Each year, my parents leased our fields to one of the larger local farms, and spring rumbled in with the roar of the cultivators circling the perimeters of our land. There were no other children living close by; our nearest neighbors, the Luchter-hands, ran a horse farm three quarters of a mile down the road. My brother and I grew up in the company of beets, which stained our hands and mouths a bloody red; during luckier years, there were sweet peas or snap beans, sugar-sweet to the tongue. Once, the renters sowed field corn, which attracted rats the size of gourds. But the summer I was ten and Sam was nine, they planted sixty acres in sunflowers, and by August our house was surrounded by a fiery corona that swallowed the usual deep summer greens in an elaborate golden yawn. When the damp wind blew off Lake Michigan, we could hear the petals rustling, sexual and fierce, and Sam and I paused during our games, whirling to look over our shoulders; it was a summer we never felt completely alone. We avoided the cellar, the smokehouse, the walk-in closet in our bedroom; at night, we leapt into our beds so that anything lurking beneath them wouldn’t be able to grab our ankles and pull us down. Mornings, I’d wake up and look out the window, and there would be the bright, broad faces of the sunflowers, all facing east like so many wise kings. In his bed on the other side of the room, Sam was still sleeping, his head thrown so far back that his body formed a question mark. Even now, the memory of him frozen in that vulnerable arc fills me with an aching protectiveness, as if he were my child and not my brother.
That summer, Sam and I played only those games that involved wearing dark clothes and crouching behind shrubs and using words like covert and operation and ambush. A boy at school had an older brother who’d gone to work for the CIA; when we pressed him for details, he combed his hair with his fingers and said, “Classified,” in a way that let the rest of us know there were things in the world we had not yet begun to imagine. I remember that I wasn’t discouraged when I heard that girls could not be spies, any more than I was discouraged by all the other things that, as a girl, I wasn’t supposed to do, because I had a vague idea that becoming an adult meant turning into a man. It was not a fully conscious thought, but it was present in the same way that God was present, a concept you trusted you would understand when the appropriate moment arrived.
Until first grade or so, I had been just as securely convinced that I could grow into any animal I wished, and after careful consideration I chose to become a cat. To encourage this metamorphosis, I made cat noises and licked my skin and ate cat chow from the house cats’ bowl beneath the sink. I pinned a piece of twine to the seat of my pants, wriggling my butt to make it swing from side to side. Once, I managed to elude my mother and board the school bus that way, and the older boys nearly strangled me with my tail before the driver intervened. Still, I believed in my right to choose my destiny, and when one of the semiwild barn cats had kits, I recognized this as a moment of truth and knelt beside her to nurse. But she scratched me—three parallel lines across my forehead, which lingered for weeks like a signature.
The summer of the sunflowers, I decided that the years I had spent practicing for cathood had had a purpose after all: They’d given me all the skills I needed to be an effective spy. I could scale high walls and jump off cliffs and fight dirty, using my teeth and nails; I could contort my body to fit into small, dark places; I could move with the fluid stealth of a cat intent on a kill. Of course, Sam wanted to be a spy too. After morning chores, we filled our afternoons with secret missions, ambushes, and code words like smokey bear and 10-4 charlie. We painted elaborate, colorful scenes of spies climbing up the walls of castles and parachuting out of airplanes, and these we hung above our beds for inspiration. But by August, we were forced to face our greatest limitation. There was nobody to spy on. My father was seldom home. My mother ruined the mood by saying things like: “If you want to know something about me, just ask. There’s no need to follow me around.” The Luchterhands down the road were not an option because of the stallions; we remembered, from a visit to the barns in spring, the sound of those gunshot hoofbeats and high, crazed whinnies, the chill of those rolling devil eyes. And so we loitered around the house and barn, waiting for a mission, trying not to notice the watched feeling that followed us everywhere we went, invisible as breath and just as urgent, brushing the tops of the fields like wind. My father had grown up on this farm; it had been a hard life, one he rarely discussed. But he’d told us about the German POWs that my grandfather, himself a German immigrant, had hired as cheap summer labor. On hot, still nights, we thought we could hear them: their choked, guttural voices, the music of their chains, the hungry scrape of their bent tin spoons as they ate beneath the quarter moon.
My mother believed in intuition, God, and the power of prayer. The future came to her in quiet dreams and chilly flashes, a gift she’d had ever since her oldest sisters were killed in the cannery fire. One week after the funerals, she told her youngest sister, our auntie Thil, “You come away from that stove,” and seconds later, the stovepipe exploded. She sketched my father’s face on a napkin the day before they met. When she carried me, she dreamed that I appeared to her, a perfect baby girl who asked to be named Abigail Elise. Where did I come from? I asked whenever she told the story, and then she’d describe the netherworld she’d seen, a universe of unassigned souls, churning in a sort of primordial soup, each shrilling, Choose me! Choose me!
Foolishness, my father said. But the time my mother begged him to stay home from work, he did. Later, we learned that the highway had been closed, due to an accident involving four cars. Two people were killed. How had my mother known? She just did. The artificial nature of spying puzzled her, though she tried her best to play along, to help us out and, in the process, convert our interest into something useful. She sent me to the garden to “ambush” slugs with saucers of beer; in the morning, she suggested that Sam “case the beans” for signs of Japanese beetles.
“That’s not the same,” we told her, but neither Sam nor I could explain why. We flung ourselves at the furniture and moped: two combat-trained, sophisticated, deadly bored spies. It was this boredom, rather than our former sneakiness, that began to wear at her nerves. One day late in August, she decided that we could take our bikes into town, three miles away. We were to pick up some dishwashing detergent at Becker’s Foodmart, stop for ten minutes at the dime store—just to look—and then we were to head straight back home.
For years, we had begged to go all the way into Horton by ourselves. We dug our battered Schwinns out of the shed and coasted down the long gravel driveway toward the road, making elaborate hand signals in case my mother was watching from the kitchen window. It was a warm, humid day. The east wind off Lake Michigan, which usually cooled our afternoons, had been stalled by a low, gray bank of clouds at the horizon. Buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace choked the ditches, and every now and then we passed a pale green patch of wild asparagus, delicate as mist. At first, we raced each other, because the flat length of road was a novelty, but after a mile or so we settled into a steady rhythm, side by side, and we felt how small we were, surrounded by fields of corn and alfalfa and, occasionally, cows. They were Holsteins mostly, and because of the heat, they clumped together beneath what shade they could find, usually small stands of trees that the first German settlers had left behind. Sometimes there was an old foundation beneath those trees, a boarded-up well, a scrap of rotting fence—all that was left of an original homestead. The cows watched us pass, releasing powerful streams of urine that splattered their legs and bellies, their silent mouths working, working.
Horton was the sort of town that happened all at once. It began with an old grain mill, the only warning before an eruption of close-set houses that led toward the downtown. If you looked between those houses to the west, you could see the fields that stretched behind them; if you looked between the houses to the east, you could see more fields, and a glimmer of aquamarine that was Lake Michigan. We propped our bikes against a telephone pole and went into Becker’s Foodmart. As usual, it was crowded with cans of food that no one ate unless it was a holiday: cranberry relish, Boston brown bread, mandarin oranges. The Dessert of the Day was always arranged on a long, low table by the grocery baskets. This time, it was a strawberry shortcake, cut into crumbling cubes. My mother never let us try these samples, though she sometimes took a plastic cup of the complimentary coffee for herself. Who knows how long that’s been sitting there? she’d whisper, sweeping us past and into the sour meat smell. Now we popped the largest pieces into our mouths, but they were dry, too sweet, disappointing.
Mr. Becker prided himself on greeting everyone who came into his store. All children looked alike to him, so he simplified the matter by calling boys Bobby and girls Susie. Today he was stocking soup; we tried to slip past him to the household aisle, but there were jingle bells attached to the electric doors, and he’d heard them when we came in.
“Susie! There’s my girl,” he bellowed, dropping the carton of soup cans and charging up the aisle. “What can I get for you now?”
“We know where everything is,” I said, in the voice I saved for adults like Mr. Becker. But Mr. Becker dropped one cold, heavy hand on each of our shoulders.
“What have you got to say for yourself!” he shouted at Sam. Sam looked at the floor and did not speak; I fixed my gaze on a pyramid of Fancy Artichoke Hearts. We both knew that when attacked by a bull or a bear, your best option was to play dead. “Cat got your tongue?” Mr. Becker asked, and then, mercifully, he released us and chuckled his way back to the soup. Sam and I headed for the dishwashing liquid, embarrassed for both ourselves and Mr. Becker. Rounding the next aisle, staring grimly ahead, we saw a tall, thin girl slipping a package of Hostess Ding Dongs into her purse.
She was about fourteen. She wore silver sandals and a gold ankle chain and frayed jean shorts that crept so high you knew she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Her shirt was a man’s white T-shirt with the sleeves and the collar ripped off. A gold star, the kind the teachers stuck on our papers when we spelled everything right, was glued to her cheek. She looked over at us, a slow, too casual glance, and we got very busy comparing the prices of Ivory and Palmolive. Without saying anything about it to each other, we knew we had gone undercover, real spies with a very real mission: follow the thief. I imagined our names in the Saint Ignatius Parish Bulletin, perhaps with a picture of us shaking Father Van Dan’s hand. I imagined Mr. Becker rewarding us with cash, prizes, maybe even a trip somewhere.
“What should we do?” Sam whispered. The girl was heading toward the automatic doors; they sizzled open and she disappeared, like an angel, into a pool of light.
“Go pay and then meet me outside,” I said, pushing the money into his hand, and I walked quickly up the aisle and plunged into the sudden bright heat of the street outside. The girl was standing at the edge of the curb as if she were waiting for me. Her purse bulged at her side. “Hi,” I chirped, trying to be cool. “Hey,” she said noncommittally. I thought that perhaps I’d seen her before, one of several girls who liked to sit smoking on the half-wall in front of the bank. She braced herself against the telephone pole where we had left our bikes and lifted first one foot and then the other to unbuckle her silver sandals. Each had a braided noose, meant to ensnare her big toe, and I thought I’d never seen shoes that looked so terribly cruel. They reminded me of the traps my uncle Olaf kept hanging in his basement, with bits of fur still clinging to the metal. There were red marks on her toes, and she rubbed at them the way an animal licks a hurt. I wanted to touch them; I wanted to ask her name. I wanted to be beautiful in the way she was beautiful, wearing silver trap shoes and a look that shivered inside me. This was the sort of girl my mother referred to as a wild girl, and suddenly I loved the sound of those words. They made me remember my cat days, moving by instinct and intuition only, prowling through the darkness with twenty-twenty vision, striking with a neat, clean blow. Her eyes did, in fact, look like the eyes of a cat: They were narrow and green, outlined in green eyeliner, made wider and brighter by green eye shadow. For the first time, I imagined my own eyes painted: fierce, mysterious, untamed.
By the time Sam came out with the dishwashing liquid in a paper sack, the wild girl was walking up Main Street in the same direction we’d come from, those cruel shoes swinging from her hand. “Let her walk ahead,” I told him. “If we tail her too close, she’ll get suspicious.”
We got our bikes and crossed to the opposite side of the street, riding so slowly that we kept toppling into each other. Once, still walking, she stared back at us evenly, but then she tossed her hair and continued on, her bare feet slapping the side-walk. We had almost reached the mill when she made a military left and marched up the steps of a rectangular brick house. It was an ordinary, everyday sort of house, with a birdbath and a statue of the Virgin in the front. It did not look like the house of either a thief or a wild girl. The screen door slapped behind her; the shades were already pulled shut. The house looked forlorn, the way houses look when no one lives inside them.
We rode around the block, buying the time we needed to come up with a plan. We rode around the block again. Finally, we left our bikes and the bottle of detergent behind the hedge across the street and scurried along the side of the house until we found an open window. Because Sam was lighter, I lifted him up for the first look, hoping there wasn’t a dog. His tennis shoes dug into my wrist, smelling of manure and grass.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Let’s try you lifting me,” I said, and we switched places so that I could look for whatever Sam had missed that would tell us what we should do next. As I gripped the shutters I could hear him below me, exhaling in little grunts, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold me there much longer. I pressed my face against the screen and saw a shadow moving rapidly toward the window, and then I was staring into the wild girl’s face. Up close, she looked much younger, and she had sweet, crooked teeth. She was eating a Ding Dong, licking the white filling from her index finger. My mother wouldn’t let us eat Ding Dongs, which she said had a shelf life of eighteen years.
“Do you see anything?” Sam called up at me.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Are you trying to see me naked or something?” she said in that low, noncommittal voice.
“No.”
“What?” Sam said.
“Then what do you want?” she said.
I wanted to look just like her, to become her, to lick eighteen-year-old frosting from my finger and survive, but this was not the sort of thing she meant. I knew all about extortion; still, money seemed too much to ask. “A soda,” I said weakly. It was the only other thing that came to mind. My mother didn’t let us drink them, not because of their shelf life but because the sugar would rot our teeth. The girl lifted the last bit of frosting into her mouth. I imagined how it would nestle there inside her, a puff of white growing smaller and smaller.
“Come around front,” she said. I pushed away from the house and tumbled to the ground, pulling Sam down too. His eyes were the feverish eyes of a hunter. “Are we going to arrest her?”
When I shook my head, he gave me a look of absolute disbelief. I could see I was a failure in his eyes, but I was tired of the game, vaguely embarrassed, and I wanted to go home. We weren’t spies anymore—just a little boy and a not so little girl who was too old to play games of make-believe. Self-consciously, I licked my hand and smoothed my hair back from my face. “She’s giving us a soda not to tell,” I said, trying to make it sound like a victory. “Besides, she ate all the evidence.”
When we got to the front of the house, she was already waiting on the porch, holding a can of Jolly Good Cream Soda. She had put on earrings and fresh, orange lipstick. She didn’t look at me—she looked at Sam. “What’s your name?” she asked him, and though I was used to people noticing Sam first, I ached with jealousy.
“Boris,” I said.
“No it’s not,” Sam said.
The girl laughed. “You got a girlfriend yet?”
“He’s got five,” I said, meanly. “One of them’s even married.”
The girl looked at me for the first time. It was a look of approval. “Boys are all the same,” she said, and then she pressed the soda into my hand as if it were a secret between just us two. It was the first time I had seen Sam as a boy instead of my brother, and his face became part of the broken blur of faces that swam to the girls’ side of the gym once a year for square dancing, boy faces with grinning teeth and strange-smelling breath and hands that dug in with short, blunt nails. The wild girl’s fingernails were long peach opals, glistening as if they were wet. She saw me staring at them. “It’s my mother’s color,” she said. “You want me to do yours?”
She turned and went back inside without waiting for me to answer. The soda was sweating in my hand. I gave it to Sam without looking at him, dried my palm on the back of my shorts. “How come girls color their nails?” he asked reasonably.
