Gun Love Read online

  By the time I was eleven, my mother and I were the same size and I never grew any taller.

  You’re the apple on my apple tree, she said.

  My mother named me Pearl because, she said, You were so white. You came from a place that is far away from any normal birthplace like a hospital or clinic.

  She said, Nobody knew, and I gave you your birthday, to you all alone, by myself, in silence. I did not cry and you did not cry.

  I used the bathroom near my bedroom because it had a long, wall-to-wall bathtub, she said. I had to think about everything I needed to do. I lay down in the bathtub like it was a bed. I placed towels down first and a blanket and then I lay down.

  My mother was so small, a bathtub was the perfect size for her.

  While I lay there, waiting for you to come to me, she said, I breathed in and out.

  From the bathtub she could look out the window, through the palm trees of her family’s garden, at the sky.

  While waiting for you I prayed the rosary, she said. When you pray the rosary your life stops.

  She watched the sunset and sunrise.

  And you came to me early with the birds, she said. I heard them outside the window.

  After she’d cleaned her body, she washed me in the sink with a bar of Avon soap and patted me dry with Kleenex.

  She said, You were so small. You fit inside a hand towel. You were so white. More like a pearl than skin. You were like ice or cloud, like a meringue. I could almost see inside your body. I looked at your pale-blue stone eyes and named you. Just that, she said.

  I was a pearl. People stared at me. I didn’t know a different life. I didn’t know what it was like to walk around and not be noticed. They could think I was beautiful or ugly but, no matter what, everyone stared. Hands were always reaching out to touch my silver hair or the white glaze of my cheek.

  You’re all luster, my mother said. Being with you is like wearing pretty earrings or a new dress.

  My mother lived in her father’s house for two months after my birth without anyone knowing I was there.

  She said, When I had to go to school or leave you to do something, I placed you in the closet in my room, all in the dark, all wrapped up. I made a bed for you on the shoe rack with towels and my sweaters. I nested you there like a kitten. I used paper towels from the kitchen as diapers. The house was so big, no one ever heard you cry.

  You were born in a fairy tale, my mother said.

  During the time my mother had been pregnant, she’d driven around in search of a place she could park the car and live with me while she looked for a job and a small place to rent. The trailer park was only forty minutes from her father’s house.

  If you’re going to hide, hide close by, my mother said. Nobody thinks you’re going to hide in plain sight. There are over one hundred thousand people missing in this country. If they can’t find those people, how are they going to find us?

  My mother picked this spot because it had a public recreational area with a bathroom. She always thought we would be there for only a few months.

  We had a place to start our living together, my mother said. I cleaned it. And, over the months while I waited for your birth, I stole everything from my parents’ house I thought we might need.

  Two months after my birth, two months before her exams, and two days before she was going to be seventeen, she drove away from home and never went back.

  I didn’t look over my shoulder, she said. Don’t ever look over your shoulder, because it can make you want to walk backward. Don’t ever twist and turn and look over your shoulder, because you might break in two pieces. If anyone ever looked for me after I ran away, they didn’t look hard enough, because I was never found.

  I never had a birth certificate. My mother falsified one copied from the Internet so that I could enroll at the local public school, but my birth was never registered.

  Don’t worry about yourself, my mother said. You’ll never be found, because you’ve never been missing.

  Every time she talked to me about my birth she said, That green-tiled bathroom with a toilet, bathtub, and sink was my manger.

  One night, a few weeks after the appearance and death of the conjoined twin alligators, my mother and I were talking in the dark before going to sleep as we did most nights.

  We almost always told each other about our day. I’d tell her about school, which was a forty-five-minute walk down the highway to the town, and my mother would recount her day at the veterans’ hospital.

  Those men are hurt and angry, but they’re full of the national anthem, she said. Pearl, it’s important to know the world’s geography, because the vets hate it if people don’t know the places they’ve been to fight.

  I knew the words “got some” meant the soldier had killed enemy combatants.

  As my mother told me the stories she heard from the soldiers, the wars outside in the world came into our car.

  My days at school were never as interesting, although there were often fights or kids being caught with cigarettes or a gun in their school bag. I kept to myself and didn’t have any close friends except for April May, who lived in our trailer park.

  It didn’t take long for my mother to figure out what people thought about us. I’d guessed it on my very first days of school: if you were living in a car, it meant you were just pretending you were not a bag lady living under a bridge. People were always thinking homelessness was contagious.

  Even with the Mercury’s doors closed and the windows rolled up with a tiny space open at the top for air, we could still hear the crickets outside. The croaking sound of frogs coming from the river mixed with the noise from cars and trucks driving up and down the highway.

  My mother’s hand reached toward me, through the space between the door and seat, and softly rubbed my head.

  I looked out the front window and my mother looked out the back window.

  Do you see any stars? she asked after a while.

  No. Can you?

  The car windows were beginning to fog up.

