Swallow the Ocean (14 page)

My hand went to the nape of my neck, reaching into the familiar knot. I chose one strand, and slowly pulled it loose. And then another. My mother used to brush out our hair, each one of us, in the morning before we went to school. With time she’d gotten careless, in the habit of just brushing over the top of the tangles in the back. Then she stopped altogether, and each of us was left to struggle with our tangles on our own. A losing battle. On weekends my father would sit us down on the floor in front of him while he wielded the brush from the couch. He didn’t know how to brush right. He was not patient. When he finished, there would be a burning circle of scalp where he’d yanked and tugged at my hair. Every once in a while my mother decided to cut our hair. We hated that too. Amy and I always broke down in tears. Tangled as it was, we could not bear to lose any of our hair.

If I could catch Sara and Steven, I’d be home free. I stayed close to the cans, never giving them an opening. For a long time, nothing happened. They were waiting me out, hoping I’d get sloppy and take a risk. I knew if I was going to catch them, it would be through patience, not speed. Sara and Steven could both outrun me. I doubted they could outwait me. I made slow circles on the patio, monotonous and careful, staying within twenty feet of the cans at all times, reversing myself suddenly from time to time in case they were counting my steps. One of them would break before I did.

I stood, bristling, in the living room, as my mother slowly circled my feet, putting straight pins in the hem of a pair of pants she’d just finished sewing for me. She’d called me in from playing outside for this fitting. I couldn’t bear to look down, the pants were so terrible. My mother had chosen a light cotton material patterned in an unruly riot of red, white, and blue—in honor of the bicentennial—with lines of stars and stripes running vertically up the legs of the pants. They didn’t look like something anyone would actually wear. Maybe, maybe, you’d use this material for a pillow cover. I was not going to wear them. Not to school, not to play outside, not even in the house.

I would have given anything for a pair of blue jeans. I hadn’t had a pair for years. Any pair of pants with a zipper would have thrilled me. My mother didn’t do zippers. The Butterick patterns she used, with blonde girls with curls or tall, thin, deftly sketched ladies on the cover, looked promising. But I was no longer fooled. Nothing ever came out like that. The elastic my mother sewed in the waistbands made the pants all pooch out around your stomach. The best I could hope for were solid colors, neutral patterns, clothing that would call no attention.

There was no point in telling my mother any of this. I’d say, “Nobody wears pants like this,” and she’d say, “If everybody jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you jump too?”

When she finished pinning, she backed away to take in her handiwork. I shifted my feet impatiently, trying not to get stuck with a pin, and averted my eyes.

“You can wear these pants on the Fourth of July,” she said.

“If I want to look like fireworks,” I said, the words darting out so fast, with such disgust, they shocked me as much as they did my mother.

Her head snapped up. She came quickly to her knees, reached out, and slapped me across the face. Hard. I leaned away from the next blow, but she sat back down, breathing heavily, still tensed. I did not move or cry.

“Don’t you ever talk that way again,” she said quickly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not ever.”

“I won’t.”

In the shocked swirling moment that followed, while my cheek was in full burn, I absorbed the fact that I didn’t have a free pass. She would raise her hand against me just as fast and hard as she raised it against Sara.

In the front hall of our apartment Sara and Amy and I lay with our heads together, in a circle, chins propped on elbows. Spread in the center of the circle was an illicit feast. The Hostess fruit pie I held in my hand had a reassuring heft. I peeled back the wrapper to take a look at the whole thing. It was crescent shaped, slightly squared off, and serrated around the edges. When I took the first bite, the sweetness of the sugar glaze hit my tongue first, followed by a slightly salty taste of crust. Then the pure, pink ooze of the filling.

When you held a fruit pie in your hand, you knew you were going to be filled from the weight of it. That’s why fruit pies were always our first course.

On afternoons when my mother went out, after we saw her trench coat disappear around the corner, we’d sneak to the candy store and buy the food she abhorred. The trouble was we never knew exactly when she’d come home. If she was on an errand—to the bank or grocery shopping, which she did herself now, for the most part—we could gauge it, predict when she’d be back. Other times she didn’t say where she was going. More and more she’d been staying away for hours, coming back well after dark with no bags in hand. But we could never be sure; she could come around that corner at any time.

So we moved quickly. First we scrounged for change—money my mother would never miss—under the couch cushions, or in the back of the drawers of the hall table. We’d shake coins loose through the slots of our piggy banks, fish dimes from the penny bowl in the kitchen. Fruit pies were thirty-five cents each. So when we had a dollar-five we could talk Twinkies, chocolate cupcakes, candy bars, 7-Up.

