“Ta-ra,” she said, stretching it out like it was two words. “This one must be Amanda’s.”
Amanda was my mother’s name, but the way she said Amanda, she might have been saying the earthquake or the flesh-eating disease. Still, I didn’t think much of her identifying me right away. Of course I was my mother’s daughter: I had her eyes, her heart-shaped mouth and one-dimpled smile, her round face, only darker.
“Yes, I remember Amanda,” Marianne went on. “I guess she never changed, did she?”
“She grew up,” said my grandmother, with a nervous laugh.
“They all do,” said Marianne, who went on to talk about her sons, an orthodontist and a deputy mayor. My grandmother looked uncomfortable, even after Marianne went to sit at her own table. Though usually she advised us to chew each bite twenty times, because we were young ladies, not wolves, she rushed us through the rest of our breakfast, admonishing us that our eggs were getting cold, even when we could still see the steam rising from them. After the meal, my grandmother relaxed again, but she made us walk around the lake for half an hour in order to let our food digest.
When we finally got to the pool, Allison and I were done with decorum. We threw our sundresses on the hot concrete and cannon-balled into the water, ignoring our grandmother’s shouts that we should be more careful, and who did we think was going to pick our things up from where we’d left them? We played Marco Polo while our grandmother sunbathed and read the kind of novel I could tell from the cover my mother would have called the waste of a perfectly valuable tree. When we got tired of Marco Polo, we tried doing handstands in the shallow end, and seeing who could hold her breath longest; and when that got boring, we played rock-paper-scissors to see which of us had to get out of the pool and go ask our grandmother for a penny to dive for. I lost. I climbed the ladder and saw that my grandmother had been joined by a woman in sunglasses and a straw hat.
“Grandma,” I called, and both women looked up, startled. I asked my grandmother for a penny and she rummaged through her purse to oblige.
“Amanda’s, I take it?” the woman beside her asked. She said my mother’s name with the same tone as the woman from breakfast. My grandmother nodded.
“What’s Amanda up to these days?” the woman asked, pressing her mouth into a thin-lipped smile. She turned away and reached for her sunscreen, as if already bored by the answer.
“She’s a doctor,” said my grandmother. I opened my mouth to clarify that she wasn’t a doctor doctor, but my grandmother shooed me away. I started to run off, then slowed down behind her, waiting to hear what else she said about my mother.
“Tara’s adopted,” my grandmother said. “From Brazil. Amanda’s down there now. She always did have a good heart.”
Here are some things I didn’t know then: The summer she was fifteen, my mother was forever banned from the premises of the Palisade Hills Country Club, after what was later described to me as “a small vandalism incident,” in protest of the golf course’s de facto segregation policy. The summer she was sixteen, my mother, bristling under my grandmother’s restrictions, ran away from home for several months. While she was gone, my grandfather died unexpectedly, and no one knew where to reach her until months after the funeral. My grandmother and my uncles buried him alone, and never let my mother forget it, because no one ever let them. Almost two years before I came to visit, a small cyst in my grandmother’s breast had turned out to be cancerous. My grandmother underwent a mastectomy, radiation, and reconstructive surgery, and was only recently back on her feet. My mother had promised to visit her in the hospital; she didn’t.
When we played in her yard, my grandmother usually sat on the porch to watch us, but eventually the phone or some other thing within the house called her away. Allison and I ran. We went for the trees, for the gravel path, for the wonders of the neighborhood or the seclusion of the nearby lake. Away from our grandmother, we mimicked the lives we imagined our parents having in our absence. We’d pretend to be my parents, carrying Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest around the northern Tallahassee suburbs, fancifully misidentifying dozens of plants, insects, and reptiles. We’d harass gardeners and mailmen and occasionally knock on the doors of my grandmother’s increasingly bemused neighbors, calling ourselves ethnographers and asking them to tell us about their people. Then we’d pretend to be Allison’s parents. Those afternoons we stripped to our bathing suits, slathered ourselves with coconut tanning oil (though I was already browner than the woman on the bottle), and made over our faces with Allison’s pilfered makeup kit. She swore her mother had so many cosmetics bags that she hadn’t even noticed one was missing, something I found shocking, having a mother who practically considered ChapStick ornamental.
