The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (9 page)

By the time McKenna and Toby were twelve, the nuns were regular dinner guests.

They never came all at once; they never came alone. Like Noah’s precious cargo, they arrived in pairs, stepping gingerly up the cracked walkway, arms linked, appearing not so much pious as geriatric and scared outside the bubbles of their sanctimonious classrooms. Once they’d climbed the four concrete steps, their knock rattled the metal door with all the force of a dried sponge tossed by a Farm League reject.

Two or three times a month they descended, always unannounced to the family. Grandma Pencil figured that no one would mind. After all, she was doing 95 percent of the cooking these days.

A couple of Mapeses minded, though. The nuns were Mc-Kenna and Toby’s teachers, ex- teachers, future teachers. For the twins, the dinners ranged from uncomfortable to mortifying. The only choice they had was to hide in their room until the last possible moment, doing (or in Toby’s case, pretending to do) homework.

“Fucking penguins!” Toby said.

He’d seen
The Blues Brothers
on his friend Tommy’s HBO (Tommy was
Toby’s
friend, not McKenna’s, you’ll notice). Toby loved to say the f-word in all its provocative and hilarious incarnations. He used it like a claw hammer on unsuspecting victims. Like the time he told a mentally handicapped kid at school, “Fuck a fencepost, you fucking retard.” Grandma Pencil had given up on scolding Toby about his gutter mouth, except when he occasionally let one slip in front of the nuns, at which point she flushed with embarrassment and told him to do fifty push- ups. Toby was happy to oblige, and Grandma and the nuns always cheered him to the finish.

“Dad says they’re lousy cooks,” McKenna said. “That’s why they come over.”

“Of course they are,” Toby answered. He lay on his bed with a
Fitness
magazine held above his face. “They’ve been sucking Bro-phy’s thingy so long, everything else tastes like cardboard.”

“Why doesn’t it surprise me,” McKenna said, “that you know what Father Brophy’s thingy tastes like?” She was seated at the writing desk.

An empty Coke can hit the back of McKenna’s head. It landed on the carpet without a sound. These were the pre- divider days, before a floral- patterned chintz provided each twin an 8' × 9' empire to rule.

“AUDREY! SNACK!” Toby yelled, returning to an article about gluteals and quads and the rest of his oily dementia.

“Don’t,” McKenna said. She tried to concentrate on her English worksheet. Pen poised, no answers came.
Identify the indirect object in the following sentence:

“SNACK, JAWS!” Toby hollered.

The door creaked open. Audrey, on crutches, entered. Her hair was pulled back into a knot and fastened by a barrette that was braided with red and blue ribbon—her “rainbow barrette.” Very trendy, very 1984. McKenna hated to see her sister being sucked into the fashion vortex. The barrette matched Audrey’s shirt rainbow, which arched across her chest from three- quarter sleeve to three-quarter sleeve.

Audrey stooped to pick up the Coke can, then opened wide and jammed it in. It popped in her mouth like it a Flintstones vitamin. The can was probably half- digested in her gut before she made it out the door. McKenna could hear her singing on the way to her room, “Our house! Is a very, very, very fine house!”

Toby’s eyes were still on his magazine. “You gotta look at this,” he said. “This chick is built like you. Oh wait, it’s a dude.”

“You shouldn’t feed Audrey trash,” McKenna said. She penciled in the answer to number seven:
me
.

“She shouldn’t eat trash.”

“But she does. And you should know better than to give it to her. She’s only seven.”

“So it’s
my
fault she’s a freak?” He sat up and unsnapped the shoulder buttons of his cham shirt. He yanked off the sleeves and tossed them in the corner by his dresser, thereby revealing the upper arms he’d stopped calling “guns” and was now calling “my babies.” Typical Toby, beating his gorilla chest. He thought cam-ouf age pants, Van Halen pins, and biceps would distract attention from the swaths of acne on his cheeks and forehead.

“Audrey’s special,” McKenna said. “She’s got a gift.”

“You
believe
that crap? Mom only says that cuz she doesn’t know what else to say.”

“You believe Grandma’s crap.”

“All I know is ‘we aren’t supposed to tell anyone.’ ” His fingers made careless quotation marks in the air. “That sounds like hiding a freak to me.”

“You would know.”

“Yep. I share a room with one.”

From downstairs, Grandma Pencil called them to dinner.

