Are You Sitting Down? Read online

  A few days passed, and I had just begun to get the thought of the unfortunate little bird out of my head. Then, another dead oriole startled me on my morning routine. This time it was right under one of the other feeders. It looked exactly the same as the other one had. I turned and looked over at the koi pond, expecting to find an empty grave as if the oriole had risen from the dead only to die again. The little brown patch of dirt where I buried the first bird was still intact, and so I planted his friend next to him.

  “Could be the whole corn kernels in that cheap feed you’re buying,” the blatantly rude pet store attendant told me when I went in to inquire about the health conditions of orioles within the vicinity of town. “Some smaller birds can choke on the larger seeds and nuts.”

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  I was ashamed of myself. I felt like some exterminator putting out rat poison for unsuspecting rodents. I was Violet Newstead putting Skinny & Sweet in Mr. Hart’s coffee! I never expected blue birds to come up and tie ribbons in my hair, but no wonder the little critters kept their distance from me. I thought I was doing a service to nature by feeding the winter birds, but I might as well have been putting out arsenic for the raccoon.

  “What can I do?” I asked the pubescent faced boy as if he had a degree in ornithology.

  “Stop buying that dollar stuff. Use this,” he said, showing me a bag of something called Clydesdale Birdseed.

  “Sounds like it’s made from horses,” I said.

  “I didn’t name it. I just sell it.”

  I bought three bags.

  “I’ve got a new menu today,” I announced out the back door the next morning.

  I could clearly see hesitation in their black beady eyes that day, but they eventually came and they ate. I watched from the porch as flocks of bright red cardinals and green finches, and more orioles than ever emptied the feeders. The next morning I held my breath as I made my way out into the yard on my daily routine, but there was no body to be found.

  It snowed that night and so I planned to fill the feeders in the morning and again in the afternoon. The koi pond had frozen over now, but we’d dug it deep enough for the fish to be able to hibernate in the bottom where the water was still thawed. Spikes of ice jutted out of the fountain like crystals on a chandelier. Marcus rarely came inside, not even during winter. He sat on top of the frozen water now licking a paw as if waiting for the fish to come up. I somehow envisioned a cartoon version of the ice cracking and the old black cat falling in. The air would be filled with squeaky laughter from the fish and the birds.

  I stayed up most of last night and the early morning preparing food and cleaning the house to get ready for the arrival of the kids today. Christmas Eve. Travis was driving up from Memphis to stay for three days. It was still to be decided if anyone else would be staying the night, but if they did all the sheets were fresh and the beds were made. I put fresh towels out in the upstairs bathrooms, along with the girls’ favorite soaps and lotions. I placed small bags of chocolates on the pillows in the bedrooms. These days, with everyone grown, there were no assigned sleeping quarters. The grandkids might end up in one of the boys’ old rooms, but there’d at least be a surprise waiting there for everyone.

  I spent an hour or so putting up more decorations. Small tabletop Christmas trees now adorned the vanities in the bathrooms and the nightstands between the beds in the kids’ rooms. Back in the day when the house was full, I’d put a tree up in every room. The boys’ bathroom had a tree decorated with American flags and green tractors. The girl’s bathroom tree had lace, strings of plastic pearls, and small soaps wrapped in pink twill.

  In the bedrooms, the trees had tiny stockings hung on them where the kids could find little treats and gifts all throughout the month of December. Even when it was just me and Clare here, I still bought stocking stuffers for her. It’d been several years since she left. These days, it was not rare for several weeks to pass without me going into their old empty rooms. I kept the doors shut except to the spaces I lived in. It made the house feel smaller. With all of the kids here for Christmas this year, I just wanted the house to feel like old times again, for them and for me. So, I went through the house and opened every door this morning. It expanded and creaked, sighing with relief. Despite winter, the house was coming alive again.

