Unlike most children, I always knew when rent was due. The second to last week of the month, my mother would serve pasta in every form imaginable, so long as it didn’t include meat. Stale spaghetti noodles swimming in off brand marinara sauce, doused with Italian dressing, pan fried in a skillet with cinnamon and brown sugar. Penne marinated in olive oil, sprinkled with free to-go packets of hot pepper flakes and parmesan cheese she collected for free at the end of her shift at La Rosa’s. We drank tap water that tasted mildly, of rotting eggs, the taste not so offensive as long as we pinched our noses. It was the water I minded most, and I’d beg to get a soda pop from Mallery’s. 

“Next week,” she promised. “And once I get a better job, we’ll be able to meet every week of the month. We just have to be patient and trust God.”

Over and over again, I believed her. But the years passed and that day, a day where we no longer would be behind on our electricity bill, when rent didn’t mean rationing—it never came. 

A father I never met, who left a month before I was born, a mother who worked at least two, sometimes three jobs, a deteriorating two bedroom apartment only a few blocks from Over-the-Rhine, the most dangerous nook in an already dangerous city. Without any siblings—my mom had never so much as dated a man in my life—I was often lonely, coming home after school to a darkened kitchen, a note telling me my mom was sorry, but I’d have to fix my own dinner. 

Dinner, which more often than not meant soaking black beans and rice, dicing a few overly ripe peppers. I’d eat alone, listening to a radio with poor reception,  antenna duct-taped but unable to relay a clear sound, to the degree I favored purely instrumental music over popular songs. You could argue that’s why I was always drawn to classical music, or maybe it was something else, the soothing strum of violins, the mellifluous symphony of soprano piano and flute. Maybe, most likely, that was the first sign there was something wrong with me, that something about me did not and would never fit the mold of the chaos and violence I saw far too often.

I never thought of my life as a tragedy, and to my knowledge, my mother didn’t either. It was the life I’d always known, and I didn’t miss things like a TV set, watching Lucille Ball gobble up candy as it sped up down the conveyor belt. I don’t think I would have found that sort of thing amusing, either: before my mom applied as a waitress at the pizzeria, she worked on assembly lines, for automobiles and jeans, and, memorably, pencils. I remember how hunched her back would be after those days, how she sliced melon and put it on her swollen feet, swearing the cool fruit brought the pain down. When I saw I Love Lucy for the first time, nearly ten years after the original episode aired, I only watched a few minutes before it became too painful for me to watch, knowing that if my mother had Lucille’s life, maybe she could have afforded such trivial worries. 

We had nothing extra: no dishwasher, a very modest fridge, a stove older than I was—all inclusive, I suppose, in the apartment my mother signed before I was born. Everything was the same, the first ten years of my memory. The cracked cream tiled kitchen, windows narrow slits like a snake’s eye, stained carpet that, despite my mother’s best efforts, smelled like cat urine from the previous tenants. Forbidden from painting by our ostentatious landlady, the walls remained a muted yellow that reminded me of sunflowers dried up in the sun, left to die. We were equally forbidden from decorating the walls, which suited us fine, because we had nothing to hang, no landscape paintings I saw once at the art museum, no photos of family. 

The only photos we had at all were a few of me, growing up: me as a five year old with pigtails and pink bows, my hair smooth and silky as a white girl’s, me as a seven year old, dressed in overalls as I played in amber and scarlet leaves. My mother never appeared in those photos. “I’m not photogenic,” she always said when I asked why. “Besides, I’d rather have photos of you getting prettier, not me getting older.”

In my mind, my mother never aged, She was the same vibrant woman grinning in the wedding photo she tucked under a desk, a modest wedding gown she’d bought from a thrift store, pleasant but plain, not even lace adorning the collar. It was the only reminder that my father existed, at all:  tall, lanky, as if unaccustomed to his own body, his skin my shade,, an obvious contrast to my mother’s pale complexion. 

The one time I asked my mother about the photo, what happened to my father, she set the frame face down, shoved it in a high drawer I couldn’t reach. “Nothing important. He’s not a part of my life anymore.”

But my mother unestimated my will, and one day after first grade, while she was working her shift at the clothing factory, I pulled up a chair from our kitchen, stacking it high with the few books we owned: a weathered Oxford dictionary, a set of dusty histories, a novel she read religiously year in and out.  

