Silence, a rare commodity at the Capotosti residence in any season, was broken that moment, when the screen door slammed behind Henry, who hurried past, guitar slung over his shoulder, followed by Louis. “See you later,” Henry said with a quick wave, without even glancing at Iris or her father. He had a habit of looking down when he walked, instead of at what was ahead or around him. Iris wondered how he didn’t get run over when he walked down the street.
“Where are you going, young man?” A half-formed smoke ring followed her father’s words out of his mouth.
“Over to the Grange,” Henry hardly ever went anywhere, except down in the basement, or out in the chicken coop, where he played his guitar for hours on end. The Grange was a glorified name for an abandoned shed down behind the playground where neighborhood kids sometimes hung out.
“I’m coming, too!” Louis said.
“No, you’re not,” Henry said. “It’s musicians only tonight.”
“So it’ll just be you and Bob Dylan?” Louis said.
“I don’t like you wandering the streets until all hours, Henry,” their father said, though Henry was already halfway down the driveway. “Be back in an hour.” Plunk! This time the apple landed right in his lap. “Jeepers Cripes!” he said, tossing the pocked green fruit to the ground. He lit another cigarette, and shook his head. “All we need in this family is another Uncle Alfred.”
“Hey, Iris, want me to show you how to get revenge on those gals?” Louis asked. Louis wasn’t the meanest of her brothers, so she didn’t really mind when he sat down next to her on the glider. In fact, though he wasn’t aware of it, Louis had actually done her a big favor. He was nearsighted like her, so when he had gone to get his vision checked by creepy Dr. Julius, she had tagged along. Louis was curious about everything, and he had been the one to suggest that they go into the examining room together so he could watch up close how Dr. Julius checked her eyes with that machine with all the lenses. Iris still hated wearing her glasses, but had to get used to it, since reading and sleeping were the only things she could do without them.
“What gals?” Iris waved a hand in front of her face. It maddened her that those pesky insects could ruin one of the most pleasant times of day.
“The mosquitoes,” Louis replied. “It’s the females that feed on human blood.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. And my science teacher. They need human blood to make their eggs.”
“Gross!” Louis may not share his twin’s talent for playing the guitar, but he sure knew about lots of other things.
“Watch this!” Louis said, grabbing her wrist. “Let one of them land on you, and tell me as soon as you feel the prick.”
“Now!” Iris said a few seconds later, followed by, “Ouch!” as her brother pinched the flesh of her forearm between his thumb and index finger, gorging the mosquito until it burst, staining her skin with her own freshly sucked blood.
“Gross!” Iris said again, as Louis squealed with laughter and ran back inside the house.
“Hey, Dad!” Louis ran out the door again a minute later.
“What is it now, Louis?”
“Mom said to tell you Auntie Rosa called. She can’t come over because Dolores is there.”
“Dolores is there?”
“Yes. Mom said to tell you there is a situation.”
“Another situation? Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” her father said, shaking his head, and draining his coffee cup.
Iris knew “situations” were not a good thing. Last time there had been a “situation” was at Easter, when Dolores had stayed at Auntie Rosa’s for a whole week, without Dr. Julius, and wore these big sunglasses all the time, even though she never left the house, and even though the sun had barely shown its face since Groundhog Day. Uncle Alfred kept trying to cheer Dolores up by saying, “Who’s behind those Foster Grants?” as if she were a movie star, but instead of laughing, Dolores dabbed at the corners of her shaded eyes with one of the hankies she always clutched in her hand.
Iris swatted at another mosquito as it landed on her arm. If Auntie Rosa wasn't coming over, there was no sense hanging around doing nothing except letting swarms of pesky mosquitoes feed on her blood so they could make more swarms of pesky mosquitoes, when she could go to her room and read. She hopped off the glider and went over to her father. “Good night, Dad,” she said, feeling reassured by his evening stubble as she brushed her cheek against his.
“Get a good night’s sleep, honey. Tomorrow’s the big day.”
