by Lucy Corin
Christine Falling: fat, epileptic, ridden with acne, and, as they say, dirt poor. She grew up mostly in a refuge, I think they call it, for children. People noticed she was drawn to cats, or vice-versa, but never had the same one for long.
A couple weeks after that fight in the locker room I mentioned, when that one girl slammed that other girl into the pole, I’d gone ahead and dressed out in the red-and-white outfit we had to buy, and I was sitting on the bleachers in the gym with all these other girls, fifty of them. Mrs. Brodie paced below us, talking about how we were going to go out and run around the track, and how some of us were going to hate it and some us were going to love it but we were all going to do it, and how she’d be standing there with her clipboard, checking us off as we came around, so no stopping on the other side of the wall-ball walls and skipping laps. I looked around to see if I could see any girls from my classes, but my eyes caught on one girl who was tall enough to stick out, a white girl, big but not fat, with the kind of eyes that tilt down on the outside, like hound eyes. We met and she took to me, she latched on, casting herself as a kind of protector. It turned out Ilene was pretty powerful in our school, as tough as the Seminole girls, physically. She beat people up sometimes, but she thought I was great and defended me with a kind of blind loyalty I’d never experienced before.
Still, we’d get into raging arguments about things like song lyrics. She’d say she loved this line of a song but then she’d sing it and it’d be nothing but a series of noises. “Those aren’t words,” I’d say. “I think it’s ‘oh my baby,’” I couldn’t win. She said he had artistic license. She said he didn’t have to use real words to express his inner feelings. “But he did use real words,” I said. He didn’t, said Ilene. If I pressed it long enough, she’d come close to hitting me. Ilene was weird, launching into fits of inconsolable anger or crying over things I could never predict, but I blamed it on her personality.
Her parents liked me a lot. They lived in a pretty nice neighborhood off Griffin Road and they’d make it easy on my mother and pick me up and drop me off because they liked me so much. They were smart people, intellectuals actually, and they’d adopted this baby who grew up dumb and with a mean streak, that potential for meanness that seems to come with being dumb. We’d sit in lawnchairs in the backyard by the pool, chatting, while Ilene floated around in the water, or said, “Watch me jump. Wait. I can make a bigger splash than that one. Wait. Watch.”
I didn’t notice her dumbness, same as I didn’t notice how her parents looked Jewish and Ilene did not. I wasn’t grown enough to attribute anything to basic stupidity. I mean no one told me some people just don’t understand things the way other people do, so you can’t expect them to. I responded to her as I would to anyone. I didn’t know to dismiss anything, in an argument, say, because she just wouldn’t get it. She was in a mental space like a pre-linguistic two-year-old, thrashing on the floor, having all these feelings but unable to get them out of her brain. I took it for stubbornness.
Dumb. Angry. Mean. What I want is a way to account for meanness.
Ilene liked this boy who went to dirtbike competitions and won trophies. She said they were going out and that seemed reasonable enough. I was more concerned with how small he was compared to her, and how when she got on his dirt bike and wobbled up and down the street her knees practically hit the handlebars. I was more concerned with that than with how maybe she was deluded. He was a cute boy. She was practically retarded. Never crossed my mind. It might not have crossed his mind either. That kind of innocence kids get accused of.
The boy’s name was Randy. Or Brian. Either way, biking home along Griffin Road he got hit. Hit and run, just like Rhonda, who I’d followed from class to class. No description of the vehicle this time, though, so I went ahead and imagined it was a white van too. His bike got dragged a quarter mile and Randy was flung into the canal. They pulled him out and he was covered in Pond lettuce. I saw a picture of it in the paper. On the side of the canal, on a patch of crabgrass between the sand path and the road, Randy was a shallow hill of himself, as if he’d already been buried and grown over and rested beneath one soft layer of cultivated turf. Years later, they came out with these novelty toys made of pins, a sort of miniature bed of nails that you put your hand under and the pins shift so they make the ghost of your hand. It feels good. People put them on their desks in their cubicles at work. Randy looked like that when they pulled him out. Pond lettuce. Like ruffled frosting on a shaped cake, like the platters of carnations that would soon cover his coffin, but green, even if gray in the photo. Three-dimensional pixels. Tiny dots in the newspaper picture. A blurry shadow of himself encased him.
