Fig (25 page)

I need another plan.

*  *  *  *

I forge the letter to Mrs. Gallagher using one of the electric typewriters in the little rooms connected to the library. I fake Daddy's signature—a squiggly line, like he lost control of the pen. Tobias Johnson. The fake signature looks a lot like his real one. His signature is nothing like his regular penmanship, something I've never considered until today.

The letter I write is written by a father who adamantly opposes sex education. “Adamant” comes right after “Adam” in the pocketbook dictionary at home—as in the biblical Adam, the first man. From Adam's rib, God carved Eve. “Adamant” is defined as being “impervious to pleas or reason; unyielding.”

This unyielding father explains to Mrs. Gallagher how I forged his signature on my permission slip. Now I understand what people mean when they say there is a truth in every lie. This unyielding father tells Mrs. Gallagher she had better find a way to ensure this never happens again. As this father writes, his character grows stronger. This father would never let his wife go crazy.

This unyielding father is offended that something as banal as a sack of flour is being used to represent something so precious as a human life. He had no choice but to take it away, and now he's forbidding me from returning to class—not until this dreadful assignment has been completed. He writes,
Seventh graders are far too young to be exposed to such adult subject matter.
This father concludes by asking Mrs. Gallagher a question:
Have you ever considered the role you play in introducing sexuality to the youth of today before they are mentally and spiritually ready?
And then he blames her for teen pregnancy in Douglas County.

His daughter will be a virgin forever and ever and ever. And there is a truth in every lie.

*  *  *  *

“Thanks for meeting with me,” Mrs. Gallagher says, taking off her reading glasses and setting them on her desk. She smiles at me. I don't say anything, and I don't dare look at her, because she's an eye-contact person. Eye-contact people freak me out.

“I got the letter you wrote,” she says. And she pulls it from a folder, holding it for me to see.

I look out the window. This second-story window frames the sky and the tree where the crows perch. Daddy always says a gray and empty sky like this means the first snow of the year is on its way. I hold my breath and cross my fingers: Maybe this is a bad dream. Maybe I'm still in bed waiting for the 6:00 alarm to ring.

“You're not in trouble,” Mrs. Gallagher says, leaning forward the way people do when they are trying to get me to look at them. She wants me to feel safe. I think about the third grade. How everything changed when Mrs. Jefferson found out about my mother. I don't want that to happen again. I wait for Mrs. Gallagher to say,
I've spoken to your father
, but then I cross my fingers and hold my breath again:
Please, please, please, let it be him and not my mother.

I was hoping junior high would be different. I knew the kids wouldn't forget, but I hoped I could at least transition into a world where my teachers didn't know, and wouldn't have to. I can feel Mrs. Gallagher studying me.

“I haven't spoken to anyone about this matter,” she says. “I wouldn't dream of embarrassing you like that. Everyone develops at a different rate, some girls slower than others. Honestly, I'm always relieved by the girls like you. It's extremely hard work to stay a little girl in today's world.” She sets the letter down, and I think,
There are girls like me?

“I admire your conviction—your resistance to growing up,” she says. “But in the future, Fig, this is not the appropriate way to handle this kind of situation.” And she taps her finger on the letter as if I've already forgotten. She explains how she caught me. She doesn't know Daddy well, but she does know him well enough to know he's not a Christian. “In a place like Kansas,” she says, “I have to keep track of my enemies and my allies.”

She says the letter was otherwise too convincing. Had she not met my father at orientation, she would have been forced to show it to the principal. And she shakes her head the way Mama does when she is sad. This is when Mrs. Gallagher gets up. She comes around to stand in front of me. She is so close, I have to look at her. I hold my breath again and recross my fingers, hoping this will be enough to make her go away.

“Fig, I'm not your enemy,” she says. “I wish you would have come to me.”

