I have to step onto the dirt mound that separates the road from the pasture—what must have been knee-deep mud when Mama freed the pigs. I keep one foot in the ditch for balance, and I reach until my hand is above the top wire, on the other side. The pigs come. Sniffing the air, they keep their distance; they know this fence and what it does. When they find I have no food, they go back to ignoring me.
I let my hand hover over the wire the way a magician does before he reaches into his hat and pulls out a white rabbit by its long ears. I feel the electricity before I make contact.
The fence does and doesn’t want me to touch it.
I don’t feel anything the first time, either because it knocks the wind out of me or because it knocks me out. I don’t know, because I’ve never passed out before. I find myself sitting in the middle of the road with a terrible ringing in my ears. Shrill, the sound lingers. The ringing doesn’t stop, and my tailbone hurts so much, I think it’s broken. But I manage to pull myself up. After that, I remain fully conscious. The second, third, and fourth time, I touch the fence.
And all the times after.
I build immunity. The fence has an incredible force. It feels like getting kicked by a horse—not that I’ve ever been kicked by one, but my uncle has. It feels like this, only it doesn’t hurt, not exactly. The charge is instant, felt in every part of me: flesh and bone—all at once. I try to hold on to the wire, but the electricity pushes me away. The shock outlines my nervous system as my body becomes an anatomy lesson. When the world goes dark, I can see my nerves—bright and white and ragged, they look like tree roots and they tremble.
I am surrounded by white light. It is blinding. And I feel warm all over and I hear myself cry out. I make noises I’ve never made before. And this is the part that feels good even though it feels like I’m peeing my pants when I didn’t have to go.
When I was younger, Uncle Billy tried to teach me martial arts, but I was too little, and got bored too fast. All the beginning lessons were about learning how to safely fall. I didn’t understand what he was doing at the time. I just wanted to kick and punch and knock people out.
One day, he took me for a walk along the Silver River. We went farther than the waterfall and the pool my grandfather built once upon a time. My uncle wanted to show me one of the century-old cottonwoods that had fallen during a recent snowstorm. He described the tree as having shattered because of the way it broke. Then he showed me the younger trees—and the way they bent instead, and how they still continued to bend under the weight of the new snow.
“It’s like they are bowing to the storm,” my uncle said. “Like the storm is their master and they are showing their respect.” Because they were young and flexible, those trees could not shatter. They went along with the massive blows of wind and snow instead. While he was impressed by the saplings, I was more affected by the impact of the ancient cottonwood and its total demise.
He also made me watch Marmalade. The way she jumped from the rafters in the barn, always landing on her feet. He said, “There’s a time for landing on your feet and a time for falling like a drunk man would, or a baby.” He was serious, and I made him mad by giggling. “You take all that force against you,” he said, “and, Fig, you turn it into a power you can use.”
When I touch the fence, I use a combination of all the falling methods my uncle taught me. Where I drop and roll. Where the last thing I do is try to land on my feet. The fence can’t knock me unconscious anymore, but it still throws me every time. But if I just take it—that is, absorb the power—I can make it my own. And each time I touch the fence, I fall.
Each time, I fall more safely than the time before.
* * * *
I’ve perfected the art of falling safely by the time Daddy turns off the electric fence, dismantles it, and takes the copper to be scrapped. He rebuilds the old fence, and the pigs continue to be contained. I turn my focus elsewhere.
The calendar is titled The Work of Salvador Dalí, and even though the melting clocks are appropriate, I’m not interested in the images. Daddy gives me the calendar, telling me how Dalí is one of Mama’s favorite artists—only he said “was.” He often talks about her like she’s gone, as in gone forever.
I keep busy keeping track. I am counting. I record each day without my mother. And I can’t help but wonder if this is the sacrifice I’m supposed to make. Is this the only way she might get better? Perhaps when I see her again, she will be back to normal.
