CHAPTER 2

Throw Salt over Your Shoulder

Bad things are happening everywhere in 1985, but never here, never in Connellsville. We can look out and see the bad things happening. We can read newspaper articles and watch news reports. Sometimes we can even feel the bad things, just sense them—a general idea of doom. Sometimes I feel like I’m a tiny pebble in a river, and bad things wash over my body and I can only lie there and watch, the bad things rubbing against me, taking bits of me with them, like the process of erosion we learn about in Earth Science class. We are surrounded by river here, by streams and creeks. Water is trickling somewhere right now, even if you can’t hear it, can’t make out the slight ticking of it all. Water is alive; my father knows this. He studies water temperature, currents, high-water marks around bridges. He studies the fish under the water, too, knows when they’re spawning, when they’re more likely to eat from a hook.

I am scared for my father when he’s out fishing. He doesn’t even know how to swim, yet there he’ll be, chest-high in a dark river, wearing rubber overalls, his fishing license tacked to the back of his cap with a large safety pin. I worry about a lot of things for him, not just drowning, which is a recurring nightmare. I’ve seen my father’s bloated body pulled from the river in my dreams. I’ve seen him laid out on a metal drawer in a morgue; I’ve seen a tag tied to his big toe. I worry about someone robbing him, about poisonous snakes attacking him, his heart giving out suddenly. I’ve seen him clutching his chest and collapsing into a pile of wet leaves on a riverbank. I worry about a crazed murderer jumping off the train at the station in Connellsville, right next to the river bank, right there on River Street, which flooded once, and became its name.

Ted Bundy did something like that. He took a bus as far as he could, which turned out to be Gainesville, Florida, and that’s where he bludgeoned two college girls to death in their bedrooms that must have been decorated the way girls’ rooms tend to be decorated. Posters taped to the walls and bundles of dried flowers hanging upside down. What’s stopping someone like that from coming here? What makes this the place where nothing bad ever happens? People always think bad things won’t happen to them. What makes us them?

My visions are deep and colorful, full of senses. I can smell my dreams, taste them sometimes, wake with my mouth still full of dreams. I don’t tell anyone, though, just keep it to myself. My mother says you should never talk about a dream before you’ve eaten breakfast, unless you want it to come true. I’m not sure why yet, but our town feels guilty. It feels like there’s something we’ve done, and even we don’t know what it is.

I look up the word bludgeon in the dictionary, wonder why it only seems to be used for a certain kind of beating. The entry says bludgeon: verb [trans.] beat (someone) repeatedly with a bludgeon or other heavy object. The person is placed in parentheses, to separate the victim from the one who beats, the one who kills. Our parents don’t hit us the way their own parents hit them. My father was whipped with switches from trees, my mother with belts and I’m not sure what else. They say they would never want to hurt us that way. I know kids who get spanked at home, get paddled at school by the principal, Mr. Hamacher.

We call it getting “cracks,” and Jimmy Carter holds the record for the most cracks in one sitting. He’s a chatty boy, unrelated to the ex-president, with red hair and freckles who looks like Howdy Doody, buckteeth and all. Jimmy and I are related by marriage on my father’s side. Something about my father’s second cousin marrying his father’s third cousin. It’s very remote, but Jimmy talks about it all the time to embarrass me. Me being the good little girl and him being the one who holds the record for cracks.

★ ★ ★

In our family, when we play Monopoly, we each have a favorite game piece. My father is the horse, reared back as if ready to gallop, front legs bent in midair. My mother is the iron. She likes to press anything she can get her hands on—jeans, T-shirts, even the red and blue paisley handkerchiefs my father blows his nose into. Linda is the car, an old-fashioned racer that reminds me of the turnpike ride at Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh. The cars let you believe you’re steering, when really they run along a thin metal rail so you can never crash. I am the little Scotty dog, ears and tail pointing up, ready to follow you at a moment’s notice.

