Frannie, I said.
Frances , Ronnie corrected.
And Mary, I said to Mary beside me, who might have no longer been beside me.
Ronnie and Frannie and Mary, he said rhythmically. It’s like a little song. I’m sorry, he said, putting a hand to his chest, Veronica and Frances and Mary.
Ronnie smirked.
Now, girls, he said. About that itch. He stretched out his right leg. It’s my ankle.
You can scratch it, Ronnie told him.
Can’t reach, he replied, and he made a show of stretching down and not being able to get there.
You can so, she said. Just bend your leg.
Can’t. Too stiff, these old bones. He wrinkled up his face, leaning back.
I scooted forward.
Frannie.
I gave her a look, then turned back and scratched at the slice of pale skin between his sock and pant leg.
Oh, oh, he said, closing his eyes. You’re an expert scratcher, Frannie. You’ve got it. But then he dropped his leg and put up the other. He opened his eyes: Now it’s my other ankle. He shook his foot at Ronnie.
She rolled her eyes and moved forward, scratching at him as one might a stray dog.
Oh oh oh! he said again. Just like your little sis.
And Ronnie gave up a giggle too.
We made a game of it. I itch here! he’d cry and point to his elbow and we’d scratch it. And I itch there! he’d cry and point to his shin and we’d scratch it. I itch here and here and here. We got so worked up, scratching and giggling and tickling, that the whole thing took on a life of its own and started to get away from us, started to bubble over with too much good feeling. But we must not have gotten to a particular itch to his liking, because he dropped his face into a well and said, Scratching around a thing is not the same as scratching a thing. I filled my cheeks and swallowed and felt the bottom of my stomach hollow out. I stood up from the couch, because he looked like a different man just then, a new, older man, and I saw Ronnie stiffen and heard her say, Frances, with her same tone of warning, like, Frannie, stay away from that stove, Frannie, keep your hands inside the car, Frannie, Frances, but nothing about Mary, who was not even there, who was not there and had never been there the whole time, Mary, who was climbing up onto the couch beside the old, deep man.
WHEN I DRINK, I drink too much. My nights get smudged, as water stains bleeding into newsprint. I can hold on to the headline, the lede, but the details—the walk home, all the in-betweens—lose shape somewhere in the middle of the night, and when I wake in the morning my head is a sponge, the rest of my body a mysterious bruise. It tells me something, and that’s usually: there’s more that you don’t know. Somewhere those nights have burned to ash and I no longer own them, if I ever did. It leaves me with a fear so familiar as to need no introduction, just as one can navigate even the most complicated rooms of her home in the dark.
Mary has been going to therapists on and off since high school. Ronnie says that she doesn’t believe in all that, doesn’t know what she’d talk about for an hour with a complete stranger every week. Divorce , I can hear Mary say, then a man older than her writing it down on a pad of yellow paper. Ah, yes, divorce, a puzzle piece, because I’ve seen those looks of recognition too. I’ll be fine and then the furniture in my house shifts. Nothing is where it was before. The bedside lamp and the spider plant start to hide from me. I’ll get dark and darker and then go to talk to one of those older men sitting in a beige armchair, and it’s like I am very precisely describing a dark gray pool of water. Divorce and the man nods and asks me about my week, but we never get to the long shadow I’m pulling behind it.
I call Mary, then Ronnie.
I say, Remember that man at Great-Grandma Bullock’s?
And Mary says, What man?
And Ronnie says, There was never a man up there. That upstairs was creepy, though, she agrees. All those dead bugs. I hear her shiver over the phone. But never a man, she says.
I remember the kitchen, Mary says. You guys would yell at me until I started crying. She is matter-of-fact, not angry, but not happy either. In her story, we are the doers of many wrongs, and they’re the only things she can remember.
When I think of my great-grandmother’s house, I see the things farthest away from me first: the bright rectangle of sunlight coming through the back screen door, her tin of saltines in the hallway pantry, the blue and green living room with the shades pulled down. I see the front screened-in porch, my sisters and me on the tile floor, Grandma on the porch swing, all of us bathed in creamy yellow light. I see the stairs on the other side of the hallway door going up. I see the stairs going up to the second floor and Mary on the couch. Mary on the couch and the man with his hand in her hair and her thumb in her mouth. I see Ronnie’s bare slender arms moving out ahead of her, she saying, Mary. Frannie, go. Go downstairs . I see a dark circle in the light brown carpeting and me in the living room downstairs and Mary on the couch with her head in Grandma’s lap crying, with Grandma looking sad and saying, It’s a hard time for you girls. And I’ve wet myself. I remember I’m eight years old and on the floor and I’ve pissed my pants fully, all the way through, no hiding it, but Grandma hasn’t noticed yet and I’m not saying anything because I’m too old to piss my pants and it is this knowledge— too old—that gets me crying along with Mary, not thinking about my dad sleeping in a different house or my mom and my sisters and me in that big house all by ourselves eating cream of mushroom soup and toast for dinner, and I look to see if Ronnie is crying with us, to see if she’s seen that I’ve pissed myself, to see if I should be feeling what I’m feeling, but she’s not there and her cars aren’t on the floor and I don’t know where she might have gone to. And then the music is changing again on the TV that is turned up too loud and Grandma is saying, Well, shoot, I’ve seen this one before.
After that summer it wouldn’t be a year before Dad would leave the state and stop sending the child support checks, and Mom would move us into an apartment complex behind the grocery store, where I would pine for my old bedroom, while Mary would come to say that she couldn’t remember the old house, couldn’t remember our father in it. Ronnie took to reading books with dark images on the covers—teenage girls in oversized sweaters staring out windows, a look of overblown anxiety on their faces. I’d pick them up when she finished but would stop reading before anything bad could happen.
Mom did her best to keep things good. We’d go to the movies on discount nights, she sneaking in greasy brown bags of popcorn and cans of soda. But once, during a showing of Labyrinth, the manager found her in the dark and asked that the four of us leave. That night at home we’d hear her crying in the bathroom, door shut, Ronnie and Mary and me on the other side. For dinner we ate beans and rice or noodles that looked like hay. Breakfast was oatmeal made with powdered milk, the four of us growing lean and hard, then thin and thinner, our bodies receding to bone, breath quieting to whispers, as though God were trying to erase us.
TOO MUCH A CHILD
THE OLD MAN WOULDN’T STOP talking about the children. The same old man at the bus stop every morning and usually something about the weather and the kinds of jackets people wore because of it (his was large and khaki, many pockets), but now this heavy, heavy talk.
It reminds me of when I was a child, he said, almost wistfully.