I'm the One Who Got Away Read online

  The lawyer she worked for was a former FBI Special Agent who had investigated the Black Dahlia murder. The Dahlia was a beautiful, dark-haired young woman famously mutilated and left in a field during the 1940s. My mother and I had watched a made-for-TV-movie about this woman, whose looseness was said to have contributed to her death. Even thirty years later, a woman on her own, divorced like my mother, risked speculation—blame for whatever unhappy ending might befall her.

  “They assume you’re cheap,” my mother would say, wrinkling her nose at the word “cheap.” It was one of the worst ways she herself could judge you. Dyed hair, hoop earrings, white shoes, gum chewing, smoking on the street all marked you as loose in my mother’s eyes. Even though she was barely thirty, she did not participate in the swinging ’70s. My mother wanted always to be above reproach—to prove that she was better than the way she sounded on paper—apartment-dwelling single mother, divorced, no college.

  After working at the FBI, the lawyer my mother worked for started practicing probate law. He wrote wills for little old ladies whose pack-rat houses belied their squirreled-away wealth. One of the first office tasks my mother gave me was to go through a small wooden file box filled with thumbed-over index cards and remove all the client cards marked DECEASED. In my mind, “Dahlia” and “deceased” mingled with a macabre thrill.

  The lawyer took long vacations—five or six weeks at a stretch during which he and his wife ate their way across Europe. When he was gone my mother ran the show, which meant the two of us were on our own for most of the summer.

  Sometimes after working all day, when we got home she would make us Coke floats for dinner. We ate them in our nightgowns playing Scrabble or watching old movies late into the night. During West Side Story—one of our favorites—I would dance around our apartment wearing my mother’s hand-me-down peignoir singing, “I feel pretty.” And in those moments, I believed that my freckles and red hair, which didn’t ring the “pretty” bell, would one day add up to my mother’s porcelain skin and brunette beauty.

  In the morning, we would drag ourselves into the office like hungover roommates. We’d skip breakfast. By lunchtime I was ready to eat.

  On the lookout for the gorditas truck, I was squinting into the next block when my mother and I were forced to slow our pace. We’d come upon a scene taking up the width of the sidewalk. Three boys about my age, on the brink of becoming teenagers, were walking backward, facing us. In between them and us was a woman trying to get past them. My mother and I followed. Witnesses.

  I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but she seemed old to me. She wore a short floral skirt with a faded tank top, the skin on her arms loose and flabby. Her hair was the color of ashes, dirty in the light of the beating sun. A zip-up sweat-shirt hung over one shoulder, and she scooted along in high heels with no stockings like a little girl playing dress-up.

  The boys puckered up at her, making kissing noises. Laughing, they played at something that would be more menacing as they got older. They did not touch her but they moved in front of her, blocking her way. She tried to get around them. Once. Twice. Three times. Then I heard her low whine as it boiled to a growl. She jutted her head at them the way a goose honks violently at a predator, and she picked up the hem of her skirt—delicately as if to curtsy.

  As the woman lifted her skirt waist-high, I saw that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. My mother pulled me into the street to hurry by. The woman’s tormentors froze, and the shock on one boy’s face caught my eye as I passed. Turning back, I took in what he saw—the woman’s dark pubic hair beneath her raised skirt, a grown-up eyeful he was not ready for. The woman dropped her hem and moved past them, free at last.

  Once we were some distance away, I whispered, “Why did she do that?” With my newly forming breasts and hips, my impulse was to protect myself. Especially the part of me that felt vulnerable to boys and men. But this woman had done the opposite.

  “She’s not well, baby,” my mother said, eyeing me. I looked over my shoulder and saw the woman cutting through the gas station, moving on her way. With the lift of her skirt, she’d called their bluff, stopped them in their tracks. She might have been unwell—disturbed—but even then I knew I’d witnessed something powerful.

