Mama in the clouds
beth meko
Mama says watching me grow up is ripping her heart right out. Says I’m shooting up like a weed, nearly thirteen years old, while she sits there locked up. She twists a fist into her chest, into the stiff material of her navy-blue prison-issue uniform. Then squeezes her eyes shut and pleads, “Just give me my little girl back.” She even waves her hands in my direction as if putting a spell on me to stop my bones cold in the process of expanding. Mama always did have a flair for the dramatic.
I roll my eyes and Mama leans her elbows on the cold metal table, covering her face with her hands, veins jumping out blue. Since she’s been in, Mama’s shoulders have sharpened. Her cheekbones are two slashes on the sides of her face, and not in a supermodel way, just in a way that makes you think her face must hurt.
I know I could say something nice to make Mama feel better, but I can’t think of anything nice. I look at the clock behind her head. The glass is scratched and covered with metal mesh. The minute hand drags, so that it sits still for four beats and then sweeps up four notches all at once, then repeats, forever and ever. Doing time. The high windows lining the room let in peeps of bright leaves blazing against a dream-blue sky.
We make the trip up the mountain every first Saturday of the month. Sally picks me up in her old Chevy Malibu with the taped-on rearview mirror and the dented passenger side door that won’t open from the inside. Her car creaks and revs over hairpin curves in a part of the state I had never seen before Mama ended up doing time.
Sally’s lips twist when I ask her, on the way back down the mountain, if we can switch the visits to every other month. She puts on her turn signal and pulls onto an overlook, tires crunching on gravel, and digs around in her purse for a cigarette. She always smokes half of a Kool Super Long at the overlook halfway up the mountain, and the other half on our walk down the gravel lot from the car to the prison. She always does the same, but reversed, on the trip back.
At first my social worker had been a woman with blond hair piled on top of her head, who always looked worried and offered me Kleenexes I never needed. Sally – close-cropped black hair; voice like rattling ice cubes – had shown up in her place one day. I like Sally better anyway. She’s not really that old, maybe even not much older than Mama, but she has some wrinkles on her face that most people don’t get until they’re old. She has a big cross swinging from her cracked rear-view mirror, but when she’s mad she curses worse than the high school kids at the back of the bus I ride to school. I climb across the driver's seat and stand outside with her, standing close to her to breathe in the smoke.
“This is the one mama you’ve got, Sammy Girl,” Sally finally says, leaning to stab the Kool out on the gravel and slipping it into the empty pack she uses for butts. “I know she’s done wrong, but it’s killing her being away from you in there.” I just kick at the fire-colored leaves swirling around the tires. Finally, Sally holds the door open for me to get back in the car.
I’ve been staying with Aunt B since Mama’s been in, but Sally’s been looking for a new place for me to stay. Aunt B lives in a little mud-colored trailer off Route 19, so close to the highway that the passing log trucks rattle the windows. Aunt B tries to be nice, but I know there isn’t room for me there. I have to share a bedroom with my cousin, who once bit me when I tried to play her toy piano, and a pair of droopy-diapered twins. Aunt B is forever yelling at them or threatening to beat the older one with a strap, despite the Bless Our Children embroidery piece displayed in the living room.
Sally shows up one day with news: the Judge’s family is going to take me in. “They live just over by the lake, so you’ll get to stay in the same school, Sammy. Isn’t that great? And oh my, that family. Such examples of leadership,” Sally raves, raising her voice to be heard over a passing truck engine. “They have six kids of their own, but take in foster kids all the time. I mean, can you imagine? They’ve done ministry all over the world. The father’s a judge in circuit court. And that Ann. A real Proverbs 31 woman, I tell you. Simply wonderful.”
“What’s that?” I ask, thinking of immaculate conception and virginal miracles. Sally tells me with an impatient edge in her voice to look it up in the Bible she had given me.
“God knows it’ll be good for Sammy to have that kind of woman as an influence,” says Aunt B, sounding relieved. She leaves the image of a strung-out Mama driving the getaway car, a kidnapped cashier in the backseat, unsaid.
