When the bed was delivered, I thought it looked gigantic, a bed for the Titans I had seen in movies. I could easily sleep between them, but my mother never encouraged that, even if I had a nightmare. She would simply send my father to sit by my bed until I fell asleep again. Usually, he did first, but I didn’t tell on him.
What really surprised me right now was her pink lace and chiffon nightgown spread down her side of the bed. For a moment, I thought she really might be there but quickly realized that it was only the gown. He had his hand palm down on the middle of it, and he was whispering. I thought I heard him say, “Doreen.” Suddenly, he lowered his head and swung himself so that he was lying on top of the gown. He sounded like he was moaning again, and it frightened me.
I backed up slowly, instinctively knowing he would not like me watching him do this. When I was out, I turned and quietly hurried back to my room. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it kept me from falling asleep for the longest time. Before I did fall asleep again, I said another prayer, wishing that Mother would come home, that she would be there in the morning and apologize to both of us for giving us a scare. I dreamed it, too, and in the dream, I heard her footsteps, the way she would walk in those stilettos, sounding like she was poking holes in the hallway’s oak flooring.
I was so sure of it that when I opened my eyes, I rose quickly and hurried out to my parents’ bedroom. The door was closed. It hadn’t been completely closed last night, so she must have come back, I thought, and knocked. After a moment, my father came to the door. He was nearly dressed, only his tie left to be knotted.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ll make us some pancakes this morning, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, surprised he had an appetite. Wasn’t that a good sign?
I tried to look past him.
“She’s not back, Scarletta. I told you. She’s never returning,” he said. “She’s gone off with someone. I’m sorry, sorry for us both. Go get washed and dressed for school. And do it all as if you expected your mother to be down there waiting to inspect you.”
He closed the door.
I stood there, finally feeling that dreaded dark, cold sensation I had feared when I looked in her closet and saw her gown wasn’t there. My mother was really still gone. No dreams, no wishes, and no surprise visit would change the reality.
There was something else to think about now. What would I tell my friends? Should I pretend this was not happening, pretend until someone’s mother found out the truth and asked what I was telling everyone about it? The questions would surely come down on me like stinging hail.
How would my father deal with this? Would he tell his friends, his workers, his sister, and his parents right away? My grandparents were very old and sick. Both of them needed the visiting nurse’s service. As far as I knew, he hadn’t spoken to my aunt Rachel lately. She and her family hadn’t visited us for nearly ten years. Would he call her now? Would Aunt Rachel even care? As people say, there was no love lost between her and my mother, or my father, for that matter. My mother said their Christmas cards were “deliberately plain and boring. Nothing was personal about them. They could have been sent to anyone, even their mail deliverer.”
My uncle and aunt always sent me birthday cards with a hundred-dollar bill in them but never sent any to my mother or my father. I really doubted that my aunt and uncle would visit to see how we were when they did learn my mother had run off with some lover.
Maybe my father really was still hoping my mother would return, I thought when I left him, and that was why he wanted to be sure I dressed so as to please her? Perhaps he suspected that she would be here when I came home from school. He’d want to show her that just because she had left, it didn’t mean he wouldn’t continue to be sure I followed her directions for my appearance and behavior. All my life, he would tell me, “Your mother wouldn’t like that,” or “Do it at least to please your mother.” Why would any of that change, especially after only a day or so?
I returned to my room. My mother had designed every inch of it. She had chosen the light brown carpet, had the walls and ceiling repainted a darkish pine, dressed my windows in dark brown blackout curtains, and then had my father custom-make my bed, dresser, and desk in a cocoa-tinted wood. These were the colors she liked for me. “For your age,” she said, and just assumed I would not only not mind them but be appreciative as well. I suspected they came out of some book that assigned colors to moods and personality.
“Sometimes you grow to like something,” she told me when I didn’t look that overjoyed. “Don’t judge things too quickly. Nice things, quality things, and beautiful things eventually become part of who you are. That’s why I take my time even to pick out a doorknob.”
If she did return, would I ever dare to tell her that I was still not crazy in love with my room? But what if she really was gone for good? Would I ask my father to change my room? That’s cold, I thought. How could I even worry about such a thing? How could I even think it?
As far as I knew, no one else yet knew anything about my mother’s leaving us. Maybe I’d go to school and act as if nothing was different. Maybe nothing would be different after another day. Keep that candle of hope burning, I told myself. When I was sad or afraid, my father had often said that dwelling on bad things brought them to life. Thinking about good things helped them to happen. My mother pooh-poohed that but did say, “I wish it were true, wish it was all that easy. Your father is a dreamer.”
I stood at my closet, deciding on what to wear. My first question was always the same: was this something my mother would have chosen for me? Even long after she would make the decision, I favored dresses and blouse-and-skirt combinations that I knew she liked. I couldn’t comfort myself by thinking that this morning she wasn’t going to be down there waiting to see what I had chosen and judge me, not that I had much chance of choosing something she really despised anyway. She had bought everything in this closet. I never had asked her to buy me anything special. I was afraid to ask her to get me something one of my girlfriends had. When we went shopping, she didn’t pause to see what I liked anyway. She would show me something and say it was what I should like, and if I didn’t right now, I would.
