Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  When they rode by one time, Harvey thought he saw her in the window looking out with a finger up to her lips—shhhhhhhh—just like the teacher in first grade, Mrs. Theresa Morgan. “Oh, no, you don’t, mister!” She was big up top with a puff of blond hair like cotton candy that everybody wanted to touch. “Don’t misbehave, you hear? I don’t want to have to tell your mother.” In story circle, she talked about how they should sow seeds of kindness and then she ended by saying, “So go and sow, you so-and-so,” and everybody laughed. She liked to use the same word spelled different and she liked to make cards of to, too, and two, and blue and blew, and new and knew. Harvey asked was it like but and butt, which Jason had taught him. I could hit your butt but Mom would get mad. Jason taught him that the same time he taught him You can tell it’s Mattel—just smell.

  The blackberry patch is not far from where Harvey has the fish cemetery. Goldfish and guppies, and there’s a hamster in there: Skippy. Jason’s hamster, Kong, killed and ate part of Skippy. And that’s the day Harvey got in trouble for writing on the wall. Shit, he wrote. Dam. And then he threw some rocks as hard as he could at a tree and then he got a trash-can lid and marched in a circle with a big, sharp stick, like a sword fighter, and then Jason taught him how to say things in Klingon. He can write shit in Klingon and kids really like that a lot.

  Harvey was playing in his mom’s closet one day when she got in her bed and started crying so loud he held his ears. He wasn’t supposed to be in her closet, because it was where she kept good things like sparkly shoes and stuff she had when she was little, like a naked Barbie doll and an old smelly quilt. There’s an old bowling ball in there too. Jason showed it to him and told him it was like the Magic 8 Ball, only bigger, and Jason could read messages in the black and red swirlies: It is certain. Yes. In the closet, Harvey held on to the ball while he sat real quiet and watched his mom’s dirty white socks kicking back and forth.

  Michelangelo would have popped out and scared her. Michelangelo would have told a joke, like he might’ve said, Hey, dude, does your nose run? Do your feet smell? Or why does your crack go thisaway and not thataway? And then he would have made that funny sound with his lips that a butt would do on a sliding board if it was cracked the other way, like Jason taught him, and his mom would have thought that was funny. She would have laughed instead of crying and he wouldn’t have needed to hold his breath, like he was waiting for something or like he was way deep underwater with that old turtle with the nice eyes. He isn’t supposed to touch the bowling ball but sometimes he does, because he misses Jason telling him what it says—Let’s eat or Burp loud—and throwing him high in the air. Be good.

  Lil

  Christmas 2014

  Newton

  You two always shook your heads and got impatient when I said I had to have a huge tree and spent way too long (your father said) there on the lot studying them all. I wanted big trees, beautiful trees. The whole process of it was a joy, from buying and getting it home to dealing with the hateful old stands, greeting each curse and slam of your father’s hammer, or whatever he was using to make it stand upright, with the expression of how beautiful it was all going to be, how it was worth every minute of trouble.

  I loved pulling out the ornaments, and you loved hearing the stories that went with each: the ones that were gifts from teachers; the old fragile glass balls with your names in glue and glitter; and all those snowflakes you cut out yourself; the photos on the lap of Santa; and those little elves with the bendy legs that sat on top of boxes of chocolates. Other than the ones you two had made, my favorites were the little pine-cone elves with their different instruments, maybe because they had been my mother’s favorites, those and the little cardboard houses, with the snow on the roof and the places for a bulb to glow within. I loved the silver icicles and the way we could toss the strings up and let them land as they pleased, sweep the strays up from the floor and throw them back on. I even liked when it was all over and I’d carefully tucked everything back into its little bed for the year, recycling the icicles by using them to shield and protect the fragile decorations.

  Now, you have your own trees and your share of all those early ornaments; this year, we bought a four-foot one, and it’s on a table in the front window. We have the same star and colored lights and, of course, icicles. From the street, it looks like a full-sized tree.

