Oma always gave out money for Christmas. Mama and I got one-hundred dollars. Phebe always got fifty. Dad received twenty. This year, Oma made no offer of money.
Uncle Jan visited after breakfast to give out gifts, and then he went with his wife to visit her family in Syracuse. I changed into the pajama set he’d given me, even though it wasn’t bedtime, and baked eggplant parmigana for dinner.
I ground up some in the mini-chop for Oma. “Uncle Jan brought it.”
“It’s chewy,” Oma complained.
Mama called the day before she was supposed to visit. “Keziah, I am so sorry, but your sister’s sick. It’s the flu, and I don’t think I should leave her. She said to go, but you know I can’t. You know how Phebe is when she’s sick.”
Poor Phebe! She always looked so weak when she was sick, lost in a pile of blankets and used tissues.
“I get it,” I whispered. “I want you to stay with Phebe. Tell her to get well soon and make sure she calls me when she feels like it. I love you, Mommy.” I closed my eyes.
“I love you, Kez.”
I sat beside Oma in bed, both of us propped up with pillows, watching the ball drop. We sipped red wine at Oma’s insistence. My ears buzzed after the second glass, and the room spun.
Five minutes left until midnight. I swirled the red wine around the cup and wondered if it would be okay to dump it.
“Too bad Phebe couldn’t go this year.” I pictured my little sister pouting at home while squeezing her stuffed pig.
“It’s not appropriate to take children to those kinds of functions.” Oma snorted.
“Dad takes care of her.”
Oma snorted again.
“Oma.” I twisted around to gaze into my grandmother’s face. “Why don’t you like Phebe?”
Oma stared at the television.
“Oma, please. Tell me why. You want me to tell you everything, but you never tell me anything.”
Oma took a sip of her wine. The silence was so long I figured I wouldn’t get an answer, but then my grandmother spoke.
“I don’t like him.”
“Dad’s never done anything to you!” He never yelled, not even when Phebe or I did something naughty.
“He took your mom away.”
“From you?” I groaned. “Oma, they’re married! That’s what happens when kids grow up. They get married.”
“Not from me,” Oma snapped. “He took her away from your father.”
I sucked my lower lip into my mouth. Oma has dementia. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “He is my father.”
“He’s not.” Oma slammed the plastic cup onto the bedside table. Wine sloshed over the rim, soaking a notepad. “Its high time you found out. I always told her she would have to tell you someday. One look at your birth certificate will tell you the truth.”
“Oma.” My voice cracked, heart pounding. “Dad isn’t my father?”
“Of course not, but you wouldn’t remember. I don’t know how old you were, maybe two, when they got married.”
I tried to picture the wedding pictures I’d seen at home. I couldn’t recall seeing anyone in the pictures holding a baby.
Oma didn’t know what she was talking about.
“He is my father.” Tears burned my eyes.
“No, it’s that other man. John.”
“Who’s John?” I squeaked. Impossible.
“John…No, not John. That other man. I can’t remember his name.”
“Who is John?”
“Your uncle, whatever his name is. He’s your father.”
Not John, then. Tom. “Uncle Tom is my real dad? That’s not true!” I rolled to my knees. “Oma, you had a dream. You dreamt it.”
“Of course I didn’t dream it. Your mom met that man, Tom, or whatever his name is, and they fell in love. I told her not to get married too soon, but she went and did it anyway. She had you, and then that man came back from somewhere. He was off in some other country writing, or something, and then she met him. She left your father for his own brother.” Oma snorted.
“But Uncle Tom wants nothing to do with me! If he was my dad—”
“He never wanted a kid. I don’t know if he even wanted to get married. Your mother pushed him into it. All he cared about was becoming a priest.”
“Reverend,” I corrected numbly.
Uncle Tom rarely called us. He never sent anything to Mama or the man I called Dad. He never wrote to Phebe, either, just me.
“Doesn’t Uncle Tom like me?” Phebe had asked once.
