Fig

by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

  Daddy is in the driver’s seat again, and when he turns the key Mama catches my eye in the passenger-side mirror, but she doesn’t smile or look away. She stares at me instead. Daddy pulls away from the curb and the tires make a noise like rain as they roll over the wet street, and Mama still doesn’t look away.

  Lawrence falls behind and she continues to stare. And even though I often can’t see her in the long gaps of country darkness, I know she is still there—in the mirror, watching me. And when we pass a lonely streetlight or a house lit up, she is illuminated by the temporary brightness, and she is there. She is there when a car comes from the other directions, and as the headlights turn to taillights, she is glowing red and she is still staring.

  Her stare is empty but sometimes angry. Mama stares at me like she doesn’t know who I am or why I’m in her mirror. Like a caption to explain an image in a book, there is a warning below her stare. It reads, Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NESTING DOLLS

  wormhole: a “shortcut” through space-time.

  September 1984

  When I enter the fourth grade, Mama starts seeing a new therapist and she seems to get better every day, and it matters less that I will be nineteen in ten years.

  On Saturdays, she takes me to the Dairy Queen and we order strawberry milkshakes, which we suck through straws as she drives back home. I wonder if these milkshakes are the reason she is getting fat, but as long as Mama is happy I couldn’t care less about her weight.

  Now I just have more of her.

  * * * *

  The whine of the tornado alarm loops and the television screen goes red.

  And the warning repeats itself: TAKE IMMEDIATE SHELTER.

  Mama fills a plastic jug with water, and Daddy grabs a box of crackers and salami from the pantry. They usher me out the back door and toward the cellar. The wind slaps against my face and stings my cheeks. I pull on the double doors because both Mama and Daddy’s arms are full. The doors fly open. Once we’re all under the house, Daddy pulls the doors shut again and he secures them with a two-by-four, and I expect silence to follow but there isn’t any. The sounds aren’t even muffled. The siren nags and the wind is just as angry as it was before.

  Mama pulls on the string to turn on the light, and all I see are amoebas swimming in the dank air—blue-black, they are like the rainbows motor oil makes on water. Daddy sits on the bench across from us. The lightbulb swings back and forth, and his face goes from dark to light, again and again.

  Outside, the world is blowing away.

  And I think about what it’d be like to lose everything. Would we start over somewhere else? Somewhere far away from here. Is the fourth grade different in a different place?

  The barn is picked up in one piece and hurled to Missouri the way they throw discs in the Olympics. The trees are next—the ring of cottonwoods that protect the house. The massive trees make a popping noise as they are ripped from the ground. And it sounds like rain when God shakes the earth from their tangled roots. Next, the tornado plays with the house the way a cat plays with a mouse—it paws at all the windows before it smashes all the glass.

  It takes the house apart, board by board. The nails scream as they come undone after a century worth of holding.

  Mama reaches into her jeans and pulls out her medicine. She shakes a pill from the bottle and swallows it without any water. Another blue circle with a heart carved out. Then she sits with her elbows on her thighs and her head in her hands. I see her knuckles poking out of her hair. Daddy leans back, watching the ground. Neither of my parents looks up. There is a dead centipede on the dirt floor.

  Gran once told me about a tornado that came through here when my father was a little boy. It took the Fergesons’ original two-story farmhouse. Tossed it to the sky and heaven kept it.

  Bits and pieces of their farm were found scattered across the county for weeks after. We still have their white enamel kitchen sink out by the train tracks, half-buried. In the summer, the chicory grows a blue fairy ring around it.

  When the Fergesons crawled out of their root cellar, the only thing left was their front door. It stood there in its frame, the three steps leading up still intact. And sticking out of the keyhole was the key where they’d always kept it to keep it from getting lost. When Gran sent Daddy across the road with a casserole, Mr. Fergeson opened this door for him like their house was still there.

  When Daddy tells the story, he always says, “That was the day I stopped believing in God.”

