Authors: Jill McCorkle
“Surrender Dorothy,” the child said and cackled. “Surrender, surrender, surrender, you . . .” she hesitated before calling Rose the Wicked Witch of the West, which she had done once before, something the child’s mother actually reprimanded her for. “Give me my ruby slippers or this house will fall and kill you,” she shrieked, and for a split second, the child did look like Drew. It was the mouth, the tilt of her head. She looked like Drew, who looked like Hank, who looked like his father before him.
“You will die!” The child pointed her finger at Rose and then ran back to her pile of papers and began scribbling furiously. Witches’ hats and brooms and then breasts. Rose’s breasts. Rose’s mouth and nose were more distorted than ever in these new drawings. She drew little speech balloons and then scratched marks back and forth while saying, “I’ll get you. I’ll get you, your dog, too.”
“Quit goddamnit.” Rose knelt and leaned down to make eye contact. She wanted to grab the child but was afraid if she did, if she ever gripped those little arms and began shaking, she might not be able to stop. “Do you hear? Do you? Leave me alone.” Her words came in jerks, loud harsh syllables.
The child’s gaze never broke, her hand grasping a black marker. She drew two big circles, dotted the centers like fried eggs. Circle dot. Circle dot. Then the child started laughing hysterically. She threw herself on her back, legs cycling the air to show the filthy marker-stained bottom of her worn-out shorts. Mucous and tears smeared her face, and the more she laughed, the more tightly her eyes closed, mouth twisted, the more she looked like Drew all those times he got out of control at church or a ceremony of some sort, all those places he should’ve been behaving and couldn’t help himself. She thought of him then in a way she hadn’t in years, there at a high school awards banquet when they served what he had always called “fanny rolls” for obvious reasons, twin mounds of golden bread. Drew raised and held up his roll, there at the head table, where he was about to be named athlete of the year, and audibly called out, “Mom, Dad, check it out.” And then he became hysterical, running his finger along the crack of the roll, whispering to his friends, who then joined in with their own jokes, getting more and more rowdy and out of control. Drew kept on until iced tea ran from his nostrils and the whole table full of great big boys and a couple of cheerleaders
had to excuse themselves to go outdoors and regain composure. For years he was misbehaving and laughing that way and then all of a sudden it slowed down, not much, but a little. The slowing seemed to coincide with his new life, the girl, the child on the way.
When Drew brought the child’s mother home to meet them, Rose was shocked. What did this say about her as a mother? Wouldn’t a boy pick someone like his mother if it were a good relationship? Her opposite if there were problems? The girl showed up for a Saturday night cookout with just the three of them looking like she was going to the queen’s coronation.
“What does this say about what he thinks of me?” Rose asked Hank late that night when they were in bed, her head still filled with a perfume too musky even for the horniest wild creature.
“Nothing. It isn’t about you,” he said. Of course he hadn’t even noticed how inappropriate she looked. Only that she seemed shy and uncomfortable when Rose started asking questions about her parents.
“I asked important questions,” Rose said. “Family history is important. And I’d think he’d want someone more like me.”
“Who says she isn’t like you?” He laughed and then reached over to pull her close. “Maybe it’s only boys who are unhappy with their moms who try to duplicate so they can try again to make everything okay.” He barely paused so she wouldn’t have time to speak, time to ask just what daytime talk show he’d been
watching. “Maybe,” he continued, his hand gripping and rocking her hipbone, “you’re such a good mother he can just follow his most natural desires.”
“Or lust.”
“Okay, lust. What’s wrong with a little lust?” He slid his hand along her side, thumb circling and stroking her breast through the thin cotton of her gown. “C’mon,” he whispered. “Give it a chance.”
That’s what he said these days about the child, too.
Give her a chance
. But that’s not always easy to do with her sitting there like a hysterical little devil cat hell-bent on aggravating her grandmother.
“Some boobies is great big,” she said as soon as Rose looked her way. “Yours ain’t so big.”
