Suitable Precautions Read online

  “Elaine,” my mother said again, more sharply. Mr. Crisander’s arms kept gliding towards me, saying, “Mickey, Mick-Mick,” until I felt Mickey shift under me. She made a noise that was almost a honk as Mr. Crisander picked her up. He moved effortlessly, like Mickey weighed nothing at all. He climbed the stairs and went inside without saying anything to us.

  “John,” my mother started, “if there’s something—” but the door was already closed. Nate crouched by the tire. My cemetery blouse had pig blood on it, and my mother held her arms out in front of her, her wrists limp.

  “Let’s go wash our hands,” she said.

  It was a surprise to all of us that Mickey didn’t die. She was back a few days later, lying in the bay window of Mr. Crisander’s living room on a new and very plush white bed. Her back end was wrapped in gauze and an adult diaper with a hole cut out for her tail. Mr. Crisander changed her diaper every few hours, and it must have hurt her for him to do it; as soon as he started to unfasten the sticky tabs at the sides, Mickey’s mouth opened and closed and we knew she was crying. My mother told us that she heard Mr. Crisander had taken a leave of absence from his job at the Veterans’ Hospital. She tried phoning him, but he hung up as soon as she said, “John, it’s Natalie.” Nate and I left cards on the front porch, addressed to Mickey, but we saw them unopened in the recycling bin on garbage day. Mr. Crisander fed Mickey with a dinner spoon out of a large bowl and gave her water with an eye dropper. They did that for weeks, but Mickey’s legs didn’t seem to get any better.

  On weekends Nate and I sat on the sidewalk outside Mr. Crisander’s house and watched Mickey blink at us erratically. Sometimes we blinked back. Mickey didn’t seem all that bad, we said. My mother agreed. “Some of the patchier parts of her skin look better,” she noticed when she came to get us for dinner. Mr. Crisander ignored us, but he talked to Mickey a lot. Sometimes he turned her bed around so she was able to see the television while he watched old westerns. He even hung a cat toy from the ceiling for her, and Mickey batted it around and looked happy.

  It was July before Mr. Crisander let us apologize. We were playing outside his house in our cemetery clothes. The sidewalk was cool, even though the sun was starting to steam the dew off the brown grass. It was getting hot and soon it would be scorching. Our mother was going to stripe our noses with neon green zinc, no matter what we had to say about it. If we didn’t want skin cancer, she said, we were just going to have to put up with looking like idiots once in a while.

  Nate leaned back on his elbows and watched Mickey blink. I drew pictures of pigs with sidewalk chalk. I made dozens of Mickeys, some with legs and some without, but all of them with big smiles on their faces and little noise lines coming off of them like they were alarm clocks. I was working on a very large and purple Mickey when Nate tapped my arm with his foot.

  “Elaine,” he said. “He’s looking.”

  Mr. Crisander stood in the window and crossed his arms. He was wearing a bathrobe, and he had Mickey’s bowl in one of his hands. Mickey was stretching her leg out at the food, but Mr. Crisander just kept staring at us. We had been waiting for this. We were sorry. My mother said that acceptance was the last stage of grief and we couldn’t rush Mr. Crisander. We could only make offerings to him, and to Mickey. “Sidewalk chalk is good,” she said. “If he’s only made it as far as the anger stage and he flips out, I can just stretch the garden hose over. Sometimes guys like him flip out.”

  Nate and I stood up and waved to Mr. Crisander. He didn’t wave back. Nate shouted, “Our thoughts are with you and Mickey at this difficult time.” I pointed to the Mickeys on the sidewalk, their smiling faces like blue and green and purple suns, glowing, and their sound lines speaking to me: Hi, Elaine. I see you.

  Mr. Crisander drew the curtains.

  “Anger stage,” Nate said.

  I drew a few more chalk pigs and Nate watched the Mickey-shaped shadow behind the sheers. We were hopeful.

  Mr. Crisander came out onto the porch. He had changed into bright blue jeans and a white t-shirt with sleeves that went past his elbows. He started for the sidewalk. Nate buttoned his suit jacket and I brushed the chalk off my hands. Mr. Crisander stood on his lawn and studied the upside down chalk Mickeys.

  “Do you know where pigs like Mickey come from?” he asked.