Mama hadn’t forgotten my twelfth birthday the day she helped her boyfriend and his friend rob the Quick-Liq. Somewhere along the way, they stopped at Food Lion and bought me a cake. It was on the table when I got home from school that afternoon, a plastic sheet container with part of the lid dented, smushing the cartoon-sky icing. The apartment had been dark when I came in. Mama and Jed were in the back bedroom of the apartment, oddly quiet. Some guy with a blond ponytail, who Mama and Jed called Spider but who the newspaper would call Richard Livingston, had been sleeping on the couch.
Spider-Richard ended up being put away the longest, since the cashier they kidnapped was his girlfriend. Mama got off the best, and it wasn’t because she was a woman, as her boyfriend Jed had said. “A judge ain’t different from any other man. Just wear something low cut and flash them that pretty smile and you’re gold. And all you done anyway was drive the car,” Jed had said in the living room of the apartment, air thick with smoke, one afternoon after they had made bail before the trial.
The judge had turned out to be a boxy-looking woman with a steel face. She had smiled a lot at each person who came to the stand, but it hadn’t been a nice smile. Jed ended up with ten years and Mama five. It’s a good thing the cashier had lived, Mama’s lawyer said, because otherwise they’d be looking at Murder One. I always picture Murder One as a door on a stage, behind which there was a bloody guillotine.
Slap on the wrist, I would overhear my new foster father, the Judge, saying, weeks later, in his study one night. Should have locked her away and thrown away the key. Then maybe that girl would have a chance.
That night at Aunt B’s I look up the Proverbs 31 verse in the Bible Sally had given me. A woman worth more than rubies, who could plant a vineyard with her own two hands, a woman of dignity. A woman who girds her loins. I’m not sure what that part means, but it sounds kind of sexual and pure all at the same time.
I picture my new foster mother as a fairy godmother with a tinkling laugh, running her hands over lush fabric. I had never known a woman like that. Mama sure isn’t a Proverbs 31 woman, and Aunt B isn’t either, not the way she hollers and hits the kids all the time. Looking at my own big-cheeked face in the bathroom mirror and baring my teeth in a smile, I see no hint that I’m shaping up as a good candidate for one either. I can’t see such a woman having buck teeth the way mine are headed, or sneaking cigarettes from Sally’s pack and smoking them under the bleachers with Mel the way I do.
The next day I tell Mel about the new foster home. We’re squatting beneath the bleachers, inhaling on a cigarette, digging our sneakers around in the dirt. Mel passes the cigarette back to me between her grubby thumb and pointer finger, squinting at me. The filter’s always wet with spit by the time she’s done with it. “Fucking weirdos. They have a big van and go to church, like, every five minutes. Watch they don’t come in your bedroom and try to fondle you. People like that always do.”
Mel spent last spring suspended for setting fire to a girl’s straight-A report card in the locker room. She came back this year taller and meaner, with a big roll of belly that sticks out over the elastic of the gym shorts she wears every day. Mel has hair the color of watery tomato soup that she pulls back with a rubber band, and a big brown birthmark on one side of her face. She likes to threaten to slap younger girls across the face unless they kiss the birthmark.
Mel picks her victims and friends at random, like a tornado that just takes the houses on one side of the street. This year she’d slapped her dirty bookbag down next to mine in the gymnasium the first day of school. She thinks it’s cool that my mom is in prison. “Mama’s doin’ time!” she sings out as we walk down the halls. She has endless questions about life on the inside. “Is her cellmate bigger than her? What’s the food like? Hey, does she get to wear her own underwear or are there like prison-issued panties or whatever? Do women fuck each other in prison the way men do?” I just make up answers to most of the questions. I tell her they run a lottery to see who gets underwear that week. I tell her Mama’s the toughest woman on the prison block and she made her roommate drink from the toilet to show her who was boss. I don’t say anything about the sex thing since it’s something I don’t want to think about.
Sometimes she shows up behind me at my locker, hot breath close to my ear. “How do they fuck each other, do you think? You know they’ve got to. They probably have all kinds of ways. Oh man, you should bake your mama a cake. And put a file in it. Bust Mama out!” And she takes off running down the hallway. “Bust Mama out!”
