by Claire Cook
I was in over my head and I knew it. So I talked Siobhan into getting some sleep and said we'd figure out what to do in the morning. I got her an extra pillow from my room, found a clean set of sheets to drape over the couch and gave her my comforter. I asked if her homework was done, found out what time she had to get up for school and sent her into the bathroom with her toothbrush.
While she was brushing, I called Carol from my bedroom. She picked up on the first ring. "I just wanted you to know," I whispered, "that Siobhan is here."
"Of course she is," Carol answered. "I dropped her off. How did you think she got there?"
. . . . .
I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. I didn't want to wake Siobhan so I tiptoed past her to the kitchen. I'd turned off the ring of the phone so I wouldn't have to explain to Siobhan why I wasn't answering. I wondered how many times Ray had called. I wondered how long I'd have to ignore his calls for him to stop calling. I stood there, the light on my answering machine winking at me suggestively. I turned my back on it and opened the fridge. Poured some milk into my favorite Flintstones jelly glass, jumped up to sit on the kitchen counter. Blushed and jumped back down. Great, I'd never be able to sit on a kitchen counter again without thinking about making a fool of myself with Ray Santia. One more pleasure lost.
Oh, God. Okay, I would drink milk, that's what I'd do. The extra calcium would calm my nerves and lull me back into a comfortable level of denial. I glanced over my shoulder at my answering machine. If I were in an old Western I would simply shoot its nasty little light out. I took another sip of milk, walked over and pressed erase. There, that was better, maybe he'd go away now.
Chapter
Twenty-seven
After I drove Siobhan to school, promising to pick her up again afterward, I called Christine. "You know what Carol's like," I said. "If I try to tell her what to do, she'll just do the opposite. But, I mean, what's the big deal, it's not like it's a tattoo or anything. When and if Siobhan outgrows the phase, she can just take it out."
"Why don't you just bring Siobhan to have it done and then we'll deal with Carol and Dennis afterward."
"I love the 'we,' Christine. I can just hear you saying that it was all my idea. And, besides, Siobhan says that if you're under eighteen, both you and a parent have to show IDs before they'll pierce anything but an ear. And if the last names don't match, you have to show a birth certificate."
"Why don't you steal Carol's license again?" Christine giggled at her reference to a famous story from the Hurlihy family archives. All these years later, I still couldn't quite find it funny. In a lifetime of fairly honest behavior, I'd strayed one night. Just home from college for winter break, I borrowed Carol's license to go to a local club with my friends who'd already turned twenty-one. Carol noticed it missing immediately, thought she'd lost it, and was already making plans to drive to the registry to get a duplicate. In the back of my mind, the evil plan to keep the license permanently was simmering, but I thought I would probably tuck it back into her wallet at the end of the weekend.
I wasn't really that nervous as I stood in line to have Carol's license checked by the bouncer at High Tide. Carol and I looked a lot alike. Besides, I'd memorized her Social Security number and year of birth, and practiced rattling them off quickly. The bouncer was cute, blond and beefy with intelligent eyes that made me think his job was an interlude rather than a dead end.
"Are you sure you're Carol Hurlihy?" he asked.
I wasn't too worried. "Yes," I answered.
He quizzed me on every bit of information contained on that little plastic rectangle, and I passed it all with flying colors. The line was backing up behind me. "Are you sure you're Carol Hurlihy?" he asked again, peering into my face.
I was more annoyed than nervous. "Yes," I said again.
"Funny, you look different than you did last night on our date." The bouncer, of course, was Dennis, and sometimes I thought he only married my sister in order to be able to say to me, thousands of times over the years: Can I check your ID?
I laughed a little to let Christine think that the decades had eased my embarrassment. "Don't worry about a thing," she said. "I'll call Carol and see what I can arrange."
. . . . .
Just before Thanksgiving we'd made hula skirts. We used single horizontal strips of green construction paper for the waistbands. To make the skirt part, we stapled on evenly spaced vertical strips of the same paper. The kids each decorated an empty paper towel holder with brightly colored poster paints. Even the goopiest ones had dried over the long holiday weekend.
