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Stacy Barton
Last night I sat on the living room rug and cried. It was my thirty-fifth birthday, and all I could think was My God, I can’t do this for fifty more years. I walked back through the sleeping house and stood beside each little bed. Lydia suddenly looked long to me, the bones in her face just beginning to widen into girlhood. Across the room, Mary slept with one hand curled beneath her cheek. In the next room, Drew lay in his loft—a chubby little boy with the mind of an ancient cleric, full of words too big for his tiny mouth to say. The baby was asleep next to Jack in our bed, and I stood motionless watching them both breathe gently—in and out, in and out. I counted seventeen breaths, went back into the living roblahom, and let the stillness fill my ears like the rush of an ocean tide.
“Push, Meg, push!” I grabbed my knees and leaned into the pain. I could feel the baby’s head heavy and near. The sounds ran together, and the room blurred into a sunset. Eyes were on me; I kept pushing.
“Wait for the pain; don’t push until you feel the contraction!” someone shouted. I think it was the midwife.
Jack was near, stroking my forehead, telling me the baby was coming. I threw up in a bedpan and took a breath and pushed as hard as I could. Suddenly she was there, all warm and wet and wriggly. I heard someone crying and singing at the same time. It was me. Jack cried, too. We wept as we touched her little wrinkled body. She smelled like new earth and felt like second skin, stretched lengthwise between my breasts.
Today I locked myself in the closet; I was scared of my own existence and the dark thoughts that pressed against the inside of my eyelids. I waited until the darkness of the closet quieted my mind, and then I came out and made cookies with the children. We walked to the park, and I laughed. Life is good. I can smell the sun.
Yesterday Jack and I went to the Outback Steakhouse. I love their Caesar salad. I told him between the garlic croutons and the New York strip that I thought I might be going crazy. Then I laughed, like it was nothing.
The next day was Palm Sunday, and the children and I made flags of ribbon and sticks from the yard. We were going to have a parade for Jesus. I read them the Bible story from the book my father read to me. I loved my babies so much; it was only sometimes that I screamed at them. I didn’t mean to. Lydia shouted at me that I looked like Ursula, the witch in The Little Mermaid, and I shouted back that I felt like Ursula! I stood in the bathroom for a while and ran water in the sink. I came out and asked them to forgive me. Then we ate grilled cheese. We left the ribbon and sticks and glue and scissors all over the floor and laid out a blanket, turnedoff the lights, and watched old movies from when Lydia and Mary were small.
I sat in the parking lot and breathed into a paper sack before I could get up the courage to go into the therapist’s office. It was very proper and tidy, like any doctor’s office. I filled out the paperwork like I was told. One of the questions puzzled me. It asked, “Why are you here?” I thought it was a funny question. It seemed to me that if I knew why I was there, I wouldn’t have come. The therapist came to the waiting room to get me himself. I knew him from church. He smiled at me and ushered me down the hallway of bad paneling. It’s funny what you remember.
He wrote lots of things down on a yellow legal pad, and I heard myself saying things I didn’t know I had ever thought. I just decided to answer with the first thing that came into my mind. He asked me if I felt the sadness of my life, and I looked at him. No one had ever thought my life was sad. “No,” I said. “I guess not.”
I have been given an assignment. I am to imagine that the little girl I used to be is sitting in a chair beside me. Then I am to try to feel sad for her. This all came about because I told the doctor that I cried every time I went to the school to pick up the children. I cried at every school program and PTA meeting—just the smell of metal school desks and the sight of small children lined up together could bring tears to my eyes. I cried over my own babies—how I was certainly ruining their lives with my inadequacies. But the doctor said I never cried for myself. He said that wasn’t good. He said I needed to feel for the little girl I used to be.
What he didn’t tell me was that the little girl I used to be might show up beside me in the Wal-Mart checkout line. He didn’t tell me that she might suddenly burst into tears at the sight of a refrigerator magnet. Or that she would start telling my stories.
“Class, this is Margaret O’Sullivan.”
