Beauty of the Broken

by Tawni Waters

  After a couple of days the casseroles stopped coming. I’m the only girl around, so it’s my job to make dinner, but I’m not very good at it. Momma never taught me to cook, so we eat microwaved hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches and frozen pizzas, always on paper plates, always on the couch, always in front of the TV. Never at the table. Daddy picks the shows we watch, so I know more about the weather and crime and politics than I ever wanted to.

  The first night I cooked I set the table, even though I was just making corn dogs and frozen fries. Iggy was already sitting, his napkin in his lap, ready to eat, but Daddy walked in and said, “Fuck this shit.” I was worried he’d be mad about how bad my cooking was, but he didn’t say anything. He just yanked a paper plate from the pantry, plopped a corn dog and fries on it, pulled a beer from the fridge, and strode into the living room.

  The TV came on. Iggy looked at me, confused.

  “I guess we’re eating out there, sport,” I said. I made him a plate and poured him a glass of milk and shoved him out of the kitchen. “Don’t sit next to Daddy,” I whispered as he walked away, worried that if he did, he’d chew too loud, and Daddy would kill him.

  When I sat down between them, Daddy said, “Well, this is the life, isn’t it, kids? Just the three of us, living like bachelors.”

  I didn’t remind him that bachelors are boys, nor did I break Momma’s favorite vase over his head, like I wanted to, because how dare he act like Momma being in the hospital was some kind of vacation?

  It’s been a week and a half. We’re pretty used to the paper plate routine now. Daddy keeps acting like we’re on vacation, and he never says anything bad about my cooking. We’re all slouched on our couch, which used to be white, but is now brown. Our plates are mostly empty, except for gnawed bits of crust and pepperoni shreds. Iggy’s making a tower with the lump of shriveled bell pepper chunks that he carefully picked from his pizza before eating it. It’s more interesting than the news, so I’m watching his building project.

  In my peripheral vision I see Daddy bouncing his plate up and down on his knee. His eyes are angry slits. I think Iggy’s tower is the problem until I hear the newscaster on TV say “gay rights.” I feel myself blushing when she says it, and I stare straight at the TV, afraid that if I look at Daddy, he’ll see my shame. When I finally get the nerve to look at him, he’s glaring at the television, muttering swear words.

  The newscaster is speaking with a pretty woman who says that in some states gays have the right to be married. She says it won’t be long before gays everywhere will have the rights that should be available to every American citizen. She smiles when she talks about it, and I can’t believe that there are people out there who are happy about gays getting rights. I have never met someone who thinks that being gay is okay, besides Xylia and Henry. I try to imagine what it might be like, two gays getting married. Two girls, for instance. Me, maybe. And Xylia. In our two dresses we wouldn’t look like a regular wedding, of course. Those little figures they put on top of wedding cakes have one person in a white dress, and one in a tux. Wait. If I wore a tux, we would match. I imagine Xylia, blushing in white, wearing red flowers in her hair, dancing with me in my tux. My heart jumps.

  A man comes to talk to the newscaster now, a man with slick hair and a puffy face. He smiles too when he talks, but it’s a tight smile, more like a snarl. He reminds me of a weasel. Or maybe Elijah Winchell. They’re pretty much the same thing. He says that gays are undermining the American social structure. He says that of course gays are people—they are—but marriage is not a human right. It is, has always been, a sacred covenant between a man and a woman. He says that the institution of marriage is being threatened by these gay marriages.

  Daddy says a bunch of words I won’t repeat, then elaborates on what the guy on TV said. He says if God had his way (and he will), all the fags and dykes would be stoned to death in the streets, just like in the Bible.

  I hate my daddy. Staring at the TV, thinking about my momma in a hospital with her jaw wired shut, I wonder why everyone’s so worried about marriage being undermined.

  The man keeps talking. His lips move, two worms writhing on the gray sidewalk of his face. I hold my breath and wait, listening. He says it. “Abomination.” I imagine Reverend Winchell’s pissed-off God, and I get dizzy.

  “Wanna go have some Otter Pops?” I ask Iggy, standing.

