Fig

by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

  I am touching her. I am practicing the ordeal for today. The word “limbo” is also related to the word “limb.” Like a border, limbo has to do with where things or places attach, like arms or legs—like how, once upon a time, I was physically attached to my mother’s body. I was a part of her.

  I take my fingers and lightly touch my mother.

  I run my fingertips along her inner arm the way the girls at school touch one another. This is the ordeal, and this is everything. Mama doesn’t say anything as she continues staring at the television, but her body begins to respond: tiny little tremors like she is shivering. And now she’s smiling and I sense her body relaxing even more. The sensation is contagious. Touch is the conduit.

  This is when I pull my own sleeve up and offer my arm over to Mama.

  It extends over her lap like a bridge, and she responds. She touches my arm the way I touched her. Fingers barely touching skin. Unexpected loops that turn and spiral. Mama turns my body into a crazy quilt.

  I close my eyes and relax into Mama, waiting for the same shivers to erupt from me. Today’s ordeal is not only to touch but to be touched. And Mama tries.

  She runs her fingers along my arm forever, but the shiver never comes. Is something wrong with me? And in the end, I have to pull away before she has the chance to give up on me. I pull away and I hold my breath and cross my fingers: Don’t let this ruin the ordeal. Please, please, please. When I finally open my eyes, the Challenger is lifting off.

  This time, I see all seven passengers as they eject into the sky. They are wearing silver space suits with big round shiny helmets as they burst forth from the splitting contrails.

  They somersault in the air like kids jumping on a trampoline. One turns his body into an X to mark the spot. And there is no gravity until there is. Mama gasps when they hit the surface of the Atlantic, swallowed by the deep cold water. Then the newscaster tells us that all the passengers were found inside the capsule, and I blink my eyes. I do this to see the reality, and all I see is Mama. She switches from station to station, chasing the Challenger. Stuck inside the loop, she searches for this scene. She needs to watch it again and again and again.

  She isn’t seeking the actual explosion; she is searching for the second when the fragments of the shuttle scatter across the sea like seeds. She is looking for the trajectory of bodies, the trajectory that never was.

  * * * *

  February 3, 1986

  What seems like a good sign, a sign that the Calendar of Ordeals is working, comes at a time when it’s clearly not. A time when Mama seems only to be disintegrating.

  Mama is sitting beside me on the sofa when the evening news comes on, and Breaking News from Australia writes itself across the bottom of the screen. I glance at Mama, and her face has a blank expression, as if she has no memory of Baby Azaria.

  “English tourist David Brett was climbing Ayers Rock when he fell to his death over a week ago.” The female newscaster has big hair and white teeth and is wearing a blue silk blouse with enormous shoulder pads. Mama thinks shoulder pads are silly. “They have no place outside of football,” she has said, so I decide the shoulder pads are the reason my mother isn’t paying attention to the woman talking.

  “Brett’s untimely and unfortunate death led to the immediate release of Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian mother who now appears to have been wrongly convicted of killing her nine-week-old daughter.”

  Mama still doesn’t react. Her glassy eyes stare at the wall, at a point in space somewhere above the television set.

  “During the eight-day search for Brett’s body, police discovered Azaria Chamberlain’s missing matinee jacket in an area riddled with dingo lairs.”

  The camera cuts to an Australian newsfeed dated yesterday and shows Lindy Chamberlain being escorted through a crowd of people by her lawyers. The dead baby’s mother is wearing large black sunglasses and keeps her head down as a disembodied voice finally explains the meaning of Azaria’s name.

  “Azaria,” the Australian voice begins, “means ‘helped by God,’ and it’s both ridiculous and tragic that anyone ever said anything different.” And then they show us the one photograph of Baby Azaria where she’s dressed in white, cradled by her mother’s arms. They do not show the picture of the black dress trimmed in red. Just before Lindy and Azaria Chamberlain’s image dissolves into the next report, Mama reaches for my hand. Without looking at me, my mother says, “I always knew she was innocent. I never had a doubt.” And I know exactly what she means.