Like most families, we covet Boardwalk and Park Place. If my mother buys them, she’ll build giant towers on them like Donald Trump, the real estate tycoon who is one of her idols. When she finds out Donald has a little boy around my age, Donald Jr., she concocts a plan for he and I to marry someday. Then I can whisk her away from factory life, and she can get a job at the Estée Lauder counter, selling creamy blush and tubes of jet-black mascara, wands that look like small caterpillars and make a soft sound when you slide them out of their shiny cases.

I like to look at the “luxury tax” square, that shiny diamond ring glistening from the game board. My mother has a small diamond ring, but she never wears it. You can’t wear rings at the factory because jewelry can get caught in the machinery, make you lose a finger, or even a chunk of your hand. Penny Horvac, my mother’s friend from C crew, comes over sometimes, and I try not to stare at the nubs of what used to be her middle and pinky fingers, resting on the orange vinyl tablecloth as she smokes with her good hand.

Linda collects green houses whenever possible, builds red hotels that look like fire erupting across her corner of the game board. My father always says something when he rolls the dice. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes or Come on seven. His chants usually seem to work, so I try it, too. When it’s not her turn, my mother looks off into the distance through the sliding-glass door, tilts her head toward the kitchen to check the time on the clock above the harvest-gold stove. It’s her turn to work the night shift tonight, so she’s counting down the minutes until seven o’clock, when she’ll disappear into her bedroom and rest in darkness for three hours. The rest of us must go down to the basement during that time, and we mustn’t breathe too loudly or jump around, until ten o’clock. At that time, my mother emerges to prepare herself for work, a sliver of light under the bathroom door to indicate she is awake.

I sit on the fuzzy blue toilet seat cover and watch her get ready. She coats her face and neck with a cotton ball soaked in beige liquid makeup, rubs her cheeks with a dab of lipstick instead of blush, sets her hair in hot rollers, and finishes the look with a heavy mist of both Adorn aerosol hairspray and Youth Dew perfume. I like the dizzy feeling I get from the fumes, thinking this is what it must feel like to be drunk.

The factory is called Anchor Glass, and it’s mostly underground, at the south end of town. The only building you can see from the street is the office. It is made of tan brick with pale stone columns, like it belongs in Clash of the Titans. Inside the factory, beneath the earth, people make glass containers—bottles, jars, jugs—vessels that will eventually hold vinegar, beer, baby food, mustard, all the staples of life. My father works in an area called The Hot End. This is where they keep the furnaces, where my father sweats in dark blue coveralls, his name sewn on a patch over his heart. He shovels a black sand mixture called batch into the ovens, where it melts into molds stamped with numbers that come out raised like Braille. I’m sure everything glows orange and red in the dark of The Hot End. I imagine my father holding a hot branding rod as if he’s about to mark a steer. I see horns, the animal struggling, hear a low moan, exhale.

My mother works in The Cold End. Despite its name, the temperature in this area of the factory hovers somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty degrees, but that’s nothing compared to The Hot End, where my father works in triple-digit heat. In The Cold End, my mother works as a selector. She works with longneck green bottles that will eventually become Rolling Rock beer bottles once they leave Anchor Glass and are shipped to the brewing company in nearby Latrobe, Pennsylvania. The bottles run on conveyor belt lines, and they are automatically tested during their journey with various pieces of machinery. One of the tests is a plunger test, which simulates the bottle being filled with liquid. It’s designed to determine whether or not the bottle is strong enough to withstand the pressure of filling. My mother supervises the machinery, like a glass babysitter of sorts. She pulls samples off the line for quality assurance, tests them for consistency, so they are uniform. No bottle should be unique.

Years ago, the factory made a now-discontinued line of tableware—rose-colored plates and cups and saucers. They called it Roseware, and you could see through it, almost like looking through a pair of glasses, to see a happier world on the other side.

There are things we can’t talk about in this house, not because someone has told us we can’t, but because no one has told us we can. In our world, in the child world, most everything is black or white, love or hate, rest or play. There is seldom a middle place. You are either in Mother’s way or she doesn’t see you at all. Her line of sight runs straight through people’s hearts. Bodies become invisible, and the most important ones are dead in the ground or rotting in a mausoleum off Route 119. My grandparents are buried there, not in dirt, but in stone drawers. I read in a magazine once that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death, picture my grandmother with wild gray strands thin as wire, my grandfather’s toenails yellow and curled. I swear to Linda that I would open one of those drawers if I could. She dares me, double dares, double dog dares.

