In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  Nothing. Some glaring back and forth.

  She bolts up and tries scrambling out the door, but Felicia puts her knee in front of it. The camper is pretty small. I do know Stephanie’s a fierce fighter when the situation calls for it. She’s been known in rare instances to lay Felicia flat, due to the fact that she’s fighting out of desperation instead of for recreation. I’ve seen it happen over at my own house, with me going unexpectedly nuts on my sister.

  “Do you want one?” I ask casually. “Because we have an extra.”

  I pick up Freckles and set him on my knee; he turns his face toward me without opening his eyes and makes a hoarse purring noise for a couple of breaths, then bows his head again. Felicia reaches for Strout, who climbs nimbly up her front and begins kneading, cradled against her T-shirt. In the corner, Ruffles has jammed himself between a cushion and the canvas wall and is staring resolutely at nothing. Long spiky fur frames his face like a lion’s mane.

  “That one is extra?” Stephanie says uncertainly. “He isn’t anybody’s?”

  “Ruffles is his name,” I tell her.

  “He named after a tater chip,” she says childishly, pursing her lips into a sly, annoying pout. This is not one of her best traits—that she reverts to baby talk anytime she’s pleased about something. Fortunately, she isn’t pleased that often.

  “Your kitten,” I explain quickly, “is not like these ones, which are friendly. Yours is independent.” I try to make it sound like a good thing.

  “He my kitty,” she says, curling her fingers over so her hands look like blunt little paws. “He my baby kitty.” She hops up on the cushion and crawls toward him on her paws and knees, at which point Ruffles rises up with a hiss, bats her about the face, runs up on top of her head, and leaps to the ceiling, where he hangs from the canvas, growling.

  There’s a knock on the camper first thing the next morning. Before we can answer it, Phyllis pushes the door open and sticks her head in.

  “All right,” she says. “Show me these cats.”

  Felicia is on one side and I’m on the other; we crawl from our bunks and shake out our sleeping bags, pick up the pillows and hold them under our arms. Felicia nudges open the cabinet under the sink and Phyllis glances in.

  “She was scratched,” she says in a scandalized voice. “So I don’t want to hear that she made it up. If there were cats and one of them is sick, you better tell me about it right now. I’m waiting.”

  The carpeting is orange and gray, a loud, spongy pattern. Felicia’s sleeping bag slumps but nothing falls out of it. There are no kittens here.

  “You cannot keep cats in a camper, and you cannot keep them in the house. We have people who are allergic to cats here.” Namely her.

  Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats. Cats.

  “I’m sick over this,” my mother says when I wander through my own back door. It’s Saturday, so she’s home stirring up a domestic crisis: homemade noodles hang everywhere in the kitchen, from the towel racks, from the curtain rods, over the backs of chairs. She’s got a cigarette in the ashtray and one between her fingers.

  “You have two cigarettes going at once,” I tell her.

  “Yesterday I’m calling Phyllis and today she’s calling me,” she continues, “and you two are supposed to be teenagers. If you don’t have any more sense than to harbor some kind of feral cats, I don’t know. And neither does Phyllis. We’re both fit to be tied.”

  I take a long, limp worm to eat—the floury dough looks somehow like sugary dough, even though I know it isn’t.

  “You eat raw noodles, they’ll make you so ill you won’t know what hit you,” she says. This isn’t true; I’ve been eating raw noodles for years, every time thinking they’re going to taste good. “Phyllis’s of the opinion you’re late bloomers; I told her the hell with that. I want you to quit pulling this kind of shit and act your age, both you and Flea.”

  I hate the phrase late bloomers. It sounds old fashioned and vaguely rank, like something a prairie woman would wear under her sweaty calico dress.

  I curl my fingers under and hold out my paws. Me little baby.

  She stares, smoking, until the phone rings. “Oh, I’m just standing here talking to this kid of mine,” she explains to the caller, still eyeing me, “telling her she better watch out.”

  I take my bird outside to the picnic table to clean his cage. My dad is staking tomato plants, tearing a sheet into narrow strips.

