I found out several years later that my mother, after regaining consciousness, had kicked my father out the night before. The gun we didn’t know she had was kept under her bed in a shoebox. She pulled it on him and made him leave. He went to his parents’ house just down the street from us. He had spent time living with them previously after fighting with my mom, either because he left or because my mom threw him out, so we weren’t too worried. The time he’d been kicked out before, I went to visit him every day after school.
My paternal grandparents lived in an old three-story Chicago house, the same house my dad and his six brothers and two sisters grew up in. The first floor always smelled like polished wood. Built in, solid-oak bookshelves lined the walls and all the doors were trimmed out in thick mahogany. The second floor was filled with bedrooms, the backmost of which belonged to my dad. The attic was the best of all. I called it the game room because it was filled with all the toys left behind from the kids growing up: buckets of various action figures, piles of old Barbies complete with accessories, Connect-Four, Hungry Hungry Hippo, and the best of all, a ping pong table right in the center with silver-handled paddles. My dad and I spent hours up there together playing games and talking. He told stories about his life growing up and how much fun it sometimes was to have so many kids all living together in that big house.
We could visit him over there anytime we wanted. This time though, my mom seemed resolute about her decision and told him he couldn’t come back until he got help with the cocaine problem. She started working full-time, which is when we began Day Camp.
Day Camp was really the name I gave the house of our babysitter, Mrs. Walker. Sophie and I went every day along with a boy named Justin and a girl, Stacy. The four of us were so similar in appearance that the only things distinguishing one from the other of us were specifics. Features and expressions. Subtleties. Heights, the placement of dimples, scars, knee diameters, fingernail to cuticle ratios, DNA. For as similar as our outsides were, the living situations we experienced by way of our parents varied considerably. Stacy and Justin were from the same neighborhood as Mrs. Walker. Sophie and I were not. We lived closer to Jefferson Park, where the houses were small, very old, and very close together. These houses were new and enormous and had expansive yards with hired landscapers.
While Sophie and Justin watched TV, Stacy and I drew hopscotch lines with chalk, held jump-rope and breath-holding contests, laughed in shrills, running from one activity to the next. Only from breathlessness would we land and would do so in a pile of limbs, tangled hair, and hard, silent laughter. Day camp became my favorite place. My time away from Mrs. Walker, Justin, and Stacy, that too-large-for-living house, and all that it contained was reduced to a state of waiting.
At naptime, Mrs. Walker made us nap on the floor of the downstairs family room together. We did it every day and each of us had a regular spot. My spot was between Stacy and Sophie. Stacy and I couldn’t sleep, so we played games instead. When we heard Mrs. Walker coming to inspect us, we held our eyes closed and breathed evenly, lying as still as we could. When we heard her walk away, we started giggling. We dared each other to get up and run around the perimeter of the room as many times as we could without being caught.
“I’m gonna go for four laps,” Stacy whispered. I had just finished three, which was the record.
“Don’t do it! You’ll never make it!” Her face broke into silent laughter and I started laughing too, snorting out loud before slapping my hand over my mouth and pushing my forehead to the floor to muffle the noise.
“Shhhh!” Stacy put her hand on my shoulder and looked back toward the stairs, listening for any sign of approach. I reached over and grabbed her hand, looking to where she watched. I saw her look at me from the corner of my eye and I kept my gaze directed away from her. She gripped my hand tighter and I looked at her. She had a half smile on her face and a question in her eyes. I nodded. She gave one last glance back and got up. Keeping her step as light as possible, she trotted around the room. She was rounding the corner for a fourth lap when I heard footsteps. I reached over and grabbed Stacy’s pant leg and she went down. We stifled our laughter and she scrambled to her spot, quickly getting into a fetal position with her back to me. I held my breath and turned over just in time to fool Mrs. Walker into believing we were still sleeping.
After naptime ended, she made us lukewarm coffee sweetened with condensed milk, creating a unique flavor I have since failed ever to reproduce. I adored those room-temperature sips of candy-sweet darkness. I began asking for it at home, where I would only get stern looks for answers from my mom.
Then came the day. The day was as bright and as clear as all other days at Day Camp were, cut from raw pleasure in silver smooth slices and lined up one after another for the melting in my mouth.
Stacy wanted to go for a swim. Neither of us had brought a suit. For Stacy, this was not a problem because she lived just across the street and down. We started to her house to get her suit and a spare suit for me to borrow. Her parents were at work but she knew where they hid the key. The excitement of fleeing Mrs. Walker’s house and yard without her permission or knowledge was of a new breed for me, dangerous and penetrating of some undefined, never-before-broken membrane of acceptability within me. I was aware that such a membrane existed, dividing my good-girl nature from the sort of careless recklessness I had observed in other, less strictly-disciplined children. I had barely probed it once by convincing Sophie to climb up the shelf of the pantry and liberate some of our Halloween candy to supplement our daily ration against my parents’ wishes.
I knew something of the driving force of emotions as distinguished from reason, that which motivates other children to break rules, and I knew that I would act accordingly given the right opportunity and good enough odds against being caught or even just the courage to act. This was that opportunity and I had taken it. Slit open the wrists of acceptability, as what is deemed acceptable by anyone, and let its pulse feed the voluntary trespass, the proud strides through the door that reads do not enter, the deliberate and forceful acceleration against the traffic of a clearly marked one-way street. Lightheaded and with a racing heart, I followed Stacy to her house. Giddy with rule-breaking zeal, I was somewhat subdued by the newness and grandness of her home. Justin and Stacy’s house was as large and striking as Mrs. Walker’s Day Camp.
The interior of Stacy’s house was bulging with sumptuous lavishness, marked by a regal form and dignity―moldings, decorative paneling, trim, and ceiling treatments―imposing in appearance to my exceedingly ordinary if not inadequate home situation. Overcome and solemn, I crept along quietly over the stately oak flooring behind Stacy to her room, when she whirled around and placed her hand against my chest.
“I used to get sent to France on summers to my grandparents’ house. My grandfather is a doctor for babies, a pediatrician,” she said, and paused, unblinking.
“Really?” I asked. A breeze that came through an open window lifted her hair and smelled like pinecones. She stared.
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t have to go this summer.”
“Me, too,” she smiled. She started to climb the stairs, then hesitated and turned again.
“Have you ever played doctor with anyone?”
“No.”
“Jessie, my best friend in France, lives next door to my grandparents. We played doctor sometimes. She pretended she was the doctor and I was the patient.”
I was intrigued. I had been to the pediatrician with Sophie once for a routine checkup. We had to take off our clothes and the lady touched our privates. We were embarrassed and we giggled. Then she gave us a sucker and we left.
“What did you do?” I queried, eyebrows arched.
“Maybe we can play sometime and I’ll show you.”
We stood in awkward silence. Again, I had nothing to say.
“Let’s go swimming!” I declared. She nodded and continued up the stairs to her room.
Stacy rummaged through the drawers of a dresser while I dangled my legs off the side of her bed, which was covered with a plush, pink, feather-stuffed comforter embroidered with her initials and silky to the touch. Finding her bathing suit, she tossed it on the floor and pulled out several others for me to choose from. Just as I was about to hop down and cross to the bathing suits, Stacy tore off her shirt and just as swiftly shoved down her shorts, kicking them off from around her ankles. I looked away and felt my face grow hot. I sat too stiff and straight.
Trying to act casual in this pose was a challenge, but I swung my legs and picked at the down comforter underneath me while forcing a relaxed posture by bending nearly double, forehead all but touching my knees, flaunting my embarrassment. But why was I so nervous? Sophie and I had been down to less than our underpants together before without incident or even notice. Still, her sudden and unexpected nakedness warranted at least some awkwardness, though maybe not quite so much. I felt her cross the room in my direction and looked up. Even before my face completed lifting, I was knocked backward onto the bed and pinned at the wrists, Stacy’s blond hair falling into my eyes, my open mouth, her breath on my face. She said nothing.
My stomach hollowed, flipped, registering physically the abruptness of being straddled and hunched over by another girl. The mouth is the altar of the body and all sensation collects there, coating the tongue with cotton. Fear like cement affixes to the roof of the mouth, teeth grip one another, the bones of the jaw contract. I gulped at nothing, almost choked, raced my mind through options of what this might mean. Was it a new game? Doctor? Wrestling? Ten seconds and it’s a knock out? She began moving rhythmically astride my hips, pushing herself up against my trapped wrists and looming higher above to see my face, what my expression revealed.
I began at first to twist about like a worm, my arms wriggling in pursuit of freedom, my legs squirming, careful to avoid imitation of her motion. My weak attempts to escape her hold only made her grip me harder so I writhed and bucked wildly against her rigid, sinewy frame and broke loose. Exploding from the house, I ran down the street back toward Mrs. Walker’s house. When I reached the sidewalk, I tripped and fell straight forward, skinning my hands and knees. I flipped over and peered up at the house. I saw Stacy standing in her bedroom window, watching me. Immediately she jumped away and the curtains fell closed. I got to my feet and limped on, tears burning the back of my eyes. I would not cry; I could not have her see me cry. My stomach felt empty, like aching hunger. So much thrill and fear had left me limp.
I reached Mrs. Walker’s house and sought out my sister. I found her quietly playing with paper dolls we had made together the night before. It was a game we had played since Sophie was big enough to hold scissors. We cut out families with moms and dads and daughters and colored them in with clean, yellow happiness. We penned on their faces various good-natured expressions, but mostly exceedingly genuine smiles. Smiles as impregnable and clear as the paper happiness that formed them. Paper shaped from my hands and Sophie’s: marrowless, humble, two-dimensional life. The permanent contrasted with the accidental. The conjecture of our very own concentrated, essential existence. They contained the best of us. We gave them our hearts, thick and real, and they beat them for us.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Take it up With Misters Smith and Wesson
When I came home, I found Sophie standing in the gangway surrounded by a pack of growling dogs poised for attack. Sophie was standing very still, a funny little half smile on her face. She seemed confused by their snarling faces, torn between her love of dogs and the unmistakable threat in these ones – black lips drawn back, gleaming sharp teeth. Missy burst from behind the house, barking and snarling. I rant to Sophie and was inches from her when Missy’s chain stopped short, snapping her back. My heart hammered, expanded, threatened to blow. The mad gods turned toward Missy. I grabbed Sophie and jerked her body against me. We both jumped a bit when the frenzied pitch of my mother’s scream echoed through the gangway. She exploded from the side door. Armed with a broom, she swung wild, savage arcs at the mad dogs. All five of them snapped to attention. My mother, reckless and hulking, advanced, and they scattered, nails struggling for traction against the smooth, slippery concrete. I swung the gate open and they poured out. We celebrated like we’d just won a small library, hugging and hopping on our toes, clapping and smiling. Missy hopped happily around us, catching the mood.
When my dad came home from work, I wanted to run at him and tell him the whole story, but the moment he walked through the door my mom burst from the kitchen and threw a tin tea container across the room aimed straight at his head. He ducked; the tin soared through the air where his head had just been and smashed against the wall behind him. Leaves, shoots, and small, tight baggies of white powder burst from the can, scattering in all directions. Wide-eyed, jaw-dropped, he stared at the tin and mess on the floor. He looked up just in time to receive a back-handed blow hard enough to rock him on his heels, and he stumbled back. He went after her. She ran into the bathroom and locked herself in.