  The year my mother died, there was no Christmas tree, and the one time I mentioned it, my father’s look let me know it wasn’t going to happen. But still, I pretended. I decorated the coatrack and called it a tree. I paid special attention to the tree in the window of a house near ours, one I passed each day walking to school. At first, it made me feel left out, but then it became my focus, it became my tree and was a bright spot in my day. And then January passed and it still stood, and then February, too, and I began to wonder if the people had died. But, no, I saw them, coming and going. Still, it was a lesson to me how hanging on to something long after the fact can diminish the power of what was. It’s where memory comes in, I guess, the abstract strength of what is no longer there to see and touch. I don’t even recall if I got a gift that year, but I must have; my father’s sister visited, and she cooked for several days and left the icebox full of food.

  My mother had become the past. And the effects on my father were like that forgotten old Christmas tree.

  “But she loved Christmas,” I told him, and he said, “Exactly.”

  At the time, his response seemed harsh, but I grew to see it as protective, part of the scaffolding he constructed to hold himself upright through those long, dark winter weeks as our numbness and shock slowly thawed with the muddy earth and green of spring into this new way of living. He dreaded winter and all the memories it brought, and I loved it; I felt closer to her when I felt close to those final days. I still do. November weather reports always fill me with anticipation.

  A few months later, I overheard my father talking to my mother’s friend Janie, a woman he had once thought was a bad influence (he’d said she aspired to too much), but there he was inviting her into our living room and talking to her, saying things that he had not said to me, revealing things about my mother’s clothes and what he had discovered in her drawer, like a receipt for money she still owed the local dress shop where Janie worked (for a new coat on layaway). They didn’t know that I was in the hallway, holding my breath so that I could hear. “Why was she hiding things from me?” he asked. “There were things in her drawer I had never seen before. A lacy slip, some handkerchiefs.”

  “Just because someone is dead doesn’t mean you should tell their secrets,” I was thinking.

  “Do you know who she was with?” he asked, and Janie said, no, she didn’t, but she had her suspicions. Then the two sat there for what felt like an unbearable amount of time. It seemed Janie was about to explain more, but before she could say it, I came into the room.

  I said that maybe my mother was helping to plan a surprise. “For you,” I said, and turned to Janie, her shell left cracked and vulnerable. “Or maybe something nice for you.” I turned back to my father, who was not as easily cracked. “Or maybe she was earning extra money so she could have those nice things without having to ask you; maybe she was afraid you would say no, because you usually say no.” That one got him, and so I kept going, about how maybe just maybe she was earning extra money so they would have a big Christmas. “So I would have a big Christmas! Maybe, she was doing it all for me.”

  “Let it stop,” I thought. “Let her just be my mother.”

  They were quiet, and finally they both nodded, as if to say I could be right, and then, in a strange distant way, they simply closed the door on it all.

  Janie came over often after that; she was a solid placeholder. She didn’t smoke nearly as much as my mother had, and she didn’t drink at all. She had a nice singing voice and was an excellent cook. She filled a chair and performed many tasks. She helped my father go through and sort my mother’s things. She cooked and c
leaned and sometimes even spent the night, though I never saw her any way other than fully dressed. For a long time, I simply thought she had returned bright and early to cook our breakfast, and then I realized she was in the same dress from the day before, her hair down around her shoulders instead of pulled up the way she usually wore it. In the spring, she even made an Easter dress for me and embroidered the yoke with tiny roses, but by summer something seemed to have happened, and the stretches of time when we did not see her lengthened. Eventually, we heard that she’d married a man from Texas, and to my knowledge, we never heard from her again.

  “It’s just as well,” my father had said. “She deserves someone who wants to marry,” something I would learn he was not interested in thinking about until I had graduated and left home.

  Though our house was a quiet one and the food questionable much of the time, I took great pride in my father’s position, unsure if it was for my benefit or for his own; it occurred to me that the wilis, those grieving ghostly virgins in “Giselle,” did not have a monopoly on broken hearts. His weighed the same.

