by Ninie Hammon
“Petey, hey, Petey,” I crooned, and the little green parakeet hopped around in excitement, making little clicking sounds with his beak.
“Petey Petey,” he said, and cocked his head to one side. “Hi there.” Then he hopped from the swing where he was perched to the floor of the cage and walked like a bow-legged sailor toward the door.
I’d decided to give Petey a breath of unfettered air before I went to work. I didn’t often let him out of his cage. The world was a dangerous place for a little green bird. I kept Petey locked up, but safe; imprisoned but secure, and the symbolism of that act wasn’t lost on me. I suspect that’s why I’d picked a bird in a cage for a pet; it was a perfect metaphor for my life.
I opened the door, and stuck my finger into the cage and he hopped on. The grasp of his tiny claws made my finger itch. I lifted him out of the cage and said, “Bye-bye, see ya.”
Petey copied: “Bye-bye, see ya.”
Then he took off for a flight around the studio, his wings making a soft fluttering sound. He circled the room once, came back and landed on top of my head, then took off again. He made another full circuit, and this time when he came back around he flew past me and landed on top of the bookcase, the one with the Masonite panel on backward, and walked along the edge of it. He flew over to the antique clock on the mantel, landed above the crack in the glass on its face, then fluttered into the air again and down on the rolltop desk.
Oops! Petey made a sticky white deposit on the rolltop. If Bobo saw it, she’d have fried parakeet for dinner.
“Here, PeteyPeteyPetey.” I held out my left arm and whistled, and he fluttered into the air and landed on my arm. I scooted the index finger of my right hand under his claws until he grabbed hold of it, and eased him back into the cage. Then I went into the bathroom off my bedroom for a piece of toilet paper to clean his mess.
The yellow-white gob of bird dookey was sliding slowly down the side of the desk when I got back. I crouched down on one knee to wipe it away and wrinkled my nose. The poop stunk!
“That poop stink? Huh? That ka-ka smell good?” Mama is yelling at Windy, who’s standing in the middle of the playroom with her head down. “That crap, you like how that smells, do you?”
Mama has her back to me. I’m seated on the floor where the rolltop desk is now. There’s a big pile of Barbie paraphernalia around me—dolls, clothes and furniture, and I have Superstar Barbie in my hand. That’s the one Windy had been playing with before Mama came in and started screaming at her.
No, she hadn’t actually been playing with it. She’d just been holding it because I’d given it to her to hold, and she did whatever I wanted her to do.
Superstar Barbie. I’d come across that doll in a box in the garage of Mama’s townhouse when Joel and I were cleaning it out so we could sell it. I didn’t know how it had found its way into Mama’s storage; it was just junk, no clothes, dirty long blonde hair matted and ugly. I’d chucked it into the garbage. The doll had no sentimental value—I had no memory of playing Barbie dolls with it. Until now.
I have a tiny comb in my hand and I’m easing it carefully through the shiny blonde curls on my Barbie doll’s head.
“Barbie’s getting ready to go to your Hollywood party tonight, and she’s going to wear this dress,” I say, and pick up a shiny blue satin dress with spaghetti straps.
I hold my doll up to Windy’s doll and talk for her in a false, high voice. “I’m going to wear my blue dress to the party. What are you going to wear?”
I wait, but Windy doesn’t make Superstar Barbie say anything. She’s just sitting there, not really concentrating on what we’re doing.
“Windy, what’s your Barbie going to wear to her party?”
“I dunno. Whatever you want her to wear.”
“She’s your Barbie and you have to decide what you want her to wear and then put it on her. I can’t be both Barbies. It’s no fun if my Barbie doesn’t have anybody to talk to.”
“OK.” Windy says, but she’s still not really focused on what’s going on. Her mind is on something else.
She has on a faded pink Minnie Mouse sundress, pale against her warm brown skin. Her black curls catch the light and sparkle.
