by Andrea Lewis
Iris’s IQ did place her within the strange nation of genius, and neither Ramiro nor Carrington was sure how to cope with it. At two years old, Iris could read road signs, and by three she could memorize a third grade schoolbook in one sitting. She moved on to everything from Carrington’s copies of Vogue to encyclopedias, dictionaries, novels, and the government mining reports she found in her father’s office. It wasn’t enough to skip grades or buy more advanced books or get a special pass at the Rice University libraries to keep her from getting bored. Iris was fragile, as if all her cerebral gifts had been gained at the price of resilience. Much of her knowledge terrified her, but she could not resist pursuing it: polio, iron lungs, killer bees, DDT, small pox, scorpions, earth-impact asteroids, airplane crashes, Gulf storm surges, and Texas tornadoes. She read up on all of it. But nothing terrified or obsessed her more than the bomb. She could quote the Hiroshima yield (20 kilotons TNT), the Nagasaki yield (21 kilotons), the atmospheric height of the Trinity mushroom cloud (8 miles), code names of US and Russian tests (Ivy Mike, Castle Romeo, Castle Bravo, Joe-1, Joe-4), crater sizes, generated wind speeds, death tolls. She knew the difference between fusion and fission, hydrogen bombs and atom bombs, and she had saved plans from Life magazine for a fallout shelter.
Carrington stacked their dessert plates onto a tray. Maybe if she cleared dishes, the Parkers would take the hint. As she stood with the tray she saw Louis Paradiso walking up from the gardens toward the terrace. He had on a blue suit with an open-necked white shirt. That was his uniform, Carrington knew, when he played blues guitar at a tavern in town.
Louis was forty-two years old, but he didn’t look it. His eyes showed some age—wise and tired—but that was offset by his muscled shoulders and the smooth copper skin from his Chickasaw heritage. He didn’t make much money with his music—only tips—but he loved playing.
“What’s up?” Ramiro asked.
“I’ll be taking the truck.” Louis looked only to Carrington. “Okay?”
Carrington said, “Of course” in the same instant that Ramiro said, “I thought you were sick.”
Louis buttoned the front of his suit jacket, then unbuttoned it. “It’s just, I said I’d play up to Tino’s,” he said. “People expecting me.”
“Women especially, I imagine,” Carrington suggested, smiling at him, trying to draw him out. He gazed at her, giving away nothing. But Carrington knew he had girlfriends. He lived over the garage, and more than once she had heard him taking someone home in the truck as the sun came up. Otherwise, he took care of their land and kept to himself, except to spend time with Hannah and Iris. He loved showing them how to pick pecans or find pelican nests or trim oleanders.
“I won’t stand for getting drunk,” Ramiro put in.
“Ramiro, really.” Carrington didn’t want the Parkers to glimpse any rift in their domestic perfection. And Louis had given up drinking years ago when he came to work for them. He had never relapsed, as far as she knew.
“All right.” Ramiro raised a hand, dismissing Louis.
Carrington called out, “Have yourself a good evening, Louis.” But he was already back on the path toward the gardens.
“Is he a Nigra or a Mexican?” Alicia asked.
* * *
Chickasaw! Iris wanted to scream from her window. But she kept silent. The alibi of the summer cold was good. No shaking hands. But how long until the weirdoes finally left and until her mother finally took the bath she always took after guests, smoking a bunch of cigarettes in the tub, and how long before she—Iris—would have her father to herself and he would forgive her for cutting her hair?
“I just love your funny little accent,” Alicia was saying to Carrington. “Now where all is it you’re from?”
Great Britain! At her window, Iris crossed her arms and peered down in disgust. England! Cornwall!
* * *
That afternoon, the sirens hadn’t so much registered on Iris’s ears as entered her everywhere: through her eyes, mouth, ribcage and fingernails. She knew it was only a test, but her whole body trembled like a tuning fork until she couldn’t tell if she was absorbing the sound or emitting it herself from sheer terror. Her sister Hannah, who sat on the floor cutting out paper doll clothes, had looked up when the sirens started, then went back to trimming the tabs on a wedding dress. Happy Hannah.
The sirens—those shrieks heralding the end of the world—were thirty seconds into their three-minute test when Iris grabbed the scissors and chopped a clump of her own shoulder-length brown hair off and let it fall to the floor.
