I Am No One You Know (30 page)

And you wouldn’t know was this real, or pretend. Was Jorie truly sick from not taking her pills, or was Jorie playing one of her games.

Like a dream the house was without Jorie.

Four hours, or five. Maybe six.

If Mom had to take Calvin or me to the doctor, maybe it would be longer.

Or Mom might take us to the mall. Riding the escalators. Staring at the big sparkling fountain lighted for Christmas, and into the store windows. Maybe Mom would take us to a movie. And maybe for a snack at Taco Bell afterward. We loved Taco Bell. We didn’t forget Jorie, she was not neglected. We would bring food back for her. But this was the quiet time.

And when Mom unlocked the storage room door, and Jorie came out walking like she was half-asleep, she would be quiet, too. Blinking and rubbing her eyes. Because the ordinary light would hurt her eyes, there was no light in the storage room. Because Jorie would need to be hugged by Mom, and would consent to be hugged, and kissed as she would never at any other time.
Mom-my do-you love-me
Jorie would ask like a little girl and Mom would say
Honey yes. Mommy loves you a lot.
In the beginning Jorie would throw herself against the door, pound and kick till she was bruised, bleeding, but after a while she would give up and lie down, probably she slept because it was so dark there was nothing to see. She’d be weak from not eating which made her quiet, too. And grateful to be fed.

Mom said
Now will you be good, Jorie?
and Jorie said
Yes, Mommy. I will be good.
And so Jorie was, for a while.

D
ADDY WENT AWAY
. I can remember Daddy but Jorie can’t. She says she can’t. Sometimes she can’t remember yesterday, or a few minutes ago. One of the doctors told Mom that Jorie’s brain is wired different from other people so now I can (almost) see thin filaments like in a lightbulb inside Jorie’s head and some of these are broken and snagged together. I feel sorry for Jorie who can’t remember Daddy except to know that he’s gone. Jorie says
I don’t give a damn for anybody’s Daddy they can all go to hell.
She laughs, and sniffs, and wipes her nose with the back of her hand in that way that drives Mom crazy. I don’t tell Jorie that Daddy used to rock her in his arms and whisper in her ear because he loved her best. I could tell Jorie
Daddy loved me best!
and maybe she would believe it.

In kindergarten Jorie began to act strange. She never wanted to go to school as I did. She’d throw a tantrum, make herself feverish and sick to her stomach and Mom would have to keep her home. Always Jorie had been different from me. She was the lively twin. I knew people called her the “pretty” twin. It would seem that Jorie was the “smart” twin too except she could not sit still and concentrate for more than a few minutes, sometimes seconds. You could feel the heat lifting from her skin. You could see her eyes jerking and rolling. It was easier for Jorie to break a doll than to play with it. It was easier for Jorie to tear all the pages out of a book than to read it. There was no use buying a little computer for Jorie and Jamie because Jorie would crack the screen with her head or break into the back and tear out the wires. At first Dad went with Mom to the clinics, to take Jorie to be examined. After a while Mom took Jorie by herself. There were many “tests.” There were “brain scans.” There were doctors, therapists, dieticians, special teachers. Daddy was gone away from home a lot. I missed Daddy, but Jorie hummed and chattered to herself not needing Daddy so when he did come home, Jorie looked right through him like he wasn’t there.
Hey: Angel-Baby? Jorie?
Daddy was hurt I could see. He loved Calvin and me but not like he loved Jorie who walked past him with this look on her beautiful feverish face like she was in another world, not even Daddy could enter. And once Daddy saw Jorie in one of her spells, maybe he hadn’t believed Mom what these could be like, poor Daddy backed off staring at Jorie quaking and gagging
and falling to the floor to thrash and “convulse” like she was dying…

The more Daddy was gone, “traveling,” “on business,” as Mom told us, the crazier Jorie behaved. Suspended from school, expelled from school, had to be bussed to a special school for “disturbed learning disability children” and eventually suspended from that school, too. She’d pick up dog shit outside and bring it into the house to throw it around laughing wildly at the looks on our faces. She stopped sleeping through the night, any night. At 4
A.M.
she’d be out in the kitchen rummaging through the refrigerator eating anything she could find, for sure Mom couldn’t keep ice cream very long in the freezer, Jorie would eat it out of the containers with her fingers, walk away and leave the freezer door wide open. She’d wander into the living room and turn on the TV loud and so if Daddy happened to be home, he was furious, disgusted, and blamed Mom that she couldn’t control Jorie.

