In four days my mother will abandon me, but tonight my parents are childlike and laughing. He lights a joint and they go inside to watch TV. Harrison puts his head on Yula’s pregnant lap and roars when a commercial tries to sell them something about sex or pimples. He likes to flop around when he laughs. He likes to roll off the couch. He rolls and crashes into the coffee table and roars so hard he weeps, throws his head to high heaven, and paws the air as if he is drowning.
V.
i am a noisy and demanding six-year-old. At dinner, I babble in every direction. Even the salt shaker sets me off. I ask where salt comes from. Then, who built the ocean and do French children think in English and who invented Cheerios. I will not eat peas unless there’s sugar on top, and I get angry if Miranda’s outfits aren’t color coordinated. She tells me I’m overly sensitive. She says I need to learn the art of conversation.
“Conversation,” she says, “is when we all talk about the same thing. Pick a topic, Shannon.” A new rule is invented: I have to leave the table if I ask too many questions. Miranda says that if she wanted to be interviewed, it would be by Mike Wallace, not me. I discover that if I pinch the skin on the back of my knee I can stop myself from blurting out. Kicking my ankles together works, too, but then I’m sent to bed without supper so I don’t do it again. My nails dig in; I scab and bleed.
While Lydia-Rose does the dishes, I take Winkie for walks in the evening and try to talk it all out with her. Lydia-Rose made her a little raincoat out of an old anorak, and Winkie and I walk with our heads down in the rain. I tell Winkie everything: how hard I have to pinch myself to keep from blurting out; how I hate all the kids at school; how I think I’d be happier if I could live in outer space. I tell her that I stole the Polaroid of Lydia-Rose’s father out of our sock drawer and ground it into a puddle with my gum boot. I tell her that I hate myself for having done this. I tell her that the town house doesn’t feel like home.
We have to walk slowly because of Winkie’s back legs. When they’re really bad, I hold a towel under her belly and walk with my legs on either side of her while she ambles along. The vet says it’s arthritis from badly broken bones. Who knows what happened to her before Miranda found her. Car accident? It makes my stomach hurt to think about it. We only walk on our side of the street, because I refuse to cross the road. It’s too frightening. The cars come out of nowhere; they peel around the corner so fast they go up on two wheels. I can’t gauge how fast they’re moving or how long I have to get across the street. I don’t understand how anyone can find the courage to do this sort of thing. Lydia-Rose darts into traffic as if she’s parting the Red Sea.
Once a month, Miranda and Lydia-Rose have a special mother-daughter lunch at the Dutch Bakery. They split a turkey sandwich and a vanilla slice. Lydia-Rose sometimes gets a marzipan strawberry to eat on the bus ride home. Miranda puts her hand on my head and tells me that I am her daughter, too, but that she needs to have “alone time” with Lydia-Rose every once in a while. Sometimes she sends me over to the neighbors’ house and then I think she and Lydia-Rose watch a movie and make popcorn, Winkie at their feet. At Christmas we each get the same thing, but then I’ll find something in our bedroom, later, slid under Lydia-Rose’s pillow or tucked into her backpack. A little something extra. A little something to show her that she is number one. At night I am so lonely that my heart aches. I lie in bed, Lydia-Rose already asleep, and listen to her breathing. Miranda spends a few minutes with us every night, but then she’s gone, into her private room upstairs, and I’m left alone in my bed.
Lydia-Rose wakes and torments me. When you were a baby, your mom left you in a closet to die. Your mother was a hooker. We found you in a shoe box outside our door. We found you in a dumpster.
I lie in my bed until my nose starts to tingle as if it’s carbonated, and then I feel the hot sting of tears. No one knows how hard I can make myself cry. I can cry until I’m almost choking. I can cry until I’m gasping for breath. When no one is home, I cry so hard and loud that I am screaming. I tuck myself into a corner of the room and feel the swell of pain in my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut to drain them of their tears, wait for them to refill, do it again. Over and over. Do other people do this? Lydia-Rose cries in the bathroom, talking to herself. She says I hate my mom. I hate my mom. No. I don’t hate her. But. But. But. And then she whispers so softly and quickly that I can’t keep up. I don’t think she cries like me.
