Such A Pretty Face

by Cathy Lamb

  It was a stunning performance—funny and theatrical, with words perfectly rhymed, and right on target.

  There was a standing ovation, and the applause was deafening. She tossed that silky purple material into the audience and bowed.

  The Snake and his cohort snakes hardly knew what to do.

  When it was over, Grandma said, “Gentlemen, the answer is no.” She brought her gavel down again. “Get out.”

  They started to argue. Stupid people.

  Then Grandpa Thomas got in trouble again, darn it. He shot off that darn gun. Three bullets, one for each fancy-pants slicker, straight at the ceiling.

  The snakes slithered right on out, lickety-split.

  Later the snakes complained to the sheriff.

  But, funny enough, when the sheriff went to talk to the people at the meeting, no one saw Grandpa Thomas shooting his gun off. Not one. Not even the sheriff’s wife, who was there that night.

  “Case closed, boys,” the sheriff said. “Now you head on out of town. Your business is finished here.”

  But poor Grandpa Thomas.

  He was suspended for two town council meetings, and he so enjoyed them.

  The harmonica songs he played, right outside the doors, were more woeful than ever.

  Grandma made him a chocolate banana pie. His favorite.

  Helen had been complaining about feeling dizzy in the morning, and then she started throwing up on her bedspread.

  “I’m being poisoned!” she hissed at me. “Poisoned! I think it’s the CIA!”

  “It’s not the CIA,” I told her, patting her shoulder with one hand, holding my nose with the other. I thought I was going to be sick, too.

  Every morning Grandma washed that pink flowered bedspread. By the end of the week, she gave up, threw it out, and bought two more. Helen refused to get up and run to the toilet to vomit unless someone was in the room with her because she did not want to be in the bathroom alone in case Barry came.

  “I’m being poisoned by the CIA!” Helen told us, sitting on the toilet later, not letting me or Grandma move an inch as she did her business. “But don’t put me in a can when I die.” She pointed at both of us, then her lips trembled, and her voice shook. “Do you think Tonya’s in a can yet?”

  There were many conversations between Grandma and Grandpa that I needed to hear around that time, because Helen had got a baby in her stomach when she was at the mental ward even though she had no husband. I spent a lot of time hiding near the stairs late at night.

  “We have a mentally ill daughter who was raped in a mental ward and now she’s pregnant….”

  “I don’t know what to do about the baby, I’m so worried….”

  “The baby may already be damaged from the drugs she was on….”

  “Can we raise another child? Can we even handle a baby here with Helen?”

  “Remember when she was pregnant with Stevie? She thought she had Punk in her stomach.”

  “The baby may be mentally ill, too….”

  “Stevie’s not, honey.”

  “Stevie’s not now. But Helen seemed pretty normal up until her last couple of years of high school…. She did get awfully depressed now and then, she complained about a buzzing in her ears, she didn’t want the TV on, she had some grandiose plans, but she did okay.”

  I put my hands to my face. What were they talking about? Would I end up like Helen? Did I have the fighting-with-voices-disease, too? Would I end up wearing tin foil and getting the bugs? Would I end up in a corner crying? I felt my whole body go cold with panic and dread.

  I saw Grandpa shaking his head, then tears coursed down his cheeks. “But she’s almost three months along. My poor girl.” He slammed his fist three times into his open palm, his face twisted in grief and anger, and my grandma linked her arms around his neck.

  Later, as an adult, I grew to understand him better. He loved his girls. Loved his wife, loved his grandchildren. And he had not been able to protect Helen. In fact, he probably felt as if he’d handed his daughter over on a platter to a rapist. He was not to blame, but he never would have stopped blaming himself.

  Never.

  That guilt sat on my grandpa’s back like a serpent, I’m sure of it.

  I didn’t speak for days.

  Grandma and Grandpa grew more worried, constantly asking me what was wrong.

  Finally, in the living room of the Schoolhouse House, which was where the students used to study (I swear I still smelled that chalk), with the sun shining through the stained glass, I told them.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to become Helen.”

  They didn’t understand what I meant at first, but then their faces cleared and raw pain creased every line.