Saying to Mom
I am trying. You want too much. This is nobody’s fault. This is not my fault. I have to support you. I have to support this household. Her medical costs. I never asked for this. You smoked when you were pregnant with the girls, no I’m not blaming you and I know you didn’t smoke for the full nine months but you did smoke, there must have been damage done. Don’t raise your voice with me, I’m not from people who raise their voices and live in pigstys like this. I said God damn you don’t raise your voice with me—

Jorie and I were ten when Daddy moved out.

T
HERE WAS A
confused time then. Mom on the telephone. Or sometimes Mom talking to herself. Groggy from Jorie’s pills she’d taken to calm her nerves. Or worn out from crying. Saying
You can’t! You can’t leave me.
Mom was desperate, pleading. Mom’s voice like something hurt, dying.
What have I done to deserve this, I love you, I want to love you, but I love her, too, I love my children, what can I do, you can’t leave us, I used to be a happy person, I want to be a happy person again, I’m only thirty-one, that isn’t old!

A
T THE CLINIC
in another city. Where they tested Jorie, again. And there were the ugly words again.
Neurological impairment. Frontal lobes, cerebral cortex. Autism.
A woman doctor told Mom this is your
child, you can learn to live with a disabled child. Mom asked how long would this be and the doctor did not understand, how long? how many years? and Mom tried to explain she has two other children, she has Jorie’s twin sister and Calvin who is five years younger and he too has mild dyslexia, a slight speech impediment, he’s a quiet boy, very shy, withdrawn, she was concerned that Jorie’s presence in the household was making Calvin worse, she was concerned that Jorie might physically injure her little brother, and the doctor interrupted to say that Mom would have to oversee Jorie, protect her little brother, maybe when Jorie is an adolescent maybe then if she is considered “dangerous” she might be institutionalized, and right away Mom said no, I will never put my daughter in an institution, I will not give up.
I will not.

Leaving the clinic, Jorie jumped down a flight of concrete steps, fell and twisted her ankle, sprained it. Shrieking with pain which was rare for Jorie.

I
N THE CELLAR,
in the night. Do you hear her?

Jamie!
she is crying.
Jam-ie! Help me.

It was not Mom’s fault, Jorie spat out her pills. Jorie would not use the pot to pee in. Jorie would not eat her food. Screaming and throwing herself against the wall, bloodying her nose and mouth like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. I felt so bad to see Jorie’s face swollen, it was like my own face, contorted and ugly. If you are a twin you want your twin to be beautiful like an angel. If you are not beautiful yourself you want your twin to be beautiful. We were fearful that somebody would come and take our mom from us, Mom was not well, migraine headaches, so dizzy she couldn’t walk across the room without stumbling, on the sofa with one of her strong-smelling bottles, smoking, the cigarette ash would fall into the cushions and we couldn’t wake her, beating out the smoldering little flames with our fists.
Mom! Mommy! Wake up.

Mom said there are people who believe that a child like Jorie is a punishment that the mother must deserve. Mom said that Daddy and his family blamed her. Would have nothing to do with her.
I love my daughter. I don’t wish to harm my little girl. I know she can’t help it. This is just to get some rest. Some peace. To protect the others. For a little while.
But
in the night, in the cellar, if Jorie continued to rage and could not be let out, Mom said there came her own heartbeat, her deranged and murderous heart she dared not free to do injury upon others.
That would be evil. True evil.

