“These things smell funny. And this box looks old. These towels are used, aren’t they? I can’t accept these.” And she thrusts the gift back at Jimmie.
I feel like crying out that they’ve never been used, that they are beautiful. “No!” I hear myself screaming. Jimmie taps her forefinger to her closed lips, signaling me to be silent.
“Time to go,” she whispers to me, taking my hand and leading me back out the way we came in. She carries the rejected gift—almost hidden—under her arm.
Zora Clay rushes up behind us, carrying our coats, murmuring and tut-tutting back toward Faye.
“I’m so sorry, Jimmie. Please don’t mind, Faye. Girl’s a silly romantic fool. Has bats in the belfry, if you ask me.”
I hold tight to Jimmie’s free hand and try to keep up with her as she takes long, powerful steps back across the field toward our house, which now looks bleak and tired and dingy and oh so very old. I feel like crying for Jimmie’s shame. I remember what Daddy said about Jimmie and Spence, that they don’t go too deep into their feelings. And I wish Jimmie could yell or curse to let her feelings out the way Daddy does. But she doesn’t. Jimmie never does. And neither does Spence.
Later this year, in the spring, a siren wails across the south field and we see an ambulance pull into Cory and Faye’s new driveway. After things quiet down, Jimmie hears through the grapevine, probably from Zora Clay, who is known to be a gossip, that Faye is pregnant and thought she was having a miscarriage when she had some stomach pain. False alarm. Probably something she ate griping her bowels. A few weeks later, another siren comes at us from across the south field. Faye has more gripes, and this time, she accuses the Cloverland milkman of putting poison in her milk. Jimmie says that pregnant women sometimes go off a little because of all the changes in their bodies. Daddy just circles a finger around one ear and says, “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” We all have to laugh at that.
But the peculiarity of Faye Clay is not all we have to worry about. It’s 1960. Everyone is getting more and more scared that the Russians will drop a nuclear bomb on us. We are nervous about the behavior of a pudgy, funny-looking, bald-headed man named Nikita Khrushchev. We remember him saying, just a few years back, “We will bury you.” Now, in October, the news shows pictures of him at the United Nations, banging his fists on the table, banging a shoe in protest.
“The Cold War,” Daddy says, “is heating up!”
Winter and spring pass. Then, in the summer, I am sitting on the front-porch steps. Jupy is lying next to me. A building crew is clearing away the last of what used to be our south woods. I watch now as the scoop of a noisy yellow bulldozer digs holes where our wheat used to grow. The east field, out back, already has one finished house, and three more are going up where the cornfield used to be. I’m petting Jupy and smoothing his black and white head. Jupy lifts his nose. His ears perk up. His eyes are fixed on a two-tone car—white and aqua blue—as it speeds along the road in front of our house, flashing its chrome grill. The greyhound part of him cannot resist. He pulls out from under my hand and takes off after the car. His long, elegant legs gain on the competition.
Jupy catches up with the car just as it passes Aunt Essie’s house. Now he’s stretching out, almost even with the front bumper. In true racing form, Jupy holds close to the car’s right front tire. The driver tries to negotiate a sharp curve to the right. The right front fender strikes Jupy’s flank, throwing him off his stride. The rear tire runs over him, crushes him.
After the accident, I walk solemnly beside Jimmie as she carries Jupy back home. I touch our dog’s once-powerful hind legs; they dangle limply from Jimmie’s arms.
Side by side, my mother and I walk across muddy ground and buried corn stubble, careful to skirt the large gaping holes where rectangular foundations have been carved out for the eastern section of Cory Clay’s housing development. He’s calling it Cory’s Ridge. We pass the one new house that is finished. A newly installed swimming pool has replaced a section of what old Mr. Clay had temporarily fenced in and was using for a cow pasture. The new homeowner emerges—gleaming wet, glittering like fool’s gold as he walks. He stares at Jimmie, a farm woman in bib overalls, toting a large mangled dog who whimpers like a puppy.