  I wanted to ask who Janie had suspected my mother was with, but there never seemed a good time to interrupt the rhythm and security of the life we came to know. When he was sad or worried, I didn’t want to add to the burden; and when he was happy, I just wanted the good time to last. Then, before I knew it, he was an old man, and together we carried those fragile memories of my mother as gingerly as I do that brittle silver star on top of the tree. I bought it at Woolworth’s before either of you were born.

  Shelley

  The few times Shelley has been able to afford good therapy, she has learned that on occasion she disassociates—that she might realize she has heard nothing coming out of the mouth of the person standing in front of her because the tightening of her own throat has forced her to think only of the click, click, click of a distant ceiling fan while she wonders, What next? What next? What next? And apparently it isn’t a legitimate excuse that someone is boring and eating up all the oxygen around you in a way you find offensive. The spoken word is overrated, and if there is a hell like what Brent’s parents taught him to believe and she is forced to go there, she will have to sit in a doorless room and listen on and on and on.

  Her job has been a lesson in focus and vigilance as she records every word and gesture and mannerism but as objectively as possible, which is another lesson in discipline, such amazing discipline, and focusing on the concrete without analyzing, a nearly impossible exercise to pull off in real life, and in fact it has been quite difficult in this particular case, because the young murdered woman’s face is so familiar. Shelley knows that she probably passed her a million times, in the grocery store, in the post office, the makeup masking the very young face of someone nearly invisible in society, and so in light of that—the murder and abuse—how can you possibly listen to someone talking about the young woman’s weight or the way she wore her hair as if that is significant? And it is hard for Shelley to listen to all of that because she’s heard it her whole life. Have you gained a little weight? What made your skin break out? Do you think if you had a job that forced you to walk around you wouldn’t gain weight? Do you think if you just gave up anything that has ever given you pleasure that maybe you would look better, behave better, do better in school? I’d take you to a dermatologist if I could afford it—try some Clearasil, scrub harder. The alternative to criticism was no attention at all, which would have been the better choice had she had any power to choose.

  Her dad had said things like: “If those people really wanted money, they’d get up off their lazy asses and work like everybody else.” He said people like being in prison, because they get three meals a day and endless television, all at the hardworking taxpayer’s expense. He said nobody ever gave him anything. He said, “So if you don’t like it, get the hell out,” and that’s what her brother did, and in many ways that is what her mother did, hidden there behind a wall of magazines and ashtrays, and laundry that never got hung up. “How-ma-ny-times-do-I-have-to-tell-you,” he would say, a belt crack with each syllable, and Shelley’s mother would say how doing that hurt him worse than it hurt Shelley and her brother, but her mother never did anything to stop it. “Well, that’s a fucking load of shit,” her brother told Shelley. He told her they were on their own. “It was an accident,” he said the last time she saw him. “An accident.”

  In yoga, once she bought her own props and could stop worrying about whose butt had been on the bolster or blanket her face was on, she discovered that the kind of repetition that accompanied her steps and passages all through the day was a kind of meditation. All this time, she’d been meditating and didn’t even know it: rhythm and rhyme, fragments of songs repeated in ways that blanked and swaddled her mind and thoughts. “Meditating” sounds better than “disassociating,” she thought. Words and rhythm lifting her from the scene before her, whatever it might be—escaping boredom in the midst of chatter, seeking safety in the midst of fear. But now, these recent days, the simple I am, I am, I am, calm or strong or peaceful, has turned to Terrified, terrified, paralyzed, paralyzed, and slick red satin damp with fatigue.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your childhood,” Brent had said to her, and if he ever came back, maybe she would tell him. She would tell what had really happened with her family, and she would tell about the old man who’d once lived here, and how he keeps circling back like a lost cat wanting in, and how, now that she has had time to think about it, she hated those things Brent said to her—they weren’t funny at all—like that she’d be so easy to kill. She would say she thinks that was mean, and so was the way he sometimes stared at Harvey’s mouth and then at her, like it was her fault, when the doctor had been so kind and reassuring to say no one was to blame; besides, it could have been much worse, much more complicated. The nurse had told her it would not affect his speech, and she was right about that, and the scar in the center of his lip—what they call Cupid’s bow—will fade. We are doing fine, she would say. I take good care of us. She would say this and then repeat it; she would say it until she believed it herself.