A Twinkie was the opposite of a fruit pie; weightlessness was what made it desirable. Like all forms of spun sugar—marshmallows, cotton candy—what was desirable in a Twinkie was its emptiness. Perfect and uniform in a way that only a machine could achieve, only a child could love, Twinkies were all arti-fice and air. I bit in. Foamy cake. White fluff. There was a clarity to these foods, a reassuring neatness. Nothing murky, crunchy, or unknown.

We had chocolate cupcakes too, each one nestled in its molded plastic cup. The frosting on top, chocolate with a neat curlicue of white, was so firm I peeled it away whole, the way a piece of rubber peels off the toe of a tennis shoe.

I got three glasses from the kitchen and lined them up next to each other. I measured out even draughts from the two tall green bottles of 7-Up. We split a Nestlé’s Crunch bar three ways. And then one piece each of Bazooka bubble gum—I’d had a few pennies left over at the corner store.

Piled together, my portions, resting on their bright wrappers, gave me a deep sense of security.

We invited no one to these parties. Not Lisa or her sister Naomi, not Steven or Theo. This was private business, something people who got Twinkies in their lunch boxes would never understand.

Dolly Madison was on my mother’s list. Hostess was on the list. Hershey’s. Coca-Cola. Bazooka. All poison. They insinuated themselves into the home via the weakest link, children lured in, addicted, held in sway for life.

We ate. We took our time. We made Amy run to the window to check for my mother every few minutes. Afterwards I never felt sick. A little sad, a little let down, maybe, but not sick.

We put the wrappers into the brown paper bag from the corner store. Sara took it outside and threw it carefully away in the neighbor’s garbage can, so that there would be no chance my mother would find it.

But she did find the wrappers. Once it was the green and white waxy paper that covered a Hostess fruit pie in Sara’s room. Even if the wrapper hadn’t been in Sara’s room, Sara would have been blamed. She always was. It took so little. And then the whole house was spinning.

Once I was trapped in the bathroom off Sara’s bedroom when my mother stormed into Sara’s room. She’d found a bankbook from an account my father had opened for Sara to save her babysitting money. There it was, evidence—hidden away somewhere in a drawer—Sara’s signature, right next to my father’s. He’d signed as her guardian. Proof. She was under his power. Proof. In stark black ink. Sara had crossed the line.

My mother didn’t know I was there, and I didn’t dare move, didn’t dare get in her path. But I could see through the cracked door. My mother’s face was mottled. She pushed Sara into a chair, then down on the bed. She wasn’t much taller than Sara, but she weighed more. She’d gotten heavy. Sara barely defended herself, and never hit back. My mother sat on top of her. “I will never let you go,” she screamed. Sara held her hands in front of her tear-streaked face to shield it from my mother’s blows.

The boys in the neighborhood grew curious about the inside of our house. It started with Kevin, who tried to climb up the acacia tree to see in the front windows. Amy thought it was funny at first. She laughed, shaking her tangled mop of hair, and leaned out the window to try to push him down. Sara and I pulled her back inside, closed the window, and pulled the shades down.

After that it became a game, a challenge for them. Willy would try to peek in, following one of us up the stairs when we went in the back door. We got in the habit of opening it just a crack, just enough to push in past the newspapers, in case someone was trailing us. This made them hungry like dogs.

One day as I slipped in the back door I felt someone behind me. I turned and there was Steven, with one hand out to bar the door. His face seemed strange to me. He pushed the door open and started to step inside. Without either of us saying a word, we were suddenly in a physical struggle, me grabbing the door and shoving it into his body to force him back out. He was startled by the violence of my movement and fell back over the threshold. I put my shoulder up against the wood and shoved as hard as I could. But now his shoulder was wedged into the open space, and he was forcing his way in. My feet slid on the linoleum as I struggled not to give way. I screamed for Sara to come help me.

She’d heard the noise and was there in an instant. Both of us braced our bodies against the door, and I pushed his arm back out, thinking if he dared put his hand back in there I would slam the door on his fingers.

I was fumbling with the lock while Sara braced the door, and nearly had it in place, when the door bucked forward. Steven slammed his whole body into it, laughing now, in a weird maniacal way.

Sara and I stood our ground; we easily outweighed him, but Steven was backing up, getting a running start and throwing himself against the door, over and over, with frightening speed and strength. Every time we nearly had the lock through its narrow barrel, the door bucked forward again. I felt the wood frame strain around my body at each impact. And his laughter, totally out of control now, was just on the other side of the thin door.

Finally, Sara worked the lock into place. Steven threw himself against the door a few more times, as if he couldn’t stop, even though he knew he was beat. We stayed where we were, both of us pressed against the wood, worried now that the frail bolt would not hold. Then he stopped. I could hear his labored breathing as he stood there on the landing, then his footsteps as he took the stairs two at a time, his sneakers on the concrete as he ran up the alley at the side of our building and back out to the street.

