In the Night of Memory, page 6
“Take it or leave it, Sherry; you can get a job or you can stay home, your choice. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
I felt sorry for Sherry, and I learned that even though she cried a lot, she could also take a lot. And she was always nice to Rain and me—as nice as she was to Andrew and Erik, her own boys. The five of us went everywhere together on the days Sherry needed the car for errands. On those days we’d get up early in the morning, bring Don to work, then run errands: we went to the bank, to the grocery store, to her sister Bev’s house for coffee, to the library, to the WIC meeting for playtime while the mothers listened to the County nurse talk about nutrition and then to pick up the coupons for milk, cheese, cereal, and produce. Our favorite, though, was the Salvation Army store: on Salvation Army days we watched the boys and went through the toy bins while Sherry picked through the kids’ clothes and tried on clothes for herself. Sherry was a fussy shopper, inspecting every inch of seams, pulling at armpits for signs of weakness, laying a boy’s jacket across a table to go over the lining and work the zipper up and down. We never left empty-handed, and usually there was something for each of us. On the best day of all, as we were lining up at the counter to pay, Sherry noticed a shoebox on the floor next to a stack of clothing waiting to be priced. From one end of the broken and torn box top a pair of doll’s legs with impossibly tiny feet stuck straight out.
“Are those Barbie dolls in there? Can I look?” she asked.
Inside were a half-dozen naked Barbie dolls lying on a layer of tiny clothes and plastic high heels. Barbies! My heart pounded.
“They’re not very clean—their hair is all tangled, and the whole box kind of stinks,” Sherry commented. My heart sank. Sherry sniffed at the box again. “Would you take a dollar?”
The Salvation Army lady said she could.
Rain and I took turns holding the shoebox in the car. At the house Sherry dumped the whole box into the kitchen sink and washed everything in dish detergent, then lay the dolls and clothes out on a bath towel to dry. She untangled the Barbies’ hair carefully with her own wide-toothed comb and trimmed off the mats. Then she went into her sock drawer and took out a handful of socks that were missing mates, cut off the toes, and made slits at the side.
“This is how you make your own Barbie clothes,” she said. “Aren’t they cute?”
With the tops rolled down to off-the-shoulder height they were more than cute, especially the lacy knee sock that had been missing its mate but was too pretty to toss.
We learned to cook by helping Sherry, who made the best meals I have ever eaten. How she did this I don’t know, but she had a repertoire of a half-dozen “success meals,” as she called them, most based on canned goods. Little that she bought was fresh, and she used minimal flavorings or spices. She and her husband argued during most of the meals, at least when he wasn’t chewing and swallowing, and yet I cannot remember a meal that wasn’t delicious. Sherry taught me how to cook, and although I don’t have the magic touch she must have been born with, I can—like Sherry—make a good meal from just about anything.
This came about because of these terrific headaches that Sherry got sometimes. It was on an afternoon that she had taken four Excedrin pills and was stumbling around the kitchen that I asked if I could help. She looked so surprised—it might have been the first offer of help she had ever had. “Sure; here, you can open a can of brown beans, and a can of corn, two cans of those little potatoes, and put them in saucepans on the stove—turn the knobs to medium.” Sherry took a dishcloth from the drawer, wetted it at the sink, and sat at the kitchen table pressing the cloth lightly to her forehead as she watched me. “Can you stack eight slices of bread on a plate, too, and get out the margarine? Put them all on the table with silverware?”
“Can I help, too?” Rain and the boys asked. Sherry told Rain that she could help the next day, and in the meantime, she would be in charge of clearing off the dining room table and setting up the silverware and glasses.
“Can we cook, too?” Andrew and Erik looked ready to tear up the kitchen. “We’ll make brownies!”
The dish towel had slipped down Sherry’s forehead to her eyelashes; she blinked slowly, peering out like a heavy-lidded tortoise. “You can help by sitting on the couch.”
