Sophie and I didn’t mind Jake as much as some of the other men who had passed through our door before him. He was nice to us and he made enough money from his motorcycle repair shop to support us and even upgraded our lifestyle by a few degrees. There was the house and the school; then Sophie and I got our first new bikes since we were little when our dad had gotten us each one for Christmas. The bikes Jake got for us were better, more expensive bikes then the ones our dad had given us, but they weren’t our favorite colors. Sophie’s was a pink Huffy with a banana seat, a shiny, chrome back bar, and silver and gold tassels off the handgrips. Mine was a Huffy, too, but it was a green 10-speed. I had always wanted a 10-speed and was grateful to get one, but our dad had known what our favorite colors were.
My mom was pregnant within the first few months of their marriage. She seemed so happy. She cut down on smoking, had only one cocktail per day, ate nutritional foods. Her condition seemed to have the opposite effect on Jake. He grew quiet and nervous, spent a lot of time smoking out in the back yard, drank coolers full of beer, even stayed out all night a couple of times without calling. Then they screamed at each other until Mom’s crippling rants would force him to succumb, pledging never to do it again.
When my mom found out she was going to have a boy, she started buying boy everything. At about the same time, Sophie came down with the measles and I soon followed. Our condition grew rather serious and lasted over two weeks. We had measles everywhere, even inside our mouths, and our eyes were too sensitive to be exposed to any light. We stayed locked inside our room and kept it very dark, our mom avoiding us for fear of contaminating the baby.
We needed water. I called through the door for ten minutes asking Mom or Jake to bring it to us. Sophie was burning up.
“OK. Just hold your horses; I’ll get Jake,” my mom called to me from down the hall. “Jake, get in here and get the girls some water!” she called from the window. He was in the back yard smoking. “Jake, you hear me?” she called again. “Jane, he can’t hear me. I’m getting my boots on; I’ll get him,” she yelled. I went to the window and saw him standing at the far end of the yard by the fence. I unlatched the lock and pushed open the window.
“Jake!” I yelled as loud as I could. My voice was too hoarse; he didn’t hear me. I leaned out the window as far as I could. I saw the back door open and my mom step out. The cold air bit my nose.
“Jake!” I shouted again, louder. He turned and looked at me. My mom slipped on a slick patch of ice just outside the back door and fell forward directly onto her stomach. She screamed. Jake ran. Her skirt had flipped up and she was curled on her side clutching her middle, the bottom of her oversized underpants facing me. A gush of liquid burst from between her legs, soaking the cotton and the ground beneath her. She moaned. I screamed. Jake lifted her off the ground and carried her into the house. I ran from my room to the kitchen.
“Get back to your room!” Jake shouted when he saw me. He laid my mother gently on the floor and dialed 911. I ran back into my room, slammed the door, collapsed against it and sobbed. Sophie began crying too, asking what happened. I heard the ambulance come, saw the red lights flash across the snow. I heard them carry my mom out and listened as they pulled away. The house fell silent.
When she gave birth to a soundless, motionless baby boy, the astonishing pain thwarted all zeal for living and wrapped her in a dense gloom. She named her lifeless baby Samuel. His small, flaccid body was cremated and presented to her in a small, bronze urn.
Jake did what he could to soothe her, but to no favorable end. She wept often, carried around Samuel’s ashes, and stayed permanently in bed for months to follow. When Sophie and I started in our new school, I discovered that my homeroom teacher, Sister Angela, had also been a teacher at the school my mom attended growing up. My mom’s reputation, particularly with Sister Angela, cast me in a less-than-flattering light to start out in. Apparently, my mother had gotten into a physical altercation with Sister Angela while in her charge; she said something inappropriate, to which the nun responded by slapping her across the face. My mom promptly slapped the nun back, landing a solid smack along the side of her head before being physically restrained and prevented from striking her again.
On my first day back to school after the death of my baby brother, Sister Angela set me in front of the class and asked me to tell the story of the tragedy that had befallen my family and further provide an explanation of how it related to the sermon we had all heard in mass on Sunday. My family never attended mass, and Sister Angela knew as much. Sitting in a chair in front of the entire class, I felt my bladder expand and bulge while my hands began to sweat and my mouth turned my tongue into a sticky kind of cotton. All the eyes fixed to my face were lasers penetrating my mind and incinerating all coherent thoughts.
“I was supposed to have a baby brother.” I said, almost too softly for even myself to hear. I don’t know how much time passed before my next barely audible utterance: “We had him cremated.”
A few gasps escaped some of the kids and I saw some mouths drop open and stay open before I realized I had said something very wrong. Hot embarrassment rose lava-like up my neck and face and my hands were damp against my lap.
“The Catholic Church is seriously considering cremation as an acceptable alternative to traditional burials now,” Sister Angela offered, addressing the class. I burst from my chair and flew out of the classroom into the hall. Sister Angela was right behind me, catching up to me and grabbing me by the elbow as I headed away. She whirled me around and thrust my head into her, my face smashed sideways against her bosom and her large hands tangled in my hair, holding me there in a confusing, perverse embrace.
During the weeks and months that followed, Jake had been fighting with my mom so much that he got himself an apartment away from us. He was there only about half the time, retreating to it only after a fight with my mom, which took place about once a week.
When I tried to give my mother the measles, it’s as if my life had been spent in a state of simmering. With my skin red and hot to the touch, I sought out vengeance. History is like water, how on the sandy bottom, black objects like holes, magnified four times their size, move and mash in slow shapes. A closer look, just shadows, quivering reflections. If there had ever been a plan for us, this was part of it. I will write what happened exactly as it happened.
A little over three months after Samuel was born and died, I confronted my mother. I came home from school and found the house a wreck, just like every other day. This time it made me angry.
“What if I wanted to bring a friend from school over?” I spoke out loud to the empty room. I found her in her usual place―lying in bed with the covers pulled over her head.
“Mom, I need to talk to you.”
No answer.
“MOM!”
The covers flew off and she bolted upright, hair wild, eyes bloodshot, glaring at me.
“What, goddammit?”
“Get up and help me clean this house!”
“Jane, I don’t need this right now.”
She lay down and started pulling the covers back over her. I walked in and ripped them off the bed.
“You can’t keep doing this! You have to move on!” I felt hotness spread across my neck and face. She stared at me.
“You can try again. You can still have a baby with Jake if that’s what you want. But you’re never going to have anything like this!” I gestured at the disaster area around me. “And I can’t keep doing everything for you! I have to concentrate on school now. It’s important!”
“Oh, Jane!” she shouted, and started crying, “If you and Sophie hadn’t gotten the measles while I was pregnant—”
“Don’t!” I cut her off. She stared at me accusingly, her wild eyes swimming in a red, streaked face framed by a tangled nest of hair.
I walked out, slamming the door behind me.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
Stains When Broken by Force
That summer while I waited for the new school year and the new school, the promise of adventure and a reunion with Stacy, I spent most of my time with Jamie. The latest move had closed half the distance between us, and we were both grateful. He rode his bike to my house and we climbed out my window to sit in the sun, stuffing handfuls of Big League Chew gum in our mouths and popping tar bubbles on the roof. Much of the time we spent together passed in comfortable silence. Our thoughts kept us busy and we were content with just being together.
There comes a point in the chewing life of a wad of gum where it reaches a rubber-like consistency, void of flavor, no longer capable of being pulled over the tongue and braced with the lips for bubble blowing. At this stage, it is necessary to take the wad of gum out of your mouth and stretch it into a thin membrane manually with your fingers, then place it back in your mouth to wrap around your tongue and blow the bubble. Jamie taught me this. Genius! The trick is getting your fingers free enough of tar from popping hot tar bubbles to handle the chewed gum somewhat sanitarily. Wiping them off with your shirt works as long as the tar is still warm and relatively viscous. Otherwise, dragging them across the rough denim of your cut-off jeans works well.
Sitting on the roof one hot Sunday afternoon, the sun teasing beads of sweat from our pores, the breeze running its fingers through our hair, Sophie and Heather running in a sprinkler in the back yard beneath us. Jamie lifted his black, tar-covered fingers to my face and said: “Jessie says this’s what my blood looks like.”
Jessie was Jamie’s new girlfriend. We had spent hours earlier that same afternoon talking about the prospect of kissing and how it would be done.
“Nonsense. You’re blood is red just like mine.”
“How do you know?”
“Because, stupid. All human beings have red blood. Animals, too, for that matter.”
“I’m black.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You never seen my blood.”
“Have you seen your blood?”
“I think so.”
“And was it like tar?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I promise you, it’s not like tar.”
“But how do you know? Jessie says—”
“What is Jessie doing talking to you about blood anyway?”
“She asked me to be her blood brother.”
A hot, slithery length of jealousy snaked its way around my stomach and up to my neck; my face blanched.
“You didn’t, did you?”
“No way. I thought I should be your blood brother.”
Relief.
“What makes you think I want you to be?”
“You’re my best friend! I just thought—”
“I’m kidding. It’s a perfect idea. This way, I can prove to you what color your blood is.”
We went inside and found a needle in my sewing kit. We struck a match and held the tip of the needle in the flame until the matchstick burnt down to my thumb and forefinger. The chrome tip of the needle turned as black as our tarred fingers. Jamie held out his thumb. I took it in my hand and pricked the padded center. It resisted at first, but I pressed harder and twisted the sharp tip. A bright red pearl emerged from the small puncture. We looked up at each other, Jamie smiling brilliantly, the whites of his teeth and eyes glittering against his dark face. He held his thumb carefully so as not to spill the drop of blood while I pricked my own thumb. The pain took my breath in sharply; but because he hadn’t made a sound, I kept myself composed. We pressed our thumbs together and held them there for a full minute.
Neither of us spoke. The moment was much too serious for words. We sat for a few moments longer looking at our blood-covered thumbs, then crawled back out on the roof. Now he really was my brother. I lay back on the shingles, rested my head on my hands, turned my face to the sun, closed my eyes, smiled. I heard Jamie lie down next to me and listened to the sounds of Sophie and Heather laughing below us.
Jamie began talking about his sister and Sophie and how he hoped they would become good friends. His parents had been pressuring him to take Heather with him when he went anywhere; otherwise, she would be left at home alone. I sympathized with him. I could tell he considered her his own responsibility. People would often stare at her when we were out together, drawn to look closer at her twisted mouth and make sure that what they thought they saw had been real. One time in the White Hen, a boy stood and stared in Heather’s direction with his mouth hanging open. Jamie became very defensive, standing in front of her, and glaring back with a scowl. The boy saw him and quickly looked away. Heather slapped Jamie on the back. “Quit standin’ there, Jamie; let’s get some candy,” she said, looking at the rows of sugary snacks, oblivious.
After talking about Sarah and Sophie for a while, Jamie turned the topic to my mom’s new husband. How did I like him? Was he nice to us? Instead, I talked about my mother, her drunken parties and the strange men, her fights with Gram and her empty promises.
“Why don’t you call your Gram, tell her your mom’s being crazy and stupid?” he suggested.
“She’s not stupid,” I said. “She’s not crazy either. She lost her husband. She lost our dad!” I was surprised at my defensiveness.
“All right, take it easy,” he said. “I know it must be hard for her, but she needs to act better, take care of you guys.”
“I know, but I think she’s getting a little better. Jake’s nice. He’s not like the other losers she brought around,” I said.
“Jaaaaaeeeeeeeeeem!” Heather called.
“Yeah,” he called back.
“I’m ready to go! You gotta walk me home!”
“OK, be right down.”
He turned to me and held up his thumb then kissed it and held it against his chest.
“Blood buddies,” he said.
“Blood buddies,” I answered.
He hopped out the window and left. I sank my index finger into a large tar bubble I had been letting grow for at least five minutes and wiped it against my shirt. I looked at my bloody thumb and lay back. I fell asleep under the shade of a maple tree and began to dream.
I was in bed with Sophie asleep when I heard the door opening and looked up to see my mom and a strange man coming in. The strange man walked over to a dark hump on the bedroom floor and began doing something to it. When the door opened wider, light fell across the hump revealing it as the dead body of my father. The strange man was cutting a hole in his chest and pulling out his heart as well as other organs and clumps of veins. My mom was slowly advancing toward me, her eyes wild, her body hunched forward, and her hands reaching out before her in my direction. She was holding something large in her right hand. Soon I could see it was some sort of device with a long, wide, tapered needle and a trigger. When she reached me she grabbed my hand and shot the needle through the meat between my palm and thumb. She pulled the trigger and a large plastic tag released from the device and attached to my hand. As she shot the needle through another part of my hand, I screamed.
“MOM, OH MY GOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT IS IT?”
“It renders stolen garments unusable by releasing a dye stain when the tag is broken by force, thus removing the benefit of stealing the garment,” she droned mechanically without looking at me. I started trying to fight her off but felt incredibly weak as she continued shooting tags into me all up my arm while calmly telling me about the device she was attacking me with in an eerie, low monotone.
