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Meghan Clay Mental’s Girl |
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My mother dances with her hips. Or
maybe they just dance all on their own without her. That’s how it seems as
all of us—my mother, my aunts, my sister, us girl cousins—spin in line
together, all barefoot in the grass of my grandmother’s back yard. The women
in my family have always danced this dance to show how connected we are. I
forget myself in the steps and watch my mother. With shoulders so steady and
feet barely lifting from the ground, my mother’s hips pump double-time to the
left, then again to the right. She tilts her head and her dark hair skims
past her shoulders. She looks like she’s listening to the music, timing her
movements with the beats. But I know she’s listening to something inside. I
imagine it as a humming, like string vibrating. When I was little and always
fidgeting, my mother would give me a button suspended on a loop of string to
keep me occupied. Twisting the ends of the loop around two fingers, I’d spin
the button around and around until the string spiraled
tight, cutting blood flow and turning the pads of my fingers purple. Then I’d
pull the string and the button would spin. Bending my ear close, I could hear
the string hum with each pull of my fingers. There has to be a string humming
inside my mother’s body to make her hips move like that. Watching from my own
non-thinking place in this line of women and girls, I see her head turn, and
she smiles at the sight of my sister, Cora, dancing beside her. Cora’s body
sways as if she’s boneless, all liquid and waves. Her insides must sound like
water skimming backwards across the sand into the thick of the ocean. Behind
them, my feet know the steps, but these giraffe legs of my father make my own
hard hips jerk instead of rock. I dance with my knees. I tilt my head,
listening for something inside. But all I hear is a man’s voice asking, “Who
is that one?” And then it’s my Uncle Mike
saying, “That one? The one in the middle? That’s Cora, Mental’s
girl.” I wait for him to point me out
as my mother’s other daughter, but he doesn’t. Then again, it’s not my
graduation party. It’s Cora’s and Aaron’s, Mike’s son. I slide my way out of
the dancing rows and stand behind Mike and his friend to see what they see. It’s
nothing like connection. My younger cousins bounce and collide, always
turning the wrong way. In the back, my uncle’s wives march more than dance,
like they’re following orders. Their arms brush against each other with every
spin. The three of them don’t like to separate or get too close to my mother,
dancing out in front. Cora smiles, singing lyrics as she spins, swaying hips
in cut-off jean shorts. I know the men can’t help but watch her. She’s
beautiful in daylight and so happy seeming that I don’t have to worry. No one
notices as I slip through the back door into my grandmother’s house. I find a seat beside the candy
dish in the dining room. Thick drapes hold back the June sunlight and keep
the inside dark and cool. I grab M&Ms and pop them into my mouth one
right after the other, so fast that I taste candy coating but no chocolate. The
curtains form a soft wall behind me and the back yard falls away. The air’s
heavy with the coppery scent of the lake and I close my eyes, wishing myself
back to our cottage just across the water where it’s just the three of us. But
the curtains only dull the edges. I can still hear the music and the voices
of my relatives mashed together into one constant, meaningless buzz. There
are so many of them that their faces do this, too—blur into one another with
all of their questions about what my plans are for the summer, and then the
faces go blank, but I can see the judgments passing behind their eyes. I
stand up to examine my grandmother’s spoon collection displayed on a chestnut
rack that hangs behind the breadboard. I press my finger against the curve of
one of the spoons. The handle rocks up and then falls back into place with a
hard, clear ping. My grandmother can pull a spoon
from its place on the chestnut rack and tell you that the man who sold it to
her had breath like vinegar-soaked cheddar and that shards of potato chips
clung to his beard as he made his sale. She can tell you that the man claimed
that the spoon was stamped from nickel mined in the mountains on the edge of
town and that she didn’t really believe him. Just like that, I keep memories
of emotions like sweet-smelling stickers or purple-brown scars on my arms and
legs. I can tell you exactly how I felt that time in sixth grade when I
followed Scott Mason behind the janitor’s shed and let him kiss me because he
said I was smarter than Wendy Davieau even though
we both knew I wasn’t. It was January and ice had frozen in chunks around the
base of the shed, so we had to be careful not to slip. He leaned toward me
and blew out a cloud of gray breath that I sucked in and swallowed with the
scent of his cherry Chapstick. I closed my mouth
just in time for the touch of his waxy lips, but I concentrated on the cloud
swelling cold and fat inside my stomach, making the walls rub against my ribs
