Geometry and Rain

Missy sprinted out ahead of us up the hill. At the top, just off to the left tucked into a cove of tall pine trees were two naked bodies on a blanket. Startled, I stopped abruptly and stared. Sophie bumped into my back.

“What,” she said and I pointed. She gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth. The couple was about 50 feet away and on a bit of a slope so the full length of them was visible. The woman was on top, her hair falling over the face of the other, her hips writhing. The curves and angles of her body and the rhythm of their movements mesmerized me. I can’t say how long we were standing and staring but it seemed quite long. When they made more and more noise, Missy came back to investigate. She ran too close to them and barked, causing them to jump and look up. The woman’s eyes met mine and I instinctively crouched. Sophie ran. The couple grasped for their clothes or the blanket or anything to cover up. I called to Missy and felt my face go hot, my hands numb. Missy ran past me after Sophie and I found my legs were stuck. I couldn’t move. The man wrestled with his pants and cursed. The woman stared back at me like she was waiting for something else to happen. Something clenched in my throat and I crouched lower, panicking. I had a wild fear that she recognized me, knew who I was and would tell on me because maybe I had done something wrong. The man had found his way into his pants and stood up, scowling at me.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he yelled and started walking toward me. My legs came back alive and I burst from the grass and ran and ran.

I found Sophie standing in front of a log cabin with Missy at her feet. It had an inviting front porch that wrapped around the sides. A flowery sign that hung from the door read: “Open” and warm smells of fresh bread and sweet berries came from the house. Without a word, we mounted the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I saw movement from a window off to the right and then a clatter from within. Spooked, I took Sophie’s hand and was about to pull her away and leave the place when the door swung open and an old woman emerged with a basket of lollipops. She was short and white haired, round and kind looking. A wide spread smile seemed to be her only expression.

“Hello there, girls, no need to knock, you know; we’re open for business here. Welcome to Matt Donahue’s. Here, have a free sucker,” she said, her voice scratchy, warm. Sophie’s hand darted out and snatched a sucker. She inspected the flavor, frowned, and put it back. The old woman laughed and brought the basket lower so Sophie could see better.

“Take a look, sweetie, and pick your favorite color. I like green; tastes like apples,” she said. Sophie peered into the basket and fished around until she found the pale yellow wrapper of butterscotch. She took it and smiled up at the old woman.

“Thank you, lady,” she said, blushing and sticking the lollipop into her mouth.

“My name is Mary Mare; what’s yours?”

“Sophie,” she said and looked at me.

“I’m Jane; we’re here for the summer with our grandparents,” I said.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you both. Please come in, but your dog will have to wait out here,” she said. I told Missy to stay and pointed at her like I’d watched my dad do then went in.

The bins full of candy were the first thing I saw. Behind the counter was a haggard woman with black stringy hair flecked with gray, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. She glanced up at us but didn’t say a word or even smile.

“This is Mrs. Donahue, girls, one of the owners here. This is Jane and Sophie, here in town with their grandma and grandpa for the summer,” Mary Mare said. Mrs. Donahue mumbled something I couldn’t hear and hunched further over her magazine. Mary Mare put an apron on and walked into a back room where all the nice smells were coming from. Sophie and I grabbed bunches of Mary Janes and Slo Pokes and piled them on the counter.

We paid for the candy with handfuls of pennies that we counted out in front of Mrs. Donahue’s phantom white face, smoke spilling thick from her mouth and nose.

“Can we have a bag for the candy?” I asked.

“You got pockets?” she said, then turned around on her stool and went back to her magazine. I looked at Sophie and giggled while we filled our pockets. She stuck her tongue out at Mrs. Donahue’s back. I slapped a hand over my mouth and snorted laughter. We ran out laughing and stuffing pieces of candy in our mouths.

I watched for signs of the couple on the way back to the cabin but they were gone. Missy sniffed around the spot where there blanket left a crushed rectangle in the grass and I thought of the white hips lifting and falling. I thought of sleeping bags packed with naked bodies and dark nights lit by stars. I thought of Mrs. Dalby as that naked woman and an uproar of fluttery excitement erupted in my gut. I ran hard back to the cabin kicking up dirt.

Later that day I sat with Gram playing Uno, something she invited me to do often, only to have the cards lie untouched while we had long conversations instead, when she started talking about my dad.

“If your dad would just grow up, he’d be a good boy.” She shook her head and shuffled the cards again.

