Once You Know This

by Emily Blejwas

  We don’t make it to the Willis Tower today. Mom squeezes my shoulder when we’re still very far away and says, “This is us.” The trees are still scrawny and the buildings are still worn out and I think, Yeah, this is us. I climb down the steps holding Miles’s hand and watch the bus chug away. The faces pass by one by one and I wonder if any of them will make it all the way downtown and up all the elevator floors to the very top of the tower where the world is so big. Probably not.

  At the church, Laila and Mom each get a small frozen turkey and a paper bag filled with mixes for cornbread, stuffing, and mashed potatoes, and cans of corn and green beans and cranberries. There’s also a four-pack of chocolate pudding for dessert. Mom and Laila thank the ladies passing out the food and we leave the church through the side door. Mom’s carrying Tommy in one arm and the bag in the other so I carry the turkey, which is heavy, but I don’t mind because the bag makes me so sad.

  Because Thanksgiving’s not supposed to come from a brown bag at a brown church. It’s supposed to be different. I don’t know how, but it is. Like the difference between our neighborhood with its bare houses and stale streets and the Willis Tower, surrounded by turquoise water and shiny stores and huge trees with red and yellow leaves. We cross the street to the bus stop on the other side and wait in the cold wind, which I use to explain my tears, the way Mom does.

  • • •

  Marisol got me a phone for fifteen minutes. She bribed Tonio to use his cell by threatening to tell their mom that he skipped school and went downtown with Estella all day Friday. When Mom takes Granny and Tommy down the block for some fresh air, I tear a page from my Plan B notebook, scribble a note on it, and run all the way to Marisol’s.

  Tonio hands me the phone. “Who you callin’, anyway?” he asks. “Your boyfriend?”

  “None of your business!” Marisol tells him and slams her bedroom door. Tonio’s as mild as a glass of milk, so Marisol can say anything to him. Before she slammed the door in his face, Tonio raised both hands like surrendering and turned away laughing and shaking his head. I start to think about what Jack would do if I said None of your business! and slammed a door but stop because I try never to think about Jack.

  I dial the first H. Hill on the list. A woman answers and I ask for Fuzzy. “Sorry, doll,” she says. “You have the wrong number.” I cross it off. No one picks up at the next H. Hill, or the one after that. The fourth H. Hill has an answering machine that says Buddy and Sudie live there so I cross it off. Why was that an H anyway? A boy answers at the next one. “Who?” he asks. I repeat Fuzzy’s name. “Naw,” he says. “No Fuzzy here.” And on and on. Some of the numbers I cross off but so many just ring. I’m only halfway through the list and I’ve already used up eight minutes. I call the next one.

  “No, Fuzzy doesn’t live here,” she says. “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Um, Brittany?” I tell her. “My great-grandma is Fuzzy’s sister.”

  “And who is your great-grandmother, dear?”

  “Daisy Hill.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes. How is that sweet lady?”

  “Um, she’s fine, I guess. Kind of quiet.”

  “But still livin’. God bless her, she always did know how to set out in the sunshine and turn her face up. You want to take down Fuzzy’s number?”

  “Yeah! I mean, thank you, yes.”

  She tells it to me and I can barely write the numbers my hands are shaking so bad. Marisol’s jumping up and down and pumping her fists to the sky. I can feel the buzzing all over my body again, like when I made Mr. McInnis laugh. I thank her, hang up, and dial Fuzzy’s number before I can chicken out. It rings three times, and halfway through the fourth, a man answers. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Fuzzy?”

  “Yes, speaking.”

  “Hi, you don’t know me but my name’s Brittany and I’m Daisy Hill’s great-granddaughter? She lives with us now. We got your birthday card. I mean, she did. I read it to her. Anyway.”

  Tonio knocks on the door. Marisol goes to talk him into a few more minutes but Estella’s there and she’s ready to go.

  “Well, hey, darlin’,” Fuzzy says in a voice that takes its time. “It’s so nice to hear from you. How’s Daisy doin’? I think about her every day.”

