Little Miss Strange

by Joanna Rose

  MONDAY MORNING, the back door of the shop was open, and Erico sat at the table in the kitchen.

  He said, “Emilia hasn’t come yet.”

  “Is Constanzia home now?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  The brick edges of the doorway cut into my hands, old bricks, broken. The day behind me in the alley was sunny and morning, and the kitchen was dark and quiet and Erico’s chair squeaked. He got up and leaned on the table, folding his arms, facing me. He closed his eyes and opened them.

  “I will be at the hospital today,” he said. “We won’t open the shop.”

  “What about Emilia?” I said, tears pouring over, and me and Erico both pretending I wasn’t crying, and then tears on Erico’s face.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She may come today.”

  He started to the stairway.

  “Erico,” I said, like a scream in a whisper. “Wait.”

  And he came back, and pulled me to him, his arms around me somehow and my face in his shirt, and he said it.

  He said, “Mama is not better.”

  He said, “She might not get better.”

  “Please let me stay,” I said, trying to breathe. “I can keep the shop open all day, please.”

  His arms fell away, and his pale plaid shirt stepped away, and I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my T-shirt.

  “Okay,” he said.

  ELLE CAME in.

  “Constanzia is sick,” I said.

  She said, “Oh, no. Sick sick? Really sick?”

  “In the hospital,” I said, and then I was afraid to say anything else.

  Elle said, “Want me to hang out with you?”

  I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no.

  MARGO CAME in, and Elle said, “I’m hanging out here, in case that’s what you want to know. Constanzia is sick.”

  Margo said, “Sick?”

  “In the hospital,” I said. “Pneumonia.”

  SASHA CAME in, looking for Erico.

  “My window fan is broken,” she said. “Last time he fixed it for me.”

  “At the hospital,” Elle said. “Constanzia.”

  “In the hospital,” I said. “Pneumonia.”

  ELLE WENT home after noon.

  AT SIX o’clock I turned the sign around CLOSED.

  Behind the counter, on the floor, my back leaned against the side of Constanzia’s blue-painted chair, I pulled out the box of embroidery thread. I sorted my fingers around in the tangled skeins, worked my fingers into the whole tangle and picked it up, threads and knots and a gold paper band dropping back into the box, onto the floor.

  The big pieces of cloth, curtains, tablecloths, the dark hanging colors along the back wall, and the boxes, stacked square. I got under there, got down on the floor like it pulled me, lying down in the dark under the dusty old smell, and I slept there all night.

  Early in the morning, quiet people in the kitchen.

  Erico and Emilia sat at the table. She was old, with black hair and red fingernails, and bare feet in copper sandals. They both looked up at me with surprised eyes in the doorway.

  “I fell asleep,” I said.

  They looked at me.

  “Are you Emilia?” I said.

  She looked at Erico, and back at me, and she nodded her head yes.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m Sarajean. Sarajean Henry.”

  “Hello, Sarajean,” Emilia said in a scratchy deep voice.

  Erico said, “You slept out there all night?”

  “Under the curtains,” I said.

  He said, “Please, go ahead, get some coffee.”

  I poured a cup of coffee and stood by the stove. The coffee warm in my hands.

  “Emilia arrived late,” Erico said. “Late last night. We’re going to the hospital now.”

  “Should we open the shop today?” I said.

  “Maybe late,” Erico said. “Maybe at noon.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Emilia said, “You say a prayer, okay?”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m not a Catholic.”

  “What is this?” she said, reaching, pointing with her red fingernail to my beads, and the blue Mary medal on the silver chain.

  “Constanzia gave this to me,” I said. “Even though I’m not a Catholic.”

  Emilia got up and leaned close, looking close, and her light blouse fell open at the collar, and she had a blue lace bra. She touched the Mary medal, looked at the back of it, and she laughed.

  “Ha,” she said, low and funny. “That used to be mine. She took it back when I got divorced.”

  Emilia and Erico looked at each other, and Erico shook his head. They didn’t look like brother and sister. They just looked like two Mexican people.

  “Well,” I said, closing my fingers over the Mary medal.

  “Oh, no,” Emilia said. “Don’t worry. It belongs to you now. It was a gift.”

  Emilia’s car was parked on Seventeenth Avenue, right in front of the shop, a black car covered in thick dust. Nevada license plates covered in thick dust. She and Erico got in, Emilia driving, driving away to the hospital.

  I walked way up the alley, then on Colfax Street to Corona Street, and past Elle’s old house. At the corner of Corona Street and Eleventh Avenue I looked for the mountains, but the blue haze hid them. Cheeseman Park was empty except for one guy in a suit going across the grass and dandelions.

  I sat at the edge of the grass, under a new tree, and I picked dandelions and made a dandelion rope, until all the dandelions around me were strung together, and then I moved to another spot.

  ERICO SAID, “She has passed on,” and I heard the words in my head the very moment before he said them.

  He touched my shoulder.

  “She was easy in her going,” he said.

  THEN CAME the rest of that day, and the next day.

  LADY JANE made a wreath of white flowers and ivy. She hung it on the door of the shop.

