chapter one
"Please?" My little sister said. "Pleeeeease? Let me push you in the shopping cart. I promise you won't fall."
"No," I said. Maddie was one of those kids with big, persuasive eyes, like a doll's. But a couple of boys from school happened to be across the alley, and I didn't want them seeing me in a shopping cart. I wasn't wearing my glasses because I wanted to look cute.
"Pleeeease?" Maddie said.
"Oh, all right." Those boys didn't like me any-way. I climbed into the cart and watched Maddie's face brighten, then scrunch up with the concentrated effort of pushing me. She started running, her face alight, but suddenly the cart came to a halt and the next thing I knew, my head thumped on the sidewalk and the shopping cart crashed against my nose.
"Ow! You said I wouldn't fall!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry! There was a huge crack in the ground." Maddie helped me get the cart off. "Your nose is bleeding."
"Yours would be too." But I wasn't too hurt to glance at the boys. They hadn't made a move to help. Instead, they were watching and laughing. As my mother liked to say, "Some men just have no manners." I rose unsteadily to my feet and swiped the back of my hand under my nose to wipe away the blood.
Maddie was near to crying. "I'm sorry."
"You almost gave me a concussion!" I said. I stomped away. I tasted blood. I knew Maddie was following because I could hear her behind me, repeat-ing that she was sorry.
We went home the back way and stepped into the usual commotion -- we didn't have much downtime at home. At the front door someone was pounding. My sisters Marilyn and Lakey pressed against the door. "It's Pierre!" said Marilyn urgently. "Why is your nose bleeding?"
"Hi," said Lakey. "Your nose is bleeding."
"Where's Mom?" I said.
"Getting dressed," Marilyn said. "You should do something with that nose, Shelby."
"My eye hurts too," I said.
"It's all red," Marilyn said. "I think you're on your way to a shiner. It's swelling."
The pounding grew louder. From the other side of the door Pierre shouted, "I'm pounding my head! It's my head you hear! I'm killing myself!"
Marilyn and Lakey kept pressing against the door as if they and not the dead bolt were holding it closed. My heart beat hard inside of me, and I could feel my face grow hot with fear and excitement. The door shivered every time Pierre pounded his head.
"Let's open it and see what happens!" Maddie cried out. Her short hair was mussed as usual, shoot-ing out every which way.
We all turned to Marilyn. She shook her head no. "That's just looking for trouble." She thought some more. "Not that trouble isn't fun sometimes. But Mom said not to open it. Are you okay, Shelby?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I can hear you in there!" Pierre shouted. He said "th" like "z." He continued to pound. "I am killing my-self!"
If we were anyone else, the neighbors probably would have called the police by now. But we were who we were. My mother walked calmly out of her bedroom, and we girls split apart like the sea as she said imperiously to the door, "Believe you me, no man ever committed suicide by pounding his head against a door!" She turned to me. "Bathroom. Come. Now."
She swept away, all of us following. She was overdressed as usual. Who else would wear a red silk dress and full makeup for a man on the other side of a door? The four of us formed a semicircle around her in the bathroom. She leaned toward me, examining my face. "Hmmm...good. There's no injury to the eye itself, just the tissue around it. And you should be thankful that your nose isn't broken." She stood up without inquiring what had happened to me. "Shelby, you clean up your face. The rest of you start packing. We're taking a little road trip." In the background Pi-erre's pounding had taken on a deliberate rhythm. Bomp! One, two. Bomp! One, two. Bomp!
To Maddie, Mom said, "Your hair -- you look like Sid Vicious." To Marilyn, she said, "Make sure the girls pack everything they need. We may be gone a couple of weeks." To Lakey: "We're going to California to see your father."
I lay on the bathroom floor holding a tissue to my nose. When my nose stopped bleeding, I checked the mirror. My eye was swollen and red. Sometimes I could kill Maddie. I hurried into the bedroom to pack. My sisters had already thrown some clothes into my bag. Pierre was still pounding, but the rhythm had slowed and the sound came from lower down, as if he were sitting now.
