Etched in Sand

by Regina Calcaterra

  I’m locked in that room for days. I’m only allowed out for potty, baths, and to eat. If I start crying, my sisters come running in and beg me to stop. They lead me in counting. We count. They leave. I sleep. I wake, and I sit there bored. I count. I count. I cry. They come back. I count.

  The room is hot, so I take my clothes off to try and get cool. I climb on top of one of the beds and open the second-floor window, waiting for a breeze. Outside that window is a view of a big building with noisy red trucks that come out. Every afternoon there’s a loud, scary alarm that comes from a big yellow horn on top of the building. I stick my head out the window and look for someone to rescue me. When it’s clear that no one’s coming, I rest my chin in my hands and see what else is around: lots of parked cars along the tarred driveway downstairs, a forest across the street, a traffic light, and lots of cars with families driving by. I count the cars parked downstairs, and the ones driving by, and the shiny red fire frucks—a word Cherie and Camille taught me. I say it a lot because every time I do, they laugh until they fall on the floor, and that makes me laugh.

  Christmas Mama finally tells me I can come outside and play with my Big Wheel, as long as I stop calling her Christmas Mama. “For Chrissakes, I told you! Just call me Mom,” she says. I nod.

  Together my sisters carry my Big Wheel downstairs, where I can play on the sidewalk with cars whizzing by. I learn to stay quiet and just count, and this way I can stay outside all the time. When it gets really hot, I take off all my clothes and climb back on my Big Wheel, riding around in big circles to create a breeze to cool off. The glue factory workers run out and wag their fingers, stretching their necks for my mother or telling me I’m too young to play Lady Godiva. Then my sisters dash down the stairs and outside, chasing after me with my clothes in their hands.

  But I guess I’ve shown Mom how well I can take care of myself because one day she tells me I’m going to live in Baby Norman’s bedroom. She says she’s tired from all the work she has to do with three messy girls living in her house now, and someone needs to take care of her little prince. Mom tells me I’ll need to clean Norman’s diaper and give him baths and teach him how to go potty like I learned. If he goes in his diaper it’s my fault, so I make sure he lives on the potty. When he stands up and tries to run away with no pants on, I chase him down the hall and lure him back with the toys Mom got him at the thrift shop. Mom teaches me how to wash and wring out his cloth diapers in the tub. “You never know, I might need them again,” she says.

  We all have chores. Cherie and Camille have to cook and do the dishes. I have to dust and clean the bathroom. All of us take turns caring for Baby Norman.

  At night, Mom’s husband, also named Norman, comes home and stumbles up the stairs in the dark. If he’s with Mom and they’re happy, they go to sleep and the house is all quiet. But if Norman gets mad, he beats Mom up, and then we have to be really, really good. If we don’t clean the house or change Little Norm’s diaper the right way, she beats us just like Big Norman beats her.

  After a few weeks here my sisters stop playing with each other. They don’t even talk anymore, and nobody laughs together. If dinner’s not ready or a dish is still wet, Mom wants to know whether it’s Cherie or Camille who should get the beating. My sisters point their fingers at each other, and Mom stands with her hands on her hips, considering which one of them she’d like to hurt. Cherie and Camille don’t try to cheer me up anymore, and when I cry, they yell at me. “Shut up!” they say. “Do you want Mom to beat you again?” It’s every kid for herself, except for Little Norman. Mom loves Little Norman.

  This isn’t my family anymore—they’re like strange, scary ghosts. I used to love Cherie and Camille more than anyone in the world, but in Mom’s house they’re different people. I’d rather be by myself than with them, so when Mom and Big Norman are out one night, I decide I don’t want to live with all the sad people anymore. I sneak out the door, down the thirty-six steps. I run across the street and deep into the woods. I hide. I stay hiding, even when I hear the voices of Cherie and Camille calling out for me. Then Mom and Big Norman join them, and I close my eyes. I’m never coming out. They keep calling and calling, but I know they’ll never find me. I drift off to sleep under a pile of leaves . . . until . . . do I hear the sound of Susan’s voice calling for me?

  “Little pumpkin! Fairy princess!”

