“THAT'S NOT TRUE,”
the girl behind me said in a singsong
voice. “You’re lying.”
I turned around and shook my head, hoping she wouldn’t
attract the teacher’s attention. Judy’s hair was unkempt and dirty. Maybe her
mother didn’t love her enough to take good care of her. I knew I should feel
sorry for her, but Judy was as nasty as she smelled.
Rain rolled down the windows during indoor recess. Our
second grade classroom was a neat rectangle, except for the jutting wall where
the door fit in. I preferred symmetry. At seven, my mother’s mindset formed
neat geometric spaces in my head . I adhered to her categories: clean and
dirty, right and wrong, bad people and good people, truth and lies. Well, I had
some trouble with the truth.
My mother often said that she loved us more than any
words could say. She told us no one tried harder to have children than she did.
Then she would tell us how many babies she had lost in order to have us. Lost. The word resounded throughout my body.
When I was very small I worried that I too would be
lost, as I often was in the grocery store. When I understood that her babies
had died before they were born it didn’t help. My mother talked about the lost
babies to express her love for us. She went through eleven pregnancies to have
a family with three living children. I did the math: my brother, sister and I
were conceived because those babies died. I tried talking to my sister about it
once but she didn’t understand.
“They weren’t even people yet,” she told me. “They were
probably smaller than a minnow. Don’t get all weird about it.”
But they were people to my mother—and to me.
Sitting at our desks during indoor recess, vying for attention,
I casually mentioned to my friends, Jennifer and Stephanie and Julie, that I
would have had a big family but lots of the babies died. I knew this wasn’t
really true. My parents would have only had three kids; they just wouldn’t have
had me. I also knew it was wrong to make family grief into a public tale even
if it gave me momentary thrill of popularity.
“Oh, the poor babies,” Jennifer said.
“How many babies?” Stephanie wanted to know.
“Lots,” I said. “Eight babies.” I knew Id gone too far.
Judy piped up, “I’m telling Mrs. Lauver.”
I felt my fate as tightly sealed as the braids my mother
lovingly bound with rubber bands to match my dresses. I was in trouble.
After the tattletale got to her, Mrs. Lauver called me
up to her desk. My knees trembled when she paid attention to me. I was a good
student, but sometimes my teacher called me names and then pointed out that I
was blushing. We had moved the year before and rules from my last school, such
as rising when called upon, had been hard for me to break for the first week.
Mrs. Lauver called me a jumping jack and punished me when I didn’t stop
standing up right away. That started it. It seemed she was always after me. But
this time Id brought it on myself.
Everyone watched as I walked up to the front of the
room. No one got called up to the teacher’s desk during indoor recess. The
teacher normally had that time off, sitting with her friends in the
smoke-filled lounge, so she tended to ignore us and read a thick paperback at
her desk, her chair turned slightly away from the class as if we weren’t her
responsibility. We honored that inattention by keeping the hubbub down. After
recess she would read a chapter of Charlotte’s Web to us. She
always
threatened that if we got too loud she might deny us that privilege and go
right to social studies.
I went up to Mrs. Lauver’s desk as slowly as possible.
Anxiety made my senses acute. I could smell the awful geraniums she kept on the
windowsill, their brown sickly leaves rotting away. I could feel my classmates’
eager curiosity—cartoon watchers waiting for the silly wabbit to be shot. As I got closer I could see where the
teacher’s too-tight sleeveless dress cut into her flesh, the frighteningly hard
texture of her hair and the orange-hued makeup on her face. I wanted my mother
badly. Her dresses were loose, her hair soft, her face never anything like my
teacher’s.
I should have been planning what to say, but a liar
sticks to the story, sometimes makes it worse. I made it worse. I stood at the
desk, unsure of what to do with my hands, twisting the ends of my braids. I
insisted that our family did have lots of children once but they died.
“Oh, and how did that happen?” She had a tight smile on
her face.
I thought about it. I saw them inside my head, my
unknown brothers and sisters. They would have been older than me. If they had
lived, I would not have been born. To me, their deaths were a burden, a gift, a
strange Christ-like sacrifice. Standing there at Mrs. Lauver’s desk, I saw
their lives pass without breath in the darkness of water, waves breaking over
their heads in the distance. I could almost see their faces. So I said simply,
“They drowned.” Despite further questions I couldn’t get another word out.
“I’m calling your mother,” the teacher said. “We’ll see
what she has to say about that.”
That
awful outcasts’ land: wanting one’s mama, but being in trouble. Now how could I
rush home to a welcoming hug when I would encounter anger? My stomach folded
up, and I had to remember what my face was supposed to look like the rest of
that afternoon.
