I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.
I’ve hurt things, the boys showed me this. Pulling legs off spiders and such. Kevin Ryder next door and his friends, they let me come into their fort. But that was years ago, I was a child, it didn’t matter if I was a boy or a girl. It would be against the law to go into their fort now I suppose. The law of my mother. Why don’t you stay home? she says. Be careful out there, every time I walk out the door. But is it just words I wonder, how much does she really care? Who is she really thinking about when she thinks about me? I have my suspicions. And anyway, do the boys even have a fort anymore? It was probably all destroyed a long time ago. It was a fort in the woods made from sticks and blankets and leaves. Things like that don’t last forever.
And besides, now I know things about my body I didn’t know back then. It’s not the innocence of yesteryear, that’s for sure.
Awful is easy if you make it your one and only. I pinch Luke sometimes. Luke is our dog. You can’t pinch all dogs, some will bite. But Luke is old and he’s a musher, he’s all about love love love and so he’d never bite you. I pet him for a few minutes all nice and cuddly and then all of a sudden I pinch him and he yelps and goes circling around the room looking for the mystery pincher. He doesn’t even suspect me, that’s how blind with love he is. But I suppose if you held a gun to my head — did I love him, didn’t I love him? — I guess I would have to say I loved the stupid dog. He’s been with us forever and he sleeps on my bed.
If you want to know, I was born in this house with this dog and those two, teachers of all things. A blue house. If you look at it from the outside, you’d swear it had a face, the way the windows are. Window eyes, a window nose, and a door for a mouth. Hi house, I say whenever I come home. I’ve said this for as long as I can remember. I have other things I say, better than this, but I don’t tell anyone. I have secrets and I’m going to have more. Once I read a story about a girl who died, and when they opened her up they found a gold locket in her stomach, plus the feathers of a bird. Nobody could understand it. Well, that’s me. That’s my story, except what are they going to find in my stomach, who knows? It’s definitely something to think about.
For a second as I watch them reading, I think Ma and Da have turned to stone. So where is the woman with snakes in her hair, I ask myself. Is it me? Then I see the books moving up and down a little and so I know Ma and Da are breathing thank god. Luke is a big puddle of fur on the carpet, off in dreamland. Out of nowhere he farts and one eye pops open. Oh what’s that? he wonders. Who’s there? Some guard dog, he can’t tell the difference between a fart and a burglar. And he’s too lazy to go investigate. As long as they don’t steal the carpet from under him, what does he care. I can pretty much read his mind. Animal Psychic would be the perfect job for me. The only animals I’m not good at getting inside are birds. Birds are the lunatics of the animal world. Have you ever watched them? Oh my god, they’re insane! Even when they sing I don’t a hundred percent believe them.
I hate how quiet it is. One smelly dog fart and then nothing, you almost think you’ve gone deaf. A person in my position begins to think about things, death even. About death and time and why it is I’m afraid sometimes at night sitting and watching the two of them reading and almost not breathing but for the books moving up and down like something floating on top of the ocean. And is Ma drunk again is the other question, but who’s asking. Shut up and mind your own business, I think. She’s a free man in Paris. Which is a song Ma used to sing when there were songs in the house. Ancient history.
Oh, and infinity! That’s in my head again. That will keep you up all night, the thought of that. Have you tried to do it? Think of infinity? You can’t. It’s worse than the thoughts of birds. You say to yourself: okay, imagine that space ends, the universe ends, and at the very end there’s a wall. But then you go: what’s behind the wall? Even if it were solid it would be a solid wall going on forever, a solid wall into infinity. If I get stuck thinking on this, what I do is pull a few hairs from the top of my head. I pull them out one at a time. It doesn’t hurt. You have to have the fingers of a surgeon, separating the hairs and making sure there’s only one strand between your fingers before you pluck it. You have to concentrate pretty hard on the operation and so it stops you from thinking about other things. It calms you down.
He’s reading a book about China and she’s reading the selected prose of Ezra Pound, that’s the long and the short of it. She’s got her shoes off and he’s got them on. Venus and Mars, if you ask me. And I’m the Earth, though they don’t even know it.
When I get a little bunch of hairs what I usually do is flush some of them down the toilet and then the rest I keep in a jar. I know this is dangerous because if someone found the hair they could use it to make a doll of me and then I would be under their power forever. If they burned the doll I would die, I would disappear. Infinity.
“What are you doing?” Ma says. “Stop picking at yourself.” She crosses her legs. “Don’t you have something to read?”
Books again. I could scream. I mean I like books just fine but I don’t want to make a career out of it. “I’m just thinking,” I tell her.
She says I’m making her nervous staring at her like that, why don’t I go to bed.
Ma was beautiful once, before I knew her. She’s got pictures to prove it. She was a beauty nonpareil, my Da says. Now she looks like she’s been crying, but it’s just the reading, and the writing too. Grading papers all the time and scribbling her notes. If she cries I don’t know anything about it, I’m not the person to ask about that. If she wanted to cry I wouldn’t hold it against her. She has plenty of reasons.
“What are you writing?” I said to her once. “The great novel,” said she. I didn’t know she was joking. For a long time I thought maybe she really was writing the great novel and I wondered what sort of part I had in it.
“Go upstairs,” she says. “Your hair could use a wash, when was the last time you washed it?”
She likes to embarrass me in front of my father, who has managed to keep his beauty, who knows how. He doesn’t care if I have dirty hair or not but still, you don’t want to be pointed out as a grease-ball in front of someone like him. Impeccable is what he is, like a cat.
“I washed it yesterday,” I say.
Ma turns to me and does that slitty thing with her eyes, which means you’re a big fat liar, Mathilda.
“Good night Da,” I say, running up the stairs.
“Good night,” he says, “sweet dreams.” This is his standard but it’s still nice to hear it. At least it’s something.
