“Sixth graders, imagine that you are pack rats,” Mr. Tyler said. “What would you include in your personal midden heaps? Go back to your desks and think of objects that are precious to you. Make a list of them. Your list will be your two-dimensional midden heap.”
I went back to my desk and lifted up the desktop to its highest degree of openness and rooted around with my hand in an attempt to find my notebook. Loose-leaf paper floated to the floor around me. I rummaged around and stuck myself with a pushpin, the same pushpin I had lost weeks ago. Weeks ago, at the moment I realized that the pushpin had been lost in the darkness of the well, I had made a mental note: This pushpin will come back to haunt you. And there it was. I pulled my hand out and sucked the blood off the tip of my ring finger, where the pushpin had pushed in.
This was my list:
1. The bottle cap that I keep rolled up in a sock in my top bureau drawer. It’s the cap to the first bottle of Orangina I ever drank, and my father bought it for me when we were in Syracuse at the Carousel Mall. He put me on the carousel. I rode around and around, and every time I rode around, there was my father, waving. Then he bought me the Orangina, which I had never drunk before but had always wanted to.
2. A letter that my mother’s sister Eva sent her from summer camp. She’s my mother’s older sister, and I found the letter in a shoebox in the back of my parents’ closet.
Dear Mildred,
You will love camp when you come next year! My counselor is the best, and I am going to keep my fingers crossed that you get her too! We sleep in bunks and I am on the top. You can buy one candy bar a day from the canteen. You will love it here! Don’t be scared, because I will be coming back next year too, so you will have a sister in case you get scared.
XXXXXOOOOO, Eva
“Mom?” I said after I found that letter and took it to my room. “Do you get scared?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sometimes.”
“Of what?”
“Well, I’m not a big fan of lightning, to be honest. Now that you’re old enough to understand lightning on its own terms, I can tell you that. When you were little and scared of it, I used to pretend how much I loved lightning and thunder.”
I wanted to tell my mother that I too get scared, terribly scared, and how much I want to be brave, but I didn’t.
3. An empty box, tiny, with a hinged lid. It’s made out of wood. I found it behind the Twin Churches when Sally and I were cutting through the woods on our way to Nine Mile Trailer Park.
4. The Rome Observer-Dispatch from the day I was born.
I remember watching Sally work on her list too. She doesn’t like lists, but since it was an assignment, she had to make one. Her desk well was no doubt messless. Sally has little tolerance for disorder.
I tried to imagine what Sally might be putting on her list.
1. Something to do with hair. Maybe the first barrette her grandmother had ever given her?
2. Her first jump rope, the one she used to lead her imaginary dog, Roscoe, around with.
3. The dictionary that she won in the fourth grade at the state spelling bee in Syracuse.
4. Her meander stick.
5. The miniature chair that she got from one of the lumberjacks at the lumberjack show in Old Forge. Willie took us up to that show one summer. We were seven, the age of reason, the age we met. First we ate pancakes at Key’s Pancake House, then we went to the lumberjack show.
6. A chocolate-covered sprinkle doughnut from a long-ago Sunday, uneaten and preserved for posterity?
But I didn’t know what Sally was really putting on her list. I couldn’t even be sure that the objects I had put on my mental midden heap were the objects I truly wanted there.
If pack rats were people, they would be list people, like me.
“Mom?”
“Edwina?”
My mother often answers me that way. Instead of “Yes?” or “What?” she’ll say my name.
“Would you say that most people are equipped for this world?”
My mother was folding towels on the living-room couch. All our towels are yellow, because yellow is my mother’s favorite color.
“Are most people equipped for this world?” my mother repeated thoughtfully.
She finished folding a towel. She shakes each one out with a snap before she folds it. She laid the folded towel on top of the pile and smoothed the stack with her palm. The sun streamed in through the living-room window, and the pile of towels suddenly looked very beautiful to me.
“I think that most people figure out ways to cope with the world,” my mother said. “Maybe that’s a better way to put it.”
She folded another towel. I watched her hands hover over the towel stack, and I knew she was debating whether or not to put the new towel on top of the stack or start a new stack. She started a new one, right next to the old one.
“We come into the world with no real defenses,” my mother said. “We’re pretty much helpless, as infants.”
I pictured a newborn baby like the kind I sometimes saw in BJ’s or in the diner. Mostly they slept. Occasionally they screamed, with their tiny faces squinched up and bright red.
“In the beginning, you have your parents to take care of you,” my mother said. “And that works for a while. But after a while, you’re more or less on your own. And if you haven’t figured out ways to defend yourself, the world is a difficult place to live in.”
The second towel stack was approaching the same height as the first. My mother likes to save up all the dirty towels so she can wash them all at once, one giant yellow load.
“I’m not talking just about ways to defend yourself against people who might say mean things to you, want to hurt you in some way,” my mother said. “I’m talking about the world itself, the sadness in it, the way it can be so unfair.”
I could tell she was choosing her words carefully. She had vowed never to lie to me.
