Fig (15 page)

Inside my palm, I am holding my uncle's lucky blue rabbit foot. I hold it the way Gran sometimes holds the silver Virgin at the end of her rosary. I squeeze it as Mama boxes up the Lincoln Logs, the Legos, and all my tiny Fisher-Price people—but she leaves my teddy bear alone. The one her mother made for her once upon another time. Her mother made this bear for Mama. The fingers of this grandmother cut the pattern and stitched the stitching and stuffed the stuffing. I love this teddy bear, but he also scares me. He is like a stranger, someone I don't yet know. Someone I'll never truly understand.

Mama keeps a framed photograph of her parents by her bed. One of the few pictures she packed and brought along to college. The picture was taken before there was color film, yet this black-and-white photograph is in color. My grandmother wears a violet dress and my grandfather has a red carnation in his breast pocket. Mama explained how her mother painted the picture. And now I wonder if the dress was really violet and the carnation red, or did she add the colors she desired?

The teddy bear, the encyclopedia, some old dresses, and the photograph are the only things Mama has left of her childhood. And the story of the fire is enough to make me want to stay on the farm forever. I'd rather die than live a life without my mother or my father. I would hate to have to survive the way that Mama did, all alone. But now she has Daddy and me, and Uncle Billy. Now she even has Gran.

Mama wraps Turtle in the same flannel receiving blanket the hospital wrapped me in when I was born and lays the doll down in her cradle. Turtle pretends to be asleep. Her eyes are closed and Mama takes the tiny crazy quilt—the one I know she pieced together using my old clothes—and she tucks it around the doll carefully. If it was up to me, Turtle would be the first toy to go.

Mama is on her knees, wearing one of her many pairs of faded corduroys and a peasant blouse with bold Mexican embroidery in bright colors around the neckline. She doesn't wear her vintage dresses anymore. “They no longer fit,” she says, looking sad. I know she misses wearing the one dress that used to be her mother's. As Mama leans forward to snag a runaway Lego from beneath my bed, her hair comes loose and falls down her back like water.

As she stands she's caught by a thick ribbon of sunshine coming in and her eyelashes are so blond, they vanish in the light. She complains a lot about the weight she's gained, and I feel sorry for her. She used to be the same kind of thin as me. The kind of thin that can't get fat even if you try. Daddy used to joke how the two of us would never last through hibernation if we were bears. And now he doesn't talk about weight at all.

Mama closes the box by folding the flaps into one another. And as she does she leans over and I can see the top of the scar—the place from where I came. But then she is trying to lift the box. It proves too heavy for her to lift alone, so she calls for my father, and together they carry my childhood down the stairs and out to the truck like this is no big deal.

*  *  *  *

I dream someone's in my room, and this dream wakes me up. But when I sit up, I find I'm all alone. With my door half-open, I can hear Marmalade prowling the house.

Mama says cats can see ghosts and fairies, and Uncle Billy says, “They also like to eat mice.”

I feel the emptiness of my room in the pit of my stomach as if I'm hungry. The moon is almost full. With my curtains drawn, everything in my room is cast in silver light. The row of nesting dolls are no longer five, but one. Mama must have put them back together, and this makes me mad. She is
my
doll.

Pregnant with quadruplets, the mother nesting doll smiles at me. She lifts her painted hands from her curvy hips and rests them on her big belly the way pregnant women always do. “I'm about to pop,” she says cheerfully, but when I blink she turns back to wood and paint.

I look to the window seat, needing something familiar. Something I know well to ground me in this world. My teddy bear leans against the glass the way he always does—brown and soft, he looks back at me with button eyes. The cradle is on the other side of the window seat, just as Mama left it, but both the quilt and the doll are gone.

I get out of bed for a closer look. And I find the cradle really
is
empty. The moon pokes through one carved-away heart before the light is devoured by the shadows.

The girls at school tell stories on the bus, and there is one they like the best, about a china doll that comes alive at night. With her porcelain fingers, she gouges out your eyes while you are sleeping. And when I look out the window, I swear I see Turtle walking through the orchard, toward the river. Unsteady on her fat plastic baby legs, she does not look back at the house.

