by Cathy Lamb
Grandma had been known to give Velvet the slip, though, so I should be prepared, wrote Momma, to leave the bakery ‘on the spin of a nickel’ and help Velvet find Grandma. ‘Come immediately. You have a lazy bone, Isabelle, you are riddled with lazy bones, and I know, Janie, that you will have to do odd things before leaving the bakery. I don’t know where you got such strange habits, certainly not from me.’
Grandma could get dressed in her flight outfits herself, although she sometimes forgot underwear. ‘You must check Grandma’s bottom each day to make sure it’s appropriately covered.’ I was to comb her hair, description given. She forgot to brush her teeth and would often give speeches in front of her mirror. If the speech grew too long and she was going to miss her day trip, I was to go into her bedroom, the same one she’d been sleeping in for sixty-four years, and say, ‘Mrs Earhart, are you ready for takeoff? Your plane is on the runway.’
Grandma would then stop giving her speech, salute, and go downstairs to the bus.
Grandma had to have bran in the morning. ‘She has bowel problems. Without the bran, she’ll be stuffed to her ears. Make sure she eats it. She has haemorrhoids, which she calls her “bottom bullet wounds,” and you will have to address that. Cream is on the dresser.
‘Don’t push Grandma to do anything she doesn’t want to. I know you girls are control freaks, but control yourself. Control is important for any lady to have and you three need it.’ I rolled my eyes at that one.
I already knew I was to address her as Amelia, or Mrs Earhart. I was not to discuss her husband, Momma’s daddy, with her, because Mrs Earhart would start swearing and expounding upon ‘killing the cheating bastard’ or ‘He is not a man. He is a eunuch. No balls. Fucker.’
My grandpa Colin was a man, as legend has it, with an ego the size of Arkansas. He was a doctor, hence the house, and died when he was having a night-time picnic with his receptionist up on a cliff. He drank too much and toppled off.
Momma was fourteen. She told me that Grandma’s response at the time was, ‘Wonderful. I was going to have to divorce him. Now I’ll take the life insurance and dance on his grave.’ Apparently she did that, too. Danced on his grave every Friday night for five years while drinking his whiskey. She would scream at him, ‘Hey, pond scum. See who’s still dancing? See who’s decaying?’
So no Colin reminders.
The list reminded me that I was not to call her Grandma or ‘chatter on’ about anything we did as kids. Ever. That confused her.
We also received directions on Bommarito’s Bakery, which we had all worked and cooked in, for hours each day, all through high school, despite Grandma’s protests that Momma was working us ‘hard enough to rip the skin off their bones.’
Momma took orders, and we baked cookies, cakes, breads, you name it, using our dad’s cookbooks. Ad nauseum.
‘The bakery is a thriving business. Thriving. Don’t ruin things for me,’ she wrote. ‘I have loyal, dear customers. I hope to the high heavens I still have them when I return.’
I rolled my eyes. She then detailed her recipes (many), what time I was to get to the bakery with Janie (5:00 A.M.), what goods should be made first, and other inane details like frosting colour. Again, I won’t list it. Think: straitjacket.
‘Isabelle, don’t get into men’s beds. That was humiliating last time. Do you have to wear your hair in braids? Black people wear braids. Not you. Are you black? I raised you better than that, and you know it. Janie, please. No muttering or chanting. Ladies never mutter or chant.
‘Get this right, girls.
‘Momma.
‘PS Keep Cecilia from eating any more than she already does. She is too fat already. I have done what I could for her.’
There was a silence when we all finished reading The List.
Cecilia’s chin was quivering.
I slung an arm around her shoulders.
‘I can love myself even if I don’t feel loved by Momma. I can love myself even if I don’t feel loved by Momma,’ Janie chanted.
I went to hug Janie.
Cecilia made a move for the closet; Janie crawled in behind her. They shut the door.
I crumpled up the pink letter that smelt like nauseating flowers and opened the door to the closet. ‘Scoot over.’
Later that night Henry, Janie, and I lined up his shells on the floor and studied them. Same with his collection of rocks.
