Fig (10 page)

“I'm screwed either way,” she says. “If I take the medicine, I can't go outside. But if I don't—” And this is when her voice trails away. Mama looks out the window at the setting sun, and she repeats herself: “If I don't take it,” she says, “then I can't do anything.”

*  *  *  *

I sit inside the potting shed.

It is cold in here with the walls made from stone. The one window looks at the garden, and standing in the distance is the orchard. Mama's straw hat hangs from a hook, and on the worktable amid the stacks of terra-cotta pots her work gloves remain as she left them; the stiff leather fingers continue to curl as if her hands are still inside. Ready to dig more holes and plant more flowers.

Last summer, I was helping Mama plant herbs when she suddenly sighed and smiled at me. “This is my sanctuary,” she said, and then she turned her attention back to the starts in their trays. I watched as she carefully jiggled the baby thyme from its cradle of black plastic, roots and all. I think about the other kind of time, as in clocks and calendars. And when I wonder if yesterday was the last time Mama will get to work in the garden, I hold my breath and cross my fingers that I am very wrong.

*  *  *  *

Christmas 1982

Daddy's sitting in his chair, and Mama's on the rug with me. We're in our nightgowns—long, white, and soft. Marmalade watches from her spot by the fire. Mama's long hair is trying to stand up, and Mama says my hair is doing the same thing.

“It's static electricity,” she says, “because we're crawling around the way we are.”

And I think about the static on the television—all the fuzzy black and white dots, and the way it sounds like silence even though I know silence doesn't have a sound.

Daddy ruffles my hair and laughs.

I feel my hair moving; it stands up and dances, and I am Medusa. My hair is full of snakes. I don't want electricity inside my body. I hold my breath and cross my fingers to try to make it go away. Mama says I am mostly made from water. And I'm scared I'll be electrocuted.

While the presents from my parents are always wrapped, the ones from Santa never are. Wrapped in blue snowflakes, the new calendar full of unicorns is from Mama. Daddy gives me every single book in the series called The Littles. Mama jokes about his masculine choice of wrapping paper: Christmas-colored plaid.

A baby doll is waiting for me underneath the tree as if she just arrived from nowhere—delivered by the stork, she is nothing but a magic trick. I don't believe in Santa Claus—not anymore. Not after all the teeth I've lost—the one that disappeared, and the ones I've been collecting, keeping for myself. I keep them in the enveloped marked
SCHIZOPHRENIA
. I keep this envelope and my teeth in the space between my mattress and my box spring. And I don't believe in Santa or the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny.

I don't believe in anything.

The baby doll is under the tree like she's asleep inside her beautiful cradle made from wood the color of black cherries. A heart has been carved away at each end like the space the cookie cutters left in the dough for Valentine's Day last year. Tucked around the doll is a tiny patchwork quilt. And I recognize the fabric. There are squares cut from all my old dresses and bits of faded denim from worn-out blue jeans. Interrupting the pattern of squares and triangles are embroidered swirling flowers and looping spirals. Drawn in bright thread, they zigzag and meander. And they trespass.

Daddy calls it a crazy quilt. And I whisper the word “crazy,” but no one hears me.

“Do you like her?” Mama asks. “You can hold her if you'd like.”

The doll looks like she is sleeping, and Mama is staring at me—eyes on fire, but she is talking normal. Her words come out at the right speed, right volume. No spit. “You should call her Turtle,” Mama says, “Because her face is all scrunched up.” And Mama scrunches her face too.

Even though I didn't want a doll, she still had a name: Elizabeth Rose—a beautiful name with an even prettier one in the middle. I didn't get a middle name.

Just Fig or Fiona, just weird or old fashioned.

Mama picks Turtle up and holds her for me to see. She shows me her dress—periwinkle blue, the color of my new favorite crayon, and then she lifts the dress so I can see her diaper. Turtle is the kind of doll that pees.

Mama shows me all the ways to hold a baby.

Then she settles with Turtle in her arms the way Sissy Baxter's mother held Sissy's brand-new little brother back in kindergarten.

