“He’s so handsome,” my mother says. Her eyes are bright, her mouth soft. We are in our Dakota kitchen. It’s Sunday.
“Who?”
“Your father and I had lunch with Sidney Poitier.” She beams. “This will be another important movie.”
We have a framed photo of my father and Mr. Poitier on the set of For Love of Ivy. I agree he is handsome. I don’t really understand how a movie can be important, though; it’s just a movie, not real life. In real life, we pass Vietnam War draft protesters holding HELL NO, WE WON’T GO signs, shouting the same on the street corner as we head up Central Park West on the bus from the Dakota to my elementary school, Walden, on Eighty-eighth Street.
“They don’t think they should have to go to war and die if they don’t want to,” my mother says.
“Why do they have to go?”
“It’s the law.”
In real life, Martin Luther King Jr. is killed. My parents watch the news, their hands clasped in their laps, shaking their heads. My mother is crying.
“Why would someone kill him?”
“He was trying to do good things. There are people who don’t like that. It’s the good people who are killed.”
There’s a banner slung across the Central Park West side of the Walden building announcing the Andrew Goodman Memorial Fund. Andrew Goodman was a Walden student who graduated before I arrived in first grade. I’m only in third grade, but I have a general sense that Andrew Goodman was killed doing good things, too. I will learn later that he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan for trying to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi.
It’s early June. We are at our beach house, in Point Lookout. The television blasts from our small living room. My mother sits on the couch and cries again. Robert F. Kennedy has been assassinated. I go outside and kick a rock around in our yard. It’s the start of summer, but it feels like the world is ending.
* * *
My mother isn’t feeling well and has decided Greg and I will spend the summer at sleepaway horse camp so that she will only have Jay and Braddy to take care of. She buys me a small pillow filled with pine needles that smells like a forest.
“If you miss home, you can smell this wonderful smell and remember to be happy.”
But the pillow doesn’t help at all. The ache that had begun in my sternum when Greg and I stepped off the bus into the grassy-smelling green meadow, which had moved up into my chest as we toured the paint-chipped dining lodge and the weedy tennis courts, and had finally settled in my throat to bulge, hard and relentless, against the back of my eyes when Greg was led off to the boys’ camp and me to the girls’, has suddenly tripped some emergency warning system I didn’t even know I possessed. Now I stand gulping air, desperate to catch my breath as, outside my cabin, the sky is red and heavy with a woodsy humid sunset. Girls I barely look at quietly brush their teeth in the long bathroom with five sinks, unpack pink and yellow shorts and tank tops into the small pine dresser beside each bed, lay out their pajamas. I try not to breathe in the sweet stink of our cabin counselor’s strange perfume, to notice the pores on her face, the faint black fuzz of hair on her upper lip. I need someone to like.
I am homesick for six weeks. I packed The Chronicles of Narnia, my favorite books. I read and reread them as I walk along the banks of the stream by the horse trails, praying urgently for a doorway into Narnia to open up and let me in. Whenever girls’ and boys’ camper activities intersect and Greg and I see each other, my throat aches, tears spill.
“Stop, you’re going to make me cry,” he hisses.
“He’s coming!” my cabinmates squeal.
It’s week four out of eight, and we are in our bunks after lights-out. A few days ago I made the mistake of mentioning to my friends that I think the archery counselor, Randy, is cute. Black curly hair, compact body. I like the way he wraps his arms around me when he shows me how to hold the bow.
But a crush from a distance is as far as I’ve planned for.
The cabin door bangs open. I sense him blow in, as cocky and confident as a breeze. I scrunch down under my blanket, wishing I could disappear. Covers to my chin, I stare straight up at the wood slats of the cabin ceiling. Maybe if I don’t acknowledge him, he’ll go away before whatever is about to happen, that I already know I will hate, happens.
He stops at my bed, which is on the top bunk, closest to the door.
