by Ninie Hammon
And Oprah, of course. Julia set a tray of food in front of her door every afternoon and now that she actually ate it, I thought she looked better, but maybe it was just wishful thinking.
Some evenings, Julia made supper for us; other evenings, Bobo cooked. She still wouldn’t let me touch anything in her kitchen— especially her precious it’ll-cut-your-thumb-off butcher knife. The kitchen was her world, her little fiefdom, and she reigned there supreme. The seasoning in most of what she prepared was off, too much or too little of something, or missing key ingredients. Anything that required a full-bore recipe was a disaster.
We sat together on the front porch most evenings—her in the swing, me in the rocker—watching the fireflies blink like Christmas lights on the willow tree. Bobo filled the warm, satin darkness with stream-of-consciousness babble; whatever entered her mind fell out her mouth.
“I keep losing time and I don’t know what happens to it,” she told me one evening as she shelled black-eyed peas into a metal bowl on her lap. “It’s just gone. An hour. An afternoon. A day. Some days I’ll look outside and it’s dark, and I can’t remember nothing that happened since I brushed my teeth that morning.”
Bobo hadn’t had a tooth to brush in 30 years.
She stopped swinging then, stopped shelling the peas.
“I’ve lost pieces of me, too.” Her husky voice was soft. “Getting old does that to you, breaks you apart and things fall off. And you get wore out tryin’ to hold it all together.”
She let out a long, slow sigh.
“I ain’t a day older’n 16.” She tapped her temple with her bent finger. “In here, I ain’t. Then I look in the mirror and I don’t see me; I see a witch a’starin’ back at me.” She shuddered and there was no chill in the air. “All wrinkled up, no hair, face a ruin … and I don’t know where I went, the me inside. I lost her someplace.”
“I think ‘me’ is a moving target, Bobo. Like you put a bunch of rocks in a kaleidoscope, and every time you turn it, the pieces look different, but it’s still the same rocks.”
Bobo was quiet for a moment, pondering, then turned and looked at me.
“That don’t make no more sense than sittin’ on the TV to watch the couch.”
She picked up a handful of unshelled peas. “I was a pretty little girl and wrinkled ain’t what I dreamed of bein’ when I grew up.”
Her gnarled fingers deftly popped open the pods and let peas drop into the bowl. The swing’s wreek-wreek, wreek-wreek melody harmonized with the drone of the cicadas in the juniper trees and the first timid chirping of the crickets.
“I hadn’t ought to a'got old.” It was a ragged whisper. “I should have died with the rascals ‘stead of falling apart piece by piece for all these years.”
There were times she talked nonstop about her garden, the minutia of planting and weeding and harvesting. She talked about people who may not have existed and events that may never have occurred. When she was telling the stories, it was impossible to tell what was fact and what was fantasy.
She often talked about the past—not the recent past—about growing up in Tahoka, Texas, and the years when her children were little. Some of her memories were incredibly detailed; I marveled at her ability to recall specifics—the color of the dress she wore the Sunday she met Granddaddy Cecil; how a pot of pinto beans she’d left on the stove burned dry while she listened to President Roosevelt describe “a day that will live in infamy.”
I just sat quietly, asking a question now and then. She never made any reference to the time when I was growing up, and I didn’t pick at the scab. I had grown comfortable with the rhythm of our lives; I knew we’d talk about those things when the time was right.
She never asked about me and didn’t seem even remotely interested in my life or my world. I couldn’t blame her. Compared to what hers had been, my life was pathetically hollow.
We usually went to bed early.
Not a very exciting existence but it was just what I needed. Every day, I felt peace soak into me like lotion on dry, chapped skin. The pressure that built up in my head until it produced blinding migraines was sighing away. I’d had only one headache three days after I arrived. It kept me in bed all day, but I’d had none since. Some coil of tension was gradually loosening inside me. I was beginning to feel at home, really at home for the first time in my memory.
Joel phoned often to see how I was getting along. His concern was touching.
