Fig (22 page)

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August 22, 1986

Everyone is asleep and summer is almost over. I take the Calendar and the faceless nesting doll outside. I must absolve myself.

I strike the wooden matches against the rocks lining Mama's herb garden—the garden with the sinkhole I was meant to fill. The hole is no longer as deep as it once was; once upon another time, this is where Mama was going to bury my placenta and plant a rosebush in remembrance. “But the hospital stole it from me,” she has told me more than once. And she never filled it in, nor did she plant the rose amid the silver-green sage and feathery-soft chamomile. I strike one match after the other, and the sulfur is pungent; it pollutes the sweet humidity of late August.

The Calendar and its effigy must be banished.

I am not alone. The statue of Mother Mary watches me. Once, she belonged to Gran, but when she moved she left the deity behind. Made from plaster, Mary's flesh is pocked by time and by weather—her blue robes washed white from many years of rain and snow; like geography she is eroding. I'm beginning to understand that Mama might not get better, but I might be able to keep her from getting worse. If she gets worse, Alicia Bernstein from Social Services will surely return. And this time, I'll be taken away.

From now on, I will protect my mother. If I find her doing something she shouldn't do, I will deal with it by myself. I will take care of her. I will not go to Daddy, not ever. The time has come to grow up instead of trying to start over.

The moonflowers open as the calendar agrees to burn, the twelve pages fanning. The matches turn paper into fire as I cremate the corpse of time. I add the doll to the fire and wait for wood and paper to make ash, for the phoenix to rise above. The paper burns: the months that were, and the months that never got to be. The watercolor paper curls—first orange, then blue-violet, and I imagine Mama's parents watching over me as the smoke rises toward the sky.

The ordeals absolve. Becoming nothing more than soft gray ash. Dust to dust. The faceless nesting doll does not burn but she does turn black; she is impossible to lose.

Mother Mary stands as my only witness. Her arms outstretched—a gesture forever unfulfilled. She beckons. I want to curl up in her arms. To nest inside her flesh. She looks like she could save a soul, but she can't.

Her dead son is my proof.

alarm:
n.
1. A sudden feeling of fear 2. A warning of danger; signal for attention 3. A device that signals a warning 4. The sounding mechanism of an alarm clock .

September 2, 1986

I'm late to the first day of school. The sixth grade—the last grade before I go to junior high. The sixth grade with Mrs. Landry, who all the kids call Mrs. Laundry, and sometimes Dirty Laundry.

I am late because the pigs got out. They got out even though the gates were latched.

I help Daddy corral the pigs back to where they need to be instead of where they were in the road that is really just a long driveway. The sheep stand in the north paddock where the motherwort grows wild, and they watch as we scour the fencing for a break, but there is no break. Daddy spent the entire summer upgrading this fence. Wood and wire: My father fortified the farm.

“Maybe it's the wind?” Daddy asks, but he isn't asking me. He seems to be asking the latch itself. He stares at it as if it will come undone of its own accord. Provide the answer he needs. The latch remains shut. It keeps silent. We get in the Dodge, and Daddy drives me to school. Before I climb down from the cab, he writes a short note on the back of an old grocery list. Daddy always writes in tidy block letters and in only capitals. Addressed
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
, the note is for the secretary. My excuse for being late.

I'm handing the note to the secretary when I see her. It's been five years, but she looks the same. Same black leather briefcase. Same dull brown hair. And there's even a run in her panty hose, only in a different place this time. I hold my breath and cross my fingers: Alicia Bernstein from Social Services has not come for me. I will not allow it.

The secretary takes the note, reads it, crumples it with a tiny fist, and tosses it into the wastebasket bin even though the cardboard recycling bin is right beside it. The social worker is talking to Principal White. Two walls of his office are made from thick glass, and the blinds are up. His office reminds me of the refrigerated room at The Flower Lady, only it's not filled with beauty.

Divided by glass and one closed door, their conversation is on mute. Alicia Bernstein is opening her briefcase, and I can almost hear the click of the hardware as it echoes from past to present while she reaches in for a manila folder. The secretary cracks her gum to get my attention. She holds the tardy note for my new teacher, and I almost rip the paper when I grab it.