“At its heart, the tag has a dye container, comprising a patented glass ampoule with gas pressure designed to explode if broken and thus spray dye over the garment.”
At this she grabbed one of the tags and bit it in a snarling, animal-like manner, crushing the plastic gadget and exploding thick, hot, black tar all over both of us.
When I woke up, I was covered in sweat and could feel the sunburn on every exposed portion of skin. I crawled inside to find Sophie in our room cutting out new paper dolls.
There comes a point in the chewing life of a wad of gum where it reaches a rubber-like consistency, void of flavor, no longer capable of being pulled over the tongue and braced with the lips for bubble blowing. At this stage, it is necessary to take the wad of gum out of your mouth and stretch it into a thin membrane manually with your fingers, then place it back in your mouth to wrap around your tongue and blow the bubble. Jamie taught me this. Genius! The trick is getting your fingers free enough of tar from popping hot tar bubbles to handle the chewed gum somewhat sanitarily. Wiping them off with your shirt works as long as the tar is still warm and relatively viscous. Otherwise, dragging them across the rough denim of your cut-off jeans works well.
Sitting on the roof one hot Sunday afternoon, the sun teasing beads of sweat from our pores, the breeze running its fingers through our hair, Sophie and Heather running in a sprinkler in the back yard beneath us. Jamie lifted his black, tar-covered fingers to my face and said: “Jessie says this’s what my blood looks like.”
Jessie was Jamie’s new girlfriend. We had spent hours earlier that same afternoon talking about the prospect of kissing and how it would be done.
“Nonsense. You’re blood is red just like mine.”
“How do you know?”
“Because, stupid. All human beings have red blood. Animals, too, for that matter.”
“I’m black.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You never seen my blood.”
“Have you seen your blood?”
“I think so.”
“And was it like tar?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I promise you, it’s not like tar.”
“But how do you know? Jessie says—”
“What is Jessie doing talking to you about blood anyway?”
“She asked me to be her blood brother.”
A hot, slithery length of jealousy snaked its way around my stomach and up to my neck; my face blanched.
“You didn’t, did you?”
“No way. I thought I should be your blood brother.”
Relief.
“What makes you think I want you to be?”
“You’re my best friend! I just thought—”
“I’m kidding. It’s a perfect idea. This way, I can prove to you what color your blood is.”
We went inside and found a needle in my sewing kit. We struck a match and held the tip of the needle in the flame until the matchstick burnt down to my thumb and forefinger. The chrome tip of the needle turned as black as our tarred fingers. Jamie held out his thumb. I took it in my hand and pricked the padded center. It resisted at first, but I pressed harder and twisted the sharp tip. A bright red pearl emerged from the small puncture. We looked up at each other, Jamie smiling brilliantly, the whites of his teeth and eyes glittering against his dark face. He held his thumb carefully so as not to spill the drop of blood while I pricked my own thumb. The pain took my breath in sharply; but because he hadn’t made a sound, I kept myself composed. We pressed our thumbs together and held them there for a full minute.
Neither of us spoke. The moment was much too serious for words. We sat for a few moments longer looking at our blood-covered thumbs, then crawled back out on the roof. Now he really was my brother. I lay back on the shingles, rested my head on my hands, turned my face to the sun, closed my eyes, smiled. I heard Jamie lie down next to me and listened to the sounds of Sophie and Heather laughing below us.
Jamie began talking about his sister and Sophie and how he hoped they would become good friends. His parents had been pressuring him to take Heather with him when he went anywhere; otherwise, she would be left at home alone. I sympathized with him. I could tell he considered her his own responsibility. People would often stare at her when we were out together, drawn to look closer at her twisted mouth and make sure that what they thought they saw had been real. One time in the White Hen, a boy stood and stared in Heather’s direction with his mouth hanging open. Jamie became very defensive, standing in front of her, and glaring back with a scowl. The boy saw him and quickly looked away. Heather slapped Jamie on the back. “Quit standin’ there, Jamie; let’s get some candy,” she said, looking at the rows of sugary snacks, oblivious.
After talking about Sarah and Sophie for a while, Jamie turned the topic to my mom’s new husband. How did I like him? Was he nice to us? Instead, I talked about my mother, her drunken parties and the strange men, her fights with Gram and her empty promises.
“Why don’t you call your Gram, tell her your mom’s being crazy and stupid?” he suggested.
“She’s not stupid,” I said. “She’s not crazy either. She lost her husband. She lost our dad!” I was surprised at my defensiveness.
“All right, take it easy,” he said. “I know it must be hard for her, but she needs to act better, take care of you guys.”
“I know, but I think she’s getting a little better. Jake’s nice. He’s not like the other losers she brought around,” I said.
“Jaaaaaeeeeeeeeeem!” Heather called.
“Yeah,” he called back.
“I’m ready to go! You gotta walk me home!”
“OK, be right down.”
He turned to me and held up his thumb then kissed it and held it against his chest.
“Blood buddies,” he said.
“Blood buddies,” I answered.
He hopped out the window and left. I sank my index finger into a large tar bubble I had been letting grow for at least five minutes and wiped it against my shirt. I looked at my bloody thumb and lay back. I fell asleep under the shade of a maple tree and began to dream.
I was in bed with Sophie asleep when I heard the door opening and looked up to see my mom and a strange man coming in. The strange man walked over to a dark hump on the bedroom floor and began doing something to it. When the door opened wider, light fell across the hump revealing it as the dead body of my father. The strange man was cutting a hole in his chest and pulling out his heart as well as other organs and clumps of veins. My mom was slowly advancing toward me, her eyes wild, her body hunched forward, and her hands reaching out before her in my direction. She was holding something large in her right hand. Soon I could see it was some sort of device with a long, wide, tapered needle and a trigger. When she reached me she grabbed my hand and shot the needle through the meat between my palm and thumb. She pulled the trigger and a large plastic tag released from the device and attached to my hand. As she shot the needle through another part of my hand, I screamed.
“MOM, OH MY GOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT IS IT?”
“It renders stolen garments unusable by releasing a dye stain when the tag is broken by force, thus removing the benefit of stealing the garment,” she droned mechanically without looking at me. I started trying to fight her off but felt incredibly weak as she continued shooting tags into me all up my arm while calmly telling me about the device she was attacking me with in an eerie, low monotone.
“At its heart, the tag has a dye container, comprising a patented glass ampoule with gas pressure designed to explode if broken and thus spray dye over the garment.”
At this she grabbed one of the tags and bit it in a snarling, animal-like manner, crushing the plastic gadget and exploding thick, hot, black tar all over both of us.
When I woke up, I was covered in sweat and could feel the sunburn on every exposed portion of skin. I crawled inside to find Sophie in our room cutting out new paper dolls.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
I Don't Fight Like a Girl
Mom worked less and drank more and went through innumerable boyfriends and one night stands until she met Jake Zabrowski, then she stopped working. Jake wasn’t the first relationship she tried after my father but he was the first that stuck. He was tall and thick with a balding head and tattoos. He owned and operated a motorcycle repair shop and sales center and he had connections. Within three months, he and my mother were married. He moved us into his house about two miles away in Lincoln Square.
We had to switch schools again, just three months before the end of the school year. We started out in Carl Von Linne School, me in 7th grade and Sophie in 5th. Before my dad died, Sophie and I went to St. Agnes of Bohemia.
Sending us to Catholic school was something that had always been important to him. We transferred from there to St. Benedictine when we moved to Wellington. This was the first time we had been in a Chicago public school and the difference was striking. The kids in my class were at least a year behind me in math, science, and reading. Sophie’s class didn’t even know about the periodic table of elements. It was impossible to make friends, so Sophie and I kept to ourselves, sitting together at lunch everyday and going home right after school. I learned nothing during my time at that school, save perhaps survival skills and what happens when someone picks on my little sister.
A husky girl decided, one morning before school, to push Sophie around and steal her new transformer watch that she had saved up weeks of allowance to buy. I was in the school at the time getting my books for the day from my locker. Sophie came to find me after it happened. She looked terrified.
“What happened?” I asked. Sophie pushed the heal of her palm into her eyes.
“Becca took my trans… former… wa…!” She started crying. I pulled her around the corner where less people could see us.
I stood with my arm around her, a shield from curious eyes, and waited for her to settle down. Sophie collected herself, caught her breath.
“She said she wanted money. I told her I didn’t have any. She shoved me down and took my transformer watch. She said that would do for today but that I better bring her money tomorrow,” she cried. I lifter her chin and took her by the shoulders.
“Don’t worry, Soph. I’ll get it back. I’ll take care of this,” I said.
Becca Moorer was in my gym class. She was bigger than me, taller and meatier, with long, pink-streaked hair and a stern, handsome face. I was intimidated by her, but she would not get away with bullying my sister; I would talk to her myself.
That afternoon, I watched Becca running laps around the perimeter of the gym, raw fear rising in my chest. I was at least three inches shorter than her; my beanpole physique did not serve as well as her ampleness for striking fear into people. I strode confidently in her direction and stepped in front of her as she rounded the corner and lumbered her way up the white line in my direction. Hands on my hips, my face fixed, deadly serious. She stopped about a foot in front of me, taken off guard; for a moment she seemed merely surprised that I was in her way. She perceived that I was threatening her and growled at me to move out of her way.
“If you ever touch my sister again,” I tried hard to keep my voice steady, “I will end you.” I had no idea from where that particular choice in words had come, nor did I expect that I could ever deliver on that promise, but I couldn’t unsay it, so I acted like I meant it. She stood silent, astonished. I didn’t wait for her to regain her composure; I turned and walked into the locker room.
I made it to my locker, trembling with adrenaline. The door exploded open and Becca came barreling in, half the class following to watch what would happen. I faced her squarely. She smashed her hulking frame against me, chest puffed out, still breathing heavily from her run. I looked up at her. Dark eyes flashing under a glistening, flat forehead, stringy pink stands snaking across it like veins.
“What did you say, Bitch?” A spray of spittle landed on my nose. Her teeth and tongue were visible through her slightly open mouth; my guts twisted.
I placed my hands against her chest and extended them out, gently pushing her arms-length away from me. Her face contorted in fury and her fist clenched.
I watched her meaty arm and balled hand arc through the air toward my face and did nothing. I don’t remember feeling the blow when it connected; the adrenaline had extinguished all pain and fear. She grabbed my shirt, swung again, I shoved her hard and her fist whirred centimeters before my face. She came at me; I grabbed her by the hair at the back of her head and yanked down hard. She was bent backwards, face up, hands flailing. I used my free hand to knock against her face with short, sharp blows, like pounding on a door. Over and over again, I smashed my fist against her face: thud, thud, thud.
I felt her skin crack beneath my fist and saw the blood on my hand. I paused, enough time for her to break free and try to immobilize me in a headlock. I hopped out of reach and continued clobbering her blindly; wild, thrashing slugs that met with her stomach, her arm, her face. She screamed for me to stop, crying now, and the gym teacher grabbed us by the backs of our shirts, one in each hand, and tore us apart.
We stood panting and sweating. A purple-maroon bruise circled a wide cut on her cheekbone, beginning to swell one eye shut. She held her elbow gingerly against her.
“I think you broke my arm!” she whined, her livid face stunned.
I couldn’t move. The other kids dispersed. The teacher told us to get dressed and come to her office. I caught my reflection in the mirror as Becca walked away. There was not a single mark on me. I had beaten Becca Moorer. I had actually kicked her ass.
I sat beside Becca in the principal’s office and listened to her version of what happened.
“Listen, we’re actually friends. We were just playing around, pushing each other, and it got a little outta hand, OK? We don’t mean no harm, really! Right, Jane?” She leaned with her elbow on the armrest of the chair, trying to cover her swollen eye casually with her hand. I just stared at her.
“Is that true, Jane?” Mr. Fisher asked me. He was a short, dark man with black eyes. His left arm was too short and it rested limply across his belly. I nodded my head.
“That’s not what I heard,” he said, “sounds to me like it was a real knock ‘em down drag ‘em out fight.”
“No!” said Becca, laughing. I gave a nervous laugh.
“Normally,” he said, and paused, leaning back in his chair and placing his feet up on the corner of his desk, “I give out a week to three weeks at-home suspension for any fights.” We waited for the punishment sentence.
“I appreciate that you’re making peace with each other here and I trust this won’t happen again—” Another pregnant pause.
“So I’m giving you a one day in-school suspension. You can serve it tomorrow.
All of your class work will be delivered to you in the detention room.”
“Aw, come on! Can’t you just give us like seven detentions instead?” Becca whined.
“No!” he barked. “Suspension is mandatory for fighting. This is minimal, believe me; be grateful!”
