by Leigh Stein
“No,” I said. “That was just a joke. I’m actually hoping I come down with a chronic illness so I can apply for disability and live with my parents forever.” It sounded so stupid when I said it aloud.
Amy held out her cigarette. “Want help getting cancer?”
“Yeah, exactly, except I don’t think you can get disability if you have cancer?”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know.”
“If the illness thing doesn’t work out, you can come to the desert with me and May. You can be the bohemian auntie.”
“Right. I’ll bring the peyote.”
Amy smiled. “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
• • •
I’d never tried to open it, but I knew which door led to the attic. Its doorknob was different from all the modern handles along the hall. This one was an antique. It looked like the head of a crystal scepter. There was even a sweet, old-fashioned keyhole, big enough to peer through.
“Do you have the key to the door?” I asked.
“No. The previous owners didn’t know where it was. But I installed my own lock on the inside, so no one can come in while I’m working.”
All I could think about was that Chevy Chase movie, the one in which he gets stuck in the attic and his family doesn’t even notice he’s missing. He spends the whole afternoon in his bathrobe watching old family movies until he falls through the insulation and almost dies. It’s my dad’s favorite. Every Christmas we watch it.
Amy turned the knob once to the left, once to the right, back to the left, and then shoved it open with her left shoulder.
“I used to hate that it sticks,” she said, “but we’ve never gotten it fixed in case May ever tried to wander up here.” She pulled a cord that turned on the first light above the staircase. The stairs were much steeper than I’d anticipated. She went first.
“When you look at your house, you wouldn’t think there’d be room for such a large attic,” I said.
“What?”
Amy turned and looked at me over her shoulder.
I felt stupid for repeating something so inane. “I just said this is a pretty big attic.” Every step sounded like a hollow box.
Even though there wasn’t much light, I could already make out the dimensions of the room. It was a dream attic, a movie set attic. There was the window that faced the backyard, there were the two windows on the side of the house that opened onto a flat patch of roof that could be used as a little porch, and there, in the middle, was something very large and dark, some mass I could distinguish among the shadows, but didn’t recognize.
At the top of the stairs I opened my eyes as wide as I could, so my pupils would dilate.
“Give me just a sec,” Amy said. The floorboards creaked.
I knew she was probably looking for the light switch, but I wanted to see whatever it was before she let me. I wanted to be ready for the surprise by spoiling it. I needed to know what facial expression to prepare.
After a few more seconds in the dark, I could more clearly make out some kind of structure. It was a huge box. Did that make sense? A huge box? Maybe it was a cage. But although the corners were squared, it seemed more shallow than deep, and certainly not deep enough to keep an animal. And why would she keep an animal up here? Maybe a centaur. I was freaking myself out.
I’d lost track of where Amy was. The only sound in the room was the sound of my breath. I took a couple steps farther away from the staircase, so she couldn’t come up behind me and push me down them like the opening scene of a Stephen King novel.
“Amy?” I said.
But before she could answer, I saw.
By the sudden illumination of hundreds of white Christmas lights, I saw a shrine, as wide as a living room wall. Amy had constructed it in the center of the attic, where the ceiling was highest. And then I saw that it wasn’t a shrine; it was more like a museum tableau. A theater set. The frame was made out of pieces of white wooden bars, haphazardly attached with nails, and bows made out of pink satin ribbon at the corners. The yellow wallpaper from the baby’s room served as the backdrop. There was a rocking chair against the wall, and floating above it: May’s doll, Emily, disfigured from being left in the rain, dressed in a white nightgown. She hung from the top of the frame by strings, like a deranged marionette.
Amy stepped into the room she’d built for herself and sat in the rocking chair.
“What do you think?” she asked, pulling the baby doll down so she could hold her. The strings rattled in the pulleys.
I was still taking in the broken crib bar frame, which was practically unrecognizable as having ever been a piece of baby furniture; it was destroyed. The chainsaw. There was a title along the bottom of the frame, painted in gold cursive against blue, that read: Woman Preparing to Wash Her Sleepy Child.
“How did you do it?” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
Amy smiled with pride. “It looks just like it, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Like what?”
“The painting!” She posed with the baby, head down, and then looked back up at me, waiting for recognition.
I searched the catalog in my brain of every painting I had ever seen. Nope. Nothing. Nada. Rien.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”
Maybe the chainsaw is still up here, I thought. Maybe because I didn’t recognize the painting, she’ll murder me. If I die now I’ll have never even done anything worth mentioning, I thought. My obituary will just be my SAT scores.
But Amy didn’t seem angry with me; she just seemed crushed, incredulous. “Mary Cassatt,” she said, and did her impression a second time. Of course I’d seen her mother and child paintings, but apparently not the one she was trying to replicate with the ruins of her daughter’s nursery.
“Mary Cassatt,” she said again. “Woman Preparing to Wash Her Sleepy Child.”
The bluish skin below her eyes made Amy look haunted, wounded, and I felt responsible. “Of course,” I lied. “Now I remember.” It was only a kind of lie, a kind lie, a white one. What did I know about Mary Cassatt? Art History 101: her childlessness. But Amy wasn’t childless. Amy still had a daughter.
