His father has never raised a hand to him, nor his voice. Once, only once, he lost his temper, and ran after Stub to punish him. But Stub ran faster and his father, a heavy smoker, stopped in his tracks, panting, empty of anger, sucking on air and laughing. Then they were both flat on their backs laughing together. Rolling around on the grass like caterpillars, said Stub.
It never occurs to Stub that his father does not know that sometimes his mother shakes him so violently his teeth rattle like marbles and his heart thrashes like a fish in a bowl of ink. That there is a bad mother, a good mother — like a planet and its moon spinning together, rising and falling, the one eclipsing the other. He knows his father will never purposefully hurt him, knows this in his bones, and then there is this other thing: the family. The shape, whole and good, they make together. Whole and good but also bad, a world of shadows, danger at its heart.
Always his father comes home late, and even if Stub is fast asleep, he strides into his room easily, islands and oceans falling away, he might as well be levitating, floats to the bed, kisses Stub on the cheek. This kiss floods the moment with promises Stub knows his father intends to keep.
Once his mother said to him: You sleep with your mouth open, your hands crossed over your chest like a corpse! He sleeps like a corpse stiff as a snake in rigor mortis.
Sometimes when she turns on the radio to hear her own voice he resents it.
Sometimes when the snow falls she says: How I love weather. And he loves her for it. Loves her so much his heart blooms like a tiger lily and he roars his happiness; he roars and runs about and his pleasure delights her. In these moments their friendship is secure, eternal, luminous; their friendship rings the hours. These words of hers give him hope; he, too, loves weather, the safety of seasons, each bringing a gift: snow, rain, sun, wind. But because he is a dreamy child, fall is his favorite. Perhaps it reflects the best moments of family life: days of color, of clement weather — and this before the first mornings of heavy fog; the first blizzard when the sky is wiped away and the sun dissolves in brine; the first ice storm, one of many, when he can hear the world outside shattering.
If he looks like a corpse when he sleeps, does this mean he will die in his sleep? Sometimes he pokes his gums with a pencil to make them hurt, to make them bleed.
Someone is coming to live with them. This way he will never be alone again in the evenings. When the bus brings him home, Jenny will be there to look after him. She was living in the madhouse, the one off the highway just a few miles away. The madhouse where people who are on their way to health and feeling better sit on the front porch in rocking chairs watching the cars go by. He has seen them rocking back and forth. Perhaps he has seen Jenny on the porch from the school bus window, rocking and sniffling and thinking, or chewing gum or smoking. Is she thick, ugly, and sad? He once saw a lady who had hair like dead mice glued to her head. And another one, all nerve and bone (his mother’s words) with a great red nose sticking out of her face like a swollen toe. No, says his mother. Jenny is pretty, thin as a pencil with hair like yellow string. Tonight when his father comes home he will bring Jenny with him. She will live in the spare room. She will stay in the spare room, not wander, except when invited elsewhere, such as the kitchen, or when they are alone together, playing in his room. And she will cook for him. During the day when he is at school, Jenny will be at work washing dishes. He wonders if she will make sandwiches. She will. And macaroni. Meatloaf. All the things he likes. Will she tell him stories? She will. Where does she go to wash dishes? Annie’s. Up the way. Jenny likes to put her hands into hot soapy water. Soapy water is what she likes better than anything. When she comes to live with them, she will wash her hands over and over and Stub will fall asleep to the sound. Jenny’s hands thick with suds like sheep’s wool; he will lie in bed listening. Clocks will dissolve and the passage of time will take on the shape of a heart. Stub will think: That is the sound of sweet Jenny washing her hands. She is on the mend but she is still crazy, sort of. And this is how we know: the suds filling the sink night after night like lambs.
Here is how Stub dreams of Jenny:
He dreams that she is shearing wool and that the wool accumulates around her in drifts like snow. When his mother’s voice hatchets into the room and he awakens, he knows that he has glimpsed something both true and mysterious.
He dreams again. Of Jenny standing in the foam of the ocean; it froths like boiling milk. She has a cup in her hand made of silver; it’s Stub’s cup, the one he had as a baby. Jenny dips it into the foaming sea and offers it to him. It tastes like milk sweetened with honey. When Stub awakens, every hour of that day is diaphanous.
One afternoon when Stub has returned from school and the orange bus has vanished behind the hill, and he is in the kitchen with Jenny eating gingersnaps, he hears his mother’s voice on the radio and puts his hands over his ears. We can turn it off, Jenny says, and she does. The delicious aroma of subversion fills the room, and Stub radiates within a cool plume of light. How easy, he realizes, to shut the box off! That day something happens that greatly matters, something good but also dangerous. And funny. When Jenny turns the knob and he laughs out loud, she joins in.
Later she asks to see the book he loves best. He brings her Little Black Sambo Lost at Sea. A beautiful book packed with pictures and thick, black letters. Jenny loves letters. She says that when they collide into one another they are like animals that change shape before your eyes. They leave tracks across the page. They are round, soft, thorny; they have edges. The letters come together, she whispers right into his ear, in order to delight, to derange us. They come together, they hold hands, they caress, they bruise one another, they force the soul down deeper, they make us thirsty for unimaginable things, they shake their limbs and dance, the page is their stage, they make music, see: that h looks like a harp.
“Is it true,” Stub whispers into her ear, “that they burned a hole into your head?”
“Yes.” She whispers back. “There was an intruder, a poet, I think, sitting inside my head on her very own chair! So. . someone thought to. . someone thought to. . look!” And she points to another letter, like a person, wanting to say hello.
Little Black Sambo is sitting on a big box of oranges floating in the middle of the sea. “O!” he says. “Good thing I’m sitting on this box of oranges!” If you close your eyes, Jenny says, leaning closer, and think about that letter O, you can smell the rind and see the seeds inside. The box is tied with string, which is why it has an X. And see the nice, mouthy O in the middle. Big enough to swallow an orange. Skin and all. A good word, box. It has so much room inside.
When in the mornings the school bus comes, Jenny is there to say good-bye. She squeezes his hand; hers is long and cool and friendly. Her fingers are very clean, cleaner than anyone else’s. And soft. They smell of almonds. Her eyes are green and strange, flecked with gold dust and cacao. Her hair floats around her face like yellow string, just as his mother said. Jenny is beautiful, dressed for work in sneakers and a gray cotton dress. She wears a brown wool cardigan because the day is nippy. She says: When you get back I’ll be here. To be here always is my intention.