One day we were looking for mints in Mommy’s drawers. She didn’t like candy but she liked her breath to be fresh, so she would put one in her mouth for a few moments then spit it into a handkerchief. She moved the hiding place but sometimes we found it. We knew to eat just one, no matter how hungry we were. Mommy counted, but one mint wasa plausible margin of error.
Mommy kept interesting things in her drawers. An old song book with bears on the front, a single white child’s flip-flop. Teddy was careless today. He pawed through her hose with damp hands.
‘She’ll notice, Teddy,’ I said. ‘Sheesh. You’ll tear them!’ He looked up and I caught our reflection in the mirror on the vanity. I saw it then, in his face. He didn’t care any more. Mommy wouldpunish us and make the body cry. She would put us in the big box with vinegar. But Teddy could just go downstairs. It was me who would feel it.
‘Ted,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t …’
He shrugged and took the box of mints from where it was neatly folded inside a camisole. Slowly, dreamily, he opened the tin and put it to his lips. He tipped it so that the mints flowed into his mouth. Some spilled from his lips and fell bouncing to the floor.
‘Ted,’ I whispered. ‘Stop! You can’t be serious, she will hurt the body for that.’
He shook the last mints into his mouth, which was already crammed with round white shapes. Even in my panic I could taste them, my mouth was filled with sweetness … I shook myself. I had to stop him.
‘I’ll scream,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring her.’
‘So what?’ he said, through a mouthful of clicking mints. ‘Bring her. You’ll feel it, not me.’
‘There are more ways to hurt than the body,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell her about your weekend place, and those cats. She will find a way to deal with that. I don’t know what it will be, but you know I’m right. Mommy knows how to make brains do things, not just bodies.’
He growled and shook his head at me in the mirror. Suddenly there was nothing in my mouth. The taste was gone. He had cut me off from our senses. He looked as surprised as me. We hadn’t known that was possible.
‘You can stop me eating mints but you can’t stop me telling,’ I said.
Ted took a pin from the cushion on the dresser. Slowly he drove the tip into the fleshy part of his thumb.
A red line of fire ran through me and I screamed and wept.
Ted stood before the mirror. His face held Mommy’s expression of clinical interest. Again and again he drove the needle home. ‘I’ll stop when you promise,’ he said.
I promised.
I understand something about life that Ted never has: it is too painful. No one can take so much unhappiness. I tried to explain it to him.It’s bad, Teddy. Mommy is nuts, you know that. She’s lost it. She’ll go too far and end us one day. Better to choose our own way out. We don’t have to feel bad all the time. Take the knife, knot the rope. Go hide in the lake. Walk into the woods, until everything goes green. The kindness of ending.Teddy tried to block his ears, but of course he could not shut me out altogether. We are two parts of the whole. Or we were supposed to be.
Shortly after that I tried to kill us for the first time. It wasn’t a very good try but it showed Teddy that he didn’t want to die. He found a way to silence me. He started playing Mommy’s music when he gave me pain. He gave me so much pain that the music became it, weaving through the air. The agony only stopped when I slipped half way down, into the dark freezer, leaving the body empty. I quickly learned to vanish as soon as the first note was plucked on the guitar.
Ted doesn’t know everything. I still fight him. And I am stronger than he thinks. Sometimes when he goes away, it is not Little Teddy who comes. It is me. When he finds himself with a knife in his hand – those times it is me, trying to do what should be done.
But I wasn’t strong enough. Ted had too good a hold on me. I had to make the cat do it. And that’s how we come to be where we are.
Ted
She must have suspected that it was all about to come down around her. The police had come to the hospital, to Mommy’s old work, asking questions. The children at the kindergarten where she worked now had got so clumsy. Previously Teddy had been the clumsiest and she had saved the big stuff, the stuff that left marks, for him. But recently Teddy wasn’t enough any more. There were too many children being stitched up who hadn’t fallen down.
Mommy had taken a long time to fix me, the night before. I was still shivering in the aftershock. I came into the kitchen for a glass of water. Mommy was standing on her tiptoes on a chair. She had a length of laundry line in her hands. On rainy days like today Mommy ran the washing line across the kitchen, to dry her stockings. Not pantyhose, she would never wear that.
‘Teddy,’ she said. ‘You are tall. Help me get this up here. The goddamn thing won’t go over the beam.’ It was funny to hear her swear in that elegant, accented voice. I climbed up on the chair and threw the line over the crossbeam.
‘Thank you,’ she said, formally. ‘Now go and get some ice cream from the store.’ I looked at her, startled. We had ice cream once a year, on her birthday.
‘But it will rot our teeth,’ I said.
‘Please do not argue with me, Theodore. When you get back, there will be some chores for you. Can you remember everything I am about to say? You must not write it down. And I am going out almost immediately, so I will not be able to tell you again.’
‘I think I can remember,’ I said.
‘There is something I need you to dispose of. I will leave it here, in the kitchen. You must take it out to the woods. You will have to wait until dark to remove it from the house, because you are not allowed to bury things in the woods.’
‘Yes, Mommy,’ I said. She gave me ten dollars, way too much for ice cream.
