Free Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen Page B

was a blow.
    Without my father’s child-support checks, we were suddenly very poor. Before, we’d been on the edge, but able to get by, but now my mother’s worries about money made her serious and quiet and abstracted. The house felt dark and sad.
    Then the head of the psych department at ASU threatened to cut or at least decrease my mother’s stipend. At one psych department party at someone’s house with a swimming pool, she sat with the department head and his administrator at a table while we all played in the swimming pool, laughing and paddling around together, three little girls.
    “Cute kids,” said the department head.
    My mother was silent for a brief instant. Then she said, looking him in the eye, “They’re the ones who will suffer if you cut my funding, you know.”
    Her funding wasn’t cut. But we still struggled. One day, an envelope containing two hundred dollars in cash arrived in themail, addressed to my mother. We didn’t know whom it was from. It was a big help, of course, but the anonymity of the gift felt ominous somehow. Everything felt ominous.
    Our neighborhood was turning seedy. Wildermuth had changed. My friends Debbie and Beverly and Shelly Renee had all moved away, and now there were strange kids on the street, kids we didn’t know, older kids. Adolescence was suddenly in full swing on our street: the boys had faint mustaches and muscles; the girls had breasts, wore makeup. Hormones raged, teen psychodramas and sexual games; no one paid any attention to us skinny little girls. Our neighborhood felt even rougher and wilder. Our family was suddenly isolated there.
    Early in the spring, a tall blond young man approached my mother after a classical music concert in Phoenix and told her, as an opening line, that he wanted to take care of her. He seemed earnest and kind and trustworthy. He was also handsome, sexy, and cultured. His name was Jim Christensen. He was the first man my mother had been with in any serious way since she’d left my father, so we got to meet him. He came over to pick her up for dates and tried to engage me, a ten-year-old girl, by tossing a ball back and forth and asking about school, as if he’d read a textbook on making conversation with your date’s kids. I thought he was overly eager and boring, but he was nice to us. He was nice to our mother.
    I remember one night when my mother was getting dressed up to go dancing with Jim; she put on a slinky hot-orange halter dress and strappy hot-yellow high-heeled sandals and a chunky bead necklace. She looked so beautiful, so tan and strong and sexy, that I swooned and threw myself at her, kissing her neck over and over.
    It was so clear to me, I could even have articulated it at the time: I was madly in love with my mother, and I was losing her to a man. Before Jim came along, on Friday nights, I got to stay up after my sisters went to bed to watch
Sonny & Cher
with mymother, in her bed, just the two of us, laughing and chatting during commercials and sometimes, for a special treat, watching
The Tonight Show
—I was my mother’s standing Friday night date, and it was easily the highlight of my week. Now those Friday night dates were Jim’s, and I watched our TV shows with the babysitter.
    Late in the spring of 1973, Jim moved from his apartment into our house on Wildermuth. I was not wild about this, even though we immediately felt safer with him around, and he adored all of us. And he was a catch: he was an architect, he dressed elegantly, loved jazz and classical music, smoked a pipe with Borkum Riff tobacco, and drove a Peugeot. He had a neatly trimmed beard. He drank a lot of wine, but he never got violent, no matter how much he drank.
    And he liked to cook. The first time he made steaks for us, I came dashing into the kitchen demanding to know what that amazing smell was. It turned out to be garlic, sautéing with celery and onions while the steaks broiled. I stood by the stove, inhaling the smell as if it