Linda Maceri

 Linda Maceri

Vita in the Morning

After soothing you back to sleep, your mother called a crisis line, but the center closed at six. All the volunteer counselors had gone home. At three in the morning, your mother got me. I was working on the sixth floor of a bank building, in the only office still open at that hour, taking messages for doctors, dentists, psychologists, insurance agents, cable companies, several pilots, a romance writer, and a masseuse named Dawn. In an emergency I connected callers. There had been several emergencies that night, and gray cords braided across a bank of PBX boards, tangling incoming and outgoing calls. From an overhead cubby, I pulled a file card holding information about the group your mother had tried to reach. Bay Area Women Against Rape. They had hired the answering service to take their after-hours calls a few weeks earlier, and I had never connected anyone to their line. A clipped-on piece of yellow paper listed the volunteers on call:

Janis on Sunday.

Yolanda on Monday.

Vita on Tuesday.

Tugging a resistant cord knotted somewhere inside the machinery, I explained that I was just the answering service operator, but could patch your mother through to Vita in an emergency.

As usual, the office manager had left the radio playing when she went home, hours before I arrived. Some old music nearly drowned out your mother’s voice. A tenor vowing forever love over piercing strings. I stretched halfway across the room, as far as my headset cord would let me go, and flicked off the plastic radio on her desk. The music continued through the other end of the phone—faded, but still identifiable. Your mother and my manager listened to the same station.

No, your mother said. She couldn’t honestly call it an emergency. More than a year had passed, and she was sure you were doing better every day.

Had been sure.

Until that night.

Keeping in mind, of course, you were only thirteen.

Twelve when it happened.

But that night, she told me, you had woken up screaming, staring past her at shadows threatening from your bedroom wall.

I have to be honest—I’m not sure she said precisely those words. I want to remember it exactly the way it happened, but I have been known to get things tangled.

She described the way you emerged from your dream, as if from drowning, and I thought about the way I wake from nightmares. When shadows lunge, I shiver, preparing for how cold and sharp they will be when they swallow me.

I’m not certain that you were the one afraid of shadows.

That night, in the hours before your mother called, I had patched a father through to a pediatrician, a hesitant woman to her husband’s cardiologist, and a man with a phlegmy whiskey-and-tobacco voice to Dawn the masseuse. We weren’t allowed to dial out after midnight unless the caller said the word emergency. The office manager was adamant about that word. We weren’t doctors, were we? We weren’t qualified to make life-anddeath decisions. We were just a bunch of minimum-wage girls. My manager was near retirement age, and called herself and everyone who worked there a girl. I was nineteen, and balked at not being called a woman.

Remember how important that seemed to us in the seventies?

In any case, what she said made sense. Nobody should want a nineteenyear-old whose previous job was cleaning houses to judge who needs help and who doesn’t.

Emergency. The masseuse’s client said it, but your mother would not.

The office reeked of burnt coffee and old, sweet, fried grease. A pink box sat open on the break table, a stack of brown paper napkins, crumbs and stains from the daytime operators’ donuts scattered around them. My yellow sticky—Please don’t leave your trash—was in the wastebasket. I wrote another: I’M TIRED OF PICKING UP YOUR SHIT. Glaring at my note kept the anger simmering for a few minutes as I brushed crumbs into the wastebasket and tossed the napkins and donut box. But once the table was clean, my furious Sharpie strokes on tiny yellow paper looked ridiculous in the middle of a tidy surface. I couldn’t keep the anger. I wadded up the note and tossed it on top of the previous one.

Being in the office alone always made me feel like an unattended child. When I was five, six, eight—we somehow made it through my entire seventh year without needing to run away—my mother and I spent a lot of hours between late night and early morning in empty bus stations. Coffee, fat, and jittery fluorescent lights dragged those hours out of my memory. Past and present tangled in my head. Your mother’s uncertain voice. The ragged pieces of your story. Me trying to figure out whether to connect callers to someone who could help them or tell them to call back in the morning. Me, eight years old, the final time we ran away, sitting on a hard bench in a Greyhound depot in the middle of the night, saddle shoes cutting into my sockless feet, a cardigan over my pajamas. Old enough to know I shouldn’t be wearing bedclothes in public. A puff of pink nylon protruded from beneath the last button of my mother’s coat, and I watched her arrange the hem to conceal it. My sweater barely reached my waist. There was no way to cover my pajamas.