Sister Maximillian and Sister P.V., along with Misty, Murray, and Grandma Pencil, sit at the dining room table. Bowls are passed, plates are loaded, glasses are filled. The record player in the living room offers Vangelis’s
Chariots of Fire
soundtrack at a volume not loud enough to interfere with the subdued conversation. To the untrained eye, the scene appears Rockwellian in its vision of domestic ease. Close scrutiny (and honesty), however, reveals that Misty’s complexion is too pale, even a bit on the green side. Her smiles are rote. Murray, too, doesn’t look comfortable, the way he gnaws a raw broccoli stalk and won’t let his eyes rest from their constant flicking around the room, never seeing the dinner guests.

Down the stairs come the children. Toby bears Audrey in his arms, newlywed-wife-over-the-threshold style. Her stumps are frilly-socked.

McKenna, lagging behind, wearing a tan, knee-length dress, carries the crutches—not by choice, but because she’s not strong enough to carry Audrey. She watches Toby reach the bottom of the steps, not so much admiring as marveling at the sculpted bulk of a preteen, the boy who used to be her twin. Toby’s brow is jutted, and his nostrils have flared so often they’ve become formidable holes. Vast disparities between the twins’ hands, legs, and thighs—every difference Toby had desired as he obsessively measured during that summer before kindergarten—all and more have come true.

And yet, he’s not happy. He’s gruff and aggressive toward family, friends, and strangers. This may be a result of his involvement with football and heavy metal. Or, it may be the
reason
for his involvement with football and heavy metal. The point is, the kid is a jerk. Just plain not nice. McKenna has long ago stopped trying to like Toby. And trying to understand Toby hasn’t led to any great revelations. As young kids, they shared an affinity for Mommy and an unspoken respect for Daddy. Now, Toby hates both parents. The only love he shows is a love of mocking their every decision, action, or utterance.

So Toby was a miserable teen. So what. Was McKenna happy? If Toby was
too
concerned with his weight, muscle mass, and size, then maybe McKenna wasn’t concerned enough. She knew she had a weight problem, a body problem. It didn’t make her feel good to be the skinniest girl in the seventh grade. Thinner than the sixth-graders. It didn’t make her feel good to hear the boys whisper “Skeletor.” It didn’t make her feel good to break a bone every six months (ankle, collarbone, forearm, other collarbone). It didn’t make her feel good to know that if the house was burning she wouldn’t be able to carry Audrey down the steps and out the front door.

McKenna was used to not feeling good, however. She’d not felt good her whole life. Why should now be any different? She only saw her dad twice a month. Her mom was a basket case. Her brother mocked her at every opportunity. Her Grandma appraised her scrawny arms like she wished she’d never been born. And the other day, while wrestling with Audrey, she’d bled into her panties. Her first period. McKenna wondered why it happened when she was wrestling Audrey, right as she pinned Audrey to the floor.

The incident kept her awake. She worried that she might be a pervert like Grandpa Ray.

But really, was life so terrible?

NO, NO, NO! Not with this beef stroganoff in her mouth. Not chewing the soft meat, savoring the tangy sauce. Swishing,swallowing. Feeling the burn at the back of her throat—such raw skin, such an overworked tube.

Upchucking. Chucking up.

Chewing again. Swallowi—

Upchucking. Chucking up.

Chewing. Swallo—

Upchucking. Chucking up.

“McKenna, you don’t like your Grandma’s cooking?”

Chewing. Swallowing.

“I do. She’s a great cook.”

“She’s a great cook
what
?” Grandma Pencil says, fork pointing.

“She’s a great cook,
Sister Maximillian
,” McKenna says.

McKenna takes another bite. Her third bite.

“Maybe she’s just slow,” Sister P.V. says, mopping the last trace of gravy with a wedge of bread.

“No maybes about it,” Murray answers. He loads his mouth so he doesn’t have to say anything else.

As people age, they get better and worse. They improve as they decline. They sink to new depths while they ascend to new heights. They become more beautiful and more grotesque. Smarter and dumber. Bolder and more withdrawn from the world.

The weeks and months become years, the same way boys and girls become men and women.

We walk the same route every day, discovering one afternoon that without realizing it we’ve memorized the number of sidewalk cracks between bus stop and house. Our friends no longer telephone us, they’re so busy. We only had two of them, anyway. The neighborhood children become automobile drivers, zip off to college, get married, die in scuba diving accidents—still nameless.