I stood in the doorway and held up my chin. I looked at them all at once. They looked like a forest, and I felt like a very small squirrel.
A pretty girl with long, straight brown hair smiled at the teacher and raised her hand.
“How are we going to tell us apart?”
Everyone laughed.
“Yes, Margaret, I’ve already thought about that.” The teacher turned to me, “You see, we already have a Margaret in the third grade, and you even have the same last initial. Her last name is O’Brien. Perhaps we can tell you apart by your middle name?”
I didn’t say a word. The trees turned into grasshoppers, and a million eyes stared at me without blinking, like I was just a piece of grass.
“What’s your middle name?”
“Anne,” I whispered. I didn’t want to be called by two names.
The girl with the long brown hair raised her hand again.
“That’s my middle name, too.”
The class laughed even more. My face got hot.
“My goodness, isn’t that funny?” The teacher laughed. “Well, we can call one of you Margaret and the other one Margaret Anne.”
The girl with the long brown hair didn’t even raise her hand.
“I don’t want to be called Margaret Anne; I want to be Margaret, like always,” she blurted out, glaring at me.
“Well,” the teacher started, and, when she looked at me, I knew I had lost. “Since you are new here, why don’t we call you Margaret Anne, and we’ll just keep calling Margaret O’Brien Margaret. Now, everyone take out your penmanship books and turn to page thirty-nine. Copy these sentences in your best cursive.”
I sat in the chair she pointed to and made my face plain. The girl beside me was the one with the long brown hair. I made a little smile at her, but she stuck out her tongue when the teacher wasn’t looking.
The teacher handed me a book, and I turned to page thirty-nine. I stared at the long words with their loops and curls and couldn’t breathe. I only knew Ls. In Tennessee, we had only just started drawing Ls. In Tennessee, my teacher read us stories while we lay on shag rugs. In Tennessee, I was the only Margaret, and my best friend had red hair. Short. Curly. Red hair.
I saw the doctor again today. We talked about third grade. He said most eight-year-olds don’t contemplate suicide, but I remember standing at the top of the school stairs and imagining how I would look crumpled in a heap at the bottom—motionless, legs and arms bent at awkward angles, a small trickle of blood sneaking from the corner of my mouth.
The baby was absolutely precious. Creamy and sweet. The other three were playing under the table. They were Michelangelo. I had taped butcher paper to the underside, and they were painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I heard one of them squeal every time the paint hit them in the face. I only got angry a little, because I knew the paint would clean up, and it was keeping them busy. I put on some harpsichord music and nursed Zoë in the other room.
Peace only lasted a little while before Lydia came in shouting with seven-year-old indignation about how Drew had ruined the entire chapel because he didn’t know anything about painting because he was only two! And certainly the great masters didn’t have to be bothered with their baby brothers when they were on important jobs like ceilings and things!
Then Mary and Drew trailed in after Lydia, Zoë popped up from my breast looking deliriously drunk with Mamma’s milk, and the morning was over.
There they were—all four of them perched on my bed. It was only 10:30, and there would be no Jack until seven.
“Let’s go to the park!”
They squealed with delight, and I was only too happy to leave behind the mountains of dirty dishes and laundry. I grabbed some apple juice and a couple of diapers for Zoë, and off we went. I watched them climb unfettered at the park and wrote poetry on a paper napkin that no one would ever see.
*
The late summer evening reminded me of lightning bugs and Tennessee breezes. I put on the Indigo Girls, and the children and I danced for Jack. We jumped and twirled in the evening light, and I put my arms over my head and spun my hips. I grinned sideways at Jack; he loved it. I felt the beer smooth me and giggled. The children enjoyed my play, and so we danced. Bare feet across the cool earth, arms and hair flying.
“What else happened in Tennessee?” the therapist asked.
“The summer between my second- and third-grade years, the locusts came. Did you know they come every thirteen years?”
He shook his head no and wrote something on his pad.
“They’re born underground, but when they finally come out, they die after a few weeks.”
