Henry's Sisters (7 page)

Plus, we finally had cash in the cookie jar so we could buy milk and eggs. There is nothing like the taste of cows’ milk when you’re a kid and you’ve been drinking powdered milk or water for weeks. Our water and electricity were no longer turned off and our phone worked on a consistent basis.

We threw out our old shoes, held together with duct tape, and Momma bought us new tennis shoes. Mine were pink, I remember that.

We still got free lunch at school, but Momma told us we could go down the street to get ice cream on Friday. We were stunned, beyond delighted.

It wasn’t too long before we got the truth.

A girl at school told us her older brother and his friends had seen our momma, ‘buck naked.’

‘My brother said your mom is sexy. Sexy sexy. He says she’s got small boobs but they stand upright. They go on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursdays now to see her with all their friends. What do you think of your mom being a stripper?’

I hit that girl so hard she had to go home because her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. She shut up about our momma, but I got suspended for five days. We knew she was lying.

When girls in pigtails and Mary Janes came up to me and Cecilia and told us our momma was a whore, we whupped all of them. Five against two. They shut up about our momma.

When an older boy, his teeth buck and sticking out, told us his daddy thought our momma had an ‘ass tight enough to hold nuts,’ Cecilia and I took care of his tooth problem and he shut up about our momma.

That took care of the overt teasing at our school, but nothing could take care of the laughter and snickers and pointed fingers behind our backs.

But Momma wasn’t a stripper. We knew that. She was a dancer – feathers, sequins, and all. We knew it so well we waited around the corner from the strip club in town that we knew she didn’t work at because she wasn’t a stripper.

We waited and waited and we cringed with disbelief when we heard the wheeze and thunking of our ancient car and Momma drove up and parked around in the back and went in a side entrance wearing an old sweatshirt of my dad’s that said
UNITED STATES ARMY
, her hair in a ponytail.

Cecilia and Janie and I leant back against the wall in shock. Too shocked to cry. Too devastated to move. Too humiliated to breathe. Within fifteen minutes, that parking lot was packed, with loud, boisterous men getting out of cars.

We trudged home, heads down, avoiding the streets of town, avoiding each other’s eyes, trying to avoid the truth but knowing the truth was beaming and bold and undeniable: our momma was a stripper.

We waited up for Momma that night, one light on in our shabby, brownish family room, us three lined up on the sofa, our feet on our stained carpet.

‘Momma, are you a stripper?’ Janie asked, soft as a mouse, a frightened mouse.

Momma froze in the doorway. She had bruisy circles under her eyes and was pale with exhaustion. One of the take-home boxes of food she held in her hands dropped to the floor. Chicken wings fell out. I still remember that. Still remember those chicken wings. To this day, none of us eats chicken wings.

‘How dare you,’ she said, her voice so quiet we could barely hear it.

Janie cringed, Cecilia wrapped her arms around herself, and I put my chin up.

‘How dare
we
?’ I asked as I stood. I was furious. So embarrassed I could have died. Momma took her clothes off for the men in this town. On stage.

‘Yes, how dare you,’ Momma said, starting to shake.

‘You’re the one taking off her clothes!’ I shouted.

She sent the other box of food flying across the room. Noodles with tomato sauce spilt out. I was steaming about that, too. That pasta was dinner! I was hungry!

‘Who told you?’

‘Everyone, Momma! We’ve been beating kids up for weeks! We thought they were lying!’

She swayed.

‘How could you do that?’ I was so frustrated, so destroyed, I felt like the devil had set my stomach on fire.

I heard Henry start to whimper in his bedroom. Momma’s eyes darted in that direction.

‘You didn’t tell Henry, did you?’

‘No, Momma, we didn’t think he needed to know about your pole twirling!’

Her face flushed. ‘Do you think I like what I do, you spoilt brats?’

There was silence. We were young. We didn’t get it, didn’t understand.

‘Do you?’ she shrieked, her blonde ponytail swinging behind her. ‘Do you?’ She threw her purse across the room. It broke a glass vase we’d found at a garage sale.

‘You must like it!’ I shouted back. ‘You must because you do it!’

God
,
I had a momma who took off her clothes!

Janie said, ‘Momma, we love you,
but—’

‘But what?’ she seethed.

‘But don’t do it!’ Cecilia yelled. ‘Don’t strip! We gotta move, Momma. Everybody knows!’