My balance was faulty at best, and I teetered as I reached for the top drawer, nearly falling twice. My disappointment was no small one when I discovered she moved the frame to the other drawer, and I had to start the process over, By the time I managed to climb down from the chair, move it, and restack the books, I could hear the front door click open, and I was forced to shove the chair into the kitchen and take up the same endeavor the following day. This time, I favored speed over safety, stacking the books with a brazen haphazardness. I managed to retrieve the frame, but I also managed to whack my knee against one of the drawers, beginning a bruise that would blossom and remain for the coming weeks.

I planned on looking at the photo and placing it back in the drawer. Instead I slid it under my shirt, moving stealthily as if worried my mother would come home any minute, decisively tucking it under my pillow. I worried she would notice and accuse me, but she never did. Maybe she never noticed its absence; I never had the indication she looked at it often. If anything, before I’d asked, it had remained in the same position for most of my life, the dust collected on the photo like a fine snow. In time I would stop anticipating her discovering my theft, and move the frame to an old pair of boots, where it remained, for many years.

I didn’t need a father--I had a mother who loved me more than she loved herself, who would subside on peanuts for lunch she I could have the occasional steak for dinner, who diligently read to my every night, even if only from a newspaper scrap someone had discarded, or a Bible passage I was too young to comprehend. She was the type of mother who stayed up in the early hours of the morning, holding me as I vomited. 

As a single mother, the decision was always difficult: was I well enough to stay home by myself? Given the choice, I knew, as she always told me, she would pick staying with me over a work shift a thousand times over. 

But things weren’t that simple. From the ages of six to eight, my stomach was upset often--something Mr. Greeson, the only doctor we could afford, whose education and degree seemed specious at best, always summarized as “nerves”. Knowing we couldn’t afford his ensemble of nostrums, my mother concocted remedies of her own: fresh ginger root tea, brewed four hours over the stove; fresh mint leaves, when we could get them; milk toast, sprinkled with nutmeg. She massaged my stomach, prepared hot water bottles, sang me hymns she’d learned from her own mother. And while I still lingered in nausea, the feeling was abated enough that I could manage to keep down a bowl of soup and oyster crackers, and my mother would feel that she could, in some good conscience, leave me home.

Not that she had a choice, or took to the idea well. At that time, as a factory shift worker, she had little to no rights. Labor union aside, she didn’t dare complain, fearing she would be asked for background information, fearing revealing who--what, as she said--she was. So she came tirelessly to work, taking on overtime, while I stayed home and tried to rest. But resting was hard.  

The tenants above us were a combative couple, who grew increasingly acrimonious, knowing their neighbors below were black. Mr. Nickleson was a failed businessman, having a reputation, even in the complex, even in his acquired state of poverty, as a spendthrift. The story went that he’d opened up a pawn shop of sorts, buying and selling second hand goods at inflated prices, often not being bothered to ensure the products were in working order, or even cleaned. For a time he made handsome lucre, but eventually his antics caught up with him, and, exposed by a rich buyer, was forced to close his shop. The money he had made, it seemed he had spent extravagantly: on new suits and little trinkets for his life, trinkets that later would loiter in the narrow confines of the dingy apartment above us. 

Now, he spent his money on liquor, and on those sick days as a child, I would listen to him berate his wife for “losing” the tie he sold the week before. Sometimes the arguments would be muffled, like our radio when the reception was poor. Other times, mid slumber, I’d wake with a start as screaming erupted, dishes clattered. And then I’d curl myself in a tight ball on our fraying couch, too frightened to move until my mother returned. 

“Why are you cowering?” she’d ask. And I would tell her they’d been fighting again, to which she took a broom and would rap loudly on the ceiling, when, finally ashamed, even by someone they held utter contempt,  they’d fall silent. 

Those moments, my mother was all I needed. But there was something--a dark curiosity, a secret too ugly for me to express, that I kept with me. It was the reason why, at seven, I’d stolen the wedding photo and sequestered it in my boots. My mother, as much as I loved her, looked nothing like me; my father was, cliche to say, my spitting image. As I looked at other families, browsed newspaper clippings, watched a mother and son take a stroll in the park, I noticed how they looked alike: the way their eyes crinkled when they laughed, the way their hair parted or their eyes turned darker on a nebulous day. They looked like they belonged together. 

