Hopefully she’d find The Terrible Thing more than unacceptable, but I don’t know if she would. She might find it perfectly acceptable. And I don’t know how I’d be able to disagree. Because in a way I found it perfectly acceptable as well. Almost expected.
The irregular wind moved the leaves far above my face, their waxy exteriors reflecting the sun as erratically as a wave making its way to shore. Tiny pockets of concentrated brightness here and there. They twittered purposefully, as though they might be trying to pass me a whispered message. I listened closely but couldn’t make anything out.
It was time for me to resume the lesson I started teaching myself this morning. The lesson I had to learn before I saw Lev again. The long-necked Lev, still as a reptile, watching behind white film. Watching for me to betray that I wasn’t actually wonderful. That I didn’t know how to smoke like a professional addict. That I’d faked it that time in the Miniature Wonderland parking lot. That I was a liar. Which I am.
We’d stood, Lev and I, legs together, shoulders up, tucking ourselves in against the cold the way that people do when they’re just standing there outside, exposed. I didn’t like the idea of Lev exposed to the elements; the idea of his thin skin wind-whipped, his delicate eyes watering. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me and I took it without thinking, held it with fingers splayed idiotically like a reaching tree frog. Real smoker’s fingers aren’t scared of the burning embers; their fingers coexist with it. Mine were terrified and it showed.
“Do you smoke?” he asked, clearly noticing.
“Oh yeah,” I said, painfully aware of the fact that if someone actually smoked, they wouldn’t say “oh yeah” like that. They’d treat it like a curse, an inconvenience, a burden that they’d taken on and now had to deal with.
I proceeded to slurp squirrely puffs from the yellow end like a first-class ass, and the long-necked Lev was gentlemanly enough not to say anything. Instead he told me that basketballs felt like chicken skin under his fingers and asked me if I preferred to hang upside-down from my legs or right-side-up from my arms. And we talked about the Miniature Wonderland and he asked me if I’d ever had a boyfriend before. Obviously I lied.
Thankfully I still had access to my pockets beneath the rock, so I reached in. The very bottoms were soaked in blood. I pulverized a tiny clot of gore with my thumb and index finger through the fabric and remembered the time Julia died of the flesh-eating disease.
I removed my lighter and a cigarette. And lay there inhaling deeper and deeper lungfuls, mimicking every smoking technique I’d ever seen as I watched the leaves move like waves and make the sound of rice falling into a metal pot on a hot stove. In the kitchen, where I wished very badly to see The Mother at six o’clock tonight.
The tops of my pinched thighs looked bloated and purple and shiny. I grazed one with my fingers and couldn’t feel it at all. I think they call this muscle death or acute paralysis or good old-fashioned instant amputation. Either way, they looked cool. Like a pair of big fat sucked-on cigars. It’s a good thing I wore shorts today otherwise I might not have been able to see them.
I couldn’t help but wonder what my body would look like when it was eventually found. I think what I’ll probably do, when it starts to feel like I’m really going to die, is arrange myself into a position a bit more damsel-y and attractive. Less clumsy. Because a bloody, broken, smashed-up girl is attractive to people. Scuff of dirt on the cheek, accentuating the bone; blood falling over a plump lower lip, exaggerating the pout; deep red bringing out the color of the eyes; hair volumized with trauma. They’ll wonder, what happened to this troubled girl? This girl with all of those beautiful troubles. Because a girl’s troubles aren’t actually troubles but accessories. What could my lovely troubles have been? What had I blown so adorably out of proportion? I wish that I’d mastered the abuse aesthetic before having this rock land on me. But who could have known, right? I guess I should have. Julia has been crush-me-with-a-rock angry over far less.
I wish that I really were all troubled and beautiful the way that some people are. Give myself the kind of beginning worthy of the Biography Channel. Being crushed by a rock is too dramatic an end for a story that begins with being born in Canada. Here’s my real Biography beginning:
Easter was born an orphan. You might think that no one can be born an orphan because you have to at least have a mother to be born, but Easter always had the distinct feeling that her mother was already dead when she (Easter) gouged her way into the world. The other condition that allows one to be born an orphan, and this was also true of Easter, is if no one knows exactly where you were born, or how you were born. If you just appear one day in a wicker basket on the steps of a tooth-shaped house like Easter did, you’re an orphan and born that way.
The Tooth House sat snugly in a cul-de-sac at the edge of a field that would eventually contain another cul-de-sac, a mirror copy of the first. But The Mother and The Father didn’t know that yet. And Easter didn’t even know what a cul-de-sac was. What she did know was that she was terribly uncomfortable. The discomfort was coldness, though of course she didn’t realize it. All she could do was cry about it, take in short, harsh breaths and shoot out high-pitched squeals.
The Mother and The Father didn’t notice at first because they were sizzling bacon and eggs on the stove that morning for breakfast. The volcanic bubbling of everything in one pan made it very difficult to hear a crying child on the doorstep.
