Some Things That Stay Read online

  My father never told my mother to put her glasses back on. My mother never told him to keep his eyes on the road.

  In the morning, my mother milks the cow as we all watch. She has trouble at first holding on to the teats, and getting the milk to go in the bucket. The cow makes funny low sounds as if she is trying to sing with a stomachache. Finally my mother gets the hang of it and milks her dry. Holding up the bucket, she asks us who wants to try some milk. We decline. Watching it come out of the cow changes everything. I may never drink milk again.

  She names the bull Harry after her father, who died of tuberculosis, and the cow Edith after her mother, who drove into a tree four months later. The beef cattle remain nameless, which is for the best since they are just walking hamburgers and pot roast.

  While my mother is gone, registering us at the new school which we will start attending on Monday, Megan, Robert, and I find a boy’s bike in the barn. It’s carmine red, with rusted handlebars and flat tires, but it’s still a find; we have never had a bike, our own or anyone else’s. When our mother comes back, Robert begs her to take us into town to have the tires filled. She agrees, after phoning the Burns to ask if it is all right that we ride the bike. It’s too big for Megan, but Robert and I could give her rides, and she is just as excited as we are.

  On the way to the Texaco station on the far side of town, my mother informs us that the bike belonged to the Burns’ son, Timothy.

  “He died,” she says. “Last year. He was only sixteen. He died of leukemia. That’s cancer of the blood. It’s very sad.”

  “Did he die in the house?” asks Robert, who reads the same horror magazines over and over again—Chilling Tales, Worlds of Fear, and The Vault of Horror—scared each time, maybe more scared each time. He tapes the pages back together when they fall apart and stubbornly packs them up in his cardboard box, refusing to leave them behind, even though my father thinks he should. It is the only time Robert ever defies my father. I think having horror magazines makes him feel protected. They are his villains, his monsters. He hasn’t brought any on this short trip, too distracted by the bike.

  My mother pauses as if she might not answer his question, but, of course, she finally does. She is a big believer in information. “Yes, he died in the house,” she says.

  My brother gasps. “No!”

  “Where?” I ask.

  She pauses again. “In bed,” she says.

  “Which bed is that?” I ask.

  “Yours,” she says. “But Mrs. Burns said she bought new sheets and blankets, just for you.”

  “Oh, great,” I say. “I’m so glad. That makes all the difference.” I wish she would have lied. There are many times I wished she would have lied, but this time I really wish she could have. Sometimes lies are preferable to the truth.

  We spend a half hour at the gas station as my mother asks the attendant how the bike should be oiled, what the tire pressure should be, what bolts should be tightened. The attendant, a twenty-year-old acne-faced nerd with gray teeth and oil-stained fingernails, does more than answer my mother’s questions. He fixes the bike for us—for her. She is good at this, getting people to like her, because she asks so many questions, then listens intently to the answers. Besides, she is breathtakingly beautiful, with golden-blond hair, green eyes, and big breasts. You wouldn’t know we were related except for those breasts. Even with big breasts, I’m no looker. My hair is the color of wet sand, my eyes are ordinary brown, and my lips are lopsided, the top lip larger than the bottom. He wouldn’t have fixed the bike for me.

  Before we go back to the rented farm with the now slickly oiled bike, she takes us to the library, her favorite place on earth. She tells Robert to find a book on bike maintenance and Megan and I are to find books about the area we now live in, as if anything interesting might have been written about Mayville, New York. I would complain, but it is good to see her acting like her old self. She hasn’t forced us to go to the library for months. She hasn’t discussed, page by page, the latest National Geographic for even longer than that. But today she seems lively and overly anxious to teach us. Just like old times.

  At dinner my mother says the Burns rented this house because they couldn’t bear to be in it any longer after their son died. She says they should sell it, but can’t, because their memories hold them to the house like an anchor. She says those memories can pull them under so they can’t breathe any longer. She says they have jumped ship, but not swum far enough to escape the undertow. My mother loves metaphors almost as much as she loves the bare facts of life.

