by John Fulton
Three
THE DAY IN LATE February when I was supposed to have my sling removed began with a fight over my sister’s hair. Jenny was used to getting what she wanted. Most recently, she had received the outfit that she was wearing that morning—the expensive purple Keds, a purple blouse and khaki pants from the Gap, and the translucent, purple, waterproof Swatch watch from a store in Crossroads Mall called In Excess, the sort of store our family could not afford. The watch had been at the bottom of a fish tank half-buried in little colored rocks as exotic fish swam above it. “Can I, please?” she had begged my father. “Please, please, please!” He could not say no, even to an eighty-dollar plastic watch. And so she was given that, too. As far as I was concerned, my arm had bought her an entire far-too-pricey wardrobe—her green and yellow and pink polo shirts, her jeans and pants that had to be from the Gap. And that morning, she wanted our mother to do her hair, despite the fact that our mother was about to be late for her new job at Oak Groves Assisted Living, where she fed and bathed old people forty hours a week, and had already shouted down the hall that she could not, absolutely not, be late for work again if we wanted to have food on our table. She’d taken the job a month ago, right after my injury, so that our family could have full-coverage medical insurance. She was a nurse’s aide, and did whatever duties the doctors and nurses weren’t willing to do. It was the sort of job that was difficult to fill and that no one wanted, which was why the benefits were good and the pay wasn’t bad. She’d probably gotten it because she’d finished a year of nursing school when she was nineteen or twenty and because nobody more qualified had applied for it. “Please! Please!” Jenny shouted through the cracked bathroom door until my mother rushed out of her room with her nurse’s white blouse half undone so that, eating my toast in the kitchen, I had to look away from the site of her bra, the textured lace of it, and had to put that image out of my mind.
“Will you please cooperate for once?” She shouted out the word cooperate in this long, desperate way.
Just as my mother turned around and headed back to her room, Jenny shoved her face out the bathroom door. “What am I supposed to do with this? I can’t go like this. Nobody even cares.” She let her hair drop. She shook it the way a wet dog does, water flying out into the air. She had tryouts for the Billmore drill team that afternoon and wanted to look her best.
“It’s just your stupid hair,” I said.
“What can I do? I’ll do something,” my father said because he hated it when Jenny threw a tantrum. Her moods really worked on him. They really upset him. He stood from the breakfast table with melted butter from his toast shining on his fingertips and walked over to the bathroom where Jenny slammed the door on him. “I’ll help, sweetie.”
“You can’t help. Only Mom can help.”
“She says only you can help!” my father shouted down the hall to my mother.
“She’s doing this on purpose,” I said.
When my mother didn’t respond, Jenny said, “Get her for me, please.” Her voice came through the door in a long, pink, soft hush that my mother had somehow heard down the hall.
“All right,” she said, bolting out of her room, her white blouse still half open so that once again I had to look away, though not before I saw the strained cords in her neck, the soft strokes of her clavicles, the lacy cups of her bra and the little white silk bow poised delicately above her sternum. Seeing that bothered me. I don’t think I ever desired my mother in a way that I had to feel ashamed of. I understood that she was a woman as well as my mother. But I also knew that in other families mothers did not walk through the hallway in half-rages with their blouses open. I knew that in other families sons did not have to look away, did not have to erase the picture in their heads of the little white bow.
“I’m here,” she said to the closed bathroom door, and Jenny opened it and looked at her with vulnerable eyes that anticipated a harsh reaction and stopped it before it could happen. “Just give me a comb and barrettes,” my mother said with a great deal of resignation, and for the next fifteen minutes my mother worked Jenny’s hair into a subtle, tight crown of cuteness, combing, curling, blow-drying, tucking strands in, pinning and tying off two ribbons and clipping down a translucent purple barrette that matched her Swatch watch perfectly. “There,” my mother said, though of course she would be late again that day and our insurance, our ability to pay bills, to put food on the table, to put gas in the car and clothes on our backs would once again be threatened.
“Thank you,” Jenny said.
