Mary stands up. I’ve seen her in the halls. Another new face from Sacred Heart. Mary clears her throat. “I said, preemies are precious. I have a Cabbage Patch preemie. Mother said she was very hard to find.” The popular girls giggle. They giggle because Mary still plays with dolls. Charity Murphy smirks. I’ve heard the boys talk about her on the bus. They use words like “slut” and “whore” and “loose” and “easy.” Charity also went to Sacred Heart, and from the way she’s glaring at Mary right now, I think they’ve known each other for very a long time.
“It’s not like I play with her,” Mary says, looking around. “Dolls are for little girls,” she says. She says the word “little” like it’s a disease. “Mother said she’ll be worth a lot of money someday. All the Cabbage Patch kids will be collectible, but especially the preemies.”
Mrs. Gallagher doesn’t say anything. She shakes her head and looks out the window. The teacher looks at the tree where all the crows are perching. The cafeteria Dumpsters are below the cottonwood. Uncle Billy says scavengers are the trash collectors of the animal kingdom; he says, “We could not survive without them.”
Finally, Mrs. Gallagher turns around, smoothing her skirt with her hands. “I almost forgot,” she says, her glasses slipping down her nose, “I need your permission slips before I can continue.”
I sit at my desk, ready. Daddy signed my permission slip last night without looking. He’s been distracted.
The slip is pink and rectangular, one third of an 81/2 x 11 sheet of paper. I watch the boys fumble for theirs—reaching into their jeans and pulling out crumpled wads of pink. They can’t even look at Mrs. Gallagher when she comes to collect their permission slips. When Mrs. Gallagher takes mine, I know everyone is staring, and I wish I was invisible. I try to blend in to my desk, to turn into wood and steel and plastic.
Mary and Charity don’t have permission to participate, and I can tell this upsets the teacher. “I’m afraid you’ll have to spend the next two classes in study hall,” she says. “Stay after and I’ll go over the alternative assignment, but for now, wait in the hall and read chapter seven.”
Mary goes to the door, stopping as if to wait for Charity. Chewing on the end of her pencil, Charity stares at Mrs. Gallagher and doesn’t move—not right away. Her eyes are so brown, they are black. She takes her time sliding out of her seat and grabbing her leather jacket. And she makes a point to leave her textbook on the desk next to her orphaned flour sack. As Charity makes her way to the door, Phillip Booth coughs: “Slut.”
Mrs. Gallagher distributes our homework. We are given a handout on infant care and a calendar for keeping track of feedings and diaper changes, only the teacher calls it a log. “You are to go everywhere with your babies,” Mrs. Gallagher says. “This is your life for the next forty-eight hours. Welcome to teen parenthood!”
“Technically,” I want to say, “we are either twelve or about to be.” But I don’t. I don’t say anything at all.
On Wednesday, the completed log, a five-paragraph essay, and the flour are all due for us to receive credit. The flour is not to be damaged. “Not only do you need to prove to me that you can keep a tiny human alive,” Mrs. Gallagher says, “we donate the flour to a charity that helps unwed mothers.” And then the bell rings and it is time to go to my next class.
In the hall, the boys throw their flour babies in the air and catch them. They punch one another and say, “Dude,” and call one another “Mr. Mom.” The girls giggle, forming into small groups, holding their flour like they’re actual newborns. The girls are making fun of the assignment, yet there’s something serious about the way they’re overacting motherhood. The girls compare babies and make-believe what each one looks like.
“Mine has curly blond hair,” Candace Sherman says. Sissy Baxter says her baby looks just like the Gerber baby. They name the babies: Barbara, Jack, Melody, Connor—and talk-whisper who the fathers are. This makes them really giggle. They pick off the popular seventh-grade boys. Trent Wallace is picked again and again, until one girl claims her baby was fathered by a ninth grader. But she’s outdone by Tanya Jenkins, who confesses: “I have no idea who my baby daddy is.” Laughing, Tanya loosens her hair from a ponytail, and the burst of blondness turns her into a movie star, or model.
I am not like them. I don’t want to have a baby. I’ve already decided. I will not have kids. I will stop the bloodline. I will stop the schizophrenia.