As we walked out the back door, mimicking our mother's silken movements, we could still hear the steady thumping. I wondered how long Pierre would continue. Mrs. Gilmore from next door and Mrs. Fedderman from below were standing on the back stair-way talking, but they stopped when they saw us. We continued moving as silkily as we could when carrying two weeks' worth of baggage. "What's wrong with that girl's face?" Mrs. Fedderman called out, looking right at me.
And that's how I came to be hanging my head out the car window with a sore eye, the warm air pounding my face as we escaped Pierre and the hu-mid Chicago summer and drove toward California and Lakey's father.
It was the summer of 1983. School was out, Sally Ride had just become the first American woman in space, and we were the four most amazing girls in the world. Our mother told us so.
I was excited. I hadn't even realized Pierre was important enough for my mother to make a move like this. He was what we thought of as one of our mother's "minor boyfriends." As opposed to, for in-stance, our fathers, who were "major boyfriends."
"My mother had four daughters by four different men." This is a line I had repeated many times in my life, as explanation. I loved my sisters more than I loved anyone, maybe even more than my mother. They were not just sisters to me, they were extensions of myself. It felt exactly right to be barreling down the expressway with them.
Whenever we needed to change lanes and it was a tight squeeze, Marilyn smiled at the driver in the next lane to make sure the car would let us in. She used her beauty the way my mother used hers. Marilyn was not a pretty girl such as you see every day, at the bank or in the store or in a restaurant. She possessed that rare type of beauty, like our mother's, that you saw only once in a great while and that haunted you. She was half Italian and half Japanese, and she looked vaguely Polynesian. Several times, at a Chicago Cubs game, a boy would spot her with his binoculars and seek her out from across the park. The boys would just want to meet her, maybe to touch her hand. She was second in command to our mother and was so grown up that she'd even driven us to school with our mother riding shotgun.
In the car Lakey had already started reading. Read-ing in a car always made me feel ill. But Lakey not only read in the car, she read in the bathtub, at the ta-ble while we ate frozen dinners, and on the sidewalk while we walked to school or the ice cream store. She was a genius, according to a test she took last year when she was seven. Lakey was conceived on a boat in Lake Michigan; thus, her name. My mother said that if we were ever out in public and she got distracted -- she meant by men -- Lakey was Marilyn's special charge, and Maddie was mine. Lakey was half Japanese and half Chinese.
Maddie was lucky she was so cute. At least, that's the way I saw it. She was a six-year-old troublemaker. She was born with a thin patch of hair low on her back, not far from where a tail would be. We thought this was proof that she was part animal. She was half Japanese and half Anglo, pale with heavily slanted eyes.
And me? I'm Shelby. I was almost thirteen and -- I don't know -- the private one. Like sometimes when I had a thought, I kept it to myself. When I cried, I did so after my sisters were asleep. Now, maybe my sisters also cried after they went to sleep, but since I was usually the last one up at night, I doubted it. I needed to debrief at the end of the day, so I liked to think before I went to sleep. I had a very clear memory and could see everybody perfectly when I closed my eyes at night. This helped me think about the day.
I wanted to grow up and be something normal with a dash of glamour, like a tour guide or a photographer.
Lakey wanted to be a lawyer, and Marilyn was go-ing to get married when she was nineteen, so she wouldn't have to work. Maddie didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted to do someday. Mad-die just wanted to laugh. She wanted to play. To have fun, like my mother always did.
My mother had briefly entertained the idea that we would be like the Partridge Family or the Jacksons: a family band. We took singing and dancing lessons and didn't much like them. Then my mother decided she wanted us all to be not only songbirds, but sex-bombs, each in her own way. She could see potential in my sisters but not me, because I wore glasses, and the contacts she once got me made it feel like dust was rubbing against my eyes. So I was always clutch-ing at my face and crying out, "There's dust in my eye!" My mother said I was a late bloomer. I hoped that was true. I wanted so badly to be sophisticated, the way my mother wanted me to be. The way my sisters saw me? I guess they thought I talked slow, and I guess they thought I moved at my own pace, and I guess they thought these were traits I inherited from my father. And because I had a habit of seeming to change the subject while we talked, they thought my mind moved around an awful lot.