“You’re welcome,” my mother said, looking into the mirror at Jenny. From where I sat at the kitchen table, I could not see the mirror or Jenny, but I could see the concern on my mother’s face. Then, for some reason, she bent down, kissed Jenny on the cheek, and said, “You know that I love you, don’t you?” It was a weird thing for her to say, not only because she said it—which she did often enough—but also because she should have been in a hurry and because she touched my sister’s cheek and waited for Jenny to look at her and say yes, she knew. Of course she knew. “Good,” my mother said. “Because I do. More than you can know, I do.”
* * *
After school that day, I went to Jenny’s tryout, which she’d begged me to watch, and was shocked to see that Jenny really did have talent. In the last month, my sister had blossomed so fast that at times she no longer felt like my kid sister. I certainly couldn’t have guessed when the physical part had happened to her, though somehow it had. She shot up at least an inch and got teacup breasts about the same time I began to notice the lattice of bra straps through her T-shirts and her Gap blouses. I had recently overheard my mother and Jenny in a shouting match about the sort of underwear my mother would and would not buy for a girl who’d just turned fourteen that October. “Those are not for you. Those are for women,” my mother had said, looking into a catalogue Jenny was holding open. That was the first and maybe only time I heard Jenny shout, tears welling in her eyes, “I am a woman!” after which she thundered down the hallway and hid away for hours in her room. Jenny’s tantrum meant nothing to me. She’d always been the sort of kid who threw fits and slammed doors. But that she had ever considered herself a woman was news to me. I knew that I did not consider myself a man, especially during that interminably long first February in Salt Lake. I was a kid with a sore as hell arm in a sling and no friends, save for a dog I loved fiercely despite his funny name. The last place I wanted to be on a Friday afternoon was in the bleachers in the Billmore gymnasium watching hordes of girls, among them my sister, dance to the happy, echoing rhythm of “Material Girl” as the Billmorette drill captains, Sara Chapman, Lisa Abraham, and a girl with whom Jenny had somehow become friends, Janet Spencer, walked through the rows of dancers and tapped the shoulders of the clumsy and homely ones—you could see who they were a mile away because their hair fell over their faces, they tripped, they stepped out of line and off beat, and they seemed to hate themselves for every mistake they made—until only a handful of tall, coordinated, beautiful girls, whose entire bodies conformed to that loud, pulsating music, remained.
Jenny was one of those beautiful girls and she did not seem at all out of place. She wore a yellow T-shirt that said GIVE ME CHOCOLATE! and white tennis shorts, which my mother had bought a while ago at a secondhand shop, though they looked new and expensive as she danced next to other girls as tall and athletic and attractive as she. The girls were doing a shimmy with their hips, with their full torsos in fact, though the powerful motion of the hips swiveling, then grinding to a stop, then swiveling again, was what you noticed most. It was sexual. There was no other word for it, and Jenny was good, was adept at this. I had to wonder then how she had made friends and become talented in the same few weeks that I had been sitting around with my arm in a sling waiting for torn muscle and strained ligaments to heal. Only a few weeks before I’d been hurt, Mr. Bryant, the assistant basketball coach and health teacher, had asked me to try out for the junior varsity bas
ketball team because I was tall. “We need a boy with your height,” he’d said. Mr. Bryant didn’t seem to doubt for a minute that I would make a good athlete, and I even began to picture myself leaping to the hoop and slamming one in, never mind the fact that I had never played the sport and that I couldn’t jump more than an inch or two into the air. The cheerleaders would shake their pom-poms and scream for me. Even Tracy Bingham, the squad leader who drove a white Rabbit convertible and had perfect, medium-size breasts and a very nice smile, would notice me and begin to think about me sailing through the air with a basketball in my hand when she was trying to do her math homework at night. It was a silly fantasy, I knew, and I was ashamed of ever having dreamed it up, especially after my injury destroyed any remote chance that I might become a star athlete. It hardly mattered, I told myself. I had more important things than Tracy Bingham to think about. But somehow my sister was a success. She was an attractive teenage girl with social ambitions and friends, and I had no idea how she’d remade herself so quickly. Perhaps she’d been developing—growing taller, more beautiful, and popular—for a while, and I hadn’t been looking. Sitting in those bleachers, I felt suddenly panicky. I felt suddenly that it was too late, though I wasn’t sure exactly what was too late. Something had passed and I had missed it. That’s all I knew.
