Fig

by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

  * * * *

  I keep Turtle on my window seat, tucked into her wooden cradle, wrapped in the crazy quilt. I keep her there and I never play with her.

  Mama comes into my room, again and again, always asking if I just adore my new doll. And I cross my fingers to lie. I don’t have to hold my breath. I cross my fingers, and I say, “Yes,” and Mama is already sitting in the window seat, running her finger down Turtle’s plastic nose, which I’ve been told is how she used to help me fall asleep when I was still a baby.

  I see the way Mama is eyeing the plastic baby bottles, still imprisoned in their package on the floor beneath my desk. This is where I keep them. These bottles are special bottles. They make Turtle pee. Filled with water, you stick the hard nipple into the hole in Turtle’s hard mouth and let the water run through her body until she wets her diaper.

  Turtle came with doll-size disposable diapers, but Mama made more by cutting up all my old cloth ones—that is, the cloth diapers Daddy didn’t already ruin. He uses them as rags to apply linseed oil and beeswax to the wood he works in his shed. My father has a way with wood.

  Mama is looking at the bottles still captured between the clear plastic and glossy cardboard, when I tell her I prefer to breast-feed instead. Only I say “nurse.” And this is when she tilts her head and looks at me. I hold my breath and cross my fingers to make her smile, and she does.

  She smiles at me, and she says, “Good for you, Fig.”

  Mama’s features are no longer sharp—not the way they used to be. Her face is getting puffy, and her body is becoming softer and softer. She blames it on water retention. Whenever I can, I cuddle up next to her and we spend the winter as one. Hibernating together, we read away the cold evenings and the weekends between the days when I have to go to school. We sit in the living room on the red velvet sofa by the fire or under the heavy quilts in Mama and Daddy’s big brass bed.

  Last week when we went to the library, I tried to check out The Headless Cupid again, but this time Mama wouldn’t let me. This time she flipped through it, reading different sections to herself. Then she closed the book and put it back on the shelf, looked at me, and said, “No. You just aren’t ready yet. But, Fig,” she said, “I swear I will let you read it when the right time comes—and I promise you, it will only make it that much better. I swear it will be worth the wait. You just wait and see,” she said, and then she kissed me on my third eye.

  So I am reading The Littles instead while Mama devours Virginia Woolf; she is trying to read every book she ever wrote—and her essays, too. Mama either borrows the books from the library or buys them from the bookstore in Lawrence. She brings them home and stacks the books on the floor by her bed. Marmalade loves to rub against this tower and often knocks it over in the middle of the night.

  Mama reads certain passages out loud and explains how Virginia was known for writing stream of consciousness.

  “This style of writing,” Mama says, “attempts to mimic the way the human brain actually works—the way we think, or rather the way we dream while we are still awake. The thought process is a constant blending of perceptions, memories, and epiphanies. The word stream implies the flow of thoughts or words, uninterrupted or censored, and not always punctuated, because ideas are never neat or tidy, nor are they linear. Our thoughts circulate, Fig. Our ideas move like water.”

  Mama used to read for hours at a time, but now she falls asleep between the pages. I think she stops and talks to me as much as she does just to try to stay awake.

  “I hate this medication,” she often mutters, and even though she’s talking more to herself than to me, I have to hold my breath and cross my fingers because it’s my job to make sure she doesn’t stop taking it. Even if it means she can’t work in the flower garden like she used to. Even if it causes her to fall asleep whenever she tries to read.

  Tonight, she drifts away, and her hands are a cradle to hold her book. Tonight, she’s reading To the Lighthouse, and yesterday she finally finished The Waves, which Mama said “was like drowning, only I was drowning inside the dreams of all the different characters in the book.”

  And I wonder if it helps to write about water when one is writing stream of consciousness.

  I take the book, careful to keep her place with my fingers as I locate Mama’s bookmark; it got buried by the quilt when Mama folded it over—lately, Mama has been getting really hot. “I’m burning up,” she will say as she peels off her sweater or kicks away the covers. I find the bookmark, only it’s not a real bookmark, and I wonder what happened to the one I gave her—the one with the watercolor butterfly and the long blue silk ribbon.