and smash my organs. It was just like the time when I was six and came
running off the dock behind our house with a small bass still hooked on my
fishing line to show my mother. The little fish flipped its body and its
scales reflected gold sunlight from the sky and blinding silver from the
metal dock that burned my feet below. I lost my footing and fell on the
still-flipping fish, but my forehead came down hard on the dock’s edge. The
next day, I couldn’t keep down the ginger ale or saltines that my mother
brought me. In both cases, my stomach felt about the same. It’s easy for me to remember
emotions like this, to file them into specific categories, because it seems
that someone is always asking me, “How did that make you feel?” They make it
seem like it’s safer to put emotions in air-tight containers with neatly
printed labels, so you can store them away. Just last Tuesday, fourth period
of the last day of school, the last day of junior high, I was staring at the
mole on Miss Zarella’s right collarbone as she
leaned across her desk, letting her chest rest on the ink blotter. “But how
did that make you feel, Ellen?” I sat there, rubbing my palms against the
carpet-like arms of my chair to feel the scratch, and waited for the end of
the period. I can’t even remember what we were supposed to be talking about,
but I remember Mrs. Zarella’s blinking over her
wire rims to signify that I was being difficult. “I feel fine,” I said. The bell
rang and I told Miss Zarella to have a nice summer.
I hope they will forget about these counseling sessions once I get to the
high school in the fall. They’ll get a copy of my report card with all of its A’s and know that I don’t need any counseling. I’m
fine. The school psychologists have wasted enough time on me in the past two
years, ever since I heard Cora’s splash. With that sound came the bonging
that started at the base of my skull, until my teeth throbbed with each
running step toward the water and I tasted acid. The rescuers didn’t come
until after I’d already pulled Cora sputtering out of the lake. I told them
that she was fine. But even now, sitting inside my grandmother’s house, that
memory of acid makes my tongue go so numb that I
can’t taste chocolate. The screen door shakes and
hisses to a close in the kitchen. I slip back into my chair in the corner and
stay still. If it’s one of my uncle’s wives, I don’t want her to see me. My
hiding inside would be enough for the whole lot of them to bend their heads
together over the tables lined with potato salad and exchange You know what I thinks, as if they
know anything at all. I don’t want to be too hard to find, though, in case
it’s my mother or sister, worried when they realize I’ve gone. Whoever it is
drops some plates in the sink and runs the water for a second. Then there’s
the soft rhythmic slapping of sneakers against linoleum and I know it’s my
grandmother, moving through an old tap dance, the way she does every time she
thinks she’s alone. I reach for another handful of M&Ms, letting the
candies and my fingernails scrape loudly against the dish. Dressed in a pale green
sundress, my grandmother steps into the doorway and puts her fists against
her hips. “Ellen, I’ve been looking all over for you,” she says and sits down
beside me. She takes one M&M from the dish, bites off half the shell, and
looks at the chocolate pellet inside. “It’s not easy going solo in a crowd
like that.” I shake my head and lean against
her. The skin of her arm is warm and damp against my face. The heat’s getting
to her. Still, there’s the scent of lavender soap behind the smell of smoke
and grilled meat. She touches the puckered skin
beneath my eyes. “You’re not sleeping again,” she says. “Late nights?” “I sleep a little bit. But
sometimes, Mom and Cora sit at the table and talk all night. I can’t help
myself. I just listen.” “What do they talk about?” “I can’t tell what they say
really. I just listen to their voices to make sure they sound normal.” My grandmother nods her head. I
think she knows that I don’t tell her everything. I know I can trust her, but
I don’t like her to worry. I don’t tell her that Cora’s sleeping with all the
lights on again. I don’t even tell Grandma how Mr. Daggett on the other side
of the lake called the other night to complain that we were too loud and
didn’t we know how sound travels across water. Mom shouted at me to hang up
on him and yelled across the room, “Mr. Maggot. Mr. Maggot.” I hung up the
phone, laughing, because that was the night that Mom and Cora had come into
my room singing and invited me into the light of the kitchen. I had let them
shake me awake even though I’d been up for hours and had heard them giggling
their plans before they even pushed open the door and started singing “Super
Freak” all screechy and out of tune. Cora brushed my hair out of my eyes,
while Mom searched for a spoon for me to sing into, and then we sang together
for hours, even though the phone kept ringing, and Mr. Daggett said over the
answering machine that he was going to call the cops. It just made me want to sing louder and drown it out. Cora and my mother
crossed their arms over the back of my neck, and I knew they wanted me there.
