Why is Dad being so mean?
“There are pictures of Frog Boy?” I ask. “Can I see them?”
Dad looks startled to hear my voice. “No,” he answers quietly. “They’ll give you nightmares.” He clears his throat and smiles at Mom. “Great dinner, honey.” He picks at the beer label. “We love you, James, but for a college graduate you’re insufferably naive.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence before all three grown-ups laugh.
I don’t understand. “Maybe Frog Boy likes living in the circus,” I say.
All three grown-ups laugh again. Jamie pats her mouth, and smiles into her napkin. “It’s the wine, Lily. Not you,” she says, taking my hand. Her fingers are cold. Maybe she’s a lizard, with boy and girl chromosomes and a hidden tail, like me. Maybe like Frog Boy too. “Your folks are right. I’m a dreamer.” She smiles at me. “You, however, are something special. You’re an original, a one-of-a-kind without even trying. And a master swimmer to boot.”
“No I’m not.”
But Jamie doesn’t hear me when she touches the pink quartz stone at the center of my crucifix. “Pretty,” she says. “But why do people wear the symbol of Jesus’s death around their neck? Why not His life?”
I’ve wondered too. Maybe I shouldn’t wear it, maybe it makes Jesus sad, maybe it makes everybody sad.
“Blasphemy!” Mom laughs. “You’re lucky Frieda isn’t here.”
Gramma Frieda gave me the necklace. I press it to my chest. “Dad says we make our own luck.”
“Maybe,” Aunt Jamie says, “but I believe that if there is a God, He doesn’t know good fortune from bad, or Jane Russell from Frog Boy. We’re all the same in His eyes, inside and out. All born of the same cosmic gasses, Einstein’s star stuff,” she points at the book, “slime, ether, clusters of cells.” Jamie leans closer and breathes wine stink in my face; usually she smells like Doublemint gum. “Between you and me,” she whispers loudly, “I think Mary and Joseph are crap. The Old Testament too. I’d rather be related to a flatworm.”
“I thought we were,” Dad says. “Unless you’ve given up evolution for something more romantic.” He’s in a good mood again.
The four of us sit quietly together for a while until Dad looks at his watch then leaves the table. A minute later he returns with Jamie’s sweater and satchel.
“Subtle,” she says, scooting her chair back. “Guess I’ve worn out my welcome, huh? Well, somebody had to corrupt the kids, so why not their favorite aunt?”
“Their only aunt,” Dad says, holding out A Child Is Born. “I’m not throwing you out, James. You said you needed to leave before nine, remember? And you’re still an hour from home.”
“Yeah, I forgot. I was having such a good time.”
“Don’t leave your book behind.”
“Keep it for a while. You know, in that fan of magazines on the coffee table: Time, McCall’s, Redbook, explicit photographs of fetuses in utero, Sports Illustrated.”
“No thanks,” Dad smiles.
I touch his arm. “Can’t we borrow it?”
“It isn’t really about s-e-x, Paul. It’s about the wonder of life. All life.”
“You don’t have kids, James. Everything is about s-e-x when you have kids.” He holds out her sweater while she threads her arms through its sleeves. “You okay to drive home?”
She hiccups. “I’m fine. I’m subbing for American Poetry first thing in the morning. Thank goodness it’s community college and freshman level.”
“Dad . . .”
He nearly throws the book at me. “All right already. I don’t want to make it a bigger thing than it is.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Sorry, kiddo, I’m tired.”
Mom gives her sister a hug. When she says something in (what I think is) Romanian, they hug even harder. It’s their secret language.
“Thanks for coming,” Mom says in English.
“Thank you. Everything was yummy.” When Mrs. Wiggins pushes in to sniff Jamie’s pant leg, the old dog wobbles and nearly tips over again. “Poor Wanda Wiggins. I hope she’s staying home tomorrow.”
“Lily wants her to come,” Mom says.
Jamie looks surprised.
“We’ll see,” says Dad.
I still hold the ribbon Jamie made me. She’s smart but Mom’s a better artist.
Chapter 3
Peace Lake
I leave the ribbon on the dining room table that night; Jamie made it for me so I can’t throw it away. The glitter twinkles, the satin shines. The next morning, when Lauren asks if she can have it, I say yes, but Mom says absolutely not, and sticks it in the china cabinet.
