The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (7 page)

Audrey grew up separately from her siblings. They attended St. Monica’s while Audrey was sent to North Park.

Everyone knows this already. It’s been documented in fifteen books and a low-budget CBS miniseries. Audrey’s public school education is always mentioned as evidence of her spiritual and moral deficiency. As in, “See!
This
is what made her eat that city! I’ve found the solution!” The number of ex-schoolmates who’ve been handed obscene wads of cash by fly-by-night media outlets for a personal recollection of the time Audrey ate licorice in the first grade is now approaching triple digits.

What people don’t know, what they haven’t yet speculated on, is why Audrey went to a public school in the first place. It’s one of
the
basic questions, and it’s not even asked. People are so focused—I almost wrote “ fuckassed,” but that would’ve cost me a Hail Mary—on describing the lurid image of a young woman swallowing a stop sign that they ignore how she might have gotten to that point.

She grew up alone.

While she snuggled with Misty on the queen-sized mattress, the sunlight beams angling through the blinds and warming her bare infant thigh, Audrey was alone. When she lay prone on the living room carpet while Murray’s cold fingers gripped her ankles, testing the softness of her stumps and the sturdiness of her shin-bones, Audrey was alone. When Grandma Pencil stooped to peel crusted snot from Audrey’s upper lip, exclaiming, “Dirty, dirty girl. Who is going to love you with a nose goblin face?” Audrey was alone.

Her siblings were five years older, a gap too wide. They treated her like a roadblock, a toy, a petting zoo goat. Through her elementary years, adept as Audrey was at maneuvering with her crutches and padded stump socks, she couldn’t keep up with McKenna and Toby. They sprinted across the yard, bicycled through the streets, played baseball at the park. She couldn’t keep up with her peers, either. Her footlessness excluded her from sports, cheerleading, and Girl Scouts.

When Audrey was in the fourth grade, Misty urged her to try out for concert band. No Mapes had ever played an instrument. Audrey loved the idea but wanted to play the drums. Misty insisted on the flute. She even bought one for Audrey (made of real silver, with open holes—top-of-the-line).

“Where did the money come from?” “Who picked this thing out?” “Why wasn’t I consulted on this decision?” Murray asked these and many other questions, around which Misty’s answers danced.

No matter how expensive it was, though, Audrey refused to assemble it. She wouldn’t put it to her lips. She wouldn’t even look at it.

Horrible fights followed, with Audrey screaming and Misty sitting in front of the TV, knitting a sweater. God love her, the girl wanted to break that flute. Audrey shook with anger. She trashed her room, scattered clothes everywhere, upset lamps, toppled toy-boxes.

McKenna talked to Audrey. Night after night, she tried to calm Audrey with distractions in the form of board games or surreptitious snacks (a pair of washed handkerchiefs, a pile of rubber bands) smuggled to Audrey as she lay crying on her bed. Audrey kept up the rage longer than anyone expected, and Misty kept up the nonchalance with equal fervor.

Murray was incapable of mediating. When Audrey knocked bowls of peanuts and pretzels onto the carpet, he stepped into the living room, frowned, and shook his head in disappointment. “Toby!” he said. “See if your sister wants to take a walk. McK-enna, get the vacuum.”

He tried, didn’t he?

Audrey spent her entire fourth-grade year drumming. She drummed on tables, floors, walls, crutches—every surface within reach. She was determined to prove that, drums or no drums, she was going to play the drums.

Misty was unflappable. Her halcyon grin could not be altered, and so she chewed her Gordon’s fish sticks with hardly a blink, hardly a dip into the tartar sauce, hardly a batted eye for the still-frozen middles as Audrey tap-tap-tapped.

The drumming affected everyone else. “I swear, I’m going to make your arms match your legs if you don’t cut that noise,” Murray barked.

But it was all bark, and Audrey knew it. Murray threatened in this way three times a week. Each time, the kids debated if he even knew he’d spoken aloud.

In the end, Audrey lost. Her tapping faded. Her dream of playing the drums vanished. She ate the flute, but this was only a symbolic victory. Misty had won.

Audrey had grade school friends, to be sure. There was the porker Sally Vance, who had the odd habit of not flushing. There was the pallid Mickey Leach, who sported a two-inch-wide part down the middle of her spaghetti hair. A severe case of psoriasis on her arms made her smell like tar. There was Betsy Frost, a redheaded girl freckled like a blizzard. Even her eyeballs were freckled. Audrey’s friends were the class rejects, girls who rarely ventured out of their houses and whose histories meant that they were exquisite at entertaining themselves. They didn’t visit often.

Mostly, Audrey stayed home and painted with Misty. And ate what Misty painted.

Undoubtedly, Grandma Pencil had saved Audrey’s legs from amputation when she’d forced Murray to throw away the Dr Pepper prosthetics. In doing so, however, she also killed Audrey’s social life.

A girl with pop cans for feet is a curiosity, perhaps even a source of admiration and envy. As in, “Why can’t
I
have Dr Pepper feet?”