“And wash that hair” is the tail of Ma’s voice following me up the stairs.
Ma is funny, she either says nothing or else she has to get in the last word. You never know which Ma to expect and I can’t decide which one is worse. Lately it’s mostly been the silent Ma. Tomorrow I’m going to break another plate. It’s already planned.
In my room I look in the mirror. It’s amazing how you have the same face every time. Or is it only a trick? Because of course you’re changing, your face and everything. Every second that goes by you’re someone else. It’s unstoppable. The clock ticks, everything is normal, but there’s a feeling of suspense in your stomach. What will happen, who will you become? Sometimes I wish time would speed up so that I could have the face of my future now.
After the mirror I line up a few papers and books on my desk so that they’re even with the edge. I also make sure not one thing touches another thing and that everything is equal distance apart. It’s only an approximation, I don’t use a ruler or anything. I’ve been doing it for about a year now, the lining up of things. It’s like plucking the hair. Basically it’s magic against infinity.
When Da comes in my room I’m sitting on the bed. Maybe I’ve been here for an hour, who knows.
“I meant to take a shower,” I say. “I forgot.”
He sits next to me and he tries to look at me, except he’s not so good at it anymore. His eyes go wobbly, almost like he’s afraid of me. He used to pet my hair, but that was practically a million years ago, when I was a baby. Still, it’s a nice moment, just the two of us sitting next to each other. But then all of a sudden she’s there, sticking her head in the door.
“I know,” I say, without her having to say anything. I know, Ma.
“Are you okay?” she says. But it’s not even a real question. I wish it was but it’s not.
Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway. That’s part of being awful, not caring. And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head. The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire. She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it. I wouldn’t put it past her.
But don’t get me wrong. I love her. This is another one of my secrets.
The thing is, I can’t love her, not in the real world. Because this would be degrading to me. To love someone who despises you, and she just might. You should see her eyes on me sometimes. Plus she’s not even a mother anymore, she’s just a planet with a face. Da at least has hands.
“Good night Ma,” I say. “Good night Da.” And they just leave me like that and they don’t make two bones about it. Walk out, whoosh, and where do they go? All I know is I’m not tired and I’m not taking a lousy shower and I’m not reading a stupid book for school about the King and Queen of Spain. I’m just going to sit on this bed and if I want to pull a few hairs from my head I will, and no one can stop me.
Six hairs. Brown, but when I look close I can see it’s almost red where it comes out of my head. Like the hair of another person. Like another person inside me, and she’s just starting to squirm her way out like a sprout. This is not in the least bit frightening. I’ve actually been expecting her.
I know you can’t see anything from where you are. You just have to believe me.
My name is Mathilda Savitch, by the way. I probably should have said that first, in case you’re taking notes.
* * *
School started again a week ago and I’m very happy to report that Anna McDougal, my best friend, is in my class. Overall it’s an interesting mix of people this year. No one but Anna has any relevance to the story of my life, but a list is always a good thing. I’ll give it to you with thumbnails.
Libby Harris has a disastrous mole on the tip of her nose. A shame really because she’s very quiet and nice. Her father is a lawyer and so she’ll probably have plastic surgery eventually.
Sal Verazzo is pretty much the fattest person in the school. Black hair, possibly shoe polish. Thinks he’s a rock star. Completely deranged.
Sue Fleishman is tall and has curly hair. She doesn’t walk, she sort of slides across the floor like she’s wearing slippers. A stupid way to move but the boys drool over her.
Barbara Bradley always has snacks. She’s allowed to eat them during class. Supposedly she has a disease.
Jack Delaney is an admirer of mine, but we’ve never spoken. He has a shirt with a rude monkey on it. Sex addict or will be.
Mimi Brockton is crippled! I’m always watching her, I can’t get enough of her. Red hair. I know I’m not supposed to say crippled, but it’s really the best word.
Donna Lavora has thrown up several times since she’s come to this school. Will not do well in life.
Max Overmeyer looks like he lives in a shack. Doesn’t smell right. Probably a victim of poverty.
Eyad Tayssir has perfect white teeth but you hardly ever see them. He’s not a big smiler. Middle Eastern, I’m not sure exactly what country.
Mary Quintas supposedly has a great singing talent but I’ve heard better. She wants to be snob sisters with me but I’m not interested.
Lonnie Tyson still thinks he’s going to be an astronaut. Good muscles.
Carol Benton is the worst. Conceited, big breasted, and loud. Unattractive but worshipped by men. Doesn’t like me apparently.
Bruce Sellars is funny and I hear he knows magic. I’ve seen him speaking to Carol Benton unfortunately.
Chris Bibb, known as Dribble, came back to school with a tan. It doesn’t make sense on him.
The lovely Anna McDougal of course. With whom I have an important but stormy relationship. More on this later.
Kelly Graber has bad teeth. I suspect she’s unloved. Good at sports.
Lisa Mead eats liverwurst. Every day!
Lucas London is very pale but I don’t think albino. When he talks his hands shake. He’s like a lamb. He’s so small you almost want to carry him.
Avi Gosh is the one person smarter than me. He has the eyes of a girl, but he’s very confident. Rich. Sometimes wears sandals.
I’m probably forgetting a few people but if I am there’s probably a reason. Some people are like ghosts, you can’t capture them, or if you do it’s nothing but a blur.
But really it’s amazing to be around so many different kinds of people every day. Sometimes I watch them and it’s like Animal Planet. Everyone’s alive and hungry and sometimes Sal Verazzo is so crazy to tell a story that spit starts flying out of his mouth. And in the morning just before class begins, when everyone’s talking at the same time, it’s like a radio caught between stations. But not two stations, more like a hundred. You can’t make heads or tails of what anyone’s saying. It doesn’t even sound like English, it sounds like bubbles coming up out of boiling mud. If I listen too long, it starts to bother me. It’s probably what hell sounds like. I saw hell once in a movie, and it was pretty incomprehensible. I had to turn it off.
