By Kara Machowski
In the early morning darkened classroom I could make out my white sneakers that lit up pink with every bounce. They were supposed to soothe the moments in-between, where my mind would wander, always to my dad, and memories that were ever fading. The fluorescent lighting flickered on and illuminated the classroom. Low desks and blue plastic chairs, the kind that had silver screws on the back that would inevitably catch my sun bleached hair. Painfully snatching long strands. I skipped to my table, the Baby Sitters Club table. We called ourselves that because all of the girls I sat with read the series, “The Baby Sitters Club”, although I lied and only read one. I read books like “Walk Two Moons”, “Out of the Dust” and “The Island of Blue Dolphins”. Samantha assumed the head of the table, pale skin and frosted hair and an ever arched back from ballet, she always boasted about.
“Hi.” Her voice squeaked.
“Hi.” I returned a nervous half smile. Everything I did now-a-days was only done with a sort of half-happiness.
“Good morning!” Natalie bounced, Florida tan, dripped in Limited Two. Then bubbly, bright teethed Brittany. The rest of the class filed in around us. By lunchtime we were drawing with colored pencils. I drew the ocean every time. Arrays of sky and deep azure blues.
“I loved “Kristy + Bart = ?”, how about you guys?” Samantha was coloring in brown, her version of her horse.
“Me too,” Brittany agreed, she glared at me with a feral smile.
“Yeah, I did too.” I felt my face grow hot.
“Yeah? What was your favorite part?”
“Uhhh-“
"Do you even read Baby Sitters Club?"
“You know Kara, my mom told me something.” Samantha leveled her voice.
“What?”
“She said that your dad didn’t really die because he fell asleep in the garage. She said he killed himself. He did it on purpose.”
The other girls stopped drawing, pencils still in hand, eyes on me. My body filled with heat and an acrid taste rose in my mouth as I dropped my pencil and slowly, what felt like ages, made way into the bathroom. My sneakers lit up the darkness as I locked the door, keeping the lights off. I slid against the cold hospital blue tiled wall and began sobbing. Heaving my chest and covering my mouth. I waited until I could wipe my tears and wash my face, I might be eight, but I still know how to compose myself. I held my head down all the way to Ms. Blanchett, and I led her outside the classroom into our open aired hallway. The sun crawled through prime colored square bars that were placed so that we didn’t fall through the triangle cut-outs, in the wall. Moss green palms waved through them.
“I want to go home.” The tears came again. I balled myself into my teacher’s lap as she stroked my hair for a minute or so. “I miss my dad.”
“I think you can make it through the day.” She patted me.
“I don’t think I can, not today.” I don’t know why I didn’t tell her what Samantha had just revealed to me, maybe because I believed her.
“Try it, if you feel like this again we’ll call your parents- err- mom and step-dad. Okay?” I agreed as she led me back through the blue metal door.
“I don’t want to sit over there.” I whispered and she led me to a table closer to the front of the classroom.
“Kara this is Flora. Flora, Kara is going to sit with you today, is that okay?” The dark skinned girl with slanted black eyes nodded her head.
“Hi.” She mustered as Ms. Blanchett walked away.
“I think I’ve seen you around, by my mom’s work,” I stated to the girl who I noticed lingering two doors down from the animal hospital that my mom worked at. It was positioned in a one-story outdoor complex. In the twenty or so business center was a bar that would open according the the Pittsburgh Steelers schedule, a French bistro that attracted $50,000 and over automobiles like a moths to a delicious light. A health food store before we knew the name "Whole Foods" The Dollar General, which ate up the change in my pocket on the weekends and a Thai restaurant.
“My parents own the restaurant.”
“My mom is the vet at the animal hospital. Do you want to play after school, if our moms say okay?”
“Okay.”
We played. We played that year into the next while I took a new resident table in our classroom. On weekends, we played violin for tips outside of Sawadee for potential customers. In our intermediate class, we were trained in Bach, Mozart and Tchaikovsky. We sourced acceptable cardboard from the recycling dumpster for the makeshift houses we built for our stuffed Beanie Babies, avoiding any that had touched the cream colored squirmy rice maggots that sometimes festered at the bottom. We skateboarded around the complex, attempting kickflips and bellied on surfboards in the Florida flat ebbs.
