by Jacki Lyden
It was only 1960. All the adults must have believed, surely believed, that things would get better now because the worst was over. I might well have believed it myself, had I been one of them. For her wedding my mother wore a gold brocade sheath, one of two dresses that the Doctor had ordered from Hong Kong's Kowloon Road, and a matching gold bolero. Her hair was teased high but still waved down her back like a flume. She wore gold shoes and her runway smile and she looked like a radiant queen, a golden queen on a parapet. Darkness swam outside the church windows. My mother turned to face the world, convinced that everything could now begin. My fingers still locked into my sisters'. Somewhere in the distance I thought I sensed my father's presence, like a ribbon of spilled milk. My mother beamed and walked down the aisle, parting the waves which rolled back at her feet. We girls were not at her side.
Teotihuacán Mexico, 1960
THE POSTCARDS FROM MEXICO said that it was indeed a land as wonderful as we had always dreamed it was, with señoritas who really did wear ruffles of many colors and pile their hair on their heads, and pilgrims who walked on their knees for miles, dust coming from their clothes as if they themselves were steaming or sending their souls to seek God. And my mother wrote that the fruit was so sweet you would have thought it was made of sugar, especially the mangoes and papayas. Postcards, paper flowers, real orchids on the tables of Acapulco. I dreamed in her wake, as I always had. My mother saw what she wanted to see, in people and in places. Her tone in the postcards sent from her honeymoon was bright and gay and infatuated. I am sure I have sounded that way myself in recounting the people and the places where I have fallen in love. She was not ignorant of our unhappiness over her marriage, but she must have prayed for a miraculous change. She willed us to change. Her need for belief was larger than life—life that was either belief fulfilled or as empty as a turned-out pocket, you could take your pick. Her belief was the same kind that built the hanging gardens in Babylon or told girls named Norma Jean they had a future in the movies. Extraordinary people have such belief. Think of the citadels of despots, the vanities that begin wars, the hubris of the conqueror. Such belief predestines that we will make fragile walls bear the weight of our longing until time and gravity and the trumpets of Jericho bring the whole thing down. I was happy then, we say, when I only dreamed of what might be. I wonder if I will be so happy again. I say, be careful what you pray for, for my mother received her heart's desire.
I had proof now that Mexico existed: cards with exotic stamps and postmarks, honeymoon treasures for us girls. There were also gifts of rosewood boxes, round ones like miniature hatboxes with the word Mexico carved into the tops. They smelled citrusy inside, not like lemons or limes exactly but bumpy exotic fruit that gleamed lushly when slit open. There was also a cotton señorita doll for me, with black cotton braids and removable clothes, and an assortment of enormous oversize paper poppies in rainbow colors, piñata burros, our own maracas, and best of all, a black lace mantilla and a red taffeta skirt with a black voile overlay for me to dress up in like Dolores Del Rio. What I did believe, clutching the Mexican mementos, is that a wonderland existed somewhere beyond our home and our understanding. And yet now that I had these proofs, these truths, these stamps of the revered face of President López Mateos, I could no longer think of Mexico as a place of escape and my own dominion. The Doctor's honeymoon visit there obliterated that.
"I want you to know that Dockie loves you just as much as one of his own girls," my mother said upon her return. She was referring to my stepfather's daughters by his previous marriage. Her words were a lie, but I knew she believed them, squeezed from a stylized, cinematic American hope. Dockie was her word for him. It was not a word I could say, it was not a word to me. It was a loathsome reflex I felt as he swept my mother into his arms and I gazed out at the fields and the road and the way that the bird feeder had iced over now, birdseed sprinkled on the snow like cinnamon. And anyway, I knew he did not love us because whatever love was it could not be a place where a wrong word was a trapdoor and a false step meant oblivion.
