14.
What could a Catholic education mean to two kids who thought “Noah’s Ark” was some old man’s forty-day piss stream?
Not much, truth be told. But for better or worse, it got them out of the house. Preschool hadn’t been offered; the twins never heard that word until they came to kindergarten. (They would learn a number of valuable words and phrases at St. Monica’s—covenant, forgiveness, only begotten, transubstantiation, Body of Christ, and sin .)
Toby was thrilled. Among other children, he flourished. School became his first obsession, and in many ways it lead to his second obsession—body measurements—which undoubtedly was the springboard for his greatest obsession—body mass.
Each day before sunrise, Toby dressed in the dark. He kicked McKenna’s mattress until she opened her eyes. Perhaps he knew she had been awake for hours. Perhaps this is why he kicked so hard.
The children slurped milky spoonfuls of Froot Loops or Honeycombs. They heard their father emerge from the master bedroom, where Misty and Audrey slept. They heard his loud ablutions, his bathroom routine of light switch snaps, water hisses, cupboard slams, gargles, and toilet flushes.
After twenty minutes, he stomped down the wooden stairs into the dining area wearing steel-toed boots and an untucked work shirt. His face was smooth, his hair parted flat to his head with a wet brush. The twins teased that he looked like a teenager. Eyelids puffy, he waved away their insults like mosquitoes and joined them in crunching a bowl of sweet cereal before heading out the door with a mumbled, “See ya.” Outside, the Catalina roared to life.
In the half-light, their backpacks like turtle shells, the twins left the house, carrying lunchboxes—Toby’s Six Million Dollar Man and McKenna’s Planet of th e Apes. They climbed the hill to Coit Ave., crossed. They walked five blocks, passing North Park Elementary, where the public school children were deboarding buses. Then it was six blocks up Elmdale hill, into the “good” neighborhood (Grandma Pencil’s term), past the row of “nice” houses (Misty’s term) with their manicured bushes and sprinkled lawns. At the thicket of trees that obscured Ascendance Lake, McKenna liked to step off the sidewalk into the brush, inhaling the fecund leaves and soil, hoping to see a robin, stooping to catch a glimpse of the calm water hidden between branches like a treasure. Toby marched onward without pause, turning left onto Assumption Drive, which inclined even farther upward until reaching another road, one narrow as a driveway that sloped downward into the church parking lot.
Beyond the lot, a one-story brick structure crouched in the shadows of sycamore trees. The yellow lights inside revealed barren classrooms waiting to be filled.
McKenna didn’t feel welcomed by the lights. Nor by the wash of warm air upon opening the door. Nor by the scent of ammonia and floor wax, nor the prickly rose perfume of Principal Potter-man, who arrived early and always left a robust cloud hovering at the entrance like some ghost self. The empty hallways filled McKenna with dread. The loneliness and abandonment were palpable. Every morning, she fought the urge to turn and flee, to sprint all the way home and jump back into bed, a bad dream averted.
Kindergarten, come to think of it, was a pretty accurate snapshot of McKenna’s entire life.
Each half-day was four hours of sensory assault. Kids vomited on desks, spilled blood from fat lips and over-picked noses. They smeared McKenna’s shoulder with paste. They jabbed her backside with pointy Elmer’s bottles. During lunch, they lost muffin chunks down their shirts before finding them later and throwing them at McKenna. Boys and girls alike screamed. Not endearing, helpless screams like Audrey’s. Rage, desperation, ecstasy—each fought for supremacy in those caterwauls, and frankly, they were upsetting.
McKenna retreated. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she was behaving exactly as her father did at Hanson Mold. While her fingers painted, or her mouth recited the alphabet, or her feet danced the hokey-pokey, her mind ran through a languid play-byplay of the washing of Audrey’s body parts: the wrinkled hands; the fingers like twigs, the nails like paper; the folds of neck spread carefully and soaped; the stumps at the ends of the legs, each bearing a soft pebble of skin she longed to pinch; the umbilical cord like a gnarled black root, hard as bone, that McKenna dabbed with the sudsy cloth until one day, like a loose tooth, it quietly detached, exposing Audrey’s navel, freeing her. There’s no going back now, McKenna had thought, and it struck her as a defin-ing moment. Audrey was locked forever out of the only home where she could be safe and warm, always.
By the time McKenna entered kindergarten, she’d learned how to handle Audrey’s mouth. Once something was inside it or attached to it—a rubber duck, a washcloth, a rattle—the mouth was satisfied; Audrey was satisfied. As time passed, the mouth’s urgency began to please McKenna. It needed, purely, and McKenna could fill that need, and it felt good to fill it.
As for Toby, he loved kindergarten. Not so much the learning and structure, but the being out in public and announcing his existence to the world. His assimilation was instantaneous. He rolled on the carpet in beet-faced tantrums, whipped muffin chunks at McKenna. He quickly established himself as a leader, a conqueror, a man among boys. All year he looked forward to June’s Field Day, when he could earn honest-to-goodness ribbons that would quantify the superiority of his body in shiny blue magnificence.