Most nights, though, my mother
and sister close the door to my bedroom and clutch each other’s hands across
the table, always whispering secrets that they keep from me. But I shouldn’t
really call it whispering, because whispers float the way lily pads dip and
weave with the waves. The quiet late-night conversations across our kitchen
table cut like propellers, churning the water, spilling gas and oil beneath
the surface. In the quiet dining room, my
grandmother tucks my hair behind my ears. “Maybe you should stay here tonight.
Get yourself one good night of sleep.” “I don’t know,” I say. I haven’t
slept away from home in almost two years. It makes me nervous and she knows
this. She pushes back the curtain and
points out toward the back yard. Cora’s walking across the grass with long,
almost-running strides that make her hair swing. She turns her head and
flashes teeth, grinning and shouting back to someone we can’t see. For a
second I can remember the way I used to follow Cora—back when I was nine and
she was thirteen. With her ponytail flicking, she’d blaze new trails around
the lake, holding back thorns and tree branches for me to follow, and tearing
across neighbor’s backyards when they got in the way of our path. Back then,
she wasn’t even scared of the Nobles’ old hunting dogs that always chased us.
I’d stand behind her as she turned and held out her palm to the running dogs.
My grandmother lets the curtain
fall. “She’s doing great,” she says. “Two years is a long time.” I nod my head, but I want to
tell her it’s different at night. I’ve heard Cora at the kitchen table,
telling my mother that she can’t see past herself in the darkness sometimes. That
everything gets so aggravated, loud, and overwhelming on the inside that she
just gets stuck. That’s why the night’s so dangerous, why Cora started
sleeping with a nightlight at fourteen, why I need to be there to remind her
to get up in the morning. I look back at the fallen curtain. “I don’t know,” I
say. “Think about it,” she says and
stands up, tapping my knee. “Let’s go join the living. You and I can stick
together.” But as soon as we push through
the door, Josie, one of my younger cousins, is tugging at my grandmother’s
arm, saying that it’s time for Grandma to judge the sandcastles. Josie
rattles on about how many towers her castle has, waving her arms high over
her head. They leave me alone on the steps. I make my way across the yard to
the food tables, lined up beneath a row of pine trees. Plucking a grape from
the pile of fruit, I scan the table for my three favorites among the bowls of
meatballs, chicken wings, and salads overflowing with mayonnaise. My
grandmother must have thought of me when she bought the paper plates, all
divided into three different sections. I don’t like my food to mix. Uncle Craig follows me through
the line. He pushes the already gnawed at chicken bones on his plate into a
pile of olive seeds and toothpicks to make room for more food. “Hey, Ellie,”
he says, plopping another heaping of macaroni salad smack into a puddle of
barbecue sauce. “What’s shaking?” “Nothing,” I say and pat my
potato salad into a neat circular mound. I place a sweet roll in one triangle
and two meatballs in the other. Nothing touches. I reach for a napkin and
turn just in time to see Craig dangling the meatball serving spoon over my
hill of potato salad. “Don’t,” I say, but I don’t move my plate away. I look
up at Craig and he’s smiling. Craig’s the one who gave my mother
the nickname Mental in the first place, because it was so easy to get her all
worked up when they were kids—to push her until she flipped out. Mom laughed
while she told Cora the story one night when I was supposed to be sleeping. She
said that he’d run by and slap her in the head. He’d steal one sock from each
of her favorite pairs that she kept neatly balled up in her sock drawer. He’d
even ball the singles back up and return them to their spots, so she wouldn’t
know what had happened until she unraveled them all, one by one. Sometimes
he’d just come up behind her while she was reading and say “Mental, Mental,
Mental” over and over again until she hit that point and ran at him, shaking
her arms, screaming as she ran, unable to stop until she fell, exhausted. Now there’s a thick bubble of
red meat sauce about to nose dive into my potato salad, and I’m counting to
ten for the third time already, so he won’t get to me. “Uh-oh, Ellie. Uh-oh. It’s about
to drop. Here it goes.” It falls without a sound and
makes a perfect little drop of sauce on top of the yellowed mayonnaise. Little
rainbows of grease form where the colors meet. Craig’s still waiting. With my
plastic spoon, I carve a little gully in the mound, removing the sauce. I
flick the spoon into the trash can. I grab another spoon from the table, pat
the mound back into shape and smile at my uncle, who’s laughing through teeth
wedged with corn kernels. Even so, I love Craig the best
of my mother’s three brothers. He’s the only one who still treats me the same.
