Fig (7 page)

Mama says Gran always wanted to stay in Lawrence, where she'd been born and raised. She called Gran a city girl who married a farm. “It was the patriotic thing to do,” Mama said. “It was World War II, and lots of sweethearts tied the knot before they should have. All the guys were enlisting, and no one knew who would come back and who wouldn't.”

Gran goes straight to bed, but I don't. I know that Mama is upstairs waiting for me. I go to her room, and Mama opens the door before I have a chance to knock.

She seems like herself again—before the medicine, and the too-much-medicine.

I milk her for all the love I can get. She tends to my knees with careful tissue and stinging peroxide and helps me get ready for bed. With my flannel nightie on and Band-Aids plastered across my knees, the whole big lesson about nature seems silly, so I don't talk about it. And even if I tried, the words to explain my experience have all blown away.

But Mama's crying anyway and telling me how much she's missed me. “I'm so sorry,” she says, wiping tears away.

We're back in her room again, sitting cross-legged on the brass bed, when she pulls my present out from where she had it hidden under the pillow. And she tells me to open it. She's watching to make sure I'm happy, and it's not just about my birthday.

I try to make the moment last forever. I'm careful as I peel off the tissue paper, trying not to tear it, but I can't help it; the rip runs away from me to reveal the gift: a glossy wall calendar with picture after picture from
Alice in Wonderland
. Mama says the illustrations are from the original book. They are not from the Disney movie. Disney is yet another thing my mother hates. “It's sexist,” she has explained a million times, “the way the women are portrayed as villain or maiden in distress.”

Mama looks at me and says, “Happy birthday, my precious Fig,” and then she brushes my bangs away so she can kiss my third eye.

Mama lets me crawl under the covers, and I know she'll let me stay the night. Daddy has to sleep downstairs on the sofa with the television turned on anyway. Just in case the tornados do turn around and make the screen go all red with a million warnings. In case the newscasters say, “No school tomorrow.”

I wrap my arms around Mama, and I hold her like I'm the mother and she's the daughter.

I like the way it feels, but it makes me worry, too. What would Gran say if she saw? But then I breathe in Mama, and she is warm, and my eyes can't help but close. It is so still right here, while outside the anxious wind rifles through the farm, looking to take something away.

*  *  *  *

Daddy says Mama needs to rest again.

She's trying out a new medicine to see if it will make her feel better—but I already know what these pills do. They don't make her better. They just make her tired.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asks, “Maybe check for eggs?”

But I'm mad at him. I wouldn't bother her. I'd only give her a kiss, and then I'd leave—maybe I'd offer to get her a glass of water, or ask if I could curl up beside her and take a nap too. If she said no, I'd understand. And I'd go away.

I glare at Daddy, which is hard to do because he's so much taller. I give up, turning around and running down the hall like I've been told not to do because the sound startles Mama.

There are new rules, and they make everything different from before. Daddy says, “Rules are important,” but Uncle Billy says, “It's important to learn the rules so you can learn when and how to break them.” I run into the bathroom and slam the door behind me. Then I lean against it, listening. I don't hear anything, which means Daddy is still standing guard. He is protecting Mama.

I slide the lock over so no one can get in, and then I climb into the bathtub.

I don't take off my clothes. I'm not planning on taking a bath. I like the old claw-foot. The way it slopes and the plug with the chain to keep it from ever getting lost. I like touching the places where the enamel chipped and watching the daddy longlegs who lives in the drain—the one who only has seven legs now because of me.

Alex Turner says daddy longlegs are the most poisonous spiders in the world. Alex talks about spiders all the time. Last year, he told the class everything he knew about daddy longlegs. “Even though they are superpoisonous,” he said, “they are completely harmless because they have no fangs.” When I told Mama, she said Alex was wrong. “That's just an urban legend,” she explained. But I still like the idea: I could be poisonous like that.

