The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

by Deb Caletti

  Trevor makes two more trips to the car, and I go clothes shopping. I start to get the hang of this, see, because I’m feeling this mall-with-money difference, this I’d-own-the-world-if-I-wanted-to buzz. Something is happening to me in here. I feel swingy and powerful, like Freud after he brings you a mouse head. The more I get into it, the more I get into it, if that makes sense. The noise, the lights, the credit card slide across the table; it’s some Las Vegas high minus the Elvis impersonators. I buy shirts and jackets and a robe for Mom and shoes for Severin and a coat for him too, and outfits for Bex, skirts and sweaters, and this Harley shirt that comes with a matching key ring that Trevor likes.

  I’m pretending I’m a millionaire and can buy anything I want and I’m starting to believe me. We’re walking through Nordstrom when Trevor starts to get whiny.

  “Can we eat yet,” he says. “C’mon, In. I’m tiii-red.”

  But there in the center of the store on the first floor is a place I’ve never gone. A non-Indigo place. A small perfumey universe of swivelly white chairs and women with high cheekbones and powdery faces and lab coats, which are supposed to make us think that eyeliner is a science that requires an expert. A place that says that real beauty can be bought only there; that the plastic packages of the drugstore mascaras and lipsticks are merely clownish frauds. Even looking over there gives me some scritch of insecurity, something I suddenly feel I need to overcome now that I could belong there. When you have money, you have Ziploc bags and not fold-over baggies. You drink Diet Coke and 7UP, not the “Diet Cola” and “Lemon Lime Drink” of the store brand. You fill up the whole gas tank, instead of buying the few dollars’ worth you have in your wallet. You go to a salon, rather than cut your own hair or get a ten-dollar chop job at a place where everyone rushes out looking the same. And you come to this place, where a skilled professional with a cool demeanor guides you toward the power of beauty. It’s a test. The big test. A fitting-in right of passage. A metaphorical journey from the two-dollar Wet n Wild lipstick of the masses to the seventeen-dollar lipstick that comes in its own glossy bag with a braided rope handle.

  I step forward and try out a wealthy confidence. I sit down in one of the swivelly chairs. I am a millionaire. Once the lab coat is off, once they remove the jacket of superiority, these makeup counter women just go home and make a salad and get up the next day and put the lab coat on again.

  “I’d like a whole new look,” I say. The woman standing over me has blond hair swooped up crescent-roll style, a poofy, decisive makeup brush already poised in her hand.

  “The colors you’re wearing are too harsh,” she says. La-ti-dah, big deal.

  “Your colors are fiii-iine, In. I want to go-oooo,” Trevor whines.

  The woman is wiping my face with a cotton ball dunked in something cool and stingy. “You have good lines,” she says. “Let’s make the most of them.” It’s a compliment and an insult both. She starts dabbing and dobbing, her face close to mine, warm breath smelling like what she had for lunch, making me shut my eyes and hold my own breath. I pop my eyes open, and yikes, hers are right there, large and staring at my mouth, and I slam my eyes shut again. Lip liner, eyes, brows—my skin pulls different directions, and then finally, “There. I’d recommend the number seventeen moisturizer, and the skin care line. You have large pores.”

  I look in the round mirror on the counter in front of me. I look airbrushed. Finished in a way I’ve never looked finished before. I’m afraid to blink, lest I crack myself.

  “You look great,” the woman says.

  “Right,” Trevor says. “Except for the hair, she looks like you. Fuck, they all look like you,” Trevor grouses, swooping his hand in a wide motion to include all the women in all the swivelly chairs.

  “Don’t mind him,” I say, moving my lips like a ventriloquist. “He just needs lunch. I’ll take it all,” I say.

  I have to ride home sitting on the Motorized Bumper Boat, with the Turbo Hair Groomer and the shower radio wedged under my elbows and the espresso machine and alcohol breath-screening device under my feet. Trevor perked up after I bought him a hot dog and fries and an Orange Julius, extra large. We pull into the driveway and he honks the horn like mad, scaring Freud, who leaps from the open window of Mom’s car, where he was sleeping but knows he shouldn’t have been sleeping. He jets across the lawn and hides under the front hedge. Bex runs out the front door.