My other two uncles, who look at their feet and mumble hellos when I walk by,
are standing around the beer cooler with their friends. Uncle Mike and his
friend back away from the group and cross the lawn to the edge of the beach,
where my mother and sister stretch out across a pair of reclining beach
chairs. Seeing this, my aunts turn their backs and hover together. With
twisting mouths and squinting eyes, they make themselves ugly at their
disapproval of my mother. Mom says they’re jealous, because my uncles love
her more than they do their wives. On the beach, my youngest cousins carry
pails of water toward my grandmother, crouching in the sand and constructing
a central family castle in the midst of all the individual ones. When my
three same-aged cousins, Gary, Liz, Hilary, and I were Josie’s age, my
grandmother used to do the same thing. “Those are nice,” she’d say, standing
over our castles with hands on her hips, “but what would happen if we built
one together?” But standing here by the food tables with my plate in my hand,
I can see the three of them rowing out to the jumping rock without me. I understand, though, because no
one’s really known what to say to me in the two years since Cora’s accident. With
Cora and my mother, they can pretend that nothing ever happened. Mom and Cora
both flick their hair and smile and make everyone breathe easy again. Everyone
talks about how my mother stays home in the nights now and goes to
parent-teacher conferences and carries pictures of us in her wallet. And how
Cora’s picture was in the paper for winning that scholarship and isn’t it
nice how everything’s turned out even better. But my relatives still don’t
look at me the same. Sometimes I think my face
changed or that some visible scar appeared the night I found Cora face down
in the water with her left shoulder wedged beneath the dock, holding her down.
I had her out and breathing on the dock before I even felt the water soaking
in my clothes, in my hair, in my mouth. I must have yelled as I ran and
someone must have heard, because the ambulance drove across our backyard with
lights flashing and siren blaring. Two men in uniforms jumped out of the cab.
“She’s okay,” I shouted, waving
them away, back into the flashing truck. “Don’t worry, I have her. She’s
okay.” But they ignored me and started
asking all types of wrong questions filled with whys. Cora’s hair hung in thick ropes, twisted like black
licorice across the blanket that the paramedics had draped over her shoulders.
I helped her sit down on the beach, tucking the blanket beneath her so sand
wouldn’t stick to her soaked clothes. Patches of mud clung to her hair and
face. I went to wipe it away, but a policeman with hairy hands pulled me back
onto the grass—out of the way, he said. The policeman knelt down in
front of me and asked me where my mother was. I told him I didn’t know. She
was out. She was always out then. He gripped a corner of my blanket with his
bear paws, so I shrugged it off, even though it was October and the wind blew
straight through my soaking clothes as if I was naked. He looked at the
blanket heaped on the ground and asked me in a pudding voice if I knew why my
sister was so sad. I told him instead about the dangers of the lake. I told
him how sometimes the weeds under the surface could wrap all slick and jelly
around your legs and then could pull you under like monster arms. Then a woman in a fireman’s
jacket asked my sister why she jumped into the water. “She didn’t jump. She
fell,” I said, but no one seemed to hear me. I turned back to the policeman
and opened my mouth as wide as I could and yelled right in his face, “She
fell. She fell.” Not even Cora listened. She just burrowed her toes into the
sand. I shut my eyes tight while hot tears pooled in the corners of my mouth.