* * *
I have a sister who died. Did I tell you this already? I did but you don’t remember, you didn’t understand the code.
My sister’s name was Helene. Helene and Mathilda. Everyone always said we were the opposite of each other. Night and Day was the famous expression. I’m the younger one, but it still feels backwards that Helene died first.
She died a year ago, but in my mind sometimes it’s five minutes. In the morning sometimes it hasn’t even happened yet. For a second I’m confused, but then it all comes back. It happens again.
She was sixteen at the end. Practically seventeen, just a few months to go. But sometimes, the way she dressed, you’d think she was even older. Plus she had an excellent way of moving. A person who didn’t know her might think she was showing off, but the truth is she just had a natural sway to her. And then add to that her legs. They went from here to Las Vegas, which is how Ma once described the length of them.
Some of the memories I have of Helene are from the beginning of my life, when I was a baby. Ma looks at me like I’m crazy when I tell her I remember the day Helene was carrying me, and then she started running and she climbed over a fence with me still in her arms.
“What fence?” my mother says.
“A white fence,” I say.
When I say this my father puts his hand on my arm. “Stop,” he says. Lately that’s getting to be his favorite word.
I think about Helene a lot, but basically I’m not allowed to talk about her. To Ma and Da, I mean. Not that this is a rule. It’s more like a law, I suppose.
The other memory I have is Helene and I are in a hole and it’s dark and wet. Somehow we’re upside down. I remember water getting in my mouth. Maybe we’re in a well is my first thought.
“You never fell in a well,” Ma says.
“What about a grave,” I say, “or a ditch? People fall in holes all the time,” I say.
Ma goes white like I’m the vampire of questions. My beautiful Da looks at me and I stop.
The thing is, Helene died from a train. That’s the problem. She didn’t jump, a man pushed her. We don’t know who this man was and the police say, at this point, we probably never will.
I wasn’t there when it happened. Neither were Ma and Da. Why she was at the train station is still a big question. A boyfriend is what I think. Helene had lots of them, sometimes even boys from other schools in other towns. She was pretty popular. She had red hair, it was the most amazing hair in the world.
It happened on a Wednesday, which is such an ordinary day. It happened in the middle of the afternoon. A man pushed Helene in front of a train, it’s unbelievable. I always think it’s a mistake. But then it proves to be correct.
Do you believe in curses? That there can be a curse on a person or on a bunch of people at the same time, like a family curse? How will we all die? I wonder. And when?
Helene was going to be a singer. She was a singer. There are recordings. Da made them on his old tape recorder. No one can listen to them now, they’re the most dangerous thing in the world. On one of the tapes it’s Da singing some stupid song with Helene. Both of them are laughing as much as singing. If you listened to it now, it would be Da singing with a ghost. The laughing would kill you.
Ma says the recordings are lost but I know where she keeps them. Plus, I have things hidden too. In my room, under my bed, I have some of Helene’s school notebooks. I have letters and drawings and birthday cards. I also have some e-mails she printed out. And there’s tons of stuff still left in her room. A person, even a sixteen-year-old, leaves a lot of stuff behind. I’ve started to spend more time in H’s room, but only when I’m alone in the house. It’s a better room than mine and I wouldn’t mind living there. Ma would never allow it though. Sometimes I leave the door to H’s room open, even though I know it irritates her.
I remember once, when I was little, I was looking out H’s window and I saw a hummingbird. Come quick, I said, but by the time Helene came over it was gone. Maybe it’ll come back, she said, and we both stayed by the window for almost a minute, waiting. I guess we didn’t have anything better to do. When I think of the two of us standing there, waiting for that stupid bird, it drives me crazy for some reason. I feel like screaming.
Why does a person push another person in front of a train? Does it have a meaning for the person, the pusher? The explanation of most people is madman. The voices of demons telling him to do it. But how did he get away is my question. It doesn’t make sense. Two men at the train station said they tried to grab him but he slipped away. He just pushed her and then he took off. The police say it happens all the time.
In my mind it’s almost as if the man disappeared after he did it. Like he had one job on Earth. To kill Helene. And after that there was nothing left for him to do but vanish.
I hate him. The feeling is tremendous. I’ve never felt anything like it.
If we knew who the man was he’d be in jail. We could go to the jail and ask him questions. Ma and Da wouldn’t but I would. I would be all over him. Even if it was the voices of demons I would pull the demons out of him and make them explain. I would use every bit of my magic.
This Thursday it will be the day Helene died all over again. It’ll be exactly one year. I marked it in my calendar like this: H.S.S.H. Which is Helene’s initials the right way and then backwards. If you stare at the letters it’s almost like someone telling you to be quiet. If Ma and Da think I’m going to ignore the big day, they’ve got another thing coming.
The thing is, Helene was supposed to live forever. That’s just the kind of person she was. You always felt she had some secret power that was going to make her immortal. I wish I could describe to you the color of her hair but there’s nothing to compare it to.
If the man was caught he’d probably be electrocuted. But electricity doesn’t kill demons as far as I know.
People say the hair was like pennies but it was better than that.
And she smelled like lemons. When I said this out loud once, Ma looked away, but Da said he had to agree. He whispered in my ear. He said I was right. He said it was lemons all the way.
* * *
I said to my friend Anna how I want to be awful and Anna said, “What about your soul?”
“What about it?” I said. “Why should I care about my soul?”
“If I even have one,” I added, “and nobody knows for sure.”
“It can’t be proved,” I said. It made me a little mad that Anna brought up the subject of souls, considering everything she knows about me.
