by Ann Hood
Mackenzie wished that when she opened her eyes she’d find herself someplace else. Maybe in her old apartment in Washington, near Dupont Circle, surrounded by damp pictures that she’d taken of the Amazon. The pictures would be coming to life in front of her and the air would be thick with the smell of the developing chemicals. Or perhaps she would open her eyes and find herself back at that long-ago birthday party, her snowman cake uneaten and her brother holding out the seashell-covered cigar box.
Instead, Aunt Hope held out a postcard. The fox stared out at Mackenzie from the arm of the couch, where the coat dangled to the floor.
Mackenzie looked down. It was the same postcard her father had received. The red cardinal perched on the words GATEWAY TO THE WEST.
“The postmark,” Aunt Hope said, “is St. Louis.”
“St. Louis,” John-Glenn said, “is in Missouri.”
“Kansas, isn’t it?” Aunt Hope said.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Missouri.”
“And,” Aunt Hope said, “there’s a message this time.”
Mackenzie took the postcard from her aunt and turned it over.
HEADING TO SAN FRANCISCO. C.P.
“San Francisco,” Mackenzie said.
“Beats me,” Aunt Hope shrugged.
“St. Louis,” John-Glenn read from an atlas he held in front of him, “a port city in Missouri, on the Mississippi, below the influx of the Missouri, population 750,026.”
“Thank you, John-Glenn,” Aunt Hope said. “Missouri it is.”
“You were getting it mixed up with Kansas City,” he said, “which is in both states.”
Aunt Hope laughed.
“That boy,” she said, “loves geography. Always has.”
“You see, you see,” he said, bouncing up and down while he read.
Mackenzie watched the Lady Smurf eraser bob in and out of his pocket.
“Kansas City. A city in western Missouri, on the Missouri River, population 475,539.”
“All right,” Mackenzie said. “Enough.”
“And a city in Northeast Kansas—”
“Thank you, John-Glenn,” Aunt Hope said again. “I’m going to go to San Francisco,” Mackenzie said.
“I’ll find her and bring her home.”
“Population,” John-Glenn said, “121,901.”
“Well, then,” Aunt Hope said, “let’s celebrate. I’ve felt like celebrating all day. Let’s go out to dinner.”
“What,” John-Glenn said, “are we celebrating?”
“Things getting back to the way they used to be.”
“I’ll go there,” Mackenzie said, “and I’ll talk to her.
We’ll work things out.”
She expected to feel relief when she said that. Instead she felt dread. A horrible dread. She couldn’t even let herself think that she might not find her mother. Or worse, that she might find her but Cal wouldn’t come home.
Mackenzie laughed a little. That, she thought, is impossible. She went over to the kitchen counter where Sam sat on a stool drawing. He had drawn an island, pink sand surrounded by sky blue water. On the beach was a purple shell, smiling out.
John-Glenn waved the chopsticks in the air.
“Hold them like so,” he said, “and—” He aimed them like giant tweezers at his plate and picked up one perfect grain of rice.
“—viola!” He smiled at them and popped the rice in his mouth.
Mackenzie smiled too. One of John-Glenn’s favorite pastimes had always been to turn foreign phrases into English. It was a habit that used to infuriate Alexander. “Stop mutilating language,” he would moan. “A fine day,” John-Glenn would say. “Next cheese pots?” Then, before he’d leave, he’d say, “As they say in Spain, Add-three-o’s.”
Sam’s chopsticks clicked and crossed each other.
“Now,” Aunt Hope said, “isn’t this nice?”
The four of them sat in a booth at the Cathay Inn. Between Aunt Hope and Mackenzie on the table was a drink in a large coconut with floating pink and purple paper parasols and foot-long straws. Sam had taken all the cherries and oranges from the drink and had lined them on this plate like soldiers facing off. He clutched his chopsticks as if they were swords, one in each hand, and stabbed two cherries.
“Barbaric,” John-Glenn said.
Mackenzie inhaled. In New York, she and Jason had Chinese food delivered once or twice a week. They got steamed dumplings and cold noodles in sesame sauce and fiery Hunan chicken. Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, they walked to Chinatown for dim sum. They sat at a crowded table full of strangers and ate, stacking their saucers high as they finished each dish.
