by Jan Burke
News Item:
BLIND WOMAN KILLED
A young blind woman was killed by a hit-and-run driver yesterday evening at the corner of Madison and Oak. Police report that Cynthia Farnsworth, 24, was struck by a blue van driven by a white male youth.
Farnsworth, who had a guide dog with her, stepped off the curb just as the light was changing. James and Lois Church, who witnessed the accident, said the dog refused to cross the street, but did not attempt to prevent Farnsworth from doing so. One other witness, who asked that her name be withheld, claimed Farnsworth was thrown off balance and into the path of the van when the dog stopped to scratch his ear.
Guide dog trainers refused to speculate about the dog’s behavior, saying only that the dog’s training and fitness will be evaluated.
The dog was unharmed.
AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER, EVERYONE HAS CARRIED A dead mouse around in his or her pocket.
I didn’t know that when I was in the fifth grade, or even in the seventh grade. I didn’t know it until fairly recently, when I confessed one of the greater shames of my childhood to Peggy, a friend at work.
Peggy and I are friends who work together; we don’t socialize outside of work very often. I don’t know why she was the one I confessed to, except that maybe sometimes when you’re around someone for eight hours a day and you’re comfortable with them, you start to tell them things about yourself, find yourself blurting out stuff that might end up making it impossible for them to be comfortable with you again. That was how big that mouse was by then.
I told Peggy that I’m not sure now whose fault it was that the mouse died. Maybe it was my fault, and not remembering is just a way of fleeing some of the guilt I felt when it died. I was ten years old, and so much was going wrong when I was ten, the death of the mouse seemed almost like a sign from God. Looking back, perhaps it was.
I was in fifth grade, and my mother had cancer. It was a word then, not something I really understood, just knew adults were very afraid of that word. I also knew that my mother was in the hospital a lot and I heard words murmured here and there about breasts being removed, and she was sad and tired and holding on to me more. I knew that my long hair had been cut for the first time in my life, cut because other people had convinced her that cutting it was something that needed to be done, something to make her life easier. But I think my hair was just something else she lost that year. Those were the things I knew, even in fifth grade.
The mouse was a classroom pet. It was brown and white and Mrs. Hobbs had allowed us to have it. It would sleep most of the time, but now and then it would run in its exercise wheel. Doreen Summers, who was my best friend, had brought it to school. Mrs. Hobbs said that if Doreen and I shared the responsibility of taking care of it, we could keep the mouse at school.
No sweat. Doreen and I were what they used to call “good citizens” in school. We were Girl Scouts in the same troop. We were two good Catholic girls who went to catechism class together. Of course, we also kept each other updated on any new cusswords and phrases we had learned. (Our favorite at the start of fifth grade: “A dirty devil’s behind in hell.” Her brother taught us that one.)
We were each ornery in our own way, and got into our share of trouble, but we knew how to take care of a mouse. We had each had hamsters as pets, and taking care of the mouse was not too much different. Every day, you put in fresh water and some food. Once a week, you cleaned the cage. Doreen couldn’t stand that job, but allergies had long inhibited my sense of smell, so I didn’t mind as much. Still, she didn’t shirk her duties. Doreen would take care of the mouse one week, I would take care of the mouse the next week. With a typical children’s sense of fairness, we decided that if one of us was absent on her mouse-caring day, she would have to make up a day for it at the beginning of the next week.
In October, a new girl came to school. Her name was Lindy and she was pretty and smart. Mrs. Hobbs liked Lindy so much, sometimes she hired Lindy to babysit her children. Only later would I wonder about the judgment of a woman who would leave several young children in the care of a ten-year-old. At the time, it just made Lindy seem all the more superior.
Lindy hated me. I have figured out the part about the dead mouse in everybody’s pocket, but I still haven’t figured out exactly what made Lindy single me out as the object of her hatred. Maybe it was because I looked like a target: unsure of myself with my short haircut; noticing that Doreen wasn’t exactly flat-chested anymore; worrying about what it meant to have my best friend grow breasts and my mother lose hers; wondering why adults shook their heads and looked at me with pitying faces when the cancer word was whispered. Or maybe I sparked some silly set of insecurities in Lindy.
Whatever her reasons, Lindy ridiculed me at every turn.
Gradually, she even wooed Doreen away from me. Soon, taking care of the mouse was the only connection Doreen and I had to one another. She dropped out of Scouts, which Lindy had declared was something for “kids.” Doreen’s mother still made her go to catechism, but we stopped walking over to church together.
I started going home for lunch more often, choosing to lose a few minutes to the walk home over sitting in the school cafeteria, watching Lindy snicker with Doreen as they looked over at me. I took long walks around the schoolyard by myself at recess. For the first time, I dreaded going school. When the flu went around that year, I caught it twice. I was glad to be sick with it. Throwing up was better than school.
One cold Monday morning, Mrs. Hobbs opened the classroom door, and let us in. The students who sat near the corner where the mouse cage was kept immediately complained of a smell. The mouse was dead.
