Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  “And he was blind in one eye.”

  Tristan saved the best for last. He rolled over on his bed, focused, and strained his sight for all he was worth on his last and favourite poster. But nothing. There was no fuzzy outline. No sense that somewhere there was the smallest amount of vision at all. His brain just wasn’t buying it. Just wouldn’t be tricked into believing his good eye was doing anything more than resting. And he was tired from it all. Tired of training his brain and focusing an eye that wouldn’t cooperate, all while his other eye was wanting to burst free from behind the patch, to take over the task. It was almost screaming out to him, “I can do it! Let me do it for you! Why get an amateur to do a pro’s job?”

  Tristan peeled off the patch, carefully put it, secretly, into the drawer beside his bed, and let his good eye adjust to the light. It took no time at all to recover, to jump into the game and take over, doing what the other could not.

  YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN SCARED TILL YOU’VE BEEN SCARED IN 3D.

  The words are written so that they got smaller as they recede into the distance, giving a 3D effect on a two-dimensional poster. A girl in a 1950s swimsuit runs out toward him. Vincent Price stares malevolently down at him.

  “Hello,” Tristan said. “Lookin’ good, Vince!”

  When Tristan had first heard that House of Wax was the most successful 3D film of all time, he wanted to know everything about it. He went through comic books and he sent away for items from the back of magazines. He went to the library. He spent all his time trying to find out whatever he could. He even went to the local theatre and asked to speak to the manager, who brought him into his trust, showing him his own collection of movie memorabilia in the projector room. And it was there that he first heard the name of the man who made 3D happen in a full-length feature film: André De Toth.

  André De Toth decided to become an actor after he’d already studied and graduated with a law degree. Then, after putting in his time emoting on the Hungarian stage, he turned his eye toward the film industry, first in Hungary, then in Hollywood. He worked as an actor, editor, and writer before even attempting to direct. His films were edgy for the time. Violence was realistic, not glamorized, and not subdued. Brave and in-your-face. But above everything else, he was best known for his film House of Wax. The first successful and critically acclaimed 3D film ever made.

  “Directed by a man who was blind in one eye!” Tristan said aloud, no longer whispering.

  What a victory! What a feat! What an inspiration!

  All around Tristan were his heroes. Men who, like God himself, could create worlds from nothing. From light and imagination. Here were his gods. And one day, one day, he would walk amongst them. A Cyclops god in a world in need of his vision.

  * * *

  Grandfather was ranting on about the evils of the world. Nothing was safe. The police department was corrupt. The store down the street always ripped him off. The liquor bottles seemed smaller. His favourite shows were cancelled. And those city people who bought the house were putting up his rent! Why was the world conspiring against him?

  “On yer knees, girls. Time fer some God intervention!”

  Clara and Blanca stopped rolling the ciggies. It was Blanca’s turn to use the contraption and Clara’s turn to measure out the tobacco from their grandfather’s pouch. A half a fistful, a squeeze to remove the excess, and that would be good for three. Three at a time, rolled and twisted off, until there were ninety-one in total. Thirteen for each day of the week.

  The first one of the day would be smoked before breakfast, with a cup of warmed-up Sanka. Only once the last drop of coffee was downed and the last puff exhaled would their grandfather consider getting breakfast for them. On weekends it was a fry-up of bacon with canned beans on the side. But on the days of the ranting and raging, the coffee would stale in the cup, the cigarette would burn away in an ashtray, and breakfast wouldn’t happen at all. On those days, all the girls could think about was the tea they were always served in the downstairs apartment. The little sandwiches, the petits fours cakes, and the etiquette lessons that accompanied the delectables.

  “Prayers, girls. Prayers! The world is going to hell in a hand-basket and yer mother isn’t gettin’ any better. But yer safe with me, I’ll take care of you. Who else would want ya?” He laughed. “Now get yer little white asses off them chairs, we gots some askin’ to do!”

