by Cathy Lamb
He could, however, attend the potluck dinner and dessert after the meeting.
So saddened was Grandpa Thomas that he could not attend the next council meeting that he sat on the steps and played woeful songs on his harmonica the whole time, which we all heard.
Grandma said it added a “haunting, mystical moment” to the meeting, and she thanked him later for it.
He hugged her. Then apologized. “I’ll try never to shoot my gun off again, Glory Be, and I apologize for it. My temper got a hold of me as the devil did in my youth, and I couldn’t get a lasso around it.”
“Don’t you worry none,” Grandma said. “Now, come on down. Ramon has made his marionberry pie and you know it’s the best pie ever.”
And that was that.
Grandpa Thomas didn’t shoot off his gun for one full year.
Church seemed to calm Helen down, and we went every Sunday and sat with The Family.
Sometimes Helen sat quietly, but sometimes she didn’t. She took to preaching a couple of sermons herself. “Everyone here: They’re after you. They’re everywhere. We’re all being watched! Not by God, but by them. They are here. They are among you. Watch out!” she shouted. “Watch out!”
Thankfully, she would then settle back into her seat and go back to her incessant turning of Bible pages and not speak again. Several people commented that it was so kind that Helen was trying to warn us all of impending danger.
The minister knew he could go on without further interruption of his sermon. This did not extend to the singing part of the service.
During singing time Helen would wait until the choir was finished, as if they were the prelude to her act. With the exception of “Amazing Grace,” which brought everyone to tears because Helen ended up crying through the “save a wretch like me” line, her songs were almost always show tunes, and she did a beautiful job, I will admit, even though it was humiliating each time. Grandma tried to stop her, but that made things worse, and Helen would have to start all over again. She usually patted Grandma on the nose first. “Pipe down, chicken,” she’d whisper, then burst back into song.
She favored songs from Cabaret, Hello, Dolly! and West Side Story with a couple of songs from The Sound of Music thrown in. Oh, and how could I forget Jesus Christ Superstar? That was a favorite of hers, especially right before communion.
She would stand, compose herself, smooth whatever she was wearing—overalls with a tutu, a slinky purple dress with a cape, or overalls under the slinky purple dress—and then burst into, “Jesus Christ Superstar…Do you think you’re what they say you are…”
Thank the Lord that our minister was the brother of Grandma’s best friend growing up and like a brother to her. He waited patiently. He was not irritated when people clapped after Helen’s performances. She bowed politely, waved, nodded her head, often covered with her beaver hat and silver foil, and sat down. Grandma and Grandpa would exchange a glance, and Grandma would mutter, “Praise the Lord she did not swear.” I’d hold one of their hands, and the service would go on.
When the baskets of communion bread came around there was a fifty-fifty chance that Helen was going to dump it on her head and then start examining each one, piece by piece. “I know there’s a camera in here…you wait. You watch. It’s a blimpomatic for spying on me.”
The men passing the baskets from row to row would be ready with another basket of bread and everyone would move on, as normal. Helen would take little bites out of each piece of bread and examine the bite, hoping to find that elusive camera. When she couldn’t find the camera, she’d toss the bread over her shoulder and grab another piece.
Grandpa always wrote big checks to the church.
Now it was said that people came to church simply to hear Helen sing. I would have laughed at that, but when we were at a cabin for a couple of weeks, and people in town knew we were on vacation for two Sundays, the church coffers went way, way down and Grandma got panicked calls from the minister for us to please return immediately.
I often heard people whispering requests to Helen before church.
“Sing that love song from Fiddler on the Roof,” old Mr.
Grotten told her one day, leaning heavily on his cane. “‘Sunrise, Sunset’…It breaks me up each time I hear it.”
“The Sound of Music makes my heart swell,” Mrs. Chandler said, quite loudly because she is partly deaf. “Sing ‘Edelweiss.’ My mother’s parents are from Austria, and it’ll bring me back home. Or how about ‘My Favorite Things’?”
