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Angela Jane Fountas
CROSSING OVER
We trundle along in our station wagon with all the other families abandoning east for west. Our mother looks in the rearview mirror and counts three heads: one in the back, two in the way back. Her mother sits next to her.
“You’ve got your boy, Cathleen,” Grandma says, then cranes her neck to add: “I was good in math, but I was a girl.” I roll my eyes, and my mother makes a look that says: “Her mind is going. Be nice.”
Be nice. When Grandma used to call, our mother would set the phone down and pick it up every minute to say “uh-huh,” then put it down again and go about her business. Sometimes when one of us answered the phone our mother would say, “Tell her I just stepped out,” and she’d step out the back door onto the patio. She never lies, but I’m diverging. We’re headed west.
East to west, east to west. This is my family’s story: crossing over. First Grandma. Then our father and his family. Now us.
… I remember more than they give me credit for. It’s all in there; I can see it. My ma and da packed me up and shipped me off, a piece of cargo for America. I calculated the waves, days, and fed myself from a bucket filled with soda bread, dried fish, and boxty, but I hurled everything up that went down. Nothing accrued.
Soon after I arrived in Great Neck, my waist grew thick, then thicker and I was banished to the kitchen where I wouldn’t be seen and told I was lucky they hadn’t sent me back, good Christians. You’re just a girl, they agreed. And there I stayed for ten years.
But what was in my belly? I tap my head to remember. I remember holding Cathleen outside a window once and saying, “If you don’t stop crying, I’m going to drop you.” I was always wanting to get rid of one, but not really. It was a feeling I had on the inside. Cathleen was my favorite out of nine. Yes, nine in a span of fifteen years, no miscarriages. (Is that right?) All girls.
I went back into service once my eldest were old enough to care for my youngest. I’d cook that family breakfast, see the children off to school, wash up in the kitchen, fix the Mrs. and her visitors lunch, wash up in the kitchen, welcome the children home, feed them a snack, wash up in the kitchen, and bundle myself up to wait for the taxi at the end of the driveway for my ride back home, where I’d boil potatoes and cabbage with a bone and turn my cheek for the whiskey-kiss planted by my no-good husband, who’d always arrive home after I’d washed up in our own kitchen. He came from the same place I’d come from, so who could blame him for drinking?
… On Sundays, my mother’s sisters assembled for tea and laughed about their childhood because they said if you didn’t laugh you’d have to cry. Their father died of a pickled liver when I was five.
I press my nose against the window and watch the world whip by. We are moving west for fresh air and an acre of land, fleeing the sardined suburbs of New York and Grandma’s ghosts, she says.
We are a caravan of nine, aunts and cousins following in their wagons. Our mother, the middle child, is a pioneer—she didn’t have to watch her younger sisters and she didn’t have to be watched.
Grandma always says she likes our mother best, her unruly one. She used to call her a wild child, a changeling fae, because our mother is left-handed and carried the devil inside her. The Sisters sent her home from school once a week with a note listing her transgressions: carving her initials in a tree, standing up to pee. And she was good in math, too.
Grandma says she used to say, “If I don’t break you, you’ll break me.
Now she says, “Your mother gave it all up for love. Foolish thing.”
But what does Grandma know? Our mother met our father in the sweetshop where she joined her girlfriends every Friday after work for an egg cream. Our father, who fixed the egg cream, was gorgeous, our mother says, handsome in that foreign way. He was nothing like her pale skin and freckles, knew nothing of her ways.
His family had fled their country for lack of bread and spread out to work in diners until they saved enough to buy their own.
The Starlight was our father’s second home. We visited him in the kitchen, where he stood over the steam table, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He took our orders personally. Before we left, he handed us a pack of gum and roll of Lifesavers each.
We’ve left this all behind, but we have stories to tell in memoriam.
… She did, she gave it all up for love, foolish girl. I envied her job at the bank. I always went to her window to deposit my week’s pay and returned midweek to take some back out. I’d watch Cathleen lick her finger to count, her green tongue darting out.