Walking down the hall to our classes a minute later, Becca slapped my back and said: “We cool, man?”
“I think we’re fine,” I said. “But I want you to give my sister her watch back and apologize to her.” She nodded, smiled, and stuck out her hand. I shook it.
After school, I met Sophie in our usual place to walk home. She stood waiting with her lunch box and stared wonderingly at me as I approached.
“How did you do it, Jane? She looked like someone threw her down the stairs!”
I laughed and threw my arm around her.
We walked home buoyantly, brought to life by the miracle of what had unfolded. I told her the whole story, leaving nothing out. Sophie squealed in pleasure at the description I gave her of knocking on Becca’s face with my fist, and shrieked in laughter when I told her how Becca whined and sniveled that I broke her arm. I surprised myself with the level of detail I recalled. I was drunk with adrenaline, which itself amazed me. How could human beings have a hormone released at the precise moment when they need extraordinary amounts of strength, courage, and fearlessness the most? Such intricate, wondrous creatures we are.
The suspension was the most peaceful day I had at that school.
We didn’t suffer long there because Jake knew some people and got us on a waiting list for the Northside Catholic Acadamy. Within a month, Sophie and I were accepted into the noble aristocracy. I was elated; it was the same school that Stacy attended.
We had to switch schools again, just three months before the end of the school year. We started out in Carl Von Linne School, me in 7th grade and Sophie in 5th. Before my dad died, Sophie and I went to St. Agnes of Bohemia.
Sending us to Catholic school was something that had always been important to him. We transferred from there to St. Benedictine when we moved to Wellington. This was the first time we had been in a Chicago public school and the difference was striking. The kids in my class were at least a year behind me in math, science, and reading. Sophie’s class didn’t even know about the periodic table of elements. It was impossible to make friends, so Sophie and I kept to ourselves, sitting together at lunch everyday and going home right after school. I learned nothing during my time at that school, save perhaps survival skills and what happens when someone picks on my little sister.
A husky girl decided, one morning before school, to push Sophie around and steal her new transformer watch that she had saved up weeks of allowance to buy. I was in the school at the time getting my books for the day from my locker. Sophie came to find me after it happened. She looked terrified.
“What happened?” I asked. Sophie pushed the heal of her palm into her eyes.
“Becca took my trans… former… wa…!” She started crying. I pulled her around the corner where less people could see us.
I stood with my arm around her, a shield from curious eyes, and waited for her to settle down. Sophie collected herself, caught her breath.
“She said she wanted money. I told her I didn’t have any. She shoved me down and took my transformer watch. She said that would do for today but that I better bring her money tomorrow,” she cried. I lifter her chin and took her by the shoulders.
“Don’t worry, Soph. I’ll get it back. I’ll take care of this,” I said.
Becca Moorer was in my gym class. She was bigger than me, taller and meatier, with long, pink-streaked hair and a stern, handsome face. I was intimidated by her, but she would not get away with bullying my sister; I would talk to her myself.
That afternoon, I watched Becca running laps around the perimeter of the gym, raw fear rising in my chest. I was at least three inches shorter than her; my beanpole physique did not serve as well as her ampleness for striking fear into people. I strode confidently in her direction and stepped in front of her as she rounded the corner and lumbered her way up the white line in my direction. Hands on my hips, my face fixed, deadly serious. She stopped about a foot in front of me, taken off guard; for a moment she seemed merely surprised that I was in her way. She perceived that I was threatening her and growled at me to move out of her way.
“If you ever touch my sister again,” I tried hard to keep my voice steady, “I will end you.” I had no idea from where that particular choice in words had come, nor did I expect that I could ever deliver on that promise, but I couldn’t unsay it, so I acted like I meant it. She stood silent, astonished. I didn’t wait for her to regain her composure; I turned and walked into the locker room.
I made it to my locker, trembling with adrenaline. The door exploded open and Becca came barreling in, half the class following to watch what would happen. I faced her squarely. She smashed her hulking frame against me, chest puffed out, still breathing heavily from her run. I looked up at her. Dark eyes flashing under a glistening, flat forehead, stringy pink stands snaking across it like veins.
“What did you say, Bitch?” A spray of spittle landed on my nose. Her teeth and tongue were visible through her slightly open mouth; my guts twisted.
I placed my hands against her chest and extended them out, gently pushing her arms-length away from me. Her face contorted in fury and her fist clenched.
I watched her meaty arm and balled hand arc through the air toward my face and did nothing. I don’t remember feeling the blow when it connected; the adrenaline had extinguished all pain and fear. She grabbed my shirt, swung again, I shoved her hard and her fist whirred centimeters before my face. She came at me; I grabbed her by the hair at the back of her head and yanked down hard. She was bent backwards, face up, hands flailing. I used my free hand to knock against her face with short, sharp blows, like pounding on a door. Over and over again, I smashed my fist against her face: thud, thud, thud.
I felt her skin crack beneath my fist and saw the blood on my hand. I paused, enough time for her to break free and try to immobilize me in a headlock. I hopped out of reach and continued clobbering her blindly; wild, thrashing slugs that met with her stomach, her arm, her face. She screamed for me to stop, crying now, and the gym teacher grabbed us by the backs of our shirts, one in each hand, and tore us apart.
We stood panting and sweating. A purple-maroon bruise circled a wide cut on her cheekbone, beginning to swell one eye shut. She held her elbow gingerly against her.
“I think you broke my arm!” she whined, her livid face stunned.
I couldn’t move. The other kids dispersed. The teacher told us to get dressed and come to her office. I caught my reflection in the mirror as Becca walked away. There was not a single mark on me. I had beaten Becca Moorer. I had actually kicked her ass.
I sat beside Becca in the principal’s office and listened to her version of what happened.
“Listen, we’re actually friends. We were just playing around, pushing each other, and it got a little outta hand, OK? We don’t mean no harm, really! Right, Jane?” She leaned with her elbow on the armrest of the chair, trying to cover her swollen eye casually with her hand. I just stared at her.
“Is that true, Jane?” Mr. Fisher asked me. He was a short, dark man with black eyes. His left arm was too short and it rested limply across his belly. I nodded my head.
“That’s not what I heard,” he said, “sounds to me like it was a real knock ‘em down drag ‘em out fight.”
“No!” said Becca, laughing. I gave a nervous laugh.
“Normally,” he said, and paused, leaning back in his chair and placing his feet up on the corner of his desk, “I give out a week to three weeks at-home suspension for any fights.” We waited for the punishment sentence.
“I appreciate that you’re making peace with each other here and I trust this won’t happen again—” Another pregnant pause.
“So I’m giving you a one day in-school suspension. You can serve it tomorrow.
All of your class work will be delivered to you in the detention room.”
“Aw, come on! Can’t you just give us like seven detentions instead?” Becca whined.
“No!” he barked. “Suspension is mandatory for fighting. This is minimal, believe me; be grateful!”
Walking down the hall to our classes a minute later, Becca slapped my back and said: “We cool, man?”
“I think we’re fine,” I said. “But I want you to give my sister her watch back and apologize to her.” She nodded, smiled, and stuck out her hand. I shook it.
After school, I met Sophie in our usual place to walk home. She stood waiting with her lunch box and stared wonderingly at me as I approached.
“How did you do it, Jane? She looked like someone threw her down the stairs!”
I laughed and threw my arm around her.
We walked home buoyantly, brought to life by the miracle of what had unfolded. I told her the whole story, leaving nothing out. Sophie squealed in pleasure at the description I gave her of knocking on Becca’s face with my fist, and shrieked in laughter when I told her how Becca whined and sniveled that I broke her arm. I surprised myself with the level of detail I recalled. I was drunk with adrenaline, which itself amazed me. How could human beings have a hormone released at the precise moment when they need extraordinary amounts of strength, courage, and fearlessness the most? Such intricate, wondrous creatures we are.
The suspension was the most peaceful day I had at that school.
We didn’t suffer long there because Jake knew some people and got us on a waiting list for the Northside Catholic Acadamy. Within a month, Sophie and I were accepted into the noble aristocracy. I was elated; it was the same school that Stacy attended.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Hazy, Quick, Gone
In that childhood home where I lived when my father died, there are sound shoots--channels for the traveling of voices originating from any point in the house to be heard quite clearly at any other point. Through the front door is a small entry way, beyond which is the living room separated from the kitchen by a thin wall with a narrow, arched doorway. To the left of the living room broke off a short hallway connecting my parents’ bedroom to mine and Sophie’s. Our two rooms shared an inside wall and in my parents’ room, directly opposite this shared wall, was the door to the stairs leading down to the basement and to my father’s private room. It was that room and that stairwell that began to produce the sounds a few weeks after my dad died.
Sometimes, from the basement door there was a scratching or tapping. Sometimes we’d hear a bump or clatter from the private room. Sometimes, when we were sleeping, we’d wake up to frustrated moans from the basement echoing in the upstairs rooms. Other times, so much silence that I wrote it down: “March 3rd, no noise.”
I woke in my bed one night hearing a rumbling of something like thunder. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I knew I had been dreaming a terrible dream although I could not remember its details. Only that bleeding, severed limbs lay in piles all around me and I was unable to breathe while one amputated hand clasped my esophagus closed. My back was wet with sweat, pasting my shirt against my skin.
The thunder was a mystery. It was not storming outside and it was deep into the night closing in on morning, maybe 3 or 4 am, a quiet hour even for our neighborhood. Then I heard the muffled, unmistakable sounds of cartoons seeping through the walls from the living room. I got up and crept slowly down the hall to investigate the source. Did my mom fall asleep watching TV? Only my dad ever watched cartoons. As I cautiously inched down the hall, I stopped moving and looked down at my feet framed by the brown, friction-worn carpet. It was the Smurfs. I closed my eyes as I remembered how, after watching an episode with him, my dad took Sophie and me out in the back yard to a patch of wild mushrooms growing among the grass and dandelions.
“They live down in there,” he whispered to us, pointing at the ground.
“They’re too small to see, but be careful where you step; you might wipe out a village they just built,” he said, looking at Sophie. Sophie’s eyes grew and she stared at the mushrooms.
“Can they hear us?” she asked.
“Sure they can, but they’re very tiny so their ears can only pick up certain tones,” he said, glancing at me with smiling eyes. Sophie bent down, cupping her hand around her mouth, and shouted: “Papa Smurf! Don’t be scared! Can you hear me, Papa Smurf?”
My dad laughed and scooped Sophie up in his arms.
“Let’s leave Papa Smurf and the rest of the Smurfs alone. We can watch them on TV again later.” I knew there were no Smurfs in the mushrooms, but I appreciated my dad’s game and how much it pleased Sophie.
The sound of the cartoon that night, however, was entirely humorless, melancholy, spooky even. But why was it on? I imagined his skeleton, having escaped its flesh and having dug itself out of the earth, had come home to resume his living habits and was now sitting in his chair watching the Smurfs.
I unplanted my feet and stepped into the living room facing the back of his chair and the dark, blank, mute screen of the television. With echoes of the cartoon, the repetition of soft musical phrases still humming around in my brain, I stood taut in the paralyzing darkness and silence. I stood for several minutes waiting for something to happen. Light from the window bisected a wall of shadow diagonally, leaving his chair equally divided into chill blue light and crouched darkness.
There were other incidents over the course of three months. The phone rang and, when answered, produced indecipherable shouting and moaning sounds drowning within thick static. Once my mom claimed to answer the phone and hear my dad’s voice on the other end, saying her name. She slammed down the receiver and unplugged the phone only to have it ring again. That time it went unanswered. The lights turned off and on by themselves. Miscellaneous items were mysteriously moved or disappeared completely.
Gram came over to bless the house with holy water and an old Polish prayer, asking the spirit to leave. When she was younger, Gram had bought a house from a deceased woman’s daughter. My mom, Grace, and Joe were all under age 10 and Grampa was working all the time, same as always. He usually has two or three jobs at a time; back then he was a hot dog vendor and a car salesman. When they moved into that house, Gram sometimes heard noises in the attic. Thinking it might have been stored items shifting in their containers and boxes, she cleaned out the entire attic just to eliminate that as a possible cause. That night she heard the most distinctive noise of all: the unmistakable footfalls of a person walking across the floor above.
She got out of bed to go look for who might be in the attic and found nothing but an old pair of red high-heeled shoes. The next day she called the deceased woman’s daughter and asked her to come over. Gram showed her the shoes and asked her if she recognized them.
“Yes,” the daughter said, “those were my mother’s! Where on earth did you get them?”
“I found them in my attic! Smack in the middle of the floor after I emptied the whole thing out! Now there was nothin’ up there, I’m tellin’ you, nothin’!” The woman stared at Gram and shook her head.
“What changes have you made around here?” she asked.
“All kinds!” Gram said, “well, I rearranged the back yard and replanted the garden, and . . .”
