Little Miss Strange

by Joanna Rose

  She kept going. At Colfax Street we had to stop for the light, out of breath, and I got my hand back. We crossed and she didn’t start running again, just walking fast.

  The newspaper box on the Safeway corner had the Denver Post. Same picture of the guy hanging on the rope but the picture was bigger, and there were other people under the guy on the rope, people who were reaching up at him, like wanting to go, like getting left behind. The headlines were thick black letters, LAST TROOPS OUT OF SAIGON.

  Lady Jane took money out of her pocket of her cutoffs and put some in the slot, enough for one Denver Post. She opened the door and took out the whole stack of newspapers and set the stack on top of the box.

  “Free,” she said.

  At my house Sasha was sitting on the front steps, and Dylan Marie was standing by her. Dylan Marie had a stick that she was hitting on the railing. When we came up the sidewalk Dylan Marie stopped hitting the railing and dropped the stick and put her finger in her mouth.

  “Go away,” she said around her finger.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I said.

  Sasha and Lady Jane looked at each other.

  I opened the front door, and glass crashed upstairs, breaking glass crashing, and I stopped.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  It was a screechy yell from upstairs.

  And then another voice, quieter, words I couldn’t hear, another voice up there with the yelling.

  “Fuck you and your Screaming Eagles, Hand, fuck you.” The screechy yell again.

  Lady Jane said, “Sarajean, come here, wait.”

  I went in, partway up the stairs, shaking in my legs, holding my breath. The door was open at the top of the stairs, and Elle’s daddy was there, standing in the doorway, and Jimmy Henry sat in the corner of the couch. His face was red and he was choking hard with crying, and his hand hanging over the edge of the couch had a black gun.

  Lady Jane yanked my arm from behind and pulled me back down the stairs. Out the door. She shut the door.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Why is Jimmy Henry crying? Why does he have a gun?”

  Lady Jane said, “Sh.”

  More yelling.

  Lady Jane said, “Shit.”

  A black and white police car drove up fast and stopped crooked at the curb and two policemen got out. They came up our sidewalk, all in blue, putting on their hats.

  “We’ve had a report of a shooting,” the first one said.

  Dylan Marie said, “Go away.”

  More yelling upstairs. The two policemen looked at each other and the first one said, “Is that door open?”

  They went in the door and shut the door behind them. The police car sat at the curb, the radio talking inside. Lady Jane watched the front door. Sasha pulled Dylan Marie into her arms and Dylan Marie looked at me. The whole day was quiet and sunny except for the police car radio, and my hands were sweaty inside my fists and I tried to breathe right and even.

  They all came down the stairs and I stopped breathing, held my breath. Backed away from the door. The first policeman, holding the gun like it wasn’t a gun, just holding it. His boots shook the porch boards. Jimmy Henry, the other policeman holding on to Jimmy Henry’s arm from behind, his other hand on Jimmy Henry’s shoulder. Elle’s daddy. Jimmy Henry’s hair was hanging down over his face. He didn’t look up, didn’t look at me. The policeman with the gun opened the back door of the police car, and the policeman holding Jimmy Henry made him get in. They shut the door on Jimmy Henry in the backseat, the sun shining in on him, and he didn’t look out the window, and the policemen got in the front seat, and they drove away. Jimmy Henry’s head in the back window.

  Dylan Marie said, “Go away.”

  Elle’s daddy sat down on the top step, and he put his face into his hands.

  I said, “Is Jimmy Henry arrested? Did he shoot somebody?”

  “Just the window,” Elle’s daddy said from inside his hands.

  “The window?” I said. “He shot the window?”

  My voice was too small.

  “Why did he shoot the window?” I said, bigger.

  Elle’s daddy looked up out of his hands. His face was wet from crying, not crazy red and wet like Jimmy Henry’s, just wet at his eyes. He looked at Lady Jane. He looked at me. Dylan Marie stuck her face into Sasha’s hair.

  I said, “Why is he crying like that?”

  “The war,” Elle’s daddy said.

  His voice was low and clogged with crying, and he kept talking, about the names of Jimmy Henry’s friends, saying Sergeant Henry, in a voice like someone else, not Elle’s daddy, a voice that ended up back in his hands.

