Your Loving Mother
I got my birth certificate from Dad and it turned out that my real name is Jealousy. Jealousy Anne Montagne.
I decided to keep that to myself.
So then, two years later, when it was Tym’s tenth birthday, I wondered if she would get the same letter, and sure enough, there was the clang of the filing cabinet, and the next thing I knew, she was rushing in to wake me with the news.
It turned out that her real name is Timidity.
“What’s your real name?” she asked, breathless. “Did you get one too?”
I explained that I could never tell, and she strangled me until she saw I meant it.
Then she sat on the floor and whispered, “Timidity.”
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Her finger could have landed on ‘Tidbit.’”
But Tym sprang up from the floor onto the bed, and I realized that she didn’t want comfort. She wanted congratulations. Then I realized why: the name fit. Our mother had predicted her true nature.
Now in the auditorium, Tym’s true nature was on display for the school. Her arms were folded tight, and she was staring up at Kershaw. “What’s your topic going to be?” He grinned, and took a square of paper from his pocket.
“Okay, you know the rules of Impromptu Time, Tym, but I’ll remind you! I read the topic, you have ten seconds to think, and then you speak for a full minute! You can stay where you are, or go on up to the stage if you prefer. And you can use any prop that you see. Within reason, of course. Think you can do it, Tym?”
He didn’t look at her as he asked this; he looked down at the paper. “Butterflies! It’s an easy one, Tym. You may even have some in your stomach there! Butterflies! There you go! Your ten-second thinking time will begin . . . now!”
My sister fluttered in her place.
Mr. Kershaw counted down from ten to one.
Then he punched the microphone at Tym, and she had to take it to protect her chest. She lifted the microphone slowly to her mouth.
There was absolute quiet.
After a few moments, Mr. Kershaw turned into a school principal. “Okay, Tym,” he said, sternly. “You know there are no exceptions to Impromptu Time. It’s one minute out of your life. Butterflies, Tym. Let’s hear it.”
I sent suggestions to Tym inside my head: Butterflies are pretty. Butterflies can fly. A butterfly is prettier than a moth.
But Mr. Kershaw was a comedian again, knocking on my sister’s head and shouting: “Anybody in there? Hello!”
She took a deep breath and whispered, “Butterflies.”
There was another long silence.
Mr. Kershaw grabbed the microphone and announced to the school: “We have a little sparrow! We have a bird in our midst! We might have better ears than birds, but we still can’t hear you, little sparrow!”
At that point, Mr. Bayley stepped in. “Actually,” he called from the stage. "Actually, birds have better hearing than humans. As a rule.”
Mr. Kershaw squinted up at him.
“We were just doing The Ear in my biology class,” he explained, tossing his soccer ball from hand to hand. “We weren’t doing Birds, but still, let me assure you, a barn owl can hear a field mouse grating cheddar from a hundred miles away. . . . ”
Students talked among themselves. Tym sank slowly to her chair. Mr. Bayley shared bird trivia with the front row.
Eventually, another teacher stood up and said, “That’s great, Mr. Bayley. But I wonder if the bell’s about to ring?”
Mr. Kershaw knocked on Tym’s head again. "I’m not sure how you pulled that off, little sparrow!” he announced. “But know this! Next week you won’t be so lucky! Next week, Impromptu Time is yours!”
The rest of the day, butterfly phrases bounced around in my head. A butterfly used to be a caterpillar. A butterfly has six legs. Kara pointed out that Tym would get a new Impromptu topic next week. She understood that I found it therapeutic, but she didn’t want to hear any more about butterflies.
I went to the library and got more phrases: A butterfly has an exoskeleton. Butterflies can only fly if they’re warm enough. Sometimes they have to sunbathe before they can fly.
I thought of Nero Belmonte leaning against the window in the auditorium. The sun had been lighting up his hair.
I thought of Nero’s exoskeleton. I thought of Nero with giant yellow wings, hovering above me at assembly, pressing his fingers to my ears.
As soon as I got home, I called Mrs. Belmonte and asked if she needed me to babysit on the weekend.
