The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  Jesus puts down the TV Guide. “I’m not Santa,” He says.

  “Hardy har har.” I roll my eyes. “Sherman’s family has one, and the Marks are building one. Dad says the Cold War is over and he’s not worried.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “That doesn’t count; you’re dead already. We stopped doing bomb drills at school years ago, but it could still happen, couldn’t it?”

  I hold my breath. One, two, three . . .

  “You worry too much. One day it’s Vietnam; today it’s Martin Hornbuckle. You’ve been sick. Go back to bed.”

  Should I remind Jesus that there’s only enough room in Sherman’s bomb shelter for his family? What about the rest of us? Of course, if Sherman’s blind sister Eva died before the bomb raid, there’d be room for one more. I’m growing taller every day, but I’m double-jointed and I can fold up like a map—no one would know I’m there. Until there’s a big deep earth-rumbling sound and it’s too late . . . I’m inside with Sherman’s family, and outside the bomb has fallen. It’s The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents all rolled into one. Time passes. We wait. Open the lid. And ta-da! A new family unit.

  “Lily,” Jesus says. “Lily!”

  “Huh?”

  He points at the magazine. “It’s called progeria, all right? It’s a genetic defect, and rare, very rare. Those kids never live past fifteen.”

  “Fifteen?” Suddenly I’m cold again and drop the magazine. Jesus picks it up and hands it to me. On the cover, poor Martin Hornbuckle presses his eighty-year-old hands over his ears.

  “Bed!” Jesus says, pointing me down the hall. “And stay there until your mom gets home.”

  Back in my room, I set my snooze alarm for twenty minutes; wherever Mom is, she should be home by then.

  The Aging Disease, reads the title. Why Martin Hornbuckle? What terrible rotten thing did he do?

  Twelve-year-old Martin Hornbuckle: Family Photo. Under the colored photograph of ancient wrinkled Martin, his mom and dad and pretty teenage sister sit on a flowery couch smiling at the camera. Martin looks strange and stupid like a kid-sized cartoon of Jimmy Durante, come to life. Does he have a boy’s voice or a man’s voice? Does he have hair on his legs and chest, and a grown-up penis? Is he scared all the time or is everything changing so fast he doesn’t have time to be afraid?

  Mrs. Hornbuckle’s smile sits on her face like a broken dish.

  Martin’s sister isn’t dating. “People feel sorry for me. I want a boy to like me for myself,” she says.

  The Hornbuckles took Martin out of school in November. In March, they remortgaged their house, sold their boat and second car, and went to Sea World, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Disneyland on a long family vacation.

  “Might as well walk my check right to the hospital,” his hardworking father complains. He holds up a framed photo of an unfamiliar boy in a Little League uniform; the caption reads, Martin, 10 years old. “Still, if I could do more for him, I would.”

  Two local banks opened an account in his name. Edie’s Nail Salon held a bake sale. The Cub Scouts honored Martin with a Badge of Courage. Willie Mays sent him an autographed baseball.

  On page fifty-nine, in each of the four black-and-white portraits in the column on the right, poor Martin Hornbuckle sits on his bed in the same position. He wears the same baseball cap too, but in each picture his body changes: his face sags more, his nose and ears grow bigger, his eyes are sadder. Using the same time-lapse photography they do on TV to show pea vines grow or dung beetles roll poo up a hill, they document poor Martin Hornbuckle’s changes: from being a regular ten-year-old kid, to a balding forty-year-old guy, to a jug-eared sixty-year-old, to a wrinkled eighty-year-old man.

  He stoops more in each picture, but never changes where he sits on the bed. They’ve been taking pictures of him since he got sick, like he’s a science experiment or something.

  I touch my face, half-expecting to find a big nose and basset hound jowls like his. I glance at my reflection in the mirror where I’m sitting on the bed—exactly like Martin Hornbuckle!

  I quickly close the magazine.

  Who makes up the magazine titles? Look? Time? I saw Nazis in Po’s True, and Martin Hornbuckle in Life, like bad stuff is always True, and little boys dying of old age is just part of Life. They say you can’t believe everything you read, so how do I know what is and isn’t real?

  The snooze alarm goes off and I jump. It’s been twenty minutes, and still no Mom.