“Why don’t you sing ‘I Feel Pretty’ from West Side Story? I feel so fat today, I think it would cheer me up.” Grandma steered her away from Clare Shoemaker pretty darn quick at that one, but that wasn’t enough. After the choir finished that Sunday, Helen burst into, “I feel pretty…oh, so pretty…I feel pretty and witty and bright…”
I swear half that congregation was swaying to the music by the time she was done. Grandma glared at Clare after the service, and Clare held both hands up innocently. “Come on, now, Glory. It was a beautiful song, and you know it!”
“Are they after you, too?” Helen asked me one day in the car on the way home from church, where she’d sung a song from Guys and Dolls. “What is your true identity? Are you part of my tribe or theirs?” Helen had wrapped foil around herself to “ward off communications.” She had also refused to brush her hair for three days, so it stuck up all over her head. She had dropped a toy crown over the top of it.
“I’m in your tribe, Momma,” I reassured her.
“You don’t look like me. You look like them.” Then she swore. “Hell’s bells are ringing. We don’t look alike. I have blond hair, you have black hair. I have white white skin and your skin is darker. See?” She held our arms together. She was right, I was darker. “And our noses.” She touched her little one and then mine, more of a beak. “Plus you have that.” She poked the dimple in my left cheek, then poked her cheeks. “I don’t have a dent in my cheek.”
She stared out the window for a while, the sun high in the sky.
“Where are you hiding the listening devices?”
“I don’t have any,” I said.
“Yes, you do,” she shouted.
“No, Momma, I don’t.”
“I know you do.” She hit her fist against the car door. “I know it. You’re lying.” She hit her fist again and glared at me, and then she started fiddling with the door handle.
Grandma hit the brakes and tried to turn off to stop the car, but she was not quick enough for Helen.
“I am not staying with the spy,” she declared, pointing at me. “Not when she’s spying on me for the government!”
Then she unfastened her seat belt and leaped from the car.
I cried for days.
Helen was gone that time for four weeks. First to a hospital for her concussion and bruising and broken ribs, and then to an out-of-state mental ward because of the “sickness in her head.”
It was the last two weeks of kindergarten. I remember because we had Clay Day the week before and I’d made a frog for Helen. Helen had turned that frog this way and that, then put the frog in her pocket and hopped off.
After she’d been there for weeks she jumped through a second-story window. I have no idea why that window did not have bars, but it didn’t. She broke through the glass with her fists and a stapler and tumbled through the night sky right to the ground.
Helen came home drugged and mentally fizzy. That’s the only way I can describe it. She came home fizzy, one foot sprained, a wrist in a cast. I heard Grandma telling Grandpa it was a miracle she was alive. “She had an angel with her, that’s all I know. Praise the Lord.”
Grandpa parked the pickup out front and, leaning heavily on him, Helen hobbled up the walk, her blond hair a mess around her shoulders, her blue eyes vacant. Grandma ran on out to give Helen a hug. Helen did not hug her back. Instead she leaned in and said, “I have to tell you about the cans of dead people.”
“All right, sugar,
” Grandma soothed. “We’ll talk about it inside. I’m so glad you’re home. We missed you.”
When Helen saw me, she opened up a huge flowered bag she had at her side, stuck her hand in, searched around, then brought out the clay frog I made her. The frog was missing an eye and a leg had broken off. “He’s hurt,” she told me. “He’s hurt. He’s very badly hurt.”
I took the frog in my palm. “Hi, Momma.”
She stared at me until her eyes got all fuzzy again, and Grandma and Grandpa led her inside. She was wearing a blue dress, plain and straight, and there was a brown stain on the back of it near her bottom. She must have sat in mud, I thought. She must have sat in reddish-colored mud.
It wasn’t reddish-colored mud.
15
Portland, Oregon
The next morning I balanced my checkbook and paid the bills that were not withdrawn automatically from my account. I made a payment on my medical bills and dared to check the balance. Oh, lovely, this two-week cycle I had $162 left. I sent out ten more résumés, took a walk, did not see Jake—so disappointing as I’d put makeup on—and came back. I finished cutting the last of my raised beds, then started constructing the trellises for the climbing roses. I had gotten the wood when a neighbor had taken down his old patio covering.