“Hey, Chris.” He’s at eye level, looking at me, smiling kindly, but also bestowing favor. I continue to stare at the ceiling as my entire body, head to toe, flames with embarrassment and something else I don’t understand. Wouldn’t most welcome the visit of a crush? But I don’t like him at all now. I just want him to go away. After a long moment he reaches out and touches my nose with the tip of his finger.
“Good night, Chris.”
“Whoo-hoo!” my cabinmates catcall after the door bangs shut.
I never look at him again.
Six weeks in, I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and longing for home has been replaced by the longing for food. Everything we eat at camp is white. We have cereal for breakfast, mac and cheese for lunch, and spaghetti for dinner. The thing I have noticed about white food is, it doesn’t matter how much I eat; I am never full.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to have when you get home?” My cabinmates and I are lying in our bunks, taking turns naming the foods we miss most.
The thing I’m looking forward to eating most when camp is over never changes. I don’t just think of steak whimsically; it intrudes on my every waking moment, though the idea of rare middles surrounded by crisp, marbled fat feels like a faraway dream. Tracy, whose lower bunk is closest to the door, receives a care package from home once a week filled with, among other items, Slim Jims, which, at first, mean nothing to any of us. Thin sticks of Spam-like product wrapped in plastic? Ho hum. Then, on an impulse of generosity, Tracy shares. I peel back the plastic and bite into explosions of fat and salt and peppery knobs of sinew, decidedly not white. As close to meat as any of us are going to get for weeks to come. We begin asking for handouts all the time until Tracy puts the hammer down.
“No more. They’re mine.”
I have never stolen anything in my life, but it seems like a good idea, when I present it to the rest of the cabin, to raid the box she keeps pushed as far back as she can shove it, under her bed, while Tracy is at arts and crafts. For the ten minutes it takes to eat our fill, I am in heaven. Unfortunately, when Tracy finds her stash has been raided, she knows she doesn’t have to look far for the culprits. As punishment, the camp administrators put us on outhouse cleaning duty. The smell of Lysol mixing with human excrement coats the inside of my sinuses and the back of my throat for a full week.
At the end of eight weeks, when my mother picks us up from camp, she is shocked by our appearance. Greg and I are as pale as the pasta we have been living on, and we have moons of black under our eyes.
“Malnourished,” she will say bitterly whenever she thinks about what we looked like. “Living on pasta all summer.”
* * *
I have been home from camp for a week. Our newest maid is standing by the door with her suitcase. She started just before Greg and I left for camp.
“I need dis job,” she says in a musical West Indian accent. Most of our maids are from the West Indies. “But de baby. Too much work dat baby. Too hard. Too hard.”
“Can you wait until I call the agency and find someone else?” my mother asks.
“I’m sorry.”
My mother drives her to the train station. I go too; I like running errands with my mother.
“He has too much energy,” my mother says on the way back from the station. I have never heard her complain about any of us. “I don’t know what to do.”
She starts to cry. Her face screws up. She begins to sob, the hardest I’ve ever seen her cry.
“I’m. So. Tired.”
* * *
It’s fall and the first week of fifth grade. I’m studying our teacher, Ray, and the rash of pink pimples that follows his hairline and clusters around the strip of closely cropped hair shaped in a miniature boot in front of his pink ear. White flakes of skin sprinkle among the short hairs of these narrow sideburns, and a few have dropped to the corner of his mouth, which is cracked, his mouth clearly dry with first-day-of-school nerves. Debbie Levine, my best friend, and Nate, the principal’s daughter, have told me that Ray is new to teaching and to the school.
He leans over my page of fractions, his focus on my pencil marks.
“Good, Christine,” Ray says.
Of course it’s good; this fraction page is third-grade level. Maybe fourth. At Walden School we call our teachers by their first names, and in fifth grade the schoolwork hasn’t gotten any harder. Heat prickles run up my neck as Ray moves to Terrence Lagonne’s fraction page. Terrence folded and pressed the tinfoil that his mother packed with his lunch into a dragon with wings and a long spiked tail, pointed snout, protruding nostrils, in a few seconds after he was done eating his bologna sandwich at lunch today.
