in a child’s consciousness. Aren’t they are the building blocks of—something, surely?
After her ordeal I tried to help Jessica get better health care, with worrying results: when I accompanied her to a follow-up appointment with the surgeon and, at her request, tried gently to assert the concerns of family and friends about her rocky recovery, the surgeon told her never to bring another person into her appointment again; a replacement doctor I helped her find turned out to be even worse. Then her time on Medicaid ran out, leaving her without a doctor or any of the follow-up medications she was going to need and always suffered without. I found Jessica an overloaded but free health clinic that would go the many extra miles needed for its patients—so long as they managed to get there and keep appointments.
ORIENTEERING
The Path of Needles, the Path of Pins.
“Y’all are family,” Benny would say when it suited him, and, even though I was slightly younger than he was, he introduced me once as “the mother of all of us.”
Mother of us all, with the bottomless checkbook; but Mother of Dragons is what I needed to be.
The Path of Beercans, the Path of Weed.
I know there are stories they still haven’t told me.
The Path of Pit Bulls, the Path of Switches.
Path of Shotgun Shells, Path of Blades.
For a week at the worst point, sheriff’s deputies patrolled our road overnight and ran their engines at the end of our driveway.
The Path of Big Gulps, the Path of Pills.
The Path of Cigarette Butts, picked up and resmoked down to the filter.
The Path of Dollar-Brand Trash Bags, burst and leaking in the rain.
Map of Trauma.
The Map of Secrets.
THE PATH of Lice. Just to put it all in concrete, miserable perspective. Head lice are on the path that almost every kindergarten family walks. By first grade, at least. Everyone shared these, but the boys came to us to treat them, to wash all their clothes and graying towels with the hottest water and chemicals, to buy can after can of useless furniture and linen spray. Shuddering at the thought, I combed and combed their hair, searching for nits, until my eyes teared and burned beneath the yellow bathroom light. I’ve finally forgotten the scorching smell of RID shampoo, but for years, whenever I got tired, or was lying on the verge of exhausted sleep, behind my eyes I would see the bugs moving along the hair parts, see those tiny gray hyphens wiggling their routes through pale scalp, and I’d know that they weren’t gone, we didn’t get them all, they were coming back from somewhere, and we would have to start over.
“Come on, please check my head,” Michael would beg me for years to come, at the slightest itch of anxiety.
The only good thing: the lice kept crawling up Michael’s long, thin hair, so finally we were able to get it cut. For three years he’d had to grow it to fit the cute image of a baby biker or junior outlaw for Benny, with constant pressure on Michael to say that was his wish. His long hair infuriated his father’s family, which only intensified the unspoken battle. I had to smash down my opinions, but I couldn’t understand why, long or short, his beautiful hair had to be unshaped and raggedly uneven. But saying the first word about it would have conjured up a massive wave of critical subtext that could have shut everything down. “At least it makes him look neglected,” I said to his aggrieved grandmother Irene more than once, “so maybe someone will stop and pay attention.” “It’s just not the style anymore,” she’d always answer. “The least they could do is trim his bangs so he could see.”
I’d grown up through the 1970s, so to me, long hair was not so bad, though I recoiled from the idea of his being Benny’s mini-me. “But he has such a pretty face,” my mother would say, convinced the girlish angel-look made him more of a target than he was anyway. Plus, “looking like a girl” definitely mattered to Michael, causing him endless pain and fury, equaled only by his dread of causing Benny a single hurt feeling.
I hid behind the advice of teachers, who spoke carefully but unmistakably about hair length and the spread of lice. Michael and a girl in his class kept infesting each other, putting their heads together while working on the kindergarten learning center projects, the teacher said—that was how it always happened in their classes.
“It’s what the teacher said,” I told Jessica the third time around. “And the school nurse. That they’ll keep passing it back and forth.” The girl came to school with her hair in French braids, pulled back, or under a bandana.
And what Michael’s angry tears at being mistaken daily for a pretty girl couldn’t do, at least the lice did. His mother conceded that Michael could decide for himself about his hair, although he knew what she wanted. He was scared. He wavered. I know it’s now not acceptable to say what a boy should look like. But he got his hair cut, and afterward he looked like a boy. The lice never came back. To both of us, I think, it was an immense relief.
THE ROAD
My car was the constant—with or without children, Jessica and I seemed always to be in it. She had no license or car of her own for reasons both practical and dubious. She did drive at the times it suited her or when she could get access to a vehicle. (Benny had no license either, but he seemed more fearless and often found some roundabout way to get the uninsured cars registered, although one of Michael’s most persistent memories is seeing Benny unscrewing a license plate from a neighbor’s car and being told to go back inside.) And every time I see another economy car spray-painted flat black, as theirs was following one of Benny’s close calls with the highway patrol, I wonder why the occupants don’t realize it makes them a more obvious target. However, the overall lack of legal transportation seemed to be one way Benny kept a tight rein on Jessica and corralled her movements. Having lost multiple licenses, Benny really ran the bigger risk, but to me his gallantry in running that risk was one more control trap. Yes, when Jessica wanted something and had a car available, she did drive, although she seemed to prefer that I didn’t know it. In general, though, the notion that she could drive off on her own and be down the road and free, out from under Benny’s thumb, was little more than a fantasy.
But I don’t think Benny minded her going off with me. At least it didn’t arouse his usual suspicions of cheating—although he certainly didn’t share her excitement about school and her newly forming identity. Jessica loved being the good student, the one who talked in class, who was chapters ahead in the reading. It’s not that Benny was against education itself (the very thing he should have feared, had Jessica taken it much further), but the immediate possibility of Jessica’s meeting other men at the community college set him on edge, she told me. God forbid she might ask some random guy to light her cigarette, back in those days when you could smoke freely in entranceways and parking lots. Of all the forces working against her, from within and without, I’d bet that Benny’s possessiveness was the biggest factor in what ultimately doomed her efforts to take classes.
As we drove, Jessica shared grueling stories from her childhood; it’s a wonder she survived it and, understandably, generously, wanted better for her kids. It was from her I first understood that the notion of moving on from the past is just one more comfortable myth.
There’s moving, yes. Moving in spirals, sometimes in and sometimes out. And then there’s moving on, the comforting, hear-no-evil myth.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Like any good twentieth-century English major, I’d learned that
