Call Me Tuesday (9 page)

She wasn’t pretty in a delicate way like Mama, but handsome, with chiseled cheekbones and deep-set eyes. She was tall for a woman born during her time, but she wasn’t awkward in her height, and she didn’t slump like some tall people do. She carried herself with confident grace.

Wherever Grandma was, there was music. She hummed or whistled as she cooked and worked her garden, and a song was always waiting at her piano ready for my request. She played strictly by ear, the music magically flowing from her fingertips.

Wherever she was, love presided. She was not one to openly display affection, except for a hug here and there, but her love had a gentle constancy I could feel. I knew it was there, as surely as I knew the crystal dish on her cocktail table in the living room was full of cream-filled chocolate drops and candied orange slices.

18

In July I celebrated my ninth birthday. Like every other year, I had my favorite German chocolate cake, only this time Grandma Storm baked it instead of Mama.

After we finished our cake and ice cream, I followed Grandma outside to walk the grounds around her house and tend to her flowers. I liked to help her water them and pluck off the dead buds, stooping every now and then to pull a weed.

Almost as much as she loved her flowers, she loved the birds, all of them, from the loud, aggressive blue jay to the shy sparrow. She had brought a sack filled with crackers and bread crumbs that we scattered out on the lawn for them to eat. They filled the trees around the house, squawking loudly, waiting to be fed.

While we were pulling some weeds, we heard a weak chirping coming from the azalea bushes. Grandma got a stick and separated the limbs, probing for the source of the sound. Suddenly, out fell a small grayish ball.

“It’s a baby robin,” she said.

What had fallen out of the bushes didn’t look anything like a robin. It had pink, almost transparent skin, with blue veins showing through, and patches of gray fuzz on its head and randomly on its body. But I figured Grandma was right because she knew her birds.

“How did it get here?” I asked.

“Poor thing must have fallen from a tree,” she said. She pointed overhead to a high branch. “See, there’s the nest full of the rest of the baby robins.”

“What should we do?” I asked.

“Let it be,” she said. “I’m sure the mother will come looking for it when she realizes it’s missing.”

I didn’t want to leave the baby bird alone, but I did because Grandma told me to. I sat on the front porch and watched, waiting for the mother to come and retrieve it.

After a few minutes, I saw the mother robin fly to the nest of baby birds that Grandma had pointed out. I knew it was her because she had a dull red breast, and Grandma had told me the female robin was a duller color than the male. She was carrying a fat earthworm in her mouth to feed her babies. They gobbled it down, and she flew away again. After a while she brought back another worm, dropping it into the open beaks of the babies.

I could hear the baby bird that had fallen from the nest chirping desperately from the ground, trying to get her attention, but she made no attempt to fly down and feed it.

Angry at the mother bird for her negligence, I barreled into the house to tell Grandma.

“Give her time,” she said. “She’ll come for the baby eventually.”

“How will she get it back up to the nest?” I asked.

“Now,
that
I don’t know, but I’m sure she’ll find a way.”

I went outside and sat on the porch again. A half hour passed. The baby’s chirping got louder, and more desperate, but still the mother bird didn’t come for it or try to feed it. I went into the house once more to give Grandma a report.

“What if she knows the baby’s gone, and she doesn’t care?” I asked. “What if the mother pushed it out because she doesn’t want it anymore?”

“That’s nonsense. It’s her baby, of course she wants it.”

All of a sudden, we heard loud squawking coming from the backyard. Grandma ran outside to see what was going on, and I was right on her heels. When we got out there, we discovered the baby bird had wandered into the middle of the yard, and a blue jay was attacking it. While we stood there, two more birds swooped down and took a turn pecking at the baby.

“Grandma, they’re killing it! We’ve got to do something!”

She took off her house slipper and fanned it in the air, chasing after the blue jays. “Shoo! Get out of here!” she hollered. I followed close behind her, waving my arms like a whirligig.

When the blue jays had all flown off, I picked up the baby bird and cradled it in my hands.