In the taxi from our apartment to the bus station, neon swooped over the curve of my mother’s dark glasses, which she wore in the waiting room and would still be wearing later, on the bus. She held her purse against her stomach and swayed back and forth as if comforting a baby in an invisible rocking chair. A cut ran from her earlobe to the corner of her mouth. It had stopped bleeding and looked like someone had drawn a twisting road in red crayon along her cheek. A paper cup of watery cocoa and a jelly donut were supposed to keep my mouth full and silent, but I placed them on the empty bench beside me, and examined the stiff shoes on my limp feet.

My mother guarded the things she needed: purse on her lap, suitcase between her legs, tickets tapping her knees.

I said, “I need to go.”

She didn’t answer.

I said again, “I really need to go.”

“I know, I know. We’re going. The bus will be here soon.”

While she looked at the clock over the newsstand, I slipped away to the bathroom and stepped into a cloud of perfume that scratched my throat when I swallowed. Old cinnamon. Burnt vanilla. Something sweet that had stayed in the oven too long. In the mirror, a woman wearing a shiny black and blue dress, colors sputtering with the light.

She asked, “Are you lost?”

I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t speak.

The mirror was soap-smeared and desilvered, her reflection cracked and indistinct. Something old and hazy to wish upon. I turned from the mirror to the woman next to me. Blackness pooled under her eyes; red settled into wrinkles above her lips. A paper towel held the colors she had scraped from her face.

She said, “Baby, you’re way too young to be running around by yourself.” I ran back to my mother, who had not taken her eyes off the clock. She held a tissue against her cheek, which had started to bleed again, the twisted road breaking into crimson puddles. I grabbed her arm, but she seemed to be in a place where she could not feel my touch. The fabric of her wool coat scratched my hands.

For years, I’ve had a nightmare: I’m losing my face. It dangles from the bone. I try to catch it in a paper towel. I need to tell someone, but sound petrified in my chest. Could be the dream took root that night in the bus depot; could be nothing but a common nightmare. Could be I needed a memory of a sparkling, mascara-streaked woman who worried about me, whom I worried about, who left me speechless.

I still worry about her. The same way I worry about you.

In the answering service office, I imagined the people on the other end of the line. The father trying to reach the pediatrician touched the damp forehead of his daughter, who was tangled in the sheets of her bed on the couch. The old woman who called about her husband’s chest pains wore a quilted, violet-print robe and sat at the edge of a white chenille bedspread, crocheted white granny squares covering the lampshade beside her. My mother, who took up needlework when she gave up smoking and eventually ran out of sensible things to do with yarn, made herself a lampshade like that.

Hearing something brash and assured in the voice of Dawn the masseuse, I conjured her image from a Mae West movie. Lounging in a peacock chair, she wore a feather-trimmed negligee, her hair in platinum marcel waves, and whispered into a candlestick phone. Her client lay on an orange bedspread in a Motel 6. His hair was slick, dark, hard, like my father’s, as if he painted it on every morning. Wet black. Indigo in low light. It looked as if you could crack off a piece and slash someone’s face so deeply the scar would remain paler than pale, the way it does after a crayon road dries into a flaking mud brown, after the brown falls away to reveal a pink curve that makeup conceals, after the pink fades to dead white, and makeup won’t stick to it, won’t let it hide. I imagined Dawn’s client tossing a pack of MarlLinda boros and an overstuffed wallet on the end table. I stained his forearm with my oldest nightmare: a teal mermaid tattoo.

Mirages slithered through the wires. I felt safe collecting imaginary people in the room.

Safer.

When your mother mentioned being alone in the kitchen, worried about whether she had said the right things, worried that she had made things worse, I thought about one of the houses I used to clean, my last job before the one at the answering service. Upon a braided jute rug stood a handmade oak table, so heavy, so stable, that when I polished it, it felt rooted in the floor tiles. I sat your mother at that table, built by a cabinetmaker for his sculptor daughter. The room smelled of lemon oil and backyard plums. The color and fragility of your mother’s voice convinced me she deserved that room. In it, a person could feel like an oak. She could shade you. I wanted her to be able to do that.

