by Cathy Lamb
“I felt guilty because I couldn’t help you, Stevie. You were eating because of this tragedy with Grandma and Grandpa and your mom and Sunshine, and I couldn’t fix you. I couldn’t help you get better. I was totally helpless. No matter what I did in trying to protect you two from Dad, making him get mad at me instead of you two, bringing you food to your room, buying you ice cream, nothing worked. Polly, you got skinnier. You were a bone. A skinny bone! I grew up scared that you were going to die. I would feel so mad at you for not eating, but I couldn’t show it because I thought it would make things worse for you,” he moaned. “You were a bone who wouldn’t eat. Even your hair was falling out then! And you were pale and weak…”
“I’m sorry, Lance.” Polly shook her head, her chin wobbling.
“You’re sorry? I’m sorry, too.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry because for years you’ve had to battle this thing, but honey, I gotta ask you—you say you’re trying here to get better, but are you?”
Polly stuttered, then said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t think you’re really trying. I think you’re clinging to your anorexia. I think you’re scared to do the hard work you know you have to do, and I can’t take this anymore. Do you know how much stress you’ve caused me? Both of you? Have you ever thought about what you’ve done to me? Polly, did you ever think of what you were doing to Stevie, and Stevie to us?”
I had thought of it, and I was ashamed. They had watched me get so big they probably wondered when I’d pop. And I had popped. “Yes.”
“Yes?” Lance asked. “What about you, Polly? I know, I know you’re sick. I know you have a disease. I know I’m probably supposed to treat you softly and gently, but I can’t anymore.” He sniffled. “Are you ever going to reach outside that disease long enough to fix yourself so the rest of us don’t have to stand around and watch you try to plant yourself in the ground because you’ve starved yourself to death? Are you? Aren’t we important enough to you, Polly, so that you’ll truly and sincerely help yourself get better instead of simply playing the game here until you can get out?”
“Lance—” I said, my voice creaky.
“After the last time you were in the clinic, did you keep going to your outpatient meetings? Did you keep seeing your counselor? No, you didn’t, and then you slipped again, and I had to watch you, on TV, when your head thunked that desk, and I thought you were dead. I screamed, Polly, then I almost wet my pants. I drove to the hospital so fast I got a ticket.” He squared his shoulders, then rolled his lips in tight so he didn’t cry.
“I love you, Polly, and I love you, Stevie, but my heart”—he thumped himself again—“I can’t take this anymore. You two are my best friends. You two are the only reason I’m not lonely all the time. I know you’re out there. I know I can call you. But what happens if one of you dies, especially from something you could have prevented but you didn’t love me enough to save yourself? I want to cry when I think about that, and I’m angry. Very angry.”
“Lance,” Polly whimpered, patting her heart rhythmically.
“Sometimes I’m up all night worrying. It makes me vomit. After Stevie’s heart attack I had to go on antidepressants, and that’s not the first time. I do it with you, too, Polly, and I hate taking drugs, you know that.” He sniffled, ran a fist over his eyes. “I knit blankets all the time and give them away. See my fingers.” He held them up. “They’re tired. They’re tired of knitting. I’ll wait for you in the parking lot, Stevie. I’m angry at you girls.”
The electric silence in that room probably could have been blown up with a match.
I climbed on Polly’s bed and we sat there, numbed, holding hands.
“He’s right,” she said, her voice exhausted, defeated. “I know he’s right.” She patted her heart. “Calm down, heart, pump the blood, relax.”
“I’m not one to talk, Polly. I was within an inch of eating myself to death. Absolutely to death.” I coughed, trying to get the lump out of my throat. “And Lance watched every minute of it.”
“And he’s watched me morph into a skeleton with a head for more than twenty years.” She brought our entwined hands up to her face, then we both lay down on that twin bed, together, and didn’t move.
The next morning I walked in the rain. I felt terrible about Lance. If guilt could physically knock people to their knees, I’d have been walking on my knees that whole walk.
I put myself in Lance’s position, something I should have done a hundred times before, and I hated myself. I did. I saw everything from his eyes.