“They just do,” I snapped—it had never occurred to me to wonder why—and then the girl came out with the nail polish and led me to the porch swing. She put my right hand on my own bare thigh. I felt my own flesh, warm and slightly damp, and I was conscious of the dark silky hairs that grew there.
“I want to go home,” Sam said.
“Spread your fingers like this,” the girl told me, and then she painted swift peach strokes across my pasty nails, brushing the edges of my chewed cuticles. It stung, but I didn’t say anything. I was hoping she would do the other hand too. “You’ve got nice hands,” she said. “Not too big, like mine.”
She seemed to be waiting for something, and I struggled to figure out what it was. I hadn’t yet learned to speak an adolescent girl’s language of false denials and subtle cues. I looked at her hands, which were perfect, and then I understood. “Your hands aren’t too big,” I said, and I glanced meaningfully at Sam. His lower lip stuck out in the peculiar way that meant he wanted to cry.
“You have stupid hands,” he said.
I started to laugh—I couldn’t help it—and suddenly Sam laughed too. The girl’s face grew longer, thinner, and she pushed my hand away. “I’m going into the house now,” she said, “and if you don’t get out of here I’m calling the police to report you for trespassing.”
“I’m calling the police!” we mimicked in high, shrill voices, scuttling down the steps, racing for our bikes. The clouds that had banked the horizon all day were finally moving inland, bringing the cool east wind along with them. We rode home one-handed, no-handed, holding hands, passing the soda between us, choking as the unfamiliar carbonation fizzled in our noses. The fields around us bucked like ocean waves. I’m calling the police! we shrieked again and again, our words swallowed into the clouds. Lightning winked inside them, delicate, darting tongues, but we were not afraid. For the moment, we’d forgotten we were late, that my mother would be worried. We’d forgotten that my father would be home from work by now. We’d forgotten the peach polish that glistened on my hand.
My father was fifteen years older than my mother, away at the car lot most of the time, and before that night he’d never seemed as real to me as she did. He was the shape on the couch after supper, the distant whine of the drill coming from the shed, the crunch of gravel in the driveway that meant he was leaving for the car lot, or else coming home. The absentminded voice that told me to be a good girl. The sharper voice that said to simmer down. On holidays, he lit a fire in the fireplace, cursing the bursts of smoke, the newsprint on his hands. In summer, he mowed the lawn in grim, unswerving lines, and whenever I heard the cough of the mower, I rushed outside to rescue grasshoppers, butterflies, the occasional terrified toad. Sundays, he gave me and Sam each a dollar to put in the collection basket. Unlike my mother, he did not tell amusing stories about when he was our age, or make up silly knock-knock jokes, or join us in games of Sorry! He seemed to have a lot of rules; he worried about what he called appearances. My mother always took his side, saying he was no more strict with us than with himself.
He did not talk much about his family. It was my mother who told us he’d had a younger brother, our uncle Arnold, who had died in World War II. It was my mother who told us that their father, our grandfather, had liked to drink whiskey and gamble, and he’d liked these things so much that he’d died with barely this farm to his name. My father was known throughout Horton as the farm boy who’d made good, honored for valor during his own tour of duty before coming home to work his way up through the ranks at Fountain Ford. He was the absolute head of our household, the decision maker, the one we approached—my mother included—to request our allowance or a new pair of shoes. He was sort of like God; we knew he was supposed to love us, but it was an all-powerful, distant sort of love, a love that was not given to explanations. A love that wasn’t quick to forgive mistakes. “This is my house,” he’d say, and those words were enough to silence any disagreement.
At home, I told my mother Sam had gotten a cramp, that we’d had to walk our bikes and that’s why we were late. She accepted the lie, as well as the detergent, and sent us straight into the kitchen for supper. My father had already helped himself to the mashed potatoes and roast, which were drowning in a muddy slick of pepper-and-flour gravy. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” he began. There was nothing he hated worse than cold food. I crossed myself and closed my eyes, folding my hands beside my plate. Outside, it had started to rain, and the rumbling in my stomach matched the distant thunder. Food smells rose around me like a thick, warm mist.
“Look at that,” my father said.
It was a tone I’d never heard before.
“Ten years old and it’s starting already,” he said, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at my fingers. “Where were you this afternoon with those painted nails? Showing off for the boys?” Foolishly, I tucked my hand under the table. My father had never hurt me before, yet, strangely, it didn’t surprise me when he rippled like a shadow over the space between us, grabbed my hand, jerked me up out of my chair. “This I’m going to nip in the bud,” he said as I dangled there absurdly. What I felt in my shoulder was not pain but color, and that color ripened into a grand, glowing rose as my father hooked his free arm around my waist and carried me out of the house, slung over his arm like a garment bag, to the shed, where he dumped me onto the low stepladder. The rain on the roof was gentle, sweet. It reminded me of spending the night at my grandmother’s house and falling asleep in the attic bedroom, closer to the stars and to God.
I have often wondered what my mother did while my father selected a rusty can from the row on the high wooden shelf, the way one might choose a good book, and fed oily turpentine into a strip of cloth from the rag box by the door. His expression wasn’t angry anymore; he looked tired, distant, resigned, the way he did when he came home from a long day at the car lot. It took him several minutes to remove the last sliver of peach-colored paint, working the rag deep into the crevices around my nails before, in an odd, uncertain gesture, stuffing it into my mouth. Perhaps my mother simply ate her supper, pretending nothing was wrong so that nothing would be wrong, the way she believed if you thought you couldn’t catch a cold, you wouldn’t catch one. Perhaps she helped Sam fill his plate and told him, Eat now; this is between your father and your sister. My father interacted with us so infrequently—small children, he believed, were best left to their mothers—that she might have felt this was, at base, something good.
“No makeup,” he told me. “No nail polish, no high heels. None of that nonsense. Is that understood?” He went back to the house, and I waited, and still my mother did not come. I spit out the rag, licked my hot lips. After a while, I got down from the stepladder and crept into the house and up the stairs to the room I had shared with Sam since he was a baby. My shoulder had begun to throb. I held my arm against my side and listened to the familiar after-dinner sounds of the dishes being washed and stacked to dry. My head ached from the turpentine smell, which seemed to lift me in a glistening cloud until I could see myself far below: a dark-haired girl sitting on the edge of a neatly made bed; and, beside her, a stuffed pink rabbit, with its ears tied into a bow beneath its chin; and, across the room, another bed, hastily made, the rumpled sheets decorated with trains and octagonal signs that said STOP! The girl was rubbing her feet back and forth, back and forth, on the braided rug, and I watched her for a while, thinking it was an odd thing for her to do.
The rain had ended by the time Sam came in to get ready for bed, both hands full of the green beans he’d swiped for my supper. The air was cool and still. I kept my hurt arm against my side and ate the smashed bean pieces with my other hand. “You OK?” Sam said. I didn’t know. When the beans were gone, Sam went downstairs and told my mother there was something wrong with my arm. She came in then, but she wouldn’t look at me. “You better not be faking this,” she said.
Dr. Neidermier met us at Saint Andrew’s Clinic in Fall Creek. It turned out that the shoulder was sprained. A nurse gave me a sling for my arm and a shot that made me very sleepy. As we walked back out to the car, breathing in the clean after-rain smell, I leaned against my mother out of habit, but her whole body flinched away. Without touching me, she unlocked the car door. “Fasten your seat belt,” she told me, and I did.
The movement of the car towed me into a warm, rich sleep, and I thought it was part of my dream when I heard my mother crying. She cried all the way home, as I tried to open my eyes to see if it really was her or just another liquid thought I couldn’t hold on to long enough to understand. When we got home, she lifted me carefully and carried me into the house. My father was there. I twisted to hide my face, and I felt how tightly she was holding me. She stepped past him and started up the stairs. Then she stopped. I felt us both sink a little.
“Take her, Gordie. Please,” she said, and I was in my father’s arms, my sore shoulder trapped painfully against his broad chest, and he carried me up the stairs and tucked me into bed with the blanket folded down and my rabbit half under the covers just right, like this was something he’d been doing all my life. “Shh, sweetheart,” he kept saying. On the other side of the room, Sam was lying in his bed, eyes open wide, as if I were the strange girl I’d seen earlier, and he didn’t recognize her any more than I did.
That night, I lay awake for hours, listening to the rise and fall of my parents’ voices coming from their bedroom across the hall. As soon as I closed my eyes I felt I was slipping through the floor of the earth, an endless whirling distance. So I kept my eyes open and listened for the sound of the POWs moving through the fields; I listened for the scratching of whatever lived under the bed; I listened, and I heard nothing at all. Mysterious things, it seemed, did not bother to hide themselves. That’s what made them so frightening, for they drifted before your eyes in the brightest daylight, clothed in everyday, human forms. Suddenly I was suffocating. Beneath the sling, my arm was slick with sweat, and an odd smell came from my body. I sat up and pushed the window open as wide as it would go. Under the hushed moon, the sunflowers raised and lowered their heads in the slow night wind. After a while, I went over to Sam’s side of the room. He was sleeping in his usual arc, his hands thrown out oddly in front of him. I nudged them together, so they folded into themselves like hands in prayer. I meant it to keep him safe somehow, but when he sighed and rolled onto his back, I realized I had arranged him into a corpse. Was he dead? I got in bed beside him and pressed my hand against his chest. His heart was beating, just like my own, and the sound of it absorbed the terrible silence. I rolled up against him, propped my sling on his shoulder, and slept.
At breakfast the next day, my father announced he had decided to turn the southwest corner of the basement into a bedroom, with wood-paneled walls and a lowered ceiling and a special subfloor to resist the damp. This was going to be Sam’s bedroom. I would remain in our old room upstairs, which my mother would help me redecorate. Sam stared into his cornflakes, and I looked down too, embarrassed, ashamed, as my mother explained I was growing up, perhaps faster than she and my father had realized, and it was time for me and Sam to sleep in rooms of our own. Nobody mentioned my bright white sling, and I wondered for an odd moment if it was part of a terrible dream, something that I had imagined. But the ache in my shoulder was real. When I’d finished eating, my father pulled me into his lap, and I perched on his knee for a polite moment, uneasy as a cat waiting to be put down, gathering strength for the leap.
After breakfast, in a controlled and careful voice, my mother explained how bad he felt about the night before. “It frightens him to think about his little girl growing up,” she said. She was washing the breakfast dishes with extra vigor. I had been excused from table chores, and now I fumbled with the thought of having made my father afraid.
“But why?” I said. He had taken Sam to the lumberyard to pick up materials for the new room.
My mother sighed. “Because you’ll be a young lady pretty soon, and you’ll have boyfriends and dates, and then you’ll start wanting a family of your own.” She stopped, considering. “It makes him feel old, I guess. Maybe a little uncomfortable. People didn’t talk about things like this when your father was a boy. It’s scary for him, that’s all.”
I put my head down on the table. I didn’t feel like a person who might make another person afraid, but then again, I didn’t really feel like myself either.
“Not that it’s an excuse,” my mother said quickly. “Not that what he did wasn’t overreacting. But he didn’t mean it, sweetheart, do you understand? He asked me to make sure to tell you that.”
I tried to nod without hurting my shoulder. My mother gave me two aspirins and a cup of tea with a tablespoon of whiskey. “Why don’t you go back to bed,” she said. “I’ll be up in a bit to see how you’re doing.”
I finished my tea and went to bed, and I didn’t wake up until late in the afternoon, when the sound of hammering poked me out of my sleep. Soon I heard the scream of the circular saw biting wood, and I realized my father had already started working in the basement.
“How did you sleep?” my mother said. She was standing in the doorway, and as I turned my head I saw that the bedroom was filled with flowers: gladioli, zinnias, hollyhocks, dahlias, lilies. Each bunch was clasped in a tin can or a jelly jar, and they perched in every crevice of my bookshelf and desk, even peeking from the drawers of my dresser. The cedar chest at the foot of my bed was covered with more bouquets, only these were held by my mother’s good vases, the crystal she got when she married. I didn’t need to go outside to know my mother’s flower gardens all were bare, each blind stalk buried deep within the greenery of the leaves.
My father wouldn’t let me help with Sam’s new bedroom in the basement. “You’ll hurt yourself,” he said sternly if I picked up a board with my good arm. “That’s too heavy for you.” But he gave Sam bigger boards to carry, even though Sam was smaller than me, and if he complained, my father said, “Aw, that’s light as a feather. Where’s your muscle, son?” He seemed to be constantly guiding Sam’s arm with his own broad hand, gripping the back of Sam’s neck, moving Sam’s body through a particular set of motions that would result in an even cut, a sharp angle, a flush edge. “Not like that, like that,” he’d say, and he made Sam repeat each thing over and over until he had done it perfectly, twice. Often, my father lost his temper; Sam didn’t have much of a knack for carpentry. He carried the hammer with two hands the way my mother insisted we carry her heirloom plates. He winced each time the head hit the nail. He plugged his ears when my father ran the circular saw. “Don’t act like such a girl,” my father told him. “That little bit of noise is nothing.” And Sam unplugged his ears, set his teeth against the grinding sound.
One week before school started, my mother took me back to see Dr. Neidermier, who raised and lowered my arm and said I could stop wearing the sling as long as my shoulder felt OK. When we got back home, I ran upstairs to tell Sam and discovered his bed was missing, and his dresser too. His posters. His little blue floor rug. The room smelled different. It was as if he’d never lived there. I sneaked downstairs past the kitchen, where I was supposed to set the table for supper, and crept down the basement stairs, using my keenest spy stealth. The new bedroom walls were completely finished; the door to the bedroom was closed. I put my hand to the knob and eased my way inside, my feet padding over the rubbery brown indoor/outdoor carpet that now covered the floor. There was Sam’s bed, his dresser, new shelves made of cinder blocks and wood, spray-painted brown. The closet, which had been merely a skeletal shape, was now a real closet, with a set of sliding doors. I opened them up, and there were Sam’s clothes, hanging in a cluster. A dehumidifier hummed in one corner of the room. Everything smelled of harsh, fresh paint.
When I heard footsteps coming down the basement stairs, I slipped into the closet and crouched beside the shoes, pulling the doors closed behind me. I could see perfectly through the slender crevice between them, and when Sam and my father came in, I felt a lurch of adrenaline. Without the cumbersome sling I was myself again, graceful and whole. I breathed the doors open, inch by inch, and I thought about all the time Sam and I had spent developing potions that would make us invisible, blending chokecherry blossoms and pounded-up stones, beer stolen from the little refrigerator my father kept in his workshop, our own spit. Mixture after mixture we rubbed on our skin, and still we could see each other, squinting hopefully as we stood eye-to-eye, waiting for one of us to fade. Now it seemed I was finally invisible as I walked toward them, slowly, step by step. They were putting up new posters of airplanes and motorcycles, a HORTON WILDCATS pennant that had once been my father’s. I was close enough to reach out and tap them on the shoulders and still neither one of them saw that I was there.