  Outside the screen door, I slip my bare feet into her gardening tennies and head for the empty lot next door where she sometimes likes to sketch. No Mom there either. I stand on a rotting log and look over at the houses across the street.

  There’s no one. Anywhere. The radio is on the Markses’ house. Judy’s stepdad must be feeling better.

  * * *

  Connie Marks was almost sick with emotion when she came by two days ago. Mom poured them coffee while I sat in the family room writing a book report.

  I tuned in when Mrs. Marks said, “For God’s sake, who needs a swimming pool in Portland, Oregon?” Her voice trembled. I’d never heard her swear before. I watched Mom put her arm around the woman.

  “Judy always gets her way, always . . . I know it’s terrible to say, but . . . but . . .”

  Connie glanced at me but kept talking. “I’m sorry, Kit,” she said, brushing off her lap. “I’m all wound up. I couldn’t sleep last night. I must look terrible.”

  “Who cares, Connie? It’s just us girls.”

  “But you always look good, Kit. How do you do it? You cook and clean like the rest of us.” She picked at something on her pants. “My husband says you’re the best-looking woman on the block.”

  “Your husband needs glasses,” Mom said, lighting a cigarette.

  Connie blew her nose. “He said we’d put the bomb shelter on the north side of the house so it wouldn’t tear up the garden. My poor little plants! But she wanted a pool and a cabana. She doesn’t even know what a cabana is, just that she read about it in one of her teen magazines.”

  Judy once told me every movie star has a pool with a cabana.

  “Now look at the backyard, it’s holes, big . . . ugly . . . holes everywhere! And the men working on it trample everything that’s growing—they’re completely oblivious. Did I mention he’s having a barbecue built? With specially treated bricks? My backyard is becoming an amusement park!” Mrs. Marks stood up and walked to the edge of the patio. “Look at it, Kit!”

  Mom did.

  “My plants, my trees, everything I’ve been babying for years . . . just torn up and thrown aside!”

  Mom patted her back.

  “And the money? We don’t have the money, for God’s sake! Where the hell’s he getting the money?”

  “And everyone says women are bad with money,” Mom added.

  Connie was quiet for a minute. “All I do is love my family and take care of them,” she finally said in a hurt voice. “All they do is . . . take advantage of me. They never ask for my input. I never know what’s going on.” She turned to Mom and smiled. “Thank God I still have you, Kit. And Rusty.”

  “The imp,” Mom said. Both women laughed. “Screw the coffee. You want a drink, Connie? I could sure use one.”

  “No thanks. It’s tempting, but I should get back. I need to think about dinner.”

  “Take a day off, Connie. Corral the kids and go to the zoo, take them ice-skating. Get away.”

  Connie nodded and kissed Mom on the cheek. After she disappeared down the berm, Mom smoked another cigarette and stared at the Markses’ house for a long time. When it was done she sat down in a lawn chair and cried.

  She cries a lot since her hysterectomy.

  By dinnertime that day, Mom was fine, Connie was planning a day at the zoo, and I had a 102.2 fever.

  * * *

  Standing in the lot next door, Mom’s tennies smile up at me. Maybe she’s taking a walk; it’s a nice day for it.
r />   I’m headed back to bed when I hear a familiar voice from Judy’s house. Mom?

  I stick the magazine under my arm again, stumble over, and slip through the patio screen door into her house. Mr. Marks must have called her for help. I hope he’s okay even if he’s a jerk. Frieda says it’s not our job to judge.

  I follow Mom’s laugh down the hall to the Markses’ master bedroom.

  The cool turquoise wall-to-wall carpeting of the bedroom stops abruptly at the door where I line up the toes of Mom’s grass-stained sneakers and peer inside. The bathroom door stands partly open and lights the floor at the end of the bed where Mom’s bra, blue cotton shirt, and the new flip-flops she bought for Tahoe lie in a heap. The rest of the room is dark. I can’t see the throw pillows, scatter rugs, and lampshades in greens and blues that Mom and Mrs. Marks shopped for.

  Sunlight, through the blinds, stripes Mom’s naked porpoise back, and I think of the tropical oceans I’ve seen in National Geographic, and zebra fish feeding in a bed of coral. When Mom leans forward, her butt tips up and I catch a glimpse of mean Mr. Marks flat on his back underneath her. She wiggles the butt of her grass-stained yellow capris, and makes sucking cooing sounds like the babies she never had.