My heart had broken for my sister. Oma shunned Phebe, and the little girl accepted it with bravado, but to have an uncle ignore you, too…
“He’s never met you, sweetie,” Mama had explained. “He only met Keziah, and that was once. He and your father were never close.”
Your father. Phebe wasn’t my sister. She was my half-sister.
“Is Phebe Uncle Tom’s daughter, too?” I asked, but my heart already knew.
“Of course not. Look at what they did to that poor man, your mother and him. That girl, too. Poor Tom, he was so nice. Always so nice. He called me sometimes, after your mother left him. He never held a grudge. I’ll never know what pain that little girl brought to him.”
“Oma,” I said, “I don’t believe you.” I can’t believe you.
“Go upstairs, then.” Oma shrugged. “You asked me to tell you, so I did, but don’t you dare tell anyone I said it.”
“What’s upstairs?” My hand shook around the cup, and I gulped the wine before it could spill. The drink burned my throat and sinuses.
“A copy of your birth certificate. It’s somewhere in the desk upstairs. Go look if you want to.” Oma shrugged again. Another musical guest came onto the television.
I set the cup next to Oma’s and ran upstairs before my grandmother changed her mind about allowing me upstairs.
My bare feet echoed off the stairs. When I turned on the light, the click of the switch echoed like a boom. The desk beneath the window hulked in the shadows like a giant. My legs wobbled as I picked my way across discarded boxes and worn-out shoes. When I opened the top drawer, my hands felt like someone else’s.
This is a dream, and I’m going to wake up soon.
I picked over bingo dotters and address labels so old they’d lost their stickiness. There were papers, but they were receipts and letters from people I didn’t know.
Three more drawers to go.
In the next drawer down, I found more letters, also some old Christmas cards and check stubs.
Two more drawers to go.
I opened the next to find manila folders. I opened them, dropping them on the floor as I went along, and there it was. The folder in my lap contained certificates. The first was a death certificate for my grandfather. Next were his birth certificate, Mama’s, and mine.
I sat down on the floor, staring at the writing. I’d been born at New Winchester hospital. I read the date, nodding. Yup, that was my summer birthday. Mama’s name was written out fully, and then my father’s.
Thomas Geller de Forest.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Uncle Tom really was my father.
Downstairs, Oma turned up the television, and the house rang with the countdown to the ball drop. Far away in the city, my parents and Phebe would watch it too.
No, not my parents. My mother and my uncle. He was my uncle, not my father.
I wondered if Oma had turned up the television on purpose.
I didn’t feel like going back downstairs. I rolled onto my side. The wooden floor was cold and hard. I tucked my arm under my head and let the tears come. The copy of my birth certificate floated next to me.
****
I am six years old. A boy at school is absent for a week. When he returns, he wears a yellow T-shirt that reads “Florida”.
“My grandpa died,” he says. “My grandma was so sad, she died too. The next day.” He emphasizes his last sentence by widening his eyes.
I never knew peopl
e died from grief before that morning.
My grandfather is dead. Will Oma die now, too?
I go to Mama’s classroom after school to cry. She hugs me.
“Oma is fine. Don’t worry.”
I can’t get the thoughts out of my head, so later, Mama walks me to Oma’s house.
“I don’t want you to die,” I wail.
“I’m too strong for that.” Oma kisses my forehead. “I was very sad when your grandfather died, but I have you. You’re my special one.”
“You’ll stay with me?”
“Always.”
Chapter 26
I played the conversation I wanted to have with Mama in my mind, but each time, it didn’t sound right. It came across as whiny or immature, so I didn’t say anything. Oma never brought it up again, and I assumed my grandmother had forgotten about telling me.
“How was your Christmas?” Meg asked after we returned to school.
I found out my uncle is really my dad. “Fine,” I barked.
“Right.” Meg drawled out the word before backing away.
“You okay?” Domenick asked when I failed a Spanish test.
