The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  “I don’t think so,” I say, turning off the lights, slipping out of my jeans. “No. I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”

  “That’s good,” my sister mumbles.

  I watch my radio clock and wait 3.7 minutes before I whisper, “I have a secret. I met a beautiful white horse at the quarry pit,” but Lauren’s already asleep.

  I wonder if we’ll like each other when we’re grown up.

  That night I dream Mom walks across the pit on a tightrope. Lauren and I sit on the edge, our feet hanging over, applauding her.

  “Emptiness pulls,” Allison said.

  Chapter 21

  The Report Card

  I wish we’d moved to Paris instead of Crawford Heights.

  Kids my age wear berets, drink coffee, and smoke cigarettes in Paris. They read poetry out loud to each other and argue about God. Art books show photographs of couples kissing in Paris, usually with the Seine in the background. People make out like crazy over there.

  I walk home from the school bus every weekday—and pass the same boring colonial homes with used brick, fancy bay windows, and big green yards—but they never look familiar.

  I think I’d recognize a windmill though, especially if it was sitting at the edge of a windy slough with ponies grazing at its feet and snow geese flying overhead.

  I’d recognize a neighborhood of whitewashed houses on a Greek island too, and wave at the short gummy-mouthed old woman in black, who stands at her stone fence petting a goat named Socrates. “Good day at school?” she calls. A telescope is strapped to my back. I’m hiking to the top of a rocky white hill to watch the stars.

  It’s fun to daydream as I walk home. Dr. Giraffe says daydreaming is okay; it’s the other fantasies that get me in trouble.

  Mrs. Bennett honks as she passes. It startles me and I drop my report card.

  Mom doesn’t like Mrs. Bennett. After she called one of Mom’s recent canvases “nice,” Mom grumped about it for days. “Nice? What the hell does that mean?”

  When I bend over to pick up my report card, another car drives by and some stupid jerk yells out his window, “Nice ass!” Sometimes I wish I weren’t “becoming a woman,” and could be something in-between or no sex at all.

  Sometimes I don’t think Mom likes being a woman either. My report card should make her happy though.

  When we moved to Crawford Heights, she told me she didn’t care what grades I got as long as I was “happy and healthy.” The family always celebrates Lauren’s good grades, so when I asked if we could go to Van’s Drive-In when I improved my grades, Mom said, “Sure, whatever you want.”

  I want to be rewarded, like Lauren is. I want to be a regular freshman at Crawford High School and not some weirdo who used her drowned dog as a flotation device. I want my family to hug me and congratulate me on the 3.8 report card I’m holding in my hand. I want them to gush at the As I got on makeup work, the special comments from my art teacher, and my English teacher’s suggestion that I work on the school newspaper next year.

  “Mom!” I call out, standing in the foyer. “I want to show you something!”

  Harry and Bess, the matching cockatiels she got for her birthday, screech at me from their cage in the kitchen nook. “Upstairs,” Mom finally answers.

  She’s painting. She’ll be in a good mood.

  Dad gets home around six. I’ll show him my report card, and the four of us will pile into the car, singing songs and playing car games like we used to. We’ll pass the Grotto with its Stations of the Cross, the furniture factory, and then, ta-da! Van’s Drive-In!

  I hit the stairs running.

  Extra-tall chocolate shake, thin-cut curly fries, burgers, and corn dogs.

  At the landing I call out, “Guess what?”

  Lauren slams her bedroom door. She’s on the phone, of course.

  Mom sits at her easel staring at a blank, framed canvas. Her back is to the door, and the room is thick with the blue smoke of cigarettes. A half-empty bottle of vodka sits on the windowsill. Without thinking, I hold my nose high and sniff for danger.

  “Do you smell it?” she asks me.

  “Do I smell what?” My hands are sweaty and the corner of the report card bends where I hold it. My heart beats so hard it lifts my sweater.

  “The blood,” she says, impatiently. “The blood of the Vietnamese. Even the cigarettes don’t cover it.”

  Not tonight, Mom, please.

