by Jane Bradley
Momma said I was her ray of God’s light in a storm. That was why she named me for Shirley Temple, the girl who could make anyone smile. I thought then all children were blessings that came by being wished for, by eating magic fruit, striking a deal with a dwarf, or throwing a caught fish back to the sea. Babies came by magic and were lost only when evil ones stole them for some selfish purpose. I was my mother’s blessing, almost lost, but spared. I was a blessing who had to wrestle my way into this world, claim a womb, then emerge to spend my life struggling to prove my worth.
The year of my conception my mother’s sister died of a stroke, her brother shot his head off, and her own mother was dying from tumors growing like wild pears through her womb. My mother had one baby named Ruby, an ex-husband who had beaten her and left. She had boyfriends, some married, some not, always on their way to someone, someplace else. She had two back-alley abortions, from an old woman with red hair who claimed to have been a nurse at some time, a nurse who wore an apron embroidered with a rooster crowing, the black words “Cock-a-doodle-do!” curling above the red rooster’s head thrown back. The woman moved around the kitchen table, hooked my mother’s bare feet into the rungs of straight-backed chairs. My mother had closed her eyes and breathed the smell of fatback and beans cooking on the nurse’s stove, while the woman jabbed at the swollen cervix, tore enough to start the bleeding, then sent my mother home.
But this was not to happen a third time. The legend was: My dying grandmother takes my mother’s arm just as she prepares to leave for the “nurse,” with me sprouting inside. She is on her way again to see the rooster. My grandmother stops her and swears: “If you have this child, she’ll be your greatest blessing!” So the story goes. More likely my mother just couldn’t bring herself to curl her feet around the rungs of those chairs, spread her legs, and lie back again on that kitchen table. So I came into the world, wrestled my way out, nearly died born breech, trapped and strangling for a time in the birth canal. Finally, I came through wailing and screaming to the world that slapped me with the cold dry air the way sunlight must slap and stun the moist, slick gills of a fish on someone’s hook.
My mother’s skin smelled like fresh bread. I can see her scattered freckles, her bluish veins untangling from her wrist reaching up the soft whiteness of her inner arm. I curled into her, tried to slow my breathing, match my breath with her long sleep sigh. I watched the lights move in her opal ring, trapped spirits, I thought, playing, dancing somehow, caught in a ring, trapped and playing under the shimmering cold stone dome.
They say when I was a toddler, they tied bells on my high-topped white shoes so they could listen for where I was in the house, so they could find me and keep me from tearing off the heads of Ruby’s paper dolls. It was my only mean habit as a child. I was the good one, I heard Momma say, trying to convince my sister that my destruction was more out of curiosity than rage. But Ruby, round-faced, sneered: “Shirley’s not good; she’s just sneaky.” She knew a good girl didn’t need bells on her shoes as a warning to paper dolls. A good girl didn’t slap her little sister, Sally, a blue-eyed, curly-headed baby that I slapped once when she wouldn’t give me back my doll. Shirley Temple never slapped anyone. Her anger was righteous indignation at worst. She was a “Little Princess” who even when orphaned, abandoned, and insulted still found room in her heart to give and be happy for anyone else’s love. Even when all facts told “Shirley” that her daddy was killed at war, she insisted, “Oh no, my daddy isn’t dead.” Denial worked for her; the plot always proved her right. Daddy was found, all was well, and she beamed with living confirmation of her faith as the movie faded out.
Denial. It worked for Shirley, but I wondered if she ever screamed, slapped, tore and broke something when the camera wasn’t on her face. What happened to Shirley when her short skirt flounced off the screen and she disappeared from our view into another room? I ripped off the heads of paper dolls in the back room, though I sang like a teapot and tap-danced in the kitchen. I was the good girl who could read, write, add, subtract, and spell, but I tore off those paper doll heads given the chance, and muffled the sound of the bells ringing with my knotted sock so no one could hear me sneak down the hall. Ruby knew. Ruby, my sister with her smirk, three years older, who already knew the fingers, cock, and tongue of the policeman, our uncle, Daddy Gene.
