The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (12 page)

But the sad thing about Jeremy was that sometimes he was tied to his chair. His parents had given the school permission to use broad, soft restraints that caught by Velcro to hold him, bound at the legs and chest, in his seat. It was sad, really sad, to watch him when they did that. He was like those caught wild animals I had seen on TV. He threw himself at the table, banged his hands, screeched like a wolf pup with a trap-crushed paw. The third or fourth time they tied him up, we were trying to draw sailboats on a lake. The phone rang. Jeremy, caught in the early part of his tantrum, jerked, and jerked, and jerked again. On the fifth ring, Ms. Whitney made for the phone from where she stood bent over Tina’s drawing.

“No!” I signed, too excited by my thought even to speak. But then I did shout, “No! No, Ms. Whitney! Ett a-hit wing!” I rose and went to the phone. I put my hand on the receiver to block hers. “Let it ring so he’ll sleep.”

Ms. Whitney looked at me the way some adults do the first time they meet me, caught between pity and revulsion, between the command, “Get your paws off that!” and the compliment, “You’re so thoughtful!” She had never looked at me like that before. I said, “It makes him tired,” and I pointed to Jeremy who by then had settled to his shoulder-shrug with each ring. Ten seconds later, his head bowed repetitively like a priest in prayer, and then finally his eyes closed and he lay asleep on his folded arms atop the table. Ms. Whitney watched as Jeremy began to snore. “When he wakes up, he’ll be quiet,” I added. “Could we read a book then?” I asked.

“If you’d like,” she said with a far-off voice.

A few days later they moved me to a different class. It was a lot bigger—fourteen in all, counting me. In this class the boys didn’t run and fight. But they weren’t nice to me, either. They stared at my hearing aids all the time. One of them refused to touch anything I had touched. He was a fat boy with a face like a big pink cake, and he smelled like wet ashes in a fireplace. Timmy was his name. During lunch period on my first day he watched me eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mother had cut it into quarters, as she always did, so I could hold each small square between my index and middle fingers.

“You eat like a chimp,” he said to me from across the table. “Monkey hand. Monkey girl.” A few boys laughed. My face got hot and my mouth got dry.

The teacher’s aide went to Timmy and put her hand on his shoulder. “We don’t call people names here, Timmy,” she said. “Jessica was born without thumbs. Other than that she’s the same as you.” The aide was about Nana’s age. Her face was the color of coffee, and kind.

“No, she’s not. She’s deaf, too,” Timmy said and then defiantly sipped his chocolate milk through a straw. The aide opened her mouth to say something, but before she could speak I said, “I have only one kidney and holes in my heart.” Ah huve uwny un khadny ahn howza ahn mah hahr. “I’m not like you at all.” I dropped my sandwich on the table and brought my fisted hands to my face with the index fingers pointed up. I crossed them quickly, then uncrossed them and curled the index fingers down.

“She gave me the finger!” Timmy shouted. A brown clot of mucoused chocolate milk unexpectedly oozed from a nostril, and he began to choke and cough.

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

The aide clapped Timmy on the back to settle his cough. “Yes, you did!” he said hoarsely. “I saw you.”

“What was that sign, Jessica?” the aide asked, none too pleased with our behavior.

It was the first time in my life I considered lying. My inclination was to say that I had given the sign for a surgical operation. But I knew how easy it was to look up signs in the manual. “I said he’s ugly.” Timmy started to cry.

I finished my lunch seated at a separate table in the corner, where I quietly read a book on whales, thinking I was the only one in class who knew Timmy had been wrong when he called me “monkey hand.” Monkeys have thumbs, even though they don’t work exactly like human ones.

There were six girls in my class. We got along alright if we were doing individual activities, like finger-painting or writing our numbers and letters or stringing beads into necklaces. Sometimes a few of them would stop what they were doing and watch me. For some it was the way I held a brush or pencil between my middle and ring fingers that fascinated them. For others, it was the way I used my mouth and teeth when stringing beads or tying a cord in a knot. I had already learned the whole alphabet and could count way past a hundred and could write those letters and numbers down. None of my classmates had learned half of what I had at home. I was proud of it all, but especially proud of my printing. Cassidy taught me. He was a great printer. It came in handy when he had to help customers fix addresses on letters and packages. I tried to make my letters just like his. It made me feel good to catch one of my classmates studying my
H’s
or G’s and then regarding their own scribble with a look of surprise on their faces. I always offered to help.

