But I don’t.
I’m too scared to say it out loud now that I know I could. Just like I’m too scared to say “nineteen,” I worry that saying “schizophrenia” will act like a spell and either make Mama worse or make me get sick too, or both. Because Daddy keeps trying to help me pronounce “schizophrenia,” I find a way to change the subject. I tell him there was another word I couldn’t pronounce—the one I tried to read in The Headless Cupid.
Even though I can see the word clear as day inside my head, I pretend I can’t. Even though I can actually see the word on the page, I pretend I can’t. I pretend I can’t remember how it was spelled, so I ask where the book is and Daddy shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Fig,” he says. “It was overdue. I returned those books a week ago.” I make a sad face, and he apologizes again and forgets all about helping me pronounce “schizophrenia.”
That night, I go to Gran’s and my tooth falls out.
I’m in bed, and she’s already asleep in the other room—I can hear her snoring. I hold the tooth between my fingers and use a slant of yellow light from a streetlamp outside to examine it.
It looks like the other teeth I’ve lost. The root is sharp and jagged and painful looking.
I put it under my pillow like I did before with Mama. I climb out of bed and find the envelope I shoved into the back pocket of my jeans, the one Daddy wrote SCHIZOPHRENIA on in careful lettering, and I put the tiny tooth inside. And then I put everything beneath my pillow.
I don’t have to wear the splint at night anymore. Gran says I broke the habit. And sleep comes so much easier than it did before, especially tonight. The house is quiet. There is no ticking. And without my tooth, I feel lighter. I fall asleep thinking about the tooth fairy and what she will bring, but in the morning when I awake I find no silver dollar waiting for me. There is nothing under my pillow but an envelope addressed to schizophrenia.
CHAPTER THREE
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
wait v. 1. To remain in expectation
October 21, 1982
I am seven years old today.
Gran is driving me home from her house, where she threw me a party. I’ve never had a party before, and I don’t ever want one again.
All my other birthdays were special without a big party. And we always celebrate it on the actual day. Not the weekend right before like Gran insisted on doing. “You want your friends to actually come,” she said. As if I had friends in the first place. Usually Mama bakes a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and the only people who come over are Uncle Billy and Gran. They sing “Happy Birthday” and I open presents and we eat cake—simple, but perfect.
This year, Gran decorated her living room with pink and white streamers and bought a cake from the grocery store that read Fiona in pink frosted cursive, and made me wear a cone-shaped hat that said Birthday Girl! And all the girls she invited stared at me and whispered into one another’s ears whenever there were no adults in the room. I didn’t know any of them—they were all the granddaughters of Gran’s old-lady friends.
One girl gave me a bendable fake Barbie doll, which I’ll have to hide from Mama because Mama hates Barbie. I don’t know why. Mama hates a lot of things that other mothers like.
I stuffed the doll way down at the bottom of my backpack, under all my school supplies. I can’t put her in the Dorothy suitcase, because one of my parents is bound to unpack all my clothes when I get back to the farm. I miss my normal birthdays, but everything is about to go back to how it used to be before Mama got sick. I hold my breath and cross my fingers.
On the phone today, Daddy said, “Mama coming home is your biggest present of all.”
And he is right. I can’t wait to see her, and I’m not worried about Alicia Bernstein from Social Services anymore. It’s been four months, but Mama is back on her medication, which means she is all better. Because Mama is better now, I too, get to move back to the farm for good.
Daddy keeps saying, “Everything is going to be okay.” And I believe him. I’m not even worried about turning nineteen. Inheriting the disease wouldn’t be so bad. All I’d have to do is take the medicine and I’d be just fine.
Gran takes the interstate, and I ride in the back. When we left her house, it was raining, but now it’s not. The sky is a wash of gray, and Gran’s car glides along and you can barely hear the outside world the way you can in Daddy’s truck or Mama’s rusty Volvo. Part of the sky is as green as a bruise, and there are black things coming down that look like lassos, and Gran says, “Those are tornados.”
