The Book of Fred

by Abby Bardi

  The first few days were hard. I kept trying to think of ways I could help her, but there seemed to be none. She just kept thanking me. Still, and this was a surprise, Roy and Puffin seemed to respond to her somewhat. That first Saturday night when we had dinner together, it felt like we were having a little party, and they were on their best behavior. No one yelled and said they hated me (Puffin) or went to their room alone and sulked (Roy). I felt glad and relieved, like maybe everything was going to be all right.

  When Mary Fred finally had her meltdown that Sunday, that too was kind of a relief to me. I had been unable to see how anyone could go through what she'd gone through, which was so tragic, and still seem perky and jolly, whereas here I, who had after all gone through so much less, was having trouble just getting up in the morning—I now see when I look back on it—and was clawing my way through every day, hoping to simply get through it. I'd go to a workshop on our new CDROM databases, which seemed destined never to function properly, or enter data about the library's new acquisitions into our new online catalogue, which was also always on the blink, and all I could think about was that I wanted to lie down on the floor behind the circulation desk where no one could see me and take a nap, or maybe cry. Mary Fred's sobs, however heartbreaking they sounded in one way, comforted me, as if they revealed a secret self she hadn't known about, a childishself I felt I could reach, and help. When she finally sank her head onto my shoulder, she felt like a kid, which is what I'd been expecting and even hoping for.

  The next day, she was up and already tidying things when I came downstairs. When I told her I was going to work, she seemed disappointed, and I stood there frozen, just kicking myself for not having thought this through better. I had said this to Diane when she first mentioned to me that she thought I'd do a wonderful job as a foster mother. “All the resources you have,” she said, “and all those people out there in need.” Diane had a way of making a person feel guilty about the most ordinary things. If you went to a restaurant with her, she'd talk about the people who were starving; if you said you'd been dancing, she'd talk about the people whose legs had been shot off by military dictatorships; if you said you'd been listening to music, she'd say that the people in prison in Central America heard only the sounds of their own screams.

  “But I have to work all the time, Diane,” I pointed out. “What kind of supervision is that for a child?”

  “You'd need an older child, of course,” she said. I didn't realize it at the time, but she already knew about Mary Fred and was trying to place her. “But Alice, surely you're not suggesting that women shouldn't work. I mean, I hope we've progressed some in the struggle since the days of—”

  “Of course, Diane, I only meant—”

  “These children need positive female role models,” Diane said, picking up one of my chicken bones and sucking on it, though she always claimed to be a vegetarian. We were in Delices, a local eatery; Diane had ordered the tofu au vin. “Strong women. Women of courage. Women at work.”

  At that point, I had agreed with Diane in the abstract, andbefore I knew it, I was filling out all the necessary paperwork. But then there I was, leaving the house, leaving Mary Fred home with Puffin in front of the TV. Diane said she was arranging for a Board of Education tutor to come work with Mary Fred, but apparently, they were short-staffed, and so far there was no sign of one. I had encouraged Puffin to find a job, since she was now old enough, or to do her community service (she needed to volunteer seventy-five hours to graduate, and she hadn't completed any of it yet), but Puffin said no one was hiring anywhere, she had tried. I knew she was lying, since there were Now Hiring signs on every gas station and grocery store in the neighborhood, but I didn't push it. I remembered all my teenage summers, how hard we'd had to work after our father died, and I didn't wish that on her.

  I guess that was one of the reasons I'd thought it would be a good thing to have Mary Fred around—she could keep Puffin company and, presumably, keep her out of trouble while I worked. When I saw Mary Fred, I knew that at the very least, Puffin was not going to be able to be a bad influence on her, though she might try. Mary Fred did not look the least bit likely to want to get her belly button pierced or dye her hair blue, both of which Puffin had done, though she had had to let the piercing close up when her navel got infected—and the blue hair dye always grew out eventually. I thought she was probably doing these things to freak out her father, but Peter was not easily freaked and seemed proud of his oldest daughter's eccentricities. Though he was a very successful lawyer now, Peter had had hair halfway down his back when I met him, and maybe Puffin was somehow keeping the flame of hipness alive for him. Especially as he now had almost no hair at all.