  The list was long. The people who needed guidance to see things the way he did. The obstacles that needed removing. A new adult-sized tricycle to replace the one that was stolen.

  “’Cause I need it for business. No wheels means there’s no supply for the demand.”

  The twins slipped off their chairs and put their bare knees to the floor.

  “A little help with the racing bets would also be nice,” he added as he sat on the edge of the twin-sized bed that doubled as a sofa when the girls weren’t sleeping on it.

  Clara reached for a nearby foam pillow to place under her bruising knees and their grandfather saw her. Slapping the back of her head, he yelled out, “What in the devil do you think yer doing?”

  “Just trying to be a bit more comfortable!” Clara answered him.

  “Prayers are not about being comfortable. Prayers are to bring comfort. It is not about comfort for yer body, but comfort for yer soul!”

  Clara had not been aware until then that her soul was in discomfort but, from that time on, she knew that fate had nothing to do with the white, white skin she wore, or her pink, anxious eyes, or even the bone-bleach natural colour of her hair. Her discomfort was deep in her soul and the only reason she looked the way she did was that her outward being was a reflection of what was wanting within. Clearly, obviously, her twin suffered the same deep soul melancholia. But how to expunge something she could not put a finger on? How to right the sin that was percolating through her DNA?

  Music.

  Clara understood that her ear for music had to be a gift from the angry god her grandfather wanted so badly to appease. The only way to soothe him, to remove the mark she and her twin bore, was to create a sound so original, so formidable, that they would blossom in colour and purity. Blush would slowly come to their cheeks, their pale eyes would stop reflecting the pink of the blood vessels hidden behind their pale orbs, and their hair might even change from snow white to a pale yellow blond. Even their lashes would darken and their brows would fill in with a light ash colour. And then maybe, just maybe, they might experience lying out in the sun, warming their skin to a tan shade while boys walked by and noticed them in their bikinis. Maybe one day they might be like other normal girls. Maybe one day the stares would stop, the whispers would cease, and they could blend, unnoticed.

  Clara and Blanca had been going downstairs to Esther’s apartment, listening to music, training their voices, and sharing meals with the Perlmans, for almost five years. While other twelve-year-olds were holding transistor radios to their ears, tuning in AM pop music, they listened to opera and folk songs. They had become lessoned in classical music, everything from Rachmaninov to Mahler. They had practised their vocal exercises at home, challenging their vocal range and experimenting with sound and tone. Yet still, they looked as though they had just emerged from a tub of bleach.

  “Why did you ever think that singing and playing the piano would make us look like everyone else?” Blanca finally asked her sister.

  “I don’t know. I just did.”

  “Maybe we can sing the way we do because we don’t look like everyone else.”

  “But why do we have to pray so hard, then?”

  “Because our grandfather is a mean and crazy old man.”

  He wasn’t always mean; the girls had seen moments of kindness and gentleness. Beautiful party dresses bought for them on their birthdays. Chips at the chip truck when they wanted. And almost weekly they took stale bread to feed to the ducks and geese at the lake. That was him at his best. But then, some memory would return. Someone would diddle him for a few dollars, a
cigarette wouldn’t be rolled quite right, and this other man would emerge. The girls learned that it was best to walk away. To slip out of sight because the mere look of them would only escalate the self-pitying rage. Their grandfather could spiral into Hell before their eyes and the only thing a spiralling man wants, they learned, is to take any innocent bystanders down with him.

  “Oh, I guess you are going down to that Jew-woman downstairs again. To have yer heads filled with her highfalutin lah-de-dah. Remember where youse come from! Yer not bloody royalty! Miss Lady Janes, the both of youse!”

  But that was just the point. Esther told them not to slurp, just in case one day they were to be invited to Buckingham Palace.

  “Oh, we’ll never be invited there!” they had responded to Esther. “Not in a million years.”

  “You never know, dear girls. Art can open many doors that would not open to you otherwise.”

  “But we aren’t artists. I can’t even draw very good.”

