Revenge of the Paste Eaters (22 page)

One day the bus driver would not let me off the bus. He called the teacher to come look at me, they conferred, everyone else piled off the bus into class, and the bus driver drove me home.

I was crushed. I loved school. I went to school every day. I cried, I promised to be good. I assured my teacher I hadn’t done anything wrong, that my mother would NEVER understand if I came home. This appeared to have greatly amused the bus driver, who assured me I really hadn’t done anything wrong and—he was relatively sure—my mother would understand. It is possible, I suppose, that I gave the impression my mother was an intolerant ogre who used school to get rid of me, but that was not the true issue: I was, then as now, a true Capricorn. I believed there was one specific place I was supposed to be and a time I was supposed to be there and at that time I was supposed to be in school.

My perfect attendance record was destroyed by pinkeye.

I was not allowed to go to school, I was thrust unceremoniously into the frightening and unsettling status of Displaced in the Universe, all because the whites of my eyes had turned pink. I had done nothing to turn them pink—until someone pointed it out, I was not even
aware
they were pink—and in truth, I could not understand the significance of a minor color variation in my eye whites . . . All of that innocence concentrated in one child and still I was sent home.

My mother took me immediately to the doctor, who prescribed sunglasses and a dark room and perhaps some pills or eyedrops or something, I don’t remember. My mother bought me a pair of red sunglasses with miniature removable pistols in the holsters in the upper outside corners of each lens, and she tucked me into her bed, drew all the shades, and went off to do whatever it is that mothers do. The sunglasses were extremely cool and kept me entertained for ten or fifteen minutes—there is a limit to the available amusement to be gained from wearing sunglasses—and eventually I lost both pistols in the bedcovers, which pretty much jaded me to that whole experience. I found myself in the middle of my parents’ bed in a semi-dark room. My eyes itched. Neither of my parents were there. I was alone. In the semi-dark. With itchy eyes, missing pistols, and the serious suspicion that being sick was not going to be any fun at all.

I do not remember my mother as being particularly solicitous of sick children, but that may have been because at that time she would have had three children at home, one age seven with itchy eyes and a distinct case of situational dissatisfaction, one three and a half with a passion for shredding anything she could get her hands on into tiny, tiny pieces she then stuffed into strange places, and a two-year-old who could toddle into any situation, given a minute, and whose sole communication tool was the word “No.” I remember, as a child, being encouraged to get well again as soon as humanly possible. School was a wonderful place, I was told, and I should strive to be there every second possible. My mother, she told me, had always loved school.

Sometimes when I was ill—although I do not remember, just offhand, if she used this as a cure for pinkeye—my mother would make me a wonderful thing she called bubblemilk. Bubblemilk was almost worth getting sick for. I suspect it is illegal, if not immoral, to give children bubblemilk now: she poured milk, raw eggs, and sugar into a mixing bowl and turned it all into a rich, sweet foam. The other reward for being ill—although one nearly almost always had to throw up to get it—was lemon-lime pop. We never had pop at our house. It was too expensive and silly and wasteful until we began heaving like a herd of grass-eating puppies, and then out came the pop.

The other cure for childhood illness were the stock reports on WOWO. Any mention of hog futures always reminds me of being a small child, home, miserable and covered with itchy red spots, and listening to the Fort Wayne radio station talk about hogs being up a quarter and beef down a half, and something about corn . . .

Pinkeye took me utterly by surprise, but as I grew slightly older I began to become aware of certain malfunctions in my anatomy. Sore throats. Inflamed tonsils. That general, overall, I-don’t-want-to-be-here feeling. I reported all of these to my mother dutifully after an incident when I was detected by some teacher radar as being unfit to be taught and sent to the town school office, where my mother was called and ordered to come get me. I was entertained all the way home with a long, not entirely sympathetic discussion about exactly why I had failed to just say, “Mom, I’m sick, I can’t go to school today.”
Before
I rode the bus, infected everyone who would talk to me for several hours, and then inconvenienced my mother by making her come get me. I don’t remember ever wanting my mother to come get me.