The fall I started junior high, my mother, who had never worked outside our home before, took a part-time job at a weekly advertiser called the Sell It Now! Three times a week, she drove twenty-five miles to Cedarton in our “second car,” a rusted Oldsmobile that conked out in a dramatic cloud of smoke if you let it idle too long. Years before, on the way home from the grocery store, Sam had spilled a gallon of milk across the back seat. Even now, and especially in wet weather, it gave off a moist, cheesy smell. But my mother didn’t seem to mind. “It runs,” she said, and if she ever envied my father’s Ford, with its sleek blue sheen, its air-conditioned silence, I never heard her mention it.
One Saturday in September, just after she got the job, she invited me and Sam to come along and see where she worked. It hadn’t been too long ago that my father had taken us to see his office at Fountain Ford, and I remembered the thick gray carpet, the water cooler with its magic hot and cold, the magnificent fish wandering the tank in the lobby, my father’s name, GORDON SCHILLER, in gold block letters on his desk. The other men greeted him with shouts—Hey there, Gordy! Gordo!—and they shook Sam’s hand and told my father I was good-looking, and one of them bought us paper cups of hot chocolate from a machine. It made me proud to see my father that way, surrounded by people who admired him, the tie we’d given him for Father’s Day dividing his chest in a fat splash of gold. His voice, which at home seemed too loud, too forceful, rang out like a bell in the vast showroom, drawing everybody to the sound. Outside the plate-glass windows, beautiful cars had been lined up in perfect shiny rows, and my father walked us up and down the aisles of the lot, one hand on the back of each of our necks, quizzing Sam on the names of various different models. “Maybe someday you’ll come work for your old man—how would you like that?” he asked. I knew Sam wanted to be a famous artist or an actor or a daredevil stuntman, but he didn’t tell my father that. I wanted to be a nurse or a veterinarian; still, I hoped my father would ask if I wanted to work for him too. Later, behind the closed door of his office, he showed us all the plaques he’d been awarded for his outstanding service to Ford. “My dad sure had nothing like this to show for himself,” he said, and he gave Sam a poke on the shoulder. “Remember what I’m telling you. You’ve got to work to get ahead in this world. Nobody’s going to hand you anything.”
It was hard not to be disappointed when my mother unlocked the door to the windowless room she shared with four other people. When Sam said he was thirsty, she poured us each a plastic cup of water from the bathroom sink; I sipped it politely as she spoke about her work, bending seriously over a mock-up, planning the layout of the center page. But I felt vaguely uncomfortable, shy, as though I were listening to a familiar stranger, perhaps a friend of the family, someone I almost didn’t know. Until that moment, it had seemed like the only things that happened to my mother were the things that happened to us. She felt my scraped knee and Sam’s burned finger; she sweated our fevers, suffered our bad dreams. There was nothing that belonged to her alone except her past, and even that she shared easily, telling stories about her childhood until Sam and I remembered them as our own.
The night she first told us about the Sell It Now!, she had made a special dinner of lamb chops and boiled new potatoes, the first of the fall crop. She’d applied for the job in secret, she said, because she had wanted to surprise us. She hoped we would all be able to help out a little more around the house, because she would be pretty busy for a while. Sam and I nodded and said we would, but my father stopped eating, which was not a good sign.
“I can’t believe you’d go behind my back on this,” he said. My mother kept on eating like nothing was wrong, which was not a good sign either. Sam and I looked at our plates. “I thought we agreed there was no need for you to work.”
“I just want something that gives me the same satisfaction your job gives you.”
“What about us? Don’t we give you any satisfaction?”
“Of course,” my mother said. “But the kids are growing up and you’re always at the lot and I don’t just want to sit around, getting older. I want to meet people. I want to learn new things.”
“The reason I’m at the lot so much is so that you can take it easy if you want. Don’t I provide for us well enough? Don’t we have a comfortable life?”
“It isn’t that,” my mother said. “There’s more to life than being comfortable.”
“Well, excuse me,” my father said, “if my best isn’t good enough for this family.”
He stood up, grabbed his coat from its hook in the hall. The door slammed, and then we listened to the gravelly sound of his car moving down the driveway. “Don’t worry,” my mother told us. “He’ll get used to the idea. Your father is a little old-fashioned, that’s all.”
But he didn’t get used to it. His anger bubbled and simmered like a thick soup, filling the house with its smell, and every now and then it boiled over into a fresh argument. Sam and I sat close to the TV, the volume turned up as loud as we dared, and still we could hear them fighting in the kitchen as my mother got ready to leave for work.
“I’m asking you to resign, Therese,” my father said. “For me.”
“This isn’t about you, for a change.”
“Where’s all this coming from? We never had a quarrel until you started this career woman crap.”
“We never had a quarrel because I never asked for anything you didn’t want. I’m asking for this. This one thing. Three nights a week, Gordon; it’s not like I’m neglecting you.”
“What about the kids?” my father said. “What about Abby? A girl that age needs her mother’s supervision when the young bucks come sniffing around.”
“Gordon,” my mother said.
“Young bucks,” Sam whispered, and he made kissing noises into his hand.
“Shut up,” I said. That males of any species might show an interest in me—or I in them—was something I still considered ludicrous. Boys were ungirls, ill-mannered, unpredictable. In the hallways at school I hugged the rows of metal lockers to avoid their sharp shoulders, their swinging hands. In biology, when we had to choose microscope partners, I quickly picked another girl; at lunch, I sat on the “girls’ side” of the cafeteria. Boys were citizens of another, stronger country. If you opened your mouth to speak in class, a boy would say it first. When you raised your hand, the teacher’s gaze flew past it, straight into the waiting glove of a boy’s eager palm.
Sometimes, falling asleep at night, I tried to remember if the differences I was noticing between boys and girls had always been there. Perhaps the shock of starting junior high had caused my perception of things to change, the way my father’s binoculars changed after I dropped them, knocking loose the fragile prism inside. But tucked in the cedar chest up in the attic, I found the outfits my mother had made for Sam and me when we were very small. A green and red checked suit for Sam; a green and red checked dress for me. Twin yellow play pants, with flowers sewn over the pocket on mine and a sailboat sewn over the pocket on Sam’s, so that people could tell who was the girl and who was the boy. It had always pleased me when people got it wrong. This happened frequently after the first of each month, when Auntie Thil came over to cut our hair in the style that she and my mother hopefully called a pixie. “Look at the little pixies,” my mother would say afterward, and we’d struggle up into her lap, adoring and eager as puppies. I’d close my eyes, divided between the pleasure I felt at my mother’s attention and the fear that, perhaps, Sam loved her more than me. I thought about this often, and at night, in the bedroom we still shared back then, I’d pose hypothetical questions for him, whispering across the dark space between our beds.
Me and Mom are attacked by mad dogs and you can only save one of us. Who do you pick?
Me and Mom are drowning and you’re in a boat, but there’s only room for one more person. Who will you save?
Pretending he was asleep didn’t help—I demanded an answer. “You,” he’d finally say, and only then could I sleep, bigger and brighter and stronger because there was someone who loved me best. With everyone else I felt my inadequacies, which I knew were abundant and terrible. I was nothing at all like the girls in the books we read in Sunday school, girls who were pretty and good, who dedicated their lives to worthy causes. I was too heavy and my voice was too loud and my hair wouldn’t curl no matter what. I asked too many questions. My teachers said I had a tendency to “carry things too far.”
“You can call me Mom,” I told Sam one afternoon while we were playing dress-up. I was in third grade, Sam in second. We’d had to play dress-up in secret ever since the time my father came home from work and found Sam and me in Mom’s high heels, wobbling between the window and the full-length mirror in their bedroom. Our hair was sprayed to stand on end; our lips were puckered red hearts. “Hel-loh-oh!” we trilled. One look, and we knew we had done something wrong.
“For heaven’s sake, Gordon, they’re children,” my mother had said, but my father said it wasn’t healthy for a boy of any age to put on lipstick and a dress. Still, I loved to outline Sam’s lips in red, to highlight his deep-set eyes with lavender and blue, to clip earrings to the tops of his ears so the weight made them fold down like a little lamb’s. I loved to dress him up in the clothes my mother had worn back when she and my father still went out dancing on Saturday nights. High on the closet shelf were the trophies they’d won, lined up like grinning gold teeth. Sometimes they’d sit at the supper table long after Sam and I had been excused, recalling those competitions, friends of my father’s they’d double-dated with, plans they’d made before my father started working such long hours at Fountain, before Sam and I came along. Then you could see how it must have been when they’d first fallen in love, back when my mother was barely eighteen and my father was thirty-two, capable, confident, picking her up in his shiny new T-bird. There was something between them that changed the color of the light, brightening the dusk, and, perhaps, they’d clasp hands between the dirty dishes.
“Say Mom,” I told Sam. He looked just like a doll, so sturdy and small in a pink speckled dress, and I wanted him all for myself.
“That’s dumb,” he said, but he changed his mind when I offered him a quarter. At supper that night, he said, “Thank you, Mom,” when I passed him the scalloped potatoes. My father, intent on the TV, didn’t notice, but my mother got the expression she wore just before she said something that might trigger an argument.
“Your sister’s name is Abby,” she told Sam.
“I know.” He looked down, the potatoes plumping his cheeks. My father snapped his fingers, meaning that we should be quiet so he could hear the evening news.
“I am your mom,” my mother said to Sam, and I hated her then because I knew she was right, that long ago she’d made Sam up deep within her body, and for this reason he would always be a part of her in a way he would never be a part of me. I got up and ran through the house, slamming doors: the kitchen door, the hallway door, the heavy front door, which shook the warped porch floorboards and scattered the cats from the cool, dark earth beneath them. I climbed high into a pear tree and stared out over the fields toward Horton and its hazy light, the summer moon ripening in the distance. It seemed to me then that I had nothing of value, that I would never be anyone interesting or important.
After a while, the porch light snapped on and my mother came outside. She had told me once how she had felt when she first came to live in this house, my father’s childhood home, and how she did things, deliberate little things, to make it her own: tying back the front curtains with a knot instead of a bow, interspersing yellow tulips among the red ones in the flower bed. Now I watched as she began flaking paint from the old porch railing with her thumbnail until the brown beneath it appeared, grew longer, proof beyond a doubt that she had been there.
My parents never lingered at the table anymore. The moment my mother sat down to relax, my father picked at her, pointing out things around the house that she needed to do. “You’re not being sensible about this job thing, Therese,” he said. “You’re needed here. To go all that distance is hardly worth the little bit of money you make.”
“You could help out now and then,” my mother said.
“That’s not cost-effective,” my father said. “You want me to stay home and put on an apron so we can live on the seventy-five dollars and change you bring home each week?”
But I didn’t mind helping out; it made me feel important, and my mother always thanked me and told me what a good job I had done. It was 1977, and a few of my friends’ mothers worked too. It didn’t seem like such a big deal to me. “And it isn’t,” my mother assured me. My grandmother disagreed. Even Auntie Thil couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t just admit the whole thing had been a mistake. “Olaf would never let me work,” she said proudly. “I don’t think he’d be able to find his way around the house if I weren’t there.”
We were at my grandmother’s, still sluggish from a big noon dinner. My mother and my grandmother and Auntie Thil were playing cards at the kitchen table; underneath, Monica and I were setting up a line of dominoes, hoping they’d forget we were there and talk about something more interesting. Their legs hung down like prison bars, and we felt deliciously trapped, safe. “Gordon’s a big boy,” my mother said. “He had an apartment before we got married.”
“He still drove home to eat at his mother’s table every night,” my grandmother said.
“She died in ’57, Mom. We didn’t marry until ’62.”
“She died in ’58.”
“I thought ’57,” Auntie Thil said.
“She died the spring we had those floods.”
“It was ’57,” my mother said firmly. “And then he moved back to the farmhouse and spent five years cooking and cleaning for himself.”
“From what you said when you first got married, it doesn’t sound like he cleaned so much,” Auntie Thil said, laughing.
“And he took his meals at Poppy’s Kitchen in Horton,” my grandmother said. “A man marries because he needs certain things. You can’t go changing the rules, Therese. You promised to love, honor, and obey, and that doesn’t just mean if you feel like it.”
“When I get married,” Monica whispered to me, “I’m sure not going to work.”
“I am.”
“Then you’re weird.”
To punish her, I let my knee nudge one of the dominoes, and they all went down. “Hey!” she said, forgetting to whisper. “That was my turn!”
“Girls?” my grandmother said. “Why don’t you take those into the living room?”
Thursday was the advertising deadline at the Sell It Now! and on Wednesday nights my mother seldom made it home before midnight. After school, I’d hurry from the bus up the drive and into the house, where I’d find her careful dinner instructions taped to the refrigerator door. I preheated the oven and prepared casserole or pot roast or lamb, remembering to stab the potatoes so they wouldn’t explode. When my father came home, I called Sam to supper, enjoying the grown-up feeling of serving the meal as if my father were my husband, Sam my little boy. My father grumbled about my mother’s absence, but by then Sam and I were so used to it that it was easy to ignore. Afterward, I’d clean up while Sam did his homework in front of the TV and my father reread the Milwaukee Sentinel. Then I’d spread my homework on the kitchen table: English, French, Science, Math. Usually, I finished the first three in an hour so I could linger dreamily over basic geometry, resketching the various shapes until my father sent me upstairs to bed.
One night, as I was fitting the stubby pencil back into my compass, he came into the kitchen with his newspaper and sat down across from me in one of the orange vinyl chairs that matched my own. Air wheezed from the seat cushion, a ragged sigh. His regular place was at the head of the table, in the wooden chair with arms that his own father had made long ago. He glanced at the rows of figures I had written in my notebook. He reached out and touched the neat labels with his fingertip: parallelogram, rhombus, triangle.
“Para-what?” he said.
“Parallelogram. It’s a figure with opposite sides that are parallel.”
He tapped his finger on rhombus. “What’s that?”
“An equilateral parallelogram.”
I was proud to know something he didn’t. But my father shook his head. “You’ll never need that fancy stuff, you know,” he said. “You should be learning about things that matter. Your mother should be teaching you the things you need to know.”
He often said that his time in the service was where he’d gotten his real education. But I liked school; I especially liked geometry. I wanted to go to college someday. I went back to my compass and drew a circle with a one-inch radius. He opened the paper and slipped it between us, a textured wall of print.
“Here,” he said, “just listen to this,” and he read an article about a young woman in Milwaukee who’d been followed to her apartment by three men. When she unlocked her door, they forced their way inside, where they took turns raping her at knifepoint. She was unable to recall their faces. She was treated at a local hospital and released.