Mrs. Hobbs was furious, angrily demanding that Doreen and I come over to the cage. “The mouse has starved to death,” she shouted, even though we were right next to her. “Which one of you was supposed to be feeding it?”
I looked at the cage in horror. No food. No water. I envisioned the little mouse, trapped, unable to do anything but starve. I started crying.
Doreen said with certainty that it was my turn to feed the mouse, I stammered that I thought it was Doreen’s. I was trying to figure out if that was true, even as I said it. I counted back on my fingers, confused, because each of us had been out for parts of the previous two weeks with the flu. Lindy proclaimed it was my turn. That settled it as far as Mrs. Hobbs was concerned. After all, I had been showing an amazing lack of attention to everything connected to school lately.
“Get rid of it. Get rid of it right now,” she said. “Take the cage out to the trash bin behind the cafeteria.” It was clear to everyone in the classroom who she was giving the assignment to. Doreen went back to her seat.
I picked up the mouse cage with the dead mouse in it and walked out of the classroom. I hadn’t had time to take my coat off yet, so I didn’t have to go back to my desk or do anything else to prolong my time in the hated classroom. My nose was running and I could hardly see for my tears, but I walked out to the big metal trash bin. I set the cage down on the ground near the bin, took out some tissue and blew my nose. I tried to calm myself. I opened the little wire door on the cage and took the mouse out.
His body was cold and stiff, but his fur was still soft and he seemed very small in my own small hand. I dropped the cage into the dumpster, but I didn’t put the mouse in with it.
I stood there, crying, wishing I was the one who was dead. I asked the mouse to forgive me for killing it, and asked God to please forgive me, too. I knew that Mrs. Hobbs had told me do something and that probably I should put the mouse in there and go back to class, to accept whatever happened as my penance for killing the mouse, even if I wasn’t the one who had killed it. It was at least a venial sin, I figured, to not have checked on the mouse on Friday.
The biggest problem for me at that point wasn’t facing Lindy or Doreen or Mrs. Hobbs or the class. It was ignominiously putting the mouse in the Dumpster without a
Christian burial. All of my dearly departed hamsters were interred in a shady spot in my backyard. The class mouse, I decided, should rate at least as much consideration.
I wavered for a while, then went into the girls’ bathroom. I carefully pulled off two paper towels and made a makeshift shroud of them. I gently tucked the dead mouse into my coat pocket. I wouldn’t go back to class, I decided. I would just walk home. I washed my swollen, reddened face and scrubbed my hands, and left the bathroom.
The janitor was standing in the hallway outside.
“What are you doing out of class so long?” he asked.
“Our mouse died,” I said, “Mrs. Hobbs asked me to get rid of it.” Not a lie, really, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I hadn’t finished my assignment.
“Better not have plugged up the toilet,” he growled, then seeing my face, gently added, “Sorry about the mouse. They don’t live very long anyway. Go on back to class now, it’ll be okay.”
I couldn’t talk, let alone tell him that I was just about to ditch school for the first time in my life. Under his watchful gaze, I walked back to the classroom. I decided I would go home for lunch, and bury the mouse then.
Mrs. Hobbs might have felt bad about yelling, because she didn’t say anything when I came back into the class. She didn’t call on me, or even ask why I was still wearing my coat. Maybe she didn’t even look at me; I couldn’t say for sure, because I was just staring at the top of my desk, not saying anything to anyone, just wishing for two things: that it would be lunch time and that my hair would miraculously grow longer again so that I could hide behind the curtain of it.
But I hadn’t been back in the class for an hour before the kid sitting next to me complained that something smelled bad. I knew what he was smelling, even though I couldn’t smell it myself.
Mrs. Hobbs demanded an explanation. When I started to tell her that I wanted to take the mouse home and give it a funeral, she looked like she wished corporal punishment would be immediately reinstated. I looked helplessly to Doreen, who had officiated at some of the backyard ceremonies. She was silent. Mrs. Hobbs wasn’t. Apparently, pets in Mrs. Hobbs’s household were not given funerals. She told me to go back out, and this time, do as I was told.
I left the classroom hearing laughter. It seemed to start near where Lindy was sitting.
I didn’t go to the trash bin. I went home.
My mother was sleeping. She had been awake earlier, but I knew that since she had gone to the hospital, she slept whenever she could manage an hour or two away from me and my younger siblings. I took a big spoon out of a kitchen drawer, gathered up a box of toothpicks, a rosary, a St. Francis holy card, and some sewing thread. I quietly went out to the backyard cemetery and buried the mouse between the bodies of a hamster and a sparrow I had found not long before. I gave him the traditional gravemarker: a cross made with two toothpicks, on which the crossbeam is held in place by wrapping the thread around the intersection of the toothpicks. I put the rosary around my neck, recited the Prayer of St. Francis, and moved my right hand in benediction over the grave.
I could hear a bell tolling; the telephone. I ran inside. I wanted to catch the phone before it woke my mother. But I was too late; she stood in her robe in the kitchen, looking at me as I stood with dirt caked on me, spoon in hand, rosary around my neck. She had the phone to her ear, but I don’t think she was listening too closely.