I look at the plains, where gigantic shadows sweep across the land as Gran watches me from the rearview mirror with sharp eyes. She tells me how safe we are.
“Perfectly fine,” she says.
She guides the long car off the interstate and into a gas station. From the backseat I watch her struggle with the pump—her hair and jacket ready to blow away. She knocks on my window even though I’m looking right at her. Muffled by wind and glass, Gran says, “Don’t get out of the car.” She looks at me funny, tilting her head and squinting, and she says, “Promise me, Fig.”
And I nod my head. With my fingers, I make an X to cross my heart.
Gran never talks like this, and she never calls me Fig—just Fiona, which Mama says is only my name on paper. Daddy wanted to name me after his mother, because she’d been named after her mother, who had been named after hers, and that list goes on: forever backward. Somehow this list is more important than naming me after the grandmother I never got to know.
The name Fiona is the only thing Gran and I have in common.
I watch my grandmother make her way through the pumps and across the lot, toward the station to pay. A piece of tumbleweed rolls past before getting sucked into the sky like there is a God and he’s drinking the world up through a straw. For a moment, I think Gran might blow away, but then she’s inside.
That’s when I break my promise. I get out of the car. I have to see how it feels.
The wind picks me up and throws me. The next pump over stops my body. My hair and yellow sundress are blowing away, and I’ve scraped both knees. The blood rises up in little dots.
I see Gran coming for me—steps like slow motion. Trash flaps through the air, and when she calls to me her voice is stolen by the wind. She reaches with one arm and I grab hold of it with both of mine. She pulls me up and drags me through the wind, shoving me into the car as if I’m trying to resist when I’m not. As we drive away her angry eyes glare at me from the rearview mirror.
Daddy is always talking about how strong nature is, and I finally understand. I want to tell Gran, but every time I try she puts her hand up to stop me from talking. And then she’s just struggling to drive against the wind, and I know better than to talk. I practice silence as I watch her fingers clutch the steering wheel so hard, her age spots disappear by turning back to white. And wrapped around her right hand I see her beloved pearl rosary.
This rosary has been in Gran’s family forever—passed along from mother to daughter, from one Fiona to the next, a procession that had to stop when Gran only gave birth to sons.
This rosary does not bear the Passion of Christ but Mother Mary instead. Like the chain connecting all the shiny pearls, Mary is made from silver, and her image dangles in the air right now. She bears her heart for all to see, and she stares at me. Exposed and wide open, her heart is trying to tell me a story. Swords and wounds and blooming roses, her heart is like a shooting star.
* * * *
When we get home, Mama doesn’t come downstairs to greet us, and Daddy acts like she isn’t even here, even though we all know what a big deal it is that she’s come home. Instead, he mixes his mother a tall gin and tonic, and when she takes it the pearl rosary is still wrapped around her wrist.
Daddy says he’s been watching the news. “No need to go into the cellar,” he says. “But I do think you should stay the night.” And he hands Gran one of Mama’s nightgowns and leads her to the guest bedroom. I
can tell it’s weird since this used to be Gran’s house where she raised two boys and lived until Mama and Daddy moved in to have me and live together happily ever after.
Mama says Gran always wanted to stay in Lawrence, where she’d been born and raised. She called Gran a city girl who married a farm. “It was the patriotic thing to do,” Mama said. “It was World War II, and lots of sweethearts tied the knot before they should have. All the guys were enlisting, and no one knew who would come back and who wouldn’t.”
Gran goes straight to bed, but I don’t. I know that Mama is upstairs waiting for me. I go to her room, and Mama opens the door before I have a chance to knock.
She seems like herself again—before the medicine, and the too-much-medicine.
I milk her for all the love I can get. She tends to my knees with careful tissue and stinging peroxide and helps me get ready for bed. With my flannel nightie on and Band-Aids plastered across my knees, the whole big lesson about nature seems silly, so I don’t talk about it. And even if I tried, the words to explain my experience have all blown away.
