The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

by Darrin Doyle

  Doctor Burger tipped over backwards as if in slow motion. He lay supine on the floor, his face pale. His chest heaved, and he gasped for breath. His eyes, two giant orbs, stared at the ceiling as cigarettes slid out of the pack in his breast pocket and landed willy-nilly about his face and neck.

  The Mapeses never called Doctor Maboob.

  27.

  Doctor Burger cannot be called “the first casualty of Audrey Mapes’s reign of terror,” as the geezers have argued. At sixty-three, Burger was no poster boy for healthy living. He, like most senior citizens of the 1970s, appeared older than his years, with his liver-spotted hands, his anemic crown of white hair combed within an inch of its life, his low-slung, rubbery jowls, his labored breathing. A two-pack-a-day smoker for more than three decades, his lungs were the color of the Grim Reaper’s cloak. His arteries were packed with the slough of a sloe gin fizz and Eggs Benedict diet. If Audrey hadn’t scared him to death, some opossum in his garbage can on a Sunday morning surely would have.

  No, I assert that the first casualty of Audrey’s “reign” was not a body, but a soul. Annabelle Pensolotschy’s soul, to be precise.

  Such a sweet name, Annabelle. So pure. So melodious. Two palindromes snuggling a “b” (group hug!). Four doubled letters arranged in perfect symmetry, 1-2-1, 1-2-1, like a line of hills inflamed to coppery gold by the sun’s plunge. A name that speaks of constancy, poetry, innocence. My beautiful, my graceful, my Annabelle.

  How fitting, then, that the mushmouthed toddler McKenna (Toby later tried to claim credit—he could never give anyone else credit for anything) couldn’t pronounce “Grandma Anna” without sounding like a barnyard animal. Grandma’s appellation was changed, first to her surname (But who could pronounce Pensolotschy?), and quickly thereafter to a truncated, easy-on-the-tongue version—Pencil.

  So accurate! So reflective of her personality! A tool that depends upon sharpness and pointedness; a tool that can stab and poison; a tool that communicates feelings, yes, but impermanent ones, feelings that change with the rub of an eraser and leave no evidence of the original. A fickle, untrustworthy—dare I say cheap—piece of wood that messes your lap with curled shavings and breaks when you push on it too hard.

  Grandma Pencil—or “Cheesepurse,” as some of the kids took to calling her because they could always sneak a slice of Kraft out of there—became a regular presence at St. Monica’s. She was a “floater,” a “helper,” an “aide” (all unofficial titles, all off the books) who appeared in classrooms without warning to assist in administering tests, buttoning winter coats, or monitoring playground behavior. And always, always, always Grandma Pencil devoted precious time to standing in the corner, or at the chalkboard, or in the hallway . . . with the nuns. A little group time for commiserating, whispering, judging, scheming.

  Grandma Pencil first met her surrogate sisters on that fateful “Bring Your Grandparents to School Day” when McKenna and Toby were starting fourth grade. This was less than a year after Doctor Burger’s fatal coronary. Who knows what it was, exactly, that made Grandma’s initial St. Monica’s visit so meaningful.

  Had it reawakened an unfulfilled desire to be a teacher, or perhaps a nun?

  Or did the sisters merely seem like an attractive crew? Buddies that Grandma could envision herself hanging out with? Shoulders to lean on, cry on, and rub with Ben-Gay? Ears to chew?

  Maybe it was simply their age that brought them together, that unspoken camaraderie of the almost-dead, that sorority of Great Depression barn photographs and Tommy Dorsey albums.

  Or perhaps Grandma was chiseling her way into a clique with front-row tickets to the concert of Eternal Bliss. If so, who could blame her?

  More realistically, though, experiencing Catholic school on “Grandparents Day” had probably revealed a structure that Grandma Pencil’s own life had always lacked, one that fate had stolen from her. She’d been uprooted from her birthplace of Kalamazoo and taken to the Philippines, where she spent four of her most formative years (six through nine) in an internment camp.

  There, the only dependable things were the murderous sun and the empty stomach she carried every day, the stomach that grew to hate her, the stomach that growled and rebelled when she so much as sipped the tainted tap water. Her stomach was a mangy, beaten dog that she longed to snuggle but that she ended up ignoring out of fear that it would soon die anyway. Ten hours a day, Annabelle stood on bare soles beside her mother and three older sisters, cooked by the 120-degree heat, in a line of ragged people as long and depressing as the Vietnam Memorial, only to receive half a bowl of rice and a tin cup of body-temperature water that tasted like blood.

