Sacred Time (8 page)

But when the poultry man brought a larger turkey, Riptide said it wouldn't fit in her oven.

As he opened the fifth cage, he whispered to me, “Last time I showed your grandmother seven.”

The fifth turkey was dangling upside down from the scale, twisting its head as it watched the people in the market. Its face was right next to mine, and all at once it noticed me. Its eyes were curious and shy, and I thought it was a nice turkey.

“Look at that turkey looking at that little boy,” someone said.

The poultry man laughed. “That turkey is looking at you, Antonio.”

“Gobobobob…”

“Nice turkey,” I told the turkey. “Nice—”

“Antonio has decided.
Questo.”
My grandmother nodded.

“No,” I said. “Not this turkey.”

But my grandmother decided this was the turkey I wanted, and when the poultry man took it from the scale and carried it behind the counter, I heard it go “Gobobobob.” The counter was too high for me to see what was happening to my turkey, but I knew because I could hear something turning—it sounded like a wheel—and my turkey screamed so hard I got hiccups and I was sure they were plucking its feathers and when it quit screaming quit making any sound altogether I knew they'd plucked my turkey bare and chopped off its head.

“This is much harder for her than for you, Leonora,” my father said.

“My soul bleeds for her.”

“It's humiliating for her, needing our help like this.”

“Oh, but she is so very fortunate to have your understanding. It's certainly more than I get from you.” My mother sat up against the maple headboard. “More than Anthony gets from you. Let me tell you, having those girls in his room is miserable for him.”

“Let me tell you then that staying in bed is not fighting fair.”

“Oh…but I am not fighting, Victor.” Her chapped lips stretched into a weak smile.

“I wish you were.”

She didn't answer.

He touched her shoulder. “Are you quite settled?”

“I may never feel settled again.”

He glanced at the stack of magazines on the dresser,
Life
and
Look
and
Good Housekeeping.
“Do you want something to read?”

When she didn't answer, I said,
“Life.
She likes it better than
Look
because it has more pictures.”

“I don't want a magazine. Is that all right?”

“Hey,” my father said, “I have work to do.”

And he was gone, leaving his night socks on the floor where he'd tossed them. My mother made him wear those to bed because he rubbed the bottoms of his feet with sticky ointment.

I sat on the floor next to my mother's side of the bed and started a drawing of the zoo for her. I colored the gate red for her, with yellow and brown, so it was like copper. On top of the gate, I drew the lion, king of beasts. Then bears on top of one arch and deer on the other. The post on one side had a monkey sitting on it, the other a leopard. Tortoises supported the weight of my gate and all its animals, including the owls and cranes. Around the gate, I colored a halo of smoke. A path led through the gate, and at the end of the path I drew the African Plains where ostriches and lions moved freely.

My mother's eyes were closed, and all I could see between the white pillows and the white blanket was her white face, thinner than it used to be, and it occurred to me that she and I—so alike in the narrow shapes of our bodies—were hiding out from the people with sturdy bodies: Aunt Floria, the twins, even my father, who was wearing a tuxedo in the wedding picture above the dresser, squinting with absolute delight at my mother, who stood to his right in a long wedding gown, one arm joined through his. “Victor's sweepstakes smile,” my grandfather called it.

Grouped around that photo were other family pictures, five of them showing me as a baby: held by my mother the day she brought me home from the hospital; by my father as he lifted me toward the ceiling fan; and then one picture with each grandparent except for my mother's father, who'd died when she was ten. As I watched her sleep, I felt sorry for her growing up without her father, and that made me wonder why the television never showed the glass-wax father. Maybe he was just in another television room—not dead like my mother's father—or maybe he was Elsewhere. All at once I felt certain that, if only I could decorate our windows with glass-wax bells and snowflakes, I would get my family back the way it used to be—one mother, one father, one boy.

While I was filling in the background of my zoo picture with a jungle just like the ferns on my parents' wallpaper, a loud crash came from my room. Then another. When I got there, Bianca was climbing on my bed, arms through the straps of her cape.

“Don't jump. You'll wake my mother.”

She jumped. Tackled me. As I kicked and struggled to get out from under her, Belinda threw herself across my legs, and Bianca squatted on my stomach.

“Let me go.”

“If you move, you lose the tickle game.”

“I don't want to play your stupid game.”

They yanked down my dungarees, my underpants.

“Let me go,” I cried, feeling hot and queasy. To be found by the Pharaoh's daughter was too good for the twins. No, I wanted Great-Aunt Camilla to lose them in the desert, where
twin snakes coil around them and choke them, where twin buzzards eat what's left.

“Let me go! Let—”

“Quiet in there, Anthony, girls.” Aunt Floria's voice.

“I'm telling.”

