Fiction

The first time my mother ran away from home, she was eleven.  At some point early in the morning, while her parents and a few other men from the neighborhood drank in the kitchen, she went through her mother’s purse and then let herself out the front door of the apartment.  She took thirty dollars, a pack of Pall Malls, and a tube of lipstick.  She stuck to the alleys until she got to the Marcy Avenue subway station, and in the stairwell up to the platform she put on the lipstick and smoked a cigarette.  Then she jumped the fence onto the platform and hid under a bench until the train came.

They didn’t know she was gone until they sobered up and couldn’t find the cigarettes.  Her father went door to door in their building, bumming cigarettes and asking about a little girl, and eventually he took a break to drink.  Her mother telephoned her two brothers, hard-working men who had always been good to their niece, and they drove up and down the avenues of Bushwick and Brownsville asking after her on street corners and in subway stations.

Later that night one of her uncles found her smoking a cigarette on the platform of the Flushing Avenue station.  She still had all thirty dollars.  He drove her home, and by the time they got up to the apartment, her father was drunk and her mother had long since stopped crying.  The uncle left, reluctantly, and my mother’s father scrubbed the lipstick off her face with a bottle of whisky and the sleeve of his shirt before giving her a few hard slaps across the face.  He broke her nose, and it stayed crooked after that.

The second time she ran away from home, she left a kitchen knife stuck between her father’s ribs.  She ended up in Union City, New Jersey; God knows how.  She had a lot more to bargain with that time.  She had the nose, for one thing: men will hedge their bets on something like that.  You know she’s seen worse.  She made it to Union City and no one heard from her for two years.

When she finally called her mother, she was pregnant, six months, and broke.  She hadn’t had much bargaining power since she started to show.  Her mother met her at the North Bergen Park and Ride and offered her three hundred dollars to come home.  My mother refused, on the grounds that her father wasn’t dead yet.

They sat on a bench at the Park and Ride for three hours and her mother prepared her as best she could.  Dilation and contractions.  Water breaking.  Cash for a cab.  What prayers to say.  If she doesn’t make it to a hospital, stop the car in a parking lot, or bring the sofa cushions into the bedroom.  Take three or four Demerol if you can find them, but nothing else.  Don’t drink.  Watch the cord around its neck.  Breathe.

I was born on a towel in the apartment of a hairdresser.  The hairdresser was named Amara, and she and my mother had met through a pimp and become close over a shared, uncompromising, and often violent hatred of men.  That morning Amara had left for work under the condition that my mother would promise to call her immediately if and when her water broke, and she did promise, although her water had in fact broken and been cleaned up in the bathroom earlier that morning.  My mother went into labor shortly after Amara left, on a towel at the foot of the bed, and when the contractions got bad, she put on a tape of Diff’rent Strokes at full volume to hide her screams.