Читать книгу Henry's Sisters - Cathy Lamb - Страница 11

C ecilia, Janie, and I trooped toward Janie’s Porsche parked outside Grandma’s house.

Henry bopped along beside us. “Sisters home! Sisters home! Who want to play the hide-and-seek! That game! Hide-and-seek!”

“We’ll play with you, Henry,” Cecilia said. “We have to get Isabelle and Janie settled first.” Then she muttered, “They’re moving into the witch’s house.”

“Okay dokay!”

I hugged Henry. He’s the nicest person I know. My poor brother had survived one wrecking-ball blow after another in his life and he miraculously still found eight hundred things to smile about. “Let me unpack. How’s your stamp collection?”

He laughed. “I have fifty-six stamps, Isabelle! Fifty-six! I have a stamp from North Dakota! Do you know where that is? I don’t!” He clapped twice. “Do you know where Michigan is? I don’t!” Clapped twice. “Do you know where Florida is?” He loved this game. “I do! They have swamps and alligators and an ocean and Disney World!” Henry loves Florida. Never been there, but he loves it. He started singing, “Mickey Mouse! Donald Duck! For ever ever ever…”

I noticed that Janie was not with us anymore. I stopped and turned around. Janie was crouched on all fours in the middle of the grass, her skinny body jerking as she went through a series of dry heaves.

“You think this is hard, you counting hermit?” Cecilia snapped, her usual compassionate self. “Try living with it day in, day out, for years. Know how many times I’ve been told I’m the size of a pregnant hippo? How she never thought she’d have a fat daughter? Get up, Tapping Queen, and suck it up.” She flounced past me, grabbed two suitcases, and marched back to the house. “Get in the house, hermit.”

“I’ll get your stuff, Janie,” I told her. She nodded weakly, went back to dry heaving.

Janie had brought five suitcases, a laptop, a sack of self-help books and her classics, a giant picture of her houseboat (“so I can visualize a peaceful place”), East Indian music, her embroidery basket, teas, a Yo-Yo Ma CD, a yoga mat, a picture of her therapist, and nine new journals to “write in when I feel like Momma will overwhelm or diminish me. My journals will recenter me, help me to find the goodness and strength within myself, and the courage to stand up tall as a person who deserves respect.”

I left Henry patting pale Janie, slung my favorite camera around my neck, and dragged my suitcases into the house, up the wood stairs, down the yellow-painted hallway, and into my old bedroom.

My bedroom was painted a light sage color and had a window seat overlooking the front porch. I used to climb out this window at night to meet one boy or the other for attention and copulation purposes. My bed was a twin, with a flowered bedspread on it. Two white nightstands and a white dresser and desk completed the room.

Janie’s room was pink with white curtains. Her room was smaller than mine but had a funky, pitched ceiling and two dormer windows. I knew she would soon be cowering in her closet, chanting to herself, rocking, embroidering flowers, trying not to let Momma undo years of therapy.

I already felt like the walls were sucking me in, stripping away my fragile, tenuous hold on sanity. The blackness in my head foamed a bit, bubbled, swirled. I had been an adult for so long, but a few minutes in this house and I was regressing.

I flicked my braids back and took a shuddery breath.

I was home.

Welcome back to your nightmare, I told myself. Welcome back.

I heard the van pull up in front of the house about an hour later. I leaned out the window of my bedroom, that busy wind blowing my braids and beads.

There she was. I couldn’t help chuckling. Within minutes I heard her marching up the steps, then a brisk knock on my door.

I smiled at my grandma, a tiny woman with white, curly hair, standing in the doorway wearing old-fashioned, air force flight gear, including an antique flight helmet and goggles. It was hard to believe that until a few years ago, when dementia caught up to her, Grandma was a firebrand who’d nitpicked Momma until she could barely see straight through her fury.

“Amelia!” I exclaimed. “Amelia Earhart!”

