“Just relax,” Dr. Julius whispered so close to her ear it tickled, but not in a way that made her laugh. She sank lower in the chair. “Look straight ahead, now, like a good girl. Don’t look at me.” Iris tried very hard to stay focused, but the smell of his rotten breath made her eyes water and her stomach lurch.
“Perfect. That’s a good girl,” Dr. Julius cooed as he snapped off the flashlight, patted her head with his free hand and moved behind the chair. He placed a hand on her shoulder and pointed to the opposite wall. “You see that chart over there, honey?” he said. “Now read the letters you see in the third row from the top, starting from the left.”
Iris grasped the armrests with both hands and scooted herself up in the chair, preparing to concentrate on her new task. The backs of her bare legs were glued to the vinyl upholstery of the chair, and she reached behind her to pull down the back of her dress, in the way Auntie Rosa and Sister Josephine said a young lady should.
“Here, let me help you, sweetheart,” said Dr. Julius, his voice as sticky as the vinyl. His offer required no answer, but before she could say anything, one of Dr. Julius’s hands slid beneath her and cupped her buttocks (that’s what Auntie Rosa said was the proper way to call your fanny), while the other tugged at the thin cotton fabric. Iris didn’t like the feeling of his hand underneath her, but she knew she couldn’t say that out loud to him. He was a grown-up, and cousin Dolores’s husband, and a doctor to boot.
“There you go, isn’t that better?” he said, as he smoothed the hem of her dress over her legs, then covered her right eye with a small plastic paddle. “Can you read those letters for me, honey?” he said, his left hand lingering on her thigh. Iris tried to decipher the letters her mother and her big sisters and the nuns at St. Augustine’s had taught her to recognize, but her already blurry vision was clouded further by the uneasy feeling that she was doing something wrong. She tried harder to focus on the chart. “F, O, or maybe Q?” she began to read. “Z, V, R or P? I dunno … I don’t feel so good. Can I go?” It was true, she really did think she was going to puke. Without waiting for an answer, she jumped down from the chair, twisting her ankle as she landed, and hobbled out the door as fast as her legs could carry her. Her mother, struggling to prevent her toddlers from shredding all the outdated magazines in the waiting room, did not notice the flush in her cheeks as Iris blurted out, “Can we go now, Mom?”
Dr. Julius was close behind. “Our Iris is an impatient little one, Betty!” he said with a chuckle. “No real problem here, she’s just a tad nearsighted. I would have run some more tests, but she’s not one for sitting still, is she? Anyway, I’ve seen enough to fit her for her first pair of specs. Would you like to pick out some frames, Iris?”
Dr. Julius stood in the doorway in his long white coat, with his tiny flashlight and gold pen stuck in his pocket, his thin smile stuck on his face, his Adam’s apple stuck in his throat. “I don’t feel good,” Iris said. “I wanna go home.”
Her mother, flustered and anxious to be on her way, gathered up her baby boys and said, “You take care of it, Julius. Nothing fancy, of course, just affordable. We trust you. Give Dolores my regards.” Dr. Julius nodded and kept smiling that horrible thin smile of his.
Iris hated thinking about the day when her mother brought her to see Dr. Julius. She hated the way the world looked to her in those glasses, and she hated the way she looked in them. She hated the way the glasses slid down her nose when she ran and fogged up when she came in from the cold. She would rather sit close to the TV, like she did that Saturday morning, at least until the scraggly bunch of barefooted brothers and sisters in crooked pajamas and tousled hair tumbled down the stairs, looking like the stunned survivors of a predawn earthquake. Iris’s brief moment of solitude was shattered, as they fought over cereal bowls, fought over who was to blame for the spilt milk, fought over seats on the sofa. Already Marguerite and Louis were complaining that Iris was blocking their view of the TV, and that The Shhh! Show was for babies. Iris relinquished her spot without a word, and slipped from the room. She had grown tired of being silenced by that man without a voice when she wasn’t even making any noise, anyway.
She wanted to find a place to be alone, but it was too early to go outside. She cracked open the door to the basement, and stood at the top of the stairs, squinting into the darkness, trying to summon up the courage to go down. She flipped a switch on the wall, and a feeble light illuminated the steps. She placed a bare foot tentatively on the first one, pausing to speculate as to what dangers might be lurking in the fuzzy shadows down below. She took a deep breath, and forced her second foot to follow the first, then both feet to take her all the way to the bottom. As she stood trembling on the last step, she was tempted to turn on her heels and scurry back up to safety, but with a rush of bravery she leaped into the air, and yanked on the chain dangling from the ceiling light. An arc of light from the naked bulb dispelled the first cluster of sinister shadows, revealing the lumpy leftovers that furnished the “rec room.” Dark places (especially dark places with lots of stuff in them, like attics and basements, more than dark empty places, like the night sky), scared Iris even more since that time when her parents had gone out, and Violet had let Iris stay up to watch a movie with her. Mostly, Iris liked the idea of curling up with Violet on the sofa, even though she couldn’t see much that far from the TV. But what she did see was that scene where the woman stabs a man in the back with scissors, after he jumps out of from behind a curtain and tries to strangle her with a stocking. Iris was terrified, but wouldn’t look away until she was sure the man was dead, and at least Violet hugged her until she stopped shaking, though probably it was mostly because she was worried about getting in Trouble for letting Iris watch the movie, but Iris wasn’t one to snitch, especially if it meant getting Violet or one of her sisters in Trouble.
