by Cheryl Klein
There was a time when Felix would have protested, But I’m punk-rock, too! Now she tries to picture this foreign girl, her drummer arms and pointy hair, with Eva. Eva who is still drawn on the cave walls of Felix’s brain. She waits for the pain to come, for that ball of love and need, history and identity to push down on her chest.
She waits as Robbie explains himself. “Eva said, ’I miss you guys. We should all get together.’ And Crane said yes before I could say, ’You bitch, how could you do what you did to Felix? Do you even know what happened after you left?’ That’s what I wanted to say, at first. But I’m kind of a chickenshit, you know that, and so we just had some drinks, and I found myself remembering… I hate to say it, but Felix, I like Eva. And Kate is pretty cool, actually. But I thought the least I could do is tell you. I know you don’t like to be kept in the dark.”
There is an ache inside her, but it’s something much older than Eva. Eva is a real girl, back in L.A., and Felix is content to let her do her thing. “Don’t worry about it,” she assures Robbie. “I’m over her, really.”
Over is invented and impossible, but it’s the only word she has. She hangs up and returns to Tawn. Tawn asks who called, and Felix says, “Robbie.” She pauses. “He’s going out with my ex-girlfriend, and he wanted my blessing.”
Tawn nods slowly. “I thought Robbie was gay.”
“He is. I mean going out like he’s having dinner with her and her new girlfriend.” It all sounds so strange when she says it aloud. It sounds like a story, not real, raw facts.
“You never told me much about her. Eva, right?” There’s something sweet in the way Tawn says Eva’s name, cradling it gently so its sharp corners don’t hurt Felix. The way she held the scissors.
“Yeah. She’s in law school. Her new girlfriend has a mohawk.”
Tawn laughs, and this makes Felix laugh. She’s not sure why they’re laughing, just that these facts are so far away. It’s like a joke: a law student and a punk-rocker walk into a bar.
“Let’s give you some layers,” Felix says, picking up the scissors. She holds the ragged ends of Tawn’s now-just-below-shoulder-length hair in her hands. The braid lays coiled on the sink, ready to strike. Felix begins the careful process of clipping Tawn’s hair into arbitrary but meaningful sections. She devotes herself to one layer at a time, losing herself in the coarse strands. Layer after layer. No noise but the two girls breathing. Finally all the sections are free, all the plastic clips piled on the sink. Felix walks around to the front of the chair.
“Shit, Tawn. You’re a knockout.” Tawn spins around toward the mirror like she’s pulling off a band-aid. “See,” Felix says. “I left it pretty long… small changes.”
“It’s so short!” Tawn gasps, but she’s smiling, her face framed by two J-shaped locks of black hair.
“Hey, Felix?” Tawn is still studying herself in the mirror. “What would you say if I asked you out?”
“I’d say that was a very purposeful thing to do.”
Tawn doesn’t quite get romantic-comedy banter. She bites her lip. “But would you say yes?”
Felix rolls her eyes. “Yes, I’d say yes.”
They fold the 17-inch braid they’ve freed from its moorings into a manila envelope that Tawn has addressed to an organization that makes wigs for kids with cancer. “I’m so glad I wasn’t a kid with cancer,” Tawn says, shivering. “Can you imagine wearing someone else’s hair?”
“I hope they streak it with purple and give it to some little punk-rock girl,” Felix says. And then they send it off into the world.
By February, Felix has sewn two pillows and a drawstring satchel. She has taken a Teaching Assistant job at Lilac Mines Elementary. The pay is low, but she likes working with second-graders. They are at an age when all subjects are art projects: coloring pie charts and making paper-doily Valentines and singing “Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my daaarlin’ Clementine.” It will do until she opens her own boutique. Or at least until she learns how to sew something with a zipper.
It is a sleepy, gentle winter, full of nights-in with Tawn, wrapped in her naked limbs beneath thick piles of blankets. There is a newness about her whole body—her lack of cellulite and her black, never-waxed pubic hair. Felix loves running her hands down Tawn’s spine, reading her vertebrae like Braille.
But there is a hovering blueness in Felix’s life as well. She tries to name it. Regret? Winter? Nothing fits. It’s not the angsty-empty feeling of her L.A. life. Is it possible for something to be heavy and missing at the same time?
