by CeeCee James
Mama asked whether everyone was ok, and burst into tears. I pulled myself up. The other car’s bright headlights were bright, and there were dark shadows of people outside the car. I looked over to see why Mama was crying (was she hurt?) and put my hand on her shoulder.
Mama turned to my uncle. He comforted her with a low, soothing voice, “It’s fine, everything is ok.”
They were silhouetted in the beaming headlights, and I watched Mama’s outline hug his. My body ached to be hugged by her, but I pulled my jacket tight around myself and pushed back into the corner of the seat. Neither of them noticed me. Somehow, I had failed again. It must have been when I hit the back of the seat, I screwed up then. I kept failing these tests to prove that I was a good girl.
A few days later Mama said we were going out to eat with my grandparents. I’m not sure if it had to do with the car accident, but now Mama’s parents wanted to repair their relationship with Mama. They had disowned her when she married my dad, and were just beginning to talk with her again. She seemed happy that her parents had invited us out to dinner.
The restaurant we went to had a fancy sign rimmed in blinking yellow lights. Mama examined her reflection in the window and brushed her long brown hair back from her face. Her face was tight when she warned me, “You be on your best behavior.” She grabbed the back of my arm, pinching me hard as a warning, and guided me to where my grandparents waited.
The waiter came over to the four of us and led us to a round table. Grandma said hi to Mama, but Grandpa only had eyes for me.
He leaned over smiling at me, “CeeCee, my dear, what would you like to order?”
Mama flashed me an intense look from behind her menu, so I tried to order something that wouldn’t make her mad. I squirmed, as the grownups watched me. The menu was heavy with a cloth cover, and I turned the pages as fast as I could, smiling when I saw a picture of spaghetti without sauce. When the waiter came to my corner of the table I pointed to it.
“I would like this, please,” I said in my most grown up voice.
“Ohhh,”Mama said in a syrupy sweet voice, “You won’t like that.” Eyes wide, I looked at her. She frightened me with her nice tone. I turned the pages in the menu as fast as possible while the grown-ups stared at me, and tried to find more pictures. I didn’t want to mess up again. The words were sprawled-out long and slanted, and didn’t look like the Bob books I read at school.
Grandpa cleared his throat, and said to me, “Well, if that’s what you want, then that’s what you’ll have.”
The waiter nodded, “Oh, you’ll enjoy it.” I shut my menu with a sick feeling, and Mama shot daggers at me from behind her menu.
The spaghetti came buttered and it tasted like crayons. I hated it. Mama laughed, “I knew it! Dad, you wasted food on CeeCee! Eat it all, little girl.” She smiled when I gagged on the food, and kicked my leg under the table.
I didn’t want to go home after dinner. She’d warned me to behave, and I failed. When we got home, Mama hit me with her wooden paddle, holding me by the back of my shirt. Whack! Whack! Whack!
“You think you’re so smart! I’ll show you for shaming me. Count these out!” she said.
Tears ran in my mouth and I couldn’t keep count with the smacks. “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen….”
“Count louder! I can’t hear you!”
The blows fell harder and faster, and I screamed to her to please stop. She counted out the last few herself, “Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five!”
She didn’t talk to me for a few days after that. I had embarrassed her in front of her father. Mama had told me before that he was the best father in the world, and I was to be a good girl around him so that he would see she was a good mom.
He took Grandma and Mama out shopping about a month later, while I stayed at the house with a babysitter. When they returned from the mall, Grandpa said he had a surprise for me. A surprise! Oh boy! I jumped up and down.
“What is it? Let me see!” He held out a new doll.
My grandparents had been fighting in the car the whole way home about this doll, and Grandma was still protesting.
“That’s not a doll for a little girl! I told you not to buy it!”
He ignored her and gently put the fancy doll in my hands. She wore a green, velvet dress, and her brown hair was long and sleek, braided with ribbons and silk flowers. Her name was Mary Jane.
