Neville Island
I also have two little sisters. My mom and I call them the babies, but
they're six and eight now. After my dad left, they became a single person
because they only had enough strength to survive between the two of them.
Even I mistake them for twins sometimes, though they're nearly two years
apart. They sleep together with their hands tangled in each other's dark
hair, and the stillness smudges them into an indistinguishable figure. I
can't bear to kiss either goodnight. To kiss each one goodnight would mean
I would have to disentangle their embrace-an impossible feat in itself-but
their conjoined body, intersecting at every point, is too alien to touch.
Even when they're awake, they act as if they're sewed together, like in
Peter Pan, so that one is the shadow of the other.
We live on Neville Island, a dingy blue collar Utopia on the Ohio River.
There's a steel mill on the island where all the dads work, and a tiny
grocery store down the main street where housewives buy their staples. My
mom only buys buttermilk and eggs there, she grows her own vegetables and
bakes her own brown bread every weekend. We eat brown bread so often, in
fact, that I imagine my flesh is ninety nine percent bread by now-the
mysteries of the Catholic Church are no longer so very mysterious to me.
The other one percent, I suppose, is canned corned beef. She buys a whole
case of it twice a yearit's cheaper in bulkso we are never at a loss for
that.
There's a bridge connecting Neville Island to the mainland, but because the
island is so self sufficient, it really isn't necessary except to take the
bus over to Coreapolis when our football team plays theirs. We never win
anyway. The bridge rests on long knotty legs of crisscrossed steel beams
that were once painted in horizontal stripes, so that anyone could tell how
high the river was just by looking at what color the water reached. Only,
the paint is so faded and rusty now the colors are indistinguishable. The
road from the bridge becomes the main street down the length of the island,
which has rows of minor streets crossing it like the stitches on a scar.
Because we have such a steep drop off our backyard into the red waters of
the river, if we ever want to go swimming we either have to throw a rope
down or jump off the bridge. I prefer the latter; it takes less effort.
We live about thirty miles from Pittsburgh. You can't see it from the
island, but the smog from all the steel mills over there make the sun look
orange. My teachers say that in most places, the sun looks yellow at noon,
and only reddish when it sets. I'd like to see it yellow for a day, and
then I'd watch it so much I'd probably forget I even have a shadow. Or, at
least, I'd like to see the steel mills that make it redI bet they're a
hundred times bigger and have a thousand more pipes than the one here. All
the pollution makes it extra hot here in the summer too, so when you wake
up on an August morning, there's grains of salt in your hair and in the
creases of your eyes, from sweating. I used to think it was from the
sandman.
It is every Neville Island boy's dream to join the Navy, and every Neville
Island girl's dream to be a secretary at the mill. A secretary, that is,
until they marry a handsome service man and raise a family at the Great
Lakes naval base. Some of us, however, were stripped of those ready made
dreams before we could even pretend to harbor them. My best friend Jimmy
Sullivan, for instance, had blue lips. When I first met him in third grade,
I thought that they were something rare and beautiful-like having purple
eyes, or red hair. Turned out, his lips were blue because of a congenital
heart defect; his heart was so weak that he was always blue or purple on
some part of his body, as though he were iridescent. He was adopted, too.
His foster parents hadn't been able to have a child, but two years after
they took Jimmy in, they miraculously had a baby of their own. The baby's
presence made Jimmy feel like an intruder in the family, since he was the
solution to a problem that no longer existed. That's why Jimmy tried to
keep out of his house as much as possible. He was number two hundred and
fifty three in line for a heart transplant.
My dad could never join the service either, because he lost all the fingers
on his right hand in a machining accident in the steel mill when he was
nineteen. Well, he had stubs enough to light his cigarettes, my mom said.
I can't remember seeing them at all, because he kept his hand in his pocket
ever since he met my mom's brother, who recoiled in horror when dad shook
his hand for the first time. "Jesus, boy, I thought you handed me a fish
there!" That's what Vern said. If my dad ever needed his right hand for
something, he'd turn his body to shield us from the sight. Since he
couldn't do steel work, he was a teacher in the school. All the other
teachers were young women, so he never had any friends. It wouldn't be
proper for him to socialize with Neville Island's most eligible
bachelorettes; they're being saved for our young heroes. I wouldn't want
to be friends with them anyway, especially Ms. Flynn, who yelled at me for
writing a page of sloppy z's when we were learning cursive in third grade.