“I can’t believe you talked your aunt into trying online dating,” Tawn says. She’s setting the big oak table in her dining room for five.
“I didn’t, it was her idea,” Felix says. “All I did was write her profile. Writing about eyeshadow for a living really teaches you how to capture the intangible in concise but enticing prose. It was nice to put my training toward a good cause.”
Anna Lisa had worried, “What if no one responds? What if someone does respond? What if we go out and she’s completely disappointed?”
“Either way, you’ll be fine. You always have been,” Felix had assured her.
Someone had responded, a woman named Kim, who used a bit too much Wiccan-esque vocabulary for Felix’s taste but seemed decent otherwise. Anna Lisa had been wracked with nervousness; finally Felix had proposed a group date, which seemed to calm her aunt slightly. And so Kim is coming for dinner at the Twentymans’ creaky mansion tonight, which Felix expects a Wiccan-esque woman will appreciate.
“I think I made too much food,” Anna Lisa says, setting a plate of pita and hummus next to the homemade samosas. With one new cookbook, she has transitioned from casserole cuisine to 21st century fare. “We probably didn’t need two appetizers, did we? That will just prolong the meal, and if things don’t go well, it’ll be agony.”
“Anna Lisa, stop it,” Felix says for the millionth time.
“My grandpa will be here,” Tawn reminds Anna Lisa. “If there’s an awkward silence, he’ll just launch into some long story. He’ll probably do that even if there aren’t any awkward silences.”
They’re all dressed up, playing old-fashioned/new-fashioned family dinner: Felix in mermaidy dress and silver heels; Tawn in her newest, blackest jeans; Luke in a tie; Anna Lisa with a dab of gel in her hair. Kim (Felix is happy to see) wears no crystals, just a small silver K around her long neck. She is in her late 40s maybe, or early 50s, with coarse ripples of gray-blonde hair and a black skirt that swishes around wide hips.
A Midwestern accent lingers in her vowels as she answers all of their questions politely. Chicago, originally, then the Bay Area for a long time. No, she didn’t go to Berkeley, her grades weren’t that good and she needed to earn a living. Engaged once, then came to her senses. She pays thoughtful attention to Felix and Tawn and Luke, but more to Anna Lisa.
“More curry?” Anna Lisa offers, and Kim passes her plate for a second helping.
When Anna Lisa goes to the kitchen to make coffee, Felix follows her. “So?” she demands.
“See if you can find something to serve the pie with, would you?” Anna Lisa’s skin is shiny-peachy. A coffee mug dangles jauntily from her crooked finger. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s far too soon to tell anything. But it’s a rush to be out there. It’s like… it’s like the first rescue of the season.”
“Hey, I’m the first rescue of the season,” Felix reminds her.
Anna Lisa frowns again. “Oh shit, Kim’s probably a tea person, don’t you think?”
“She said she would love some coffee, you heard her.”
“But maybe she just said it to be polite.”
“Anna Lisa, stop it.”
They return to the dining room, where they eat pie and drink coffee beneath the watchful glass eyes of a dusty moose head. Talk tumbles out like beads from a jar. Crazy patients. That new Pepsi commercial. Flooded roads. Solstice. When Luke tells stories, it is to keep a good night going. He turns toward Feli
x during dessert. “You find your gal?”
Felix blushes and looks at Tawn. “Um, yeah. Well, I guess she found me.”
“No, not that gal. Lilac.”
“Oh.” Felix looks down at her apple pie. The blueness is back, that little cloud in her peripheral vision. “No, I didn’t. I kind of stopped looking. I’m sorry, I wish I had something exciting to report. I guess I decided to, um, focus on the present?” She glances at Anna Lisa, who is studying Kim. “Or at least the recent past. The part that’s knowable.”
“Old mysteries can be solved,” Luke says. “Richard III, for example.”
“Gramp’s reading this book called The Daughter of Time,” Tawn explains.
“He was innocent, most likely. Whole societies out there devoted to proving it. They dress up in old English garb.”