  I am sleeping in a room where someone died. A kid, like me. Right here. Right in the space I’m in. Every time I hear a strange sound my eyes fly open and I am sure, for a brief moment, I see something, so I close my eyes again.

  The attic of the house, which can be reached through a trapdoor in the ceiling, is filled with boxes of the dead boy’s stuff, and we are not allowed to go up there. I hear noises coming from up in the attic. I can hear the boxes whisper.

  Out behind the house, just past the garden, where the ground begins to rise into the hill, is a half-completed bomb shelter made of gray cinder blocks and cement. There is a doorway, but no door, and steps leading down to the cement floor six feet below. The walls are finished and they extend two feet above the ground. There is no roof. I suppose the Burns stopped building it when their son died.

  I try to imagine my parents without us kids. I can.

  Two

  At first I just watch them from my bedroom window.

  One is a skinny boy, about my age or maybe a year younger, with light-orange hair and a pale round face. It’s kind of exciting, the idea of a boy right across the road. It’s certainly better than no boy, or a dead boy. It’s hard to tell from this distance if he’s cute at all. At least he’s not fat, like my brother.

  It’s rained a lot in these past three days, but whenever the rain stops, he comes out of his tar-paper house and takes off into the woods carrying something: a board, a tin pot, a mug, a box of crackers.

  Sometimes his sister follows him. She is the same height as her brother, and skinny, but with a narrow face and tangled hair the color of sawdust. I wonder if they’re twins. He yells at her to get lost, but she still follows him. She doesn’t stay away long. When she comes back, her arms are folded across her chest, her face even longer than before.

  Today they are in their enormous and overgrown vegetable garden, with their older sister, a large-boned girl who must be past school age, maybe almost twenty. She has hair that falls in dark-red curls to her waist, tied back loosely in a thick ponytail. She has her brother’s round face and she is fleshy, but not fat. She moves in a slow, peaceful way. Although I am too far away, I’m sure she hums as she works; the way she pulls the weeds from the ground, tosses them aside, then bends down again, has a rhythm that comes only from music. I believe I can hear the music as I watch.

  The thin, tangled-haired girl puts down her basket and runs over to the tire swing. The tire is tied by a rope to the thick limb of a twisted ancient maple at the back of their house, an unfinished house that looks like it will never be finished. The girl is too big for the swing and her butt hardly fits through the hollow opening of the tire. She turns herself around until the rope gets twisted real good, then lets go and it spins her like a top. I’d be too embarrassed to play on a swing at her age. I grow dizzy watching.

  They have a mother who comes and goes, wearing a tan uniform when she leaves in the morning, then comes home around four, goes inside for a half hour, then comes back out wearing a dull gold uniform, both shapeless dresses with big square pockets. She drives a dark-blue car and the door shrieks when she closes it. The back of the car has a huge dent on the driver’s side, and the bumper wobbles like a broken jaw. If her car were an animal, I’d shoot it.

  The father has only come outside a few times, to carry garbage to the compost by the garden, and to work on one of the junk cars when it’s not raining. His face is very narrow
, and he’s as tall as my father, a little over six feet. He keeps his right leg straight all the time and kind of has to throw it around his body in a half circle to take a step. My brother calls him Frankenstein.

  I will write their names in my diary when I meet them, so I will remember them. It is the only way I remember the names of people I have met, and sometimes even the names don’t bring back a face. Some people are so forgettable.

  “Hey! Come here!” the skinny girl yells at me from across the blacktop road. It’s our fourth day here, and finally it’s stopped raining.

  She stands on a lawn that is mostly dandelions. The furry yellow flowers weren’t there yesterday. In the woods behind her house, the trees have tight green buds as if someone squeezed the trunks and green burst out at the tip of every branch. Spring has come with the rain. It’s May and finally warm, not a false warmth but a promise.

  From up close, she looks like she’s been hibernating. Her skin is white as a ghost’s and her hair is a mess. Her face is very plain and she has a long, thin, triangular chin. What I notice most is her elbows and knees, which are knobby and make her arms and legs look even thinner than they are.