  “Yeah!” He jumps up, knocking his plate to the floor and sending bell pepper chunks all over the rug.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Daddy thunders.

  “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll get it,” I say, my heart banging. Quickly I bend and gather the chunks into my waiting palm. As I pick up the plate, Daddy mutters and turns back to the television. “Let me take your plate too, Daddy,” I offer. His silence sounds like permission. I carry all three plates and the pepper chunks to the kitchen and drop them in the trash. The place by the stove where Momma always stands looks empty and cold.

  “Sis!” Iggy yells from the porch. “I want grape!”

  “Okay, Iggy.” I turn away from the stove and pull two Otter Pops from the freezer, purple for Iggy, red for me.

  “Here, Iggy,” I say as I walk onto the porch.

  He’s sitting on the step, watching fireflies cartwheel through the air. They’re not lit up yet, or if they are, it’s not dark enough to tell. I sit next to him. Iggy and me gnaw open our ice pops, waiting for the fireflies to do their stuff. As Iggy eats his Otter Pop, his lips turn purple. He looks dead. My lips must be red, the way Xylia’s always are.

  Inside, the newscaster drones on and on, talking about who knows what. We hear Daddy grunt once in a while, shifting his weight on the couch so it creaks. I try not to think about Momma’s messed-up face, but trying to talk a wrecked heart out of hurting is like trying to talk a ripped skin out of bleeding. You tell yourself that the wound’s not there. But it keeps bleeding, and if you ignore it for too long, it gets infected.

  I’ve been walking around with a festering hole in my heart for almost two weeks. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in class, reading about Joan of Arc being cooked, and that hole will start to ache and throb. The pain bleeds through my chest, and I want to scream in the middle of history class. I want to run to my momma and kiss her broken face. I want to go home and curl up in my closet, cry all the water out of my body until I shrivel up like a raisin and die. But I can’t die. I don’t have the guts to pierce my rib cage with a dagger or put a poison asp to my breast or burn myself on a pyre. And even if I did, what would Iggy do without me? Who would protect him then?

  “Look, they’re lighting up,” Iggy says, pointing.

  I stare at the tiny fireflies flitting and floating on the evening air. Iggy squeezes his eyes shut and grunts.

  “What are you doing?” I ask Iggy, concerned that he may have forgotten the proper place for a bowel movement.

  “I’m lighting up,” Iggy says.

  “You can’t light up, Iggy. You’re a person, not a bug.”

  “Can too,” Iggy says. Iggy grunts again.

  I shake my head. “My brother, the lightning bug.” Iggy’s hand slides into mine. He squeezes my fingers and grunts some more.

  “Did you hear what that lady on the news said?” I ask, ignoring his attempts at becoming a human firefly.

  Iggy grunts.

  “Gays can get married. What do you think about that?”

  Iggy grunts so hard, he farts.

  “Iggy!” I yank my hand away.

  He opens his eyes. They’re see-clear-through-you.

  “I think everyone should have a shot at love,” he says. Then he closes his eyes and starts to grunt again. “It’s the best thing about life.”

  My belly grows warm. I slip my hand back into Iggy’s and listen to him trying to light up. “You did it, Iggy,” I want to say. “You lit up.” But I don’t.

  Still, that night, after Iggy and I have climbed the stairs to our bedrooms, I dream ugly dreams again. The landscape is cold and
blue, and Elijah Winchell is there, calling me an abomination. Someone is laughing across mountains made of steel. I wake up sweating. I think about God and hell, my thoughts going round and round until they feel like a tornado inside my skull.

  “I’m sorry, God. I’m sorry, God,” I whisper.

  He doesn’t answer. I slip from beneath my comforter and tiptoe to the bathroom. In the mirror, I say it over and over. “Abomination. Abomination. Abomination.”

  Being mindful of the squeaky hinges, I open the medicine cabinet and take one of my pink razors in my hand.

  I run it up and down my arm, along the veins that branch like purple rivers just under my skin. I imagine what it would be like to cut, watching my life pour out and pool on the white bathroom tile. I would wear a bunch of lace at my throat like the Highwayman, and I would suck an Otter Pop first so my lips would be red.

