Burglar

By 1960, my protectors are gone. (Not Dad, but he’s working a lot.) Every life holds such changes, but in a large family they come earlier. “People come and go so quickly here.”

I write to Kako, my maternal surrogate. I could always make Pogo laugh—our senses of humor were similar: quirky, verbal, but he wasn’t writing letters. Mom once described me as a feminine version of him, but I know she likes him better. Tender Tom of baby rabbit fame is at St John’s University now. Though an hour’s drive, it feels thousands of miles away. As does my self-esteem.

I chalk notes to Dad, in Burma Shave ways reminding him to take his vitamins. In his square letters he chalks a rhyme back; all of our worded affection erased with a pass of a wet paper towel in my mother’s red hand.

Skip gets my jokes, he’s smart, but he doesn’t like me. He always tries to prove how smart he is, so I have to prove how smart I am, so he can prove I’m not. I can’t just relax. We take turns watching the Littles or setting the table, but at night when we are screaming at each other over who will wash and who will wipe the red, red counters and the gray linoleum surrounding all around us, I see ourselves in the black night windows like the sun will never shine again and I hate it. I hate to be a prisoner of the dishes on a never-ending night.

I have to toughen up, find some extra love. Where?

One whole week when I am eight and Ro is two, each night in the streetlit dark of our shared room, I pull on cap and bandit-kerchief and roar into her little slatted crib, “I’m a burglar! I’m going to get you!” Then I step back, whip off my disguise, step forward as myself, her champion.

“I’ll save you!” I bend back, make the sounds of struggle, toss the cap, swoop her up and tell her she is safe because of me.

This is not a game. I do it to scare her and to save her, so she’ll look up to me.

I still feel the rawness of my burglar throat.

•••

“I’ll protect you from any bad thing,” I said, so she’d love me. But I was the bad thing. What makes me be so mean? Worse than Skip. Why even feel bad feelings?

Like I love animals so much so why sometimes when I pick a kitten up do I want to squeeze and squeeze it is so cute which would hurt it which I would never do so why want to? This feeling comes, but lucky not my hands but makes me scared to pick up kittens.

Then there are bad feelings people make you feel on purpose, which why? To look at me you maybe see a reason to call me names but why? I never hurt them. I say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” but go to Confession. You lied.

I get scared to be so mean to my little sister or mad at Mom who loves me because what if Russia got mad at us who hates us?

This scary feeling is like hearing “Tornado coming.” Go down the basement. Take candles, radio, deck of cards.

The tornado blows up houses stores schools churches. Many die.

So with Russia I think how I get tornado mad. What if they blew us up? Worse than the worst Twilight Zone. Worse than my nightmare parade.

At school we have drills to our gym with gray rooms of food and water. But what if we’re home? In our basement we have only three tomato jars and one peaches that were there fifty years.

If they blew us up everything would be gray and gone and terrible.

It’s hard work not to think of this. If it did I would try to be brave and help the way of a good Girl Scout. The only person to get me through this would be God. My giant wish is He would not let this happen. But He let me be mean to my sister and mad at my mother so maybe not. It’s hard to know what’s in His will. But I would keep trying because who else?

They might not kill us, though, but take over. Skip says no matter what I say, they’d say, “You lie!”

“Then I’d say I hate Brussels Sprouts and they wouldn’t give me any.”

But they despise priests and nuns, which spells trouble for Kako. Me, too if I become one.

•••

So it’s a joyful night when the Catholic takes the White House. Now we’re talking. How great, living in a country that never lost a war, in Minnesota, which was North in the Civil War so it never lost, and now a Catholic president. Winners all the way.

No doubt I bake a celebratory batch of cookies. I learned to bake around this time, with help from Mom, Betty Crocker, Girl Scouts, my E-Z Bake oven, and a child’s cookbook from the Bookmobile—oh those carnival cookies, loaded with coconut, butter, and powdered sugar.

I want to bake so urgently that I beg Mom to ask neighbors for cups of sugar when we run out. She won’t, though. I’ve written elsewhere of the rewards of baking: not just fingerfuls of dough, and the pick of the just-baked cookie litter, but the love and attention of the family. It surpassed even poetry for garnering praise—feeding my need into their need, which fed back into mine.

For Mom is making the world a better place: raising money for children with defective hearts, flying them in from India and Africa and South America.

•••

You scoured the globe, Mom, for children with punctured valves and malformed chambers, who engaged you in a way our bickering, our jockeying, our accidents, our falling grades, our pain, our health did not. The irony was lost on you: healing the hurt hearts of strangers’ children by hurting the hearts of your own.

All along, you said you were an awful mother, and, “This house is a mess, I never get caught up.” We learned your heaving purple sighs were cues for us to say, “No, no you are a wonder mother! The messy house is all our fault, hot dog hash, canned spinach are delicious. You look pretty smell the Chanel where you going?”

When you are gone, looking for your soft cheeks, deep brown eyes, high hair in your vanity mirror, drawing my finger through the fine snow left by your powderpuff, whispering into your lipstick, hugging your puffy chiffons. You are Donna Reed. Come back, I’ll be good.

Holding postcards to a landscape blocks the view, yet we do it all the time.

Who are you and who am I? What is America, what is TV?