I
T WAS NOT
what they say. Mom left food for Jorie. Mom did.

If Mom forgot, I took food to Jorie. Sometimes she was so weak, she couldn’t fight me. Wouldn’t wish to fight me. I shared what I ate with Jorie, my sister. I would not let her starve to death and neither would my mom. But Mom was sick sometimes, too. Calvin and me, we stayed home from school to take care of her.

Mom has a college degree, or almost. She dropped out to get married she says, she wanted her twin girl-babies. She didn’t want an abortion. She was in love, she loved Daddy and wanted to marry him and now Daddy has “severed all ties” with her. It is because of Jorie but Jorie is not to blame, Jorie can’t help herself.
Yes but if Jorie took her pills. If Jorie went to therapy. If Jorie did not bite, kick, scream, rage. Throw herself into convulsions.
Mom says
I don’t hate my daughter, I don’t want to hate my daughter. Because I love my daughter.

It’s a lie, what they say about Mom. In the papers. What the neighbors say. If Jorie weighed only fifty-nine pounds, it was because she refused to eat. Or she ate, and made herself sick and vomited it up.
Jorie
I said
Please eat this
I was shining the flashlight onto the plate, I squatted there beside her till I saw her begin to eat. Then Mom called down to me.
Jamie! Get back up here, lock that door.
Jorie grabbed my arm, grinned, and sank her teeth into my wrist. That fast, I could not believe it.

N
O.
M
Y MOM
did not do that. I was the one.

No! My mom did not know about that. Calvin and me, we were responsible.

Because—why? Mom was so tired, and had to sleep. And Jorie would not let her sleep. In May it began. What Mom calls
evil in Jorie.
So we—I guess that was when—we locked her in the storage room almost all the time.

I don’t know! But it was me, not my mom.

I love my mom, I would do anything for her. She isn’t like people
say. Calvin and me, we belong together, too. We don’t want some “new home.” We don’t want some “foster family.” We want each other, and we want Mom. And we want Jorie too, when Jorie is well.

No, I would not lie for my mom. I am not lying. I am telling the truth.

Jorie will tell the truth, when she is well enough. They won’t let me see her yet. They say she is “malnourished”—“mute.” They say that she is “traumatized.” She wouldn’t look at me, the last time I saw her. Her eyes were strange and blurred like they were sleeping. I whispered
Jorie c’mon! Jorie wake up!
but she would not.

The school nurse asked why I was crying, why I was so nervous, what were the bite marks on my wrist, she would keep my secrets if I had secrets she promised. But she lied.

I know, it’s better for Jorie now. It’s better for all of us.

Mom said
Thank God. It’s over, thank God.

But in the jail Mom is on “suicide watch.” I want to see my mom, and so does Calvin. Today. Right now!

You promised.

I
t has all happened before. A thousand thousand times. Like drowning, your life flashing in front of your eyes. Something like that.

W
HY
R
ICKIE
S
WANN
was only just in eighth grade at his age of almost fifteen towering over younger classmates was he’d been kept back twice and each time unjustly Rickie believed. The first time, so long ago he could barely remember, his mother hadn’t been married yet to Dexter Swann and he’d been “temporarily placed” in a foster home in Jersey City so he’d had two years of first grade and the second time, fifth grade in East Orange, he’d had to take the year over for reasons of
tension decifit disease
or some bullshit like that. So by junior high at Grover Cleveland Rickie was the tallest boy in all his classes and by eighth grade he was as tall as some of his teachers who were uneasy in his presence and tended to assign him a seat at the very rear of the classroom. Also Rickie was skinny and twitchy as a snake balanced on its tail. His eyes often glittered with fury and obscure hurt like chips of mica. His jaws glittered with a silvery fawn-colored stubble. His hair
looked like broom sage straggling past his collar. He had an Adam’s apple like something stuck midway in his throat. He had few friends at Grover Cleveland and his teachers rarely called upon him in class because he had a disconcerting habit of staring blankly at them as if unhearing, and if he did manage to mumble an answer it was likely to be wrong. Nor did his teachers discipline him when suddenly he might unwind his long legs from beneath his desk and walk out of the room wiping his nose on the edge of his hand.

