Authors: Laurie Jean Cannady
Her first week in Norfolk was the reprieve for which she'd prayed. Norfolk State University was only twenty minutes from her daddy's Deep Creek, and yet it felt years away, so far, from the two-bedroom house with floors that had moaned as she tiptoed over them. She had moaned too, quietly, so her daddy couldn't hear, once she'd passed her second month without a period. At Norfolk State, she could moan loudly. There she wasn't Big Boone's daughter, she wasn't “Pretty,” and she wasn't the girl Pop had deposited his shame into.
No fear of her daddy hearing in spaces he did not own. This new space, with buildings so large they could have birthed her daddy's house five times over, belonged to her. She belonged to it, and neither she nor that majestic campus would suffocate under this new belonging.
There's something about being surrounded by people who believe the world will work as expected. That kind of confidence rubs off on the less fortunate. That's what happened to Momma. She became so immersed in that environment she forgot what awaited her at home. She forgot what had prompted her to leave.
She attended classes, walked the Norfolk State campus like she'd always belonged there, and spent nights with other Upward Bound students talking about lives they would enjoy after graduating and entering college. That was her plan too. Upward Bound, college, maybe even the Army. The Army would get her far from Deep Creek.
While there was more than enough food at Norfolk State, there were still those pangs, those cramps in time that doubled her over, and left her paralyzed in a bathroom stall. She rationalized her weak stomach as nerves. Then she found she was sick at her calmest moments. Finally, she visited the infirmary. After a quick rundown of her symptomsânausea, tender breasts, headaches, vomitingâthe nurse recommended she take a pregnancy test.
She didn't need a test. She knew there was something growing inside her and its life meant her life would forever be changed. She knew this soon after Pop did what he did, soon after that first ride on those handlebars. No, she didn't need a test. She needed a time machine, a way to go back and do things the right way so the life she'd glimpsed those few days at Norfolk State could be hers.
After she learned she would be a mother, she learned there would be no Upward Bound graduation. As if she and her pregnancy were contagious, Norfolk State officials told her to leave the campus. No longer one of the hopefuls, she instantly became the girl Norfolk State graduates would look down on, the one they would warn their sons to steer clear of, one they would caution their daughters against becoming. All the possibilities, the future she'd imagined, college, Army, moving far from Deep Creek, were no longer possible. She needed answers and to get away from the people she'd spent weeks with, so she boarded a bus to Portsmouth. She was going to a place she felt safe, a place she knew had answers and possibly a way out. She was going to her momma.
In preparation for Momma's visit, Grandma Rachel had strewn her newly purchased red dress across the bed. She'd crisscrossed the store several times, trying to find the perfect one. Then she saw it, fire-engine red, with gold buttons on the side, a modest split, and turtleneck top. She couldn't wait to try it on and show her baby how done up she'd be for her Upward Bound graduation. In celebration of Momma's visit, she hadn't taken a drink all day. She was not sitting at the kitchen table, arms limp at her sides, head smashed into the tablecloth. Her baby wouldn't have to place her ear against her mouth, just to see if she were breathing. Grandma Rachel was wide awake, alert, and sober, all because she wanted to see her daughter's face when she showed her the dress she'd purchased.
Grandma Rachel stared out of the window as she saw Momma trudging toward the house. She studied her daughter's movements, her body.
Something just isn't right
, she felt in her back, her neck before she saw Momma's tear-stained cheeks, before her growing
belly came into view. Grandma Rachel gathered the red dress with the gold buttons, folded it into a square, and placed it in the drawer atop her clothes. She smoothed the creases in the fabric, wiped the tears that fell down her face, and went to greet her daughter.
Together, they devised a plan. Momma would have to tell her daddy she was pregnant. They agreed that was the right thing to do, but Grandma would be there. Not next to Momma, in the conversation, but on the porch steps, able to get to her if necessary. Where she'd live? What she'd say to Pop? All of that would come later. She first had to tell her daddy.
Granddaddy's gaze pulled Momma to the car. The passenger seat was empty, waiting for Momma to sit there, waiting to transport her back to Deep Creek. Momma saw that emptiness and knew it was a void she could no longer fill. The walk from Grandma's porch to the curb had never been so much of a journey. She looked through the open window, saw her daddy's bronze face, his round chin, which sat heavily on his chest, obscuring his neck. He didn't look so mean, so demanding in that car by himself. He just looked like her daddy, the man who'd worked at the shipyard all of his life, the one who sold liquor to his little brother and then gently collected his rumpled, inebriated body after he'd passed out in the yard. She saw that man who'd loved hard, so hard sometimes she felt as if she were being strangled.
