by Cheryl Klein
“Hey,” she says softly, “hey, it’s okay.” He’s a half-grown cat, thin and flexible, clumsy with new muscle.
He hiccups and pulls away. “Shit,” he says, all tough 12-year-old again. “What the fuck.”
Close up, Felix can see the not-even-peach-fuzz hairs on his face. He has a round bulb of a nose and scared greenish eyes beneath his frowning brow. He is right on the cusp, half baby/half bad guy. She puts her hand on his back, his kitten spine, and guides him toward the back door.
“Chewbacca should be out there already,” she smiles.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, and Felix releases him into the night.
“Poor kid,” sighs Tawn, fumbling with the twisted sheet. “I guess we should call it a night.”
“Yeah.” Felix stoops to help her. In a minute the lights will be on. In a minute Tawn will be a girl in spirit gum and a graduation robe. Grandpa Luke is probably asleep by now.
Felix tugs the sheet free from its clothesline and it falls on them with a nearly silent fwump.
For a second she panics, tangled in the dark. Then she feels a gentle witch hand on her waist. Tawn is warm and close. She smells like pumpkin and candle wax. Her lips taste like Hershey’s Special Dark.
Tawn’s hands find a place between the spiky hair at the nape of Felix’s neck and her high beaded collar. She’s a real witch, Felix thinks as her hands search for Tawn through her robe. Felix’s dress, for all its yards of cloth, binds and reveals her silhouette. Her petticoats are noisy. Tawn is whatever her body wants to be beneath her black cotton robe. Slim-hipped. Girl-bellied. Shaking a little. Her lips and hands move in strong, silent collusion. Hands on floor, lips poised above Felix’s. Then, hands on Felix’s face, lips at the edge of her scalp. When she puts her tongue in Felix’s mouth, Felix can taste her own hair gel.
Rolling, rolling, they are a yin-yang tumbling down a hill. Finally they surface from the sea of eggplant sheets. Somehow they’re beneath the banged-up oak table that holds the bowl of peeled-grape eyeballs. The half-light seems bright, now that they are night creatures.
“What’s on your lip?” Tawn says finally.
Felix touches her mouth. “What do you mean?”
“That thing. Is it a scar? Or a cold sore?”
“I don’t have herpes!” Felix says. Then she realizes what Tawn is referring to, what she thought she had successfully covered with lipstick every day. “It’s a scar.”
“From what?” Tawn, her face strewn with shadow, is somehow both innocent and scarred herself, the kind of person who might understand.
“A few weeks before I came here I went clubbing with my friends,” she begins. The events flow from her imperfect mouth: the all-night parking meter, Guy Guy and Eva Guy, her purse exploding on the ground, the street sign that watched over her. It is the same story she gave the police, mostly, but now she’s crouched beneath a table in a haunted house, watching Tawn’s dark brown eyes crinkle at the corners. Now it’s all different, as faraway as Los Angeles. It barely seems true.
“What did you do with the purse?” Tawn asks.
“Nothing. It’s still in my closet at home. But I see what you mean. I probably won’t carry it again.”
Tawn touches the silver stud in Felix’s chin, then her bottom lip, her freckles smeared with GirlPunk Long-Wearing Lip Color in Nutmeg, the tiny, raised zigzag scar apparently not. Tawn leans forward on her hands and knees and kisses Felix again, slow and light. The table forms a small cave around them. Felix wants to stay exactly here.
How do you date when there’s nowhere to go? Felix thinks about Eva, how their first few dates were an elaborate, aroused game of oneupsmanship. Eva took Felix to a film festival. Felix took Eva to a fashion show. Eva took Felix to a museum of hoaxes. Felix took Eva to Miss Velma’s millennium church service, where a white-haired woman with bright lipstick preached about golden pillars and Jesus in flames.
It’s hard to separate a girl from her world. How would Tawn measure up in L.A.? But Lilac Mines is not L.A. It’s not something Felix aspires to; more like a book she wants to read, the one assigned for class that turns out to be a page-turner. And Tawn is not a gateway to cool; she’s just company. Very good company.