It was my ma’s and da’s stories of the famine that came up, rising in my throat like bile. But I wanted to remember where I came from, why I was in the mess I was in.
My ma always told us to stop our crying and eat our potatoes, and if we didn’t she gave us the lecture. She was a wee thing from years of malnourishment and had almost died during the famine because her own ma fed her weeds and grass, staining her baby teeth and tongue green.
God love her, but she tormented us with those stories.
By the time I was old enough, I had two choices: remain home with my unmarried siblings, no prospects, or use the education I labored over to work for rich Americans and marry Irish there. I listed the miseries in two columns, assigned a value to each, and tallied them up. But, oh, the ones I couldn’t foresee.
… Tired of Eye Spy, Grandma offers to entertain us. “Once upon a time,” she starts. I rub my ears to listen, even though we’ve heard this story before.
“There was a little girl who lived in a three-room cottage with her father, mother, sisters, and brothers. The floor was dirt. She shared a room with her four sisters and three sheep. The specialty of the house was potatoes, boiled and skinned with one’s thumbnail, then dipped into a bowl of buttermilk and salted to perfection. For breakfast, on even days, they relished toasties, and on odd days, poundies. For lunch they devoured boxty by the dozen. And the girl, although poor, grew fat and ruddy.
“Then one night a black fog settled in and by morning all of the potato plants were weeping. ‘Do not cry,’ the girl said, for she was sure that God’s green Earth would protect the fruits of their labor. But instead He had punished the girl’s family for throwing unwanted potatoes in ditches when their harvest was too abundant to eat. For days on end they dipped fingers into buttermilk and salt and licked them clean, then wrung their hands, worrying over the new crop they had planted from the last of the seed potatoes. But that crop failed too. ‘Fool’s gold,’ the girl’s parents said, then gave in to the hunger. Over the years the girl’s brothers left for foreign soil and her sisters spun themselves into spinsterhood.
“Then one morning the sun came out and the frail girl and her sisters set their sights on scraping together a dowry so that she could marry. And she did. The girl-who-turned-into-a-woman bid the spinsters farewell and joined her husband and his family in the next county. Her own daughters went to school and learned the Queen’s English. She was proud of them, especially her youngest who was a whiz at math and dreamt of teaching but, alas, was born to the wrong class and there was barely enough dowry for the eldest. No marriage prospects meant no eggs to count, chickens to barter, nor butter to sell. So the girl-who-turned-into-a-woman’s youngest daughter was shipped off to the land of opportunity, where she counted pennies instead of eggs and lived unhappily ever after. The end.”
… I knew Cathleen would never be a spinster. She had a job, a real job. “Never take it for granted,” I told her, “or it’ll come back to sting you.” I told her to keep her knickers on too.
There was a good girl in Cathleen’s class who got knocked up and was sent away to care for a sick aunt. I had a soft spot for her, coming home empty handed. I knew the weight of the first; it felt like no other. You couldn’t get that back.
Since I was a wee girl I had wanted a boy to see him go places, but over the years, I have convinced myself that I never had a son, because I don’t. He isn’t with me, though he was of me. Oh, this head of mine, that belly that grew. Are you following me? I’m not.
… Grandma smells like onions and garlic, always. She eats them raw between two pieces of bread and our mother says it’s to ward off those ghosts and we laugh, but we never laugh in front of Grandma. She cared for us until our mother traded her job at the bank for housewifery after our brother was born, making us three.
Every morning, our mother walked us to school and returned home to do dishes or laundry. By noon, she’d be done and bored and go off to one of her sister’s for tea. When we came home she helped us finish our piles of homework so that we had time to fortify our fort. After war with the neighbor’s kids, we went to the diner for dinner.
On Saturdays, we brought Grandma to 5:00 Mass. She sat up straight and gave us the eye when we fidgeted. Our mother studied backs of heads of the devout, profiles of those pretending. For dinner, Grandma boiled the life out of vegetables and meat.
Our mother always says the world goes by in Grandma’s head and that you can get over anything if you want to and that Grandma doesn’t.