Hannah stared up at her. “I’m telling.”
Iris reached around the back of her head for another clump and sawed that off too. Hannah ran down the hall, yelling for their mother.
While the sirens pealed the apocalypse, the handfuls of hair falling to the rug provided a strange safety. Something she could engineer herself, since nobody else seemed to care. Certainly not her school, with its duck-and-cover drills. Didn’t they know anything? Didn’t they know about Castle Bravo, an H-bomb test with a fireball four and a half miles wide? When you’re about to be vaporized you don’t hide under a Tinkertoy desk.
By the time Hannah dragged their mother in, most of Iris’s hair was on the rug in a ragged circle around her chair. The sirens had ceased their keening and the air stood scrubbed and still in the aftermath. “Oh, Iris.” Carrington gathered up handfuls of hair and dropped them into the wastebasket, fighting down guilt and anger. Guilt at her inability to understand this stranger who was her firstborn. Guilt that sometimes she liked Hannah better. Anger at Iris’s impulsiveness, turning herself into a freak, and with the Parkers due in a couple of hours.
While her mother stood wringing her hands and staring into the wastebasket, Iris had wandered outside. It was midday and muggy, a Saturday in early October. In the heavy air, the low-tide smell from the south collided with the bougainvillea scent along the garden walls. Iris couldn’t find her father—the person she counted on to absolve all sins—but she found Louis Paradiso in one of the sheds. He sat on an old footlocker, his Fender guitar on his lap, a small bottle of rye whiskey by his right foot. The guitar wasn’t plugged in, but he practiced some tinny-sounding chords. He looked at her hair and said, “New style?”
Iris shrugged. “I didn’t like the sirens.”
“Me either,” he said.
She pointed at the bottle. “Is that why you have that?”
“Nah,” he said. He moved it behind the footlocker, embarrassed she had seen it and hoping she wouldn’t tell her father. “Just feeling lonely.”
“You’re lonely?” Iris had thought loneliness was her sole dominion. “You have me.” She sat next to him. “Even if I look like Frankenstein.” She wanted to climb into his lap like she used to, but she knew she was too old for that. And the whiskey smell was foreign and somehow ominous. She cut him a sideways look.
“Okay,” he said. “I had a drink.”
Iris reached back for the bottle and held it to the light.
“A few drinks,” he added. “So what?”
On top of the sirens, this was too much. So what? Louis didn’t talk like that. And he wasn’t supposed to drink. She wanted to say I’m telling in the whiny voice of her sister. She wanted her old hair back, right now, and she wanted the real Louis back. She wanted all sirens everywhere to be silent and all atomic explosions, past and future, to rewind into never-igniting chunks of uranium or plutonium and stay there. But for the moment, she took hold of the guitar’s neck and tried to right the world with something familiar. She arranged her fingers into an A minor seventh. Louis had shown it to her the day before.
Louis strummed through the chord for her. He loved Iris but didn’t feel like giving a guitar lesson. He patted her shoulder blades where they stuck out like chicken wings, hoping she would give up and leave. She was a skinny, gawky kid, burdened with brilliance. She bore some resemblance to her beautiful mother. The same wide-set eyes and fair English sk
in. He imagined Iris and her sister would both be stunners.
“Show me another chord,” Iris said.
“Do you want me to trim this?” Louis touched a ragged patch over her left ear. “I can cut hair, you know.” He didn’t like her holding the bottle. He took it from her and tilted it to his lips, as if to prove he could do whatever he wanted. The Delgados didn’t own him.
Iris smelled the whiskey again. “Leave me alone.” She pushed his hand away from her hair and stood up. “You know what my mother would say?” She looked him up and down. “She’d say you’re pissed.”
“Look, Iris, don’t tell, okay?” But Iris was already stomping out of the shed.
* * *
With the coconut crème pie finished, Ramiro steered John Parker into a conversation about Delgado Mines. He unfolded a map he had half hidden under his napkin. “This is where we’re excavating some new veins in Bolivia. A lot of silver.” He ran his finger along a mountain range and John Parker leaned forward politely.
“Could you show me the powder room?” Alicia asked.
