I wasn’t even going to ask about that.
At night, while she sat in front of the TV—JIGGLE TO GET 11—Mira worked on her projects. Nothing ever seemed to get completely fixed, just tinkered with and then labeled with a note. I came back one day to find she’d taken apart the alarm clock in my room—which, although I reset it each day, had been CONSISTENTLY FIVE MINUTES BEHIND—and then put it back together. She was very proud of herself until she discovered she’d left out one huge spring. Now, instead of ringing, it made this awful moaning sound. The next day I’d snuck out to the drugstore and purchased a nice, new digital clock, which I kept hidden under my bed as if it was contraband and illegal just because it worked.
The strange thing was that she had enough money to buy all new appliances, if she wanted; I’d discovered a stack of bank statements in a lower cabinet while searching for a vegetable steamer.
The evening I found the vacuum cleaners, I came downstairs to find her sitting on the back porch watching TV.
“Mira,” I said, after shoving the broom into the closet, “why don’t any of these vacuums work?”
She hadn’t heard me, her eyes fixed on the TV. I walked down the dark hallway to stand behind her chair. Then I heard my mother’s voice.
“My name is Kiki Sparks,” she was saying, right there in her trademark windsuit, blonde hair cut and curled, hands on hips in the can-do pose. She was in a fake living room set, with a plant and sofa behind her. “And if you are overweight and have given up, I want you to listen to me. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Because I can help you.”
The music started, that same tune I knew so well; I’d seen this infomercial a million times. It was the one that had made my mother a star.
“Mira?” I said softly.
“It’s just amazing what she’s done,” she said suddenly, as we both watched my mother clap her hands and walk toward the studio audience, grabbing a woman to demonstrate how to do a deep knee squat (perfect for toning those glutes!). “You know, I never doubted your mother could get thin. Or conquer the world, for that matter.”
I smiled. “I don’t think she ever did either.”
“She was always so sure of herself.” Mira turned around in her chair to look at me, the light of the TV on her face. “Even during those terrible years when you two were moving from place to place, she was never scared. And she’d never take a cent from our parents; just because she was too principled. She wanted to prove to everyone that she could do it. That was always very important to her.”
I thought back to the nights we’d slept in the car; to ketchup soup. To the times she’d thought I was sleeping and cried silently, her hands over her face. My mother was strong, to be sure. But nobody was perfect.
Onscreen, my mother was leading the crowd in a touch-step, touch-step, her arms waving over her head. She had a big, bright smile, her muscles flexing and unflexing with each lunge. “Let’s go!” she said to them, to us. “I know you can do it! I know you can!”
Mira was watching, leaning in close. “I just love this program. The weight stuff—” she paused, shaking her head. “That’s not important to me; we’ve always been different that way. But I just love to see what she can do. It’s infectious, you know? That’s why I always watch,” she said softly, there in the dark, the light from the TV flickering across both of us. “I always watch.”
“Me too,” I said, and I sat on the floor by her feet. I pulled my legs in against my chest and we watched together as my mother spread the gospel, one touch-step, touch-step at a time.
Chapter five
The Colby post office was a tiny little house, one room lined with mailboxes, staffed by an old man who always looked half asleep. After I worked lunches I’d leave from the back door of the restaurant, walk across an empty field, then past an auto shop and a drugstore to come out right by its front door.
There’s a kind of radar that you get, after years of being talked about and made fun of by other people. You can almost smell it when it’s about to happen, can recognize instantly the sound of a hushed voice, lowered just enough to make whatever is said okay. I had only been in Colby for a few weeks. But I had not forgotten.
I was in the post office picking through the mail one day—bills, a check from Mira’s card company, and a postcard from my mother featuring the Venus de Milo in workout wear—when I heard it.
“Well, you know what they say about her.” It was a woman’s voice, middle-aged and twangy. She was around the corner, behind the next row of mailboxes.
“I’ve been told some things,” a second woman said. You could tell she wanted her friend to go on. She just wasn’t ready to contribute yet.
This was also part of what I knew.
“It’s no secret,” said the first woman. I could hear her shuffling her mail. “I mean, everyone is aware of it.”
I stepped back and leaned against the mailboxes, touching my tongue to my piercing. My face was already hot, that uncontrollable red flush that climbed across my skin, rampant, that one dry spot in the back of my throat that no amount of swallowing helped. I might as well have been back at school, standing in the girls’ locker room listening to Caroline Dawes announce to her friends that I’d told Chase Mercer my mother would pay him to be my boyfriend.
And that was a good day. Now here, months later in a town where I hardly knew anyone, it was happening again.