Ever since kindergarten I had spent my after-school hours waiting at the pharmacy until Mom’s bus delivered her from work. I loved the pharmacy with its marble ice cream counter and my basement cottage and even the two brothers while they squabbled and disagreed and corrected each other as they wildly slashed up the aisles and past the counters like two pole-crossed magnets stubbornly resisting each other in their halfhearted struggle to remain distinct. The pharmacy marked the center of town, and when people came in to shop and talk I greeted them and helped guide them to products on the shelves. To keep me occupied the Twins would give me little jobs like writing prices on bottles of aspirin with a black marker and sorting out the toothbrush choices by bristle strength and handing out sample-size bottles of hand lotion and dandruff shampoo. There were many times when I said to Ab and Dolph, “I want to be a pharmacist like you.” But this only seemed to make them nervous.“You do as your mother says,” Ab would remind me.
“She’ll always know what’s best,” Dolph would add.
She did. Mom and Sister Nancy planned for me to enter a life of religious service. And after what I had seen in the basement, I was happy with their plan. A calling into the church seemed better to me than a calling from Mrs. Rumbaugh.
Seeing the Twins’ mother like that was pretty shocking. I couldn’t entirely put the discovery of her out of my mind. I tried to think of other things. Wholesome thoughts. But there were compelling feelings deep down in my gut that were stronger than my effort to resist. I simply could not stop dwelling on the image of that preserved mother. I thought something was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I put her out of my mind? Why was I attracted to what was perverse? And why was I compelled to know more?
My mother knew, but she was waiting to tell me until—as she said—“you are mature enough to control your future.”
So on the Monday morning after Easter, while we were getting dressed, she said, “I’ve come up with a different after-school arrangement. From now on you’ll return to the hotel and Mrs. Kelly will watch over you.”
I was happy to do what she said. When it came to fulfilling her orders, obedience and contentment always felt the same to me.
Just then Mrs. Kelly knocked on our door. When I opened it, she gave me a dog-friendly pat on my head hard enough to buckle my knees.
“Good morning, Ivy,” Mrs. Kelly said brightly. “Your Mom
and I spoke last night after you conked out and we decided that I’m the lucky one who gets to watch over you.”
I nodded. “Mom was just telling me,” I said.
“Now, don’t be afraid to ask me to help with anything if you need me,” she added. “Remember, you are an honorary Kelly. Okay?” She reached out and again patted me on the head until I stepped back. “And you’re probably a lot easier to care for than most of these luckless shamrocks.” She laughed at her own remark and afterward had to lean forward and adjust her chest from having jostled it out of place.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek.
She kissed me back, then marched down the hall with some pressing chore in mind. She was a heavy walker, and after she was out of sight I could still feel her solid footfalls humming through the floorboards. There was something happy in that vibration, like a song that makes you feel good when you sing it.
Just then my mother caught me from behind and gave me a big hug. I knew she was pleased with me, and there was nothing I loved more than to make her love me even more. At times like this, when she hugged me so tightly, I thought I’d rather be recessed inside her than be my own person, as if being her heart and pumping blood through her veins all day and night from the red niche of her chest would be more satisfying than looking into the mirror and seeing my own living face.
“Now, don’t you think we are off to a good start?” Mom asked, releasing me and right away fussing with my hair.
“Oh, yes,” I said, holding still. “I like Mrs. Kelly.”
“And I trust her,” Mom added, adjusting a barrette. “I’m glad we’ve worked this out so smoothly.”
It was easy for her to feel confident that everything would be fine leaving me at the hotel. First, I wasn’t the kind of girl who would run off without telling someone where I was going. And Mount Pleasant was the kind of small town where I knew most people by sight and they knew me.
After school that day I walked back to the hotel and checked in with Mrs. Kelly, who was downstairs at the front desk talking on the phone.
“I’m home, Mrs. Kelly,” I announced, and waved to her.
“Hi, sugar,” she whispered, covering the mouthpiece for a moment. “Go on up to your room.”
The elevator was still broken, and I lugged my backpack up the stairs as her voice followed, gleefully ordering another ten pounds of rose petal potpourri, as if she were ordering a bucket of rubies. After I unlocked the door and entered our drowsy rooms the first thing I did was glance up at the clock. Mom would be home in two and a half hours. I knew I had to stay busy otherwise the clock would move slowly. I cleaned up our little corner kitchenette. I washed the breakfast dishes and hand-mopped the dirty tan linoleum floor. I made the double bed we shared. I tidied up the bathroom and then sat down to do my math homework. After that I made a birthday card for a schoolmate. We were doing a class play with Egyptian costumes, so next I practiced walking back and forth across the
room as if I were flat with one crooked arm held up in front of me like a bent snake and the other hooked down behind me like a crimped tail.