"How do you expect me to be able to read this?" I wanted to tell her that
it was just a page full of z's, it didn't mean anything, so why should she
care if she could read it or not? But you're not allowed to talk back to
teachers.
My dad left about three years ago, so the babies were too young to remember
him, but I do. On Sunday mornings, I used to wake my parents up and lie in
their warmed bed as they took showers and got dressed, leaning into my
dad's pillow and smelling his nightmare sweat. By the time my mom made
breakfast I was so hungry I felt like I'd throw up. Then for dinner,
sometimes dad would take us to Minella's diner, we'd bring Jimmy too, and
they'd put a maraschino cherry in my soda, because I loved cherries. I
would save it for last, then eat it reluctantly, since I knew it would be
over all too soon. On the walk home my dad would slip away, back to
Minella's to grab a few maraschino cherries from the obliging cooks, and
return like a triumphant warrior with a handful of severed heads.
But all this was just to apologize for the Saturday night beforehand, for
staggering home from the pub, angry and trembling with the impulse to hit
us. He never did, of course-he couldn't take his hand from his pocket. So
he'd stand there for hours, towering over the babies and I pretending to be
asleep in bed, but tottering, burping, drooling like an infant. I was
afraid to speak, that my breath might knock him over. It was kind of like
watching the sea from the shore. The waves crescendo to a furious height,
but by the time they reach the sand, they've been torn into threads of
bubbles and fleck. That's what he reminded me of. I imagined he might
lean over and hug me the next moment, and his embrace would grow stronger,
until my ribs were crushed. He was mad at us for something, he probably
still is. I wish I could go tell the priest what I did wrong, but I don't
know what to apologize for. I'd walk into the dim church and wait in line
to confess, fumbling with the pink rosary beads I got for first communion.
I'd step into the booth and choke out the Confiteor, but by the end I'd
have no air left in my lungs. The priest would lean into my booth to see
what became of his confessor and, seeing me throttled by my own breath,
he'd suck his tiny teeth and know that my sin was terrible. "What is it
you've done?", he'd ask.
"I don't know!"
"But ignorance is the greatest sin of all!"
The only big sin I can think of is when I got the chicken pox. My dad
forced me to sleep in the same bed as the babies, so they'd get it too. I
cried all that night, because I didn't want them to get sick, and prayed
that they wouldn't. My dad told me that the younger you get the chicken
pox, the less suffering you go through, but I couldn't bear to see my
sisters with those horrible scabs and know it was my fault. Maybe that's
why he's so mad, I probably should have put up more of a fight. I
shouldn't have slept in their bed at all, even though he asked me to.
Anyway, I already confessed it to Jimmy, and he told me that probably isn't
the reason my father's mad at us.
When they were first dating, my father gave my mom a Celtic lever harp as a
token of his affection. She learned how to play it in order to return the
compliment. Her long fingers were always chapped and red from the strings,
and I only wished there were some similar deformity on my body that could
prove to my father that I loved him. One day the harp was taken away, but
it came back a week later with an infinitely complex gold knot painted on
its spine. My mother used to play for money in department stores, at the
weddings of strangers, at office parties. But I don't think she could ever
play for money the way she played at the ceilidhs our friends held in
their backyards, dozens of people spread out on picnic blankets, with Mark
Carol accompanying her on the hammer dulcimer and Mike Malone on the
fiddle. The next day I would stare at the harp in its dormant state,
concentrating on the tiny high strings of transparent catgut and the low
bass strings of wire wrapped elastic, but it was never the same harp as it
had been the day before. My dad gave her a second harp on the last
Christmas we would ever spend together. It was smaller than the other, and
more precious, with a simpler knot on the spine culminating in a copper
colored gemstone, but its strings were made out of brass wire and cut my
mother's fingers when she tried to play it. She keeps it in the front room
for decoration, because it's so pretty, but if you look closely, you can
see she never wiped the blood from her cuts off the wires.
She sang, too-Jimmy once told me he thought she sang like an angelbut I
don't remember how she sounded. I do remember the shape of her mouth,
though-her tongue a quiver of arrows, and her lips a taut bow vibrating
with each plucked syllable. She had a mole on her lower lip, and when I
asked her about it she told me that moles were where angels kissed you. I
showed her the only mole I had at the time, and she laughed out loud.