Sara and I sat down, side by side, hearts still racing, on the piles of newspapers stacked solidly in the hall. My mother was out somewhere, or so deep in her room that the noise didn’t rouse her.

“How much did he see?” Sara asked, when she caught her breath.

I sat with my elbows on my knees, face on my hands. “Not much,” I lied.

Early in the spring of the year I was in fifth grade, I came home from school one afternoon, opened the door to our apartment and felt a keen disturbance in the air. My mother paced in the kitchen. Amy rushed out of our bedroom to tell me the news. “Sara ran away,” she whispered.

Sara had fled before. Twice the year she was thirteen she had taken the bus to my father’s in the middle of the week. Both times she’d spent the night with him and then come home the next day.

That night my father called, and my mother sat in the dining room yelling into the phone, while Amy and I pretended to watch
Hogan’s
Heroes
in the other room.

My mother called me to her. She handed me the phone and walked away. Sara had asked to speak to me.

“Why did you go to Dad’s?” I whispered into the phone when my mother had left the room.

“Mom would’ve killed me.”

“Why?”

“There was a can of paint open in the hallway. I kicked it over, and it got on everything.”

“I know, she told me.”

“I tried to clean it up, but I got it on my shoes, and then I got it on the carpet. I didn’t want to wait for the shit to hit the fan.”

“She’s not mad about the paint anymore. She’s mad you went to Dad’s.”

Sara said nothing.

“So you’re not coming back tonight?” I asked.

She started to cry.

“You’re staying there?” I asked when she didn’t answer.

“Yeah.”

“’Til when?” Again there was no answer. I turned slowly, my bare feet against the parquet floor, spinning into the corner of the dining room.

Finally she whispered, “Lor, I can’t take it anymore.”

I turned again, and the phone cord wrapped once more around my body as the meaning of her words sank in.

“You’re not coming back?” She was sobbing now. I cupped the phone in my hand so that my mother would not hear me from the kitchen. “It ain’t exactly peaches and cream for me here either,” I said, pressing all the bitterness I could into a whisper.

A loud sob rose from her end. I said nothing to comfort her. It was terrible to hear, but I let her cry.

My mother came back in the room. “I have to go,” I said. Sara choked out, “Good-bye.”

“See you this weekend,” I said coldly. I unwound the phone cord from my body slowly before hanging it up. Reeling, I placed the set in its cradle. I looked up at my mother. She was all mine now.

Chapter Thirteen

THEY’RE FOUR SISTERS. And they live in a tower with an old woman,” I said.

“But she’s not their mother?” Amy asked.

“No. She found them in the woods when they were small.”

“What about their parents?”

“They’re dead.”

“So we have to run away?”

“Yeah.”

We were sitting on our knees on the floor under my bed. It was a school night. It was late. But my mother hadn’t told us to go to bed, so we kept playing.

“Can I be Meg?” Amy asked, reaching for the doll. When Sara first left, Amy and I had fought over who got to be Meg. Now I mostly let her.

“She’s blind,” I said.

“No,” Amy started to object, then stopped. She knew I could quit and go back to reading, and the night would be a desert for her. Her eyebrows furrowed. “Why does she have to be blind?”

I shrugged. “Born like that.”

We slept in bunk beds, but we’d taken them apart. My bed, the top bunk, was against the wall. Hers, three feet lower, was pushed up next to mine. To get into bed I had to walk over Amy’s mattress and then climb up onto my bed. Under my bed with its long stilt legs, there was a space big enough to crawl into and sit up straight. That’s where we played this doll game.

“The tower is very tall. Trees’ve grown all around it.”

“We need a ladder?”

“Yeah, but there isn’t a ladder.”

“How’re we gonna get down?”

“We’ll make a rope. From our hair.”

The overhead light in the bedroom was on, but we’d pulled a blue wool blanket down over the opening between the two beds. The room that Amy and I shared had a bright green carpet that peeked out in spots from under the layers of toys, clothes, and books. Amy made a nightly ritual of clearing a path for my mother to come in and kiss us good night. The white plastic shelves against the wall were remarkably clean, as the books and toys that might have gone on them were piled on the floor. But in here we couldn’t see the rest of the room, and the light was dim, blued by the blanket.

I scissored my fingers and placed them under Jo’s black hair. She wasn’t the pretty one, but I didn’t care anymore. I made a clipping sound, then passed the scissors to Amy.

“All their hair?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She clipped Meg’s hair. Then she picked up her own doll, the youngest, her namesake, Amy. She pretended to snip the doll’s perfect blonde curls. It pained her.

“Shh,” I said, suddenly, hearing something from the living room. I froze and listened, my lips pursed together. Amy looked towards the door—her dark blue eyes open wide under a lumpy mop of hair. The dolls in our hands were frozen too, standing up straight, eyes unblinking. There were murmurs from the living room, as if two people were talking. There was only one person there.

