I think about it as the plane moves farther away, leaving a streak of puffy white across the sky. We stand in front of her house.
“Okay?” Leigh asks.
“Okay,” I answer.
“So you can sleep over tonight and we can walk to the dance from my place,” Leigh says, moving across her lawn to her porch steps.
“Great,” I call out.
She lives in one of the ranch houses built by the developer who bought the land Howard sold. With the exception of the land supporting the O’Connells’ home, my grandfather purchased all the available land around our house. The land was cheap at the time, and he saw the potential in the real estate of the neighborhood long before the developers who came later making offers to Howard. The developers built the ranch homes well, but with no imagination: they’re clad in different colors of aluminum siding, but they’re built exactly the same.
The spicy, sweet smell of Leigh’s mom’s tomato sauce sneaks out the door as Leigh holds it open. The juices in my stomach give a gurgle and my mouth waters instantly.
Eggplant parmesan—my absolute favorite!
“So, are you gonna go home or do you want to eat over first?”
Leigh knows that, 90 percent of the time, our refrigerator holds two staples: nail polish and film canisters. The film canisters alternately hold Jack’s film and various drugs that Wendy insists are vitamins.
Wendy started a lifelong diet at fifteen, and she figures the best way to avoid overeating is to avoid grocery shopping. The fact that she has three growing children clearly doesn’t stand in her way.
My brothers and I, not coincidentally, befriend people with generous families who feed us regularly.
“I gotta go back and see what I can feed my brothers,” I say. “And I gotta grab nicer clothes. This isn’t a good thing to wear, is it?” I say, motioning to the farmer jeans I’m wearing.
A few months ago, Wendy started modeling clothes at trade shows for a friend who owns a clothing design business. She gets to keep most of the clothes she models and she’s collected an enormous wardrobe of trendy clothes, like the stuff rock stars wear on shows like The Midnight Special. Leigh loves coming over when Wendy leaves because we can open her closets and dive into the rayon, paisley-printed blouses with billowy butterfly sleeves, glittery, multicolored, rhinestone-studded denim shirts, and crushed velvet jackets. The bellbottoms drag the floor on me, but Leigh can almost get away with wearing them when she’s got Wendy’s high-heeled black vinyl boots on. Leigh even borrows some of the clothes from time to time. Left to my own devices, however, I choose plain, ordinary clothes and wear the same things with great frequency. This is the second time this week I’ve worn the farmer jeans.
“You should wear that purple suede vest your mom has with the beaded fringe. Do you think I could borrow the one with the American flag on it? I’ll fix you up, it’ll be fun.”
“I’ll see you in a bit,” I say to Leigh. I wave and make my way up the avenue and around the corner to the edge of my neighborhood.
Leigh has a great eye for fashion. I trust her opinion. I know talking Wendy into letting me borrow her clothes is out of the question, however. She gets multiple samples of the clothing she models at trade shows, in several different colors, but I’m still not allowed to touch them unless she doesn’t like them or grows tired of them.
I don’t come close to filling out most of the things she wears unless my grandfather tailors them, anyway—but the vests are one-sizers Leigh and I can both wear. The tricky part will be swiping them without her noticing, although given the normal chaos and level of distraction in our house, it might not be that difficult.
Cigarettes are not the motivator for me to go to the dance, though I let Leigh think they were. The truth: I am dying to go to the dance. I have a fantasy I will meet the guy of my dreams and live happily ever after there. And I’m certain the guy of my dreams does not live in Withensea, so he will have to be visiting someone and have been brought to the dance, like me. We will have that in common.
Leigh is the only girl close to my age who lives near our neighborhood. Before she moved into her neighborhood, when I wasn’t playing sports with David and his friends, I hung out with some of teenage girls on my street once in a while, smoking cigarettes and listening to their stories.
When Wendy learned about my smoking (David told on me in a moment of revenge), I became known as “stupid”—the worst thing you could possibly be. Stupidity, in our house, is the ultimate sin. Stupidity trumps thievery, substance abuse—anything you can imagine as a normal ethical, moral, or legal breech, actually. Stupidity, in Wendy’s mind, is the lowest rung of human behavior.
