The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (5 page)

I’d like to share Misty with you, construct a living Misty before your eyes. A tree house of sentences high in the branches, barely visible from the ground. You need to shimmy up the trunk, squint into the leaves. Ahh, there she is. A sturdy structure, but one that isn’t so finished or vivid that it precludes imagination. I want you to help create her. That way you can visit her anytime, in your own mind.

Envision a short woman, five-four, well-proportioned and trim. She walks barefoot through the house, except in winter when wool socks warm her toes. Her feet are compact, gorgeously curved, arches never touching the floor. “Bright colors are me,” she likes to say, and her wardrobe reflects this: lemon skirts to mid-calf, peach scarves, shirts the color of cartoon skies. She even owns a pair of green panty hose, popular with the teenagers in the late 1970s. Murray says to Misty, “You aren’t a ditz, but you dress like one.”

She pretends not to hear, or in fact doesn’t hear his words but rather the music of his voice. Her bliss is her beauty.

Light brown hair, a self-inflicted haircut, bangs draping her brow while the back and sides rest upon her shoulders. Breasts moderate, unremarkable. Hands long-fingered and thick-knuckled. Low-slung face, not pretty in a chiseled way. Jaw broad and defined, tending toward mannish, but her lips—“supple” is a good word—remove all doubt that this is a woman. She has soft, heated hands, one of those people whose skin radiates warmth in spite of her lack of body fat and in spite of always complaining of being cold (so much that McKenna has to run to the hall closet for a blanket every time Misty watches
Dallas
).

But other than her great gift of touch—which isn’t to be downplayed and in fact communicates haystacks of words in the smallest of cheek caresses—Misty is not an emotional person. Her children never see her cry.

They also never see her thirty-seventh birthday.

Toby, a technical adult, is proud to stand with five other men (none of whom are their father) in dark, ashen suits. They carry Misty in her closed coffin up the aisle of St. Monica’s church. They set her on a rack at the foot of the steps leading to the altar. After the service, the men bear the coffin outside, slide it into the hearse. Toby watches the door slam shut. He leans over and whispers to McKenna: “You look like a bag of sticks, Kenny.”

It’s a spectacular April day, with the sun staring through a hole in a bank of clouds amassed in the east, a columnar pattern of clouds, which, if studied closely by a person with an artistic eye, resembles a door. The sun is the knob.

Imagine you’re eating a hamburger. Better yet, go to a nearby fast food restaurant and buy a hamburger. It’ll cost you eighty-nine cents. You go. I’ll wait.

Ready? Now lift the burger as you normally would, by the buns. Bring it to your mouth. Take a bite—not huge, not tiny. Bite as if you weren’t being watched. Rend as much meat, cheese, tomato, and bun as is comfortable for your particular mouth. Now chew. Concentrate on what happens inside there. Notice how the food shifts naturally, without conscious thought, from one side to the other? First, it’s kept near the front, dancing over the middle of the tongue. Those bumps—called papillae—each one of these bumps has taste buds on it. And the buds themselves are wearing wigs—microscopic microvilli, sensitive hairs that describe to your brain what you’re chewing: salty, grilled, fleshy; sour, tangy, sweet; metallic; ashy; acidic like bile; flavorless as glass.

Within seconds, your teeth do a decent job of pulverizing your bite. Enough so you can swallow, anyway. Your neck convulses as the wad of Burger King breeches the back of your throat. This morsel drops into your tummy for one last disintegration, the acid bath, which will transform it like a fairy tale prince into a frog of basic nutrients—vitamins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals. These will course through your tissues and blood. They will help you live.

But wait! Don’t let that bite go so fast. Bring it back up. With a slight flex of the epiglottis, a gesture similar to making yourself

belch, and with an additional heaving motion, a tightening of the back of your throat to kick-start the gag reflex, you can rescue that masticated bun and burger, welcome it into your mouth again. Ahh . . . there we go.

Chew it some more. You weren’t finished. It’s quite soft now, more pliant than gum. Spongy, to say the least. Ten, twenty more chews.

Then swallow.

But wait! Don’t let it go. Bring it back up. Run it through the courses a third time. Your saliva enzymes are doing their job. The mush is nearly liquid now, but you don’t discriminate. Ten chews. Slow ones. Swallow.

You’ve been holding the burger for five minutes. The teeth marks in the bun indicate you’ve only taken one bite. Your family is looking at you. You’re working on it. You haven’t finished chewing yet. They need to mind their own business.

Audrey gummed her first ball of Play-Doh under big sister McK-enna’s supervision. It was purple. McKenna didn’t try to stop her as she stuffed it into her mouth. Audrey was delighted, squealing. The Play-Doh softened, and baby Audrey drooled some of it onto the carpet. She swallowed the rest. Her gums turned the color of an eggplant. McKenna saw the joy it brought Audrey and began sliding pea-sized bites between Audrey’s lips when no one else was around.

