We interlocked our fingers, tips touching each other’s knuckles. Our free hands shoveled cornflakes into our mouths.
“Shoo now!” Dad said, with his mouth. With his hand he told us to hurry, to go get dressed for school. The swat was sweet, we tried to convince each other by squeezing the hams of our palms till the pain in our fingers was all we could feel.
We plucked our free hands from our pockets and scratched each other, catlike, on the arms.
“Why’d you do that?” Mom asked, and we couldn’t tell if she was talking to just us kids or also to Dad.
We turned our lips inside out. Mom kissed our scratches.
“Don’t coddle them,” he said to her. Then to us: “Go, git.”
Dad touched Mom’s bottom while we craned around a corner, hiding. She didn’t cry. She buried her hand down the back of his pants, and her face went all soft and mushy, like something was washing it away. It made our stomachs turn when she gave in to him.
After school, we invented games of tag. Runaway train, runaway horse, runaway cookie. “Run, run, cows to the slaughter. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread daughter,” we chanted as the neighbor kids dragged us on the grass to pretend to bite our heads off.
Where could we run? Where would we stay? we asked each other. Up in a tree, hours away from the city, holding our breath, becoming the wind. In the triangle the seesaw made at the playground at school. Under the table in the teacher’s lounge, the smell of coffee thickening our hides. In the supermarket bathroom, filching cold cuts and pound cake. In the back of the truck, like a dog on long road trips. He didn’t suffocate. He could dig under the fence, but we had thumbs, so all we had to do was open the gate.
Dad gave Mom grocery money every week. If she weighed too much, he gave her less. One Sunday night we heard the creak of springs, her stepping on the scale, the needle wobbling as she shifted hips. We hoped she had peed before she stepped on it. A heavy bursting bladder could cost us how much cash for dinner? Could mean dry peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.
That week, her normal whisper broke. We heard her yelling from the bathroom scale: “Who made you boss of me?”
“You said you’d honor and obey,” Dad said.
“What’d you expect? I was sixteen going on twelve.”
“I rescued you from the garbage heap.”
We knew it by heart, the origin story Dad liked to tell about Mom. How when they met, her dad was long gone, her mom was a loon, and Dad made Mom a queen. A goddess, even, in some versions. “You’re nothing,” was all he said this time, “without me.”
We might have changed our minds and packed our bags, if Mom could come. Maybe she would.
We grabbed old lace curtains Ya-Ya gave Mom for arts and crafts. We tucked fabric into headbands for veils, into pants for trains. Two holey white tails trailed us. We pinked our cheeks and mouths with lipstick thinned with spit. Then we asked Mom to marry us.
A fuzzy bathrobe didn’t cover her tiny purple nightgown. She pulled at her earlobes till we could almost see through them. Then she patted our bottoms. “I could eat you up.”
“We’d never say, ‘You promised to honor and obey.’” We mimicked Dad’s bellow on the last word.
“Shh,” she scrubbed the counter. Again and again.
“He’s asleep.” We slurped soggy flakes.
“Oh, he has spies.” She laughed, but we couldn’t see why.
Then our cereal spilled from the tremors of Dad’s steps. “Hey, babe, how would you feel about . . . ?”
“I’d love to,” she purred.
We couldn’t hear what he asked into her ear, but we knew she always said yes. To him.
“What’s with the getup?” Dad wiped sweat from the white T-shirt bunching on his chest, his plaid boxer shorts drooping.
“They want to get married,” Mom said.
Dad kissed Mom in the ear, whispering her goddess name, Hera. He scratched Rex under the chin, then did exactly the same thing to Mom. She looked into his eyes, begging for more.
“I’ll do the honors.” He squeezed our hands together and smiled wide.
We couldn’t tell him we wanted to marry Mom, then run away. We couldn’t tell him we wanted to pull him up by his hair and make bald spots behind his ears. We couldn’t tell him anything. He was the one, not Mom, who might really eat us up. We could almost see the fangs through his big grin.
The dark hair on his fingers felt like fur. His claws clamped down on our little knuckles. “Till death do you part,” he said.
