The White Door

The bathroom door is a painted white barrier behind which lie all mysteries, all secrets, all truth, the past, the future, selfishness and its apotheosis, mother love and singular suffering.  She waits, just far enough back from the door to allow the child a halo of privacy in which to lose his breakfast.  This is a carefully judged distance; for a fifth grader you had to be close enough to offer the cool cloth, the comforting touch, but far enough away to imply that vomiting is something he can accomplish by himself.  Silence from the other side of the door.  It is already eight, and in another three minutes he’ll be late for school.

Throwing up. Taken individually these two words seem like a party of a poem, about spring, perhaps, and baseball, and the challenge of tossing a ball straight up. Straight up into the blue. Can anyone do that? Or is an angle required for throwing? A gun can shoot straight up, certainly, engineering helping out against the laws of physics. Matilda, standing outside the bathroom door and thinking of guns.  This is a bad idea.

 She hates vomiting and will do anything to avoid it. Last spring, when they all thought Joe had a double round of the stomach flu, she fasted for almost two weeks, limiting herself to foods that she wouldn’t mind seeing again. When the boys were toddlers she used to stop eating as soon as the first one threw up, and then wait for the virus to circle like a carousel through the house, all three children heaving within hours, looking at each other, smelling each other and heaving again. Her husband, Tom, would go in the bathroom, toss it up, and get right back to the work of the day, painting or mowing the lawn. Even Joe is stoic about it now, behind the bathroom door. He’d eaten his breakfast knowing it would make him throw up –- his growing hunger outweighing the consequences of eating. The only thing worse than vomiting is waiting to vomit.  He stands by the toilet or sits there when he is too tired to stand, resting his back against the bathtub and staring at the basket of catalogues and cooking magazines. He waits for a half an hour to throw up, never sure if it will come. Tea, water, juice, Pedialyte, chamomile, ginger, oriental remedies, licorice root, and Kool Aid only make it worse.  Seven Up is the standby and now they have cans of it sitting everywhere, gleaming emerald icons in every room, and all the teenagers are warned to save the Seven Up for Joe.

When she vomits, she reverts entirely to some infantile version of herself.  She retchs and weeps and retchs and feels sorry for herself and fears death; mops her face and blubbers into the wet washcloth.  The terror of that moment, of losing everything in the bathroom, was reason enough to forgo the drinking binges of her early twenties, and is still reason enough to fast through the virus season.  Now, however, she’d trade places with the child in the bathroom in a maternal instant.

“Are you okay in there?”  Pause. 

“I think I’m going to throw up, but I can’t.” He sounds like no one she knows. He speaks like an old man. Not even afraid, just hopeless.  Too many doctors. Too many tests.   Every test is an assault, and every tentative diagnosis a tangible threat of new distress.

Is it a parasite? No problem. Too much swimming in Idaho hot springs last summer. Easy to cure.  Oh. No, not a parasite.  A bacterial infection? Maybe from the water at the beach? No, he was already vomiting when they got to the beach.  Check anyway.  Try a round of antibiotics. Maybe another, just in case. White count almost normal. No, apparently not an infection.

Was it cancer? Oh God, please not that. No, not cancer. Oh, thank you God, it isn’t that.

Is it an ulcer? Not so bad, we can deal with that. No not an ulcer either. Perhaps its cystic fibrosis. She doesn’t even know exactly what that is. Doesn’t it involve breathing problems? They test for that by wrapping his tender white arm in a wet towel and giving him electric shocks and then measuring his sweat for some chemical or other.  No. Test negative.  That was such an awful idea for a test that even Joe had to laugh.  What will they think of next? His dad says that somewhere there is a room full of Ninja Turtle mad-doctors thinking up outrageous tests for Joe Green.  Comfort him with pizza, and never mind that it will make a quick round trip.

Now, on Monday morning, the decision about missing another day of school looms large. The teachers are beginning to wonder what is going on with this family. All the cushy normalness of the Greens has so quickly evaporated. All her volunteer work, reading “A Christmas Carol,” and giving essay-writing workshops.  All Tom’s building of carnival booths. All the good report cards. The new teachers this year don’t know Joe. To them he is just odd and absent. He is now a problem child of a problem family.

The doctor has written a letter excusing him from school indefinitely, so the school staff can’t act directly to punish him. Instead they gossip, and make snide comments, and don’t discourage the kids who tease him.  His old teachers stick up for him. They remember the old Joe, once nicknamed “the little professor” because he liked homework and would copy out endless sheets of of sour-smelling mimeographed exercises for reading and writing. “Smart as a whip and stubborn as a mule,” said his second grade teacher, an ex-truck driver. Exactly.

The old teachers know Joe is upright with a Joseph brand of uprightness that always shines around him. He has only lied once in his short life, when he told his mother that he’d tamed a pet squirrel on his way home from Kindergarten and that it ate from his hand every day. He had stuck by that story for a whole week. Still, even those who knew him were starting to look at Joe’s mother more closely. Is there something a little off about her? They gossiped about how he wasn’t the first one to miss a lot of school. Her other children had similar problems in the past. Last year Joe’s older brothers both had health problems. The oldest, Vance, had missed a month of sixth grade for some vague fatigue-related illness that was finally diagnosed at Children’s Hospital as an “unknown pain syndrome.” A fishy story. 

Now each time he comes in late in the morning, after his hour at the toilet, the new teacher makes comments when Joe passes her in the echoing corridors. “I wish I could sleep in every morning. Must be nice.”

Joe didn’t want to tell his mother this. He knows she’s tired, wants to spare her a new fight. It’s just another blow. He takes them well. It is his job. But Matilda is a hard one to keep secrets from; usually she intuits a problem before the kids get around to speaking it out.  Some part of him is glad to know that this teacher will have to face his Mother down. It is a fate the brothers would wish only on their worst enemy.  Matilda had started with the principal, acting calm and reasonable and angry. She referred to the letter from the doctor. “I understand that this is frustrating for his teachers, it is a big inconvenience and I know they are already overworked. And I understand their concern about a kid with a mysterious disease. I even understand that suspicion naturally falls on the parents. But at this point we have a letter from the doctor and in any case this teacher has no business taking it out on Joe or making his attempts to come to school any more difficult.”

 The principal is young and shocked.  She offers to sit in on the next conference.  Sure enough the teacher in question can not keep from making snide remarks, even with the principal in the room. The woman revealed her malevolence so blatantly that no epic battle was necessary after all. In the hallway in principal apologized. “I’ll move him to a different classroom today. I’ll have a word with her.” The young woman’s face was pink with fury. “She will be directed not to talk to Joe again and to keep her opinions to herself.”

Matilda had won one small battle. But she cannot help Joe with the isolation he feels at school, the feeling of being doubted, the knowledge that the adults in charge were gossiping about him over their coffee breaks, talking about his mother and making remarks behind his back. 

Joe opens the door of the bathroom at last.  “You can stay home, Joe,” she offers. “You don’t have to go.”

“Yes I do.  My report is due today. We have a math test.” His face is flushed, his mouth set at a familiar stubborn angle. She sighs and goes to warm up the car.  Stubborn and brave.  In front of the school they sit together for a moment watching the flag whip in the damp breeze. He wipes his mouth.  Then he shoulders his backpack, and turns away, plodding heavily and oh-so-slowly across the sidewalk.  She longs to run after him, even grabs the door handle, but catches herself in time and sits on her hands.  It won’t do any good to knock some more heads. She needs to leave him alone for the day. The wind tosses the tree limbs, making a blurred etching on the rice paper sky. Only a few leaves are left after Halloween. She thinks of painting smudges under his eyes for his Frankenstein costume, the purple make-up covering real smudges of faded violet under his eyes.  Her hands go to sleep tucked under her thighs.

She watches him disappear into the building and looks for clues to what is happening to them.  Despite hardly eating for two months, he still looks chubby. How can that be? Really, looking back now she can see that this chubbiness was the first sign of something wrong.  She knew, had known for a year, that it wasn’t normal for a kid to run all day long, and still be getting chubbier and chubbier.   His brothers, though normally active, are far more sedate than Joe and less likely to eat a decent diet.  Joe will ask for salad and suggest recipes with odd vegetables. Vance, her oldest can spend the whole day eating chips and frozen pizza and reading car magazines, and is still skinny like all the men in the family. Sam, the middle son, is as slim as the flute he plays and as finicky. Given his druthers he’d sleep all day long and never leaving the house except hunt for new bugs in the fields or rent another video game. It has always been Joe with the endless energy. Joe dashing through the house with Alex from next door. The two of them used to keep a running check every night between their two houses, a scheme to determine which family had the most appealing dinner plan -– chicken and dumplings from Joe’s mom, Thai-glazed seitan from Alex’s.  As often as not, the boys ate dinner twice.

Joe is addicted to ball games. He has always driven her crazy with a constant bouncing accompaniment striking the hours and her last nerve -- rubber balls bouncing off freshly painted walls; gooey balls that stuck to the ceiling for long seconds before pealing off with a satisfying slurp, leaving indelible brown stains; rhythmic basketballs and their constant bound, bound, bound; soccer balls invariably appearing out of nowhere to bounce off her ankles as she stirs something hot on the stove; baseballs rolling down the street to the park, and the arguments as the little boys made the big ones go down the street to get them back; tennis balls hitting the side of the house and driving the dogs mad; street ball played with a ruffian crowd;  hilarious hackysacks. Joe, always moving his feet and always hungry. That had been his hallmark. 

