I Am Isabel the Storyteller

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Category: Notebook Keepers Lead Wider-Awake Lives

January 13, 2021

#9. An AFTERWORD. Get it? Like afterward, but with the “a” changed to an “o”?

One time Dad and I stand next to this huge steam engine that pulls the commuter train between our town and the next one.  I see the engineer and another guy shovel coal into a furnace. Dad says, The coal heats the water, and the steam from the water moves the train. 

I  hear all this huffing and puffing, like the engine is revving itself up for pulling all the cars.

Dad looks down at me and says, It’s called “gathering steam,” Isabel.

I think of Dad and the engine yesterday morning when Mimi comes up to see if I’m okay.

She sits on the edge of my bed and tells me that since Mom and Dad died it’s been hard for her to get up too. I feel bad ’cause I haven’t been thinking about how hard it must be for them.

It’s okay for you to feel the way you do, Mimi says.  It’s because we’re sad. This is what it means to grieve.

I’m about to ask her whether we’ll ever STOP grieving, but don’t think I want to hear the answer. If we cease grieving does that mean we lose Mom and Dad?

Mimi gets up to go back downstairs, but turns back and says, Take your time, Isabel. You’re gathering steam.

If words can warm, then Mimi’s heat my heart.

ISABEL

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January 13, 2021

#8. Why I Can’t Hop Out of Bed.

Every morning since coming to live with Pop and Mimi, after I wake up? After my eyes open? I.  Just. Lie Here. It’s like I don’t have a habit of what to do next in this place. I haven’t jumped out of bed once.

Yet.

One reason is I’m shocked to be at Pop and Mimi’s still. Of course the twins and I have stayed overnight lots of times. It was always a special treat. We loved it. Now it’s like a Big Mistake.  This place we loved to visit is now instead of the place we loved to live in. With the two people we loved most in the world. The universe. 

So I’m shocked, like I-stuck-a-finger-in-an-outlet-shocked.

I think it’s partly because I’m not in my regular-when-life-was-good bedroom: Rainbows on the walls–painted by Dad. Constellations on the ceiling–painted by Mom. In our second floor, crowded apartment. 

Where I am now is Dad’s old bedroom. The one he had when he was a kid like me.

Dormer window facing the morning sun. Bed with carved pineapple bedposts.

Tiny bedside table with one drawer. I found a basketball inflator needle in it, leftover from Dad’s b-ball days as a hotshot three-point champ.

Water pump lamp. Dad made it in woodworking class when he was in fourth grade. The handle of the pump has a chain on it. When you pump the handle the light goes on and off. There’s a pretend spout and a water trough for pretend water to flow into. Oh, and did I mention this? The lamp shade has horses on it, like hole-punched horse shapes, so when it’s dark and the light is on you see horses all over the walls.

Back to why I can’t budge out of bed in the mornings:

I feel like I have to check on my mind and muscle powers. You know, to see if I’ve got any.

It’s like I’m Mr. Frank, the grocery man at Frank’s Grocery and Food Mart. I help Mimi with our weekly shopping there. She holds onto the cart and her list, and I fetch stuff for her. (That’s a Mimi word–fetch.)  I always bump into Mr. Frank in his white apron.  He checks the shelves and makes notes. Just doing inventory, Isabel, he says to me and pats my head. Need to see what’s what. 

That’s how it is with me. I’m doing inventory, checking to see what I have left on my shelves.

It’s not that I don’t want to go downstairs and see Mimi and Pop, Clyde and Sam. I can hear them from here. They’re up and at ‘em, as Mom used to say.

Listen to this, Dearie, Pop says as he reads the sports page.

Do you want oatmeal or Cherrios, Clyde? Mimi doesn’t know exactly what the guys like for breakfast, and she’s trying to Get It Right.

And I hear VaroomVaroom noises that tell me the Tonkas are on the table next to the cereal bowls. Pop and Mimi don’t know that Dad didn’t allow toys at the table, because of all the spills.

Or maybe they do know and don’t want to say NO yet.

ISABEL

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(sketches by Ryan Grimaldi Pickard, Isabel’s dear friend)

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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

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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.

isabelinchair

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