“Can you keep a secret, Lily Lou?” She breathes slowly and deeply to keep from crying. I nod and look over my shoulder. Her cheeks are shiny with tears; she’s cried off all her eye makeup. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do,” she says quietly. “Sometimes things happen . . . and I don’t know what to say, or how to fix them. There’s no instruction book, you know. I blurt stuff out without thinking. I hurt your feelings. Or your father’s. I’m not a nice person sometimes.”
“Yes you are,” I say quickly. It hurts to talk and I touch my lips. The salt on my fingers makes it worse.
Up the beach I hear the shovel digging in the sand. Dad and Lauren are burying Mrs. Wiggins.
* * *
When I open my eyes again, the lake is dark, and the sunset skips across the water. Dad has built a fire, and it pops and crackles, sending sweet-smelling sparks into the air. Mom calls them “fireflies.” Her portable bar sits in the sand beside us; the fire highlights the vodka bottle and a half-full plastic cup.
“She was old, and sick,” Mom says. How long have we been talking? The cold penetrates my clothes and wool blanket, and I press myself into her for warmth. “The water, the swimming . . . it was just too much for her.” Mom sniffs. “I know you, and you’ll think about it until you make yourself sick. Listen to me, Lily, okay?” I listen to the waves lap the beach. “It was an accident. Accidents happen, sometimes awful, unfair things happen. Terrible things. You’re too young to take on the world’s heartbreaks. Nobody’s shoulders are that big.”
Mrs. Wiggins?
My embryo tail swells and lengthens, pushing out of me, digging through my skin and clothes, planting me like Mom and Dad’s kissing tree, deep into the beach at Peace Lake.
“Mrs. Wiggins saved me,” I say. I clutch the dogtooth extra tight.
Mom sighs and kisses the top of my head. “I know,” she says, then leans away, reaching for her purse. “Listen, now that you’re awake, I’m going to stretch my legs.” She digs out her cigarettes, stands up, and brushes off her pants.
I watch her walk to the water’s edge and stand there. Even from the back, Mom is beautiful. Prettier than Aunt Jamie, prettier than anyone. “Mom?” I say quietly. I know she can’t hear me.
Dad’s long shadow, carrying the shovel, appears between us. “Doing better?” he asks me.
I want to tell him that lies hurt so much that sometimes you can’t lift a juice glass or swim back to shore, but I don’t, and he tells Lauren to sit with me while he smothers the fire and puts our things in the car.
She sticks out her tongue, begging me to slug her.
So I do.
* * *
It’s dark when we leave Peace Lake. I’m thankful for the headlights that focus my attention on the long, slow drive out of the lake basin.
Dad swerves to miss a dead deer.
“We’re not coming back,” Mother announces. She lights a fresh Kent off the one she hasn’t finished yet. Her hands are shaking.
“What . . . to the lake?” Dad asks.
“Of course to the lake. What else would I be talking about?”
“No, Mom, no,” Lauren whines. “We love Peace Lake. It won’t happen again.”
“Damn right it won’t,” Mom mumbles.
I know I should say something, but I can’t. I’m still in the lake, still staring at Mrs. Wiggins’s milky eyes, still breathing her cancerous breath when she said to me, “You didn’t do anything.”
But I did.
Dad pats Mom’s leg. When she looks at him, he smiles weakly. “I’m serious, Paul. I’m done with this place; it’s dangerous. I should have listened to Jamie when she said the lake was haunted.”
“Haunted? I thought you were the sensible sister.”
“You remember the story about the Indian children drowning when their canoe capsized, don’t you?”
“A cautionary tale, Kit. It’s probably happened in every lake in America.” Mom looks out the window. “No comment, kemo sabe?”
“Lily nearly died out there.”
“Kit . . .”
“No, Paul. We’re not coming back, and that’s that.”
“But Mom, we love the lake!” Lauren cries out. She scowls at me. “You ruin everything,” she says, pinching me. Hard.