I hear Daddy walk toward the bathroom. I can tell when he pauses, listening through the door. He says, “Fig ?” but I don't say anything, so he says, “Fig, leave your Mama be. Do you hear me?” He stands there as if I'll answer, but finally I hear him sigh. And he walks away. I listen to his steps as he goes down the stairs.

I listen until I can't hear him anymore.

I'm still in my nightgown. When I tuck my knees under my chin, the skirt part slips down and I can see my knees. I have scabs from the tornado knocking me over—the tornado that Gran insists wasn't a tornado. “The real tornados were very far away,” she told my father. She looked at him long and hard with her dark eyes and said, “I thought they said her IQ was exceptionally high?”

The scabs are scattered across my knees the way stars make constellations in the sky.

I trace them as if to play connect the dots. On my left knee, I trace a sun. The kind of sun I like to draw—a circle with little triangles all around for the rays. When I trace the scabs on my right knee, I discover a volcano.

The kids at school don't call them scabs. They call them owies—and so do some of the grown-ups, like Mrs. Olson.
“Owies.”
I don't think this is a very grown-up word to use. Unlike owies, scabs aren't about being hurt. They are proof I am healing.

I've had enough scabs to know that in a day or two these ones will disappear. They will leave behind brand-new skin like nothing ever happened.

I pick one to see what is underneath. There's no blood, just pinkness. Pink like Wilbur the pig in
Charlotte's Web
. Not the color of our pigs, which are black and white and gristly. I choose another scab because it looks like a bleeder, and it is. It turns into a little bead of blood and looks like it did when I first got hurt.

Then I pick them all, one by one, and my body is an Advent calendar. Sometimes I have to pinch the skin to coax the blood. And sometimes I mess up and the skin peels too far. The skin runs away like the tissue paper did when I was opening my birthday present.

The sores spread like watercolors on wet paper, and the bleeding makes me feel the way I did when I still sucked my thumb. It makes everything stop.

I pull myself out of the tub and go to the door. I unlock the latch and I get back into the claw-foot. I check my knees and find I have to pick more.

Pick, pick, pick.

Once the blood is good again, I start to cry. I'm careful not to actually call out for Mama. I cry like I can't help but cry—the way a person really cries when they are very hurt. But she doesn't come. No one does. Even when I am really crying, even when I cry for Mama. No one comes.

*  *  *  *

“That's not a real Barbie,” Candace Sherman says. And she keeps her arm up like she's still waiting for Mrs. Olson to call on her. She does this so no one else can get a turn till she's said what she wants to say. “
That
is the fake kind they sell at Kmart. That's why she's so bendy, Fig. Not because she's a special edition.”

And the whole second-grade class giggles.

The way show-and-tell works in Mrs. Olson's second-grade classroom is each student only gets to do it once a year on his or her birthday. If your birthday is in the summer, your birthday show-and-tell is on your half birthday, or whatever closest day is available. The only other show-and-tell you get is if you travel outside Kansas.

I'm lucky because we never go anywhere.

I'd been hoping Mrs. Olson would forget my birthday because I was careful not to remind her like the other kids always do, but she remembered. Even if it took her a few days, she remembered.

After morning recess, she pulled me aside to tell me I was up first thing after lunch before language arts. I was about to beg her not to make me, when I remembered I still had the bendable Barbie doll in my backpack. I imagined the other girls coming up afterward, asking to play with her during recess. Asking to play with
me
. And this was the stupid reason I agreed to do show-and-tell.

*  *  *  *

I watch the school bus drive away, and then I stand in the road watching the dust settle. I'm the first kid picked up in the morning and the last one dropped off.

The days are getting shorter, and the moon is coming up—the kind that Daddy calls a harvest moon. It's as orange as a pumpkin, and it looks too heavy to go any higher.

I open my backpack to get my sweater.

There's the fake Barbie.

Her legs stick out and make the letter
V
. I take her out. And I bend her into impossible positions, positions that don't make sense. Positions that scare me because the expression on her face never changes. Sometimes this happens to Mama, but when it does she is never smiling.

I bend her until her back should break.