“The couuuuch,” the boys whined. “We want to heeeeeee-elp.”
“If you stay on that couch and I don’t hear a peep out of you until your dad gets home, I’ll pay you a quarter. Each. Starting this second.” The boys trotted out of the room, and the tortoise pulled the wet dish towel back down over her eyelids.
By the time Don got home Sherry was feeling better, and after he had washed up and roughed around with the boys, she and I filled plates from the stove, arranging canned potatoes, beans, and corn in neat mounds that didn’t touch. We carried the plates into the dining room and placed them in front of Don, Rain, and the boys, Don’s expression becoming somewhat suspicious when Sherry announced that Azure had cooked the whole dinner. Erik inhaled the steam rising from his plate and said, “Smells good,” then we all dug right in and ate with the same appetite we had during all of Sherry’s delectable meals.
Sherry said I had been a big help and next put me to work on the grocery list. This meant that every week we discussed how many cans of brown beans were needed, and how many of green beans and corn, or if we were low on Spam, or canned cream soup, or egg noodles, or brownie mix. I began to love our skinny, harried foster mother, and without telling Rain, I would imagine sometimes that Sherry would adopt us and become our official mother.
I knew that it was just pretend, because if she had begun to love us back and want to adopt us, wouldn’t she have called us by our correct names? She called her little boys, her own children Andrew and Erik and never mixed them up like she did me and Rain. Sometimes she called me and Rain by each other’s names when she got distracted, which was understandable, I told myself; after all, although I was younger than Rainy, she was so much smaller, and although she was the older sister she talked like a baby. I told myself that it was no wonder Sherry got mixed up—all the time aware she never got Andrew and Erik mixed up, even though they looked almost like twins.
And, really, why would Sherry want to adopt me and Rain when she was always stressed about money and Don was always on her about it? There was hardly anything left over after food and clothes for those girls, he said; they never got to go out because the babysitter charged too much, and who wants to watch four kids, anyway? If we wanted more kids—which we don’t—we would have our own, Don said. If Sherry wanted to save some money, she should just quit smoking, Don said. But don’t go eating up whatever you save just because you quit smoking, he said; don’t be one of those women who get fat, he said. Then he put his mouth right by her ear and reached across her back and under her arm to place a hand on her breast. “Except right here,” he said, and because the boys and Rain were wrestling around on the floor and laughing—which they would do until somebody decided they were hurt and would cry—he didn’t notice that I was listening over the racket.
Don breathed onto Sherry’s ear and the side of her neck. “And if you wanted little Indians maybe you should have married one,” he half-whispered, squeezing her breast. “Like Michael Washington; I bet that girlfriend of his would have pounded the snot out of you if she ever found out.” Sherry pushed Don’s arm away and walked out of the room.
After Sherry quit smoking to try to cut expenses, things got worse. She went on a diet of cheese, apples, milk, and Ry-Krisp but gained five pounds; she cut out cheese and chewed ice cubes when she got too hungry but became a little light-headed and mixed up in the afternoons and so took to calling both of us Azure-Rain, to save on confusion.
The boys, who were toddlers when we moved in, knew us as half of that single entity, Azure-Rain—which is what they learned to call either one of us when they learned to talk.
“No, Azure-Rain,” the smaller boy, Erik, giggled at me when I sat my Barbie doll in the back of his Tonka truck for a ride. “That’s a boy toy.” I made a revving noise, careening the truck around the couch toward Rainy’s feet, causing the boys to laugh uncontrollably.
“Look out, Azure-Rain, Barbie’s gonna get you!” the older boy, Andrew, shouted, both boys collapsing gleefully on the floor as Rain leaped over that crazy dump truck driver, Barbie.
“What are you kids up to?” panted Sherry from the dining room where she was frantically dancing around the table, doing her aerobic exercises to Elton John songs that she played on the stereo with the arm up so that the side she liked better would repeat. The boys explained the magic of Azure-Rain as the creator of the wildly hilarious scenario. “Saturday, Saturday, Saturday night’s all right!” Elton screamed over their laughter.
