Standing on One Leg

By M. Sophie Schneider

It is not until the day Sophies mother dies that the search for her fathers family begins. As Sophie rehashes her childhood over the phone with her sister, Kat, she soon realizes she has more questions than answers.

Sophie hires a genealogist to research her fathers family, but without a real name, information is scarce. Unlike in a mystery novel, there are no witnesses or disgruntled family members, just fragmented memories and a slip of paper found in an old book. As Sophie struggles to piece together the bits and pieces of snatched conversations she heard as a child, she soon wonders whether anyone in her one sided family knows anything-whether their silence is deliberate or habitual. But Sophie is determined to unearth the secrets buried long ago. As she digs into the past, she slowly begins to unravel information that just might lead her to her fathers true identity, and who the other shiny-shoed man was in her mothers life.

Standing on One Leg is a story of heartbreak and hope that reveals one womans journey to the realization that change happens only if she is willing to look at everything in a different way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Dec 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781480804302

M. Sophie Schneider

M. Sophie is passionate about encouraging women to step outside the lines drawn in childhood and create a higher vision for themselves. Prior to moving to Arizona, M. Sophie was a certified massage therapist and the facilitator of Healthy Being workshops. Upon retirement, she and her long-suffering but ever-supportive husband moved to the Phoenix area where M. Sophie designs handcrafted jewelry and creates whimsical art for her company, Creations from Mars. She has written and published a creative memoir, Standing on One Leg, and is evolving her therapeutic skills as a Reiki practitioner.

Book preview

Prologue

‘Goodnight, Irene, good …’

I hear her shoes clopping across the linoleum as she hurries into the parlor, where Kat and I sleep on a sofa bed. The sofa, when it is folded up and ready to be sat on, is green and nubby. In the summertime the nubs press against your legs like little pebbles. A painting of a pink flamingo perched on one leg hangs over our heads. It’s always summer where the flamingos live.

Get up! Put these on.

My mother’s cold fingers poke me as she reaches beneath the pile of blankets.

‘I’ll see you in …’

Daddy’s words, as he sings, are slurred. Right now he couldn’t carry a tune if his life depended on it. Other times he sings like Aunt Dita’s yellow-feathered canary. He can whistle a wobbly tune also. But tonight, I put my hands over my ears.

There’s a loud crash coming from inside the bedroom. Mommy throws our jackets, scarves, and mittens on the bed. Hurry up and get dressed, she whispers.

The smoke from her cigarette curls around my nose.

My tummy hurts, I whine, and sink deeper into the covers.

Get dressed now! Mommy grabs my arm, squeezing hard. I picture my skin turning white beneath her fingers, and then black, blue, green, yellow, and back to pink again.

Daddy is opening and closing drawers, slamming and banging them, causing Mommy’s vase with the fiery dragons, on the corner of the dresser, to shake and rattle against the wall. I picture it bumping against the chalky plaster, tipping over and then righting itself like a drunken sailor.

Hurriedly, Kat and I put on our jackets. The edges of our flannel pajamas peek out the bottom of the heavy wool coats.

Where is it, Zosha? Daddy’s voice booms from the bedroom.

Mommy glances at the open door to the bedroom. Let’s go.

I suck in my breath as the cold night air hits my face. Where’re we going, Mommy?

For a walk. She takes a drag of her cigarette.

I rub my eyes with my mittened hand. Can we get ice cream?

My mother checks her pocket for change. She’s left her purse behind. Kat is already rounding the corner. Her red-and-green plaid scarf waves at me.

Three single scoops of chocolate with lots of sprinkles, please, I say to the man behind the counter. His name is Charlie. I try my nicest smile on him, the one I practice in front of the mirror, trying to look like Shirley Temple, only I don’t have dimples or curly hair. When I stand tippy-toe and stare at myself in the mirror, I don’t look like anyone.

It was Kat’s turn to order last time, vanilla ice cream in a cup. She never smiles when she orders. My sister looks at Charlie with her narrow brown eyes the same way she does when she dares me to say something bad. Mommy doesn’t like vanilla, but when Kat orders, she eats it anyway.