He was the last child who should have a weight problem. She’d even mentioned it to the pediatrician last year. He hadn’t been concerned. “Kids just grow at different rates. If he’s that active he’ll get a growth spurt and be fine.”

“But is it normal for him to be so hungry all the time? I mean really, its extreme.” Over-anxious mother.  One more of the mother labels to avoid.

Pediatricians see so many normal kids. That’s the problem. “He’s probably hungry because he’s about to grow. Just be thankful he likes to eat vegetables. He’s a great kid, aren’t you, buddy?” Joe had grinned up at him, his square little jaw strong even through the prepubescent roundness. Now he just stared at the doctors and no longer found their false jollity convincing. In fact he now found it insulting.  For the new doctors were beginning to act like there was a psychological basis for his nausea, especially lately as the actual vomiting became less frequent.

Some doctors had begun to look at the Mother. After that ghost movie. more people know about Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy than about the dozens of more common diseases.  And, as for rare diseases, well forget about it.  Munchausen’s is now a staple on C.S.I., E.R., and Law and Order.  The sicker Joe becomes the more Law and Order they watch together.  They joke that you can tell the mood in the house by whether it is a one-Law and Order, a two-Law and Order, or a three-Law and Order day.  When Munchausen’s comes on they look at each other. “Would you like a poop milkshake, son?” she asks. 

“Uh, not right now. Maybe later.”

 She often reflects on the mystery of Munchausen and the way it has come to haunt her life.  Many of the symptoms of Munchausen’s are identical to the assets of a committed mother of a sick child.  The internet is full of horror stories of mothers with injunctions that had kept them from seeing their sick children. Later doctors find that the child has a rare disease. Of course, she thinks, maybe these are written by mothers with Munchausens, you can’t know. But on T.V. the mother is always guilty.  Matilda and Joe keep waiting for a show where the kid turns out to be sick, but they haven’t seen one yet.

Mother’s of sick children do have a lot of the symptoms of mothers with Munchausen’s. Yes, you know a lot about different diseases. Yes, you ask for help from doctors, learn medical terminology and suggest treatment options. Yes, you keep trying and travel to different doctors if you don’t get answers.  Yes, you develop a peculiar connection with the child who depends on you for everything. Yes, you become each other’s reality when outsiders don’t believe or understand.  Studies have shown that mothers of children with muscular dystrophy are twice as likely as the rest of the population to be taking antidepressants. A huge controversy rages between the irate mothers who say chronic illness causes parental stress (well, obviously) and the renegade doctors who ran the study and propose a link between mental illness in a parent and muscular dystrophy as a childhood disease.  Articles like this make her contemplate the blue veins in her wrists. They make her remember her dreams. Dreams of her own mother. Dreams of bathroom doors.

Still, the mechanics of poisoning a child remain mysterious. She reflects that if a person wanted to become a successful Munchausen’s mom, they’d have to start early. Because by first grade you can’t make them wear a Hawaiian swim suit or eat avocado.  Poop smoothies are completely out of the question. 

She can’t blame the doctors and teachers.  They are right to feel protective of the innocent.  The screaming moms on T.V. don’t ring true to her either, crying, and protesting righteously when their kids are taken away to an isolation ward. A real mom would be willing to do whatever is necessary.  Still, she doesn’t want to imagine her son alone in the hospital. Would they let his brothers visit? Or would those elegantly awkward adolescents be under suspicion too?  Could a grandparent or a family friend come to sit with a little boy in a big bed? It would be clear that she wasn’t guilty when he still vomits.  He will vomit even more when you take him off of his current diet, the low-vomit diet she has worked out, of crisp fried potato pancakes and Seven-Up.  

On the other hand, it is hard on any child to have the doctors narrow their eyes when they speak to his mother, harder when they raise their educated voices or are downright rude.  On the other hand, deep down there is a worry that when he is separated from her he will get well.  Perhaps she is making him sick.  Perhaps she has done everything wrong.  Maybe it is something in the Seven Up. Maybe she should feed him a normal diet and just let him throw up. One doctor insisted loudly and in front of Joe that she should do just that. Or maybe they’ll take him away and he’ll have a spontaneous recovery and everyone will believe she’s quite mad. Her great grandmother, also named Matilda, died after thirty years in an insane asylum in Pendleton, Oregon.  No one knows why.  It is a family secret, now impenetrable.  Matilda fears the same fate. Perhaps her hold on sanity is more fragile than that of the ordinary pedestrian. 

She decided after the last colonoscopy down in Little Rock that they would allow any kind of testing or separation if the Munchausen’s diagnosis was ever mentioned.  Take him away and see what goes in and out of his  body and just tell us why!  It would be worth anything to know. 

She calls down blessings on their main pediatrician. For whatever reason, perhaps having seen her in and out with the other boys -- the way they all tease her, call her Mumsical, and are perpetually disrespectful, Dr. Smith believes Joe is just plain sick. Not shirking school, not sick from some ugly psychological torment at home or elsewhere, not suffering child-molestation, or keeping a terrible secret that makes him nauseated. Last week Dr. Smith had asked Joe directly: “Has anything bad happened to you? Anyone one hurt you.”  She had doubted it, since Joe has his brothers or his friend Alex with him every minute, but it was worth a shot to ask.  Bad things do happen to children,

“No,” Joe said and rolled his eyes. Heard it all before.

“Are you feeling upset or stressed? Are you afraid of anything? You can tell us if something bad has happened to you.” The doctor pressed on, kind, reassuring, confident. He asked in just the right way.  Silence. They all wait.  Joe is about to say something and it feels as if the information, the answer, is about to materialize. 

“Yes.”  They all lean in.  “I’m scared because I’m sick.... I’m sick all the time.” 

At home they wait for a call from the doctor about any one of the most recent tests. Joe lies on the couch in the yellow lamplight and the shadows of a vicious Alien flash across his face. He is  watching the third rented movie of the day. She looks and him and knows that he’s dying.

Then she accuses herself of an inflated sense of destiny, a predilection for self dramatization.  Still, it is obvious that somehow the food she gives him is poisoning him. Every time he eats he gets sicker. The more balanced and healthy the portions, the sicker he gets.

They sit together for long hours, sipping Seven Up and watching the Thirteenth Warrior.  He wants to watch it again and again.  Something about the Beowolf story feeds them; something about  the  monster that winds down the mountain in an endless flaming snake, something about the mystery, something about the power of the unknown.  Without speaking he hits the rewind button at the point where the body of the Viking king is set upon the river. The warriors lift a girl. She rises like a white tower in their arms as they chant their divinity,   

Lo, there do I see my father.
Lo, there do I see my mother.
Lo, there do I see my sisters
  and my brothers.
I see the line of my people
  back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me to take my place
  in the halls of Valhalla
  where the brave may live forever.

The dusk sinks blue around the flames, flames so bright they can hardly look at them even on film. Later, she finds that this is a documented ancient prayer, and the historian in her is relieved.  This song remains after a thousand years, and they both recognized it even through the film glaze of the movies. They feel its hard truth and strange comfort. They watch it again, the flames, the river, the ship, the sacrifice, “Lo, there do I see . . .”

The family waits for the phone to ring. Even the neighbor kids grow quiet and watch her spring for the phone. They wait for something to turn up.  No one knows whether to hope for or against a diagnosis. They try to imagine diseases they wouldn’t mind having. Or maybe having even a bad disease is better than not knowing. At least the doubt and the gossip would be gone and Joe could receive some support

 It is obvious to the family and to Joe himself that he throws up less often because he has quit eating.  He talks about his hunger all the time. Hunger dominates his day. At this point only apples and potatoes and hard candy don’t make him vomit. This is what he eats.  And the nausea remains, but the vomiting of the last three months has subsided.  Joe is hungry and articulate. 

It is a strange combination, hunger and nausea.  They go to another hospital to drink barium and get x-rays.  He doesn’t want to go. It is early in the morning and his face is green, his eyes shadowed, his courage disturbing.  She puts one foot delicately in front of the other.  Cement sidewalk, fall leaves, grey hospital tiles. “Why do hospitals smell funny?” Good question, honey.

“Well they have to clean really well so that no germs can live around sick people. And the cleaner smells so strong that you can’t get rid of the smell.  You know, like when we bleach the toilet and the whole bathroom smells.”

“No.”

“Hmm. Well I guess I need to clean the bathrooms more often. I’ll put it on my list.” Good mothers clean the bathrooms.  The sons of good mothers are familiar with the smell of bleach and Lysol and pine-scented cleaners. Perhaps she has been lazy and let some terrible germ into their world.

Inside the clinic the x-ray room is very cold.  They shiver in their tee shirts. The technician steps into the room and everyone breaks into smiles.  It is the mother of one of his friends from school.

“Wow, it is great to see a friendly face in here,” she says. “This should make it all easier.”

Somehow the woman manages to smile warmly at the boy and coolly at Matilda. “Come on Joe, let’s mix up this drink. You can stir it up.” The doctor, slim and regal in her white coat and warm turtleneck, explains the procedure to him, the barium, the photography, the machines.  “Okay kiddo, drink this and I’ll be back in 15 minutes to take some pictures.”

