Her dead son is my proof.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TRANSITION
alarm: n. 1. A sudden feeling of fear 2. A warning of danger; signal for attention 3. A device that signals a warning 4. The sounding mechanism of an alarm clock .
September 2, 1986
I’m late to the first day of school. The sixth grade—the last grade before I go to junior high. The sixth grade with Mrs. Landry, who all the kids call Mrs. Laundry, and sometimes Dirty Laundry.
I am late because the pigs got out. They got out even though the gates were latched.
I help Daddy corral the pigs back to where they need to be instead of where they were in the road that is really just a long driveway. The sheep stand in the north paddock where the motherwort grows wild, and they watch as we scour the fencing for a break, but there is no break. Daddy spent the entire summer upgrading this fence. Wood and wire: My father fortified the farm.
“Maybe it’s the wind?” Daddy asks, but he isn’t asking me. He seems to be asking the latch itself. He stares at it as if it will come undone of its own accord. Provide the answer he needs. The latch remains shut. It keeps silent. We get in the Dodge, and Daddy drives me to school. Before I climb down from the cab, he writes a short note on the back of an old grocery list. Daddy always writes in tidy block letters and in only capitals. Addressed TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, the note is for the secretary. My excuse for being late.
I’m handing the note to the secretary when I see her. It’s been five years, but she looks the same. Same black leather briefcase. Same dull brown hair. And there’s even a run in her panty hose, only in a different place this time. I hold my breath and cross my fingers: Alicia Bernstein from Social Services has not come for me. I will not allow it.
The secretary takes the note, reads it, crumples it with a tiny fist, and tosses it into the wastebasket bin even though the cardboard recycling bin is right beside it. The social worker is talking to Principal White. Two walls of his office are made from thick glass, and the blinds are up. His office reminds me of the refrigerated room at The Flower Lady, only it’s not filled with beauty.
Divided by glass and one closed door, their conversation is on mute. Alicia Bernstein is opening her briefcase, and I can almost hear the click of the hardware as it echoes from past to present while she reaches in for a manila folder. The secretary cracks her gum to get my attention. She holds the tardy note for my new teacher, and I almost rip the paper when I grab it.
I walk so fast, I run out of breath, and when I stop to get it back I read the note. The secretary forgot to mark the time of my arrival, which means I have all the time in the world. I duck into the girls’ bathroom, where I sit inside the last beige stall trying to catch my breath.
I am hyperventilating. I cannot catch my breath. This morning when I was helping Daddy herd the pigs back into captivity, I rolled my jeans up to keep from getting muddy and a mosquito got the front of my calf. Sitting on the back of the toilet, I roll my jeans up to compare the injured leg against the uninjured. The difference is so small.
The mosquito bite is a tiny mound of swollen pink flesh peaked by a scab so new, the brown is still translucent. And the itch is still there. It talks to me. I scratch myself open—I scratch past the point of itching, and I can breathe again. My blood intermingles with the oxygen in the air, and my lungs inflate. I feel my body rising. I float until I empty myself of air again. Deflating, I bleed. And then I inflate again, and still bleeding, I deflate. I fill and deplete, I rise and fall. Sometimes floating away is the only way I can get myself back to reality; if I go away, I can then return.
* * * *
Alicia Bernstein doesn’t come and pull me out of class, nor does she drive out to the farm. The social worker does not come to take me away. I don’t see her again that day, or the days after.
Time passes, and the leaves on the trees turn yellow, orange, and red; autumn sets the world on fire, and yet the weather turns crisp and cold. I try not to count the days without any further sign of the social worker, but I’m also trying not to count the days until I turn eleven, because then I’ll have to count the years before I turn nineteen.
Mama pulls it together as she usually does and makes the annual carrot cake for my birthday, and Gran and Uncle Billy come over for the celebratory dinner, only Gran still calls it supper.