When the Doctor moved into our house, I felt as if the very light had changed in our old familiar territory. His clothes hung in my mother's closet where my father's once had, but I had never before seen so many suits. Though they sometimes smelled of ether or antiseptic, other times they smelled of forests and salt brine. To this day, I associate Old Spice with manliness. I smelled his clothes when no one was looking, sniffing lapels and pockets where they crowded into my mother's dresses and hats and bags. I shined my leather shoes on his electric shoe polisher with black and red scuffs that reminded me of the crowns on the King and Queen of Hearts. His leather doctor's kit bag stood beside our sofa, sometimes spilling out charts of the central nervous system, the skeleton, the intestinal tract. I picked them up if he wasn't around. The pancreas was a muddy pool, the heart a basin of rivers. I looked at pictures of diseased organs and thought of all the things that could go wrong in the body. Our voices, hushed and thinned, lowered to a little staccato of whispers. Unconsciously, we girls had begun to imitate my father when the Doctor was home. We trolled about the house and, if we had been the most beautiful women in the room, perhaps it might have turned out differently.
He eliminated the skins-versus-shirts games because there are no skins without undershirts on, that's why. Because I told you so, that's why. Shut up now. I looked at the Doctor reading in my father's chair. I handed him my book, Pippi Longstocking. On a whim I hurled myself into his lap. "Read to me," I said. He pushed as hard as if struck. The book flew to the floor and me with it. Tell me I'm pretty, I wanted to say from where I lay on the floor, looking at his shoes. Tell me I'm smart. If you can't do that, then tell me you like the way I stack the dinner plates on the counter. Tell me you like the way I pump the swing to the treetops. Tell me whatever you like, but tell me I exist. His silence was the loudest shout I'd ever heard and it filled my ears with sludge. His silence communicated itself to you, and his eyes found you out and executed you. My mother's smile said she didn't know and didn't want to know. "At the end of the day," she would say, slipping out of her pedal pushers and into a dress, "you should freshen up for your husband and welcome him home. Try and look nice. He's looked at other women all day, you know. Put on a little lipstick."
"Kitten," he'd say to her, purring as a tiger purrs. "Dolly." "Lambie." His hands roamed her body, and I felt suffused with an agony for which I had no name. Rows of little bottles lined up in the bathroom cabinet, with "Kitten" or "Dolly Girl" scrawled on their prescription faces. Medicine, my mother said. Little bottles for serenity in a stressful life. My mother said we were a real family now, but a real family would have suffered with much less self-consciousness. There were indeed times we'd drive off with the Doctor in the big Cadillac, and then I would exult, "We're rich!" I was the betrayer of the betrayed; I was a phony and I knew it, biting into the succulent filet mignon at the fancy restaurants where the Doctor took us for dinner. At home though, when I looked at the Doctor's shaving mug in our cabinet, his stacks of white starched shirts in a drawer, his enormous shoes lined up in my mother's closest, I felt spasms of mourning. Then the silence closed in again, and I lost the old rhythms of life. The natural sounds were all still there of course—the doves cooing at the feeder, the cows' rumbling lows in the morning, the hissing wheels of the road. I was deaf to them because I was roaring with fear. A footstep could land on a crack in the world, a spilled glass could bring an apocalypse. A jagged vocabulary entered our lives —pig, jerk, chum, and fathead. I took to ordering Sarah around and calling her "pig" and "jerk" when no one was looking merely because she was defenseless. I became a bully. I made Sarah suffer, stripped her and whipped her until I raised welts on her tiny pink buttocks. She cried and didn't tell our mother. Our powerlessness mixed somehow with a new fear in the airwaves. The Bay of Pigs meant failure and the force of something atomic that would cause us all to implode. Deadly atoms danced in the dust motes. I had no problem understandi
ng that the nuclei of atoms, of any life-form no matter how elemental, could be split to blow up. Hadn't my sisters and I been split from our old lives? At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, the Doctor took my mother off to a medical convention in Miami. We trembled in our school lockers, preparing for a nuclear attack. President Kennedy was on the loudspeaker. My mother would be atomized. Fear was coming, fear had arrived. The lockers felt like coffins. The whole world as I knew it was threatened with annihilation and extinction as a universe, right down to the molecules, and it was only the third grade.