Carrington led her inside from the terrace and pointed to the first-floor bathroom. Then she fled upstairs, lit a Newport from the cigarette-and-lighter stash she kept behind a philodendron on the landing, and went to Iris’s room. “Honey?”
Iris looked up from her desk. “When are they leaving?” She had rubbed away the tear tracks and her cheeks were pink.
“Soon. How are you feeling?” Carrington dragged on her cigarette.
“Mom, it’s a haircut. It doesn’t hurt.” She touched her temple where her scalp shone through, marble-white and vulnerable.
“I know.” Carrington sighed. The cropped tufts made her daughter look like a cartoon cat stuck in a light socket. “But you were pretty upset.”
“I’m fine now. I’m reading.” Iris held up her innocent copy of And Now Miguel. It was a decoy. She had stashed the real book she was reading, the one that described nuclear bomb tests, in a drawer.
“Did you eat?” Carrington set her lighter on Iris’s desk and tipped cigarette ash into her palm.
“Yes.”
“Did you really?”
“Ask Pilar. I ate. I stuffed myself. Macaroni and cheese and a glass of milk and coconut crème pie. We might have a dairy product explosion.”
Carrington smiled. She turned to leave, but heard someone on the stairs. She leaned over the bannister and saw the billowing pink skirt. “Yoo hoo!” Alicia called. “Are you girls up here?”
Carrington tried to find somewhere to stub out her cigarette and dump the ashes and close Iris’s door and pretend nothing was happening all at the same time.
“I just have to meet this smart little girl.” Alicia pushed past Carrington and into Iris’s room. There was nothing to do with the cigarette but hold onto it. Carrington wanted to put it out in the metal wastebasket, but it was still half-full of hair.
“Iris, this is Mrs. Parker.”
Iris stood and looked at the carpet. “Hi.”
“Can you speak up?” Carrington said.
“Hi,” Iris repeated.
“Why, whatever in the world happened to your hair?” Alicia blurted. She touched her own bubble-styled head, as if Iris’s hair might threaten her own.
“We had a little accident,” Carrington said.
“Or a little train wreck,” Alicia said.
Iris raised her gaze to burn it into Alicia.
“Sweetie-pie, I could help you fix that.” As Alicia reached out her stubby fingers, Carrington glimpsed, for a moment, what was about to happen. How Alicia would touch Iris. How Iris would lash out. How Alicia would be hurt. How soon-to-be State Senator John Parker and his chubby, pink wife would leave in a huff. But at least they’d leave. Soon Carrington would have Ramiro to herself. She’d have his wonderful-smelling chest on top of her the moment these people cleared the driveway in their ugly orange Chrysler Imperial. She’d have the bedroom door locked and the sheets kicked on the floor and a long night of lovemaking and sleeping and waking up to more lovemaking.
With an animal yelp of fear, Iris slapped Alicia’s hand away. And she kept on slapping, hands paddling the air like a furious two-year-old. She connected with a few slaps and scratches to Alicia’s forearm, and one significant slap to her face, before the stunned Alicia could turn away.
“Why you little brat.” Alicia pressed her hand to her cheek. “You vicious little—”
Carrington wedged herself between her daughter and Alicia. “Iris, sit down. Now.”
Iris sat and swiveled back to her desk.
Carrington put her arm around Alicia’s shoulders and led her back to the terrace, apologizing as they went, turning her head to take desperate drags from the still-burning cigarette.
* * *
They stood on the porch as the Parkers drove off. “I know,” Ramiro said. “They’re idiots. But we need him.”
“I’m sorry,” Carrington said. “I’ll call Alicia tomorrow. Try to explain.”
They stepped into the foyer, but the evening air felt so soothing that Ramiro left the door open and put his arms around his wife. Hours earlier, he had zipped the back of Carrington’s linen sheath for her and kissed the nape of her neck. All evening he had wanted to pull the zipper back down and now he had his chance. He ran his hand inside the dress, over the soft skin of her back and under the edges of her bra.
“Daddy?” Iris stood on the stairs above them, watching. Ramiro dropped his hands. Carrington tugged the dress back over her shoulder.
Ramiro took in the haircut for the first time. He kept his voice neutral. “Iris, isn’t it your bedtime?”
“I want to show you something.” Iris held a piece of paper.
