by
Martha Clarkson
My
mom heard that Libbey-Owens would pay money for old glass at their plant in
north Portland. Libbey drinking glasses sold in sets of four in the dime stores
in 1972.
To
get this money, my mother had to find glass. She drove her little blue Beetle
around to restaurants in the area, asking for empty liquor jugs. Bartenders at
three lounges were willing to save their empties for her. The three restaurants
were Poor Richard’s, the Mandarin, and the tile-faced Pagoda, all within a few
blocks of each other in a district called Hollywood. During the day she made
her rounds, hefting the bending boxes of jugs into the front trunk of her
Beetle and more into the backseat, reached awkwardly in the two-door car.
Sometimes
she took me along on her collection route. I didn’t like going to the bars. She
was only allowed to pick up by day, before opening, so as not to interfere with
business. Walking into the dark empty bar to find an employee spooked me.
My
father drank in public at places that I assumed were similar, at lunch and
after work, making deals with his advertising clients, and sometimes losing
them, depending on how drunk he got or how badly he’d estimated how drunk the
clients were willing to get.
I
didn’t like going to the liquor store either, government-run, walls always the
same sour green, rows and rows of bottles behind the counter, their gold and
black labels calling to the customers. And I never went to the liquor store
with my mother because the stance she presented to the world was that alcohol
was evil. She never drank at a social dinner out, but ordered a 7-Up in a
haughty tone, something I never heard her use any other time, while the other
guests gave their directions to the waiter, words like “up” and “with a twist.”
But
at home in the evenings she drank vodka posing as water from a yellow
Tupperware glass on the kitchen counter. The yellow glass’s contents came from
under the sink, behind the onion bin, a half-gallon jug of Popov, secretly
poured.
Our
garage was underneath the kitchen, off the basement, a typical design for a
house on a steep hill, and after dinner, which was sometimes cooked well and
sometimes a disaster, depending on the action seen by the yellow Tupperware
glass, she’d head to the workbench and start smashing. She wore glasses anyway,
but never any goggles. She’d empty a box except for one jug, and smash that one
to bits, because the recycler would only take broken glass, and on and on this
continued until the box was full of fragments. She had to learn what weight she
could lift in pieces, versus jugs.
I
think in the beginning, my dad wondered if she’d adopted this hobby to pour the
last bits from each bottle and keep a liquor stash on her workbench, which
really was hers, because my dad was hard pressed to pound a nail, let alone
operate a drill or know the purpose of a vice. But that wasn’t it, there was
plenty of booze upstairs behind the onions. She was not desperate in that way.
The
Libbey plant was a mammoth metal structure supporting two large angled sections
at the top resembling a claw. I rode to the plant with her, the little Beetle
sagging on its tires, wending through security to get to the consumer recycling
station. The red-lettered sign by the huge scale read “No color contamination.”
My mother had diligently sorted brown, green, clear. The burly worker wouldn’t
even help us unload. At thirteen, I could barely lift the boxes, but my mother
hauled them out like they held duck feathers.
We
put the boxes on the commercial scale and the man in the blue jumpsuit paid my
mother from a wad of bills in his deep pocket, between six and eight dollars.
We drove home, the car floating on the road like a piece of plastic.
The
money from the recycling was what drove her to do it. She was a Depression child,
had grown up poor, with the bad molars from not going to the dentist to prove
it. My mother paid cash for everything and used paper money even if she had the
change. At night, she’d dump all her coins into a blue ceramic piggy bank by
the phone. Twice a month we’d go to the bank, a square glassy building close to
her bottle pick-up spots, and deposit the money. She’d show me her passbook with
the updated modest total and tell me it was a secret from my dad, her stash. I
wondered if she planned to run away.
She
didn’t run away. She wasn’t the type. She was just saving for a rainy day,
which she seemed to think could come at any moment from my father’s business
decisions. The recycling went on for two years. Sometimes I helped her in the
garage. I liked it when she left me alone down there after dinner to smash the
glass. The first time she did, I was surprised how satisfying it felt to slam
the family hammer down on those jugs. I combined the activity with swearing,
which made it all the sweeter. “Break, fucker!” I shouted at the glass. I had loved
learning the word “fuck” the year before. When I was done, I found the sweeping
up of errant chips peaceful. Then I’d plant the broom on its wall hook because
I’d get yelled at if anything was out of place, and walk up the stapled vinyl
steps to the first floor. I’d sneak through the back hall to climb the carpeted
upper flight, not wanting to see her staggering around the kitchen. My father
offered to buy her a dishwasher each year, but she declined on the basis of
losing cupboard space. What she really wanted was that time alone in the
kitchen after dinner with the yellow glass on the pretense of washing dishes.
Most of the them were chipped from the unstable handling. Two or three glasses
broke a week. When I grabbed the stair’s handrail, a splinter of glass poked into
my palm, but I kept my wits enough to skip over the stair that squeaked.
Martha Clarkson manages corporate
workplace design in Seattle. Her poetry, photography, and fiction can be found
inmonkeybicycle, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Alimentum, Hawaii
Pacific Review. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and is
listed under “Notable Stories,” Best American Non-Required Reading for
2007 and 2009. She is recipient of best short story, 2012, Anderbo/Open
City prize, for “Her Voices, Her Room.”
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