“You can’t hide this shit from me!” she screamed through the door.
I slapped my hands over Sophie’s ears and pulled her back down the hall into our room where I closed and locked the door. I heard my mom’s shrill voice through the door and my dad’s shouts in reply.
“Why did mom do that?” Sophie asked. She sat against the wall holding a doll, plucking out the hairs on its head one by one. I watched her hands, pink and small, dirt beneath her fingernails, carefully grabbing only one strand of hair at a time, jerking quickly with a snap of her wrist. Once the hair was free, she dropped it on her lap and set out for the next, close to the same spot where she had taken out the last one, creating a gradually expanding bald spot.
“She was mad. She found bad stuff dad was hiding.” I shuffled a deck of cards.
“Yeah,” she said.
I took out a stack of paper and our box of scissors and crayons. We spread out a blanket and got to work. Hours must have passed before my mom knocked on the door, asking us to come out for dinner. The contents of the tin had been cleaned up. The smell of toast and gravy wafted from the kitchen. My dad sat at the table, ladling white sauce with flecks of beef on a stack of toast. My mom went to the counter to toast more bread, and Sophie and I took our seats.
“Sit up, girls,” my dad said. He watched while Sophie and I straightened our spines and laid our hands in our laps; then he gave us a slight nod and lifted a forkful of dripping bread into his mouth, making sure to chew with his mouth closed. Table manners were highly important to my dad. My mom appreciated proper etiquette as well, especially in her daughters, lest we end up looking “trashy” to anyone.
That night after dinner Sophie, Missy, and I sat in our room going over the details of our adventure from earlier in the day. Downstairs, my mom’s muffled voice was growing louder. My parents had been drinking and smoking pot for the past hour and 47 minutes. I knew because Sophie and I were sent to our room the moment it started. My mom had been talking the entire time. Sometimes when she was high, a poetic gem within her would emerge and her eloquent, verbose speech would monopolize conversation, excluding my dad.
Her words seemed to forcibly anger my father. It seems to me that it would begin with a subtle uneasy feeling that spread outward from an inherent wrath; a hot, molten nucleic ire he stored deep in his chest. By the time it surfaced, he had been quietly disturbed for some time and the surge of rage seemed sudden, the unexpectedness of it confounding even him. My father, whether high or low, was never good with words. He had to fight everything with his fists.
“Beginnings and endings. They make life, which only exists in time, inherently tragic. Although sometimes I think there is a region of existence beyond time from which I came and to which I will return. Or, perhaps more acutely, a region where the idea of me exists currently and is expressing itself in various ways and places simultaneously, time and this self that I currently am being but one of them.”
“Cut it out, Christine.”
“What frightens me is that we are bound fast to the laws according to time: that everything in life has a beginning and an end. Everything. Who I love, what I know to be real, what I have will all be gone, will disappear or turn out to be illusory, and all that I contrive to gain will be taken away.”
“Enough with that horse shit now.”
“Even if you and I are together for this life, we will have separate and unequal durations.”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
“One of us will be gone and one of us will be left. I wonder if the one of us who is gone will be held within time somehow by—”
The beating started after Sophie had fallen asleep. I pulled the blanket higher up over her head and made sure our door was locked before I sat down to listen. The steel and concrete foundation of the building shuddered with the blows. Heavy thumps through the walls and floor, like a dumbbell falling from a shelf. There was something wrong, something lacking from the noises that usually accompany their fights. I heard no cries from her, no fighting back. No hurtled objects colliding with faces. Only the occasional grunts he made between fist falls.
After a while, I began to worry that he had killed her. I got up and it stopped. A thick sludge of silence rose into the grooves dug by the noises of violence in the air, like clotting blood filling an open wound. I listened hard. Nothing. I waited what seemed to be hours. Still nothing. At last I fell asleep next to Sophie, sandwiching her between Missy and myself.
That night I dreamed that I was in a crowd of people tightly filling a room whose floor was breaking away avalanche-like from the wall opposite one single door that seemed to be shrinking as I scrambled near it, fighting to get through, shoving and throwing elbows, even gouging out eyes to make people go down. When I finally reached the threshold and was about to step through to safety, I heard a shot and felt a bullet enter my back squarely between my shoulder blades. I was thrown forward on impact and as I reached to break my fall, I felt a second shot penetrate high in my left shoulder, then a third almost simultaneously in the back of my neck. Lying face down I felt the warm blood rise, breach the skin and spill down the slopes of my sides and neck to the floor where I saw the dark red puddle form and spread. I felt the pain acutely, struggled for breath while my lungs collapsed, and knew I was dying.
I woke up to the same sealed, airtight soundlessness that I had fallen asleep with. I crossed the hall to my parents’ bedroom door. Pushing open the door slowly, I looked in to find the shape of my mother alone beneath a heap of covers. Overflowing ashtrays and prescription pill bottles littered the night tables. My dad wasn’t there, which was not unusual; he often woke up before any of us and left the house without making a sound. I saw a glint of sun bounce off metal on the nightstand. A gun. A hand-held revolver lay perpendicular to the bed on the table to the right of it, partially covered with cigarette ashes, handle facing my mother. I stared for a moment and then winced, remembering my dream. I drew back as if being pulled from the threshold and into my room where I relocked the door.
When my dad came home from work, I wanted to run at him and tell him the whole story, but the moment he walked through the door my mom burst from the kitchen and threw a tin tea container across the room aimed straight at his head. He ducked; the tin soared through the air where his head had just been and smashed against the wall behind him. Leaves, shoots, and small, tight baggies of white powder burst from the can, scattering in all directions. Wide-eyed, jaw-dropped, he stared at the tin and mess on the floor. He looked up just in time to receive a back-handed blow hard enough to rock him on his heels, and he stumbled back. He went after her. She ran into the bathroom and locked herself in.
“You can’t hide this shit from me!” she screamed through the door.
I slapped my hands over Sophie’s ears and pulled her back down the hall into our room where I closed and locked the door. I heard my mom’s shrill voice through the door and my dad’s shouts in reply.
“Why did mom do that?” Sophie asked. She sat against the wall holding a doll, plucking out the hairs on its head one by one. I watched her hands, pink and small, dirt beneath her fingernails, carefully grabbing only one strand of hair at a time, jerking quickly with a snap of her wrist. Once the hair was free, she dropped it on her lap and set out for the next, close to the same spot where she had taken out the last one, creating a gradually expanding bald spot.
“She was mad. She found bad stuff dad was hiding.” I shuffled a deck of cards.
“Yeah,” she said.
I took out a stack of paper and our box of scissors and crayons. We spread out a blanket and got to work. Hours must have passed before my mom knocked on the door, asking us to come out for dinner. The contents of the tin had been cleaned up. The smell of toast and gravy wafted from the kitchen. My dad sat at the table, ladling white sauce with flecks of beef on a stack of toast. My mom went to the counter to toast more bread, and Sophie and I took our seats.
“Sit up, girls,” my dad said. He watched while Sophie and I straightened our spines and laid our hands in our laps; then he gave us a slight nod and lifted a forkful of dripping bread into his mouth, making sure to chew with his mouth closed. Table manners were highly important to my dad. My mom appreciated proper etiquette as well, especially in her daughters, lest we end up looking “trashy” to anyone.
That night after dinner Sophie, Missy, and I sat in our room going over the details of our adventure from earlier in the day. Downstairs, my mom’s muffled voice was growing louder. My parents had been drinking and smoking pot for the past hour and 47 minutes. I knew because Sophie and I were sent to our room the moment it started. My mom had been talking the entire time. Sometimes when she was high, a poetic gem within her would emerge and her eloquent, verbose speech would monopolize conversation, excluding my dad.
Her words seemed to forcibly anger my father. It seems to me that it would begin with a subtle uneasy feeling that spread outward from an inherent wrath; a hot, molten nucleic ire he stored deep in his chest. By the time it surfaced, he had been quietly disturbed for some time and the surge of rage seemed sudden, the unexpectedness of it confounding even him. My father, whether high or low, was never good with words. He had to fight everything with his fists.
“Beginnings and endings. They make life, which only exists in time, inherently tragic. Although sometimes I think there is a region of existence beyond time from which I came and to which I will return. Or, perhaps more acutely, a region where the idea of me exists currently and is expressing itself in various ways and places simultaneously, time and this self that I currently am being but one of them.”
“Cut it out, Christine.”
“What frightens me is that we are bound fast to the laws according to time: that everything in life has a beginning and an end. Everything. Who I love, what I know to be real, what I have will all be gone, will disappear or turn out to be illusory, and all that I contrive to gain will be taken away.”
“Enough with that horse shit now.”
“Even if you and I are together for this life, we will have separate and unequal durations.”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
“One of us will be gone and one of us will be left. I wonder if the one of us who is gone will be held within time somehow by—”
The beating started after Sophie had fallen asleep. I pulled the blanket higher up over her head and made sure our door was locked before I sat down to listen. The steel and concrete foundation of the building shuddered with the blows. Heavy thumps through the walls and floor, like a dumbbell falling from a shelf. There was something wrong, something lacking from the noises that usually accompany their fights. I heard no cries from her, no fighting back. No hurtled objects colliding with faces. Only the occasional grunts he made between fist falls.
After a while, I began to worry that he had killed her. I got up and it stopped. A thick sludge of silence rose into the grooves dug by the noises of violence in the air, like clotting blood filling an open wound. I listened hard. Nothing. I waited what seemed to be hours. Still nothing. At last I fell asleep next to Sophie, sandwiching her between Missy and myself.
That night I dreamed that I was in a crowd of people tightly filling a room whose floor was breaking away avalanche-like from the wall opposite one single door that seemed to be shrinking as I scrambled near it, fighting to get through, shoving and throwing elbows, even gouging out eyes to make people go down. When I finally reached the threshold and was about to step through to safety, I heard a shot and felt a bullet enter my back squarely between my shoulder blades. I was thrown forward on impact and as I reached to break my fall, I felt a second shot penetrate high in my left shoulder, then a third almost simultaneously in the back of my neck. Lying face down I felt the warm blood rise, breach the skin and spill down the slopes of my sides and neck to the floor where I saw the dark red puddle form and spread. I felt the pain acutely, struggled for breath while my lungs collapsed, and knew I was dying.
I woke up to the same sealed, airtight soundlessness that I had fallen asleep with. I crossed the hall to my parents’ bedroom door. Pushing open the door slowly, I looked in to find the shape of my mother alone beneath a heap of covers. Overflowing ashtrays and prescription pill bottles littered the night tables. My dad wasn’t there, which was not unusual; he often woke up before any of us and left the house without making a sound. I saw a glint of sun bounce off metal on the nightstand. A gun. A hand-held revolver lay perpendicular to the bed on the table to the right of it, partially covered with cigarette ashes, handle facing my mother. I stared for a moment and then winced, remembering my dream. I drew back as if being pulled from the threshold and into my room where I relocked the door.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Nothing Else Smells Like You
I squirmed under Jamie’s bed, slapping at his hands, screaming as I went. Jamie woke up, jumped out of bed, and flipped on the light. Seconds later, his mom entered, followed closely by Heather.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Jamie’s mom glared at her drunken husband sprawled on the floor shirtless, his pants undone.