But when Jericho picked her up this morning at her mother’s house, her hair wasn’t clean. It’s usually not clean when she comes here, and Mama gets mad if she has to give her a bath, so I always say I want to play in the bubbles in the claw-foot bathtub in Bobo’s bathroom, and we get in together so she can get clean and Mama doesn’t have to do it.
Sometimes in the tub, I notice that Windy has bruises. On her arms, her butt and her thighs. I saw fresh ones this morning, but when I asked her how she got them, she’d just shrugged her shoulders and said what she always says, “I fell down.”
I saw what some man did to her! I saw it when we took a bath together! The bruises. New ones, deep purple with red edges, and older yellow-green ones, too. I saw. I saw!
A sudden wave of nausea swept over me, and I swallowed hard, struggled not to throw up. Windy was so tiny, maybe seven years old, but no bigger than a five-year-old. How could anybody hurt her? How could some man force her to … put his hands on her, touch her that way—molest her?
I collapsed where I was kneeling, put my head in my hands and cried—for a dark-eyed little girl who’d been dead for a quarter of a century. The sobbing stabbed daggers into my side and chest, lighting fires in all the muscles I’d strained the day before. But the burning felt good. Appropriate. It ought to hurt, somebody ought to feel pain for what happened. Somebody had to care.
“You want your Barbie to wear the yellow dress?”
Windy nods.
“Then she needs to say that.” I’m exasperated. “She needs to say that’s what she wants.”
Windy holds up Superstar Barbie. “I’m going to wear the yellow dress to the party.”
“I think the yellow dress will look very pretty on you. Do you think I should wear black shoes?”
I lay my Barbie aside and search through the pile of clothes, looking for shoes. Windy’s just holding her doll, an odd, faraway look in her brown eyes.
Then I smell something.
“Pwew! What’s that stink? Smells like poop! Yuk.”
Windy’s mind snaps back from wherever it had gone and recognition dawns. She looks down, then back up at me, shock and alarm on her face.
“Windy, did you poop in your pants?”
“I … don’t know.” Her brown eyes are wide with horror. She drops her Barbie doll into my lap. “I didn’t mean to!”
That’s when Mama appears at the door.
“Joel’s down for his nap and your lunch is ready,” she says. Her eyes look funny, like black marbles. The blue’s completely gone. I see the pleat between her eyebrows she gets when she’s upset about something.
“Go wash your hands and …” She stops. Her nose wrinkles. “What’s that smell? It smells like …”
Recognition mingles with revulsion and disgust on her face, and Mama goes postal! She turns on Windy, reaches down, grabs her by the arm and yanks her onto her feet, where she stands awkwardly, her legs spread apart.
“You crapped in your pants, didn’t you? Didn’t you!”
She shakes Windy by the arm like a rag doll as she yells, shakes her so hard Windy has trouble standing.
“You little Indian rat! First you pee in your pants and now …”
Windy wet her pants a lot. Suddenly, my mind goes cold. And whenever she wet her pants, Mama always made her wear her underwear on her head.
“Get that nasty … take it off!” Mama lets go of Windy’s arm. “Take your panties off, I said.”
Windy tries not to make a mess but it’s hopeless. She smears brown streaks all the way down both legs, then steps out of her underwear and stands in front of Mama, holding white cotton panties full of feces.
“That poop stink? Huh?”
Mama’s speech is muddy. Windy says nothing, just looks at the floor.
Still no response.
Mama grabs Windy’s face and yanks her chin up, forcing Windy to look at her. Then she squeezes Windy’s cheeks so tight her mouth puckers up like a kiss.
“Well, you better like how it smells, Sweetheart, because you’re gonna wear it!” Mama drops Windy’s face and takes an unsteady step back. “Put it on.”
Windy looks up at her but doesn’t move.
“Did you hear what I said? Put it on. Now.”
Windy shoots a questioning glance at me. In that look, I see confusion, fear and pain. Then resignation.
She lifts the underwear toward her head, then leans over to put it on like a cap. She stretches the elastic waistband and sticks the top of her head down through it. Her face disappears. Then she straightens up.
“How do you like that, crap girl, little Indian crap rat? That smell good?”