But Mama’s crying anyway and telling me how much she’s missed me. “I’m so sorry,” she says, wiping tears away.
We’re back in her room again, sitting cross-legged on the brass bed, when she pulls my present out from where she had it hidden under the pillow. And she tells me to open it. She’s watching to make sure I’m happy, and it’s not just about my birthday.
I try to make the moment last forever. I’m careful as I peel off the tissue paper, trying not to tear it, but I can’t help it; the rip runs away from me to reveal the gift: a glossy wall calendar with picture after picture from Alice in Wonderland. Mama says the illustrations are from the original book. They are not from the Disney movie. Disney is yet another thing my mother hates. “It’s sexist,” she has explained a million times, “the way the women are portrayed as villain or maiden in distress.”
Mama looks at me and says, “Happy birthday, my precious Fig,” and then she brushes my bangs away so she can kiss my third eye.
Mama lets me crawl under the covers, and I know she’ll let me stay the night. Daddy has to sleep downstairs on the sofa with the television turned on anyway. Just in case the tornados do turn around and make the screen go all red with a million warnings. In case the newscasters say, “No school tomorrow.”
I wrap my arms around Mama, and I hold her like I’m the mother and she’s the daughter.
I like the way it feels, but it makes me worry, too. What would Gran say if she saw? But then I breathe in Mama, and she is warm, and my eyes can’t help but close. It is so still right here, while outside the anxious wind rifles through the farm, looking to take something away.
* * * *
Daddy says Mama needs to rest again.
She’s trying out a new medicine to see if it will make her feel better—but I already know what these pills do. They don’t make her better. They just make her tired.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asks, “Maybe check for eggs?”
But I’m mad at him. I wouldn’t bother her. I’d only give her a kiss, and then I’d leave—maybe I’d offer to get her a glass of water, or ask if I could curl up beside her and take a nap too. If she said no, I’d understand. And I’d go away.
I glare at Daddy, which is hard to do because he’s so much taller. I give up, turning around and running down the hall like I’ve been told not to do because the sound startles Mama.
There are new rules, and they make everything different from before. Daddy says, “Rules are important,” but Uncle Billy says, “It’s important to learn the rules so you can learn when and how to break them.” I run into the bathroom and slam the door behind me. Then I lean against it, listening. I don’t hear anything, which means Daddy is still standing guard. He is protecting Mama.
I slide the lock over so no one can get in, and then I climb into the bathtub.
I don’t take off my clothes. I’m not planning on taking a bath. I like the old claw-foot. The way it slopes and the plug with the chain to keep it from ever getting lost. I like touching the places where the enamel chipped and watching the daddy longlegs who lives in the drain—the one who only has seven legs now because of me.
Alex Turner says daddy longlegs are the most poisonous spiders in the world. Alex talks about spiders all the time. Last year, he told the class everything he knew about daddy longlegs. “Even though they are superpoisonous,” he said, “they are completely harmless because they have no fangs.” When I told Mama, she said Alex was wrong. “That’s just an urban legend,” she explained. But I still like the idea: I could be poisonous like that.
I hear Daddy walk toward the bathroom. I can tell when he pauses, listening through the door. He says, “Fig ?” but I don’t say anything, so he says, “Fig, leave your Mama be. Do you hear me?” He stands there as if I’ll answer, but finally I hear him sigh. And he walks away. I listen to his steps as he goes down the stairs.
I listen until I can’t hear him anymore.
I’m still in my nightgown. When I tuck my knees under my chin, the skirt part slips down and I can see my knees. I have scabs from the tornado knocking me over—the tornado that Gran insists wasn’t a tornado. “The real tornados were very far away,” she told my father. She looked at him long and hard with her dark eyes and said, “I thought they said her IQ was exceptionally high?”