In a sugar-sweet voice, Mama said to Grandma, “It’s ok, Mom.” And then she turned to me, “Look at what Grandpa bought you CeeCee! Isn’t she pretty? You will take good care of her, won’t you?”
It was the first doll I owned. She was beautiful. I loved her because Mama looked at me when she said the doll was pretty.
Weeks later, Grandma bought me a huge Kewpie doll. “Now this is the type of doll a little girl would want to play with,” she announced with a look towards Grandpa.
The Kewpie doll was the size of my friend’s two-year-old sister. I bit my lip when I saw how my grandparents watched me closely, waiting to see which doll I chose to play with. I didn’t want to lose the love of either of them, so I carried both dolls slung under my arms.
Kewpie was heavy and wore real baby clothes and my old brown shoes. I had green play-doh stuck in the bottom of those shoes. One night in my room, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pretended she was hugging me good-night. Her arms were hard though, so I pushed her away from me, disappointed.
Sometimes I brought Kewpie to the Smith’s house. They were Mama’s friends, and I stayed with them if I wasn’t at preschool. They had a three-year-old daughter, Chelsea, and we watched Captain Kangaroo on their black-and-white TV, sitting on a messy sofa that was half-covered with piles of unfolded laundry. One time as Chelsea and I played with our dolls together, she grabbed for my doll’s dress when I was changing her, and wouldn’t give it back.
I pulled on it, “It’s mine! Give it back!”
We had a tug-of-war over the pink baby dress. She wouldn’t let go, so I boxed her ears. Her mom ran into the bedroom when Chelsea screamed and rushed to comfort her. I stared, as Holly scooped her daughter up onto her lap. She gently smoothed the hair back off of Chelsea’s forehead and kissed her. There was a lump in my throat when Holly wiped her daughter’s tears; I didn’t know a mother’s hands could be so gentle. She cuddled her daughter, and I looked away. A deep hollow echoed inside me.
Holly turned to me defensively. “Do you want your ears boxed?” I shook my head no. She asked, “Do I need to tell your mom?”
“Please don’t tell her,” I begged. Holly didn’t like me anymore and I couldn’t fix it, even by saying that I was sorry.
Chapter 5
~The Brown House~
When I was four-and-a-half, Mama and I moved out of the city apartment and into a small country town in Pennsylvania. I still didn’t see Dad and didn’t understand why.
Our new home had brown shingles that covered all the sides. The owner met us there and gave Mama the keys while I ran around the outside and counted out the five windows. The owner was an old woman in a plaid shirt and blue jeans named Mrs. Perkins.
She puffed out her chest and said, “This house has been home to many generations of the Perkins family.”
I squinted at the brown house. They must have been small to fit so many in there.
Mrs. Perkins lived at the bottom of the hill, down the black top road that twisted past our home. I spent hours running over all the hills near the house, because Mama wanted me to stay outside all the time. My hair bleached white from the time in the sun.
A few weeks later someone dropped off two kittens at our house, one all black and one striped gray. The black kitten tried to scamper up the lilac tree, its tiny nails getting stuck in the bark. It tried to free itself with little jerks, and Mama laughed. She pulled its nails out of the tree and held it against her face.
“Such a sweet baby!”
Mama sat in the sunshine on the front stoop, and stroked the kitten.
“Such a pretty girl, such a good girl.”
I stood quiet under the lilac and watched hungrily.
She brought the kittens inside, and I escaped to my meadow, scrubbing the tears from my eyes.
The field always made me feel better. I’d run through the tall grass and squeal at the spit bugs that made my tan legs wet. Or, watch a daddy-long-leg as he picked along the ground with thread-like legs. My favorite part was lying back in the grass. It towered around me in waving green walls, giving me a rectangular window of the blue sky.
One day, Mama said to me, “Go on down to your aunt’s house. Your cousin’s going to meet you.”
Our little brown house was a few miles away from Mama’s sister and the cousins. Mama often sent me to walk to their house during the years we lived there.
