On special occasions The Parents would lay a dark cloth over the table, and Easter and Julia would enter their fort slowly, dramatically. It seemed a more solemn, beautiful place when the tablecloth quieted everything. Not a place for squealing laughter and violent thumb wars or fights about squiggling toes.
After dinner on those tablecloth nights, The Parents usually went upstairs and left the girls to play, shutting off every light but the one in the bathroom so they could still spot it in the dark. The girls would turn on flashlights and tell stories, illuminating sections of the mural and their own curvaceous faces, letting the light change the look of everything.
Some nights the darkness of The House would sneak under the cloth and fill their wide-awake bodies; previously busy hands were loaded with the mysterious weight of sleep. Easter knew that hands were always the worst giveaway in a pretend sleep attempt, sleeping hands being impossible to fake. She would later learn that the same was true of pretend deaths when she and Julia started playing the lipstick game, and when she’d watch her mother imitate death on Sunday nights in the bathtub. What was that invisible girth that filled them?
So the sleep would fill them up and keep them warm until The Parents emerged from wherever they’d been and carried the two of them to their room, their hands perhaps threatening to fill with wake as they were carried up the stairs.
Many times one or the other had whacked a head while coming out from or going under that table. Easter had a scar on her forehead to remember the time when she took a brisk, routine dive beneath the table and woke up to Julia’s deflated, worried face spilling over her.
“Good, you’re not dead,” Julia said, and then disappeared into the basement.
Easter sat up. The Mother had heard it from upstairs and came barrelling down the steps with dye in her hair.
“Easter, my god, what did you do?”
That’s when Easter felt the trickle down her forehead, a nimble plop on her upper lip. She tasted it. Like pennies. The Mother shrieked and Easter cried, though it didn’t really hurt.
She took Easter by the arm, grabbed the keys, and within ten minutes they’d checked in at Emergency and were both crammed into a small hospital bathroom while The Mother washed the dye out of her hair over the sink. Easter stood on the lid of the toilet, her right hand holding a square of gauze to her forehead and her left hand clipping together the two corners of Mother’s towel, which she’d wrapped around her shoulders to protect them from dye.
“Oh god, Easter,” The Mother moaned, “we’re going to get the plague in here. Do you know what happens to people who spend more than fifteen minutes in a hospital bathroom? You don’t wanna know. How’s your head?”
“It feels fine.”
“Good. Couldn’t you have just waited ten more minutes before bonking your head on the table? We’re going to get the measles in here. Or the flesh-eating virus. Goddammit, Easter, we’re going to get the flesh-eating virus now. Do you know what that is?”
“I could make a pretty good guess, I think,” said Easter.
“Don’t be smart, young lady.”
When the doctor finally called them in, he asked Easter a number of questions.
“What’s the first thing you remember when you woke up?” was one of them.
“Julia,” I said.
“Julia.” He scribbled it down. “Who’s Julia?” His eyes still down on his paper.
The Mother cleared her throat, an attempt to indicate to Easter that she should shut up about Julia, but Easter didn’t realize that because she was still too young to know that sometimes people cleared their throats to get other people to shut up or change the subject or act differently than how they’d just been acting.
“Julia is my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“That’s because she doesn’t,” piped The Mother. “Julia is her … her imaginary friend, I guess you could call it.”
“How old are you, Easter?”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven, hm? That’s a bit old for imaginary friends, isn’t it?”
Before Easter could correct him, tell him that Julia wasn’t imaginary, The Mother pried a spot for herself into the questioning:
“It’s perfectly normal,” she said.
“Is that a professional opinion?” The doctor seemed annoyed.
And The Mother went quiet again.
“So you see Julia all the time?”
“Not all the time. But most of the time.”
“Like I’m standing here now?” the doctor continued.
The Mother wanted to intercept all of his questions, but he held a hand out to quiet her.
“Mm hmm.” He nodded and scribbled and nodded and scribbled.
The doctor knew, now. He knew about The Lonely. Perhaps he could prescribe a Julia for The Mother, so that she wouldn’t have to be lonely anymore either. Not that Easter wasn’t lonely. She had it just like The Mother did, but Julia made it so much more bearable.
He suggested that they speak in private, he and The Mother. So they got up and left Easter alone. She sat high on the gray patient bed, moving her feet in circles, paper sheet crunching beneath her thighs. She hoped and hoped to the rhythm of her stirring feet that a Julia for The Mother came in an easy-to-swallow pill form.
While they were gone, Julia walked through the door. She’d put on a white coat and grabbed a clipboard from somewhere and imitated a doctor:
“Just as I suspected,” she said in a deep voice, pretending to pore over the clipboard.
“What?”
“You’re retarded.”
Easter laughed and said, “Shut up, Julia.”
“Seriously, though,” Julia said, suddenly very serious, “I’m not feeling very well.”
“What’s wrong?”
Julia lifted the white coat and revealed a pattern of angry boils on her once-creamy thigh.
Easter recoiled slightly and said, “Julia, what did you do?”
“I don’t know! There’s this too, though.”
