“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is this because of Lev? Does the wonderful Lev smoke?”
And I turned quiet again, and tried to put my face into an expression of The Terrible Thing, so she could read it there without my having to breathe the words to life. But instead she looked confused and more annoyed.
“Easter, would you just tell me what’s wrong? This is so irritating!”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well then why did you come down here? Why did you even bother! Get out of here Easter! Scram! You’re nothing but an intruder. A germ. A piece of sand agitating my oyster. But you’re not a pearl; you’re a tumor or a wart or a cyst. Get out!”
And just then, the glowing red cigarette that had been burning down behind my back seared my thumb, causing me to react: jump back and look down at my freshly reddened appendage. As soon as I looked back up, Julia was gone. The creek gushed cold and lonely in front of me.
The Terrible Thing, The Terrible Thing, The Terrible Thing. There it was. In the bathroom. In The Tooth House. Just waiting for me. The Father wouldn’t find it. He might not notice for days because he never, ever used our bathroom. Our cluttered, too-warm torture chamber.
“Julia?”
I knew she wouldn’t respond.
“Julia, it was terrible. A terrible, terrible thing.”
But she was gone.
I maneuvered my way back onto the path, brushed a few burrs off my sweater, and let the branches close up behind me. After a few minutes walking I wouldn’t even know where to find that sunny spot again.
Before I could move much further, another distraction caught my eye, the sun reflecting off a glimmering something lodged between two rocks, deeper into the highway side of The Woods. I left the path and moved closer and saw that the glimmering something was a piece of metal, attached to a strip of leather wedged between two giant boulders. As I pulled and I gouged and I scraped around the intriguing item, the rocks which had seemed as stuck still as tiles shifted suddenly with a growl. I jumped and let out a little yelp, then looked around hotly. Julia probably heard that.
I pulled on it again angrily, revenge on an inanimate object, and this time it slipped right out, causing me to lose my balance and fall backward. I was so furious with the little item that I needed a moment of silence to compose myself properly, after which I recognized what it was: a horse bridle. With an ornately embellished E embossed into the side.
Elizabeth’s bridle.
What the hell was Elizabeth’s bridle doing out here? Elizabeth’s bridle was supposed to be buried somewhere deep in Phyllis’s basement, wedged between a crocheted photo album and a ring of mink pelts, not stuck between two rocks, two rocks that’d probably been wedged together since some Lonely woman gave birth to a Lonely girl, and that Lonely girl gave birth to Phyllis and Phyllis had The Mother and The Mother had me.
Then there was a low rumble in what sounded like the stomach of The Woods, a growling from somewhere far away. A pair of squawking birds flew from the treetops, startled. I was startled too. I’d never heard anything like it before. Then another growl, louder, and in a split second a giant boulder was tumbling over the rocks, about to splatter me into tomato paste.
Then
After the boulder came crashing down on me I passed out and became just a bleeding ornament in The Woods. As still and broken as a stone cherub, pushed over and cracked open.
Then. I remembered a cascading white tablecloth, like whipping cream stopped in its tracks. I’m under a banquet table at a wedding that I barely remember but have seen pictures of myself at. Friends of The Parents who they never see anymore. Both of my dimpled fists submerged in frosty metal dishes of melted ice cream like I was at the manicurist, listening to my name screamed, starting off as a yell then dissolving into a sob. I wanted to cry out to them but Julia said, “Shhhhh.” That was the first time she got me in really big trouble.
I think about that tablecloth. A paused videotape. It’s odd the way that things tend to stop looking like themselves when you take their motion away.
And suddenly I became very aware of my bleeding. A dark red pool, throbbing with awkwardly spreading growth over and under the leaves on the ground. Speckles of gore caught light all the way to the path.
It didn’t really hurt, but I could feel it, the blood escaping my body, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It slipped from me smooth. Effortlessly. Like coins from an undiscovered hole in a pocket.
I looked up and saw the shape of Julia’s head looking down at me over the side of the rock wall. Her hair hung around her face in ringlets of uncoiled snake skin.
