Yet it had once been effortless.
And it was that effortlessness that she was trying to replicate. But an attempt at effortlessness is a paradox at the very least. And certainly a futile war for Phyllis. Which she fought rigorously at night and in the morning, reserving the day for absolute stillness in the hope that time would just stop noticing her all together.
Each morning, once she’d prepared a cup of coffee, she would sidle herself in front of the bathroom mirror to begin the process of finding her real, day face beneath the old face that she wore to bed. She would pull back the skin around her temples and jawbone until someone else was looking back at her. Then she would tape everything in place carefully, hoisting and tugging here and there to make sure that the tape could withstand all of the sitting and sipping.
In the next step, she scooped two handfuls of brilliantly white cream from an industrial-sized jar and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed it into her face and neck until it was all gone. This cream caused her to look all slimy and tight and sore like duck meat; a wet, wincing eye betrayed its sting.
Then a second cream, a thin layer this time, on top of the other stuff.
And the second cream caused her face to foam white, very suddenly and furiously, bubbles exploding from one another, dripping in hunks from her face to the sink. After a few seconds Phyllis picked up a cloth from a basket on the counter and gave her face a clean swipe from top to bottom, revealing skin as white as porcelain beneath, a mask that seemed to have emerged from that once raw, angry canvas. A scar. Smooth and happy as a firm, white grape.
An army of pots and tubes and jars came down from her cupboard, each with its own instrument. It was time to apply paint to her new mask and arrange her hair just so to hide the tape and clips that she’d used to pull back her bedtime face.
The last step was the examination. Her face so close to the mirror that she left a picture of her breath behind, she scrutinized every angle under the bare bulbs over the mirror, peering into each of her wrinkles and pores, making sure that there was nothing more she could do to make them look better.
When she was done she would turn to me and squint carefully, perhaps suspecting my own odd mirror habits. Julia and I, both in the hallway watching; Phyllis’s mask eclipsing the bright, bare bulb over the bathroom mirror. She would smile slightly and step around our bent, compacted bodies, leaving us in the cloud of cosmetic smell that billowed from her housecoat. It was time for her to enter the bedroom and hoist herself into an outfit for the day. We never watched this part.
The lawn, though, really was beautiful. And though this beauty wasn’t effortless, it looked as though it could be. Possible that under the right conditions, grass like that could grow naturally from the earth, a rare, fluorescent event in nature. Strange like stars, or the aurora borealis: spells cast from a wand over the sky.
So she would sit in her enclosed porch, as still a butterfly in a crate save for one infrequent twitch: the raising of a teacup to her lips. A living, breathing, sipping shrine for her many admirers, who very often found themselves stopped on the sidewalk in front of her lawn, lips hung from gaping mouths on faces sizzling in green light. Some even dared to speak a word of appreciation from time to time. Phyllis would nod and smile, a mystery in the shadows. She adored being the face accepting credit for that lawn.
Some old ladies kept little dogs or disloyal birds, but Phyllis kept a lawn. It invited hands. Brought life into a dead world, brought light to a dark place. Each little blade was easier to love than anything or anyone she’d ever encountered. These little blades were kind and sweet and cared only for her, worked for her, grew up to be strong and healthy all for her. Phyllis liked to watch them, their stillness disrupted rarely by the wind, which moved each blade differently. She wanted to be as still as they, wanted to be drawn into the dirt and reborn a million times, at the same time, like each little blade of smooth grass.
In the evenings Phyllis would finish her last teacup of the night slowly and have one cigarette from the pack that she kept hidden behind a rung supporting her chair. I’m not exactly sure who she was hiding them from, because she smoked them just as openly as she gave disapproving looks to perfect strangers.
At night, each of her feet was encased in a black slipper, intricately embroidered with gold and silver thread. The colors reminded me of the hair that grew from The Mother’s head, gray and yellow, colors almost indiscernible from one another unless suddenly caught by light and held for a moment, stiff with the terror of being discovered. It was just about impossible to keep hold of the distinction for long. The silver and gold thread would confuse themselves in your eyes almost immediately and you’d have to blink to be sure of anything at all. Phyllis’s thread drew a picture of a family of little birds eating golden berries from a silver branch. I think. It could have been silver berries from a golden branch.
Her whole body moved ever so slightly, as though she were stuffed with something slithering. Her neck seemed tired, struggling with the weight of her small head, her hair wrapped up in a sheer black scarf. Once, she fell asleep. I watched it happen from the living room window, and at first I didn’t know what to do. Julia wouldn’t want me waking her up. Julia would prefer Phyllis to wake up in the middle of the night, neck stiff and uncomfortable, feeling strange and unrested like you sometimes do when you fall asleep in jeans. She might even wish that Phyllis catch a cold out there, the kind that devastates older ladies and eventually kills them. But I couldn’t do that. So I went outside and shook her just enough so she woke up without being startled and I thought for a moment that I saw The Lonely flash across her face, distort her carefully highlighted features. The same Lonely I saw in The Mother and the same Lonely that would overcome me if I didn’t have Julia.
“Sit with me a minute, Easter.”