“Nothing! I just must’ve passed out in here. I don’t remember! Jesus, calm the fuck down!” He struggled to his feet, fastening his jeans. Jamie glared at his father, beet-red. His mom grabbed her husband’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He shook her off violently and turned, fixing his eyes on me, struggling to focus.
“I don’t know what you’re screamin’ for, girl,” he slurred.
“Everyone get back to bed,” the mom said. Heather ran back to her room and Jamie closed the door behind them.
“Are you OK, Jane?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Just turn out the light and go back to bed.” He kept looking at me, sad. I turned over and pulled the cover up over my face. He shut the light off. I never spent the night at Jamie’s house again, not in Lodi or in Chicago. He came to my house and never asked any questions.
The first day after returning home to Chicago, I walked to Mrs. Dalby’s house to return her Emily Dickinson book and borrow another. I was surprised by the amount of anxiety I had just going to her house. I walked across the front lawn and knocked on her door. There was no answer so I pushed the button for the doorbell. Still no answer. I was disappointed; the anticipation of seeing her again had been fueling me for days. I sat down on the front stoop and opened the book on my lap. I tried to read but kept thinking of Mrs. Dalby, wondering where she was, when she would be back, what she would think finding me here waiting. I scanned the page, then read and re-read the same three lines:
What Inn is this
Where for the night
Peculiar Traveller comes?
I read and read without comprehension. Only fantasies of spending the night at her house, the two of us on the fold-out sofa in our pajamas with mugs of tea and blankets draping our shoulders. I would watch her dark, beautiful face while she read to me poetry that she had written, words she had never shared with anyone. I heard the garage door lift and I looked up from the book to see her car approaching. We connected eyes and she smiled. I blushed, closed the book and stood up.
“Jane, it’s great to see you. I love your haircut.” She opened the back car-door and unbuckled Sarah from her car seat. She approached me with the child on her hip and gave me a one-armed hug. Her casual attitude clashed against the serious intimacy I had been imagining; her vanilla scent closed my eyes and demanded to be breathed in.
“I brought your book,” I said, my cheek pressed against her shoulder. I must have stayed too long in the embrace because Sarah began to squirm although Mrs. Dalby didn’t release until I did.
“Great! You ready for a new one?”
“Yeah.” I looked at the ground, the cement floor of her garage. I looked around and saw boxes of WWF action figures stacked in front of life-sized cardboard cutouts of muscle-bound men and women with furious expressions.
“What’s all this?” I pointed at the collection.
“That’s Josh’s, my ex-husband.” She slammed the car door. I imagined Josh as a 300 pound bulging, angry wrestler.
“Come on in; help me change Sarah and put her down.” She walked through the garage door into a small basement area, then up a few stairs to the front room with all the books, where I had been before. The baby’s room smelled like citrus. I stood beside her as she unpinned Sarah’s diaper.
“Where’s her dad?” Anxiety filled my gut waiting for the answer.
“He lives in California. We’re divorced.”
Relief. I knew that what I felt was relief, I knew I did not want him around, but I didn’t understand why. I wanted her all to myself.
“What happened?” I asked. She threw the diaper into a container beside her and reached across me to pluck a new diaper from the package. I leaned closer to her before I moved out of the way. She glanced at me, smiling. Sarah kicked her pudgy pink legs.
“He met someone new. Left even before I knew I was pregnant.”
“Did you tell him about her?”
“Oh, of course. He knows she’s here. He’s not really interested. We were only married nine months. It was a mistake. How are you? How’s Sophie?”
“We’re fine. We just got home from the summer in Wisconsin.”
“Nice.” She finished changing Sarah and put her in her crib. She covered her up and switched on the monitor.
“Let’s go sit and talk.” She held the door for me to pass. We sat on the couch in the front room. I noticed a woman with her in many of the pictures that I hadn’t noticed before. Short dark hair, dimples, a giddy smile squishing her eyes closed.
“How are your mom and dad?”
“Fine, I guess. I haven’t seen them. We stayed with my Gram in her cabin in Lodi all summer with our dog, Missy,” I answered, still staring at the picture.
“So you got some reading done there?” She followed my gaze, looked a few moments at the woman in the picture, smiled.
“Yes, I read the whole book.” That was a lie. I had actually only read about a quarter of the book.
“What’d you think?”
“It’s nice. I like her poems.”
“Good. I made a reading list for you but I don’t know what I did with it. I know the first book I have for you is Black Beauty.” She walked over to one of the bookshelves and plucked out the book.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s the autobiography of a horse. He tells the story of all his adventures. It’s really exciting; I know you’ll enjoy it.” She handed the book to me. I flipped through the pages.
“Thanks. Who’s that woman in the picture?”
She sat down next to me and crossed her legs.
“Her name is Anne. She was someone very special to me.”
My question hung in silence between us.
“What do you want to do when you grow up, Jane?”
“I don’t know—” I considered all the possible answers, all the answers I had heard other kids my age give to that question: doctor, fireman, astronaut. They all seemed so unimportant and uninteresting to me.
“Save the world, I guess.” She laughed a little too loud.
“Bold aspiration for a fifth grader,” she smiled. My face grew hot and I hugged the book to my chest.
“What makes you think the world needs saving?” She tapped my knee. I looked up at her.
“Have you seen it lately?”
“Maybe the world is a matter of perception. Maybe it’s you that needs saving.”
“I don’t need anybody to save me. I’m just fine.”
“Of course you are,” she smiled again, perfecting her face. I was squeezing the book so hard that my arms tingled and my hands felt numb. I walked toward the door.
“I better go home. Sophie’ll wonder where I am.”
She stood up, stretching. I walked close to the picture with the dimpled woman in it and leaned toward it. Mrs. Dalby’s hand was on the side of her neck almost cupping her face, tilting it toward her. Both of them looked so happy.
“Anne and I were in love.”
Her voice startled me. I didn’t believe she said what I heard.
“What, who?” I straightened and stumbled back a step, nearly knocking the picture over. My stomach grew tight and tense.
“She passed away.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you miss her?”
“Like crazy.”
Suddenly sad, she was looking at the image of her and Anne happy together. I couldn’t understand why I asked that question.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s fine, Jane, really.”
She put her arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the door.
“There’s something special about you, Jane.”
A stir rose and whirled in my chest, my stomach, like aching hunger.
“I’m not a kid.”
She laughed, pulled her hair back and twisted it. It was hard to tell through her darker complexion, but I thought I saw her cheeks blush.
“OK, Jane. I hope you’ll visit us again soon.” She walked toward the door, placing a hand on my shoulder, gently squeezing as she passed. The spot where her hand had been burned through my shirt and skin and ached in my bones for her touch again. A woody, musky scent filled the room like freshly cut oak and a lemon tree together with a hint of the light, sweet smell of vanilla. Walking home, that smell, it was in the pages of her book. It lingered on my clothes.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Jamie’s mom glared at her drunken husband sprawled on the floor shirtless, his pants undone.
“Nothing! I just must’ve passed out in here. I don’t remember! Jesus, calm the fuck down!” He struggled to his feet, fastening his jeans. Jamie glared at his father, beet-red. His mom grabbed her husband’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He shook her off violently and turned, fixing his eyes on me, struggling to focus.
“I don’t know what you’re screamin’ for, girl,” he slurred.
“Everyone get back to bed,” the mom said. Heather ran back to her room and Jamie closed the door behind them.
“Are you OK, Jane?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Just turn out the light and go back to bed.” He kept looking at me, sad. I turned over and pulled the cover up over my face. He shut the light off. I never spent the night at Jamie’s house again, not in Lodi or in Chicago. He came to my house and never asked any questions.
The first day after returning home to Chicago, I walked to Mrs. Dalby’s house to return her Emily Dickinson book and borrow another. I was surprised by the amount of anxiety I had just going to her house. I walked across the front lawn and knocked on her door. There was no answer so I pushed the button for the doorbell. Still no answer. I was disappointed; the anticipation of seeing her again had been fueling me for days. I sat down on the front stoop and opened the book on my lap. I tried to read but kept thinking of Mrs. Dalby, wondering where she was, when she would be back, what she would think finding me here waiting. I scanned the page, then read and re-read the same three lines:
What Inn is this
Where for the night
Peculiar Traveller comes?
I read and read without comprehension. Only fantasies of spending the night at her house, the two of us on the fold-out sofa in our pajamas with mugs of tea and blankets draping our shoulders. I would watch her dark, beautiful face while she read to me poetry that she had written, words she had never shared with anyone. I heard the garage door lift and I looked up from the book to see her car approaching. We connected eyes and she smiled. I blushed, closed the book and stood up.
“Jane, it’s great to see you. I love your haircut.” She opened the back car-door and unbuckled Sarah from her car seat. She approached me with the child on her hip and gave me a one-armed hug. Her casual attitude clashed against the serious intimacy I had been imagining; her vanilla scent closed my eyes and demanded to be breathed in.
“I brought your book,” I said, my cheek pressed against her shoulder. I must have stayed too long in the embrace because Sarah began to squirm although Mrs. Dalby didn’t release until I did.
“Great! You ready for a new one?”
“Yeah.” I looked at the ground, the cement floor of her garage. I looked around and saw boxes of WWF action figures stacked in front of life-sized cardboard cutouts of muscle-bound men and women with furious expressions.
“What’s all this?” I pointed at the collection.
“That’s Josh’s, my ex-husband.” She slammed the car door. I imagined Josh as a 300 pound bulging, angry wrestler.
“Come on in; help me change Sarah and put her down.” She walked through the garage door into a small basement area, then up a few stairs to the front room with all the books, where I had been before. The baby’s room smelled like citrus. I stood beside her as she unpinned Sarah’s diaper.
“Where’s her dad?” Anxiety filled my gut waiting for the answer.
“He lives in California. We’re divorced.”
Relief. I knew that what I felt was relief, I knew I did not want him around, but I didn’t understand why. I wanted her all to myself.
“What happened?” I asked. She threw the diaper into a container beside her and reached across me to pluck a new diaper from the package. I leaned closer to her before I moved out of the way. She glanced at me, smiling. Sarah kicked her pudgy pink legs.
“He met someone new. Left even before I knew I was pregnant.”
“Did you tell him about her?”
“Oh, of course. He knows she’s here. He’s not really interested. We were only married nine months. It was a mistake. How are you? How’s Sophie?”
“We’re fine. We just got home from the summer in Wisconsin.”
“Nice.” She finished changing Sarah and put her in her crib. She covered her up and switched on the monitor.
“Let’s go sit and talk.” She held the door for me to pass. We sat on the couch in the front room. I noticed a woman with her in many of the pictures that I hadn’t noticed before. Short dark hair, dimples, a giddy smile squishing her eyes closed.
“How are your mom and dad?”
“Fine, I guess. I haven’t seen them. We stayed with my Gram in her cabin in Lodi all summer with our dog, Missy,” I answered, still staring at the picture.
“So you got some reading done there?” She followed my gaze, looked a few moments at the woman in the picture, smiled.
“Yes, I read the whole book.” That was a lie. I had actually only read about a quarter of the book.
“What’d you think?”
