My mother could turn anything into a story. Nights, when she tucked me into bed, she’d ask me what color kiss I wanted, then wait while I tried to describe what I saw. A red kiss, bright as a zinnia. A fat, orange kiss, like the fish in its bowl. Earthworm kisses that tickled and twisted, slid down the back of your neck. “What color kiss tonight?” she’d say, after listening to my prayers, and I’d try to come up with something new, a color I’d never tried before. A kiss the color of the palm of my hand. A kiss the color of my grandmother’s hair. My favorite kiss was exactly the color of the sky before a storm, smoky blue with purple streaks along the horizon, but this kiss took a lot of time and my mother could only deliver one if her papers were all graded and her lesson plans finished and the housework reasonably under control. Then she’d wrap me tight in the blankets, roll me to and fro like the wind, lift me up and drop me like thunder on the bed. The rain was her fingers up and down my back. The purple came afterward, the pressure of her hand on my forehead. And then a blue whisper over my hair, soothing, smoothing, stroking the clouds away.
At the piano, my mother spoke not of sound but color, not of notes but what the chords might stand for, what they made me feel. My brother preferred to sit under the piano, working the pedals with his hands, while my mother and I sat together on the bench, telling stories on the shining keys. Perhaps she picked out a swervy melody as I knuckled the black keys into frenzy. Or we might take turns mashing the white keys with the palms of our hands, a line of broad, flat stones. Sometimes I’d choose a song from one of her old music books. “Spinning Song” or “Tarantella” or selections from The King and I.
“Play this one,” I’d say, pointing to a measure. “Play this one.” And I’d play back what I heard.
When I was seven, I started formal lessons. My first assignment was a series of rhythmic variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The most difficult one went da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da—Think of rutabaga, rutabaga, my teacher said—and when I finished, my wrists ached all the way up my arms. I remember my surprise. I’d never guessed, watching my mother, that playing the piano hurt.
“Shake it out,” my teacher told me in her lovely alto voice. “Thatta girl. Shake it all out.”
I rode my bike home through a canopy of elm trees, weaving between the puddles of sunlight scattered across the sidewalks. That night at the piano, my mother listened to what I’d learned.
“The rutabagas hurt me,” I explained, holding out my hands. My mother cupped them in her own, studied them very seriously. Then she covered them with kisses the cold, clear color of ice.
In my family, no one complained about a cut, a bump, a bruise. “Anything broken?” the nearest adult would say if you tripped and fell. “No? Then what are you crying for?”
Illness was something to be hidden. If it was discovered, you still went to school or to work, of course, but when you got home you were quarantined in your room, so whatever you had wouldn’t spread. All it took was a sneeze to rouse my father’s suspicions. “You catching schnupe?” he’d say. My brother and I would deny it fiercely—who wanted to be isolated from the family room TV? At school, kids ran the water fountain twice, to kill the germs, before taking a drink; in the bathrooms, we put toilet paper on the seats before we sat, the way that our parents had taught us, so we wouldn’t catch some sex disease. Cleanliness was next to godliness. The moment we got home, we washed our hands with hot water and soap. We washed them again before meals, and one last time before bed. You just couldn’t be too careful.
Ringworm, on the other hand, wasn’t so serious. Everybody had that. You just soaked a couple of Band-Aids in kerosene, plastered them on, and left them there as long as you could stand it.
Pinworms passed with enough castor oil; pinkeye with saltwater flushes.
Doctoring people wasn’t much different than doctoring livestock, and anyone could do that.
Sore throat? Take a hydrogen peroxide gargle.
Head cold? Hot whiskey punch with lemon and sugar.
Fever? Ice bath, if it got high enough. Otherwise, drink lots of water and for Chrissake sake, don’t eat anything.
Toothache? Chew on the other side of your mouth and see if it don’t get better.
Earache? Lie on a warm heating pad, or else ask Uncle Artie to blow a little warm cigar smoke in there.
Sprain something? Well, don’t step on it, silly. Keep your mind off it, keep busy, forget about it. At night, make up a plastic bag of ice, wrap it in a towel, and take it to bed.
Headache? “Stick your head in the toilet for ten minutes, my father would tease. “I guarantee you won’t feel a thing after that.”