“Good, Terrence,” Ray says.
My chest feels tight as the year spreads out before me, all of us locked in Ray’s jail of too-easy fraction exercises.
* * *
It’s spring and the air that comes through the towering windows, tilted enough to let it in but with too small an opening to let us out, feels warm and dewy and carries the smell of bus exhaust and gasoline from the jackhammers rat-a-tat-tatting on the corner, of hot pretzels and cool grass and the ever-present waft of dog shit. It’s 1970, pre–doggy scoop bags, and Central Park—we call it Dog Shit Park—is an obstacle course of piles of excrement in various states of decay. The dried feces leave only a slight smell, a dusty mark on the side of my sneaker. But the fresh piles are deadly and will ruin the rest of the day, forcing one to spend it bent over the offense with a stick, trying to dig the yellowy-brown mash out of every sneaker crevice, the smell of rubber sole blending in with the steaming smell of shit: vinegar and putrefaction. Beatles music is playing everywhere, on every radio, on the bus, in our VW van, on radios carried by people we pass on the sidewalks. I sing along, I want to hold your hand; the songs are bouncy, simple, rhyming. This is music I would have chosen myself to be the soundtrack of my life. Listening to it, I feel how I like to feel, confident, cocky. These songs are easygoing, friendly, childlike. Other songs that also come from the radios around me are less so. At sleepovers at her house in New Jersey, Debbie Levine listens to music to fall asleep. I lie awake waiting for the automatic shutoff. Doesn’t anyone else notice this music is terrifying? Psychedelic, drug-induced guitar weeping and wailing that make my blood freeze. I want to go home. I fight homesickness on sleepovers even at the best of times. A panic descends at nighttime. I’m afraid of the block of endless dark, when adults shut down, leaving no one stronger than I am to tend to things.
“Can I join your gang?” Stephanie, straw-dry strawberry-blond hair, nose so upturned that you can see into her pink nostrils, the thickness of knees and ankles visible even through the polyester of her powder-blue slacks—who wears slacks in fifth grade?—is looking up at me. It’s recess and we’re across the street in the park. I’m standing on a bench, taking a break from avoiding the piles of poop. I didn’t even know I had a gang, though it’s true that I beat all the girls in both classes and all but two of the boys in the sixty-yard dash two days ago. I have taken to wearing only boy’s jeans and the white Hanes undershirts I pilfer from my father’s drawer. I draw peace signs with on them Magic Markers and sing “We Shall Overcome” in the hallways, hot with indignation. It feels good to have something to fight for. The anti-war protesters we pass on the street corner scream their frustrations, and I go as many days as I can without a bath or a shower. I am also protesting Ray, who treats us like kindergartners and still talks in slow motion when explaining math. It feels good to be grimy; I like my hair greasy. Showering feels like washing off my me-ness. I am lean and boyish. My body does what I want it to do. This must be what Stephanie means. From the outside this must look like something’s been decided. What’s the harm in letting her into a gang that doesn’t even exist?
“I’d like to take you, but we’re full,” I say.
* * *
“How much is that penis in the window?” It’s skit day and I’m singing to the tune of “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?” My classmates are tittering. Ray’s lips are stretched in a smile, but the rest of his face isn’t going with it. “The one with the curly red hair?”
Ray approaches and grabs my arm. “You need to go to Lynn’s office.” Even the vice principal at Walden is referred to by her first name.