Before Luke can begin recounting evidence in the king’s favor, Tawn jumps in. “When I was little, I used to go looking for our ancestors. You know, the Indian ones. A girl in my fourth grade class called me a half-breed when I beat her at tetherball, and it kind of made me want to figure some things out. I mean, I didn’t really know anything beyond the guys who fed the pilgrims. I found these round, skinny holes in some of the flat rocks further up the mountain. I decided they were grinding rocks, where our people or whoever used to grind corn. I would mash up my Cheetohs in them after school. It sounds dumb, but it was kind of magical.” She points at her grandfather with her fork. “Until Gramp told me that they were dynamite holes. Until he spoiled it for me.”
“I was just telling you the facts.”
“And I’m saying the facts don’t always help.” She turns to face Felix. “I hadn’t been back to my grinding rock in years. It just seemed fake and embarrassing. But you wanna know the first time I went back? It was right after you started at Goodwill. After you told me all those stories about the people and their clothes.”
“Seriously?” Felix blushes, self-conscious and proud.
“I went back there and I remembered how real it used to seem. I think I even found an orange Cheeto stain on one of the rocks. Which means now it is real. It was my grinding rock, at least.” Beneath the table, her hand brushes Felix’s thigh, light and anxious. “The truth will only get you so far.”
“Who is Lilac?” Kim wants to know. “You mean, as in Lilac Mines?” She has driven over from Murphys.
Felix looks around the room, at her girl and her aunt, the detective and the stranger and the moose. They look at her expectantly, waiting for her story. The blue at the edge of her brain fades to ghost-white. “Well, I can tell you who I think she was.”
FAIRYTALE
Lilac: East Beedleborough, 1899
They don’t know it, but they watch each other. Lilac watches Calla be good, and Calla watches Lilac be bad. Lilac has to pass the post office and newspaper office on her way home from school, except usually she doesn’t pass it, she stops there and stays as long as she can.
“Any mail?” she says to Mr. Crabb, the postmaster. Her eyes drift through the big open doorway that connects the post office to the loud, inky room where the Hogans print the East Beedleborough Examiner. The oldest girl Hogan wrestles with the printing press like it’s some sort of biblical beast. Her sleeves are rolled up, and she straddles as wide as her dress will let her. The late afternoon sun shines through the front window and traces a silhouette of her legs against thin calico.
“You must have a suitor, you’re in here so frequent,” Mr. Crabb says. He wears what is supposed to be a fatherly smile beneath his wheat-colored mustache, but Lilac thinks he’s lecherous. She would tell her father so, but he would just tell her to stay away from the post office, leave the mail-getting to him.
“I do have a suitor,” Lilac says. “He lives in Milwaukee and sends me jewelry by post.” The oldest Hogan girl finishes her work and, dragon slain, rolls her sleeves down to her wrists and buttons them. She smoothes strands of hair back into her bun. It’s a color Lilac has heard called dirty blonde, but everything about Calla Hogan seems clean to her, even the spot of ink perched like Miss Muffet’s spider on her cheek.
“Funny, I can’t remember seeing any packages from Milwaukee for the Ambroses lately,” Mr. Crabb comments. “Or ever, now that I think about it.”
Lilac is vaguely annoyed that Mr. Crabb is going to press her for details. She likes lying—the way it speeds things up and rescues her from trouble—but she expects her audience to help her out.
“How’d you meet a man in Milwaukee anyhow?” Mr. Crabb demands.
“My people are from there.” This much is true. She was born in sin there: her railroad worker father and her prostitute mother did their thing in a smelly room behind the train station, the same thing Gertie Zaide did with lots of men. But by the time the new branch of tracks was laid, Gertie’s flat belly had grown like a white mushroom after the rain. When she stood in the doorway of her room, between her unmade bed and the sweaty summer, the only one of her men she could see was Harry Ambrose. She told him the baby was his, and then she went back to Berlin, thinking of the little black ducks that glided along the Spree. People expected Harry to leave the child—which was noisy and female—with his sister or at the orphanage. But he bundled her up like a potato and took an already-built train and two stagecoaches west, to a place where the mountains had silver skeletons and everyone assumed his wife had died.