Iris was proud of her bravery coming down here this morning, and a sigh of relief deflated her lungs as she searched for her reward. Her heartbeat slowed, then instantly sped up again as she spotted the object of her desire: the record player. She knew she risked a pounding from Alexander if she was discovered, but she simply couldn’t resist. She slipped the vinyl LP from its jacket and dropped the Beatles album onto the turntable. A scraping sound came over the speaker as she picked a clump of fuzz from the needle and eased the arm down into the groove, being extra careful not to make any scratches, like she had seen Violet and Marguerite do the previous afternoon, when they had granted her temporary permission to stay in the basement with them because she had folded all the diapers and even brought them glasses of orange juice. Iris had stayed out of their way, like they made her promise, sitting silently on the lumpy couch, wiggling her bare foot to the beat as she watched them twist and turn, but after a while she couldn’t stand it anymore, kind of like when she had to pee real bad and someone else was taking a real long time doing number two in the bathroom. When it was just too much for her and she jumped up and started dancing, they told her she didn’t know how to keep promises and kicked her back upstairs.
This morning, there was no one to stop her from dancing all she wanted, at least not until someone sniffed her out. She turned the volume down lower than she would have liked, to avoid attracting unwanted attention, and as the music began to play, she started imitating the moves she had seen her sisters make when they danced. It was Iris’s favorite tune, the wanna hold your hand song, which she used to call the Hawaii song, because of the part that went “and I held her hand in Hawaiii-iii.” That was until Marguerite had heard her singing, and started laughing at her, and told her she was too young to listen to the Beatles if she couldn’t even get the words right, and then embarrassed her to death at supper when she told all the Big Kids how Iris had mistaken the word “mine” for “Hawaii” and then they all had a good laugh at her, except Alexander, who just gave her a mean look, and said he better not catch her with her sticky paws on his album, or he would pound her. As if she didn’t already know that.
But the more she danced, and the more she sang, the less she thought about the risk of Alexander catching her with her sticky paws on his record. She played the song over and over again, dancing from beginning to end, then rushing to raise the needle, and lower it carefully in just the right spot without scratching, which was getting harder to do as the dancing made her hands all shaky and sweaty. She finally collapsed on the couch, her nightgown soaked with perspiration, her ribcage rising and falling as she sucked in gulps of musty basement air. Just as the next tune started playing, she heard a loud squeak groan over the sound of the music. Someone was opening the door at the top of the stairs! Images of Alexander coming down to pound her instantly materialized with such frightening clarity that she could hear the thump his fist of knuckles would make against her back. Cringing, she ran to turn off the record player, lifted off the album while the turntable was still spinning, and shoved it into its jacket.
“Anyone down there?” her father’s voice bellowed from the top of the stairs.
“I am!” Iris called out with the scraps of voice left after all the singing and dancing, shaking with relief that it was not her brother, though everyone must be up by now, judging by the sounds of Saturday morning bedlam tumbling down to the basement through the open door.
“Jeepers Cripes!” her father shouted. “How many times do I have to tell you kids to turn the lights off?!” He must not have heard Iris over the ruckus, because if he had, he never would have flicked the switch and slammed the door and left her stranded there with all the creepy shadows and leftover furniture in a tiny island of light, with no way out but through the darkness.
Clouds played in the spring sky, somersaulting in from Lake Ontario, then scuttling off capriciously every which way. Like Iris, they didn’t seem to have a clear idea of what they should do this Saturday afternoon. After her unnerving experience in the basement (she was finally liberated when her mother switched on the light and came down to get started on the Saturday washing), Iris set off for a walk down Rugby Road. As usual, she found that walking was too slow a means of locomotion, unless she was on the prowl for gum wads, and soon broke into a skip. She enjoyed the hopping rhythm she set for herself, and the sense of freedom she felt when she let her arms swing back and forth, gaining momentum with each carefree, sweeping motion. Heading in the direction of Rita Esposito’s house, she spotted Rosemary, the girl who lived alone in the corner house with her parents, presumably on her way home from the corner drugstore, judging from the little paper bag in her hand, which was probably filled with Bazookas, each soft pink square of bubblegum still ensconced in its miniature comic strip, and packaged in its waxy wrapper. Each piece had a little line down the middle, so it was easy to break in half if you had to share it, but Iris doubted Rosemary would be interested in sharing with anyone, let alone her. Iris waved to her, and Rosemary waved back, blowing bubbles and clutching her bag even more tightly. Iris wondered whether she might even have some Juicy Fruit in there. Her mouth watered at the thought; she hardly ever found Juicy Fruit on the ground because its neutral color made it harder to spot than pink bubblegum, and when she did, it never tasted very juicy or very fruity. Iris felt a certain sense of awe mixed with pity for Rosemary, ever since that day when Sister Josephine had made each of them stand in class and state their dates of birth. When Rosemary said hers was February 29th, Sister Josephine got all excited and told the class that meant she only had a birthday every four years, which seemed like a pretty awful thing to have happen to you, especially if you were supposed to have a free will, because no one with a free will would ever give up their birthday, and there was no amount of gum that could change that.