I walk so fast, I run out of breath, and when I stop to get it back I read the note. The secretary forgot to mark the time of my arrival, which means I have all the time in the world. I duck into the girls' bathroom, where I sit inside the last beige stall trying to catch my breath.

I am hyperventilating. I cannot catch my breath. This morning when I was helping Daddy herd the pigs back into captivity, I rolled my jeans up to keep from getting muddy and a mosquito got the front of my calf. Sitting on the back of the toilet, I roll my jeans up to compare the injured leg against the uninjured. The difference is so small.

The mosquito bite is a tiny mound of swollen pink flesh peaked by a scab so new, the brown is still translucent. And the itch is still there. It talks to me. I scratch myself open—I scratch past the point of itching, and I can breathe again. My blood intermingles with the oxygen in the air, and my lungs inflate. I feel my body rising. I float until I empty myself of air again. Deflating, I bleed. And then I inflate again, and still bleeding, I deflate. I fill and deplete, I rise and fall. Sometimes floating away is the only way I can get myself back to reality; if I go away, I can then return.

*  *  *  *

Alicia Bernstein doesn't come and pull me out of class, nor does she drive out to the farm. The social worker does not come to take me away. I don't see her again that day, or the days after.

Time passes, and the leaves on the trees turn yellow, orange, and red; autumn sets the world on fire, and yet the weather turns crisp and cold. I try not to count the days without any further sign of the social worker, but I'm also trying not to count the days until I turn eleven, because then I'll have to count the years before I turn nineteen.

Mama pulls it together as she usually does and makes the annual carrot cake for my birthday, and Gran and Uncle Billy come over for the celebratory dinner, only Gran still calls it supper.

Mama puts all the candles on the top of the cake—eleven plus one to equal twelve candles altogether. “One to grow on,” Mama says. “Either that or this one counts for all the time you spent inside me.” She can't decide. She never can. She is repeating what she says every year. “Did you know women aren't really pregnant for nine months?” she says. “I don't know where that myth came from, but it's not true. Human gestation takes ten months instead.”

Mama made the usual cream cheese frosting and used the icing tube to make the white roses. She planted them all around the circular edge. Last year she made candied violets and this year she uses carob chips to make spirals all around the top. Gran wants to know what carob is, and Daddy shrugs and says, “It tastes like chocolate.”

My grandmother scowls, and I can see the coffee stains on her teeth. Turning to Uncle Billy, she says, “Then why bother? Why not just use chocolate chips?” And Uncle Billy nudges her softly and whispers, “Ma, let it be.”

I wish I had a soft grandmother. The kind of grandmother who bakes chocolate chip cookies and knits pink-and-brown-striped leg warmers like the ones Sissy Baxter wore to school yesterday. I want the kind of grandmother you call Grandma or Nana. My soft grandmother died before I could even meet her.

Like a clock, my body is wound. It keeps going. I am eleven years old today, and this makes me think of something Mama does. Whenever a digital clock reads 11:11, Mama says, “Make a wish!” I do make wishes, only I make the same wish every time. I will wish this wish until it comes true, and then I will never make another wish again because I will have everything I could ever want or need; because it would be selfish to ask for anything more.

Daddy lights the candles and everyone sings “Happy Birthday,” and before I blow all the candles out I make this wish, my one and only. And as the ritual requires I do not speak it out loud or else it won't come true.

*  *  *  *

Five days after I turn eleven, the time to fall back arrives. I help Daddy reset all the clocks in the house, in the barn, and in the truck. He winds his wristwatch, and we all gain an hour just like that.

I take the slop out to the pigs, and that's when I see her.

The sky is a lavender dome of dusk and the trees are skeletons again and the straw man is a silhouette of himself. Like my grandmother's Jesus, his head lulls forward, and because it does the scarecrow appears to be headless. She, too, is a shadow—a cutout of herself as she prances along the edges of the pasture where the sheep are no longer grazing. She is alone this time, but then I realize she might be one of the pups from before, only grown. Her ears reach for sound, and she stops to listen. She is listening to me. She listens to the pigs that have come to greet me, sniffing the table scraps with their sensitive snouts and snorting with pleasure.