One night not long after they'd returned from the honeymoon, Sarah, four years old, waking from one of her frequent nightmares, rose and felt her way to my mother's bed and curled up lengthwise at its foot as she had always done. She nudged at the Doctor's toes, which, she remembers more than thirty years later, were chill. In the kick from his feet she was knocked to the floor and, in the subsequent shock of his hands, dragged back to her bedroom. The Doctor leaned against the door like a sledge. Her night-light with its tiny blue stars was confiscated because only babies cried in the dark. Sarah's small fists beat inside the door, bleats like a lamb's coming from her room. Her cries reached Kate and me, where we lay in the upstairs bedroom, our limbs interlocked.
The dark. I think of it like another opponent of my youth. A dog once bit me in the leg while I played at a friend's. It was only a dachshund, a wiener dog we called her—Queenie, not a dog with much of a bite. Queenie was a dowager dog who hated children. She got me just for standing there, biting the back of my knee. I walked home on our road in the sun, the blood dripping down my leg, and I was not afraid. I thought I was brave and noble, the survivor of Queenie's nip. But then my mother had called the Doctor as I lay fevered on my bed, and he loomed over me in his massive starched white doctor's tunic, bigger than God. He could cure or kill. I had told my mother I would take my chance with tetanus, rabies, anything but a shot. I was silent while the Doctor drew a long needle out of his satchel and then squinted it into my backside while my mother lifted my nightgown. After that, the dark held dogs that lay beneath my bed waiting to sink their teeth into me. They were black dogs about knee-high. I could see and hear them, snuffling monster snorts. And as bright as day, I heard the click of their jaws, snapping and ripping sounds that interposed between the bed and the doorway. My mother's room was continents away. Queenie got closer and closer, and I screamed and Kate screamed. A face in the doorway. A monster shadow in the shaft of light.
"If I hear another sound, the night-light's going with me." An ax trembling near us, like a fairy tale come alive in which a woodsman's voice chops the past from the present.
So Kate and I whispered in half words at night and often in the daytime, partisans in our own country, talking in code. We were learning a secret language of defense and the cunning of those who inhabit occupied territories. Our minds began to construct labyrinths and whole corridors and interior passageways of escape. The characters from my stories were there, the tribe of snow children and the six-foot Pooka and Pegasus the winged horse. My Sunday father. I put into the chambers of my imagination all the things I would have put into a bomb shelter. My sisters and I could live in there, I thought, we had provisions for fifty years. Sometimes I wonder if this is what my mother has done, made her own shelter against annihilation, but she shakes her head. Insanity she can scarcely recall, but the stone-cold timbre of the Doctor's voice, this we all—each one of us—remember like yesterday.
I was stunned by all the new rules. You had to remember to put the toothpaste cap back on tightly, and not squeeze the tube in the middle. If you failed to do that, the air filled with an electric charge. You were warned, you'd been warned. Objects had to stay in their place. My stepfather may have believed like certain Chinese geomancers that things not returned to their proper position released the Furies. Perhaps the toothpaste, blue and alive, would snake out of the capless tube like a cobra. "I saw that, chum," my stepfather would say to me with so much venom that I felt the fangs in my skin. I am a chum, chum, and do you know what? It rhymes with dumb.
The bottle cap rule was almost as niggling. Sarah, Kate, and I all liked to run as fast as possible, with filthy feet, from the front yard around to the side door and through the living room, through the kitchen and out the back door to the fields. We would yell at the tops of our lungs, yell even louder because the Doctor was away, chase one another, head for the meadow, disappear. Reappear. Slam. Slam. Slam. We're in the house, we're thirsty now. Drag a chair to the refrigerator, open the refrigerator door, swig from a bottle of soda, leave it on the shelf, out through the back door. Slam. Slam. Slam. We were wild and dirty. My mother and my grandmother agreed that Kate and I were tomboys and monkeys. We ran all day long with the boys on our street, trying to be keen and tough, toppling our bikes off ridges and daring to jump from trees. I scraped my knees and elbows most days of the summer. The pain was nothing to Kate and me if it meant we got to play with the boys, but Sarah hated their loudness and rudeness. So we'd grab her and escape; we ran into the house for soda. Many times we left the soda uncapped in the refrigerator, causing it to go flat, enraging my stepfather, who lived on Pepsi-Cola, usually going through a whole six-pack at night. I would defy him. I wanted to change the imprisonment in the air around us. I wanted to write with cool blue toothpaste on the bathroom wall, but I knew that at seven, I was too old for something that infantile. I wanted to fill the sink basin with Pepsi and launch a hundred bottle caps on the sticky brown sea, like the water lilies on Lake Puckawasay.