Just before I turned seven, I was walking home on a cool winter day, from the grocer’s with my mother and we came across a flyer for a father-daughter dance. The word dance, since a very young age, stirred an irrepressible excitement. I danced to classical music, swayed to hymns in church, and sometimes danced to no music at all. Dancing was blissful, a feeling that my body was completely unbounded, a way to feel as though I could escape the confines of our two room apartment. I asked my mother if we could go, imaging myself donning a fur collared cape, a cream crepe dress, my natural hair styled in precise curls, lips colored pink, a little Shirley Temple, dancing as others looked on with envy.

“Hon,” my mother told me, “I can’t take you.”

I asked her why as we crossed the slushy streets. 

“For one thing, we can’t afford it right now. For another…” She jerked me back so I narrowly missed being hit by a four wheel jeep driving fifteen or twenty over the speed limit. “For another, it’s a father-daughter dance.”

My feet were aching, my shoes a size too small, my toes bleeding inside. I hadn’t told my mother, thinking I could bear tight shoes until we were able to pay our bills. 

She told me everyone would bring their fathers.

“Why don’t you come?” I offered. We were almost home, always evident by the way the trees became more sparse, the air harder to breathe, the sidewalks becoming more and more eroded, creviced like cavities on teeth, until they fell in complete disrepair and winded into the side alley where our apartment lay. 

“It’s called a Father-Daughter dance,” my mother said gently. “Maybe we can find something else.”

But we didn’t find anything else. There was a ballet shop in the heart of Cincinnati, in the more prosperous Hyde Park, the windows lined with advertisements for petal pink leotards and matching shoes, headbands with ostentatious fuchsia and lilac bows. But I knew better than to ask. This dance had given me hope that, if I couldn't take dance lessons, I could at least have a night to dance publicly, a night where I danced to music crisp as the music that played in the department stores, a night where I had ample room to dance and didn’t have to worry about banging my knee against the kitchen table or the sofa in a single movement. A night where I could be with other girls my age, where I drank punch instead of sulfurous tap water. 

But I was seven and I still believed in dreams. I persuaded my mother to take me past the Father-Daughter dance. She looked at her plate of buttered noodles with a doleful expression. “I told you--”

“I just want to see,” I told her.

“Ruth. Why do this? It’ll only make you upset.”

But Mr. Nickleson’s belligerence decided for us: he decided at that moment to begin a harangue that would last the next two hours, something about his wife putting the salt away in the wrong place. My mother set aside a newspaper scrap she’d been trying to read, sighed. “Okay,” she said. “But get your coat. I don’t want you catching something. Heaven knows we don’t need that.”

I was excited enough I grabbed a blanket instead of my jacket, then was forced to look for my gloves, despite my protests. It was well after nine when we set out, a flashlight trained at my mother’s side, her grip on my hand firm. The slush had further melted, resolidified, and the uneven walks were treacherous, both of us sliding and almost falling several times before we found the main sidewalk that took us to the outskirts of Over-the-Rhine, where the boxy slums gradually diminished and gave way to better kept apartments, apartments, at the very least, with fresh paint and new shutters. Even though the smell was different, away from the intoxicating stench of rotting meat and cigarette ashes, I could smell the impending snow in the winter sky. It was a brilliant, almost ethereal night, and I felt, then, that we lived in a beautiful city, a beautiful world, the skyline like a thousand colored lanterns, touched with the iridescence of the half moon, the smattering of stars that so often were not visibly under the haze of factory smoke. 

The dance was held in what had once been an Italian restaurant, since converted into a community center, dismal with boarded windows and peeling paint, but it was the only thing we had, a place our church used for its food pantry, used for evening vocational lessons for those who couldn’t afford the time or expense of a formal education, for seasonal parties, though these were pallid affairs at best, a single streamer and a plate of stale cookies sufficing for the Christmas celebration, a crackly radio playing as people stood to the sides, unwilling to talk with anyone else. 

But that night the center seemed transformed, warm embers in paper lanterns twinkling in the main room, what appeared to be a series of circular tables, handsomely dressed in eyelet blue table cloths, the normally austere walls adorned with a coat of periwinkle paint, celebratory navy streamers hanging from industrial rafters, Little girls, bows in their hair, threadbare shifts that nonetheless were enlivened by the soft light, fake pearls strung around their slender necks. 

They danced with their fathers an ethereal glow, as if they were spirits or shadows of light. 

“It’s getting cold,” my mother said, breaking the spell of reverie. “We should get home.”

 Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines, including two Pushcart Prize nominations and two Best of Net nominations. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Fairy Tales (Bottle Cap Press) and a forthcoming poetry collection. Her debut novel (Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams) was published by Type Eighteen Books.  X/Twitter: @erin_simmer