  Mr. Marks moans and Mom sits up again, jerking her right arm up and down in short fast movements.

  Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is on the radio. It’s my parents’ favorite. Mrs. Chester, our piano teacher, ordered me the sheet music.

  “Stop . . . stop . . . stop,” Mr. Marks says breathlessly, and Mom climbs off his legs and kneels beside him on the bed. “Jesus Christ,” he says, dragging a pillow across his forehead. “You’re really something, Kit.”

  Mom gives her pants a tug up so what Dad calls a “plumber’s crack” won’t show. The room smells sour and sweet at the same time, like dirty clothes. Mom and Mr. Marks are having sex. This is what sex smells like.

  “You have amazing breasts.”

  “Thank you,” she says, standing up. Her voice is flat and bored. I’ve heard it lots of times; she’s thinking of something else: a place she needs to be, something she should be doing.

  The blue rug seeps through Mom’s tennis shoes, chilling my feet and sticking them to the thin metal strip that separates the hall rug from the Markses’ master bedroom. The water is cold and begins to rise, in seconds flooding the shoes, passing my ankle, halfway to my knee. My tail snakes down my pajama leg, headed to the sandy bottom of Peace Lake.

  And then the strangest thing: a bark.

  It’s sharp and loud and angry and fills the room.

  It startles me. And Mom and Mr. Marks, who turn to look at me.

  I drop the magazine, hear it splash, and run home again.

  Back home, I place Mom’s shoes where I found them.

  The house feels funny, like somebody else is living here, someone I haven’t met yet. In the kitchen, I pour Mom’s last one-calorie Tab over ice and listen.

  “Hello?” I call out, and imagine Martin Hornbuckle sitting on my bed. I take a sip and check the doors.

  Things get out if you’re not careful, things get in.

  Except for the screen door, the house is locked. Mom wants me to be safe.

  Her kitchen isn’t as clean as Mrs. Marks’s. The breadboard is smudged with butter, jam, and toast crumbs, a package of hamburger is defrosting in the sink. There’s burnt stuff on the foil under the stove’s burners, and the teakettle is dull. Mrs. Marks’s kettle shines; you can see yourself in it. I imagine Mom’s reflection as she walked through their kitchen on the way to Mr. Marks’s bedroom. It’s like the fun-house mirrors at Pixie Kitchen: distant at first, then coming closer, her head disappears in the kettle’s handle and only her belly shows, her sad round soft belly where babies want to grow but can’t. It curves like a clef sign.

  At Mom’s place at the kitchen table are a cup of cold burnt-smelling coffee, a full ashtray of cigarette butts, and her sketchpad. She doesn’t want us to look at her new drawings. She calls them “primitive,” and says she’ll share something with us when she’s ready. Dad says Mom has an “exaggerated sense of privacy.”

  I stand behind her chair and look out the window. Isn’t she coming home?

  She’ll be mad if she catches me drinking her last Tab and looking through her sketchpad.

  When I open it, a tear plops on the page. My tear. It darkens the new redwood gate in the first charcoal sketch she made of the Markses’ house. The next sketch is almost the same, except an unfamiliar woman stands at the gate smiling. In the third and last one, the redwood fence between the Markses’ house and ours is gone, the way it used to be when Mom didn’t drink so much and Judy wasn’t always angry. Mom drew the toolshed our dads shared because they could only afford one mower, and the rosebushes Mom and Mrs. Marks both took care of. Now that we can afford our own mower and two TVs, we’re moving to a bigger house.

  After the trip.

  After the swim party.

  I stick one of Mom’s lipstick-stained cigarette butts in my pocket, dump the ashtray over her sketches, and walk away.

  Until right now, I didn’t want to move. Now, I want to get as far away from the Marks family as I can. I want a new house and new friends. I want new everything.

  At the threshold to my room I don’t jump over the ocean onto Scatter Rug Island. I walk right in, wading across the shark-filled water to my bed.

  Where I sit on it, just like Martin Hornbuckle, and smile for the camera.

  Soon Mom is home. When she checks on me, I pretend to be asleep.