  “Am I going to have a Command Center when I’m older? A Punk? Am I going to hear voices and wear weird clothes and throw things?” I was distraught, almost beside myself.

  Grandma and Grandpa comforted me, told me that I wouldn’t. “Honey, you don’t have the same thing….”

  “But I might get it!” I insisted. “I heard you talking! It might come out when I’m in high school! Helen was in her twenties!”

  “Sweetie, you don’t have it…. You won’t be like your mother…I’m sure of it…. We thought something was off when Helen was a little girl, didn’t we, Glory? She was different at your age, way too imaginative, talked to imaginary friends…. She’d be happy one day, sad the next….”

  They tried to reassure me.

  But I was smart. I could spell schizophrenia, and I could read their loving, frightened eyes. I saw the desperate hope that what I was suggesting wasn’t true, but I knew that there was at least a possibility that I could end up having the same problems as Helen.

  That overriding fear, the fear of becoming Helen, chased me down my entire childhood and into my twenties. I read about it, I learned about it, and it shook me to my core. The fear of a collapsing mind, the fear of a Command Center and a Punk, were a huge part of my eating problem.

  And the primal, all-encompassing fear of living in a mental ward as Helen had and facing nightmares of my inner mind and nightmares on two feet stalked me like a phantom stalks his victim for decades.

  Helen was the one who brought the baby to Grandpa’s attention weeks later as she was sitting on the toilet. Her fear of being alone in the bathroom continued. Sometimes she refused to go to the bathroom unless Grandpa was home. She’d started peeing outside rather than be in the bathroom without him. Even in her delusions, she knew that Grandpa would protect her at all costs.

  “The enemy didn’t come to bleed me,” she told him. “Did you see that? There’s no blood. And there’s a mystery here.” She pointed to her stomach and stood up, straddling the toilet. “I think they put something in me. It’s right there. It’s moving.”

  She bent down to see herself and poked her stomach with her pointer finger.

  “What. Is. That?”

  She glared at Grandpa.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Grandma and Grandpa took Helen to see Dr. Lindy Woods, an OB-GYN in the city. Lindy was a cousin on Grandpa’s side and used to hang out with Helen in high school.

  Helen wore her hair in six braids, lay down in the backseat of the car, and made up poems. Most of her words rhymed with the F word. She was mad at Punk, one of the loudest voices in her head, because he was “so bossy, so rude. Always bugging me, he’s crude. Punk the funk, soon I’ll give you a deep dunk.”

  I was dropped off at the house of my best friend, Lornie Rose, but later, when we were back home, I heard Grandma talking on the phone to my great-aunt Cinnamon, who was an attorney, when she thought I was out in the vegetable garden pulling carrots and onions and squash.

  “We took Helen to the clinic to see Lindy. She was fine for a while, she sat straight up in Lindy’s office, hands clasped tight in her lap, but when Lindy and another doctor and a nurse entered in white coats, she started screaming, backed right into a corner and covered her head with her
hands. She was terrified, absolutely terrified. Then she started yelling, ‘I’m not going back there! You won’t put me in a can! I don’t like that dark room, I don’t like the hall. He’s bad, he’s bad! Help me, Dad! Help me, Dad!’

  “She grabbed Albert and would not let him go, her arms and one leg wrapped around him. So I pushed Lindy and the others out and explained how Helen was scared of people in white coats because of her experience at the mental wards. So Lindy, I swear I thought she was going to cry, she changed into a University of Oregon sweatshirt and jeans and then she sat down and talked to Helen, as they did in high school, and eventually Helen got out of Albert’s lap and she let Lindy put her hands on her stomach. I think that somewhere in her mind, Helen recognized Lindy. She said, ‘I remember you because of lemonade and horses.’ They used to ride our horses and then drink lemonade.” I heard Grandma’s voice crackle, then she sniffled.

  “Anyhow, Helen got on the table but told Lindy she wasn’t going to allow them to put any ‘tracers’ in her, and Lindy said, ‘We never put tracers in anyone. We’re the good people.’ And Helen said that the enemy had put something in there, and she knew because they weren’t ‘bleeding her anymore.’

