by Jo Ann Beard
“You are not the kind of person we worry about,” she said reassuringly as they walked over to where we were sitting. “It’s the others that we worry about—things you would not believe.”
“I’ll bet,” my mother agreed vaguely.
The woman went behind the counter where the tellers were and came back with an all-day sucker for Ray, a set of knives for Meg, and a manicure kit for me.
“Free gifts,” she told my mother. “For when they open a checking account some day.”
While Meg considers the peacoat request, I clean her half of the room, hauling clothes out from under the bed and folding them. It’s incredible what’s under there, stuff from summer, plates my mother has been looking for, makeup, curlers, and way in the back a really cute shirt all balled up with the tags still on it.
“That’s for you,” she says quickly.
It’s a dark, rich burgundy, fitted at the top and loose at the bottom, gathered right under the bodice with a narrow black ribbon. Meg jumps up from her bed, yanks off the tags, and puts them in her pocket.
“It looks big but it isn’t,” she explains, holding it up to me. “See?”
It’s true, and when I try it on, something amazing happens—boobs appear out of nowhere, nestled right above the black ribbon. No matter which way I turn, they’re still there. It’s a dazzling, expensive shirt, given to me by my sister for unknown reasons. I yawn casually, take it off, and stow it in my dresser.
Once her side of the room is as clean as mine, she lets me try on her peacoat, which doesn’t fit. At all.
This puts her in a genial mood. “So, what’s that kid’s name?” she asks.
“Prentiss,” I tell her after a long pause.
“What’s his first name?”
“Kevin,” I say after a longer pause.
“And what do we like about Kevin Prentiss? Is he cute?”
I try staring at her the way she stares at me. Both of us have brown eyes. Brown eyes staring at brown eyes. Still staring. Brown eyes like pools of muddy water, seeping toward one another. Still staring. Water, seeping toward other water, getting ready to merge. I blink.
“He’s okay,” I say.
* * *
Once Whinny collects my sister, I put a mud mask on my face and talk on the phone to Felicia while it dries. Then I scrub it off and get out my manicure kit and use all the tools in order, even the one I don’t know what to do with, which looks like a miniature shovel. Then I get the shirt out and try it on again, with various pants. Then I look at the CPO jacket and try to figure out how to make it warmer. Then I go downstairs in my nightgown and make popcorn.
Everybody is gone but me.
The dog and I go back up and get in bed to read with our bowl of popcorn. We’ve got two books going at once—David Copperfield, which we know by heart, and Look Homeward, Angel, which we don’t altogether understand. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door… that’s the underlying theme. My mother got it at a yard sale.
I read a few random chapters about David C., just for the simplicity of it—“I Am Born,” “I Fall into Disgrace,” “I Have a Memorable Birthday,” et cetera—and then switch for a while to reading about Eugene, the fellow in the other book. Tammy curls up beside my knees and stares at me for popcorn, which she doesn’t like. I hand her several pieces, which she takes and then sets down on the bedspread.
“No, eat them,” I urge her, and my voice sounds really, really loud and strange. What size stone? What kind of leaf? What color door? Usually I see the stone as smooth and weighty, like a river rock; the leaf slender and serrated, like an elm leaf; and the door as the door to the old chicken shed behind my grandmother’s house, dark flaking green with a rusted latch. Right outside that chicken shed was a thick stump with two nails pounded into it about an inch and a half apart. My cousins and I used to climb a trellis onto the roof of the chicken shed and then jump from the peak onto a pile of loose dirt. I liked the old stump and would lean on it, touching the nail heads lightly, while I waited for my turn to climb, until one of my cousins told me that between those nails was where the chickens’ necks were laid while they were getting their heads chopped off.
I suddenly don’t feel that well.
My book is full of long, bulbous passages describing things I don’t want to know about Eugene and his demented, vain family. The whole thing is florid and thick, too heavy to rest on my chest without hurting.
I feel like I might throw up.
