"The Summoner’s Monkey"
by Jeanne Maxwell


I think it started when the walls started breathing. I think that’s when it started. But maybe it started earlier than that. They tell me to write it down, to write it down and remember, and I’m trying. I’m trying, but it’s hard, because sometimes it hurts, and sometimes they hurt me. But that’s as far back as I can trace it right now. I think it started when the walls started breathing.

I think I’ve always hallucinated. I used to wonder what other people meant when they said they were tripping on some drug, because if I looked up wrong when I was reading, all the leaves on the trees would blur together and run down the bark like green blood. And if I didn’t count properly on the way home from the grocery store, if I let a car go by before I could count the right number of paving stones, or count past all the cracks in the concrete, my mind would hide my house. But this is different. They’re different. Or maybe they’re only telling me they are.

They tell me to be concise. They tell me to speak plainly. That’s always been difficult, but I’m trying. I’m trying to speak plainly. I’m trying to set down the facts in order. Because it’s important. I think it’s important. They tell me it’s important. They tell me if I don’t remember it right, if I don’t remember the truth, bad things will happen. I’m tired of bad things happening. I’m tired of the walls breathing.

So these are the facts, as I remember them. My name is Mary. I’m 38 years old. I think I officially went crazy last year. And I think I’m schizophrenic.

But I don’t think that’s what they want me to say.

They want me to talk about my childhood.

CHAPTER ONE

I don’t remember my childhood being different from anyone else’s, except that everyone I’ve ever met says it was. Which is interesting, because some of the people I met ended up with fish blood in high school because all they had to eat was tuna, growing up. But that’s the problem with perspective. Everything looks fine from one angle, then I move, and it’s all upside down, or on its side, or missing. They tell me not to worry about it, but I do. When their eyes go away I do.

My childhood, though. They ask about it. And I’m trying to remember. I’m trying to be honest. So the first thing I remember is staring through the bars on my crib, watching snowflakes drift into the house. The window wasn’t open, they were just coming through the glass. And I remember my mother coming into the room and sighing, and opening the window. Sunlight streamed through, warming my face and hands, and soon I settled back down and went to sleep. And she closed the window.

Is that my first memory? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my first memory is the little white TV in the front room. I remember we had a little white TV, in the house on Cole Drive. I remember we had the little white TV, only to me it was huge. It sat on top of a white chest of drawers, on an expanse of dark blue shag carpet, and I used to sit and watch colors play across the screen for hours. Of course that stopped when my mother turned the TV on. Then everything was slightly blurry, and monochromatic, and usually not that entertaining. Though one night I remember I watched Godzilla rampage across Tokyo, destroying tall buildings with abandon, getting snarled up in telephone wires. I was just old enough to connect the looping black wires with people. I was...two years old? I don’t remember. I think I was two.

Later, my mother took me to a park and sat me down on a bench, pointing out in a big picture book what Mount Fuji looked like. I didn’t realize she was crying because my father had divorced us. I thought she was crying because pictures of Japan made her sad. Later, I remember running in that same park, and falling down, and getting bark dust in my eyes. I can still hear my mother shrieking in memory. But I was older then. I think I was five when I fell down.

That was just before we moved from the house on Cole Drive, and I had to pack up all my toys for my father’s other family. To this day I don’t understand why I was asked to do that. Maybe I’m not meant to know. Maybe my mother never told me. They keep asking, though, and the questions are getting sharp.

I don’t remember that much of the early years. I try, but it just won’t come back, no matter what I do. I remember the fish pond in the back yard. I think that was the new house, after we moved away and my toys were safely packed in boxes that were shipped across state lines. It was a shallow fish pond, but it was large enough to swim in, large enough for a babe just walking on unsteady legs to nearly drown in. Big orange-and-white marbled fish, flanks gleaming, eyes slick as marbles under the green water’s surface, and I had to know what their world was like. We had a Basenji at that point, and she patiently dove in, whining all the while, and grabbed whatever flailing chubby limb she could to drag out. And I would let her, shaking my head, and wait until she wasn’t looking, and then streak for the pond again. That dog learned pretty fast not to grab onto my diaper, because I’d just wiggle out of it and go back to inspecting fish scales up close.

Sometimes I forgot I couldn’t breathe water, and I’d stay down there for hours, crouched on the bottom of the pond like a toad, my toes squelching through silt. Sometimes I forgot I could, and fought to the surface, sputtering, coughing up brackish water with waterlilies draped across my face. Our Basenji would sit and whine and wait, and whine some more, and eventually come in and rescue me, if I didn’t surface fast enough. I don’t think I developed my fear of dogs then. I think I developed it later, with the bike, and the chasing. But that was later. I think. It’s so hard to remember.