“It’s nice. I like her poems.”
“Good. I made a reading list for you but I don’t know what I did with it. I know the first book I have for you is Black Beauty.” She walked over to one of the bookshelves and plucked out the book.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s the autobiography of a horse. He tells the story of all his adventures. It’s really exciting; I know you’ll enjoy it.” She handed the book to me. I flipped through the pages.
“Thanks. Who’s that woman in the picture?”
She sat down next to me and crossed her legs.
“Her name is Anne. She was someone very special to me.”
My question hung in silence between us.
“What do you want to do when you grow up, Jane?”
“I don’t know—” I considered all the possible answers, all the answers I had heard other kids my age give to that question: doctor, fireman, astronaut. They all seemed so unimportant and uninteresting to me.
“Save the world, I guess.” She laughed a little too loud.
“Bold aspiration for a fifth grader,” she smiled. My face grew hot and I hugged the book to my chest.
“What makes you think the world needs saving?” She tapped my knee. I looked up at her.
“Have you seen it lately?”
“Maybe the world is a matter of perception. Maybe it’s you that needs saving.”
“I don’t need anybody to save me. I’m just fine.”
“Of course you are,” she smiled again, perfecting her face. I was squeezing the book so hard that my arms tingled and my hands felt numb. I walked toward the door.
“I better go home. Sophie’ll wonder where I am.”
She stood up, stretching. I walked close to the picture with the dimpled woman in it and leaned toward it. Mrs. Dalby’s hand was on the side of her neck almost cupping her face, tilting it toward her. Both of them looked so happy.
“Anne and I were in love.”
Her voice startled me. I didn’t believe she said what I heard.
“What, who?” I straightened and stumbled back a step, nearly knocking the picture over. My stomach grew tight and tense.
“She passed away.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Do you miss her?”
“Like crazy.”
Suddenly sad, she was looking at the image of her and Anne happy together. I couldn’t understand why I asked that question.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s fine, Jane, really.”
She put her arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the door.
“There’s something special about you, Jane.”
A stir rose and whirled in my chest, my stomach, like aching hunger.
“I’m not a kid.”
She laughed, pulled her hair back and twisted it. It was hard to tell through her darker complexion, but I thought I saw her cheeks blush.
“OK, Jane. I hope you’ll visit us again soon.” She walked toward the door, placing a hand on my shoulder, gently squeezing as she passed. The spot where her hand had been burned through my shirt and skin and ached in my bones for her touch again. A woody, musky scent filled the room like freshly cut oak and a lemon tree together with a hint of the light, sweet smell of vanilla. Walking home, that smell, it was in the pages of her book. It lingered on my clothes.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Dirt in My Organs
I went back to the playground every day after that to look for the girl. When I got back to Gram’s cabin that night, I was soaked and my knee was still bleeding. Gram cleaned me up and put a big band aid on my scrape. She washed and patched my jeans, too, only the patch she used was pink and flowery. Nobody would take me for a boy now. They were my only pair of jeans left that fit. I grew out of the others and gave them to Sophie. Gram said she would take me shopping in Chicago but that I would just have to deal with what I had for that summer. When I went to the park, I tied a black bandanna around my leg to cover the pink patch. Sophie looked at me funny but seemed to understand when I told her I hated the patch. The girl never came back. A couple of other kids that came every day took over my attention.
Jamie lived three blocks from our cabin in Lodi. I noticed first his black, lumpish hair and brown skin. There weren’t any other brown kids in Lodi. I was playing catch with Sophie when he asked where I was from. When he said his family was moving to the very same neighborhood in Chicago in the coming autumn, we decided we were meant to be friends. His sister, Heather was Sophie’s age. She was on the playground too, swinging alone. Jamie called to her and she came over to say hi. Her mouth pulled far to the left when she spoke and rested in a softly curved slash when she was silent. One of the two of them must have been adopted because Heather was white.
“Which one of you was adopted?” I asked. Looking from one face to the next, I saw a resemblance and it occurred to me they simply had two different dads. Jamie smiled.
“I was,” he said. I felt the confusion on my face.
“But now that I’m looking, I see that you do look alike so how’s that possible?” Jamie laughed and looked at Heather who laughed in response. Her face pulled out of shape when she laughed too. The smallness of her face and the lack of symmetry contrasted with her big eyes to make them stunning.
“I was left in a basket on the front porch when I was a baby,” he said. Now Sophie and I laughed. I appreciated a good sense of humor. Only neither of them were laughing. In fact, he looked serious, hurt even.
“It’s true, actually. My parents took me in and kept me as their own. They had Heather when I was three,” he said. His parents took him in and cared for him. I shook my head a little because he was telling the truth. When the truth sounds more like a lie than a lie does, it’s usually the truth. I looked at Heather. Without her facial deformity, she really did look like him.
My friendship with Jamie softened the rougher spots of being. Every morning that summer in Lodi, I rode my bike over to Jamie’s house. We pretended our bikes were motorcycles, climbed trees, and built forts in branches.
Almost every night I slept on the wide, wooden slats of his bedroom floor. Most of our tree-forts, built with plywood and brush, seemed to architecturally surpass Jamie’s own home, if not in structural soundness then at least in quality and age. His house was older than the eldest members of the thick-trunked trees in the woods surrounding it, shrouding and secluding it. There was a slight slant to every room and a dissymmetry to the house overall. One half looked barely attached to the other, like the two halves were built separately then placed together. When I asked Jamie about it, he said the east half of the house was newer than the west half. There had once been a fire that required a rebuild but the previous occupants wanted to save money, so they tore down just half the house to rebuild. Water at Jamie’s house smelled like dirt. It came from the poorly maintained well in the side yard. Every time his mom gave me a glass, I looked at the sediment in the bottom when I took a drink and tried not to think about it. The smell in the house was always that well water dirt mixed with the aroma of recently cooked game, usually squirrel, and sometimes, at its most pleasant, the scent of freshly brewed coffee.
Jamie and I rode up to his house on our bikes one day to the sight of his father and another man aiming shotguns at the tree tops around the yard. I skidded to a stop. Jamie rode ahead as if he didn’t notice then stopped and turned back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“They have guns!”
“They’re hunting,” he laughed.
“Hunting what?”
“Squirrels and rabbits.”
“Why?”
“To eat, why else?”
“You kill squirrels and rabbits and then eat them?”
“Dad does. He goes up north to hunt deer, too. That’s my favorite. Especially the jerky he makes from the leftover meat.”
I just nodded, amazed.
The next day I woke up at Jamie’s early, shivering and sore from the hard floor and the cold draft. I waited for him to wake up, counting the spider-web cracks in the ceiling, starting over every time I blinked and lost my place. I heard his dad coming in from the night before. I actually smelled him coming before I heard anything, his one-hundred-proof sweat preceding him. He came through the door of Jamie’s room and peered at me with watery eyes. I feigned sleep with held breath and eyes too tightly shut, trying too hard not to open them. I felt him staring. I felt examined and disgraced. His stare left dirt under my clothes, under my skin, inside my organs. The grit made my bones ache. I heard him walk away and let go of my breath. It wasn’t until a few days later that I decided never to come back to his house again.
I was on the floor sleeping next to Jamie’s bed when I heard a loud whisper.
“Jane, are you awake?” I smelled whiskey and stale sweat. The room was oil-dark and I was lying on my side, my face half-buried in my pillow. I felt him close behind me, his breath hot against the back of my neck, then something wet. I jumped and turned over.
“Shhh, it’s OK.” He reached for my stomach.
Jamie lived three blocks from our cabin in Lodi. I noticed first his black, lumpish hair and brown skin. There weren’t any other brown kids in Lodi. I was playing catch with Sophie when he asked where I was from. When he said his family was moving to the very same neighborhood in Chicago in the coming autumn, we decided we were meant to be friends. His sister, Heather was Sophie’s age. She was on the playground too, swinging alone. Jamie called to her and she came over to say hi. Her mouth pulled far to the left when she spoke and rested in a softly curved slash when she was silent. One of the two of them must have been adopted because Heather was white.
“Which one of you was adopted?” I asked. Looking from one face to the next, I saw a resemblance and it occurred to me they simply had two different dads. Jamie smiled.
“I was,” he said. I felt the confusion on my face.
“But now that I’m looking, I see that you do look alike so how’s that possible?” Jamie laughed and looked at Heather who laughed in response. Her face pulled out of shape when she laughed too. The smallness of her face and the lack of symmetry contrasted with her big eyes to make them stunning.
“I was left in a basket on the front porch when I was a baby,” he said. Now Sophie and I laughed. I appreciated a good sense of humor. Only neither of them were laughing. In fact, he looked serious, hurt even.
“It’s true, actually. My parents took me in and kept me as their own. They had Heather when I was three,” he said. His parents took him in and cared for him. I shook my head a little because he was telling the truth. When the truth sounds more like a lie than a lie does, it’s usually the truth. I looked at Heather. Without her facial deformity, she really did look like him.
My friendship with Jamie softened the rougher spots of being. Every morning that summer in Lodi, I rode my bike over to Jamie’s house. We pretended our bikes were motorcycles, climbed trees, and built forts in branches.
Almost every night I slept on the wide, wooden slats of his bedroom floor. Most of our tree-forts, built with plywood and brush, seemed to architecturally surpass Jamie’s own home, if not in structural soundness then at least in quality and age. His house was older than the eldest members of the thick-trunked trees in the woods surrounding it, shrouding and secluding it. There was a slight slant to every room and a dissymmetry to the house overall. One half looked barely attached to the other, like the two halves were built separately then placed together. When I asked Jamie about it, he said the east half of the house was newer than the west half. There had once been a fire that required a rebuild but the previous occupants wanted to save money, so they tore down just half the house to rebuild. Water at Jamie’s house smelled like dirt. It came from the poorly maintained well in the side yard. Every time his mom gave me a glass, I looked at the sediment in the bottom when I took a drink and tried not to think about it. The smell in the house was always that well water dirt mixed with the aroma of recently cooked game, usually squirrel, and sometimes, at its most pleasant, the scent of freshly brewed coffee.
Jamie and I rode up to his house on our bikes one day to the sight of his father and another man aiming shotguns at the tree tops around the yard. I skidded to a stop. Jamie rode ahead as if he didn’t notice then stopped and turned back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“They have guns!”
“They’re hunting,” he laughed.
“Hunting what?”
“Squirrels and rabbits.”
“Why?”
“To eat, why else?”
“You kill squirrels and rabbits and then eat them?”
“Dad does. He goes up north to hunt deer, too. That’s my favorite. Especially the jerky he makes from the leftover meat.”
I just nodded, amazed.
The next day I woke up at Jamie’s early, shivering and sore from the hard floor and the cold draft. I waited for him to wake up, counting the spider-web cracks in the ceiling, starting over every time I blinked and lost my place. I heard his dad coming in from the night before. I actually smelled him coming before I heard anything, his one-hundred-proof sweat preceding him. He came through the door of Jamie’s room and peered at me with watery eyes. I feigned sleep with held breath and eyes too tightly shut, trying too hard not to open them. I felt him staring. I felt examined and disgraced. His stare left dirt under my clothes, under my skin, inside my organs. The grit made my bones ache. I heard him walk away and let go of my breath. It wasn’t until a few days later that I decided never to come back to his house again.