But a girl on crutches, if you’ll pardon the pun, is pedestrian. There’s no sex appeal to those armpit sticks. The only thing crutches say is, “Keep your distance—you might catch it.”

It’s the same old tragic story: Footless baby spends each day with a depressed mother who is warm to the skin but cold to the soul—a distant, distracted, touched-in-the-head mother. Footless baby’s father is either at the factory or in the basement with his hissing, clanging toys.

Then again, maybe it’s not all sad: Footless baby reveals to her big sister an appetite for paper, wax, cardboard, soil, and other nonfood items. McKenna, captivated by this footless girl—our dear Audrey—becomes her nervous “supplier,” going to great lengths to hide her habit from the family. Afraid of being caught, ashamed of what she feels are abnormally intimate feelings toward footless sister, McKenna maintains a distance, avoids footless sister around the house.

(There are, however, stolen moments: feeding Audrey; telling Audrey the story of “The Three Little Pigs”; brushing Audrey’s golden hair; bathing Audrey; watching Audrey sleep.)

Overall, McKenna acts like a gutless dweeb. She follows Toby’s every lead even while her gut tells her that the only hope for a real connection in this family is with the footless girl playing alone in the corner.

One afternoon, Grandmother catches an eighteen-month-old Audrey eating dirt in the backyard. Doctor Burger assures them nothing is wrong. A few months later, Grandmother finds Audrey eating a crayon. “Don’t have a hairy,” Murray tells Grandma. “Do you know more than the doctor?”

When the shoddy “feet” Murray labored over for a year with such devotion are removed under threat of legal action, Grandmother becomes Audrey’s primary caregiver. Murray never quite recovers from his profound disappointment. Ignoring his bright-eyed footless toddler becomes one of his favorite weapons.

Grandmother continues to discover evidence of sinister gob-blings. She catches Audrey chewing the cover of her father’s notebook, half of it already in her stomach. “She’s lucky it wasn’t any of the pages,” Murray growls. He begins storing his notebooks in a fireproof lockbox. Grandmother catches four-year-old Audrey with a ball of Misty’s lipstick in her mouth. “Aww,” says Misty. “She wants to look like Momma.” Grandmother pries open Audrey’s lips to find a family photograph, half-masticated.

Grandmother says enough is enough.

“I will not pay for this girl to go to St. Monica’s,” she announces at Sunday dinner.

Murray is
way
into his spaghetti. Sunday dinner is the one meal that he always eats with the family. On other days, he takes a Hungry Man into the basement or grabs a bowl of Fritos from an end table. His face is submerged in the noodle pile when he says, “So what’s your point?”

Before Grandma can answer, Misty says, under her breath, “The kids really should go to the same school.” Her words are a wet paper towel.

There’s no sound. No chewing or clanking. Even the children aren’t speaking.

“Exactly,” Murray says at last.

Grandma Pencil—why has she waited until this moment to make the announcement?—speaks as if Audrey isn’t sitting across the table: “The girl doesn’t deserve to be schooled in the ways of Jesus Christ. I won’t have it.” She taps the edge of her plate with her knife—ting!—for emphasis.

Murray looks at Misty, who wears an amused, abstracted smile. She is watching the fork gripped in her own hand as it stirs, needlessly, her potatoes.

(Spaghetti and mashed potatoes? I told you she was touched in the head.)

Murray clears his throat, fist over mouth. “I don’t know if anyone
deserves
that kind of schooling.” He waits, looking around the table for a supportive laugh. Getting none, he adds his own chuckle. “I’m glad you’re coming around, Annabelle. The twins can go to North Park. Starting next year.”

“Yes!” says McKenna, pumping her fist.

“No way!” says Toby. “That’s not fair! Just because Kenny doesn’t have any friends. That’s bullshit.”

“Your mouth,” says Misty, still monitoring her fork, the tines throttled by noodles.

Toby’s curse word lights up Murray as if someone’s tickling his toes. “Lot of good that
moral
education’s doing, huh, Annabelle?”

“Enough!” Grandma Pencil shouts. Her face has gone the color of Japan’s rising sun. She scoots from the table, tosses her napkin onto the plate like a gauntlet. Her lips are quivering.

Nobody but McKenna sees Audrey reach across to grab the cloth napkin. She stuffs it into her mouth.

Audrey gives McKenna a wink. McKenna returns it.

The sun has shattered.

Late afternoon slips between the leaves, strewing shards of light upon the grass.

The wind combs the treetops.

Grilled meat hangs on the breeze, the last barbecue of the season for Oscar Foster.

