I Am Isabel the Storyteller
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Category: I Am Isabel Scheherazade
January 15, 2021
#11a. A story from the Way-Back Seat of my memory about Dad that shows how pumped he was about Miss Mary’s pump.
Miss Mary’s water pump looks like the one in Little House on the Prairie. In fact, it looks JUST like that water pump LAMP next to my bed–the one Dad made in shop class. I wish I could ask Dad if he got the idea for the lamp from Miss Mary’s real pump.
BEFORE everything changed, my family would “come over” to Pop and Mimi’s for brunch or picnics, stuff like that. And every time we come, Dad brings us to the farm to see the animals and, quiz us on how the pump works.
Dad really wanted us to understand, and I’m finally getting it. Here’s what happens the very last time we visit BEFORE. (Which, BTW, is only two weeks ago. Seems more like a decade.)
After cranking the pump handle a few times while the twins and I watch, Dad raises his eyebrow and says, Who can tell me why there’s no water coming out of the pump today?
ME: Air.
DAD: Right, air’s gotten in, so there’s no water pressure. No water pressure, no water.
(You might notice that the twins aren’t saying anything. That’s ’cause they’re four. They ARE looking back and forth between Dad and me like it’s a tennis match.)
DAD: So what do we do?
TWINS: Knock on Miss Mary’s door! Knock on Miss Mary’s door!
DAD: Looking a little perplexed, Er, why would we do that dudes?
TWINS: Miss Mary has water in her sink! Miss Mary has water in her sink!
DAD: He ruffles their heads and fist-bumps with them, and then he says, What ELSE could we do?
ME: Get rid of the air that’s wrecked the water pressure.
DAD: How do we do that?
ME: Like this. And I run back to Mimi and Pop’s, turn on their hose, pour water from the hose into a bucket, and run back up the hill to Miss Mary’s. (The twins watch me like I’ve never done this before and, trust me, if I’ve done it once, I’ve done it a zillion times. Or at least three times when they were around.)
DAD: Now what?
ME: I pour the water into the top here. (I have to stand tippy-toed to lift the bucket and pour it into this pipe that’s right next to the pump.) Then I pump the handle.
I pump the handle updownupdown a few times and then, with a great gurgle and splash, water spurts out and into the trough below. The trough’s for the animals to drink from. In fact, one of Miss Mary’s lambs (Pretty funny, huh? “Miss Mary’s Lambs,” like in the nursery rhyme?) scurries around the corner of the barn and starts lapping it up.
ISABEL
-sketch by my friend Ryan Grimaldi Pickard
January 14, 2021
#10. I remember a detail about the murderer.
Right before I confronted the killer, this is the scene at Ye Old Coffee Shoppe: Mimi thought we should try the round glass-top wire table Belle has tucked in a corner. Since it’s further from the counter and other customers she figured it might work better for the twins. (She and Pop haven’t started to put their foot down yet with their antics. I understand. I don’t how they’ll react to having somebody who isn’t Mom or Dad say “no” either.
Mimi says, Sam, er, maybe you shouldn’t teeter?
“Maybe?” Really, Mimi? I study Clyde as he moves his chair around on the flagstones to teeter it like Sam’s. I take a break from scooping pumpkin latte froth; it’s still too hot; I scan the rest of the room.
The door swings open and the oxygen sucks out of Ye Old Coffee Shoppe.
It’s him. The guy. The one who ran the red light. I know it’s him for sure because I saw his picture in the paper the day after he murdered Mom and Dad. Black curly hair, one big eyebrow, whiskers, a faded jean jacket, work pants, and boots.
I watch him order coffee. Belle asks him to repeat what he said. Figures he would be a mumbler.
I see that he’s dusty. Looks like drywall dust, I think. How the heck do I recognize drywall dust, I ask myself, and a scene from the Way-Back Seat of my memory emerges like magic.
This guy looks like DAD looked that time he fixed the wall in my bedroom–before he painted the rainbows and Mom did the constellations. I play the memory out in my head as I stare at the killer ripping sugar packets. Four of them. That’s a lot of sugar, Mister, I think. While he dumps sugar, the rest of him doesn’t move. My image of Dad and the drywall dust comes clearer, like a fog’s blown away from it.
At the end of the bedroom project, Dad is covered head to toe with white. He looks like someone with ghost make-up.
Mom and I laugh at him. (It’s just the three of us at this point in our lives; the twins haven’t been born yet.) Dad chases us around and makes hooohooo noises. He was so fun.
