If you were to abbreviate Social Services, you’d get SS—the same abbreviation for the Nazi paramilitary organization the Schutzstaffel. And the SS soldiers, with their lightning-bolt double-S insignias, were connected to the Gestapo, and it was the Gestapo who tore all those people from their homes and from their families—throwing them into cattle cars, taking them far away, some of them forever. But I think I’d rather die. To survive the Holocaust would be even harder. Alicia Bernstein tilts her head, watching me the way people do when they are waiting for me to speak. To say anything.
She can’t stand to wait. Her mother probably didn’t teach her the value of silence or negative space. Instead she seeks refuge within the paperwork again, the file she holds on me, and she deliberately holds it so I can’t see what she can see. And I think of Emily Dickinson, and my favorite poem about death, and the line that reads “I could not see to see.”
This is the line Ms. Sylvia copied onto the board in her beautiful cursive, which spirals away like bindweed tendrils, and then she asked the class what it might mean. I didn’t even have to think about it. I just knew. To see to see, which is not exactly what Dickinson wrote, means knowing how to look. How to look to understand. How to look without your eyes. And to die, is not to see at all. Of course, I didn’t actually say this out loud. I never raise my hand, but Phillip Booth did, which is weird because he never volunteers to answer; he doesn’t ever willingly participate in classroom discussion, but this time he did. And he seemed excited. He raised his hand, and when Ms. Sylvia called on him he asked: “Is it a typo?” And I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. I really think he thought he was right. He didn’t understand the repetition of the word “see.”
I pretend not to care about the social worker’s stupid folder and what it may or may not contain. I stare at the surface of the desk instead. There is nothing on the desk, and the gray plastic is cracked down the middle like someone heavy sat on it. Mama is fat, but no one talks about it. It’s another secret. Another unspoken. We try to keep her safe through silence. I can’t help but sneak my hand into my sleeve to find the scab on my arm, the one below my elbow.
Once I get started, it’s impossible to stop scratching. Scratching turns to picking, and I convert itchiness into pain and turn pain into pleasure. This is alchemy. Trying not to draw attention to what I’m doing, I touch the scab with careful fingers. And once again, I am reading my body like I am reading Braille.
The scab is perfect.
Not just the toughness, or the way it rises from the healthy skin, but because it’s a circle. A perfect circle created without a compass. I don’t have to look to know. It’s dark brown, but reddish too—the color of crispy bacon, which is how my uncle likes it. I rub the scab with the soft pad of my forefinger. And then I press on it. I press harder. And harder. And harder yet.
I glance at Alicia Bernstein to see if she is looking at me, but she’s not. She is busy reading her top-secret file on me, so I bend my forefinger and position my nail at the edge of the scab. I tuck the crescent moon of fingernail into the crescent curve where the scab begins to rise. I allow myself a few practice picks. I go through the motion without actually doing it. I practice-pick in the air, and after each swing I realign my nail with the scab, and finally, in one quick but satisfying pick, I scrape it off. The process is surgical—a part of me has been removed forever.
I watch the social worker through the fringe of my eyelashes as I find the loose scab in my sleeve. I pinch it between my finger and my thumb, and then I slowly slide my hand out. I drop the scab onto the floor without Alicia Bernstein ever noticing. And this is when the blood begins to surface. It is hot. The increasing throb connects back to my heart, and my body tingles.
I am alive.
“It seems there was an incident at home the other night,” the social worker says. She says, “incident” instead of “episode,” and she also says “home” without a pronoun—like it’s her home too. And what she says is both a statement and a question, and this is when I begin to truly hate her.
She leans forward the way people do when they are pretending to help. I read about this technique in one of the books Daddy has underneath the bed where he sleeps at night. It was a manual for other therapists, written by a therapist who specialized in schizophrenia. The author listed strategy after strategy to be applied in one’s private practice. This is how I know what Alicia Bernstein is trying to do: She is trying to establish intimacy.
