The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  Po’s cuckoo clock is from Germany but there are pits of fallen legless cuckoos all over the world, their bellies scraped bloody, their wings broken, their beaks frozen in counting.

  It’s hard to give up counting. I know.

  There’s a noise on the porch, conversation, someone wiping their shoes on the boot brush, and I jump up, stick the magazine under the sofa cushion, and rush behind Po’s rocker, shaking his shoulders. “Po!”

  He jerks awake as Mom walks in. Back with groceries and barbecue, she announces, “Ribs!”

  I’m not hungry.

  * * *

  Cass likes to “cuddle,” so when we go to bed I make myself small and lie on my side at the very edge. When she rolls over, a big soft boob rests on my arm and I wonder if it’s freckled like her face and hands.

  In the middle of the night Cass mumbles, “Water,” and gets out of bed. I climb to the foot of it to watch her pad her way through the house. When she shuffles past Lauren, asleep on the couch, the flame in the window of the heater stripes her thick white ankles. As she passes the cuckoo clock, she bumps the corner of the dining room table, collapsing Po’s card house; it falls on the damp plastic tablecloth he washed with a sour dishrag after dinner. Cass takes a card and holds it up to the moonlit window.

  “Black,” she says out loud. “Club.” She counts one through six then says, “Seven.” The seven of clubs.

  I wander around the house at night too. I guess we are related.

  Po’s quiet house is lopsided; the floors are higher in the bedrooms, lower in the kitchen and back porch. Glasses clink as she takes one off a kitchen shelf and holds it under the faucet.

  “Uh-oh,” she says when the water splashes off a teacup, getting her nightgown wet.

  Gulp mumble, gulp mumble, she drains the glass and sets it in the sink before walking back through the house like a circus bear. There must be a diagram in her head; Cass never turns on a light but she sees everything. From here to there, and back again, like an Arthur Murray dance chart: blue arrows and yellow feet that direct her to the kitchen, yellow arrows and blue feet that take her back to bed.

  In the bathroom, the toilet seat squeaks when she sits down. When she’s through, she washes her hands and walks to Po’s room. I watch her when she stops and peers in. His room is small, only big enough for his white iron bed and the window behind it. The moon pours through the window tonight, falling like a spotlight on Cass. She doesn’t move until Po turns over in his creaky bed, and then she says, “I love you,” as clearly as I’ve heard her say anything. Ever.

  A voice I’ve never heard.

  I crawl back into bed.

  Cass’s thick, flat feet make a sticky sound when she walks in, and she grunts when she climbs up the steps to her princess bed and lies down again.

  She reaches for the radio and turns on a golden oldies station: Perry Como is singing, “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. Never let it fade away . . .”

  * * *

  Jamie said history bounces off stars. On one star, a Tyrannosaurus rex runs through the Everglades, on another Jesus sits down to the Last Supper.

  “We’re all time travelers,” she said. “That’s what déjà vu is.”

  Mom said World War II feels like yesterday to her.

  Before Jews became prisoners or skeletons, the world was a different place. Maybe on the closest star, like the one sitting next to the moon tonight, the Nazi boy was different too, and stood in his brother’s doorway saying, “I love you,” just like Cass.

  Chapter 12

  Barbie Island

  The last time I was ever in Judy’s room, there were stacks of Brides magazines next to her bed. On top of one stack was the extra-fat June wedding issue featuring miniskirted models in white silk coats, lacy hose, and big-bowed shoes. One model’s platinum hair was braided with white rags while the other wore a wagon wheel–sized hat draped with a gauzy beekeeper’s veil.

  It was beautiful and, while Judy stood in her doorway waiting, I stared at the magazine cover for 2.5 minutes.

  Judy doesn’t read Seventeen or Tiger Beat anymore. She gave away every toy and old book, and hangs out with her girlfriend Karla now, introducing me to their other friends as “my next-door neighbor.”

  But most of the time, Judy ignores me.

  * * *

  I gave my Barbie to charity, but sometimes I think she’s still here.

  I hear her practicing her scales.