We always stop at Elmer’s Pancake House on the way to Peace Lake, and sit in a booth by the window to keep an eye on Mrs. Wiggins. This year she’s too sick to climb in the front seat, or hang her head out the window, so I don’t see her over Dad’s shoulder when he raises his juice glass in a toast.
“To the master swimmer!” he announces, then winks at me. The people behind us look over their shoulders. I raise my glass too, only my arm’s heavy, like it was at the lake the other day, and I put it down right away.
Mom looks at me. “You already full?” She’s worried that Lauren and I won’t eat enough of the chocolate chip pancakes, fresh bananas, three strips of bacon, and OJ we each ordered. I eat most of it but when I wrap my bacon in a paper napkin to give to Mrs. Wiggins, Mom says no. “It’s too hard on her stomach, Lily.”
Dad didn’t want to bring her, but Lauren and I whined until he gave in. I whined more because Mrs. Wiggins is my best friend, even more than Judy. Dad loves the old dog too; he gave her to Mom on their first Christmas together. I felt terrible when he lifted her in the car this morning and she groaned with pain.
In fact, the longer I sit beside her in the back of the car, the guiltier I feel.
Dad looks at me in the rearview mirror and smiles. “Bet you can’t wait to get your feet wet, huh?”
Yes. No. “How much longer?” I miss my watch.
“About forty minutes.” He clears his throat. “How’s the pooch back there?” Lying between Lauren and me, her giant head is in my lap; my legs are numb.
“Should we pull over so she can wet?” Mom doesn’t like us to say “pee.” She waves her cigarette around the car. It almost covers the bad smell coming from Mrs. Wiggins and her blanket which Mom washes every week, “in its own load.”
“No, no, keep going!” Lauren answers.
Mrs. Wiggins doesn’t want to smell bad. It embarrasses her. She turns a big brown bloodshot eye at me and moans.
* * *
“Did I ever tell you kids how your mother and I fell in love?”
“Yes,” Lauren pretends to be disgusted, “one hundred billion times.”
I start: “Mom was a bathing beauty . . .”
Lauren loves this part. She tells everyone that our mother is the most beautiful mother in Portland, Oregon.
“That’s right,” Dad says. “At a photo shoot at Rooster Rock, modeling swimsuits for Jantzen swimwear. I hadn’t seen her in years. Who would have guessed she didn’t know how to swim? She was made to wear a Jantzen!”
Mom whacks him on the shoulder with a rolled-up magazine. “You’re not exactly Johnny Weissmuller!” she laughs.
Johnny Weissmuller?
“You know, Tarzan? He won five gold medals, girls. Anyway,” Mom explains, “it was the polio scare. Everyone thought that swimming in a lake, even in a pool, could make you sick. You know, Frieda was an excellent swimmer in her day too, and—”
“Mom tripped over you. Right?” Lauren is eager to get on with the story.
“Right, she didn’t see me. She fell for me all right,” Daddy says. “Flat on her face!”
Lauren laughs.
“Just call me Grace,” Mom and I say simultaneously.
Mrs. Wiggins moans.
* * *
Lauren colors, while I listen to the usual joking our parents do on car trips: Mom teases how she s
hould have married “that good-looking Barton boy,” who became head of surgery at St. Francis Memorial Hospital, rather than a “skinny knucklehead.” Dad teases how he never had a girlfriend until he met Mom, or “maybe one, but she was blond and went to Hollywood”; he’s forgotten her name. “Marilyn-something, or something-Mansfield maybe,” he wasn’t sure. He had a French pen pal too, “one of the Bardots, I think,” but they lost touch over the years.
Mom and Jamie rarely talk about growing up in Romania during the war, or what happened to their parents when the girls were sent to live at a Christian school in Bulgaria. Mom will sometimes discuss how Frieda’s church brought them to Portland, and how she and Jamie lived with several families when they got here, even about how they took elocution lessons so “we could fit in,” but usually she just says, “We were lucky,” and changes the topic.
Mom tells one story from “the Old Country,” though. It’s my favorite too, about her dead cousin Albert and how something was wrong with his body, but he still got married, then his new wife ran away during their honeymoon, and he committed suicide. They found him dead in a bathtub.
