Girl in Reverse (9781442497368)

by Stuber, Barbara

  “Sorry, George Washington,” I say to his picture on the front page of the newspaper. “I know today’s your birthday, but I lied anyway.” I glance at the telephone. Sigh. And if Patty had asked me if I have any girlfriends, I would have lied twice and said: yes, I do.

  Chapter 18

  It’s small and scary. I should have seen it coming—the new political cartoon pinned to Miss Arth’s bulletin board.

  A Chinese guy with a shaggy Fu Manchu mustache holds a shower nozzle and a scrub brush. He aims the stream of water down into a U.S. GI whose head has been sliced off above the eyebrows. The Chinese guy’s face looks robotic. The caption reads: “China’s Red masters brainwash our boys.”

  Neil Bradford comes in, stops to absorb the cartoon, and announces, “My brother would never fall for that.”

  The class gives Neil you bet! nods, but they’re not convincing. Everyone’s edgy. Another cunning chink tactic. Another atrocity. The idea of Reds scouring the brains of our soldiers and filling them with Communism is horrid. And if we lose the Korean War, the Red Horde will wash our American minds too. Resisters will be blown away by atomic bombs, except the few underground survivors lucky enough to have fallout shelters.

  Fear lives in our peanut butter jars, parks and baseball fields, barbershops and beauty salons. If you look up a pole, the American flag can only momentarily block the atom bomb on its way.

  Miss Arth shows us a newsreel of the “concussion,” the aftermath of the atomic bomb President Truman dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. In a flash the city was transformed into flat nothing with agony on top. There’s a picture of what remains of the “little man Jap”—a ghostly sidewalk imprint after his encounter with heat at the speed of light.

  What is to stop the Communists from turning the USA into a giant photographic negative?

  Brainwashing. Bombs. Brainwashing. Bombs.

  Where can a sane person go?

  Underground?

  Art room?

  Crazy?

  * * *

  After school I turn on the art room lights and take a deep breath. It smells good—wet clay, oil paint, and shellac. The sink drips its rusty recital. Mr. Howard’s prisms hanging in the windows spray the spectrum everywhere. He calls them his “reminders of miracles.”

  I wander over to Elliot’s stool and sit down, hook my feet around the legs the way he does, and stretch my arms across his drawing table. Elliot could never be brainwashed. He seems totally untouched by what other people think. Maybe being a genius just takes care of that.

  The Art 3-D class has made sculptures. They sit on racks across the room in varying stages of dryness. The surfaces have distracting polka dots of lighter gray clay, so it’s hard to tell how they are going to look. They’re free-form. Creating something out of the clear blue, with no anchor in the real world, seems impossible, just squishing your guts into a wad of clay with the chance it will turn out looking like throw up. As Mrs. Van Zant says, express what’s inside you!

  I walk over, hold a chunk of wet clay, and balance its cool weight in my hands. I feel the details of the Gone Mom sculpture inside me accumulating. I’ve got her incense smell and the sound of her laugh. I’ve decided coriander is her flavor, since pungent pulls tears from our eyes. I can touch what she touched—the wrist rest and the bootie—and I have our memory now anchored in the art museum. But her sculpture is still hollow.

  Even though I remember her face, it is the woman reflected in Picasso’s mirror I see when I picture her now—empty inside, ghostly, shrunken from life, with a hard tear scarring her eye. Not good. It matches my feeling that she’s gone, not just from me, but also from the earth—sucked behind the mirror of time.

  But gone or not, I’m still shoved around by her.

  She is powerful. She’s everywhere. She’s changing me.

  People who have lost something—a dream, a soldier son, their country, a baby—can go backward and then go forward. Sister Evangeline and Mr. Howard and Picasso and the Chows are proof of it. They are reaching out, figuring things out. They are so different from my mother. The hint of something painful stops Vivian Firestone dead. Fear shoves her around. It makes her slam doors and twist the locks inside. Do not live in reverse! Wash, starch, and iron the past away. Brainwash yourself. Use bleach to remove every trace.

  But Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror reaches out, touches her hurt.

  My mother says, Hands off! Don’t go backward.

