CHAPTER 12

Tie a Red Ribbon on a Sick Child

I’m getting too old to play with dolls. Rows of Cabbage Patch Kids sit on plastic shelves in my bedroom, soft cloth bodies in diapers, hard faces, iris stickers for eyes, chubby feet stuffed into baby socks and hard little shoes. They don’t say a word, but they watch me in my bed, when I’m doing things I shouldn’t, like rubbing myself to reach the dew point. When I’m finished, I roll over to face the wall, so the dolls can’t see me.

My cat sleeps on my bed with me every night, starting out at my feet, but ending up near my head at some point, the soft pads of her paws sometimes waking me as she tries to make a nest in my hair. She loves me and only me, sleeps on my bed all day while I’m in school, next to my Alvin the Chipmunk doll and blankie, the little afghan my mother made for me before I was born. Blankie is soft from washing, and I love when it’s hot from the dryer, smelling like fabric softener and warm air. I’m certain different temperatures have different smells. You can smell cold, just like you can smell hot, and every degree in between.

I’m starting the sixth grade in the fall, so I’m too old to play with dolls, just like I’m too old to play with our new neighbor, who is going into the third grade, but he has become my best friend this summer, my only friend. My mother finally scared away Amy Nickels when she checked Amy’s head for lice before letting her come inside to play with me one afternoon. My mother has decided that our new neighbor doesn’t have lice. He likes to play dolls with me, and he doesn’t mind if I paint his nails or put mousse in his hair.

His name is Samuel Ryan. He has two older brothers in high school, named Greg and Danny, and one younger sister, Sarah, who goes to a special school in Uniontown. Sarah needs more help than the special education kids at our elementary school, the kids who learn in a basement classroom, who only come up for air at lunchtime, where the other kids laugh at them under their breath, and call them “speds” behind their backs. One boy’s head is permanently cocked to one side, like the dog in the RCA ads, peering into the horn of the phonograph, his head tilted, black ears listening intently. I don’t know this kid’s real name, but I call him “Amos” in my mind. Another kid can’t seem to close his mouth. It’s constantly open and he wears a terry-cloth bib to absorb his drool.

Sarah is seven years old. Her head is very small, almond shaped, her eyes round and black, only her pupils visible. She still wears diapers, and sometimes, when she hops the fence to play with us, she smells terrible and Samuel has to remind her to go home and ask their mom to change her. Sarah will get angry for a moment, but will eventually climb the fence again, emerge minutes later shouting “I came over!”

My mother has little patience for retarded people, so I’m proud of her for behaving herself about Sarah and Samuel, holding my breath sometimes when it seems she might say something mean. She wants to blame Samuel’s parents for Sarah. Surely they must have done something to make her that way. After a few weeks of the Ryan family living next door, my mother finally comes up with a hypothesis. When two people get together and have a really intelligent child (Danny, who is Linda’s age and the smartest kid in their class), it only makes sense that they are also capable of making a really stupid child.

Mrs. Ryan, whose first name is Alicia, even though it doesn’t fit her face in the slightest, is always in a bad mood. She looks more like a Helen or a Martha to me. She’s a manager at a fast-food restaurant and works the overnight shift, her red Chevy Lumina pulling into the makeshift parking spot in their backyard in the morning. She opens the car door slowly, toting a Styrofoam cup of coffee, waving half heartedly to me and Samuel, as we can often be found sitting on the glider on my back porch in the light of the rising sun, waiting for the summer air to warm so we can go swimming.

Greg is the oldest and a senior in high school. His bedroom window is the only window in their house that faces ours, and most nights in the summer, Greg takes the screen out and sits on his windowsill, listening to a Richard Marx tape, one leg dangling outside. He usually rewinds “Don’t Mean Nothing” a few times, listens to it again for good measure. Danny is the middle brother and a genius. According to a rumor, he has the highest IQ of all the kids in IMPACT in the school district, so he thinks he’s smarter than me.

Greg and Danny and Samuel and Sarah come over some afternoons to watch HBO in the basement with Linda and me. It’s very hot this summer, but our basement is always cool. It’s below ground, with one window that looks out into my mother’s flower bed, which is more like a gravel bed these days, as she’s given up on growing anything. She loves her plastic greenery more, would rather polish it than try to nurture a living thing. After a while, the six of us get bored and go outside and throw ourselves on the white hot driveway, where Samuel and I get out a box of chalk and begin to draw stick-figure versions of ourselves. Greg draws a naked woman, complete with nipples and pubic hair. Linda makes an elephant, the only thing she knows how to draw.