After our makeovers, Allison and I would climb to sit beside each other on a branch of the biggest tree above the lake, pretending it was a ship’s deck, and the water beneath us the Atlantic Ocean. We imitated the way we’d heard adults talk, complained about our imaginary jobs, the scandalous behavior of our friends and coworkers, the way our families drove us crazy, and about—we never forgot this part—how much we missed our daughters and wished we’d taken them with us. I liked our pretend cruise ship days because I imagined us glamorous, like Allison’s parents. When I pressed her for details about their travels, she’d just shrug, and say “How do I know? They never take me with them.” I knew better than to say that my parents never took me with them, either, but they talked to me enough that I knew all about where they had been.
When our secret days were finished, we’d cool off by dipping our bodies in the shallow end of the lake, and then sneak back into my grandmother’s house, dripping some combination of muddy lake water and suntan oil and high-end cosmetics across my grandmother’s floors. On those occasions that Allison couldn’t manage to charm forgiveness out of her, we accepted our increasingly restrictive punishments with some combination of amusement and grim determination: we cleaned bathroom tile with a toothbrush; we were not allowed to accompany my grandmother to the city on shopping trips; we ate Brussels sprouts for dinner for an entire week; we were spanked, which was new to both of us. My grandmother blamed me more than Allison for our expeditions.
Though we were equally guilty, I accepted the blame, knowing that whenever it was possible, whatever punishment she gave me Allison would take along with me. Once we spent an entire morning locked in the bathroom. I’d been ordered not to come out until I had done something with my hair. We thought she was kidding us at first, because the door only locked from the inside anyway; but when we stopped laughing and tried to open it, we found she’d actually taken clothesline and looped it from the doorknob to the banister in order to shut us in. Originally it was supposed to be for an hour, but when she told me it wasn’t even really a punishment, because a girl my age ought to be able to brush her own hair and it was a travesty that my mother hadn’t taught me, I’d muttered that she couldn’t even brush my hair, and look how old she was, and just like that one hour turned into six.
In the bathroom, Allison and I pretended that we’d been confined to our cruise ship cabins because of stormy conditions and choppy water. We sang “Kokomo” at the top of our lungs over and over again, and when that got old we ran the bathtub full of water and splashed each other until we were soaking, complaining that the storm was so bad our cabin was flooding. When my grandmother finally let us out, my hair looked the same as it had that morning, only damper. Insufficiently chastised, we collapsed at her feet giggling and shouting Land! Land! What did it matter, what chores she made us do or how many hours a day she forbade us to leave the house, when we had each other?
A month into the summer, my grandmother had a brainstorm. She sat us down in the family room after dinner one night, and told us that we absolutely must stop disobeying her and running off, that she’d become very worried about us, and that the next time we disappeared, she’d have no choice but to call the police. We nodded our assent, but were doubtful. Our grandmother h
ad worried about what the neighbors would think when the gardener took a week off and dandelions had sprouted in her yard; we could only imagine what she’d do if people spotted a police car in her driveway. Sensing our skepticism, she leaned forward in her chair, looking first me and then Allison in the eyes.
“Do you know what’s living in that lake?” our grandmother asked.
I thought we did. Minnows. Tadpoles. Mosquitoes we regularly slapped off of ourselves.
“Snakes,” said my grandmother. “Snakes are in that lake.”
I giggled. We’d seen the occasional small brown garden snake; my mother had told me before she left that there were a lot of them where she grew up, and I shouldn’t be alarmed, because they were perfectly harmless. I repeated this to my grandmother.
“Tell your mother,” said my grandmother, “that when you leave a place for twenty years, a lot changes. They’ve got these pythons that love water. Some idiots imported them as pets, and now they’re taking over. A Burmese python can grow to be the size of the both of you put together, and can get you from twenty feet away. Sometimes they lay eggs in drainpipes, and the baby python will travel through the sewer pipes and come right in through a hole in a wall and eat their prey alive. When a python eats something it eats everything, even the bones. Crushes them completely. Lately there’ve been a lot of cats and dogs lost, even a huge Saint Bernard—vanished. I’d hate to lose a granddaughter. There’d be nothing left of you to find. Tell your mother she has never had any idea how easy it is for something to be destroyed.”
