CHAPTER 1

Bread and Butter

When I sit perfectly still, the stars seem to dim then brighten like a pulse, a metronome of breathing. My mother is next to me in the grass. I am eight years old and she is telling me about shooting stars. She says if you see one, it means someone you love is about to die. My eyes scan the stars, which are splattered in clumps, as if someone has thrown handfuls of light against the dark. I hope everything stays put for now.

My mother knows a lot about the sky. She teaches me things: where to find the Big and Little Dippers, how to spot Orion’s belt on a clear night, how to track the phases of the moon. There are rhymes to help me remember certain things. Red sky at night, sailors delight. I spend hours in darkness stretched out in the yard, looking up. My mother says there’s a star for every person alive in the world. That’s why you see a falling star when someone dies. The sky doesn’t need that star anymore, so the sky sends the star to you.

“Are you supposed to catch it?” I ask.

“Why sure,” she tells me, “if you can run fast enough.” She pulls herself up, gently brushing a few damp blades of grass from her jeans. “If you can find the spot where the star fell to Earth, then that person you love won’t die after all.” She disappears up the back porch steps and into the house, its windows blinking through sheer curtains that sway in the evening breeze.

As long as I can remember, my mother has been teaching me what my father calls Mother’s ways. I know to knock on wood when I think about good luck, like never breaking a bone in my body. If I don’t, the spirits of bad luck will scold me for boasting, and curse me with a broken ankle or arm, their way of reminding me of my place in the world. If you can’t find wood, knocking on your head is the next best thing. Knocking on glass or plastic is actually worse than not knocking at all. There are things you should never do, like break a mirror or use your oven on Sunday or let a bird fly into your house. Then there are things you must do: throw salt over your shoulder after you spill some, shake an empty purse at the full moon, say “bread and butter” if you’re walking down the street with a friend and something comes between the two of you, like a telephone pole or another person.

I have a recurring dream. In it, I am walking alone on a slick black road. There are no houses, no streetlights, no trees, nothing to distract my view of the sky, which is inky blue. It has a texture. If I reach up to touch it, it will feel like corduroy, millions of soft raised rows, perfectly spaced, like cornrows. There is only one star in the sky, and even though no one in the dream tells me this, I know it is because I am the last person on Earth.

All of my mother’s family is dead, except for one brother, Jack-Rogers, who lives in Somerset, but she doesn’t speak to him for reasons I’m not old enough to know yet, so he doesn’t really count. My mother had three younger brothers in all: Jack-Rogers, Eugene, and Joseph. Like most people in southwestern Pennsylvania, they had nicknames. Jack-Rogers, the oldest of the three, goes by “Roger.” Eugene, the middle brother, was known as “Boots,” and Joseph, the youngest, was called “Little Joe.” Boots and Little Joe both died in sad ways before I was born—one beaten to death during a drunken fight on a naval ship, one liver-poisoned from too much nerve medicine. I picture my uncle Boots drinking it straight from a brown glass bottle with no label, then counting the money in his sock drawer. My mother says when Boots died, she found two thousand dollars in that drawer, all in nickels and dimes. She talks about Boots and Little Joe like they’re still alive, her eyes moist and shiny, her cheeks suddenly a brighter pink as if blood is trying to pump itself out of her through invisible holes in her skin.

I peel myself from the wet summer grass of our backyard and wander inside the house through the large sliding-glass door. Every night before we go to bed, my mother closes the slider, then puts a stick in the door. It’s a piece of broom handle my father cut and shaped to fit in the grooves of the door’s sliding track, so no one can break in while we sleep. We call that piece of wood the-stick-in-the-door. We like to name things based on where they belong, like the-pen-by-the-phone, my mother’s black Bic ballpoint that lives in a small orange box of scrap paper next to the kitchen telephone. You better not move the-pen-by-the-phone, not even an inch, or there will be hell to pay, even though I’ve discovered my mother has entire packages of those pens stashed in the attic.