“That’s so sweet of you, Jay!” (That’s what Mrs. Belmonte always says when I call.) “And it’s only Tuesday too! We are going out this Saturday, but Nero has offered to stay home.”
Oh, Nero.
You stole my heart, and sometimes you steal my babysitting money too.
Of course, the main reason I babysit Nero’s little brothers is to get close to Nero. But if the Belmontes ever need me to babysit, it’s because Nero has gone out. It’s my paradox.
I told Mrs. Belmonte I’d keep Saturday free anyway, in case there was an emergency, or maybe Nero would need extra help, or whatever; then I went to find my sister.
She was doing a handstand against her mirrored wardrobe.
Tym is another paradox. She’s so shy that family friends spend years believing she is mute. But when she’s home with just me and Dad, she slides down the hallway in her socks, somersaults off the couch, and shouts from the middle of the kitchen: “Vot would you say if I said that I ate the last Veetabix?” before laughing like a maniac.
“So, Kara and me have a contract out on Kershaw,” I said from the doorway, talking to her upside-down head. “You wanna be there when it goes down?”
Tym drummed her heels on the wardrobe door, making the mirror shake.
“Just tell me when it’s done,” she decided.
I sat on her bed and we discussed more reasonable options for avoiding next week’s Impromptu Time. We could get Tym a disguise. She could hide in the bathrooms next Tuesday, and every Tuesday, from now on. She could drop out of school and go into witness protection.
Eventually, I said, "You know, you don’t have to talk about the actual topic that he gives you if you don’t want. You can talk about whatever. You just make a stupid link. Like, when I got picked last year, my topic was the ozone layer, so I said,’ The ozone layer protects us from the sun just as animal fur protects them from the wind,’ and then I talked about carnivorous animals.”
“Why would you want to talk about carnivorous animals?” wondered Tym. She dropped to the floor from the wardrobe and started doing push-ups. That was unexpected.
“People are going to expect you to be quiet again,” I said. “You could use it as a chance to surprise them and do the opposite. You could even think of it as a chance to surprise yourself.”
We looked at one another in the mirror for a moment. Taped on her mirror frame is one of our mother’s letters:
Dear Tym,
Happy 11th birthday! Look in the mirror often, won’t you? Look in the mirror, think about who you are, and surprise yourself.
Best wishes,
Your Loving Mother
I got a similar letter on my eleventh birthday, but I didn’t tape it to my mirror. I thought it was terrible advice: look in the mirror often. Did she want us sitting around staring at ourselves all day? Did she want us getting anorexic?
But Tym is obsessed with the letter. She thinks there must be a hidden message, and she keeps trying to decode it. Like, our mother wants us to check our appearance often to make sure we don’t have bread crumbs on our cheeks. Or maybe she wants us to stare at ourselves until we see how we resemble her, and that’s her way of saying she’s still with us.
I stood up from the bed. “Don’t even think about next week,” I suggested. Then I saw my school bag lying in the hallway. I took out my biology folder and dropped it on Tym’s bed. “We just did The Ear, but we did Human Reproduction a couple of w
eeks ago,” I said. "Use that as your topic if you like. All you’ve got to do is make the link.” She was laughing as I headed to my room, which I did without looking back, so neither of us would get embarrassed.
Later that night, I was watching TV when my dad wandered by and said, “Watching TV?”
I explained that I wasn’t watching TV so much as trying to collect new landscapes for my dreams.
“Hokeydoke,” said Dad, and sat down beside me on the couch.
But I was watching Sex and Chocolate, and as soon as he sat down, the voice-over said, "Let’s find out how kinky you really are!” and my dad said, “Hokeydoke. Night-night then,” and stood up with a yawn.
My dad uses the letter “h” a lot. Often he’ll say he’s going to go look something hup on the hinternet in his hoffice. And don’t wait hup for him, hokay? Many would find that annoying, but my sister and I are accustomed to it. It’s just the way he talks.