There was no such thing as mental illness. There was craziness, of course, but there really wasn’t any cure for that. Character flaws such as moodiness or laziness could be easily relieved by doing something nice for somebody else, getting your mind off yourself, thinking about those less fortunate. A smile’s just a frown turned upside down. Nobody saw a psychiatrist, except on TV.
My mother accidentally dislocated my shoulder once while she was playing with me, swinging me in circles by my outstretched arms. When I cried, she scolded me for acting like a baby—my arm looked fine, there was nothing the matter with me. Alone in my room, I felt it pop back into place, but then it swelled, and we wound up at the emergency room. By then, my mother was beside herself, but when the X rays came back, we were both a little embarrassed. We could have saved ourselves the trouble, the expense. A couple of days on the heating pad, the way my father had suggested, and it would have been fine.
Several years later, when I knocked myself unconscious practicing gymnastic flips, the first thing I did after coming to was beg the other kids not to tell. Around that time, my mother, on a dare, ran the school’s annual thousand-yard dash alongside her students. The next day she was hospitalized; she’d had pneumonia, it turned out, for nearly a week. “I’d been feeling really lousy,” she admitted. “I thought it was just me.”
Cancer, on the other hand, you didn’t mess around with. If you found a lump, you didn’t tell a soul. You didn’t even say a word like that outright. Nobody knew exactly how you caught it, so if somebody’s mother or father had cancer, you weren’t allowed play at their house, though you could play in their yard where there was plenty of fresh air.
This was rural Wisconsin in the 1970s. Farmers, and the children of farmers. Germans and Luxemburgers and Czechs, Italians who’d worked in the local quarries at the turn of the century. Dutch who drove cars that sported bumper stickers boasting IF YOU AIN’T DUTCH, YOU AIN’T MUCH. No blacks. No Jews. A few families from the Philippines. Everybody knew who was what. It was the second, question you asked at school, right after What church do you go to?
At my elementary school class graduation, awards were given for Best Attendance. I coveted that prize, but my best friend, Tabitha, won. She’d come to school despite strep throat, several colds, the stomach flu (though she’d been confined to the nurse’s office), and a case of chicken pox cleverly concealed beneath a turtleneck sweater.
My parents grew up on dairy farms less than ten miles apart, the grandchildren of Luxemburg and German immigrants. At sixteen, my father left high school to farm full time with my grandfather, and it was common, in good weather, for the two of them to work sixteen-hour days. After marrying my mother, my father threw that same energy into selling fertilizer and, later, farm machinery, traveling for the Gehl corporation on marathon routes throughout the Midwest, saving money to start his own company. He came home every weekend, but he was something of a stranger, distant, unfamiliar with our household routines. Saturdays, he worked at his desk in the family room, going over ledgers as the adding machine chimed its toneless song. Sunday nights, before he went back on the road, he spread newspapers over the family room carpet and polished his wingtips with an old diaper. My brother and I watched, curious but shy, inhaling the deep sweet smell of the polish. If we asked whose diaper it had been, my father sometimes said, Ann Manette’s, calling me by my full name, the name of my childhood. Other times he’d say, Michael’s. This lack of consistency both fascinated and frightened us, for our mother was exacting in her answers, no matter how foolish our questions, and no matter how many times we asked.
Mostly, on those weekends my father was home, my mother kept us occupied with projects in the kitchen, away from his desk, away from his briefcase with its tempting, snapping locks. Or she took us out to her mother’s farm where, likely as not, there’d be a handful of cousins and second cousins swarming the rusty swing set by the chicken coop, a couple of aunts plus a distant relation or two playing Scrabble in the kitchen, uncles watching TV in the living room. Grandma Krier not only welcomed us; she expected us. A weekend with less than a dozen visitors was considered a lonely weekend indeed. And you always showed up with room in your stomach—there was no point in protesting that you’d just eaten.
