by Nisi Shawl
“We’ll discuss it when you get home,” she said, and after a bunch of kisses from her to Roxy, and back and forth with everyone else at home, I hung up and opened the sack of ice at my feet. The cold felt great. I watched the headlights of the cars heading south.
I would have fallen asleep but Roxy started singing again. “I’ve got to be travelling on now….” She turned to me, as if waiting for me to join in again, but when I didn’t, she tapped her ear as if it were clogged. “Crap,” she said. “That song. It gets in there, yeah?”
“It’s called an ear worm.” I leaned over and turned up the stereo, then pushed the back button until I heard the opening notes. “The only cure,” I explained, and we sang and drove into the night.
Ω
Not too long after the first time I peeled, Mamo started telling Roxy and I the story of Lallah Pombo. She never told it the same way twice, yet it was always the same.
“There was and was not,” she’d say, “in the long ago days, a gypsy family who found a young girl. They called her Lallah Pombo and took her back to their caravan, which never travelled. They raised Lallah and loved Lallah and Lallah was their very own. They all lived in peace and abundance and sang and danced to the sun and the moon and the rain, who together had raised them and loved them and made them their own.
“One day, the rain didn’t come, even though the sun and the moon did. This happened for a long time. They sang for the rain, and they noticed Lallah couldn’t sing on key. They danced for the rain, and they saw that Lallah couldn’t keep a beat. They berated her and called her useless, but the only rain they saw came from Lallah’s eyes.”
Always, around this point in the story, Roxy knew nothing in it was going to be about her, so she stopped listening and fell asleep.
Mamo would continue: “So, Lallah ran away to find the rain. She wandered to the city and she sat among scholars and merchants and laborers and adventurers, but no one knew where the rain lived. She wandered from village to village to city to city, and the only rain came from her eyes.
“One day, she reached the end of the world, the shore of a great sea. The sun and the moon both shone down, and she knew she had found the rain. The rain appeared to her, and asked why the gypsies had sent her.
“‘I am useless, she answered. I cannot sing and I cannot dance and have nothing else to give my people.’
“The rain patted her shoulders and soaked her hair and spread across the lands. But first he told her, ‘You have found me, and are not useless. You will go home and you will tell the stories of what you have seen. Then your people will travel, and sing and dance the stories for everyone all over the world. And wherever you go, I will follow, and the land will give you all that you need.’”
One night, Mamo tucked us in and told us the story. Roxy was asleep by the middle, as she always was, but when Mamo was finished, she tucked a stuffed elephant under Roxy’s heavy arm, and a stuffed unicorn toy under mine.
Roxy rolled onto her new elephant and snored quietly. Mamo watched as I turned the unicorn around and around in my hands. “Do you know what it is?” she asked. “It’s a magical animal. A unicorn. Very special. Just like you.” She flicked off the lamp, kissed me, then Roxy, and left our trailer.
I lay in the dark, that night, for a long time. Then I pulled out a flashlight and my sewing box. I ripped the unicorn’s horn off and carefully pinned the wound closed with tiny safety pins from a sewing kit.
Mamo never commented when she saw me lugging it around the next day, her Lallah Pombo and a plain old stuffed horse.
She never stopped telling the story.
Ω
The truck came to a stop and then shut off, and I woke, arms to the elbows in the bag of melting ice.
“We’re here, Kiz,” Roxy said. “Wake up.”
Either Aunt Gracie and Uncle Marko had been fighting, or Marko had been drinking hard liquor, because she emerged from the ofisa to greet us, alone. She hugged Roxy tight against her kimono, and then hugged me equally hard, as if she hadn’t seen me all summer.
“Were you trying to call again?” Gracie asked us. “The phone kept ringing and no one was there.”
We shook our heads.
“Well, then, go on inside,” she said. “Mala won’t sleep until she sees you.” She pulled a cigarette from inside a voluminous sleeve. “I’m not sleeping either, but that’s because your Káko wants to kill me with his snoring.” She lit the cigarette, then shooed us. “Go on.”