I was on the floor sleeping next to Jamie’s bed when I heard a loud whisper.
“Jane, are you awake?” I smelled whiskey and stale sweat. The room was oil-dark and I was lying on my side, my face half-buried in my pillow. I felt him close behind me, his breath hot against the back of my neck, then something wet. I jumped and turned over.
“Shhh, it’s OK.” He reached for my stomach.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Geometry and Rain
Missy sprinted out ahead of us up the hill. At the top, just off to the left tucked into a cove of tall pine trees were two naked bodies on a blanket. Startled, I stopped abruptly and stared. Sophie bumped into my back.
“What,” she said and I pointed. She gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth. The couple was about 50 feet away and on a bit of a slope so the full length of them was visible. The woman was on top, her hair falling over the face of the other, her hips writhing. The curves and angles of her body and the rhythm of their movements mesmerized me. I can’t say how long we were standing and staring but it seemed quite long. When they made more and more noise, Missy came back to investigate. She ran too close to them and barked, causing them to jump and look up. The woman’s eyes met mine and I instinctively crouched. Sophie ran. The couple grasped for their clothes or the blanket or anything to cover up. I called to Missy and felt my face go hot, my hands numb. Missy ran past me after Sophie and I found my legs were stuck. I couldn’t move. The man wrestled with his pants and cursed. The woman stared back at me like she was waiting for something else to happen. Something clenched in my throat and I crouched lower, panicking. I had a wild fear that she recognized me, knew who I was and would tell on me because maybe I had done something wrong. The man had found his way into his pants and stood up, scowling at me.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he yelled and started walking toward me. My legs came back alive and I burst from the grass and ran and ran.
I found Sophie standing in front of a log cabin with Missy at her feet. It had an inviting front porch that wrapped around the sides. A flowery sign that hung from the door read: “Open” and warm smells of fresh bread and sweet berries came from the house. Without a word, we mounted the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I saw movement from a window off to the right and then a clatter from within. Spooked, I took Sophie’s hand and was about to pull her away and leave the place when the door swung open and an old woman emerged with a basket of lollipops. She was short and white haired, round and kind looking. A wide spread smile seemed to be her only expression.
“Hello there, girls, no need to knock, you know; we’re open for business here. Welcome to Matt Donahue’s. Here, have a free sucker,” she said, her voice scratchy, warm. Sophie’s hand darted out and snatched a sucker. She inspected the flavor, frowned, and put it back. The old woman laughed and brought the basket lower so Sophie could see better.
“Take a look, sweetie, and pick your favorite color. I like green; tastes like apples,” she said. Sophie peered into the basket and fished around until she found the pale yellow wrapper of butterscotch. She took it and smiled up at the old woman.
“Thank you, lady,” she said, blushing and sticking the lollipop into her mouth.
“My name is Mary Mare; what’s yours?”
“Sophie,” she said and looked at me.
“I’m Jane; we’re here for the summer with our grandparents,” I said.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you both. Please come in, but your dog will have to wait out here,” she said. I told Missy to stay and pointed at her like I’d watched my dad do then went in.
The bins full of candy were the first thing I saw. Behind the counter was a haggard woman with black stringy hair flecked with gray, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. She glanced up at us but didn’t say a word or even smile.
“This is Mrs. Donahue, girls, one of the owners here. This is Jane and Sophie, here in town with their grandma and grandpa for the summer,” Mary Mare said. Mrs. Donahue mumbled something I couldn’t hear and hunched further over her magazine. Mary Mare put an apron on and walked into a back room where all the nice smells were coming from. Sophie and I grabbed bunches of Mary Janes and Slo Pokes and piled them on the counter.
We paid for the candy with handfuls of pennies that we counted out in front of Mrs. Donahue’s phantom white face, smoke spilling thick from her mouth and nose.
“Can we have a bag for the candy?” I asked.
“You got pockets?” she said, then turned around on her stool and went back to her magazine. I looked at Sophie and giggled while we filled our pockets. She stuck her tongue out at Mrs. Donahue’s back. I slapped a hand over my mouth and snorted laughter. We ran out laughing and stuffing pieces of candy in our mouths.
I watched for signs of the couple on the way back to the cabin but they were gone. Missy sniffed around the spot where there blanket left a crushed rectangle in the grass and I thought of the white hips lifting and falling. I thought of sleeping bags packed with naked bodies and dark nights lit by stars. I thought of Mrs. Dalby as that naked woman and an uproar of fluttery excitement erupted in my gut. I ran hard back to the cabin kicking up dirt.
Later that day I sat with Gram playing Uno, something she invited me to do often, only to have the cards lie untouched while we had long conversations instead, when she started talking about my dad.
“If your dad would just grow up, he’d be a good boy.” She shook her head and shuffled the cards again.
“Why do you hate him?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t hate him. We struggle with ‘im, that’s all. His parents are the real problem. When you were just a baby, you and your mom and dad lived in our four-flat right above us. Well, your dad was a janitor at some crummy hotel downtown where they gave ‘im drugs. He’d come home high as a kite and beat on yer mom. He’d be real violent and just nasty. He’d grab and twist ‘er—” I knew what she was talking about. My dad rarely hit my mom when they fought, although she hit him freely. Instead, he had a way of grabbing and twisting parts of her that stood out: her nose, breasts, ears.
“So anyway, your mom asked Papa to keep ‘im out when he was high like that. So wouldn’t ya know it, he come home in a stupor and Papa just stopped him right at the door, told ‘im he can’t come in all coked up like that. Well, Bobby starts cursin’ and yellin,’ sayin’ it’s all Christine’s fault, callin’ her bad names. Papa says to ‘im, we saw the bruises; we know what he did. So then Bobby hauls off and punches your Papa right in the nose. I come runnin’ out to help ‘im and he punches me, too. That was it. Papa had to get ‘is gun out and force ‘im to leave that way.”
Her voice was louder and higher and her face red. I pictured my Papa going to get the gun from inside their apartment. When he returned to the sight of his wife being brutalized, however, his finger stiffened against the trigger, his vision blurred red, and the unambiguous, nearly palpable urge to kill overcame him. My father must have seen this distinctly when he raised his eyes to Papa’s, his glare displacing air in its wake. He must have felt the breeze from it.
Gram was shuffling the cards again.
“Then what happened?” I tapped her shoulder. She put the cards down and took a deep breath.
“I shouldn’t be goin’ on like this to you.”
“I wanna know; it’s OK.”
“Well, that was it. He finally left. But then he went and told his police-captain daddy on us and they come an’ arrest your Papa. They never did nothin’ to help him. They just let ‘im stay up there in that attic when he was comin’ down all shakin’ and sick. They even sat up there, held ‘im down all night once, he was so bad. Well you know me, I tell ‘em how it is. I went marchin’ right over there an’ told your grandma to her face: Your son is sick. You have to get him help. Take him to a hospital or a drug treatment place. Don’t just keep him up there in that attic leaving him to rot.”
She grabbed my hands and squeezed them; her eyes were wide and angry.
“She comes back at me and tells me it’s Christine’s fault. Says she drives ‘im to it! I just told her plain, that son of yours will die from this. It will kill ‘im dead.” She clasped her lips and stared at me.
“What’d she say?”
“If she didn’t just slam that door right in my face!” She started shuffling the cards again, shook her head. My head was clamoring. I rubbed my temples.
“What’s with that hair, young lady?” Gram grabbed a lock from the side of my head and flipped it.
“What?”
“It’s too long and straggly. I’m gonna cut it. Go get me the scissors.”
I didn’t like having it combed; it was something I always fought, and I always had it up in a ponytail, so I agreed. She set me in a chair, placed a shallow bowl over my head, and carefully cut the hair along the edge of the bowl, leaving me with a perfectly even, boyish cut.
Just after dark, I went to the nearby playground sporting my new haircut accessorized with red rubber boots, a blue Izod sweater, and jeans with holes in the knees. Before I left, I looked approvingly into the mirror: fun hair, cool outfit, straight hips. There was a group playing keep-away around the slide, girls against boys. I joined in, climbing up the slide after one orange-haired boy, his bright locks bouncing cheerfully. Arriving at the top, he gave a furtive peek behind him, glancing down at me, small eyes indistinguishable among a mass of fiery freckles, he swiftly disappeared. I climbed into position to go down after him when I was abruptly frozen in my spot. There was a girl down below pointing squarely at me, shouting: “There he is, up there! Get him!”
He? Him? I looked around, flushed, redly smiling, preparing to laugh when her mistake was discovered and pointed out by one of the other kids. I shivered. A voice behind me shouted: “Go down, man, run!” I swooped down, leapt to my feet at the bottom, and ran, settling in to the queer power of how it must always feel to be a boy. It was intoxicating, yet frightening to deceive these girls into believing that I belonged on the opposite team. At any moment they could notice my soft, long eyelashes, a girlish curve to my cheek. I could move in some un-boyish way and give myself away. But when I high-fived the boys and took off away from the girls, they believed I was a boy and they changed. The differences were subtle, but unmistakable. I treasured being chased by them, their squealing and giggling, their blushing cheeks and flirtatious grins. I was completely transformed in their eyes and its effect over me was total.
I ran fast, away from a dark-haired girl, looking back every few seconds to see her wide open laughter and ember-lit eyes pursuing me. Without warning I tripped on a protruding root and fell, my knee slashed open on a piece of slate rock, my face dug into rocky soil. I lay there, splayed out on the ground with a bleeding knee and a scraped cheek. It began to rain. The girls screamed, everyone scattered. I turned over and found the dark haired girl crouched next to me. Our faces, so close, seemed to freeze, eyes locked, her black pupils like tiny oil spills: shiny, beckoning. A car honked in the street. A truck rumbled by. The gritty taste of dirt lingered in my mouth, the smell of extinguished campfires hung, trapped under the rain. She placed one small hand on my shoulder, brushed a fingertip across my scraped cheek, her eyes asking if it hurt. I attempted to speak, but couldn’t get my mouth to move. The rain fell harder; a voice called from a distance. She leaned forward, pucker-lipped, close-eyed, summer-scented, and left the soft tremble of a kiss on my wounded cheek. She ran off. I sat there, drenched, a smile so big it ached.
“What,” she said and I pointed. She gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth. The couple was about 50 feet away and on a bit of a slope so the full length of them was visible. The woman was on top, her hair falling over the face of the other, her hips writhing. The curves and angles of her body and the rhythm of their movements mesmerized me. I can’t say how long we were standing and staring but it seemed quite long. When they made more and more noise, Missy came back to investigate. She ran too close to them and barked, causing them to jump and look up. The woman’s eyes met mine and I instinctively crouched. Sophie ran. The couple grasped for their clothes or the blanket or anything to cover up. I called to Missy and felt my face go hot, my hands numb. Missy ran past me after Sophie and I found my legs were stuck. I couldn’t move. The man wrestled with his pants and cursed. The woman stared back at me like she was waiting for something else to happen. Something clenched in my throat and I crouched lower, panicking. I had a wild fear that she recognized me, knew who I was and would tell on me because maybe I had done something wrong. The man had found his way into his pants and stood up, scowling at me.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he yelled and started walking toward me. My legs came back alive and I burst from the grass and ran and ran.
