Cures for Hunger (6 page)

“If World War III starts,” my brother asked, “can we capture a tank and can I live in it in the backyard?”

My father turned sharply and looked to where we lay before the TV.

“Well,” he said, “okay, I guess that's fine.” But he kept studying my brother.

I tried to picture the camouflage tank beneath the apple tree and wondered if I should ask for one, too, but I could tell from my father's face that he thought my brother's request was weird. I'd been compiling a list of all that I shouldn't mention to him, levitation being at the top. That was the good thing about what was in my mind: no one else could see it, so I couldn't get in trouble. Still, I often worried that my mother could tell what I was thinking just from looking at me. Or maybe it was because I knew that she believed in telepathy. My father didn't, so it was easier to make him happy.

I carried my book into the kitchen and sat across from my sister, who was coloring horse pictures. She wore bell-bottoms and a plaid shirt, her blond hair in a barrette. My mother glanced at me with those blue eyes that saw right into my head. Instantly, I wanted to confess, but my fear was stronger. She'd be angry, and my father would be angrier.
Pepsi, which she'd forbidden, seemed far worse than alcohol. How could she accept that he drank it?

“What's a nuclear missile?” I asked to distract her.

“Oh, that's hard to explain,” she told me. “It's a terrible, terrible thing, and it could kill all of us. It will probably destroy the planet someday.”

But she didn't explain the way she usually did. She paused, staring into the bubbling spaghetti sauce as if seeing this future.

“The world,” she said more quietly, “is a terrible place. It's not so bad for boys, but girls have to be strong.”

My sister looked up. She was six, and I wanted to tell my mother to be quiet.

And yet I longed to see the fierceness of the world revealed, to witness it at last.

 

 

The entire class was laughing at me. It was the day before Christmas break, but they still made fun of the lunches my mother packed. Usually, to hide my sandwiches, I ate them from inside my brown lunch bag, like a wino swigging from a wrapped bottle.

“Show it,” they were saying. They had chips, PB&J, and cookies. I took out two dark, crumbly slabs of bread with six inches of lettuce and tomatoes piled between.

“Oh,” I said as the tomato slices slid free and the bread broke and the lettuce spilled onto my desk. The children howled. To make my accident appear intentional, I lowered my head and snuffled about like a cow, gobbling from my desk. Kids were falling out of their seats. I sat up, making bovine eyes and working my jaw with a ruminating motion.

Mrs. Hand swatted the back of my head.

“
Cochon,
” she scolded, and the students fell silent.

During recess, when I spoke about levitation, the kids looked doubtful, having seen me imitate a cow. Only Guillaume was enthusiastic. He was getting better at moving sheets of paper propped against the wall. He talked until his face turned red and spit gathered at the corners of his lips, and even I wanted to knock him down.

I explained that my mother had said I should build mental powers
slowly, by meditating with a candle. She'd set one up for me, and when I'd concentrated, the flame had wavered considerably. Guillaume sputtered that he'd try it, though his parents didn't let him play with fire.

No one else cared. They were looking at my unzipped fly, my lopsided shirt, my shoelaces trailing in the dirt. They trickled away as I rambled—great wars, mutations, superpowers. I felt that if I talked enough, something amazing would happen.

“You have to focus,” I said. “It takes time.” I said all sorts of things.

“Maybe you aren't the right type,” I told Matthieu as he turned away.

“The right type of what?”

I had no answer, and he snorted and wandered off.

Normally, I'd be excited for Christmas break, but home wasn't fun these days. For the rest of recess, I followed the path around the playground, walking backward, closing my eyes when I could, just breathing, not letting myself be angry, not thinking anything at all. Each time the wind gusted, I leaned back into it, trying to see if it would hold me up.

 

 

On Christmas Day, my father returned, smelling of pine sap. He'd shut down his lots and stripped his rain gear at the door without speaking to my mother. He turned up the heat that she kept low since, as I'd heard her complain, he didn't give her much money for gas and we'd once run out and had to warm ourselves around the stove. He sat in his chair wearing boxers, and stared at the TV as the anchorman mentioned the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Briefly, there was a clip showing men outside a church, all wearing sandwich boards printed with The End Is Near.

At least when the end came I wouldn't have to go to school, and my life would be like
The Chronicles of Narnia.
Maybe I'd do things my father had, catch huge salmon that took hours to reel in or drive a truck without brakes, crashing into things that people no longer needed.

“Did you like school?” I asked him.

“I didn't go for very long,” he said, eyes on the TV. “I had to work, but my brother and me, we'd walk my sisters to school and beat up kids who bothered them on the road.”

“Where are your sisters now?”

He looked at me, then stared off and sighed. He seemed uncomfortable, the way I did when my mother made me put on too many winter clothes, but he had only his underwear on. He sat tensely, as if he might jump out of his chair and run forever.

“Can I stop going to school and work with you?” I asked.

He smiled faintly, almost sadly, and said, “Someday.”

I wanted him to tell me a story about what we'd do. If I could think about the future when everything would be different, then each boring day at school wouldn't be so bad. But he said nothing, and I sprawled on the rug and watched the news, which felt more serious even than school. With his eyes locked on the screen, he inhaled slowly through his mouth, the way I did when my nose was plugged, and I wondered if he breathed like this because of something to do with his nose.

“Bonnie said your nose isn't real,” I told him.

“What?” He glanced down at me.

“She said doctors gave you a new one. How did it get broken?”

He hesitated, cheeks scrunched up as if he might become angry, though I kept my face curious and unafraid. It wasn't easy, but it worked.

“Someone hit me,” he said.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It's a long story. I was coming out of a . . . a bar, and they were waiting for me, and they . . . they hit me in the face with towing chains.”

