Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  “I don’t think she’s waiting for anyone,” Kara says, pressing her fingers into her chest and coughing out a wheeze. She leans over me at the window, cradles the inhaler between her lips, pushes down the top, and breathes in the medicine it releases. I’m dying to try it.

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s a crazy lady. She’s just doing what crazy ladies do; they stand on corners.”

  “She’s drunk,” Eddie announces, shoving contraband Oreos into his mouth and wiping the crumbs off his Ace-bandaged knee onto my bed. At school he jumped down a flight of stairs, and his teacher had to carry him home because he couldn’t walk. Eddie and I fight a lot because he’s mean to me, and right now he’s breaking the law by being in my room. I want to citizen arrest him, but I don’t know how.

  I know the lady on the corner is waiting for her mother. The part I don’t understand is why her mother isn’t showing up. Did she get hit by a car or move to Europe without telling her? Maybe the lady’s been standing there for forty years, since she was a girl, because her mother told her to wait right there while she ran a quick errand, but she never came back. Maybe the lady on the corner doesn’t know she’s turned into a grown-up. Whatever she was supposed to become, whomever she was supposed to make a life with, it never happened. It’s been so long, now she can never leave.

  There’s no one to tell her how to be a grown-up now. No one explains anything to me, so maybe no one explained anything to her either. How do people find jobs? Or get a house? What happens at a bank? Where do you find a husband, and how do you make sure they don’t kill you? When I ask my mom she says I don’t need to worry about that kind of stuff for a long time, but if I’m already worried, can’t she just tell me so I’ll know how not to be homeless? My mom says I will never be homeless. When I ask how she knows, she says, “I just do.”

  “Can I live with you when I grow up?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course,” she says. I calm down. She is lying on her bed, as usual, cheek propped in her hand and two pairs of glasses on her head. Her bed is her safe place, like she is my safe place.

  “Here in this house?”

  “Of course in this house; where else will I be?” She is distracted, trying to find a phone number in the white pages.

  “I’m never going to college,” I tell her. “I want to be with you always.”

  “You’ll feel differently when you get older,” she says, her voice distant.

  But I know I won’t. “What if we spend all our money and we lose the house?” I ask her.

  “That’s not going to happen,” she says. She sits up, presses her finger into the page, and dials the number. “Goddamn it,” she says. Busy signal. When my mom’s tone changes to mad, it happens fast, and it scares me, even if it’s not my fault.

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  “Because one day this house will be yours, so you have nothing to worry about.” She tosses the phonebook down, still annoyed.

  “What about Kara and Eddie?” I ask.

  “Theirs too.”

  “It will?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, propping up pillows behind her and reaching for a book.

  “So I can live here always? Even when I’m a grown-up? You promise?”

  “Promise. No matter what, you will always have this house.”

  I exhale. I want to dance. This house is my best friend. Knowing I will never lose it protects me inside a coat of shiny armor. Uncertainty throws me away from the world, but as soon as I know something for sure, I’m dropped back to earth, living and breathing with everyone else.

  “You promise?” I ask one last time.

  “I promise,” she says, turning to the thick middle of her novel where she left off. “Why don’t you go make a project?” she says.

  When I’m at home, I feel guarded. I can be myself and put on shows to make my mom laugh. I dress up and do impressions of my teachers and even of her. I’ll put two pairs of her glasses on my face, and yell out in my mom’s high-pitched voice, “I can’t find my glasses! Where are my glasses?” And my mom, doubled over with laughter, will say, “You’re so mean to me!” but she doesn’t really believe that.

  Whenever Kara and Eddie and I get bored and want her to play with us, she always says to make a project and show her when we’re done. This is why I’ve written, directed, and acted in fifteen plays. I’m also building a robot out of a shopping cart and tinfoil, which is why we keep running out. No matter what, every time we’re deep in the middle of writing a play, or making a puppet show, she’ll yell out for one of us to bring her this medicine or that medicine. We always have a good hard laugh when she asks me to bring her Titralac. I can’t believe someone put the word “tit” in their medicine.

