“Right. We are good girls, we follow the rules.” The smaller one, the piano player, smirked. Clara.
Then the biggest laugh of all and the audience was on its feet again, giving these beautiful creatures love. What was it? Magic? A spell cast over everyone like an encompassing fog of devotion? All Jack knew was that they pulled him to them with their siren song, until he was trapped by the illusion they had created.
There may be one, there may be more, but they are called the Lorelei and they can trap a mortal man with the sound of their song.
Jack didn’t care. He wanted to be trapped. He wanted to believe in magic once again. He scribbled down a note, with his name and address, telling them to be in touch. He would use his talent behind the lens to bring them to him.
“The twenty-third pair of chromosomes are two special chromosomes, X and Y, that determine our sex. Females have a pair of X chromosomes, whereas males have one X and one Y chromosome. Chromosomes are made of DNA, and genes are special units of chromosomal DNA.” The teacher, Miss Reynolds, held her chalk in her hand, pausing for emphasis, as though she had just relayed a great secret to the class, enlightening them. She was the antithesis of what Gareth thought of when he considered a science teacher. Yes, she was keen on a lot of boring stuff, but, if he were to ever take another science class in his life, he would want her to teach it. Not because she explained things better than Mr. Swatasky, whose heavy Polish accent made science seem grave indeed, but because she had an enthusiasm that spilled into how she spoke, her childish joy as she would toss the chalk in the air when she felt she said something clever, and, mostly, because she never wore a bra. Now, with the weather warming, she often showed up in an Indian cotton printed shirt, loose-fitting but falling in drapes over her curves, and a peasant skirt that fell almost to the floor. In every way, Miss Reynolds looked more like a peace-and-love hippie, passing joints around a campfire, than the keeper of the secrets of DNA.
“How does that affect recessive genes?” It was Jack who asked. Of course, thought Gareth, Jack can feign interest in almost anything if it serves him somehow. The teacher’s pet!
“Good question!” And up the chalk went, landing flatly into the palm of her hand. “Never gets old!” she said. “Okay, so … a recessive gene is a gene that can be masked by a dominant gene. In order to have a trait that is expressed by a recessive gene, such as blue eyes, or better still, red hair, you must get the gene for blue eyes or red hair from both of your parents.”
Jack raised his hand.
“Yes, Jack?”
“How is it that two blue-eyed parents can have a brown-eyed child, then?”
“Well, because the two must carry a brown-eyed gene as well as the hidden blue-eyed gene. It is more complicated with eyes. So let’s, for argument’s sake, look at red hair as our example. With red hair, both parents must carry the red gene, whereas with other hair colours only one parent needs the gene. So there are two available hair genes in each parent. The child has to grab the red gene from both parents, even if the parents are brunette or blond. So in a family of, say, three children, one might suddenly pop out with red hair even though there hasn’t been a redhead for generations, because the parents each have a recessive red gene hiding in them. With eyes, there can be many differentials and there are some scientists who believe that blue eyes are not recessive. They think that it is all about the amount of melanin, or pigment, in the eye.”
Gareth was listening, although it did seem as though he was not paying attention. It was a problem he’d had from the earliest grades. Teachers assumed that he wasn’t listening because he always doodled in his books and rarely looked up at the teacher. When he did look at them, he was distracted by their gestures, their choice of clothes that day, their quirks, their looks. With Miss Reynolds, it was her looks. How could he hear what she was saying when her nipples could be seen through her cotton shirt? Better to just doodle in his notebook. Had they mentioned eyes and eye colour? In the margins he’d drawn eye upon eye of every sort. Fringed in thick lashes, crying, old and wrinkled. But those were just the exterior trappings. Gareth liked to draw the eyeball with expression and accuracy.
“Are you listening, Gareth?”
“Yes, to every word.” He looked up and there she was, in front of him. She leaned over and looked at his notebook filled with drawings. The loose peasant neckline of her shirt fell forward and Gareth had an optic nerve–full of neckline and cleavage. He looked down at his book.