  “It is ‘very well,’ Blanca. Not ‘very good.’ And there are many kinds of art. Music is art.”

  “Music is art?” Clara had been stunned by that revelation.

  “Yes, you can create a feeling, and even an entire image or story, with sound just as you can with paint. Art is about creating another world. Another reality. An inner reality that is a reflection of the soul.”

  And that was why Clara believed that music would bring colour, a painter’s palette of colour, into her soul. If only she could use her music the way an artist does his paints, then that colour would reflect in a prism of light out of her.

  “On yer knees the both of youse! God listens even to the ugly ones, so long as youse are pure of heart!”

  The albinos’ mother, Faye, stared out at the waves. The girls would be coming later and this time she felt confident that she could handle their visit. Nurse Elaine had prepared her, reminding her daily for almost a week of their upcoming visit. When Faye looked at her without any sense of understanding, she reinforced a memory of them by showing Faye their pictures. Two pale white girls with unblinking pinkish-blue eyes with dark red pupils stared out happily. Of course. Her girls. Yes, she was prepared for it. She could do this.

  There were memories that were lost to her forever. Moments that would never be retrieved. There was a calmness in that. Like the days when the water was still and the waves were almost nonexistent. It was peaceful. No churning water. No grey waves. No undertow. Just a gentle rock without a ripple to be seen. That was how it felt to her once the resting time was done and she could return to the little yellow cottage. She rarely remembered the treatments, only the fatigue that came afterward. And the confusion that settled in for a time. Then glimmers of the past would re-emerge, without sense, like fragments of dreams lost when the awake time would take over. Flashes of the past that seemed more surreal than concrete.

  She did not, at any time, agree to any of this. She never agreed to come here to convalesce. But she doesn’t remember the discussions. Doesn’t remember what brought her to the yellow cottages in the first place. Cannot really remember a time before the cottages. At times she could remember something like the taste of ice cream, or a mother holding her and telling her stories about fairy godmothers and magical spells. A finger pricked. An awakening kiss. Dwarves and witches. Were they memories or stories? And who was the Big Bad Wolf?

  No. No. There was no Big Bad Wolf on the shores of Lake Ontario. Just acres of farmland sloping to the lake. Fresh air, birdsong, and rest every day. Rest until it was time for a treatment in the bigger building. She could remember being taken there, she always remembered that part, but then nothing, again, until she’d wake up, wondering where she might be, and feeling the tired ache in her thigh muscles and back.

  She understood that her girls were coming. Two of them. They looked the same, though. Exactly. It could be the same girl posing in two different pictures. How was she to be sure that there were really two? They looked like the same child. Same white hair, same white, chalky skin, same pink eyes. Same sweet and shy smile. Surely there couldn’t be two children who looked so very strange?

  Flash. Yes, she remembered. She had twins. Two snowflakes, so wee and tiny that they looked more like porcelain baby dolls than babies. They couldn’t hold their little heads up and so they looked like a pair of bobbleheads, with tufts of white hair growing straight up and out of their pink scalps. Right, there were two of them. And when she first held them she worried she would get them mixed up. Confuse one for the other after she named them. So she just called them her wee ones. She put one then the other to her breast, but they were too weak to give suck because they came too soon. Almost six weeks early. Always early, those girls. And now they were going to come to visit today. And she wasn’t really ready, after all. It was too soon.

  Mustn’t tell them the truth, she thought. If what she could remember was actually the truth. Her father said it wasn’t the truth, though, just crazy talk. But still. Still, there must have been some reason as to why she didn’t want them. Why she feared them when they were growing inside of her and how she had wanted to tear them out of her body. But there they remained, pushing up against her heart, pressing down onto her pelvic bone, kicking at random whenever they liked without a thought of the host who carried them. How exactly did they get inside of her? Two of them. If her memory was wrong, then how did it happen?

