The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (6 page)

But Father’s voice, what I could feel of it, was nice in the nights. He never made me cry and his rendition of “Toura-loura-loura” cured my hiccups more than once. Days were different, though. On weekends and in the evenings, home from work, he sometimes fell to the forced high volume that emptied words of meaning, shouting when I began crawling at five months, “There she goes! There she goes!” and at seven months when I cruised between table and couch in the living room, “Off to the races! The filly’s off to the races!” It was as if any progress I made brought forth his fears for my eventual failure. He loved me timidly in that first year. There were nights when he was content in our quiet feeding dance, and even occasional days when his noise held solid affection. But often that year his empty words tried to knock me down, push me back, steamroll me into submission to some concept of inevitable failure that he could only slowly vacate.

I made my first sign at seven months right after I’d eaten my first bite of mashed banana. “More,” I signed. And he yelled loud enough to wake the dead, “My Chiquita girl! My Chicky-Chiquita girl!” as if to announce my deafness against my development. Mother signed back, “Good.”

I ate a whole banana that feed and didn’t even need to burp.

A
dvancing age and bad weather had prevented my only grandparents, Mother’s parents, from traveling to Maryland for my baptism. By the end of March the yellow forsythia had faded, the crocuses had come and gone in purple and mud, the grass was new green and tight on the skin of the yards, and they arrived to meet me. By then I was six weeks old and sleeping, Mother would joke, like a baby: sleep for an hour, wake up and cry; sleep for an hour, wake up and cry. I was ravenous for her milk, her sleepy milky eyes, her creamy smile, for the lotions she spread on me at odd times, for the feel of the wet wipes cold on my bottom, the solid pats of her hand on my back, the sights of the wall behind her burping shoulder where the painter—Father—had left a pink stippling of paint drops at the bottom of the doorframe (which later, when I was just past two, I would connect with a marker and reveal a flamingo taking flight). And I ate her every slow, soft word that dropped on me when she looked down. “Thunder thighs,” “Butter butt,” “Chubby cheeks,” “Rosebud lips,” and “Auger eyes,” her articulations of my developing articulations.

But Nana, my grandmother, spoke only of my hands. She met me in my crib, awakening at noon from an hour’s nap, content to babble and coo at the waves of the ceiling while my hunger crested. She came in with Mother. She watched Mother scoop me up and begin a diaper change. I watched her watch my hands as they scrabbled my round belly while my bum was raised and lowered, washed and dusted, diapered and done.

“Jess, I would like you to meet your grandmother,” Mother said, wrapping my lower half in a blanket and handing me off. Nana held me in the crook of her left arm. Her right hand clasped my wrist and held it still. My grasp reflex was triggered and all eight fingers clutched for purchase. My right hand found only the smooth knuckle of Nana’s restraining thumb, while my left caught the starched end of her shirt cuff.

“Can she hold a bottle with them?” Nana asked.

“Ma, she’s only six weeks. We haven’t even tried yet.”

“Does it hurt to touch where the thumb’s not at?”

“No, Ma, nothing hurts anywhere in her body. Except her insides when she’s hungry. Let me take her and get her going.”

Nana watched my fingers caress her knuckle, wave after wave of tiny fingers on her slippery bony ridge. “Looks like a big old spider taking a stroll,” she remarked. She shifted her attention to my face, and I stared back. Her features were plain and unadorned as a child’s crayon scribble. Her eyes were gray dots and her eyebrows gray lines and her hair a gray cloud. The pink tip of her tongue slipped out of her mouth when I scratched her. “You need to cut her nails, Kate, before she scratches us all up. At least it won’t take long to do,” she said handing me back to Mother. “And she’ll never need an orthodontist, either,” she added confidently. We went downstairs to the living room where Mother fed me on the couch. Nana watched.

My grandfather emerged from his rounds of the basement as my feeding ended.

“Everything seems shipshape,” he allowed when he entered the living room. “Furnace is holding up. Hot water heater, too. No problems. No problems the rest of this winter. I might decalcify the humidifier pad. It’s gotten a mite crusty.” He sniffed the air to check the house’s humidity. “Not working bad, though. Probably like forty percent.”

Mother had me in her lap for a burping. “Dad, this is Jessica Mary. Jessica, your granddad.”

