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Listen to thisYou can view Chapters One, Two, Three, Four and Five of this serialised and previously unpublished book before you read Chapter Six. – Eds
The Home Again
Dear Mother,
I had to have an operation. This is what happened:
I was at school, thinking about something I had forgotten. I looked at the cold grey floor of the cafeteria. The macaroni didn’t smell good. Then it was cold and it was black because I fainted. I tasted the hard cement when I fell.
I have been gone somewhere a long time . I am in a hospital bed now. I feel this white table a lot. It’s smooth like an ice cube. My mouth is still dry. I can get water with a glass straw. It is bent, this straw. A jar has some money in it. People have come and looked at me and put money in that jar. I think it is for me, but we have no money at our home where I live now.
Today I have something new. Mrs. Gradler came to visit me. She brought a box of new crayons and a stack of coloring cards. They come from cereal boxes I think. They are the shade of an elephant and smell of toast.
My belly aches like one hundred scabs and an earache. I can’t color, but I like my present. Mrs. Gradler came on her day off. She wore a hat and gloves. At home Mrs. Gradler only wears a smock. A red one, maybe. She walks down the hall hard. Her feet are like two long potatoes. She tells me “Go on now”, or she says “Nasty, nasty” if something is dirty. Her dog, Belinda, taps on the wooden floor like she has high heels. Belinda has long round ears that look like long hair on each side of her face. She is so sad. I love her. I always kiss her. I put her on my lap. We don’t sit on Mrs. Gradler’s big lap. She has too many little girls who don’t mind her.
She doesn’t like us but she came to see me, on her day off. I didn’t know what to say. It took a long time to save the cereal cards. Where did she get them?
In our dining room at the home everything clangs. We have hot cereal, with a spoon of sugar and milk. My belly gets stuffed, but children have to eat up everything. I am a good eater. We sit at square tables – shiny as party shoes. Two and two and two and Mrs. Gradler. We can’t eat until Mr. Downen says prayers. They call the prayers “Grace”. Here is one of his graces: “I will lift up mine knives unto the hills – from whence cometh my health – my health cometh from the Lord”.
Then we eat. They say I am fat. My cheeks get red. Maybe I am a watermelon belly. In the operating room, up at the ceiling there was a big platter of bright light and lots of enamel tables, buttons, silver scissor things. I knew my belly was uncovered. My pants were gone. That’s bad. I couldn’t help it, but it’s bad. It’s like the dream of the red wagon and the snails and worms.
Mr. Downen was behind me. He held my head in his hands. He never did that before. In the dining room he comes by in back of us. He looks mad and quiet. Once I kissed his hand. It had lots of hairs but I didn’t care.
In the operating room, Dr. Megan and Mr. Downen didn’t talk to me. They put a half moon of sheet, on a frame in front of me. I couldn’t see anymore about what was happening to my belly that’s too fat. Dr. Megan said he liked detective stories. Mr. Downen likes them too. One of them said he liked to see the blood run in them. Someone put a cup over my nose and mouth. It smelled like danger. Then the triangles came, the ones that were all attached like paper dolls and they flapped up and down and flew in front of me.
Then I was in the dark, alone and my belly was stinging and throbbing like slivers and bee stings. I was so sorry that I am so fat. I vomited something like green spinach.
I hate it. Someone I don’t know said I must move up, get on a high bedpan. It was so cold, so high. I hurt so much. I cried and cried and I did it. But I peed on the bed. I am always so bad.
Now the belly is deep scab sore. I feel this white table a lot. The sheets smell ironed. My belly is stitched together from my appendix operation. I saw it when the nurse changed my big white bandage. I think there is a big white rubber thing there. They call it a stitch.
Mr. Downen is here now. He looks mad. Mutti, he has the biggest nose holes in the world. They are like a bull dog’s nose. He has a shiny head with no hair except all around the edges. He is like a top, but I love Mr. Downen. Mrs. Gradler likes it if I say “God bless Mr. Downen” at prayer time before we go to bed. Mr. Downen wears round glasses like an owl and he is looking at my jar of money. He asks if I ask people for this. My cheeks are red, I know. He thinks I did something bad. He thinks I am a beggar. I can only say “no”. I should not be glad that he goes away now, but I am.
Now I remember what I was thinking about in the cafeteria line. I wondered if Mr. Downen would marry Mrs. Gradler. Then they would be like our mother and father. That’s when that white thing exploded in my stomach.
Your Nora
* * *
Dear Mutti
Honor room it’s called
Three beds for us
Still the iron arms
like half moons at my head
and my feet
I can see the window over Lucy’s and Olive’s beds
Such tall thin windows and the white curtains a veil.
I have seen the purple flowers there from a tree that grows way down on the ground where the playroom is.
When the afternoon hums during the summer, we do not need to sleep, but we must have naptime anyway.
We are too big for this, I am eight and a half, but we get our books from behind the glass doors of the shelves in the library room anyway.
Take the one of Mitzi and Fritzi of Germany
Those two are told babies come from cabbages
I wonder
Mrs. Gradler has a different book
Olive and Lucy call me fat, make fun of me
They do not like me and I cry about it
In the room that has no honor
Donna reads comic books to Jackie, Pearl and May
Donna’s father has taken her to ride in an airplane on Sunday
She is strong too
I wanted to be her friend and she got mad at me
I gave her a piece of paper I found. It had words on it
“We must love one another"
If grandfather said this to me, I would do it
She plays cowgirls, with Jackie, Pearl and May
There is no one in my grade here
Donna reads Batman comics to us, but she did not read my bible paper.
Because I am so good, I am in the Honor Room
* * *
Once I read that the Taurean woman can be very stubborn. Being called stubborn used to make me ashamed until I was old enough to laugh about it. Maybe that’s why Donna Muse, who was the Tom girl among us, had other things to do than be my friend. I was very good but very stubborn about everything. We all admired Donna. She was a good reader and got comic books from her father.
We gathered around her like ants making a circle round a drop of honey. We learned about Nancy, Superman, Spiderman, and Batman. She was our “Wonderwoman” “wide, strong and smart. We were the same age, but she had skipped a grade and left me without my own age mate. Still, she shared a dorm with three younger children, while I who was so good was in the honor room, miserably ostracised by Olive and Lucy.
Before supper time, a Senior girl would come on duty to help us wash and clean up. When it was Alice Parberry, she read us The Secret Garden in which the crippled girl found her friend Peter and together they made the dormant garden bloom.
I didn’t know that I longed for a friend too and was learning to be as cruel as my two roommates.
With a husband for a roommate, most of our lives together, I have never been tactful when angry. I insult, accuse, blame and demean, as though he will be just as ashamed as I would be, if my deceased Prussian grandfather or the imposing Mrs. Gradler would scold me. It was never safe for me to be anything but very good as a child, so I was always getting isolated from the group with rewards, but when I got my own Peter to help me make dormant things bloom, I cut to the quick.