  “Christmas and every birthday anyone’s ever had,” she shrieks. “Now we’re talking!”

  “Xbox,” I say.

  “No,” she breathes.

  “Yes.”

  “OH MY GOD!” she jumps up and down the way she used to when she was younger and had to go to the bathroom badly. I carry in an armload of boxes, passing Ron the Buddha on the way in, who eyes us serenely from over by the rhododendron bush. I flop onto the sofa when I get in, take my shoes off. Mom’s wearing a pot holder on one hand, with a lethal amount of happy toasters on it. “Well, look at you,” she says.

  I put my hand to my face, forgetting the layers pasted there. I look at my fingertips, splotched with dots of brown. I haven’t figured out yet that you’re not supposed to do this. “I had a makeover.”

  “So I see,” she says.

  Severin pushes open the front door with his hip. “Clear the living room, we’re coming in!” His arms are full of boxes. “Make room!” He shoves Mom’s rocker with his foot, and it sits against the wall pointed the wrong direction. It looks somehow offended.

  Trevor sets some boxes down with a thump.

  “Hey, easy with the merchandise,” Bex says. The room is filling. “Check it out!” Bex holds up a musical soap dispenser for Mom to see. Mom nods. She looks overwhelmed. Picks at a piece of packing tape with her finger.

  “Let me get a knife,” Severin says. He trots to the kitchen and comes back, starts slitting the lids of boxes.

  “Maybe we should do this in some sort of…order,” Mom says.

  “Nah,” Bex says.

  Trevor returns. He passes out the boxes of cell phones. “For you, Missus,” he says to Mom. “And you, and you, and you,” to me, kissing me. “And me.”

  “A CELL PHONE!” Bex shrieks.

  I remove mine. I decide I want to take a picture of all this.

  “Wait, we’ve got to charge them first,” Severin says.

  Trevor takes control of this, lines them up on the floor by the TV. In a few minutes, the room is filled with blocks of Styrofoam and plastic wrappings and instruction manuals. I hear Bex’s voice, locate the top of her head as she sits cross-legged on the floor in a bare spot surrounded by cardboard towers.

  “Cool,” she says. She’s wearing a pair of the headphones, and she’s got the alcohol-level breath analyzer, Alcohawk, held in her palm.

  “Indigo,” Mom says. “You don’t even drink.”

  I shrug. I hand her the barbecue fork that’s also a thermometer.

  “We don’t have a barbecue, either,” she says.

  “I think that’s coming with the TV,” Trevor says.

  “I’m sober!” Bex says.

  At dinner Mom opens a bottle of wine, but not before Trevor hunts around in the paper and packing bubbles and locates the new one-touch bottle opener. Mom doesn’t drink—I think someone from work gave her the wine last Christmas. But now she sips it gratefully, sighs as if she’s just descended into a hot bath after a long day.

  “Oh. My. God,” she says.

  “This is the best day of my life,” Bex says. She’s wearing all three shirts I got her, and this cool hat with a feather in it that looks a little like Robin Hood’s.

  “I thought your best day was when you collected a hundred and sixty-three dollars at QFC for tsunami victims,” Mom says.

  “Oh, that,” Bex says.

  Severin is wearing this abdomen exerciser we bought him that increases muscle size without any actual physical activity. He forks in a few bites of meatloaf, then undoes the Velcro strap with a shh-shwick. “I don’t th
ink I can eat with this on,” he says.

  “You look buffer already. More buff,” I say.

  “Yeah, In, a buffer is something you shine a car with,” Trevor says, and I stick my tongue out at him. “Wait. Can we get a buffer? For Bob Weaver?”

  “Honey, I don’t know if I can take another day like this,” Mom says. “Undoing all that packing tape and twisty ties alone has given me a migraine.” She’s not even eating. She’s just drinking wine and nibbling at bread crusts. “And the makeup…Honey, you’re a natural beauty. All that foundation—I think of bodies in caskets.”

  I decide to ignore her. I decide she just needs time to get used to the new me. “Wait. Something’s missing,” I say.

  “How could you even tell,” she says.

  “Something I got for you. It’s probably with my clothes.”

