Girl in Reverse (9781442497368)

by Stuber, Barbara

  I’m sorry. I’m awful. I touch my cheeks in the dark. They’re wet. I wipe my face, imagining Gone Mom’s fingers are mine, wondering if the only place in the whole raging world she exists is in me. I slide my new notebook between my bed and the wall. With her name written in it, it’s already too full . . . and too empty.

  Chapter 6

  I have cleaned out my bobby pin box, tossed the rusted clippies, finished my geometry homework, and started reading Jane Eyre for extra credit. I have emptied the wastebaskets, dusted the downstairs, and now I am in the basement plowing through the ironing basket without being asked. The reason?

  Guilt.

  I am sprinkling and pressing my father’s cotton boxer shorts because guilt will make a person do many fantastic and insincere things. Guilt will motivate a person to iron underpants and complicated pleated skirts.

  Why do I feel guilty? Because I stood up for my Chineseness. I stalked the House of Chow. I gave my birth mother a name and wrote it in my notebook and if my parents knew, they would die.

  Unlike me, Ralph is not bullied by guilt. He can fake his voice to sound like Mother, hide his cruddy Scout collection, grind gravy into the rug, and feel fine. He can do anything. He’s free because he’s their natural-born son. He fixed our mother’s life by being born. He is the guilt-free answer to everything.

  I should hate him, but I don’t. He is real smart and loyal and funny and always thinking.

  Pinned to our basement clothesline is an army of Mother’s girdles. Two white, one flesh-toned, and a black one with a lace front panel. Ralph refers to her putting on a girdle as the “Fat vs. Elastic” battle. The girdle always loses.

  Our basement is the opposite of the art room. It smells like Spic and Span and it stays exactly the same—tidy stacks of canned beans and tuna fish, snow chains on hooks by the furnace, the crate of empty pop bottles rinsed and wiped. Ash bin spotless. Neat as a pin.

  With a few additions it would make a perfect fallout shelter. Or if the Pope dropped by our basement one day, he’d hire Mother to be God’s housekeeper. She could organize His medicine cabinet, arrange His manicure kit, and starch His halo. She would wipe God’s fingerprints off His bottle of Squirt.

  Ironing, my contribution to the clean and orderly world of our house, is better than going to confession if I want to be rid of guilt. It’s the perfect penance.

  I gather Dad’s handkerchiefs, Ralph’s rolled socks, which I did not iron, and head upstairs. Out of nowhere I picture Elliot James’s paint-spattered pants, the scarf hanging around his neck, and the gray sweater stretched across his shoulders. He looks like he lives in an art studio. He sure doesn’t try to look like everybody else. He seems unaffected by what people think, except maybe his girlfriend if he has one. Surely he does. I drop Ralph’s socks. They bounce behind me all the way down the steps.

  * * *

  No trace of Elliot today. Mrs. Van Zant’s art quote for the week on the chalkboard reads:

  If you want to understand something, try drawing it!

  She has just walked out after hanging posters of famous artists along one wall. Each has a biography and an example artwork: Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, Salvador Dalí, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso. I scan the artists. The only fact I know about any of them is that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear. His own ear ! How could he?

  One poster describes Michelangelo, who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy. God wears a blue nightgown that needs ironing while riding across heaven with a squad of angels. He reaches to touch fingers with “Man,” who is naked. They are both white. Man’s and God’s fingertips almost touch, but not quite.

  Did they ever touch? What did Michelangelo believe was supposed to happen then?

  A stained-glass window at Our Lady of Sorrows showed God on His heavenly throne with fiery eyes and His sword of righteousness. He isn’t reaching out to touch anybody. He’s in a bad mood. His helper angels look miserable. God’s hard to work for.

  Salvador Dalí’s surreal poster is a nightmare landscape—melted pocket watches crawling with black ants. The Persistence of Memory. Memories of what?

  Pablo Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror painting looks like two exploded clowns staring at each other. The background is clashing red and black diamonds and green polka dots. It’s crazy, more hideous than all the self-portraits combined.

  I grab some rags, turn and bump the pedestal with the still-life arrangement. The water bottle wobbles. I grab it and knock the pipe and shells on the floor. I put it back all wrong. “Why do people care about this junk?” I bark at the ruined arrangement. “Can’t a normal person just see something and go about their day without drawing it?”