Did your bed have a canopy? The teenage daughter in that house with the handmade table had a canopy bed. While dusting and vacuuming her room, tugging toenail crescents and sunflower seed shells from long carpet fibers, I pondered what it would feel like to sleep in a bed like that. Looking up at billowing fabric, would I dream of wind-filled sails and lapping waves, a ship finally tugged into its mooring?

Your mother struggled to pry you from your nightmare. She wanted you to be aware of where you were, not think about where you had been.

She used those exact words. They still sometimes catch on a sharp corner of my brain when I’m trying to fall asleep: Do not think about where you have been.

When you saw her, you hurled details that, after she got you back to sleep, made her forage through every purse she owned in search of forgotten cigarettes. She discovered she hadn’t thrown them all out when she quit smoking the previous year. An unopened pack had slipped through a torn lining. By the time she telephoned, she had one stale cigarette left. I imagined it smelled like old cinnamon and burnt vanilla.

She said, “Oh, Jesus. I’ve smoked an entire pack in a couple of hours.”

I didn’t answer.

She said, “I have no idea what tomorrow will be like.”

I explained again: I wasn’t the crisis line, just the service. But I could call someone for her to talk to. It sounded like an emergency.

I wanted to take back the final word. I shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t my call. But there it was, tangled in the lines, wiggling through the knots, trudging through the underground cables.

Your mother sighed through my headset, exhaling from somewhere across town directly into my ear. I let out a matching breath, and thought about the way clouds of blue smoke used to surround my mother in the predawn kitchen.

Monday through Friday, my mother worked the graveyard shift in an open-all-night diner, and slept in the daytime. She kept the same schedule on her days off. Weekends, under the flickering kitchen light, she stayed up smoking all night. I’d wake on the couch, wrestling nightmares and sheets, and squint at a rectangle of light across the gray living room. My mother sat on the good kitchen chair, her stockinged feet on the bad one that oozed cotton from a rip in the red vinyl cushion, smoke coiling from her cigarette. She tapped a matchbook edge against the table until its steady rhythm lulled me back to sleep for a few hours. No matter how many times I awoke, I saw the same picture, heard the same tap. By the time I got up for good, she had gone to bed. To be honest, I barely knew the woman. I watched her smoke. I watched her sleep. I waited to see if her pale scar would ever match the rest of her skin, if the white road that traveled from ear to mouth would disappear. I didn’t really want her to heal. Without the scar to remind me, I knew I would stop trusting the memory of the night I first saw her bleed.

Close to midnight, shortly after my mother went to work but before I made up my bed on the couch, I heard unsteady footsteps on the landing outside our apartment. Thump. Followed by three light, quick steps. Shoes scrambling for solid ground. Thump. Clang. A body hitting the metal guard rail.

I called the number my mother had taped to the phone receiver: the diner where she worked. Before the manager handed her the phone, I heard him tell her, over sleepy music and crashing plates, that this was a business, not her private answering service. If her kid couldn’t take care of herself, maybe she should stay home. But if she wanted the job, she better fucking do her job.

The dry voice. The way he controlled his anger, kept it quiet enough not to disturb the customers. As the threat rumbled through the phone and into my bones, I wondered if my mother, so much closer to the sound, was also looking for a place to hide.

Into the phone she whispered, “I’m busy. What do you need?”

I said, “I heard noise outside. A man. A drunk.”

I expected her to ask how I would know what a drunk outside the door would sound like, but she said nothing at all until the manager called her name.

She said, “There’s nothing I can do from here. Go to bed.”

After she hung up, I stayed on the line, clutching the receiver, listening to the pulsing disconnect tone, holding on to its steady rhythm, shutting out the chaos outside.

As I put the receiver back in the cradle, I heard a crack behind me and turned to see the chain lock taut between the door and the jamb, darkness in the gap. Four thick fingers wrapped around the door just below the chain. Four more groped above the knob. The man’s hands pushed at the door’s edge, and when the door didn’t budge, he shook it, jangling the chain.