After the vet puts Jupy to sleep and Jimmie brings his body home, Daddy builds a coffin of knotty pine and makes a cross of the finest rosewood. Jimmie digs a deep hole and buries Jupy on the sheltered side of the grape arbor. I get out the mother-of-pearl and silver rosary I found one day in a red velvet box in my grandmother Lovenia’s trunk in the attic—Daddy said I could have it—and I recite the beads all the way around, as Daddy has taught me, and kiss the crucifix.
Spence looks like he wants to cry, but can’t. The sight of Jimmie, swinging the shovel, dropping heavy loads of sod into the grave with the easy tempo of a laborer, stays with me because it is the last time I see the real Jimmie, the strong and healthy Jimmie.
At the end of summer, my daddy, Jimmie, me, and Spence make our annual visit to Timonium Fair. We only go on a few rides this year.
“The rides are getting to be expensive,” Jimmie says.
So, we do things that are free—like looking at and climbing on the latest farm equipment, watching the sheep judging, and taking a tour up and down aisles of prize-winning jellies and quilts and pumpkins and squash. We are admiring the blue-ribbon eggplant—amazingly large and shiny and purple—when a girl I know from school runs over to me, tugging her mother along with her. Her mother is pale, with faded red hair. She reminds me of a tall, thin, withered carrot. Her daughter, Tishia, always bursting with wild ideas and brimming with self-confidence, likes me because I am quiet and let her do most of the talking.
“Hi, Lissa. Want to come see the sideshow with me? It’s really cool!”
Daddy has gone to the car to get away from the noise and the crowds, smoke a cigar, and take a nap. I convince Jimmie to let me go off with my friend. Jimmie stays with Spence to see some of the 4-H exhibits. I promise to meet them back at the exhibition hall in an hour.
I have never been to a sideshow. A brassy huckster, wearing a bright bowtie that matches the band on his straw hat, bawls out a steady stream of bizarre sideshow attractions.
“Come one, come all. See them here. See them live. See them up close—the Two-Headed Man, the Snake Woman, and more. Oneof-a-kind, unique freaks of nature. Step right up and get your tickets here. The chance of a lifetime! Come one, come all. See it here!”
The price of a single ticket is twice what it costs for the most expensive ride at the fair. It costs most of what Jimmie gave me to spend for the rest of the afternoon. I can hear Jimmie cautioning me, saying, “Lissa, don’t throw your money away.”
“Come on, Lissa. We’ve got to see this.” Tishia locks arms with me, pulls me toward the ticket line.
I can’t resist. I buy the ticket. We go inside the front part of the tent. Here, we are allowed to peer through a small hole in a covered box labeled Dancing Fleas. It’s dark, and I can’t see much of anything. A glass display case exhibits what looks like a short lumpy body wrapped in strips of yellowed white cloth. The sign says Authentic Egyptian Mummy. It doesn’t move or do anything.
A man at a podium tells us that for just an extra fifty cents, we can go through a curtain and see the Two-Headed Man and the Snake Woman—live and up close.
We pay our money and file, in a line, through an even darker part of the tent. The Two-Headed Man lurks in the shadows at the back of a small cage. I can see two heads sticking out and I can hear his heavy breathing, but I can’t make out his body. In another darkened cage labeled Snake Woman, Daughter of Eve, a woman writhes in a snake costume. Her face is painted a wicked green. She dances up close to the bars of the cage and hisses at me as I pass by. It’s as if she’s taunting me, calling me “SSSLissa, SSSLissa.”
And then I hear Daddy’s voice, as clearly as if he were standing right next to the Snake Woman in her cage, yelling at her, “How could you? How could you?
”
By the time we get out of the sideshow, it’s getting late. I say goodbye to Tishia and go back to find Jimmie and Spence in the 4-H pavilion. Daddy’s with them, and he’s pretty worried and upset. He’s lecturing Jimmie, telling her he would never have let his little girl go to something as cheap and tawdry and depraved as a sideshow. He tells me he was just about ready to send a security guard after me. Jimmie just looks tired and sad. Spence doesn’t say anything.