Momma didn’t move.

‘Even being a waitress is better than that!’ I told her, superior, snotty. ‘You’re holding a tray in the air kissing people’s asses but at least you’re not naked!’

‘Momma, they’re calling you the River of Love at school!’ Cecilia accused. ‘They say, “My dad wants a sexy river.” That means they’re going to see you!’

‘It’s a little slutty, don’t you think, Momma?’ I sneered.

That did it. Looking back, I’m surprised she didn’t pound me into the wall. She was not known for her restraint.

‘You think I’m a slut?’

‘I think you’re acting like one!’

Janie whimpered.

‘You’re judging me, Isabelle Bommarito? You, who has never had to work a day in her life? You who has never had to worry about supporting four kids, on your own?’ she shot back, her bright green eyes with the light in back of them filling with tears.

Henry made a moaning sound in his bedroom.

‘Yeah, Momma, I am. That’s disgusting! You’re disgusting.’

‘Isabelle, stop—’ Cecilia pleaded.

Her whole body shook. ‘Then you do it, Isabelle. You support this family.’

‘I can’t, Momma, I’m fourteen!’

Momma charged right up to my face. ‘Do you know why I have this job, you little snot? Do you have any clue?
It’s because I had to take it
. I don’t have any skills. I don’t have an education. I don’t have a husband. Waitressing, you obnoxious brat, did not pay our bills. Do you think you all were eating crackers for lunch because I wanted you to eat crackers? Do you think we had noodles all weekend because you liked them? We ate them because that’s all I could afford.’

She pulled away from me as if she couldn’t bear to be near, then picked up the nearest item on a table – a clay imprint of my hand I’d made her as a kid – and hurled it across the room. It smashed a mirror and both the hand and the mirror shattered into a thousand pieces. I felt the blood draining from my face like liquid through a sieve.

‘Do you know how much Henry’s stomach medicine is each month?’ she rasped out. ‘His asthma medicine?’

I shook my head.

I could hear Henry sobbing.

She picked up another item. It was a ceramic sculpture Janie had made last year. It was supposed to be a dog. It looked like a snake with a porcupine back. It went flying over the couch and crashed into a lamp. The lamp toppled and broke.

Janie moaned. Cecilia sucked in her breath.

‘Do you know how much I owe the hospital and doctors for Henry? Do you?’ She named an enormous sum. ‘I will never, ever be able to pay that back, but they’re suing me anyhow. At least I
can
keep the lights on.’

The third item that went flying was a framed photo of the four of us plus Momma.

Janie covered her face with her hands and talked to herself.

Cecilia trembled, red, flushed, scared.

Momma shoved her face, twisted with anger, one inch from mine. ‘I hate stripping, you get that? I
hate it
. I do it for us. Even you, you judgmental, stupid child. I do it because you’re the only ones who can take care of Henry. I do it because he’s sick so much and needs one of us with him all the time. I don’t have a choice. Do you think I like taking off my clothes in front of leering, sick, gross men?’

She screamed then, in frustration, in defeat.

In humiliation.

‘Oh, Momma,’ Janie wailed.

‘Momma, we love you—’ Cecilia started.

Henry shouted, ‘Help me! Help!’

I crossed my arms. ‘There’s got to be a different way, Momma, than being naked.’

I could still hear those words in my head. The biting tone, the condescension, the harshness.

To this day I hate myself for that.

‘Get out of my sight,’ she raged. ‘And don’t you ever open your snotty mouth and bring this up again!’

‘We should move,’ I drawled. ‘Our momma is little more than a hooker.’

That did it. Her arm arched, like the curve of a bow, whipping me across the face. It knocked me to the ground.

‘God, I think I hate you,’ she seethed.

‘Momma—’ I stayed on the ground, crushed, stunned by her words. Cecilia had stapled the back strap of my bra together and I felt it snap.

Henry shouted again, ‘Help me! Help!’

She cracked me again and my head whipped back. My neck would hurt for days, the bruises purple, then greenish-beige.

‘Get out! Get out!’ she yelled. She moved towards me again and at first I crawled, then Cecilia and Janie hauled me up and yanked me to our room.

Henry’s wails grew to a pitch. They softened only when Momma went to his room. In the darkness I could hear her soothing him, calming him.

I knew she was hugging him until he went to sleep, like a mother bear protecting a cub.

For a second I hated Henry.

