“The bed is five feet high,” said my grandmother. “No one has a concussion. And if I take you to the hospital to find that out officially, they’d need to shave all those knots off the back of your head to see your scalp. Go back to bed, both of you. Come get me if you feel funny.”
I didn’t want to get back into the bed. I thought briefly that if I went to the hospital, my parents might be called and, upon hearing that the house had been overtaken by enormous pythons, come and get me out of here, maybe Allison too. But it was possible that no one would reach my parents. In any case, I believed my grandmother about the head shaving, and I didn’t want to be bald. I stayed on the floor, thinking that the ground was a good safe distance from the walls and whatever might be inhabiting them. Allison’s voice rescued me from the embarrassment of admitting I was afraid to get back into my bed. “I think,” she announced with the authoritative wisdom of someone six months older, “you have a concussion. You shouldn’t move. I’m going to sleep next to you so I can check your breathing.”
She pulled the blue blanket off the bottom bunk and brought it to me. We curled up in the center of the floor, counting our breaths in whispers until they came almost in unison. I opened my eyes every few minutes to check the walls for any sign of movement, and check that Allison was still there. Every fourth or fifth time, I’d find Allison staring back at me, her two small fingers reaching out to feel the pulse on my neck.
By the next morning,
I was jumpy again. I kept up my new rituals, persisted in refusing to go outside. Nightly, Allison persuaded me into our bedroom, letting me sleep in the bottom bunk with her. When I refused to even do that, she’d sleep beside me on the floor. I spent most of my days in the center of the living room. Among its advantages were a wall consisting almost entirely of plate glass windows, meaning there was one less direction from which I could be ambushed, and a wall of portraits that—once I’d read through the last of the books my parents had sent me with—I began to study in earnest, in order to keep myself entertained.
There was my grandmother’s whole life, in gilded frames: the family together, my grandmother younger and undeniably beautiful, the grandfather I had never met. Pictures of my uncles as kids, their hair pressed down so flat it looked like they’d been wearing helmets before the pictures were taken. Uncle Mark and Uncle Timothy at high school and then college graduations. Wedding portraits, including one of Allison’s father marrying his first wife. At the one Christmas dinner we’d spent together, my grandmother announced the first wife was a better woman than Allison’s mother would ever be. Allison had run from the room in tears. Everyone else sat there like they hadn’t heard her. My mother said later that if they’d all stopped eating every time my grandmother said something honest but awful, they would have starved to death before they were ten.
There were no pictures of my mother’s wedding on my grandmother’s wall. The pictures of her stopped at sixteen. There was my mother, wispy and young-looking, eyes wide open and surprised. I imagined her daydreaming before the photo was snapped. It wasn’t long after that when my mother took off on a road trip across the country with friends who imagined themselves hippies. Some of these people were still my mother’s friends, and in one of their houses I had seen pictures from that summer: my mother laughing and making faces in the backseat, my mother sleeping on a beach somewhere. My mother didn’t talk about that summer. While she was off with her friends, my grandfather was killed when his small plane encountered a tropical storm and crashed.
In my grandmother’s butterfly theory, my mother was the moth who flapped her wings in Japan and caused disaster; there was an inevitable correlation between her being in the wrong place at the wrong time and my grandfather’s untimely accident. I had been given this secret knowledge too early to know what to do with it. I was old enough to know better than to prod my mother with questions, but too young to understand debt and obligation. Too young to understand what my mother must have felt during her mother’s fight with cancer, or to appreciate the uncertainty my grandmother must have been living with. I was too young to understand that a python could be not just a threat but a warning, and too young to understand why this summer, of all summers, I had been sent off as a flawed peace offering.