My father is in the kitchen—dark blue work jacket, collar up to his ears, his black lunch box symbolizing departure. Hungry cats circle the yellow rug as he makes wax paper–wrapped sandwiches, loads small cakes wrapped in cellophane, and stores the Coca-Cola he drinks, a bottle an hour, to stay awake. He is working the night shift tonight at Anchor Glass, the glass factory in the south end of town. I don’t say goodbye to him, convinced that if I do he will somehow die before 7:00 a.m., will not return to this brick home on this slanted street, these windows secured with shiny brass locks. I say good night instead, running through my catalog of different ways it can happen: heart attack, explosion, a fall into the furnace. I sleep in bed with my mother when he’s gone, check the-stick-in-the-door eight times before I try to fall asleep, listen to our house settle in the night.

“But our house isn’t very old. Why does it settle?” I ask my mother.

“It’s stretching itself out. You know, getting used to the land,” she says, half asleep already. At 7:00 a.m., she will begin her shift at Anchor Glass just as my father punches a stiff time card into a clock and walks up the long metal staircase that leads out of the underground furnace. My older sister Linda and I are big enough to sleep alone in the house for the fifteen minutes that pass between my mother’s departure and my father’s arrival.

I wake to the sound of my mother closing the front door—the soft thud the swollen wood releases, the ka-ching of the screen door. I run down the hallway but only manage to catch the back of her platinum-blond head as she walks briskly to her car, the used maroon Lincoln with vinyl seats that stick to our bare legs in summer.

Linda sleeps in her own bedroom, shaded by stiff burgundy drapes. She breathes in and out with a whistle, clutches her stuffed Pink Panther. She’s sewn a line of odd buttons down his tail. Linda’s bedroom furniture is ivory with antique-looking handles. She has a skinny chest of drawers taller than me, in which she keeps socks of every color imaginable. My mother arranges them in hues: reds, oranges, and yellows in the bottom drawers; blues and greens in the top drawers; neutrals in the middle. I open the drawers slowly, let the rows of color dizzy me, then close each one quietly.

I go back to my own room with the pink ballerina bed skirt with walls painted to match. I put one eye up to the slit between the window curtain panels, holding the other eye shut with a finger. I watch for a brown and white Chevy Blazer, and when it pulls up to the curb, I make sure it’s my father who gets out. He always comes home in one piece; mesh cap perched on his shiny black hair. I knock three times on the wooden window frame, slide down under my covers, and pretend to sleep.

★ ★ ★

According to the FBI, mass murder is defined as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between them. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location, three or more victims killed by one individual. When you’re eight years old, definitions make sense. You know how to look things up in your family’s fancy set of Britannica Encyclopedias, the rows of books that sleep in a wooden shelf next to the piano your sister plays. The pages are bible-thin and edged with gold, an effect that is only visible when the book is closed.

I’m in second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Swan, sends weekly newsletters home from school. When she signs her name, she draws a small beak on the capital S in her name, draws a row of ocean waves underneath, stiff peaks and low rockers. Ever since we learned how to write in cursive, I see serifs everywhere. I’m left-handed, so I’m taught to slant my paper and hold my pencil in a certain way. Left-handers are notorious for sloppy penmanship, but not me. Mrs. Swan praises my daily writing exercises. My hooks and stems are perfect. One day she invites Mrs. Lambert, the other second-grade teacher, to come watch me write that day’s message on a yellow sheet of paper. Today is Tuesday, March 5, 1985. McDonald’s is opening in Connellsville today. We have our own golden arches now!

Last summer, in California, a man named James O. Huberty walked into a McDonald’s near San Diego and started shooting. He killed twenty-one people and himself. On 20/20, Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters described the event, but they didn’t include the perpetrator in death counts. The killer is always separate. He (it’s usually he, but I know women kill people, too) doesn’t deserve to be in the same group as the victims, even though they’re all dead now and how could it possibly matter whether or not you place their names together in print, whether you speak their names in the same sentence? I understand the emotion of it, how the victims’ families need that separation between the murderer and the murdered, but I sometimes feel sorry for the killers, and that makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with me.

