excerpts from
KATHY FISH’S
Together We Can Bury It

FLORIDA

Every morning Emmeline changes out of her wet nightgown and goes into the bathroom and shakes her mother’s Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder all over her body and into a fresh pair of underpants before she dresses for school. For about an hour she smells like perfume. Once, she saw her dad put Ban roll-on on his armpits and then swipe a big “X” of it across his chest. She tried this, but the kids at school said Ban roll-on smells worse than piss.

She asks her mother if she can take a bath in the mornings. “But how will you ever learn if you don’t suffer the consequences?" her mother says, pointing to her chin. “You have cereal there.”

“So be it,” Emmeline says.

Dick Fencl draws pictures of army planes and war scenes during class. At recess, he stands inside the monkey bars and sings “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” He and Emmeline are both on the chunky side. They don't climb the monkey bars and everybody leaves them alone there. Emmeline wishes Dick Fencl would sing something a little more up-tempo.

They're getting their history papers back today. They were supposed to write a biography about a person from Civil War times. She was going to write about Abraham Lincoln but then found a book about his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Mary Todd Lincoln reminds her of her Aunt Janine, who takes off every few months and drives to Florida and Emmeline's mom and grandma have to track her down and commit her. When she's not being committed, though, she's okay. She paints Emmeline's toenails and gives her sips of the cocktails she learned to make tending bar at Vic's Tavern. In her paper, Emmeline compares Mary Todd Lincoln’s crazy, which involved spending lots of money and going to séances, with her Aunt Janine’s, which involves wearing cowgirl outfits and running with strange men.

So all the kids get their papers back except Emmeline. Sister Valeria calls her up.

“This,” she says, flapping the paper on her desk, “is filth and nonsense.” She’s glaring at her. Behind her, Pope Paul and President Nixon are glaring at her too.

Emmeline wants to say, “So be it,” but she can't open her mouth. She's sweating in her wool jumper (with the embroidered heart for the Sacred Heart of Jesus) and that stink melds with her usual pissy smell. Sister Valeria wrinkles up her nose and tears up the paper on Mary Todd Lincoln and orders her to write another one, twice as long. Emmeline is made to kneel in the back of the room and say a rosary. Out loud.

The floor hurts her knees. The kids are turning around in their seats to look at her. Dick Fencl is smiling goofily, giving her the thumbs up.

If she closes her eyes and breathes deep enough, she finds she doesn't smell so bad. blessedisthefruitofthywooomJesus The words make her feel like she's all alone in a shiny new place. She wonders if Dick Fencl feels like this when he’s singing about the Green Berets. nowandatthehourofourdeathamen

Mary Todd Lincoln was holding her husband’s hand when he was shot in the back of the head at Ford’s Theater. After the funeral, she holed up in the White House for six weeks, and then one day she put on a fancy black dress and went to Chicago. Like that.

WREN

Her name was Renee Chu, but she was always Wren to me. My mother never let me play with her. “That child is as fragile as cracked glass,” she’d say. I only really wanted to talk to her and have her talk to me. I wondered if her voice was like a bird’s, soft and sweet, or if she could talk at all.

We lived across the street, kitty-cornered from Wren and her parents in one of the big, family-sized homes. There were six of us, including our parents. We were all taller than average, with long arms and legs and freckles and bushy hair. Our faces were grotesquely ruddy, our eyes bright and flashing. Every early evening, while Mother prepared dinner in big pots and cast-iron fry pans, our father had us outside on the front lawn, throwing a football or playing catch or tag. The back yard was larger and fenced, but our father liked to display us like some of the men of the neighborhood displayed their new cars.

In summer we ate at sundown, around a large table set up on the front porch. Mother would bring out salads and fried catfish and a pitcher of iced tea. We tore into our food under the ceiling fan and listened to the bug zapper fry mosquitoes and flies and moths on the other side of the screens.

We’d see Mr. and Mrs. Chu moving up the street, each holding onto one of Wren’s tiny hands, their bodies curved inward on either side of her like parentheses.

One evening our mother joined in the games instead of making supper. Father grabbed her and held her tight around her waist and she struggled to free herself. My brothers and I yanked on Father’s arms and legs, screeching and laughing, as the fireflies lifted out of the grass around our ankles.

Mother stopped struggling and Father loosened his grip and we all turned to see Wren and her parents on their nightly walk. Mother gathered us all around her, hushing us. We were panting and sweaty and unable to keep still.

Father picked up the forgotten football and smacked it against his palm. Mr. Chu nodded and Father nodded back. Wren’s mother glanced at our mother. Some maternal understanding, like heat lightning, flashed in the space between them. I couldn’t see Wren’s eyes, but it seemed she was looking at me. I wanted to cross the street and touch her white cheek. I wanted to tell her my name.

Later, Mother told us Wren was going to live in a home for sick children, but I didn’t understand this. Wren was not sick, only very small.

That night I dreamed that I had hammered together a home for Wren. She would live there forever, surrounded by a thousand bright blue butterflies. And she would emerge from time to time to smile at me from behind a window of cracked glass.

SHOEBOX

Their parents worry about them because they are so thin. Their mother fries steaks, untrimmed, in butter, mashes full cream into the potatoes. They cradle spoonfuls of food on their tongues and when their father says, “Chew that up and swallow it,” they do, but the feel of it sliding down their throats is an agony.

They don’t want to grow big and strong, they want to be left alone. They want to walk out to the open field behind their house, talk low, pluck caterpillars from the milkweed. Soon, there will be monarch butterflies the size of their mother’s hands.

They get a hold of their aunt’s cigarettes. They learned to read last year so they pass the pack back and forth, reading the warning label. They try to smoke the cigarettes, but their lungs are small and rigid, like stones in their chests. They lie down in the prairie grass and clutch each other, imagine dying together under fat clouds.

Their aunt comes to watch them sometimes when their parents have to go into Osage. As soon as the car disappears down the long, gravel driveway, she turns to them and says, “Go. Be One with Nature.” The aunt drinks Seven & Sevens and sits on the screened porch, one hand squirming like a puppy under the blanket on her lap. Some smell rises up out of the aunt they can't identify. They are careful not to get too close.

In town, there is a school and there are other children. They know this because the aunt has told them. They sit on the floor in the far corner of the porch, staring at the ham salad sandwiches she made for them.

“You two fit inside a shoebox when you were born,” the aunt says. “This big.” She holds her hands up.

They have heard the story, how their mother swaddled them tightly together in one receiving blanket and their father put them in the box and took a picture. He sent it into the local newspaper. The photo ran on the front page. After that, their mother did not speak to their father, or anyone, for one full month.

They want to hear more about the town but are afraid to ask.

“You think I care if you eat those sandwiches? I do not. I'll stuff them down the disposal and not say a word," the aunt says.

The aunt has lupus. Her face is flat and round as a plate. A red rash sits on the bridge of her nose and across her cheeks like a pair of reading glasses. She regards the girls with her little eyes.

They read the Bible and the stories their mother types up for them. The children in the stories are forever naughty and forever in peril. In the end, the children repent and all is well. Still, God looms over their shoulders as they play, disappointed and angry.

They press their palms over a triangle of sunlight on the edge of the blanket. A truck rattles past on the road behind the stand of evergreen trees. Both girls turn their heads and listen hard.