And she pulled off a shoe to reveal a missing pinky toe.
“I think you’ve got the flesh-eating disease. The Mother said we could catch it in here.”
“Ah fuck, Easter, you just had to go and whack your head.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Well, I guess it’ll be nice to have less body to worry about.”
“That’s awfully optimistic.”
And then Julia coughed and gore splattered across the crispy clean sheet over the hospital bed. Easter picked up a chunk of it and squished it between her fingers.
“I’m no doctor, but I don’t think this is a good sign,” she said.
“No?” Julia laughed.
Then, with a crunch, she hoisted herself up next to Easter on the bed.
“They’re talking about you in there, you know.”
“They’re talking about you, Easter.”
“Well, yeah, but only because of you.”
And suddenly The Mother stormed back into the room and pulled Easter off the bed and pulled her to the car. They never saw that doctor again. And Julia’s flesh-eating-disease death was certainly her most gruesome.
The Feasts
The one thing that was typical of The Father, or at least of what I’ve seen of fathers on TV, is that he was painfully cheap. And this cheapness was like a powerful seasoning to him, or some kind of unique palatal mutation that allowed him to enjoy things that were about to turn rotten and tasted like feet. He could often be found in the kitchen, checking the labels of things deep in the recesses of the fridge, his folded, black-rimmed glasses held up to his face as he considered the date. Would it make him sick? If so, how sick? Would he pay the cost of said item to not vom
it? This, he told me once, was the true determining question.
He would carefully arrange his feast on our kitchen table, which was wooden and blemished with deep gouges from where I used to grate the bottom of my spoons and knives and forks into it. Julia never did this. She was always a good eater. And to show for it she hadn’t left a single mark on the table, not a gash or a scallop or even a bruise.
He would arrange the jars and containers into a little kingdom: castles of boxes and cartons and jugs with moats of opened salad dressings and jams emitting their own almost-salad-dressing or almost-jam-like smell, but not quite. No, everything was always noticeably off, even if only a little bit. He sat at the head of the table, the devouring king of all that lay before him.
I would sit with him for as long as I could stand watching him eat the stuff, finding the edible centers of things unrecognizable with mold or hard discolorations. Scraping and ripping and breaking things apart. It was because I sat there and insisted on bearing witness to his obsessive finishing off of things that I was served the nearly rotten pudding, which I refused to eat, which made him insist that I get a job and learn the value of a dollar, which is why he first suggested I work at the Miniature Wonderland with Mortimer Ungula. Mr. Ungula to you. And to me.
Mr. Ungula and the Miniature Wonderland
Mr. Ungula had hair that was always reacting rhythmically to his movements, like water carried in a too-small bucket. It was dense as a tongue and once, I swear, it lapped the end of his nose. Which is really quite a feat when you think about the size of Mr. Ungula’s nose: a long, twisted affair with whiskery wrinkles running along the sides and up to the delicate inner corners of his eyes which were very brown and very wet and very twitchy like a pair of large squirrel noses. The bags under his eyes were loaded with flesh: pouches, soft and begging to be squeezed, the way that a baby’s big soft cheeks urge you to stroke them.
A stripe of beard made a line down the center of his chin and curled at the end like a fiddlehead. He wore shiny shirts the whole year round, which pattered over with sweat in the summer and peeked from beneath tattered old blazers in the winter. His hands were all knuckle, fingernails embedded with dark model paint. He kept naked scotch mints in his pockets and sucked on them animatedly whenever he wasn’t smoking the long brown cigarettes that he rolled himself on the back porch of the Miniature Wonderland.
It had been the Miniature Wonderland for as long as most people could remember, though everyone was aware, in one way or another, of its previous life as an army barrack. For one thing, it looked like a barrack: long and straight and windowless, straddling the perimeter of town. For another, it was the site of an often-whispered-about scandal involving an initiation ritual and an unlucky goat. Either way, as an army barrack or as the Miniature Wonderland, there it sat, in a pool of gravel parking lot overrun with grass, a front door on one end, and a porch built into the side toward the back.
The Father had become acquainted with Mr. Ungula at the music store. Not friends, mind you, just acquaintances. Both of them would remind me of that on my first day. They each played rather obscure instruments: The Father his clarinet and Mr. Ungula, I would come to learn, a large antique organ. Somehow during one of their conversations, The Father learned that Mr. Ungula owned the Wonderland. Bought it forty years ago from the city and had been working inside it, more or less alone, ever since. Over the past few years, however, the barrack and Mr. Ungula had begun to age at the same pace, both reluctantly requiring more and more assistance all the time. And that’s how I ended up with the job.
When I told Julia about it she was sitting upside down on the couch, her legs over the backrest and her head hanging and bloating with blood.
She laughed and said, “We’re not getting a job, Easter.”
“I know. I’m getting a job. Just me.”
“What do you mean, just you?”
“I mean you’re not allowed to come.”
“Why not?”
“Because Dad said so,” I lied.
“Easter, you’re such an idiot.”
“Why?”
“That was just about the worst lie I’ve ever heard.”