Every day, Mrs. Swan draws lines on the chalkboard with a five-prong wooden chalk holder. She starts on the left side and walks across to the right, her shoes making hard sounds on the terrazzo floor. The lines turn the chalkboard into a sheet of notebook paper, and she writes our daily writing on it. We copy her sentences, then she collects our papers, returns them to us the following day, with notes of encouragement or rubber stamps of red ink smiley faces. After daily writing, we stand for the pledge of allegiance, then bow our heads for a moment of silence. We recite the seven continents as Mrs. Swan points to each on a world map she pulls from a blue metal canister above the chalkboard. We practice our directions—north, south, east, and west. Even in second grade, it’s important to know how to read a map, to know where you’re going. James O. Huberty’s apartment was only three blocks from the McDonald’s in San Diego. He didn’t need a map.

Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where I’ve lived all of my eight years, is a small city on the Youghiogheny River. We call it the Yough for short. It’s pronounced with a hard k sound (Yock), and it’s usually high and muddy. There’s an arched bridge that crosses the Yough and when we drive over it, I watch for fishermen, men in rubber waders like my father, who stand at the edge of the bank and cast invisible lines for fish. The men don’t move much—they are still as statues. My mother can’t understand why my father enjoys spending hours in muddy water up to his waist. He sews carpet on the soles of his waders, his special technique to avoid slipping on the rocks.

Trout season starts in April each year. My father will fish the Yough a few times, but he prefers Dunbar Creek (which we pronounce crick). On days off from the factory, he wakes before dawn and sets out with his old yellow cooler, his salvaged plastic bread bags (for holding cleaned fish), his milk jugs of frozen water (makeshift ice packs), his fly rod and reel. Baby food jars hold salmon eggs; old Cool Whip and butter containers house live meal worms, holes poked in the lids so you can smell them, the sawdust they burrow into, their bodies curled tightly inside. Do they know their place in the food chain? I hope they don’t feel a thing when my father slides one onto a hook, that little bubble of pus oozing out.

My father tells made-up stories to Linda and me at bedtime, when our mother works the night shift. We beg him to tell us these stories over and over again, so much so that we finally convince him to record them on our Sears tape recorder, so we can hear his stories any time we want, calling his voice into the air from a thin spool of tape that winds around our plastic Memorex cassette. He tells his own version of The Three Little Pigs. In his version there’s a cool pig, a serious pig, and a stuttering pig. He also tells us tales of a young boy named Egglebert Humperdinky, whose life, I begin to notice, resembles my father’s. Egglebert has three older sisters—Betty, Barbara, and Becky. He lives in a small village in the woods where he and his brother get into trouble.

In my favorite story, Egglebert visits an old village man named Mr. Kovach. Mr. Kovach tells of a spirit called The Shadow that appears in the woods on certain nights around midnight. The Shadow makes a clicking sound, that’s how you know it’s there. Mr. Kovach says that when he was a boy, he heard that sound one night, as he lay in his bed half asleep. He ran outside to see what it was and in the woods behind his house he saw a light, like a dim lantern, moving along a path. He followed and followed the light for nearly a mile, when suddenly it disappeared. Poof. The light just went out. This happened several nights in a row, until finally Mr. Kovach decided to begin marking the spot where the light disappeared. It turned out that the light went out at the exact same spot in the woods each and every night.

Mr. Kovach decided to dig in that spot and sure enough, he found a real honest to goodness ruby in the ground—The Shadow’s treasure. Egglebert Humperdinky becomes obsessed with the legend of The Shadow. He lies awake night after night listening for the clicking sound, until finally he hears it. Each time my father tells the story, Egglebert finds a different treasure when he digs in that spot in the dark woods—a velvet bag full of pearls, a stack of gold coins, a raw diamond.

After the stories are over, my father goes down to the basement to watch the local news and Johnny Carson. I sit at the top of the stairs and listen to Johnny’s theme song play as he appears from the rainbow-colored curtain that I’m sure would feel like real silk if only I could touch it. Later, I lie in my bed perfectly still, so the ruffles on my bedspread don’t make a sound. I want to be silent, so I hold my breath in as long as I can and listen for The Shadow, the steady clicking sound that must resemble a beating heart. I never hear it, just my own breath when I finally exhale.