Rickie’s grades were unpredictable. Sometimes he did surprisingly well in math. He wrote slowly in upward-slanting sentences with large balloon-like letters. Teachers encouraged him but often he gave up midway in a test, crumpled up his paper, and lurched out of the room muttering to himself.

In Mrs. Halifax’s fourth-period social studies class Rickie Swann had been assigned a seat at the rear of the room. Rarely did Mrs. Halifax call upon him. Not that she was afraid of him. (Mrs. Halifax wasn’t afraid of any student!) Before their love affair his grades were C, C-. None of Mrs. Halifax’s colleagues at Grover Cleveland would recall her having mentioned Rickie Swann in their hearing when in the teachers’ lounge they spoke of their students and compared notes.

What do you think of Rickie Swann?

Disturbed kid. Waiting to explode.

Ever seen his mother?

In fact Mrs. Swann never came to Grover Cleveland to meet with her son’s teachers though she’d been so advised. Never came to PTA meetings. She had a distrust of anything to do with the government and this included public schools. Yet Mrs. Swann had her own standards of decency and these were exacting. Often she commented on Rickie’s failure to adequately wash and the fact that his underarms, newly bristling with hairs, swam in slime. His
boy-equipment
as Mrs. Swann quaintly phrased it was growing, she knew, and would soon cause problems. By eighth grade, Rickie had begun to shrink from mirrors. His face was often broken out in flaming rashes. Though since he’d shot up to five feet ten there were shameless females who winked at him in the street murmuring in his wake what sounded like
Sexy boy kiss-kiss!
making him want to howl and pound his fists and tear at somebody’s throat with his teeth.

You had to admire Rickie’s mom. The few friends Rickie had in the neighborhood thought she was some character. Not bad-looking for a woman so old (she was maybe thirty-five) and funny like some TV comedian. She’d toss a wash cloth at Rickie: “Wash.” When a patina of grime had been building up on Rickie’s hands, forearms, neck of that sickly gray hue of the air of industrial New Jersey she’d toss a steel wool pad at him: “Scrub.” The same high-potency deoderant she purchased for her husband Dexter Swann she was likely to shove at Rickie: “Use this. Now.” Before Rickie grew taller than his mother and outweighed her by twenty pounds Mrs. Swann would dare to seize his chin in her hand and examine his teeth as you’d examine a horse’s teeth: “Brush.” Now that Rickie towered over his mom and flared up sometimes in bad temper, she’d ceased this practice.

Whoever Rickie’s mom once was, she was now Mrs. Dexter Swann. Rickie called her
Mom
and her husband Dexter Swann (who was Rickie’s step-dad, not his actual dad, but had adopted Rickie as his own son) called her
hon.
She had a shrewd ferret face and elbows sharp as hammer prongs. Many times during the nine years they’d been alone together, a family of “two survivors,” she’d told Rickie of how she had been abandoned by her unknown mother as a week-old infant, left to be eaten alive by rats in a Dumpster behind a Taco Bell in Jersey City, New Jersey—“But I sure as hell didn’t abandon
my kid.
” Rickie was made to know that she’d had the opportunity and possibly the wish to abandon him not once but many times. Mrs. Swann’s eyes were glittery like her son’s, vigilant and derisive. Growing up an orphan with no “siblings” or anybody in the world who “gave a shit” about her had given her an air of suspicion tinged with mirth. Her customary stance was hands on her hips, palms up in mockery.

