Change Me into Zeus's Daughter : A Memoir

Book by Moss Barbara Robinette

Near the Center of the Earth

Mother spooned the poisoned corn and beans into her mouth, ravenously, eyes closed, hands shaking. We, her seven children, sat around the table watching her for signs of death, our eyes leaving her only long enough to glance at the clock to see how far the hands had moved. Would she turn blue, like my oldest sister, Alice, said? Alice sat hunched next to me in the same white kitchen chair, our identical homemade cotton dresses blending into one. She shoved my shoulder with hers as if I were disturbing her concentration and stared unblinking at Mother. Each time Mother hesitated, spoon in mid-air, Alice's face clouded and she pushed against my shoulder.

"She's dying," Alice whispered, covering her mouth so Mother could not hear her. "I told you she was gonna die."

I ignored her and watched Mother. I wanted to feel the kernels of sweet yellow corn slide against my teeth. I didn't care if they were poisoned. I was so hungry my head throbbed. The clock ticked as loudly as the clattering train that passed beside our house every day, each tick echoing against the wall and bouncing into my head, making my heart beat in my temples and my eyes want to close. I forced my eyes to stay open, to watch my mother as she ate. I stared at her; the light freckles on her face smeared into a large round blur, then snapped back into focus. No one spoke or moved. My oldest brother, Stewart, sat next to me, hands in his lap clenched into tight white balls; David, his chair pushed as close to Stewart's as possible, leaned forward with his arms spread across the table, ready to catch Mother if she fell. Willie and Doris Ann also sat together, their small legs sticking straight out, dirty bare feet dangling over the edge of the chair seat, Doris Ann's arms wrapped around the feather pillow from her bed. Mother held John cuddled in her lap, leaning over his head to spoon the beans into her mouth. He fussed and reached for the spoon, hungry and angry because she kept pushing his hand away.

Mother had waited all morning for a letter from Dad, a letter with money for food. When, once again, no letter or money arrived, she went out to the toolshed and brought in the corn and bean seeds for next year's garden. The seeds had been coated with pesticides to keep bugs from eating them during the winter. Poison. I watched Mother split the dusty sealed brown bags with a kitchen knife and empty the contents into bowls, the seeds making sweet music as they tapped the glass: "ting, ting, ting." She ran her hands through the dry seeds, lifting them to her nose. Did they smell like poison? She rubbed a fat white bean between her fingers and touched her fingers to her tongue, then spit into the sink, rinsed her mouth with cold water and spit into the sink again. She stood staring out the window above the sink, her hands limp in the bowl of seeds. She stood this way for ten minutes or more, staring out the window.

Then, as if released from a spell, she opened the cabinet and got out two colanders. She poured the dry seeds into them: corn in one, beans in the other, and ran water over and over them. She rubbed each tiny seed with her fingers and wiped the cool water on her forehead and the back of her neck. Her dress was already damp under the sleeves from the afternoon heat.

"Those seeds are poison, you know. Poison. If we eat them, we'll die," Alice whispered. She was eleven and knew these things. I tapped my bare feet against the kitchen chair and thought about this, deciding I would eat them anyway. I was so hungry and certain that no poison could kill me. I could just tell myself not to die and I wouldn't. I was that strong.

John slid from his chair and pulled at Mother's dress, kicking and fussing, wanting to be held, wanting to be fed.

"Alice, why don't you take the kids outside for a little while," Mother said as she churned the seeds through the water. She turned and caught Alice's disappointed face. "Just for a little while," she said.

We stumbled reluctantly out the back door. Alice peeled John from Mother's legs and carried him out; he liked to be outdoors and stopped fussing. We moved into the yard, each claiming our territory. Stewart and David ran into the garden and picked cornstalks, to joust like the knights in our storybooks. Alice took John for a walk in the shade of the oak trees, to push the leaves around and look for buckeyes. She began reciting from her favorite book -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- the part where the Mad Hatter sings Alice an example of what he sang for the Queen of Hearts: "'Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, Like a tea-tray in the sky.'" I sat on the steps with Willie and Doris Ann and listened. When she couldn't remember any more, she jumped to her favorite parts of "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

"The Walrus and the Carpenter were walking close at hand. They wept like anything to see such quantities of sand. 'If this were only cleared away,' they said, 'it would be grand! If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year. Do you suppose,' the Walrus said, 'that they could get it clear?'"

