Black Eyed Susan

by Elizabeth Leiknes

  If I cared more, I would’ve said, “Learn to spell, moron.”

  Within seconds, Gretchen Brown, a girl who had never picked me in dodge ball or sat by me at lunch, got out of her chair and walked straight over to the picture. “Gimme a yellow crayon, Randy.”

  Randy stared at her.

  “Now,” she said.

  I figured she was going to draw a fountain of pee coming out of my stick-girl butt, or something equally unattractive, but instead she drew long flowing hair which flipped up at the ends like mine.

  When she walked by me on her way back to her desk, she didn’t smile, but whispered, “You’re not ugly. You’re just … weird.”

  After dispatching Randy Pitts to the principal’s office, Mrs. McIntyre had us each read our classwork assignments: “All About Me” reports that documented our personal histories. In mine, I tried to be honest. Deep down, I knew that on the day I was born, God, the universe, the cosmos, whatever entity is responsible for creating life, must have shook its head and sighed with exasperation, because it was evident something had gone very … wrong. Everything connected to me—and I mean everything—was improbable.

  For starters, I was a colorblind female. I belonged to the one half of one percent of the population which is both female and colorblind. But sometimes I saw colors anyway. I had two different-colored eyes. I experienced synesthesia, a condition where two bodily senses morph together—and naturally, I had the rarer type, tonal synesthesia, where I could feel the sensation of certain colors when I heard certain music. The first time music and the notion of color collided was in 1977. “It’s red,” my mother said while we waited for the light to change, and as I heard a man on the radio sing about finding a “Higher Ground,” his voice and the idea of that word—“red”—were forever intertwined.

  My blood type, AB negative, was the rarest of all—there’s a six-tenths of one percent chance of having this blood running through your veins. And to make me even more peculiar, I was a leap year baby. Those of us with that quadrennial anomaly overcame a one in one-thousand, five-hundred and six chance of being born on February 29.

  After reading my report aloud, Mrs. McIntyre gave me an approving smile and said, “Wow, you are a very special girl, Susan.” But I knew what she was really thinking: Wow, Randy’s right. You really are a total freak.

  By the time I was eleven, I’d accepted the fact that I was indeed a flesh-and-bone cluster of anomalies, and decided to embrace other rare people and events with the same instinct that made me snuggle with my ratty, worn-out electric blanket. I wrapped myself in solar eclipses, albinos, and four-leaf clovers.

  Being near odd things comforted me, and so it should come as no surprise that, behind closed doors, I sought solace in a small green frog who played the banjo. I’d received The Muppet Movie soundtrack for my birthday, and though I thought it was a little juvenile for me, I couldn’t stop listening to it. I hid it behind Van Halen’s 1984, which featured a sweet blonde cherub smoking a cigarette on the cover. And that’s how I felt—part child, complete with baby fat and naiveté, and part grownup.

  But when Kermit sang, I didn’t feel strange or lost, I felt … normal. Sure, Kermit was a smart, logical, singing frog-journalist, but he had questions like everybody else. Why are there so many songs about rainbows? And more importantly, what’s on the other side? I didn’t know what was on the other side, but there were plenty of days when I didn’t care. I just wanted to go there.

  One Saturday morning in July 1985, when I was exactly eleven and a half, I was introduced to yet another of my eccentricities. This one proved to be the crown on my bizarre young head, la crème de la crème of weirdness. Kermit had just gotten to the second stanza about wishing on a morning star, when out of nowhere my closet door slowly opened on its own. It spooked me a bit since I was home alone (one of the perks of being an only child). But the prospect of excitement outweighed the possibility of danger. I figured the mysterious door opening would be my big thrill for the day, but to my surprise, a remarkable reflection emerged in my full-length mirror on the open closet door.

  “Whoa,” I whispered when I saw it. It was a living, spontaneous visual image to accompany Kermit’s words. It was a perfect rainbow. Well, I wasn’t sure if it was perfect because several of the colors looked the same to me, but there was definitely one strong bow. And the show wasn’t over.

