Up From the Blue (23 page)
Phil came up the stairs slow and steady, as if still considering all that he’d seen. When he got to his room, I heard the first crash. He’d taken a swipe at the pyramid of beer cans he kept on the shelf over his bed, and the cans clanked against each other as they tumbled. Then there was another crash, and another, and the sound of him kicking the ones that had already fallen against the wall.
My hand squealed against the pole as I spun faster.
The woman my father brought up from the basement was a ghost of my mother. She slumped on the couch in the formal living room like a person with no bones, her orange hair brittle and knotted. The makeup she wore the night before was faded but still visible on her face—a ring of lipstick, a trace of rouge, mascara smudged below the eyes.
“Your mother hasn’t been well,” Dad said, standing right in front of her. Though his voice was calm, the veins stood out in his neck and forearms. “She wasn’t well, and I was caring for her.”
“That’s not true,” I argued. “She’s well. And
I
was caring for her.” I held her limp hand as she stared forward. The sunlight from the window was cruel, revealing loose skin, dull eyes. I squeezed tighter.
“Tillie,” he said, “there’s a lot you’re not understanding.”
“You’re wrong,” I told him, but under my breath and without any courage.
“She would be embarrassed if people knew she’d been living in the basement,” he continued. And then he repeated the rule I knew so well: “This is a family matter, and we won’t talk about
it outside of this house.” But we weren’t talking about it inside of the house, either.
The only real sound of protest came when Phil dragged his feet through the beer cans. There were sixty-eight cans in his collection, sixty-eight cans still lying on his floor a week later. No one mentioned them, but every day, the sound of Phil going in or out of his room sent a shiver through the house.
I spun so fast, the world began to blur. I didn’t realize my eyes had been closed, but when I opened them, they stung from the brightness of the sun. Turning my head toward the pole, I saw a brown hand just above mine. I didn’t need to look behind me to know it was Shirl because she always wore a ring made of wire and shaped like a butterfly, and she had the cleanest fingernails, like she never once clawed into the dirt to pick up a worm.
“Why are you outside for recess?” I asked, still walking in circles. My jaw hurt when I talked, as if I’d been biting down too hard and for too long.
“You’ve been going around the pole for a half hour,” she said, staying with me.
“So?”
“So what’s your problem?”
I slowed and considered telling her everything. I could feel the words in my throat and in my chest—heavy as stones—but something stopped me. Maybe the habit of keeping secrets. Or maybe the shrieks of laughter on the playground, reminding me how badly I wanted to be like the other kids.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “Just feel like spinning, I guess.”
Though I felt queasy, I kept on turning until the bell rang to go back to class. When I finally stood still, the monkey bars, the field, the slide all turned in circles and smashed into each
other as if I were viewing them through a kaleidoscope. I let go of the pole, and my arm ached at the elbow. My hand, its palm sore from rubbing for so long against the metal, would not straighten. It stayed scrunched up like a claw, like I could grab something and strangle it.
IT WAS THE QUIET
that bothered me. It was everything continuing as usual as if nothing had happened. It was walking through the hallway at school, and seeing the same kid cut in line at the water fountain, the same one do a lay-up to touch the exit sign. It was sitting in my seat, pulling one of the chewed pencils from my desk, and writing
9 × 3 = 27
. How had all the screaming and crashing cans come to this? Where were the police asking if I wanted to keep my father with us or send him to jail? Where were the crowds of neighbors wondering how I survived?
I tried to remind myself:
I got my wish
.
I have my mother back
. But she wasn’t the same person I had known in secret—handing me trinkets, whispering stories, and calling me a poet. In the week since she’d been upstairs with us, I only saw her leave the couch once, at Dad’s insistence, to join us for dinner. She took painfully slow steps to the table, the sash loose around her bathrobe, exposing the bones above her chest. She bent over a serving of chicken and broccoli, her makeup washed away so her face had become faint—lips as pale as her skin, eyes like faded blue dots. She only put food into her mouth when Dad ordered her to do it.
I knew we weren’t supposed to talk about private family matters, but the secrets felt right there at the surface. They were tangled in my mind with math problems and spelling. And when the school bell rang, they rattled inside me as I walked down the
hallway. I looked toward the glass wall of the main office, where the teachers and principal stood, fighting an urge to tell.
But telling wasn’t so easy to do. I didn’t know where to begin, for one thing. Would I just blurt out that my mother was locked in our basement for almost a year? Because if I said this, they’d call home, and the only one who answered our phone was Dad. He could show them my mother sitting right there in the living room, not in the basement at all.
As I continued out the main doors of the school, Phil was ready to take the path into the woods that led to the river. I jogged beside him, but he sped up, trying to lose me. Frustrated, I simply stopped where I was, put my hands on my hips, and shouted, “Are you going to tell?”
He turned, his face stretched tight. “I’m no whiner,” he said. “And what do you think would happen if you told someone?” He dropped his book bag and put his hands in the air, wiggling his fingers. “Do you think things would just magically get better? Mom would stop being a crazy person?”
