by Karen Foxlee
Mother said, “I knew it.”
She leapt toward it and had it in her hand before it could ring twice.
“Hello,” she said. “Yes, that’s me.”
There was a long pause then. She looked startled, confused, as though someone had told her a joke that she didn’t understand.
“So,” she said, carefully. “So,” again.
Another pause.
“So do we come now?” she said. “Oh, I see, the morning. Yes.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We have to go to see Dr. Leopold about the blood test in the morning,” Mother said.
Davey said nothing. He looked at his Sea-Monkeys, flipped the page back to the laser-spouting-warship story.
“Okay, Davey?” said Mother.
“Okay,” said Davey.
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” said Mother. But she was lying. I could tell. She was nothing but a Cindy Spink cicada shell filled up with dark heart feelings.
January 12, 1976
Apartment 15, 762 Second Street
Grayford, Ohio 44002
Dear Martha Brent,
I’m writing because the E issues have begun arriving and still there is no sight of the volume covers. Nor was there a reply to my previous letter dated December 13th. Christmas has come and gone and there has been bad news for Davey. There is something wrong with his hormones. We are going on the night bus to Chicago in two weeks’ time to see a special doctor who knows about these things. Davey is a good boy and very brave. Lenore is the best big sister you could ask for. Each day my children check the mailbox to see if the volume covers have arrived. I don’t want to have to tell them that Burrell’s Publishing Company does not deliver what they promise, which was a Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia, completely free.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs. Cynthia Spink
* * *
The Magic Blanket
5’ 3”
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1976
It was true, the Es lay in a pile, volume-coverless. Davey was glued to eagles while I waded slowly through the anatomy of the ear, ecology, economics, and education. The tedium was broken only by embalming which we looked at with frequent furtiveness. Embalming contained a painting of a shadowy room and an embalmer at work upon a pale white body. It was bluish-white that body. It was something turning, something decaying. Looking at it was daring the universe in some way, but I wasn’t sure how.
E contained Earth.
“Been there, know all about it,” Davey said, deadpan, when he saw the two-paged illustration of our blue-green planet. Sometimes he really made me laugh.
El Salvador. The history of enamels. The Etruscans and Europe.
But the rest of Mother’s letter was lies. The lies were piled on thick. We never checked the mailbox every day. We checked on Fridays, when the issues arrived. I was not the best big sister anyone could ask for. Davey was not brave. If I said Peter Lenard Spink in a scary voice he screamed out right away. In that letter, my mother’s high school handwriting had grown rigid and jerky. The whole thing reeked of sadness and rage.
“It’s pretty good,” I said.
“They mightn’t send us any more,” said Davey. “When they get that.”
“Oh, they’ll be sending them to us, all right,” said Mother, “or I’ll drive all the way to Indianapolis and get them myself.”
It was an empty threat. We didn’t have a car.
I’ll take a Greyhound bus to Indianapolis and get them myself, didn’t have the same ring.
I imagined what the Burrell’s headquarters looked like. I saw a dark driveway and a drawbridge. We’d have to shout out our business to the guards. “We’ve come to see about the volume covers.” The drawbridge would lower, and our feet would be loud on the wooden floor.
Inside was half castle, half factory. There were encyclopedias stacked up high to the ceiling. In shadowy corners, authors worked by candlelight. I caught a glimpse of a woman working on beetles. She was surrounded by jars of them and she smiled knowingly at me.
Martha Brent wore an emerald green cloak. She came down the stone staircase and her cloak swirled around her.
“I need pacaranas,” she commanded. “I need the history of painting. I need palmistry, I need Pennsylvania.”
Her minions turned their pages in unison.
“I need beetles, I need biochemistry, I need blue jays.”
I pictured vast libraries in the turrets where the information was sourced. They were large circular libraries, filled to the ceiling high above with books. Ladders reached up into the gloom.
