And Now You Can Go (10 page)

. . .

My feet are killing me.
My dogs are barking
.

I ask my mother if she works with any foot doctors. "It hurts to walk," I tell her.

She gets me into the busy schedule of a podiatrist she knows. He is tall and has difficulty breathing through his nose, which is surprising: it's a big nose.

"I won't charge you," he says, "on one condition." I panic.

"Tell your mom to get off my case in Surgery." I relax. "Is she a nag?"

He looks at me. "The worst." Then he smiles. "She keeps us on our toes. I adore her." This is the right thing to say.

He pumps up my chair, like at the dentist's office, but this chair goes even higher. Through the dirty window, I can see my mother's car in the parking lot.

The nurse, who has crooked teeth and a body that's so perfect I feel lewd looking at her, sprays my feet with disinfectant. She tells me she lives in Pacifica, how nice it is there.

I tell the doctor I don't know what's wrong with my feet. "It might be nerves," I add. "Why?" he asks, pulling on both my big toes at the same time. "What's going on?"

I figure that because he is a medical professional, this is all relevant. I tell him the story.

"You know," he says. "A woman I was dating had a stalker. The police wouldn't listen to me until I called up and said I was a doctor."

"Huh," I say. I'm waiting for him to say something else, offer some condolence or medical assessment. Will he call the police for me?

"That could have something to do with this," he says. "Pain is migratory, you know." He drums his fingers on the bottoms of my feet. My toenails are unpolished and ragged.

"I have to go make up the solution," he says. "I'm going to give you some shots." He hands me a blue marker. "Do me a favor," he says. "Circle the spots where it hurts."

When he leaves the room I hold the marker in my hand. I touch my feet. Then my thighs. I cup my breasts and then squeeze the hard rims of my ears. I don't know where to start.

At home, with round Band-Aids over my injections, I ask my mother why the doctor said she gives everyone a hard time.

"I'll have a patient on the table, ready, and the doctors are nowhere around. And where do I find the doctors?" She pauses for effect. "In the lounge eating donuts." She emphasizes "donuts." I know from previous conversations she thinks donuts are responsible for teenagers fighting and shoplifting— all that sugar.

My mother doesn't understand Americans that well. Certainly, she never got the idioms.

"I have to keep the doctors in line," she says. "Otherwise, when the cat's away, the mice dance and have a big pizza party on the table."

I drive to the airport to pick up my sister. I spot her outside the baggage claim. She's wearing a new coat—long and black and shiny. I assume it's the trend in England. Other than the coat, my sister looks the same: tall and with reddish-brown hair that double-helixes to her midback.

We hug and I smell her perfume. She always wears too much. "Hello, brown hair," she says.

She has blue eyes like me and a birthmark on the underside of her jaw that she's stopped camouflaging with concealer. The edges of the birthmark are jagged, like the base of a mountain on a relief map. She asks if we have to go straight home.

"No," I say. Suddenly, the possibilities seem endless. L.A., Vegas, Walla Walla! I feel strong, like the world has potential; we have a full tank of gas. "Where do you want to go?"

She wants to walk along the ocean, on a trail called Land's End. We drive there blasting club music she's bought in England.

"Isn't it great?" she asks. She's put her hair up in a bun. "It's awful," I say.

Freddie laughs. Her laugh is different, darker.

When we park I check the car doors twice to make sure they're locked. If Freddie weren't there, I'd check again.

It's the first walk I've taken since December second, the day in the park. My feet hurt when I remember this. But something's on her mind—her face looks deboned when she's troubled.

She asks how I am and I say okay. She already asked me on the drive. Beyond the hill that borders the trail lies a golf course. Sometimes you have to watch your head—you never know the skill level of the golfer. I spot an old golf ball on the trail, pick it up, and palm it in one hand, then the other.

I ask her why she came home. "I had a rough term," she says.

She tells me that her psychology tutor, the one she met with privately once a week, had been drugging her tea, telling her she was repressed, that she was Dora from Freud's case studies. The tutor made her say the word "cock." Made her yell it.

