Bornfamous

I am screaming and my mother is holding me back.

“Daddy, don’t!”

My father is aiming a shotgun down the basement stairs.

“Don’t shoot the cute little mouse,” I plead. The mouse is at the bottom of the stairs, tiny and harmless. Defenseless.

I scream, “Noooo,” as a huge BANG ends the discussion. I sob in my mother’s arms, hating my father.

It is my first memory.

—

The kitchen is full of sunshine and my mother is squeezing a plastic bag full of white glop. A red dot is in the center of the glop.

“What is that stuff, Mommy”

“Margarine,” she says. “It’s cheaper than butter but the farmers made a law that says margarine can’t look like butter, so we have to mix it up ourselves. The red dot is food coloring. Want to try it?”

Squishing the color into the white margarine is fun. I’m surprised to see the red change to orange and then yellow.

—

My dog Chief is very sick. He lies on a blanket on the kitchen floor. A car hit him and broke his back. For awhile, we didn’t think he would live but he’s getting better now. I sit with Chief and pet him, telling him I love him. He licks my hand, his tongue rough and warm.

Chief is a big dog when he can stand up, and strong. He is a black and white mutt with silky fur and droopy ears. His eyes are sad and fierce. I am proud to have such a strong, beautiful dog but my mother has stopped letting me take him out on a leash because once he dragged me into the street. Maybe that’s how he got hit by the car; I can’t remember.

—

My uncle Lynn and some friends of my father come over to help with construction on the house. I’m not sure what they’re building. There is a concrete slab outside the back door and much wood everywhere. It’s fun to play in the chaos amid the sounds of saws and hammers, the smell of fresh-cut wood.

Someone has left an empty Coke bottle on the concrete. I wonder what it’s like to sit on a bottle, so I try it. I am surprised by the warm feeling in my private parts as I squat over the bottle, careful not to put my whole weight on it. It feels funny but good.

My father’s car is in the back yard. I climb in and open the glove compartment. There’s a can of my father’s snuff. I wonder what it tastes like so I open the can, scoop the brown goop out with my fingers the way I’ve seen my father do, and put it in my mouth.

The taste is so awful that I scream, loud and long. My mother comes running from the house. To my dismay, she laughs when she sees what’s happened. I feel tricked by my father and angry with my mother.

—

Playing in the back yard, running barefoot in my pinafore and shorts, I step on a board with a nail sticking out. The nail goes deep into the sole of my foot, and I take a deep, sharp breath before letting out a wail that brings my mother on the run again. She doesn’t laugh this time. I scream again as she pulls on the board and the nail comes out. She carries me inside to wrap my foot in a bandage. I am required to wear shoes after this.

My mother takes me down to the basement every afternoon for my nap. There’s a cot with a blanket and pillow right below a small, high window. I beg my mother not to leave me but she goes upstairs anyway. I can hear the neighborhood kids shrieking and yelling as they run past the window. I don’t want to sleep; I want to play.

It occurs to me that if I stand up on the cot, I can reach the window, so I push it open and pull myself up. I crawl through the window and run to play with the other kids, feeling like an escaped prisoner. Freedom is delicious.

“How did you get out here?” My mother is astonished to see me in the back yard when I’m supposed to be sleeping in the basement.

“Through the window,” I say, and show her.

She laughs. “You’re pretty smart, you know that?”

I’m proud of how smart I am, but she takes me back downstairs and moves the cot away from the window.

“I have to stay one step ahead of you, don’t I?” She kisses me and walks up the stairs.

I listen to the sound of kids playing and wish I hadn’t told her about the window.

—

I’m angry with my mother, I don’t remember why.

“I’m going to run away!” I’m certain that this will bring her to her senses but to my amazement she gets out a small suitcase.

“Let me help you pack,” she says, sounding way too cheerful for my taste.

“Fine,” I say, and grab the suitcase. I march to the front door and outside, suddenly realizing that I have no place to go and my mother doesn’t even care. I make it as far as the tiny sapling in the front yard before dissolving against it, heartbroken.

My mother comes out laughing, hugging me and carries me inside. I’m so relieved that I don’t have to run away that I forgive her for laughing at me.

—

We’re at a lake, Mom and me, her friend Peggy and my best friend, Margo. The sun is warm as we sit on the dock in our bathing suits, but we don’t go in the water. Peggy is slim, pretty in her two-piece pink suit. Mom is large, covered with a shirt. Peggy talks about polio.

“Did you know,” she says, “that the little girl on the corner has it?”

“What’s polio?” I ask.

“It’s a sickness,” says Peggy. “A lot of kids are getting it and then they can’t walk any more.” She looks at my legs. “Dorothy, you really should take LaVonne to the doctor to make sure she’s all right.”

“You mean I could get it too?” I’m getting a little worried.