And now, the morning after I'd crept out of Ray Santia's house, the morning after Siobhan had shown up at my house, June and I began to staple the hula skirts around the children. We started side by side, worked in opposite directions around the circle. When it was his turn, Jack Kaplan said, "I'm not wearing a skirt."
"Okay," I said, turning to staple Molly Greene's hula skirt over her ankle-length black velvet jumper.
"Okay, I'll wear it," Jack said, moving to stand in line behind Molly.
The kids had to hike their waistbands up practically to their armpits in order to sit on the circle. June and I passed out the carefully labeled paper towel rolls after first cutting fringe with scissors. I explained that they would now be called puili sticks. "Can you say poo-ee-lee sticks?" I said, using my best teacher voice, which was a bit of an effort this morning, I had to admit.
"Pweelie sticks," the children said in unison.
The classroom telephone rang. I nodded to June to answer it. Turning back to the kids I said, "Hawaii is a place that is made up of many islands, which is why many Hawaiian dances are about the water."
"Sarah, it's for you," June stage-whispered from the other side of the room.
"Take a message," I stage-whispered back, not without sarcasm.
"It's a . . ." June's last word was lost to me.
"A what?"
"A guy," Austin said. "June says there's a guy on the phone."
"What's his name?" asked Amanda McAlpine.
"Handle it," I hissed at June. I unclenched my teeth enough to smile at the children, made myself keep going. "Can you say hey-ey-ee-ah?"
"Hey-ey-ee-ah," they said in a perfect imitation of my voice. I tried to ignore the annoying fact that June was still talking on the phone. "Hey-ey-ee-ah is a very, very old dance from Hawaii. It's about a canoe trip for spearing fish."
"Does it hurt the fish?" asked Jenny Browning.
June was laughing and throwing her hair around. I, however, maintained my professional demeanor. "Well, Jenny, in many cultures people have to eat the fish to keep from starving."
"Can't they just have a sandwich?" Jack Kaplan asked. "I can make a sandwich."
If June didn't get off the phone in two minutes, I was going to strangle her. I decided to ignore Jack's question, move on. I mean, why did teachers have to do all the hard stuff? Shouldn't parents have to explain some things?
"Okay, everybody. Hold your puili stick in this hand, and put your other hand like this, palm up." I showed the children shading their eyes (maka malumalu), churning the water (wili wai) and all the rest. They followed along like brightly colored little parrots. When we were ready, I put an actual record on an actual record player, a scratchy version of Dances Around the World that had been recorded so long ago it didn't even have a cassette version. We made it through the dance two complete times before June finally hung up the phone.
After she finished passing out snacks all by herself, which I thought was only fair, June sidled up to me. "That was Ray Santia. He is just like the nicest guy," she said, still whispering. "He's dying to see you again." She paused, watched my face. "You are just so lucky. I mean, I hardly ever meet nice guys anymore. Sarah?"
I was working up to a response when June added, "Do you know that Ray Santia has a puppy from the same litter as Wrinkles?" I looked at her, not saying a word. There was absolutely no reason to admit to a thing. "He was a little confused though. He see
med to, like, think you had one too?"
. . . . .
Siobhan and I sat in the waiting room at Pins and Needles, sandwiched between a mother and son combo on our right and a mother and daughter team on our left. They were surprisingly clean-cut and looked as likely to spend an afternoon shopping at The Gap as waiting for a turn at a body-piercing salon. The kids were about Siobhan's age, not quite old enough to be here alone. I was probably just about the same age as the mothers, a depressing thought.
I hadn't stolen Carol's license this time. Instead, she'd loaned it to me in a belated decision that navel-piercing wasn't a battle she and Dennis wanted to pick with Siobhan. It was, in fact, much better than either a tattoo or an older boyfriend, or even an out-of-the-country piercing experience during a school trip where who could imagine what the hygiene standards might be. Carol even decided this would be my Christmas present to Siobhan, because that way she could hang on to some vestige of parental disapproval.