I felt brave walking down the paved road that ran by my house. The hot sun melted the black tar in the asphalt and it stuck to the bottoms of my shoes. My littleness felt magnified every time a car rushed past me as the wind tugged at my clothes and hair. I was scared to walk on the road by myself, afraid I might get lost, but couldn’t say that to Mama. My blue sneakers walked the white line like a tightrope with my arms flung out to balance. I am big enough for this wide world. I take care of myself.
After about a mile-and-a-half, I turned left onto a dirt road. Christy was already halfway up the road to meet me. I ran up to give her a hug, and we walked with arms linked together. The maple tree branches touched overhead, making a long autumn tunnel. It was rare for a car to travel down it, and the deep tire ruts were hidden beneath a thick carpet of orange maple leaves. We jumped and crunched through the leaves and swung broken branches through the bushes on the side of the road.
“What was that?” she said, making her eyes big to scare me. She ended up spooked herself, so we sang made-up nursery rhymes at the top of our voices to drown out any creepy forest noises. That night, my aunt packed me in her car and dropped me off at my home. My smile fell off my face as I walked through the front door. Mama was still cuddling her kittens as I hurried to my room.
I had a sick stomach the next day, and preschool wouldn’t take me. Mama rushed around the house trying to get ready.
“Walk over to Shelby’s house. She’s going to watch you today,” she said, whipping a brush through her hair.
I nodded and put my blue sneakers on, the laces flapping as I ran out the door.
Shelby was a teenager who lived on the other side of the thick woods that sat on the far side of the hill. The trail to her house was muddy and thin, and wove like a snake through the dark woods. The fallen leaves didn’t crunch here. Instead, they lay in brown wet piles at the base of the trees, and the smell made me feel even sicker. I hurried along the trail and tried not to imagine the big bad wolf I had learned about in preschool.
Shelby opened the back door right as I shot out of the woods. She watched me run across her back yard.
She leaned out and yelled, “What’s the password? Just kidding, come on in.”
We went through the laundry room where I left my sneakers next to a pair of rubber boots. I followed her to her bedroom, and my mouth dropped open. Her room was filled with a rainbow of colors-- shoes, jewelry, and stuffed animals-- and her clothing overflowed out of the dresser. She had a frilly bed with a pink bedspread and bed ruffle that came from the store. I had never seen anything like it.
She caught me staring, and said, “It’s called a canopy. I’ve had it for years.” She flicked the lace with her finger. “It’s getting too young for me now.”
She handed me a plastic bag off of the bed. “Here’s some stuff I’ve outgrown, just a couple things.”
I flipped through the bag. Among the clothing was a black-and-white dog lamp. I giggled when I saw it, never thinking I could own such a prize.
Just then, my stomach gave a squeeze of nausea, so Shelby told me to go lie on the couch. I nibbled on saltines all day and stared at an ugly painting of a black vase filled with flowers that hung on the wall.
That night, when I got home, I tore through the bag to look for the dog-lamp. But it wasn’t there-- a large hole was. Somehow, I had lost my treasure on the trail when I hurried home in dread of the shadow monsters. I sunk to my bed and started to cry.
When Mama picked me up from preschool the next day, my aunt was in the car next to her, and bags of groceries were in the back seat. At our house, I scrambled out of the car after my aunt through the passenger door. She didn’t see me and slammed the heavy door shut on my finger.
Pain exploded to my elbow. I didn’t make a sound, instead gasped and tried to pull myself free. My aunt turned around and yelled, “Hurry up! What the heck is your problem?” Her eyebrows flew up when she saw my finger pinched white in the door. I cried as she wrenched the car door open, and my finger throbbed. Mama walked away into the house. My aunt examined my finger and hustled me into the kitchen. I whimpered when she held my hand under the cold water.
A week later my nail dangled and was an awful shade of purple. Chelsey’s dad examined it when we went over for dinner.
“Would you like me to pull it off?”
I nodded, and he took me into a dark room.
“This will just take a second, don’t cry.”
He ripped it off. It came off so quick I didn’t have time to wince. I put the nail in my pocket, and that night, taped it to my cardboard kitchen oven at home.
