“Nobody likes him?”
“Yeah, no one would vote for him.” She glances at the page. “He told a bunch of his friends to ask around about his”—glance—“chances for winning, but they don’t look good.”
“Interesting.” Sister nods and looks at the class to see if they agree. They don’t. “Does the article say why?”
Nenny looks down again. All she wants to do is sleep, to just sleep through a whole night with no images or dreams or sounds. “They say he’s just running as Prince George, and Texans don’t like that kind of thing.”
“Good. And what do you think?”
Nenny considers the article. It’s called “Daddy’s Boy” and has a little photo of George Jr. on it. He looks handsome but smug, like even in the photo you can tell he’s sure he’ll win. Nenny shrugs. “It seems like he’s just running because his dad is president. And…” She thinks. “I don’t know. That seems like a dumb reason to run for governor.” She’s not even sure what a governor does, but it probably requires more qualifications than just being the president’s son.
“Okay. Thank you, Nenny,” Mary says, and Nenny returns to her seat. Everyone looks terrifically bored. Is this how you measure the size of the world? In drowsy eyes and stifled yawns? The next day Sister Mary hands her article back. On it, she’s written, “Nice work. In the future, don’t be afraid to choose bigger articles,” and given Nenny a B.
Leonard
ON THOSE rare nights when she does sleep, Nenny dreams things no one should have to dream, certainly not a child. Sideways things, abstract things—bloodied teeth at the back of a mouth, or the sun nearing the earth so close they all shrivel up and die. One night she dreams of an angel with bricks for a face, rattling a stick covered in glass bones.
“Daddy?” Tiny says at breakfast, slurping Chex from a spoon. “Who’s that man in the alley?”
“Man in the alley?”
“Yeah. The one with all them cans.”
“Cans?” Dad says and looks at Bubbles. Since Bubbles is the oldest, he’s often tasked with translation. But Bubbles just shrugs and goes back to his cereal.
“The man with the cans,” Nenny says, because she’s seen and heard him too. Late at night, long after everyone’s in bed, a man who is no more than a shadow from her second-story window pushes a shopping cart down the alley behind Citrus Grove, stopping at the bins to pull out bottles and cans. It’s like a song played each night: the clatter of his cart, thump of a bin’s lid, sounds of rummaging, glass breaking other glass, thump of lid, clatter, clatter, noise fading, gone. “The bottles and cans.”
“Oh!” Dad says, as if she’s transcribed ancient Hebrew when all she did was repeat what Tiny said. “That’s Leonard.”
“Leonard?” Tiny says, squinting and confused.
“Yeah, Leonard. The homeless guy,” as if this is a complete description of a man.
Homeless. The word hangs over the table, hovering in the air. Nenny pictures Leonard beneath the canopy of a broken tent, using a pocketknife to open a can of beans, then realizes that everything she knows about homeless people comes from cartoons: trash-can fires and fingerless gloves, fishing for boots, that sort of thing.
Tiny, though, clearly doesn’t get it. “Where does he live?” he asks between bites.
“He doesn’t live anywhere,” Dad says. “He’s homeless.”
Tiny stops, spoon stilled midair. His eyes twitch slightly at the corners and his lower lip juts out. It’s clear this concept, as a possibility, has never occurred to him before.
Now Nenny translates Dad for Tiny. “Homeless people don’t have homes. They sleep outside.”
Tiny turns to Nenny then, a long look on his face. This goes on for a full minute, and Nenny prepares herself to answer his questions about the ways of the world. She’s older, she’s wiser, she knows things. War happens and people kill each other. They’ll look you right in your face and say awful, heartless things. This life is not easy, Tiny. People will hurt you and trample you, they’ll fixate on your weaknesses, belittle and diminish your dreams. People you love will lie right to your face. You’ll be betrayed, stampeded, threatened, told where you come from and exactly where you can go. You think anybody cares what happens to you? Sure, they love you now, they take care of you now—but just wait a few years. Wait till your adorable charm wears off. Then you’ll see what it’s really all about. There is no such thing as grace, Tiny. There is no mercy. It’s just you and everyone else against one another. It’s a brutal and unforgiving world.
