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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619020276 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
This Is What People Do
"Would the mother of Renée Thyre please come to the front of the store?"
The assistant manager of Venture stepped away from the microphone and wiped his mouth on his wrist. We were up in his managerial aerie, a skybox that looked out onto Kansas City's first superstore. His name tag read "Garry" and he was a little greasy at the temples, but I could still imagine being happily adopted by him.
"Have some more popcorn, Renée," Garry said, shaking the bag at me. "Don't worry, I'm sure your mother will be here soon — c'mon, gimme a little smile!"
I smiled up at him the way an adorable seven-year-old named Renée would, batting my eyelashes like Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose. I reached for the popcorn daintily, and was just about to ask for something to drink when my mother rushed up the steps of the platform and shot through the half-door.
"Oh my god, Sarah! I have been looking all over this store for you! I was just having them cut the fabric and I look over and you're gone! They still haven't caught that kidnapper, you know!"
Garry took a little half-step between my mother and me, his feet in ballet's third position. I felt so safe.
"Ma'am, I think there's a misunderstanding? This is Renée. Renée Thyre?"
Mom threw back her head and burst into laughter. "Well, that's what she told you. Her name's not really Renée! It's Sarah! But she's always telling people it's Renée! For some reason she just loves that name, Renée. I don't know where she even heard it. Can you imagine?"
Garry swept his feet from third to fifth position and swiveled his hips away from me. In that swift, subtle shift of his body, he left my side — me, Renée, his future ward! — and went over to Mom's. Together at last, they regarded me with heartless, unchecked mirth. I half-expected Mom to get on the store microphone and say, "Hey everybody! That announcement a little while ago — the one about Renée Thyre? Well, there is no Renée Thyre! It's just Sarah Thyre. 'Kay?"
* * *
"You're always ruining my life!" I cried in the car on the way home. "Why did you have to go and TELL him?"
The whole thing would have been worth it if I knew that just one person, just Garry, lived the rest of his life believing my name was Renée.
We'd gone to Venture that morning because Mom was having Prayer Group at our house later that afternoon. She needed to pick up a few yards of cheap calico fabric to make some quickie cloth napkins. All ours were stained and the Prayer Group ladies might notice.
Prayer Group consisted of Mom, four or five of her friends from church, and a Catholic priest named Father Donatello. The purpose of the meeting seemed more social than worshipful. The first order of business was grousing about the damn hippies who had taken over St. Lucy's and how things were so much better before Vatican II, when priests said Mass in Latin and women wore doilies on their heads. Pamphlets were distributed, or bookmarks embossed with a holographic saint. Lunch, usually a gourmet casserole, was served, but merely picked at if eaten at all. Hard liquor was poured. Piety drifted into levity, and levity exploded into ribaldry. Dance steps were demonstrated; cigarettes were French inhaled. When one of us kids got hungry or injured, the party would break up. Everyone staggered out to a chorus of "Best prayer group ever! God love you!"
My mother was a nervous wreck whenever Prayer Group was at our place. About a week before, she'd launch her campaign for me and my three sisters to pitch in and clean up the house.
"How did it get so bad?" Mom would say, kicking a path through the thick blanket of clothes, toys, and assorted paper products on our floors.
So bad? It was never good. Our house was always a mess. Banks of detritus built up against the walls, as though blown there by gale-force winds. You'd need a rake, possibly a pickaxe, to make a dent in it.
The night before Prayer Group, Mom began the preparations for her signature classy entrée, eggplant parmigian. She sliced and salted and stacked layers of eggplant between clean cloth diapers and cast-iron skillets to "leech out the extra juice," as she so appetizingly put it. In the morning she assembled the dish, layering the now brownish eggplant, Hunt's tomato sauce, an entire green can of Kraft parmesan cheese, and liberal sprinklings of dried Italian seasoning. The whole thing was topped with long-ignored mozzarella slices from the back of the fridge, trapezoid-shaped from having their moldy edges trimmed off. When she took it out of the oven, it had all coalesced into a rust-colored plank that drew rave reviews from adults, and suspicious "no thanks" from children. We knew a napkin-filler when we saw it. It was the perfect dish to serve when you wanted the kids to buzz off so you could live it up and pray.
When we got home, Mom laid the calico out on the dining room table and started to mark off squares with her fabric pencil. She looked up at the clock.
"Dammit, I won't have time to baste the edges. I'm just going to have to use my pinking shears."
The heavy, black-handled pinking shears would give the napkins a snazzy zigzag edge that, in a pinch, was an acceptable alternative to a finished seam.
"Where are my pinking shears? Sarah!"
I was the last one to get caught with the pinking shears. The day before, I had used them to trim my little sister Hannah's bangs into a nice jagged brim. Standing back to admire my styling skills, I nicknamed her "Cappie" on the spot. She burst into tears when she looked in the mirror.
Initially I played dumb. "What's wrong, Cappie?"
"I look stupid!" Hannah wailed.
"Aw, it's okay, Cappie," I said.
I couldn't even sell myself on this one. She did look terrible. Worse, she looked poor. Though Hannah's face was nicely tanned after a summer of playing outside, her new shelf of bangs revealed a strip of fresh white skin that underlined, practically illuminated, their crisp triangular edge.