Then I heard the motor and waves splashing onto the beach. I smelled lavender
soap and strong arms circled around me. “I’m their grandmother. Take Cora
where she needs to go, but I’m taking this one home with me.” They sent Cora to a hospital for
two weeks of observation. Cora kissed me softly on the forehead when Mom
brought her home. Staring out from behind filmy eyes, she told me I didn’t
need to worry about her. But I already knew this. While she was gone, I had
swum beneath the docks with scissors and cut away every last strand of lake
grass. My mother waves to me from her
beach chair and shouts across the yard, “There’s my pretty baby girl.” The
men and boys standing around my mother and sister look back at me, as I walk
across with my plate of still uneaten food. My mother tucks her legs beneath
her to make room. I sit by her folded knees and balance my plate on my lap,
but I can’t eat with all these people looking. Cora stretches her arms over her
head, making her back arch away from the chair. “Ellen,” she says, “You
should have heard the story Blake was just telling us.” She waves in the
general direction of our cousin Aaron and two high school boys I’ve never
seen before. I know right away, though, that Blake’s the one with the big
freckled ears, because the freckles connect together into one blushing mass
when Cora says his name. His eyes flick back and forth from my mother to my
sister as his story about helping some mean old woman fix a flat tire gets
retold. Cora starts, interrupting parts of the story with her fluttering
giggle. Then my mother takes over with her talking hands that fly from her
temples to her mouth and then shoot out in front of her as she speaks. Cora
giggles and it’s her turn again. They tell the entire story like this, a
volleying match that holds our attention—the men’s
and mine. When they finish, they smile at each other, making it clear that
the story wasn’t for the audience’s benefit after all. “Mom,” I say, making them look
at me. “Do you want something to drink?” “That would be great. Maybe some
iced tea?” When I get up, she shifts her legs out straight again. At the drinks table, I drop a
couple of ice cubes into a glass. Mike’s wife, Kate, comes up behind me. “Getting
yourself a drink?” “It’s for my mom.” I reach for
the pitcher. When I’m done pouring, Kate morphs her face so that her eyes
droop at the sides. Her eyebrows arch and then knit together. This is her
concerned face—a face I know not to trust. “How are things at home, Ellen?” She
asks this in a whisper like this is some kind of secret conversation she
hasn’t already rehearsed with the other aunts. “Fine.” “Really? Good. That’s great. I’m
happy to hear that.” She folds her hands together like she’s praying and
presses them to her chin. “Listen, sweetie, if you ever need someone to talk
to about anything—about how you’re feeling or anything.” She lets her voice
trail off and presses her lips together into a sad smile. Right now, I’m feeling like
punching Kate. A muscle begins to spasm in my shoulder so that I have to put
the glass down and hold my arm in place by my side. At times like this, I
wish I felt things the way my mother and sister do. I try to imagine an
impulse so overwhelming that it just happens and even afterwards, it can’t be
categorized. If I were Mom or Cora, Kate would be holding a hand over her eye
right now, calling out for someone to bring her ice. But this is me, so she’s
still standing there with that fake smile and her hands clasped beneath her
chin. Kate acts like she’s not the one who called my father after the
accident. Like she’s not the one who called my mother unfit. My father came in the middle of
a Saturday morning after all the leaves in our yard had fallen but hadn’t
been raked yet. From where I sat on the living-room couch, trying to read my
history book, I could hear the leaves crackle when he sat down with my mother
on the porch steps. They divorced before I turned two. Cora and I had spent a
weekend a month at his house ever since. This fall day wasn’t on his weekend.
My father kept his voice low, muffled behind a thick moustache that I was
never sure was blond or brown. He has always seemed colorless to me. After a
few minutes of his muted voice, my mother shrieked, “You are not taking her.”
I looked up at Cora, who was perched on the recliner across from me. She had
only been home from the hospital for a few days. She just stared all glassy
at the empty fireplace like she was waiting for something to appear. My
father’s voice continued in its hushed way, but it seemed more insistent now.
I looked back at my book and tried to make sense of some old political
cartoon of a fat man in striped pants, but the stripes started to blur as I
thought about Cora leaving again. I wished Mom would stop screeching and talk
normal, so she could convince him that Cora was better off here with us. The door slammed and Mom
streaked across the room and disappeared into Cora’s and my room. Then she
shouted through the doorway, “Get your stuff, Ellen. You’re going with your
father.” She said this all nasty and mean, like she was mad at me, not at Dad.
