I DEVELOPED A PHOBIA about the closed door to our parents’ bedroom. Late at night, I could hear it, pulsing in its frame like a heart. Whenever he let me, I huddled with Lowell in his room, as far away from that door as I could get and still be home.
Sometimes Lowell felt sorry for me. Sometimes it seemed that he, too, was frightened. We each carried the weight of Fern’s disappearance and our mother’s collapse, and occasionally, for short periods, we carried it together. Lowell would read me a book or let me jabber away while he played complicated games of solitaire that required two or three decks of cards and were nearly impossible to win. If just anyone could win a game, then Lowell couldn’t be bothered.
Sometimes, if he wasn’t completely awake, he’d let me climb into his bed after dark to get away from our father’s shouting, though other times he’d remember to be mad, send me silently sobbing back upstairs. Bed-hopping was an established custom in the house—Fern and I had rarely ended the night in the bed where we’d started. Our parents felt that it was natural and mammalian not to want to sleep alone, and though they would have preferred we stay in our own beds, because we kicked and thrashed, they’d never insisted on it.
While Lowell slept, I’d calm myself by fiddling with his hair. I liked to catch a bit between two scissored fingers and run my thumb over the scratchy ends. Lowell had Luke Skywalker’s haircut, but the color was pure Han Solo. Of course, I hadn’t seen the movie back then. Too young for it and besides Fern couldn’t have gone. But we had the trading cards. I knew about the hair.
And Lowell, who’d seen it several times, had acted it out for us. I liked Luke best. I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you. But Fern, who was more sophisticated in her tastes, preferred Han. Laugh it up, fuzzball.
Unfairness bothers children greatly. When I did finally get to see Star Wars, the whole movie was ruined for me by the fact that Luke and Han got a medal at the end and Chewbacca didn’t. Lowell had changed that part in his retelling, so it came as quite a shock.
• • •
LOWELL’S ROOM SMELLED of damp cedar from the cage where three rats, washouts from our father’s lab, would chirp and creak in their spinning wheel all night long. In retrospect, there was something incomprehensibly strange about the way any of the laboratory rats could transform from data point to pet, with names and privileges and vet appointments, in a single afternoon. What a Cinderella story! But I didn’t notice that until later. Back then, Herman Muenster, Charlie Cheddar, and little hooded Templeton represented nothing to me but were only themselves.
Lowell smelled too, not bad, but sharp to my senses, because his smell had changed. At the time, I thought the difference was that he was so mad; I thought that it was anger I was smelling, but of course he was also growing up, losing the sweetness of childhood, beginning to sour. He sweated in his sleep.
Most mornings, he left before anyone else was awake. We didn’t know this right off, but he was having breakfast with the Byards. The Byards were a childless couple, devout Christians, who now lived across the street from us. Mr. Byard’s eyesight was bad and Lowell read the sports page aloud to him while Mrs. Byard fried up bacon and eggs. According to Mrs. Byard, Lowell was sweet as a peekin pie and always welcome.
She’d known a bit about the situation at our house. Most of Bloomington did, though no one really understood it. “I’m praying for you all,” she told me, appearing at our door one morning, holding a tin of chocolate chip cookies and backlit like an angel by a soft autumn sun. “You just remember you were the one made in God’s image. You hold tight to that and it’ll carry you through the storm.”
• • •
MY LORD, ANYONE would think Fern had died, Grandma Donna said. Which is maybe what you, too, are thinking, that at five, of course, I wouldn’t have figured that out without being told, but anyone older would have.
I can only assume that our parents explained to me about Fern’s disappearance, possibly many times, and I’ve repressed it. It simply isn’t plausible to think they hardly said a word. But this I remember clearly—waking up each morning and going to sleep each night in a state of inchoate dread. The fact that I didn’t know what I was dreading made it no less dreadful. Arguably, more so.
Anyway, Fern was not dead. Still isn’t.
Lowell started seeing a counselor and this became a frequent topic in our father’s nightly monologues. Lowell’s counselor would suggest something—a family powwow, a session with the parents alone, some exercises in visualization or hypnosis—and our father would explode. Psychoanalysis was completely bogus, he would say, good only for literary theory. Maybe it was useful, when plotting books, to imagine that someone’s life could be shaped by a single early trauma, maybe even one inaccessible in memory. But where were the blind studies, the control groups? Where was the reproducible data?
