“You need to get out of your room, Lily,” Mom says. “It’s not healthy to spend so much time inside. Look at Lauren, she gets out.” Lauren stays over with girlfriends almost every weekend. She went to a slumber party last night.
“I get out,” I whine, but when I try to remember where and when, all I can think of are scenes from books or TV. “I’ll get out at the new house.”
“You’re old enough for dances, shopping, hanging out with your friends.” Friends?
I don’t do those things. Mom doesn’t either. Mom likes her studio like I like my room, and she hasn’t had a friend since Mrs. Marks moved away. Which I blame on evil Mr. Marks. I write S-E-X in my left hand under the table.
“Lily’s fine,” Dad says. My folks take turns arguing about me. “Look at her. She’s healthy, and isn’t she pretty? She’s like you, Kit, pretty and artistic. What’s wrong with that? She’ll be dazzling the boys in no time and then you’ll wish she was spending too much time in her room.”
“Lily’s a nerd,” Lauren says.
“Lauren!”
Mom gets “directed” when she paints, productive, “hyper,” and Dad says he wishes she’d start drinking earlier in the day. Mom’s father was the same. “Everybody’s a slouch next to her old man,” Dad told me once. “There weren’t enough hours in the day. He was hard drinking but productive. He could do anything, fix anything, build anything. He even played the violin. At least that’s the story.”
He doesn’t know many other stories about Mom’s father. None of us do.
Mom says, “All stories are secrets first,” so for the longest time we didn’t know that Mom and Jamie were once little girls on a train. They had nothing when they were first sent away, but when they left the orphanage years later—with steerage tickets to America in the pockets of their donated coats—Jamie had a notebook and pencils, and Mom a cigar box of new paints. They had a future. They had secrets, stories, and dreams. Mom says that they pretended a lot; that pretending helped them survive. Pretending to be happy when they weren’t, not happy when they were. Pretending they didn’t remember their parents waving goodbye to them at the train station. They were brave. How did they leave “home” twice? How did they leave even once?
I’m growing up. I need to know.
I follow Mom upstairs. We have to talk but I don’t know where to start. Instead, as Mom stares at her easel, with its portrait of a dead Vietnamese woman, and lights a cigarette, I pull the pocket-sized notebook out of my notebook-sized pocket and add another hash mark under today’s date.
“Must you, really?” she asks.
Back in my room, I open my closet door and stand there, smelling the smoky remains of the desiccated jungle.
It used to smell rich and wet, like dirt and licorice and dewy summer mornings, but one night I woke up to the heat and crackle of a dying fire in my closet and, pulling aside the sliding doors, saw burning villages on the floor there, American helicopters hovering in my hanging clothes and frightened villagers hiding in my shoes. Actually, I didn’t see the villagers but I knew they were there. When I closed my eyes I recognize their faces from Mom’s paintings. They were Vietnamese.
“Be matter-of-fact,” the doctor told Mom, so I was too, gave the burning villagers their privacy and closed the closet doors. There was nothing I could do anyway. Death is a personal thing: no one ever understood what happened to Mrs. Wiggins, even when I tried to explain it.
Within hours the jungle’s lushness was dried up and only a sour bitter smell remained. It’s still there when I open my closet.
Mom says it’s my collection of old gym shoes, but I disagree.
On the shelf above my clothes is the box with the mask from Aunt Jamie. Beside it is a stack of letters from her—the African stamps are beautiful, bigger and brighter than American stamps.
Until Jamie died, Africa was the most beautiful place on earth.
When the package first arrived, Mom wanted me to wait until Dad got home to open it, but I tore into it. The carved wooden mask jumped out at me and I laughed.
“You laugh at the weirdest stuff,” Lauren said, opening Jamie’s note and reading it out loud: “Lily, it’s made of tree bark. Wear the mask when you don’t want people to see you. Well, duh!”
But I smiled so big you could hang wooden masks off each ear.
“Great,” Mom mumbled.
At breakfast the next morning she told me to take it off. “No, Lily, absolutely not. We just got rid of that damned Big Bad Wolf outfit . . . ”
Just? Sure, I remembered the costume, how it stuck to my body and melted into my legs, arms, and teeth, but that was a long time ago and I’m older now. “It was a werewolf costume,” I said in a muffled voice from inside the mask. I smelled the paints that colored it and the dusty, spicy air of the African village where Jamie found it, tried it on, and knew the mask was for me, even if it meant wrestling it away from the local witch doctor.
“It’s Lily’s!” Jamie cried, and upon hearing my name the witch doctor smiled and motioned his guards to put down their spears.
“Lil-ee,” he nodded, and the others did too. Everyone knew my name. It was carved centuries ago—in ancient trees that scratched the clouds—by ancient ancestors who rode giraffes and lived underground. My name was heard in songs sung by beautiful black girls dancing in formation, and in the dreamy howls of wild dogs sleeping in the bushes.
Lil-ee. Lily’s. The mask was meant to be mine.