Matilda thanks her profusely. Too profusely.

It is not surprising that Joe can’t get the barium down.  The room swims, he breaks into a cold sweat, his skin is green-gold.  Can’t anyone see he needs help? She begins to panic. “We need a bathroom, quick!” The nurse barely looks up.

They find the bathroom.  Like all hospital bathrooms it is large and cold. There are aluminum bars in unlikely but useful places. It smells so clean that she can think of nothing but bacteria and contamination. Joe leans over the toilet and won’t let her leave the bathroom, his fingers digging into her arm. What will they think, seeing she has gone into the bathroom with him? That is a definite sign of being overprotective.  He retches twice but nothing comes up. Of course nothing comes up, his stomach is empty except for three tablespoons of barium. 

“Come on sweetheart. Just drink it down.  Two big drinks and it will be over. We can go home. I’ll buy you a milkshake.”

“I don’t want a milkshake. I’m hungry. I’m starving.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll stop and get you a hamburger. Anywhere you want. Whatever you want. We’ll go home and see if there is a Law and Order rerun on.”

He takes another drink. Throws his head back and tries again. Then he is coughing and choking and retching again.  Tears leak from his eyes and he brushes them away quickly so his friend’s mother won't see evidence that he has cried. He tries again. Breathes deeply, heaving over the icy toilet.

“I can’t stand it.” This is her silent scream, but it echoes with other silent screams and is lost in the hospital ether.  She wipes her own tears away when he isn’t looking. Still nothing comes up.  She can’t help but think that now they won’t believe how sick he is, not if they can’t see the vomit. Can’t someone come and watch him suffer? She knows he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this. He hides it from everyone. And then they think she lies when she describes his symptoms. She has told him not to be so brave; she has delicately approached the problem of unbelief.  He understands. He feels the doubt, but it just makes it harder for him to show his weakness. 

They emerge from the bathroom to an empty waiting room.  “He can’t drink it all. What should I do?” she asks the nurse. 

A shrug. “Just keep trying.”

 Oh thanks. Thanks a lot. She goes on trying to cajole him. Just a few more sips. Then the Doctor is back. A big smile. “How are we doing?”

 “Joe is extremely sick to his stomach this morning. He’s having a little trouble getting it all down.” The doctor’s smile fades.

She looks sternly at Joe.  They remember that she has told her son that Joe should not be missing school. Suddenly they see that she is eager to get a look at these x-rays.

 “Joe, you have to do what needs to be done. Drink it up.”

It feels like a betrayal when Matilda says “Come on, honey. Two big gulps.” He looks at her. He tries. He gags. Again. He gags again. Now they will see how sick he is. Now they will see his sweaty bleached face.

 “Come on Joe.” The doctor’s face seems far away. “You are a big strong boy.”

She wishes he’d vomit all over the doctor’s gleaming white coat. She wishes he could vomit. She wishes he could drink it. She wishes they were home on the couch watching Law and Order. Joe looks at her and she thinks he is wishing the very same things. At last the chalky stuff is gone.

Now to the x-rays. She stands across the room in her lead apron as if she will have more babies. The doctor uses this opportunity to chat with Joe.

“What’s going on, Joe?  I hear you’ve been sick.”

 “I’m sick to my stomach.”

 “Do you throw up?”

“Not anymore.”

“Anything else?” she probes. “Turn to the side.”

He is silent. “I’m tired. Really, really, tired.”

 “You need to get outside. Go for a hike. Get back to school and you’ll feel better.” The doctor shoots a look towards Mom. Joe shoots a look too.

“Joe loves school. He hates missing days.” Matilda tries to find a still space as she speaks. There are no still places.

“Are you nauseated right now?”

Joe hopes the truth will set him free. “Yes. But not as bad as in the bathroom.”

“Oh, come on. The barium’s not that bad. Hold your breath.” They hold their breaths.

 “It’s not that,” he says after the machine has made its strange rotation. “I’m just nauseated all the time. Sometimes its better for awhile and then it gets worse. And I’m hungry.” That’s right, you tell her.

“Are you going to go get some lunch?” He doesn’t see the loaded question, but she does, behind her lead jacket.

“Yep. My mom says I can have anything I want.”

“I thought you were nauseated?’

 “I am. But I want to eat.”

 “What do you want to eat, Joe?”

 “Taco Bell.” The thought brings a faint smile to his face.

The doctor finishes and speaks to them both.  “Listen, you can’t be nauseated and hungry at the same time.”

Matilda stands, “You can be hungry and sick to your stomach. Like when you have the flu for a few days, or when you have morning sickness.”

“ I don’t see anything on these x-rays and he’s not pregnant. I expect you to go to school now, Joe.” The two women look at each other. “I’ll send these on to his pediatrician.”

On the way home they stop for tacos. “Don’t worry about it, honey, she just doesn’t understand.”

He gobbles the tacos greedily, and smiles at her. “I know Mom.” Before they get home she stops the car so he can throw up. Her own lunch sits uneasily on the day. He gets back in the car, and starts to fall asleep as they cross the busy intersections, the lunch break shoppers darting in and out of fast food places. 

“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you the taco,” she says as they pull up to the house.

“It was worth it, you know?” He looks at her. She knows.

Now they are thinking it could it be some intestinal blockage or severe cramping or liver or kidney problems, or Crohn’s disease. An upper and a lower G.I. scope involves sedation. A day of sitting with him, playing cards and making him drink an emetic.  How do you get a mother to spend eight hours forcing her starving child to drink a viscous bitter chemical  so he can spend another eight hours in the bathroom with violent diarrhea? Its easy. Just ask her.  She can’t say no, and neither can the child. Act cheerful. Act hopeful. “Well the good thing is, honey, this test ought to do it. At lest we’ll finally find out what the problem is.”  

She and Tom sit for a long time in the waiting room, blind to the sunshine and uncomfortable chairs. What heretofore unknown and mystifying new disease might they find? 

Were there any diseases she hadn’t turned up in her endless searches on the internet? Do you know there are dozens of search engines just for medical use?  You have to register to use them and answer questions about your type of research.  No, she’s not a doctor, not a medical professional, not a pharmacist. Yes, perhaps a kind of  research specialist.  No spaces provides for "desperate parent."  The abstracts never say quite enough and usually you have to pay for the whole article.  Did you know there is a parasite passed by a bug that bites the lips of children in Texas and can cause death by intestinal blockage? According to an article in Discover the tiny worm hitchhiked across the Bering Strait ice bridge with the first Americans 20,000 years ago and enjoys the climate of Texas. Joe was in Texas for a few days on his summer trip with his cousins.  But he was already sick then. Or was he? She phones the Idaho State Epidemiologist to ask about emerging diseases or new parasitesat the Hot Springs. (Did you know every state has a State Epidemiologist? Now you do.) He actually answered her email query and called her back. Amazing.  And they do have some new strains of resistant bacteria and parasites in a couple of the hot springs, but the drugs he’s already taken would have killed even those.

Now he’s out of surgery.  Out of surgery, but the clinic can’t send him home in the usual two hours because he has been vomiting for five hours.  Finally they let her back there.  The children's clinic has brightly painted walls covered with whales, monkeys, and lions to ward off evil.  Joe lies on a table swathed in the color she thinks of as scary green.  He’s a big boy.  Husky and soft and stoic. He is beautiful, like those Victorian sculptures of babies asleep. His skin is too soft for his age. Is that a symptom, she wonders. The other boys had hard little hands by age eleven, small but already capable, already anticipating the hands of a man. Joe’s skin is still pearly, his fingers soft and round. The nurses always adore him; his giant grin, his giant heart, his dry jokes, his contagious laugh, his shocking sarcasm.

Joe doesn’t whine, he doesn’t complain. She whines, she cringes, she cries, she screams, she tears her hair, she beats her breast, she has a tantrum of panic and rage and prayer on her knees before all the gods, wiping their stone feet with her hair.  But not out loud.  In the recovery room she is calm, reaching for a sweetness that doesn’t come naturally. Joe speaks, sadly matter of fact like an abused wife after a beating.  “I’m sick,” he says.

“I know.” She replies.  The gastroenterologist stands nearby frowning and holding no results.  They couldn’t find anything wrong.  Joe vomits again and they administer more drugs, gently adjusting the tubing, moving from Phenergan to a more powerful anti-nausea bolus. Something they use for chemo patients. She must never cry while he’s looking at her.

“Mom, they didn’t find anything wrong.” This should be happy news, but his voice is cracking with fear. They look at each other and that look holds them, anchoring the pair of them to some vertiginous reality that they alone recognize.  They hang like a pair of mountain climbers, who find themselves strung up on an impossibly sheer granite abutment.  Below them stretches the whole delicate mantle of ordinary life where faraway people go about their business.  She looks down at him, silently assuring him of the excellent quality of the cord they made so long ago.  They look at each other. In this moment they are no longer child and mother, but equal humans full of fear, bound to each other and nothing else. 

