Up From the Blue (33 page)
Mrs. Newkirk marched right over to Shirl, held her by the chin, and told her to quiet down. She said nothing to me, just frowned a little and pointed again to my costume.
I stepped into the yellow box and put my arms through the holes in the sides. Then Mrs. Newkirk gently herded me across
the backstage wing, where I was to wait until it was time to skip down the aisle, leading Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion, to see the Wizard.
Shirl waited with the other poppies in her green leotard and giant crêpe paper flower pinned to her head. She was the chubby one with the pointy starter breasts poking out. As she tried to straighten the flower, she caught my eye. I quickly turned away so she couldn’t turn away from me first. Then, to demonstrate just how unconcerned I was with her being mad at me, I peeked into the auditorium filling with parents and siblings. This was what I did best these days. I had become a performer: the little academic, the soldier’s soldier, the girl who never cried, the girl who could not even be hurt by losing her only friend.
Scanning the auditorium again, something stirred in me—nerves, maybe—as I searched for Momma. She had never come to my school before. What if they were still arguing and wouldn’t get here on time? But there she was, stepping sideways between the chairs with my father, and wearing the outfit she’d worn to the mall—her skirt wrinkled and her hair greasy. She looked out of place beside my father, beside the other parents, and I wondered if this effort to be a part of our family again would last.
When she noticed my head sticking out of the curtain, she waved, and I slowly raised my hand only so high, not moving my wrist or fingers. Who knew what the first lie was—a nod of the head, a failure to speak up? A lie that led them to believe I was kinder, smarter, more obedient than I really was. But truth is stubborn. Our nature, our secret hearts can only hide for so long.
When the house lights dimmed and Mrs. Newkirk walked to the microphone, the feeling came over me again—not nerves, I was wrong before—but the feeling I had feared for so long. The
one that was hard to push down and seemed stronger than my will. I would not stop it this time, even if I wanted to.
“Welcome, families and friends,” she said. “Welcome to our production of
The Wizard of Oz
.”
The door at the back of the auditorium was propped open by a metal chair, but the breeze didn’t reach to the stage area. I felt hot in my costume, could hardly stand to hear the music start. It was such a dull play when you practiced for so many months.
“So sit back,” Mrs. Newkirk finished, “and let our kids show you what they’ve got!”
The curtain opened to the dreary Kansas set. I knew all the lines that were coming, despite how desperately I tried not to pay attention during practice. And as the opening music began with the sixth grade orchestra playing, I knew it would be a very long time before we got to Oz, where I would finally stand on stage to skip in front of Dorothy whenever she sang about the yellow brick road.
It was building, something buried deep—restless and not wanting to stay down any longer. My legs couldn’t wait, and I skipped toward the audience in my yellow box. One yellow brick, the surprise star of the show.
The box was difficult to manage, the corners banging into chairs and shoulders. And because my arms couldn’t hang straight by my side, they, too, slapped into the audience as I raced down the aisle.
When I reached the back wall of the auditorium, when there was an obvious place to stop and let the play continue as planned, I took off again and made another run down the aisle.
The applause was wild. Even the poppies stuck their flowered heads out from the sides of the stage. The orchestra had stopped playing and there was such a commotion in the audience,
believing I’d made a mistake. I had not made a mistake. I wanted to be ridiculous and disobedient, out of control.
There were plenty of boos, and Mrs. Newkirk was waiting for me at the end of my run for a certain scolding. But above all the other voices, I heard Shirl cheering. She had walked out in front of the Kansas set, where poppies did not grow, and raised her hands. I turned toward her and shot my arms out to the sides like I was flying. She cheered louder.
After the play, Phil, with the skateboard tucked under his arm, was the first to reach me. He’d come after all. “I was really embarrassed for you,” he said.
“It was nerves,” Dad said. “You’ll do better next time.”
