Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

“Hey, man, did you shave your eyebrows off?” the sarcastic girl from confirmation class asked with a wise-ass expression on her face. We stood in the middle of the Bermuda Lawn and Shirley stood nearby. Sun at nearly noon, slight sweat on our brows, a dry wind stirring the chaff of dead Bermuda as the green grass was just coming in then. Blue sky disappearing with storm clouds coming, gray piling on the Rincon Mountains, the Catalina’s black and even spring lightning strikes. The wind became more cutting to me and I could feel it lifting my skirt. The girl said this with a cruel smirk. She was staring at my eyebrows and laughing. I had plucked them too much, made them too thin. I hadn’t realized how comical it looked. How absurd my face had become. I resembled a clown with skinny eyebrows.

  A clown. That made me think of something funny from my childhood. A babysitter had once told us a crazy story about a clown in a stagecoach. Sure.

  “No, of course not! Why do you ask that?” I answered defensively crossing my arms over my chest. She was the kind of girl who didn’t have any breasts and made comments about your nipples showing and crap like that.

  “Well, because it looks like it. It really does. Look at yourself.”

  “Well, I didn’t shave them.”

  “Well, it looks like you did. Really.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” asked this cruel tormentor of the other girls.

  Everyone agreed it did.

  Here I was at church getting attacked about my eyebrows. The girls at school had said the same thing. Why did the kids at church have to be as nasty as the ones at school? Shouldn’t religion have changed them? I guess that was too much to ask.

  And Shirley? What about my long time “friend” at the church? My oldest companion, my weight, my burden, what did she actually think? Did she think anything about my ghastly missing eyebrows? The mistakes I was making couldn’t have an impact on her, or could they? Could I sense disapproval in the way she gawked at me at times? Did she think I was too homely now, when I had been cute as a kid? But then she was always remote, though in my teenage state I was sure she was a little more remote than usual. Her little companion was getting big, growing up. It was time to relinquish my duties to her; I had outgrown my usefulness and I sensed forces in the wings ready to remove me if I didn’t surrender.

  Well, I was going anyway. I didn’t want to stick around church forever and Shirley was just collateral damage. Not that she knew a thing about me.

  The world? The real world, I mean. It’s as dumb as Shirley. As unsentimental. As unfeeling. Full of blankness. Unresponsive to the agonies of anyone, Mrs. Shelton or me. Only the act of creativity breaks through the mute exterior of the cold, cold real world.

  Did she think anything at all about anything? Did she ever peer around herself and wonder where I’d gone after that day and for all the years since? Did she ever ask about me? If so, I never thought of her then, or cared about her. My only thought was of the relief I had of never having to touch her saliva and listen to her atrocious wails throughout the sermon her father gave. I dismissed my companion for years so easily. I never thought of her again, until now, a few months ago. I’ll admit there were strange pangs that day, but they were gone quickly. I’ll never know if she missed me. I can’t take the feeling sometimes of suffering I feel for her. What did I ever mean to her? Anything at all? Did my being with her achieve anything?

  I had sat beside Shirley in church service (through the whole service for the last day in church) and stood beside her on the church Bermuda lawn, where the church would gather no more after services—the new church was done and the original church now was the annex and there stood the old annex of the house. That was why the yawning door scared me; it served as a door to the past, my past with Shirley that was now about to end. We were to have no more services in the original, plain church, but all activities would move to a new church. Our confirmation was the first to have the ceremony in the new building and that Sunday was the last service in the original building. That was the last time Molly would sit in that room breaking open the offerings and the last time in the old church, the concrete floor, tattered carpet, tan metal folding chairs, gone forever, a church service of my past, an impoverished memory, the barren cross only remained. The kitchen full of long dead elders laughing in a sunlight that left, on cold winter mornings in the early 1960s, time gone, those people I envied so because they didn’t listen to sermons any more, had listened to their last sermon ten years prior and would never hear another on this blessed earth again. Or were they listening to one endless one somewhere else?

  Now I wouldn’t listen to sermons. I wouldn’t listen to a sermon again in my whole damn life.

  But a life without Shirley. As much as I looked forward to it, there was a gaping hole there which nothing would ever fill, although she was as much a nothing as a person could ever be.

  Storm clouds gathered over the blue saddles in the mountains. I was impatient to get it over. Desperate to end my time at church, end it forever for me. This time with church I had endured for so long, this time with Shirley was so long in my memory I could barely see myself with patent leather shoes, anklets, a tiny purse and a short brittle fake velvet jacket and Shirley, Shirley at my side.

  Was Shirley ever aware that I wasn’t there when suddenly I left? The next week perhaps, was she a little unsettled and unhappy? A little whiney? Or did she howl and howl as only she was capable of and which I was there to stop her from doing. I hope she wailed for my sake. I hope she drown out her father’s word. Though we had no friendship, really, but I want to think that she missed me.

  Was she a treasure I had to collect?

  Did they find another quiet little girl, oh so good and docile, uncomplaining and cheerful, to start the process over and last for another a decade? Was there anyone as docile as me? Did she think I and the other girl were one and the same? Did she know me to be a person? A person separate from her? Or was I? Had I long since absorbed her into me and become the weird mumbling muttering misfit that she embodied? Yes, I probably had, with my eyebrows over-plucked, my inadequate defenses, and fumbled opportunities to illustrate my coolness. I don’t think she ever used my name, but her speech was so garbled…God…so difficult to hear maybe she had been saying my name all those years. Goddamn, what a thing to think of now. I never grieved at the time. Now I think of these terrible things with no way back.