Jesus Land (18 page)

“Um, I have to go.”

“Your mom?”

“Uh-huh.”

I hang up and spin around. She’s gone, the doorway a dark rectangle. I find her in the kitchen, her lips pinched into a small line, washing dirty tinfoil in the sink to reuse. I walk around her to the cupboard and open it, my heart pounding.

“I never want to hear that language from you again,” she says in a tight voice.

I stop stacking plates and look at her.

“What language?”

“You know very well what I’m talking about.”

“Actually . . . I don’t.”

“Gosh! Darn! Jeez!”

“What’s wrong with those words?”

“You know exactly what they mean: God! Damn! Jesus!”

I stare at her mouth as profanity explodes from it, then swallow hard, as if I were the one caught using it and not her.

“But I use those words so I don’t have to use the other ones,” I say.

“Don’t be flippant with me, missy,” she says. “You’re not too old to get your mouth washed out with soap.”

How dare she threaten me? I storm into the dining room with the plates, muttering
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you
as I set down each plate on the plastic tablecloth.

“What did you say?”

I whip around to face her. She stands a few feet from me, her fists on her narrow hips, her blue eyes boring into mine. Despite her aggressive posture, she looks frail. The pouch of her abdomen bulges under her gray polyester slacks. Hard to believe I occupied that space once, that we were that close. She has never told me she loves me, or drawn me to her in an embrace. Never touched me with tenderness whatsoever. When I was a little, the closest she got was spitting in a tissue on the way to church and scrubbing my face with it, and I craved that attention.

Once in sixth grade, after spending a weekend at the Kuipers’ house with my friend Sandra, I asked her why she couldn’t be more like Mrs. Kuipers, who read us bedtime stories and took us to see a matinee and made us popcorn balls.

“What, Mommy too hard on you?” she asked in a whiny voice. I was horrified at her mockery and slammed myself in my room to write “I hate you” on every page of my diary, which I knew she read.

When did she start to despise me, and when did I learn to despise her back?

I should tell her what I feel for her, those three words, and pour salt on the infection of our relationship. Get it out in the open, clean and honest.

“I said . . .,” I start to say, but stop and shake my head. What if she says the same words back to me? What then? How could we live in the same house anymore? And I have nowhere to go.

“I didn’t say anything,” I say, setting a glaring white plate in front of David’s chair.

The garage door creaks open, announcing Dad’s arrival, and we quickly revert back to mother and daughter roles, she pulling a casserole from the oven, me setting utensils alongside the plates. This is what Father will see when he walks through the door.

At supper, we are four strangers, eating. We have nothing to say to each other.

The wind howls over the sharp corners of our house on the prairie and Rejoice Radio plays Christmas carols on the intercom.

“Your mother and I have something to tell you kids about Jerome,” Dad says halfway through this silent meal of macaroni with cheese and hot dogs.

David and I look across the table at each other and then at him.

“Jerome’s in juvenile hall. Apparently he got into a fight with another boy and put him in the hospital with a concussion. A judge will decide what to do with him.”

So that’s where Jerome is. “Juvi.” Jail for kids. Kids who are hardcore screwups, beyond hope, total losers. Figures.

“Can I go visit him?” David asks, putting down his milk glass.

“Of course not,” Mother says.

“Why not?” David asks.

“Well, for one thing, you have school,” she responds.

“And what else?” David asks.

At this, Father jumps in, irritated at David’s insistence.

“If your mother says no, it means ‘no,’” he says loudly. “End of discussion, got it?”

Dad’s got his fork in his hand, and David sees it and shrinks away from him. In eighth grade, Dad got angry at him during supper and pronged him in the head. He cried from the pain, but they wouldn’t let him leave the table.

As soon as the “Amen” is pronounced, David mutely clears the table and slams himself into the basement. He doesn’t even open up to me when I walk downstairs with two bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream, his favorite flavor.

“I’m not hungry,” he says through the door.

“Gastric distress?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond.

“Okay, I’m going to leave it right here,” I say, setting one of the bowls outside his door. I shut myself in my room to eat the other.

We were fascinated with the world outside our stern household and became chronic wanderers, given to poking around dank church basements, the secret back hallways of truck stops, the Lysol-scented wards of our father’s hospital.

There were other places besides home, and we wanted to explore them all.

One summer morning when we were five, we struck out on our own. David pulled me down the sidewalk in our red Radio Flyer wagon, which I’d stocked with cookies, a blanket, and my pet tick, Blinky, which I’d housed in an empty salt shaker.

We’d decided to join the outside world, the bright sun and sweet grass and playful dogs that beckoned behind fences. Outside was better than home.

But our adventure was cut short before we reached the end of the block, when a neighbor woman phoned our house.

“Your daughter’s running off with the maid’s son,” she told Mother.

We’re shoveling the driveway, scarves wound around our faces, heads and jackets soaked from the pelting sleet. It’s Saturday morning, the sky is ash gray, and Christmas is two weeks away.

David jabs his shovel under the heavy snow, grating cement as he shoves it off the driveway. His glasses are fogged so I can’t see his eyes, but I know he’s still pissy at me.

