Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

  ‘You’re a practising Mormon?’ Janie asked Kayla, taking a sip of lemon tea, then putting her teacup on a doily.

  Cecilia glared at her daughter.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I thought you were Catholic,’ I said mildly. Kayla is hilarious. She antagonises Cecilia until Cecilia’s about to pop.

  ‘I go to a Catholic church, because I’m forced to against my will, but I’m a practising Mormon.’

  ‘Ah. How do you practise being a Mormon?’ I asked.

  Grandma made the sound of a plane’s engine. Then she dropped her fork and clasped her hands together. ‘Dear God, this is Amelia. I pray for my plane. Don’t let it pretzel. I pray for my gas. I hope there’s enough of it. I pray for the natives here. They seem friendly. I pray for my bottom bullet wounds. Amen.’

  Henry puffed out his chest. ‘I wear my Big Bird shirt today!’

  ‘Well, I’m reading the book of Mormon,’ Kayla said. ‘And I’m studying Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Did you know that a prophet named Moroni came to Joseph Smith and told him where to find a book written on metal plates? I want Moroni to come and sermonise me. I am waiting for him and listening intently.’

  Cecilia stabbed her ravioli again. Spinach squished out.

  ‘Now, last month you were studying Buddhism and said you were a Buddhist,’ Janie said. ‘You told us you were going to be reincarnated.’

  ‘That’s right. I studied Buddhism. I know that when I die I’ll come back to earth. Maybe as a person. A man or a woman. Maybe as a leaf. I also spent time in meditation, I accepted the Four Noble Truths, and I pursued my own path of enlightenment.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell them about your Jewish month, too, Kayla?’ Cecilia snapped. ‘Let’s make a complete circle here.’

  ‘Well, the month before that I was Jewish. I asked six rabbis for wisdom, three of them online, studied Moses and the Ten Commandments, said prayers three times a day, and baked challah bread.’

  Cecilia grunted.

  ‘I like bread,’ Henry said. ‘I squish bread. Ducks like bread. You want go to duck pond?’

  ‘Air traffic control, this is HRT02233.’ Grandma spoke into her empty glass. ‘All is well. Give me a weather update. Storms ahead?’

  I nodded. ‘Well, you’ve certainly been busy with your faiths.’

  ‘It’s important to explore and not naively swallow the religion that gets stuffed down your throat by someone who has never explored any other religion in her life.’ Kayla glared at her mother.

  ‘I don’t need to study another religion because I know what I am, Kayla: Catholic.’ More spinach squished out of that ravioli, then Cecilia attacked her roll.

  I nodded. Cecilia had never wavered on her religion. Momma took us to the Catholic church on Sundays no matter where we were unless she was semi-comatose with depression/fighting her mental monsters, and then she insisted we go without her.

  After church, if Momma had roused herself, we had to stay so she could say a rosary. She always made us wait outside. A couple of times we snuck in because she was taking so long, then skittered right back out when we saw our momma sobbing at the altar.

  ‘You don’t even go to church, do you, Aunt Isabelle?’ Kayla asked, her eyes narrowed. ‘Are you an atheist?’

  I put down my garlic bread. Here’s another genetic marker of being a Bommarito: we cannot have normal meals like normal people. Our conversations are often inflammatory.

  Food has been known to fly. One time a chair. Another time an entire stuffed turkey. Screaming occurs. Cecilia reached for me one time over the table and landed on Momma’s casserole. Janie’s flipped the table. Glasses have broken. Whipped cream has been sprayed, hot dogs have been hurled like bombs, loaves of bread have been used as weapons.

  It’s hereditary. When we first arrived at this house as teenagers, Momma and Grandma had a fight over Momma’s make-up (too much, looked trashy), and Grandma’s attitude (critical, judgmental), and Momma’s lack of visits over the years (she had deprived Grandma of her grandchildren). Momma threw a chicken leg at her mother, Grandma pelted an apple at Momma’s forehead. A handful of corn and a roll followed. Then a peach.

  I glanced at the food on the table. Gall. Ravioli. Miniature square land mines. Salad that would be so slimy.

  ‘Jesus loves Isabelle!’ Henry said. ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’m not an atheist,’ I told her.