To Lilac, Milwaukee is a very useful word. Its truth can be tightened around her father’s neck. It can be rattled off in an authoritative lie, tracks that send the Mr. Crabbs of the world puffing into the wilderness. And it can be hummed beneath her breath, a song marking the dusty walk between school and home. Finally Mr. Crabb stops bothering her and hands her a book her father has ordered. Probably one of his Westerns. Lilac doesn’t understand why needs to read about the west when he already lives there.
Calla Hogan is nowhere to be seen by the time Lilac leaves. She sighs. The walk back to her tiny house at the base of the mountain is so long, with only jackrabbits and tumbleweeds to entertain her. It is June and already so hot that Lilac has to pull her bonnet forward like horse blinders. She wishes she had a hat, like a real lady. As she trudges up Moon Avenue, her book bag pulls on her right shoulder. There are three books inside: history, arithmetic, and the Bible. The Bible is the thickest, but it has thin pages and good stories about people sinning. History is the heaviest. She looks around. The street is empty. She spots a large shrub in front of a white house with gingerbread trim. She darts behind the bush and buries History of the Western World beneath a quail nest. In the book, “west” means England. She’ll be out of school in a few weeks anyway, and then what need will she have for it?
When she looks up, she sees two angels on the porch: That’s what they look like. Calla Hogan and a smaller, blonder girl shaking out a white sheet. It puffs up, then deflates like a wistful sigh. Then the girls come together, the corners of the sheets still between their fingers. They are dancing with it, some new kind of waltz. Lilac can’t hear what they’re saying. Her thighs hurt from squatting. She feels small and evil and left out.
Two little children, a boy and another girl, burst out of the house and come running in her direction. At first their chins are tilted up toward the road, but something catches their focus. Soon they are standing right over her. Lilac freezes.
“Meggie, come back! You are not going anywhere with your hair in a tangle like that!” Calla shouts. This Lilac can hear. Her voice is smooth as pudding on the stove. If she lived in a city, she could be a singer.
“Calla, there’s a girl in our bush!” announces the little girl gleefully, as if she has just discovered a nugget of gold. She has a turned-up nose with blotchy freckles on it. Big loops of hair have escaped from her white-blonde braids.
“Meggie, what are you talking about?” Calla laughs. She’s getting closer. There’s nothing to do now but stand up. Calla is just a few feet away. She smells like a sheet that has been waving in the sun. Lilac suddenly wond
ers how she smells. Like sweat and schoolbooks, probably. She feels grimy, childish.
“You’re the girl who was in the post office earlier today,” Calla says, extending her hand. “How do you do?”
Lilac loves her, then, for acting as if Lilac is not crouching in someone else’s front yard at all. As if the world is full of good, upstanding people doing perfectly reasonable things.
“Howdoyoudo,” Lilac mumbles. “I dropped my book is all. It was so interesting that I just had to read it on my way home from school, but I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
Calla nods. The two youngest children chase after the quail family, which is bobbing frantically toward the road.
“Final exams are in three weeks and I want to make straight A’s,” says Lilac. She has three C’s and one B as things stand right now. She talks too much and never helps the younger children with their work.
“You must be a very good student,” Calla says.
Lying to Calla Hogan, Lilac is surprised to discover, is not nearly as much fun as lying to Mr. Crabb. “Actually,” she says. “I’m a terrible student. The books were making my back hurt, so I thought I’d dump one of them once and for all.” She brushes the dirt off History of the Western World. “Something happened in 1066, that’s all I remember.”
“I’ll bet lots of things happened in 1066,” Calla offers. She has pink lips that make Lilac think of the Valentine Jack Gundersen gave her last year, which she tore up. There is a small brown mole on her chin, and another near her left ear. Lilac can’t quite figure out if she’s a girl or a woman. Woman, Lilac decides, because Calla knows so much: “You’re Lilac Ambrose. And you do have trouble with history, though you’re not so bad in arithmetic.”
“How did you know?”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You don’t remember? I went to school with you for a year.” When she sees Lilac’s confusion, she tries to save both of them from embarrassment. “I sat in the back, though. I was pretty quiet, I suppose. And it was only a year. You’d just moved here. Then I finished up and started helping out my folks at the paper. But you kept things entertaining, that’s for sure. Like when you filled Jack Gundersen’s gloves with glue.”