“Julia!” I barely rasped. The effort caused me to cough uncontrollably.
“Can you move that thing?” she asked.
I squirmed a bit and tried to push it, but it was no use. My legs were mush, the boulder was halfway into the ground, and every effort to move on my part was exhausting. Just lying there, not moving, was ecstasy by comparison.
With effort, I shook my head no.
“Good,” she said. “Now I’m going to go to The House to see what this terrible thing is.”
“Wait, wait!” I growled.
“What?”
“How did you get Elizabeth’s bridle down here?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions, Easter.”
And with that she was off. I tried to call again but all that came out of my mouth was a whisper of rattled phlegm.
What an asshole. Knowing Julia, she probably wouldn’t be coming back. She would leave me here to die because that’s what I was going to do to her. She was very vengeful, that sister of mine. I suppose I couldn’t blame her though. Dying on a forest floor is exactly what I deserved.
So I just lay there. Coming to terms with the fact that I’d be bleeding to death for the rest of the day. I wish I could say that I was upset or worried or even scared, but I wasn’t. I was almost looking forward to relaxing for a good long while. I just didn’t want to spend the last few hours of my life lying in the dirt beneath a huge rock, enduring a long, slow death as opposed to the quick one I’d always dreamed of for myself.
The Terrible Thing. The Terrible Thing is ultimately what put me here. And The Parents were mostly responsible for The Terrible Thing. I started thinking that my slow and uncomfortable end was really all their fault and how, in that way, parents are just as responsible for your death as they are for your birth. They set you on the tangent along which you inevitably die. I wonder if thinking about this tangent is what it means to have your life flash before your eyes. It probably is, though I bet most people’s life-flash tangents are populated with happier things: memories of barbequed hotdogs over checkerboard tablecloths or the smell of a loved one’s shoulder. Not just spite for negligent parents.
I should come clean about one thing first though: I don’t have a fat cousin named Denise who threw her fetus in a garbage can. I lied. Sorry.
Babydom
I was born fourteen years ago in a big hospital in Canada. This is because The Parents were visiting Niagara Falls while The Mother was dangerously pregnant with me. When her water broke they were on the Maid of the Mist and no one noticed. I quickly became an emergency and The Mother had to be rushed to a hospital right there in Niagara Falls. From day one I was an inconvenience. But apparently I was a very cute baby so that helped my case a bit. According to The Mother anyway, I was very cute. And even Phyllis my Evil Grandmother says so. Of course when The Mother says the words, “You really were such a cute baby,” she is exploding with pride and falling in love with me all over again, recalling memory-warmed images of my gummy smile and button nose. When The Evil Grandmother says it, she seems to be mourning the loss of my good looks.
What I always find disturbing about this story is that Julia had to endure a five-hour car ride with The Evil Gra
ndmother to come and pick us all up at the hospital in Niagara Falls. The Mother didn’t want to fly with such fresh meat. Julia would often torment me with horror stories about this car ride, tales of her having to watch The Evil Grandmother’s barely there lips wrap greasy around a fast-food cup straw, listen to her complain about the “peon food” so fiercely that bits of French fry shot from her mouth with a flat splat on the dashboard, tales of Julia’s misery told with the covers up to our chins in the dark, causing me to howl and twist with guilt. I’d never stop feeling bad about it.
Julia always told me stories this way: her cheeks washed in the cool glow of moonlight, she trapped her whispers between two cupped hands against my head and I would get to see up close how perfect her ears were, imagine that spot just behind the lobe as soft as a bud. She taught me everything I know about us this way.
She explained to me that my memories were implants. Formed by years and years of listening to the telling and retelling of stories about me (Easter where on earth did you ever get that word anyway?), the stories becoming virile little tadpoles, squiggling their way into the folds of my brain (I remember the teacher told me that you were the youngest kid she’d ever known to make a racial slur). These implants made themselves indistinguishable from the real memories (I’m sure you didn’t know what it meant. My god, can you imagine how embarrassing?) My “memories.”
