Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother’s Back

Nina Gaby

Word Count 1,324

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” my sister answers.

“Yes you are.” I stare down from the lofty three inches and four years that I lord over her in 1959 . 

Suspicious as always, I have cornered her against the kitchen counter. I look past her shoulder but only see the toaster, a cluster of spice bottles and a greasy butter knife. I can’t resist pursuing this. Early morning on a school day, we hear our parents in another part of the house. Their angry murmurings are indistinct but familiar.

She wrestles herself away from me, then stands there with a look of defiance on her face. I know this look. 

“You were.” I embellish my conviction with the universal cuckoo sign, twirling my index finger next to my temple. 

At breakfast, I sit in front of a glass of skim milk and a glass of orange juice. The skim milk isn’t even the kind you buy from the store. It’s the kind you mix at the sink with warm water. My mother is tugging a brush through my eighteen inches of thick curly hair as I glare at my sister who is mindlessly chomping away at her Trix. “At least drink your orange juice,” my mother says as she yanks. 

“I’ll throw up!”

My father’s fingers tense, reactive and involuntary, around the edge of the newspaper he is reading across the table. A warning.

“How can a person drink orange juice? With this milk? It makes a poison in your stomach!” 

Yank. Shriek. My father slams down his newspaper. He looks like a comic book character as he yells at me for having long curly hair and yells at my mother for brushing it. 

“That’s ridiculous,” I mutter just loud enough. 

The whack across the back of my head from the newspaper he has just rolled up comes as no surprise and I visualize standing over him holding his head face down in his bowl of cereal.

All the while my sister is calmly studying her own cereal. I storm out the door. 

“Wait for your sister,” they yell after me.

Author and her sister.

The next morning, I get to the kitchen early and hide in the doorway that leads to the garage. My sister marches across the room to the counter where the toaster sits in its own nook behind red and white containers. She leans over and smiles into it. Actually smiles. Into the toaster.

*

I get home from school after my sister.  “Hey, why is the toaster moved?” I challenge, throwing my stuff on a chair.

 “Don’t know,” she answers, without looking up.

 “Did you play with it?” The prickling is starting in my cheeks.

 “No.” She still doesn’t look up.

 My heart beats faster, keeping up with the spreading sensation along the back of my knees. 

 “Yes you did.”

 I pick up the toaster, checking for fingerprints as I have seen them do on Grandma’s lawyer show, and fling it aside. That’s when I see the wine. Tucked in next to the canisters. A twelve-ounce jelly glass with a lipstick smear along the edge. Revlon’s Fire and Ice, my mother’s signature brand.

My little sister is much too young to hear the truth as I insist on interpreting it.

“She is not.” 

“Is.”

“Is not.”

“Who is not what?” My mother has walked in.

I look suspiciously at the glass of iced tea my mother places on the table. I tally the infringements against normalcy that my family has made in just this one day. I want to sniff her glass in that imperious way they do on the soap opera my grandmother and I secretly watch together when I stay at her house. Ah-ha I will say. Ah-ha!

Instead I witness my sister implode as she mangles her way through the pronunciation of “incorrigible alcoholic,” a phrase I have learned from the TV and only too happily have just passed on to her. She snivels onto the tablecloth still littered with her Trix from the morning. My mother picks up a doll dress and dabs my sister’s nose. I cringe. Case in point, counselor. Case in point.

“So who’s an incorrigible alcoholic?” My mother is almost laughing as she tosses the doll dress over the counter in to the sink. “That sounds like something from your Young Doctor Malone.”

My sister points a tiny chubby finger. “She says you are. And it sounds bad!”

“Well, my darlings, she is probably right.” She absently turns to glance at us and walks out. My sister and I both look at the toaster.

*

I visit my grandmother whenever I can and look forward to watching the allegations and subsequent divorce of Doctor Malone’s young alcoholic colleague. In bed at night, I talk across the murky, monster infested darkness and tell my sister we will have to divorce our parents. She cries. I fantasize about a boarding school filled with bright and adventuresome girls like myself. In my new life I wear a crisp white blouse,  pleated skirt and shiny saddle shoes. My hair is straight and gleaming.

Instead, my hair gets cut and I become known in school as “Brillo.”

The Current Events teacher calls me “Miss Personality” and the boy who hands out the Weekly Readers winks. In the Weekly Reader, we read about an archeologist who found a cave where all the family’s bones were bunched together in a pile and no one could tell whose bones were whose.

*

My sister has taken to avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk on the way to school. “Hurry up, we’re going to be late,” I yell, but this one morning she won’t move. “You hate Mommy and you don’t care if her back gets broke,” is all she’ll say. Why did I ever tell her that would happen? “I was kidding,” I say. 

A heavy spring rain makes my hair grow even bigger and we’re still at least a half a block from the school. “Hey Brill,” call a couple of really cute sixth grade boys as they race by us on their bikes. That’s it. I grab her arm and she starts to scream. I see us having to sit in our wet clothes in the Principal’s Office with notations being made by the secretary who stares at me and clicks her pencil. I can see my mother coming in with her red lipstick all smeared. I’m already fated to a loveless life because of my hair, and now this. 

Down the street the kids on the playground line up to go into the building. She breaks free and bolts for home, managing to leap over the broken sidewalk and onto the grass. Her run is still a half waddle for which I have absolutely no sympathy or affection.

My lunch bag is a sodden mess smelling of wet brown paper. I throw it down, hard, into the street, and start stomping on the cracks of the broken sidewalk. “Come back here or I’ll keep jumping!” I threaten. She can’t hear me. Her feet are just a little red blur splashing towards our house where our mother is undoubtedly splayed face down in a puddle of skim milk. A powerful fate, I worry, of my own making.

*

A patina of guilt covers my memories of childhood. A heavy sack holds in place all the bad things I grew to believe I was made up of.

Years later, I still occasionally like to review every infraction, every misspent truth-telling raging moment, of my youth, including the slow creep of my own jelly glass to a spot behind the toaster.  

“One does not sit alone,”my husband reminds me. "You bring all those bones in with you." 

On a good day, though,  we all scrawl our apologetic messages across the canvas with a branch, a laundry marker. Like poetry. Like cave dwellers.

Nina is a writer, visual artist and psychiatric nurse practitioner who spent the pandemic hunkered down across from the longest floating bridge east of the Mississippi with her dog, two cats, husband.