There is no rule-setting or punishment regarding my smoking, however. There is, instead, an almost constant admonishment about how ignorant I must be to continue damaging my lungs, stunting my growth, and ignoring the fact that my behavior will permanently mark me as a person incapable of making any respectable, responsible, or intelligent choices.
I still smoke, however, and sometimes I light up in full view of Wendy to spite her. I’ve always been stubborn. Leigh and I both smoke, but her mom will kill her if she finds out she’s been smoking, so we never smoke anywhere in public.
We live on the end of the island where the high school is, and Leigh’s house is closer to the school than mine. I don’t have to ask permission to sleep over and Leigh knows it. Wendy is rarely at our house, and even when her body inhabits the place, her mind rarely checks into our reality. Ever since she got back from the hospital, she and her friends have been having a party that never stops and involves every conceivable painkiller and psychotropic drug. Pretty much anything that might create an altered state.
A few months ago, I found Wendy and Jack tripping on acid and hunting for her face in the living room rug, under the piano. Wendy stared up at me and said, “Oh God Jules, I’m glad you’re home. Could you help us? Help me find my face? I lost it somewhere here in the rug and I’ve been searching a long, long time.”
The situation was hysterical: Wendy, the card-carrying Mensa member who lorded her intelligence over everyone, was carrying on like a fool. But it was also scary. I had complete control over this particular situation, and I didn’t want it. Wendy was tripping her brains out and depending on me to produce a happy ending. I wanted to rescue her and I also wanted to let her suffer. My protective instincts won, as usual.
“Well, you’ve been searching in the wrong place. It’s right here under the piano, and if you weren’t doing drugs you wouldn’t have lost it in the first place.” I pretended to scoop it up and handed it to her gently.
She tore the imaginary face from my hands breathlessly, patted it to her cheeks and thanked me.
Sensing an opportunity for a real connection, I asked, “When are you going to start being a good parent? It’s time for you to grow up. Don’t you care about us?”
Wendy became oblivious to me. She started touching her face and moaning. She never answered me. She got lost in her trip again. I stomped up the stairs and slammed my door.
I heard Jack say, “Jesus, what a drag.”
I slam lots of doors these days.
I’m pissed with Wendy for not being a parent, an adult, or even a semblance of support for us. At ten, I have become what she needs—her mother.
My brothers and I make the choice to rebel and not be a part of the drug-induced party, although we are constantly, inappropriately, invited. I figure this is the greatest annoyance to Wendy—for us to be “square,” as she calls it.
A few weeks after the “lost face” episode, Wendy’s retaliation for my refusal to embrace her lifestyle was to slide a hit of acid into a bowl of Raisin Bran I left on the counter.
After I finished my bowl she made up an excuse to punish me, telling me I hadn’t put away the dishes fast enough, sent me up to my room, and let me go through the acid trip without knowing what was happening to me.
Up in my room, I grabbed a book and lost myself in the story.
A bit later I found myself unable to concentrate on the words, which were sliding over the pages of the book and dropping to the floor like small seeds. Next, they came alive and turned into tiny bugs. Having no idea what Wendy did, I thought I was going crazy. I became terrified. My hearing magnified—at one point I thought the airplane flying overhead would crash into our house. It sounded like it was making an unusually slow descent, and the sound grew deafening. I felt my floor begin to shake. I ran out past Wendy and Jack, who were getting stoned in the living room, and into the road in front of our place. I felt convinced the house would erupt into a firestorm any second. But I couldn’t see a plane anywhere.
Once the deafening noise of the passing plane faded away and I was done shaking, I wandered into our backyard, which felt like a safer environment. I sat on the grass beside the back porch, but soon I realized the grass appeared to be breathing. I freaked out, and the thought crossed my mind that I’d fallen through the rabbit hole, like Alice. The thought of calling for Wendy occurred to me, but then I remembered she and Jack were stoned. I didn’t think she’d be any help. My brothers had gone out that morning.