  “Lindy told her that there was a baby in her stomach and…” Grandma choked on her tears. “And Helen sat up straight and said, ‘There is no baby in my stomach. I don’t have a husband.’ And Lindy said, ‘Yes, there is, honey. There’s a baby in there. Do you remember how it got there?’ And, Helen did, she must have, because her eyes got wide, and I knew she wasn’t with us anymore—she was somewhere else—and her whole face crumpled up and she pulled her knees up and started crying, keening back and forth, then she pulled at her hair, and fiddled with her toes, and kept crying, these mewing, sobbing sounds, and yelled for Albert to help her, help her.”

  Grandma slumped onto the floor, still holding the phone.

  “It about destroyed Albert. Anyhow, when we finally got Helen calm, Lindy asked her if she wanted the baby, and said if Helen didn’t want the baby that Lindy could take it out. Helen completely lost it. She started shrieking, high pitched—it was like listening to an animal. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and tried to kick Lindy. ‘You won’t take it. I won’t let you take it. You get away from me. You aren’t going to hurt it, it’s mine!’ Helen knew. Somewhere in the back of her mind she understood she was pregnant, she had a baby, and she wanted to protect it, above all.”

  I thought of that baby in Helen’s stomach. Would we look alike? Was it a girl? Was it a boy? How did it get in there?

  “So we’re keeping the baby. Lindy talked to her about eating well and resting, once Helen wasn’t hysterical, but then she started rhyming words again, and asked Lindy if she wanted to hear her poem. Lindy said yes, and Helen said, ‘Babies, babies, babies. How do they jump in your stomach? You must be a bad girl. Or get them from throw up.’”

  Grandma rubbed her forehead. “Lindy started to cry—she and Helen were such wonderful friends—but Helen didn’t notice. She said another poem. It was about a black room. ‘Black room, slimy room, hurt room. Stick in your butt, stick in your front. Always ouch, always mad, I tried to kill that hairy crab,’ and then she started singing that song, ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from Pinocchio, and Lindy cried again. Before we left, Helen actually let Lindy hug her, and said, ‘I like lemonade and horses.’”

  Grandma listened on the phone for a minute. “How do I feel about another baby? I don’t know how we’re going to do this. But what else can I do? She refused the abortion. The baby is coming, so we’ll deal with it.” She paused. “I love all of our grandchildren, and having Stevie live with us has been a gift from the second she came into our lives. We’ll hope this baby has the personality and cheerfulness of our Stevie. I love that child to distraction, and so does Albert. Without Stevie we would never have been able to handle all this grief with Helen, never. Stevie has saved our lives. She’s an angel, right from God to us.”

  I went to sleep that night, after Grandma and Grandpa kissed me good night, then kissed each other, and the last thing I heard were Grandma’s words in my head. “I love that child to distraction, and so does Albert…. She’s an angel, right from God to us.”

  I believe, I truly do, that the love of my grandparents is what saved my life.

  Even after they were gone.

  Grandma and Grandpa watched Helen very carefully.

  And who knew why—maybe it was hormones or maybe Helen was hanging on to a shred of sanity, or maybe God stepped in and answered Grandma’s incessant prayers to Him, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Apostle Paul, and the Prophets—but Helen did eat, she did rest. There were incidences, but the voices in Helen’s head seemed to grow dimmer. They didn’t tell her to stand in the middle of the street and flap her arms or climb a tree and jump from a branch or pick at her fingernails till they bled. They didn’t tell her quite so loud that the CIA was after her.

  Until the seventh month. That’s when things fell apart. That’s when she tried to get Sunshine out of her body. All by herself.

  I loved first grade, although I did get some teasing about Helen at first. Some kids called her a “crazy lady,” and one girl asked why she shouted at lampposts and why she wore a cape, but I could deal with that. Plus, a bunch of cousins and kids of Grandpa’s employees were in my class, and they told the kids teasing me to “shut up or lose a tooth” or “Tease Stevie and I’m going to smash your nose inside out,” and that took care of things, even when Helen danced into my classroom wearing antennas on her head and a set of black spider legs from my last year’s Halloween costume. Grandma rushed in and escorted her out pretty quick.

