Beige

by Cecil Castellucci

  I hang on to the side and watch him. The water makes his arms and legs glisten, slick, wet. He swims half the length of the pool, and on the way back, he glides up my body, presses up against me, his arms around me. Pool water in his mouth, he spits it out on top of my head, slowly, like he’s a fountain, and then laughs a little. His skin is touching mine, his legs sliding over mine.

  My heart is pounding.

  I think he’s going to kiss me. He leans in close like he’s going to. Instead he says all low-like, “You’re all wet.”

  Then he laughs again, and pushes away from me and swims away.

  I think I’ll die.

  “Beige. Get out of the pool.”

  It’s Lake. Suddenly, she’s right there.

  Leo eyes us from the other side. He juts his chin out in a greeting to Lake, then he dives under the water and swims almost the entire length of the pool.

  I’m shivery. I climb out of the water.

  “He’s not your type,” Lake says as she hands me my towel.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.

  I close the gate to the pool, but I look back over my shoulder at Leo as he continues to swim. His body is dissected into parts by his strokes and by the lines he makes as his arms and legs disappear under the water.

  Head. Shoulders. Arms. Back. Bum. Legs.

  Beautiful.

  Trixie has asked me to come over so I can get acquainted with the apartment before I babysit for Auggie. I don’t even have to come over — she said it was no big deal and that she trusted me, but I am a good girl and, like Garth, I keep my word. I said I’d come over before I started sitting, so come over I do.

  I knock on the door.

  Trixie sticks her head out and puts her finger up to her lips.

  “Auggie’s finally sleeping.”

  The first thing I notice is that she looks great dressed in denim jeans, a 1940s shirt, and her black hair pulled back in a red bandana. She looks like the woman in that World War II poster, Rosie the Riveter. The second thing I notice is the whole place is filled with mermaids. Mermaids of every kind. And blue. The apartment is all kinds of blue.

  “I’m kind of obsessed,” Trixie says. “I always liked that story. When I was young.”

  “‘The Little Mermaid,’” I say.

  “Yeah, but the real version. The sad one,” she says. “Not the Disney one.”

  She shows me around, and I can barely hear her because the stuff in her apartment is more interesting than what she’s saying.

  “Oh, and you can touch anything or try anything on. I always hated when adults would be freaked out about me touching cool shit. I have a lot of cool shit. If you break anything, well, I’ll be really bummed. But I’ll still have plenty of other cool shit.”

  Immediately my hand reaches out and strokes two enormous plumed fans on the wall. I love that I can touch anything. I love that Trixie has no rules.

  “Cool, huh?” she says.

  I stroke the feathers.

  “They’re soft.”

  “They were Misty Temple’s. She was a burlesque queen in Los Angeles in the teens. I perform in this modern burlesque show once a month. Wanna see my feather dance?”

  I nod.

  Trixie removes the feather fans from the wall. She puts them on her couch as she moves some furniture around. She grabs a CD and puts it on, volume low. As the music fills the air, Trixie takes the feathers and opens them up and starts to dance.

  “Imagine I’m just wearing pasties and a little G-string,” she says. “Of course, Misty Temple was really nude. But you can’t be nude in the revue that I’m in.”

  Her body moves and gyrates as she wiggles in and out of the feather fans, never really showing more than her face. The feathers cover her gracefully. It’s mesmerizing.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Want to learn?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you could learn to do the feather dance. I used to do it in the burlesque show. It was my act, but now I’m doing this Cleopatra thing. I like to switch it up. For a while I did a total mermaid thing. Come on, I’ll show you how to hold them.”

  She puts them in my hand and begins to show me how to twist my wrist.

  “They’re heavy,” I say.

  “It takes a lot of strength to make it look effortless,” Trixie says. “That’s the big secret.”

  She starts to sway next to me and I copy her as I move my body. I start to sway. She makes her hips, her arms, her shoulders, her legs pop and bend to the accents in the music. Trixie helps me twist and sway, occasionally putting a hand on my body to move me in the right direction.