Their mother had given instructions on this exact topic. She’d sat down with McKenna and Toby after Audrey was born and said, “Babies like to put things in their mouths. That’s how they discover the world. But she shouldn’t eat things that aren’t food. She could choke. You need to be big for Momma and tell me if you ever see her putting something bad in her mouth.”

At eight months, Audrey was crawling with confidence, a military-style dragging of her lower body, using her forearms. She investigated all corners, her yawning hole leading the way.
Nothing bad in her mouth nothing bad in her mouth.
This phrase spun like the hamster’s wheel in McKenna’s head.

Audrey grabs one of Murray’s mechanical pencils: “No, Audrey.”

Audrey grabs a candle: “Yucky, Audrey.”

An Army man: “Not for babies, Audrey.”

A spool of thread: “No, Audrey.”

She would feed Audrey a couple of nibbles of Play-Doh to tide her over. Then the phrase returned:
Nothing bad in her mouth nothing bad in her mouth.

By the time Audrey was one year old, McKenna was tired of saying “no.” Audrey had been eating Play-Doh for months with no ill effects. One afternoon, McKenna found her baby sister on the floor of McKenna and Toby’s room. Audrey’s hair was a mass of tight yellow coils that reached her shoulders. Her oral cavity was packed with black goo that had once been a Crayola. Rather than prying open her jaws, reaching in to pull out the foreign material, calling for help, watching Audrey’s face collapse into a confused jumble of sadness and betrayal, hearing the paroxysm of wailing that blamed McKenna and begged her for a return to pleasure—rather than performing any of these actions, McKenna decided to sit on the carpet and see what happened.

Audrey swallowed the goo. Then she crawled to a nearby book (one of the Choo-Choo Charlie series, if memory serves—which it does, again and again) and tried to eat a page. McKenna wrapped her arms around Audrey’s gut and repositioned her so she faced the open door. Audrey crawled out of the room, slapping her hands on the wooden floor, joyous, wanting McKenna to chase. She did.

The rest of the day, McKenna waited anxiously, expecting her sister to die. Bites of Play-Doh were one thing, but a crayon, paper and all, was frightening. And what awful timing. Dad was almost finished with the top secret feet that he never discussed but that he spent every night in the basement perfecting, the new feet for Audrey, an entire year’s labor, an entire year of neglecting his twins. This would be the worst time for Audrey to die, before she could even try the feet, before she could walk upright and make Daddy smile. McKenna’s stomach kicked like an angry kangaroo. She watched Audrey crawl around the house. She held Audrey’s hands and helped her do a wobbly stump-walk into the living room.

After six hours passed and Audrey continued to breathe, McKenna decided that she wouldn’t die. No, she would become a vegetable. McKenna had seen a TV movie titled
Who’s Killing the Stuntmen?
in which a mustachioed guy with a gentle demeanor and seaweed-green eyes not unlike McKenna’s, jumped from the top of a skyscraper. But somebody had tampered with his air cushion. It didn’t properly break his fall. The stuntman became a “vegetable” in a hospital bed. His face was expressionless. Tubes snaked out of his arms and throat. His wife, despondent, held his hand. She talked to him, but he wasn’t there.

A person could be alive in body while dead in mind—a hor-rific revelation. During McKenna’s intense mental probing of the subject, she could think of no reason that eating a crayon couldn’t also turn a person—especially a baby, so vulnerable—into a pale, lifeless thing that only stared, blinked, and breathed.

Four hours later, Audrey lay asleep in her crib. Misty scuffled into the living room to watch
Dallas
, easing into the recliner without a word about Audrey’s black gums. Hadn’t she noticed? Did she even care? McKenna was finally able to relax . . . sort of.

From that day on, she spent a portion of her allowance at the corner drug store. Packs of forty-eight crayons cost $1.99. When she caught a moment alone with Audrey, McKenna would pull one from her sock and hand it to her sister, her stomach aching with nerves and another sensation, unfamiliar but not unpleasant, located in the same area of her gut. Audrey’s hand, attached to a wild, jerky arm, reached for the crayon. Her brow scrunched in concentration. When at last the waxy stick was in her grip, she would “AHHHH AHHHH,” showing all five of her teeth and punching herself in the legs with excitement. McKenna wanted to know what Audrey was experiencing, so she once took a few nibbles. It tasted similar to the overcooked carrots Misty served. McKenna doubted there was any difference in color-flavor, but for some reason, Audrey had an affinity for black. McKenna became skilled at cleaning the evidence during baths, and Audrey never complained about the soap in her mouth.