I remember we had a bush of Chinese lanterns in the back yard of the Cole Drive house. I don’t know what the flowers are really called. I remember they were orange, and looked like the Chinese paper lanterns we saw all the time when my mother took me out to eat. When she wasn’t looking, I would go out, and press my small fingers against them, and pop them open. My mother would come and get me, and take me back inside, and explain to me that I was killing the flowers, I was opening them too early, and the bush was going to die. Even knowing that, I couldn’t stop doing it. I did begin to wonder, though, if I was a very bad little girl for killing flowers deliberately.

I remember yellow roses, too, but I didn’t like them after the first trip out. I didn’t like them because they ran along the back of the fence, and the back of the fence had a barbed wire strip across the top that the roses had grown over. I climbed the fence one morning to see the roses up close, and fell, and my chin was impaled on a barbed wire spike. Red blood on yellow roses is very, very vivid, maybe especially so when one is very young. I don’t remember screaming. I remember trying to get free, though, and failing. Then I remember starting to cry, because I was going to be stuck on the fence forever, and that’s when my mother came outside and started screaming. Again.

I remember a blur of motion after that--the neighbor’s moonlike face peering over the back fence, my mother scooping me up and rushing me so quickly into the house my blood seemed to leave a dotted line in the air behind us as we went. We went to the hospital then, a dull grey and yellow place, and I talked softly to a nurse who had died in 1945, jumping off the top of the building. She said I had it much much easier and might not even need stitches. I asked if she’d needed stitches and she said some hurts couldn’t be mended. It was the first time anyone had said that to me, and it must have made an impression, because I still remember it, in spite of everything. But she soothed me until the doctor came out and asked me gruffly who I was talking to. I guessed at that time adults couldn’t see everything, though I watched my mother turn away, shaking her head sadly.

It took three stitches across the center of my chin and now I have an x-shaped scar there, just where the center is, folding it in just slightly. It must have been very deep, because I have scars from grade school and high school that are fading, and that one I can still feel under my fingertips, still see in the mirror. When the mirror works, anyway. It doesn’t always, but no one I’ve ever spoken to understands that.

They ask me about that. They ask me about mirrors. They want to know about them, about why they don’t work for me. I’ve tried to tell them everything I can remember. They don’t have reflections all the time, only they don’t seem to know. Maybe that’s why they’re so interested?

I’m trying to remember. I’m trying to be good. It’s hard. My next memories all seem to be from grade school, and that just doesn’t make sense. Two years old; five years old; nine? Do other people remember like that? Do other people have these gaps?

In the early days in the little white house, it was just the three of us--my mother, my father, and me. The first word I ever said was *Da-da*. He didn’t seem overly pleased. But then, as I would understand years later, he wasn’t. I was born on Father’s Day, the child he never wanted, adding insult to injury. He never quite forgave me for it. I didn’t understand that, then, just as I didn’t understand that I was living in the heart of what once was prime wine country, until three-quarters of its flourishing vineyards were struck by phylloxera around the turn of the century. The farmers had converted first to growing fruit--apricots, plums, peaches and cherries--and nuts--almonds and walnuts--and then converted to technological support just past the time I was born. The two biggest employers in the area were Varian and Hewlett-Packard, and both my parents were employed by Hewlett-Packard.

Of course, I wasn’t born in Cupertino. I think the little house on Cole Drive was the first house I lived in, but it wasn’t the city of my birth. That dubious honor goes to Los Gatos, a small town seated at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountain range. Los Gatos always had a strange feel to it. One story says the town was named for the many mountain lions drawn to the creek that runs through town, which was subsequently named Los Gatos Creek--Spanish for ‘the cats’. It seems as plausible as any tale of naming.

Early California history, it must be understood, is primarily a tale of settlers from the east coast or missions founded by wandering monks. Mexico won their freedom from Spain in 1821, after years of hard-fought battle, and then-current law allowed private *Mexicanos* to petition for land grants--provided those grants were all on former Spanish Mission properties. Luckily for two stepbrothers, Jose Maria Hernandez and Sebastian Fabian Peralta, the 6,631 acres of property--the full ‘one and a half leagues’--were available. They quickly laid claim and named their new ranch *El Rancho Rinconada de Los Gatos*--the ‘corner ranch of the cats’. Los Gatos Creek ran through the property, and part of where the ranch once was forms the current town of Los Gatos.