“Good to see you, young lady.” She narrowed her eyes at me, saluted, clicking her black army boots together two times. “You’re familiar to me. I believe we met during my speaking tour in 1929. That tour exhausted me!” She flipped a hand to her forehead. “It was my sinuses. Clogged. Burning. Running.”

“How are your sinuses today, Mrs. Earhart?”

“Better.” She tipped her head up, touched her nose. “Probably because of my latest operation. The doctors had no idea what they were doing, none. Men are stupid. I’m surprised my nose is still on my face.”

“I’m glad it’s still there, Amelia.”

I hugged her. She seemed surprised at first but then hugged back.

“My fans love me!” she declared, then stepped up close to me, flicking one of my braids back. She smelled like roses and mountain air. “I love to fly at night.”

“Well, Amelia, your night flying skills are excellent—”

“Some people question my flying abilities.” She adjusted her goggles over her face. “Again, they’re men. Stupid, know-nothing men. Eight brain cells. Maybe. I’ve written a poem about them, shall I pronounce it to you?” She straightened her flight jacket and clicked her boots together. “ Men. Slimy and rude, loud and uncouth. Never inclined to give up their booth.’ That about sums them up.”

“Sure does, Amelia.”

“I’m a nurse, you know. I aided the soldiers in World War I and I know what I’m doing. If your arm is amputated while you’re here, I can sew it back on. If your head has a bullet in it, I can get it out with a spoon. Care to fly with me soon?”

“It is my dearest wish,” I told her. “It will be my pleasure.”

“Women power!” she shouted, fist up and swinging. “Women power!”

I raised my fist. “Women power!”

By the time we moved in with Grandma, my first year of high school, all of us were covered in so much fear we were quaking. It practically dripped off of us. Momma was holding on by her fingernails and most of the fingernails were split in half.

Henry had regressed at least two years and was babbling, his speech lost, bladder control iffy because of what he’d been through. Janie was anxious to the point of cracking. Cecilia was furious and inhaling food. I had retired into my head and my blackness.

But Grandma’s gracious home was an oasis in the midst of an ocean of night terrors come alive. We had clothes that fit. We had food on a regular basis that she cooked from scratch. We had heat.

When Momma hit blackness and crawled to bed, we were not alone. Grandma was not a saint—she had a flaming temper and did not bother to mince words—but she hugged us warm and tight, unlike Momma, who avoided all displays of affection with her daughters as one might avoid malaria, and she cared. Grandma cared about us.

By any account, you could say that Grandma saved our family. She was smart, strong, and ran a tight ship. As captain of that ship she hounded Momma to get counseling, to get a date, to gain weight, to button her shirt up, to go back to school so she could be “someone,” to stop hiding in her bed, and her hair! A mop! Grandma reminded Momma that she’d warned her this would happen! She knew it! She’d told her! It was endless.

As I grew older I realized that Momma’s relationship with Grandma was a carbon copy of our relationship with Momma: difficult, competitive, critical, demanding. Never good enough.

It’s genetics, and we were screwed in that department.

When they fought, we hid in our closets.

Amelia and Momma, however, never fought.

Grandma/Amelia rose onto her toes. Clicked her boots. “I must be off to the tower. I have to hide my secrets again so the natives won’t steal them.”

I nodded sagely.

“Will you be residing here for a while with my copilot and what did you say your name was and do you fly?” She stuck her arms straight out, made the sound of a plane engine deep in her throat, and left the room.

I wandered into Janie’s bedroom.

“Get out of the closet, Janie,” I said.

“No. I’m in self-analysis contemplation.”

“Come on. Out you go.”

I opened the door to the closet. It was filled with stuffed animals. Janie’s face was buried in an alligator. She was sitting on her yoga mat.

“I’m regressing back to childhood, Isabelle,” she whimpered. “I can feel it. Feel the backward passage of time flowing.”

I got down on my knees. “Take it on the chin.”

“I can’t.”