She was always critical of what my friends wore. Either their clothes made them look cheap, or they weren’t well coordinated. “Too many of your friends’ parents care about what they look like only when they go out on special occasions,” she told me. “Well, every day is a special occasion, Scarletta. You’re always on the stage. I can’t say it enough. People are always assessing you, rating you. I’m sure even your teachers are impressed with how I dress you.”
They were, but that wasn’t important to me. My friends weren’t impressed with how I dressed. That was what really mattered. Most of the time, someone like Agnes Ethridge or Mindy Lester would make fun of me. I really wished we all had to wear school uniforms so I wouldn’t have to worry about my clothes and whether my classmates or teachers would approve of them. Not one of my classmates really did, even though I occasionally was asked how much something I wore cost. I never paid attention to prices, and that annoyed them more.
“Scarletta looks like she belongs in a department-store window,” Agnes told everyone at lunch one day. The laughter felt like bee stings.
“You know, she’s right,” Mindy said, pretending to really think about it. “Sometimes I see you standing and looking like a storefront mannequin. Why do you have to wear such expensive things all the time? You’re afraid to move in them. A smudge is like a scar to you. Don’t deny it. I see how you jump if someone brushes against you, and you squeal like a pig if someone steps on your perfectly polished shoes.”
“She has to get dressed up for dinner, too,” Jackie Hansford said. “Every night.”
Jackie had been to my house for dinner, and my mother had been critical of how her mother had sent her to eat with us. She didn’t hesitate to tell Jackie, who told her mother. Apparently, she was quite upset. She told me that what my mothe
r had said made her whole family feel like people just off the boat or people without any taste.
“My father doesn’t wear a tie to dinner, but Scarletta’s does. Every single night, right, Scarletta?” she sang, her face full of glee.
“Yes,” I said. What else could I say? It was true.
“Dainty, proper Scarletta the mannequin,” she chanted, and then they all did in chorus, which made everyone in the cafeteria turn our way, most smiling and laughing. I wanted to shrink into my socks.
That night, I came up with an idea. I stuffed one of my sweater shirts into my book bag. Whatever my mother expected I would wear to school would not be coordinated when I put on this shirt. She didn’t pick things out for me, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t ready to pounce if I didn’t meet her expectations and shout, “FRAME!” I did this sneaking around with different shoes and socks, too. It seemed to please my friends and stop them from mocking me so much. I had to be excused to go to the bathroom right before school ended sometimes to change back, or I had to rush out fast, change, and just make the bus. Amazingly, no one noticed or maybe cared, but I thought that if I could keep my mother happy and my friends pleased, I was being pretty smart.
But then, one day when I was in the third quarter of the seventh grade, my mother made an unexpected visit to the school to get me. Her mother, whom I had seen only twice in my life, had died. Grandmother Natasha had been living in a mental clinic for the past fifteen years. When we were there to visit her, she didn’t seem to know who my mother or my father was. She barely looked at me. I thought she must have been pretty once, but now her gray hair was so thin I could see her scalp, and she was so underweight that my father thought a doctor wouldn’t need an X-ray to see her insides.
“Just put a bright light behind her,” he said. He shook his head, feeling sorry for her.
I didn’t know immediately why I was being called to the principal’s office, but the moment I saw my mother, I felt myself go into shock. I actually trembled. For a moment, I couldn’t move. She was standing in the doorway of the principal’s office and saw me in my deliberately disheveled clothes. Her eyes looked like they might shatter and fall like tiny shards of glass to her feet. How would I explain this? I thought, and then wondered why was she here calling for me anyway.
Before I could think of an excuse and ask why she was there, she stepped out, put her arm around me, and turned me down the hall as if she wanted to keep me from being seen by the principal’s secretary.
“You didn’t leave the house like this. Explain,” she ordered.
My brain went into overdrive, desperately looking for an excuse, any excuse that would appear to make sense.
“We are doing a messy experiment in science class today. I brought this along to wear in case,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t have time for this. Your grandmother is dead. Go change back into your proper clothes and come out to the parking lot. Your father is waiting in the car.”
“Which grandmother?” I asked.
“My mother. Your father’s mother will outlive us all.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. The word dead wasn’t really registering in my mind.
“Where do you think? To arrange her burial. My father isn’t here to do anything to help,” she said. “Maybe he’s dead, too.”
Whenever she mentioned her father, it was said with such bitterness I half expected spit to follow. He had deserted her and her mother when she was only four. Her uncle George, her father’s older brother, who was a rich investor, took care of her and her mother for most of her life. He provided her with private schooling and her college fund. He was dead now as well. His wife and children had inherited everything. My mother said his wife made sure of that. She claimed he had given her enough.
But she was finished with college by then, and she had met my father, so that didn’t matter. She made it sound as if money and not love was the reason she had married him. Maybe that was why she had turned to feng shui. She thought it was time to bring love into their marriage.
