Amy Frykholm

When Rowena was with us, when we saw her everyday before school for breakfast and after school until we closed, she wore clothes dug out of the bins at the St. Vincent De Paul store.  She wore stretch pants and oversized flannel shirts that smelled of wood smoke, must and infrequent washings. Even at eight years old, Rowena was almost as big as her mother. Rowena was big for her age and Sally was small, and they shared the same clothes.  She had skin the color of very milky tea, but one patch was not like the rest. This was a stretch of pinkish-white skin that spread from her right eyebrow onto the corners of her wide cheek.  A patch of slowly spreading bleach, a birthmark in reverse. 

Rowena’s mother, Sally, wore dream catcher earrings and had a faint blue tattoo on the inside of her wrist with markings I never deciphered.  She laughed easily and with grit, but she also withheld from everyone she met the most crucial part of herself.  Where Rowena was fleshy, even doughy in the face and heavy around the middle, Sally was bone—slight and lithe.  Rowena’s face was something like the surface of the moon; it had an ancient cast.  But Sally, even with the lines deepening around her eyes, had a child’s innocence.  Rowena often told her mother when it was time to go home; for breakfast, she spread jelly on her mother’s Wonder Bread.  She watched over her mother with otherworldly patience.  Once I saw her pat Sally’s hand and say, “It’s OK, Mom. We’ll make it.”

Rowena followed her mother through missions and trailer parks, dirty apartments in crumbling buildings and $100 a month boarding rooms. Once they lived briefly in an apartment that the previous tenant had abandoned because of credit card debt.  Sally met the building owner at a bar and slept with him a few times before he took them into the apartment to stay. Everything was exactly as the mysteriously disappeared woman had left it.  Clean, new furniture in pink and floral, figurines carefully placed on shelves, a glimmering new television with a screen bigger than Rowena had ever imagined possible, shiny metal on the kitchen table’s molded legs.  Rowena drew me a picture of this place in which the tiny apartment became a castle and around it a soft pink glow.  They stayed there only a few weeks.

In between these begged and borrowed shelters, they lived in Sally’s 1979 Oldsmobile with its velour seats that irritated bare skin and seemed to sweat in the summer all of their own accord.  It was a long car with a pale blue interior and panels that had rusted from sand and salt on winter roads.  Under the driver’s seat was a patch that had worn through completely, the ground visible beneath the gaping hole.  One of Sally’s boyfriends had covered it with plastic wrap and duct tape, but the air found its way in, and the car was almost always damp.  It smelled perpetually sour and decaying.

Rowena made her bed in the back with two faded sheets tacked together to make a sack, a pillowcase stuffed with sweatshirts and dusty blankets thrown on top.  Sally made her own bed in the front, fitting easily beneath the steering wheel.  In the trunk, they kept their few belongings: a garbage sack of clothes, Rowena’s drawing pencils, and a few plastic dishes.

They ate together in soup kitchens—white bread and hot dogs, spaghetti, Jell-O salads studded with canned pineapple, bags of expired vending machine potato chips.  In the mornings, they went to the day shelter first thing for donuts, and if the right person was working, Rowena got a little carton of milk.  A lunch or two might come directly out of a cereal box.  When Sally’s check came, they went to Sunshine Market and strolled the aisles making random choices—a package of hamburger buns, fruit leather, a can of pork and beans, a package of American cheese slices. 

Or on the day a tribal check came, Sally cashed it quickly and tucked the wad of bills into her jeans.  At Dillon’s she bought Rowena a hamburger, French fries, and ice cream.  Then while Rowena swiped at the ketchup on her plate with her finger and tried to see if she could spin herself all the way around on the stool, Sally went into the back of the shop and plunked quarters into the poker machines.  Sally and Rowena sometimes lived a few days in a row on the cheap lunch specials of gambling rooms.  When Sally disappeared into the back, she seemed to forget Rowena’s existence altogether, as though the underlit rooms, the flashing lights, the whir of the machine handles, cleansed her of her past.  The face of the screen became her own face; the pulse of the machine her own life-blood; the clink of the money was the sound of her own mechanical self in a propelled universe.