“Lenny,” said Mother. “Earth calling Lenny. Drop this in the mailbox near the bank in the morning, letters go quicker from there.”
Since Dr. Leopold and the blood test, Mother asked about Davey’s head each morning. No one ever mentioned the word tumour. We could say hormones, but not tumour. Mother could not even use the word tumour in her letter to Martha Brent. The word tumour would have added weight to that letter. I figured we would have received the volume covers the next day, special delivery.
Dr. Leopold had said there could be one, on account of all the growth hormone. “Your boy’s got an awful lot of growth hormone,” is what he said. “Could be a tumour on his brain.” That’s why we had to go to the special doctor. But when we got home and I’d mentioned it, when I’d said “What’s a tumour?” Mother had hushed me violently.
“Don’t say it, just don’t say it,” she had whispered in the kitchen, as though just the word might make it real, might make one burn suddenly into existence in Davey’s head. As though the word was magic and I was a tumour-creating magician. “Tumour,” I could say at school and give everyone one. CJ, Matthew Milford, Mr. Marcus.
We didn’t have the Tissues. The Tissues were a long way away.
Davey kept growing. He grew at an alarming rate. His head got bigger. His jaw got bigger. His teeth got bigger. His hands grew. After the visit to Dr. Leopold a new gap appeared between his front teeth, and his two big toes burst out of his sneakers spontaneously. He said his kneecaps ached.
“What do you mean, your kneecaps?” cried Mother. She was only worried about his head. The kneecaps were a new and sinister development.
We walked to school together and puffed our breath out in front of us like dragons. Davey looked at his shoulder and I knew he was looking at his imaginary golden eagle. It annoyed me. I wanted to shout at him but I didn’t in case he had a tumour. I wanted to say, Maybe you’ve got a tumour and that’s why you’re so weird. But I didn’t. Because whatever was inside me seemed powerful. My anger and sadness, a big ball of it, felt electric, white-hot, I felt like I could cause tumours just by looking at people. I was a tumour-spouting laser gun.
We went past the bank, where I mailed Mother’s letter. It looked like such a normal letter on the outside, but Martha Brent didn’t know what was coming to her.
I walked Davey to his class and that took us right past Nurse Sandy’s office. Davey stopped and said hello at her door. He did that because secretly he loved her. He rubbed the toe of one large new sneaker on the ground and looked at her from under his lashes.
“Well hello, Davey,” said Nurse Sandy. “How are you feeling today?”
“I’m feeling just fine,” said Davey.
“Well, I’m glad to see that,” said Sandy Sunshine. “And how are you, Lenny?”
“Great,” I said.
But I wasn’t. I walked the whole way to my class trying not to think about Davey. About the black egg. About him growing so tall that he hit the ceiling. About tumours which in my mind looked like marshmallows but in a sinister marshmallow-y way, a dreadful spongey grey. I disliked Mother. I disliked Davey. I disliked Nurse Sandy. I disliked everyone dancing around the word tumour.
Yes, my mother lied about me in that letter.
“I can’t believe you get to go on a bus,” said CJ. She was playing the drums with two pencils
on her workbook. CJ never stopped playing the drums. Her new blue Junior Ludwig Drum Kit sat in her living room at home right beside the television. And if she wasn’t there with it she used anything she could find to beat out a rhythm.
“I know,” I said. “At night.”
“Will you be gone for weeks and weeks?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Will you write me a letter?”
“Yes,” I said.
Matthew Milford said, “Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-why are you g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g—?”
“Going? Because my brother has something wrong with him that makes him too big. Maybe a TUMOUR. And a special doctor needs to see him.”
It felt good to say that word out loud. I said it extra loud. I watched Matthew’s and CJ’s face. Marshmallow-shaped tumours didn’t suddenly erupt from them.
“Yeah, a tumour,” I said again. Just for good measure.
Matthew appeared satisfied with that explanation. I could tell he had no idea what a tumour was. CJ played with her pencil drumsticks.