I thought maybe she’d said the wrong name, gotten mixed up the way she does
when she’s angry, but then I recognized the sound of my dresser drawers
squeaking open. My chest got tight and it felt
like I was breathing chunks of air. “Why me?” I looked over to my father
standing by the door with his hands jammed into his jeans pockets. He had on
the nubbly sweater he always wore to football games
and confrontations with my mother, because it made him look less skinny. He
didn’t look back at me. I couldn’t even tell what expression he was making
behind his moustache. I couldn’t remember a time I had gone to my father’s
alone—without Cora. “Why me?” I asked again. Cora didn’t move. All of her
attention was still focused on the fireplace, like nothing was happening,
like none of this had anything to do with her. Heat rose beneath my skin,
making the hair on my head and arms prickle. My jaw ached. Take her, I thought. I grabbed my book
with two hands and flung it into the fireplace. The book smacked hard against
the brick and there was a sound like ripping as binding tore away from the
pages. Cora blinked once, but didn’t alter her gaze. Mom came back into the living
room and dropped my book bag and her old green suitcase on the floor in front
of my father. Pieces of my clothes poked out from the metal clasps. Dried
tear lines made my mother’s face look cracked and old. I moved to go hug her,
but she stopped me with a hand against my chest. My face felt wet although I
don’t remember crying when I asked her why. She stared at my father, who was
picking up my bags, and said, “Since I already screwed up one daughter, he
won’t let me screw up another.” My father nodded his head toward
the door. “Let’s go, Ellen.” In the car, I looked back at the
house, waiting for my mother to come running out of the house, to chase us
down, and make him let me stay. But the door stayed closed behind us. When we
pulled onto the main road and I couldn’t see the house anymore, I turned
forward and looked at the history book in my lap. The paper-bag book cover
had torn free. I tugged at the strings dangling free from the binding. My
father looked over. “I’ll help you fix that when we get home,” he said. My father brought plates of food
into my room on the nights that I wouldn’t come down for dinner. He’d stand
in the doorway with a plate in his hand and stare at the green suitcase still
open and overflowing with clothes. “You’ve got to eat something,” he said. “I’m not hungry.” I sat curled
on the bed, chewed at my hangnails, and looked at the non-ringing phone. In
my head, my mother spun tires in the driveway as she left for the night,
leaving Cora inside to listen to those squealing tires alone with the water
so close. My father would hover around for
a minute, slide the plate onto the bedside table, and walk out. It took a
month for him to admit that he’d made a mistake. When we finally pulled back
into the pebble driveway of my mother’s house, the skin around my fingernails
was bitten raw and my clothes hung loose on my body. That night, back in my own bed,
I woke up to them talking for the first time. I opened the door and leaned
against the frame. My mother was telling Cora how she met our father. With
her hands stretched to the center of the table and folded over my sister’s,
she said, “He dropped his cup and his soda poured all over both of our shoes.
So sticky, I should have known.” She saw me standing at the edge of the room
and stopped her story. “I’m sorry, Ellen. Did we wake you with our talking? Go
back to bed. We’ll be quieter, I promise.” I looked at Cora, who blew me a
sleepy kiss. I fell back into bed and tried to make sense of the hushed
voices on the other side of the door. When the cars begin to pull out
of my grandmother’s driveway, I catch my mother’s shoulder as she pulls
sun-dried towels off of the fence by the beach. “Mom, I think I’m going to
stay here tonight with Grandma, if that’s okay.” She drapes the towels across her
arm. “Are you sure?” she asks, squinting her eyes
against the sun and watching my face. “I’m pretty sure,” I say and nod
my head. “I’m sure. It’s just across the lake. I can see the house from
here.” My mother tugs at the ends of my
hair. She smiles. “Okay. You two have fun,” she says, but adds that I should
come home early for Sunday morning pancakes, a tradition she started when I
got back from my father’s. My grandmother and I stand on
the front porch and wave as Mom and Cora back the car out, waving as they go.