“You didn’t!”
“What?”
“The garden. My mother never let anyone touch her garden. You shouldn’t have done that . . .”
“Now you listen here! I’ll do as I please; this is my house!”
Gram showed the daughter out and bid her good riddance. Later that same day she went to the local butcher shop where she had an acquaintanceship with the clerk, an old Polish woman with a fine mustache, a hairnet packed with white locks, and a thick accent.
“What wrong?” asked the Polish woman.
“Oh, nothing. I got this problem with my house is all.”
“What the problem?”
“Well, I keep on hearin’ these noises in my attic so’s I cleaned the damn thing out. Next night I hear someone walkin’ up there and I find these pair a heels!” Gram was anxious to change the subject, not expecting the Polish woman to believe her.
But she said, “Oh, you have restless spirit there. That very common in Poland.”
“It is?” Gram asked, stunned.
“Oh, yes. You just need say this prayer, then sprinkle holy water from church in all corners. That make spirit rest.” The Polish woman wrote down the prayer and gave it to Gram. She decided to carry out the old woman’s ritual, though she admitted she felt silly. That night she woke up and saw the foggy impression of a woman in the corner of her room.
She shook Grampa and woke him, pointing to the ghost when he grouchily asked her what was going on. She says he jumped and yelled out when he saw the ghost, but he claims he never saw a thing. Gram swore it was the truth, and that after the ghost hung there suspended in the air of their bedroom for several minutes looking at them, it simply faded away, never to return. This was why she came to our house packing holy water and the prayer.
She walked into the house looking very grave.
“Gram!” Sophie yelled and ran toward her. Gram held up her hand palm out and put her finger to her lips.
“Shhh! You’ll disturb the spirit,” she said. Sophie stopped, looked hurt and confused.
“What is she talking about?” She asked me softly.
“Dad,” I whispered. I shrugged and winked, reassuring her with an amused smile. Gram walked into the middle of the room and carefully unfolded her paper.
“Spirit of unrest, hail. Hail, holy Lady, most holy queen, Mary, mother of God, commands you now to leave this place.”
“Gram, I though it was an old Polish prayer,” Sophie said. Gram shot her an angry look and pressed her finger squarely to her lips. Sophie again looked at me. I nodded and winked, gestured toward Gram who had returned to her paper.
“You were chosen by the most high father in heaven, consecrated by him, with his most holy beloved son and the holy spirit, the comforter. On you descended and still remain all the fullness of grace and every good. To our Lord I commit you. Go now. Amen,” she read loudly, holding the vial of water out in front of her. She uncapped the vial and walked, slowly and deliberately, to each corner of the room where she splashed some of the water out and mumbled, “hail, oh spirit.” She repeated this for every corner in every room in the house. We followed her and watched; waiting for any sign of the ghost of our dad. When she had sprinkled every corner in the house, she capped the vial and slipped it in her pocket.
“That’s it, girls. You won’t have no Spirit in this house no more,” she said.
“Gram, I thought that prayer…” Sophie began.
“It is a Polish prayer, dear,” Gram said, sounding annoyed, “It’s what the old lady wrote down for me and it works!” She insisted. Sophie didn’t say another word.
I never understood why she addressed the ghost of my father as Spirit, when it was so obviously my father. Maybe that’s the reason it didn’t work. I thought he would have respected the authority of holy water even if Gram didn’t. She claims to this day that it did work. Perhaps there was a short period of rest directly following her ritual, but it didn’t last. On the day of my first communion, about 13 weeks after his death, we had the worst time of all.
It happened at St. Wenceslas Church. My father had been baptized there, attended mass there, married my mother there, had Sophie and me baptized there, and was laid to rest there, his grave marked by a small metal cross like all the rest, distinguished only by the name etched on the memorial stone. Walking by that churchyard in my little white dress, I felt consumed by the awareness of his dead body contained in that very ground. I wondered at its process of decay, how it might look at this stage and if the glue they used to keep his eyes shut in the coffin had worn off, allowing the lids to pull back, revealing swollen white orbs, the pupils rolled up toward the top of his head. I couldn’t look; I kept my eyes riveted on the face of the main church building.
Stained-glass, Roman Gothic window panes, German style towers, and common, rural America bricks. Although my first communion took place in that same building, unlike my dad, we did not attend regular mass. My connection to it, I knew, was through him.
At the house, following the Communion ceremony, Jamie and I were sitting together on the couch in the midst of about six or seven family guests including my aunts and uncles. The front door stood open allowing a fresh breeze in and serving as an open invitation to any newly arriving company come to congratulate me on my initiation to the Catholic Church. While sitting around in the living room, the radio on the mantle kept turning on and off randomly. Jamie looked nervous and glanced around the room:
“Someone got a remote control for that thing?” he asked.
“There’s no remote for that radio,” I said.
“You know about Jane’s daddy,” my Aunt Grace said, “he’s still hangin’ around here is all.”
“Why don’t we go into the kitchen, everybody?” my mom yelled out, overhearing the conversation. We all filed into the kitchen while my mom stood with her back to the door and her hand on the door handle. When the room cleared, she pulled the door closed, leaning into it and whispering through clenched teeth loud enough for me to hear: “Cut this shit out!”
I took Jamie into my bedroom while the adults finished their coffee and cake calmly around the kitchen table. After that day, we began plans to move out of my father’s house and back into Gram and Grampa’s four-flat.
Jamie didn’t take the news well. It was the very first time I ever witnessed him cry.
“I’ll never see you,” he whimpered. He stepped on a clump of grass; a shock of green sprang up around his shoe.
“Nonsense.” I grabbed his hand.
“In the summer we can ride our bikes and meet halfway. And when it’s cold we’ll take a cab…”
He dropped my hand, shoved both of his into the pockets of his beat-up jeans, kicked the dirt. “Where do we get money for a cab?”
“We’ll take the bus, then.”
He looked down. So much sadness about him. I wanted him to come with us. I didn’t know what to say.
“Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord why don’t weeeeeeeee?” I bellowed, out of key.
He looked up at me, mouth curved down, eyes laughing. He looked back down. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
“Love you.”
He looked up. “Love you, too.”
His friendship filled me like blood. Words we found and spoke to one another, the pulse.
Sometimes, from the basement door there was a scratching or tapping. Sometimes we’d hear a bump or clatter from the private room. Sometimes, when we were sleeping, we’d wake up to frustrated moans from the basement echoing in the upstairs rooms. Other times, so much silence that I wrote it down: “March 3rd, no noise.”
I woke in my bed one night hearing a rumbling of something like thunder. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I knew I had been dreaming a terrible dream although I could not remember its details. Only that bleeding, severed limbs lay in piles all around me and I was unable to breathe while one amputated hand clasped my esophagus closed. My back was wet with sweat, pasting my shirt against my skin.
The thunder was a mystery. It was not storming outside and it was deep into the night closing in on morning, maybe 3 or 4 am, a quiet hour even for our neighborhood. Then I heard the muffled, unmistakable sounds of cartoons seeping through the walls from the living room. I got up and crept slowly down the hall to investigate the source. Did my mom fall asleep watching TV? Only my dad ever watched cartoons. As I cautiously inched down the hall, I stopped moving and looked down at my feet framed by the brown, friction-worn carpet. It was the Smurfs. I closed my eyes as I remembered how, after watching an episode with him, my dad took Sophie and me out in the back yard to a patch of wild mushrooms growing among the grass and dandelions.
“They live down in there,” he whispered to us, pointing at the ground.
“They’re too small to see, but be careful where you step; you might wipe out a village they just built,” he said, looking at Sophie. Sophie’s eyes grew and she stared at the mushrooms.
“Can they hear us?” she asked.
“Sure they can, but they’re very tiny so their ears can only pick up certain tones,” he said, glancing at me with smiling eyes. Sophie bent down, cupping her hand around her mouth, and shouted: “Papa Smurf! Don’t be scared! Can you hear me, Papa Smurf?”
My dad laughed and scooped Sophie up in his arms.
“Let’s leave Papa Smurf and the rest of the Smurfs alone. We can watch them on TV again later.” I knew there were no Smurfs in the mushrooms, but I appreciated my dad’s game and how much it pleased Sophie.
The sound of the cartoon that night, however, was entirely humorless, melancholy, spooky even. But why was it on? I imagined his skeleton, having escaped its flesh and having dug itself out of the earth, had come home to resume his living habits and was now sitting in his chair watching the Smurfs.
I unplanted my feet and stepped into the living room facing the back of his chair and the dark, blank, mute screen of the television. With echoes of the cartoon, the repetition of soft musical phrases still humming around in my brain, I stood taut in the paralyzing darkness and silence. I stood for several minutes waiting for something to happen. Light from the window bisected a wall of shadow diagonally, leaving his chair equally divided into chill blue light and crouched darkness.
There were other incidents over the course of three months. The phone rang and, when answered, produced indecipherable shouting and moaning sounds drowning within thick static. Once my mom claimed to answer the phone and hear my dad’s voice on the other end, saying her name. She slammed down the receiver and unplugged the phone only to have it ring again. That time it went unanswered. The lights turned off and on by themselves. Miscellaneous items were mysteriously moved or disappeared completely.
Gram came over to bless the house with holy water and an old Polish prayer, asking the spirit to leave. When she was younger, Gram had bought a house from a deceased woman’s daughter. My mom, Grace, and Joe were all under age 10 and Grampa was working all the time, same as always. He usually has two or three jobs at a time; back then he was a hot dog vendor and a car salesman. When they moved into that house, Gram sometimes heard noises in the attic. Thinking it might have been stored items shifting in their containers and boxes, she cleaned out the entire attic just to eliminate that as a possible cause. That night she heard the most distinctive noise of all: the unmistakable footfalls of a person walking across the floor above.
She got out of bed to go look for who might be in the attic and found nothing but an old pair of red high-heeled shoes. The next day she called the deceased woman’s daughter and asked her to come over. Gram showed her the shoes and asked her if she recognized them.
“Yes,” the daughter said, “those were my mother’s! Where on earth did you get them?”
“I found them in my attic! Smack in the middle of the floor after I emptied the whole thing out! Now there was nothin’ up there, I’m tellin’ you, nothin’!” The woman stared at Gram and shook her head.
“What changes have you made around here?” she asked.
“All kinds!” Gram said, “well, I rearranged the back yard and replanted the garden, and . . .”
“You didn’t!”
“What?”
“The garden. My mother never let anyone touch her garden. You shouldn’t have done that . . .”
“Now you listen here! I’ll do as I please; this is my house!”
Gram showed the daughter out and bid her good riddance. Later that same day she went to the local butcher shop where she had an acquaintanceship with the clerk, an old Polish woman with a fine mustache, a hairnet packed with white locks, and a thick accent.
“What wrong?” asked the Polish woman.
“Oh, nothing. I got this problem with my house is all.”
“What the problem?”
“Well, I keep on hearin’ these noises in my attic so’s I cleaned the damn thing out. Next night I hear someone walkin’ up there and I find these pair a heels!” Gram was anxious to change the subject, not expecting the Polish woman to believe her.
But she said, “Oh, you have restless spirit there. That very common in Poland.”
“It is?” Gram asked, stunned.
“Oh, yes. You just need say this prayer, then sprinkle holy water from church in all corners. That make spirit rest.” The Polish woman wrote down the prayer and gave it to Gram. She decided to carry out the old woman’s ritual, though she admitted she felt silly. That night she woke up and saw the foggy impression of a woman in the corner of her room.
She shook Grampa and woke him, pointing to the ghost when he grouchily asked her what was going on. She says he jumped and yelled out when he saw the ghost, but he claims he never saw a thing. Gram swore it was the truth, and that after the ghost hung there suspended in the air of their bedroom for several minutes looking at them, it simply faded away, never to return. This was why she came to our house packing holy water and the prayer.
She walked into the house looking very grave.
“Gram!” Sophie yelled and ran toward her. Gram held up her hand palm out and put her finger to her lips.
“Shhh! You’ll disturb the spirit,” she said. Sophie stopped, looked hurt and confused.
“What is she talking about?” She asked me softly.
“Dad,” I whispered. I shrugged and winked, reassuring her with an amused smile. Gram walked into the middle of the room and carefully unfolded her paper.
“Spirit of unrest, hail. Hail, holy Lady, most holy queen, Mary, mother of God, commands you now to leave this place.”
“Gram, I though it was an old Polish prayer,” Sophie said. Gram shot her an angry look and pressed her finger squarely to her lips. Sophie again looked at me. I nodded and winked, gestured toward Gram who had returned to her paper.
