Fig (21 page)

After I eat ten crackers, I hope evaporation is on my side. I need these Saltines to be dry enough. Everything else not wet is too moist. I stay in my room, afraid to run into anyone else. Uncle Billy's right. People are approximately 70 percent water. Maybe this is why our blood is blue inside our skin? We truly are nothing more than hairy bags full of water, which means I can't touch anyone. Not today.

Today, I try not to even touch myself.

I keep my fingers away from the rest of me. When I do walk, I walk with my arms spread out like wings and my legs do not touch. I worry about going to the bathroom. There is water in my urine and in the toilet. And I pee a lot despite not drinking any fluids since yesterday. In bed, I turn myself into the letter
X
. I am the Roman numeral for how old I am. I mark the spot for where I am in time. But no matter what I do, I still touch myself. So I tell myself my own body doesn't count.

I don't count.

But still I won't allow myself to cross my fingers, not today. And I regret holding the nesting doll as well—all my digits gathered together, knuckles folded and touching, fingernails cold against the inside of my hand, and I am left muttering an incantation:
“I can't count. I can't count. I cannot count.”

Mama is bathing again. She seems to wash herself all the time—long, hot baths, or showers like right now. I hear the water through the walls as the pipes shudder, and then it starts to rain. The pitter-patter on the roof announces the arrival of spring, and even though I'm inside I don't feel safe.

I am surrounded by the threat of water, and the only comfort I have is that the day is almost over. Outside, the rain falls; inside, condensation collects on the cold glass and watches me through tear-shaped eyes. I go to bed. I go to bed hours earlier than I normally do.

Outside, the lightning turns the farm bright white, and from the boom of thunder more rain releases, and the sky is weeping. It is hysterical. I worry about Mama, who once told me I could get struck by lightning when taking a shower or a bath. Water is a conduit, but I can't hold my breath because I can't cross my fingers, so I change my incantation:
“She will survive. She will survive. She will survive.”

I uncap the magical licorice-scented marker. I am careful not to touch the tip of the marker, because the tip should be wet. I begin to color away today, only no ink will come. There is no black to make today obsolete, to make it
over
. I shake and press, but all I get are streaks of pathetic gray until there is no gray at all. Despite the water-logged world all around, my sacred black marker has run dry. It is as dry as a sun-bleached bone. Even when I succeed, I seem to fail.

*  *  *  *

The calendar is becoming impossible. Today is the first day of May, a Thursday, and today is the day I cannot touch metal. No steel, no lead, no brass, no iron, no silver, no tin, no gold, no copper. I cannot touch any metal of any kind. This was the same ordeal the Stanley children had to do in Zilpha's book—only they were allowed to cheat. They wore gloves and used their clothes as a buffer.

I'm allowed no such assistance. I am allowed no crutches.

This is the most important ordeal for me to master because it is the ordeal from the book, the instruction I'd been waiting for. I hold my breath and cross my fingers: If I can only get through today, life
will
improve. Everything will stop spiraling out of control.

Today, I cannot touch metal. And the ordeal begins the second I awake.

My door is shut, the keyhole watching me. The brass doorknob tarnished green from a century of handling. Getting out of bed, I am aware of the headboard and the footboard. The wrought iron reaches for me, fingers made from twisted antique tendrils. Despite a coat of white paint, the metal latch on the windowsill still winks at me. And the heating vents all yawn as if to swallow me.

I can tell someone's in the bathroom by the way the old pipes cough. They cough to let me know what they are made of—they cough-talk the way Phillip Booth does whenever he is making fun of me. The pipes talk to me. They say one word, again and again:
copper
.

It must be Daddy in the bathroom, because Mama has been staying up all night again. Her insomnia is so contagious: I lie in bed at night, unable to fall asleep. I listen to her take long showers or pace the house. I watch her from my window as she walks the yard, her nightgown white and trailing. My mother is a ghost.

I knock on my own door.

I knock as loud as I can. I have no other choice, or else I'm trapped.

“What is it?” Daddy yells.

I just keep knocking.

