by Abby Bardi
“Jocks?” M.F. knows perfectly well what jocks are, since I have explained the whole thing to her about a million times, who all the various groups are and which ones she should avoid.
“You know who I mean. Those guys from the football team.”
“Justin and Carl?”
“I don't know their names, M.F.” I explain to her that I'm sure they're very nice, but like I told her before, they aren't cool.
M.F. says she doesn't really care if people are cool or not. I roll my eyes and explain that if she talks to the wrong people, it will reflect badly on me. Then I realize that this sounds horrible and selfish, but by this time we're being dropped off on our corner and I manage to change the subject.
When I think about it later, I realize that the truth is, I'm jealous. And it's the worst kind of jealousy, the two-way kind. I'm jealous of all those stupid football people for taking M.F. away from me, and then the weird part is that I'm also jealous of her. Like there's part of me that wishes I was blond and perky, with a great figure, and that jocks hung all over me drooling whenever I laughed at their jokes. Though I have basically been more or less cool ever since my nerd period in seventh grade, I am now horrified to discover that I have thissecret desire to be popular. I shudder at the thought and resolve to try to get over it.
But the idea kind of haunts me. Maybe it's because when I see them all sitting there in the cafeteria together, talking about dumb stuff, like whether the Redskins will make it to the Super Bowl (answer: of course not), they just look so normal, like they all go home to mothers in aprons who offer them brownies and milk, and dads who come home at five and play catch with them out front, and even though I happen to know that their parents are all divorced, just like mine, and that no one is normal anymore, still, I find myself wishing for a horrible moment that I was a cheerleader and that my mom had perfect fake blond hair, and that she stayed home all day and helped me with my algebra, and then we brought Dad his slippers and pipe and he read the paper while we sang songs from the sixties at the piano. But we don't even have a piano, and the thought of Mom with perfect hair, even reasonably decent hair, makes me laugh, even though at the same time, I'm sad.
The next day, I tell M.F. she can talk to whoever she wants.
By the time Thanksgiving break rolls around, I do a personal inventory, like Mom says to do. M.F. is still hanging around with the wrong people, but even if it bothers me, I just keep it to myself. Mom still gets on my nerves, but I notice that I have stopped screaming at her quite so much, which is good since I never wanted to scream, it's just that she can be so annoying sometimes. M.F. always looks so shocked when I raise my voice to an adult that it's inspired me to cut way back on it. Roy is still, well, Roy, but he pretty much stays out of my way. I still don't see too much of my dad, since he works all the time and does soccer with the twins on weekends, but I'm more or less used to that. So overall, I have to say that things are fine,like if life is a big volleyball game, say, against the team of evil and doom, my team is still a few points ahead.
On Thanksgiving Day, Mom, M.F., and I cook a huge turkey with stuffing, broccoli, corn, and potatoes. M.F. bakes two kinds of pie, pumpkin and pecan. We all sit down at the table, and Roy isn't even late, and it looks like he's wearing a clean shirt. Mom makes us all tell what we're thankful for. Roy says he's thankful that we made two kinds of pie, since he likes both of them. I say I'm thankful that we have a lot of food, since I'm really hungry. And some people don't have any food at all, Mom says, to try to give my statement some relevance. Yeah, I say. We all turn to M.F. She says, “I'm thankful to be here with you,” but she looks sad, and she is probably thinking about her real family, wherever they are now, in jail and in a bunch of other foster homes. Mom puts her hand on M.F.'s hand as if she knows that M.F. is thinking that, and she says, “I'm so thankful that we're all here together, and I think the thing we're the most thankful for this year, Mary Fred, is that we have you in our lives.” I wait for Roy to say something sarcastic, but he doesn't. The fact is, what Mom said is basically true, though I would never say it out loud.