"I don't have the pinking shears. You took them away and hid them, remember?" I said. An accusatory tone flavored my voice. Maybe Mom would think twice before stifling my budding creativity again.
She flared her nostrils. "Is that poddy? I smell poddy."
"Poddy" was our family word for the actual turd, the feces, the shit, the log. It never was "potty" or "pottie," and never meant the toilet/chair hybrid used for training toddlers. Nor was it used to describe the act of going, as in "Time to poddy" or, "Do you have to poddy?" It was used with "go," but poddy itself was always a noun. When one said, "I have to go poddy," one meant "I have to go make poddy," the way one would make cookies or an ice sculpture.
"Maybe it's Jeb's," I said.
Jeb was our spastic, semi-housebroken English setter. Technically, he was my father's dog, but Dad was often gone on business for three weeks at a time, so my sisters and I were forced to feed him and pat him on the head every once in a while. Eventually Becky and I would be caught mocking Jeb's dangling dogballs, and poor Jeb would be sent "to live on a farm."
"That doesn't smell like Jeb's poddy," Mom said, her eyes darting about. She spotted the offending item, a soiled cloth diaper in the corner of the room, shed by its wearer.
"Where's Debbie?" Mom said, looking around for my ten-month-old sister. As she picked up the diaper, several tiny turds fell out of it onto the floor.
"Ewwwww!" Hannah and I ran a safe distance away, into the hall that adjoined the dining area.
"Oh come on," Mom said, smiling like a genial TV neighbor. She clamped one of the pinky-sized pellets in the diaper and held it out as if offering a canapé. "Baby Ruth, anyone?"
I squatted down and sauntered over, dragging my knuckles on the ground. I took the turd and held it under my protruding bottom, then pretended to throw it.
"Guess who I'm supposed to be?"
"Big Mac!" Mom and Hannah shouted.
Big Mac was the silverback male gorilla at the Kansas City Zoo. He was named after a popular menu item at his corporate patron, McDonald's. He was known far and wide for blindsiding spectators with handfuls of excrement.
That was too much for my oldest sister Becky, who had been sitting at the end of the dining room table, immersed in a Nancy Drew mystery.
"You guys're so gross," she said, slamming her book shut.
On her way out, she paused to inspect the turd. "What it really looks like is a Tootsie Roll."
Becky flounced out of the room in her indignant nine-year-old way, leaving me, Hannah, and Mom to a no-holds-barred "No wait, what does it really look like?" debate. Debbie crawled in, bare-bottomed. Grabbing the legs of a dining room chair, she pulled herself into a standing position and gurgled, pleased to see us so engrossed by the contents of her abandoned diaper.
It really broke the tension about Prayer Group. What did it matter if we put out the old stained napkins? There was poddy on the floor! Mom gathered up all her sewing tools into the uncut calico like a hobo's bindle and dumped it behind the couch. She sudsed the green shag carpet where the poddy once lay.
"Okay, enough," Mom announced in her company voice. "I'm going to go take out my curlers. Father Don'll be here any minute. Be polite when he says hello and then go play outside."
Our neighborhood in Kansas City was the one where newly married, lower-middle-class locals moved to get out of their childhood neighborhoods, which were becoming "dangerous." As though designed by Richard Scarry, the homes were faux Tudor style with identical three-bedroom floor plans, terraced front yards, and steep driveways. Our cousins, my mom's sister Barb and her family, lived two doors down. There were kids in almost every house on the block, with one house reserved for the requisite witchy old lady whose doorbell we rang and ran. We were the last of the Go Play Outside Generation. "Go play outside" was license to disappear all day long without anyone fearing for my safety.
My mother put out a stack of plates and silverware along with her eggplant concoction, a pitcher full of freshly mixed martinis, olives, toothpicks, and glasses.
Father Don arrived first, tenting his fingertips together at his lips and looking over Mom's shoulder at the spread on the dining room table. Back in the seventies, there was no shame in anyone, not even a priest, asking for a highball before lunch. In fact, priests were often the life of the party! They brought cases of altar wine to dinner and were least likely to cause a scene by getting into a drunken row with their spouse. Mom used to know a monsignor who kept a well-stocked bar in the trunk of his car in case he stumbled upon a party. Mom didn't approve. She had fallen out of touch with him, which I thought was a shame. He sounded pretty fun to me.
If Father Don was any fun, I wasn't around to see it. He was always sneaking up behind me, sliding his hand around my neck like a Crescent wrench, and whispering:
"Have you been honoring your mother and father? Pray the rosary every day."
Carrie Brower was next to arrive. She was tall, taller than my dad, who was six foot one. I couldn't tell if she was white or black. Her skin was sort of a greenish taupe and she wore her hair swirled up into a giant bun. If she were black, having her over would've been a semi-scandal in our neighborhood. We weren't racists per se, but we were definitely of the lock-your-car-door-there's-a-man-with-an-Afro variety. I was pretty certain a race war was about to start any day, and often begged Mom to keep plenty of canned goods in the basement.