But then, before she’s had a chance to explain, he says, out of nowhere, “I caughted a caterpillar yesterday at school,” and that’s the end of that.
Display
WEEKENDS BACK at Mom’s feel like clamps around your ribs, or a firm grip on your head. Things have changed, and the differences are so subtle it’s like water at your toes, rising imperceptibly to swallow you up. On a small table in their room, Kat has set up what can only be called a shrine: a black-and-white photo of Windsor (her hair pulled back, wearing an unfocused and wistful gaze) floats among a sea of loose beads and dried flowers left over from the funeral. Kat refers to her now as “Mom” openly and without reservation, whereas before Windsor’s death the word was like a stone in her mouth, like dirt. But now she says it all the time, at every opportunity—“I found Mom’s old diary” or “I dreamt about Mom again”—as though Windsor is everyone’s mom, as though everyone wants to talk about their mom who is dead.
Charles, on the other hand, is as fixed as a tomb. There’s no writing in his diary like the counselor suggests, no sudden floods of tears. There’s just Charles, stony and closed. It’s as if someone has come along and built a wall smack through the middle of Kensington Drive, and on one side grief is loud and colorful and open, filled with memories and hot, wet tears; on the other, it’s as grey and lifeless as a concrete slab. It doesn’t matter, really, which side you are on. Either, both, could puncture you, shred you in two.
* * *
Sunday morning, Kat comes thumping up the stairs with a box from the garage. “Look what I found,” she says triumphantly and starts emptying it on the bed. “It’s Mom’s old belly-dancing clothes.”
Nenny had no idea that Windsor was a dancer, let alone a belly-dancing one. She tries to picture Windsor on a stage under a spotlight, but all she sees is that leather jacket and her jagged teeth, men throwing cans at the stage like in a cartoon.
The box is filled with all kinds of bangles and jangles, silver and gold bracelets, skirts that touch the floor. Kat pulls them out and examines each one like a museum piece. Her back is to Nenny; she’s facing the mirrored closet, which takes up a whole wall.
“She used to have this sword, this belly-dancing sword,” Kat says, laying things on the bed, “and Charles tried to swallow it. Sliced the roof of his mouth.” She turns to Nenny and points inside her mouth.
The questions arrive in a stampede. When was Windsor a belly dancer? Before or after they were born? Is that how Rick met her? At a belly-dancing show? What was the sword for? How old was Charles when he tried to swallow it? Who tries to swallow a sword, for criminy’s sake?
She would’ve answered too, Nenny knows it—this is one of those moments, one of those rare sister moments—but then Kat suddenly does something unexpected: she begins to take off her clothes. She does it quickly, without unease, as if it’s nothing, as if they undress in front of each other all the time. But the thing is, they don’t. Nenny takes her clothes with her to the bathroom in the morning and does the same when it’s time for bed. It’s a tacit agreement they have, where privacy is an intricate game with unyielding rules. Nenny walked in on Kat once, when she was in the bathroom. All she was doing was curling her hair, but she looked at Nenny with fury in her eyes and said, “Do you mind?” as if curling one’s hair is the most intimate and sacred of acts.
Now Kat stands with her back to Nenny, in just her panties and bra, holding Windsor’s clothes to her frame and turning in the mirror.
Of course Nenny’s seen Kat in a bathing suit before, but this feels different somehow. Her skin is pocked and white, more textured than Nenny would’ve imagined it to be. There are freckles on her thighs and hips, shocking for their color and size, as if someone has pressed their fingers into her and left marks. Nenny’s own skin is suddenly flushed, a hot swirl of anxious strain. She’s being invited to look as if looking’s no big deal, but she does not know where to settle her eyes.
In the mirror, Nenny’s face is blank, like a flower that will never do anything, never open or even close. She stands up and hurriedly grabs her shoes. “I’m going outside.” But why? To do what? Kat doesn’t watch her go. She’s in her own world, turning in that mirror, ever so slow.