“And if it is real,” I said, “where is it?” Stuck up inside me like a baby all white and pudgy like a piece of dough? And what does it do anyway except stay inside you for your whole life and then it’s not born until you’re dead.
I said all this to Anna and she didn’t have an answer. But it got her thinking. I could tell by the way her face (which for the record is quite beautiful) went ugly with wrinkles. It’s hard for Anna to think, for her it’s like climbing a mountain. She’s in the remedial reading group, as well as slow math.
Finally, after a minute, Anna’s face came back and she said, “But the baby is you, Mattie, your soul is you, there’s no difference.”
And then she said she didn’t think it was at all like a piece of dough but more like a silk dress in the shape of your body, your head and your hands and your feet and everything.
“And see-through,” she says. When she says things like this you realize what a child she is. Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.
“If it’s see-though,” I say, “does that mean I can see your titties?”
“No,” Anna says, the total nun now. “The dress is on the inside,” she says, “and so who could look through it, no one but god.”
If Anna gets too smart I might have to stick pins in the head of a doll lumped up into the shape of her. If you added brains to Anna’s beauty it would be unbearable.
And by the way, Anna doesn’t even have titties. She basically has two anthills on her chest.
“Don’t you want to live forever?” she says.
“Heaven and everything,” she says. “A person like you has to believe in heaven, don’t you Mattie?”
I had started up Anna’s thinking engine and now she wouldn’t shut up. Plus I didn’t like where she was going with this conversation. Trying to get me to talk about private things.
Personally, I don’t believe in god. I never had any lessons in him like Anna. She got a bunch of information from her family and from Sunday school. I have my own beliefs, self-invented. What I believe is that there are people watching us, I don’t know who they are, they didn’t give me their names. The watchers I call them. They could be anyone. Who’s to say if they’re even human.
Anna kept talking but I just stopped listening and stared into the blue magic of her eyes. Anna has eyes, not everyone has them. Most people just have holes in their faces, it’s just biological, like pigs or fish. Plain ordinary eyes that don’t mean very much. Anna’s eyes are from outer space, they’re not animal and they’re not human either. I could kiss Anna sometimes she’s so beautiful. Blonde hair too. I only want beautiful friends, even though I’m not beautiful myself. My mother says I’m handsome. I look sort of like a baby horse. Striking is what I am.
I’m looking at Anna going on about her soul, but in my head was still that word. Awful. Awful Awful Awful Awful. Lufwa, if you write it backwards. I figure this out in my head and then I say, “Anna, shut up, listen. From now on,” I say, “I want you to call me Lufwa.”
Does she understand? Of course not.
“Why?” she says. “What does it mean?”
“Just do it,” I say. “Okay?”
“But what does it mean?” she says again.
If only she could have figured it out, that would have been the perfection of the moment. In my fantasy, the light bulb goes on in her head and her face just starts beaming from the miracle of understanding. Lufwa, she’d say, winking at me with her magic eyes. Lufwa.
And by the way I’m not a lesbo. I’ve been told I have an “artistic temperament” which means I have thoughts all over the place and not to be concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Savitch, who are my parents. The doctor who said this was old and looked like a tree and he’s famous at the college where my parents teach and so they had to believe him. My parents have tried to become famous too, but they haven’t gotten very far. They’ve written one book apiece (academic not creative), but neither book made much of a splash. Both of them meant to write a second book, but they never did. Apparently they had a lot of hopes and dreams back in the old days.
When my parents took me to see the Tree, I didn’t say much. I kept what they call a low profile.
“Is she an only child?” the Tree asked.
Da said nothing and Ma said, “What about medication?”
The concern was over my tip-top magical thoughts. And because of the nightmares.
“It sounds French,” Anna says.
“What does?” I say.
“That word,” Anna says. “What you said to call you.”
“It doesn’t sound French,” I say. “Don’t be stupid.”
Anna sulks when I say this.
“Well it doesn’t sound English,” she says.
“It’s not English,” I say. “There’s more languages in the world than just French and English.”
“What language is it then?” she asks.
I can’t even answer her when she gets like this.
“It’s probably not even a real language,” she says.
“Probably not,” I say. “You’ll never know.”
There is so little imagination in the world. A person like me is basically alone. If I want to live in the same world as other people I have to make a special effort.
I take Anna’s hand. It confuses her because she thinks we’re having an argument.
“What?” she says. She doesn’t trust me.
“Nothing,” I say. “Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” she says.
“Good,” I say. I’m looking at her dead in the eye.
“Just say it, okay?”
“Please,” I say.
She closes her eyes. There is a pause a person could die in.
“Lufwa,” she says.
When she says it I have to laugh.
“Oh my god,” I say, “it does sound French.”
Anna opens her eyes and smiles like someone’s given her second prize.
“I told you,” she says.
“Lufwa,” I say. Suddenly I am the king of France. “La fois,” I say. “La fois!”
We are both laughing now and it’s almost like being a child again. Anna is only eight months younger than me but sometimes she’s like a magnet pulling me backwards. It is the glorious past of childhood and no one is ever going to die. It doesn’t even matter that Anna is a little slow. And really she’s not much slower than most people.
And besides, very few people have eyes from outer space, and it doesn’t matter if these people are smart or not. Angels, I bet, are not smart. I bet angels are dumb. But it’s not even relevant, the smartness of angels. The point of angels, as far as I understand, is something even greater than smartness. Supposedly it has more to do with brilliance. Which is light beyond anything we can understand. Like diamonds everywhere, in every bit of the air, and colors you wouldn’t even have names for.
Anna stops laughing and wipes the tears from her cheeks.
“I have to go home,” she says.
It is the completely wrong thing to say.
Because we are standing in that place where two people could stand forever, staring into each other’s eyes. And how often does that happen? And will it ever happen again?