“Did you remember anything yet?” he’d ask eagerly and when I’d tell him, “not yet,” he’d let out a long, disappointed sigh. For some reason, finding out about my amnesia had planted a burr under my little brother’s saddle, and he was frustrated that he couldn’t do anything about it.
“I tried to remember living in that house, thought as hard as I could so I could tell you about it. But I couldn’t.”
“Joel, you were two years old when we moved away from Goshen. How could you possibly remember anything about it?”
“I just want to help, that’s all. I want to help you remember.”
“Oh, I’ll get my memory back,” I assured him. “You can count on it. Just give me time and I’ll remember.”
Almost a week later than scheduled, a truck finally pulled up out front one morning, and two burley men unloaded my Ikea order in the front yard, flat packed, and, of course, “Assembly Required.” I tried to talk them into hauling the boxes up the stairs, and when my persuasion didn’t work, I played the Bobo card. I got her to do her pitiful-old-lady-with-arthritis shtick and I managed to guilt-trip them into depositing the boxes and the two loveseats in the studio.
I showed them where I wanted the couches, one by the hall door and the other on the wall between the back stairs door and the window overlooking the backyard.
In less than half an hour, I had one corner of the room piled high with packing materials, and all the pieces-parts of the whole order laid out on the rag rug. I’d obviously bitten off way more than I could chew. It had been a risk to order all this stuff with nothing more than a vague notion that I’d figure out how to assemble it when it arrived. And Anne Mitchell didn’t do risks.
But I didn’t feel anxious. I was excited. And proud of myself.
I wasn’t a complete novice; I had built an Ikea computer desk in England. Of course, it had taken me a week. It could be Christmas before I got all this assembled. The shelves would be easy and I decided to start there to build up my confidence before I tackled the storage cabinet. Then I discovered that the tool kit which was supposed to accompany the order was missing—the metric tool kit—so I trudged out to the garage to collect replacements.
But they weren’t there.
I stood in the cool, windowless building, the florescent bulb in the ceiling fixture popping and snapping, and stared at the wall above the workbench where the tools hung neatly inside their Magic Marker outlines. The hammer was gone. So were two large, flat-head screwdrivers. I didn’t need the flat-heads, but I couldn’t do the job without a hammer.
Where had they gone? Who could have taken a hammer and screwdrivers? Why would Bobo want them? Julia? Must have been Julia. I’d have to ask her what she did with them.
I looked over the remaining tools and selected a couple of small, Phillips-head screwdrivers and a set of Allen wrenches.
As sure as God made little green apples, the tools wouldn’t be the only thing missing from the Ikea order. Some essential nut, screw or bolt would be AWOL, too, and I’d have to come up with a substitute, so I began to dig through the drawers on the far end of the workbench to check out what was there.
Then my glance fell on the shelf in the cabinet unit. The can of WD-40 was gone. It had been there a week ago. It had been the only thing on the cabinet shelf so it wasn’t like it was stuck behind something else and I couldn’t see it. The cabinet was empty.
I passed Julia on my way through the downstairs parlor and asked her about the tools and the WD-40. She shrugged her shoulders.
“I didn
’t move them. But there’s a tack hammer under the sink in the kitchen if that will help.”
Actually, the tack hammer was better suited to the task at hand than the one I’d been looking for. It was smaller, closer to the size of the hammer in the missing Ikea tool kit. I deposited the hammer, screwdrivers and wrenches on the floor in the studio, intent on getting to work.
Julia appeared in the doorway.
“I forgot to tell you; I think you may need to call the exterminator again,” she said. “I was on the third floor putting sheets away in the linen closet, and I heard noises in the attic. The squirrels must be back.”
“Goody. I’ll go take a look.”
Using the-shortest-distance-between-two-points-is-a-straight-line logic, I should have popped up the creepy, dark, back staircase to the third floor. The attic door was right beside the back stairs door in the third-floor bedroom above me, as the cellar door was right beside the back stairs door below me in the kitchen. But I didn’t use the back stairs. I went out into the hall and up the front stairs.