Several weeks later, Preschool was closed for a holiday. Early the next morning Mama got me up before the sun was up.
“Hurry and get ready. You’re coming to work with me.”
She did the billing at the local auto parts shop. When we walked into the big, dirty building, the bright fluorescent lights hurt my eyes. I had to trot to keep up with her, but was too excited to care. The bland room was a let-down, with only an old desk and wall of gray filing cabinets.
She gestured to the desk, “Climb under there.”
I looked at the small space with my fists over my mouth. She snapped her fingers in impatience. I crawled under the desk, quickly turning around to look out.
She bent down and said, “Don’t make a sound, or I’ll get fired.”
Her hand appeared several minutes later holding a pencil and a small square of paper. I smiled at her gift. I’m going to make her a pretty picture!
She scooted her chair in and blocked the bright office light. I blinked my eyes to adjust to the dark. Mama wore a skirt, and when she turned to answer the phone, her bare legs moved from one side to the other, brushing against me.
She didn’t like that and whispered in an angry tone, “Don’t touch them!”
I curled my body up a little more into the corner while I used the back of the desk to draw on.
Hours later, my pretty picture had collapsed into a messy, dark drawing because every inch of the paper had been colored on. I was hungry, and cramped, and had to go to the bathroom. I squirmed, hoping the coast would be clear soon, so that we could go home.
One Saturday soon after that day, she rushed around the house to get dressed. She put on a cute skirt and her favorite strappy sandals. There were beads on the toes like little candies.
“Let’s go,” she said, and I climbed into the back. We drove for a long time. The sun heated the vinyl so I scooted to the other side of the seat.
Mama pulled into a driveway and we got out. Before Mama knocked on the door, she smoothed down her long hair and put a bright smile on her face. It was rare when I saw her smile, and I loved to see it appear, like a magic trick. She didn’t knock on the door, but walked right in. Everyone greeted her with loud cheers. I walked behind her with a big smile, like I was with a famous person. She flicked her finger towards the kitchen and told me to wait there for her and stay quiet.
I sat on a kitchen stool waiting for Mama to finish her visit and studied the room. The window by the sink was filled with stained glass animals, and seashells. My stomach growled, and I giggled, poking at it, trying to make it growl
more. When that no longer worked I leaned back to look through the doorway into the living room to see what the grownups were doing. My room was quiet and dark, and their room was loud with laughter and men’s voices. I watched for a few minutes, they kept laughing but I didn’t understand what was so funny. Grown-ups are weird.
A man walked into the kitchen and grabbed a bag of chips. I sat up quick, heat flooded my cheeks at being caught looking into the grownup room. He came over to me.
“Hey kiddo, you want something to eat? Want some chips?”
Was Mama watching? I snatched the food and shoved it into my mouth with a mumbled thank you.
Mama looked around the corner, and caught me chewing. She spanked me that night.
“What did I say about bothering my friends?”
I screamed I was sorry, and couldn’t sit down when she finished.
She took me with her to another party a few weeks later. I rested my head on the table, tired. My legs hurt from dangling, and I drummed them against the chair. Mama and another lady came in to get a beer, so I sat up. Mama’s friend brought over a glass of ice water and a carrot for me. I peeked at Mama, and she nodded. I took a big bite out of the carrot, and crunched it fast, and then took a gulp of the water, and inhaled an ice cube. Choking, I hopped off my chair. Mama popped the cap off a beer, and handed the opener to her friend. I clawed at my throat, and tried to gasp that I couldn’t breathe. Mama stared at me with owl eyes, but she didn’t move. Her friend came over and rubbed my back to soothe me.
“You’re ok honey, it will go down, don’t worry.”
The friend hurried to the sink and ran the hot water until it was steaming. She filled a glass for me to drink. “Drink this, it will push it down.”
I tried to drink it while she continued to rub and pat my back. The ice cube slid down, and I burst into tears. I looked for Mama, but she wasn’t there. The friend patted my back for another second.
“You’re all right,” Mama’s friend said, before disappearing through the kitchen door.