But here, at home, Chinese food meant shrimp, fried rice, beef chow mein, and egg foo yong in brown gravy. Grammie always used to do the ordering, enunciating loudly and slowly into the telephone as if the people on the other end were deaf.
“I’m sorry I won’t be able to see you and Sam off tomorrow,” Aunt Hope said. “But I’ve got to get in some Christmas shopping.”
“What,” John-Glenn said, “are you buying, anyway?” He had the red linen napkin tied around his neck like a bib.
“John-Glenn! It’s Christmas. I can’t tell you what I’m buying.” Aunt Hope sipped her tea.
“And who is there to buy for?” John-Glenn said. His napkin had a large dark spot on it.
“I want to buy the perfect gifts. That’s all.”
Carefully, Sam picked the shrimp out of his fried rice and placed them on the table.
“Those are shrimp,” Aunt Hope said, and smiled.
“He knows that,” John-Glenn said. “He isn’t stupid, you know. Maybe he just doesn’t like shrimp.”
Mackenzie leaned forward so the aroma from the steaming silver plates surrounded her. Who would ever think that things like this are the pieces of home we carry with us? she thought.
“I never did like egg foo yong,” Mackenzie said.
“It was my mother’s favorite,” Aunt Hope said. “But I never really cared for it either. I like sweet and sour pork. With pineapples and cherries. You’d like that, Sam.”
“I hate egg foo yong,” John-Glenn said.
Mackenzie laughed. “Then why did we order it?”
“Because that’s what we always get,” Aunt Hope said.
“But no one likes it.”
“Mackenzie,” Aunt Hope said, “sometimes you are so silly.”
After dinner, while John-Glenn and Sam waited for the leftover food to be put into cartons, Aunt Hope said to Mackenzie, “I still feel like celebrating. What do you say we go dancing?”
“Dancing?”
“Hear some music.” Aunt Hope did a fast cha-cha and laughed.
Mackenzie thought again of her aunt dancing, a young woman in love. She smiled. “All right,” she said. “Dancing it is.”
They drove to a lounge in Attleboro after they dropped Sam and John-Glenn off at home. Aunt Hope had changed into a green chiffon dress. The skirt was accordion pleated and a short, wispy chiffon cape hung over the shoulders. The cape was held closed by a rhinestone clasp at the throat. As they drove, Aunt Hope kept touching the clasp, rubbing it gently.
“I really feel like celebrating,” she said.
Mackenzie glanced over at her aunt. The passing cars on 1-95 sent moving shadows across her face. She stared straight ahead, the rhinestone clasp first dull in the darkness, then shooting a quick sparkle as a streetlight or headlight found it.
As a child, Mackenzie used to love to sit at Aunt Hope’s vanity table, on the long pink cushioned bench, and imitate her as she stroked on rouge and shadows, outlined her eyes and lips with pencils. For a while, Aunt Hope worked downtown, in the Outlet Department Store, at the Revlon counter as a beauty consultant. Cal would take Mackenzie there. As they walked, tall beautiful women would spray perfume on them, and would hand Cal tiny samples of cosmetics and colognes. Mackenzie made it a point to touch each glass counter they passed. Cal would wave her hands as she moved, as if to part
the clouds of cologne. But Mackenzie would stand on tiptoe and turn her nose upward to catch every drop of fragrance.
When they finally reached the Revlon counter, they would find Aunt Hope, wearing a baby-blue smock and curly long eyelashes, working on a client. “My appointments,” she called them. Cal would wander off to look at scarves and purses until Aunt Hope finished and could join them for lunch. But Mackenzie stood and watched as Aunt Hope turned an ordinary woman into someone special.
“Do you remember,” Mackenzie asked her aunt, “when you worked downtown?”
“Which time?”
Mackenzie frowned.
“At the Outlet, of course.”
“I had a million jobs in my time,” Aunt Hope said, laughing. “I worked in the coat department at Gladyings downtown for a while. I never could fold those boxes up right. I was in shoes there too, I think. Or maybe that was at the Garden City store. Let’s see. The Outlet—”
“Revlon,” Mackenzie said, irritated.
“Oh, yes. I remember now.”