Hitler in the Basement: A Memoir

Hitler in the Basement

A murderer is a person who kills people.  There was a murderer in Chicago, which is a really bad place.  He murdered nine nurses in their apartment.  Or maybe it was five. Five and nine are odd numbers.  Every time one nurse came home from her date, he would kill her and wait for the next one. One girl hid under her bed and pretended to be dead.  She got stabbed but she didn’t die because she was brave and she was smart and she was always thinking.  She couldn’t help her friends though.  All the nurses were pretty and they all wore white hats.  I saw them in Life Magazine.  I think there was a murderer in Oregon where we live, but my parents say there was not.  I’m sure I heard them talking about it, but they say I am imagining things.  The man cut ladies up and put them in plastic bags like they use for sandwiches and then he hung the plastic bags on barbwire fences from the little hooks.  My mommy says she never heard of such a thing. 

Hitler was worse than a murderer.  Hitler did something worse than just killing people. It scares me, trying to imagine what that could be. What is worse than killing people? Worse than putting them in baggies? Now, they can’t find him. On the news they said that some people think he is dead. Hitler killed himself and ordered that his body be burned along with his girlfriend.  Hitler’s girlfriend was a pretty blonde girl named Eva. I saw her picture in Life Magazine too.  Even though there was a war she looked happy in the picture. Then she got burned so badly that no one could tell if it was really her or not.  That isn’t so hard to imagine. Once on a trip I saw the coals left after a forest  fire. If they hadn’t been sticking straight up like black toothpicks on a black mud pie you wouldn’t even know they had once been trees.

Daddy was in the war, but Mommy was just a teen ager. Actually, Daddy was just a teen ager too. He was really skinny when he was in the war. There is a picture in our photo album of Daddy in his Navy uniform. In the olden days they used black paper in their photo albums. They stuck the pictures on with little gold corners. Dad looked happy and skinny in the war and he wore a silly round sailor hat.  They probably made the teenagers wear the funny hats. He says he was lucky and didn’t go to the bad places. Probably he wasn’t old enough to go to the bad places.

Me and my friend Alex are in a car pool.  I don’t know why they call it that, because it isn’t like a pool at all.  I went to a pool at the University.  Well, first I went to a dance class.  I went every Saturday with my mom.  Usually I go places with my Dad, but on Saturday’s he is at rehearsal.  Daddy is an actor and rehearsal is where you go when you are getting ready to have a play and you do it over and over again so you don’t make any mistakes when you have the real play.  I’ve been to a real play. It was outside with flags and they did Cinderella. It was a play for kids and I went with my Dad. My brother was too little and he might talk during the play, which is a very bad thing and makes the actors mad. Someday Daddy says I will be in a play. I can be an actress, which is a girl actor.  You can put “ess” on the end and that makes it a girl. 

But, first I was going to the dancing class. It is a beginning.  We did a lot of things I don’t remember and we all wore pink tights.  I wanted black tights like the big girls, but they only let me have pink ones.  At the end we wore red skirts for costumes.  It was Christmas and my mom made me a red skirt for the costume and the skirt stuck out straight instead of hanging down like my skirts for school. It was really short too.  Then we were going to the last practice. 

Usually we practice in a room with mirrors on the walls.  When you’re dancing you can look at it and  see if you are standing up straight, but the rest of the time my Grandma Ericson, my Dad’s mom, says that I shouldn’t look it the mirror because it will make me vain. She says I look in the mirror too much and she pulls my hair if I look when she is braiding, but I’m only looking to see if I look the same as I did the last time l looked.  I’m never sure that I will.  It’s always kind of a surprise when you look in the mirror. You’re supposed to see what other people see when they look at you, but I’m not sure you do.  So sometimes I look in the mirror at dance class and sometimes I don’t.  But, at the last practice instead of going to the room where we usually go, we went to a pool. 

We were doing  a dance called “elephants on parade.”  The pool was giant.  About a hundred people could fit in it and it smelled bad, kind of like the gas station but not quite.  The water moved when you watch it.  It never stopped moving and hot smells came up from the edge.  The pool was blue with black stripes under the water and the stripes kept wiggling. The edge had a round place that touches the water and it was bumpy like some rocks got in the paint. 

I was supposed to stand by the edge and do the elephants on parade dance.  Mommy sat in the audience, on boards, which is not like the theatre where the chairs have seats that go up and down.  I did’t want to dance by the water that was moving all the time.  I don’t know how to swim.  Daddy keeps trying to show me how and he says its easy just kick and paddle your arms.  But every time he lets go the water gets in my nose and I cry. Daddy says don’t cry be brave.  Everybody should be brave. Especially girls.  Or maybe, especially boys. I am brave, but my brother isn’t. He cries a lot and it makes my daddy mad.  I am the bravest.  Dad wasn’t there so he didn’t know that I was too scared of the water to do all my elephant steps.  Mom didn’t tell him. She said I would be fine when I got my red tootoo. 

 On Saturday we went back to the pool for the dance.  It was like a play.  We all wore our skirts and we put them on in the dressing room where ladies put on their swimming suits and there was some water on the floor and it was is icky and smelled bad.  I didn’t want to get my dancing shoes with white feet in the water, but my mom said: it doesn’t matter just hurry up. She said don’t be scared you won’t fall in and Daddy’s coming all the from the Theatre to see you dance.  He is even leaving his rehearsal to see you. 

In his play he was being a president, one called FDR.  He had a funny smile when he was FDR, and a thing that helds his cigarette, but he couldn't walk.  He was pretending he can’t walk and he even fell down the stairs.   Pretty soon the elephant music started, and we got in a line and start to walk out into the giant pool place.  This time you could hear people talking and the water was making sounds.  I was walking the elephant walk, but before we got to the edge of the pool I ruined it.  I saw the black stripes and the noises got louder and louder and the elephant music was just a record player on a table. I couldn’t go to the edge of the pool. I just couldn’t go over there.  I ran for the doors.  Everybody stopped dancing. 

I don’t know why they aren’t scared at all.  Their Daddies aren’t even actors. I was crying and crying.  Daddy came running over.  He was being really nice and not acting mad at all.  He said I have to be brave if I’m going to be an Actress.  I have to forget about the people watching.  I wasn’t even thinking about them. I was scared of the pool.  He took me back to the dressing room door and we all lined up again. Daddy was holding my hand and I felt better.

Then the elephant music started again and Daddy let go of my hand.  We made elephants steps with our arms for the trunks.  I was doing really good.  Until we got by the edge of the pool.  I looked at the water and the wiggling stripes.  The smell and the sounds were wiggling too.  It was a bad place.  I stood there and stood there and then. . . I ran away again.  And I wouldn’t come out of the ladies room.  I was sitting in the icky water with snot all over my red skirt and it was a very bad day.  I don’t want to talk about it.

My mommy is going to have a baby, and me and my little brother Spike and my Dad, of course, are moving to another town after school is over.  It is a lot of work packing up to move and Mommy is a little grouchy.  I am being extra careful not to step on any cracks so not to break my mother’s back.

Dad has started taking me to rehearsals more often because my mom doesn’t feel very good and she is typing.  She types for people at graduate school who have to write long reports in order to get out.  My mom is a perfect typer.  She types people’s papers without any mistakes. If she makes a mistake she pulls the paper out of the typewriter and throws it in the garbage can and Spike and I can draw on it.  We can draw on any paper in the garbage can.  Sometime there is a lot.  Daddy buys us lots of crayons, but they always get short and you have to tear off the paper that is around them.  That paper gives me goosebumps so I showed Spike how to tear off the paper. I draw ladies in Cinderella dresses.  Lots of them. I don’t know what Spike draws, you can’t tell.  Mommy gets really mad at the typewriter and we have to be quiet so she doesn’t make mistakes.  She says Dad should take me with him because I am difficult. Spike can stay home because he doesn’t make as much noise as I do. 

I like going to rehearsal.  You have to be really quiet at rehearsal too, but it is easy because there is always something to watch.  I can watch Daddy being FDR.  Or I can watch the lady named Vivian be his wife. She has blonde hair and is prettier than Hitler’s girlfriend, but she isn’t really his wife. My mom is really his wife. Vivian is just pretending. She does a pretty good job. She seems to like him, even when he can’t walk and falls down the stairs. Everyone says he falls down the stairs very well.  His legs just stop working.  All the other actors say I am amazingly quiet.  I wish I could be amazingly quiet at home.  They say I do exactly what my Daddy says. Well, it’s better if you do. If I do exactly what my Dad says, good things happen and we are both happy. Sometimes we get ice cream after rehearsal, or sometimes everyone gets sandwiches and we sit on the stage and eat them.  My dad and I get Turkey on dill rye. 

Sometimes the other actors take me for a walk.  Vivian took me to see the costumes. There is a secret basement full of Cinderella dresses.  She says they are for Shakespeare. Shakespeare likes velvet and a lot of gold stuff on his costumes.  If my hands are clean I can touch them.  There is a wall full of giant boxes where they keep curtains.  There is also a green room. The green room is where the actors and actresses wait until it is their turn to be in the play.  Sometimes we sit there and play Old Maid.  Daddy says they should teach me a real game.  So then we play rummy.  Everybody likes my pigtails.  There is also a room where the ladies put on their makeup. You wear special makeup in a play so that when you get up on the stage and the people watching are far away, they can still see your eyes and your mouth.  Sometimes you put on wrinkles and fake noses too. You can even get a beard. One time Vivian put a beard on me, but it hurt when she took it off. 