Sherry turned the volume down. “Those funny girls! Hey, let’s make ants-on-a-log!”
“Mmmmmmmmm,” Sherry inhaled the smell of the peanut butter as we spread it on celery sticks, allowing herself one of the raisins we were lining up, six on each celery stick.
When Don got home from work he kissed Sherry, noogied her head, and squeezed her waist with both hands. “Dropping some of that weight,” he commented approvingly. Hatchet-faced and stressed, she grinned and snarled like a hungry wolf and then started to cry.
I have to say that Sherry tried, but on top of everything else she had going on and no matter that we helped with cooking and watching the boys, we were just too much for her. I knew about some of the other things she had going on too, from listening to her talk with her sister over the phone: Don wasn’t making any money; they needed a new furnace; she couldn’t go to work because the babysitter would cost almost as much as she would make; even if they had an extra dollar, Don spent it going out with his friends; the kids were so wild, and getting cable for the TV would help but they couldn’t afford it; the money from the County for fostering the girls helped but she never, ever got out, and it was so much work; the older one had so much trouble in school and the younger one was either pestering her or so quiet it spooked her.
“Azure-Rain,” she said to me suddenly, “go find something to do. It’s not nice to listen in when somebody’s on the phone.”
“Yes, the older one still wets the bed,” I heard her say as I left the room. “Don thinks I should ask the County for a new washing machine because he says all that extra laundry is probably why ours is falling apart . . . he says if we can’t get some help for all this work, they should just go back to the reservation . . .”
It was sometime during the summer after she went off cigarettes that we could see Sherry was losing heart. Things just added up one by one. When the boys started talking, Rainy began calling Sherry “Mama” just like they did, which made Sherry tell Rain not to call her Mama, just Sherry. Then Rainy asked if she knew where our real mother was.
“I’m not really sure,” Sherry answered.
“Does that mean you know someplace she might be?” I asked. “Is she on the reservation?”
“Can we go see her?” asked Rain.
“Just never mind. It’s snack time; I’m busy.”
Sherry made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and told us we could eat them in front of the TV for a change instead of the kitchen table. I let Rain and the boys sit close to the screen, and when I heard Sherry dialing the phone, I edged back around the doorway in order to hear what she was saying to her sister. She just couldn’t keep up with everything, she said, never got used to having two other kids besides her own. It was more than double the work, and she had to fill out meal reports and clothes vouchers, and the last time the social worker stopped by the house was a terrible mess and she was sure the worker had heard her yelling at us to pick the place up before Don got home. And now the girls were asking about their mother. The County said she had given up her rights, but what if she found out where they were and just showed up at the house?
Sherry’s sister had told her about a trick for quitting smoking: place a little pinch of tobacco in between her toes every morning. The nicotine would in theory get into her bloodstream and keep her from climbing the walls and going crazy. Don told Sherry that was just the kind of thing a lunatic like her sister would say—but what the hell, it might be worth a try. It surprised us all that it seemed to work, and although Sherry complained about putting on weight and that she was getting to be the size of a truck, Don told her he thought she looked better from the front, now that she was growing a bust.
Near the end of the August when I was eight and Rainy nine, Sherry brightened up somewhat at the thought of school starting. She ordered school clothes, even our shoes, from the Penney’s catalog, and then a week before the first day of school she gave all four of us haircuts that she found directions for in a magazine to neaten us up—the boys’ shingled up the back and Rain’s and mine parted in the middle and blunt-cut to bobs at midneck, all with thick heavy bangs down to the eyebrows. The boys’ bangs reminded me of broom bristles; Rain’s bangs covered her eyebrows and brought out the green of her eyes. My hair, as Sherry cut it, sprang into its natural wave, curving under at the ends. I loved it.
When Don got home that day, he asked her if she paid for that or did it herself—they looked like the Beatles.