  After filling the feeders, I decided to take a walk down to the property line where the barn had been. The sun had just started to crack the gray sky. First, I went back inside to change into warmer clothes and to make sure the stove was turned off. When we bought this house in 1966 Martin, the eldest, was one year old. Frank and I married in 1963 and a small upstairs apartment in the city was our first home. When Martin was born in ‘65 we both decided we wanted more kids but would need a larger home.

  The two-story colonial, built by the Dogwood family who also founded and named the community, was the first home we’d looked at. Back then, it was one of only four homes on the dirt-clad road that ran through Dogwood. There are over thirty homes on Main Street now. With the ten acres of trees surrounding us, we felt like we were the only house around for miles back then. Even in the winter when the apple trees had dropped their leaves and their thin limbs were practically transparent, we still couldn’t see the neighboring house when looking out the window.

  Many generations ago, the Dogwood family had planted a fruit orchard on the property to make a living. Mr. Dogwood kept a fruit stand out in front of the house and sold produce to downtown markets. Since the family business had long been retired and Mr. Dogwood had passed on many years ago, most of the property had been divided and sold for community development.

  When Mrs. Dogwood died in early 1965, none of her few existing family members wanted to live in the house. The older generations were all resting in the cemetery nearby, and the younger generations had moved away and didn’t care about where their roots had started. Frank and I purchased it for a steal from her money hungry grandchildren. It’d practically tripled in value since then. With three bedrooms and two baths, this house was the perfect size to grow the family. Frank’s mother passed in 1980. We used money she left us to add another bedroom and bathroom, and to make some other much needed improvements to the house. I was pregnant with Sebastian before construction was done.

  It’d been months since I walked the property line. The four acres I still owned were thick with old apple, plum, cherry, and pear trees that had stopped producing ample fruit back before Frank died. Like me, the trees had grown old and retired. It’s odd how I remember things based on if they happened before or after I lost him. When the children were young, we spent many Sunday afternoons playing in the orchard and filling bushel baskets of fruit. I’d bake pies and bread, and Frank would give some of the harvest to friends and neighbors. In autumn when the leaves fell, we’d all rake them. The kids would play in the piles, while Frank and I bagged the leaves for the mulch bed.

  The six acres I sold had yet to be developed. The land was still in much the same condition as when I divided the property except now it was overgrown with dead brush and a few trees had fallen, and the barn was gone. Its brick foundation had been left, but now looked as if it were slowly being claimed by the earth as the dead foliage collected around it. Even though I knew the old man who had bought the property, I still felt like a trespassing stranger. My heart raced a bit like a kid exploring wheat fields and making mazes by bending down the crop, hoping they didn’t get caught.

  I smiled, standing there in the middle of the foundation where the old barn had been. Frank walked the entire property once a week, an old farmer mending fences. When I started walking with him, it became our usual weekly stroll just to escape from the house and the burden of children.

  The creak of the old barn door turning on its rusty hinges, and the long strands of sunlight leaking through the gaps in the walls took us back to a younger time. We were teenagers keeping warm in the back seat at a drive-in all over again.

  Ellen, Travis, and Se
bastian were the end result of three trips down to the barn over the years. Frank was a great lover, so adventurous. There wasn’t a tree on the property that hadn’t seen our aging bodies. We made love in the barn or on the ground beneath the spring blossoms many times.

  After he was gone, the immediate decision was to sell off some of the property because I couldn’t take care of it by myself. I hated to do it because I was selling off the playground of our memories. Not only was the land our funny love shrine, but it was also where the children grew up playing. Those memories would never escape my heart and my head though. Frank was gone, the kids were all grown up and Martin and Ellen now had kids of their own, so letting go of the land where our lives had happened wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

  Clare

  Obese fucker, I thought to myself. Who just sits there and watches a car almost explode?

  His face looked familiar, but I was used to dirty old men gawking at me when I walked by. Eventually, they all started to look the same. Mr. Greer never looked at me that way. He might have been an old coot, but I felt comfortable around him. I didn’t even need the milk for Jake. I just stopped there to sort of check in on Mr. Greer. I’d known him my whole life from my parents taking me into the grocery when I was small. He’d give me a sucker and tickle my arm. Later, I’d stop in to buy cigarettes from him on the way to high school.