When I tired of that, I opened my mother’s closet and put on her clothes—not her good ones but the too-tight ones we shared because they were a little too young-looking on her and a little too old-looking on me. They made us more like sisters.
And then I waited. I sat on the ottoman and looked out our third-floor window and down at the pharmacy and surrounding streets. I had spent many hours of my life looking out that window, and nothing much ever changed. The pharmacy was a three-story brick-and-red-stone building. The Twins had designed it as if it was a gothic temple to medicine, and they were very proud of their work. Along the roof were lined a half-dozen spires with carved ferns running up their sides, and on top of each spire was a white stone apothecary jar. Just below the edge of the roof were four round oculus windows, which looked like pirate cannon ports aiming directly at the Kelly Hotel. At times it seemed they were about to let loose a broadside and blow us to smithereens. At other times the beams of sunlight reflected off those windows and shined into our rooms like spotlights. We stood within them and dramatically delivered fake lines as if we were theater stars onstage.
The middle floor of the building had two deep and dark interior porches with heavy parapets of rubbed red stone, from which the Twins hung flags on national holidays or black swag when anyone from the church died. The burglar who
had broken into the drug room had jumped out over the top of the parapet after the Twins heard him and blocked his exit on the ground floor. He broke his leg upon impact and was captured up the street huddled in the orange doorway of the boarded-up Rexall.
Though the Twins had been robbed, they tracked down the burglar, set his leg, and gave him enough medication to satisfy his drug dependency until an ambulance arrived and he could be taken to a hospital. They never pressed charges, explaining to my mother that the broken leg was “God’s punishment enough.” My mother disagreed. She worked in the criminal court and knew a broken leg was no deterrent to a drug addiction.
But the united force of the Twins’ minds was immovable. They would not charge him.
“Suit yourself,” my mother said curtly. “You can be both judge and jury, but I guarantee you he’ll be back. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see him rehabilitated, but once people are inflicted with a craving it never goes away. You might control it, but you will never fully stop it.”
Once she put it that way, I understood the burglar’s plight. I was not addicted to drugs, but I was addicted to my mother and there was no cure and even if there was I wouldn’t want it anyway. Mine was an affliction I did not resent. After all, who could resent love?
Below the pharmacy balcony along Main Street were two tall picture windows. Between the windows stood a thin column
that was finished with a keystone capital from which supporting ribs, like black eyebrows, arched across the full sheets of thick glass.
The windows allowed shoppers to look directly into the store, and allowed Ab and Dolph to look directly back like two nearsighted hoot owls with their fixed pupils and rotating necks. They never blocked the view with hanging advertisements or bright product displays. They never had a sale. Whenever they had products that they no longer wanted, or had expired, they gave them to the church. “That’s what a tithe is,” Ab explained to me when he was thinning the inventory. “Ten percent of what we make goes to the ten percent that can’t.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“It means that ten percent of the population is either disabled or feebleminded,” he said matter-of-factly. “Mother Nature isn’t perfect, so it’s man’s duty to help those who can’t help themselves.”
When he said that I wondered why it was that some people were less than perfect. It seemed that nature also had secrets locked behind closed doors. What was nature hiding? It was puzzling that we were not all one and the same when at school I was constantly taught that in the eyes of church and state we were all created equal.
“Don’t fret,” he said, reading the confused look on my face. “Science will figure it out. Someday there’ll be procedures to make up for nature’s faults. You’ll receive a gene implant and
not be mentally diminished or diseased, but until then it’s up to us to shoulder the burden.”
Won’t that be wonderful? I thought. Someday science would make us all truly equal so nature’s faults could no longer leave some people with less, because I wanted Mother Nature to be as perfect as my own mother.
So that first day under Mrs. Kelly’s care I waited patiently at the window and stared over at the pharmacy building. Each time a bus arrived I perked up like a puppy waiting for its owner, then slumped back down when it wasn’t Mom’s. I had memorized what she wore to work, and when the five-thirty pulled in, I saw just a snatch of her favorite plaid jacket through the window and my heart began to pound. Then I saw her black patent-leather heel emerge from the bus and step toward the curb, and by that time I was waving wildly. She knew to look up at the window and smile and wave back. She stepped forward to allow the others off behind her, and as she walked toward me she blew me kiss after kiss until the air was filled with them like soap bubbles whooshing this way and that up and up to the window until they popped against my lips and cheeks and eyes and my face was like the bright center of a sunflower surrounded by the gentle petals of her kisses.