The following week I tried sneaking it to the Portland Public Library, but Mom caught me. She convinced me to leave it at home and did a quick sketch of the mask instead, and the two of us researched African iconography (the use or study of images or symbols in visual arts, Oxford Dictionary) at a long table in the library’s biggest room where a handsome man stopped to ask, “Sisters, or mother and daughter?” Mom blushed and said something about visiting the library more often, but we never did and we never found the mask’s design either.
Near the library was the natural history museum where a docent looked at Mom’s sketch. She said she’d seen a mask just like it in an import store across town, but we knew better.
Mom filled a new sketchbook with pictures of the mask. She wanted to do “something new, something abstract using the mask. Maybe a collage?”
“Hurray!” Dad said, tearing up the newspaper and throwing it in the air like fat confetti. Mom called it “trying too hard,” which he does when the two of them are fighting or he’s been away on business.
“Are you being sarcastic?” Mom asked, but Dad only joked about “naked native titties in National Geographic,” then stomped around the kitchen “like a Bantu,” thumping the broom handle on the floor, calling for a hula with Mom who’d be the “most popular girl at the fertility dance.”
Dad confused everything: Africans don’t do hulas, and there are millions of Bantus in Africa and most of them don’t do fertility dances either, but Mom put down her sketchbook, kicked off her shoes, and, wiggling her boobs at Dad, took tiny barefooted hula steps toward him, both of them laughing till their faces were red and Lauren ran to her room to call a friend.
I thought of the girl whose parents chaperoned the Harvest Dance at school that fall. While I sat, fully clothed, on the toilet reading before class one day, she stood in the restroom crying, two friends patting her on the back. “They actually danced!” the girl said. “It was so embarrassing!”
I took out my notebook and wrote, Never ask Mom and Dad to chaperone. Especially on Luau Night.
When they wiggled their way to the middle of the kitchen, my parents fell in each other’s arms, and turned to look at me.
“Lighten up, Lily!” Mom laughed. “Honestly, I don’t know how we raised such modest girls, do you, Pablo?”
“All day, all night, Marianne,” Pablo sang, giving Mom a twirl.
* * *
Have I mentioned the basement before?
I like its damp sawdust smell and the single bulb lighting the floor
-to-ceiling shelves on three of the four walls. Sometimes I sit on one apple box and write at another, getting up every so often to swing the lightbulb back and forth like it does in old movies. I don’t go down there much, but when I do and I’m not writing, I like to arrange and rearrange the shelves of canned food. Alphabetically, or by fruit or vegetable. Mom doesn’t notice when they’re out of order, but I do. I check on them once a week and when Jamie’s Special Jams get pulled forward, I hide them behind the others again. If no one opens them, they’ll last forever.
Yesterday I only went halfway down, and sat on the steps in the dark listening to Mom and Dad dance overhead. Halfway down is as far as SOG ever goes, and when I saw His sandals and the hem of His robe over my shoulder, I wasn’t surprised.
I wasn’t surprised when He was gone either.
There’s something about basements.
Maybe if I spent less time in my room and more time in the basement, Jesus would give me some privacy. I decided to do my homework down there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but imagined Mom freaking out about it. Then Dr. Giraffe would want to talk to me about that too.
Forget it.
Later that night, after everyone went to bed, Jamie’s little red house with the yellow shutters on the old coast highway burned down.
We read about it later, how the growth around it was too wet to take a spark, so the outbuildings were safe and the neighbors were able to “tamp out any errant flames.”
“Errant flames, huh?” Dad read. “Who writes like that? Must have been one of her poetry students.”
Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away.
When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me,
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back anymore!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door.
Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away.
“Did you write it?” I asked. This was two years ago.
Jamie is dead now but I still remember the poem. I remember everything.
“No. Somebody named Hughes Mearns,” she said. “I always wondered what he was like.” She tucked the red velvet bookmark back in her journal. “I memorized it for drama class when I was about your age.”
We sat up together in her bed with the Lincoln Log headboard, pressing hip to hip under her Guatemalan quilt, sharing the same long pillow that stretched the width of her bed. She’d sewed two regular-sized pillows end to end, and made a pillowcase out of moth-eaten wool sweaters. She called it her winter pillow. It was cold that winter in her little yellow house with the red shutters, especially since she wouldn’t date the guy who delivered wood so he only left half a cord.
She’d paid for a full one. Dad threatened to call the cops but Jamie said no.
“Shall we?” Jamie cleared her throat. “Yesterday upon the stair . . .”
“Yesterday upon the stair,” I repeated.
“Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there,” Jamie recited. She paused and reached for the glass of warm sake beside her bed. I felt her thoughts wander. “I still don’t know how he got in. I never gave him the key.”
What’s she talking about? I looked at her but she was pretending I wasn’t there. Like the man in the poem.
“There was a staff meeting after school, and I grabbed some groceries on the way home. I was late,” she said. “He was sitting on the bedroom stairs.”
When I came home last night at three, the man was waiting there for me.
“The dogs went crazy when they saw me drive up, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was stupid for going inside. I could have been killed.” She looked across the room at the matching His and Hers bathrobes hanging on the coatrack.
