Fig (24 page)

“It's just . . .” I look around. “It's in my backpack, and there's no place to set
it
down.” I jiggle the flour so she understands. I jiggle it like I would a real baby.

Mama frowns at me. “It?” she asks, but then she's distracted. She looks around like she's just now noticed the state of the kitchen. She looks irritated. I can't tell if she's irritated with me, herself, or all of it. She goes to the sink and turns the faucet on with the side of her wrist. Considering the chaos everywhere else, it's a strange precaution. She squirts dish soap on her hands and uses the vegetable scrubber to scour her fingers.

“I wouldn't want to get the baby sick,” she says. She isn't looking at what she's doing. The glue is washed off by now. Her hands are red—raw and inflamed. And I wish she'd stop. I wish she were joking too. I see how other mothers might tease their daughters—the mothers on TV, or the mothers who give birth to Candace Sherman. But my mother is dead serious. This is a dead end. There is no way out.

She holds the flour with her red hands while I take off my backpack and get the handout. She continues to hold it as she reads the instruction sheet Mrs. Gallagher had also given us. Mama holds the flour like the girls at school held theirs, and I can't watch her anymore. There are magazine pages scattered all over the floor. The large faces look at me, except they have no eyes. Their eyes have all been torn away. The eyelessness acts like strange blindfolds on these paper faces, which is not the same as the eyelessness of the faceless nesting doll. This eyelessness is like negative space instead.

When I was younger, Mama taught me about negative space. She looked at all my drawings, tracing the negative space with her fingers—the space between or around the matter. She taught me to see not only the value of nothing but the value of what is missing. I don't draw anymore.

“This makes it sound much simpler than it really is,” Mama says, shaking her head and blowing her bangs out of her eyes. “It doesn't take into account all the emergencies that happen.”

Emergency C-section, twelve years ago, come next month.

“It's only forty-eight hours, Mama.” And when I tell her this, she seems satisfied. She hands me the flour, instruction sheet, and the log, and then she returns to her work. To all those eyes. And it's like I'm not standing here anymore. Like I never even came home.

*  *  *  *

Daddy comes in for dinner, and Mama explains the high chair. Daddy smiles at me as he sits down, but I see the way he eyes the flour. He shakes his head, and I know what he is thinking. But it's too late. The flour baby is already here.

The bag of Gold Medal flour is sitting in the high chair because Mama insisted. “You have to treat it like a real baby,” she said before my father came inside. And somehow in the time it took for me to do my pre-algebra upstairs, she got the kitchen to look like a real kitchen again—no sign of shredded eyes or mannequin heads. They've all vanished like a magic trick, and Mama, too, has been transformed. She is a TV mother, a TV wife. She not only cleaned, she also cooked.

I play along with Mama. And the flour-sack baby turns into a real baby. We name her Daisy, and Daisy likes to play with her food. Daisy gurgles when she laughs, and her laugh makes us all laugh—even Daddy. We all love Daisy. And now we're the family we are supposed to be. A family on the television.

We laugh and talk and eat together. Our conversation has absolutely nothing to do with anything. And Daddy isn't dressed like Daddy anymore. Instead of jeans and a T-shirt, he grows a necktie, which he's loosens because he's at home now, and his suit is navy blue with gray pinstripes. For dessert, he makes chocolate milkshakes. I drink mine too fast and get an ice cream headache, and the way I pinch my nose with my fingers makes us all laugh even harder. Behind our laughter is a laugh track laughing with us.

The person in control brings up the volume of it whenever we are threatened by an awkward silence. The person in control brings up the volume of strangers' laughter whenever Mama messes up and says something strange or wrong. The laugh track cues the studio audience, and they start laughing too. I try not to look at them—just like looking at the camera is considered bad acting, it would be unprofessional. Instead, I catch them in my peripheral vision; they look like mannequins. That is, they look like mannequins before my mother gets hold of them, before she paints their hard skin or glues magazine clippings to their faces. They look like mannequins before she decapitates them.

They look like mannequins, only real—flesh and blood; they are animate, perfect people. Laughing, they rock back and forth and slap their knees. I laugh until I almost pee my pants. I laugh so much, my cheeks begin to hurt from smiling, working all the muscles in my face that never move.