  * * * *

  I hear Mama at night, downstairs in the kitchen or the dining room. Sometimes I stand at the top of the stairs where she can’t see me, and I watch her pace. She wears Daddy’s terry-cloth bathrobe, and sometimes her nightgown shows, but mostly she’s still dressed—baggy jeans or frumpy sweatpants.

  I prefer the nightgown.

  I feel sorry for all the vintage dresses hanging in her closet. They look lonely whenever I dare to look at them. They remind me of the abandoned houses that always worry me, and I wish I knew which ones belonged to my mother’s mother, but I don’t.

  And Mama’s gone without washing or brushing her hair again, which she wears in a messy bun atop her head. I understand why Gran calls it a rat’s nest.

  And her lips never stop moving. She whispers and paces and I still have no idea what she is saying. I do my best to listen, but she’s too far away and when I creep closer she falls quiet, eyeing me suspiciously. The Calendar of Ordeals is testing me. It is becoming more and more real, forever pushing me. I talk to the faceless nesting doll. I seek advice. The time has come to beat my personal best. And I will do this for her. For Mama, I would do anything.

  * * * *

  March 3, 1986

  Tonight, I go to sleep only to wake to the usual sounds of my mother’s insomnia. Tonight, I find her sitting at the kitchen table, no more pacing. All the lights in the kitchen are turned on. Not just the overhead but the porch light, the pantry, and the small bulb above the stove.

  The lights burn hot and yellow.

  I sit across from Mama, and she looks at me. Her eyes have been swallowed by dark circles. She’s wearing Daddy’s robe, and the black sleeves are crusty with something white. She doesn’t say anything. She returns her focus to a mechanical pencil.

  Using her thumb, she pushes the graphite out—the graphite everyone calls lead. The pushing makes a clicking noise, and when she goes to write, the graphite is too long and it snaps. She pushes again and more graphite slides out. People who call graphite lead must not understand how poisonous lead is. It has many of the same ill effects as mercury if ingested. I know because Mama worries about the heavy metals in the environment. She worries I’ve been exposed.

  “You’re so vulnerable,” she will say, and then she’ll shake her head and ask the impossible—“Fig,” she’ll say, “How do I save you from the world?”

  There is a pad of graph paper on the table next to the same feed-store calendar I used as a template for this year. She is drinking a cup of black coffee, and on the counter the pot is still on and I can smell the burning coffee and the red light is a warning.

  It’s after midnight, which means yesterday’s ordeal is over. Yesterday, I had to skip every third word I would normally use when speaking or when writing. For example: It was ____ hard to ____ these words ____ thinking. Translation: It was too hard to skip these words while thinking. But I did my best; I kept my thoughts slow and still the way my grandmother seems to always do. I will probably fail the reading test I had to take. Especially the five-paragraph essay on Where the Red Fern Grows. Mr. Denmar is forever assigning sad books for us to read. Bridge to Terabithia was my favorite, although Tuck Everlasting was a close contender.

  This won’t be the first time the Calendar has affected my grade-point average. And poor Daddy—he keeps asking, “Is there something wrong ?” “Is something bothering you?” “Is something going on at school?” He of all people should understand. He does everyth
ing for Gran. Even Mama sees. She is forever calling him “Mama’s boy.” She is jealous, and she has every right to be. I am jealous too.

  Technically, I’m between ordeals right now. In a state of limbo. The ordeal begins once I’ve woken up for the day and announced the particular constraint out loud to myself and the powers that be. Like Azaria, I too need help from God, even if I don’t really believe in him. I still plan on sleeping more tonight. For now, I excuse myself from the calendar. For now, I am between time. And I do not have to worry about the color red. Not yet. Which is good because I swear the light on the coffeemaker is burning brighter and brighter despite the ferocious brightness of all the other lights turned on in here.

  Mama looks at me the way she does when she doesn’t seem to remember who I am, but when I smile she smiles back and I can see the flash of recognition.