“Seems to me that you are doodling instead. Perhaps you would like to tell us where we left off.”
“Miss, I concentrate better when I doodle. Anyhow, we were talking about genes and what it means to have two recessive genes in creating red hair or blue eyes. But I do have a question.”
“Yes?”
“What about pink eyes?”
“You mean like pink eye, the condition?”
“No.”
“You mean like what rabbits have?”
She actually liked Gareth. He did well on tests even though he never paid attention. It had occurred to her that he might be cheating, but she had watched him closely and could never figure out quite how. And even though her great passion was talking about genetics and biology, when she wasn’t meditating or smoking pot with her friends, she had to admit that the boy seemed to have a great talent for drawing. Those eyes stared right off the page.
“I want you to leave your notebook with me over the weekend, Gareth, to see if you are doing the required work.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am. I am only twenty-seven. Not a ma’am yet.”
“Are you going to tell me about pink eyes?”
“No such thing.”
Gareth sat quietly. How could she say that? Of course, there are pink eyes. He had seen them. They had stayed with him throughout his life. Little pink eyes, darting back and forth as if vibrating within the heads of those girls.
Jack raised his hand, but their teacher ignored him and so, when she turned her back, he spoke up anyhow.
“I know quite a bit about eyes and eye colour and you are both right and wrong, Miss.”
Miss Reynolds turned slowly. The cloth of her shirt moved over her slim waist and it seemed to Gareth that Jack’s impertinence must have excited her because her nipples hardened and poked through the cotton.
“And you are an expert, how exactly?”
“I’m pretty tight with an ocularist, actually. In Germany,” Jack informed, with a slight cockiness in his voice. “Anyhow, most pink eyes are very, very pale blue, but with so little pigmentation that what you are actually seeing are the blood vessels behind the eye. In the retina. But if someone loses an eye and a replacement has to be made, like mine, then the ocularist has to take into account the pink shades that are very obvious in certain lights.”
“And who are these people with pink eyes?” she asked.
“I’ll show you.”
Jack went into his backpack and pulled out a manila envelope. He carefully removed a stack of 8x10 photos. Photos taken at the competition. Photos of Bleach.
“See, in this light their eyes look very, very blue. Pale and piercing like a wolf’s. But in this one, with a slight change in direct light, the one here looks to have pink eyes. And it isn’t because of the camera, picking up red tones. Cyclops doesn’t do the red-eye thing.”
“Cyclops?” Miss Reynolds asked, fully aware that she had lost control of her lesson some time ago.
“My nickname for my camera because it only has one eye, like me.”
Miss Reynolds had not noticed that Jack only had one eye as Jack always wore the matching eye to school. The David Bowie look he saved for special occasions. Miss Reynolds looked directly at Jack. She wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to know that looking at someone with curiosity wasn’t always the most subtle and acceptable reaction for an educator.
“Which one? No, don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s that one. Of course, that
makes sense. I see now that it doesn’t move as much. Quite extraordinary, though.”
Gareth had stopped sketching. He stopped listening to the banter. All he cared about was the fact that his best friend had pictures of the albino twins. It had to be them. All these years later and there they were, in a series of photos, in the possession of his friend. What a betrayal that Jack hadn’t told him!
Miss Reynolds looked at the photos. Jack was right, the eyes went from a blue to a violet to a pink depending on how much light was being let into their eyes.
“Well,” she said, “they are albino. Everything about them is recessive. Both parents would have had to have carried the albino gene. But that doesn’t mean that they would be sure of having an albino child, because they would also be carrying a non-albino gene, assuming that the parents were not albino themselves.”
Now she was excited, drawing charts on the blackboard and explaining probabilities.
