The Queen of Everything (9 page)

And she of course would say,
There are worse
things, Jordan. We need good people around us. Like a plant needs good
soil.

Plants don't have to see Grant Manning in
his skivvies,
I would say.

Plants don't stand outside his door and yell
"Fire!" so he'll come running out,
she would say.

Once,
I would say.
I did that
once.
And then:
Okay, fine.
Which is the only thing you can say when
you know you've lost an argument.

We started seriously veering away from each
other, my mother and I, after I got my first

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period. It was when I first thought she might
be crazy. Or at least so far away from where I was and needed her to be that she
might as well not be in my life at all. It was not an easy time. I mean, not a
year before it was still fun to poke the cups with your finger when your mother
went bra shopping. Then suddenly, you've got all the guys at school snickering
about hooter harnesses and over-the-shoulder boulder holders with the same
nervous giggles people get when they go to funerals and serious stuff like that.
And just when you think,
Okay, the breast business stinks but I can handle
it
--boom. More than anything, you can use a little casualness, a little
humor. Someone to laugh with about those advertisements for pads with
wings.

Instead, my mother took me to the doctor, which
was fine except that Dr. Mary's nurse was a guy named Larry, who looked like a
construction worker. Larry wore tight jeans and had a red too-much-beer face and
looked like he should have carried that squishy blood-pressure thing in a tool
belt. When he asked what we were there for, I started blushing like crazy and I
wore that blush the rest of the day, throughout Dr. Mary's talk about my
developing
(like I was, maybe, a roll of film), and all during the
menstrual-cycle celebration I had to endure back home. Picture me with a wreath
of baby's breath stuck on my head and in a circle around me, Miss Poe
and

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Mom and Janey from the marimba school and Mom's
friend Bea Martinson, who had tried for years to be a lesbian, except she
couldn't do the sex part. All of them holding glasses of sparkling cranberry
juice in the air and making goofy toasts and Mom with a limp daisy stuck in her
buttonhole and happy eyes like I'd just won the lottery or something. Miss Poe
spiked her own juice and got rip-roaring drunk and poor Hugh Prince wouldn't
look me in the eyes for a week. I wondered why Mom didn't just rent a billboard,
or better yet, paint Jordan's first period on the island's old oil tank and tape
on a few red balloons.

I thought she'd lost her mind. She was
disappointed I wasn't more enthusiastic. Let me tell you, when my mother said,
"Close your eyes, Jordan, I have a surprise," and took my elbow as we stepped
from the car after the doctor's visit, I somehow wasn't expecting a period party
complete with a cake that said, welcome, woman.

Not quite a year later, Nathan became more than
a boarder, something I only found out when Mom dropped the news that she was
pregnant. The whole thing turned my stomach. I'd spent the last few months at
school hearing about Ovary and Uterus, which if you ask me, sound like a couple
of gossipy old spinster ladies who refuse to drive themselves around anymore.
Now I was face-to-face with not only

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them, but Fetus. Why they call babies something
so unfriendly I will never know.
Fetus
is the kind of word that comes to
mind when you think of aliens or cousins marrying, not when you think of
babies.

"We're having a commitment ceremony," my mother
said.

"I thought only gay people had those," I said.
I'd had enough of her ceremonies.

That look again. And two weeks later, me with
another bunch of flowers stuck to my head, standing out in the meadow, wind
whipping our dresses in a column around our legs as Reverend Lee from Big Mama's
church said hocus pocus and waved his hands over our heads as if he were a
magician whose costume just happened to have a white rectangle on the
throat.

I thought they'd write their own vows, the long
mushy type you see on soap-opera weddings, but they stuck to the traditional
ones. At "I, Nathan, take you, Claire," Nathan's jaw started to quiver and my
mom grasped his hand and squeezed. At "sickness and health," his eyes filled and
his voice caught, and by the time he got to "until death us do part," the most
he could do was wave his hand at Reverend Lee and croak, "Go on, go
on."

Afterward Cliff Barton buzzed by the reception
in his biplane, and Hugh Prince did a marimba solo he'd practiced for the
occasion,

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and Nathan fed Mom carrot cake they'd ordered
from Nadine, who bakes for friends and sells the extras out of the back of her
station wagon. Nathan got ahold of himself and walked around showing everyone
his tomato plants, which in a few months would be as round and ripe as my mother
would be. Tim Berg, D.D.S., who runs his practice out of a schooner docked on
the sound out near Asher House, tried his hand at the gourd rattles.

The entire day I forced myself not to run away.
My father had always been the weekend guy, the
take-you-places-and-visit-the-
grandparents guy. But I guess that day, for
the first time, I started thinking about the possibility of living with him
full-time. I imagined going home to his house after a day at a normal school.
His house would be a quiet, regular home where the strangest thing that ever
happened was the time the coffeepot started spitting water.

The day of my mother and Nathan's ceremony, Big
Mama patted my shoulder a lot. She was living with us by then. If it wasn't for
her, I might have done what I felt like doing, ripping the gourd from Tim Berg,
D.D.S.'s, hand and screaming at them all to go away. But Big Mama was the kind
of person you didn't want to disappoint. I'd started to count on her a lot in
the months before, when everything caused an argument between Mom and me.
Vicious arguments.

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Fingernails in flesh arguments. Arguments that
caused Miss Poe to make her point by walking around wearing a huge, puffy set of
earphones connected to a Walkman.

