“Help me!” Izzy handed me a red crayon. I nervously started coloring the tip.
Dr. Cone glanced over. “Jesus, looks like it’s pissing blood.”
I froze. I felt like my heart had stopped. But before I could say anything, or put the red crayon down, Dr. Cone wandered out of the kitchen.
Izzy and I finished the penis. I was relieved when she turned the page and we colored a uterus and fallopian tubes. Orange and yellow and pink.
That day, neither Dr. nor Mrs. Cone appeared to go to work. And they didn’t get dressed till around noon. In my own house, both of my parents were showered and dressed by six thirty. My father walked out the door Monday through Friday at seven a.m. Dad was a lawyer. He wore a tie every day, and only removed that tie at the table after we’d thanked the Lord for our food and prayed for President Ford and his wife. A framed color picture of smiling President Ford hung on the wall just behind my father’s head. Ford’s gaze in the picture was aimed directly at me. His eyes were a feathery suede blue. His teeth looked like short little corn nibs. An American flag undulated behind his head. Sometimes, when I thought father or when people talked about their dads, I envisioned President Ford.
My mother’s work was mostly in the home. I’d never seen anyone busier than Mom. She made the beds every day, vacuumed every other day, swept every day, grocery shopped every Friday, made breakfast and dinner every day, and mopped the kitchen floor each night. She also taught Sunday school at the Roland Park Presbyterian Church. And she was really good at it. Sometimes the kids colored pictures of Jesus while Mom read them Bible verses. Sometimes she played Bible bingo with them. But the best part of Sunday school was when Mom played the guitar. Her voice was thick and husky, like her throat had been carved from a hollowed-out log.
Mom said Jesus didn’t care that she didn’t have a pretty voice, but he did prefer it when I sang along. Harmony came naturally to me and it made my mother proud when I harmonized. So every Sunday, with an audience of eight to fifteen little kids （depending on who showed up）， Mom strapped on her guitar and we stood together at the front of the church basement classroom and belted out songs about Jesus. The kids were supposed to sing along, but only half of them did. Some just played with their shoes, or nudged and whispered to their friends, or lay on their backs and stared at the water-stained ceiling. When they really started to lose attention, we sang “Rise and Shine,” because all kids love that song.
There was a thirty-minute break between Sunday school and church services. During that time, Mom went home to drop off her guitar and fetch Dad, while I ran off to practice with either the youth choir （during the school year） or the summer choir （during the summer）。 I preferred the summer choir, as it was made up mostly of adults and only a few teenagers—the majority of whom rarely showed up. I didn’t feel self-conscious with the adults as I did the youth choir. Singing with my peers, I never let my voice go too loud, as I didn’t want to be teased for my vibrato, or for slipping into a harmony when my ear told me that it would be right to do so.
We were always home before noon on Sunday. After lunch, Mom either did prep work for the meals she would serve during the week, or worked in the garden. Our lawn looked like a green shag rug. In front of the house were blooming azaleas, all trimmed to the exact same height and width. In the backyard were more blooming trees, and flower beds that curved around rocks and outlined the property like a plush purple-and-pink moat. Gardeners came once a week, but no one could keep it as neat as my mother. Weeds that dared to poke their pointy green heads out from the soil were immediately snatched from life by my mother’s gloved hand.
Every spring, a team of men showed up to wash our house’s white clapboard, repair the loose black shutters, and touch up the paint where necessary. It was only after this touch-up that my mother planted the window boxes that hung below each window on the front of the house. When I was around Izzy Cone’s age, my mother hired an artist to paint a picture of our house. That painting now hung above the sofa in the living room. Sometimes when I helped pull weeds or water the flower boxes or plant new annuals in the beds, Mom would say, “We’re obliged to live up to the painting, Mary Jane. We can’t let that painting be fiction!”
The Cones seemed uninterested in how their house or yard looked. The only thing that appeared to concern them was turning the third floor into a guest suite, which they were discussing every time they passed me and Izzy—in the TV room, in the kitchen at lunch, and on the front porch, where Izzy and I played with her Erector Set.