“Someone will want these,” Miranda says, and a pair of red heels clatters to the floor.
Lydia-Rose reaches first. “Let me.” She slips her feet inside and jerks around the bedroom like a marionette, her cheeks sucked tight in concentration. She pauses in front of the mirror and pulls a face. I laugh and she smiles at me. That night, we pour salt in Miranda’s wineglass when her back is turned. Lydia-Rose is spanked and sent to her room, and I am lectured about maturity and sentenced to morning Winkie walks for a week. But I don’t care. It is the first time that Lydia-Rose and I have banded together as sisters, and it is great fun.
On the weekends, Miranda takes us to Willows Beach. Lydia-Rose and I catch suckerfish and try to make them mate. We spend all day investigating hermit crabs and plunging our hands into tide pools, making all kinds of sea creatures run for their lives. When Miranda is out of earshot, we run down the beach, screaming Fuck! as loud as we can. Lydia-Rose loves to swear. Backlit by the sun, we giggle at our shadows, long and lean. Lydia-Rose wiggles her toes in the wet sand and practices Indian burns on my arm. Winkie flattens out in the surf, her belly coated with sand. We make shadow puppets with our hands.
“Look,” says Lydia-Rose. “A rabbit.”
I hook my thumbs together and flap my hands. “A dove.”
A couple wearing Hawaiian shirts walks past us, kicking up sand with their shoes. They are laughing and talking in another language; it sounds like German. The man reaches into his pocket and takes the lens cap off a small camera. He circles the woman, snapping pictures, moving her by the shoulders to get some part of the beach in, some ocean liner in the background, a bird. Lydia-Rose and I dance behind them, dipping into the shot as the man hits the shutter, making peace signs, sticking out our tongues. Lydia-Rose says, Hey, look, what’s that, and when I spin to see what she’s pointing at, she lobs a piece of bull kelp at the back of my head. My teeth gnash together from the force of the blow but I don’t cry. I look across the ocean. When Lydia-Rose hits me again, I think I see the devil in the clouds, but it’s only Mount Baker.
At night, I listen to the hiss of the iron, the slosh of water as Miranda lifts it over her shirts, the high whistle of steam. Ashamed, I roll up a pair of soiled underwear and shove them under a loose floorboard in the laundry room, wondering where else I can hide things in this new, foreign house.
After everyone is asleep, I sneak into the kitchen and stick the black beret on my head. The fridge is a mess of phone numbers and Polaroids: Halloween cape-swirling, group shots on the beach, Lydia-Rose’s hair in the wind. I wonder how much longer it will be until Miranda puts a photo of me on the fridge. I look up. The ceiling feels too close to my head. Winkie hears me open the fridge and comes running, her little toenails clicking on the linoleum. Winkie thinks the fridge is a small, cold white room. We survey the contents together. A jar of dill pickles, a packet of ground beef. No-name mayonnaise. I hold the refrigerator door open until I am freezing.
Winkie and I pace, open all the cupboards. Nothing is wasted here. A kitchen drawer is devoted to plastic bags and twist ties, and every doorknob is wound tight with rubber bands from celery and broccoli stalks. A Tupperware container in the pantry overflows with sticky birthday candles, which are only thrown out when they’re less than an inch long. We are also supposed to recycle and compost. I hate the fruit flies and find it impossible to peel labels off soup cans, but Miranda says I must persevere. She tells me to put all the fruit and vegetable peelings in a small stinky rubber trash can by the sink, but I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, and when no one is looking, I stuff them into the bottom of the trash or give them to Winkie.
Outside, a man drinks a beer in the parking lot, and the sky is midnight blue. I see my face in the window’s reflection. My hair is curlier than it used to be. It’s still the whitest of blondes. It looks like a giant cotton ball. My face is pale and slack, some kind of unfinished quality to it. The rest of me: warped from a chink in the glass.
“Go to sleep,” I tell the face.
Later, Miranda finds me in the living room, bent over a yellow plastic stereo. It’s two in the morning. I’m wearing the red heels; I’ve scuffed them somehow. Winkie is watching my every move.
“Good night now,” Miranda says.
I jut my lip and press the Play button. “No sound,” I whimper.