  But I say, Sorry, Mother, it’s too late.

  Chapter 19

  Mr. Howard’s response is “Phooey” when I unload my brainwashing and atom bomb fears on him.

  “Isn’t that kind of an understatement?”

  “Brainwashing will never work.” He sits on the edge of Mrs. Van Zant’s desk. “When I was stationed in Okinawa, we hated the Japanese, and the Chinese were our allies. Now, with the Korean War, we hate the Chinese and befriend the Japanese. Minds can change fast.”

  “It makes everyone crazy. All Oriental people are stirred together into one big enemy.”

  “Fear thwarts thinking.” Mr. Howard shakes his head.

  “I feel like the enemy all the time.”

  “Yeah. That’s real hard. Real unfair. What does your family say?”

  “Nothing. My mother is adverse to my past.” I look off a moment. “She’s also adverse to my present.”

  Mr. Howard’s eyes narrow. He stops his next question before it exits his mouth. “She’s scared for you, you know, protective. Mine sure was.”

  Mentioning Mother flares her up in me. I can’t stand that she believes she really knows me. She thinks she’s so right and worldly with her timid little brain, all shampooed and shaped and shellacked with hairspray.

  Mr. Howard heaves the art room trash can and dumps it into the container on his cart. “It’s hard to keep a whole group of people your enemy if you get to know one or two of them personally. Challenges your mind. Do you think my relationship with the Chows happened overnight? Very tricky territory at first, but so worthwhile.” I think of Sister Evangeline’s theory about important changes requiring a gestation period. Mr. Howard starts to wheel his cart out of the room, turns, and says, “I remind you, Miss Firestone, it’s real easy to start believing in your own inferiority. Disowning yourself. It’s the biggest battle of all.”

  Mr. Howard leaves. I check out the window. Elliot’s usual parking spot by the track is empty. A rainbow dances on the drawing pad he has left on his desk. Elliot’s diary. About half the pages look drawn on. Okay, I will look at only one. I flop the cover back, leaf through, and stop at Meleager’s strong, beautifully foreshortened arm reaching right out to me.

  * * *

  It’s Sunday and I’m waiting for Ralph, who is taking forever getting ready for our visit to the museum. He’s jammed something from Mother’s dressing table into his Scout pack along with binoculars and gum.

  I hold my little slipper on a blank notebook page and try a new tactic, tracing around it in the hope of understanding it better, which is ridiculous. I have decided against trying to draw the gory pictures and the lizard tail and the camels. It takes me several tries to get all the way around the shoe without my pencil slipping. I hold the outline up, study it from every angle. The toe is the strangest part, the way it’s bent straight up. But tracing it makes me wonder if it’s just my imagination or if the sole of the bootie is ever so slightly curved.

  My heart flips. I sit back, stare at the paper, chew my pencil. Of course, it’s half of a pair. I’ve learned something new. But I don’t understand a thing.

  * * *

  After visiting the wrist rest in the Scholar’s Studio, Ralph and I stand by the opening to the Main Chinese Gallery, still blocked by screens. The Buddhist temple beyond is brightly lit. Wall painters are working on Sunday. Ralph sets his pack on the floor, pulls out his compass, and turns it, whispering to himself, “North, where’s true north?”

  “Don’t you mean east? Isn’t China east?” I
say. “Plus what good’s a compass in here?” A shut up look comes in my direction. Ralph scratches his behind, wipes his hands on his pants. He’s wearing the Scout neckerchief slide he carved to look like a matchstick. I take his shoulders and turn him toward the screen. “Look, in the far room, beyond the ladders. The dragon pearl’s hanging right there.”

  He stands on tiptoes, cranes his neck, breathing through the crack. He turns; his eyes are lanterns. “Whoa!” He peeks again, his cheek pressed against the screen. “God. Lily. Look on the table back there.” We trade places. I focus on a folding table draped with white cloth. On it sits a sculpted hand cut off above the wrist. It’s pale golden-brown and has a wide band of carved gold bracelets. “That’s the hand in your picture,” Ralph says. “I swear.”

  I look again. The severed hand is balanced right there with the fingers spread.