“I think I’ve heard of that.”
“Every bush and shrub and tree in Nashville was full of them. In the mornings after breakfast, the women would come out on the front porch and sweep the dead bodies into the yards.”
He waited for me to continue.
“I heard them singing the night my sister was born. Grandma Jean and I decided they had come to sing for her.”
He studied me.
“I only held her once. She died before the locusts quit singing.”
“That must have been hard.”
“After she died, Mamma wouldn’t go back in the house. We just left. Grandma Jean took me back to pack a suitcase. Daddy said I could only fill one because the movers would come later. Grandma Jean packed Mamma’s. I made sure to get my Holly Hobby picture album and my white sundress. It had these tiny raised blue polka dots that you could feel even with your eyes closed—and a silky blue ribbon for a sash.”
I left his office, got in the car, and drove hard. I got on the highway and drove harder. I watched every truck as it passed on the other side. One slip of the wheel, one tiny jerk . . .
“Go straight to the hospital,” my boyfriend practically shouted into the telephone. I sat on the other end and refused.
“I already threw up! I’m not going to the emergency room; they’ll just laugh at me.”
“You took three bottles of pills. Go to the hospital!”
“No!”
I hung up on him and sat on the hallway floor of the dorm, traced the carpet design with my fingers, and felt my breath in my mouth. It was still there. I was still there.
It felt like my head wasn’t exactly attached to my body, and if I tilted my head to the side, my eyes didn’t follow. The clock on the wall said 2:12, and the hall was quiet with sleep. I decided to skip my early morning class and put my head on the carpet and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, there were men in orange suspenders poking at me.
“Get off me! Stop touching me! Leave me alone!”
I screamed and screamed, but they held me down.
“You don’t understand! I can’t breathe. Stop touching me!”
Everyone on my dorm floor was standing in their doorways. They were all looking at me—huge locusts with bulging eyes. Their sticky feet burned my skin. I started clawing at my arms; the locusts were itching me. I heard a growl and tasted blood in my mouth. And everything went black.
I didn’t have any of my children in hospitals. I hate hospitals. Hospitals are for sick people, and childbirth is a healthy, holy thing. I had my babies at home. All four of them. Little Zoë was a water baby.
I was curled up inside Jack’s love. My head pillowed on his shoulder. We breathed in tandem. Mamma and Daddy were here this week. When they left, I cried all the way home from the airport. Later Jack and I made love, and as I came, I cried. I couldn’t stop. Jack held me fast and took it all. He was amazing. I think maybe he is not from the same planet as I.
“Jack, am I crazy?”
“No, honey.”
“But how can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve watched you with the children . . . the way you talk to them, the way you look when Zoë’s nursing, the way you make their peanut butter and jelly. You’re not crazy.”
I sat in his brown office. I had to pay someone to talk to me. I breathed slowly, but I was certain I sounded like the giant fan at the train station—the one that whirs and sticks and whirs and sticks—up in the corner where the wall meets the ceiling.
“Do you think I need to be here?”
I looked at him, and he realized I was serious.
“Yes, I think if you could have worked through this any other way you would have.”
“So, I’m not just being dramatic?”
“No, Meg, you’re not just being dramatic.”
I was so excited; I didn’t even care that I was Margaret Anne. My best friend Becky was coming to Virginia to visit me. I hadn’t seen her in a whole entire year! Her mamma and daddy were bringing her to Williamsburg for summer vacation on account of its having historical significance. Daddy said we could drive all the way in to meet them and see the blacksmith and the tailor. And we each would get to make our own mop cap, Mamma said.
I was imagining what Becky looked like. She said she still had her hair cut in a pixie. I had a pixie too, but I didn’t like mine. Becky was cute with hers because she had curly red hair, but I hated mine because Mamma made me get it cut with my cousin last year. And I don’t even like pixies. When my long hair was gone, Clay, the boy I liked, stopped chasing me on the playground and started chasing Cynthia because she still had long hair. Becky tried to comfort me; she said it made us more like sisters. I liked that.