Ever since the calendar began, Daddy's grown more and more impatient. He looks at me the way he looks at Mama when she's not well. I wish I could tell him what I'm doing, but I cannot break the rules. So I keep knocking. I knock until my door swings open and my father's standing there—white T-shirt, striped boxers, freshly shaved. He looks annoyed.

“Is there something wrong with your door?” he asks, but I push through the open space without answering. He is already testing the door. Swinging it back and forth to study the motion of the hinges. Using the eyes on the back of my head, I can see my father as he looks up to watch me disappear into the bathroom, the door of which is miraculously still open.

I'm careful not to close this door all the way. Keeping my hands clear of doorknobs and hinges, I tiptoe around the grate, the radiator, and the claw-footed bathtub. I can't flush the toilet or wash my hands, and I have to brush my teeth without rinsing.

I hold on to the walls to keep from falling. My room and the bathroom are only tiny tests. An entire day awaits me. I am so consumed with all the potential metal ahead, I forgot to say my vows.

I forget the point of what I am trying to do.

*  *  *  *

Coming down the stairs, I'm mindful of the tiny nails masterfully hidden in the Victorian woodwork. With arms stretched out, I descend—a tightrope walker once more, like when I used to walk the plank that bridges the ditch.

I don't use the banister or rely on this wall where the molding divides the rosebud wallpaper from the rosewood paneling. I'm grateful for the Oriental runner, but I am also aware of the brass-plated borders that keep it tacked down.

“Good morning,” Daddy says when I come into the kitchen.

I absorb the fact of certain objects in the room: step stool, toaster, and the chrome edging along the counters. Daddy looks at me. “There's something off about today,” he says, and he shakes his head the way he does. And what he really means is there is something off about
me
.

When he opens the door to go feed the chickens, I grab my backpack and push through before he has the chance to exit. I am aware of zippers, buttons, and the snaps. I avoid the metal bucket that holds the feed.

Tin.

I know Daddy is watching me. I don't need to turn around to see. He is watching me the way he watches her.

Our driveway is over a mile. And the long walk gives me time to prepare.

My days used to blend together, but now each one is marked unique by its ordeal even when I fail. Today, I see metal everywhere when yesterday I did not. The fence nails gleam, and the parallel lines of wire stretch forward into the future—both to follow and avoid. I think of Sleeping Beauty. Despite the banishment of spindles from the kingdom, she still managed to prick herself on one.

Waiting for the bus, my brain extracts the soda pop and beer cans from the new grass in the ditch. It extracts the painted crushed aluminum from the other litter tossed from cars. I am a robot now with robot vision. I see the world through a computer screen that targets metal. The red X marks the spot and tugs at my nervous system.

The bus, of course, is one gigantic metal box.

As it approaches, I hear the gears grinding—the downshifting that comes with slowing down and with stopping. Having read the reports Daddy keeps in his desk, I know I have an IQ of 187. It is recommended I attend another school. A school for children who are gifted and talented. But the tuition is twelve thousand dollars a year, and I'd have to move far away from home.

When the bus stops, it vibrates because the engine is still on. The engine is mostly made from metal. The driver manually opens the door for me. The lever is metal too—coated in black rubber. While this is something he has always done for me, I have never noticed until today. And I remember the need for ritual. I bow to him and he bows back. “My lady,” he says, and winks at me as I climb aboard.

I am surrounded.

Exposed metal everywhere—the ceiling, the sides, and even the bars for holding on are all made from metal. I see the places where the rubber matting has worn away and the metal is waiting there. My robot brain turns these areas red and the word “warning” blinks urgently as I follow the careful grid. I sit where I have never sat before: in the front. I plant my feet in the aisle where the black mat looks brand new, and I use my backpack as a buffer from the metal floor under the seat in front of me. This is not the same as cheating. It is a precaution. I brace myself by holding on to the seat. I can feel the metal springs through the plastic green upholstery and
this
feels like cheating.

I hold my breath and cross my fingers.

In Daddy's desk, I've also read Alicia Bernstein's diagnosis—not only do I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, I am hypervigilant. Neither dictionary at home included “hypervigilance,” so I cut the compound in half and looked up “hyper” and “vigilant” separately.

