Jumping the Scratch Read online

  “Death leaves a lingering odor,” she said.

  “So does life,” Sapphy told her.

  Sapphy packed up and moved to the trailer in Wondrous Acres, where she lived by herself for a few years until she had her accident at the cherry factory. One minute she was standing there watching cherries go by on the conveyor belt, and the next thing she knew, she was lying in a hospital bed with her head all bandaged up. She doesn’t remember a thing about how it happened. She woke up in the hospital with a terrible headache, her hair shaved clean off, and twenty-seven stitches marching like a line of black ants across her scalp. We were told that a big metal pipe had come loose and fallen from the ceiling, hitting Sapphy square on the top of her head.

  While she was still in the hospital, a lawyer came to visit, and Sapphy signed a bunch of papers. After that, instead of a paycheck she got a disability check from the Cheery Cherry Corporation every month. The check wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to mean she didn’t have to work anymore. Even so, she couldn’t have kept living in the trailer. At least not by herself. After the accident Sapphy was missing more than just her hair.

  It was as if somebody had come into her head with a little pink eraser and gone to town rubbing things out. Not remembering the accident wouldn’t have been so bad if that had been all there was to it. But the blow to her head caused Sapphy’s memory to develop a skip, like an old phonograph record with a scratch. Although she could remember very clearly everything from her past right up until the moment the pipe fell, she lost the ability to make any new memories. Things that happened after the accident stayed with her only for about half an hour, and then they faded away just as if they’d never happened.

  I once saw an episode of The Three Stooges where Moe got hit in the head by a falling flowerpot and lost his memory. He couldn’t remember his own name or recognize the other stooges at all. He staggered around in a daze, seeing stars and hearing birds tweeting, until Curly accidentally hit him in the head with a long board and suddenly Moe was cured.

  In real life amnesia doesn’t work like that. Sapphy didn’t forget her name, and she knew who my mom and I were when we came and saw her in the hospital. But if I told her a good joke, she’d laugh her head off, and half an hour later not only would she have forgotten the punch line, but she wouldn’t remember that I’d ever told her the joke.

  I knew better than to believe hitting Sapphy in the head a second time would cure her, but I sure wished it could be that easy. I felt sorry for her, but I remember thinking she was lucky at least in one respect: She wasn’t to blame for her misfortune. That pipe would have fallen no matter what. She couldn’t help it if she was standing under it when it happened. It wasn’t her fault. But I was the one who let Mister outside that night, and I was the one who told my father to go away, and when Old Gray asked me what my favorite candy was, I was the one who told him butterscotch.

  4

  IN SPITE OF WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO SAPPHY, RIGHT after we got to Traverse City my mother took a job herself at the Cheery Cherry canning factory. She didn’t have any choice; it was the only place in town that was hiring. She worked the late shift because it paid more, but it meant I barely saw her. She went to work at eight o’clock at night and didn’t come home until four the next morning. It was pitch-dark when she came in, and she was always careful not to wake me as she tiptoed through the kitchen and on into the back where her room was. When I got up in the morning, I’d find my toothbrush laid out on the edge of the bathroom sink with a fresh stripe of toothpaste she’d squeezed onto it for me.

  Money was tight. The only extras my mother allowed herself were cartons of menthol Kools and six-packs of diet cola because she was addicted to both. Every day she sent me to school with a bag lunch containing a peanut butter sandwich, a can opener, and a can of cherries with a damaged label, which she got for free at work. The cherries were for dessert, and I was supposed to use the juice to help wash down the sandwich.

  “Two birds with one stone,” she told me.

  Eating cherries day after day, I developed a deep hatred for them, but at least later on I found a use for the empty cans.

  In case you don’t know, northern Michigan is cherry country. Seventy-five percent of the country’s tart cherries are grown there. Whether they want to or not, anybody who ever lives in northern Michigan carries around a bushel of cherry facts in his head for life. Here’s another one: The average cherry tree produces approximately seven thousand cherries a year, which is enough to make twenty-eight deep-dish cherry pies.

