I receive a letter from Mills Elementary. After all the confrontations I’ve had concerning my two girls, I’m surprised any teacher has the nerve to confront me. Right now, Jenna’s in the middle of a fashion war, and I’m right there with her. Why can’t she wear skinny jeans? They sell them. As for Carlee, well, wasting materials isn’t a crime. She likes to draw and she likes to draw right. I pay for that paper with my tax dollars, and I haven’t been shy about telling the principal. But this concerns Nathan. What I can pull from the loopy, distracting handwriting of Miss Lewis, first year teacher, is this: my son isn’t doing well. I’d like to schedule a conference at your earliest convenience. Then it concludes with a flourish, An extremely bright but nervous child. I put the letter back in in the envelope and fold the envelope in half, sliding it into the side pocket of my purse. I’ll tell Royce after the conference. I want to find out what’s going on.
After that conversation with Grandma Lizzie, I think Mother entered another world. She was already too quiet, but now it was impossible to get the slightest response. I finally gave up after I’d repeated myself, inches from her face, and realized her eyes weren’t focused on me but at something on the wall. Her breath smelled funny, too. She went through gum like Catherine Valentine smoked cigarettes. I started directing my questions to Grandma, and she told me what to do — how to watch the boys and what went where.
Mother was always in her room with her door locked. She came out when she knew Grandma was gone, but then mostly to lie on the couch and watch T.V. with the sound turned down. She’d always wore a nightgown. I tried to brush her hair once, but that made her cry. She said I was hurting her head. I slunk around and was picking up on more things now. I knew the trouble between my mother and grandmother wasn’t just about college. The boys had no clue. After school, they stayed in the back yard and tried to put up a pup tent, which kept falling down. Mother had the telephone man put an extension in her bedroom because the phone rang a lot and she didn’t want us disturbed at night. We were disturbed, anyhow. The calls stopped eventually, but when the phone rang night after night, I’d think: I never knew my mom had so many friends. Unlike me. I was even losing the friends I had, and the girls, especially Jane Lee Veach, were laughing behind my back. They didn’t bother to stop when I turned around.
It made me glad when the last bell rang, even though the arguments at home had worsened. They used bad words, some I’d never heard before. I might not have known all the meanings, but I knew what was going on. Mother and Grandma were in a full-scale war, though neither would tell me the cause.