Ilene wept and wept that her boyfriend was dead. She threw the plastic lamp from her dressing table onto her bed. She threw herself onto the bed next to it and the lamp bounced off the bed onto the carpet. I thought about when Julie told me that girl flung herself at the foot of Rhonda’s grave.
What I mean is there’s a way that these traumatic events served us. You set your face and shove yourself through the world. You shove through the way Mrs. Brodie shoved through those girls to get to that one girl who’d been slammed against the iron post by that other girl. You shove through, and when you reach the trauma there’s a way in which it’s a relief. You can let go. You can relax and collapse for a while. The world stops. You’re in a coma. You’re dreaming.
Ilene clipped the newspaper articles and scotch-taped them onto construction paper and folded them up and put them in her closet in a jewelry box she didn’t use any more, the kind you open and a tiny mechanical ballerina pops up and turns around and around to music.
Christine Falling was probably about as retarded as this friend of mine. And violent. At fourteen, she’d already been dropping cats from windows for years. Sometimes she’d squeeze them to death. She’d hug them, and then she’d just kind of shift the positions of her hands or lean her weight in a little. This fascinated her, in the wordless way things can become fascinating. This minute shift of attention that changed the whole thing.
Then, when she was fourteen, a twenty-year-old man married her for a short time. Christine threw furniture at him and he left soon enough, but still, just as it’s one thing to have a guy like you, and quite another thing to have him fuck you all the time, it’s one thing to be mad at someone and wish they’d go away, and quite another to have them go away forever. Christine Falling panicked in her dumpy heart and started going to the hospital all the time. In the paper they say it’s hypochondria, or psychosomnia. If you look at her record, she complained of “vaginal bleeding.” Could have been menstruation, I suppose, and could have been mutilation. Also “red spots,” and I told you about that acne, so it could have been that, but you know when you see red, like a bull sees red. Could have been that, could have been she was angry like that. And her record says “snakebite,” which you know I believe, and you know I believe you can imagine yourself into all kinds of real pain.
Christine Falling: a clod, a lumpy dumpling, a psychosomatic, hypochondriac, cat-killing boyfriend beater. She started babysitting, so you know what had to happen. For many years it was taken for bad luck, the number of kids who died in her care. It’s easy to look at her and think bad luck. Dumb, damaged, fat, poor, ugly. Kids were dying in her care all through the time I was in elementary school and then middle school. From her picture, you might think she was fifty, but around the time I was friends with Ilene, Christine was nineteen, arrested in Lakeland (which is near Plant City, near Egypt Lake and somewhere north of Miami) and had already admitted killing a few by what she called smotheration. It was like she put her hand near their faces to stroke them, one baby and then another. And it could have been that she leaned in closer, but as she remembers it, while she watched, her hand got bigger and bigger. It swelled and pushed into their ruddy faces, everything puffy and warm.
Evil is always, it seems, linked to stupidity. Even evil geniuses are stupid, these beaker-wielding old men with ost
eoporosis you see in cartoons. The whole point is how flawed their plans are. The flaw is how silly they are, these dumb intellectuals, forever thinking they could be powerful. You know they will never take over the world. They’re all locked up in their scientific minds, which are incapable of functioning outside the lab. They can never account for friction, or for the common sense of the brawny everyman who foils them. Makes you feel pretty safe from evil geniuses, as if they did not actually exist. Hitler, for example, appears in many zany comedies, sometimes in drag as a lady gym teacher.
Mean, the word itself, means run-down, stunted. Mean means mean. Huts and shacks. Brain stem responses. But it does not come down to raw stupidity. I didn’t think of it in so many words, but I know I felt meanness connected to that place. The school, the town, the rumors of the city, the whole notion of the whole state seemed to conjure meanness. Right about that time, someone in Chicago was putting cyanide in Tylenol, so someone in Miami started putting antifreeze, I think it was, in mouthwash. In California, our twin state, the prettier twin, four teenage girls had been abducted, one, two, three, four, from local shopping malls. Some guy said they could be models and one by one they hopped into his car. This was a bit before little Adam Walsh, who you know was also abducted from a mall, from our mall. But it’s not a particularly bad place, where I lived. Mostly, it’s just more obviously bad than other places. It’s the kind of place where people take flying lessons before they hijack a plane. Mostly, we didn’t have much money, and it’s not that money keeps people from doing mean things to each other, but if you have money it’s a lot easier to shut yourself off in a castle, and it’s a lot easier to feel safe from other people’s pain, which is the great majority of it anyway, other people’s pain, no matter who or where you are.