My parents say I am acting out. I have been sent to the principal’s office twice this week, and once last week after a few of us wrapped Josh Korda’s father’s bottle of Scope like a present in a box with a bow and I drew the straw to give it to Ray. In my parent-teacher conference, Ray tells my mother I display leadership qualities, which sounds to me like he is trying to kiss up. My father sets up a meeting for me in another part of the city with a psychiatrist who wears a tight bun and horn-rims and speaks unintelligible English in a heavy German accent. She takes notes as I speak and, after forty-five minutes, she leaves me on a hard wooden chair and talks to my mother behind a frosted glass door. I watch their shadows through the glass. On our way home my mother tells me the psychiatrist’s diagnosis is that I have a crush on Ray. Cold horror spreads through me. Does my mother believe her? (Do I have a crush on Ray?) At home my father is reading child psychologist Haim Ginott and spouts Ginott-isms in a playful way around the apartment, as if he’s not quite swayed by this new way of parenting. Let the punishment fit the crime is a sentiment he can get behind and quotes often. This must be the new way of parenting, employing techniques that make sense. But as we leave the psychiatrist’s office, my mother rubs her cheeks as if she wants to rid them of something.
“This woman is traditional, Freudian. Psychology is ridiculous. Everything is reduced to sex,” she says.
* * *
It’s fall and I’m the new girl at Columbia Grammar, at least a year and a half behind in academics. There are two sixth-grade classes but, except for Ingrid, whose parents also pulled her out of Walden after fifth grade, everyone here has been together since kindergarten. No one is looking for a new best friend. Alliances have been forged since the beginning of time. I like Ingrid, but since what felt like heartbreak, leaving Debbie Levine behind at Walden, I’m looking for a bosom buddy. I have zeroed in on Inga, but she is already best friends with Lorraine. I become a threesome to their twosome, which isn’t how I like to do things. I definitely don’t have a gang. Besides, I’m not the person I used to be. Over the summer my thighs thickened and my lower half widened in general, and I now have hips. These are parts of my body I have never given any attention to, and I am just as uninterested in them now. But they have a mind of their own, growing out from under me and taking my boy cool with them. My new classmates, stiff and formal with me like we are all made of glass, look at me with no recognition. They don’t know my history. I am blank to them and I feel newly blank to myself.
* * *
My father stands behind me. I’m seated at the kitchen table. In front of me, a page of word problems. He is helping me, but his frustration grows like a cloud gathering in size and threat. He reads the problem to me as if I haven’t already read it myself. This is no help. I already know what’s on the page.
“Ummm,” I stall. My heart beats harder than it should. We’ve only been at this for a few minutes, but I already know what’s going to happen. He reads the problem again, more slowly, as if the issue was his reading too fast. I stare at the words on the page, praying the numbers arrange themselves so they make sense, so I can see the answer in them. But they’ve already started to freeze the way they do when I panic.
“Christine?” His voice is high and tight. My heart pounds against my rib cage and in my eardrums. It’s too late now, I know it; even the parts of the sentences that don’t have numbers in them don’t make sense to me anymore.
He reads the problem again, shouting it now.
“Ten, twelve?” I offer, pulling these numbers from thin air. Please, God, just let me accidentally get the right answer.
“Do you see”—his voice is suddenly calmer; I’ve given him something to latch on to—“how if this answer is fourteen, the remaining numbers must be seven?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“Write it, then.”
I write fourteen and seven under the problem, and my panic recedes. It’s over.
“Now let’s do the second problem.”
Oh God. I look at the second problem. With him staring over my shoulder, the words and numbers are frozen solid. I can discern no meaning.
He reads it to me.
“Six?” A blind guess. Let’s get this over with.
“Close.”
“Eight?”
“You’re guessing.” He pulls the pencil from my fingers and writes an equation. I take a deep breath.
“Do you see?” he asks.
I nod.
“Write the answer.”
He’s done most of the factoring, so I can see the answer is three. I write it under the problem.
Eight more problems to go. He begins to read problem three, which is still frozen like problems one and two were, but slightly less so. Maybe I’m going to be able to relax and think logically. The phone rings just as he gets to the first half of the setup.
He lifts the receiver from its cradle on the wall, then covers the mouthpiece with his palm. “Carol? Hang the phone up when I get to the den. Christine, we’ll finish when I’m off the phone.”
I have never done a page of word problems so fast. I speed through them, panting like I’m in a race. I’m finished by the time he gets off the phone.