“Vigilant” means
on the alert, watchful
, and comes from vigil.

There was a candlelight vigil at my school for the boy in Nevada who committed suicide because the lyrics in a Judas Priest song told him to. This is how I learned the word “subliminal.” Gran wanted to take me to the vigil, but Mama said, “No way, Fiona.”

She said she had to draw the line somewhere. Somewhere over the rainbow.

“Hyper” has two definitions: 1.
Over; above; beyond.
2.
Excessive; excessively.

I already knew what it meant, but the dictionary always says it better. In the case of “hyperthyroidism,” “hyper” alludes to the abnormal and excessive. The word “hyperventilate” is where “hypervigilance” would have been had this been the
DSM IV
, where I first read about schizophrenia before Mama fed that book to the fire. I'm not the only one who knows about Daddy's library beneath his bed. When a person hyperventilates, she's breathing so hard that she can't get any oxygen into her brain, which seems ironic.

I am abnormally alert and excessively watchful.

I am hypervigilant.

*  *  *  *

There is metal everywhere, not just the lead hidden in the paint on all the walls at the farm. There are doorknobs, handles, pencil sharpeners—there is metal everywhere. There is metal on my pencils, and there is graphite inside the wood. I look up “graphite” during recess. I use the encyclopedia. I learn it is a semimetal, and semi counts. I am semi-Mama. And graphite has the same
f
-sounding
ph
as “phobia” and “schizophrenia.”

There are metal rings on my shoes to feed the laces through, and all those hooks in the coatroom. There are zippers, clasps, and spiral-bound notebooks, and there is jewelry hanging off all the bodies around me. The silver and gold chains reach for me, and the earrings flash like lightning.

And then there is my desk: a combination of wood and steel, it is bolted to the floor. Once I find a way to safely sit, I cannot move. For geometry, Mr. Denmar asks us to draw the perfect circle, which I know can only be done with a compass. The teacher says it's sweet I tried to do otherwise, an important thing to attempt as an artist, “But this is math,” he says. “Do you understand?”

At home, I am confronted by silverware and wire hangers, spatulas and cast-iron skillets, pots and pans, the stove itself, the kitchen sink, and there is no end.

I fail.

And Mama doesn't come down for dinner. She's been in the bathroom all afternoon, once again. She was in there forever, both with and without the water running. But now she's in her room, and I can hear her crying. At the table, I ask if she's okay, and Daddy looks up as if he can see her through the ceiling.

“Today was just a bad day,” he says, standing up.

He starts clearing the table even though we just sat down to eat. He takes away my fork, spoon, and butter knife—the utensils I wasn't going to use—and puts everything in the sink. He scrapes the meat I never eat into the trash, and then he goes outside to check on all the animals.

*  *  *  *

June 13, 1986

The failures have been accumulating, and it's all my fault.

Mama has been experiencing tactile hallucinations. I find her getting ready to take a bath dyed blue with window cleaner, and I make the mistake of going to get my father. She was naked and just stepping into the tub when she looked at me. She looked at me like she knew she was doing something wrong. She recognized it in my eyes.

Mama looked at me and she said, “I'm just trying to get rid of the bed bugs.”

I didn't even know she was in the bathroom. I'd been waiting for this day—for Friday the thirteenth—but Mama doesn't seem to care anymore. She only cares about the bugs. “But there are no bugs,” Daddy says. He says this again and again and again; he is stuck on repeat.

He teaches me the word “formication,” as if vocabulary is the only way I can understand the world. “Formication” is one letter away from “fornication.” And it's the medical term for a sensation that resembles insects crawling on or under the skin.

This time Mama was not triggered by anything related to birth or babies, but it was still my fault. I've been punished for reversing the roles of mother and daughter. For tucking her in at night. And whispering the bedtime charm she used to say to me. My father's black hair begins to turn to white like the squares for all the failed ordeals. And the failed ordeals add up. I ran out of Sundays a long time ago, and 1986 is no longer long enough. I'd have to create four more calendars just to redo what I failed to do before. I wave my white flag instead; I surrender.