  Instead, she’s using one of the printouts from Eudora Drug—the ones from the pharmacist that come stapled to the white paper bags full of Mama’s endless medication. This one is for Valium.

  VALIUM is typed in boldface at the top of the printout and highlighted by a thin strip of bright yellow. This bright yellow is fluorescent like the colors all the popular girls at school wear these days. Only they call it “Day-Glo”—these girls who wear pants with stirrups, and a hundred rubber bracelets to swallow their perfect arms, while I just wear what I find inside my closet or dresser drawers. Clothing picked out by someone else. Clothing mostly picked out by Gran.

  Mama has three available refills of Valium remaining.

  I scan the possible side effects—dizziness, a spinning sensation, blurred vision, dry mouth.

  I tuck the printout for Valium into the book and put Virginia away for the night. Virginia and her stream will rest between Mama’s water glass and the telephone, and when I pull the chain on the lamp the light turns off and the night comes flooding in to my mother’s bedroom like a jar of black ink spilling—and I think, Everything moves like water.

  * * * *

  Kansas is still covered in a crust of yellow-white snow and contained by a sky dome of dull gray—but the weather is growing warmer, and Daddy is racing against the fast-approaching spring to put his father’s red-belly tractor back together again. With or without Uncle Billy, Daddy spends every day in the barn working on what he calls “the beast.”

  He torches iron rods until the metal is angry hot, and he fills the air with blue-white sparks and the hot smell of melted metal. The black lenses of his protective eyewear reflect the display of shooting stars, but despite his determination, Daddy comes home every day cursing yet another failed attempt to resurrect this machine.

  Sometimes I watch my father work, and other times I lie on the floor outside my mother’s bedroom, surrounded by the portraits of my father’s family. They stare down at me from their oval frames, where they float amid a garden of wallpaper roses. I lie here listening to the softness of my mother resting, and I let my fingers wander. They search for scabs to worry, but I haven’t any, so they worry the edge of the old Oriental runner instead. When Mama does reemerge, she always appears refreshed. She never asks why I’m on the floor—she just smiles at me and pulls me up. And together we go downstairs to fix some tea, eat cookies, and read some more.

  * * * *

  March 21, 1983

  I try to blink away the sleep.

  Mama is wrapping me in her wool shawl and telling me to sit, and then she’s helping me step into my galoshes. She holds my hand and guides me down the stairs. I am a baby bird under a Mama-bird wing. Daddy’s outside in the truck, and the engine is running.

  It still looks like night, but Mama says, “It’s almost morning.”

  We get in the truck and drive in silence. It’s a Monday, the first day of spring break, and for a second I wonder if we’re going on a trip, but we don’t go far. Daddy pulls over and parks next to the pasture where the pigs have been. I look at Mama, and she smiles, nodding her head. She says yes without saying anything at all. She brushes away my bangs and kisses me on my third eye the way she always does.

  I’m careful to be quiet the way they are.

  Daddy pushes the top wire down and steps over the short fence with his
long legs. Mama lifts me over, and when Daddy takes me he holds me long enough that it’s a hug. And when he sets me down, I grow tiny again in the tall Johnsongrass.

  We walk across the pasture, past the stable, and still we continue walking. We stop once the pasture meets the woods. This is where the tallest cottonwoods on the farm stand guard. They dip their roots into the deep farmer’s ditch and drink forever from the lazy water.

  The sun is rising, and the horizon turns watercolor pink. Mama sits and invites me onto her lap, taking her shawl and wrapping the soft wool around the two of us. And I think this is how it’s supposed to be. Everything is working out—Daddy was right after all.

  It was just a matter of time.

  My father squats down beside us, chewing on a blade of grass. He uses a flashlight to show me where Matilda is, but as soon as the first piglet begins to come, we don’t need the light anymore.