Whose death, of course, he didn’t say.
6
Sometimes we scratched our husbands under the chin, but at that moment we vowed never to do it again. Never to do what he had done to her, even if she liked it.
Dad had worshipped Mom. That’s why she stayed with him.
No.
Yes.
What did we know?
That she had stayed even after Shoes Day. That’s what we called it, as if it came every week, between Tuesday and Wednesday, though it happened only once—as far as we knew.
Which was how far?
We answered the question at the same time by making a C with our left hands, marking the distance as the small space between thumb and index finger. This much.
The size of those leopard-print stiletto heels. The ones that girl-woman let us wear when we were only eight.
Pixie. Was that her real name?
7
Ya-Ya, our good grandma, always bought us shoes. Before our back-to-school shopping trip to prepare for third grade, she shoved a brush through our tangles till we cried. We bowed our heads as she sliced our scalp down the middle with the comb.
She made tight braids, “for no lice.” Her own black hair, blooming gray, lay tightly wound on the back of her head. She wore a net she forgot to remove at the end of her shift, still reeking of grease and crinkle-cut fries.
She drove us to Penney’s and parked between Patsy’s Pet Salon and Sloan’s Payday Loans. We didn’t want to buy squeaky shoes that pinched our toes. Our soiled red Keds were comfy, but they didn’t come clean, even after Ya-Ya rubbed wet fingers on them. “Spit shine your shoes, and nobody spit on you,” she said. And then, “Shoes clean, no one look at holes in socks.” Dad said everyone talked that way in the Old Country.
We plopped into the shoe department chairs and played with the measurement tools. “Where Marge?” Ya-Ya asked the only person in earshot.
“She retired,” said a woman barely old enough to be called a woman. “I’m the new girl.” Her name tag read, “Hi, I’m Pixie!”
“No, no. She not tell me. I go find her,” Ya-Ya said to the Woman-Girl. Then to us: “You stay.”
“She always leave you by yourselves?” Pixie asked.
We nodded.
“You could get kidnapped, you know.”
We hoped she would kidnap us herself. We always wanted a big sister.
Pixie let us play dress-up. We wore peasant skirts and lots of pink, perfect for tottering in satin wedding pumps, in wedges and booties and espadrilles. In buckles and slipons. We were rock stars and mountain women. Goddesses in leather sandals strapped up our shins.
Our favorites were the leopard-print stilettos. Their heels bore holes in the carpet. They could gouge out eyes. We wrestled over who could wear this pair.
We pranced around, mimicking the sway of Pixie’s hips, swishing our hair and pulling down our shirts the way she did. We wanted to see her breasts, so much bigger than Mom’s. We wanted to grow them ourselves. Mom drank only coffee for breakfast and lunch so she wouldn’t get fat. Maybe breasts were bad. Maybe we were, for wanting them.
“If your shoes are clean, no one will ask about your conscience.” Pixie laughed at the way we parroted Ya-Ya. We knew what a conscience was. We had seen Pinocchio. A conscience was a little green bug.
When we tripped, Pixie helped us up and scanned us for damage. “You Moose’s kids?”
“Uh huh.” We weren’t s
urprised she knew Dad. He was famous.
Her dress stretched and rippled with her belly laugh. She lifted the soft curls around her ears. “He gave me these. Real diamond studs. A hundred percent genuine.”
We didn’t ask why. He was Santa Claus to the world.
When Ya-Ya finally returned, she pinched our ears for making a mess and a racket and being a nuisance. She packed the heels back into their boxes and slammed down the lids. “Marge not retired,” she told Pixie. “Laid off. So why they hire you?”
Why not? Pixie was the queen of fairies wearing sparkly jewels. Couldn’t Ya-Ya see that? “Look at her diamond studs,” we said. “They’re from Dad.”
Ya-Ya stopped stuffing paper back into the shoes we had tried on. She stopped doing anything. She never held still, except now.
We didn’t buy shoes that day. Ya-Ya whisked us away. We crammed our toes back into the too-tight tennies we had outgrown in the space of a half hour. Stale grease and crinkly fry smells trailed behind us.
