by Beth Goobie
Dee’s eyes were vague. “Did anyone at Bible camp see you like this?” she asked.
“It was always dark,” Jez mumbled.
“So I’m the only one?” asked Dee.
“Yes,” said Jez.
“Then we’re even,” said Dee. “No one’s ever watched me the way you have. Turn around.”
Trying to shrink into invisibility, Jez made the required pirouette. “Okay, so I told you I was ugly,” she babbled. “Anita Bryant looks better without a girdle.”
“You could pose for the virgin centerfold,” murmured Dee.
“I am not a virgin,” protested Jez.
“Okay, okay,” said Dee. Her gaze was still vague; she seemed to be pulling herself in from a great distance. “I think we are the same size. Close enough, anyway.” Crossing to the dresser, she pulled out a pair of pink panties and a matching underwire bra, and tossed them onto the bed. “Try these.”
Thankful for the camouflage, Jez scrambled into the skimpy panties and the bra, which compressed her breasts into a high-rise shape even her mother’s darts hadn’t been able to imagine. Then it was Stevie Nicks singing “Rhiannon” as Dee pulled her to the dresser, lit two white candles, and began tilting her face this way and that, applying lip gloss, eyeliner, mascara, and blush. Unfamiliar with makeup, Jez was surprised at its heaviness, the drag on her skin, but she quickly forgot it as Dee whispered, “Now tell me who’s ugly,” and turned her toward the mirror with its candlelit reflection of pink satin, the shadowy hollows of throats, the huge questions of eyes.
“Do you like it?” Dee asked softly.
Slightly stunned, Jez avoided the question. “Is this what you want me to wear to school?” she stammered. “I mean, do I get to wear anything over it?”
“Just a sec,” said Dee. Crossing to the wardrobe, she began tossing clothes onto the bed, and eventually Jez decided on jeans and a Starsky and Hutch T-shirt. “Jehu would love you, baby,” teased Dee, giving her the once-over. “Meet me at a quarter after eight tomorrow morning at the 7-Eleven on Dundas. You can change into those in Sinbad’s backseat.”
“Sinbad?” asked Jez.
“My car,” said Dee. “Sin bad. Sin, for short.”
“Of course,” said Jez.
They sat outside on the top step in jeans and bras, smoking a last cigarette. Jez had asked to wear the underwire bra home that night as a practice run, wanting its pink shimmering presence, its two secret hands stroking her this way and that under the paisley midi, forbidden and closer than the touch of a mother. For the last ten years, Rachel Hamilton’s monster midis had been a stranglehold on her daughter’s life, numbing it and stealing it away, but tonight Jez would sit at her mother’s table, eat her roast beef and apple pie; they would take turns reading Bible verses and praying, and Jez’s softest, most innermost prayer would be the shimmering satin bra—a reminder that buried alive, she still breathed. Playing with this thought, she watched the blue butterfly on Dee’s upper arm darken to black in the fading light.
“Monarch,” said Dee, catching her glance. “I’ve got them all over. Even two down here.” She traced a finger along her inner thigh. “I’ll show you sometime.”
“How many are there?” asked Jez, amazed.
Dee shrugged. “Not as many as I want. Did you know monarchs migrate like birds? They fly south to California and Mexico. Cerro Pelon—that’s the name of a mountain in Mexico where a hundred million monarchs spend the winter. Huge flocks of them roost together, all winter long. Imagine if they all took off at once. Sky of wings, man.”
“Hard to imagine a butterfly flying all the way to Mexico,” said Jez.
“How far can you send your mind?” asked Dee, her eyes intense in the late afternoon shadow. “Butterflies are the way you think, man. Flit-flit-flitting, inch by inch. A tiny cosmic detail, but they can go anywhere. Just think—they’re in Cerro Pelon, and we’re stuck here.” Briskly, she slapped Jez’s leg. “When are you supposed to be home?”
Jez had been keeping an eye on her watch. “I have half an hour,” she replied. “I told my mother I’d be working on a history paper at the library.”
Stubbing out her cigarette, Dee got to her feet. “Shit,” she muttered. “Where’d I leave Pinko?”