A thick voice stumbled out of the darkness.

“ Shit!”

I picked up the phone and considered throwing it, but the cord was too short. I held it to my chest, as if it still connected me to the diner, as if my mother could travel through the line.

The man said, “Hey. Girl. Open.”

I dropped the phone. It hummed a dial tone on the floor, waiting for a call.

I said, “No.”

Never say no to a drunk. He let go of the door and hurled himself at it. Under the lock, the wood cracked, and a screw fell to the floor.

When I reached the door and tried to push back, a medicinal odor came from the other side. It conjured a memory of broken glass, a curved gash, waiting on the stoop for a cab under orange street lights. A hand reached into the room, fingers clawing the air. A teal mermaid tattoo followed, drowning in dark hair. She smelled like beer, sweat, and cigarette ash. My stomach churned. I gagged.

“Shit,” he said, and for a moment stopped pushing. “Girl’s gonna puke.”

As soon as I felt the weight give way on the other side of the door, I crushed the mermaid in the door jamb and kept pushing until the man’s arm scraped back outside. He may have left behind a layer of skin, a bit of mermaid ink. I slammed the door.

Locked.

Deadbolt locked.

I watched the doorknob for at least an hour before I could move again. It turned several times.

No, it probably didn’t turn.

I’m sure it didn’t turn.

I saw it turn.

That night, I slept on the cold kitchen floor, with the lights on, fingernails scraping the linoleum every time a shadow moved across the thin drapes or wind shook the railing outside. It was like grasping ice in search of warmth. The ground churned below the surface. But I believed that the door would stay closed as long as I kept still. If I got up to get a blanket, it would instantly burst open, and it would be my own fault for not paying attention.

In the morning, I heard my mother’s key jiggle in the lock. The deadbolt’s thud.

She stepped over me, slipped off her shoes, kicked them under the chair, and massaged the bottom of one foot with the top of the other. She pulled tips from her apron pocket and tossed them into a Folgers can on the table, where they clattered against older coins.

“What are you doing on the floor?”

As she filled the kettle from the faucet, I realized I couldn’t explain. I told her I didn’t know. It wasn’t important.

When the kettle whistled, she spooned instant coffee powder into a mug and poured the boiling water. I felt sick. I’ve always hated the smell of coffee.

Your mother had one last question: Was Vita in the office, or was she at home, asleep? She would like to talk to her, but didn’t think it was necessary to wake anyone.

Inside the old headsets, silence buzzed and spat. The rest of your story hissed into my head.

You took a dress from your closet and ripped it with your bare hands, throwing shreds of fabric against the wall. Your mother thought she had thrown that dress away. Every time you slapped the wall with an open palm, so hard she was afraid you’d crack a bone, she felt the blow against her chest.

She asked, Why didn’t I throw that dress away?

How was I supposed to know why she didn’t throw that dress away? Women do what they can. They make lampshades out of bits of yarn, people out of voices, solace out of other people’s burdens.

I wish I had told her that, but I didn’t think of it for nearly twenty years. Not until I had a twelve-year-old of my own and sat up with her one night when she couldn’t sleep. She had a math test the next day. I started thinking about you and your mother, me and my mother, all the sleepless women.

I still feel bad about not saying those words to her: Women do what they can.

I told her: “I’m sorry. All I can do is connect you to Vita.”

She thanked me for listening. She said you would probably sleep at least until noon, and she could survive one night alone tangled in her thoughts. Let poor Vita rest. She and I had no choice but to stay awake, but there was no reason we should make everyone suffer. One woman should get a decent night’s sleep, at least.

I told her the office would open at eight.

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night to you,” she said. “Good morning to Vita.” While we dangled in uncertainty about the time of day, I took a silver jack and thrust it into the hole for an outgoing line. The connection rode the cord and cracked in my ear, my shoulders, the pit of my stomach, my legs, my feet. It cracked through the sticky linoleum, six floors of office building, and into the depths of the city.

I dialed the number I was given to call for Tuesdays’ emergencies.

Vita, torn from sleep, grunted, “Yeah?”