According to our father, the nomenclature of psychoanalysis had taken on a scientific patina only when it was translated into English Latinates. In the original German, it was refreshingly modest. (You must picture him shouting this. In the house I grew up in, it was perfectly ordinary for a tantrum to include words like Latinates, nomenclature, and patina.)
Yet the counselor had been our father’s idea. Like so many other parents of troubled children, he’d felt the need to do something, and like so many other parents of troubled children, a counselor was the only something he could think of to do.
For me, he engaged a babysitter, Melissa, a college student with owlish glasses and blue streaks zigzagging, like lightning, through her hair. The first week, I went to bed the minute she arrived and got up again only when she left. I was, let’s agree, a babysitter’s dream.
It was a learned behavior. Once, when I was four, as a stratagem for shutting me up, a babysitter named Rachel had spooned several kernels of popcorn onto my tongue and told me they would pop if I only kept my mouth closed long enough. This seemed like an entirely desirable goal and I lasted as long as I could and took the failure hard until Lowell told me it never would have happened. That put me off babysitters entirely.
As I got used to Melissa, I decided I liked her. This was a bit of luck. I’d concocted a plan that involved fixing my family with the only valuable thing I had to offer—my talking—and I couldn’t do it alone. I tried to explain to Melissa the games I was supposed to be playing for my father, the tests I was supposed to be taking, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t get it.
We settled on a compromise. Every time she came, she would teach me a new word from the dictionary. The only rule was that it had to be a word so lonely, so dusty with neglect that she, too, hadn’t known it beforehand. I didn’t care what the words meant; that saved a lot of time and bother. In return, I had to not talk to her for an hour. She would set the oven timer to make sure, which generally resulted in me asking her every few minutes when the hour would be up. The things I had to say would collect in my chest until they were so crowded together I was ready to burst.
“How was your day, Rosie?” Dad would ask when he came home from work and I’d tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. “That’s good to hear,” he’d say.
None of this was meant to be informative. Obviously, it didn’t even need to cohere. Catachresis? Bonus points.
I was merely trying to show him that I, at least, was continuing with our work. Whenever he was so disposed, he would find me, sleeves rolled up and hard at it.
• • •
ONE AFTERNOON, Grandma Donna came and forced our mother into an outing—coffee and a shopping trip. Summer had gone and autumn was headed toward its sell-by date. Melissa was supposed to be watching me but was watching television instead.
Melissa was now an established part of the household and watched TV every afternoon, although daytime TV had never been allowed before, children being expected to make their fun up from scratch.
Melissa had gotten hooked on a soap. It wasn’t the same soap as my grandparents’—there was no Karen, no Larry. Melissa’s soap was all about Ben and Amanda, Lucille and Alan. And if my grandparents’ soap had been regrettably sexed up, this one was an orgy. Melissa let me watch it with her because I wouldn’t understand a thing; because I didn’t understand a thing, I rarely wished to watch. We disagreed as to how quiet I should be while the show was on.
Melissa was beginning to slip the tether. She’d just taught me a word and then made me promise not to ever say it to our parents. The word was ithyphallic. Years later, if ithyphallic had come up on the SATs, I’d have been all over it, but no such luck. It’s not really a very useful word.
And just ask Lowell if I’m the sort of person who keeps her promises. The minute I saw our father, I told him that my day had been ithyphallic, instead of the official day’s word, which was psychomanteum, but whether that figured in the impending decision to let Melissa go, I cannot say.
Anyway, before I said ithyphallic to our father, I said it to Lowell. Lowell was supposed to be at school, but had come home early, sneaking in through the back door, motioning at me to follow him outside, which I did, though not as quietly as he’d wanted. Lowell was uninterested in my new words, waved them past with an impatient flick of his hand.
One of the neighbors was out front, the boy from the white house on the corner, the big boy from the high school. Russell Tupman, leaning against Mom’s blue Datsun, lighting a weary cigarette and sucking it in. I’d never thought to see Russell Tupman in my own driveway. I was charmed. I was flattered. I fell instantly in love.