“In the backyard,” said Jez.
“You put on that sperm mural while I get Sin,” said Dee, heading down the stairs. “I’ll pick you up in the alley in five.”
Still seated on the top step, Jez watched her jump the bottom three and take off running across the yard—a girl composed of a flock of monarchs, each butterfly traveling its own tangent. Until the day, Jez mused, they all came awake together and rose in a great blue tattooed spiral, transforming Dee into a skin of wings.
Three
My mother rarely slept at length. Retiring at eleven, she typically dozed off for several hours, then rose and prowled the house. My father, on the other hand, was a sound sleeper and so remained largely undisturbed by her wanderings, but it was not unusual for me to wake at three or four to the sound of footsteps in the hall or the running of water in the kitchen sink. To a child’s ear, these were guardian sounds—my mother an angel patrolling the divine pathways of our home, guided by an inner but audible map of voices that led her, free from human error, through the denser material realm. That these voices were archangelic and of the highest celestial order was never then in question, for it was mere days after her baptism by the Tongue of Fire that they initiated contact, thereafter summoning her nightly out of mundane sleep to visions of the sublime.
From the beginning, my bedroom was of interest to them, and I often woke to see my door opening so silently, it felt like a crack in my brain oozing wide. Then the stooped shape of my mother appeared, standing in that opening, darker than the darkness of the hall. If I stirred, the door closed as soundlessly as it had opened, and I heard the quiet pad of angel’s feet leaving me. If, however, I managed to remain motionless, my mother entered and crept about the room, running her fingers over my stuffed panda, my library books, the mirror on my dresser.
Opening my dresser drawers, she sifted through my clothes, all the while whispering in soft hissing sounds. Restlessly, her fingers traced the carpet’s border design and ran along the floorboards; sometimes she knelt at the center of my room and drew a circle about herself or patterned the air above her head. Less frequently, she approached my window, drew apart the curtains, and sent out her voice in a low hum; but always she completed her activities by opening my closet door and emitting a low digging sound—a grave-digger’s call that dug the dead deeper, piled earth higher over what had been buried, and kept it down.
On occasions of significance—birthdays, holidays, notable changes in the weather—she circled my bed, stroking the edge of the mattress and braiding the bedspread fringe, and sometimes she shaped her hands into a soft-flowing mold and ran them over my body, whispering, always whispering, inward to herself. At these times, I felt something lift from me and depart—some inner shimmery membrane of breath and nerves that passed from the darkness of my flesh into the darkness of hers; as it entered her body, she took a quick shuddery breath and turned from me, deeper into night, into another level of the mind, and left the room.
I rarely thought of these moments during the day, for they seemed to belong to the dark—that fabric of consciousness that fades into the dawn. Signs and warnings, the faint drumming of angel wings, a whisper of prophecy in the blood—my mother and I never spoke of these matters, simply knew they had a place in the order of things, necessary and familiar as the sound of one’s own breathing. Instead, I learned to tune to the nocturnal shuffle of her feet passing my door, to watch in my sleep as she crept along house corridors, touching framed prints of The Last Supper and the Crucifixion, so often awake within my dreams that if I physically climbed out of bed, crept to the door, and opened it, I could not be certain if I was still dreamin
g or actually saw what transpired next.
Houselights were not turned on at night, and in the dark, sounds magnified. A heavy wind might fill the lungs of the backyard trees, the rustle of my mother’s bathrobe carve out a long, cavernous tunnel. Creeping in her wake, I would stand in a doorway and watch her progress around a room, tracing her fingers over the walls as if looking for cracks or holes. Sometimes she came to a halt, humming all the while deep within herself, and circled her fingertips endlessly about a single spot; when she moved on, her fingers remained on the wall’s surface without breaking contact. To my child’s unimpeded mind, she seemed to be sending into and receiving from some kind of divine circuitry. When, several times, I managed to sneak up behind her and touch a point in the wall she had just stroked, a shock shot through me, accompanied by a swiftly cut-off current of voices or a series of brilliant images that flashed by too quickly to comprehend.
