“You okay?” Jesus asks, offering me a hand.
“Go away, asshole.” I’ve never used that word before.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. It’s not in my job description.”
“You don’t like your job description, so why do you care?”
“Can I walk you home?”
“I’m not walking, I’m riding.”
“Don’t be mad at me. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do.”
“Too bad for Beauty, I guess.”
“Wait,” Jesus says, holding my handlebars.
“You killed him!” I scream. “He was beautiful and Allison loved him and you killed him!”
Jesus looks around nervously. “Can we talk about this later?”
“No! I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see you. I want to stop seeing you!”
“Can’t I come by tonight? We can talk about it then.”
“No!” Jeez, we’re not going steady. “I’m busy tonight.” I think of Gidget and Moondoggie when they’ve had a fight. “I’m busy every night.”
“You sound like a teenager.”
That’s what Mom said.
“You’re the teenager!” I say. “You’re the selfish, lying, phony brat!”
His face grows red. “Correction: you sound like an angry teenager.”
Two boys ride by on bicycles, competing to sing “Kumbaya” as loudly as they can. I recognize them from the quarry pit. Singing and laughing, they’ve already forgotten the horse.
Beauty stands off the trail, nibbling a clump of grass. He sees the boys and runs off, the English saddle flapping under his torn belly.
Jesus is quiet.
I don’t want to be mean, I just want Him to go away. It’s fine for some people to see Jesus. Saints can see Him, and the Pope I suppose. Poor little starving kids in Europe a hundred years ago saw Jesus at the bottom of a well, and they weren’t crazy. But girls like me, “weirdos” who live in Crawford Heights, aren’t supposed to. “Please go away.”
The birds stop chirping when I say it; the clouds stop darting through the trees.
“If I go, you’ll be alone.”
“No I won’t. I’ll have my shoe boxes. And my family. And my books. And Mrs. Wiggins.”
“Mrs. Wiggins?”
“Go.”
“But . . .”
“I know what I said.”
“I’m sorry,” He responds sadly. “Sometimes doing the right thing feels wrong, Lily. Please don’t send me away, I need you. If you don’t see me, I’m not sure I’m here.”
Dad wrote something like that on a valentine to Mom once.
Jesus lets go of my bike. When a tear slides off His face it turns into a diamond, just like in fairy tales.
“There are lots of other girls to bug,” I say.
“But I like bugging you.”
I’m tired and my voice is soft when I say, “Thou shalt not kill, remember? You could have saved him, but you didn’t. You only do miracles for other horses, and other girls.”
“That wasn’t me back there.”
“You kill everything I love.”
“It wasn’t me, Lily. You were hallucinating. That wasn’t me.”
I’m hallucinating? Maybe Dog Girl was a hallucination, but the man with the rifle?
An overweight woman rides by on her bicycle. I know what it looks like: I’m alone in the woods, talking to the trees.
“Everybody thinks I’m crazy.” A cartoon anvil falls from the sky, flattening my head into a disc. A cartoon bird lands on it and, using his beak as a record needle, plays sad Gypsy music.
Jesus swallows. “I know. I’m sorry.”
I don’t know why I ask, but I do: “Can you make them stop?”
“You mean the people?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” He says.
“I didn’t think so.”
Chapter 24
Clam Dip
Mom meets me at the door. “You’re a mess. Where have you been?” She’s impatient and looks me over. “Are you hurt?”
I shake my head.
“Lauren said you went for a bike ride . . . You’re okay, right?” She knows something’s wrong.
I look at Mom’s flip-flops and her freshly painted toenails. If she catches my eye she’ll see Beauty, and I can’t talk to her about it. “I left my watch at home. Sorry.”
Mom walks to the kitchen and I follow. She picks up a shiny pickle fork and starts polishing it. “All right, Lily. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” She’s mad at me but trying to stay calm. “Did you put your bike away?”
“I think so.” It’s hard to remember. I’m empty inside.
“You think so?”
“Do you want me to go look?” I close my eyes and see myself in the garage, leaning it against the lawn furniture. I usually put it there. Everything’s the same. Except me. “I put it away.”