Grandma Krier’s cavernous refrigerator was crowded with bottles and tins, stacks of wrapped platters, Tupperware containers of all sizes, mysterious lumps of foil, soft cheeses, bean salads, jars of raw whole milk with the cream thick at the top, and—in summer—zucchini breads and cakes, not to mention raw zucchinis, which always seemed to multiply in the crisper. A pungent, not wholly unpleasant odor rose from the racks when you opened the refrigerator door. Sometimes, my mother would have me lure my grandmother out of the house, and then she’d sneak into the kitchen and throw out what she called the questionables. The basement root cellar was overflowing as well, the bins filled with onions, apples, pears, potatoes with sprouts as long as my arms. Once, on a shelf behind the old wringer-style washer, I found a box of murky preserves dated 1955.
For years, Grandma Krier worked as head cook at the community center in Belgium, supervising wedding suppers and graduation banquets, funeral receptions and family reunion brunches. Before that, she’d cooked for her family of nine children, plus whichever of the “city cousins”—an assortment of relatives from Milwaukee—happened to be visiting. Summers, these numbers swelled further with the “trashers,” threshing crews made up of local farmers who took turns working one another’s fields, cultivating in spring, bringing in the harvest at summer’s end.
“I don’t cook small,” she’d say, “because it just looks wrong in the pan.”
My mother was the baby of the family, the youngest of seven sisters and a much awaited brother who’d arrived next-to-last—just as we’d given up hope, according to family lore. All had married and were busy raising children of their own within a twenty-mile radius of my grandmother’s farm. I had sixty-odd cousins and over a hundred second cousins, and it seemed that I saw at least a third of them every weekend on the farm. When the house got too full, we kids were sent out to the barn. Winters, we played hide-and-seek on the upper level where the heavy machinery was stored, or else we climbed the ladder to the hay mow, where we swung on the rope swing, or hunted for mouse nests, or stacked hay bales into spectacular, multiroomed forts. Outside, we sledded on my grandmother’s dead-end road, which had two hills: one good, one better. Summers, we moved out into the surrounding fields, building forbidden forts in the corn, hunting for arrowheads between the rows of soybeans. We picked cherries and mulberries, asparagus and rhubarb, and when the spray-trucks came by to douse the apple orchard with pesticide, we concealed ourselves in the branches, weathering each blast, a game we called Hurricane. On rainy days, we set up dominoes in the sour-smelling milk house, played crazy eights or slapjack beneath the shelter of the porch awning. My grandmother would have happily provided us with a midafternoon snack, but my brother and I preferred to sneak into the basement through the root cellar door and raid the apple bin, the pantry—just as our mother had done.
Our mother had loved farming as much as our father had hated it. (In junior high, when I asked for horseback-riding lessons, he refused, saying, “Don’t you see I work like I do so you won’t ever need to mess with things like that?”) Though she’d graduated from a Catholic women’s college, and now taught fifth grade, her arms were still thickly muscled from fieldwork, her shoulders broad from lugging buckets of milk, bales of hay, sacks of feed. Her father, my Grandpa Krier, had died in a farming accident when she was two, and my grandmother had managed to keep the family’s one hundred acres intact with only the help of her children, plus a hired man named Irwin. Summers, Irwin preferred the barn to his room in the house, and, at night, my mother and her sisters watched him from an upstairs window, following the glow of his cigarette as he passed in front of the open barn door. He liked to go out for a drink once in a while. He put ketchup on everything, from eggs to bread. His cigarette butt smoking on a nearby saucer. His cough like a private language.
“But when was his birthday?” I asked my mother, pressing for more, always more. Irwin had died of emphysema the year before I was born.
“I don’t know,” my mother said, but I wouldn’t accept this, couldn’t. At ten, I still believed my mother knew everything. It was a belief I’d cherished, protected, long after I’d stalked and killed the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, Saint Nicholas.
“What was his favorite color?” I demanded. “What was his middle name?”
“I’ve already told you everything I know,” my mother said, evenly. “Sweetheart, he’s been dead for over ten years.”
One day, I begged her to make up the answers, and when she refused, I stomped up the stairs to my room and slammed the door so hard that the framed needlepoints fell off the wall. I’d always assumed that every question, large or small, would have its corresponding answer. But Irwin was, and would remain, an open-ended question, a mystery my mother refused to illuminate with a lie. Lying was a sin. Telling stories that weren’t true, even if everybody knew they weren’t true, was the same thing, only said differently. There was right and there was wrong. There was good and there was bad. Mine was a world of black and white; there was nothing in between.
