Fig (27 page)

I have endured, and I will continue to do so. I will endure. This is not like the time before when Mama only went away for the summer. This is different. And I think I know everything the social worker is about to say, until she explains how Mama made the choice herself.

This is called voluntary commitment. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the word “commitment.” This word defines my relationship to my mother, and like a palindrome, I thought she was as committed to me as I am to her, backward and forward, both of us the same—that's what I thought until today. And now I wonder if Mama knew about the Calendar. Is she leaving me because I couldn't get it right?

*  *  *  *

It hasn't rained in over two weeks, and the dirt road leading home is sunbaked and hard.

I see the impressions left from Daddy's truck—from the tires, a rolling pattern of diamonds—two fixed rows, each wide enough to walk in. My peripheral vision expands as soon as I step off the bus. The Kansas landscape surrounds me, flat and gently sloping. Pasture, field, and prairie interrupted by the occasional house, windmill, barn, or tractor, and of course all the sad-eyed cows standing on the other side of the highway.

The bush honeysuckle swallows the ditch, creeping thicker with every passing day it threatens to overtake the road/driveway. The only way to get rid of this noxious weed is with fire. Soon, Daddy and Uncle Billy will do the first controlled burn of the year. I remember the honeysuckle in the tussie-mussie I never really got to give to Mama; with accelerant and a match, my father will set fire to the bonds of love; in a holocaust, he will wipe the honeysuckle out.

*  *  *  *

I stop and stand in front of the electric fence.

I think I hear it humming.

While some of the pigs root around, most of them lie on their sides. Fat and lazy under the spring sun. I wonder what it'd be like if they started talking to me the way they did to Mama. What do they have to say? And what did Mama say in return?

I think about all the books Mama and I used to read together. Not just the Peter Rabbit stories, but
The Wind in the Willows
,
Dandelion
, and
The Story of Ferdinand
. I can't remember if Ferdinand talked, but I know the others did. I think about
Charlotte's Web
.

The old wooden fence has been dismantled and is leaning against the back of the pen in pieces. Even taken apart, it looks far more substantial than does the electric fence—far more capable of keeping. This means the electric fence must be on, otherwise the pigs would have snuck through the suspended wires a long time ago. Pigs are very smart. Back in the third grade when Phillip Booth called Sissy Baxter a pig, she turned around and said, “P.I.G. stands for ‘pretty intelligent girl.' ”

I know Sissy Baxter is the one who left the white hyacinth in our mailbox after Mama went to Saint Joseph's. Wrapped in white lace, the tag on the nosegay read
To Fig
and nothing more, but I recognized the smell immediately. Like lilacs, only so much stronger: Now I know that Sissy Baxter smells like hyacinth. Without saying anything at all, Sissy said, “I am praying for you.”

I look at the wire and wonder if Mama will have to do electric-shock therapy.

After the social worker pulled me out of class, the kids started talking about Mama again. How crazy she is. It doesn't help that Tanya Jenkins's mother finally did become a nurse—a nurse at Saint Joseph's, where Mama now lives.

Everyone knows, and they all keep asking about electric-shock therapy. “That's just what they do in the loony bin,” Phillip Booth said earlier today. “Either that or a lobotomy,” and Ryan Hart started to head-bang with his shaggy hair in his face. Using his fist as a microphone, he scream-sang,
“Lobotomy.”
And something about a teenage lobotomy, having no cerebellum, but getting a PhD.

As usual, Sissy Baxter remained quiet. She pretended to read the textbook as Phillip Booth and Candace Sherman got into an argument about how the electric chair is different from electric-shock therapy. Phillip swore to God and crossed his heart that mental hospitals use electric chairs to administer shock therapy, “But with way less voltage,” he said, and then Candace called him a retard.

“Everyone knows there's a difference,” she said. “Didn't you watch the special news report about how they're getting ready to fry Ted Bundy?”

They agreed on one thing only: Mama would not be lobotomized. “Because she didn't kill anyone,” Phillip said, but then Candace yelled across the classroom, as if I couldn't hear otherwise. “Hey, Fig !” she said. “Has your mother killed anyone?”

