Their trip to Disneyland.
In a bittersweet rush, Ruby remembered all of that day; the screams of older kids on scarier rides, the sudden, plunging darkness of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, the rollicking music of Country Bear Jamboree, the sugary residue of cheerios, eaten while you walked, the magic of the Electrical Light Parade. Ruby had watched it from the best seat in the house--on her daddy's shoulders.
And she understood what Caroline had done. Caro, who couldn't stand conflict or confrontation ... Caro, who just wanted everything to be normal.
It had hurt her sister to look back on these years.
Better to simply ... go on. Start over. Pretend that there had never been happy summers spent on these shores, in these rooms.
Ruby released her breath in a heavy sigh and boxed the photographs back up. Her sister was right. It was too damned hard to see the past in Kodachrome.
God ... she'd already lost her equilibrium in this house, and it had only been a day. Suddenly she was wound tightly, full of nervous energy. She had to get back on track. Remember why she was here.
The magazine article. That would keep her focused.
She unzipped the side pocket of her suitcase and withdrew a yellow legal pad and a blue pen. Then she crawled up onto the dusty bed, drew her knees in ...
... and stared down at all those blue lines.
We want your thoughts, your memories, what kind Of mother you thought she was.
“Okay, Ruby,” she said aloud. “Just start. You can always change the beginning later.”
It was the first rule of comedy writing; it should work here, too.
She took a deep breath, released it slowly, and wrote the first thing that came to mind.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you (she decided to talk directly to the Cache' readers) that I was paid to write this article. Paid handsomely, as they say in the kind of restaurants where a person like me can't afford to order a dinner salad. Enough so that I could trade in my beat-up Volkswagen Bug for a slightly less beat-up Porsche.
I should also tell you that I dislike my mother. 132 No, that's not true. I dislike the snotty salesclerk who works the night shift at my local video store.
I hate my mother.
That seems like a pretty harsh statement, I know. We're taught in childhood not to use the word “hate” because it represents a blight on our own soul, perhaps even a karmic misalignment. But silencing a word doesn't eliminate its meaning.
It's not like I hate her for no reason, or even for a stupid, petty reason. She's earned my contempt. To explain, I have to open the door to my mother's and my life, and welcome you in as friends.
The story of us starts eleven years ago, in a place few of you have ever seen: the San Juan Islands up in Washington State. I grew up in a small farmhouse on a patch of land that had been homesteaded by my great-grandfather. The island.. the to ... . my house ... they all belong on Hallmark cards. I went to school with the same kids for thirteen years; the only crime I can recall happened in 1979, when Jimmy Smithson broke into the local pharmacy, ripped open all the condom packages, and wrote “Peggy Jean likes sex” in Dial soap on the front window.
And then there was my family.
My dad was-is-a commercial fisherman who repairs boat engines in the winter months to make ends meet. He was born and raised on Lopez Island; he is as fixed in that place as one of the ancient trees that line the main road.
Although my mother was born off-island, she was a local by the time I came along. She volunteered for every town charity event and was a fixture around school.
In other words, we were a perfect family in a quiet little town where nothing ever happened. In all my growing-up years, I never heard my parents argue.
Then, in the summer before my seventeenth birthday, everything changed.
My mother left us. Walked out the door, got into her car and drove away. She didn't call or write all that summer, she just ... vanished.
I can't remember now how long I waited for her to return, but I know that somewhere along the way, in the pool of a thousand tears, she became my Mother, and then, finally, Nora. My mom was gone. I accepted the fact that whatever she wanted out of life, it wasn't me.
I could describe what it was like, the waiting, but I won't. Not even for the money. The worst of it was my father. For my last two years of high school,
I watched him ... disintegrate. He drank, he sat in his darkened bedroom, he wept.
And so, when Cache came to me, asking for my story, I said yes. Hell yes.
I figured it was time that America knew who they were listening to, who was giving them moral advice.
Like the rest of you, I heard her message stream over the airwaves: Commit to your family and make it work. Be honest. Hold fast to the vows you made before God.
This from a woman who walked out on her marriage and abandoned her children, and –
“Ruby!”
She tossed down the pen and paper and went to the doorway, poking her head out. “Yeah?”
“Can you breathe okay, with all this dust?” Ruby rolled her eyes. As always, her mother was as subtle as an exclamation mark. “I see you found enough air in your lungs to scream at me,” she muttered, hurrying downstairs.
As she passed her mother's bedroom, she heard a sneeze.
Ruby smiled; she couldn't help it.
In the kitchen, she knelt in front of the cabinet beneath the sink and opened the doors. Everything she needed to clean the house, and in quantities large enough to clean any house, stood in four straight rows. When she realized that the supplies were organized in alphabetical order, she burst out laughing.
“Poor Caro,” she whispered, realizing how badly her sister wanted everything to be tidy. “You were definitely born into the wrong family.”