Big Mama and my own mother had been friends for
years and years, since my mother lived in Chicago. Big Mama came to live at
Asher House after her husband, Clyde, decided he did indeed need a hole in the
head. She and Clyde had come to Parrish a few months before, for Big Mama's job
with the fisheries department. She had to finish out her two-year stint before
she could go back to her home in Nine Mile Falls near Seattle, and she couldn't
bear to go back to the small house she and Clyde had rented on the island. Big
Mama's job had been a temporary one; Clyde Belle, or rather, parts of him,
stayed on Parrish Island permanently.

Even though I knew Big Mama was suffering, she
was there for me. She said things that made sense. Big Mama talked about God a
lot, and salmon. She knew a lot about both things. She knew a lot about children
too; she had four grown ones.

I liked to listen to her; her voice made me
calm, like laying your head down on a pillow. I didn't know Laylani Waddell yet
then, but let me tell you, Big Mama never went around like Laylani did, wearing
Jesus shoes. Big Mama made God sound like the friendly next-door

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neighbor you actually wanted to see at the
mailbox. Even if you happened to be in your robe with your morning
hair.

In spite of Big Mama's help, my mother and I
were a blow-up waiting to happen. And it finally did happen the night after my
mother's ultrasound test. She had wanted me to come with her and Nathan, and so
I did. I even fetched her a hundred tiny paper cups filled with water until her
eyeballs were practically swimming in their sockets.

When it was time for the test, she did a funny
cross-legged walk to the table and had to be helped up; her naked belly stuck up
tight and glistening as a slice of Swiss cheese. It was embarrassing. Then the
nurse came in and squirted a splotch of goop on my mother and pressed this thing
that looked like a microphone on her, rolling it around with this look of
concentration like Mom was a big crystal ball about to reveal our future, which
I guess she was.

All during the test, my mother was making these
little gasps because she had to go to the bathroom so badly. I guess they have
to make your bladder float like a rubber boat, I don't know; I didn't exactly
want to know the gory details. So anyway, Nathan is holding her hand, and here
come the pictures on the screen, which look just like what Steve Pool shows on
the weather forecast. Swarmy gray clouds, a cold

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front you just have to take his word for. Then
they zoomed in on the heart, a gaping pulsing circle, and it's something you get
the feeling you really shouldn't be seeing. It gave me the willies.

"No doubt about it," the nurse said. "It's a
boy." She zoomed in on what she said was a penis, and everyone started to cry,
although all I could think of was how the kid would hate that when he was
sixteen, since it was all being put on videotape. My mother was gasping and
crying and she looked up into my face, and I guess she didn't like what she saw,
because she got this hurt look. Well, you know, sorry.

Finally the machine was switched off and my
mother rolled off the table. "Bathroom," she breathed.

The nurse knocked on an adjacent door in that
efficient way medical people have, like extra movements are simply too
frivolous. They don't even talk with their hands, unless it's to describe the
specific size of something--a needle, say. "Right here," the nurse said. She
handed Nathan the videotape, gave her congratulations, and turned on her heel.
Not an expression you use every day, but exactly what she did.

"Thank God," my mother said, waddling over to
the door. She turned the knob, pulled. "Don't tell me. Oh no, no, no. Stuck.
Nathan! Oh my God, it's stuck. Help me."

"Locked," Nathan said after trying the
knob.

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"Oh God, oh God, do something. Go get her.
Hurry." Mother crossed her ankles, jiggled up and down. Nathan dashed
out.

I was already getting a sinking feeling.
Nathan's sneakers pounded away and back again, and he popped his head in. "No
one," he said. "But there's a bathroom around the corner."

My mother moaned. She grasped the little gown
around her, waddled to the door. "I can't make it. I can't make it."

Nathan looked desperate. His eyes darted around
the room as if a blue sign with a white block woman in a triangular dress might
just pop up to save the day. Instead he spotted a garbage can.

"Oh no," I said.

"Shut up, Jordan," my mother said.

She took the garbage can from Nathan. I turned
my head. Think of the sound the Little Dutch Boy would have made if he took his
finger out of the dike.

"I can't believe this," I said. I said it
again, too, in the car, after Nathan had finally found the nurse and whispered
to her, making these apologetic little gestures with his hands.

"Until you are in that exact place, you have no
right to comment," my mother said to me.

So let's just say that night there was already
some tension between us. The three of us, plus Miss Poe, were watching
television, some sitcom,

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which didn't happen too often in our house. Mom
was one of those people who thought animals mating and hyenas ripping zebras
apart were the only appropriate things on television. I mean, you see less sex
and violence on cop shows. Just another variety of animal.

Anyway, this commercial came on for Cover Girl,
and I made the mistake of saying that I liked the names of lipsticks.
Millionaire Red, Tropical Kiss. Mother let out a long, dramatic sigh.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing," she said.

"What?" I said.

"You probably think that singer you like is
going to someday ride up in his mirrored suit and whisk you off too."

"I do not," I said.

Nathan pretended he suddenly had something
urgent to do and got up. Miss Poe felt around the couch for the remote control
so that she could turn the sound of the television up.

"Honestly Jordan. You rely too heavily on
romance for inspiration."

I just sat there, and okay, it's a cliché, but
it was like she stabbed me. Shoved a pamphlet of island activities at me, the
one half of a Romantic Couple. I knew her feelings about romance and other
"flimsy" stuff as well as I knew the lines on her face and where the creaks on
the hall floor

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were and to fasten the garbage-can lid down or
the raccoons would get at it; they were what home was about just as much.
Romance and shopping and fussing over your looks, she said, were life's
advertisements. A shallow and meaningless diversion from the main program. The
paths you got pulled down when you simply desired. Desired, without knowing
exactly what.

So I liked the advertisements, so what? They
were harmless. Fun even. Who didn't need a break sometimes from a heavy show? A
chance to get up and make popcorn? What made her think she knew me so well,
anyway?