Crossings by Betty Lambert Page A

with him, are you?’
    â€˜That’s just in the movies, Mom,’ I said.
    She shook her head. ‘He’s in love with you. Don’t you dare hurt him.’
    Ben was in love with me and I did hurt him. My mother knew all about me.
    About three days before I got married, she gave me a bill. An itemized list from the high school years: Kotex. Lustre Creme. One sanitary belt. One brassiere. All the things she’d had to buy besides food, which the Welfare paid for anyway. I never thought much about the bill, just paid it. Jocelyn got a bill too, when she finished university. And Francie got hers before her wedding. They paid too, without thinking.
    â€˜You know,’ I say to Francie, ‘that wasn’t usual. The bill thing. No one has ever heard of it.’
    â€˜I know,’ says Francie, laughing. ‘I asked Jo Anne and she didn’t have one. But that’s just Mom. She felt like it was cheating the Welfare to spend money on stuff like O-Do-Rono. And, I mean, she thought we could use rags instead of Kotex.’
    â€˜She did,’ I say and we go into peals of embarrassed giggles.
    â€˜Oh god,’ says Francie, ‘don’t put that in the book. Please. I’ll die.’
    â€˜And she kept them in the bottom of the clothes closet. Used.’
    â€˜Oh don’t,’ says Francie. ‘Oh god. Don’t. I know. Oh god. You know,’ she says seriously, ‘that’s why I hate encounter groups. I think I’m going to say something like that, when I get excited. I’m going to say, “My mother used rags.” I mean, they’re all so middle class, those encounter group people, they don’t have a clue.’ And, ‘But we never
felt
poor, did we?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜I know. It wasn’t like Aunt Harriet’s. I mean, there, you could
smell
the poverty. I mean, it was clean and everything, but it smelled poor. How much did she get for us anyway?’
    â€˜Sixty a month. But that was in the good days, when I got the scholarship. I got thirty-five a month for a straight Honours report.’
    â€˜Yeah. I got that too,’ says Francie. ‘Maybe it was because there weren’t any books. At Aunt Harriet’s. Did Mom ever look at your report cards?’
    â€˜No. She just signed them.’
    â€˜Yeah. Funny, wasn’t it? She really hates the intellectual bit but I wonder what would have happened if we’d been dumb.’
    I can’t stop myself. ‘It was I who brought the books into the house.’
    But Francie says, ‘Then it was something else. Like, table manners and speaking correctly and all that. It was a different feeling. We weren’t poor.’
    â€˜Because we were going to get out,’ I said.
    â€˜Yeah. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the hope.’ Francie is working with negroes in ghettos, trying to understand. ‘I mean, we were white and we could get out,’ she says.
    But the money thing doesn’t begin with my father’s death. It’s there even before, when I’m six and I say, ‘I’m going to live with you forever.’
    â€˜Well, you’ll have to pay room and board,’ Momma says.
    â€˜What’s room and board?’
    â€˜It’s what you pay for eating and sleeping in a house,’ my mother says. She looks very grim.
    â€˜But children don’t pay their parents,’ I say.
    â€˜Yes they do, when they’re old enough to work. It wouldn’t be fair.’
    I’m horribly shocked. You don’t pay your parents. It’s terrible, to think of that. Momma becomes furious with me and we have a dreadful fight. She says I’m selfish and I say she’s mean. She cries. She never forgets either. The day I said she was mean.
    Mom is horribly honest about money. If the cashier at Safeway’s gives her too much change, she gives it back. One day she caught Francie skipping school. In the distance