  “I was asleep with my mouth open and I accidentally swallowed a star and that is how you were planted in my belly. The star broke into two and each of you is part of that star and when you are together, that star is whole again.” That was what she whispered to them as she held them, swaddled tightly, to her chest when they were little. And now the star was coming. The fragmented two pieces of one star would be there. A white star it was. It must have been, to produce such white babies.

  Her girls. Now she could remember the pieces of the puzzle. The babies were hers alone. Clara and Blanca. She had named them herself. They belonged only to her. One day, she would leave the yellow cottages and reclaim them. They could live happily ever after. And the ogre and the henchman could just stay away.

  But to do that she would have to leave her lake.

  Clara wanted to sing to their mother. Wanted to make her happy with the joy of their sound, but Blanca was worried that their mother might be hurt and jealous that another woman was teaching them manners and how to sing. Blanca was also worried that their mother would somehow read her thoughts and know that she wished that Esther was her mother instead of her. How she secretly longed for stability. One room that was theirs, and not a single bed in their grandfather’s stinky living room. Food that wasn’t fried and fatty, or reheated. Food that didn’t come from a box or a can. Just last week Esther had made them a huge salad with apples and walnuts. In a salad! Who puts fruit and nuts in salads? Salads had always been that anemic thing you pushed out of the way so that you could smear ketchup closer to the fish and chips. Salads had never looked so colourful, so pretty, in all her life as they did at Esther’s. She could get used to food that had colour, and flavour. And music, and art, and nice smells. Blanca knew that if they brought the music they learned from Esther to their mother, it might open the door to their secret life and it wouldn’t be so secret anymore. It would be shared and, like everything else, slowly taken away from them.

  “But you could bring her joy. Maybe even make her better,” Clara pleaded with her sister on the ride there as they watched the world slip away because they still rode in the backward-facing seats of the station wagon.

  Blanca knew how selfish she was being but she just wanted something that was theirs alone. Something uncontaminated by worry. Something so pure and beautiful that it would transport them from the endless teasing at school. Still, she couldn’t help but feel shame and, because she didn’t want her sister to know how she could so easily betray their mother, she agreed to sing a duet with her. She even offered to sing the part of the slave girl instead of the part of the love i
nterest from Lakmé. The perfect song for two sopranos, equal in size and harmony, one offsetting the other as the two girls, one a servant and the other royalty, gather flowers. The perfect song for a summer’s day when there is water nearby, and a fallow field full of wildflowers.

  “You mean weeds?” their uncle asked them as they zoomed closer. It was his turn to drive them and, even though they could have sat in the front, all important-like, they still sat rear-facing.

  “Ah, c’mon, girls,” he had said to them when they took their usual places, “I don’t bite!’

  And they had all laughed. Uncle Bob made biting gestures and they had laughed all the harder. How wonderful it had been staying the night at his place, eating all together as a family at the dinner table with their cousins. And then, all of them, watching their favourite TV show, Bonanza. They never watched Bonanza with their grandfather! And then the two boys wanting to play cowboys and Indians, but, of course, they both had wanted to be the cowboys and so Clara and Blanca offered to be the Indians because of their long braids.

  “Are you gonna visit her, too?” Blanca asked him as the car passed through the impressive iron gates.

  “Naw, your uncle Bob is in need of a pep-me-up. Gonna go inside where there is a café and put back some joe.”

  “Joe?”

  “Another word for coffee.”

  “Oh,” they both said fake-knowingly, leaving him at the big building as they rambled toward the lake.

  They ran to their mother at the water’s edge but slowed as they neared her, not knowing if they might startle her. How pretty she looked with her long, long hair. So many mothers had sensible haircuts, with a wave falling by their chins or shoulders and the top feathered or teased just a bit for height. But their mother had hair that fell past her waist, in ripples as gentle as the calmest waves before them. How brilliant it was in the summer light. Burnished and bright and glorious. It reflected the light in a way theirs never would. The white was just too opaque, too uniform. But, as the wind moved their mother’s hair, they saw myriad colours, from gold to red to light brown. Like a painting the woman downstairs, Esther, might collect.