I pressed the sharp point of the compass into my thumb; when I took it away, there was a tiny red hole. I knew about rape from catechism; there it was called violation. But the women always died protecting their virginity, and then they were rewarded by God, glorified as saints, which made the possibility of rape seem as abstract, as unlikely, as a virgin birth. A window opened up in myself, and I saw what I could not know: the hallway that led to the woman’s door, poorly lit and carpeted in orange, the apartment number screwed into the smooth, painted wood, the way she jingled the keys, thinking, Hurry, hurry. Then my mind winked shut. I smelled the sharp, after-dinner smell of the kitchen, and there was the circle I’d just drawn. I sketched a smile on its face. I wrote: The diameter of a circle with a one-inch radius is two.
“Has your mother told you about sex yet?” my father asked.
I nodded. Sex happened after marriage. At first it would hurt, but afterward it got better.
“When you live alone like that, you’re at risk, you see,” my father said in the utterly rational voice my math teacher used to explain right angles. “You have to learn to be careful,” he told me. “You’re not a little girl anymore.” Sam came into the kitchen then and leaned against me, his body warm and faintly sour-smelling, twitchy from lying too long in front of the TV. “What’s that?” he said, and he pointed to circumference in my notebook.
“The distance around a circle.”
My father put his tongue to his teeth. “Nothing you’ll ever need to know,” he repeated. “It’s the school of hard knocks that counts,” he said.
“What’s the school of hard knocks?” Sam said.
“Life,” my father said. “What you’ve seen and where you’ve been.”
“Oh,” Sam said, and I was not surprised when he moved away from me. He no longer crept up the stairs at night and into my room, where we held flashlights under our chins, or played Scissors-Paper-Rock, or dipped our feet over the edge of the bed into piranha-infested air. He kept his sketchbooks hidden under his mattress, and he’d given me his watercolor paints and his calligraphy set, though sometimes he borrowed them back. My father said Sam was too old for all that, that it was time for Sam to grow up. He said it was time for me to grow up too, and yet it was clear that growing up meant one thing for Sam and, for me, something else. Boys were expected to live in the world; girls needed special protection. They had to be careful, and some girls, it seemed, never learned to be careful enough.
From then on, Wednesday nights as I worked my way through geometry, my father read to me about women who walked alone after dark, or talked to strange men, or went to bars with professional athletes, women who let themselves fall into the wrong place at the wrong time, women who suffered the consequences. Women who didn’t have my father’s respect for the world and the way it worked. Women who had learned the hard way, who hadn’t been told, the way he was telling me now. “‘Entering through an open second-story window,’” my father read, “‘a juvenile, armed with a gun, sodomized a sixteen-year-old girl while her horrified sister watched.’” He shook his head. “What a world!”
I wrote out my math problems in clean, dark script. A rectangle with four sides of equal length is a square. The next day, I consulted the big red dictionary on display in the school library. Sodomy: abnormal sexual acts: bestiality. It made me think of the screams I heard from the horse farm down the road when the mares were bred by the stallions. I began to have trouble sleeping. During the day, I drifted through the halls at school, bumped by the flood of bodies that seemed drawn in one frenzied direction like magnetized bits of iron, and by association I became magnetic too. Each day, I got where I needed to go. I sat, I took notes, I swallowed my lunch in small, careful mouthfuls. Perhaps it was then that mathematics began to frighten me, the bent-necked evil sevens, the pregnant sixes, the snickering twos. I’d squint as I copied assignments from my textbook to the page, but it didn’t help my growing sense of vertigo. The numbers loomed three-dimensional, rising and falling like sharp black lungs, and it was all I could do to guide my pen down between them, to coax a brief, flat line from the tip, to take my pen away before that line began to swell.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asked frequently. “Honey, you seem kind of out of it.”
“I’m just tired,” I said. But I started to wonder if maybe my father had a point when he said my mother’s job was hard on us all. It seemed to me that we’d been happier when she’d devoted her time to us alone, greeting Sam and me at the door after school, asking my father questions about his day at work instead of talking about her own. She’d already been promoted to assistant editor. Once, she and the associate editor, a woman named Cindy Pace, met for coffee to talk about ways they could improve the look and distribution of the Sell It Now! My mother came home flushed with excitement, to find my father waiting for her in the kitchen, home early from work as, lately, he so often seemed to be, asking where she had been and who she’d been with and what they had done.
“A cup of coffee with a friend,” my mother said. “I’m thirty-seven years old, Gordon. I didn’t think I needed to ask your permission!”
It was easiest to leave their angry voices behind and disappear into my room, where I’d lie on my bed and listen to the sound my heartbeat made inside my body, feel the pulse in my wrists, my throat. I found myself concentrating on only those things that were exactly in front of me. I peeled my cuticles until my fingers bloomed red; I twisted my hair around and around my second finger; I stared into my lap, or at the soft, smooth knees of my jeans, or at the toes of my sneakers, which I found strangely pleasing, narrow and pointed as the muzzles of dogs. Every day after school, I read the paper, skimming through the pages until I found the word rape. I read hungrily, shamefully, shivering with the same thing I felt when I saw people kissing on TV. Afterward, I felt sick with the cries of women beaten and molested and torn, the wailing of children who were never seen again, the swollen necks of strangled prostitutes, the spidery limbs of teenagers wearing skimpy clothing or too much makeup or polish on their nails.
One night, my father didn’t read to me from the paper. Instead, he told me something he’d heard at work. A woman’s car had broken down, and she’d last been seen with two men who’d pulled up beside her, offering assistance. Her body was found in a ravine months later. Raccoons had carried away the fine bones of her hands, a small portion of her skull. I imagined my mother’s car breaking down on the dark rural highway from Cedarton, woods for miles around. As I chewed my pencil tip, I saw the truck pulling up behind her, baking my mother in a bright white beam like the probe from a UFO. She was under the hood, knowing it was a hopeless gesture because she wasn’t even sure where the oil went—my father took care of all that business—so she squinted happily at the figures approaching her, blocking the light like coils of smoke. “Am I ever glad to see you!” she sang out, and here my mind shut like a terrible fist, holding in the poison, choking me inside it. That night, when she sat on the edge of my bed to listen to my prayers, the holy words lodged in my throat like bones. The Lord helps those who help themselves: This was something I’d been told for as long as I could remember, and every time I visited my grandmother’s house I read it again, cross-stitched in gold and blue, hanging on the living room wall. My mother was not helping herself. Each time she left for work, she put herself at risk. God had little sympathy for fools, but I asked Him to make an exception in my mother’s case, promising Him all sorts of things even though I knew it was a sin to bargain.
“You’re so quiet lately, honey,” my mother said, picking bits of nubby wool from my blanket.
“I’m worried about you,” I said.
“About me?”
“What if your car breaks down?” I said. “What if you get stranded on the highway?”
“My goodness,” my mother said. “I’ll just walk to the nearest house and ask to use the phone.”
“What if somebody attacks you?”
My mother looked at me. “Where would you get an idea like that?”
“It’s in the newspapers,” I said, and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t cry. My mother kissed me and stroked my hair and told me that nothing was going to happen to her, but I knew that she was just being naive. That was another word I’d learned. My father had used it to describe me.
The next Wednesday night, I waited in the kitchen, defenseless, not even pretending to do my homework as the owl-shaped clock over the sink chirped the quarter hours. I stared at the owl and I followed the movement of its wings, and still my father did not come in. Finally, I went into the living room, where I found him polishing his business shoes, Sam beside him, half a dozen pairs fanned around them on sheets of newspaper. My father worked carefully, scrubbing polish into the crevices with a bristled brush before passing the shoe to Sam, who patted the excess polish away with an old diaper. The unpolished shoes waited, unlaced and open-mouthed; the room smelled strong and sweet.
“Finished already?” he said, without looking up.
“I guess.”
He didn’t say anything else. I waited for a minute or so, and then I went upstairs to bed. My father never read aloud to me after that, though sometimes he still brought the paper into the kitchen and sat across from me as I worked. “All that fancy stuff,” he told me, shaking his head at my Introduction to French book. “Who do you know who talks French?” It was as if those other Wednesday nights had never happened. Perhaps he stopped because he felt he’d made his point. Or perhaps he simply grew bored with the routine. Maybe he noticed my increasing nervousness and realized he was frightening me far more than he’d ever intended. But I continued to read the paper on my own, furtively, secretly, shamed. Wednesday nights, I thought of my mother stranded on the highway, and the numbers in front of me collapsed into piles of short black sticks. Then I got up, casually, as if to get a glass of juice, or to scratch whichever cat happened to be slouched across the counter. But my father caught me glancing at the door, making sure it was locked. “You’re safe with me,” he’d say. “No need to be so jumpy.” Sometimes he’d even get up and open the door, twisting his neck to peer at the stars, while I stared down at the knees of my jeans, imagining the wolf glide of a man’s shadow slipping from the barn.
Halloween fell on a Wednesday, and my mother asked if I would mind staying home to wait for trick-or-treaters while she worked late at the Sell It Now! This year, for the first time, my father would be in charge of Halloween, driving Sam to Horton, watching closely while he approached each house, rang the bell, came back with a miniature chocolate bar or a fistful of sweet hard candy. There had been icy rumors about razor blades in apples, arsenic in Pixy Stix. Even Girl Scout cookies weren’t safe; someone had discovered a pin. “You check everything before he eats it,” my mother told my father. “Nothing unwrapped, nothing homemade. I’m serious, Gordon,” she said, because my father had started to laugh.
“You worry too much,” he said. “Sam’s not afraid of that horse crap, are you, Sam?” and Sam looked between my mother and my father, anxiety creasing his forehead.
Other years, my mother would have driven us into Horton and dropped us off at the band shell, with strict orders to return by nine o’clock. We were never late. After curfew, the high school kids roamed the streets, the sweet tooth of childhood gnawing in their throats. They couldn’t go trick-or-treating anymore; they were too old, too angry, stiff-legged in their freshly washed jeans. A few of the biggest boys dressed up as girls, while the girls painted their faces in the usual ways—white lipstick, green eyeliner, blush the color of beef. To us, they had become a part of the terror, no less essential than witches and demons. If they found a younger kid scurrying between the houses, the next day at school that child would be without candy, humble, eager for even a few stale pieces of chicken corn.
This year, I had planned to be an angel, my wings pinned into a clever V to minimize wind resistance. But as my mother pointed out, a lot of kids my age would also be staying home, and I began to enjoy the idea of answering the door, looking over the costumes, deciding if they were worth one candy bar or two. So on Halloween night, I put on my everyday jeans and helped turn Sam into a vampire bat, stapling black streamers to the arms of his shirt for the air to ripple like wings. With his white plastic fangs and spiky bat ears, he looked the way I imagined a real-life vampire bat would. But just as he was ready to try his first flight off the couch, my father announced that costumes were for sissies. “You can be your old man, how’s that?” he told Sam, scrunching his company hat over Sam’s cardboard ears. It was a blue baseball cap, with a bent visor and Fountain Ford scrawled across its brim. “Dad!” I said, but Sam did not say anything, not even when my father plucked the streamers from his arms and took away his plastic jack-o’-lantern, the hollow kind all the other kids had, and gave him a brown grocery bag instead. “It’ll hold more,” my father explained. “This is a bag that means business.”
Sam spit out his fangs. “Maybe I should carry a briefcase or something,” he said, tilting the visor to hide his eyes. “So it looks more like a costume.”
“Not necessary!” my father said. He was bristling with enthusiasm, clapping his hands together the way we’d seen him do at Fountain Ford when talking with the other salesmen about a hot deal. I could see how it was going to be, my father hustling Sam door to door, block to block, jeering him on when he stopped to catch his breath. Sam would have more candy than he’d ever had with me—my father would make sure of it. He winked as he guided Sam out the front door, his hand at the back of Sam’s neck. I did not say good-bye; I was angry with my father, but even more so with Sam, because he did not fight back. The door slammed shut, forcing in a puff of air, rich with wood smoke and damp.
I finished the dishes and wandered around the house, waiting for trick-or-treaters. I looked out the windows. I opened the refrigerator door and closed it. I examined the row of family pictures hanging on the stairway wall. My parents’ wedding portrait. My mother’s high school graduation, a picture of my grandmother, Auntie Thil and Uncle Olaf. A snapshot my mother had taken of Sam and me when we were very small, sitting back-to-back in a gigantic pumpkin my father had bought from our neighbors. There were no pictures of my father’s parents or his younger brother, Arnold, who had died in the war. No, he said, when we asked, he did not miss them. “How could I miss anybody when I have such a fine family right here?”
Sam’s favorite cat, Rose, rubbed against my legs, but when I tried to pick her up she switched her tail and stalked away. To console myself, I began to eat the miniature Snickers bars from the candy bowl. The taste was flat and chalky, the way something on sale would taste. It didn’t taste as good as trick-or-treat candy, which was sweeter because you sensed it wasn’t really yours, something deliciously stolen. I imagined Sam in my father’s baseball cap, holding out his ugly grocery bag, and I ate a few more Snickers, mixing the remaining ones with my fingers so it looked like there were more. My mother had said we probably wouldn’t get many trick-or-treaters anyway. Our house was too far from Horton, set back from the highway. The trick-or-treaters we did get usually came just as we were ready for bed, kids from the neighboring farms huddled close for warmth in the open bed of somebody’s pickup. The glowing end of a cigarette watched from the cab, a red devil’s eye.
Tonight the first group of trick-or-treaters didn’t arrive until well after dark. I had long given up sitting by the door and was watching a Charlie Brown special and nibbling Snickers bars when I heard footsteps on the porch. I ran into the kitchen and peeked carefully through the window: a group of clowns and one tiny, shivering fairy. When I opened the door they all just looked at me, shifting foot to foot.
“What do you say?” I said, because it didn’t seem fair they should get something for nothing.
“Please,” the fairy chirped. The older ones tittered a few “trick-or-treats” and held out their plastic jack-o’-lanterns. I wondered how I looked to them, too big to go trick-or-treating, perhaps, but not big enough to be mistaken for a grown-up. They had come in a rusted blue station wagon that was idling by the shed, and when they ran back and opened the doors I heard a woman’s shrill voice telling them to hurry up and shut the goddamn doors, did they want to freeze her ass?
Suddenly it seemed that every five minutes I’d hear a knock at the door. There were witches and elves and Martians; there were ingenious salt and pepper shakers, a martini, an airplane, even a Tweety bird with real chicken feathers. I began to worry about running out of candy, and I wished that I hadn’t eaten so much of it myself. I was jittery from the sugar, and every time I heard a new group at the door, the sound tickled my spine like a burst of electricity.