I found Sophie standing in front of a log cabin with Missy at her feet. It had an inviting front porch that wrapped around the sides. A flowery sign that hung from the door read: “Open” and warm smells of fresh bread and sweet berries came from the house. Without a word, we mounted the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I saw movement from a window off to the right and then a clatter from within. Spooked, I took Sophie’s hand and was about to pull her away and leave the place when the door swung open and an old woman emerged with a basket of lollipops. She was short and white haired, round and kind looking. A wide spread smile seemed to be her only expression.
“Hello there, girls, no need to knock, you know; we’re open for business here. Welcome to Matt Donahue’s. Here, have a free sucker,” she said, her voice scratchy, warm. Sophie’s hand darted out and snatched a sucker. She inspected the flavor, frowned, and put it back. The old woman laughed and brought the basket lower so Sophie could see better.
“Take a look, sweetie, and pick your favorite color. I like green; tastes like apples,” she said. Sophie peered into the basket and fished around until she found the pale yellow wrapper of butterscotch. She took it and smiled up at the old woman.
“Thank you, lady,” she said, blushing and sticking the lollipop into her mouth.
“My name is Mary Mare; what’s yours?”
“Sophie,” she said and looked at me.
“I’m Jane; we’re here for the summer with our grandparents,” I said.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you both. Please come in, but your dog will have to wait out here,” she said. I told Missy to stay and pointed at her like I’d watched my dad do then went in.
The bins full of candy were the first thing I saw. Behind the counter was a haggard woman with black stringy hair flecked with gray, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. She glanced up at us but didn’t say a word or even smile.
“This is Mrs. Donahue, girls, one of the owners here. This is Jane and Sophie, here in town with their grandma and grandpa for the summer,” Mary Mare said. Mrs. Donahue mumbled something I couldn’t hear and hunched further over her magazine. Mary Mare put an apron on and walked into a back room where all the nice smells were coming from. Sophie and I grabbed bunches of Mary Janes and Slo Pokes and piled them on the counter.
We paid for the candy with handfuls of pennies that we counted out in front of Mrs. Donahue’s phantom white face, smoke spilling thick from her mouth and nose.
“Can we have a bag for the candy?” I asked.
“You got pockets?” she said, then turned around on her stool and went back to her magazine. I looked at Sophie and giggled while we filled our pockets. She stuck her tongue out at Mrs. Donahue’s back. I slapped a hand over my mouth and snorted laughter. We ran out laughing and stuffing pieces of candy in our mouths.
I watched for signs of the couple on the way back to the cabin but they were gone. Missy sniffed around the spot where there blanket left a crushed rectangle in the grass and I thought of the white hips lifting and falling. I thought of sleeping bags packed with naked bodies and dark nights lit by stars. I thought of Mrs. Dalby as that naked woman and an uproar of fluttery excitement erupted in my gut. I ran hard back to the cabin kicking up dirt.
Later that day I sat with Gram playing Uno, something she invited me to do often, only to have the cards lie untouched while we had long conversations instead, when she started talking about my dad.
“If your dad would just grow up, he’d be a good boy.” She shook her head and shuffled the cards again.
“Why do you hate him?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t hate him. We struggle with ‘im, that’s all. His parents are the real problem. When you were just a baby, you and your mom and dad lived in our four-flat right above us. Well, your dad was a janitor at some crummy hotel downtown where they gave ‘im drugs. He’d come home high as a kite and beat on yer mom. He’d be real violent and just nasty. He’d grab and twist ‘er—” I knew what she was talking about. My dad rarely hit my mom when they fought, although she hit him freely. Instead, he had a way of grabbing and twisting parts of her that stood out: her nose, breasts, ears.
“So anyway, your mom asked Papa to keep ‘im out when he was high like that. So wouldn’t ya know it, he come home in a stupor and Papa just stopped him right at the door, told ‘im he can’t come in all coked up like that. Well, Bobby starts cursin’ and yellin,’ sayin’ it’s all Christine’s fault, callin’ her bad names. Papa says to ‘im, we saw the bruises; we know what he did. So then Bobby hauls off and punches your Papa right in the nose. I come runnin’ out to help ‘im and he punches me, too. That was it. Papa had to get ‘is gun out and force ‘im to leave that way.”
Her voice was louder and higher and her face red. I pictured my Papa going to get the gun from inside their apartment. When he returned to the sight of his wife being brutalized, however, his finger stiffened against the trigger, his vision blurred red, and the unambiguous, nearly palpable urge to kill overcame him. My father must have seen this distinctly when he raised his eyes to Papa’s, his glare displacing air in its wake. He must have felt the breeze from it.
Gram was shuffling the cards again.
“Then what happened?” I tapped her shoulder. She put the cards down and took a deep breath.
“I shouldn’t be goin’ on like this to you.”
“I wanna know; it’s OK.”
“Well, that was it. He finally left. But then he went and told his police-captain daddy on us and they come an’ arrest your Papa. They never did nothin’ to help him. They just let ‘im stay up there in that attic when he was comin’ down all shakin’ and sick. They even sat up there, held ‘im down all night once, he was so bad. Well you know me, I tell ‘em how it is. I went marchin’ right over there an’ told your grandma to her face: Your son is sick. You have to get him help. Take him to a hospital or a drug treatment place. Don’t just keep him up there in that attic leaving him to rot.”
She grabbed my hands and squeezed them; her eyes were wide and angry.
“She comes back at me and tells me it’s Christine’s fault. Says she drives ‘im to it! I just told her plain, that son of yours will die from this. It will kill ‘im dead.” She clasped her lips and stared at me.
“What’d she say?”
“If she didn’t just slam that door right in my face!” She started shuffling the cards again, shook her head. My head was clamoring. I rubbed my temples.
“What’s with that hair, young lady?” Gram grabbed a lock from the side of my head and flipped it.
“What?”
“It’s too long and straggly. I’m gonna cut it. Go get me the scissors.”
I didn’t like having it combed; it was something I always fought, and I always had it up in a ponytail, so I agreed. She set me in a chair, placed a shallow bowl over my head, and carefully cut the hair along the edge of the bowl, leaving me with a perfectly even, boyish cut.
Just after dark, I went to the nearby playground sporting my new haircut accessorized with red rubber boots, a blue Izod sweater, and jeans with holes in the knees. Before I left, I looked approvingly into the mirror: fun hair, cool outfit, straight hips. There was a group playing keep-away around the slide, girls against boys. I joined in, climbing up the slide after one orange-haired boy, his bright locks bouncing cheerfully. Arriving at the top, he gave a furtive peek behind him, glancing down at me, small eyes indistinguishable among a mass of fiery freckles, he swiftly disappeared. I climbed into position to go down after him when I was abruptly frozen in my spot. There was a girl down below pointing squarely at me, shouting: “There he is, up there! Get him!”
He? Him? I looked around, flushed, redly smiling, preparing to laugh when her mistake was discovered and pointed out by one of the other kids. I shivered. A voice behind me shouted: “Go down, man, run!” I swooped down, leapt to my feet at the bottom, and ran, settling in to the queer power of how it must always feel to be a boy. It was intoxicating, yet frightening to deceive these girls into believing that I belonged on the opposite team. At any moment they could notice my soft, long eyelashes, a girlish curve to my cheek. I could move in some un-boyish way and give myself away. But when I high-fived the boys and took off away from the girls, they believed I was a boy and they changed. The differences were subtle, but unmistakable. I treasured being chased by them, their squealing and giggling, their blushing cheeks and flirtatious grins. I was completely transformed in their eyes and its effect over me was total.
I ran fast, away from a dark-haired girl, looking back every few seconds to see her wide open laughter and ember-lit eyes pursuing me. Without warning I tripped on a protruding root and fell, my knee slashed open on a piece of slate rock, my face dug into rocky soil. I lay there, splayed out on the ground with a bleeding knee and a scraped cheek. It began to rain. The girls screamed, everyone scattered. I turned over and found the dark haired girl crouched next to me. Our faces, so close, seemed to freeze, eyes locked, her black pupils like tiny oil spills: shiny, beckoning. A car honked in the street. A truck rumbled by. The gritty taste of dirt lingered in my mouth, the smell of extinguished campfires hung, trapped under the rain. She placed one small hand on my shoulder, brushed a fingertip across my scraped cheek, her eyes asking if it hurt. I attempted to speak, but couldn’t get my mouth to move. The rain fell harder; a voice called from a distance. She leaned forward, pucker-lipped, close-eyed, summer-scented, and left the soft tremble of a kiss on my wounded cheek. She ran off. I sat there, drenched, a smile so big it ached.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
All The Good Parents Were Taken
“How old is she?” I asked.
“17 months. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Yeah. And she’s so good too.”
“She’s pretty happy just being her,” she said, looking straight ahead, walking slowly, a slow smile pulling up the corners of her mouth. Her hair was a mass of dark brown, almost black, curls, twisted up in a loose knot at the back of her head. Tendrils fell freely and bounced around her face in soft coils. She was one of the youngest of all the teachers and counselors at that school, just a few years younger than my mom. Her skin was deeply tanned and she had small, almost unnoticeable lines around her eyes and mouth that bunched together when she smiled and rested waiting when she didn’t. Somehow her soft beauty offended me, the easy way she carried herself. As if this was any regular day.
“Here’s our house.” She turned up the driveway of a small, ranch-style home.
“I can’t believe I’ve never seen you before in the neighborhood,” I said.
“I’ve seen you around,” she said and smiled at me. My cheeks grew hot and I stared at the cement. I knew that people in the neighborhood talked about my parents and how they fight. One time my mom threw all my dad’s clothes and shoes and even a large amount of cash out on the front lawn in the middle of a rage. It was after they had a fight and he had already left the house when she started gathering armfuls of his things to take outside and scatter across the lawn and sidewalk, kicking some of it wildly out over the curb and into the street, screaming all the while. People came out of their houses to stare. Then my mom came out with a shoebox filled with cash and emptied it out onto the sidewalk. After she walked back inside to get more, people started closing in and picking up bills. That was when I picked up the phone and called the police. It hadn’t been the first time: 3309 Avers was an address the police knew well.
“Have a seat right there, girls. I’m just going to put Sarah down for a nap. Be right back.” We sat down on a couch in the front room. Sophie was still clinging to me but she had her head up and was looking around. The place was filled with pictures of Mrs. Dalby with other dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful people in some exotic land. There were lots of candles in large, ornate holders garnished with colorful potpourri. There were several bookshelves lined neatly with hardcover books. I had never seen so many books and each of them intrigued me. It was an altogether new feeling, like a tickle in my chest. My heart, I imagined, sprouted a feather and it fluttered against inner chambers I’d never see. Names like Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Freud; some I had heard before and some I only sensed the greatness of. Chaucer, Cervantes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Neruda, all in various scripts, sizes, and colors, their spines beaming with rigid importance.
“Can I get you girls anything to eat or drink?” she asked, emerging from a doorway across the room.
“No, thank you, we’re fine,” I said, still scanning the books.
“You like fiction?” she asked and sat down next to me. She had taken the loose knot out and her hair fell freely over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back.
“I really do,” I answered, now staring at her.