Danny writes Einstein’s equation for the theory of relativity, E=mc2. I let him have his moment, pretending not to know that E stands for energy, m for mass, c for the speed of light in a vacuum, pretending not to know that energy and mass are transmutable, that it’s always possible to change one form, nature, substance, or state into another. Pretending not to know that ideas are translatable into reality, like atoms sharing electrons, covalent bonds, like kids on concrete sharing this longing, this tension that powders the air around us, the chalk dust settling as we draw.

★ ★ ★

Samuel and I swim in our pool every day. Some nights we swim after it gets dark, dragging ourselves out of the warm water at nine, ten, even eleven o’clock, and say goodbye. Some nights I fall asleep on the couch in the basement, still in my bathing suit, my hair tangled in a ponytail that smells like chlorine. I wake up and wade into the pool before I even eat breakfast. Some mornings, Samuel is sitting on his back porch, waiting for me to come out. Some mornings, I wait for him. One of us is always there, killing time until the other emerges, as if we can’t think of anything else to do, as if there is nothing to do without the other.

We invent our own world in the water, hang beach towels over the diving board, letting the ends of the towels dip into the water, becoming heavy and dense. Inside this space we create a tiny spaceship. We close the imaginary door and lift off. When we come out, we are on another planet, a planet that looks much like Earth, but is completely covered in water. My family’s dog, a cocker spaniel poodle mix named Honey Louise runs around the edge of the pool when we play. We call her Shultz, the Underwater Space Dog, make her a part of our adventure.

Linda doesn’t like our game, because she feels Honey Louise is her dog, and she doesn’t like the fact that the dog runs to us when we call her Shultzie, the tags on her collar jingling, her claws clicking the damp pavement around the pool. Linda thinks we’re brainwashing her dog and she won’t stand for it. But there’s nothing she can do, because I am powerful when I am with Samuel. He and I together are somehow greater than the sum of our child bodies.

Samuel knows what I like, makes a point to remember things about me. He knows my favorite Kool-Aid flavor is tropical punch. He knows I love the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing. He knows that I secretly wish I had a childhood disease, like leukemia or cystic fibrosis, not because I want to die, but because I want attention, want my family to gather around my bed holding my hands and placing cool washcloths on my face. Samuel knows that I have never kissed a boy, that I adore doo-wop music from the 1950s, my mother’s 8-track tapes we listen to, sprawled out on the couches in the basement while we eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—no crusts for Samuel.

Their father, Greg Senior, works at the mill in Clairton, and he has to work a lot of overtime to afford Sarah’s special school. Alicia has to work a lot, too, but I get the feeling it’s more to avoid being at home than anything else. The older brothers are left in charge of Samuel and Sarah a lot. I like to go over to their house on these days. Greg and Danny and Samuel are the Lost Boys and I am Wendy Darling, Sarah our female Peter Pan. She will never grow up. Alicia told my mother that Sarah will never develop fine motor skills, never be able to write her name or tie her shoes. Sarah sits at the kitchen table, scribbling long ragged strokes on her fish sticks with a blue Crayola marker before eating them, shoving them in her mouth with a satisfying look, her cheeks puffy with breading and shards of fish meat.

I show Samuel the secrets of his house—how you can take the ball off the end of the banister, pretend it’s an old-fashioned telephone. That’s what the Nicola grandkids and I used to do on the days we ran around this old house, the days Mr. and Mrs. Nicola were still alive. They rarely allowed their grandkids to go swimming in our pool, afraid they would drown, even though they were all strong swimmers. They wanted them to stay home and eat toasted cheese sandwiches and watch the birds in their cage.

I show Samuel the hidden door in Greg’s room, the crawl space inside the wallpapered wall that no one knows about. Inside we find an empty jewelry box shaped like a treasure chest, tarnished gold chains that stretch to keep the lid open. We promise not to tell anyone, just like we promise not to tell anyone about the day we almost lost Sarah, how we took her to the playground and didn’t pay attention to her. How she must have wandered down the street. How we called for her. How she finally came running from out of nowhere. How she couldn’t tell us where she’d been.