I see her somber, round eight-year-old face. She was bigger, older, smarter, played football with the boys, read books, could count to ten in Spanish. She could make hot chocolate and Jell-O by herself. I would watch with envy as she walked down our gravel driveway to catch the bus to school. I listened for the bus to come rumbling up the road, heard the squeal of brakes, watched the clanking miracle of the folding glass door that opened and waited as she stepped up inside. Then the door closed as the bus rolled forward, carrying her away.
Afternoons I would sit at the end of the driveway waiting for the bus to bring her home. If she was late, I’d worry. She’d told me about the narrow dirt road the bus took over mountains, the turn-around point where the bus had to stop, back up, and turn on the edge of a cliff. I’d jump up at the first flash of school-bus yellow up the road between the trees. I’d stand, eager to carry her books up the hill of the driveway, and daily I’d ask her what happened, what were the others kids like, what did she learn at school. She’d tell me something to silence me, some little fact like they grow oranges in California, bananas in Brazil. I’d carry her books in, and while we sat at the table having chocolate milk and cookies, I’d page through her books, run my fingers over the colored maps of countries, follow diagrams of the water cycle, study the carefully arranged photographs of the four food groups. “I can’t wait to grow up,” I’d say as I watched her walk away from the table and go turn on the TV. Once she simply stood, pushed the papers across the table, shook her head, looked down at me, and sighed, “You don’t want to grow up. It just gets worse and worse every year.”
I ran from the room crying. She wasn’t joking. She’d teased me before, but this time she meant it. It wasn’t a trick. She knew we were all getting older, and it would be awful. I ran to my mother who was outside hanging clothes, grabbed her thighs, and stood crying until she bent and held me to her chest.
Those were the good days. That is how a child remembers things, good days, bad days, good Mom, bad Dad, good girl, good girl, good girl. That is how a child knows things. That is me. The good days: A gravel road down a hill, over the cornfield, across the railroad track, and alongside Chickamauga Creek where my best friend Kathy Hanes had to fetch water from the spring.
The good days: A nice brick house, the only one on that new gravel road, cows in a pasture next door. Kathy Hanes and her house with no running water, just a walk and a slide down the red rocky hill, Kathy Hanes whose Momma wrung the chicken’s neck and plucked it for her chicken and dumplings. The white flesh and doughy dumplings bubbled up in her pot, the picked bones set aside in a bowl for me and Kathy to salt and suck while we waited to eat. We sat on the back porch, legs dangling off rough boards as we swung our feet, looked out at the creek, and threw bites of cold biscuit down to the chickens who clucked and squawked, pecking at the ground. They walked filling up and fattening as Kathy and I made bets on which one would be the next to be plucked and put in her momma’s pot.
Georgia Hanes had white-gray hair, blue eyes, red, man-looking hands. Kathy bragged that the song “Georgia” was written for her momma. A believer, I figured her momma had been pretty once, before she married, before her husband beat her, before she got stretched out and wrinkled from having all those kids. I would watch her heating water, breaking the bones of a chicken, and I’d wonder how she had come to this. Kathy Hanes’ momma had been the reason for a famous song, and now she was living in a house with no running water and a husband that sometimes beat her with a belt.
Mr. Hanes was tanned and skinny, and he made me think of brown spiders. He beat them all with a belt, even Georgia. I can
see him, leathery face always frowning, his hands tough and strong. I feared he could snap our necks like chickens if he ever got the urge.
As he came in the house I watched for a sign of his mood, could smell it as soon as he pushed open the door, and I saw the thin lips slightly twisting, ice-gray eyes red-rimmed from drinking on the way home from work. He glanced around the room and looked for something, anything to give him a reason to yell, to unbuckle and start swinging that thick black belt.
Kathy and I ran and hid in the chicken house. We held our breath against the sour dead smell of rotten eggs. We watched the house through the cracked door, listened for the yelling until finally something eased over or gave way inside. We’d sit and tell stories, watch the chickens and wonder if they did it like people: his thing sticking in her thing. How did they do it? We’d look at their round bodies, scrawny legs, the roosters always strutting outside, the hens inside in the dark stinky shed with us, all of us staring blankly at the dust hanging in the light like dead dirt suspended in the air, floating and trapped within the limits of the shed.
