by Toni Jensen
The siren’s wail behind her shakes the snow-quiet, and she wonders the next twenty or so miles if help got there in time. She wonders about her sister, about the imminent baby’s arrival. She wonders if she will get there in time.
The auntie’s arms want to tighten and shake, but she won’t allow it. She holds her back and arms so straight, and she drives and drives. She does not press on the brake, only taps the accelerator light, so light, so that the car will go slowly and will remain on the road. The exit to Sterling, Colorado, is a steep rise and then a fall, but she takes it and slows and slows until she comes to a stop at a Comfort Inn.
She has prayed the whole way in a quiet way, in a way that focuses on her grandmother’s voice, on her body, on her breathing. At the Comfort Inn, there is one room left, one homemade muffin remaining in the basket with its red-and-white checkered cloth. She takes both, and in this last room, she falls into a long, deep sleep, muffin crumbs littering the bedsheets like a trail to her sleeping mouth.
The next day brings a bright, clear sky—it’s Colorado, after all, where the weather sweeps in and back out as if its main function is to provide surprise. Her arms are sore from being held so stiff, but she eats another muffin and shakes out the stiffness, and she drives and drives.
At the house, upon arrival, she is not too late. The baby is not yet arrived, and she helps with the packing. She cooks meals. She plays with the girl, who is clever and darling, though no one else ever tells her she is clever and darling. The baby does not yet arrive.
Time runs out. There is the teaching job for which to return. When she says this, the household laughs. It is not a household for jobs.
The auntie opens the living room curtains, and when she comes back from the store, the curtains again are closed. Open and shut, shut and open, their fabric thick like a velvet cape tied tight around a neck.
There is talk of who might be watching. There is talk of leaving as soon as possible.
When the auntie is the first to leave, she does not take the girl, though this will be her impulse, then and always. When she leaves, she waves and smiles and waves, and she has to focus to calm her breathing.
After, she will be told to stop calling. She will have said something, she will have somewhere crossed a line she was not meant to breach. She will perhaps have not closed or opened the velvet curtains at exactly the right angle. She will not hear any word, any darling words from the clever girl. She will not be allowed any contact. She will not see the girl for several more years.
Later, back in contact, she will be told to mind her own business. If she has questions, she will be told she has no right, she has no right, she has no right. She will be told she has had such an easy life. She will be told she has no idea—no idea. She will be left with so much anger she will have to work and work to find a large enough container.
II.
Make the brother born. Make him grow up noisy and encouraged to be louder still, except when the father wants to make music or sleep or think. Make the girl the brother’s keeper. Take the brother to the movies. Take the brother to The Shopping Mall—you know the one—where the father first met the mother.
Make the mother have grown up so small-town. Make, then, a shopping mall such a rarity in the mother’s childhood that pretty much anyone she meets in one still seems like a miracle. Make Webster’s third definition the relevant one: “3a: an urban shopping area featuring a variety of shops surrounding a usually open-air concourse reserved for pedestrian traffic, 3b: a usually large suburban building or group of buildings containing various shops with associated passageways.”
It will be the one where the mother, not yet a mother, only twenty years old, wanders the stores, the hallways, the associated passageways, her head burning with fever. In a fever dream, the father takes home the woman who becomes the mother. Make her have had a childhood that did not feature caretaking. Make her have had a childhood of illness during which she was made to feel like a burden rather than a darling child.
When she is sick in this childhood, in winter, the sister, who is not yet the auntie, will roller-skate in the basement. With eighties pop as the soundtrack, the sister practices figure eights and limbo moves with one leg kicked out at a sharp angle. What must it have sounded like from upstairs, from a sickbed?
Make their childhood front yard hold a maple tree with leaves bigger than waving hands. When the tree is cut down, make the baby squirrels who’ve lost their home come inside the house to be fed at regular intervals from an eyedropper. There are neighborhood hawks, so the baby squirrels live inside, in the basement.
Everyone feeds the baby squirrels—the sister who becomes the mother, the not-yet auntie, their mother, their father. No one hits the baby squirrels or yells or whispers about how they should just get up already. Isn’t it about time? Isn’t it? Baby squirrels are called kits or kittens. A litter of kittens is a dray or scurry.
The baby squirrels grow up to be regular, everyday squirrels, named Chipper and Charlie. One later day, they are released from the basement into the wilds of the front yard. Chipper scurries away; Charlie lives in the front yard’s last remaining tree. The sturdy sister, the auntie, plays with Charlie and also with the neighbor girl a game called “high seas.”
The auntie sails the ship of an old mattress in the basement or a wide expanse of front-yard grass. She map-reads. She plots exit upon exit upon exit. When there are Barbies, they are busy Barbies, off to work, to the beach, to dinner, to the movies—off, off, off.
When the sister who is not yet the mother leaves her sickbed, she likes to play baby doll. She likes to play kitchen. Her baby dolls are well dressed, their hair brushed flat and sleek to their shoulders. When the auntie plays baby doll, she dunks the dolls upside down in the bathroom sink she’s pre-filled. They have troll hair thereafter. She is not allowed to touch the sister’s dolls.