  We didn’t.

  “Vietnam,” he said. His eyes paused on the giant purple Mickey. “My son lives there.”

  “You have a son?” Nate was surprised. Mr. Crisander was terrible at baseball. “What’s he doing in Vietnam?”

  “Does Mickey ever get homesick?” I asked.

  “Let’s have some Kool-Aid.” Mr. Crisander said. “Mickey misses you two.”

  We had never been inside Mr. Crisander’s house before. My mother drove us to and from the baseball games and sat in the stands and read a magazine. She said that the baseball diamond was one thing but a person’s house was another. If Mr. Crisander ever invited us in, we were supposed to check with her first. “All I’m saying is, better safe than on Geraldo,” she said. But Mr. Crisander had never asked before and he might not ask again. Nate and I wanted to see Mickey. We followed him up the front walk.

  His house was the same as ours—the living room was to the left of the front door, and on the other side there were twisty stairs to the basement, and down the middle, a hallway that led to the kitchen—but Mr. Crisander’s house seemed bigger because it was so empty. In our living room we had a sofa that turned into a bed, a loveseat, a bookshelf, and a big coffee table that my mother buffed with Pledge before my aunts came over. Mr. Crisander only had a rabbit ear TV and a VCR, and an olive green wingback chair that was rubbed down to beige on one side. Mickey blinked at us from her bed in the window seat.

  “Look who’s here, Mickey,” Mr. Crisander said loudly. We stood in the alcove and waved. Mickey blinked back.

  “She’s doing a lot better,” Mr. Crisander said more softly to us. “But the vet says she’s a little heavy from the lack of exercise. I’m thinking of making her a wheelchair she can power with her front legs.”

  Mickey’s front legs looked like spindly little toothpicks that had been jammed into her giant watermelon body, but we didn’t say anything.

  “We’ll be in the kitchen if you need us, Mickey,” Mr. Crisander shouted. “Her hearing’s going,” he said as we walked down the hallway.

  Mr. Crisander dumped two packets of Kool-Aid powder into a big blue pitcher, but he filled it to the brim without even measuring and he didn’t stir for long enough. The Kool-Aid tasted like water but looked like pale blood.

  “Would you like to see Mickey’s room?” he asked.

  “Mickey has her own room?” I couldn’t believe it. Mickey was the luckiest pig in the world.

  “We have bunk beds,” Nate said as Mr. Crisander took us back down the hall.

  “Well, pigs aren’t very good with ladders,” he said.

  Mickey’s room was painted light purple. She had a wooden scratching post drilled into the floor and a large rope with big knots that was probably a toy. There was a giant teddy bear losing his stuffing from a hole in his face, and a beanbag chair with a Mickey-sized depression still in the middle of it. In the corner of the room there was a large doghouse in the shape of an igloo. Inside it we saw a fluffy pink comforter. Mickey also had a radio. It was set high on a wooden shelf near the top of the window, and it was tuned to the same station my mother liked.

  “What do you think?”

  Next to the radio was a small picture in a gold frame. The photo was blurry and old, the corners of it yellow and blotchy. It was even harder to see because it was up so high, but we could tell it was of a woman with long dark hair and tiny eyes. She wore a funny-looking pointed hat that cast a big shadow over her face, but I still saw that she had a hand over her mouth. She might have been smiling.

  “Is that your wife?” Nate pointed. Suddenly it seemed possible that someone like Mr. Crisander might have a wife.

 
“No,” Mr. Crisander said, “she’s not.”

  Nate and I finished our drinks. “Thanks for the Kool-Aid. It was really good,” I lied.

  Mr. Crisander told us we were welcome any time we liked. Any friend of Mickey’s was a friend of his, and bygones were bygones.

  “Maybe on Friday night you guys can come over and watch a movie,” he said as we made our way to the front door. “Give your mom a break. I’ll make popcorn.”

  Maybe, we said, but right now we had to go. It was Sunday and we were already late.