I turned back to Amy, my voice lower. “We weave our hair together. At night. When the old lady is sleeping.” I imagined what the rope of hair would look like, four different colors woven together.

I caught the sharp scent of smoke in the air. My mother had started a fire in the living room.

We sat the dolls down on the floor. I held Jo’s stiff arms, which flexed from the shoulder and made a motion for braiding hair.

“I’m hungry,” Amy said, after a while.

“I know.”

“We could get cereal.”

I shrugged.

“I can go very quiet,” Amy said.

I was hungry too—we hadn’t had dinner—but I didn’t want to risk rousing my mother with a trip to the kitchen. She seemed agitated tonight. Though she was almost never directly violent with Amy or me, it was still best to stay out of her path when she was in this mood. If we didn’t call attention to ourselves, she forgot us, and we could stay up as long as we wanted.

Amy lifted the blue blanket from the opening and crawled out over her bed. Her flannel nightgown bunched at her waist, then fell to her ankles as she stood up.

I waited. My right foot, locked under my folded knees, had fallen asleep. I shifted slightly. Pins and needles shot up my leg. I held still to make it stop.

My mother would be sitting on her mattress, which she’d dragged from her bedroom out into the middle of the living room. She’d be feeding papers into the fire. She didn’t use the screen. There was a large patch of charred carpet in front of the fireplace, burned black from when she’d fallen asleep and something big had rolled out. For the past few weeks she’d been burning things at night when we were in bed. After years of hoarding, now she was purging. Piles of accumulated mail. Stacks of newspaper from the back hall. Bills. Even things that didn’t catch easily, like milk cartons and butter packaging with their waxy coats, eventually went up in flames. If she was staring into the fire, then probably she wouldn’t look up or turn to see Amy slip across the hall to the kitchen.

I lifted Jo up to my face. She wore a sky blue dress that went down to her feet under a red and white polka-dotted apron. Clasped to her dress, at her throat, was a red diamond. Her eyes were perfectly round, with drawn-on lashes sprouting from the bottom and the sides, her brows, two thin curved lines. Her nose was dainty, rounded at the end like Amy’s real nose. Not like Sara’s or mine, which came to a point. The peachy tone of Jo’s lips was the same color as my mother’s discarded lipsticks, which we still played with sometimes, an almost-orange that women didn’t wear anymore.

Jo had shoes and socks and a petticoat when my grandmother had sent her to me three years ago—and a net for her hair. These were gone. Something about the way her bangs were cut straight across her forehead made Jo look smart and practical. I pulled her black hair together, and twisted it into a bun at the nape of her neck. She looked older this way. Like a woman. Like she could handle things. I shook her, sideways, so her weighted eyes tapped open. She looked surprised.

In the kitchen, I knew exactly how Amy would manage the refrigerator. She’d brace the door with one hand, pulling with the other, to mute the noise when it snapped open. She’d take the spoons from the drawer one at a time, careful not to rattle them. She’d open the mouth of the carton and sniff the milk before pouring.

At the foot of the bed amid a pile of toys, books, and clothes, I noticed a stuffed mouse. I crawled over on my hands and knees, with my head down so I wouldn’t bang it on the slats of the bed. The blood flowed painfully up my leg. I picked up the mouse. He was about as tall as a grown person’s thumb, wearing a perfectly sewn blue suit and red felt hat. The mouse had two black eyes, beady, made from two black beads.

“See!” Amy said, holding up two bowls of cereal when she came back into the room. She was intrepid. She crossed her bed slowly, balancing the cereal in her hands as her feet sank into the mattress. She handed both bowls to me while she slipped back under the bed and pulled the blanket down behind her.

“There’s a field mouse,” I said, holding up the mouse, “who helps us get out.”

“So we don’t need to cut our hair?”

“We need the hair. But he’s gonna show us a way through the trees.”

Facing each other, cross-legged on the floor, we ate. The cereal was good: Wheat Chex held up strong and crisp against the cold milk.

Amy clanked her spoon against the bottom of her bowl.

“Shhh,” I hissed at her.

There was a rustling noise in the living room. We froze again. Footsteps. The faint sound of laughter, but moving away, not towards us. She’d gone to get more newspapers from the stacks piled waist-high in the back hall. We were still until we heard a bundle of papers hit the floor. She settled back onto the mattress. Then there was a roar, like wind, or water rising, the sound of flame consuming paper.

“Turn off the light,” I said. Amy crawled out and flipped the switch on the wall. I clicked on the plastic flashlight I kept for reading under the covers at night. I wrapped Jo’s arms and legs around the bedpost. She went first, slowly winding her way down. The little mouse waited for her at the bottom. Next came Meg, feeling her way, then Beth, then Amy. At the bottom they all linked hands. Then they ran.