  Staring out the window at the stars and the hills, imagining the cows and their calves sleeping in the grass, I lie on the floor and feel the tile’s coolness seep into my back. I ask Iggy’s God to take me into his arms when I die. I beg him to hold me the way he held Iggy, to patch up that hole in my heart. “When it happens,” I whisper, “let me meet you instead of Reverend Winchell’s God.”

  Then I press the razor to my skin, imagining I’m cutting. I move slowly, because I think the sharp edge would feel soothing slicing into my white flesh, like scratching a deep down itch. Slowly I shave the word “ABOMINATION” in capital letters on my forearm. But when I hold my arm to the light, I can’t see the word mown into the almost invisible blond hair.

  I bring down the razor once more, press hard. This time it marks me. A miniature bullet of blood leaks out. It hurts more than I thought, but I like the good, fresh pain. I smile a little and wander back to my bed.

  When I wake the next morning, the scrape has scabbed over. What I did last night seems like part of my bad dream. I comb my hair, not because Mr. Harris said so, but because Xylia might like it. She’s supposed to be back from Taos today. I can’t wait to see her again.

  I do have to wait though, because when I get to school, Xylia is not there. At lunch I sit with Henry.

  “How’s your mother?” he asks as soon as I sit down.

  “Good,” I say, searching the cafeteria for signs of Xylia. “She’s getting better.” Henry asks about Momma every day. The day after she went to the hospital, I explained why I ran away, how I just knew my momma was the one that got hurt. He said that I was psychic too. I didn’t tell him that I only knew because my daddy is a monster, and it’s only a matter of time before he kills somebody. I repeated Momma’s lie. “She fell off a ladder,” I told him and everyone who asked. Most people didn’t care.

  “I’m glad she’s better,” Henry says. “I hope you don’t think this is too forward of me, but I brought her a feather too.” He unzips his backpack and gives me a hawk feather, just like the one hanging over my bed. “I blessed it to help her heal.”

  I almost start to cry. Henry is the only one besides Iggy who seems to care that Momma got hurt. “Thank you, Henry.” I hug him. Over his shoulder, I see Xylia’s teacher at the corner table, grading papers. I kiss Henry’s cheek. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

  I go to Ms. Elibee.

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  She looks up, smiling. “What’s up, Mara?”

  “Do you know where Xylia Brown is?”

  “She’s home sick,” she says. “Just a bug, I think. She should be back tomorrow.” She smiles again and turns back to her papers.

  For the rest of the day I worry, imagining cancer and diabetes and leprosy. I can’t think about anything but Xylia, wasting away in her bed. Mr. Farley gives us an assignment. We are to write two hundred words about the light spectrum. I pick up my pencil and screw up my face, trying to think of what to say. I mean to write about light, but instead I write about Xylia. It goes:

  Mara Stonebrook

  Science POEM

  Xylia is a rainbow. ROY G. BIV—the colors of the light spectrum.

  She has red for her lips, which are the prettiest I’ve ever seen.

  And she is orange, because sometimes she’s so happy, she’s as bright as the sun. She sings and shouts, and part of you wants to hide your eyes from her shining, but you want to be close to her too, so you can soak up some of that warmth.

  Yellow is for butter on popcorn. At the movies, she tells the guy behind the counter “more butter please” until the popcorn is shriveled and wet.

  G is green, for the way she is a blade of grass, so close to the earth. So fresh and new. She reminds me of a baby deer sometimes, all knobby and not much knowing or caring what anybody thinks about her. She smells flowers and tastes honeysuckle blossoms and closes her eyes to feel the sunshine.

  And blue is for the way she cries when she talks about her daddy, for that hole that got carved inside her when she had to leave him.

  Indigo is because she cares when other people cry.

  Violet is last, and that’s because purple is the color of queens, and Xylia has a gentle dignity, a violetness about her, the ways of a princess.

  Xylia has more colors than anyone I’ve ever known, even Iggy. There aren’t many people who have that many colors inside of them. Look at my daddy. He’s not real colorful inside. And me? I’m blue. Nothing else. Just blue.