But then someone turns the TV off. The screen goes black—goes black in an inward way, where the last thing left is a white dot in the center of the screen. And when the white dot burns out, it makes a soft electrical pop that makes me think,
God has gone to bed
.

*  *  *  *

Mama wakes me at midnight to feed the baby. She sits with me in the kitchen as I make believe heating up water, mixing formula, and warming milk. She tells me to nurture the baby. I rock the flour-sack baby on my no-hip hip as Mama rants about breast-feeding being better than formula.

Daddy opens the door to his office, which is also the guest bedroom, which is also where he sleeps and keeps all his clothes. I still don't know what to call this room. He's wearing long underwear, and he stands in the frame of the open door, watching us. I smile as much as I can and thank Mama again and again for helping me until he seems satisfied. He finally turns to go back into the room. He shuts the door, and the ribbon of light underneath goes black.

Mama drinks her tea, watching me with tired, bloodshot eyes. When I'm ready to go back to bed, her eyes flash with anger—but it was just a flash, and now it's gone. “Daisy is not my baby,” Mama says. “You're going to have to wake up on your own from here on out.” She reminds me of everything I already know. I'm supposed to wake up every three hours, which really means one more time. On schooldays, I always wake at 6:00 to eat breakfast and get dressed in time to catch the bus.

I set the alarm for 3:00 a.m. but I'm too tired to get up when it goes off. I barely manage to reset it for 6:00. As I fall back to sleep I think about the assignment. How it's designed for us to cheat. That's the beauty of it, and Mrs. Gallagher knows it. The reason it works is that we have to also write the essay about what it feels like to be responsible for another life. Imagining alone is enough to scare us. The assignment works even if a student leaves her flour in her locker instead of taking it home. As long as the log is filled in, even if the entries are all false, the assignment works.

*  *  *  *

When I wake up to the alarm, I don't have to get out of bed to know. I see before I even sit or have a chance to turn off the clock. There has been a snowstorm.

My bedroom is covered by a blanket of quiet white flour. It is everywhere, like someone took the bag, ripped it open, and spun around and around. My desk, my window seat, my dresser, my floor—there is flour on my bed and in my hair. There is flour everywhere.

I hear Daddy's steps coming down the hall and I jump out of bed. Slipping on the flour, I throw myself against the door just as he knocks. “Fig ? You up?” he asks, and the knob turns and I can feel him pushing on the door. I push back. I tell him I'm awake. That I'm getting dressed. I tell him I'll be right down. Then I get dressed as fast as I can.

I find the empty bag buried in the flour. I exhume it, shake it off, and then bury it once again—deep in my trash can. I bury the empty flour sack under wads of crumpled-up notebook paper, a week's worth of messed-up homework—essay answers that couldn't find the right words. I am running out of time. Daddy cannot see. He cannot know what she just did.

I brush the flour off my body, and then I sneak out of my room. I am quiet as I pass Mama's door, but then I rush down the stairs. Daddy is frying bacon in the kitchen and doesn't see me snatch the broom and dustpan from the pantry. Mama is nowhere to be seen, and I am quiet when I pass her room again. I worry she's in there, listening for me. That she's not really still asleep, because there is no snoring. I grab the bathroom trash can and take it to my room because it has a trash bag and mine does not. I sweep the flour as fast as I can, but fast is a mistake. Fast makes it spread.

The flour takes flight, and my room becomes the inside chamber of a terrible snow globe. Spinning around, I see the mannequin heads. They are blindfolded and laughing. They laugh because they cannot cry, and they cannot cry because they have no eyes. As the room spins I catch glimpses of my mother. She won't look at me. She is too busy caring for a baby.

Mother and baby become white dust. I am holding the broom, waiting for the flour to settle—for the vision to fully dissipate. And then I sweep again, slow but deliberate. I sweep the flour, I sweep the mother and her child, emptying dustpan after dustpan into the black trash bag. I sweep the rest of it under my bed to deal with later. I wipe the flour off my desk and shake out my quilt. I brush the walls and use my hands to beat the cushions from the window seat, and I do the same with all the pillows on my bed. And then I sweep again.

