Down City

ONE

One of my first memories: I'm eating a TV dinner. Each part of the meal is in its own little tinfoil compartment. I love the bright-green peas, the square of crusty, salted mashed potatoes, and the rectangle of Salisbury steak. I eat in front of the TV, my legs folded under a tray.

I'm talking to my dad but I call him Kevin, which is his name.

"Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Daddy's name is Kevin."

Suddenly, my dad is out of his chair. He grabs me under the shoulders, knocking over the tray. Salisbury steak splatters on the wooden floor, peas roll in all directions. Dad pushes my bedroom door open with his foot, lets go of my armpits with a push, and I'm sailing through the air. I land on my bed, too stunned at first to cry. I bob up and down on my waterbed, dumbstruck. Finally, I let out a long wail. My leg hurts from where it hit the wooden bed frame and I cry, curling into a ball in the middle of the big undulating bed. Later, Mom comes into the room and pulls me onto her lap. She wipes at my grimy face with her hands.

"Leah, Leah," she says, stroking my head, "what are we going to do with you?"

"You're not going to call the police, are you?"

She looks at me for a few seconds and then runs her fingers through my hair. "No, sweetie," she says. "We would never call the police."

MOM AND DAD teach me all the words to "Rock 'N' Roll High School" by the Ramones, and Mom and I make up a dance to Michael Jackson's "Beat It." I use the coffee table as my stage and Mom and Dad blast the music on the record player and I know all the words and we dance around the living room, the dogs jumping and barking and going crazy around our feet.

At night I wake up and Dad is screaming at Mom. I walk into the living room where Mom sits on the couch and Dad stands by the window. Mom's yellow mutt, Brandy, is curled at her feet, and his tail thumps against the ground when I come in. Dad's boxer, Ali, sits next to him, ears alert.

Dad says, "We're fighting because I want your mom to quit smoking."

He crosses his arms over his PAWTUCKET PIRATES softball T-shirt, the one with the skull.

I sit on the couch next to Mom and Brandy puts his head between us. Sometimes when he goes to the bathroom his poop is orange, and Mom says it's because he has cancer. I love him so much that sometimes I squeeze him extra hard, trying to hurt him just a little bit, and he lets me. He's a ragged-looking dog, missing patches of yellow hair. Dad's dog, Ali, wins prizes at dog shows and follows Dad around adoringly. When my mom takes photos they pose with the same proud expression and upturned face. But Ali is too strong for me and once he chewed my kitchen play set to bits.

"You shouldn't smoke, Mom," I say. "It's bad for you."

Mom cries again, which makes Brandy skittish. He staggers on his weak hind legs and backs up a few paces. I don't want Mom to smoke and get cancer like Brandy.

DURING THE DAY Mom unfurls long strips of film to dry on a string over the bathtub and sometimes she lets me stand in the tiny closet next to the bathroom where she flips on a red lightbulb and warns me not to touch any of the chemicals. We watch the paper go from white to gray and then shapes begin to form as she swirls the paper around with a pair of tongs. Images of Ali and Dad appear like magic.

Most of the time my mom and I are a secret team, keeping secrets from my dad. She tells me we're going to take the city bus because her car is getting fixed and this sounds like a great adventure. We take the bus to her friend's house in Providence and she leaves me there in the living room, where I watch television until the room begins to darken. I sit on the floor pulling at long strands of orange carpet, wondering what is up the stairs. There are no stairs at our house.

When she comes back we get on the bus again. Mom says, "Isn't this fun?" and I nod, because it is kind of fun, the way the bus lurches and wheezes around the city. "If you want to do this again you can't tell Dad where we were. If you tell Dad I'll get in big trouble and we won't be able to ride the bus again. Do you understand?" She kisses the top of my head.

Later, Mom drives me in Grandma's car to a small house with long steps leading up to the front door from the street. She takes the keys from the ignition and tells me to wait in the car. She leans over and pats the space beneath the dashboard, telling me to get down there and stay until she comes back. "I'll lock the doors," she says.

After a few seconds, I peek out the car window and watch her go up the stairs to the house. She wears a black leather jacket, tight at the hips. She walks up, up all those stairs. And then she's out of sight.