Pale mountains jutted in the far distance. I could see the gas station at the bottom of the hill and farther on, barely visible, our closest neighbor's house. Directly in front of me was the garden, or what was supposed to be a garden. The fierce sun had baked it brown before any vegetables had appeared, the temperature climbing to over a hundred degrees every day. Twelve rows of shriveled corn, dwarfed and fruitless. So many tomato plants, twenty or more, the little yellow flowers dried and stiff, not bothering to form into green balls. The tomato vines weaved in with the cucumber vines like the hot-pan holders we made on our loom. Grasshoppers, thriving in the heat, had stripped the cucumber plants. Vines, like curved barbwire, ran through the dusty red clay, in and out of the tomato vines and in and out of the bean rows.

Nothing to put up and stack on the pantry shelves for winter, no steam from boiling kettles fogging the kitchen windows, the aroma seeping into every corner of the house: tomato sauce, soup stocks, creamed corn, sweet bread-and-butter pickles, succotash, green beans, white navy beans, speckled pinto beans. Not one jar to open when the coldest days arrived, when it hurt to breathe the air. There had been no summer tomato sandwiches smeared thick with mayonnaise on white bread baked in the oven, no corn on the cob dripping with butter, no crispy cucumbers to eat, straight from the garden, still warm from the sun.

That summer, in Eastaboga, Alabama, what had flourished were the daylilies: thousands of them, in the yard hovering close to the house, around the trees, alongside the road and in the ditches. Dad called them ditch lilies. "Ditch lilies! Living in the ditches, like beggars. Returning every year -- more and more of 'em. We can't grow goddamned tomato but we can grow thousands of these. We couldn't weed enough to make 'em disappear, even if we wanted to. 'But Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'"

Dad had pulled a handful of lilies up by the roots and tossed them into the sun to dry like bones, knowing Mother loved the bright red and orange lilies, knowing she did not want them to disappear.

The daylilies had not disappeared but, somehow, my father had. Alice said she had gotten out of bed one morning and he was gone and did not show up again.

"That's disappearing," she said matter-of-factly, hands on her hips. It was, after all, more mysterious to have a father who had disappeared than one who had just gone somewhere. And this time, we were sure, he had not just been put in jail for the weekend. The black-and-white sheriff's car had not driven into the yard. The sheriff had not, this time, stepped out of the car, tipped his hat to our mother and apologized for disturbing her, telling her he would bring our father back home in a day or two. No, this time our father had been gone for weeks. We wanted to ask Mother where he was but had learned not to ask questions, or speak of it except among ourselves.

Actually, Dad had not disappeared but had gone to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born and his brothers still lived, to find work. He left no money. He took the car. Said he'd write and send money soon. Mother couldn't drive anyway, so the car wasn't a great loss. The one time he had tried to teach her to drive, she had driven into a ditch. He never let her try again, claiming women weren't made to drive, they were made to take care of the home. And that's just what she did: wash clothes, iron clothes, wash dishes and cook meals for her husband and seven children.

Seven children: girl, boy, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, like descending stairs: eleven, nine, eight, seven, six, four and two years old, some without a full year in between; four with their father's hazel eyes and dark hair and three with their mother's blue eyes, but blondes rather than redheads.

I had just turned seven years old and didn't think Dad's disappearance was such a bad thing; no more dishes shattering into the wall, no more whiskey breath and smell of urine, no more fear of being discovered, of having to peek into a room before entering to see if he was slumped in a chair waiting for you to walk within his reach.

"Now I've got ya," he would shout, like he had just caught a raccoon raiding the corn patch, pulling his leather belt from the loops as the unwary one struggled to get free. You didn't have to do anything -- anything at all -- to get pinched, poked, shoved or hit, just be where he could reach you when he was drunk. "You belong to me and I'll do with you what I want."

Unless, which often happened, he decided you didn't belong to him at all.

"Where did these towheads come from?" he'd chide, ruffling Doris Ann's blond hair, pulling just hard enough to make her wince. "I got dark hair, your mama's got red hair; maybe they got you mixed up at the hospital and you don't really live here."

"I live here and I got blond hair," David said defiantly.

"Maybe you don't really live here either. Maybe I'm feeding kids that don't really even live here," Dad said and thumped David on the head. "Hell, Mamie's kids look more like me than you do!"

Mamie, our closest neighbor, lived about a quarter of a mile farther down Mudd Street. We played tag and leapfrog with her children. How could be believe Mamie's kids looked more like him than some of us? Mamie and her husband, Buck, and her kids -- they're Negroes -- how could he think they look more like him than us? We ran as fast as we could to the kitchen to ask Mother.