When I got home, I went to bed for about twenty minutes, pulled the covers up, and stared at the Starlight Starbright ceiling. Within ten minutes I wanted to conk myself on the head. Wasn’t I done with this yet? Done with literally and figuratively pulling blankets over my head?
I showered, pulled my sweats on, had two pieces of toast, and headed to my garage, where I kept my obsessions. I would build and paint Lance a chair. No, it did not make up for the years I had hurt him, but it was something. An acknowledgment of my realization of what I’d done. An apology.
First, I cut off the legs of a chair with an abnormally large seat I’d bought at a garage sale ($2). Next, I attached new legs, about four feet tall. I cut out four guitars from wood. Two were about two feet long, two were one foot long. I painted the chair black and the next day painted a skull on the seat. I painted the guitars with red, purple, and green swirls, then attached the guitars to the front and back of the chair and painted the long chair legs with red squares.
Across the middle slats I wrote, “Rock your own life. Always.”
I drove it over to Lance’s and put it on his front porch, with a note attached. The note was simple. “I’m sorry. I love you. Stevie.”
My phone rang later that night.
I heard muffled words, a sniffle.
“Lance? Lance?”
More muffled words, another sniffle, and then, “I can’t talk right now, Stevie. Oh! You’ve made me cry! Cry! I love my chair! If my house burns down tonight, I’ll take it out first! Oh! I can’t talk right now, I can’t talk!”
Muffle, sniffle.
Jake called. He wanted to take me to a piano concert downtown on Sunday night. I almost laughed. Huge, athletic, rough and tough Jake, loving piano. I had to turn him down. He asked about Monday. I said yes. “Busy Sunday night then?” he asked.
“Yes, I am.”
I could feel his question, his frustration. He was not pleased. I just couldn’t tell that man I was a chicken yet. There was a lot I couldn’t tell him yet.
Cluck and cluck.
21
Ashville, Oregon
Helen escaped.
Despite my grandma and grandpa’s best efforts, she slipped out the door. She’d been pointing more and more at her growing stomach, saying, “The bees and the babies are trying to kill me.” And she’d whisper, “Command Center doesn’t like it. I’m going to pop. I want it out. So does he.”
Grandma grew pale trying to calm her, and the creases in Grandpa’s face grew deeper. Both of them had aged during Helen’s pregnancy. You could almost see them changing overnight. They were scared to death and had every logical, rational reason to be so.
One rainy day, after I won the first-grade spelling bee, I got off the school bus, walked up our driveway, and saw Grandma sprinting for the Schoolhouse House from the fields, her cowboy boots flying. I had no idea my grandma could run that fast.
“Search inside. Don’t miss a corner, Stevie,” she told me, panting, frantic. “I can’t find your mother.”
Soon Grandpa came roaring up the drive in his pickup truck with six of his employees from work. We searched all over our property, then Grandpa told me to call Uncle Peter, the chief of police, and the minister at church and to tell Aunt Terri to call The Family. Within an hour we were mobbed with people going out on search parties to find Helen.
No one paid any attention to me as I huddled in a corner.
I didn’t know what to do. I was scared. Scared for Helen, scared for the baby in her tummy, scared with all the people around, scared because Grandma and Grandpa, although standing tall, were clearly covering their panic.
And then I thought of the cave.
Sometimes, on lucid days, me and Helen walked across the property, Grandpa or Grandma behind us, and explored. One day Helen took me to a cave, hidden in the hillside. In front of the cave there was a giant rock, so it could not be easily seen. Helen had gone there as a girl many times, apparently. She called it her secret cave.
The first time she showed me the cave, she showed me a metal box where she had saved photos of her, Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Janet, and her many friends. She also had dried corsages from dances, dried wildflowers from our farm, a few love letters from various boys, two necklaces that had been gifts from girlfriends, shells from a trip to the beach, rocks from a campsite on Mt. Hood, and a whole bunch of pretty cards. There was also a pennant from her college and playbills from shows she had been in on Broadway in New York. There were playbills about operas, too, a man’s face on the front. She held those in her hands and touched his face with her finger. “He’s nice,” she told me. “He sings. We sing together.”