The night before we start grade one, Miranda tries to tell us things about herself while we eat corn on the cob. She wipes the butter from her chin and laughs. It’s a warm evening in early September. We have our backpacks, notebooks, pens, pencils, and first-day outfits spread out all over our beds. We have new white runners for P.E.
“In the summers, my sisters and I would spend the evenings on the front porch, shucking corn,” Miranda says. She is at the head of the table with her back to the open window. Outside, we can see Grant Street. “We hated it.” She looks at Lydia-Rose, but her daughter is pushing bits of her cut-up hot dog around on her plate. Lydia-Rose has even more trouble sitting still than I do.
Miranda spreads some more butter on her corn. “We lived in the Interior at the time. It was hot in the summers, not like it is here. We had to be outside; it was too punishing to be indoors. And so many bugs—had to have screens on all the windows.” She presses on, keeps talking about the wind and the hot sun and her father calling them in to boil the corn, the awful steam heating up the already hot kitchen. She looks at Lydia-Rose, but her daughter hasn’t heard a word. She’s wiggling in her seat, desperate for her mother to excuse us and let us play, but I could sit here all night listening to Miranda. I could sit here forever, trying to postpone tomorrow morning. Except there’s something else, too—I don’t like that I can see how hard Miranda is trying. I don’t like that I can tell she’s lonely. I don’t like that I can see her trying to reach her daughter from across the table. Why should I notice these things when Lydia-Rose doesn’t? I try to be more like her, and I stop looking at Miranda’s face. Instead, I bang my heel against the chair. And, finally, Miranda says we’re excused.
That night I dreamt that I was still living with Moira and Julian, except in some weird wood-paneled motel room, and there was a big spider on the wall, and I asked Julian to kill it, which he was always very good at doing, and just as he was about to hit it with his shoe, its whole body glowed fluorescent green, and I said, Did you see that, Dada? but he had not. At 6:40 a.m. I woke from the dream, looked up at the ceiling, and there was a huge spider over my head.
And I thought there should be a word for this sort of thing—when your last dream mimics your first waking moment. Shouldn’t there be a beautiful word for that?
The first day of school, Lydia-Rose and I stand side by side, our arms folded across our chests, daring the bigger kids to hit us. We are seasoned fighters from our days at Blue Jay. Lydia-Rose has laced a set of keys between her delicate fingers, but I’m ready to go without armor or adornment. I have toughened my hands. For the past year, I’ve been punching the wall in the laundry room as hard as I can every time I walk by it. I can’t say why I do this, but my hands are callused and numb.
And I’m ready. I’ve got on my new pink backpack, pink shorts, and a red V-neck T-shirt. Red flip-flops. Toenails done French-manicure style with Wite-Out. I’m the shortest person in grade one and probably the weirdest looking person, too. My mom or dad must have had really curly hair because I’ve got white-blond curls so tight they could hold a pop can. My bum eye is off to the side, sleeping in the corner by my temple, and people don’t know where to look when they’re talking to me. They stand there, bounce back and forth between my eyes, and try to figure out which is the good one. And I don’t know who I inherited it from but I’ve got a turned-up nose like a little pig. My best feature is my mouth: a perfect puffy pout. I’m not hideous, but I’m definitely a cross between Shirley Temple and a pug.
Lydia-Rose jogs in place and calls the kids wh
o have surrounded us on the playground a bunch of shit-ass losers. She is the skinniest girl I’ve ever seen, too tall for her age, and knobby kneed. Her hair is pulled into a tight bun at the top of her head and her eyes are full of rage. She is goofy-looking now, but I often hear Miranda and her friends tell her that one day she will be a “classic beauty.”
“Come on, you fucking fucks.” Lydia-Rose has got on white high-tops and pink spandex, a too-big T-shirt with Sonic Youth spray-painted on the front that we found in a cardboard box at the side of the road. She pumps her fist; the other one with the keys is hidden behind her back. The kids look at us like we’re aliens, like we’re straight-up weirdo freaks.