There are some I generated myself, because I was there and I saw it and I knew for sure. I remembered pouring five or six Pixie Sticks onto a plate and then lapping up the tiny pyramid of sugar like a dog. The Evil Grandmother thought it was disgusting, which made me like it even more. I sneezed in threes and caught the chicken pox so bad that blisters were erupting in my mouth and underneath my eyelids. I remember hearing The Father fall down the stairs, the sound of him yelping when he broke his ankle. I remember the first time I touched his scar, all purple and angry and hard and raised; there was bounce to it, unlike normal skin, spongy and resistant. I felt it whenever he’d let me.
But the idea of these pesky little tadpole memories, disguised, hiding, polluting my brain, made me feel unsure of everything. I really should have tagged them before they wriggled in, snapped a serialized marker onto their tails. Or draped them in bells so they would unwittingly announce themselves as fakes, but I didn’t think of it then. I was too young.
So Julia tried to help me see what was real and what was fake. She told me that there were ways of distinguishing and that she always knew for sure. You see, Julia had a special talent with brains. She could tell right away if a memory was an implant. She could even tell me who’d implanted it. She said that she had this special ability because she was sort of like a memory herself, squiggling her way through the folds of my brain with the rest of them and drawing out the fakes. Julia the Memory. She said that, just like a regular memory, she worked to serve me, help me make sense of myself in the world. But I had to laugh at that; nod my head of course, but on the inside laugh and disagree. Because Julia was the reason I didn’t make sense in the world. And we always did everything she wanted to do.
The Tooth house—
Pulp and Stories
The Tooth House. Our house. Named so (by me) for its remarkable resemblance to a tooth. It struck me so when I first looked in the secret anatomy book I found in The Grandmother’s basement. A picture of a tooth, bisected like a deviled egg, all of its layers nicely exposed. I learned that teeth have pulp. Soft, soggy centers. In the drawing the pulp was yellow and stitched with red and blue veins, which I dragged my fingers along until they wound together so tight that I couldn’t be sure which vein had belonged to which finger.
The outside part of the tooth was white—a helmet of hard enamel, grizzled by all of the stuff you put in your mouth, eroded and chipped and rotted to the pulp in concentrated black whorls when you eat too much candy. Which was a bad habit of Julia’s. Always eating too much candy, though she never had a cavity. I’d had about four so far and the dentist told me that, while disappointing, it was still conservative compared to some. I told him that Julia ate way more candy than I did and he said, “Who?” and raised his eyebrows up at The Mother who always used to come into the room with me for some reason and smile with her chin down the way I watched her do it in mirrors when she thought she was alone. The doctor’s forehead looked like a package of uncooked sausages when he raised his eyebrows like that. So squishy and unattractive. I looked over at The Mother and she twisted her sweatshirt in her hands and smiled harder with her chin down.
Whenever I thought about that anatomy book, and that pulpy tooth in the picture, I suctioned my tongue over my teeth like a mouth guard.
Pulp.
Pulp inside teeth.
The most succulent section of a fleshy fruit; the fibrous inside of a spleen; a word to describe the parts of things that rot first. How could there be something so delicate in a tooth? Teeth that were made for gnashing and chewing and shredding. Or ripping unruly plastic tags from clothes when The Mother wasn’t looking so she couldn’t say,
“Do you have any idea how much those teeth cost, Easter? Do you want to pay for the dental work when you crack one?”
I’d even hoped to one day use my teeth to twist the cap off a beer bottle in a dark bar. Someone tries to pick a fight with me; bumps into me purposefully or something like that. Makes mention of how ugly I am loud enough for me to hear. I mutter something quietly without looking up and the anchor-tattooed forearm of a worn-looking bartender emerges from a shadow with my beer in hand. I bring it to my mouth and snap it open using just my teeth. The grunty foe is duly intimidated. I resume my quiet, thoughtful drinking.
