From Broken As Things Are

or many years, our mother laughed in the retelling: a laughter so quiet and seemingly unwarranted that it could easily be mistaken for something else-a slight wheeze, a muffled sigh. "For two straight weeks after you were born, I was laid up with a fever," she would say, unable to remember the roses Aunt Lois claimed filled our hospital room. Instead of flowers, our mother spoke of tiny women in flaming dresses, of closing her eyes on small lit fires, knowing all the while there was a baby in the room. There was danger.

"I really believed we were burning up then, Morgan-Lee," she'd tell me, her fingers flitting to her forehead and down again. "And hard as I tried to save you, I couldn't. I was just too tired. Much too tired."

"She was. She was tired," Aunt Lois would confirm, patting different powders on the back of her hand to check for color or unpacking boxes of newly arrived creams and lipsticks. When she found the right powder, she'd puff some on her nose and forehead, wave away the extra particles that glistened in the sunlight, and arrange her bottles in ascending order according to height. She'd wait patiently for our mother to finish speaking about the aftermath of my birth.

When it came to her part in the story, Aunt Lois stopped whatever she was doing to tell it. She liked her part. "I brought the two of you home on the hottest June day North Carolina had seen in fifteen years," she'd say, her violet eyes opening wide, pleased at the thought of her own strength. "I literally carried the both of you. Carried."

No one ever asked where our father and Uncle Pete were, because of course they were there. Aunt Lois never had children. She had never really carried anyone in her life.

Our mother would listen without comment as Aunt Lois continued. "Oh! You were such a pale white thing with all those veins glowing blue under your skin. You looked like a little machine, something mechanical out in all that blazing sun. You were just so white," she would conclude, disappointed, her fingers resorting to the smooth glass bottles or plastic makeup kits.

Aunt Lois had always maintained that beauty was a question of shadows, so she took it personally that my face was blank as a stretch of desert. Even as a baby, I had not been beautiful.

"Ginx," she'd begin again, whispering my brother's name, "Ginx's face, though. Even when he was a newborn, you could tell he'd be extraordinaire!" She'd pause then to draw in a quick breath, as if preparing to mention the dead. "It's not the first or only time I've witnessed God giving abundantly in one area to make up for another." No one ever asked her to elaborate.

Our mother would interrupt then, the bones in her cheeks so delicate I was surprised they hadn't shattered all those years ago during the fever of my birth. "Ginx thought you belonged to him, Morgan-Lee. He would sit on our big couch right there in his sailor's suit and hold on to you for dear life. We have a picture of it somewhere-Ginxy holding you on that couch like it was a ship about to go under."

When they brought me home from the hospital, Ginx was one and a half years old. Even in the years that followed, he would not speak except in invented words lined one after the other. I was told that he stared hard at the faces of adults who repeated "Mom-ma, Dad-da" to him. Aunt Lois said she'd get worked to tears just trying to teach him those two words.

"He didn't speak normal till he was five," Aunt Lois told me. "Then-bang-one day he's just talking away in complete sentences. But he wouldn't say I. He said we, meaning you and him. 'We're hungry,' he'd say." Aunt Lois shook her head while our mother laughed in her quiet way.

At night, Ginx said his own words. I could not have been much older than two, but I swear I can still remember my brother's hand when he reached to caress my scalp, a pure ray of moon against the wall. Occasionally, he caught the filaments of my hair in his fist and pulled. "Aduage," he would say, if I started to cry. Aduage-a word that contains all words the way white contains all colors. His small arm would point toward the moonlight that parted our curtains: aduage.

Ginx did not want our parents to come in, their tired faces breaking the dark. I must not have wanted it either, because our father said I was such a quiet child. No one ever had to sing me a lullaby. Some mornings, Ginx would still be holding to the bars of my crib when our mother came to wake us. "Ginxy," she would say. "Ginx," she'd whisper more loudly, if he was asleep. He might look up, but he rarely moved. Often she was forced to bend down and pry open his fingers as he watched, detached and curious. "Oh, Ginx, you'll be okay." He was a small child, quickly up and against her chest. He did not hold her as she squeezed him, turning away from me. She covered the back of his head with her hand so that his chin rested on her shoulder, his face peeking through her abundant hair. Aunt Lois once told me that when Ginx was around four, he would shrug and wince when our mother tried to hold him. "And to tell the truth," our aunt mused, "after that I never really saw her hold any of you unless she had to."

When Dana was born, our parents put her in the crib, and I got a narrow bed with bars on the side. Ginx slept in a regular bed with no bars. In the mornings, our mother would open the curtain and stare out our window. "Oh, it's day," she'd finally say, blinking as if the concept were new and difficult. The universe was all one piece then: hair, skin, the coming light.

_

When he was around five, Ginx started to practice his figureeight drawings. It was after our father gave him a train set with a track in the shape of a figure eight. We put the train on that track and let it run. Ginx sat in an overstuffed armchair, and I sat on the ground. "Look," he said. "Pannot." And the train went round and round in its figure eight, the circles melding into one another. I never spoke about our train, because I soon realized that other kids built towns or made tunnels over their tracks. Other kids had their trains run on bridges or stop to load and unload pretend cargo. Ginx didn't even open the box of toy houses, trees, and tunnels that Aunt Lois had given him for his birthday. We would just sit, watching the train. Sometimes, Ginx would rock, but usually he sat in the armchair, digging at the cloth in the armrest. By the time he was six, the armrest was covered in dug-out circles, and our father gave the chair away.