She is running away.

I watch until I cannot see her anymore. Then I climb back into my bed. And I can't tell if I'm awake or dreaming. As I fall back to sleep, I startle from a dream in which I'm falling, and this is how I know I am awake even though I've had dreams inside other dreams before. Someone is moving around downstairs. I can hear the sound of walking—back and forth, back and forth, and the rhythm is familiar; it lulls me back to sleep, and this time I sleep till morning.

I wake to the sound of Mama coming into my room. I rub away the sleep in my eyes, and when I can see again I see Turtle in her cradle in the window seat tucked under the crazy quilt. Like she always is.

Mama looks at me, and her mouth is open as if she's about to say “Oh.” And then she does say “Oh.” She says, “Oh.” And then she says my name. She says, “Good morning” and “Rise and shine!” She continues to greet the new day in every possible way a person could. “Up and Adam!” And then Mama looks around like she has no idea what she is doing, so I jump out of bed and give her a hug.

*  *  *  *

May 12, 1985

For Mother's Day, I get Daddy to drive me to the new flower shop in Eudora. We leave the farm before Mama wakes up so it will be a surprise. The Flower Lady is on Main Street, and Daddy parks in front of the shop and hands me a twenty-dollar bill to go buy something for my mother. Then he runs into Baxter Lumber to get supplies; it's time to begin the annual repair of all the fences on the farm.

I've never been in a flower shop before. A brass bell is fixed to the door, and it rings when I open it. I step inside, and the smell of flowers is intoxicating. The Flower Lady reminds me of the potting shed, only better. It is the most beautiful place I've ever seen.

Large tin pails boast freshly cut tulips, irises, and daffodils. Wooden crates stuffed with green moss serve as drawers offering tiny wire chairs and tables, fairy-size, for decorating your flower garden. These bins also offer stakes made from old forks and butter knives; the names of herbs, like rosemary and oregano, have been stamped into the handles, and I almost decide on these for Mama, but I don't have enough money. A variety of vases sit atop a small antique table, waiting to be bought, and toward the back there is a refrigerated room; through the glass, I see orchids and anemones. I see roses of every color, big and small. I also see sprigs of purple lilac.

Amid a burst of baby's breath, an array of greenery sticks out of a white plastic bucket like a plume of emerald feathers, and behind the counter, almost hidden by the large, black old-fashioned cash register, I see Sissy Baxter perched on a stool, reading a book. She is too young to have a job, and I realize she is here by choice. Her parents own the hardware store next door, and if my parents owned Baxter Lumber, this is where I'd choose to be as well. That is, if the owner would allow it.

Sissy Baxter does not look up—not until a young woman comes through the swinging Dutch doors behind the counter that divide the back of the store from the front. “Hello,” the woman says, her hair a nest of short black curls. “Welcome to The Flower Lady.” And this is when Sissy looks at me. Our eyes meet, and she blushes; quickly returning to her book, Sissy turns the page, bends farther forward, and squints at what appears to be an illustration of a poppy.

The Flower Lady smiles at me. Wiping her hands on her floral-print apron, she steps closer and asks, “Are you here to get something for your mother?” I look at my feet and shrug. I consider fleeing, but then the Flower Lady is hooking her arm into mine and leading me toward the whitewashed worktable pushed up against the wallpapered wall. The surface of the table is littered with scraps of colorful paper, rolls of green tape, spools of green wire, scissors of every shape and size, pruners, pins, a stack of crisp white paper doilies, and loose bits of flower material and greenery. Bolted to the wall above are a roll of brown paper and a roll of cellophane.

I see the small bouquet before the Flower Lady even picks it up to show it to me.

“It's called a tussie-mussie or a nosegay,” she says as she hands me the cone-shaped flower arrangement. The small bouquet is wrapped in one of the white paper doilies, and as I study it the Flower Lady explains the Victorian tradition of using flowers to communicate. “It was a secret language for a time when people had difficulty expressing themselves otherwise,” she says, and it's my turn to blush now because I know Sissy Baxter is listening to everything we say.

