She holds the picture higher, and she says, “Tell me everything you can about the little girl. What’s her name? Why is she alone? Is this where she lives? Are there people we can’t see?”
And I try. I try to tell the stories in the black-and-white pictures, but I get distracted. The kids on the posters and in the pamphlets all around are also telling stories, and I want to help them run away from the stories they are trying to tell. “A story is made from three parts,” Wendy explains. “It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You need to include all three, okay, Fig ?”
Wendy says, “No more happily ever after, okay?” but the ending is the hardest part to tell.
On Friday, when I finish, Alicia Bernstein steers me back to the waiting room, where Gran is sitting surrounded by more brochures: Overcoming Depression. Teen Pregnancy. Anxiety Disorder.
“It was so nice to meet you,” Alicia Bernstein says, and reaches out to shake my hand while her other arm clutches the manila folder. The children in the posters all warned me about Alicia Bernstein. “She’s a social worker,” they explained. “Her job is to take kids away from their parents.”
I let the social worker shake my hand, but I’m careful to also hold my breath and cross my fingers; I cross the fingers on both my hands, the ones behind my back and the ones inside her fist. I hold my breath and cross my fingers because I never want to see Alicia Bernstein ever again.
* * * *
September 1982
Summer ends and the new school year begins, second grade with Mrs. Olson. Most school nights, I stay at home, and just being in my house makes me less worried about Alicia Bernstein coming to take me away. Mama is still in the hospital. Daddy says she needs a place to rest. “A little break,” he says. “A time out.”
I ride the bus back and forth—home to school, school to home, and on the weekends I go stay with Gran. She stops at a gas station along the way and buys me a Wizard of Oz suitcase because it’s the only kind they carry. “I don’t have time to go anywhere else,” she says. Daddy calls the suitcase “tourist paraphernalia.” It is blue and there’s a picture of Dorothy standing on the yellow brick road, holding Toto. I can’t tell if she’s at the beginning or the end of her journey. Underneath, written in white cursive, the suitcases reads: There’s No Place Like Grandma’s.
I never get into Gran’s bed again.
I sleep in her living room. Wrapped in scratchy sheets, I watch all the shadows, and I listen to the ticking that never seems to stop. And I suck my thumb. But when Gran sees, she yanks it from my mouth. She doesn’t care if my teeth scrape against my skin, and she doesn’t care when I get cut. I learn how to fall asleep without my thumb, but once I’m dreaming it sneaks back into my mouth. Gran buys a product from the drugstore called Hoof. It’s applied like fingernail polish. I try to remind Gran of Mama’s disapproval regarding makeup, but Gran says this isn’t cosmetic.
“Fiona,” she says, “this is about good hygiene and conquering bad habits.”
Gran paints my thumbnail before I go to bed. Hoof tastes bitter—like burnt coffee, horseradish, and licking batteries all at once. But it doesn’t take long to chew it off. After Gran goes into her room, I chew and spit the bad taste into the thick carpet. While the taste never goes all the way away, it does get better, and the comfort of my thumb makes up for it.
Gran replaces Hoof with a splint.
It goes around my elbow to keep my arm from bending. This way, I can’t get my thumb into my mouth. The splint makes sleep impossible. I lie for hours watching the shadows of the passing cars drift across the ceiling and then across the floor, where they stretch—growing even longer, and longer still. I cannot sleep, and not sleeping makes me scared of everything. And the ticking continues. My arm throbs, and I’m still awake by the time morning is announced by the boy on the red bicycle as he hurls the daily newspaper at Gran’s front door.
* * * *
Gran surrounds herself with other old ladies, and they all look at me like I’ve done something wrong. They look at me, and I know they know.
They know all about my mother.
They play hearts and talk about their dead husbands. My grandfather died from heart failure, but Gran makes it sound like he was the one who failed and not his heart. Mrs. Nelson is the only one with a husband who is still alive, and sometimes the card games are at her house. Mr. Nelson has emphysema from smoking cigarettes since he was eight years old. He is plugged in to a big tank that helps him breathe and makes the living room sound like the inside of an aquarium.