We stand in the circle of a streetlight licking our sugar cones, the paper wrappers clinging to our mittens. It is snowing, the kind of fat flakes that pile up on the ground. I stick out my tongue to catch them. As they melt I begin to count. One, two, three …

Mommy pokes me in the shoulder to shush me. I look over at my sister. She is kicking the snow with the toe of her bright-yellow boot. Most of our friends have red boots, but Mommy always buys us yellow.

Stupid jerk, stupid idiot, stupid …

I wish Mommy would shush Kathryn. I call my sister Kathryn when I am mad at her. How come she can say bad words and not get poked? I blow out air that dances and swirls around my face and then disappears. I wonder where it has gone.

Stupid … Looking up at my mother, I test the word. The red tip of her cigarette glows and then sizzles as it falls to the ground and dies. I lean over and cover it with snow.

‘Goodnight, Irene …’ First I hum, and then I sing the words.

Shut up, Sophie! Mommy jabs me in the back.

I know I should keep quiet, but I can’t help myself. Sister Grace, the fourth grade teacher in my school, says that God helps those who help themselves. I worry that he will never help me. I start to sing again, and she smacks me, her hand hot against my cheek. I pull my mitten off and leave it dangling from the gray elastic that attaches to my sleeve, and I touch the warm spot on my face.

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At least that’s how I remember it. If I called Kat, she would probably tell it in a different way, or perhaps she would not remember it at all. You would think we were raised in two different families. Memory is so unreliable.

My cousin Ana says it makes no difference anyway.

Chapter 1

I t wasn’t until the day my mother died that the search for my father’s family began. Until then, she had forbidden it. She would wipe her red, chapped hands, one across the other, and say, What’s done is done.

So now I sit with one sharp pencil in hand, listing all the things I know about him. And as I begin to write, she steps across my words, her backless slippers slap-slapping across the page, and I can hear my father calling in his heartbroken way, Is that you, Zosha?

I picture her standing in the middle of my page, her hands on her hips, a cigarette dangling from her lips, one in a long line of brokenhearted women demanding to be seen.

I turn my gaze away. It’s him I want to see.

My intention was to place my thoughts in organized rows the way you would plant a garden, separating the peas from the corn. My father had said he was raised on a farm, so I thought this would please him. I pictured him smiling down at me as I sowed my seeds, watered them, and watched them grow. But not every life blooms.

And what do I know about planting gardens? My sister and I were raised in the city, our views obstructed by brick walls. We bought flowers wrapped in two-day-old newspaper or potted in black containers, their roots pushing against the hard plastic. We walked on cracked concrete, occasionally bending to pull a wishing weed.

They would grow at the base of the oak trees that lined the sidewalk, the trees leaning precariously toward the traffic that honked and squealed its way toward the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, like a flock of geese fleeing the coming winter. There were red geraniums too, in terracotta pots haphazardly placed on fire escapes, their straggly blooms poking through the black railings like waggling fingers. And there were my mother’s roses standing knee deep in water in the hand-painted vase that sat on top of the bedroom dresser, their petals falling one by one onto the freshly waxed floor.

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Like an early bloom, my mother was supposed to die first. She had cancer. But my father elbowed his way to the front of the line. I could tell you that it was because he didn’t think anyone would take care of him once my mother was gone, but what I really think is that he couldn’t live without her. In relationships, one person loves more. Whether it’s based on need or temperament, I don’t know. But I watched them as I grew up, how sometimes Daddy would play his Elvis records and dance around the parlor in his black cotton socks, crooning Love Me Tender to my mother, who sat in the kitchen staring out the window at a brick wall and the frayed clothesline that stretched across the alley, swaying in the wind.

How ’bout it, Zosha? Daddy called as he spun across the floor, his arms wrapped around thin air.

Don’t be an idiot, Frank. My mother would spit out his name as if it were a curse.

She called him Frank when she was mad at him, or when no one else was around. He had another name, the one we used in public—Rudy. But Daddy said his given name was Frank. On a good day, I once asked him who gave him that name. He laughed without making a sound and said, The milkman.