All this took place while we waited for Mr. Arnold to come back from the bathroom. It didn't matter that I didn't say a word or react—not reacting
is
a reaction. Nothing stops them. I buried my head in my arms and focused on how the cold desk felt against my hot face.

When I think of Saint Joseph's, I think of the movie
Return to Oz.
How much it scared me. Not just the lady with the different heads in the glass cabinets, or the Wheelers—but the beginning of the film, when Auntie Em takes Dorothy to the hospital to be cured. To get fixed. Because she won't stop talking about a place where all the animals can talk. But it's not a hospital. It was an insane asylum with medieval-looking contraptions and evil devices—images I can't get out of my head. I see Mama captured. She's locked inside an iron maiden, and no one can hear her screaming.

Her doctors still won't allow visitors—not even Daddy.

First, they need to establish a therapeutic relationship with my mother. That's what they say. They are trying to establish intimacy, and I wonder if Mama will let them.

*  *  *  *

I decide to touch the fence. I don't know why. Maybe I want to check to see if it's really on, or maybe it's because I'm mad at Daddy for keeping it up. Is he worried I will free the pigs as well? Or maybe I do it to punish myself for not talking to the social worker like a normal kid would have. And I definitely do so to punish myself for everything else I've done wrong.

I have to step onto the dirt mound that separates the road from the pasture—what must have been knee-deep mud when Mama freed the pigs. I keep one foot in the ditch for balance, and I reach until my hand is above the top wire, on the other side. The pigs come. Sniffing the air, they keep their distance; they know this fence and what it does. When they find I have no food, they go back to ignoring me.

I let my hand hover over the wire the way a magician does before he reaches into his hat and pulls out a white rabbit by its long ears. I feel the electricity before I make contact.

The fence does and doesn't want me to touch it.

I don't feel anything the first time, either because it knocks the wind out of me or because it knocks me out. I don't know, because I've never passed out before. I find myself sitting in the middle of the road with a terrible ringing in my ears. Shrill, the sound lingers. The ringing doesn't stop, and my tailbone hurts so much, I think it's broken. But I manage to pull myself up. After that, I remain fully conscious. The second, third, and fourth time, I touch the fence.

And all the times after.

I build immunity. The fence has an incredible force. It feels like getting kicked by a horse—not that I've ever been kicked by one, but my uncle has. It feels like this, only it doesn't hurt, not exactly. The charge is instant, felt in every part of me: flesh and bone—all at once. I try to hold on to the wire, but the electricity pushes me away. The shock outlines my nervous system as my body becomes an anatomy lesson. When the world goes dark, I can see my nerves—bright and white and ragged, they look like tree roots and they tremble.

I am surrounded by white light. It is blinding. And I feel warm all over and I hear myself cry out. I make noises I've never made before. And this is the part that feels good even though it feels like I'm peeing my pants when I didn't have to go.

When I was younger, Uncle Billy tried to teach me martial arts, but I was too little, and got bored too fast. All the beginning lessons were about learning how to safely fall. I didn't understand what he was doing at the time. I just wanted to kick and punch and knock people out.

One day, he took me for a walk along the Silver River. We went farther than the waterfall and the pool my grandfather built once upon a time. My uncle wanted to show me one of the century-old cottonwoods that had fallen during a recent snowstorm. He described the tree as having shattered because of the way it broke. Then he showed me the younger trees—and the way they bent instead, and how they still continued to bend under the weight of the new snow.

“It's like they are bowing to the storm,” my uncle said. “Like the storm is their master and they are showing their respect.” Because they were young and flexible, those trees could not shatter. They went along with the massive blows of wind and snow instead. While he was impressed by the saplings, I was more affected by the impact of the ancient cottonwood and its total demise.

He also made me watch Marmalade. The way she jumped from the rafters in the barn, always landing on her feet. He said, “There's a time for landing on your feet and a time for falling like a drunk man would, or a baby.” He was serious, and I made him mad by giggling. “You take all that force against you,” he said, “and, Fig, you turn it into a power you can use.”

