The Joyce Maynard Collection Read Online Free PDF Page A

ocean. They kept a sleeping bag under the seat. One was enough.
    This was strictly summer work, of course, she said. Winter came, they headed south to Florida. She got a job for a while, serving margaritas at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. He sold hot dogs at the beach. Nighttime, they went dancing.
    I tried to eat slowly when my mother told these stories. I knew when the meal was over, she’d remember where we were and get up from the table. When she talked about their old days, the Florida days, and the hot-dog wagon, and the plans they had to drive out to California sometime and try out to be dancers on some TV variety show, something happened to her face, the way people get when a song comes on the radio that used to play when they were young, or they see a dog go down the street that reminds them of the one they used to have when they were a kid—a Boston terrier maybe, or a collie. For a moment, she looked like my grandmother, the day she heard Red Skelton died, and like herself, the day my father had pulled up in front of our house with the baby in his arms, that he called my sister. He’d been gone over a year by the time that happened, but that moment when she saw the baby—that was the worst.
    I forgot how little babies were, she said, after he’d left. There was that melted look on her face then too. Maybe the word is crumpled . Then she recovered. You were much cuter, she said.
    Back when she used to take me places, she also told me stories while she drove, but once she started staying home all the time, dinners were when she told me her stories, and even when they were sad I never wanted them to end. I always knew, after I set my fork down, the story was over, or even if it hadn’t ended—because these weren’t stories with endings—and her face changed back.
    We’d better clear away these dishes, she said. You have homework to do.
    The real ending came when my parents moved back north and sold the hot-dog wagon. They didn’t have that kind of show on TV anymore, like when we were growing up, she said. With dancers. They had driven all the way across the country without ever noticing that The Sonny and Cher Show and The Glen Campbell Hour had been canceled. But that was just as well, actually, because what she wanted most was never to be some dancer on television. She wanted to have a baby.
    Then you were on the way, she said. And my dream came true.
    My father got the job selling insurance policies. His specialty was injury and disability. Nobody could calculate faster than my father how much money a person got for losing an arm, or an arm and a leg, or two legs, or the bonanza, all four limbs, which, if they were smart enough to have bought a policy from him before, meant they were a millionaire, set up for life.
    My mother had stayed home with me after that. They lived with my father’s mother then, and after she died, they got the house, though that was not the place we lived after the divorce. My father lived in our old house with Marjorie now, and Richard, and Chloe. He took out a second mortgage on that one, to buy my mother out, which was the money my mother used to get the place we moved into. Smaller, without the tree in the yard where my swing had been set up, but enough room for how our family was now, the two of us.
    These were not stories she told me over dinner. This part I had pieced together on my own, and from Saturday nights with my father, when he and Marjorie took me out to dinner, and sometimes he said things like, If your mother hadn’t made me give her all that money for the house, or Marjorie would press her lips together and ask me if my mother had applied for a normal job yet.
    My mother’s problem about leaving the house had been going on so long now I couldn’t remember when it started. But I knew what she thought: it was a bad idea, going out in the world.
    It was about the babies, she said. All those crying babies everywhere, and