“Do me a favor,” she said.
I took a step toward her. She stood up and took a step toward me, still holding Emily, and the strings rattled in their pulleys again. I took the doll from her arms and Amy went to stand in the place I’d just left. “Now sit in the chair.”
I sat in the chair. To my right, a blue washbasin rested atop a small stool. The tableau glowed with soft holiday light, and Amy stood in the darkness. I was reborn, an actress again. I was playing the role of my audience. I was playing Amy.
I cradled Emily in my arms.
Amy pressed her hands to her mouth and shook her head. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s what it was like that night.”
TRUTH OR DARE
When May woke from her nap, she found me downstairs in the living room, staring uncomprehendingly at a copy of The New Yorker—some short story about an estranged couple and an elephant souvenir. My starring role in Amy’s tableau had given her the impetus to carry on, and I’d left her upstairs, to re-dress the doll, or string more lights, or maybe run the chainsaw just to break something apart. As I had come down the stairs from the attic, my hands were shaking.
“What are you doin’,” May said, climbing into my lap on the living room couch.
“Nothin’,” I said. “What are you doin’?”
“What are you readin’, I said,” she said.
“The New Yorker?”
“The noonyorker?”
“For people who live in New York. Who are fancy.”
May had recently proven her ability to read Green Eggs and Ham by herself, from start to finish. Of course I knew that she didn’t really recognize the words, that she had just memorized them sequentially like lines in a play, but words were now int
eresting to her. She understood that they were pieces of a whole, something worth paying attention to.
May nodded. “Spell it.”
“N-E-W.” I pointed to each letter on the cover.
“N-E-W,” she repeated.
“Y-O-R-K-E-R.”
“M-A-Y. H-A-M! I do not like that Sam-I-am!” She tucked her legs into her chest and threw her arms around my neck like a baby monkey.
“Jeeze Louise, how much do you weigh now? A hundred pounds?”
May ignored my question. She leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “I have a surprise for you,” her breath hot on my neck.
“Uh oh,” I said, “did you wet the bed?”
“NO!”
“Did you … find a panda in your closet?”
“No, come on! I’ll show you!”
I had had enough surprises to last the rest of the summer, if not my entire life, but I couldn’t blame May for how her parents burdened me with their confessions and exhibitions, their secrets and lies, and so I followed her back upstairs to her room.
She made me close my eyes before we entered.
“Don’t be scared,” she said.
“I wasn’t,” I said, “until you said that.”
I felt her small hand pulling mine toward the unknown. Bright sunlight spilled through the windows, and rosy spots danced in the field behind my eyelids. She pulled me to the floor until I was kneeling on her rug. I heard a drawer open. Then nothing. An unsettling silence. I could have peeked, but I didn’t want her to catch me breaking the rules. I was imagining what it was she might have collected—a crop of kitchen knives, or Amy’s Joan of Arc and all the angels, or maybe a dead mouse or a live grasshopper in a jam jar, and then finally May clapped her hands.
“Okay! Open your eyes, Esther!”
At first, I didn’t know where to look. I looked at her face. Her eyes were sparkling, but her face was solemn. There was nothing spread across the rug, nothing out of place. Then May began to jump up and down and gesture toward the drawer itself, until I crawled close enough to look inside.
There were cicada husks, dozens and dozens of brown gossamer shells, spread across the bottom of the drawer, thick as carpet. My skin reacted as if brushed by a cold wind.
May stared at me with her wide doll eyes. “Wow!” I finally said. “You got a lot!” She nodded, pulled a polka-dotted diaper bag out from underneath her bed, and began to put handfuls of husks inside it. They’re dead, I told myself. They’re just dead bugs. But still I felt sick, waiting for one of them to reanimate.
“Come on,” she said, hoisting the bag over her shoulder. “We have to bury them.”
I followed her downstairs, the bag dragging one stair behind as she took single step after single step, her left hand clutching the railing for guidance.
“Can I help you carry the bag?”
“No,” she said. The gravity in her voice, the fact that she wouldn’t let me help her, and the grim nature of our objective, made me feel like I was witnessing May’s transformation into a stranger. Like a tiny adult had come from the future to replace the little girl I had known.
• • •
The dramatic shift I saw in May, from playful to grave, reminded me of a shift of my own, although mine had been much later, when I was thirteen. I could pinpoint it—that same still seriousness, the watchfulness in the eyes—to the night of Kelly VonderHeide’s thirteenth birthday party.
That night, Mr. and Mrs. V. had pitched a camping tent in the backyard for us. They left some frozen pizzas and a rented VHS tape of It on the kitchen counter, and then went to a wedding anniversary party a few blocks away.
I didn’t tell my parents we’d be alone, or else they wouldn’t have let me come.
Kelly lived in the unincorporated part of town, where every house was a variation on a split-level ranch, and residents didn’t have the luxury of sidewalks or a regular police presence. At night, the streets hummed with the sounds of sparse traffic along the highway overpass, and the laughter of stoned teenagers on exodus to the 7–11 en masse.
Inside the tent, the air smelled like our skin and the bubble gum in our mouths, like cheap baby powder perfume, like five girls on the verge of getting their illicit questions answered.
