Judith was unapologetic as she twisted her body into my mother’s and explained the haircut. Underweight and eyes bulging, Judith looked like a stray cat, but instead of telling her to scat, my mother said nothing. She simply took us home and did not speak for hours. The razor cut was so short it stood up on top. My mother could not look at it. Could not look at me. I must have looked as ragged as we were.
Hating to see my mother broken, I blamed myself for having trusted Judith’s touch. She had always been cold, the words that came out of her mouth clanged like metal on glass. I had never really liked her, and so, when she agreed in advance to baby-sit while my mother went to the hospital to have the baby, I cried.
One day, my mother tripped on a toy, and her water broke. The next day Judith was walking around the house, barking orders, and reclining on my mother’s big bed in the cool-weather bedroom.
Judith sat under the white chenille bedspread, the TV set planted squarely before her. When she noticed me watching, she said it was late and told me to get to bed. I said that my mother always let me watch The Sonny & Cher Show. She said no. When I did not budge, Judith reminded me that my mother was not there. Still, I remained by the side of the bed.
Judith was tired and mean, but I was pigheaded and right.
“I am allowed to watch Sonny and Cher, I am!” I chanted, as if it were a prayer, until Judith could stand it no longer and dialed my mother at the hospital.
A minute into the call, Judith’s hand loosened on the receiver, her eyes flipped to the ceiling, and I knew that my mother had backed me up.
Judith did not let go of power easily, though. Hanging up the phone, she swore under her breath and said that I was spoiled. She was wrong, of course; my mother spoiled no one. Still, she had given me victory over Judith, and though I didn’t want to be near my bitter second cousin as she sprawled her scrawny body under my mother’s covers, I sat on the edge of the bed and made myself watch the entire show. I was tired, but sat there straight-backed till Sonny and Cher sang “I Got You Babe,” their closing song.
The pair exchanged wet glances with each other and then with the viewing audience. That night, Chastity joined her parents on stage. Cher was jubilant at the arrival of her daughter, and beamed as though the sun had been harnessed and brought before her. She sparkled and glowed and squeezed her daughter’s hand. Finally, Cher broke into a wide smile and blew all of America a kiss goodnight. Then she took her baby into her arms and turned to leave—the beads of her glassy gown swirling about her feet as they walked off stage.
When all signs of Cher had vanished, after she’d returned to the shimmer of her Hollywood life, I walked back to the big room and laid myself down. It was dark, but the walls were stubborn, and I could still make out the pink. The pink I spent too much time looking into. The hard broken pink. I stared into the broken plaster holes and waited.
30
The thing was, it had a dent in it. A scar ran across the face of the metal box. It was chipped and rusted in spots, pushed inward, and pressed together whatever unfortunate food item was placed inside.
There was nothing pretty about my lunchbox, nothing to see but the huge old head of Kwai Chang Caine, the crime-fighting monk from TV. And if you looked at it, that’s all you’d see—Caine’s bald head, cracked by the dent, looking like the shell of an overcooked egg.
The dent was there long before I ever got hold of it. It was a hand-me-down from my oldest brother, Will, who was as strange as the box.
And don’t think I didn’t try covering Kung Fu’s rocky head with a carefully placed hand or two. I tried. And tried. But his head ballooned and was way too wide for covering. I was convinced that the head was the first thing people noticed about me on the bus to Albion Primary School or at the Brownies. Having the head of Muhammad Ali or Evel Knievel—even the entire Walton family, including John-Boy and his squishy red mole—would have been far less painful.
I never told my mother how much I hated it, not wanting to seem weak. I preferred to be seen as greedy and begged regularly for a Josie and the Pussycats box. And when begging didn’t work, I banged my own head against Kung Fu’s on the school bus, the first time by accident, but after that, for the easy laughs it garnered, and the chance of damaging it beyond repair. And when knocking heads with Kwai Chang Caine failed to ruin the box, I simply left it at home and waited to eat my lunch till after school.