Of course, before all that, the Ohlone tribe lived in the area. The Ohlones are thought now to have been descended from several nomadic tribes that crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, on their way to North America. They worshipped the sun as the giver of all life and burned their dead to set their spirits free. Which would have been fine had Padre Junipero Serra, founder of the Missions in Mexico, not been sent close to the area by explorer Gaspar de Portola. His primary interest in setting up the Mission system throughout California was to create a unified system of worship, similar to the existing system in Mexico. His rules were simple but absolute: convert everyone.

The Ohlones, simple fishers and hunters of the abundant life throughout the Santa Clara valley, were remarkably easy to convert, by report. We may never know how much pain and strife actually occurred, as it wasn’t thought to be ‘relevant’. The reports back from the area say approximately 5,000 Ohlones converted, and guarded their new faith with zealotry and zeal.

There aren’t many Ohlones left today, but not because they were wiped out by Spanish settlers. Mostly, it was their yen for ornamentation--they may have been the first ones to discover cinnabar (a dense clay-like ore comprised of mercury sulfide) in the mountains. It’s known they used it, powdered and crushed with local herbs and berry juices, to paint designs on their skin. Unfortunately, over time this mercury-rich paint poisoned them, and many died.

I think I was born in Los Gatos simply because it bore the largest hospital at the time in the area. I know in 1967, Cupertino was still a small community, still mostly dedicated to farming and fruit and nut orchards. Los Gatos, while not much larger, did have the money to build a flagship hospital for the area. I suppose that’s the only explanation needed.

They treat me like I’m a travelogue sometimes. Maybe I am. They hit me with a place name and I spin out the early tales, as they were told to me by family, friends and teachers. California history is rich with tales of wandering missionaries like Padre Serra, rich with Scotsmen who founded towns, rich with Chinese workers building railroads, laundries, and homes far from the lands they knew. Unfortunately, it’s also rich with tales of deceit and treachery, cannibalism and conversion, bigotry and racism. I suppose no state is perfect.

Five years old. The year I turned five we went to Disneyland. I thought Disneyland was a wonderful place. It’s strange to me now, though, because I went back as an adult, and things had radically changed. For one thing, Space Mountain existed. It didn’t when I was a kid. Where Space Mountain was as an adult, there was a field, undeveloped, and the earth was dark and rough under my fingers. It smelled like good growing earth, but I guess that’s progress for you--always paving over the growing places on the way to somewhere else. Tomorrowland, in fact, was mostly unbuilt--they had a sign, and a few small rides just after the sign, and that was about all. The jungle reaches were smaller than they were in 1985, the next time I went. In 1972 Sleeping Beauty’s castle was rising out of lathe and plaster, plastic and pink in sections. Strange--I remember actually being disappointed when I went through it at last, because it had looked so much larger, so much more fabulous, while it was being built.

I remember going on the submarine ride, and being fascinated with the mermaids--so much so that I begged my mother to go on it four times more during our trip. (Later, of course, I went on the ride as an adult, and was fascinated with the sharks, and thought the mermaids were desperately cheesy.) As a child we went to all the animatronic displays. I was interested in the Hall of Presidents, and wasn’t too unnerved by the Bear Jamboree, but I ran shrieking out of the Enchanted Tiki Room when the Tiki heads behind me started to sing. I will never know if the operators were used to that reaction. To this day I don’t know why I had it.

Also, I think I was the only child in Disneyland scared by the people in costumes--I could handle the Haunted Mansion without raising an eyebrow, because what else did I spend my days doing but talking with dead people? But Mickey Mouse, larger than I was, leaning down and squeaking at me? I started crying. And there was a man in an ape suit, I remember, sitting on a box. I thought he was a statue at first, and then he moved, and I just broke down. I think he was upset. He left very quickly.

I remember Knott’s Berry Farm from that same year. Even in 1972 they were becoming famous for their jams and jellies. I will always be mystified a little by Knott’s Berry Farm, because now I hear reports of it having rollercoasters and log rides and big hollow mountains. When we lived near the Farm, it really was a working farm--growing apples, berries, corn and pumpkins, and the closest they had to a theme park anything were two employees dressed as a giant raspberry (the man) and a giant strawberry (the girl). There wasn’t anything else there. I guess that’s another sign of progress--start small, go big, and make people support your expansion.

When I was growing up, California--at least, northern California--was mostly about farming. In fact, one summer my mother decided she and I were going to make every food festival we could. People who do not come from heavy farming areas would be astonished at how many small communities in farming country celebrate vegetables, fruits and other comestibles. We went to onion festivals, garlic festivals, tomato festivals. We celebrated the squash harvest and the asparagus harvest and the strawberry harvest. We ate preserves of every kind imaginable, ice cream in assorted odd colors and flavors, garlic chocolate cake and pickled eggs. We had ribs fresh off pigs we’d met that afternoon and milk out of cows and goats we milked ourselves. There were hog-calling contests and yodeling contests and calf-roping contests and weed-pulling contests. I got my face painted nearly everywhere, whether I wanted it painted or not. I got an opportunity to carve pumpkins, which was expected, but also apples, turnips and potatoes. There was an entire festival devoted to fresh cheese.