“Do you want me to check them?” he asks, sauntering back into the kitchen, cracking his gum.
“No, that’s okay.”
“Let me look at them.” He has a short glass filled with copper liquid in one hand. I can smell the sharp sweetness on his lips and breath. He doesn’t drink often, but when he does, he is more relaxed; still, my heart pounds as he looks over the page. Miraculously, I’ve gotten most of them right. He makes marks by the problems that are incorrect.
“Check these again,” he says, and heads back down the hall.
* * *
I follow my brother and father through a warehouse soundstage. My father walks with a spring in his step, he cracks his gum, and the people we pass part so we can make our way through them. Men laying down thick black cables, women and men adjusting cameras, screwing white screens in place over lights, and ladies in director’s chairs, thumbing through scripts, look up.
“Good morning, Mr. Scherick.”
We are living in London for a month over Christmas break, staying in a flat while my father makes Sleuth with Michael Caine and Sir Laurence Olivier. We live, my mother tells me, in the elite section of town, Eaton Square. We have a key to the park across the street, a square of grass surrounded by wrought-iron gate.
“Want to see something, Gregory?” My father beckons to us with his finger, a grin on his face, revealing his tiny teeth, ground down each night as he sleeps, so they’re getting tinier. He pushes open a door. We step from a drafty warehouse and are suddenly standing in a large lived-in room with a winding staircase, a comfortable-looking couch. There are pictures on the walls, a chessboard, dolls on stands, and, in particular, a laughing sailor with a maniacal twinkle in its glass eyes.
“Are these toys?” Greg asks. I’ve forgotten for a second that we’re not in someone’s strange home.
“Laurence Olivier’s character likes games. Sleuth is about playing a game.
“They did a good job, wouldn’t you say?” My father opens the door, and we step out back into the warehouse and head toward a construction trailer with a set of doors. My father knocks. Michael Caine sticks his head out and grins at my father, who takes on the hum of happy energy I’ve noticed he has when he’s around movie-business people.
* * *
For Easter we travel to Grandma’s farm. At the airport, my grandfather is waiting. We all pile inside his old Chrysler: my three younger brothers and me in the backseat, my grandfather and mother in front. My grandfather pulls away from the curb. His pink scalp is peeking through neat gray rows of comb lines wet with Vitalis. Beside him, my mother’s arm drapes across the back of the seat, her hand open and relaxed. It seems like a long time since I’ve noticed the familiar awkward bend of her elbow, the only remnant from her fall from the stepladder when she was very young. Soon the white two-story house comes into view, doll-size amid checkerboard pastures.
“There it is!” my mother says, and I am reminded that she is returning to her childhood home. The light gray gravel pops and crunches under our tires. My grandfather slows and I look back at the cloud of dust we kicked up. “See the alfalfa? And the corn?” my mother says. On either side of us now, tight rows of leafy plants grow in neat lines.
“Bunnies!” Jay points as three small brown rabbits duck into the briar hedge lining one side of the road.
The hedge gives way to the house. It’s springtime in Illinois, and the magnolia tree in front of my grandparents’ porch is snowing purple and white petals. We spill out of the car and out of our shoes. The grass, long and feathery, lighter at the tips, is cool between my hot toes. My brothers find our rusted red wagon and shout orders to one another as they take turns riding it down the grassy hill in front of the house. I walk over to the gate, stepping carefully over the gravel pebbles with my bare feet. The cows grumble and stomp in the pasture just beyond the trees. I climb the aluminum gate and it tips, top-heavy, with my slight weight. One whole week here. Trigger, my grandparents’ dusty pony, grazes at the far end among the cows. At home I have a plastic landscape—a farm—with a knobby molded plastic dirt path that meanders through green molded grass and rises up over a molded hill. I place the triangle of farm in my lap and trot my toy horse over the path—plastic hooves striking plastic dirt in a tick, tick, tick. In New York the dirt is sandy, citified. It spills up thinly through the sidewalk cracks like leftover dust pressed thin from the weight of a city. Here, where the grass is upturned, the earth is moist, like dough wet with butter, and smells sourly of manure by the barn and sweetly of earthworms and moss by the canal.