  There was no TV reception at Wondrous Acres, so it wasn’t even worth trying to watch. We had a radio, though. When I got up, I’d turn that on low so I wouldn’t wake anybody, tune in one of the Detroit stations, and read while I ate my breakfast alone at the little table in the corner of the kitchen.

  That year I became what I guess you would call a reader. I took tons of books out of the library at school, plus I read whatever my mother left lying around, even the sappy paperback romance novels she bought off the spinning wire racks at Kresge’s. I read because the words made noise, and the noise filled my head, and that gave me at least a little break from having to think about the dumb things I’d done to mess up what had been a perfectly good, normal-as-cornflakes life.

  That afternoon, I was standing at the counter, pouring myself a glass of milk, when Sapphy appeared, wearing her pajamas and a nubby old pink robe. Her hair had grown back, but it was uneven and short, and she didn’t like to comb it because she said it hurt her head. She always looked like she’d just woken up, and the only time she ever bothered to get dressed was when my mother took her downtown to see the doctor.

  “Is that you, Jamie?” Sapphy said. “Golly, how you’ve grown. What on earth are you doing here, sweet thing? I wasn’t expecting you, was I?”

  I was used to this. Sapphy was always surprised to see me when I came home from school each day, even though my mom and I had been living there with her for months. I opened The Hobbit, pulled out the gum wrapper I’d found on the bus, and handed it to her.

  “I brought you something,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “I used to collect these when I was a little girl, did you know that?” she said, taking the wrapper from me and holding it up to admire it as if it were something special.

  “He knows about your wrappers,” said Marge, coming into the room with a gossip magazine in one hand and one of my mother’s diet colas in the other. “We all know about your wrappers.”

  Marge was the home nursing aide. She came every morning before I left for school to watch over Sapphy while my mother was sleeping, and she stayed until five, except on the weekends. Marge never came right out and said it, but I don’t think she liked any of us very much, especially not Sapphy. The insurance company paid for her to come, and we needed the help, but I hated the way she treated Sapphy. I wished the insurance company would pay for me to stay home from school and take care of her instead.

  “I’m sorry. Do I know you?” Sapphy asked, looking at Marge as though she’d never in her life laid eyes on her before.

  “Here we go again.” Marge sighed. “You know me, and I know you too. Now let’s go have a pill, and while we wait for it to kick in, you can add that wrapper to your chain.”

  Sapphy looked confused, but she let Marge take her by the arm and lead her back to her room.

  “You can’t be talking about that old gum wrapper chain I used to have. I haven’t seen that thing in years,” Sapphy said.

  “Uh-huh. Not since this morning,” said Marge.

  Both Sapphy and my mother had collected gum wrappers back when they were kids. They’d used only the silver foil part of the wrappers, folding and hooking them together into zigzaggy chains. There had been a fierce competition between the two of them to see whose chain would get to be the longest. My mother’s got lost or thrown out at some point along the way, but not long after we moved into the trailer, we found Sapphy’s gum wrapper chain
curled up in the corner of an old box of junk high up on a shelf in the back of one of the closets.

  Sapphy’s accident had made her unsteady on her feet and clumsy with her hands. It was my mother’s idea for her to work on the wrapper chain to help improve her coordination. Sapphy seemed to enjoy it. It brought back pleasant memories for her, and she would reminisce, telling the same stories over and over again without realizing we’d heard them all before.

  The wrapper chain was kept on a hook on the back of Sapphy’s door. She liked the way the light from the little window over her bed caught in the folded foil and made it sparkle on sunny days. She liked anything that sparkled. I read somewhere that crows are like that too. If you leave a diamond ring outside on your windowsill, a crow will fly right down and steal it if you’re not careful. I think maybe Sapphy was a crow in another life. She looked like one, the way she tilted her head when she listened, and she sure was crazy about those sparkly foil wrappers.