At the change of each season, we put the little black stool in the trunk of the Lincoln and drive to the cemetery, where my mother climbs out and uses the stool to retrieve memorial vases full of silk flowers from the burial chambers. She takes them to DeMath’s Florist in town, has a woman named Tibby create a new arrangement to fit the new season. Sunflowers for summer, mums for fall, poinsettias for winter, lilies for spring. I like to pull the old flowers out of the vases, to release the plastic stems from green foam that used to be spongy but now crumbles, dried out from the winds on top of that hill where the mausoleum looks down on the highway, no lights to guide you there at night. You just have to know where it is. You just have to know that your family is sleeping there, behind golden nameplates wearing tiny days, months, and years.

★ ★ ★

I throw salt over my shoulder when I spill some. I stay up on New Year’s Eve to eat grapes at midnight.

The idea is that if you eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve, you will have good luck for the year. You have to eat the grapes during the twelve strokes of midnight, one grape for each month of the upcoming year. Any less and you’ll risk an incomplete cycle of luck. If you only eat eleven, you’ll have one month of disaster. And if that isn’t bad enough, you won’t know which month it will be.

To my mother, good luck equals money. She has many strategies for me to become rich. She instructs me to drink as many milk bubbles as I can because each bubble represents one hundred dollars I’ll have as an adult. I can’t wait for the milk jug to be nearly empty, because I know most bubbles live at the bottom. When my mother pours the last bit into my cup, I chug greedily, and she smiles.

There are lots of superstitions about good luck and prosperity. Shaking an empty purse at the full moon is thought to bring riches. The first time I do it, I’m disappointed because I think actual money will appear in the purse the next morning. I wake up and race to the small leather purse, a gift my father had brought back from a hunting trip in New Mexico, dissolving into tears when faced with its emptiness.

But my mother assures me that superstitions aren’t magic. They can’t make things happen immediately. “They’re like insurance,” she explains. “Sometimes you need to do certain things to make sure bad things won’t happen. And other times you need to do certain things to give good things a helping hand.”

I can control the world by following these superstitions and by counting things. I count the sips of water I drink at the school water fountain, the number of jelly beans I eat (it’s unlucky to eat an odd number), the seconds I spend washing my hands. I knock on wood after most thoughts. Throughout the day, I keep track of all the knocks I owe the universe, then run to the bathroom and knock over and over again on the wooden door of the linen closet that holds neatly folded bath towels, families of shampoo bottles, and bars of soap in beautiful rows.

If our house is a body, the kitchen is the heart, full of dark flesh, full of blood. It’s where my father prepares gutted fish for dinner, where he grinds raw deer meat into burger, cuts liver into thin slices. He wraps it all in foil, labels the packages with a fat black permanent marker, the kind kids at school say you can sniff and get high from the fumes. Every year in November, our kitchen becomes a butcher shop, the metallic smell of animal blood thick in the air. The grinder is loud as it tears apart deer muscle, my father tamping slabs of red meat from the feed pan into the tube with his bare hands. The ground meat oozes from the holes through various dies, like our Play-Doh Fun Factory. You can make your own shapes, mold it into anything your want.

My father grinds the meat into a giant glass bowl and then breaks it into one-pound servings for future spaghetti sauce, chili, meatloaf. We don’t eat beef in this house. Everything you would make with beef, we make with deer meat. Linda and I like to fool our visiting friends into eating it, assuring them they’re eating pieces of cow in their chili. Only after they’ve cleaned their bowl, sopped up every delicious bit with their buttered English muffin, do we reveal the truth. “You just ate Bambi!” we like to tease.

