“What crowd?” I was organizing Momma’s record albums by the ones I liked best, but now I joined him at the window, where nearly a dozen women dressed in Popsicle colors huddled on our lawn, pointing to the blue door.
“Let’s go see what’s happening,” I said.
“You should get dressed. You can’t wear pajamas all day.”
“Momma does.”
He jingled coins together in his pocket. “You should get dressed.”
I grabbed a t-shirt and shorts off the living room floor, and put them on while Phil, in the kitchen, climbed the cluttered counters in search of food. He grabbed two packages of Kool-Aid, while I found the cleanest cups in the sink. We mixed both flavors together and added water but no sugar because I’d eaten what was left of it the night before. Our drinks came out brown and impossibly sour, but we giggled, daring each other to gulp them down.
It was rare to see him laugh like that anymore, and as soon as he noticed, he quickly shut his mouth. Over the winter, he’d crashed on his sled. His front tooth had chipped so badly the dentist covered it with a silver cap. Ever since, he tried to keep it hidden.
We left the house through the garage and took a seat on the front steps. Phil brought his homework and began to study despite the commotion—so serious except for his mouth stained blue brown. I enjoyed the audience—how their eyes followed when I jumped off the steps and spun in the grass. I couldn’t stop smiling as I walked over to the bush that was always filled with ladybugs and reached my hand inside. Once Momma had told me to count them and tell her when I knew the exact number. Plucking them from the branches, I set the bugs along my arm—not one of them completely round or completely red.
“Little girl?” A woman wearing an orange minidress crossed the yard as the others looked on. “Is your mother home?”
“Yes. My mother’s home,” I said. I touched the hem of her dress because I couldn’t help myself.
“And where is she?”
Dad had told me that he would answer all questions regarding my mother, and Phil reminded me with a forceful stare to follow the rules.
“That little girl’s Matilda Harris,” said the blonde who’d rung our doorbell.
“Matilda?” the woman in orange continued, and now she knelt down, holding me by the shoulders. I liked the way she smelled of Life Savers. “Can you ask your mother to come out and talk with us?”
I stayed mum, gently tapping the red back of a ladybug, hoping to see its outer case open and the wings unfold.
“See, I told you,” the blonde said mysteriously.
The woman in orange approached Phil next. “How about you, young soldier? Will you help us?”
Phil didn’t say anything, either. He watched the bugs crawl across my arm without expression as I made believe my mother was beside me, saying what the colors reminded her of: pepperoni, cinnamon gum, strawberry jelly.
The curious women had gone to their homes to cook dinner, occasionally peeking at us from their steamed kitchen windows. I was pleased to notice how much Phil and I looked like the other kids in our neighborhood. Sitting on the front porch with our Kool-Aid-stained mouths, we were all hungry for dinner and waiting for our fathers.
“I opened her door today,” I finally said.
“Did she wake up?”
“Uh-uh.”
Phil rubbed his finger over the silver tooth, and didn’t ask any more, just kept his eye out for Dad. When his station wagon pulled onto our street, I saw his gray hair was swept to the side, and with his chin up, his mustache caught the sunlight. I stood and saluted.
As he turned into the driveway, the women in Popsicle colors
came out of their homes again, some wearing aprons now. When he got out and fetched his briefcase and hanging bag from the backseat, they came so close he seemed to sense them there.
“Is there a problem?” he asked before turning to face them.
The blonde stepped forward, then hesitated, staring at the bars and stripes on his uniform, and then his nametag, which read ROY HARRIS. Finally she said, “Your daughter’s been home all day.”
“That’s because I bit Mary Beth,” I said, helpfully, running from the front steps to greet him.
“She says her mother is inside,” the woman continued. “But I’ve been ringing the bell for hours.”
My favorite thing about my father’s mustache was how it hid his expression. I could look right at him and pretend he wasn’t mad. “I appreciate your concern,” he told the woman. “I’ll handle this.”
I nodded to her because I was convinced he could handle all of this, but he placed his hand on the top of my head to stop it from moving. “Tillie, clean that mess off your face,” he said, and quickly disappeared through the garage door.
As Phil and I followed him, I pulled off the stickers, my eyes watering when invisible hairs came with them. We stopped short of going into the house, staying there beside the trash cans.