I lived with my mom, step-dad and step-brother, four and a half years my senior. We didn't get along unless he was getting something out of me. We shared cigarettes while I pretended to inhale so that if he were caught I would be "in trouble" as well. I was the opposing silent partner in amateur crimes. He found it amusing to throw rocks at a neighbor's home because the man was "gay", a term that I didn't understand to be infraction in our society in the nineties. However, my brother's sexuality, while still perceived to be "straight", would later be questioned as he befriended many gay man later in life. It was perhaps a retribution to his wrongdoings --a good deed only know by his own conscious which was surely tormented after his many lapses in good judgement, me being his most offended victim. I was a doll he used to "try anything new" on. The violent orange carpeting that haunted the darkest crevasses of my memories, from one vacation where the perversions began. It was followed by many years of soft, heart-skipping knocks on my door when our parents weren't home, which was most times of the weekdays after school or late in the night, always revealing wanting eyes and wet lips.
It was another sun drenched morning, while parrots nestled in the palms outside of my window screeched to the heating day. We lived in a wide wooden West Indies style two story house, on a peninsula off of the intercostal near the ocean, the street named after the isle of Queen palms that towered along one side of the tippet street. At night ground owls excavated themselves and cooed in the palms while police cars crept up and down the street, keeping watch of the elite homes.
When I spent the night at Flora’s we would watch Thai movies about lovers who would be separated by death, but each time they were reincarnated they found each other again, regardless of sex. I was amazed at how homosexuality was so accepted in the Thai community, which would later be understood. Her and I constantly shared the aroma of peanut oil, soy sauce and fried eggs. Before bed we would bathe in our bathing suits with a wooden ladle, scooping rain water that collected from a roof chute into a large, colorful basin.The four of us, her parents, Flora and I, all slept most nights together, sweaty on two mattresses pressed to one another, perched on squeaky metal frames, in tangles of thin sheets with the windows open and fans blowing. It was a family sin to open a window in Florida, even in the wintertime. I imagined myself receiving twenty Hail Mary's for a mosquito that entered behind anyone, even though my step-father was raised Jewish the Catholic church teachings remained ingrained in the blueprint of my soul from years of Sunday mass with my Polish grandparents and even my mother who would later identify as a Catholic Buddhist.
As my mother and I drove to her work on A1A as the biter-sweet blinding sun lifted heavy from the ocean, highlighting unruly strands in my mother’s thick, wavy hair. I always joined my mom at her work, a black sheep our household, and an act that most likely salvaged me from more secrets I would be forced to take in and hide, creating an ever-present monster of festering anxiety which gripped my stomach and kept me unhealthily lithe. Plus, in only four hours Flora would arrive with her parents to open up the restaurant and we were free to make up new and more interesting worlds.
“Are you going to play with Flora today?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you tried to make any other friends at school?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean, wouldn’t it be nice to have a friend who has a family like you do?” Confused, I thought about the days at home where my mom or step-dad would tell me to do something creative with myself as I lingered, bored and tippy bare toed in the kitchen, watching, asking. It happened so often I confused the term with them telling me to actually go create something. So I wrote picture books, still too short to reach the dials on the oven, but not too short to write. I locked myself in my bedroom, the corner of the upstairs of our home that I imagined to be a tropical scribes tower, as pages drifted; pages written, pages read.
As we circled the plaza to the rear, where employees parked, I spotted peanuts drying in a cardboard box that was cut open in the rear of Sawadee. Soon those peanuts would be sun roasted enough to be crushed into a tangy, sweet peanut dressing. We entered the animal hospital through the rear door and were met with the faint scent of lavender bleach, wet dog, and a bit of a foul stool that had yet to be cleaned up. We passed the barking Golden Retriever, the shaking Shitzu and wagging, howling hound dog. I was placed in my mom’s office, with a hairy couch and a small television. Every so often I would creep out, poke my head over a silver freezing metal examination table, and watch. Today my mom was spaying a medium sized orange tabby. Her legs were spread apart and tethered to opposite ends of the table. She had a blue sterile cloth covering her body, minus about a two inch incision where my mom’s gloved hands held glimmering metal forceps that looked like odd scissors, digging. The cats head stuck out from underneath the cloth, glazed over, piercing green wide eyes stared blankly at me.
“Are you spaying her?” I questioned.
“Yes, she’s getting spayed.” My mom’s eyes peered over magnifying loupes.
“How old is she?”