  Instead of walking down our pebbly driveway in my bare feet, I jump across the ditch in front of our house, my jump not good enough to clear the pebbly edge of the road. Stones scatter in all directions as I skid and slip backwards into the ditch filled with a good four inches of cold water, which immediately soaks straight through my jeans and into my underpants. Embarrassment heats my face like a sunburn, but I will it away. In a year, I’ll be gone. It is this girl who will have to stay in this nowhere place with the embarrassment of her tar-paper house.

  I pretend I don’t even notice my pants are wet as I get up and cross the road.

  “Hey,” she says. “You moved into the Burns’ house, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking she sure is bright.

  “You know what happened in that house, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Their kid died. I’m in his room.” I say this like it doesn’t bother me at all.

  “Ewww! I couldn’t sleep in there. Not a chance. My name’s Brenda.” She sticks out her hand.

  “I’m Tamara.” I shake her hand.

  “What?” she asks. Everyone asks that.

  “Tamara.”

  “They call you Tammy?”

  “No. Just Tamara. Like tomorrow with an a.”

  “Oh.”

  We stare at each other. She has a smudge of dirt running all the way down her right cheek.

  “My brother’s Rusty,” she says. “And my sister’s Helen.”

  I think Helen is a perfect name for her older sister, like Helen of Troy. And I bet they call her brother Rusty because of his red hair. Then they should call this girl Mop Head. I feel myself grinning and bite my lip. “My sister is Megan,” I say. “My brother is Robert. Megan’s seven and Robert’s eleven. I’m almost fifteen.”

  “I’m fourteen too!” Brenda says. “I turned fourteen on April 10th. Rusty’s fifteen, and Helen’s nineteen. What’s your dad do?”

  “He’s a painter,” I say. “He paints pictures that get hung in galleries in New York City. He paints landscapes.”

  Which is why we move each year. We find houses to rent, then leave them behind like a snake sheds its skin. My father outgrows the landscape. He needs new lines, new hues, new inspiration.

  “Are you going to go to school here?” Brenda asks.

  “Sure.” We came on Thursday. Tomorrow is Monday. There are only about three weeks of school left. I’ve only finished the same grade in the same school once.

  “What grade are you in?” she asks.

  “Tenth.” I’m ahead a grade, just like my brother and sister.

  “So, you’ll ride on the bus with us?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m in eighth grade,” Brenda says. “I hate my homeroom teacher. Mrs. Burt. I call her Mrs. Butt. You’ll get Mrs. Green or Mrs. Hawthorn. They both seem nice. We gotta be out here at seven-thirty. The bus won’t wait. It’s Mr. Matthews. He hates kids. You want to come in and meet my family?”

  I shudder. I’m not going in that house. “No, thanks. I got to help my mom. Nice to meet you.”

  “Okay.” Brenda rubs at her face with the back of her hand. The smudge grows bigger. She shrugs. “See you at seven-thirty. Better be a little early.”

  “Okay,” I say, knowing my mom will drive us to school on our first day. I don’t want to tell Brenda. She might ask for a ride. I don’t want to show up at school on the first day with Brenda. I’ve got a good feeling she’s not too popular. If she is, I’m in more trouble than I thought.

  We always live in these backward places where the schools are easy; even a grade ahead I get straight A’s. My mother was a science teacher, until she gave it up for my father, and my father was a math teacher, until he gave it up for art. They are both so full of information they are likely to burst. They ease the weight of so much knowledge by passing it on to us, like other parents might pass a football or a platter of brownies.

  They are so alike inside and so different on the outside. My father is six feet four with an abundance of white hair, and piercing light-blue eyes. He’s almost sixty, much older than my mother, but he still looks imposing because of those eyes and his height and the way he holds himself up so straight. Some people think him a snob, but he doesn’t realize it. He’s not a snob, he just doesn’t know how to carry on a normal conversation. I understand my father, I just don’t like him.

  My mother doesn’t know how to carry on a normal conversation either, but that doesn’t stop her. She’s only as tall as me, five feet six, and her blond hair and pale skin make her look soft and vulnerable, but she lets you know that’s a mistake pretty quickly. People think she’s charmingly eccentric. My mother loves my father, more than us, more than herself, and he loves her, even more than art, so I forgive him his trespasses. He loves us too, but we come after art.