  I go into the living room, kick my way through paper and plastic. Freud is sleeping on an open instruction booklet Severin was reading. I find the shopping bags with my new clothes still inside. I reach my hand around the crispy new fabric, feel for a small bag.

  “Aha!” I shout.

  “Oh, God,” Mom groans.

  “Oh, God,” Chico says.

  Back in the kitchen, I hold the bag out to her. Trevor chuckles. “I know what it i-is,” he sings.

  Mom takes out a small box, decorated with color tiles. She opens the lid. “It’s a pillbox,” she says. She knits her eyebrows together, baffled.

  “For your hormone replacement therapy,” I say.

  “I am not in menopause!” she says.

  “Yet,” Bex says.

  “Wow. What can I say,” she says. “That was very thoughtful.”

  “It’s got the little squares so you can remember to take them every day,” I say.

  “Just what I needed,” she says. Sips her wine again.

  Just then, one of the cell phones rings in the other room.

  “Hello?” Chico says.

  “Cell phone!” Bex shrieks, and runs there. “It’s mine!” she announces. Hers is pink. She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, pushes the talk button, then holds it up to her ear. “This is Bex,” she says. “Huh?” She covers the mouthpiece with one hand. “They want to order a pizza.”

  “Ask them what kind,” Severin says.

  “What kind?” Bex says into the phone. She listens a moment, covers the mouthpiece again. “Large Canadian bacon and sausage.”

  “Where are they calling from?” Severin says.

  “Take their credit card number!” Trevor says. We’re all laughing now.

  “Where are you calling from?” Bex says. “Astoria?”

  “Tell them we’ll be there in about five hours,” Severin says.

  “Bex, tell them they have the wrong number,” Mom says, but she’s laughing too.

  “We’ll be there in five hours,” Bex says. She listens. “They hung up,” she tells us. “My first call. Cool.” She punches in a few numbers and in a moment our home phone rings.

  “Hello?” Chico says.

  “I wonder who it is,” Mom says.

  In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It’s music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The fucking ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds, to the tune of “Zippity Do Dah”?

  I listen. It’s coming from the bathroom. My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser/alarm clock, singing at midnight.

  11

  Leroy is looking at the want ads again.

  “What happened, Leroy?” I ask.

  “The old lady I was watching? She wanted to get out of the house. I took her out to see the salmon hatchery. She wanted a smoke, so we were just sitting there on a bench, having—”

  “You deserve whatever you got, then, Leroy.” I tie my apron behind my back. “You let an old lady smoke? You let yourself smoke?”

  “Hey, now, I haven’t for years. Things have been a little stressful in my life lately, you know…. And anyway—”

  “She died on you. Right there on the bench,” Trina guesses.

  “No—,” Leroy says.

  “She fell in the water,” Nick guesses. “Slipped and fell in.”

  “And then got chewed on by a giant salmon,” Funny says. She cackles evilly.

  “Broken hip,” Joe says.

  “I vote with Joe,” Jane says. “Broken hip.”

  “God, you people.” Leroy gives up. He takes a crunch of his wheat toast, goes back to his paper.

  “What, Leroy, what?” I plead. “Come on.”

  He chews as if we are all invisible. There’s only the tink sound of Funny’s fork against her plate, and Luigi whistling in the back.

  “Oh, well,” Trina says. “We’ll never know. Big deal. I’ll have the chocolate pie,” she says to me.

  “Yeah, really,” I say. “Who cares.”

  “All right, all right,” Leroy says. His cheek still has a round ball of toast in it. “We were sitting there having a smoke, and who should walk up, of all people, but her grandson. Her grandson! He works at the Ale House across the street, but Grandma didn’t tell me that. I think she wanted to get in trouble. Just to liven things up, only now she’s gonna get some nurse and the highlight of her day is gonna be when she gets her pulse taken.”

  My cell phone rings from my backpack behind the counter. I ignore it since I’m in the middle of my shift, but it goes off again. Bex set up my ring tones, and now every time anyone calls it sounds like a fucking circus. “Just a sec,” I say to Trina. I trot over. Flip it open. Melanie.

  “You told me you’d call me right back,” she says.