Some nights my mother appeared to actually summon angels. Certain voice tones and colors seemed necessary to invoke their presence; she often used flowers or colored candles, cupping her hands around the blossom or flame and humming until a second glow appeared between her palms. As this new glow grew, the space between her hands widened until, taking sudden form, a luminescent figure stepped forth, but whatever happened next was lost to me—the circuitry of my mind not strong enough to handle such intensity—and all that I perceived were vague shape-changing forms that swirled about my mother in restless communion.
If, indeed, I occasionally witnessed Rachel Hamilton communing with illuminated beings from another dimension, most nights she walked alone, tracing her fingers along the walls and whispering, it seemed to me, only to herself. Though she gave no sign of noticing my presence, I was careful to keep my distance, aware without having to be told that the path we were on had been granted only to her and that I was trespassing on forbidden ground, violating sacred law. There came a time, however, when in spite of my caution I was abruptly trapped at one end of a hallway as my mother made an unexpected turn and came back toward me. That night, she was carrying a pale green candle that lit the underside of her face and cast the upper half into leaping shadow. Heart thudding, I pressed to the wall, but my eerily lit mother brushed past without acknowledgment, leaving me in her wake as merely another bit of the unworthy, a speck of the dingy material world.
From that moment on, I knew my mother could not see me. The landscapes we inhabited were too different—what she saw was not what I saw; what surrounded her disdained and shut me out. By haunting her footsteps, I was able to catch occasional glimpses into her realm, but she wandered a part of the mind I could not enter; I stood on the edge of a world she had passed through to, a world I had been refused. While as a child I resented this, for years it seemed the natural order of things, dictated by my mother’s chosen status, her direct line, as it were, to the divine. But as I came into adolescence, I realized that the situation was more complex—as complex, in fact, as the careful web my mother wove about my bedroom, closing gaps and cracks, any openings onto other planes. Was she indeed attempting to protect me by preventing evil influences from reaching through to me from other levels of reality, or was she preventing me from reaching toward them? Was it actually true that she had the sacred sight and I had none? If so, why did she have to expend so much effort, night after night, spinning her spiritual web—a web I finally understood to be accomplishing more than simply closing me in? Rather, it was draining me of something vital, blinding me to what I needed to see of my own means, to know.
I did not tell my mother about Dee Eccles for months, but she sensed it, and started coming into my room more often, hiss-whispering to herself as she sent her fingers spider-walking the walls. During that early period, while I moved away from her toward Dee, toward myself in the context of Dee, my mother’s searches intensified. As I lay nightly in bed, she reached to touch my bedroom wall and I felt that touch on my skin; she stroked my dresser mirror and invisible fingertips were suddenly traveling my face. Once, her touch reached out to connect with me during the day. It was weeks into my friendship with Dee; I was on lunch break and had crowded into the backseat of her Bug with several others; abruptly, a door opened inside my head and the dark whispering outline of my mother appeared. No one else noticed, not even Dee. High on a shared joint, she and the others continued to crack up over yet another snide comment, leaving me trapped and alone within my mother’s questing current, shuddering like a startled horse as her fingertips brushed lightly over some section of my brain.
•••
The following morning Sinbad idled at the 7-Eleven, “Smoke on the Water” blasting from the tape deck as Dee sat slumped in the front seat, her eyes fixed in a dull stare. Overnight, the weather had turned cold, a sharp frost withering colors and curling the edges of leaves. Huddled against the store’s side wall, Jez was a blaze of lime in a jacket her mother had bought on sale at Zellers. Inside her left pocket rested the pink satin bra, carefully folded. She had come to return it, and had spent the last fifteen minutes perfecting the polite, impervious smile she intended to wear as she handed the bra pleasantly but firmly through the car window.
“Yesterday was a mistake,” she planned to say, her voice dispassionate and impersonal. “My mistake. I’m sorry I wasted your valuable time.” Then, turning from the car window, she would walk the last few blocks to school alone.