  Pinned to her empty canvas is a photograph of a crying woman bent over a dead baby. Except for a bright red cloth in the background of the picture, everything is dusty, even the woman and child. Usually Mom wouldn’t paint something like that; there’s not enough color “to make the subject pop.” But she’s not painting anyway, she’s drinking, and when she turns to look at me, I see that she’s been crying too. Her eyes are swollen, and what remains of her makeup blotches her face with black smudgy hyphens.

  I got an A minus, technically an A hyphen, in world studies. I hold out my report card and stare at her. She doesn’t see it.

  “Don’t you smell it, Lily?”

  I don’t smell anything. I’d rather cut off my nose than smell blood thousands of miles away. Maybe I’m just taller these days, but Mom’s smaller than she used to be. Crying shrinks her, draining off her 86 percent water inside, and once she starts she cries for everyone: Vietnam and Romania, Jamie, her lost Jewish family, kids dying of hunger and disease.

  “Mom? Mom!” When she finally looks at my hand, a question crosses her face. “You promised,” I say quietly.

  “You raised your grades? Congratulations, Lily!” She buttons her work shirt. “Van’s, right?” She smiles, briefly sober and pretty, then frowns. “Sure, we can do that, but . . . but can you imagine how much rice a Vietnamese family could buy with the money for a burger and shake?”

  I drop my hand.

  SOG should be taking care of the Vietnamese people, not me.

  The room is suddenly noisy with the sound of Mrs. Bennett’s gardeners. The lawn-care specialists come every Thursday afternoon, filling the block with the racket of lawn mowers, rakes, and electric hedge trimmers. Mom says we moved to an affluent neighborhood because that’s what you do when you start making money. Lauren’s friend Simone lives up the street in the house with the big white columns and a wraparound porch. They used to have a black maid, but since the March on Washington they have a Mexican one. Except for being closer to Crawford Butte and the Grotto, I don’t like it here.

  “Let’s talk about it downstairs, shall we?” Mom says.

  No we won’t. Mom won’t snatch up my report card, dancing me around the room. She’s not going to say, I always knew you could do it, then try, in vain, to talk me into dinner at Oscar’s instead of Van’s.

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, Lauren doesn’t notice my report card either. “Dinner at Van’s!” I say, holding it up.

  “Can’t. I’m eating at Simone’s; tell Mom, okay? We’re on the same math team and we need to study. This chapter’s really kicking my butt.”

  Maybe it’s wrong to want a hamburger, but a deal’s a deal. At least it is when Lauren makes one. I set my report card on the counter. “But the whole family’s going to Van’s.”

  “Not me,” she says, skipping out of the room.

  I alternate sitting on the third, sixth, and ninth steps while I wait for Mom to come down. I cross and uncross my legs, roll and reroll my jean cuffs, and pick at the scab on my elbow until it hurts. When I hear the vodka bottle fall off the windowsill, I slowly walk upstairs again. My left foot is angry, my right foot scared.

  Angry.

  Scared.

  Angry.

  Scared.

  “Mom?”

  She’s covered the easel with a sheet; the bottle’s in the trash. She locks the door and leans into me as we walk downstairs.

  The more I think about the night Dad slapped her, the more certain I am that it didn’t happen. It was a rip or something, like the awful sound cloth makes when Mom
tears it and it hangs like a broken wing in her hands.

  She smells of Doublemint gum.

  “Do you miss Aiken Street? Do you miss the old house?” I ask. Gulliver disappeared after we moved here. We were all homesick at the beginning. Then school started, and Mom had more time to paint; and I spent every Tuesday and Thursday after school in the art room making stuff.

  “Not really. Do you?”

  No. Yes. “No,” I answer. “Have you ever been to Paris? I mean, when you were little and lived in Europe?”

  Mom turns to me and smiles. “No. Have you?”

  “How about Greece?”

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Lily? We could both set up our easels on some rocky beach, and snorkel in undersea caves.” The worry lines in Mom’s face clear, the bags under her eyes fade. “We’re alike, you and me,” she says. “I know you don’t think so, but we are. We understand each other.”

  But I don’t want to understand her. I don’t want to agree with her when she says the world is full of uncaring people and it’s just a matter of time until we blow ourselves up. I don’t want to be reminded of the quiet skinny kid at school who always gets beat up on his walk home. I don’t know his real name; everyone just calls him Cry Baby.