If I am scared of something that I shouldn’t be scared of, I figured out a way to do it anyway. I wish I had figured this out before, when I had to dance on the edge of the pool. 

All I have to do is dare myself to do it. 

I always take a dare at school.  I don’t let people know that I always have to take a dare, because if they knew that they could make me do anything they wanted and they would be the boss of me.  This dare thing doesn’t go for things you should be afraid of.  Some things you should be afraid of, and some things are silly to be afraid of.  You can be brave for both kinds.  Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.  Like once we had a storm.  It was a hurricane. There are never hurricanes in Oregon, so it was a freak hurricane.  My Uncle was visiting and he sat on me. Uncle Lewis is my mom’s brother.  She only has one, like me, only I may have another one.  I hope my mom has a boy cause my Dad likes me best and if she had a girl he might like her better than me.  She’ll be cuter.  I’m growing up and not so cute any more.  My mom likes Spike best, so that’s fair.

 Anyway, there was a freak hurricane. We watched out the window from our house. We could see the roofs blow off of the other apartments and some of the roof pieces from the high school where our babysitter goes. Her name is Julie and she has red hair. She is going to be an Actress when she grows up and Daddy says she is very good. Her mom wrote a famous book called “The Lively Art of Writing” and the book tells people where to put commas.  The view from the window got worse and worse and roofs were flying all over the place, just like the “Wizard of Oz” only in color.  Not much color because everything was grey except our buildings are painted green.  Then one piece of roof came right at our window, flying around and around and my Uncle pushed me down and sat on me and my Dad sat on my brother.  Spike was crying but I wasn’t scared.  I actually didn’t need the dare, because I thought it was interesting and not that scary. 

Then the phone rang and it was Julie’s mom. She said we should come over there because she has a basement and we should hurry while we still can get out of Marriedstudenthousing.  When we ran for the car there was an ambulance in the parking lot and it turns out that a man was killed in the building in front of ours. A piece of roof came right through his wall and you can see the hole it made.  I think it was flying through the air just like that piece that came towards our window, except that piece missed us.  At Julie’s house we watched a movie about the Titanic.  A big ship hits a piece of ice in the ocean and the ship goes under the water and all the people die except for some of the girls and the babies that they put on smaller boats to escape.  One man pretended to be a girl so he could get on while all the other men died and sang a song about God.  That man wasn’t brave. He should have dared himself to stay on the boat like he was supposed to.  It was a sad movie and I was crying and Spike was asleep on Julie’s lap.  My Dad came down to get us when the storm was gone and we could go home.

Dad carried me and my uncle carried Spike and my dad said that when you die in ice cold water like the Titanic your eyeballs pop out.  My mom said, “Oh, Bob. Now you’ll really scare her.”  But that didn’t scare me either.

The next play is going to be J.B.  It is the story of Job from the bible but they put it in the now.  Dad says I am too little to read the play. In the bible story God makes a bet with the Devil that Job will love God no matter what happens to him. So a lot of bad things happen to him.

My dad took me downtown to get a shot in the arm. Downtown is black and white kind of like the T.V.  We have a T.V. that my Grandma and Grandpa Gay got us. They are my Mom’s mother and Dad.  They got us a television set because my grandma was visiting to see Dad be F.D.R.  She got up one morning and Spike and I were being quiet.  Mommy and Daddy were sleeping. They have to stay up late.  Dad has the play that lasts until late at night and my mom has to type until the middle of the night, except this time she was watching the play with my Grandma and Grandpa.  We were being quiet by watching T.V. on a cardboard box.  I drew some knobs on it.  In the morning we would watch the box and I would tell  Spike what’s was happening in a real quiet voice.  The morning my Grandma was there we were watching a program about a donkey.  Then my Grandma and my Grandpa got us a real T.V. set.  Now we can get up and watch whatever is on it, usually cartoons, but sometimes I Love Lucy.  Daddy says it was better when we watched the box.  It was better for our imaginations and quieter too. 

Anyway when you go downtown it looks like programs on T.V. You can’t go near the street.  One time my dad said he let me go in the street and then spanked me so I would learn not to do it.  I was two.  I don’t think that was very fair and neither does my Grandma.  But my dad says now I don’t go in the street and I listen to what he says. I guess I did learn something.  All the cars downtown park on a slant, which they don’t do on T.V.  We went on an elevator to get the shot that keeps you from getting a bad disease. Daddy said he would tell me the truth and never lie to me. He said the shot was going to hurt.  But, he said that if I was brave and I didn’t cry at all, then he had a special surprise for me.  So I didn’t cry. He kept saying, “Now don’t cry…” and I kept saying, “I won’t.”  It wasn’t that hard. 

When we left the building Daddy held my hand and he was swinging it.  His hand is giant.  He has the biggest hands in the world. I thought maybe the surprise was a doll, but he said it was better than a doll.  After I got the shot we got in the car and drove to his school. We went to his office where there is a squirrel that eats peanut butter that Daddy leaves for him. While we were watching him eat peanut butter, Daddy told me the surprise.  I am going to be in my first real play.  I will be finally be an Actress. I am going to be J.B.’s youngest daughter.  I have five lines.

Lines is what you say when it is your turn to talk in the play.  Five lines is a lot. I have more than any of the other kids because my dad can teach me how to say them.  My favorite line is: “And two kinds of pie!”  In my part of the play it is going to be Thanksgiving.  Vivian is pretending to be my mother.  There is a very big man with a beard who is pretending to be my father and this time Vivian is pretending to be his wife.  I don’t think she likes him as well as she liked my Dad when he was her husband.  My dad isn’t an actor this time. He is the director. The director tells the actors what to do and where to walk.  It is his job to make sure the audience understands the play. We have to talk loudly, but not act like we are yelling. I have a very clear voice. 

Dad tells us to walk stage left or stage right.  I don’t do left and right very well and I can’t tie my shoe either. Stage right and stage left is the opposite of real right and real left, but that doesn’t help very much if you don’t know real right and real left. Vivian says I don’t know right and left because I can write with both my hands so it doesn’t make any difference to me.  

There is upstage and downstage too, which is easy.  Upstage and downstage is important for actors and actresses.  If you stand upstage the others have to talk to you and they turn their head away from the audience.  Then everyone looks at the one who is upstage.  That is stealing and a good actor never, ever does that.  And if you are downstage and someone keeps moving upstage to get you to look and steal your scene, a good actress never looks. Instead you are supposed to cheat downstage.  Cheating is usually bad, like at school if you copy someone’s answers on the math test, but in the Theatre cheating downstage is good. It means you pretend to look upstage at the stealer and really you look a little bit downstage so the audience can always see your face.  If you are an Actress your job is to make sure the audience can see your face.  Unless the director tells you to hide your face for some reason, but usually he doesn’t. 

The man with the beard carries me in on his shoulder, which is high and fun and he always swings me up.  Then Dad just tells me to walk over by the table and then I run offstage with all the other kids and we are supposed to make a lot of noise. After you get off the stage you can’t make any noise at all.  They take the other kids away to keep them quiet, but everyone knows I won’t make any noise because my dad said not to. 

At first we just do the part of the play that I am in and then my mom comes and gets me and I have to go home and go to bed.  After school my dad runs lines with me. That means practicing.  You have to know all the things you are supposed to say and my dad says a good Actress knows everyone else’s lines too, so that if they forget theirs you can help out.  The line that comes before my line is called a cue.  A good Actress always picks up her cues and never makes everyone wait while she thinks and tries to remember her lines.  You aren’t supposed to have a big break between people talking because the audience will get bored.  I always pick up my cues.  And I get all my homework done after school so I can go to rehearsal.

I don’t get a costume though, I just have to wear my plaid skirt because this is a modern play and we just wear regular clothes.  I begged my dad to let me wear a pony tail for the play because it is so pretty. My hair is long and light brown and yellow and goes down to my bottom and my mom’s is even longer, only hers is black.  I never get to wear it in a ponytail because it gets tangled and my mom is too tired to brush it out. Daddy says I have to wear pigtails for the play because they are cuter than a ponytail. I think a ponytail is much cuter. 

When the dress rehearsal comes we have lights on the stage and we wear makeup.  Daddy does mine, but he says I get to learn how to do it pretty soon because a Good Actress always does her own makeup.  There are people up in a box to work the lights for the stage. They have cues too and their’s are even more important than ours.  If they get the lights wrong it will be dark or the lights will be on the wrong part of the stage and not on the person talking.  Also, the audience is not supposed to think about the lights, Dad says.  If the light people get it wrong, the audience will forget about the action and think about the lights. 

One day we have the tech rehearsal when they just work on the lights and the sounds and there are no people.  Dad comes to get me down in audience seats.  I was trying to read the script that someone left on the floor by my seat.  It is hard to read and the words are really small.  One time I read another book with small printing. It was my Dad’s and it was called “Sex and the Single Girl.”  My Mom took it away from me, but my Dad said it didn’t matter I couldn’t understand it anyway.  I could read almost all the words though.  J.B. was harder to read than that, so I hadn’t got very far when he came to get me. 

We went up the stairs at the side of the stage, and went out into the middle of the set.  Daddy was holding my hand. “I’m going to teach you something,” he says. “Something that most people never learn.” 

All the lights went out.  Then one light cam on at the side of the stage. 