At precisely nine o’clock I gave the last Snickers bar to a rabbit; his sister scowled at me through her ballerina eyes when I handed her an apple, still cold from the crisper. “It’s all I have,” I pleaded. The rabbit giggled and scampered toward the waiting truck. The ballerina held her stare an extra moment before pivoting elaborately, then stomping down the steps, her long braid swinging. I shut the door, locked it, and turned off the porch light. I considered putting a sign on the door saying Sorry, just ran out, but Uncle Olaf did that every year so he wouldn’t have to pay for candy, and last year he’d gotten his windows soaped. Maybe there would be no more trick-or-treaters. With that, I heard another car creeping up the drive. I ran around the house turning off lights, until everything was dark. The car hesitated in the courtyard, then turned and headed back toward the road. I was relieved. It was nine-fifteen; my father and Sam would be home soon. Maybe we could give away some of Sam’s candy, the kinds he didn’t like. I found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer and amused myself by letting the cats chase the floating white circle of light across the floor. The furniture loomed in the silence, the couch and the chairs rubbing shadows. The big fern rustled from the cold air seeping in beneath the front window.
By ten o’clock I had started to worry. My father and Sam should have been home by nine-thirty, and I wondered if they’d been in an accident. There hadn’t been any trick-or-treaters for a while, but I still didn’t want to turn on the lights. To pass the time I went upstairs and changed into my nightgown and slippers and robe, leaving the flashlight, still lit, on my bed. When I picked it up, it flickered uneasily. I turned it off to save the batteries. Outside, the wind had blown back the clouds to reveal a nearly perfect full moon, and after a moment I could see everything clearly. I was heading back toward the stairs, stepping through the dappled patterns made by the moonlight, when I heard another knock at the door.
It startled me because I hadn’t heard a car. It was almost ten-thirty, and I figured whoever it was would give up quickly. But that didn’t happen. Somebody began to knock. Then I heard the screen door open; the person pounded on the inner door. I crept down the stairs to the living room window, wondering if it was anyone we knew. But when I looked out into the courtyard, there was no car. I went into the dining room and cupped my hand to the glass, looking down the long driveway to the road, but I couldn’t see a car down there either. Whoever it was had come by foot.
I didn’t know whether or not to be afraid, and I wished desperately for my father and Sam to come home. After a while, the pounding stopped and the screen door closed, almost gently. I heard the porch steps creak, the low murmur of a man’s voice, and then I saw a shape outside the living room window. I dropped to the floor, listening as it moved around the house, testing each of the windows, one by one. The cats listened too, their green eyes glowing. If someone got inside, they would disappear like shadows and wait patiently for whatever was happening to me to be finished, so they could return to their favorite chairs and lick their paws. I hated them then. I wanted to put my hands around their smooth, smug throats and squeeze. And I hated my mother and my father and even Sam, who had left me at risk, all alone.
Now someone was working on the back door, making quiet, careful sounds, worrying at the lock, jiggling it, cajoling it, until I heard the bolt slide back with a hollow crack. I got to my feet and backed into the kitchen, thinking I would get a knife from the drawer, but then I decided that the sound of the drawer opening would reveal that someone was home. Instead, I reached for the largest cast-iron pan hanging on the wall. Just as I was lifting it down, the kitchen light snapped on, and I spun too hard too fast, the heavy pan jerking my body toward a man. The pan sailed past him, hit the wall, dropped straight to the floor, and bounced in a cloud of plaster. “Jesus Christ,” the man said, and he was my father, and he was laughing. Sam peeked out from behind him, his eyes huge and terrible beneath my father’s Fountain Ford cap. “I locked the damn keys in the car,” my father said. “We had to hitch back with some kids, and when you wouldn’t answer the door…”
He was limp with his laughter, leaning against the wall beside the dent where the pan had landed. “How are we going to explain this to your mother?” he gasped. “She’s going to think you’ve gone crazy.”
“I am not crazy,” I said, and I was dizzy with what I thought was pure embarrassment; I hadn’t learned, yet, to recognize rage. “How was I supposed to know it was you?”
“Well, Christ, Abby, who else would it be?”
“A rapist,” I yelled. “Or a sodomist!” My father stopped laughing. He stared at me, incredulous, as if I’d just done something obscene. “Honey,” he said awkwardly. My body was trembling beneath me, and with all my will I forced it to stay whole, to carry me step by step through the kitchen, past my father, past my brother, until I reached the stairway. There, shame broke over me in hot, sharp waves, and I took the stairs two at a time. In my room, I got into bed without taking off my robe, without turning on the light. After a while, Sam came in and sat at the foot of the bed with his bag of trick-or-treat candy, as if he wasn’t sure whether to stay with me or go back downstairs to my father. I could hear his breathing, ragged and thick, as if he was crying too. “I thought you were going to kill me,” I finally said, and then he crawled up the length of the bed and got under the covers beside me, the way he used to do. The candy bag rested, stone heavy, on my chest.
“Look,” he said, but I didn’t need to reach inside to understand it was more candy than either of us could possibly have imagined. I sat up and upended the bag across our legs. The contents slithered and spread, glittering in the moonlight like a blanket of jewels.
“Do you think some of them are poisoned?” Sam asked, and he sat up too.
I picked up a tiny carton of Junior mints and turned it over in my palm, but there was no way to tell. “We ought to turn on the light,” I finally said, but neither of us did. Sam was the first to begin to eat; it was some sort of cookie, homemade, with lots of chocolate chips. He held it out to me, and I opened my mouth, bracing, bracing hard for the stab of the pin or the muffled whiff of poison, the edge of the razor biting bone.
Though my mother had lived in Horton since before Sam and I were born, she still referred to Oneisha as home, drawing out the word so that it sounded like someone’s name. Every Sunday after Mass, the three of us ate dinner at my grandmother’s house, sometimes joined by Auntie Thil and our cousins, more rarely by my father and Uncle Olaf. The house was a pale pink two-story with a porch that wrapped around it like the snug waist of a girdle. The first floor listed slightly to the left, while the second floor listed slightly to the right, and when you compared them to the strict vertical lines of the porch railing, it made the house appear to be swaying to a gentle internal wind. In summer, squirrels nested in the gutters and rustled in the chimney; in winter, mice made scritching noises behind the walls. My grandmother’s cats tracked the sound with their ears, while Sam and I watched, twisting our faces, still young enough to want our own ears to move with that same quick, swiveling grace.
My mother says that, even now, Oneisha hasn’t changed. If you stand in front of Saint Ignatius Church, Highway KL and the Fox Ranch Road stretch in four directions like the arms of a cross, narrowing until they vanish at the point where they meet the horizon. Growing up, I believed these roads wrapped the world like flat, wide ribbon, and that if you followed any one of them, you would eventually find yourself approaching the wooden signs Uncle Olaf had carved to replace the green metal kind issued by the state of Wisconsin: ONEISHA, POP. 650. Home was a place you never escaped. Like an enchanted maze, the very steps you hoped might lead you away were, in fact, bringing you back to the same streets you walked with your friends, restless, your sneakers scuffing the pavement, all the while sensing things could change in an instant if only you knew what to look for.
But the year I started high school, I stopped looking and closed my eyes. I slept for hours on end, going to bed right after supper, sleeping through my alarm the next day, falling asleep in school. Friends stopped calling, puzzled by my lack of response to the things in their lives that mattered most—boys, curfews, parents, grades. Someone reported me to the school guidance counselor, who called me in for a few short “consultations.” He was a heavyset man, who chain-smoked as he asked faltering questions about my home life; afterward, he sent my mother notes on pale blue paper, explaining his role in the school system, inviting her to make an appointment to discuss “life’s rocky transition called adolescence.” The principal sent notes too, only his were form letters printed on stark school stationery, two parallel columns with Check Off Items That Apply at the top. “Grades falling,” my mother read aloud. “Attitude poor. Does not pay attention.” When I began to lose weight, she took me to Dr. Neidermier, who took my pulse and palpated my abdomen before he said hello. I stared at the medical diagram on the wall, a man’s head and torso, the skin and muscle peeled away to reveal his various organs. Just above his jellyfish brain, THE HUMAN ANATOMY was printed in bold black letters.
“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Dr. Neidermier said. I sat motionless on the edge of the examining table, clutching the worn green gown around me. My mother smoothed it over my knees, as if I were still a little girl and the gown was a fancy little girl’s dress. I remembered her driving me to grade school birthday parties, the proud feeling of sitting alone beside her in the front seat like a grown-up. “Her weight’s OK. Actually, she could lose another ten, fifteen pounds, no problem.”
“But there must be something the matter,” my mother said. I could see her shoulders rise as if she were pulling herself up by an internal string. After two years at the Sell It Now!, she and Cindy Pace had taken out a small-business loan and started their own advertising company. Cindy Pace had a college degree in English; she seemed nice enough to me, but she’d never been married, which, according to my father, meant she wasn’t normal. He nick-named her “Windy Face,” because she and my mother talked on the phone so much. At night, he listed all the reasons why A-1 Advertising was going to be a failure, but my mother tuned him out, reading books with titles like Assert Yourself! and Yes, I Can! As she spoke to Dr. Neidermier, she enunciated each word carefully, a technique, she had explained to me, that would make a person take you seriously. “You don’t need a medical degree to understand this child isn’t well,” she said.
But Dr. Neidermier was smiling, the way he did at Sunday Mass when he turned around to give the Sign of Peace. “It’s her age. You know,” he said, “sweet sixteen and all that.”
“She’s barely fifteen. A freshman in high school.”
“Fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty. It’s tough for a girl these days,” he said. “Competing with the boys. College. Career.” He winked at me, a gesture that always made me feel I’d missed something. “Join some clubs. Go out for pizza with the boys.” I felt my eyes closing under the bright fluorescent lights. When I opened them, he was gone and my mother was standing in front of me, staring into my face.
“Wake up,” she said. “Concentrate.” Her eyes were hazel, with flecks of brilliant green, and I realized how seldom I looked past the thick curve of her glasses. Her nose, I knew, was a slender replica of my own, and there was a small pink mole at the corner of one nostril. “What are you thinking,” my mother asked, “when you look at me like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I was wondering if I would be able to recognize her if we met on the street in Chicago or New York City or Paris or any of the millions of other places I had never been. I wondered how I could be sure that it really was my mother. This woman’s hair, I noticed, was blondish at the temples; didn’t my mother have red hair? But who would want to trick me like this, to pretend she was my mother when she wasn’t? I began to feel afraid. I closed my eyes again.
“We’ve got to do something,” my mother said. “You’re slipping away as we speak.”
“Yes,” I said. I was tired. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed, where I’d been all afternoon, waking to the intermittent whine of the saw coming from my father’s workshop. He had a rare day off from the car lot, and he was spending it making yet another bird feeder with Sam. The backyard rattled with bird feeders and birdhouses; they swung from the trees and from delicately curved stands, they stood at attention on thick posts, they dangled from the clothesline, they stuck like barnacles to the sides of the shed. “Do we really need another one, Gordon?” my mother said, but my father said that Sam needed to practice what he called the fundamentals. “Repetition leads to perfection,” he told my mother. “Anybody who can lie around drawing pictures of birds should be able to build a house for them. Right, Sam?”
Sam glowered; he was thirteen, and glowering had become his stock response to my parents, though he still got along all right with me if nobody was watching. “Adolescence,” my father called it, shaking his head as if it were a sad diagnosis. I wondered if adolescence was what I was suffering from too.
“We’ll figure this out on our own,” my mother muttered, handing me my clothes. “Doctors.” She spat the word. “What do they know?” but I sensed she was more angry with herself for letting Dr. Neidermier escape so easily. She had done everything the books said to do; what could she have missed? As we drove home, I pressed my forehead against the cold window, watching the town of Horton ripple past like a colorful river. On Main Street, the houses were painted pastel shades of green and blue and yellow; they were small and square, like candy houses, and I imagined I could taste them in the back of my throat, cloyingly sweet but with a bitter core. Outside town, the slender trees dividing the fields were already bare, the leaves blown down too soon, browned with frost. Crows rose from the corn stubble, and just up the road from our house, we passed a flock of wild turkeys near the drainage ditch where Sam and I used to build dams after the heavy spring rains. I remembered the feeling of the icy mud between my toes, the smell of it as we scooped it up and slapped it into a thick brown wall, the delicious panic as the water rose over our ankles, up to our knees.
My mother parked in front of the barn, and I started for the house, but she grabbed me by the sleeve and led me through the maze of bird feeders, car parts, abandoned household appliances, and rusty farm equipment until we reached the shed. Recently, my father had fixed it up as a place where he and Sam could spend time together. According to my father, my mother had done a poor job with Sam; she’d been too soft, too lax, overprotective. Now he was stepping in “to put some hair on Sam’s chest,” an expression that was painful considering how slow Sam was to mature. But Sam was changing in other ways. He kept to himself more and more. He lied about things, stupid little things, even when it was easier to tell the truth. He talked back to my mother, picking on her just like my father did, complaining about a meal she’d fixed, refusing to carry his plate to the dishwasher. “Make Abby do it,” he’d say, when she asked him to strip the sheets off his bed or vacuum or wipe the table. And though my father insisted he obey, it was clear that he was really on Sam’s side. “That’s why God made girls—right, Sam?” he’d say, winking at my mother so she’d have to take it as a joke.
A sign on the door said Enter at Your Own Risk. When my mother and I came in, my father leapt up from beside the metal cabinet where he kept his small tools. Sam was running a plane over a two-by-four again and again, as if he were making a giant spear. One corner of the shed was arranged like a small living room with carpeting, a refrigerator, and two overstuffed chairs. An American flag hung from one wall. Below it was a table made out of a door balanced on three sawhorses, and there were blueprints spread across it like the secret maps Sam and I once had made to find buried treasure, with X marks the spot. Beside the blueprints were two open cans of beer.
“I didn’t hear you,” my father said, and he walked toward my mother with careful steps, the way he did when he’d been drinking. “What’s the matter—is she really sick?” A perfect dusty handprint clung to the thigh of his coveralls. “What did the doctor say?”
My mother went over to the table, picked up a can of beer, set it down. “You’re not drinking this, are you, Sam?” she said.
Sam ignored her, shook his long hair across his eyes. Girl hair, my father called it. For weeks, he’d been trying to shame Sam into getting it cut.
“Sam?” my mother said. “I asked you a question.”
My father looked annoyed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I can’t believe you’re giving a thirteen-year-old beer,” my mother said.
“Don’t come in here telling me what I can and cannot give my son,” he said. “If it were up to you, Therese, he’d be wearing a goddamn skirt.”
“Gordon—” my mother began, but my father had turned to me. “So what’s wrong with you?” he said, interrupting my mother.
“Nothing,” I said.
“The doctor doesn’t know,” my mother said.
“Is she…what’s that thing girls get? Where they don’t eat.” For a moment, his voice was concerned; he met my mother’s gaze.
“No. Thank God.” They were silent for a moment, considering what to do with me.