  A few years later, when I was a teenager, my mother and I were exiting a Metro car in Paris. By then, my fully developed body always seemed to announce its presence in a way that I wasn’t ready for. As we left the car, pressing into the crowd, a man behind me cupped his hand between my legs. Shamed by his grab, my cheeks red, afterward, I told my mother what had happened. She berated herself.

  “I should’ve made you wear a slip,” she said, glancing at the scoops and curves of my light cotton dress. To my mother, a slip—that thin membrane between proper and cheap—could make a difference in how men treated you. A slip might save you from ending up in a field like the Black Dahlia.

  I had yet to begin challenging my mother’s view of the world. But even then I wondered: What if what really saved you was the courage to growl, to honk, to lift your skirt?

  Traveling Companions

  MY MOTHER AND I WERE ON THE SLOW LOCAL TRAIN bound for Rome. I was fifteen. We had started our journey in Venice. Now the train was stopped in Florence, waiting for new passengers to board.

  We were alone in a compartment of six seats, three on each side facing the middle. We’d chosen to sit opposite one another by the window. When the compartment’s wooden door slid open, we looked up from our books. A small man with a bald, age-spotted head stood in the doorway. He ran his hand over his head—a habit no doubt left over from days when his hair needed smoothing. He made a grand bow to my mother, who lowered her green Michelin guide. She granted him her lovely smile, welcoming him into the compartment like he was a guest arriving at her dinner-party door. Turning to me, he made his bow in miniature. In the movement I saw him think the word signorina. Trying a smile, I knew before I began it would not match my mother’s.

  He stowed his leather bag in the metal rack on my mother’s side and chose the seat closest to the door, leaving a space between them. As I watched him settle in, I nicknamed him Danieli, after one of the most deluxe hotels in Venice. He opened his La Repubblica across his lap. I noticed his eyes wander past the pages of his newspaper to my mother’s legs—her graceful ankle and high calf. He glanced at her breasts, snug in a simple dress of light green wool that matched her eyes, then up to her face and the freshness of her unlined skin. Did he realize this young woman he was clearly appreciating was my mother? People were always shocked to discover it. Not only because of her youth, but also because of her dark hair next to my auburn. Her fair, flawless skin next to my freckles.

  I turned to the window, still pouting about being on the wrong train and blaming my mother. We had planned to be on an express that offered a restaurant car complete with white tablecloths and waiters. But that morning, after arriving at the station in Venice, we’d learned the express was sold out. “No, è pieno,” the ticket seller had said and then urged us to take the local. My mother explained to me that it was a national holiday so the trains were packed but the slower train was leaving in just a few minutes. We could catch it if we hurried.

  This never would have happened on previous trips, when she’d planned out every detail. But she’d said we were “old hands” at this traveling thing now. Excited by the idea that we were going native and leaving more to chance, she’d made no reservations for the fancy train. So we’d been stuck with the local, not even having a moment to buy food at the station before we left.

  Perhaps if I hadn’t picked a fight with her the night before—if we hadn’t gotten up late, spent and groggy from arguing—we would have arrived in time to secure tickets on the fast train. We could have been sitting across from one another enjoying a meal, safe from potential perils.

  My mother once told me that she’d heard a radio broadcast about Paris when she was four years old. From then on she yearned to see Europe—a desire h
er parents and most of her many aunts, uncles, and cousins found peculiar. Europe was a place they’d fought the war to end all wars. Why would anyone go back?

  My grandfather’s youngest brother was a kindred spirit though. Just six years her senior, Uncle Don and my mother were more like cousins. A gay man in a Southern Baptist family, my uncle had moved from his small-town Oklahoma birthplace to Los Angeles, where he could live an unmarried life without raising eyebrows. He and my mother each longed for culture and became one another’s safe “dates.” They played tennis at the local high school, took painting classes on Sundays, and dressed up to go to Broadway shows.