  POSES

  YEAH, ALICE WILL DO IT, I’M SURE. She’s always ready to do anything I say, just sometimes she makes me go first. Like one time I asked her if she wanted to look at my dad’s magazines, the ones he keeps in the firebox. Which is kind of a weird place to keep them, I think, because they get all full of wood shavings and stuff and then mice pee on them and I’m like, Dad, hello, learn how to turn on the computer, why don’t you? But whatever, maybe these are what he likes. Women with retro haircuts and furry beavs wearing high heels and making cupcakes. Still, like you couldn’t find that on Google. But the point is that Alice was all like, Sure, I’ll do it, whatever, but it was my idea and Alice made me open the box.

  There was a picture of this woman sitting on a bed with her legs open. And I mean wide open. She had her fingers down there, like she was checking to make sure that everything was in the right place, or something, but her eyes were looking off into the top right corner of the room in a way that made you wonder what she was thinking about. Maybe something like, Is my dentist appointment on Tuesday or Thursday? or What time did that pot roast go in the oven? Touching herself the whole time like the answers were in her hoo-ha, which is the word my mom uses instead of vagina. Lauren, she’ll say to me in the summer, you should get out of that wet bathing suit before you rot your hoo-ha. I don’t know why, but all I can picture when she says that is a big hot air balloon full of mould. Go figure, but it makes me put on underwear.

  The woman on the bed had her mouth open, not in a smile, but you still saw her teeth, white like she’d never puckered up to anything but bright clean sunshine. Really you know that no amount of Colgate or Ivory or even Javex will ever get that mouth clean. Which is the point, obviously.

  Alice said, Doesn’t your mom get mad about these?

  I thought about that. I tried to imagine my dad taking the old Leica off the shelf in the bedroom closet and saying, Okay, Karen. Sit on the edge of the bed. Spread your legs. Yep, be more pinchy with your fingernails. Now, look at the corner of the ceiling like you’re trying to decide which of the kids’ Halloween costumes to sew next. And my mom, purple spider veins on her thighs, holding the pose like she was sitting for one of those oldie timey photographs you can get at Pioneer Village, saying through her closed teeth, Are you almost done, Eric? I think the dishwasher’s finished and I don’t want spots.

  No, I said to Alice. I bet she probably doesn’t mind. And Alice said, Well, I would. Who’d want her husband looking at pictures of other girls’ you-knows. And I was like, What, hoo-has? Snatches? Twats? But Alice gave me this look and said, God, Lauren. Sometimes you don’t know when to quit.

  I get that a lot.

  Sorry, my arm is tired. Okay, I’m good.

  Yeah, Mrs. Ogilvy said those exact words to me, except for the part about God, because I don’t think you’re allowed to talk about God at school anymore. Not like when my mom went to school and they made her pray before every math test and spelling bee, and do creepy stuff like kiss her crucifix before trying to jump over the pommel horse in gym. But then again, what do you expect when you go to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow and all your teachers are named Sister Mary Jehosephat, or whatever? So Mrs. Ogilvy didn’t say God, because I don’t go to a Catholic school, and because if anyone’s got a pickle up her bum about what you’re allowed and not allowed to do it’s Mrs. Ogilvy, but she definitely said, Lauren, sometimes you don’t know when to quit.

  She said it because I did this thing that I do sometimes, this thing where I fall over. I’ve perfected my technique so it looks really painful, but it isn’t. I roll my eyes back in my head so people can only see the white parts, and then I twist my lips up into this weird kind of face. I’ve learned to keep my mouth closed and my teeth clenched so I don’t bite my tongue. Then I click my shoulder blade out of place—I’m double-jointed—and jerk my shoulder up to my ear. After about a half-second I let one side of my body, I’m better at the left side, go limp and I just kind of crumple in on myself. Blam. I jerk my left arm up at the elbow in kind of a spastic way when I do it, so it looks like maybe I’m having a seizure or a stroke, or something, but really it’s for balance. It’s a controlled fall.

  I got the idea from reading this book by a girl with epilepsy. The girl had to go to this special school for epileptics that was run by nuns, and one of the things the nuns taught them to do was fall. That way if the girls felt a seizure coming on, they could fall on their own time and be on the ground when it came, and they wouldn’t seize standing up and crack their heads open. I don’t know how the nuns knew what they were talking about. I mean, they were nuns, not physiotherapists, right? But their training methods made sense. First they got the girls—they were all girls—to fall into a swimming pool, so they could get used to the feeling of falling, the loss of gravity, and stuff. Then they made them practice the same sort of thing but on these cushy gym mats. The girl in the story described the process in very poetic terms. She wrote that the girls in the water were like spreading lilies and that the girls on the mats were like drifting snowflakes, and all of that. It was cool to read but not all that helpful when it came to learning how to fall, especially because I don’t have a pool or a cushy gym mat and so I had to start with my bed, which was okay, and then move on to thick basement carpet, which gave me rug burn.