The scabs are scattered across my knees the way stars make constellations in the sky.
I trace them as if to play connect the dots. On my left knee, I trace a sun. The kind of sun I like to draw—a circle with little triangles all around for the rays. When I trace the scabs on my right knee, I discover a volcano.
The kids at school don’t call them scabs. They call them owies—and so do some of the grown-ups, like Mrs. Olson. “Owies.” I don’t think this is a very grown-up word to use. Unlike owies, scabs aren’t about being hurt. They are proof I am healing.
I’ve had enough scabs to know that in a day or two these ones will disappear. They will leave behind brand-new skin like nothing ever happened.
I pick one to see what is underneath. There’s no blood, just pinkness. Pink like Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web. Not the color of our pigs, which are black and white and gristly. I choose another scab because it looks like a bleeder, and it is. It turns into a little bead of blood and looks like it did when I first got hurt.
Then I pick them all, one by one, and my body is an Advent calendar. Sometimes I have to pinch the skin to coax the blood. And sometimes I mess up and the skin peels too far. The skin runs away like the tissue paper did when I was opening my birthday present.
The sores spread like watercolors on wet paper, and the bleeding makes me feel the way I did when I still sucked my thumb. It makes everything stop.
I pull myself out of the tub and go to the door. I unlock the latch and I get back into the claw-foot. I check my knees and find I have to pick more.
Pick, pick, pick.
Once the blood is good again, I start to cry. I’m careful not to actually call out for Mama. I cry like I can’t help but cry—the way a person really cries when they are very hurt. But she doesn’t come. No one does. Even when I am really crying, even when I cry for Mama. No one comes.
* * * *
“That’s not a real Barbie,” Candace Sherman says. And she keeps her arm up like she’s still waiting for Mrs. Olson to call on her. She does this so no one else can get a turn till she’s said what she wants to say. “That is the fake kind they sell at Kmart. That’s why she’s so bendy, Fig. Not because she’s a special edition.”
And the whole second-grade class giggles.
The way show-and-tell works in Mrs. Olson’s second-grade classroom is each student only gets to do it once a year on his or her birthday. If your birthday is in the summer, your birthday show-and-tell is on your half birthday, or whatever closest day is available. The only other show-and-tell you get is if you travel outside Kansas.
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I’m lucky because we never go anywhere.
I’d been hoping Mrs. Olson would forget my birthday because I was careful not to remind her like the other kids always do, but she remembered. Even if it took her a few days, she remembered.
After morning recess, she pulled me aside to tell me I was up first thing after lunch before language arts. I was about to beg her not to make me, when I remembered I still had the bendable Barbie doll in my backpack. I imagined the other girls coming up afterward, asking to play with her during recess. Asking to play with me. And this was the stupid reason I agreed to do show-and-tell.
* * * *
I watch the school bus drive away, and then I stand in the road watching the dust settle. I’m the first kid picked up in the morning and the last one dropped off.
The days are getting shorter, and the moon is coming up—the kind that Daddy calls a harvest moon. It’s as orange as a pumpkin, and it looks too heavy to go any higher.
I open my backpack to get my sweater.
There’s the fake Barbie.
Her legs stick out and make the letter V. I take her out. And I bend her into impossible positions, positions that don’t make sense. Positions that scare me because the expression on her face never changes. Sometimes this happens to Mama, but when it does she is never smiling.
I bend her until her back should break.
I force her head into her crotch and jam her legs and arms until all her joints bend the wrong way. I straighten her out and strip off her clothes. I pop off the rubber high heels, letting them fly one at a time like champagne corks. I undo the Velcro on her blouse and slide off her jeans, and I’m surprised to find she isn’t wearing any underwear. She doesn’t have nipples or a belly button or a vagina, but she does have something resembling a butt crack.
I stuff all her clothes into the culvert. And then I put the naked fake Barbie back into my pack, buried under my Trapper Keeper—just in case.
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