I look at her for a second but only to try to figure out whether or not she really knows what happened at my home the other night. I’m quick. And then I look away. I guarantee that intimacy is not established.
“It seems your mother wasn’t feeling very well,” she says. “The pigs were talking to her. It seems they told her they needed to be freed.” The word “freed” startles me, and I move my right hand to the spot where the scab was. I touch the open rawness through my sleeve. The fabric sticks to the wound because blood can act like glue. After all, it is just one of the substances that binds me to my mother. And the social worker keeps saying “It seems,” and I think about that word. Actually, I think about “seam,” which is not a homonym with “seem” because the two words are not spelled the same, although they share the same exact sound.
Rather, they are homophones, and I meditate on the latter: a seam as in clothing, where the different cuts of cloth are stitched together—joined. The scar on Mama’s belly is also a seam. Her skin was sectioned. Her organs all removed, arranged on the stainless-steel table next to her. After I came out, she was put back together and stitched shut again. This seam was supposed to keep her from spilling out. But I no longer can blame it on the doctors. Mama is falling apart now because of me; I’m the one at fault—I created the Calendar of Ordeals, only to fail.
The social worker asks a lot of questions. Does Mama let the animals out often? Does she do other unusual things? Does she talk to people who aren’t there? I think about dear, sweet Emily and the poem in which she wrote And Kindred as responsive / As Porcelain. This line resonates because it’s the perfect way to describe my mother when she’s the opposite of manic. But right now it could be used to describe me and how I have to be: as responsive as porcelain.
But then Alicia Bernstein from Social Services asks if Mama has ever hurt me. And I have to speak up. I say, “No.” And my voice comes out louder than it should. I try to lower it. I tell her my mother is an artist. “That’s all,” I say. I make sure my words don’t come out too fast. “That’s why she’s not like other people.” And then I cross my fingers and hold my breath, but the ritual doesn’t work. The situation doesn’t end. In fact, the social worker makes me undress.
“It’s procedure,” she says. And she takes up her legal pad for now, flipping through her notes to find a new sheet of the yellow paper with pale green lines. She clicks her ballpoint pen into place and poises herself. She is ready to turn my nakedness into a permanent record.
I’m allowed to keep my underwear on, and for the first time ever I’m relieved to be wearing the training bra Gran insisted I had to wear every day. But I still feel naked. Actually, it’s worse than being naked, and naked is already terrible. When I take off my shirt, I do my best to wipe the blood away. I use my sleeve, but it ends up smearing all the way to my wrist. It looks like Indian war paint.
Alicia Bernstein points at my elbow with her pen and asks, “What happened?”
I shrug. I shrug in a way that tells her whatever happened is no big deal. Unimportant. I shrug as if to say I had no idea I was bleeding or even hurt. My body is the one to tell the lie.
* * * *
Daddy put up electric fencing where Mama tried to free the pigs. He says it’s to keep the pigs from getting out, as if I wasn’t there that night and didn’t see, or understand.
I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about the new fence, but he has to. I’m the one who will pass it the most. Five days a week, back and forth from house to highway to ride th
e bus to school and back again. And sometimes on Saturdays to fetch the mail or on Sunday to collect the newspaper. He says the fence won’t hurt the pigs. “It just stuns them,” he says, but the words come out sloppy—a tongue twister, even though it’s not. “They learn not to touch it after that,” he says. The fence is designed to keep predators out as well. “It’s a win-win,” he says, and I wonder what he said to Mama. I wonder if there’s a part of him that hopes she will touch the fence.
During lunch, I look up electric fences using the encyclopedia in the school library. This encyclopedia is like the one we have at home. One volume, only bigger, it is kept on a podium by the checkout desk. It has a lot more information about electric fences than I expected. I had no idea there were so many different kinds, or so many histories. I use the magnifying glass to read the tiny font. This magnifying glass has no black velvet case. Instead, it’s kept tied to the podium by a length of utility string, and someone labeled the handle with a piece of masking tape that reads PROPERTY OF LIBRARY.