Mama puts all the candles on the top of the cake—eleven plus one to equal twelve candles altogether. “One to grow on,” Mama says. “Either that or this one counts for all the time you spent inside me.” She can’t decide. She never can. She is repeating what she says every year. “Did you know women aren’t really pregnant for nine months?” she says. “I don’t know where that myth came from, but it’s not true. Human gestation takes ten months instead.”
Mama made the usual cream cheese frosting and used the icing tube to make the white roses. She planted them all around the circular edge. Last year she made candied violets and this year she uses carob chips to make spirals all around the top. Gran wants to know what carob is, and Daddy shrugs and says, “It tastes like chocolate.”
My grandmother scowls, and I can see the coffee stains on her teeth. Turning to Uncle Billy, she says, “Then why bother? Why not just use chocolate chips?” And Uncle Billy nudges her softly and whispers, “Ma, let it be.”
I wish I had a soft grandmother. The kind of grandmother who bakes chocolate chip cookies and knits pink-and-brown-striped leg warmers like the ones Sissy Baxter wore to school yesterday. I want the kind of grandmother you call Grandma or Nana. My soft grandmother died before I could even meet her.
Like a clock, my body is wound. It keeps going. I am eleven years old today, and this makes me think of something Mama does. Whenever a digital clock reads 11:11, Mama says, “Make a wish!” I do make wishes, only I make the same wish every time. I will wish this wish until it comes true, and then I will never make another wish again because I will have everything I could ever want or need; because it would be selfish to ask for anything more.
Daddy lights the candles and everyone sings “Happy Birthday,” and before I blow all the candles out I make this wish, my one and only. And as the ritual requires I do not speak it out loud or else it won’t come true.
* * * *
Five days after I turn eleven, the time to fall back arrives. I help Daddy reset all the clocks in the house, in the barn, and in the truck. He winds his wristwatch, and we all gain an hour just like that.
I take the slop out to the pigs, and that’s when I see her.
The sky is a lavender dome of dusk and the trees are skeletons again and the straw man is a silhouette of himself. Like my grandmother’s Jesus, his head lulls forward, and because it does the scarecrow appears to be headless. She, too, is a shadow—a cutout of herself as she prances along the edges of the pasture where the sheep are no longer grazing. She is alone this time, but then I realize she might be one of the pups from before, only grown. Her ears reach for sound, and she stops to listen. She is listening to me. She listens to the pigs that have come to greet me, sniffing the table scraps with their sensitive snouts and snorting with pleasure.
She postures the same as the wolf in the pop-up book I made with Mama. She is trying to camouflage—to dissolve into the sharp fringe of Johnsongrass harvested black by the coming night. Her feral fur is tense, electric with life and nerves, and something tells me she knows I’m watching.
She doesn’t move—a statue of herself, but in the stillness of her shape I can feel her breathing. I can even picture her lungs; they are two wings flapping. They work to keep her heart beating, and just as I begin to see the red inside her chest she runs away. She disappears into the foliage along the ditch, and swallowed by the shapes of trees and bramble, she is devoured by the night.
* * * *
January 19, 1987
The nurse wears a stiff white coat and orange lipstick. Her lipstick makes the situation ironic.
irony: 1. The use of words to conve
y the opposite of their literal meaning. 2. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.
“Ironic” is one of Mama’s favorite things to say. To her, everything is ironic.
I don’t know why I didn’t expect it to be the same nurse. Of course it is. This is her job. She is the school nurse. She not only remembers who I am, she makes it clear she does not like me. It’s been four years since I last went to her.
“Girls your age don’t have periods,” she says, as if I’ve made a mistake.
The nurse rummages around in the supplies closet until she finds something like nothing I have ever seen before. She appears just as mystified, holding it in the air for further examination.
“Now this is a relic from the 1950s,” she says, and shakes her head the way grown-ups do whenever they are overcome by nostalgia. Lately, I’ve been overcome by this word: “Nostalgia.” And I am absolutely in love with the idea. Aster and Zinnia indicate nostalgia according to Floriography.
nostalgia: 1. A bittersweet longing for the past.