“That is a spot light,” he said.  “It lights one small part of the stage where an actor might give a long speech.  I want you to walk over there and stand in it.”  So I did.  Then he told me to find the spot where the light is the brightest on me.  “You can feel it,” he said, “Turn your face up if you need to, and move around until you find the brightest spot.”  I moved just a little bit. 

“Is it here?” I said.  My Dad came over to see. 

“Very close.” He moved me a little bit. “Now see how it’s brighter and hotter? Can you feel the heat on your face?”

I could feel it.

“That’s the hot spot.  Every actress needs to know how to find the hot spot.”  Then he waved his hand and the light went out and another light came up across the stage.  We did it again and again until it was easy to find the spot.  It didn’t take very long. My dad yelled thank you. 

Someone yelled from the box in the dark yelled back. “She’s a natural!” 

“That was pretty good,” my dad said. “Now, we’ll see how you do opening night.”

I think Dad is afraid that I will get scared and run off the stage, but I don’t even have to dare myself because it isn’t scary at all. You can’t even see the people because the lights are in your eyes and you’re not supposed to look at them anyway.  I can feel the people out there though. The audience is breathing in the lights and the color and waiting for it to be a good play.  I can smell the greasepaint makeup. It smells funny and it kind of makes my face itch.  I touch the lucky spot on my Dad’s wrist where the veins make an X and he tells me to break a leg.  That means good luck, but  you can’t say good luck because it is actually bad luck, so you say “Break a leg.” 

I say my lines perfectly and the whole audience laughs when I say “And two kinds of pie!”  After my part is over Dad takes me down to the costume department and lets a student keep an eye on me.  He thinks I will be scared down there but I’m not. I like all the Shakespeare clothes.  He gives me my library books and make a nest out of the curtains in one of the boxes on the wall. He says that is my nest and tells me to read my book about planets and go to sleep. He will wake me up at the end to bow to the audience. 

I read my book but it is hard to believe in planets and I can’t go to sleep.  I can hear the rest of the play happening far away. I want to know how it ends and what bad things happen to Job.  I asked the boy babysitting me what happens but he won’t tell me either. He just says there is a war.  Then I hear the bombs.  They aren’t real bombs, they are sound effects, but they sound like real bombs.  When I am almost asleep I have a thought. I finally understand the play.  I must have died in the bombing.  That is why they won’t tell me what happens in the play.  My character must be part of the bet that they make about whether J.B. will love God.  I probably die, the little cute one, and that must be the bad thing that happens to J.B.

I asked my mom if J.B. still loves god and she said he does.  I wouldn’t.  Especially if I knew about the bet. Dad comes and gets me out of my nest and the man with the beard carries me onstage again because I’m kind of sleepy and we have to hurry. The audience is clapping and they get tired of clapping pretty fast so you have to make the bowing short. It is better if they are still clapping when all the bowing is over.  The bowing is called a curtain call and Daddy hates a long curtain call. 

I have been saving my dares for something scary to happen, but there are only a few scary things.  Once my mom wasn’t home when the car pool dropped me off at our house. Alex’s mom had to leave but she told me to stay on the porch of the apartment and NOT GO ANYWHERE.  And not be scared.  I wanted to go look for my mom, but I dared myself to sit on the porch and read my book. And I did.  So it worked.  Then my mom came. She said I was only there for a few minutes but I think it was at least an hour. 

I get very tired of not stepping on the cracks.  All the sidewalks have them and I hate not stepping on them, it makes me walk slow and I have to think about it all the time when I would rather look around and think about other things or ask my mom questions.  I don’t really think she’ll break her back if I step on a crack.  I asked her if people’s backs break though, and she said they did.  The right thing to do is to be careful of the crack just in case, but I don’t want to do it.  So I dared myself to never step on a crack and then I never did. 

In the spring we went for a picnic at the ocean. The ocean is the biggest thing in the world and it makes white foam on the rocks at the coast.  The coast is the edge of the land.  The rocks there are black.  Before we could eat lunch we stopped at a viewpoint where there is a parking spot and you can see the ocean from high up.  It is called the Devil’s Churn.  A churn is something they used in the olden days to shake up milk and stir it around. 

My mom says if you get milk from a cow, instead of from the store, and you shake it up for a long time, it will turn into butter.  We used to drink instant milk because we are graduate students and we are poor.  But I don’t have to drink it anymore because I won a bet with my Dad.  I don’t like instant milk and I quit drinking it.  He bet me that I couldn’t tell the difference between real milk and instant milk if they were both really cold.  I bet him back.  My mom said don’t bet with her Bob.  I said that if I won, Spike didn’t have to drink it either because it wasn’t fair if I didn’t have to and Spike did.  Spike doesn’t say so, but he doesn’t like instant milk either.  Dad said okay, but you aren’t going to win.

My dad always wins when we play games.  Daddy Wins is the name of the game he says.  My grandma thought he should let me win sometimes so I don’t get discouraged.  Dad said it isn’t good for me to let me win, it’s like lying.  He says, someday I’ll win and I’ll be more happy then, if he doesn’t pretend about it now.  My dad was sure he’d win the bet and I was sure I’d win. 

So I sat on a stool with a handkerchief for a blindfold and my dad made cold, cold milk.  He tried to make it harder by making three glasses to test, one milk, one instant milk, and one half instant and half real milk mixed together.  He said we could still save a lot of money if we drank it half and half.  I took one taste of each and named them right off. I didn’t even have to think.  So, I won the bet and Spike and I get to drink real milk forever.

The Devil is evil. Evil like a murderer.  Maybe the Devil causes wars, or maybe its God. It must be hard to tell.  My dad says there is no such thing as the Devil. If there is no such thing, then why do they write a story about him and a play and put it in the Bible?  My dad and my mom don’t think the Bible is true, but some people think it is.  The Devil’s Churn is a place where the ocean gets knocked hard into a circle of black rocks. The rocks are sharp and they come from one time when there was a volcano and it exploded and made lava and when the lava got cold it turned into sharp rocks.  They don’t have volcanos here anymore so everyone says not to worry about it, but we weren't supposed  to have hurricanes either. I'm pretty sure that there could be a freak volcano. 

Mom and Dad are watching Spike because he always walks off the edges of things. That is why they call him a toddler.  Once he almost crawled off a tower at another park we went to, it was made of lava too.  And once he almost walked off the train when we went to see my Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Lewis on the Ranch.  I wanted to watch from the end of the train and Spike almost walked off. Daddy says Spike doesn’t have the sense God Gave a Goose.  I think that’s God’s fault, not Spike’s.  I wouldn’t trust God after that bet.  We stand at the lookout and watch the Devil’s Churn.  It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.  My uncle Jon, that’s my Dad’s brother, told me “Never say ‘beautiful’ because it is trite.”  Trite is something that everyone says and it loses its meaning. It’s better if you think up something new to say.  I can’t think of anything new to say about the Devil’s Churn. It is beautiful. 

The water changes from waters to whiteness, and the waves make so much noise that we have to yell even up on the cliff. The water smells like real water, not like the pool and not like the faucet.  Kind of like the Snake River at the Ranch only more so.  The rocks are even more black when they are wet and the ocean doesn’t wiggle, it breaths in and out like a beautiful monster. 

I was kind of testing to see if Mom and Dad watched me or just Spike. They just watched Spike.  I could get closer and closer to the edge.  I wasn’t scared at all.  I wanted to see when I would start getting scared. I got right up to the edge, but I didn’t think I would fall off.  I could jump off, but it didn’t seem like I’d just fall off.  The waves looked like whipped cream.  I tried to imagine what it would be like if you jumped into the water from here.  It would probably feel good. Cold. And bouncy.  I kind of wanted to jump.  I bet my Dad would jump in after me.  That made me scared. I didn’t want him to jump in after me.  It was okay for me but not for him.  I think this was an experiment.

An experiment is how scientists find out what is true by making tests.  Like one time my teacher said that when things get hot they expand, which means gets bigger.  She said you could see this happen if you put a glass on the stove and turned it on. The glass would break because it gets hot and expands.  I didn’t believe her.  I’ve seen things on the stove lots of times and they never get bigger.  And our car gets so hot in the sun, especially on the Ranch, but it never gets any bigger.

So I did the experiment, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to.  Usually I don’t do anything I’m not supposed to, because I don’t want my Dad to get mad at me and spank me or Spike. He has really big hands and when he spanks us he holds our arms behind our back with one hand and hits our skin until we cry. I try not to cry because it makes me mad, but I always end up crying anyway. Spike cries even before the spanking starts. I wish Daddy would spank me instead of Spike because....well I don't know why, but I can't stand it when he spanks Spike. Spike is so little and his crew cut gets all red, and he didn't mean to be bad. Spanking is terrible.

But I did the experiment with the stove and I didn't care if I did get spanked. So I guess, sometimes I am bad on purpose. This time I wanted to tell the teacher she was wrong.  I don’t’ like my teacher. She has a tight face and she’s mean.  She won’t let me read ahead in reading circle and I have to wait and wait while everyone sounds out the words.  I’m sorry they can’t read fast, but its not my fault. The book is boring anyway, but it would be better if I could read ahead.  So to do the experiment I set a jar on the stove and turned it on.  The jar exploded. It burst into a hundred pieces and I started crying.  I never saw it get bigger, but I guess she was right about it.  I didn’t get in too much trouble because Mom and Dad were laughing so hard.  Dad said it was good thinking and he can’t complain.