  She lives by herself on an island with dogs and horses, and plays jazz piano in a bar on the mainland. Every night, no matter how late or dangerous the weather, she ferries herself home again. Sometimes Barbie brings Ken back with her and they drink wine and eat grapes while they sit on the miniature rattan lawn furniture and watch the blinking lights on the opposite shore. Then they kiss and Ken does a one-minute push-up on top of her, but they never have kids or get married. Barbie makes eggs Benedict for him in the morning, but mostly she forgets about him being there. While Ken reads the sports page, she rides her black stallion along the beach or drives her sports car really fast past coconut palms and banana trees, right up to the edge of a high, rugged cliff overlooking the ocean. Sometimes she takes off all her clothes and dives off it—like they do in Mexico. Then she goes to work again.

  She likes work. She likes playing the piano.

  Maybe Barbie will bring a different Ken home this weekend. There’s a bunch of sunburned, blister-lipped Robinson Crusoe Kens who forage for nuts and berries on Barbie Island. Sometimes they steal ripening bananas off her porch or cooling jars of pineapple jam off her kitchen windowsill. At Christmas, Barbie makes them snickerdoodles and leaves them on a tree stump in the jungle, but they eat them so fast they get sick.

  Sometimes there’s no food at all so the Kens become cannibals. There’s a temple in the jungle made from human bones; inside it is a paint-by-number portrait of Barbie, surrounded by darts that didn’t hit their target.

  I’ve come for the weekend, and stand beside Barbie at the prow of her shocking-pink speedboat, skimming over the waves home to her island paradise. I’m wearing my favorite Pendleton coat with its deep pockets, red plaid lining, and pickle-barrel buttons.

  Barbie smiles as she effortlessly threads her way through the rocks and reef, one hand on the wheel, the other pointing out the undersea grottos where ships were lost and bottlenose dolphins have bottlenose babies. The occasional sea spray glitters her cheeks.

  “I have room for you, Lily, even if Judy doesn’t.” She smiles and passes me the wheel.

  * * *

  Judy and Karla took me to a movie last week. Karla drove her parents’ old Buick, smoking and swearing. They thought I’d be shocked but I wasn’t.

  They didn’t want to take me, but I insisted on going even when Mom explained that they were both too old for me and were only being polite. Almost eighteen isn’t so old. “So what?” I whined. “I never see Judy anymore.”

  At the movie theater, Judy didn’t see me either.

  In the lobby, they stood away from me and whispered to each other; only the tightly rolled ends of their matching pageboys (with the wide white headbands) moved when they talked. They wore identical deck shoes and madras culottes too, blushing when boys looked at them, giggling when certain kids walked by. Once Judy laughed so hard she blew a booger bubble. I’ve never seen her laugh that hard at anything.

  Judy and Karla think they’re cool but they’re not. When I looked at them, I made fists with my hands and hid them in my pockets.

  Two for the Road, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, was stupid. Karla called it sophisticated and Judy agreed. We were supposed to see Doctor Doolittle with Rex Harrison.

  I could have ratted on them, but I didn’t.

  * * *

  The back of Barbie’s bright pink speedboat is piled high with suitcases, hatboxes, and packages with colorful string and foreign stamps. A handsome man with a dark mustache, who looks nothing like Ken, sits next to her, pouri
ng champagne, while Barbie pilots them across my bedroom rug. When they fly over the threshold and land in the hallway, their champagne splashes. They laugh and kiss.

  Before they disappear from view, Barbie turns to look back at me. She waves and I wave back.

  Later that night I find Barbie’s bright pink sports car smashed into a palm tree.

  She left her island to the Kens. Several missed her so much they got drunk on mango martinis and took her mangled car for a joyride. After stumbling home they put on her feather boas and sequin gowns, and tried to squeeze their flat boy feet into her teeny-tiny backless high heels.

  They took pictures too, but one of them opened the back of the camera, exposing the film.

  Chapter 13

  SOG

  Someday I want to ride a camel deep into the Sahara, or take a dirty bath in the Ganges like Jamie did (while dead people covered with lit candles float by), but until then I’m okay to stay home.

