Shadow Baby (7 page)

M
y baby sister was dead, my chickens wanted to kill me, and the old man came from a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Those were the kinds of secrets that I used to write down on my spool of green adding-machine paper, on Wednesday night when I visited the old man in his trailer. Soon I had unspooled enough paper to make several curls. Enough to hang to the floor.

I wish now that I had told the old man about CJ Wilson and the other boys and Tiny and the chickens. I wish that one cold night when my chickens were just beginning to be mean, and Tamar was at choir practice, and I had made the old man his coffee and me my hot chocolate, and we were sitting at his kitchen table and I was eating my toast spread with an inordinate amount of margarine and he was stirring his coffee with the handle of his spoon, I had told the old man everything.

Tamar says I’m crazy. Tamar says, That baby was dead before she was born. Tamar says, Give up.

But my sister was alive before she was dead, wasn’t she? She grew the same as me, swimming around in a little water world. We knew each other. We touched each other. We would have been together forever.

Winter killed my baby sister. Not only was she my twin sister; she was my identical twin. I can feel that in my bones, too. If it hadn’t been a blizzard, and if the truck hadn’t gone off the road into the ditch, and if the plow hadn’t chosen to do Route 12 before Glass Factory Road, my mother, Tamar, and my
grand father would have gotten to the hospital on time and my twin sister and I would have been born in the hospital and my sister would have lived. This is what I believe to be true.

“My mother didn’t name my sister,” I told the old man after we were
compadres
. “She did not give her own child a name. Is that even a possibility?”

“Anything’s a possibility,” the old man said.

“But she buried her,” I said. “You don’t bury someone unless you think of her as someone. If she was someone enough to bury, she was someone enough to have a name.”

“You don’t know what was going through your mother’s head.”

“But her own child?”

“She was not
your
child, she was your sister,” the old man said. “There’s a difference.”

My sister is stuck forever at the spot where she was born. She was born there and she died there, while I lived and grew. I’m still growing. There’s no telling how tall I’ll be when all’s said and done.

Tamar doesn’t have the memory to connect her September blue sky and the smell of autumn leaves with the coming snow and what it means. She pushes it out of her mind. She pretends there never was another baby. She pretends that I was the only one. You don’t have a sister, she says, stop dragging her into conversation all the time.

“But what would you have named her?” I used to ask her.

I can’t help it. I’ve got to know.

“I wouldn’t have named her anything,” Tamar says. “She was born
dead
. And that’s the end of it.”

“But what if?” I say. “What if? Just tell me. Just give her a name.”

She doesn’t answer. She never answers. She has condemned me forever to think of my sister as Blank.

“She wasn’t ever alive!” Tamar says. “Get it through your head, Clara.
You never had a sister.”

I did, though. She swam beside me for nine months. We might have held hands inside Tamar’s womb. Our noses might have touched. She might have played a game with me, pushing me around with her tiny unborn foot.

If you have seen a death certificate, you know what a small piece of paper it is. If you have ever searched your mother’s bureau drawer for something that would be proof of your twin sister’s existence, you might have been surprised at how small and simple a death certificate is. You don’t even have to put someone’s name down on a death certificate. If the person who died was a baby, all you have to put is “Baby” and the baby’s last name. For example, “Baby Girl Winter.”

If only the snow hadn’t been blowing horizontally the way it does in an upstate New York blizzard, if my grandfather had only been able to rock his truck out of the ditch. If only Tamar hadn’t mistaken early labor pains for indigestion and started for Utica sooner, if only we had just managed to stay inside her belly instead of forcing our way out. If only Angelica Rose Beaudoin, American Midwife, had been a real person.

But that’s a different story. That’s the story I would have written myself: my twin sister and I alive together, each the other’s half, one child under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. That’s the kind of book report I would have written, if I had made up a book about me and my sister.

“I want my sister,” I said. “I want Baby Girl Winter.”

The old man said nothing. He got up and carried his coffee cup and the plate that my sugar cookie had been on to his miniature sink. He put the stopper in and squeezed one small squirt of dish soap into the sink, then ran hot water. I watched him do that the exact same way every single time I ever visited the old man.

W
hat sorts of books are placed by garbage cans on garbage night in the town of Sterns? Mainly they’re old class books, the kind people carry around in boxes in their basements for twenty years and then one day think:
I will never again in my entire life open this book and there is no sense in its taking up valuable space in my basement
, and they throw them out. Right out by the garbage cans they put them, in cardboard boxes with the bottoms falling out.

Books should not ever be treated that way. It’s a sin to treat a book that way. That’s what I believe to be true.

The world of my childhood is behind me now. I am no longer a child and I have put away childish things. But childish things come back to haunt you. The destruction of books is something I would not have visited upon even my most hated enemy. Had you asked me, I would have termed myself incapable of such an act.

There it is, though: I was a book ripper.

It hurts me now to think about it. I can’t remember the actual ripping as I was only a baby. At most, a very small child.
Tamar told me about it on a day when I came to her holding a library book that someone had written in in purple magic marker. Not only that, but the top corner of each page had been creased, folded over in a triangle as if every page was a bookmark. It had to be the same magic marker person. A maniac.

“How can someone do this?” I said to Tamar.

She was making split pea soup, the only item of food that she actually cooks from scratch. A soup I like to eat but hate the smell of while it’s cooking.

“Ma? Look.”

I showed her the book, each page corner worn and creased, purple magic marker underlining certain paragraphs.

“And the thing is, the paragraphs that this person underlined don’t even stand out,” I said. “There’s not one thing special about any of these underlined paragraphs.”

Tamar took a cursory look. How I love that word. There may not be anyone in the world who loves the word
cursory
as much as I do. That’s how I am about certain words.