That’s just the fantasy, though; something I picked up from watching old movies at night. The reality is much grimmer: While maintaining confrontational eye contact, Easter attempts to bite off the cap. Her teeth break suddenly, the sound unfathomable, and all of her pulp gushes out onto the floor. The grunty foe, not even remotely intimidated, proceeds to beat the crap out of her while she writhes on the ground with her hand over her mouth, scraping frantic streaks into her own thick pulp with the heels of her boots.
Stupid, pulpy teeth. Destroying my dream.
I’d actually had a similar concern about glasses a few years ago when The Mother took me to see an eye doctor. She thought that I wasn’t seeing things in a normal way.
Eyeglasses and teeth: both breakable, valuable things that you have to carry with you all the time. Hanging there precariously like earrings without backings, threatening to fall out, chip off, crack to the quick because of some innocent nut or seed or beer bottle.
With my tongue suctioned to my teeth, I realized that if our cul-de-sac were a jaw, The House would be a canine. Not only because of where it was placed with respect to the other houses (nestled toward the back of the crescent, which would technically be the front of the mouth, between a white-slatted spread of incisors and a squat molar where The Parents moved the car at night), but also because of its shape. The House was taller than the other houses and seemed to lean backward into its dark gray roof, which was badly in need of retiling. I’m not sure if The House was actually leaning or if it was just so tall that it sort of appeared that way from my much lower perspective. To me, it looked like an interrupted stretch. The whole thing twisted with dissatisfaction. White siding up and down like rippled enamel. Swollen gums gathered at the bottom in the form of big-berried bushes. Wide black cavities, our basement windows, peeking over the top.
The Parents were very careful not to let any of our pulp spill out into the yard.
The only things that did manage to escape were corkscrews of smoke from a cracked-open basement cavity. It was from this cavity that The Father blew the evidence of his remaining relationship with smoking. He was supposed to have quit years ago and told The Mother that he had, but that the residual effect of being a life-long smoker was continuing to smoke. Which didn’t make any sense to me, but
which she would laugh at. That kind of “I give up” laugh in which she shakes her head to the quiet tune of her disapproval.
On still nights, the smoke would lie over the grass for a moment before it disappeared.
The way that Julia lay there once, grass peeking in bundles from between her white fingers, one blade against her open eye. She’d fallen from the roof trying to retrieve our neon plastic boomerang, which she clutched in her hand, spattered in the blood that had escaped with the bone which erupted from her twisted neck.
Julia died a lot.
The Terrible Thing
This morning was my first visit to The Tooth House in weeks. And technically a scheduled visit, stickered onto my calendar hanging on the June Room wall, each Sunday staring at me like a peek of someone’s skin between buttons. Irresistible to look at, yet to look made me feel so guilty. The Mother had become too depressing. I wanted to stab her, impale her eyeballs onto a barbeque fork and roast them like marshmallows till they popped. She’d gone all flat, a paper doll flapping in the wind, so weak and boring and barely there. But she still smelled like her old full self, which made me feel bad about wanting to skewer her eyeballs. The Father was the exact same because he never changed.
I’m starting to think that it was The Terrible Thing itself that roused me from sleep this morning. The Terrible Thing that fought the sleep drugs and dragged me to The House and up the stairs to the bathroom that no longer smelled like powder and bath oil but cold and metallic and not like The Mother at all.
But that’s impossible. The Terrible Thing couldn’t have woken me up. It was most likely the dread of having to face the girls from the Craft Room last night. Dread so powerful that it shook me from the inside out.
I wonder if Julia found it yet.
I really had no idea if she was coming back for me or not. A big part of me felt as though she wouldn’t. Probably because she’d dropped a boulder on me. Which seems like a pretty clear sign. Like I said, Julia could be scary when she was mad. And leaving her in The Woods to die alone was probably one of those things she would call “unacceptable.” Like people who offend easily and funky eyeglasses and the way The Mother ate salad.
The Lonely Page 2