Allison got impatient
with my refusal to leave the living room. She tried to reason with me: “If a snake wanted to eat us, wouldn’t it have done it already? If a starving python was living in our lake, wouldn’t all the other animals be dead by now?” I wanted to believe her, but then I pictured myself being crushed into fine dust inside of something so big that no one could hear me scream, vanishing without my parents ever knowing what had happened. When logic failed, Allison retrieved my copy of
Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest
from where it lay abandoned and pointed out pictures of snake after snake.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a picture of a man with a large yellow snake wrapped around his shoulders, two women in the background looking unphased. “All these people who live with snakes, and they haven’t been eaten. Your parents are with these snakes right now, and they’re not dead.”
“How do you know?” I asked. They’d told me before leaving that by a month into the summer, they would be unreachable, leaving Rio for the dense territory of the rain forest, a place where they neither sent nor received letters.
Allison gave up on me after that. She stopped letting me sleep on the bottom bunk; she began to tease me about my fears. I made a new amulet out of one of Allison’s barrettes and a friendship bracelet she had given me; Allison demanded the barrette back and, when I refused, ripped the bracelet in half. My phobia was taking a greater toll on her than boredom. Being inside meant she had to spend more time in the direct presence of my grandmother. My grandmother quizzed Allison incessantly about her grades, pulled her into the study to review brochures for day schools she wanted Allison to be prepared to apply to next summer. Allison’s credentials sorely disappointed her; makeup theft and an active imagination were apparently not among the early markers of genius. Her grades were not great, and her school records were dotted with minor citations: Allison talked back to teachers, Allison poured glue in someone’s hair, Allison stole the class turtle to keep as a pet. When I overheard my grandmother grilling Allison over these infractions, I shimmered with a kind of pride in her boldness, but Allison’s explanations were alarmingly meek. Even my grandmother noticed that Allison seemed to get in some sort of trouble every time her parents left for a vacation, which they did often, year-round, but Allison refused to admit to the correlation.
My grandmother scheduled Allison for beginning piano lessons, and took her for informal conversations with a French-speaking neighbor. My grandmother didn’t invite me to come, which saved me the trouble of refusing to leave with her. In any case, she wouldn’t have had grounds to force me. My mother shared her views on language and music, if not her approach. I attended bilingual elementary school, and was in the school orchestra. Had she asked, my grandmother would have found out that I spoke fluent Spanish, and played the viola quite nicely.
There was a
long time that I didn’t talk about that summer at all, and then there were times when it was all I could talk about. It was the sort of thing that made a person interesting in college: My Youth as Real Live Tragic Mulatta. My recovery turned my scars into party favors. If you had seen them—the dot on my leg, the line on my elbow, the water in my eyes when I talked about Allison—then you had something about me to take with you. If you knew what was behind it, you had even more.
If you think your family was messed up,
people would whisper,
you should talk to that girl.
In my first year of law school I was famous for using myself as the basis for a sample torts question in study group. People wondered whether being so casual about it meant that I was screwed up, or that I was OK. I couldn’t have answered them.
A confession: because I didn’t know the difference between kinds of intimacy back then, I told each of the first four men I slept with that he was the only one I’d ever told this story. Jason was the fourth, and the only one to call me a liar: he’d already heard the story from my roommate the week before. According to him, it was part of what made him like me in the first place. I was so stunned that I kicked him out of bed and didn’t speak to him again for months. But after he had left and I had given up trying to sleep, I wondered which part of the story had drawn him to me. I never asked, but I wondered. I wondered years later, when he called the Yale housing law clinic on behalf of the
New Haven Register
and, upon recognizing my name and voice at the other end of the line, asked me to dinner. I wondered—it was a tiny flash in the back of my mind, but yes, I wondered—when he brought me takeout during finals week at the end of my second year of law school, and I cracked open the fortune cookie and found an engagement ring. Was it the part of the story where I was strong that made me special, or the part where I was weak? It mattered more than I could say.
This is what
I told him: My grandmother, it seems to me in retrospect, was a woman whose better impulses frequently led to her worst, the sort of person who would offer you a genuine favor, then punish you for having the gall not to take her up on it. The afternoon I ended up in the hospital, I think she started out meaning to help me.
“Look,” she said, approaching me in the living room that day, bending down to my level to look me in the eye. “This is too much. You need to go outside today. I’m taking Allison swimming. You’ll come with us.”