★ ★ ★

My sister Linda, her friend Rochelle, and I are in Linda’s bedroom—red shag carpet, cream furniture with fake antique handles, the walls textured, thick with layers of white paint. The windows hide behind heavy red curtains, the kind of drapes you open with a rope and pulley system, a dozen sharp metal hooks we’re forbidden to touch.

We’re huddled around a French telephone, its elegant mouthpiece curved like an ivory horn.

“Just do it, already,” Linda commands.

“You do it. It’s your idea,” I say.

Rochelle laughs through her nose. She’s lying on her side, propped up on one arm, fingering the three-inch mass of neon jelly bracelets on her wrist. “You’re scared,” she says.

“I am not!” I insist. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, inspecting the shiny pennies in my cordovan loafers. My mother taught me that color—cordovan. It just looks like burgundy to me.

We’re trying to prove a rumor going around our elementary school: If you dial 666 on your telephone, the devil will answer.

“Not necessarily the devil himself,” Rochelle explains. “You could get one of his helpers.” She tugs on her chewing gum until it breaks, snapping her chin, a sticky string of pale pink dangling.

“The devil has helpers?” I ask. “Like Santa’s elves?”

“Sure, something like that,” Linda says, giving Rochelle a look, as if to say she’s impossible, mimicking my mother’s expression when I ask too many questions.

“Okay, but what do I say when he picks up?” I need to know.

“Just say, sorry, wrong number,” Rochelle says.

I imagine telephone lines sleeping in the ground, red and yellow and black, spiderlike fingers stretched beneath earth. The devil sits in a leather chair, somewhere in hell. I grab the receiver from its pearly cradle, and dial.

★ ★ ★

My mother is a storyteller, too, but she tells true stories. Some stories belong to others, and she tells them, over and over again, because my mother knows the shape of suffering. She tells me about a young man who is about to propose to his high school sweetheart. He’s driven to her house hundreds of times over the years, but on this particular night, he drives with a diamond ring in his pocket, a crushed velvet box that will surely open with a creak as he kneels in front of her in her parents’ living room, in her childhood home on Christmas Eve, turkey or ham in the oven, glazed with butter or honey or brown sugar. On this night, the most important night of this young life, the man loses control of his car on the icy street, the one he’s driven too many times to count, really, and he is thrown from the vehicle, splashing through the windshield and onto the inky pavement on a night without a moon, for it is certain that most bad things happen during a new moon. When the police arrive, they find him facedown, the diamond ring, somehow freed from its box, glittering on the frozen pavement beside him.

In another story, a teenage girl wakes up on the morning of her birthday. She is a spoiled girl, and she’s asked for a pair of brown suede boots for her birthday, expects them gift-wrapped and waiting for her at the breakfast table. Instead, her father presents her with a card. There is no money inside, no sign of the suede boots. The girl screams at her father, storms out the kitchen door and off to school, drop dead, her words to her father, echoing over her shoulder. A few hours later, the girl’s father has a massive heart attack and dies. When the girl returns home later that evening, after spending the day at the hospital with her mother and dead father, she finds a pink box on her bed, tied in red ribbon. Inside, under tissue paper that crinkles, she finds the brown suede boots. Her father had them all along.

Some stories belong to my mother, if it’s possible to own a story, to carry it inside a small case you wear, perhaps one that fits neatly inside your shoe, invisible to most people. She only takes the stories out of the case for me, not Linda, not my father, not the women she talks to on the phone. Just me. Sometimes, I feel like the stories were written just for me, so that maybe I can carry a small case of my own stories some day, so I will remember the shape of suffering.

When my mother was born, she came out wrong. No, she didn’t slide out feet first—she was a girl. According to her father, she was supposed to be a boy. It was 1941 and my mother was the first child of JR and Pearl Richter. My grandfather, whose full name was Jack-Rogers Richter, wanted nothing to do with a daughter. In fact, he didn’t even lay eyes on my mother until she was seven years old. My mother, little Gloria (who would later be nicknamed Ginny by her high school classmates who decided her name was ugly, making people eternally assume in error that her given name is Virginia) was whisked away to her grandmother Lindermann’s house. Granny Lindermann was Pearl’s mother. She lived alone just a few blocks from JR and Pearl.