Mrs. Nelson has several large paintings of Jesus Christ. Gran points to them with her bony, crooked fingers and tells me all the titles: The Immaculate Conception. The Birth of Baby Jesus. The Crucifixion. The Resurrection. When she says “conception” and “crucifixion,” she whispers like she does when she says “cancer,” “lesbian,” or “university.”
Jesus is always surrounded by rays of light.
In The Crucifixion, someone has hammered gigantic nails into his wrists, and there is a lot of shiny blood. Gran makes me look at this, but she won’t let me watch St. Elsewhere even though I’m allowed to watch it at home.
Gran is worried that I will go to hell. She wants me baptized. She wants me to take my first communion. When I ask Uncle Billy what communion is, my question makes him laugh.
“That’s when we eat the flesh of Christ,” he says. “And then we drink his blood.”
* * * *
Gran still goes to church in Eudora because that is where she got married.
The Sacred Heart of Mary, only I read it as “scared” instead of “sacred” every time I see the sign.
Gran introduces me to the priest, and when she does she calls him father even though he’s young enough to be her son. He, too, knows about Mama—I can tell by the way he looks at me. And even though he’s taller than Daddy, he is nowhere near as strong, and his skin is see-through like he never goes outside.
Gran makes me go to Sunday school.
Candace Sherman’s teenage sister is our teacher. We’re supposed to call her Miss Sherman, but Candace messes up all the time and calls her Buffy. Candace Sherman is in the same grade as me, and so are her two best friends, Sissy Baxter and Tanya Jenkins.
Sissy’s family owns and operates Baxter Lumber, and Tanya’s mother works part-time at the salon Curl Up & Dye, which is in Lawrence and happens to be where my grandmother goes to get her hair done. According to Gran, Tanya’s mother is going to night school to be a nurse.
Candace Sherman lives in a ranch house made from bloodred brick, and her daddy grows corn and alfalfa. Once upon a time, back in high school, Daddy dated Mrs. Sherman. I’ve seen the pictures in his yearbook. Mrs. Sherman was the homecoming queen, and after graduation she was a beauty queen. Gran still has all the newspaper clippings in her scrapbook. The year Daddy finally made his way to Cornell was the same year Mrs. Sherman was crowned Sweetheart of Mid-America. Now she works the beauty counter at Eudora Drug on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Gran often goes to her for advice on how to erase her wrinkles.
In Sunday school, we color bubbly cartoon pictures of Jesus and his herd of baby sheep, and everyone there knows I’m going straight to hell.
I can’t help but fall asleep when Buffy reads out loud.
To wake me, Buffy hits me on the back with a wooden yardstick. It’s exactly like the Little House books before Laura got to be the teacher and was nice instead of mean like Buffy. There’s a little playground in the churchyard where statues of angels watch over the children as they play, but I never get to go outside.
I have to stand in the corner of the classroom with my arms stretched out.
I turn my palms toward the ceiling so Buffy can place a bible on each hand. I have to stand like this and hold the bibles without bending at the elbows or lowering my arms. I get in trouble for being double jointed until one of the nuns tells Buffy I can’t help it. The burning begins in the armpits, and from there it spreads.
&nb
sp; For every time I fall asleep in class, I’m to stand like this for five minutes. If an arm wavers or a bible falls, Buffy doubles and sometimes even triples the amount of time I am to be disciplined. The burning moves toward my back, into my shoulder blades. And this is where my wings would attach if only I could fly away. Five minutes turn into ten, and ten minutes turn into fifteen.
And this is how I learn to tell time.
* * * *
Adam and Eve get stuck in my head.
Like Eve, I was cut out—emergency Cesarean, seven years ago come next week. Daddy says it’s just another creation myth. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” he says. “Your birth has a story too.”
And this is what I’ve been told.
