Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets (5 page)

But the real celebration, the wondrous,
YAWP!-
worthy, loafing-on-the-grass joy, stems from my sister’s presence. I’m not even upset that she can only stay for an hour because she has to work in the morning.

“On my feet all day.” She shows me the worn bottom of her shoe.

“How do you live?”

I want to hear that she’s got money and a nice place to live, that her friends are helping her. I want to hear that she misses being at home. Instead, she complains a bunch about things like a small bathroom and a loud landlord. She has no car. She bought a bunch of thrift store clothes. She’s learned to live on less.

“Do you want me to pack a bag for you?” I ask. “From the closet or your dresser?”

“Mom didn’t throw out my clothes yet?”

“No. Why would she?”

“She throws out my clothes
all the time.
Says they’re old or ripped.” Jorie leans in and whispers comically loud, “Even though they
aren’t
old or ripped!”

“They haven’t touched the room, really.” I hesitate to mention the things that have been touched.

“Why did you get kicked out?” Beth asks, too loudly it seems. There’s a reasonable pause that I threaten to fill with an honest answer, but then Jorie cuts me off.

“Oh, typical stuff. Politics. Religion. Arguments about Ultimate Fighting Championships on Pay-Per-View.”

“Bummer,” Beth says.

I think that it’s fortunate Beth and I are buzzed. Beer will prevent us from exploring certain conversational threads.

“You ever finish that graphic story thing?” Beth asks. “I’ve got nothing for the last issue!”

I can feel my tenuous connection to Beth dissolving—she won’t need to talk to me if Jorie can just hand over this mysterious graphic poem.

“Left everything in my room, Beth! It’s there with all my best socks and bras.”

“I could write you some stuff,” I offer. This makes as much sense as me offering to conduct brain surgery on myself, but I need to say something to prevent Beth from revealing that I went into Jorie’s room.

“Yeah, you should let my brother give you stuff. He reads lots of Walt Whitman. He should be able to crank out something good enough to fill twenty pages.”

I laugh because I feel like someone should laugh.

And then it’s all over. Derek comes back and says his lady needs to leave, which means Jorie needs to leave. The invisible magic of our conversation fizzes away. I hum a sad song as Beth strolls off to find Martin.

I hug Jorie and ask her to send me more photos.

“I don’t always have a computer and I’m gonna have to get rid of my phone soon. But I saw those berries and the sky was so blue! I thought it would cheer you up.”

“It did,” I say.

“Did you need cheering up?”

“I always need cheering up,” I say as cheerfully as I can.

“It should be okay, though, at home? It should be calm and cool.”

I smile in a way that suggests that things are not cool, that I want her to come home, but what can I say in a stranger’s house to my sister who lives somewhere strange and has no money and no car and works all day so she’s no longer getting knocked around and screeched at by our brutish banshee parents?

“It’s okay,” I lie. “Things are okay.”

ON RANDOM SATURDAYS
, my mother conscripts me to clean the house. We never clean the entire house, just certain sections intensely. The worst cleaning, of course, is the bathroom. Or the kitchen. It’s a tie, really, because both rooms involve lots of bleach or ammonia. Never both.

“Your grandmother nearly
died
once because she poured a bunch of bleach into the bathtub and she didn’t know that I had poured a bunch of ammonia in there already.”

My mother always uses cleaning gloves—bright green. She gets a pair of them every month. Her cleanliness is a divine neurosis.

Today we’re cleaning the kitchen. I offer to shake crumbs out of the toaster. It’s the least annoying job I can do with one working arm. Plus, I can stretch it out for twenty minutes without suspicion.

“When I was very little,” my mom says while halfway inside the fridge, “it was easy to clean the fridge because we didn’t have as much food. We grew our own veggies and had plenty of fresh fruit from local places in the summer, but we didn’t have much food in the fridge itself. Your grandfather hunted and we got a freezer for the venison, but I think I was ten by the time that happened.”

I try not to encourage many details about my mother’s childhood since it gives her opportunities to tell me how grateful I should be.