Rickie tried to love his step-father who spent most of his time now indoors in a Barcalounger noisily sucking oxygen through tubes in his nose and flicking through ninety-nine TV channels. Mr. Swann suffered from emphysema caused by years of inhaling the toxic stink of hogs bound for slaughter. Mr. Swann said the hogs, unlike cows, knew where they were headed and so shat in a continuous diarrhetic stream you could smell not only in the cab of his truck but everywhere in the truck’s wake. Something of the brooding diarrhetic melancholy of the doomed hogs clung to Mr. Swann even in his retirement years with
his “new family” which he’d hoped would have been a happy time. Over the years Rickie had grown accustomed to the smell of his step-dad and hardly ever noticed it any longer.

What was weird was: how Rickie loved his mother but was so nervous of her he couldn’t sit still for more than two or three minutes at mealtimes for instance. Couldn’t watch TV with his step-dad because his mom was likely to be present not watching TV herself but seeing it through Rickie’s eyes so if for instance a sexually provocative female appeared on screen Rickie’s mom would know exactly how this looked to Rickie and would tease: “Eyes wide
shut,
kiddo.” Mrs. Swann seemed to be on intimate terms with Rickie’s
boy-equipment
and sensed its every quiver and throb. Rickie had come to think he’d have to murder his mom just to stop her X-ray eyes on him, her disgust and her derision which he knew was warranted, or to protect her from disappointment in him when he brought home the kind of report cards Rickie Swann hadn’t any choice but to bring home for her signature. Not just low grades for his studies but
poor
for such mysterious categories as
deportment, citizenship, peer interaction.
They were like Siamese twins, Rickie thought, him and his mom, that kind of twin where one is growing out of the spine of the other like a misshapen tree, or, the scariest sight Rickie had ever seen, one night on the Discovery Channel, one twin growing upside-down out of the other’s skull.

Rickie loved his mom but if he had to kill her it would be her skull he’d smash, with maybe a hammer. His step-dad kept tools in the basement and among them a claw hammer. Not something sharp. Not a knife. It made him queasy to think of stabbing and of blood. Rickie guessed a skull could be smashed like crockery and without pain. You come up behind the unsuspecting victim and bring the hammer down hard and the person would fall unconscious in an instant like a struck steer and would be dead and never know what had happened, still less who’d done it.

Rickie would never do such a thing, though. Rickie loved his mom too much.

S
OME OF HER
pupils hated and feared her. Some of her pupils loved her. Mrs. Halifax was cool, they had to agree.

What she was mostly was a
tease.
She teased her favorite pupils but she teased pupils who pissed her off. So you never knew where you stood with her. If Mrs. Halifax winked at you that was usually a good sign, though not always. If she winked at the class over your head that was definitely not a good sign. What sounded like praise at first—“Why, Jimmy, did you write this report
all by yourself?
”—had a way of turning sarcastic with a sly slippage of her voice and a downward pucker of her mouth.

Though she wasn’t much taller than most of her students, Mrs. Halifax exuded the authority of a giantess. She was a compact little woman with a bosom that looked, in profile, like nubs of extra limbs protruding from her body. Her face gave off a perpetual dramatic heat though her skin was pale as cold cream. Her eyes were a warm glistening brown. She licked her lips that were full and shinily red like plastic cherries. Often she stroked her bare, downy forearms and her bosom as she might pet a cat. The least mature boys in her classes staring at Mrs. Halifax’s sensuous caressing hands were made to feel anxious. The more mature boys were made yet more anxious, antsy. Her rust-colored hair was sometimes twisted into some kind of teacher top-knot on her head but at other times fell loose and wavy to her shoulders. Though her official subject was social studies, Mrs. Halifax sometimes read poetry to her classes, and there was the belief that, though she credited these poems to actual poets, they were her own efforts, mysterious to even the brightest students. When Mrs. Halifax read these poems, which were laced with such words as
tempest—sorrow—destiny—soul—soul-mate—beyond the grave—
her beautiful brown eyes filled not with mockery but with tremulous tears.

Because we were fated. What a soul-mate is, is fate.