I believe there is a relationship, much like that between parent and child, between the physical, or external, landscape we call home and the spiritual, or internal, landscape that becomes the human soul. I was the offspring of manicured lawns, of perfectly rectangular ranch houses laid out on perfectly rectangular lots, of streets that met at right angles. Following directions, there was never any question which way was left, which way right, which way straight ahead. The roads leading out of town parted the flat fields neatly, cutting more rectangles, precise as stained glass: gold and green in the summertime; white and dun in winter, black when the land was freshly cultivated, speckled with seagulls like smooth, gray stones. Lake Michigan edged the horizon like the bright, blue border on a quilt. A place for everything; everything in its place, I was told, and the landscape bore witness to those words. You could see the truth of it laid out for miles. Faith was clean-cut as a corn row or a fence line, direct as a county highway. God was the hawk, high overhead, overlooking us all. We were the rabbits, trying to blend in, trying not to draw attention to ourselves.
This is just the way things are. If you don’t like it, take it up with God.
Summers, restless, I’d get on my bike and ride out of town as far as I could. After an hour or so, I’d coast to a stop and wait for the lake breeze to cool me. Around me, the fields would be planted in soybeans, field corn and sweet corn, oats, wheat. In the distance there’d be a little white farmhouse beside a red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Perhaps I’d see a herd of Holsteins taking their shade beneath a single stand of hickory trees. A frenzy of black-eyed susans in the run-off ditches. An orange housecat, bright as a button, stalking something in the weeds. After catching my breath, I’d get back on my bike and, again, I’d ride and ride until my hot breath burned my upper lip and the pavement seemed to rise and fall with each pump of my knees. At last, I’d coast to a stop, look around…
…and the fields would be planted in soybeans, field corn and sweet corn, oats, wheat. Once again, there’d be that little white farmhouse beside its red barn, a windmill in the courtyard slowly turning. Another herd of Holsteins, larger perhaps. A meadow lark balancing on a telephone line. A ragged cluster of purple-headed thistles, day lilies rising around it in a fiery cloud.
This was not a landscape that encouraged individual interpretations, diverse opinions, conflict. The Catholic God we worshipped was a God who did not permit negotiations, a God who came and went like the seasons, a God who moved in mysterious ways. There was no mention of anything like a personal relationship with Christ. There were rules, there were beliefs, and you could like them or lump them but you had to obey. The madder you got, the harder you smiled.
If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
You did what you were told. You believed what you were taught. Dear Senator, I wrote with the other members of my catechism class. Please stop the murder of helpless unborn babies. Dear Senator, Homosexuality is a perversion of God’s most sacred laws.
Dear Senator. Dear God. It terrifies me, now. I would have written anything, believed anything. Absolutely anything at all.
God was Love, yes, but the icy stream that fed this love was Fear. When storms blew in off Lake Michigan, turning the sky an almost supernatural green, where did the lightning strike? Not the fields or the roads. Not the low-lying houses and milk sheds, the chicken coops and corn cribs. No, it struck the windmills, the power lines, the stands of hickory trees. It scorched whatever dared to stand up, stand out, stand alone.
“What should you do,” my mother drilled my brother and me, “if you ever get caught out in the open during a storm?”
But we already knew the answer. It was something we learned in school.
Lie down. Keep still. Wait for the thunder to pass.
Each time I left Grandma Krier’s house, she pressed her faith firmly into my hands, like lunch money, like a map should I ever get lost. Her Catholicism reflected the view she saw every day from her kitchen windows: few shadows. Straight lines. A precise, uncomplicated horizon.
Her name, until her marriage, was Margaret Catherine Jacoby; her birth certificate, which I learned of after her death, read Margaretta Katarina Jacobi. She loved to tell the story of how my grandfather’s parents, who owned the adjacent farm, had carried him, a babe in arms, to the wedding of her mother and father. “We made the boy,” they said. “Now you two make the girl.”
And her mother and father did.
