I was scared and looked down at the rug, the way the

blue and green and brown strands ran in circles; I wondered why the rug didn't come unraveled. I thought of Rae and me dancing naked beneath the big blue sky. Swinging each other in circles.

Maisey edged away from me, but then Mama hit her

skinny leg and she whimpered and socked me in the arm, then Mama whipped the belt against my thigh so I kicked Maisey and we both started crying. Not because we were hurting each other—we were fighting like girls—but because Mama was running around us with the belt like a dog chasing its tail.

When Maisey didn't hit me back, Mama jerked a handful of her hair and Maisey closed her eyes and kicked at me but she wasn't close enough. Mama hung on to Maisey s hair like she was hanging on to a baby doll and with her other hand, swung the belt at me and started screaming again, "Hit each other, 51

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goddammit, hit each other or I'm going to kill you both." Out of the corner of my eye I could see James hunched on the black couch.

Maisey and I repelled each other the way magnets do if

you don't line then up just right. It wasn't funny anymore. I felt like we were both naked, and not like Rae and I had been. This was an ugly dance, and I was ashamed and I wanted Mama to stop, to leave us alone, but she wouldn't stop until we hurt each other, we had to hurt each other, so I kicked at my sister's legs like a wild woman, just stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

Mama was about to grab Maisey again and Maisey slapped her right in the face. Mama's eyes turned into giant zeroes for a second, then she dropped to her knees and started crying and holding her cheek. Strands of Maisey's hair stuck to her fingers. The room went completely quiet except for the horrible sound of Mama crying.

I just stood there until it hit me—you don't slap your

mama, no matter what—so I balled up my fist and punched Maisey square on the cheek. It felt good to hit her, to smash the bone behind her soft skin. I kicked her as hard as I could, then grabbed her, threw her onto the floor, and plopped down on her stomach. I pinned her stringy arms down with my knees, frogged her belly with knotted fists. I wanted to kill her; she was the cause of our unhappiness; she made Mama do this to us. James crouched behind me, trying to lug me off of Maisey, but I punched and slapped her wiry

little body till my palms stung, my fingers covered with snot and tears.

52

8

After Mama made me and Maisey beat each other up,

I never told Rae anything about what happened at my house again. She wanted to know why I didn't show up that day, but how could you tell someone that your Mama made you kick your sister till she had purple bruises running up and down her legs? I didn't even tell Daddy when he came home that day, not even after he asked me for the third time what was wrong. The house was full of bad air. I wished Mama would just go on and go crazy and go live at the hospital with the patients, since she liked them so much.

The hospital had become Mama's home in a way. After Thanksgiving, she spent hours at our house cutting angels and snowmen and trumpets out of cardboard, spraying them with fake snow, sprinkling glitter on them. Then she hauled them up to her ward and tacked them on the walls for the patients. Her patient friends thought she was Michelangelo. Mama introduced them to me once when Daddy and I came to pick her up from work. Mrs. Sylvester was a tiny woman with a birdlike face that peeked out from beneath a cloud of lavender hair. She was from Miami Beach, and she spent L U V I C K E RS

all her time crocheting lace doilies she gave to Mama. Mrs. Vanatter was a refrigerator-sized woman from Tampa who wrote poetry. Standing next to each other, they looked like a giant and a dwarf. Mrs. Sylvester grabbed my hand with her claw. "Honey," she wheezed, "I've been in museums all over the world, seen the finest art, the Renoirs, the Rembrandts, the Picassos. Your mother," she said, giving my hand a squeeze, "is an artist of the first order. Her snowmen are positively cold."

Mrs. Vanatter nodded. "She could work for Hallmark." "Those women have style," Mama said on the ride home. "You won't catch them sitting around in their nightgowns." She turned around in her seat to look me full in the face, her eyes all dreamy. "Mrs. Sylvester used to be a millionaire," she said. "Can you imagine? She and her husband owned a hotel shaped like an ocean liner in Miami Beach, but they lost it because Mr. Sylvester went berserk one day at Hialeah and bet a zillion dollars on a horse named Hooves of Fire." Mama said that even though Mrs. Sylvester didn't have a

pot to pee in, she could get a little snobby sometimes from all those years of being a bigwig; she'd forget she was in the

hospital and try to boss the nurses around. Mama still liked Mrs. Sylvester, but she cared the most for Mrs. Vanatter. She had a black satin purse full of Mrs. Vanatter s work, pages and pages of poetry.