After cleaning the fridge from top to bottom, she asks me to help her pull it away from the wall so we can vacuum the back. The air behind the fridge smells hot and tastes coppery. The dust makes me feel a little sick. It’s all dead skin, cobwebs, crumbs, cigarette ash. Who knows what else.

While my mom drags the vacuum hose along the coil, I notice a piece of faded red construction paper poking out from under the fridge. When she’s out of the way, I squat down and carefully pull the paper.

“Is that from you kids?” my mom asks over my shoulder.

The paper has two handprints of different sizes with our names under each. Red construction paper, white paint handprints.

“I remember doing this,” I say.

“Was that for Dad’s birthday?”

That I cannot remember. Jorie and I wore old, paint-speckled dress shirts, put on backwards so that we each had to button the other’s shirt. I remember trying to paint a lion with brown paint for the mane and yellow for the face. Jorie helped me make the lion’s nose and eyes. She painted a huge tree on multiple pieces of paper that we taped together. About six pieces of blue. No! It was three blue for the sky, three green for the grass. She made the trunk with brown paint and for a moment I even remember getting mad because she used up the rest of the brown before I could try to make another lion. Then she let me help her with the tree; I was happy. I drew birds the way my second grade teacher taught me—two black curves. All the birds I drew looked like distant seagulls. Jorie painted the tree, gave it a bird’s nest. She painted a cloud and a sun. We spent hours. I might be making up all sorts of details, but here with my mom I feel like everything happened exactly that way.

What the hell happened to that tree?

We painted a bunch of things that afternoon, but this handprint thing might be the only thing we kept.

I think it was for Valentine’s Day. Or my parents’ anniversary. Or maybe it was my dad’s birthday. Should I be worried I can’t remember why we did it?

“I should give this to Jorie,” I say, forgetting for too many nanoseconds that Jorie lives somewhere else.

I really really really just thought I could go upstairs and give this to her.

THE SCHOOL SECRETARY’S NAME
is Mrs. Berry, but she smells like cigarettes. Extremely so. I wonder if she knows it.

“I need to speak with Mr. Kunkel,” I ask on Monday morning when I should be off to third period.

“
Principal
Kunkel,” she corrects without making eye contact, though I’m not sure what she’s doing since her desk is relatively paper-free and her computer monitor is off. Maybe she’s staring at her next cigarette.

“Sorry.”

“He’s not in.” She looks at me.

I leave her alone to count down the nanoseconds to her next break.

I’m not sure what to do next. My plan is not very involved. All weekend, I was reminded of how Jorie was living in some kind of limbo. I sat in my room and worried about her. But not in the usual way I worry—not with pacing and sweating and nonsense thoughts. I had a
pure
worry for her. It felt rational but sick. I thought of terrible things happening to her: people breaking into her apartment, stealing her few valuables, menacing her physical well-being (though I stopped myself from overimagining this). Then I imagined her living under a bridge somewhere, becoming a local sob story: “Girl Under Bridge Wears Trash Bags, Eats Stray Cats; Parents Refuse to Help.”

Maybe this was late-night, fatigued thinking, but I thought that if she could come live back at home, she might be safer. She might be able to save money, get a car, live more comfortably. She could write and draw and try to be a better version of Jorie—a more family-friendly version. I imagined fun dinners. I imagined her complimenting my parents. I imagined we’d all be better at being a family.

Plus, I could actually help her this time, instead of turtling up during the awful moments.

Dr. Bird—who doesn’t charge extra for late-night therapy—said I should simply ask my parents to let Jorie come back home.

I disagreed.

Dr. Bird said I might just be scared to bring up the situation.

I disagreed again, but we both knew she was right.

“I’m going to work this the other way around,” I said. “Get her back in school, then back at home. Maybe the school can force my parents to let her move back home, even. Like, on the condition that she’s living at home she can finish out the year.”

Dr. Bird stretched her neck and glared at me with one solid black eye. She said she was surprised by my naiveté, a word I never thought a pigeon would know.

“I need to do it this way, Dr. Bird.”

She dug her beak into the crook of her wing.

“If you need to do it this way,” she said, “it means you need to learn how to talk to your parents in a different way.”

