I change the television channel with my foot, watching him out of the corner of my eye. Nothing. She points at the potholder herself, tapping it with her finger, shaking her head so the glitter on the red hat will flicker in the light. “Potholder. I’m pointing at a potholder.”
He looks up at the red glitter hat, his mouth open, drool sliding down his chin. The cats crouch behind my mother, their eyes large and dilated, focused on the potholder.
But she doesn’t stop. She takes pictures of various objects in the house and tapes them to the back of a cereal box, their names printed in large letters underneath: TELEVISION, BED, RADIO, BATHROOM, DRINK, FOOD. Twice a day, she sits down next to his beanbag, the radio in one hand, the cereal box in the other.
“This is the radio, Samuel. Do you hear the music?” She places his hand on the radio, letting him feel the vibrations, and then turns it off. “This is a picture of the radio. If you want the radio, you have to point to the picture. See?” She points at the radio. “I’m pointing at the radio. That means I’d like to have it on.” She turns on the radio. “Now you try, honey. Okay? Now you.”
Samuel stares at the floor, unmoved, his finger in his mouth.
When we go back to school in the fall, there are large yellow posters in the hallway that say HEY SOPHOMORES! LET TRACI C. BE YOUR VOICE IN STUDENT COUNCIL! next to an enormous picture of Traci in a Guess? sweatshirt, smiling so you can see her braces. Libby Masterson is running for vice president, and doesn’t get a picture.
When Travis sees these posters, he is able to keep a straight face and point out that it makes sense Satan should seek offices of power at an early age. When no one is looking, he draws a red tail coming over Traci’s shoulders, arching her eyebrows so she looks as evil as we know she truly is.
“Don’t,” Deena says, trying to take his pen. “That’s immature.”
I get out another pen, give Traci a set of fangs.
New posters go up the next day. At lunch, Traci and Libby hand out Xeroxed copies of her campaign promises:
* * *
VOTE FOR TRACI C!
SHE WILL WORK FOR:
Sophomores getting to vote for the theme of Homecoming and Prom!
Making miniskirts (for girls) and shorts (for guys) okay when the weather is warm!!
Allowing fast-food chains to open booths in the cafeteria, with a portion of their profits going back to Student Council Events and Planning!!!!
* * *
“Here you go, Evelyn!” Traci says, smiling at me with her metal teeth. I take the paper and throw it away while she is still watching. Travis does the same thing. Deena won’t do it though. She takes one of the flyers from Traci and says thank you, reading it over slowly.
“Kiss ass,” Travis says, kicking her lightly on the back of her knee.
Deena shrugs, opening her Thermos. “She’s never been mean to me.”
“That’s because you haven’t been here long enough,” I say. Travis and I give each other knowing glances. We, on the other hand, have.
There are a lot of things like this now, things that Travis and I understand that Deena does not. Like French. And imaginary numbers. Deena failed algebra and has Mr. Goldman again, but Travis passed the final exam, so now he’s in geometry with me. Mr. Goldman and Travis are friends now, and when they see each other in the hallway, Travis gives him the peace sign and says, “Right on, dude,” like everything that happened between them the day he hit his head on the doorknob is now just a joke for them to laugh at together.
Travis goes to all his classes this year, not just math, which means no more Dairy Queen or anything else for Deena in the middle of the afternoon. She isn’t happy about this. She says it’s hard to get through a full day of school, now that she’s gotten so used to taking breaks. But it isn’t like she can go anywhere without him; there is nowhere to go and no way to get there, so sometimes she doesn’t come to school at all.
Her father sent her a television for her room for Christmas, and when I go over to her apartment after school to give her her homework, she is usually sitting up in bed watching MTV, sometimes eating ice cream. She makes me a bowl and we watch videos together for a while. I like watching videos, and I wish we had cable so we could have MTV too, but after watching them for an hour, I get sick of them. But Deena can just sit there all day, no problem, going back and forth between MTV and soap operas with her remote control.