Mel might smell like B.O. and be crazy as a bat but having her as a friend is better than having no friend. And I kind of like that she seems to think highly of Mama.
In a pile of old photos in the cabinet at Aunt B’s, I find one that I’d never seen before, a school photo of Mama labeled on the back “10th grade” in Mama’s loopy scrawl. I realize that Mama and I don’t really look much different. We both have chubby cheeks and stubby eyelashes, and I can see that then, as now, her smile is all closed up to hide her gnarled top teeth. Her hair is the same rusty brown as ever. In the prison she pulls it into a skinny braid that’s always unraveling because she’s not allowed to use hair ties. But in this picture, it’s almost long but not quite, flipped up to form a playful plume around her neck, like water splashing up.
I can’t stop looking at it. It’s like someone took all the rough edges and shadows and lines out of Mama, fluffed her up, and put her up against a pale blue background. This version of Mama gives nothing away about the rest of her body below her pointy yellow collar. In the picture her eyes don’t have that beaten look like in the prison; they’re not glassy and jumpy, like when she was taking pills. There’s an expression in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before, but I can’t tell what it is. I can’t get to this version of Mama, this young Mama hovering in the clouds.
The Judge’s house peers down at the lake from a hill, yard mowed into perfect lines rolling up forever. Sally’s Malibu revs to make it up the steep driveway lined by spruce trees. “Well, shit on me,” she says under her breath. I can’t tell if she’s cursing her car or the immensity of the house.
I struggle to unbuckle my seatbelt, which has what Sally calls “a trick” to it. Sally fluffs her hair in the rearview mirror. “Don’t be nervous about meeting the judge,” Sally tells me, not for the first time. “He’s not the kind of judge who decided on your Mama’s case. He’s a family court judge. A good one, I’ve heard.”
My new foster mother meets us at the door. She turns out to be on the dumpy side, with wide kind eyes peering out from glasses too large for her face. Behind her the house hums with activity. Children are shouting in the next room, and a toddler runs past in a pair of pull-up diapers. My foster mother says to call her Ann, which I do, but I call her Proverbs in my mind.
Proverbs gives us a tour of the house, with Sally oohing and aahing, then clearing her throat like she thinks I should say something too. The house has three stories--two above, and a carpeted basement that they call the “movie room.” There are six kids in the family, and all of them appear to have a different type of shoe and uniform for each activity. Skis line the walls of the movie room, and piles of shoes crowd every entrance.
The house is like a maze with all its hallways. In this house you don’t have to leave the rooms the same way you come in. Kids chase each other throughout, never once having to turn in a tight spot and try to battle through the advances of their pursuer. They simply run out the other door, winding through the house free and easy. That first evening I get lost and end up wandering back and forth on the second floor hallway, confused about which room is which. “The Temp got lost upstairs!” I hear the ten-year-old, Maddie, say, giggling, and Proverbs shushes her.
There are no kids my age. The oldest are two boys in high school who I never see. Then there’s Maddie, and then a string of little ones: a sturdy kindergartner in Velcro shoes, a shaggy-haired toddler, the diapered baby kicking his feet in the highchair as Proverbs cooks dinner. None of them act very interested in me. I’m just one in a long string of Temps who stay in the foster kid’s room, just off the back stairwell upstairs.
The bedroom is bigger than any of my rooms in the apartments Mama and I have shared. Part of the ceiling slopes downward over the twin bed, which Proverbs had made up with a pink comforter and sheets. I wondered if they have a set just like it but in blue for boy Temps. A brown bunny with a bow tie smiles at me from the pillow. I’m too old for stuffed animals, so I set it down on the dresser, stitched face turned toward the mirror. On the bedside is a smushed New International Version Bible, and in the corner is a three-shelf bookcase full of horse stories and Christian adventure books, all below my reading level.
The Judge shows up for dinner that first evening looking perturbed and exhausted. Seated at the end of the table, he places his skinny wrists by either side of his plate. I have no problem picturing him in a judge’s robe, although he now wears a simple gray button-down shirt and black pants. He gives a sharp intake of air that sucks in his nostrils like a vacuum, bringing his nose to a thin blade for the briefest second, exhales, and then says “Let’s pray.”
