Just in case I get home and find Mama feeling better. Good enough to leave her room, have dinner with us, and maybe even help me with my homework. I was wrong to think that everything would go back to how it was. Sometimes holding my breath and crossing my fingers doesn’t work.
“Fig, we have to be patient,” Daddy keeps telling me. “The medicine doesn’t just start working overnight. It takes a while for the doctors to find the right dose, to see what combination of drugs brings the most relief.” And this is when he always pauses. He pauses and looks at me for a long time. He looks tired every day. And finally, after forever, Daddy will finish the speech. “It will take some time,” he says.
But he is never specific; he does not elaborate. He does not show me on the calendar how long it will take. This is because he doesn’t know. And if Daddy doesn’t know, that means no one does. “We just have to wait and see,” my father says, and I swear he tells me this every single day.
* * * *
Mama does come downstairs while Daddy and I are eating. We’re sitting at the old oak table in the kitchen. Through the French doors, I can see the table in the dining room. The pile of broken china dolls is still there next to the coil of barbed wire, but Daddy must have used the power drill, because it’s no longer there.
No more blinking red light.
Gran gets after Daddy about how Mama shouldn’t use that space to work.
“If Annie is going to insist on being an artist,” Gran says, “then she should act like one and turn the attic into a studio.” But Daddy always tells Gran he doesn’t mind.
He likes Mama out in the open—where he can see her.
Daddy slides his chair back, like he’s going to get up. The way that men do on TV whenever a woman comes into the room. But he doesn’t get up—he watches Mama, who is standing in the doorway, her hair tangled and face as pale as a ghost. She’s wearing Daddy’s terry-cloth bathrobe, and in reaction to us staring she tightens the belt. I’ve seen Mama tired before, but not like this.
Maybe Mama has cancer like Sissy Baxter’s mother does. Maybe she has cancer instead of schizophrenia? I was hiding in the coat closet when I heard Sissy Baxter tell Mrs. Olson.
“How is your mother?” Mrs. Olson asked, and that’s when Sissy Baxter started crying. Mrs. Olson let her cry. But then Sissy Baxter stopped crying like it was something you can just turn off. That’s when she said, “Daddy says Mom’s going to be okay after she gets the mastectomy.” Sissy Baxter didn’t trip up when she said “mastectomy.” Sissy Baxter said “mastectomy” out loud the way I wish I could say the word “schizophrenia.”
“Are you hungry?” Daddy asks, and I remember where I am. Mama looks at him like she doesn’t understand what he is asking.
“It’s ham,” Daddy says. “The end of what Billy cured last year.”
I cringe.
I still can’t stand the idea of eating meat, but I’ve stopped feeding it to the dog. No matter how many times Mama insists nothing was actually chasing us that night, I remember all those yellow eyes. What if they really were coyotes? What if I was the one who lured them to the farm by leaving all my scraps by the ditch? Now when I pocket the meat from my plate, I bury it deep in the kitchen trash instead.
Daddy is always going on about how important it is to know where your food comes from. But the slaughter is hard on me—it’s always come after my birthday, once it’s cold enough that all the flies have died. This year, I hid inside my bedroom to avoid it but I forgot about the curing, which is still to come, and soon.
Daddy also says, “There is no cure for schizophrenia.”
Mama is staring at the oven like she can see the ham inside, even though there is no window. Just white enamel and an oven mitt hanging from the handle. Maybe Mama has been hiding in her room for the same reasons that I hide in mine.
Maybe we can hide together.
“Tobias,” Mama says, “don’t get up. I’m fine.”
Her words are heavy and slow, and she doesn’t once look at me, not even when she gets a glass from the cabinet and her robe brushes against the back of my chair. She fills the glass with water from the tap. Looking out the window, she drinks the water and fills the glass again before she shuffles out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and back to her bedroom.
* * * *
After dinner, I go to get my homework, but my backpack isn’t where I thought I’d left it.