One time it was night, and I don’t know where my parents were, either not home or sleeping, but I was in the bathroom right after taking my bath, examining my legs, which I’d just shaved for the first time. I was sitting on the vanity with my feet in the sink, trying to figure out how it ended up so patchy a job. When the phone rang I answered it in a towel, still pretty drippy.
It was Carlotta, a girl from school who I never thought would call me. This girl was extremely beautiful, and at the time I wasn’t sure if Julie was my best friend any more because she’d been spending so much time with Carlotta. Those two did things I wouldn’t do, like use ballpoint pens to scrape the initials of rock stars into their wrists. Julie showed me how she worked on it at home with a razor. She showed me the razor, in the yellow bathroom with the sailboat wallpaper off the hall between her pink room and her parents’ green one. But I wasn’t angry at Julie. I was half in love with Carlotta myself. Black hair, and those tiny light brown freckles over her nose just to prove the clarity of her skin. She cursed, but more delicately than Julie. Julie smoked like she might have been spitting, with a sour mean look on her face, which I adored. Carlotta smoked, but she smoked like it was a gourmet thing to do, like she was sipping on moonbeams.
Carlotta came from Miami, new to the school in January and immediately everyone was enchanted with her. If you put her hair in rag curlers, just enough to fluff it up, had her eat pudding for a week so her face’d puff out, and dressed her in that flouncy costume, she’d look like Snow White. I did associate her with Snow White, the way people followed her around, looking idiotic. Her mouth, too, reminded me of Snow White, like she’d just eaten something delicious all the time, or was about to and knew it.
Carlotta called me late at night and said she was really sad, that she wanted to die. I heard her say it, and for a second I felt a surge of pride that she called me in such a moment. It was more than a second. I still feel pride. She called me. When she said she wanted to die I felt tiny shivers of light through my stomach. Little electric spasms, little pieces of hopefulness near the tension I felt at hearing her voice from nowhere, at letting an image of her face settle in my mind so the voice could become what you might call bodied, so that the voice could make sense. Carlotta in my room.
“You can’t die, Carlotta,” I said. It’d kill me, I thought.
She explained. She was one of five sisters and they all looked alike, all five girls, two and three years apart on down the line. They lived with their mother. Carlotta was youngest.
Her oldest sister died in a crash on 1-95 on a school trip to see a museum. The bus crashed, one of those stubby half-busses, what they call an Activity Bus, and everyone was hurt, but Carlotta’s oldest sister died. Her window was open. She’d tried to get out or something. Or she’d been leaning out the window like they tell you not to do. It was hard to tell. But the bus tipped over when she was part in and part out. That’s what I could make out of what Carlotta told me. That was when her oldest sister was our age.
A second sister, the sister one step older than Carlotta, died of drugs, one of those girls you hear about who end up in a fancy apartment way high up, holding her hair back with one hand and snorting powder with the other until she wanders to a window or a balcony, thinks she’s a bird and takes off. That happened in Miami and that’s one main reason they’d moved here. To get away from the memory, Carlotta said.
Another sister, the one in the middle, ran off with her boyfriend that very week. He rode his motorcycle right up to their little stucco house in the dark. Her sister’s boyfriend was extremely cool, Carlotta said, a punk rocker from Lauderdale. We didn’t have punk rockers at our school.