“What's a towing chain?”

“You use it to pull cars.” He glanced back at the TV, but I had the sense that I was missing a pretty good story. After all, who just went and hit someone in the face with chains?

“What did you do?” I asked.

He stared down at me where I lay on the rug. “Well,” he said and cracked a grin, “I gave them the worst beating of their lives. They cried like babies and ran away.”

I was waiting for the story to go on, but he yawned and focused back on the TV. When had he stopped telling stories the way he used
to? He said nothing, and I grew so bored of the man's head droning away on the TV screen that I left to read at the kitchen table.

After dinner, I asked my brother what would happen if there was a nuclear war. How did it all work? He focused his large brown eyes on mine, nodded seriously, and took a breath. Then he described a future of cannibalistic humanoids in caves who'd hunt down good humans. The monster humans would eat people because there'd be no animals left. The good humans, though, might not eat at all. Given that I could eat endlessly, it occurred to me that I might become a monster human.

Later, in bed, I couldn't bear not understanding all that was happening—the way my parents ignored each other and rarely laughed. I stared at the dark ceiling until the house became quiet and stayed that way for so long I thought I might fall asleep. Then, downstairs, footsteps slowly crossed the wooden floor and just stopped, as if someone was standing and thinking, not sure where to go or what to do next, as if too afraid to move. Even now, without my knowing, so much could be happening. I might wake up and find the world changed—sirens and detonations forcing us underground, faceless creatures capturing me, tying me to a table and brandishing knives.

In a dream, I crossed a yellow field, running toward my mother, who appeared gray, caught in motion, a colorless snapshot—her hand extended, floating before me as I reached. In the center of the sky appeared a black shape like a fighter jet. It began to spin as, from every horizon, darkness rose, and there was no more light.

 

 

In the morning, my father was gone, and after breakfast my mother said that we were going into town. A bag held her presents, and if ever there were proof of the nonexistence of Santa, it was this: my mother with her receipts, leading us into the mall to return everything my father had bought her.

Outside the clothing store, she put my brother in charge while she went inside. My sister sang quietly to herself as we watched the crowds surge past Boxing Day signs.

A slouching woman stopped and stared. After glancing around, she came closer. She had blond, frizzy hair and a long jacket that reminded me of burlap. She asked if we were alone.

“Our mother is just over there,” my brother told her, repeating the words that my mother had drilled into us.

The woman's big eyes rolled from one side of the mall to the other. Instantly, I knew she'd do something repulsively sexual. Both during school assemblies and by my mother, I'd been warned about perverts.

She slipped three pamphlets from her purse and gave one to each of us.

My brother blanched. “We can't,” he told her.

“It's all right. Your mother won't mind,” she said and hurried off, not having exposed her naked body from beneath the jacket after all.

He stood, hunched, as if he'd returned home with a bad grade. The pamphlet showed two abandoned-looking children in saggy diapers waiting in a doorway as Jesus approached along the sidewalk. He'd probably change their diapers. No, whatever he'd do had to be bad if my mother hated Christians so much. Maybe he'd feed them processed foods. She'd never explained why, if proselytizers came to our house, she slammed the door in their faces.

She snatched the pamphlets from us.

“Who gave these to you?” She made a constricted huff like a growl and went to a trash can and tossed them. As she led us out, she searched faces, asking if we recognized the woman. My brother said he didn't, and I could no longer recall what she'd looked like.

“Why were you so angry?” I asked her that night as she was tucking me in. I wanted to hate the woman who'd given us the pamphlets, but I didn't understand why I should.

“I don't want you to grow up with that garbage in your head. When I was a kid, I had to go to church. I imagined God was some big, mean guy staring down, and I was afraid to do anything, afraid to be myself or have fun.”

She told me about her father, how strict he was, as if this were also God's fault. She said she'd wanted her freedom. The way she told me
this—the look in her eyes—made me feel that she was still struggling to be free. She seemed as if she were going to tell me something else, and an expression like pain came onto her face, but she said nothing.

“Who is God?” I finally asked, just to make her speak. She sighed and explained how some people believed in an all-powerful, judgmental geezer who saw everything we did. Her description was so convincing that I forgot what we'd been talking about before and became a little jealous of this old man's mental powers. Above all, I was angry at the thought of being spied on, and I told her that I never wanted to take a bath again.

 

 

My sister was lying on her belly with a book, the blinds drawn, her room so dark I didn't know how she could read.

“Want to hear a story?” I asked and flopped down next to her.

“Okay,” she said and turned onto her side. I wasn't sure why I was bothering her. Vacation had ended and winter dragged on, my parents fighting, all of us busy with our own things, books or music or video games.

I began to describe a future in which everyone could levitate, but she said, “Tell me about how Bonnie and André met.”

“Well, she's from Pittsburgh,” I said and thought of all she'd shared over the years. “Grandma's mom is German, and Grandpa's from somewhere else. He made steel. Bonnie didn't like them because they believed in God, so she ran away to live in nature. Since André grew up really poor, he could do everything—farm and catch fish and even . . . deliver babies.” This expression always sounded funny to me, as if he were a mailman, but now the story I'd been struggling to find became clear. It was about my birth, and I repeated the version he'd often told me. “I was born on the living room couch. André delivered me. The cord was around my neck.”

“What cord?”

“Babies are born with a rope. Sometimes it feeds them, but sometimes it strangles them. He took it off and blew into my mouth, and then I began to breathe.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, as if expecting something else, but I couldn't think of what came next. My story seemed to have started well, but what happened after my birth? Feeling vaguely irritated, I got up and walked away. The next day, after school, she asked me to tell another story, but I said I was busy and left her in the musty silence of the house.