Siobhan walked over to the display case to check out the navel rings, which gave me a chance to look around carefully for signs of cleanliness. PINS AND NEEDLES said a sign over the register, CALL 1-800-STICK-ME. A larger-than-life ceramic ear, pierced within an inch of its life, hung on the wall to one side. On the other side, a long vertical file held clearly labeled information sheets: GENITAL, NIPPLE, NAVEL, TONGUE.
I shivered a little, noticed an open book lying facedown on the counter, read the upside-down title: Essentials of Human Anatomy and Physiology. I wondered if someone was actually reading it or if it was just a prop.
"So tell me," I said to Siobhan when she sat down again, "why exactly do you want to get this done?"
She pointed to a poster of a long-torsoed, hard-bodied, bikini-clad woman, wearing a tiny, sexy ring in her perfectly formed navel. "Look," she said, "how cool is that?"
. . . . .
He was a bit hard to understand because of the three silver studs in his tongue, but Adrian, the owner of Pins and Needles, was really very nice. He gave Siobhan and me each a sheet of paper explaining that everything had been autoclaved and/or chemically sterilized. The misspelling of equipment—equiptment—made me a little uncomfortable, but that was probably just the teacher in me. While he photocopied Carol's license and Siobhan's learner's permit, I forged Carol's name on a form saying that I hereby released all agents from all manner of liabilities, actions and demands, in law or in karmic equity, by reason of complying with the undersigned's request to be pierced.
"Give me another one of those forms," I said suddenly.
"You gonna go for it?" Adrian asked.
"Oh, my God, Aunt . . . I mean, Mom. Are you really?" asked Siobhan.
"Happens all the time," Adrian assured her. "Who first?"
"Age before beauty," I said. Nobody argued.
It was cold and tickly, but not unpleasant, to have the area around my navel swabbed with Betadine solution. Siobhan and I lay side by side on orange vinyl recliners. I hoped her eyes were closed so she wouldn't chicken out when her turn came. I felt brave and brazen and deliciously wild, and more than a little sexy, and I realized that a pierced navel could symbolize all sorts of new growth for me. This might well be the first truly spontaneous decision I'd ever made. I opened my eyes just a little and lifted my head to peer at the expanse of skin below my rolled-up sweatshirt. Forty was young when you looked as good as I did. There were probably lots of women who'd trade places with me in a second.
I shut my eyes fast when Adrian attached a clamp just above my navel. The pain wasn't much, so I opened them again, just a little, thinking I shouldn't miss any of this moment or any other. Life was just too damn short not to live every bit of it. I looked over at Siobhan to see how she was holding up.
Adrian leaned over me and I felt an amazing, burning pain, truly the mother of all burning pain, immediately accompanied by nausea, and looked down to see Adrian shoving what looked like a barbecue skewer into my stomach. I opened my eyes only once more during the removal of the piercer and the endless painful threading of the hoop. I saw that my belly button had become a little wading pool of blood. Stop, I wanted to say. Oh, please stop. I'm really not very brave at all.
A half hour later, Siobhan leaned over me with a sterile cloth to put pressure on my navel. With her other hand, she angled a small mirror to get a front view of her own pierced and hooped belly button. I assumed Adrian was in the front room looking up clotting under blood in the medical book. As we age, I imagined it saying, blood clots less readily.
By the time I was ready to leave, Siobhan had called her mother to let her know we'd be a little late. She'd also finished off half of her homework. "You are just the coolest aunt in the world," she said as I lowered myself painfully into the passenger seat of my Civic and replaced my ice pack. "I can't wait to tell everybody."
Chapter
Twenty-eight
I had just explained to June why I'd be needing a chair during circle time for the foreseeable future. I simply couldn't face the searing pain of lowering myself to the floor and maintaining a seated position. "Don't worry," June said. "It's just the first couple of days that are bad."
"That's encouraging," I said, thinking June and I might finally have something in common. "How do you know? Is yours pierced, too?"
She placed her hand over her own stomach, which I had no doubt would rival the abdominal splendor of the poster Siobhan and I had seen at Pins and Needles. "Some of my friends have had it done. I'm way too chicken, though. I would, like, never have the nerve. Wow, Sarah, you are so amazing. I always think how I wish I were more like you."