"There's a figure eight," Ginx would say, pointing at a cloud or a swirl in the river or a patterned rug. "Right there, Morgan-Lee. Figure eight." I'd turn to where he was pointing; I wanted to see it too. And so I stayed close to my brother, looking where he pointed, listening to what he saw, and feeling protected as long as he was there because other people were as blind as I was and had no clue about what lurked behind even the most normal objects. Iwas one of Aunt Lois's phrases. I worried for other people who had no one to explain how the world was wired, the sounds and shapes hidden everywhere. Ginx had learned all of it by himself, and slowly he was teaching me.

_

"Ginx is not my real name," he told me one day in the beginning of my ninth-grade year. We were outside raking leaves.

"Yes, it is." I pulled the rake as quickly as I could, wanting my arms to grow muscular. I knew girls had to work harder at it.

"It's not my name," he said, pulling his own rake over the same grass again and again because he would not stop till it was utterly clean of leaves.

"What's your name, then?" I pinched each of my arms to check out my muscles, but they were still slender and long-no different, really, than bone. Ginx stopped raking. His arms and legs were too long for his torso, so his clothes hung strangely, as if he'd dressed years ago, before his limbs had grown. He was thin and often hunched when he walked. He was wearing a colorful striped shirt, buttoned up to the collar, and brown corduroy pants. Aunt Lois had taken those pants in at the waist and let them out at the hem as much as possible, but they were still an inch too short, and the sleeves of his shirt didn't quite reach his wrists. If our father didn't remind Ginx to change clothes, he would have worn this same outfit every day. It wasn't that the pants and shirt were comfortable-they were not-but he liked the shirt's stripes, which encircled his body, holding certain things in and keeping others out. The brown stripe matched his corduroys.

"You're not born with a name," Ginx said, returning to his patch of almost leafless grass. "You are given a name."

"Like I didn't know that," I huffed, pulling my rake so hard two of the metal teeth bent. I wondered how long it would take me to do the whole yard. Probably I could do it faster than it would take Ginx to finish two patches.

"So 'Ginx' is only the sound of the name Momma wanted to give me."

"Why didn't she-" I began, then stopped to rephrase the question. "How come she didn't just give you the actual name then?" If he had to choose someone to look at, Ginx would choose to look at me, but he preferred in general to avoid faces, usually settling for the third button down on an oxford shirt, the nadir of the V in a T-shirt, or the fold line of a turtleneck.

"That way the name is secret."

"What is your name, then?" I wanted to know.

Back in fifth grade, the teachers had encouraged me to skip a year, but our father said I wasn't mature enough to advance so quickly. So I didn't. I didn't care about not skipping a grade; what I wanted was for Ginx to consider me smart. I was pretty sure he didn't.

"What is it?" I asked again. His brown hair hung in his face and grew shaggily around his ears.

"Don't know," he said. "If you're lucky, you find out before you die." He wiped his right hand on his pants and resumed his raking.

"Everyone has a different real name?" I asked. My brother shook his head, and I could see he was trying not to laugh, forcing his lips down, as if my question were as ridiculous as asking the color of green grass. He shook the hair from his eyes.

"No. Most people's names are just fine for them," he said. Dunapull. "Most people just get their names and that's it." He picked up his rake and began to rake out a new patch. "But other people get a sound, a clue," he told me, "and then they have to look a long time, and sometimes they might get close, but most don't actually find it."

"But Momma knows your real name?" I asked, looking at our small brick house with its black shutters and little stone stoop. Our father painted the shutters every year, so they were always a shiny black, and he had made the stoop himself.

Ginx shrugged. "She knew what it sounded like." He cut me short, quickly adding, "That's all I know." I did not want to ask if I was one of the people with a real name; I wanted him to tell me. And Ginx would have told me without my asking, but he would have told me another day, in the middle of some other conversation, and this, of course, was basic fundamental information, more important than knowing your primary colors or the letters of the alphabet. If I were the kind of person who didn't have a hidden name, I would forget about growing my muscles. I would no longer want to go to the river or study math or tell my brother stories. I'd give up. I could barely ask it.

"Is my name my name?"

Ginx did not even pause in his raking. Again, I saw he was trying not to laugh.

"What's so funny?" I asked, irritated. "Just tell me."

"No." He looked at me now, spearing the rake at the ground as if it were a shovel. "No, Morgan-Lee. No and not. That's not your name. It is the sound of your name; you should know that." And then, in a low voice, he added, "Cantaloupe."

"I know," I told him, happy now and strong enough to rake our yard and Aunt Lois's and even Old Mrs. Dean's. "Dalla," I added, in refrain.

"Yes." My brother returned to the original patch of grass, which the wind had now scattered in leaves. "Is that Poppa hollering?" he asked.

I didn't answer. Our father was at the supermarket. Our mother was weeding the garden and spreading a fresh load of rinds and vegetable scrapings on the compost pile. Aunt Lois and Uncle Pete were helping her; after all, they benefited from the garden too. No one was hollering.

So I spent my first year of high school knowing what to listen for. It wasn't so much that I expected after my ninthgrade year to have pieced together the fragments of my real name-that could only be done little by little. It was enough that Ginx believed I had one.


Read another excerpt called "Party" (Word doc) from Broken As Things Are.


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