“Lauren . . .” Daddy warns. “Kit, listen. You know who should stop coming up here, don’t you? Jamie. Driving four hours twice a week just to swim up here, alone. It’s dangerous. And crazy. Think of the relationships her swimming has cost her. But Lily? Lily just bit off more than she could chew today, that’s all.” He catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “And Mrs. Wiggins did what came natural to her breed. She was a good dog.” He pushes the button on his wristwatch; a small green light briefly colors his face. “It’s been a long day but we’ll be home by ten.”
“Good!” Lauren says.
Jesus races by in the bright red jeep I saw earlier; a raccoon tail waves from the radio antenna. He’s alone this time, and it’s dark, but I know it’s Him. “Woo-hoo!” He yells as He passes, then He really hits the gas.
What happened to the boat? Did He leave Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head tied to a tree and steal their car?
Why didn’t he save Mrs. Wiggins?
Don’t my prayers mean anything?
Mom throws her cigarette butt out the window, checks her lipstick, and snaps back the visor.
“Imagine what the kids will write when they get back to school next week,” Dad chuckles. “‘What I Did on Summer Vacation.’ Let me see, Lauren fell into the quarry pit, Lily nearly drowned . . . and all that in a couple of weeks. Quite a summer.”
* * *
Lauren’s right.
I ruin everything.
Mrs. Wiggins is buried at Peace Lake but her heart, inside the tooth in my pocket, beats all the way home.
Chapter 4
Lickety-Split
Mom stops painting, rinses her brush, and dabs it on her shirt. She’s barefoot and her nails are red as valentines. “We’ve talked about it before,” she says. “They’re growing pains, Lily.”
Over her shoulder, Sherman presses his stupid ten-year-old mouth against the sliding glass door, inflating his cheeks and crossing his eyes, before running off. It leaves an impression that instantly evaporates.
“Lily, are you listening? You said your body hurts sometimes, right?”
I shrug.
“Of course it does,” she says. “Mine did. You just turned fourteen. It’s puberty. You’re going to feel strange for a while, but you’ll get used to it.”
It isn’t puberty, it’s the tail. I felt it before Peace Lake, but since I killed Mrs. Wiggins, it wakes me up at night with bad dreams. Sometimes I feel it all day long.
“You’re growing breasts, aren’t you?”
Not that again.
“Yes, but—”
Frieda said I was born with a calcification at the end of my spine. She said the baby doctor shaved it down, or cut it out, or off, or whatever he did, lickety-split. In fact so lickety-split, I didn’t even miss a nursing. “Maybe it’s . . . growing back,” I say, and swallow hard.
“There’s nothing to grow back, sweetheart. Your grandmother is a wonderful woman—sometimes anyway—but she’s a storyteller. You like telling stories too, don’t you?” I do? “Remember when Frieda told you and Lauren that we’d found you under a cabbage leaf?”
That doesn’t count. That’s not the same thing at all.
Mom smiles and motions me to her stool. When she hugs me, her heavy, tanned boobs push into my stomach and leave indentations like I’m made of clay or wet papier-mâché. She smells of perfume and cigarettes, wine and turpentine. She’s beautiful in her paint-speckled toreador pants and baggy work shirt. I want to look just like her when I grow up.
“I guess it’s okay if it hurts,” I say. Then, remembering my first day at Frieda’s church, I add, “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.”
Mom stiffens. “Listen,” she says, “if you real
ly want me to, Lily, I’ll take a look.”
Yes. No. “Yes.”
It’s weird to feel something growing inside you; something that’s attached but still wants to get out. What if it keeps growing? Caesar, the biggest German shepherd in a three-block radius, got Judy’s poodle, Fifi, pregnant. Even though Judy is three years older than I am and says she doesn’t believe in magic (or God), we’ve been burning candles, making up spells, and saying prayers in Pig Latin and Spanish (Judy’s taking Spanish in school) so Fifi won’t die giving birth to oversized puppies.
Good thing Lauren isn’t around. She’s a blabbermouth and would tell all her friends at school about my invisible tail.
I shake as I follow Mom to the bathroom.
What if she pulls down my pedal pushers and my tail plops out and she screams bloody murder until the neighbors call the police? They have to, don’t they? Dad said you should never be afraid of calling the police. “That’s what they’re there for.” Maybe it’s even written on the side of their cop cars when they squeal into our driveway and wrap bright yellow police tape all over our house. Danger. No Trespassing, it reads. Our neighbors stand together in their front yards watching while Mom is led out of our house, crying and shaking, by a nice policewoman who looks like Ethel Mertz on the TV show I Love Lucy. I watch while the police put on gas masks and pull bats and shields from the back of their cars before entering the house where they look for me.