  Now living in an apartment downtown, I still stopped at the grocery when I came to visit mom. Then this whole mess with the gas happened. Mr. Greer would hate to see me ever drive up again. I remembered hearing on the news how a spark from static electricity can cause flames to ignite, but I never gave second thought to it. Something like that would never happen to me. It seemed that was my motto in life, but whenever I thought it, something usually did happen. Like two years ago when I had never planned to get pregnant.

  My right hand stung. The hot metal handle of the gas nozzle had burned when I pulled it out. I was going to put the handle in the snow to extinguish the fire, but the blistering sting caused me to drop it. At a stop sign, I put my right mitten back on as if covering my hand would somehow make the pain go away. I couldn’t find the left mitten. I’d search for it before I got out of the car at Mom’s. It was probably in the back seat with Jake. Thankfully, the hum of the car and its rocking motion had soothed him back to sleep. I looked at him in the rearview mirror. The redness from crying so hard had faded from his fat little face. It had not faded from mine.

  “Pull yourself together, Clare,” I whispered to myself in the mirror.

  I pulled strands of hair from my face and turned the radio back up a bit. Christmas music blared from every station. I left the dial on a station playing some guy I didn’t know, but at least he wasn’t singing about the holidays. Instead, he was singing about how everything can change in a New York minute.

  “What about a Ruby Dregs minute?” I said out loud to the radio. “Nothing ever changes in this damn town.”

  I turned the heater down because I’d broken into a sweat. I wanted to crack the window for some cool winter air, but I was afraid the sound of the wind pouring in might wake Jake again. My stomach and chest felt tight. A hot ache pushed itself upward. I was only a few blocks from Mom’s house, but I needed to stop the car right now.

  I pulled the car off to the side of the road. I hesitated with the emergency lights for a second, but then there was no time to turn them on anyway. My throat burned. I opened my door wide enough to bend over and out. The cradle of the seat belt kept me from going much further. Resting my forehead on the door handle, I held my hair to one side and let the burning ache expel onto the pavement. Long spider web strands of spit hung in the air, not wanting the poison to escape. I wiped them from my face with the mitten and turned my head to look down the street. There was a car in the distance. I leaned back up and shut the car door gently to avoid waking Jake. I didn’t want anyone to drive by and see me getting sick, and I prayed it wasn’t one of my siblings.

  The oncoming car crept by. It was no one I knew, just some young cocky kid with a goofy grin trying to act like he was checking me out. He gave a nod with his chin as if he knew me, but every guy did that around here. I faked a smile but wanted to give him the finger. I turned on the left blinker and pulled back onto the road. Mom’s house was just a few blocks away. The blinker was still flashing when I pulled into the driveway. I parked behind Travis’s car. He and Mom were outside unloading his car. They paused to wave at me. Mom approached the car, waiting for me to cut off the ignition.

  “Merry Christmas Baby Doll,” she chimed before I had opened the door.

  “Merry Christmas,” I moaned getting out of the car.

  Mom grabbed my neck and hugged me. I lightly patted her on the back.

  “Want me to get Jake?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I sighed.

  Travis just stood there looking at me with a bit of doubt. He could tell something was wrong. I cowered toward him like a scolded puppy wanting to apologize, trying to force a smile onto my face without bursting into tears over what had happened at Mr. Greer’s. I actually was happy to see Travis, but didn’t want Mom to think my tears were for him.

  He leaned down to hug me as I hurried to him with open arms. I held him tight, trying to squeeze back my tears but it was no use. I closed my eyes and buried my face in the sleeve of his wool coat. I felt dizzy. Breaking loose from his grip, I wiped my snotty nose with my hand and ran inside the house, a sleeve covering my face to shield my expression from them. I ran upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom.