  Anyway, I had to leave them at home. Of course, Roy was there too, but he seldom got up until at least eleven, and then he went out and did whatever it was he did, I was never sure. Sometimes I saw him at the coffee shop in town, sitting at the counter with a bunch of other messy, sleepy-looking men. He'd generally be home already by the time I returned from work, and if I cooked, he would have something with us in front of the TV and then go back up to his room. Diane said he was clearly suffering from clinical depression and that I ought to put some Prozac in his coffee, but I think she just didn't like him.

  I could tell that Mary Fred had never seen much TV because she kept making comments about the commercials, whose purpose she did not quite seem to understand, as she sat watching Judge Judy every day with Puffin. As I listened to them talking, I could see she didn't realize which of the shows were fictitious and which weren't. In fact, the whole concept of fiction seemed alien to her. I had suggested that she might want to read some of the books that were in her room, old books of Puffin's mostly, and she said she only ever read two books, the Bible, by which she meant the New Testament, and something called The Book of Fred. She said they were the only books that had ever been written that had any truth in them, and that there wasn't any point in reading anything that didn't. I felt myself sighing and again thinking how nice it must be to feel so sure about things. Every day, she sat in the living room with The Book of Fred by her side, but though she had the book open and seemed to be trying to read, her eyes increasingly kept drifting to the TV.

  When she was in the bathroom one evening, I picked the book up and looked at it. It was 741 pages long, includingthe index, and it had chapter titles like “Persecution,” “Evil Spirits,” and “The Prophecies.” The index had entries like “Incarnations of Satan” and “Evil, final extermination of.” I put it down quickly when I heard her step on the top stair, which creaked, and laid it back as she had had it, open to a page on the history of the Crusades. I went into the kitchen to stick a chicken in the oven—I had bought a Perdue roaster. I washed it first, which I hated doing because it felt like a fat naked baby, and closing the oven door on it felt barbaric. I had basically tried to be a vegetarian for most of my adult life, but I had kept on eating meat because Peter had liked it, and Roy seemed to need a lot of protein or he looked even more pale and listless than usual. As for Puffin, she wouldn't eat anything unless it came directly from a bag or a box.

  As I entered the living room, I overheard Puffin trying to explain to Mary Fred that Judge Judy was not only a real judge but a great heroine for our times. Let them fight it out, I thought to myself. After a while, it appeared that Puffin had won—Mary Fred was cheering and saying, “She's so right about these people, they just need to pull themselves together and start acting like grown-ups.” By the time dinner was ready, they were watching Friends, an episode Puffin had already seen forty times, and I had to practically drag them to the table. “But do they ever find the baby?” Mary Fred asked, sounding really worried. Puffin assured her that they did.

  The whole first week went on basically the same way. I would leave in the morning and Mary Fred would already be up and dressed. She always wore brown, and eventually when I asked her about it she told me that brown was the holiestcolor, which was why when the original
Fred had come to earth and been incarnated as a modern prophet, he had been given the last name of Brown. “So you're saying this man's name was Fred Brown?” I asked her. She said yes, and she made a little motion with her hand, as if she were drawing the letters F and B with her fingertip. I found out later that that was what she did whenever anyone said the name Fred Brown, and when Roy found that out he used to say the name just to watch her make this motion. He seemed to get a big kick out of this.