“Why do you hate him?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t hate him. We struggle with ‘im, that’s all. His parents are the real problem. When you were just a baby, you and your mom and dad lived in our four-flat right above us. Well, your dad was a janitor at some crummy hotel downtown where they gave ‘im drugs. He’d come home high as a kite and beat on yer mom. He’d be real violent and just nasty. He’d grab and twist ‘er—” I knew what she was talking about. My dad rarely hit my mom when they fought, although she hit him freely. Instead, he had a way of grabbing and twisting parts of her that stood out: her nose, breasts, ears.

“So anyway, your mom asked Papa to keep ‘im out when he was high like that. So wouldn’t ya know it, he come home in a stupor and Papa just stopped him right at the door, told ‘im he can’t come in all coked up like that. Well, Bobby starts cursin’ and yellin,’ sayin’ it’s all Christine’s fault, callin’ her bad names. Papa says to ‘im, we saw the bruises; we know what he did. So then Bobby hauls off and punches your Papa right in the nose. I come runnin’ out to help ‘im and he punches me, too. That was it. Papa had to get ‘is gun out and force ‘im to leave that way.”

Her voice was louder and higher and her face red. I pictured my Papa going to get the gun from inside their apartment. When he returned to the sight of his wife being brutalized, however, his finger stiffened against the trigger, his vision blurred red, and the unambiguous, nearly palpable urge to kill overcame him. My father must have seen this distinctly when he raised his eyes to Papa’s, his glare displacing air in its wake. He must have felt the breeze from it.

Gram was shuffling the cards again.

“Then what happened?” I tapped her shoulder. She put the cards down and took a deep breath.

“I shouldn’t be goin’ on like this to you.”

“I wanna know; it’s OK.”

“Well, that was it. He finally left. But then he went and told his police-captain daddy on us and they come an’ arrest your Papa. They never did nothin’ to help him. They just let ‘im stay up there in that attic when he was comin’ down all shakin’ and sick. They even sat up there, held ‘im down all night once, he was so bad. Well you know me, I tell ‘em how it is. I went marchin’ right over there an’ told your grandma to her face: Your son is sick. You have to get him help. Take him to a hospital or a drug treatment place. Don’t just keep him up there in that attic leaving him to rot.”

She grabbed my hands and squeezed them; her eyes were wide and angry.

“She comes back at me and tells me it’s Christine’s fault. Says she drives ‘im to it! I just told her plain, that son of yours will die from this. It will kill ‘im dead.” She clasped her lips and stared at me.

“What’d she say?”

“If she didn’t just slam that door right in my face!” She started shuffling the cards again, shook her head. My head was clamoring. I rubbed my temples.

“What’s with that hair, young lady?” Gram grabbed a lock from the side of my head and flipped it.

“What?”

“It’s too long and straggly. I’m gonna cut it. Go get me the scissors.”

I didn’t like having it combed; it was something I always fought, and I always had it up in a ponytail, so I agreed. She set me in a chair, placed a shallow bowl over my head, and carefully cut the hair along the edge of the bowl, leaving me with a perfectly even, boyish cut.

Just after dark, I went to the nearby playground sporting my new haircut accessorized with red rubber boots, a blue Izod sweater, and jeans with holes in the knees. Before I left, I looked approvingly into the mirror: fun hair, cool outfit, straight hips. There was a group playing keep-away around the slide, girls against boys. I joined in, climbing up the slide after one orange-haired boy, his bright locks bouncing cheerfully. Arriving at the top, he gave a furtive peek behind him, glancing down at me, small eyes indistinguishable among a mass of fiery freckles, he swiftly disappeared. I climbed into position to go down after him when I was abruptly frozen in my spot. There was a girl down below pointing squarely at me, shouting: “There he is, up there! Get him!”

He? Him? I looked around, flushed, redly smiling, preparing to laugh when her mistake was discovered and pointed out by one of the other kids. I shivered. A voice behind me shouted: “Go down, man, run!” I swooped down, leapt to my feet at the bottom, and ran, settling in to the queer power of how it must always feel to be a boy. It was intoxicating, yet frightening to deceive these girls into believing that I belonged on the opposite team. At any moment they could notice my soft, long eyelashes, a girlish curve to my cheek. I could move in some un-boyish way and give myself away. But when I high-fived the boys and took off away from the girls, they believed I was a boy and they changed. The differences were subtle, but unmistakable. I treasured being chased by them, their squealing and giggling, their blushing cheeks and flirtatious grins. I was completely transformed in their eyes and its effect over me was total.