“You better. She’s gonna eat you alive, regurgitate you back up, and start picking at your bones if you don’t.”

“You sound gruesome. It makes me uncomfortable.”

I rolled my eyes. She writes graphic crime novels and I’m gruesome? “Sorry, but it’s true. Find a backbone and stick it in your spine.”

Cecilia came into the room. “Okay, ladies…Oh, man. What the hell? Get out of there, Janie. Right now. Stop being such a wimp.” She shifted her weight to a rocking chair. The chair made cracking sounds. She wiped the sweat from her brow. She was wearing a dress that resembled a green tarp, her long blond hair in a messy ball on her head.

“I have the list from Momma.” Cecilia whipped out the list. It was written on pink paper. I collapsed on the bed. Janie shut the closet door.

“Damn!” Cecilia threw the list down, yanked open the closet door, grabbed Janie by her ankles, and dragged her to the middle of the rug. Janie struggled like a dolphin would if caught in the jaws of a killer whale and tried to crawl back into the closet, but Cecilia hauled her back out.

“We’re too old for this…” I drawled.

“Oh, shut up, Isabelle!” Janie said. “You tackled me outside of my own houseboat!”

Cecilia grunted and flipped Janie over. Cecilia is fat but she’s about as strong as Popeye. “Listen to me, Janie!” she screeched. “You’re not going back in the goddamn closet!”

“Yes, I am, and then I’m going home,” Janie wailed. “Home to my houseboat—let go of me, I was in my restorative mood, claiming my own gentleness in my journal—”

Cecilia got down on all fours and put her face two inches from Janie’s. “You listen to me, you skinny, obsessive crime writer, you are gonna get yourself together and help me. I can’t, I won’t, do this all by myself when you hide in your houseboat, tapping this, tapping that, counting this, counting that, indulging yourself in your problems while you write about ripping people’s throats apart with barbed wire and a machete. That’s sick, Janie. No wonder you can’t sleep at night….”

“I turn off my light at precisely 10:14 at night, fluff the pillows four times”—she dissolved into tears—“tap the tables on both sides of my bed four times, drink water, touch the closets, check the front door to make sure it’s locked, check the stove, check the door and stove again, touch the lock of the door, touch each knob on the stove, retouch the closet doors, get in bed, fluff the pillows, tap the tables.” She put her hands on her face in complete despair. “After that I sleep.”

Cecilia was speechless.

I crossed my legs, examined my nails. “Think that’s exhausting? Ask her about her morning routine.”

Cecilia turned her head toward me, her blond hair flipping over her shoulders. She has amazing hair. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope. No joke. Now let’s see that list you have.”

Janie clapped her hands four times.

The list Momma had compiled of things we needed to do while she was in the hospital was extensive and detailed. I will not share each glorious detail here because if I did, you would probably want to check your own self into a nice, quiet, mental ward and a nice, quiet straitjacket.

Beyond obsessive detail on how to keep the house cleaned in her absence (corners, girls!) and admonishes to not eat too much or we’d get fatter (Cecilia), or too little and appear corpselike (Janie), and not to sleep with the gardener (me), Momma detailed Henry’s schedule.

Henry helped at the bakery at least twice a week. He also had to be at the church on Sunday from 8:00 to 1:45. Henry was in charge of bringing the boxes of doughnuts in from Mrs. McQueeney’s car. A description of Mrs. McQueeney followed: “Her facial features are a cross between a nutria and a carrot. She has large nostrils.”

Henry got the coffeepots out and ready, then sat in the front row for both masses to help Father Mike, if necessary. (“For God’s sakes, Isabelle, don’t confess to Father Mike. It will humiliate me as a mother. Humiliate me. ”)

On Wednesdays Henry helped at the church for the high school youth group. On Thursdays he went to the senior center, served lunch, cleaned the tables, and set things up for Bunco. On Mondays and Friday mornings he went to the animal shelter and petted cats and dogs. (“If Janie is going to obsessively count the cats, keep her away!”)