  So I'd go out the door, telling Mary Fred good-bye. It was nice to have someone to say good-bye to, since Puffin and Roy were always still asleep when I left, and unlike Puffin, she let me kiss her on the cheek after a few days, and though she didn't kiss back, she would smile. Mary Fred had the sweetest smile—a little lopsided, because of her wide mouth and crooked teeth, but big and cheerful. It was so nice to see her looking happy that I found myself trying anything I could to get that smile out of her. When I brought home some more of those pink beads she had asked for in the Safeway, she seemed glad that I had thought of it, though it seemed to me that she didn't much care about the beads. (Whereas Puffin sucked them right down. They were pure sugar.) I began to suspect that what she really liked was the color pink, so I started buying pink cupcakes to see if they would make her smile too, and they did.

  When I came home from work that first week, they would be sitting silently together in front of the TV, Puffin sprawled in the armchair, Mary Fred sitting primly on the couch with her weird book propped in her lap, trying to read. But by the second week, I'd find Mary Fred riveted to the screen, and the two of them chattering about the transsexuals on Jenny Jones or the incestuous lesbian sisters on Jerry Springer. “Are you saying that woman was really a man?” Mary Fred would be squealing. “But if he was born a man, I don't see why he'd want to wear a dress.”

  “Sometimes they have things cut off,” Puffin would say darkly, and Mary Fred would squeal some more.

  Some days I'd get the two of them to help me with dinner, just to pry them away from Jerry Springer. I had never had much luck getting Puffin to help me in the past, but now that Mary Fred was here, she pitched in when I suggested it without her usual yelling, as if she didn't want her new foster sister to know how uncooperative she normally was. But other days, I just left them where they were, since it was nice to hear them talking and sometimes laughing. Puffin had always been a quiet girl when she wasn't shrieking, at least since her father and I had split up, and I liked hearing ordinary noises, instead of the sounds of yelling or whining, coming from her.

  The second Sunday that Mary Fred was with us, I decided to get up early and take her to church. Diane had given me the name of the church she belonged to, though she and Sandy would be away that weekend at their beach house and wouldn't be there for moral support. I didn't much like Sandy anyway; she seemed to disapprove of me, maybe because I was heterosexual, or because she knew I was still hung up on my ex-husband, or just because I had known Diane longer than she had (we had met in college).

  I told Mary Fred on Saturday that I would be taking her to church the following morning. I had pried her and Puffin away from the TV and had taken them shopping. Puffin dragged us through a bunch of cheap teen stores at the mall, somehow talking me into buying her a see-through blackshirt that she said looked cool. I wasn't sure whether she meant literally or figuratively cool, but I let her get it since it was on sale. Mary Fred walked through all the stores, fingering the fabric and drawing her hand back as if she had never felt synthetics before. Maybe she was looking for something brown. There was no brown, though there was a lot of black. At one point, she stopped in front of a rack of pink hair clips, and I offered to buy her one but she declined, though she glanced back at them with what looked like wistfulness.

  She seemed excited about the idea of going to church, and when I got up the next morning, she was sitting in the living room in a brown dress, reading The Book of Fred again. “Aren't Heather and Uncle Roy coming?” she asked as we pulled out of the driveway. I told her they were still sleeping and she said, “Many of those who sleep shall awake to everlasting shame.” I told her I thought that was quite likely.

  It wasn't hard to find the church, and we got there just in time. I ran into a few people I knew in the lobby and said good morning, and we made our way to a pew in the back. There was a program on the seat and I picked it up and read it as the congregation sang a song I had never heard before about world peace. There was a brochure in the program asking for donations for the Cows for Kids program. I knew all about this because Diane had been one of its leading lights. She and a bunch of other people had raised money to buy a herd of cows for a group of people in Nicaragua. Diane had often handed me pamphlets with a black and white splotchy cow-ish pattern on their covers.

  After the song, a bunch of people stood up one by one and made positive wishes for people who were sick, or refugees,and occasionally for ailing pets. I looked over at Mary Fred and she was smiling as if she was having a nice time. The wishes took about forty-five minutes—it seemed that everyone had something to wish for, but when it was finally over, a woman in a plain black suit stood up and talked for twenty minutes about the situation in Kosovo. I guessed from the program that she was the presiding lay person; there was no minister. There was another song, and then everyone held hands and gave the person next to them a kiss of peace, and the service was over. People were serving bagels in the lobby, but I thought we had better head home and see if Puffin was awake yet. When we got in the car, I looked over at Mary Fred and asked her if she had enjoyed the service. She looked out the window and said, “Oh yes, Alice, it was very nice.”