  “He was sure singing this morning, honey,” he calls to me. “I took his cover off, and boy, did he go to town.”

  I’ve had a lot of birds in my life—green and blue parakeets, zebra finches, and singing canaries like this one—which is one reason I can’t have a kitten. I did have a temporary cat once, a stray from the neighborhood named Inky, who came by of an evening and let me wrap him in a pink doll blanket and put him to bed in an empty window box on the front porch. Eventually he broke into the house and was discovered by my mother, draped over the bird cage, one long black arm inside, groping for the canary, who was clinging to his cuttlebone.

  That cat Inky was never seen again, and a determined, unapologetic silence would settle over my parents whenever his name was brought up. I still have the pink doll blanket with his hair on it in a box that contains other keepsakes—a little hat I wore in kindergarten that had yarn pigtails and a girl’s face embroidered on the back of the head, a drawing of my grandfather in heaven sitting across from God at a two-legged table, and a fan letter I wrote to Tramp from Lady and the Tramp.

  The canary loves the sunlight, although he can easily bake in it, and begins trilling wildly as I replace the newspaper, sprinkle gravel on it, sand off each of his perches, and pry the hardened crap off his swing. On second thought, I remove the tray again and put a bowl of water in there. My dad comes over and we watch the canary take a series of blustery, cage-soaking baths.

  “Now he’s really going to sing for you,” my dad predicts, but he actually doesn’t, and my dad goes back to tearing the sheet into bandages. It’s 10 A.M. and he’s already been drinking.

  * * *

  Since it’s Saturday, Felicia and I are walking downtown to look at our clothes. We’ve fallen into a vast pit of depression over our troubles—collapsing kitten, burned boy, incarcerated outfits—and barely talk most of the way. At Weigandt’s we order our food and sit silently until it comes, carried aloft by the teenage waitress, who looks as miserable as us, her dirty hair crammed into pigtails. The bananas are clumped at the bottom of the mayonnaise, and I pry them apart, one by one.

  At the Style we page rapidly through the things on the racks, overcome with the usual desperation to have all of it, even the things that don’t fit. Today they have mix-and-match sweater-vests made to go with items we already own. We stand in the fitting room talking for a long time about whether to add them to our roster of unpaid-for outfits. The saleslady at some point comes in and asks if she can help us.

  “No, thank you,” we whisper through the slatted door.

  When we leave, the sweater-vests are back on the table, folded into soft candy-colored bundles. Outside, there’s a bright headachy glare and a snarl of pedestrian confusion—a gang of grubby boys on Sting-Ray bicycles have hopped the curb and are weaving erratically down the sidewalk, terrorizing the townsfolk. Right in the middle of them is Derek. We brace for the worst, but instead of coming after us, shouting cusswords, he gives a shy surprised grin and, steering with one hand, extricates himself from the snarl of bikes, turns around, and rides back to us.

  “Hi,” he says, still smiling, lifting his free hand in a sheepish wave. The hand is thickly and inexpertly bandaged, already dirty and unraveling. The tips of his fingers look pink and exposed.

  “Um, are you coming to babysit us on Monday?” he asks. He smiles again, a strange and compelling sight—Derek Kozak smiling!—and then waits for the answer.

  “We were fired,” I tell him.

  “And/or quit,” Felicia says.

  “No,
no,” Derek explains. He looks nervous and eager. “We-we-we want you to babysit us again. If you don’t come on Monday, my m-m-mom is leaving and never coming back.” The smile creeps wider across his face, stretching everything in the wrong direction and making a white ring around his mouth.

  “My mom says that all the time,” I tell him.

  “Ha,” he says flatly.

  Silence. Derek’s friends are circling in the street, trying to knock one another off their bikes. While he’s waiting, he tries wrapping his bandaged palm around the handlebar but can’t bend the fingers. He winces, then places it gingerly in his armpit.

  “She said if you show up, you’re getting a raise and my dad has to pay it,” he says dully. “And if you don’t, she’s leaving with Wanda to go down to Wanda’s mom’s house in Arkansas. And will not come back.”

