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Uses for Boys
By Erica Lorraine Scheidt St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2012 Erica Lorraine Scheidt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01381-1
CHAPTER 1
the tell-me-again times
In the happy times, in the tell-me-again times, when I'm seven and there are no stepbrothers and it's before the stepfathers, my mom lets me sleep in her bed.
Her bed is a raft on the ocean. It's a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon we share. I stretch out big as I can, a five-pointed star, and she bundles me back up in her arms. When I wake I'm tangled in her hair.
"Tell me again," I say and she tells me again how she wanted me more than anything.
"More than anything in the world," she says, "I wanted a little girl."
I'm her little girl. I measure my fingers against hers. I watch in the mirror as she brushes her hair. I look for myself in her features. I stare at her feet. Her toes, like my toes, are crooked and strangely long.
"You have my feet," I say.
In the tell-me-again times she looks down and places her bare foot next to mine. Our apartment is small and I can see the front door from where we stand.
"Tell me again," I say and she tells me how it was before I came. What it was like when she was all alone. She had no mother, she says, she had no father. All she wanted was a little girl and that little girl is me.
"Now I have everything," she says and the side of her foot presses against the side of mine.
eight is too big for stories
But everything changes and I'm not everything anymore. We're in the bathroom and she's getting ready. His name is Thomas, she says, and he won't like it if she's late. She tugs at the skin below her eyes, smooths her eyebrow with the tip of her finger. I'm getting old, she says.
"Tell me again," I say.
"Eight is too big for stories," she tells me. She sweeps past me to pick out a dress and when she does, I know. I know this dress. It's the dress she wore the first time, the dress she wore the last time she left me alone. It's yellow and when I touch the fabric, my fingers leave marks.
"Stop that," my mom says and steps out of reach. Then she sprays perfume between her breasts and I turn away. I know what comes next. She'll go out and I'll get a babysitter. She'll wear perfume and put on nylons. She'll wear high-heeled shoes. The babysitter will sit at our kitchen table and play solitaire.
"Why do you have to go?" I say.
"I'm tired of being alone," she says and I stare at the wall of her room. The bathroom fan shuts off in the next room. Alone is how our story starts. But then I came along and changed all that.
"You're not alone," I say. My back is to her and on the wall of her bedroom are the photographs I know by heart. The pictures that go with our story. She always starts with the littlest one. The one of her mother.
"The last one," my mom says, meaning it's the last picture taken before her mother died. She died before I was born. "She was so lonely," my mom says. Our story starts on the day that her father left her mother. It starts with my mom taking care of her mother when she was just a kid like me.
I can take care of you, I think. But already she has her coat on. She's opening the front door because Thomas is waiting downstairs.
I look at another photo, the one of me at the beach sorting seashells and seaweed and tiny bits of glass. In it, I'm concentrating and wearing my mom's sweater with the sleeves rolled up.
"Bye," she calls and I look up, but the door is already closed.
he's our family now
She goes out that night. She goes out the next night. I sleep alone in her bed and when she comes home, she packs a suitcase. She's going away for the weekend, she says. She's going away for the week. In between she comes home. She repacks. She washes her nylons and hangs them in the shower. She washes her face in the sink. I watch her in the mirror as she gets ready to go out again. She looks at her face from different angles. She pinches and pulls at her skin.
Then I meet this man. This Thomas. She brings him home like he's some kind of gift.
And I'm told to be nice. I'm told to stand still. I'm made to wash my face.
I stand in front of him with my arms straight down at my sides. He's in the kitchen, crossing in front of the light like an eclipse. Our kitchen table looks strangely small. Our ceilings too low. I'm watching the front door and willing him to walk back out of it. Instead he bends down until his face is even with mine.
"She looks just like you," he says.
"You don't look like anyone special at all," I tell him. And I curse him. And I start a club to hate him. And I make a magic spell to get rid of him. And when she marries him, when we pack up our apartment and move into his house, when I change schools and have to eat the food he likes to eat, I don't talk to him.
"Anna," my mom says.
"What?" I say.
"Be nice," she says. "He's our family now."
our story
The pictures stay packed away. I unpack my stuffed animals and line them up against the wall of my new room. I put the smaller ones in front so they can see. I tell them our story. I had no mother, I tell them. I had no father.
"Tell me again," they say.
after the divorce
I sleep alone in my bed. I eat the food he likes to eat. I learn to be quiet and when he leaves, when he packs a suitcase and slams the door, I'm glad.
He moves out and we stay in his house, my mom and me.
"Now we have a house," she says and she says it more than once. She wanted a house, I think. And then I think, now we have a house. Now, I think, we'll be happy.
