Loud in the House of Myself Read Online Free

thought this was what adults did with their friends—they went to the movies.
    She laughed. “No, I’ve never gone to the movies with her.”
    “Who’s your best friend?”
    “Linda, I guess,” she said,
    “But she’s your sister.” I didn’t think sisters or aunts or cousins counted.
    “Well then,” she said, “I guess Grandma.”
    The fact that my mother had no friends became a matter of increasing concern to me. I didn’t like that she didn’t go to the movies. I felt sorry for her and didn’t want to leave her side. When she was with me, I did whatever I could to make sure she was having fun, and I took this upon myself with a resolute determination. I could not bear to see my mother sad.
    I hid my dolls from her. Not because they were girly and I preferred Hot Wheels cars (which I did) or because they were creepy (which they were), but because I could picture my mother holding one of them and sobbing if I was dead. If I died, she would have no one. She would have to play with a doll and pretend it was a baby, like the old lady we saw at the nursing home when my Brownie troop went there to sing Christmas carols.
    I lay awake at night imagining my own death, and what came afterward. In Sunday school they told us Christians lived forever in heaven, but this offered me no comfort. I never worried about what I would do if my mother died, only what she would do if I died. She would be sad, and the last thing I would see before I went to heaven would be her sad face. She might be crying. She might already be holding the doll.
    When she told me she was going to have another baby, I felt a profound sense of relief. There would be someone else to split the job of entertaining her. Before her pregnancy, when my dad was on the truck, which was most of the time, I was all she had. I played the piano for her a lot, but sometimes I got tired. I made up plays and dances and songs for her. I wrote her books, stories written and illustrated in blue ballpoint pen on pink stenographer’s paper, bound with my Snoopy stapler. I made her sno-cones with my Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine, and when I took ceramics classes at Ethel’s craft shop, everything I made was for her. Our cabinets were packed with my meticulously painted plaster witches and Santas and Easter bunnies; I thoroughly equipped her for all seasonal contingencies. In her room were ceramic jewelry boxes, in the kitchen a ceramic cowbell shaped like an actual cow. I never made anything for myself, but for my mother I made elaborate plastic jewelry and latch-hook rugs and loop ’n’ loom potholders. I saved my allowance to buy her things from the Avon catalog; her bathroom counter was littered with glass owls filled with solid perfume.
    Because I needed someone else to help me, another set of hands on the assembly line, I couldn’t wait for the baby to come. We talked about names. One late-summer night, while she scrubbed my back in our pink bathtub, she told me I could pick the middle name if the baby was a girl. I tried to choose between Jane and Nancy. She said the first name would be Natalie, so Jane was better. Unlike many children who are jealous when a sibling comes along, I loved sharing my mother with the person growing in her belly. The world was full of possibilities. My sister. White petals fell from the dogwoods outside our expectant home.
    Natalie Jane died on Christmas. She was never born; she died while she was still inside my mother’s womb. While we were opening our presents, my mother started bleeding. The next day my dad took me to see her in the hospital. I made her a green construction-paper tree with cotton balls glued on for snow, and she fed me lemon Jell-O from her avocado-green dinner tray. I tried not to think about the fact that my sister had, according to my father, “something too wrong with her to be born.” I tried not to imagine what her face might have looked like.
    When my mother came home, she stared out the kitchen window and