2. Homesickness. The Greek root, Nostos, means “return home.”
My quest: to bring Mama back.
The pad looks nothing like the ones Mama uses. This is a large white butterfly. And there are a lot of strings. It is not designed to stick to your underpants. The nurse looks at me. “It’s all I have,” she says, “other than the tampon dispenser in the ladies’ room. As I said before, you are much too young for all of this.”
As I try to put on the white butterfly, the nurse stands on the other side of the bathroom door. She has X-ray vision, sighing every single time I fail. The strings are confusing: Cat’s Cradle. Cup and Saucer. Jacob’s Ladder. They get tangled, and I have no idea where they go or what I’m supposed to tie them to. In the end, the pad is no better than the bed of paper towels I used to line my panties with during morning recess.
I drape the used paper towels over the edge of the trash can as my proof.
I leave them in case I’m about to bleed to death. I leave them for the nurse to see because if I’m actually dying, she will have to save my life—no matter how much she hates me, she is a nurse. And she must be bound to a code of ethics that dictates saving lives when they need saving.
* * * *
It’s no secret Daddy is struggling to make ends meet.
Gran calls the farm “high maintenance,” and she’s right. Everything needs to be repaired. The roof is leaking. The house needs to be painted. The John Deere has trouble starting.
Daddy decides to lease out a little bit of the land. This bit runs along County Road 12. He chooses this plot because we can’t see it from the house. My father draws up all the paperwork, and Larry Byrd signs. This man plans on using the patch of earth to grow animal-grade grain sorghum.
No one talks about what this means because we don’t have to. Everyone knows—even Gran, who probably doesn’t care. Larry Byrd will use pesticides and herbicides, and because he will, Daddy will never get certified organic, and this is yet another dying dream.
* * * *
Mama abandons the meticulous Victorian paper cuts and all the detail-oriented art she normally does. She gets large and messy instead. And the only color she uses now is red.
Mama works on the floor—sprawled out across gigantic sheets of newsprint that come on big rolls like toilet paper. When she runs out, she goes and gets the butcher paper from the barn, which Uncle Billy uses to package all the meat. She smears the red oil pastels, making red tornados that spin into sizes bigger than me. She spins a web of utility string from one room to another and hangs the red work on it using the wooden clothespins, which look like little people—which look like the smallest nesting doll before she turned black.
“Prayer flags,” my mother says as she steps back to admire the artwork suspended throughout the house. She is always out of breath because she has taken to smoking again. She smokes ten cigarettes a day. I’m told this is nothing compared with what other smokers smoke. Especially the schizophrenics. But Mama is also growing larger and larger.
Mama sits down amid the sloppy red spirals, the intense red circles, the bursting poppies, the smashed tomatoes, and she smiles. There are entire rectangles of paper so red, they are bleeding.
“This is a breakthrough,” she explains, but I’m pretty sure she’s not talking to me. She is talking to herself. Mama’s smile grows until her mouth takes over; it swallows her face, another gaping redness, and now she looks at me, and when she says “I can breathe again” I know exactly what she means. I, too, paint red breakthroughs, only I use my fingernails instead of brushes. I use blood instead of watercolors or acrylics, and skin in place of paper.
Like Mama, I paint my breakthroughs because it is the only way I can breathe.
* * * *
Winter turns to spring, and I see the feral dog walking the borders of our land. Crepuscular, she only comes at dawn or dusk, and I have no evidence to prove she is female, or to know she is dog and not wolf or coyote or dingo, and yet I do know.
She always emerges from the woods along the ditch before she dares the open horizon of Kansas flatness. And because it’s just before the sun has risen or set all the way, she is nothing more than a shadow against the canvas onto which she chooses to paint herself.
She takes her time. She wants to make sure I see her. I watch from windows, or from the porch, and sometimes I watch from the heart of the orchard from my perch in the apple tree in the row farthest from the house. She appears and disappears at the same gate of wild raspberry that curtains the ditch. And she always walks a full circle around the house. She tells time. Like the hands of a clock, she begins where she ends and ends where she began.