I wished Momma would hug me to sleep.

I crawled to my closet and cried until my tears were dried up, shrivelled, gone. Left in their place was a hollow void.

I still have that void.

The Bommarito girls were never invited over to anyone’s house or to a birthday party.

Not once.

People can be unforgiving and unaccepting, and that easily extends to the offender’s children. Especially when the mother is gorgeous and often naked, and when their husbands whisper out, ‘River,’ when atop their wives, they’re not moaning about water.

We never talked about Momma’s work again but we continued to fight our way through childhood, literally.

Momma collapsed on a fairly regular basis into a downward, whirling spiral. When she did, essentials like food and electricity were often not there. Cecilia got rashes that wouldn’t go away and Janie had migraines, but we couldn’t afford the medication for either. Henry’s health was shaky.

An incident with a lot of blood still replays in my head like a red, vibrating vision. Another time, with evil waiting on the deck of a dilapidated house, I thought we’d sunk to the bottom of fear and poverty. But there was more devastation working its way towards us, insidious, unstoppable, shattering.

That time, though, it came for Henry.

At five o’clock in the morning, my alarm went off. It sounded like a torpedoing bomb and I leapt out of bed. Too many nights in war-torn cities will set your feet on fire when awoken from a deep sleep by high-pitched buzzing.

I sank back onto my bed and held my head until my heart pittered back down and I could breathe.

I showered and pulled on jeans and a V-necked black sweater, the morning so still and cold outside, I felt ice cubes in my gut.

I met Janie downstairs. She was wearing a pink skirt, white blouse, and white tennis shoes, with her hair in two braids wrapped around the back of her head to complete her frumpiness.

‘You look like a cupcake.’

She put her hands on her hips. ‘Nothing wrong with a clean, crisp outfit.’

‘You look like a clean, crisp cupcake.’

She put her nose up a fraction. ‘I like my clothes.’

‘Me too. Tasty.’

‘Funny. You’re hilarious, Isabelle. Hilarious.’ She stomped towards the door. ‘We don’t all want to dress with suggestiveness!’

I took a gander down my shirt. There wasn’t
that
much cleavage showing.

Before we left the house, Janie checked the stove and the iron and the hair dryers. She locked the front door, got in the car, then ran back and rechecked all her checking, locked the door, tapped it four times, and ran to the car.

‘Tap tap tap,’ I sang out, starting her Porsche.

‘Shut up, Isabelle. At least I don’t lay naked on my counters when I’m upset.’

‘I lay naked on my counters when I’m happy, too, so there, tap tap tap.’

‘You’re never happy, and at least I don’t show people in skyscrapers my boobs.’

‘They like my boobs.’

‘At least I don’t drink Kahlúa for breakfast.’

‘Kahlúa is yummy.’

She put on Vivaldi.

We drove towards town, no one else up and around at this time because they are sane. The sun even seemed tired, the golden globe slowly rising, as if she was getting out of bed and only now starting to slough off her hangover and begin thinking about the colours she would spread across the morning sky.

Trees arched over the road and I saw familiar homes, remembering who lived where when I was in high school. Nice kids and mean kids and kids who got in trouble and kids who were trouble.

It had been a long time since I was here for any length of time. I had run far and long in my work as a photographer. I’d lived for years in France, Israel, Lebanon, and London, with stints in various war-torn, war-crushed, war-raped, war-demoralised countries in the serenity of Africa and the sweet tranquillity of the Middle East.

Seeing people’s bodies blown apart in different directions – a foot here, a head there – because a few men have decided they can’t sit down at a table and figure things out isn’t pleasant.

Arriving in a village that’s been obliterated by a tsunami isn’t, either, with mothers screaming that they can’t find their children and children screaming they can’t find their mothers. Running from the Janjaweed as they swish the jungles with their machetes is a heart-stopper. Famine offers up an especially lovely glimpse of how other people wait on the porch of death, barely able to stand, their stomachs swollen as if they’ve ingested a watermelon whole.

Strange diseases that we never see here thrive in other countries, their symptoms cruel, debilitating.

I’d photographed all of it.

And it was actually here that I’d come to love photography.

There was a photography class at school and only nerds took it. I took it because I thought it would be easy.

The teacher was a nerd, too. His name was Mr Sands. He had a friend named Mr Reynolds.

We all knew they were gay.