Momma walked that last stretch of yard, paused at the open window, and placed her hand on the door. She leaned down to him, careful not to lean too far in. He locked eyes with her. She heard him questioning why she hadn't gotten into the car even though he never opened his mouth. Momma swallowed, but her throat was as dry as the dirt yard she'd just traveled. She fingered the rim of the car window, wishing she could slink into the thin opening.
Granddaddy, again, didn't open his mouth, still speaking with his eyes, penetrating, growing more demanding with blinks. Momma had no response. She did not have his powers. It was hard enough to speak with her tongue.
Granddaddy's look softened, eyes questioning rather than barking orders. Her hand moved from the door to her belly. She began to speak with her mouth, eyes talking to the ground only. “Daddy, I'm,” and her opened hand resting on what had always been flat spoke the rest.
His eyes widened at first, then retreated into his face. Their eyes met again, but his, this time, looked away. She heard an “umpf” escape him, as if he'd been kicked in the stomach. He raised his fist, but no blow came. The hum of the car engine was the only sound, the only feeling radiating through their bodies. Then there was a shift, not of her, but of the car. She felt it go into gear. She opened her eyes and saw her daddy looking at her in wonder, as if he were meeting her for the second time and trying to place where they first met.
She considered telling him it wasn't her fault, that Pop had done this, and she had never really been willing, but there was no use. No matter how far she walked from that reality, the blame would always find its way back. So, she remained quiet and watched her daddy, shoulders slumped near the steering wheel, hand hanging on the shifter. She watched as her daddy slowly coasted away.
Missing Ingredients
Missing Ingredients
Soon after Momma learned she was pregnant, she sent Pop a letter. He revealed his life was just beginning as he trained for the Air Force and they could never actually be together because she was so young. He questioned whether she'd given it to someone else, probably because it had been so easy for him to take it. He decided the baby wasn't his, but because he wanted to assist her, he'd get his cousin to give her pills, so all their troubles could disappear. She never wrote him again. Just months after her sixteenth birthday, she became a single mother. Grandma Rachel decided she would take care of the baby so Momma could go back to school, but months after the baby was born, Grandma Rachel suffered a massive stroke and died.
Momma met my father, Carl, on the school bus when she was six months pregnant with Pop's baby. Fortunately for Momma, her pregnancy didn't broadcast a “This body is busy making another body” signal. Momma's pregnancy was inviting, her body tight, round in all of the right places. In those first months, she lost weight and that made her features more striking than they'd been before she got pregnant.
After she'd asked to sit next to him, he cautiously sparked a conversation with her, knowing what all guys at Cradock High knew: she was a Boone girl, the youngest, and that meant you didn't mess with her, unless you wanted to be messed with. But somebody had already messed with her, he saw. Messed with her real bad because she sat, chin resting on her hand, books opened but unread, belly bigger than it should have been when a body was that small. And those thin fingers, curled under her chin, none of them wore a wedding band, which would have bestowed honor upon her situation.
Even though he was a known
fuck up
, at least that's what his daddy always said, he believed he couldn't hurt her. Like Momma,
he'd also been hungry since before he was born, but he'd learned to fill himself with a shot of liquor when famine hit. He believed he might be able to help her and she him. Casting off fears of the Boone boys and blinding himself to the protruding belly, he offered his hand.
When I was ten months old, Momma rushed me to the hospital because I couldn't breathe. My chest, filled with crackles, rumbles, and bubbles, sounded as if Pop Rocks were sizzling inside of it. Of course, I can't remember any of this, due to the age/memory handicap, but there are things the body knows, even if the mind has not the capacity. I'd contracted pneumonia. Mucus, which lined the walls of my lungs, expanded like insulation foam. I'd suffered an unbreakable fever for more than a week and had a whining cough reminiscent of a car with a faulty starter.
Momma waited as long as she could to take me to the hospital, not because she wasn't concerned, but because she had my older brother, Champ, at home and my younger brother, Dathan, in her belly. Plus, sick babies didn't normally require hospital care. A pot of boiled onions, a sponge bath, and a round of steam-filled bathroom visits could usually do the trick.