  But their biggest adventure was a trip to Europe just before my mother’s thirtieth birthday. They saved all year and spent the month of August in London, Paris, Rome, and Florence. I stayed in Fresno with my grandparents. I think my grandmother thought the trip would be a one-time, get-it-out-of-your-system experience for my mother. But the opposite was true. On the plane home, all she could think about was coming back the following year and bringing me.

  By the time I graduated from high school, we’d been to France, England, Italy, Austria, Holland, and Germany. We’d cruised the Greek islands, roamed the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, and sailed up the Nile to Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel. Despite all this grand travel, we hadn’t struck it rich. We owned no property, had no investments, and did not save for the future except for these trips. But my mother worked hard. She’d gone to night school to become a paralegal and was making a decent salary by then. She managed our apartment building for reduced rent, and she did people’s taxes and balanced their books for extra money—all of which went into the travel account. My grandmother continued to ask when my mother was going to stop “traipsing around,” marry again, and live in a house with a man who provided for her. For the longest time, I wondered that, too.

  Instead, my mother visited the world’s romantic spots with me. In Venice, we’d passed beneath the Bridge of Sighs in a gondola. Our handsome gondolier had given me his hand when I stepped onto the unsteady boat. I knew the legend that if you kissed under the bridge your love would last forever, and as he steered us beneath it, I was embarrassed to be sitting on the cushioned seat beside my mother.

  “Better to see these things with each other than not at all,” she had said more than once. “I’m spoiling you,” she teased. “Whoever you marry will have a lot to live up to.” In her own marriage, she had not been spoiled. Now she relished going where she pleased, creating a life my father never would have fathomed.

  Our first trips were group tours, but as my mother read more and saved more, we branched out on our own. We began to stay in places for those in the know—the cognoscenti, a word she whispered with pride. When we arrived in Venice this time, we stayed at the Flora off the Piazza San Marco. Deluxe and intimate.

  The first night of our stay, the hotel made a mistake and gave us two single rooms rather than a double. The bellman unlocked doors kitty-corner from one another. Each held a narrow bed. When the dark green shutters were pushed open, one of the rooms revealed a balcony overlooking a courtyard abundant with geraniums and quiet places to sit. The other room held an ornately carved armoire, the door to which—the bellman smiled and shrugged—had to be closed if one wished to enter the bathroom.

  After my mother gave the man a discreetly folded wad of lire for carrying our bags and we heard his steps echoing down the hall, we peeked into the bathroom and were surprised to see that it was huge with all new fixtures. “It’s bigger than the bedrooms put together,” my mother said, and we broke out laughing.

  Over dinner we continued to joke about the room mix-up, but at bedtime we found ourselves unwilling to separate.

  “We’re being silly,” she said.

  “What does it matter if we’re across the hall from each other?” I agreed. “We’re just going to be asleep.”

  My mother nodded and I went to the room with the big bathroom, giving her the one with the balcony. But a moment later I was in her room, clutching my pillow and climbing into her bed. Our shoulders knocked against each other as we lay side by side.

  “Do you have enough room?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I lied. “Do you?”

  “No,” she said, and we laughed again, knowing that this would be one of the stories we’d tell when we got home. Our faces close on the smooth, white pillows, we each felt that this was what made us special, better than other mothers and daughters. We didn’t want to be apart.

  As we continued to wait for the train to move on from the Florence station, I surveyed the scene beyond our compartment window. My mother read her book. Danieli had his newspaper. I watched the arriving and departing passengers on the platform, picking out the Italians from the tourists. I envied the local girls with their bare, slim legs. In coy, flirty voices, dark-haired boys called to them over the heads of the milling crowd. A man with a silver cart rolled up the platform toward our end of the train. “Dolci! Coca!” he hawked.

  “Get something if you want,” my mother said from behind her green guide. Rather than her face, I saw the white letters spelling ROME across the book’s cover. Even without looking at me, she knew what I was thinking.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked, hoping.