One of Eugene’s older brothers, the sweet, melancholy one, dies of typhoid and they put his body on something called a cooling board. Eugene has managed to forget this brother during the short course of his illness, but it all comes back to him—the soft eyes, the strange, delicate demeanor, the birthmark—when he sees the brother laid out on his cooling board. He misses him suddenly with the kind of terrible intensity people in his family are known for: “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!”
I sob, ill.
Tammy hops down off my bed and walks over to Meg’s bed, jumps up, scratches the bedspread into a heap, and settles down again, black nose nestled into her side.
There might have been something wrong with the popcorn.
My own brother is at a Cub Scout sleepover in his school’s gymnasium; the last time I saw him he had on his dark blue Cub Scout shirt and a bright yellow neckerchief, held in place with a Webelo clasp. I creep over to the desk and upend the plastic wastebasket to dump out its contents, then carry it back to my bed. After a few minutes I retch into it, and a lava flow of dinner comes up, with kernels of popcorn here and there. The dog jumps down and leaves the room.
Help, I’m sick.
My mother is over at Tuck’s, the neighborhood tavern. “I guess I’ll go have one,” she said after the dinner dishes were done. “I’m too tired to do anything else.”
On nights like this, when my dad is missing, she sits with other couples and with her best friend, Kay, a small woman with a gravelly voice and a similarly drunk husband. It’s a mysterious, damp cave over there at Tuck’s. No kids are allowed, but they can peer in from the propped-open door during daylight hours and see the dark wood, a glimpse of mirror, and every kind of liquor possible, lined up on shelves behind the bar, like a library, only booze. There are usually one or two people sitting on stools with an ashtray and a glass in front of them. You can order cheese sandwiches there; I’ve had them brought home to me.
More retching, more molten lava.
I grab the phone cord and reel it in from my bed, dial the number to Tuck’s and Tuck answers. Ten minutes later she’s coming up the stairs. I feel better, but not that much. I can’t stop shivering.
“I-I-I-I c-c-c-c-can’t st-st-st-stop sh-shiv-shiv-shivering,” I tell her.
She peers into the wastebasket. “Oh boy,” she says. “I thought you looked funny all week.”
Her cure for everything is to grind up a bitter white aspirin and have us drink it in a tablespoon of water.
“No,” I croak.
“You’ve got to,” she tells me firmly. It’s the middle of the night and I’m in her bed, throwing up over the side into a series of wastebaskets that she’s collected and washed out. I keep falling asleep and imagining things. Hands, inflated like rubber gloves, a kitten in a T-shirt. Once, Kevin Prentiss jumps down a set of stairs and bounces back up in the air like he has giant springs on his feet, arms pinwheeling. Bounce, bounce, across the landscape and gone. Raymond in his Cub Scout kerchief, taking miniature cars out of his pocket and setting them loose on the floor, where they race toward me across the bedcovers.
“Get them off,” I holler, and they are swept away by Mr. Dreil, the custodian at my old grade school. He steers a long red dust mop down a hallway and into the detention room, where Felicia is bent over a biology tray, poking a scalpel at a fetal pig. My mother takes the biology tray away from Felicia and puts it in the oven, twists the knob on the timer.
“It’s formaldehyded!” I cry, waking myself up.
“What? What did you say?” my mother mumbles, dozing beside me.
“Nothing,” I murmur, embarrassed, and slide backwards into it again. Poor old Lepkis sweeps equations off the board with a whisk broom, into a spoon that my mother puts against my lips.
“No!” I say.
“Yes,” she tells me. “You have to, you’re burning up.”
She needs to put me on a cooling board. Eugene’s sister carried him in to show him the wasted husk in the bed—soft, willing Grover, dead at twelve. I see an ironing board balanced on its thin heron’s legs, a dead boy stretched out on it. My mother approaches with a steam iron in one hand. The boy is Prentiss, in a burgundy shirt with the tags still on it.
“No!” I cry.
“Yes,” she says. “Now here.”
I drink the spoonful of chalk, and by morning I’m sitting up, eating toast.