  No. There’re no stars tonight, not one, but I do feel them. They’re coming now.

  What do you feel, Mother? Who’s coming?

  Don’t you feel it? Indian ghosts are on the prowl tonight.

  I don’t hear anything.

  My mother stopped rubbing my head.

  Feel it, she said. Close your eyes.

  No. Nothing.

  But don’t you feel it? They’re coming through the trees, from the dump, she said.

  Yes. Maybe. No.

  There’re two. Yes, two of them. Yes.

  Are you sure?

  Yes, I’m sure. They alight.

  What?

  Yes, they alight. They’ve come to take the spirit of those alligators away with them. Every time things go wrong on their land, they come. It’s the Great Brilliance.

  How do you know?

  Just feel it.

  I closed my eyes but could hear only the rustle of my mother’s body in the backseat and hear her breath go out, out, out like a gentle pant. I never once heard her breathe in.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the strange soft squeaks or sighs the car sometimes made when the air outside grew dense and cold.

  I can see there’s no silver bullet to end this life, this one-dollar-bill lifestyle, my mother said. We must remember to buy a lottery ticket tomorrow. It hungers me just to think about it.

  Yes, I said.

  You know, my mother said after a few minutes. Sometimes I’m taken over by a great wish to start all over. I want to fall in love with my future again.

  My mother was always full of birthday-candle wishes.

  4

  Once, after Eli had come into our lives, I found my mother all alone in the backseat of the car. I was coming home from school a
nd she should have been at work.

  My mother was wearing a light-blue cotton summer dress and she still had her shoes on, which she never did. We always took off our shoes when we were in the car.

  What happened to you? I asked. Why aren’t you at work?

  Words are only meaningful if they’re true, my mother said. I think Eli lies to me. He doesn’t talk about his life. If I ask him a question, he changes the subject. I can’t see inside.

  My mother could see inside a person and see broken glass. She could see splinters inside their bodies and the bottles filled with tears.

  I can see broken windows, my mother said. In a person’s body I can see the bathtub’s dirt ring and cigarette burns in the carpet. I can see all the little white Bayer aspirins.

  My mother said these feelings increased with every birthday. I remember my piano lessons, she said.

  My mother had studied the piano ever since she was six years old at a private music school, until it closed when she was fifteen. Then she took private piano lessons at her home from Mr. Rodrigo until the moment we drove away.

  Mr. Rodrigo was a musician from Cuba who had studied in Vienna and London and could have been a great concert pianist. He also taught my mother to love blues and jazz.

  Of course, he never became famous, my mother said. He only became a teacher because he had to support his wife and two children. But I also knew there was another reason. Mr. Rodrigo would clap to keep time, and every clap was a slap and a spank and a whipping. Every clap to the metronome was a night of going to sleep without supper. I could see the childhood bruises and broken bones under his grown-up skin. Every piano lesson, every time, after playing the warm-up scales, the room began to smell of Merthiolate.

  Do you miss your piano? I asked.

  Yes, and I also miss Mr. Rodrigo. He was that kind of man who knew all anyone really needed was to listen to a song and be swayed.

  Since she could see under the rind and husk, my mother was always getting mixed up, stirred up with a spoon, shaken like a milkshake with the wrong people all the time.

  Once she let an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker stay in the Mercury with us for two days. I moved into the backseat with my mother and he took my place in the front. He was so thin, the belt loops on his jeans almost came together with the cinched leather belt that held them on his hips. The belt buckle was silver with a gold eagle in the center.

  The veins along the young man’s arms stood out like branches.

  You can see the tree inside that man, my mother said.

  He had pale skin, dark blue eyes, and long eyelashes, and he was as small as we were. He was from California and was kind and well mannered. He said his parents were schoolteachers.

  He was a runaway. When he told his parents he was going to leave they’d laughed and said, If you leave, just don’t come back. They didn’t believe him. They thought he was joking.

  My mother called him Mr. Don’t Come Back.

  I’m a runaway too, my mother said to him. Runaways need to take care of each other. Anyway, she added. I can see you’re a boy who never had a dream. You never went to sleep and had a dream. You’re only living half a life. You don’t have the other side. You have the life side; the death side will come, but no dream side. If there is no dream then there’s no vigil of the dream. You’re not keeping watch.

  My mother was right. The runaway never slept. His eyes were always open.

  You’re making a mistake, my mother said to him. You need to rest. If I had a sport, if someone asked me what my sport was, I’d have to say sleeping.

  It was because of Mr. Don’t Come Back that I found out about my mother’s father and the reason she’d left her home.

  Mr. Don’t Come Back had been with us for one day and one night. We were outside the car, leaning against the trunk and looking at the cars and trucks pass on the highway. My mother was peeling an orange and giving Mr. Don’t Come Back the full juicy wedges for him to suck on. She’d already decided he was shipwrecked and had scurvy since she believed you don’t have to be adrift on an ocean to be shipwrecked.