Summer sat with a bag of Twizzlers in her lap. A Real McCoy tape played from Kelly’s boombox. I hugged my knees and stared at Angela, the new girl, who no one had ever seen wear pants (she wore shorts to gym class, under her long skirt), waiting to see if she’d do something weird and remarkable. Angela fascinated us. We’d convinced each other that her parents were members of a religious cult, and invited her to sit at our lunch table to find out more. But Angela was shy, and adept at dodging our curiosity. Whenever we begged to know why we weren’t allowed to see her knees, she’d blush and shake her head, distract us with offers to share her Capri Sun.
But it was Kelly’s cousin Julia, two years our senior, who was the first one to do something weird and remarkable. Angela and I watched her unpack the cans of Miller Lite and minibar-size bottles of whiskey she’d carried in her overnight bag. Her hair was dark and thick like mine; her skin shiny and porous. It was Julia’s idea that we play Truth or Dare.
“You first,” Julia said, looking at me. “What’s your name again?”
I felt like a deer in headlights, but worse—I was myself in headlights, about to be run over. What was in my overnight bag? A t-shirt to sleep in and a tube of Clearasil.
“Esther,” I said.
“CHESTER?”
“ES-THER.”
“I’ve never heard of that name.”
“She’s Jewish,” Summer said with a smirk, which made me want to hit her, one hit for each time she had come over for Hanukkah dinner, one hit for each latke eaten.
“Esther,” Julia repeated, “truth? Or dare?”
“Truth.”
She looked ready. “Who do you think about when you masturbate?”
The truth was there was no way to answer in a way that wasn’t self-incriminating. The truth was I thought of Mr. Hanson, our seventh grade social studies teacher.
Mr. Hanson was a Monty Python fan, which gave him the chance to explain, among other things, the Spanish Inquisition. To my parents, when they asked if my bed was made, I’d begun replying, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” And I felt that as far as trauma went, Truth or Dare was on par with waterboarding. At that moment, I would have rather been a heretic, had someone put a rag in my mouth and pour the water in, than answer the question.
“I bet Angela thinks about Annie Casterman,” Summer said, holding a piece of licorice between her teeth like a cigarette, and snickered. Annie Casterman was a chubby redhead who ate carrot sticks and rice cakes at lunch, which confused us, and led us to believe she went home every day and ate six hundred cookies. “I bet her tits are uneven.”
Angela was so quiet I’d almost forgotten she was sitting next to me. Her face flushed beneath her freckles.
“My dad’s friend Mike,” I lied. “Michael. Mike.”
Kelly squealed. “What does he look like?”
“He’s, like, tall and stuff. He plays the guitar.”
“That’s a lie. She probably thinks about Mr. Hanson,” Summer said. Another hit. We weren’t friends anymore. I didn’t even care that her parents were divorced. I wanted to throw her down a well.
Everyone laughed and clapped their hands. Julia closed her eyes and moaned his name like a porn star. Even Angela giggled, and it was the first sound she’d made all evening. She was wearing socks with ruffles at the top. There was something about her innocence, her inexplicably enforced modesty, that made me want to throw her in front of the headlights next and save myself.
“Your turn,” I told her, hoping my voice sounded as snide as Summer’s. “Truth or dare.”
I think everyone was surprised when she said, “Dare.”
I dared her to go skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool.
• • •
I followed May downstairs and outside, through the tall grass that had grown thick and green after the rainfall. She led me to a patch of dirt in the back, which was partially hidden by some overgrown tree branches. A row of Popsicle sticks marked the spot.
May took a plastic disposable knife out of the diaper bag and began to saw at the earth. When she had made a little hole, she put a cicada inside and gently covered it with dirt. She stuck a new Popsicle stick at the head of the grave.
“You go,” she said.
I buried the next one.
She buried the one after that.
We buried rows and rows of bugs.
Then we stood and brushed the dirt off our knees.
“We made them cozy so they can be sleeping,” May said, staring at the ground.
• • •
Kelly’s backyard was enclosed by a chain-link fence. All the lights in the house next door were out, and the pool water was black and still in the darkness. The sounds of traffic were far away in the night.
“What if I don’t want to? What if they see me?” Angela said. She was no longer laughing, and her soft chin trembled. I thought she might run inside and call her parents to come get her, but maybe she saw this as a final initiation. If she did it, we’d be her friends for life.
“No one’s even home,” Kelly told her.
“Just do it and get it over with,” Summer said.
“Just do it,” Julia repeated, and started jogging in place in slow motion. We all giggled. I squeezed my eyes shut and drank the beer Summer had handed me like a peace offering.
Angela went to the darkest corner of the yard and turned her back to us. With her head down, she unbuttoned her dress. It’s her fault she said dare, I told myself. After the dress was off, she folded it into a neat square and laid it in the grass. She took off her socks. Her legs were pale and doughy at the top, like a baby’s.
Then she started to climb the fence.
“Wait,” Julia said, running to her. She grabbed Angela’s arm and made her come back down. “That’s not naked.”
“I was going to take the rest off over there.”
“That’s cheating,” Kelly said.