I’m a freak like Lawrence Talbot in the old werewolf movies, half-man, half–murderous dog.
A horse-drawn wagon appears in our driveway. An old gypsy woman slips a feedbag over the horse’s nose and waves at me standing in my window.
I stop at the threshold to the bathroom. Inside, Mom sits on the edge of the tub, waiting. “If you don’t want me to look, Lily, I’ve got other things to do.” After I pull down my pants, she tenderly presses the skin around my tailbone. “Does that hurt?”
I grit my teeth. Yes, I’m growing a tail, why shouldn’t it? “No,” I say. “Is there anything back there?”
“Nothing, sweetheart. Still, I think I’ll call the doctor.”
No! Dr. Goodnight’s a kid doctor and I’m not a kid anymore. He didn’t believe me when I told him about the tail last time I was in, which I did when Mom was out of the room so I wouldn’t embarrass her. My tail hides from Dr. Goodnight like it hides from everyone.
“That’s okay,” I call after Mom as she heads to the kitchen. “It feels better now.”
I pull up my pants and touch each tile with the toe of my shoe. There are things to be counted all over the house: the Swiss Dot curtains over the utility sink, the straws of the garage broom, Gramma’s collection of faceted cranberry glass.
Mom is talking on the kitchen phone. “Yes,” I hear her say, “I’ll hold.” She opens the fridge, and sets something heavy on the counter. A wine bottle, I think.
Outside, the metal mailbox rattles when the postman sticks something inside it.
“Lily?” Mom calls. “Will you bring me the mail, please? I’m on the phone.”
Mom loves mail. Today’s mail consists of two bills, a McCall’s magazine, a postcard from Aunt Jamie (she’s visiting friends in Boston), and the new TV Guide with the cast of I Dream of Jeannie on the cover. Mom said there’s a fight over Jeannie showing the jewel in her belly button. She says the TV censors are afraid of women’s bodies.
“Here,” I say, handing it over.
Thank you, she mouths, then holds her index finger to her lips. “Yes,” she says into the receiver, “Wednesday afternoon would be fine.” There’s a folded piece of paper in front of her. She’s not talking to Dr. Goodnight. It’s a psychologist named Dr. Madsen, it says so right under the phone number and his photograph. He has a very long neck, spiky blond hair, and looks like a giraffe. I reach for the paper but Mom snatches it away, then thinks twice and blows me a kiss.
The crisscrossed paintbrushes in her curly auburn hair look like antennas in the TV show My Favorite Martian. Dad calls me his walking, talking TV Guide.
Mom refolds the note and sticks it in her pocket.
I’ve seen psychologists on TV. They ask stupid questions, cost a lot of money, and never smile. Seeing a psychologist means your head is screwed on wrong; it means I’m more than just a weirdo. Mom says “it’s a good thing to be different,” but I don’t want to be different like that.
“I feel better,” I say. “Really, Mom, you don’t have to call anybody. I’m fine.”
I grab her arm to get her attention. It’s slick with mineral oil from tanning. Before cleaning her brushes she laid outside on the chaise longue. It’s a warm day in late September, but in Portland, Oregon, that’s no guarantee it won’t rain. “You get the best tan between eleven in the morning and one p.m.,” Mom says in the same voice she used to teach Lauren and me how to set the dinner table for guests: the short fork on the far left, the water glass to the right of the wineglass, linen napkins folded edge in.
“Mom! I’m fine.”
“Please, Lily, I’m on hold again and . . . That’s right, she just turned fourteen. No, she hasn’t started her period yet. Yes, I know. Uh-huh. Perfectly healthy, except for . . . That’s right, Lily Asher,” Mom says patiently.
She hangs up the phone and takes a wineglass out of the cupboard.
* * *
Mom told me her family’s last name once. It was long with lots of vowels, and when I finished writing it, she asked me to burn it. She said it was fitting that she’d married a man named Asher.