“I don’t swim anymore,” I said. “Snakes like water.”
“Be that as it may, they don’t like chlorine. Go get your swim-suit on.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be eaten.”
“Look,” said my grandmother, exasperated, “it’s possible that I
exaggerated
a little, so you would learn a lesson about running off. There
is
a Burmese Python, and they have spotted a few in the Everglades, but no one’s ever heard of one this far north, and no one’s ever heard of one eating an entire person, and the only dog missing around here is that Saint Bernard, who probably ran away because his owner is a fool and a drunk, and he may not even have stayed missing if she hadn’t written her own damn phone number wrong on the lost dog poster. Get dressed.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Why would I lie to you now?” she asked.
“Why would you lie to me about it in the first place?” I asked. “Either way, it makes you a liar. Maybe you just want me to get eaten.”
“Don’t you get smart with me,” said my grandmother. “I never took lip from your mother and I certainly won’t take it from you.”
“Daddy says you took everything from my mother,” I said, more innocently than was honest. There was a thick feeling in my throat.
My grandmother’s eyes narrowed. She was silent for some minutes. When she left the room I could hear my breath coming rapidly in tune with her retreating then returning footsteps. In the moment I first saw the gleam of metal in her hand, I truly believed she was going to stab me.
She never said a word. She started snipping quickly, unevenly, the rhythm of her anger punctuated by the growing pile of tight black curls on the floor. It didn’t occur to me to run. It didn’t occur to me that there was anywhere to go. I don’t know how long Allison had been watching. I only know that when it was over, and all but half an inch of my shoulder-length-when-it-lay-flat hair was piled on the floor, Allison was in the doorway, looking straight at my grandmother.
She walked over to me and grabbed my hand, dragging me toward the front door. I didn’t know what to believe about snakes anymore, but at that moment I would have preferred being inside a python’s belly to seeing my grandmother look at my practically bald head like she had proved something to me. I followed Allison down to our lake, climbed with her to the top of our tree. We were out of stories, or we were out of words. We didn’t pretend to be my mother in the Amazon, or hers on a cruise ship, because we knew what we were right then: people too small to stop the things we didn’t want to happen from happening anyway. The bottoms of my jeans and Allison’s thin ankles were muddy then, our socks wet from a puddle I could not remember having stepped in. I looked down before I remembered not to. I saw our watery reflections blending into one on the water’s wet canvas, pink and peach and beige and denim softly swirling, and wondered how my grandmother managed to see two of us so clearly.
“I want to go home,” Allison said. “I want us to run away. I hate that woman.”
“She likes you,” I said.
“If she liked me, she’d like you too. You’re my best friend.”
“No I’m not,” I said, and realized as I said it that something about the last few weeks had made it true.
Then I saw Allison’s reflection lift her arms, felt the weight of her palms on my back, felt myself rock forward. In those first few seconds, I could feel the fall in my belly, a sharp reminder of gravity, the constancy of the laws of physics even when they run counter to everything else we’d have ourselves believe in. We are safe, with our families, until we are not. On the way down, I remembered dropping out of the bunk bed, thought about how much worse the first moment of the fall had been than the actual impact. I braced myself for the slap of the water, but was still unprepared for the sting of it against my nostrils, the sharpness of the underwater rock on which I landed.
I woke up
in a hospital room with blue walls. It was not my mother cradling my head and humming but my aunt Claire, who, as always, had soft hands and smelled like peach lotion. She was much thinner than she’d been two months ago: for the first time I believed she was as sick as my mother had said and felt the sharp stab of what I could finally name as anger fade a bit. Aunt Claire apologized to me nonetheless. “If I had known,” she said over and over again, “what kind of people they were leaving you with, I would have insisted you stay with me.” Allison had admitted what she’d done, and my aunt Claire had already dismissed my grandmother from the premises, told the nurses she was not allowed in my hospital room, though I couldn’t exactly see her trying to sneak in.