  I walked to my window to witness the rainbow firsthand. Cool air rushed in on the tail of a sudden gust of wind. The arc popped out from behind a still-swollen cumulus cloud that had just watered nearby cornfields. Right when I placed my hand on the wooden windowsill, I heard someone behind me.

  “Hello.” It was a sturdy, multi-faceted voice, like a hundred voices all intertwined into one, and I could tell it was a female. Kermit was still singing because I’d recorded “The Rainbow Connection” twelve times on my bedtime tape. Twelve times was enough time for me to begin dreaming.

  I turned around to see a woman standing in my bedroom doorway. Her blonde hair was smoothed back into a sleek bun, and her lips were full and dark, which to me meant she must have been wearing red lipstick.

  A faint smell of cigarette smoke and lilacs lingered in the air as the woman walked over to me and connected with my trembling hand. Although the room by now had a post-thunderstorm chill, the woman’s hands were warm. But before I had a chance to evaluate whether she was real or not, she was gone, leaving as quickly as she came, out the door to the hallway to wherever she came from. I looked over at the stereo as if Kermit was going to comment on what had just happened, but instead he sang, “Have you been half asleep? Have you heard voices?” I wondered if I had, and from that day forward, I spent much of my free time speculating about what had happened.

  For three weeks, I did not hear or see the woman again, and told no one about her visit. I didn’t yet know her name, but I wondered who she was and why she’d shown up at my little white farmhouse in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

  And so to complete my flawless equation of weirdness, I now wondered if I was also privy to seeing ghosts. After all, why else would a complete stranger visit my house? I knew the woman had returned when one Sunday in the middle of the night, I awakened to the same hint of smoke and perfume. Instead of feeling frightened, I welcomed her. She was exceptional—just like me.

  I sat up in bed to see the woman standing by my window, staring off into the starry Minnesota sky. Still half asleep, I asked the woman who she was.

  “Jochebed,” she answered. When she noticed my scrunched-up, confused expression, she gave me a half eye-roll and said, “Yeah, I go by Jackie.”

  I laid back on my down pillow, closed my eyes, and in my dream asked, “Is Kermit right? Are rainbows just illusions?” Jackie ran her hand over my blonde hair and whispered the truth. “It depends how badly you need them to be real.”

  Seven weeks later, when my parents went into town for groceries, Jackie returned. I was hanging laundry on the clothesline when she appeared from behind a sheet blowing in the summer wind.

  “Come with me,” she said, leading me to our big oak tree by the creek bed in our backyard. “Ever buried a time capsule?” she said in a sweet voice, while my hand nestled inside hers.

  “Nope,” I admitted, “but I know what one is.”

  She crouched down, so I did the same, and from a crocheted bag she pulled out a Nabisco cracker tin.

  “What’s inside?” I asked. “I hope it’s not crackers. They’d be really gross sitting in this thing for all eternity.”

  She smirked. “No crackers. It’s a surprise.”

  “Am I supposed to guess?” I said.

  “Why don’t we open it together?” she suggested.

  “Right now?” I was getting excited.

  “No. Time has to pass. That’s what makes time capsules bittersweet.” She gave me a reassuring look. “I was thinking next summer—same day, same time. Now, promise me you won’t dig it up without me.”

  “Okay,” I sai
d, looking down at my watch, noting that it was 2:47. She dug a two-foot-deep hole with my mom’s metal gardening shovel, then placed the tin box in the hole and buried it with dark fertile soil.

  She stomped the ground where the tin lay hiding below. “Wanna help?” she said with a grin. I returned the smile. When she grabbed my hands, we jumped together, giggling in the afternoon sun.

  Without warning, she released her hand from mine and looked into my eyes. “Better go. Be good, Susan,” she said, kissing my forehead.

  I kept our secret.

  Exactly one year later, I made sure my parents were gone for a few hours, and went to the oak tree at 2:47. I waited and waited until the sun disappeared behind our neighbor’s bean field.

  I waited for her by the tree the next summer and the next and the next, but was always left alone and empty-handed. When we eventually moved away, I delivered my secret goodbye as my parents packed the last of our things in the moving van.

