Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [58]
But this didn’t last. It couldn’t. She ran out of money, and we were kids who went to bed late and didn’t get up in the morning. Before Mom had started these breakfasts, she’d be on her way to work when we were supposed to leave the house to catch the bus around seven. Even with those wonderful smells filling the house once again, we rarely made it to the table on time, and our mother, depriving herself of a little extra sleep for this, gave up. It was like living inside a great slumbering beast who’d woken just long enough to blink its watery eyes, howl, then turn over and go back to sleep.
BUT THANKSGIVING was coming up, one of those days each year my mother always rallied for, when she seemed to shrug off the massive weight that was raising children alone, and it was like watching a night-blooming flower open its petals in the gloom: for a while holidays changed everything; she’d clean the house, and with genuine good cheer coax us into getting off our asses to clean, too. She’d put some Rolling Stones on the stereo and turn it up loud and make decorations out of construction paper and glue and yarn and glitter, taping these brilliant colors around the house. At Thanksgiving, there’d be earth tones—browns and greens and yellows. At Christmas: red, silver, and gold. On our birthdays we’d wake to presents in the living room, each of them wrapped by her; sometimes the paper would be homemade, a grocery bag she’d stenciled stars onto, then dressed with twine and a rope bow. There’d be store-bought paper, too, cut and taped perfectly around our new clothes, records, or books, these boxes laid out and stacked so that there always appeared to be more than there were. She probably spent the rent money on all this, and she put presents on layaway accounts she’d spend an entire year paying down.
For this Thanksgiving, Mom had stuffed turkey with cornbread dressing. There was baked squash and Yorkshire pudding. There was homemade cranberry relish, steaming dirty rice and mashed potatoes and rolls made from scratch. She’d decorated the house and used an ironed sheet as a linen tablecloth. She’d been playing old jazz albums on the stereo, the same music she and Pop would listen to years earlier—Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Buddy Rich.
Outside it was cold enough to snow, the sky gray, the front yard hard and brown. Bruce was south of Boston with his family, and Mom had put on makeup and a light sweater. She wore earrings and a bracelet like she did to work. Pop was due at three, and we’d be eating at four, and Mom worked in the kitchen, a Pall Mall smoking in an ashtray, sipping from a glass of Gallo red wine while she stirred gravy on the stove, Brubeck’s West Coast piano filling the house.
It was holidays when the six of us sat down as a family again, and whenever we did, Pop sitting at the head of the table like he used to, it was as if we were each inhabiting roles to play for this brief time: Jeb was the reclusive genius; Nicole was the studious one getting good grades; Suzanne was the one just barely getting by but would; I was the newly disciplined athlete; Mom was the hardworking woman who managed to work, shop, do the bills and laundry, and cook for us too, especially on holidays like this; and Pop was the man who gave us most of whatever money he made and would sit at the head of the table like it was a throne he’d somehow left behind and was glad to reclaim two to three times a year.
Maybe we could all feel the charade, that Jeb spent way too much time in his room with his teacher, that he’d tried to kill himself once and why wouldn’t he again?, that Nicole had become distant and brooding and terribly alone, that Suzanne would fall in love with one avenue boy after another, that her dealing money