He came to his knees and studied my hands for a second. He took my right hand in his big, calloused paw and shook it till my head bobbed and he became a blur with a beard. “Call me Ned, young lady. Ned will do perfectly well.” He finally stopped his pumping and encased my hand between his two palms. He looked like a priest at prayer, with his hands held together and his red Irish face bowed and his copper hair slicked back and smelling of pomade. He was staring at my feet, which were covered by pink booties, gifts from Mother’s coworkers at the preschool she used to staff. He raised his head in a snapping motion. He asked excitedly, “Kate, she have big toes?”

“I wouldn’t say big, Dad. Normal size toes. For a baby.”

“I meant ‘big toes,’ you know, the two big ones.” He uncovered my hand and moved his thumb to the digit-denied side of my palm. He pressed in once, twice, a third time. I caught his thumb with my fingers before he could raise it again and held on tight. He looked surprised and said, “Well, now!”

“Yeah, sure she does. And all the other toes, too,” Mother said with a hint of exasperation in her voice.

“Maybe somebody could do a switch. Put her toes where the thumbs should be. Who needs all those toes down there anyway? Thumbs are what make us human.” He slipped his own human thumb from under my fingertips, and held it wide in the plane of his palm. “See, this is how she is without thumbs. Like a little critter or a bird. Her fingers are near useless. And this is what they could change her to.” His thumb moved out of the plane of the palm and did a little dance with his other digits. “See?”

“I’ll mention your idea to the doctors, Dad. See what they think.”

“Well, let’s all just call you Doctor Ned O’Brien from now on. You who spent forty years operating a bulldozer and a crane on the roads of Maryland. Girl’s got no thumbs, Ned. Never’ll have thumbs. Your tinkering around life is not going to change that.” Nana rose from the couch and stood over her kneeling husband. “I’ll go start the lunch. I could use a good hot cup of tea.”

Ned sat next to Mother and watched Nana walk off. “Mom will be okay after a while,” he said. “You know how hard it is for her. Give her time, Kate, and she’ll come around.” They sat silently for a minute while Mother blotted an eye with her sleeve. “Can I hold her?” he asked. Mother nodded. “Well, Jessy, you sure seem to be taking all this in. Someday we’ll tell you all about your early months.” He settled me in his arm, just the way Cassidy had done. He felt the same, Ned did, like his arm was some solid shell around me, but he lacked the earthy odors that came away from Cassidy’s torso. Ned used deodorant and men’s cologne and smelled like a florist shop in the summer.

“Dad, how old was he when he died? Billy? Do you even know much about him?”

“She showed me pictures once just before we got married. I think she wanted me to know what I might be getting into. He was, I’d say, maybe three or four in the picture. Remember, now Kate, this was fifty, sixty years ago. There was nothing for children with birth defects back then, and he had this really bad heart condition as well as those other defects. But I do remember he was smiling in the picture, at some zoo or park where there were cages of animals. His face was . . . was sort of puffy and bloated, but he was at this place enjoying himself, it seemed.”

“And Mom, how old was she?”

“Just a young girl. Ten, twelve maybe, when he died. But you know back then, the family carried it all on their shoulders. The home care, the financial burden, the . . .” He paused to rub my head with his big palm.

“The shame,” Mother added quietly.

Ned sighed and moved his hand from my head to Mother’s. “Kate, sixty years is a real long time. People had different ways of looking at things like this, back then. Mom will work it out in time. I’ll help her. All we have to do is give her time and let little Jess blossom.” He leaned down to stroke the top of my head with his scratchy beard and to kiss its crown. I squealed.

“Were there thumbs in the picture of Billy, Dad? Did he have thumbs?”

“No, Kate, Billy did not.” Ned looked at Mother with a face set for the hard work ahead.

I squealed and kicked.

Nana and Ned stayed for two weeks. The weather turned unseasonably warm. Mother pushed me in my carriage for hours each day. Often Ned was busy with a project—an oil change for the car, a new coat of paint for the two bathrooms, an overhaul of the central air conditioner. Nana always came with us, though. I could see her from where I lay on my back. For such a stern-looking woman, her stride seemed young and free. She moved her hands and arms in such wide arcs with each step, she looked like a jockey whipping her mount as it came furiously down the stretch. The outdoors made her smile, too, especially if we were passing a spot that evoked a memory of her own life as a young mother. We lived in what had been their house through all those years of raising a family. Mother and Father, newlyweds, had purchased it from them eight years ago, as Nana and Ned went off to Florida with a pension from the state of Maryland. Even so, Nana would always consider the neighborhood her own, though the house no longer belonged to her.