“Good. Now run upstairs. I need you to clean the bathroom before you change your clothes.” Behind her, the counters are full of her best glasses and dishes, antique china (which she bought on a “long weekend” with Dad) etched with rosebuds and sprigs of mint. Fancy canapés are arranged under plastic wrap. Unopened bottles of vodka, gin, and whiskey stand next to a big silver ice bucket.
“Lily?” Lauren calls from upstairs. She listens, then slams her bedroom door.
Mom glances toward the sound and scowls. “Your sister is not a happy camper. You stuck her with your chores again. You better get up there and apologize.” Mom looks at me nervously. “Something happened, didn’t it?” She gives me a quick hug. “Damn it, Lily. What can I do about it when the Hendersons will be here in, in . . .”
I look at the wall clock. “An hour and a half. Give or take.”
Mom smiles crooked. “Give or take, huh? Nothing more specific? Guess we can call that progress.” She polishes the fork even harder. “Your father’s at the drive-in grabbing you two dinner. He’ll be back anytime.”
“Van’s?”
“Tik-Tok, or Yaw’s. No Van’s, remember?”
“But I’m fine now and—”
“End of subject.” Her hands shake when she unties her apron and sticks it in a drawer. “I’m not happy with you rolling in here at the last minute, either.”
“I know.”
“Go, just go. Clean the bathrooms.” She wipes out a dry water glass. “You know how I like things organized before we have company. I don’t want to have to worry about you being gone, being late, wondering where you are.” She looks at me again and her eyes soften. She knows I’m keeping something from her. “Maybe I should cancel—I mean, the Hendersons aren’t here yet. We could always have them over another time.” She puts down her towel and touches my face. “What’s wrong, Lily? Should I cancel? Would you like me to cancel?”
“Have your party. I’m okay.”
It’s what she wants to hear and she exhales deeply. “All right then,” she says, and looks around the room. “What do you think? Everything look ready to you?”
It’s not a real question. “Yep,” I answer.
She looks at me with her why-are-you-still-here eyes. “Bathrooms?” she asks. When she doesn’t take her happy pill these days, Mom gets all tug-of-war inside, happy one minute, wound-up the next. Dad warned her against taking it if she was going to drink with the neighbors tonight. “Pills and booze don’t mix,” he told all of us. “It’s one or the other, Kit.”
On my way upstairs, I pass the family room where a TV game show is on, no volume. Someone has won a trip to Busch Gardens, Florida, where gaudy water shows include tiers of smiling bikinied showgirls balanced on the shoulders of other water-skiing showgirls. They turn their heads and wave at me, one-handed.
Maybe I could tell them about Beauty.
The living room smells like warm beeswax candles. Ella Fitzgerald’s on the stereo. The stairway banister is already polished; usually that’s my job.
At the top of the stairs is Lauren’s bed
room. She sticks out her foot to trip me and then slams her door again.
“Stop slamming the door!” Mom yells. “Lauren!”
My sister opens her door but she doesn’t answer.
Mom stomps up the stairs. Her eyes are black and stormy. “Do I need to take it off its hinges? No door to your bedroom—would you like that?”
Lauren glances at me quickly then shakes her head. “No,” she answers timidly.
“So stop!” Mom rears back with the door, and slams it shut . . . “Slamming!” She slams the door again. “Your . . . door!”
Lauren crawls on her bed and hugs her pillow.
“Okay?” Mom asks breathlessly. She’s sweaty and panting.
“Okay,” Lauren says quietly.
Mom looks at the back of Lauren’s door and her lucky jump rope hanging on a hook. Mom starts untangling it, but my sister’s been practicing macramé knots and it’s knotted pretty good. The more Mom works on it, the more the wooden handles with the metal hardware bang against the door.
Mom puts her hands on her hips. “Okay, okay, just hang it up in the garage and stop banging the door, all right?” She’s quieter now, calmer. “Can you do that for me, please?”
“But I want it in my room.”
“The answer is no, Lauren. No, you may not keep it in your room. No, you may not slam the door. Why doesn’t anyone listen to me?”
“But it’s my lucky—”
“You make your own luck, Lauren. Haven’t you heard?”
Bully. “No,” I suddenly say. “It’s Lauren’s lucky jump rope. She’s leaving it there.”
