Ariel

by Lawrence Block

  The ceremony at the graveside was a brief one, with a short formal service. The minister read about ashes to ashes and dust to dust and the resurrection and the life and a lot of familiar phrases. Throughout it Ariel tried to decide whether to close her eyes when they lowered the coffin. She wound up watching the whole thing.

  Erskine had come to the cemetery. That surprised her. And the man from the Funeral Game, he had turned up, too, standing off to one side at the rear.

  Mrs. Tashman had not come. Evidently just turning up at the funeral was enough for most people, but some liked to sign on for the whole routine.

  Her grandmother was buried here somewhere, and other relatives of Roberta’s. Probably Roberta and David would wind up here sometime, buried along with Caleb.

  And would the same thing happen to her? She couldn’t be buried with her real parents, not if she didn’t know who they were. Maybe she could be buried at sea. Or they could cremate her and scatter the ashes from an airplane, like that movie star they were talking about on television.

  She didn’t like thinking about death. But what else could you think about at a funeral?

  The limousine returned them to the funeral parlor. Then they were in their own car and David was driving back to the city. At one point she thought they were going to drive past the house where they used to live, but they didn’t.

  It was a little creepy, being in the old neighborhood. She hadn’t wanted to move downtown, but now she liked the new house so much better.

  No one spoke while David drove. He parked finally on the street directly behind Roberta’s Datsun. Houses were close together on this block, with no driveways or garages, but the house was large enough so that you could easily park both cars at the curb in front of it.

  Ariel opened the back door and got out. She stood on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb while David emerged from behind the wheel and walked around the back of the car to open the door for Roberta. She seemed reluctant to get out at first. Then she took his hand and let him help her out, and the two of them stood side by side, looking up at the towering red brick house with its ornamental black ironwork.

  David put his arm around Roberta and she leaned against him. Ariel felt funny watching them. While they stood there, supporting each other, she scampered up the walk and mounted the steps to the front door.

  THREE

  The night of the funeral Ariel was afraid to go to sleep. She knew it was crazy, but what she couldn’t get out of her mind was the idea that if she actually did fall asleep she would be dead by morning. Just like Caleb.

  And of course it was crazy, because she was too old for crib death, which certainly sounded as though it was limited to kids too young to sleep in a regular bed. And, since she hadn’t heard anything about an outbreak of Bed Death reaching epidemic proportions in downtown Charleston, it stood to reason that she had nothing to worry about.

  Knowing this wasn’t terribly helpful. She went to her room after dinner, reading for a couple of hours, and then she got into pajamas and went downstairs to say goodnight to David and Roberta. David picked her up and set her on his lap and put her to work running a pipe cleaner through one of his pipes. That had been a real treat for her some years back, and evidently David hadn’t figured out that she was a little old to go bananas at the opportunity to clean the tobacco spit out of a pipestem. But she did it, and pretended as much enthusiasm as possible.

  David kissed her and told her to have pleasant dreams. Roberta, sitting in the kitchen with coffee and a cigarette, told her to sleep well. Ariel went upstairs with no intention of either sleeping or dreaming. She didn’t care whether it made sense or not. She was going to stay awake until morning.

  But it was boring just sitting there. After a long time, when she was sure both of them were sleeping, she picked up her tin flute and played it as softly as she possibly could, piping the notes tentatively. She had barely begun playing when she heard Roberta’s footsteps in the hall. She put the flute down and managed to be in bed when the door opened.

  “You’re awake,” Roberta said.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I don’t want you playing that thing.”

  “I didn’t think anybody could hear.”

  “I don’t want to listen to that tonight. It’s a matter of respect, Ariel. For Caleb.”

  “All right.”

  “And try to get some sleep.”

  “I will.”

  Alone in her room she tried to figure out how playing the flute showed a lack of respect for her dead baby brother. I don’t want you playing that thing. I don’t want to listen to that tonight. Fair enough, she thought, but why drag Caleb into it? He’d liked her flute music when he was alive and it certainly wasn’t going to disturb him now. Either he was six feet deep in the suburban cemetery or he was up in Heaven with God and the angels, whichever way you wanted to figure it, and either way her flute wasn’t going to put him off his feed.

  Anyway, she’d been sort of playing for Caleb. And then Roberta told her to show respect by stopping.

  She made a stab at reading, picking up first one of her Oi books, then a young adult novel by Sandra Scoppettone. Both were favorites, but tonight it seemed to her that she had outgrown the first without having yet grown into the second. She put the books away and retrieved the flute, sitting cross-legged on the bed with the mouthpiece to her lips and her eyes closed. She fingered the notes without blowing across the mouthpiece. In this way she was able to hear the music in her head while the flute remained silent.

  Eventually she put the flute back on her desk. After a while she turned off her light. She felt a chill and got under the covers. It was all right to close her eyes, she decided, so long as she didn’t let herself fall asleep. For practice she closed them and lay still, counting her breaths, then snapping open her eyes and sitting up in bed on the fiftieth breath.