Jenny made the team and as soon as the rejects had left the auditorium, the Billmorettes surrounded their new members and screamed and clapped and hugged them. They handed over to the new girls the red-and-gold Billmorette uniforms with the big B on the chest. I walked down the bleachers and faced my sister on the court, who made no sense to me as a Billmorette. “Did you see? Did you see?” she shouted. When she tried to hug me, I let out a yelp and reminded her that my arm hurt, even though it hadn’t hurt a bit when she’d grabbed me. I just felt that she should be cautious around my injury, that she should show some manners and consideration. But she was too damned excited to apologize.
“You have work to do at home,” I reminded her because someone had to lay down the law and insist she spend some time at the kitchen table trying to turn her C and C- grades into B’s. When we lived in Boise, she’d signed a contract with Mom that was taped on the refrigerator door and that said, “I agree to get at least two B’s this term.” After breaking this contract, she was grounded to the house between the hours of three and five, her mandatory study time. But with both my parents working, I was the only one to enforce these study hours, which I did militantly because I understood how essential good study habits were. All the same, my father had given her permission to try out for the Billmorettes and do just about anything else she wanted to do when she wanted to do it.
“We have our first team meeting right now,” she said. “Could you tell Mom to stop by school and pick me up on her way to get you at the hospital? Could you call her please and tell her that?” That afternoon was supposed to be my last appointment at The Richmond Clinics.
“I guess I could,” I said.
“Who’s that?” Janet Spencer asked her.
“Oh,” Jenny said. It hadn’t occurred to her until then that she was going to have to introduce me to her new friends. I didn’t look so hot. I never did. Fashion was not a big concern of mine then. I wore a loose pair of Levi’s—another of my mother’s great finds at Deseret Industries—that fell halfway down my butt and that I had to pull up fifty times a day. I pulled them up when Janet Spencer set her large blue eyes on me. My white, long-sleeved T-shirt said TEAM PLAYER on it for some reason. I hated wearing T-shirts with words on them, but more often than not the best secondhand clothes—the newest, most unused-looking clothes—were the ones with the silliest words on them. I had another that said SLED DOG on it, which was really a strange thing for a shirt to say. Of course, my arm was in a sling and I held my heavy backpack and red parka in my good hand. Janet Spencer wore the red-and-gold Billmorette uniform, the little skirt of which came up to the middle of her muscular thighs. Her hair was the blond of lemon peel and her smile was incredibly white and large. She seemed to take me all in with that huge, terribly dishonest smile. “This is my brother,” Jenny said.
“Cool,” Janet Spencer said.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, turning away and plunging into a huddle of red-and-gold drill team girls. My sister waved a hand at me and said, “See you in a couple hours.” I stood there for a while, alone in the middle of that court, holding my coat and heavy book bag and feeling how separate, how far away—a universe away—I felt from all those squealing girls who had just begun shouting out the first line of the Billmore fight song, which goes, “Billmore! Billmore! Billmore is bold!” I did that until my sister actually stuck her head out of the huddle and shouted silently—so that I could only see the word on her lips—“Go, go, go.” So I did. I turned and headed for the main exit, which was all the way on the other side of that basketball court and seemed to take forever to reach.
* * *
It was a strange day for the end of February—rainy and muggy—and I spent the bus ride up to The Richmond Clinics watching beads of water flit across the window next to me. In the examination room, the doctor prodded at my shoulder and moved my arm in different angles before telling me that I’d healed up, that the strained ligaments and torn muscle were better than ever, and that there was no need to put the sling back on. He was a young guy with an absolutely bald head that shone orange and smooth in the light. “You don’t seem too happy about it,” he said. I said I was, even though I couldn’t have felt less excited and I wanted to keep the sling, which he had been about to throw away. When I asked him if I could take it, he laughed and said, “It’s all yours.” Later, as I stood outside the entrance waiting for my mother to pick me up, my arm felt odd, skinny, naked without it. I stood just inside the awning, watching the rainwater run off the building. It put me in a trance—the water running down in strings and drumming against the sidewalk—so that I barely noticed the fact that I’d put the sling back on. My arm still hurt a little, or so it seemed to me, and I wondered if the doctor hadn’t been wrong, if maybe my arm could use a few more days in that sling. Besides, I liked the way it felt and wanted to wear it a little while longer, the way you want to wear an old, holey T-shirt because the fabric is worn fine, nearly as comfortable as your own skin.