Also, my sister was once watching the home movie of her own third birthday and the cameraman, who was my dad, says in his close-to-the-camera voice, “What’s the special occasion, Tym?” And Tym says, shyly, “Hum. Hit’s my birthday.” Then the camera swings around to the kitchen, where our mother is doing the hokey pokey.
You can tell from the movie that Tym will turn out to be beautiful. She has the cheekbones already, and the auburn highlights and the arched eyebrows. Cheekbones? She was only three. She should have just had cheeks.
Anyway, what Tym noticed was not her eyebrows, but her use of the letter “h,” as in “hum” and “hit’s.” And that got her excited.
“Do you think Dad talks that way now,” she asked, “as a tribute to our mother? Because it’s the way I used to talk when she was still around?”
I could tell Tym really wanted this to be true: that Dad held on to her baby talk to suspend Mum’s hokey pokey.
But I had to be honest. “Tym,” I said, “I think a lot of parents keep using their kids’ words after the kids have grown up.”
I gave her an example. Nero’s family has an old gray station wagon, which Nero gets to use, and once, Nero’s mum threw the keys to Nero’s dad, so he could drive me home after babysitting. “You want to take the nu nu?” she said, as she threw them. And Nero’s dad looked down at the keys and said, “But I hate the nu nu. It’s such a nerdy car.”
After a moment, I asked, “What’s a nu nu?”
And they explained that the station wagon had been their new car when Nero was small, and they’d referred to it as “the new car,” so Nero, being young and sweet, had called it “nu nu,” and the name had stuck.
“That’s cute,” said Tym, “but kind of annoying.”
“No,” I explained, “it’s adorable.”
But, oh, Nero, it’s true you are annoying.
The fact is, it was unfair to blame my biology teacher. None of my fantasies about Nero have ever come true. And you can only blame Nero for that. I swear, they are so easy. Do I long for him to kiss my fingertips, or to park the nu nu in an alley and embrace me? No. I don’t even ask for him to speak to me.
In March, all I wanted was for him to notice a lunchbox lying on the art room floor, and kick it sideways toward me.
In April, I just wanted him to reach over and unzip the pocket of my jacket, take out the packet of M&M’s (which I kept there the whole month), hold them in the palm of his hand, and put them back.
And now that it is May, I only want his fingers in my ears.
Yet I know he will never do these things. (I’ve never even seen a lunchbox on the art room floor, for a start.) It’s not even Nero’s fault, really, it’s the paradox again: by thinking them up at all, I make them impossible.
Which is why I was not even really surprised when Nero said: “Hey, Jay, can I ask you something?”
I had never come close to imagining such a thing. That Nero might want to ask me something.
It was the Friday after the assembly and I was leaning against the wall outside my advanced mathematics class. Nero was heading to his intermediate class next door.
“Hey, Jay,” he said, “can I ask you something?”
His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows so you could see some of his lovely exoskeleton. The sun was shining behind him, lighting up his hair.
For comic effect, I pretended to consider before I agreed. “Okay. You can ask me something.”
“It’s about the assembly on Tuesday.”
For a quivering moment, I believed he was going to explain why he did not cross the auditorium to stand behind my chair. Maybe his fingernails were dirty.
“And how Kershaw was such a prick to your sister?” he continued. “And now he’s making her do Impromptu Time again next Tuesday? Well, I just wanted to say, if she needed any help, I don’t know, I could talk to her, give her advice on how to cope with Kershaw? ’Cause I know how to cope with him, see. Maybe I can somehow do her speech for her or something. Know what I’m saying?”
He was nodding and shaking his head as he talked, and every time he moved, the sun stopped lighting up his hair and blinded my eyes.
I put my hands on either side of his head and shifted it into position so it blocked the sun. I did this quite roughly.
“There,” I instructed. “Keep it there.”
He seemed surprised, but held his head obediently still and waited.
I regarded him.
“You realize,” I said, "that my sister is half your age?”
He looked confused. “No she’s not,” he suggested, tentatively.