From the time she was born, in 1899, it was understood by everyone that my grandmother would grow up to marry Otto Krier. Even as children, they’d loved each other. My grandmother followed him everywhere, like an adoring younger sister. At school, my grandfather made sure the other boys included her in their games. When the first world war threatened overseas, and speaking anything but English was forbidden, they stood side by side in the schoolyard, scratching notes to each other in the dirt. Neither of them knew English very well at that time; they spoke Luxemburg with their families, German with neighbors and friends. Both would end their formal educations after finishing eighth grade. There was too much work to be done at home. Advanced education was a luxury.
Grandma Krier was never one to voice regrets, but several times, when I was growing up, she said she wished she’d gone to high school. “So I would be smart,” was how she put it, her tone flat, without self-pity. And yet, she’d continued to educate herself by reading the English dictionary, which she kept pushed to the center of the kitchen table, in easy reach. She also read the Bible, the newspaper, the almanac, in addition to a number of religious publications. She spoke and wrote Luxemburg and German, as well as English, and could carry on a conversation in Dutch. At ninety, she still beat nearly everyone at Scrabble. At ninety-five, furious, she phoned my mother with a list of words: Internet, cyberspace, modem. My mother defined them one by one, but my grandmother wasn’t appeased. “They shouldn’t be allowed to have words that aren’t in the dictionary,” she said.
I see her now as she pulls a steaming pan of chicken from the oven. She strides impatiently into the center of the thickest raspberry patch, ignoring the thorns that tug and tear at the loose skin on her arms. Winters, she walks out to the barn through the drifts wearing only a short-sleeved dress, ladies’ shoes from J C Penney’s, hose striped with runs. If one of the geese forgets itself and hisses, she snatches it up by the neck and swings it forward and back.
“Mind your manners,” she says, then lets it sail.
She never raises her voice to her grandchildren. She doesn’t have to. When my brother refuses to eat his liver and onions, she offers to fix him a ground glass sandwich instead. We know she isn’t joking. My brother cleans his plate. I take a second helping, just to be safe.
My father calls her Big Mama—but never to her face.
Even the bull knows enough to leave her alone.
She tells us the story of going to get her tonsils yanked. It was 1908. Her father hitched the horses to the wagon and took her into “town,” which would have meant Random Lake. A nurse held her mouth open as Doctor reached down her throat with a long-handled scissors. There was no anesthetic, not even a piece of ice to suck. Her father paid the bill, then drove her back home.
“Did you cry?” I want to know.
“What good would that have done?” she says, and she’s right.
Sundays after Mass, we cross the street to the cemetery, where she tidies my grandfather’s grave. I long to know more about his death, but my grandmother deflects my questions, pretends she doesn’t hear. I have only the facts from my mother, who was too young to remember him, who knows no more than this: that he lost his balance and fell off a wagon, landing on a pitchfork. That he didn’t die right away. That the night of his wake, the aurora borealis appeared, and no one could remember having ever seen it so bright. People believed it was my grandfather’s message from heaven, his good-bye.
Walking back to the car, my grandmother spots a thistle growing in the lawn. Without warning, she jackknifes at the waist, jerks it up. “Toss this in the field,” she says. I accept it like a crown of thorns. Her own hands are so callused that the prickers don’t stick. She brushes them off like flour.
There is strength in my family, and then there is weakness.
My other grandmother, my father’s mother, doesn’t like me any better than she did when I was five, though she’s awfully fond of my brother. My mother says I shouldn’t take it personally. Grandma Ansay, she says, is old-fashioned, and old-fashioned people like boys better than girls. It isn’t fair, but it can’t be helped.
Grandma Ansay tries to wheedle my brother away from my mother whenever she can. Sometimes she pulls him aside and gives him a gift. It could be a quarter, or a brand-new watch, or a savings bond. By now, she’s had her stroke—that’s what we call it, as if it’s something she’s selected for herself, like a peculiar hat—and she walks with a cane, dragging one leg. Her speech is slurred. She often cries. But then, she’s been sickly all her life, always complaining: this ache, that pain. My father doesn’t call her Big Mama or Mom or Ma or anything else, although he says Mother when he’s speaking about her in the third person, as in Mother never came with us to the fields and Pa always said that Mother bought shoes to fit her head and not her feet.