I had never been a loud baby, having been taught by Momma's squinty eyes and two-finger swats that silence was preferable to noise. But that night, I was quieter than usual, so quiet even my eyes lay silent in their sockets. I lay in Momma's bed instead of my makeshift crib, the dresser drawer. On my side, with my leg and arm sprawled across my body, I resembled a swollen letter “K.” Petrified, the only movement came from my chest and back: waves, up and down, quickening, becoming shallower with each breath I took. I was not hot. I was a heater, scorching the fabric of Momma's sheets with my skin. I would not eat. What little milk I drank curdled and spewed as soon as it hit my stomach. My face was bright red and my cheeks shined as if they'd been glazed with Vaseline. Momma took my temperature with her makeshift thermometer, the back of
her hand. When she found no sweat, just burning, she knew then something was seriously wrong.
She packed bottles of water mixed with Pet Evaporated Milk and the cloth diapers she'd washed earlier in the kitchen sink. She prepared a meager meal for Champ of flour bread and a slice of the block of cheese she'd picked up from the welfare office. She did not know who would watch him while she was at the hospital with me, but she had to get moving. Movement often led to solutions and she required solutions for so many things in that moment.
Believing it would be too easy to say “no” to a voice, she did not make calls. Instead, she caught a cab to her sister's, rehearsing the dialogue that would convince her to watch my brother. Knowing Momma, there was no pleading, no crying, maybe some adamant reassurances it would only be a couple of hours. Whatever the exchange, Momma continued to the hospital with me alone.
The cab pulled into the emergency room driveway. Momma handed the driver the last of her money, which would have been spent on food and milk for us children. She pushed through the emergency room doors, rushed to the glass window at the registration desk, holding my limp body. I was wrapped in a cloth blanket, folded longways. With my arms and legs pinned so tightly to my body, I might have been mistaken for a caterpillar in a cocoon. Momma leaned on the desk, not out of disrespect, but exhaustion.
“What's wrong?” the nurse asked curtly.
“She's not breathing right,” Momma replied.
“How long has she been sick?”
“Two days,” Momma lied. She couldn't say it had been two weeks and she hadn't taken me to the hospital because she didn't have cab
and
food money, she didn't have anybody to take care of my brother, her body was in constant aches because she was pregnant again, and she was only eighteen. She couldn't explain she'd tried to heal me herself, feeding me the juice of boiled onions from a spoon, placing me on my stomach and patting my back, trying to loosen the crud building within. She couldn't describe how she'd
sat with me on the toilet, hot water spouting from all faucets, towels rolled at the bottom of the door, turning the bathroom into a foggy sauna. Momma knew by the woman's look she would not understand things like that, so she repeated, “Just two days.”
The nurse raised her eyes and continued to write. Her other questions, “What medication is she on? Is she allergic to anything? Does she have any recurring illnesses?” held Momma steady as the small of her back and leg muscles began to tighten like twined meat.
The last question, “What insurance do you have?” stood between me and the emergency room doctors bustling behind the double doors. My mother had never been proud of being on public assistance and I am willing to admit I have hidden in the corners of stores, clutching a book of food stamps, waiting for the line at the register to shrink, but I can assure you, that day, Momma was unashamed to say, “I have Medicaid.”
After a too long, too quiet wait, Momma was called to the double doors, which led behind the window. We were guided into a small room. The nurse took my temperature, not with a makeshift thermometer as Momma had, but with a thin rod which she inserted into my rectum. I remained still, all energy reserved for breathing as the nurse's eyes widened while watching the mercury jump from 96 to 101 to 104 degrees. Before the red dot stopped rising, the nurse swooped me from the table, leaving behind my diaper and Momma, and ran into the emergency room foyer. She yelled “Doctor” as she careened toward a rectangular room with curtains for walls. I was thrust onto the hospital bed as the doctor rushed in and nurses crowded around. Commands bounced from one curtain to another.
“She needs an IV.”
“No, we need to cool her first.”
“Get her on oxygen.”
“Start a neb treatment.”
Momma was swallowed by their voices, eyes trained on me through the sticking, prodding, and pulling. No one talked to her or asked questions. She cried. I cried too, but it was not a baby's cry, more like a kitten being smothered under the weight of its mother.
They decided to cool me after pushing a nebulizer treatment. Buckets of ice were tossed into an oversized sink while a stream of water cut through the ice construction. They drew blood, swabbed my throat, and took my temperature again. Then it was time for the bath not intended to clean.
Momma had given me what she thought were ice baths before. Cracking ice trays over the bathroom sink in a puddle of water, she'd douse a rag, wring it, and wipe my exposed body. She stopped only when my shivers made it too difficult for her to hold me still. That was not the hospital's ice bath.