  Eventually I got it, though. At first Alice thought it was stupid, but then I showed her that it’s actually pretty crazy. Like I said, sometimes I just have to do stuff first.

  I used it at this variety store across the street from the school. The man behind the counter is an Indian guy with a turban. He’s got this weird rolled-up twist of hair that comes out from the turban on one side, goes under his chin and then gets tucked up into the turban on the other side. It kind of supports his double chin. I know that’s not the reason behind it, but it seems sort of rude to ask, Hey, what’s with that hair strap that you’ve got under your chin? So I just let it go. I went in there one day and asked him for a pack of cigarettes.

  Belmont Lights, I said, leaning on the counter in front of the candy bars and trying to play it cool. Like maybe if he noticed that I wasn’t staring at his hair strap, he wouldn’t give me a hard time about the cigarettes. They’re for my mom, I said, pointing across the street to a car that had a bored-looking woman in it. The woman was checking her watch and flipping her hair in the rear-view mirror, putting on lipstick and drinking a coffee, all at once. She looked like the type who sent her daughter for cigarettes, I thought, but the guy hesitated. He looked at me like maybe I was just another punk kid trying to shove jawbreakers in my pocket when he turned his back, which, for the record, is not the kind of person I am at all. I had already calculated the exact change for the cigarettes. So I decided to fall.

  I rolled back my eyes and twisted my mouth and twitched my shoulder and then did the arm thing. Blam, there I was on the floor in front of the counter, a few chocolate bars spilling off the shelves, and the guy looking like he was going to crap his pants because now he had a dead girl in his store. I got up quickly and was all like, Sorry, sorry. My mom . . . I need to go. I acted all embarrassed and apologetic and scared, like my mom, waiting in the car and plucking her eyebrows, was going to beat me if I was five minutes late with her cigarettes. Like maybe I was subject to all kinds of nic-fit beatings and that’s why I had the falling problem. I don’t know what he thought, but he gave me the cigarettes and hustled me out of the store. I’m a really good ac
tress.

  From then on, I’d just walk into the store and he’d have a pack of Belmonts in his hand like that, like the faster he sold me the cigarettes, the less chance there was of me falling and dying in his store and clogging up the aisles that were already jammed with kids who were trying to tuck porno magazines into the sleeves of their jackets. He had enough to deal with, I guess, so it was just easier to sell the cigarettes to the girl with the exact change and the freaky falling problem and not question it. It worked out well.

  One time, though, the regular guy wasn’t there. It was some young dude in a homemade t-shirt that said Sikh and Destroy on it. For a second I thought he might be cool with just selling me the cigarettes right off, but then I thought I’d better do the falling thing, just to be safe. But because I was out of practice, I actually hit my head on this giant Doublemint gum cardboard display and gave myself a little cut. It wasn’t a big deal. Anyone who has taken the St. John Ambulance babysitting course knows that head wounds can really gush and it’s usually not something to go ape about. Evidently this guy hadn’t taken the course and he completely freaked out. He ran out of the store, shouting for an ambulance, a doctor, the police, you name it. It was kind of ridiculous. There he is trying to be all tough and religious in his Sikh and Destroy shirt and he’s crying and waving his arms because a twelve-year-old girl knocked over a gum display thing. I tried to shout at him that I was fine, to never mind about the cigarettes, but by that time there were people running down the street towards the store. Even the crossing guard man who has Down’s Syndrome was coming over to see what was wrong. Seriously.

  Mrs. Ogilvy was on bus duty that day and she was the first one there from the school. Mouth open, she saw my bleeding forehead and the whole smashed up Doublemint display. She leaned forward, moving her whole body back and forth like she was one of those drinking bird toys. That’s when she said it: Lauren, sometimes you don’t know when to quit. You almost felt like the words For God’s sake were on her tongue, but they never came out, even though I suppose we weren’t technically at school and so it was fine to mention God.