As soon as Thanksgiving is over, I start to get this knot in my stomach. I used to like Christmas when I was a little kid, but since my parents got divorced, I've dreaded the holidays. Every year I go to my dad's for Christmas Eve, and then late at night he brings me home so I can wake up where my presents are, with Mom. It's always at least midnight when I get back, because Dad and Jemma have a big party with lots of her relatives there and it lasts a long time. When I was younger, while Dad drove me home I would try to stay awake so I could look at the sky and see if Santa was flying by, but the only thing Iever saw that was at all interesting was a bunch of police cars surrounding some people in a van.
In the morning, I always wake up excited because it's Christmas and I like getting presents, but at the same time, I feel sad when I realize I'm not at my dad's anymore, and that while I open my presents with Mom, he's down in Chevy Chase opening presents with the twins, who always get a zillion things and then go on to ruin them all. If you give them Barbies for Christmas, by New Year's Day, the dolls will be stark naked and have weird punk hairdos that have been dunked in the toilet.
It has always seemed to me at Christmas that there were just not enough people in our house. There was Mom and me, and sometimes Roy. Even when all three of us were in the living room, and it's not a big room at all, it seemed like there weren't enough of us, like no matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't fill up enough space.
Before Christmas, both Mom and Mary Fred each have a birthday. Mom's comes first. Usually I just make her a card, but M.F. insists that we go out and buy her a nice present. We go to one of the cutesy little stores in town and get her a necklace with a fairy on it. I don't think M.F. realizes it's a fairy— she thinks it's an angel, and I don't bother to correct her since she'd probably just think fairies were satanic anyway. We each buy Mom a nice card, and when her birthday comes, we make dinner and serve it as if we were waitresses. I can tell that Mom is really touched, and I kind of wish I'd thought of doing all this for her before, but it never occurred to me.
M.F.'s birthday is an even bigger deal. Mom wants to have a party for her, but I talk her out of it. Mom has asked who M.F.'s friends at school are, but I've told her that she doesn't have any, since the last thing I want is a bunch of jocks andcheerleaders at my house. Mom has met Jack and Todd and thinks they're nice. She says that since bowling seems to have become very important to M.F., maybe we should all go to Copacabana Lanes for her birthday. It's true that M.F. has gotten serious about her bowling and is doing better every time. As for me, every now and then I actually hit a pin or two but mostly it's gutter balls all the way. I picture Jack and Todd and M.F. and me bowling with Mom and Roy, and tell her that no, there is no way M.F. would want to bowl on her birthday. Mom says that we'd better just do something at home for her. She suggests inviting Diane but almost instantly shakes her head no and says, “We'll just have family.”
The day of M.F.'s birthday, we go out and buy party hats and noisemakers and a huge cake with flowers all over it, and we cook her favorite fish (red snapper) and we don't let her help with anything.
At dinner, I can see that M.F. is having a terrific time. Roy is making lots of jokes, and we're listening to the new Backstreet Boys CD I bought for her. I hate the Backstreet Boys, so it's a big sacrifice on my part. M.F. loves the fish and keeps oohing and ahing over our cooking, which is really nothing special. We're all wearing party hats, and she keeps blowing into her noisemaker. There are crepe-paper streamers hanging above her head like a pink and white frame. “I'll be right back,” Mom says, and I know she's gone into the kitchen to put the candles in the cake. I stand up and am about to dash in to help her when the phone rings. I pick it up and hear a man's voice asking for Mary Fred Anderson. “It's for you,” I say to M.F., handing her the phone without really even wondering who it is, since I am only thinking about cake. She says hello into the phone a
nd then she gets this weird look on her face. Her eyes dart to the stereo, and I turn the sound down so she can hearbetter, though what I really want is to hear for myself. Her eyes are misting over and she sounds like she has suddenly developed a Southern accent. “Oh, thank you,” she says, then listens for what seems like an eternity. “Bless you and keep you in the One,” she says finally. “You too, Papa.” She hangs up the phone and sits there without saying anything.