"Oh Freddie, I'm so sorry," I say. Then the rage kicks in. I get more upset about things that happen to her than to me. "I hope the university fired him," I say.

"Her," Freddie says. "What?"

"It was a woman."

"Oh my God," I say. "That's so weird."

She tells me she got assigned to a new tutor, but she's afraid of running into the old one. "I'm scared not because of what she did," Freddie says, "but because I'm sure she knows I turned her in."

"I know what you mean," I say.

By the time we get back to the car, we've collected eleven golf balls. Freddie tries to arrange them on the dashboard, but they roll out of place. "What the hell are we going to do with these?" she asks.

In my room, with my door locked, I open drawers and cabinets and scan my bookshelves like I do every time I'm home.

In my second desk drawer I find old letters from Nicholas, the troubled boy with mismatched eyelashes. The letters accuse me of cheating on him, of being "wet with another man's sweat." This was two years before we broke up. I had been faithful, always.

The phone rings: it's the representative of the world. "Just checking in," he says.

"That's nice," I say, and mean it.

"I wanted to make sure that … everything was on schedule." "What?"

"That you got your monthly visitor? I think she was supposed to come today."

"My aunt, yes, she came today, on schedule," I say. "You're so conservative." "I was
concerned
, not conservative. Okay, conservative too."

I try to think of something else to say. "Thanks for calling."

"If I'm stuttering," he says, "it's because I'm on a new medication."

After we hang up, I go through my childhood diaries. They're of varying sizes and covered with different textures and patterns: frogs, tulips, whistles, soccer balls. The one from seventh grade has stickers on it. One large oval sticker shows a woman crying; the bubble caption above her brown hair reads: "Oh my God, I forgot to have children."

I open this diary, from seventh grade, and read up on the group of girls who called themselves the Fine Nine. No one else called them that; it was their name for themselves.

In the spring of that school year, they organized a scavenger hunt for me. Stuffed through the vent-slot of my locker was a typewritten note: "If you want to find out why we hate you, follow this trail." The note instructed me to look behind the toilet in the third stall of the bathroom by the principal's office. There, a note told me to go to where the photos of aborted fetuses were kept in the bio lab. The note behind the dead fetus photo instructed me to go to the sewing room, and from there I was told to progress to the first-graders' hamster cage (where two hamsters had been married before the teachers discovered they were both male), which took me to the left-hand side of the far goalpost on the soccer field, where I unearthed a note that led me to the library, to a book about a girl who doesn't have any friends, the instructions pencilled in on page 62 taking me to the sixth hymnal in the fifth pew of the chapel; the directions found therein finally led me outside the lunchroom, where rolled up under the garbage can was located a mucky note, which I unfolded with the tips of my fingers and which stuck to my hands like wet lint. It read: "We hate you because you think you're the queen."

The Fine Nine still didn't talk to me after the scavenger hunt, even after I tried to plead my case: "I do not think I'm the queen. How could I think I'm the queen?"

My mother tried to console me. "Well," she said, "scavenger hunts take a lot of organization. I'm sure they wouldn't have put you through all of that unless they liked you
mol-tissimo
."

My father had his own solution. That night he came into my room carrying a hatbox. "I was just driving and it hit me," he said.

I was sitting at my desk with a calculator, trying to determine how many minutes remained until I graduated from eighth grade. "What hit you?"

"This idea. The best way to show someone that you're not something is to play the part. Make a joke of it."

My father, his wedding ring on his pinkie finger now that his hands had swelled with weight gain, opened up the hatbox.

"Ta-
dah
" he said. His thick, manicured fingers extracted an antique crown with fake diamonds and rubies. "I found it at a garage sale."

I put it back in the hatbox and placed the lid on like I was trapping something inside. My father got up and left the room. I waited a minute. Then I locked the door and lifted the crown out of the box. Standing in front of the mirror, I placed it on my head. I wore it until I went to bed.

I spend the morning of the twenty-third the same way I've been spending most mornings: staring out the front window of the house.