  Shelley remembers the case where the man said, “I’ll take care of you.” It was a crime of passion, and the arguments went round and round, the man testifying that he’d said those words in love, in his attempt to reassure his wife how much he loved her and wanted to take good care of her, but the prosecution seeing it as a threat—I’ll take care of you—the way it was spoken suggesting the man had a twisty villain mustache and a maniacal laugh. The weight fell on the word you, a threat more than a promise. I’ll take care of you—that is the line she hears the times she wakes to a sound that is unfamiliar, a shadow that races past her eyes, when what she wishes for is the comfort of laying her head down and closing her eyes and feeling someone really is there to take care of her, to love and watch over her.

  Shelley didn’t believe in making children lick soap for saying bad words or physically spanking or yanking or switching. She and Brent were different this way. He believed the previous generation sometimes knew best and that she was spoiling Jason and Harvey; she thought whipping and all that “spare the rod” shit was barbaric behavior, abominable and sadistic, and did nothing but perpetuate fear and anger and all those terrible weaknesses that feed everything bad in society, and she told him so. Brent had looked surprised, and she wasn’t sure if it was because she had stood up to him or that she had used barbaric, abominable, sadistic, and perpetuate all in one sentence. She usually just said things like “I think that’s fucked-up,” but there had been a recent trial with some people being accused of embezzlement, and she had picked up some powerful vocabulary.

  “You are calling someone fucked-up? You?” he asked incredulously, which is another word popular among the lawyers. “Let’s talk about you, Shelley,” he said. “Let’s talk about the way you have lived.”

  Who wouldn’t want to cuss? That’s what she said when Harvey was standing beside her bed for the third time
the other night. He said he’d had a bad thought and he needed to tell her, that he was worried and he needed to tell her. He’d seen a ghost all dressed in black, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the bad things bad people do. He told her how the Glencoe Munchkins threw rocks and cussed at the people who passed by.

  “Of course they did,” she said. “Like I keep telling you, people made fun of them and were mean about things they couldn’t help. They were born with problems, a lot of sad problems.” She sat up and turned on the light. He was bare-legged, his Nemo nightshirt barely reaching his briefs, and she knew she would find wet pajama pants in the sink and a towel over the wet spot in his bed.

  “So that made it okay to cuss?” he said.

  She turned back the covers and moved over so Harvey could get in. “It made it understandable,” she said. “I understand why they did what they did.” She knew there was probably something he still wanted to tell her and hadn’t, but before she could ask, he was fast asleep, his hand holding her arm. She had to help him get over this problem, but for the moment she allowed herself the comfort of his warm little body beside her and the rhythmic breaths. When he was younger, he liked to pretend they were bears in a cave or the three bears in their little house, and at nap time he would ask to hibernate, a word Jason taught him, and pull the blanket up over his head.

  Lately, Shelley feels like someone who’s been hibernating, the way she knows she has taken on the mom look—the tug and longing of motherhood pulling you toward a kind of domestic hibernation, comfort food and easy clothes, hair pulled into ponytails, and face cleaned of makeup. As in nature—birds and beasts blending to hide and protect their nest or den—a warm, soft mama spreads her wings or paws to comfort and protect. “You don’t even try to look attractive,” Brent had said, or was that what the murderer had said? Yes, that is what the murderer had said of his wife: “She stopped trying to look attractive. She stopped being there for me as a partner. What man wouldn’t look elsewhere? Does that make me a murderer?”