The kids were looking at their baby pictures today. It was funny how they loved that. They would be happy for hours squealing over how cute they were “when we were little.”
While the kids looked through their photo albums, I put the baby down for a morning nap and went to the china cabinet. On the bottom shelf, tucked behind my wedding bouquet and Grandma Jean’s silver plate, was a small blue Holly Hobby photo album. Inside there were a few pictures of me from when I was little. I flipped through them until I came to a picture of me and Becky Goodwin standing in front of the fudge shop wearing our mop caps.
Lydia came over to show me a particularly funny picture of Drew covered in blue ink. While we laughed at him, looking like a blue hobo from trying to eat a stamp pad, Lydia asked me what I was looking at. Once they discovered I had pictures from when I was a kid, they all jockeyed for position to get a look at them.
“Who’s that?” Lydia pointed to the picture of Becky and me in our homemade hats. Mary giggled with her thumb in her mouth, and Drew pulled the book over so he could see, too.
“That’s a picture of me and my best friend, Becky.”
“Cool!” Lydia said. “What grade were you in?”
“That picture was taken the summer before the fourth grade, but I only went to school with Becky for first and second grades.”
“Why?” The kids looked at me, surprised. They didn’t know.
“We moved from Tennessee, and I never saw Becky again—except for the time she came to visit me in Virginia. That’s when this picture was taken.”
They studied the picture. I looked at them all crowded together, intent on knowing the little girl I had been.
“Nana had a baby that died in Tennessee. A baby girl. She was born sick, and they couldn’t make her better, and when she died, we moved.”
“That’s awful!” Lydia looked at me in horror, and I felt my voice go a little shaky.
“Yeah, I guess it was.”
Mary rubbed my cheek with her soft little hand, and Drew stopped pulling on the book for a moment. Lydia studied the picture again, gently. It was quiet, like the time we buried Mary’s hamster.
All six of us were piled in the truck. Jack drove while I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe out loud to the kids and passed out squirt cheese on crackers. We were on our way to Virginia to see my folks. The kids couldn’t wait to see Nana and Pop-Pop. It was summer, and we were full of hope.
“Nana! Pop-Pop! We’re here! We’re here!”
The kids jumped out of the truck and ran up the hill to the porch. My folks met them in the yard; they had seen us pull up the long drive. There was a tangle of arms and legs as I watched my children wash my parents in love.
The kids ran in the yard, and Pop-Pop chased them. In between their squeals, he stopped and grinned at me from behind the peonies. Mamma hugged me, twice, and patted my arm. I breathed in the sugar maple and remembered my first poem.
Later that night, as I lay in my old rose bedroom, the familiar sound of the attic fan mingled with the crickets in the trees below. I watched the children asleep on their pallet; they were so beautiful I waited a moment to breathe, so I wouldn’t miss it. Zoë stirred, and Lydia put her arm out. The smell of summer grass wafted across the bed, and I was every age I had ever been.
I sat in his office for the last time. I’m not sure how I knew. I just knew I would not be back. I closed my eyes and thought about Zoë’s sweet, sweaty smell, her tiny curls, moist with summer, clinging to the nape of her neck. I thought about Lydia, wise and strong and full of knowing. Of Mary, funny and bright with thumb-sucked hands. Of Drew, sturdy and certain and all boy.
“Sometimes,” I told him, “I think I’ve found her.”
He looked up from his yellow pad. He had always been kind and interested.
“She’s the only one that shares my skin.” I rubbed the back of my hand and found that I was far away. “The little girl I used to be is right here.”
I showed him.
He nodded.
I stared at the floor and noticed how brown the carpet was. I felt my hand again, softly, and tasted the salt of my own tears.
Stacy Barton lives in Florida with her husband, four kids and assorted pets. She is a free-lance scriptwriter for the Disney Company and the published author of short stories, children’s picture books, plays, and poetry. She is the author of the children’s book, Babba and I Went Hunting Today, and her literary short story collection, Surviving Nashville, will be released this April.
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