  Before Daddy’s grandfather bought the farm, there used to be a cider house, but it, too, blew away. Ever since we Johnsons moved in, nothing on the farm’s been touched by the tornados that sweep through Douglas County as routine as a housekeeper and her broom.

  I lay my head in Mama’s lap. Through the crack between the cellar doors, the world is a filthy color green. As Mama strokes my head I pray. I pray for my family to begin anew. I hold my breath and cross my fingers. And the repetition of my praying puts me to sleep—but when I wake up, I find myself in my bed, and it’s a new day just like every other one that came before, and our house is where it’s always been. We will not be moving away to start over somewhere better; somewhere over the rainbow is not a place we get to go, or have. The only difference is I don’t have to go to school today.

  The storm broke the kitchen window and the yard’s littered with mangled tree branches and the gardens are all a mess. The hens did not survive, and I help Daddy clean the coop. The straw floor is plastered with egg yolk and broken shell. The black and white feathers are everywhere—woven into the chicken wire, caught in the splintered wood. The bodies of the flightless birds themselves lay where they were dropped, and when I pick them up they are limp and cold.

  * * * *

  Uncle Billy has work in Colorado and is leaving town for a spell. In the winter, he often goes to work at the ski resorts in Aspen or Steamboat Springs.

  “It’s the only way I can afford to have any fun,” he says. And then he winks at me and says, “Someday you will come along and I will teach you how to fly.”

  He wants to give me my birthday present even though my birthday isn’t for another twenty-one days. He insists I open it in front of him. The box is wrapped in silver paper with a long ribbon tied all the way around. The ribbon ends in a fancy black velvet bow at the top.

  The box is gigantic, almost as tall as my chest when I am standing.

  Uncle Billy grins. “Go on,” he says. “Open your present.”

  I fill the living room with the sound of tearing paper. What I peel off, Uncle Billy gathers and tosses to the side. He lets me use his pocketknife to cut where the cardboard flaps have been taped shut. Inside the box is another box wrapped in red with yellow ribbon. And because of how big it is, Uncle Billy lifts it out for me, and I use his knife again to cut the ribbon.

  In this box I find another box.

  I unwrap paper, undo ribbons, and cut open boxes. The living room fills with wadded-up wrapping paper, ribbon, bows, and empty cardboard boxes. Marmalade busies herself by chasing after all the paper and attacking it. Uncle Billy acts as if everything is normal.

  “Open your present,” he keeps saying every time I find another box.

  I’m left with a small box that fits in my lap. It looks like the first present, only smaller. The same silver paper, but instead of ribbon Uncle Billy has written, I love you.

  Inside I find a wooden doll.

  She is not shaped like any doll I have ever seen. Her hair, face, and clothes have all been painted on. She smiles at me with her rosebud lips, and she wears a head scarf, a cloak, a long skirt, and an apron. Every garment is decorated with flowers—bright reds and pinks and oranges contrasted sharply by the application of black.

  “Open your present,” Uncle Billy says again.

  And he shows me how her body unscrews. How she comes apart at the middle. I pull one doll from another.

  “They are n
esting dolls,” he says. “Matryoshka.” And this is a doll I can actually love.

  “They come from Russia,” Uncle Billy says. And there are five altogether, but I like the smallest one the best. She looks exactly like all the other ones, only smaller—and she is solid.

  She cannot be opened.

  * * * *

  Today is the first day of 1985.

  Uncle Billy comes back for Christmas and stays long enough to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

  And it is bitter cold outside, but Uncle Billy doesn’t care. He wants to take a walk before he drives back to Colorado in his little pickup truck. He wants to walk with me.

  We walk out to the old railroad spur where the busted-up tracks are buried by the perfect snow. From here, I can see the cut of the Silver River, and the dome of Kansas sky is blue today like a robin’s egg. There are roses in my uncle’s cheeks from the cold, and as we walk we are surrounded by the clouds we make just by breathing. I feel like I am floating. And this is why I can’t be sure of what I see. I see the silhouette of a dog in the distance across the water. As she trots she continues to stop and turn around, and when she looks so do I. There are three of them, impossibly small. They chase their mother, and the pups are nothing more than black dots on the white snow.