“She’s about six-months,” Betty, the Latino technician answered. My mom removed a light pink tube from the cat’s incision and cut it in half. She sewed a suture into one end.
“What’s that?”
“That’s her ovarian artery, we have to suture it so it doesn’t bleed out.” Betty smiled.
My mom then removed a pale sack, bits of blood clinging to thin tissue as she placed it on a sheet of stark gauze. She repeated the process as I grimaced each time she cut or sutured.
“You have to do it two times?”
“Yes, that’s because there’s two ovarian sacks.”
I scowled.
“Both sacks produce eggs, so if you don’t remove both of them, she can still get pregnant.”
I nodded.
“Honey, why don’t you go see if Flora is here?” My mom was now sewing up the tabby’s incision.
“Okay.” I shuffled my feet to the back door, opened it, and walked two doors down, following the scent of peanut oil and brine wafting from the open screen door where I heard oil sizzling. I am a Thai Ninja, I thought. Carefully, I opened the screen door and tiptoed, ducking low. I turned the corner to the back office, where Flora and I usually played Nintendo. The light was off, so in my quest to remain inaudible, I began to creep to the front of the restaurant.
“Hello daughter!” A familiar voice startled me. I raised myself and peered over the cloudy silver prep station to the ovens. It was Flora’s dad, Lake, feverishly prepping fried rice, soy in the bottom of the wok and fresh white rice smoldering into a pale yellow as thick steam bloomed, meeting the ceiling above Lake and trailing out the screen door, whose scent scattered into the alleyway. The creases in my lips curled into a grin and put a finger to them signaling “shhhh”. He nodded and pointed towards the head of the restaurant. As I peaked from behind the curtain I saw Flora, in a tee-shirt and baggy shorts, hair, raven and silk, was perpetually pulled back into a low, tight pony tail. Often times she was met with a “young man” or “he” by unassuming strangers. Sometimes we laughed, sometimes it hurt us both. A few times I attempted to give her a ‘girly makeover’. “Why don’t we put it in pigtails today?” Her nose would shrink and wrinkle as she took clasp onto her hair. “How about a tank top with those baggy pants?” She would humor me, only to take one look at herself in a mirror and tear it off.
I jumped from behind the curtain that separated the dining area from the kitchen and wailed. Flora casually turned her head while her mom, Payia, dropped a stack of bills she had been counting.
“Kara, you crazy!” She wailed. She picked up the stack and signaled me to her embrace. “Ah, my other daughter,” she sighed. Flora grabbed my hand and we escaped the small sitting area, decorated with portraits of elephants, crisp, single orchids, dyed to cobalt or deep violet, and placed in a tiny vase on every dining table. The grimly dusk blue carpeting was freshly vacuumed. A gaunt gold Buddha, with day old grapes and a small offering of wine was perched near the entrance. We passed Lake as he jammed the roasted peanuts into cinder.
“What you girls going to do?”
“Umm we’re going to play Nintendo Dad” I answered as we entered Flora’s office.
“O.K. but you girls having lunch soon, so get ready.”
I still hadn't eaten breakfast. Flora rolled her eyes as my mind began to play Russian roulette with the different types foods we could be served. Amongst the digital Mario soundtrack we heard Lake call our names to the viscid vinyl table placed in the rear of the kitchen. There were three porcelain bowls in front of each chair. Lake took his apron off and seated himself with us. I felt the afternoon sun filtering past the screen door and heating my back as I starred into my abyss of my soup. Flora was glaring at me, she held up two quarter sized, ringed alien objects to her ear lobe.
“What is that?” I squealed, reexamining my lunch.
“Shark ears.” Flora beamed, “they’re like rubber.”
Out-Asia-Ninja-ing me, Payia appeared above us.
“It is food. Lake made it. Eat. Don’t play.” She was the disciplinarian.
As the steam rising from my bowl began to dissipate I spotted the stretchy looking circles suspended with worm-like noodles, accompanied by what to me reflected, the innards of large dog testicles, and a few non-alien foods. Carrots, celery and onions. I glanced at Flora as she consumed the non-consumable. I followed suit, as Lake watched the two of us with a child-like grimace. I devoured the familiar at first, letting the boiled vegetables fill my stomach. I decided to conquer the shark ears. I situated the rubbery substance betwixt my teeth, then fighting my instinct to regurgitate, I squish the chewy seafood, which to my surprise is salty-sweet, and swallow.
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