I wondered why I had to go along to arrange a burial, but I rushed to my locker to get my bag and then hurried into the bathroom to change and fix my hair. I was still trembling when I stepped out of the school and ran to my father’s car. When I got in, he turned around to smile at me.
“Hey,” he said. He didn’t seem to care about my having to change my clothes, but I was pretty sure my mother had given him two earfuls of complaints about what I had been wearing.
“Don’t ‘hey’ her, Raymond. I’ve been teaching her how to properly greet people all her life.” She looked me over. “Fix the collar of your blouse. It’s uneven,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s get this over with,” she told my father.
He might as well have been our limousine driver taking orders, I thought.
For some reason, my mother believed it was necessary for me to see her mother laid out in the undertaker’s parlor. Usually, everything she made me do in my life was some sort of lesson for when I was older. What could this one be?
As if she could hear me wonder, she turned to me and said, “I want you to know what death is, really is, and what’s involved when it’s someone in your family. I don’t expect you to shed tears for either grandmother, but especially not this one. Don’t worry about that,” she added.
She certainly wasn’t shedding any for her own mother. For a passing moment, I was worried that I would grow up to be like her and not shed any tears for her. How terrible even to think it.
When we arrived and I looked at my grandmother, I didn’t think she looked much different from the last time I had seen her. Before I could stop myself, I said so. However, when my mother turned to me, she didn’t look angry.
“Astute observation, Scarletta. She died a long time ago,” she said. “It was just that no one told her.”
I thought that was really a very strange thing to say. How could you not know you were dead? When I looked at my father, he shrugged. He had been relatively silent the whole trip and wasn’t saying much now. It wasn’t the first time he’d acted as if we were stepping carefully on thin ice.
“Say good-bye to your grandmother,” my mother ordered. She pressed her hand behind my shoulder and pushed me closer to my grandmother’s body. “We’re not going to have any sort of formal funeral. Nobody who would know her cares, and most are dead. I don’t want you missing any more school over this.”
My father rushed forward to take my hand when he saw how shocked I was. I had heard dead people smell, and right now, her eyes were open. If she was dead, why weren’t they closed? Maybe she really didn’t die, but they thought she had. What if she suddenly turned to look at me with that strange angry and confused expression?
“Say a silent prayer,” he whispered. “Like you do before you go to sleep.”
Sometimes, I thought. I don’t pray all the time.
I really had nothing to say when I looked at my grandmother, but I tried to appear like I was reciting a prayer.
“All right,” my mother said. “My conscience is relieved. Just wait in the other room,” she told me.
She had brought me to relieve her conscience? What did that mean?
My mother and my father went in to speak to the funeral director and left me in the room where coffins were on display with their price tags. I was afraid to look into any. Maybe a dead body would be in one and his or her eyes would be wide open, too.
I decided to step outside to wait. There was no place to sit, so I sat on the sidewalk and watched the traffic and people. To me, it seemed like everyone passing was avoiding looking at the funeral parlor. It was probably too much of a reminder of what awaited everyone.
“Scarletta!” my mother screamed when she and my father finally emerged. “How could you sit on the dirty sidewalk wearing that skirt? It cost more than two hundred dollars!”
I got up quickly, and she spun me around to inspect it. I felt her slap at it, hitting my rump sharply as she
chased off the dust and dirt.
“Your father is taking us out to dinner on the way home,” she said. “We don’t have time to go home and change, Scarletta. That’s another reason why you must always treat your clothes like holy robes. You never know where you’ll be going and which people will be looking at you.”
“Okay, Mom,” I said. I didn’t often call her Mom. I didn’t think she liked it. The truth was, I did it mostly when I was angry because of something she had said or done to me.
She shook her head as if I was close to a lost cause, and we got into the car. Once we were away from the funeral parlor, my father talked about happier things, like how well his business was doing and his idea for a vacation for us all.
“Her sister-in-law won’t contribute a penny,” my mother said, ignoring him as if she hadn’t heard a word. “I won’t even bother to tell her she died.”
“No problem, Doreen. We don’t need her money.”
She looked at him. “I bet when your mother or father dies, your sister won’t bother to do anything, either, Raymond.”
“My parents have all that arranged. Besides, we live with our own conscience and let everyone else live with their own,” my father said.
“Oh, please, Mr. Forgiveness. It amazes me you make money in the cutthroat business world.”
“You get more with honey than vinegar,” my father said, smiling. She couldn’t get him angry enough to say something nasty back to her, I thought, even if she stepped on his foot deliberately with one of her stiletto shoes. He might not even say “Ow.”
My mother was silent, and then she turned around and peered at me. “You’re lying about your clothes, Scarletta. I’ll ask your science teacher tomorrow.”
I gazed out the window, the tears icing my eyes. They were not tears of fear or sorrow; they were tears of anger and disappointment.
I would never please her, I thought.
“Well?”
“My friends make fun of the way I’m dressed,” I said. “They think I’m some mannequin in an expensive store window.”
The Silhouette Girl Page 6