* * *
At school today, first thing, I was told to go to Ms. Olivera’s office. She’s the principal of the penitentiary but you wouldn’t know it from the way she dresses. Beads and bracelets and scarves in her hair. She really should be out on the street selling incense.
“Look at me,” Ms. Olivera says.
I only look at the lips.
“How have you been doing lately?” the lips say.
Oh brother, I think, now we’re going to have to go through the whole story of my life, when all she really wants to know is why I slapped Carol Benton in the face this morning. Which I did without really meaning to do it. It actually surprised me when it turned out to be a real slap and not just the thought of a slap.
“Why are you so angry?” O says. Who does she think she is, the Tree?
“I’m not angry,” I say. I wonder if she’s recording me.
“You slapped someone, Mathilda. That’s an act of anger,” the lips say.
The truth is, Carol Benton is the kind of person who inspires violence. Just the bigness of her face. And more than once I’ve seen her whispering with her friends and then they look at me. What’s the big secret? As if everyone doesn’t already know.
“Mathilda,” O says. “Mathilda. Are you listening to me?”
“I’m giving you a chance here,” she says, and she reaches for my hand like a pervert. I pull away and pretend I have an itch.
“Is everything okay at home?” she says. The same old questions.
“How are your mother and father doing?”
“Is your mother doing a little better?”
“Fine,” I say.
O looks at me with her X-ray eyes but I don’t let her in. I don’t know that I can trust her. I’d like to tell her how it’s been one year, and how I still haven’t seen my mother cry in the way mothers are supposed to cry after the death of a child. Ever since Helene died it’s like Ma’s joined the army. Is that normal? I’d like to ask. Even this morning it was the same old drill. The big day, and all she did was put some oatmeal in front of me and then tell me to rinse out the bowl when I was finished.
“Can I use your bathroom please?” I say.
O nods and I get up and go through the door.
O has her own private bathroom. It’s not as clean as it should be. There’s a hair in the sink. I pick it up with a piece of toilet paper and put it in my pocket, just in case. On a little shelf there’s some air freshener, plus a tin of mints and a candy bar. Who keeps food in the bathroom? Disgusting, if you ask me.
Interesting as well is a bathtub filled with potted plants. All leaves, no flowers. Jungly. I pretty much have to force myself not to make the sounds of monkeys and tropical birds.
I flush the toilet so as not to arouse suspicion. I open the medicine cabinet. Inside there’s a hairbrush, lipstick, a bottle of pills, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. I take the pills, which are called Exhilla, and I put them in my pocket. According to the commercial, Exhilla helps you get through your day with a lot less worry. But the thing is, I remember last year, right after the explosion at the opera house in New York that killed a lot of bigwigs including a senator, Ms. O gave a special talk to the whole school and by the end of it she was crying into her scarves.
When I come out of the bathroom, O is smiling. As far as I can tell it’s not a lie.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I won’t do it again,” I say. And I ask her to please not tell my parents.
“You have to ignore people,” Ms. Olivera says. “You can’t let them get under your skin.”
It’s a sad smile. Like my father’s.
“You’re a smart girl,” she says. She stands up and I’m afraid she’s going to try and touch me again.
“Go to class,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, but I don’t move. I don’t move for about ten years. At least that’s the feeling. Time is funny lately, nothing to do with clocks.
* * *
After school Anna and I decide to go to Mool’s for a soda and curly fries. Walking there Anna doesn’t bring up Carol Benton, which is a big relief. Instead she asks me what I think of the boys this year in our class.
“Not for me,” I say.
“No one?” she says. Obviously she must have her own eye on someone.
Anna and I haven’t started with boys yet, not professionally anyway. But I have noticed that Anna is becoming a bit of a flirt. She has this new thing she does with her hair, a kind of a toss. It’s pretty impressive actually. If there’s one way Anna’s ahead of me it’s in this department. Flirting isn’t a brain thing, it’s an animal thing. But so is slapping people, I guess. And so if I can slap people I should be able to flirt with them. Probably I should give it some attention. I’ve learned a few things from Helene’s e-mails, most of which are from boys. The language gets pretty explicit sometimes. I can’t believe she printed them out, considering the possibility of Ma finding them. I’m adding bravery to the list of Helene’s virtues.
When you think about your body you barely know where to begin. Even just the words for it. Your bum is your bottom is your butt. Is your ass if you want to get crude about it. There’s a ton of expressions for everything down there. Your vaj is your cooz is your crack. Or your cunt if you’re really in the mood or you’re a slut or if someone’s trying to insult you. Boys have more words for theirs than girls, according to my calculations. Penis and pole and peter and prick, but it’s not just Ps. You also have dong and cock and stormtrooper and willy and sausage and you could go on and on if you had all day. Breasts and tits and knockers and boobs and if you’re an old lady you have a bosom, which is hysterical. If I ever say bosom to Anna she nearly pees her pants.
Once, a long time ago, I saw my father come out of the shower and he was naked. Ma was in the bathroom with him. I saw my Da’s thing and it looked like a carrot pulled out of the ground with all its roots and hairs sticking to it. I thought of it inside my mother, like putting a carrot back into the ground, back into the dirt. A woman is a garden, they say. I used to think flowers but now I think vegetables.
“Lonnie’s not bad,” Anna says.
“The astronaut?” I say.
“He doesn’t want to be an astronaut anymore,” Anna says. “That was like three years ago.” She grabs my arm and drags me into Mool’s. Nobody’s there but us and we take the booth in the corner, which is our favorite.
“What’ll it be?” Mool says, even though he knows it’s always curly fries and cokes. He comes over to us, practically dancing from the pleasure of our company. Mool is the happiest old person I’ve ever met. Old people are funny, they’re either lizards or birds. Mool is a bird. When he drops the basket of fries into the oil, he goes squawk squawk, he can’t help himself.
“Do you want to sleep over tomorrow?” Anna says.