Carrie was loud and holy and you could tell she didn't like children much. She used the first person plural to make it seem like she was on your level, but it was always mildly insulting.
"Oh my, don't we look dirty today? We could sure use a bath, couldn't we!" she said, reeling back as if she smelled poddy. Not a hair of her Jiffy Pop chignon was out of place. "Well! No doubt Mommy told us it's time for the grown-ups to pray and we should go play outside! Isn't that right?" "I don't say 'Mommy' anymore," I grunted, feeling as dirty as she said we were.
Two other women I didn't know came in. Everyone stood around saying nothing, just sort of humming and smiling at each other awkwardly. Father Don rubbed his chin and said, "Ah, why don't we get started?" They all broke for the martini pitcher.
My sisters and I went outside and rustled up some neighbor kids for a game of Sardines. Sardines was sort of an inverted Hide 'n' Seek, wherein the person who was It hid, and everyone else counted to a hundred. The group split up to look for the hiding person, and as we found him we would quietly join him in his hiding place, cramming and crowding in together. The last person to find the hidden folk would be the next It.
We had a pretty good-sized group for Sardines. Mia and Pia Moretti had the most street cred because they went to public school and were known to be "wild." Mia had been suspended for setting her desk on fire and Pia had been picked up across the state line with a boy. Last year, my sister Hannah had stolen a necklace of Pia's, broken it, and shoved a bead from it up her own nose. Old Lady Hoover next door tried to get it out with a crochet hook but it was jammed so far up there, it just rolled around like the ball in a roll-on deodorant. Mom had to take Hannah to the hospital to get the bead sucked out with a giant vacuum. There was some grumbling over who should pay the doctor bills, and Pia's mom had grounded her. Since then the Morettis had a snotty attitude toward our whole family.
There was Mindy Nickles, who was Becky's age but more my friend. In the summertime, we shared popsicles with her dog Cindy, whose name I thought was "Sinny" because that's how Mindy pronounced it. Mindy was the youngest of four, and they were all up for Sardines that day. Her brothers were Foxy Dan and Mean Pat, and her oldest sister Beth babysat for us on the rare occasions my parents went out.
Foxy Dan was twelve that summer and the alpha male of our street. When we reenacted scenes from Walking Tall, he always played the vigilante sheriff Buford Pusser, busting up our pretend white slavery den with a plastic neon baseball bat. When we played any hide or chase games, he was It first because he liked being It.
Whenever Dan was It, I tried my best to be the first to find him. I loved sliding in next to him in his hiding place, real close so I could see the blackheads on his nose. I loved the smell of him. He had that sort of sweet boy b.o.: green onion-y with just a tincture of rancid.
I was the youngest of the gang, and I wasn't very good at finding anyone at all, much less first. It wasn't long before I was It. Everyone hated when I was It because I was small and flexible and could tuck myself into a bathroom cabinet or basement window well and they would be forced to cram themselves in around me.
"Don't hide someplace tiny, Shrimp-tard," Mean Pat said, pinching me hard on the arm.
I hated Pat. Pat was the one who had arranged for me to fight Skippy a few weeks before. Skippy was five, the youngest of eight boys. He lived a few blocks over, on a not-yet-gentrified street. He rode around on his brother's yellow ten-speed with his long hair blowing in the breeze. Skippy thought he was hot stuff.
But I was seven. I was sure I could take him. So it was arranged. Skippy and I were corralled in a circle of teens and preteens. My cousin Louis officiated. When he said, "1,2,3 ... FIGHT!" I moved forward just in time for Skippy to shove his hands into my cheekbones like my face was a volleyball. I crumpled. I cried. I went home, threw myself on the kitchen floor, and sobbed, "Mom! Call the police!"
"Skippy pushed you? That's not reason enough to call the police," she said. "Besides, isn't he only five?"
I put a wet washcloth to my face, refused dinner, and sobbed through Petticoat Junction, wishing I had a gruff, kindly Uncle Joe like the spunky girls on that show.
I was still mad at Pat for my public humiliation. This time I would find a good place to hide. I'd show him.
When we first moved into this house, the driveway ran up alongside and ended in a broad concrete slab where a garage used to be. Dad built a new garage, a soaring brown and yellow structure that felt like a barn. While it was under construction, evenings after dinner I'd sneak into it just to be alone. One night I went in there barefoot and punctured my foot on a giant bolt in the floor, earning the first of many lectures about lockjaw from my mother.
"Step on a rusty nail and you're dead of rigor mortis before you get to the hospital," she said. "I tell you one thing: I'd rather be dead than have to eat all my meals through a straw for the rest of my life."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dark at the Roots"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Sarah Thyre.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
This Is What People Do,
Break Me Off a Piece o' Dat,
Smell It Like It Is,
Git in the Truck,
What Would Mr. Goodbar Do?,
Oh the Places You'll Go! - A Play in One Act,
The Hills Are a Lie,
Choke,
Rubbing Alcohol and Vaseline,
Underground Railroad,
The Center Cannot Hold,
Top o' the Food Chain,
Movin' on Up,
Misty Popularity,
Creamin' in My Jeans,
The Bad Seed,
Say Uncle,
Acknowledgments,
Copyright Page,