“I know,” But it wasn’t tomorrow yet, was it? Tonight, she could still look forward to Little Women.
Once inside, Iris climbed the stairs, the temperature rising with each step of her ascent into the breathless air of the upper floor. She was sweating and irritated, but relieved to find the bathroom free; she went in and locked the door. She sighed as she leaned over the sink she had scrubbed clean that very morning. The basin was coated by a grey film, sprinkled and spattered with bits and pieces of Capotostis and their grooming habits: whiskers in shaving cream scum, shed armpit hairs, gobs of toothpaste and wads of saliva, granules of acne scrub, plucked eyebrows, nail clippings, boogers and mucus in various shapes and shades of green. She turned on the hot water full blast, and chased it all down the drain.
When the goop and gunk were gone, Iris plugged the drain, filled the sink with cold water, and submerged her head to cool off. She stayed that way, blowing bubbles out of her nostrils until she had squeezed all the air out of her lungs, then came up for air, and dunked her head again. When she ran out of air again, she stood up straight, tossing her hair back with a jerk of her head, enjoying the feel of the cool drops trickling down her neck and back. She felt better for a moment, as she watched the water swirl down the drain, but her irritation resurfaced when she fished her toothbrush out of a glass, and found the bristles wet, a sure sign that someone else had used it. She brushed her teeth anyway, knowing she could not sleep with corn wedged between them. She lowered the seat on the toilet, which was always in boy position, and sat; while peeing, she looked down at her feet, which were covered in dirt and grass stains, and contemplated washing them, but decided she did not feel like it. The sheets on the bed were never clean, anyway. She reached for the toilet paper, and her irritation grew when she found there was only one square of tissue clinging to the roll. She sat to air dry until someone started banging on the door.
“It’s about time!” John pushed past her as soon as she unlocked the door. Iris went to her room and flopped down on the mattress next to Lily who lay on her back with her eyes closed, the vestiges of light from the window throwing a soft blanket of grey over her motionless form. The bed bounced under Iris’s weight, its tired springs groaning.
Iris reached down to pick up her book from the floor; there was still enough light to read for a bit without disturbing Lily. She couldn’t wait to find out whether Jo would marry the German professor she had met in New York.
“Iris?” Lily said.
“What?” Iris replied, flipping to the page she had marked with a clover necklace.
“I can’t sleep.”
“It’s pretty hot, isn’t it?” Iris said. Though the sun had gone down, the temperature and humidity had barely budged. Iris might have wished for a thunderstorm to clear the air, but lightning scared her at night. She heard all kinds of stories about lightning striking houses and setting them on fire while everyone was sleeping.
“It’s not because I’m hot,” Lily said.
Iris rested the open book against her chest. “Is it because you are excited about tomorrow?” she asked.
“I dunno.” Lily rubbed her eyes and yawned.
“Are you all packed?”
“Yep. Look over there,” she replied, pointing to a brown grocery bag slouched against the dresser. Iris could spot Lily’s favorite outfit sitting atop the jumble of familiar fabrics peeking out from the bag. Like most of Lily’s clothes, the flowered top and turquoise shorts had once b
een worn by Iris, and by one or more sisters before her. No one had ever gotten around to replacing the top button that had gone missing from the shorts, which were still a size too big for Lily, and when she ran, they tended to slide down her narrow hips. One look at those shorts made Iris picture Lily running behind her, in that lopsided way of hers, with one hand clutching the waistband, and the other churning the air as she tried to keep up. Sometimes it was faster to grow into an article of clothing than to get it fixed, but Iris was thinking maybe she would find a button and sew it on for her one of these days.
“Good girl. Me too.” Iris pointed to another brown grocery bag standing tall and straight next to her blue valise, its posture expressing confidence that it could do the job as well as a proper suitcase, even if it only had a Star Market logo on its side instead of a sketch of the Eiffel Tower.
“Did you pack enough socks and underpants?” Iris asked.