Sailing the high seas only involves learning to sail. Driving the highways of America only involves learning to drive. But the sickbed sister who is not yet a mother never plays high seas. She never does learn to drive.
The sickbed sister who becomes the mother never does like to play in the childhood basement. Later, years later, the sickbed sister says, “Don’t you remember that time when Mom was so mad at you, and she took you down into the basement, and you were gone so long—you were down there so long—and I was sure you were never coming back up?”
“No,” the sister/auntie replies. But she can well imagine the choices. She broke something, said something, her face did or did not do something, her mouth would not stop saying something, her mouth would not stop.
The sister who is not yet the mother reports hovering near the basement stairs, convinced the mother was killing the auntie. That’s what she remembers, what she says: “I thought she was going to kill you. I thought she was killing you.”
The childhood house in which they grew was a metaphor-drought of a house, was metaphor-poor. So when the sister who is not yet a mother says, “I thought she was killing you,” she means exactly what she says.
III.
Make the man at The Shopping Mall, who is certainly not a minor cult leader, become the father twice over. At The Shopping Mall and just after, make him offer his care until the fever breaks. His hold will not break for better than a decade.
In Walnut Creek, California, as reported in The Washington Post, another shopping mall, after a renovation, is overcome with pigeons. Remmy, a Harris’s hawk, is hired to solve the pigeon problem. He swoops over Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus and seems to particularly enjoy the pigeons who lurk near the Lush cosmetics store.
The Shopping Mall where the mother meets the father offers no pigeons or hawks, but the food court offers ice cream. Give the brother an ice cream big enough he will not have finished it by the time he arrives back home. Never think about the sister and whether she wi
ll notice or whether she likes ice cream or whether she is growing up to be a pigeon or a hawk or another sort of bird no one yet has ever seen or invented.
At home and in the yard or the park or everywhere, encourage the brother to take the world as his territory. He plays sword fighting. His first words are “en garde.” Enjoy with total joy his high-pitched squeals. Never hear the mother say stop or shush or sit down, goddamnit, sit down and be quiet. The girl grows to know those words only in reference to her voice, her body.
The brother grows tall and is praised. All limbs and territory. The sister owns no territory, not even her body, not even her own growing limbs. If her body is a too-much body, why should she want it? If it’s been claimed as belonging in the land of the too-much, is it really even hers, anyway?
IV.
Tell the girl this body is not only a too-early body but a too-far body. Mark the edges of her body like we are carving up territory. How many steps past territory and timelines do we have to go before we’re making a commodity? How many steps back does this too-much body have to make before it is again hers?
At twelve, give her a first period. Give her pain. Have her report her pain to the mother, who at first receives these reports with shush. Have the girl escalate. Have her perform the act called doubled over. Have her say she can’t walk or move. Have no one consider the potential other sources of pelvic pain in a twelve-year-old girl, in a twelve-year-old girl who looks as if she might be sixteen or seventeen. Have no one ask any of the right questions.
Have a lone doctor visit end with an OxyContin prescription. Have the mother fill and deliver it. Have no one question whether narcotics for a twelve-year-old are a good idea. Have no one question why it might be seen as a good idea to shush and drug a twelve-year-old.
If generous, report how tired is the mother, how loud the younger brother. If generous, mention the move after move, city after town after city. If generous, forget to mention how many times the prescription is filled and filled and filled before somebody asks a question. If generous, report how the incidences of begging and smiling and saying thank you at street corners increase during this time. If generous, report how during this time, it is winter.
If generous, report how many people fill such prescriptions. If generous or if stingy, if at all interested in accuracy, report how the father during this time escalates his violence against the mother to a breaking point.
V.
Make the hospital visits complex and frequent. Make the girl overdose so many times it is not possible to keep count. Make there be so many drugs. Make there always be Oxy. Make there always be paperwork.
Make the girl turn into a woman. Make her learn the ways of the methadone clinic. She will eat bag after bag after bag of Snickers and Reese’s, drink Pepsi after Coke after Pepsi. Make her too-much body turn large. Then, hallelujah of all hallelujahs, make the methadone work.
VI.
Make the girl, who’s now a woman, give birth to a child who’s mostly clean. The woman/girl will have been mostly clean, so the child will be born, too, in this liminal state. Make the girl go through more rehab. Make the child be born into weeks of detox before the hospital release, the blanket swaddling, the taking home. The mother now is a grandmother and also she is again or still the mother.
VII.
Make the auntie the one with the narrative of the too-much mouth rather than the too-much body. Both of them, all of them, all of us, know this really is one common narrative: she should have learned, she wouldn’t learn, she should have.
The girl posts online she’s forty-eight days sober. Despite a flurry of calls, no one in the original family knows exactly what this means, only that there has been more relapse, more recovery, more repeat, repeat, repeat. Except this time, they learn, it’s booze, not pills—it’s drinking, not snorting or smoking or shooting up. This time, the girl joins most of the rest of the family with a drink in her hand.