  Estella marches across Marisol’s bedroom, holds her hand out to me, and shoots her eyebrows as high as they can go. She’s wearing a man’s tank top that’s supposed to go under a shirt and it’s turquoise and I try not to stare at the black lace of her bra underneath or think about if she’s wearing underwear.

  “She’s fine,” I tell Fuzzy. My voice sounds squeaky and Estella rolls her eyes. “Um, Fuzzy? I’ll call you back, okay?”

  Estella grabs the phone and pushes the red button with one perfectly curved tangerine fingernail. “Sorry,” she says in a voice that’s not sorry. “Time’s up. You’ll have to talk to your Fuzzy friend later.” But her eyes aren’t mean like she pretends to be. They’re left behind.

  • • •

  We’re watching the parade on TV and eating Pillsbury cinnamon rolls because that’s what Mom used to do on Thanksgiving morning when she was little. But Jack is here so we’re all sitting up straight and not talking like Granny. We’re also shivering because Jack says Mom uses too much heat and turned it down. And the cinnamon rolls aren’t right. They taste like metal, like the dentist’s office, like being afraid. I don’t want to eat them but my body’s so hungry and so cold I can’t stop. I already had two and I want another one but there are only eight, and three-eighths is almost half, so.

  Tommy crawls into my bedroom and Mom stands up to get him but I say, “It’s okay. He can play in there,” and follow him. He crawls all the way to the other side of the bed and pulls on the covers. I lie across the bed and play peep-eye with him, which is what Grandma Jane called peekaboo. He likes it. “Thanks, Tommy,” I whisper because he got us away from Jack and the metal rolls and all the smiling balloons and pretty hair singers and kids in perfectly round red mittens. The announcers keep saying how cold it is in New York this morning but nobody looks cold.

  I give Tommy the hair ribbons Marisol gave me and he chews on them with his two teeth while I make a list in my Plan B notebook.

  Questions for Fuzzy

  1. Is there winter in Alabama?

  2. Why did Granny keep her maiden name and was her husband (Frank) mad?

  3. Where did Granny live before she lived with us?

  4. Who is Lily?

  • • •

  It’s the last night of the brown-bag Thanksgiving, which I ended up thankful for because it’s been the one warm thing in all the cold days. Granny’s coughing and Tommy got so tired Mom put him to bed early and Jack’s been gone for hours but Mom still won’t turn the heat up. “He’s coming back,” she says. “Trust me.”

  “Yeah right,” I say and fill the tub up as high as it can go with the hottest water I can stand. Mom doesn’t stop me so water must be cheaper than gas. But it gets cold eventually.

  Granny’s already in bed when I get out with my chin trembling like right before you cry. I put on my warmest clothes and slide in next to her. She’s so thin I’m worried she won’t have enough body heat to make it through the night but she doesn’t shiver like me. She’s perfectly still.

  We’re on our backs with our elbows touching looking up and I wonder if somewhere in a warm place like Alabama there’s another Granny and another Brittany lying side by side in sleeping bags looking up at the stars and smelling a campfire and tasting marshmallows and graham crackers in their throats and the Granny is telling old stories and the Brittany is just listening and wiggling her toes in her wool socks.

  I look at Granny and her face is pale and her mouth is open a little and her eyes are windows washed. “It’s okay, Granny,” I whisper. “I know you’d tell me your stories if you could.” Then it’s like a barrel of sleep tips over on me. I feel Mom lay another blanket on us and I want to tell her it’s not enough and she has to
do better but I’m just too tired.

  Then the front doorknob is jiggling. Jack’s voice comes in and out and up and down like he’s riding a roller coaster in the living room, but Mom’s is steady and quiet. The TV comes on and Mom is in the kitchen popping a beer and I guess I don’t understand beer because I thought if you wanted someone to be nicer you wouldn’t give them more of it.

  I breathe in and out, matching my breath to Tommy’s, fast, then Granny’s, slow. My hair is cold. I try to fall back asleep but I’m wide awake. After a long time the TV hisses off and the hall light flashes to nothing and maybe in a crazy way Mom knows what she’s doing.