I watch the ebb and flow of cars: a stoplight stands at each end of our block. There's little pedestrian traffic this time of day, so I try to glimpse into people's cars. I'm surprised by how many people are driving by themselves. I'm surprised by how many red cars there are.

When the mail woman comes to our door, I hear the lip of the mail slot creak open and then slap shut. She's late today. All those last-minute Christmas cards and packages. I peer out the window and see her pushing her mail cart down the block. I get the idea to follow her, see what her route is. I know so little about people I see every day.

Trailing her is tough. I have to walk slowly and pretend to be examining the fronts of houses, their garage doors. The mail woman is wearing uniform shorts and leather gloves. The soles of her shoes are worn down an inch on the outside. She takes a right at the end of my block, on Wawona.

Up the stairs of houses and down again, she goes. She stops to pet an orange cat. "Hey, sugar," she says. She looks like the drawing of the mail woman in the brochure the podiatrist gave me. The brochure showed people who relied on their feet to get back to work after foot surgery. Maybe she was the model.

"Hey, Maria," a woman in a peach-colored bathrobe calls to the mail woman from her doorway. She descends the stairs in her slippers and hands the mail woman a check. "Merry Christmas!"

I follow Maria another block, until she turns around and looks at me with squinting eyes.

I think about posing as a stamp collector and asking when the next blues stamp is coming out, but decide against it. I turn around and run.

On Christmas morning, I wake Freddie up by reaching under her comforter and tickling her toes.

"Go away," she says.

"Come on," I say. "Let's go check our stockings."

The stockings were given to us by Freddie's godfather and are embroidered with our names. Freddies name is spelled wrong.

Christmas in our house is a practical matter: each year I'm given socks with seasonal patterns on them—candy canes and Santas, socks I'd wear only under boots—and thread for darn-ing them. This year my socks have reindeer jumping over the moon.

Also in our stockings are key chains attached to Rubik's Cubes. I can't even imagine what store still sells them. Stuffed into the toes are books: we each get
Emily Post's Etiquette
.

"Jesus," I say. I turn to a page—Ms. Posts tips for saying thank you to a date—and laugh. I look over at Freddie, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She's holding her book in her lap, crying.

Freddie hasn't told my parents what happened at school, why she came home for Christmas. I call Sarah in Ireland and wish her a merry Christmas. "It's already over, here," she says. "How was it?"

"I wish I had gone home," she says. "This Christmas, especially, I wish I had gone home. I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe that by being here it wouldn't seem as strange to not have him around, but it's worse." Since her brother's death, Sarah's voice has become thinner.

"What can I do to make you feel better?" "Tell me a joke," she says.

"I'll keep telling jokes until you feel better." "Okay," she says. "Deal."

I tell her all the jokes she's told me over the years. The one about the ten-inch pianist, the one about the wolverine, the one about Bob Dole and the wolverine. She loves jokes about Bob Dole and wolverines.

In the corner of the hallway, near a plant, my mother has a large pair of yellow decorative clogs. She got them in Holland. They're a foot long, and I stuff my reindeer-socked feet inside. They feel like boats. I spend Christmas walking around the house in them.

"Take those off," my mother says. "Those are for decoration."

I keep wearing them, even at the dinner table. They knock together if I don't watch out. With these clogs I could stomp out whole colonies of ants. I could walk on water.

My father tells a bad joke and I clap the heels together. My mother gets exasperated. "Take those off now, please." "What's your problem?" Freddie asks my mom.

My mother tries to justify her anger with a medical excuse: "I'm sure you're not doing your feet any good."

"Please, Ellis, you're upsetting your mother."

My father takes her side these days. This and other things he does never cease to catch my interest: that he gets up at five to make her oatmeal before she goes to work; that he turns on the outdoor lights when he knows she's coming home late; that once a month, he'll accompany my mother to an event where only Italian is spoken, even though he doesn't speak a word of the language.

I take off the clogs and place them in the corner of the room, their toes toward the wall, like those of a punished child.