On Sundays, we went to an aunt’s house or they came to ours. After sweets us kids were shooed away to play and the sisters rolled up their sleeves for dueling rounds of Rummy, all the while downing tea with milk and sugar.
Our father took a weekday off and slept all day if he was working nights or caught up on soap operas while we were at school. For dinner we’d go to someone else’s diner, where our father would order steak with fries and a salad, dress the salad himself with oil and vinegar, and dip a basketful of bread into the juices. That’s all we know of him.
… I cried the day Cathleen came home with a fiancée, an immigrant no less. I, at least, had spoken English. But I soon saw that Cathleen was the alpha. Kuriakos, whose name, it turned out, means Sunday, was completely dependent on her.
Cathleen was in the business of mortgages by then, and she saved enough to get their own. The house was stuck in the middle of a row of houses and looked like all the others until Cathleen had it’s trim painted the color of the sea her husband and I had crossed to her.
When the house was fully furnished, Cathleen sat at the head of her kitchenette table with paperwork spread out before her and her husband’s family surrounding her, showing them how to become proud owners of The Starlight Diner—an American dream come true.
I took to calling Cathleen “The Greatest,” and she was, in my eyes, taking care of her own, having a hand in the roof over their heads. She knows how to rule a roost and still have some fun.
When Cathleen quit her job at the bank, I was heartbroken but relieved to be done with my duties as caretaker. Showing my grandson how to aim his tiny penis was more than I could bear. The girls had been easy to train, happy to sit on the toilet like queens. But the boy, oh, he was a poor shot and needed supervision. It was as if my own son had come back to haunt me.
Now I listen to my boy in the back and stare at the map, the red line that stretches coast to coast. There are miles left, but how many and which way?
I knock on my forehead. “Nobody home.”
… When Grandma’s mind slips, she refers to our mother as The Greatest. “Ma!” our mother says, to stop her. When “The Greatest” comes out of Grandma’s mouth, we know we’re about to learn something about our mother that she hasn’t told us herself.
“The Greatest was a pill of a girl. She filled paper bags with dog droppings and set them afire on her enemies’ front steps, then rang the bell and ran. You didn’t want to cross The Greatest, the wrath you’d suffer. Did you know the Sisters wrapped her knuckles black and blue, but she continued to recite the Lord’s prayer backwards.
‘Twas poetry, but I never let on. She needed those lashings to keep her straight. Some girls wander off and get themselves into trouble, saying yes to one thing and before you know it, goodness caves in.
“But not your mother. She had more pluck than Carter had liver pills. Do you know she came to this country on her own, not a penny to her name, and labored for rich folks in the city. Ah, the troubles she endured. Once she…”
“Ma, that wasn’t me, it was you.”
“I never did a thing in my life,” Grandma says, “but give up that boy.”
… In the Badlands, our mother pulls over, eight station wagons following suit. “This isn’t Ireland,” Grandma says. “Not a single shade of green.”
Our mother challenges Grandma to a game of 500 Rummy. “Winner tells all.” It’s the only way to get the truth out of her. We drag four picnic tables together. Our mother shuffles and Grandma cuts the deck. The aunts pull thermoses from picnic baskets and fill Styrofoam cups with hot tea. Playing to lose takes a long time.
I cross my fingers, tight.
After a grueling twenty minutes, our mother is forced into laying down a meld of sixes, but Grandma soon follows with a sequence of royalty. Hours pass, as they feed each other the cards they would ordinarily need but don’t want. I keep score in my head. Aces are played as ones whenever possible; the jokers, wild, hang low. Our mother leads and falters, leads and falters, but in the end she wins by losing.
Back in the car, she asks the one question Grandma claims to have swallowed the answer to long ago, but she says it must come up. “You caught me red handed, hanger in hand, but it didn’t work. So I gave the poor thing up for adoption, he must be somewhere.”
She turns to me and says, “You think you know someone and then you don’t.”
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Angela Jane Fountas writes and teaches in Seattle, WA. Her work has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Quick Fiction, Diagram, Sentence, Redivider, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, and she runs two websites in support of writers, WriteHabit.org and Quoterly.net.
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