Mama and Daddy meet in college, fall in love, and are married—just the two of them, at the courthouse, both in blue jeans. They decide to leave the rat race behind and come to Kansas, to the family farm where Daddy grew up. They begin the long process of converting the farm to all organic, and I’m conceived.
Daddy tells Mama that she glows.
Mama joins a home-birth group because she wants to have me all natural. She picks out a midwife and begins to grow me while Daddy plants corn and sweet potatoes. Mama starts a sunflower patch, tall and yellow. She plants herbs in one garden and flowers in yet another.
I grow bigger and bigger and take up all of Mama. When I’m supposed to turn like all babies do, there isn’t any room. And Mama has no doubt I’ll either turn when the time comes or she’ll just have to push me into life backward.
Mama nests. The other women in her group have babies one by one—all at home. One woman gives birth outside at sunrise, and another delivers the baby right into her husband’s hands. They all describe childbirth as empowering.
Empowering.
Mama’s contractions come fast and hard. She always says, “It felt like I was being split in half.” The midwife comes but refuses to do the home birth.
Mama must be taken to the hospital, and this is called transport. Mama agrees to go but she can’t stop crying. She tells them she can do it—deliver me breech—but the nurses and doctors all ignore her, prepping for surgery instead.
Just as God put Adam to sleep, the anesthesiologist does the same to Mama, and I am born from a dream like I’m not real.
* * * *
Uncle Billy wants to take me for a walk before he drives me back to Gran’s. The morning frost has turned the clover into clumps of silver. The sky is not blue, and the sun looks far away. Dolly, the llama, stands guard chewing her cud. She watches as we pass through the paddock of black and white sheep.
I have a loose tooth. I’ve already lost two of them and the tooth fairy brought me a shiny silver dollar each time. With my tongue, I push this loose tooth forward until I taste the blood, and then I spit just to see the red.
Uncle Billy answers all the questions I don’t actually ask out loud.
“Fig,” he says, “your mother has a disease called schizophrenia.”
And then he tells me that Mama was nineteen when she first struggled with the disease. The number nineteen feels important, and I say it to myself quietly. “Nineteen,” I whisper, and I can still taste the saltiness of my blood. “It can be hereditary,” he is saying, and I am still whispering the word: “nineteen.”
But then I stop, because now I’m wondering if I, too, will inherit the disease when I turn nineteen. Gran is always going on and on about how Mama and I are like paper dolls. “Cut from the same paper,” she always says, and when she does she shakes her head and makes a clicking noise of disapproval with her tongue. And now I’m scared. I’m scared to even think about the number nineteen. Let alone say it out loud, even if I only whispered it.
Uncle Billy tells me Mama’s aunt has the disease as well. “The one who lives in Connecticut,” he says, as if I know all about her, when I know nothing. I’ve only been told that everyone on Mama’s side of the family is dead.
“With your mother, the disease manifested itself a few weeks after your grandparents died in the fire,” Uncle Billy says. “Annie used to talk about how scary it was. She saw and heard and even felt things that weren’t really there. But she found a special doctor and started taking medicine and all the symptoms went away. She met your dad, fell in love, finished college, and moved out here.”
He explains how she had no choice but to go off her medication once she was pregnant.
“It can harm the fetus,” Uncle Billy says. “After Annie had you, she really wanted to breast-feed, which meant not going back on the medicine right away. She’d had no problems during the pregnancy, and she ended up nursing longer than she ever expected. Three years passed and still no meds, and still no symptoms. That was when she began to wonder if she’d been misdiagnosed.”
Uncle Billy pauses, looking at me the way people do when they need me to understand.
“It made so much sense when we thought about it,” he says. “We all ended up coming to the same conclusion. We decided the first doctor paid too much attention to her family history and not enough to the fact her nervous breakdown likely resulted from having just lost her parents to a fire.”