Dr. Bird bobbed her head, then fluffed out her feathers.

Session over.

So, I’m at the principal’s office, desperate to plead my sister’s case.

I go back up to Mrs. Berry.

“It’s kind of urgent that I talk to someone today.”

“If you’re having
personal
issues, your guidance counselor can help.”

“It’s not that kind of urgent.”

The secretary snaps some gum. Or maybe it’s her teeth clacking in disgust at my refusal to take advantage of school services. I expect her to tell me that the counselors get paid good money to deal with my problems.

“The vice principal is in.” She gestures to an office.

Vice Principal VanOstenbridge looks like a less successful version of my father. His shirts seem perma-wrinkled; his glasses constantly slide down his nose. He speaks with the voice of a shy kid ordering his own food for the first time. He’s pale, too, paler than normal people who are pale for a particular reason (nausea, fear, the flu). He’s paler than the
Twilight
vampires, but less pale than an albino. Also: sweaty. He’s a sweaty, translucent creature. Like a jellyfish without the poison stingers. He’s like the lame jellyfish that never makes it on nature shows—no tentacle stingers. Just a clear disk that gyrates regularly to keep moving. Who would watch a show about that?

“I guess I can talk to him.” Who knows if he even has the power to do what I want.

“Sit and wait there.” She gestures at a brown wooden chair next to his office door.

While I wait for VP VanO, I begin to worry that I’m unprepared for this meeting. I came in ready to make demands but not ready to discuss specifics. VanO is the kind of person who thinks school is
great fun.
He loves school functions, PTA meetings, Back-to-School Night, pep rallies and bonfires. But VanO seems like he might crack if demands are made in his presence.

I might have to use finesse. But I don’t have finesse. I have panic attacks and my family’s genetic tendency to talk too fast when upset.

The student who comes out of VanOstenbridge’s office seems pale. Is VP VanO contagious? I have no time to fear it, as I’m being welcomed in by his noodley arm and an all-lip smile.

Walt Whitman would find a way to celebrate VanOstenbridge. Walt found something to celebrate about everyone.

“You have a very clean office,” I say while sitting down.

“Thanks.” He sits behind his desk. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here to ask about my sister. Jorie. You might remember her?”

“The first girl expelled from this school in its history. Yes. I remember.”

If I could read people’s faces I might know if VanO would be sympathetic to my plea.

“Well. I wonder if there’s any chance she can be allowed to walk in graduation.”

VanOstenbridge tilts back in his chair. The resulting squeak kills any sense of contemplative authority the gesture would normally carry. I expect his chair to whisper a request for oil.

“This chair,” he chuckles. “Older than me!”

I blurt out my mastered fake laugh. It sounds exactly like this:

Heh!

“What you’re asking, what you’re
really
asking, is that the school admit it did something wrong by expelling Jorie. And I’m not sure the school board or Principal Kunkel and I would be able to do that.”

“Don’t think about it as admitting a mistake. Fighting is wrong—we all know that. No one wants to pretend that she didn’t get into a fight. It’s just—she deserves to have a chance to graduate with everyone else.”

“And why does she
deserve
that? Do you know what she did, exactly?”

VP VanO gets a file from behind his desk. It seems odd that he’d have a file on my sister at the ready, but if she really is the first girl to get booted out, maybe everyone in the administration reads the file each morning to remember the worst student ever.

“She got into a fight with Gina Best,” I say. “Essentially.”

“Well,
essentially
it wasn’t a
fight
so much as a
beating.
” VanO twitches his mouth, mouse-like. “It was an
ambush.
”

I shake my head. “She hit the girl’s head against the locker. But it wasn’t an ambush.”

“You know that your sister sent Gina to the hospital?”

“Yeah, but everyone knows that was a joke. It wasn’t serious.”

“You know that Gina’s head was smashed into a locker.” He looks at me. “You know that Gina went to the hospital as a result.”

I try to look at him, but my eyes find everything else in his office quite interesting.

“That’s
not serious?
” he asks.

“She didn’t get stitches or staples or anything.”