* * * *
“What is that?” Mama asks when I come in through the kitchen door. She is looking at the flour.
The table is littered with shredded magazines, and there are mannequin heads all over the room—on the table, the counters, the step stool, and the floor. This is what happens when Mama runs out of space.
I’m carrying the flour sack. It is sweating a fine white dust. I’ve checked the bag for tears, but the packaging is intact and the top folded over, still sealed. I have no idea where the flour is coming from, but my shirt is white from carrying it and my arms are tired. I’d put it down but there isn’t a bare surface left, so I shift the bag to my other arm.
“It’s supposed to be a baby,” I tell her. “It’s for health class.” I wonder if Daddy would have signed the permission slip if he’d bothered to read it.
Mama is plastering a mannequin head with human eyes torn from National Geographic. Last night, Mama tried to tell Daddy about the evil eye, but he wasn’t listening. He does that a lot these days. And sometimes he does it to me. He forgets who I am, and who I am not. He’ll be ignoring me and then all of a sudden he will realize it’s me, and he’ll snap out of it and start asking questions. He will ask one question after the other—too many to ever answer. He doesn’t listen like I do. I listen to everything.
Surrounded by all these eyes, I feel like I am being watched. Mama has a paper eye stuck to her cheek, upside down and starting to curl. She holds her hands in the air the way surgeons do after they’ve scrubbed in for surgery. Sticky with clear glue, they look webbed, and her long hair is coming undone—strand by strand, it escapes the spiral bun held in place with only a pair of chopsticks.
“You mean your baby,” Mama says, and she has that look, the serious one. And I wish I’d come in through the front door instead. It’s getting harder to know which door to use.
I look at the flour sack. “Okay,” I say. “My baby.”
“You know, Fig, it’s true I wasn’t feeling well when it was time for orientation, but your father still filled me in. Junior high is a big deal. You’re a big deal. This project is for sex ed, right? Your father wasn’t sure, but I think it’s absolutely brilliant—especially with all those damn pro-life billboards popping up across Kansas like burning crosses. No wonder teen pregnancy is skyrocketing. I say pass out condoms with the milk, but this at least is a good start.”
Her cheeks are flushed and her pupils big and black, two holes to fall into.
“Okay, Mama.”
“You have a schedule for the baby, right?” she asks.
I nod my head.
“Well?” Mama says, looking at me. She wants to see the log book. The last time she even looked at my homework was in the third grade. The pop-up book. Little Red Riding Hood.
“It’s just . . .” I look around. “It’s in my backpack, and there’s no place to set it down.” I jiggle the flour so she understands. I jiggle it like I would a real baby.
Mama frowns at me. “It?” she asks, but then she’s distracted. She looks around like she’s just now noticed the state of the kitchen. She looks irritated. I can’t tell if she’s irritated with me, herself, or all of it. She goes to the sink and turns the faucet on with the side of her wrist. Considering the chaos everywhere else, it’s a strange precaution. She squirts dish soap on her hands and uses the vegetable scrubber to scour her fingers.
“I wouldn’t want to get the baby sick,” she says. She isn’t looking at what she’s doing. The glue is washed off by now. Her hands are red—raw and inflamed. And I wish she’d
stop. I wish she were joking too. I see how other mothers might tease their daughters—the mothers on TV, or the mothers who give birth to Candace Sherman. But my mother is dead serious. This is a dead end. There is no way out.
She holds the flour with her red hands while I take off my backpack and get the handout. She continues to hold it as she reads the instruction sheet Mrs. Gallagher had also given us. Mama holds the flour like the girls at school held theirs, and I can’t watch her anymore. There are magazine pages scattered all over the floor. The large faces look at me, except they have no eyes. Their eyes have all been torn away. The eyelessness acts like strange blindfolds on these paper faces, which is not the same as the eyelessness of the faceless nesting doll. This eyelessness is like negative space instead.
When I was younger, Mama taught me about negative space. She looked at all my drawings, tracing the negative space with her fingers—the space between or around the matter. She taught me to see not only the value of nothing but the value of what is missing. I don’t draw anymore.
“This makes it sound much simpler than it really is,” Mama says, shaking her head and blowing her bangs out of her eyes. “It doesn’t take into account all the emergencies that happen.”