★ ★ ★

In our house, we float in separate bubbles, my mother’s tinged with factory grease, my father’s quiet, invisible sometimes. We can go for days without noticing one another, only passing each other in the hallway, down the basement stairs, around the dining room table, piles of food on top of plates on top of a pink vinyl tablecloth with flannel backing. My mother cleans up after mealtime, won’t allow anyone else to do so. She needs a place for everything, everything in its place, the spoons stacked in a certain order inside the silverware drawer, butter knives and sharp knives separated, the jagged edges never allowed to touch the smooth. Even in the cupboards, canned goods sleep in orderly rows, all the labels facing the same way, canisters always filled to the top, flour and sugar packed like snow.

Samuel’s house is our opposite. Stepping inside is like entering a playground of dust and clutter. Noisy and bright, the windows are always open in summer. They are a loud family. I can hear them arguing and celebrating when I sit on our back porch with Honey Louise. Sometimes, Samuel’s mother gets angry, fed up with her boys and their boy messes, fed up with changing Sarah’s diapers, fed up with working the night shift at the drive-thru, the constant opening and closing of the accordion window, handing out grease-stained paper bags, cheeseburgers in their slippery yellow wrappers, Styrofoam boxes of chicken nuggets, super-sized drinks.

Once, she swiped some kids’ meal toys for me and Samuel—a plastic sleeve of french fries that turned into a robot, a milk shake with secret panels. We played with our food transformers in Samuel’s sandbox, first burying them, and then making them emerge like heroes to save us.

It is nearly September now, and my father is preparing to close the pool. Samuel and I watch as he pumps a foot of water from it, a chlorine stream running down the gravel alley and into a drain. Our first summer together is almost over, although I’ll never say those words out loud, never give a name to what is happening around me, afraid that if I dare to speak it, it will all disappear. Afraid that Samuel isn’t real at all, that he’s the ghost boy I invented to love, to love me back. I want to knock on wood when I think about Samuel and me. I want to throw salt over my shoulder into the eyes of the devil I feel standing behind us, waiting.

When you spill salt, you must toss some over your shoulder. But you can’t just pick up the saltshaker and shake it. You have to use the spilled salt, have to pinch it between the forefinger and thumb of your right hand, toss it over your left shoulder. This is the way my mother does it. This is the only way it works.

My mother is a book of superstitions, an encyclopedia I open daily, running my index finger down the pages looking for definitions, for instructions. If you swallow twelve cat hairs, you will die. If a bird flies into your house, someone you know will die within twenty-four hours. If you eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve, one for each strike of the clock, you will have good fortune in the coming year. If you see a shooting star, someone you love will die. I look things up in her, my dictionary of what-if’s, of how-to’s, my mother, my own atlas, map of the world.

★ ★ ★

School starts. Leaves and fallen buckeyes collect at our feet as we walk. I am in sixth grade now, Samuel in third. I’m worried that people will think we’re boyfriend and girlfriend. The idea embarrasses me, even though it is something I want more than anything else. If only we were older, then age wouldn’t matter so much. If I were twenty-three and Samuel were twenty, we could get married and no one would think we were weird. Samuel doesn’t seem to care that I have dark hair on my legs and arms, and he doesn’t know that my classmates have teased me about it over the years, told me I was turning into a gorilla, that I was turning into a man. He doesn’t know that my mother wouldn’t buy me deodorant in fifth grade, even though I needed it, and that I had to go to school smelling like body odor, because the baby powder I patted on my armpits wore off after a few hours.

Samuel doesn’t know that Heather Grain would whisper about me, about how bad I smelled, how the girls in class would secretly warn each other not to sit next to me. He doesn’t know that last year, a boy named Brad Molan followed me home from school, harassed me the entire way about my hairy arms, laughing and snorting and pushing on his glasses as they slid down his sweaty nose, how I found out later that Heather Grain put him up to it, how I still don’t understand why she hates me so much, why she gives me death stares in the lunchroom, tells other kids not to be my friend.

I’m happy at school once a week, when I’m placed in a van and shuttled to IMPACT, where I learn about special things and people like Brad and Heather aren’t allowed to come. My mother tells me that I’m destined for greatness, that some day I’ll get my revenge as I sit on the couch next to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and then I can finally reveal the names of my childhood tormentors, make them feel bad for teasing me. Then my phone will ring off the hook with people apologizing. “They’ll be kissing your ass,” my mother says. “Just wait and see.”