The topic of electric fences takes up almost three pages. The paper is tissue thin, and I worry about tearing it by accident whenever I turn the page. We have an agricultural electric fence—nonlethal. I read about the lethal ones next. The ones used for high-security reasons; for example, the ones that surround prisons to keep the inmates from escaping, or what the Nazis used to contain their concentration camps. The prisoners often used these fences as a means to commit suicide. And I think of Anne Frank, and how she was so full of life the way people always like to say.
I think about all the things she did that I have never done—like kissing Peter in the attic, or fighting with her mother. I’ve never even yelled at Mama. If I did, she might come undone forever.
I decide if I’m ever put into a concentration camp, I will touch the fence. The choice is easy.
I still haven’t told anyone at home about Alicia Bernstein coming to visit me at school. That was Monday and now it’s Wednesday, but nonetheless I’m convinced Social Services is going to take me away. This must be my punishment for ruining the calendar.
When I get home today, I’m going to make Mama a pot of chamomile tea. Maybe it will make her feel better, but when I get home the social worker is there and Mama is not.
Alicia Bernstein is here to help Daddy and Gran tell me Mama has gone to the hospital. I see the way Daddy glares at the social worker when she says, “This is the kind of hospital where people go to live.” And then she uses the word “permanent” and even tries to explain what it means. The dictionary definition for “permanent” has been filed away in my brain for a very long time. I can see it now: typed on thin white paper in black ink. When I committed it to memory, I recorded it using Courier New because it was the most matter-of-fact-looking font I knew of.
Permanent, as in lasting, or fixed. As in We fixed this. As in The game was fixed.
I think about Mama and the episode she had the other day. Before the incident with the pigs. She was mad, but not at me. She was yelling at my father.
“I wanted something more,” she said. “I wanted more babies, remember? I thought you did as well, then you went and fixed that, didn’t you?” Daddy didn’t engage her. He just looked sad. He studied the world on the other side of the window.
And because he wouldn’t look at her, Mama turned and looked at me. “Do you know where your father was that night?” she asked, and she didn’t have to tell me what night she was referring to. I knew she was talking about the night in the orchard: the night when everything changed. “He had Billy take him to the hospital in Kansas City,” Mama said, and her eyes were red and swollen.
She looked at me, but I knew her words were directed at my father. “He went and got a vasectomy, and it was supposed to be a secret,” she went on. “I wasn’t supposed to know. But your grandmother! She just couldn’t help herself. She spread the news like it was gospel, and the gossip came around like it always does, and that’s how I got to find out about something my husband did.”
“Permanent” is derived from the Latin word permanere, which means “to endure.”
I have endured, and I will continue to do so. I will endure. This is not like the time before when Mama only went away for the summer. This is different. And I think I know everything the social worker is about to say, until she explains how Mama made the choice herself.
This is called voluntary commitment. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the word “commitment.” This word defines my relationship to my mother, and like a palindrome, I thought she was as committed to me as I am to her, backward and forward, both of us the same—that’s what I thought until today. And now I wonder if Mama knew about the Calendar. Is she leaving me because I couldn’t get it right?
* * * *
It hasn’t rained in over two weeks, and the dirt road leading home is sunbaked and hard.
I see the impressions left from Daddy’s truck—from the tires, a rolling pattern of diamonds—two fixed rows, each wide enough to walk in. My peripheral vision expands as soon as I step off the bus. The Kansas landscape surrounds me, flat and gently sloping. Pasture, field, and prairie interrupted by the occasional house, windmill, barn, or tractor, and of course all the sad-eyed cows standing on the other side of the highway.
The bush honeysuckle swallows the ditch, creeping thicker with every passing day it threatens to overtake the road/driveway. The only way to get rid of this noxious weed is with fire. Soon, Daddy and Uncle Billy will do the first controlled burn of the year. I remember the honeysuckle in the tussie-mussie I never really got to give to Mama; with accelerant and a match, my father will set fire to the bonds of love; in a holocaust, he will wipe the honeysuckle out.