The next day that Felix has to work is a Tuesday. She dresses slowly, trying to quiet the okay-so-now-what chatter in her head, and skips breakfast. She wears a yellow T-shirt that says Hermosa High History Hoe-Down ’95. She was an actual hoedown participant, which ups the shirt’s conversational value (“All I remember is the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. I don’t even know if that’s the answer that we won or lost on.”) She wears her darkest, thigh-hiding-est jeans, big silver hoop earrings, bright red Adidas. She studies her ass for a long time in the mirror. This ritual is familiar, and only by enacting it does she realize how long it’s been. The early days of Eva were all about checking and double-checking her grooming. Eva was gorgeous enough to get away with not shaving her legs, but Felix believes her most beautiful self is her most controlled self.
“You have a smudge,” says Tawn when Felix arrives at Goodwill. She rubs Felix’s cheek with her thumb. “You really put make-up on to come to work?”
“Sure, I always wear make-up,” Felix says. She means to say she’s not doing anything special today, but it sounds like she won’t leave the house without eyeshadow. Tawn has accented her black jeans with a man’s button-down shirt. It is loose, plain white, sleeves rolled up like she’s going to sit down at a typewriter. Over by the cash register, Matty is watching them.
“Oh,” Tawn remembers, “I brought you something. Gramp thought you’d be interested in this. He said he’s had it forever.” From her back pocket, she extracts a folded piece of notebook paper, almost as yellow as Felix’s shirt. She presents it to Felix, still folded, free hand behind her back, like it’s a rose.
Felix opens the soft paper. On the top it says, in very light letters, Why Alexander Hamilton Was The Best Of The Founding Father’s, Not Georg Washington. At first she wonders what Alexander Hamilton has to do with Lilac Mines or ghosts. But then she moves past content to form. The handwriting is a kid’s—it hasn’t found its groove yet, though all the letters are properly formed. It’s shaky and so faded that it’s clear Felix will never learn why Alexander Hamilton trumps George Washington. But she knows this writing: neat, slanted, eager.
“Gramp said, ’What am I going to do with it anyway? I’m an old man,’ ” Tawn says.
“This is Lilac’s handwriting,” Felix says.
“Yeah.” Tawn touches the top corner of the paper where it says, Lilac Ambrose, Grade 8.
“Which means that she wrote the postcard,” Felix says. Laughter bubbles out of her. Tawn squints and Felix explains. Tawn is less impressed than Ranger LeVoy, more cheerful than Gary Schipp. A sort of Cool, you have fun with that.
“Thanks for this,” Felix adds, waving the paper.
“Hang on,” says Tawn. She ducks behind the counter. Matty continues to stare. Tawn pulls out a wooden box carved with trees like the ones that cover the west side of town. “You could put it in here. I found it the other day, when you were off.” She pauses, looking down. “I’m stupid to get involved with an employee. But that’s how I am sometimes. Stupid.”
Tawn sighs, resigned to her fate and hopelessly honest. Felix takes the box. It’s the size of her heart. It’s better than Miss Velma’s kingdom of rainbows and waterfalls.
Felix puts the box in the middle of the dining room table at Anna Lisa’s house, between a crock of vegetable stew and a cooling pumpkin pie. Daylight savings time is over, and they now eat dinner against a backdrop of darkness. Autumn is always half-cozy, half-sad. Lilac Mines has real seasons, and Felix finds herself feeling delicate, as if she could be nudged toward tears at any moment.
“What is it?” Anna Lisa asks when they’re halfway through their stew.
Felix finishes chewing a carrot. “The box is from Tawn Twentyman.”
“Your boss.”
“
Mm-hmm. And the paper inside is an original school paper written by Lilac Ambrose. Her grandpa gave it to me.”
“Her grand—Luke Twentyman?” Anna Lisa scoots her chair an inch closer to the table.
“You know him?”
“Not well, but—my girlfriend used to work for him. Actually.”
“You’re dating someone?”
“No, I mean, she was my girlfriend. Meg. She worked for him in the ’60s. Did a little research and typing but mostly just did her best to keep the guy organized. His office looked like a crime scene in a detective movie.”
Felix smiles. Meg. She rolls the name around in her mouth, tries to lose Meg Ryan and taste the word on its own. Bold. Quick. Red-haired?
“Tell me something else about Meg,” Felix says.
“What?”
“Anything.”