“Yes,” I say, “I would love to.” And suddenly I’m feeling so good that I almost tell her what day it is today. But I decide to keep my mouth shut. Why ruin the moment? Besides, my life with Anna is different from my life with Ma and Da. My life with Anna has more to do with the future, which is not a big topic of conversation at home. At home it’s more like woolly mammoths sinking into a tar pit.
* * *
The phone rang four times before Ma picked it up. I was at a pay phone six blocks from the house.
“Hello?” she said.
I crunched up a piece of notebook paper by the mouthpiece to make it sound like static.
“Hello,” she said again. “Is someone there?”
I put the paper over my mouth to disguise my voice.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I can’t understand you,” Ma said.
I made the paper crackle some more. I tried to say what I’d planned but I couldn’t do it.
“Who is this?” Ma said.
Helene, I wanted to say.
Instead I just hung up.
I felt like punching myself. Sometimes I can’t stand how weak I am. I have great ideas but then I hesitate.
When I got home, Ma was in the kitchen staring out the window. She had on her Chinese robe with the bridges and the dragons.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
There was a pecan ring on the table. Ma had already eaten a good chunk of it. Ma’s always been skinny and I want her to stay that way. Fat wouldn’t make sense on her, she doesn’t have the bones for it. Plus fat people are liars, have you noticed that? They hide things.
“What are you doing?” I say. She was just standing there.
“Pecan ring,” I say. “From Kroner’s?”
“You want a piece?” she says.
I tell her no, even though I’d love a piece. Pecan rings from Kroner’s are pretty amazing. My plan is to eat it later when she’s passed out.
I sit at the table and wait to see what happens. It takes about two hours but then finally Ma comes over to me.
“Your hair’s getting long,” she says, and she touches it. The feeling is electricity, warm, and maybe it wouldn’t have felt half bad if Ma’s lousy hands weren’t shaking. Plus the kitchen smells like cigarettes, which is her old habit back again.
I pick a nut off the ring, but I don’t eat it. I examine it like a scientist until Ma moves away. Suddenly all I can hear is the humming of the refrigerator. It’s like the sound track to infinity. I get up and whack the stupid thing. Ma flinches a little, it’s almost funny.
Before I know what I’m doing I’m eating the pecan ring. I sort of make a pig of myself. I eat more than I mean to. Ma’s still turned away from me, and when she breathes it makes the dragon on her back look like he’s getting ready to shoot a big load of fire. I wish I knew what was inside her head. For some reason my ESP doesn’t work when it comes to Ma. I keep counting the breaths of the dragon and when I hear Da’s car, it’s music to my ears.
Ma moves over to the stove, pretending to be normal. She stirs something in a pot. Dinner, I suppose, though she hasn’t been too creative lately. Lately she’s the one-pot wonder. Throw everything in and hope for the best. What she really should be making tonight is chicken français, which was Helene’s favorite.
The front door opens. Luke barks from somewhere in the house.
“We’re in the kitchen,” I say, careful not to shout. But then I can’t help myself, I say it again and this time I shout. “We’re in the kitchen, Da.”
Just get him in here is my thought. Save me from the dragon.
* * *
Once or twice I’ve heard my mother and father having relations in their bedroom, but not in a while. Ma sounds like an owl and Da sounds like a sheep. When Helene and I were kids, we would catch them kissing in every part of the house. Da gave Ma the kind of kisses that linger, and afterwards she looked like someone who’d just had a bath. Recently Da has been trying to put his hands on her again but she’s not too interested. He makes jokes and tries to touch her but he mostly misses. Ma’s pretty fast when she wants to be.
Every night after dinner Da takes a walk with Luke. “Anybody coming?” he always says. My standard excuse is homework, and Ma is Ma. Other than work she hardly ever leaves the house. Lately she doesn’t even answer him. But my Da can’t help asking, he’s always been the optimist in the family. He’s definitely the one who could save the world, but will Ma let him is the question. Maybe she wants everything to come down in fire.
Tonight when Da asked if anyone was coming, I said yes. Ma looked at me like I was an impostor.
“What?” I say to her. “I used to walk Luke all the time when I was little.”
I wanted her to know that some people can do more than just sit around and smoke cigarettes. A person can wake up if she wants to.
“Get your coat if you’re coming,” Da said. He didn’t seem terribly excited by my company. It struck me that maybe he goes somewhere private on his walks and now that I was coming he wouldn’t be able to go there. Or maybe it was just his private thoughts I’d be interrupting.
We only walked around the neighborhood, it wasn’t anything special. A few people waved at us and we waved back. Luke barked at some dogs. One house still had a bring back our troops sign on the lawn and I couldn’t even remember if we still had troops over there. I guess we always have troops somewhere, due to the fact that it’s an age of terror. And then the funny thing was, I completely blanked out as to where “over there” was. Helene would know, she was very political for a person her age. Ma and Da used to be political too, they were big marchers once upon a time. But I guess they’re more selfish now. Death does that to people apparently.
When Da bent down to scoop up Luke’s poo I noticed a tiny bald spot on the top of his head. I realized I wasn’t exactly sure how old my Da was. I know he’s not too old but a bald spot, even a tiny one, is definitely a sign of time passing. I tried to picture my Da bald but I had to stop because it was like a monster movie in my head.
Luke stopped to smell something and Da and I waited. We were like two strangers at a bus stop. Finally I kicked Luke, not hard, just a love tap. “Get a move on,” I said.
“Be nice,” Da said, and so I gave Luke a make-up smooch right on his nose, which made his butt wiggle. And then I wiggled my butt the same way and Da laughed. When a plane flew by overhead Luke barked. It was dark up there and the plane’s lights were on. It’s still something that scares me. I wouldn’t mind if I never saw an airplane again my whole life. In our history book, there’s a picture of the burning towers. I was only a kid when it happened, but they don’t let you forget stuff like that. Every year there’s a show on television when it’s the anniversary of the towers. Sometimes a bunch of movie stars read a long list of all the people who died. These dead people get special treatment because they died in a national tragedy. But I don’t see how they’re any different from normal people who die. Everyone deserves a little bit of fame after they’re gone. Nobody should disappear completely.