They’re interested in the festivals. I don’t know why. They spent three days once asking me questions about cheese. They spent ten asking me to describe a perfectly ripe pumpkin to them. It’s kind of mystifying. But they had eyes then, and their reflections were just a little blurry, and the walls were calm. So that was all right. I can’t remember what year that was, though. I think I was in grade school. So I still have to go back.

Five. I don’t remember that much more from five. I don’t remember that much more from two, save that once I locked my mother in the closet. I didn’t mean to, but one of my uncles had given me a tool set for my birthday, and I spent the month following taking many things in the house apart. I was a great dismantler. I removed drawer pulls and door hinges and bookshelf screws and really, it was amazing that more didn’t go wrong that month. My mother very patiently screwed everything back in, and helped me learn the wonders of pounding nails into wood with the little hammer. It wasn’t soon enough to stop me removing the door knob from the inside of her bedroom closet door, though.

Up until that moment, I had not known she had a problem with small and dark enclosed spaces. She handled it well, being shut inside the closet by her bumbling daughter. I hadn’t realized she was inside, and shut the door as I was wont to do. Open doors need shutting. Drawers need closing. Chairs need pushing in. Even back then I was trying to be orderly. Trying to be good.

She called out, in a calm and only barely trembling voice, for me to come open the door. I thought it was a game. Now I think it’s cruel, what I did, but I stood in the door of her bedroom, asking if she really needed my help.

"Yes, sweetie, I really do," she replied.

"Are you sure? Are you really sure?"

"Yes, I really am."

I made her wait, in the dark, in the close, for a handful of minutes, while I thought it over. It must have seemed like hours. Finally I went and reached for the knob, only to grasp that I wasn’t tall enough to open it. Thinking back on it now, I must have stood on a box or some small footstool inside the closet, to take off the closet knob. Then, I was just curious.

"I can’t open it, Mother," I said.

There was silence inside the closet.

"I want you to go into the living room, sweetie," she said slowly. "Can you do that?"

"I can do that," I said.

"Tell me when you’re there."

And off I went, taking small steps with my short legs, crawling laboriously, slowly, onto the couch.

"I’m here, Mother," I called out. "I’m on the couch."

"Okay, then," she said, and kicked the door down. It hit the bed at high velocity, grabbing the grey and pink satin comforter and pulling it up nearly to the level of the pillows. She emerged from the closet sweaty, tangled, and kind of wild-eyed, and for a moment--just one moment, meaningless in the larger span of time, but real enough then--I was scared of the woman who came out of the closet. I remember wondering if the woman who went in was the same one that came out, because I'd seen that happen sometimes, too--someone walk into a place and someone with their face and different eyes walk out. Even that young, I'd already seen a lot of things.

"Mother?" I remember asking. "Are you all right?"

"I will be, sweetie. I will be," she said, and went to a large curving bottle of amber fluid I was told not to touch, pouring a large glass and taking it over to the side chair. She sat in that side chair, looking out at the back garden, and sipping whatever it was for several hours.

Later, I had a long talk with the little girl who lived in my closet. She told me why my mother got so scared. She told me her daddy used to shut her up inside her closet and leave her there. She told me that once her daddy forgot, and left for vacation, and when he came back she was dead.

I felt very sorry then, and went and told my mother that I understood now, and I wouldn’t do anything like that again, that the girl inside my closet had told me everything. The next day we went out and bought a doorknob set, and she had me hold my closet door open while she put it in. Until I spoke to her, it hadn’t sunk in that there was no doorknob on the inside of my closet door, either.

CHAPTER TWO

I remember the day we moved from the Cole Drive house vividly. I don’t know why. I packed up my clothes, and those boxes went into the moving van. I remember being barely taller than the queen-sized bed in the back room. The back room was empty of everything except two boxes, and a barrel of plastic monkeys--the kind that locked together. I remember feeling as if it was the last thing in the house, but that’s obviously not true--there was my mother and I, and the two moving men, and the boxes in the room, and the bed.

But I felt as if it was the last thing in the house, and I picked it up, smiling at it, as if at a familiar friend. Which is an odd thing, because I don’t remember ever playing with them before. But I turned this barrel over in my hand, and even sat down on the floor, taking out the monkeys and stringing a few on a short, colorful chain.