  “I knock it every darn time I clean in here,” a voice answers. It’s the janitor, Mr. Howard, who seems perfectly fine to have witnessed me yelling at a pile of pure junk. “I just sorta”—he walks over, patting his big hands on the air—“put it back.” Mr. Howard scrutinizes it and adjusts the bottle. “It needs to be closer to the edge, and the cloth needs to be slightly more crinkled over the pipe. There, that’s a nice reflection on the candlestick. Don’t you agree?” He steps back, tilts his head this way and that. He kisses his fingertips. “Perfect. Nobody will notice. They never do! Art rooms aren’t supposed to be clean, they’re supposed to be cluttered with inspiration and new ideas.” He pauses a moment. “How are you, Miss Firestone?”

  I know he’s referring to the horrible social studies fiasco he witnessed from his ladder. “Okay,” I mumble, the way I might say it’s okay that my house burned down or that I have contracted polio.

  Mr. Howard nods. He checks the kiln, rewraps a block of wet clay, then turns with a hand against his chest. “As you may already know, Miss Firestone, I can work here, but my kids can’t go to school here. Negroes can’t live in this neighborhood.”

  I blink at him, tongue-tied. He stands there ten feet tall. I can’t tell if he thinks it’s a good or bad thing not to be able to live around here. For an awkward moment we both turn to Picasso’s mirror painting. On the left side is a girl whose face is a mix—half-yellow, half-white. The white part is a profile with a triangle-shaped nose, a black oval eye, and black slash for a mouth. The yellow part looks forward with pink cheeks and red lips. “I think Picasso’s saying that people can treat an artwork like a mirror and find themselves in it,” Mr. Howard says.

  Really?

  He empties the waste can, turns with his cart, and says, “This is my favorite spot in the whole building, best place in the world for a detention.” He smiles. “Good afternoon, Miss Firestone.”

  I walk closer, squint at Picasso’s crazy painting. The girl’s reflection in the mirror on the right side is mysterious and disturbing. Her profile is dark purples and blues with a thick orange tear hooked on her eye and a pregnant-looking stomach that’s hollow—no baby inside. Gone Mom. I cover my face with my hands. Go away.

  I grab my coat and walk out the side door onto the practice field. I swallow the chilly, busy air, my coat flapping against my legs. An airplane whines. I follow the sound up to a speck of glitter crossing the pale sky. I imagine the passengers as tiny, distant dolls. If one of them really needed God, she could break the rules—just open the airplane window, reach out, and brush fingertips with Him.

  Chapter 7

  Toward the end of dinner these words pop from Ralph’s mouth and crash on the table. “Say, everybody, I have something!”

  Uh-oh . . . here come the Chows.

  Ralph gives me a look. My eyeballs return bullets. “It’s more a question, really.” He turns to Dad.

  Dad holds up his hand—halt! “Ralph, if this is another rendition of your when-are-we-going-to-get-a-television-set campaign . . .”

  “No, Dad. It’s a legal question.” Ralphie takes a deep breath. “When kids get adopted . . .” He pauses. “Adopted” shatters our chandelier, pierces the ceiling. Mother dabs her mouth, leaving two mauve smears on her napkin.

  “.
. . when they are four or five years old or something . . . does the orphan get to bring all his stuff with him to the new people—pictures and clothes from the orphanage, or, you know, what happens to all his stuff?”

  Mother leans in, grips the table edge, and glances at my father. “It is gotten rid of.” Dad tips his head, blinks, presumably considering the correct legal answer.

  Our mother shivers, turns to her husband. “It’s best. Why should a child be encouraged to live in reverse?” Her face looks a mix of amen and dammit.

  My mind exits the dining room and enters the little girls’ dorm at the Sisters of Mercy Children’s Home. I see the scratchy green wool blanket on my metal bed—seventh down on the right side—and my pink plastic hairbrush labeled “Lillian” and my locker stacked with pajamas and undershirts. I smell the incense smoke floating in the chapel. My reverse.

  “But, technically, shouldn’t the things still belong to the kid?” Ralph insists.