Once she disappeared from sight, I hopped up and dashed down the stairs to greet her in the lobby. She knelt as I ran into her arms.
“How’s my brave girl?” she asked, giving me a good look.
“Brave,” I replied, squinting with savage bravery. I didn’t want her to worry, and so I lied as best I could.
On the following day my morning started out well. Early recess went smoothly. From when I was in kindergarten I played a game by myself where I’d imagine what my mother would be doing, and I would do it, too, as if there were invisible but strong wires attached to our joints, like long-distance puppet strings. I would stand out at recess behind the soot-black Polish church with my eyes closed and arms held out and hands poised as if typing, just as she did, and I would cock my head to one side and bite down on my lower lip, as she did, and with my fingers would tap-tap-tap away at the air while hers were furiously recording at the steno machine in the Greensburg courtroom. Sometimes I’d play like I was taking a break. I’d walk the coal ash playground as if following a hallway, stand in line at the snack bar and wait my turn, buy a Coke, go a few more steps, and open a small door that led up a cramped flight of stairs to the top of the courthouse dome, where I would sip my Coke and look up at the sky and watch for unusual weather patterns like counterclockwise circulations and wind-shear formations and I’d make little notes on a pad about “seasonal affective disorder” and weather-influenced crime rates. Afterward I’d reapply my lipstick and return down the cramped stairs and reenter the judge’s office to report on my atmospheric theories. “Humidity is rising,” I would announce gravely. “Crime will increase.”
These are things my mother told me she did during the day, and so I did them, too. This all seemed so innocent at first—just a young girl growing up to become exactly like her mother. What could be more natural?
Then at lunch recess something happened. At first I was running wildly with a pack of girls across the playground and screaming at the top of my lungs, and this distracted me from all thoughts of my mother. But that was a temporary relief. Suddenly the color of a spring leaf on an elm tree reminded me of the leaf applique on the sweater set she was wearing that day, and instantly the dread of her looming death sent me into a spiral of fear. I panicked. I didn’t know what was happening. My heart raced.
The fear was very potent; still I tried to fight back. I imagined kissing my mother’s hands and neck like a pet. I pictured myself brushing her hair and painting her nails, bringing her a cup of tea, and preparing her bath. But these made-up happy scenes did not save me from my fear. I needed the real her. I fled the playground while ignoring the teacher’s calls to come back.
I ran the five blocks to the hotel. The lobby was empty, and I stamped up the stairs and pounded on our door.
“Mom! Mom!” I shouted. “Please let me in. Please!” I just knew Mom had come home sick or hurt and needed me, and I was blind to the truth that it was I who needed her.
I had left my door key taped inside my lunch box at school. I raced down to the lobby and took the passkey from behind
the counter and ran back up. I opened the door and scrambled through the rooms calling out for her. Of course she was at work.
The school called Mrs. Kelly, who came into the room and found me curled up under the covers on Mom’s side of the bed, my head slipped into the exact pillow dimple where hers had rested. The darkness and the faint scent of Mom’s skin on the sheets had calmed me. Mrs. Kelly sat on the edge of the bed and patted my hand.
“There, there,” she cooed. “You’re fine. Your mother’s fine.”
She tried to soothe my fears, but I didn’t listen to her words, yet her voice was a fountain of comforting sounds.
When Mom returned home I hopped up and was suddenly purring like a cat overflowing with contentment. By then she had had a talk with Sister Nancy and, after a few words with Mrs. Kelly, wanted to talk with me. I told her my fears about her dying. She assured me how safe she was in court, and how young and healthy she was. It meant nothing. I knew the moment she was out of sight she was doomed and it would always be up to me to keep her safe, and to keep her by my side.
“Why do you think you feel this way?” she asked, petting my hair.
“You already told me,” I said, looking up into her face. “I’ve got a love curse.”
“Honey,” she said tenderly, “I was wrong. It is not a curse to love me.”
“I know,” I said. “Loving you is what I live for. It is the fear of losing you that is the curse.”
“You mustn’t worry,” she said, kissing me. “You will never lose me.”
That simple line, you will never lose me, somehow changed my whole mood, and I began to pull out of the state I was in. I will never lose her, I thought, because it is not up to her to leave me but up to me to keep her—and I planned to always keep her by my side.
That night we sat in front of the TV, both of us knitting, and the sound of the needles clicking as the knots came together was an enormous comfort. “Maybe you can just knit after school and make an afghan for the couch?”
“It’s no fun to do it alone,” I said, and made a long face.
“Then maybe you need a hobby,” she suggested. “Some fresh new activity to keep you busy.”