A big chunk of feces falls out of the underwear in the back and lands with a soft plop on the floor.
“Pick that up.” Mama isn’t yelling anymore. Her voice is quiet, cold as a stone in the night. “Are you deaf as well as stupid? I told you to pick it up.”
Windy bends down, careful not to dislodge the underwear on her head, picks up the brown glob off the hardwood floor and slowly stands.
Mama takes a swaying step forward, reaches over and puts her hand on the top of the underwear on Windy’s head.
“This’ll teach you to come over here to my clean house and crap in it.”
There’s a lump of feces beneath her hand, and Mama mashes it down and rubs it back and forth, squeezing it into Windy’s hair, sending streams of brown down her face and out the sides and back of the underwear.
“You like poop? Well, that’s what you are—you’re poop! You’re crap, filthy Indian crap.”
She grabs Windy by the arm. “Come on, you stinking little crap rat!” And she drags her out of the room.
I sit in the sudden silence, clutching Superstar Barbie. I stare at the little pieces of feces on the floor, not knowing what to do with them, wondering if I should pick them up.
I don’t. Instead, I scoot back away from them as far as I can go, pushing myself into the corner like I could vanish into the wall. But I can’t stop looking at them. When I notice that I still have the Barbie doll in my hand, I cradle it like a baby doll in my arms, hold it tenderly and begin to rock back and forth, back and forth, my eyes riveted on the little brown blobs on the shiny hardwood floor. Even from where I’m curled up in the corner, I can still smell the stink.
I suddenly smelled the stink of the bird crap on the toilet paper in my hand and wadded it up and threw it across the room in revulsion. After that, I did nothing at all. Just sat on the floor beside the rolltop desk, my back against the wall, my arms wrapped around my knees. I sat for so long my butt went to sleep and I couldn’t feel it anymore. The crosshatch of shadows from the windows moved slowly across the room, elongating, like an image in a carnival mirror or a tear just before it drops off an eyelash and splashes down on a cheek.
Mama sent me to summer camp when I was 14. I didn’t want to go. Nothing about it appealed to me. A beach, with canoeing, skiing and tubing? In an hour, I was so sunburned they didn’t need a grill that night to cook hot dogs. A cabin full of giggling girls? Teen speak was a foreign language. I refused to ride horses or go rock climbing or walk across steel cables suspended between one tree and another. After three days, I was so miserable that I broke my arm so I could go home.
Truth was, I didn’t intend to break it. I just meant to bruise it, sprain my wrist, maybe. So I stretched out on my bunk, jammed my arm through the small opening between the slats on the headboard, then rolled off the bed onto the floor.
A green stick fracture of the ulna that took almost eight months to heal.
I will never forget Mama’s face when she burst into the emergency room and saw me sitting on the side of the gurney, pasty pale, my arm in a cast. Her features were paralyzed with terror. She threw her arms around me, crushed me to her chest and sobbed. I could hear her heart pounding, feel her trembling, and even as a not particularly discerning 14-year-old, I knew the reaction didn’t fit the circumstance. I had a broken arm, not a broken neck. She kept whispering over and over in my ear, “I was so scared I’d lose you! I was so scared!”
Joel got chicken pox when he was 12—way too old. He was desperately sick, not life-threatening, just miserable. He had scabby sores all over him and even got a secondary infection that formed huge blisters around some of the sores on his lower back, so the elastic of his underwear had to be cut away.
Mama cared for him night and day for over a week. She never left his bedside, never even changed clothes. She bathed the sores in cool water, coaxed Sprite or 7UP down him, learned how to play video games just to entertain him.
Mama wrote me a letter every day the first semester of my freshman year in college. Started each one, “Dear Honey,” only she spelled honey hunnie.
She flew Bobo in from Texas and made the house a Christmas fairy land every year. She…
Who was the woman who smashed feces into the hair of a seven-year-old child? I don’t know that woman! I never met her.