Lowell held up his hand and shook it. The car keys rang in his fist. “You sure about her?” Russell asked, indicating me with his eyes. “I hear she’s a talker.”
“We need her,” Lowell said. So I was told to get in the back and Lowell fastened my seat belt, which he was pretty conscientious about doing even when Russell wasn’t the one driving. I learned later that Russell didn’t technically have his license yet. He’d taken driver’s ed and everything; he knew how to drive. I don’t remember a moment’s anxiety about his driving, no matter how much fuss it caused after.
Lowell said that we were going on a secret adventure, a spy caper, and I was allowed to bring Mary, because Mary knew how to keep her mouth shut and was an example to us all. I was pretty happy about the whole thing, pretty honored to be going off with the big boys. Looking back, I can see that Lowell was only eleven years old, while Russell was sixteen, and that this must have been an enormous gap, but at the time I thought of them as equally glamorous.
I was also, in those days, desperate to get out of the house. I’d had a dream in which I heard someone knocking on our parents’ door from the inside. It started with a jaunty rhythm, like the sound of tap shoes, only each tap was louder than the last until they were so loud I thought my eardrums would burst. I woke up terrified. The sheets beneath me were soaked and I had to get Lowell to change my pajamas, strip the bed.
Russell switched from our mother’s radio station to WIUS, the student one, and some song I didn’t know came on, but not knowing the song didn’t stop me singing along in the backseat until Russell finally told me I was hell on his nerves.
Hell. I repeated that several times, but under my breath so Russell wouldn’t have to deal with it. I liked the way it made my tongue curl.
I couldn’t see out the front window, only the back of Russell’s head bopping in time against the headrest. I tried to think of how to make him love me. Something inside me knew that big words weren’t the way to Russell’s heart, but I couldn’t think what else I could offer.
More songs on the radio and an ad for an original radio mystery play to be aired on Halloween. Then a caller who wanted to talk about a professor who was making his entire class read Dracula, even the Christians who thought it imperiled their souls. (Let’s just pause here for a moment to imagine how a person who felt imposed on by vampires back in 1979 feels today. And then, right back to my story.)
More callers. Most people liked Dracula though some didn’t, but nobody liked professors who thought they could tell you what to read.
The car began to bounce and I heard gravel under the tires. We came to a stop. I recognized the bright crown of the tulip tree by our old farmhouse drive, its golden leaves floating in a white-blue sky. Lowell got out to open the gate, got back in.
I hadn’t known this was where we were coming. My good mood turned anxious. Though no one had said so, as no one was saying much of anything, I’d assumed Fern had been left behind in the old farmhouse to live with the graduate students. I’d pictured her life going on much as before, maybe even with less disruption than I’d had—missing Mom, for sure (and weren’t we all?), but with Dad still stopping by to oversee the drills, the games with colored poker chips and raisins. When, in a couple of months, she’d turn six, I’d assumed like every other year she’d have a birthday cake with the icing roses she and I so loved. (I don’t know for a fact that she didn’t.)
So my thinking was that it was sad that she never got to see our mother, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be her, but it wasn’t that sad. The graduate students were nice and they never shouted, because they weren’t allowed to and they loved Fern. They loved Fern more than they loved me. Sometimes I had to wrap myself around their legs and refuse to let loose, just to get their attention.
Now we were bumping up the driveway. Fern was always quick to hear a car approach; she’d already be at the window. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her, but I knew for certain that she wouldn’t want to see me. “Mary doesn’t want to see Fern,” I told Lowell.
Lowell twisted around, pinned me with a narrow-eyed look. “Oh my God! You didn’t think Fern was still here, did you? Fuck, Rosie.”
I’d never heard Lowell say fuck before; in retrospect, I’m sure he was trying to impress Russell. Fuck was another word that felt good in my mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Quack, quack, quack. “Don’t be such a baby,” Lowell said. “There’s nobody here at all. The house is empty.”