Anna Lisa bites her bottom lip. Felix studies her face for clues. It’s creased in the expected places—not folds like Luke’s, but thin, distinct lines. As if small rivers once ran there, then dried up. But she wears no make-up, and this makes her eyes look young, a secret Revlon would kill to keep. Round and brown, flecked with little gold apostrophes.
“She loved driving,” Anna Lisa says finally. “She was a good driver, in a dangerous kind of way. We used to drive all through the mountains. One afternoon we drove all the way to Columbia—we didn’t plan to, we just got to talking.”
Felix cannot imagine her aunt sustaining a conversation all the way to the 7-Eleven. The myth of Meg doubles.
“We got there and drank sarsaparilla.”
Felix nods. “I’ve never had sarsaparilla,” she says earnestly.
“Neither had we. It was a tourist thing, even then.” She gives Felix a half-smile. “I’m not that old, Felix.”
“Oh, I know.” But she has trouble with beginnings and endings sometimes. When cars were invented, did everyone stop riding horses? Did the telegraph die once telephones became common? How is it that her parents lived through segregation and affirmative action? How could one body contain all those contradictions?
“What was she like?” Felix asks. “Meg.”
“She was… brave. Passionate. She really loved me. She had a beautiful smile.”
These are the things they say on the news when someone who isn’t famous dies. Honor student. Cheerleader. Beautiful smile. They don’t mean anything. But as Anna Lisa tries to translate sarsaparilla and the specificity of a smile, her jaw begins to quiver. She isn’t a youthful 60 now, she’s an ancient girl. A stood-up prom date. It makes Felix nervous. What can she do for a 40-year-old broken heart?
“Can I show you something?” Felix jumps up, a little breathless. “Hang on.”
She jogs down the hall and returns with the postcard. She’d vowed not to bring it up to anyone until she had more information. But now, with Lilac’s history paper just inches from this other artifact, it seems only a matter of time before the other pieces of the puzzle shake off the dust and make a pilgrimage from the hills. Like the trick-or-treaters. Felix’s desire will be enough.
“Look what I found,” she says, presenting the card to her aunt. “The writing is the same.”
Anna Lisa reads the postcard. “It’s kind of romantic, isn’t it?” she says without looking up.
“Exactly!” says Felix. “I mean, all of it. The whole mystery.” Who would have thought that Anna Lisa, of all people, would be the one to understand?
“You know, there are people who say she wasn’t the only one who disappeared that day.”
“Really? Who?”
“Just people. You know how rumors are. I remember people saying things years ago, back when the whole thing seemed a little less like something out of a history book and a little more real, I guess. It wasn’t anything specific.”
“But I mean, who else disappeared?”
Anna Lisa shrugs. “A boyfriend? A friend? Some other kid from school? Her mother? Everyone has their own little theory, whatever makes sense to them.”
Cal? Felix wonders.
Anna Lisa adds, “Some people think she killed herself.”
Coal wanders into the room and flops at Anna Lisa’s feet with a dog-sigh. Anna Lisa bends to scratch his curly ears, and Felix cuts the pie.
Later that night, Felix finds Anna Lisa in the guest room—her room. She’s crouched by the short bookcase where Felix has stashed her magazines and hats. The bottom shelf is still occupied by Anna Lisa’s books, titles like TransPlants: Tropical Plants in Cool Climates.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to snoop,” says Anna Lisa when she sees Felix. “I was just looking for this.”
She holds up a book with a vaguely pornographic-looking bird of paradise on the cover.
“Isn’t it getting a little cold to garden?”
“No, this,” says Anna Lisa. From its pages, she pulls a black and white photograph. Felix approaches slowly, as if her aunt is a mountain lion who might flee for the hills. The woman in the picture is leaning against an old, light-colored car. She has shiny hair and a beaky nose. Her outfit is so Jackie O: a tweedy, tailored jacket and narrow skirt to match. She does have a very nice smile. Dark lipstick. She looks toward the mountains that Felix imagines are behind the photographer, and not at the camera.
“Is this Meg?”
“Mmm,” says Anna Lisa. She props the picture up next to Lilac’s postcard on the dresser, and they look at it together. Felix wishes her aunt were in the photo, too.
“Hey, Anna Lisa?” Her chest is tight as a corset. “Can I. um, I was wondering if it might be okay . if I stay here a little longer?”