  I carried my glass of milk out into the living room, pulled my math workbook out of my backpack, and started going over the homework problems. Pretty soon Marge appeared with a basket of dirty laundry in her arms.

  “I’m going to go put a load in the machine,” she said. “I won’t have time to get it in the dryer before I leave, though. Can you remember to do that later?”

  I was in the middle of trying to solve a difficult math problem.

  “Jamie!” she said sharply. “I asked you a question. Can you please remember to put the laundry in the dryer?”

  Have you ever noticed that some people take it personally when you don’t answer their questions right when they ask them? Marge was like that, and so was Miss Miller. Whenever she called on me in class, she’d stand there, tapping her foot, saying, “I’m waiting, James. We’re all waiting.” I didn’t understand why she called on me. It’s not like I ever raised my hand. I didn’t want to answer her questions, or Marge’s questions either. Or anybody else’s, for that matter.

  5

  “WELL?” SAID MARGE IMPATIENTLY.

  “I’ll remember,” I said.

  “Laundry isn’t supposed to be a part of this job,” she complained as she dug around in the jar of change my mother kept on the counter, looking for quarters. “But somebody’s got to do it, and as usual I guess it’s gonna be me. Watch her while I’m gone, Jamie. You hear?”

  Mister used to like to follow me around the house, purring and rubbing against my legs, but Sapphy would follow me around and talk.

  “I know this is going to sound crazy,” she said as she wandered out into the living room, where I was hunched over my workbook, still working on that same math problem, “but I don’t remember getting this haircut. The last time I looked, I had a full head of hair, and now look at me. I look like a caveman. I’ve had the same gal doing my hair for umpteen years, and she’s never done anything that looked like this before.”

  “They shaved your head at the hospital, Sapph,” I told her. “You got hit in the head at the factory, and they shaved off your hair.”

  Sapphy looked surprised. She was always surprised when we told her about the accident.

  “I got hit in the head?” she said.

  I nodded. She touched her scalp with her fingertips and winced.

  “No wonder it hurts,” she said. “I thought I must have banged it on the corner of the medicine cabinet yesterday or something.”

  This discussion, word for word, including the part about the corner of the medicine cabinet, had taken place countless times. When it started, you had two choices. Either you could sit there and answer the questions about what had happened and when and how, or you could try to distract her.

  “You want to play a game?” I said, opting for the latter and hoping to keep her occupied until Marge returned from the laundry shed.

  “What game?” she asked, brightening a little.

  Sapphy liked to play games. She told me she and her sisters had played jacks and hopscotch and boxball as girls, and later she’d played bridge and Scrabble with Grandma Jeanne and Grandpa Will in the evenings to fill the long hours between dinnertime and bedtime. The game Sapphy and I played was called Use It or Lose It. I’d discovered it in a book I brought home from the school library. It was the only thing there about memory, and I checked it out several times.

  There wasn’t anything in it about amnesia, but I hadn’t taken it out because I wanted to learn more about Sapphy’s condition. I had taken it out for myself, hoping there might be something in it about learning how to forget. There were pages and pages of tips on how to improve your memory, but there wasn’t one thing in there for someone like me who wanted to forget. At first I was discouraged, until it occurred to me that since remembering is the opposite of forgetting, maybe it would work if I just did the opposite of everything the book recommended.

  That’s why I gave up peanut butter. The book said it was a memory booster. I didn’t bother to tell my mother I wanted a different kind of sandwich—I knew what she would say. Instead, every day at lunch I scraped out the peanut butter and ate only the bread. Playing the opposite of Use It or Lose It was a little trickier.