I stare at her. “That was your dad calling?” It has been some time since I'd given any thought to M.F.'s real parents. I had grown so used to thinking of her as ours. “He was wishing you a happy birthday?” She nods. She looks too upset to talk, so I say, “That was really nice of him, wasn't it? You must be relieved to hear from him.” She nods again, then stands up and goes to turn off the stereo. The Backstreet Boys stop in the middle of a sentence. She sits back down at the table and is just opening her mouth to say something when Mom bursts through the kitchen door carrying the cake lit with sixteen candles plus one to grow on. As we sing to her, I can see that M.F. is trying not to cry, but by the time we finish the song, she looks pretty normal again, and she blows the candles out in one breath without even trying. “Blowing the candles out is just like bowling,” she says. “You have to aim at the middle.” Her voice still sounds weird.
When M.F. went upstairs to wash up before bed, I told Mom about how M.F.'s father had called, and how she had turned off the music afterward as if she had suddenly remembered her old self. “Oh, the poor baby,” Mom says. “What can we do? She must be really upset.” We start talking about how we can cheer M.F. up, as if her father had just ruined her day. Later it occurs to me that of course M.F. was glad to hear from him and that it's not that he's some terrible usurper. SAT word, to usurp: to seize or hold by force or without legal right. As I lie in bed, I realize that of course, we are the usurpers. Isuddenly see us as trolls in a fairy tale, evil trolls who are holding the princess captive and never want to let her go.
By the week before Christmas, the knot in my stomach always expands to the size of the Titanic. I am walking around nearly doubled over with the ickiness of it all, how I hate my parents for getting divorced, and I hate my life, and most of all, I hate Christmas, I just hate it. I'm back to screeching at my mom—I can't help it, everything she says irritates me. As usual, though, I look to M.F. to cheer me up, to make me see the sunny side of divorce or something, which she is usually good for. But M.F. does not seem to be doing so well herself. Ever since her father's phone call, she has been different—not distant, exactly, but a little distracted, and she seems edgy, like something is worrying her. It's not just the usual sadness you always see when she's thinking about her brothers and sisters, but more of a nervousness. She picks at things when she sits around, pulls loose threads from her sleeves and twists her hair around her fingers. Since her father's phone call, she is back to wearing a lot more brown, and she has even put her hair in french braids a few times, though I try to talk her out of it by saying that her head will be cold, since it has gotten to be winter. Though we bought her some cute boots at Parade of Shoes, she is back to wearing the sensible shoes she brought with her, though that's okay because they look a little bit like Doc Martens.
The week before Christmas, M.F. insists that we go to the store and buy decorations. Mom takes us to Kmart and lets us go wild filling the cart with cardboard angels, plastic holly wreaths, and icicle lights. We buy electric candles to put in each window, a plastic snowman to hang on the front door, and some branches from pine trees. I pick up a Santa doll, butM.F. makes me put it back—she says Santa has nothing to do with Christmas, really, and that if I read the historical information I would know that. She also says no to a Baby Jesus that I figured she would like. She says that models and pictures are raven images, or something like that.
We stop and buy a tree on the way home. Usually we wait till the day before Christmas because they go on sale then, but Mom thought that M.F. would want to spend the whole week decorating the tree. When we get the tree home, M.F. says that actually, the whole tree business is some kind of pagan thing. I'm not sure what “pagan” means but from the way she says it I'm pretty sure she thinks it's satanic. Mom goes up in the attic and gets out the big box of ornaments, and we start putting them on the tree. I've had a pretty good time so far buying stuff at Kmart but when I open the box of ornaments, the knot in my stomach suddenly grows larger, like I have accidentally swallowed a barrel of broken glass. Each ornament reminds me of when I was a little kid. I remember the elf, the tiny little house with angels on it, the nutcracker soldier, the signs of the zodiac. (Cancer for me, Sagittarius for Mom. Dad is a Leo, and his sign hangs on his and Jemma's tree.) Even the lights make me feel sick because I remember Dad draping them all around the tree, trying to get them just right, and Mom sitting there laughing at what a perfectionist he was.