  ‘Are you agnostic? That means you doubt that God exists.’

  ‘I’m not an agnostic.’

  ‘You believe in God?’

  ‘Yes. I believe in God.’ I didn’t think about Him much, though. One does not like to think about God, or particularly hell, when one is living the life I live. ‘Basically, I’ve tried to stay in the shadows so God can’t see me.’

  That didn’t stump smart ol’ Kayla. ‘You can’t hide from God in the shadows.’

  ‘God see you.’ Henry laughed. ‘God see you, Isabelle. He gots good eyes. You silly.’

  ‘Only if he squints his eyes and slinks around all the shadowy corners. I think I lost him a few years back when I was in the Middle East and he’s forgotten about me. They’re busy there, you know. Wars and famine and zero rights for women, who are treated like goats. He’s got a lot of work on his to-do list there.’

  ‘He can see you, too, Kayla, and he sees a kid who’s changing religions monthly,’ Cecilia interjected.

  ‘God doesn’t care about that. He knows I’m searching for peace,’ Kayla protested. ‘Besides, religion is what people use as an excuse to kill each other.’

  ‘The natives may kill us!’ Grandma declared, wielding her knife back and forth like a sword fighter. ‘Watch out!’

  ‘Not always,’ I said. ‘I used religion as a way to guzzle red wine at church.’

  Janie blew milk through her nose as she laughed. Cecilia choked and I had to hit her on the back.

  It was the holy truth, though. We used to sneak into the church and drink the wine out of paper Dixie cups on Wednesday nights. No one could understand why we laughed so hard while reciting our Hail Marys.

  ‘I don’t get it. It’s a sister thing, isn’t it?’ Riley asked. She was twisting hair around her finger. I don’t think she’d stopped twisting the whole meal.

  ‘Take your finger out of your hair. What is it? A finger corkscrew?’ Cecilia snapped.

  She took her finger out. Riley’s hair was so thin, too…it used to be thick. Was I seeing bald spots, or was she styling her hair in a weird way?

  ‘So, Kayla,’ Janie said, picking up her teacup again. ‘You’re studying to be a Mormon?’

  ‘Yeah, and I’m going to church with my friend Shelley next week. She’s a Mormon. There’s eight kids in her family. Eight, Mom. You only have two. And they all will live together in heaven and on Sundays they have family days and they don’t fight.’

  Cecilia stood up, arms spread, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me I don’t have eight kids? I thought I had at least six. There’s only two of you? Nobody tells me jack anymore.’ She patted her huge stomach. ‘Maybe there’s one in there?’ She eyeballed her stomach. ‘Yooo-hooo! Anyone in there? Hello? Another baby? Maybe two?’

  Kayla picked up a ravioli with her fork and aimed it at her mother.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Cecilia told her. ‘Don’t you dare.’

  She put the ravioli down, scowling.

  I threw one of my ravioli at Kayla.

  Cecilia tossed a ravioli at Kayla, too. It landed on her face. She said, ‘Bless you, bad mother.’

  I threw one at Janie. She jumped in surprise, and tossed one at Riley. Appropriately, it landed on her hair. Riley took it off her head and started squishing it through her fingers.

  Henry laughed. He picked up a handful of ravioli and put them on his head. ‘Look me! Look me! I have ravioli nest on my head! Ravioli nest. I need a bird!’

  Grandma stood up straight, pulled her goggles over her head, and straightened her flight jacket. ‘I am ready to take off n
ow.’ She grabbed a handful of ravioli and threw them into the air, then climbed on top of the table and sat in the middle of it. ‘There’s weather ahead! Weather ahead!’ she screamed. ‘Prepare for a crash landing! SOS! SOS!’

  We knew what to do or Grandma would get all upset. We pretended to pull on our own flight goggles, dropped napkins on our heads, and held on to our seats while we rocked back and forth.

  ‘Hang on! We’re going down! We’re going down!’ She shouted into her glass, ‘SOS! SOS!’

  We all threw some more ravioli squares, then we crashed.

  Grandma stopped abruptly, sighed heavily. ‘We’re lost.’

  Grandma was so, so right.

  We were lost. I tossed a slice of garlic bread at Cecilia.