  Do boys like this? Would Leo?

  I twist and dance more, kind of imagining eyes are on me. Leo’s eyes. I feel a little tingly.

  “That’s it! You’re a natural! Burlesque is all about feeling sexy and being titillating,” Trixie says. “It totally gets your dad hot.”

  Ew. Suddenly I don’t want her touching me. I don’t want her twisting with me the way she might twist to get The Rat all hot and bothered. I stop dancing, but the music continues without me.

  Auggie’s voice crackles through the baby monitor. Trixie smiles.

  “He’s awake!” she says.

  I follow her into the other room as she takes him up into her arms.

  “Look, Auggie — it’s Katy! She’s your new babysitter! Isn’t she pretty?”

  Auggie hides his face in her shoulders. Shy.

  “He’s just shy around new people. He just doesn’t want to be away from me.”

  Me and Auggie, we feel the same.

  I want to tell him. Warn him. That moms might leave for two weeks and stay away for two months.

  “Did it go well at Trixie’s?” The Rat asks.

  I shrug.

  “She’s nice, isn’t she?”

  The Rat smiles. Kind of sweetly actually. Then he changes the subject. He keeps doing that, filling up the silences.

  “Are you having fun hanging out with Lake?” The Rat asks.

  I know what the correct answer here is.

  “Um, it’s OK,” I say.

  He smiles again. This time like he’s a bit relieved. As long as I say OK, then he is doing his job. I can tell that is what he’s thinking.

  “Oh, good,” he says, kind of happy about it. “What do you girls do?”

  “I dunno. Nothing,” I say. “We went to a show at the Armenian Center.”

  “You went to a show?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  The Rat’s impressed. Perhaps even hopeful.

  “Was it fun?”

  I shrug.

  “How was the band?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What were they called?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did you like them?”

  I shrug.

  He gives up on his line of questioning because it is going nowhere. I can see he wants to push, but doesn’t want to push too hard. I appreciate that. But I don’t tell him that I do. I don’t let on. I don’t want to make it easy for him.

  Why should I?

  Nothing is easy for me. This whole summer, this whole being in Los Angeles thing is hard. Everything is hard.

  Where’s my bribe?

  Later, when I am in the middle of a particularly juicy scene in the book I’m reading, the phone rings. The Rat doesn’t seem to be picking it up, and maybe it’s for me. Maybe it’s Mom calling to tell me that she’s changed her mind about staying in Peru. Maybe she’s calling to tell me she’s had enough of Peru and is coming home.

  I run into the living room to pick up the phone.

  The Rat is lying on the couch with his eyes closed and his earphones on, drumming on the air.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, who’s this?” a gravelly voice inquires.

  “I’m Katy. Who’s this?”

  “I’m Frank. Is Beau there?”

  “Yeah.”

  I walk
over to The Rat and poke him. He removes an earphone and looks at me.

  “It’s Frank,” I say, dropping the cordless on the couch next to him.

  The Rat picks up the phone. I go to the kitchen, but I kind of take extra long, kind of hanging around as I eavesdrop on The Rat’s side of the conversation.

  “Hey, man, sorry I didn’t make it tonight. . . . Nah . . . yeah . . . everything is OK. I’m doing fine. I know . . . I know . . . two weeks is a long time. It’s my kid. She’s here for the summer now, so the plan has changed and I don’t think I’ll make the Wednesday meetings for a while. . . . Yeah, I know . . . I think there’s one in West Hollywood at seven a.m. I’ll go Wednesdays before work. . . . Yeah . . . sorry I didn’t check in with you. It was kind of last minute.”

  The Rat hangs up the phone and picks up a cigarette.

  “Who’s Frank?”

  “He’s my sponsor.” He lights it up in the house and gives a big exhale. I don’t make him go outside.