When I touch the fence, I use a combination of all the falling methods my uncle taught me. Where I drop and roll. Where the last thing I do is try to land on my feet. The fence can't knock me unconscious anymore, but it still throws me every time. But if I just take it—that is, absorb the power—I can make it my own. And each time I touch the fence, I fall.

Each time, I fall more safely than the time before.

*  *  *  *

I've perfected the art of falling safely by the time Daddy turns off the electric fence, dismantles it, and takes the copper to be scrapped. He rebuilds the old fence, and the pigs continue to be contained. I turn my focus elsewhere.

The calendar is titled
The Work of Salvador Dalí
, and even though the melting clocks are appropriate, I'm not interested in the images. Daddy gives me the calendar, telling me how Dalí is one of Mama's favorite artists—only he said “was.” He often talks about her like she's gone, as in gone forever.

I keep busy keeping track. I am counting. I record each day without my mother. And I can't help but wonder if this is the sacrifice I'm supposed to make. Is this the only way she might get better? Perhaps when I see her again, she will be back to normal.

I use the Dalí calendar to keep track of her absence. I don't blacken the squares, nor do I use the crossroads method of making an X. Instead, I make the same careful checks Mama makes in dictionaries. They are the same, only smaller. I make them as small as I can, despite all the room the insides of the squares provide.

I make each check before I go to bed. I make the check next to whatever number represents today. The checks are camouflaged by the numeral for the days—so tiny, they can't be noticed by anyone who might be snooping around my room, checking to see how I am holding up.

I check off the entire summer, and I check off the first day of the eighth grade. I make a special note for September fifteenth, the day both Lindy and Michael Chamberlain's murder conviction is unanimously overturned by the Northern Territory Court of Criminal Appeals. The day Azaria finally gets to rest in peace, I write R.I.P. and not an X. I am meticulous. Especially when it comes to the twenty-first of October. The tiny black check is perfect; the best I've made so far.

I check off October 21, 1988, and I am thirteen years old.

And this is my first birthday without my mother. I think about the number thirteen, and that night in the kitchen with Mama. Her thirteen knocks echo from past to present.
Knock  , knock—who's there?
I can hear her knocking, and I understand why people develop a phobia of this number. This phobia is about betrayal. That which is gone.

As I record the days without Mama, I can't help but fall back or spring forward. I think more and more about the days to come. I think about the days remaining before I turn nineteen. I was six years old that evening in the orchard, and the math is simple. I work the equation on the chalkboard of my mind: 6 + 13 = 19. My brain is dark matter, and the math problem is white—easy to see to see.

determinism: the philosophical view that past events and the laws of nature fix or set future events; given these conditions, nothing else could happen.

September 1, 1989

Without Mama, the house sounds different; even now, after all this time I still notice the sound of her absence. At night, I try to keep from picking at my scabs. I'm embarrassed because I'll be fourteen soon but I just can't seem to stop. I fall asleep, and in the morning I've reopened my skin and the white bedsheets are constellated with the brown bursts of dried blood.

Laundry is one of my many chores now that Mama is no longer here. I bleach the bedding back to white. This is erasure, but I am not done with my mourning.

We visit Mama whenever we can. The visiting room is noisy and full of stale smoke. This mother trembles. Her hands and her face. The shake inside this mother is another kind of echo. It is the echo of electrical currents charging through her soul. Daddy promises it doesn't hurt. And no one here calls it electric-shock therapy. They all call it ECT. Acronyms and initials are employed like camouflage or buffers; they are the sugar coating on a bitter pill, or the mittens worn by the Stanley children when they practiced the ordeal of no touching metal.

Mama won't look at me, and she won't look at Daddy. Instead, she counts each drag she takes, lighting one Salem off another. Her complexion blends in with the hospital walls, and through the window in the one door I glimpse the corridor leading to another world: the world where my mother chooses to live instead of with me. Voluntary commitment. I wish I could see to see: I want to see where she sleeps at night and what pieces of home she brought along. More than anything, I wish I could see the view from her window.