“I guess. I took what was in the drawer. That’s all there is.”
“How about your bathing suit? Maybe we’ll get to go swimming. Wouldn’t that be nice?” Iris wasn’t crazy enough to think she would ever make it to any of the Hawaiian beaches depicted in Uncle Alfred’s posters, but maybe it wasn’t too much to wish for a swim in one of those crystal clear lakes she admired in the glossy magazines in the waiting room of the guitar studio.
“Remember where they took us last year, Iris? To that swimming hole that stank like pigs? And we floated around on those tractor trailer tire tubes? And you had to wear sneakers in the water or the mud would grab your toes and suck you in, just like it did to Auntie Teresa?” Lily didn’t look at Iris, but at the ceiling, as she spoke.
“It was kinda gross,” Iris had to admit, picking her memory for some other feature that would make her look forward to two weeks on the farm. Two weeks in which her parents would have two less mouths to feed, and two weeks in which her cousins would have two extra pairs of free farmhands. It sounded like everyone would be getting a break; everyone but Iris and Lily.
“Can’t you remember anything good? Try harder.” Iris wished that Lily, just for once, would recognize her need to see the positive side of things, and try to support Iris, instead of always pointing out the negative side. Anyone could do that, and all it did was make you feel worse.
“Like what, Iris? Like when you got out of the water and I pulled that big fat leech off your back?” It was no use; Lily obviously relished her role as saboteur of memories.
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that!” Iris cringed at the recollection. “I give up!” She closed her book and rolled on her side to face Lily. “Good thing you saw that thing, before it sucked out all my blood.” She scratched at the constellation of mosquito bites on her left ankle. What was so good about her darn blood that they all wanted a taste?
By unspoken accord, the girls fell silent, as a distant freight train wailed of worries of its own. Iris and Lily loved to listen to that sound on summer nights, with the window thrown wide open. Sometimes, when they had trouble falling asleep, they would lie in bed and fantasize about where the trains were headed, and Iris would hang upside down over the side of the bed, and reach underneath to pull out the dusty atlas she kept hidden there. She had discovered the atlas in the garage, under her father’s workbench, where it had been abandoned together with the plan to drive the family all the way down to Independence to visit Grandma Whitacre. Iris and Lily liked to snuggle close together under the sheet with a flashlight (that, too, came from the workbench, and was even more top secret than the atlas); after studying the maps of all the states, they would each pick out a city they would like the train to take them to. Iris loved the French-sounding Boca Raton; Lily’s favorite was Kalamazoo.
As the last faraway whistle grew faint then faded altogether, and the only sound sticking to the thick night air was the chirping of the crickets, Iris felt herself sinking more deeply into the mood of sadness that had pervaded her earlier. Summer was pressing on, just like the train, leaving her and her expectations behind. Though she could live without going to Boca Raton, she still wished she could go swimming in one of those silvery blue lakes. But there was no sense thinking about that now, if there was no way she could make it happen. “Have you counted them tonight?” she said.
“What? The trains?” Lily asked.
“No, silly. The cricket chirps. Remember how Louis taught us about figuring out the temperature? You start by counting the number of chirps per minute.”
“No. I mean, yes, I remember. But I don’t feel like counting anything tonight.”
Because Iris had always liked to count things, sometimes she got Lily to play a game where one of them closed their eyes, and asked the other questions about the room they were in, such as how many linoleum tiles ran across the floor each way, or how many butterflies there were on a certain section of wallpaper. Numbers helped Iris define her surroundings, and she felt a sense of security in knowing how many steps were in each staircase, how many toothbrushes in the bathroom glass, how many pews ahead and behind her in church, how many rows of how many seats in her classroom.
“Why not?” Iris asked.
“I’m just thinking about tomorrow. About the farm.”
“We’ll have fun. You’ll see. You’re Nancy’s favorite, that’s why she picked you to be her flower girl when she got married. You were so pretty in that yellow gown with the hoop skirt. And we can play with her baby.”