  She caught it in mid-air and rolled her eyes.

  Velvet helped get Grandma to bed after dinner while we girls did the dishes.

  Velvet Eddow was the skinniest person I’d ever seen and reminded me of Mrs Ichabod Crane without the horse. She was six feet tall with white curling hair she piled on top of her head and strong bones in her face. She was not younger than seventy-five and had a thick, gentle, rolling southern drawl she’d acquired after living for fifty years in Alabama. Those words left her mouth like honey, with the honey winding its way around each syllable, smooth and gold and yummy.

  Sometimes she used ol’ southern sayings and sometimes I knew she was making them up on the fly.

  I’d watched her with Henry and Amelia Earhart. She was brilliant and, most important, kind. It did not take us more than a day to beg her to move into the spare bedroom in the house until further notice.

  She gave us a hug and said, ‘Well ain’t that the berries! Sure, sugar, I’ll come help y’all. This takes the cake!’

  In college the woman with the honey drawl studied engineering when it was an all-male domain. ‘The men didn’t even know what to do with me. I wasn’t their mother or their sister or their girlfriend. But I was smarter than them. They didn’t get that part. It baffled the heck out of all of ’em.

  ‘Men are easily baffled, though, darlin’, don’t ever forget that. Their brains think like porn. That’s the only way I can describe it, darlin’, like porn.’ She dragged that word out real long. ‘One part of their brain thinks, the other part is holding a breast in his hand, at all times. I’m givin’ that to you as free advice, darlin’.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, thank you.’

  ‘Men are for amusement only. They are treats. Like candy. Like ice cream on an Alabama afternoon. A dessert. They are not the main course. As soon as you have a man in your life who becomes the main course, that is the time, my sweet, when you should go on a diet. Right that second. Men are for dessert only.’ Envision: honey.

  ‘Yum, yum,’ I told her.

  ‘They are yummy.’ She winked at me. ‘But never take them seriously. A bite here and there is puh-lenty. All three of my husbands died, bless their pea-brained souls, but I never thought of them as the chicken and potatoes. They were always the flamin’ cherries jubilee at the end of dinner.’ She stared off into space. ‘And there was many a time, darlin’, that I wanted to set them on fire.’

  OK dokay.

  As long as she didn’t set any men on fire in the house with her cherries jubilee, we’d be good.

  Later that night, about one o’clock, I headed for the middle of the grass near a huge weeping willow tree in the yard. The moon was almost smack over my head and the stars were bright white holes in the deep soft black.

  I closed my eyes against my life. I thought about my loft in Portland, the view of the river, my cameras I could hide behind, and my darkroom I could work in for hours. Dark on dark.

  I wanted the aloneness of my life, even though it came with the familiar thick blackness, the blackness I struggled to contain and felt lost in. I didn’t want this mess here.

  All the emotion.

  The fighting and the stress. The total lack of control. The incessant responsibility, the small town, the Momma element.

  I wanted my loft.

  The wind meandered over my face.

  What the hell was I doing here in Trillium River, I asked myself. What the hell?

  One sole star twinkled at me. I rubbed my hands over my face, then breathed in a touch of wind.

  I knew why I was here.

  I knew.

  About a year after Dad and his jungle nightmares took off, Momma told us she was a dancer. We thought that was pretty cool. She had been working as a waitress during the day but she kept getting fired because of Henry.

  Henry cried when he had a sitter and if he wasn’t crying he was ill with one of his many health problems – asthma, chronic colds, sleeping problems that produced colds, continual stomach aches, pneumonia, and ear infections – and she had to be home to take care of him.

  So Momma would soon be fired for taking too much time off, we’d rapidly be broke, she’d get that empty no one’s-home blankness in her eyes, then go to bed for a few days or a few weeks, and the hard-core struggling would begin.

  When Momma told us she had a job as a dancer the first time, we were living in Massachusetts. We envisioned her with one of those Las Vegas showgirl type costumes doing the cancan. Why we thought that, I don’t know.

  All I knew was that Momma started working nights and left us notes on pink paper on what to do and not do when she was gone. Janie, Cecilia, and I watched Henry when she left about two hours after we got home from school. What we liked about that job is that Momma always brought food home after her shift so we’d have it the next night for dinner.