When she does come to school, she doesn’t pay attention. She acts like she’s listening to the teachers when they talk, taking notes, but really she is drawing flowers in vases or using her calligraphy pen to write things like “Mrs. Fredina Rowley, Mr. and Mrs. Travis Rowley, Deena Sobrepena Schultz Rowley, Mrs. Deena Schultz Rowley.” When the teachers ask her questions, she looks up, startled, as if she isn’t sure where she is, and says she doesn’t know.
I wake up late on a Saturday and come out to the front room to see Samuel in his beanbag, his eyes open, my mother kneeling at his feet. Various objects surround them on the floor: the radio, plastic measuring cups, a box of plastic wrap, my mother’s winter coat. She stands up when she sees me, the glitter hat crooked on her head. “Evelyn,” she says, her hand on my arm. “Look what he’s doing.”
I look at Samuel. He is sitting in his beanbag, eyes glassy, mouth open and drooling.
“That’s really neat, Mom.”
She slaps me on the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Just wait. Wait.”
We both stand there for maybe half a minute, watching Samuel sit. But then, slowly, his arm begins moving upward, his hand dangling in such a way that his E.T. finger appears to be pointing at the kitchen.
“See?” she says, moving toward him. “See?” She follows the line from his finger to the telephone on the kitchen wall. She picks it up and walks toward him, stretching the cord behind her. “Telephone. This is the telephone.” She looks up at me, the glitter hat still crooked on her head. “He knows.”
I look back at Samuel. His eyes are staring over our heads, at nothing. I’m not sure about this, and I don’t know what to say. But again his hand moves, his finger this time pointing in the direction of the brown love seat in the corner of the room. My mother nods quickly at him and gets behind it. “Give me a hand with this,” she says.
I hesitate, putting the phone back in its cradle. “This is kind of making a mess.”
She snaps her fingers, the way a rude person would call a waiter at a restaurant. “Just do it, okay?”
I get on the other side of the love seat, and we push it toward him, the wheels snagging on the carpet, two cats still asleep on the cushions, going along for the ride. When we get it within arm’s reach of Samuel, my mother gets back down on her knees. “This is a couch, Samuel. You pointed at a couch.” She presses his fingers against the upholstery. “Couch.”
His eyes remain blank, still as a doll’s. But then his hand rises again, his finger pointing maybe at the television set, or maybe just pointing.
“I can’t believe it,” my mother says. Her eyes are wide, her hands pushed up under the glitter hat. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
I stay silent, watching his doll eyes. My mother is never this happy anymore, and I don’t want to ruin it for her. She thinks she’s found a key, a way in, and proof that something is going on behind the blank blue sky of Samuel’s eyes. I don’t want to steal this from her. But I think she’s tricking herself, seeing something because she wants to see it, not because it’s there.
But Verranna Hinckle is impressed with the pointing, even more excited about it than my mother. She comes over and takes pictures with a Polaroid camera, watching Samuel’s arm move this way and that, writing down notes on her clipboard. This pointing is a very good sign, she says, an important step. She likes what my mother is doing with the radio.
“You just don’t know,” she says, pushing up the sleeves of her turtleneck. “There was a girl in Pennsylvania who never talked and never looked back. Severe autism. But then, final
ly, somebody thought to give her a pen, and the first thing she wrote was a sonnet.” She nods at my mother proudly, as if she herself had something to do with this miracle. “It rhymed and everything. Fourteen lines.”
I am standing in the doorway eating an apple, watching Verranna Hinckle carefully. I am suspicious of her now, with her little snub nose and her clipboard and her notes for her dissertation. I don’t like her getting my mother’s hopes up. I take a pen and slide it into Samuel’s hand.
Nothing. He doesn’t even look at it. He bangs his fist though, and we have to take the pen away from him so he won’t stab himself. I look at Verranna Hinckle, and she looks back at me. She wears glasses too.