Yeah, yeah, that facing my fears thing. It’s on my to-do list.
I opened the attic door and climbed the steep, narrow steps, idly wondering why the stair treads in attic staircases are never wide enough to fit your whole foot.
At the top of the steps, I pulled the string to turn on the puny little light and looked around. I should have asked Julia for the location of the hole the squirrels used the last time they got in. Must have been on the back wall somewhere; they’d have to leap from the neighbor’s elm tree onto our roof, and the tree was on that side.
I was jumpy, expecting a furry little creature to scurry out of the shadows at any moment and startle me to death. I didn’t like squirrels. They didn’t strike me as the slightest bit cute.
A squirrel is nothing more than a rat with good PR.
There was a ton of junk on the back wall, and the light at that end of the attic didn’t work. Or the bulb was burned out, and how were you supposed to replace it when it was suspended 15 feet in the air? I poked around a little, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I’d let the exterminator figure out where the little buggers were hiding.
Back down in the studio, I stretched the directions for the shelf unit out on the floor. Since Ikea products were sold all over the world, they’d come up with a handy-dandy way to keep from having to translate their assembly instructions into Swahili or Farsi. They didn’t use words. Just pictures.
I was concentrating hard, trying to figure out how to insert Tab A into Slot B given that there was no hole in Slot B, when it suddenly hit me. The thought stole my breath, like I was looking down from a high window. I sat back on my heels and felt goose bumps pop up on my arms.
The attic door didn’t squeak. When I opened it to go up the stairs, it didn’t make a sound.
That more or less solved one mystery and created two others. Obviously, the WD-40 was missing from the garage because somebody had used it on the attic door hinge.
But who?
And why?
Chapter 10
I went downstairs and found Julia at the kitchen table folding a pile of towels. Dried on the line in the backyard, they’d brought the sunshine into the house with them. Bobo was shucking corn.
As in all good detective stories, the usual suspects in the attic door whodunit either lacked motive or opportunity. Bobo claimed not to know what WD-40 was; Julia hadn’t been in the garage where it was stored. Neither cared that the attic door squeaked.
“Well, I guess it’s possible the door just stopped making noise all on its own,” Julia offered. She glanced at Bobo. “A leetle piece was rubbing, sí? An’ when jew shut the door lass time"--Julia’s Spanish accent blinked on and off like a Joe’s Beer Joint sign, but Bobo never seemed to notice--“eet stop rubbing.” The pendulous skin on the big woman’s upper arms swayed in rhythm with the sure, practiced movements of her chubby hands. “I bet eet jus’ feex eetself.”
“Humph!” Bobo plopped a handful of husks and silk into the trash can between her knees. “If that door fixed itself, I’ll eat dirt and call it potato salad.”
I went back upstairs and examined the door, opened and closed it several times. It glided smoothly, no friction anywhere.
I examined the hinges closely. The metal wasn’t greasy, and there was no petroleum smell, but if WD-40 had been applied two or three days ago, there’d be no trace of it now.
Since the only three people who had access to the hinges claimed not to have been a party to their repair, I was left with only one conclusion. Julia was right. The door had been miraculously healed, divine intervention, an act of God.
Halleluiah!
And in the grand scheme of things, the question: “Who?” begged an even greater question: “Who cares?” I couldn’t waste valuable cognitive energy pondering hinges when I needed to bring all my mental faculties to bear on a much more important riddle: what happened to the hole in Slot B?
I worked through supper. Bobo had made stew, which offered a veritable cornucopia of missing-ingredient opportunities. I was too busy to be hungry anyway. I had my game face on. Once I’d located the Slot B aperture—on the opposite end of the piece than the picture showed—I was on a roll.
It was close to midnight before I stood back and surveyed my handiwork. My back and neck ached from bending over for so long, but the prize was worth the punishment. Two bookshelves. One on either side of the mantel where the antique clock with a broken face sat in limp-handed silence.