  “I missed my NA meeting, my regular Wednesday night NA meeting. The one I’ve been going to every Wednesday for five years.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  And then I feel terrible. I know what the meetings are. I know that he should probably go.

  “I’m old enough to stay at home at night,” I say. “I know where the take-out menus are.”

  “Would that be all right?” The Rat smiles. “’Cause I feel better when I go.”

  I shrug and nod. Then I go into my room and close the door. I don’t want him to see how bad I really feel about him missing his meetings. I wouldn’t want him to fall off the wagon because of me.

  Lake’s room is painted all black, except for one wall, which is white with flyers and handbills and set lists and VIP stickers from shows pasted up like a thick wallpaper.

  One of the VIP stickers is for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It says ALL ACCESS. The date is 10/27.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  My mom has the same VIP pass in her shoebox at home.

  “Patches,” Lake says. “Homemade. I silk-screened them myself. My dad knows a guy who has a screen.”

  I meant the wall. I meant the shows. I meant the VIP pass. She knows it, too. But I guess she doesn’t want to answer me. The wall speaks for itself. It’s a rock shrine.

  I know one thing. She wasn’t at that show.

  “Did Suck play that night?” I ask.

  “That’s where they met,” Lake says.

  “Who?”

  “Our moms!” She throws her hand up and sort of indicates a painting hanging on the black wall next to the bed. I scoot over and look at it. It’s a nude. It’s a person’s back, hint of a profile, from behind. Thick paint. Ripped up pieces of yellowed newspaper make up the body. The body is suspended in darkness. The hair. Oh. A Mohawk. It’s a portrait of Sam Suck. In the lower right-hand corner, I see the signature. Yana Banana.

  Let’s be friends! Yana Banana.

  “Did you know I got free classes at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music?” Lake says. “Because Flea was in love with my mom. Everyone was in love with my mom. Everyone.”

  “Yana Banana?”

  “You think it’s a stupid name,” she says.

  I didn’t say it. She said it. I thought it.

  “It’s no more stupid than Exene. Or Siouxsie Sioux. Or Janet Planet. Or Poly Styrene,” she says.

  Or Lake Suck, I think.

  But I don’t say it. I want to know more. I dig a little. I test it out. I want to know. How close were they?

  As if reading my thoughts, Lake gets up and goes over to a wooden chest at the foot of her bed and opens it up. She pulls out all kinds of shiny, colorful, strange-looking vintage dresses and puts them carefully on the bed. She would never wear those kinds of clothes, but she handles them gently. As though they are treasures. She digs deeper into the chest and pulls out a few books until finally she finds the one she’s looking for. She brings it to me and puts it in my hands.

  “There you go,” she says.

  It’s a sketchbook. I open it and start to flip through the pages and pages of sketches of my mom, The Rat, Sam, and a baby that I figure is probably Lake. Mostly it’s drawings, but sometimes there are some photographs taped into the book, or diary entries. I stroke the page whenever I see a drawing of my mom. I notice that whenever she’s drawn with The Rat, they are always touching each other.

  “I think your mom broke my mom’s heart when she left,” Lake says.

  I look up from the sketchbook.

  “I think your mom left because my mom couldn’t stay clean even after I was born. I think your mom didn’t want that for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Why?” Lake says. “You’re lucky. You dodged a bullet.”

  My eye falls on a photograph of a beautiful woman with blond spiky hair, holding a baby in the air. The baby’s mouth is wide open, screaming, maybe happy, maybe scared. Totally Lake.

  “She left my dad when I was three because he was just a disaster. Everyone thought he’d be the one that ended up dead, not my mom.”

  Lake keeps talking like she’s out of breath. Like she’s running a marathon.

  “All my life my mom would get clean, and then everything would be OK for a while. Then she’d mess up.”

  She doesn’t even look up at me. She is telling me something about her mom, about her dead mom, while she is just cross-legged on the black shag carpet with a bunch of Grown-Ups patches surrounding her, like a moat.

  “When I was nine, she was going to quit for real. She wanted to go and finish up and get her college degree. She was going to turn over a new leaf.”