Emergency C-section, twelve years ago, come next month.
“It’s only forty-eight hours, Mama.” And when I tell her this, she seems satisfied. She hands me the flour, instruction sheet, and the log, and then she returns to her work. To all those eyes. And it’s like I’m not standing here anymore. Like I never even came home.
* * * *
Daddy comes in for dinner, and Mama explains the high chair. Daddy smiles at me as he sits down, but I see the way he eyes the flour. He shakes his head, and I know what he is thinking. But it’s too late. The flour baby is already here.
The bag of Gold Medal flour is sitting in the high chair because Mama insisted. “You have to treat it like a real baby,” she said before my father came inside. And somehow in the time it took for me to do my pre-algebra upstairs, she got the kitchen to look like a real kitchen again—no sign of shredded eyes or mannequin heads. They’ve all vanished like a magic trick, and Mama, too, has been transformed. She is a TV mother, a TV wife. She not only cleaned, she also cooked.
I play along with Mama. And the flour-sack baby turns into a real baby. We name her Daisy, and Daisy likes to play with her food. Daisy gurgles when she laughs, and her laugh makes us all laugh—even Daddy. We all love Daisy. And now we’re the family we are supposed to be. A family on the television.
We laugh and talk and eat together. Our conversation has absolutely nothing to do with anything. And Daddy isn’t dressed like Daddy anymore. Instead of jeans and a T-shirt, he grows a necktie, which he’s loosens because he’s at home now, and his suit is navy blue with gray pinstripes. For dessert, he makes chocolate milkshakes. I drink mine too fast and get an ice cream headache, and the way I pinch my nose with my fingers makes us all laugh even harder. Behind our laughter is a laugh track laughing with us.
The person in control brings up the volume of it whenever we are threatened by an awkward silence. The person in control brings up the volume of strangers’ laughter whenever Mama messes up and says something strange or wrong. The laugh track cues the studio audience, and they start laughing too. I try not to look at them—just like looking at the camera is considered bad acting, it would be unprofessional. Instead, I catch them in my peripheral vision; they look like mannequins. That is, they look like mannequins before my mother gets hold of them, before she paints their hard skin or glues magazine clippings to their faces. They look like mannequins before she decapitates them.
They look like mannequins, only real—flesh and blood; they are animate, perfect people. Laughing, they rock back and forth and slap their knees. I laugh until I almost pee my pants. I laugh so much, my cheeks begin to hurt from smiling, working all the muscles in my face that never move.
But then someone turns the TV off. The screen goes black—goes black in an inward way, where the last thing left is a white dot in the center of the screen. And when the white dot burns out, it makes a soft electrical pop that makes me think, God has gone to bed.
* * * *
Mama wakes me at midnight to feed the baby. She sits with me in the kitchen as I make believe heating up water, mixing formula, and warming milk. She tells me to nurture the baby. I rock the flour-sack baby on my no-hip hip as Mama rants about breast-feeding being better than formula.
Daddy opens the door to his office, which is also the guest bedroom, which is also where he sleeps and keeps all his clothes. I still don’t know what to call this room. He’s wearing long underwear, and he stands in the frame of the open door, watching us. I smile as much as I can and thank Mama again and again for helping me until he seems satisfied. He finally turns to go back into the room. He shuts the door, and the ribbon of light underneath goes black.
Mama drinks her tea, watching me with tired, bloodshot eyes. When I’m ready to go back to bed, her eyes flash with anger—but it was just a flash, and now it’s gone. “Daisy is not my baby,” Mama says. “You’re going to have to wake up on your own from here on out.” She reminds me of everything I already know. I’m supposed to wake up every three hours, which really means one more time. On schooldays, I always wake at 6:00 to eat breakfast and get dressed in time to catch the bus.
I set the alarm for 3:00 a.m. but I’m too tired to get up when it goes off. I barely manage to reset it for 6:00. As I fall back to sleep I think about the assignment. How it’s designed for us to cheat. That’s the beauty of it, and Mrs. Gallagher knows it. The reason it works is that we have to also write the essay about what it feels like to be responsible for another life. Imagining alone is enough to scare us. The assignment works even if a student leaves her flour in her locker instead of taking it home. As long as the log is filled in, even if the entries are all false, the assignment works.