  Her father was gone, a hole in their lives. He’d disappeared from their hut two days after they were captured. The unspoken belief was that he was either a POW or was dead. In either case, they were powerless to bring him back. Each day of not knowing his condition meant a fortifying of Annabelle’s psychic defenses. Each day meant that another piece of her father—his deep, sonorous laugh, the softness of his flannel against her cheek, his firm palm on her back, coaxing her to brave the public pool—was excised from Annabelle’s mind. To hold onto any part of him was too painful, too dangerous.

  Her mother tried to raise their spirits by invoking Daddy, by showing them his picture, by telling about the time he dropped his shoe into the toilet or when he accidentally hammered a hole in the kitchen wall. But Annabelle stared coldly at the photograph and listened to the stories without expression. This man was a stranger. She had already buried him, mourned, and moved on. (And so had his POW barracks-mates, as it turns out. Shot in the head.)

  So St. Monica’s Elementary was where Annabelle Pensolotschy finally found her family, her routine, her stability.

  Nuns are nothing if not predictable. They commit their lives to the sanctity of routine. After all, remember their husband’s M.O.—the sun, the tides, the rotation of the Earth—and maybe you’ll get some small sense of a Catholic nun’s aspirations.

  Sister P.V., Sister Robert Ann, Sister Maximillian, Sister Pat, and Sister Michael lived together in the convent behind the church. They woke at 5:45 a.m., even on weekends. Each Sister, beginning with the eldest, was allotted seven minutes of bathroom time. “Age before beauty!” the younger ones loved to say, with chuckles. They said grace before slurping tea and unsweetened oatmeal at one big table. They strolled to the garden to water vegetables and pull weeds. Yes, it was quite a community. They lashed each other’s naked buttocks with rosaries if the laundry didn’t get done on time. Fortunately, it always got done on time. You see, the laundry routine, like every other routine, was carved into the stone tablets of their wizened heads.

  In addition to sharing bathrooms, the nuns shared delusions. They also shared an unwillingness to perform self-examinations of any kind.

  Undoubtedly, these qualities appealed to Grandma Pencil.

  Where you would see stubbornness, the nuns saw conviction. Where you would see vindictiveness, the nuns saw the even hand (read: the open backhand) of justice. Where you would see pettiness, the nuns saw the Devil in the details. Where you would see nosiness and invasion of privacy, the nuns saw council.

  Where you would see hate, they also saw hate (of the “sin,” not the “sinner”).

  Where you would see sin, they saw the sinner.

  28.

  The years drifted by, as years do. A more accurate verb has never been applied. Like rafts upon an ocean, or astronauts cut loose from their space walks, the anni float at a languid pace, with no set direction, providing an arbitrary definition of “progress.” Always moving, yes, always arriving somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

  And of course, by “years,” I mean our lives. Our selves. Us. You and me. We drift.

  1982, ’83, ’84, ’85. A dazzling era. Arcade games, home video games, Olympic Games, Trivial Pursuit games, War Games . The Year of the Bible. Swatches. Sally Ride. A bull terrier in shades pitching beer. The first execution by lethal injection.
Music Tele-vision. Moonboots. Styrofoam. Chinese yo-yos. Happy Meals. The Computer is The Man of the Year. Saved whales, bludgeoned seals.

  What began as a volunteer stint became a paying gig. St. Monica’s named Grandma Pencil the official Classroom Assistant—a position created for her. Five days a week, five hours a day, she went into rooms as needed, lending support, zipping zippers, licking gold stars, pitching in, scolding, making herself useful. Never mind that she had no qualifications, no formal training in education . . . Neither did the nuns! So it worked.

  Grandma Pencil was, after all, just under fifty years old. A spring chicken by today’s standards, and what’s a chicken if it’s got nothing to peck?

  Like her daughter, she’d never held a job. After the G.I.s freed her and her family from Los Baños on February 23, 1945, the Pen-solotschy clan came back to the U.S., to Kalamazoo, and lived off the money the government paid out to war widows. Her father hadn’t been a soldier, but all internment camp survivors were given this status. The money was a pittance. Annabelle’s mother knew what she had to do.

