Nest (12 page)

Dad smiles like he’s really pleased, but his jaw keeps twitching, which is what happens when he’s
mad or nervous. My guess is both, since it’s pouring rain out and the wind is smacking the branches around and this is our first weekend without Mom. And Rachel is still in her pajamas and hasn’t been nice to him for days or said anything at all yet to him today, even after Dad sighed while we were eating our Rice Krispies and looked really sad and said, “Wow, this is so tough, having Mom away.”

“Cool, Dad,” I say, and reach out so that he hands me the chore wheel. I spin it and study it, since Dad is trying so hard and his job is to help people with their feelings and his own wife is in the nuthouse because she’s developed feelings that she isn’t able to manage without professional help and how can that not make him feel like he’s some kind of loser?

“Maybe Rachel would like to take a look,” Dad says, because Rachel is staring at the streams of water running down the kitchen window. She hasn’t been paying attention to the chore wheel at all. Rachel shakes her head, but I keep holding it out to her until she kind of has no choice. She takes it from me like it has dog doo on it, just touching the edge and wrinkling up her nose.

“C’mon, Rach,” Dad says.

“C’mon, Rach, what?” she says.

“How about a little effort here,” he says.

“Fine,” she says. Rachel drops the chore wheel on the table and leans over it. “Wow!” she says. “Fascinating! What an amazing piece of work.”

Dad stares at her like he doesn’t know her. Rachel takes a peek at him and then looks down at the chore wheel again.

“Unbelievably interesting,” she mumbles.

Dad’s frozen like a wild brown bunny when you surprise it on the sand path. His shoulders are hunched up. His mouth is open. He might not be breathing.

I watch the way the rain bounces back up when it hits the picnic table in the backyard. It’s raining in two directions. When I look back at Dad, he’s shaking his head like he’s got some stuck parts that he wants to loosen up. Then he slowly walks out of the room.

“What?” Rachel says to me, even though I haven’t said anything. She sounds as cranky as a little kid who needs to take a nap.

“Want to play water worms?” I ask.

“Maybe,” Rachel says, but she’s already pulling her chair right up to the window. I pull my chair up, too. We don’t choose contestants. We just watch all the squiggles of water running down the glass.

“You know, Dad doesn’t even know how long she’ll be gone,” Rachel says. “He just dumped her off at McLean Hospital and drove away. He’s waiting for a phone call from the people there.”

“He didn’t just dump her off. He told us it was Mom’s idea. He said that she wanted to go somewhere to rest and get better. They met with a nice doctor there. And there are apple trees.”

“Oh, Chirp,” Rachel says. She presses her nose up
to the window. I don’t know why she’s
Oh-Chirp
ing me. There’s too much I don’t know. I don’t know why Mom can’t just get better at home if we give her lots of peace and quiet and take turns dancing for her and cooking her chicken soup and mashed potatoes and, every once in a while, bringing her an ice cream sundae with hot fudge from Benson’s. I don’t know when we’ll get to visit Mom in the nuthouse. I don’t know why Rachel used to think everything Dad said was so great and now she won’t listen to anything he has to say. I don’t know what happened to the marsh lady to make her want to keep her distance from people, even a girl who talks extra gentle and shows her a red-winged blackbird nest.

“Listen, Chirp, let’s ask if we can go see Mom for Thanksgiving, okay?” Rachel finally says. She puts her arm around me.

“We’ll make her a pie,” I say, pressing my nose against the glass, too.

“Lemon meringue,” she says.

The glass is cold on my nose. Our breath makes fog.

Rachel backs up and draws tic-tac-toe with her finger on the window.

“You can go first, Chirpie,” she says. I’m just about to put a fat
X
right in the middle square when Dad walks in.

“Listen,” he says, “we need to talk.”

I turn my chair around, but Rachel just sighs
really loud, like Dad’s said we have to pick up every grain of sand on every beach on the Cape. She keeps staring out the window.

“Rachel!” Dad says. I’ve never heard Dad’s voice sound so sharp.

“Oh,
all right
,” she says, and makes a big deal out of dragging her chair around as if it weighs a ton.