"Did they mix up the babies at the hospital?" Alice asked, breathless and close to tears.

"Of course not," Mother frowned. She pulled plates from the cupboard and put them on the table.

"Then how come I got blond hair?!" David demanded, holding up a lock of straight blond hair.

"And me!" Doris Ann said. She held her hair out from both sides like a long-eared puppy.

"Because God gave you -- "

"But how do you know they weren't really mixed up at the hospital?" Stewart interrupted, holding his hands out and hunching his shoulders.

"Am I eating food that's not mine?" David asked. He sucked in a sharp breath and held back tears.

"What?!" Mother asked.

"Am I eating food that's not mine? Do Mamie's kids look more like Dad than I do?" he choked, pressing his palms over his eyes.

"That's ridiculous." Mother exhaled heavily. She put her hands on her hips and glanced in the direction of Dad's crackling laughter. We turned toward the laughter but inched closer to Mother, surrounding her.

I pulled on the skirt of her dress. "Are you sure I live here?" I asked. "Are you sure I live here?"

"And me?" Doris Ann added.

"Yes, I'm positive," she said irritably. She patted my hand so I would let go of her dress. "Nobody was mixed up at the hospital. You all belong right here!"

I would not have questioned my parentage, for I had dark hair and hazel eyes like my father except: How did I get to be left-handed if neither my mother nor my father were left-handed? Maybe I'd been swapped for another baby girl with dark hair and hazel eyes. Maybe I was the one eating food that wasn't mine; maybe I was the one that didn't really live here.

It annoyed my father that I was left-handed. He called me "Southpaw," "Sinister" and sometimes "Middle-of-the-Road" because I was the middle child: three older, three younger. Just before I started to school he decided to remedy my left-handedness.

Dad came in the door with a six-pack of beer and a brown bag.

"Southpaw," he shouted. "Southpaw, come here! I got something for you." He dropped the bag on the couch. "Bring me a church key for my beer, there, Stu," he said, pulling a beer from the carton and sending the rest with Stewart to the refrigerator.

When I crept into the room, he was sitting on the couch drinking -- small, refined, pleasurable sips, pleasure that he seemed to get from nothing else. He put the beer on the coffee table and pulled the contents from the bag: a small blackboard, a box of chalk and a length of cord. He propped the blackboard against the large family Bible on the coffee table.

"Well, get over here," he barked. "I can't reach you from there."

I walked slowly toward my father, my heart beating faster with each step. I didn't understand the meaning of the chalkboard or the rope. The fear crept higher in my chest and I could hardly breathe. I wanted to run out the door but I knew he would catch me and more than likely hit me. I looked around for Mother, but she was not there. I could hear Alice and Stewart in the next room talking. "Dad brought home a rope for Barbara." I bit my tongue and tasted salty blood in my mouth. What had I done?

"Now, Miss Sinister, we're gonna rid you of your problem," Dad said, pulling me toward him and shaking me gently by the shoulders. He let go of me, took another sip of his beer and opened the box of white chalk. He took out one piece and placed it firmly in my right hand. Then he picked up the length of cord and shook it out, holding on to one end.r

"What are you gonna do?" I asked, my voice barely audible. "Are you gonna tie me up?"

Dad didn't answer. He took my left hand and wrapped the cord around and around my wrist.

"Where's Mom?" I asked, beginning to shake. I must have done something terrible...

He pulled my left hand behind my back, twirled me around to wrap the cord around my waist, and wrapped it, once again, around my wrist. I dropped the chalk from my right hand as I was whirled around. It hit the hardwood floor and broke into pieces.

"It's time for you to learn the correct way to write," Dad said as he tied the cord snugly, tugging at it to check for security, as if I were a prisoner who might try to escape. "It's time for you to change hands. You'll be off to school this fall. We can't have you still writing with your left. You want to be like everybody else, don't you?" He picked up a piece of the broken chalk from the floor and put it back in my right hand.

I nodded but didn't really see why it mattered if I wrote with my left instead of my right, as long as I could read it. Besides, I knew I wasn't like everybody else. Not like the other girls, anyway. I was smaller. And when I looked in the mirror, the face that looked back at me didn't have nice cheeks and a round chin. It was thin and long and squirrelly. If Dad could change that, I'd willingly let him tie me up.

"I'm gonna...