Paper Hearts Don't Beat

I found out several years later that my mother, after regaining consciousness, had kicked my father out the night before. The gun we didn’t know she had was kept under her bed in a shoebox. She pulled it on him and made him leave. He went to his parents’ house just down the street from us. He had spent time living with them previously after fighting with my mom, either because he left or because my mom threw him out, so we weren’t too worried. The time he’d been kicked out before, I went to visit him every day after school.

My paternal grandparents lived in an old three-story Chicago house, the same house my dad and his six brothers and two sisters grew up in. The first floor always smelled like polished wood. Built in, solid-oak bookshelves lined the walls and all the doors were trimmed out in thick mahogany. The second floor was filled with bedrooms, the backmost of which belonged to my dad. The attic was the best of all. I called it the game room because it was filled with all the toys left behind from the kids growing up: buckets of various action figures, piles of old Barbies complete with accessories, Connect-Four, Hungry Hungry Hippo, and the best of all, a ping pong table right in the center with silver-handled paddles. My dad and I spent hours up there together playing games and talking. He told stories about his life growing up and how much fun it sometimes was to have so many kids all living together in that big house.

We could visit him over there anytime we wanted. This time though, my mom seemed resolute about her decision and told him he couldn’t come back until he got help with the cocaine problem. She started working full-time, which is when we began Day Camp.

Day Camp was really the name I gave the house of our babysitter, Mrs. Walker. Sophie and I went every day along with a boy named Justin and a girl, Stacy. The four of us were so similar in appearance that the only things distinguishing one from the other of us were specifics. Features and expressions. Subtleties. Heights, the placement of dimples, scars, knee diameters, fingernail to cuticle ratios, DNA. For as similar as our outsides were, the living situations we experienced by way of our parents varied considerably. Stacy and Justin were from the same neighborhood as Mrs. Walker. Sophie and I were not. We lived closer to Jefferson Park, where the houses were small, very old, and very close together. These houses were new and enormous and had expansive yards with hired landscapers.

While Sophie and Justin watched TV, Stacy and I drew hopscotch lines with chalk, held jump-rope and breath-holding contests, laughed in shrills, running from one activity to the next. Only from breathlessness would we land and would do so in a pile of limbs, tangled hair, and hard, silent laughter. Day camp became my favorite place. My time away from Mrs. Walker, Justin, and Stacy, that too-large-for-living house, and all that it contained was reduced to a state of waiting.

At naptime, Mrs. Walker made us nap on the floor of the downstairs family room together. We did it every day and each of us had a regular spot. My spot was between Stacy and Sophie. Stacy and I couldn’t sleep, so we played games instead. When we heard Mrs. Walker coming to inspect us, we held our eyes closed and breathed evenly, lying as still as we could. When we heard her walk away, we started giggling. We dared each other to get up and run around the perimeter of the room as many times as we could without being caught.

“I’m gonna go for four laps,” Stacy whispered. I had just finished three, which was the record.

“Don’t do it! You’ll never make it!” Her face broke into silent laughter and I started laughing too, snorting out loud before slapping my hand over my mouth and pushing my forehead to the floor to muffle the noise.

“Shhhh!” Stacy put her hand on my shoulder and looked back toward the stairs, listening for any sign of approach. I reached over and grabbed her hand, looking to where she watched. I saw her look at me from the corner of my eye and I kept my gaze directed away from her. She gripped my hand tighter and I looked at her. She had a half smile on her face and a question in her eyes. I nodded. She gave one last glance back and got up. Keeping her step as light as possible, she trotted around the room. She was rounding the corner for a fourth lap when I heard footsteps. I reached over and grabbed Stacy’s pant leg and she went down. We stifled our laughter and she scrambled to her spot, quickly getting into a fetal position with her back to me. I held my breath and turned over just in time to fool Mrs. Walker into believing we were still sleeping.

After naptime ended, she made us lukewarm coffee sweetened with condensed milk, creating a unique flavor I have since failed ever to reproduce. I adored those room-temperature sips of candy-sweet darkness. I began asking for it at home, where I would only get stern looks for answers from my mom.

Then came the day. The day was as bright and as clear as all other days at Day Camp were, cut from raw pleasure in silver smooth slices and lined up one after another for the melting in my mouth.

Stacy wanted to go for a swim. Neither of us had brought a suit. For Stacy, this was not a problem because she lived just across the street and down. We started to her house to get her suit and a spare suit for me to borrow. Her parents were at work but she knew where they hid the key. The excitement of fleeing Mrs. Walker’s house and yard without her permission or knowledge was of a new breed for me, dangerous and penetrating of some undefined, never-before-broken membrane of acceptability within me. I was aware that such a membrane existed, dividing my good-girl nature from the sort of careless recklessness I had observed in other, less strictly-disciplined children. I had barely probed it once by convincing Sophie to climb up the shelf of the pantry and liberate some of our Halloween candy to supplement our daily ration against my parents’ wishes.