"A house is like a raft on the ocean," I tell her. And I tell her not to cry.
After the divorce, I think things will go back to how they used to be. A return to the tell-me-again times. After the divorce, I think, we'll unpack the photos and hang them on the wall. After the divorce, I tell her how good she looks. And she really does look lovely in a sad, made-up kind of way. She wears a lot of burnt orange and dark red, dark green. She lightens her hair and talks about getting a face-lift.
But her eyes go dreamy when I speak and she never really listens.
I'm nine years old. Look, I want to say, you are beautiful. But she hates being at home with me. Having a child is another kind of defeat.
* * *
When she does get a face-lift, it's Armageddon — angry cuts and shiny black stitches, a runny egg yolk of yellow-blue bruises. Her mouth and eyes are swollen. I can't even look at her. I won't speak to her.
In the bathroom, I run the water in the sink and look at my face. I cross and uncross my eyes. I frown. I smile. I close my eyes and open them really fast to catch myself. I'm her little girl. Arms spread. I'm her five-pointed star.
All she wanted was a little girl and I'm that little girl.
"I can take care of you," I say. I say it out loud over the sound of the water and then I say it again. My voice is hoarse from not speaking for so long. I run into her room to tell her. I forget and leave the water on. I burst into her room.
"I can take care of you," I say.
But she needs quiet now, she says. The room is dark and she turns her bandaged face away from me.
"Not now," she says. She needs to heal.
waiting
Not now. The house is uneasy. Waiting. The worst part is that I'm alone. I watch a thin line of ants snaking through the kitchen. I put my face so close that my breath disrupts their path. They right themselves and keep on, winding along the wall and down the counter and back behind the refrigerator. I fill a pitcher of water and set it quietly on my mom's bedside table.
after the face-lift
After the face-lift there's a new dress. There's a George and then a Martin. Martin prefers the blue dress, my mom says. The new dress. George likes the yellow. Then there's Robert.
"He's the marrying kind," she says.
She doesn't bring them home to meet me, these new ones. And when she marries Robert, she doesn't bring him home either. He's not a gift to me. My mom's new husband and her new face stretch tight against the bones of her old one.
"We're going to be a family," she says when she gets back from the honeymoon. She's standing in the bathroom with bobby pins in her mouth, arms over her head, arranging her hair.
"Wouldn't you like that, Anna?" she says. "A real family?" She's curling pieces of hair and then pinning them up. There's a slip over her bra and her new face is pale, waiting to be made up. She doesn't meet my eyes in the mirror. She's married a man with two sons, I learn. She goes on, curling, twisting, pinning.
"And you must be Anna," my mother's new husband says when we meet. "This is Anna," he says, turning to his sons.
"Hi," I say. They're bigger, older than me, hunched over in identical jackets. Sullen, acne-strewn boys who look warily at my mom and me. My mom is not a gift to them either.
The five of us move into a big house in the suburbs outside of Portland. A big new house with a big yard and tall glass windows.
"I always wanted a house like this," my mom says and she sighs and puts her arm over my shoulder. "This," she says, "is the house I always wanted."
we're a family now
I don't want this house. I want to go back to the tell-me-again times when I slept in her bed and we were everything together. When I was everything to her. Everything she needed.
I unpack my stuffed animals and line them up against the wall of my new room. I put the baby ones in front so they can hear. I tell them our story. "I had no mother," I say. "I had no father." I was all alone and all I wanted was a little girl, I tell them. I pick a different one each time. "You," I tell a blue stuffed bear. "You are my little girl."
It's a deep Oregon summer and the sun fights its way into the yard through the dense pine. It's hot and every day I wear the same blue shorts and my favorite pair of sneakers. I cut my own bangs and my mom says they're crooked and half in my eyes. My room is upstairs, near her and the stepdad. The boys have their rooms downstairs.
"We're a family," my mom says. But we're not a family. We're something else.
the stepbrother
I'm on the living room floor eating cereal and watching cartoons in a patch of morning sun. It's Saturday, but school's out anyway. I spill the milk and wipe it up with the hem of my T-shirt. I go back to the kitchen for another bowl. I don't even see it coming. A sharp crack and the tall glass window shakes like it's been slammed with a rock. The television is suddenly loud.
I'm out the door, racing around the side of the house. My sneakers skid against the bark dust. By the time I get there, the younger stepbrother is already crouched next to the injured bird. I look up at the window and see the reflection of trees, the faint smudge from its body where it sped headlong into the glass.
