Pieces of My Mother (12 page)

When Jack Frost arrives in early spring Jamie, Eden, and I find our way to the center of house where our old floor heater ticks, purrs, and blows hot, dusty air into the hallway. We line up, three across, and stand over the grate with our legs apart until it gets too hot and the metal edge starts to burn the bottoms of our feet. Our dad says the fifty-year-old heater is a fire hazard but we don't care. It's the warmest spot in the house and the place we gather on cold mornings before school.

“Scoot over,” says Eden, eleven, bare chested, and shivering in his Fruit-of-the-Loom underwear.

He says I'm hogging the heater because all the good air is blowing into my nightgown. Jamie bumps Eden out to the edge and tells him to stop acting like a girl.

“Watch this one,” says Jamie as he leans over and spits into the rectangular metal grate.

“You missed,” says Eden, who follows and hits the center.

They like to watch their spit sizzle and fry on the metal burners. They are not supposed to do it—Dad will be furious.

“I'm telling,” I say. But they know I won't because they remind me that I tried it once too. I did try it. It makes a strange smell like hair when it gets singed over a stove burner.

This morning, I hold my spot. Our dad comes down the stairs buttoning up a Pendleton shirt. He says he's making a run to 7-Eleven for Frosted Flakes and milk. He turns back, commanding Eden's attention.

“I want you off this heater and dressed for school by the time I get back. You understand?”

Eden shifts his feet back and forth along the metal grate. “Yeah, yeah,” he says back.

“Don't ‘yeah-yeah' me,” says my dad, already angry.

The two of them are mad almost every morning these days because Eden won't get out of bed without a fight. When he finally does get out of his bed, he stands hunched over in his underwear on the heater—and that's a whole other fight.

As soon as my dad walks out the door, I tell Eden, “You're supposed to get dressed.”

“Shut up,” he says back to me.

I don't want them to have a fight this morning. I know how long it takes to get to 7-Eleven and back. It's pretty much a straight shot down Center Road.

“I'm out of here,” says Jamie, already dressed and pulling his black beanie on. He heads out the front door with a jar of mustard in his hand and half a dry salami sticking out of his back pocket. I get dressed quickly in my room, hoping that Eden is off the heater when I open my door. But he's there.

I make another attempt. “You know, Dad is going to be back any second.”

He says nothing. I step back onto the heater.

“Okay, make some room at least,” I say.

I don't see his fist coming at me.

He slugs me square in the face.

Beneath me, I hear the sizzle sound. But it's different from the spit frying. It's blood hissing against the hot metal.

I want to cry, but I look him straight in his blue eyes instead. I look for something in him, something that will make me believe that he didn't mean it, that he's sorry. But I don't see anything except my brother who is always mad these days, my brother who pulls apart insects and lights things on fire. He turns and walks away from the warmth of the heater.

I let the blood drip from my nose. I watch it splatter into black spots on the metal. It dries fast.
Blood
, I think…different from spit, more sharp smelling.

I was wary around Eden after the incident on the heater. But there was also a side of my middle brother that was kind and wise and patient. I remember catching him in my room after he had pried the musical component out of my dancing ballerina music box.

“It's not right to take apart things that aren't yours!” I yelled.

And he said, “You gotta see how this works inside.”

Then he showed me that I could still play the music and that now I could
see
how it was made by tiny metal spikes all going around in a certain order. As the spool of spikes hit the small bobby-pin fingers, I could feel the movement and cadence of the “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” song right through the palm of my hand. I kept running my fingers along the sharp moving parts that could make up a whole song. It was simple magic. Copper and steel wires, small metal screws, a spool of spikes, sound and order.

We sat together on the floor, not needing to say anything to each other. I understood that he was showing me something—that when things are hidden inside, you can't possibly know how they work. If you take something apart and really look at it, hold it, and touch it, you can understand it much better.