My mother came in, looking down at me. She wore her white-rimmed cats-eye sunglasses, and a smartly tailored pale green tweed suit. She was wearing makeup and white high heels. She looked down at me on the floor, frowning, and told me to put those away, pack them up.

"But they’re mine," I remember saying, looking up at her. I held the chain in my hand, as if that would prove it to her. She just shook her head.

"We have to leave them here, sweetie," she said. "We have to leave them for the other children."

A powerful surge of resentment went through me--who were these ‘other children’ that I had to abandon all my toys? They weren’t me, I knew that much, even so small. Already I had at least two, four, maybe five Christmases behind me, and I knew the difference between giving away toys to those poorer than myself, and leaving toys behind for other children I didn’t know.

But part of me said I did know them. Part of me insisted I’d always known them. Sometimes, late at night, I would hear voices, and know they were memories of some larger event I could only piece together around the edges. I remember being small and squirming away from pinching hands. I remember feeling too weak and holding my hands to my ears to shut out taunting words. I don’t remember their faces. My mother told me I used to play with Daddy’s other family, with Daddy’s other children, but I don’t remember it. At least not entire, not as a whole memory to look at and unfold and retain. I remember times I went off with Daddy, and we were alone, but I don’t remember spending the day with other children. I think that’s my first serious memory gap, and it lasts for several years.

They pry at me, poke at me, poke and examine, but I can’t remember any more. They ask if they can hypnotize me, and so far, I’ve always said no, and they’ve always backed off. But they’re getting more insistent. They’re getting more insistent and the walls are beginning to bleed.

I was four when Daddy took me to see The Omega Man. I still remember the staring eyes of the Family and the blood staining the water of the fountain. I was eight when Daddy took me to see Jaws. There are times the sight of a shark fin in the water will still make me go cold. Daddy didn’t seem, in retrospect, to know age-appropriate movies for children. I suppose it’s only fair; he never really understood children, didn’t like them very much; he may, in fact, have been slightly scared of his progeny before we developed articulate thinking and patterns of logic. I wouldn’t know, I didn’t really know Daddy that well. Just a little, on the edges, here and there--observations from a distance. It was all anyone else would allow.

Mother found another house in Santa Clara; it was larger than the Cole Drive house but, I felt, not nearly as welcoming. For one thing, the living room had pale gold shag carpeting, and ivory curtains that fully covered two walls. I learned later the curtains were there because those two walls of the house were primarily glass. The curtains covered huge picture windows--opening the curtains made it look as if the whole world was a television set. This did not impress me at the time. Plus, it made half the living room desperately cold, no matter what was used to warm it.

I remember my father coming over once, for my third birthday. My mother made a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, and carefully sliced frozen marshmellows to make polka-dot decorations. I remember blowing out the three candles, and looking up to find my father staring at me, as if I was some puzzle he had to figure out, before he had to leave. I didn’t understand then. I don’t now.

I remember we celebrated a Christmas there, with a new tree. My Nana came over, Daddy’s mother, and there is a picture of her holding me, with the brilliant silver-foil tree behind her, and my eyes open and shining red. I got presents, presents I don’t even remember, because that wasn’t the main thing--the main thing, as even I was starting to figure out, was seeing my father at holiday occasions. He came in long enough to carry me about on his shoulders for five minutes, then he put me down and left. I spent a lot of my childhood wondering why my father didn’t want to spend time with me.

I know I hadn’t yet turned four yet when my mother’s sister Delora came to the new house for the first time, babe in arms. My mother had carefully explained to me that the roundness of my aunt’s belly meant she was pregnant, and would have a child. I asked what that meant, and my mother--far from giving me the delusion of children born in gardens--told me what that meant. She had a book on how to explain common things--like polio, penicillin and pregnancy, just to cover the ‘p’s--to children. It had been printed in 1954 and bound in white leather, the same shade of white leather that covered her jewelry box. It wasn’t a bad book, all things considered, even if it started out 'When a married woman loves her husband'...

Once, while my aunt was sitting down, I gravely asked permission to listen to her belly. She laughed and let me. She must have been at least six months pregnant at that point. I leaned in, closing my eyes, and laid my head on her belly, and heard fluid slushing through her, strange little ticking noises, and a dim, muffled, repetitive sound. When I told her this, she beamed, and said I must have heard the baby’s heartbeat. I absorbed this in my quiet way, now knowing what a heartbeat sounded like underneath skin and fluid.

Three months later, she arrived at the new house, introducing me to the first cousin I ever had. He was the first family member I’d met who was younger than I was. I treasured him. I learned to carefully change his diapers, at first under the watchful eyes of my aunt or my mother, and later by myself. I had to remember to fold the cloth carefully, slide my little fingers under the waistband, and guide the large diaper pins in over my fingers rather than over the baby’s skin. That way, if I pricked anyone, it would be me, not the baby. I was overjoyed at being trusted with the task.