My face was streaked in makeup from the tears I didn’t understand. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“I liked it just fine, Bear,” Momma said, smoothing my hair. “And here we are, all dressed up. You’d think we were going on an outing.”
The strangeness of this idea hung there before us until Dad said, “I suppose we could have a stroll around the neighborhood.”
My parents seemed both pleased and nervous with this thought as they shuttled me through the crowd of whispering parents and students. Phil stayed far enough behind that he could pretend we weren’t related.
When I passed Mr. Woodson, he bent close to my ear and said, “I was wrong. You haven’t lost
that thing
.” I giggled all the way out the door.
It had taken a year for us to walk through the neighborhood together. As we got farther from the school, the sky blackened
and trees pulsed with cicadas. The houses were lit up inside like little viewing boxes, and Momma felt she knew something of the people who lived in them by what we observed: a rocking chair, rocking itself on a porch; a house with pastel balloons tied to the door handle and the muffled sounds of laughter and dogs barking inside. Perhaps people did this with our home, taking a peek as they walked to and from their cars, and believing our lives were successful or trouble-free compared to their own.
It was humid, but not uncomfortable as night cooled us just enough. I struggled to climb onto a low wall and balanced along it. My arms out the sides of the yellow box, I felt how unnatural it was for me to walk in a straight line and pay such close attention to every step.
Momma walked slowly, not used to the exercise or the impractical shoes. And Dad, who could not walk at her pace, raced ahead and then waited at each corner, urging her to catch up. At one of those corners, he called her Cootie, though the moment he said it, he tensed his shoulders, like he hadn’t meant to offer so much hope.
I thought about how we might look from a distance. You could not tell that these adults were trying to decide if they should stay together, or that the boy would never be as close to anyone in his family as he was to the river. You could not tell that the girl in the cardboard box had just ruined her school play.
Whenever I thought of myself bursting through the aisle, and the crowd in an uproar, I buzzed with satisfaction, barely holding in the giggles. Sometimes what you fear, what you spend all your energy avoiding or pushing down, is not as terrifying as you thought.
I banged along in my box, my brother beside me, pushing
up the hill with one foot, the wheels going
shuk shuk shuk
against the road.
When we reached the hill where the crossing guard usually stood, Momma questioned whether she could continue. Her skin moist between the shoulder blades and her back bent forward with exhaustion, she turned for home. Dad, still out front with his quick but unathletic walk, reunited with her at each corner. His hands swung at his sides and I knew, if I only bothered to catch up, he’d take hold.
I hopped off the wall, arms out, flying again, the giggles building. This time I laughed out loud.
Phil picked up his skateboard and turned to me, asking, “What’s wrong with you?”
And there was so much that was wrong. This was what had been bubbling up, a desire for them to see me when I wasn’t pretending—to see me flawed and impulsive—and have that be good enough.
I
SEE MY BABY, ONLY
a glimpse, coated in white grease, silent. I try to sit up as Dr. Young, in bloody gloves, cuts and ties the umbilical cord, his face tense, deep lines between his eyebrows.
“Is something wrong?” I only have the strength to sit up well enough to see them hurry my baby out of the room. “Where are they taking? …” It occurs to me I might be alone in the room, and the shrillness of my voice frightens me so much that I stop speaking. It’s so terribly quiet.
“It’s all right.” I hear the voice of the nurse who’s been so rude to me, and her kind words and sudden smoothing of my hair troubles me. “They’re just making sure everything’s all right.”
“Oh, God, is something wrong?”
“They’ve taken the baby in the other room, just making sure everything’s okay, giving her a good evaluation.”
“Her?”
She nods with a close-lipped smile.
“But I didn’t hear her cry.”
“It’s very common for a preemie to need some help breathing,” she says, moving back between my legs. “You’ll just have to trust that they know what they’re doing.”
I grip the side of the bed as my stomach tightens again. “I think I’m having another contraction.”
“That’s right. Here it comes.”
“A twin?”