Favorite television shows get cancelled, replaced by inferior ones. But we watch anyway, to “give them a chance.” Magazines guilt us into resubscribing every year. We get turned down for major credit cards. We keep secrets. We attend work-sponsored Christmas parties. We revisit a few choice photographs that remind us how each passing day makes us less and less like ourselves. Dreams of success, of fulfillment—intellectual, spiritual, physical, emotional—fade into bathroom graffiti while the bank teller job that pays the bills becomes our newspaper, our connection to the world. Hair abandons ship. Boobs droop.

We turn cynical: “Sister Janice only wants to come over because I have the satellite and can get the World Cup games.” We turn lazy: “I’m not going to see that new Ang Lee movie. So what if Shalit called it ‘As important as
Schindler’s List
!’ I don’t care! Leave me alone while I empty my mower bag!” Being demanding is no longer a negative trait: “The menu says coleslaw. This is shredded lettuce and mayo!”

And how nice to finally be smart! How wonderful to have the
time
, at last, to think! To write, to mull, to live through
reliving
.

Sure, children possess admirable illness-recovery skills, excellent athleticism, endurance, and energy. And Lord knows they’ve got hope—buckets of it, full to the brim, sloshing everywhere as they walk. If you’re not careful, you might slip in it and break your neck. Hope is a potent fuel. It’ll keep you moving. But doggone if kids aren’t stupid as burlap. They can’t survive on their own. They can’t control their urges. They think like animals, if what animals think can be called thought.

Eat. Run. Kiss. Punch. Cry. Sleep. Betray.

Kids don’t even
get
that they’re going to die. How dense is that? And this stupidity doesn’t only afflict babies and toddlers—it infects grade school, high school, college. Basic skills like taking out the trash, paying rent, getting price quotes for a funeral? Don’t count on a kid!

But don’t count on adults, either. Just because they “know” things doesn’t mean they know what to do with that knowledge. A teaspoon of self-understanding doesn’t equal the recipe for happiness. Grown-ups can master the basics, but will they ever live in the bliss of childhood again? Never. Will they ever again know the thrill of possibility? Not likely.

Will they dream of sinning and wake up with smiles on their lips? Will they suck popsicles with abandon? Will they believe in themselves without worrying what the neighbors think? Will they just
stop
? Stop looking at me that way. Stop taking pictures of the house. Stop calling. Stop sending threatening mail. Stop telling me I need to be forgiven. Stop writing about me. Stop peering into my windows. Just
stop
for a minute.

Will we have the opportunity to start over? A second chance where we might
not
hold onto every experience?

To live in the moment. To break all the mirrors in the house. To push a bully into a puddle. To ride a bicycle no-handed down a hill in winter. To descend into the basement and see what all that noise is about. To be wonderful. To be wondrous. To be worthy.

To erase that bewildering girl.

To steal a lungful. To taste her ripe mouth with no fear of damnation.

The Mapeses and Grandma Pencil took an Amtrak to Kalamazoo in the summer of 1988. It was a sixty-eight minute ride for a three-day weekend. Not exactly an ocean liner to Australia, but to the kids, it was like going to the moon. They’d never left Grand Rapids (except for a few of Toby’s football games in neighboring Rockford).

Each year, Murray depleted his week of vacation time. But he spent it you-know-where (underground), cranking out you-know-whats (inventions) for you-know-who (nobody). In fact, the Mape-ses had only gone out as a family—as in, “Mom, Dad, Toby, McKenna, and Audrey leave the house together, pile into one car and drive to the same destination”—some two dozen times during the years of 1972—1988.

The Kalamazoo vacation was Grandma Pencil’s idea. She insisted. She made all the arrangements. It was her birthplace, the city where she’d lived her happiest days until being taken to the Philippines. Her father was buried in Kalamazoo’s largest cemetery, a place called Mountain Home. She hadn’t “visited” him in over a decade. Although she admitted to remembering nothing of her time in Kalamazoo, the city occupied a special place in her persistent little heart.

Grandma Pencil was not a driver. She never owned a license. In general, she didn’t trust machines, and she especially hated cars. It’s reasonable to assume that one of her main automobile memories was of riding behind the hearse that carried her father’s corpse.