“When did you ever work in the shoe department at Gladylings?” Mackenzie said.
Aunt Hope shrugged. Her shoulders lifting under the green chiffon cape made a slight rustling sound.
“I always loved shoes,” she said. “I used to like to get the employee’s discount on things. I still have a beautiful pair of gold sandals that I bought when I worked there. Lovely ones. With a T-strap.”
Aunt Hope kept all her shoes in their original boxes, her coats in plastic hanging bags, her jewelry in boxes lined with cotton. She could delve into her closets and drawers and produce perfectly kept items from twenty-five years ago—a leopard coat, scarab bracelets, and cashmere sweaters.
“We used to come and watch you do makeovers,” Mackenzie said.
“That’s what Daisy does, isn’t it? Makeup?”
“You used to have appointments.”
Aunt Hope laughed. “I never knew anything about makeup. They used to tell us to look dramatic. So I’d put on eyelashes out to here and dark red lips. One time I had a bride come in. She took one look at me and ran out.”
Mackenzie pointed ahead to an exit sign.
“Where exactly are we going?” she said.
“Not this one,” Aunt Hope said. “The next one.”
She gave Mackenzie directions, a series of lefts and rights, counting traffic lights and stop signs until, in the midst of emptiness, she said: “We’re here.”
“Where?” Mackenzie said.
“Just keep going.”
They finally reached a low flat building with a sign that glowed green, LIZARD LOUNGE, the I faint and dull. In one window a neon lizard moved, eerily, airily, up and then down.
“Isn’t this fun?” Aunt Hope said.
“I guess so,” Mackenzie said.
At the door, a bald man with no eyebrows asked Mackenzie for an I.D.
“How about me?” Aunt Hope said, smiling up at him.
“You,” he said, “I know.”
“You know him?” Mackenzie whispered.
Three staples glistened in his left earlobe as he examined Mackenzie’s driver’s license.
“Hey,” he said, “you’re older than I am.”
The bar was full of people with spiked hairdos dyed in rainbow colors. A lot of the women were dressed like Marilyn Monroe, platinum hair, lips a thick red. Three giggling Marilyns passed them.
“They have a Marilyn look-alike contest on Tuesdays,” Aunt Hope said.
Mackenzie nodded.
Behind the bar, in cages, were lizards, horny lime green iguanas, small flat brown ones, fluorescent salmon salamanders, and tiny chameleons clinging to rocks.
“Aunt Hope,” Mackenzie shouted over the Talking Heads, “have you been here before?”
Across the room, near the stage, a long-haired man in an Iron Butterfly T-shirt tinkered with equipment.
“Over there,” Aunt Hope said. “I like to sit up front.”
Aunt Hope pushed her way through the crowd. The smell of leather and beer was strong.
A man wearing round glasses with multicolored psychedelic swirls for lenses stuck his face in front of Mackenzie.
“To the moon, Alice,” he said.
Aunt Hope turned to her. “They get a lot of students from Brown,” she said.
“He’s from Brown?” Mackenzie said, but again her aunt was moving on.
What am I doing here? Mackenzie thought. What is Aunt Hope doing here? She remembered going to a nightclub like this in London once. “Welcome to the future,” the doorman had told her. His Mohawk haircut had been metallic blue. A safety pin pierced his cheek. Later, she had sent Alexander a postcard, three punks in front of the Piccadilly Circus tube stop. Welcome to the future, she’d written on the back.
They reached a table where a lava lamp glowed and dripped red.
Across the room, a microphone screeched.
“Two Cuba Libres,” Aunt Hope said to the waitress.
“What?”
“Rum and Cokes,” Aunt Hope said sadly. “No one knows anything anymore.”
“Why are we here?” Mackenzie said. “This is where you like to come dancing?”
The taped music stopped.
Someone blew into the microphone.
“Testing.”
“Do you come here a lot?” Mackenzie asked Aunt Hope.
“Of course not. I’ve only been here twice. This is my third time.”
Mackenzie looked toward the stage as a group of musicians paraded on. They wore blue velvet tuxedos and ruffled shirts.
“What is this?” she shouted above the noise. “A wedding or a bar mitzvah?”
Aunt Hope touched her arm.
