More Than Enough (7 page)

The salesperson would then eye Jenny and me, seeming to confirm what kind of family we were, before finally saying, “All right, then. Just this once.”

My father had never cared for shopping, especially grocery shopping. But for the four short weeks of that February during which the Salt Lake Valley was covered in the dirty muck of inversion and the nights were black and starless and the lights of the city, even when you looked from the top of the Downs, became distant, blurry, and disconnected dots lost in the swampy air, my father was determined to make a sort of party out of our weekly trips to the Albertson's Super Store. “I'm going to let the kids loose on the cookie aisle. You've got ten seconds to grab whatever you want.” It was for events like these that he had persuaded Jenny and me, who'd rarely accompanied my mother on shopping trips before, to climb into the Buick and drive through the black smog—the air made two smoky cones in our headlights—for an evening of family food shopping. My father didn't seem to understand that I was too old to freak out with happiness—which he wanted to see us do—over a timed rush at the cookie, cold cereal, or candy aisle. But Jenny was still willing to act the part of a kid and go spastic, become giggly and greedy, as she filled her arms full of Keebler Fudge Shoppe Fudge Sticks, Chips Ahoy!, and Chips Deluxe, Fudge Shoppe Deluxe Grahams, and Pecan shortbread Sandies, and whatever else she could grab and haul to our shopping cart before my father—attracting the attention of other shoppers and store employees—eyed his wristwatch and shouted, “Time!” When my mother complained, when she called it wasteful, accused him of spoiling his daughter, when she said we couldn't afford to play with food, my father claimed it was just this once, though he'd do it again the following week.

I think she, as I did, half liked to see him make Jenny run wild, arms full of needless things my sister and I and maybe even my mother and father had never tasted. For my mother, shopping had always been a tedious process of price comparisons and coupon clippings, which she kept in an envelope taped to the refrigerator door. My father was quick and careless. He tossed cans and boxes, fresh pastas and sauces, cheeses, patés, and spreads we'd never tried—and later found stinky, uneatable, and threw away—into the cart without looking at prices. She'd never shopped that way. None of us had. As soon as my father convinced her that it was just this once—“Let's treat ourselves, for God's sake!”—or that this, he promised, was the last time, no more after this, she calmed down, relaxed, even began to eye the shelves and claim a few items—a bottle of red wine vinegar, flavored olive oil, fresh strawberries—for herself.

The store was different for shoppers who could buy what they wanted. My father hummed to the old music—“Respect,” “Your Kiss Is on My List,” “Blue Skies”—that played in the store, kicking a foot, moving his hips a little, performing a small dance move. In the produce section, hidden sprinklers sprayed silver mists of water over the vegetables while a voice over the intercom—happy and confirming—announced special sale items, which we no longer had to consider buying. My sister tackled my father, hanging off him and begging for something she'd just seen. “Can I? Can I? Please … please.”

“Why not?” he'd say.

I remember something odd about that particular supermarket. A family of birds lived in there that winter, quick little field sparrows. You'd see one shoot across the fluorescent sky inside that store, and all you could do was laugh. Another perched for an instant on the exit sign above the sliding doors before bolting off again. Jenny called them the Bird family, even though I told her birds didn't have families, at least in the sense that she was thinking when she called them Mr. and Mrs. Bird. They lived well in that universe of shelved food. Once we saw one flit over the cold cereal aisle, land where a box of Cocoa Puffs had burst open over the floor, and rapidly feed on the chocolate debris before an Albertson's employee rushed it with a net. It easily escaped, flew off, landed again, pecked at the chocolate cereal, and then again shot off before the empty net landed. We championed the birds. “You've got to survive somehow,” my father said.

Once they did catch one. We didn't see it happen. We just saw a short man walking quickly through the produce section holding up a meshed canvas cage in which a sparrow fluttered. The man was bald and pale and wore a latex glove on the hand he held the cage with. Jenny and I followed him and tried to look in at the bird, which the man didn't particularly like. “Excuse me,” he said. He was a small man, with a mustache the same shade of gray as the bird he had trapped. His eyes were pink and darted quickly at and then away from us, after which he seemed to look at us from the side of his face.

“How'd you catch it?” I asked.

“A trap,” he said.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” Jenny asked.

“Neither,” he said. “It's a female. A hen.”

“It's Mrs. Bird,” Jenny said.