“No, no. The placenta. Just give it one gentle push.” It slips out with barely any effort. I want my feet out of these stirrups. I want to curl up and cry. I want them to hurry up and tell me if my baby’s okay.
“Do you want to see the placenta?”
“Do I want to what?”
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m supposed to ask.”
My belly feels like a squashed soufflé, no little kicks and turns. She’s gone and I don’t know if they’ll ever bring her to me. The nurse rinses off instruments, washes her hands, opens and closes cupboards. And my arms—all of me—has never felt so empty.
“Here, take a sip,” she says, holding a plastic cup filled with apple juice below my chin.
I start sobbing.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” she says, rubbing my arm. “Is there someone here for you?”
I fold my arms over my breasts, hard like stones, and shake my head.
“Well, how about your mother? I’d be glad to give her a call.”
“Not possible.” I cry harder, inconsolable.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. As she quietly washes things and puts them away, I turn my head to the wall, feeling that familiar knot in my chest.
In the end we couldn’t save my mother. Our family walk and what looked like the beginning of something new, was actually quite close to the end.
Our shopping trip, her attending my school play, they were a sort of last gasp, something too hard to sustain.
It was my brother who found her as I was still trudging up our street after school. I heard him yell in a thin voice that still haunts me: “Goddamn you!” I remember my book bag going light as the feeling in my hands disappeared, then my shoulders—a sense of being erased. For some time, I stayed right where I was, my feet planted in the center of the lawn where the sash to Momma’s pink and tattered bathrobe lay.
My book bag fell from my fingers. The ground swayed beneath my feet. And when I began to walk—my legs wobbly, like they’d never tried walking before—I felt completely disconnected from the sneakers that followed the stone steps down the side of the house. White noise pumped through my ears—
shh shh shh
—a radio turned between stations, my brother’s voice far away, as if from another world, one I would wait to enter. I concentrated, instead, on the ivy vines grabbing for my sneakers, holding my face toward the ground, not daring to look up. Some part of me knew what I would find when I got to the backyard.
My brother’s desperate cries sounded as if they came through a cardboard tube. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” We had never said the word “God” in our home until that day. There were no other words for seeing our mother facedown at the bottom of the swimming pool, her hair like seaweed, rising and swaying.
Phil jumped into the plant-stained water filled with branches and ivy vines, and Momma’s body shifted left and right with the waves, as if she might swim.
“Call Dad at work!” he yelled, but it was like a squeak, and after he yelled, he started panting and gagging, trying to make himself touch the body that was our mother and not our mother. She was weighed down by her bathrobe, arms out to the side; her orange hair seemed alive, reaching toward Phil.
“Oh, God,” Phil cried, drool coming from both sides of his mouth. And suddenly the sound came back strong like someone had turned up the volume of the world, my brother’s voice too loud, too high, “Oh, God. Oh, God.”
I took panicked steps toward the pool, where Phil had grabbed the neck of the bathrobe, shrieking when Momma’s hair tangled around his wrist. He pulled hard, but her pockets were weighted, stuffed full with Dad’s medals, and fighting to keep her under the water.
After what seemed like impossible effort, the top of our mother broke through the surface, her bathrobe sliding off one shoulder and exposing her thin, floating breast.
Phil, with wide, terrified eyes, told me, “Don’t look.”
The last protective act my brother took over me was telling me this, not to come closer, not to see what he had seen. But I never listen.
I climbed down the metal ladder. I, too, got in the water, warm like a puddle, and waded out through the sticks and leaves.
“Oh, my God. Call an ambulance,” he said, his voice high-pitched and cracking. “Call them right now!”
But I continued toward her, my feet scraping against the peeling blue paint and the crack along the bottom. Some part of me believed, as I had all year, that my mother could be saved. The loose skin of her fingers rippled in the wave I was creating. And I had not expected, when I reached out to touch her arm, that it would be stiff like one of the branches, or that touching that stiff arm would rock her entire body the way a boat rocks when you touch one side of it.