Tracy

She was tall, blond and young, the last attribute though temporary, her strongest suit. Her eyes were close set and almost too large for her face so that her gaze was immediately riveting, a piercing green.

She never used her middle name, Margerite, as her mother had chosen it, after her favorite cocktail. Her mother was a heavy drinker once, until she was ten, in fact, and had slowed down until Tracy went to college, at which point she resumed her liver-wrecking with abandon. Her mother was bright and cheery to the exclusion of their solitary reality. Tracy had grown up with clothes that had been frayed and worn from wear and wash, seasons out of fashion. Sometimes, she would have lunch at school, sometimes she wouldn’t have anything, if her mother forgot to give her money. Her mother loved to take Tracy out to lavish dinners at the best places around town, but fell short of budgeting money enough for meals at home during the week. When they did shop, treats and quickly perishable foods occupied either side of the teeter-totter shopping list, leaving little edible until the next food safari. Every few months, either the electricity, gas or water would be shut off for non-payment by the respective utilities so that something was always non-functional. It was usually the gas for a few months in the summer, when the weather was warm and cold showers wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Tracy thought later, when she had grown up and was able to put her mother’s craziness in perspective. It was a balancing act of microcosmic household economics that, given her mother’s income as a money executive at a construction company, was incongruous, as if she meant to identify and exert her independence from the usual world by means of defiantly doing whatever she damn well pleased with her money. As a result, their existence was a house of cards built on the distorted rationalizations of reality as only her mother could see it.

“Marge! Margie!” her mother would shout from the kitchen or living room in the general direction of Tracy’s second-floor bedroom. “Honey! What are you doing?” Tracy sometimes forgot that her mother was even in the house. Her mother spent most of her time talking on the phone, reclined in bed, tucked away in her bedroom next to the kitchen. She thought of her mother as a benign and sometimes irritating force always to be obeyed without question. Tracy didn’t always answer immediately, if she was reading or on the phone. She had her own phone only because her father insisted that he pay for it and her mother steadfastly refused, claiming that this was yet another way he intended to exert his manipulative and abusive control over both her and Tracy. And, like the other utilities, the phone bill sometimes went unpaid so that the other spinning plates could be kept spinning and this resulted in her father writing helplessly to her mother, threatening, cajoling and finally giving up, understanding that it was no use.

In fact, Tracy’s father was not at all the monster than her mother had constructed as the basis for her failure to live in harmony with the world’s terms. She remembered that he always seemed to be around somewhere nearby, until the divorce, where she could watch him tinkering with something electronic, or plastering a wall, or folding laundry, or playing with the cat. He sat with her and kept her company while she struggled through elementary algebra and played word games with her on the way to school. She also remembered the savage arguments between her parents and remembered how, as time went by, loud voices more quickly became shouts and then screams. Toward the end, there were scuffles that she was glad she never saw, instead, hiding in her room with the pillow over her head, hoping it would soon be over. Finally, it was over and Dad moved out but not far away. He said it was opportunity that kept him close, but she suspected that he needed to continue his vigilance. He blamed him for destroying their family, for hurting her Ma, for scaring her and making her hate him, for a time, at least.

Later, she came to discover his side of the story. He had broke her heart when he asked a judge to keep her mom away because he claimed that she hit him and that there was a long history of physical abuse to justify a court-ordered separation. Tracy had come home the summer at the end of her sophmore year though she had planned to stay and work near school. When she couldn’t find a job anywhere near the college town that would go to sleep at the end of the school year, she decided to come home. It was meant to be a surprise for her Mom. Instead, Tracy was surprised. She had called her mother but couldn’t get her. She wanted to get a lift from the bus when she got in. She left a message on the answering machine she got her mom the Christmas before. When she arrived, it was hot and windy and she sat down on her duffle. She waited in the parking lot long after the other passengers had been greeted and taken away in minivans, pick-ups and old, American-made sedans. Finally, she resolved to walk the mile and a half home, since it seemed clear that Mom hadn’t checked the message or that something else had happened.

Tracy could hear her mother’s laugh filtering through the side door as she mounted