"Look at that writing," Mama said when she brought the poems home. "How could you think anyone was crazy who has such beautiful handwriting?"

I looked at the writing; it was beautiful, the letters perfectly shaped and slanted. The poems were all about flowers and sunshine and rain and hummingbirds, and Mama crammed 54

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them into that old pocketbook she didn't use anymore, and

it was sad in a way, all those poems shoved into a closet. But Mama said Mrs. Vanatter writes her poems every day all day; she sits by a window and writes and writes and writes. Sometimes she doesn't even eat. She has notebooks full of poems about daisies, Mama said.

Rae would've found a way to laugh about those things.

She seemed to live just outside of her life, able to watch it the way her Mama watched wrestling on TV. Nothing seemed

to bother her. People were made for her amusement. Even her old Mama.

Mrs. Miller attended the holy roller church a mile down

the street from my house, where she spoke in tongues. "You don't want to miss that," Rae said. "When Mama gets the spirit and starts babbling, she can make a drowning look tame."

So I told Mama I wanted to go to the Baptist church,

and come Sunday morning I got dressed, and walked up the street in the cold toward the First Baptist, then walked on around the block and back down the street to the Assembly of God. It was nothing like the church Mama and Daddy drug me and James and Maisey to on those Sundays when Mama felt like facing a crowd.

For one thing, it was the smallest church I'd ever seen, all wooden inside like a playhouse. A smell like mothballs seeped from the floor. The pews were as hard as the benches from a picnic table. Rae and I sat down with Mrs. Miller between us. The preacher stepped up to the front of the church and made a few announcements. Then he picked up his Bible, riffled the pages, and launched into his sermon as if he'd become somebody else. He started out preaching slowly, then revved 55

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himself into a kind of frenzy, the same way Mama did that

day when she sicced me and Maisey on each other like dogs. He gripped the Bible in his thick white fingers like a hatchet, chopping at the air. Sweat ran down the sides of his big red face even though the church was icy-cold. I stared straight ahead, too afraid to move.

The preacher's words poured out like scalding water:

"You will buuuuurn in hay-yell if you do not take the Lord Jesus Christ to be your Savior. You can be rich, you can

be poor, you can be pretty as a peach or ugly as bulldog,

but GodtheFather won't have none of ya, less you take the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart." His voice got louder and louder till he was purely barking at us to Get! Up! And! Do! Something! Almost every person in the church was shouting out now, "Save me, Jesus," "Oh Lord God Almighty," "Amen brother."

I watched as a woman in a faded blue dress threw her hands up to the ceiling and bawled, "Oh Jesus." Then something twitched in her and words started gurgling out of her mouth, "Oh gubba gubba, Jesus God, gubba gubba," her whole body shaking like she was strapped to a washing machine going full tilt. Others around me, men in worn-out overalls, women with hair spun high over their heads like cotton candy, started shouting and moaning. The whole church heaved from side to side with swaying bodies. The room stank of sweat. I was terrified.

Then Mrs. Miller got the spirit and rose, trembling, out of the pew next to me. Rae leaned back and nodded, grinning at me. Mrs. Miller flung her flabby arms up to heaven, and her eyes turned white like a snake's eyes do when it's shedding its skin, but she wasn't holding still like a shedding snake. She 56

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started hollering and screaming and threw herself out into the aisle on the pine floor, where she writhed around like she was on fire. I thought she was having a fit, that she'd gone out of her mind for real. Rae moved closer to me, whispered in my ear, "Every Sunday."

Meanwhile, the preacher started slowing things down

with his voice, saying about one word to the five he was shouting out before, while the people quieted themselves down, whimpering and catching their breath the way little kids do when they've been crying hard. He mopped his big wet face with a handkerchief. All over the church, people fanned themselves, patted at their bodies. An old woman walked over and helped Mrs. Miller to her feet. "We are God's people," the preacher said slowly, his voice spent. "We

are the chosen ones. Now let us pray."