  * * * *

  March 3, 1985

  Mama begins her annual spring cleaning.

  And her first focus is my bedroom.

  I sit in the window seat and watch her make decisions about what I get to keep. She rounds up all my stuffed animals, both ratty and not ratty, and tosses them into the cardboard box while I pretend not to care. I pretend I’m not a little girl anymore.

  The box is the same big box from Uncle Billy, only now it takes instead of gives. It swallows my entire childhood, which will all be donated to the Goodwill in Lawrence. Mama doesn’t look underneath my mattress, and she leaves my nesting dolls alone. They stand on the top of my dresser, where I lined them up in a row. Large to small, they watch Mama sort through my belongings, and they can’t help but smile because that is how they were painted.

  Inside my palm, I am holding my uncle’s lucky blue rabbit foot. I hold it the way Gran sometimes holds the silver Virgin at the end of her rosary. I squeeze it as Mama boxes up the Lincoln Logs, the Legos, and all my tiny Fisher-Price people—but she leaves my teddy bear alone. The one her mother made for her once upon another time. Her mother made this bear for Mama. The fingers of this grandmother cut the pattern and stitched the stitching and stuffed the stuffing. I love this teddy bear, but he also scares me. He is like a stranger, someone I don’t yet know. Someone I’ll never truly understand.

  Mama keeps a framed photograph of her parents by her bed. One of the few pictures she packed and brought along to college. The picture was taken before there was color film, yet this black-and-white photograph is in color. My grandmother wears a violet dress and my grandfather has a red carnation in his breast pocket. Mama explained how her mother painted the picture. And now I wonder if the dress was really violet and the carnation red, or did she add the colors she desired?

  The teddy bear, the encyclopedia, some old dresses, and the photograph are the only things Mama has left of her childhood. And the story of the fire is enough to make me want to stay on the farm forever. I’d rather die than live a life without my mother or my father. I would hate to have to survive the way that Mama did, all alone. But now she has Daddy and me, and Uncle Billy. Now she even has Gran.

  Mama wraps Turtle in the same flannel receiving blanket the hospital wrapped me in when I was born and lays the doll down in her cradle. Turtle pretends to be asleep. Her eyes are closed and Mama takes the tiny crazy quilt—the one I know she pieced together using my old clothes—and she tucks it around the doll carefully. If it was up to me, Turtle would be the first toy to go.

  Mama is on her knees, wearing one of her many pairs of faded corduroys and a peasant blouse with bold Mexican embroidery in bright colors around the neckline. She doesn’t wear her vintage dresses anymore. “They no longer fit,” she says, looking sad. I know she misses wearing the one dress that used to be her mother’s. As Mama leans forward to snag a runaway Lego from beneath my bed, her hair comes loose and falls down her back like water.

  As she stands she’s caught by a thick ribbon of sunshine coming in and her eyelashes are so blond, they vanish in the light. She complains a lot about the weight she’s gained, and I feel sorry for her. She used to be the same kind of thin as me. The kind of thin that can’t get fat even if you try. Daddy used to joke how the two of us would never last through hibernation if we were bears. And now he doesn’t talk about weight at all.

  Mama closes the box by folding the flaps into one another. And as she does she leans over and I can see the top of the scar—the place from where I came. But then she is trying to lift the box. It proves too heavy for her to lift alone, so she calls for my father, and together they carry my childhood down the stairs and out to the truck like this is no big deal.

  * * * *

  I dream someone’s in my room, and this dream wakes me up. But when I sit up, I find I’m all alone. With my door half-open, I can hear Marmalade prowling the house.

  Mama says cats can see ghosts and fairies, and Uncle Billy says, “They also like to eat mice.”

  I feel the emptiness of my room in the pit of my stomach as if I’m hungry. The moon is almost full. With my curtains drawn, everything in my room is cast in silver light. The row of nesting dolls are no longer five, but one. Mama must have put them back together, and this makes me mad. She is my doll.