"Eight years old, and already angels are kissing your ass!"
The first time I ever saw my mom cry, I came into the kitchen one morning to
find her scrubbing at the grout in the floor tiling. One of the tiles, I
noticed, had been broken into a spider web of cracks, with a crater nested
in the middle. I found the hemisphere of missing white tile under the
kitchen table, like some broken moon, its other half still hanging in the
sky. Mom had been trying to scrub red out of the grout; I asked if it was
blood. "No love, it isn't blood. But it would've been the blood of Jesus
if it had found itself in a happier bottle." I knew what that meant.
Even when it wasn't consecrated, my dad drank wine with a religious fervor.
He had thrown a bottle of it at my mom the night he left, as if to christen
a ship. Bon Voyage! Only he raised anchor, and not the kitchen floor.
The tile with the chip in it is my excavation site. Like an archeologist
building up an entire culture out of a shard of pottery, I study it in hope
that some information is still hidden there. By measuring its slope into the
ground, I can envision what angle the bottle hit the floor, where my
mom must have been standing, where my dad threw it from. I can tell by the
color of the stain in the grout that the bottle contained red wine,
Almalden. By the dark color of the underlying clay, I can determine that it
was night when the bottle struck, that the bottle broke into roughly sixty
thousand pieces of which only twenty three were large enough to be visible.
The cracks in the tile tell me the shape of the deep creases in the corner
of his mouth that night, the length of his chin stubble if you plucked it
out and stood each hair end to end, and the direction in which his hair
curled, counterclockwise. There are many things, however, that the
excavations have not told me. For example, his arms were dark and shaggy
on top, but pale and opalescent on the underside, like a fish's belly. Yet
I have no proof of such things, so I can't ever be sure that they're true,
and not just my imagination.
It was shocking to me, that morning, to see my mom cry. But I still don't
know how to comfort herthough I've grown used to her sobs, I am constantly
amazed at my lack of soothing words and gestures. Because I can never bear
to look at her tortured face, I watch myself in the greasy dishwater as she
leans into my hair. When she's done, she shuffles to her room, and her
eyes look calm and bovine.
I can't imagine where my dad went to. I sometimes think he's still around,
watching us from behind the bushes, so whenever I skin my elbow I don't let
myself cry, and I roll my sleeve down to hide the scrape. Only then, my
mom gets mad at me for bloodying up my shirt. On Christmas Eves, when most
other children hear Santa stumbling about on the roof, I imagine the noises
I hear are my father, if only returning to try to suck that wine he wasted
out of the grouting. With blind courage I creep into the kitchen, but each
year am sorely disappointed to learn that the noises had only been St. Nick
after all.
The night he left, I think my dad stole everything we had. He took our
livers and muscles, all our sinew and intestines, our rib cages and nerve
endings, and filled us with the sand that the river barges carry. He
pulled out all our teeth and swallowed them with a glass of water like the
aspirin he took Sunday mornings. He even snapped the tips of our fingers
off like green beans-I imagine my bones are frail and hollow, like a
sparrow's. And now we have river water coursing through our sand castle
bodies. Maybe one day the tide will grow so high that we will melt, and
that day my dad would come home to find the kitchen floor covered in sand,
flopping with dying fish and scabby with dried seaweed.
As he stumbled away that night, maybe he kept his head turned to watch our
house receding behind him, bowing and pitching along with each step. The
walkways here are all broken and buckled and littered with crab apples, but
he probably didn't pay attention to sidewalks or streets or street lamps,
he just watched the house and walked in the opposite direction. Which
makes me wonder how he managed to find the bridge. Maybe he really fell
off the side of the island, and got washed out to sea. But, then again,
the streets here are white cement, and lighted. In the middle of the
night, the glare off windows and the white roads are all you can see on
Neville Island; everything else is totally dark. Even a drunkard could
navigate that.
It was weeks before it occurred to me that he might never come back. I had
still been setting his place at the dinner table, like I always did. The
whole island must've known he was gone before the babies and I realized it.