I wait for the insults. The jokes about being adopted. Shorty shorty dogface. Crazy eyes. Cyclops. Lydia-Rose waits, too. Baked potato skin; brownie. The girls turn away from us, disgusted. The boys stay a little longer, and one throws a handful of woodchips into Lydia-Rose’s face. She flinches, throws a punch at the boy, who ducks and darts away. Her nose starts to bleed all over her Sonic Youth shirt and through her hands. She drops the keys and tilts her head back, and I stand on my tiptoes and pinch the bridge of her nose. We stay this way for ten minutes, past the recess bell, while Lydia-Rose chokes on the blood running down her throat and then spits up a big clot. It looks like a chicken liver and we stare at it among the woodchips at our feet. It is disgusting and makes her cry, and we sit there for what feels like hours, the woodchips digging into our legs while she occasionally dabs at her nose with the edge of her T-shirt to make sure it has stopped bleeding.
“Do you miss your mom?” She says it quickly, and at first I think I haven’t heard her right.
“Miranda?” I pick up a stick and start digging in between the woodchips, trying to make a hole in the dirt underneath.
“Your mom, stupid.” She laces the keys back through her fingers and rakes them through the woodchips. I look toward the school. I am willing a teacher to notice that we’re missing and come walking out of the big double doors, calling our names. I am willing for anything to happen besides this conversation.
“I don’t know.” It’s an honest answer. I’ve never thought about it before. I don’t even know who she is.
“Mom says you were in a bad situation.” She looks at me, and I see that her questioning is earnest. She isn’t trying to be mean. She dabs at her nose, then spits on her fingertip and rubs the saliva around her nostril. She wipes the goo on her pink spandex tights.
“I lived with some other people before I lived with you.” It’s all I can think of to say. My face is hot, and I want to go inside and wash Lydia-Rose’s sticky blood off my hands. But my heart is pounding, and I’m too scared to move.
“Mom says she loves me in a different way than she loves you.” Lydia-Rose stands up carefully, her head still tilted, her hands poised in front of her nose in case the blood starts again.
At three o’clock, the horrible day is finally over. I tap my toe against the concrete steps and bang my backpack against the school’s brick side. I am waiting for Lydia-Rose to emerge so that we can walk home.
“Freak,” a voice says behind me.
I freeze.
A fat girl wearing a ball cap and three others walk down the steps and form a circle in front of me.
“We heard about you.”
I drop my bag and clench my fists.
The girls move closer and the fat girl pokes me in the stomach. “Your mother was a whore.” They kick my backpack and I swing at them, knock the cap off the fat girl’s head.
“Get away from me,” I spit. I see Lydia-Rose at the top of the stairs, and I push past the girls, then grab my bag and use it like a battering ram against the fat girl’s chest. “Get out of my way.”
Lydia-Rose grabs my hand and we run down the street together, and even though I know she was the one who told the fat girl that my mother was a whore, I’m grateful to be holding her hand. We run away from the girls, the fat one on the ground, crying now.
When we get back to the town house, I stand in the living room, hands on hips. “I’m not going back.”
“Everyone says that the first day of school,” Miranda says. She looks Lydia-Rose and me up and down. Lydia-Rose’s shirt is blood splattered and my shorts are covered in grass stains. “Let’s get you girls some better outfits.”
She hauls out one of her big bags of consignment clothing and puts her hands on either side of my face. “You’ll feel better with something new.”
She rifles through the bag, then throws four shirts over her shoulder. She pulls out a little denim jacket with shiny brass buttons. She shifts from foot to foot, holds the jacket up in the window’s light. “This one’s fit to see the Queen,” she says. “All those buttons. And you’ll try this skirt on, too.” She hands me the heap of clothing, and my arms sink from the weight.
The bathroom is bright and cold, the window left open all day, and I try to slip the skirt over my shorts, but it won’t stretch. It’s a little plaid thing, and I can tell it’s nicer than what I usually wear and fashionable, but I hate it. I tug at the zipper and try to force it up farther, but the fabric hugs my hips and won’t budge. I kneel and rest my forehead against the cool of the full-length mirror, wrap my hands around my shoulders, and rock back on my heels.