We followed him out to the parking lot where a light crystalline snow fell. It was freezing, and the cold seemed to drive the bird into a frenzied twirping. “What's wrong with him?” Jenny asked.

“Not
he
,” he said.
“She.”
The man actually glanced at us then. “I'd guess she wants to go back inside,” he said. “There's more food in there, isn't there?”

Jenny actually answered him. “Yes.”

“Why are you wearing that glove?” I asked him.

“Birds are extremely dirty.” He opened the flap in the canvas and the sparrow shot out into the dark and was gone. “I've got to go back in there now and handle food, after all, don't I?”

Ten minutes later, Jenny and I saw him in the produce section arranging oranges in a pyramid, examining the bagged lettuce, eyeing the zucchinis, and Jenny said in her little girl's voice, “Poor Mrs. Bird.” I also tried to feel bad for it, Mrs. Bird out in the cold dark winter with nowhere to go. But it was really just a hen, as the produce man had said, a dirty animal, and you couldn't think too much about a dirty bird when what you really wanted to do was reach into the large, round bins of candy advertising three items for $.89—three Twix bars, three Snickers, three 3 Musketeers, three Chunky bars, three Kit Kats, three Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, three bags of Peanut M&M's—three of anything you wanted for less than a dollar. We'd never bought candy before that February, before what my family had come to call my accident. Candy, sweet cereals, Pop-Tarts, cookies, ice cream, and frozen desserts were new to Jenny and me. During those few weeks, these sweet, useless foods meant we had become rich. We could have as much as we wanted when we wanted it, though buying it was always better than eating it. At home, only minutes after unbagging the groceries, we broke open the Chips Deluxe, the Kit Kat bars, the Pecan shortbread Sandies, the chocolate-covered graham crackers, and ate until exhausted, until the chocolate tasted waxy and our mouths, full of shortbread, lined with flour and sugar, dried out, until we felt stuffed, if not quite sick, until the bored, draining sensation of satisfaction left us calm, let down, and looking for something else to think about and desire.

Those shopping trips stopped all at once at the end of February, not because my mother put a stop to them or even because we ran out of money, but simply because they were no longer enough, no longer interesting, no longer worth the trip to the store. They stopped because food was just food, and you could eat only so much of it before it got stale in your mouth, before you got sick of the taste of it and threw it away. They stopped in the middle of winter when it was cold and the nights were short and the gray inversion still clung to the valley and we wondered what could be next for us and hoped that it would be more than excessive food shopping, that it would be something that would change us, something that we not only wanted before we got it, but that we would keep on wanting afterwards, too, something that would make all the wanting and dreaming that had come before seem worth it, more than worth it, even.

Three

THE DAY IN LATE
February when I was supposed to have my sling removed began with a fight over my sister's hair. Jenny was used to getting what she wanted. Most recently, she had received the outfit that she was wearing that morning—the expensive purple Keds, a purple blouse and khaki pants from the Gap, and the translucent, purple, waterproof Swatch watch from a store in Crossroads Mall called In Excess, the sort of store our family could not afford. The watch had been at the bottom of a fish tank half-buried in little colored rocks as exotic fish swam above it. “Can I, please?” she had begged my father.
“Please, please, please!”
He could not say no, even to an eighty-dollar plastic watch. And so she was given that, too. As far as I was concerned, my arm had bought her an entire far-too-pricey wardrobe—her green and yellow and pink polo shirts, her jeans and pants that had to be from the Gap. And that morning, she wanted our mother to do her hair, despite the fact that our mother was about to be late for her new job at Oak Groves Assisted Living, where she fed and bathed old people forty hours a week, and had already shouted down the hall that she could not, absolutely not, be late for work again if we wanted to have food on our table. She'd taken the job a month ago, right after my injury, so that our family could have full-coverage medical insurance. She was a nurse's aide, and did whatever duties the doctors and nurses weren't willing to do. It was the sort of job that was difficult to fill and that no one wanted, which was why the benefits were good and the pay wasn't bad. She'd probably gotten it because she'd finished a year of nursing school when she was nineteen or twenty and because nobody more qualified had applied for it. “Please! Please!” Jenny shouted through the cracked bathroom door until my mother rushed out of her room with her nurse's white blouse half undone so that, eating my toast in the kitchen, I had to look away from the site of her bra, the textured lace of it, and had to put that image out of my mind.

“Will you please cooperate for once?” She shouted out the word
cooperate
in this long, desperate way.

