Picking Up Sticks

PREHISTORIC FOREST, IRISH HILLS, MICHIGAN
Early 1970s

My brother had long ago dropped Ronnie for Ron. Steven was always Steven, and Lisa was never could never be made small and endearing by adding a “y” to the end. Sometimes, people tried to match my name with pizza which I detested because it made me feel as wrong as the inexact rhyme. So we had no nicknames, no pet names. We were known not as children, or sons and daughter, but collectively as “the kids”, more often as “those damn kids” or “those fucking kids”. We each had our own special string of spat out words. “Fucking never gets off his ass to help around here” was Steven. Ron was sometimes that as well but mostly “where is my goddamned hammer or saw or drill or …. Can’t keep his fucking hands off anything.” “Fucking books” – that was either Ron or me. “Always got her nose in a goddamn book” was me. Also: “listening again to damn music on the fucking radio” and “sleeping the entire damn day”. You could hear my father ranting in the basement through the floor. On Saturday mornings I stayed in my room on the second floor as long as possible, until I knew he’d come looking for me to perform some ludicrous chore. On Sunday mornings I escaped to church.

The chore we hated above all else was called pick-up-sticks. It was an all-purpose chore, suitable punishment for any crime, large or small. Our property was lined with massive ancient maple trees on the south and west; a large pine tree spread across the front yard, and the back held a dozen maple and elm trees. All the trees were generous with gifts of dead limbs and branches and twigs and, in the case of the pine, cones. Anything that fell from a tree was considered sticks and all had to be removed constantly continuously unceasingly, not just the large obvious branches but the smaller sticks as well. After being yelled at for sleeping or reading or listening to music, I would crawl around in large patterns, humiliated, on my knees in the grass, seeking redemption in the spiky twigs. There was none to be had, and the round hot tears dribbling down my face made me want to bite and chew at my own limbs.

I did not understand, could not understand, what was so lacking in me, that caused these tears, that caused me to place obstacles in the driveway one summer to try to trip myself as I ran helplessly back and forth, that created the desperate desire to be injured enough to be taken to the doctor so I could feel his cool concerned impersonal touch along my arm searching for a crack in the bone or rotating my ankle assessing a sprain. This didn’t happen; however hard I tried, I could not trip and send myself sprawling. I took to shoveling snow for an hour, or for two hours, in the bitter twilight wind without boots or coat or gloves or scarf or hat. I skipped meals, always lunch and often dinner. I drank no liquids, and used the bathroom barely once a day. And I could not still the terrible roar within me, like a waterfall deprived of its water, its stones normally so beautifully shiny, exposed and dry.

And so the tears came, despicable things that I ignored; they ran into my mouth and I choked and spit out their salt. I could not bear any evidence that I was alive inside or out, and the tears kept coming in spite of the vow I had made when I was four to never ever cry no matter what. I sat on our high school stage, a ghost in the Our Town cemetery and wished, because I was too horrifically alive to pray, that soon I would be a ghost too. I tried to be invisible. I sometimes succeeded. I envied Tom Crisman, another ghost, his uncanny ability to materialize, pale and insubstantial from the shadows backstage. It unnerved us all, that he wasn’t acting. A couple years past high school, his body was found in the car in the garage, windows rolled up, a hose to channel exhaust. The engine had run out of gas before he was found. I think of my tears dropping into the grass, and see instead Tom’s eerie face, ethereal in the curtained darkness, lit only by a small enigmatic smile.