  Dad does not look at me. He chuckles a phony ho-ho-ho, now there’s a doozy kind of laugh and says, “If you don’t follow in my footsteps in the construction business, son, you’ve got the makings of a fine attorney.”

  No one has asked Ralph why he’s asking such a question. No one has asked what I think. Mother stands like a juggler who has lost her pins. She turns and studies her face in the mirror above the buffet, then glares at her precious crystal cabinet. She walks out, lifts a new McCall’s off the mail pile in the front hall, and heads upstairs to that tidy upholstered place inside herself with no adopted Chinese daughter, no smarty eleven-year-old Boy Scout, no old orphan belongings, no commies or chinks or Korean War—just bridge club, manicures, darning, and solitaire.

  Don’t live in reverse! That’s my mother, always summing things up, exiting a difficult conversation before it starts. In our house hard topics are either swirled away in a glass of bourbon or wrapped in sandpaper and swallowed.

  * * *

  “Why are you stealing my misery?” I ask Ralph upstairs. “Why are you so interested in adoption all of a sudden? You’re all rooted here and fertilized and growing your nice branch on the family tree.”

  “I was asking a general question.”

  I nod. “Sure you were.”

  The phone rings. Ralph leaps downstairs to answer it. “Lily!” he yells, loud enough to awaken our neighbor’s dead parakeet buried in the side yard.

  I walk down slowly, reviewing who it could be. Patty Kittle? No. Anita, who acts married since she and Neil Bradford’s best friend are going steady? No. Mr. Thorp reporting that I walked out early on my detention?

  “Hello?” I croak.

  Deep voice. I grip the phone. Elliot James! Oh, God! “Mr. Howard found your books and purse and stuff in the art room.” What’s in my purse? Oh, God. Did you look in my purse? “The side door doesn’t lock every time, so somebody could just come in there. . . . Anyway, I left them on your front porch.”

  “Yes, w . . . w . . . well . . . Okay. Bye.”

  I squeeze the receiver of our magical telephone. Ralph is standing one and a half inches away, coating me with Wrigley’s spearmint breath. Git! I bump him with my knee. “Go away—now—or die.” I walk to the front hall and creak open the heavy door. My textbooks are in a neat pile with my purse on top. I look up and down the block. No Elliot.

  I flutter upstairs, past Dad with his newspaper spread on the kitchen table. I unclasp my purse and paw through it—just dull stuff: an elastic headband, comb, my detention slip, Tangee, pen, money. Thank God.

  I sit on my vanity stool, lean in, and stare at the mirror. Same face, new me. I have been telephoned by the mysterious, know-it-all, future artistic genius of the century Elliot James. “So there!”

  Like clockwork Ralph is at my door demanding, “Who was that?”

  “Michelangelo.” I know Ralph has no earthly idea who Michelangelo is, but he’d never admit it. “He brought my books over.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “thought I recognized him. Hey, check this out.” He drags me to his room and opens the door to the attic. The bottom stair holds his Scout gear—binoculars, a camping heater, ditty bag, magnifying glass, his Handbook for Boys.

  The next step houses his newly revamped Scout collection. “I’ve got a theme now, like you suggested.” But it doesn’t look like it. There’s the odd polished stick and the fossil shell. The rotten squirrel tail has been replaced with a bundle of bamboo poles and string. “Wind chimes,” Ralphie says, lifting them in front of me. He sits back on his heels. “For my pigeons.”

  “Why, yes, of course. How excellent.” I shake my head. “What pigeons?”

  He points. “Up there. I’m doing the Pigeon Raising merit badge. You know, squab.”

  “No.”

  “For racing and flight contests and carrying secret messages. There’s coop sanitation and seeds and grit and record keeping . . .”

  “Ew. Where’d you buy them?”

  “Didn’t. The pigeons were already up there. Now all I have to do is raise ’em.” He jiggles the wind chimes. “These’ll keep them in a good mood.”

  “No, stupid. Where’d you buy the wind chimes?”

  “Chow House gift shop.” Ralph backs away from the steps on his knees and turns to me. “We’ve gotta eat there sometime.”

  “I told you, I’m never going in there.”

  “Their shop is neat. They also sell wrist rests like this. New ones. Chinese artists use them to prop their forearms up while they paint. Gives a better angle for the brush. But this one of mine is old. An antique.” Ralph gives me long look. “Have you ever seen one before?”

