I can’t sleep. Every so often I twitch awake, convinced there is someone in here with me. I feel them along my side, stirring in the dark.
Ted
I cannot remember exactly how old I was when I realised that my Mommy was beautiful. No more than five, I think. I understood it not by looking at her but from the other kids’ and parents’ expressions. When she picked me up from school the parking lot was always full, and they all looked.
It gave me complicated feelings. It was obvious that the other mommies weren’t like her. My mommy had smooth skin and big eyes that seemed to see only you when they looked. She didn’t wear big jeans or sweaters. She wore a blue dress with a skirt that swished about her calves like the sea, or sometimes sheer blouses, which showed glimpses of the warm shadowed caverns of her. She spoke really softly and gently, she never yelled like other moms. Her pointed consonants and flat vowels were exotic. I was proud that they looked at her. But the glances also made a little hot place in my belly fire up. I both wanted them to look and didn’t. It was better after I started taking the bus.
I was protective of her at school. But I was always most jealous when Mommy came home from her shift. I was scared that all the other kids she looked after at the hospital would use her up and there would be nothing left for me.
In a way, that was what happened. She was heartbroken when they let her go. There were cutbacks everywhere, everyone knew that. Money was tight. Daddy told me to keep out of Mommy’s hair. She needed some space, he said. And she did seem diminished, somehow. Her easy glow was dimmed. I was fourteen or so then, maybe.
The Chihuahua lady and Mommy were tight. Every morning, if they weren’t on shift, Mommy would walk over to her house. They would drink black coffee and smoke Virginia Slims and talk. If it was nice they sat on the screen porch. If it was dull or cold, which it usually was, they sat at the dinner table until the air grew so thick with smoke and secrets that you could have sliced it with a knife. I knew all this because sometimes on the weekends they lost track of time and I had to go fetch Mommy to make lunch. Maybe it was only opening jars of baby food, but it was still women’s work, Daddy said. He was drinking a lot by then.
After Mommy was fired the Chihuahua lady was outraged, way more upset than Mommy. Chihuahua lady tried to get her to fight it. ‘You’re the best,’ she said. ‘You have such a way with the kids. They’re crazy to lose you. It’s a crime.’ Her wide brown eyes were pools of belief. The Chihuahua lady always hummed with energy. ‘You can write to the hospital board,’ she said to Mommy. ‘Come on. You can’t take it lying down. You are an asset.’
Daddy and I both echoed her. ‘You’re the best, Mommy,’ I said. ‘They don’t know how good they have it with you.’
‘It’s just the way of things,’ Mommy said in her gentle way. ‘You accept misfortune with grace.’
My problems at school had already started, but my parents had not yet begun to take them seriously. I guess I was so well behaved at home, they must have thought there was some mistake. I was helpful and polite, or at least I always tried to be. ‘Teddy seems to have skipped being a teenager,’ Mommy would say, stroking my cheek. ‘We are lucky.’
One morning the Chihuahua lady came to the house before I left for school. I was eating cereal at the kitchen counter. Mommy was wearing her blue gauzy dress that floated behind her when she moved. The Chihuahua lady settled herself on a stool and poured three sachets of sweetener into her coffee. Steam wreathed about her head. She liked her coffee molten hot and sweet enough to kill. She took her dog out of her bag and put him on the counter. He had a little smooth, dark face, intelligent. He sniffed delicately at the coffee cups and blinked in the blue haze of cigarette smoke.
‘How can you do it?’ Mommy asked. ‘How can you keep that poor creature in captivity? Can’t you see the suffering in his eyes? It’s monstrous to breed and keep wild animals.’
‘You’re soft-hearted,’ the Chihuahua lady said. (Of course, I realise now, this was pre-Chihuahua. She was the dachshund lady, then, so I’ll call her that.)
The dachshund lady gave her a look and Mommy said, ‘Let’s go in the other room. Teddy, finish that math homework.’
They went to the living room and she shut the kitchen door. I heard her say, ‘Oh, that dog. I can’t bear to look at him. And don’t let him sit on my upholstered dining chairs! It’s not hygienic.’
I got out my math homework. I had a headache. It had been sitting there for a few days now, like a toad at the front of my skull. I stared at the page, which throbbed and swam. It was hard to concentrate with my brain pulsing like this. I seemed to have at least attempted some of the math problems last night, although I could also see that I had got most of them wrong. I sighed and took out my eraser. The dachshund lady’s voice drifted in and out. The kitchen door was thin pine board.
‘Something stinks,’ she said. ‘All week there have been these big meetings, and yesterday the cops came. They’re interviewing us all, one by one in the nurses’ lounge. It’s not very convenient. It means we have to go to the cafeteria for coffee. That’s three whole floors down in the elevator,
