by Annabel Lyon
“Sweetie,” Mom says. “But your friend is here.” And that’s true: Mean Megan has come over to keep Dex company this evening. I was allowed to invite my friend Sam, but at the last minute Sam’s mom phoned to say Sam’s little brother had come down with chicken pox and Sam was in quarantine. I don’t really mind. I don’t especially want to watch funny videos or play Boggle and pretend to have a good time. With Mean Megan taking care of Dex, I can just read or, more accurately, stare at the white space between the words while my mind roams far far away.
Mom is talking very softly to Dexter now, but I hear my own name in the flow of words. I understand she’s telling Dex that I can’t come along but I can’t be left alone.
“That’s okay, Mrs. Snow,” Mean Megan says suddenly. “I have my St. John’s Ambulance.”
We look at her blankly.
“My babysitting certificate,” Mean Megan says. “I can do CPR .”
Then Dex is getting her good black shoes and her good black felt coat with the buckles and nobody is exactly telling her not to. I realize my sister was already wearing a dark skirt and sweater and has probably been planning this—grim determination collapsing into panic—since she got up this morning.
“Mommy,” I say, meaning to protest, but no one hears. Mom is now having a quiet word with Mean Megan, both of them glancing meaningfully at me from time to time.
“Daddy,” I say, but he only gives me a hug and says I’m his pumpkin and his princess and they’ll all be home very, very soon, which I know—it’s not even lunchtime yet—is not close to being true. Then they’re gone, and the door is closed, and Mean Megan and I are left staring at each other in the front hall. I think I might have a few tears left after all.
I’m remembering everything I’ve ever tried to forget about Mean Megan, everything that’s making me think this day can’t get too much worse. Remembering, for instance, the time Mean Megan invited me to play hide-and-seek with her and Dexter and, while I hid, persuaded Dexter it was all right to abandon the game and go look at magazines in Dexter’s room. They left me squooshed under the kitchen sink for close to half an hour, so that I couldn’t stand straight and my foot felt like needles when Mom finally opened the cupboard door to throw away a handful of carrot scrapings, and I scared her Half Out Of Her Wits. Remembering, also, the time right after Mean Megan and Dexter became friends—this was a few years ago—when we were all in the same school together, and I was really quite small and didn’t know any better and tried to say hi to Mean Megan in the hallway, and Mean Megan ignored me and walked on by. Reflecting, too, that Mean Megan is as proud of her own prettiness as Narcissus (I know about him from my book on the ancient Greeks) and once looked at Dexter’s and my baby pictures on the windowsill in the living room and pointed out that I was not nearly as cute anymore and would only get uglier until the day I died.
“I’m really sorry about your grandpa,” Mean Megan says.
No! No! That’s worse! Niceness is worse!
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say as I run there and slam the door just the way Dexter is doing so often lately, so Mean Megan won’t see me cry. I stay in the bathroom until the crying stops. It’s interesting how my mind and my crying often seem to part ways. My eyes will be running and my nose sniffling and my shoulders shaking even after my mind has calmed down and is not feeling quite, quite so terribly bad and is even starting to think about other things. Hopefully by now Mean Megan will have gone to watch TV in the den.
I flush the toilet and wash my hands and brush my teeth, for no particular reason, and splash cold water on my eyes, pat them dry and open the door. Mean Megan is sitting on the floor opposite the bathroom door, leaning against the wall, finger-combing long strands of her straight black hair.
“Are you okay?” she says, flipping her hair back and looking closely at me.
“What’s CPR ?” I say.
“Say I make you lunch,” Mean Megan says. “Say you start to choke on your sandwich. I could save your life.”
I see her get dreamy and I know that in her mind she’s saving my life and telling my parents all about it when they get home and getting a medal for bravery.
“I could save my own life,” I say. “I could spit the sandwich out, duh.”
“Say you were in a swimming pool,” Mean Megan says.
I can see where this conversation is going. I stomp past her down the hall to the kitchen. Mean Megan follows me.
“Say you swallowed some water and were choking,” she says. “Say you stopped breathing. I could give you artificial respiration and bring you back to life.”
“Stop it,” I say.
“I also know what to do about cuts, poison, dizziness, faintness, abrasions, fever, insect bites, allergic reactions and vomiting,” Mean Megan says. “I can apply a tourniquet. Want to play a game?”