  I said, “Was he crazy there?”

  “We were all crazy there,” Elle’s daddy said.

  THE TOP half of the front-room window was gone, broken out in big smashed pieces down on the skinny sidewalk, and glittery slivers on the floor along the wall.

  A jagged piece fell, all by itself, out of the window, slowly at first, and then it crashed down onto the sidewalk.

  Lady Jane got the broom and started to sweep the slivers into the dust-pan. I stood by the door and watched her and didn’t help, and both of us stayed quiet, not a word, until Lady Jane got a piece of glass in her foot and she said, “Shit.”

  She stopped sweeping and leaned against the wall by the window, looking at bright red drops drip on the floor.

  I went downstairs into the painted apartment and shut the door. I sat on the mattress and took off my green corduroy jacket and started pulling at the threads around the horse patch, biting the threads and pulling them away, pulling the horse patch off my green corduroy jacket. The green was a darker shape under there. I put the horse patch inside the envelope with the letter from my mother and tucked the flap of the envelope back in, the horse patch inside there, with the folded-up letter that had all our names.

  When I went back up the glass was cleaned up from the floor. Big pieces still stuck out from the sides of the window. Lady Jane was sitting on the couch. She had a piece of toilet paper stuck on her foot.

  She said, “I can stay here. It will be alright. Elle’s daddy will go get him.”

  She patted the couch next to her.

  “Come here,” she said.

  I stood still and straight by the door.

  “When?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “What about the window?” I said.

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  ELLE’S DADDY came over in the morning. He broke out the rest of the glass in the broken window, and I laid in my bed and tried not to hear glass breaking on the sidewalk, smashing and breaking, and then I left.

  I walked down to Saint Therese Carmelite. I tried to see in the windows to the basement, down the basement stairs with the door that was painted red, and I couldn’t remember if it used to be painted red. I went around back of the church where the brick walls had ivy, and through the parking lot and up the dead end street that came back out on Ogden Street. I walked around for a while.

  THERE WAS a board nailed up over the broken out window and Jimmy Henry was back. His bedroom door was shut, and Lady Jane said, “Sh.”

  SHE WAS around a lot after that. In the mornings she was in our kitchen making coffee, wearing one of Jimmy Henry’s T-shirts. She put flowers in the green apple, and she made bean soup and muffins or potato soup and muffins. She pulled the curtain closed across the nailed-up board. Jimmy Henry’s door stayed shut.

  Jimmy Henry finally came out of his bedroom when the kitchen sink broke underneath and water ran out on the kitchen floor. He came out and turned off the black faucet under there, behind the wastebasket.

  He said, “You’ll have to use the bathroom faucet.”

  He went back in his room.

  ELLE’S BEDROOM in the apartment upstairs from Together Books was the little bedroom, three walls that were light orange and one wall, the wall with the window, that was pink. Th
e window looked a little way across to the red brick wall of the next door building.

  “Fucking Dylan Marie,” Elle said. “Has to have her own room. My room. Has to have my room.”

  Dylan Marie didn’t sleep in her baby bed anymore, so she got Elle’s room. Dylan Marie was skinny and blond-headed and she always had a runny nose, but besides that she was cute, blond hair like blond dandelion fuzz.

  “She’s cute,” I said. “You’re her big sister.”

  “Half sister,” Elle said. “Doesn’t count.”

  “Like stepsister?” I said.

  “Same thing,” Elle said.

  The new apartment was long wood floors and nothing on the walls, no posters or anything. The kitchen was in the back. It was big and white in there, and a shining green floor that Margo put wax on. All Margo’s stuff in jars was lined up along the counter, jars of noodles and beans and different colors of peas. Jars of jelly were on the windowsill and the sun from the alley came through in different colors of red and purple. There was a round wooden table in the middle, and five different chairs. My favorite chair was painted blue, with a flat velvety green cushion.

  “Which is your favorite chair?” I said.

  “All those chairs are ugly,” Elle said. “Having a favorite chair is stupid.”

