twelve
One summer when I was eleven and Tash was fourteen, she and my mom went away for two weeks to work at a Christian camp on an island in the Lake of the Woods. You’ll be able to take care of Dad, won’t you, she asked me. How hard can it be, I said. Yeah, said Ray, throw a piece of meat in the cage every once in a while.
Tash was really excited because it was a boys’ camp. My mom was going to work in the infirmary and Tash was just going to fool around and look hot and drive guys crazy.
That’s when my dad and I developed the alphabet routine that has served us so well since. I started with Alphaghetti and then moved on to Bread and Cake. After that, my dad took us out to the Sunset Diner for a break and because I couldn’t think of a D.
Tash came home from the camp and told me she had had the most amazing romance with a junior counsellor named Mason McClury. God, even that name, she said. He was nuts about her and kept leaving his group of nine-year-olds asleep in their cabin so they could go skinny-dipping together. But, okay, I said. Weren’t you like the only girl on the island that whole summer? She hissed at me and held up her hand like a claw. It reminded me of when we used to play White Fang in the backyard.
She told me that when she and my mom had left the island on the camp boat, Mason had stood on the dock blowing her kisses and then, oh my god it was so sweet, he dove into the water in his clothes and pretended to swim out to the boat because he couldn’t let her go. Did he make it to the boat, I asked. No, obviously not, she said. It had a motor on it. It was a gesture, Nomi. Like, of love. She told me that Mason had promised to write her and that they’d somehow hook up together in the future, when he got off the island at the end of summer.
When fall came around he still hadn’t written and Tash said that he’d probably lost her address, that was so like him, but that he had told her he played basketball for his school team and that he was from a small town and sometimes his team played our boys’ team and so she started going to all the games even though she hated sports and one time his town’s team was there and she asked all these people if they knew Mason McClury and they said no, who’s he? And she sat there for the whole game pretending to cheer for our team and smiling a lot and trying not to cry hot tears of shame. And when she walked home along the highway she thought about what it would feel like to throw herself in front of a livestock truck. She wondered who would miss her, really, and concluded no one. She didn’t tell me any of that, actually. I read it in her diary. I was impressed with hot tears of shame.
After that I tried to be really nice to her and when she went places I’d say why do you have to go or I sure hope you’re coming back, but she wondered what my problem was. And then she burned her diary in this ceremony that indicated the end of her little-girl period and threw the ashes into the Rat River, a properly embittered woman.
Recently, in the top drawer of her dresser, I found a little card and envelope with her name on it. Natasha, my love, “And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire with good things and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” I wish you joy, peace and contentment. My thoughts will be continually with you, and they will be thoughts of love and goodwill. I will picture you in safety and beauty. Mom.
Puzzling. Had Trudie known all along that Tash would one day leave? Or had Trudie been fooling around with the idea of leaving herself and then stashed this card into Tash’s dresser. If so, where was my card? But also, Tash left months before my mom did which would mean…I don’t know. Either my mom was saying goodbye to Tash, knowing she was on her way out of town, and Tash either didn’t find the card before she left or found it and forgot it OR my mom was saying goodbye to Tash long before she herself actually left. A dress rehearsal. Before she had the guts to really leave? Before she felt she had to leave for Ray’s sake? It’s raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.
Travis is putting blinds up today for his dad. We sat in his dad’s work truck on my driveway and he told me that I should go on the Pill. I thought yeah, probably. Good idea. Travis had quit school to work for his dad and learn things on his own. He had just turned eighteen. I liked to tell him things that reinforced his idea that school was ridiculous.
I told him that my English teacher didn’t know what a codpiece was. He called them grossly enlarged sex organs. Codpieces were the height of fashion in Shakespeare’s time, said Travis. He says height of fashion in a way that bugs me. I told him that my biology teacher, while teaching us about the reproductive system, pointed at the penis on the overhead and mumbled er, no function. Simians, said Travis. I made a mental note to look up codpiece and simian in the dictionary when I got home. Then off he went to hang blinds. I had to go to a farmer’s field with my history class and pick rocks. It was supposed to help us appreciate how excellent our current lives were.
In the field a few of us spelled out SOS with the rocks although nothing but a crop-duster flew over us and we almost died choking on the poison. It was so hot our eyes dried out to the horrific extent that we couldn’t blink and Mr. Quiring had to open up the first aid kit for drops.
I found a note blowing around the field that had been torn in half, right down the middle. It said: I’m sittin in I want to get drunk but I have no flo’? kid here at S.H. that name’s Andrew. I ugly but the point are bitching that guys. So one day you with some sexy off, ha ha. Well shit face, me and Sherise ways I guess I’m just my sister for a while if you forgot my pants hope you won’t ght you should ditch you could do so much She always a bitch, you don’t do what erv, walking around She’s gonna trap your thing!! I’m just biz, I’m your gurl here or not. I’ll always playboy. Your gurl!
A couple of us looked around for the other half but the wind must have blown it to another town. I knew exactly what your gurl was talking about because I also only ever said half of what I meant and only half of that made any sense, which is, I admit, a generous appraisal of my communication skills.
I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don’t know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.
When we got back to school our principal told us he had cancelled the Queen City Kids from playing in our cafeteria on the last day of school because a number of large parents had complained about the negative ramifications. Instead, we were given tablets that turned our mouths pink to indicate cavities. Hard to keep up with the changes around here.
After school I went home and had a nap. When I woke up I discovered bite marks on my arm. I bit my arm, experimentally, and the patterns matched. I wondered if this was the beginning of insanity. My Christina’s World poster fell on my head again because Ray disapproved of tacks in the wall. I got pink shit from my mouth all over my Noah’s Ark pillowcase. I thought to myself: The world can be divided into two types of people. That’s where I stopped. Travis had suggested I broaden my horizons and attempt to finish my thoughts. He said I should make a list of ways to improve. Oh that’ll help, I thought.
1. Topics chosen for conversations: To be filled in later.
2. Plan of action: Read books by philosophers (The Outsider by Albert Camus).