“I’m not a baby.” This was reflexive; I was too relieved to be insulted. No angry reunion, then. The familiar treetops were overhead like golden clouds; beneath us, the familiar crunching of the gravel under the tires. I remembered how I used to find pieces of quartz in the driveway here, clear and crystalline. Like four-leaf clovers, this happened just often enough to keep me looking. There was no gravel at the new house and, so, no point.
The car stopped. We got out and walked around the side to the kitchen door, but it was locked, all the doors were locked, Lowell told Russell, and the windows, even the upstairs windows, had been, in our last year there, fitted with bars, the route from the apple tree to the bedrooms cut off before I’d ever mastered it.
The only remaining hope was the dog door into the kitchen. I don’t remember ever having a dog, but apparently, we did once, a large terrier—Tamara Press was her name—and apparently, Fern and I had loved her to distraction and slept on top of her until she died of cancer just before I turned two. Unlike most dog doors, the latches for this one were on the outside.
Lowell undid them. I was told to go through.
I didn’t want to. I was frightened. I felt that the house must be hurt not to be my house anymore, that it must feel abandoned. “It’s just an empty house,” Lowell told me encouragingly. “And Mary will go with you,” as if even I could think Mary would be good in a fight.
Mary was useless. I wanted Fern. When would Fern get to come home?
“Hey,” said Russell. Talking to me! “We’re counting on you, runt.”
So I did it for love.
• • •
I SCRAPED THROUGH the dog door into the kitchen, stood up inside a fall of sunlight, dust motes caroming and shining about me like glitter. I had never seen the kitchen empty. The scuffed linoleum was brighter and smoother where the breakfast table ought to have been. Fern and I had once hidden under that table so that no one would see us drawing on the floor with felt-tip markers. The ghosts of our artwork were still visible if you knew to look for them.
The empty room closed about me like a hum, squeezed me tightly until it was hard to breathe. I felt the whole kitchen thick with rage, only I couldn’t tell if it was the house or Fern who was so angry. I opened the door hastily for Lowell and Russell, and as soon as they entered, the house let me go. It was no longer angry. Instead it was terribly sad.
The boys went ahead, talking quietly so I couldn’t hear, which made me suspicious and I followed. There were so many things I missed here. I missed the wide staircase. We used to sled down on beanbag chairs. I missed the cellar. In the winter, we’d always had baskets of apples and carrots you could eat without asking, as many as you wanted, though you had to go down into the dark to get them. I wasn’t going down into the dark now unless the boys did, and if they did, then I wasn’t staying behind.
I missed how big and busy it had always been. I missed having a yard I couldn’t see to the end of. I missed the barn, the horse stalls filled with broken chairs and bicycles, magazines, bassinets, our stroller and car seats. I missed the creek and the fire pit, where we roasted potatoes or popped corn in the summer. I missed the jars of tadpoles we kept on the porch for scientific observation, the constellations painted onto the ceilings, the map of the world on the library floor, where we could go with our lunches and eat in Australia or Ecuador or Finland. My palms cover continents curved in red letters down the far western edge of the map. My palm didn’t even cover Indiana, but I could find the state on the map by shape. Soon I’d hoped to be able to read the words. Before we moved, my mother had been teaching me out of my father’s math books. The product of two numbers is a number.
“What a freak show,” Russell said, which took the shine right off for me. What a dump. My room in our new house was bigger than my room here.
“Is the lawn still electrified?” Russell asked. The front yard was choked with dandelions, buttercups, and clover, but you could see how it was meant to be a lawn.
“What are you talking about?” said Lowell.
“I heard if you stepped on the grass, you got an electric shock. I heard it was all wired up to keep people out.”
“No,” said Lowell. “It’s just regular grass.”
• • •
EVENTUALLY MELISSA’S SOAP ended and she noticed I wasn’t around. She looked all through the neighborhood until the Byards made her call our father, who’d just found out that Lowell was missing from school. He’d had to cancel his class, a point that was repeated to us many times over the next few days—that it was not just him we’d inconvenienced but a whole class of students, as if his not showing up hadn’t been the best part of their week. Arriving home, he saw that the car was gone.
So when, on our return, he lifted me out of the backseat, he didn’t ask how my day had been. It didn’t stop me telling him.