Roxy went first, through the red door and over to our parents’ trailer. I went straight to the trailer she and I shared, kicked off my shoes, and wrapped myself in my fleece blanket.
Roxy came in and dumped her bag across her half of the back room. I pretended to be asleep. She tiptoed out, but through the open window I could hear her on her phone.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I’m sure. I just want to make—” Silence. Then “My sister will be here.” Quiet. “I want to tell Kizzy. She’s the only one—” Hush. “The train is lovely.” A pause. “Phone me with your info. Of course I’ll pick you up.” Footsteps.
“Kizzy? I know you’re awake.”
I answered her with a noise like “Ungh.”
She waited, as if I would say more. I heard her plug in something, then rub her wet head with the towel. She slipped into her bed. “I love you, Rovli,” she said, then music filled her earphones. I lay awake through two complete repeats of the CD, “Free Bird” to “Free Bird,” before I fell asleep.
Ω
I’d always hoped the peeling would reveal itself to be cyclical somehow, predictable like menstruation, or have triggers I could avoid, like hot foods or gluten. Instead it seemed to come and go as it pleased, lasting two, three days, leaving me clean and raw.
Mamo gently squeezed my shoulder until I awoke. “How is it?”
“Na dara, Ma. I’m fine.”
“I should be staying with you, not going all the way to Florida,” she said, and I realized she was already in her travelling clothes, scarf holding back her long hair.
The past two days had been a fever dream of itch and fatigue. “I’ve peeled. It’s done,” I said. “Besides, Fatlip is your brother. You have to go to his wedding.”
“We could have girls’ time. The three of us,” she began, then sighed, resigned.
“Roxy’s staying?”
“Roxy’s staying.” Mamo laid a stack of cash on my side table. “This should be plenty. Use some to get her a birthday cake? And a bottle of wine?”
“I will.”
“And something nice?”
I nodded.
“And if it gets worse, you’ll call Levowitz?”
“I promise.”
As Mamo hugged me, the phone rang. She answered our extension, then just held the phone to her ear without saying anything.
“What—” But she shushed me with a finger. After a few seconds, she simply hung up.
“Someone,” she said, “just keeps calling. They don’t say anything, but I can hear them. Do you think it’s something bad? A creeper? Should we stay?”
Then Tate came in. “It’s a wrong number, I tell you,” he said. “Or a bill collector.” He smiled at that, but Mamo did not.
Tate came over and ruffled my hair. “We should head out, Mala.”
“All right,” Mamo said. “But you girls keep the doors locked. Just in case.”
Then Tate kissed me and Mamo kissed me, and I waddled stiffly out of bed to wave to Dei, Gracie, and Káko Marko. Roxy and I stood side by side as they drove away.
Ω
The hot tub was a gift from Uncle Marko. Káko was a trader by occupation. By passion. He was continually up-swapping something for something else: car parts for a flat of soymilk, a flat of soymilk for a collection of old Playboys, a Playboy collection for a pinball machine. Occasionally, when he up-traded to something valuable enough, he would sell it.
Káko kept a photo of a Canadian gadjo in his wallet. He’d pull it out as m
otivation. The kid had traded a single paperclip for a house in Saskatchewan. One red paperclip, he’d say, with great reverence.
Marko might have been able to trade that hot tub up for something, or even sell it. But instead, he traded again, for a couple of hours from a pair of sad-faced apprentice plumbers to install the tub in the center of the garden. He said it was for everyone, but looked at me when he demonstrated how it worked. Trailer showers gave me cramps from stooping.
I uncovered the tub and slipped in. Even over the hum of the jets, I could hear music from our trailer. “Roxy, not that CD again,” I said towards the glow of her laptop.
“I love this CD,” she called back.
I let the warm water clear off the last of the loose skin, sticky and fine as cobwebs. I had finished peeling, and I thought about calling in to pick up a morning shift at work, then getting Roxy a cake and bringing home Chinese. Then Roxy turned down the music.