  The front room was just a long red couch of swirly scratchy stuff in the middle of the wooden floor. The couch faced the window that looked out to Seventeenth Avenue, and across at Who’s Next Used Records. Who’s Next Used Records had a cartoon sign of two records with a boy face and a girl face, and the record faces looked in the front-room window.

  The only other thing in the front room besides the red couch was the bookshelf with the beautiful glass doors. I opened one of the doors, unhooked the little gold latch.

  Elle said, “You’re not supposed to touch her stupid books.”

  Cassandra Wiggins’s books.

  I shut the glass door. Clicked the little gold latch.

  “Cassandra Wiggins is pretty cool,” I said.

  “Yeah, groovy,” Elle said.

  I said, “Cassandra Wiggins is a poet, you know.”

  “How do you know so much about Cassandra Wiggins?” Elle said. “Wiggins. What a stupid name. Wasn’t that some rabbit or something?”

  “I like this place,” I said. “This is a cool apartment.”

  “What’s so cool about it?” Elle said.

  “This front window is nice,” I said. “It even opens up. At your other house it was too high up to even see the sidewalk.”

  Street sounds came up when I pushed the window open, and I leaned out and looked way down the street, and way up the street. I could see the flower box. Marigolds and petunias.

  “Hey,” I said. “Pink and orange. Marigolds and petunias.”

  Elle flopped down on the couch behind me.

  I went in to Elle’s new bedroom. Lighter pink. Lighter orange.

  “Your new bedroom,” I said. “Marigolds and petunias.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Elle said.

  Margo’s stuff was in boxes around the edges of the other bedroom, clothes folded into boxes and smaller boxes in boxes. One box next to the bed was turned upside down and an embroidered cloth, lavender cross-stitch on the hems, draped over like a tablecloth. There was a fat purple candle on a plate, and matches and an ashtray and a bottle of lotion. I rubbed some lotion on my arm. Strawberry. A dark red blanket covered the window.

  The bathroom didn’t have a window. A wooden box by the bathtub had all the bath stuff. A plastic fish. A glass bottle of peppermint stuff. Herbal shampoo. I rubbed some herbal shampoo on the other arm from the strawberry.

  In the mirror cabinet over the sink there was toothpaste, aspirins, pink stomachache stuff. A blue and white Tampax box, half full of little white tubes in rustly paper. I took one of them out and put it in my pocket. There was a folded-up piece of paper in the Tampax box too. It said “How to Use Tampax Tampons for Complete Protection,” and it unfolded to a cartoon drawing of the bottom half of a girl showing what was inside between her legs. I put the piece of paper in my pocket with the Tampax tampon.

  “Let’s go over to my house,” Elle yelled from the living room, and I jumped, and shut the mirror door.

  “No,” I said.

  “I have to go get some more of my stuff,” she said.

  I went in there, and she didn’t get up off the couch.

  “I left my lizard skin cowboy boots over there,” she said.

  “You said those boots are too small for you now,” I said.

  “So, what, I’m not just leaving them for Dylan Marie to wear someday,” she said. “Sasha would probably throw them out.”

  “Why don’t you sell them at Constanzia’s?” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Elle said.

  She had her arm over her eyes.

  WHEN I got home nobody was there. I looked in the refrigerator for a while. Then I went downstairs into the painted apartment. I sat on the mattress and took out the folded-up piece of paper from the Tampax tampons box. The drawing of the girl had names of her inside parts written around the outside, with arrows pointing in. “Ovaries.” “Fallopian tubes.” “Uterus.” “Vagina.” I flattened the piece of paper out on the mattress and took the Tampax tampon out of my pocket. The blue writing on it said “Open This End,” and a blue arrow. I tore away the paper at the arrow, to the shiny white cardboard with the string hanging out one end.

  There was a drawing of the girl’s hand with a Tampax tampon in her fingers, and I held my hand just that way, the Tampax tampon in my fingers, my pinkie finger sticking out. The inside fell out of the cardboard tube, the string stuck to the end of it like it was a tail. It was the real Tampax tampon. I picked it up by the tail and laid it on the mattress next to the piece of paper. The girl in the picture had long pointed fingers and fingernails. My fingers were round finger ends and lumpy knuckle skin.