I start upstairs to see if it’s in my room, but when I reach the top of the stairs I notice the door to Mama and Daddy’s room is open, when it’s been closed for days. Mama is sitting on the bed, leaning over, and she appears to be looking at something I can’t see.
Her long blond hair is a curtain to hide behind.
She has brushed it since she came downstairs, but it still needs to be washed. Daddy calls her hair strawberry blond, but Mama says it is dishwater blond. “Fig,” she says, “you’re the true blond, the one with the golden locks.” Only I have no locks, because Mama insists on keeping my hair cut short. I don’t really care—even if the girls at school make fun of me. And call me a boy.
Short hair is much easier to manage, and Mama needs life to be a little bit easier than it is. If I can help make life easier, then it won’t take as much time for the medicine to start working.
The floorboards squeak and Mama looks up. Her hair falls away and I see her face. Downstairs, the front door closes, and I know Daddy’s gone out for his evening walk. He says it’s to check on the animals, but Uncle Billy says it’s his time to get away—that Daddy’s done this ever since he was a boy. “We all have our rituals,” my uncle said, winking at me the way he always does.
“Fig,” Mama says. And she says my name like it’s the first time she’s ever said it out loud. Like she’s trying it out, and now she is smiling and her whole face brightens. Her bedside lamp is turned on, casting an amber glow on the room, and making her not look so pale.
“Darling,” Mama says, patting the bed. “Come sit a minute.” While her words are still heavy, they are beginning to come faster.
I do as she says.
I try not to look at the naked fake Barbie in her lap, or my opened backpack, which I couldn’t see before. The entire room looks different from how it looked when I was in the hall. There are deep shadows in the corners, and the white bedspread is more worn than I remember. I run my fingers across the white, feeling the tiny bumps in the weave.
Mama holds up the doll, and now I have to look. She turns it around, looking at the fake Barbie in a way that makes me feel like there’s something I can’t see that she can see clearly. “Did you get this for your birthday?” she asks, and her words are coming even faster.
I nod, looking down. My knees poke out from under my skirt. My socks are bunched around my ankles because the elastic is worn. The scabs are almost healed, but I want to rip them off again. I can remember the way the blood felt. It was hot, and everything stopped long enough for me to really catch my breath and breathe again. I think about my fingernails, and then I think about using something else to do the picking—maybe something made from metal.
Mama pulls a permanent marker out of her bedside drawer and starts drawing on the fake Barbie. She draws little black arrows all around the doll’s breasts, stomach, thighs, and buttocks. The marks remind me of sewing stitches. Mama must assume all Barbies, fake or not, come naked, because she never once asks where her clothes have gone. Instead, she makes her perfect arrows, and I can tell she’s really concentrating by the way she works her tongue back and forth. This is what she does when she works on her art.
“There!” she says, her tongue normal again. “Do you know what I did?”
Mama tells me she did exactly what a plastic surgeon does to a woman’s body before she goes in for surgery. She explains how all the areas marked are the parts of the body women are made to feel most ashamed of, and she points at the arrows on the fake Barbie’s tummy and says, “Nip and tuck!” She says it so the p in “nip” pops and t
he k in “tuck” clicks.
I think about the long, purple scar on Mama’s tummy from when I was born. Sometimes I wish I could unzip that scar and crawl back inside. I’d find a new way out, and this time she wouldn’t have to get cut open. “Butchered,” Mama sometimes says to describe the operation.
Mama holds the doll and points at her feet. I think about the tiny rubber heels I took off. I worry a rabbit will try to eat one and choke to death. Mama is not just a feminist but an environmentalist as well. I see how the doll’s feet were made to only wear high heels. Mama touches the pointy toes on each foot and asks me if I’ve ever heard of Chinese foot binding.
Her words are no longer flat. Now they come fast, and overpronounced.
“The term ‘binding’ is very misleading,” Mama says. “Binding implies the cloth kept the girl’s feet from growing, but there is much more involved. The ideal age to begin was when a girl was three. You’re much too old,” she says, smiling as if to comfort me.