When people came to see the display of Helene in her coffin, they didn’t see Helene because the coffin was closed. Locked. I wonder who had the key. Apparently Ma and Da got to look at her before they closed it but I wasn’t invited. Supposedly her body was pretty bad. I don’t know if it was or it wasn’t. Everyone went up to the stupid box as if Helene was inside. But I wasn’t convinced. Death is a joke almost. You can’t honestly believe it.
Ma wore red lipstick to the funeral because that’s the only color she has. I sat next to her and she kept saying the same thing over and over again, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Oh god oh god oh god it could have been. But probably not because she doesn’t even believe in him. Capital Him.
It’s funny, it didn’t even rain the day of the funeral. Nothing was right about it. Da’s brother made a speech but he barely knew his lines, he kept looking at a piece of paper. I’m telling you, the whole day was completely unbelievable. I know what funerals look like from movies, and Helene’s was a total sham.
* * *
I’m watching her but she doesn’t even know I’m there. Da’s asleep and I should be too, except I’m not ready for H.S.S.H. to be over yet. Obviously Ma isn’t either. She’s on her knees in the kitchen, a total dog, huffing and puffing and pulling stuff out of the cabinets. I can hardly stand to look at her. The bottoms of her feet are black.
What are you looking for? I almost say, but then she finds it. A bottle. I jump out of the doorway and hide in the hall like a cop outside a room of potential danger. I can hear the vodka slub-slub into a glass. I can hear her drink. She makes a little sound in her throat.
Lately Ma’s always doing something funny in some shady corner of the house. Last week was the worst. I found her in her bedroom with the curtains closed and no lights on. Daytime but she’d made it dark. She was naked, that’s the main thing. She was rolled up in a ball and her hand was between her legs. The sound is what I would call a whimper. I think maybe she was doing it to herself, like in Da’s magazines. Either that or she was crying.
I’ve started to wonder about Ma’s loneliness. I’ve never thought about it before because of my father. The meaning of marriage is the end of loneliness, but maybe not. Sometimes I think I should go to her, I should climb into bed with her when she’s curled up there in the middle of the day. But the thing is, after Helene died I cried for months and months but Ma was deaf. After Helene died I was basically alone. Da was there but that’s not the issue. Da is Da, Da isn’t my mother. A person’s mother is a whole different story. A person’s mother is supposedly a big part of a person’s life.
“Why are you standing there?” she says, coming out of the kitchen.
The drink is still in her hand and the awful thing is when she comes toward me I can smell her. The awful thing is she kisses me. Her lips touch the top of my head but there’s no passion in it, it’s the kiss of a zombie. And then she disappears into the fog. Even though you can’t see it, there’s the feeling of smoke everywhere, in every room of the house.
One of the things I wonder is: Do the dead want us to be dead too, or do they want us to be alive? Sometimes I wonder if Helene is jealous of me. Is she mad at me, does she wish we could swap places? And then I wonder does she even have a mind to think of me at all. Is there anything left of her out there?
I go into the kitchen and I take a plate out of the cupboard. With both hands I swing it high and tense my arms. But nothing happens. I end up standing there like an idiot, with a dinner plate over my head. I keep trying to make it come down, but I just don’t feel inspired.
* * *
Anna and I are sitting in her living room. The TV is on but we’re barely watching it. Anna’s trying to get a splinter out of her finger and I’m making a tattoo of a snake on her ankle with a blue ballpoint.
“Don’t press so hard,” she says.
Helene used to draw tattoos on me. One time she made a masterpiece of red lips on the side of my shoulder. For a while I was really crazy about tattoos and I made Helene do a new one on me every week. Mostly we did it in secret because Ma worried about blood poisoning. But once, in the summertime, I was sunbathing on the lawn and my sister drew a giant flower right on my stomach, with the petals coming straight out of my belly button. When she was finished she sealed it with a kiss. “You’re a rock star,” she said, and I pretty much believed her.
The snake I’m doing on Anna is coming out pretty crappy and I consider turning it into an octopus. On television a man is having a conversation with a deaf boy. The boy is doing signs with his hands and grunting. Anna sighs and changes the channel with the clicker. She goes past a hundred things until she gets to the plastic surgery. At first I don’t even know what it is, for a second I think it’s a cooking show.
“Look,” Anna says, but I’m already looking. A doctor is pulling a loose piece of someone’s face, you can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.
“Gross,” Anna says, but she doesn’t change the channel. “Oh my god,” she says. An assistant to the surgeon is sucking up blood with a tube. I get a funny feeling in my stomach. I used to be able to watch gross-outs but lately it’s not so appealing.
“I’m going upstairs,” I say.
Anna doesn’t move, she can’t take her eyes off the stupid television.
I really can’t stand it when other people have control over the clicker. No one ever watches what you want to watch. And then they always shut the TV off at the wrong moment. When I’m watching TV by myself my rule is to shut it off only after something good has happened, or when the last words you hear are not going to hurt you. You don’t want to shut it off in the middle of two people having an argument or someone saying pig or death or my car broke down. You want to make sure the last words are something like that would be great or world of your dreams or magically delicious.
When you go up the stairs in Anna’s house, you pass all these pictures of gardens painted by Anna’s mother. The flowers are good but the people are just blobs in the distance, they don’t even have faces. The blobs are standing under trees or sitting down to blobby picnics. Why even paint people if you’re not going to give them some character?