  She remarried a year later. As Pencil would describe it, “Mommy got herself a little leprechaun.” By this, she wasn’t only referring to her stepfather’s diminutive stature, bright orange shock of hair, and deep Irish roots. What Grandma Pencil also meant was that Sean Flannery McCain had a giant pot of gold. But instead of having to be tricked, this leprechaun shared his gold recklessly, drunkenly. He foisted it on people in the same way a shore leave sailor passes gas—sometimes without even realizing he’s doing it.

  And like it or not, everyone gets a taste.

  Annabelle and her sisters ascended eight rungs, give or take, on the socioeconomic ladder. For a while, they lived the good life in a 5,000 square-foot home on the shore of Lake Michigan, near St. Joseph. McCain was an entrepreneur, a self-made man, an importer and dealer of exotic “native artwork.” He traveled to New Guinea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Nepal, Morocco, Madrid, Peru, and Bolivia, snatching up local treasures for pennies and selling them in the States at one thousand times the price he’d paid. He bought an even bigger house, this one in East Grand Rapids.

  Annabelle was given a respectable private school education at St. Alphonsus and then West Catholic high school. After graduating summa cum laude, she shipped off to Aquinas College (a twenty-minute drive from home; she lived in the dorms all four years). She immersed herself in philosophical and religious texts and ate copious amounts of peanuts, crackers, Cheetos, and trail mix. The instant her stomach growled, all of the horror came rushing back: that furnace of a hut; that stifling air; those mosquitoes growing fat on her blood; the dysentery; the bones coming to life on her skin like a secret, buried self, threatening to burst forth and erase the girl she could see in the shard of mirrored glass her mother kept hidden beneath the straw mattress.

  After college, Annabelle followed in her mother’s footsteps by marrying a nice Irish Catholic gentleman named Raynor Childs. Ray, in fact, was the Junior Regional Distribution Manager—or some such nonsense—for Sean McCain’s burgeoning Exotica and Tribal Wonders Emporium. Annabelle bore Ray a daughter, whom they named Misty. Shortly thereafter, Annabelle’s plumbing went bad. She underwent an emergency hysterectomy. Once Misty entered grade school, Annabelle made it clear to her husband that she wanted to get a job (her major was in Philosophy, her minor in Sociology), but Ray was firm: no wife of his would work. He insisted that she “take care of the house.”

  What a smothering life that must have been for young Misty Childs! To have her mother at home every second of every day, scrutinizing her every move!

  Wait . . . that’s exactly how it was for Audrey, McKenna, and Toby. Never mind.

  From the outside, it undoubtedly seemed that Annabelle should be happy with her upper middle class, split-level ranch home in suburban Grand Rapids. Not to mention her healthy (if introverted and passive) daughter and handsome husband with his well-groomed mustache, stable career, and no apparent flaws other than a penchant for hording dirty magazines under the bed.

  Most people would hear this described and say, “Now that’s the life!”

  In truth, though, too much free time, too many quiet, uninterrupted moments of sitting, staring, and thinking . . . well, that can be the worst sort of slow death. Worse than cancer, because nobody actually believes it’s a disease. They’ll scoff and tell you to get off your lazy ass and do something, “Get a hobby, for Christ’s sake!”

  And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Annabelle Childs,aka Annabelle Pensolotschy, aka Grandma Pencil, went as mad as a Columbian dwarf during those years as a “kept” woman.

  No one but Misty and Annabelle knows exactly what went on in that house, but McKenna and Toby overheard many conversations between Mom and Dad. They pieced together a number of incidents: how Annabelle had gone into a rage while Ray was overseas, had torn apart his magazines and wallpapered the living room with nude women; how Annabelle forced Misty to copy lines out of the telephone book if Misty didn’t finish what was on her plate (“One page per pea,” they heard Misty say to Murray, with a tired laugh); how Annabelle became convinced that Ray had died during a Thailand jungle expedition; how Annabelle pulled Misty, quite literally, out of school and dragged her to the airport with only the clothes on her back (and a passport, one must presume); how they landed in Bangkok and spent the next two months hopping broken-down buses and third-class trains, searching remote villages for Ray, who had returned three days after they’d left town, and in a panic filed a missing persons report and corralled hundreds of search volunteers.