  Plus, we finally had cash in the cookie jar so we could buy milk and eggs. There is nothing like the taste of cows’ milk when you’re a kid and you’ve been drinking powdered milk or water for weeks. Our water and electricity were no longer turned off and our phone worked on a consistent basis.

  We threw out our old shoes, held together with duct tape, and Momma bought us new tennis shoes. Mine were pink, I remember that.

  We still got free lunch at school, but Momma told us we could go down the street to get ice cream on Friday. We were stunned, beyond delighted.

  It wasn’t too long before we got the truth.

  A girl at school told us her older brother and his friends had seen our momma, ‘buck naked.’

  ‘My brother said your mom is sexy. Sexy sexy. He says she’s got small boobs but they stand upright. They go on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursdays now to see her with all their friends. What do you think of your mom being a stripper?’

  I hit that girl so hard she had to go home because her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. She shut up about our momma, but I got suspended for five days. We knew she was lying.

  When girls in pigtails and Mary Janes came up to me and Cecilia and told us our momma was a whore, we whupped all of them. Five against two. They shut up about our momma.

  When an older boy, his teeth buck and sticking out, told us his daddy thought our momma had an ‘ass tight enough to hold nuts,’ Cecilia and I took care of his tooth problem and he shut up about our momma.

  That took care of the overt teasing at our school, but nothing could take care of the laughter and snickers and pointed fingers behind our backs.

  But Momma wasn’t a stripper. We knew that. She was a dancer – feathers, sequins, and all. We knew it so well we waited around the corner from the strip club in town that we knew she didn’t work at because she wasn’t a stripper.

  We waited and waited and we cringed with disbelief when we heard the wheeze and thunking of our ancient car and Momma drove up and parked around in the back and went in a side entrance wearing an old sweatshirt of my dad’s that said UNITED STATES ARMY, her hair in a ponytail.

  Cecilia and Janie and I leant back against the wall in shock. Too shocked to cry. Too devastated to move. Too humiliated to breathe. Within fifteen minutes, that parking lot was packed, with loud, boisterous men getting out of cars.

  We trudged home, heads down, avoiding t
he streets of town, avoiding each other’s eyes, trying to avoid the truth but knowing the truth was beaming and bold and undeniable: our momma was a stripper.

  We waited up for Momma that night, one light on in our shabby, brownish family room, us three lined up on the sofa, our feet on our stained carpet.

  ‘Momma, are you a stripper?’ Janie asked, soft as a mouse, a frightened mouse.

  Momma froze in the doorway. She had bruisy circles under her eyes and was pale with exhaustion. One of the take-home boxes of food she held in her hands dropped to the floor. Chicken wings fell out. I still remember that. Still remember those chicken wings. To this day, none of us eats chicken wings.

  ‘How dare you,’ she said, her voice so quiet we could barely hear it.

  Janie cringed, Cecilia wrapped her arms around herself, and I put my chin up.

  ‘How dare we?’ I asked as I stood. I was furious. So embarrassed I could have died. Momma took her clothes off for the men in this town. On stage.

  ‘Yes, how dare you,’ Momma said, starting to shake.

  ‘You’re the one taking off her clothes!’ I shouted.

  She sent the other box of food flying across the room. Noodles with tomato sauce spilt out. I was steaming about that, too. That pasta was dinner! I was hungry!

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Everyone, Momma! We’ve been beating kids up for weeks! We thought they were lying!’

  She swayed.

  ‘How could you do that?’ I was so frustrated, so destroyed, I felt like the devil had set my stomach on fire.

  I heard Henry start to whimper in his bedroom. Momma’s eyes darted in that direction.

  ‘You didn’t tell Henry, did you?’

  ‘No, Momma, we didn’t think he needed to know about your pole twirling!’

  Her face flushed. ‘Do you think I like what I do, you spoilt brats?’

  There was silence. We were young. We didn’t get it, didn’t understand.

  ‘Do you?’ she shrieked, her blonde ponytail swinging behind her. ‘Do you?’ She threw her purse across the room. It broke a glass vase we’d found at a garage sale.