  “I want to live far away, but I want it to feel like my room,” I tell Mom.

  “Never gonna happen,” she replies, making smudgy paint clouds with her thumbs. “You have to be brave or you’ll never leave the house, Lily. It’s scary in the real world.”

  When Dad overhears and calls her “irresponsible” and says that her “duty is to be encouraging, not discouraging,” Mom pushes him out of her workroom and kicks the door closed.

  She blushes and says, “Things aren’t going too well at the office right now. Daddy’s a little tense.”

  I know that. She doesn’t have to call him “Daddy” either. I stopped calling him that years ago.

  She clears her throat. “Your hands are clean. Would you please take a cigarette out of my shirt and light it for me?”

  I’m almost as tall as Mom and look into her eyes as I slowwwly remove the pack from her shirt pocket.

  “Now, Lily. It’s just cellophane and paper; nothing will break.”

  I stick the Kent in my mouth, flick the butane lighter, and light it.

  “Take a small inhale then pass it over, huh?”

  While she darkens the gas cloud hanging above the palm trees in the background of her painting, I inhale just a little. Dad would have called this irresponsible too—it smells bad and tastes even worse—but at least I don’t cough like the kids at school.

  The cigarette makes me feel different. Different like everyone else.

  I hand it to Mom.

  She smiles. “So, what do you think of my painting so far?”

  “Homework, Lily!” Dad calls from downstairs.

  It’s day four of Mom’s nonstop painting of her latest piece, Dead Vietnamese Woman No. 2, and he’s in charge of dinner, homework, telephone, and bedtime.

  Mom rushes past me, throwing open the door with her messy hands. “We’re talking! She’ll be down in a goddamn minute!”

  Lauren and I need a silent language we can use when our parents are fighting. I have a book on sign language and I’ve been practicing—I even put some in my genuflections—but Lauren said no. She said her brain was already overflowing with school stuff and she needed space for music and fashion.

  I told her about Helen Keller talk too, which isn’t really a language, just printing on each other’s hands. I promised Lauren it wouldn’t crowd out important stuff like the Monkees or granny dresses, even though I knew Lauren had memorized almost everything in the stupid Avon catalog and still remembered it after the Avon Lady stopped delivering. Which happened after Mom “read her the riot act” one afternoon.

  Mom had been painting and drinking and drinking and painting and “had the blues,” she explained to Dad after the head regional saleswoman called to cancel any further business with us.

  “You should know that Mrs. White did not file intimidation charges against your wife even though your wife picked up a wine bottle and drove her off the front step with it, swore at her, and refused to pay $23.40 for the goods she’d contracted to buy.”

  When Dad hung up, he glared at Mom who put her hands on her hips and said, “For God’s sake, Paul, it wasn’t that bad.”

  Dad bet her a long weekend in San Francisco—“museums, dining, the works”—that she couldn’t “give up the easel for three months.” Mom said it was just another excuse to gamble and marched off.

  I read later that Avon stopped delivery in 1967 but I wondered if other drunk moms didn’t chase Avon ladies off their front porches before that and that’s why they stopped home deliveries. Mom said the milkman used to deliver glass bottles of milk to our back step, but now you only get pizza deliveries, and Dad said they stand “halfway across the driveway so you won’t shoot them for being too close to the house.”

  Jesus left a pizza at our door once. At least I think it was Him.

  By morning it was cold and soggy and an animal had eaten most of it.

  Jesus hates being called the “Son of God,” so I decide to use the acronym SOG.

  Acronym means: An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word, Oxford Dictionary.

  “Like it? It’s an acronym.” I prop myself up in bed. Jesus isn’t usually here this early. I wait. Isn’t He listening? “An acronym means—”

  “I know what it means. And no, I don’t like SOG. Are you kidding? It sounds like a Japanese movie monster, like Mothra or Godzilla. Call me Jesus, or Hey-Seuss if you want—that’s how it’s pronounced in Spanish. Just don’t call me SOG!”

  Maybe I should call Him Mr. Crabby Butt instead.