“Big deal!” Lily replied. “We have plenty of kids around here.”
“But Nancy has a little girl,” Iris said. “And you’re the only Capotosti girl that doesn’t have a little sister. Just little brothers.
“I don’t care. I don’t want a little sister. And anyway, why should I pretend she’s a sister when she’s only a cousin? And I really don’t want to help milk the cows. They make me sick to my stomach.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, they scare me!”
“I hate cows!” Lily said.
“Lily, don’t say that! It’s not nice,” Iris reprimanded her, wondering what would happen if she blurted that out to their cousin’s husband. He was a real farmer, and cows were his life. Bill Jablinski had the blondest hair and pinkest skin Iris had ever seen. Their father said that was because his grandparents came from Poland, and not from that Scurcola place, or anywhere else in Italy. When cousin Nancy was out of earshot, Bill always called Iris and Lily “guinea” and “wop” and a bunch of other names that made him laugh, and when his tractor wouldn’t start, he blamed it on them, saying the engine got all clogged up on account of them being greasy Italians.
“Well, it’s true!” Lily said. “I do hate cows! And you do, too. Admit it!”
Iris tried to remember more about their time on the farm the previous summer. When she squeezed her eyes shut, her skin flinched at the sting of horseflies, and her stomach turned at the stink of the knee-deep manure she had to wade through in the barnyard to herd the cows into their milking stalls. Anxiety gripped her chest, and fatigue seeped into her limbs at the recollection of the endless rows of cows with their bulging, swaying udders, and of how she had to squeeze in between their dirty, hulking frames, terrified that they would shift their weight and crush her like a fly when she tossed the milking strap over their backs and crept below them to hook it under their bellies. Her nose wrinkled at the pungent smell of hot urine as it cascaded freely from bovine backsides, showering her arms and legs as she tried to dodge the stream. Her belly churned with nausea at the image of cow poop plopping into the trench behind the animals, and the cruddy pail of foul water everyone used to rinse excrement from their arms. It was amazing how many memories she had of those cows, if she really thought about it.
“Who ever decided we had to like cows, anyway? Iris said. “You’re right, Lily! I hate cows, too!” She knew it wasn’t holy to think, let alone say, the word “hate” but it sure felt good. A sense of liberation rippled through her, making her giggle. “Everyone expects us to be all thrilled about g
oing out to that farm, but we both hate cows!”
“We hate cows!” Lily said, jumping to her knees on the bed, the squeaking of the springs as she bounced making them both laugh harder. “We hate cows!” they chanted together. “WE HATE COWS!”
“In case you guys don’t understand it in English, BOOO MOOO!” Iris tackled Lily, and tickled her under the armpits. The girls laughed and rolled on the bed until their stomachs hurt and Marguerite yelled from their big sisters’ room for them to shut up. Clamping their hands over their mouths until they regained control of themselves, they fell on their backs, sweaty and panting.
“I ... don’t …. wannagothere … Iris,” Lily said, between breaths. Neither did Iris, but that was what they had to do.
“I only know one way out,” Iris said. “How about a fairy tale? One set in a very special place, in a fairyland where there are no cows to milk. But everyone can have all the creamy white milk they want, because it gushes from a waterfall – a giant one, like Niagara Falls. And the swimming holes are filled with chocolate milk instead of mud.”
“Please, Iris?” Lily whined. “Couldn’t we go there for vacation instead of Miltonville?”
The girls lay on their backs, their rib cages rising and falling rapidly, then slowly settling into an even rhythm. The chirps of crickets were drowned out by the roll of thunder, followed by a loud clap that made them jump into each other’s arms.
“Don’t worry, Iris,” Lily said. “We’re going to that fairyland now. Houses can’t get struck by lightning there.”
Iris sucked in a deep breath, then sighed. A long, loud sigh, that ended with a hmmpf.
The Complete Series Page 21