She is different, though, in how she’s working toward sobriety. She is different only in the tenacity, the accountability, the reporting of the exact number—forty-eight days.
VIII.
In the repeating cycle of the girl’s childhood, not all the strangers who come to live in the houses are women, made to smile and beg, to mind the children. In the childhood, the stranger men visit; they to and fro. They have access to everything. Everything is theirs.
When the auntie visits this time, she is writing about trafficking, about fracklands and water protectors, about the endless sea of parking lots filled with trucks, hotel after hotel after hotel. When the mother leaves the room to make more tea, the girl leans forward from her perch on the sofa, says, “I know those hotels.”
The mother appears with the tea, and what is there to say, upon her return? The girl’s face shutters, and the auntie has so many questions that will go unanswered: What is the state of the girl’s mind, of her sobriety? Is she clouded by Oxy, by other pills, or through drinking? Is she clear in what she says, and why does she say it? Is she wanting only a connection with her auntie? Or if she does know the hotels, what sort of knowledge is this—through rumor or through worse, the kind of knowledge that lives in the body, the kind we call firsthand? The auntie’s hand shakes as she sets down her tea and prepares for her departure.
It is once again winter, or perhaps it is perpetual winter. The auntie no longer owns an ice scraper, so upon her departure, she clears her windshield with her coat sleeve and a credit card long past its expiration date.
IX.
Meanwhile, the brother grows and grows. For his nightmares, no one prescribes Oxy. For his nightmares, he is given books and a cat to pet and a turtle that he turns his back on, one time so very briefly, at a park, and then it is gone. He searches and searches. In the last place, it is perhaps surprising how fast a turtle can make an escape, or in the first place, it is surprising how long the turtle lasted inside the house.
The brother has no Oxy for his nightmares, no rest from how his mind wheels and wheels, no rest from what he saw when he was small and freshly back from the movies.
There is college for him while the girl works the liquor store, the big box store, the grocery store, the online knife store. She practices her online knife store pitch for her auntie, who offers praise but does not buy a single knife. She does not trust herself with knives that sharp.
The brother plays music like the father but is in no other way like the father. He misses the turtle. He pets the kitty. Hawks, of course, can’t be trusted around kitties or baby turtles, but no one here has hired a hawk. The brother’s wheeling mind becomes all spokes, becomes all splintering spokes. He can’t unsee or forget. He begins wearing a surgical mask and telling people not to get too close—he’s worried about germs. Back off, he tells them, please, just back off.
In childhood, the brother remembers how the girl was supposed to behave, and how, for him, there was no supposed to. He remembers the sword fights, the high-pitched squealing fun. He remembers the mall. He remembers the movies. He remembers what he sees upon return from the movies, what he was not supposed to have seen in the first place. He replays his rememberings like movie stills, scene after scene after scene, till his mind fragments.
X.
The girl’s child is raised by the grandmother/mother, but for a time, they all live together in something approximating a family. The girl for a time holds down a job. She brings home a boyfriend, and they all live together until the night he tries to choke her to death and almost succeeds but not quite.
Unlike the father, who goes to Chicago and Philadelphia and California, who goes and fathers and goes, the boyfriend goes to prison. The father, this past Mother’s Day, posts online, “Hey my people, today is a day of honor, to the mothers who bared our children who gave them life and nurtured them and most of the time have to protect them. To all the fathers who are men!, stand up for the day
of motherhood; and give thanks to the Queens who brought forth life, Bears the pain and Joy of childbirth, it’s always nice to take a few minutes out and say thank you from the bottom of my heart, mother of my children, happy Mother’s Day! happy Mother’s Day! happy Mother’s Day, peace out.”
The father’s latest child, in the picture, looks to be four or perhaps five years old, though the father by now must be in the ballpark of seventy. As far as she knows, the auntie is the only one googling. The auntie is the only one maintaining contact, if you can call online surveillance contact. The auntie is the only one calling a school that one time, asking about the father, saying, “It appears from your website this man is working with children, with teenage girls.” The auntie is the only one suggesting various spellings and iterations of the father’s last name.
The boyfriend will be released soon from prison. The boyfriend from prison passes along how he remembers where they live, how he remembers the name of the store where the mother works at the shopping mall in a nearby town.
The phrase shopping mall is descended from “pall-mall,” which Webster’s describes as “a 17th century game in which each player attempts to drive a wooden ball with a mallet down an alley and through a raised ring in as few strokes as possible” and “also: the alley in which it is played.”
The mother and the girl and the girl’s child and the auntie all are Métis, all are descended from trappers and traders and strong women, original women. The mother and the girl and the girl’s child all come from the Road Allowance people—from Métis women who lived through Alberta winters in shacks, roadside, after being kicked off their land, and they also come from the men who did the kicking and sometimes worse.