I heard her say, “Hello,” then, “No, this is her sister,” and then, again, “Hello?” A moment later, she came out of the trailer. “Someone just called and asked for you,” she said. “Then they hung up.”
“Who was it?”
“No idea. It was male, though,” she said, and waggled her eyebrows.
“Har,” I answered. It must have been the silent caller again, and Roxy thought she was being funny.
She sat up on the side of the tub to talk to me.
“I was reading up on ear worms,” she said, letting her bare feet dangle in the water. “Scientists don’t know what causes them.”
“I’m pretty sure repetition has something to do with it,” I answered.
She splashed me in response. “A friend made me that CD.”
“So you said.” I looked at my beautiful sister in the darkness, the shape of her nose, her thin, muscled arms, the curve of her breasts, and I drew up my knees, light green in the trailer light reflecting off the water, and large as cabbages.
I straightened my legs and watched the sky. My sister kicked her feet gently in the tub.
“Ever wish Mamo and Tate would let us date who we want?” Roxy asked quietly.
“I never thought about it.”
“Really?” Roxy asked. “I think about it a lot.” Her feet bobbed around like elegant fish. “About picking your own—” She paused, searching for the word. “—mate.” She leaned down, as if to brush something from her calf, then continued. “Like, what if I brought home someone white? Or Chinese? Or Jewish?”
“Is your CD-making friend white, Chinese, or Jewish?”
Roxy ignored that. “I mean, how hard would they freak out? How much would they hate me?” she asked. Her tone suggested she already knew the answer.
It was a new moon, and the sky was dark. If I squinted, I could ignore the smoky haze of headlights on the freeway.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” Roxy said.
But then, a flash, a blaze across the sky. “A shooting star,” I said, and Roxy craned her neck. We watched the bright pink ionization trail until it disappeared behind the southbound lanes.
“That’s lucky,” she said.
“Make a wish,” I told her.
Ω
Roxy poked me awake. I opened my eyes, and she was leaning over my bed in our trailer.
“Kizzy,” she said. “I have to talk to you.” She sat down on the floor next to my bed, cross-legged, and balanced her phone in one hand. She encouraged me to sit up in a hurry by staring.
“Is everything OK?” I asked. I couldn’t remember the last time Roxy voluntarily woke up before I did; then again, she’d just spent a summer working crazy, long shifts, watching for fires in the deep forests of Oregon.
“Na dara,” she said. “I just have to tell you.”
“OK.”
Roxy opened and closed her mouth, thinking, like she did sometimes when she had to use only English or only Romany, and had to plan her words carefully. Then she said it. “I’m a lesbian.”
The words hung like dust in the air. She expected a reaction. The only one I could give her was, “So?”
She sat up on the bed, then leaned into me, wrapped her arms around me. She sobbed in my shoulder, partly happy, partly miserable.
“So?” I repeated.
She didn’t answer, just lay on my nightshirt, wet with tears and snot. She calmed down, then sat back and looked at me.
“Did you wonder why we drove straight south from the fire station?”
“Not really.”
“I was going to tell you on the road. I didn’t want to go to Uncle’s wedding in Florida. I wanted to go to Oakland.”
“California?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“To see your friend. The one that made you the CD. The white, Chinese, Jewish one.”
“Yeah.” Roxy sniffed. “I don’t think she is Chinese or Jewish, though.”
“And I messed up the plans.”
“It’s OK, Rovli. You didn’t mess up anything. She’s coming here instead. Her train gets in soon.” Roxy looked at her phone. “An hour. She’s going to stay a few days.”
“OK.”
“You’re really OK with this?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stretched them.
“Tate and Mamo won’t be. This is going to kill them. They are going to kill me.” She put her head in her hands. “You don’t understand.”