I use the Dalí calendar to keep track of her absence. I don’t blacken the squares, nor do I use the crossroads method of making an X. Instead, I make the same careful checks Mama makes in dictionaries. They are the same, only smaller. I make them as small as I can, despite all the room the insides of the squares provide.
I make each check before I go to bed. I make the check next to whatever number represents today. The checks are camouflaged by the numeral for the days—so tiny, they can’t be noticed by anyone who might be snooping around my room, checking to see how I am holding up.
I check off the entire summer, and I check off the first day of the eighth grade. I make a special note for September fifteenth, the day both Lindy and Michael Chamberlain’s murder conviction is unanimously overturned by the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeals. The day Azaria finally gets to rest in peace, I write R.I.P. and not an X. I am meticulous. Especially when it comes to the twenty-first of October. The tiny black check is perfect; the best I’ve made so far.
I check off October 21, 1988, and I am thirteen years old.
And this is my first birthday without my mother. I think about the number thirteen, and that night in the kitchen with Mama. Her thirteen knocks echo from past to present. Knock , knock—who’s there? I can hear her knocking, and I understand why people develop a phobia of this number. This phobia is about betrayal. That which is gone.
As I record the days without Mama, I can’t help but fall back or spring forward. I think more and more about the days to come. I think about the days remaining before I turn nineteen. I was six years old that evening in the orchard, and the math is simple. I work the equation on the chalkboard of my mind: 6 + 13 = 19. My brain is dark matter, and the math problem is white—easy to see to see.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EMPTINESS
determinism: the philosophical view that past events and the laws of nature fix or set future events; given these conditions, nothing else could happen.
September 1, 1989
Without Mama, the house sounds different; even now, after all this time I still notice the sound of her absence. At night, I try to keep from picking at my scabs. I’m embarrassed because I’ll be fourteen soon but I just can’t seem to stop. I fall asleep, and in the morning I’ve reopened my skin and the white bedsheets are constellated with the brown bursts of dried blood.
Laundry is one of my many chores now that Mama is no longer here. I bleach the bedding back to white. This is erasure, but I am not done with my mourning.
We visit Mama whenever we can. The visiting room is noisy and full of stale smoke. This mother trembles. Her hands and her face. The shake inside this mother is another kind of echo. It is the echo of electrical currents charging through her soul. Daddy promises it doesn’t hurt. And no one here calls it electric-shock therapy. They all call it ECT. Acronyms and initials are employed like camouflage or buffers; they are the sugar coating on a bitter pill, or the mittens worn by the Stanley children when they practiced the ordeal of no touching metal.
Mama won’t look at me, and she won’t look at Daddy. Instead, she counts each drag she takes, lighting one Salem off another. Her complexion blends in with the hospital walls, and through the window in the one door I glimpse the corridor leading to another world: the world where my mother chooses to live instead of with me. Voluntary commitment. I wish I could see to see: I want to see where she sleeps at night and what pieces of home she brought along. More than anything, I wish I could see the view from her window.
Instead, we sit in silence like we always do.
Daddy goes to get a cup of coffee from the vending machine by the bathrooms. He leaves me and Mama alone. There is a television mounted to the wall, and it is always on. People talk, and one group plays a board game, but no one laughs in here.
Mama finally looks at me. Her eyes are no longer hazel; they are now the same empty gray as the sky before the first snow of the year arrives. “You’re not mine, you know?” she says. She says this as she lights another cigarette. And then she smiles. Amid the twisting smoke, she smiles at me, and then she says, “But don’t worry, dear. It’s not your fault.”
* * * *
On the drive home, Daddy takes a detour.
He hasn’t been talking much since Mama went to Saint Joseph’s, and he doesn’t say anything about where we’re going, and I don’t ask. We pass a sign that reads KICKAPOO INDIAN RESERVATION OF KANSAS. The name makes me wonder if there are Kickapoo reservations in other places.