  “I’m at work,” I say. I feel the little twingy unease of wrongdoing, can see Jane’s back straightening slightly at my voice on this phone, now, during work hours. She’s told me she doesn’t want my phone ringing every two seconds, that I should turn it off. Since no one hardly ever calls me, I just keep it on low, in case of emergencies. Once you have a cell phone, you can’t imagine how you ever lived without it.

  “I need to know if you want to go or not.”

  “I told you, I’ve got to think about it. I’d have to get time off of work, and I’d miss Trevor…”

  “Oh my God, Indigo. That’s ridiculous. This is a lifetime opportunity. There are going to be parties. The kind that Hunter Eden goes to, do you hear me? Hunter Eden. And you are worrying about missing Trevor?”

  Let’s just say Melanie doesn’t understand Trevor. To her, Trevor doesn’t have a future. And having a future apparently means having the means to make money. If she didn’t understand Trevor before, she really doesn’t understand him now. “Melanie,” I say. I’m ready to fight her on this, but just then two ladies with laptops walk in the door, and Jane catches my eye.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “I need to know by the end of the week,” Melanie says. “Hey, did you get a dress? For prom?”

  “What are you talking about? You know I’m not going to prom. You know it’d take armed men to forcibly drag me to prom.”

  “I just thought that now—”

  “Right. I have money, so I’d want to go. That not wanting to go was some sort of fake principle disguising the fact that I couldn’t afford a limo.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”

  Jane gives me a real look this time. She grabs the menus and seats the couple herself.

  “I’m saying good-bye now.” But for a moment, just a moment, I picture myself back at the mall. I get the revved thrill imagining buying dresses and earrings and shoes and beaded purses and shawls and stockings; the image is shattered, though, when I picture Trevor and me in front of a fake sunset.

  I hang up, tuck my phone into my backpack. Jane shoots me her displeasure through eye contact, but doesn’t say anything. I take the order of the laptop ladies (coffee for both, fruit, one poached egg). I seat
the bookstore guy, then an elderly man and wife.

  “Shit. Look who’s coming,” Nick says. Bill and Marty, the True Value guys. Bill is wearing his camouflage hat again, and a T-shirt that reads GET HAMMERED, with a picture of a big hammer on it. Marty’s in a flannel shirt, even though it’s seventy-five degrees and beautiful out. In the Seattle area, in case you don’t know, when it’s above sixty, convertible tops go down and people start wearing shorts. Hey, our season in the sun is so brief, why let goose bumps stop you? What’s the big deal about hypothermia? But seventy-five and flannel? This means his skin probably hasn’t seen the light of day since chicks drooled over Peter Frampton.

  “Hey, Killer,” Bill says.

  “You polish the old pistol today?” Marty says, chuckling. They sit down beside Nick.

  “Marty, you idiot, it wasn’t a pistol. He shoved her down stairs.”

  Marty looks up. His mustached mouth hangs open. There really are those people whose mouths hang open upon shock or attempt at deep thought. It’s hard for them to think and operate parts of their body at the same time. “No, it was a pistol.”

  “Stairs, you dumb shit,” Bill says.

  “No, Nick, tell him. Pistol.”

  Nick sighs. “She fell down stairs. Carrying laundry.”

  A sick feeling, a solid regret, sits in my stomach. And I wonder then, you know, why he puts up with this. Why not tell them to shove off, to sit somewhere else? Why not take it up with his boss, or get up and leave? It’s true that there are two of them, and that they are both larger than Nick, which may be part of it. It’s always wise to be careful who you say Fuck off to. But there is something else at work here, I understand now. Nick has reached the point when a person stops fighting for themselves. When a sense of powerlessness seems larger than any ability you have to fight back. He has gotten to the place where the words “destiny” and “fate” are not used as expressions of possibility, but as the words for forces that always win. It is the way early settlers saw fate (a storm, famine, disease, a harsh winter that would take half the family), or maybe the way sailors did (too much wind, no wind, a raging sea, a drowned ship). Maybe just anyone who’s up against things too large. He has lost the ability to wrestle and rail against; he’s given up his will to make things better for himself. It makes me sad for him. But more than that, it makes me pissed off.