On the first day, I watched them talk of the things mothers and daughters always discuss. Their husbands— “Your father is getting on in years, I’m afraid. Some mornings it’s all I can do to get him out of bed by seven.” And “Ford’s up for a promotion at the post office. They’re thinking of making him branch manager.” Their roles as wives and mothers—“Ned couldn’t wash clothes if his underwear got brown as a nut. It makes me so mad!” And “I miss my girlfriends at the preschool. When Jess is asleep, sometimes I go a little stir-crazy, listening to the creaks in the staircase, the hum of the refrigerator.” Their relatives— “Your Uncle Emmett has diabetes.” “Eric, cousin Eric, shot three deer this season. He wanted to send us the third’s antlers as a gift for Jess! He’s so weird!” Their friends— “Millie Casserton had triple bypass.” And “Sara Scott has had her closets professionally organized. Just because of her shoe collection. Can you imagine?”

“Tell me about Billy, Ma,” Mother said on the morning of the third walk. We were barely two houses away from home when she spoke. The look on her face was set so tight her eyes could have belonged in a church’s stone angel. Her request put Nana’s arms to rest and parted her mouth an inch. “You can start by telling me how he and Jess compare.” Mother stared straight ahead. Nana’s arms resumed their arcing. She closed her mouth and swallowed hard enough to wiggle her ears.

“Billy was a mess,” she began. Her eyes searched the sidewalk at her feet.

“His heart was full of leaks.

“He wasn’t allowed any salt.

“In the summers he’d try to lick my skin just for the taste of salt.

“His arms and legs—especially his legs—all puffed out so they split open at the ankles and wrists. They were like slits in pie crust.

“They wept pink ooze till they were sticky as a used sucker.” She looked up from the pavement to Mother. “Then I had to wash him in his wheelchair, run the damp cloth over his hands and feet and legs while he tried to get his tongue to my neck or face.” She shook her head. “He was a mess.” We crossed Buchanan.

“And he was my brother, Kate. My brother with no thumbs.” She sighed at the flash of memory.

“He liked to lick his fingers after he’d held some food to his mouth. It turned my stomach when he did that. Finger after finger going in and out of his mouth with loud sucking sounds.

“I had to push his wheelchair around when we were out. At the end he couldn’t walk at all. He just sat in his chair and turned his head and smiled at me when someone we knew passed, or a dog or a cat.

“A mess.”

Mother waited for a few seconds. “Could he hear? Did he speak?”

Nana shook her head at the sidewalk. “Not a word. But he had sounds, noises, he’d made up for some things. A different grunt for me, one for our father and mother, one for the neighbor’s German shepherd. His own language.”

They both looked at me then as they trudged on. “You were ashamed of him,” Mother finally said. There was no tone of accusation in her voice, simply a soft acknowledgment.

“I was eleven years old when all this was happening, Kate. The kids teased me at school about his claw hands, his elephant legs always crusted with ooze. I could never have my friends to the house. Even my teachers at school seemed to treat me . . . differently than the other girls. I didn’t cry when he died. I remember that. I didn’t cry a single tear.”

We crossed a street. I felt the front wheels bump down and then the rear. The sensation made me laugh.

“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to Jess,” Mother said. “But it won’t. Her heart has a murmur but it will either mend itself or get fixed by surgery when she’s seven. The cardiologist did all the tests and told us so.” Nana’s face registered surprise, and she stumbled a little coming off the curb.

“How do they know that?” she asked.

“They have all these tests—EKGs and echocardiograms and X-rays. Her heart’s not going to be a problem for her. It’s going to be her hearing and her learning to speak, to communicate. She’s going to have an operation on her ears in six weeks. We’ll work with the speech pathologists. Then we’re all going to learn sign language. We’re going to do it, Ma. Her geneticist is convinced Jess is smart. Real smart. And we believe him.”

Nana’s eyes drilled into mine. “Well, she looks smart, if you don’t notice her hands. Not like Billy, I’ll give you that.”