I ran fast, away from a dark-haired girl, looking back every few seconds to see her wide open laughter and ember-lit eyes pursuing me. Without warning I tripped on a protruding root and fell, my knee slashed open on a piece of slate rock, my face dug into rocky soil. I lay there, splayed out on the ground with a bleeding knee and a scraped cheek. It began to rain. The girls screamed, everyone scattered. I turned over and found the dark haired girl crouched next to me. Our faces, so close, seemed to freeze, eyes locked, her black pupils like tiny oil spills: shiny, beckoning. A car honked in the street. A truck rumbled by. The gritty taste of dirt lingered in my mouth, the smell of extinguished campfires hung, trapped under the rain. She placed one small hand on my shoulder, brushed a fingertip across my scraped cheek, her eyes asking if it hurt. I attempted to speak, but couldn’t get my mouth to move. The rain fell harder; a voice called from a distance. She leaned forward, pucker-lipped, close-eyed, summer-scented, and left the soft tremble of a kiss on my wounded cheek. She ran off. I sat there, drenched, a smile so big it ached.

All The Good Parents Were Taken

“How old is she?” I asked.

“17 months. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yeah. And she’s so good too.”

“She’s pretty happy just being her,” she said, looking straight ahead, walking slowly, a slow smile pulling up the corners of her mouth. Her hair was a mass of dark brown, almost black, curls, twisted up in a loose knot at the back of her head. Tendrils fell freely and bounced around her face in soft coils. She was one of the youngest of all the teachers and counselors at that school, just a few years younger than my mom. Her skin was deeply tanned and she had small, almost unnoticeable lines around her eyes and mouth that bunched together when she smiled and rested waiting when she didn’t. Somehow her soft beauty offended me, the easy way she carried herself. As if this was any regular day.

“Here’s our house.” She turned up the driveway of a small, ranch-style home.

“I can’t believe I’ve never seen you before in the neighborhood,” I said.

“I’ve seen you around,” she said and smiled at me. My cheeks grew hot and I stared at the cement. I knew that people in the neighborhood talked about my parents and how they fight. One time my mom threw all my dad’s clothes and shoes and even a large amount of cash out on the front lawn in the middle of a rage. It was after they had a fight and he had already left the house when she started gathering armfuls of his things to take outside and scatter across the lawn and sidewalk, kicking some of it wildly out over the curb and into the street, screaming all the while. People came out of their houses to stare. Then my mom came out with a shoebox filled with cash and emptied it out onto the sidewalk. After she walked back inside to get more, people started closing in and picking up bills. That was when I picked up the phone and called the police. It hadn’t been the first time: 3309 Avers was an address the police knew well.

“Have a seat right there, girls. I’m just going to put Sarah down for a nap. Be right back.” We sat down on a couch in the front room. Sophie was still clinging to me but she had her head up and was looking around. The place was filled with pictures of Mrs. Dalby with other dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful people in some exotic land. There were lots of candles in large, ornate holders garnished with colorful potpourri. There were several bookshelves lined neatly with hardcover books. I had never seen so many books and each of them intrigued me. It was an altogether new feeling, like a tickle in my chest. My heart, I imagined, sprouted a feather and it fluttered against inner chambers I’d never see. Names like Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Freud; some I had heard before and some I only sensed the greatness of. Chaucer, Cervantes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Neruda, all in various scripts, sizes, and colors, their spines beaming with rigid importance.

“Can I get you girls anything to eat or drink?” she asked, emerging from a doorway across the room.

“No, thank you, we’re fine,” I said, still scanning the books.

“You like fiction?” she asked and sat down next to me. She had taken the loose knot out and her hair fell freely over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back.

“I really do,” I answered, now staring at her.

“What’s your favorite?” she asked, leaning back and crossing her legs.

“Huckleberry Finn.”

“Oh, that’s a great one. One of my favorites too. I’ve read it maybe a hundred times. What else?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read much else.”

“Well, you can borrow anything you want that you see here. I have a regular library. Just make sure you take good care of them and return them when you’re done.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Anything you want.” I wiggled out of Sophie’s grasp and got up. I pulled a thick volume from the top of one of the shelves: The Poems of Emily Dickinson.

“Ah. You want poetry?”

“This first, then I’ll borrow something else?”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll even make you a reading list; how about that?”

“Yes! I mean, yeah sure.” I felt my hot face again and looked at the floor to hide it. She laughed and messed my hair.

“You can come here anytime, Jane.” She looked at Sophie and smoothed her hair back with her palm. “You too, sweetheart. What’s your name?” Sophie looked at me.

“Her name’s Sophie,” I said.

“Hi, Sophie. That’s a beautiful name.”