Anna’s bedroom is the perfect room of a girl, pink and white and fluffy. Everything is in its place. It’s easy to imagine people visiting this room in a hundred years. It would be like a museum. The bedroom of a girl would be the exhibit. This would be in the future when people sleep in pods and live forever. But I bet the room would still make them jealous. A huge bumblebee is knocking on the window. I kick off my shoes and sprawl on the bed.
“What are you doing up there?” Anna shouts. “Are you coming down?”
“No,” I say, “you come up here.”
I arrange myself on the bed like pornography but when Anna sees me she doesn’t get it.
“Why are you lying like that?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, and I close my legs.
The bumblebee is still doing a number on the window, bonking its head. You have to feel sorry for animals like that, you really do.
Anna comes and sits next to me on the bed. She tilts her head like a doll. Suddenly she’s my nurse. She pushes the hair out of my face. Around us on the bed are pillows shaped like hearts. It really is another world.
When I sleep at Anna’s I always sleep in her bed. It’s huge. The sheets smell like milk. Hours after the bumblebee that’s where we were again, talking with the lights out. I noticed there was a lot of moonlight coming in the window, there was a nice patch of it on the carpet. We were talking about fall projects at school but neither of us were coming up with any brilliant ideas. I suggested we take off our clothes and lie in the moonlight.
“For fall projects?” Anna said. She gets confused if you change the subject too quickly.
“No,” I said, “just for tonight.”
“Why?” she said.
But I didn’t really have a reason.
“I’m not stripping,” she said. But she laughed.
“Nymphs do it,” I said.
“Do what?” she said.
“Bathe in the moonlight,” I said.
Anna’s eyes were glowing in the dark. “I don’t even know what nymphs are,” she said.
I told her that nymphs were beautiful young girls that live in the woods. “Spirits,” I said.
She said she didn’t want to be a ghost and I told her they weren’t ghosts exactly. I mentioned how they were related to the Greek gods.
“Are they immortal?” she said. Boy, did she know how to irritate me.
“Sometimes,” I said, “not always.”
“Most of them live for a long time,” I explained, “unless they have an argument with one of the gods. And they never lose their beauty or grow old,” I told her.
I also said that a woman’s breasts were born to live in the moonlight. I was really hamming it up until I had Anna blushing and laughing. I knew she wanted to do it.
“Just for a minute,” she said.
So we did it. We took off our tops and settled down on the floor, on our backs. We made ourselves cozy in the little box of moonlight.
“I don’t think the door’s locked,” Anna said. She started to get up but I grabbed her hand.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “no one can get in. And if they do,” I said, “they’ll be punished for looking at us.”
“Only the animals can look at us,” I said. And in fact Anna’s cat was doing just that. Staring at us from the bed.
The moonlight was coming in the window and it was almost like something definite. It wasn’t just empty air, it had fingers, it attached itself to our bodies. I noticed how Anna’s skin was a lot whiter than mine but I tried not to look because I didn’t want to make her nervous.
I told her how one day it wasn’t going to be just moonlight all over us.
“I know,” she said. “I think about it sometimes.”
“I think about it almost as if they were already on top of me,” she said.
Once I tried to get Luke to lie on my stomach to see what it would feel like. I don’t mean sex. I wasn’t naked or anything. I just wanted to understand the weight of another person. But it didn’t work. Luke just put his head on my stomach and then I petted him until we fell asleep.
“It’s going to hurt,” Anna said.
“Probably,” I said.
All of a sudden we burst out laughing. Then it was quiet for a while, except for my heart which was going about a mile a minute.
Anna was getting pretty comfortable on the floor, and so I peeked at her belly again. Boy, I couldn’t get over the whiteness of it. It looked like it was dusted with powder. It really did.
The heat was blasting in the house but I could feel the chill of moonlight on my skin like the invisible fingers of aliens. Plus other things, also invisible, passed between Anna’s body and mine. I bet I could have become pregnant with something that came off of her, some of that white powder. The alien fingers were moving it back and forth between us like bees.
Suddenly I noticed Anna was crying. It wasn’t sobbing, it was just quiet lines down her face. I looked at her and she looked at me.
This is happening, I think. Anna is crying. For some reason it made me happy.
“I don’t know,” Anna says to herself.
“I’m bleeding,” she says.
I don’t understand, and then she touches her stomach. “It started this morning.”
I ask her if it’s her first time and she says, “yes.”
She wipes her eyes.
“Maybe we should do some homework,” she says. “I don’t feel like sleeping yet.”
She stands up and puts her shirt back on. She gets her books and brings them to the moonlight. It’s the same world we’ve been living in, but different now. Everything starts to glow. The cat sees it. He sees the miracle. He comes over and rubs himself against Anna’s leg. Anna opens a book and inside is a picture of a bird, as well as the bones of a bird.
Awful, I say to myself. Lufwa.
Anna puts the book between us and we begin to do our homework inside the miracle. We’re in no rush. We have all the time in the world. We’re like the secretaries of god.
The first time I bled I thought I was going to die. I also cried.
When I first found out about Helene I didn’t cry right away. I was too busy noticing how many people were screaming in outer space and wondering why I had never heard them before.
There are a lot of worlds we don’t even know about.
Anna gives me a tiny smile and I give her one back. My whole body starts to shiver and I can feel it straight down to my bones. But it doesn’t feel bad. When you’re head over heels about someone, it’s a real painkiller. You almost wonder why doctors don’t recommend it more.
“Look at that,” Anna says, pointing to a green bird with gigantic wings.
“It’s not a bird,” she says, reading my mind, and correcting me.
“What is it?” I ask her.
She moves closer to the book so she can make out the words in the moonlight.
“It doesn’t exist anymore,” she says.
“Go to the next one,” I tell her, and she turns the page.
* * *
Adapted from “Mathilda Savitch” by Victor Lodato, to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
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