My family has lied to me for all of my life. “I’m fine.”
“But you never fail anything.”
It irked me that Domenick could know me so well. “I don’t get all hundreds!”
“But you don’t fail.”
He walked away, and I stuck my tongue at his back, not caring I’d been rude.
I finally felt calmer when Michael helped me take down the decorations. Instead of his usual shaggy hair, he’d gone with a buzz cut.
“My mom hates really short hair,” he handed me a wooden candy cane. “After one day of having her treat me like a little kid, I went and got it cut. Do you like it?”
I set the candy cane down. “It looks cool, but I like long hair.”
“Into the rugged, bad-boy look, huh?”
I laughed, accepting another candy cane. “Sure, we’ll go with that.”
“Want to see my tattoo, then?” He wriggled his eyebrows.
My laugh wasn’t so much over that as the idea sparkling in my mind.
Mama and I shared the same hair shade of light brown. My “dad” and Phebe both had dark brown hair. My real dad, Tom, had black hair.
“What will it be?” The buxom hairdresser asked when I entered the boutique next to Ann’s.
“Short.” My lips trembled, but I smiled. “Black. Short and very black.”
When she started snipping my silky tresses, I almost cried, but I bit back the tears. Somehow, the emotional pain of detachment felt amazing.
Two hours later, I walked out of the small boutique with shoulder-length black hair. I’d never known how heavy hair felt before, but the absence was palpable.
“Hey, Oma,” I walked into the house with the hood of my coat hiding my head.
“Well,” Oma snarled from the bedroom, “are you going to share how your day was, or just ignore me today?”
“It was okay. I needed help on Spanish.” My nerves tingled. “I’m going to go take a shower and try a new hairstyle, okay?”
Oma ran her fingers over her oily hair. It hung in limp strings around her face. “You never wash my hair.”
“Do you want me to wash your hair?” Whenever I asked, Oma refused, saying she was too tired.
“No, I’m too tired. My toenails need cutting, too.”
“Um, what?” I dropped my shoulder bag and flexed my arm.
“Just look!” Oma pulled off her loafers and socks. What lay beneath sent me reeling.
The things couldn’t even be called toenails. They were thick and yellow, with grayish fuzz around the cuticles, and at least two inches long. The ends curved sideways and under, forced that way by constant wear of shoes. Whitish lumps of skin grew around Oma’s joints like mushrooms.
I gagged. “When was the last time you cut your toenails?”
“I can’t remember,” Oma snapped. “I can’t bend over anymore. I’m old.”
“You want me to cut that?”
“I’m not!”
I backed to the doorway, the back of my hand pressed to my mouth to keep out the sour stench. “Can I take you to a foot doctor?”
“Doctors make up illnesses.”
“I’m going to do my hair.” I couldn’t do anything about the feet without gagging more. “I’ll…do all that…later.”
How am I supposed to cut those toenails?
I still didn’t know after my shower, but I got out the nail clippers and a file. Holding my breath, I tried to snip a corner of the littlest toenail, but it was too thick.
“I’m going to have to take you to a podiatrist,” I said through the scarf wrapped over my mouth.
“A pedifialatist?” Oma mutilated the word. “Anything’s better than a foot doctor.”
I didn’t bother to say a podiatrist was a foot doctor.
Oma pointed at my hair. “Did you just do that to yourself? You look ugly. You’d better hope it grows out soon.”
I winced as the words cut deep. So what if it made my skin look sallow and my eyes glossy?
Later that night, I wrote my blood father a letter to ask why he didn’t contacted me more. I was his daughter, and the more I wrote, the angrier I became. How could he abandon me like that?
By the end of the four-page letter, there were at least two-hundred exclamation points and a dozen underlines. I tucked the floral stationary into a matching envelope and sealed it, but I didn’t remember Uncle Tom’s address, so I only wrote his name on the outside, along with my address as the sender, and hid it in the desk to mail later.