By the time I finish looking through the box of ornaments, I'm ready to just throw up all over the tree. But I don't say anything about it. M.F. goes through the box holding up each ornament and squealing about how precious and cute it is. We decide to wait until two days before Christmas to actually decorate the tree, so we can make a big deal of it. School finishes that Wednesday, and the next day we get up, put on the one Christmas CD I can find, and get to work. As I pin the ornamentson the tree, trying not to really look at them so I won't keep getting dragged into the past in my mind, all these horrible folksingers bleat Christmas songs in the background. When we get to the star that we always put at the top of the tree, M.F. hands it to me and says, “Here, Heather, you're taller than me.” Actually, I'm two inches shorter than her, but I think she realizes that putting the star up is kind of an honor. I reach up the side of the tree with it, but I can't get the star all the way to the top, so I get a chair from the dining room and stand on it. As I teeter at the top of the tree, I see my parents laughing, and me small, and Mom sticking the star up there, Dad standing behind her to make sure she doesn't fall. Mom's face looks younger and her hair isn't graying, and Dad doesn't have his bald spot, and I am just their little Puffin.
“Heather, are you okay?” M.F. comes up behind me like she is going to catch me if I fall.
“I'm a little dizzy,” I say, getting down off the chair and handing her the star. “You'd better do it. I think I'm afraid of heights.”
“Heights?” M.F. lets out one of her peals of laughter. Then she sees my face and says more seriously, “Come on, Heather, it's okay. You'll get through Christmas somehow.”
Then I realize that she is having just as much trouble as I am. “Did your family have a Christmas tree?” I ask her as she stands at the top of the tree, rearranging the tinsel so it fits around the star better.
“No, we always decorate a pile of straw,” she says. “A huge pile of straw. All the kids in the Compound get together and make ornaments for it every year. Mostly papier-mâché, but sometimes we make things out of clay, or construction paper. The little ones make a lot of doilies. Then we get together and hang them all up. I guess that's what they're going to dotonight, at the Compound. That's when it would be, tonight. It'll still be decorated when we get there. We never take it down till the middle of February. It gets kind of dirty but that's part of the meaning of the straw.”
“When we get there? What do you mean?”
“We're going there, Heather. Didn't you know that?”
“We are? When?”
M.F. gets that nervous look that I've been noticing and says, “January seventh. Didn't Alice tell you? She says she's going to take us all there.”
“Really? I didn't know that.” I think for a minute. “But isn't that a school day?”
“Yep. It's supposed to be.”
“And Mom said we could take the day off? Or are we going after school?”
“No, we have to be there by noon, so we'll have to miss school.” M.F. stands there twisting a big clump of tinsel in her hands. Her face looks tense, like someone is pinching her.
“And we're going to the Compound? Where is it?”
“It's out in Virginia. Frederick County. It's pretty there, you'll love it.”
“Are there horses? Can we go riding?”
“I think the horses will be shut away that day,” M.F. says. “It's going to be kind of—different.”
“Is your, um, real family going to be there?” The minute this is out of my mouth I'm sorry, but M.F. just shakes her head and says she doesn't think so, though you never knew for sure just what was going to happen. She explains how all the Littles have gone to nice homes with wonderful families like us, and they won't be able to be there but that will be okay, though. She looks like she's not so sure just how it will be okay, but I nod and say I just know the Littles are doing great wherever they are.
M.F. looks sad again, which I hate, and says, “Well, I'm glad you and Alice and Uncle Roy will be there.”
“Me too,” I say, though so far I'm not feeling glad at all. Looking at M.F., all I feel is worried.
Every year Mom drives me to Dad's and lets me out of the car. She waits just long enough to make sure I get in the door, and then she speeds away. I don't even know what she does when she gets home. Sits there all alone, I guess. Every year I feel awful as I climb up the steps to Dad's house. Through these big panes of glass on the sides of his front door, I can see lots of people standing around holding drinks and eating these little fancy snack things. Everyone is laughing and talking so loud that no one ever hears the bell when I ring so I have to walk right in. I turn around and wave to Mom before I go in, but she is always gone before my hand is even all the way up in the air.
This year will be different, though. I have forced M.F. to come with me, even though she has said she doesn't want Mom to have to stay home alone. “But what about me, M.F.?” I keep saying. “I really need you to be there.”