  “I can wait,” she said. A cruel response. I wanted to be like her—someone who needed only the passing countryside and a book to feel full. I’d already eaten the rolls that came on the hotel’s room service tray that morning. She’d eaten nothing, yet I was the hungry one.

  While I did not get my mother’s fine nose and coloring, by the time I was twelve I had her hourglass figure. I resented having the shapeliness coveted in her era rather than the stick-figure chic of mine. Boys my age didn’t know what to do with my curves, but men gave me looks that said they knew just what they wanted to do. Looks that made my mother pull me to her. I was determined to starve myself into a more controllable package—to be rail thin like the girls in the magazines I read. My determination only made me hungrier.

  “I’m going to get something,” I said as I quickly dug into my straw bag for my wallet.

  As I rose to leave the compartment, I hesitated. Catching Danieli’s eye, I wondered if he spoke English. Did he have a daughter of his own? Did he recognize these mother-daughter interactions? I stepped around his fine leather shoes and made my way down the corridor. A few moments later, I was off the train.

  The platform was loud with talk and hurrying passengers as I counted out my lire for a box of cookies. Still, I recognized the first chug of our train. A tingling swarmed my legs as I looked up and saw it nudge forward. My feet would not move.

  Later my mother told me that even though Danieli did not, in fact, speak English, he knew immediately what was happening. The two of them stood together to look out the window. My mother lowered the glass. She leaned out as far as she could. She saw my pink dress farther down the platform than she expected. With no time to get off the train herself, she stood there willing me to run, to jump, to leap aboard at the last minute.

  One of the rules my mother had instilled in me on our very first trip was that if we were ever separated while traveling on a train or subway, the one left behind was to go to the next stop, where the other would be waiting. My sandals slapped the concrete as I ran toward the terminal to find another train. The schedule was on a circular stand that spun around, displaying times, track numbers, and destinations. I twirled it until I found our train. Eyes stinging with tears, I told myself I could not cry. Not until I saw my mother again. Finally, I found ROMA in red letters listed next to our train. That’s where I would find her. Immediately below the listing, I saw another red ROMA.

  Again, I ran. All around me, people moved like extras on a movie set, their spontaneous gestures automatic after long rehearsals: waving, kissing cheeks, buying cigarettes and magazines, bringing little cups of espresso to their lips. I followed a woman wearing a fitted suit and trailing a little boy behind her. His feet tumbled in tiny
steps. A group of porters in baggy pants and gray aprons leaned on their dollies, speaking to one another, nodding, flicking cigarettes. An old one with a bear-like face said something, and two of them turned their eyes and mouths toward me. I looked away quickly and they laughed. Hugging the cookies to my chest, I wished I’d taken my passport, my bag, and my sweater from the train.

  At last, breathing hard, I found the track I wanted. The conductor, a young man in a dark blue uniform dulled from too much wear, stood in the doorway.

  “Scusi, scusi,” I said.

  He lowered his clipboard and squinted at me as I tried to explain my situation. I felt tears again when I realized that he did not understand a word I was saying. I switched to my high school French. Maybe seeing my distress made him try harder, because at last we broke through to some understanding.

  “No, è pieno,” he said.

  I recognized the words. My mother and I had repeated them to each other earlier that morning, trying to imitate the finality of the Venetian ticket seller’s tone when he’d told us the express train was full. It dawned on me that this train was the one we had wanted to take in the first place. This was our train. Our lumbering local had left much earlier, stopping several times along the way. The later departing express had arrived in Florence at the same time. I felt as if I’d bumped into someone I knew. But it was still pieno—full. And even if it hadn’t been, all I had was a handful of purple and orange lire amounting to about nine dollars. Not enough for a ticket.

  In my halting French, I tried to explain that I’d been left behind. That I had to get to Roma. The conductor pushed his hat higher on his forehead, listening. I can’t imagine that my cobbled-together French mixed with some English was comprehensible, but finally he shrugged. “Avanti,” he said, stepping aside and motioning me aboard.