In Zanesville (12 page)

She peers into the wastebasket. “Oh boy,” she says. “I thought you looked funny all week.”

Her cure for everything is to grind up a bitter white aspirin and have us drink it in a tablespoon of water.

“No,” I croak.

“You’ve got to,” she tells me firmly. It’s the middle of the night and I’m in her bed, throwing up over the side into a series
of wastebaskets that she’s collected and washed out. I keep falling asleep and imagining things. Hands, inflated like rubber
gloves, a kitten in a T-shirt. Once, Kevin Prentiss jumps down a set of stairs and bounces back up in the air like he has
giant springs on his feet, arms pinwheeling. Bounce, bounce, across the landscape and gone. Raymond in his Cub Scout kerchief,
taking miniature cars out of his pocket and setting them loose on the floor, where they race toward me across the bedcovers.

“Get them off,” I holler, and they are swept away by Mr. Dreil, the custodian at my old grade school. He steers a long red
dust mop down a hallway and into the detention room, where Felicia is bent over a biology tray, poking a scalpel at a fetal
pig. My mother takes the biology tray away from Felicia and puts it in the oven, twists the knob on the timer.

“It’s formaldehyded!” I cry, waking myself up.

“What? What did you say?” my mother mumbles, dozing beside me.

“Nothing,” I murmur, embarrassed, and slide backwards into it again. Poor old Lepkis sweeps equations off the board with a
whisk broom, into a spoon that my mother puts against my lips.

“No!” I say.

“Yes,” she tells me. “You have to, you’re burning up.”

She needs to put me on a cooling board. Eugene’s sister carried him in to show him the wasted husk in the bed—soft, willing
Grover, dead at twelve. I see an ironing board balanced on its thin heron’s legs, a dead boy stretched out on it. My
mother approaches with a steam iron in one hand. The boy is Prentiss, in a burgundy shirt with the tags still on it.

“No!” I cry.

“Yes,” she says. “Now here.”

I drink the spoonful of chalk, and by morning I’m sitting up, eating toast.

She’s got me in the living room with sheets and pillows on the couch and cartoons on the TV, while she’s in the kitchen, cleaning
cupboards, talking on the phone, and every once in a while stretching the cord around the corner to check on me. Trying to
radiate a sense of health and well-being, I ignore her. When she snaps her fingers, I nod without taking my eyes off the TV.

These cartoons are nothing like during my era. The drawings aren’t that good, if you compare Mighty Mouse or Donald Duck,
say, to the Archies or Scooby-Doo. If I want to know about Archie and his friends, I’ll read one of the three thousand
Archie
comic books that we have in our attic—in the comics, the characters are dark and ridiculous, that’s the joke, that’s why
it’s a comic. In the cartoon, they aren’t meant to be ridiculous at all but are members of a rock band. Scooby-Doo is also
depressing, if you think about it—the dog is a Great Dane, and they don’t live very long, maybe seven or eight years at the
most.

“How long has this show been on?” I ask Ray. He’s back from his sleepover, eating bowl after bowl of cereal.

“An hour?” he says.

“No,” I say patiently. “It’s been on a
few minutes.
I mean how many years.”

“Ten?” he says.

“No,” I sigh, rolling over on the couch. I’m sweating again.

My mother hangs up, comes in, and feels my forehead.

“Your hand is cold,” I say without opening my eyes.

“I’m defrosting the freezer,” she explains.

My plan is to get gradually better and better all day until game time, at which point there’s nothing she can do but let me
go.

“Your sister isn’t going anywhere,” she says to Ray, preemptively.

“I know,” he agrees. “She’s sick. Last night Kippy Cappert threw up macaroni on a Tonka truck.”

“Can you tell him to shut up?” I say nervously. It’s not the macaroni; it’s the thought of Kippy Cappert, who has been in
our house before and who walked around with a thick green caterpillar under his nose all afternoon.

“It wasn’t a dump truck,” Ray continues. “It was one of them with wheels like this.” He makes an inexplicable jabbing motion
with his hands. “A whatchacall, and he threw up macaroni on it.”

“That’s enough,” my mother tells him. “She’s right on the verge.”

Too late.

After that, I retire to my parents’ bedroom for a few more hours of festering sleep, and wake completely renewed. My mother
is sitting on the edge of the bed with a thermometer, smoking a cigarette.