  First grade was all day, not like kindergarten, which meant I was out of the house for hours. My teacher, Mrs. Zeebach, had been a student of Grandma’s and she had me reading novels and doing advanced math worksheets, but the best thing was that I won the school’s art competition in the fall and in the spring with my work. When my name was announced, the kids in my class stood up and cheered because that meant I had beat the sixth graders, too. I won $5 and chocolates. I shared all the chocolates with my classmates.

  Grandma and Helen usually met me at the end of the driveway where the school bus stopped.

  One afternoon Helen was waiting for me with two pencils behind her ears. She was carrying a lunch box. “Stevie Stevie. A beehive girl. You won’t give a monster a swirl. Buzz buzz buzz, beehive girl, you don’t make me want to hurl.”

  She poked me in my stomach, then she poked her own stomach. “I got a beehive in here. It’s moving. I can feel them. I think they’re going to sting me so I’m going to have to smother them.” Then she softly hit her stomach, got all teary-eyed, and said, “Barry’s bad, Barry’s scary, Tonya’s in a can, not one that you can carry.”

  On a sunny Friday, though, Grandma’s friend Mrs. Wong came and got me before school was out. It was Song and Music Day, where we spent an hour in front of the piano that Mrs. Zeebach played. It had been my turn to sit next to her on the piano bench, which was the first good thing. Another good thing that happened: We had found Herschel, our hamster, who had mysteriously escaped during the night two days ago. Phuc Do found him behind the bookshelves and caught him, only dropping him once on his head when he wriggled out of his hands.

  Right after we got back from Mr. Wright’s PE class, I heard the sirens.

  I later learned that Helen had gotten ahold of a knife and tried to take the baby out of her own stomach. “The bees are all cooked,” she’d told Grandma. “All cooked. I tried to take them out so they wouldn’t get burned.”

  That night I studied the stain of blood on the carpet of Helen’s room.

  I don’t know why I did it—maybe it was simply years of living with someone sick and how it makes you see almost everything differently from anyone else, how it makes you feel crazy, too, and your world shakes and sputters, and reality is topsy-turvy and confused—but I got my paints out.

  I drew petals in purp
le, blue, and green around the circular red stain.

  I made a flower out of the blood, complete with a long stem.

  That night I kept thinking about flower blood.

  And I kept thinking about how my own mother used a knife on herself to get her baby out of her stomach.

  I wondered if it was ever possible to run out of tears.

  I sure hadn’t.

  When the sun came up, I was still up, too, and when Grandma and Grandpa saw the blood flower, I thought I was going to get in trouble, but I didn’t. The three of us stood there, and then Grandpa pulled me into his strong arms for a long hug and Grandma kissed my forehead.

  Helen came home about three weeks later from a special hospital in Seattle. She was, miraculously, still pregnant. But her fear of chairs had grown exponentially.

  “I am not going to sit in a chair again,” she told Grandma when she waddled in the door, a plain green dress over her skinny but pregnant frame, her blond hair in a ponytail. “No. I didn’t like that. The chair wouldn’t let go of me. It hurt me.”

  “Sugar, we have different chairs here,” Grandma said, wiping her hands on her flowered apron. “These chairs are comfortable and friendly.”

  Helen eyed her suspiciously. “I think you’re from the other side.”

  “No, sugar, I’m on your side. I’m always on your side. And these chairs are nice chairs. They won’t hurt you.”

  “Have you gone to the CIA?” she asked Grandpa.

  Grandpa shook his head and put his cowboy hat on the coatrack. “No, baby, I haven’t. I’m with you. I’m on your side, and you can sit in this chair. Your mother made your favorite dinner again, oatmeal with cinnamon, no white sugar.”

  “I don’t eat white sugar because of the noise, and I’m not going to sit in that chair because of the foobadurang.”

  “Sweetie, how about this chair?” Grandma pointed to a big, comfy red chair in the living room. “There’s no foobadurang.”

  Helen stared at that chair. She went over and peered underneath it, then she sniffed it. “There’s no ropes here.”