When Henry helps in Cecilia’s classroom, “remind Henry to make Cecilia go out for recess with the kids. She needs the exercise!” On Saturdays he joined other special people for a day trip.

As for Grandma, aka Amelia Earhart, she had her activities, too. Grandma was picked up by one of those short senior buses and taken on day trips with other seniors. Not all of them had lost their marbles yet. They let Grandma come because when Grandma had her marbles still in her head, she’d made a large donation. (“Do not let Grandma bring the whiskey with her on these trips. Fred Kawa always drinks too much and ends up doing stripteases.”)

“Velvet will come in and help you with Grandma. She is a much better caregiver than the mothball you sent me last time and dear Henry likes her, bless him. She has already been informed to never, ever serve Henry orange juice. You know why. ”

Yes, we knew why. All too well, we knew why.

Grandma had been known to give Velvet the slip, though, so I should be prepared, wrote Momma, to leave the bakery “on the spin of a nickel” and help Velvet find Grandma. “Come immediately. You have a lazy bone, Isabelle, you are riddled with lazy bones, and I know, Janie, that you will have to do odd things before leaving the bakery. I don’t know where you got such strange habits, certainly not from me.”

Grandma could get dressed in her flight outfits herself, although she sometimes forgot underwear. “You must check Grandma’s bottom each day to make sure it’s appropriately covered.” I was to comb her hair, description given. She forgot to brush her teeth and would often give speeches in front of her mirror. If the speech grew too long and she was going to miss her day trip, I was to go into her bedroom, the same one she’d been sleeping in for sixty-four years, and say, “Mrs. Earhart, are you ready for takeoff? Your plane is on the runway.”

Grandma would then stop giving her speech, salute, and go downstairs to the bus.

Grandma had to have bran in the morning. “She has bowel problems. Without the bran, she’ll be stuffed to her ears. Make sure she eats it. She has hemorrhoids, which she calls her ‘bottom bullet wounds,’ and you will have to address that. Cream is on the dresser.

“Don’t push Grandma to do anything she doesn’t want to. I know you girls are control freaks, but control yourself. Control is important for any lady to have and you three need it.” I rolled my eyes at that one.

I already knew I was to address her as Amelia, or Mrs. Earhart. I was not to discuss her husband, Momma’s daddy, with her, because Mrs. Earhart would start swearing and expounding upon “killing the cheating bastard” or “He is not a man. He is a eunuch. No balls. Fucker.”

My grandpa Colin was a man, as legend has it, with an ego the size of Arkansas. He was a doctor, hence the house, and died when he was having a nighttime picnic with his receptionist up on a cliff. He drank too much and toppled off.

Momma was fourteen. She told me that Grandma’s response at the time was, “Wonderful. I was going to have to divorce him. Now I’ll take the life insurance and dance on his grave.” Apparently she did that, too. Danced on his grave every Friday night for five years while drinking his whiskey. She would scream at him, “Hey, pond scum. See who’s still dancing? See who’s decaying?”

So no Colin reminders.

The list reminded me that I was not to call her Grandma or “chatter on” about anything we did as kids. Ever. That confused her.

We also received directions on Bommarito’s Bakery, which we had all worked and cooked in, for hours each day, all through high school, despite Grandma’s protests that Momma was working us “hard enough to rip the skin off their bones.”

Momma took orders, and we baked cookies, cakes, breads, you name it, using our dad’s cookbooks. Ad nauseum.

“The bakery is a thriving business. Thriving. Don’t ruin things for me,” she wrote. “I have loyal, dear customers. I hope to the high heavens I still have them when I return.”

I rolled my eyes. She then detailed her recipes (many), what time I was to get to the bakery with Janie (5:00 A.M. ), what goods should be made first, and other inane details like frosting color. Again, I won’t list it. Think: straitjacket.