  Since I met Xylia, the whole world has leaped into high definition. It’s like I walked from a normal movie into a 3-D. That’s saying something, considering how shitty everything else has been. I guess you could say Xylia Brown has saved my life. (I’d draw an illustration, but I left my colored pencils at home, and you can’t draw a rainbow with just a gray pencil.)

  When Mr. Farley asks us to turn in our papers, I wad mine up and shove it in my pocket.

  “Where’s your paper, Mara?” he asks, his eyes squinting behind those thick glasses.

  “I couldn’t think of anything to write about.”

  He opens his grade book. “Ze-ro per-cent,” he says as he writes.

  When school lets out, there are army recruiters in our hallways, sitting behind folding tables and smiling. They have set up giant signs with pictures of uniform-wearing men and women staring at the camera and looking heroic. BE ALL YOU CAN BE, the signs say. Some kids are talking to the recruiters, leafing through brochures, and dreaming of being all they can be. I don’t stop though. I don’t care about being all I can be. I just care about being with Xylia. I shove past the dreamers and run all the way to Xylia’s house. When I knock, Juliette answers.

  “Mara, come on in.” She swings the door wide before I can even ask if Xylia’s home. Her hair is done up in crazy braids, and she isn’t wearing a bra. Her boobs are still perky, though, poking out through the thin fabric of her turquoise T-shirt.

  “Is Xylia okay?” I ask as I step through the doorway, surprised, as I always am, at all the colors in this house.

  “She’s fine,” Xylia’s mother says. “Just a flu.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Of course.”

  I run to Xylia’s room. Xylia’s a lump underneath a mountain of purple blankets. She sits up when I knock on her door frame. Her hair looks like mice have been using it to nest. Her skin is sick-white. She’s lovely.

  “Hi,” I say, feeling shy all of the sudden, even though we’ve spent hours and hours together now, studying and sharing secrets. “I just wanted to see how you were.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Thank God you’re here. I was about to die of boredom.”

  “Brought you something.” I drop my backpack on the floor and pull out a stack of books. “Just some stuff I got from the library.”

  She takes them, reading the title on top. “The Complete Works of Yeats? Yes! Did I tell you my dad loves Yeats?” I nod. “ ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ ” she snarls, curving her fingers like claws. I smile. She sorts through the books. Auden. Pound. Sexton. She quotes a line
from each one off the top of her head. I watch her lips move until she catches me staring.

  “You’re the smartest person I know,” I say.

  She laughs and waves a hand dismissively. “Whatever. I know poetry. Algebra, not so much. Xs were not born to become numbers.”

  “What were they born for?”

  “To make words, silly. Beautiful words.” She falls back on the bed, clutching Yeats to her breast. I sit cross-legged on the floor in the corner.

  Beautiful words like “Xylia.”

  “What are you doing way over there?” she asks, even though I’m only feet away. She pats the bed next to her. “Sit.”

  I do. Xylia leafs through the book, gasping a little when she gets to a page she really likes. Through the window I can hear a train chugging along the tracks by the river, whistling every once in a while to let little kids playing on the tracks know they’re about to die.

  “Hear that?” Xylia asks.

  I nod.

  “That’s the song my heart sings.” Coming from anyone else, this would sound like a bad Valentine’s Day card. From her, it sounds like church bells.

  “You want to ride the train?” I ask.

  “I want to wander,” she tells me. “Hit the tracks like the old-time hobos.”

  “Where?” I ask, not liking this wandering talk. I bite my lip. I can’t imagine this place without Xylia. Not now. Not ever.

  “Anywhere.” She grins, and the tiny wrinkles around her eyes come out for a second. It’s like I’m getting a peek at what she will look like when she’s old. “Everywhere.” She reaches for my hand and grasps it. I might be melting. Her fingers are warm and a little sweaty. “You should come with me.”

  “Where?” I ask again, feeling stupid as soon as I say it.

  “Everywhere!” She waves her hand in a sweeping arc. “The whole wide world. Wanna go?”

  “Okay,” I say. I can feel my meaty heart smiling.

  Xylia’s eyes are wide. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”