* * * *
The sixth graders are herded into the gymnasium, where we’re told to sit on the old wooden floor.
I sit inside the faded orange curve of a line that has something to do with basketball.
Mrs. Landry leans against the wall, looking at us like a mother might, like she’s about to cry. I heard her tell Mrs. Jefferson she wasn’t sure how much longer she could teach the sixth grade. “I can’t stand sending them away,” she said.
I look at Mrs. Landry, and there is a handkerchief in her fist, the white cotton contrasting sharply with her long red fingernails.
Principal White is standing on a makeshift stage, in front of a microphone, waiting for us to settle. Mrs. Landry gets our attention and whisper-screams, “Crisscross applesauce,” and puts her finger to her lips and hisses a long “shh!” But I’m the only one watching her. Everyone else is too excited. Our time at elementary school is nearly over.
Principal White taps on the microphone, and the large room fills with the amplified sound of his tapping. I look up, drawn to the lights swinging idly inside their metal cages. Basketball hoops stand at both ends, and both are missing their white nets. Last night, Mama went after the prayer flags. She ripped all the red sheets off the string and burned them in the fireplace. I don’t know why.
“The adviser from Keller is here to talk to you about junior high,” Principal White says, and everyone is quiet now. I’m not the only one wide-eyed and scared. Principal White steps aside as a woman takes the stage. I look down. Through the pale fringe of my eyelashes, I watch the woman gathering herself to speak to us.
“I am here to talk to you about the transition,” the woman says.
I scrape notches into my skin. I count the minutes as they pass, or maybe I’m counting seconds instead.
Mrs. Landry sniffles, and now she is hiccupping against her tears. When she blows her nose, she sounds like a foghorn, and the adviser says, “You will all succeed at Keller Junior High!” And Mrs. Landry begins to clap. Her clapping is muffled by the white handkerchief, and yet it sparks a wave of clapping, and now everyone around me is clapping—everyone but me.
CHAPTER NINE
NEGATIVE SPACE
continue: 1. To persist 2. To endure; last 3. To remain in a state, capacity,
or place 4. To go on after an interruption; resume 5. To extend 6. To retain 7. To postpone or adjourn.
September 11, 1987
Seventh grade is where sex education changes from an anatomy lesson to something different, and in health class the boys and girls are no longer separated. The kids talk about sex all the time—in the halls, in the cafeteria, and especially on the bus. But during sex ed, when they’re supposed to talk about it, they are suddenly quiet.
Some of the girls will talk about pregnancy. They talk about it like they know everything there is to know. They’ve had mothers pregnant with younger siblings, or aunts round with cousins. And they love to read about pregnant celebrities in the magazines Mama calls trash.
They talk about babies, too. How cute they are, or how ugly. And they all describe childbirth as “painful” and “excruciating.” They talk about it like they know firsthand.
They’re obsessed with the idea, while the boys fidget—their faces hot and red. Come Monday, Mrs. Gallagher begins passing out the bags of Gold Medal flour. Even I’ve heard about this assignment. Everyone talked about it back in the sixth grade. This assignment is a true rite of passage into junior high, and we each receive a bag.
“I used to use eggs,” Mrs. Gallagher explains. “There was the special challenge of not breaking them, but parents complained about them breaking—they claimed they broke all the time, so I switched to flour, and really, these bags are closer in size to an actual newborn.” She jiggles a bag to test the weight while watching the girls who always sit in a cluster.
Mrs. Gallagher continues to look at them and says, “Rather, they’re the weight of a premature or low-birth-weight baby.” She looks at the girls like they’ve done something wrong. “Teen mothers are more likely to give birth to premature or low-birth-weight babies,” Mrs. Gallagher says, and one girl turns to another girl and says, “Preemies are so precious! I hope I have one.” Mrs. Gallagher asks her to speak up. “Mary, it isn’t fair when the rest of the class can’t hear, and it must be important, since you had to share right this moment. So, Mary, do share.”
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