My mother gripped the steering wheel, her sandaled foot heavy on the pedal. Our car rumbled as we followed the road that sliced up and over the Santa Cruz mountains. The sky, infinite cobalt fixed with a blazing white ring, loomed above and before us. We chased the sun, heading west.
She announced the trip without warning after lunch. Let’s go to the boardwalk. Normally, we’d head out in the morning to maximize our beach time, however, we didn’t refuse her offer. In the thick of summer with no classes or camps to occupy us, there were too many bodies in close proximity for too many hours of the day. Our house pulsed with the tension of a jack-in-the-box forcefully restrained in its tight container.
It was a chance to get out of the stifling house, a chance to feel the ocean breeze, to ride the rollercoaster. Our chance lay in a fifty-dollar-bill folded in a ring box the size of a child’s palm. It was my younger sister’s allowance from our dad. My mother had asked permission to use it. She handed the box to me and I placed it on the dashboard.
All four windows down, a miasma of sour milk, ancient ketchup stains and cigarettes (I smoked when driving alone even though my mother forbade it) revived like ghosts, reminding us of our sins. I leaned my elbow out the window, sunglasses perched on my face. My mother, having begged our dad to move her back to California so she could bask in sunshine the majority of the year, never wore sunglasses. Perhaps after dreary, dour Michigan, she vowed to never shun the sun. In the car, she lowered the visor and squinted into the glare.
My siblings—aged fourteen, eight, six, four—squished into the back seat. As the oldest, I sat in front, in the passenger seat. My mother’s lieutenant, my sisters’ and brothers’ keeper, a self-conscious seventeen year old.
Our car coughed with a mysterious illness we never fixed. As we snaked switchbacks on Highway 17—sharp lefts, sharper rights—the box slid side-to-side across the dashboard. I never grabbed it, never moved it out of harm’s way. To this day I don’t know why.
My mother entered a hairpin turn twenty miles over the posted speed limit. She cranked the steering wheel left and the box sailed out my window. We shouted in unison. She pulled over onto an unpaved section perilously close to the edge, beyond which the mountain dropped in a near vertical line.
This was before the city built rails to prevent vehicles from being flung off the road and into the abyss.
She told me to get out and look for the box. I refused. I was too embarrassed. My high school peers regularly drove along Highway 17 in cars gifted on their sixteenth birthdays. I couldn’t let myself be seen crawling on the ground looking for a jewelry box. It was too humiliating. That for our family, our excursion hinged on my fourteen-year-old sister’s allowance. That our family didn’t have extra means in a wealthy neighborhood. We were the bottom-scrapers, the pump-two-dollars-in-the-tank, the eat-potato-skins-for-dinner—no salad, no main.
I scowled and told my mother the box was lost, and even if we found it, I was certain the lid had flown off, the bill flying over the pass. My mother set the emergency break. Looking back, I see how the light in her eyes died, how she closed her lids for a moment—a pause—to swallow her despair. Like the jack-in-the-box, she vibrated with pent-up tension. She prayed for release, for someone, her eldest daughter, to support her, to help set her free. Instead, she remained trapped.
My mother stepped out of the car, used her hand like a visor and squinted while her blue and white dress billowed. Vehicles whizzed by, rocking our car closer to the edge. I stood helplessly by the door, not in solidarity with her, just exposed and arrogant and angry. What if my classmates saw me? I’d have to make up a good reason: my mother lost her wedding ring and we were looking for it even though my dad was out of the picture.
A middle-aged man pulled in behind us and said our car was parked on a dangerous blind curve and risked getting hit. He urged us to move. My mother looked longingly one last time into the beyond. She conceded and returned to the driver’s seat. I climbed into the passenger seat whereupon she berated me for not securing the box. I bristled. Folded my arms. My mouth a black hole of rage. Blind to my culpability, I insisted on my innocence and plunged the knife of self-hatred in deeper.
We turned around and drove home. The heat glanced off our skin while somehow lodging as a pugnacious force. I refused to take the blame, arguing my mother could’ve taken hold of the box herself or ordered me to do so, but she didn’t. Just like I didn’t, and neither of us could explain why we didn’t treasure and guard something important, something in scarce supply. Why we let means—in our hands for twenty minutes—slip through our fingers.
It wasn’t the only thing that slipped through.
Ever since my dad had lost his job and moved to Korea two years ago, my mother let phone bills, credit card bills, piano lesson payments, medication refills slip through. She let days slip through as full-blown depressed twenty-hour naps on the couch. Cleaning slipped through. Dishes piled in the sink, on counter tops, on the floor. Cords of ants marched in from numerous entry points. When my dad finally demanded a divorce, my mother’s wedding ring slipped through.
With the box flung into the abyss, my younger sister lost her allowance, which she had ear-marked for items other than sponsoring our family beach day. My two younger brothers and youngest sister lost the opportunity to ride a rollercoaster boasting steep drops. I lost the ability to locate self-respect.
Cash tossed into the chasm like a payment to the gods for our transgressions. Maybe we caused offense by continuing to drive our car with plumes of black smoke billowing out of the tail pipe which we couldn’t afford to fix. Or the sound of my mother scolding us in our house on the hill, her pain and fear bearing down upon our well-to-do neighbors. Or my brother—six years old—who sobbed and sobbed in our driveway with no one comforting or assisting him, prompting our neighbors to call the police who knocked on our door to conduct a wellness check.
Before the box flew out the window, for those twenty minutes we were a normal family en route to a weekend day trip.
In those twenty minutes, my mother had given us some money to disappear in the amusement park. She’d stripped down to her bathing suit, trudged through scorching sand, felt water rush her feet, observed the waves swell and break, swell and break. For those twenty minutes she wasn’t a mother, wasn’t a wife, wasn’t on the verge of discovering her husband’s mistress and infant son in Korea. She dove head first into an oncoming wave, swam under the surface, her stretch marks stitching back together. Her body had stretched for five children, for her absent husband, for a graveyard shift, for discount groceries. She swam further into a pocket where sunlight and sound couldn’t penetrate. For once she was weightless. An unbearably light being.
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