CHAPTER 15

Knock on Wood

It’s 1989 and everything is burning. Billy Joel wails from the white miniature television set in my bedroom, a futuristic kitchen in flames around him. Students stare down tanks in Tiananmen Square. Rescue workers rub oil from ducks after gallons bleed from the Exxon Valdez, their blue-gloved hands lost beneath foaming mounds of dish soap. Men and women hold handmade signs outside a Florida correctional facility, cheering the execution of serial killer Ted Bundy, a man my mother judges too handsome to be a murderer. One sign, in chunky block letters, reads Have a Seat Ted. In my mind, Ted’s scalp sizzles as smoke from the electric chair smolders.

All this burning feels like chaos, not the controlled burn I long for, like the rusted barrel our neighbor sparks trash in, on Thursdays. We have to close every window to escape tiny flecks of cinder and ash that waft across the alley, to our red brick home. I am twelve for most of 1989, having been a late November child, a fact that makes me naturally smarter than others, insists my mother, who believes children born in the summer are disadvantaged. Sweltering heat makes part of a baby’s brain melt, while cold air is good for the brain.

I think about a movie I watched on TV about a baby trapped in a well in Texas. Her name is Jessica and she doesn’t need a last name anymore. She is “Baby Jessica” now as if she will always be a baby. As if Baby has become her first name, Jessica her last name. I remember watching the news coverage about her two years ago on CNN, a new channel that shows news twenty-four hours a day instead of signing off at midnight the way some TV stations used to do. They would play “The Star Spangled Banner,” and then the screen would turn to static, that black-and-white fuzzy picture that Carol Anne spoke to in the movie Poltergeist. I don’t like horror movies, but I told myself I had to watch that movie or else I would be the next little girl to get sucked up by the spirit world.

My mother’s family ghosts seem friendly to her, but I’m not so sure. She thinks it’s good for spirits to visit you, thinks it’s more of a function of the dead needing to tell you everything’s okay, or to remind you of something.

My mother feels her dead parents’ spirits every time she tries to forget about them. She becomes difficult for weeks, even months surrounding their birthdays and their death days, so between her mother, her father, her grandmother Lindermann, and her two dead brothers, there is a lot of feeling and remembering to do. And it’s hard work, it really is. I try to keep up with it all, make myself available for comfort. Sometimes my mother comes into my room at night and she crawls in bed with me. I let her do what she needs to do because it makes her feel better. I can only do so much, but I can do that. She can use me. Isn’t that what a child is for?

The old joke goes something like this: “When they were passing out brains, you thought they said trains and you jumped on.” I think some people are born missing certain parts. Not parts as obvious as brains of course, but small things, tiny fractures in the soul of a person that can’t be repaired. The plumbing works even when there’s a leak in one of the pipes, and you have to keep a bucket under the sink to collect water droplets that bead up on the surface, then drip down. You don’t notice it at first, but over time the bucket fills to the rim, so you empty it and this becomes your routine. It seems like a minor annoyance, but if you add up every minute you spend emptying the bucket, it accumulates until you realize you’ve spent one-fifth of your life emptying buckets.

I’m intrigued by those books that tell you how long you spend doing certain things over the course of your life, like standing in lines for three years, or sleeping for twenty-two. Somehow we can’t feel the measure of time as it’s passing, don’t notice how many minutes we spend brushing our teeth while we’re in the moment, so we need someone to calculate it for us. It’s the accumulation that gets you. Living with my mother is like living with that bucket slowly filling under the sink. You remember that it’s there, even when you can’t see it, even when you try to forget. You know it will be waiting for you to empty, over and over again.

★ ★ ★

It’s almost Valentine’s Day and I have my period for the first time. It happened just as I was getting ready to leave for All-Star Chorus practice. I’d been playing a Summer Olympics computer game on the Commodore in the basement, and even though my mother had been yelling down the stairs for me to hurry up and get ready, I was trying to beat my high score in platform diving. My mother’s voice kept tumbling down the stairwell toward me, first slowly, then faster and faster, my first name and middle name spoken together to indicate that she meant business. I finally gave in and dashed up to the bathroom to pee before we left.

I was just sitting on the toilet thinking about what exactly? I was thinking about nothing, actually. That’s how simple life seemed in those minutes before I looked at the white panties stretched between my knees, before I saw the truth of what was happening. The blood had felt like nothing coming out. Like air, like light, nothing at all. What would have happened if I’d never looked down?

I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on the alto part for “Hello Again.” At All-Star Chorus practice, we’re working on a medley of Neil Diamond’s ballads that also includes “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and “Song Sung Blue.” It’s a combined chorus of fifth and sixth graders from all the elementary schools in the district. I sit next to Jamie Costello, a fifth grader with a perfect olive complexion and silky light brown hair. She doesn’t talk to me much, except for the time I had a giant pimple right above my lip. Of course, she asked if it was a cold sore, which was just a way of drawing attention to something I apparently had no control over.