The thing about Roger, Carlotta said, was that Roger was really protective of Michelle and there was no way he’d let anything happen to her, especially since he knew about her sisters and he was really sensitive about that. So when he pulled up to the house and the motorcycle’s headlight streaked their bedroom, Carlotta and her fourth sister, who was the oldest now, although she’d always been the shiest, the quietest, the smallest, and most studious, both of them helped Michelle gather clothes into a little suitcase, smashed the pink piggy bank and tied the coins into a kerchief, and helped her out the window. When Michelle settled on the motorcycle behind him with her white nightgown gathered around her knees, Roger took something from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and tossed it to Carlotta and her sister, who leaned out the bedroom window, curtains billowing behind them. Carlotta caught it, and you know those little cloth rosebuds you can buy at gas stations, it was five of them, tied together in a bouquet with a thin white ribbon.
Carlotta said she was holding that bouquet in her lap, right then, talking to me.
I felt half in a dream. I saw the three lost sisters in their final moments of swift life, one with her black hair beating the yellow wall of the wobbling bus, one with her black hair weightless around her face as she dropped from the balcony in the sky like a bird that suddenly tucks its wings, and the third, her face pressed into that boy’s leather jacket, her black hair invisible in the night, except I thought I could hear it, under the engine of the motorcycle, making leafy whispers.
I said, “Where are you now, Carlotta? I mean where in your house?”
“My room,” she said. “Sitting on the floor. Leaning on the wall.”
I’d been standing in my towel, with my elbows on my dresser where the body of the phone stayed. I brought the phone with me as I sat on the floor next to my dresser and leaned against the wall. “Me, too,” I said. The towel was damp all through and I felt cold. I’d missed a patch of hair near my ankle and I touched where my skin was bare right above it. “You can’t kill yourself, Carlotta,” I said. She was crying.
“My mother’s like a zombie,” she said. “I feel like it’s either me next or it’s my sister. I can’t be alone with her,” she said. “I can’t be the last one left.”
Carlotta didn’t kill herself that I know of, at least not then. Maybe later, maybe in high school she did, I don’t know. And after that, around school, it’s not like we had a special understanding. I mean she didn’t look at me knowingly from across the room, but she didn’t shut me out either, the way she might h
ave. It was basically as it had been before. She spent more and more time with Julie, but I felt like I understood why they were becoming best friends and my job was more to look at them from a distance and think about how fucked up and lovely they were. At one point during that late night conversation with Carlotta I got up from the phone and it had such a long cord I could walk all the way to the bathroom. I hung up my damp towel and put my robe on. I let the water from my bath out of the tub and watched the gross little hairs swim down the drain or get left clinging to the plastic walls. I felt afraid. I saw Carlotta lined up with her dead and missing sisters, but I loved hearing her tell it. I felt afraid that I was mean. I looked at myself in the mirror for a while, and watched myself listening to her.
Around that same time, although I didn’t know it until years and years later, although when I learned about it, it seemed like I must have felt it, seeping out of Miami and dribbling along the highways, picked up by fleeing birds and fluttering down like airborne seeds, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, a great, black, bearded man in a white turban and robes was moving through the entrepreneurial world in Ft. Lauderdale and Miami, revitalizing the economic opportunities for African Americans with one great arm and beheading errant followers and other enemies with the other. No lie: he called himself God, Son of God, and led the Nation of Yahweh for the Only True Jews at the Temple of Love, which housed his people who left their birth families, their enslaved families, to join their True Family, and which also housed a printery, a grocery, and a beauty salon. A great, white, winged building, guarded by Yahweh’s Circle of Ten, men who body-searched anyone entering the temple and stood at its gates with wooden staffs the size of men, and machetes, and swords. Followers who spoke against him were ridiculed and beaten at Temple Meetings. I will die for God Yahweh, I will kill for God Yahweh. That’s what the followers shouted in unison, in throngs in the great white circular hall in the Temple of Love. And he ordered the members of the Brotherhood, the extra-super secret central circle within the sect, the men he called his Angels of Death (Leon Grant, known as Abiri Israel; James Louis Mack, known as Jesse Obed Israel; Ernest Lee James, known as Ahinadad Israel, and others, too, like Rozier, Pace, Beasley, Maurice, Ingraham, and also Gaines, who stood out because she’s a woman, but I don’t remember their special cult names) to kill, among others, a man named Branch who’d had what they call a scuffle with a member of the Yahweh religious sect.