“What’s your favorite?” she asked, leaning back and crossing her legs.
“Huckleberry Finn.”
“Oh, that’s a great one. One of my favorites too. I’ve read it maybe a hundred times. What else?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read much else.”
“Well, you can borrow anything you want that you see here. I have a regular library. Just make sure you take good care of them and return them when you’re done.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Anything you want.” I wiggled out of Sophie’s grasp and got up. I pulled a thick volume from the top of one of the shelves: The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
“Ah. You want poetry?”
“This first, then I’ll borrow something else?”
“Sounds good to me. I’ll even make you a reading list; how about that?”
“Yes! I mean, yeah sure.” I felt my hot face again and looked at the floor to hide it. She laughed and messed my hair.
“You can come here anytime, Jane.” She looked at Sophie and smoothed her hair back with her palm. “You too, sweetheart. What’s your name?” Sophie looked at me.
“Her name’s Sophie,” I said.
“Hi, Sophie. That’s a beautiful name.”
Sophie smiled at her and actually spoke. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“You can talk to me about what happened if you want to.” She turned to face me again.
“My mom and dad had another fight,” I blurted. She nodded her head.
“She started it because she insulted him. Said he’s never going to amount to anything but a janitor. He started beating her up like he always does and then she knocked him out. I think she threw something at his head and cut him. He pinned her down after that and was bleeding on her from his head. I walked in and he looked up. That’s when she punched him in the head where his cut was and knocked him out for good. She told us to leave and call for help.” I watched for her expression of shock and horror but it didn’t come. She kept her gaze level. Concerned, sad even, but not shocked.
“So this happens often with your mom and dad?”
“All the time. She always has some mark on her. She lies and tells us she fell or accidentally walked into a wall.”
“She doesn’t lie!” Sophie said, shooting an angry look at me. Mrs. Dalby put an arm around her. It was easier for Sophie to believe the lies. They, along with my mother’s unblinking almond eyes, held her like vice grips in place, allowing her to ignore things into nonexistence. I always knew the truth though I wished I didn’t, or at least wished for a place big enough to hold it for me. My mom and her lies swarmed inside a hollow place in my gut.
That evening just before nightfall, Sophie and I walked home slowly and in silence. When we reached the house it seemed as if nobody was home, but for the door being unlocked and the car parked out front. Inside, it was quiet and dark. I locked the front door behind us and we went straight to bed. Waiting for sleep, my head was filled with thoughts of Mrs. Dalby. Her books, her photos, the father of her baby.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked Sophie, wanting a break from my thoughts.
“Mrs. Dalby’s nice.” She said.
“Yeah.” I said.
“Where do you think her husband is?”
“Maybe she’s not married.”
“She has to be married, she has a baby.”
“Maybe she’s divorced, or never got married to begin with.”
“What’s divorced?
I thought carefully about how to answer. When Sophie asked me a question about what something meant or what it was, I felt obliged to tell her the truth as accurately as possible. I wanted my answers to be factual, so if she looked it up later in an encyclopedia, the information would check out.
“Divorced is when a married couple breaks up in court. They legally undo their marriage,” I said. Satisfied with my answer, I smiled into the dark.
“Oh,” she answered back. After a long silence, she asked, “why do people do that?”
“Lots of reasons, I’m sure. They fight too much, they stop loving each other. Mom and dad will get divorced one day.”
“No they won’t. Don’t say that,” she said in a high voice, sounding near tears.
“I’m sorry, Sophie; I was just kidding. I’m sorry I said it. Everything will be alright, I promise,” I said in the most reassuring tone I could muster. She did not reply again. I lay listening to the soft night noises. My mom told us it was the house shifting and settling. I fell asleep praying that what I told Sophie would be true.
The next day, Sophie and I woke to the absence of my mother. This day there would be no facing her beat-up face and accompanying story. Only my dad with red, raised scratch marks across his neck and cheek and a few stitches over his right eye.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“Jail.” He was sitting in his chair eating a bowl of cereal.
“Why?”
“You see this?” He glared at me and pointed to his stitches.
“You hadda go and call the cops, so they came. Saw what she did and cuffed ‘er. Took ‘er away.”
“Mom told me to go.”
“Yeah, I know. ‘Sokay.” His mouth was full of half-chewed cheerios. He put the bowl down and got up. He grabbed his white t-shirt from the back of the chair and pulled it over his head. Chest hairs sprang out from the collar.
Without a notion of where we were going, he took us out. We walked toward the corner of Milwaukee and Belmont Avenues, where I knew there was a pet store. Galvanized by the throng of hurried people, steel, and concrete, there is a wholesome violence about the city of Chicago on a Saturday afternoon.
The smell hit us first. Fur-covered bodies in small-barred cages soiled with urine and dog spit. Echoing all around were their varying, inflected barks―high pitched screeches, low ambiguous moans, desperate howls, curt, loud outcries.
Sophie approached the cage of a small, white, black-flecked Siberian Husky. She had unnaturally beautiful, darkly framed eyes, one unlimited blue, one bottomless brown. Under our attention she was a blaze of trembling, amplified life, flashes of pinkish skin against thick tufted fur, glints of white sharp teeth and black arced lips, lustrous flaring nostrils and blurred whipping tail. Sophie’s groping hands thrust as far as her arms could reach through the bars of the cage while the wet length of the dog’s tongue flapped against her small face. She became our dog in that moment.
“I want this one!” Sophie yelled.
“What should we name her?” I asked. Sophie just stared at me, half her little body still jammed inside the dog’s cage.
“It’s gotta have a name,” my dad said. Sophie looked at the dog thoughtfully, tilted her face, grabbed her ear.
“Missy,” she said.
“What’s Missy gonna set me back?” my dad asked the clerk, pulling a fat wad of bills from his back pocket.
“She’s $500 even,” the store clerk said. My dad flipped out five hundred dollar bills as if they were singles, and handed them to the clerk. The clerk looked at the cash and blushed.
“Oh, OK. Just follow me to the register over here.” He turned and bumped into another dog’s cage, nearly tripped over his own feet. My dad followed him to pay for Missy while another clerk took her out of the cage and fitted her with a collar and a leash so we could walk her home.
On the way, we stopped off at Jefferson Park to play with Missy. We ran and ran in circles while Missy chased us. She broke away and sprinted wide circles around us, her body low to the ground, ears plastered back, teeth and eyes glinting.
My dad told us that dogs traveled together in the wilderness in what were called packs. Missy, Sophie, and I became a pack. That first night, exhausted from playing hard with Missy for hours, we slept as one entwined pile together on Sophie’s bed. That night of sleep was peace for me for the rest of my life.
My dad had resisted our pleas to adopt a dog for years before, always saying it wasn’t fair to raise a dog in the city, confining it to a chain in the yard. One of the conditions he gave us for keeping Missy was that we take her to Wisconsin during the summer, where my grandparents went to spend the summers in a cabin by a lake.
Besides her brother Joe, my mom had an older sister, Gracie. As a child, my aunt Grace had suffered several seizures. She would alternately go blind and fall over, spontaneously losing her balance. Tests revealed a brain tumor. She opted to have surgery that would remove the mass and relieve the pressure, reducing the seizures but not stopping them. The surgery was a relative success, and Grace went on to marry Ronald and live a happy life. Her seizures continued but were less frequent. As a result, a pleasant dulling of awareness was both her burden and her blessing. She was genuinely kind and easily happy, a delightful presence.
Their father, whom Sophie and I called Papa, was a young immigrant from Greece when he married a girl of Polish, Bohemian, and German descent named Carol, known to Sophie and me as Gram. She came from an old, lawless Chicago family. Her mother, Lola, was an alcoholic and a known bootlegger after the Volstead Act (better known as the National Prohibition Act) was enacted by Congress in 1919. She was a tough, rugged woman with bullet-holes in her legs from being shot at while she ran from the authorities carrying outlawed booze to saloons and speakeasies, or so the legend goes. Lola’s husband, Gram’s father, straight-edged Gary, was a door-to-door Hoover salesman from the age of 18 until the time of his death in 1944. It was the early 1900’s when William Henry Hoover revolutionized vacuum technology by producing the first upright, bag-on-a-stick, domestic carpet sweeper. By the decade of my great-grandfather’s death, more than 70% of all vacuum cleaners were sold door-to-door. And then there was Lou, Gram’s brother, who was a rather prominent gangster, rumored to have been one of Al Capone’s minions and to have played a part in the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.
With an alcoholic mother, Gram grew up to be a woman constantly either fearing or protecting, always loving. True to its tendency, the disease skipped Gram’s generation and landed squarely on her second-born, my mother. It is for this reason, I believe, that I have always shared a special bond with Gram. Each of us had, from an early age, been heaped with the sufferings and destructions of our mothers. That first summer when we got Missy, Mom needed a break, so Gram invited us up there. We went with my aunt Grace and my uncle Joe.
Missy had land there to run and a lake to swim in. And it was quiet, so quiet compared to Chicago. The trees and water with their greens, blues, and browns created together an intensified soundlessness. Matt Donahue’s was the candy store, a log cabin at the top of a dirt road, hidden by thick woods so that it seemed like a secret that only we knew about. The old lady who worked there, Mrs. Mare, cooked homemade bread and jam and sold them to the people in town. But the reason Sophie and I nicknamed it the candy store was the penny candy she sold out of big, bottomless bins at the front of the store. Tootsie Rolls, Lemon Heads, sugar taffy, bubble gum, Alexander the Grapes, everything no more then a penny a piece. We filled our pockets for a quarter and went on our way. I’ll never forget finding the candy store for the first time.
Sophie and I set out walking with Missy through the playground into a big open field with tall grass. Missy bounded through like a rabbit; she was so happy in that field we decided to walk all the way across. When we reached the far side and were about to start back, I noticed a small dirt road that emerged from the bordering woods and snake uphill. Without speaking, I started toward it and Sophie followed.
“17 months. Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Yeah. And she’s so good too.”
“She’s pretty happy just being her,” she said, looking straight ahead, walking slowly, a slow smile pulling up the corners of her mouth. Her hair was a mass of dark brown, almost black, curls, twisted up in a loose knot at the back of her head. Tendrils fell freely and bounced around her face in soft coils. She was one of the youngest of all the teachers and counselors at that school, just a few years younger than my mom. Her skin was deeply tanned and she had small, almost unnoticeable lines around her eyes and mouth that bunched together when she smiled and rested waiting when she didn’t. Somehow her soft beauty offended me, the easy way she carried herself. As if this was any regular day.
“Here’s our house.” She turned up the driveway of a small, ranch-style home.
“I can’t believe I’ve never seen you before in the neighborhood,” I said.
“I’ve seen you around,” she said and smiled at me. My cheeks grew hot and I stared at the cement. I knew that people in the neighborhood talked about my parents and how they fight. One time my mom threw all my dad’s clothes and shoes and even a large amount of cash out on the front lawn in the middle of a rage. It was after they had a fight and he had already left the house when she started gathering armfuls of his things to take outside and scatter across the lawn and sidewalk, kicking some of it wildly out over the curb and into the street, screaming all the while. People came out of their houses to stare. Then my mom came out with a shoebox filled with cash and emptied it out onto the sidewalk. After she walked back inside to get more, people started closing in and picking up bills. That was when I picked up the phone and called the police. It hadn’t been the first time: 3309 Avers was an address the police knew well.