  The gilt lies on her side like nothing is happening. Like she’s still asleep. But then the piglet slides out, feet first. The head gets stuck inside the mother, and just when I think he’ll never come he does. He sniffs his mother’s tail, and then he tries to stand. He falls, but on his second try he makes it to all fours. He tries to walk away, into the woods, but he can’t. He is still attached to his mother by the spiral of blue umbilical cord—a leash to keep him near. The cord stretches, and as the firstborn strains toward the woods, another is born.

  This one also tries to run away.

  Matilda has delivered six baby pigs by the time the roosters have stopped calling in the new day. The babies come covered in wet cobwebs that Mama calls the afterbirth. The black-and-white newborns wobble, and soon are sticky with mud and dead grass.

  “It’s good for them to eat the dirt,” Mama says. “It’s full of iron.”

  They root around, clumsy and unstable, except for the one who never moves at all—the only baby who doesn’t try to run away.

  Daddy starts to build a temporary fence to keep the other pigs away from Matilda. Mama rearranges her body and my body—she is growing restless. She wraps the shawl around my shoulders before she stands, and she tells me she’s going to walk back to the house to make breakfast. She takes long strides across the pasture, her white nightgown parting the Johnsongrass, and it isn’t long before I can’t see her anymore.

  I stay to watch Matilda and her babies.

  It gets hot and I let the shawl slip off my shoulders. Kicking off my galoshes, I wiggle my toes, which are tiny and white compared with the dark bristle of the gilt and the deep black of the torn-up pasture. All the living piglets have nursed, and Matilda has licked them clean, cut them loose, and consumed their placentas by the time Mama returns with a small bucket of boiled potatoes and the picnic basket. She dumps the potatoes on the ground, and the mother pig eats without getting up.

  Mama has a thermos of milky sweet coffee and, wrapped inside paper towels, toasted English muffins with butter and chokecherry jam. She has two red-and-white sticks of peppermint candy that we use as straws to suck the juice from swollen oranges.

  And this is when I make my decision: Today, when I go back into the house, I am going to march up the stairs and go straight to my bedroom. I’m going to mark the square for today on my unicorn calendar. I will make a big black X and this X will mark the day Mama got all the way better. But for now I sit with Mama in the shade, and we don’t talk. We sit and eat and watch instead.

  I’m ready not to understand everything I see.

  When Matilda has finished eating her potatoes, she shakes the nursing piglets off her body by standing for the first time since she gave birth. Her babies try to latch on again, but she pushes them away with her snout. Then Matilda approaches the dead piglet, and the others fall back. Matilda sniffs the small, still body before she picks it up with her mouth. And this is when Mama catches her breath. She clenches her pale hands into fists that turn whiter because she’s squeezing herself way too hard, and I know what she is thinking: Mama thinks Matilda is going to eat her baby.

  The mother pig carries the stillborn to the edge of the woods where the wild raspberries grow thick. Matilda places the baby on the ground. Using her front hooves and snout, she begins to tear at the earth while the stillborn waits. Matilda finishes, and returns to her dead baby to nuzzle it toward the hole. And then I can’t see the baby anymore, cradled now by a shallow grave. As Matilda covers her stillborn with a blanket of brown-black soil, Mama begins to cry, but that doesn’t mean she’s acting crazy. She is having a normal reaction to something sad.

  Mama leans forward, uncurls her hands, and presses them against the earth, palms down. So I do the same.

  It feels like how praying looks.

  I stretch my fingers as far as they will go and push my palms against the cold dirt. I am trying to feel all the bodies buried below, but Mama gives up almost right away. She leans back, and then she’s standing, shielding her eyes with dirty hands. She watches Daddy work.

  I remain very still and will stay like this even after Mama drifts away and Daddy has finished building the fence. I will stay, bent forward, palms down.

  I am trying to feel my dead relatives. Daddy’s father is buried in the cemetery behind the Sacred Heart of Mary, and even though his body is far away, this earth is connected to his earth. Mama’s parents turned to ash, but with my hands pressed against the ground, I still feel connected to them somehow. Connected to all the people I never got to know.

  And I will stay like this until I feel their bodies pushing back.