On those autumn nights when flocks of Brownies gathered in fidgety groups in the school gymnasium and opened their sewing boxes in search of thread and needle to fashion dolls from empty Palmolive bottles, I’d look shocked that my own box had gone missing and ask my cousin Dori for a needle and some thread.
“Where’s your sewing kit?” my mother asked when the troop leader reported that I’d forgotten it yet again and had to borrow from Dori, whose box was everything a sewing kit should have been—clear plastic with powder-yellow handles, stuffed to capacity with yarn and thread and a rainbow of fabric scraps.
I shrugged and kept to myself the fact that mine was not even a real sewing kit, that I would have preferred to pull needle and thread from a brown paper bag than carry around sewing supplies in Kung Fu’s big buttery head. I said nothing, and kept as a secondary source of shame the fact that I cared about such things.
I decided to be rid of it once and for all by convincing my mother that I hated Brownies. And either she was sick of coming up with money for dues or I was an excellent liar, because my mother somehow believed that I no longer wanted to sing and sew and dip peeled apples into brown sugar and cinnamon, push them onto the ends of broken branches, then turn them over an open fire.
I hated the songs and the parades, I said, and prayed she wouldn’t look into my eyes.
“Let me quit,” I pleaded.
And just like that, she did.
My mother had other things on her mind. A new baby to feed, a sitter to pay, a job to hold on to. And boxes to pack. We’d lived in Albion for three years—a tiny eternity given our record—but we were heading out again.
Our stay in the crumbling old house was over. Time at play in the strawberry patches out back, hours hiding in tall grass and cow corn, late-night walks along the outhouse path with my bravest sister in hand—all of this was coming to an end.
31
With little explanation and no preparation, most of us moved onto the Tonawanda Indian Reservation. The reservation was south of Albion, closer to Buffalo. The three oldest kids (Will, Anthony, and Lisa) were either sent back to Rochester to stay with friends, or took a train to stay with their father in Albany. In truth, I hardly noticed. So many people crowded around the edges of our murky family, it was hard to keep track of who was there or not.
As we drove onto reservation land, we looked for teepees and tomahawks, but were greeted only by long stretches of trees and, between them, small houses that leaned softly into the earth.
“There are no teepees,” my mother said as she steered the car down the winding roads into the heart of the reservation where faces browner than those of the Indians on TV peeked out from passing yards. “The Iroquois built long houses, not teepees.”
My newest sister was half-Indian. Rachel’s father was a Seneca and from the reservation. Billie was his sister and friendly with my mother, so we’d be staying at her place.
Billie’s hair hung long and black and flapped against her large behind as she walked through the one-bedroom home that on any given night held ten to fifteen people. Jolie, Lana, and Soupy were Billie’s children and thus the rightful inhabitants of the tiny house. Soupy was the youngest, a fat-faced boy of four whose real name had been discarded the day he was said to have fallen into a huge pot of soup—emerging from the pot baptized in venison broth, and with a new name.
Lana lied. I learned this within hours. She told everyone I’d wet the bed that very first night. Shy because my mother wasn’t around, I didn’t call Lana a liar, and just shook my head back and forth, staring at the dark spot on the thi
nly-sheeted sagging mattress that had held both our bellies the night before. I couldn’t believe how she lied. I wanted to cry, but didn’t let myself. Lana’s eyes were hot and mean; she used them like pokers.
“Forget Lana,” Jolie said, “that’s just how she is.”
Jolie was the oldest. At nine, she was one year older than me and so pretty it hurt. Grown-ups evaluated children’s beauty as though they weren’t in the room and Jolie, they said, was just gorgeous. Her hair had a bit of curl, a beauty mark hovered over her top lip, and her skin was the color of cream because her father was Italian. Italian, and in prison. Lana and Soupy’s skin, on the other hand, was as chocolate as Billie’s. Their father was not Italian but was in Attica just the same.
Jolie embraced me, was as friendly as Lana was mean. Right after Lana’s accusation, she took me to the reservation candy store—a locked shack in the woods near the home of the old man who owned it. I followed Jolie up his porch steps.
“He’s a chief,” she whispered as she set her hand to the door.