  “Wow! I bet the rest of the body parts are under that tablecloth,” Ralph says.

  There’s static where my voice should be. A dark-haired lady has walked into the temple through a door hidden in the wall. She stands by the table with her hands on her hips. She lifts the hand, examines it. “A lady just picked it up,” I whisper.

  I fix my eyes on her, freeze. Animal instinct. The museum shrinks to a closet containing only her and me. Tears roll. “God! Ralph!” I screech in a whisper. “It’s Gone Mom. I swear. She just walked in and walked out. It’s her. She went to the other end of the room. I can’t see her now!”

  Ralph nudges into my place, looks, turns, shakes his head. “Damn. I need Mom’s compact!” He paws through his pack.

  “What? You have her compact?”

  “Yup.”

  Ralph lifts it out, presses a tiny bar on the side, and snaps it open.

  Without a word he slides the screen and slips his chubby self through far enough to plant the compact on a tall crate, with the mirror angled toward the temple.

  He returns, slides the screen back into place, bumps me, and says, “Jeez, give me some room. I’m on business. You’re making me jittery. It is not a crime to look in a mirror. Why, a person can stand anywhere on earth all easy-breezy and spy just fine using strategic mirror placement. Using strategic mirror placement, one can catch the odd angle, peer around corners. Why don’t you go distract the guard or something?” He looks through the crack. “Besides, she just walked out through a hidden door in the wall. You want me to ask somebody if she’s really Lien Loo?” Ralph says, his voice softer now.

  “No! I’ll just stand here wondering why you aren’t on a leash.” The ceiling lights buzz. My chest cracks down the middle. “God. It really could be her!” Suddenly I’m running downstairs, across the main hall, and out the front doors onto the steps. I hear Ralph huffing behind me.

  I wheel around. “What if she has been living behind that wall in the very same town as me for thirteen years? And all this time I worried she’d gone to hell!” Gone Mom turns into something small and hard. Forget her. I will never go in there again. Didn’t she think she might run into me someday? Did she care? Does she care? No, she does not.

  It is hours and an endless stomachache later—long after I have exhausted the Gone Mom possibilities and the fact that the hand is wooden, not stiff, dead enemy flesh—that I remember we have left Mother’s precious, monogrammed, family-heirloom, ultrapolished compact on a crate in no-man’s-land.

  When I knock on Ralph’s door to tell him, he waves me off. “I know. It’s closed tomorrow. I’ll have to wait till Tuesday. Can Mom survive that long without her face goop?” He rubs his cheeks, imitating her.

  “It’s not the goo, it’s the container—her most prized possession of her whole life, and that includes you!”

  * * *

  On Tuesday Ralph comes into my room right before dinner looking all serious and smug except for one thing. He does not have Mother’s compact.

  “What happened?” I say.

  “I sneaked in to get it. . . .”

  “How?”

  He points to his moccasins. “These. I employed Indian ways. And also these.” He holds up binoculars.

  “But you didn’t find it?”

  “No wampum, but I bring news.” He gives me a careful look, says slowly, “The lady you thought was Gone Mom, isn’t.”

  The room absorbs this revelation. I lie back on the floor, eyes locked on the dead bugs in my ceiling light.

  “I used my binoculars and I saw her point-blank. She isn’t a Chinese person at all. And then she walked right past me in the hall and I asked her about the hand and she said it was a secret, part of the big grand-reopening event, so I got you one of these on my way out.” He hands me a fancy flyer with Chinese figures on the front.

  Grand Reopening and Dedication

  Chinese Temple

  Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

  Friday, March 9, 1951

  6:00 p.m.

  Lecture and reception

  Chinese buffet and cocktails

  “Mr. Howard, if you had the chance to learn something, you know, about your birth father, would you do it?”

  “Nope.” He pops the p sound as we stand on the curb in front of school. It’s windy and humid with an edge of spring.

  I look up, shield my eyes from the sun. “Because?”

  He turns to me, taps the side of his head. “I’m good. I’ve got him where I want him, squared away. If that man’s soul got restless to seek me out one day, my advice to his soul would be: go chase your tail.”

  “Yeah, but what if you had a chance to learn something new or see his face?”