I was full-blooded Japanese and, like Maddie, was conceived in Arkansas.
Pierre, our current nemesis, was a five foot three Frenchman with a good sense of humor and a volatile nature. He was barely taller than I was, but he pumped weights, so he said he could take any of us in a fight. He said that because Maddie called him short. He used to lean his oversized head in to me and whisper things like, "Do you know why the French eat cheese?" I did know, actually, because my mother had told me: "It makes them feel sexier."
When I saw other girls living normal lives, in what one of my teachers called "a traditional nuclear family," those girls seemed to be living in a parallel universe. My mother said that many, many such universes existed side by side. They existed right here at the same time on Earth, and most people in their own universe hardly paid attention to people from the other universes. For instance, there was the basketball universe, where people thought basketball was the center of the world. And there was the college universe, the rich people's universe, and so on. "There are many universes," my mother said. "Didn't Einstein write about that?"
Every so often when my mother broke up with a boyfriend, he would fly into a rage and we would have to go on the lam. Oftentimes what the men were really angry about was how much money they had spent on her. Many of them were angrier about the money than about being broken up with. I wasn't sure which Pierre was upset about, but he sure was upset.
My mother said that Pierre had a Napoleon complex but that she didn't realize it until too late. Since he owned several shelves full of Napoleon biographies, she might have noticed his complex earlier. One of the things she told us was always to assess a situation as early and accurately as possible, since it was harder to get out of a relationship than get into it -- unless, that is, you dumped the guy and perhaps infuriated or otherwise upset him. That's what happened with Pierre.
As we sped down the expressway, my sisters chatted and sang Beatles songs, but I kept my head out the window, my glasses in my lap. My mother still wanted me to try contacts again because I was get-ting those little marks on the sides of my nose. She thought that might tip men off to my bad eyes. "Men like perfection in a woman," she liked to say. "As if they deserved it," she sometimes added when she was in a cynical mood.
I reveled in the hard wind. My sisters were trying to sing harmony. They sounded terrible.
I started thinking about how yesterday our mother had said that Maddie's father, Mr. Bronson, was thinking of coming up to Chicago to discuss Maddie's future. I brought my head back in. I didn't see Mr. Bronson often, but it was easy for me to re-member him. What I remembered most was the way he always shook his head with disdain at other people, even strangers, who he thought were ignorant. Like, once a young couple was trying to cope with a screaming toddler by asking the boy what was wrong. Mr. Bronson stood directly in front of them and shook his head back and forth. When they ignored him, he said, "There are better ways to deal with that." They pulled their child away, and Mr. Bronson shook his head again. He looked know-ingly at my mother and said, "I could have helped them."
"Mom?" I said. I leaned toward the front seat. She caught my eye in the rearview mirror.
"Yes, Shelby."
"What happened with Mr. Bronson?"
I saw a flicker of worry in my mother's eyes, but other than that she didn't change expressions. Then she fluffed her hair and said, "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." My mother was very fond of clichés. In fact, next to jewelry, clichés were just about my mother's favorite thing in the world.
"He's in back of us!" Lakey called out suddenly. "Pierre is behind us!" We girls turned around and studied the car behind us. It was Pierre. How had that happened?
"Maybe he does have special powers," I said. He always said he had special powers. He used to stare at light switches and say he was going to turn on the light with the power of his mind. When it didn't go on, he would say, "There, did you see? It almost worked!"
My mother stepped on the gas. She used to date a race car driver, and she could drive really well be-cause he'd given her tips. She said she would have become a race car driver if she had a little more time. I stuck my head out the window again, the wind pounding me. I felt ecstatic. The force of the wind made me breathless. My sisters were crying out behind me, "We're losing him!"
I brought my head in to look. Pierre's car was fad-ing into the distance. I laughed. I felt giddy as we went faster and faster, and I even felt a slight disappointment when Pierre's car disappeared for good.