“You were chosen by the most high father in heaven, consecrated by him, with his most holy beloved son and the holy spirit, the comforter. On you descended and still remain all the fullness of grace and every good. To our Lord I commit you. Go now. Amen,” she read loudly, holding the vial of water out in front of her. She uncapped the vial and walked, slowly and deliberately, to each corner of the room where she splashed some of the water out and mumbled, “hail, oh spirit.” She repeated this for every corner in every room in the house. We followed her and watched; waiting for any sign of the ghost of our dad. When she had sprinkled every corner in the house, she capped the vial and slipped it in her pocket.
“That’s it, girls. You won’t have no Spirit in this house no more,” she said.
“Gram, I thought that prayer…” Sophie began.
“It is a Polish prayer, dear,” Gram said, sounding annoyed, “It’s what the old lady wrote down for me and it works!” She insisted. Sophie didn’t say another word.
I never understood why she addressed the ghost of my father as Spirit, when it was so obviously my father. Maybe that’s the reason it didn’t work. I thought he would have respected the authority of holy water even if Gram didn’t. She claims to this day that it did work. Perhaps there was a short period of rest directly following her ritual, but it didn’t last. On the day of my first communion, about 13 weeks after his death, we had the worst time of all.
It happened at St. Wenceslas Church. My father had been baptized there, attended mass there, married my mother there, had Sophie and me baptized there, and was laid to rest there, his grave marked by a small metal cross like all the rest, distinguished only by the name etched on the memorial stone. Walking by that churchyard in my little white dress, I felt consumed by the awareness of his dead body contained in that very ground. I wondered at its process of decay, how it might look at this stage and if the glue they used to keep his eyes shut in the coffin had worn off, allowing the lids to pull back, revealing swollen white orbs, the pupils rolled up toward the top of his head. I couldn’t look; I kept my eyes riveted on the face of the main church building.
Stained-glass, Roman Gothic window panes, German style towers, and common, rural America bricks. Although my first communion took place in that same building, unlike my dad, we did not attend regular mass. My connection to it, I knew, was through him.
At the house, following the Communion ceremony, Jamie and I were sitting together on the couch in the midst of about six or seven family guests including my aunts and uncles. The front door stood open allowing a fresh breeze in and serving as an open invitation to any newly arriving company come to congratulate me on my initiation to the Catholic Church. While sitting around in the living room, the radio on the mantle kept turning on and off randomly. Jamie looked nervous and glanced around the room:
“Someone got a remote control for that thing?” he asked.
“There’s no remote for that radio,” I said.
“You know about Jane’s daddy,” my Aunt Grace said, “he’s still hangin’ around here is all.”
“Why don’t we go into the kitchen, everybody?” my mom yelled out, overhearing the conversation. We all filed into the kitchen while my mom stood with her back to the door and her hand on the door handle. When the room cleared, she pulled the door closed, leaning into it and whispering through clenched teeth loud enough for me to hear: “Cut this shit out!”
I took Jamie into my bedroom while the adults finished their coffee and cake calmly around the kitchen table. After that day, we began plans to move out of my father’s house and back into Gram and Grampa’s four-flat.
Jamie didn’t take the news well. It was the very first time I ever witnessed him cry.
“I’ll never see you,” he whimpered. He stepped on a clump of grass; a shock of green sprang up around his shoe.
“Nonsense.” I grabbed his hand.
“In the summer we can ride our bikes and meet halfway. And when it’s cold we’ll take a cab…”
He dropped my hand, shoved both of his into the pockets of his beat-up jeans, kicked the dirt. “Where do we get money for a cab?”
“We’ll take the bus, then.”
He looked down. So much sadness about him. I wanted him to come with us. I didn’t know what to say.
“Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord why don’t weeeeeeeee?” I bellowed, out of key.
He looked up at me, mouth curved down, eyes laughing. He looked back down. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
“Love you.”
He looked up. “Love you, too.”
His friendship filled me like blood. Words we found and spoke to one another, the pulse.
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Origins of Guilt
Two weeks after Missy died, Sophie and I were approaching our apartment building after our first day back to school. I could sense from a block away that something was very wrong. I slowed my pace and considered turning back, unwilling to face whatever was waiting for us at home. The first thing I saw was my mom sitting on the front steps, my Aunt Grace close beside her. When Grace saw us approaching, she placed a hand on my mom’s shoulder and said, “Christine, the girls are coming.”
I took Sophie’s hand as we approached. My mom came to us and stooping down, put her arms around our shoulders.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
“Is it about Daddy?” Sophie asked.
She looked at Sophie silently for several moments, watery gleaming eyes fixed absently on her face.
“Daddy’s gone, honey. He died today. He had a heart attack.”
As these words formed and spilled from her lips, the tears, fat, bulbous drops, slipped from her eyes. Her face was red.
Sophie began to sob and my mom turned to her, embraced her. I walked out into the road, past the people, past the sounds, the weeping. I don’t know when my walk became a run. It happened fluidly, my feet gliding above ground between falls. I closed my eyes and kept running. A dark ledge against a dark void. I leaned out just far enough, peering over to regard plain, white points of light, some steady, some madly rushing to catch each other, some unbridled as chaos, some darting toward collision, and others standing silent as sentinels, overseeing the whole melee, unable to affect or change the course, but destined to watch until even their own light dies. A wave of vertigo hit me and I carefully pulled my eyes back open, sought out a deep breath; instead I listened, imagining I could hear the low moan of the wind as it slipped between buildings, increasing in speed as it lifted the breath from my gut up through to my throat. I ran, the grass beneath my feet a blur of green.
Something might have been carrying me for hours to pound out old rhythms in staccato breath; to rain blows in hammering footfalls meant to detach from the earth rather than to connect; a soporific series of repetitive motions--satori.
I was aware of a large knot lodged in my chest, rising, indicating the tied-up presence of a great pain that contained so much. I could not move but to move twice as fast; there was no such thing as slow. I had made my way down the Chicago River. Every so often I looked around and registered the beauty, the amazing face of air, water, earth. My hands were stiff, fingers unmoving. I wondered then if I had left my body; if my spirit had just leaped up above my head to hum and vibrate with the other realms.
The sky turned dark and the moon appeared. That moon and those clouds, even the stars and that night sky were all tattooed with images from so many years. A constellation of pain bodies holding little girl guilt in its seams. As I ran I was certain I had come through some real and terrible time warp, some rip in the fabric of space where he was alive and—
No. Forget it. He was dead.
No time passed, it seemed, between that run and the wake. They are bumped up against each other in my mind like a single memory, separated by a semicolon or a dash. Sophie and I were in dresses. Mine was dark gray cotton with a white collar and white cuffs, the left one smudged with my mother’s red fingernail polish. Sophie wore her Easter dress, a poly satin blue garment with pearl-white beads along the neckline. My mom put on makeup and what she called her black mourning clothes.
My dad lay there in a gray three-piece suit. I had never seen him look so dressed up. Sophie and I stood and stared. His hair had been washed and made to lie neatly, not one strand out of place. His face had an artificial healthy glow provided by expertly applied cosmetics. I thought about the people whose job it was to tend to his hair and makeup and wondered what they had thought of their work. Did they imagine that this was the way he looked while he was alive? Did they think his natural appearance included shiny, soft hair and glowing skin? And how would his yellow-specked hazel eyes have appeared if he were to open them at that very moment and smile?
“I feel like he’s going to pop up any minute and say: ‘Just kidding!’” my mom said to the funeral director.
I became aware then that I had been standing on my toes, bent slightly forward over the coffin, rigidly studying him for quite some time. I sank back on my heels.
We were taken home after the wake because our mom didn’t think we should attend the funeral, but if anyone lacked the means to control her emotions, it was she.
I was both angry and piteous toward her for going alone. I felt too weak to resist, too weak for temper. I remember feeling helpless, it was a strong desire to stand aside and just let the pieces fall, their effortless migration somehow mesmerizing; events giving rise to still more events, gaining force and strength through their motion, shaping in each moment a new subset of possible outcomes. Bound as I was to that formula, the fate of my life in its cold calculation, I had not the momentum of will to catch up, to hold on. There was nothing at all to hold. All surfaces had become round, slick; nothing could allow capture or grip, only sad, hollow grasps.
Later that evening while my mom sat with Sophie, I walked over to my grandparents’ house where he died and stood outside. I remembered how Gram told Grandma that he was going to die if they didn’t help him. That house, tall and skinny, the temple of his death, stood as a testimony from that day forward, ominously affirming how utterly without help he remained until the very end. I saw people standing in the driveway, weeping. I saw the strong, wide back of my uncle and the buxom frame of a woman I didn’t know, her head darkly lowered, patient tears slowly seeping out of broad eyes. I witnessed them as if softly praying (hardly able to find a normal breath, the verdict so irreversible) for her to be comforted. He just let her weep. He did not offer false hope.
I felt the ground holding me up, as if the earth alone were capable of enduring, bravely and quietly, the unsoothable, constant hum of human grief. Suddenly I felt a great although contradictory desire to praise God. The matter of a body unliving will disintegrate into dust and soil, just not right away. Eventually it will join the surface of all creation, absorbing and upholding the byproducts of life, hope, the disappearance of hope, the fullness of endings, the absence of feeling. No despairing, just holding until it is time to be exposed and dispersed, fused with the basis for all sensation. What I know now and didn’t know then was that it was in my recognition of this unending cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth that I found God: A process, a funnel of energy, the outer lining of which is uncertainty and within which all life gets sucked and spun, broken apart, shaken out and unraveled across time.
I took Sophie’s hand as we approached. My mom came to us and stooping down, put her arms around our shoulders.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
“Is it about Daddy?” Sophie asked.
She looked at Sophie silently for several moments, watery gleaming eyes fixed absently on her face.
“Daddy’s gone, honey. He died today. He had a heart attack.”
As these words formed and spilled from her lips, the tears, fat, bulbous drops, slipped from her eyes. Her face was red.
Sophie began to sob and my mom turned to her, embraced her. I walked out into the road, past the people, past the sounds, the weeping. I don’t know when my walk became a run. It happened fluidly, my feet gliding above ground between falls. I closed my eyes and kept running. A dark ledge against a dark void. I leaned out just far enough, peering over to regard plain, white points of light, some steady, some madly rushing to catch each other, some unbridled as chaos, some darting toward collision, and others standing silent as sentinels, overseeing the whole melee, unable to affect or change the course, but destined to watch until even their own light dies. A wave of vertigo hit me and I carefully pulled my eyes back open, sought out a deep breath; instead I listened, imagining I could hear the low moan of the wind as it slipped between buildings, increasing in speed as it lifted the breath from my gut up through to my throat. I ran, the grass beneath my feet a blur of green.
Something might have been carrying me for hours to pound out old rhythms in staccato breath; to rain blows in hammering footfalls meant to detach from the earth rather than to connect; a soporific series of repetitive motions--satori.
I was aware of a large knot lodged in my chest, rising, indicating the tied-up presence of a great pain that contained so much. I could not move but to move twice as fast; there was no such thing as slow. I had made my way down the Chicago River. Every so often I looked around and registered the beauty, the amazing face of air, water, earth. My hands were stiff, fingers unmoving. I wondered then if I had left my body; if my spirit had just leaped up above my head to hum and vibrate with the other realms.
The sky turned dark and the moon appeared. That moon and those clouds, even the stars and that night sky were all tattooed with images from so many years. A constellation of pain bodies holding little girl guilt in its seams. As I ran I was certain I had come through some real and terrible time warp, some rip in the fabric of space where he was alive and—
No. Forget it. He was dead.
No time passed, it seemed, between that run and the wake. They are bumped up against each other in my mind like a single memory, separated by a semicolon or a dash. Sophie and I were in dresses. Mine was dark gray cotton with a white collar and white cuffs, the left one smudged with my mother’s red fingernail polish. Sophie wore her Easter dress, a poly satin blue garment with pearl-white beads along the neckline. My mom put on makeup and what she called her black mourning clothes.
My dad lay there in a gray three-piece suit. I had never seen him look so dressed up. Sophie and I stood and stared. His hair had been washed and made to lie neatly, not one strand out of place. His face had an artificial healthy glow provided by expertly applied cosmetics. I thought about the people whose job it was to tend to his hair and makeup and wondered what they had thought of their work. Did they imagine that this was the way he looked while he was alive? Did they think his natural appearance included shiny, soft hair and glowing skin? And how would his yellow-specked hazel eyes have appeared if he were to open them at that very moment and smile?
“I feel like he’s going to pop up any minute and say: ‘Just kidding!’” my mom said to the funeral director.
I became aware then that I had been standing on my toes, bent slightly forward over the coffin, rigidly studying him for quite some time. I sank back on my heels.
We were taken home after the wake because our mom didn’t think we should attend the funeral, but if anyone lacked the means to control her emotions, it was she.