  Pregnant with quadruplets, the mother nesting doll smiles at me. She lifts her painted hands from her curvy hips and rests them on her big belly the way pregnant women always do. “I’m about to pop,” she says cheerfully, but when I blink she turns back to wood and paint.

  I look to the window seat, needing something familiar. Something I know well to ground me in this world. My teddy bear leans against the glass the way he always does—brown and soft, he looks back at me with button eyes. The cradle is on the other side of the window seat, just as Mama left it, but both the quilt and the doll are gone.

  I get out of bed for a closer look. And I find the cradle really is empty. The moon pokes through one carved-away heart before the light is devoured by the shadows.

  The girls at school tell stories on the bus, and there is one they like the best, about a china doll that comes alive at night. With her porcelain fingers, she gouges out your eyes while you are sleeping. And when I look out the window, I swear I see Turtle walking through the orchard, toward the river. Unsteady on her fat plastic baby legs, she does not look back at the house.

  She is running away.

  I watch until I cannot see her anymore. Then I climb back into my bed. And I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming. As I fall back to sleep, I startle from a dream in which I’m falling, and this is how I know I am awake even though I’ve had dreams inside other dreams before. Someone is moving around downstairs. I can hear the sound of walking—back and forth, back and forth, and the rhythm is familiar; it lulls me back to sleep, and this time I sleep till morning.

  I wake to the sound of Mama coming into my room. I rub away the sleep in my eyes, and when I can see again I see Turtle in her cradle in the window seat tucked under the crazy quilt. Like she always is.

  Mama looks at me, and her mouth is open as if she’s about to say “Oh.” And then she does say “Oh.” She says, “Oh.” And then she says my name. She says, “Good morning” and “Rise and shine!” She continues to greet the new day in every possible way a person could. “Up and Adam!” And then Mama looks around like she has no idea what she is doing, so I jump out of bed and give her a hug.

  * * * *

  May 12, 1985

  For Mother’s Day, I get Daddy to drive me to the new flower shop in Eudora. We leave the farm before Mama wakes up so it will be a surprise. The Flower Lady is on Main Street, and Daddy parks in front of the shop and h
ands me a twenty-dollar bill to go buy something for my mother. Then he runs into Baxter Lumber to get supplies; it’s time to begin the annual repair of all the fences on the farm.

  I’ve never been in a flower shop before. A brass bell is fixed to the door, and it rings when I open it. I step inside, and the smell of flowers is intoxicating. The Flower Lady reminds me of the potting shed, only better. It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.

  Large tin pails boast freshly cut tulips, irises, and daffodils. Wooden crates stuffed with green moss serve as drawers offering tiny wire chairs and tables, fairy-size, for decorating your flower garden. These bins also offer stakes made from old forks and butter knives; the names of herbs, like rosemary and oregano, have been stamped into the handles, and I almost decide on these for Mama, but I don’t have enough money. A variety of vases sit atop a small antique table, waiting to be bought, and toward the back there is a refrigerated room; through the glass, I see orchids and anemones. I see roses of every color, big and small. I also see sprigs of purple lilac.

  Amid a burst of baby’s breath, an array of greenery sticks out of a white plastic bucket like a plume of emerald feathers, and behind the counter, almost hidden by the large, black old-fashioned cash register, I see Sissy Baxter perched on a stool, reading a book. She is too young to have a job, and I realize she is here by choice. Her parents own the hardware store next door, and if my parents owned Baxter Lumber, this is where I’d choose to be as well. That is, if the owner would allow it.

  Sissy Baxter does not look up—not until a young woman comes through the swinging Dutch doors behind the counter that divide the back of the store from the front. “Hello,” the woman says, her hair a nest of short black curls. “Welcome to The Flower Lady.” And this is when Sissy looks at me. Our eyes meet, and she blushes; quickly returning to her book, Sissy turns the page, bends farther forward, and squints at what appears to be an illustration of a poppy.