Daddy pulls off the road and into the dirt parking lot of a gas station/convenience store. There is one pump, but evidently he’s not here for gas. He puts the truck in park and leaves me to watch a group of Indian kids as they sit around a dilapidated picnic table sucking on Popsicles striped red, white, and blue like the American flag. When he returns, he’s carrying a plastic grocery bag. He gets in the truck and tosses the bag onto the floor by my feet. He pretends to be adjusting the rearview mirror, but really he is watching me from the corner of his eye as I examine the contents of the bag.
I am trying to see to see.
Through the thin white plastic, I see green packaging, which I recognize by now. I begin counting. I count ten cartons of Salem Lights 100s. The packaging design is more suitable for mint gum than it is for cigarettes. “No tax on the reservation,” Daddy says, putting the truck in reverse. As we drive away, we pass another sign, and this one reads NOW LEAVING KICKAPOO INDIAN RESERVATION. It does not specify which reservation or what state.
In school, we studied the Kickapoo Indians, and Phillip Booth couldn’t get over the name.
He said, “I thought Kick the Can was a dumb game, but kicking turds is even dumber.”
He didn’t pay attention to what the teacher was saying, and I doubt he read the book we were assigned. Otherwise, he would have known what I and the rest of the class knew. Kickapoo comes from kiwikapawa, which means “stands here and there.” It refers to the migratory patterns of the tribe and means “wanderer.”
I might not actually go anywhere, but I do know how to stand here and there.
* * * *
The next time we go to visit Mama, Daddy brings all those cigarettes and I give her a bouquet of flowers.
I picked the last blooms of Johnny-jump-up from our yard, and I bought the orange daylilies from The Flower Lady because Sissy Baxter, who is now officially employed there, said, “Daylilies are the Chinese emblem for Mother,” and the Flower Lady explained, “Probably because it’s easy to make an exact clone of the parent.” In Hamlet, Ophelia says, “There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts,” and this is what I mean to say to Mama with the Johnny-jump-ups: You are not only in my heart, but forever in my head.
Mama doesn’t even say thank you. Ignoring the vase I’ve set on the table, she takes the bag of cigarettes from Daddy and pulls a carton out. She isn’t rushed, but she is methodical.
She uses her thumbnail to cut a slit in the cellophane. She slides the cellophane off and uses the same nail to open the cardboard flap at one end, before she shakes a pack out. I think about fingernails, and I think of my nesting dolls while Mama repeats her actions—only this time she’s removing the cellophane from the individual pack, and now she’s shaking out a long, white cigarette.
Filter down, she taps the cigarette on the table, and I almost expect her to do this thirteen times—but she doesn’t. I count three taps before she sticks the Salem 100 between her chapped lips, lighting it with a lighter that reads COUNTRY GIRL. The lighter is decorated with a picture of a lipstick tube and a pair of spurs. I excuse myself.
I say I have to use the bathroom, but I don’t. I do this all the time. I excuse myself to go ride the elevator up and down. There are six floors if you count the parking garage down below. People get on and off the elevator, and I don’t know anyone.
From the main level, a boy wearing plaid pajamas gets on the elevator with a woman who must be his mother. The boy is my age. Our eyes meet for a second before he looks down, focused on the carpeted elevator floor. There’s a name-tag sticker on his chest, only it’s upside down, but the word Satan is not. I can’t help but smile, and I do everything I can to force my lips in the opposite direction. I end up holding my breath and crossing my fingers to make it stop.
Satan is wearing a pair of brown fleece slippers, and I can see his toes and what’s remaining of the black nail polish he applied before he came here. His hair is dyed black, but his roots have grown long—at least three inches of painful-looking strawberry blond. His natural color is the same as Mama’s.
His mother clutches one of his arms with her hand. Her grip looks tight, and her fingernails are long and red. She holds on to her son, waiting for the elevator to take them to the third floor. They both smell like cigarette smoke, and they share the same scowl, only hers is made more severe by age and all the facial lines around her mouth. The elevator dings and the doors open. She pushes Satan into the corridor, but this is when he breaks free. He turns around and uses his foot to keep the doors from closing. And then he pushes up the sleeves of his hooded sweatshirt.