“Well,” my father said. He cuffed my shoulder playfully. “It doesn’t sound too serious.”
“Can I go now?” I said. The room seemed too warm, and it smelled faintly of turpentine, an odor that always made me queasy. My mother grabbed me by the sleeve again, as if she thought I might float away. “I’ll come with you,” she snapped, “seeing it doesn’t look like your father’s going to help.”
“What do you want me to do?” my father said.
“For starters,” my mother said, “I want you to stop giving alcohol to a minor.” She swept the beer cans from the table with the back of her hand; they foamed on the carpeting before my father could retrieve them. Back in the house, in the cold mud room, she slipped my coat from my shoulders and spun me around to face her. “What do you want me to do for you? Tell me.” She rubbed my shoulders hard, as if she were trying to warm me. “Because if you don’t, I’ll have to decide, and I might be deciding wrong. Maybe you need to see another doctor. Maybe you just need a change of pace. More exercise. Vitamins.” She waited for me to agree or disagree. “Please,” she said, and I finally opened my mouth to speak. But the sleepiness lapped my chest, the back of my neck. “I just want to sleep,” I told her, and she released me, exhaling a white flag of steam.
I woke up because something was wrong with my big toe. There was a snap, and then the smaller toes next to it stung. I sat up, picked the rubber band from between my toes. “Jerk,” I told Sam, without malice. He still had the same giggle he’d had when he was six. A late bloomer, my father called him, pinching back his slender elbows until they touched, or pinning him helplessly in the crook of his arm as Sam fought back silently, furiously, hopelessly. Sometimes he’d grab Sam by his long hair, lift until he rose up on tiptoe. “You see, sport, why short hair is an advantage?” he’d say. The room was dim; it was late afternoon, and I felt peaceful and good, the way I always felt after I woke up.
“They’re fighting about us,” Sam said.
I rolled my eyes. “What else is new?” We listened for a moment; my mother’s quick bursts of speech, my father’s low rumble. The sounds seemed to settle in the corners of the room. My mother was quoting statistics that said people were more likely to become alcoholics if they started drinking young; my father said it was fine for a boy to have one beer with his dad, and that the kid they should be worrying about was me, and if my mother cared about me she wouldn’t have started that goddamn business when it was perfectly clear I needed more attention. “You’re turning her into Mathilde,” he told my mother, and I thought about Auntie Thil: her nervousness, her adolescent hospitalization, which was spoken about in whispers or not at all. Maybe my mother would send me to a hospital. I thought about how I’d look wearing a long white gown. The priest would come to visit me; my eyes would burn dark and fierce and holy, as my worldly body wasted away. One day, gold light would spin a ring around my head, sprout from the tips of my fingers. Then I would be whisked up to heaven. I imagined my father and Sam bending over my corpse, their faces torn with regret.
“What’s beer taste like?” I asked.
Sam made a face. “Sour. Like somebody else’s spit.”
“How do you know what somebody else’s spit tastes like?”
He raised an eyebrow lewdly. “I know all about girls.”
“What are we like?” I asked, because I really wanted to know.
“Not you,” he said, blushing, and I snapped him with the rubber band. He snapped me back, and I grabbed him; we were wrestling around on the bed when we heard footsteps on the stairs. Instantly we let go of each other; Sam slouched to the other corner of my room, and I lay back on my pillow. When my father stepped into the room, he seemed to grow larger against the backdrop of my white wicker furniture; his breathing sucked up all the available air. My mother stood beside him. She was saying something. “Listen to me,” my mother was saying. “Have you even heard one word I’ve said?”
“What if she doesn’t want to go?” Sam said. His voice was too loud, shaking.
“Stay out of this,” my father said.
“To the hospital?” I said.
All three of them looked at me. “To live at Grandma’s, stupid!” Sam shouted. “And they can’t make you go if you don’t want.” His voice cracked on the word want; perhaps it was changing after all. I looked at him, at my mother and father. They wanted a decision from me. They were waiting to hear what I had to say. I couldn’t tell if the sound I was hearing was my own heart beating or the collective sound of theirs. So much noise! I thought of my grandmother’s quiet rooms, the regular tick of her kitchen clock, the soft slap of cards on the kitchen table.
“I’ll go,” I said.
Sam kicked my white wicker rocking chair so hard it swung to and fro long after he’d stormed out.
My grandmother prepared the bedroom in the attic, the one that had been my mother’s when she was growing up. Auntie Thil’s old room was directly below; across the hall was a room filled with the things that had belonged to Mary and Elise. My grandmother slept in the first-floor bedroom, always on the left side of her marriage bed, which was worn lower than the right side, where my grandfather had slept. The departed were present in a quiet, constant way: in the funeral photographs lining the hallway between the kitchen and the living room; in the quilt, stitched by Mary, spread across my grandmother’s bed; in Elise’s piano that my grandmother kept tuned. She’d collected recordings of all the pieces Elise had played; my favorite was “Für Elise,” and I listened to it again and again. My grandmother told me that Elise had liked to pretend Beethoven had written it for her.
My mother drove me out to Oneisha the Sunday before Halloween, and it could have been any other Sunday, except that Sam wasn’t with us. He’d announced that from now on he planned to attend Mass with my father, who went—or, at least, pretended to go—to Saint John’s in Fall Creek, a larger, more modern parish, where Masses took only forty minutes. My father didn’t like Saint Ignatius’s hour-long services or my grandmother’s custom of having us say the Rosary together in the afternoon. He’d come along every once in a while, if Uncle Olaf was going to be there too. Then, after my grandmother’s big dinner, while the rest of us cleaned up, the men took the boys—Sam and my cousin Harv—into the living room to watch football on TV.
“But your grandmother’s expecting you,” my mother told Sam. “You should have said something earlier.”
Sam stared pointedly at the TV.
“Leave him be,” my father said in his end-of-discussion voice. “He’s old enough to hang out with his old man if he wants.” He leaned past my mother to kiss me good-bye, a loud smack that scratched my cheek.
“’Bye,” I called to Sam, but he didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry about him, sweetheart,” my father said. “You just rest up and feel better, OK?”
My mother drove at her usual swift pace, keeping toward the center line to avoid the soft, crumbling shoulder of Highway KL. Horton, at six thousand people, was one of the larger cities in the area, and now we were heading north toward the smaller townships: Ooston, Farbenplatz, Holly’s Field, Oneisha. The sky was low and gray and bright, and the air tasted of the brittle snow that spattered against the windows. My mother’s car had no heat, and it was cold even with the blankets spread across our knees. There were no other cars, and the fields were nearly empty. Occasionally there were horses, but they stood motionless, facing north without expression. We passed the burned-out cannery site, where Mary and Elise had died; I’d never once seen my mother turn her head to look at it. When we crossed the railroad tracks at the south edge of Oneisha, I jumped, startled back into myself after all that smoothness. “Funny how it always gets you,” my mother said. “Those tracks. They’re the last thing you’d expect.”
When I didn’t answer, she said, “Remember, I said I might decide wrong. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“You should have someone with you all the time, till you’re feeling better again.”
I nodded, but she wasn’t seeing me.
“Maybe I should have cut back my hours, stayed home with you for a while, but we’ve made such an investment, Cindy and me—”
“Mom, it’s OK,” I said, and I meant it.
“I just can’t be dependent on your father like I used to be.” She stopped, made a wry face. “I’m not the little girl he married. There’s more to my life now than him saying, Jump, and me saying, How high?” The highway had dissolved into Main Street, and she drove slowly now, edging past the row of nearly identical houses until she reached the intersection. Jack-o’-lanterns leered out of windows, perched on porch steps. Someone had erected a corn-husk man; he pushed a real wheelbarrow filled with pumpkins and gourds. “Maybe you’ll feel better just getting out of Horton for a bit,” she said. “You can spend time with your cousins—won’t it be nice to have them next door? You and Monica can run back and forth, make popcorn, sleep over.”
We turned onto Fox Ranch Road, passing Saint Ignatius and, beside it, the cemetery, with its low, sculpted graves. Each winter, it disappeared beneath the snow until spring, when it erupted with geraniums and tiny American flags. Across the street was the low brick rectory where Father Van Dan lived and, beside it, a cottage occupied by the two elderly nuns. On the other side was Geena Baumbach’s cheery yellow house; she was the rectory housekeeper and her front yard was cluttered with rusted swing sets, a teeter-totter, a slide that tipped over whenever it stormed, and a few plank benches for young mothers to sit on while their children argued turns. In summer, the nuns were outside every day, working in their vegetable garden. Sometimes they’d cross behind the rectory to the swing set, where they’d arc toward the sky like blackbirds, weighted down by their strict religious garb.
My grandmother’s house and Auntie Thil’s tan brick ranch were next door to one another, divided by a single shared driveway. Jakey, my grandmother’s old yellow dog, was lying in the middle of it; he barked once for show before ambling out of the way so we could pull in and park. “Where’s your brother today?” my grandmother called from the door. “He isn’t sick?”
“Oh, no,” my mother said cheerfully, lightly, as if Sam hadn’t been coming along for Mass and Sunday dinner in Oneisha ever since he was born. “He’s going to Saint John’s with Gordon.”
“I see,” my grandmother said, but it was clear she didn’t.
“I think it’s nice he and Gordon have some time together, don’t you?” my mother said. She carried my suitcase inside, as my grandmother held the door. But then, instead of putting it down, she escaped up the long, narrow stairs toward the attic. The house looked oddly unfamiliar to me, though Sam and I had explored every odd-shaped closet, every corner from the attic to the musty cellar. I tried to understand that this was where I would live, the place I’d go to sleep every night, away from my parents and my brother.
“Things all right at home?” my grandmother asked me gently, kindly. I never could lie to my grandmother; I shook my head. No.
“Your mother has too many irons in the fire,” my grandmother said. “Starting that business…I don’t know.” It was 1980, and in Horton, Wisconsin, married women didn’t do things like start their own businesses. “If it was a question of money, I could understand,” she said. “But that isn’t it, then, is it?”
My mother came back down the stairs. “What isn’t a question of money?” she said.
“Your job,” my grandmother said.
“Business is booming, thank you for asking,” my mother said.
“Therese,” my grandmother said. “Nobody’s criticizing you. We’re just concerned, that’s all.”
“We’ll be late for Mass,” I said quickly, and neither my mother nor my grandmother said anything more. My grandmother stuck two stuffed Cornish hens into the oven, and we walked up the street to Saint Ignatius; by the time we returned, the house was thick with the smell of roasting hens. I chewed and chewed, but the food had no taste, and I slipped what I could to Jakey, who was begging beneath the table. Halfway through dinner I asked to be excused, and my mother walked with me up the stairs to my new room. It was cold and smelled of cedar; I shivered as I pulled off my jeans and stepped into my long underwear. She tucked the covers under my chin and listened to me say my prayers, her eyes bright with tears. “I wish I had something nice to leave with you,” she said. “A ring or something.” She looked at her hands, which were bare except for her wedding ring. Her ears were not pierced. Her hair was cropped close, practical hair, which my father called mannish. “If you want to come home, just call and I’ll come get you. I’ll come get you right away—OK, honey?” She looked like someone familiar, someone I should know, and I was about to say her name, but I was already sleeping.
For weeks I slept, rarely leaving my room except to use the bathroom or eat. Those were the weeks I did not even remember my dreams. When I slept, it was as if the world I’d lived in blinked closed along with me. Years later, I would encounter the word truncation in a music composition class; it referred to lifting out a group of notes so neatly that when you played the piece through, it was as if they’d never been there. At last I had a word to describe those weeks of sleep. I ate breakfast; I ate supper. There was nothing in between—no fights between my father and mother, no slamming doors between my father and Sam, none of my father’s remarks about my weight or my clothes or the dirty minds of boys. Believe me, sweetheart, he’d say, I was a boy once. I know. No Dolly Parton jokes, his heavy arm draped over my shoulders. No questions that made me uncomfortable: Do you have a boyfriend yet? Been doing any smooching? I never could tell how serious he was—after all, I was not allowed to date until I turned sixteen. No makeup or high heels or panty hose. No bikini swimming suits.
Sometimes I’d come downstairs for breakfast and my father would look at my face, at my body, as if he were seeing me for the first time. My God, Therese, she’s growing up! he’d say, and he’d give a low wolf whistle. Where did our little girl go? I’m right here, Dad, I wanted to say, but I wasn’t really sure anymore. A year before, at the beginning of eighth grade, my mother had taken me shopping for school clothes; she’d waited outside the JC Penny dressing room, insisting I come out to model the jeans and blouses and sweaters we’d chosen. In the three-way mirrors, my breasts looked huge—they were already much bigger than my mother’s—and my stomach stuck out no matter how hard I tried to suck it in. “Stop doing that,” my mother told me. “You have a perfectly lovely figure.”
“I’m fat,” I said. “Even Dad says so.” I’d learned not to eat dessert in front of him, sneaking back to the kitchen for a scoop of ice cream or a cookie before I went to bed. If he caught me, he’d say, A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.
“He’s being ridiculous.”
“Maybe he’s just being honest,” I snapped.
“Abby,” my mother said. We were alone in front of the mirrors. Everywhere I looked, a dozen Abigail Schillers seemed to be looking back at me. “You are a lovely young woman.”
“Mom,” I said. I couldn’t bear the sound of that word, woman.
“Your whole life is ahead of you, and I think your father is a little jealous of that. Maybe curious about it too, because soon you’ll be leaving us both behind. We’ll never know you the way we did when you were a little girl.”
She stood next to me in front of the mirror. “I’m jealous,” she said. “I was never as pretty as you. Remember, the great artists didn’t paint skinny beanpoles like me.”
She convinced me to tuck the blouse into my jeans, ran back out into the racks to fetch a rust-colored vest. “Put this on,” she said, and even I had to admit it was flattering. She made me buy two, in different colors. “It’s so nice,” she said, “to have my own money to spoil my kid if I want.”
“I thought you said I was a woman,” I said, trying to maintain my sullen cool but smiling in spite of myself.
“You’ll always be my kid,” my mother said. “Woman or not.”
The next day, I chose that outfit to wear to school, and when my mother complimented me at breakfast, I spun around like a model. But my father put down his toast. “My God,” he said in a small, strange voice. “Therese, are those her real breasts?”
Sam giggled, and I blushed the color of my vest.
“Gordon,” my mother said, furious, “she’s fourteen, she’s not a child anymore,” and as they fought, I grabbed my backpack and slammed out of the house, ran down to the foot of the driveway to wait for the bus. At school, I carried my books in front of my chest; I sat slouched over in my chair. I hated the world and everybody in it. I wished I were invisible. I wished that I could simply disappear.