I’d put the Masonite backing on the first bookshelf wrong—the shiny side was supposed to face inward—but that was the only flaw I could see. Of course, it was certainly possible that as soon as I put books on the shelves, they’d collapse in a heap on the floor. But barring that misadventure, I had done a good job. I was proud of myself, exhausted, but proud.
It was all I could do to slip into a nightgown before I collapsed in the bed and went instantly to sleep.
A tunnel stretches out in front of me, shadowy but not dark. It’s a hallway with a door at the far end. An official door, behind which official people do official things. I start toward it, passing other doors along the way. There are windows in the doors, but the glass is frosted and I can’t see in. And there are lockers on the walls between the doors. This is a school.
I hear the sound of children playing outside, beyond the hallway doors. I’m supposed to be out there playing with them, but I have to go down the hall instead. I pass door after door, but the final door, the official door, remains a constant distance from me, neither closer nor farther away. If I run, the door will recede from me faster. I don’t know how I know that, but I do, so I keep walking. Which is hard. I’m in a terrible hurry. My heart’s pounding; I’m desperate to get to the door.
Then a bell rings and all the doors in the hallway open and children pour out. They are noisy, talking and laughing. But then they see me, and they stop, their eyes wide, staring. The children surround me in a big circle, saying nothing.
I want to tell them I’m in a hurry, I can’t stay here, I have to get to the official door. As soon as I begin to speak, their curiosity turns to horror, and they turn and run away from me, screaming.
Suddenly, I’m in front of the official door. I reach out my hand and open it. There’s a woman behind a counter and when she sees me, she lets out a little peep of a scream and stares at me wide-eyed.
And then the official people are there, but not to listen to me, to stare at me. I have something terribly important to tell them, but when I start to speak, they turn aside in revulsion. Then I see my reflection in the frosted glass window.
I shriek in terror but I make no more sound than I did when I talked to the children or to the official people. The little girl with long blonde braids staring in horror at me from the mirrored surface has no mouth. There is no opening of any kind below her nose. And when she tries to speak, the skin twists and curls and collapses into a wrinkled hole, a cavity of old,
gray, withered flesh.
I back up, scream, “Noooo!” But it comes out muffled, like there’s tape over my mouth. “Mooo!” I keep screaming, more terrified with every muffled sound I make. “Mmmooo! Mmmooo!”
“Noo, nooo!” I cried out the word, it came out clear, my mouth was moving. My eyes snapped open. I was looking at my face in a mirror, and it was me, not the little girl in braids. My hair was tangled, bed-head, and I looked terrified. But I had a mouth. I had a mouth!
Panting, disoriented, I grabbed the mantel for support.
The mantel?
I looked around, slowly pivoting 360 degrees. I was in the parlor, staring into the gilded mirror above the fireplace.
As reality flowed over me in a warm flood, my tense muscles relaxed. I took a couple of steps and collapsed into Bobo’s platform rocker. Sleepwalking. I’d been sleepwalking again.
The images of the accompanying nightmare were dissipating rapidly, like smoke from a dying campfire. I grabbed at them but they evaporated. There was a hall, doors, I had to get to the end, tell somebody something. But I had no mouth.
There was no time to ponder the dream and its significance, however, because the images faded and the content quickly melted away. The previous night terror, the one about drowning, was etched indelibly into my mind. But by the time I was lying in my bed again, this one had gone translucent. I could see through it like a jellyfish.
Bobo padded by my door in bare feet, heading to the stairs as I got into bed. She was always up wandering around the house at all hours of the night. I rolled over and closed my eyes, and I could hear her puttering around in the study on the floor below me, the sounds of cabinets opening and closing piped into my room through the heat register.
And an image formed, dim at first, then brighter as the light came up in the room of my memory.
I have the covers pulled up under my chin, my head buried in the pillow, trying not to hear. But it’s impossible to escape the angry voices from downstairs. Mama and Jericho’s room is directly below me, where the study is now. Piped up through the register, their loud voices are so clear, their words so distinct, the two of them might as well be standing at the foot of my bed yelling at each other.