Two weeks after that, I fell out of a bunk bed. My grandmother, sensing she’d gotten to me, had begun elaborating on the latest exploits of the Burmese python after dinner every night. A Burmese python had been caught in a child’s bedroom in Orlando. A Burmese python had eaten an alligator in Lake Jackson; a tourist had gotten a picture of it happening, before he ran. A Burmese python came out of the pipes in a Miami kitchen; a plumber only narrowly escaped with his life, and only because he was too fat for the snake to get his jaws around. Three cats were missing from the house at the end of the block: they’d gone out in the morning as usual and simply never come back.
I consulted the books my parents had left me, contemplating metallurgy and purification rituals as forms of protection. Actually undertaking any of them was impossible, especially when I refused to leave the house. It wasn’t just the outside world I was newly afraid of: I was haunted by what my grandmother had said about baby pythons, and imagined one growing and swelling inside the walls even now. My grandmother had won one battle—I stayed where she could see me, I tracked no more mud into her house—but she hadn’t bargained for the way the fear would overtake me. I was afraid of snakes, yes, but I was also afraid of open windows, peeling paint, creaking floorboards, sinks, bathtubs, and toilets. I dropped the talisman I’d made out of the plastic wings and chewing gum down an open shower drain while trying to wash myself and hold it under the faucet at the same time. I refused to pee unless Allison held my hand, panicked when within ten feet of a wall, and tried my best not to sleep at night. One night, while trying to keep my body as far from the bedroom wall as possible, I fell from the top bunk. I hit my head, hard enough that it smacked sharply against the bare floor and Allison woke up screaming at the sound.
By the time my grandmother rushed into the room to see what had happened, Allison had already climbed out of the bottom bunk to sit beside me. My grandmother ran for her first, and I told myself, without believing it, that it was because she was the one who had screamed. Allison extracted herself from my grandmother’s arms.
“Tara fell,” she shrieked. “She fell off the top of the bed.”
“Are you hurt?” my grandmother asked.
“I hit my head.”
My grandmother pressed a palm to my forehead.
“You’re not cut,” she said. “Are you dizzy?”
I shook my head no.
“Don’t move your head,” said Allison, who had come by her medical knowledge through frequent viewings of her mother’s favorite soap opera. “Grandma, she could have a concussion.”
“The bed is five feet high,” said my grandmother. “No one has a concussion. And if I take you to the hospital to find that out officially, they’d need to shave all those knots off the back of your head to see your scalp. Go back to bed, both of you. Come get me if you feel funny.”
I didn’t want to get back into the bed. I thought briefly that if I went to the hospital, my parents might be called and, upon hearing that the house had been overtaken by enormous pythons, come and get me out of here, maybe Allison too. But it was possible that no one would reach my parents. In any case, I believed my grandmother about the head shaving, and I didn’t want to be bald. I stayed on the floor, thinking that the ground was a good safe distance from the walls and whatever might be inhabiting them. Allison’s voice rescued me from the embarrassment of admitting I was afraid to get back into my bed. “I think,” she announced with the authoritative wisdom of someone six months older, “you have a concussion. You shouldn’t move. I’m going to sleep next to you so I can check your breathing.”
She pulled the blue blanket off the bottom bunk and brought it to me. We curled up in the center of the floor, counting our breaths in whispers until they came almost in unison. I opened my eyes every few minutes to check the walls for any sign of movement, and check that Allison was still there. Every fourth or fifth time, I’d find Allison staring back at me, her two small fingers reaching out to feel the pulse on my neck.
By the next morning, I was jumpy again. I kept up my new rituals, persisted in refusing to go outside. Nightly, Allison persuaded me into our bedroom, letting me sleep in the bottom bunk with her. When I refused to even do that, she’d sleep beside me on the floor. I spent most of my days in the center of the living room. Among its advantages were a wall consisting almost entirely of plate glass windows, meaning there was one less direction from which I could be ambushed, and a wall of portraits that—once I’d read through the last of the books my parents had sent me with—I began to study in earnest, in order to keep myself entertained.