  We walk, and he pedals slowly alongside us for half a block, the wounded hand tucked under his wing. At the corner, he takes the bike over the curb and pedals slowly away, no-handed, steering with his shoulders.

  “I thought she was Wanda’s mom,” I say.

  “Food,” Felicia says wearily. Thin chocolate mints from the Candy Shoppe, stacked like dominoes. We buy an eighth of a pound, which is five each, and—it’s boiling hot out—eat them under the awning of a store that sells medical devices and shoes for people with legs of varying lengths.

  “ ‘I stand corrected in my orthopedic shoes,’ ” I quote.

  “ ‘I see butts, says the person under the bleachers,’ ” Felicia answers.

  She can’t even remember the jokes from her own joke book. Under the Bleachers by I. C. Butts. Get it?

  “No,” she says pointedly, and sets out walking again.

  We go up the hill on opposite sides of the street, both of us starting out stomping and ending up crawling. At the top we wave at each other.

  “What’re you having?” she yells.

  “Dumplings and homemade noodles,” I yell.

  “Can I come?” she yells.

  “I want to come to yours,” I yell.

  “Yours,” she yells back.

  “Okay,” I yell.

  She crosses.

  My dad is asleep in the backyard, sitting semiupright in a lawn chair with a beer bottle in his hand and his head dropped forward on his chest. We walk past silently, Felicia staring diplomatically sideways at the neighbor’s shrubbery. Inside, my mother is smoking and setting the table.

  “There,” she says, putting down the final fork. “You can all go to hell.”

  “What did we do?” Meg calls from the other room.

  My mom smiles at Felicia and takes a swallow from a glass of beer. “Here’s somebody who’ll eat my dumplings.”

  “Yeah,” Felicia whispers nervously.

  “Tell your dad dinner’s on the table,” my mother says to me.

  “He knows,” I say.

  “Raymond! Help get your father.”

  Out in the backyard, Ray gets one arm and I get the other and we pull, sending him dangerously over to one side. Ray braces himself against the lawn chair, grunting theatrically.

  “Dad, get up,” he croaks.

  “Huhrr,” my dad says.

  All the neighborhood dogs are watching this with interest, including Tammy, who is on her hind legs at the end of her tether. The dogs’ owners are watching from behind their curtains, out of respect for my father, whom everyone likes.

  “Dad,” I entreat him. “Dad, Dad, Dad. Mom has noodles.” Even if we get him on his feet, we’ll never get him in the house. “Go tell her we can’t do it,” I hiss at Ray.

  “Unh-uh,” he says, jamming his cowboy boots into the dirt and pushing with his back.

  “Dad!” I yell it directly into his ear, causing him to jump dramatically and grimace. I feel sick and terrible now, like I stabbed someone in their sleep.

  I cup my mouth and speak in his ear: “Get up and get in the house, it’s dinner.” And then, because I can’t help myself: “I have company!”

  We tug and he comes off the chair, then gamely lifts one foot after the other as we steer him across the grass and up the steps into the house. At the table, he settles heavily into his place and looks around.

  “Why, hello, Flea,” he says faintly, and falls asleep again.

  My mother ladles food onto everyone’s plate from what seems like a boiling vat of sweat socks. The mood is such that even Raymond takes a few bites. My nerves are shot at this point. I know it’s entirely possible my kitten has died by now—when we put them back in the garage at dawn, the other two ate but Freckles just crawled onto a stack of boards and sat there, shuddering.

  I love that kitten, and if he dies it’s my fault. I will have killed a kitten at age fourteen; the whole rest of my life will be ruined. I get up and go outside to where Tammy is still hovering expectantly at the end of her chain. I unhook her and we walk back in, past the long-necked bottle tipped over in the grass. I fix myself a bowl of cereal and take my place again.

  “She can’t eat a bird with a bird watching,” Meg explains to my mother, who grabs a dish towel, walks through the doorway into the dining room, tosses it over the canary’s cage, comes back, puts my bowl of cereal in the sink, and adds another wad of chicken to my congealing plate.

  “You want to act like a three-year-old? You can sit there until it’s gone,” she says, lighting a cigarette.