“This is a tough time for all of us,” Dad says, looking right at Rachel. “And I have room for a lot of things, but I don’t have room for your disrespect. I understand that you have a range of feelings, some difficult, that you’re contending with. But you simply have to do better. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” Rachel says.

“And?” Dad asks.

“And, I’m sorry?”

“Is that a question or an apology?” Dad asks.

“I don’t know,” Rachel says, “but
this
is a question.” She stands up. She walks right over to Dad. She pushes her face so close to his face that I bet he can smell her milk breath. “Are
you
sorry?” she says. Then she runs out of the room and up the stairs before Dad can answer.

“Okay,” Dad mumbles. “Well, that didn’t go well.” He’s pacing around the living room and looking down, like he’s hoping to find an escape hatch in the wood floor that he can jump into and be transported to another land, where he doesn’t have a wife in a nuthouse
and an oldest daughter who has turned nasty. I think I hear Rachel crying upstairs, but it might just be a maple branch scraping against a window.

It’s probably a good time to check out what the birds are up to in this downpour. I get all suited up and I’m standing by the front door in my yellow rain slicker with my yellow rain hat that’s shaped like an astronaut’s helmet and my brown rubbers when Dad comes over to me and crouches down.

“Hey, honey,” he says, looking right in my eyes, “do you want to play water worms?”

I nod, because suddenly there are tears in my throat that will bubble up and spill out of my eyes if I try to talk. Daddy helps me unbuckle my slicker, like I’m a little girl. He lifts my rain hat off my head and hangs my slicker back up in the closet.

He takes my hand, leads me to the living room window, and points to a squiggle of water near the very top.

“This one’s mine,” he says. “Alfred, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Naomi.”

I point to a squiggle right near Dad’s. “This one’s mine. Dad, Josephine. Josephine, Dad. On your mark, get set, go!”

I lean against Dad, and he doesn’t move away. He smells good, like dry grass. We watch Alfred and Josephine race down the window. Our contestants take their sweet time, but Dad and I, there’s nothing else
we need to be doing right now. He doesn’t have to go see if Mom needs a bite to eat or if she’s warm enough on the couch or if she’d like him to read a short story to her from
The Best Short Stories of the Sixties
. Maybe once we see whether Alfred or Josephine is the winner, I’ll ask Dad if he’ll come with me to the kitchen. Maybe I’ll have milk tea in a pink mug and a piece of rye toast with margarine. Maybe he’ll have a cup of instant coffee and we’ll sit at the kitchen table and watch the rain splash and just not talk about all of the things there are to talk about.

“Turkey, Corn, Sweet Potatoes, and Peas, one more time!” Miss Gallagher says.

“Do I have to be the turkey?” Joey asks. “I really, really, really don’t want to be the turkey.”

“Joey,” Miss Gallagher says, “we’ve discussed this. We had a fair process. Everyone chose his or her role by pulling a slip of paper out of a bowl. And the turkey is a very important part of the Thanksgiving meal.”

“I guess you don’t have older brothers,” Joey says under his breath.

Miss Gallagher thinks we
could
have a blockbuster of a Thanksgiving play, because she’s added a creative element, which is having the meal dance around the Pilgrims and Indians before it settles on the table
to be eaten,
if only
Peas (Dawn) and Corn (Lisa B.) and Sweet Potatoes (Tommy) and Turkey would add their own unique flavor and spice to the basic step so it doesn’t just look like the Mexican hat dance.

I’m tired of sitting on the floor, waiting to bow my head and lead the other Pilgrims in saying grace before the meal, especially since I’m not even sure I should be saying it.

“Dancers, again!” Miss Gallagher says. Aside from Dawn, who really is trying, because she’s got her cheeks puffed up with air and actually looks a little like a pea, the rest of the meal is just shuffling around.

“I bet Miss Gallagher got this idea from
Harriet the Spy
,” Sally whispers.

I nod. Miss Gallagher is staring at us with her I’m-one-breath-away-from-yelling-at-you look.