The Thing About Fear
THE THING about fear that no one tells you is that it’s like the cup in the myth about Thor: you can drink and drink and you will never be done. Fastidiously, steadily, without consciousness, you can devote everything you have to being afraid. Through dedication—or mere habit, really—fear becomes as hardwired within you as the length of your scrawny limbs or the color of your turd-brown eyes. Fear doesn’t just define you, fear is you: your breath, your eyes, your ears, your mouth. You are the house ablaze. You are the earth being torn apart. You are the masked men, their hunger, their rage. You are the vacant eyes of what really happened in Vietnam.
Until something real happens. When something real happens, you’re not even afraid anymore. Brittle, maybe, or a little coarse. Fear leaves and a kind of anger settles in its place. And you know what? There was never any point! The sleepless nights, the churning in your gut, the gnawed-down fingernails—what a waste! Because the most frightening thing possible will never even occur to you. If anything, that’s what you should fear. That you will never, ever anticipate the thing that all along you should have feared the most.
Confession
SISTER RENATA must’ve begun sowing seeds for what is to come—Communion, confirmation, a lifetime of sit and kneel and stand—because all of a sudden Tiny’s obsessed with the holy rite of confession. It’s all he wants to talk about, pummeling Dad with questions. What do they say in the confession booth? How come a priest is the only one to forgive? What if the priest says no?
“The priest never says no.”
“But what if he does?”
“He doesn’t, Tiny. You’ll always be forgiven, as long as you confess.”
Tiny gets his hands on two large boxes (Mrs. Anderson in 7G got a new oven and fridge) and spends the afternoon taping them together and cutting holes. He begs Dad for an old sheet, insists that it be white, then takes scissors and trims it down.
Nenny’s sitting by the pool when he approaches. He looks ridiculous, like exactly what he is: a six-year-old in a bedsheet robe playing priest. It’s the kind of moment parents adore, taking snapshots to cherish for years—You were so cute in your little robe—but Dad doesn’t take snapshots of anything.
“My child,” Tiny says, hands touching at his chest, “come confess your sins.”
“No thanks,” Nenny says, as if he’s offered her gum. Panic flashes across his face. He glances back at his booth, then around at the empty yard, the lifeless pool. There’s no one else to confess.
He turns back to Nenny, his eyes sad, a boy with no one to forgive. “Pwease,” he begs, and since Boots went somewhere with her mom, and it’s boring under the canopy of palms, and Nenny knows what it feels like to reach and have no one there, she stands and dusts off her pants.
“Fine,” she says, clipping the word so he’ll know what a huge favor this is.
“Yay!” he shrieks and starts to run across the yard.
“Priests don’t run,” she calls, and he grinds to a halt, walking solemnly the rest of the way.
When she gets there, he politely holds the cardboard door open for her. She doesn’t bother to tell him the priest should already be inside. What’s the point of confession if the priest has seen your face? The whole point is you can go in there and spill your stupid sinful guts and the priest won’t look at you funny next time at church.
Nenny wriggles her way into the box. She must admit, given his limited resources, he’s done an impressive job of approximating a confessional. He’s cut the bottom flaps so the boxes rest flat on the ground and run tape along their edges so they share a common wall. He’s cut two corresponding mouth-level holes in each box, his version of the sliding windows in the booth. A plastic crate acts as a stool. Nenny sits and waits for Tiny to settle on the other side. The booth rustles with his movement, as if disturbed by a slight wind, and then, finally, he takes a deep breath, preparing for his role.
“My child, why have you come?” He asks this calmly and without judgment, almost lovingly, and she wonders what movie he got this from. He’s certainly never been to confession before. You’re not allowed to until at least second grade.
“I came because you made me,” Nenny says. She feels his confusion as a slight stir in the box, and then his mouth is at the hole, whispering, breaking the fourth wall.
“No, you sposed to say ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’” he instructs.
I know, stupid, she thinks, but sighs and plays along.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she recites robotically.
He settles back. “And what, my child, is your sin?”