I erase anything Daddy might notice if he was to come in here while I'm at school. I stash the trash bag in my closet and put the now-bagless trash can back into the bathroom. I hold my breath and cross my fingers, trying to erase my worries about the baglessness. And then I head back downstairs. I act like this is the first time I've come down today. Daddy is scrubbing the cast iron with coarse salt and steel wool and doesn't see me put the broom and dustpan away.

We eat scrambled eggs on toast with bacon, only I don't eat the meat. Daddy drinks black coffee, and I drink a small glass of orange juice. When he goes to the bathroom, I check the cabinets for flour but find what I expected to find. Our flour is whole wheat. Bought in bulk from the health food store, it's kept in large Mason jars with cloth lids. When Daddy returns, I pretend to be looking for the granola bars.

“You're a hungry girl,” he says, and before he sits down he gestures to the plate of bacon on the table. “There's still some breakfast left,” he says, arching an eyebrow. Then he sits down again and opens the newspaper from yesterday. On weekdays, he is always a day behind because I bring the mail to the house after school. Otherwise, the mailbox is just too far to go.

I grab my backpack and give him a kiss good-bye. I kiss his third eye and I say a quick prayer in my head. I hold my breath and cross my fingers that he will not look in my room.

As I open the door he puts the paper down and looks at me. “Fig ?” he says. “Aren't you forgetting something ?” His words are like a spell. They turn me into ice. And I freeze. He could mean anything. The studio audience returns, only they are frozen too. Mouths gaping, they are waiting to see what will happen next, and the drums roll. “Honey,” he says, “aren't you forgetting your baby?” and his tone is sarcastic. The laugh track rumbles—low, waiting for a chance to crescendo.

I tell him I haven't forgotten—the flour is in my backpack, I say. I tell him I put it there because I want to hide it. And I try not to check the stairs for Mama, or worry about the vents and the way this house can carry voices.

I smile like I'm shy about the subject. The way the daughters on TV smile at their fathers when they're embarrassed. I explain how no one else actually carries their babies around, and I'm sure to end with a sweetly saturated “Daddy.” And this alone breaks my heart. The audience is divided. Half of them are with me, and the other half with Daddy. Either way, they are captivated.

Daddy nods his head and smiles at me. He says, “I won't tell if you won't,” and then he looks at the ceiling the way he always does, because my mother is on the other side. My father thinks he understands, and this hurts even more. The guilt pain radiates from every broken shard of heart, spreading into my fingertips, into my toes. The guilt hurts. But he cannot know.

I leave Daddy to his day, and the theme song and credits begin to roll.

On the screen, I walk away from the house. Down the long driveway I slowly disappear, and the audience gets ready to leave the studio. Standing, they stretch first, and then they begin to gather their belongings, their jackets and purses, and they chat about what they think they just saw.

I walk fast and faster still. Lungs wide open: I inflate.

I fill myself with the crisp morning air, inhaling the possibilities of a new day. I baptize myself in oxygen. I swallow the sky. Clouds and starlings drift across my lungs. I fill myself with the endless blue until there is no more room for all the pain.

*  *  *  *

I ditch health class.

I decide to lie when I get home—tell Daddy there was an accident with the flour. I consider the accident. Maybe I tripped and it broke open, but that doesn't explain why I wouldn't go to class.

It has to be someone else's fault.

I think of blaming Phillip Booth, but I know better. I don't need to make him mad—he's already terrible enough. Instead, it was a ninth-grade boy. He was teasing me. He grabbed the flour and held it in the air so I couldn't get it. He held it out the window on the third floor, but then he dropped it. I'll tell Daddy I don't think he meant for this to happen. And I will have no idea what his name is. The incident happens right before class, and because I'm so upset I hide in the bathroom and I miss health.

But I don't know how to tell Daddy without Mama being around. Even if I find a way, it will be impossible for us to replace the flour without her asking questions, or knowing what we are doing. The story of the ruined flour will prompt a trip to town to go to the grocery store, and a trip to town will get her attention. And then what? What would she say? Or do?