  “I put myself and everybody else through hell finally getting my feet on the ground.” He turns to me. “I can make a perfect Peking duck. I can spoil my wife, whack a baseball, play the flute, pick my way through a crapload of prejudice, and tickle my kids’ funny bones. I’m glad he abandoned me. I never would have learned those life essentials from him. Let him be.” Mr. Howard waves a fist at his invisible father. “Bye-bye, ol’ buddy.”

  “But you yourself said things change, that life doesn’t stay still.”

  Mr. Howard nods. “Yep. Sounds good. Sounds right. But I admit I don’t want him meeting my kids—their grandfather. Sheesh. But don’t you believe I haven’t thought of it a million times.” Mr. Howard pauses, gives me a puzzled look. “I’m more than a little curious why you’re asking, Miss Firestone? Did you happen to run across my birth father?”

  We stand there, me knowing I’ve swirled up the dust inside him. “Sorry, Mr. Howard.”

  “No. That man did me a favor letting me figure my own self out.” Mr. Howard looks off and says slowly, “On the other side, think what his life has been like. Leaving your baby boy must feel raw right up to the day you pass. Maybe especially on that day.”

  Misty is how I would describe Mr. Howard’s face. He doesn’t try to hide it. Seems he has bruises under his eyes. I wonder, if I have the chance to see Gone Mom and I don’t take it, if I’ll regret it every day until I pass.

  Cars and buses slide by us. I am already late for first hour. “Okay,” Mr. Howard says, “why are you asking? You got something?”

  And from my mouth spills the legend of my box, my stupid museum-lady mistake, the slipper, the dragon pearl, the photos, and the teeny chance that Gone Mom might be at the celebration at the art museum. I am shaking by the end.

  Mr. Howard throws up his hands. “Oh, is that all?” He raises his eyebrows, whistles, and says, “Well, fear ends when you do what you fear.” He looks off, thinking. “I’ll be there stirring the bird’s nest soup. Elliot’s coming. The mayor’s coming too and museum bigwigs, archaeologists, Chinese art types.” He looks at me—eyes wide. “I can get you a ticket.”

  Chapter 20

  Lantern light washes the museum entrance in Chinese red. Wind chimes chatter. A huge, bug-eyed dragon coiled over the doors warns—enter at your own risk. I have a ticket and six pictures in my purse and fear shredding my stomach. I need the “do what you fear” flame in me. It’s no
t.

  I review my plan: sit in a chair in the back row, locate the exit, bolt if I see someone I know, do not get in a picture, do not leave my purse under the chair, stay incognito, and watch the clock. I have until at least ten to get home. Dad is being honored by the chamber of commerce for his real estate developments and innovations in Kansas City. My parents left the house in a twit, all bow-tied and girdled with not one question to me or to Ralphie about our plans for tonight.

  I will also avoid Auntie Chow and her jade-shattering voice—HA! LILY FIRESTONE! WHY YOU HERE?

  I am searching for my birth mother, Gone Mom.

  Fur coats sweep up the steps, their owners all dolled up and in high spirits. I stand in a stone column’s thick shadow, shivering.

  Limousines slide around the circular drive. Their shiny black sides swim along the icy water of the lighted reflecting pool. Valets swing car doors open. Passengers slip out. Clustered momentarily, they exclaim over the huge, billowing dragon and the spills of knotted red silk streamers, then waltz inside.

  Hours ago in social studies we learned of the USS Essex ’s ability to handle atom-bomb-carrying planes and how “in civil-defense news, cities gird for attack as war crimes soar and truce talks stall.” I walked out of class tasting jellied gasoline napalm, a mushroom clouding my mind, scared for our civilized world, wondering if war is “just” or just organized violence.

  I walk inside, hand over my ticket, and head straight to the restroom, astounded that so many have come to celebrate the artwork of the enemy. I pick at a threadbare place in the fainting couch upholstery, wondering what Gone Mom and I will do if we meet. I will show her my pictures—the proof that I am her daughter—and then what? Exchange hugs? Tears? Telephone numbers? Or not. Surely lots of girls like me have fainted here before going upstairs to meet their birth mothers.