“Mrs. Parker was very upset, Iris.” Ramiro secretly slipped his hand back inside Carrington’s dress.
“Mrs. Parker is stupid.” Iris started down the stairs, clomping hard on each step. “Look at this.”
“Go—to—bed, Iris,” Carrington said.
“No.” Iris came closer. “This is Castle Bravo.” She showed them a black and white aerial photograph of a mushroom cloud. “They messed it up,” she said. “They didn’t calculate for lithium-7.”
“Iris, not now!” Carrington pulled away from Ramiro and twisted her arms behind her, trying to find the bottom of the zipper.
“The yield was fifteen megatons, the biggest ever.” Iris held the paper up to her father’s face. “It poisoned everybody, all the island people.”
“Where did you get this?” Ramiro took it and read the caption: Castle Bravo, Bikini Atoll, 1 March 1954.
“I cut it out of a book,” Iris said.
He stared at the glowing jellyfish cap of the hydrogen explosion, swelling above a layer of cloud cover. An elliptical saucer of brilliant light hovered like a fifty-mile-wide lampshade over the mushroom top.
“That’s why I cut my hair.” Iris pointed from the picture to her head.
Carrington gave up on the zipper. “And turned yourself into more of a freak than you already were,” she snapped.
“What?” Ramiro looked at her.
“Well, she is.” Carrington’s mouth was taut and white. “Isn’t she?”
Iris stood there fingering a tuft of hair. “I’m not a freak.” The hurt in her eyes slowly condensed into fury. She raised her small fist and landed a weak blow on Carrington’s shoulder. Then she stepped closer, grabbed the top of her mother’s dress and dragged it down, digging in a fingernail hard enough to scratch a line from Carrington’s collarbone to the swell of her breast above the bra. “There,” she said, satisfied, still gripping the fabric, watching the scratch redden.
Carrington’s jaw hardened and she hissed in a deep breath. Ramiro hugged Iris from behind, pried her fingers off the dress, and pinned her arms. “Iris, Iris, Iris,” he whispered into her impossible hair.
In the small silence that followed they heard quick steps on the porch. Louis reached the doorway, smiling. “I saw the door open,
and—” He stopped as he took in Carrington, grappling again with her dress; Ramiro, holding Iris with one hand and reaching to help his wife with the other; Iris, wriggling out of her father’s grasp, saying, “I hate everybody,” as she stooped to pick up a photograph from the floor. Louis tried to put the scene together. “Everything okay?” He knew it was not, but he needed to hide his anguish at seeing Carrington’s bare shoulder, pale chest, the white straps. Now he heard her breath—loud, hard, almost sexual.
Iris studied the photograph. “They really messed up,” she muttered to herself.
Louis held out his hand. “Let me take you up, sweetheart.” Iris shook her head.
Ramiro shot Louis a pleading look. Louis got his arm around Iris and steered her toward the stairs. “Come on,” he said. She trailed along with him, dragging her feet.
Ramiro called after them. “I’ll take you to a beauty parlor on Monday, Iris.”
“I hate beauty parlors,” Iris yelled back.
Behind them, Louis heard Ramiro say, “Darling, calm down.” They must have turned toward the kitchen, but Carrington said loudly, “I don’t want to calm down.”
In Iris’s room, Louis closed the door.
“Are you drunk?” Iris asked.
“Maybe a little,” he confessed.
“I’m telling.”
Her mother’s Ronson lighter was still on the desk, next to a fat, cloth-bound library book. Iris took up the lighter and snapped the silver button down. The flame wavered on the stubby wick. “Why do you like my mother so much?” she asked, staring at the flame. “I hate her.”
“Look at me, Iris.”
“Just tell me why.” She lit the corner of the Castle Bravo photograph. Yellow fire crawled toward her fingertips.
“What are you doing?”
She dropped the burning page into the wastebasket. Some of the chopped-off hair caught briefly, smoldered, and went out. “I’m mad at you.”
“I thought we were friends,” Louis said.
“Nope.” Iris shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Because.” Iris flipped the pages of the cloth-bound book to another glossy photograph of another mushroom cloud and ripped it out. “Because you like my mother and because you drank that stuff and because I hate everybody and because we’re all going to die.” She held the new page over the lighter.