Those were the good days. I was voted princess of Hillcrest Elementary School, wore a dress of white satin, white netting, just like Cinderella. More good days: three-layer birthday cakes, pink roses, the crusty dried edges of colored icing — we almost gagged from those roses so thick and sweet in our throats. Momma’s petunias growing along the sidewalk, trips to Florida in the white Rambler, me, Ruby, Momma, and the man I called Daddy, his own children not yet born. But everything was sliding. The birthday cake slipped; the walls swayed, the windows crashed. And I woke to see that it wasn’t dreams of evil or too much thick sweetness that made me choke on what I swallowed, made me cry, turn my head away, and gag.
That year, a week before Christmas, our nice brick house burned. I had thought brick didn’t burn, that it couldn’t fall down, thought I was as safe as the third little pig. My friends in the wood houses had naked light bulbs, peeling wallpaper, leaking roofs and daddies that came in swinging a belt. But not me. I was a princess in a nice brick house. My daddy flipped pancakes, and my momma made my dresses and curled my hair.
Ruby and I were at our grandmother’s who lived in Georgia next door to Daddy Gene, Daddy Gene who daily parted my legs at the kitchen table, where I was trying to shape bears and turtles out of blue and green Play-Doh. “That feels good don’t it. Don’t that feel good?” So I stayed close to Ruby. We stuck close, played and ate together, slept together as much as we could.
We were on the living room floor, drawing clothes for paper dolls, dolls with their heads on when our grandmother came in the room and told us the news. We looked up and knew something was awful by the way she stood shaking her head, wringing that blue-checked dish cloth in her hand. “Your house burned, honey,” she said, and I looked at Ruby as if it must be her house somehow without being mine. Ruby got up and ran across the room, but I sat there coloring a green party dress for my black-haired paper doll. “The dress won’t fit,” Ruby had told me. I’d drawn the dress too big, as if somehow by will, when finished, I could shrink the colored paper down to size.
Someone was crying somewhere. Ruby was crying on the phone. I ran out, headed for the swing under the live oak in the backyard. But I saw my grandmother running toward me, and Daddy Gene coming with her, tucking his shirt in his pants as he walked toward me, and I wondered what he was doing at home in the daylight. Why was he tucking in his shirt like that, the belt buckle hanging loose as he picked me up and said, “Let Daddy Gene hold you, you poor little thing”?
I tried to see how the house burned from the scattered details I heard: Mother rocking my brother, Glenn, to sleep, watching the opening scene of F.B.I., my sister Sally eating Cheerios off the coffee table, still awake and up late that night. Daddy was in the bathroom. Suddenly, he said, he smelled burning plastic and wires, saw the smoke peel from the ceiling, and he ran to get the family out. They stood in the cold night watching the house burn, our Christmas presents securely hidden at my grandmother’s house, and our family treasures safely packed in the trunk of the car.
I went back there after Christmas, a gray January day, wearing my red galoshes and blue corduroy pants, hands bare and pink with cold. But I didn’t feel my hands, only what my hands felt with the stick as I poked through the ashes, beams, and soggy remains of plastic, cushions, glass, and metal pans. With big high steps for my small legs, I stepped over charred brick, the remains of walls crumbling. A blackened shell of sharp cold air and gray ash. It was a thorough burning. Took everything we could claim on insurance forms. We were lucky to have survived. “Ain’t that peculiar,” a neighbor said. “A fireman’s house burning down.” He stood with us and watched the man I called my daddy who wouldn’t take his eyes off the black beams, boards and ashes on the ground. “An electricity fire too,” he said. He shook his head. I saw the look. “Imagine that! A fireman and electrician’s house burning down!”
I saw the three-layered birthday cake burning, the yellow flames on the candles, the long curls of black smoke. I saw my long curls Momma placed around my head like Shirley Temple, the starched dresses, crinolines, lace socks and panties, the shiny patent leather shoes. I saw it all sliding together in a heap, melted, smoked and charred. We had been known on my street for having a brick house once, with a garage, an air conditioner, and the best birthday parties they’d ever seen.
I felt only curiosity as I used a stick to lift charred boards, my feet unsteady swinging over the spongy damp ashes and coarse burned things that made a dull scraping sound when my feet moved. I didn’t feel the loss. I still had my Barbie and Ken safe in their shoebox home, so I didn’t cry. I couldn’t remember anything I had lost, didn’t know even what to look for in the ruin.