  “Triskaidekaphobia,” she says, leaning forward and locking eyes with me. “That’s the key.”

  And now she’s looking around, worried someone might be listening. With all the lights blazing, we are indeed surrounded. The lights have turned all the windows into mirrors. From at least three different perspectives, I can see my mother searching for spies. And in the window glass, I see myself times three. The reflections multiply Mama and me, and I’m claustrophobic in the crowd of duplicates. Now I understand what people mean when they say, “The walls are closing in.”

  Mama knocks on the table thirteen times. She looks at me as she does. And she counts each knock out loud: “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.” Thirteen knocks on the table, and I think about the boys at school who play bloody knuckles and the girls who play Bloody Mary in the bathroom.

  “See?” Mama says. “It’s all coming together. I will  break the code. Thirteen degrees. Thirteen. The Challenger. I always did appreciate a challenge.” Mama is talking in sound bites. She is speaking newspaper headlines. “Don’t worry, Fig,” she says. “The ever important Friday is coming—it’s just around the corner, come June.” And now she taps her finger on the open calendar. The image for June is a shimmering lake reflecting a clear blue Kansas sky. She has her finger inside a square. “See,” she says. “The next Friday the thirteenth is in June, and I am the Judas at their table.”

  Mama smiles and I smile back. I nod my head to mean Yes, I understand, even though I don’t. I make her think I do, and she is relieved, and this brings me more relief than it should. Mama nods at me. She nods at me as if I am the only person in the world she can trust.

  Then she pushes her chair back and stands. She walks to the counter and turns the radio on, twisting the dial from clear to unclear. Another red light burns in warning of tomorrow.

  Through the static, I hear the disembodied voice of another man: “Art Bell. Coast to Coast AM.” Art Bell takes his first caller, and the caller sounds nervous. He is talking too fast, the way Mama does when she’s excited. “The Challenger was a test run,” he says, “for sending nuclear waste into outer space, but the aliens caught wind of what we were doing and shot it down.”

  “Imagine, folks,” Art Bell responds. “What if the shuttle had actually been full of nuclear waste?” I think of everyone out there who is listening too. I turn them into bodies I can see, and then I watch them all react.

  Their eyes open wide. And they shake their heads in disbelief the way Mama is shaking her head right now. Some tremble while others shake. One is squeezing her eyes shut to keep from crying, and another woman throws her radio out the window, where it smashes against the street and that red light burns out. A man who looks like Uncle Billy if Uncle Billy was an old man takes a drink of whiskey straight from the bottle, wincing. He closes his eyes as if in prayer.

  Mama stands there, but now she’s nodding her head and not shaking it anymore. She’s hunched over the radio the way some people worship at a shrine. I wish I still had the rabbit foot, or the scab that was on my knee. Mama nods and hugs herself, and I see her jeans poking out from below her robe. Her socks don’t match. The static thickens, but Mama does not adjust the dial.

  She shuffles across the kitchen to stand by the back door. Still turned away from me, she looks out the window in the door, and she is face to face with a portrait of herself. And I can kind of see her face as she leans into the glass. Her forehead touches her other forehead, the one reflected in the pseudomirror. She feels around for the light switch on the wall and turns the porch light off by flipping the switch. I expect her to repeat this action thirteen times, but she doesn’t.

  The radio antenna reaches into the radio waves, feeling around, and now an oldies station is trying to compete with the conspiracies. Through the static: “Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream.” And Mama just stands there. “Sandman, I’m so alone.” Mama will not move again—that is, not for another thirty-four minutes. I know because I stay to keep track—to keep watch, I keep count.

  * * * *

  March 24, 1986

  At school, the kids are all talking about the movie Poltergeist, which just became available on video at Wilma’s. Most had to sneak seeing it because their parents would never have allowed it. Ever since that boy killed himself in Nevada after listening to heavy-metal music, devil worship has been all over the news. And the good people of Douglas County are concerned about the spiritual welfare of their children.

  On the bus, the kids who have seen Poltergeist talk about it all the time. Trent Wallace, who is the strongest boy in my grade, says, “Dude, now I’m afraid of clowns.”