Her aunt snaps her head toward Felix. Is this a bad time or the perfect time? “Why?”
Felix would not have a problem kicking Genevieve out of her apartment. She might even enjoy it. She shrugs. “I like it here. It’s, you know, quiet, and people are friendly—” She’s starting to sound like a newscast herself, one about the charms of small-town life, so she stops herself. “I like getting to know you, and I’m sort of maybe seeing Tawn. It’s nothing yet, not really, but—”
Anna Lisa smiles knowingly. “Then it’s settled. The room is yours as long as you want it.”
A GIRL SPLIT IN PARTS
Al: Lilac Mines, 1966
One Saturday morning in June, Al wakes with a hangover that can only partially be attributed to Pabst at Lilac’s. Equally heavy in her stomach are the words and glances she and Meg slung across the dim bedroom. She remembers “drinking” and “butch” and maybe “bitch.” But she’s not sure who said what—the words are a crossword puzzle she can maneuver in too many ways.
Still, the morning is crisp with possibility, and as she pads sock-footed to the porch, she wonders if the details of their life can save them. Yes, there are arguments about whether 95 cents is too much for a beer, but aren’t there also pink-budded plants kissing the sides of their house, performing the glory of transformation? Aren’t there Meg’s old saddle shoes, the ones she announced she was exiling to yard work, sitting sweet and pigeon-toed on the bottom step? Mud freckling the bumper of Meg’s car? The neighbors’ orange cat glaring lazily in her direction? All of these things are part of her life, and if Al squints hard enough at them, the bigger questions disintegrate. She does not have to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of world; she can just reach out her hand and scratch the cat between the ears.
He begins a rusty, rib-rattling purr. Then, with species-appropriate fickleness, he leaves her to go sniff something on the far side of the porch. With her own feline sluggishness, Al stands up to investigate. She’s not in the mood for a dead mouse. She sees a bit of silky brown hair, but it’s not a mouse.
It’s a girl’s braid. Tapered and innocent, except that it is in completely the wrong place. It’s lying on the ground next to a bright green shrub and not on a girl’s sloping shoulder. The top is secured with a rubber band out of which spiky, bluntly cut hairs extend. The bottom end is tied with a pink ribbon, which also holds a crumpled bit
of paper.
Al touches her head. The braid on the ground is her color, the color of sugar pine trunks heading for the spinning saw blade. Sylvie cuts Al’s hair every six weeks. She and Jody and Jean take turns in a kitchen chair like good little boys. Nevertheless, she feels as if the braid could have been sliced from her own head. The thought makes the short hairs on the back of her neck stand up, as if they are sniffing the wind for lost kin.
“Al? Darling? What’re you doing out there?” Meg’s voice penetrates the thin walls easily. It is like the house is talking to Al.
“Petting the cat,” she calls back, surprised how calm her voice sounds.
“Scandalous!” giggles Meg. She does not come outside. Nevertheless, Meg’s voice always makes her want to do something. It’s part of what she loves about Meg. “Well, if you need me, I’m just in here writing to Petra.”
Sometimes Al wonders if Petra is real. It’s silly—she’s seen the letters, the Kerhonkson postmark, the handwriting looping on about a junior prom dress (No one else had silver, let me tell you!). But Meg has a way of wielding her pen pal at just the right time. Petra is a faraway angel girl who always understands when Al does not. Al floated her theory for Meg once, in an offhand, half-kidding manner that nevertheless immediately revealed its true suspicions. Meg’s face broke, as if Al had just repeated every insult Meg had ever received. As if Al were just like them after all.
Now Al touches the braid, gently, as if it were alive or recently dead. It inevitably belongs to someone who is one of the two. Her fingers trace its curves to the ribbon. Pink for a girl. She pulls. The slip of paper falls out. Unrolled, it reads DiKE.
The epithet’s misspelling might have made it laughable, but somehow the effect is to unnerve Al even more. Whoever this threatener is, he or she is not one to research, to listen to reason. The note is written in black pen, block-lettered. The lettering is not quite stylish, but it contains no trace of doubt. Too, there is the fact that it says DiKE, not DYKES or even DiKES. She is sure, somehow, that only she has been named. Meg is the good girl who has been seduced.