I took off running for the cave. To this day, I realize how stupid it was for me not to tell them where I was going. Perhaps I had some grandiose notion that I would find Helen and bring her home myself. Remember: I was seven.
I ran as fast as I could, arms pumping, past the vegetable garden, past the sunflowers, past the barn with the horses, past the corn, past the cattle, and up into the hills.
It was very difficult to see the slit of the cave from anywhere on the property, so the only people who would ever know it was there had to be told by someone else. Helen and Aunt Janet knew about it because Grandma had told them. Grandma knew about it because her mother told her. And her mother’s mother found it, rumor has it, when she was running from an angry boyfriend who had a scythe in his hand.
Once through the slit, however, which was about six feet long and two feet high, you could stand up in the cave. It was about twelve square feet wide and probably eight feet tall, although my memory probably isn’t very accurate. It wasn’t as dark as you would expect, because the top of the cave opened to the sky through a small tunnel. Native American artwork adorned the walls, which Grandma told us never to touch, so we didn’t. There were horses, Native Americans with spears, Native American families, buffalo, teepees, moons, and stars. We’d even found arrowheads on the floor. I had one in my jewelry box and Helen put a couple in her box, too.
But I wasn’t thinking of Native Americans or arrowheads at all as I scampered up the hill and crawled behind the big rock. I didn’t need to ask if Helen was there, because I knew she was. I heard her wailing, loud and guttural, intermixed with sobs and yells to Command Center to stop hurting her with the “stinging, biting bees.”
I slithered through that slit, shaking at what I’d find, and stood up. I had a hard time seeing at first, because I went from the light of the day to the semidarkness of the cave, but then my eyes adjusted.
I saw Helen’s box, which was open, all the letters and pretty things strewn about, and I saw Helen, holding the playbill with the opera man’s face.
She was sitting up, hands on her stomach, sweating, panting, sobbing. She was wearing a green plaid maternity dress Grandma had bought her, one tennis shoe and one flip-flop, and tin foil wrapped around her chest.
“Get it out!” she hollered. “Get it out! It’s killing me!”
I scrambled over to Helen in the semidarkness of that cave, her knees up, teeth clenched in pain, panting. I instinctively hugged her. “It’s okay, Momma, I’ll help you. I’ll go get Grandma and Grandpa.”
I pulled away, ready to run, but she grabbed my wrist and yanked me back, our faces two inches from each other. “Don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t leave me.” Then she let out a piercing scream, that scream lancing through me like swords swishing through my insides. I can still hear it, deep within me, echoing through my nightmares.
“Don’t leave! Do you hear me, girl kid?” Her eyes were crazed, her breath coming in gasps, her knees trembling by that big belly of hers. “There’s an alien in there. A bee alien! Command Center doesn’t like it. It hurts! It’s hurting. I can feel it coming out! It’s coming out.”
Well, I was pretty smart—I even knew my multiplication tables and could spell schizophrenia—but I wasn’t sure how the baby got in her stomach without a husband, and I sure didn’t know how it came out. Did it come out through the stomach? Was there a zipper? I had heard they came out “down there,” but what did that mean? There were so many questions in my life already, living with Helen, and the baby issue had not been a priority to address.
Helen’s wracking scream brought me back to reality on the double, the noise echoing off the dark, wet walls of that cave as she yanked me back to her face, only inches away.
“I can’t breathe,” she said, her face a scrunched mask of misery. “I can’t breathe. Ohhh! Stop it, Punk! Stop it!”
“It’s okay, Momma, it’s okay.” I pushed her hair back from her sweating face and she groaned as she collapsed to the floor. “It’s okay.”
“Take it out,” she demanded, pale, sweaty, deathly, her beautiful blond hair caked with dirt and sweat. “Take it out and kill it.”
In my quaking fright, I knew two things: I didn’t have the slightest idea how to get the baby out, and I wasn’t going to kill it.
I found out a lot that night.