So I did. She finished the contents of her teacup and I followed the outline of the houses across the street with my eyes, carefully separating black house from dark blue sky. They seemed as unreal as a pop-up book.
Lipstick
Julia and I had a lot of conversations with her hanging upside down off the couch in The House, a vine-like vein throbbing in her forehead, her eyes growing redder, all of the blood rushing to her head as though poured slow from a ketchup bottle. She told me about babies like this, where they came from and the terrible ordeal of childbirth.
“You see my face, Easter? How it looks all veiny and strangled? That’s what fresh babies look like. You should see it. Horrific. Your vagina rips in two and this purpled, wrinkled creature comes flying out. And you’re stuck with it.”
“That’s horrible.” All of the blood scurried from my face. Julia liked to scare me.
“I know.”
“Why does anyone do such an awful thing?”
“Because they’ve got to do it. Everyone’s got to.”
“Well, I don’t want to have a baby!”
“You’ve got to get one somehow, Easter! Otherwise you’ll be a freak with no one to take care of you when you’re old and people will look at you and feel bad for you. You don’t want to be pitied.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know, but I know that you don’t want it. No one ever wants anyone else’s pity. In movies anyway.”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind being pitied.”
“That’s because you don’t know anything yet, Easter. You’re still just a kid. You’ve got to either be a pod or get a baby some other kind of way, otherwise you’re a social reject.”
“How are you going to get one?”
“I’ll just acquire one somehow. In the comical way that hard-working career women accidentally acquire them in movies. That way it won’t be my fault. I’ll have really tried to have a career, but by some hilarious turn of events I get stuck with a baby and eventually fall in love with it, and change my name to Mommy and get married to a husband who loves the baby.”
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“Well, I want that too.”
“You can’t. I’m already doing it.”
“I can do it too.”
“Fine, Easter, do whatever you want.”
Julia pulled her head up and sat backward on the couch, letting her brain readjust to right-side-up reality. She stood up and staggered a bit to the bathroom. I lay on my stomach on the carpet, still staring at the spot on the couch where Julia’s face had been. If I closed my eyes the shape of her head remained, seared onto my eyelids, skin glowing.
When I opened my eyes her face was right-side-up in front of me and she was holding a gold tube of lipstick in front of my face. She had fetched The Mother’s bag of lipsticks from the bathroom: an ancient, filthy, black-and-white-checkered bag that contained every lipstick The Mother had ever purchased in her entire life. Literally. And she was very proud of that accomplishment. The Mother was as proud of her mangy bag of lipsticks as some people are of their stamp collections or rare comic books. Evidence, to herself and others, of her immovable motivation, her ability to commit to and complete tasks, her passion about things outside of her family. Because apparently that’s what a giant bag of lipsticks says about a person.
Julia plucked a gooey Pink Rose Petal to apply to her lips and I picked up an orangey red called Autumn Rust. Lipstick was an easy answer to boredom. It was the most exciting thing you could do in the shortest amount of time because for a second, you got to convince yourself that you were the kind of gal who wears lipstick every day. You got to pout to yourself, and trick yourself that you were glamorous. Then in a second it was over, time to wipe it off and start again.
Sometimes when I was in the bath or on the toilet and The Mother was folding laundry in our room we would read the colors out to her and she would reply with the corresponding number code or vice versa. It was actually quite fun.
“4207,” I would squeal.
“Sugar Plum Fairy. Sparkly purple. I wore it in 1989 to a friend’s birthday party. We went to a club called Wavelength. Isn’t that an awful name? Sounds like a Barbie Nightclub. Next!”
“6399,” I hollered.
“Fire Engine Red.”
“Yeah, that’s right! You’re amazing.”
“That’s my sixth tube of that stuff, thanks to you.”
We had destroyed many a tube of that particular color over the years, on account of a game that Julia made up.
It went like this:
She would drag the Fire Engine Red across her wrists and mock a very dramatic suicide. Then, when I would pretend to investigate the scene, she would leap up and slit my throat with it, at which point I would attempt to perform an even more realistic death than she had because in the game, this one was real. We were practicing this scenario, among others, with some frequency for a while, seeing how long we could lie still, how discreetly we could move our chests as we breathed. A few times I walked in on Julia lying in front of the tall bathroom mirror, watching herself perform death so she could get better and better at it.
The problem is, you can’t fake dead hands. That invisible something that fills dead or sleeping hands, making them appear strange and inanimate, is impossible to imitate. The Mother couldn’t do it in the bathtub on Sunday nights, though she tried so hard to imitate it, and we couldn’t do it in our game.
After a while The Mother got wise to this misuse of her precious lipsticks, which, incidentally, was wearing them out and making them flat so she couldn’t use them properly. She told me that we had to stop or she’d take them away and hide them in a closet somewhere far beyond our reach. But it was fun while it lasted.
One afternoon, before we were found out, I walked in on Julia lying still on the floor in front of the mirror, covered in fatal slashes of Fire Engine Red. I sat down on the edge of the tub and looked down at her face. With her eyes still closed she said:
“Sometimes I feel like I’m disappearing.”