When he went to bed, we sang songs, and I brushed his curls back. ‘I love yous,’ he murmured, when his almond eyes began to shut. ‘Yeah, yeah. I love yous. I so happy you home.’
No one in my life has ever been as excited to see me as Henry always is. No one has ever loved me as much as he does, either. Darn near made me tear up, thinking of that.
We snuck out when he was asleep. Janie went straight to her room and started murdering people. ‘I have a deadline and I still haven’t set out my doilies or peace candles, nor have I arranged a serenity corner or a positive breathing space.’
I hugged her goodnight, then I headed out to the porch swing. Momma was already in bed. She had not liked the dinner we cooked. The sauce was too spicy, the bread hard ‘like a suitcase,’ the salad filled with salmonella.
You might think that Momma had lost it, like her Momma has, based on what she says. That would be incorrect. Momma has been like this since before our dad slung a bag over his shoulder and walked down our driveway, away from our home and swing set and into the soft lights of dawn. This is how River Bommarito is.
I pushed River out of my twirling mind and thought about Henry as I swung.
You would have thought that we sisters would have hated Henry for being Momma’s clear favourite.
Never happened.
From an early age, he was sick, helpless, loveable, pitiful, lost, cheerful, loving, and sweet.
It was an unbeatable combination.
He was completely unprepared for the shittiness of our childhood, for what had happened specifically to him, but unlike his sisters, he had learnt to trust again. To hope. To reach out to others with innocence.
He was a blipping miracle.
I swung more, the country quiet, the wind a gentle rustle, calm, the land undulating like the soft swells of a green ocean, trees rustling overhead. It was incomparably beautiful in Trillium River.
I felt like I’d entered hell.
Cecilia took a day off work from her kindergarteners to help us get Momma to the hospital the next morning. She swung by in her van and Janie and I got Momma settled in the front seat.
The sun was peeping up, the sky golden and pink, the wind sauntering by, relaxed, as if it had all the time in the world today to see Momma off. All was still, sleepy, and content.
Except for the three of us sisters, who were twisting in the middle of an emotional battlefield filled with booby traps and land mines.
Momma was not in a good mood. The breakfast I made her was ‘flat’. Janie was making her nervous. I hadn’t snuck a man up to my room last night, had I? The kitchen was messy, she never had a messy kitchen. Cecilia was late. She’s always late. ‘Not an organised woman. She’s a mess. A mess.’
‘Stop spinning around me,’ Momma snapped, attaching a pearl earring. ‘Do not tell me to relax, Isabelle! Cease mumbling to yourself, Janie. Or are you speaking to an imaginary friend? Cecilia, for God’s sakes, you have enlarged. You’re bigger than you were yesterday! You have got to stop eating. One of the biggest days of my life, if not the biggest day of all because I am getting open-heart surgery, if you girls care to remember, and here you are, making me late!’
‘We’re not late, Momma,’ Janie said, tentative. ‘Don’t you worry—’
‘I am worried, Janie. I’m worried that I have a daughter who has written nine books and all she does is murder people in bizarre, twisted ways.’
‘I don’t murder people, Momma—’
‘You do! What is going on in that head of yours? This is not the lady I raised you to be!’ She wriggled in her perfectly p
ressed blue suit and recrossed her blue heels. ‘When are you getting married and having children? You’re going to get too old—’
‘Momma,’ I interjected, as soon as Cecilia pulled out of the drive. ‘Don’t miss the sunrise. It’s beautiful.’ Momma, don’t you want to stay in the hospital five months instead of five days? Don’t you want the doctors to sew your mouth shut for the rest of your life?
With both hands, I pressed my braids tight to my head. I could feel that blackness again, right on the periphery. I fought so hard against that blackness. It had plagued me since childhood. Sometimes it won, sometimes I won. I was definitely sliding into second place today.
‘Please, Isabelle! I know what you’re trying to do,’ Momma argued. ‘You’re trying to change the subject and it won’t work. Drive by my bakery, Cecilia, immediately. I want to see the building one more time before you girls get in it and burn the whole thing down.’ She shook her head, tsk-tsked her tongue. ‘I’ll be out of business before a week is up.’