Mrs. Gallagher looks at me like this is an easy thing to do when I have never asked for anything from anyone in my whole, entire life. She blinks, and then she tells me seventh grade is not only the worst grade to be in but the worst one to teach. “Worse than kindergarten,” she says. “Some kids are having sex already,” she announces, pausing long enough to gauge my reaction. So I make sure to give her the reaction she needs from me. And in doing so, I confirm her theory: I am the epitome of immature. Too shy to carry a sack of flour and pretend it's a baby, because by doing so I am implying that I've had sex, even if it's only make-believe.

She is wrong after all; there are no girls like me.

And I'm not yet off the hook. Mrs. Gallagher assigns a standard five-paragraph essay.

The topic: teen pregnancy. “Take an angle,” she says, “and support your thesis with plenty of evidence and valid research.”

When she finally releases me, lunch is nearly over. She never once inquires about my missing flour baby. Instead she signs a permission slip that allows me to spend tomorrow in the library instead of in her class. I will return to health only after the assignment is complete, and all the other flour babies have been donated to the real young mothers and their children.

*  *  *  *

I write the paper Mrs. Gallagher wants me to write. My thesis statement:
How sex education helps prevent teen pregnancy.
It is a cliché.

Preaching abstinence is not enough. I advocate for informing students about birth control and abortion. I steal from Mama. I propose that public schools should distribute prophylactics. I conclude that abortion should be legal in every single state and made available to minors without parental consent.

I'm getting better at providing people with what they want and acting like the girl they think me to be. And most important, I am learning how to help Mama when she needs my help. I am her protector.

*  *  *  *

Daddy is counting sheep when I get home from school. I see him when I decide to cut through the pasture, toward the orchard, instead of walking the long driveway home. My father always jokes about this particular job. “There are things,” he says, “like counting sheep, I never imagined myself really doing.” And then he'll pretend to yawn and fall asleep.

I wave, and he waves back. Then I head for the orchard. It was snowing in town, but not here—not yet. The sky is gray and empty, and it won't be long before the storm comes. Before the giant dome above shatters into a million snowflake shards of winter.

Mama doesn't see me, but I see her. I hide behind one of the thick cottonwoods that encircle the house and protect the structure from the midwestern tornados.

I watch her dig a hole. She stabs the backyard with a shovel. I haven't seen her use a shovel since she gave up on gardening. The mannequin heads are on top of the wood pile, and the carelessness of how they were dropped reminds me of a photograph I once saw of a mass grave at Auschwitz. A picture that made me sick to my stomach.

Mama uses the wooden yardstick to measure the distance from one hole to the next. The yardstick has warped since I last used it to construct the Calendar of Ordeals. And she seems rushed as she attacks the cold earth with the sharp steel. I count twelve piles of dirt, which means she has already dug twelve of these holes.

She keeps looking at the driveway, where I would normally appear. And then she appears to be done with the digging.

One by one, she takes a mannequin head and places each one into a hole of its very own. When there are no more heads, she fills the thirteen holes with dirt and uses her feet to stamp the earth back to flat again. She even gets on her knees, smoothing out the dirt and pressing down with her palms. She keeps looking up, like she's afraid to be caught.

I turn into the cottonwood when she looks my way, and I can't be seen. I am a tree nymph. Finally, Mama stands, and as she brushes the dirt from her hands she examines each grave that is no longer a hole, and then she goes inside. She leaves the shovel leaning against the side of the house.

I count to sixty. Then I count to sixty three more times. When I'm done, it still doesn't seem like long enough, so I do it one more time. After six minutes, I reemerge. Three hundred and eighty seconds. I walk toward the house. I open the door, and I go inside just like I would any other day. That night, it snows one foot, and the white layer of cold makes the world appear pure again.

*  *  *  *

The snow continues to fall.

As predicted by the
Farmers' Almanac
, winter comes early. The farmers in Douglas County scramble to harvest their crops but suffer plenty of losses. The price of hay skyrockets. While the pigs are smart enough to dig through the snow and find the clover, the sheep just stand there looking dumb, bleating to be fed. We buy more feed for winter than we have ever done before.