She’s got me in the living room with sheets and pillows on the couch and cartoons on the TV, while she’s in the kitchen, cleaning cupboards, talking on the phone, and every once in a while stretching the cord around the corner to check on me. Trying to radiate a sense of health and well-being, I ignore her. When she snaps her fingers, I nod without taking my eyes off the TV.
These cartoons are nothing like during my era. The drawings aren’t that good, if you compare Mighty Mouse or Donald Duck, say, to the Archies or Scooby-Doo. If I want to know about Archie and his friends, I’ll read one of the three thousand Archie comic books that we have in our attic—in the comics, the characters are dark and ridiculous, that’s the joke, that’s why it’s a comic. In the cartoon, they aren’t meant to be ridiculous at all but are members of a rock band. Scooby-Doo is also depressing, if you think about it—the dog is a Great Dane, and they don’t live very long, maybe seven or eight years at the most.
“How long has this show been on?” I ask Ray. He’s back from his sleepover, eating bowl after bowl of cereal.
“An hour?” he says.
“No,” I say patiently. “It’s been on a few minutes. I mean how many years.”
“Ten?” he says.
“No,” I sigh, rolling over on the couch. I’m sweating again.
My mother hangs up, comes in, and feels my forehead.
“Your hand is cold,” I say without opening my eyes.
“I’m defrosting the freezer,” she explains.
My plan is to get gradually better and better all day until game time, at which point there’s nothing she can do but let me go.
“Your sister isn’t going anywhere,” she says to Ray, preemptively.
“I know,” he agrees. “She’s sick. Last night Kippy Cappert threw up macaroni on a Tonka truck.”
“Can you tell him to shut up?” I say nervously. It’s not the macaroni; it’s the thought of Kippy Cappert, who has been in our house before and who walked around with a thick green caterpillar under his nose all afternoon.
“It wasn’t a dump truck,” Ray continues. “It was one of them with wheels like this.” He makes an inexplicable jabbing motion with his hands. “A whatchacall, and he threw up macaroni on it.”
“That’s enough,” my mother tells him. “She’s right on the verge.”
Too late.
After that, I retire to my parents’ bedroom for a few more hours of festering sleep, and wake completely renewed. My mother is sitting on the edge of the bed with a thermometer, smoking a cigarette.
“I’m not sick anymore,” I say, sitting up.
“Good,” she says, poking the thermometer under my tongue. It’s strange how when you’re telling the truth, they know it.
“I’m hungry,” I tell her.
“Quiet for three minutes,” she says, raising the shade to stare out the window, smoking and frowning, gray eyes pale behind her glasses. She’s waiting for my father. Every once in a while a car door will slam and voices are heard, but it’s just neighbors leaving and returning from their Saturday errands. If he shows up at Tuck’s, someone will call her—either Tuck himself or one of her friends, whoever happens to be over there having one.
“I’m here to tell you, not to sell you” is the motto of the company my dad works for—Best Home Improvements, supposedly run by Dick Best, a man who shouts the motto on late-night television commercials. In fact, the man is an actor; there is no Dick Best. That’s the thing about being an independent door-to-door salesman: you are the one sending yourself out there each day, so hating the boss means hating yourself. Which is why a lot of them work in twos and threes—not only does it help with the loneliness and inertia, but it gives them somebody different to hate.
The way it usually goes when my dad works with a partner is that the partner shows up sometime midmorning and drives the two of them to a shabby neighborhood where they knock on doors, showing poor people their sample cases until they get one or two to sign up for siding or a new roof. Then they drive to the nearest bar and sit drinking for the rest of the day, and sometimes one or two days after that. After a few weeks of this, when the partner slides up and honks, my dad won’t go out. Eventually the partner drives away, and my dad stays home for a few days or a week, petting the dog and drinking in the garage; then he disappears completely, which is the phase we’re in right now.
The thin afternoon light reveals dog hairs on the rug, the covers thrashed into a snarl, and two wastebaskets sitting on the other side of the bed, damp washrags draped over their edges. On the night table, along with a full ashtray, is a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, a sticky spoon, and a glass of water with an expanded crumb floating in it. As soon as I get the thermometer out of my mouth, I’m going to put everything back where it goes, strip the bed, remake it with clean sheets and pillowcases, sweep the rug, call Felicia, take a bath, wash my hair, put on my new shirt, go to the game.