He prays for what seems like a long time, but when I peer out from narrowed eyes everyone has their eyes shut, except for the baby who is blowing spit bubbles and looking at the ceiling. The Judge prays for the people he’d seen in courtroom that day, that they would find their way from their “seemingly hopeless entanglements” to God’s grace. He prays for success for all the kids in the new school year. And he prays for me, that I’ll feel welcome in their home, that I will “thrive.” He calls me Samantha and no one corrects him.
The only person who’s ever called me Samantha was my grandmother, who died when I was five. To everyone else I’ve been Sammy since I was born.
In November Mama’s in a good mood. She says my yearbook picture is the prettiest thing she’s ever seen, and that she displays it nice and proud on her wall right by her bed. I don’t say anything. The thought of her sticking my picture up in her cell with that gummy blue stuff depresses me. She talks about the pastor in the prison chapel, who had spent time in this very prison and whom God had rescued from the snake pit of addiction and sin. She actually says that, “the snake pit of addiction and sin.” I’ve never heard Mama talk like that before.
All the noise makes it difficult to talk to Mama. Around us the guards pace, their pants fabric brushing up against the backs of our chairs, calling out to each other and to the prisoners. Their shouts (“Hands above table where we can see them! Hands above table!”) and the static of the intercom when it bursts on keeps drowning out our voices. Out the windows, the sky looks like cement and rain batters the few brown leaves left on the tree branches.
I could say more to Mama. When she asks me how I like eighth grade, I could tell her about the girls who shout curse words in the bathroom and leave lipstick stains on the mirror, or the boy in pre-algebra who looks off my paper and rubs ear wax under his desk. But I can’t make myself tell Mama any of that. I just tell her I’ve got a new friend named Mel who I walk to class with. But I’m curious about the underwear question, so I ask Mama how that’s handled in the prison.
Mama seems happy and surprised that I’m asking her a question. “They have pairs here for us to wear,” she says. “This is a woman’s prison, after all. They’ve thought about all that.” She smiles big at me. “And by the way.” She’s pinching an M&M, which I’ve gotten for her from the snack machine in the corner, between two fingers and she points with it at me, close to my chest. “Girl, your boobies are getting bigger than mine.”
All the blood drains from my face.
“Time!” yells a guard. “Say your goodbyes and single file toward exit! Single file!”
“I am not visiting her again,” I say on the way back down the mountain, over the squeak of the windshield wipers.
Sally’s teeth click together but she doesn’t say anything. When she stops for her overlook cigarette, I stay in the car but sneak one of the Kool Longs out of the wrinkled pack on the seat while her back is turned. When she gets back in the car, she keeps clucking and sighing, and as we turn down the last curve of the mountain, she finally speaks. “Time has pretty much stopped for your mama, you know,” she says. “And then seeing you…develop...just through visits and pictures, and some other woman playing mother to you while she’s in there. It’s just hard on her, Sammy. Try to understand.”
“Whatever. Who cares.” Why hadn’t she just stayed out of prison then? It’s not like that’s hard for most people. These people wouldn’t know personal responsibility if it came up and karate kicked them in the face, I had overheard the Judge saying to Proverbs one evening about the people in his courtroom.
Proverbs takes me to the mall one day, just me and her, one Saturday in December. We have sandwiches and fries in the food court and she smiles down at me as we walk through the mall, festive lights from the Christmas decorations glinting off her glasses. She calls it our “girls’ outing” and says we should have done this before now. She buys a couple Christmas presents for the little ones and then we go clothes shopping for me.
We leave the Juniors section at JCPenney with three pairs of jeans to replace the ones that have become highwaters, a couple of sweaters and a new puffy coat. As we walk through the store with the bags Proverbs touches my elbow. “Now,” she says, gesturing toward the rows of cool cotton and smooth, rounded silk that made up the bra section, “Let’s see if there’s anything here that we like.”