I AM FOUR years old and we're going to Grandma and Grandpa's house. Mom has packed my stuff into a blue American Tourister suitcase. Her car smells like cigarettes but also something sweet. It's my favorite smell. I snap the brass buckles on the suitcase open and closed.

"I don't want to go to Grandma's house, again," I say. Mom is silent in the front seat.

When we get there, Mom takes my suitcase into the house. Grandma wipes the counter in the kitchen with a damp towel. I hug her around the knees and say, "I love you, Grandma, but I don't want to stay over anymore."

Grandma smiles like she doesn't hear and kisses my cheek. She looks like my mom, but with white hair. The inside of her pocketbook smells like lipstick and sugarless gum. I like to sneak it open and leave her love notes and drawings. I steal tissues from the little package she keeps inside and look at myself in her compact mirror. I put on her sunglasses and pretend to be her, hands around the imaginary steering wheel of her big blue Dodge, purse strap hanging off my shoulder.

Grandpa sits, where he always sits, in his reclining chair in the den. His dog, Spot, snores on his lap. Spot only gets up from the chair when Grandpa gets up. Spot's name is funny because his fur is all black. No spots.

Grandpa tells a lot of jokes I don't get and sings old-fashioned songs like, Hey good lookin' / what you got cookin'? Sometimes we watch The Three Stooges and Grandpa laughs and laughs. He tells me that the Stooges were Jewish, just like us.

I start crying so Grandpa will notice me. I tell him, "Mom says we have to stay over again."

Grandpa doesn't look away from the TV screen. "Knock, knock," he says.

I sniff wetly and keep my head buried in my knees. "Who's there?"

"Boo."

"Boo who?" I ask.

"Whaddya cryin' for?" He looks at me, waiting for my laugh. I wipe my face on the crocheted afghan and Grandpa adjusts the TV antenna with his foot.

Mom kisses Grandpa on the forehead and says, "Leah, if you don't stop crying, you won't get your present."

I run after her into the kitchen where a big cardboard box waits for me. On the front is a picture of a vacuum, a broom, and a mop. Grandma gets scissors from a drawer and says, "Here, Lee-lee, I'll do it."

Together we pull out the miniature cleaning supplies. I stroke the ropy ends of the mop imagining all the games I will play with these toys. I can be a mom, cleaning the house and yelling at the kids. I can be an orphan who has to clean the whole house before the orphanage lady comes back and beats me. I can be a princess, locked away by an evil witch and made to clean my dungeon. I barely notice as Mom kisses me and walks out the door. I hear her car rev up and out of the driveway as I push my broom around the orange-and-brown linoleum. Grandma ties a bandanna around my head so I can be just like a real maid.

AT NIGHT, GRANDMA lets me wear one of her velour housecoats over my pajamas. It goes down past my feet and as we walk down the stairs Grandma holds up the back and says, "Careful, careful," with each step. We make our special nighttime snack by pouring peanuts and big fat golden raisins into a bowl and then shaking them until they are all mixed together. Grandma lets me have a spoonful of peanut butter, and I lick the spoon as we walk into the den and sit on the couch.

"That kid's nuts for peanuts," Grandpa says, and he and Grandma laugh. Grandma thinks all of Grandpa's jokes are funny.

I wake to Grandma lifting me off the sofa. Grandpa snores in his chair. I fell asleep halfway through Murder, She Wrote, which is kind of scary but mostly not, because Jessica Fletcher is an old lady.

I wonder when we are going home to the little house on Dixwell Avenue. We stay with Grandma and Grandpa for what feels like a long, long time.

ONE MORNING I wake up and the sun shines bright through the window beside me, but where Mom should be, the bed is untouched. I walk down the stairs and into the kitchen where Aunty Sandy and Grandma are standing by the counter.

"Mom's not home," I say.

Grandma bends over the kitchen table and starts to cry. She and Aunty Sandy talk about Mom's car. Aunty Sandy says she wants to go out and look for it again. Grandma says we should call and let the police do that. Grandpa is in the den, sitting in the recliner, watching TV.

"Where's Mom?" I ask again.