So, I wasn’t scared when I was standing by the edge of the cliff, and I reall wanted to jump.  I kept looking at the waves and imagining.  The froth was so pretty and you could see rainbows sometimes when the sun hit just right.  There probably isn’t a better place in the world to jump.  Then I remembered the dare.  If I dared myself to jump in, I’d have to do it.  You just have to decide if you want to do it before you make the dare.  I was still thinking about that when my Dad grabbed me and started yelling, “We trusted you.”   My mom said that I didn’t understand how dangerous it was. 

Maybe I didn’t. Or maybe I did.

But the thing I’m afraid of the most is Hitler. Some people think Hitler is hiding in Argentina. Argentina is somewhere else, and a lot of bad people hide there, especially people from the War.  A War is a bad thing. I think it is a verb.  A lot of people got together and killed each other. Some were good and some were bad, and the good guys won.  There was a lot of burning and a lot of things ended up unrecognizable and looking like charcoal briquettes.  Little kids like me got burned up too, like the deer that get burned up in forest fires because they can’t run fast enough. Like Bambi’s mother.  Some things in the war were even worse than this, but I don’t know what they are yet. I keep listening when the grownups talk but they always start whispering when they get to talking about the really bad things. On the news they don’t talk about the war much either, but sometimes when they talk about Hitler hiding in Argentina, they show pictures of skeletons with skin on them.

The thing is, I know where Hitler is hiding.  It’s obvious.  Why would he go to Argentina where everyone is looking for him and everyone knows it’s a place where bad guys hide? That would be stupid.  He would hide in a place where no one would think to look.  I tried to tell my parents that I know where he is, but they didn’t want to talk to me about where Hitler was hiding.  “Don’t worry about it,” they said. 

But, the evilest man in the whole world is hiding in the basement of our school and who wouldn't worry?  I’ve never been to the basement of our school, but I looked in once when our class walked in a line to the library. The scary janitor guy has to duck down when he walks through the door there.  He is the one who’s protecting Hitler and bringing him food from the cafeteria. They put lots of food down the disposal there, so there are plenty of leftovers for Hitler.  I think sometimes the janitor goes to Safeway to get cheese for Hitler. For some reason I have a feeling that Hitler likes cheese. He probably likes grilled cheese sandwiches and they don’t make those in the cafeteria.  I don’t know how the janitor cooks grilled cheese for Hitler, but maybe he makes a camp fire.

Finally, I have decided not to think about the basement anymore.  Nobody seems to care what I say. They think I am dumb, but I’m not. I am not dumb. I’m not very good at arithmetic and I never know if the picture shows many sheep or few sheep, but that’s not my fault. It’s because my Grandpa, my mom’s dad, has a sheep ranch and he has many sheep.  The picture in our workbook said “many sheep,” but there were only eight.  That’s not very many sheep.  But I’m not dumb. I can read better than anybody in my class. When I learned to read it was like magic, one day I didn’t know how and the next day I did.  I hardly ever have to sound out words.  At least not more than once. 

As long as Hitler doesn’t know that I know he is down there, I am probably safe enough.  When he finally comes out of the basement, in a few years, the police will catch him.  Unless he figures out to shave off his mustache. Without that little black mustache they might not recognize him.   But, by that time I’ll be gone and it won’t be my problem anymore.

Anyway my friend and I are in a car pool. It is really just a car and not a pool.  Sometimes his mother picks us up and sometimes my mother does.  Sometimes we go to his house after school for a treat.  He has a rich house with a garden and a gate.  We live in an apartment house with other families whose dads are going to graduate school.  Graduate school is a school you go to after you get done with your other schools.  You have to learn other languages like French and German. They put the words on a lot of little tiny cards so you can learn them. They do this at my school too, but all the words are easy, like “Dick” and “go.”

Alex is fun to play with because he mostly does what I say.  We go out in the garden and play house. We live in Eugene, Oregon and Eugene is very green. My grandparents live on a ranch in Oregon too.  But at the ranch it is all yellow and brown.  Alex gets to color in coloring books, which is fun.  My Daddy won’t let me color in coloring books because it will stifle my creativity.    Anyway, I color in them at Alex’s house, but I feel just the same afterwards. I think I am just as creative as I was before.

One day my mom doesn’t come to pick us up after school. I’m sure it is her turn.  The school is empty. There aren’t any kids left in the playground.  There is a dark place at the end of the playground where the wire fence comes against some stranger’s yard.  I make sure that Alex doesn’t go over there.  I also have to be sure that Alex doesn’t go near the basement and I have to explain to him about Hitler and Argentina and hideouts.  I don’t tell him about the burnt people or the skeletons because Alex is soft and sweet like my baby brother and I don’t want to scare him.  It’s better if little kids like him don’t know about really bad things. It will be better for him if he doesn’t know that there are things that are too bad to talk about so he won’t have to worry.

I decide that we’d better make a campfire.  Maybe there is a war and the parents have all been burned up in an explosion like in J.B.  Maybe they won’t be coming, ever. It will be dark soon, and Alex and have to figure out how to make a fire.  I make Alex go get sticks while I look for a safe place to camp.  There is a hole in the hedge over by the street.  If we camp there, we can keep a lookout on the door of the basement and one of us can stay up and we can take turns sleeping like they do on “Maverick” and “The Rifleman.” From this spot we can see where the cars drive up too.  If the parents do come, then we will be able to see them. 

“We aren’t supposed to play with matches.” Alex says.

“Well, this is an emergency,” I tell him. “Anyway, we don’t have any matches. We’ll have to rub two sticks together like Indians.”

Alex and I squat down to rub the sticks together.  I decide it will be better if I kneel even though my knees will get dirty because when I am squatting Alex might be able to see my underpants.  My hands are dirty now and they feel gritty. I hate icky fingers.  Mommy says I have a thing about clean hands.  But if this is the end of the world I will just have to be brave. I will have to get used to dirty hands.  Then my Daddy drives up.  He thinks our campfire is funny and he tells Alex’s mom about it when we get to their house. She thinks it is funny too. Alex and I look at each other.  No one even says how brave we were.  Especially me. I was taking really good care of Alex.  I didn’t let him get scared at all.

The next day Alex’s Mommy takes us to a movie.  It is Babes in Toyland.  I am hoping it is better than Bambi. I just couldn’t take that Bambi again.  We have both popcorn and candy. Alex’s mom doesn’t know I can’t have candy.  I decide that it would be more polite not to tell her.  Before Babes in Toyland comes on they show a short movie. Right in the middle of the box of gumdrops something bad happens.  A terrible movie comes on. It is worse than Bambi.  

There is a girl, pretty old, maybe nine, and she’s trying to escape from the War.  She is crawling through the mud towards a giant barbwire fence, like the ones they use for sheep on the Ranch only bigger.  The movie is in black and white, which is how I know it is about the War. Back in the War days they didn’t have color.  A searchlight sweeps back and forth across the ground.  If it touches the girl the soldiers will shoot her with their machine guns. There is nothing she can do. She can’t stop the lights. They are shooting already.  Mud is getting all over her. She’s crying and crying and crawling and crawling.  Now she can’t find her parents.  They are probably back in the camp with the skeletons.  I think the machine guns got them.  The gumdrops turn into a gob in my mouth and I can’t swallow it.  Yellow and and green taste terrible together. 

The girl is crawling through the mud for hours, but finally she is scooting under the barbed wire.  It tears her shirt and blood gets on her. Blood is black when there is no color.  Once I got scratched by blackberries all over and it hurt so bad.  My dad put methiolate on it in big pink streaks and told me a story and painted an Indian on my leg. The light is looking for the girl and its bright white. She keeps hiding but finally it hits her. I am almost sure they shot her in the leg.  Then she gets past the fence and starts to run, but she can’t run very well because of her leg.  She runs and she falls down and tries to get up and run some more to get away from the light. 

The rest of the movie is about a circus. Finally I swallow the gob of gumdrops. I love circuses but I hate this movie. The girl has an elephant for a pet but I don’t even care. I hate this movie. When it finally comes on, I hate Babes in Toyland too, even though it is in color.  Who cares about Babes in Toyland? Somewhere  there are barbed wire fences in Germany and girls are getting shot.  Really, I think I was too little to see that movie.

Hustler's Diet -- short, short story

Every morning that freaking baby woke with a cry that could splinter glass. Jett didn’t like babies. They were cute in pictures at the doctor’s office, but then all the mothers in those pictures were cute too. None of them had red faces and none of them looked like they used food stamps. The babies in the magazines were fat and the mothers were skinny, but they were all happy, that’s for sure.

Jett lay on the mattress in the Big Kid’s room and tried to find her dream again. Impossible once that brat started crying. Something about a tiger...a swimming tiger pushing through dark water, a pool beside some ancient temple in India. It had been an excellent dream. Kind of like that Jungle Book cartoon, but without the stupid parts. More realistic. Maybe more like the Discovery Channel. She tried to get back to that cool water, tried to make the sobbing baby into one of the villager’s kids.

She was almost there, about ready to make those villagers run screaming from her striped, yellow majesty. Then Marshall woke up too. He slept in the bed under the window, the one everyone wanted, and when he woke up he liked to make sure the day began for everyone else too. 