  Erico wore a white shirt buttoned up to his neck, and he and Emilia talked in low voices and short words to the people who came into Someone’s Beloved Threads.

  Cassandra Wiggins brought a bottle of whiskey, and Emilia added some to the coffee she poured.

  Elle sat out on the flower box, and I went out and sat next to her. The street had waves of heat in it, and Elle gathered her hair up on her head, twisting it until it stayed up in a knot, and red curls floated around her ears. Her ears had silver hoops pierced through.

  “Hot,” she said.

  I said, “You got your ears pierced.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Margo did it.”

  “When?” I said. “Did it hurt?”

  “Well, yeah, some,” she said. She touched one silver hoop with her fingertip. “I had to hold ice on there until my ear froze, and that hurt, plus it kept dripping down my neck.”

  Where the little silver hoop poked through Elle’s ear looked swollen and there was a dot of blood right there.

  “Does it hurt now?” I said.

  “It was a bitch sleeping,” she said. “About every ten minutes I had to wake up because my ear hurt because I was laying on it.”

  The guy from Uncle Sam’s Attic came up to us, up the sidewalk. He had sunflowers tied together with a green string.

  “Hi,” he said.

  He looked into the door of the shop.

  “A few folks in there, huh?” he said.

  His beard was all gray, pale and dark and white in it, and he was bald on top. He had a little square cross for an earring.

  “Think there’s a jar for these?” he said, holding out the sunflowers. Huge, and velvety black centers.

  I said, “The blue olla. On the shelf over the stove.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

  He went in.

  “Olla means jar,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Elle said. “That’s what I thought.”

  I said, “I hate this sun.”

  It glared off the sidewalk and it shimmered of
f the black street, and when I looked up it was squinting into the light at Jimmy Henry. He stopped at the door.

  Elle said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  He looked at me, and I looked back at him. I didn’t want to say hi. Hi. It was a silly word. He went in and I watched in the door. He went to Erico and took Erico’s hand, to shake hands with him, and they held their hands together and I saw that they were friends. They stood close, front to front.

  Elle stood up.

  “It’s too fucking hot,” she said. “Let’s go over my house.”

  Erico pulled Jimmy Henry over to Emilia, and they were all three talking. They looked at me, and I hated Jimmy Henry for that.

  Elle said, “Come on over. You can get me high.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  It was cool and empty in the apartment upstairs from Together Books. I gave Elle my little pipe and took off my hightops. I wiggled my toes.

  “You smoke,” I said. “I don’t want any.”

  She took the pipe and went into the bathroom. She turned the water on in the bathtub and came back out, puffing clouds of marijuana smoke around. I lit a stick of incense and stuck it in the Buddha on the kitchen table.

  “Are you taking a bath?” I said.

  “Just a bird bath,” Elle said.

  She unbuttoned her shirt and handed me the pipe.

  “I said I didn’t want any,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, and she puffed some more. She dropped her shirt on the bathroom floor. She had a pink bra.

  “A bird bath?” I said.

  “Cool,” she said. “Cool water.”

  She went in the bathroom, and I went as far as the bathroom door. Elle pushed off her tight cutoffs and got in the bathtub, just partly full, with bubbles foaming up. She took the pan that was for rinsing hair and splashed water over her shoulders, on her chest where her breasts were. She splashed a pan full of water in between her legs, wetting the dark red curls. Then she stood up, got out. She got a towel.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt and hung it on the doorknob. Elle went past me, out the doorway. I took off my cutoffs and my underpants and I got in the tub, cool water trickling in from the faucet. I got down, goosebumps all over, and splashed the cool water all over, my face, my chest, down my back. In between my legs. Then I got up, and out.

  “Hey,” I said. “You want me to turn this water off and let it out now?”

  “I don’t care,” she said.

  I turned off the water and left the plug in. It smelled damp and flowery in there. I put my shirt back on, long soft blue cottony stuff, and I picked up my cutoffs and my underpants. I went to the doorway of her bedroom. Elle was flopped down on the bed, a big white shirt wrapped around her, one button buttoned.

  “Where’s that pipe?” I said.

  She held her hand up.

  I took the pipe and put it in the pocket of my cutoffs. Then I laid down on the other side of Elle’s bed. My skin was cool and tired. I closed my eyes, but when I closed my eyes tears rushed at them from behind, and I opened them, staring at the pink ceiling.

  Petunias and marigolds.

  I woke up once, Elle breathing, sleeping, curled next to me. Snoring a little snore. Me on my back, and Elle’s hand was resting on my chest, palm down, fingers spread, curled, resting. Freckles on her fingers. I turned my face to her face, lying by me so close. A spot of dark blood on her ear.

  JIMMY HENRY brought the sewing machine to our house. He set the sewing machine on the kitchen table, closed in its suitcase box, and the box of extra bobbins and sewing machine needles and the zipper foot.

  He said, “We’ll get a special table for it. In your room? Or in the front room?”

  “In here I guess,” I said, sitting on the edge of my bed, the sewing machine taking up all I could see of the kitchen table.

  I STAYED in my room most mornings, lying in my bed. The music would come on downstairs, and then Jimmy Henry would come up from Lady Jane’s, quiet, bare feet into his room, into the bathroom, and into the kitchen. He made coffee in the coffee pot. He made toast. Sometimes he would leave after that, and Blackbird would drive away.