“So if both parents carried the gene it would seem the probability would be, assuming they had, say, four children, that one would be albino, two would be carriers, and one would not be affected at all. However, it is estimated that one in three hundred carry the gene and so if you do the math, the probability is one in twelve thousand children. And most often both parents look unaffected.”
Gareth thought of the red-haired woman in his painting. Pale, yes, but unaffected. And so her daughters, the twins, must have a father, somewhere, who carried the albino gene, as well. How likely was that in a small town? Gareth thought of the whispers he had heard on the other side of his bedroom wall.
Jack placed the photos back into the envelope and carefully put it back into his backpack but, because Gareth was sitting on the side of his artificial eye, he did not notice the jealousy in his friend’s eyes.
Clara stretched out on their grandfather’s sofa. He was off on his tricycle, peddling his wares up and down the streets. Up to no good, the girls now understood. All those years of believing it was special vitamins he was selling. But no! Supply and demand had nothing to do with vitamins. Something to get you up wasn’t vitamin B12. Something to put you down wasn’t melatonin, after all. Dear old grandad was the town’s geriatric drug dealer. Nothing could have made them cleaner, more straitlaced teenagers. Drug use would be very uncool if it was something their grandfather approved of … and traded in.
“You know, we never really talk about Mom,” Clara said, seemingly out of nowhere.
Blanca looked up from her homework. They were coming to the very last of the exams they would ever have to write in their entire lives. All those years of study and confinement almost over. So very close now they could almost taste the freedom.
“I mean, I felt bad. I felt it was unfair, but then, I guess, I felt like life wouldn’t be that different without her. She wasn’t really in our lives.”
“That is so cold,” Clara said. Sometimes she wondered why people thought of them as the same. Why people got them so mixed up because it was clear to her, and clearer every day, that they were very, very different. Oh, perhaps not to look at them, as they really were carbon copies. Blanca being that bit taller, but still, the faces, the body shape, the hair, the eyes — all identical. But it was inside that was different. Blanca was much more practical than Clara. She could move on and get over things. She could forget the past and plan ahead, getting her ducks in a row. She didn’t question everything the way Clara did. Things were what they were, best to accept them and use them if possible. Blanca could even see their albinism as an asset. Something to be exploited for fame and profit.
“I just wonder how different we would be if we had known her better. If things weren’t the way they were.”
“Well, you cannot change the past. You just have to accept it. Hey, what doesn’t kill us becomes art, right?”
Clara shrugged. Moving forward wasn’t her most present thought. She wondered when her sister changed her focus. Didn’t they always ride backward in the station wagon, seeing what had been instead of what was ahead of them?
“Ever wonder who our dad was?”
“I have my theories, but I am not going to tell you. You would just freak out and I have to study.”
“You think you are so much smarter than me. Why don’t you just tell me?” Clara pestered.
“Maybe it is someone who prays so much for forgiveness. Then again, maybe not.”
“Oh, God. That’s disgusting! Makes me feel unsafe around him.”
“Naw. Our white skin is repulsive to him. He thinks that God punished him by giving us white skin and pink eyes. Our albinism is a blessing. It’s a shield of protection.”
Clara couldn’t believe how Blanca was talking. It was all too much for her. She started to cry softly but, because Blanca wanted to finish the year with the same high marks she had achieved throughout, she chose to pretend that she did not notice.
He waited. The door had been unlocked and a few overhead neon lights were turned on just so that he would not be in complete darkness. They would come in and find him once his mother let them inside. That was his plan. Let the twins see him in his domain, where he ruled, not as a teenaged boy living with his mother on the outskirts of town. Here he could be king, in a room he designed and created himself, for the purpose of making magic.
He started out by developing his photographs at night until he quickly learned that developing photos could be time-consuming and, on many nights, he found himself still fiddling with the images until the morning sun started to stretch its long-reaching fingers across the lightening sky. Daybreak could be beautiful, but to Jack it was no more than an intruder, ruining a night of work and concentration. At least in the countryside he didn’t have the inconvenience of streetlights to ruin his work, but still, that eager, unwelcome sun!
