“The rainbow bars. Turn it back to the colored bars one,” Girl said to Brother. His longer arms meant that he always won their battles over the TV channel.
“No, the dots. The fighting dots,” Brother said, holding the knob so Girl couldn’t turn it back. The children watched the test pattern every morning as they waited for the broadcast to come on while they sat on the carpet eating Cheerios.
“This is stupid,” John said. He was Bonnie’s son, a soon-to-be-quasi-stepbrother. John was a year older than Brother and surly. He already went to kindergarten, not just nursery school.
“No, just watch,” Brother told him. “Once we saw a rocket take off.”
John rolled his eyes, but it was true—one morning the familiar black-and-white dots were suddenly replaced by a tall rocket erupting off its launch pad, the needle-tip rising into the clouds. Girl was there. She saw it. It could happen again.
John ignored the younger children and walked to the door, standing on tiptoe to slide the deadbolt to the right, the white metal door to the trailer swinging free. John walked outside, and the siblings followed into the chill of the early morning air.
They had a piece of straggled lawn outside their trailer with a good tree big enough to hold a swing, but the driveway and road were gravel. The siblings were lucky that John was tall enough to unlock the door. Outside was always better than inside, especially before cartoons came on.
That crisp, early morning, the three children found that Mother had forgotten to lock the door of her school-bus-yellow VW Bug. John graciously allowed the siblings to climb in first, sliding over to the passenger’s side. The children were small and skinny and fit side by side easily on the dark gray seat. Girl could not see over the dashboard with its round dials and overflowing ashtray. John took the driver’s seat, but he earned that right by providing those extra inches of height that bought their freedom. His five-year-old hand released the parking brake, and the tires crept down the incline, gaining speed, and now they were flying, soaring, as they rolled down the hill. A Herculean man loomed out of nowhere, his hands pushing on the hood of the car, shoulders bulging in his tank top as he caught the vehicle and stopped their joy ride. It was okay, though. Girl had felt that rollercoaster feeling in her belly and she had seen a man stop a car with his bare hands. It was enough. After that morning, Mother installed a slide lock close to the top of the trailer’s door, where John couldn’t reach.
two montessori schools
Brother went to preschool and Girl didn’t, which she thought was completely unfair. There was no way Girl was being left behind while he got to do something as neat and fun as he made preschool sound. At drop-off one day Girl went up to his teacher and apprised her of the unfairness of the situation. The teacher said any child that could speak that well should be in school, regardless of her age, so Girl got to go, even though she was only two. Mother was cleaning houses and going to college, so having the siblings together made her life easier.
Although they were eighteen months apart, Mother always treated the children as if they were the same age. The children had the same bedtime, the same rules, even the same friends. Girl always got to do whatever Brother did, and Girl thought of them more like twins than older and younger siblings. She resented anything that implied otherwise.
Girl and Brother attended Trinity Montessori school. They poured water into little dishes of clay to learn the difference between islands and peninsulas. They shook buttermilk in jars with marbles inside to make butter. They traced letters made out of sandpaper and read The Jet, which had an orange cover and was clearly better than any other early reader in existence—it involved a man’s hat falling into the mud—what could top that? But there was something weird going on at Trinity Montessori. There were a lot of parents with closed-up faces, mouths turned downward. Some of Girl’s friends stopped going.
“Now, Girl, you may hear some people say bad things about the school director. Some people think she is a bad person and don’t like her, but I think she’s a nice person. She just had some problems and went a little crazy, but she’s okay now. You are totally safe there.”
Mother always talked to the children on an adult level. She explained to them how the director of their school had been a nun and had given birth to a baby in the cathedral of a Catholic church and then killed it, but Mother was really sure this was an isolated event and that the nun had probably been abused by a man so it wasn’t her fault, and Mother was quite certain the director wasn’t going to kill random kids, and the church was sure, too, or they wouldn’t let her continue to teach at the school.
Girl wasn’t bothered by it. If Mother said it was okay, it was okay, just grown-up stuff. What she hated was when she wore a leotard under her skirt and had to pee really badly and wound up hopping around on one foot trying to get everything off in time, and sometimes she didn’t quite make it. The small spot of urine in her underpants humiliated her, because it wasn’t her fault that not all her leotards came with snaps at the crotch and that she could never remember which ones did and which ones didn’t. The other thing she hated were tights that were too short, and how her legs felt as if something was tied around her thighs, making it harder to run or climb things. Girl loved to climb things. But she was a little wary of Sister Maureen, in spite of