“That Moose,” Ya-Ya said, flooring the gas with her lunch lady shoe. She mumbled in a mix of Greek and English. “He want to kill me, too?” In an instant, we were back at Papu’s funeral—Ya-Ya’s face shrouded in black lace, our sinuses filling with snot.
She slammed the brakes in front of our house. On her rubber soles, she knifed her way to our door. Normally, we ran into our room to dodge the daycare babies, but today we wanted to hear what Ya-Ya would say.
She poured coffee and stretched her polyester pantleg under the Play Doh–covered table. We sat next to her, but she shooed us away. “Out.”
We hid up in the leaves of the pear tree and watched Ya-Ya talk with her hands. We heard crying, even through the closed windows, but we often did. From babies or Mom, it was always hard to tell.
Ya-Ya slid a slice of cake across the table. The poppy-seed and honey one she baked us every week. Mom turned it into cubes, then dust. Pixie would have eaten it, and her breasts would have plumped into balloons.
We bit into pears so hard they hurt our teeth.
Ya-Ya waited till the daycare babies left, then helped us pack our clothes in black garbage bags. Mom taped a sign to the door on our way out: Sunflower Closed Due to Illness.
“What’s wrong with you?” we asked Mom. Her eyes did look puffy.
“What’s wrong with me?” She turned the car radio up louder.
At Ya-Ya’s, we ate grape leaves and anise cookies. The grown-ups slept in the bedrooms, and we kids climbed under an electric blanket on the fold-out couch next to the kitchen. We dreamed we were flying.
And then we were. No, it was Dad, lifting us, still in our nightgowns, toting us out to the truck. Both at once, each in an arm. He lay us in the truck bed, covered us with a scratchy blanket.
The window to the cab was closed, but we still heard.
“Just this one night,” Mom said. “And just because I don’t want to wake up the kids again and make a scene.”
“Please, babe,” he begged. We could hear the mucus in his throat. We didn’t like the sound of his voice dribbling down his beard in a puddle, the stop and go of his choppy breath. We didn’t like it when he turned into the kind of rabbit Rex chased out of holes. We thought we knew how the world worked, but Dad-the-rabbit was from some other planet.
We pressed our hands against our ears, but the whole truck shook with his sloppy kisses on her knuckles, his little-boy babbling. “I can’t live without you. I’ll do anything to keep you. I’d drop to my knees if that wouldn’t make me crash the truck.”
We felt her breathe it all in. She laughed, a soft and satisfied sound.
“I wrote a song for you,” he said. He sang about seeing her the first time. Their first date, first kiss, first dance. He sang about the day we were born. Even we would have given him whatever he wanted.
Then he fished a velvet box from his pocket and handed it to Mom. “Real diamond studs. They’re yours now.”
Had he pulled them right off Pixie’s ears? We weren’t about to ask. This whole fight was our fault for not keeping our big mouths shut.
“We’ll stay,” Mom said. “If you teach me how to drive.”
“You already drive me crazy.” The last word a playful howl.
“When I do this?” she asked, her voice a soft coo.
“Don’t stop.” We looked away though we knew Mom was rubbing his thigh or leading his hand to her knee. It’s what they did at moments like this. It’s how they made up, their words mushing into moans. We closed our eyes, in case we crashed.
We pretended not to hear, the anise cookies churning in our stomachs. The truck finally snugged in the driveway, and Mom and Dad rushed us to our room, eager to sequester themselves in their own. We faked sleep, but after they left, we tried to pierce our ears with our fingernails. We wanted to feel the way Pixie did. We longed for the sharp prick. We bit on a blanket to keep quiet once our skin started to bleed. Sunflower was closed at night. So if we cried, the babies couldn’t cover up our noise.
Days later, Dad floored the gas, no slowing for curves. Next to him, Mom’s breath came short and hoarse.
From the back, we inhaled her exhales, then squealed, “Rollercoaster!” This was Dad’s cue to whoosh us down the hill as we lifted our hands above our heads.
“Whee!” To cover Mom’s heavy breathing, we shrieked even louder this time.