“No!” I say. I get a plate and a glass down from the cupboard. After a second, I make myself say, “Do you want a sandwich?”
“What kind?”
I’m about to break one of Mom’s food rules and can’t say the word out loud. Instead, I go to the fridge, pull out the jar of chocolate spread and hold it up for Mean Megan to see. Mean Megan frowns and nods.
“You can’t tell,” I say. Chocolate spread is strictly a Weekend Food.
“Neither can you,” Mean Megan says. “I’m not allowed to have chocolate.”
“What?” I say.
“Chocolate ruins the complexion, my mother says.”
I make two sandwiches bulging with glossy chocolate spread and slap the plates down on the table. I feel like the eighteenth-century gentleman from another of my books who slaps down his gloves when he’s annoyed with someone, as a challenge. Throwing down the gauntlet this is called. A gauntlet is a glove.
Mean Megan eats her sandwich and says it’s good.
“What kind of game?” I ask suspiciously.
“You lie down,” Mean Megan says, “and pretend to be choking. And I’ll save your life.”
“No,” I say.
“I could do your hair.”
“No!” I say.
“Pretend you have a broken arm? Paint your nails?”
“Stop it!” I say.
“I know,” Mean Megan says. “I can teach you to dance.”
“This is ridiculous,” I say. “I know how to dance. I have my own class now.”
“Since when?” Mean Megan demands. “You suck at dance. I’m sorry, but this is true.”
This is the kind of “I’m sorry” that means its own opposite. “Dexter didn’t tell you about my class?”
Mean Megan shakes her head. “Ever since I quit ballet, she won’t talk to me anymore.”
“Is that why you’re being nice to me?”
Mean Megan nods.
“She’s not here,” I say. “She won’t notice.” Which is true but pretty nasty. I feel bad as soon as I say it. So I add, “Dexter wouldn’t care anyway if you were nice to me.”
“That’s true,” Mean Megan says.
We go into the den and I turn on the TV. I flip the channels with the clicker until I get to the music video channel.
“Cool,” Mean Megan says.
I put the clicker down and climb up into the big recliner, the one Grandpa used to like to sit in when he came to visit. I wonder why I’m being nice to Mean Megan.
For a long time we don’t talk. Mean Megan watches the TV with a kind of rapt earnest attention, mouthing the lyrics to the songs she knows and leaning forward to study the singing and the dancing and the clothes. She’s as crazy as Dexter. I pick out an architecture magazine of Mom’s from the pile next to the recliner and look at pictures of beautiful homes around the world. Mean Megan gets up and leaves the room. I hear her go down the hall to the bathroom and then come back via the kitchen. I hear the suck and sigh of the fridge door being opened and the heavy thump of the oven door. I hear the beepa-beepa-beep of the timer and I wonder what Mean Megan is doing.
“Your mom
told me to put in the leftover lasagna at three-fifty for half an hour for dinner.” She sits down on the sofa again and speaks with her eyes riveted to the TV, where a young girl is singing with her head thrown back, at the top of her lungs, in a rainstorm. In the video her clothes are getting soaked, and every time she flicks her hair, droplets fling away like sparks. “I love lasagna,” Mean Megan says, watching the girl intently. “I only get it when I come to your house. We don’t eat cheese at home.”
“That is insane,” I say. I’ve been staring for a long time at a picture of an underground house built into the side of a hill. The house itself is practically invisible, except for the front door.
“My dad is lactose intolerant,” Mean Megan says.
We eat our lasagna in front of the tv. Dusty wanders through the room and I instinctively reach to scoop her up but Mean Megan gets there first and holds Dusty in her lap, cooing and petting until Dusty is purring like a vacuum cleaner. “I love your cat, he’s so cute,” Mean Megan says, finally letting Dusty spill to the ground so she can keep eating her lasagna.
I think my eyes will fall out of my head and roll away across the floor like marbles. “Aren’t you allergic?”
“I love cats,” Mean Megan says. “They just make me a little sneezy. Or if I, like, forget to wash my hands and touch my eye, my eye will water a little. It’s not so bad.”
