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got to be better than that hellhole.” Then
she gave the fleshy thigh of my arm a squeeze and smiled. Only she wasn’t
looking at me in a way. She was looking at me, but she wasn’t looking at me at
the same time.

 
    RATHER
THAN DISAPPEARING into neon bars with her strange, unmanicured men, Mom took
longer and longer looks at herself in the vanity mirrors of our motel rooms,
drinking her Seagram’s and 7UP, her Scotch and Tab, her vodka and Sprite. She
wore her laciest lingerie and just sat there alone. Perhaps she would paint her
face with very bright makeup, or contrast her pale cheeks with soft blushes and
eye shadows, leaning forward, one elbow braced against a dimpled knee, one
brilliantly manicured hand splayed gently against the top of the dresser, her
other hand producing various vials and Maybelline from her handbag, which
bristled with crumpled Kleenex, tattered road maps, plastic cutlery, and the
various salt, ketchup, and NutraSweet packets she had lifted from fast-food
restaurants. Her breasts were fully outlined against the sheer fabric of her
lingerie; her long, slightly pudgy thighs (of which she was curiously ashamed,
and over which she generally wore pants or thick cotton “middie” skirts); her
legs glistening with dark nylons. Sometimes, as she watched herself applying
makeup, she might take a few long slow breaths. I could feel her breath in the
air; I could taste its warmth against my skin and face. Sometimes her nipples grew
more prominent and stiff. She removed her left hand from the table and placed
it against the inside of her left thigh. Lying on my side of the bed I watched
her, and my body filled with strange, smoky sensations. She wasn’t looking at
me. But I was looking at her.
    I
began to feel a little out of breath, resting the open textbook against my
thin, almost concave chest.   Mom
was a bird, a cloud, a car. Mom was something that breathed like me, that felt
warm like me, that could move her legs like me. She wasn’t looking at me, but I
was looking at her. Her face emblazoned with cosmetics, her body firm and distant
and unbelievably warm. I was becoming her only man. No other men ever came
around. I was watching Mom and, after a while, in the corner of my eye, Mom
began watching me, her hand which held the lip gloss hovering against the edge
of the dresser, her cool gaze directed at me now, as if she saw me and she
didn’t see me, and I felt my entire body burning and pulsing with the light,
the light, all the night’s darkness which was now turning into light, and all
the sleepiness pulling at my face and filling my eyes with heat and softness
and a sort of blurred and amorous detachment, and then I was falling asleep,
and my body gave a sudden little kick. And as I slept I dreamed of Pedro. I dreamed
of Pedro dreaming of me. Because Pedro and I understood one another perfectly
now. We both loved Mom. And now we were all that remained of the strange and
delusory world of Mom’s men.

 
    MANY
OF OUR surviving Visa and MasterCard cards were beginning to reach and
overreach their expiration dates, and Mom and I grew stingier with our fund of
invisible credit. We pulled “runners” at restaurants, coffee shops and motels. While
Mom flirted in the office with mechanics and gasoline attendants, I jimmied
open cash boxes on the service island with a screwdriver and pulled out the
large bills from under the steel change tray. We lifted food from grocery
stores and clothes from clothing stores. We took magazines, beer and cigarettes
from 7-Elevens, Stop ‘N’ Shops, Liquor Barns and Walgreen’s drugstores. One afternoon
at the Van Nuys Motel 6 I was returning to our room after playing one of my
slow games with a sharp stick and a dead, forlorn blackbird, and found Mom
carrying the color portable television from our motel room downstairs to the
car. We sold it that night to a pair of diminutive, portly Mexicans– very
pleasant and smiling men, as I recall–for twenty-five