Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  The girls needed a look. They needed to lose the pastels of childhood and focus on something a bit edgier. Dark red, midnight blues, and mostly black came to mind. Something that would contrast their white, white hair, their pale skin, their translucent thick eyelashes, and invisible eyebrows.

  “We should start wearing eyeliner and darkening our lashes,” Blanca said. “We can copy Deborah Harry’s look. Eyeshadow, dark liner, and red lips. Everything else pale.”

  Makeup was strewn across the counters: rouge, lipsticks, eye-shadows, and pencils. Clara took a cobalt blue, pulled down her lower lid and inked a line over the inner pink of her lid. It felt waxy and irritating, but the effect was perfect. A dark inner line sat in contrast to all that was pale. Blanca reached for the pencil, copied her sister. And then they stood, looking in the mirror at their handiwork. A contour below the cheekbones, but every contour was too dark for their white skin, so eventually they just opted for the lightest ivory, and that was dark enough to hollow out their little cheeks.

  “Oh my God! It’s amazing! We look completely different!” Clara exclaimed to her sister.

  “We need to outline our lips. But on the outside to give us a big, full, pouty look.”

  By now they had loosened their hair so that it fell in braid-waves down their backs. Lips were blood-red, eyes were cobalt blue with a blue-black mascara on the lashes, cheeks were contoured and the whole picture was somewhere between goth and Tammy Faye.

  They donned ripped black jeans they snuck from their aunt’s closet and tight-fitting T-shirts they found in their younger cousins’ drawers. Then practised strutting in front of the long mirror. If nothing else, it was fun. Fun to experiment with their aunt’s makeup behind her back. Fun to see themselves in a different way. Fun to dream of a life as rock stars.

  “What in God’s name! You look like a pair of cheap tarts!”

  It was their uncle Bob, home a bit earlier than expected. He looked horrified, as much by the mess in the bathroom as by their painted faces and tight, tight clothes.

  “Your mother would roll over in her grave if she saw you like that!”

  It had been the familiar threat for a couple of years, ever since their mother had died mysteriously at the yellow cottages. Clara and Blanca hated it when their uncle mentioned their mother. It made them feel guilty for any pleasure they might have. Made them think that they should have been nicer, better, more attentive as daughters. Worse, they felt that if they hadn’t been born, then their mother would not have suffered because they knew, they knew, that they were the cause of her endless grief.

  Bob grabbed a face cloth and threw it at them.

  “Wash that shit off your faces. You think you look good like that? You look like a couple of sorry clowns. Sorry slut clowns. You don’t look good, you look pathetic. Wash it off!”

  “Sliffy midwists umper stash,” Clara whispered to Blanca.

  “Yep. Sliffy umpteen thrice upper den.”

  “And stop with that gibberish. You know it’s just made up and nonsensical. You just do it to piss me off!”

  “Dinger immer and jammer, stingerly,” Clara said, in defiance, and Blanca understood every word.

  “Keep it up and I’ll wash your mouths out with soap! Jee-zus!”

  He hated that they were wearing makeup, growing up. The world wasn’t a safe place, he knew that only too well. No matter how many times he smacked his boys, he could see them leering at the girls. Probably because they were walking around like a pair of sluts, showing off their suddenly evident, perky buds. Yes, they would have to stay full-time at their grandfather’s apartment now. There’d be no one to blame but themselves if something happened to them there.

  “Now get that shit off your faces and put on something decent.”

  As they rubbed, the colours smeared and bled across their faces. Black mascara streaked into the blue and the red and the pink, making them look as though they had been beaten. The more they rubbed, the worse it got, until their little faces looked bruised and raw.

  But they knew it was all wrong, anyhow. They knew that their look depended on their differences, not their ability to mimic someone else. And so there would be no mascara; the lashes would remain, full and white, in a dense fringe around their pale, lightly rimmed eyes. Eyes that had steadied considerably over the years and had come to look more violet than pink. Eyes so intense that they needed no adornment. Gone were the thick glasses. Contacts would keep them seeing at their 40 percent vision and that would be just fine. Good enough to get by.

  They removed the tight black jeans and the T-shirts. Blanca pulled white sheets from the bed and draped them, tightly, around their thin bodies. Yes, that was right. They would make tight white dresses that would fall from their bare shoulders to the ground. Or perhaps something gauzier. It didn’t matter as long as it was white.

  “White. Everyone is wearing black and tight. We will wear all white from top to bottom. And our only makeup will be lipstick.”

  And so the look was created. Two white goddesses with blood-stained lips. White brows, white lashes, white hair.… Everything white except the backup band. Yes, they would find the best musicians to back them up, one day.

  “Add a little funk to the opera and the punk!” Blanca declared.

  “Punk and funk opera!” Clara agreed, a conspiratorial smile across her face.