He needed a darkroom where he could work any time of day or night, without having to wait till natural darkness occurred. A place where there was no sense of time, like a Vegas casino where there were no clocks, no windows, and oxygen pumped inside to keep the gamblers gambling. Not that he had ever been to a Vegas casino. But his father had. He’d taken one of those all-inclusive trips with Jean and, upon his return, made a date with Jack so that he could make a huge announcement. But Jack ignored the announcement, choosing, instead, to ask questions about the desert, the climate, the quality of the light in the Southwest. Even the gambling rooms, the cheesy shows with the high-kicking gals, the buffet, and the over-the-top descriptions of the neon lights were of more interest than the news the couple had for him. News that they were busting at the seams to deliver. They had done that other thing folks so often do in Vegas. And they had done it at the Elvis Chapel, no less! Married by an Elvis impersonator. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
It wasn’t that Jack would have attended a ceremony if they had actually had one in Canada. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a part of the ceremony, being told after the fact. Well, hey, they both claimed that it was a very spontaneous moment, another way to have the full Vegas experience, top to bottom! Sure, it was top to bottom, Jack thought to himself. Top to bottom, then you rolled her over, you old, disgusting dog. It was that Jack felt a betrayal that his mother was replaced by someone fun but insubstantial. Something shiny and new. It was like trading in a perfectly cared for, humming Mercedes for a shiny new Ford. And it would be just a matter of time before he, too, was replaced by a brand-new boy with two working eyes and a goo-goo-ga-ga non-judgmental love.
It was right after the announcement that Jack mentioned how he needed his own darkroom. His father offered to create one in their second bathroom in their newly built, cookie-cutter condo, but Jack impressed upon him that he needed access to it at any hour of the day and that his comings and goings would be disruptive for them, newlyweds and all. He also said that he would have to trouble him or his mom for a ride every time he needed to work and that photography was his only hope for his future, and building a great portfolio was the key. John pretended to be disappointed but Jack read the re
lief on both their faces. Perfect. He knew that guilt was the key to getting the needed funds from his father. He could get the required drywall and labour out of his dad. If he put the room in his mother’s mudroom off the kitchen he would be able to access water and put in deep, heavy sinks. He would just have to section off where the washer and dryer were. Washers and dryers have a way of removing all magic from darkrooms as equally as marriages.
He would need to make the room light-tight, using blackout curtains or blackout blinds for the small window to keep that bit of light out. Blinds were probably better, but to be safe he told his father that he would need both. Even the slightest leaks could cause problems with light-sensitive photo paper. And so his father provided those first things, but there was so much more to building a functioning darkroom. A darkroom that would be his place, his sovereignty, his church.
Now, in his true domain, Jack sat on a chair with wheels and no back. A homemade moveable stool that he often used to move from one side of the darkroom to the other. One side was his dry side, with the electrical outlets, where he kept equipment, paper, and his enlarger, a second-hand Meopta Opemus 6 enlarger, a gift sent in a package from Germany. Jack was fully aware that his parents’ divorce actually helped him achieve this darkroom. Both parents wanted to assure him of his worth, while their own worlds were changing and crumbling.
Jack pushed back, his foot pressing on a cabinet drawer until he zoomed over to the wet side of his darkroom. No equipment here, just the two large sinks and the chemicals. And these things were kept quite, quite separate from the dry things, as though a line were drawn down the centre of the room like the line that had been drawn between his parents. Things on one side could never, ever, cross the line to the other side. Never.
Jack heard voices outside his darkroom. His mother’s deep, accented voice welcoming the girls and then their softer, gentler voices making niceties. How he wanted to run out straight away but he had already waited weeks, what was another five or ten minutes? Oh, do be quiet, Mom, with your offerings of coffee and sweets. Just show them to the mudroom!
Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack Page 15