Not Suitable For Children

THE FALL OF 1977 had arrived in northern Indiana, and orange and yellow leaves as big as paper plates covered the russet lawn of Southwood Elementary, where I was in fourth grade. My mother had been referring to herself in the third person for almost two years by then. A hysterectomy without hormone-replacement therapy had left her acting strange and feverish. She was always engaged in some project or another, such as painting rooms of our rental house in wild colors: the pantry cherry red; the living room coal black; the bathroom red, white, and blue (for the Bicentennial) with silver and gold glitter thrown on while the paint was still wet. “Your mother sure is tired,” she’d say, or, “Your mother wishes she could find some time to paint the inside of the closet purple.” Who was this other mother? And why was she so tired and wishful? She looked as though she’d been jolted by electricity, her beautiful brown eyes alive with surging energy but puffy and gray underneath. At times her zest to complete tasks frightened my brothers and sisters and me, and I’d hide from her, even though I liked to help her cut out pictures for collages.

As the night of my school’s fall carnival approached, Mom was frantically sewing big white pillows into triangles to make them look like shark’s teeth for a Jaws-themed haunted house. She’d read the novel several times and had gone alone to see the movie at a drive-in. We kids couldn’t come, she’d said. “It’s a horrible story about being all by yourself in a huge ocean, and something just comes up from out of nowhere and rips you to pieces. It’s not suitable for children.”

I watched her from the corner of my eye as I read a book about Daniel Boone for school. Mom sewed shut a seam on the pillow, cinched it, and ripped the thread off with her teeth. Then she caught me watching her, smiled a dry grin, and told me to get back to my homework. My brothers and sisters had all finished theirs, but I was always behind, sometimes scrambling to complete it on the bus the next morning. I sat up straighter and tried to focus on the book while she reached for a stack of shark photographs ripped from National Geographic. “I’ve got to get the head and teeth just right,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Make it look like the real thing when the kids first walk in the door.” She held one of the magazine pages up to the light: the gigantic head of a shark, mouth as wide as a school-bus hood, streaks of red along its snout, little scraps of flesh wedged between its teeth. “Says here sharks have between ten and fifteen rows of teeth. When a tooth falls out, there’s already another waiting to replace it. The new tooth moves forward like on a conveyor belt. It can be replaced in as little as twenty-four hours.” She spoke in a monotone that didn’t match the hectic pace of her work. When she caught me spying on her again, she walked over, pulled the book from my hands, and kissed me on the head. “Get upstairs, now,” she said. “Your mother’s got to get this work done, and you need to go to bed.”

That night I dreamed of a huge shark’s head with teeth as big as me about to clamp down on my leg. I twisted and turned and tried to scream, but when the teeth finally made contact, they were as soft as pillows. I woke up and heard the sewing machine rattling downstairs, the syncopated throttling as Mom stomped on the foot pedal. Every so often the machine would go silent, and I would hear her mumbling to herself.

IN THE MORNING Mom showed us all her work from the night before. She was bleary-eyed, fingers red and nails chipped. Dad was already at work at the ceiling-tile factory, and she was due at Harding’s grocery in just an hour or so. She held up the teeth and explained to us how they would be installed: “We’ll use Velcro to stick them to the sides of the little hallway that leads to the stage — you know, the one the principal enters from during your convocations.” She was almost out of breath. “Anyway, when the kids walk in, they’ll see these big, awful-looking shark teeth, then, when they go farther in, the dry ice will make the stage look like the pit of his stomach, and we’ll have bones and pieces of clothing, and one of you can pretend like you’re still alive and writhing around in the shark’s belly. We’ll make it look like you’ve had a chunk taken out of you somewhere.” She’d been after me to play this role, but I kept telling her I didn’t want it.

My brother Darren looked at his watch. “You better get your uniform on, Mom. You’ll be late.”

She smiled and let one of the tooth pillows fall from her grasp. “Your mother’s not going in today,” she said. “She’s got to get the rest of this figured out before the carnival on Thursday.”

When we returned home on the bus that evening, Mom was sewing a pair of old pantyhose together and pushing dark wads of red velvet into the legs. “These will look like intestines under the black lights,” she said, her face pallid, as if she’d lost half her blood. “There’s chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen.”

The others scrambled away, but I hung back to watch her make the intestines. It was Wednesday, the day before the carnival, and we were supposed to go with her to the school that night to help decorate the haunted house. She mumbled to herself and shoved the wads of velvet into the pantyhose with her fist. “Your mother’s so tired, Dougie,” she said, and then continued attacking her project.

Mom was fidgety as she drove us to the school. I knew the children of other pta members would be there, and I worried how she would act.

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