Replacement Child (11 page)

Halfway to Broad Street, Linda was tired, so my mother hoisted her up and balanced her on her hip for the few blocks to Woolworth’s. At the double glass doors, Linda jumped down and pulled my mother by the hand to the pet department to watch the goldfish and the parakeets. Then they went to look at the rolls of cloth for material for a new housedress my mother planned to sew for herself.

Crossing the street, they looked through the window of Goldblatt’s and saw my father in conversation with a customer. Knowing better than to interrupt him, my mother headed straight to Pamel’s. She and Linda took a booth in the middle of the shop and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with fries, coffee, and a glass of milk.

“She’s getting so big, and so adorable,” Rita said as she delivered their meal.

“I know; they grow up so fast. I really love this age. We’re having that birthmark removed from her cheek. We just went to the doctor.”

“Oh, I didn’t even notice it.”

My mother ordered a corned beef on rye to go for my father and told Rita to put it all on his bill.

“No problem, Flurry. So nice to see you and the little one. You’ll have to bring Donna around. I haven’t seen her in so long.”

“You won’t recognize her, Rita. She’s gotten so grown up. Seven going on seventeen! Here’s the latest photo of her,” my mother took out a photo from her wallet.

“Beautiful—a really beautiful girl,” Rita smiled.

1961—1963

M
Y MOTHER KEPT
all her hats, which were just going out of style, in their original cardboard hatboxes on the top shelf of her walk-in closet. I knew the white one that I loved was in the tan box with the brown trim and red ribbon keeping it closed.

When she dressed up and wore it to go out with my father, I thought she looked like a movie star—only prettier. It was those times I remembered him looking at her differently, and maybe even putting his arm around her when they went out to the car.

I was seven when I got into her closet, found the step stool tucked in the corner, and used it to reach the hat. Gingerly, I untied the worn, wrinkled ribbon and popped open the box. Now, I knew I was in deep. The hatboxes were strictly off-limits to little hands. Between glances over my shoulder to be sure I wasn’t found out, I dug my hand into the deep layers of yellowed tissue paper that cushioned the precious headpiece. It let out a loud crackle that sounded to me like a siren calling attention to my crime.

My parents were downstairs in the living room with some friends. Linda was playing the organ, and my father was singing. I was jealous of their musical duo. It was like they had a secret
language. I didn’t play an instrument yet, and I didn’t know the tunes to the songs they sang together. My father never asked me to sing with them or taught me the songs, and he didn’t notice that I felt left out.

The hat looked great on me when I modeled it in my mother’s full-length mirror, but I needed a whole outfit if I was going to steal the scene downstairs and grab away my father’s attention. I spotted my mother’s blue and white polka dot dress, and I pulled it down from the hanger and stepped into it. I didn’t need to bother with the back zipper to get it up over my head and shoulders. I was practicing my dance and strut when I heard my mother coming up the stairs.

At first I thought she was mad. She looked like she was going to yell at me, but she changed her mind and came over and hugged me. My mother was the queen of hugs. Warm and tight and smelling like flowers, she always held on for an extra minute that made you know she meant it.

“What’s my pretty girl gotten into now?” she asked.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t think there was anything I could say that would help. Usually, that just made things worse when I was in trouble, so I just smiled and twirled the big skirt around to show her how I looked.

“Beautiful, honey! But you need some jewelry with that dress.”

She took out a giant string of pearls from her jewelry box and put them around my neck. They hung down almost to my knees, but I was pleased when I looked over at the mirror. She left me there gazing at myself and went back to her company.

I thought I needed one more thing, so I went back into the closet and got her shiny black high heels. They were hard to walk in, but I could do it if I turned the heels inward and walked with the outside edges of my feet. Lipstick was the last thing I put on, bright red, from my mother’s makeup table in the corner.

Walking down the stairs, I was a little wobbly, but I got into the middle of the living room without falling. My aim was to show my father how beautiful I was, that I was the daughter he should pay attention to now. I pranced in and started to sashay to the music.

But when I turned around, he wasn’t smiling. He had been leaning on top of the organ, but he stood up straight after my dance and held his hand across his forehead like it was falling apart. His lips squeezed tight, and his eyebrows creased. He glanced over at Linda and then me, but he spoke first to my mother.

“Flurry, what is she into now? She’s got hold of all your stuff,” he said, like he thought I couldn’t hear him. “Can’t you control her? She’s too young to be dressing up like that. Geez! Go take Mommy’s dress off, young lady, and wash your face!”

I have to believe my father had no idea of the devastating effect of his words. It was just that to praise me as pretty in front of my scarred sister was something he had decided early on never to do. I ripped off the dress, kicked off the shoes, and ran up the stairs.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I ran away from home, I was eight. I packed up a bologna sandwich on white, a couple of Twinkies, and a carton of chocolate milk in a sheet and threw it over my shoulder like
I’d seen in the movies. My mother let me go, probably thinking I wouldn’t get far with only a bologna sandwich for sustenance. When I got to the center of town, I sat on a bench to eat my lunch, and then I went back home again. I remember her waiting at the door.