Twice a month, we have dinner at this grandmother’s house. “Dinner” means a meal that is eaten at noon. Grandma Ansay keeps the thermostat set at eighty-five Her enema bottle hangs behind the bathroom door, and the house smells of Ben-Gay and a terrible, unnamed sadness. She pokes at my flat chest to see if I’m developing. She tries to look up my dress, then laughs when I slap it down.
At the dinner table, she and my grandfather bicker until Grandpa says, “That’s enough out of you!” Then they fight in earnest, speaking their own venomous mix of Luxemburg, English, and German, while my mother and father and brother and I keep eating, as if nothing whatsoever is wrong. Please pass the peas. Please pass the bread. Nothing has changed since the brief time we lived with them.
“I’ll tell them everything, if that’s what you want,” Grandpa finally says. “I’ll tell them all about you!”
Tell us what? Personally, I am dying to know. I figure it must have to do with either sex or money, the Twin Taboos, the two things nice people never talk about. But Grandma’s tongue is tired and cannot shape the words. She gives up, stops arguing. Instead, she stares at her hands, chained together by the rosary in her lap. After the meal, she lies face down on the daybed, weeping quietly, furiously. I watch her from the doorway. In catechism, our teacher—the mother of one of my friends—explains that if we only have faith the size of a mustard seed, God will work miracles in our lives and grant us any request. She even passes around a tiny yellowish husk, so we can see for ourselves that this isn’t so much to ask. Then she tells us, in graphic detail, about her miscarriages, how everybody told her she’d never carry a child to term, but look—here’s her daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who sits among us smiling like the Gift from God she is. We can reach out and touch Mary Elizabeth, the way Doubting Thomas touched Jesus. We can see for ourselves the power of faith.
I love my religion classes, which are held in our teacher’s home. Mrs. T. always pulls the shades and lights tall, white candles. It’s better than ghost stories at camp. We hold hands and chant Hail Marys. Once, as we’re talking about Saint Benedict, we all see Satan circling us in the form of a small blue light. But because we’re each wearing a Saint Benedict medal, blessed by the Pope himself, Satan can’t do a thing to us and eventually the light winks out. That night, Mrs. T. holds a special ceremony in which we each vow to wear our medals until our deaths. I keep mine pinned to my underwear; when I shower, I hold it in my mouth. I will wear it until I’m in college. I’ll have nightmares when I finally take it off.
Grandma Ansay prays all the time, but clearly, she’s doing something wrong. Why else wouldn’t God make her better? And why would God give her a stroke in the first place, if it wasn’t something she deserved? At Mass on Sundays, we pray for the intentions of particular people who are sick, and some of them get better, and some of them don’t. Either way, there must be a reason, and that reason is implied by every Bible story we read, every sermon that we hear. The good are rewarded. The bad are punished. When someone gets better and returns to church, everybody congratulates them, shakes their hands. When somebody doesn’t get better, well, it’s always a little bit awkward. The priest speaks of mystery, and we say the Our Father: thy kingdom come, thy will be done. God wants some people to suffer, like it or lump it, and He isn’t saying why. But it isn’t just luck. There is a Master Plan.
Certainly, no one who gets better ever thinks it’s just dumb luck.
“Your grandmother used to sing, and play the organ. She loved to dance,” my mother says. “Imagine how frustrating it would be if you couldn’t do the things you loved.”
But I don’t imagine, because I know I’d never let something like that happen to me.
At twenty-one, on medical leave, I receive a letter from a college friend. By now, mail seldom arrives for me, unless it contains a bill from a hospital or clinic. I take the letter from the kitchen, where my mother has handed it to me, and head toward the privacy of my bedroom. Crutching across the house leaves my arms and legs feeling as if the muscles are being pulled from the bone. It’s winter, but I’m wearing shorts because the scrape of fabric is unbearable against my shins. My mother has strategically placed a dining room chair in the hall, and I decide to stop and read the letter here, instead of taking the next fifteen steps to my bedroom, just in case I need those steps to get to the bathroom later. My days are divided up this way, a sequence of bargains and rationings. Do I shower in the morning and then rest until lunch time, or do I shower in the evening, when I can go directly to bed afterward? If I answer the phone in the kitchen, will I be stranded for an hour, for an afternoon?