This guy must be on a coffee break. I’d read that he has two jobs–a floor-polisher and shelf-stocker in a grocery store at night and a builder during the day. Maybe this is why he looks exhausted. Today he must have been putting up dry wall.
I watch him carry the coffee to a table. He pulls out the chair and sits down. He cradles the cardboard cup. He doesn’t sip, just looks into a middle distance. Suddenly, he puts the cup down and puts his head in his hands.
I glance at Mimi to see if she’s noticing either the guy or me, but she’s totally into twin-teetering.
I push my chair back, stand up, and go over to his table. The rest, as they say, is history.
ISABEL
(sketches by Ryan Grimaldi Pickard)
January 9, 2021
#5. Wherein I explain who the narrator of my own life is…
I, Isabel Scheherazade, am 13-years old. Still a kid, technically; but what I’m writing is not-just-for-kids. Parts of my story is “for mature audiences” as they say. In fact, the movie rating for this memoir of mine wouldn’t be “G” or even “PG.” The reviewers would say it’s “edgy” and maybe give it one of those “parental warnings” for violence and death.
(My old school once tried to ban “A Day No Pigs Will Die.” We protested to the school board; that’s how I know about this stuff.)
My dad was writing a memoir with his high school Freshmen. (He’ll never finish it, BTW.) I asked him, “How do you decide which stories?”
“I write the stories that will still ring a bell in my heart when I’m 99,” he says.
How’s that for a not-really-an-answer answer? But now that I’ll never see him again I get it. My mind and heart throb with my stories. They’re seared into me and making a sound in my heart and mind every minute.
This is what happened. I’m going to write it quick and then throw up.
Mom and Dad were killed.
A guy in a truck ran a stop light; my parents swerved to avoid him and rolled over and over down this steep hill.
They wouldn’t let us see Mom and Dad after the accident. This means that the last time I saw them was about 5 PM. Mimi and Pop (my grandparents) had come over to babysit for date night. I was on our front porch in my PJ’s, electric- tooth brushing while telling Dad that Pop and I were going to play Settlers of Catan.
So, I didn’t even give them a good night kiss.
Since that night, me, Clyde, Sam (they’re twins) and Mimi and Pop sip and gulp from this Huge Cup of Sorrow.
I notice, though, even on the worst days I see OVER the lip of the cup a tiny bit. It’s because I’m trying to write to understand what’s happening. I’m trying to hold myself together by grabbing at words.
Stories jump up and down to get my attention.
I’m like this lady Pop told me about. She thinks someone is trying to poison her, so pretty soon, since she expects it, all her food begins to taste funny. Because I’m on the look-out for stories that will shed light, I find them. All around me. Just waiting for me to pick them up.
My memories are organized like our minivan (the one that rolled down the embankment.) Before it got squashed, it had three rows of seats, but, we used this van differently from other families.
I’ve got stories about what’s happening Right This Minute: The front seat memories. They’re full of our life With Mimi and Pop, school, neighbors, every day kinds of stuff. Some big. Some little.
I’ve got stories of Mom and Dad’s car crash: That’s the middle row o seats. But most times it’s like that row is turned down for storage. In our family we used that middle section for storage because the twins’ huge double stroller didn’t fit in the usual back door storage area. So all three of us kids sat in the third row of seats, me in between two car seats full of noisy boys. Tight and gooey.
Back to the middle row. You know how you can press a lever to fold and turn the seat cushions so they’re out of sight? That’s how it is with the crash day memories. Out of sight. Usually.
Then there’s our whole life with Mom and Dad. Before. It’s like they’re just sitting in the way back seat of my memory, waiting for me to notice them.
So, here goes. This is the story of our first few months–After. You’ll see how memories and stories jump out of the way back and into the front.
And sometimes plunk right into the middle.
January 8, 2021
#2. Official First Chapter? Wherein I WATCH THE PARTYING MOURNERS FROM BEHIND A BUNCH OF ORANGE FLOWERS
It’s over. We had a memorial service at the stone chapel near Raging River, which was not.
I can’t remember much of what was said except this. One of the readers quoted Abraham Lincoln, “it’s not the years in a life, it’s the life in the years.”
Words as comforting as peroxide on a cut. When President Lincoln’s kids, Tad, Edward, and Willie died, he couldn’t have uttered this.
I don’t process most of the words. They were like that blah blah background grown-up talk in Charlie Brown TV specials.