My daddy slammed my mother’s head again and again into a wall. He once beat her unconscious with the broken leg of a chair. Then he crawled over her, sucked at her crotch not seeing us there, not hearing, not knowing anything but what he wanted to do. We stared at the man sucking at our mother’s crotch, too drunk to move the girdle off those heavy deadweight hips. I wondered why he was doing it. I saw the dull spots of bloodstains on the white girdle where my mother’s periods had caused accidents. I could hear her always asking me to watch for some stain on the back of her dress, knowing this blood was something shameful, but he didn’t see it. Blind drunk, he lay between her legs and sucked until he gave up, took her blue high heel and for some reason decided to smash it in her head. I grabbed his wrist and screamed, “Daddy, don’t do that!” I knew he would kill her, so I grabbed his arm, hung on and screamed. He turned and stared at me as if I had appeared suddenly from thin air. Then he crawled away.
How did I find the voice to say the words, to reach and grab my daddy’s arm, to keep his hand from smashing the blue high heel into my mother’s head? I found it somehow, and sometimes I still hear it pushing up at the back of my throat.
“There’s no telling what that girl might say,” they had said about me. They were amazed at the words I came up with and wondered how I’d picked up such a vocabulary, not realizing how well I always listened, not knowing my compulsion to find a quiet place, open a book, any book, and try out the words, feel them on my tongue and read. “She’s smart as a whip,” they’d say. “Lordy, you never know what that child might say.”
A living doll is capable of anything. Not like Shirley Temple who plays her lines from a script, not like a Chatty Kathy doll with her limit of recorded messages wound up behind a speaker in her chest, safe messages neatly coiled there to be released on demand with the pull of a string. Chatty Kathy’s round freckled face kept smiling, her blue eyes with their stiff, glued-together lashes closed when you put her on her back, and unless you pulled her string, she wouldn’t say a word. “Don’t that feel good? Don’t that feel good?” A dead doll of plastic blinks, nods, says nothing, but a living doll, she learns. There’s no telling what a living doll might say.
I know what happens to a plastic doll when you bury it. I tried it once, then dug again, felt the hard nudge of my digging spoon against her cheek, saw the eyes sealed shut, then pulled her up and out. Only one eye opened. I threw her down, ran, and screamed. What happens to a plastic doll buried? Nothing. It comes back, hair matted, one eye open, pink-bow lips curled around teeth full of dirt. She’ll last longer than a mortal life and look more monstrous with each burial and resurrection. Each revival requires a little more bathing, holding, and pressing into something that looks almost worth loving again. It takes more effort to keep her looking human. She keeps her eyes wide open, her pink-bow mouth partly open in a smile showing a hint of teeth that will never bite. Sometimes there is a hole punched in the center of her lips, ready to receive the hard plastic tiny tip of a tap-water bottle, or a toothpick, or dirt, or anything someone has a mind to try to cram in. She smiles no matter what she is fed, no matter how many times you bury her, smack her, twist her head off, tear her torso free from arms and legs. Death cannot touch that molded friendly open loving face, a doll, a sweet thing with the face of an angel. A living doll keeps smiling; for a living doll nothing can be dead.
I found a dead snake once, carried it home bent, limp, and black on a stick. I dropped it on the porch, hid it under an overturned cardboard box with a brick on top to keep the dogs away. Then I went inside and found one of my daddy’s sharp pocketknives, one he used sometimes for gutting fish. I took it from his top-drawer tackle box, not stopping this time to play with the red rubber worms, plastic minnows, lead weights, red and white bobbers, feathered hooks. I sat on the concrete slab of our porch, stretched the snake out and made a long cut down its gray-yellow belly. I cut through the tough, finely ridged skin, pulled it open with an old bent nail and dug out what I could find inside. Cause of death: unknown. It didn’t seem to have been squashed or run over by a car. It only seemed asleep by the side of the road. I pulled out the black, gray and red strings of tissue inside. I tried to locate the heart, lungs, belly, but couldn’t tell what was what, so I threw the rubbery stuff into the grass where something, a dog, cat, opossum, or skunk would surely eat it and drag it away.