She postures the same as the wolf in the pop-up book I made with Mama. She is trying to camouflage—to dissolve into the sharp fringe of Johnsongrass harvested black by the coming night. Her feral fur is tense, electric with life and nerves, and something tells me she knows I'm watching.

She doesn't move—a statue of herself, but in the stillness of her shape I can feel her breathing. I can even picture her lungs; they are two wings flapping. They work to keep her heart beating, and just as I begin to see the red inside her chest she runs away. She disappears into the foliage along the ditch, and swallowed by the shapes of trees and bramble, she is devoured by the night.

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January 19, 1987

The nurse wears a stiff white coat and orange lipstick. Her lipstick makes the situation ironic.

irony: 1. The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. 2. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

“Ironic” is one of Mama's favorite things to say. To her, everything is ironic.

I don't know why I didn't expect it to be the same nurse. Of course it is. This is her job. She is the school nurse. She not only remembers who I am, she makes it clear she does not like me. It's been four years since I last went to her.

“Girls your age don't have periods,” she says, as if I've made a mistake.

The nurse rummages around in the supplies closet until she finds something like nothing I have ever seen before. She appears just as mystified, holding it in the air for further examination.

“Now this is a relic from the 1950s,” she says, and shakes her head the way grown-ups do whenever they are overcome by nostalgia. Lately, I've been overcome by this word: “Nostalgia.” And I am absolutely in love with the idea. Aster and Zinnia indicate nostalgia according to
Floriography
.

nostalgia: 1. A bittersweet longing for the past.

2. Homesickness. The Greek root, Nostos, means “return home.”

My quest:
to bring Mama back
.

The pad looks nothing like the ones Mama uses. This is a large white butterfly. And there are a lot of strings. It is not designed to stick to your underpants. The nurse looks at me. “It's all I have,” she says, “other than the tampon dispenser in the ladies' room. As I said before, you are much too young for all of this.”

As I try to put on the white butterfly, the nurse stands on the other side of the bathroom door. She has X-ray vision, sighing every single time I fail. The strings are confusing: Cat's Cradle. Cup and Saucer. Jacob's Ladder. They get tangled, and I have no idea where they go or what I'm supposed to tie them to. In the end, the pad is no better than the bed of paper towels I used to line my panties with during morning recess.

I drape the used paper towels over the edge of the trash can as my proof.

I leave them in case I'm about to bleed to death. I leave them for the nurse to see because if I'm actually dying, she will have to save my life—no matter how much she hates me, she is a nurse. And she must be bound to a code of ethics that dictates saving lives when they need saving.

*  *  *  *

It's no secret Daddy is struggling to make ends meet.

Gran calls the farm “high maintenance,” and she's right. Everything needs to be repaired. The roof is leaking. The house needs to be painted. The John Deere has trouble starting.

Daddy decides to lease out a little bit of the land. This bit runs along County Road 12. He chooses this plot because we can't see it from the house. My father draws up all the paperwork, and Larry Byrd signs. This man plans on using the patch of earth to grow animal-grade grain sorghum.

No one talks about what this means because we don't have to. Everyone knows—even Gran, who probably doesn't care. Larry Byrd will use pesticides and herbicides, and because he will, Daddy will never get certified organic, and this is yet another dying dream.

*  *  *  *

Mama abandons the meticulous Victorian paper cuts and all the detail-oriented art she normally does. She gets large and messy instead. And the only color she uses now is red.

Mama works on the floor—sprawled out across gigantic sheets of newsprint that come on big rolls like toilet paper. When she runs out, she goes and gets the butcher paper from the barn, which Uncle Billy uses to package all the meat. She smears the red oil pastels, making red tornados that spin into sizes bigger than me. She spins a web of utility string from one room to another and hangs the red work on it using the wooden clothespins, which look like little people—which look like the smallest nesting doll before she turned black.