It would appear, from the available memories—all of which are solely mine—that I was rarely satisfied with the way I felt in the morning. That, or it is difficult to determine just how sick a sick child really is. By junior high I had determined that it was much easier to go to school than it was to endure her inquisition about
exactly
how sick I was. I interpreted this to mean she never believed me; that she believed, for some unknown reason, that I would
make up
an illness to stay home with her.

All of this reminds me of a story my grandmother used to tell me. She was the oldest child, her only brother nine years her junior. When he was five or six he began telling his mother that his heart hurt. His mother and his sister were of course immediately alarmed. Exactly
how
did it hurt? Under what circumstances did his heart hurt? He was a child and his answers were vague and confusing. Finally my great-grandmother said, “Show me
exactly
where your heart hurts.” And he looked at her as if she had lost her one remaining marble, and he grabbed his knee and said, “Right
there
—in my
heart.
” As a child who was served olives whenever I ordered pickles for several years, I understand how small mistakes like that are made.

So it may not have been disbelief on my mother’s part that drove me to wobble, weak and riddled with germs, to school in order to escape her inquisition. I know, as an adult,
where
my heart is: this still does not always tell me whether or not I am too sick to go to work.

silly rabbit . . .

when i was a
kid I believed it would have taken only one thing to make my life perfect—a horse. I wanted a horse so badly I could smell it. When I wandered off to the gravel pit, I always rode an imaginary horse. I collected china statues of horses. My favorite movie was
Tonka
, my favorite book was
The Black Stallion
, my favorite TV show was
Fury.
In fourth grade, my best friend got a horse. Every Christmas I closed my eyes (often months in advance—good preparation is important) and promised I would be completely satisfied if the only present I ever got—perhaps for the rest of my life—was a horse.

When I was a kid we lived on seven-eighths of an acre, which held our house, my father’s garage, and the rambling, extended “shed” where my father kept his tools, his projects, and often himself. The rest was grass, which was a sacred crop for my father. My best friend’s horse stepped on my father’s lawn once, and I found my father out there, glaring at the horseshoe-shaped dents in his lawn hours later. He appeared to be in mourning. Eventually he became a professional groundskeeper, but when I was a kid he drove a delivery truck for a fuel oil company and later for a grocery company. My mother stayed home and made our home until I started high school. We had nowhere to keep a horse, my parents told me. We could not afford a horse. I took this to mean my parents did not want me to be happy.

My parents had a long history of keeping me from happiness, particularly when it came to animals. That I was even born aggravated their dog, Tinker, who grew to hate me. As soon as I was old enough, he led me out to the goat pen where my father’s goat, Susie, would knock me down, stand on my suspenders, and breathe goat-breath in my face. The cat allowed us conditional permission to live in her home, but she lost no time establishing her boundaries where children were concerned. I developed a lifetime habit of good cat manners about four seconds after my first firm grasp of fur. I should have been suspicious, therefore, when my father brought home a rabbit.

I knew very little about rabbits. Wild ones lived in the yard. They did not appear to require any care. They were cute and furry and never made any noise, and their noses twitched.

Our rabbit was black and white. She was an adult when we got her. We named her Millie. I really don’t remember how old I was when Millie came to live with us, nor do I remember ever asking for a rabbit, but for some reason her care was assigned to me. It was my job to feed her, water her, and keep her cage clean.

My first unpleasant discovery about Millie was that my father seemed to think I needed to feed her and water her
every day.
This cut into my personal social life something fierce. I complained from time to time, but he always pointed out that caring for a rabbit was nothing compared to caring for a horse. I had been wanting a horse for years by then and I was deeply suspicious no horse was going to be forthcoming, so I could hardly see why the comparative responsibilities even mattered, but he was on my case about that rabbit daily.