Grandma goes to the den to tell Grandpa they are leaving. He turns briefly from the television to look at her. "We'll be right back," she says to me. Her face is splotchy from crying and her lipstick is worn away from her mouth. Her breath smells like coffee.

When they leave I halfheartedly mop the floor with my toy mop, but it isn't as fun without a bandanna tied around my head, and Grandma is the one who does that for me. I go to the living room, with its china closets and sofa I'm not allowed to sit on. There are pictures in beautiful silver frames set up on a table in front of the bay window. I make the faces in the frames talk to each other.

"Hi, Kevin and Joan," I make a picture of my Aunty Sandy say to a picture of my parents. In the picture my aunt looks extra pretty. She wears a green shirt that says ARMY and big silver earrings.

"Hi, Leah," I make a picture of my mom say to me. "Here I am," says the picture. "Here I am. Here I am. Here I am."

FOR MONTHS AFTER my mom disappears, my grandmother and I live in a world of make-believe. It's like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe, but there is no King Friday or Queen Saturday. There is no shy Daniel Striped Tiger. Mister Rogers never pops up at the beginning of our day to narrate what happened the day before.

He never says, "Yesterday in Grandma and Leah's world of make-believe they went to the Rhode Island Mall. And Leah asked Grandma if they could sit in the pit in the middle filled with fake trees where all the old men smoke cigarettes, and Grandma said, 'No, of course not,' and that Leah 'should never smoke because smoking kills you.' And Leah thought, But Mom smokes."

The difference between our world of make-believe and the regular world is that in our world of make-believe my mom is still alive. In the real world, my mom's body will remain off the side of the highway, undiscovered for five months. But because there is no trolley car to signal the beginning and end of the make-believe, my grandma and I keep at it relentlessly.

AT NIGHT I sleep in bed with Grandma. Grandpa, like always, sleeps in his recliner. Before we go to bed, Grandma and I say a Jewish prayer for protection. We open the small blue prayer book and read, "Oh Lord, grant that this night we may sleep in peace. And that in the morning our awakening may also be in peace. May our daytime be cloaked in your peace. Protect us and inspire us to think and act only out of love. Keep far from us all evil; may our paths be free from all obstacles from when we go out until we return home."

Then Grandma says, "Close the light," and I jump out of bed and flick the switch. "Now we pray for Joanie," she says as I climb back under the sheets. Grandma's head is covered in plastic rollers, and her nightdress makes a zipping sound as it rubs against the sheets. Her partial dentures sit in a glass of water on the nightstand. The pink and silver of them in the cobalt-tinted drinking glass look like jewelry to me, or treasure sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

"Dear God," says Grandma, "please bring Joanie home safe to us because we love her and miss her." Even then, as we pray, my mom seems to exist only in the world my grandma and I have created. Nobody else talks about her.

SOME MORNINGS, GRANDMA takes me to work with her at Klitzner Industries, a brick factory building in Providence producing pins and medals and emblems, and—the best thing—American flags inlaid with shiny red, white, and blue gemstones.

"Rhode Island," Grandma tells me, "is the costume jewelry capital of the world."

She pins a shining American flag on my jean jacket. I work on the adding machine, sending out a roll of narrow white paper covered in my own imaginary algebra. I calculate my age, Grandma's age, Mom's age, Brandy's age, Dad's age. I add them all together, then subtract them.

After work, we run errands. Sometimes when Mom had errands to do, she let me stay in the car, but Grandma is nervous about kidnappers, so she makes me go inside every place we stop. At the market, I pluck a grape as I roll past in the shopping cart. Grandma grabs it out of my hand.

"That's stealing," she says. Grandma never gets mad at me, just a little more nervous than usual, which is pretty nervous. She clutches the grape in her fist and looks around. "You could get arrested," she says.

I say, "Mom lets me eat grapes when we go shopping."

She looks at the waxy green grape in her hand and drops it into a bin of oranges.

I THINK THAT things might stay like this forever—that it will be just me and Grandma and Grandpa—but then things change. The police find my mother's body and in March 1985 there is a funeral. Nobody tells me about it and I don't go. It's a secret but I'm the only one who doesn't know. Even though I kind of know.