  It’s Sunday. Shouldn’t He be at church, signing autographs in the parking lot or something?

  It seems everyone is grumpy these days—even though the Cold War has warmed up and we don’t have to worry about the Russians or Cubans anymore. More people care about the civil rights movement and that’s good. They say the war in Vietnam will be over soon. I think we need a royal taster to sample everything—the news, our food, maybe even the air and dirt. Maybe we’re being drugged. Timothy Leary said if everyone took LSD, we’d see how crazy life really is.

  Even the criminals and politicians and dead US soldiers looking out at us from Dad’s newspaper each morning seem angry and tired. If life is really that bad, why does Mom want me to get tough and grow up?

  As I roll into a fetus, I hear SOG open the window to leave.

  Mom knocks on my door. “Lily? It’s nine o’clock.”

  My bed is an island adrift in a warm green sea choked with duckweed. I tried growing duckweed in Mom’s rock garden pond but she tore it out.

  Why should I get up when the whole world is unhappy? When I start talking, people get nervous; no one wants me around. Mom said that’s not true, but what does she know? Jesus tucked me in the other morning whispering, “Keep sleeping. You’re growing, you need it.” Had He turned off my alarm? “Don’t go to school. Stay home. No one will miss you.”

  “Lily!” Mom knocks louder.

  SOG is right. No one would miss me. I’m not a jock or a hood, popular or in the school government. I’m not interesting. Okay, maybe I’m interesting.

  I smell ocean and hear seagulls call, pop my head through the bedding, and peer across the room. I love my wallpaper with its repeated tableau (a French word with four vowels) of Copenhagen Harbor, a section of seawall, mermaids, and fishing boats. This morning, boats bob sleepily in the water while fishermen nap below deck; mermaids stop basking on the rocks and float on their backs in the water, their eyes closed, looking annoyed at Mom’s knocking.

  I talked her out of painting my room. “Next year,” she made me swear.

  I roll over again and the bed squeaks. “Are you sick?” Mom asks as she walks in. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I snap.

  She pulls back the bedspread. “Up. Now.”

  I should be nicer. Since the Savage Boy tried to chew his way into my room, Mom gets nervous when I don’t answer the door.

  I roll over again and stare at her through my eye slits. Be
hind her, waves wash lazily over mussels and starfish, and sea anemones affixed to the seawall spit tiny sprays of water from their tiny sandy mouths. Some spit lands inches from Mom’s feet but she doesn’t notice.

  “You can bet Lauren’s up this morning!” Mom smiles. “Yesterday was the big hike! Six miles into the wilderness, lunch, then four miles more, dinner, and rolling out their sleeping bags. Hot dogs, s’mores, and ghost stories. Building a campfire and washing dishes in the creek. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  “No,” I say angrily. Yes, it does, but none of the kids at school like doing stuff with their families and I’m a teenager now too. It’s bad enough SOG is always showing up; I’m pretty sure most kids don’t have that problem. “No,” I repeat.

  We drove Lauren to the Outdoor School’s bus two days ago. As Mom and I kissed her and turned to go, I heard one of the kids say it wasn’t a good idea to wear new boots to camp, but Lauren was already looking for Randy, the boy she had a crush on. Randy was the real reason Lauren wanted to go to Outdoor School, she said so herself.

  The kitchen table is empty when I finally get there, just milk, a bowl of fruit, and cold coffeecake.

  I pick up the paper, pretending to be Mom and Dad: first scouring the headlines for things to get angry over (Mom) or reciting scores from football, basketball, and baseball games I never watched (Dad). After putting the paper down, I stare out the window. It takes me a few minutes to realize Dad’s standing at the edge of the backyard. What’s he looking at? What’s he thinking?

  “Paul?” Mom calls. “Paul!”

  I knock on the window, waving Dad inside, and follow him to the front door, which stands open.

  Mom is talking to a strange woman in the driveway. “It’s about Lauren,” she tells him, her voice trembling.

  “Hold on, Kit. I’m sure it’s not that bad.” He folds his big hairy arms around her.