  Perfectly safe, she told herself. That would get her through the night, little stretches of rest with her eyes closed. As long as she never stayed that way past fifty breaths she couldn’t possibly fall asleep, and if she didn’t fall asleep she wouldn’t die in her sleep. Not that she really believed in that possibility anyway, but why take chances?

  She closed her eyes again, counted fifty breaths, and opened them. She closed them a third time, and when she opened them again it was morning. She’d slept after all, and had lived through it, and she felt a little sheepish and greatly relieved.

  After that she didn’t have any further worries about Bed Death.

  The second week after Caleb’s funeral Ariel stopped at a Meeting Street drugstore on the way home from school and bought a spiral composition notebook. When she got home Roberta’s car was gone and the house was empty. She let herself in and hurried up the steep staircase and down the hall to her room at the rear of the house.

  Her tin flute was disassembled on her desk. She fitted the pieces together and put the instrument to her lips, holding the pose for a moment before beginning to play. Then she let herself drift into a melody, improvising, letting the flute lead her fingers to the notes it wanted to sound. She played with her eyes closed, and, as the music caught her up, a remarkably serene expression transformed her face.

  She played for perhaps ten minutes. Then she put down the flute and took the new spiral notebook from her bookbag. She uncapped a green felt-tipped pen and began writing on the first page, forming the letters in a neat angular hand. The words flowed as effortlessly as the notes had poured forth from the flute.

  I am Ariel, the Adopted.

  “I am the beautiful stranger.” I liked that book. I didn’t finish it, though. I don’t know why. I do that a lot, start a book and get interested in it and enjoy it and then not finish it.

  Anyway, I am not the beautiful stranger. It’s the beautiful part that doesn’t fit. I don’t hate my looks but I would never stop traffic, not unless I flung myself in front of a car and maybe not even then.

  I can just abou
t picture that, like a cartoon. Me lying dead under the wheels of a car and a crowd of fools all standing around gawking and one of them saying, “Well, poor child, she just wasn’t pretty enough to stop traffic.”

  Sometimes it scares me, the kind of thoughts I have. All the wrong things make me laugh and none of the right ones.

  I just looked in the mirror to see what it is about me that isn’t beautiful. I can’t exactly say because beautiful is how things all add together or how they don’t. But my whole head is long and narrow and my chin comes to a point and that doesn’t help a great deal. I remember one Halloween when I was young enough for that sort of thing I was got up like a witch and it could chill you how much I looked the part. It’s the shape of my head that does it, and what are you going to do about that? If I were one of those Jewish girls with big noses in all those books I start but don’t finish it would be simple enough. But where is the plastic surgeon that will change the shape of your head?

  Plus my eyes are too small. Correction: the eyes are big enough but the irises are too small. There was an expert on the Chinese art of face-reading on Merv Griffin who said eyes like mine are a sign of a small and insignificant character. I got mad and turned the set off. Like it would teach the fool a lesson.

  Roberta used to tell me I was pretty. She used to talk to me a lot even if I was never much at paying attention to her.

  She hardly talks to me at all now. I don’t know when it was that she decided she didn’t like me anymore. Maybe she never liked me but I used to be too dumb to know the difference, and maybe as I grew up she got tired of pretending, plus I began to notice things.

  She was through liking me by the time Caleb was born and now that he’s dead she hates me. For being alive, I guess.

  For a while I thought things were going to change. When she came into my room the night of the funeral, I thought she would say how she couldn’t sleep either, and we’d wind up having one of those mother-daughter talks.

  I tend to expect too much.

  I never really believed her when she told me I was pretty. I knew she didn’t mean it. It’s something you do, you tell your little girl she’s pretty. David told me the same, and when he tells me I believe it. Not that I am pretty but that he thinks I am.

  I wonder who I look like. My mother or my father.

  No way on earth I’m ever going to know.

  I think about this a lot. When I think about my mother sometimes I’ll just stand staring into the mirror over my dresser and try imagining my face the way it’ll be when I’m older. Of course I don’t know how old my mother was when she had me, but what I usually decide on is that she was seventeen or thereabouts, because that seems a usual age for having a baby and putting it up for adoption. This is just guessing because she could have been forty for all I know but I usually settle on seventeen. Well, I am almost thirteen now. That is just four years shy of seventeen, so the face in the mirror isn’t all that different from hers when she had me.

  I can just hold that thought in my head and fool with it for hours.

  That’s if I look like her. I could just as easy look like my father, and I don’t even know where to start when I try thinking about him. He could be anyone at all, anyone in the whole world. He could be old or young or dead or alive, and no way in the world for me to know anything about it.

  That gets to me sometimes. It really does. I could pass either of them on the street and never know it.

  Twice in recent months Ariel had seen women on the street with faces that seemed to remind her of her own. Each time she found herself following the woman, hurrying along on the opposite side of the street trying to sneak quick peeks at her. She began working out in her mind an elaborate sequence in which she and her mother recognized one another and had a whole joyous family reunion.

  Then in each case she had seen that there was really no strong resemblance after all. And if there were, what would she do about it? Just tag along until she was noticed, she supposed, and then slink off like a whipped dog.

  Oh, I am not beautiful, but I am the stranger.