We go back to school, and this fall, in October 1961, President Kennedy gives a speech on civil defense. He advises American families to build bomb shelters to protect themselves in case we get attacked by the Soviet Union. Daddy reads articles in the newspaper about how to build a concrete fallout shelter in the basement. Spence clips out the instructions and saves them, but Daddy says, “Even if we could build a shelter under this old house strong enough for us to survive a nuclear attack, we would have to come out eventually. And the radiation would poison the soil and the air and the water, and all of us along with it.”
Daddy and I have a special bond, but so do Spence and Jimmie. Jimmie is as curious and excited about science and medicine as Spence is. Sometimes, I can really see this connection, like one weekend when Spence is, at the last minute, trying to pull together a notebook on germ theory, microbiology, and vaccines for science class. Spence reads aloud to Jimmie sections of Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters. Then I see Jimmie and Spence put their heads together over the set of Compton’s encyclopedias that one of Jimmie’s patients left for us when he died. Red-bound volumes with gold lettering on their covers are spread open on Spence’s bed. Jimmie helps him pick out key points to include in his notebook.
I hear Jimmie tell Spence, “Don’t be like me, and put off your studying. I regret not getting my high school diploma. Maybe you can be the first one in our family to go to college.”
When Spence gets the notebook back from his teacher, the cover is marked with a big red “A.” Inside, on the title page, I notice that Spence has written a dedication:
Heroes in Medicine
by Spencer Power
For My Beloved Mother
I’ve never seen Spence express so much emotion before.
One morning when I am eleven, my mother feels a lump under her arm while she’s brushing out her hair. Our family doctor examines her and tells her she needs to go to the hospital. “You’re a nurse,” he says. “You ought to know better than to miss something like that. That lump feels as big as an orange!” She has the lump removed at University Hospital.
The doctors find other tumors, and they remove her breast. We hope they got all the cancer out.
But the head surgeon tells Jimmie that because the tumors he removed were so large, he would like her permission to do all that is possible to halt this disease. Jimmie agrees to be his “guinea pig.” Over the next months, the doctors give Jimmie a hysterectomy. They burn her skin red with cobalt treatments. Because she has been such a good, brave patient, the head surgeon arranges to have all her medical expenses waived.
In seventh grade, I meet a girl named Paloma. At first, I think she is kind of weird. She’s so different from me. She’s the same age as me, but talks to the high school teachers as if she’s equal to them. Sometimes, she uses sophisticated medical terms—like cardiovascular and pulmonary, or hypertension, or hemorrhage and hematoma—when she talks to the science teacher. She even debates some teachers in class when she doesn’t agree with a point they are trying to make.
Paloma and I are in the same homeroom, and one day, she comes over to me, introduces herself, and walks along with me to our next class.
“That’s a pretty smart answer you gave in English class yesterday, Lissa,” she tells me. “I like the way you wear your hair in a pigtail down the back, by the way. You don’t seem snotty the way some of the kids are.”
I like Paloma; she’s not afraid to speak her mind. She likes to make fun of people who take themselves too seriously. She makes me laugh, and she thinks I have a good sense of humor, too. She says she likes me because I’m down-to-earth and not stuck on myself.
Sometimes, Paloma’s a little hard on me, though. In Home Economics, for a sewing class, we have to go into a dressing room to measure each other’s bust size for a blouse pattern. When Paloma wraps the tape measure around my small chest, she laughs so hard her face gets red and tears roll down her cheeks. “Bust size? What bust? You don’t have a bust!” Paloma is pretty well-endowed herself. She makes me feel self-conscious about my flat chest.
I accidentally embarrass Paloma when I pull a sanitary napkin from her purse one day at lunch. I hold it up and ask her what it is. She pulls it away from me, hides it back in her handbag, and says, “I can’t believe you don’t know what that is.” But I honestly don’t know what it is, or what it’s for. I’m not even sure why Paloma’s embarrassed about it.