In the front row, Pop and Mimi clamp onto us like Dad’s woodwork vise, the one with super sturdy metal and wide wide “jaws.” I use this vise, Izzy, for the heavy-duty projects, Dad would explain while I sat on the cellar steps just above the work bench. See? The vise keeps it all from coming apart.
Sam, Clyde, and I are Mimi and Pop’s heavy-duty projects. Otherwise, I know we’d come apart.
Now we’re back at Pop’s. The twins and I are hiding out on a glider behind a tall wooden trellis loaded with viney, orange trumpet-shaped flowers. They’re glorious. Inappropriately jolly?
What a minute, Isabel. Give it a rest.
Clyde and Sam had a playgroup we brought them to for a while; we stopped because one of the mothers was always scolding kids for being “inappropriate.” Honestly? At age 2!! So, take a lesson, self. These flowers are perfect. Mom would be pointing out how their shape suits Hummingbirds.
I peer at the bunches of people in the backyard. If you didn’t know, you’d think this was a picnic. Pop calls the crowd the partying mourners. Some party.
Right now one of Mom’s scientist buddies is talking to Mimi. Just last week I was at Mom’s lab waiting for her. The two of them were comparing slides, talking about honey bee mouth parts. Now he looks up at the trumpet trellis and gives a tiny wave.
Sam and Clyde are rolling their little trucks back and forth on the seat slats. It’s weird though. Unlike usually, they make no noise. None. It’s like their volume control knob is turned all the way to OFF. If Mom were here, she’d be holding their foreheads and murmuring, where you gone, little guys?
But they’re not. Gone, that is.
And she is.
And there’s this killer, not even in jail. Even though he made Mom and Dad go off the road and roll down a hill.
And die.
And, unlike the river, I am, raging that is.
ISABEL
January 8, 2021
#1. Preface to a murder memoir by Isabel Scheherazade, story catcher and orphan.
A week before he was murdered, Dad was learning Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on his guitar. First he listened to the song a lot. Then he learned the guitar part. Then he played it while he deliberately talked to me or Mom. Then he listened again. Then he copied the lyrics and read them over and over while he brushed his teeth. Then he sang along with Bob Dylan on his iPod figuring out which words and syllables had chord changes. Then he sang and strummed and finally said, Listen up, Izzy.
One of the lyrics went like this:
“…something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…”
That is exactly what it’s like for me now. Something is happening, and I don’t know what it is.
And, Dad? Are you nearby, somehow? How else to explain why I’m hearing “Thin Man” in my mind’s ear? And Listen up, Izzy? in your exact tone of voice?
Is there magic going on?
—Isabel Scheherazade (who’s trying to keep it all together by writing it down in this blog)
May 19, 2014
#45 Can a kid break a rule even though the “caretaker” hasn’t laid down the rules? What’s next for me, Isabel Scheherazade? Hint: It requires going to Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe.
How’d you know I was at court?
The school called, says Pop.
The school called?
It’s a new procedure, Mimi says. They call when anyone’s absent, just to make sure.
Make sure?
Mimi nods. Yes, to make sure the student is sick and not abducted, or some such.
Cray*, I think. We all ponder kidnapping for a few seconds, I break the silence with, How did you know I’d be here? At court?
Remember the day you pulled the newspaper out of the bookshelves? Pop looks at me. Then he looks at Mim and they do that thing where they communicate for a few paragraphs without talking.
Mimi takes over, Isabel, we were going to take you back to school and talk later, but let’s do this. We have until the boys get out of Kindergarten. In between now and then, we’ll…
I interrupt. We’ll go to the hearing?
No. Pop’s one raised eyebrow goes to a full frown. We’ll get some sandwiches and drinks at Belle’s and explain things to you. We’ll talk, and you’ll listen.
Mimi puts her hand on his arm and gives him a small frown.
Wow, I think to myself. “I’ll talk and you’ll listen” sounds just like Dad used to when I’d done something wrong and he was fed up with “All the Nonsense.”
I don’t know why, but suddenly I begin to feel safer or something like safe. Secure maybe. Secure the way a Native American baby in a papoose must feel when there’s no way to be anywhere but on its mother’s back. All cozy. I wish Oliver had stayed. He would have liked this part.
—Isabel Scheherazade, a sort of delinquent who is learning slang from Olivia. So cray* means crazy. I THINK it’s a rapper word, but Oliver’s on-line slang dictionary says it’s going mainstream.
I Am Isabel the Storyteller 