I search deep in the folder of letters for any other clues about Eden. Instead, I find this one scrawled on torn pink stationery:

Gee, golly damn, there is so much to learn—to think over and decide about. I feel so righteous every time I come to a decision but I never have enough of a basis. Personally, it has been a rather low period. I hope that it doesn't get much lower, or that any reactions I might have don't cause havoc with anyone. How I hate my bitchiness when any little thing goes wrong. It used to be just when I was tired or particularly worked up. But now it is far too frequent and J. and the children suffer, and I do mean suffer—every day. But ever realizing this, I cannot help myself. I am pulling further and further away—their suffering affects me less and less. But is that not natural when I suffer more and more? I don't suffer from anything but myself. They try so hard to be good to me, and I have to be sick to keep pushing such goodness away. If only I could talk to someone. Medea must have suffered too.

I look out the window, watching the winter rain trickle down the glass. Medea killed her children. In the Greek tragedy by Euripides, she was a highly intelligent woman who allowed passion to rule her actions. These words of my mother's so clearly spell out depression and desperation. For the first time ever, I think,
Maybe it was a good thing she walked out and that we had all those live-ins
. And then I remember my visit to Valley View Farm.

Valley View is a nice place to visit my mom—a lot better than the last place, which had no electricity or toilet. I get to stay for almost a week, and I even get to be here for my tenth birthday. There's a bed with a blue quilt, a shelf piled high with boxes of puzzles, and the scent of my mom's L'Air du Temps perfume drifting down the hallway. She lives on this dairy farm with one hundred eighty cows and her new boyfriend, Roger Short.

One of the first things she mentioned about Roger is that he's color-blind. She says he can't see how horrible the wall-to-wall chartreuse carpet looks in his house—in fact he can't see the color green at all. I think that's a shame, because there are green fields like patchwork for miles around his farm. But then again, I suppose that being color-blind is just fine for Roger since he only raises black and white cows.

My mom pours the warmed milk from the stove into oversize plastic bottles and then pops on the giant caramel-colored nipples.

“Do you want to feed one of the little ones down in the calf barn?” she asks.

I cannot contain my smile. My Keds are on in three seconds.

I follow her down the grassy path, holding the warm milk bottles against my chest, and try to copy the sway of her hips. She explains how the calf barn is the holding place for the young Holstein calves who are being weaned from their mothers' milk.

“Roger likes to wean them young,” she tells me, “so that the mother cows can get back to their job of being milk cows.”

When they see us with the milk bottles, the calves cry and bleat like goats. A black and white calf shoves his head through the wooden slats of the stall and stares up at me with his big polished eyes. I place the rubbery nipple close to his mouth. He grabs and tugs fiercely at the bottle.

“Hold on tight,” my mom says. “That guy is a tough little sucker.”

My calf slurps as he drinks, then yanks at the nipple like he's mad at it. Milk splatters across his soft black face. When he's done with the milk, he wants to keep chewing and sucking on the rubber tip, but my mom says that will put too much air in his stomach.

“Just stick two fingers in his mouth,” she tells me from across the aisle.

“What?” I say.

She walks over to my calf and sticks her middle and pointer finger right into his mouth. He latches on and starts making sucking sounds.

“There are no teeth in there, just gums,” she says.

I hesitate, not certain about this. She grabs my hand and pulls it toward the calf's mouth. He latches onto my two fingers with such force that I am startled. His mouth is strong and smooth inside. I feel his tongue, like fine sandpaper scrubbing my fingers. I start to laugh. My mom laughs too. I don't want this to stop. I take my other hand and rub the calf's face, admiring the swirls of thick, black velvet and the lopsided white diamond on his forehead.

My mom says she's got a few chores to do back at the house, and I ask if I can stay here in the calf barn for a while. “I like it here,” I tell her.

“I'm glad,” she says. She smiles at me, pushes an unlit cigarette into her mouth, and gathers up the empty milk bottles.

My fingers have become a little sore from staying in the calf's mouth so I pull them out. The calf seems okay because after a minute he buckles down on his wobbly legs and flops onto the straw floor. I decide to do a little exploring around the barn. There are dusty bird's nests tucked all around the rafters and small starlings that swoop down to gather bits of straw from the ground. I find a place to sit in the feed room where there are burlap sacks filled with cracked corn and molasses-covered oats. I push my hands deep into the open sacks and pull the molasses oats close to my nose. They smell good enough to eat.