He answered her knocking with a clouded stare. Blue at the edges, his black eyes pushed past me. He asked Jolie where she got the paleface. Jolie shrugged. I whipped round to see what type of thing a pale-face was, and when I saw nothing, slowly understood that the old man with ponytailed white hair must mean me.
I was the paleface.
“We came for candy,” Jolie said.
He waited a minute, so that we were not sure if he’d even heard, then disappeared into the house. Except for the sound of cushioned feet on the floor, it was utterly quiet; I imagined moccasins touching down on moss-green carpet. He returned with a loop of keys, and I noticed that his lined face was the same maple syrup color as Jolie’s. I shifted my weight and stared at the sandals strapped to my feet.
“Not her,” he said, pointing to be sure we both understood. Still, I followed them over to the shack just beyond his house, pretended the words had somehow been a mistake, and pretended the old man’s voice had not sounded like an axe chopping wood. When we reached the door, I turned away and handed Jolie my quarter, sneaking peeks through the torn mesh of the screen as I waited. Rows and rows of Sweetarts and candy cigarettes and plastic fruit filled with flavored sugar lined the shelves. Jolie pointed at each candy option and looked out the door to see if that’s the kind I wanted, eventually emerging with hands full.
The walk back to Billie’s was quieter. Before, our words had tumbled into each other as we talked of strawberry lip gloss and KC and the Sunshine Band. On the way home, I noticed that crickets had begun to sound. I tried counting tiger lilies but couldn’t stand to look into their spotted interiors. The velvet insides, I couldn’t help thinking, robbed the trumpeted weeds of their beauty; their spots reminded me of snakes.
32
When you eat soup every night, thoughts of bread get you through.
Bowl after worn plastic bowl of unfocused ingredients floated before me in a strained broth. Corn, carrots, cabbage, and whatever else could be found were softened in water and flavored with animal fat. We had soup on the reservation every day, sometimes twice. The overworked broth was even further weakened by the knowledge that my mother worked in a factory and had money for Beefaroni. She said that eating Beefaroni would be rude, with Billie and her kids eating soup. I thought about sleeping on the floor while Billie’s family slept on beds and couldn’t understand.
My bread craving grew.
Cold mornings, I spooned cornmeal mush into my mouth, thankful for at least something warm that was not soup. Warm and solid, the mush was sweetened with a trace of syrup. Still, mush was mush, and nowhere near as solid as bread. Bread was what I wanted.
33
In September, we were bussed a few towns away for school. Brown eyes settled upon us as we climbed aboard. My sisters and I were the only whites on the bus, and in the days to come, I would fight almost daily with a dark girl who insisted on making fun of my whiteness. Neither of us wanted to fight, but she had to say things, and I had to defend myself. I was only eight years old, but I knew this. I learned to say just enough to avoid a fight without seeming weak. She did the same. Leaning into me, she said she couldn’t wait for the day to kick my white ass. I made my face stiff and talked about how good it would be to kick her Indian ass once and for all while praying it would never come to that. Despite our talk, however, we always sat near the other, sometimes even slipping into the same wide seat.
Winding its way through broken roads, beyond Indian land, the bus headed west, to the town of Akron. Except for our busload of Senecas, the school was filled with whites, and a place I hoped to escape notice. And for a few minutes anyway, it appeared I would. Until the teacher called my name on the first day of school.
“Please stand when your name is called,” came the voice from the front of the room, and I obeyed, not noticing until I had stood that every other child standing was brown. The teacher walked to her desk and returned with a pile of school supplies, which were passed into open hands. Free supplies, I thought, this can’t be so bad. The colored pencils, in particular, caught my eye. But when the teacher came to me, she squinted. She looked into my blue eyes, scanned my light brown hair, rechecked the names on her list, looked back into my face, then returned to her list. In the end, she decided against my eligibility, asked me to sit back down, while the colored pencils I’d come to think of as my own remained on the corner of her desk.