That appealed to me. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll give it a chance.”
The next day after school I checked in with Mrs. Kelly, who now looked at me more carefully, as if I had been something beautiful, like a fancy vase, that had been dropped. She scanned me up and down and around, as if searching for the cracks where I had been glued back together.
“I’m going to go down to the library,” I said to her. “I need to find a book on hobbies.”
“An excellent idea,” she replied a bit too brightly. “When I was a girl I cut out magazine pictures of fancy hats and shoes and pasted them in a scrapbook. It kept me occupied for hours.”
“I think I need to do something with my hands,” I said, holding them in front of me as if they were two tiny, embryonic
people. “They need some training,” I explained while wiggling the fingers.
“Have fun,” she said, then went back to sewing green K’s onto new bath towels.
The library was on Main Street, and I walked there in minutes. Once inside I asked the librarian, Mr. Fenton, for books on hobbies. “Not just kid hobbies,” I explained. “Or girl hobbies, but all kinds of hobbies.”
He stood and with long, deliberate strides lunged forward as if he had a limit on the number of steps he was allotted each day. He pointed out the shelf of hobby books, then just as deftly returned to his desk.
It didn’t take long to know what I was there for. Once I saw the book on taxidermy, it seemed so obvious. I pulled it from the shelf and flipped through the pages—Taxidermy for Fun and Profit. The sensation was riveting. I can only say that it must have been something like when Joan of Arc spoke to the archangel Michael in her garden. I had a vision of my mother not in heaven but here on earth. She was sitting in a chair holding a book in her hands reading out loud. She was dead, but her lips were moving and her recorded voice was coming from a little speaker embedded in her chest. Some people might call this the hallucination of an unfit mind. But it wasn’t that to me. It was a vision as clear and purposeful and embracing as any romantically maternal moment I’ve ever felt. Of course, I thought, I will need to record her voice, too.
I marched to the front desk and immediately checked out the book.
When I left the library, I went down to the hobby shop and bought some supplies. With my Easter money I bought plaster of paris, and thick wire, and wooden dowels. I couldn’t afford the special tools illustrated in the taxidermy guidebook, but Mom had some hand tools at home she kept in an old cigar box. I could use them, I figured. The book listed special chemicals, too, but the hobby shop didn’t carry them. I’ll figure that out later, I thought.
I returned to the hotel and hid everything I had bought, plus the book, in the dresser drawer of one of the empty hotel rooms. Then I dashed upstairs, and just before the five-thirty bus stopped in front of the pharmacy I was sitting at the window. When she stepped off and looked toward me I was waving wildly, my heart full of love and joy. Then I ran downstairs to greet her at the door.
“How’d it go today?” she asked, her voice as upbeat as birdsong.
“Much better,” I said, nodding happily. “I think a hobby is the answer.”
“Find anything you might like?”
“I’m working on it,” I replied coyly, smiling secretly to myself. I wanted to surprise her.
That night I was calm, and the next day at school I was, too. It was as if I had stopped fighting something. I wasn’t sure if I had defeated an enemy within me or had been captured without resistance. But I was at peace.
The following day I put my new hobby to work. I gathered some stuffed animals and a large rag doll and tools from upstairs
and went down to the hotel room and locked the door. I carried everything into the bathroom and set out all my equipment as if I were in an operating room. I had the tools and hobby supplies on the counter. In the sink I had the plaster of paris. I dropped my stuffed animals into the dry bathtub. I opened my taxidermy book and read a few pages, then got busy. I took the rag doll and cut open the length of her belly. I pulled out the old shredded cloth stuffing and handful by handful threw it into the toilet. I didn’t want to clog it up, so I flushed often. When I had completely removed the stuffing, I took the wire and began to build an armature inside the cloth skin as if I were filling her full of bones. I ran short of wire, but luckily there were wire coat hangers in the closet and they twisted up just fine. Once I had the body stretched out on the armature, I mixed the plaster of paris and with a spoon began to work it down into her limbs as the book had advised. From the moisture leaking through the cloth the skin became blotchy, but I figured I could blow-dry it later, then paint it.
When I had stuffed it full, I began to sew the belly back up. While I worked the stitches as finely as I could, I drifted into thinking more about preserving Mother. She would get bored in the same outfits, so I’d collect an entire wardrobe and dress and undress her for all specific occasions, from cocktail gowns to church clothes to business suits. I’d get her wigs too, just like my dolls had. It would also be helpful for her to have bendable joints so she could sit down with me for dinner. And if I could disconnect her limbs and fold her up into a suitcase,
I could take her on trips. Around the house I could have her on wheels with a little electric motor and steer her from room to room like those remote-control cars. I was entirely cheerful with these thoughts while I completed the sewing.