My grandmother’s hand falls on my shoulder. “This is going to be a good
night,” she says, and I follow her inside. The aunts have already stacked
the extra food in Tupperware in the refrigerator and the uncles have folded
up the tables and put them away in the cellar, so there’s little cleaning
left for us to do. While my grandmother sweeps beach sand out of the kitchen,
I wonder what my mother and Cora are doing across the lake without me. Grandma
makes us cold meatball sandwiches that we eat in the den while we watch the
Red Sox game. She falls asleep during the sixth inning. She looks peaceful as
she sleeps with her hands crossed across her stomach that rises and falls in
slow, even breaths. I lie back on the couch just like her and close my eyes,
but my breath comes like hiccups and my eyelids won’t stay closed. I stare at
the raised ceiling swirls, so unlike the flat painted white above my own bed,
and listen to her easy sleep, so unlike Cora’s. I wake her up during the
seventh-inning stretch and tell her the Sox are already down by five. Rubbing
her eyes, she says, “No use in my watching the rest of this. I’ll see you in
the morning.” She heads down the hall to her bedroom. I switch off the set
and take the stairs up to my mother’s old room. My grandmother has laid out one
of my mother’s old nightgowns on one of the twin beds. It fits exactly. I
notice a stain on the arm that looks like chocolate. I try to picture my
mother as a girl my age. I turn her into the type of girl I’m friends with at
school—the girls with pretty hair, good grades, and no problems—the type I
could see drinking hot chocolate or eating ice cream sundaes before bed. I
crawl beneath the covers and try not to think, but I’m not tired. A six-foot
stuffed snake sticks its tongue out at me from where it hangs across the
bureau mirror. Uncle Craig won it at the town fair one summer and brought it
home for my mother. I try to picture the scene as he walked in the door, but
he’s just a smaller teenaged body with Craig’s adult head and laughing corn-kerneled teeth. And I can’t see my mom being excited
about a stuffed snake. Through the open window, I hear gentle waves lapping
onto the beach outside. I close my eyes and sleep for
what seems like a minute, but I keep dreaming that I’m awake in my own bed,
even though this pillow is too stuffed and full to be mine. I open my eyes
and Cora’s not in the bed across from me. The glowing alarm clock on the
nightstand says I turn on the light and get
dressed. Before I leave, I pull up the bedspread and tuck the sheets under
the mattress. I write a note, so my grandmother won’t worry. With my sandals in my hand, I
run across the lawn in darkness. I look up in the sky, but there’s no moon. The
only light on the lake comes from my house on the other side. Everything else
is black, even the water. My grandmother’s rowboat waits
by the beach’s edge. I set my sandals on the bench by the bow and push
through the blueberry bushes to unravel the rope from the tree. The berryless
branches scratch my thighs and calves. Digging my feet into the sand, I lean
into the bow and send the boat rocking backwards across the water. I wade in
up to my knees before climbing in. With a few solid pulls of the right oar,
the boat spins around until I’m facing my grandmother’s house, but moving
away from it. My strokes are silent except for the knocking of the oarlocks. I
don’t need to check my direction as I row. If I keep an eye on the top
bedroom window where the lamp beside my mother’s old bed still glows, I know
I’m heading straight for home. When the boat reaches the middle
of the lake, something like the opposite of fear makes me stop rowing. I
slide the oars in and let the handles cross on the bottom by my feet. Water
drips fast in fat, round drops from the oars. I ease back until I’m lying on
the floor of the boat. My head and back rest against the metal ridges, while
my legs remain draped across the bench, feet dangling. I’m not afraid of the
lake grass, waving somewhere deep beneath the boat and me, floating on the
surface. Warm puddles of water on the boat’s bottom seep into my shorts and
shirt. Lying here like this, I begin to see that the black’s not as constant
as I first thought. It’s charcoal gray directly overhead and then gets
blacker as it spreads wide, closer to the pointed shadows of the trees, even
blacker than the sky. At my grandmother’s side of the lake, the black’s
already showing hints of blue, a sign of morning coming. My heart hurts and I
want to reach out my arms in a circle as if the night were something solid. Stuck
inside themselves, my mother and my sister could never see these different
shades of black. With them it’s only light or dark. The thought of them has
me back in the seat and rowing fast, ugly, slapping strokes back to our beach.
Our house looks like it’s on fire with every single light on except for the
burned-out bulb hanging over the back stairs. The peeling steps are hard to
manage in the shadows. I step lightly, watching out for splinters. Mom and
Cora are asleep at the kitchen table. Each of them rests her head on one arm.
The other arm stretches across the table. Their hands meet in the middle with
linked fingers. I lead them half-sleepwalking to
their beds—Cora first, then my mother. My mother opens her eyes when I pull
up the covers and they brush her chin. Then her eyes flutter closed again. “I
like having both my girls home,” she says and turns
over onto her stomach. I turn out the lights. My eyes ache, but I stay awake,
listening for shifts in my sister’s breathing. I let my head fall against my
flattened pillow and wait for the sound that makes the acid rise in the back
of my throat and the throbbing spread from my skull to my teeth. As long as
I’m here, everything will be fine. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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