Anyway, that is where Easter sat until finally Julia opened the door, her hair wet and dripping and thick as dreadlocks and a yellow towel tied tight around her chest. Julia had been taking her first bath alone while The Parents cooked breakfast, which is why the smell of bacon always made her feel dirty. She glided her bare bum across the slick bottom of the tub, creating giant waves that sucked up the army men she’d perched precariously around the porcelain perimeter. The water was red with casualties, or perhaps it was the marker she’d used to draw wounds on the toys and her own soft body. She’d been chanting in her head, “Don’t drown, don’t drown, don’t drown, otherwise you’ll never be allowed to do this again.” And it must have worked because she didn’t drown but lived to find Easter on the doorstep. Lived even to scoop her up and stop her crying and tuck her into a warm doll crib.
Julia took care of Easter for the first little while in secret, came up with excuses for mashing up food and bringing it upstairs, and snuck loads of laundry into the wash after The Parents went to bed. When she finally told The Parents about her little project, they made room for it and told Julia that she could name it. She chose the name Easter because that’s what day it was when she found the little thing.
That’s actually how it happened. None of this Niagara Falls and traumatic car rides with The Evil Grandmother and freezing cold water splashing up between the Maid of the Mist boat rails, coming together and confusing itself with my persistent knocking on the world’s warm, wet double doors.
The Mother
Phyllis the Evil Grandmother is a fucking bitch, and when I first realized that Phyllis was a fucking bitch, I also realized that the poor Mother was someone’s daughter. And not just anyone’s daughter but a fucking bitch’s daughter.
Phyllis the Fucking Bitch always wore some manifestation of “expensive lady suit” no matter what season it was. If it was winter, she would wear a dark, woolly skirt and blazer, thick nylons, and heaps of heavy silver jewelry fastened around her wrists and neck like a pillory. Inside the house, black leather boots became a pair of embroidered slippers. Phyllis’s feet never spent more than a few seconds unshackled.
In summer she wore light, flowing pant suits, maybe in a coral or light blue color, and was swimming in gold necklaces with big, shining ornaments pulling on her ears like a pair of anvils. Tan leather sandals transformed into a pair of sheer footies in the house.
And she didn’t move often. She greatly preferred to ask other people to move for her,
follow her bellowed instructions from the porch while you mixed her cocktail in the kitchen: tomato juice and vodka, which shuddered when passed into her hands. She had no shame when it came to asking for small favors. I think if it were physically possible, she would have asked someone to go to the bathroom for her.
Though The Mother looked a lot like her, Phyllis the Fucking Bitch always insisted that she got her father’s “baboonish eyebrows” or his “strong, masculine nose.” On Sunday afternoons she “treated” The Mother, Julia, and me to brunch at the club where she used to golf a long, long time ago. It was always a stressful affair during which Phyllis would watch our hands as we reached for bread from the basket at the center of the table, or follow our too-full forks from our plates to our mouths. She was never not looking when Julia or I spilled something, or accidentally allowed food to fall from our nervous lips as we chewed. She could sense a mistake even before it happened, or perhaps she caused them with her accusatory eyes.
By the time that we left the restaurant and made it back to the safety of our car, The Mother always looked a bit crumpled. We would attempt to revive her from the backseat. Tell her that Phyllis the Fucking Bitch was an old drunk, that she was just jealous of The Mother for growing up to be so beautiful and have such excellent kids.
The Mother would laugh and thank me, then scold me for talking about The Grandmother that way, but that was just a formality. You could see that it soothed her to hear that we were unaffected by Phyllis the Fucking Bitch.
The Mother didn’t remember much about her father. Just his feet one summer afternoon: shapely leather shoes, red-brown, and beautifully arranged on the grass. Though she was old enough to walk, she crawled on hands and knees over to his feet and he fed her an olive from his martini, then patted her head as though she really were the dog she was pretending to be.
He died shortly after, in a bad car accident. Phyllis had always told The Mother that the reason he went careening into a wide cement pole at fifty miles an hour was because he was getting his penis sucked on by the widow next door and lost control of the car.
Phyllis told her that, as soon as they hit the pole, the widow’s jaws clamped shut and bit his penis off, a reflex in response to the crash. They found it in her mouth the next morning when the mortician pried her jaws open.
I always wondered if Phyllis kept it somewhere, in a jar, maybe, at the back of her closet. Or maybe it was in something more official-looking. Some hazardous waste bag that the doctors placed it in with tweezers and a gloved hand. I bet it looks more like a fig now, all purple and dried up. Or maybe she had it preserved and vacuum-sealed. I imagined it withering in the widow’s mouth overnight so many years ago, covering her chin in dick blood. Dick blood beard, dick blood beard. Try saying that five times fast. Actually, try saying “five times fast” five times fast.
Phyllis was as full of lies as I was, but somehow she wasn’t embarrassed by them. She told them openly, without shame. Mixed them right up with all of the true stuff she said, so it was very hard to tell which was which. That’s why The Mother really had no idea if she should believe this story or not and, over the years, grew too scared to try to actually find out. Instead, she kept the broad-shouldered saint in her head. The generous king who kept her secrets, retrieved her balls, fed her cake. Wise beyond his years, a comfort to the sick and savior of the weak. The Mother must have seen some of these same qualities in The Father way back when, but thinking of him now, it doesn’t seem possible.