I sawed and smoothed the wood, and later that week if it wasn’t raining I would attach the wood pieces together, pour cement, and get the posts in the ground. My yard had patches of dead grass, weeds, and barrenness. It was my life in dirt, I noted. My garden was a metaphor. I blew hair out of my eyes. I am ridiculous.
But soon Ridiculous Me would plant the vegetables starts and seeds and I’d have roses climbing up my trellises on the way to Sunshine’s garden.
Not bad.
I reminded myself to build the two crosses but not for who you think.
That night I lay in the bed that Jake thought was incredible and watched Polly on the news. Dressed in a green suit jacket and plain white silk undershirt and sedate pearl earrings, she managed to appear proper and professional, but she reeked sex appeal. The men loved her for that sexiness, and the women loved her because she took her job seriously, wasn’t flirty or flighty, and reminded them of a well-loved sister. She couldn’t help it that she was gorgeous, but she was on their side.
Polly was so Portland. She chatted about biking along the river and hiking in the gorge and fishing on the Deschutes River. She joked about having panic attacks and not wearing makeup around town and no one recognizing her. Now and then, during a rush of news, the darker circles under her eyes grew, and people knew she was a trooper.
Yes, Portland loved Polly.
But no one in Portland knew, except for me, Lance, and Aunt Janet, what was under the stylish jackets, the curly curls, and expertly sprayed on makeup: Polly was denying that she needed to fight for her life.
I was sick, sick, sick with worry. My hands shook.
Herbert ignored Polly’s anorexia completely. His family didn’t have problems. We were better. We were Barretts. We were pillars of Portland.
Pillars.
We were falling apart.
When Polly and I were fourteen, we were both disintegrating in our own ways. I was fat, withdrawn, depressed, prone to bouts of panic, semihysteria, and mood swings, and I studied all the time. She weighed less than 100 pounds. She was pale with a slightly bluish tint, with sunken cheeks, and often physically weak. I know she couldn’t sleep at night. She was crawling in bed with me, and because she was so cold, her heart was constantly pounding, on a dead gallop. I could feel it. It hurt her to sit in a chair because she had no fat.
Kids called us the Fat Cousin and the Bones Cousin.
And still she ran and played basketball and piano.
I begged Aunt Janet to do something. She did. She took Polly to the doctors, repeatedly. The doctors told her to commit Polly. She did. Herbert went and got her at the clinic and brought her home. Aunt Janet committed her again. Herbert brought her home, and actually hit Aunt Janet into submission.
“She needs to eat. Open mouth, insert food. Here, dummy,” he said to a white-faced Polly at dinner one night. He picked up a spoon and started shoving food into Polly’s mouth. Polly sobbed, then choked. Lance leaped over the table and tackled his father. I pulled Polly away from him and whacked her on the back until she could breathe. Herbert slammed his fist into Lance’s face. Lance hit him back, twice, and Herbert was down. Aunt Janet leaned over Herbert and howled that he was “an abusive ass,” and we hauled Polly up to her bedroom.
When Lance was at football practice the next night, Herbert tried shoveling food into Polly’s mouth again. This time Aunt Janet, red with fury, leaped on his back and tackled him to the ground, calling him a “fucking bastard.” He punched her in the jaw. I grabbed Polly and we ran from the house. Two doors down, Polly collapsed. The neighbors called the ambulance.
Polly was committed to a clinic for six weeks, which was extended to nine weeks because she wasn’t doing well. At the same time Aunt Janet went back to rehab, too. She probably figured it was a safe time to go because the police were asking questions about her bruises and she told Herbert to leave Polly in the clinic or she’d tell the police everything.
The clinic didn’t work for Polly. She came home and stopped eating again.
Herbert refused to send her back. “She’s a spoiled, rebellious brat. When she’s hungry enough, she’ll eat. Why can’t you be like Lance, Polly? Athletic, the star of all his teams, popular…”
The sick irony was that Polly was like Lance. Athletic, the star of her teams, popular, and a 4.0 grade point average.