My mother had arranged for me to take a temporary leave from school. The agreement was that she would collect my assignments once a week and I would mail them back to my teachers, keeping up with my classes independently. I did this fairly regularly at first, then rarely, then finally not at all. Once, I did turn in a paper called “Volcanoes” for my sophomore science class. After a brief factual introduction cribbed from the World Book Encyclopedia, I wrote pages of vivid prose about a girl who had the magical powers of Jesus and lived inside Mount Vesuvius, untouched by the heat or the fumes. My midsemester report card showed a neat row of F’s, which reminded me of merry little flags. I forgot how to write in cursive, a memory lapse that would prove permanent. My textbooks mildewed in my bedroom closet; mice nibbled the covers to lace.
My grandmother cared for me matter-of-factly, without pity but also without the slightest trace of impatience or scorn. Nights, when she listened to me say my prayers, she always asked me to name one thing—no matter how small—for which I was grateful. At first, my head filled with cotton, the shushing noise I heard whenever I was asked to think, to speak my mind, to do anything that called attention to myself. But gradually I could think of things to say. The way Jakey sleeps at the foot of my bed. The recording of the “Moonlight” Sonata you played for me this morning. The mourning doves in the tree outside the window. And after she’d gone: You, Grandma. You. Everything in my grandmother’s house was predictable, calm, safe. Sometimes I’d wake up in the cold sweat of a nightmare, but as soon as I opened my eyes, the memory was blanched by the glow of the Jesus night-light she had plugged into the socket by the door. Let My Light Guide You glowed in gold across the front of Jesus’ robe, and some nights I thought I could feel that Jesus was really there in the room, watching over me so I could go back to sleep. Warm at my feet, Jakey thumped his tail and sighed; I pulled the covers up to my chin. Let My Light Guide You. I was used to Mass on Sundays, prayers before meals and bedtime, but I’d never lived with God in the constant, quiet way my grandmother did. She didn’t pray for me to get well; she prayed that God’s will be done. “Offer everything up to God,” she said, “and pray for those less fortunate than you.” She gave me a German prayer book that had been Elise’s when she was my age, and I’d lie in bed sounding out the strange words, translating as much as I could. This pleased her, and she wrote out the English so that I could compare the two. Soon I could quote them in both languages, and I memorized several of the Psalms from her German Bible as well.
When I first began to wake up again, to come back into myself, I took long baths, singing to myself while I waited for the old claw-footed tub to fill. The water pressure was poor at the top of my grandmother’s house, and if she was doing the dishes downstairs, there was plenty of time to run through my repertoire of Christmas carols and hymns. I began to notice the deepness of my voice, the flicker of my pulse in my temples when I sang, the pattern the sunlight made as it splashed through the lace hanging modestly over the window, and because I had been able to notice nothing for so long, everything seemed precious to me, blessed. I liked to sing, which surprised me, because I’d never really taken conscious pleasure in doing so before. When I told my grandmother, she nodded mysteriously. She gave me a gold ring with a pink glass stone that had once belonged to Elise. To my surprise, it fit my finger perfectly. I did not take it off.
Every Wednesday afternoon, my grandmother and the other Ladies of the Altar met at the church to do the weekly cleaning. Just before Thanksgiving, I went with her for the first time. The women had decided to clean the Stations of the Cross, which hung from the walls fifteen feet above the pews. Their fear of heights made me fearless, tireless. I stood at the top of the ten-foot ladder, wiping the faces of the apostles with warm, soapy water, coaxing dust from the creases of their plaster gowns, from their weary shoulders and delicate toes, washing away the faint gritty layer of the past year of prayer. Afterward, we relaxed with coffee and cake in the windowless room in the basement where the cleaning supplies were kept. While we’d been busy upstairs, Auntie Thil had stayed back to prepare the food, and now she fixed my coffee, thick with sugar and cream. She was a big, soft woman, with fingertips swollen from constant nail-biting. Her face held the look of someone who was ready either to laugh or to burst into tears.
“Look at the roses,” she said, gently touching my cheeks. And that night, preparing to take my bath, I saw in the mirror that my eyes were clear. The dark circles that had ringed them for months had faded, the nervous tuck of my lips smoothed away. I got into the water and soaped my breasts and stomach without feeling disgusted with my body. It was simply that, a body, and if it wasn’t as attractive as my mother said, it certainly wasn’t as ugly as I’d thought. I lay in the tub until the water chilled me blue, joy rushing over and over me. I sang myself the lullabies my mother use to sing me, my voice growing more and more confident until it echoed off the floor tiles, the tall windows, the smooth plaster ceiling.
The next day, I got up at six-thirty and made breakfast for my grandmother, shredding the bacon into the scrambled eggs the way she liked it. Over our second cups of coffee, she stared into my face as if she were searching for the heaviness that had been there. “Today I visit Mrs. Heidelow,” she said, and understanding this was an invitation, I said I’d come along. Mrs. Heidelow was not expected to live until Christmas. A member of the Ladies of the Altar visited every morning, so her daughter could take time away to shop, to fill prescriptions, to light a candle at the church, to grieve.
My grandmother and I bundled up in our coats, and before we left the house, she handed me a colorful scarf that was identical to her own. I tied it firmly over my head the way she did, jammed my hands deep into my pockets, and together we began the icy walk to the other side of town. The sun was up now, tinting the snowy streets a pale, hopeful rose. My nostrils pinched together and stuck; I sniffed hard, smelling the cedar trees that stood beside each home. Light spilled from behind the drawn shades of tiny bedroom windows. We walked with our shoulders touching, stepping out into the street when the sidewalks disappeared, pressing close to the curb when a car drove by. Passing the crossroads, we reached the abandoned fox ranch that had given Fox Ranch Road its name. As children, Sam and I had wandered among the rusty cages, inhaling the peculiar smell that seeped from beneath them. It was easy to imagine that the ghosts of the murdered foxes still lived here, and I was glad when the ranch was behind us, the sun firmly above the horizon, and our stiff boots scuffing up the long driveway that led to Mrs. Heidelow’s house.
Her daughter let us in, leading us through the house to Mrs. Heidelow’s room, where she served us coffee before she left. We sat on folding chairs as Mrs. Heidelow drifted in and out of a medicated sleep. The tiny black-and-white TV buzzed on the dresser, the commercials too bright, too cheery. I watched Mrs. Heidelow’s eyelids flutter; she was awake, but the effort of opening her eyes exhausted her. Still, when she spoke, it was to ask about me. Was I feeling any better? Was my grandmother taking good care of me?
“Yes,” I said. “I’m feeling good again.”
“How she sings!” my grandmother said. “Every night in the bathroom, it’s just like Elise has come home to me.”
I twisted Elise’s ring. It was the first time I’d realized my grandmother could hear me, had been listening to me all along, but I was not embarrassed. And this was what made living here so different than living in Horton, where my father was always quick to laugh, to make you wish you hadn’t sung, hadn’t spoken.
“What do you sing?” Mrs. Heidelow asked, and, again, I understood the unspoken invitation. I sang “Stille Nacht,” the first verse of “O Tannenbaum.”
“Do you know the other verses?” my grandmother asked, and then she and Mrs. Heidelow taught me, the old German words rolling easily from their tongues. Walking home, I knew my grandmother was proud of me by the way she clutched my arm, tightening her grip when we reached icy spots, allowing me to assist her. I began accompanying my grandmother on all her visits to the sick, the lonely, those who were specially chosen and loved by God. I waited the long rows of tables at the monthly church supper, while she and the other women cooked in the kitchen. Afterward, standing up beside the sweltering heat of the ovens, we ate crushed pies, a scorched roast, a pudding that hadn’t quite set. Evenings, I learned to quilt, and soon I carried my own sewing basket when we met in groups of fifteen or twenty to make a “weekend quilt” for the missionaries to give to cold children far away. Wednesdays, I went with my grandmother to Devotions and, afterward, to the rectory, to visit Father Van Dan and the nuns, Sister Mary Andrew and Sister Mary Gabriel, who served us homemade pretzels, cookies, or chocolate cake decorated with perfect hickory nut meats they’d coaxed from the tough, pale shells. Father Van Dan, surrounded by women, was not uncomfortable the way a regular man like my father would have been, and the women spoke of the same things they spoke of when alone: farming and weather, religion and politics, children, sickness, money.
Thanksgiving came, and my mother asked me to spend the day in Horton—my father really wanted Thanksgiving at home, just the four of us, as a family—but I begged to stay in Oneisha and, at last, my mother relented. I was never far from my grandmother’s side. Friday nights, Auntie Thil drove us, along with my cousins, to the Knights of Columbus hall in Ooston, and there we played bingo, mingling with the men, who wore their funny hats so proudly, smoking cigars that turned the air the color of dust, occasionally leaving their wives to slip outside for “a little something Joe forgot”—booze someone had in a brown paper bag. Uncle Olaf was already there, sitting with his pals at their usual table, and whenever he won something he’d carry it to Auntie Thil and present it with a flourish. The smaller prizes were made by hand: yarn-covered hangers, knitted booties, stained-glass Christmas decorations, a pound of divinity; but the prizes we crossed our fingers for were crisp twenty-dollar bills. We marked our cards with pieces of corn, gritting our teeth, holding our breath for that B-69 or 1-19 that would launch us into the air, shrieking Bingo!
Saturdays, we’d take Jakey next door to visit Auntie Thil’s Little Buster. The dogs chased each other around the pond in the backyard, while Auntie Thil and my grandmother played cards in the kitchen and discussed Uncle Olaf’s drinking. My cousins and I went into the den, where Monica watched TV, and Harv and I talked about God. If God was both perfect and able to do anything, could He make a mistake? Why did He make suffering? Harv was a year older than me, and I saw my brother in his face, only here that sullen roundness had become stretched and angular, filled with purpose. Harv had a vocation; I was curious and envious and awed. He was still an altar boy, and because he liked to be, not because he had to be. He helped out with church bake sales, and he often went to Mass during the week. He was able to shrug away his father’s teasing. He answered to another Father now.
“You guys are so weird,” Monica said. “You sound like a couple of monks.” She pointed her chin at me. “No wonder you cracked up.”
“Don’t mind her,” Harv said. “She’s jealous.”
“You bet I’m jealous,” Monica said. “I’d do anything to get out of school.” She lay back on the couch, fanning her fingers in a practiced way to check the polish. I rolled my eyes at Harv; he struck a pose, rippling his fingers. “Dahling,” he said, “do my nails have that pahrfect sheen?”
“Oh, dahling, yes, I believe they do.”
We collapsed on each other, laughing.
“You guys are weird,” Monica said again.
I didn’t miss my mother as much as I’d thought I would, not even after she started going to Mass at Saint John’s with my father and Sam. It was, she said, the only way to make certain they actually went, and though she still came out to Oneisha on Sunday afternoons, she didn’t stay very long. When my grandmother pressed her, my mother admitted that she was afraid to leave Sam unsupervised. She’d caught him hitchhiking by the highway one Saturday, grounded him, and caught him at it again the next day.
“I thought he was spending time with Gordon,” my grandmother said.
“They’re not getting along so well,” my mother said. We were playing cards at the kitchen table; she shuffled and reshuffled the deck. “What does Gordon expect? On the one hand, he encourages Sam to defy me. Then he turns around and complains when Sam doesn’t respect his authority.”
“What do you expect?” my grandmother said. “You defy your husband.”
“Mom,” my mother said. “It isn’t the fifties anymore.”
“Show me,” my grandmother said, “where the Bible says God’s law should change with the times.”
I couldn’t believe Sam had been hitchhiking. Getting into a car with a stranger didn’t seem like something my shy brother would do. Yet Sam wasn’t exactly shy anymore; indifferent, perhaps, was a better word. The few times I talked with him on the phone, he didn’t have much to say beyond “yeah” and “no” and “I don’t know.” His voice was changing rapidly now, and I realized that soon it would be as deep as my father’s. “Why won’t you come visit on Sundays?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t feel like it.”
“We could set up the dominoes like we used to,” I said, remembering the elaborate mazes we’d made in the living room only a year before, one of us keeping an eye on Jakey so he wouldn’t knock them down with his tail. But Sam only made a scornful sound with his tongue. “That’s for kids,” he said. “You wanna talk to Dad?”
I always passed my father on to my grandmother as quickly as I could, and then he complained about how my mother was never home and Sam was running wild and there wasn’t a clean shirt to be found in the house. “I showed him how to use the washing machine,” my mother would say. “Mother, a man as worldly as Gordon claims to be should be able to push a few buttons.” But my grandmother sided with my father; a woman’s place was in the home. The deaths of her oldest daughters still weighed on her heart, and she worried that my mother was tempting Providence, upsetting the natural order of things by leaving my father to make his own bed and drive Sam to school when he missed his bus. And Sam missed the bus whenever he could, oversleeping, dawdling over breakfast. One morning in November, my father pinned him beneath the sheets, cut off his long hair by force, then bent him over the bathroom sink where he shaved off the rest. “Maybe you’ll hear me calling you better without all that hair over your ears,” he said. My mother told me the story privately; she asked me not to repeat it to my grandmother.
“I don’t know what to do about them,” she said. “Every time I turn around, they’re at each other’s throats.”
One Sunday afternoon, she didn’t come out to visit until late in the afternoon. My grandmother was napping, so we took a walk across the frozen fields at the edge of town, Jakey trotting happily ahead of us. When we got to the picnic table in the Yodermans’ apple orchard, we sat on top of it, side by side, our feet propped on the benches. The ice weighted the trees, and it seemed they were bending down to listen as my mother spoke to me about all the wonderful choices my life would offer me, choices her own life had not presented. This year with my grandmother was a slight detour, but soon I’d be back in school, doing well again. When I graduated, I wouldn’t have to get married right away. I could go away to school, find a career I loved. With her profits, she’d opened a special college fund for me and Sam. When I told her not to worry about me getting married or going to college, that I was praying for a vocation, she stopped, her breath leaving her mouth in small, irregular puffs. “The more you learn about yourself,” she finally said, “the better you’ll be able to serve God. Your grandmother says you’re musical like Elise.”
I nodded, slipping my mittened hands between my thighs and the cold surface of the picnic table so I could feel Elise’s ring pinching my skin.
“Perhaps you could study music. Many of the greatest musicians praised God through their instruments.” She put her arm around me. She’d been buying me books she had never read but had heard were books an educated person should read: The Great Gatsby, My Antonia, An American Tragedy. She used that phrase often now—“an educated person”—and whenever she said it, she’d gesture at me as if it were my name. But the books made me nervous; they were filled with un-Godly people, people who lived lives of sin. My grandmother told me not to read them. She gave me The Catholic Digest, a copy of The Song of Bernadette that had once belonged to Elise, pamphlets on dating, growing up, loving God, that were distributed through the Church. I liked them better than my mother’s books. They showed only people who had a clear sense of purpose, the sort of person I wanted to be, bright with the secret of faith.