I was both angry and piteous toward her for going alone. I felt too weak to resist, too weak for temper. I remember feeling helpless, it was a strong desire to stand aside and just let the pieces fall, their effortless migration somehow mesmerizing; events giving rise to still more events, gaining force and strength through their motion, shaping in each moment a new subset of possible outcomes. Bound as I was to that formula, the fate of my life in its cold calculation, I had not the momentum of will to catch up, to hold on. There was nothing at all to hold. All surfaces had become round, slick; nothing could allow capture or grip, only sad, hollow grasps.
Later that evening while my mom sat with Sophie, I walked over to my grandparents’ house where he died and stood outside. I remembered how Gram told Grandma that he was going to die if they didn’t help him. That house, tall and skinny, the temple of his death, stood as a testimony from that day forward, ominously affirming how utterly without help he remained until the very end. I saw people standing in the driveway, weeping. I saw the strong, wide back of my uncle and the buxom frame of a woman I didn’t know, her head darkly lowered, patient tears slowly seeping out of broad eyes. I witnessed them as if softly praying (hardly able to find a normal breath, the verdict so irreversible) for her to be comforted. He just let her weep. He did not offer false hope.
I felt the ground holding me up, as if the earth alone were capable of enduring, bravely and quietly, the unsoothable, constant hum of human grief. Suddenly I felt a great although contradictory desire to praise God. The matter of a body unliving will disintegrate into dust and soil, just not right away. Eventually it will join the surface of all creation, absorbing and upholding the byproducts of life, hope, the disappearance of hope, the fullness of endings, the absence of feeling. No despairing, just holding until it is time to be exposed and dispersed, fused with the basis for all sensation. What I know now and didn’t know then was that it was in my recognition of this unending cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth that I found God: A process, a funnel of energy, the outer lining of which is uncertainty and within which all life gets sucked and spun, broken apart, shaken out and unraveled across time.
Friday, July 16, 2010
This Won't Hurt More Than a Little.
“She ate something poisonous outside, maybe a mushroom; we don’t know,” I lied. I wanted to tell her the truth, I really wanted to, but when she asked and I opened my mouth, that’s what came out. Somehow, telling her that my dad killed my dog didn’t seem possible in that moment. My parents’ fights had been bad enough, at times quite exceptional in their explosive brutality, blowing apart all structures of comfort, the debris from which we were left to choke on. But to kill. That was when I first realized that my home was the battleground of a torrid civil war. Missy had been its first real casualty.
Mrs. Dalby had tears in her eyes. Her hand flew to her chest.
“I’m so sorry, Jane,” she said. Sometimes I secretly wished she were my older sister, just so I could live with her and see her every day.
“My dog when I was a kid, her name was Casper; she was a white terrier mix. I found her when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Her hair was overgrown and matted, she had welts on her body, and her nails were overgrown and curled into her pads. She had been abused,” she said.
“How old was she?” I asked. We were sitting in lawn chairs on the small square of concrete behind her house that she called her patio. Sophie and Sarah were playing together in the leaves. Sarah was almost five by that time and a lot younger than Sophie, but they got along anyway and loved to play together.
“She wasn’t that old, maybe just a year. She broke my heart, that someone could be so cruel to an innocent puppy,” she said, shaking her head, eyes glistening. I felt a hot tear run down my face, tasted the salt.
“Jane, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how you must be hurting right now,” she said, leaning forward and placing her hand on my knee.
“It’s Sophie,” I said, looking at my sister playing in the leaves. I was trying hard not to cry; each word I spoke cracked with the effort. “She’s the one I’m worried about. She really loved that dog.” I pressed the rough heel of my palm to my eyes.
“It’s OK; you can cry,” she whispered. The rustling of leaves stopped and I turned to see Sophie looking at me, specks of brown and yellow covering her shirt and hair. She looked at me, I smiled and waved, she went back to playing with Sarah. I wiped my face and nose on my sleeves and struggled to compose myself.
“Tell me more about Casper,” I said, pulling away from Mrs. Dalby. She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. She pulled her hair back, revealing her neck. I couldn’t look away.
“You found her when you were in fifth grade?” I asked, pushing my chair back to gain some distance.
“Yes, I think that was when. She was bad off at first, but I took her in and cared for her. She was afraid of everyone but me at first, especially men.” She lowered her head and wrung her hands together in her lap. She didn’t say anything for a full minute.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Jane, I want you to know you can talk to me.” The warmth of her hand on my knee sent shivers through me.
“I know.”
A gust of wind blew. Leaves lifted and swirled, settling again in soft piles of brassy tones. I looked at my wrist as though a watch were there and stood up, suddenly feeling an urgency to leave. Mrs. Dalby had given me a new book and all I wanted to do was go home and read it. As soon as we got home though, we climbed into Gram’s car. She’d been waiting to take us shopping.
“She needs new shoes and a new coat, right?” Gram asked me about Sophie, pulling the car into the parking lot of Sears.
“I guess,” I said, staring out the window.
“What about you? Need anything for school?” She pulled into a parking spot and unbuckled her seatbelt. “You need sweaters. You don’t have enough sweaters,” she said. She grabbed my hand and started walking toward the store. I pulled my hand away and shoved it in my pocket.
“I don’t need to hold hands, Gram, I’m old enough.”
“You’re right, you are. Just stay close; I don’t trust these crazy drivers.” She walked so fast I had to trot to keep up. It had been a week since Missy died. Life without Missy felt lazy, no running, no wrestling. It was bleeding the energy from our lives. Mom was angry or sad all the time; Sophie cried often.
Gram picked out sweaters from the girls’ section and brought them to me. They looked awful, frilly and soft.
“These are all wrong,” I said, holding them up before me one by one.
“Why, what’s wrong with ‘em?” She snatched a sweater back from me and looked at it.
“This one’s pink and I hate pink. This one has a lacy collar. This has puffy sleeves…”
“That’s pretty. What color do you want, then?” She put the sweaters back where she found them. I walked across the aisle and picked up a plain, dark blue sweater. I held it up to my chest and turned toward the mirror.
“Those are boy sweaters,” she said, grabbing it out of my hands.
“I like it,” I said, seizing it back from her. My face grew hot, I wondered if I was wrong to want to dress in a boy’s sweater.
“All right, all right,” she said, stepping away. “You pick ‘em out for yourself then. I’ll get those others for Sophie.” She walked back to the girls’ section. I chose two plain sweaters for myself and pulled one on over my t-shirt to check the fit. When my head popped through the neck hole I jumped, startled by the figure in the mirror behind me.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked, a mixture of repugnance and mockery in his tone, his expression. I opened my mouth then closed it again. I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was short and pushed back behind my ears. My chest flat.
“Can’t figure it out either?” he said, smiling meanly.
“Cut it out, man!” Another boy approached, gave him a shove and they both walked off laughing. I took off the sweater and thrust out my chest. I pulled the hair from behind my ears, letting it fall into my face. With straight hips and nothing up front to speak of, I barely passed for female. I had the face of a girl, soft features and smooth skin, but my body lacked the curves that most girls had and even Sophie was starting to display. This way, people like those boys knew I was a girl when they looked closely enough but made fun of me for being too boyish. I wondered if I would have minded if people had just mistaken me for a boy altogether. I had liked the feeling of that when I was younger. I also realized with dread that I was not attracted to boys like other girls my age were. I had no interest in going with anybody or even flirting.
I had a dream once that I was kissing a girl and she took her shirt off. She thought I was a boy and I was going along with it. In the dream, she took my hand and placed in on her breast, all round and soft. I woke up then, with the feeling of that breast in my hand and the taste of the kiss in my mouth. I was wildly aroused and troubled. I decided that it was normal, that all girls probably have similar dreams every now and then. Standing in front of that mirror being made fun of by that boy, I wasn’t so sure.
“You found what you like?” Gram asked, pushing a cart and adding my garments to the pile.
“No, I don’t want these,” I said, taking them out.
“You’re getting’ em,” she said, putting them back in. She wheeled the cart away from me. “You say you don’t like what I pick, then you pick and say you don’t like that. Well, you’ll live with it,” she said. I followed her silently through the store.
“I wish I had red hair and freckles like Strawberry Shortcake,” Sophie said. I looked up from my book. She had the doll dressed in a new outfit and was combing its hair.
“Why would you want that? You’d sunburn all the time. Besides, you wouldn’t actually have red hair like that. It would be orange,” I said.
“So!” She shot me an annoyed look. I smiled and went back to my book. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing his dive after being outcast by his family.
“Why don’t we go to the beach and feed the seagulls today?” my mom asked, walking into our room, stepping on clothes covering the floor. “You really should clean this room up. It’s a complete mess.”
“OK, yeah! Let’s go feed the birds,” Sophie said, jumping up and getting her shoes on.
“What do you think, Jane?” she asked.
“I’m reading a book about a Seagull named Jonathan.”
She rustled the hair on the top of my head and began picking clothes up off the floor. “We need to do more together as a family,” she said. Ever since my dad had been gone, she tried to do things with us that we didn’t normally do.
At the beach, we took our shoes off and walked along the shore. My mom had brought a baggie of bread crumbs for each of us. Sophie loved it when the seagulls came close. I preferred to keep my distance. Their wild eyes and small, jerking heads frightened me when I saw them up close. I kept my bag of crumbs closed until Sophie ran out of hers, then I gave her mine. My mom did the same, smiling at me as she handed her bag over.
“This is great, Mom!” Sophie shouted, surrounded by a mob of noisy seagulls.
“Are you having fun?” my mom asked me. I nodded and smiled. She grabbed my hand and held it as we walked.
That night I fell asleep while reading on the couch. I dreamt of a man coming into the house and standing over me as I lay on my back with the book open against my chest. I was seeing it from behind him. He was tall and scruffy; his hair lay jumbled and drenched over his face, a tangled wet nest for birds. A thin white t-shirt stretched across his broad back. At first glance, the patterns looked like dark masses of wiry hair. But soon I realized they were veins, madly winding tendrils embedded in sheets of muscle beneath thin, glassy skin.
“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. He leaned down. I tilted my head to expose my neck. He turned into a lion and I felt the teeth go in, the tendons tear, the bone shatter in his clamped jaw.
Mrs. Dalby had tears in her eyes. Her hand flew to her chest.
“I’m so sorry, Jane,” she said. Sometimes I secretly wished she were my older sister, just so I could live with her and see her every day.
“My dog when I was a kid, her name was Casper; she was a white terrier mix. I found her when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Her hair was overgrown and matted, she had welts on her body, and her nails were overgrown and curled into her pads. She had been abused,” she said.
“How old was she?” I asked. We were sitting in lawn chairs on the small square of concrete behind her house that she called her patio. Sophie and Sarah were playing together in the leaves. Sarah was almost five by that time and a lot younger than Sophie, but they got along anyway and loved to play together.
“She wasn’t that old, maybe just a year. She broke my heart, that someone could be so cruel to an innocent puppy,” she said, shaking her head, eyes glistening. I felt a hot tear run down my face, tasted the salt.
“Jane, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how you must be hurting right now,” she said, leaning forward and placing her hand on my knee.
“It’s Sophie,” I said, looking at my sister playing in the leaves. I was trying hard not to cry; each word I spoke cracked with the effort. “She’s the one I’m worried about. She really loved that dog.” I pressed the rough heel of my palm to my eyes.
“It’s OK; you can cry,” she whispered. The rustling of leaves stopped and I turned to see Sophie looking at me, specks of brown and yellow covering her shirt and hair. She looked at me, I smiled and waved, she went back to playing with Sarah. I wiped my face and nose on my sleeves and struggled to compose myself.
“Tell me more about Casper,” I said, pulling away from Mrs. Dalby. She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. She pulled her hair back, revealing her neck. I couldn’t look away.
“You found her when you were in fifth grade?” I asked, pushing my chair back to gain some distance.
“Yes, I think that was when. She was bad off at first, but I took her in and cared for her. She was afraid of everyone but me at first, especially men.” She lowered her head and wrung her hands together in her lap. She didn’t say anything for a full minute.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“Jane, I want you to know you can talk to me.” The warmth of her hand on my knee sent shivers through me.
“I know.”
A gust of wind blew. Leaves lifted and swirled, settling again in soft piles of brassy tones. I looked at my wrist as though a watch were there and stood up, suddenly feeling an urgency to leave. Mrs. Dalby had given me a new book and all I wanted to do was go home and read it. As soon as we got home though, we climbed into Gram’s car. She’d been waiting to take us shopping.
“She needs new shoes and a new coat, right?” Gram asked me about Sophie, pulling the car into the parking lot of Sears.
“I guess,” I said, staring out the window.
“What about you? Need anything for school?” She pulled into a parking spot and unbuckled her seatbelt. “You need sweaters. You don’t have enough sweaters,” she said. She grabbed my hand and started walking toward the store. I pulled my hand away and shoved it in my pocket.
“I don’t need to hold hands, Gram, I’m old enough.”