‘You won’t be out of business, Momma,’ Cecilia said, turning towards town. She always tried to appease Momma, as she’d tried to appease Parker for years. Cecilia had simpered and catered and smothered her own personality around him to meet his endless and unreasonable needs and wants. With Parker, she had recreated the same relationship she had with Momma. In turn, he had decimated her soul.
There was no one else on the planet she did that for, as she is a tornado with feet.
‘Janie and Isabelle are going to take good care of the bakery, and when summer starts I’ll be there, too, while you recover.’
Momma humphed in the front seat. ‘Humph! And what will Henry do without me?’
‘Henry will be fine,’ we all three said.
‘And what about Grandma?’ She patted her perfectly brushed hair. Twisted her pearl necklace.
‘Grandma will be fine,’ we all three said.
‘The house will be declared a waste site when I return,’ she muttered.
‘The house will be fine,’ we said.
‘What are you, parrot triplets? Stop. You’re hurting my ears.’ She massaged her ears.
I groaned.
Janie gurgled.
Cecilia sighed.
It would be a long drive.
You might find me callous for not wringing my hands and diving into semi-hysteria about Momma’s open-heart surgery. After all, this is what they do in open-heart surgery, if I’ve got it correct: they cut your chest open with a knife as if you are a fish to be filleted. A human does this. Then, they yank open your rib cage, like it’s a closed clam, using something referred to as a ‘spreader’.
Even thinking about this bothers me. If God had wanted our rib cage opened up, I’m sure he would have inserted a zipper in the middle of it. I see no zipper.
Then they stop your heart.
Boom. Beatless.
You’re hooked up to a heart-lung machine, which does what you could imagine it should do. It beats and breathes for you, like it’s a person only it has an off-on button.
Then they (often) cut open your leg and borrow a blood vessel or two without asking the permission of your leg. They use the blood vessel to bypass a clog in your artery. The vessel that is clogged may well be clogged because in your lifetime you have eaten the equivalent of nine cows, four pigs, and a multitude of yummy stuff like wagons full of fried chicken. This cholesterol clings like plaque to your arteries.
If you don’t get your arteries hosed out or fixed, well, you’re a goner.
So, you might think I would be worried that Momma would soon be a goner.
That is not going to happen. Why?
Because I know it.
Momma will live to be one hundred. Maybe older. I can see her living to be one hundred and twenty-one to taunt me and Cecilia and Janie. By then we’ll be in our late nineties and I hope I will have lost my hearing so I can’t hear her anymore and I will have lost my sight so I can’t see her anymore and I will have lost my mind and will believe that I am someone else.
Like Amelia Earhart. Or Cleopatra. Or Joan of Arc.
I vote for Cleopatra.
On our way into Portland I saw a windsurfer. He had a red and purple sail. He was whipping right along on the waves of the river. Away from struggles. Away from people. Away from life. Free.
He was free.
I wondered if he’d take a shift for me with Momma.
CHAPTER FIVE
We got Momma checked in to her room at the hospital. She didn’t like her room. (‘It’s small. Dirty. I feel like I’m being housed on the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag.’) She didn’t like the hospital outfit. (‘I will not wear this green sacklike monstrosity. Never. Bring me my pink robe.’)
She complained of being hungry but she was not supposed to eat. (‘I’m being starved to death. Starved. You girls can’t even get your momma fed properly.’) She didn’t like the nurse. (‘The nurse is too thin. If I need help, she’ll snap like a toothpick.’)
She didn’t like her doctors. ‘Too young. One is Mexican. One is Chinese. One is short. I need a tall, white doctor.’
She told them that.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, raising my voice to a thundering decibel to block her out. ‘She’s always like this. Ignore it or go into therapy. The three of us have done both. Still, we’re all slightly insane because of her. Want to knock her out right now with a hammer to the head? Do you have a hammer?’ I made a pounding motion with my hand. ‘I’ll do it for you.’
The doctors’ eyes widened in surprise.
Janie started to hum and rock. Then she whispered, ‘I am envisioning a peaceful place. My houseboat. On the river. Ducks. Birds. Charm. Quiet. I am in control.’