“You may as well keep it,” said Grandma. “Your scent is on it. The mother bird won’t come for it for sure now.”

That was fine with me. It was what I had wanted all along. “I’ll take good care of her, Grandma. I promise, you won’t have to do a thing.”

“Her? How do you know it’s a girl?” she asked.

I looked down at the fragile creature in my hands, its scrawny, wrinkled neck, bulbous, half-closed eyes, and open yellow beak. “I can just tell.”

“What are you going to call her?”

I studied for a minute and then announced, “I’m going to name her Ladybug.”

She laughed. “Why are you naming her that? She’s a bird, not a bug.”

“Just because.”

Grandma found a shoebox to keep Ladybug in, and I lined it with grass to make it feel more like a nest. I fed her tiny bits of bologna and pieces of bread soaked in milk. She was always crying out for food. No matter how much I fed her, she still opened her beak wide whenever I came around her, begging for more.

About a week after I found Ladybug, I went to feed her some leftover toast from breakfast, and she wouldn’t take the food. When I picked her up, her head flopped to one side.

I took her to Grandma. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

Grandma examined her closely. “I think she’s dead,” she said. “I’m sorry honey, but baby birds don’t make it long without their mothers.”

I thought Ladybug was just sleeping. I nudged her with my finger again and again, trying to wake her up, but she wouldn’t move. For the rest of the day, I held her and cried.

“Sweetheart,” Grandma said, “it was just a bird. You didn’t even have it long to get attached to it.”

Late afternoon Grandma told me it was time to take Ladybug outside and bury her before she stunk up the house. I got a spoon from the kitchen drawer and dug a hole in the yard near the azalea bush where I first found her. After I had buried her, I made a tiny headstone with rocks and stuck dandelions in her grave. Grandma didn’t understand; Ladybug was more than just a bird to me.

19

Before I knew it, summer was over, and I was in the car with Daddy, heading back home to get ready for school.

When he drove up, I was glad to see him because I had missed him over the summer. But I was sad in a way too, because I didn’t want to leave Grandma’s house. And I was worried that I didn’t have notebooks and pencils and whatever else was required for the fourth grade. Daddy promised me he had checked into it and bought all the necessary supplies, and everything was ready for me at home. He tried to cheer me up by telling me he’d bought me three new dresses and a pair of shoes for school, and it worked. It gave me something to look forward to.

Mama and the boys were already in bed when we got home. It took me hours to fall asleep that night, knowing school was starting the next day. My mind raced with thoughts of what fourth grade would be like.

Mama woke me up in the morning. “Time to get ready for school,” she said in a somewhat kind voice.

The minute I saw her I realized how much I’d missed her. Thinking maybe she had changed over the summer, I said, cheerfully, “Good morning, Mama,” and ran to her. I tried to put my arms around her waist, but she pushed me back. Then she handed me one of the dresses Daddy had bought me, still in the cellophane wrapper, along with a pair of white knee socks. She told me to take off my dirty clothes and to give them to her. Without delay I obeyed her.

As soon as she left the room, I picked up my new dress, tore off the plastic wrapper, and removed the pins, one at a time, putting them in a neat pile on my bed. Then I slid out the piece of cardboard that kept the dress crisp and square. It was a simple plaid, madras shift in pastel colors of pink and orange, with two low pockets in front, below the waist, and a white rounded collar with a tiny, pink satin bow right in the center.

It was an ordinary school dress, but to me it was special, because I knew Daddy was thinking of me when he picked it out. As I slipped it over my head, careful not to wrinkle it, I imagined how all the other kids at school would admire and compliment me, and how proud I would feel.

I sat on my bed to put on my knee socks. As I was folding down the tops of each one, Mama returned, carrying my new brown oxford shoes. They were shiny and stiff and smelled like leather. I loosened the laces and stepped my feet in, and when I bent down to tie them, it occurred to me something was missing.

“I don’t have any panties on!” I blurted out to Mama, without thinking. “You forgot to bring my panties!”