“Yes. She is.” I became brisk. “She’s thirteen. And you’re sixteen, right? So, thirteen over sixteen, cancel the ones, that leaves three and six, and three is half of six. So she’s half your age. It’s advanced calculus. You’ll get to it next term.”
For a second, he almost fell for it.
Then he grinned, and a complicated look crossed his face—something wry, disappointed, gentle, and kind—that altogether made me want to punch him.
“I’ll let her know you offered,” I said, and spun on my heel.
“He’s not good enough for you,” Kara comforted.
But she says that about every guy I’ve ever loved, including Ashton Kutcher.
And this time she was wrong. I was the one who was not good enough for him. But my little sister was.
I’d never even thought of Tym as a girl before. I’d never imagined her talking to a guy; she was much too quiet. But now I remembered those cheekbones. She wouldn’t need to say a word. They’d just want to look at her. And they’d talk for her.
Soon Nero would be kicking lunchboxes across floors toward my sister. He’d be unzipping her jacket pocket to take out M&M’s. He’d be hooking his little fingers into her ears.
It was while I was realizing all this, sitting sadly in advanced mathematics, that my mother’s mirror letter became clear.
Tym was supposed to stare at the mirror because it would teach her that, although her name might be Timidity, she was also really pretty, so that would be okay. And I was supposed to look at myself and see that I was average, maybe even strange looking, and although my name was Jealousy, well, that was exactly right. I was supposed to be jealous of my sister.
From now on, Tym would steal every boy I ever loved, without saying a word.
My destiny was all wrapped up.
Our mother had been trying to warn me.
I did not say a word to my sister throughout that sad weekend. I’m not sure she noticed.
Midnight on Monday, I woke Tym up and said, “Nero Belmonte says he can help with your speech if you want.”
“Mfwuh?” She likes to sleep facedown on the pillow.
“He offered to help with your speech tomorrow.”
“Nero?” She turned over. “Your Nero?” (That was respectful.)
“You’ll have time before school if you get in early.”
“Why would I want that?” she murmured, and fell asleep again.
I had passed on Nero�
��s offer, just as promised.
The next day, there was a humming through the school. This is what the humming said: We feel so sorry for Tym. And so angry with Kershaw. At least we won’t get picked for Impromptu Time today. Tym will be picked. We can relax. But we feel anxious for Tym. But at least we can relax. But—.
And so on.
At assembly, the humming became feverish, and found its way into my stomach. Beside me, Kara looked pale, and we ignored the announcements, awards, and musical displays.
When Mr. Kershaw announced, “Impromptu Time!” the auditorium breathed in sharply. He jogged across the stage, toward the stairs—but then he stopped.
Tym was standing at the bottom of the stairs.
“How about that?” twinkled Mr. Kershaw. “Our sparrow’s flown to the stage! Come on up then, Tym, let’s not waste any time!”
There was an interested murmuring.
It was a good start: Tym taking the initiative like that.
“She’ll still have to speak,” Kara pointed out.
Tym stood in the center of the stage, looking small next to Mr. Kershaw. They both faced the school. Behind them, teachers and guest speakers sat in an embarrassed-looking row.
“Right, then.” Mr. Kershaw assumed his solemn voice. “No more excuses, Tym. This is something that we do every week. Nobody is exempt, and I don’t want you trying to get out of—”
“Cut the crap,” someone shouted. “She’s standing up there, isn’t she?”
A few other people shouted intelligent things like: “Yeah!”
“Hecklers!” Mr. Kershaw smiled at Tym, as if the comments were directed at her instead of him. "Think you can cope?”
He reached into his pocket for a topic.
“The rules again,” he said, closing his fist over the paper. “You can use any prop you like—”
But he stopped, because Tym had turned around and was walking to the back of the stage. She was picking up an empty chair, which was next to Mr. Bayley, and she was carrying it back to Mr. Kershaw.
“A chair?” he said. “You want to use a chair as a prop? But you don’t even know what the topic is yet.”
“Not the chair,” she said. “You.”
Then she waved a graceful hand, indicating he should sit down.
Not Like I'm Jealous or Anything Page 8