The years at St. Monica were marked by prayers, beatings, and halitosis. In fourth grade, it was Sister Peter Verona, a wisp of a woman whose habit framed a sullen, heavy-browed, fuzzy-lipped face. Pee Vee, as the students called her, weaved prayers throughout the day. Mornings started with an Our Father, a Hail Mary, a Gloria, an Apostles’ Creed, and an Act of Faith. Schooldays ended with the same, but in reverse order and with an added Memorare and Prayer for the Pope. But it was after recess when Pee Vee truly got the children to reach for God. Fifteen solid minutes of invocation, including a song lead by her delicate falsetto: “I have been a naughty child/Naughty as can be/Now I am so sorry Lord/Won’t you pardon me?”

McKenna felt sure that she hadn’t been naughty. She’d been, in fact, a model child compared to Toby. She’d resisted the pressure to take a hit from the Kool cigarette Toby had stolen from Murray’s jacket pocket and invited a circle of boys to smoke in the woods behind the baseball diamond. McKenna’s refusal had been mocked, while Toby, eyes narrowed, self-assured in his corruption, dared McKenna to nark on him as he dragged deeply.

McKenna was a good daughter, and a damn good one at that. She obeyed her parents without fail, even her father’s nonsensical demands.

“Cut the yard after dinner, McKenna, but son of a Band-Aid, don’t be so noisy about it,” Murray said. “I’m trying to concentrate downstairs, with power tools.”

Having cut the grass a half-dozen times, McKenna couldn’t recall any volume knob on the lawnmower. Toby smirked from across the table, bit a green bean.

Misty scooped potatoes onto her plate. “What your dad means is that maybe you could wait to cut the grass until he’s done working.”

“That’s not what I mean, Mist. Don’t speak for me, please.”

“I want a
cold
meatloaf,” Audrey said. She sat poised on her knees in a grownup chair. She two-handed a plastic glass of milk to her mouth and drank deeply, with noisy gulps.

“Just don’t rev the damn thing, McKenna. And when you turn a corner, don’t raise the blades off the ground.” Murray stabbed a hunk of loaf with his fork. “The sound gets really loud when you do that. Think about it.”

“Don’t rev the mower, dummy,” Toby said.

“I want a soap,” Audrey said.

Misty frowned. “Your sister is not a dummy. Say you’re sorry.”

“Sorry, dummy.”

McKenna cut the grass with hedge clippers. It took two hours, but it made no noise. Crickets jumped at her hands. The neighborhood was veiled by twilight. The air was chilly. She snipped away, on her knees. Now and then, she looked up at the house. On the second story, a light glowed behind the curtain in Audrey’s room, and McKenna wondered if she should be saving the grass clippings.

So McKenna hated to sing the naughty child song. She also hated the way Pee Vee thrust her face five inches from hers when visiting desks to check homework. “Do you really think
Michigan
is the second biggest state?!” The raw blast of onions, coffee, bologna, boiled cat—Who knew what went in that slit of a mouth?—choked McKenna. She tried not to inhale. And there was another odor, too, one that she’d also detected on Grandma Pencil’s breath. A sweet, curdled stench.

Perhaps it was food caught in her teeth. Perhaps it was the decay of her gums. Perhaps it was the rot of heart, lungs, stomach—that general wind of death that stirs inside every old person.

In private, the kids called Pee Vee “Muck Mouth,” “Garbage Pail,” and “Sewer Breath.” They imagined what was hidden beneath her veil. They envisioned a crew cut, a scarred, dimpled piece of head fruit. They tried to understand how, even in an afterlife of pillowy clouds and golden loving forgiveness, this woman could ever stand close to God. With her foul insides, hidden disfigurements, and cruel eyes, surely she would be cast out and left to flop like a fish upon the hard dirt of damnation.

Pee Vee, and all of the nuns at St. Monica, took great plea sure in humiliating the children; in separating them into groups (the “fast,” the “average,” and the “slow”; the slow group banished to a table in the back of the classroom); in slapping the boys on the ears; in quivering with rage while dragging a troublemaker like Toby to the front of the room and forcing him to sit on the carpet, facing the chalkboard. The nuns took plea sure in demanding an apology and, when not receiving one, pummeling his spine and shoulder blades with an open hand, the dull thumps echoing off the chalkboard, the globe, and the poster of the girl handing the wheelchaired boy an apple, with the caption,
The fruit of kindness is the sweetest fruit
. The air was forced from Toby’s lungs in shallow expulsions. His face crimsoned, and his cheeks jiggled. He fought back tears. His lips formed a smile—one without happiness but certainly with plea sure.

Sister Pee Vee was followed by Sister Michael, Sister Maximil-lian, Sister Pat, and Sister Robert Ann. All sadistic, all on missions to uncover evildoers. Like a squad of superheroes whose special powers were never bending to another’s will, never apologizing, and living to the age of one thousand. The nuns were a ruddy, sexless creature of one mind. They had traded individuality and womanhood for unfettered power. They were gnarled trees, eyesores that nobody could chop down. Axes would shatter; saw teeth would break loose and twinkle upon the ground in the winter sunlight.