“You’re right, you are. Just stay close; I don’t trust these crazy drivers.” She walked so fast I had to trot to keep up. It had been a week since Missy died. Life without Missy felt lazy, no running, no wrestling. It was bleeding the energy from our lives. Mom was angry or sad all the time; Sophie cried often.
Gram picked out sweaters from the girls’ section and brought them to me. They looked awful, frilly and soft.
“These are all wrong,” I said, holding them up before me one by one.
“Why, what’s wrong with ‘em?” She snatched a sweater back from me and looked at it.
“This one’s pink and I hate pink. This one has a lacy collar. This has puffy sleeves…”
“That’s pretty. What color do you want, then?” She put the sweaters back where she found them. I walked across the aisle and picked up a plain, dark blue sweater. I held it up to my chest and turned toward the mirror.
“Those are boy sweaters,” she said, grabbing it out of my hands.
“I like it,” I said, seizing it back from her. My face grew hot, I wondered if I was wrong to want to dress in a boy’s sweater.
“All right, all right,” she said, stepping away. “You pick ‘em out for yourself then. I’ll get those others for Sophie.” She walked back to the girls’ section. I chose two plain sweaters for myself and pulled one on over my t-shirt to check the fit. When my head popped through the neck hole I jumped, startled by the figure in the mirror behind me.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked, a mixture of repugnance and mockery in his tone, his expression. I opened my mouth then closed it again. I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was short and pushed back behind my ears. My chest flat.
“Can’t figure it out either?” he said, smiling meanly.
“Cut it out, man!” Another boy approached, gave him a shove and they both walked off laughing. I took off the sweater and thrust out my chest. I pulled the hair from behind my ears, letting it fall into my face. With straight hips and nothing up front to speak of, I barely passed for female. I had the face of a girl, soft features and smooth skin, but my body lacked the curves that most girls had and even Sophie was starting to display. This way, people like those boys knew I was a girl when they looked closely enough but made fun of me for being too boyish. I wondered if I would have minded if people had just mistaken me for a boy altogether. I had liked the feeling of that when I was younger. I also realized with dread that I was not attracted to boys like other girls my age were. I had no interest in going with anybody or even flirting.
I had a dream once that I was kissing a girl and she took her shirt off. She thought I was a boy and I was going along with it. In the dream, she took my hand and placed in on her breast, all round and soft. I woke up then, with the feeling of that breast in my hand and the taste of the kiss in my mouth. I was wildly aroused and troubled. I decided that it was normal, that all girls probably have similar dreams every now and then. Standing in front of that mirror being made fun of by that boy, I wasn’t so sure.
“You found what you like?” Gram asked, pushing a cart and adding my garments to the pile.
“No, I don’t want these,” I said, taking them out.
“You’re getting’ em,” she said, putting them back in. She wheeled the cart away from me. “You say you don’t like what I pick, then you pick and say you don’t like that. Well, you’ll live with it,” she said. I followed her silently through the store.
“I wish I had red hair and freckles like Strawberry Shortcake,” Sophie said. I looked up from my book. She had the doll dressed in a new outfit and was combing its hair.
“Why would you want that? You’d sunburn all the time. Besides, you wouldn’t actually have red hair like that. It would be orange,” I said.
“So!” She shot me an annoyed look. I smiled and went back to my book. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing his dive after being outcast by his family.
“Why don’t we go to the beach and feed the seagulls today?” my mom asked, walking into our room, stepping on clothes covering the floor. “You really should clean this room up. It’s a complete mess.”
“OK, yeah! Let’s go feed the birds,” Sophie said, jumping up and getting her shoes on.
“What do you think, Jane?” she asked.
“I’m reading a book about a Seagull named Jonathan.”
She rustled the hair on the top of my head and began picking clothes up off the floor. “We need to do more together as a family,” she said. Ever since my dad had been gone, she tried to do things with us that we didn’t normally do.
At the beach, we took our shoes off and walked along the shore. My mom had brought a baggie of bread crumbs for each of us. Sophie loved it when the seagulls came close. I preferred to keep my distance. Their wild eyes and small, jerking heads frightened me when I saw them up close. I kept my bag of crumbs closed until Sophie ran out of hers, then I gave her mine. My mom did the same, smiling at me as she handed her bag over.
“This is great, Mom!” Sophie shouted, surrounded by a mob of noisy seagulls.
“Are you having fun?” my mom asked me. I nodded and smiled. She grabbed my hand and held it as we walked.
That night I fell asleep while reading on the couch. I dreamt of a man coming into the house and standing over me as I lay on my back with the book open against my chest. I was seeing it from behind him. He was tall and scruffy; his hair lay jumbled and drenched over his face, a tangled wet nest for birds. A thin white t-shirt stretched across his broad back. At first glance, the patterns looked like dark masses of wiry hair. But soon I realized they were veins, madly winding tendrils embedded in sheets of muscle beneath thin, glassy skin.
“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. He leaned down. I tilted my head to expose my neck. He turned into a lion and I felt the teeth go in, the tendons tear, the bone shatter in his clamped jaw.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Death: A Teaching
Mom was absent, working nights at O'Banyon's, a local bar, in addition to her day job as a desk clerk in a beauty salon. For a while, O’Banyon’s patrons had been a literary crowd; artists and publishers from the Art Institute scene, a politically charged group. Every Friday night they held a poetry slam. This had attracted my mother, ever enticed as she was by verbose manners of speaking and sharp intellects. That year, however, a place called The Green Mill began to be known as the poetry venue in Chicago, and O’Banyon’s inhabitants grew less literary and more punk. Although they continued to hold them weekly, O’Banyon’s poetry contests slowly had become transformed from performances of eloquent, politically charged monologues into raucous welters of discordant sounds.
She began this extra work when it became apparent to her that to extend the absence of my father, she had to gain financial independence from him. There were several times she had taken us with her to the bar during her first few weeks there. When her shift would end, she would say it was her unwind time.
“Have a seat over there, girls, put whatever you want on the juke box. I’m just going to have my unwind time. Just a few cocktails and talk with some friends, then we’ll go home, OK?” Sophie and I sat at the end of the bar and drank glasses of milk. We passed the time playing tic-tac-toe on the cocktail napkins and making up stories about strangers. Sophie picked out a man or a woman in the crowded bar and I began telling his or her life story.
“There, do that lady over there with the weird hat,” Sophie said, pointing her finger. I grabbed her hand and pushed it down.
“Don’t point; it’s rude. The one with the beret, the flat round hat?”
“Yeah, her,” Sophie said, watching her. She took a sip of milk and waited while I thought it over. The woman was smoking a long, slim cigarette. Her hair fell long and curly down over her shoulders, puffed out and a bit frizzy under her tan beret. She wore an army jacket over a white t-shirt with a black skirt, leg warmers, and army boots.
“Her name is Madame Champagne but people call her Sarge,” I said. Sophie giggled, leaned forward in her seat.
“She comes from a nice family. Her parents are Joe and Betty Champagne. They raised her up right; they don’t know where they went wrong. She started acting strange when she was 13 or 14, dressing up in army clothes, wearing funny hats.” Sophie laughed and slapped my leg.
“Then one day, she just took off. Joe and Betty got a letter a few weeks later saying she had joined up with the military and they had made her a sergeant right away. She told them that in all future correspondence, they were to refer to her as Sarge. Her only wish was that the army wouldn’t shave her head, that they would let her keep her curly locks. Alas, they did, on the condition that she would always wear a beret.” I straightened my posture and put my hand to my brow in a mock salute. Sophie smiled and saluted me back.
After a few hours, I had done a story for every person in the place and Sophie had fallen asleep at the bar. I went to find my mom and found her sitting on a guy’s lap reciting Sappho. I knew it was Sappho because she kept saying so.
“I recite Sappho, what in my mad heart was my greatest desire, who was it now that must feel my allurements…”
“What are you sayin?” asked the man.
“Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, I’m reciting her. Who was the fair one that must be persuaded, who wronged thee?” she continued, with a drunken, dramatic voice, great, sweeping gestures, and swaying body. Just then, applause broke out in the crowd from a poetry performance that had just finished on the low stage. Mom smiled and bowed as if they were applauding her.
“Thank you, O thank . . .”
“Mom, let’s get out of here; Sophie can’t keep her eyes open,” I interrupted. She swung to face me, squinted to get me in focus.
“Oh, OK. Shit. What did you say your name was?” she asked the guy whose lap she was on.
“Tom.”
“Oh, Tom. Can I ask how much you’ve had to drink tonight, Tom?”
“A beer or two.”
“Really? Well, how do you feel about taking my kids and me home and coming in for a nightcap?”
“Love to.”
“Excellent, let’s go.” She got up and staggered backward, almost falling over a chair before Tom jumped up and caught her.
My dad had been gone almost a month, the longest amount of time he ever stayed gone. Around this time, when I was ten years old, I had reached an age deemed old enough by my mother to be entrusted with a key of my own. She tied it to a piece of green yarn and hung it around my neck. I felt noble with it on, like I had just been knighted. It fit only the back door and I was to use it on days when she was at work and I was looking out for Sophie. Once I had the key, we no longer had to go with her to the bar.
Towards the end of the summer on a Friday after Day Camp, Sophie and I were coming into the house through the back porch when I nearly tripped over a body on the floor, my Uncle Joe. My mother’s only brother, Joe was a post-hippie poster boy during the 1980s, permanently clad in dirty bell-bottomed corduroy pants and a flower-patterned shirt complete with a butterfly collar. He had long, tangled, unwashed hair that attracted mites and fleas―the latter of which he gave to our dog, Missy. Every so often he would show up at our door needing a place to stay after a brawl in whatever commune he was living in at the time. Or sometimes he ran out of money and couldn’t afford even the slightest rent. He was asleep in front of the door when I ran into him and kicked him awake.
“Hi, girls; your mom around?” he asked, struggling to his feet.
“No, she’s at work already, but you can come in,” I said. We went in and he stayed behind.
“Something stinks!” he said. He was sniffing the air. There was a rotten smell I noticed also and assumed it was the garbage in the back trash cans. Sophie began calling Missy, and I began straightening up the apartment: picking up articles of clothing left in the place they had last been removed, stacking and neatly ordering my mother’s books, emptying overflowing ashtrays, clearing away used and soiled dishes from the living room. After a few minutes, I noticed that Sophie was still (more frantically) calling out Missy’s name.
To help rid her of the fleas she had caught from Uncle Joe, we had bought her a flea collar two days before and were anxious to record the progress, if any. Then I heard Uncle Joe’s muffled voice coming from the back porch. Sophie screamed. I dropped the glass objects in my arms, winced at the shatter, and bolted to the porch where Sophie was sobbing. The door was standing open and Uncle Joe was slowly backing out, mumbling condolences and reaching absently toward Sophie with hushing, petting gestures; a slinking apologetic shell. I shoved past him to find Sophie face down with her butt in the air and her hands extended in front of her, a kind of fervent worship pose, or in this case, one of agony. Gripped in her small fist was a glint of light, the sound of metal. Missy’s collar. I stifled a gasp and stared, open-mouthed. Intuitively already having the answer, I emitted a quiet question to the room: “What happened?”
“Dead! She’s dead Jane!” my sister shrieked. I snapped from my momentary trance and held her, a crumpled grief against me. Her hot tears felt like lava on my arm. Curled in the corner, hidden behind a chair was Missy’s body. The whites of her eyes, blank and milky, stared eerily at us, her tongue sagged lifelessly from the side of her open mouth covered with a white foamy substance. Staring at her, squeezing Sophie so hard I might have bruised her, I felt Joe’s hand on my shoulder and jumped.
“Jane, back away, Sweetie, let me get her,” he said gently. He was carrying a blanket. I pulled Sophie to her feet. We stood by the door and watched our uncle gather up Missy’s body and wrap her in the blanket. I felt tightness in my chest and a panicky feeling came over me. How did this happen; how could she be gone? She was still a puppy. I broke into a sob, crying so hard I was gasping for air. Sophie wrapped her arms around my waist and cried too. Uncle Joe walked slowly toward the back yard with Sophie in his arms.
“Where are you taking her?” Sophie cried.
“Just outside here,” he said. “Can you get me a garbage bag Jane?”
“For what?”
“We need to put it in a bag honey; it smells bad,” he said. Sophie cried harder; I straightened my spine and steeled myself. Suddenly I felt dry and numb; all grief was gone. I walked into the kitchen as if mechanically, got a garbage bag, brought it to Joe, and watched as he dumped her small furry body from the blanket into the garbage bag. He tied off the top of the bag with two knots and set it down next to the garbage. I stood staring at the bag and the figure of my dog inside it. The shape of her head, her body still curled, somewhat stiff. She seemed so much smaller. Sophie ran into the house wailing. I stood there for a long time staring at the bag, feeling nothing.
