Mary Jane by Jessica Blau (debian ebook reader TXT) 📗

breakfast, however, so I knew I had time. Maybe Izzy and I would start shelving when she woke up.

The dining room looked fine. Even the candlesticks with the white nubs of melted candle in them were exactly where they’dbeen last night. The record player was on the floor where Izzy and I had set it up. The records were still lined against thewall, now held up by two stone carvings I had found on the washing machine. One was the shape of a woman’s torso and one theshape of a man’s.

I tried to push open the swinging door to the kitchen, but it was stuck. I walked around the back way: dining room, livingroom, entrance hall, TV room. When I got to the open doorway to the kitchen, I gasped.

The kitchen was like a crime scene. Or like the kitchen on The Poseidon Adventure after the boat sinks. The floor was covered with broken dishes: plates, bowls, glasses, even the serving platter I had used for the chicken. On top of the glassware and crockery was food from the pantry: cereal boxes, graham crackers, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, oatmeal, flour, sugar, raisins. Everything. The cupboard doors were open and the shelves were mostly emptied. In some places the debris was heaped two or three feet high.

I tried to imagine the scene in my head. Sheba had been doing most of the hollering. But would she break all the dishes? Andhow did Mrs. Cone feel, watching her dishes get destroyed? What was Dr. Cone doing? Was he trying to medicate or calm or stopwhoever was doing the breaking?

My mother entered my head. Not in Roland Park, she often said, as if all the ills of the world were contained in a cloud that just refused to hover over this little nookof northern Baltimore. But there I was, in Roland Park, and a big, heavy shattered-glass storm had landed. I imagined my mother’sface, seeing this scene, her head pulled back, eyes widened, the nearly invisible scratches of her eyebrows lifted almostinto her hairline. I remembered the single broken plate in my kitchen at the beginning of the summer and how serious thatcrime had seemed.

I looked at the closed kitchen door and envisioned Izzy forcing it open, just a bit, and then squeezing through and steppinginto a pile of broken glass. Very carefully, I high-knee-stepped through the debris. I picked up a cookie sheet from the floorand used it to push aside the crackling heap that was blocking the door. Then I swung the door open, and pushed debris againstit so it would be held that way.

I turned and went back to the TV room, and then to the laundry room, where Izzy and I had organized mops and brooms, rain boots, snow boots, raincoats, umbrellas, roller skates, and a bike pump. I pulled on Mrs. Cone’s orange rubber rain boots. They were too big, but I could walk easily enough in them. With a bucket, a mop, a broom, and a dustpan, I returned to the kitchen. Izzy was standing in the doorway on the dining room side, her mouth open in the shape of the letter O.

“Mary Jane! I woke up and you weren’t there!”

“I’m right here.”

“WHAT HAPPENED?!”

“I don’t know. When the grown-ups wake up, they can tell us what happened.”

Izzy lifted her arms. I waded over to her, picked her up, and walked her to the kitchen table. There were a few cracked andbroken glasses on the bench seats, so I placed her on top of the table, which was miraculously clear.

“Everything is broken.”

“I know. I’ll clean up.”

“What will we eat?”

“Hmmm.” I went to the refrigerator and checked inside. Untouched. “Milk straight from the carton? And some Laughing Cow cheese.Okay?”

“Yes!”

I took out the entire circular container of Laughing Cow and the carton of milk and placed them on the table beside Izzy.“Have you ever had milk from the carton?” The twins drank milk like that in their house. When I tried it once in my own home,I was swiftly whacked on the back of my head by my mother. The milk spilled, of course, and I had to mop the whole kitchenfloor as punishment.

“I can do it if my mom holds it for me. She does it all the time.”

I knew this already, as I’d seen Mrs. Cone stand at the refrigerator and drink milk from the carton. I’d also watched her dip rolled slices of cheese into the mustard jar with the fridge door still open. I opened the cardboard corner of the carton and held it to Izzy’s lips. She guzzled the milk. A bit dripped down her chin. Finding a napkin seemed too labor-intensive, so I wiped her mouth with my thumb. “Can you open the cheese yourself?”

“Yes.” Izzy wiggled out a wedge from the box. “You pull the red string.” She made her concentrating face and went to work.

I waded to the sink cupboard and got out a trash bag and gloves. With my gloved hands, I picked up the food items one by one.If it wasn’t canned or sealed, I threw it away. If it was boxed, I examined it closely for any possible openings where shardsof glass could have entered. The idea of Izzy taking a bite of oatmeal and swallowing a nearly invisible sliver of glass mademe feel a little panicky. Izzy ate cheese and talked to me while I worked. Every now and then I returned to the table andfed her more milk. She seemed entirely untraumatized by the night before and I thought, If she can handle this, then surely I can too.

It was easy to scoop up the broken dishes with the dustpan. I dumped them into a trash bag. There were more unbroken dishes on the floor than I would have guessed. Probably the second layer, cushioned by what had already been thrown down.

I picked up a white coffee cup and turned it around to make sure there were no cracks. “Coffee mugs have the highest survivalrate.”

“What’s a survival rate?