Bread and Butter
When I sit perfectly still, the stars seem to dim then brighten like a pulse, a metronome of breathing. My mother is next to me in the grass. I am eight years old and she is telling me about shooting stars. She says if you see one, it means someone you love is about to die. My eyes scan the stars, which are splattered in clumps, as if someone has thrown handfuls of light against the dark. I hope everything stays put for now.
My mother knows a lot about the sky. She teaches me things: where to find the big and little dippers, how to spot Orion’s belt on a clear night, how to track the phases of the moon. There are rhymes to help me remember certain things. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. I spend hours in darkness stretched out in the yard, looking up. My mother says there’s a star for every person alive in the world. That’s why you see a falling star when someone dies. The sky doesn’t need that star anymore, so the sky sends the star to you.
“Are you supposed to catch it?” I ask.
“Why sure,” she tells me, “if you can run fast enough.” She pulls herself up, gently brushing a few damp blades of grass from her jeans. “If you can find the spot where the star fell to Earth, then that person you love won’t die after all.” She disappears up the back porch steps and into the house, its windows blinking through sheer curtains that sway in the evening breeze.
As long as I can remember, my mother has been teaching me what my father calls mother’s ways. I know to knock on wood when I think about good luck, like never breaking a bone in my body. If I don’t, the spirits of bad luck will scold me for boasting, and curse me with a broken ankle or arm, their way of reminding me of my place in the world. If you can’t find wood, knocking on your head is the next best thing. Knocking on glass or plastic is actually worse than not knocking at all. There are things you should never do, like break a mirror or use your oven on Sunday or let a bird fly into your house. Then there are things you must do: throw salt over your shoulder after you spill some, shake an empty purse at the full moon, say “bread and butter” if you’re walking down the street with a friend and something comes between the two of you, like a pole or another person.
I have a recurring dream. In it, I am walking alone on a slick black road. There are no houses, no streetlights, no trees, nothing to distract my view of the sky, which is inky blue. It has a texture. If I reach up to touch it, it will feel like corduroy, millions of soft raised rows, perfectly spaced, like cornrows. There is only one star in the sky, and even though no one in the dream tells me this, I know it is because I am the last person on Earth.
All of my mother’s family is dead, except for one brother who lives in Somerset, but she doesn’t speak to him for reasons I’m not old enough to know, so he doesn’t really count. My mother had three younger brothers in all: Buttermore, Eugene and John. Like most people in southwestern Pennsylvania, they had nicknames. The oldest of the three, named Buttermore is called “Smitty.” Eugene, the middle brother, was known as “Boots,” and John, the youngest, was called “Little Joe.” Boots and Little Joe both died in sad ways before I was born– one beaten to death during a drunken fight, one liver-poisoned from too much nerve medicine. I picture my uncle Boots drinking it straight from a brown glass bottle with no label, then counting the money in his sock drawer. My mother says when Boots died, she found two thousand dollars in that drawer, all in nickels and dimes. She talks about Boots and Little Joe like they’re still alive, her eyes moist and shiny, her cheeks suddenly a brighter pink as if blood is trying to pump itself out of her through invisible holes her skin.
I peel myself from the wet summer grass of our backyard and wander inside the house through the large sliding glass door. Every night before we go to bed, my mother closes the slider, then puts a stick in the door. It’s a piece of broom handle my father cut and shaped to fit in the grooves of the door’s sliding track, so no one can break in while we sleep. We call that piece of wood “the-stick-in-the-door.” We like to name things based on where they belong, like “the-pen-by-the-phone,” my mother’s black Bic ballpoint that lives in a small orange box of scrap paper next to the kitchen telephone. You better not move “the-pen-by-the-phone,” not even an inch, or there will be hell to pay, even though I’ve discovered my mother has entire packages of those pens stashed in the attic way.
My father is in the kitchen– dark blue work jacket, collar up to his ears, black lunchbox symbolizing departure. Hungry cats circle the yellow rug as he makes wax paper sandwiches, loads small cakes wrapped in cellophane, Coca-Cola he drinks, a bottle an hour, to stay awake. He is working the night shift at Anchor, the glass factory, tonight. I don’t say “goodbye” to him, convinced that if I do he will somehow die before 7am, will not return to this brick home on this slanted street, these windows winking beneath white shutters. I say “good night” instead, running through a catalog of different ways it can happen: heart attack, explosion, a fall into the furnace. I sleep in bed with my mother when he’s gone, check the-stick-in-the-door eight times before I try to fall asleep, listening to our house settle in the night.
“But our house isn’t very old. Why does it settle?” I ask my mother.
“It’s stretching itself out. You know, getting used to the land,” she says, half asleep already. At 7 am, she will begin her shift at Anchor just as my father punches a stiff timecard into a clock and finally walks up the long metal staircase that leads out of the underground furnace. My older sister Linda and I are big enough to sleep alone in the house for the fifteen minutes that pass between my mother’s departure and my father’s arrival.
I wake to the sound of my mother opening the front door– the soft thud the swollen wood releases, ka-ching of the screen door. I run down the hallway, but only manage to catch the back of her blonde head as she walks briskly to her car, the used maroon Lincoln with vinyl seats that stick to our bare legs in the summer. Linda sleeps in her own bedroom, breathing in and out with a whistle as she clutches her stuffed Pink Panther. She’s sewn a line of odd buttons down his tail. Linda’s bedroom furniture is ivory with antiqued handles. She has a skinny chest of drawers taller than me, in which she keeps socks of every color imaginable. My mother arranges them in hues: reds, oranges and yellows in the bottom drawers; blues and greens in the top drawers; the neutrals in the middle. I open the drawers slowly, let the rows of color dizzy me, then close each one quietly.
I go back to my own room, pink ballerina bed skirt with walls painted to match. I put one eye up to the slit between the curtain panels, holding the other eye shut with a finger. I watch for a brown and white Bronco, and when it pulls up to the curb, I make sure it’s my father who gets out. He always comes home in one piece, mesh cap perched on his shiny black hair. I knock three times on the wooden window frame, slide under my covers, pretend to sleep.
Karen Dietrich's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Nerve, Scapegoat Review, Tarpaulin Sky, and Pank. She lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania and online at http://grapesatmidnight.com.