“I’m not sick anymore,” I say, sitting up.

“Good,” she says, poking the thermometer under my tongue. It’s strange how when you’re telling the truth, they know it.

“I’m hungry,” I tell her.

“Quiet for three minutes,” she says, raising the shade to stare out the window, smoking and frowning, gray eyes pale behind
her glasses. She’s waiting for my father. Every once in a while a car door will slam and voices are heard, but it’s just neighbors
leaving and returning from their Saturday errands. If he shows up at Tuck’s, someone will call her—either Tuck himself or
one of her friends, whoever happens to be over there having one.

“I’m here to tell you, not to sell you” is the motto of the company my dad works for—Best Home Improvements, supposedly run
by Dick Best, a man who shouts the motto on late-night television commercials. In fact, the man is an actor; there is no Dick
Best. That’s the thing about being an independent door-to-door salesman: you are the one sending yourself out there each day,
so hating the boss means hating yourself. Which is why a lot of them work in twos and threes—not only does it help with the
loneliness and inertia, but it gives them somebody different to hate.

The way it usually goes when my dad works with a partner is that the partner shows up sometime midmorning and drives the two
of them to a shabby neighborhood where they knock on doors, showing poor people their sample cases until they get one or two
to sign up for siding or a new roof. Then they drive to the nearest bar and sit drinking for the rest of the day, and sometimes
one or two days after that. After a few weeks of
this, when the partner slides up and honks, my dad won’t go out. Eventually the partner drives away, and my dad stays home
for a few days or a week, petting the dog and drinking in the garage; then he disappears completely, which is the phase we’re
in right now.

The thin afternoon light reveals dog hairs on the rug, the covers thrashed into a snarl, and two wastebaskets sitting on the
other side of the bed, damp washrags draped over their edges. On the night table, along with a full ashtray, is a bottle of
Pepto-Bismol, a sticky spoon, and a glass of water with an expanded crumb floating in it. As soon as I get the thermometer
out of my mouth, I’m going to put everything back where it goes, strip the bed, remake it with clean sheets and pillowcases,
sweep the rug, call Felicia, take a bath, wash my hair, put on my new shirt, go to the game.

“Normal,” she reads. “But we’ll wait to feed you. I just made Jell-O; when it’s set up, you can have a little bowl.”

“What kind?”

“All I had was orange,” she says.

“Orange?”

She flinches at this and looks out the window again, her lips bunched up in the way she does when she’s getting ready to cry.
She thinks better of it. “You’re welcome to starve,” she says, standing up.

On her way downstairs, she pounds on the door to Meg’s and my bedroom. “It’s almost three,” she says. “And I won’t tell you
again.”

From somewhere inside the room comes a dull thud.

“What?” Meg cries, voice muffled.

“Listen,” my mother says through the door, her voice now
tearful, wavering. “I’ve got your dad drunk, one kid sick, one kid exhausted, and one kid who better get her ass out of bed
now.
”

Another thump.

“What?” Meg cries.

“You’ve had about forty calls this afternoon,” my mother tells me when I pass through the kitchen carrying laundry to the
basement. “I told them all you were in bed with the flu.”

“I’m going to the game,” I inform her. She’ll just have to get used to it.

“Forget it. You’re not going anywhere sick.”

“I ate bad popcorn!” I say.

“There’s no such thing as bad popcorn,” she says.

Tammy follows me down to the basement and stands outside the coal cellar, a room nobody ever ventures into, staring at the
door intently.

There’s a Ping-Pong table next to the washer, which we use for folding things that come out of the dryer and, on the far end,
for stacking the things that migrate out of the laundry—some ancient and war-torn underwear, a dense, miniaturized sweater
that should have been dry-cleaned, a melted shower cap, the usual limp, disoriented socks—and all household flotsam not suitable
for the attic. Once, I came down and there was a mouse on the Ping-Pong table, nibbling on the green foam block from the bottom
of a florist’s arrangement. Because the block was perforated with holes, the mouse might have thought it was cheese.

“Come here, girl,” I coax Tammy.

She glances over once and then looks back at the door,
steadily. Waiting. What does she think is in the coal cellar? I crouch down.

“Come here, Tammo… come here, Tam o’ Shanter… come here, Tam o’ Shay.” Nothing.

