CHAPTER 10

Break a Mirror, Bury the Pieces

I’m sitting on the back porch, my bare legs brushing the green outdoor carpet, the kind that covers Green Garden Miniature Golf on Route 119, and looks like it’s made of plastic. Green Garden has a windmill and a wooden airplane with propellers. You must hit a colored ball between the blades. They have sand traps, and water hazards, and a final hole where your ball disappears into a noisy white pipe, making a clanging sound as it travels down under the ground. I wonder if it can get lost, end up in the sewer somehow. How does it know where to go? How does anything know where it belongs?

I’ve made my mother angry today, so I’ve been sent out here on the porch to sit in the sun, to think about what I’ve done. My mother has beautiful things on her dresser, things I’m not supposed to touch. Some she uses and others are for decoration only, her fake plants, her greenery. My mother dusts her greenery with lemon Pledge. She sprays it directly on the leaves, then wipes them with a soft rag, which is actually a piece of old T-shirt. Every few months, mother cuts up one of my father’s work T-shirts into rags. They are thin from too many washes, and I want to steal one for myself, hide it in my drawer and touch it to my face every so often, when I can’t fall asleep at night, when the house creaks and I wonder if it’s a man breaking into our home, when I look into the dark hall outside my bedroom doorway and see the face staring back at me. When I have to knock on wood every time I think in my head nothing bad happens to me, nothing bad happens to me, those times when I need something to hold on to.

I love everything on top of my mother’s dresser—the brush, comb, and mirror set with heavy bronze handles, the vanity tray with scalloped gold edges, the box of scented powder from Estée Lauder that comes with a square powder puff, fluffy white, a length of ribbon on the outside. You slide your hand between the ribbon and the puff, as if you’re sliding your hand into a luxurious mitten. Then you pat it all over your body, making small chalky clouds around you, the scent of flowers and spice in the air. There are glass bottles of nail polish, various shades of pink, glass bottles of perfume, expensive face creams in jars with heavy lids, trinkets and knick-knacks. There’s a tiny pewter jewelry box that holds my grandparents’ class rings, years etched on the side, letters that stand for something, although I’m not sure what, and some sort of Navy pin that belonged to my Uncle Little Joe.

I’m not supposed to touch anything on my mother’s dresser, but I like to pretend as though I’m in a commercial, and her dresser is the only spot in the house that will do as my sound stage. There’s a large mirror, and I stare into it. It is my camera. I can sit at the edge of my parents’ bed and tell my audience how youthful and soft my hands look and feel because I use Nivea. I can share stories of men who follow me around, thanks to the scent of my Youth Dew perfume, how strong my nails are thanks to Sally Hansen. I’ve done commercials plenty of times and no one’s ever noticed. I usually wait until everyone has made themselves scarce—maybe someone’s at work or at the store, maybe someone’s downstairs watching television, maybe Linda is at Rochelle’s house. But today my mother finds me somehow. I don’t remember how now, the details already fuzzy, but she has found me and she is angry now, and the mirrored tray with scalloped gold edges is broken, the bottles of nail polish are broken—some spilled on the mint-green carpet in my parents’ bedroom, some on my legs. I watch it shimmer on my skin, here in the sun, on the back porch, where I am supposed to be thinking about what I have done.

My father comes home from fishing and finds me here and for a moment, I act as if nothing is wrong. “I’m just getting some air,” I say. But then he goes inside and my mother must tell him something. I can’t hear what they are saying through the closed windows, but a few minutes later my father comes out to get me.

“We’re going for a drive,” he says.

“Where?” I ask. And “What about Linda?”

“We’ll pick her up on our way.”

I go inside through the patio door and see my mother sitting at the dining room table, staring straight ahead, her eyes like marbles, the cloudy ones they call cat’s eyes. She is twisting a dishrag in her hands, her arms close to her body, stiff, a doll’s immovable parts. My father touches her shoulder, a signal for her to stand, which she does mechanically, not looking at me. We walk outside and into the Lincoln, the dishrag still in her hands, always in her hands, as my father drives to Rochelle’s to pick up Linda, who gets in the car bewildered, until I signal to her with my eyes, let her know that Mother is having a spell, a phrase we’ve heard our father use somewhere before, though we’re not sure where.

We drive to Ohiopyle, up the mountain, to where the Youghiogheny makes a small double waterfall, where people kayak and ride bicycles and eat ice cream in the summer, look at golden leaves in the fall, watch the frozen river in the winter.

“Do you want to park and get out? To see the falls?” my father asks my mother. She doesn’t answer, but twirls the dishrag, which must mean no. So my father keeps driving, down windy roads that make me feel carsick, but I don’t dare say a word about it. Usually, I sit in the front seat on long trips, because the Lincoln rides like a magic carpet, as if its wheels don’t even touch the ground, and I get queasy if I’m not able to get a clear view out the front windshield. I try to look through the crack between my mother’s head and the car door, a small sliver of clear glass. I find a decent position and sit that way the rest of the ride home, perfectly still, not even breathing too heavy, not wishing to disturb my mother, not wishing to make the spell worse, not wishing for anything anymore.