“What on earth is going on here?” he yelled from inside.
“I think he’s in the kitchen,” I said.
Phil leaned his head through the doorway, concentrating—and when we heard the bedroom door open we held our breath. For a while it was silent, and then Dad said something too quiet to hear.
I grabbed a piece of Phil’s shirt. “Do you think—”
“Sh.”
Dad’s voice got louder, and finally words we could make out: “What’s wrong with you?”
I inhaled the smell of oil stains from the cement floor.
“Tell me,” Dad shouted, still in the bedroom. “Did you even know she stayed home from school today? Did you think to feed her? Because nothing’s making sense to me right now.”
“She’s alive,” Phil said in practically a whisper.
I tipped my head backward to stretch out the cramp in my throat, staring a long while at the pink insulation on the ceiling, then down the wooden walls to Phil’s sled, hanging midway, and the mower propped in the corner. What a relief, all the yelling and stomping through the house.
“Why is there food in the living room? What’s the heat doing on?” When he headed our way again, his keys rattling, we hurried closer to the trash cans as if we hadn’t been eavesdropping. “In the car,” he told us. “We’re not going to eat frozen meat for dinner.”
As we walked down the driveway together, our neighbors all appeared to be busy—checking an empty mailbox, coiling a garden hose, buffing the car with a sleeve.
“Nothing to see,” Dad told the blonde, who stood at her front door as if waiting for a report. He opened the back door of the car for me.
When we pulled off our street, Phil, who had taken Momma’s seat up front, rolled the window all the way down and turned around to see how it messed up my hair.
I rolled down my window, hoping for the same effect, but the wind didn’t touch him. Kneeling into the breeze, I slid my mouth along the bristly strip of the window frame, tasting metal and dust. My teeth hurt whenever we drove over bumps in the road.
If I concentrated, I could smell a hint of Momma’s gardenia
lotion, even though it had been a long while since she’d ridden in the car. She’d swing her orange hair back and forth to the music—she knew every song on the radio—and when the 5th Dimension or Peter Paul & Mary came on, she’d turn up the volume and I’d sing with her. The only sound when we drove with Dad was the air rushing through the open windows. Sometimes as we drove, Momma’s orange hairs still blew through the car.
We had to park two blocks away from the commissary because the marching band had taken over the parking lot to practice for the weekend parade. “Can we go?” I asked Dad, feeling the band play the notes on my ribs. There would be flyovers and songs I knew and miniature flags for all the kids to wave. “Can we?”
“We’ll see,” he said. A phrase I learned a long time ago meant no.
When Dad marched down the sidewalk, one soldier after another stopped to salute him. “Evening, Colonel Harris, sir.” And he returned the salutes with such a sudden whipping motion I thought his wrist would snap.
“Keep up, Tillie,” he’d shout now and then. “You’ve got to hustle.”
I tried, but the trombones kept sliding my head in the direction of all those blue uniforms and white gloves.
Phil stayed by Dad’s side as if he were on an invisible leash. He had a knack for finding pennies on the sidewalk whenever we went out, but he picked them up so quickly, he hardly lost a step.
“Come on, Tillie.” Dad’s voice was farther away now.
The parade music jiggled my insides, and lifted the hair up on my arms. I wanted to be the girl with the pompons tied to her shoes, jabbing a baton at the sky. I danced along behind my father, danced to the
womp womping
of the tuba, the wild drumming.
I trotted with fancy steps, keeping my eyes on my father’s hand, held out to the side with his fingers spread apart. If I could only catch up, I knew he’d take hold.
We drove home to the sound of Phil flipping the lid of the ashtray open and closed. Sitting in the backseat with me were paper bags filled with hamburger meat, buns, a carton of milk, and an assortment of cleaners—liquid Lysol, Brillo soap pads, and powdered Ajax with bleach. I was beginning to enjoy the tiny pain of hunger and how I could make it hurt more or less with my mind. Curled just below my window, I felt the car turn left and slow, stop and slow—the rhythm that meant we were near home. But when I raised my body to see our ladybug bush and our blue door, I saw the neighbors watching us pull into the drive.
