Rise: How a House Built a Family(11)
I ripped out a piece of Hope’s notebook paper and handed it to Jada with a bottle of glue. “We’ll have to clear this away for our feast tomorrow. Anything you want to keep will have to be glued to something mobile,” I said.
She nodded, silent and no doubt imagining scenes I didn’t want to see. She made globby white lines and began moving her stick person to the paper. I found scissors in the kitchen and gave them to her with a floral paper towel that would make more fashionable dresses than the plain white napkin I’d started her out with.
Drew began gluing the stick house together in an exact replica of our plan while I stacked firewood into a crude newspaper-filled pyramid in the fireplace and lit it. I had the impression we were in for a long, sleepless night. The fact that we were about to load up on peanut-butter ice cream and brownies with fudge swirls would barely contribute to the insomnia, but we would all blame it on that in the morning.
Honesty was a skill we’d all have to work to master. It was as big a challenge as banishing the ghosts.
–4–
Fall
What I Learned in First Grade
It takes years to build a mind-set of defeat. Girls are at a higher risk with lower pay, lesser jobs, and even many gods declaring them a step or two lower than their male counterparts. But if you toss a few bullies in the mix, anyone can declare themselves powerless.
My brother and I grew up swinging wildly from the branches of young pines on forty acres in rural Wisconsin. John was three years older than me, so he was allowed to do more things. But he was never a match for kids his own age, always a step or two behind in strength, lessons, and social behavior.
None of that mattered to me before I joined him at elementary school, though. We were Tarzan and Jane with our black poodle mix, Snoopy, running along the forest floor beneath us. Forty acres was Mom and Dad’s claim, but—land titles be damned—John and I staked out hundreds of country acres as our personal playground.
For practical and survival reasons, our most prized possessions were matching pocketknives. Dad had melted our names into the fake bone handles in crooked cursive. With these sharp little marvels we whittled spear tips, sawed ropes, and dug animal traps. And when the blades bent sideways, we hammered them flat on the anvil behind the garage. Occasionally, when our adventure demanded a larger blade, John snuck a rusty hatchet into our afternoon picnic satchel.
On the surface, it was an idyllic life start. But like passengers on the Titanic, I learned that the surface view can be a bitch of a liar.
The year I turned six I stole a book titled Make It Yourself from Mom’s book-club mailing. I expected my pocketknife to be the only tool needed to make the sweaters and turquoise afghan on the cover, so I was disappointed to learn about knitting needles and crochet hooks. I found a ball of white cotton string Dad used to mark vegetable rows in the garden. Then I eventually created makeshift knitting needles out of long, skinny paintbrushes and hid in the basement with them, terrified that I’d be caught while I followed the step-by-step pictures. I’d never seen a six-year-old knitting. I’d never seen anyone knitting. But in cartoons it was for wise old women in rocking chairs. Like staying up late to watch horror movies or drinking beer, knitting was not for children.
John caught me knitting and told Mom, who immediately bought me a set of emerald-green knitting needles and gave me a ball of orange yarn that had been her mother’s. A skinny child with knitting needles turns invisible in the shadowed corners of a room, so I spent a lot of time listening and thinking that fall of my first-grade year.
My grandma Laura, Mom’s mama, had just died, and our family dynamics had shifted. Mom was sad in an aching sort of way that I could see even when her back was to me. Her head was lower, curtaining her brown eyes with her long dark hair, and her shoulders slumped; but it was more than that, more than just the heaviness of grief pushing down. As she canned tomatoes that autumn over the old gas stove, every lift of her arm, every step from the stove to the sink was lighter, as though she were growing transparent and would soon float away to wherever her mama had gone.
From the dining-room table I kept watch through my clicking emerald needles, careful not to drop a stitch. The way the string looped, tied, and held everything together was soothing. I believed that if I could tie enough knots it would hold us all together.
First grade had put me in the same school as my brother, and that changed everything. It taught me to hide, to stay quiet, and it taught me to hate. Not the gentle you’re-not-my-friend hate of finicky first graders, but the real, vehement thing, ugly, dark, and lasting. The fullness of hate took me by surprise, since my mom was a fanatically religious woman who drove me to church three times a week and carried her Bible into the grocery store and on walks down deserted country roads. “You have to forgive no matter what,” she told me, “or you’ll burn in hell.”
Burning in hell sounded a lot less pleasant than snuggling up in front of our fireplace, but I couldn’t fully subscribe to the idea that my hate was wrong. Mom said even if the truck that had hit my brother and almost killed him that year would have actually taken him from us, she would have forgiven the man who was driving. God commanded that. I tried to be as light and good as she was and believe that suffering was all for a bigger purpose, for some plan, but I wanted a more immediate answer.
As luck would have it, Dad was an atheist. This was really convenient whenever I wanted to subscribe to an alternative view, but less than pleasant for the enormous weight of tension and disagreement between my polar-opposite parents. My childhood self most resembled a tightrope walker dodging projectiles. Every spoken word was up for debate, every activity; even my thoughts had to be weighed and weeded to a middle ground that I hoped might be acceptable to both. The atmosphere turned me into a listener, a thinker, and a careful negotiator.