The stepbrother picks it up and cradles it in his hands. Cups it close to his chest. The shade makes patterns on his face. There are patterns all around us. I'm holding my breath and I can feel my heartbeat. I can see the tiny movements of the bird's chest. I'm hoping for something different. The stepbrother is hoping. We're holding our breath. The stepbrother is close enough to touch. It's the sweaty middle of day. I'm hoping so hard I can feel the throb of it in my ears.
When it dies the stepbrother looks down at his hands. He doesn't say anything, just drops the little body in the bark dust and walks back inside the house and locks the door to his room.
I follow him and stand at the top of the stairs listening. I think maybe I can hear him, but then it's like I don't hear anything.
In the bathroom I look at myself in the mirror. I don't look like my mom anymore. I don't look like anyone. I look at my reflection. This lying house tricks the birds. Why do we live in this lying house?
I hate this house.
The TV is still on and I walk around the empty upstairs. The TV is so loud I can hear it from under my bed where I keep a blanket and my favorite stuffed animals. I climb under and gather them around me.
"We're a family," I say and hold them tight.
the dream
Nobody wants to be in the lying house. The stepbrothers stay away. They go to their mother's. They stay with friends. Their rooms are empty. My mom and the stepdad leave early to go to work. They come home late. They come in after I'm supposed to be asleep. They lean and laugh in the hall, bumping into things. They speak too loudly.
My mom opens my door and asks why I left the TV on, why all the lights are on. Her voice is strange. Then she walks away leaving the door open and I hear them leaning and bumping in their room.
I have a dream and in it everyone in the world is racing to the same place on the globe. I can see the whole globe and the frantic racing. It's a buzzing, like the static of the television and it gets faster and louder until I wake up. I fall back to sleep, but later the dream returns.
"Stay home with me," I say to my mom. "I don't want to be alone." It's morning and I'm watching her get ready in the bathroom that smells like the stepfather.
"You're not alone," my mom says. She's thinking of the stepbrothers. "And besides, you should make some friends. Don't you want to make friends?" And then she puts on her lipstick and blots it on a piece of toilet paper.
I want to tell her about the dream. Even awake I can hear the buzzing at the edges of things. I look down at my bare feet. Hers are already in stockings and heels. She steps past me.
"Have a good day," she says, leaving.
summer
Summer stretches out and my mom redecorates. She hires men who tear out all the carpeting and replace it with unbroken expanses of beige. The stepdad pays for everything. She buys bedroom sets, a living room set, and one for the family room. Everything matches. She paints my room yellow and buys me a yellow dress to match. I'm almost ten. I hate yellow dresses.
The stepbrothers won't let her touch their rooms. They lock their doors. They shun us. I hang around the hallway hoping they'll talk to me. We have imaginary conversations. I hate all the same things they do. I make fake blood out of the berries on the Oregon grape outside their window and hope they'll notice my smudgy fingerprints on the light switches. But they're like spies. They enter the house through the side door, close the vents so I can't hear them talk, eat their meals after I've gone to sleep.
fall
It's still hot when the school year starts. All the kids already know each other and I am too something for them. Too quiet or strange. Too sad, one girl says. I sit alone on the bus and stare out the window. I drag my backpack along the ground on the way home from the bus stop. I arrange my stuffed animals along the wall of my room, the little ones in front.
winter
At first I don't notice when the stepfather stops coming home. By spring it's over.
spring
"Why?" I ask my mom.
"Men leave," she says. "Just like my father," she says. "Just like yours."
the big house
It's raining when the stepbrothers emerge from their rooms. The divorce is almost final and they're moving out. They wear a uniform of worn sneakers and faded green army coats and they drag their stuff out of their rooms in large green duffle bags. They walk right past me in the hall without saying a word. Then they're gone and it's strange to see their doors ajar. The carpet in their rooms doesn't match the rest of the house.
I poke around looking for signs of them, but there's only a pile of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor. My mom watches me and then sighs and goes back upstairs. This time there's no crying. She rearranges the furniture and spends long hours at her new job. The one she has to dress up for and travel for. The divorce is decided and we stay in the big house alone, my mom and me.
"It's such a beautiful house," she says.
after the divorce
Everything changes.
My mom never goes downstairs. She doesn't mention the stepfather. She never mentions the stepbrothers. She comes home late and I don't know where she goes. She sprays her hair with hairspray and I stand in the doorway to the bathroom and watch. She sprays perfume on her neck and then leaves, turning off the light and stepping past me. I follow her around in my pajamas and she says, before she leaves, hurry up and get dressed. Then she takes her coat from the hall closet and a green leather briefcase that she leaves on a kitchen chair.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt. Copyright © 2012 Erica Lorraine Scheidt. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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