Dad stiffened his shoulders, stepping out of the car with the kind of posture that reminded you he was used to being in charge. He carried a grocery bag in one arm and turned my head forward with his other hand, so I would face our house. When he let go, my head swiveled right back to the neighbors, heading to their own homes now. I wondered if the little girl pushing her baby carriage thought of me—jumping at the window—even as she disappeared around the corner.
“Go inside,” Phil said. “Go on!”
Dad walked right over the trail of crushed potato chips on his way to the kitchen and began to bang the pots and dishes around and mop the floor, lecturing the empty room until, finally, hamburgers hissed in the frying pan.
I waited in the living room with the dolls Momma had made—long-nosed elves, brown- and pink-skinned Raggedy Anns, their big button eyes watching the closed bedroom door to see if she would come out. How many days had it been since
she bathed and dressed and left her room smelling of gardenia lotion? How many days since I sat beside her on the couch, our legs touching, as she sewed? I remembered those times as if they were rolled into one overstuffed day: the hi-fi turned all the way up, Rod Stewart then Dusty Springfield singing. Momma would make up her own words—“Isn’t this more fun than cleaning?”—and sing them right over top of the ones playing on the albums.
When Dad called us to the table for dinner, my eyes and throat burned from the intense cleaning he’d just given the kitchen. As he served the food, he lectured about how we ought to pick up after ourselves, how we ought to behave at school, and how I should not choke down my food, but I couldn’t make myself eat any slower.
After we cleared the table, Dad brought a hamburger and a pile of wrinkled peas to Momma. I followed him like a shadow into the humid room, where he raised the blinds and set dinner on the bed beside her face.
“Please,” he said. That was all.
Without raising her head, she reached her thin hand from the sheet to take nothing but the top bun. She barely opened her mouth, straining to take a single bite, and soon she and the bun slid beneath the covers so that only her orange hair showed.
Dad swatted me on the bottom so I’d leave the room, and when I was in the hallway he asked, “What am I supposed to do?”
My brother stayed out of all of it, hunched over the rug in his room, where he took apart his rubber band ball, band by band. It went from a sphere the size of a cantaloupe to a hundred loose ends covering the floor.
• • •
There was so much the neighbors couldn’t have understood about our family by staring at our blue door from the lawn that day. They could not have known the relief I felt in hearing grown-ups in the house—even the sound of Momma crying facedown on the bed and Dad cursing as he scrubbed the different rooms, putting everything right. They couldn’t have known the comfort of sinking into bathwater for the first time in days and washing the fine clay dust from my skin, or of hearing clothes tumble in the dryer along with the scrapes of pennies that had fallen out of Phil’s pocket. Most of all, they could not have appreciated the small miracle of Momma coming to my room that night to tuck me in.
She came in her pink terry cloth robe, carrying the beautiful cup we’d made together. It had started out as just an ordinary white mug from our cupboard, but we had glued plastic rubies to it.
“There you go, Bear,” she whispered, handing me the steaming cup. She settled at the edge of my mattress, her face still creased from her long sleep. I chattered about baby carriages, ladybugs, and sour Kool-Aid until she closed my hands around the cup and insisted, “Taste it.”
I sipped the warm, bitter drink, feeling the rubies with my tongue in between swallows.
“I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying for you, okay?” And she reached for
Alice in Wonderland
, turning to the page where we last stopped. I was captivated with her singsong voice, how quiet it was that night. Sometimes she read the same sentence twice, and sometimes she had to pause until she’d wiped the tears from her eyes.
I was fading, blinking, trying to will myself to stay awake,
to have this time with her a little longer, but every part of me felt heavy. The cup began to slip from my hands, and when I squeezed my fingers closed to catch it, one of the rubies fell into my lap.
Momma took the cup from me, and I picked up the ruby, saving it in my pillowcase, where I liked to tuck my hands. What the neighbors couldn’t see as I lay my head down was how Momma adored me, how she didn’t leave until I was asleep. I tasted the bitter drink in the back of my throat, and the room began to spin.
A
SMALL, BARELY LEGAL TRAVELING
circus had pulled into our town in the middle of the night and set up in the parking lot of Ace Hardware. Dad and Momma took three-year-old Phil to this circus, where they sat on the shaky bleachers with the store to their backs and the mountains creating a backdrop for the performers.