And then I see it. It’s not about pills, painting sad pictures, or arguing with Dad. Mom gets stuck like I do. Only different, of course.
Did she always get stuck or did I infect her with my weirdness? Maybe real weirdness is a germ or a disease, maybe it’s airborne, and if you’re already dying, like Beauty was, it’s fatal. I imagine each breath of mine taking microscopic parachutes down the quarry wall. Maybe Beauty was dead before Jesus pulled the trigger. I know I killed Mrs. Wiggins, but maybe I killed Po too. Maybe if they put me under a gi-normous microscope I’m teeming with weirdo bacteria.
Mom steps back. “I’m sorry, girls. I guess I’m a little nervous about the party.” She looks at Lauren. “Oh, Bean,” she says. Then bolts downstairs.
I follow her as she heads to the kitchen, turning smaller and smaller with every step she takes. I want to tell her that I’m sorry too, but I’m already counting by twelves as loudly as I can, and Mom will be the size of a mouse by the time she reaches the kitchen. She likes the mouse hole I painted (over a wood knot on the paneled wall of the kitchen), but I’d rather she yelled at us all day long than live in the wall.
In cartoons, every house has a mouse hole. There were no mouse holes in our perfect house, so I made one. The hole is a foyer, really, to rooms where mice sleep in matchbox beds, or nap in cushioned thimble chairs with tiny newspapers in their tiny laps. In other rooms, mice outfit themselves in climbing gear, hat-pin swords, and sewing-thread lariats for a midnight raid on the kitchen counter. Swashbuckling their way to the lip of the breadboard, they’ll fling themselves onto the counter, careful to dodge Mom’s ashtray and lipstick-stained wineglasses while looking for cheese scraps from her cocktail party.
We pass the family room where a police show is now on TV.
Mom collapses on the floor behind the kitchen table and pulls her knees to her chest. “Jesus, Kit,” she scolds herself.
I sit down beside her in my loose-fitting mandatory TV cop pants with three inches of thick white leg showing above the mandatory black socks. I’m overweight and bored, and three hours into the stakeout.
“Sometimes I don’t know what gets into me,” she says.
I take her hand.
“As long as the party’s a hit, right?”
She wants an answer but I’m only a cop, gnawing on the end of my blue-black mustache, sucking on the shoe polish I use to touch up the gray.
Dad brings Lauren and me cheeseburgers from Yaw’s. We eat them in my room that night, and when we’re done I wipe off the checkered wax paper and put it with my scrapbooks.
We don’t say much until Lauren asks, “Did you see the horse, Lily? What happened?”
“He’s fine,” I tell her. Someone has to lie to Lauren. “Everything’s fine.”
* * *
I’m still on page twelve of The Doors of Perception when, four hours later, Mom knocks on my door. The pages are too heavy to turn, line after line of black ink tiers down the page, like striations in the walls of the quarry pit. Each white space is Beauty’s crumpled body.
Mom tucks her head inside. I smell Chanel No5.
“May I borrow—ohhhh, damn it, what’s that record with the song about the restaurant and the garbage dump? Alice something?”
She’s tipsy. Not drunk, just tipsy.
Jesus walks down the hall behind her, a drink in one hand, a potato chip—with a huge shovel of clam dip—in the other. When He slips into the bathroom, glancing at me over Mom’s shoulder, there’s no recognition.
“Lily?” Mom repeats.
I open the door wider. “You want to borrow Alice’s Restaurant?”
She’s wearing her new black dress with the low-cut back, and the rhinestone earrings Dad calls “candelabras.” She’s already taken off her high heels and rubs one stockinged leg against the other.
“Well, don’t look at me that way,” she says, her voice a little slurred. “I just thought it would be fun.”
“You look pretty,” I say when I hand her the record.
She wrinkles her nose self-consciously and looks at Arlo Guthrie on the album cover and smiles. Arlo smiles back from his Thanksgiving dinner table, wearing nothing but a clean white napkin and a bowler hat.
“Thanks, sweetie,” she says, kissing my cheek. Then she drops her smile. “I know something happened this afternoon, Lily. When you were out. Should we call the doctor about it in the morning?”
“I’m okay. Are you having fun? Are the Hendersons nice?”