“No,” says my mother. “We’re Christian Scientists. We rely on prayer.”

Then Peggy stops talking and I look back and forth between them, not understanding anything.

—

More kids are getting sick in the neighborhood. Grownups seem tense, worried. They scoop up their children and carry them inside. One boy takes me to see his older sister who lives in a huge metal tube, with just her head sticking out of one end. She talks to us between breaths, when a whooshing mechanical sound interrupts her. My friend says the machine is making his sister breathe. I’m very impressed.

Then I get sick. It doesn’t feel any different from a cold or the flu but my father is worried. My mother says that prayer will take care of me. They have an argument in the other room while I float in and out of a fevered dream.

After my mother goes to work, my father carries me to the car and takes me to a doctor. I’m back in my bed before she gets home, and my father makes me promise not to tell her about the doctor.

Later, I begin to feel better. When I get out of bed, I’m surprised that I can walk just fine.

—

I go to visit my grandparents for two weeks, and when my parents come to pick me up, they’re very sad. My mother sits down next to me and explains that my dog Chief has run away.

“What?! Where is he?”

“We don’t know,” she says. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

My father is silent as my mother consoles me.

Riding home, I sleep on the ledge under the back window of the two-seater Studebaker, as always. The sun feels hot but good. I vaguely hear my parents’ voices enter my dream.

“If I can’t have her,” my father’s voice is saying, “no one can.” I can feel the car accelerate.

“Joe, stop it, you’re scaring me!”

I’m dreaming, so I’m not afraid. I open my eyes a crack but I’m too sleepy from the hot sun.

“This is crazy,” says my mother as the car goes faster. “What good will it do to kill all of us?”

The car guns forward.

“Joe,” says my mother, her voice now quiet and firm. “Stop this car. Now.”

The car slows down.

“I’m sorry,” says my father, and his voice sounds like he’s crying. “I’m sorry.”

—

My mother and I move into the big attic bedroom of my grandparents’ house. My aunt Ruth lives there too. Grandpa is a quiet man with white hair and thick, black eyebrows who lets me curl up in his lap while he smokes a cigar. Once, he burns my hand by accident and I can see that he feels very badly. I forgive him but I don’t remember sitting in his lap after that.

I love snuggling in the bed at night with my mother, looking at the stars through the window. In the morning, the sun streams in to wake me and I burrow into her large, soft body. She is my own personal pillow, the way mothers are supposed to be. I feel sorry for Jimmy, my new friend across the street, whose mother is nice but too bony. I can’t imagine hugging her.

I love my mom. I don’t even miss my dad.

Sometimes, though, I spend time with him in his new place, a converted railroad dining car behind the small restaurant where both he and my mother still work. While she waits tables, he takes me downstairs to the bar where his buddies laugh to see me. They call me Blondie. There is an smell of stale beer and tobacco in the air but I like the attention from the men, so I put up with the smell.

My father sits me on the bar, buys me an Orange Crush and tells jokes. The deep sound of men laughing rings in my ears.

—

I am sitting on the bed in my father’s room at my aunt and uncle’s house, where he’s living now. I’m watching him pull a rubber tie around his upper arm. He pulls it tight and taps his arm inside the elbow. He lifts a needle and syringe, squeezing it until a few drops of liquid shoot up out of the needle. Then he places the needle on the skin of his inner arm and punctures it, pushing the end of the syringe until the liquid inside it disappears. He pulls the needle out of his arm, unwraps the rubber tie and rolls down his shirt sleeve.

“What was that, Daddy?”

“Insulin,” he says, and he pulls a small bag out of his shirt pocket.

“What’s insulin?”

“Medicine.”

He takes a small, thin piece of paper and holds it between the fingers of one hand, forming a furrow down the length of the paper. With the other hand, he picks up the bag and pours a dry, brown substance into the paper.

He puts the bag down and uses his forefingers to smooth the brown substance into an even line that fills the bottom of the paper furrow from end to end. He licks the length of one edge of the paper and carefully, expertly, rolls it all into a white stick.

He puts one end of the stick into his mount, picks up a book of matches from the bed and lights the other end. The delicious first smell of sulphur and new tobacco fills the room.

I love that smell.

–

That’s all I remember of my father, except for the hospital visit when he gave me a jar full of pennies, and the funeral when I tried to kiss his powdered cheek and my mother wouldn’t let me.

I don’t remember his face, just his hands and his arms as he put the needle in, and rolled the cigarette. He was thin, very thin, 135 pounds according to my mother, and six feet tall.

Oh yes, now I remember his hand on a knob on the steering wheel, sleeve rolled up around a pack of Camels, left arm resting on the edge of the car’s open window as he pulled around the drive between my aunt and uncle’s house and the barn. I’d forgotten that.

I need to remember him now, because I forgot him after he died and life took over.

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