I looked at June, with her wide-set spacey eyes and her veil of long, silky hair. She looked like a doll that my sisters and I might have had as a child, one of the "good" dolls we were only allowed to take out on special occasions. "But what am I like?" I asked.
"Well, you're so strong and you're, like, such a good teacher and you know what you want and you're, um, like not afraid to go after it."
"Why, thanks, June," I said. "You're very kind." Perhaps I had been underestimating June's intelligence. I lifted the loose sweater I was wearing out of the way, and moved my ice pack around on my belly. I figured I'd keep it on for another minute or so before I put it away in the little classroom refrigerator and got ready for the kids to arrive.
"My, my, my," said Bob Connor from the doorway. "What have we here?"
"Hi, Bobby," June said, as Austin ran by us and over to the aquarium to feed the fish. "Sarah got her navel pierced. Isn't that the coolest thing?"
"Having a bit of a midlife crisis, are we, Ms. Hurlihy? Would you like to go out some night and pursue it further?" Bob Connor's shirt was the color of cranberries today. I tried to decide whether it would be worse to continue standing with my hand underneath my sweater or to casually remove the ice pack. His green eyes watched me. "After the swelling goes down, of course."
I replayed June's assessment of me in my mind. "You know, Mr. Connor," I said firmly. "You'll simply have to come up with a better offer than that."
. . . . .
I boiled a saucepan full of water, found a box of Annie's macaroni and cheese in the back of a cabinet. Sniffed the milk, then threw it out while my stomach lurched and I wrestled a strong impulse to gag. Checked unsuccessfully for butter. Poured the pasta shells into the boiling water anyway, which gave me six to eight minutes to problem-solve for ingredients.
An inspired cook, I figured it out with two minutes to spare. I waited out the final boiling time, then drained the pasta, scraped it back into the saucepan, sprinkled on the packet of cheese dust that came in the box. Dug a well in the center with the spoon, poured in half a glass of white wine and stirred briskly.
On the way to the living room, I took a big bite of my new creation. Wow, a keeper. And low-fat to boot. Maybe I'd send the recipe to Annie and she'd print it on the box. I'd call it Sarah's Winey Macaroni and Cheese.
I propped my ice pack with a pillow on my lap so my hands were f
ree to eat, and made myself as comfortable as my present condition allowed. The Brady Bunch was somewhere in the middle of a show. "Come on, Tiger. You're the only one around here who cares about me," Bobby Brady was saying to the family dog. "You still like me." I put my feet up on the coffee table, had another bite of my dinner. Bobby Brady's big blue eyes welled up with tears. "I'll show 'em," he said. "I'm not going to stay where I'm not wanted. I'll run away. That's what I'm going to do. Run away."
I considered this as a possible solution for my situation. I'd have to get a dog first. Michael would probably be thrilled to let me take Mother Teresa. I'd start a brand-new life somewhere where I didn't know a soul. Maybe I'd go to Paris after all, find an American school to teach at until I learned the language. Maybe that waiter I'd imagined before would be there, still waiting for his big break.
Nah, at my age running away would be far less dramatic. And I'd never find another teaching job midyear, especially without references. Plus, my family would find me in a minute. Damn, I hated it when an episode didn't speak directly to me. Bobby Brady was adorable though. Kids. That's another reason I couldn't run away, the kids at school were just too cute. But, then again, sometimes the cutest kids had the most horrendous parents. When Patrice Greene picked up Molly today, she eyed the hula skirts, which the other parents were certainly oohing and aahing over. Then she turned to me and said, "Really, Ms. Hurlihy, it's almost Christmas. It would provide far more consistency for the children if you linked your units thematically with the seasons." I mean, why even tell her that the kids were assaulted by the holidays everywhere they turned, and that I'd long ago toned down our classroom celebrating to compensate. Why bother to try to impress upon someone like Patrice Greene that even when I was hopelessly inadequate everywhere else in my life, I loved my job and really, truly knew what I was doing in my classroom. At least most of the time.