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left behind on Helwig Street. Because she was in her mid-forties now and still an
attractive woman, but for how much longer? And more to the point, how long was any
person with hopes and dreams expected to remain in a cage, without hope, without a
life to call her own? She had the job in Phoenix because without it she was nished.
Because for my sake she’d stuck it out in Gloversville as long as she could, and she
couldn’t stand it a moment longer. She just couldn’t. And so she had a job.
THE GE FACILITY WAS located on the other side of Phoenix, even then, in 1967, an obscenity of
urban sprawl. It was more of an outpost than anything, and I could see my mother’s
face fall when she saw how small it was, about the size of an automobile dealership.
She’d dressed with great care that morning, but it was already close to a hundred
degrees out, and in the hour it had taken us to drive there her hair and clothes were
limp. Even more discouraging were the people emerging from and entering the facility,
the women dressed in slacks and casual tops and sneakers, the men in jeans and shirts
with snaps instead of buttons. A few even wore cowboy hats. One of these pointed my
mother to an oce door into which she disappeared on her high heels. I found a shady
spot, expecting to roast there awhile in the punishing heat, but less than ve minutes
later she returned. The man who’d encouraged her to come by if she was ever in the
area hadn’t worked there for a year. In his place was a woman who informed my
mother that not only were there no openings but also none were anticipated. Theirs was
a very small operation, and almost everyone who worked there had done so forever. If
she’d had such a good job in Schenectady, why did she leave it?
For a few minutes we just sat in the car and let the blazing desert sun bake us. I saw
my mother’s hands were shaking. I was about to ask what she meant to do now, when
she said, “How can anyone even think in heat like this?”
We went to an air-conditioned coee shop and sat in a window booth, our wet clothes
sticking to the vinyl cushions. Outside, the heat shimmered in waves o the pavement.
Everything was singed brown, even the weeds pushing up through cracks in the
sidewalks. “What an awful, awful place,” my mother remarked, more to herself than me.
“All that way we came.”
I was inclined to agree, but pointed out that we’d been in Phoenix less than twentyfour
hours, perhaps not long enough to pass judgment.
“I can tell you one thing,” she said, nally turning to face me, and there was
something wild in her eyes, something so desperate it bordered on rabid. I’d seen it, or
something like it, a few times before, usually when she was at wit’s end and instead of
helping I, her only ally, did or said something to make things even worse. At such times
it seemed to occur to her that maybe I’d been enlisted in the swelling ranks of those
determined to thwart her. Who knew? Maybe I’d always been against her. “I can tell
you one thing,” she repeated, challenging me to disagree. “I’m not going back.”
EVENTUALLY SHE DID, of course, just as my grandparents had foretold, but by then a lot had
happened, some of it predictable but mostly not, at least not by me. Sitting across from
my mother in that Phoenix coee shop, I couldn’t even have predicted the next two