  When one of us has a headache or feels sick, my mom opens her overstuffed medicine cabinet. I’m relieved she has something for everything, but if there are that many medicines for different things, then there must be hundreds of different sicknesses that I could die from. Whenever I am afraid, worry sounds itself as sixty maybe seventy radio channels playing at the same time inside my head. Refrains loop around and around my brain like fast jabber, and I cannot get any of it to stop. I know there is something wrong with me, but no one knows how to fix me. Not anyone outside my body, and definitely not me. Eddie says a body is blood and bones and skin, and when everything falls off you’re a skeleton, but I am air pressure and tingly dots, energy and everything. I am air and nothing.

  If I try to explain to adults how I’m feeling, they say I’m being overdramatic. Adults always say that kids have it easy, that they wish they could go back to childhood. The kids around me are carefree and happy, but I’m not, and life doesn’t feel easy for me, ever, which means I’m being a kid in the wrong way.

  You can’t see the wrong on my outside, but I wish you could because then my mom would get me fixed. My mom can fix anything; she knows every doctor in New York City. Kara and Eddie always have something wrong with them; they’re so lucky. Kara is allergic to everything, and her asthma means she gets to miss school all the time. Sometimes she even gets to go to the hospital. Eddie doesn’t have things wrong with the way his body works, but he’s accident-prone. A couple of years ago, he got hit in the back of the head with a metal swing and got stitches, but then a guy put bird feed in his hair and a pigeon swooped down and plucked the stitches out of his scalp. Once he broke his arm playing on the escalator at a department store when he wasn’t supposed to. He lied to my mom and said he walked into a wall. She believed him because she believes everything, but the doctor wasn’t fooled. When I started sobbing because I thought broken meant dead, the doctor crossed his arms and looked at us funny, like someone wasn’t telling the truth.

  Grown-ups can see how to fix Kara and Eddie. I feel my wrong things all the time, but no one else seems to see them. Eddie’s cast is covered in drawings and signatures and I stare at it all the time and imagine my arm inside. He gets to wear it for six weeks and I’m so jealous. Sometimes I wear his sling and it fills me with a deep comfort, like I’m being swaddled next to my mom. Eddie is a daredevil. I’m the most daredevil of the girls in the garden, but no matter how hard I try, I never seem to break anything.

  Maybe the lady on the corner was a tomboy, too, flying her scooter off ramps in a garden. Probably not, though—she keeps her hair so neat, even now that she’s homeless. She probably hates being dirty. My mom probably wishes I could keep my hair like that. My mom likes things that are beautiful. My mom is very beautiful; everyone says so. She is skinny and glamorous; in the daytime, she wears oversized sunglasses, batik halter tops, and wraparound skirts. Her hair is dark brown and wavy, and it falls down her back like a movie star’s. She has a lot of friends who are always talking about how she’s “fabulous” and “too generous.” She’s all those things, but she’s also daydreamy. She doesn’t notice things everyone else seems to notice, and sometimes when you’re talking to her, her eyes go glassy, like she’s somewhere else, bu
t I never know where, and I miss her, even though she hasn’t actually gone anywhere.

  She doesn’t wear shoes, but she loves nice clothes and jewelry and is always put-together and perfect, like our house. This is one way we are not the same. I am not pretty, and the way I like things is worn-in and torn-up. I am the opposite of the things my mom likes. Instead of a regular bar of soap in the bathroom, there are little pink perfumed soaps shaped like seashells that we’re not supposed to get dirty. I like being messy, and I keep my hair short like a boy and wear boy’s clothes because I don’t want to be a girl in the way that girls are. I want to be a girl in the way I am, which is more like a boy. I care about climbing trees and cursing, not dolls or being a bride. I don’t want boys looking at me with sexy eyes. Grown-ups are always telling me that playing sports and cursing isn’t ladylike or feminine, but I am a kid. Kids can be girls and act like boys and the other way around, but that upsets grown-ups, and I don’t know why.