On Tuesday, I was standing with Elaine at the snack bar when she remarked on the outfit she’d seen David wearing that day, a bright purple sweatshirt and green jeans.

“Good thing his sense of fashion doesn’t run in the family,” she sniffed, “because I wouldn’t be able to associate with you.”

“Good thing he’s not my real brother,” I’d shot back, “because he’d embarrass the hell out of me.”

There was a commotion behind us, and I turned to see David racing away with Kenny trailing after him, the dictionary I’d lent him crashed to the floor.

I tried to apologize as he set the supper table that evening— “you know I was just kidding”—but he banged down the plates on the table, refusing to talk to me, and hasn’t spoken a word to me since. Even yesterday, when we missed the bus and had to hike a mile and a half to Harrison as the below zero wind sliced our faces, he refused to open his mouth.

He’s been acting strange lately, and my stupid comment didn’t help matters. It’s like something’s been knocked out of him. Every evening he camps out in the downstairs rocker, swaying and staring at his reflection in the window.

Last weekend I tried to force him out of the chair, and the effort backfired on me. I went into the basement Saturday night with the Monopoly board and set it up on the carpet at his feet, spending ten minutes organizing the money and separating the Chance and Community Chest cards.

He refused to play. I grabbed his arms and tried to pry him out of the rocker and this devolved into a fierce battle of wills that ended with him kicking me in the stomach, knocking the wind from me. I fell onto the Monopoly board—sending money and cards flying—and lay there doubled over, gasping for air.

“I told you I didn’t want to play,” David said before locking himself in his room.

Although we’d had many brutal kick fights in grade school, his action on Saturday was unjustified and I was still angry at him when I made my comment to Elaine. But I know all too well that my comment hurt him more than his kick hurt me.

Mother’s frustrated with him, too. Half the time he won’t respond when she calls him on the intercom, and then she makes me go find him. She seems to think I have a sixth sense for locating my brother, as if some invisible leash tied us together. “Where’s David?” she’ll say. “Go find him.” It’s been this way since we were little.

The other day, I had to interrupt a manicure to find him. He was locked in his room.

“David, open up,” I yelled, kicking the door with my shoe so I wouldn’t ruin my nails.

“Hold on,” he called.

When he opened the door, he had blue eyes.

“What do you think?” he asked, smiling for the first time in weeks.

His eyes were blue. Cataract, sickly, unseeing blue. He looked like a freak.

“They’re contacts,” he said, before I could gather words to respond. “I saved up my allowance.

First he cuts a part in his hair, then he gets blue eyes.

“When are you gonna stop trying to be white?” I asked.

His smile fell, and he stood there blinking his blue eyes for a moment before closing the door in my face. When he sat down at the supper table, his eyes were back to normal, but he didn’t lift them from his dinner plate.

After the last patch of the driveway is cleared, we walk around the house to the basement door, stomping the snow from our boots before entering. The woodstove is burning, and Mother’s set a pan of apple cider and cinnamon sticks on top of it; the aroma hits us as we walk through the door.

“Mmm, smells good,” I say, looking at David hopefully. “You thirsty?”

He ignores me, sitting on the bench to peel off his snow pants.

“How long you planning to stay mad at me?” I ask him. “Forever?”

He doesn’t say anything, but shrugs, which is something at least. A possible softening. As I’m arranging my wet socks and gloves on the rack next to the woodstove, Mother thumps downstairs.

“Don’t hang those so close to the stove, you’ll scorch them,” she says.

I move the rack to the other side of the woodpile, and she starts to walk away, then stops.

“The judge sent Jerome to Cary Home for Boys, downtown,” she says. “They’re not going to charge him with assault because he’s a minor, but they should have.”

“Is he coming home for Christmas?” David asks, and I feel a twinge of jealousy at this concern for Jerome.

“Of course not,” Mother says. “He’s a juvenile delinquent!”

“He’s not a juvenile delinquent, he’s my brother!” David screams, jumping up. He whips his snow pants across the room and they flap against the ping-pong table like a giant tattered bird. His action startles both of us and we stare speechless as he stalks to his room and kicks the door shut.

“David, get out here and clean up your mess, right now!” Mother yells.

I hold my hands to the woodstove, thawing my blue fingertips. The cider is boiling in the pan, ready to drink.

Mother edges closer to David’s door, hands on her hips, looking tired and old in her flesh-colored sweater.

“I’m warning you,” she says.

The door stays shut.

“Just wait until your father gets home!”

I wince as she thunders back up the steps, slamming the basement door behind her, then walk over to pick up David’s snow gear and put it away.

When his screams rise from the basement a few hours later, I wrap my head in my pillow and scream along with him. After twenty minutes tick by on my alarm clock, I unwrap my head
and sit up. Pat Boone is crooning “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on the great room stereo.

I tiptoe to the mouth of the hallway. The ceiling-high Christmas tree flashes rainbow beads of lights on the walls and windows. David and I decorated it last weekend to the usual soundtrack of
A Christmas Sing with Bing,
but this year, it was just another Saturday chore. We used to sing along to the album as we decorated the tree, giddy with the idea of Christmas, with the idea that the presents our parents gave us would prove that they loved us.