The letter is short. My friend is angry with me, disgusted. This is the last time she’ll write.
“How can you let this happen to yourself?” she says.
I’m the second-fastest kid at Lincoln Elementary—only Jimmy Borganhagen, who can do three hundred sit-ups and seventy-five push-ups, can beat me. In my mind, his ability to do sit-ups and push-ups has married his unbelievable speed, and I start doing sit-ups before I say my bedtime prayers, boy sit-ups, my feet hooked beneath my bed. I do push-ups, too; I can even manage a clap in between. I eat lots of bananas, because I’ve heard this is what weight lifters do.
“Feel my muscle,” I tell my brother, my mother, my best friend, Tabitha, who I wrestle to the ground every so often, just because I can. In the kitchen, while my mother is at work, my brother and I take turns mixing concoctions of vinegar, baking soda, pickle juice, chocolate syrup—the one who can’t swallow the other’s bitter medicine loses. We judge each other, our friends, our cousins by one standard: toughness. When Mike jumps off the hood of the car, I jump off its roof. When he does the same, I pull the ladder out of the garage, shimmy up the side of the house, and fling myself into the side yard, where the grass is longer, softer. Summer mornings, we both chase after the garbage truck on our bicycles, but I’m the one who gets close enough to high-five the sanitation worker’s outstretched hand. “No fair,” Mike says, and he’s right. I’m two and a half years older. Taller. Stronger.
“That will change,” my father says, but he’s been saying that since the day my mother brought Mike home from the hospital, his head like an overripe tomato, wrapped in a brilliant blue blanket. I hated the way my father immediately started calling him Tiger. “Call me Tiger,” I insisted, but my nickname was already Pumpkin, which I hated. Pumpkins weren’t tough. Pumpkins got their guts carved out, then sat in people’s windows, rotting slowly, their faces caving in on themselves.
I’m no pumpkin. At school, Bonnie Adelsky—a big girl with breasts, who has been held back—arranges a wrestling match between me and a junior high school boy. We meet behind the teacher’s parking lot late in the afternoon. While he’s busy protecting his balls—as if I cared—I throw myself at his ankles, and as soon as I’ve got him on the ground, I clamp his narrow waist between my thighs and squeeze until he shrieks. I love knowing I could snap his spine like a potato chip, and then, when he starts to cry, I love letting him go. We jump to our feet, and our eyes lock, dazzled, before I take off running, slaloming parked cars, his pack of friends just a clenched fist behind as I bolt across the street. We tear though backyard gardens, hurtle sandboxes, dodge swing sets until, one by one, the boys drop out of the chase, curses fizzling like damp fireworks in the sweetness of dusk.
I love the carefully printed notes he sends me afterward, signed with X’s and O’s, and the twin silver bracelets he steals from his mother’s jewelry box and presents to me, wrapped in toilet paper and Scotch tape. He asks me if I’ll go with him to Fish Day, Port Washington’s annual summer festival. This is early June, and Fish Day isn’t until late July, but that doesn’t matter. My first date! And yet, I’m relieved when my mother says no, I’m too young to have a sweetheart. “Just tell him that July is a long time away,” she suggests, but what I tell him is something I’ve read in a book: Sorry, but your eyes are set too low for such a high fence.
I love it that I’m not old enough for certain things, and that I’m still young enough for others, like taking my shirt off at Harrington Beach, where my girl-cousins and I, naked to the waist, splash through Lake Michigan’s frigid shallows after schools of little fish. Now and then, we have to hop out and bury our aching feet in warm sand. I love that ache, how it feels worse before it feels better. I love the alewife stink of the beach, and its smooth, gray stones. High overhead, along the edge of the bluff, evergreens grow at terrible angles, like crooked teeth. Each spring, a few more come tumbling down, and another couple inches of Port Washington floats away.