“Stop!” Mom must have known he would slap her thigh when she said that. We knew to never tell Dad what to do.
“Ow,” she said, but her lips curled up. We heard “meow,” a purr.
Dad pimped the Bull with monster tires and ornaments. On Saturdays he drove us to the grocery store and smoked Marlboro Reds and listened to the radio while Mom dragged us through the aisles.
Sometimes we took too long. He drained the battery, and Johnny Cash ran out. He nodded off, the ashtray full, his chin, bearded in a week-old fuzz, falling into the fire.
That’s how we found him, embers in his fur, when we returned. “The line was practically to Canada,” Mom said.
“Time I teach you to drive.” He had promised he would, the day we moved back from Ya-Ya’s.
Mom and Dad switched seats. He showed her how to start the engine and steer. But she stopped too late and jerked the brake. “Don’t give me whiplash,” he said.
“Mmm,” she said. A grunt that meant “OK.”
He poked her in the ribs with his elbow. Her face now hot and pink, just like her clingy V-neck tee. Underneath we wondered if he had left a splotch of black and blue, green and purple. We would check next time we peeked into her bath. She always left the door ajar. A crack.
She said, “Mmm,” again, but this time in a deeper voice, like a growling stomach.
When she swerved too sharp, he said, “Don’t make me puke.”
We leaned as far from the front seat as we could, dug our shoulder blades into the metal tailgate. We clenched our bellies and whispered to each other, “We could stop growing if we didn’t eat so much. And the less we eat, the less Mom needs to drive to shop for food. The less she needs these lessons.”
Every little failure brought his elbow to her ribs again. “Easy, babe,” Dad said. “Why do you have to be such a woman driver?” The last two words like cussing.
“We’ll grow our food,” we said, hooking our pinkies. “We won’t need to drive.” We scratched together grubby scabbed-up elbows, girl to girl, to validate the vow.
“We can walk to school. And to work when we grow up,” we said. Dad couldn’t hear us, though, over the cracking of his knuckles.
“Walk on the highway?”
“That’s what the shoulder’s for.” We punched each other on the forearms.
“You hit like a girl,” we said.
Then: “At least I don’t drive like a woman.” We hung our heads like cows.
“Will they let us walk if we work at Ford? They’ll think we hate their cars.”
“We do. We’ll be crossing guards at school instead.”
“Only if you share my corner.”
“I’ll be right across the street.”
“Stop!” Did we say that? We thought we only wished that Mom would hit the brakes, that Dad would hit nothing at all. No one. But mostly not her, not her again. Please. We knew better than to breathe our thoughts out loud.
Then the truck came to a halt. We must have stopped it with our minds. We almost forgot we had that power. The kind we had wielded with The Groundhog.
“Get out.” Dad snapped at Mom.
Dad switched seats with Mom and peeled onto the highway. “See how smooth I merged.”
“Like a smooth shave.” Mom’s hand sandpapered against his chin, then grazed his lip.
He bit her finger and fondled the beauty mark above her lip. “I thought girls liked it rough.”
“Mmm, good.”
Who said that? We stopped our ears. We didn’t want to know whose voice it was, his saying she had tasty blood, or hers telling him she enjoyed the hurt.
We looked only at each other so we couldn’t see if he was driving with his hands or knees or furry chin.
Or with nothing—really? nothing?—but his mind. If we could make a truck stop with ours, we knew he could make one go with his.
Later, when Mom tucked us into bed, we asked, “Why do you have to learn how to drive?”
Her shoulders sank. Her ribs caved in.
“We can give up Brownies and birthday parties. Or we can walk.”
She kissed our heads, lipstick pinking our parts. “Sometimes you have to be able get away. As fast as you can.”
Where would she go? Dad would always find us at Ya-Ya’s. Could we go to Granny’s? Maybe we could fit inside the phone and find her. She might like Mom better if she could make herself that small.
“Go to sleep.”
We burrowed under the covers and did what she said. We would be good so she would take us with her when she made her speedy getaway. We wouldn’t even play with her phone anymore. Not much.
Mom killed the light, her skin flashing violet in the dark.
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