“Well, it’s not always that drastic, of course,” she says. “Sometimes it’s just a blinking of the eyes, but at least then you’re communicating. At least then you know he’s in there.” She keeps talking, looking only at my mother. “Right now we should concentrate on the basics, meaning self-care. I want you to keep his hand under yours when you feed him. Let him get the feel of it. We won’t know what he can do unless we give him a chance.” She squints down at Samuel, tapping her fingers on the counter. She tells my mother there are people just as disabled as Samuel who have learned to feed themselves, to use sign language, to use the telephone in an emergency. My mother nods, holding Samuel’s twisted hand. She is believing this. She believes that Samuel might be able to use the telephone.
If I weren’t so mad I would laugh. As if, when someone answered, there would be something for him to say.
I think Travis actually wants to be Mr. Goldman now. I am only waiting for him to show up on the bus one day with his hair long in the front but short in the back, wearing an ironed shirt and a tie, a U.S. News & World Report tucked under one of his arms. All of a sudden, Travis wants to travel. He says Mr. Goldman has been to Italy and Japan. He’s gone looking for kangaroos in Australia.
“You’re not going to believe this story,” Travis says, leaning over the back of his seat on the bus. “This is great.”
The story is that when Mr. Goldman was just out of college, he and two of his friends went to Australia together, and they drove into the outback to try to find kangaroos. They spent a whole day, looking and looking, but the only kangaroo they saw was the one they hit with the jeep they were driving home. Thunk, and that was it. They felt bad, but then finally decided they should at least take a picture of the dead kangaroo, since that’s what they had come out there to see.
“Gross,” I say.
“Just wait,” Travis says, pinching my shoulder. “Listen.”
Mr. Goldman and his friends thought it might make a funny picture if they picked the kangaroo up and held it in between them with his sunglasses on its face, so it would look like the kangaroo was having a good time instead of being dead. They ended up putting his sunglasses and his friend’s jacket on the kangaroo. But when the flash of the camera went off, the kangaroo came alive and punched Mr. Goldman right in the eye. It took off jumping, and all three of them ran after it, but they couldn’t catch it. They’d left the keys to the jeep in the pocket of the jacket they put on the kangaroo, so they had to walk forever, and when they finally got to a police station, the Australian police just sat around and laughed.
“No way,” I say, trying to imagine this, Mr. Goldman, his tie flipped over his shoulder, running after a kangaroo wearing sunglasses and a jacket. “He made that up.”
“He showed me the picture! You can see the kangaroo, right before it woke up!” We’re both laughing now. If there’s a picture, then maybe it really happened. It’s a great story, if it’s true.
“You know what Deena said when I told her that story?” Travis asks. “She said, ‘What country is Australia in?’”
We laugh harder, Travis slapping his forehead with his fingers. But even while I am laughing, I think of Deena, what her face would look like if she could hear us, if she were on the bus instead of sick at home watching MTV, her large brown eyes widening with hurt.
But I deserve to be able to laugh a little, after all she has gotten, and all I have not.
Verranna Hinckle wants my mother to get Samuel a wheelchair as soon as possible, preferably a lightweight one. She says one of his legs is very strong, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to pull himself around.
My mother has found a wheelchair just like this in a catalog. She tore out the page and stuck it to the freezer with a magnet shaped like a banana. It’s been up there for a month, just a picture, too expensive to buy. Eileen says if my mother really wants the wheelchair, all she has to do is write a letter to any church and tell them she needs a wheelchair for Samuel, and they’ll come through for her, lickety-split. That’s what churches do.
But my mother says no way. She’s not about to write out some sob story and make us sound pathetic.
“We are pathetic,” I remind her. It’s just a joke, but the look on her face makes me wish I hadn’t said anything.
The next week, Eileen brings the same wheelchair from the catalog over to our house, a red bow tied to one of the wheels, a card taped to the seat:
To Tina, Evelyn, and little Sam,
You are in our hearts.
Love,
The First Christian Church, Wichita, Kansas
My mother eyes the wheelchair with suspicion, reaching forward to touch its shiny aluminum wheels. “No strings?” she asks.