When Eighties Hour comes on, Mean Megan asks politely if I would mind if she flipped around, and I politely say she should go ahead. She’s given me a particularly cheesy, crusty portion of lasagna, and I’m starting to feel mellow. Eventually she settles on a teen movie about a girl who really, really, really wants to be a ballet dancer even though everyone tells her she’s too big and tall. She starts to go on diets until everyone tells her she’s too thin, and then she goes to the school doctor and switches to choreography. She starts eating again and gets a date with the school quarterback and is named Prom Queen and makes a courageous teary speech about loving yourself.
“That’s your sister,” Mean Megan says. “Except her body is perfect just the way it is. She’s the best dancer in her class. She wins everything. It’s all she ever thinks about, ballet, ballet, ballet.”
“I’m Dexter,” I say, jumping up from my chair and going en pointe, which means on my tippy-toes. “May I have some more lasagna, please?” I ask in a fluting voice with a vague English accent. I do a pirouette. Mean Megan laughs and says, in a pretty good imitation of Dexter’s voice, “You’re doing that wrong. I’ll show you. Watch me. I can do it perfectly. You can’t. Nobody is perfect but me.”
I don’t laugh. I’m watching Mean Megan’s face.
“It’s true,” Mean Megan says, back in her own voice again, shrugging. “She is perfect. She’s so, so good and I’m just not. I got so sick of it. I just wanted to try something else for a change, something I could do better than her.”
“Jazz,” I say.
“Hip-hop.” Mean Megan flips back to the music video channel and says, “Perfect.” A young man is half singing, half talking his way through a song while some pretty girls chirp along in the background. The young man looks annoyed and makes a lot of rapid hand gestures. Mean Megan begins to dance in a loose, relaxed way that I know instantly is very, very cool. When she’s finished, I clap.
“Your turn,” Mean Megan says.
I push the mute button on the clicker and start to clap slowly and steadily. “With me,” I tell Mean Megan. We clap together. “Yes,” I say and stop clapping, letting Mean Megan continue on her own. I close my eyes and stamp my feet and lift my hands high over my head and start to dance.
“Show me how to do that,” Mean Megan says when I’m done.
We’re dancing while my family says good-bye to the last of the guests at Grandma’s house and clears away the dirty dishes and mounds of leftover food and does the dishes. We’re dancing while my family kisses and hugs Grandma, who says she’s fine on her own and doesn’t need to borrow our guest room again. We’re dancing while my family drives home along cold dark streets, not talking, each in his or her own sealed bubble of tired sadness. We’re dancing when my family parks the car in the garage and unbuckles their seat belts and slowly, sadly gets out of the car. We’re dancing when my family comes quietly through the front door, in case we’re asleep, and follows the sound of laughing and foot stomping to the den. Mean Megan and I have pushed the furniture back and are dancing with our eyes closed. The TV shows a man with long blond hair whapping a guitar against a tree because it’s All-Metal Power Hour, but we’ve left the mute on and haven’t noticed.
“What are you doing?” Dexter asks.
We’re hot and red-faced and breathless, and when we see Dexter we both start to laugh.
“You too, Dexter,” Mean Megan says. “You have to dance too.”
I say, “Dex too.”
Maybe Dexter is too stunned to say no, because she starts making her pretty swan movements while I snap my fingers and stomp my feet and Megan grooves and swerves her head around and makes her hip-hop moves. Mom and Dad stand in the doorway of the den, watching us and saying nothing.
A few miles away, Grandma hangs up her clothes and puts on her dressing gown and brushes her hair and cleans her teeth and checks the front door and the back door. Then she slowly goes upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Grandpa, where she lies in bed and speaks to him for a long time before she closes her eyes and makes herself lie still, alone in the big bed, waiting and waiting for sleep.
Dexter in a Whack of Trouble
Up in my attic room, I suddenly cock my head to one side and begin to shake it, like a swimmer trying to get water out of her ear. I’ve been tracing bugs. This is a slightly unusual Edie activity, but Grandma recently gave me a book called Insects of the World, full of excellent words like “mandible” and “thorax,” that so bothers Dex she won’t be in the same room with it. I’ve been giving an Egyptian scarab beetle the blackest, shiniest possible carapace (carapace!), experimenting with a combination of black pencil and black crayon, layering them on top of each other and pressing very hard, snapping the tip on the pencil again and again and wearing the crayon’s sharp nose down to a blunt snout. Then I felt the tickle deep in my left ear, very slightly annoying. It could be a drop of water left over from my pre-bedtime bath, when I ducked my head under because I was a coelacanth, very bug-eyed and ancient. I start whacking at my head with the heel of my hand to dislodge it.