  Well, that is obvious. I would not be writing in this book if I had anyone in the world to talk to. It isn’t even a real diary. I looked in Woolworth’s the day before yesterday and they had diaries but I didn’t have any money with me. Then yesterday Erskine walked me home and I couldn’t exactly say, “Let’s stop in Woolworth’s so I can buy a book to write secrets in.” And by this afternoon I decided I couldn’t see myself buying one of those books that say things like My Secret Thoughts in gold on the fake leather cover.

  They have locks a baby could open with a toothpick, if a baby happened to have a toothpick, and all Roberta has to do is find a locked book called My Secret Thoughts. That would be like writing Be Calm and Relaxed on a red flag and showing it to a bull. Plus it wouldn’t matter where I hid it. I could bury it six feet deep in the flower bed and she would “just happen” to dig up that particular bed and come across my diary.

  Plus I’d probably just lose the key my own self.

  So instead of a diary I have this notebook, and so instead of hiding it where I’d never find it but Roberta would, I’ll keep it in my schoolbag with my other notebooks. Yes, like The Purloined Letter, which I actually read all the way through, short as it was. Roberta could never resist a diary, but who on earth would want to read a kid’s dumb notebook?

  My name is Ariel, the Adopted.

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” Names, names, names. Sometimes I think ninety percent of school is learning the names of things, whether they’re cities or presidents or parts of the body or whatever they are. I wonder if it makes any difference whether you know something’s name or not. Say a bird flies by and you say, “Hark, there goes a Great Crested Flycatcher.” Now what have you actually said? You’ve only proved that you just happen to know what other people have decided to call that bird. It’s not as if the bird knows he’s a Great Crested Flycatcher. He just hangs in there catching Great Crested Flies, or whatever he does for a living.

  I can just ramble on and on. I wonder does everybody have thoughts like these or am I crazy. I can just say that easy and all, or sometimes I can worry about it. Not exactly working up a sweat, but more like lying in bed at night ready to sleep and getting a chill at the thought and sitting right straight up in bed for a few minutes.

  My name is Ariel and I don’t know if I like it or not. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t and I don’t know which feeling generally has the upper hand.

  The first thing about my name is that it is unusual. When you are a little kid that is awful because all little kids want is to be like everybody else. Anything different is bad and embarrassing. Especially your name because that is something everybody else knows about you.

  Ariel.

  I used to be teased about my name. Kids would all make the same stupid jokes about car aerials or TV aerials. Or they would call me Antenna. Hysterically funny. Thinking about it now I wonder why I even bothered to hate it, but I did. You tease a little kid about anything and it’s going to hurt, even if the teasing doesn’t make any sense.

  I started to like my name about the same time I started becoming the unbeautiful stranger. I guess everything started happening in the early part of the year. We moved here and I left my old school and started in my new school and Caleb was born and I got my period and Roberta started not liking me anymore and I started turning into a private person.

  I don’t think I became a different person, exactly. I changed by becoming more completely the person I really was all along. As if I was always a stranger but never knew it before.

  Ariel the strange stranger.

  What I like about the name Ariel is partly what I used to hate about it, namely that it is different. It is just fitting that I should have an unusual and uncommon name. Plus it makes me think of flying, soaring high in the sky above the ordinary people, gliding effortlessly like a hawk in the autumn sky, just floating on air currents and havin
g a great old time.

  There is a book of poems called Ariel by a crazy woman who killed herself as soon as she was done writing them. I found the book in the public library over the summer. My heart jumped when I saw it. I had never heard of it and there was my name on the cover of a book. It was the oddest sensation seeing it like that, as if the book had been put there just for me to notice it.

  I was almost afraid to touch it, but I’d no more not pick it up than Roberta would pass up a book that calls itself My Secret Thoughts. I sat at one of the long reading tables with it and my first reaction was to be disappointed because it was poetry. I like poems but I guess I thought the book would be about me and tell me who I was or some such silly thing, and then it was poems.

  Before I ever tried to read them I read on the book cover about Sylvia Plath, who wrote them, and how she kept writing her poetry and thinking about suicide until finally she stuck her head in the gas oven.

  And I got so mad! I don’t know if I was ever so mad before or since. Because I thought they named me Ariel after that book of poems, named me after somebody putting her head in an oven and turning on the gas, and I thought, God, what a hateful thing to do to a baby!

  That book was published after I was adopted. I checked the dates. They just went and named me Ariel. Maybe Crazy Sylvia named her book after me.

  Oh, who cares? She was crazy and her poems are crazy, or at least I can’t make head or tail out of them. Anyway I don’t want to make head or tail out of them. They make me feel all cramped, all that hate and blood and anger, all that screaming without any noise.

  I wonder who picked the name. David or Roberta?

  I guess they like unusual names. Their names are ordinary ones but they picked Ariel and Caleb for their children. Caleb Oliver Jardell. I wonder if Caleb would have liked his name, or if they would have teased him about it.

  My middle name is Emily. For David’s mother. I hate it.

  I liked Caleb’s name. The sound of it, and the way it looks on the page when you write it. It looks like Cable with the letters switched around, and once you see that you keep switching letters and trying for other words, but all you get is gibberish.