When I sat down in the car, my mother didn’t say anything and didn’t look over at me. She just pulled out of the parking lot and drove past the Fort Douglas Country Club and for some reason down the hill, which was the opposite direction we needed to be driving. She’d just gotten off work from Oak Groves and looked especially tired that day, her hair a little messed up where she’d worn the nurse’s cap, a white hat that she’d thrown into the backseat of the Buick and that looked like one of those paper boats kids make in grade school. Jenny was sitting in the backseat, wearing her new Billmorette uniform. I guessed that my mother and she had been arguing since Jenny was quiet and quickly gave me a look of caution, a look that said something’s wrong with Mom. When my mother looked over at me, I saw that her eyes were swollen and glossy red, that she’d been crying, and that something really was wrong. “I thought they were letting you out of that thing today,” she said, gesturing at my sling.
“They asked me to wear it for another week or so,” I said, lying to avoid what I sensed was going to be a very unpleasant situation.
“Your arm is healing, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I guess I’m not healing as well as they thought I would.”
“Why is that the case?” she asked.
“The doctors aren’t sure.”
“Wonderful. Great,” my mother said. She looked at me, and I saw that she was not only sad but angry, too.
I should have stopped, but sometimes I just didn’t know when to stop. “They said it might take months more. They said they’d have to do some tests and things.”
“Jesus.” She hit the steering wheel with her hand. “Why can’t anything go ri
ght with this family? Why?”
“What’s wrong with everybody?” I asked.
“Nothing,” my mother said. We’d stopped at a light, and she looked at me and smiled, as if to prove it. “Nothing.” A tear dropped quickly from her eye, then another and another. She let out a laugh. “Oh, shit,” she said.
“You’re scaring me,” I said. I looked out my window at a hippie on a chopper who’d just pulled up beside us. He wore no helmet, and his long hair and beard dripped with rain. “I want somebody to tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing. Nothing at all.” My mother put her head down on the steering wheel and really started to cry.
“The light’s turned,” I said. The people behind us had begun honking. “You have to go.” I nudged her, and she sat up and began driving, her eyes focusing, drying a little as she watched the road.
“Mr. Warner died today,” my mother said, looking straight ahead. Mr. Warner, I guessed, was one of the tenants at Oak Groves. “I have this job where people actually die, Steven. It’s crazy, crazy. He just fell over on me. I couldn’t believe his weight. I’ve never felt anything so heavy.”
“Who’s Mr. Warner?” I asked.
“Just an old man,” she said. “A very old man who died a few hours ago and fell on your mother. How insane is that?” She looked at me and began laughing out loud as the tears came to her eyes again. “Now I have to go back there and talk to someone about it—the coroner or someone—so that they can make out a report. I’m the sole witness to Mr. Warner’s death.” She was taking a left turn and stopped talking to concentrate on her driving before starting in again. “I have to make a statement. I was telling him to lift his arms up so that I could sponge him there. That’s when he fell on me. Jesus.” I could see by the way my mother was shaking her head back and forth, back and forth, that she was remembering it in detail and trying as hard as she could, flexing her jaw and then spitting out a laugh, not to remember it. In the backseat, Jenny was looking down at her lap. She’d probably heard the whole story by now. I could picture Jenny wanting to tell my mother about making the drill team, being a Billmorette, and then my mother telling her about the dead guy. “He still had soap on him,” my mother continued, “and I was rinsing him off. If you send them to lunch with soap suds still on them, they get sent back to you and you have to rinse them off again. That’s when he just fell over on me like I was supposed to comfort him or do something. So now we need to go back there. I have to sign something. I guess that’s what you do when somebody old with no living relatives dies. I didn’t even know him. He was too old to know.”