  A short time later, Annabelle was placed in a home. “Mental exhaustion,” they labeled it. Annabelle’s sisters, at this point, were both married to Filipino men and living, ironically, in Manila, fifty miles from the site of their internment camp. Annabelle’s mother had long-since passed away, and there was no one to look after Misty. Rather than cut back his workload or stay home himself, Ray hired a full-time nanny and tutor (“My business doesn’t stop because your mother decides to have a breakdown!”).

  After six months, Annabelle returned home. Misty spent the next seven years under the watchful eye of her “recovering” mom. Only the imagination can supply the details of that dark time. Needless to say, Misty bolted as soon as her leash was removed. At eighteen, she got her own apartment in the Heritage Hill district downtown. Shortly thereafter, she invited her new boyfriend Murray, who worked at the caulking glue factory, to move in.

  Raynor Childs divorced Annabelle in 1972, the same year Misty gave birth to their grandchildren, McKenna and Toby. An alimony payment was agreed upon and signed into action, and then all that remained of this man—Misty’s father, Annabelle’s husband, and McKenna, Toby, and Audrey’s Grandpa Childs—was a washed-out black-and-white photograph showing him with Misty (age five or so) perched on his shoulders. Both of them are staring down into the rising mist of Victoria Falls.

  The day is partly cloudy or partly sunny, depending.

  29.

  By the time McKenna and Toby were twelve, the nuns were regular dinner guests.

  They never came all at once; they never came alone. Like Noah’s precious cargo, they arrived in pairs, stepping gingerly up the cracked walkway, arms linked, appearing not so much pious as geriatric and scared outside the bubbles of their sanctimonious classrooms. Once they’d climbed the four concrete steps, their knock rattled the metal door with all the force of a dried sponge tossed by a Farm League reject.

  Two or three times a month they descended, always unannounced to the family. Grandma Pencil figured that no one would mind. After all, she was doing 95 percent of the cooking these days.

  A couple of Mapeses minded, though. The nuns were Mc-Kenna and Toby’s teachers, ex- teachers, future teachers. For the twins, the dinners ranged from uncomfortable to mortifying. The only choice they had was to hide in their room until the last possible moment, doing (or in Toby’s case, pretending to do) homework.

  “Fucking pen
guins!” Toby said.

  He’d seen The Blues Brothers on his friend Tommy’s HBO (Tommy was Toby’s friend, not McKenna’s, you’ll notice). Toby loved to say the f-word in all its provocative and hilarious incarnations. He used it like a claw hammer on unsuspecting victims. Like the time he told a mentally handicapped kid at school, “Fuck a fencepost, you fucking retard.” Grandma Pencil had given up on scolding Toby about his gutter mouth, except when he occasionally let one slip in front of the nuns, at which point she flushed with embarrassment and told him to do fifty push- ups. Toby was happy to oblige, and Grandma and the nuns always cheered him to the finish.

  “Dad says they’re lousy cooks,” McKenna said. “That’s why they come over.”

  “Of course they are,” Toby answered. He lay on his bed with a Fitness magazine held above his face. “They’ve been sucking Bro-phy’s thingy so long, everything else tastes like cardboard.”

  “Why doesn’t it surprise me,” McKenna said, “that you know what Father Brophy’s thingy tastes like?” She was seated at the writing desk.

  An empty Coke can hit the back of McKenna’s head. It landed on the carpet without a sound. These were the pre- divider days, before a floral- patterned chintz provided each twin an 8' × 9' empire to rule.

  “AUDREY! SNACK!” Toby yelled, returning to an article about gluteals and quads and the rest of his oily dementia.

  “Don’t,” McKenna said. She tried to concentrate on her English worksheet. Pen poised, no answers came. Identify the indirect object in the following sentence:

  “SNACK, JAWS!” Toby hollered.

  The door creaked open. Audrey, on crutches, entered. Her hair was pulled back into a knot and fastened by a barrette that was braided with red and blue ribbon—her “rainbow barrette.” Very trendy, very 1984. McKenna hated to see her sister being sucked into the fashion vortex. The barrette matched Audrey’s shirt rainbow, which arched across her chest from three- quarter sleeve to three-quarter sleeve.