Sophie smiled at her and actually spoke. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“You can talk to me about what happened if you want to.” She turned to face me again.

“My mom and dad had another fight,” I blurted. She nodded her head.

“She started it because she insulted him. Said he’s never going to amount to anything but a janitor. He started beating her up like he always does and then she knocked him out. I think she threw something at his head and cut him. He pinned her down after that and was bleeding on her from his head. I walked in and he looked up. That’s when she punched him in the head where his cut was and knocked him out for good. She told us to leave and call for help.” I watched for her expression of shock and horror but it didn’t come. She kept her gaze level. Concerned, sad even, but not shocked.

“So this happens often with your mom and dad?”

“All the time. She always has some mark on her. She lies and tells us she fell or accidentally walked into a wall.”

“She doesn’t lie!” Sophie said, shooting an angry look at me. Mrs. Dalby put an arm around her. It was easier for Sophie to believe the lies. They, along with my mother’s unblinking almond eyes, held her like vice grips in place, allowing her to ignore things into nonexistence. I always knew the truth though I wished I didn’t, or at least wished for a place big enough to hold it for me. My mom and her lies swarmed inside a hollow place in my gut.

That evening just before nightfall, Sophie and I walked home slowly and in silence. When we reached the house it seemed as if nobody was home, but for the door being unlocked and the car parked out front. Inside, it was quiet and dark. I locked the front door behind us and we went straight to bed. Waiting for sleep, my head was filled with thoughts of Mrs. Dalby. Her books, her photos, the father of her baby.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked Sophie, wanting a break from my thoughts.

“Mrs. Dalby’s nice.” She said.

“Yeah.” I said.

“Where do you think her husband is?”

“Maybe she’s not married.”

“She has to be married, she has a baby.”

“Maybe she’s divorced, or never got married to begin with.”

“What’s divorced?

I thought carefully about how to answer. When Sophie asked me a question about what something meant or what it was, I felt obliged to tell her the truth as accurately as possible. I wanted my answers to be factual, so if she looked it up later in an encyclopedia, the information would check out.

“Divorced is when a married couple breaks up in court. They legally undo their marriage,” I said. Satisfied with my answer, I smiled into the dark.

“Oh,” she answered back. After a long silence, she asked, “why do people do that?”

“Lots of reasons, I’m sure. They fight too much, they stop loving each other. Mom and dad will get divorced one day.”

“No they won’t. Don’t say that,” she said in a high voice, sounding near tears.

“I’m sorry, Sophie; I was just kidding. I’m sorry I said it. Everything will be alright, I promise,” I said in the most reassuring tone I could muster. She did not reply again. I lay listening to the soft night noises. My mom told us it was the house shifting and settling. I fell asleep praying that what I told Sophie would be true.



The next day, Sophie and I woke to the absence of my mother. This day there would be no facing her beat-up face and accompanying story. Only my dad with red, raised scratch marks across his neck and cheek and a few stitches over his right eye.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked.

“Jail.” He was sitting in his chair eating a bowl of cereal.

“Why?”

“You see this?” He glared at me and pointed to his stitches.

“You hadda go and call the cops, so they came. Saw what she did and cuffed ‘er. Took ‘er away.”

“Mom told me to go.”

“Yeah, I know. ‘Sokay.” His mouth was full of half-chewed cheerios. He put the bowl down and got up. He grabbed his white t-shirt from the back of the chair and pulled it over his head. Chest hairs sprang out from the collar.

Without a notion of where we were going, he took us out. We walked toward the corner of Milwaukee and Belmont Avenues, where I knew there was a pet store. Galvanized by the throng of hurried people, steel, and concrete, there is a wholesome violence about the city of Chicago on a Saturday afternoon.

The smell hit us first. Fur-covered bodies in small-barred cages soiled with urine and dog spit. Echoing all around were their varying, inflected barks―high pitched screeches, low ambiguous moans, desperate howls, curt, loud outcries.

Sophie approached the cage of a small, white, black-flecked Siberian Husky. She had unnaturally beautiful, darkly framed eyes, one unlimited blue, one bottomless brown. Under our attention she was a blaze of trembling, amplified life, flashes of pinkish skin against thick tufted fur, glints of white sharp teeth and black arced lips, lustrous flaring nostrils and blurred whipping tail. Sophie’s groping hands thrust as far as her arms could reach through the bars of the cage while the wet length of the dog’s tongue flapped against her small face. She became our dog in that moment.

“I want this one!” Sophie yelled.

“What should we name her?” I asked. Sophie just stared at me, half her little body still jammed inside the dog’s cage.