Mrs. Baxter came to show the baby to the class. She sat in the rocking chair Miss Ada always used for story time. Mrs. Baxter sat in the rocking chair but she didn't read out loud from any of Miss Ada's beautiful picture books. Instead, Miss Ada helped us gather around Mrs. Baxter in what she called a semicircle, which is the same shape as a crescent moon. And we were allowed to look but not to touch. And this is how I sit with Mama. She shows me all the different ways a person can hold a doll. I look, but I don't dare touch.

*  *  *  *

I keep Turtle on my window seat, tucked into her wooden cradle, wrapped in the crazy quilt. I keep her there and I never play with her.

Mama comes into my room, again and again, always asking if I just adore my new doll. And I cross my fingers to lie. I don't have to hold my breath. I cross my fingers, and I say, “Yes,” and Mama is already sitting in the window seat, running her finger down Turtle's plastic nose, which I've been told is how she used to help me fall asleep when I was still a baby.

I see the way Mama is eyeing the plastic baby bottles, still imprisoned in their package on the floor beneath my desk. This is where I keep them. These bottles are special bottles. They make Turtle pee. Filled with water, you stick the hard nipple into the hole in Turtle's hard mouth and let the water run through her body until she wets her diaper.

Turtle came with doll-size disposable diapers, but Mama made more by cutting up all my old cloth ones—that is, the cloth diapers Daddy didn't already ruin. He uses them as rags to apply linseed oil and beeswax to the wood he works in his shed. My father has a way with wood.

Mama is looking at the bottles still captured between the clear plastic and glossy cardboard, when I tell her I prefer to breast-feed instead. Only I say “nurse.” And this is when she tilts her head and looks at me. I hold my breath and cross my fingers to make her smile, and she does.

She smiles at me, and she says, “Good for you, Fig.”

Mama's features are no longer sharp—not the way they used to be. Her face is getting puffy, and her body is becoming softer and softer. She blames it on water retention. Whenever I can, I cuddle up next to her and we spend the winter as one. Hibernating together, we read away the cold evenings and the weekends between the days when I have to go to school. We sit in the living room on the red velvet sofa by the fire or under the heavy quilts in Mama and Daddy's big brass bed.

Last week when we went to the library, I tried to check out
The Headless Cupid
again, but this time Mama wouldn't let me. This time she flipped through it, reading different sections to herself. Then she closed the book and put it back on the shelf, looked at me, and said, “No. You just aren't ready yet. But, Fig,” she said, “I swear I will let you read it when the right time comes—and I promise you, it will only make it that much better. I swear it will be worth the wait. You just wait and see,” she said, and then she kissed me on my third eye.

So I am reading
The Littles
instead while Mama devours Virginia Woolf; she is trying to read every book she ever wrote—and her essays, too. Mama either borrows the books from the library or buys them from the bookstore in Lawrence. She brings them home and stacks the books on the floor by her bed. Marmalade loves to rub against this tower and often knocks it over in the middle of the night.

Mama reads certain passages out loud and explains how Virginia was known for writing stream of consciousness.

“This style of writing,” Mama says, “attempts to mimic the way the human brain actually works—the way we think, or rather the way we dream while we are still awake. The thought process is a constant blending of perceptions, memories, and epiphanies. The word stream implies the flow of thoughts or words, uninterrupted or censored, and not always punctuated, because ideas are never neat or tidy, nor are they linear. Our thoughts circulate, Fig. Our ideas move like water.”

Mama used to read for hours at a time, but now she falls asleep between the pages. I think she stops and talks to me as much as she does just to try to stay awake.

“I hate this medication,” she often mutters, and even though she's talking more to herself than to me, I have to hold my breath and cross my fingers because it's my job to make sure she doesn't stop taking it. Even if it means she can't work in the flower garden like she used to. Even if it causes her to fall asleep whenever she tries to read.

Tonight, she drifts away, and her hands are a cradle to hold her book. Tonight, she's reading
To the Lighthouse
, and yesterday she finally finished
The Waves
, which Mama said “was like drowning, only I was drowning inside the dreams of all the different characters in the book.”