I realize that this is the reason for the whole outing; it’s why Proverbs had taken me to the mall alone. My face hot, I think of Mama pointing with the M&M, and a boy in English class whispering that my headlights were on. Sally had probably pulled Proverbs aside and asked her to do this. It’s past time, I imagine Sally whispering to Proverbs in that raspy voice. Or maybe Proverbs read she should do this in some manual for Christian foster mothers. Who knows? In any case, Proverbs is flagging down a saleswoman to give me a fitting in the dressing room.
It isn’t all that bad, really. Proverbs sits outside the dressing room and waits until I come out with a couple bras that fit, and she takes me to the register. I know Proverbs and the Judge get money each month to do things like this. As we walk out of the mall, the cold air with its sharp smell of coming snow hits us. Proverbs shivers, smiles down at me and says that new coat is going to come in handy this winter. A woman walks by with a teenage girl and smiles at us. She must think we’re mother and daughter, shopping together at the mall, like them.
Mother and daughter, I think back at the house, the door of the Temp bedroom shut, as I try on the bras and the clothes in front of the mirror. The house vibrates around me, footsteps clattering, the sound of laughter ringing out from some shared joke. Family, I think. All my life it’s always just been me and Mama, and you can’t really call just two people a family. I wonder if I could pass for one of Proverbs’ and the Judge’s kids. A close look into the mirror confirms that I look nothing like any of them. I think of Mama’s big eyes, so much like mine, staring back at me from that school photograph.
Mel thinks I’m stupid for missing the opportunity to steal money from Proverbs. “Doesn’t she ever just leave her purse open on the counter or something?” She taps the cigarette and takes a noisy drag, staring at me hard. “She wouldn’t even notice. Her husband’s rolling in money.”
She won’t leave me alone about it. “I don’t want to,” I finally say.
“Idiot,” Mel says. “What’s the matter with you?”
I don’t say anything; I just look out at the snow-dusted football field. I want to get away from Mel and go in from the cold, but there’s still a lot of the cigarette left.
“Whatever. That mama of yours would be so disappointed,” says Mel. Then she looks back at me with renewed interest. “Hey, those freaks tried to fondle you yet?”
Sometimes I think of the bloody woman in the ditch and Mama getting high with her boyfriend and Spider-Richard and I can’t help it--I think, Fuck you, Mama. Fuck you all to hell. You had this coming to you. But I don’t think I really mean it.
Almost every night I dream about Mama. In one of them I come into the visiting room and there’s young Mama in the yellow dress with pillowy hair and smooth skin. I want to touch her but the guards hover, not letting me get close. Sometimes I’m bringing her something: sweet treats, a homemade Valentine like the ones I made when I was little. In one I climb over the prison fence and force my way through impossible vent openings and tunnels to Mama’s cell. When I get to her, she’s different every time. Sometimes she’s Mama in the clouds, sometimes she’s real-life Mama, and once she’s even a slinky cat that I chase from corner to corner. I never catch her.
Mel and I get caught smoking and I have to do a week of after school suspension. Proverbs picks me up in the van, a grim look on her face. Later I find out she’s looked through my dresser drawers and found things I had taken from around the house--a few cat-eyed marbles from Maddie’s collection, a photo frame with a younger, grinning Judge holding one of the kids as a generic-looking toothless baby, a pack of playing cards, a figurine of an angel playing the harp. Nothing valuable. I don’t even know why I took them. But she takes all of it, plus the few wrinkled Kools I’ve been storing in my sock drawer. In the nightstand drawer she leaves only the red Bible Sally had given me and the picture of Mama in the clouds.
One night, creeping downstairs for some water after all the kids were asleep, I hear her and the Judge talking about me. “We can’t have her being a bad influence on the little ones,” Proverbs is saying. “I’m thinking some counsel at the church might clear it up.”
Ice clinks in his glass and I picture him sniffing, nose tapering to a narrow ridge. “What do you expect? Look at the influences she’s had.” I think they’re talking about something else for a minute, voices muffled. But then, loud and clear, “Really, there’s no excuse for it. They nearly killed that woman. Standing by just watching, driving the car…” His voice disappears for a minute and then comes back. “It’s probably better that she’s in prison. That girl’s better off with no mother at all than one who’s capable of that.”