  I’m so happy to be back at school I can’t stop smiling. It’s so warm here. I am thinking thoughts again. I am thinking lots and lots of thoughts, like my brain’s trying to catch up after four days of being frozen. I can barely sit still. I want to draw a picture and write a book and solve the hardest math problem at the same time. I also want to take a nap. Even though you barely move, being cold is very tiring.

  Mr. McInnis is excited too. He’s standing in front of the class with the book about Ivan the gorilla we were all supposed to read. He set page goals for every week starting in September. He reminded us every day that we had to finish by Thanksgiving. I’m glad I didn’t wait till the last minute because my brain would’ve been too cold. “Okay,” Mr. McInnis says. “Now I want an honest show of hands. I won’t be mad. How many of you read any of the book? It’s okay if you didn’t finish it. Remember, honesty.”

  Five of us raise our hands. Five out of thirty-two. Well, five out of thirty because one kid’s absent and Jerome is still gone. That’s exactly one-sixth, so at least I’m learning to reduce fractions. I want to tell Mr. McInnis this but I don’t think it will help. He’s still looking around at the hands, waiting for more to go up. “Okay!” he finally announces too loud, like trying to convince himself that it really is okay. “No problem!” he adds. He has the five of us form a circle in the back to discuss the themes of the book and tells the other kids to read the first ten pages.

  • • •

  It’s been one month since we went to WIC and we’re back at WIC. But now it’s winter so everyone’s coughing. Mom holds Tommy tight like she can protect him from all the germs sailing around the room like bad magic carpets. Even worse, WIC got a grubby train table so now all the not-sick kids are running around pelting each other with boxcars while the sick kids watch from their moms’ laps, sniffing their snot back up or just letting it run down. I’m hungry and out of homework so I lean my head on Mom’s shoulder even though it’s bony and not comfortable at all. Her hair smells nice.

  This time it’s Faiza who gives us the vouchers. She’s my favorite because she doesn’t say the thing about breastfeeding that makes Mom look at the floor, and when she asks which baby foods Tommy has tried and how much formula he drinks she looks at Mom and not at the computer and she always has teddy bear eyes. Today she’s even wearing a fuzzy brown sweater so it’s easy to picture her as a teddy bear with a teddy bear husband and two cute (but wild) teddy bear boys. Probably it’s not normal to think this stuff and I wonder if being hungry is starting to make me nuts.

  Then Faiza reads my mind. “What about your daughter?” she says and turns into a person again.

  “What do you mean?” Mom asks but in an easy voice because she likes Faiza too. “She’s too old for WIC, isn’t she?”

  Faiza’s laugh is twinkly like the little flying fairies in Sleeping Beauty. I wonder if she’d be the red or blue or green one. Do fairies get to choose? “She is, yes, but how is her eating?”

  Mom looks at me. “She’s a good eater. She’ll try anything.”

  “That’s good, that’s good.” Faiza smiles at me. “Good to try new things!” I smile back. But then she talks quieter.

  “But I mean, is she getting enough? She’s growing fast now and she’ll need more calories for her body and brain to develop strong and healthy.”

  “Oh,” Mom says, and all of a sudden I’m scared my stomach will growl and betray Mom. I hold my breath.

  “You get the SNAP benefits?” Faiza asks, and Mom nods. She doesn’t tell her that plenty of times Jack steals her card and somehow uses it for cigarettes.

  But unlike the mean WIC lady, Faiza knows when to stop. “Good,” she says and I turn her back into a teddy bear, just for a second. “Lots of fruits and vegetables, and mostly vegetables!” she tells me, with the fairy laugh. “And some nuts or fish for protein.”

  I make my face into Very interesting! and nod like I can follow her advice. I wish she would ask what Mom eats, which is almost nothing, but our time is up.

  • • •

  I turn my Plan B notebook sideways so I can draw Faiza’s vegetables like Cézanne painted fruit. Mr. McInnis told us Cézanne’s dad wanted him to be a lawyer or at least work in the family bank but he kept painting instead and made over two hundred still lifes, not to mention the landscapes and portraits, so I guess that showed him. Also Cézanne made objects significant by using intense color so I push hard on my markers since some of them are drying up. But nothing really looks significant, except maybe the eggplant, but that’s probably because it’s so purple.