Nobody used to notice when I went to the garage, got on my bike, and disappeared for hours at a time. I knew every street, all the shortcuts and back roads in town. The dirt path through the woods had a quiet place to stop to sit on a tree stump and eat an apple. Or I might go to town to the Corner Sweet Shop for a Coke. But more often, I’d just ride by myself to feel free on my own—every turn down every street, my own choice.

At the time, Linda was thirteen or fourteen and didn’t want me around much. She locked the door to her room when her friends were over. I could pick the lock, which I sometimes did, but that didn’t really endear me to her. She would just kick me out and yell for my mother. Sometimes we were friends like we used to be, but other times I truly thought she hated me. She would kid around, but the jokes would sometimes have a bite to them. She’d say things like “You even got the good hair in the family.” There was nothing I could say to her joking accusations, and nothing I could ever do to even the score.

Meanwhile, my parents were constantly planning our lives around Linda’s hospital visits. They’d be planning the next surgery for June when it was only September. I didn’t allow myself to feel resentful.

When I was eleven, I wrote to Barnum & Bailey Circus about joining. I wanted to go to clown school—right away. I wanted to
learn to make people laugh like my father always did. I saw that it made people love him, and I thought my clowning might make him love me. I waited for a long time for a reply and then forgot about it. My mistake, I found out later, was asking my mother to mail the letter. She never did.

I
LOOKED LIKE
her. Or she looked like me, but nobody ever mentioned it.

I was nine and looking for my father to come help me with a picture I was painting. My mother said he was in their bedroom reading, but he wasn’t there. I went over to his side of their big bed, which was really two beds pushed together. His nightstand was crowded with two books, his clock radio that he listened to at night, and his black-rimmed reading glasses. I sat down on the bed and looked up at the wall full of photos that I had never taken notice of before.

For a minute, I thought they were pictures of me, but they were all her.

In the center was the formal eleven-by-fourteen portrait taken just before she died. She was seven in the photo, although she looked at least thirteen. Her apricot silk sundress had off-the-shoulder scalloped sleeves. Her chestnut hair was curled in a pageboy, the sides held in place with white barrettes, bangs cut straight and high on her forehead. Just like mine. She leaned lightly on her elbows with her hands clasped in front of her. If you looked hard enough at her thoughtful expression, you could see the woman she might have become.

My mother walked in as I was scrutinizing each picture, and she sat down on the bed next to me. She put her arm around me, and we didn’t say anything for a while. Then she started to tell me about the photos.

She pointed to the picture of Donna at six months old with her chubby cheeks filling the frame.

“Her legs were too fat for her to walk,” my mother explained, admitting that she doted on Donna, maybe even overfeeding her so much that it delayed walking.

“She really didn’t need to get up for anything,” she chuckled.

She told me that she had just turned three when the photo was taken of her with short, curly hair, sitting primly. My mother stopped when she got to the one that looked most like me, of Donna in a casual pose, leaning both arms on a blanket in front of her. She gave me a squeeze.

All the faces of my sister. The daughter lost to them. But she was there every morning when they first put their feet on the ground and every night when they closed their eyes. Not forgotten, never really gone.

After the crash, my father told me, he was determined to recover some of the old photos that were lost in the fire. When he called the photographer to get a replacement photo of the last picture taken of Donna, my mother fought with him.

“It will just remind us more. Every single day,” she said.

“I want it! It was a beautiful picture of her!”

My father went to the rest of the family to collect photos they had kept of Donna, to add to his memorial wall.

My Uncle Art and Aunt Ruth both sent a few small photos of Donna along with some of my mother and father with her and of Linda before the accident.

My father spread them out on the kitchen table with some frames, scissors, and tape. When my mother walked in, she accused him, “What are you doing? I hope you aren’t planning to hang those.”

At this, my father raised his voice.

“Isn’t it enough that she’s gone? That all traces of her have been erased from our lives? We don’t have a doll she played with, or a sweater she wore, or even a crayon picture she made in school! Can’t we at least have something of her in our house?”

My father continued matching each picture to the perfect round gilded frame, or square black one, with his artistic eye. He held each photo for a moment, staring at his girl, before deciding how to shape and fit her into place, taping each image squarely onto a photo mat before securing it behind glass. When he was done with the framing, he knew better than to hang them in the living room.

That’s how he chose the spot in their bedroom, on his side of the bed, where my mother could avert her eyes if she wanted to. He centered the large portrait and was positioning the picture hooks for the others when my mother walked in on him. He stopped the hammer in midair to turn to her, his eyes pleading for this one concession. She nodded to him slightly, turned, and walked away.

A
FTER MY MOTHER
’
S
explanation of the photos, my father joined us on the bed, sitting on the other side of me. He glanced up at Donna on the wall over us and leaned over to pick up the one photo of me on his nightstand—a two-by-three-inch snapshot in a white metal frame. In the photo, I was sporting Donna’s same pageboy hairstyle. Only my blue-rimmed glasses, and my lazy left eye, made it me.

“My favorite of you,” he said.