  Here’s how the game is supposed to work: Two players take turns being the gatherer and the rememberer. The gatherer goes around the house, picking up ten small objects, and puts them all together on a big plate or tray. Then the rememberer gets one minute to stare at the things on the tray, trying to commit them all to memory. When the minute is up, the gatherer tosses a dish towel over the items to cover them up, and then the rememberer has one minute to try to recall all ten things on the tray and write them down. Sapphy liked to play, but she wasn’t very good at it. If I was the gatherer, and the ten things I chose were, say, a rubber band, a toothpick, a straw, a dime, a plastic spoon, a toothbrush, a sugar cube, a raisin, a cork, and a piece of string, and she was going to remember anything, it would probably be the dime—because it was shiny. If I put two shiny things on the tray, sometimes she would remember both of them and sometimes neither one. There was no way of telling with Sapphy.

  When it was my turn to be the rememberer, I tried to do the opposite and be the forgetter instead. I would stare at the objects on the tray and try as hard as I could to keep them from getting into my memory. But playing the game only pointed out what I already knew: No matter how hard you try, you can’t force forgetting. It either happens on its own or it doesn’t happen at all.

  Marge hated the Use It or Lose It game. She’d always blame us when she couldn’t find something she was looking for.

  “Where’s my glove?” she’d say, digging around in her pockets. “How many times have I told you not to use my stuff for that game?”

  I never fessed up about using her stuff. After the game, when Marge wasn’t paying attention, I would stuff the glove or whatever else I’d taken from her between the cushions of the couch or put it outside on the front steps, so she would find it later and think she’d dropped it there on her way in. I guess it was my way of getting back at her a little for the way she treated Sapphy.

  Sapphy and I played Use It or Lose It until Marge returned from the laundry shed. As she came in the door carrying the empty basket, a car horn beeped twice down on the road.

  “Mail’s in,” she said.

  “What day is it?” Sapphy asked.

  “Monday,” Marge told her.

  “Coupons!” said Sapphy happily.

  Sapphy had always been a big coupon clipper. Mondays in Traverse City the Kroger circulars came, with a ten-page insert of three-color coupons. She had a coupon organizer file with cardboard tabs with headings like “BREAD AND CRACKERS,” “DAIRY,” “HOUSEHOLD CLEANERS,” and “PET FOOD.” Sapphy clipped coupons for Wonder bread and peanut butter and milk and other things we actually bought, but after a while we noticed that she was also clipping coupons for dog food and dishwasher soap.

  “What are you doing?” my mother asked her once when she noticed Sapphy clipping out a coupon for Vet’s Choice
canned dog food. “We don’t have a dog anymore, you know.”

  “I know that,” she said, giving my mother a funny look. “What do you think I am, daft or something? Happy’s been dead for over twenty years, Opal. Why would I be clipping coupons for him now?”

  “I don’t know, Sapph, I just thought maybe you’d forgotten.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my memory. I’m planning to get a dog from the pound,” Sapphy said, filing the coupon behind the pet food tab. “I’m on the call list for a beagle or a cocker spaniel—whichever comes in first.”

  Judging from the coupons, apparently Sapphy was planning to get a dishwasher too. It was strange that she could remember plans she’d made for the future and she could remember the past, but she couldn’t keep track of the present anymore. Her life was like one of my sandwiches, with the peanut butter scraped out and nothing left but the two slices of bread.

  Our mailbox in Battle Creek was a big basket, which hung outside on the wall next to the front door. There were two silver hooks that held it up, and whenever we had letters to mail, we stuck the envelopes behind the tips of those hooks so the mailman would see them. At Wondrous Acres there was a honeycomb of identical mailboxes for all the trailers out on the road. You had to walk down the gravel driveway to get there. But I didn’t go that way. I always cut through the weeds, angled down the hill, and walked along the ditch same as when I got off the bus, only in reverse.

  That day, after we heard the horn honk, Marge sent me down to get the mail. When I got there, Audrey Krouch was standing in front of the mailboxes with a bunch of envelopes in her hand. What was weird was I almost got the feeling she’d been waiting for me.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said, walking past her to get to our mailbox.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she asked.

  I shrugged. She could ask, but that didn’t mean I was going to answer.