When my mom came home, she broke down and cried. Sophie and I hugged her and patted her back.
“I won’t call your father; I won’t,” she kept saying through her tears.
“We can handle this ourselves,” she said. She took a deep breath, got up, and got a shovel from the back porch. She headed out into the back yard; we followed her.
“We’ll bury her and have a service,” she said, sniffling and wiping tears off her cheek with the back of one hand as she dug. The ground was dusty and dry, the dirt floated up to our faces and hair, mom’s tears left muddy tracks down her cheeks. We buried her there in the back yard. Sophie found two sticks and tied them together in the shape of a cross with her shoelace then stuck the cross in the ground on the pile of dirt that was Missy’s shallow grave. We stood around the grave and cried. My mom said a few words.
“Missy was a good girl. Loyal and sweet, good with kids. We’ll miss her,” she said, then turned and walked back into the house. Sophie followed her. I stood for a while longer at the grave. The grass swayed in the breeze, too tall and weedy. Birds chirped and sang, the phone rang in the house, a dog barked and howled in the distance. I stared at the ground and waited for more tears to come. My mom had cried so freely; I longed to do the same.
“You bastard asshole!” My mom yelled from inside the house. “How could you, Bobby, how?” she cried. I ran into the house. My mom was crying on the phone.
“Damn you!” she screamed and slammed the phone down. Without saying a word, she stormed out of the house.
When she came home about an hour later, she called us in the kitchen and asked us to sit down.
“Your dad did it. He came over here and threw a piece of ham wrapped around a double dose of rat poison through the window to feed to Missy,” she said, hands on her hips, face hard and angry.
“Why would he do that and how do you know?” I demanded. Sophie started crying again.
“He told me, that’s how I know. He called here and asked me if I needed him to talk to you girls and help you understand what death is. I told him we don’t need his help, that I would talk to you myself and we would be fine without him. ‘Wait a minute, how do you even know about Missy? What did you do?’ I asked him. He said he did it. He was the one who got the dog in the first place, he said, so he could take it away.” She walked across the room and tried to embrace me. I pulled away from her and took several steps back, out of her reach. She hugged Sophie and looked at me.
“Don’t be mad at me, Jane. I’m just telling you the truth.” She let go of Sophie and filled a glass with water.
“Why would Dad do that?” I yelled, tears burning the back of my eyes.
“He did it to get back at me. He just went too far and he knows it. He feels real bad. I’m not allowing him back in this house until he gets help. He just needs help.” She handed the water to Sophie, sat, and pulled her up in her lap.
I could imagine just what Missy had looked like responding to my dad’s voice calling her. She would have been wild with joy after missing him for weeks. Tearing through the house, nails ripping across the tiled kitchen floor, racing to the window. Smelling the gift he so generously passed to her through the open window, she would have been doubly pleased: pink tongue panting, teeth bared smiling, a blur of wagging tail.
She began this extra work when it became apparent to her that to extend the absence of my father, she had to gain financial independence from him. There were several times she had taken us with her to the bar during her first few weeks there. When her shift would end, she would say it was her unwind time.
“Have a seat over there, girls, put whatever you want on the juke box. I’m just going to have my unwind time. Just a few cocktails and talk with some friends, then we’ll go home, OK?” Sophie and I sat at the end of the bar and drank glasses of milk. We passed the time playing tic-tac-toe on the cocktail napkins and making up stories about strangers. Sophie picked out a man or a woman in the crowded bar and I began telling his or her life story.
“There, do that lady over there with the weird hat,” Sophie said, pointing her finger. I grabbed her hand and pushed it down.
“Don’t point; it’s rude. The one with the beret, the flat round hat?”
“Yeah, her,” Sophie said, watching her. She took a sip of milk and waited while I thought it over. The woman was smoking a long, slim cigarette. Her hair fell long and curly down over her shoulders, puffed out and a bit frizzy under her tan beret. She wore an army jacket over a white t-shirt with a black skirt, leg warmers, and army boots.
“Her name is Madame Champagne but people call her Sarge,” I said. Sophie giggled, leaned forward in her seat.
“She comes from a nice family. Her parents are Joe and Betty Champagne. They raised her up right; they don’t know where they went wrong. She started acting strange when she was 13 or 14, dressing up in army clothes, wearing funny hats.” Sophie laughed and slapped my leg.
“Then one day, she just took off. Joe and Betty got a letter a few weeks later saying she had joined up with the military and they had made her a sergeant right away. She told them that in all future correspondence, they were to refer to her as Sarge. Her only wish was that the army wouldn’t shave her head, that they would let her keep her curly locks. Alas, they did, on the condition that she would always wear a beret.” I straightened my posture and put my hand to my brow in a mock salute. Sophie smiled and saluted me back.
After a few hours, I had done a story for every person in the place and Sophie had fallen asleep at the bar. I went to find my mom and found her sitting on a guy’s lap reciting Sappho. I knew it was Sappho because she kept saying so.
“I recite Sappho, what in my mad heart was my greatest desire, who was it now that must feel my allurements…”
“What are you sayin?” asked the man.
“Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, I’m reciting her. Who was the fair one that must be persuaded, who wronged thee?” she continued, with a drunken, dramatic voice, great, sweeping gestures, and swaying body. Just then, applause broke out in the crowd from a poetry performance that had just finished on the low stage. Mom smiled and bowed as if they were applauding her.
“Thank you, O thank . . .”
“Mom, let’s get out of here; Sophie can’t keep her eyes open,” I interrupted. She swung to face me, squinted to get me in focus.
“Oh, OK. Shit. What did you say your name was?” she asked the guy whose lap she was on.
“Tom.”
“Oh, Tom. Can I ask how much you’ve had to drink tonight, Tom?”
“A beer or two.”
“Really? Well, how do you feel about taking my kids and me home and coming in for a nightcap?”
“Love to.”
“Excellent, let’s go.” She got up and staggered backward, almost falling over a chair before Tom jumped up and caught her.
My dad had been gone almost a month, the longest amount of time he ever stayed gone. Around this time, when I was ten years old, I had reached an age deemed old enough by my mother to be entrusted with a key of my own. She tied it to a piece of green yarn and hung it around my neck. I felt noble with it on, like I had just been knighted. It fit only the back door and I was to use it on days when she was at work and I was looking out for Sophie. Once I had the key, we no longer had to go with her to the bar.
Towards the end of the summer on a Friday after Day Camp, Sophie and I were coming into the house through the back porch when I nearly tripped over a body on the floor, my Uncle Joe. My mother’s only brother, Joe was a post-hippie poster boy during the 1980s, permanently clad in dirty bell-bottomed corduroy pants and a flower-patterned shirt complete with a butterfly collar. He had long, tangled, unwashed hair that attracted mites and fleas―the latter of which he gave to our dog, Missy. Every so often he would show up at our door needing a place to stay after a brawl in whatever commune he was living in at the time. Or sometimes he ran out of money and couldn’t afford even the slightest rent. He was asleep in front of the door when I ran into him and kicked him awake.
“Hi, girls; your mom around?” he asked, struggling to his feet.
“No, she’s at work already, but you can come in,” I said. We went in and he stayed behind.
“Something stinks!” he said. He was sniffing the air. There was a rotten smell I noticed also and assumed it was the garbage in the back trash cans. Sophie began calling Missy, and I began straightening up the apartment: picking up articles of clothing left in the place they had last been removed, stacking and neatly ordering my mother’s books, emptying overflowing ashtrays, clearing away used and soiled dishes from the living room. After a few minutes, I noticed that Sophie was still (more frantically) calling out Missy’s name.
To help rid her of the fleas she had caught from Uncle Joe, we had bought her a flea collar two days before and were anxious to record the progress, if any. Then I heard Uncle Joe’s muffled voice coming from the back porch. Sophie screamed. I dropped the glass objects in my arms, winced at the shatter, and bolted to the porch where Sophie was sobbing. The door was standing open and Uncle Joe was slowly backing out, mumbling condolences and reaching absently toward Sophie with hushing, petting gestures; a slinking apologetic shell. I shoved past him to find Sophie face down with her butt in the air and her hands extended in front of her, a kind of fervent worship pose, or in this case, one of agony. Gripped in her small fist was a glint of light, the sound of metal. Missy’s collar. I stifled a gasp and stared, open-mouthed. Intuitively already having the answer, I emitted a quiet question to the room: “What happened?”
“Dead! She’s dead Jane!” my sister shrieked. I snapped from my momentary trance and held her, a crumpled grief against me. Her hot tears felt like lava on my arm. Curled in the corner, hidden behind a chair was Missy’s body. The whites of her eyes, blank and milky, stared eerily at us, her tongue sagged lifelessly from the side of her open mouth covered with a white foamy substance. Staring at her, squeezing Sophie so hard I might have bruised her, I felt Joe’s hand on my shoulder and jumped.
“Jane, back away, Sweetie, let me get her,” he said gently. He was carrying a blanket. I pulled Sophie to her feet. We stood by the door and watched our uncle gather up Missy’s body and wrap her in the blanket. I felt tightness in my chest and a panicky feeling came over me. How did this happen; how could she be gone? She was still a puppy. I broke into a sob, crying so hard I was gasping for air. Sophie wrapped her arms around my waist and cried too. Uncle Joe walked slowly toward the back yard with Sophie in his arms.
“Where are you taking her?” Sophie cried.
“Just outside here,” he said. “Can you get me a garbage bag Jane?”
“For what?”
“We need to put it in a bag honey; it smells bad,” he said. Sophie cried harder; I straightened my spine and steeled myself. Suddenly I felt dry and numb; all grief was gone. I walked into the kitchen as if mechanically, got a garbage bag, brought it to Joe, and watched as he dumped her small furry body from the blanket into the garbage bag. He tied off the top of the bag with two knots and set it down next to the garbage. I stood staring at the bag and the figure of my dog inside it. The shape of her head, her body still curled, somewhat stiff. She seemed so much smaller. Sophie ran into the house wailing. I stood there for a long time staring at the bag, feeling nothing.
When my mom came home, she broke down and cried. Sophie and I hugged her and patted her back.
“I won’t call your father; I won’t,” she kept saying through her tears.
“We can handle this ourselves,” she said. She took a deep breath, got up, and got a shovel from the back porch. She headed out into the back yard; we followed her.
“We’ll bury her and have a service,” she said, sniffling and wiping tears off her cheek with the back of one hand as she dug. The ground was dusty and dry, the dirt floated up to our faces and hair, mom’s tears left muddy tracks down her cheeks. We buried her there in the back yard. Sophie found two sticks and tied them together in the shape of a cross with her shoelace then stuck the cross in the ground on the pile of dirt that was Missy’s shallow grave. We stood around the grave and cried. My mom said a few words.
“Missy was a good girl. Loyal and sweet, good with kids. We’ll miss her,” she said, then turned and walked back into the house. Sophie followed her. I stood for a while longer at the grave. The grass swayed in the breeze, too tall and weedy. Birds chirped and sang, the phone rang in the house, a dog barked and howled in the distance. I stared at the ground and waited for more tears to come. My mom had cried so freely; I longed to do the same.
“You bastard asshole!” My mom yelled from inside the house. “How could you, Bobby, how?” she cried. I ran into the house. My mom was crying on the phone.
“Damn you!” she screamed and slammed the phone down. Without saying a word, she stormed out of the house.
When she came home about an hour later, she called us in the kitchen and asked us to sit down.
“Your dad did it. He came over here and threw a piece of ham wrapped around a double dose of rat poison through the window to feed to Missy,” she said, hands on her hips, face hard and angry.
“Why would he do that and how do you know?” I demanded. Sophie started crying again.
“He told me, that’s how I know. He called here and asked me if I needed him to talk to you girls and help you understand what death is. I told him we don’t need his help, that I would talk to you myself and we would be fine without him. ‘Wait a minute, how do you even know about Missy? What did you do?’ I asked him. He said he did it. He was the one who got the dog in the first place, he said, so he could take it away.” She walked across the room and tried to embrace me. I pulled away from her and took several steps back, out of her reach. She hugged Sophie and looked at me.
“Don’t be mad at me, Jane. I’m just telling you the truth.” She let go of Sophie and filled a glass with water.
“Why would Dad do that?” I yelled, tears burning the back of my eyes.
“He did it to get back at me. He just went too far and he knows it. He feels real bad. I’m not allowing him back in this house until he gets help. He just needs help.” She handed the water to Sophie, sat, and pulled her up in her lap.
I could imagine just what Missy had looked like responding to my dad’s voice calling her. She would have been wild with joy after missing him for weeks. Tearing through the house, nails ripping across the tiled kitchen floor, racing to the window. Smelling the gift he so generously passed to her through the open window, she would have been doubly pleased: pink tongue panting, teeth bared smiling, a blur of wagging tail.
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