I’d hear Mama in Joel’s room at night when he was little, tucking him in bed, asking him, “How much do I love you?” And I could imagine him stretching his chubby little arms out as far as he could.
“Dis much?”
“No, no, no. Much more than that!”
“How much?”
“Oh Joel, I love you all the much.”
That woman was my mother. The woman who loved Joel and me all the much. That other woman was an imposter.
I shook my head violently, trying to shake the images out, then leaned back against the wall again and felt hot tears slide down my face and drip off my chin.
I thought about the big black man in the movie The Green Mile who had a magical gift of healing. He could lean over a sick person and inhale the disease, the injury, even death, suck it out of them. Then he’d blow it out his mouth—the ugliness, black spots and flies.
I wanted somebody to suck this ugliness out of my mind and breathe it out as flies. I wanted a do-over! I wanted to start again in my studio in England with the eyes looking out of the pictures. Only this time, when I saw the eyes, I’d chuck the canvasses and all my art supplies into the rubbish bin in my garage and go back to being a librarian.
And leave my childhood in the black hole of hell where it belonged!
I didn’t want to know Laughs in the Wind.
I didn’t want to know my alcoholic mother.
I went over and over the images in my mind. Mama had been drunk or well on her way there, and I didn’t want to know the woman who was already so tanked before noon that she smashed feces into my little sister’s hair.
But she didn’t get a free pass with the booze card. Her behavior was unconscionable, drunk or sober. She was abusing a little girl who’d come to our house after she’d been sexually assaulted!
So what am I supposed to do with that?
It was sunset when Bobo came looking for me, shuffling from room to room. I heard her calling, “Anne? Anne, where are you?”
I hated the concern I heard in her voice. She was worried about me, and she had every right to be. I was worried about me.
Obviously, the combined effect of the emotional body slams of the last few days had caused some kind of psychotic episode yesterday morning. I hadn’t even gotten around to thinking about that yet.
Does a crazy person know they’re crazy?
If I toppled over the edge, I wondered if I’d even know I was falling.
“I’m in here, Bobo,” I called out, and she hobbled up the stairs and stopped just inside the studio door.
“Phew!” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I smell something nasty.” This from the woman who’d lived with rotted food behind her dresser!
She eyed Petey in his cage
on the other side of the room. He was walking back and forth on the swing, clucking happily.
“It’s bird dookey, ain’t it. I know it. I hate birds. The only good bird’s a—”
“Bird frying in a skillet. I know.”
“You watch out or that parrot of yours—”
“Petey’s not a parrot, Bobo, he’s a parakeet.”
“Or that parakeet’s going to turn up hung.” She started back across the hall toward the stairs, talking as she went. “Come on down to supper now.”
She stopped, turned around and gave me a toothy smile that revealed both sets of dentures securely in place.
“I made meatloaf!”
Goody.
Chapter 15
The next morning, I went into the studio and found Petey with a noose around his neck, hanging lifeless from the center bar on the top of his cage.
The sight literally knocked me backward, slammed me against the wall. I screamed, the wailing, anguished screech of a horror movie heroine, only no sound came out my mouth. Just a little squeak, a breathless gasp. I dug my knuckles into my eyes, trying to wipe the image away. But I saw it even with my eyes closed. I’d see it in excruciating detail for the rest of my life. In only a glimpse, my mind had recorded every dot, every pixel like a digital camera.
Little green bird, wings limp, head twisted to the side at an unnatural angle. Hangman’s noose so tight around his neck the gold twine disappears in the feathers. Gold twine.
Gold twine!
Bobo. Where’s Bobo!
I had no memory of going down the stairs. I was at the top of the stairs; then I was at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing but a blank space in between. I must have found my voice, the scream in my head found its way out my mouth because Julia looked up in shock as I raced past her. She gawked at me, the dust cloth in her hand and the Philco radio forgotten.
Through the kitchen.
Bobo!
Out the back door.
Bobo!
She was standing by the gate to the chicken house, holding a white hen upside down by its feet. The bird was fluttering its wings and squawking, but it was powerless to do anything but struggle.
