My mother hit me when I brought home my end-of-term grades. She had me backed into the dining room, where all the most expensive and fragile objets d’art in the house were, and somehow it was the fear of breaking some of the good china and being blamed for it that sent me into a panic, more than the immediate pain or humiliation of the attack. I hit her back. She grabbed me by the neck and pressed hard on my throat, and I balled my hand into a fist this time and hit her in the jaw, and she let go.
There’s a card in the tarot that shows a man in a black cloak standing beside a river, three cups of wine spilled at his feet, facing a castle that stands across the water. A palm reader in Union Station told me the castle is where he’s going, but it always seemed clear to me that the man had fled the castle and was looking back for the last time.
That night I ran outside with her car keys and took the Packard. I made one stop, because I had some hopes; and then I drove straight out of Chevy Chase, heading north toward Baltimore, where my aunt Bev lived. She was my father’s younger sister, and she seemed like my best chance. There was a tender spot on the inside of my lip where it had cut against my teeth when my mother hit me, and I ran my tongue lightly over it, back and forth, while I drove. My head ached from crying. The radio was playing hymns and nothing else would come in. They were up-tempo hymns at least. I sang along to some—we had been Methodists once.
Aunt Bev’s house was on a corner by a cemetery on the fringes of Baltimore, a brick twin, the wood trim painted white on her side and blue on her neighbor’s side. I parked at the curb and turned the engine off. A light upstairs was on. It was cold, and I wasn’t well dressed. I stalled for a few minutes, sitting in the car. My conviction that I would be taken in as an outcast had begun to shrink over the miles from Chevy Chase. I tried to think what I might do if Aunt Bev didn’t rally to my side, if she was unmoved by the swollen lip and the lack of socks, if I actually turned out, under her kitchen lights, to be a stupid child sulking over a punishment.
I went up the steps finally and pressed the bell. There was a patter of clipped claws in the hallway immediately, and then the barking of her fat old corgi. Paws scrabbled on the door, and then a black nose poked through the mail slot. Heavier footsteps sounded in the background. “It’s me, Aunt Bev,” I called. “It’s just me, it’s Vera.”
“Vera?”
An overhead light blinded me and the corgi rocketed past my shins, glanced off the porch railing, and circled back to press his wet nose against my bare ankles. Aunt Bev was tiny, somehow tinier than I remembered her even though it had been only two years since she last came to Chevy Chase for Christmas. She was draped in a huge red sweater with cuffs past her hands, and she patted at me like a large woolen bird. She squeezed my upper arms in lieu of a hug. Her wide gray eyes stared up through thick glasses. They were my father’s eyes.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “Did something happen?”
“We had a fight,” I said. “I’m not going back.”
She waved me in. The corgi shot up the hallway and made a sharp right turn into the kitchen. Aunt Bev, like a tugboat with a barge, pulled me after her and set me down in a vinyl chair at the table. She began searching through the cabinets, her back turned to me.
“How did you get here?” she said.
“I drove.”
“It’s late, Vera.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I was snuffling again.
“What happened?”
“She hit me,” I said. “She always hits me, and this time I hit her back. I can’t go home.”
She set a canister of Hershey’s cocoa powder on the counter and looked at me.
“Have you ever seen her mad?” I said.
“No,” she said. “You think she’d let me? Not our Liz.”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. I had no handkerchief, no Kleenex in my pocket.
“I have egg salad,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes, please.”
She took a covered bowl from the refrigerator, a loaf of bread, a quart of milk. She made a sandwich and put the milk in a saucepan. She was making cocoa. For a few minutes she didn’t say anything, and I began to think that she might not care what had happened in Chevy Chase. An opportunity to explain myself was slipping away. “She hates me,” I said. “She hardly talks to me.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”
“She does. She acts like she does.”
“She has to manage all by herself, Vera.”
That didn’t make any sense to me. If ever there was a person in the world who had no trouble managing, it was my mother.
“She’s far from her people, too,” Aunt Bev said. “And I don’t know how much help they ever were.”
The dog lay down on my feet. I was so tired. I put my head down on the table. My mother’s people: a few quiet Southerners who seemed a little afraid of her, except for her sister, who glowed with scorn for her and everyone else in the world.
“What was she like when you first met her?” I said.
“Oh, she was something. She used to play tennis and then go and drink whiskey at the club. Lord knows where she learned.”
“To drink whiskey?”
She laughed. “To play tennis!” She stirred the pot for a while, and then turned the burner off. “Listen, Vera,” she said. “Soon you’ll finish school and then you can get married and you’ll have your own house and you won’t have to live with her anymore. But you know you have to go home for now.”
I couldn’t look at her. A tear dropped on the table.
“What’s the point in fighting,” she said, “when you know you’ll lose?”