  * * * *

  Back in my bedroom, I select the black Magic Marker from the pile of markers in my desk drawer. The one that smells like licorice.

  The unicorn calendar is on the wall in front of me, and I take the marker and I draw an X.

  The X is big and black—a railroad crossing, it marks the spot. Like a cobweb, the X reaches into each corner of the white square for March 21, 1983, and I stand here admiring the geometry. I don’t leave until the scent of licorice finally disappears. Then I follow the scent of spring—the hint of lilac, overpowered by the deep musk of freshly turned fields, and the smell of animals being born everywhere in Douglas County. Their numbers cancel out the one who didn’t make it.

  I wander past Mama’s herb and flower gardens, untended now, and yet I find the unruliness beautiful—the wild nature of the flowers and the weeds in the otherwise domesticated space. I pass these gardens where the dandelions are just poking through and the bindweed is beginning to spiral away, out of control. And I walk through the orchard, where the apple blossoms, two weeks early, are white and delicate, their centers dotted with sticky yellow stamen hearts.

  I pass through the bramble of wild raspberry where the buds are still tight and green and the new thorns haven’t yet formed, still harmless. And here I stand, in the cold shade of tall trees, watching the farmer’s ditch rush forth. Barely contained by the bosom of the mossy banks, this water washes everything away. I watch this rushing water, and I can only imagine the rising levels of the Silver River. But as much as I’d like to go see, there are still rules—said and not said—about where I’m allowed and not allowed to go.

  * * * *

  Uncle Billy was the one who answered the ad for a used tractor in Missouri, and today he and Daddy are driving down there to buy it. “We’ll be gone for one night and two days,” my father says.

  My uncle arrives at eight thirty in the morning with a box of doughnuts, and Mama smiles at me. “Just this once,” she says.

  I choose a glazed doughnut, but Mama surprises me by picking one with chocolate frosting and cream filling. She keeps smiling at me as she licks her fingers between sticky bites, and when she’s done the chocolate on her teeth turns her into a fairy-tale witch. Uncle Billy eats three doughnuts in a row without looking at what they are and washes them down with two tall glasses of cold milk. Daddy dunks his powdered doughnut into a cup of coffee as he studies the road map on the table, and when he’s done there are still half a d
ozen left.

  Grabbing the box of doughnuts, Uncle Billy says, “These are for the new mother.” And he winks at me. “Not only does Matilda deserve a treat, they’ll sweeten up her meat. Ancient family secret—so, Fig, don’t forget.”

  “You’re so full of crap,” Daddy says, standing up and folding the map into a neat rectangle. “Our family never raised pigs till now.” No one mentions that I never eat the meat I am served.

  When Uncle Billy comes back from the pigsty, he and Daddy climb into my father’s Dodge Ram and drive away, with Mama and me waving good-bye from the front porch. The redbud is in blossom, as is the bush honeysuckle trying to strangle the ditch along the driveway. We watch the dust settle, and we still have most of the day before Gran comes to stay with us. I’m hoping Mama will want to take a walk with me to pick the early spring wildflowers, the yellow fawn lilies, the violets, and the spiderwort, and maybe even press them between sheets of wax paper using the encyclopedia, but when I ask her she says she needs to get the house ready for my grandmother.

  * * * *

  For dinner, Gran brings Chinese takeout from Lawrence in paper cartons, with plasticware, fortune cookies, and those paper placemats with the red-and-white illustrations of the Chinese zodiac. Mama tells me what sign I am.

  I am a tiger.

  The picture shows the profile of a tiger walking. Instead of black and orange, the stripes are red and white. Mama says she’s a tiger too.

  Gran stands before the kitchen sink, waiting for the dishwater to fill. With her back to us, she says, “That figures. Two peas in a pod, and no room for anyone else.”

  I read the description for tiger: You are sensitive, emotional, and capable of great love. However, you have a tendency to get carried away and be stubborn about what you think is right; often seen as a “hothead” or rebel. Your sign shows you would be excellent as a boss, an explorer, a racecar driver, or a matador.