There was my grandmother’s whole life, in gilded frames: the family together, my grandmother younger and undeniably beautiful, the grandfather I had never met. Pictures of my uncles as kids, their hair pressed down so flat it looked like they’d been wearing helmets before the pictures were taken. Uncle Mark and Uncle Timothy at high school and then college graduations. Wedding portraits, including one of Allison’s father marrying his first wife. At the one Christmas dinner we’d spent together, my grandmother announced the first wife was a better woman than Allison’s mother would ever be. Allison had run from the room in tears. Everyone else sat there like they hadn’t heard her. My mother said later that if they’d all stopped eating every time my grandmother said something honest but awful, they would have starved to death before they were ten.
There were no pictures of my mother’s wedding on my grandmother’s wall. The pictures of her stopped at sixteen. There was my mother, wispy and young-looking, eyes wide open and surprised. I imagined her daydreaming before the photo was snapped. It wasn’t long after that when my mother took off on a road trip across the country with friends who imagined themselves hippies. Some of these people were still my mother’s friends, and in one of their houses I had seen pictures from that summer: my mother laughing and making faces in the backseat, my mother sleeping on a beach somewhere. My mother didn’t talk about that summer. While she was off with her friends, my grandfather was killed when his small plane encountered a tropical storm and crashed.
In my grandmother’s butterfly theory, my mother was the moth who flapped her wings in Japan and caused disaster; there was an inevitable correlation between her being in the wrong place at the wrong time and my grandfather’s untimely accident. I had been given this secret knowledge too early to know what to do with it. I was old enough to know better than to prod my mother with questions, but too young t
o understand debt and obligation. Too young to understand what my mother must have felt during her mother’s fight with cancer, or to appreciate the uncertainty my grandmother must have been living with. I was too young to understand that a python could be not just a threat but a warning, and too young to understand why this summer, of all summers, I had been sent off as a flawed peace offering.
Allison got impatient with my refusal to leave the living room. She tried to reason with me: “If a snake wanted to eat us, wouldn’t it have done it already? If a starving python was living in our lake, wouldn’t all the other animals be dead by now?” I wanted to believe her, but then I pictured myself being crushed into fine dust inside of something so big that no one could hear me scream, vanishing without my parents ever knowing what had happened. When logic failed, Allison retrieved my copy of Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest from where it lay abandoned and pointed out pictures of snake after snake.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a picture of a man with a large yellow snake wrapped around his shoulders, two women in the background looking unphased. “All these people who live with snakes, and they haven’t been eaten. Your parents are with these snakes right now, and they’re not dead.”
“How do you know?” I asked. They’d told me before leaving that by a month into the summer, they would be unreachable, leaving Rio for the dense territory of the rain forest, a place where they neither sent nor received letters.
Allison gave up on me after that. She stopped letting me sleep on the bottom bunk; she began to tease me about my fears. I made a new amulet out of one of Allison’s barrettes and a friendship bracelet she had given me; Allison demanded the barrette back and, when I refused, ripped the bracelet in half. My phobia was taking a greater toll on her than boredom. Being inside meant she had to spend more time in the direct presence of my grandmother. My grandmother quizzed Allison incessantly about her grades, pulled her into the study to review brochures for day schools she wanted Allison to be prepared to apply to next summer. Allison’s credentials sorely disappointed her; makeup theft and an active imagination were apparently not among the early markers of genius. Her grades were not great, and her school records were dotted with minor citations: Allison talked back to teachers, Allison poured glue in someone’s hair, Allison stole the class turtle to keep as a pet. When I overheard my grandmother grilling Allison over these infractions, I shimmered with a kind of pride in her boldness, but Allison’s explanations were alarmingly meek. Even my grandmother noticed that Allison seemed to get in some sort of trouble every time her parents left for a vacation, which they did often, year-round, but Allison refused to admit to the correlation.
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Page 4