****
For English, I had to write an essay about something I wanted. I chewed on the end of my pen while staring at the assignment sheet, the voices of my classmates winding around my mind. What did I want?
“Gustavo?” The teacher called on a boy in the back row. His friends snickered as he coughed, standing up from his desk.
“I want,” he boomed, “a girl with giant jug tits and a—”
“That’s enough,” the teacher interrupted. “I should have known you’d say something like that. When will I learn?” She waved him back into his seat when he used his hands to form an image of that perfect girl.
“What I want,” the teacher exemplified, “is world peace. All of these so-called leaders of the ‘free’ world need to unite. Instead of having hundreds of individual countries, we should all be one, big country. The country of Earth…”
She continued talking, but I droned out the high-pitched voice.
World peace would be nice, but what I really wanted was for everyone to live together—Mama, my dad/uncle, Phebe, and Oma. We could live in New York City or New Winchester. It didn’t matter, just as long as we were together.
I sighed. It could never happen. Oma would never forgive my dad/uncle for marrying Mama when she’d been wedded to his brother, and Phebe was a constant reminder of that shame, as Oma saw it.
I tapped the corner of the notebook paper with the pen, smearing a faint trail of indigo ink across the crisp whiteness. I couldn’t write about that because I couldn’t tell anyone about who my blood-father was. People would look at me funny. Even if they had skeletons hiding in the closet, it was easier to target other people than sympathize.
“Rachel?” the teacher called on a new student.
“I want a new pair of pumps.” Rachel lifted her foot to point at the shiny pink shoes she wore. “I saw a really cool pair in Macy’s.”
“What a dumb blonde,” a boy whispered in the back of the room.
“They’re wicked expensive, though,” Rachel continued, “so Mom said I can pay for them instead of my car insurance next month. So,” she finished with a grin, “I’m going to write about the world of fashion.”
“Okay.” The teacher crinkled her nose, maybe put off by Rachel’s selfish want as compared to the world peace theory. “Any other ideas? Angelo?”
“I wa
nt more practice time,” Angelo replied. “You gotta love dirt bike racing.”
“So you do. Meg?”
“I want to get my art into an online magazine.” Meg already wrote in her notebook.
“That’s nice.” The teacher smiled. “What about you, Ricky?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ricky said.
“Get to thinking. Time is precious.” The teacher’s gaze flitted over the class. Her hand rested on the Smart Board, but she hadn’t written ideas down, yet. She honed in on her next victim. “Ah. Keziah. We never hear from you. What are your ideas?”
I tucked a wayward strand of short hair behind my ear. “I want my grandmother to remember.”
“You want your grandmother to…remember.” The teacher rolled the sentence around her tongue. “That’s an interesting concept, but you need to elaborate. What do you want her to remember?”
“I want her to remember all the times she used to dress me up and walk me down to see Mom for lunch.” I closed my eyes, recalling the pictures I’d found from those moments “I want her to remember where she puts her glasses, so she doesn’t think I always hide them on her. I want her to remember she already ate lunch, so she doesn’t eat two yogurts a day. I want her to remember what a balanced meal is, so she isn’t just eating yogurt.”
I set the pen on my desk to stare into the teacher’s eyes, daring her to stop the tirade. “I want her to remember Phebe is just an innocent little kid. I want her to remember she paid Uncle Jan for the milk and stop giving him all those tens. I want her to remember how to use the remote control for the television.”
Angelo snickered.
“I want her to remember.”
“That…is an interesting topic to write about.” The teacher rubbed her nose before she swung her gaze over her students. “Any other ideas? I need hands raised high and tall, people!”
I wrote my name on the top of the paper. Across from it, I wrote the date, and in huge print, I titled the paper Oma.
****
Meg darted in front of me in the hallway. “That was really powerful stuff you were saying about your grandma. I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“Thanks.” I shut my locker. Metal clattered against metal. “It’s not really all that bad. I love Oma.”
The Goat Children Page 19