“I hope your brother is okay,” said CJ at last.
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” I said.
But in bed that night I saw Davey feeling his head with his fingers. He moved them slowly, creeping them through his hair like he was looking for something.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Everything will be fine, Davey,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
We listened to Frank and Roger and Martin cooing on the dark sill.
“Can you tell me about Great Bear Lake?”
So I did. In this story, we walked up through the Dakotas. It was a long way but we kept going. We slept in barns and railway yards. We ate food that we found. Stuff that Timothy hunted for us. Rabbit cooked over a campfire.
“Could you really do that?” Davey asked.
“We’d have to, Davey.”
“We could save for a bus ticket,” he said.
“How?” I said. We hardly ever got pocket money, no matter how many chores we did for Mrs Gaspar. I sighed in the dark. “And anyway, a bus wouldn’t take us all the way to the Northwest Territories.”
Jefferson City, Lincoln, and into the Dakotas. Just thinking of the Dakotas, I shivered.
“What?” asked Davey.
“Nothing,” I said.
I could feel the cold still air there and the sky all sprinkled with burning white stars and our boots on the hard ground, tramping and our breath rushing out before us.
“Keep going,” he whispered. But I couldn’t. I was stumped. My eyes were tired from staring into my imaginings. Saskatchewan and Yellow Knife and Great Bear Lake shrivelled like fallen leaves. We flew backwards and our hearts lurched and landed right back in our chests. Back in our little room.
Mrs. Gaspar dreamed she found a magical blanket. She was going through her linen closet and she found it there in among all her sheets and pillowcases. It was black with colourful squares and she hadn’t remembered it until she found it.
She remembered she made the squares with her sister. They had sewn them together long before the war, when life was good and there were berries in the fields and dances in the square on Saturday nights and Max Jakab had a motorcycle and she was going to marry him. Before fear. The magic blanket was made before fear.
“But how was it magical?” I asked.
“Just listen and you’ll find out,” said Davey. He was lying on Mrs. Gaspar’s sofa, holding Space Family Robinson.
“Yes, just listen and you’ll find out,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
But her dreams were so long. She would tell me what soup she made next. How she cleaned the magic blanket with a brush made out of some kind of birch twig. I pretended to lose interest. Mrs. Gaspar didn’t care.
“I carried it to the window, dumplings,” she said. “Very carefully. Because I had remembered. I opened the window.”
Davey had closed his eyes, listening, a smile on his face.
Maybe she was going to fly out the window on that blanket? I wished we were in the dream, but she always told us if we were.
“I took that blanket and I shook it out,” said Mrs. Gaspar. She shook out the imaginary blanket in her hand. “And out came the meadow pipits.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Out came the sparrows and the wood pigeons and the night-jars,” she continued. “They flew out the window, all the brown birds, then came the songbirds, the thrushes and warblers, out they poured, singing. All the loons and larks, all the geese and swans. I shook that blanket out until all the birds were gone.”
“Cool,” said Davey.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “How is it magical?”
Mrs. Gaspar ignored me. She looked at her imaginary magical blanket sitting on her lap and she began to cry.
The Night Bus
5’ 4”
LATE FEBRUARY 1976
The night we went to Chicago, Mrs. Gaspar kissed us all on the heads and cried. Her lips were cool and smelled of cigarettes. Davey clutched the falcon and falconry issue to his chest, for the F issues had arrived. For me, fleas, fireflies, false eyes on the backs of beetles and flying ants. For Davey: falcons.
I considered falcon and falconry disappointing but Davey could find no fault with it. There was one colour plate and only two paragraphs on the ancient art of hunting with birds of prey. I wondered if Martha Brent, as well as withholding volume covers, had done it deliberately.
“Don’t cry, Mrs. Gaspar,” said Davey. “We’ll be home in a day or two.”
“Oh, my dumpling,” cried Mrs. Gaspar and she sobbed against his chest because Davey was taller than her now.