  Standing at the base of our big oak, I felt its strong and intricate root system flourishing beneath, and blew an underground kiss in the direction of my unopened time capsule. “You’ve done a good job staying a surprise. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

  THREE

  It was the day after my deadly diagnosis and I should’ve spent it feeling sorry for myself, but instead I felt like kicking my own lame dying ass. I realized just how lame I was after reading an article in The Chronicle that morning. The article boasted of a one-pound turbot flatfish named Herbert (Yes, “Herbert the Turbot”) who survived fifteen hours in some English guy’s fridge after being caught the day before.

  When the guy washed the fish under the tap, he realized it was moving and didn’t have the heart to eat it. According to experts well-versed in freaky fish phenomena, Herbert drastically lowered his metabolism in the cold temperature and took advantage of the moisture in the Ziploc bag. After his near-death experience, Herbert was taken to the local aquarium and became the star attraction. Anticlimactically, Herbert died one week later from unrelated complications.

  So it occurred to me that Herbert the Turbot had more of a will to live than I did. (Well, at least until he got to the aquarium.) I could barely survive a twelve-hour shift without wanting to shoot myself. I mean, I was devastated about dying, but part of me couldn’t help thinking that receiving a death sentence in the movies was so much sexier. The soon-to-be-dead on the big screen always cried a lot, found beauty in unexpected places, and then somehow ended up harnessing Jimmy Stewart’s Richest-Man-In-Bedford-Falls gratefulness in their final days.

  But I wasn’t grateful, I wasn’t even bitter, I was just bummed. And the most miserable part about my misfortune was that even if I’d wanted to embark on a quest to live the remainder of my life to its fullest, I didn’t have a clue where to begin. So I went back to bed.

  When I awoke, everything was inexpressibly different. A misty haze hung in the air, I viewed the world around me as if through a gauzy filter on a camera lens, and when I looked over at my living room curtains, I saw something I’d never seen before in my life, but only experienced, rarely, through music: color. Not a lot of it, but a small patch of a flower’s petal that until that very moment, had always appeared to have shape but no color.

  Red.

  It had to be red, because the flower was a rose and I knew roses were red. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if the color would disappear, but I wished it would stay for a while. And it did, for about two minutes. Then in an abrupt departure, it disappeared and the muted nothingness returned.

  Placing my hand on my forehead, I checked for a fever, but feeling no unusual warmth, I looked out the window and felt a new sensation—an overwhelming sensation of choice: not the usual choices I encountered on a daily basis, like should I go to work five minutes early or five minutes late, but a real, I’m-in-charge kind of choice. I wondered, Should I run around in my underwear and eat Ben & Jerry’s right from the container, or should I go trick-or-treating ten weeks early, becoming the first grown woman in the neighborhood to ask strangers for Butterfingers?

  I didn’t have a costume handy, so I grabbed a carton from the refrigerator, stripped down to my panties, sat down in the middle of my living floor, and dug my spoon deep into Heath Bar Crunch. But in the middle of this wonderful moment, something not so wonderful happened.

  My parents phoned. They were the last people I wanted to deal with right then, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie to them because they were both liars themselves. They owned a successful antique shop in Marin County called Second Time Around. The ironic thing is that the antiques weren’t antique at all. In fact, all of their pieces were First-Time items made to look like Second-Time bits. I’d been aware of their scam ever since we moved to the Bay Area from Minnesota when I was eighteen. Romanced by the idea of living in golden California, they bought this small but swanky storefront property and developed the bright idea of beginning a business they knew nothing about.

  They soon discovered that people in the West, especially people with preposterous amounts of money, liked spending their cash on furniture with a history. They enjoyed having conversation pieces in their big, breezy homes, and got a kick out of telling their friends that they got it at the prestigious Second Time Around. And my parents worked this con right down to the tiniest details. Upon entering the store, they provided shoppers with a glass of expensive chardonnay and, in a casual tone, mentioned other socialites’ recent purchases. In a world of new strip malls on every block and new trends around every corner, my parents’ clients procured, or meant to procure, pieces from the past that told stories they themselves could not tell.