He wants me to see. And I do.
I see every single sliver of thin white scar. And I can almost see what they looked like before—slender strands of fresh vibrant red. He is covered in these scars. And the scars remind me of the shading technique Mama calls crosshatching. I look at his arms, and then I look at him: His eyes are blue—blue like a summer sky, and he looks at me. And when his mother grabs his arm and yanks him back, he yells at me. “Pay attention!” he says, before he turns around to let his mother steer him away from me, to the left.
The elevator doors close, and I’m left staring at a dull reflection of myself in the shiny steel.
I ride the elevator to the fifth floor and then back to the garage. I do this three times. And only three people and one baby ride the elevator during this time. After three rounds, I ride the elevator from the garage, but this time I stop at the third floor, and I’m the only who gets off. This hall looks like the hall on the fourth floor where my mother is committed. According to the directory on the wall, if I turn right, I will go to Cognitive Therapy, but if I turn left, I’d be headed to the Juvenile Psychiatric Ward.
Because the hallway bends, I can’t actually see the ward. This hallway bends like the hallway on Mama’s floor, and there’s the same set of vending machines by the drinking fountain and the public restrooms with the blue wheelchairs stenciled on the doors, but the fluorescent lights work better. They still buzz, but they don’t buzz quite as loudly as they do on Mama’s floor. I should get back to the fourth floor but I can’t move. I’m thinking about those scars. And I’m wondering what it’d be like to turn left—to commit myself. Head tilted, I stand here staring at a place I can’t see.
* * * *
October 21, 1989
Uncle Billy gives me a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for my fourteenth birthday. The volumes are stacked up in the back of his truck bed. The books are white with red lettering and remind me of Daddy’s varsity jacket—the way the red is tinged with gold.
Gran and Daddy should be here soon. They went to pick Mama up from the hospital. The doctors call this “a temporary release.” They say Mama wanted to spend the weekend at home because it’s my birthday. The doctors also use the term “trial.” They say, “If she can handle being home, she can visit more.” That’s what they say. They say this more than once, yet they never notice the contradiction or acknowledge the oxymoron, and I want to ask, How,
exactly, does a person visit home?
“Well, they’re not going to sprout wings and fly up to your room,” Uncle Billy says, and I realize I’ve been standing here, on the porch, staring at his truck. I’ve been standing both here and there, but I return. I come back.
Together, we carry the encyclopedias up to my bedroom. I kneel on the floor, lining the volumes up in alphabetical order. I don’t have a shelf big enough, so we make one using some of the old wooden crates left over from when the apple orchard was still in operation.
“I’m sorry they’re used,” Uncle Billy says. He’s just inside my room, leaning against the wall. He is wearing a pair of black cowboy boots.
I insert the last volume into the place where it belongs—between the L and the O—and then I look up at him and smile. My smile tells him I love them just the way they are.
“I wanted to buy you a brand-new set,” he says, “But they were too expensive.”
I tell him I’ve always wanted a set, and how once upon a time I even asked Gran for one. But she refused. “Encyclopedias are too much clutter for a young girl’s bedroom” is what she said, and what she really meant was All that information is too much clutter for a young girl’s brain.
Uncle Billy smiles back at me, and then he begins to wander around my room. He stops by my desk and picks up the Matryoshka doll, and my heart begins to pound. The burnt-black faceless one is hiding within the core of all four mothers, so I hold my breath and cross my fingers that he doesn’t open the matriarch, and it works. He sets her down and strolls over to the window seat.
He stands there looking out the window with his legs spread and his hands on his hips, and he reminds me of Peter Pan—the Peter Pan who’s just about to fly away: out the open nursery window. “You know,” Uncle Billy says, “this used to be my room.”
I look around as he looks around. And I try to imagine a little boy in here. I see the miniature Uncle Billy from all the old pictures lining the hall at Gran’s. This little boy sits in my window seat. Captured on black-and-white film, he looks at the orchard and the sky and he fidgets.
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