“Isabelle, don’t get into men’s beds. That was humiliating last time. Do you have to wear your hair in braids? Black people wear braids. Not you. Are you black? I raised you better than that, and you know it. Janie, please. No muttering or chanting. Ladies never mutter or chant.

“Get this right, girls.

“Momma.

“PS Keep Cecilia from eating any more than she already does. She is too fat already. I have done what I could for her.”

There was a silence when we all finished reading The List.

Cecilia’s chin was quivering.

I slung an arm around her shoulders.

“I can love myself even if I don’t feel loved by Momma I can love myself even if I don’t feel loved by Momma,” Janie chanted.

I went to hug Janie.

Cecilia made a move for the closet; Janie crawled in behind her. They shut the door.

I crumpled up the pink letter that smelled like nauseating flowers and opened the door to the closet. “Scoot over.”

Later that night Henry, Janie, and I lined up his shells on the floor and studied them. Same with his collection of rocks.

When he went to bed, we sang songs, and I brushed his curls back. “I love yous,” he murmured, when his almond eyes began to shut. “Yeah, yeah. I love yous. I so happy you home.”

No one in my life has ever been as excited to see me as Henry always is. No one has ever loved me as much as he does, either. Darn near made me tear up, thinking of that.

We snuck out when he was asleep. Janie went straight to her room and started murdering people. “I have a deadline and I still haven’t set out my doilies or peace candles, nor have I arranged a serenity corner or a positive breathing space.”

I hugged her good night, then I headed out to the porch swing. Momma was already in bed. She had not liked the dinner we cooked. The sauce was too spicy, the bread hard “like a suitcase,” the salad filled with salmonella.

You might think that Momma had lost it, like her Momma has, based on what she says. That would be incorrect. Momma has been like this since before our dad slung a bag over his shoulder and walked down our driveway, away from our home and swing set and into the soft lights of dawn. This is how River Bommarito is .

I pushed River out of my twirling mind and thought about Henry as I swung.

You would have thought that we sisters would have hated Henry for being Momma’s clear favorite.

Never happened.

From an early age, he was sick, helpless, loveable, pitiful, lost, cheerful, loving, and sweet.

It was an unbeatable combination.

He was completely unprepared for the shittiness of our childhood, for what had happened specifically to him, but unlike his sisters, he had learned to trust again. To hope. To reach out to others with innocence.

He was a blipping miracle.

I swung more, the country quiet, the wind a gentle rustle, calm, the land undulating like the soft swells of a green ocean, trees rustling overhead. It was incomparably beautiful in Trillium River.

I felt like I’d entered hell.

Cecilia took a day off work from her kindergarteners to help us get Momma to the hospital the next morning. She swung by in her van and Janie and I got Momma settled in the front seat.

The sun was peeping up, the sky golden and pink, the wind sauntering by, relaxed, as if it had all the time in the world today to see Momma off. All was still, sleepy, and content.

Except for the three of us sisters, who were twisting in the middle of an emotional battlefield filled with booby traps and land mines.

Momma was not in a good mood. The breakfast I made her was “flat.” Janie was making her nervous. I hadn’t snuck a man up to my room last night, had I? The kitchen was messy, she never had a messy kitchen. Cecilia was late. She’s always late. “Not an organized woman. She’s a mess. A mess.”

“Stop spinning around me,” Momma snapped, attaching a pearl earring. “Do not tell me to relax, Isabelle! Cease mumbling to yourself, Janie. Or are you speaking to an imaginary friend? Cecilia, for God’s sakes, you have enlarged. You’re bigger than you were yesterday! You have got to stop eating. One of the biggest days of my life, if not the biggest day of all because I am getting open-heart surgery, if you girls care to remember, and here you are, making me late!”

“We’re not late, Momma,” Janie said, tentative. “Don’t you worry—”

“I am worried, Janie. I’m worried that I have a daughter who has written nine books and all she does is murder people in bizarre, twisted ways.”