“Normal,” she reads. “But we’ll wait to feed you. I just made Jell-O; when it’s set up, you can have a little bowl.”
“What kind?”
“All I had was orange,” she says.
“Orange?”
She flinches at this and looks out the window again, her lips bunched up in the way she does when she’s getting ready to cry. She thinks better of it. “You’re welcome to starve,” she says, standing up.
On her way downstairs, she pounds on the door to Meg’s and my bedroom. “It’s almost three,” she says. “And I won’t tell you again.”
From somewhere inside the room comes a dull thud.
“What?” Meg cries, voice muffled.
“Listen,” my mother says through the door, her voice now tearful, wavering. “I’ve got your dad drunk, one kid sick, one kid exhausted, and one kid who better get her ass out of bed now.”
Another thump.
“What?” Meg cries.
“You’ve had about forty calls this afternoon,” my mother tells me when I pass through the kitchen carrying laundry to the basement. “I told them all you were in bed with the flu.”
“I’m going to the game,” I inform her. She’ll just have to get used to it.
“Forget it. You’re not going anywhere sick.”
“I ate bad popcorn!” I say.
“There’s no such thing as bad popcorn,” she says.
Tammy follows me down to the basement and stands outside the coal cellar, a room nobody ever ventures into, staring at the door intently.
There’s a Ping-Pong table next to the washer, which we use for folding things that come out of the dryer and, on the far end, for stacking the things that migrate out of the laundry—some ancient and war-torn underwear, a dense, miniaturized sweater that should have been dry-cleaned, a melted shower cap, the usual limp, disoriented socks—and all household flotsam not suitable for the attic. Once, I came down and there was a mouse on the Ping-Pong table, nibbling on the green foam block from the bottom of a florist’s arrangement. Because the block was perforated with holes, the mouse might have thought it was cheese.
“Come here, girl,” I coax Tammy.
She glan
ces over once and then looks back at the door, steadily. Waiting. What does she think is in the coal cellar? I crouch down.
“Come here, Tammo… come here, Tam o’ Shanter… come here, Tam o’ Shay.” Nothing.
An ancient wringer washing machine stands under the open-riser steps, thick rubber lips pressed together. No matter what you do with its cracked black hose—coil it inside the tub, hang it over the edge, or lay it on the cobwebby floor—you’ll always have to look twice to make sure it isn’t what you just thought it was. An old buffet with chipped veneer stands along the wall, filled with cupcake tins, cookie sheets, and stacks of empty Cool Whip containers and their lids. Jumbled along the top are various canning supplies and implements, a box of shotgun shells, a paper bag stuffed with other paper bags, some plastic rope, and a ceramic Easter bunny for the center of the dining room table.
Across from the buffet is the furnace, tentacled and wheezing. Behind the furnace on the left is the door to the coal cellar, where Tammy is stationed, gazing with pricked ears at the doorknob.
Something feels wrong. I stand for a moment, listening to the washer fill. When it stops, there’s a pause before it clunks into the next cycle. It’s during the silence that I figure out what’s wrong.
There shouldn’t be shotgun shells down here.
“Now what?” my mother says as I run up the basement steps and through the kitchen.
“Nothing,” I say, panting. In the upstairs hallway, I pause at the door leading to the attic. Up there is where the shotgun is kept, zippered into a case that hangs way in the back, behind a beam, invisible from most angles. The front of the beam has two hooks from which a wide, obscuring clothing bag hangs; next to the bag is a stack of hatboxes. In the third one down, underneath a man’s gray hat, the shotgun shells are kept.
“Meg!” my mother calls up. “Help your sister!”
Our bedroom door flies open and Meg stares at me. She’s still in her pajamas, holding a book. “What?” she asks me.
“She thinks I’m throwing up,” I tell her. I yell back down the stairs. “I’m not sick, I told you.”