“It’s gotta have a name,” my dad said. Sophie looked at the dog thoughtfully, tilted her face, grabbed her ear.

“Missy,” she said.

“What’s Missy gonna set me back?” my dad asked the clerk, pulling a fat wad of bills from his back pocket.

“She’s $500 even,” the store clerk said. My dad flipped out five hundred dollar bills as if they were singles, and handed them to the clerk. The clerk looked at the cash and blushed.

“Oh, OK. Just follow me to the register over here.” He turned and bumped into another dog’s cage, nearly tripped over his own feet. My dad followed him to pay for Missy while another clerk took her out of the cage and fitted her with a collar and a leash so we could walk her home.

On the way, we stopped off at Jefferson Park to play with Missy. We ran and ran in circles while Missy chased us. She broke away and sprinted wide circles around us, her body low to the ground, ears plastered back, teeth and eyes glinting.

My dad told us that dogs traveled together in the wilderness in what were called packs. Missy, Sophie, and I became a pack. That first night, exhausted from playing hard with Missy for hours, we slept as one entwined pile together on Sophie’s bed. That night of sleep was peace for me for the rest of my life.

My dad had resisted our pleas to adopt a dog for years before, always saying it wasn’t fair to raise a dog in the city, confining it to a chain in the yard. One of the conditions he gave us for keeping Missy was that we take her to Wisconsin during the summer, where my grandparents went to spend the summers in a cabin by a lake.

Besides her brother Joe, my mom had an older sister, Gracie. As a child, my aunt Grace had suffered several seizures. She would alternately go blind and fall over, spontaneously losing her balance. Tests revealed a brain tumor. She opted to have surgery that would remove the mass and relieve the pressure, reducing the seizures but not stopping them. The surgery was a relative success, and Grace went on to marry Ronald and live a happy life. Her seizures continued but were less frequent. As a result, a pleasant dulling of awareness was both her burden and her blessing. She was genuinely kind and easily happy, a delightful presence.

Their father, whom Sophie and I called Papa, was a young immigrant from Greece when he married a girl of Polish, Bohemian, and German descent named Carol, known to Sophie and me as Gram. She came from an old, lawless Chicago family. Her mother, Lola, was an alcoholic and a known bootlegger after the Volstead Act (better known as the National Prohibition Act) was enacted by Congress in 1919. She was a tough, rugged woman with bullet-holes in her legs from being shot at while she ran from the authorities carrying outlawed booze to saloons and speakeasies, or so the legend goes. Lola’s husband, Gram’s father, straight-edged Gary, was a door-to-door Hoover salesman from the age of 18 until the time of his death in 1944. It was the early 1900’s when William Henry Hoover revolutionized vacuum technology by producing the first upright, bag-on-a-stick, domestic carpet sweeper. By the decade of my great-grandfather’s death, more than 70% of all vacuum cleaners were sold door-to-door. And then there was Lou, Gram’s brother, who was a rather prominent gangster, rumored to have been one of Al Capone’s minions and to have played a part in the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.

With an alcoholic mother, Gram grew up to be a woman constantly either fearing or protecting, always loving. True to its tendency, the disease skipped Gram’s generation and landed squarely on her second-born, my mother. It is for this reason, I believe, that I have always shared a special bond with Gram. Each of us had, from an early age, been heaped with the sufferings and destructions of our mothers. That first summer when we got Missy, Mom needed a break, so Gram invited us up there. We went with my aunt Grace and my uncle Joe.

Missy had land there to run and a lake to swim in. And it was quiet, so quiet compared to Chicago. The trees and water with their greens, blues, and browns created together an intensified soundlessness. Matt Donahue’s was the candy store, a log cabin at the top of a dirt road, hidden by thick woods so that it seemed like a secret that only we knew about. The old lady who worked there, Mrs. Mare, cooked homemade bread and jam and sold them to the people in town. But the reason Sophie and I nicknamed it the candy store was the penny candy she sold out of big, bottomless bins at the front of the store. Tootsie Rolls, Lemon Heads, sugar taffy, bubble gum, Alexander the Grapes, everything no more then a penny a piece. We filled our pockets for a quarter and went on our way. I’ll never forget finding the candy store for the first time.

Sophie and I set out walking with Missy through the playground into a big open field with tall grass. Missy bounded through like a rabbit; she was so happy in that field we decided to walk all the way across. When we reached the far side and were about to start back, I noticed a small dirt road that emerged from the bordering woods and snake uphill. Without speaking, I started toward it and Sophie followed.

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