It annoyed me that she thought I didn’t understand. Our parents loved me, and they found me under a tree. I started to shake my head, but Roxy started talking again. “You went to bed,” she said. “They yelled at me for two hours about cutting my hair before that chav comes.”
“Your hair was pretty,” I said, trying to explain, but she shot me a look.
“He’s coming for me,” she said. We stared at each other, the shock of saying the truth out loud a palatable thing. This was something we all knew, but we never said these things, just like no one ever said what I was. Roxy looked bolder and sadder. “I think they already made the deal,” she said. “I think they already took my bori price.”
“Mamo would never—”
“Oh, Kiz, don’t be stupid,” Roxy said. “It’s different for you.” She remembered my feelings and scanned my face. She grabbed my foot and squeezed it. “I’d trade places with you in a second.”
I wanted to hide. Under the covers, my cabbage knees to my chest, my lineless hands over my smooth, shiny face. But I didn’t. And couldn’t. A girl my size hiding was even more ridiculous than the idea that a chav would choose me over my sister. That our parents would offer me up as a bride. “What’s her name?” I asked. “You’d better get going to pick up—”
“Natalie.” Roxy’s mouth smiled when she said it, even though the rest of her looked pinched, panicked.
“Natalie,” I repeated. “I won’t tell Mamo and Tate. But you will have to.”
“I’ll be back,” she said, and stood up to go. She smoothed down her pants and ran one hand through her hair.
“Roxy,” I called, but she was already gone. I got out of bed and put on some sweats and a tee-shirt to clean up before they returned. I wound up emptying and scrubbing out the hot tub, replaying the conversation over and over in my head. I’m a lesbian, my sister had said, and I answered, So?
I’m a lesbian, she repeated, and I asked, So what? It’s different for you, she’d said. I scrubbed the tub until the ringing phone made me stop.
I could hear breathing on the other end of the line. “Whoever you are,” I said, with a surprising amount of conviction, “stop fucking around.” Then I hung up.
The hot tub shone in the lights from the trailer.
So what? Then I said it aloud. “So what? I’m an alien.”
Ω
Roxy and Natalie tumbled over one another like puppies, trying to get ready. I’d tried to leave the trailer three times, but each time they whined at me, like somehow I was an integral part of the goings on, so I made m
yself as small as I could and stayed on my bed. Occasionally, a piece of clothing would get flung my way as they searched for this or that. I flicked back a lacy thong that landed by my foot in an attempt to participate.
“You should come with us, Rovli,” Roxy said into the mirror, threading earrings into her lobes.
“Please do,” Natalie added.
They meant it, which was sweet. I wanted to say yes. I actually liked the club where they were going. It was dark and loud, and the booths were big enough to swallow even me up.
I wanted to go. But when I opened my mouth to say yes, it came out as “No.” Yes. My body wouldn’t behave. My legs swung down and my arms leaned into a drawer and extracted a bent paperback. “I’ll stay here tonight.” Yes. “You two have fun.”
“Are you sure?” Roxy clicked her tongue, disappointed. “Na dara, you aren’t in the way.”
My head nodded. No. “I know.”
Roxy flopped next to and on top of me while Natalie laced up her boots. “Voliv tut.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
The taxi honked. The two of them hugged and petted me and then left in a cloud of glitter and perfume.
As the sun sank, the volume rose. Traffic roaring on the freeway overpass above, late summer cicadas hiding among the fake flowers in Mamo’s garden. Even the lake seemed to have a sound, the air loud with smells, fishy salt and tannins. I rolled open the trailer windows and lay back on my bunk, trying to read and half-hoping the phone would ring, then wishing it wouldn’t.
I filled the clean hot tub and started the jets.
I tried not to feel sorry for myself. After all, I’d refused to go out with the girls. I dropped my clothes there in the garden, acting as if the solitude was a gift. I sat in the tub and leaned back to look at the darkening, moonless sky, and when I was done, I dripped my way back to our trailer, dripped over the torrent of clothes until I found a towel. I wrapped myself up and slid into my bed.