After a few minutes of this, I go downstairs to get a Q-tip and bump into Dexter in the hall. Dexter is obviously heading for the bathroom too, so I’m forced to make a dash for it, which Dexter thwarts by grabbing at my hair, which I counter by stamping on her foot. An all-out brawl is only averted by the appearance of Mom at the top of the stairs with a laundry basket full of Dad’s clean but wrinkled shirts.
“Megan phoned for you earlier,” Mom says to Dexter. “I told her you would talk to her at school tomorrow.”
“Ha, ha,” I say.
Dexter lets go of my hair. “Why didn’t you just come get me?”
“You were doing your homework.”
“If you were downstairs doing laundry,” Dexter says, “and somebody phoned for you, I would get you. I wouldn’t say, ‘She can’t come, she’s doing laundry.’”
“Don’t argue with your mother.” Dad squeezes past the three of us and into the bathroom. The lock clicks.
“No!” I whack my ear a few more times and make my eyes go round to demonstrate to Mom the proven futility of this gesture.
“No!” Dexter points after him. He was carrying his newspaper.
“You’ll live,” Mom says.
“I was going there!” Dexter says.
“Me first!” I say.
“First up, best dressed!” Dad calls from behind the closed door. I hear the rustle as he turns a page of his newspaper.
“I don’t know what that means,” Dexter says. “I need to brush my teeth. You can hardly accuse me of wasting time in the
bathroom. I don’t take reading material in there, like some people.”
From behind the closed door, Dad starts to hum.
“Mommy,” I say. Thumping my own head again has made me dizzy.
“I have a Q-tip and a spare toothbrush,” Mom says. “Just let me go get this ironing squared away and I’ll find them for you. You can go wait in my bedroom.”
“Can I look in your closet?” Dexter asks.
“Yes.”
“She can’t look in my closet!” Dad calls from behind the closed door. “It’s private!” The newspaper rustles again.
Dexter and Mom exchange a look that means, Ignore him, puh-leese.
The appeal of Mom’s closet is the square blue garment bag that hangs at the far, far right. It has a peaked top where the hanger pokes out, like a tent top or a pavilion, and falls all the way to the floor, with a zipper running down its full length. Inside are Mom’s very best clothes: a skinny black dress with black threads for straps; a long, strapless, dark red dress with a skirt that poufs out all the way to the ground; a green and gold sari; a pair of very plain black wool pants that Mom loves for some reason; and an orange silk blouse, light and frothy as candy floss, that always makes Dad say, “She’s turned into a pumpkin!” when she puts it on. I love my dad and can’t imagine much about being married, or what kind of person I’ll be married to, but I know for certain it won’t be someone who accuses me, in my best favorite clothes, of looking like a gourd.
After Dexter has unzipped the bag just enough so that we can take turns reaching in and identifying each special outfit by feel—we know the textures by heart— she takes down the three shoe boxes from the shelf above the garment bag and lays them in a line on the bed. These, too, we know by heart, but Dexter seems to enjoy the little Christmas shiver of opening each box, each time. I sort of understand, the way I sort of understand the appeal of the clothes—this is Dexter’s version of playing dress-up— though I have trouble getting as worked up about them as Dexter. The first box holds Mom’s plain black pumps with the two-inch heel. These she keeps nicely polished and shaped by stuffing a wad of tissue paper up into the toe whenever she isn’t wearing them, which is most of the time. These are the shoes she wears with the black pants and orange blouse, which is her School Concert and/or Dinner At A Nice Restaurant outfit. The next shoe box contains Mom’s sandals: open-toed, whippy straps and a high, pencil-thin heel. They look teetery but Mom always manages, even though she only wears them maybe once a year, when she and Dad go to a concert at the Orpheum. I know Dexter covets these shoes particularly. The closest Dex is allowed to high heels at the moment, despite much reasoning, pleading, begging and groveling, is a pair of platform sneakers with the word “angel” written on the side. These are all very well, Dexter says, but not really the same thing at all.