Which is why I am not guilty. Never will anyone convince me in any way I AM GUILTY.

S
O IT FIGURED:
Rickie Swann was fated, too. In that habit of drifting downtown after school instead of returning home where his step-dad Dexter Swann who wasn’t a bad guy was wheezing through plastic tubes in his nose and surfing the TV and his mom was—well, but you never knew, did you? Maybe Mrs. Swann would be waiting
for her son to drift back home or maybe, which was happening more frequently lately, Mrs. Swann wouldn’t be home herself but at the grocery store so she’d return sometimes after dark with that icepick look signaling to her men
You two mouths are hungry? Me, too.
If they were lucky they got TV dinners heated up in the microwave. To avoid these encounters in the fall of his fifteenth year Rickie fell into the habit of hanging out at the 7-Eleven or he’d prowl a nearby mini-mall hanging out at Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Shamrock Lounge & Bowling Lanes where older guys who were friends of his, sort of, had jobs. And one evening back of the Shamrock Rickie saw a car like his mom’s secondhand Mazda including the license plate number beginning
TZ
and he thought, What the fuck? and entered the bowling alley by a rear door little knowing how this was destiny, as Mrs. Halifax would later explicate to him, his life was to be changed forever for a reason.

“Mom?”

Like it was a movie scene where edgy music comes up Rickie stood staring and gaping at Mrs. Swann in a gold lamé turtleneck and tight-fitting black nylon trousers as she was laughing, drinking beer, bowling, and obviously having a terrific time in the company of a coarse-skinned man of about her age with a chunky ferret face and icepick eyes like her own except this guy was muscled and tattooed and wore his graying ginger hair tied back in a ponytail, and he had sideburns that looked gouged into his cheeks, and a beery belly laugh as with a swaggering rush he sent a black bowling ball sliding, slipping, careening down the alley to crash squarely into the pins and send them all flying—“Stri-ike!” Mrs. Swann protested, “Hey! How’d you do
that?
” swiping at the guy’s bared bicep with her fist like she seriously doubted he’d rolled a perfect strike legitimately except: how can you cheat in bowling? In plain view of any spectator? Rickie saw through a shimmering haze that the ponytail guy wasn’t alone with his mother but there was a fattish girl of about eleven with them, her sturdy right leg in a brace, and the girl’s face was so soft and pie-shaped and her mouth so slack, you had to figure she was mentally disadvantaged as you were taught to say at school not retarded or a moron. Who were these people? Why was Mrs. Swann hanging out with them? Rickie figured the girl was the daughter of the ponytail guy judging by how tenderly he regarded her clumsy antics as she took her turn at bowling,
tottering and lurching forward dragging her stiff leg, swinging and releasing her ball (child-sized, speckled orange) to drop onto the alley like a rock that rolled forward slowly—slowly!—toward the pins and after several slow seconds the orange-speckled ball veered into the gutter failing to knock down a single pin. Which Rickie was thinking scornfully was fucking hard to accomplish.

Yet the girl was loved, you could see. Her second ball too she threw like the first, and it rolled into the gutter.
Yet her daddy grinned and applauded her.

“My turn!”

Now came Mrs. Swann all elbows and bared gums. Whom Rickie had never seen bowling in all their life together and who’d for fucking sure never taken him bowling. Mrs. Swann in her gold lamé turtleneck reckless and show-offy as a teenaged girl for the benefit of the ponytail guy, yet with unexpected skill gave her ball a twist of the wrist as she released it so that it rolled swiftly and unerringly down the alley to strike the pins with such force that eight of them went flying; and with her second ball she knocked out the remaining two to score what’s called a split, pretty damned good, Rickie had to concede, though Rickie was upset, and Rickie was resentful, seeing how the ponytail guy and the fat girl with her leg in a brace were applauding his mom.
His
mom! The guy called her “Lenore” and the girl called her “Aunt Lenore.”
Was that his mom’s fucking name, Lenore?
She’d never told Rickie her own son.