An ancient wringer washing machine stands under the open-riser steps, thick rubber lips pressed together. No matter what you
do with its cracked black hose—coil it inside the tub, hang it over the edge, or lay it on the cobwebby floor—you’ll always
have to look twice to make sure it isn’t what you just thought it was. An old buffet with chipped veneer stands along the
wall, filled with cupcake tins, cookie sheets, and stacks of empty Cool Whip containers and their lids. Jumbled along the
top are various canning supplies and implements, a box of shotgun shells, a paper bag stuffed with other paper bags, some
plastic rope, and a ceramic Easter bunny for the center of the dining room table.

Across from the buffet is the furnace, tentacled and wheezing. Behind the furnace on the left is the door to the coal cellar,
where Tammy is stationed, gazing with pricked ears at the doorknob.

Something feels wrong. I stand for a moment, listening to the washer fill. When it stops, there’s a pause before it clunks
into the next cycle. It’s during the silence that I figure out what’s wrong.

There shouldn’t be shotgun shells down here.

“Now what?” my mother says as I run up the basement steps and through the kitchen.

“Nothing,” I say, panting. In the upstairs hallway, I pause at the door leading to the attic. Up there is where the shotgun
is kept, zippered into a case that hangs way in the back, behind a beam, invisible from most angles. The front of the beam
has two hooks from which a wide, obscuring clothing bag hangs; next to the bag is a stack of hatboxes. In the third one down,
underneath a man’s gray hat, the shotgun shells are kept.

“Meg!” my mother calls up. “Help your sister!”

Our bedroom door flies open and Meg stares at me. She’s still in her pajamas, holding a book. “What?” she asks me.

“She thinks I’m throwing up,” I tell her. I yell back down the stairs. “I’m not
sick,
I told you.”

“You’re not going anywhere either,” my mother replies.

“I am too!”

“How big do you think you are? Because if I call you down here, you’ll find out who’s bigger.”

The thing is, now that I’ve hesitated, I’m scared to go up to the attic. For a few months, in fifth grade, I used to sneak
up there every morning and every evening, taking the gun down from its case and hiding it in a box of quilts before school,
and then putting it back later. In those days I couldn’t go into the house alone after school but would sit on the front steps,
waiting for Meg, who got home a half hour later. My dad was usually inside, sitting at the kitchen table watching the backyard,
making notes on which birds were visiting the feeders. I knew that, but I also had it in my head that whoever went in first
might find him dead by his own hand.

Once, on a day so cold that the fronts of my legs were burning from walking the six blocks from school, I was huddled on the
steps, breathing into my mittens, when Meg got there.

“Why don’t you go in?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to,” I said. “I just felt like sitting out here.”

“Look,” she said, sighing, and sat down on the step, took
her pencil box out of her coat pocket, and opened it for me. Inside, along with pencils and pens, were the razor blades usually
kept in the bathroom cabinet.

If I go up in the attic and there’s no shotgun, I will have no choice but to go back down to the basement, move the dog aside,
and see what’s in the coal cellar. I lean against the wall and look at my sister, but what I see is the door to the coal cellar,
which is slumped on its hinges and has to be lifted slightly or it won’t open. During the summertime, worms are kept in there:
two large Styrofoam coolers filled with soggy shredded newspaper and fat night crawlers, which my brother sells by the dozen.
Once a week he and my dad run the hose under the tree in the backyard and pick up what pops out on the grass. I happen to
have a morbid fear of worms, which is one reason they’re kept in the coal cellar. The other reason is that it’s cool in there,
like a tomb, with a dirt floor and damp walls.

Meg stares at me curiously. “Maybe go take a bath or something,” she suggests, not unkindly. “You look like shit on toast,
which is why she thinks you’re still sick.”

“I’m not sick, I’m nervous,” I say.

We call them dew worms. In the mornings when the grass is wet, my dad will open the back door and say, “Get the dews, Tammo,”
and the dog will hop all over the yard, chasing worms.

Along one wall of the coal cellar are rough shelves that hold jars of preserves: tomatoes, corn, beans, beets, pickles packed
in brine, fruit floating in syrup, jelly in juice glasses, grape and currant, each sealed with a disk of paraffin. Eventually
she’ll send one of us down there while she’s cooking.