Just as my mother turned around and headed back to her room, Jenny shoved her face out the bathroom door. “What am I supposed to do with this? I can't go like this. Nobody even cares.” She let her hair drop. She shook it the way a wet dog does, water flying out into the air. She had tryouts for the Billmore drill team that afternoon and wanted to look her best.

“It's just your stupid hair,” I said.

“What can I do? I'll do something,” my father said because he hated it when Jenny threw a tantrum. Her moods really worked on him. They really upset him. He stood from the breakfast table with melted butter from his toast shining on his fingertips and walked over to the bathroom where Jenny slammed the door on him. “I'll help, sweetie.”

“You can't help. Only Mom can help.”

“She says only you can help!” my father shouted down the hall to my mother.

“She's doing this on purpose,” I said.

When my mother didn't respond, Jenny said, “Get her for me, please.” Her voice came through the door in a long, pink, soft hush that my mother had somehow heard down the hall.

“All right,” she said, bolting out of her room, her white blouse still half open so that once again I had to look away, though not before I saw the strained cords in her neck, the soft strokes of her clavicles, the lacy cups of her bra and the little white silk bow poised delicately above her sternum. Seeing that bothered me. I don't think I ever desired my mother in a way that I had to feel ashamed of. I understood that she was a woman as well as my mother. But I also knew that in other families mothers did not walk through the hallway in half-rages with their blouses open. I knew that in other families sons did not have to look away, did not have to erase the picture in their heads of the little white bow.

“I'm here,” she said to the closed bathroom door, and Jenny opened it and looked at her with vulnerable eyes that anticipated a harsh reaction and stopped it before it could happen. “Just give me a comb and barrettes,” my mother said with a great deal of resignation, and for the next fifteen minutes my mother worked Jenny's hair into a subtle, tight crown of cuteness, combing, curling, blow-drying, tucking strands in, pinning and tying off two ribbons and clipping down a translucent purple barrette that matched her Swatch watch perfectly. “There,” my mother said, though of course she would be late again that day and our insurance, our ability to pay bills, to put food on the table, to put gas in the car and clothes on our backs would once again be threatened.

“Thank you,” Jenny said.

“You're welcome,” my mother said, looking into the mirror at Jenny. From where I sat at the kitchen table, I could not see the mirror or Jenny, but I could see the concern on my mother's face. Then, for some reason, she bent down, kissed Jenny on the cheek, and said, “You know that I love you, don't you?” It was a weird thing for her to say, not only because she said it—which she did often enough—but also because she should have been in a hurry and because she touched my sister's cheek and waited for Jenny to look at her and say yes, she knew. Of course she knew. “Good,” my mother said. “Because I do. More than you can know, I do.”

*   *   *

After school that day, I went to Jenny's tryout, which she'd begged me to watch, and was shocked to see that Jenny really did have talent. In the last month, my sister had blossomed so fast that at times she no longer felt like my kid sister. I certainly couldn't have guessed when the physical part had happened to her, though somehow it had. She shot up at least an inch and got teacup breasts about the same time I began to notice the lattice of bra straps through her T-shirts and her Gap blouses. I had recently overheard my mother and Jenny in a shouting match about the sort of underwear my mother would and would not buy for a girl who'd just turned fourteen that October. “Those are not for you. Those are for women,” my mother had said, looking into a catalogue Jenny was holding open. That was the first and maybe only time I heard Jenny shout, tears welling in her eyes, “I am a woman!” after which she thundered down the hallway and hid away for hours in her room. Jenny's tantrum meant nothing to me. She'd always been the sort of kid who threw fits and slammed doors. But that she had ever considered herself a woman was news to me. I knew that I did not consider myself a man, especially during that interminably long first February in Salt Lake. I was a kid with a sore as hell arm in a sling and no friends, save for a dog I loved fiercely despite his funny name. The last place I wanted to be on a Friday afternoon was in the bleachers in the Billmore gymnasium watching hordes of girls, among them my sister, dance to the happy, echoing rhythm of “Material Girl” as the Billmorette drill captains, Sara Chapman, Lisa Abraham, and a girl with whom Jenny had somehow become friends, Janet Spencer, walked through the rows of dancers and tapped the shoulders of the clumsy and homely ones—you could see who they were a mile away because their hair fell over their faces, they tripped, they stepped out of line and off beat, and they seemed to hate themselves for every mistake they made—until only a handful of tall, coordinated, beautiful girls, whose entire bodies conformed to that loud, pulsating music, remained.