“I’d like you to start taking piano lessons,” my mother said. “Maybe we could rent a piano for you when you come back home.”
“OK,” I said, although I wanted to tell her not to worry, I could just keep on living with my grandmother and playing Elise’s piano. Usually, if I listened to a record once or twice, I was able to play parts of it back, and one day I managed to sound out all of “Für Elise.” My grandmother listened in the kitchen doorway, and afterward she told me I could go through Elise’s things and choose whatever I liked for myself. Now I drank from what was once her favorite mug, wore her nightgown to bed, decorated my nightstand with her piano figurines. I hadn’t realized my own ear might have anything to do with my abilities, until Father Van Dan, visiting one day, said that I had “perfect pitch.” The phrase reminded me of the way a dog’s ears lifted whenever it heard something. Perfect pitch. I liked the sound of the words. I whispered them over and over to myself so there was no chance I would forget.
“I have perfect pitch,” I told my mother.
“Really?” my mother said. “So does your brother—the guidance counselor told me.”
“Maybe he can take piano lessons too.”
“He doesn’t want to,” my mother said.
“Why not?”
My mother stood up on the bench, dusted off the seat of the jeans she’d started wearing. She climbed to the tabletop and stood there, scanning the flat, snowy countryside as if she thought something might be coming toward us—an unfriendly dog, a storm. The sun was already starting to set. “Your father will tease him,” she said.
I shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “That’s just how Dad is. He makes fun. Like the nose-to-the-wall test.” My father had found me reading the classifieds, imagining myself as a waitress or a teacher, a salesman or a clerk. The jobs were divided into sections, one for women and one for men. I’d been scanning the men’s section because it looked more interesting, but when my father came in, I dragged my finger over to the women’s so he wouldn’t be able to tease me. “Looking for work?” he said. “Good God. A career woman just like your mother.”
“I guess,” I said, which was what I always said. It was neutral, unassuming, dull, which meant my father would lose interest and go away. But that day he sat down on the couch beside me.
“You got the right qualifications?”
I shrugged.
“Let’s see,” he said. “There’s only one test a girl has to pass. Stand up,” he said, and he led me over to the wall, his hand on the back of my neck. “Put your nose to the wall,” he said, and when I did it, bending forward over my breasts, he laughed, shaking his head. “Nope,” he said, “not quite. They’ll have to hire someone else.”
My mother came into the room and saw us standing there. I pressed my nose to the wall again; it was cool, unyielding, a good place to rest. I didn’t understand. “Don’t worry,” my father said, still laughing. “Your mother wouldn’t get the job either, that’s for sure.” My mother took me by the hand and led me from the room. “Don’t listen to him,” she said. It was Sam who finally explained the joke to me: If a woman’s nose could touch the wall, her breasts were too small for the job.
“I’m so sorry about that,” my mother said now, as if she had done something wrong. “That’s why it’s important for you to think about going to college, to have the skills to look out for yourself, even if you don’t think you’ll need them. I have no education, only three years’ experience. This business is a huge risk, and it can’t support two children. Your father and I both know that if it were just my income alone—” She stopped, then shrugged, and I briefly saw myself in that futile gesture. “It’s not good to be too dependent on anyone,” she said.
“Except God,” I said.
“Well, yes,” my mother said. “But God helps those who help themselves.”
“If it’s His will, God can help anybody.”
“But don’t you think it’s His will that you go to college, make something of your life? Let your light shine instead of hiding it under a bushel basket?”
“I want to keep on living in Oneisha,” I blurted. I hadn’t meant to say it like that, and my mother gave me a hurt, surprised look.
“I know we’re going through a tough time right now, but we’re a family, Abby. We belong together.”
“But I feel good here. I’m not sleepy anymore.”
“You’re still sleeping,” my mother said, “only now you don’t even know it. Abby, there’s a whole world out there!” She waved her arms at the horizon, but all I saw were the Yodermans’ cows standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the feeder like a black and white bracelet, Jakey’s yellow tail poking up from the weeds, the small cross of houses that was Oneisha, Wisconsin. The world ended where the sullen winter sky met the stubble of fields not quite completely covered with snow. The world was the smell of frozen apple crushed beneath my heel, the wet black bark of the apple trees, my mother’s voice saying, “I want you to come home. Maybe in another week or so.”
For the next few nights I had terrible dreams, and in them I was running from a man who I knew was going to catch me and do unspeakable things. Sometimes the man was chasing Sam too, and then I had to make a decision, because he would be able to catch only one of us and, being older, I could run faster. Should I save myself? Should I fall behind, saving Sam’s life with my own? Night after night I woke up on the floor, twisted in the blankets, with my shoulder or hip or head stinging from the fall, and always I was the one still alive, intact, safe, facing the open arms of Jesus. Let My Light Guide You.
When I told my grandmother about the dreams, she spoke to my mother, and after that there was no more talk of my going home in the near future. And soon the dreams were forgotten in the rush to prepare for Christmas. My grandmother and I spent entire days baking for the children living in the trailers south of Farbenplatz, the elderly in the nursing home in Holly’s Field, the sick sentenced to Christmas in the hospital. I supervised the younger children on a hayride sponsored by the church. I helped make the queen-size hand-stitched bear paw quilt that would be raffled away on Christmas Day. I made ornaments for our Christmas tree—walnuts rolled in glitter, clothespin angels, paper snowflakes, tinfoil chains.
Father Van Dan arranged for me to sing the Ave Maria at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, and I rehearsed with Eva and Serina Oben, Eva conducting me with one long finger. Afterward, they gave me sight-reading lessons, loaned me armfuls of music I could study on my own. How easy it was to make music! I’d accidentally found a language I could use to express absolutely anything I wanted, even forbidden, sinful things like anger and desire. It was the first time I could remember feeling as though it was all right to speak my mind, and suddenly I was never at a loss for things to say. I practiced on Elise’s piano two hours every day, and then I walked over to the church, where I experimented with the organ. Now that I knew the notes, I could sound out everything I heard. I could even transpose things into different keys without fumbling. My mother had heard about a Milwaukee Conservatory teacher who came to Horton twice a month. She got me on a waiting list for lessons, paying the reservation fee out of her own business earnings when my father insisted fancy lessons were unnecessary, that if I had to have lessons at all, a local teacher should be good enough.
“Are you nervous about Christmas Eve?” she asked. It would be the first time I’d performed for a real audience, including my father and Sam, who were also planning to come for the service. But that didn’t bother me. I intended to sing for God and God alone. I’d been praying for a vocation, the absolute knowledge that my life was meant for Him. It was a feeling that, according to Harv, was unmistakable when it came. “I guess it’s like the way you describe music,” he told me, during another one of our conversations that left Monica rolling her eyes. “Understanding without words.” I wanted to understand. I wanted to be chosen.
At eleven-thirty on Christmas Eve, my grandmother and I walked over to the church, and I was grateful for the stinging snow, the bitter wind chilling me awake. My parents and Sam were already there, and at first they looked like any other family, lined up in a pew, Sam’s blond hair cropped so short I could see his scalp shining underneath. Then, as we got closer, I saw what my mother hadn’t described, what I had not imagined: deep clotted nicks where my father’s razor had bit in. There was a noise in my head like bees. Suddenly I was remembering all the times my father held Sam and me down, one at a time, rubbing his coarse whiskers into our necks as we screamed and begged him to stop. When he grabbed me first, Sam could have run, but he never did, pummelling my father’s shoulders, trying to set me free. My father laughed and pummeled him back, too rough; did he think it was all just a game? Sometimes he would take us for drives, letting the car swerve over the median or off the shoulder, accelerating so our stomachs lurched and our heads snapped back against our seats. He would tell us he was going to drive into Lake Michigan, and he’d edge the car inches from the drop-off. Nobody sneeze, he’d say.
My grandmother called my name; I was blocking the middle of the aisle. I stepped quickly over my father’s knees, kissed my mother, sat beside my brother.
“Hi,” I whispered.
“Hey,” he said. The worst of the cuts was behind his ear; he noticed me staring, sank lower into the collar of his coat.
Offer it up to God. When I rose to sing at Communion time, I stopped seeing Sam and my parents and grandmother. I didn’t even think about the rest of the congregation. I walked to the altar, and as soon as Eva began to play, I opened my mouth and let my voice fill the church like a choir. As I sang, I prayed for God to accept the offering I made of myself, waiting for the feeling of absolute understanding that Harv had described. But I felt nothing except my own want, heard no voice other than my own—and then not even that. The song was finished. Eva swayed to stillness. In the long moment before the congregation burst into spontaneous applause, I knew I had been refused. Harv was assisting Father Van Dan; at the Communion rail, he slid the gold platter beneath my chin. I saw my reflection there, terribly distorted.
“The body of Christ,” Father Van Dan said.
“Amen.” I could barely say it. I believe.
After Mass, people nodded to me, pressed my arm; a few of them said shyly what a pretty voice I had, how much like Elise. My grandmother nodded proudly, accepting compliments on my behalf; my mother scooped me into a hug, and even Sam said, “That was pretty good.” We’d been fasting since sundown, and when Harv emerged from the sacristy, we all walked back to my grandmother’s house for pancakes and sausage and sweet fruit preserves, the same early breakfast we ate each year before everyone finally went home, stuffed and exhausted. My father put his arm around my shoulder, leaning too hard, the way he always did. “Congratulations,” he said, and I offered him my hand to shake. But when he tried his usual trick of squeezing too hard, I bent his thumb back as if I were snapping a carrot.
“Don’t do that,” I shouted, “I hate it when you do that,” and then I started to cry.
“Did you hurt her, Gordon?” my mother said.
“Who’s the victim here?” my father said. “Christ, look what she did to my thumb,” and he held it out, already swelling; I could see it under the dim light of the moon. But nobody was listening to him. Instead, my mother was rubbing my hand, my grandmother was patting my shoulder, Harv and Uncle Olaf were searching their pockets for Kleenex, and Monica was saying in her affected way, “Why does everything have to be so melodramatic?” I cried all the way home and into the bright warm light of the kitchen, where the cats climbed into my lap and my grandmother fed me whiskey tea. I cried while my grandmother fixed an ice pack for my father’s thumb, and later while Uncle Olaf secured it with tape from the first-aid kit, teasing him about the dangers of thumb wrestling with a daughter. It was clear to me now that I belonged in this world. There was nowhere else for me to go.
On New Year’s Day, I told my grandmother I wanted to go back to school in January. She surprised me by giving me Elise’s piano; Uncle Olaf had agreed to haul it in his truck. “For your lessons,” she said. “It will fit nice in your mother’s living room, and I’m sure Elise would want you to have it.”
“Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. “Are you sure?”
My grandmother took my hand, rubbed her thumb across the top of my knuckles the way she did when she was pleased with me. “When God shuts a door, He opens a window,” she said, “or, in your case, perhaps, another door.” I’d told her about how much I’d wanted a vocation, how hard it was not to envy Harv. “Keep the piano and practice your lessons and remember Elise in your thoughts,” she said. “If God wills it, you’ll have the lifetime of music she always wanted.”
Sam’s fourteenth birthday was coming up on Saturday, the sixth of January, and we decided I would move back home then. My father hadn’t spoken to me since Christmas Eve; I’d sprained his thumb badly, and for the next six weeks he would have to wear an embarrassing white splint. He told people he’d slammed his finger in the car door, but there was something about the way he said it that made them ask more questions. Eventually, someone heard the story from someone who knew my uncle, and my father was teased without mercy. Sam told me about it the next time I called. “Serves him right,” he said bitterly.
The night of the fifth was bingo night, and for the first time, I won twenty dollars. Auntie Thil won next, then, amazingly, my grandmother. People were laughing and rubbing our sleeves for luck, and we drove home happy and warm with our good fortune. As we walked into the house, the squat, old-fashioned phone was ringing, and I knew by the way my grandmother reached for the receiver that she also sensed something was wrong. It was my mother; Sam had been hurt in a car accident that involved two other underage drivers. She’d thought he was at a friend’s house, doing homework, and when the police called, she was so certain they had the wrong number that she told them so and hung up. They called her back. She called us. The car, an old Pontiac, had spun out of control on Highway J, bounced through a ditch, and hit a tin shed. My father was already on his way to the hospital. Would we meet her there?
My grandmother phoned Auntie Thil, and within minutes we were on the road to Saint Nicholas Hospital, our twenty-dollar bills still crisp in our pockets, our coats giving off the festive smell of the KC hall. Auntie Thil dropped us off at Emergency, and for the first time I was scared. The receptionist knew my grandmother; she smiled kindly and gave us the number of my brother’s room.
“Quit,” my grandmother said when she noticed me sniffling. We stepped into the elevator, and she punched the floor button. “Abigail, use your head. If it was serious, they wouldn’t have him in a room so quick.”
There was my mother at the end of the hallway, talking with two police officers in their stiff uniforms. I knew the younger one. His daughter was my age. I went to her birthday parties when we were in grade school, and her father always helped us play Pin the Tail on the Teacher. Officer Holtz. He recognized me and smiled, but his uniform made me shy, and I did not smile back. The other officer had a pen and a pad. He seemed eager to finish and go.
“He has a broken collarbone, some stitches,” my mother told us. “The other boys were sent home already.”
“So you’ve never noticed any sign before this that he’d been consuming alcohol?” the impatient officer said. My mother looked at my grandmother, and her face darkened with shame. “No,” she whispered. “I’ve already told you.”
“We’ll give a holler if we need any more information,” Officer Holtz said quickly, and the two of them left in a jingle of keys.
“The other boys were older,” my mother said, as if she were speaking to herself. “They gave him the beer. It was their car he was driving.”
“Can we see him?” I asked, and my mother nodded. My grandmother took her by the arm.
“You go on ahead,” she said. “Your mother and I need to have a private talk.”
There were two beds in the room. The one closest to the door was empty. The second one was hidden behind a loose white curtain, but I knew it was Sam’s because I recognized my father’s shoes. I hoped that my father wasn’t scolding Sam, but as I listened, I didn’t hear either my father or Sam saying much of anything. What I heard were ragged gasps, like the sound of someone in pain, and for a moment I wondered if Sam was hurt worse than my mother had said. But when I peered around the curtain I saw that Sam was asleep, his face a white ghost mask except for his lashes and brows and the faint gold hairs that lined his upper lip. His shoulder was covered in plaster; he had stitches in one ear, black and spiky-looking, like a row of ants feeding there. My father was sitting beside the bed, one long arm thrown over Sam’s chest, and the splint on his thumb seemed huge and glowing. His shoulders moved, and I heard that gasp again.
When he looked up, I recognized the man from my dreams, and as I stared at the shine of tears on his face, I understood why God had refused me. I had run with all my strength, as fast and far as my selfish legs would take me. The man had caught my brother instead. Now he’d never let go.