Uncle Billy doesn’t actually explain how Mama was mistaken, how they all were. He said enough when he said, “Your mother has a disease called schizophrenia.” He assumes I understand. “Sometimes the disease goes dormant,” he says. “It hides for a while before it resurfaces.” My uncle makes the sickness sound like a monster—and I can see it. Lurking in the shadows, hidden somewhere in my nineteenth year, ready to jump out and get me. Was this what was chasing me and Mama? Does this disease have yellow eyes and sharp claws and hungry teeth? Is it going to try and scare me to death?
Uncle Billy tells me how my parents asked him to talk to me about the disease. He explains how hard it is for them. “Your mother wanted me to tell you how sorry she is,” Uncle Billy says. “She didn’t mean to scare you like she did. She wanted me to make sure you knew there was nothing chasing you that night.”
We’re standing where I stopped to spit, and I can still see the red. I know my uncle wants to walk all the way out to the river, because the Silver River is his favorite place in the world. My favorite place was being inside my mother, where I felt safe because I didn’t feel anything. Where I was safe before the scalpels cut me out like I was a piece of meat and not a baby. Sometimes Mama takes me to the Silver River too, and we play in the wading pool. When we go, she almost always sings, “Take me down in the river to pray,” which is weird because she doesn’t believe in God.
I look at Uncle Billy. His eyes are a lighter shade of brown than mine, and as I study them his pupils turn into pinpoints because the sun is coming out. I push again at my loose tooth. I use my tongue like I did before, but this time I do not spit. This time, I swallow the blood.
Uncle Billy starts to walk again, and I follow, half running just to catch up with his long strides. We cross the ditch using a different bridge than the one by the orchard. This one is wider, not just a plank of wood thrown across the water. And now we are walking without talking. We walk until we reach the Silver River.
This is where the water is still calm and shallow, but if I followed it downstream, I would arrive at the place where it begins to rage. At this place, the water rushes forth so fast, it runs white. There, the white water crashes over the big rocks into a waterfall, and the waterfall fills the pool below with deep underwater chambers.
From the waterfall, the river splits: On the McAlister side, the river remains a river—wide and rushing onward, but our side is different. On our side, when the river resurfaces, it is channeled by curving walls of rock. Here the water calms and forms the shallow pool where Mama takes me to play. This is where Uncle Billy finally pauses. Here where the water turns white before it leaps over the rocks. The waterfall is loud, and when my uncle speaks, he almost shouts.
“Your grandfather made that pool,” he says, pointing at the wading pool below, farther down from the f
alls. “He hauled all those rocks and piled them into dams and walls to tame this river. He turned chaos into a place of peace.” My uncle stands there looking at the quiet pool, so I do the same. The stone wall circles out from a weeping willow that slants across the water. Uncle Billy shakes his head and sighs, and then he gestures for me to follow him down the stone steps embedded in the side of the steep hill.
When I reach the bottom, my uncle is already sitting on a rock by the pool, skipping stones. I stand on the last step to listen to the waterfall, which now sounds different from how it did when I was above it. Mama’s shown me pictures of the gorges in Ithaca, where she used to live. She’s in the photographs too, tiny compared with the gigantic waterfalls behind her. This is how I know how small our waterfall really is. I try to see through the white curtain of water, but the falling motion makes me look down. The water here is so deep, it turns to black.
* * * *
I ask Daddy how to spell “schizophrenia,” and he tells me Mama has started taking her medicine again.
“Once the doctors get it all figured out,” he says, “she can come home.” Just when I think he’s never going to spell “schizophrenia,” he grabs a piece of junk mail from the foyer and writes the word on the back of an envelope. It has the same f-sounding ph as “phobia,” and I wonder if ph is only used in words about the brain and how it works.
I try to pronounce “schizophrenia” and get it wrong every single time.
The loose tooth doesn’t help. It turns the s and z into a waterfall of spit. Daddy tries to help. He breaks the word apart, syllable by syllable, and I repeat each one like an echo: “Skits.” “O.” “Fren.” “Eee.” “Uh.” Broken into five different parts, I say it perfectly, and now I know I could pronounce the word if I wanted to.
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