I don’t know what will make me famous enough to sit on the couch at The Tonight Show, so I’ll wait and I’ll see. My fame is the answer in one of Carnac the Magnificent’s envelopes. One day I’ll be torn open, and the rest of my story will be revealed, a prediction come true.

Samuel and I like to take pictures of each other. We pose in front of the landscaped shrubbery around the swimming pool, try to capture action shots of us jumping off the brick wall that runs next to the driveway. We take pictures of Honey Louise running, her ears pinned back in the wind. We pose on the diving board, even though the pool is closed now for the winter, sleeping under a dark green tarp my father has anchored with long water bags. The bags remind me of the rubber hot water bottle my mother pulls from the bathroom closet when someone gets the flu. It swells like a hot pregnant belly when you fill it and you have to cover it with a towel so it won’t burn your skin.

Sometimes, the red caps on the poolside water bags flip open, clear water shooting straight up like small fountains, reminding me of what Old Faithful might look like in miniature. I love anything built to scale: model cars, model houses, doll furniture, blueprints of cities, where every tree, every flower is planned to the centimeter.

I lead a double life. In school, I am a Goody Two-Shoes. Quiet, teacher’s pet, nothing less than an A in every subject, no friends, no one to trade clothing and glances with. No one to get in trouble with. At home, I am Samuel’s wife, a child bride longing to grow up, Samuel and I playing house, Sarah our staccato child. We care for her together, defend her when a group of mean kids outside the corner store calls her a retard.

Is Samuel too young to realize what I want? Or has he figured out that I’m wishing to be kissed, pretending that we’re lovers when we hide under his back porch steps, pretending that he’s going to kiss me at any moment, pretending that he wants to kiss me? In the basement, I listen to my mother’s records, Crystal Gayle and Anne Murray and Air Supply, anything sad, anything about love.

★ ★ ★

I think I would die for my mother. She loves dead people. They are quiet, invisible. Dead people don’t live inside tombs and under gravestones, they live in the mind, in the body. Her brothers, her mother, her father, they are liquid, moving—she can conjure them anytime. She can talk to them and she can make them talk back to her. This is why she loves them.

She loves Elvis so much, and he is dead, too. I like to study her Elvis bottles in the basement, whiskey decanters she collects, in different Elvis shapes and Elvis sizes. They hold whiskey but also play music, something to listen to while you drink. I pick one up, turn it over, twist the small silver key underneath. High-pitched bells plink out a melody hup two, three, four, occupation G.I. blues. Elvis is in his army fatigues, tall black boots, leaning against a duffle bag full of letters, “Presley” in block print on a patch over his heart. His hair is slicked back, but dry in porcelain. When the music stops, I turn him over again, listening first to the whiskey splashing inside his hollow body, then to the bells replaying their tune. The song starts out fast, but gets slower as the key unwinds, as the musical parts lose their momentum, that system of raised metal dots spinning, a turbine powered by Braille.

I think of my mother crying when Elvis died, mascara down her face, her throat dry from sobbing as she listened to Are You Lonesome Tonight? on the turntable. It was August 1977, and our house didn’t have air-conditioning yet so surely all of the windows were open. My father returned home from work, found my mother sobbing on the living room floor. Surely I was hot and sticky in my crib, shaking the bars to get out. Surely the song floated out of our house, passed like air through the freshly washed screens, into a world where Elvis was dead, where my mother had lost someone she adored.

I have a musical jewelry box in my bedroom. It’s in the shape of a Swiss chalet painted blue and white. Tiny pink flowers live in the window boxes. I imagine it is a sweet shop, where they sell saltwater taffy and chocolate bunnies year-round (not just at Easter). I can’t figure out why a ballerina appears when I open the roof. What is she doing there, trapped in perpetual spin, her spindly legs glued together, inseparable?

Her tutu is a stiff piece of net and I can undress her, slide the skirt over her head and watch her dance naked, arms permanently in third position, the ballet poses I’d memorized years before in dance class, a dozen girls in black leotards and baby fat, chanting as our arms and legs move through each one, first, second, third, fourth, rising on tiptoe for fifth, so high on Orange Crush from the soda machine in the waiting room we thought we might take flight.

The ballerina has no face. It sounds impossible, but I’m looking at her now and she has no face, just a plastic head without features, without color. She can’t leave the sweet shop. Elvis can’t stop reading that sack of letters he’s leaning on. I can’t die for my mother. Each of us can only do what we’ve been designed to do. I’m afraid I’ve been designed to live.