Across the street from our house, across a busy road that gave my mother grey hairs every time I forgot and crossed it by myself, lived a woman with brilliant white hair and crinkles around her eyes whenever she smiled. She always wore colorful scarves at her throat. She owned a monkey--one of those black-and-white ones that would coo and look adorable one moment, and then demand worms with high screeching noises and banging on his cage. I think he was a spider monkey, but he had a large white ruff framing his face, so I’m not sure.

She doted on him, feeding him mealworms, bits of apple, raisins and crickets. Her house smelled like apricots and wax. I used to sneak over whenever I could, just to watch her feed her beloved pet. Sometimes the monkey and I would sit and stare at one another. He never took it as a challenge. He would turn his head, and I would turn my head, and he would turn his head more, and I would turn my head more. Finally he turned it at such an angle to be nearly upside-down, as he clung to the cage bars. I would turn my head to match him and fall off the ottoman. I fell for it every time.

At this point, my mother was contemplating going back to school, getting out of nursing--the job she went back to when we moved away from Cupertino and her electronics job there--and getting her accounting degree. I overheard her talking to her sister, my aunt, late into the night. Sometimes I crept to the door of my grey room, listening carefully for important information. Sometimes I walked across the room to where the baby slept when my aunt came over, kneeling beside the bars and listening to him sleep, trying to drown out every other sound in the sound of his breathing. I liked this new house--not as much as I’d liked the house on Cole Drive, but I did. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to leave the lady with the monkey and move again.

But we celebrated my fifth birthday, and then my mother moved on to college, and I went to live with Aunt Delora, who was pregnant again, and Uncle Gerald, in their two-level split-ranch in San Jose. We lived on a palm-tree-lined street populated by a large Hispanic population. Three houses down there lived a man who had imported two lime trees when he moved, planting them in his front yard. He had no objection to the children in the neighborhood dropping by and asking for limes. These were large, brilliantly green fruit, with a thick, tart rind and the palest green, sweetest interior flesh. You could eat them like oranges, and we did. I’ve never found anything like them since. He had more than enough for his needs, and more than enough for our needs, and still, three times a year, he would pluck baskets of them, and drive them away somewhere else. I guess that part of town had good growing soil, or he really knew what lime trees liked.

The San Jose house had originally been owned by a Hispanic family, we concluded, because downstairs--in what became my bedroom--there was a giant portrait of Jesus Christ painted on the ceiling. My uncle valiantly painted the ceiling twice a year for two years, and perhaps kept painting after I left. It didn’t seem to matter--it only took a month to bleed through again, in full vivid color. I would wake in the middle of the night, looking up to staring green eyes like the limes, blood dripping down the gaunt forehead, thorns gouging his face, and know Jesus was back.

It was a strange, rambling house, even for California construction of the past twenty years. The full basement had three rooms--one my bedroom, one a storage room, and the larger room that opened off the stairway was the downstairs family room, complete with furniture ‘the kids could have’ and a small TV high up on the sideboard. A switchback staircase led to the front door, and then to the upstairs, where they had a railing-lined living room, the baby’s room, the new room being furnished for the coming child, and the master bedroom. Off the living room was the kitchen, adjoined by a dining room, and from there it got very odd.

There was a back door on the upper level that led from the kitchen. It led to a set of suspended balconies, one over the carport, one to the side, and one almost at ground level above the garden. All of these were connected by sets of wooden stairs. A separate set of stairs led off to a higher balcony, directly over the garage. Many days I would leave the kitchen and count my steps out on the balconies. It was four steps down to the first balcony, six steps to the second, six steps to the third. From then I had the choice of six more steps to the ground and the garden, or retracing all twelve steps and taking the additional twelve steps to the top of the garage.

The garden was thickly planted with food vegetables, and existing trees and a pepper garden came with the house. Also, along the shadier side of the garden, there was an herb garden, surmounted by a hugely overgrown fennel plant, nearly a bush at this point. When it was very hot outside, sometimes I didn’t want to swim in the little inflatable pool in the back, or the small plastic pool in the front. So I would go to the shady side of the garden, and worm my way into the fennel plant, and sit and watch the world through green fennel fronds, chewing on small bits of the plant when I felt like it.

I hid a lot growing up, I remember that clearly. I was always finding places to hide, places I could not be seen. It seemed imperative that I maintain escape routes, and places I could secret myself away from sight. To this day I don’t know why, I only know I still do it. Though I’m a larger person now, in so many ways, I still hide when I can, I still plan escape routes.