By Christmas, Billie’s house had become home. Snow grew deep, water became ice. Deer carcasses had long since disappeared from trees. And though my mother warned against wanting too much, I wanted ice skates for Christmas. I wanted them like I wanted bread. Only I got the skates. I opened the gift and it was like magic. Had I hovered above and watched as the red foil paper was torn from the box, I would have been startled by the look of joy on my own face. Like my teacher, I would have blinked, scanned my face, and had to look again. I would have thought I was seeing a hot cocoa commercial or an after-school special about poor kids and Christmas miracles as this joyful imposter of myself removed the lid of the box and lifted out a brand-new pair of skates. Years later I discovered that my brother’s saxophone had been sold to buy presents that year, but at the time I was ignorant of such things, and pushed my feet into the skates without guilt.
After the gifts were opened, all the kids grabbed their skates and headed out to the ice, except for my sisters, who had neither asked for nor received skates. Steph followed the crowd to the frozen pond where I skated in circles, my scarf flapping in the wind as I laughed. It was the best day ever. Cold snapped my face red and, as I began to glide, I still felt something of the hot cocoa commercial. Steph sat at the edge on a pile of snow. Watching. She was my best sister, but I barely even heard as she asked to try out the skates.
“Wait—just another couple minutes, okay?” I said again and again as I whipped round and round the frozen pond.
I couldn’t stop. In plain sight of the dark-haired girl who always finished the soup I couldn’t eat and killed bugs for me and lent her mittens when mine had holes or were lost, I couldn’t stop. Those skates carried me across the pond like the wind pushing a leaf along the road. My cheeks must have been red circles and there was the scent of hot cocoa and it was magnificent, so I managed not to see her.
“Can I try now?”
Day became night, and just before the call for home, as everyone else was getting back into boots, I remembered my frozen sister, removed a skate, and gave it to her. I loved my sister better than anyone, but need must be bigger than love, because even then, I couldn’t bear to give up both skates. Steph quietly settled for one, and the two of us flopped on the ice for a few cold minutes before heading home.
34
Mallory was younger than me, but not the youngest. Rachel was the baby, the dark-haired reason for our move to the reservation. Mallory was blonde with ringlets and dimples. The truth was I’d never quite forgiven her for being born, but due to limited options I’d som
etimes play with her.
Everyone loved Mal. They couldn’t get over how adorable she was. “Ooh, look at her—she’s an angel, just like a little Shirley Temple.”
Everyone said it. Even those who didn’t like whites thought she was a doll. Perhaps she was so pale that she seemed less pale, her golden curls and pink cheeks putting her in a fairytale category.
People played Shirley Temple songs and Mallory danced to them. They laughed and clapped. They thought this was cute. I thought it was stupid, though I found myself wanting to be asked to dance and sing, too. On New Year’s Eve, the adults dropped off one at a time, either leaving or passing out. Mal and I were in the kitchen, standing on chairs. The record player was perched high up on a shelf, and we took turns dragging the needle back to the same song. Over and over. We listened to “The Good Ship Lollipop.” With the adults asleep and Mallory still in first grade, I made the rules, and the first thing I decided was that yellow ringlets hardly mattered. Girls with flat brown hair could sing golden songs, too. There were bottles of vodka and schnapps on the table. I danced and twirled in the tiny kitchen. I sang Shirley Temple songs at the top of my lungs. I let peppermint schnapps trickle down the back of my throat and felt fire come up from my belly.
35
Billie’s house was as small as a shack to begin with, but as the wind whipped east from Lake Erie and south from Ontario, we crouched in its hold so that, by late February, we began to feel cramped. Even as we gathered around the wood-burning stove, rubbing palms together, we longed for space. We made up games and read books, but as the winter wore on and we felt we could bear it no more, we pulled on warm clothes and wandered outside in search of signs of thaw.
The tree out front, we discovered, leaked sugar water. We tapped into it with the sharp end of a nail, used a hammer to break into its flesh, then pressed our mouths to the rough bark and waited for the tree to bleed. It was slow in coming, but the taste was clean and cool and sweet. A few cars passed and drivers stared at the sight of children licking on trees. We ignored them. The sap fell onto our tongues and we had nowhere else to be, so we waited—mouths opened, latched onto the giant old maple.
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