* * * *
When I wake up to the alarm, I don’t have to get out of bed to know. I see before I even sit or have a chance to turn off the clock. There has been a snowstorm.
My bedroom is covered by a blanket of quiet white flour. It is everywhere, like someone took the bag, ripped it open, and spun around and around. My desk, my window seat, my dresser, my floor—there is flour on my bed and in my hair. There is flour everywhere.
I hear Daddy’s steps coming down the hall and I jump out of bed. Slipping on the flour, I throw myself against the door just as he knocks. “Fig ? You up?” he asks, and the knob turns and I can feel him pushing on the door. I push back. I tell him I’m awake. That I’m getting dressed. I tell him I’ll be right down. Then I get dressed as fast as I can.
I find the empty bag buried in the flour. I exhume it, shake it off, and then bury it once again—deep in my trash can. I bury the empty flour sack under wads of crumpled-up notebook paper, a week’s worth of messed-up homework—essay answers that couldn’t find the right words. I am running out of time. Daddy cannot see. He cannot know what she just did.
I brush the flour off my body, and then I sneak out of my room. I am quiet as I pass Mama’s door, but then I rush down the stairs. Daddy is frying bacon in the kitchen and doesn’t see me snatch the broom and dustpan from the pantry. Mama is nowhere to be seen, and I am quiet when I pass her room again. I worry she’s in there, listening for me. That she’s not really still asleep, because there is no snoring. I grab the bathroom trash can and take it to my room because it has a trash bag and mine does not. I sweep the flour as fast as I can, but fast is a mistake. Fast makes it spread.
The flour takes flight, and my room becomes the inside chamber of a terrible snow globe. Spinning around, I see the mannequin heads. They are blindfolded and laughing. They laugh because they cannot cry, and they cannot cry because they have no eyes. As the room spins I catch glimpses of my mother. She won’t look at me. She is too busy caring for a baby.
Mother and baby become white dust. I am holding the broom, waiting
for the flour to settle—for the vision to fully dissipate. And then I sweep again, slow but deliberate. I sweep the flour, I sweep the mother and her child, emptying dustpan after dustpan into the black trash bag. I sweep the rest of it under my bed to deal with later. I wipe the flour off my desk and shake out my quilt. I brush the walls and use my hands to beat the cushions from the window seat, and I do the same with all the pillows on my bed. And then I sweep again.
I erase anything Daddy might notice if he was to come in here while I’m at school. I stash the trash bag in my closet and put the now-bagless trash can back into the bathroom. I hold my breath and cross my fingers, trying to erase my worries about the baglessness. And then I head back downstairs. I act like this is the first time I’ve come down today. Daddy is scrubbing the cast iron with coarse salt and steel wool and doesn’t see me put the broom and dustpan away.
We eat scrambled eggs on toast with bacon, only I don’t eat the meat. Daddy drinks black coffee, and I drink a small glass of orange juice. When he goes to the bathroom, I check the cabinets for flour but find what I expected to find. Our flour is whole wheat. Bought in bulk from the health food store, it’s kept in large Mason jars with cloth lids. When Daddy returns, I pretend to be looking for the granola bars.
“You’re a hungry girl,” he says, and before he sits down he gestures to the plate of bacon on the table. “There’s still some breakfast left,” he says, arching an eyebrow. Then he sits down again and opens the newspaper from yesterday. On weekdays, he is always a day behind because I bring the mail to the house after school. Otherwise, the mailbox is just too far to go.
I grab my backpack and give him a kiss good-bye. I kiss his third eye and I say a quick prayer in my head. I hold my breath and cross my fingers that he will not look in my room.
As I open the door he puts the paper down and looks at me. “Fig ?” he says. “Aren’t you forgetting something ?” His words are like a spell. They turn me into ice. And I freeze. He could mean anything. The studio audience returns, only they are frozen too. Mouths gaping, they are waiting to see what will happen next, and the drums roll. “Honey,” he says, “aren’t you forgetting your baby?” and his tone is sarcastic. The laugh track rumbles—low, waiting for a chance to crescendo.
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