I let the Flower Lady help me make my own personal arrangement for Mama. The focus is red geranium for comfort and good health, but we add basil for best wishes and honeysuckle to represent the bonds of love. To reinforce the meaning of the geranium, the Flower Lady bundles the tussie-mussie with a length of red silk ribbon and ties it into a heart-shaped bow. This is the kind of bouquet I wanted to give to Sissy Baxter back in second grade.

When it's time to pay, the Flower Lady steps behind the desk and traps Sissy Baxter in the corner. I hold my breath and cross my fingers to keep the shopkeeper from asking questions about whether or not we know each other, and it works—she continues to ignore that we are the same age, that we live in the same town, and that we must know each other. Instead, the shopkeeper leaves us to talk only through flowers.

When the Flower Lady punches the mechanical buttons on the register, the cash drawer opens and Sissy Baxter has to pull her book away from the counter. Using her finger to keep her place, Sissy holds the book against her chest and I get to see the title:
Floriography: The Language of Flowers
. I take a picture of the cover with my eyes. To do this, I have to blink; if I continue to see the image in my brain, then it is there forever.

When I open my eyes, I catch Sissy Baxter looking at my hands—at the tussie-mussie I am holding. And I recognize the task her eyes are performing because it is something I do all the time: Sissy Baxter is taking inventory of the flowers. She is decoding the message I've written to my mother, and I realize I don't care. I even reposition the flowers so she can see them better.

The Flower Lady hands me my change and says “Have a good day,” but Sissy Baxter is the one who smiles the biggest smile, and then she says, “Please be sure to come again!”

*  *  *  *

When Daddy and I get home, Mama has woken up. She's in the living room, sitting in her rocking chair. And I see what she is holding. How could she be so careless as to come downstairs? My heart is beating too fast for me to even attempt holding my breath, and if I can't hold my breath, I can't cross my fingers. This ritual only works if I can do both actions at the same time. Instead, I try to get Daddy to turn around before he sees, but Daddy looks at me and his eyes are wet. He pushes past my little-girl body, into the house.

Mama doesn't even notice. Somehow she didn't hear us pull into the driveway or come into the house, and somehow she doesn't sense us standing here and watching her.

She is trying to nurse Turtle.

Mama uses one hand to support the doll's head, to keep her close, and the other to hold her breast in offering. She presses her nipple into Turtle's plastic mouth, which was designed to take the special bottles full of water that make the doll go pee. She is wrapped in my old receiving blanket, and the crazy quilt has fallen to the floor, beyond my mother's reach. I let go of the bouquet; I drop my ability to comfort my mother and her good health as the red geranium comes undone from its bed of best wishes and the bonds of love.

Mama adjusts her position, and as she does Turtle's foot comes loose from all that swaddling. Mama goes to cover her up again but stops first to study the tiny foot. She touches it with gentle fingers, soft. She looks at this tiny foot as if it's the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. Then she covers it again and she never once stops singing:
“Hush little baby, don't say a word. Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that bird don't sing, Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring.”

Another word for forever is “infinity.” Infinity has a symbol: It looks like the number eight, only one that's fallen on its side—exhausted from too much time. And it takes forever before Mama looks up—even after Daddy says her name. He says it several times, and then he just says, “My poor, sweet Annie.” And this, too, takes forever. Infinity. And when Mama finally does look up, she doesn't seem to see my father. She only looks at me, and then she looks at Turtle. Like the symbol for infinity, Mama loops between the two of us, and I know what she is trying to do.

She is trying to figure out which one of us is real.

*  *  *  *

Before I go to bed, I go into the bathroom and lock the door. There is a scab on my elbow from when I fell in PE and scraped it on the asphalt. I haven't picked since I came home from the hospital with cellulitis, but I can't breathe.

I must pick again.

I wash my hands with scalding hot water and oatmeal soap. I rinse, and then I check my nails for dirt, and find I have to wash again. My fingers turn red from the heat and they are slippery and white with the second lathering of sweet soap. Once my hands are spotless, I sit on the floor.