CHAPTER 6

Eat Well, You Hound

“It’s not a sin to be poor, but it is a sin to be dirty.” My mother’s eyes nearly glow in the dimly lit bedroom as she states this belief, first held by my dead grandmother, then my mother, and now, presumably, me. My mother folds towels while she talks. I sit cross-legged on her yellow and green bedspread, watching her. She has this tri-fold technique and works too quickly for me to figure out the moves. I stare at stacks of perfectly folded blue towels in the bathroom closet and then unfold one carefully, making mental notes, yet somehow I can never get it back to the way it was.

“What if the poor people can’t afford soap?” I ask. “Is it still a sin?”

“Listen carefully,” she says, clearly exhausted by me. “Some people may not choose to be poor, but they do choose to be dirty.”

My mother cleans a lot. Many days I return home from school to find her on her hands and knees with a bucket of bleach water, wiping down the baseboards, fumes burning my nose hairs if I get too close to her. My mother is forty-four years old and has already lost her sense of smell from nearly twenty-three years of working at Anchor, where she inhales glass furnace exhaust and asbestos residue.

My mother can’t do laundry, or iron, or wash dishes on Sundays. She can make dinner, as long as she only uses the stovetop burners, not the oven. Using your oven on Sunday is strictly forbidden and brings bad luck. You can’t even open the oven door, unless you want something bad to happen.

Once, when Linda needed her Brownie uniform cleaned on a Sunday evening, my mother refused to so much as show her how to turn on the washing machine. “That would constitute work, and I don’t work on the Sabbath,” she explained. Linda stood on a chair, baffled by the buttons and dials on the cream-colored Maytag.

“But you work at the factory on Sundays all the time,” I remind her.

“That’s different because I don’t have a choice in the matter. But I do have a choice when it comes to housework.” She lingers in the doorway for a moment, holding a cup of instant coffee in her hands as if to warm her fingers, which are bony and always cold. Dad expects Mother has ruined most of the nerve endings in her fingers from handling hot bottles with her bare hands when she was younger.

“She never did like the way those bulky red gloves looked on her,” he tells me when I ask how Mother can wash her hands with water so hot it fogs the bathroom mirror with a coat of steam. “You better not use the faucet right after her unless you don’t mind getting scalded,” he warns me. “Best to let the pipes cool first.”

My mother acts as though it is her personal mission in life to clean the world—to rid it of dirt, dust, mildew, unwashed hair, dingy windows, soiled carpets, rusted cars on blocks in overgrown backyards. She warns me not to befriend the dirty kids in school, the ones labeled as “scurfs” in local kid language. The Murphy family is the most famous scurf family in town. There are so many of them, one in practically every grade at South Side Elementary. You can hear the taunts on the playground, on the steps leading up to the blond brick school, the glass double doors, Scurfy Murphy. Anyone can be a scurfy Murphy, the highest form of verbal punishment a kid can dish out.

There are so many poor families in Connellsville, home to abandoned coke ovens, pizza parlors, bars, and churches. There are so many half-crumbling houses with tar paper roofs, so many kids living in the housing project by the high school stadium, so many welfare bums as my mother calls them. They seem to be just like me. Many of them are smart, make good grades in school, even though they smell like old food, or cigarette smoke, or urine. Even though Amy Nickels is one of them, and even though I’m hiding it from my mother, she is becoming my best friend.

Amy is hilarious. One of our favorite rituals is analyzing skits from Saturday Night Live on Monday mornings. We have the same sense of humor. We’re precocious, according to Amy’s mother. Her name is Bubbles and she is twenty years younger than my mother, with beautiful red hair down her back. I look precocious up in the dictionary. When referring to a child, precocious means having developed certain abilities or proclivities at an earlier age than usual. The word can also refer to a plant flowering or fruiting earlier than usual.

Amy can write and draw really well, and she loves comic books. Once, she wrote and illustrated a comic book called “Mr. Smarty Pants and the Jumpy Toupee.” Mr. Smarty Pants is a man whose pants have been enchanted by a sea-witch, so they come to life and talk. They are always ruining the day. When Mr. Smarty Pants is at work giving an important presentation in front of his bosses, his pants decide to unzip themselves and fall down around his ankles, exposing his boxer shorts, which are covered in little pink hearts. Mr. Smarty Pants’ toupee is also possessed, jumping off his head at the worst possible times.

Amy is in IMPACT with me, so every Thursday we are shipped to another elementary school in a van so we can learn how to program computers and make various things out of papier-mâché and plaster of Paris. Our second-grade classmates call our IMPACT trips “nerd conventions.” When we study dinosaurs, I set out to construct a model Tyrannosaurus rex, but I don’t hold his head up long enough while he dries, so he ends up looking more like a brontosaurus. I give him a smiley face instead of a snarl to try to cover up my mistake.

When we study Egypt, I make a tiny sarcophagus out of Popsicle sticks, which I spray-paint gold. Inside is a little King Tut, his body molded from clay, then covered in plaster of Paris, like a real mummy. If you crack him open, you’ll see he has arms and legs and everything, as I used a sharp toothpick to carve them out of the soft green clay. He’s also wearing his famous mask, the one with the blue and gold stripes and the serpent between his eyes. I keep King Tut in my bedroom, take him out of his little coffin every night, cup his still body in the palm of my hand the way I imagine a mother might.