I take a walk to the far end of the barn aisle where the calf stalls are empty. There are two tall, white buckets with lids on them, the plastic kind that painters use. They look out of place to me for some reason, like maybe they were set down there and forgotten. I pry the lid off the bucket closest to me. There is no particular smell.

I am not sure if what I am seeing is right or true. Kittens. Piled up to the brim. Clean white fur. Brown, black, tan, orange. Small paws with fleshy pads as soft as apricot skin. Wiry tails. Tiny pink noses. Whiskers, as fine as fishing line, almost transparent.

It is not a dream. I push the lid back on. I think that there must be more than a dozen piled up in there. I pry open the other bucket, only because I want it to be something different. But it's not. One all black, one striped orange, one smoky gray, more colors underneath. Soft triangle ears, thin as potato chips. I want to stop staring but I can't. A small calico kitten lies across the top of the heap. Its eyes are closed, but the shallow part of its belly moves—barely, up and down like it's in a deep sleep. I want to touch it, but I am afraid. I don't know what to do so I put the lid back on.

I walk back up the hill toward the farmhouse, my heart thumping underneath my yellow T-shirt, the tall wet grass soaking the bottoms of my jeans. When I open the screen door, I see my mom at the table with her
New
York
Times
crossword puzzle, her coffee, and a cigarette. She's smart with words. I'm not. I have a throat full of gravel that keeps me from saying what I want to say. But this time my question forces its way out.

“Why are all those kittens in the white buckets?” I ask.

She keeps looking down at her crossword puzzle as if she's just about to figure something out. Her sandy bangs hang like a frayed curtain across her forehead. Twenty to thirty seconds pass and I begin to think she's not going to answer my question.

“Oh, that,” she says with a frown. “You
weren't
supposed to see that. Roger was supposed to dump them.”

I wait for her to say something more.

“I'm sorry you had to see that, darlin'. It's the way of the farm here.”

That's it?
That's all she's going to say? She smashes the clump of soft ashes down with the filter of her cigarette. There is sparkly pink polish on her fingernails. I hate it when she's so matter-of-fact.

“There were just too many kittens.”

“What do you mean, too many?” I ask.

“Those were feral kittens, wild and inbred—just the ugly ones. Believe me. I can tell the inbred ones right away, their eyes are wide-set and slightly askew. Their heads are oversized.”

“But how did they die?”

My mom gets up from the table with her ceramic coffee cup and goes into the kitchen. I can tell she doesn't want to listen to my questions.

“Chloroform is what Roger said to use.” She measures a heaping spoonful of sugar into her cup. “But power-steering fluid works just as well. It's very quick. They don't suffer.”

I feel my throat tighten up like a fist. My legs are as wobbly and uncertain as the calves down in the barn.

“Mom, I saw one breathing on the top. A calico one. Not an ugly one, but a long-haired calico.”

“There were no calicos,” she says, slamming the garbage-can lid down. “And you
did
not
see any kittens breathing.”

“I did, Mom. I definitely saw that one on top.”

“None of those kittens were breathing, you understand?”

I am suddenly afraid of her. She knows how much I love kittens, and I know there was a calico. I try to stop the image of her hands pushing those kittens into the white buckets.

She heads out the screen door, says she has to grab a few fresh eggs and she'll be right back.

I watch her outside the window, walking through the tall grass. I recall what I once overheard her say—that she thought about drugging my brothers and me when we were small because she didn't want us to suffer. She had an emergency plan in case there was an awful natural disaster. She would give us all sleeping pills. We wouldn't suffer. But I am almost ten now and I am too big to trick like that.

I wait at the window for her to come back, willing myself not to think about the kittens. I want to feed the calves with her again. I want to swirl the sugar and cream into her coffee and breathe in her L'Air du Temps perfume. I want her to like me. I'm tired of not knowing the next time I'll see her. I scratch my fingernail along the thin, white paint that covers the windowsill, reminding myself that it's better to keep my secrets inside.

I am not supposed to remember the day she drove away in her baby-blue Dodge Dart. Everyone tells me that I was too young to remember. But I remember everything. “Too many,” she said. I know this phrase well. I heard her screaming it late one night at my dad before she left us. Three kids were too many. I was the third.

I shove my hands into my jean pockets and push those secrets in as far as they will go. I make room for the kittens, because they are a new secret.