I thought they were the nicest men, besides Father Mike, that I’d ever met. Mr Sands gave me a camera and told me how to take photos. I used to go with Mr Sands and Mr Reynolds to take photos in the mountains and by the river. Cecilia and Janie tagged along, too.

From an old, battle-weary perspective, I now realised they ‘got’ our home life. They had met Momma one morning after she’d been in bed for two weeks. She had not showered, her hair was straight up and gnarled, her robe stained by food and grape juice and mental collapse.

She took one shocked glance at the men and slammed the door. ‘How dare you bring men to the house when my hair’s not done!’ She slapped me across the face, her eyes still fuzzy and unfocused. ‘What do they want with a young girl? They’re perverts, aren’t they? Perverts.’ She slapped me again.

No, Momma, I wanted to say, but they care if I live or die, which is more than I can say for you. ‘It’s my teacher and his brother. I’m catching up on my work.’

She ran two shaky hands through her greasy hair before bursting into tears. ‘Fine. Go. Go!’

Mr Sands and Mr Reynolds patted my arm all day and bought me a root beer float.

I was soon hooked on photography. I think it was because when I was with them, I started to feel clean. Not completely clean, that couldn’t happen – I had a momma who appeared to hate me, a reputation growing uglier second by second, and cataclysmic memories I couldn’t shut down – but around their gentleness and humour I felt better.

That afternoon I took a photo of my face from an arm’s length away with the river in the background. The area Momma had smacked was red, my eyes swollen and lonely from the tears I’d shed hoping she would love me one day. I stared at that photo for days. I still have it. I started to get interested in shooting not rivers and waterfalls and flowers, but people in pain. People like me.

Which led me to a major in Journalism in college and a minor in Photography, which led me to newspapers and documentaries, which led me to war zones.

Which led me to so many thousands of images of utter, abject, hideous suffering in my head that eventually my mind, on top of what was already there, split open and electrocuted itself.

And that’s when that other thing happened last year.

I shook my head, my braids swaying off my shoulders as I cleared out the memories.

And now I was back, headed towards a bakery I’d hated working in.

‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ Janie whimpered.

Bommarito’s Bakery is a two-story brick building between the pharmacy and a bookstore on the main street of Trillium River. Momma had ‘revived’ it two years ago after she closed it a year after Janie left for college. ‘The people of Trillium River begged for my desserts, desserts made my way. The River way,’ she had told me, arching her brows.

The bells jangled as I opened the door and we stepped inside.

‘Now, this isn’t gonna be fun,’ I groaned.

‘Not good, not good, not good,’ Janie moaned.

There were five red booths and seven tables. They needed a scrub down. The floor was black and white checked and scratched and dirty. It needed a mopping.

The red canopy outside was dusty and sagging, the lettering on the windows washed out, the window treatments boring beige. There were two long display cases for the cookies, cakes, sweets, and breads.

They needed to be replaced.

This was in direct contrast to how the bakery shined when we worked here. Momma had handed us toothbrushes, sponges, brushes, and mops and made us work ’til that place was so clean you could lick the floor.

‘I knew it.’ I had known it. Cecilia hadn’t wanted to tell me.

‘The bakery is dead. It’s like there’s ghosts wandering around,’ Janie whispered as we stood in a ray of sunlight, dust bunnies dancing around our heads.

‘Ghosts?’ I sputtered. ‘You’re not into ghosts.’

‘Yes, I am. I am researching them for my next book. I think they’re fascinating.’

‘They think you’re fascinating, too. In fact, they have elected you to be president of their Ghosts in Oregon Society. There’s a national convention in June. “Ghosts Beware” is the headliner followed by “Multicultural Ghost Awareness Night” and “Sensuous Ghosts: How Not to Disappear.”’

‘Stop it. I can hear the ghosts.’

I froze to hear the ghosts. ‘Boo!’ I shouted.

She jumped.

I laughed. ‘There’s a ghost in the booth. Gasp. He’s naked! He’s gorgeous!’

‘Then maybe you can sleep with him, Isabelle. For one night, not two. That might constitute a relationship.’

‘It’ll be ghostly sex. I’ll burn another bra and thong. My white ones.’ I slung an arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on. I’ll cook, you sell.’

‘We’re both cooking. You sell. I don’t want to talk to all those people, and you know I don’t do raisins. When I touch them I feel like they have to be counted.’

‘I know you don’t do raisins.’

‘They’re too small.’