“Can I ride Trigger?”
My mother is following my grandfather, who drags in our suitcases. “Not now, Christine,” she says, sounding overwhelmed. I feel badly for bothering her. “We’ll do all that later.”
Bare feet on linoleum. I stand and take deep breaths of the sweet, musty smell of this house, race upstairs, taking the steps in twos. My room is my aunt’s old room; it has gabled windows and rose wallpaper. I flop down on the double bed’s feather mattress and sink endlessly. In the corner of the room, our Easter baskets wait, filled with green plastic grass from years before. The baskets are in my room because I am the oldest and the only one who knows that it is my mother and not the Easter Bunny who leaves the chocolate by our beds on Easter morning. My mother has confided in me that she is tired and preparing and hiding the eggs is too much for her. This will be our last Easter egg hunt.
At breakfast, my grandparents’ kitchen smells of coffee and gingerbread. My grandfather sprinkles sugar on his grapefruit half. In New York we eat our grapefruit plain.
I suck a sugar cube from the box in the cupboard. One for me, two for the pony; two for me, two for the pony. The sugar cube thins, wedged between the roof of my mouth and the thick of my tongue, geometry intact until it collapses like sweet ice. This morning my grandfather called morning glory! when I walked into the room. The cinnamon nose on my grandmother’s bunny cookies, in the blue-and-white cookie jar on the linoleum counter, bled pink when they were baked. The plastic flowered kitchen tablecloth sticks to the underside of my mother’s forearm when she lifts it.
My father’s voice cuts through the morning, loud and high. He flew separately because of work and arrived this morning. He is now on the phone in the other room. My stomach tightens into a knot, but after several exchanges he hangs up with no incident. He strides into the kitchen, helps himself to a cookie from the cookie jar, and bites and chews it too quickly, it seems, to be tasting it.
“Things going well, Eddie?” My grandfather scrapes the last bit of grapefruit from its rind, sets his spoon down on the tablecloth, and pushes the bowl slightly away from him.
“Things are going fine.” My father’s voice is still tight and high. He finishes the cookie, pulls a napkin from the holder on the table, and wipes his hands.
My grandfather takes a sip of coffee. Swallows as if mulling over my father’s response.
“How’s business, Ot?” My father takes another cookie and looks it over, bunny head to tail. Then he bites off the head.
My grandfather also sells farm equipment.
“Oh well, why, we’re doing all right,” my grandfather says.
My father eats this cookie as quickly as the first. My grandfather takes another slow sip of his coffee.
I slip out of the room, push through the screen door, and head to the pasture, where Trigger grazes by the gate. Butterflies entwine in midair. Birds flit from branch to grass and back to branch again. I climb over the gate and approach Trigger, stop and rest my hand on the top of his neck, hold the sugar cube the way my mother showed me, palm flat. Trigger takes it, and his lips are dry and bristly on my tender palm; they tickle. He crunches the sugar then goes back to grazing. I clutch handfuls of mane. Will he get upset? He continues—step, crunch-rip-crunch, step, crunch-rip-crunch—seemingly undaunted by my presence. I jump once, twice, clutch the thick hair on his back and use the momentum to pull myself up, swing my leg over. Step, crunch-rip-crunch, he continues, unfazed. Overhead, the sky is blue and the sun is already hot. Trigger’s brown back under my bare legs is warm. I settle my head on his rump, dangle my legs on either side of his neck, and breathe in the musk of his sweat, the dust of his coat. It’s just him and me. Step, crunch-rip-crunch. Soothed by his rhythm and the warmth of his sun-drenched hide, I close my eyes. I hope no one comes looking for me. I plan to stay here all day.
* * *
“Now you just wait a minute there,” my grandfather says to me.
I’ve come in for a glass of water.
“Sit down on the couch,” my mother says.