  They began to try out their look on an everyday basis. They wore white to school. White T-shirts and jeans and white sneakers on their feet. Never again did they braid their hair; they wore it loose, sometimes as straight as a pin and sometimes in waves. They brought a tube of lipstick with them at all times and often dashed off to the washroom to touch up those lips so that they could be seen coming from a mile away. At first, there were whispers and pointed fingers but, in time, it was accepted. Accepted to the point that no one even remembered the awkward two with the thick glasses and tight braids. They were just a vision in white, striding in tandem down the halls, hanging out in the drama and the music rooms. And strangely, for the first time in their lives, they began to make friends. Kids wanted to hear them sing or they invited them to hang out. Somehow, the more they tried to differentiate and not to blend, the more accepted they were.

  “What will you call your band?” a cool boy two grades older asked them.

  “Bleach,” Clara replied. It was supposed to be a joke, but the moment it left her lips, her red-stained lips, she knew that indeed, they would be Bleach. And they would turn heads.

  * * *

  The art teacher sat with her hands placed in front of her, one over the other, in a nonthreatening but not entirely open manner. She waited for Gareth to explain himself, to shed light on why the student who had won the art award the previous year was now failing her class.

  “It isn’t that your work isn’t good. Quite the contrary. You get As on everything you hand in. The work you hand in is excellent. But you hand in so little.”

  “Why don’t you just mark me on what I hand in?”

  “Because you are not doing the work. If Susan, for instance, who doesn’t have your degree of talent, is working really hard to get better and she not only hands in what is required but goes beyond the call of duty, why should she get less of a mark because the few pieces you hand in are better?”

  Gareth knew she was right. He handed in one out of every five assignments. It just seemed to take him longer. If they had an exercise in class where they had to sketch ten quick still lifes in thirty minutes, Gareth would complete two. But what he handed in were not simple sketches. They were never quick. Gareth was incapable of showing anyone anything that wasn’t a study in detail.

  “Let me ask you something, Mrs. Beacon. If you had to have an operation, say, on your heart, and you had two doctors, one who did three operations a day but lost one or two of his patients and you had another doctor who only did one every two days but never lost a patient, which doctor would you choose?”

  “Clever question, Gareth, but it
is hardly the same thing. Saving lives is not the same as making art.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re a teacher and not an artist.”

  “I am an artist, as well!”

  Gareth shrugged. “If you say so, but you don’t take art seriously.” And then he imitated her, “Saving lives is not the same as art, after all.”

  Mrs. Beacon wanted to slap his impertinent face, just to wipe the smile off of it. But no, there was something she could do that was far, far worse. She could fail him. She could decide to not recommend him for art college and say that he was too lazy to be a true artist. That he lacked discipline.

  She pressed. “How can you improve if you do not do the work?”

  Gareth opened his binder, which was filled with handouts and assigned work from other classes. There, where the science notes should have been, were drawings of faces and eyes and body parts. She could see her fellow teachers’ expressions in the doodling. In the math Duo-Tang, it was the same. In physics, where equations should be, there were more sketches. History class had illustrations in every margin. Again and again, in every other class notebook, there were pages and pages of faces and details of eyes everywhere.

  “If you just put these into your sketchbook for a mark you wouldn’t be failing.”

  “And what kind of a mark would I get on these sketches?”

  “I don’t know. At least a seventy-five or an eighty percent and that would bring your whole mark up to the high eighties.”

  “That’s exactly why I can’t hand them in. I can’t have you judge something that isn’t perfect. Why would I? I’m just doodling to relieve boredom. It isn’t worthy to be considered my work. I would rather get a zero for work not handed in than to get anything less than ninety percent on something I did feel worthy of being judged.”

  “But you are failing and that could ruin your entire future.”

  Gareth knew that she could never understand him. She couldn’t see that there was work you played with, knowing it would be discarded and never seen, then there was the work you put out into the world.

  “You could give Susan a better mark even though you know she’s average. And you could fail me, if you want. But does your mark make me less of an artist?”

  Why were her best students always the most difficult? That young confidence was something she couldn’t fathom. She was, even at this late stage in her life, always seeking approval. Always trying to imitate greatness. And so her work was competent, in the style of this artist or that, but she knew that what she lacked was the very thing this boy had. That was the thing about genius. Genius never made a good student. They were the ones who came in, knew what they needed to learn before they learned it, took what they wanted and discarded whatever didn’t apply to their vision. How are such creatures made in this world? And why didn’t she have that quality? She should have admired him for his youthful confidence, his talent, and even his impertinence, but she couldn’t. He was a walking, breathing slap in the face.

  “Then you will fail. Perhaps when you go home, you should take a long hard look in the mirror and practise saying, ‘Would you like fries with that?’ Good luck, Gareth.”

  “You’re gonna retire in a few years, right? And you’ll have lots of retirement money. Now if you pass me, you’ll retire the same way as if you fail me. You have in your hands the power to affect someone’s destiny and either way it’ll make no difference to you.”

  “No, your destiny is in your own hands. It is up to you. There is nothing predetermined. There’s only hard work and rejection and disappointment. You, Gareth, are an arrogant little prick. Now get out of my class. You’ve ruined my weekend.”