In the kitchen, my mother believed in fairy tales. She was a little girl too. She was more fragile than we girls, who were not fragile at all. She sang in the kitchen, humming for him the songs she liked to sing for us, "Easter Parade" and "Red River Valley." She invited us girls to join her. I had forgotten the words again. I had become so absentminded that my mother pinned or sewed to my jacket anything really important. I lost eyeglasses, books, dolls, homework, and retainers. I was a sorceress, anything given to me vanished into thin air. But I shouldn't worry, my mother said. "Perhaps you are really a great genius like Albert Einstein and we don't know it. He knows how the universe works, but there is a story that he does not always remember where he lives. One night on his way home, he lost his house. He called his laboratory, and said, 'Do you know where Dr. Einstein lives? Do not tell anybody, but this is Dr. Einstein.'"
I was beginning to forget, actually, where I lived, in what time zone, what country, what street. Where I really lived there were dancing girls and Indians and horses. When The Rifleman came on TV, I thought I would like to live in a desert town of sagebrush and moral rectitude, doing gritty chores that got me as dirty and callused as a boy, learning to shoot a rifle and making a cherry pie like the girl in the song "Billy Boy." When Make Room for Daddy was on TV with Danny Thomas, then I wanted to go home with Uncle Tonoose. Kate and I wanted to cannonball into Uncle Tonooses arms, convinced of the protection they afforded. My mother said my imagination was becoming a problem, and now, besides talking out of turn I was getting bad marks for failing to pay attention in class, but I had no idea how to change. I then performed cloyingly self-conscious good acts, like writing poems for other children's Mother's Day cards or teaching the Brownie motto to my sisters. I empathized with people on Queen for a Day, like the foreign woman who shyly let it be known she wanted a dictionary to improve her English, but got a Kenmore washing machine instead. Kate and Sarah and I acted out all the parts on Queen for a Day, wearing our rhinestone tiaras and pretending a jump rope, with its wooden handles, was two microphones.
My secret and magic notebooks were black with red binders. I had several of them in which I wrote stories about unhappy people and unhappy families, like Lulu the ugliest shell on the beach, who no one would ever pick for a friend. She had a curveball of a mouth on her so it was a good thing she was so small, but all that lip was just her way of taking on the world. And the heroic Broken Candy Cane, who had lumps and hump
s, and who would never be chosen for Santa's bag. All the other candy canes busted him into a million pieces when he tried in desperation to hop into the sleigh. Then Santa took pity on him, plastered him back together with sugar, and took him to some sick children for their holiday. From Santa's sleigh he got to see the whole world and found zillions of lumpy candy canes just like him. I punched holes in the pages of my best stories, collected them in a large black folder with red steel snap binders, and called it "My Famous Book."
One day I found the "Famous Book" lying open in the living room. Red ink corrections in block capitals, the Doctor's handwriting, crawled over its pages. The Doctor had gone through the stories and corrected the improper grammar. The spelling I had right, but he had changed tenses and pronouns. One story in particular described a little girl trapped beneath a woodpile while her stepfather, a wizard, searched for her so he could cook her in the oven. But she had befriended the birds, who surrounded her stepfather and shooed him toward the spot where she had planted booby traps of sharpened toothbrushes. He fell on one and swiftly died, while she sat above him, drinking Pepsi and throwing the bottle caps over her shoulder. Now he knows, I thought. His fingers have been on my pages, and he knows how passionately I hate him. I felt exposed and naked. I took the "Famous Book" upstairs and hid it under my pillow. That night I watched him in the living room. He was tall and dark and handsome. He spoke into his Dictaphone, letters to his nurses, secretaries, suppliers, patients, and other doctors. He seemed to be talking to the whole world. He called all his nurses "dear." He discounted me because I was only seven and weighed fifty-eight pounds. But I knew I would have my revenge, would reach him even when he would not be reached and make him notice me. Make him never forget me.