Another thing I’ve always done, in every house I’ve moved into, is walk through it blind. Sometimes I close my eyes, sometimes I just wait until dark and shut off all lights. Sometimes I do it before we get the furniture unpacked. Usually I wait until everything’s settled and then map it out in my mind. I have this fear of going blind, for some reason, and I always must know how I would survive if I suddenly lost my sight.

They ask me about my fear of blindness. They ask about my escape plans. This is where my reluctance always shows. I don’t want to tell them about my hiding places in the past. I don’t want to tell them my hiding places now. I know I have them, even though I block even the memory of them when they ask me. I know I have them because I remember being in the dark, the smell of heated machinery around me, and everything else here is light, though from strange angles.

There’s still blood on my hands. I want to hide them behind my back but I’m so tired, so tired, too tired to move.

My cousin Evan, the first born, was old enough at that point to dare me to do things. I’d dare him right back. He dared me to go down the street and eat the flowers on the wide dividing hedge between two of the end houses. He had heard a rumor that one flower, even one single petal rubbed over the tongue, was poisonous. Unfortunately for me, they were poisonous. They were oleanders, and even as I finished the first flower and reached for the second, a shrieking man ran out of his house, screaming at me to stop eating, didn’t I know those were poison? No, apparently not, I thought, as he grabbed me and ran for my house. All too soon my mother had me downstairs in the little bathroom off my room, forcing dose after dose of syrup of ipecac down my throat. My cousin was snickering all the while, even though he was starting to look green around the gills, while I threw up flower petals, fennel leaves, and not-quite-so-fresh tomatoes.

Even with the poison out of my stomach, I was still shuddery and weak for a few days. All my muscles ran with trembling, and we were both grounded for the next fourteen days. It was little hardship for me--for most of those two weeks I was lying in bed or lying on the couch--but for Evan it was torture. He was a boy built for the outdoors, even though he had asthma so bad breathing sometimes was a privilege.

I mused for a while, plotting my revenge. The perfect opportunity came after a rain, when the front yard sprouted bunches of beautiful, red and white spotted mushrooms. I dared him to eat them. He did. He started to feel sick sooner than I did, and, sighing, I went in and told my mother. Whereupon we both went down to the basement again while he received dose after dose of ipecac, hurling God only knows what into the little sink. My mother didn’t stop until she couldn’t see any mushroom bits in the sink, and then she set me to cleaning up the mess while she took him to the emergency room.

We spent another two weeks trapped together indoors, and it was a miracle he didn’t bash my skull in with a Tonka truck. The only thing that stopped him, he confessed later, was that I was his only other company, most of the time...and he’d left the trucks outside in the sand pit.

After punishment was over, he pushed me head-first into a barrel of waste oil my uncle, for some inexplicable reason, kept outside the garage. Not to be outdone, I picked him up and bodily threw him in. My uncle came out of the garage at the sound of all the yelling, and found two extremely filthy children screaming what they knew of obscenities at each other. We didn’t know that much. My uncle watched for a few moments, then, not to be outdone himself, he told me that since I’d had all the fun, I should be the one to get him out.

"But--"

"But me no buts. Go in and get him out."

So I had to get in the barrel, completing my transformation from half-clean to fully oiled. He walked off, telling us to wait--wedged into the barrel, where would we have gone?--and came back with a full can of gasoline.

"Okay, get out of the barrel. Evan first."

I helped him out, then climbed out myself.

"Close your eyes tight."

We did. He poured gasoline on us, rubbing it into our hair, our ears, over our hands.

"Don’t open your eyes, now."

The smell was resinous and overpowering. It burned in our nostrils and seemed to singe our lungs. Evan started coughing and couldn’t stop; I think I just stopped breathing.

"Okay. Don’t open your eyes yet."

We heard him leave again, heard the screen door open, heard him speaking to Aunt Delora. We quickly heard the screen door open again and had to stand there, inhaling fumes, while the adults debated what to do--Uncle Gerald in calm, amused tones, Aunt Delora in shrill, somewhat hysterical ones.

The decision was finally made that we could shower later, but we were going to get scrubbed down now. We stripped down to underwear, and my uncle got out the hose--the slithery rubber-on-metal sound making me shiver--and then we were sprayed down, doused in car-cleaning soap, sprayed down again, and sent scampering into the house to take showers and finally get warm.

We spent the following two weeks quietly reading, or watching Disney specials on the little TV. We didn’t speak.