“No strings, honey,” Eileen says. “They’re just being nice.”
My mother smiles, trying to hide it. She gives Eileen a peck on the cheek.
After a few days of tantrums and tipovers, Samuel learns to get around in the wheelchair. He uses his good leg to scoot himself forward and then plants his heel in the carpet to pull the rest of his body along, like a slow-moving hermit crab dragging its shell. He likes to sit by windows, we notice. We didn’t know that, before he had the chair.
The new wheelchair makes life both easier and more difficult for my mother. She does not have to carry him everywhere now, which is good. But he can move around quickly, get himself into trouble. He pushes himself into walls, and, not understanding how to back up, just keeps pushing, screaming to himself, his face pressed against the plaster. He inches into the kitchen when my mother is cooking, reaching up behind her at the handles of pots on the stove.
So she has tied a little bell to the side of his wheelchair, to better track his comings and goings. It works well, but it also encourages the cats to stalk him. They crouch like lions under the sofa, waiting for him to wheel by, their eyes wide, their tails twitching.
“Bad kitties!” my mother yells, swinging a dish towel at them. “Leave him alone!” They hiss and scatter, looking for new hiding places so they can do it again.
Verranna Hinckle says that my mother is doing an excellent job, and that Samuel is making, relatively speaking, substantial improvements. She tells my mother to keep her hand over Samuel’s whenever she is doing something for him—feeding him, brushing his teeth, washing his hair, pulling on his diaper, changing his clothes—so he participates in his self-care. Agency, Verranna Hinckle calls it. Give him agency. Verranna Hinckle has a lot of words like this.
“And by all means,” she adds, “keep up the talking. He understands more than you think.”
I say nothing. Verranna Hinckle is pretending to know something that she does not. For four years now, I have listened to my mother talk to Sam, telling him every day how much she loves him, what a good boy he is, that this is the way you brush your teeth, this is how you lift a spoon. Still, we get nothing. He cries when he wants something, and he stops when he gets it. That’s it.
But I suppose if my mother wants to think that he understands her words, fine. She isn’t hurting anyone, and I think that, maybe, she is the one who needs to hear them.
Three days before the student council election, Mr. Leubbe puts us in pairs so we can do sit-ups for the Presidential Fitness Exam. “You and you,” he says, pointing at Traci and then at me.
We hesitate for a moment, and he slaps us on our backs—me with his left hand, Traci with his right—so hard we almost bump into each other, and tells us to get a move on.
“I’ll go first,” I say. I am the one in charge.
“That’s fine,” Traci says, her voice too friendly, too nice. She places her hands lightly on my feet and starts counting off my sit-ups in fives. Each time I come up, she smiles. I look only at her metal teeth, not at her eyes.
Travis will have a good time with this story when I tell him. He will say I had Satan binding my feet, and will examine my ankles for welts and bruises. But she’s really bothering me, still smiling at me, not looking away. I do the sit-ups more quickly, pretending that I care very much about the Presidential Fitness Exam.
She clears her throat, forces a laugh. “Remember we got in that stupid fight in fourth grade?”
I pause mid–sit-up and look right into her blue-gray eyes, her contact lenses swimming in front of them. “Yeah, Traci. I remember.”
She looks a little shaken. I am proud of this, the lowness of my voice, my ability to make her nervous. But she keeps talking, her thin lips pushed into a smile. “It was so stupid. I can’t even remember what it was about.”
I do another sit-up, and when I come up again, I stop and look at her carefully, wondering if she really believes what she is saying, if she could really be that dumb. “You made fun of my mother, the day I won the science fair.” I go back down to the mat, starting to count where she left off. “I won, and you were mad about it. You said they let me win because they felt sorry for me for being poor and not having a father.”
She looks down, at her hands on my shoes. She wears a small silver ring on one of her fingers, some kind of red jewel embedded in it. Nothing has changed. I think of her stolen clothes, still folded neatly in my bottom drawer. I’m glad they’re there.
The Center of Everything Page 26