  Sometimes he would knock one small knock on my door.

  Who’s in there sleeping.

  “There’s coffee,” he would say.

  “See you tonight,” he would say.

  After he drove away I got up, went downstairs, locked the lock on the front door.

  One morning Lady Jane came out into the hallway. She wore Jimmy Henry’s tie-dye T-shirt and just underpants.

  “Hey there,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said, not stopping, going up the stairs.

  She said, “Wait.”

  “What?” I said, waiting.

  “I don’t know,” she said, coming to the bottom of the stairs. “Want to have some tea?”

  “No,” I said. “No thanks.”

  “Well, listen,” she said. “Let’s go out for breakfast together. Want to? To the café? I have to work lunch, so I could just go in early and have breakfast. Want to?”

  She stood there, untangling one of the Christmas lights from its cord.

  “I’m not too hungry,” I said.

  “Well, I wanted to talk to you,” she said.

  “About what?” I said.

  “See how you’re doing,” she said.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said.

  She tangled the Christmas light back into its cord again.

  “Lalena came over a couple times,” she said. “I guess you weren’t home.”

  “Elle,” I said. “You’re supposed to say Elle.”

  “Elle,” she said.

  Lady Jane came around the railing and up the stairs to where I was. She sat down, and she patted the step next to her.

  “Just sit down for a minute,” she said.

  I sat down next to her on the step.

  “Have you been over to the shop?” she said.

  “It’s closed,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  “Elle told me,” I said.

  Lady Jane’s feet were tanned from sandals, white marks across the top of each foot from her sandal strap.

  “Why don’t you go over there?” she said. “Say hi to Erico?”

  My feet were bare white toes, white up my ankles to where it turned tan from wearing hightops.

  “Sarajean?” she said, and I quit looking at my feet, and looked at the Christmas lights.

  “I think he’d like that,” she said. “I think the spirit of Constanzia touched you and it would make Erico less lonely to see you. You know?”

  Her voice was kind of shaky. She put one arm around my shoulder and hugged a quick squeezy hug, and she smelled like Jimmy Henry in his T-shirt. I stood up.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I went up the stairs. I heard her stand up behind me. I went in, and I shut the door quietly. I shut the door of Jimmy Henry’s bedroom. I went in my room, and I shut the door, and I got back on my bed with my book.

  That night, late, dark, when everything was quiet, I got up. Jimmy Henry’s bedroom door was still shut. I went out the front door and out into the night lit by streetlights and the red Safeway sign.

  Colfax Street was still busy, cars and doors open into bars with music. I crossed and went as far as Ogden Street and Seventeenth Avenue. People were hanging out on the steps way down in front of the Lair Lounge. The yellow sign of Bill’s Pepsi Store.

  I crossed to the other corner.

  Lights were on in the window above Together Books.

  The windows above Someone’s Beloved Threads were only dark.

  Two guys walked by me, slowing down.

  “Hey, baby,” one of the guys said.

  I said, “Fuck you.”

  That made them laugh.

  They kept walking, down the sidewalk, down Seventeenth Avenue.

  JIMMY HENRY was sitti
ng on the front step. He was smoking a cigarette, an orange dot on the front porch. No shirt, no shoes. Just in his cutoffs, his skin all white.

  “Kind of late for you to be wandering around, isn’t it?” he said.

  Fuck you.

  Who do you think you are, my father?

  That made me laugh, and I just kept walking, into my house and up the stairs.

  End of Summer, 1977

  Elle left again right before school started.

  Jimmy Henry came home in the middle of the day, came to my open bedroom door.

  “Lalena took off again,” he said.

  “Elle,” I said. “How come nobody calls her Elle? She changed to Elle years ago, you know.”

  “Sarajean,” he said.

  He came in, leaned on the doorway.

  “Do you know where she went?” he said.

  “Los Angeles,” I said. “She said she was going back there.”

  “Who did she know there besides that girl Talia?” he said.

  “She had a boyfriend,” I said.

  “She took her daddy’s money,” he said. “He owed that money to some other people. It was a lot of money.”

  “Dealing, huh?” I said.

  “What did she say to you?” he said. “Did she say anything? Listen, this is important.”

  “I haven’t talked to her in a while,” I said. “I haven’t even seen her.”

  He rubbed his face in his hands.

  “What a fucking mess,” he said.

  “Why is it a fucking mess?” I said.

  Jimmy Henry’s hair had long streaks of gray at the front.

  “It just is,” he said.

  “Was it your money, too?” I said.

  “What was this boyfriend’s name?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Bart something.”

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  Bart Allen.

  “Please, if you remember, tell me,” he said. “Okay? Please, promise? And if she gets in touch with you?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said.

  JFK CAME over, and Nancy, downstairs at Lady Jane’s. Jimmy Henry was down there, and JFK came up and opened the door into the front room.

  “Don’t you believe in knocking?” I said.

  “Knock knock,” he said. “Hi.”

  “You home now?” I said, sitting up, putting my book face down on the applebox table.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got home Monday.”