  My mom gets upset when we spill something on the fancy lace tablecloth she makes us eat dinner on, and when I curse she gets mad and says I’m being “fresh.” If I keep biting my fingernails, she says, no one will want to marry me, and if I keep my hair short, no boy will ever ask me to dance. She wishes I wore dresses. She thinks good things happen when you’re pretty, but I know that’s not true. When she makes me wear a dress, grown-ups say I look pretty, but I am not pretty, I’m cute. I don’t want to be pretty. They want me to be pretty. I don’t think it’s fair that there’s only one way to be a girl. When you’re pretty boys want to sex on you. At night, on the street side of my house, the Jersey kids come and press their tight jeans against each other, swapping spit between their bad-accent mouths and long hair. I don’t want to be pretty because I do not want sex, especially after that time Frederick and his mother came over. It was a special occasion, but I can’t remember what we were celebrating.

  The best part of Truth or Dare is Dare, but Frederick is older and I’m seven, so he was the boss of me, and I had to do what he said. Truth or Dare isn’t a top secret game, so he shouldn’t have covered the escape way of the hidden cubby in Eddie’s loft bed. After he asked me the first Truth question I wish I hadn’t said, “What is that?” because then he showed me what it was. When he asked the next question, I didn’t say “What is that?” but he tricked me by asking, “Do you know what that is?” When I shook my head, he showed me what it was. I should not have asked, and I should not have shaken my head. I wish I hadn’t been wearing a dress. I didn’t want to play anymore, but he wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t fun at all. Finally, he said I could put my clothes back on. He let me out only after I promised I’d never tell—if I did tell, he’d have someone take my mom away.

  That’s what happens when you’re pretty. Funny is safer than pretty.

  When I worry about bad things happening to me, like getting kidnapped, my mom always tells me bad things like that don’t happen to kids. But I know they do. And she does, too—some nights, when I make her sing me songs or read to me, it’s always about babies dropping out of cradles and children turning into ash and falling down. Madeline rushes to the hospital in the middle of the night with a bursting appendix; a boy finds a rotten peanut, eats it, and dies; a pig loses her life; and people are always disappearing. My mom sings that I am her sunshine, and asks me to please not take myself away. How could she think I would ever do that? I want to stay with her always. Sometimes I wish my mother sang me different songs and read me different books, but if I tell her to stop or change, she’ll think I mean forever, and I’ll accidentally send her away.

  My worry that something terrible is going to happen when my mom and I are separated is a thick, blurry sadness that covers everything, like cracked plastic sleeves in an old photo album. It sits on top of my Family Circus books, Etch A Sketch, Magic 8 Ball, posters of Philippe Petit, John Travolta, and the Fonz. Even the rainbow decal on my window looks sad. Sometimes I feel like I’m watching a movie about myself. I am always in the future somehow, separated from my body, and it’s from there I feel sad for the moment I’m living. Soon this moment will be gone; it will turn into another moment that will go, and I think I must be the only person who feels life as though it’s already over. This is the weight I feel every time the sun goes down. No matter how hard I try to stop the feeling, I can’t. Even if I run from it, it meets me wherever I land.

  At night when I’m in bed, I try to hear the house sounds that comfort me: the low mumblings of my siblings, the tamped-down warble of the radio, the needle’s skipped return over scratches inside a song, the ceramic clatter of plates being rinsed, and the first turbulent bumps of the dishwasher before it coasts into its varoom lulling hum. My mother’s voice talking on the phone curls its way to my room, and I pull it toward me, past the other sounds, and try to swallow it inside me. When I can’t hear her at all, I look out my window to make sure she’s not running down MacDougal Street to join another family. Or to just live alone, which is one of the worst things I can think of happening when I grow up.