  Mom used to grow vegetables every summer in big pots on the fire escape. The green beans grew right up the railings to the fourth floor. Before Grandma Jane left every September she’d pick everything and put it in mason jars and it would last almost until she came back. We could really use those jars now. Except Grandma didn’t think vegetables had to be healthy like Faiza because whenever we bought elotes from the street carts she’d get butter and mayonnaise and parmesan and salt and black pepper and red pepper so you could barely see the corn underneath.

  “Mom says all that’s bad for you,” I told her once and Grandma said, “Your mama, she’s so good. Just like her daddy, rest his soul. But sometimes, peanut”—and she leaned down so our faces were in the shade of her big floppy straw hat—“you just gotta live!”

  • • •

  Marisol didn’t have to bribe Tonio to use his phone this time because Estella broke up with him for a boy with a car that rides so low it scrapes the ground when it goes over bumps. Marisol says it has a leather interior but I don’t see why that’s more important than having a boyfriend who’s nice. Marisol says I’ll understand someday. All Tonio does now is sit on the couch and watch Simpsons reruns because he says if he doesn’t laugh he’ll cry. I want to punch Estella in the face. When we take Tonio’s phone from the couch he doesn’t even flinch.

  This time Fuzzy answers on the second ring but skips the first part of hello and just says, “ ’Lo.”

  “Hi, Fuzzy? It’s Brittany again, Daisy’s great-granddaughter? Sorry it took me so long to call you back but it’s hard for me to get a phone.” I’m holding the phone between Marisol and me because she wants to listen.

  “Well, hey, sugar. I was hopin’ you’d call me back someday.” His voice reminds me of the music those foreign guys played that made Granny walk down the block.

  I look at my notebook. “Um. I was wondering if you could answer some questions for me? It’s for a project, for school.”

  “Well, I don’t know but I’ll sure do my best,” he says. The way he talks makes my chest hurt and also makes me want to sleep on his couch forever. I don’t care if it’s old and scratchy and smells like medicine. I don’t even care if I have a blanket.

  “Okay. The first one is…” I skip the one about winter in Alabama because it doesn’t seem important. “Why did Granny keep her maiden name and was her husband, Frank, mad?”

  Fuzzy chuckles. “You know, I never did ask her why. But your granny always has had her own mind. I guess she felt like her name was how she liked it. And Frank was the nicest man you’d ever hope to meet. He was so in love with your granny he wouldn’t care if she changed her name to Giddyap and dyed her hair purple.” I think of Tonio and smile.

  “Okay, thanks. The next one is, where did
Granny live before she lived with us?”

  “Well, she lived in her house. Right down the road from me. Lived there”—Fuzzy makes a whistling sound in his teeth—“gosh, fifty years, I guess. You were there when you were just a tiny thing. I know you don’t remember.” He chuckles again. “Time does pass.”

  “Her house?” I ask. “Who lives there now?” My heart thumps in my whole body like the bass from the cars at sunset.

  “Nobody does,” Fuzzy says. “I been tryin’ to keep it up some. You know, runnin’ the water when we get a freeze and standin’ the windows open once in a while. I cut the grass in the summertime. Don’t have but a little patch.”

  My brain’s like a speeding train now and I can’t focus. I know I should ask something else about the house but I don’t know what. It’s too weird to ask if we can live there. Marisol writes in huge capital letters on the bottom of the page and holds it up: RENT.

  “Who pays the rent?” I ask Fuzzy. I know it’s the biggest bill because it’s the one Mom worries about the most.

  “You sure are sharp for a girl your age,” Fuzzy tells me. “How old are you now, Miss Brittany?”

  “Eleven.”

  Fuzzy whistles in his teeth again. “That house been paid for a long time, honey. Nobody has to pay the rent.”

  Marisol and I stare at each other. She shakes her head a little and her earrings clink. I don’t know what else to say so I say, “Thanks for all your help, Fuzzy. I gotta go now but I’ll call you again really soon.”

  “Brittany? Before you go, hon. How’s your mama?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “Well, you just tell her I said hello, and if there’s anything she needs for Daisy…or for anybody, just call.”