“See what I mean?”

“Doesn’t look so bad to me,” she said. “Considering how you used to rip books to pieces when you were a baby.”

She dumped two cupfuls of tiny hard green peas into the giant pot she makes soup in. They sank to the bottom with a clattering sound. Immediately the boiling water in the pot stopped boiling. It settled down and became ferociously quiet, working hard to start boiling again. The quietness of the once-boiling water made it seem as if the water was too busy to make noise.
I mean business
is what is meant by that absence of sound.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You,” she said. “Clara Winter, defender of books. You used to rip them to shreds. Drove me crazy.”

The water in the pot began to hum in a sinister way. A low, gathering hum, bringing itself back to a boil as if getting ready to go off to war.

“Any kind of book,” she said. “Your baby books, my books, books belonging to other people. You’d rip the cover to pieces, then you’d start on the insides. You were possessed.”

She took a bite of honey toast, a big one right out of the folded-over middle. That’s something about Tamar. She greatly prefers the soft middle of bread, but she would not admit it, nor would she ever not eat her crusts. On her deathbed, Tamar will be finishing her crusts. That’s the kind of person she is.

“Little Clara rips books, I scream at little Clara, little Clara laughs,” Tamar said. “That’s the way it was.”

I had my roll of green note-taking adding-machine paper ready in its paper holder. The old man made the paper holder out of tin for me. He followed directions by looking at the pictures in his book
Metalworking Made Easy
. It holds my roll of adding-machine paper perfectly. It keeps it taut and tight, ready for me to take notes on.

“Yup,” Tamar said. “That’s all she wrote.”

That’s all
, I wrote.

Books? Books are sacred. Books are to me what the host is to the priest, the oasis to the desert wanderer, the arrival of winged seraphim to a dying man. That’s the main reason why I can’t write a book report. I can’t stand what a book report does, boils a book down to a few sentences about plot. What about the words that make each book unique, an island unto
itself, words like
cursory
and
ingenuous
and
immerse
? What about the
heart and soul
?

Plot? Who cares?

My plots are always interesting. They’re just not real. After the last report I wrote, my teacher sent me a personal note: “Clara, you have an intuitive understanding of how to include just enough information about a book to make your report exciting, while not giving away the ending. I am intrigued now and I may just have to go read this book myself.”

That’s the danger. She wants to know the nonexistent ending to a nonexistent book. I know how she feels. After I finish making up a book report, I myself want to read the book. I myself feel as if the book is out there, searching for me, with an ending I don’t know, a future waiting to be written.

The old man knew of my love of books. He used to gather them for me on scavenging nights. Another place to get books is garage sales, of which there are many in a Sterns summer, but the old man didn’t do that. He didn’t go places where there might be crowds of people. He was a loner, the old man. He preferred solitude to conviviality.

Conviviality
. Six syllables. A word that would be hard to say were English not your mother tongue.

Some of the books the old man gathered for me were not to my taste. I said nothing, though. He chose them mostly for their pictures and photos. I could tell. They had personal meaning for him, the books that he chose. I always thanked the old man when he saved a book for me. Here’s the kind of book that appealed to him:
Metalworking Made Easy
, by William J. Becker. 1942. The old man had
Metalworking Made Easy
open to the page that showed a picture of how to make a tin paper roller.

“This would be useful for you,” the old man said. “You could put your roll of adding-machine paper in it and it would keep it taut.”

That was thoughtful of him, to think of me and my adding-machine paper. Next time I came to visit, he had a paper roller waiting for me. He had made it out of some sheet metal that he cut with his tin snips and soldered together with his solder iron. It looked just like the one in the book.

I
f you know how to read, you know how forever. You can’t unread. You can’t ever look at a word and not know what that word is, precisely and permanently. You just can’t do it. They should tell you that when you’re a kid, that once you get into phonics you’re into them for life.

“There’s no backing out, kiddo,” they should say.

Brainwashing. That’s what it actually is.

The old man though, he was a different matter. The old man was seventy-seven years old. When I met him, he was exactly seven times as old as me. How I love numbers that are multiples of eleven. They are far more interesting than multiples of ten, which are what the structure of the world revolves around when you think about it.

Here’s a secret about the old man: he did not know how to read.

A few months after I met the old man I had a dream. I was on Ellis Island. The old man was standing on the edge of a pier. He was wearing a coat with a round collar like in the olden days. He was a boy. He was seventeen years old. His nose was moving, lines and stars and rectangles. The shape of the American flag.

The old man had told me that he used to use the tip of his nose to write in the air as a child. He called it air-writing. In my dream, there was a certain look in the old-man-as-a-young-man’s eyes. I woke up and I knew he couldn’t read.

I proved it.

“I’m writing you a message in the air with my nose,” I said.

This was one day after he told me about the air-writing.

“You see if you can figure it out,” I said.

I wrote it in small letters:
bye
. That was the whole message, three small letters. It was time for me to go. Tamar didn’t like to drive all the way in to the old man’s trailer. She liked me to walk out to the entrance and meet her there. It’s good for you, Clara, she used to say, the fresh air.

“Good,” he said, after I wrote it in the air with my nose. “You’re getting the hang of it.”

“What did it say?” I said. “Did you really figure it out?”

“I did.”

“But could you tell I was writing
bye
?”

“I could.”

Nay sir, I think not
.

I tested him again.

I wrote him a note and put it under his coffee cup when I brought it over to the table.

“What’s this?” he said.

He pulled it out and looked at it.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Very good.”

Why did I have to test him again? There wasn’t any need to. How I wish I hadn’t written what I wrote on that note:
I know you can’t read
.