  I splashed cold water onto my face in the old pink bathroom. Pink shower curtain, pink soaps, there was even a pink toilet seat. This was the girls’ bathroom when Ellen and I lived here. I remembered playing with Barbies in the big pink bathtub. Mom even bought pink toilet paper for us. Back then, I liked to pretend I was a princess and often played dress up with Ellen. I’d sit on the vanity and pretend to do my make-up in the mirror. Now, I hated pink. I searched the drawers, unsure of what I was looking for. They were full of wash cloths and guest towels. Nothing comforting to be found.

  I dug in my purse for my lipstick and eye shadow, both now darker, more adult shades unlike the pretty pink and red colors Mom bought us for dress-up back then. Up close in the mirror, I tried to reapply my eyes. Ellen had taught me how to put on eye liner in this very mirror. My hands were too shaky now to do anything.

  “Pull yourself together, Clare,” I whispered to the mirror.

  It was no use. I had more crying to do. It wasn’t my life that had flashed in front of my eyes back there at the grocery. My life had long ago lost its meaning and hope for any kind of momentous future. I was a mom now, and all I could think about was that baby. He was the importance of each and every day. I had to be there for him, to bend and break the day so that he would not grow up and be like me. And when something bizarre or accidental happened like today, it scared me to think that life was that fragile; and that sort of stuff was always happening to me. I cursed myself if Jake fell and scuffed his face when trying to walk. I stood over his crib at night, sleepless, just to make sure he was breathing.

  Just a few years ago, I was not so responsible. At twenty, my upper arms and back were already filled with ugly tattoos. The tattoos covered the scars left by reckless boyfriends who beat me. I was thankful the bruises at least healed. Some of the scars I’d put there myself, but I no longer beat myself up—on the outside. I still didn’t like the person looking back at me in the mirror now, but the girl from two years ago seemed even farther away.

  My cell phone was full of friends. They were all wrong numbers, the kinds of friends you never wanted your mom to meet because you knew she wouldn’t approve anyway. They were from the “wrong side of town,” I could hear mom say. I called them friends because I never knew anything—or anyone—better. Like me, they wore baggy clothes and skipped class. After high school, they snuck me into bars and bought me drinks. They shared their cocaine and thei
r pot. They introduced me to strange alluring men who gave me chills when they touched my hand, who fingered me in dirty bathroom stalls. Instinct whispered in my ear that this feeling should have been fear. I should have been afraid, but I didn’t listen. That’s how I met Andre.

  His real name wasn’t Andre. Andre was the name of some cute jock in high school I had a crush on back then. He never looked my way, and graduated two years before me. He joined the marines and was killed in the line of duty in Iraq. His parents had taken out a memorial ad in my senior yearbook with Andre’s senior picture and a photo of him in his uniform shown side by side. I drew a red heart around his photos, just like I did in the yearbook two years earlier when Andre was a senior. By giving Jake’s father that nickname, it somehow made him less terrifying.

  I didn’t know his real name. Luckily, I’d never seen him again since that night. Me and a friend, Chelsea, were out at a bar on a typical Friday night. She lived in a trailer park on the edge of town, but liked to hang out at bars in the projects on Forrest Avenue.

  Chelsea preferred to date colored men, and she wanted to go to some new bar called Project X. I had never been to those bars before, and was a little too trusting of her judgment. I had read about police raids and drug busts going down at Project X ever since it opened, but I let her talk me into going with her anyway. Surprisingly, we weren’t the only white people there like I thought we would be. The bass of the music was so loud it hurt my ears and my teeth.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Chelsea told me.

  The thick sweet smoke of cigars was not like the smoke in the truck stop bars I normally frequented. It stung my eyes but had a pleasant aroma.

  You’ll get used to it.

  We barely had time to finish a beer when Chelsea wanted to dance. Some tall thuggish guy immediately started to flirt with us. Chelsea went with him to the bathroom to score some weed. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay on the dance floor by myself either. I must have washed my hands a thousand times while Chelsea let the man snort lines of coke off her breasts in one of the stalls.