As she stood considering her next move, cars veered into parking spaces and a stream of adults hurried in and out of the store’s main door, cradling steaming cups of coffee. In contrast, Dee looked completely unplugged. Jez had never seen her this wasted, almost lifeless—as if an inner switch had been flicked and her circuitry shut down. Her skin was pale, her eyes two hollowed-out charcoal caves, and she wasn’t even smoking. Whatever lived in Dee—all those transitory quick-winged wishes that flew her skin—seemed to have migrated south overnight, leaving her facing a winter without dreams.
Jez knew about being exiled from dreams. If no butterflies flew her skin, still she had been a slave in Egypt and had wept by the waters of Babylon; she had knelt at the cross, wrapped the mutilated body in the tomb, and gone underground to await the Second Coming. Years had passed as she had waited alone in the catacombs of her gut, waited so long she sometimes forgot what it was she was waiting for. But last night she had been reminded. Last night, she had finally recognized all those years of loneliness as a sanctuary carefully carved out around her—a period of preparation necessarily keeping her separate and alone. It was a dream that had brought this revelation to her—a dream sent by The Chosen Ones. In this dream, she had seen the hooded faithful, knives raised as they whirled around an underground cavern. At their center had stood a large stone altar with two girls laid across it, their throats about to be slit like pigs. When Jez had woken from this dream, the memory of it had been so strong that she could still feel the altar beneath her back and see the firelight arcing off the raised blades.
The dream’s message had been clear: in spite of her failings, in spite of everything she did not yet comprehend, The Chosen Ones had claimed Mary-Eve Hamilton for a purpose, and she belonged to them. If the purpose had not yet been revealed, still that was no reason not to trust it. If it seemed bewildering and unfathomable, The Chosen Ones had carried the secret mind of God throughout the history of mankind; they moved in mysterious ways and were not to be questioned. Dee Eccles was an outsider, one of the unchosen. If Jez continued her association with the wild butterfly girl, The Chosen Ones would spit them both from their holy mouths as unclean vermin.
Did anyone at Bible camp see you like this? she remembered longingly. Then we’re even. No one’s ever watched me the way you have.
The parking lot’s black asphalt stretched out before her—dark, dense grief; then, without warning, a lucid ache opened within Jez, rippling up from the inner place that holds all that is unknown. In that instant, everything about her seemed to lose its form, as if sto
res, cars, houses and schools, family and friendships, all of human history, including Jez herself, were simply molecules playing a game at the surface of some deep ongoing knowing. A liquid exquisite, she felt it for several seconds—a knowing that had never, and would never, reveal itself fully to the human mind. Then this knowing faded, returning her to the mundane—Dee sitting slumped and dull-eyed in the Bug, cars pulling in and out of the parking lot, the curse of the normal once again pressing its thumb down upon the world…everything empty of call, the heart cored, the pulse of the possible lost.
All that remained was faith. The Chosen Ones had always possessed the gift of great faith—they were, after all, the spoken forms of the Logos resonating within the world of flesh. Perhaps, Jez thought suddenly, the realization hitting her in a delirious, delicious flash, she had misunderstood the dream; perhaps The Chosen Ones had been protecting the girls on the altar. That’s it! she thought jubilantly. It was a dream of approval, not condemnation.
And if not, if she was wrong and The Chosen Ones came after her and Dee for this unintentional transgression, then she would voluntarily lay herself down on the altar, bare her throat, and say, “Take me. I’ve got enough for the both of us.”
Tentatively, Jez approached the powder-blue Bug and knocked on the passenger window. As if touched by a bare wire, Dee jerked upright, then jabbed a finger at the backseat, where the Starsky and Hutch T-shirt and a pair of jeans had been tossed, and returned to her slump. Opening the passenger door, Jez ducked into the backseat and began unbuttoning the front of her green and red plaid midi.
“Shit,” croaked Dee, her voice hoarse with the day’s first words. “Someone’ll see you. Hold on.” Without further warning, she burned rubber out of the parking lot, Jez hanging tightly to the front seat as Sinbad veered into a nearby alley. “Okay, fine now,” said Dee, killing the ignition and settling back into her dull-eyed stare. “No one’ll see you here.”