“Have a seat right there, girls. I’m just going to put Sarah down for a nap. Be right back.” We sat down on a couch in the front room. Sophie was still clinging to me but she had her head up and was looking around. The place was filled with pictures of Mrs. Dalby with other dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful people in some exotic land. There were lots of candles in large, ornate holders garnished with colorful potpourri. There were several bookshelves lined neatly with hardcover books. I had never seen so many books and each of them intrigued me. It was an altogether new feeling, like a tickle in my chest. My heart, I imagined, sprouted a feather and it fluttered against inner chambers I’d never see. Names like Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Freud; some I had heard before and some I only sensed the greatness of. Chaucer, Cervantes, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Neruda, all in various scripts, sizes, and colors, their spines beaming with rigid importance.
“Can I get you girls anything to eat or drink?” she asked, emerging from a doorway across the room.
“No, thank you, we’re fine,” I said, still scanning the books.
“You like fiction?” she asked and sat down next to me. She had taken the loose knot out and her hair fell freely over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back.
“I really do,” I answered, now staring at her.
“What’s your favorite?” she asked, leaning back and crossing her legs.
“Huckleberry Finn.”
“Oh, that’s a great one. One of my favorites too. I’ve read it maybe a hundred times. What else?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read much else.”
“Well, you can borrow anything you want that you see here. I have a regular library. Just make sure you take good care of them and return them when you’re done.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Anything you want.” I wiggled out of Sophie’s grasp and got up. I pulled a thick volume from the top of one of the shelves: The Poems of Emily Dickinson.
“Ah. You want poetry?”
“This first, then I’ll borrow something else?”
“Sounds good to me. I’ll even make you a reading list; how about that?”
“Yes! I mean, yeah sure.” I felt my hot face again and looked at the floor to hide it. She laughed and messed my hair.
“You can come here anytime, Jane.” She looked at Sophie and smoothed her hair back with her palm. “You too, sweetheart. What’s your name?” Sophie looked at me.
“Her name’s Sophie,” I said.
“Hi, Sophie. That’s a beautiful name.”
Sophie smiled at her and actually spoke. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“You can talk to me about what happened if you want to.” She turned to face me again.
“My mom and dad had another fight,” I blurted. She nodded her head.
“She started it because she insulted him. Said he’s never going to amount to anything but a janitor. He started beating her up like he always does and then she knocked him out. I think she threw something at his head and cut him. He pinned her down after that and was bleeding on her from his head. I walked in and he looked up. That’s when she punched him in the head where his cut was and knocked him out for good. She told us to leave and call for help.” I watched for her expression of shock and horror but it didn’t come. She kept her gaze level. Concerned, sad even, but not shocked.
“So this happens often with your mom and dad?”
“All the time. She always has some mark on her. She lies and tells us she fell or accidentally walked into a wall.”
“She doesn’t lie!” Sophie said, shooting an angry look at me. Mrs. Dalby put an arm around her. It was easier for Sophie to believe the lies. They, along with my mother’s unblinking almond eyes, held her like vice grips in place, allowing her to ignore things into nonexistence. I always knew the truth though I wished I didn’t, or at least wished for a place big enough to hold it for me. My mom and her lies swarmed inside a hollow place in my gut.
That evening just before nightfall, Sophie and I walked home slowly and in silence. When we reached the house it seemed as if nobody was home, but for the door being unlocked and the car parked out front. Inside, it was quiet and dark. I locked the front door behind us and we went straight to bed. Waiting for sleep, my head was filled with thoughts of Mrs. Dalby. Her books, her photos, the father of her baby.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked Sophie, wanting a break from my thoughts.
“Mrs. Dalby’s nice.” She said.
“Yeah.” I said.
“Where do you think her husband is?”
“Maybe she’s not married.”
“She has to be married, she has a baby.”
“Maybe she’s divorced, or never got married to begin with.”
“What’s divorced?
I thought carefully about how to answer. When Sophie asked me a question about what something meant or what it was, I felt obliged to tell her the truth as accurately as possible. I wanted my answers to be factual, so if she looked it up later in an encyclopedia, the information would check out.
“Divorced is when a married couple breaks up in court. They legally undo their marriage,” I said. Satisfied with my answer, I smiled into the dark.
“Oh,” she answered back. After a long silence, she asked, “why do people do that?”
“Lots of reasons, I’m sure. They fight too much, they stop loving each other. Mom and dad will get divorced one day.”
“No they won’t. Don’t say that,” she said in a high voice, sounding near tears.
“I’m sorry, Sophie; I was just kidding. I’m sorry I said it. Everything will be alright, I promise,” I said in the most reassuring tone I could muster. She did not reply again. I lay listening to the soft night noises. My mom told us it was the house shifting and settling. I fell asleep praying that what I told Sophie would be true.
The next day, Sophie and I woke to the absence of my mother. This day there would be no facing her beat-up face and accompanying story. Only my dad with red, raised scratch marks across his neck and cheek and a few stitches over his right eye.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“Jail.” He was sitting in his chair eating a bowl of cereal.
“Why?”
“You see this?” He glared at me and pointed to his stitches.
“You hadda go and call the cops, so they came. Saw what she did and cuffed ‘er. Took ‘er away.”
“Mom told me to go.”
“Yeah, I know. ‘Sokay.” His mouth was full of half-chewed cheerios. He put the bowl down and got up. He grabbed his white t-shirt from the back of the chair and pulled it over his head. Chest hairs sprang out from the collar.
Without a notion of where we were going, he took us out. We walked toward the corner of Milwaukee and Belmont Avenues, where I knew there was a pet store. Galvanized by the throng of hurried people, steel, and concrete, there is a wholesome violence about the city of Chicago on a Saturday afternoon.
The smell hit us first. Fur-covered bodies in small-barred cages soiled with urine and dog spit. Echoing all around were their varying, inflected barks―high pitched screeches, low ambiguous moans, desperate howls, curt, loud outcries.
Sophie approached the cage of a small, white, black-flecked Siberian Husky. She had unnaturally beautiful, darkly framed eyes, one unlimited blue, one bottomless brown. Under our attention she was a blaze of trembling, amplified life, flashes of pinkish skin against thick tufted fur, glints of white sharp teeth and black arced lips, lustrous flaring nostrils and blurred whipping tail. Sophie’s groping hands thrust as far as her arms could reach through the bars of the cage while the wet length of the dog’s tongue flapped against her small face. She became our dog in that moment.
“I want this one!” Sophie yelled.
“What should we name her?” I asked. Sophie just stared at me, half her little body still jammed inside the dog’s cage.
“It’s gotta have a name,” my dad said. Sophie looked at the dog thoughtfully, tilted her face, grabbed her ear.
“Missy,” she said.
“What’s Missy gonna set me back?” my dad asked the clerk, pulling a fat wad of bills from his back pocket.
“She’s $500 even,” the store clerk said. My dad flipped out five hundred dollar bills as if they were singles, and handed them to the clerk. The clerk looked at the cash and blushed.
“Oh, OK. Just follow me to the register over here.” He turned and bumped into another dog’s cage, nearly tripped over his own feet. My dad followed him to pay for Missy while another clerk took her out of the cage and fitted her with a collar and a leash so we could walk her home.
On the way, we stopped off at Jefferson Park to play with Missy. We ran and ran in circles while Missy chased us. She broke away and sprinted wide circles around us, her body low to the ground, ears plastered back, teeth and eyes glinting.
My dad told us that dogs traveled together in the wilderness in what were called packs. Missy, Sophie, and I became a pack. That first night, exhausted from playing hard with Missy for hours, we slept as one entwined pile together on Sophie’s bed. That night of sleep was peace for me for the rest of my life.
My dad had resisted our pleas to adopt a dog for years before, always saying it wasn’t fair to raise a dog in the city, confining it to a chain in the yard. One of the conditions he gave us for keeping Missy was that we take her to Wisconsin during the summer, where my grandparents went to spend the summers in a cabin by a lake.
Besides her brother Joe, my mom had an older sister, Gracie. As a child, my aunt Grace had suffered several seizures. She would alternately go blind and fall over, spontaneously losing her balance. Tests revealed a brain tumor. She opted to have surgery that would remove the mass and relieve the pressure, reducing the seizures but not stopping them. The surgery was a relative success, and Grace went on to marry Ronald and live a happy life. Her seizures continued but were less frequent. As a result, a pleasant dulling of awareness was both her burden and her blessing. She was genuinely kind and easily happy, a delightful presence.
Their father, whom Sophie and I called Papa, was a young immigrant from Greece when he married a girl of Polish, Bohemian, and German descent named Carol, known to Sophie and me as Gram. She came from an old, lawless Chicago family. Her mother, Lola, was an alcoholic and a known bootlegger after the Volstead Act (better known as the National Prohibition Act) was enacted by Congress in 1919. She was a tough, rugged woman with bullet-holes in her legs from being shot at while she ran from the authorities carrying outlawed booze to saloons and speakeasies, or so the legend goes. Lola’s husband, Gram’s father, straight-edged Gary, was a door-to-door Hoover salesman from the age of 18 until the time of his death in 1944. It was the early 1900’s when William Henry Hoover revolutionized vacuum technology by producing the first upright, bag-on-a-stick, domestic carpet sweeper. By the decade of my great-grandfather’s death, more than 70% of all vacuum cleaners were sold door-to-door. And then there was Lou, Gram’s brother, who was a rather prominent gangster, rumored to have been one of Al Capone’s minions and to have played a part in the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929.
With an alcoholic mother, Gram grew up to be a woman constantly either fearing or protecting, always loving. True to its tendency, the disease skipped Gram’s generation and landed squarely on her second-born, my mother. It is for this reason, I believe, that I have always shared a special bond with Gram. Each of us had, from an early age, been heaped with the sufferings and destructions of our mothers. That first summer when we got Missy, Mom needed a break, so Gram invited us up there. We went with my aunt Grace and my uncle Joe.
Missy had land there to run and a lake to swim in. And it was quiet, so quiet compared to Chicago. The trees and water with their greens, blues, and browns created together an intensified soundlessness. Matt Donahue’s was the candy store, a log cabin at the top of a dirt road, hidden by thick woods so that it seemed like a secret that only we knew about. The old lady who worked there, Mrs. Mare, cooked homemade bread and jam and sold them to the people in town. But the reason Sophie and I nicknamed it the candy store was the penny candy she sold out of big, bottomless bins at the front of the store. Tootsie Rolls, Lemon Heads, sugar taffy, bubble gum, Alexander the Grapes, everything no more then a penny a piece. We filled our pockets for a quarter and went on our way. I’ll never forget finding the candy store for the first time.
Sophie and I set out walking with Missy through the playground into a big open field with tall grass. Missy bounded through like a rabbit; she was so happy in that field we decided to walk all the way across. When we reached the far side and were about to start back, I noticed a small dirt road that emerged from the bordering woods and snake uphill. Without speaking, I started toward it and Sophie followed.
First Month's Winner Announced!
Congratulations to Lauren, the winner of the first month's double prize for participation in this reader-directed Digital Serial Novel!
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