  I don’t know where the lady on the corner sleeps, or if she even has a house. My mom can’t tell me where the lady gets medicine when she gets sick, but when I ask if she can live here with us, my mom says no. When you have a safe house that loves you and a person needs help, that’s the right thing to do. When I am older and this house is mine, I will let her live here with us. Isn’t she afraid out there at night by herself? Night is scary, even in here. When she sees all the house lights turn out, does dread drop its stones in her stomach like mine? Lights-out means my mom is going to sleep, too. Turning out all the lights tells the bad people of the world that we’re asleep and now is the best time for them to break in and kill us—except I’m not asleep, and I am going to have to watch it happening. If I’m the only one still awake, then I’m in charge of protecting everyone, and no one is in charge of me. If I do manage to fall asleep before the lights go out but wake up in the dark, I worry I’m too late, and I can’t hurry fast enough to my mom’s room, where I climb onto her couch once I’m sure we’re all alive.

  Our mom is a night owl. She stays up until 3 or 4 a.m., and then in the morning her alarm sirens the rest of us awake. She sleeps right through it, which makes me worry she’s died in her sleep, and my breath flips on its side, horizontal and too wide to go through my lungs. The only way to wake her is to put ice down her back. She doesn’t take us to school, though, so during the week we don’t ice her. If we don’t wake her, she sleeps until noon.

  When we were very little, before we lived here, we lived in a hotel, but not with our dad. Kara was six, Eddie was four, and I was two. One day Kara came home from school and found my mom fainted on the bed. I don’t know what baby-me was doing, maybe just crawling around. The ambulance took my mom away to a hospital, and we had to go live with my dad until she came home. I don’t remember that, and I don’t know how long we were apart, but it makes me cry to think of my mom being taken away from us. My body feels like it is always worried it’s going to happen again, any second.

  Now Kara makes banana smoothies for her in the morning because the hospital says she has low potassium. Other days she can’t get up because she has a headache and needs Kara to make her a fruit smoothie and bring it to her in bed. She wakes up with a lot of headaches. I get a lot of headaches, too; so do Kara and Eddie. Also earaches, and my nose bleeds all the time, but mainly on the weekends I have to spend at my dad’s house. Sometimes, when Eddie and Kara leave for school before me and she’s still asleep, I sit on the end of her bed and stay with her. When she opens her eyes, I ask her if I can stay home and she says yes. When she wakes up at noon, she doesn’t remember why I’m not at school, but by then it’s too late to take me, so we go shopping or to the toy store. I know she is safer if I’m with her.

  I know my mom doesn’t want us to leave her either. Since she was little, she’s hated being alone. She was an only child and her parents never played with her. Her parents competed with each other
for her affection, and her mom was so strict about how she looked, she sewed her winter coat pockets up so it looked more streamlined. My mom’s hands were cold her entire childhood.

  “Do you wish you had brothers or sisters?” I ask her sometimes. The answer is always the same.

  “Why do you think I had so many children?” I never understand what that means. Are we her siblings?

  I worry about my mom, and myself, all the time. Even in the moments when I’ve found a way to stop worrying, just for a minute or two, something abrupt always stabs the calm. Usually it’s my own mom, who screams out emergencies, like “OH GOD!” or “JESUS CHRIST!” and I jump into action and zoom down the stairs, terrified I will find her bleeding and dead.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, I dropped my pen,” she’ll say. Or Kara spilled something, or Eddie tipped a chair back. When she reacts this way, with her worried hospital panic, it’s hard to calm down again. Her responses mean the world is just as scary as I thought, and I’m right to stay alert. That’s why I can’t sleep at my friends’ houses, or even let friends sleep over here. Because even when I’m home, a sleepover is a distraction that might make me miss an important cry for help.

  I worry so much that at school sometimes my teacher’s words turn into thick fingers rubbing inside my ears so I can’t hear. The only voice I hear is my own, and it tells me that while I’m trying to listen to the lesson, my mom is answering the door to a stranger who’s shoving a sock into her mouth, tying her up in the basement, and burning down our house.