I pick up my pen and write: Frank and then Rudy, one name given, one chosen. Why pick a new name? Does it change who you are? But with all my clicking and clacking on my keyboard these past few months, the only thing I’ve been able to find is my parents’ marriage certificate. It is as if my father was born the day he married my mother.

I call my sister and recount my memory of my father dancing. Kat listens in silence as she always does, and then she says, She used to tell him to go to hell.

I wrap the phone cord around my index finger. I never use the cordless when we speak. My sister and I talk a lot on the phone, hashing and rehashing our childhood. We are like the brick wall and the window, held together by a swaying cord.

I close my eyes, trying to picture my father as he spun around the parlor. Did he stop mid-step as she yelled from the kitchen? Did his hands drop to his sides? But I can’t see him. I only hear the scratch of the needle as it slides across the record.

Chapter 2

I read that April is rose month. Gardens are chock-full of blooms ready to burst. While the bushes all look healthy, you must look carefully at the leaves to prevent burgeoning problems, ominous sounding things like aphids and black spot, sawfly and mildew. I’m not a gardener, but I like to know about how things grow. Kat has started gardening. She enjoys the way the soil feels in her hands. She likes to lift and heave the bags of dirt and pat mounds of earth. She likes to clip and prune and bag old twigs and fallen branches, tightly twisting and knotting the tops of thick plastic trash bags, while I rock in my chair picturing the seeds turning into sp routs.

Remember, I say to Kat, when Daddy used to sit out on the fire escape pinching the dead leaves off Mommy’s roses?

My sister is used to answering my phone calls and hearing these kinds of questions. Sometimes we get disconnected because she holds the phone between her chin and her shoulder while she sweeps or dusts.

They were geraniums, she replies.

She’s right. They only had roses when Michael, my husband, and I moved them to California. Daddy found them, big clay pots with crushed blossoms, some reds, some pinks, and a few whites, discarded by the Dumpster at the back of the complex. He dragged these throwaways, one by one, across the asphalt parking lot, leaving behind a trail of red clay.

Your father’s roses, my mother would say, though I knew he had resurrected them for her.

The roses filled the tiny porch of their manufactured home. After my father died, Michael and I filled the backseat of our station wagon with them and then set them in the concrete backyard of the patio apartment my mother moved into. I don’t know if my mother would have cared if they got left behind, but we brought them just the same.

The decision to move from the one place to the next was hers. I think she wanted to live somewhere my father hadn’t, but there is no such thing as a clean start. Some things find their way into the seams of our clothes and deep into our pockets. We unwittingly carry them from place to place, sloughing off bits and pieces that find their way into our carpets as we cross our rooms. Or they fall onto our beds as we sit on the edge, pulling on our socks or untying our shoes. Trace evidence. This is what I look for when I sift through her old address books and lists.

I saved it all: crumpled pieces of paper and her black book with its broken binding, all thrown into a box from a pair of Keds, size six and a half, white. One folder, a halfhearted attempt at organization, the papers inside once alphabetized by subject and then dumped onto the bed and refiled by date, and then tossed together like a hasty meal. This is what is left of her, along with a pair of dangly earrings, a heart-shaped pin, and a gold ring with red stones that blink at me when I open and close my jewelry box.

The only thing my father left behind was a gold pocket watch promised to my middle son, the one who looks most like him, though my uncle Syl said that Kat and I weren’t his. So how could my son resemble him?

He has Daddy’s eyes, I told my sister the day my son was born.

I look for these comparisons all the time. But in truth, we are all like mismatched chairs sitting around the same table.

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I’m adopted, you know. Kat dumps Mommy’s jewels onto the blue-and-gray-striped mattress of the unfolded sofa bed. I’m in the bedroom rummaging through my mother’s dresser drawers, looking for her silk kerchiefs. Mommy doesn’t keep a neat drawer, so she will never know.

Don’t forget to shut the door, my sister warns as I skip back into the parlor. She cocks her head toward the glass door that separates the parlor from the long, skinny entry hall.

I bump past the bed with an armful of kerchiefs and with my foot push the door so it swings shut. This way if Daddy comes home early, we’ll hear him before he