  In the first year of their new business, I became proficient at creating what my mother called “Susie Patina.” That was when she’d leave a brand new secretary’s desk or dresser bureau in the backyard, letting it get weathered by rain and sun, then have me gouge the crap out of it with a hammer. I remember my hands digging deep into the moist soil, gathering dirt to smear on the wood for the desired aging effect. With each breath of damp, musty air, I became more skilled in the art of accelerating time, and I learned how to apply muck and grime so that nobody questioned our goods.

  Often my parents made what in the antique business is referred to as a “marriage” out of different pieces they came across. That’s when you put two different units together, forming one seamless whole. While their merchandise consisted of fake marriages, their own marriage was not only intact, but as solid as oak. My parents’ marriage was the one thing they didn’t fake, and I resented how easy it came for them. “I quit my job,” I said when they asked what I was up to via speakerphone. “Mom. Dad. I’m dying.” And in true form, they formed a united front, taking turns telling me to suck it up. “Honey, everyone feels lost sometimes,” my father said.

  “No one really likes their job, Susie Q,” my mother piped in. I hated it when she called me that. “Buck up, little camper. At least you have your health.”

  “Whatever,” I said with a disappointed sigh.

  My mother didn’t miss an opportunity to insult me. “For the love of all that is holy, stop using that word! It only highlights the fact that you’re aloof and … oh, what’s the word?”

  “Ambivalent?” I said. Then, in a calm voice, I asked, “Did you hear what I said? I’m hardly a drama queen, Mother. I’m dying. Really. I don’t even know where to begin with all of this.”

  I heard my mother whisper, “I can’t deal with this right now. Honey, doesn’t she realize we have a store to run?” She passed the ball to my dad. “Sweetheart?” my father said, “There is no beginning and there is no end. There is only now. I know you feel lost, but you need to be open … to signs. You’ll find your way.”

  “That’s the best you’ve got?” I gave up on getting his advice and decided getting information would be more helpful. “Forget it. Hey, do we have any history of weird illness in our family?”

  My father was losing patience. “Like what kind of ill
ness, dear?”

  Now I was losing it. “Like fucked-up illnesses that kill people in their early thirties!”

  “Watch your language, Susie Q Spector.” My mother was silent for a moment, and in her most condescending voice, she said, “Besides, darling, you know we don’t have the same family history.”

  “What are you talking about, Mom?”

  There was a long pause.

  My dad scolded her. “For God’s sake, Farrah. Didn’t you tell her?”

  “I thought you did,” she said in an accusatory voice.

  “Tell me what?!” I hollered.

  My mother shout-whispered at my dad, defensive, “Well, I saw you talking to her that one time, and I thought you were telling her, Charles—”

  “She’s our daughter, I have been known to talk to her from time to time, Farrah. Besides, you’re her mother.”

  My mother let out an annoyed sigh. “We’re not your real parents, darling.”

  Things had actually gone downhill since my death sentence.

  “Susie Q? Are you there? Don’t be mad, honey.”

  “Mom?” I was angry. “Or should I just call you Farrah?”

  “Oh, let’s not play the guilt game, Susie Q. Your father and I have a lot on our plate right now. Please don’t be selfish, okay?”

  Dial tone.

  FOUR

  After I hung up on my parents, I sat on my couch and snuggled up to my dreadful life. Not only was I dying of a rare disease, but apparently I was some sort of bastard-child whose whole miserable life had been a lie. I stared at my front door waiting for a camera crew to come crashing in, yelling, “Gotcha, Susan Spector!” But there were no cameras, no apologies, no Ashton Kutcher. It was the worst punk ever.

  After realizing no one was going to rescue me, I decided I had to do something. After all, ambivalent or not, I didn’t want to die in my living room, at least not in the underwear I was currently wearing. My mother—oops, let me rephrase that, my almost-mother—always reminded me to have nice underwear on just in case I was hit by a truck or something. She never explained to me what the “or something” could be. But now that I could perish at any time, I had to start thinking about things like pristine underwear.