Now Rose longed for Drew. She longed for Hank. She wanted back all those times it was just the three of them. If she had ever known all that was coming she would have done so many things differently. She would have made him go to the doctor more often and she would have stressed a healthier diet and years before she would not have allowed him to engage in horseplay at all. She would have stayed in his room just a few minutes longer those nights he fell asleep pretending to be a dog. She would have nursed him a few months longer, not rushed in those wee morning hours to get back to bed herself but just sat there holding him, making it all last. Maybe the three of them would have gone on vacation someplace foreign and exotic where they wouldn’t have
known the language and wouldn’t have cared.
And yet, Hank had pointed out when she expressed some of these longings, usually in the dark, often when she thought he was sleeping, she couldn’t have nursed Drew forever —he did grow teeth —and there was no way to keep him from goofing around the way he did, and look at what they would have lost if they’d guarded him so —a fun-loving and good-hearted man adored by hundreds of people. And Drew was okay with the trips they did take. Sliding Rock was fun, wasn’t it? Six Flags over Georgia. Fort Fisher.
Whether or not Drew really loved the old Civil War battlefields the same way Hank did was something she would now never know. What she did know is that they spent hours talking about it, and Drew encouraged Hank’s idea to step foot on every battlefield he could. Hank decided to make it part of his birthday, even kept a little scrapbook of it all with postcards and notes: Shiloh at fifty, Gettysburg just last month when he turned sixty-five, lots of little battles Rose had never heard of there in between. She went with him to Gettysburg, an experience she had not been able to shake in the days since, a host of sighs and shadows. She felt that in cemeteries sometimes. A still moment when the wind became language —giving in, giving up, giving —and there were prayers and murmurs, grief and desire all run together in a whooshing sound like the ocean, like ultrasound, the baby’s heart submerged there in the womb, floating peacefully, little dinghy bumping the
dock. She was Drew’s dock, and there was, had always been, an invisible line tethering mother to child —a single cry in the dark night and her breasts tightened with a surge, the phantom sensation of milk about to flow even years after when there was nothing there to give.
She had waited these long weeks to hear Drew’s voice. She thought it would come in a dream. In a word. Now she realized the child’s mother was in the kitchen doorway watching her, and Rose had no idea how long she had been standing there. Monkey bread. She had begun the process without even paying attention, biscuits taken from the roll and dipped in milk, rolled in sugar and cinnamon, tossed in a Bundt pan with butter in between. Hank had promised the child monkey bread and she did what all children do, pictured a loaf shaped like a monkey, long dangling arms or wings and little caps like the ones from
The Wizard of Oz
she liked to mimic. He explained to her that it got its name because that’s how you eat it, like little monkeys, using your hands to pick and pull. “We’ll act like monkeys,” he promised her and scratched under his arms before catching her up in a big strong hug, something he seemed to have no trouble doing.
“Drew always wanted me to make that,” she said. “He wanted me to ask you about it.”
“Really.”
“He said one of his favorite memories is when you acted like a monkey. And of course the way you let him act like a dog, licking
his plate and scratching his ear with his foot.” She paused but Rose did not look up. She stared at the biscuits in her hand, damp lumps of dough and sugar. “He said sometimes
he
gave
you
commands. Things like shake, roll over, play dead.” They both froze, the word lingering heavy in the air around them. “Drew said y’all laughed all the time. He said he wanted to give me that kind of life.”
What kind of life?
she wanted to ask, starved for the words she was hearing, but instead she said, “I haven’t made this silly bread in years.” She said, “It’s terrible for you, too. Pure sugar and starch.”
“I found Molly a day care place,” she said. “I’m sorry if she’s been in the way.” Then the child was there, handing her mother a stack of the drawings she had produced through the course of the long day. She held up one where you couldn’t tell Rose’s mouth from her breast but the intention of her focus was clear all the same.
“Stop it, now,” Drew’s wife said. “Your grandma doesn’t like that.”
“Here’s her nursers.”
“Stop it, Molly.”
“Titties.”
“Please. We need to go.”
“No. I want the monkey food.”
“We’ll come back.”
“No,” the child screamed. “He said she’d cook it just for me and now she is. And,” she pulled out another piece of paper and waved it in the air, “here’s her big fanny.”
“That’s it.” Drew’s wife was crying then as she bent and wrestled the squirming child into her arms. “I’ve had it.”