I sat alone in the breathing grass and craned my neck up at the huge weeping willow tree in our backyard, which has long been one of my refuges. I jumped up and began to climb the wide limbs, but my legs were uncoordinated and slow. I talked my way through the action of climbing. “Step here. Slide your arm up the bark. Hold on to this branch and pull. Oh, so heavy. Lift this leg. Higher. Higher. There. Step here now. Reach this arm up. Grab this branch.”
This occupied me until I found myself at the top limb of the tree. Time became quite fluid. I began to relax and enjoy the view from my perch, which sat above the roofline and offered a breathtaking view of the ocean. Leaning back against the bark, I let go of the branches I’d been holding and let myself sink into the tree limb. I felt myself become part of it, the tree bark a part of my skin, part of me. The leaves, grass, fence, ocean. The lighthouse in the distance. I could feel the air moving through my body. I became the center of a large figure eight. All of life seemed to flow through me in the center of that design, spiraling like a huge
DNA strand.
Later I learned it’s the symbol for infinity.
At some point, I became convinced I was weightless and capable of floating. I stretched out my arms, Superman-style, and began to lean over the edge of the branches. At that moment, Moses came into the backyard. I could see him down in the yard, but from my vantage point, high in the tree, he seemed like a small speck. I couldn’t make out his features clearly, and his hair looked like it had been dyed a deep brown. It glinted with bronze shimmers in the sunlight.
He was standing in the shade of the willow.
Jules, what are you doing? You better come down or you’re going to fall.
He sounded funny. Like a lady.
I wondered how he knew I’d climbed up there. I knew the foliage hid me well. It seemed impossible that he could know about my hiding spot, and yet I had watched him walk straight to the tree and gaze up to exactly the spot where I lay.
I balanced in the center of the limb.
“I’m going to float down to you,” I shouted down to him. “Watch me.”
No!
I let my body fall forward as he screamed.
I still remember the scream. It sounded strange. Like an echo.
It frightened me and caused me to jerk into an adrenalized awareness. I felt myself hitting the branches and instinctively grabbed at them as I bounced from one to the other on my way down.
I slammed chest-down into one of the lower limbs of the tree. Stunned, I lay there for a moment. Moses, who had been screaming, stopped. The wind had been knocked out of me. I choked for a few seconds before I could catch a painful breath. When I could breathe normally, I peeked my head over the edge of the tree limb to see how far I was from the ground.
Wendy and Jack stood below and I, about halfway up the tree, could see their anxious faces.
“You need to come down now,” Wendy said.
“I’m fine. I’ll be down in a while.”
“Why were you screaming if you’re fine?”
“I wasn’t screaming,” I answered. “Moses screamed.”
“What’re you talking about? Moses isn’t here,” Wendy said.
I glanced down to where he’d been standing, but he’d vanished.
“Come down and we’ll have dinner,” Wendy said.
Dinner?
That seemed weird. It had been breakfast a bit ago. Where had the time gone?
I climbed carefully down. I felt bruised everywhere, and my body was scratched from head to toe, but—miraculously—not a single bone was broken.
I came in to make dinner. I decided it would be TV dinners that night. It meant less time in the kitchen. I had an aching body and an aching head. The brightly colored daisy flooring of Wendy’s kitchen renovation made my head hurt even more. The countertops were still covered with the old flesh-pink linoleum, and the pattern seemed to be shifting. The walls, recently painted bright orange, seemed more intense than ever.
As my brothers and I sat at the bar eating, I asked Moses, “Where did you disappear to after you were screaming at me in the tree?”
“Huh?” Moses stared at me like I was nuts and scratched the inside of his arm.
He told me he’d been with David until he came in for dinner. I could tell he wasn’t lying. I attributed the “Moses mirage” to sudden insanity. Or maybe it was another kid who looked like Moses. I remembered I wasn’t able to see him clearly.
But what was that other kid doing in our yard, and how did he know I was up there?