  I hear a car cruising slowly down our street—Elliot? I hop up, peek out of Ralph’s window, but I can’t see a thing. I turn back. “Huh?”

  “Like I just said, they sell these at the Chow House.”

  Ralph waves the stick in front of my face. “Ding-dong, anybody home?” He puts it in my hand.

  I look down “What’d you say this was?”

  “God! Never mind.” Ralph puts it back on the step. Sighs.

  My brain is fuzz. What a day!

  It started in Kansas City and ended in Weird Town.

  Chapter 8

  Neil Bradford’s brother, Tom, is missing in action in North Korea.

  After attendance is taken Friday morning the principal announces an all-school gathering outside by the flagpole. Neil and his sister, Susan, who is a freshman, stand by the principal. Susan is crying. She looks scared to death. Neil has his arm around her. Everybody is shivering. After a moment of silent reflection, the ROTC honor guard raises the flag. It is regal and reassuring lifting in the wind, snapping strong against the Red Scare. Neil salutes. The flag helps everybody focus.

  Anita glances over. She actually looks scared of me. I stare at my feet, feeling responsible for Neil’s missing brother. The principal pledges that the school will keep a vigil for Tom Bradford and his family. I feel terrible for a thousand reasons, especially for the possibility of Elliot and these other guys joining the army someday and trudging across Korea dodging bombs and bullets.

  We say the Pledge of Allegiance and dismiss, but the Bamboo Curtain blocks my way. Kids literally sidestep around me. I see ching-chong head tilts. I hear “commie” coughs. A thousand students and staff head back into school, but not me.

  My heart pumps glue. I hate my impossible self and the impossible warring world. I sink onto a low brick wall by the bike racks. Go back into school or go away? I could take a quick walk across the street and become missing in action too. What’s the right thing to do in this wrong world?

  Mr. and Mrs. Chow must rise above slights and slurs every day, just go on about their business. What did Gone Mom do? I guess she gave a big part of her problem to the Sisters of Mercy and went on about her business. I pledge to the flag: “I will never do that to anybody!”

  Mr. Howard comes down the school steps. He walks past the flagpole into the crosswalk in front of the building to retrieve the portable
STOP FOR PEDESTRIANS sign. The base of the pole is stuck in a tire filled with cement. He spots me on the wall, pauses. Cars gather on both sides of the crosswalk but Mr. Howard is in no hurry. He glances at the flag and then back at me. He seems to read my mind. He tips his hand toward the stop sign—are you going to be a pedestrian or not? For a frozen moment our eyes lock. The second-hour bell sounds. I stay put. In the wind the metal hooks on the flag rope clank against the pole. Mr. Howard straightens his back, salutes me, and walks toward the building, rolling the sign along.

  A gust of wind whips the flag around the pole until all but a little red corner disappears. I get up and disappear too, back inside the building.

  * * *

  Social studies is torture. I feel like everyone expects me to confess which of my chink relatives captured Tom Bradford.

  Lights off. Thank God. Venetian blinds closed. Miss Arth starts a newsreel about the war. She sits at her desk and slides a nail file from her drawer. I have concluded that showing movies is a way to avoid teaching us something. The first film features a man who is finding homes in America for “war waifs”—unbaptized babies with mixed Asian and American blood that nobody wants. A beaming crowd of dignitaries applauds as the orphans are unloaded from military planes. The man and his wife wave, surrounded by six waifs they have adopted themselves. The kids look too petrified to blink, despite the flashbulbs.

  I think back to the second grade at Our Lady of Sorrows. Patty and Anita and I played a game called “pagan babies” in which we acted out the dynamics of our real Pagan Babies classroom project. I was always the pagan baby who got saved, which I now understand was because I was foreign and lesser. In our real classroom Pagan Babies activity we were all encouraged and coerced to bring pennies, nickels, and dimes for the coffee can on the teacher’s desk. When we had five dollars we sent it to a Catholic mission in a heathen country to baptize one baby and save its soul. We got to vote on the name. Once somebody put my name in the ballot box. Sister read it out loud before realizing the joke. Everybody laughed at me. I laughed too, but I never played pagan babies again and I never stopped worrying that I might become one someday.