I keep expecting the snow to stop—to melt—to reveal one more time the red, orange, and yellow colors of the autumn, but this fire continues to be extinguished by the silent snow. And the snow is steady; it keeps falling and falling and falling. It comes, but it never actually blizzards. Not even wind. Just a white sky and the steady white of falling snow. The white blanket grows thicker, and the quilt squares of Douglas County disappear for now. Like the thirteen heads buried in the yard, the snow buries us; and it makes no plan to uncover what it hides.

I hold my breath and cross my fingers to keep my father in a permanent state of ignorance. And it works. He doesn't find out about the flour, and by the time I turn twelve I can breathe again. Like skin growing over a wound, the hurt is hidden. Maybe even healed. And the snow falls. The world is a clean slate, and even Mama doesn't seem to remember, which is for the best.

She sets aside her art for books and for sleep. And she isn't the only one swallowed by the need to hibernate. Everyone in Douglas County goes through the motions of life, but after the hurried harvest we are all slow—lethargic, almost drugged. We do as we have always done, and yet we are so far away. We dream the collective dream that is also the longest winter I have ever seen.

meridian: 1. An imaginary great circle on the Earth's surface, passing through geographic poles. 2. Either half of such a great circle, all points of which have the same longitude. 3.
(Astronomy)
A great circle passing through poles of the celestial sphere and the zenith for a particular observer. 4.
(Mathematics)
A similar line on any general surface of revolution. 5.
(Alternative medicine)
Any of the pathways on the body along which the vital energy
(Qi )
is thought to flow and, therefore, the acupoints are distributed. 6. The highest point or state of consciousness and enlightenment achievable by a human.

March 19, 1988

It's more than just the engine or the rain that wakes me. It's a bad feeling. I've been dreaming, but the dream runs away fast.

From my window, I watch Daddy in the dark rain throwing stuff into the back of the truck. I grab my robe and go downstairs. Gran is in the kitchen. She looks at me, surprised. “Why are you here?” I ask. She tells me Daddy called and asked her to come stay the night with me. “All the pigs got out,” she says, stirring her instant coffee. “And he needs to clear them out of the road and get them back into the sty.”

“I'm twelve years old,” I say. “I don't need a babysitter.”
Besides
, I think,
Mama's here
.

I slip on my galoshes, and then my rain slicker. Ignoring Gran's protests, I rush outside into the wet night. After the long winter, spring is still a shock to me. The farm is no longer asleep, smothered by a blanket of quiet white; the coma is over and the rain has washed away the frozen dreamscape.

Daddy doesn't see me slide into the truck, not until he gets in too. For a second, he stops and looks at me. His eyelids droop the way they do when he is tired, and his eyes are sad. He nods, then shifts the truck into gear. He has the brights turned on, and they highlight long strips of rain and road.

The headlights pick up the pigs where they stand in the road snorting at the sky, awkward and miserable in the storm. It isn't until Daddy pulls over that I see Mama. She's wearing one of her white-linen nightgowns, and she glows against the black night. She's soaked through, and even from inside the truck I can see her body through the wet fabric.

She's standing on the side of the road with her arms raised, orchestrating both the rain and the escaped pigs. She is smiling like she's an actor on a stage, in the spotlight—she pays us no attention. Daddy doesn't say anything.

He gets out of the truck and pulls the hood of his jacket over his head. He starts leading the pigs back through the gate, and he doesn't tend to Mama—not until he's finished with the livestock.

And this is how I know everything has changed.

*  *  *  *

At school, Alicia Bernstein takes me to a room I never knew existed.

The room is across the hall from the principal's office and through the classroom used for special education. At first, I think she's only getting something from a closet, but when she opens the door I see it really is a room. And we both go in. There are no windows in this room.