  I got my shoe box out and put the Tampax tampon parts inside and the piece of paper inside. I took out Tina Blue’s ring and put it on my finger, first on my ring finger, then on my middle finger. It fit, slipping around just a little bit, Tina Blue’s silver ring shiny dark on my middle finger. I stuck my pinkie finger out, curving it out to the side. The ring was heavy and cold.

  I took my poem book out of my jacket pocket, Rod McKuen, and folded my jacket into a pillow. Lying on the mattress, looking up at the purple ceiling, not opening to a poem. I twisted Tina Blue’s ring around on my finger. I closed my eyes, and I unzipped my blue jeans and put my hand in, down into my underpants, in between my legs, the cold of Tina Blue’s ring on my legs, on my skin down there. I held in one breath and pushed my finger up inside. I closed my legs together on my hand, and curled over on my side, moved my finger around in there. My heart was beating on my finger in there.

  I woke up to the white of moonlight coming in the tall window on to the mattress. The moon took up the piece of sky between the houses, perfectly white, almost round. I got the peacock cloth out of the bottom drawer and pulled it over me. The white moon made the peacock cloth silver and darker silver, made Tina Blue’s ring shine black on my middle finger.

  When I woke up again, it was morning and bird sounds outside. Birds in the backyard. Bluejays out front, and rain dripping down between the houses. I got up, wrapped in the peacock cloth, warm in the peacock cloth, and my knees stiff. Out in the hall I listened up the stairs, listened to no sounds at all except bluejays. The peacock cloth trailed behind me up the stairs like a princess robe.

  Jimmy Henry’s door stayed shut. I went in the kitchen, sat on the bench, pulled the peacock robe around me. I laid my hand on the table and looked close into the flowers of Tina Blue’s ring. The flowers had turned blackish all the time the ring had been in my shoe box and, up close, was a smell on my fingers.

  Jimmy Henry’s door opened, and I tucked my hand with the ring under the peacock cloth. He came into the kitchen doorway and leaned there. He didn’t have his shirt on, j
ust his blue jeans. His hair was tangled, hanging long over his bare arms. The dark hair on his chest swirled in a design over the bones of his ribs. His blue jeans hung down on more bones.

  I said, “Hi.”

  He said, “You’re up early.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”

  He rubbed his arms, rubbed his face, rubbed his eyes, and he came over and sat across from me, leaning on his elbows. He looked out the window. His long hair had thin gray in it.

  I said, “You need to brush your hair.”

  He said, “I need to brush my life.”

  He looked back in from the window, looked at me, and there was a smile there for a second. The rain sound was light raindrops blowing onto the glass, and the heavy drops dripping down from the roof, onto the skinny sidewalk between the houses.

  His bare arms had gray every once in a while in all the dark hair there. The insides of his arms were soft, white-looking, no hairs. No scabs. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Is Lady Jane here?” I said.

  “No,” Jimmy Henry said. “I haven’t seen her for a while. Have you?”

  The green apple teapot was on the counter. Dried brown stems stuck up, and the counter was messy with dark curls of petals.

  “No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “She’ll be back around,” he said.

  Then it was back to just the rain blowing on the window, and the wet dripping down. I tucked my hands deeper into the warm of the peacock cloth, and Tina Blue’s ring slipped around on my finger. I took the ring off my finger and put it into my jacket pocket. Then I pushed the peacock cloth away and got out of the bench. I got the hairbrush from the bathroom and handed it to Jimmy Henry, and he took it, and looked, running his thumb over the bristles. He raised his arms and closed his eyes, brushing his hair back from his face. The long muscles of his arm moved round and smooth and the ribs under the white skin of his side moved, and I looked away from the long dark hair under his arms.

  I turned around to the stove and took out a wooden match from the box there, turned on the gas, swiped a match on the side of the box and I saw down to my zipper, still unzipped, a zipper-shaped triangle of white underpants. The match didn’t light and it broke in half and I dropped the box and matches spilled down bouncing and clicking all across the floor. I turned off the gas and got down to pick up the matches and pull my T-shirt down over my zipper, the matches all over the floor under the table by Jimmy Henry’s bare feet, long bare toes. I came up and banged the top of my head on the table.