“Okay fine, Julia, I don’t want you to come because I don’t wanna mess this up.”
“Why? Because he got you the job?”
“Well, yeah, what’s so bad about that?”
“Easter, he’s not going to like you more just because you suck up to this weirdo friend of his. You can’t do anything to make him like you more. He just doesn’t like you and that’s it.”
“Weirdo acquaintance … ” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
I wanted to tear her hair out, first with my hands and then with my teeth and not stop till her brains were showing.
“Pass me the mirror, please?” she asked.
So I did. And she covered the top part of her face so her chin looked like a head and she asked me to draw eyes on it and hair all the way down her throat.
I should take a minute to describe the Miniature Wonderland a little bit better. Mr. Ungula had separated the ex-barrack into four themed rooms depicting Our Town Over Time: Early Our Town, Later Our Town, Later Still Our Town, and Present Day Our Town, in order.
Most of the replicas covered the span of two wide dining room tables side by side, and Mr. Ungula took his time to make sure that every little detail was represented in every little room. Doors opened wide, cups could be raised to lips, leaves rustled, plants seemed to grow, and all of the appropriate documentation was represented: deeds to houses, permits for weapons, driver’s licenses in wallets.
Mr. Ungula was always in the process of updating and adding to the Present Day Our Town model. For an hour each morning he would drive through town to make sure that everything was still the same. If something had changed, a banner at the used car dealership, a giant, inflatable gorilla in front of the mattress store for “We’ve Gone Bananas” month, Mr. Ungula would take a dozen pictures of it and adjust the Present Day Our Town model accordingly. Of course, by the time he finished the miniature alteration, the new thing had already been taken down and something newer erected in its place.
Mr. Ungula might have been the most detailed miniature builder to ever walk the earth, but we’ll probably never know because most miniature builders aren’t really the competitive type.
The Miniature Wonderland was one of the quietest places I’d ever been. But it was an odd quiet. A recipe of constant little noises that imitated quietness: creaking floorboards, ticking clocks, a frame aching with age. Every nail and floorboard in the place still hard at work keeping the place together seemed to groan, a plea for some merciful meteor to smash it to death. But somehow the place seemed all the more quiet because of these sounds.
The only thing able to splinter the “silence” of the Wonderland was a loud train whistle that came from a station south of town. I’m not sure what was carried: people, livestock, explosives; but I did know that it blasted the Wonderland every day at twelve o’clock, three o’clock, and six o’clock. Twelve o’clock, three o’clock, and six o’clock.
The whistles seemed to bring light into the Wonderland, make it more clear, dust its shoulders, straighten its tie.
And Mr. Ungula would reset himself when he heard it. If he was getting very mad or frustrated or upset, when the whistle blew he became immediately composed, flattened the front of his shirt with one hand, and cleared his throat, a quick smile twitching into his face. Once I dropped a pot of paint into a filing cabinet, soaking a stack of miscellaneous papers in lime green. I thought he was going to kill me, sweat exploding from his pores, his skin shaking over his bones, but then the whistle blew and he relaxed. His pores sucked the sweat back in and his eyebrows unwound themselves. A hand slicked flat his hair, then off to the back porch to smoke it off.
He kept an immaculate l
og of the people who came in and out: how much money they spent, where they lingered, where they smiled, where they laughed, where they gagged, where they covered their children’s eyes, where they stormed out, what they were wearing, how they smelled, the insults that a few scarred souls needed to hurl at him as they left, etc. Most often it was families: mothers or fathers, or both, with their children. Other times it was run-down middle aged women, some wearing Winnie-the-Pooh attire, pockets full of scratch tickets presumably, assisting or rolling their elderly parents through the tour. Sometimes a child accompanied, pushing an oxygen tank connected to their grandparent’s nostrils.
I was the first spectacle of the tour, sitting like a rubber duck behind a round wood desk, paneled and ornamented with a sign that scrolled RECEPTION across its center. A cymbal-like lamp hung over my head from a long wire, which caused the dim, orange light to cascade into blackness in the corners of the room. I was instructed to smile, so I was smiling, and sometimes Mr. Harp the handyman smiled too; big and leaning in a dark doorframe, his pudgy triceps a cushion to his shoulder, causing fat to accordion up his neck all the way to his cheeks.
Mr. Ungula instructed me to write down the first things they said, how they reacted to the entrance fee, what they looked like, the acute change in atmosphere that accompanied them.
Day 9,321 (three customers):
The ugliest man alive came in today. He was as ugly as someone could possibly be before it’s considered a real deformity or a disability even. Are people with severe facial deformities considered disabled? I wonder. His name: Peabody. His occupation: “Appreciator of fine things,” he’d said. His face: A melting Clint Eastwood type. His mouth: A large, drooping frown weighted with heavy jowls. His smell: Musty, like a room once flooded, now drained and dried. His aura: Also drained and dried. His business: To examine Mr. Ungula’s craft, write an article on it, submit it to a journal, and appear vicariously unique and creative for having found such genius and beauty in something so strange. The first thing he said to me was, “Well, aren’t you just perfect.”
The Lonely Page 9