* * * *
I stop and stand in front of the electric fence.
I think I hear it humming.
While some of the pigs root around, most of them lie on their sides. Fat and lazy under the spring sun. I wonder what it’d be like if they started talking to me the way they did to Mama. What do they have to say? And what did Mama say in return?
I think about all the books Mama and I used to read together. Not just the Peter Rabbit stories, but The Wind in the Willows, Dandelion, and The Story of Ferdinand. I can’t remember if Ferdinand talked, but I know the others did. I think about Charlotte’s Web.
The old wooden fence has been dismantled and is leaning against the back of the pen in pieces. Even taken apart, it looks far more substantial than does the electric fence—far more capable of keeping. This means the electric fence must be on, otherwise the pigs would have snuck through the suspended wires a long time ago. Pigs are very smart. Back in the third grade when Phillip Booth called Sissy Baxter a pig, she turned around and said, “P.I.G. stands for ‘pretty intelligent girl.’ ”
I know Sissy Baxter is the one who left the white hyacinth in our mailbox after Mama went to Saint Joseph’s. Wrapped in white lace, the tag on the nosegay read To Fig and nothing more, but I recognized the smell immediately. Like lilacs, only so much stronger: Now I know that Sissy Baxter smells like hyacinth. Without saying anything at all, Sissy said, “I am praying for you.”
I look at the wire and wonder if Mama will have to do electric-shock therapy.
After the social worker pulled me out of class, the kids started talking about Mama again. How crazy she is. It doesn’t help that Tanya Jenkins’s mother finally did become a nurse—a nurse at Saint Joseph’s, where Mama now lives.
Everyone knows, and they all keep asking about electric-shock therapy. “That’s just what they do in the loony bin,” Phillip Booth said earlier today. “Either that or a lobotomy,” and Ryan Hart started to head-bang with his shaggy hair in his face. Using his fist as a microphone, he scream-sang, “Lobotomy.” And something about a teenage lobotomy, having no cerebellum, but getting a PhD.
As usual, Sissy Baxter remained quiet. She pretended to read the textbook as Phillip Booth and Candace Sherman got into an argument about how the electric
chair is different from electric-shock therapy. Phillip swore to God and crossed his heart that mental hospitals use electric chairs to administer shock therapy, “But with way less voltage,” he said, and then Candace called him a retard.
“Everyone knows there’s a difference,” she said. “Didn’t you watch the special news report about how they’re getting ready to fry Ted Bundy?”
They agreed on one thing only: Mama would not be lobotomized. “Because she didn’t kill anyone,” Phillip said, but then Candace yelled across the classroom, as if I couldn’t hear otherwise. “Hey, Fig !” she said. “Has your mother killed anyone?”
All this took place while we waited for Mr. Arnold to come back from the bathroom. It didn’t matter that I didn’t say a word or react—not reacting is a reaction. Nothing stops them. I buried my head in my arms and focused on how the cold desk felt against my hot face.
When I think of Saint Joseph’s, I think of the movie Return to Oz. How much it scared me. Not just the lady with the different heads in the glass cabinets, or the Wheelers—but the beginning of the film, when Auntie Em takes Dorothy to the hospital to be cured. To get fixed. Because she won’t stop talking about a place where all the animals can talk. But it’s not a hospital. It was an insane asylum with medieval-looking contraptions and evil devices—images I can’t get out of my head. I see Mama captured. She’s locked inside an iron maiden, and no one can hear her screaming.
Her doctors still won’t allow visitors—not even Daddy.
First, they need to establish a therapeutic relationship with my mother. That’s what they say. They are trying to establish intimacy, and I wonder if Mama will let them.
* * * *
I decide to touch the fence. I don’t know why. Maybe I want to check to see if it’s really on, or maybe it’s because I’m mad at Daddy for keeping it up. Is he worried I will free the pigs as well? Or maybe I do it to punish myself for not talking to the social worker like a normal kid would have. And I definitely do so to punish myself for everything else I’ve done wrong.
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