Seconds later Helen sat straight up again, dropped her head back and sobbed, grunted and moaned, breathed in and out like a freight train, and screamed again, mouth open all the way, eyes lost.
I stroked her hair with shaking hands, my mouth dry as sand. “Momma, let me go and get Grandpa—”
“No!” She sucked in air through her mouth, her lips bloody where she had bit down. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me with this thing. It’s killing me!”
She collapsed back on her elbows, her knees still up, her whole body heaving.
I decided then and there, almost comatose with fright, that I was not ever going to have a baby. I wasn’t going to go to the store or go to a baby doctor or go to a stork and get one of those things put in my stomach, no way.
She let out a primal, raw groan, then started crying, tears streaming down her face. “Save me, save me, girl kid!” This whole scene repeated several times, the freight train breathing, the groaning, until she yelled at me, “It’s coming! It’s coming!” Helen pulled up her dress to her waist and pointed at her naked privates. “Get it out. The aliens put it there. Pull it out. Out!”
I was used to seeing Helen’s privates because of her fear of bathrooms and showers, but her stomach was shocking. It was huge and seemed to be moving, her knees wide apart, shaking as if someone had put a wiggling worm in them. I put my hands on her stomach. Where was the zipper? Where was the opening? How was that baby going to get out? Would it be naked?
“Pull it out, girl kid, pull it out!” she hollered at me, her face white, eyes pooling with tears.
“I don’t know what to do, Momma,” I whimpered. “Where is it? Where’s the baby?”
She couldn’t answer for a second, her white face tight as she contorted in pain, then another tortured shout erupted, seemingly from the center of her ragged soul.
“It’s right there!” She swung an arm around, leaned toward her knees, and pointed at her privates, way “down there.”
“Get over there! Pull it! Get rid of it!”
I scampered around between Helen’s legs. She grabbed my shoulders and shook me until my teeth ached. “Help me! Help me!”
And then I saw something coming from between Helen’s legs. I felt sick. I felt ashamed. I shouldn’t be looking this close at Helen’s privates, and there was something wrong with them! They were huge and something moved down there, something I didn’t recognize. It was gross
. It was all red and wet and gooky. What was going on down there? What was that?
“Pull it out. Pull it out pull it out pull it out,” Helen told me, her voice weakening, her face pale, so pale white, sobbing.
I started to cry, the tears slipping down my face. Pull what out? Pull that thing?
But Helen was insistent. She rose up again, a wild animal in pain, grabbed my hands and shook them. “Pull it out, pull it out!”
That cut through the dense fog of my own terror. I peeked again and saw something coming out of Helen’s body. I put my little fingers on both sides of that hard thing and I pulled gently. Helen moaned between clenched teeth, and I stopped and cried and ripped my hands back.
But Helen was insistent, crying, begging. “Take it out, kid! Help me! It’s going to rip me apart! They’re going to kill me!”
I swayed, so nauseous, and scared, all the way to my petrified bones. Helen kept making guttural, animalistic sounds, and I put my hands down there again, and I could see that it was a head. A tiny head. I pulled and I didn’t stop pulling even though Helen was shrieking, her eyes wild as she dipped into hysteria, her hair sticking up all over, her mouth gaping open as her body shook and strained and arched. I pulled, so gentle, and a tiny baby came out, first her head, then her eyes and mouth, then shoulders and a tummy and two legs and teeny toes and all.
Helen heaved one more time, then collapsed back onto the dirt of the cave, panting, moaning, exhausted. She whispered, “It’s all over now. You can kill it.”
I held the baby on my lap, ignoring the rope that connected her to Helen. It resembled a brown snake and I thought it was gross, but I didn’t pay too much attention. The baby was red and wet and bloody and goopy, her fists flailing, and I could tell it was a girl, and I fell in love with her.
Right at that second.
I fell in love with my sister.
I heard voices and yelling outside the cave but I didn’t say anything because my baby had taken a deep breath, and sighed, and now she was sleeping. She made cat sounds, and I could see her chest going up and down, up and down. I held her up in my arms as I did with one of Grandma’s friend’s babies. Her name was Chloe and she was tiny, too.