My next unpleasant discovery about Millie was that rabbits have been given uncommonly kind and misleading press. My father taught me to pick her up by gripping the nape of her neck and letting her feet dangle. He did not tell me this is because rabbits have a kick just slightly inferior to that of a kangaroo. I picked up my ten-pound rabbit, expecting a fuzzy, cuddly house pet, and she bared her toenails and tried to dice me. Then she started screaming. I was in no way prepared for the ungodly noises that an irate rabbit can make. Astounded, I looked into her pink eyes and determined she was possessed. Some perverse and malignant soul had transformed Flopsy into Hellspawn.

When I gave her fresh water she immediately crawled into the dish and spilled it, getting her bedding, herself, and, if she could, all of her food wet. She produced more rabbit pellets than she ate. She would sit out there in her cage behind the garage and make up lies to tell my father about how often she had been fed or watered. Every time that rabbit came up in conversation I knew automatically that words like “responsibility” were not far behind. I had determined that “responsibility” was a bad thing at a very early age, and personally did everything I could to avoid it. It had not occurred to me, before the rabbit came, that parents could just assign a responsibility to you, whether you wanted it or not, and then hold you accountable.

I never liked that rabbit. I hated every minute that I spent on her care. She made it clear there were no warm feelings she had to waste on me, either. Contrary to adult fiction, it is not a character-building experience for a child to realize she is actively hated by a bunny rabbit. All kinds of unresolved ego problems arise from situations like that. I could have been psychologically scarred.

I was a very rule-oriented child. Another child would have just set the rabbit on the ground and let the problem hop away.
I have no idea what happened to that rabbit, Dad—I turned my back on her for one second and the next thing I knew . . .

I don’t actually remember what happened to Millie. Perhaps my father grew tired of harassing me and found her a new home. Perhaps she died out of spite. I gave up rabbit tending without a single regret and went back to my pre-Millie life.

My father the groundskeeper, however, kept tending his grounds. A wide variety of wildlife grew in my father’s grass. Salamanders were rare, but he grew three or four species of snakes, hundreds of frogs, a few stubborn moles, a turtle every now and then, and a fair number of wild rabbits. It was not all that uncommon, when I was a child, to look up and see my father racing across the lawn with his pitchfork poised overhead like a spear as he chased the offending mole or snake. It is perhaps images like that that make me the person I am today. My father’s grass was never more than an inch tall, so most of his wildlife must have wandered in from the untended gravel pits and woodlots around our yard. When we still had the apple tree in the side yard, my father used to hunt the muskrats that came up in the fall to forage on the apples that had fallen to the ground. He chased them with a ball bat.

He had been mowing the day he came into the house carrying a baby rabbit in his hand to show us. The baby was barely an inch long, with too-short ears and a twitching nose. When I held it, I could feel its little heart beating in my hand. I knew immediately that I had to save it.

I had no idea what baby rabbits eat. Or, I assumed they drank their mother’s milk, but I had no idea what rabbit milk was like. I picked grass for the baby and I put him in a refrigerator box in my father’s shed, and every four hours I fed him evaporated milk through an eyedropper. We bonded immediately: he would not eat for anyone but me.

Unfortunately I had been invited to a slumber party that weekend. I suffered horribly over the moral dilemma the baby rabbit posed in my life, but ultimately I made my mother promise me she would feed the baby and I went to the party. I worried about the baby all night, but by the time I got home the next day, the baby rabbit had died.

I felt horrible. I had killed him. He had depended on me, and I had betrayed him with negligence and self-

centeredness. Years later I picked up a book in the library that explained what to feed wild babies. First of all, the book warned that almost no babies found in the wild are truly abandoned and the best approach is always to go away and leave them alone so their mother can come back for them. The book rephrased this thought in several different ways, stressing the point. Nonetheless, when I reached the part about feeding baby bunnies I learned that if my neglect had not killed him, what I was feeding him would have. This knowledge does not make me a better person, but it has saved me from the temptation to “rescue” any number of apparently abandoned wild babies since then.