That perks her up. “Oh yes, they’re very nice. We’re having lots of fun.” She looks at Arlo again and giggles. “Thanks, kiddo,” she calls over her shoulder.
The stairs are freshly waxed. I hope she’s careful.
SOG flushes the toilet, but He doesn’t come out. Cabinet drawers open and close, tubes and bottles of stuff, toothpaste and makeup, knock against each together as they slide around. What a snoop! What’s He doing at Mom’s party, anyway?
Wait! I should rush after her and explain to everybody that Alice’s Restaurant is an antiwar album. That Arlo Guthrie is Woody Guthrie’s son, and while it’s a funny record, it’s not funny ha-ha. Definitely not funny ha-ha.
But I stay in my room instead, and when I hear Arlo’s guitar intro roll out, I lay on the floor listening through the grate.
A moment later, when the bathroom door opens, I imagine tackling SOG, then making a beeline for the living room where I’d tear the record off Mom’s new stereo—but I don’t. It would just embarrass my parents, and no one would say, Thanks for telling us about Alice’s Restaurant, Lily. You are certainly an articulate young lady.
It’s too late to rip the record off the turntable.
Too late to tackle SOG who’d mumble, Gross, when He wiped the clam dip off His face.
Too late to save Beauty.
Check out the album cover, Mom will giggle. Look at that hair!
When Alice’s Restaurant finishes, and there’s a smattering of applause with requests for more drinks, I feel like a traitor.
Later that night, I find the record slipped under my bedroom door. I don’t turn on the light when I stick it in the back of the closet.
Behind my clothes hangers and a mountain of empty shoe boxes is a hole as deep and wide as Crawford Quarry. It holds the things I say, and the things I don’t. Its walls are ribbed like the inside of my mouth; I feel them with my tongue.
I listen for the record to hit bottom, but it keeps falling.
Chapter 25
Frog Boy
I was quieter in OE (oral expression) than the rest of my classes. In math and spelling, I was quietly confident and I quietly smiled, but in OE (Dad calls it “speech”) my tongue curled up like a potato bug in the back of my throat. I calmed myself by doing times tables on the bright red abacus in my brain, visualizing first odd then even multiplication tables.
Earlier in the week our teacher, Mrs. McGivens, gave us an assignment to “write an essay about someone you find interesting.”
Mrs. McGivens is a newlywed. If she were writing an essay, it would be on her husband who brings her back and forth to school each day, kissing her hello and goodbye in the car. The popular girls use binoculars to watch them from the science lab. Dad calls her husband “a kept man.” Mom called Dad “jealous” and said everyone deserves to fall in love.
I wonder if I’ll ever fall in love.
I briefly considered writing about Jesus, but last time I mentioned Him at school someone called me a “Jesus freak,” which I’m not. He’s a jerk a lot of the time—rude and bossy, demanding I pay attention to Him even when I’m busy. “You’re trying to ignore me,” He says, but I couldn’t if I wanted to. No matter what direction I turn, He’s bull’s-eye, smack dab in the center of things, like a bad actor who won’t get off stage.
Then I remembered the shoe box. Frog Boy!
Of course!
I thought of the Look magazine photograph inside it, the picture of Frog Boy—the circus freak, the “mistake,” the fleshy little lump of life sitting, slumping actually, in Floyd Halverson’s big calloused hands. I’d dug the magazine out of the trash after my folks and Jamie argued about sharing it with me.
My teacher said to write about someone interesting. Frog Boy was the perfect candidate.
Even essays have beginnings, middles, and ends. Whatever happened to Frog Boy? A cat could have eaten him. Or he might have fallen in the trash and no one would have noticed, only he probably didn’t, and because he didn’t, and girls feel sorry for ugly little things, one would have fallen in love with Frog Boy.
Mom jokes about bald rich fat old men getting the prettiest girls, so I sewed Frog Boy tiny clothes (like Cinderella did for her mice friends)—including a top hat and a wedding tuxedo with an extra-wide felt bib, and waders in case he went fishing on his honeymoon—and put everything in a shoe box I painted bright green with potato-stamped webbed feet all over it. Mom said the box wasn’t my “best work,” so she left it alone and never looked inside, and I never had to explain who it was for. It’s been in my closet ever since.
The Shark Curtain Page 31