“What?” Mackenzie said.
The lights dimmed, except for one over the stage that cast a fuzzy green light over the musicians and the people at the front tables.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” crooned a low voice, “straight from Havana, via Hoboken, the Hoochie Coos’s!”
The crowd cheered wildly.
“Aunt Hope,” Mackenzie said.
Aunt Hope shook her head slightly. She kept her gaze fixed on the stage, where Ricardo Havana was stepping up to the microphone. It seemed to Mackenzie that his eyes searched the crowd for Aunt Hope before he began to sing in his thick accent, real or imagined, full of rolling r’s and elongated e’s.
It was as if no time had elapsed just then. Ricardo Havana’s black hair was wavy and stiff, the color of tar, and his face was unwrinkled and tanned. His eyes settled, briefly, on their table and then he sang:
“Say it’s only a paper moon …”
Mackenzie thought of her aunt imitating that voice, that song, waltzing with her girlfriends in an upstairs bedroom lined with posters of Fabian and Troy Donahue, and she felt, as she watched and remembered, that anything was possible after all.
“I’ve never really had any friends before,” John-Glenn said.
He and Sam sat on the floor of his bedroom. The room was lit by only one light, a tulip-shaped leaded glass lamp that used to sit on the desk Grammie wrote letters at. Sam was wrapped in John-Glenn’s plaid bathrobe. Only his fingertips poked out of the sleeves, and the belt looped around and around his waist, ending in a droopy oversized bow at his hip. On his head, he wore John-Glenn’s McDonald’s hat.
John-Glenn ate the leftover Chinese food from the stained white take-home cartons. The lids had a dragon emblazoned on them.
“Everyone,” he said, “thinks I’m weird.”
Sam nodded.
“You too, huh? Sure. I can see that. It’s very spooky the way you don’t talk.”
Sam opened his drawing pad. With a red Crayola he wrote HI, and drew a yellow smiling face below it. His mother had taught him how to do that, to write HI and draw that face, always using the same two colors, always putting the face below the words. She said that could be his trademark, like things that were pink were her trademark—her car and a lot of her clothes, her bedroom with the
pink satin sheets and pale pink walls. In the morning, he left her his trademark on the message board by the refrigerator and sometimes she left him pink bubblegum or lollipops.
“Only my mother really listens to me,” John-Glenn said. “Well, Grammie used to listen, but only to be polite.” He leaned his face closer to Sam. “I have a million theories. People thought Columbus was crazy, saying the world was round, right?”
Sam drew another smiling face. His mother had given him a roll of stickers full of these faces and he had stuck them to the headboard of the bed.
“For example,” John-Glenn said, “my martian theory. They are everywhere. I have books that support this, that list sightings, visits, etcetera.” He waved toward the bookshelves. “My mother says that science fiction is just that. Fiction. But I say it is real. Fact.”
Sam frowned. Martians.
“There are planets we haven’t even discovered yet. Whole galaxies. Sometimes I think about us, earthlings, just as a speck in it all. Our entire planet might be just a little dot. Have you ever looked at a drop of water under a microscope?”
Sam shook his head.
“No?”
John-Glenn went to his closet and pulled out a microscope. He set it up on the bureau, beside the tulip-shaped lamp. Sam followed him into the bathroom and watched as he put some water on a glass slide, then followed him back into the bedroom. John-Glenn played with the microscope, turning and focusing, then peering into it.
“Look here,” he said. He lifted Sam up and sat him on the bureau.
Sam leaned into the lens, squinting. When his eyes focused, he drew back in horror.
“Viola!” John-Glenn said. “Another world.”
Slowly, Sam rested his head against the lens again. He watched as tiny squiggles—bugs?—swam through the tapwater. He would never drink water again. Never.
“Imagine a planet where the people are gigantic. Enormous. A scientist there picks up the earth and puts it under a microscope and watches us move around just like that.”
Sam closed his eyes and imagined a gigantic scientist lifting up the planet earth. He had seen pictures of how the earth looked from space in the Air and Space Museum. It was a circle with lots and lots of blue. The blue, his mother had told him, was the oceans. Sam wondered if a martian scientist could see him right now. He looked upward and gave a little wave.