Before the plaster set too firmly, I twisted the legs so that the doll could sit on the counter, and I put her arms on her hips and cocked her head to one side. She looked a little sassy. I glanced out at the bedside clock. It was almost time for my mother to come home, so I turned off the bathroom light, pulled the door closed, and ran upstairs.
When Mom got off the bus I was waiting at the window, and as before I ran down to greet her. She didn’t ask how my day had been because she could tell I was so carefree. We walked to the grocery store. “We’ll have opposite day,” she announced. “Eggs and bacon for dinner.”
I always loved opposite day. “Can we sleep upside down in bed, too?” I asked. We had done that before. And we walked backward through the rooms and pronounced our names backward and said just the opposite of what we meant.
“Not tonight,” she said, slumping a bit. “It’s all I can do to think forward, but we’ll do it soon.”
That was fine with me. I was in such a good mood nothing could upset me. We walked home, and she cooked at the stove and I made cinnamon toast and she talked about her day and the medical malpractice suit she was recording. A woman was diagnosed with twins, but when she gave birth there was only one baby. She was suing her pediatrician for incorrect medical
information and for trauma because she had already “bonded” with the second child.
“What happened to the other baby?” I asked.
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Mom said, “but it’s so bizarre I can’t get it out of my mind. The defense called in a doctor who testified that some twin fetuses seem to swallow the other twin. He cited a medical case where an autopsy was performed on a grown man who had died, and when he was cut open they found a complete fetus, like a tumor in him. He had swallowed it when in his mother’s belly and somehow it had remained inside him all his life.”
This story suddenly began to make me wonder if inside me there was another me that had just recently awakened, like a second little self telling me what to do, taking control, steering me toward my hobby. “Maybe that’s what’s happening to me,” I said.
She gave me a terrified look as if I had just broken out with a pox. “I’m sorry,” she said, and bit down on her lip. “I shouldn’t have brought this up. It’s awful dinner conversation.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about the love curse. Maybe this is what’s going on inside me, because I’ve been different from my usual self.”
“No,” she said, suddenly rushing around the table and sweeping me into her arms. “Don’t start thinking about that again. There is nothing wrong with you.”
And then there was a loud knock at the door, which startled both of us.
I never imagined anyone would rent a hotel room that night. But they did, and they must have gotten a shock when they went into the bathroom that I had been using as a workshop.
“Hello, June?” Mrs. Kelly called forcefully, and knocked loudly again before Mom could respond.
When Mom opened the door, I heard Mrs. Kelly say in a puzzled voice, “What do you think this is?”
“It must belong to Ivy,” Mom said. “But it looks kind of odd.”
“I’m beginning to think she needs some extra help,” Mrs. Kelly said in a hushed voice. “Take a good look at what she’s done here. This isn’t right. Even my boys weren’t like this, and they were half-cracked.”
“I’ll speak to her,” Mom replied. By then I had slipped around beside her and looked up at Mrs. Kelly.
She was holding the rag doll in her hand. It was lumpy and misshapen. Maybe the hotel guest had thrown it across the room. It was still damp, and lines of plaster had leaked out where I had sewn it up. Mrs. Kelly handed it to Mom. “I have to run,” she said. “I need to take care of the guest. He’s pickled to begin with, and now he’s gotten all psychotic-like.”
“Offer him a drink on me,” Mom said.
“That’s the last thing he needs,” Mrs. Kelly snapped, her voice already trailing down the hall over the thumps of her footfalls.
As soon as Mom closed the door I dreaded what she might say, so I spoke first. “I know why she said I needed help.”
Mom looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. In her hands was the oddly shaped doll. “Why would Mrs. Kelly say that?” she asked quietly.
“Because I didn’t do it right,” I said, reaching forward and pulling the doll from her hands. I squeezed its slumping, twisted body, but the plaster wouldn’t even out. I gave it a shake. I was so frustrated. “It shouldn’t be lumpy. And it should look real. And now it’s ruined.”
I stomped over to the kitchen and furiously stuffed it into the trash bin.
“I think you need more supervision,” my mother said.
“I think so, too,” I replied.
“I think we are talking about two different things,” she said. “I think you need some healthy activities, and you think you need help with your home taxidermy.”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said, “I need help. I’m doing it all wrong.”
“I can’t afford after-school care,” Mom said.
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “I’m going to return to the pharmacy.”
“I thought you were angry with them,” she reminded me.
“I’ve gotten over it,” I replied. And I had.