“Sometimes I think that Jill never figured out how to protect herself from that kind of sadness,” my mother said.
My mother finished folding the last towel. I looked out the living-room window at the sun, spreading fingers of light across the Sterns Valley. When I was little, I used to think light like that, in rays that play across the valley, looked like the legs of an unknown giant being, walking across the foothills and the valley and the meander and the trees next to our house. I used to think those rays were a glimpse into heaven. I used to ask my mother where heaven was.
“Where do you think heaven is, Edwina?” she always said.
Then I started asking what heaven was.
“What do you think heaven is, Edwina?”
My mother answers questions with questions.
A few days later my mother and I drove up to BJ’s Foods in Remsen, the same as we do every week. When the milk runs out, it’s grocery day.
My mother takes the big cart and starts in the soup and noodles aisle.
I get one of the green baskets and go straight to produce. My job is to pick out whatever vegetables and fruit I think we might like, enough to last us until the milk runs out.
Among the fruits and vegetables is where I like to be. All the beautiful colors: purple eggplant, orange carrots, green broccoli, red apples. When we made our color wheels in first grade, I made mine in the colors of vegetables.
That day, an old man was in BJ’s, picking out apples. His hands shook the way some old people’s hands shake. He could hardly hold a single apple. There was a pyramid of them, and the old man tried to pick one up from the bottom row, and the whole pyramid fell. Apples tumbled every which way. The old man kept turning his head to look at the apples rolling all over the swept floor of the vegetable section. A feeling flickered through me, the same shadow feeling that I had felt that day on the school bus when I had willed Willie to appear and she had not appeared.
I ran after the apples and picked them all up. I wished I could pick them all up and pile them back into their pyramid, undo what had happened,
so that the old man would not have to stand there like that with that look on his face.
When I was done, and the apples were heaped back onto their apple shelf not in a pyramid, just in a heap, I looked up and Jill was standing next to me, looking at the old man. He had that look on his face. His hands were still trembling.
“Jill,” I said. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say, which is how awful it was seeing the old man like that, an empty plastic bag in one trembling hand.
She knelt down next to me and put her arm around me.
“It’s hard, isn’t it, Eddie?” she said. She tucked my hair behind my ear. “It’s so hard, sometimes.”
I had never heard Jill’s voice before.
The next time I was at Sally and Willie’s house, I felt as if I were carrying a secret inside me.
I wanted to tell Sally about the old man and the tumbling apples. I wanted to tell Sally about her mother’s voice that day in the produce section, how quiet it was, how gentle.
What I really wanted to talk about was Jill, how she had been fifteen when she had Sally, how when you think about it, she had been only three or four years older than we are now. I wanted to talk about sadness, and unfairness, and defenses.
But I didn’t know how.
“Sally, do you remember the first day we met?” is what I heard myself saying.
We were sitting in her living room, not doing anything. Sally didn’t want to play Monopoly. She didn’t want to jump rope. She didn’t want to go see how the blue bicycle was doing. She didn’t even want to do earth science experiments in the kitchen.
Willie was upstairs, taking a nap. I had never known Willie to take a nap before.
“The day we met?” Sally said. “What day was that?”
“The first day of second grade, of course.”
“No,” Sally said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Then she said it again.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sally. The first day of second grade, back by the hedgehog cage.”
She gave me a look.
“You and I didn’t meet in second grade,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “We met on the very first day of second grade, when Mrs. Lattimore sat us together at that table back by the hedgehog cage.”
“No, we didn’t.”
She kept looking at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
We sat there, silent in her living room, while the sky turned orange and pink over the foothills to the west. William T. Jones’s house on Jones Hill glowed white for a second as the sun dropped. I looked at Sally and she looked right back at me.
I wanted to talk about the first day of second grade, and the dress Willie had worn, bright green with yellow polka dots, swinging around her like a tent. All of us second graders watched Willie standing and laughing with the teacher, Sally-the-new-girl holding her hand and wearing a dark jumper and standing slightly behind her grandmother, so that a fold of bright green cloth half-covered her. The brightest thing about Sally was her hair, her beautiful hair, falling in two smooth braids on either side of her face. I wanted to talk about the bicycle tree.
What I wanted to talk about was Willie, about the disease in her blood.
I snapped my purple rubber band and tried again.
“There was a hedgehog cage, and there was a hedgehog in it, and the hedgehog’s name was Hedgy. Sally! Come on! You’re the one who named it.”
“I would never give any animal such a stupid name.”
There was a look in her eyes.
“That would be like calling a cat Catty or a sheep Sheepy,” Sally said. “I would’ve chosen a much better name for the second-grade hedgehog, had there ever even been a hedgehog in second grade.”
“Okay,” I said carefully. “You don’t remember Hedgy, and you don’t remember the table with the name tapes on it. Do you remember being in Mrs. Lattimore’s class at all, then?”
“I wasn’t in Mrs. Lattimore’s class for second grade; I was in Mr. Marconi’s.”
She smiled.