  I think about the Calendar of Ordeals. I keep messing up. At least once a week, if not more. And the blank Sundays are quickly filling up with ordeals to be redone. I am losing stamina. I can’t seem to ever catch up. Mama is relapsing back to bad. Daddy is taking her to Kansas City today to get another brain scan and to participate in some kind of drug trial. They’ll be gone for three days.

  Instead of sticking me with Gran, they ask Uncle Billy to look after me. They do this because he can also take care of the animals. They do this because my grandmother doesn’t like to have me.

  Uncle Billy has been renting a room above Wilma’s, where he has a bed that unfolds from the wall the way our ironing board does. Wilma’s is how everyone knows what road to take to get to Mirror Lake, because someone stole the street sign eight years ago and it hasn’t yet been replaced. On the highway between Eudora and Lawrence, Wilma’s operates as a gas station, a breakfast diner, a bait shop, and now the video store where Poltergeist can be rented out.

  Uncle Billy called yesterday to ask what movie I wanted him to bring. I told him, but he didn’t say yes. He said, “Well, Figaroo, let’s see what my big brother has to say.”

  Daddy must have consented, because Uncle Billy brings Poltergeist. I’m surprised it’s even available, but there it is on the coffee table, inside the plastic case. He also brings a VCR  , which he hooks up to our television set, and then he makes popcorn and we sit on the sofa to watch the movie. Yesterday I would not have been able to eat popcorn because the ordeal was no touching anything that is white. All my panties are white cotton, so I had to go without—and going without made me feel weird, especially whenever I looked at a boy or a boy looked at me.

  Yesterday was no white, and today I can’t say proper nouns out loud.

  For example, I can’t say, Hey, Uncle Billy, thanks for renting Poltergeist. Instead I’d have to say, Thanks for renting this movie, but I still feel guilty when I think in proper nouns.

  One of the reasons The Headless Cupid was banned from the school library by the PTA is that the Stanley children believe their new house is haunted by a poltergeist. Because of Zilpha, I’ve read a lot about ghosts and hauntings.

  According to my research, the little girl in the movie is too young to be an agent for a poltergeist. That’s what they call them—agents, as if I could hire one to work for me. I’d hire it to go after all the popular kids at school, to haunt and torment them as they do me. Generally, the girls who
attract poltergeists are in their teens instead of little like the girl in the movie, and the clown part isn’t scary because it’s just a toy. Only real clowns are scary. I can’t tell whether or not they’re actually smiling.

  Nonetheless, I am captivated. Especially when the house swallows the little girl and her mother goes in to rescue her. I’m convinced they will never return, stuck forever. In the walls, the space between, stuck in limbo for infinity—but they do return—mother and daughter. They return from the ceiling like a tornado, only backward because it gives instead of takes. With a rope, they are pulled back into this world, and the mother and daughter hold on to each other like they will never let go. And my body remembers being held like that. My body remembers everything.

  It’s not until after the movie is over that I realize what I did. It must have started just by scratching. Sometimes the skin around the scar from the cellulitis gets dry—and sometimes the dryness gets irritated, itchy. I did not mean to do what I did. This is forbidden. But the body does remember, and so did my fingernail. It found a way in without me even noticing, and now the skin is reopened and I am bleeding.

  I not only hid the picking from my uncle, I hid it from myself. I picked inside the shelter of the quilt, which I now use to wipe my ankle clean of blood. Made from pieces of my paternal grandfather’s suits, the quilt squares are dark wool, navy blues and brown tweeds, so no one will ever notice. Hidden still by the covers, I pull my sock up over the open sore. I do this before I stand to go about getting ready for bed. Uncle Billy watches me in a way no one else does. He’s noticed other scabs before when no one else ever did. And when he did, he asked a lot of questions.

  Questions like “What happened to your arm?” or “Haven’t you had that an awfully long time?” Like his koan, his questions only invite more questions, and all these questions are questions I don’t want to answer.