MOM CUT MY hair at the beginning of every summer with a pair of rusty old clippers, once used on a poodle named Ragamuffin. She didn’t see anything wrong with that, even though the clippers cut odd furrows and missed some of my hair altogether.
I stretched out across the kitchen island between flour sacks and stacks of well-worn pots, shivering as the small strip of skin between my uniform shirt and pants touched the frigid zinc countertop. There was no escape. When I was younger, I tried running away, or hiding in the storage closet with the rest of the family’s odds and ends, but Mom always found me in three minutes flat. I think she had a secret weapon, it might’ve been Grandpa Ernest, but I was never sure.
“I’m too old for this,” I said.
Mom didn’t look at me, but continued to search through a drawer filled with rusty egg beaters, broken crayons, and bits of jagged scrap metal.
“You’re not too old for anything until I say you are,” she said.
I picked a walnut off a loaf of zucchini bread and popped it in my mouth. “Can’t I go to the barber like other people?”
Mom smacked my hand as I went for another walnut. “Why would I pay someone to cut your hair, when I can do it for free?”
Then she discovered the clippers in the back of a drawer with dog hairs still sticking out of the blade and pulled me upright. She switched it on with a look of triumph and my curls rained down around me, sticking to my sweaty arms and tickling my neck. After Mom finished, I ran my hand over my head. Spiny hair pricked my fingers and I sighed. It wasn’t so bad. If I could stand being called Puppy, I could stand anything. My real name was Ernest, like Grandpa, and that was worse. Mom nicknamed me Puppy when she was potty-training me, because I kept peeing all over the house. She loved telling everybody the origin of my name, so the hair wasn’t so bad in comparison.
Mom blew my hair off the counter and shooed me out of the kitchen. I wandered around our big house, kicking up dust bunnies, and listening to Mom pack and cuss about packing. My dad came home a little later. He laughed out loud when he saw me sitting on the porch swing with dirty feet and a shorn head.
“So, it’s that time again, is it?” Dad asked, still chuckling.
“Yeah, can you fix it?” I rubbed my head and gave him a pitiful look.
“Sure. Give me a minute.”
I followed Dad into the house, watched as he dropped his briefcase and got himself a beer. Then we went upstairs and Dad changed into a pair of baggy shorts and a ragged T-shirt. He motioned for me to come into the bathroom and he trimmed up my hair with a pair of nail scissors.
“Bet you can’t wait for tomorrow,” Dad said.
“Tomorrow after school, yeah,” I replied.
“Right, of course.” Dad gripped my shoulder. “I know it was rough, but you’ve done pretty damn well, considering all you’ve had to put up with.”
“I guess.”
I had one day of school left. Mom and Aunt Calla would pick us up after the awards assembly and we’d be gone for most of the summer. I’d spent the year wriggling beneath my homeroom teacher’s thumb. The promise of Camp gave me hope that I could hunker down for the last day and finally be free of Miss Pritchett. She made freshman year misery, but home wasn’t much better. During the school year, I had to pick up, set the table, take out the trash, and make my bed. Camp was freedom from all that crap and Mom was happier in her natural element. At home, Mom was always in a bad mood because the cleaning was never done.
Mom hated cleaning more than anything in the world. She cleaned, but our house was never clean, not like other people’s houses anyway. There were always jelly smears on the kitchen counters or poop streaks in the toilets. It drove Mom crazy. She said she had to keep a nice house in case someone came over. If people saw her house a mess, they’d think bad things about her.
I wanted to tell her it was too late. The women at school already thought bad things about her and, in my more reckless moments, I came close to telling her. Only my sense of self-preservation stopped me.
Those women said Mom was weird and bohemian. Once I found out what bohemian meant, I agreed. Who else wore corsets over men’s suits or lederhosen to the Fourth of July picnic? Maybe I should’ve cared, but I didn’t. She was Mom and I was used it.
I left Dad sipping his beer and ran down the stairs dodging stacks of books, multiple pairs of shoes and the cat, Slick, who’d taken to sleeping on stair number five. Mom yelled something about freaking boxes in the freaking kitchen. I did an about-face and went in the opposite direction into the living room. There were no boxes in there, but plenty of crazy. Books went to the ceiling in odd towers, threatening to topple at any minute, and strange paintings covered the walls in a patchwork quilt of no conceivable theme or design. None of the furniture matched, and some of it looked ready to crumble. I flopped down on a horsehair sofa, careful not to slide off the slick red fabric. At least it was cool in there, unlike the rest of the house. Mom didn’t believe in air-conditioning, like it was a matter of faith. No matter what my sisters and I said, Violet Gladwell MacClarity refused to acknowledge the existence of air-conditioning and if she didn’t believe in it, we couldn’t have it.
My eyes wandered around the room until a glint of yellow caught my eye. I went to the fireplace and stretched out a finger to touch a large brass elephant forgotten on the mantel. My finger carved a shiny streak in the layer of dust on the elephant’s back. It was my namesake great great-grandfather Ernest Gladwell’s elephant and the one thing Mom would happily pack. I picked up a long thin package of incense tapers off the mantel, pulled out a stick and sniffed it. It smelled of jasmine and summer. Mom only ever lit a taper and put it in the elephant’s trunk on the family property, Camp, and only there, like it was a smoke signal announcing our return for the summer. She never said we couldn’t light it somewhere else, but it was understood. The elephant was part of Ernest and Ernest was part of Camp.
What could it hurt though? Maybe the whispers were true. Ernest might still be around protecting his descendants. Maybe he did take care of us as Grandpa Lorne claimed. I could use some help getting through the last day of school with Miss Pritchett, so I took the old tortoiseshell lighter off the mantel and flicked the grimy wheel. A blue flame appeared and I touched it to the taper. The tip crackled and smoked, sending its sweet scent up my nose. I stuck the taper in the elephant’s trunk and watched the smoke curve and climb in concentric circles.
“I just need a little help, Ernest,” I whispered. “Take care of Miss Pritchett for me. Don’t let her ruin anything.”
“Careful what you ask for,” said a quiet voice behind me.
I turned and saw Mom standing in the doorway.
“I didn’t ask for anything,” I said quickly.
“Didn’t you?” she said. A smile curved her wide, thin lips changing her sharp features into soft, happy lines.
“Well…” I looked down at my hands holding the lighter.
“Never mind. It was bound to happen sometime,” said Mom.
“What was?”
“Asking Ernest. We all do it. Why don’t you go ahead and pack the elephant for me?”
“Really?” I put the lighter back on the mantel.
“Really. I trust you,” said Mom as she disappeared leaving only the warmth of her smile.
I looked back up at the smoke rising from the elephant’s trunk. It moved and changed, thickened and thinned. Before my eyes, the smoke arranged itself into an elaborate letter E. I blinked and the E was gone. My head started spinning and I gripped the edge of the mantel.
Somewhere in the house, Mom started singing a Guns N’ Roses song, except she started with the chorus. “Where do we go now? Where do we go?”
My head cleared. I plucked the taper out of the trunk, dropped it into an ashtray, and picked up the elephant. Its coolness radiated up my arm and stopped the last remnants of dizziness. I rubbed the elephant on my shirt and revealed its yellow gleam. My fingers searched out every familiar blemish on its shiny surface. Ernest’s elephant and I got to pack it. So what if Mom was weird? It pissed off Miss Pritchett and anything that irritated her worked for me. Besides, I thought Mom had a good excuse. She was a famous artist. My dad didn’t seem to mind or even notice how odd our family was and he was normal. Everyone agreed on that.