  My troubles are accumulating. The dying kitten, waiting in the cobwebby dark for me to come and do nothing, and now the canary, put to bed while it’s still light outside, trapped behind a dish towel, encased in the terrible fate of a bird who has never flown, but who watches all day through the dining room window while other birds land and take off from the clothesline. Sometimes he sings so elaborately and desperately that I have to put my hands over my ears.

  And there’s no way Yvonne can take Miles with her to Arkansas; even if she felt like it, he wouldn’t be able to hold on. A tiny boy in a bad diaper, abandoned in the backyard, fingers gripping the chain-link fence as it gets darker and darker, as Lurch shoves his empty bowl around.

  “She’s bawling,” Meg says, and gets up to remove the cloth from the birdcage. The canary resumes swinging and looking out the window.

  My father wakes up for a second, lifts his fork, and puts it back down. My leg starts shaking and I can’t get it to stop. I start hiccuping, violently.

  “All right now, that’s enough,” my mother says. She removes my plate and makes me a fresh bowl of cereal. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Felicia eats her dumplings carefully, not looking at anyone.

  A half hour later, we have no trouble getting out of dishes or out of the house, although my mother calls me into the dining room before we leave, to ask why sleeping in a canvas box is so appealing to me when I have a bed right upstairs. Also, she doesn’t want me going over there and acting like nobody fed me dinner.

  “And let me ask you this,” she says, whipstitching a hem, squinting against her cigarette. “Don’t you two ever get sick of each other?”

  “We’re sick of each other right now,” I say.

  We stop at the end of her block to rest for a while, lying back against someone’s mossy terrace. It’s a stagnant Saturday night in Zanesville, velvety black and hot. The parochial kid’s light is on and everything is visible but the boy himself—a desk lamp, a picture of Jesus, the top of a cluttered bureau, part of a mirror with a palm frond behind it.

  “His mother should get him some curtains,” Felicia says.

  On a different Saturday night, back when I babysat for the big quiet boy Daniel, his mother had shown me the new curtains she had hung in his bedroom. They were crisp white, with bright farm animals appliquéd on them. They looked like they had been bought at a store, but in fact Lisa had made them herself.

  “He loves anything from a farm!” Lisa had said, bending over Daniel in his railed bed, smoothing his curly hair. When he had a cold, she had demonstrated how to clear his nose, using
a pointed rubber ball and a warm washcloth.

  “Okay,” she told him, pressing on the bulb to create a vacuum and then poking it into his nostril. “Big sniff!” she said in a lilting voice, releasing the bulb and drawing out the contents of his nose, which were deposited in a tissue. It was actually an interesting tool, but I never got good at using it.

  If my kitten had ended up with someone like her, he’d be playing with a ball of yarn right now instead of dying.

  “Hey, wait,” I say, sitting up.

  The camper is dark and mostly silent. Felicia has a habit of sighing in her sleep, like her dreams are disappointing her, and she does that now—sigh, sigh… sigh, sigh—on her back with one arm flung over the edge of the bunk, the inside of her wrist untanned and vulnerable, and the other draped over her forehead. With the sighing, the theatrical arms, the occasional donkey kicks, she has as big a personality asleep as she does awake. I, on the other hand, sleep like a sidekick—on my side. All limbs are kept close to the body for safety reasons, and a tube sock is laid across my face, a holdover from sharing a bed in childhood, when I had to sleep with a pillow over my head, then just the pillowcase, then a hanky, now anything that symbolically makes me think I won’t be hurt while I’m sleeping.

  Footsteps.

  A foot of door is unzipped and Felicia’s dad sticks his head in to look around.

  “Asleep,” he whispers.

  “Poke them,” Phyllis whispers.

  “I can see them,” he whispers.

  They switch places.

  “Girls!” Phyllis whispers.

  Nothing, just the faint couplets of sighing.

  “Girls!”

  I startle up onto my elbows, my sock falling to the floor. “What?” I say, squinting. I can just see the shape of her upper body and head, the moon shining through her teased, Saturday night hair.

  “Oh, nothing, honey,” she whispers. “We were just back and wanted to make sure you were here and all.”