There are lots of secrets in my family.
Dad’s real last name isn’t Asher either. It’s something “that was changed at the immigration office a long, long time ago,” he said. Something Gramma Frieda swore she’d never tell anyone.
Rusty, Judy’s little brother, says our real name is probably German for smelly butt. If Frieda doesn’t want us to know it, it must be really bad. Like Hitler.
When I asked Mom about it, she smiled. “Someone’s got to be Hitler, I guess. I wonder what happened to his family.” She stared at a magazine ad for Hai Karate cologne and said, “I feel sorry for them.” Mom’s nice; she feels sorry for everyone. Dad says she needs to protect herself, but Mom says she just “feels a lot. My family were empathics.”
Dad says he’s a secular humanist “like Steve Allen.”
I know who Steve Allen is but what’s a secular humanist? “Do you think they had plastic surgery like in that Humphrey Bogart movie?” I ask her.
“Who?”
“Hitler’s aunts and uncles and cousins.”
“Maybe. Or moved to South America. At least changed their names.”
“Do you think we could be related? I mean, if they changed their names and we don’t know ours, maybe we’re related. Maybe our families got married and had kids. Maybe the kids were retarded.” My voice crawls into a box. “Or crippled, or something.”
Judy says it’s against the law for cousins to get married. It leads to idiocy or birth defects. Or Down syndrome like Aunt Cass.
“You think too much, Lily,” Mom says. “You worry too much.”
The boys at school call me “Asher to Asher,” like the “ashes to ashes” they say at funerals on TV. Paul McCartney’s girlfriend is Jane Asher. She has long red hair like Jamie and Lauren. Even though she’s British, I wonder if Jane Asher’s grandparents are German too. I’d rather be related to her than Hitler.
* * *
When Judy gave me a bunch of old teen magazines, I cut out all the pictures of Jane Asher, pasted them on my notebook, and told the kids at school that she was my aunt.
What’s in a name, anyway?
I looked up Adolf. It means noble and wolf. Hitler could have been something else if he’d wanted, something grand.
I looked up Jesus too. Jesus, with a J, is short for Yeshiva, Isaiah, or Joshua, all meaning salvation. There’s a Joshua on our school bus. He thinks it’s funny to wipe snot on everybody.
I didn’t need to l
ook up Lily. Lily is for Easter flowers, for coffins, for the prayers of the living that their dead loved ones will rise again like Jesus did.
We read W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” in English class last week. In the story a woman, in mourning for her dead son, makes three wishes on a wizened (shriveled with age, Germanic origin, Oxford Dictionary) little monkey paw. Jesus might not think so, but maybe the dead are best left that way.
Once, when Lauren and I were little, Dad tried to scare us with a story about enlisting in the US Army and how, on induction day, an army doctor told every eager young recruit to strip naked and bend over. Dad didn’t say what he was looking for, but the doctor quietly confirmed each man was healthy until he suddenly dropped his clipboard and cried out something about a tail.
Everyone looked of course, and the guy pulled up his pants but not before Dad, and some of the others, saw it. “Like a monkey’s tail,” Dad explained, “only shorter. And fleshier and not very hairy. Like a monkey’s tail.” I remember his repeating this because he wanted to scare us, but Lauren only ran outside to play and I smiled.
People were monkeys before they were human, so it made sense to me. The man’s monkey tail was a mutation, an evolutionary throwback, maybe something in a time warp H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, or Rod Serling would have created.
I forgot about Dad’s story until Mrs. Wiggins died. A tail started growing inside of me right away. Things get out if you’re not careful, things get in. I feel it push against my spine. It wants out.
Sometimes I like the idea of having a tail. Using my school pictures, scraps from Mom’s ragbag, and pages from National Geographic or Arizona Highways, I make pictures of myself hanging by my tail from the London Bridge, the Grand Canyon, or in kivas dug by Anasazi Indians.
I read that in some societies, being freaky or ugly or weird, even schizophrenic or retarded, made you special, and special made you important. In those societies growing a tail was no big deal.
But it wasn’t that way for Mom’s cousin Albert who drowned himself on his honeymoon.
The Shark Curtain Page 6