“Okay.” Miranda turns the stereo on its side. “This isn’t a piece of magic. The batteries are in the wrong way.” She shivers and pulls her bathrobe tight. I lay my head in her lap while she fidgets with the batteries. I feel so sad and lonely that I wrap my arms around her waist and don’t let go.
When I start to cry, she carries me up the stairs to her bedroom and shuts the door. The room is small and square. A queen-size foam mattress sits on the floor, Lydia-Rose’s old Little Mermaid comforter stretched across it. She sets me at the edge of the bed and sits down. Her skin smells like Jergens hand cream.
I look around. One of her pillowcases has a hole in it. A pack of menthol cigarettes lies on the floor beside a coffee tin filled with water. Cigarette butts float at the top like dead men. There’s a cardboard box filled with paperbacks in the corner and a chest of drawers with Little Mermaid stickers all over it—must have been Lydia-Rose’s at some point, too. A tabletop ironing board is set up on the dresser, along with a stack of her Molly Maid shirts and a pocket-sized Holy Bible. A plastic cosmetics bag sits on the floor, filled with brushes, eye shadow, and tubes of lipstick. There is nothing on the walls except a full-length mirror in the far corner, with a crack in the bottom. The room is lit by a small desk lamp.
“I want you girls to have the nice things,” she says when she sees me looking. She takes my little hand and flips it, palm up, in her own. She traces the lines on my palm with her fingertip, something I’ve seen her do with Lydia-Rose. “You used to beg me to take you up here when you first came to live with us,” she says. “Remember how scared you were? The first few days you hardly said a word.”
I shake my head. I ask Miranda how long I’ve been here, and she tells me it’s been three months.
“When I was growing up,” Miranda says, still stroking my hand, “we lived down the street from a foster family. They had six girls. After I had Lydia-Rose, I thought, I should do this. Someone out there must need a home.” She puts my hand down and reaches for the pack of menthol cigarettes, lights one, and blows the smoke into the room. “I was so lucky they let me have you. There weren’t any available homes at the time—it just worked out that way, so perfectly. I would have liked to take in more, but I never made enough money to be able to rent a bigger house.” She sucks on the cigarette and shakes her head. “I’ve never been any good at making money. I don’t know how people do it. I really don’t.” She takes one more drag and sinks the half-finished cigarette in the coffee can. “I wanted to have lots of girls,” she tells me. “I wanted Lydia-Rose to have lots of sisters. I couldn’t have any more children after I had her.”
“Oh.”
I can tell she is telling me something important, something meaningful, but my eyes are heavy and one of them is twitching.
“Let’s go to bed now, honey,” she whispers, and we pad down the stairs to the bedroom together. Miranda scoots my pillow around, tugs the blanket to my chin. She puts her hand on my forehead for a second. Outside, the neighbor calls for his dog. “Yogi,” he cries. “Yo-gi.”
Lydia-Rose and I like to lie the same way: on our backs, arms folded across our chests. Lydia-Rose wakes up and shivers. The cold night air blows in from a draft in the window. It smells like wisteria. “Why do we have to share a room?” she asks suddenly.
Miranda leaves my side and pulls the blanket tighter over her daughter. “Go to sleep now, girls.”
“But—”
“Just stop.”
Lydia-Rose huffs and rolls to her side. “I want my own room.”
Miranda kisses my forehead and leaves. I listen as Lydia-Rose’s breathing turns deep and slow. I want he
r to like me.
A few hours later I wake again. Winkie is rooting in the bathroom for mice, and I want only to be asleep. The house is so still. I slide out of bed, then tiptoe to the kitchen. The floor is like ice beneath my feet. I scan the Polaroids on the fridge: Miranda’s old house, the park, the time Lydia-Rose dressed as a pixie for Halloween. A brochure for a single mothers’ support group, the address circled in red ink.
Lydia-Rose keeps a Polaroid of her father in our sock drawer, and sometimes I stare at it. He looks distinguished, handsome. He looks noble. I never learn where he went. It’s not something Miranda ever talks about. Lydia-Rose looks at me with no expression on her face when I ask about him. She tells me she does not remember.