She knew.
She knew I had been caught with a dead mouse in my pocket. But her face wasn’t angry like Mrs. Hobbs’s.
“Yes, she’s here,” I heard her say. There was a long pause, then she said, “No. I think I’ll keep her home today.”
She hung up the phone. I thought she might be angry about my ditching school, but she just told me that maybe I should get out of my priest’s clothes and wash up, maybe put on some pajamas instead. I nodded, then hurriedly followed her advice. By the time I was in my pajamas, she was lying down again. I tiptoed into her room, thinking she might have fallen back to sleep, but she was awake. She patted the bed next to her, and I crawled in beside her. She held me as if I were much smaller, close to where she had once had breasts. I had not ever been allowed to see her chest after the surgery, a radical double mastectomy, but I imagined that day that I could hear her heart better.
“Did you say the Prayer of St. Francis for the mouse?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then he had a very nice funeral,” she said, and fell asleep.
EVENTUALLY, I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL. I DON’T REMEMBER NOW how long I stayed out; it seems to me I might have been allowed an extra day at home with my mother. No one mentioned the mouse to me. Doreen asked me if I wanted to walk to catechism with her. I said yes. We didn’t talk on the way there or the way home, though, and we never did anything together again after that. But she stopped hanging around Lindy.
The cancer moved to my mother’s liver. I said the Prayer of St. Francis one hundred times, but God didn’t accept it as a trade. She died the summer I turned twelve.
I started seventh grade the next fall at a new school, a junior high. All the kids from my school went to it, but kids from two other schools went there, too. I was making new friends and was feeling pretty good about the fact that I hadn’t cried at school, not even when other girls complained about their mothers.
One day, one of the new friends, Barbara, stopped me in the hall outside of geography class. She seemed uneasy about something, and asked me to walk away from the other kids who were waiting for the teacher to arrive. We moved a few feet away, closer to the lockers. “I have to ask you something,” she said. “Lindy has been going around saying that you used to walk around school with dead mice in your pockets. Is it true?”
“No,” I said quietly. “It”s not true.” I hesitated, wondering if anyone would believe the truth if I told it. Was every other kid from Mrs. Hobbs’s class saying the same thing?
But before I could make up my mind about what I would reveal, a locker closed behind us. I turned to see Doreen. She must have heard every word.
Doreen had changed a lot since fifth grade; we had even less in common. She had grown much taller and had really big breasts now, and I was still short and flat as a griddle. Doreen had beautiful long hair, and was popular. My hair was cut even shorter after my mother died, and my circle of friends was much smaller than Doreen’s.
She looked from me to Barbara, then her face set in a frown. I was expecting the worst. “Barbara,” she said, shaking her head. “Use your brain.”
She walked off. Barbara smiled at me and said, “Yeah, now that I think about it, that was a pretty stupid story Lindy was telling.”
But every now and then, throughout the school year, I was asked about dead mice.
I moved to a neighboring town the next year, when my father remarried. I grew my hair long again and, after a couple of years, I even got breasts and grew taller. No one at my new school knew about what happened when I was in fifth grade, or even that my father’s new wife was not my birth mother. By then, I knew how to keep a secret. And my stepmother defied the fairy tale image, loving her stepchildren so well that I decided God had not, after all, abandoned us.
Until the day before my college graduation, I never saw anyone from elementary school. That day, I had gone into a department store to buy some new underwear. As I approached the counter, I recognized the saleswoman. Lindy.
My first impulse was to run from her, my second to think up something cruel to say. Or maybe something snotty. (“Lindy, I’m giving the commencement address tomorrow. Why don’t you come on down and heckle me—you know, mention the mouse thing from fifth grade.”)
Instead, I just bought underwear. She didn’t seem to recognize or remember me.
In the car in the shopping mall parking lot, I held on to the steering wheel and screamed behind my teeth. As much as I wanted to, I knew I
would never forget Lindy, or fail to recognize her.
TO MY SURPRISE, PEGGY CRIED WHEN I TOLD HER THE STORY of the dead mouse in my pocket. It dawned on me, as I finished telling it, that just about all of us have these memories of some moment of humiliation, have secrets that weigh down our pockets, but are really no larger than a mouse. The things that we think will bring our lives to a halt, don’t. And no one remembers our shame as well as we do.
The next day, Peggy told me that she had gone home and told the story to her mother and to her elementary-school-aged daughters. Her mother cried, too.
Her daughters wanted to know if it was really true that I used to carry dead mice around in my pockets.
“Tell them yes,” I said, “it’s really true.”
ALSO BY JAN BURKE
Irene Kelly Mysteries
Disturbance
Kidnapped
Bloodlines
Bones
Liar
Hocus
Remember Me, Irene
Dear Irene,
Sweet Dreams, Irene
Goodnight, Irene
Other Fiction
The Messenger
Nine
Flight
Eighteen
Caught Red-Handed
Apprehended
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