  Dr. Giraffe said that a clinical study just came out about genes and alcoholism and “addiction is both inherited and modeled.”

  When Mom suggests we wait at the kitchen table “for your father to come home,” I do the crossword in the TV Guide and don’t say a word.

  Dad holds up my report card. “There’s our little scholar,” he beams, and jingles his car keys. “Ready, Freddy?”

  Mom says Dad should have been an actor because he can change his emotions on a dime. Or a trial lawyer. Or a fairy-tale knight, because he thinks people ought to act better than they do. Years ago, at a parade downtown, Dad suddenly grabbed a stranger by the collar and marched him up to a policeman. The surprised man had a little mirror taped to the tip of his shoe; he used it to look up women’s dresses.

  Mom touches my arm. “We’re so proud of you, sweetheart.”

  My stomach growls. I try to unknot my fists but I can’t.

  “Van’s Drive-In, here we come!”

  Mom steps back.

  “You’re not going?” I ask.

  “It’ll be more special without Lauren and me. You and your dad never have enough time together.”

  Dad’s outside honking the horn.

  She hands me my coat.

  “But . . .”

  “You earned it, Lily, now go enjoy yourself. And I’m . . . sorry about earlier.” Dad honks again. “I’m a little drunk. You know that, don’t you?”

  Yes. A blind girl riding a white horse would know she was drunk. I look toward the door. I thought I was done with it. I thought I didn’t care anymore if she was drunk or sober, but I guess I do. I guess I do.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Who cares?

  “I’ll be fine,” she repeats.

  But Dad isn’t. He drives too fast. Forty-five miles per hour down a thirty-five-miles-per-hour street. When I mention it, he scowls at me.

  I cross my arms against my chest and push my fists into my boobs. I don’t want boobs. I don’t want boys looking at them, or honking at me when I drop something. I don’t want to have an artistic temperament like Mom.

  It’s a longer trip to Van’s since we moved to the other side of town. 136th has been widened, digging into people’s yards with only a thin strip of gravel and litter separating them from the road. It must be strange to walk out your front door and watch people race through your yard. Someone threw a sack of empty beer bottles in front of one house. A mangy-looking dog tied to a rope makes a big dirt circle in front of another.

  “It’s pathetic,” Dad says. “It used to be such a nice neighborhood.” Then he bangs on the steering wheel and mumbles to himself. We’re going fifty miles per hour now. At the next light he sits back and takes a deep breath. “Hungry?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Me too.” He looks tired.

  I don’t know what to say. “Hard day at the office?”

  “Yep,” Dad smiles. “But this is your night, Miss 3.8. Tell me about school this term. What do you like best?” He tries to sound upbeat but there’s a twitch in the outside corner of his eye. Mom calls it the Kit Twitch.

  I like lots of stuff. Especially when no one makes fun of me. “Math, of course,” I tell him. “Science. Literature. I like learning about the Industrial Revolution. I like writing stories and art. Art and writing are my favorite subjects.”

  “You know, Lily,” Dad says, “I read that some geologists believe the earth is three and a half billion years old. How ’bout them apples?”

  “Cool.”

  Dad loves geology. Rocks, minerals, shale, volcanic refuse from the lava beds upriver, fossils with embedded seashells, all that stuff. He collected samples when he was a kid; there are boxes of it in the garage.

  “Three and a half billion years old,” he repeats, shaking his head with wonder.

  My fists relax. I’m glad Mom and Lauren aren’t here.

  A school bus pulls into the lane ahead of us.

  “Do you think we’re alike?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “Mom and me. Do you think we’re alike?”

  “No,” he says right away. “Not at all.”

  Good. I look at Dad and sit up straight. I’m fifteen and nearly as tall as Mom. With the flat of my hand I measure the distance between the top of my head and the ceiling of his car.

  “You’re getting tall,” he says.

  “Yeah . . . from the top of my head to the tip of my tail.” Did I say tail?