“It’s okay,” Rose said, watching them, her own chest tight with longing. Drew’s wife was wearing one of his old T-shirts and it dwarfed her small frame. She clutched the child with one arm, and her free hand held the string around her neck as if it held all that Drew had promised her. A family. Laughter. A lifetime of love. “I do have a big fanny,” Rose said. “I really do.” The child’s loud mischievous laugh filled the room. She wiggled out of her mother’s arms and ran up to Rose, stopping just shy of their bodies touching. She raised her small hand and held it up in front of Rose’s breast as if daring Rose to do something.
“That’s my breast,” Rose said, wiping her sticky hands with a dishtowel.
“Nurser,” the child said, looking up and leaning in so close Rose could feel her breath.
“My nurser.”
“Tittie.” She reached and pressed Rose’s breast, leaving marker smudge on the pocket of her shirt.
“Molly.” Drew’s wife straightened up and then reached in and grabbed the child’s hand, twisted, and yanked her away.
“Tittie, say it.” The child was torn then between laughing and crying, her face flushed as she tried to shake loose her mother’s grip.
Out the window, Rose saw Hank walking up from the mailbox, a sack of Purina over his shoulder; he loped along engaged in the world in a way few people are. Even the retrievers bouncing and barking along didn’t seem to faze him. Her heart filled with the sight of him there, a flow of blood coursing through her veins, and where did it come from? This feeling? This urgency?
“Quit it.” Drew’s wife wiped her cheeks as she spoke, her voice filled with exhaustion. “Please.”
“Not till she says it.”
“Tittie,” Rose said then. “Tittie and nurser and tittie again.” She touched the child’s head, petted down a piece of sticky spiked hair. She held her open palm up to Drew’s wife to tell her to stay, to wait,
please don’t leave
, and some part of her wanted to linger there, to put her arm around the girl’s shoulders —her name was Melinda —to put her arm around Melinda’s shoulders the way that Hank had done. To hug the child —Drew’s child, Molly —close to her chest. But first she had to get to the door, then she would be right back. She would take the hot sweet bread from the oven and she would find a chain for the ring around Melinda’s neck, some clean shorts for Molly, but right now she could not get to the door fast enough. She was moving through
the house then, her hands grasping the tops of tables and the backs of chairs —her hands leaving traces of sugar and flour, prints, traces of all their hands through all the years. And of course she would hear her son again. She would always hear him. There in the darkness, a pant and a whimper, a sigh and a whisper, the softest breath of a windless night as she lay waiting for sleep, Hank there by her side, and now she could not get to him fast enough.
MIDNIGHT CLEAR
“What makes this
night different from all the rest?” Charles asks. His hair is damp with sleep as he follows me from room to room, a crumbling graham cracker in one sticky hand and a glass of chocolate milk in the other. He is five. His brother, Michael, who is eight, is absorbed in the Game Boy he holds in his hand, a series of beeps and distracting sounds. He is also watching cartoons and moving one bare foot under the edge of the rug in a way that flips it and scatters dust and crumbs about every thirty seconds. The other question Charles has asked ten times since waking from his nap is how Santa Claus comes out of a wood-burning stove. “Won’t that hurt?” he asks. “What if
he wants to give me something big?” This one got his brother’s attention. He has figured everything out about Santa Claus, you can see it in his eyes, but is not yet ready to admit the truth. Once the truth is admitted, there’s no taking it back, no return to what you once believed in so completely. You would think that those early experiences of disappointment and loss and disillusionment would prepare us for what lies ahead. Things like career disappointments, a parent dying way too young, a marriage that functions the way a mirage does, constantly forcing physical distance so you can continue to see something that isn’t really there.
It is Christmas Eve —our first in this new house, our first in our new family configuration —a single mother and two young sons. Charles has already taken the little figure of Joseph out of the crèche several times and placed him at the far end of the table with a green Matchbox car that resembles the one his dad drives. “You live over here now,” I have heard him say and then nod and giggle as if the little plastic Joseph had just told him a joke. “You’re still my daddy,” he says, a recital of all he has heard during the past eleven months. He has claimed the Jesus figure as his own namesake and a little plastic Spiderman figure as his brother. I, of course, am Mary and keep finding my figure placed outside of the manger, close enough to see what is going on but out of the building nonetheless. “You are working in the yard,” he has told me. “You are at the grocery store and will be right back.”