PART ONE
On The Boulevard
1
The first time I saw my mother I was eleven and she was dead. The next time she was in heaven. But like Gram always used to scold me for, I'm getting ahead of myself.
You see, for always and forever, I've been the oldest, the big sister, the one trying every day to drag the younger ones along through the muck of our lives, trying to keep as much off them as possible. But sometimes it just sucks us down.
People, the ignorant ones who don't know to just shut up, tell me, "Sylvie Messinger, you look just like your mom," but to be honest I have never really cared because the weird thing is, everyone thinks that just because your mom's not around; you must be sad about your mom.
But I've figured out the real truth: you can't miss what you don't know.
That doesn't mean you don't feel the big dead spot in your life that morphs around like the blobs of mercury my little sister Peanut and I used to play with on the floor in Gram's powder room. At least three times I can think of, we found long glass thermometers in her medicine cabinet with big silver bulb ends. I would hold one up in the air, rising on my toes to reach up as high as I could, and then, whoosh let it go crashing onto the tile floor.
Each time, Peanut was so scared she would try to crouch down to hide behind the toilet and she was so little, she could almost fit. She would cover her ears with her little chubby hands and scrunch up her freckly peanut-face, but just as soon as that thermometer hit the floor, she would crawl over and together we would hurry and pick up each tiny frosty piece of the thinnest glass you ever saw, being careful not to get cut. I always hid the tiny glass shards down in my jeans pocket, to be dumped out later behind the detached garage with the boarded-up window on its back wall, in the secret place no one knew about, with its odd assortment of stuff I'd collected there.
Once the glass was all picked up, Peanut would do a quick check out the door, her head almost at floor level to make sure no one was coming down the hall. Then she would duck back in and the fun would start. We would divide the mercury into small globs with our fingernails, and roll them all around on the little black and white tiles that were shaped like stop signs. Sometimes we would smack the mercury so it broke into tiny squishy balls or we would rub it around on our palms, coating them silver.
The day we coated our fingernails silver with it, Gram ended up noticing later and we got in big trouble. Well, to be honest, with Gram we never got into truly big trouble. But she did make us sit in the living room with Grandad the next Sunday afternoon and watch an entire golf tournament with him while he smoked his pipe, bowlful after bowlful that smelled like burning cherries. But that only happened once because then Peanut had an asthma attack and Gram ended up having to take her to the Emergency Room. Gram hates hospitals so much that after that she made Grandad stop smoking. Well, in the house at least.
Another thing we did in Gram's powder room was lick the top of the Comet can. She kept it in the cabinet under the sink, and for some reason I decided once to taste it, and it tasted really good. Not the actual powder you'd pour out of the can. Just the little bit that was caked on the top. It was tangy, but not too tangy. Of course I got Peanut to taste it. She liked it better than the SweeTart candies Grandad used to bring home from the service station when he went out to get the tank filled up. It wasn't as sour.
The grownups never knew we tasted the Comet. One time, though, Peanut climbed up onto her chair for dinner and Gram noticed something light green at the corners of her mouth.
"Sylvie! What on earth has Sariah gotten into?" Of course I was the one who should know—since Peanut was only three and I was almost six years older.
"M-m-m, PlayDoh." I had to think quickly of something that I knew was non-toxic. I could never get my hands on enough things to read, so I was familiar with the labels on every single bottle, can and box in the house.
"Sariah, the PlayDoh is only for your hands, not your mouth," Gram said. Peanut looked at me with big eyes but stayed quiet; probably because of the scowling face I was making at her from behind Gram's back.
We got in trouble often, which is easy to do when you live a city where cars, trucks and buses rumble by right in front of your house, and your backyard is all parking spaces and a big empty back lot surrounded by chain-link fence. Because I am so fidgety by nature, I get bored very easily and the things I found to keep me busy were often not approved activities—or wouldn't have been, if Gram had ever known about them. Peanut frequently got in trouble, too, because she always did everything I did. Or at least she tried.
Ours is a city in New York by a great lake, and winter meant month after month of snow-blanketed imprisonment indoors and desperate loneliness; and then my sister came along.
I remember when Gram and Grandad went to get Peanut.
I woke up one time and, thinking it was morning, I climbed out of my bathtub bed and went down the long dark hallway toward the yellow light of the kitchen. As I got closer, I could hear big sniffling sounds like when you catch a really messy cold, and I slowed down and tiptoed on the cool wood floor up to the doorway, trying not to trip over my nightgown that kept wrapping around my legs.
I peeked around and saw Grandad leaning with his back up against the kitchen sink with both of his big arms around Gram and she was pressed up tight against the front of him and the sounds were from crying and they were coming from her. Even though we called her Gram, her name was really Sandra. Grandad kept smoothing down her hair and I could hear that his voice was softer than usual and that he kept saying, over and over in rhythm to his hand, "Sandy, Sandy." I remember her hair sparkling from the overhead light and that it was almost the same color as the copper jello molds hanging behind them, decorating the kitchen walls.
I heard Grandad say, "No, I don't know why she can't stop havin' 'em, but what else can we do? We're just gonna have to go up there and get her, Sandy, we're all she's got." And I could see Gram's head bob up and down, agreeing with him, and I wondered go up and get who? We're all WHO'S got?
[Email the author at phrasefan@ggelliott.com for more information regarding this work in progress.]