“Oh, my,” she said in her sarcastic voice, a voice that always made me nervous. “Your daddy must have forgotten to buy you any new panties for school.” She put her hand on her cheek—one of her favorite theatrical gestures—and said, “Oh, no! What are we going to do? I threw all your old ones away! They were ratty!”

I glanced across the room to the corner, where I had left the paper bag of clothes I brought back from Grandma Storm’s. It was gone. I looked at Mama, dumbfounded. Suddenly I was no longer excited about my new clothes or the fourth grade.

“I guess you’ll have to go to school without panties today,” Mama said. “Now hurry and get in the car. It’s time to leave.”

Mama took my older brother, Nick, who was now in junior high, to school first. Then she drove Jimmy D. and me to elementary school, and dropped us off at the front door.

As I walked down the hall searching for my classroom, I could feel a draft between my legs. When I found the right room and entered, all the kids’ eyes were on me. Embarrassed, I imagined they could see through my dress. I hurried to find a seat in the last row, and then sat, pressing my thighs together, tucking my dress snugly around them.

At recess I wanted to join my classmates on the playground, but I looked down and saw the sun shining through the thin cotton of my new dress, outlining the curve of my hips, and in my mind, my bare vagina. Afraid someone would discover my secret I sat on a concrete step by the door of the school, and watched the other kids play.

The girls had on crisp new dresses, like mine, and they wore brightly colored ribbons in their hair that trailed behind them as they ran. They screamed out when a random brisk wind whipped and snapped their skirts, sometimes lifting them high enough to expose their panties. Carefree, and happy, they sailed down the slides and climbed on the monkey bars, played tag, and jumped rope; some of them were on the swings, pumping and stretching their legs out in front of them. I could hear them giggling, and see their smiles when they talked to each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Like my brothers, they were in a world far away from mine.

It took me a while to adjust back to my dismal life at home. Everything was the same as it had been before I left—face to the wall and everything—but it seemed much worse, because I had gotten a taste of what it was like to be a normal kid again. All I could think about that fall was my summer at Grandma Storm’s.

Being exposed to other kids in school, and listening to them talk about their parents and their lives at home, reminded me of how happy I had been before Audrey died, and before Mama’s accident. It also made me realize how wrong my life had become. But still, I wasn’t sure what I should do about it. I loved Mama, and I kept waiting, hoping, for her to get better and go back to the way she used to be.

Thanks to Grandma and Aunt Macy, by the end of the summer I was able to see a cute little girl whenever I looked in the mirror. But when I got home, Mama was quick to remind me I was ugly. To keep her from seeing my face, I found my mask in my room and started wearing it again. I put in on every day when I got in from school, this time not because she told me to, but because I wanted to.

One afternoon a friend of Nick’s came over to the house for a visit and saw me wearing it. He asked Nick why his sister had a dish towel on her face.

Mama overheard the conversation and bailed him out. “We don’t know why she does it. She put it on one day and has been wearing it ever since. I guess we’re used to it.” Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “She’s always doing strange stuff like that.”

She turned to me. “Why
are
you wearing that thing over your face anyway?” she asked, as if she didn’t have the slightest clue as to why I would do such a thing. “Take it off right now!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered mechanically. But I didn’t want to take off my mask. I stalled, pretending to fumble with the knot.

“Give it to me,” she said, sticking out one of her hands, palm up. “Now!” she demanded, jutting her hand forward. I wasn’t moving fast enough for her, so she jerked the mask down from my face herself. It dangled around my neck, held on by a double knot. “Now, take it the rest of the way off.”

As soon as I got it untied, she snatched it from me and tossed it into the trash. One ragged edge hung over the side, and clung there for a while before its own weight took it down, out of my sight.

I missed my mask immediately, the closeness, the warmth, the smell of it, and the sense of security it gave me. But most of all, the barrier it put between Mama and me. Without it I felt frightened and vulnerable, like a newborn suddenly stripped of the safe, familiar boundaries of a womb.