But it was group activities that brought out their meanness. They took after the boys in that regard. If we played a game with a ball, many refused to catch the one I threw. And that game where you pass from person to person a red apple held against your neck with your chin—that was always an embarrassment for me. It was always boys against the girls, each group standing in a line facing the other. There wasn’t a girl in the class who allowed me to put my face against her shoulder to receive or transfer the apple. The teachers tried everything—having me go first or last, offering prizes for the winning team, giving heartbreakingly beautiful expositions on the dignity of the handicapped. Not a single girl bought it. The first time my turn came to receive the transfer, the boys whooped and hollered, Timmy especially, and shouted, “No way! Don’t do it.” Dorey with the tucked chin looked at me. Her eyes fell on my ears, bowed down by the weight of my hearing aids. And then those eyes dropped to my hands. “Go, Dorey, go! Pass it on to Jess,” the aide exhorted. At this she started toward me a little. She positioned her neck and torso to align with mine. But then she straightened, raised her head, and let the apple drop. The boys laughed. I wanted to kick them all—apple, boys, and Dorey—but I saw the aide take Dorey roughly by the elbow. I reached out and took the aide’s hand instead. “A-hit’s okay,” I said. She let Dorey go.

After a while they only started that game if a boy was absent and the lines would be unbalanced. Then they’d make me the official timer, handing me a stopwatch with the instructions on how to arrest the sweep of the second hand when the object had finally passed all the way down the winning line. Everybody laughed and shouted so much I had to turn my hearing aids off. The seconds swept by in silence.

I asked the clown one afternoon if he thought they played the game the same way when I was absent. Was Timmy made the timer, or Gary or Josh? He didn’t really know. I never told my parents or Cassidy about it. I just kept practicing my printing and my numbers; kept learning new signs; kept reading and listening to stories; kept putting all the new sounds into proper shapes before letting them out; kept scanning the ceiling for friends.

None of the girls in my class ever invited me to their house to play. That didn’t bother me as much as the way they went about making their plans to visit each other. They started, usually, during the lunch break. We sat together at a long table in the back of the classroom. Marci or Courtney or Dorey or Sasha or Lexi or Lacy would announce their new present. Dorey would say, “I have a new sheepdog puppy with a diamond collar!” The other girls would stop eating and stare at her in wonder. In a few seconds she would say, “Lexi, would you like to come over today to play with him? We can feed him cupcakes! He
loves
cupcakes!” Then she’d look at me and smile a little before continuing, now in a whisper so I, theoretically, wouldn’t hear, “His name is Bo Bo! I named him that!” “A puppy!” Lexi would reply. “I love puppies!” Then it would be Lexi’s turn to give me a wan and knowing look. In a whisper that hollowly echoed Dorey’s feigned concern, she’d add, “I’ll ask my mom if I can.”

I sat, quietly chewing my finger sandwich, reading their foul lips, never letting them see how sad they made me feel by pretending their whispers worked. For something so soft, a whisper can sting like a whip.

Most lunch periods I took to quietly counting numbers in my head. I went slowly, trying to see how each number looked when it was spelled out, stumbling over the eighties for weeks, somehow the alignment of letters never looking quite right, but eventually I could get way into the two hundreds before it was time to clear our trays and sit in a circle for a song.

I did have one friend, Tina, from my first classroom. She didn’t have as much trouble sitting still as most of the other kids there, but it was very hard for her to speak. She stuttered. It made Jeremy laugh. Even Ms. Whitney smiled a few times. “What is your name?” she asked her that first day of class. “T-T-T-T-T-T-T-Tina,” came the rat-a-tat reply. Jeremy rose from his seat, streaked to her chair, and stole the ribbon from her ponytail. “T-T-T-Tina!” he yelled, running and waving the ribbon so fast it seemed to blur to a pink cloud above his head.

Soon after I went to my new class, Tina’s mother called mine to arrange a Saturday playdate. Father drove me to their house. It wasn’t far from school. Close enough, in fact, that we sometimes walked there with Tina’s mom to play on the swings and climbing sets if the weather was nice. But that first day, we just stayed inside her house. Tina’s mother was a big woman with so much black hair I could see only the very center of her face. Her eyebrows and ears were hidden in a ringleted wave of shiny black. She reminded me of a raven with a smile. She had the warmest hands of any human being I have ever touched. She took my hand in hers as we walked from Father’s car, and it was like holding a hot bun right from the oven. “Are you a nurse?” I asked on the second step of the brick stairs going up to the front door.