Davey smiled at me over her shoulder.
“Okay, then,” said Mother. “We better hurry or we’ll miss the bus altogether.”
Davey extricated himself from Mrs. Gaspar’s shaggy tangerine bathrobe.
“Gootbye, Lenora,” said Mrs. Gaspar. She was much more formal with me. “I will watch you from the window.”
Downstairs Mr King called out to us from the front of his shop. “Take some oranges for the trip,” he said but Mother declined. He ruffled Davey’s hair and told him to behave, which was stupid because Davey was the best-behaved kid in the world. I took a step back so I was out of hair-ruffling reach.
The whole of Grayford seemed stopped by the cold, like a picture, the streets empty and iced. The air caught in my aching throat. Mother and Davey said goodbye to Mr King and we walked to the Greyhound bus station where we’d watched countless arrivals and departures. Now it was our turn.
We’d never been anywhere before.
I looked up and counted windows until I found Mrs. Gaspar’s bedroom window. She waved down at us. I saw a shadow moving in the window next door and knew it was Mr. Petersburg. I looked again, eyes straining in the dark, but the shadow didn’t appear again. I didn’t tell Mother or Davey because they looked too nervous already.
The third window along was our own. It made me think about what it must have been like for Peter Lenard Spink looking up and how small his goodbyes were until he vanished altogether. I sighed right there in the dark.
People stared when we got on. They stared at our little mother in her good jeans and her good coat and me in my navy jacket with glow-in-the-dark toggles and six-year-old man-sized Davey with his slicked-down hair and his new good pants and shirt and tie. We looked over-dressed on the Greyhound bus, like we were going to church. Mother had a paper bag filled with food. Most of it was for Davey because he ate so much.
“That’s a mighty big boy you got there,” said the driver when we passed.
“He has a condition,” said Mother. “We are going to Chicago to see a doctor.”
She said it in her small polite Cindy Spink voice like she was being interviewed on channel five about an accident she saw.
We proceeded down to our seats. Davey and I on one side of the aisle, Mothe
r on the other side next to a bald man.
“You look a lot like Kojak,” said Davey loudly. “I’m Davey.”
“Hush, Davey,” said Mother.
Somewhere someone whispered, “She said he has a condition.” But then the bus engine started up and it hummed our bottoms on our seats and we were off. Mother clutched onto the seat in front of her like she was on a fairground ride. She looked scared, but the truth was that it was good to go somewhere. I couldn’t stop my heart from hammering in my chest. The city became suburbs, and Second Street changed somewhere from a big street to a little street and then to a highway, and on either side the suburbs melted away to frosted fields and pastures. There were red barns glowing in the moonlight like in storybooks. Another city rose up once and then towns in the cornfields like prickle patches and we ploughed straight through them.
We were on the bus for a night, and when we arrived at our destination, we were crumpled versions of our previous selves. Davey’s back ached when he unfolded himself. He said so himself and he never complained. All the way to the doctor’s office I could still feel the bus rushing and swerving inside me.
The doctor’s name was Professor Cole and he didn’t look like the type to deal with giant boys. Professor Cole was normal sized, but old and stooped and the sleeves of his white coat were crinkled. “David Spink,” he said. “David Spink.”
“You say there are tall people in the family, then, Mrs. Spink?”
“Yes,” said Mother.
He had gold-rimmed spectacles and he looked to me like someone who should sit at a table mending dusty clocks or building ships out of toothpicks.
“Hello, David,” he said in a voice so soft that Davey had to turn his ear toward him.
Professor Cole asked Davey to bend his head forward and searched through Davey’s clumps of fair hair slowly. He looked at Davey’s ears. He held Davey’s forehead, his brow, he looked at his jaw, in his mouth, up his nose. He muttered things: Interesting. Epiphyseal. Scoliosis. Should be straightforward. That’s quite the femur. I see. Six, you say? When did he start this growing business?