I don’t know why I can’t stay in my bed. This goes on for years, these secret sojourns to the kitchen. I stand in front of the fridge, yearning for this place to feel like home, Winkie by my side, tongue hanging out of her mouth, hoping for something to eat.
Sometimes, when Lydia-Rose and I have nothing better to do, we practice dying. Lydia-Rose tells me that when her grandma died, they were all listening to a song from The Big Chill—that old movie, she says—and when it came to a certain part of the song, her grandma died, and Lydia-Rose whispered, Mom, she died on that note. That’s the note she died on. Lydia-Rose and I take the cassette tape and walk to Clover Point with the yellow stereo, and when it gets to that note, we just kind of let go.
It’s very nice dying, we tell Miranda.
The dizziness starts about six months after I move in with Miranda and Lydia-Rose. I am always nauseous, and I keep walking into things. My shins are covered in bruises, my elbows red and raw. Miranda takes me to the doctor and asks him to look at my left eye, which she says has a funny look to it, as if it’s not seeing. The doctor isn’t nice to her at first, and it’s only years later that I realize he was the doctor who used to see me when I lived with Moira and Julian. He puts his hand on the top of my head and asks me, in a quiet voice, to wait outside with the nurse, and then I hear shouting from behind the door. Miranda emerges, red-faced and weeping, and takes me into her arms. She carries me back into the room and pleads with him that she is not hurting me, and would he please look at my eyes. She puts me on the examining table and bangs her fist on the counter. I reach for her hand and tell her not to cry. Something in the doctor’s face softens and he obliges. He shines a red light into my eyeball and asks me to follow the light as he moves it around. It is an easy game, and I leave the office bursting with pride because the doctor makes such a fuss about how well I have done, all things considered.
“All things considered, my dear,” he says and waves as we walk out the door. On the bus ride home Miranda explains to me what he means. I am going blind in one eye.
Late that night, Miranda crawls into my bed and tells me that people with a sense disability sometimes make up for it by having another heightened sense.
“I know a blind woman,” she says, slipping her hand under my pajama top and rubbing my back, “who can play anything on the accordion or the piano. Anything at all.” She speaks so quietly I can hardly hear her. Lydia-Rose is breathing heavily in her bed and Winkie is waiting expectantly at the end of mine, waiting for Miranda to leave so she can resume her place on top of my feet.
I ask Miranda if this blind person is some kind of prodigy and Miranda says no, not really, but that she really is a good player. I tell her that I don’t think I have any such heightened sense to make up for my bad eye, though I’ve noticed that my nose is as strong as a bloodhound’s. But no one’s going to celebrate that: the little blind girl with a snout so keen she can tell you what you had for breakfast. Big deal.
I’m blind because of amblyopia. Lazy eye. My right eye got so good at seeing, it told the other to give up. It takes too much energy to look after a sick thing. The world is flatter; I see in a dimension just under third. Rembrandt had this problem and some scientists think he was a better painter because of it. I think it makes me trip. Where’s that stair? How far from my foot? I can’t tell. It’s all by feel. It’s not my mother’s fault. I wasn’t born blind. Amblyopia comes later, when one eye fails to thrive. I could have worn an eye patch if someone had noticed this earlier, but now, well, why kick a dead horse. In the doctor’s office, the eye chart starts with E. For eye, for easy. Everyone can see the E.
While Miranda is at work, Lydia-Rose and I go to Blue Jay School. It is in a nicer neighborhood than the one we live in, in an old white character house, and is both a day care and a kindergarten. Blue Jay is run by a woman named Krystal, who has long wild hair and drives a black Pontiac Trans-Am with a yellow firebird on the hood. I decide she is my idol and stare at her whenever possible. Her jeans are high-waisted and very tight, and she looks like a rock star, skinny arms in a muscle shirt, big hair-sprayed bangs, and gorgeous almond eyes. “Is she yours, too?” she says to Miranda, her eyes on me, when Miranda drops us off the first day.
“Sure is.”
“What a sweet little girl,” Krystal says. “And such a pretty girl, too.”
“Oh,” I say, looking down.