The experience made me believe I might be capable of random crazy thinking. Being crazy, in our family, would not be unusual or particularly noteworthy, but I didn’t talk to anyone, even Leigh, about it. I’ve been determined to appear normal, even if I’m not. And for the past few months, I’ve been afraid it might happen again. Then, the other day, I overheard Wendy tell a friend how she gave me a hit of acid in my cereal.
I hate Wendy more than ever. But I also haven’t forgotten the feeling of being somehow connected to the world in a way I’d never experienced before that day.
As I continue the walk toward my street, the setting sun bounces off the multicolored leaf reflections in the glass windows of the surrounding homes. The scene paints “idyllic New England” until you turn the corner and see the sight our place has become.
The Victorian still sits alone on the cliff. It faces the one where the O’Connells still live, but now another row of the aluminum-sided ranch homes stands—gleaming in all its pastel glory—along the O’Connells’ side of the block.
Our house was recently painted a vivid shade of periwinkle blue. Wendy picked the color from a Peter Max poster, and although the painter tried to talk her out of it, telling her that home exteriors shouldn’t be painted that particular shade, she was adamant. One of the most bizarre consequences of her choice is that the color glows in the dark, which makes pointing it out to people who drop us off at night easy—and embarrassing.
As if the color isn’t enough to distinguish the house, Wendy hired a company to blow insulation into the walls to help weather the winters and save money on the heating bills. This particular insulation method involved creating round, baseball-sized holes in the wood siding to allow insulation to be blown in. When they finished the job, they covered the holes with small, louvered, silver discs. She never bothered to have the discs painted to match the wood shingles, and the end result is an electric blue surface dotted with silver discs. Our house now perches on the cliff like a psychedelic Victorian spaceship.
The first sense irritating me as I turn the corner onto our street, however, is not my sight but my hearing: the music coming from our place is blaring at concert level, and it grows louder with each step.
I hate the song that plays—“Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You,” by the Bee Gees. Jack’s fa
vorite song. It’s dirgelike, unlike any other music the Bee Gees have produced. Jack used to play it over and over while David chanted, “Play it again. Play it again,” in a failed attempt at reverse psychology. I say failed attempt because Jack kept obliging David, I think because he wanted to bond with him and believed that he really loved the song as well.
VW vans, Beetles, and other cars and motorcycles painted with bright colors crowd our front lawn and line Alethea Road. The crowning glory of “freak,” however, is the 1947 Daimler Hearse bearing the logo The Hop Shoppe in an ornate, psychedelic design, which has taken up residence in the driveway. To say it draws attention would be an understatement.
One of Wendy’s friends owned the first head shop in Boston, and they used to use the hearse to advertise it. They originally parked it out on the city street in front of the store. But when the store began attracting attention from the Boston police, they repeatedly ticketed the hearse and finally towed it. After Wendy’s friends rescued the hearse out of its towing debt, it ended up permanently parked in our driveway.
Our neighbor who purchased the ranch house located diagonally across the road from ours is agoraphobic. I totally understand why she has a fear of going outside.
As I walk closer, I can see the party is pulsing in full chaos mode. People spill out onto the lawn and wander down the cliff toward the beach. Wendy’s parties are notorious and sometimes last for days.
When I reach the porch, more people pour out the door. They’re laughing loudly. One of them grabs my arm as I brush by. It’s Dorothy, Wendy’s newest best friend.
Dorothy used to be a Rolling Stones groupie and likes to tell stories about the time she had sex with Keith Richards. She smiles at me and stays, still holding my arm, while her friends keep going. She waves off her boyfriend, a quiet guy named Decker, who lingers on the porch with her.
Decker, a major drug dealer for the Boston community, and Dorothy, a nurse who steals meds from the hospitals she works for, have, like the hearse, become fixtures at our place. Hospitals fire Dorothy when they find out she steals, but she’s never arrested. Sometimes they rehire her. Dorothy has charisma. She’s friendly, and when she isn’t stoned she’s interesting to talk to. Dorothy talks to me in a way that makes it seem like I matter, like my opinions are important.
The Belief in Angels Page 12