  “What did you like best about it?”

  “Oh. . . .” She seemed to be thinking. “Some of the songs were nice. I liked that one about the woman named Sibyl.”

  “Sibyl? Oh, the one about civil rights.”

  “Was that it? I thought her last name was Wright.” Mary Fred continued to look out the window, though there wasn't anything interesting out there, just a bunch of small suburban houses and the occasional strip mall.

  “Was it like your church, Mary Fred? I mean, I know it was different, but did they have anything in common at all?” I turned to glance at her and saw that her shoulders were shaking, and I thought she was crying. We stopped at a stoplight, and I leaned over to put my arm around her, but when she turned to face me I saw that she was laughing uncontrollably.

  “Oh, Alice,” she said, gasping for breath, “I don't know what that was, but it sure wasn't church.” She started tolaugh some more, and something about her laughter was so infectious that I started giggling too as she went over some parts of the service that she had found particularly striking. “And when that lady said she wanted her dog Snuffles to get over his dia—his dia—” She was laughing too hard to say the word “diarrhea.” We drove down the street in hysterics and didn't stop until we were back home, and then Mary Fred tried to explain it all to Puffin, who was sitting groggily in the living room, flipping channels, but like all funny things, it was impossible to explain and after a while she gave up.

  The next few weeks went on basically the same way. I didn't try taking Mary Fred to church again, since she said she was afraid she would start giggling and not be able to stop, and she didn't want to offend anyone. She explained to me that there were no churches anywhere but the ones in the Frederick counties that were the right kind; it seemed that everyone else was really a Lacker in disguise, so there was no point in bothering about them. I thought about taking her up to the one in Frederick County, but Diane had warned me to keep Mary Fred away from her previous life, since we wanted her to make a good adjustment. Every morning I'd go to work and find her awake already, dusting the furniture or sometimes doing dishes that Roy had left there in the middle of the night, or reading her book. During the day, while I was at work, I suppose she and Puffin spent most of their time in front of the TV, though when I got home, the house always looked nicer than it had when I left, a
nd I could tell Mary Fred had been cleaning, though I had urged her not to. I have to admit that when I came home and found things tidy, orderly, shiny, it gave me a feeling of tremendous relief, evenpeace. I would bring my groceries into the kitchen and Mary Fred would help me put things away, talking to me the whole time about things Judge Judy had said, or about Jerry Springer's concluding message, and occasionally she would quote something to me from The Book of Fred. Her quotations always sounded sort of biblical, but garbled, like someone had not quite gotten it right. Of course, I had only ever read the Bible when I had been stuck in motel rooms with nothing else to do, so I had no idea if Fred Brown had bastardized it or not. When I thought of the name “Fred Brown,” it made me want to draw a little F and B in my mind. Mary Fred was definitely getting to me.

  Mary Fred always helped me with dinner, and she often came up with great ideas for what to do with things like cauliflower or frozen peas. We ate a lot of fish, since she seemed to like it, and she knew how long to cook every variety, and whether to bake it, fry it, or broil it. (She got me to boil haddock once and I can't say I liked it much, but she did.) We ate at the dinner table instead of in front of the TV, and Roy almost always joined us, which surprised me. I had never had much luck with getting him to sit at the table. Puffin and Mary Fred would chatter on about things they had seen on TV, and Mary Fred would ask Roy and me how our days had been. It seemed odd to hear so much talking in the evening. Sometimes I ended up telling them about things that had happened to me at work, and though Puffin still looked completely bored by anything that did not have to do with, well, Puffin, Mary Fred would listen avidly, like she really wanted to know what had happened when our whole network went down. Roy never said much.