the bathroom door, and then pulled one of the flattened hats down over her eyes. She found the knife in the drawer beneath her jeans and stuck it in the side of her shoe, working the handle up under the leg of the trousers. She tore a strip of cloth off one of the blouses Darlene had left on the floor and used it to tie the handle in place, snug, against her ankle.

Her mother’s sunglasses were found on top of the fridge. She put them on. They were cheap and the bridge cut her nose.

“Angela, goddamn it!” called her mother from the living room.

Tony tried to see herself in the window glass over the sink. From what she could tell, she looked a little like herself, a lot like her father. That was good. Her father, Burton, had been a real man. He’d left when Tony was six but that was okay because he didn’t really want to, Mam had made him go. She had found a new boyfriend and told Burton to get out, she never wanted to see him again. Tony understood why he didn’t try to stay. Burton had been a real man and a real man could never have put up with the shit on the sofa in the living room.

Tony dumped her mother’s black vinyl purse out on the kitchen table and collected up the three tubes of Shop-Rite lipstick. These went into the shirt breast pocket. War paint for the Hot Heads.

“Angela, you’re in there, I hear you!”

Tony shoved a kitchen chair over to the stove and climbed up to get the shoebox from the back of the tiny cabinet over the stove. The box was covered with chew marks and inside were little black mouse turds. Also inside were Burton’s revolver and a small paper bag of bullets. Burton had lost the revolver in the divorce along with the sofa and his television. Tony had tried the weapon out several times in the woods behind the houses of Rainbow Lane, drilling holes in trees and downing groundhogs and starlings. It had a good feel to it, the wooden veneer on the handle slick and easy to grip. She put the revolver in pocket of the slacks and patted it. It felt like a hard-on. She grinned.

As she was pulling the small paper bag of bullets out of the cabinet, her fingers lost hold and the bag fell, bounced on stove, and the folded top popped open. The three bullets in the bag rolled out, skipped over the lip of the stove, and disappeared into the black maw of the crack between the stove and the solid sink counter.

“Fuck!” swore Tony. She grabbed at the air as if she might actually draw the bullets back out of their hiding place, but came up empty.

“Tony!” Mom at last relented, her voice dissolving, changing from demanding bitch to whiny child. “I need a beer, honey. Please?”

Tony tried to rock the stove to move it backward, but it was too heavy. She yanked the long-handled barbecue fork from the utensil drawer, got on her knees, and scraped the narrow space with the prongs. Nothing came out.

“Goddamn it!” Tony kicked the stove, tried to rock it again. It didn’t budge. She slammed both fists against the white enamel surface of the stove, and kicked it with her Granddad’s shoe.

“Tony, honey? You out there in the kitchen? Please bring me a beer. My throat’s so dry I can hardly breathe.”

Tony shoved the kitchen chair back into place and took another beer from the fridge. She popped the tab, then found the can of Bug-Be-Gone spray in the cabinet under the sink. She spritzed down the hole in the can, not too much, just enough to make Mam sick, then swirled it around and wiped the top with the wet dishrag.

You’re a fucking bug, Mam, a lazy ass mosquito, sucking everybody dry.

Tony took the can to Mam, who thanked her meekly, then left by the back door, stomping in Granddad’s shoes across the warping redwood deck and down the steps. Darlene glanced up from the sinkhole, stuck out her tongue, and kept on digging. Tony walked down the brown graveled drive to the road with the empty revolver in her pocket. It was already after three-thirty. Leroy and Buddy wouldn’t be long.

As a sharp winter wind blew up around her legs, Tony wished she’d brought her heavy coat. But she wasn’t going to go back into the house with that stinking new nigger. She wouldn’t step foot inside that dump again until she’d done what she had to do.

She licked beer and salty sweat from her upper lip, jammed her hands into the trouser pockets, leaned against the yellow house’s sagging chain link fence, and counted, counted, counted, until the Chevelle showed up.

The teacher was going to take her on a ride. Mistie didn’t know this woman, but she’d seen her on the school playground sometime. The teacher wore bright lipstick and had pointy eyebrows and smelled good like the soaps and hand lotion Mama had tried to sell from that pretty catalog. The teacher had told Mistie what her name was but Mistie had forgotten it.

Now, the two of them were in the teacher’s classroom. Mistie sat in a desk the teacher had pushed behind her own desk. The desk wasn’t like the second grade desks. This one was bigger and there were papers and books inside. “Sit there,” the teacher had said. “Don’t get up, okay? Can you sit still for just a few minutes? I need to get a few things before we go.”

And so Mistie sat in the desk, looking alternately at the dots on the ceiling and the rows of little clay houses in the classroom window sills. Some of the clay houses were painted, some of them were plain. Some were cracked. Some looked like they hadn’t been finished.

The teacher said, “We’re studying ancient man. Those are supposed to be early native homes from the southwest.” The teacher was talking really fast and her voice went up and down like a cat when you squeezed its stomach. “Some of the boys and girls did a very nice job, don’t you think?”

Mistie didn’t. She looked at the ceiling again. Her stomach growled. She poked at it, making it growl some more.

The teacher had a big cloth tote bag with writing on it and a picture of an apple. The teacher crammed in books and a few things out of her desk drawer. “My senior annual,” she said, holding up a blue and orange book. “I can’t leave this behind. I graduated from the University of Virginia nearly twenty years ago, can you believe that? Yes, I’m just an old Wahoo. Wa-hoo-wa! Well.”

Mistie put her hand between her legs and rubbed hard until it got hot.

“Mistie, don’t do that,” said the teacher. “Please. Okay? Mistie? Here, here’s a Tootsie Pop I took from one of my students. It’s raspberry I think. Hard to tell raspberry from cherry in this light. Here.”