Having Lance, the golden boy athlete of the school, as my older cousin, and having Polly, the beautiful cheerleader and prom queen, in my same grade meant that a lot of the teasing I normally would have gotten in high school for my weight was cut off. Lance pummeled two boys in the face and knocked out a total of four teeth when those boys teased me. He actually picked up one boy and dumped him in a Dumpster and flipped the lid down. He tied another kid to the flagpole outside school.
Polly verbally eviscerated the girls who made fun of me and then made sure they were ostracized so bad they came to me pleading with me to talk to Polly so they could be in the “in” crowd again.
“Listen, Stevie,” Daly Howe told me one day, her blond ponytail swinging behind her, big eyes filled with tears. “You know the other day when I drew that picture of you in a bikini—I was kidding, but it wasn’t funny. I know it wasn’t, and it hurt your feelings and I’m sorry and I won’t do it again, and would you tell Polly because she won’t let anybody be friends with me.”
But even though Lance and Polly had done what they could to shut down the teasing, I knew what I saw in the mirror.
A girl who was fat and getting fatter.
Now and then, when the sun was up and the shadows were right, I’d see my momma in my cheekbones, my eyebrows, my profile, and that made me eat more. She could not be in me. She was not me, I was not her. I would erase her from my life, certainly from my face, by eating. Those recognitions scared me, completely irrationally, to pieces, especially since I worried constantly that schizophrenia was lurking in my genes, too, waiting to spring to life, and that I would soon be hollering at Command Center.
And when the sun was slanted on Polly? She could hardly make a shadow she was so thin. She passed out twice at school. It was only when several teachers and the principal said that if Herbert didn’t commit her to a hospital they would report him for child abuse that he did so again. “What will everyone think?” he roared. “I’ve got a kid who refuses to eat and one who eats everything in sight and is getting so fat we can hardly keep her in clothes. Mental problems. Runs on your side of the family, Janet, not mine.”
Polly was a girl who was being killed by anorexia, I was eating my way into oblivion, and Herbert was worried about his reputation.
“I have one fat cow and one skeleton,” Herbert said to us. “This psychosis is fr
om your side of the family, Janet, and you’re your crazy mother, Stevie. I can see your mother in you.”
“And I can see why my momma thought you had a stick for a dick,” I said, my pain for Polly finally making me speak up. “And that you’re a short weasel fart. You are a short weasel fart. She was right. My grandpa called you Hatchet Face and said God knew he’d blown it with you. He was right, too. Grandma wanted to cut you up and put you in the pig trough.”
Herbert shook me till my teeth rattled and I was grounded and not allowed dinner for two weeks.
No matter—Aunt Janet, Polly, and Lance snuck it to me.
Here’s the thing: Polly and I are on the same spectrum. Both of us suffered from appallingly low self-esteem, tragedy in our pasts, devastating losses that we couldn’t speak of or we’d “shame” the family, an abusive relationship with Herbert, and Aunt Janet’s alcoholism.
We were a mixed-up clan—not in a funny, we’ll-laugh-at-these-stories-when-we’re-older kind of way, but in a diseased, rotting, maggot-infested way.
Polly stopped eating for control over her life.
I shoveled food into my mouth for comfort and so I could forget my past.
The public response to us was always different. Anorexia, oh, how sad. How terrible. But, hey! She’s a size 2, or zero. Isn’t she svelte? Slim as a whip! There’s the pity element, but she is, thank God, not fat.
Morbidly obese? The public response is completely different: Gross. Disgusting. Get some self-control, why don’t you? Lazy lady, dumb, a burden on society, you’re responsible for our soaring health costs, and so on.
But what’s behind both problems, now that’s about the same.
No one gets that part.
It’s a spectrum, folks, and what’s behind the spectrum isn’t pretty.
I received another note on my door from Jake when I got home from work. He enjoyed our last date. Could he take me out on a river boat cruise in Portland? Would I want to come?