As if the question itself wasn’t bad enough, my answer was even worse. I really didn’t want her to think I had a cold sore, but I also didn’t want her to know it was a pimple. I said, “I don’t know what it is, but I think I got it from my cat. She’s always sniffing my lips.” Okay, great. What’s worse than herpes and pimples? Some mysterious disease contracted from kissing your cat. And why are you kissing your cat anyway? It was a disaster. She spoke to me even less after that.

I’ve made it through the two-hour rehearsal without shifting my weight or getting up during break time. I’m afraid to move, unsure how the maxi pad between my legs will react. It’s finally pickup time, and I stand, hoping that no one is watching me from behind. I climb into the Blazer, my father at the wheel, the heater ticking warm air on my face. The Pittsburgh Penguins hockey game is being called on the crinkled waves of the AM radio, its display lit up like a mouth on fire. “We’re winning, 3 to 1,” my father reports, sliding the smooth metal arm of the heater’s control panel to turn it down a notch.

I nod and smile and stare out the side window at the darkened landscape on the ten-minute drive home—bony trees, flowerless rhododendrons, living room windows glowing warm and inviting in the cool winter air. What will happen if I open the door and roll out? I’ve seen MacGyver do it a dozen times. He tucks himself into a human cylinder, bracing himself against a dirt road. But this is asphalt. I don’t think I could pull it off. So I’m going to have to tell my mother about getting my period.

When we arrive home, I find her sitting at the dining room table, wearing her gold-rimmed reading glasses, her small box with the blue flowers opened to reveal all her bill-paying accessories: checkbook, silver refillable pen that belonged to my grandfather, brown accordion folder for receipts, stamps. She’s drinking a cup of Suisse Mocha, her favorite flavor of General Food International Coffees. I’d microwaved myself a cup once, when she and my dad were in bed for the night, but it didn’t taste the way I’d wanted it to. Still, I huddled over it in my room while reading Stephen King’s Carrie. I was stuck on a line where Chris, one of Carrie’s female tormentors describes the feeling of losing her virginity as being reamed out with a hoe handle. This sensation, I thought, I could certainly do without. I plop myself down on one of the dining room chairs, its latticework scratching my back through my sweatshirt.

I sit perfectly still, willing my mother to notice me, like the nights I hover over her sleeping form trying to wake her up with my mind. Stephen King’s Carrie became telekinetic after she started her period. In the scene where the girls in the locker room pelt her with tampons and maxi pads, a light flickers overhead. I watch the dining room chandelier for changes.

“What is it?” my mother asks. There is an edge to her voice that means my sitting there is making her nervous. She doesn’t like children close to her and that is her standard reasoning: You’re making me nervous.

“I think I got my period today.” My voice sounds much squeakier than I remember, breaking slightly at the end like Peter Brady in the famous “Time to Change” episode of The Brady Bunch.

She licks an envelope flap and folds it over, its blue cross-hatched security lining flashing. I feel like taking an exaggerated gulp the way they do in cartoons, waiting at the edge of the newly re-­upholstered chair. Mother recently changed our home’s color scheme from orange and brown to green and gold.

“Well, you’re twelve years old,” she declares. “So I knew it would happen soon. I was twelve years old, Pam was twelve years old, Linda was twelve years old.” Her voice trails off. She is trying to tell me how inconsequential my news is, that she can’t be bothered with the business of my growing up.

In the book, Carrie’s mother hadn’t told her anything about menstruation. Carrie was scared that day after gym class when she started bleeding. She thought she’d hurt herself. She was never the same after that day, staring at a small puddle of her own blood, her mother at home with all the curtains drawn, a makeshift altar on the mantel.

There is no hugging, no taking me in her arms, no tears at the news of this event. I know where the maxi pads are kept, always have. Not because my mother showed me, but because I like to snoop around under the bathroom sink, and that’s where they live in their soft blue wrappings.

In Judy Blume books when a character gets her period, there is fanfare of some sort—a mother says how proud she is of her girl, an older sister gives advice, a best friend compares notes on the telephone late into the night. There will be none of that for me. I’ll take care of myself alone, only the words of the girl who played Annie on Broadway to comfort me.

I want to go back to that day in the school library, a room full of girls sitting at smooth green tables, the shades drawn so we could see the images of our future. I want to jump into those scenes with the girl who played Annie on Broadway, the way Mary Poppins and Bert the chimney sweep and Jane and Michael Banks jumped into the sidewalk drawings in Mary Poppins. The girl who played Annie on Broadway will take me to live with her and the other orphans and we’ll dance and sing “It’s the Hard Knock Life” and we’ll all be okay in the end.