  Gareth looked at his adversary. Maybe she was young once. Maybe she had dreams once. But there in her face, all he could see were pools of regret weighing down the corners of her downturned lips. This is what it meant to defer. This is what it meant to compromise. This is what it meant to rush and ignore detail. It meant a life of comfort and content, but the price was regret. And an ugly mouth.

  Gareth sat at the kitchen table, an open quart-bottle of milk in front of him and, as there was nobody home, he could see no reason why he should reach for a glass when the milk was in glass, anyhow. Besides, he knew he would finish it off, which was fine as he had just carried in the fresh bottles that had been delivered and left on the doorstep.

  He wondered if that bitch teacher would actually fail him, just to teach him a life lesson about effort. But what kind of a lesson was that? To rush and to accept less than your very best? That quantity was more important than quality? That was the type of lesson that produced the workers of the world. The factory workers, the clerics, the teachers.

  Gareth felt a bit guilty for his thoughts. Hadn’t his father worked in a factory to support him and his brother? He never shied away from shelling out for whatever interest took their fancies. Cameras for Tristan and paints and canvases for him. And didn’t his mother work long hours as a nurse to provide for them all? It was her extra shifts that allowed his dad to return to university to follow his dreams. His mom did all that, caring for others and caring for them and doing whatever she could so that everyone else could reach their full potential. His father would be a labour lawyer in another year, all because his mom worked the extra shifts. His brother would be going to school in Toronto to get a degree in film studies, all because his mom worked extra shifts. And so how could he possibly tell her that he may fail art because he didn’t put in the extra time, when all she did was put in extra time?

  He took a long pull on the milk, swallowed with a gulp, and wiped the white creamy moustache from his upper lip with his sleeve. “Wear a crazy T-shirt, wear a cutaway skirt, but wear a moustache.” He hummed the milk ad song as he opened the top cupboard. There, on a plate, were freshly made oatmeal raisin cookies. His mom had even baked before going to work, where she would be changing patients, holding straws for them, and giving them medicine, saying, “There, there, it will all be okay.”

  Gareth grabbed four cookies, picked up the milk bottle, and went to his room. In the corner stood an easel, in his closet there was a 3x4 canvas, and in his toolbox there were oils and brushes. He thought of Ophelia and the flowers. He thought of the lake and the wind. He thought of the albino twins. But no matter what he thought, there was one image that he could never shake from his mind: the image of his best friend’s body, twisting as though in some danse macabre, falling from the branches of a tree.

  He mixed blues first, adding a little black and a dash of Carmen red. Next to that, he placed the greens and greys. From a tube, he squeezed a long line of white. This, he thought, this will be my answer for my failing mark. This will be my reasoning, my excuse. And anyone who can see will understand its meaning.

  A woman stands with hair blowing in the wind, her dress billows around her as the grey-toned waters lick at her ankles. Behind her is another woman, in white, a nurse running, but she is so far in the distance that it is hard to tell if she is indeed a woman or a wisp of a cloud. Before her is the expanse of water, in greys and blues and greens, but from the water, there is a rock and on the rock are two girls — or are they mermaids? It is hard to tell, as only their torsos are above the water. Their mouths are open as though singing a siren’s song. One combs her hair and the other reaches out toward the woman, and, in her hand, she holds something, an offering of sorts. Here Gareth puts the most attention. Here are the details and the point of the whole painting. Here she holds out an eye to the woman. And in the eye is the reflection of the entire world.

  Gareth worked furiously, with intent. The paint hitting the canvas in globs, colours rising from the white background, almost three-dimensionally. The water’s waves seemed to curl to the end of the canvas so that the viewer could almost walk in, along with the woman who was being seduced to her death.

  If a picture is worth a thousand words then this would be what Gareth would hand in to Mr. Birch as his essay on the demise of Ophelia. This is what he w
ould give Mrs. Beacon as his reason for all those assignments not done. And who cares, who really cares what mark he would get, anyhow? There it was, everything he felt responsible for, but could never really comprehend.

  “You have been working for hours. Didn’t you hear me come in?” his mother asked. “I brought you up some dinner.”

  Gareth stepped back. Away from the canvas. He was tired and covered with paint. His mom, Elaine, looked at her youngest son. How tall he had grown this past year. He was on the precipice between boyhood and manhood and sometimes it was hard for Elaine to know if he needed the hug or cuddle of youth or if he wanted to work things out for himself. Gareth had always been the one who kept things inside and only broached topics when he was ready. When he was tiny he seemed to stare off into space if he didn’t want to discuss something. He looked far, far into the distance, as though he could place all his sorrows on the horizon, only to revisit them when he was good and ready. So many times Elaine had wanted to check in, make sure things were fine with him, but a quick hug and off he would go, as though replenished and ready to embrace a new day. Still, there were things that were buried in her son. She worked in a psych ward; she knew the signs of suppressed memory and emotion, but as long as he carried on as though he was fine, Elaine chose not to push him too far emotionally.

  “I’m failing art, Mom.”

  Elaine looked at the painting for a very long time.

  “No, you are not failing art at all.”

  * * *

  “Strrrr-rike!”

  Johnny’s ball roared down the lane, took out the lot! He had another two goes and he knew he would do it again, and again.