The Mapeses deboarded the Amtrak train on a muggy, overcast July afternoon. Murray’s forehead was beaded with sweat, and his Polo knockoff had black armpits. He carried Audrey down the steps, followed closely by Grandma Pencil, McKenna, Misty, and Toby. An observer—of which there were none (save for the shoeless lunatic reposing beside a newspaper box and staring out of two rheumy eyes, perhaps struggling internally against the realization that he’d slept through yet another opportunity to hurl himself in front of a train)—would have thought the Mapes clan was from another country, if not another planet, the way they tentatively descended the steps and clumsily arranged themselves on the platform, eyes wide with wonder and trepidation.

They found a taxicab idling in front of the station. They piled inside. Grandma Pencil sat shotgun. Murray and Misty book-ended the children in the back. Audrey’s crutches lay across their laps like the protective bar of a roller coaster. The cabbie didn’t comment on the unusual suitcase and suitcase accessory he’d been asked to put in the trunk.

It was a tight squeeze for the Mapeses. They were crammed in not so much like sardines as like teeth in an overcrowded mouth, leaning upon one other in a crooked jumble. Toby expressed irritation in his way, mumbles and growls, and before the cab had even exited the lot, he’d lifted Audrey onto his lap. This seemed to satisfy him, and Audrey did not resist.

The first stop the family made—before food, drink, or toilet—was Mountain Home Cemetery. The taxi climbed the winding, narrow roadway as Grandma Pencil squinted out the passenger window. The cab was air conditioned, but humidity filled the cramped space. Murray’s B.O. was not charming to anyone, least of all the driver, who stopped the car abruptly before Grandma had located her father’s plot. The cabbie apologized as he opened the trunk, saying he had to hurry back to the station for more passengers. No one argued with him; they took him at his word. Even though they were from a city twice the size of Kalamazoo, they might as well have been country bumpkins. Their immediate surroundings were unfamiliar, and therefore they assumed everything else in this Bizarro World was operating under a mysterious set of rules they had yet to decipher.

The cemetery was immense. Twenty-eight acres rolling to the horizon in all directions, white and gray markers dotting the green hills. Some gravestones were no wider or thicker than a 3-subject notebook, stained an ashen hue. Names and dates had faded into ghostly suggestions, as if despite mankind’s best efforts, nature was determined to purge the last traces of these people from the Earth. Other markers were monoliths, epic in their construction, a wonder and a horror to behold: Columns looming two stories high; rectangular blocks the size of automobiles; a monstrous sphere of reflective marble ten feet in diameter, balanced atop a pedestal. These two-ton raised middle fingers to Time, Nature, Impermanence, Rot—to Mortality itself—represented dead people who dared God to just
try
to erase them:
HENRY UPJOHN
,
CHARLES B. HAYS
,
EPAPHRODITUS RANSOM.

The band of merry Mapeses puttered among the tombstones, admiring and critiquing in the oppressive heat. They laughed at names like
Constance Noring
and
Paige Turner
. They fell silent at the grave of little
Louis Merchant 1889—1892 .

Toby unceremoniously whipped out his thingy and began hosing the base of
Earl Coleman 1922—1980
’s rather average-sized granite cross.

“Classy,” said Murray.

“You gotta go, you gotta go,” Toby answered.

“We
all
have to go,” Audrey said, and on her crutches she began beating an impressive path up the grassy slope. “Come on!” she hollered, and Misty followed.

McKenna was in “sled dog” mode. She’d lost the paper-scissors-rock competition with Toby and was therefore hitched, via shoulder and torso harness, to the cart on skis that Murray had invented the year before as a way to transport luggage.

At this time, wheeled suitcases were not yet standard. When luggage did have wheels, it was often difficult to pull without tipping. The sled was a cool idea—a rack mounted on two ski blades, upon which a piece (or pieces) of luggage could be strapped. But then some joker invented extendable handles and stuck the wheels on the vertical end of the suitcase. “Roller Boards,” they’re called now. Everyone’s got one. Murray saw another opportunity slip away.

Truthfully, though, he never gave it much thought. He was just happy to have made the SledDogger, an idea that had come to him one year earlier, when Grandma Pencil first mentioned the upcoming anniversary.

“Next summer will be thirty-three years since my father’s death,” she said. “The family must make a pilgrimage.”

“Make a pilgrim
itch
?” Toby asked. “Why?” The family was eating dinner, and Toby was on his second helping.