In the Capotosti family, your birthday was even better than Christmas. It was the one day of the year when people actually noticed you, in a good way, though, not like when you got in Trouble. You got to pick out which kind of cake and frosting you wanted, and your mother made it, just like that, the very exact one you asked for! Your brothers and sisters were all real nice to you, at least part of the day, and put cards they made specially for you by your plate at supper. Auntie Rosa came over straight from work, wearing her nurse’s uniform and white stockings, unpinning the cap from her hair as she sighed over the emergency that had held her up, but then got in a happy mood when she saw the whole family gathered together, and started pinching everybody’s cheeks and saying “Bella della mamma!” Then she set down a prettily wrapped box which always made everyone curious, even though underneath the tissue paper there was never anything but a new pair of pajamas for the boys or a nightgown for the girls. After dinner Uncle Alfred always sneaked out of the room, then the lights suddenly went out, and Uncle Alfred returned with his guitar, and started leading the Capotosti chorus in “Happy Birthday.” Her mother brought in the cake, ablaze with just the right number of candles that meant you really were one year older, and the frosting with your name written on it in colored gel, which meant the cake really was for you, and your face felt all warm when you bent to blow out the candles and everyone clapped, and you felt all warm inside, too, because of the way nobody tried to butt in and blow out your candles, or tried to rip up your cards, or steal the box with your new nightie, or threatened to pound you or make you fold diapers or send you to the dairy, all because it was your birthday. Maybe, since Rosemary didn’t have any brothers or sisters, she didn’t really need a birthday every year.
Bright yellow shingles clung to the sides of Rita Esposito’s house, dressing it like a spring frock. The house was separated from the cracked and buckled tree-lined sidewalk by a lush lawn of emerald grass that beckoned Iris to take her shoes off and wade through it, even though it wasn’t summer yet, and even though she knew Mr. Esposito detested people walking on his grass, which was the one thing that made him yell even louder than Iris’s father, though it was hard to imagine anyone yelling on such a lovely day. Iris sensed the arrival of spring in her bones; she loved the way it made her feel all fluttery inside, and hopeful that she had seen the last of the cold and grey and dark and ice and wind that pummeled her hometown in upstate New York during the long winter months. It was funny how seasons changed, how one day you suddenly noticed that it was already light out when you got up in the morning, and still light out when you went to bed. And how suddenly the last traces of dingy snow and icy slush were washed away by the rain and sucked up by the sun. She hoped Rita could come out to share the sunshine while it lasted.
Hopping up the steps to the front porch, Iris peered through the curtained windows but saw no sign of life. She went around to the side of the house, and stopped below Rita’s bedroom window. Iris liked playing in Rita’s room when it was too cold to play outside; the only girl and the youngest of four kids, Rita had the room all to herself and slept on a neatly made bed covered with a frilly pink bedspread and piled with stuffed animals that Rita called by name. Toys and games were kept in a wooden chest in one corner of the room, from which they were taken and into which they were returned with meticulous care. Iris shared Rita’s penchant for neatness, but doubted whether Rita would ever understand how Iris felt upon discovering strewn about the living room floor the Crayola crayons her parents had given her for her birthday which she had hidden in her last resort drawer together with her glasses that didn’t work and the underwear with frayed elastic and socks with holes in the heels, where she was sure no one would ever look. So although Iris admired Rita’s toys, sometimes she felt like a part of her got locked out when they played together in her room. Outdoors, they were more on Iris’s turf; Rita was afraid of dogs, and cars, and colored kids. She was afraid of getting dirty, and of getting caught in the rain. Rita made Iris seem much more courageous than she actually was when they played outside, and after surviving her experience in the basement, Iris felt primed for the role of fearless leader. Standing beneath the window, she cupped her hands around her mouth, mustered up her strongest voice and sang, “Ri-ta-aaa!! Ri-ta-aaa!!” No answer. She inflated her lungs and tried again
. “Ri-ta-aaa!! Ri-ta-aaa!!” Still no answer. After a few more tries, Iris felt lightheaded and her throat was all scratchy. She finally gave up and walked back down the street with no destination in mind, and ended up in her own backyard. Half disappointed, half surprised to find no one else there, she spent her courage climbing to the very top rung of the Jungle Gym to have a look around. She loved the feeling of being able to observe without being seen. From her perch, she could see the backyard of the house next door where, when the weather was fine, two old ladies sat for hours on end, draped in crocheted shawls, mumbling and moaning and rocking back and forth in their chairs. Iris and Lily sometimes crouched near the fence to spy on them and try to decipher the lyrics of their laments, until they got bored by the total lack of action, or scrambled away in fear when the ladies made gurgling animal noises that made the hairs on their arms stand up straight.
The Complete Series Page 4