I force her head into her crotch and jam her legs and arms until all her joints bend the wrong way. I straighten her out and strip off her clothes. I pop off the rubber high heels, letting them fly one at a time like champagne corks. I undo the Velcro on her blouse and slide off her jeans, and I'm surprised to find she isn't wearing any underwear. She doesn't have nipples or a belly button or a vagina, but she does have something resembling a butt crack.

I stuff all her clothes into the culvert. And then I put the naked fake Barbie back into my pack, buried under my Trapper Keeper—just in case.

Just in case I get home and find Mama feeling better. Good enough to leave her room, have dinner with us, and maybe even help me with my homework. I was wrong to think that everything would go back to how it was. Sometimes holding my breath and crossing my fingers doesn't work.

“Fig, we have to be patient,” Daddy keeps telling me. “The medicine doesn't just start working overnight. It takes a while for the doctors to find the right dose, to see what combination of drugs brings the most relief.” And this is when he always pauses. He pauses and looks at me for a long time. He looks tired every day. And finally, after forever, Daddy will finish the speech. “It will take some time,” he says.

But he is never specific; he does not elaborate. He does not show me on the calendar how long it will take. This is because he doesn't know. And if Daddy doesn't know, that means no one does. “We just have to wait and see,” my father says, and I swear he tells me this every single day.

*  *  *  *

Mama does come downstairs while Daddy and I are eating. We're sitting at the old oak table in the kitchen. Through the French doors, I can see the table in the dining room. The pile of broken china dolls is still there next to the coil of barbed wire, but Daddy must have used the power drill, because it's no longer there.

No more blinking red light.

Gran gets after Daddy about how Mama shouldn't use that space to work.

“If Annie is going to insist on being an artist,” Gran says, “then she should act like one and turn the attic into a studio.” But Daddy always tells Gran he doesn't mind.

He likes Mama out in the open—where he can see her.

Daddy slides his chair back, like he's going to get up. The way that men do on TV whenever a woman comes into the room. But he doesn't get up—he watches Mama, who is standing in the doorway, her hair tangled and face as pale as a ghost. She's wearing Daddy's terry-cloth bathrobe, and in reaction to us staring she tightens the belt. I've seen Mama tired before, but not like this.

Maybe Mama has cancer like Sissy Baxter's mother does. Maybe she has cancer instead of schizophrenia? I was hiding in the coat closet when I heard Sissy Baxter tell Mrs. Olson.

“How is your mother?” Mrs. Olson asked, and that's when Sissy Baxter started crying. Mrs. Olson let her cry. But then Sissy Baxter stopped crying like it was something you can just turn off. That's when she said, “Daddy says Mom's going to be okay after she gets the mastectomy.” Sissy Baxter didn't trip up when she said “mastectomy.” Sissy Baxter said “mastectomy” out loud the way I wish I could say the word “schizophrenia.”

“Are you hungry?” Daddy asks, and I remember where I am. Mama looks at him like she doesn't understand what he is asking.

“It's ham,” Daddy says. “The end of what Billy cured last year.”

I cringe.

I still can't stand the idea of eating meat, but I've stopped feeding it to the dog. No matter how many times Mama insists nothing was actually chasing us that night, I remember all those yellow eyes. What if they really were coyotes? What if I was the one who lured them to the farm by leaving all my scraps by the ditch? Now when I pocket the meat from my plate, I bury it deep in the kitchen trash instead.

Daddy is always going on about how important it is to know where your food comes from. But the slaughter is hard on me—it's always come after my birthday, once it's cold enough that all the flies have died. This year, I hid inside my bedroom to avoid it but I forgot about the curing, which is still to come, and soon.

Daddy also says, “There is no cure for schizophrenia.”

Mama is staring at the oven like she can see the ham inside, even though there is no window. Just white enamel and an oven mitt hanging from the handle. Maybe Mama has been hiding in her room for the same reasons that I hide in mine.

Maybe we can hide together.

“Tobias,” Mama says, “don't get up. I'm fine.”