This was the house where my aunt, matron saint of fruit trees, read an article in Prevention Magazine that said if you tapped lightly around the trunk of a fruit tree, it would cause the sap to flow earlier, and you’d get sweeter, riper fruit. There was a tangerine tree in our yard, just in front of the garden, and it produced small, hard, very tart fruit. She went into Evan’s room and found a baseball bat, went out to the back yard, and ran in circles around the little tangerine tree, whacking hell out of the trunk. The next day, all the leaves fell off with a traumatic whoosh, and it never bore fruit again.

This was also the house that had the basement that wasn’t there. I discovered this the day after my birthday. I was sitting down in the family room downstairs, staring dolefully at a pink china tea set, wondering who in their right mind would want me to have such a thing, when I heard a door open. I looked up to the back door that led onto the concrete facing the garden, and saw no one there. I got up, going out to the hallway, looking upstairs. No one at the door. I looked into my bedroom, wondering why I’d heard a door open when I couldn’t hear anyone moving around in the kitchen--the only other door into the house--when I realized that there was a source of light missing in my room.

My bedroom, in addition to the gigantic face of Jesus on the ceiling, had four windows at ground level--one on the east wall and three on the north wall. The three northern windows were spaced according to room division, oddly enough--two in my room and one in the little bathroom area.

It was the one in the little bathroom area that didn’t seem to be casting any light into the room.

Carefully, I walked forward. Even at four, I knew enough to know you never go into dark rooms when they call you, you never listen to their voices at midnight, you never open your eyes when you feel something touch your face in the dark. There were rules in my universe. Those were three at the top of the list.

I looked around the corner, remembering to stand in the doorway. That was another rule. If you were in the doorway, and they were bad, they had to talk you out of the doorway. If you were very stupid and walked through the doorway, they would just grab you and hold you close, and you’d squirm, smelling earth and formaldehyde on their breath, shivering in the chill of their arms, until they let you go. It was never warm in a dead person’s arms. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be.

There was no little bathroom area anymore, no bright white sink and built-in white cupboard, no small bathroom with the door half-open. The window was missing. I stood in the doorway and tried to figure out what was so wrong with what I was seeing, beyond the fact that the room that usually was there--wasn’t. It took me a while. I wasn’t up to that much in the way of deductive reasoning yet.

Finally, I realized that the back wall of the house should be much, much closer than it was. I had this feeling that if I stepped through the doorway, and walked until I touched the back wall, I would walk for hours until I reached it. Maybe days. That was how huge the space felt.

The smell reached me then--old earth, like when I crawled into the back of the garage, back between the side of the storage shed built onto the outer wall and the gap that I could just barely manage to press my body through. This was what that place between the shed and the garage smelled like--old, cold earth, earth that never saw the sun, earth that had stopped providing nourishment for growing things because there was no sun to renew them and no water to soak the roots.

Carefully, I stepped back, one step, two steps, three, keeping my eyes on the doorway and the growing darkness beyond. I angled my body so that I was walking backwards and to the side, still watching the door. I didn’t close my eyes and run for the stairs until I could no longer see directly into the room that wasn’t my bathroom, and then I closed my eyes, inhaled until my chest hurt, and ran for upstairs and the kitchen and a room that had not changed.

That weekend, when my mother returned from school, I asked her what I should do if I wanted to keep something penned up.

"What a question," she said, stroking my hair. "What do you want to keep penned up?"

"A room," I told her. Any other mother would have called me crazy, but my mother thought about it. Finally, she cocked her head, looking down at me.

"Is it a bad room?"

"I don’t know. It’s not there all the time. But it’s dark and it’s cold when it is."

She thought again, and then she got up, taking me into the kitchen. She poured a small cup of water into a Flintstone jelly glass, and stirred a teaspoonful of salt into the water. She peered into the cupboard and shook some green herbs into the water, still stirring. I was connecting letters to form words at this time, and I read off D-I-L-L and S-A-G-E before she turned, looking at me oddly.

"Don’t tell your aunt."

"I won’t."

She smiled, stroking my hair again, and handed me the glass.

"Go sprinkle this on the threshold, that’s right in front of where the room is. Can you do that, honey? And concentrate on nothing bad coming through that door."
I nodded, and carefully carried the glass downstairs, checking out of the corner of my eye to see if the room was dark and still, or bright with the light I’d left on before going to the living room. Bright light shone out of the opening, and I knelt, pouring dollops along the bottom sill of the door.

"Nothing can come out and hurt me," I said. "Nothing bad can come out."

My mouth twitched--it seemed too simple--so I poured half again the fluid out again, drenching the carpet. It dried before Aunt Delora came down to my room the next week, but she saw the green flakes and made me get the vacuum cleaner from upstairs, dragging it down thump-thump-thump to my room.

"Honestly, I don’t know what you do down here," she said, and plugged the machine in.


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