  I was chewing on a piece of gum and wondering how long my mother was planning to let Mr. Don’t Come Back hang around. I was ready for him to move on out.

  So, Mrs. Lady, he asked, why are you living in this car with your baby girl?

  My mother didn’t answer.

  And look, he said, stepping away from the car and pointing. The grass has grown tall around the tires. This old car hasn’t been driven in years. The tires are even flat.

  I know. I know, my mother said. I really don’t have anywhere to drive to, not really.

  So why? Why you living here?

  The answer is easy. My father had a fly swatter in every room of our house, my mother said. That’s why I left.

  As she said these words, I became still and held my breath. My gum chewing came to a full stop in my mouth.

  The fly swatters would be hanging from a hook or lying under a windowsill. My father had many and was always swatting something until it was dead, my mother explained. He even used it on butterflies. So he liked to take a whack at me. And he always looked to step on things like a beetle or an ant. My father had shoes on his feet to crush and squash and kick. You can’t go around killing little things. And he never went to work. He never had a job. I did leave him a note to say I’d left because he wasn’t going to come or go looking. My father thought I’d be back when I ran out of money. He must still be waiting.

  You never asked him for money, Mrs. Lady? the runaway asked, but then corrected himself. Of course you never asked him for money. You don’t even need to answer my stupid question. People think that runaways have no pride but we’re full of pride like a pride bank.

  Pearl, my mother said to me. I saved you from a fly swatter. As a kid, I always wondered one thing. It was a question inside me all the time. Do people in other houses wash their fly swatters?

  It’s good you left your daddy, Mrs. Lady, the runaway said. You can’t have some old man swatting your baby girl. That’s just the worst thing I ever heard.

  These words made my mother fill up with joy as if he were giving her a Being a Good Mother diploma. Usually everything my mother did was met with disapproval, as if not having a front door to open made you unworthy of a job or friendship or someone lending you something. People were always shaking their heads at our life.

  My mother never forgot about Mr. Don’t Come Back. She said his hands were full of church claps. They understood each other. His one-sided life made her anxious and she’d bring him up from time to time.

  Of course, he was a firecracker you could burn your fingers on, she said. Of course, he was a cutthroat and a runt. If you don’t dream at night then only this life matters. There’s nowhere else to go. I sure don’t miss his bag-of-broken-bones body.

  Since my mother translated the world for me, I understood everyone was walking around with secrets and broken bones and hurtful words that could not be washed away with soap.

  At church she’d scan the pews, bend toward me, and whisper, Pearl, sweetheart, all the people in here are afraid they’re going to die.

  Since she felt the fragility of everything, it was impossible for her to hold a grudge against anyone. She was sugar. And she always had a box of Domino sugar cubes instead of candy. When I kissed her cheek I could taste the grains. If I were sad about something, she’d give me a cube to suck on.

  So, the truth of it all is this: my mother always said that the day she met a murderer, she’d be feeling that the man’s shoes were too tight.

  And she could see into me too. Once she said, Baby, Pearl, don’t love me so much. I’m not worth it.

  5

  The Mercury was full of things my mother had stolen from her house when she ran away.

  I thought about this carefully during the nine months
before you were born, she said. I knew I had to take the kind of things I’d never be able to buy. I wanted you to see the life you came from. This car is not your only heritage.

  I liked to stand outside when she placed the key in the Mercury’s lock and turned. The trunk would open, lift slowly, and I would look inside and see gold and silver beneath the groceries. There was the shimmer of beautiful boxes made of cardboard lined with white paper, wood and leather boxes with fine gold latches.

  One long, green felt bag with a red silk drawstring contained a Chinese hand-carved ivory boat. It had been made with masts and sails carved from one elephant tusk, which was as long as my arm. There were also small figures of sailors in the boat who were holding on to oars or leaning against one of the masts. This had belonged to my mother’s great-grandfather.

  Wrapped in tissue was an antique music box made of mahogany and inlaid with shells. It had a piece of glass on one side so that you could watch the lever move and the pins pluck the comb teeth while it played “The Blue Danube.”

  There was a black leather violin case, which contained my great-grandfather’s violin.

  My mother said, Obviously it is not a Stradivarius, but it is a very fine Italian violin.

  At the very back of the trunk there was a long, flat box lined on the outside in light yellow raw silk and wrapped with a dark yellow silk ribbon. We never opened that box because it contained my grandmother’s silk chiffon wedding dress, and my mother didn’t want it to get dirty.

  My mother had two plates of Royal Limoges porcelain, two Baccarat Massena crystal wineglasses, and a five-piece sterling flatware set for two.

  She taught me how to hold china up to the light and know if it was porcelain. I needed to see if it was translucent, almost transparent.

  I learned about the difference between glass and crystal and the importance of the sound they made. I came to appreciate the craft in making the stem, lip, and bowl of a wineglass.