And I wonder if it helps to write about water when one is writing stream of consciousness.

I take the book, careful to keep her place with my fingers as I locate Mama's bookmark; it got buried by the quilt when Mama folded it over—lately, Mama has been getting really hot. “I'm burning up,” she will say as she peels off her sweater or kicks away the covers. I find the bookmark, only it's not a real bookmark, and I wonder what happened to the one I gave her—the one with the watercolor butterfly and the long blue silk ribbon.

Instead, she's using one of the printouts from Eudora Drug—the ones from the pharmacist that come stapled to the white paper bags full of Mama's endless medication. This one is for Valium.

VALIUM
is typed in boldface at the top of the printout and highlighted by a thin strip of bright yellow. This bright yellow is fluorescent like the colors all the popular girls at school wear these days. Only they call it “Day-Glo”—these girls who wear pants with stirrups, and a hundred rubber bracelets to swallow their perfect arms, while I just wear what I find inside my closet or dresser drawers. Clothing picked out by someone else. Clothing mostly picked out by Gran.

Mama has three available refills of Valium remaining.

I scan the possible side effects—dizziness, a spinning sensation, blurred vision, dry mouth.

I tuck the printout for Valium into the book and put Virginia away for the night. Virginia and her stream will rest between Mama's water glass and the telephone, and when I pull the chain on the lamp the light turns off and the night comes flooding in to my mother's bedroom like a jar of black ink spilling—and I think,
Everything moves like water
.

*  *  *  *

Kansas is still covered in a crust of yellow-white snow and contained by a sky dome of dull gray—but the weather is growing warmer, and Daddy is racing against the fast-approaching spring to put his father's red-belly tractor back together again. With or without Uncle Billy, Daddy spends every day in the barn working on what he calls “the beast.”

He torches iron rods until the metal is angry hot, and he fills the air with blue-white sparks and the hot smell of melted metal. The black lenses of his protective eyewear reflect the display of shooting stars, but despite his determination, Daddy comes home every day cursing yet another failed attempt to resurrect this machine.

Sometimes I watch my father work, and other times I lie on the floor outside my mother's bedroom, surrounded by the portraits of my father's family. They stare down at me from their oval frames, where they float amid a garden of wallpaper roses. I lie here listening to the softness of my mother resting, and I let my fingers wander. They search for scabs to worry, but I haven't any, so they worry the edge of the old Oriental runner instead. When Mama does reemerge, she always appears refreshed. She never asks why I'm on the floor—she just smiles at me and pulls me up. And together we go downstairs to fix some tea, eat cookies, and read some more.

*  *  *  *

March 21, 1983

I try to blink away the sleep.

Mama is wrapping me in her wool shawl and telling me to sit, and then she's helping me step into my galoshes. She holds my hand and guides me down the stairs. I am a baby bird under a Mama-bird wing. Daddy's outside in the truck, and the engine is running.

It still looks like night, but Mama says, “It's almost morning.”

We get in the truck and drive in silence. It's a Monday, the first day of spring break, and for a second I wonder if we're going on a trip, but we don't go far. Daddy pulls over and parks next to the pasture where the pigs have been. I look at Mama, and she smiles, nodding her head. She says yes without saying anything at all. She brushes away my bangs and kisses me on my third eye the way she always does.

I'm careful to be quiet the way they are.

Daddy pushes the top wire down and steps over the short fence with his long legs. Mama lifts me over, and when Daddy takes me he holds me long enough that it's a hug. And when he sets me down, I grow tiny again in the tall Johnsongrass.

We walk across the pasture, past the stable, and still we continue walking. We stop once the pasture meets the woods. This is where the tallest cottonwoods on the farm stand guard. They dip their roots into the deep farmer's ditch and drink forever from the lazy water.

The sun is rising, and the horizon turns watercolor pink. Mama sits and invites me onto her lap, taking her shawl and wrapping the soft wool around the two of us. And I think this is how it's supposed to be. Everything is working out—Daddy was right after all.