Phyllis’s social life became quite active after her husband died. She went to parties where live bands shook like it was Gatsby’s house and people had fancy hats to go with their fancy outfits. In the same closet where she might have kept Grandpa’s dick, Phyllis had an enormous wardrobe of gowns draped in mauve plastic protectors with clear little windows over the hearts so you could see what was inside. Julia and I went over once to help her organize the closet, move the body bags from one rack to another. It was while we were moving summer clothes to the off-season rack that she told us a few things about our grandfather. She enjoyed letting us know the reasons why her life was harder than anyone else’s.
She said that she hated him.
That he was a podiatrist.
And whenever they went out, no one wanted to shake his footy hand. They did so reluctantly, out of politeness, but she always saw them afterward, casually wiping their palms on napkins or their suit jackets. Every time he opened his mouth she wanted to strangle him. Berate him in front of the others so that they knew she was better than he was. And that she knew it too.
She said that he had a hunched back from kneeling at people’s feet all day while they watched the bald spot on the crown of his head expand over the years, and that she was a perfect masterpiece of genetics and good taste. Disappointment swirled around her like cigar smoke. Obscuring her eyes and the sharp corners of her thin body, making her seem softer and more attractive than she really was.
Before she was completely consumed by all of the whirling disappointment, she changed the subject with an order about how she wanted her afternoon suits organized.
Easter Story
One morning a bell rang from downstairs in such a strange and ferocious way that it woke Easter right up. She could tell from the light through her curtains that she’d slept in later than usual, which made sense considering the fact that she blew right through bedtime last night watching movies on the couch alone, secretly, while everyone else was asleep.
She’d watched a movie about a girl who woke up one morning beneath different sheets in a different bed in a different room in a different house, with a different family carrying out a most unfamiliar morning shuffle downstairs. Her whole life before that moment might have been a dream, a very real dream, but now she was waking up to her actual life. Easter dragged a hand along her face to see if the same thing had happened to her. Same face, same sleep smell between the sheets. She could feel the familiarity as plainly as a burn.
That bell was very different, though. Not only unique to her regular mornings, but also a strange way for a bell to sound. It didn’t sound like it was in someone’s hand, a wrist shaking ever so slightly, the sound of the bell filling the air like incense from a thurible, but rather this bell was being banged against something hard. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
She walked to the stairs in socked feet, avoiding the creaks in the hardwood known well to her and even better to Julia. She sat slowly down on the middle step and peeked through the vertical dowels beneath the banister, her arms and feet all tucked in the way she imagined a spy’s would be if they were peeking in on someone.
The Mother appeared to have attached a bell to the basement doorframe and was now testing it vigorously, bringing the door back and forth and back and forth and back and forth so that it sounded more like a gong than a bell. Her hair looked sweaty, her head warm, and Easter thought about the way The Mother never touched her face with her hands. She was all forearm and wrist when it came to daubing up beads of sweat and swiping hair from her face.
She always did the same for Easter, too; no hands on the face, just soft inner wrists and arms because, as Easter knew very well, The Mother believed that touching your face would cause unsightly blemishes to sprout. And The Mother didn’t want Easter to have unsightly blemishes just as much as she didn’t want herself to have unsightly blemishes, because Easter knew that The Mother wanted only good things for her and loved her more than she loved herself. Wanted her as beautiful and happy and perfect as she could be, even though she was very bad at making Easter feel beautiful and happy and perfect.
Easter sometimes felt like a cherished heirloom, a vase sitting in the middle of the table, there but not really there, kept clean and filled with lovely living flowers, watered and tended to, but also ignored. Listening and seeing everything in secret.
Easter watched. The Mother struggled with the nails lying on t
he floor. They rolled along the circular path set out by the size of their heads, little synchronized swimmers evading her grasp. She wore a long white T-shirt and jeans. Easter knew they were her most “hard working” jeans. And when The Mother got up for a glass of water, Easter noticed that she’d even tied her running shoes extra tight in readiness for a morning all full of physical labor.
Easter knew The Mother so well. Knew everything she’d do and say before she did and said it. Because The Mother had passed The Lonely along to Easter, the same Lonely but different because it had moved, contracted differently: the way a secret whispered into ears and through mouths mutates; a disease from genome to genome.
The Mother returned to the doorframe and began testing the bell again. Easter rose from the stairs and approached her with her hands over her ears.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
The Mother suddenly stopped and Easter saw beads of sweat on her upper lip. She daubed them delicately in her soft, wristly way, her eyes red-rimmed and wide.
“Oh hello, honey. I’m putting bells on the doors.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know, I’m tired of not knowing where you people are all the time.”
“So you’re putting bells on the doors?”
“That’s right.”
“So you know where we are.”
“Yes dear.”
“Like a jingly collar?”
“What’s that?” Her voice hit a skip somewhere in the middle.
“Like a jingly collar on a cat.”
Her eyes grew even wider and she might have nodded a bit, but it was hard to tell. She turned around again and resumed banging the bell against the door.
The Lonely Page 3