Toby is wearing sweat pants that match the autumn sky. A sacred color, the color of the Virgin’s mantle. Except there is nothing pure or saintly about this boy. He’s ready to crack teenhood like a can of beer. Sweat slickens his arms and neck, gives him an unhealthy shine like he’s just emerged from the womb. His red face, breathless, squinched in ferocious determination, adds to the effect. A radio on the picnic table in the southwest corner of the yard blasts Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” so loudly that it almost covers the heavy breathing and intermittent moans and grunts, the carnal noises of Toby’s free-weight lifting. These are similar to, but slightly quieter than, the noises of his masturbation, which McKenna hears every night, sometimes three times a night. McKenna hears it all and doesn’t move. Not a finger.

It’s arms today, and upper body: Toby’s pride and joy—his “guns”—as well as his “holsters,” which McKenna can only assume means his shoulders.

McKenna and Audrey watch their brother from the second floor window of the twins’ bedroom. Audrey is kneeling atop a pine toy trunk no longer filled with toys. Now it holds baseball cards—Topps, mostly, some Fleer. Inside this single-compartment trunk, a plywood board, sawed to fit, has been inserted as a divider, forming two compartments. One side is McKenna’s, one Toby’s.

Toby’s baseball cards aren’t visible. They’re filed away in narrow, white cardboard boxes, each box labeled with team name and years. Every card he owns has been painstakingly logged onto a yellow legal pad, the details written in crisp, careful (primitive-looking) capital letters—MILT WILCOX, PITCHER, 1982, FLEER, CONDITION PRISTINE.

None of Toby’s cards are anything less than “pristine.” But still, he writes this word on the note pad.

McKenna’s half of the trunk, by contrast, looks like it’s filled with vomit. The loose cards are scuffed, bent, and jelly-stained. Their corners are mashed, their statistics faded from merciless hours of sifting, of searching for Pete Rose only to find Johnny Bench instead, which sends her scrambling for Lance Parrish in order to compare how many attempted steals each catcher has thrown out. A few of her misfit toys—My Pretty Pony (“Brown”), three Trolls, Papa Smurf and Smurfette—hide within the pile of cards.

The pine trunk is now closed, and atop it kneels seven-year-old Audrey. Her nose is smooshed against the window. Her breath makes a white circle. She leans back, revealing the outline of two lips on the glass. McKenna stands beside Audrey, studying her. Audrey’s profile is delicate, meaning she has soft curves of the chin and forehead, round cheeks, remnants of infancy in a head that is still slightly too large for her wiry frame. This only adds to her doll-like quality. She is utterly perfect. Her hands pressed to the glass have left the smudges of fingers and palms. And now, with the added impression of nose and lips, it appears as if a ghost is pushing through the window toward them.

Audrey smells like a carrot. Or a potato. Some freshly unearthed legume or root. Maybe, McKenna thinks, her insides have finally turned into dirt. Then again, she’s way past eating dirt by this point. Audrey glances up at McKenna, and a smile opens on her face, revealing gray teeth. Black ballpoints are her latest kick. With her paper route money, McKenna buys bags of twenty-four at ninety-nine cents apiece. Ten bags a week.

It’s no longer a secret from the family, of course. How could such a noise be covered or explained away, even by a resourceful big sister? The popping, grinding, snapping. Sounds that do what the Hand-Held Alarmer Bell was supposed to do—reach around corners, traverse walls, find you where you’re hiding, tap you on the shoulder.

“Build her a feedbag,” Grandma Pencil likes to snarl.

Murray may be doing just that. He has changed from flesh and blood into sound and motion. Months now with only glimpses, noises, speculation. A series of phlegmy coughs in the kitchen. The crinkling of Stouffer’s Salisbury steak tin foil. A blur of blue (his work shirt?) on the staircase. The slamming of a door.

Is he crafting another pair of feet? Designing armor and a broadsword for Toby? Inventing a combination salt and pepper shaker/transistor radio? (Wait, he’s already made that one.) How about a robot Dad that will actually spend time with its kids?

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

The world may never know.

Audrey is on her knees atop the closed pine trunk that Murray built. Her dress is gauzy and loose. McKenna can see down the front of it, to her chest, like a boy’s except for the smallest hint of tightening skin, of trouble rising from beneath the two dime-sized nipples. McKenna’s own breasts have already arrived, without fanfare, unable to fill a training bra.

“Now you do a face,” Audrey says.

McKenna leans to the window, exhales. Through the translucent fogging, she can see Toby down there, twisting his skullcap in his hands, fertilizing the lawn with his sweat. He looks up at the window, raises his middle finger. He mouths the word “faggot.”

In the circle of misted glass, McKenna draws a smiley face with her fingertip.

“My face is better,” Audrey says. “It’s creepy.”

“Of course it is. Look who made it.”

She elbows McKenna in the ribs. “Shut your piehole!”

McKenna wraps her arms around Audrey, drapes her over her shoulder. In the center of the room, she spins until they’re dizzy, laughing, sick to their stomachs.

McKenna lies on the carpet, breathing. This small exertion has left her rubbery.

Twenty minutes later, before Toby comes inside, Audrey wants to eat. McKenna opens the pine trunk. One by one, she feeds Audrey the 1978 Saint Louis Cardinals. So delicious, so pristine.