I sit. My brothers are with my grandmother, making sugar cookies. The rest of the house is quiet. My father must be taking a nap. Bud, my grandfather’s foreman, knocks on the door, opens the screen, lifts off his billed hat, and scratches the back of his head with the same hand. He kicks his dirt-streaked leather boots on the stoop before he steps inside. The three of them—my mother, my grandfather, and Bud—stand looking at me. He holds something very small in one hand, holds it close to his hip, like he is hiding it. I catch a glimpse of pink. Bud looks at my grandfather.
“Sure. Why, go ahead,” my grandfather says.
Bud holds what’s in his hand out to me, and I see a tiny pink nose, tiny squinted-shut pink eyelids, rose-petal ears, four miniature cloven hooves sticking straight out, a curly pink rubber-band tail.
“Oh,” I say. My eyes smart, fill with tears. I swallow.
“Take it,” Bud says. He steps forward, sets the little hairy body into my arms. It wriggles, grunts, pokes its nose against my T-shirt. Its tiny hooves press into my forearm and my palm. A pig. A very small pink pig.
“It’s yours,” my grandfather says.
“What will you name it?” my mother says.
I consider. What’s the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard?
“Kathleen,” I say.
“The piglet is the runt,” my grandfather says. “Its mother will crush it if it stays with her.”
I hold Kathleen in my lap. She is rough, scratchy, so small, so pink. Charlotte’s Web is my favorite book. I can’t believe I have my own infant pig.
My mother is sunbathing on the grass in front of the screen door. I’m holding a bottle, feeding Kathleen. The piglet suckles for a while then grows restless, breaks away, and trots around the grass before coming back for another suckle. After a moment she breaks away again, this time taking a moment to hop up onto my mother’s chest and walk around on her. Greg and Braddy squeal with laughter.
“It’s easy to climb on me,” my mother says, “because I am so flat-chested.” She has told me she likes having no breasts to speak of. “I can sleep on my stomach. Most women can’t sleep on their stomachs.”
Suddenly my mother sits up. Yellow mustard streaks run off her chest, her arm. The smell is worse than anything I have ever smelled: putrid, rotten decay. My brothers shriek. My mother stands up, dripping and laughing.
“What is that?” Greg screams, holding his nose.
“The piglet pooped,” my mother says.
“It pooped. The piglet pooped on Mom!” Greg and Jay shout.
I pick Kathleen up, wipe her off with my towel, and take her down to the tire swing so we can be alone.
* * *
At dinnertime, my brothers, mother, grandmother, and grandfather sit around the table with my only cousins, who are slightly older than us. Chipper is eight; John-John, nine; Carol, eleven; and Leatha, twelve. They are visiting from Kentucky with their parents: my mother’s sister, Aunt Audrey, and her husband, my uncle George. My father left after two days to return to New York City to work. We are having beef stew and grits for dinner. The pot sits in the middle of the table. My mother serves us with a ladle. My boy cousins have crew cuts, and all four speak with a pronounced Kentucky twang. Carol and Leatha, both with feathery blond hair and cornflower-blue eyes, spent the past two summers with my grandmother, which makes me envious. They call her Grannie.
My uncle reaches for the bowl of cornmeal paste. “Want some of our farm grits, Little Steenie?”
He smiles at me from his square, chiseled face, his blue eyes crinkling, his voice soft. I hold out my plate, happy to take whatever he’s offering. For the next two days I find any excuse I can to stand near Uncle George. I want him to talk to me so I can hear him say my name in his soft way. It’s enough to secure my affections that he is a large-animal veterinarian; his handsome gentleness is an added bonus. I imagine what it must be like for my cousins with this kind of father.
