Loud in the House of Myself Read Online Free Page A

cried a lot. She still took me places and did things with me, but a part of her was gone. I tried hard to be very good and entertaining so she wouldn’t miss Natalie Jane. So that I wouldn’t bother her or see her cry, I hid in my room, picking out fantasy mothers from the JCPenney catalog. I spent hours naming the people on every page: first name, last name, middle name sometimes too. Then I faked their signatures, because that made them seem more real, more like people I actually knew. The arrival of the Penney’s catalog each Christmas may have excited other kids because they couldn’t wait to start making lists of the things they wanted, but it excited me because there were more people to name, more mothers and sisters to make up. I created entire JCPenney families, sometimes folding back the pages of women’s wear to touch children’s wear so I could assign smiling besweatered mothers to offspring in cozy quilted pajamas. I asked my grandma if I could have her catalogs when she was done with them; that way, I could name the same people all over again. I became obsessed with classification, as if by making enough lists and putting everything in exactly the right order and calling everything by exactly the right name, I could save both my mother and myself. I began “collecting friends” when we went shopping: in the mall, I walked up to random women with a pen and a paper bag from the Hallmark store. If they agreed to be my friends, I asked them to sign their names on the bag. I kept the bag under my mattress, pulling it out and meticulously copying the signatures next to my JCPenney mothers.
    My mom told me she was pregnant again a year later. I prayed she would carry this baby all the way, and—I was convinced this was due solely to my asking Jesus enough times—she did. My brother Cameron Jeryl came into the world on a cold March day in 1978, a few months after we moved into our new yellow house. My father picked me up from school, telling me there was someone at the house who wanted to meet me, and that day I held a baby for the first time. He had thick black hair and small pursed lips, and his milky blue eyes were closed like a kitten’s. I loved him instantly, and liked to set his carrier next to me on the piano bench while I played. I told him the names of the songs. I explained to him why Bach was better than Mozart (the fingering was harder) and why Beethoven was better than both of them (he was deaf but still wrote music). Cameron slept and gurgled and eventually cried, and my mother swept him into her arms like she used to do with me.
    Now that my mother had a baby, she was hypervigilant about his safety. Once, after he’d started to climb, he pulled himself up on a chair, then lost his balance; the chair tipped over and he fell to the floor. My mother’s back had been turned, and now Cameron had a concussion. I’m not sure she ever forgave herself. She began to slip away into an obsession with protecting him. When he got sick two months later and ended up in the hospital with a high fever and aching joints, she spent every minute with him while I stayed with Aunt Linda and my cousins Kendra and Jason. I rattled about in their big house, twice the size of ours, wondering if I would ever see my mom or my brother again.
    One night, I heard the unmistakable sound of my mother crying in Linda’s living room. I crept out of bed and sat on the landing above the stairs, twisting the multicolored shag carpet in my fingers, straining to hear the conversation downstairs. I heard my mother say Cameron had to have a spinal tap. They thought he had meningitis. I imagined a tap like the one I’d read about in Little House on the Prairie, the kind Pa stuck into trees to get the maple syrup that Laura and Mary froze in the snow to make candy. Were they going to drain my brother’s spine? What kind of syrup was inside a spine?
    My mother said, “They told me it would hurt him a lot.”
    Linda said, “But