I love the names of the little towns to the north: Dacada, Oostburg, Sheboygan. Sometimes, my brother and I ride our bikes to the farm in Knellsville where my father was born. We leave them hidden in a corn row while we enter the cool woods. Following deer paths, we make our way east until we reach the dropoff. Below is the shining platter of the lake. The shark fin of a sailboat. Further out, a barge with its dark load of coal. Our nostrils burn with the sharp, green sting of juniper bushes, and we rub the dusty berries between our fingers before scrabbling down the side of the bluff, clinging to exposed roots, grabbing branches, sliding the last ten feet on our butts. Already, we can hear the artesian well, buried somewhere deep in the haunch of the bluff. A stream of water runs clear and cold toward the lake, and we squat to drink from it, cupping our hands, pretending we are self-sufficient, survivors living off the land.
At night, my mother comes into our rooms to hear our bedtime prayers. When my father is home, he’ll sometimes listen, too. But he stands in the doorway, shaking his head. He thinks my brother and I are too old for this.
“Are we too old?” I ask.
My mother says no. She explains that Grandpa and Grandma Ansay never tucked my father in, so he doesn’t understand how important it is.
Sometimes, I feel very sorry for my father.
Dear God, I plead with the dark emptiness above my bed, I’m sorry for all my sins. Please bless my mother and brother and father and me, and people here and on other planets, and all animals everywhere—
I say the same thing every night, though “all animals everywhere” is a recent addition. Father Stone says that animals can’t go to heaven, but I believe that if I pray, if I have faith, all things are possible.
—and please protect everybody who has died, and everybody who hasn’t been born yet, and Satan—
After all, didn’t God say to love all things? And wasn’t Satan one of his creatures? I have an idea that if everybody prays for him, Satan will come around to God’s light once again, wake up as if splashed by cold water, and then there will be no more evil in the world. For a while, I’d been enlisting the help of kids at school, making them join hands to pray for Satan in the belly of the jungle gym, but then my teacher gave me a note, in a sealed envelope, to take home to my mother. So now, I pray for Satan in the privacy of my bedroom as my mother sits on the edge of my bed, listening calmly, rubbing my back. She has told me she prefers not to pray for Satan herself, but that I may do as I wish. When I’m finished, she kisses me, tucks the covers tight.
“Don’t go yet,” I say, but I know it’s my brother’s turn.
My mother winds the music box to conceal the sound of her footsteps moving away. Fear washes over me in shattering waves. I can’t move. It’s hard to breathe. Even before the music stops, my throat aches with unspeakable things.
Night after night, I struggle to fall asleep, to escape this paralyzing sense that something terrible is going to happen. And all it will take to stop it from happening is one small gesture on my part: holding my breath, or not holding my breath. Sleeping on my right side or sleeping on my left. Chanting eight Hail Marys, or four, or two—which is it? Sundays at Mass, I am so very careful to fold my hands with my right thumb crossed over my left, to let the Host dissolve in my mouth without brushing against my teeth, to genuflect all the way—knee touching ground—when I pass in front of the sanctuary.
Dear God, I pray, clutching my Saint Benedict medal, my rosary, the blessed icons glued to felt that Grandma Krier gives me for being a good girl. But I hear nothing but the drumming of my heartbeat, echoing deep within the coils of my mattress. And what if the sound isn’t coming from my heart, but from Satan, who doesn’t want to be saved, who is hiding there, waiting to get me, waiting to pull me down? Occasionally, this panic hits as I’m walking home from school, forcing me to count sidewalk cracks, the trees I pass, the number of steps I take. Even numbers are good, particularly fours and eights and twos; odd numbers are bad, particularly threes and sevens. If somebody gives me three cookies, I have to give one back. If my mother gives me a handful of chocolate chips, and I count twenty-seven, I must ask her to give me one more.
Why?
“Because something bad will happen if you don’t,” I explain.
My mother’s face—I can see it now. Could it be she understands? She doesn’t attempt to convince me otherwise. She gives me the extra chocolate chip.
As a child, I love my mother above all else, even my own self. Once, after reading the story of Isaac in the Bible—whose father, Abraham, is prepared, at God’s request, to slaughter his bleating son like a goat—I asked her who she’d choose if she had to choose between God and me.
“God,” she said, without looking at me, which was how I knew she meant it. “Because God came first. Without Him, neither of us would exist.”
I nodded, pretending I understood, but a window of loneliness and sorrow opened up within me, opened and opened again until it consumed me from the inside out, and I stumbled away from her as if I’d caught fire: brilliant, blinding, inconsolable.