Nenny glances around the box, her lips pursed. She’s always hated confession. What a joke. You sit in some dank box in front of a little window so the priest can’t see your face and you can’t see his, but come on—there’s only so many priests to choose from. If the box reeks like booze, it’s Father Chauncey; if he’s quiet and lets you do all the talking, Father Bill. It’s not rocket science to figure out who’s who. And then you’re supposed to confess your sins, but what sins? Not listening in class? Thinking Katie Marion’s stupid? And then the priest makes the sign of the cross and tells you to count some beads? Please.
“Um, I littered,” Nenny says.
“You littered?” Tiny’s clearly unsure if littering’s a sin, and his confusion is justified because it’s probably not.
“Yeah. I threw a can in a lake or something. At a duck.”
“You throwed a can at a duck?”
“Uh-huh,” and as she says it, Nenny kind of wishes she had. Who knew pretend confession was as boring as real confession.
“You shouldn’t throw cans at ducks. That’s a sin.”
“I know. That’s why I said it.”
He’s silent a minute. Evidently his pretend time in the pretend seminary didn’t quite prepare him for this. “What else?”
“What else what?”
“What other sins?” he asks, tacking on a “my child” as an afterthought.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, something crackles within her. It’s scorching white, and she hates Tiny and wants to hurt him. She feels mean, vengeful—things should be getting better, but they’re not. Everyone should be coming together through their sadness like they do on TV, to form something warmer and close-knit, but they aren’t. It’s a sin to say what she’s about to say, but it’d be a sin not to.
She leans close to the hole. “I killed someone.”
Tiny’s silence is hot and immediate and fierce. “You what?”
“I killed someone. I shot him and left him to die.”
The air in the box is suddenly consumed. That’s what you get, she thinks, but who knows who she’s talking to anymore. Ashes to ashes, you stupid jerks.
A quiet as big as rocks falling.
“No,” Tiny finally says. He’s only six years old, for criminy’s sake. Maybe that’s the biggest sin of all. “Do a different one.”
“A different what?”
“A different sin.” His voice sounds stricken.
Nenny sighs. A game is just a game is just a game until it’s not a game anymore. “I lied. My sin is I lied.”
“About what?” Father Tiny says somewhat hopefully, on the verge of forgiveness
but also unsure.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” she admits.
“And the duck?”
“Yeah, I lied about that too.”
“Okay, good,” he says, pleased. “Say one hundred Hail Marys.”
“That’s too many,” Nenny says.
“It is?”
“Yeah.”
Pause. “Okay. Say ten.”
After that, he doesn’t ask about confession anymore.
Rampage
IT’S BEEN almost three months since Windsor died and nothing changes, nothing’s changing. Everything is shrouded in a terrible mist, everyone floating in their own separate worlds. Tiny makes stuff up, perhaps to escape things as they really are, and Bubbles acts as if the solution lies buried in the guts of some toaster or clock radio. Dad behaves as though he doesn’t know what’s going on. On weekends, Kat is like a ballerina trapped in a box, like a person dancing slowly and sadly to music only she can hear. Mom is distant these days, and there’s no understanding or penetrating Rick. Charles won’t even talk to Nenny, not at home and not at school. “You’ll see each other at school,” Mom’d said, but what happens if no one sees you? What happens if you do not know how to be seen?
It’s Tuesday, and Sister Mary is telling the story of Jesus on the mount. He’s up there praying because he’s scared; all anyone ever does in these stories is pray. That said, Mary does know how to weave a tale. She holds a captive audience, sketching with words the night in the olive grove, small pebbles digging into Jesus’s knees, slow clouds moving across a moonlit sky. Tomorrow Jesus will be crucified, and though they know this story like the backs of their hands, everyone is on the edge of their seats.
Everyone except Nenny. Nenny doesn’t care about Jesus on the mount. Last night the phone rang, and since no one ever calls, Bubbles asked, “Who was that?” after Dad hung up.
“Your mom,” Dad said, back in his paper-grading chair.
Every Other Weekend Page 14