I’m glad that Mom can’t come to our performance, since she thinks dance is one of life’s great joys and what’s going on here feels like the opposite of joy. Joey looks all stiff, and suddenly I remember Plymouth Rock and the way he tipped his head back and whirled around with the minicyclone and the wind and his tangly hair all lit up in the sun, so when the music stops on the record player, I jump up and say, “Miss Gallagher, I’d really like to be the turkey. My mother is a dancer, and I’ve inherited her genes, so I think I could add some inspiration.”

Everyone stares at me. Miss Gallagher smiles the kind of smile a grown-up makes when they think they understand you better than you understand yourself.

“That’s a generous offer, Naomi,” Miss Gallagher says, “but it wouldn’t be fair to the other students, who are sticking with their designated roles.”

I know that I should just sit down, but I keep standing, because I also know that life isn’t always fair and is filled with things like mean older brothers and dancer mothers who can’t dance.

“Does anybody mind if Joey and I switch parts?” I ask. “Not at all!” Sally shouts in her dance-party, not classroom, voice. I look around and everyone else is shaking their heads no, even Tommy, who would be the only boy left dancing if Joey became a Pilgrim.

Miss Gallagher walks over to me, still smiling, but I can tell she isn’t happy. “Now, Naomi,” she says, “I really don’t think we can trust that this is a fair representation of your classmates’ true feelings, given your current situation with your moth—”

“Hey, Miss Gallagher,” Joey says. “I know all my lines.
Gobblegobblegobble!
” He starts flapping his arms. “I can fly, too.” He’s flying right at her.
“Gobblegobblegobble!”
He looks really mad.

Miss Gallagher gets red, scurries back to the record player, and says, “Let’s take it from the top.” She turns the music back on, louder.

Now I know that she thinks everyone feels sorry for me, which makes me want to run out of the room
and slam the door. Instead, I sit back down and bow my head like a good Pilgrim until the end of class.

On the bus, Dawn leans in and stares at me. “Don’t feel bad, Chirp,” she says. I just shake my head. If I talk, I might cry, since all of my mad got pushed down inside me and now my throat aches.

“Anyway,” she says, “I think it would be more fun to lead the prayer than be a turkey.” When I don’t say anything, she says, “Well, maybe you can be the turkey next year.”

When the bus drops Joey and me off, I don’t run ahead. Joey walks right next to me, kicking a rock.

“What’s cookin’?” he says.

I shake my head.

“You know who the real turkey is, right?” Joey says.

I shrug.

“Knock-knock,” Joey says.

“Who’s there?” I whisper.

“A stupid turkey teacher.”

I can’t help smiling.

Joey kicks the rock to me, and I kick it back to him, and he kicks it back to me.

“Hey, you want to see something?” Joey says.

“Okay.”

When we’re in front of our houses, Joey says, “Get your bike and meet me back here.”

There’s no reason to go inside, because nobody’s there and we don’t have any Oreos since Dad didn’t buy any because he doesn’t know that I always have them as a snack with a glass of milk when I come home from school. I go out to the shed in the backyard, pull on my blue jeans that I keep hidden there, take off my skirt and stash it behind the snow shovels, and grab Bluebird. Joey’s already in the road waiting for me, so he must not have had a snack, either.

Joey takes off and gets a good head start, but he doesn’t just leave me in the dust, because Bluebird has three gears and I’m riding standing up. I’m pumping, pumping, pumping, and the cold air hurts when I breathe. The harder I pedal, the more my legs burn, and the more my legs burn, the less my throat aches.

“Joey!” I yell. Suddenly I want to ask him if it’s true. Is everyone just being fake-nice to me because they feel sorry for me?

“Joey!” Do they know that Mom is at McLean’s, which means she’s at a nuthouse? Who told them, since I haven’t said anything to anybody?

“Joey!” But he’s just far enough ahead that he can’t hear me.

He’s taking the shortcut to Route 6. I’m not supposed to ride my bike, only walk it, on Route 6, but Mom isn’t going to care, since Dad says her clinical
administrator says she’s taking a break from our day-to-day goings-on, and Dad isn’t going to care, because he’s so busy with his extra work and responsibilities that he says he’s having a hard time keeping his head screwed on straight.