OnlyI never knew why. I asked Jimmy why his real parents didn't keep
him. He stared hard for a few moments, like it was the first time he'd
ever wondered about it, though I knew it was just about the only thing he
ever thought about. Instead of answering, he told me he had decided to run
away, and I agreed to join him. We stopped before we even got to the end of
my street. Of course we couldn't run away. Running away is reserved for
adults, because only they have anything to run away from. Jimmy and I only
had each other, and even if we'd been able to cross that infinite bridge,
we'd be in the same place we'd always been. We sat back down, and Jimmy
studied his purple fingertips. "I don't think he left just because of the
alcohol." I didn't either, but I didn't replyI was out of ideas. I still
am. It's better to have some idea, no matter how unlikely, than no idea at
all. I'm sure Jimmy knew this better than I did.
For as long as we knew him, the babies and I would meet Jimmy every day
after school. The year my dad left, I was in fifth grade, and the babies
were in first and second grade. Jimmy was a grade ahead of me, and went to
the middle school I go to now. We'd come from separate directions, and our
shadows, made massive by the low hanging sun, would darken him yards before
we even met. One year, when the dandelions had turned to fluff, the four
of us picked every single dandelion we could find on the island, and blew
on the bouquet with all our might, each of us making some secret wish. The
air was choked with all the seeds. Then we went home and fell asleep as
the world around us died of asphyxiation. Upon waking, however, we each
found a wet lump of dandelion fluff beside our beds-the wind had coughed it
back at us.
When he got sicker, Jimmy went to live in the big Pittsburgh hospital. He
didn't get a transplant in time, of course. I used to wonder what would've
happened to his old heart when it was taken out. Would they throw it away?
If that were the case, I think I would've stolen it out of the trash when
no one was looking. Mom told me he died in peace, sleeping in his foster
mother's arms. I know what that really means.
Since Jimmy's gone, it makes me wonder where he came from. I bet someplace
far off, like Russia. And it even makes sense, because the map in our
school has Russia colored in mostly white, as if it's snowy, and if it's
such a cold place, maybe that's the real reason Jimmy was blue all the
time, and he actually froze to death. The map in our school has "U.S.S.R"
instead of Russia, the teacher says it's an old map but new ones cost too
much. And our social studies books even say that America is having a war
with the U.S.S.R, except it's a cold war. My teacher says that's all over
now, and the reason they call it a cold war is because no one actually died
in it. But I know it's not over, because Jimmy is its first casualty.
I still remember Jimmy's funeral, it was open casket, but he was barely
recognizable-they painted his lips red, and his face was dark as a new
moon. The rest of him was covered up, because he was an organ donor and so
was missing almost everything from his neck down to his hips-besides his
heart, that is.
My fingers are red and chapped like my mother's, but only because I chew off
my fingernails and, when I have no more fingernails to bite, the skin from
the tips of my fingers. When Jimmy diedI didn't even realize itI started
biting straight through the flesh. I guess I could rob a bank pretty
easily because most of my fingerprints are gone. My mom came in my room,
and saw blood pouring from each of my fingers, like one of those statues
that spout water into a fountain, and screamed for the babies to call the
doctor. While I was staying at the little hospital, the doctor told me he
remembered when I was born. He told me that, two weeks before I was due, my
umbilical cord got a kink in it, and I started to die. My mom must've felt
the pain in her womb, because she rushed to the hospital. The doctor had
to perform an emergency cesarean section-and when I got out, I was dead,
but they were able to revive me. The doctor said that my dad took his
newborn from the nurse and pressed me to his chest. He came out of the
embrace all smeared with blood, like a wolf after feeding. Then he gave me
a bath in the hospital sink, because the nurse was still busy attending to
my mom. I asked mom if the story were true, and she lifted up her shirt to
show me the long white scar on her belly, as if that could explain
everything.
After I got out of the hospital, my one hand got infected, and a blood
vessel popped, so I have a big red mark that clouds my thumb and palm. My
CCD teacher told us that a proper praying position could send our prayers
directly to God. "All you have to do is press your palms and fingertips
together, pointing to heaven, and cross your thumbs, like this. Hold your
hands close to your face, so your breath tickles the tips of your fingers
when you speak." I can't bear to pray that way anymore, I could never send
a wish to God through anything as ugly as my hands. I decided to write all
my prayers in marker on the little stones by the river, and throw them in.
That way, the words would dissolve into the water and be carried away to
God. It took me hours, I threw in so many stones. But the next day, after
I stepped out of the shower, I found that all those prayers had come back
through the pipes and stained themselves on my skin. |
Kelly Clancy |