  She turns on The Mike Douglas Show but I don’t join her and, when she knows I’m awake, she doesn’t ask me to. I like Mike Douglas; he’s nice to people—even loudmouth Don Rickles, who isn’t nice to anybody.

  When my sister gets back from the zoo, Mom makes BLTs and sends Lauren in with a tray and the Life magazine with Martin Hornbuckle on the cover.

  * * *

  Mom’s been standing on the other side of my door for a couple of minutes. Inside, I stand on my head on the cubit-sized confession rug I cut from Mrs. Wiggins’s towel, making jerky dance moves like in The King and I, lecturing myself about hating Mr. Marks. When a white dizzy light fills my head, I think of the boy in Siddhartha who struggled to be good, and finally getting over his anger and guilt and judgment grew up to be Buddha. There are photos of three big fat smiling Buddhas on the bulletin board in my world history class—two gold statues in India, one carved into a tree in Thailand.

  I’ve taken to confession lately. It doesn’t look or sound very religious but I don’t care. I’m not Catholic and I’m tired of talking to Dr. Giraffe. It’s my room and I can do whatever I want here. I decide what things mean and what matters.

  Jesus chuckles. I hate how He reads my mind. He tried talking to me about what happened with Mom and Judy’s dad, but it’s none of His business. When He said, “You barked again,” I listened. I didn’t want to believe Him. It’d been a long time since I did something like that, but I touched my throat and my fingers melted through, and when they touched Mrs. Wiggins’s wet fur, I knew He was right.

  Mom’s nervous when she finally walks in. She folds her arms across her chest, which looks weird when you’re upside down like I am.

  “I didn’t know you could stand on your head,” she says, trying to sound casual. “You’ve been sick. That might not be good for you.”

  I get up, then sit on the bed and look at her right-side up.

  I hate Mr. Marks but I’m only mad at Mom. What she did with him even changes the way my room feels, though I’ll adapt. We studied “adaptation” in school. Adapting is about change and survival, and I want to survive. I want to live outside my room someday, so I have to.

  Dogs learned to adapt when people were cavemen; that’s why there are so many of them. I read that there are more animals and insects than people, which means they’re better at adapting and smarter than us. They don’t care about money or TV or art; they run or fly, and eat, sleep, have
babies, and die. That’s enough for them—why isn’t it enough for us?

  “This is your private place and I shouldn’t have listened,” Mom says, “but I heard you talking to yourself. You have nothing to confess, Lily. You did nothing wrong.”

  But I barked and it scared her, I can tell. She’ll want to take me to the doctor or maybe she’ll insist I take more pills, like some of the crazy kids at school. She’ll watch me closely for a while, and feel extra bad, extra guilty, for all the stupid stuff she does.

  Everybody does stupid stuff, I want to tell her, but I might bark so I keep my mouth closed.

  It won’t happen again, I want to say, but what if I growl instead?

  A tear rolls down my cheek.

  “Ah, sweetheart,” Mom says, stepping toward me. Her arms open to hug me but then she remembers what happened. “Shall I call Dr. Giraffe? You could talk to him about the barking and,” her voice softens, “what you saw.” She pauses. “Or maybe you should talk to Jesus—you go to church after all.”

  Jesus looks up. He’s sitting on my desk blotter taking the batteries in and out of my transistor radio. Lately, He’s been showing up with grease on His hands and robe, like He’s been working under somebody’s car. He can’t resist taking my radio apart and putting it back together again. Dad says a good mechanic is always in demand. Maybe Jesus should get a job in a garage.

  “Of course, He never did much for me,” Mom says. “He sure as hell wasn’t around for my family.”

  Jesus’s face turns white like He’s heard a terrible lie, or a terrible truth, and it shocks Him.

  She’s nice. It’s not that Mom isn’t nice. “She doesn’t mean it,” I say to Jesus.

  Mom looks His way, but doesn’t see Him. “I guess you’re busy,” she says to me, then walks to the door.

  Suddenly I blurt out, “John 1:9 says, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I never know what stupid stuff gets stuck in my head, what poems, TV schedules, or Bible quotations.

  I feel myself turn red.

  Mom stands at the door, her hand on the knob, smiling sadly. “You’re a fount of information, aren’t you?”