I knew something of the driving force of emotions as distinguished from reason, that which motivates other children to break rules, and I knew that I would act accordingly given the right opportunity and good enough odds against being caught or even just the courage to act. This was that opportunity and I had taken it. Slit open the wrists of acceptability, as what is deemed acceptable by anyone, and let its pulse feed the voluntary trespass, the proud strides through the door that reads do not enter, the deliberate and forceful acceleration against the traffic of a clearly marked one-way street. Lightheaded and with a racing heart, I followed Stacy to her house. Giddy with rule-breaking zeal, I was somewhat subdued by the newness and grandness of her home. Justin and Stacy’s house was as large and striking as Mrs. Walker’s Day Camp.

The interior of Stacy’s house was bulging with sumptuous lavishness, marked by a regal form and dignity―moldings, decorative paneling, trim, and ceiling treatments―imposing in appearance to my exceedingly ordinary if not inadequate home situation. Overcome and solemn, I crept along quietly over the stately oak flooring behind Stacy to her room, when she whirled around and placed her hand against my chest.

“I used to get sent to France on summers to my grandparents’ house. My grandfather is a doctor for babies, a pediatrician,” she said, and paused, unblinking.

“Really?” I asked. A breeze that came through an open window lifted her hair and smelled like pinecones. She stared.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t have to go this summer.”

“Me, too,” she smiled. She started to climb the stairs, then hesitated and turned again.

“Have you ever played doctor with anyone?”

“No.”

“Jessie, my best friend in France, lives next door to my grandparents. We played doctor sometimes. She pretended she was the doctor and I was the patient.”

I was intrigued. I had been to the pediatrician with Sophie once for a routine checkup. We had to take off our clothes and the lady touched our privates. We were embarrassed and we giggled. Then she gave us a sucker and we left.

“What did you do?” I queried, eyebrows arched.

“Maybe we can play sometime and I’ll show you.”

We stood in awkward silence. Again, I had nothing to say.

“Let’s go swimming!” I declared. She nodded and continued up the stairs to her room.
Stacy rummaged through the drawers of a dresser while I dangled my legs off the side of her bed, which was covered with a plush, pink, feather-stuffed comforter embroidered with her initials and silky to the touch. Finding her bathing suit, she tossed it on the floor and pulled out several others for me to choose from. Just as I was about to hop down and cross to the bathing suits, Stacy tore off her shirt and just as swiftly shoved down her shorts, kicking them off from around her ankles. I looked away and felt my face grow hot. I sat too stiff and straight.

Trying to act casual in this pose was a challenge, but I swung my legs and picked at the down comforter underneath me while forcing a relaxed posture by bending nearly double, forehead all but touching my knees, flaunting my embarrassment. But why was I so nervous? Sophie and I had been down to less than our underpants together before without incident or even notice. Still, her sudden and unexpected nakedness warranted at least some awkwardness, though maybe not quite so much. I felt her cross the room in my direction and looked up. Even before my face completed lifting, I was knocked backward onto the bed and pinned at the wrists, Stacy’s blond hair falling into my eyes, my open mouth, her breath on my face. She said nothing.

My stomach hollowed, flipped, registering physically the abruptness of being straddled and hunched over by another girl. The mouth is the altar of the body and all sensation collects there, coating the tongue with cotton. Fear like cement affixes to the roof of the mouth, teeth grip one another, the bones of the jaw contract. I gulped at nothing, almost choked, raced my mind through options of what this might mean. Was it a new game? Doctor? Wrestling? Ten seconds and it’s a knock out? She began moving rhythmically astride my hips, pushing herself up against my trapped wrists and looming higher above to see my face, what my expression revealed.

I began at first to twist about like a worm, my arms wriggling in pursuit of freedom, my legs squirming, careful to avoid imitation of her motion. My weak attempts to escape her hold only made her grip me harder so I writhed and bucked wildly against her rigid, sinewy frame and broke loose. Exploding from the house, I ran down the street back toward Mrs. Walker’s house. When I reached the sidewalk, I tripped and fell straight forward, skinning my hands and knees. I flipped over and peered up at the house. I saw Stacy standing in her bedroom window, watching me. Immediately she jumped away and the curtains fell closed. I got to my feet and limped on, tears burning the back of my eyes. I would not cry; I could not have her see me cry. My stomach felt empty, like aching hunger. So much thrill and fear had left me limp.

I reached Mrs. Walker’s house and sought out my sister. I found her quietly playing with paper dolls we had made together the night before. It was a game we had played since Sophie was big enough to hold scissors. We cut out families with moms and dads and daughters and colored them in with clean, yellow happiness. We penned on their faces various good-natured expressions, but mostly exceedingly genuine smiles. Smiles as impregnable and clear as the paper happiness that formed them. Paper shaped from my hands and Sophie’s: marrowless, humble, two-dimensional life. The permanent contrasted with the accidental. The conjecture of our very own concentrated, essential existence. They contained the best of us. We gave them our hearts, thick and real, and they beat them for us.