I want Amy to be interested in murders and other tragedies, but they seem to roll down her back, spilling over her yellow hair. I’ll try to strike up a conversation about the made-for-TV movie I saw last night, Fatal Vision, about a man who killed his pregnant wife and two daughters, then claimed it was a group of Manson family copycats. He stabbed his wife with an ice pick, bludgeoned and stabbed the girls to death, then wrote “pig” on a headboard in their blood. He was an army doctor, so he knew how to pull off a self-inflicted stabbing. To make it look like he was attacked without really hurting himself. He knew the map of veins and arteries in the torso, knew exactly where to cut. A superficial wound it’s called. I look up superficial in the dictionary. In this context, it means situated or occurring on the skin or immediately beneath it. It has other meanings, too. I think one of them could be used to describe my mother: not having or showing any depth of character or understanding. My mother is always quoting Zsa Zsa Gabor, mimicking her thick Hungarian accent. Dahling, if you can’t look your best, you shouldn’t even leave the house! There’s another definition for this entry: appearing to be true or real only until examined more closely. I’m beginning to notice many things that appear real until you get closer. My mother’s false eyelashes, the plastic log in our decorative fireplace in the basement. It actually plugs into the wall, and you can flip a switch and make it glow red from within. It even makes a fake crackling noise.

Some things aren’t real, but we think we see them, like a mirage, water appearing to a thirsty person in the desert. Can our minds really play tricks on us? Make us see things that aren’t even there?

My father is going back to work and I’m worried for him. His first shift back is the night shift, the worst one of all. Even though he’s not a foreman, I’m afraid of angry men shooting him overnight with guns they pull from inside their dark overalls, foremen who don’t like the way he moves. What will they do to him when he returns to the furnaces, The Hot End floor, all that overheated cement? My mother says everyone at the factory knows that my father’s been on sick leave for his nerves, and I’m sure this is true. I’ve heard her spreading the news as she leans over the orange kitchen countertop, the phone cradled between her shoulder and chin. The telephone lines in a small town like ours burn with gossip, a constant stream of discussion that is simply a way of life around here.

I’m afraid people will tease my father for being nervous. The doctors in Pittsburgh never found anything wrong with him, no diagnosis, no disease, but his sick leave is running out and my mother is complaining about the Discover Card bill, how the balance keeps growing and needs to be paid. Before the many different test results came in, after getting enemas and colonoscopies and swallowing tubes and taking needles in the creases of his arms, I worried about cancer in my father’s bowels, imagined tumors growing dark and thick in his body, a wild black stalk of something, an uninvited guest taking over. But it’s not cancer, not now.

We take my father to Anchor to drop him off for his first day back to work. My mother is driving the Lincoln, dad on the passenger side. Linda and I are in the backseat, our bare feet brushing the scratchy red carpet of the floor mats. At shift change, there is a line along the curb, a slow procession of men and women getting into and out of cars and trucks, saying hello, saying goodbye. My mother parks and I lean forward to whisper in her ear. “Is that mean supervisor going to be there today? The one who said I don’t like the way you move?” I want to know whether he’s one of the dead men, one of Sonny’s victims, or if he’s one of the lucky bastards who got away.

My mother is angry now. She pushes my face away, shouts at me to sit down. I don’t know if it’s my question that’s made her so mad or the fact that I’ve gotten too close to her face. She seems to live within a layer of glass, like a snow globe nobody can enter, especially little girls.

The four of us sit in silence for a minute or two, watching people file in and out of the factory gate. I look over at Linda and she appears to be blank, like the smooth tiles in Scrabble that don’t have letters on them. She is wiped clean. Just sitting there in the backseat of this big car, staring out the window and picking at her thumbs, a bad habit my mother scolds her for. Linda picks her thumbs raw, bloody scabs all around her thumbnails that bloom all the way down to her knuckles. When it gets bad enough, my mother wraps two flesh-colored Band-Aids around the thumb—one over the top of the thumb like a hat, and one that wraps around the thumb knuckle like a belt. Linda’s thumbs are little people under those bandages, trying to grow new skin like new faces. But as soon as the bandages come off, she digs the skin open again, breaks it apart, pink and wet and new.

That night while my father works, Linda and I crawl into bed with our mother. Linda is on my father’s side of the bed, closest to the nightstand, the clock radio with its white needle, the little jar of rose salve for his cracked hands. I lay in the middle of the bed sucking my thumb, the left one tonight. I’ve decided that the left one is cherry flavor and the right one is lemon flavor, and cherry is my favorite. Linda is picking her thumb and I’m sucking mine and our mother is already sleeping, her blond head sunk into the pillow, her back facing me, always facing me. When I wake up, my thumb will be white and shriveled, small bits of the skin shredding, my teeth sore. While we sleep our father moves slowly around a furnace, sweats over glass, while we do what we can to break ourselves open, still breaking, always breaking.