★ ★ ★

I’m in fifth grade now, in Mrs. McLuckey’s class. I guess you could say I’m the teacher’s pet. Mrs. McLuckey says she and I are on the same wavelength. I picture us in a little boat together, rowing over our thoughts that are clear and cool like water. When Mrs. McLuckey has papers to grade, she asks me to read aloud to the class from whatever book we’re currently reading—A Wrinkle in Time, Bridge to Terabithia, Island of the Blue Dolphins. I like Judy Blume books but not Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret, like every other girl in class. My favorites are Deenie and Tiger Eyes. Amy and I are still best friends, and she’s turning me on to Stephen King. Her mom has a whole collection of fat paperbacks, the spines worn out from folding. I’m starting with Carrie. Amy says that is a good place to start.

There’s a new girl in school this year. She transferred from the Catholic elementary school in town. She is tall like me, but thinner and freckled. She has long red hair that is very bright, the color of carrots. Her name is Heather Grain. There are lots of girls named Heather and Jennifer and Amanda in my grade, but Heather Grain seems different. Everyone wants to be her friend, even though they know little about her. In the movies and on TV the new kid has a hard time fitting in, but not Heather Grain. It’s like she was born to be here, right here in this classroom, born to be popular. I’ve been trying to figure out popularity since kindergarten, when it was already clear that Amy and I would never be popular, and kids like Amanda Weaver and Todd Armor would break records for the most-loved children in town.

Heather Grain is always staring at me. I catch her every now and then. I turn my head and she suddenly snaps her eyes back to the front of the room, pretends like she’s copying something from the chalkboard, but Mrs. McLuckey hasn’t even written anything down. All the girls are chattering more this year, about bras and makeup and growing-up things. I’d noticed the change in Linda that began when she hit fifth grade. When Rochelle would come over they’d talk about boys and kissing. They’d read magazines and point to pictures, giggling at each other to communicate instead of using words.

Then one night, toward the end of Linda’s fifth-grade year, my mother called her over to the couch, and together they read through a pink booklet about becoming a woman. It had a cartoon drawing of a girl on the front and the words were actually written in ribbon. I looked for the booklet in Linda’s room a few days later. I like to snoop through her drawers when she goes to Rochelle’s house. I never found it.

The girls are giggling this week because we’re going to watch the puberty video, which everyone is just calling the period video because we can’t imagine what else there is to talk about. Jimmy Carter promises to tell us girls all the explicit details of the boys’ puberty video, which he says will be about boners and wet dreams and jacking off.

The period film they show us stars Andrea McArdle, the original Annie on Broadway. She explains, at times through song, that all of our body parts have a necessary function. We need lungs for breathing, a heart to circulate blood, and a uterus to bear children. We watch a cartoon graphic of the uterine lining thickening up each month, preparing for the egg, followed by tiny contractions that flush the unused tissue outside the body when the egg isn’t fertilized.

Andrea tells us other things—that it’s okay to bathe or shower during our periods and that we need to start washing our hair more often and wearing deodorant. It turns out that our skin is about to start making more oil, which we all think is pretty disgusting. I find it strange that a girl who played Annie is telling me about the difference between maxi pads and panty liners. We get little pink bags with samples of both as we leave the library, shove them into our desks quickly once we’re back in the classroom.

At lunch, Jimmy Carter lives up to his promise. “Our film had Mickey Mouse in it,” he says, then imitates the cartoon character’s high-pitched voice. “Hey boys, you’re going to grow hair on your balls!” I know he’s not telling the truth, but the other boys have been sworn to secrecy. They’re backing Jimmy up as usual.

My mother circles certain days with a red pen in her pocket calendar, the one she gets every year from the card store. The plastic cover is usually decorated in flowers or the “Footprints in the Sand” picture and verse she loves. She can read that verse over and over again and it still gets her every time. I don’t understand the appeal. So God was carrying the guy through the hard times, that’s why there was only one set of footprints. Big deal. It’s not so hard to figure that one out the first time around.

Where are the other girls like me? Amy might be one of them, but she doesn’t seem to have the same strange insides as I do, the odd thoughts and worries. My mother says worrying is a family trait. Her mother was a worrier. That’s how she ended up in a mental hospital in Worthington, Ohio, receiving electroshock therapy. She had what they called nervous breakdowns back then. I know that I’m nervous, too, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a breakdown, although I have had some days where I feel like I’m slipping down a drain. When I finally reach the bottom, it takes some time for me to climb back out. I tell my mother about these feelings and there’s a light of recognition in her eyes. Maybe we are alike after all.

My mother wants to know about my slipping down the drain—what it feels like, what triggers it. She wants us to sit on her bed and have long conversations about these things, just us, our secret talks. My mother says she feels doomed sometimes. I nod my head in agreement. “It’s not so much that I want to die, but it feels like I’m doomed to die,” she says. “It feels like maybe it would be easier if I were to lie down in the river. Just to get it over with. Do you understand?” I am eleven years old. I understand.

Sometimes, my mother feels like crying for no reason at all. I find her one afternoon, spread across her polyester bedspread, one arm over her forehead. She’s got tears in her eyes, and I want to know what’s wrong. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says. “You don’t have to have a reason to cry. You can cry just because you want to.”

I want to show my mother that I’m just like her. She needs that. And it’s the least I can do. I stare at the bronze butterflies on the wall, the small plaque of the Ten Commandments. Honor thy father and mother, it says. I think about something sad, like my father dying. I think about what this house would be like without him, and I cry. I don’t cry for him—I cry for me, the child left behind with her mother.