‘Yes, I know, Janie. Their smallness unnerves you.’

‘They’re not tasty.’

‘Right. Raisins are not tasty.’

‘They’re tight and wrinkled and shrivelled. Yuck.’

‘I know. Tight, wrinkled, and shrivelled is a no.’

‘Right. And they crunch sometimes. They’re rough in my mouth.’ She smacked her lips.

‘You sound positively sexual, do you know that? Do you have a hidden thing for raisins?’

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Yep. So is being unnerved by a raisin.’

Her face set. ‘I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I also don’t handle hazelnuts anymore.’

‘No hazelnuts?’

‘Too thin. Poor taste.’ She scrunched up her nose.

I rolled my eyes. ‘Got it. I will be the raisin and hazelnut woman in this bakery.’

‘Don’t make fun of me.’

‘I’m not. You can still work with icing, right?’

She threw up her hands in frustration. ‘Icing is smooth.’

‘Smooth?’

‘Yes. Plus its initial colour is white.’

‘White and smooth.’ I didn’t even try to put that together. ‘Come on, icing woman, let’s get to work.’

At six thirty we opened our doors. Based on the shabbiness here, I did not expect a rush of people, as had happened when we were high schoolers. Back then people came by before work for coffee and treats. They came by during the day for streusel or orange bran muffins or brownies with white chocolate chips.

The card-playing ladies came in on Tuesday night and the quilters came on Thursday. We had a Sunday church crowd and the Saturday afternoon train of people who needed treats for that night’s potlucks.

I was surprised to see
no
customers, though. Zero. Nada.

Janie turned on her east Indian music and hung up the photo of her therapist.

We propped open the old cookbooks, most from our dad, a man who loved cooking when the demons weren’t prodding him with pitchforks, and kept baking.

I ignored the loss I felt. I ignored the memories that swirled around and about those early dawn hours, wretchedly painful and hilariously funny, soul crushing and radiant. I did not want to dive into those memories.

So, we baked.

At ten o’clock, an older woman shuffled in. She left her shopping cart, piled with filled black garbage bags, outside the door. She wore a blue flowered hat, three sweatshirts, saggy jeans, and one black shoe and one brown shoe.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

She grinned. She was missing teeth.

I brought over a menu as she sank down in a red booth.

‘Breakfast today?’ I asked. I had put a white apron around my waist and my braids were back in a ponytail. I knew there was flour in them already. Wouldn’t surprise me if I had purple marzipan icing on my cheek, either.

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Coffee?’

She smelt like honeysuckle and mint. I learnt later that she somehow always had a plastic bottle of scented lotion with her.

‘Juice?’

I saw a flash of confusion in her eyes, then she opened a sugar packet and tipped it into her mouth. She did it with a second one, too.

I thought I’d leave her to her sugar. ‘I’ll come back in a minute.’

I returned to icing about two dozen blue, pink, and green whale cookies.

Ten minutes later I headed back out. ‘Decided yet? I have cookies in whale shapes.’

No answer. A smile.

About three seconds later, she leant over and curled up on the red bench. She made a gurgling sound in her throat.

She slept.

‘Ma’am?’ I shook her shoulder softly. ‘Ma’am? No whale cookies?’

A snore escaped her nose.

We learnt later her name was Belinda.

Life had not been a whale of fun for her.

At three o’clock, we’d been mass cooking all day, and we were still empty. Belinda had woken up, snuffled, snorted, and left after using the bathroom. I could tell she’d used our sink to take a mini-shower, though the bathroom was perfectly cleaned up when I checked.

I had dug through the trash where Janie and I had tossed pies and cookies and bread. Now, to be fair, these goodies were several days old and wouldn’t taste fresh.

Still. The bread tasted like sand and water mixed with a dead scorpion thrown in. The doughnuts tasted like soggy sugar and the cookies tasted like corrugated cardboard laced with paper. I gave a bite to Janie. She spat it out.

‘Good. That helps me with my book. I needed to know what dead flesh would taste like.’

‘It wasn’t dead flesh.’

‘I know. But I needed a way to describe it.’

What do you say to things like that?

People ambled on by outside, some carrying windsurfing boards, others pushing strollers. Two women with briefcases. A man wearing a blue apron. Three teenage girls giggling, followed by three strutting teenage boys.

Now why weren’t they all in here? Spending money?

Easy. The food sucked.