“Mr. Marconi was really nice. Every Friday he gave us the choice of a popcorn party or extra recess.”
I stared at her.
“We all loved Mr. Marconi.”
I thought, Is this what happens when a person loses her mind? Is this what a nervous breakdown is?
Because there is no Mr. Marconi. There never has been a Mr. Marconi. Sterns Elementary is a tiny school in a tiny town in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, and there is only one second-grade teacher. And that second-grade teacher is Mrs. Lattimore, and like it or not, every single second grader in Sterns Elementary is taught by Mrs. Lattimore.
“How can you not remember Mr. Marconi?” Sally said. “His classroom was right across the hall from Mrs. Lattimore’s.”
Her eyes were looking away from me, out the kitchen window that looked onto the foothills in the distance. She smiled, as if she was remembering a happy day in Mr. Marconi’s class, a day with a popcorn party or extra recess, a day that never happened.
“Why would someone not talk?”
“Why would someone not talk?” my mother said. “Are you talking about a hypothetical someone, or are you talking about Jill Hobart?”
It was no use trying to hide something from my mother.
“I’m talking about Jill Hobart,” I said.
“I don’t know,” my mother said.
“Does she have a complete tongue?”
My mother looked at me.
“What do you mean, ‘Does she have a complete tongue?’”
I shrugged.
“I read in the medical encyclopedia that if you’re missing part of your tongue, it’s hard to talk, is all,” I said.
“I imagine it would be.”
“For example, it could have been chopped off in an accident,” I said. “Jill could have been sitting in the front seat of a car that came to a very abrupt halt right while she was in the middle of taking a bite of a sandwich, and her teeth could have gone right through her tongue and chopped off the end of it.”
“Have you been spending a lot of time thinking about this?” my mother said.
I shrugged again.
“Have you made a list?”
I shook my head.
I had, though. I had made a list of possible reasons why Jill Hobart didn’t talk. Then I had ripped it up. After I made the list I had felt as if I were spying on Sally and her grandmother and her mother. As if I were disturbing something that had been put in place long ago, a routine that didn’t involve me, a routine in which Jill was the cashier for lane number 3 at BJ’s Foods, and Willie walked the roads with her green pail, and Sally grew up happy in her house with her grandmother.
I can still remember the list, though.
Possible reasons why Jill doesn’t talk
1. Incomplete tongue.
2. Extremely shy.
3. Nothing to say.
4. Speech impediment.
5. Doesn’t speak English.
6. Cat’s got her tongue.
7. Unknown.
I put number 6 on there to make myself laugh, but I didn’t laugh, so I crossed it off. I studied the others. Shy — that was a possibility. But Jill wasn’t so shy that she was a hermit. She worked every day at BJ’s, and many people liked her. I personally knew of people who, even if another checkout line was shorter, would wait in Jill’s line because she was a nice person. That’s what everyone always said about Jill, that she was a nice person. I crossed off number 2.
My mother had said that Jill’s tongue was fine, so I crossed off number 1.
Having a speech impediment would have been my best guess, had I not heard Jill’s voice that day in the produce section of BJ’s. Her voice had been soft and clear.
I crossed off number 4.
Number 3: nothing to say? I crossed that one off for its sheer impossibility.
Number 5
was just dumb, so I crossed that one off too.
That left only number 7: unknown.
The way Sundays used to be, Willie and Sally and I would sit around the table, eating chocolate-covered sprinkle doughnuts. That used to be our routine. It was our routine as long as I can remember. But I hadn’t been to Sally’s house on a Sunday morning all summer.
“Edwina, why don’t you ride your bike over to Sally’s house?” my mother said.
I looked at her. She looked back at me. It was a Sunday morning. Did she know what I was thinking? Did she know that I was scared, scared to go to Sally’s house, scared that everything would have changed, scared that those Sunday mornings, the way they used to be, would never happen again?
“Go on,” she said. “Your friend needs you.”
I rode my bike over to Sally’s. I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I was used to not eating breakfast on Sunday mornings so as to save room for doughnuts with Sally and Willie. Even though I was hungry, it didn’t seem right to eat breakfast at my own house.
There were no doughnuts at Sally’s house. No doughnut plate — the green china plate with the watermelon slices painted onto it that Willie got for a wedding present — sat in the middle of the table. No pyramid of doughnuts, the special doughnut pyramid that Willie always made. There was just Sally, sitting at the table. “Your friend needs you,” my mother had said.
The shadowy feeling came crawling through me again.
“Hi,” I said.
Nothing.
“Where’s Willie?” I tried again.
Sally pointed upstairs. She didn’t look at me.
“Sleeping?” I tried.
Nod.
“Did you already eat breakfast?” I said.
Sally shook her head.
What is the right thing to do when your friend needs you but she won’t talk and you don’t know what to say? I sat down in my chair at the table. Sally said nothing. I thought of Willie upstairs, sleeping, and I wondered if she was really awake and listening for sounds of conversation between Sally and me, conversation that wasn’t happening. I started to lean back in my chair and then caught myself.
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