“I want to be a pilgrim,” Audrey chimed in.

“It’s
forty-seven
years, Mom,” Misty said. She sounded embarrassed.

But Grandma Pencil couldn’t be bothered by mathematical trivialities. “Thirty-three was the age of our Lord Jesus when they nailed him to that tree.”

Sister P.V. and Sister Robert Ann joined Grandma in crossing themselves.

“More importantly,” Grandma continued, “thirty-three was Jesus’ age when he rose to join his Heavenly Father at the throne.”

Murray, brow furrowed, made calculations. “So,” he said, “if Jesus was thirty-three, then God was what, in his early sixties?”

Audrey giggled. The nuns frowned—not at Murray, but at Audrey. No doubt every one of their withered hands itched to give her a thumping. No doubt they were all imagining the perverse joy of laying her over their knees. Grandma muttered under her breath, most of it inaudible. The phrase “devil child,” however, was quite clear.

McKenna’s face burned with anger, burned as much as her throat. She told Grandma Pencil to shut up. She was sent to her room without finishing supper. Little did anyone know, she would savor her lasagna for the next half-hour.

Misty knocked on the door. McKenna lay on her bed. Misty took a seat in the desk chair and scooted it across the carpet, to the bedside. McKenna closed her eyes as the scent of Misty’s perfume filled her nose.

“Grandma Pencil hasn’t had a happy life,” Misty said.

“So no one else can have one, either?” McKenna’s voice came out as a rasp.

“Darling, have you been feeling well?”

“So now it’s
my
fault.”

“You don’t eat. You’re very thin.”

“I know. I need to be like Toby Dick, the great white whale. He’s super cool, and I’m a loser.”

Her mother’s voice—McKenna wanted to lay here forever with her eyes closed, listening, letting Misty’s words brush her, baste her, tenderize her. Arguing with Mom was the last thing Mc-Kenna wanted to do, but she needed to hear Mom’s voice, so she hurled stones. Misty was a pond; her surface would suffer only the slightest ripple before returning to its smooth, natural state.

“Grandma loves all of us,” Misty said. “Even Audrey. I know it’s hard to see, but it’s true. Sometimes what shows on the outside is the opposite of what’s inside. When people act angry, they’re usually hurting. Sad and hurting.”

“Those are your specialties.”

Got her with that stone. Misty stood without a sound and left the room. So she was human after all. And McKenna wished she could take it back.

Nothing is taken back. Nothing is erased. It piles up. Walls us in.

McKenna dragged the SledDogger (Patent no. 40457A) up the hill, trailing fifteen yards behind her father. They arrived at a thicket of trees at the edge of the cemetery. Murray unzipped and began shooting a heavy stream into the dirt. McKenna, embarrassed, unsnapped the harness (it
was
easy, the “push of a button,” exactly as Murray had boasted during the demonstration). Where had Misty and Audrey gone to pee? McKenna had to go, too. Her hips ached. Salty sweat flavored her upper lip.

With a determined puff of air, like a dragon, she yanked down her jeans and pan ties and squatted. The splashing increased, deepened in resonance, as a puddle formed beneath her. She decided she wouldn’t be embarrassed. She didn’t care that she wasn’t with the girls.

“You got your dad’s bladder,” Murray said. They’d been going for over twenty seconds, neither showing signs of slowing.

“I guess.”

“You WHAT?” The hearing loss had begun.

“I GUESS.”

“I could’ve sworn you said, ‘I’m blessed.’ ”

“You guys pee forever,” Audrey said.

She’d materialized from behind a marble block marked
ASHTON 1922—1977
.

“What do you think of Kalamazoo so far, honey?” Murray said. He was trickling now, as was McKenna.

“The people aren’t very talkative.”

Murray laughed. “And their name tags are waaayy oversized.”

McKenna, Murray, and Audrey rejoined Misty and Toby, and they fanned out like a search party to track down Grandma Pencil. They found her kneeling on a patch of grass. There was no standing grave marker in front of her—only a rectangular bronze plaque laid into the ground.

Her eyes were closed. Her lips formed words. Following Murray’s lead, the family stopped a few yards away. Nobody spoke. The air was pasty. Above, the clouds hung like clumps of dark berries, ready to burst. Grandma Pencil’s lean torso swayed in the breeze. In her dress and velvet millinery hat, she resembled a flower, a black-stemmed flower crying for its daddy.