But Paloma is really impressed with me when she sees how well I do on IQ tests. And when Paloma finds out my mother has cancer, she gets really concerned about me. “You’re way too thin, Lissa. You look malnourished. Are you getting enough protein in your diet?” Sometimes I think Paloma likes me because I let her be in charge and tell me what to do. Paloma has lots of pet animals—horses and burros and a monkey from her father’s lab at Johns Hopkins. Sometimes I think Paloma treats me like one of her pets. Paloma says she likes animals better than people. So maybe, for Paloma, I’m like a stray animal that she can tame and groom. Anyway, I like animals, too. That’s something we have in common. I’ve always had lots of pets around the farm.
In October, I hear Spence talking to his friend, Mark, on the way home on the school bus. Mark is all excited about something he calls the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Mark is skinny, with a crewcut and thick black-framed glasses. Paloma calls him a nerd. “Did you hear about those U-2 spy plane photos?” Mark says. “They prove that the commies have nuclear missiles in Cuba that could hit most of the U.S. We talked about it in current events today, and Mr. Burns says this just might be the start of World War III!” But I don’t pay much attention, and eventually this crisis seems to fade away.
Anyway, I’m more worried right now about Jimmie.
For a while, Jimmie is still able to get around. When I am twelve, I have a toothache, and Jimmie takes me to an old-fashioned dentist downtown. Daddy drops us off where the bus stops at the Crossroads Inn parking lot, and we take the number eight bus. When we get on to pay the fare, the bus driver asks Jimmie how old I am.
“She’s eleven,” Jimmie says.
When we go back and take a seat, I ask Jimmie, “Why did you say I’m only eleven?”
“The bus fare goes up when you turn twelve. And we need to save every penny.”
“But you lied, Jimmie.”
Jimmie looks embarrassed. “Just a little white lie.”
“What’s a little white lie?”
“It’s when you stretch the truth a little, but you do it for a good reason. Like when you tell somebody they look pretty when they really don’t—so you won’t hurt their feelings.”
I think about this all the way downtown. I don’t really understand how lying to save money is really a white lie. But I can see that my question has made Jimmie feel bad, so I don’t say any more about it.
At the dentist’s office, I am so scared that I shiver and my knees clap together. The dentist is an old man with a missing finger. He tells me he lost his finger because it got exposed to too much radiation from his X-ray machine. He pulls out my six-year molar.
Jimmie tells me, “You need to start brushing your teeth.” I promise to do that. I don’t want to lose any more teeth, and I don’t want my teeth to look like Daddy’s.
In February 1963, Jimmie comes home from her latest radiation session looking very, very tired. She seems to collapse into her chair at the kitchen table. Doesn’t even take off her coat.
“What’s wrong, Jimmie?”
She doesn’t look at me. Instead, she stares straight
ahead. “I was on the table getting my treatment.” She seems to be talking to the wall across the room. “I couldn’t read the time on the clock across the room. I couldn’t see anything out of my right eye. The doctors say I have a tumor behind my eye, and my system can’t stand any more radiation. All they can do is remove my eye.” Jimmie’s lips are quivering so much she can hardly get the words out. And then her tears come, and the rest explodes out of her mouth. “That’s just too much! Too much to bear! I am not a vain woman, but I won’t let them take out my eye.” She buries her head in her arms on the kitchen table. I stand beside her, try to smooth her hair. She takes my hand. Finally, she raises her head from the table and peers deep into my eyes. “I’ve always liked being a nurse and taking care of people. The last thing I want, Lissa, is to be a burden.”
One cold winter afternoon, Jimmie is kneeling down to help Daddy bleed the dining room radiators. All of a sudden, she collapses on the floor. She cries out a sound I have never heard her make before, a deep, wrenching groan filled with pain.
Jimmie prepares me to take over some of her responsibilities around the house. Daddy, she tells me, has a habit of sitting on the toilet for what she calls his “morning meditation.” If he’s smoking a cigar, he spits tobacco juice into the tub. So now Jimmie teaches me how to clean the toilet and how to scrub the yellow tobacco stains off the tub.
At the Far End of Nowhere Page 9
