Limbo by A. Manette Ansay Read Free Book Online Page A

fine, there was nothing the matter with me. Alone in my room, I felt it pop back into place, but then it swelled, and we wound up at the emergency room. By then, my mother was beside herself, but when the X rays came back, we were both a little embarrassed. We could have saved ourselves the trouble, the expense. A couple of days on the heating pad, the way my father had suggested, and it would have been fine.
    Several years later, when I knocked myself unconscious practicing gymnastic flips, the first thing I did after coming to was beg the other kids not to tell. Around that time, my mother, on a dare, ran the school’s annual thousand-yard dash alongside her students. The next day she was hospitalized; she’d had pneumonia, it turned out, for nearly a week.“I’d been feeling really lousy,” she admitted. “I thought it was just me.”
    Cancer, on the other hand, you didn’t mess around with. If you found a lump, you didn’t tell a soul. You didn’t even say a word like that outright. Nobody knew exactly how you caught it, so if somebody’s mother or father had cancer, you weren’t allowed play at their house, though you could play in their yard where there was plenty of fresh air.
    This was rural Wisconsin in the 1970s. Farmers, and the children of farmers. Germans and Luxemburgers and Czechs, Italians who’d worked in the local quarries at the turn of the century. Dutch who drove cars that sported bumper stickers boasting IF YOU AIN’T DUTCH, YOU AIN’T MUCH. No blacks. No Jews. A few families from the Philippines. Everybody knew who was what. It was the second, question you asked at school, right after What church do you go to?
    At my elementary school class graduation, awards were given for Best Attendance. I coveted that prize, but my best friend, Tabitha, won. She’d come to school despite strep throat, several colds, the stomach flu (though she’d been confined to the nurse’s office), and a case of chicken pox cleverly concealed beneath a turtleneck sweater.
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    My parents grew up on dairy farms less than ten miles apart, the grandchildren of Luxemburg and German immigrants. At sixteen, my father left high school to farm full time with my grandfather, and it was common, in good weather, for the two of them to work sixteen-hour days. After marrying my mother, my father threw that same energy into selling fertilizer and, later, farm machinery, traveling for the Gehl corporation on marathon routes throughout the Midwest, saving money to start his own company. He came home every weekend, but he was something of a stranger, distant, unfamiliar with our household routines. Saturdays, he worked at his desk in the family room, going over ledgers as the adding machine chimed its toneless song. Sunday nights, before he went back on the road, he spread newspapers over the family room carpet and polished his wingtips with an old diaper. My brother and I watched, curious but shy, inhaling the deep sweet smell of the polish. If we asked whose diaper it had been, my father sometimes said, Ann Manette’s, calling me by my full name, the name of my childhood. Other times he’d say, Michael’s . This lack of consistency both fascinated and frightened us, for our mother was exacting in her answers, no matter how foolish our questions, and no matter how many times we asked.
    Mostly, on those weekends my father was home, my mother kept us occupied with projects in the kitchen, away from his desk, away from his briefcase with its tempting, snapping locks. Or she took us out to her mother’s farmwhere, likely as not, there’d be a handful of cousins and second cousins swarming the rusty swing set by the chicken coop, a couple of aunts plus a distant relation or two playing Scrabble in the kitchen, uncles watching TV in the living room. Grandma Krier not only welcomed us; she expected us. A weekend with less than a dozen visitors was considered a