“With all his clothes on too,” Dad chimes in. “He didn’t cut his wrists. He didn’t drink himself to death. He drowned himself. How the hell do you drown yourself?” He shakes his head sadly. “Whatever drove him to it must have been a god-awful thing.”
“I only met Albert once,” Mom says. “Everyone said he was a funny duck.” Mom called me a funny duck once. “He kept to himself a lot.” Mom says I should make more friends. “Always so serious. Carrying the weight of the world on his back.” Mom says I’m too serious.
“Poor Albert,” she continues, looking in the visor mirror. Lauren turns a page in her coloring book. “I wonder what it was. Maybe,” she winks at me, “maybe he had an extra toe so the army wouldn’t take him. Or maybe . . . an arm growing out of his stomach!” She turns quickly in her seat. “Boo!”
Lauren’s still coloring. Mrs. Wiggins woofs.
I stare. It’s not funny.
“Lily . . .” Mom moans, “I’m teasing.”
“Dummy,” Lauren mumbles. “She’s teeeez-ing.”
I slug her arm, then turn my back to her and open Aunt Jamie’s book and concentrate on seeing a human being in the lumps of blind dough and bug-eyed guppies in each picture. I smile at the pretty pregnant girl in the photographs and wonder if the fetus is healthy. Is it a boy or a girl or a hermaphrodite? Will it have Down syndrome like Aunt Cass? There’s weird stuff in our family and Judy says weird stuff gets passed down. Maybe Cousin Albert had a tail.
When I turn to the eighth week, I gasp.
It’s me, inside out: the single-celled-something-weird that becomes a mud frog, a newt in Mother’s rock garden, a fish, a monkey, or Adam and Eve. At eight weeks and one inch, my heart has been beating for a month. Draped in an egg-white shower curtain, I’m a shrimp, a tiny hunchback with webbed fingers, plastic doll joints and black bullet eyes. My head is stitched together like a baseball. The picture is me on the inside: a fuzzy cashew floating in a starry galaxy.
What happens next month to Lily Elaine Asher of Portland, Oregon, West Coast, United States of America, Northern Hemisphere, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, in Forever and Ever, amen? Stay tuned, readers!
“Do fetuses have feelings?” I suddenly blurt out. “Do they know right from wrong? I mean, in a fetus kind of way?”
“Did you bring that damn book?” Mom asks impatiently. She lights another cigarette.
“I brought Jules Verne too.”
Dad touches Mom’s shoulder. “You’re the best read kid I know, Lily Lou,” he says. “No. Fetuses are too busy growing and changing to know right from wrong. Their brains are just developing.”
The radio crackles. It’s mostly fuzz except for some guy answering phone calls far away. “I’ll be damned,” Dad says, twisting the dials. “It’s Joe Pine, all the way up here!”
All the way up here and out the car window, Lauren holds up her Brownie Starlight camera and takes blurry snapshots of tall dark trees pressing against each other, crowding out even Bambi. I get dizzy trying to hold my eyes in one place and focus, looking for a path through the dense undergrowth to a hideaway in the bushes.
And wait.
If no one sees me, and I wait as quietly as I can, for as long as I can, something will happen there. Something special. I know it.
* * *
Lauren’s asleep with her hand on the camera when Dad drives around a slow-moving red jeep pulling a matching red rowboat. Jesus waves a bottle of Coke at me from the backseat. He smiles and picks up His tackle box, waving that at me too.
Jesus?
If He’s “always on the job,” like Gramma Frieda says, shouldn’t He be feeding all those starving kids in China?
Okay, so He’s taking the day off, going fishing. Big deal.
“Where’s the funeral?” Dad laughs as he turns into the lane in front of them. Does he see them too?
Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head sit up front, their eyes (and upside-down noses) on the road. I haven’t seen the Potato Heads for a while—Lauren lost most of their eyes, noses, and mouths last year, which is fine with Mom because real potatoes are messy and smell bad after two weeks in my closet. I was experimenting: If potatoes grow underground, they’re used to the dark. How much would they grow in my dark closet? Is water more important or dirt? I was taking notes, even talking to Mr. Alsup (my science teacher) about it.