“I don’t murder people, Momma—”

“You do! What is going on in that head of yours? This is not the lady I raised you to be!” She wriggled in her perfectly pressed blue suit and recrossed her blue heels. “When are you getting married and having children? You’re going to get too old—”

“Momma,” I interjected, as soon as Cecilia pulled out of the drive. “Don’t miss the sunrise. It’s beautiful.” Momma, don’t you want to stay in the hospital five months instead of five days? Don’t you want the doctors to sew your mouth shut for the rest of your life?

With both hands, I pressed my braids tight to my head. I could feel that blackness again, right on the periphery. I fought so hard against that blackness. It had plagued me since childhood. Sometimes it won, sometimes I won. I was definitely sliding into second place today.

“Please, Isabelle! I know what you’re trying to do,” Momma argued. “You’re trying to change the subject and it won’t work. Drive by my bakery, Cecilia, immediately. I want to see the building one more time before you girls get in it and burn the whole thing down.” She shook her head, tsk-tsked her tongue. “I’ll be out of business before a week is up.”

“You won’t be out of business, Momma,” Cecilia said, turning toward town. She always tried to appease Momma, as she’d tried to appease Parker for years. Cecilia had simpered and catered and smothered her own personality around him to meet his endless and unreasonable needs and wants. With Parker, she had recreated the same relationship she had with Momma. In turn, he had decimated her soul.

There was no one else on the planet she did that for, as she is a tornado with feet.

“Janie and Isabelle are going to take good care of the bakery, and when summer starts I’ll be there, too, while you recover.”

Momma humphed in the front seat. “Humph! And what will Henry do without me?”

“Henry will be fine,” we all three said.

“And what about Grandma?” She patted her perfectly brushed hair. Twisted her pearl necklace.

“Grandma will be fine,” we all three said.

“The house will be declared a waste site when I return,” she muttered.

“The house will be fine,” we said.

“What are you, parrot triplets? Stop. You’re hurting my ears.” She massaged her ears.

I groaned.

Janie gurgled.

Cecilia sighed.

It would be a long drive.

You might find me callous for not wringing my hands and diving into semihysteria about Momma’s open-heart surgery. After all, this is what they do in open-heart surgery, if I’ve got it correct: They cut your chest open with a knife as if you are a fish to be filleted. A human does this. Then, they yank open your rib cage, like it’s a closed clam, using something refered to as a “spreader.”

Even thinking about this bothers me. If God had wanted our rib cage opened up, I’m sure he would have inserted a zipper in the middle of it. I see no zipper.

Then they stop your heart.

Boom. Beatless.

You’re hooked up to a heart-lung machine, which does what you could imagine it should do. It beats and breathes for you, like it’s a person only it has an off-on button.

Then they (often) cut open your leg and borrow a blood vessel or two without asking the permission of your leg. They use the blood vessel to bypass a clog in your artery. The vessel that is clogged may well be clogged because in your lifetime you have eaten the equivalent of nine cows, four pigs, and a multitude of yummy stuff like wagons full of fried chicken. This cholesterol clings like plaque to your arteries.

If you don’t get your arteries hosed out or fixed, well, you’re a goner.

So, you might think I would be worried that Momma would soon be a goner.

That is not going to happen. Why?

Because I know it.

Momma will live to be one hundred. Maybe older. I can see her living to be one hundred and twenty-one to taunt me and Cecilia and Janie. By then we’ll be in our late nineties and I hope I will have lost my hearing so I can’t hear her anymore and I will have lost my sight so I can’t see her anymore and I will have lost my mind and will believe that I am someone else.

Like Amelia Earhart. Or Cleopatra. Or Joan of Arc.

I vote for Cleopatra.

On our way into Portland I saw a windsurfer. He had a red and purple sail. He was whipping right along on the waves of the river. Away from struggles. Away from people. Away from life. Free.

He was free.

I wondered if he’d take a shift for me with Momma.