Everyone in Connellsville remembers my grandfather. When he was out and about, he was the big talker, the big spender, the big joker. At home, he was the big drinker, the big fighter. Pearl wore long sleeves even on the hottest summer days, and everyone in the house came to dread Sunday nights, when he would be the most drunk, the most wild, the most dangerous. My mother remembers hiding under overturned mattresses, covering Pearl’s bruises with heavy pancake makeup. She remembers Pearl hanging wet wash on the clothesline in freezing weather because the electricity had been shut off for nonpayment and JR had been missing for two weeks, leaving no money in the house for them to live on.

When my mother was born, JR exiled her to Granny Lindermann’s and didn’t bat an eye. He and Pearl went on to have three more children—all sons—and seemed to be just fine without little Gloria until Granny Lindermann died when my mom was seven years old. Of course, she was sent back to live with her parents, to meet her little brothers for the first time, and to finally meet her father. Pearl had visited my mother secretly a few times.

My mother remembers sitting on the porch on Atlas Avenue crying and crying into a handkerchief. She was so scared to go home. I think of this scene now and I want to reach down into the well of time and somehow hold my mother close, closer than she’d ever let me be in real life—to smell her hair, to let her bury her head on my shoulder, while I whisper in her ear. Mommy, I wish you didn’t have to go.

My father is from Lemont Furnace, a village in the foothills of the Laurel Mountains. My father’s family lived in a valley known unofficially as Yauger Hollow. Residents pronounce it Yaga Halla. This kind of thing makes my mother cringe, her eyebrows wrinkling like angry caterpillars, her mouth pursing into a painful-looking sneer. “They might as well call it Dog Patch,” she says. My mother doesn’t exactly come from high class herself, but her father did go to college, and he worked as an engineer on the CSX Railroad. My parents occasionally engage in a friendly game of Who Was Poorest Growing Up, but my father always wins quickly and easily as soon as the subject of indoor plumbing comes up or something like churning one’s own butter or cleaning your clothes by hitting rocks against them in a stream.

My father grew up in a house that his father built with his own hands. The rooms didn’t have regular doors that closed. Instead, they had curtains that were hung from thin rods or, in some cases, just pinned over the doorway with straight pins. My mother grew up in a house the size of a funeral home—rooms and rooms with hardwood floors and beveled windows and a wraparound porch. The house is so big, it is now being converted into four apartments, and although the paint is peeling and the wooden pillars in front have been whittled down by the rain and the wind, it is still a grand house. The old place is in South Connellsville, not far from Anchor, so we must pass it as we drive along Pittsburgh Street on our way to drop someone off or pick someone up from work.

Weekends were horrible times for my mother as a child. Her father drank from sundown Friday to sundown Sunday, dragging himself to his railroad job on Monday mornings. My mother learned to hate Sundays most of all, for this was when her father was the most drunk, when objects sailed around the room, when the children tried to stand in front of their mother, a movable living shield. To this day my mother hates Sundays and feels a quiet release of joy when she wakes up and it’s finally Monday morning. She remembers this feeling in her bones, has carried it all this way, all these years, to me.

My mother wears these stories, and others. They live somewhere inside her. My mother is a well and these stories spring from her. She can control when they come out. She gives me a sprinkle here and there, a small dollop of sadness when I need it, when I forget about suffering, about our history. Don’t let yourself be happy, because that’s when it will find you. The stories will always find me, just as they have always found my mother.

Some stories end. They end and exist in a space where things are final. They won’t be told again because you’ve already learned from that story. You know what the story knows. But other stories, they never end. Instead, they continue to grow, continue to be told, the feelings in them felt over and over, a living, breathing part of you, an organ, like skin or a lung. Sometimes, you can stand there and watch your own history inflate like a balloon. If you let it go, it will fly into the air, and you can watch it get smaller and smaller, watch its slanted path, its white ribbon tail waving surrender as the balloon becomes a quarter, a nickel, a penny, a dime, then nothing at all.