  I hear her, again and again. I jump up. Susan’s come to get me to bring me home! I just know it. I dash out of the brush and run toward her voice, racing into her arms. I hear Cherie and Camille yell, “She was in the woods, we found her!” Susan carries me back toward the street where I see Papa’s car is parked . . . oh, I knew they’d come back for me! But she doesn’t stop at the car to put me inside. Instead she walks past it, carrying me toward the glue factory. “No!” I scream.

  She carries me into the hallway up the steps, stopping at the platform where Mom is standing. “I’m so happy you’re okay!” Mom says, smiling at Susan. “After a nice bath I’ll give her some oatmeal and put her to bed.” She looks at me adoringly and says, “You could have gotten attacked by a wild dog—or even worse, hit by a car, you silly girl. You scared all of us!” Susan kisses me good-bye, again, and walks downstairs. I sob as she closes the outside door behind her.

  Mom stands there with the phony smile on her face. Then it turns mean. “Cherie, are they gone?”

  Cherie stands by the window and nods. I beg her, “No!” Doesn’t my big sister know what will happen now?

  In an instant Mom turns her energy toward me, grabbing me by my hair and slamming me to the ground. It feels like my hair is being pulled all the way out of my head, and the skin on the top of my head is being ripped open. I try to put my arms in front of my face, but she punches them down and grabs me around my waist. Then she picks me up and throws me into the wall, denting it. As I slide down to the floor and land on my back, she grabs my right arm and leg and flips me over on my stomach. Then she kicks my legs, back, and stomach until I’m all weak and my head turns heavy. There’s a loud buzzing sound ringing from my brain. All I can see is white, and I can’t fight back or move my body anymore.

  When I awake, I’m naked. I try to sit up, but my arms can’t cooperate. I raise my head to see why I can’t move, and I notice my arms are clasped together on my side and tied to the radiator. My legs are bound together above my ankles and tied to the rails underneath my bed. When I see this, I have to rest my neck. My brain feels like it’s swollen. I close my eyes.

  I feel something cold. When I open my eyes again, Camille is holding a rag that feels like it has ice inside. “Where’s Susan?”

  “Gi, Susan is only our foster sister. We don’t live with her anymore.”

  “Can we go back?”

  “No.” Then she whispers, “Not unless the police find out that Mom hurts us.” Camille tells me, still in a whisper, that while Mom was tying me up, she made my sisters take all my clothes out of the room so I couldn’t run away again. “This is what happens when you don’t listen to Mom,” she says. Now I want to spit in Camille’s face, but I can’t lift my head.

  After that, Big Norman tells Mom that having a baby was enough, he didn’t bargain for three little girls and their crazy business, too. He starts spending more time away from the house, and one morning Mom’s crying at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, saying Big Norman left her for good.

  She says she needs more time to herself and I’ll start kindergarten in a few days, even though I’m only four. My birthday falls in November, a few days before the cutoff, so she says I’ll probably be the youngest in my class. She also tells me that I have to use her last name when I go to school because I don’t have a daddy like Norman does. “Because you’re a bastard, remember?” she says. “Your daddy didn’t want you. And I can’t blame him. You’re a smug little snot, just like him.” Cherie overhears Mom saying this, and later she tells me not to worry about having the same last name as Mom—Cherie has the same one, too, and
that makes me feel better. I like sharing a name with Cherie. “Cherie, where’s my daddy?” I ask her.

  Her only answer is this: “I think he’s at the Happy House.”

  Where is the Happy House? “Can we go there?”

  “Well, maybe someday when you’re bigger we can find it again.”

  I want to find the Happy House now.

  Because my school day is shorter than Cherie’s and Camille’s, I have to stay in the school library until they’re ready to walk me home. That seems okay because I flip through books all afternoon, but it doesn’t work so well when my sisters start getting held up in detention all the time. They miss school to take care of Norman, and they’re not turning in their homework, and they said that it doesn’t help that the man who’s been sneaking in our house at night likes Mom more than his wife, who happens to be a teacher at our school. When they’re in detention and I stay too long at the library and can’t watch Norman, my sisters realize we’re all in danger of Mom’s beatings. They tell me I have to walk home alone, as long as I cross with the crossing guard and walk along the storefronts.