It’s our last day visiting my grandparents’ farm; we leave in the morning. My brothers are shouting to one another as they head outside, and the screen door bounces several times before it stops with a final bang. I’m passing through the dining room on my way from the kitchen to head upstairs. As I walk, the old wood floorboards creak loudly under the braided rug my grandmother has stitched from my grandfather’s socks and ties. I stop walking and the creaking stops. In this room, the blinds are kept closed and the air is still and somber in the way that air remains when the sun never hits it. Various projects sit out on the coffee-ice-cream-colored tablecloth that covers the dining table: small piles of photographs to be put in the open albums lie beside the tiny colored glass beads that my grandmother strings together with a needle and thread to become miniature bouquets of beaded pink petals cupped by beaded bright green leaves. I reach into the armoire and take out one of her tiny bouquets. I am struck by how much time must have gone into stringing these bouquets. In my world, effort is spent toward being important in some way. My father is a television executive. My mother restored our prestigious apartment. What would it be like to live in a world where stringing bead flowers would be enough? Beside the tiny beaded bouquets, glass figurines of birds collect dust. Tarnished silver frames hold photographs of people, most of whom I don’t recognize. This room is the repository of the lives of the people who inhabit this house. The celebrations, the milestones as life rushes by, lived in all the other rooms; this room holds their remnants, the silt laid in deposits as the river flows past. In one photograph, my mother is a tall, elegant young woman, dressed in a white strapless gown, perched regally in a wingback wicker chair. Around her, six little girls on either side, miniature attendants in their own white dresses, gaze up at her in awe. My mother smiles at them indulgently, a dazzling, white, movie-star smile. On the back of the photograph, I recognize my grandmother’s small, neat cursive written in blue fountain pen: Carol, May Queen, 1949. Another picture shows my mother as a young girl holding her bassoon. Her sister’s instrument, the instrument my mother took up after the accident to strengthen her lungs. In the photograph, my mother is holding a plaque. My grandmother’s writing says, Most Outstanding Woodwind Soloist, Illinois State Music Contest. A third photo reveals my mother as a young woman, dressed in a white bathing suit. On a stage with a banner reading MISS MISSOURI draped across one shoulder, falling at her slim hip. My mother, seamstress, bassoonist, pianist, musical prodigy, beauty-pageant winner, the golden girl of her family, must have gotten used to impressing; she impresses her parents still, returning here like a celebrity, with her four children in tow, from her glamorous life in New York City.
The next morning, our grandfather waits beside his sedan, his hair again wet with Vitalis. I kiss the top of Kathleen’s head and hand her to Bud. She will be rejoining her brothers and sisters and her mother in their pen.
“She’ll be fine in there now,” Bud says. “You did a good job. See how big she got?”
I don’t want to ask what will happen to my piglet once she reaches her full size. Kathleen has no Charlotte to spin words into webs. This is not a storybook.
Driving back from the airport, nose pressed to the window, I pass the landmarks that mean we are definitely not on the farm anymore: the blackened smokestacks of Con Edison, the enormous crunching Godzilla sweep of the Triborough Bridge, lifting us, cement and steel, metal cables as thick as torsos, rivets and bolts the size of human heads, up and over Brooklyn and then Queens, each borough as vast and dark and lonely below as an unfriendly country, before dropping us into the empty, dimly lit streets of the outskirts of Manhattan.
That night, home in the Dakota, my mother says she has to tuck me in quickly so she can go lie down.
“My ankles are bothering me tonight.”
Her ankles look fine to me, but I also know she is wearing a nightgown with no underpants—though she tells me she buys only cotton, because cotton breathes and most women don’t know how unhealthy it is to wear synthetic underpants—because she has been getting bladder infections. Sometimes her infection gets so bad, she can’t wear any underpants at all; she can only wear dresses and slips during the day, even when she leaves the apartment.
“Come and see me later.” I feel selfish making her promise this when she isn’t feeling well, though it is precisely because she’s not feeling well that I want this promise.
“I will. I’ll be up later.”
I don’t ask her why she’ll be up later. She has told me sometimes the incinerators and the street exhaust bother her.
“Something I ate is bothering me,” she says now.
That’s a lot of things wrong. I’m used to this feeling of worry, though. Sometimes it seems I’m the only one paying attention.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, sweetheart.”