On his way to the bathroom Marshall kicked and poked the other kids and began singing rap, like always. Mostly he sang Ghostface Killah, off the CD that his Real Dad gave him for his birthday. Tamitha, in the bunk bed, always woke up smiling, all crooked white teeth and soft brown eyes. No matter that the bedroom smelled like dirty dish rags, no matter how ugly the old frog decals were that came peeling off the walls, even when she got an F at school, no matter what, Tamitha always woke up smiling. Now she was sitting cross-legged on her bed singing “Hustlers Diet” along with Marshall. Emily, on the top bunk never woke up, no matter how loud Marshall sang. She’d stay up there, wrapped in her pimply yellow blanket until Miz Marco came up to get her.

At least now there was no school. Jett wouldn’t have to get the little kids into their clothes and help Miz Marco pack up the lunches. In addition to babies, she hated peanut butter, fake Cheerios, canned spaghetti, and bananas – all staple in Miz Marco’s kitchen.

This morning Jett reached under her pillow where she had stashed half a package of Zesta Saltines. They weren’t as crisp as they had been yesterday when she swiped them off the countertop, but they were still better than Premium. Since she slept in her shorts last night she could make a dash for the stairs while Marshall was still in the bathroom. She was out the front door before anyone could make her share.

A little way down the street there was an old boxwood hedge, full of holes and perfect for a fort. She liked to sit in there and make up stories about what she was going to do when she grew up. Used to be, she’d imagine her future life as a rodeo clown. She’d wear a green frizzy wig and a big red skirt and save all the cowboys when the bulls got real mad. But, lately she’d been thinking that she might want to be one of those people that put the tags on polar bears, so the scientists could see who they were eating. That was a good job where you got to fly around in helicopters and shoot tranquilizer guns. 

On a July day in the delta, a job on an ice floe sounded pretty good. Jett was considering what to do next. Better to get stuff done before it got too hot. Maybe she could borrow Marshall’s old bike to ride to the library or maybe she ought to check out the permanent garage sale down on Casper Street. Sometimes the lady that sat out there in the lawn chair would give her a book to keep, just to get her to shut up. Trouble was, it took a lot of talking to get to that point, and today Jett was kind of out of things to say.

She crawled out of the hedge and went to sit on the edge of the sidewalk. The sun was so hot that you could smell your skin cooking. It was a good smell, dry and sweet, kind of like fresh saltines. Jett rubbed her nose along her arm, squinting so she could see the little blonde hairs catch the light. 

Then there was a new sound. Drowning out the lawnmower whining down by the tracks and the squealing of the cicadas along Balthazar Street was a brand new sound--a grinding and a coughing, and it sounded just about as hopeless as Tamitha’s winter croup. Jett raised her head from up the crook of her arm and looked around. Nothing much new ever happened on this street, unless you counted the ice cream truck, which almost never came this far south of the depot.

A shiny green taxicab drifted toward her down the blacktop. Although she’d never seen a taxi before, Jett know what one was because a lot of people used them on Law and Order, which was Miz Marco’s favorite show.

The taxi coughed again and squirted blue smoke out of its tail. Then it came to a stop right next to her. Jett froze, arms wrapped around her knees. Anything could happen now. A few minutes passed while the driver talked on his cell phone. Jett could see a lady sitting in the back seat. She thought it must be strange to sit in the back seat, when no one was sitting in the front seat. At Miz Marco’s, Marshall always called shotgun.

The old lady had silver hair, in little waves all over her head and wore a tiny hat, like a crescent roll on top of her hair. Somehow she looked just right sitting by herself in the back.

Then it must’ve gotten way too hot in that car, because the driver got out to smoke a cigarette. The lady got out too, struggling to make the door handle work.

The lady was old. Real old. She smoothed down her shiny blue dress, and adjusted a large white purse over her arm. Then she looked right at Jett. They looked at each other and for some reason Jett remembered the tiger in her dream. The old woman stepped towards the curb. Then she turned around and sat down slowly, using her freckled white hand for balance. She sat down right next to Jett.

“What’s your name?” the old woman said. And all Jett could think of was the faint blue of ice sheets, the deep white coats of polar bears, and the smell of honeysuckle.

Hustler's Diet -- short, short story

Every morning that freaking baby woke with a cry that could splinter glass. Jett didn’t like babies. They were cute in pictures at the doctor’s office, but then all the mothers in those pictures were cute too. None of them had red faces and none of them looked like they used food stamps. The babies in the magazines were fat and the mothers were skinny, but they were all happy, that’s for sure.

Jett lay on the mattress in the Big Kid’s room and tried to find her dream again. Impossible once that brat started crying. Something about a tiger...a swimming tiger pushing through dark water, a pool beside some ancient temple in India. It had been an excellent dream. Kind of like that Jungle Book cartoon, but without the stupid parts. More realistic. Maybe more like the Discovery Channel. She tried to get back to that cool water, tried to make the sobbing baby into one of the villager’s kids. 

She was almost there, about ready to make those villagers run screaming from her striped, yellow majesty. Then Marshall woke up too. He slept in the bed under the window, the one everyone wanted, and when he woke up he liked to make sure the day began for everyone else too.  

On his way to the bathroom Marshall kicked and poked the other kids and began singing rap, like always. Mostly he sang Ghostface Killah, off the CD that his Real Dad gave him for his birthday. Tamitha, in the bunk bed, always woke up smiling, all crooked white teeth and soft brown eyes. No matter that the bedroom smelled like dirty dish rags, no matter how ugly the old frog decals were that came peeling off the walls, even when she got an F at school, no matter what, Tamitha always woke up smiling. Now she was sitting cross-legged on her bed singing “Hustlers Diet” along with Marshall. Emily, on the top bunk never woke up, no matter how loud Marshall sang. She’d stay up there, wrapped in her pimply yellow blanket until Miz Marco came up to get her.

At least now there was no school. Jett wouldn’t have to get the little kids into their clothes and help Miz Marco pack up the lunches. In addition to babies, she hated peanut butter, fake Cheerios, canned spaghetti, and bananas – all staple in Miz Marco’s kitchen.

This morning Jett reached under her pillow where she had stashed half a package of Zesta Saltines. They weren’t as crisp as they had been yesterday when she swiped them off the countertop, but they were still better than Premium. Since she slept in her shorts last night she could make a dash for the stairs while Marshall was still in the bathroom. She was out the front door before anyone could make her share.

A little way down the street there was an old boxwood hedge, full of holes and perfect for a fort. She liked to sit in there and make up stories about what she was going to do when she grew up. Used to be, she’d imagine her future life as a rodeo clown. She’d wear a green frizzy wig and a big red skirt and save all the cowboys when the bulls got real mad. But, lately she’d been thinking that she might want to be one of those people that put the tags on polar bears, so the scientists could see who they were eating. That was a good job where you got to fly around in helicopters and shoot tranquilizer guns. 

On a July day in the delta, a job on an ice floe sounded pretty good. Jett was considering what to do next. Better to get stuff done before it got too hot. Maybe she could borrow Marshall’s old bike to ride to the library or maybe she ought to check out the permanent garage sale down on Casper Street. Sometimes the lady that sat out there in the lawn chair would give her a book to keep, just to get her to shut up. Trouble was, it took a lot of talking to get to that point, and today Jett was kind of out of things to say.

She crawled out of the hedge and went to sit on the edge of the sidewalk. The sun was so hot that you could smell your skin cooking. It was a good smell, dry and sweet, kind of like fresh saltines. Jett rubbed her nose along her arm, squinting so she could see the little blonde hairs catch the light. 

Then there was a new sound. Drowning out the lawnmower whining down by the tracks and the squealing of the cicadas along Balthazar Street was a brand new sound--a grinding and a coughing, and it sounded just about as hopeless as Tamitha’s winter croup. Jett raised her head from up the crook of her arm and looked around. Nothing much new ever happened on this street, unless you counted the ice cream truck, which almost never came this far south of the depot.

A shiny green taxicab drifted toward her down the blacktop. Although she’d never seen a taxi before, Jett know what one was because a lot of people used them on Law and Order, which was Miz Marco’s favorite show.

The taxi coughed again and squirted blue smoke out of its tail. Then it came to a stop right next to her. Jett froze, arms wrapped around her knees. Anything could happen now. A few minutes passed while the driver talked on his cell phone. Jett could see a lady sitting in the back seat. She thought it must be strange to sit in the back seat, when no one was sitting in the front seat. At Miz Marco’s, Marshall always called shotgun.

The old lady had silver hair, in little waves all over her head and wore a tiny hat, like a crescent roll on top of her hair. Somehow she looked just right sitting by herself in the back.

Then it must’ve gotten way too hot in that car, because the driver got out to smoke a cigarette. The lady got out too, struggling to make the door handle work.

The lady was old. Real old. She smoothed down her shiny blue dress, and adjusted a large white purse over her arm. Then she looked right at Jett. They looked at each other and for some reason Jett remembered the tiger in her dream. The old woman stepped towards the curb. Then she turned around and sat down slowly, using her freckled white hand for balance. She sat down right next to Jett.

“What’s your name?” the old woman said. And all Jett could think of was the faint blue of ice sheets, the deep white coats of polar bears, and the smell of honeysuckle.