They took off all of my clothes and dipped my body in those newly formed glaciers. They held me there even as my limbs stiffened, my feet slapped against the sink floor, and my body spasmodically twisted and jerked in their latex-covered hands. Unlike Momma's two hands struggling to keep a hold of me, there were plenty of hands in the hospital. If I twisted from one pair, there was another to catch me.
I could not cry. What little breath I had was frozen inside me. Momma stood, wanting to demand them to stop, but her voice was frozen too. The doctors and nurses held me in the sink until their hands became numb.
After all of the baths, X-rays, and needle sticks were done, the doctor admitted me to the hospital's PICU. Despite it being a place for the sickly, noise flooded the room. The sucking and swooshing of machines drowned any tears we children cried. Nurses bounced from child to child. Some carried IVs, others needles, and a few walked around the room, monitoring machines spouting melodies of beating hearts. Cribs, no bigger than the drawer I normally slept in, lined the PICU walls. Momma's eyes ached and any wall within a foot of her became a crutch. She had not realized so many sick babies lived in the world. This made her sad, but relieved she wasn't the only mother who couldn't heal her child.
Hours after admission, my fever broke and my lungs opened. Momma stood vigil in the PICU waiting room with other mothers of sickly children. Head leaning against the wall, body pressed into
the overstuffed chair, she observed the room. One mother with deep grooves under her eyes sat with coffee in her hands. Another sat with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. There was a bouquet of mothers in that room that night. Some wore expensive rings that sent cascades of light across the room's ceiling. Some, like Momma, wore no rings at all because they'd been pawned months before in order to buy food. Some looked as young as Momma, too young to have a husband and a sick baby in the PICU. Some were so old they looked as if they could have been Momma's grandmother. Most were paired and some were lucky enough to have husbands, mothers, brothers, and sisters watching them like they watched the clock on the wall.
Momma, alone, watched the clock too, knowing she soon would have to leave in order to get my brother. She spied dawn cresting through the crack in the curtain. With no more cab money, she'd have to walk the six miles to her sister's. There was hope someone driving along would see her and offer a ride. For her children, she'd violate her own rule, which was to never take a ride from a man while she was walking. On that morning, she was counting on those men who often pulled off the asphalt, windows rolled down, all smiles, beckoning.
She became nauseous. Since food was scarce, she'd never had the luxury of morning sickness, so she chalked it up to nerves. What would the nurses think when they learned she had to leave? What would I think when I woke and she wasn't there? Those questions made her stomach feel as if it needed to be emptied. But staying was not an option. Champ had to be collected, and the money she'd paid on the cab had to be recouped. She needed rest because the next day and any day that began with me in the hospital would mean a four-mile trek. As she rose from the chair, she felt her bones protest in cracks and creaks. She was only eighteen, but years of worry and pain had buried themselves in her joints. Pregnant and petite, not by choice, but circumstance, she wore curves that made everyone, men and women, follow when she walked.
Momma ambled toward the nurses' station, smoothed her wrinkled jacket, adjusted the waist of her pants so the buckle would not press against her belly. She wished for a mirror so she could see what they would see. Unsure of what to say, she practiced words that would show she was not a neglectful mother and she wanted to stay. None she conjured were sufficient. She readied for looks of disappointment, disbelief, chastising eyes indicting her for making one bad decision after another, the decision to have the first baby, the decision to marry, the decision to have the third and fourth after losing the second, and now the decision to leave the hospital. Those chagrined eyes would not know her story, yet they would sing the same song of disappointment her father sang, her brothers and sisters sang, the strangled melody which pulsed from behind her drunken husband's jaundiced eyes.
Midstep, she stopped. No need to interrupt the nurses in the middle of their work, and no need to wake me to say goodbye when all we both needed was rest. She could steal out, take care of tasks the day required and steal back in without anyone knowing. Then, those disapproving eyes wouldn't follow her home and silence would replace clanging reminders of inadequacies. Who's to say when they went to find her she wasn't in the bathroom, getting coffee, or out smoking? She didn't drink coffee and she'd never smoked, but who was to say? Instead of walking into the judge's chambers, she could escape before being summoned. No harm since I was safe. She could still suffer damages.
So, she pulled her jacket closed, obscuring herself, as if she were a thing being smuggled. She dipped into the elevator and exhaled once the doors closed. She continued looking down in an effort to remain hidden. Once she made it out of the hospital, away from the sliding doors, the sun shone so brightly, she believed it to be patting her on the back. But celebration was short-lived, as it often was in her complicated life. There was still much to be done. So, her walk began, which was good because movement led to solutions, meaning she was at least headed in the right direction.