Our kitchen is also the place where the sweets are stored—packaged cookies and snack cakes that my sister and I eat in large quantities. We’ll split an entire box of Twinkies, unwrapping new ones while the last ones are still in our mouths, the way chain-smokers light a new cigarette with the end of an old one. We’ll eat a whole package of Oreos, dunking them in a Tupperware bowl of milk. We’ll eat store-bought frosting from the can, brown sugar by the spoonful. Anything sweet goes directly into our waiting mouths. Afterward, we’ll lie on the couch in the basement holding our sides, half asleep on sugar, but feeling half loved, too.

When my mother works the afternoon shift, she has to leave for the factory right before we come home from school. I’ll enter the house, throw my book bag on the floor, and run to the kitchen to find meatloaf and potatoes baking in the oven, a pot of candied carrots on a back burner, bubbling in a glaze of brown sugar sauce. There are wire racks of oatmeal raisin cookies on the counter, still warm to the touch. In the bathroom, her perfume and hairspray are still in the air, a fine mist that coats the blue edges of the sink, leaves spots of residue on the mirror. I see myself in the mirror, but also see her. We have the same prominent nose, the same heart-shaped face. Her hair is blond now, but it used to be dark brown like mine. In the girl factory, something must have gone wrong. I look like my mother on the outside, but not the inside.

★ ★ ★

I know things. I don’t know how I know them, but I do. I know that if I rub my finger against my underwear, right there in the middle of me, something happens. Sometimes I can’t stand doing it because it scares me and sometimes I think I might break myself, but I can’t stand not doing it, either. The idea of it teases me as I lay in my bed at night. The house is dark and quiet, not even my parents whispering from their room or sounds of the television from Linda’s little white thirteen-inch set. The moment feels like it will last forever, yet when it’s over it feels unreal, dreamlike. Did it really happen at all? How can something that feels so big last for only an instant? I don’t know what it’s really called, but in my mind I call it reaching the dew point.

We’ve been learning about weather in school, about the water cycle, how rain evaporates, becomes the soft white bodies of clouds, how steam condenses into water, how the process never ends. The dew point is the temperature to which air must be cooled for water vapor to condense into water and make dew. It’s almost springtime, and when I walk to school in the morning, there are globes of dew on the stiff grass, the bright green sod my mother had the landscaping men put down so that we would always have a beautiful lawn.

My father wanted to start a vegetable garden out back, like the kind he and his siblings tended to as a child in Yaga Halla. “In the summertime, between the garden and my fishing, I can catch and grow most of our food,” he said. “Your mom will barely have to go to the grocery store.” My mother vetoed the idea, mouthed the words “Dog Patch” to me behind his back, rolled her eyes beneath lashes clumped with too much black mascara. I remember watching the landscaping company dig up the yard and then roll out the sod like carpet, long strands they cut to size so my mother wouldn’t have to look at brown grass because she doesn’t like dead things, only dead people.

Surely, I must have my own temperature, surely part of me can evaporate, can rise up into the sky and become a cloud. This is what I think about when I rub the washed cotton of my underwear against that spot, the center of me. The water, the vapor, the clouds. The water, the vapor, the clouds.

There are three basic types of clouds—cumulus, stratus, cirrus—and I write a report about them for school, make a small book cover for it out of blue construction paper, cotton glued to the front in the shape of my favorite clouds, cumulus. They are fair-weather clouds, mid to low level, and if you see them, you know it will be a beautiful day. Some days in Connellsville, there are no clouds at all. Those days make me nervous, the way my mother gets nervous when I hover around her. She wants the air near her clean, free of little girls and our milky breath, our braids slapping against our backs when we walk.

Mother insists on doing my hair every day. Barrettes, headbands, side ponytails, or a straight part down the middle and two braids so tight you can see my clean pink scalp, a perfect line dissecting my dark head. My head feels sore at night, when my hair is finally freed, hanging in crimped waves down to my waist. When I attempt to part my hair myself, my mother says it’s as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. I spend a long time looking in the mirror that hangs above my pressboard dresser, trying to tame my hair into that perfect part, licking the comb to taste the oil, that faint animal smell, the only way I recognize myself.