  The next fall, Mom meets a new man named Vito, who always wears a black suit and a thick belt around his waist that we’re not allowed to touch. Vito is nice to us, way nicer than Big Norman, but the two friends who are always with him are weird. They’re really quiet, and they’re always wearing sunglasses—even at night. I know this because when Vito sleeps in Mom’s room, his friends sit down in the car and wait for him so he always has a ride somewhere.

  Mom begins to stay out with Vito all the time, and we love to play house without her. When the snow melts from winter, we collect our change and bundle Norman up and take a long walk to the Saint James General Store, where we treat ourselves to apple, grape, and watermelon swirled candy sticks and candy necklaces.

  Then on the way to the local King Kullen supermarket we drop Norman off at home, securing him in a room by himself so we can go shopping with Mom’s food stamps. Camille and Cherie take two different carts, and I stand on the outside edge of Cherie’s with my feet on the bottom rail, adding up the cost of the food items as they’re placed in the cart to make sure we have enough food stamps to cover our groceries. When we bag our food at the cash register, my job is to hide an extra stash of bags in our cart. Then Cherie tells the cashier we have to go find our sister, and she wheels me back into the store to look for Camille, who takes the contents of her cart and stuffs it all in my bags when no one’s looking. Camille’s cart is always better—she grabs Fluffernutter, peanut butter, frozen jelly donuts, and lots of cake mixes. Then we zip out the door with our stash.

  We prefer to be left alone. We watch Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and The Flintstones without any interruption from my mom’s boring shows like Guiding Light and As the World Turns. When it’s cold or raining outside, we take out the games that Mom gets from the Salvation Army for Cherie and Camille. We play five hundred rummy, chess, checkers, Connect Four, and Battleship. We take turns feeding Norman and teaching him words for the objects around the apartment. Couch, we tell him. Television. Lightbulb. Of course, we also continue his potty training.

  When spring breaks, Mom’s away even more, so I go out to the side yard to make mud pies and chase worms and ants. We miss school more days than we attend, which finally brings a truant officer to our door. Then we start attending again, for now.

  When the weather heats up, Mom starts coming home more. She’s always groaning that her back hurts. “You’d better get prepared,” she says. “You’ll have a new little brother or sister by Halloween.”

  Mom says she and Vito want to plan a vacation together, so she begins working across the street at the deli. On weekends she brings me to stock the freezers. Her tummy is too big for her to climb around, but I’m small enough to crawl on the ground and stack juices, milk, and sodas on the bottom shelves. Then I stick around and clean the counters and mop the floor before the deli opens.

  After school lets out in June, Cherie, Camille, and I put Norman in his walker and walk two whole miles to our favorite spot: Cordwood Beach. We stroll past homes that look like palaces with big wrought-iron gates, finally arriving at the beach. On sunny days it’s filled with kids—splashing around, building sand castles, and screaming when they see a horseshoe crab or a jellyfish. We spatter in the sand and water with them, taking breaks to climb the remains of an old brick house that looks like a castle and jumping off the floating dock. Even on gray days, we’d prefer to get caught in the wind and rain than stay home bored in the glue factory. We squeal, digging in the wet sand for clams with our hands and feet, hunting out mussel beds, and loading up our arms and pockets. On the way home we pick onion grass for a special treat at dinner.

  Right after I begin the first grade, our baby sister is born. We’re all thrilled to have a baby girl in the house. Roseanne doesn’t look like any of us, with her pale skin and blond hair—just like Vito has.

  Sometimes I like to imagine that my daddy has dark brown hair, just like mine.

  For Rosie’s baptism at Saint Philip and James, we dress Rosie in a long white gown. Vito looks funny in his dark suit and sunglasses, and his two friends stay by his side during the ceremony—even for the photos. After Rosie’s christening, we get to take care of her ourselves while Vito takes Mom on a celebration “baby trip” to Lake Havasu, Arizona. It’s Mom’s first plane ride. When they come back, Mom tells us she and Vito had a great time on his “going away” trip but that he won’t be seeing us. “Vito had to go live somewhere else for a while,” she says.