“First, the girl’s feet were broken. They tried to do this during the winter so the cold would help to numb the pain.” Mama pauses to take a drink of her water. “The cold also helped to stop infection,” she says. And then she hands me the naked fake Barbie doll.
I know she wants me to examine it, so I do, and I find her feet are nothing like my own.
“It was the mother’s job to break her daughter’s feet and do the binding,” Mama says. “She’d fold the broken toes under and wrap the binding cloth around the foot as tight as she could. At night, she slept on top of her daughter’s feet to cut off the circulation and thus ease the pain.”
Mama is talking way too fast. I try to keep up.
Mama explains how the mothers had no other choice. In their own way, they were being very kind. She uses the word “compassion.” Mama tells me the practice of foot binding has lasted about one thousand years. “There is no way to unbind a bound foot,” she says. “Trust me, the communists tried.” The most desirable size was no longer than three inches. “These feet were called golden lotuses,” Mama says. “Anything bigger was ridiculed.”
Mama says large feet were called lotus boats, but then she stops talking. She stops in the middle of a sentence, and her hazel eyes have caught on fire. And I realize that Daddy has returned.
He must be standing in the doorway. I can smell the cold air and the manure. He steps into the room and ruffles my hair. He is looking at the doll I am holding. There are bubbles of spit on Mama’s bottom lip.
“Good night, Fig,” he says. And I say good night too. I say good night as I grab my backpack, and I leave as fast as I can.
I leave so fast, I don’t realize I still have the naked fake Barbie until I’m in my room with the door shut behind me. And this is where I drop her. I let go like she’s about to burn me.
* * * *
In the morning, when I wake up, I go to the bathroom and the door to Mama’s room is closed again. And I can hear her snoring, which she never used to do. I go back to my room to get dressed.
Before I put my socks on, I inspect my feet. They’ve always been big, but they’ve grown even larger; overnight, they are absolutely gigantic.
I pick up the naked fake Barbie and hold her so she can also see my feet.
“What do you think?” I ask. I talk in whispers, afraid of my own voice.
She zooms in, taking a closer look at my lotus boats. My toes are hairy and my nails are dirty and need to be trimmed. Mama is the one who cuts my nails. I pull the Barbie back really fast. She is disgusted. She stands in front of me, tilting her head to study my face. She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head.
“Something must be done,” she says, and then she blows out her breath the way I do after I’ve been holding it in and crossing my fingers to make a wish.
* * * *
When the morning bell rings, I hide behind the shed and wait until everyone’s inside.
And then I unzip my backpack and start pulling out the supplies—first the scissors, then the hammer. The roofing nails are still attached to one another by wire. The Ziploc baggie opened by accident inside my pack, and the little tubes of lipstick all spilled out. Gran gets these from the woman who goes door to door, from one old lady to the next, and always says, “Avon calling.” These are samples and look exactly like regular lipsticks, only smaller. Gran has hundreds, but I’ve only stolen thirteen.
The last thing I take out is the naked fake Barbie doll.
I wrapped her up with rubber bands so she can’t move anymore. I cut off the end of my shoelace and used it as a gag to silence her.
I didn’t much like what she had to say.
Despite the rubber bands, she squirms around in my fist. The little arrows Mama made don’t come off. They won’t smear even if I spit on them and try to rub them away with my thumb. I cut off her hair and I can see the hundreds of tiny holes where her hair was fed through like one of the Chia Pets I’ve seen on the television. She is crying and looking at the ground where her hair landed in plastic clumps of platinum blond.
Next, I break off two of the roofing nails.
I put one nail between my lips as I hammer the other through her left hand. She is screaming as I attach her to the back of the shed, where the other kids carve their initials into the wood. The gag turns her screaming into a squeaking, and she is a mouse. The second nail bends and I have to get another, but it goes right in and the naked fake Barbie sticks to the shed like the letter T, only with a head. She passes out from the pain, and her head droops like a wilted flower.