Miranda leaves and we are told to sit cross-legged with the other children. Krystal takes a piece of felt and cuts out little animals and tells us stories using these makeshift puppets. She serves us pieces of oranges and apples, cut into what she calls “boats.” We are allowed four each, but I sneak extras into my pockets and eat them in the bathroom, my mouth and hands sticky with juice for the rest of the day.
At lunchtime, I discover that Miranda has slipped a little envelope into my lunchbox. Inside is a piece of paper folded in two, a makeshift card. When I open it, there’s a picture of me, asleep on the couch, Winkie curled up beside me. For your treasure chest, the back of the picture says, and I hold it close to my body so no one else can see.
When it rains, which is all the time, Krystal helps us into our Muddie Buddies, navy blue–and-red waterproof jumpsuits, so that we can still go outside. But despite Krystal’s good intentions, kindergarten is a rough place. We are always getting punched. The older kids tell Lydia-Rose and me that we smell bad, that our clothes are secondhand and covered in cat hair. Two girls tell me they want to push me on the swings, and when I climb onto the swing and begin to lift off, they start to laugh and tell me they’re going to punch me on the downswing—so I never come down, I swing higher and higher, kick at them with my legs, dodge their fists as I swoop toward the sand.
“You have deformed knees,” the popular girl, Peggy, says to me when I show up one day in shorts. She has perfect legs: small knees with calves that round out on both sides, tapering to thin, delicate ankles. Like an hourglass stretched. My knee bones jut, collide with each other, and I have to stand with my feet apart. Peggy can lift her legs behind her head and touch her toes in a V. She has a brown oval the size of a penny on the back of her white thigh. We all gather to see her acrobatics—but mostly to see her underpants. Lydia-Rose steps into the circle, and Peggy points at her forearm. “You’re the color of a baked potato,” she says. “Maybe more like dirt.”
I begin to sneak off by myself during recess, and finally I find a place at the back of the house where I can hide behind a pile of firewood. It smells so good that I break off a thin splinter of bark and put it in my mouth. Beyond the firewood is a gutted Volkswagen Beetle in the middle of the lawn, the long grass pushing its way into the interior. We are forbidden to go near it, but I can’t help myself. I crawl in and grip the steering wheel, which is small and black and won’t turn in my hands. The seats smell like mold, and the grass tickles my thighs. But in that car, away from the fists of other children and Lydia-Rose’s loud cursing and Krystal’s beautiful face, I am at my happiest. I grip the wheel, pretend my legs are long enough to reach the pedals, and shift into first, second, third. I am five and a half and can’t imagine having lived anywhere else but Miranda’s, having had anyone else’s life but this one.
But even though my life is moving forward, Julian starts
watching me. He sits in his car outside the day care while Lydia-Rose and I wait for Miranda to pick us up. The first time I see him we are playing Hunter-Gatherer, a game we’ve made up about being cave people. I’m busy strangling a pudgy three-year-old underneath the monkey bars and Lydia-Rose is waiting for me to tell her what to do.
“Bad antelope! Bad antelope!” I keep yelling at the kid. “Gonna feed my wife and kids with you.” I drag the kid by the ankles and set him in front of Lydia-Rose. “Eat! Eat! Eat!”
Lydia-Rose gets busy fake-eating the kid’s foot, and I look up.
“Hey, Shannon.” He says it like he’s been saying it for years. “You probably don’t remember me. Brought you some gummy bears.” He is in a suit; maybe he just got off work.
I take the gummy bears from his hand, give half to Lydia-Rose, and watch him wave good-bye.
“Who’s that?” she asks.
“My old dad.” The words sound funny in my mouth.
He comes again a week later. Always gummy bears, sometimes wine gums, too, but I think they have wine in them, so I decline.
“I don’t drink,” I tell him. We are sitting in his black Mercedes-Benz. He has asked me to sit with him and eat gummy bears.
“I don’t drink either,” he says. The radio is on. A husky-voiced woman talking about the prairies. Something about jazz. Julian’s car seats are black leather and hot from the sun. He still has a lot of hair on his arms. I look out the window and watch Lydia-Rose swinging on the monkey bars. She lets go and lands in a crouch, stands and does a cartwheel. Julian tells me that Moira left him, moved to another city. He hasn’t spoken to her in years.
Y: A Novel Page 5