He picked up his bag again and walked fast toward the path. I didn’t try to catch him. I turned up the sidewalk toward the patrols waiting at the top of the hill. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is nothing. You just make do. Keep your mouth closed and hope all the rattling goes away. You walk home from school, pretending everything’s the same, running your hand along the hedges and fences, like there’s nothing waiting for you but your homework.
O
NE OF THE TOYS
that never made it to the new house was my Drowsy Doll. She had a plastic head and plastic hands and eyes that were always halfway closed, but the rest of her, the part wearing pink footed pajamas, was as soft as a bean bag. And what I liked best about this doll was how, after months of carrying her around, she got even softer and smelled like a real person.
Drowsy Doll had a pull string on her hip, and she’d say, “I’m sleepy” or “I want a drink of water.” But I wasn’t careful with my toys, and after too many times left in the rain and too many times of being carried by her string, she stopped talking.
Eventually, she sunk to the bottom of my toy box and stayed there until one day, for no reason at all, she started to say something in a slow and muddled voice. By the time I dug her out she was silent again, even after I shook her hard. Dad said I should throw her out, and I guessed that’s what he did the day he packed the U-Haul. He didn’t understand that even if she
never talked again I would miss her smell, her soft belly, and the way she always fell asleep at the same time as I did. Now something was breaking inside my mother that I wasn’t sure could be fixed again. Though Dad had moved her upstairs, she didn’t become a part of our lives.
DAD CARRIED A CARDBOARD
box filled with Momma’s belongings up from the basement, and I hoped this would help cheer her up. I set out her favorite trinkets and books. I set out her makeup but hid her mirror. I thought when the room was friendlier and more familiar looking, I’d see a sign of the mother I knew in private.
“Phil, why don’t you help, too?” Dad said, heading back downstairs with a bucket and sponge. “Help unload that box.”
Up until then, Phil had been sitting in a corner of the room with his
Mad
magazine, turning pages faster than he could read them. But when Dad gave the command—because Phil always did what he was told—he came right over to the box. At first, he reached inside and picked up Momma’s beret with just two fingers, as if it was something disgusting to touch. Sneering, he looked around for a place in our home where her things might belong. And when he didn’t see anything obvious, he simply dragged the entire box to the hallway closet, where he dumped it upside down and shut the door.
Momma turned her head away—never willing to fight with Phil or tell him what to do—but I knew she didn’t want to see him hurting her, either. I scooted close beside her, patting her leg. I was happy with the display I’d made of her favorite things and waited for her to feel better. I waited for her to tell me one of her stories or pass me some object we could admire. I sat till
the edge of the couch dug grooves into the backs of my legs. The whole time she hardly moved.
I sat with her like this each day—after school and after dinner, sometimes with the TV on, though we didn’t really watch it, and sometimes with a book opened in her lap, though she didn’t look at the words. I often passed time by flipping my eyelids inside out, which made the room blur and darken. It was like the fade-out of a TV show, and I could roll my eyelids back down if something started to happen again.
It was another night eating dinner in the front of the television—the easiest way to bring us together. I liked listening to Walter Cronkite, who was always calm, just sitting with us in the living room and telling stories. He told about a peanut farmer who wanted to be president and a high school football team that didn’t like the bused kids joining it. Phil sat on the floor because there was no room on the couch, and Dad, rather than watching TV, spent dinner glaring at a dirty fork Momma had dropped on the floor.
“Dad,” Phil said, “isn’t that your research they’re talking about?”
The TV showed protesters on college campuses, waving signs that said: stop the war machine. books not bombs. no classified research on our campus.
“Zealots,” Dad muttered. “Why wouldn’t they want more accurate missile strikes?”
He grabbed his plate and Momma’s fork and took them into the kitchen. “Am I the only one who cleans up after myself in this house?” he yelled, like he’d been in the middle of an argument with someone. “I work all day, and then I come home and work some more—dinner, dishes, trash. And now we’re
practically out of groceries, and I suppose I’m the one who has to go shopping.”
He came back into the room and turned off the TV in the middle of a story about porpoises who died tangled up in fishing nets. “Phil. Tillie. In the car,” he announced. “And Mara, I don’t want to see you lying on the couch when we get back. I’m not kidding about this.”
We drove to the commissary, though there was a grocery store not five minutes from our house. Dad always made the thirty-minute trek to shop at the local base, not just for the military discount, but because the world there was orderly. Customers moved through the aisles in a quiet, disciplined fashion. Unlike Safeway, parents at the commissary didn’t open a box of cookies before they paid for them, just to quiet a baby’s crying. And here, no child dared to put one foot on the bottom metal rack of the cart and push off with the other.
Phil strolled the cart down the aisle with excellent posture, stopping whenever Dad found something from his list. He was as polite and distant as a stranger since Momma had come back.
“Colonel Harris?” A soldier slowed his cart near ours in the produce aisle and saluted. “I’ve been following your research, sir,” he said, and they shook hands.
While they talked, I searched a nearby apple bin, turning each one to see which was best.
“Leave those alone,” Phil said. “Don’t put your fingers on everything.” But I kept touching them until I found one that was huge, without a flat side or a soft spot, and so red it looked painted.