“No, honey,” she said with a big smile of very white teeth. “I’m just Tina’s mommy.” It was an early October day, the kind that spreads sky blue on the city every autumn. The light was clear and made the fallen leaves shine yellow and orange. Every window in the house was open to the mix of scents from the earth. Tina’s father was in the backyard mowing the grass. It all smelled sweet as a bakery.

We played a while in her room. Her ceiling was flat and painted pink. There were no ridges in the plaster, but the overlapping roller marks left by the painter made dark rhomboids that looked like a puzzle to be assembled. We gave her dolls a tea party. Tina said very little. She let me do most of the talking. She did say once, “M-M-M-More t-t-t-t-tea?” to Raggedy Anne. And then she frowned and moved her lips quietly, “More tea? More tea? More tea?”

“You said it! You said, ‘More tea’ three times!” I spoke as slowly and carefully as I could, somehow warned by Tina’s tongue to be gentle with words. Still Tina had an innate talent in deciphering my voice and was able to understand me. Chew ed a-hit! Chew ed, ‘Umure tya’ tahree tayumes!

“N-N-No I d-d-d-d-didn’t!” she stammered. “I d-d-d-d-didn’t s-s-say any-th-thing!” Her face drained of color and tears welled in her eyes.

“I saw your lips say it. ‘More tea’ three times went your lips.”

She looked at me blankly and lipped again, “More tea.”

“You did it again!” I exclaimed. Tina started to cry. She covered her face with her hands. “Tina,” I started, “don’t cry. You don’t even have to try to talk to me. Just move your lips and I’ll know what you said. I just need to be looking at you.” I put my hand on her arm. It was warm like her mother’s, but tears had dripped down in wet streaks making it a little slippery. Somehow I thought of Jeremy’s head. “Is Jeremy still wild?” I asked, hoping to break the spell of sadness that had been cast. She uncovered her face and nodded.

“He’s c-c-c-c,” she tried.

I shook my head and lipped, “He’s crazy.”

“He’s crazy,” she lipped back. “Really crazy.”

“Really, really crazy,” I mouthed with my eyes spinning like crashing moons. It made her laugh.

We went downstairs. There was a jigsaw puzzle under construction on the dining room table, a Halloween jack-o'-lantern that was bigger than my bathtub. We worked on it for the remainder of the afternoon. When she wanted to tell me something, she tapped the tabletop with a piece so I’d look up. Freed of the need to talk, of the fear of her own uncertain voice, Tina didn’t leave her seat for two hours. Her mother looked in on us fourteen times. I counted.

“Good-bye,” Tina lipped in the driveway when Father arrived to pick me up.

“Good-bye,” I lipped back.

It was the start of my only real friendship with another child, one that would last the three years until I died. I’m pretty sure it was Tina who gave me the flu that December. She gave it to me when she shouted, spraying a little spit in my eyes, “I’m sick! I have a c-cold.” She said it with pride and near perfection. We were coloring Santas at the kitchen table in her house. Her mom had baked brownies for us. We ate them before they cooled, with the chocolate chips still mostly liquid. “I love brownies,” she declared with her mouth brown and full.

I never tire of watching that tape.

Father was the god of my nocturnal firmament. He expanded it year on year. In the beginning, there were single stars so lonely in the void they could have been the eyes of cast-off angels looking down on me. If, in the dark, I let my own eyes pass from glowing point to glowing point, sometimes it seemed one would blink. Then the rapid movement of my eyes back to the signaling star would seem to start others twinkling. Next, Father came with constellations. Before I fell asleep, I was content to lie on my back and decode the shapes he was gradually pasting there, trying to remember what had been present before and what new star had appeared in my heavens. In the bright light of day, the stars transformed the ceiling’s savannah to a rocky plain where egrets stood on boulders and rabbits threw stones from raised paws. It all made the clown laugh.

I was born in February, the month dedicated in antiquity to purification. I am Aquarius, the Water Bearer. My symbol glows above my bed, the two jagged parallel lines like tight waves in the sea. Father used a fluorescent paint for that. He tinted it the exact color of the ceiling so I couldn’t see it in the light of day. But I had no need to. In the day, my whole ceiling sloshed like the eternal ocean. It befitted me.