  It doesn’t take long before Mom disappears, too. She begins to spend more time away at night, and when she returns from her binges, she brings home a man or a hangover . . . or both. We learn to stay out of her way, because especially when she’s sad or not feeling well, we’ll catch a serious licking. As men come into our home, though, they always comment on what pretty little girls she has. We look down and walk away: If only they knew the trouble their compliments cause. When the men leave, Mom makes sure we all know that we’re just sluts and whores, and Norman is her prince. “You think you’re so pretty?” she says when her visitors leave. “Get over here. You won’t be pretty when I’m done with you.”

  Months after Rosie arrives, our mom doesn’t look like our mom anymore. She locks us in her room and cries that, at age thirty, her old go-go dancer body is gone forever and all the stress of raising kids is making her face lined and puffy. “My life amounts to nothing, and it’s all because of you kids!” she screams. As her unhappiness worsens, so does her drinking; and as her drinking increases, so does her weight. It’s Cherie, Camille, or me who take a beating during these tirades. And we never allow her near Norm or Rosie, but Mom’s usually too tired to fuss with the baby anyway.

  We teach Rosie to talk and walk and play games, and we shower her with beautiful expressions of love like mia bambina amore and je t’aime. We don’t know how they’re so familiar to us, but we use them a hundred times a day.

  All our fawning over Rosie frees Mom up even more, but instead of bringing men home, she’s started bringing in animals to try and cheer herself up. We tiptoe around, cautioning Rosie to avoid the monkeys, turtles, and chickens that Mom attempts to hide from the landlord. The three squirrel monkeys are kept in a cage, and Mom reminds us to put on gloves to feed them—otherwise they’ll eat our fingers as appetizers. Unfortunately, our yellow dishwashing gloves aren’t exactly appropriate for primate-caretaking: One of the monkeys bites off a rubber fingertip and chokes to death, and Mom leads us in an emotional burial service in the side yard. We clean up poop from the donkey that lives up on the tar roof, where we sometimes shower with the hose since we can’t use the tub—it’s the home for our land turtles. They’re our favorite. When any of us gets grounded in our rooms, we take a couple turtles out of the tub and line up bits of food to pit them against each other in a turtle race. But since we only have one bathtub and need it for five baths and clothes washing,
the turtles finally make a mystery escape in the middle of the night.

  The chickens only last until the landlord finds out about them. I envy all these animals for their easy exits from our mother’s domain. Pepper, Mom’s German shepherd mix, is the only creature in this house who’s always happy and loving. We take him to the school yard to run around for exercise, or on long walks past the local farms. Occasionally we stage a disaster scene as though he’s run loose into the fields, and while we go “looking” for him, we snatch corn and potatoes for our dinner.

  By December of my second-grade year, Mom has gone roaming again. The glue factory workers, crossing guards, and firemen are suspicious. In fact, sometimes we see a parked police car outside, and Cherie says we need to be careful because they’re watching us.

  WE ARE READY for the cops when they come up the stairs. We realize they caught Norman wandering outside in the dark, at night, in the cold, and that they’ll be the ones to bring him back to us. We know they are watching and waiting to catch us doing something wrong, and Norman innocently gave them a tip. The two cops come in and grab all five of us, still in our pajamas. They put Norm in the front between them and all us girls in the back, with Rosie on Cherie’s lap. They ask us to stay silent, but we are five kids in a police car without our mother, and we don’t know where we are being taken. We aren’t silent. We are children.

  It’s mid-December and they’ve decided to put the four of us older kids in a home together so we’re not separated for the holidays—but Rosie, just a year old now, is going to another house.

  The foster family sets up four sleeping bags for us on the living room floor. The parents and their two teenage boys force us to lie in the sleeping bags all night and day, never moving or complaining. If we do, they close the bag around us by zipping it up over our heads, and they beat us while we’re inside of it. If we cry too loudly, the punishment turns even worse. One day the foster mom grabs me by the head and cuts off my long curls with a giant pair of scissors. When the social worker checks on us and asks what happened, she answers that I got gum all stuck in my hair so she had to cut it out. I haven’t chewed gum since the last time my sisters and I went to the Saint James General Store.