She looked particularly pale and her clothes hung over her prone body like a sheet over a corpse at a crime scene. Her lips had taken on the whitish quality of someone who’d been trapped in a meat locker for a couple of hours, and beneath her eyes hung hammocks of bluish-gray skin. I’ll never forget the way that her face looked on this day, which is probably why it’s this face of hers that keeps flashing in my head as I lie under this big, stupid rock.
I didn’t really know how to respond to her statement, so I said,
“You know, you really look like a corpse right now. How did you do that?”
“I’ve been practicing.”
I furrowed my brow at her, smiling. Our inside joke.
“Your face, though, it’s all blue.
“I’m dead, Easter. I drowned this afternoon. Had a seizure throwing up and fell-face first into the toilet.”
“Why were you throwing up?”
“Because I’m feeling sad, Easter, that’s why.”
“Why?”
“Because one day you’ll lose me and then you won’t be special anymore. You’ll be just like everyone else.”
I’m You
Shortness of breath. That’s one of the first signs of kidney failure. And I’m pretty sure I had it. Kidney failure that is. And shortness of breath for that matter. My cigar-butt stumps were almost black, and as shiny and smooth and full and firm as concord grapes, and the color was reaching up into my shorts.
In a weird way I kind of felt like Snow White or Cinderella or one of those other princesses who are surrounded by woodland creatures, so good and sweet and special that even cute little animals are drawn to me and show me, only me, how helpful and aware they are. If only Lev could walk up right when a little blue bird is fluttering down upon one of my elegantly outstretched fingers.
But actually I didn’t want him to find me. And I didn’t want anyone else to find me either. I was fine with this kind of death, bleeding slowly. I wanted it for myself. I liked the smell of The Woods and sounds of the leaves and the way more and more squirrels seemed to be growing comfortable with me. Plus I had nowhere else to go—I couldn’t face Mrs. Bellows after last night, or any of the girls who’d been in the Craft Room. And The Terrible Thing was in The Tooth House. So I might as well just live as a ghost in The Woods. Be as unreal as Julia. Two strange girls living in the strange, unreal world, so in it we’d actually be normal. Normal and together, an impossible combination for us in the regular, real world.
I ground my shoulders deeper into the forest floor, moving them in wide circles to work my way in. I dipped my hands in the pools of blood at my sides and rubbed them on my face. That way I would look far worse off than I already was and maybe some stranger walking by wouldn’t rush or anything to try and save me.
And then the wind exhaled through The Woods and cooled the blood on my cheeks, brushing the hair off my forehead and dragging knuckles softly across my face, running a cool finger beneath the ring of my shirt collar the way The Mother would sometimes do on hot days after she’d been rummaging through the freezer. It always put a smile on my face, involuntary, as though she were turning a dial around the base of my neck that made my grin grow wider and wider. I always yelped at her to stop. “Cut it out!” I’d whine, but she’d caught my smile and would do it again.
The wind made me wonder why I’d rubbed this blood all over my face. Why I didn’t want anyone to find me. It reminded me that I wasn’t the only person on earth. Because that can happen in a stripe of woods. I could easily forget that I’m just one girl, like many other girls. And most other girls lying in The Woods, bleeding, crushed beneath a rock, would be scared and worried and screaming for help. Maybe even praying. They certainly wouldn’t feel relieved, or take comfort in the idea of not existing anymore. But then again, they’d probably never seen anything like The Terrible Thing, so it didn’t seem fair to compare.
Though I really must remember to remember: I am one of many Is. In fac
t, to everyone else in the world, I’m you. And the wind helped me to remember that, like a loud noise or a bucket of water splashed into my face, pulling me from a dream. Which I suppose I appreciated in some ways, but in other ways I very much didn’t. I’m you, I’m you, I’m you. I’m I, I’m I, I’m I. I’m two people at once, always, and so are you.
And suddenly fast footsteps cut through brittle leaves, louder and louder until they stopped somewhere above my head. A shadow on the forest floor.
I looked up and saw Julia. Had she seen The Terrible Thing? A ball of something vile formed in my throat and my heart gathered steam, pumping loud enough to keep the death-eating bugs away. I couldn’t tell from her face.
“Julia … ” I began, but couldn’t continue. I needed to know if she’d seen it before I could speak.
“Easter. The door’s locked. I need your keys.”
I exhaled loudly and the tears that had nestled in the corners of my eyes, perched and ready to fall, sucked themselves back in from where they came. No need to cry yet. She hadn’t seen it. The Terrible Thing still might never have happened because only I saw it. And I could never really be sure of anything I saw. Until Julia confirmed it anyway. Because she’s the only person I’d ever really trusted; the only person I could really believe.
“I’m sorry I left you down here, Julia.”
She made her way down the side of the cliff, ignoring me, complaining about the inconvenience of having to come back for the keys.
“I said I’m sorry I left you here,” I repeated.
“I know,” she said.
“When this is all over I’ll come and stay with you. We can live here together.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I could hear her huffing and puffing as she moved from her legs to her bum where the side of the cliff got steep. Pebbles trickled down with her, cracking against the rocks at the bottom.
The Lonely Page 6