“Tattletale.”

“Meanie.”

The jingle “Don't be a meanie, bring me Barricini” floated through my mind. My mother loved Barricini's chocolates, and sometimes she would get all dressed up and take me for a walk along the tree-lined Concourse, where the wealthy Jewish families lived. We'd stop at Barricini's, nowhere else, to buy chocolate-covered almonds. Inside my head, I could hear the Barricini jingle, “Don't be a meanie, bring me Barricini,” and the jingle was pounding through me and I was the one yelling it, “Don't be a meanie bring me Barricini,” yelling it faster, now, faster while the twins skittered from me.

“Don't-be-a-meanie-bring-me-Barricini!”

The twins hopped on my bed, watching me darkly through their father's leaf-colored eyes while I tugged up my underpants and dungarees, and when they edged forward I shrieked, “Don't-be-a-meanie-bring-me-Barricini, dontbeameaniebringme—”

“Girls. Anthony—” Aunt Floria again. “What is it now?”

“Barricini,” I whispered fiercely while I backed away from my cousins.

In the hallway, Aunt Floria was opening the front door for two nuns.
Nuns know. Nuns know everything. They're here because of the tickle game.
I had the urge to confess though I was afraid I'd only get punishment, not absolution.

“Sisters, come in. Merry Christmas. Come in.” Aunt Floria looked as if she were about to receive communion. “I'll get you some eggnog. Fresh yesterday. My brother made it at Festa Liguria. Or if you'd like some of my fig fruitcake—”

“No, thank you.”

“We only have a minute.”

“Anthony, darling, you get your mother out of bed. Tell her it's the Sisters of Mercy, collecting for the pagan children, and they're in a rush.”

What if these are the nuns who took Mrs. Hudak away in their truck? Then they'll take the twins away. Aunt Floria, too. Take them Elsewhere. But not bring them back.

I jiggled my mother's arm. One side of her face was creased, and her hair was flat. Usually, before she went to sleep, she pinned her hair into curls and wrapped toilet paper around them. Slowly—as if she had to learn how to walk—she approached our living room.

“The twins started the tickle game,” I told the nuns, “I didn't—”

A sudden sneeze interrupted me.

“Jesus Christ, Belinda.” My mother wiped the back of her wrist against her chenille robe. “Bless you, I mean. I'm sorry, Sisters.”

Aunt Floria was shoving two nickels and one dime into the slot of the cardboard collection box that had pictures of naked brown children squatting in a patch of grass, their faces sad. One had his head bent while the others picked through his hair for lice or worse. On back of the box was a mother in clothing with a child in clothing, both smiling at a cross. Clothing meant salvation, and what those naked pagan children needed for salvation was the clothing the nuns in Africa would buy for them the instant my aunt finished shoving her coins through the slot. Somehow, I expected those coins to make more of a sound, louder than a church bell.

I felt noble, picturing the pagan children with clothing and without lice, and I waited for my mother to help the children, too.

But she didn't. “Religion,” she said to the sisters, “is only valid when it has to do with compassion, not with forcing your belief on—”

“Not now, Leonora.” My aunt started apologizing to the Sisters. “I'm sorry, but my sister-in-law, she's been ill.”

“It's arrogant to teach these African children that your God is better than theirs.” My mother's eyes blazed. Trashing religion did that to her.

“My sister-in-law gets those migraines that—”

“For us,” my mother added, “charity is close to home this year.”

“If that's all we are to you, Leonora, charity…” Aunt Floria began to cry.

“That is not what I said.” My mother pressed her fingertips against her temples. Her nail polish was chipped.

“We all do the best we can to be charitable in this earthly world,” the older nun murmured hastily.

The other nodded. “In the eyes of our Lord, each act of charity is a prayer.”

My mother shivered.

“I didn't want to do the tickle game,” I confessed to the nuns. “The twins jumped on top of me and—”

But the nuns didn't glance at me. They were fretting about the chalices at their church. “Those chalices won't last much longer.”

“Because they're worn so thin.”

“Like a child's fingernails.”

When my father came home with a carton of groceries, the nuns were long gone, and Aunt Floria had piled her belongings in the hallway. He had to climb around them to find her in the kitchen, where she was pacing between stove and ice box, trailed by the scents of mothballs and fish.

“I'll move out, Victor, right after I feed you and your family the seven-fish dinner. Mama says she'll take me and the girls in.”

Already, I could see myself
back in my own bed. In my own room. Kevin and I are building bridges from Lincoln Logs. A crane with a real motor from my Erector Set.

“Let's talk this over, please.” My father set the carton on the table. From the hesitant way he unbuttoned his coat, I could tell he didn't want Riptide finding out about the troubles between Aunt Floria and my mother.