I keep an ant farm in my closet too. The ants climb to the top, where the clear plastic sky meets the green plastic frame, trying to get closer to God, so He can hear their prayers. Judy says that’s why Asian people build temples high in the mountains. Judy’s family has a miniature Japanese garden, so she knows stuff like that.
Where my bedroom wall meets the ceiling is where my prayers run, like ticker tape, like a locomotive, around and around my room, rattling and smoking, barely making the corners sometimes.
If I were Jesus, I wouldn’t sit in the backseat of the Potato Heads’ jeep. I’d drive instead, and fast. It’s not like it would kill Him.
My parents don’t mention the jeep’s strange passengers. Mom flips down her visor, touches up her lipstick, and checks me out in the mirror. “Lily, are you still looking at Jamie’s book?”
I want to answer, but at eight weeks, one inch, my brain is still developing and I don’t know what to say.
* * *
“Peace Lake!” Daddy announces when his Pontiac rattles onto the gravel road that winds down to the lake basin. Mrs. Wiggins moans and squeezes her eyes shut. She opens them again when we pull in. There are only two cars in the parking lot.
“Great! Nobody’s here,” Dad says, as he unloads the trunk. He hands Lauren the beach towels. Mom tells me to leave my books in the car. Judy says Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a boy’s book, but I don’t care. I wish I were Captain Nemo and had my own Nautilus to explore Peace Lake, and then I wouldn’t have to swim.
“Let’s draw, shall we?” Mom hands me her sketchpad and a pencil. “You can draw what you see here at the lake,” she suggests. “Or dinosaurs! Aren’t you studying dinosaurs in school? Just not imaginary scenes from the life of Jesus, okay?”
Gee, I only did that a couple, five or six, times. “Okay,” I mumble, and tuck the pad under my arm. “Thanks.”
While Mom unwraps the blankets swaddling her portable bar, Mrs. Wiggins walks past me to the beach, slower than usual. All of us watch her teeter and stumble through the rocks and driftwood before losing sight of her. We know she has finally reached the water when a flock of noisy ducks fly up and over our heads. A few minutes later she slowly brings me a stick.
Dad’s right, we shouldn’t have brought her.
“She got the stick. Maybe she isn’t as sick as we thought,” Mom says. She looks disappointed. Maybe she wants another pet. Chester, her favorite parakeet, used to sit on her easel while she painted; last year he sipped Mom’s turpentine and died.
“She’s slow,” Dad says, “but she seems to be enjoying herself. She still loves being here.” Lauren laughs when he grabs the kindling ax from the trunk of the car, takes a deep breath, and strikes a pose like Paul Bunyan. “Beware the sharks!” he warns before heading off to collect firewood. Dad always jokes about sharks, in Peace Lake—at the YWCA, even in Lauren’s old wading pool and the bathtub at home; any place there’s water.
“You girls know sharks don’t live in fresh water, right?” Mom asks.
Sure, but I talked to Mrs. Wiggins about it anyway. About Sea Hunt and Crawford Woods and all the dark blurry places I’ve noticed since then, but she just opened an eye and closed it again, reminding me that she’ll protect me and there’s nothing to worry about.
My sister and I pull off our shoes and socks and race across the sharp gravel toward the beach. Lauren runs ahead of me, slowing only to toss back the long lacy vines of the weeping willow where our parents first kissed. They came here on their first “official” date.
Lauren and I fill our pockets with shiny rocks, and stand knee-high in the lake eating barbecue potato chips until Mom yells at us for ruining our appetites.
Minutes later, I sit on a rock with my feet in the water. Mrs. Wiggins lies in the cold sand nearby, panting hard, the stick beside her. “Please, Jesus,” I whisper to my picture of the guy with a halo sitting on the back of a dinosaur, “watch over Mrs. Wiggins.”
Creepy Frank Sinatra sings “Strangers in the Night” on the portable radio Mom placed on the tablecloth, and Dad scoops her up, dancing her to the water’s edge. They walk up the beach hand-in-hand, while Lauren makes drippy sand towers for her sandcastle, and I draw.
Lauren and I eat lunch while they’re gone. There’s no time to waste when you have to wait thirty minutes before going in the water.
The Shark Curtain Page 4