“Miranda,” I say and the word sprays like spit. “Miranda.”
“Doesn’t fit?”
“No.”
“Let me see.” She comes into the bathroom and looks down at me and the ball of wadded-up clothing on the floor.
“Stuck,” I say, fingering the silk liner under the skirt. I roll my head toward Miranda and blink, droopy-eyed, heavy.
“The littlest things defeat you,” she says. “Come on, honey, stand up.” Miranda pinches the fabric of the skirt and shakes the zipper and the skirt falls around my ankles. I wrap my arms around her and let myself cry.
“You’ll be all right,” she says. She takes me by my shoulders and presses her face close to mine. “You’ll be all right, little one.”
“Who is my mother?” I try to ask her, but no sound is coming out of my mouth.
That night I cannot sleep. The mattress is cold on my back, and I stare into the black ceiling, my legs dangling off the edge of the bed, and wait for my eyes to adjust. Here, there is always something to listen to at night. Slow cars outside my window, the rise and fall of a passing siren, the click of heels on pavement, a lonely dog. Miranda has taken to playing the radio at night; she leaves it on in the kitchen. A low, constant hum. She says it will confuse someone if they try to break in—they’ll think someone is awake and talking.
Outside, a car’s engine growls, and I snap my head up, wondering what’s going on.
“Hi, Shannon,” I imagine my real mother saying, one arm outstretched. “Don’t tell.”
I reach for my jacket off the doorknob and push my arms into the sleeves, blow hot breath on the collar, and rub my chin back and forth against the soft fabric. I open the front door of the town house, but my mother’s not there; there is no one outside.
For my tenth birthday, Miranda gives me a piggy bank in the shape of a cross-legged cow and a French knitting kit. She is a lover of garage sales, of sifting through junk. Lydia-Rose and I now have a whole section of our closet devoted to strange toys from the fifties, Hummel figurines, and Christmas ornaments. I put the cow in the closet and stare at the knitting kit, turn it over in my hands. Miranda has told me my whole life that I need a hobby. She tried to get me to take up kickboxing because lately I’m angry for no reason, storming around the house in a purposeless rage. She caught me punching the wall in the laundry room, something I’ve been doing for years now, and sat me down at the kitchen table. “Sports, Shannon,” she said. “You should get involved in sports.”
No. I hate sports. Slap of the ball in my hand in baseball, body checks in basketball, panic attacks during swimming lessons. The gasps for breath, flushed cheeks, the pinch of the swim coach’s fingernails as she swam w
ith me in her arms after I, at the halfway point down one length of the pool, started to sink. The ridicule, Lydia-Rose’s nosebleeds, the flinching, the bitchy girls, the getting picked last for every team. The hard orange balls, sticks, and cleats of field hockey slamming into my shins. The eye-rolling when I tried out for the volleyball team; how every time without fail the dodge ball hit me in the face. Then: the special class I was put into where we rode bikes and did light weight training—I guess to spare me any more emotional and physical trauma. There were four of us: a girl who waxed everyone at academics and never spoke; a red-haired girl, tall and spindly and more awkward than I; and Charlene, a girl with long blond hair who was good at sports and had to join our class because of a scheduling conflict. She led us all.
French knitting sounds like something I should do. It’s solitary, something for crazy people, weird people, people with too much time on their hands, people who are good with their hands, people who are good with finicky things, people who like finicky things, people who can start something and see it through to completion, take a mess of yarn and make something whole.
Am I supposed to unravel the yarn first?
French knitting is simple to learn: just follow the instructions and wrap brightly colored yarn around the metal guides crowning Madame Knitting Guide’s head.
WARNING—CHOKING HAZARD
Small Parts.
Not for children under 3 yrs.
What instructions? Madame Knitting Guide? Are they kidding?
If I were an archaeologist, I’d photograph the knitting kit, describe it in considerable detail, then liken it to something in modern times.
1. Clump of yarn.
2. Red plastic object the size and shape of a small pen, presumably the knitting needle.
Y: A Novel Page 7