  The only family member I think is interesting is my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who died when she drove into a tree. When my mother speaks of her, which is not often, she describes it as an accident. “My mother died in a car accident,” she will say, in a tone that stops all other questions. But I think my grandmother killed herself from grief, after her husband died. I imagine her behind the wheel, headed directly toward that tree, firm, unflinching. It’s an image that sticks with me. I want to be strong like that. Determined. I feel my jaw tighten as I pretend I am her.

  I used to wish I could paint, like my father. With pastels I drew trees and hills and suns. I could draw them all separate, and you’d know exactly what they were, but I couldn’t put them together. I could never figure out depth. It’s like music, which I love. When I try to sing, I can get each note, but the notes never slide together, become a melody. I’m good at math. I like taking apart the functions. I like the way things add up to a right or wrong answer. I like the fact I’m good at it.

  But sometimes I take out my pastels. Sometimes I wish I could sing.

  Only occasionally will my father pack up his easel, canvas, and paints, and drive to some other valley or hilltop. Mostly he wakes up, walks around the perimeter of whatever house we are living in, stops at some particular spot looking out toward the trees, and nods as if in greeting. Then he goes inside and gets his easel and sets up for the day, painting that same view for the next few weeks; a morning version and a late-afternoon version. He begins with a sketch in pencil on paper, which will take countless revisions, then moves to canvas and oil. He has a cigar box filled with gum erasers he tosses across the yard in frustration, and it is our job to collect them at the end of the day. He pays us a penny apiece, and still we don’t always find all of them. We leave erasers behind us like bread crumbs. As a child, I used to imagine tossing them one by one out the car window as we moved, so I could find my way back.

  A few months ago, I decided to be rational and try to talk my father out of
our constant moves. I set up my questions like a math problem, believing I could lead him to an answer that would prove we didn’t have to keep moving. As he set up his easel only ten feet from the back door of our house in Diamond, Georgia, I calmly approached him and asked him why he always painted so close to the house.

  “Look out there,” he said. It was early morning and our back lawn was three acres of mowed grass, dotted with a few old magnolias casting shadows like black ink on the dewy grass. Beyond the lawn was the edge of a national park, thick with tall weeds and muddy swamps. “Look at the robins, how they stand guard over the earth, watching for a worm to escape. Today is the first time I’ve seen robins this way. I’ve seen them before as birds in flight, or perched on the tops of trees to sun themselves in the late afternoon. I’ve seen them as color—used them for color—placing them where I need them, but I’ve never seen them this way, like prison guards. I want to capture them this way, see what it will do to the rest of the painting. It is the small things that bring a painting to life. There is a challenge right here, where I stand, that I can’t resist.”

  I thought about that, how it fit into my equation, and I asked my next question carefully. “Then why do you drag us across the country each year? When you get done with the views from this house, why can’t we just move a mile or two away, to a place you haven’t painted yet? Why drag us so far away just to stand in the back yard?”

  “To jar my soul,” he said. “Or because I am afraid. Now, I have to sketch the robins before the light changes, but good try, Tamara.” He turned away, to look at the lawn, to raise his pencil to the canvas, and even though I didn’t step back, I was gone. Erased.

  That was, and will be, my last attempt at rational argument. When my mother told us we were moving to Mayville, New York, I threw a fit for days, my best fit ever. I refused to eat dinner but sat at the table and glared at my parents. I threatened to slit my wrists, but when I took the blade out of my father’s razor, I got scared and sliced up my pillow instead. My mother bought a new pillow without a word of comment. I hid the car keys until my father said he’d break all my records. I even tore a hunk of hair out of my head that is only beginning to grow back. The day we moved I refused to pack the trailer, so my mother did my part. When it was time to leave I said I wouldn’t get in the car, but she just stood there holding the door open. She was so pale and tired-looking I got in the car, but I’ll never do that again. I’ll never move again.