Did Kevin know?
“I don’t know why I went through with it. I mean, he was cute and there’d always been a . . . a . . . vibe between us, I guess. But I was never going to do anything about it.”
So she knew him? Mom says all stories are secrets first.
“There was sawdust in his hair,” she continued, “and he smelled like freshly cut wood . . . and beer. That night he smelled like beer too.”
She had told me things before, things she knew I wouldn’t repeat, things she wasn’t sure I understood or even heard her say. Mom does the same thing. Dr. Giraffe says they’re taking advantage of me, and suggested I tell them to stop, but I don’t care. Their secrets are like chapters in someone else’s book, with characters I’ll never know and questions that will never be answered. Mostly I just run out of space in my head. I keep so many secrets I can’t hold them all, and once in a while one slips out an ear or the corner of my eye so I don’t have to worry about remembering.
“He never did it again but now the peace is gone, you know? The house isn’t mine anymore, not since then. There’s something else living here, something else.”
“He wasn’t there again today,” I said, remembering the poem.
She looked at me, alarmed. “He didn’t hurt me,” she added. She was explaining herself again.
I stayed quiet, then repeated: “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.”
Jamie smiled. “He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away.”
Go away, go away, don’t you come back anymore! Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door.
She was talking about sex, wasn’t she? Not love. Not marrying Kevin.
I took her hand, turned it over, and wrote S-E-X in Helen Keller, then added a question mark.
She wiped it off on the bedcovers and looked away.
Wait, I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just being stupid.
Stupid and weird.
I decided to write S-O-R-R-Y in Helen Keller, and reached for her hand, but she jerked it farther away.
I quickly recited, “Yesterday upon the stair . . .”
“I met a man who wasn’t there,” Jamie said, her head still turned away. She sniffed. Was she crying?
I took a deep breath. “He wasn’t there again today . . .” I turned away too, so only the backs of our heads were looking at each other, and waited, silently reviewing the poem in my head.
The room was quiet.
“Go away, go away, don’t you come back anymore!” I said in a witch’s voice, putting a spell on the dark places in Jamie’s house, the places where something else lived. Then I turned back.
But she was gone, and in her place: nothing. Not a creased sheet or a dent in the winter pillow.
I listened for her footsteps but only heard my heartbeat knocking on the front door, and a tiny squeak when I pushed the door open.
“Hello?” I heard myself call out. “Anybody here?”
Chapter 20
The Slap
We move into what the Oregonian classifieds call “a charming sixty-year-old Cape Cod in Crawford Heights” on August 25. Lauren and I are enrolled in school by September 1; and by the end of the month, Mom has introduced me to most of the women on our block as “my beautiful older daughter.” When one of them smiles and says, “Why yes, she looks just like you, Kit,” Mom pulls me close.
I hate that. No one knows what I look like, not really; not where it counts, not on the inside.
Mom says moving to the new house is a chance to “start fresh.” She even asks us to write a “New House Resolution.”
While our parents both want “more family time,” I’m not sure what I want, only that for a while it had to do with the lump of gray-white clay I kept in a bread wrapper on my bed stand.
Mom says I read too much, but if I didn’t I wouldn’t know about golems: how their spirits live in cl
ay and mud, and if you perform the right spell, they’ll come to life and do your bidding, like Frankenstein’s monster.
Mom bought me the clay but she didn’t like the idea of me building a golem. “There are things you play at,” she said, “and things you don’t,” which Dad called “being superstitious.” I didn’t worry about it until I came home from school one day and found the entire ball of clay gone. The wrapper too.
A small white clay horse stood in its place.
When I ask Mom about it, she smiles and says, “What horse?”
Mom’s a good artist, and it’s nice of her to make me something, but the clay was mine. I was still designing the golem’s face, and writing the spells I would give it. I wasn’t playing at anything.
The next day, when everyone is out of the house, I call a synagogue—a lot of people in Crawford Heights are Jewish—and I talk to the assistant rabbi. I tell him I’d read about a golem who, even now, is said to live in the attic of a really old house in Prague. He murdered a bunch of Nazis up there during World War II.
Mom always says, “Never be afraid to ask,” so I ask him why the golem didn’t kill all the Nazis. “It could have saved the Jews,” I say.
“Let me get this straight,” he laughs over the phone. “You’re not Jewish? How old are you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Okay, so maybe you’re a teenager. And you’re not Jewish?”
“I live in a Catholic neighborhood but I’m Presbyterian. Kind of.”
“Do your parents know you’re calling?”
It’s not a golem, but I like the clay horse. When it falls over, I stand it up again.
* * *
Dad suggests my New House Resolution should be to “write down or illustrate every wild thing that crosses your mind for a year.” Mom says he is being cruel, and makes a joke about reams of paperwork.
Lauren’s resolution is “to earn enough money to buy an entire set of Bonne Bell cosmetics. She tells me people call me pretty because they feel sorry for me. She says I need lots of makeup and that’s why she gave me a sack of little half-used Avon lipstick samples she and her friends use at school.
The Shark Curtain Page 26