  She is sewing or safety-pinning patches onto all of her jackets. While she talks, her hands keep busy.

  “She had a lot of talent, you know. She probably could have been anything. She could have shown in galleries all over the world maybe. And now instead, she’ll forever be nothing. She’ll have forever never made it. She’ll forever just be dead.”

  I should change the subject.

  “Do you really make all your own patches?” I ask lamely.

  Lake swallows twice, stops busying herself, and looks around like she sees a way out of having to cry. I feel relieved for both of us.

  “Yep. I make all of my stuff myself. I make my own clothes. I peg my own jeans. I dye my own hair. I pin my own pins. Make my own lunch. I earn my own rips and holes. I like to keep it real, you know.”

  She likes to keep it real. And complicated.

  “Do you want one on your jacket?” she asks, throwing me a patch. “It’d look good.”

  I put the sketchbook down and pick up the patch. I can’t believe she’s being serious. I nod.

  I hand her my jacket, and she scrutinizes it until she nods in approval and starts to safety-pin the patch in the place she wants it. Then she hands me back the jacket and gives me a spool of thread.

  I thread the needle and start sewing.

  I am walking and Garth is half skating so I can keep up with him. I’ve got a few books in my bag from the library. I’m on the Ws. Wharton.

  “Do you have to read those for school?” Garth asks. “Like a summer reading list?”

  “No.”

  “You’re reading them just for fun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You must have a huge brain,” Garth says. “I don’t read anything unless it’s assigned or it’s got pictures in it.”

  “OK,” I say.

  We pass by the wall with a mural of swirling black and orange graffiti all over it. People have written words all over the swirls. As we walk by it, Garth kisses his fingertips and then places his hand on the brick.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Kiss the wall,” I say.

  “It’s the Elliott Smith wall.”

  “The what?”

  “Elliott Smith,” he says, and he starts to sing.

  “That’s nice,” I say.

 
“Yeah, he’s pretty good,” Garth says, getting kind of quiet. I can’t tell if he’s being super serious or shy. “I like sappy shoe-gazing boy sensitive stuff as much as I like punk. Don’t tell anyone, though, because everyone already thinks I’m a pussy.”

  He is not kidding. He does seem all soft and skinny and girl-like.

  “OK, I promise,” I say. Anyway, I don’t have anyone to tell.

  “I know my secret inner sap is safe with you, Beige.”

  He might be safe with me, but in reality he’s not safe at all. He wears everything right on his sleeve. He’s got no filter. Maybe someone should tell him that he’s thin-skinned. Maybe someone should tell him that if he wants to keep safe, he should keep quiet. Maybe someone should. But it isn’t me.

  “But I love punk, especially modern So. Cal. punk. See?” He flips his board to show me the stickers plastered underneath: NOFX, BLINK-182, GREEN DAY, THE TRANSPLANTS.

  Is he saying that just to cover up? Is punk just a kind of armor to shield his soft heart?

  I turn from him to look at the wall. I start reading the text. It’s notes to Elliott Smith. Wishes for him.

  It’s a memorial.

  “Is he dead?” I ask. “Is Elliott Smith dead?”

  Garth looks surprised at my ignorance, but he’s not mean about it.

  “He stabbed himself in the heart. Or he was murdered. Case still open. He used to live around here. He played Sunset Junction once. I was too young to care. But I heard the show was legendary.”

  “Is everyone in this neighborhood a musician?”

  “No,” he says. “But I am. I’m going to be a great drummer like your dad.”

  “Is my dad that great?”

  Garth clutches at his heart and flutters his eyelashes like he’s having a heart attack or a seizure.

  “Your dad is a genius. He does all these very complicated time measures that, like, no one else can do. They’re impossible!”

  “What is so great about drumming?”

  “Don’t you want to be a musician, Beige? You must have music in your blood.”

  “No way,” I say. “Maybe it skips a generation.”