  “Jesus,” Dad says, laying on the horn. The school bus is right in front of us; it’s creeping along. When the fat boy in the backseat hears Dad’s horn, he flips us off then pulls down his pants, mooning us. Raindrops on the steamy window make his white butt looks like melting candle wax.

  “The perfect end to a perfect day!” Dad says, honking the horn again. “Some juvenile delinquent flashes his bare ass at us.”

  Now all the kids in the backseat make faces. “It’s okay,” I say nervously. “I’m not in any rush.”

  It’s raining hard, and Dad turns up his windshield wipers. “Goddamn it, Kit,” he mutters as he pulls around the bus.

  Up ahead, on the right, is the bright red neon spaceship of Van’s Drive-In.

  “There it is,” I point.

  It happens in a flash.

  A blue metal blur slides into us, and Dad slams on the brakes. The sound hurts my fillings. Dad throws his arm in front of me, like the gate at a railroad crossing. It thumps my chest, but the sudden stop pushes me through it, and I slam into the dashboard.

  I hit the windshield and am thrown back again, knocking my breath into the backseat.

  Where’s my seat belt?

  I smell the brakes. And oil.

  Dad?

  The car has stopped, but I’m still moving. My head bobs like the bobblehead figure on Frieda’s old dashboard. My head has a mind of its own . . . that’s funny, isn’t it.

  Dad?

  The blue metal blur comes to a stop in the gravel beside the road too, spitting rocks at our car, making little dents in its freshly waxed hood.

  I think I should be hurting but I don’t feel it yet.

  “Dad?” When I open my eyes the light burns, so I close them again.

  He moans and swears. Then says my name. When he kicks open his door, cool air fills the car. It’s still raining.

  The car seat moves; he’s gotten out. Gravel crunches. The car rocks when he briefly leans against it for balance. More gravel crunches as he walks to my side.

  I hear strange voices in the background, footsteps running toward us and, in the distance, a siren.

  “Lily!” Dad struggles with the door handle, yanking it open, swearing. Then he clears his throat. Men always clear their throats before they say something
important. “Daddy’s here, Lily. Don’t move . . . but if you can hear me, honey, wiggle a finger for me. Just a finger. Wiggle a finger for Daddy.”

  I taste salty blood in my mouth. Doll-sized breaths make me sleepy. My body is heavy. Something hurts, somewhere far away inside me, maybe Greece, maybe Paris.

  The pain gets closer the more I concentrate on my father’s voice.

  “Lily? Can you hear me?”

  I’m a little burger, short and stout . . .

  Spaceships and french fries float through the interior of Dad’s car.

  Here is my handle, here is my spout . . .

  A chocolate malt. A dipping tray, please.

  The earth is three and a half billion years old. How ’bout them apples?

  Someone is moving me. It hurts like hell. “It hurts like hell. Can I say that? Can I say it hurts like hell?”

  “Sure. Go ahead,” Mom says. “It probably does.”

  I open my eyes. A crack. Just a crack crack bo-back, banana-fana fo-fack . . .

  I’m in a hospital.

  Or on the set of Dr. Kildare.

  Or in poor Dorothy Gale’s bedroom at the end of The Wizard of Oz. And you, and you and you were there, I say in my mind, pointing at each member of my family.

  Only my hand is a paw and my index finger a thick black nail like Mrs. Wiggins’s. Did the doctors find my tail? Did it break off during the accident? Was it shoved inside me with the impact of the crash?

  “Welcome back, sweetheart,” Mom says. She sits in a chair next to my bed.

  Lauren looks up from a copy of Vogue. “Hey, klutz,” she says.

  Dad explains that the accident was yesterday. He has cuts and bruises, especially on his arm, and for a month he’ll have to wear a stiff white neck-thing that makes him look like one of those long-necked African women in National Geographic, but he’ll be okay.

  “You broke your arm and suffered a concussion. It rattled you up pretty good, Lily Lou.”

  “You’ve got an egg on your forehead,” Lauren says, still flipping pages.

  An egg? On my forehead? What’s an egg doing there?

  “We weren’t wearing our seat belts, Lily,” Dad says. “Neither one of us buckled up. We were talking and forgot, I guess. I should have checked, I should have—”