I twist open a sample lipstick and smear it on her wrists. She opens her eyes, coming in and out of consciousness. She blinks her blue eyes as I hold her head up. I smear her eyes with lipstick, and she can’t see me anymore. Her head just rolls when I let go.
The lipstick goes farther than I expected and I don’t need another, except this one is too orange so I use a different one. It’s bright red, and once I’m satisfied with its likeness to blood, I pack up.
I peek around the corner of the shed and make sure no one is around. I go straight to the nurse’s office. I don’t run, but I do walk fast.
I tell the nurse I’ve been in the bathroom with diarrhea. I act like I’m embarrassed to say that word: “diarrhea.” She touches my forehead with the back of her hand and takes my temperature. The mercury climbs up to normal, and this is the only normalcy in my life. The nurse hands me some water and I gulp it down. When I’m done, she uses her hand to crumple the cone-shaped paper cup, which she tosses into the trash can.
I tell her I’m feeling much better. That I have an important test to take. I hold my breath and cross my fingers to make it work, and it does. The nurse writes a note for me to give to Mrs. Olson, which will excuse me from being marked down as tardy.
* * * *
The dandelions are dying, but they’re all I have. When I picked them, they bled white milk, and I had to wipe it off my fingers. These three flowers were the only ones left in our yard that hadn’t yet gone to seed. When I cut my shoelace this morning, I messed up and cut off way too much, but using what’s left I tie the dandelions into a bouquet. I wish I could do better. I wish I had some ribbon instead, and all I have for a card is a piece of pink construction paper I stole from the art room and a stubby pencil I can’t go sharpen. Mrs. Olson continues to sit at her desk instead of going to eat lunch with the other teachers in the lounge.
I use the thin line of light shining into the coat closet to carefully write the note I wish someone would write to me:
Dear Sissy Baxter,
I’m sorry about your mother. I hope she gets better real soon.
Sincerely,
Fig Johnson
I fold the fibrous pink paper into an envelope to hold the wilted dandelions, and then I slip the package into the side pocket of Sissy Baxter’s brand-new Strawberry Shortcake backpack. I sit down and I hold my breath and cross my fingers—please, please, please, let Sissy Baxter understand; please don’t le
t her make fun of me instead.
* * * *
Principal White looks uncomfortable in his clothes. Tight necktie, and the way his shirt seems to tug at his elbows. He sits on the other side of his gigantic desk—an island to separate his world from mine. He has a large calendar on his desk. When one month is over, you just tear away the sheet and the next month is there, waiting.
I look at the cardboard backs of all his framed photographs, and then I look at his nameplate, which reads PRINCIPAL WHITE.
In his back-to-school speech, Principal White said, “The difference between ‘principle’ and ‘principal’ is the word ‘pal’ that’s in my title,” and then he did that thing grown-ups do with their fingers that’s supposed to look like quotation marks. “That’s right,” he said, “I am your pal.” And when he laughed, I saw his big yellow teeth.
On the wall there is a framed photograph of Principal White holding a large fish. The fish is still alive, wet, and squirming; the fish is trying to escape the paper, ink, and glass. I recognize the river. This is the Silver River, but not the section that runs next to our farm and works as a property line. This section runs through Silver River Park on the other side of town.
In the photograph, Principal White is smiling. He wears a khaki hat with hooks and flies attached to the brim. Uncle Billy is a fly fisherman too.
This is why I know that these flies are also called lures.
The Principal White in the picture looks relaxed and comfortable in his clothes, unlike the man in front of me. He appears to be waiting but doesn’t tell me why I’m here.
It’s dark inside his office. The venetian blinds are slanted, and the sunlight stripes the air, highlighting all the dust. Gran says ninety percent of all household dust is dead skin. If this is true, just by breathing, the principal and I are eating each other. The word for this is “cannibalism.” I can see the page in the dictionary from when I looked it up months ago. I used the wonky dictionary in the cabinet. There was a crease in the page and not a single one of Mama’s check marks.
This is called a photographic memory.
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