‘Shhh!’ I ordered Janie. ‘Put her out,’ I ordered the doctors. ‘Not my sister. My momma. Swing the hammer, cut her open, yank the ribs apart, and fix her ticker. If you keep her here for a few extra days, I’ll pay extra. Double even. Triple. Can she stay a month?’
I crossed my arms over my chest as Momma squawked and announced I was ungrateful, poorly trained as a daughter, rebellious, and so on. ‘You’re already humiliating me, Isabelle.’ She threw up her arms in the pink robe. ‘Humiliating!’
I knew the doctors would never accept any extra money from me, but they whipped her out pretty quick, the stretcher rolled around the corner, and Cecilia, Janie, and I sagged against the wall, hip to hip.
It was nine o’clock in the morning.
‘Is it too early to get drunk?’ Janie asked.
Cecilia grabbed her purse. ‘Nope. Not to me. Get your rears in gear.’
We got our rears in gear.
We left Momma’s room, then waited in the hallway for Janie to go back in, check we hadn’t left anything, and tap all the tables in the room four times.
We heard her tapping.
She smiled as she passed through the doorway.
We were ready to go.
‘Did you smile?’
We nodded.
She made us go back through the doorway smiling.
Janie always knows when we’re lying.
The three of us found a breakfast diner about two blocks from the hospital, then decompressed in our own ways.
Janie took the sugar packets out of the container and divided them into groups of four. She shook salt out of a container onto her saucer and divided the salt into groups of four. She muttered.
When the waitress, a skinny girl with dyed black hair, sauntered over, I ordered coffee and toast and a round of beers.
Cecilia ordered two breakfasts of eggs and bacon. The waitress raised her eyebrows at Cecilia’s order.
‘I overeat so you can feel better about yourself,’ Cecilia snapped, hands crossed on the shelf of her stomach.
The waitress cracked her gum. ‘Whatever. We got fruit y’know, you can order that, less calories…and all that stuff.’
‘I don’t want all that stuff. I didn’t order it, did I? Did you see me open my mouth and
order a plate full of damn fruit?’
‘No, you didn’t. It’s a suggestion, don’t get your panties in a twist. A diet suggestion. Helpful, you know.’ She dropped her gaze to Cecilia’s stomach.
‘Sexy, isn’t it? One day, you too could have this. You could have a stomach big enough for a small calf to rest inside.’
The waitress rolled her eyes.
‘Aren’t you Beck’s daughter?’
‘Uh…yeah…you know my mom?’ Now the waitress was nervous.
‘Yes, I know your mother. Tell her I said you need better manners around fat people.’
‘I didn’t say you were fat.’ She cracked her gum twice.
‘You didn’t have to. Now bring me my double order of bacon and eggs without the attitude. Perhaps sometime today you could decide in that pointy, black head of yours not to judge people’s worth solely on the size of their gut. Think you could do that? Too much for you?’
‘No.’ She scribbled on her pad. ‘Shit,’ she said quietly.
‘Shit yourself. Hey, Beck’s daughter, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t tell you that at first I thought your nose piercing was a black bugger if you lay off with your weird sneers.’
‘Uh. Whatever.’ The waitress scampered away. ‘Yeah.’
‘I hired a private investigator,’ Cecilia said.
‘You what?’ Janie asked, her head tilting up. ‘What for?’
‘Because I want to get laid, Janie, that’s why. He’s going to find me a man who wants to have sex with a female King Kong.’
I laughed. ‘Excellent. You can make monkey noises together.’
‘I feel so nervous when I’m with both of you,’ Janie complained, fingering the sugar packets.
‘We feel nervous with you, too, shrink tank,’ Cecilia said.
‘Don’t ever say I’m a shrink tank,’ Janie huffed. ‘You mean sister.’
This was going to get warlike. Here came the peacemaker. ‘Why did you hire a private investigator?’
‘Because I need her investigated.’
‘Who?’ Janie asked.
I didn’t need to ask.
‘Her. The husband-stealing witch.’ Cecilia slammed her coffee cup down. ‘The loose slut. The whorey home-wrecker. The woman who met Parker on the Married But Unhappy website.’