We were going to Green Valley, California, where Lakey's father lived. I think Lakey's father was the only man my mother ever really loved. He was what my mother called a "manly man," her favorite kind if not for the fact that, in general, manly men didn't make any money. They did things like construction work, plumbing, carpentering, and landscaping. Lakey's father managed a deck and fencing company, and he spent most of his free time fishing, hiking, and hunting. Once, he sent us stuffed animals for gifts. That is, he sent real animals that were stuffed. Mine, sadly, had been a rabbit.
Sometimes I secretly wished my mother had loved my father. Other times I wished Lakey's father were my father. And still other times I didn't think about the fathers at all.
For our road trip my mother put me in charge of guiding us to California. I took my responsibilities very seriously and studied my map collection even though reading it in the car made me dizzy. "Mom!" I called out. "Can we drive up to see Yellowstone?"
"What's Yellowstone, dear?"
"You know, Yellowstone."
"It sounds like some kind of diamond."
Everybody knew what Yellowstone was. "Mom, it's a national park."
"A park? Honey, we don't have time to see a park."
"How about Carson City, Nevada?"
"Now you're talking."
Maddie was in charge of watching the gas tank; Marilyn and Lakey were in charge of money, meal-times, and motels. So in this way -- as a team -- we made our way across the nation.
I, however, was not good at what my mother called "baton changes." In Davenport, Iowa, I suddenly noticed something. "Mom, we have to change from I-88 to I-80."
"Just say when, Shelby. You're in charge of the map."
"The map doesn't have an inset for Davenport."
"Say when!" Marilyn and Lakey shouted.
My mother was signaling as they screamed. It was too much pressure! I couldn't figure out the map. The car swooped past a sign. I turned and stared at the sign, looked at the map again. "I think that was it," I said.
"Too late," my mother said. "I'll get off at the next off-ramp."
So we lost an hour tooling through the streets of Davenport. Maddie snuggled against me when she saw I felt bad.
We finally found ourselves on I-80. A young couple stood on the side of the highway hitchhiking.
"Pick them up!" we all shouted.
"They're in love," cried Marilyn. "Aren't they cute?"
They looked like they were about twenty. My mother pulled to the side. In our car the woman sat in the man's lap, and he kept kissing her neck the whole time they rode with us. I wondered if he just kissed her neck all day, no matter what they were doing. We let them off at a truck stop to catch another ride northward. Even as the woman stuck out her thumb, her boyfriend held her with both arms.
We found a deli outside of Iowa City and bought sandwiches that were almost as tall as they were wide. We ate on a blanket in a field off the highway. The grass danced around us. It seemed like a wonderful world, where you could grow up and someone would kiss your neck all day while you hitchhiked across the cornfields.
Maddie suddenly started coughing and trying to clear her throat. "Are you okay?" I said.
She nodded, but her face grew red as she coughed. I stood up, ready to do the Heimlich if necessary. Then she blew out from her nose and expelled...a piece of lettuce.
"Maddie, that's gross!" we said.
Mom just shook her head. "It's beyond me how you girls are ever going to catch husbands," she said. "Let's get going."
In a few hours we came upon a series of shacks with a sign in the parking lot saying MOTEL.
"Stop here!" commanded Marilyn and Lakey. Since they were in charge of our accommodations, our mother pulled over. Such misers those girls were.
That night in the double bed the four of us shared, Maddie whispered to me, "I feel something on my feet."
"Me too," I whispered back.
We both screamed at once and jumped out of bed, Lakey and Marilyn following. I turned on the light and pulled back the sheet, and we saw a dozen black bugs scurrying for cover.
My mother took off the mask she wore to sleep better and also to hold the moisture in the delicate skin around her eyes. She squinted, even though that caused wrinkles. Sometimes my head was so filled up with all these little rules about beauty and comportment that it felt like there was no more room in my brain. "Why did you choose this place?" I asked.
"We don't tell you how to read your maps,"
Marilyn pointed out.
We never got into big spats, but little ones -- those happened a lot. But we got over them fast. And we liked to follow a rule to always call our-selves "we" instead of "I." It was impossible to do all the time, but we tried.
Copyright © 2008 by Cynthia Kadohata
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