I don’t hear Proverbs reply, but somehow I know she’s nodding her agreement.
I’m looking at Mama’s picture a lot more lately. I think that she could have been growing me already as she paused to pose for this picture, in between 4th period and lunch, maybe, feeling me in there like a stomachache.
She sends me letters every week and I never write her back, although I tell Sally that I do. Her letters are stamped with the Correctional Facility mark and I’m embarrassed that the family sees them in the mail. Proverbs leaves them propped up on my dresser. Mama tells me in her latest letter that she’s going to get baptized next Sunday in a pool they’re setting up in the chapel. I think of Mama getting dunked into a flimsy pool inside a prison and I feel depressed.
In December, they have a Christmas tree set up in the corner of the visiting room, just an artificial one with drooping branches and a single string of lights. There are no gifts underneath it, not even the fake presents with nothing in them like in department stores. But it still feels kind of nice to have a tree there. A man with a Polaroid camera is walking from table to table, and Mama tells me she’s secured us a spot to get our pictures taken in front of the tree.
Mama can’t give me anything during visits, but she says she made a gift for me, a bright-colored hummingbird from a plastic suncatcher kit. She says she’ll see about sending it to me. It’s a complicated process for her to send anything but letters. I can’t bring Mama anything either, but Sally had helped me pick out a care package from the prison-approved catalog, which has chocolate candy, a book of inspirational sayings and a pair of socks. I think nice socks mean a lot in prison. Mama will get it sometime at the end of December, but she hasn’t gotten it yet. I feel bad that Mama won’t have any presents for Christmas, so I line up early at the snack machine to make sure I can get a honey bun. Those are her favorite and they’re usually out by the time I make it through the line.
When it’s time for our pictures, we pose together by the tree. Just for this occasion, visitors and prisoners are allowed to hug each other for the camera. I’m surprised by the strength of Mama’s hand gripping my shoulder. We get two Polaroids, one for each of us, that we lay on the long table at the end of the room to dry.
Visitation lasts for fifteen extra minutes in honor of Christmas. “Time,” calls the tall guard with thick hips that sway back and forth when she walks and a braid parted down the middle with the front half gone white. I’ve seen her each time I’ve visited and I’ve nicknamed her Skunk. “Ten til. Start wrapping it up, folks.” Skunk snaps her gum like her mouth’s made of elastic and always shouts across the room even if it drowns out the conversations at the tables around her. Once as I was leaving, she’d looked at me and laughed. “Girl, you better hope you don’t end up like that mother of yours,” she had said to me.
As we hug at the end of the visit Mama claws at my back with her fingers and leaves a wet spot on the top of my head. I feel it dripping down my scalp as I walk away, not sure if it’s snot or tears or both. Skunk’s eyes glance over me as I pass by, uninterested.
I look back at Mama and her back looks very small, disappearing back into the prison in the line led by the guards.
When I get back to the Judge’s house, I take out the Polaroid of me and Mama. I gaze over my own face--hair freshly cut straight across my forehead, lips turned upward in a reluctant smile--and settle on Mama’s. I look at her for a long time and I swear that there’s something of young Mama I can see in her eyes. I didn’t see it in person, but I see it here.
Sally says the mountain roads get icy in the winter and it might be a while until I see Mama again. I should be happy about that, I know, but I’m not. I sense the winter break stretched out, with me rattling like a lost piece in this house where I’m trying to fit in but never really do. I think of the Christian counselor at the church, who nods and smiles at everything I say and then starts talking about Jesus, and about the presents addressed to Samantha among the heap of gifts underneath the family’s massive Christmas tree in the front room.
I was going to put the picture in one of the dresser drawers or maybe tucked into one of the books on the bookcase, but I don’t. I know that soon, weeks or months from now or maybe even tomorrow, I might change my mind, but for now I tuck it into the mirror frame above the dresser, where anyone can see it. I think about it for a minute, and then I put young Mama on the other side. I can’t look at myself now without seeing Mama. There they are, both versions of Mama, with eyes that lock into mine, trying to tell me something that feels important. Trying to tell me something I’m going to need to know.