“Hey, which one of you is Ringo?” he laughed.
Sherry dropped the basket of laundry she had just finished folding onto the floor, opened the storm door, and kicked the basket like a soccer ball out the door onto the porch and down the stairs.
Don told Azure-Rain to go bring that stuff inside. The boys thought it was a game.
“Azure-Rain, look! Look at my new hat!” Andrew twirled on the sidewalk with a pair of Don’s undershorts on his head, waving a tube sock from each hand.
“Dad’s underwear—ish!” Erik giggled, then tossed several balls of rolled-up socks at me; I caught them and placed them in the laundry basket. “Two! Six! Nineteen!” he shouted. “Bases loaded! . . . and sheeeeeee’s out! Azure-Rain is out!”
Azure-Rain caught more socks and contained them in the basket; Azure-Rain gathered the clothes and folded them, except for Don’s underwear—which I sternly told Andrew and Erik we would not touch because that was a job for boys.
“Butt-wear!” They picked up each piece between thumb and forefinger and dropped them into the basket.
“It’s a boy job to carry the basket in the house, too.” I sounded more authoritative than Sherry ever did, and Erik and Andrew cheerfully obeyed, one lifting a handle on each side. Then we went inside to eat one of our favorite suppers—Dinty Moore canned stew over mashed potatoes, with canned corn. Sherry showed Don the back-to-school-haircut article, and he said that he was just joking and that we looked good, as good as the barbershop. I patted my bob and pushed the ends up, feeling the satisfying weight of the curve and catching Sherry’s eye.
“You look like the kids in the magazine,” she said.
“Like school kids, for sure,” said Don.
“I think Azure-Rain is beautiful.” The expression of Erik’s face was dopily smitten; I guess he must have just been wishing for someone to boss him around.
2
I think Rainy really believed we were each a half of one sister, Azure-Rain, and up until third or fourth grade it sometimes seemed that way to me as well: what one of us could do the other couldn’t, and what one couldn’t the other could. Rainy hated to read, yet she understood phonics and could sound out words; I loved to read yet stood dumbly when the teacher asked me to identify and sound out vowels and consonants. Rainy could not comprehend the meanings of sentences, what those strings of words were supposed to mean. I had learned to read by recognizing how words looked before I started kindergarten, yet once in first grade could not recognize those same words broken down into sounds and letters by phonetics. I struggled to learn letter by letter, sound by sound, chasing symbols that to my eyes ran in patterns up and down the page until I broke the code; Rainy never did and gave up. Yet she, the sister who could barely read, broke the numeral code right away, easily mastering addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division until she was tricked, as she saw it, by Miss Fisketti.
Miss Fisketti lied about the remainder.
Rainy had discovered, after explaining to me about the remainder for two entire afternoon walks home after school (“And what’s left over after division is called the remainder! You write it down, right there at the top, a little r and what’s left over and that’s called the remainder, it’s what remains after the problem, is what Miss Fisketti said!”), that the remainder was not really the remainder at all and thus not the end of the problem: it would have to be divided up into fractions or decimal points. After all that work and sequenced following of directions, which never came easily to her, Rainy had been betrayed. And by Miss Fisketti of all people, Miss Fisketti who smelled so nice and wore such pretty clothes.
As I heard it being discussed by the principal and Sherry an hour later, my older younger sister had raised her hand for permission to go to the washroom, communicating to Miss Fisketti the secret sign she had taught the students to indicate the length of time that their bathroom visits would require: across her chest Rain had held up two fingers in a sideways V (indicating a request for a longer stay than the one finger sign). Stuffed down the front of Rainy’s jeans and covered by her sweater were her math worksheets from the beginning of the school year, which the students kept stacked inside their desks for what Miss Fisketti called “the building blocks of arithmetic.” Alone in the girls’ washroom, Rainy had removed one worksheet and then rolled the rest into a thick tube that she stuffed as far as she could into the toilet without getting her hands wet and flushed.
