She led us out to the reception area where Chuck was waiting in his silly chauffeur’s hat, and Edie and I fell to our knees giggling. In those few seconds it became clear why I’d taken her along on the trip: She was my decoy just as John Strong had been yours. I felt guilty for doubting her and worse for doubting you. What happened on that set between us was too big for the rest of the world. It had to remain between us.
For better or worse, till the end of time, world without end.
AFTER NANCY, I FIND ANGEL LYING ON MY BED, waiting for Chandon to slip her a needle. She can’t sit up without chafing the scar from her C-section. Twice, she’s ripped open the staples so the wound won’t close. It’s all she’s got left of the boy, she says.
“What’s shaking, little Long Island?” Chandon says.
I shrug. Words, phrases, sentences won’t coagulate. There’s a word for this, a disease. I read it in the medical dictionary.
“It’s tattoo day.” Chandon smiles at me then looks down at her hands, where she’s got the needle filled with clear liquid, not ink. She flicks it with her middle finger, and we, the three of us in my cell, are hypnotized by the few clear drops squeezing through the tip. Seems too small an opening for a drug so powerful, but I know better. I can make the same hole bleed ink into people’s skin. We don’t go as deep as Chandon’ll get inside of Angel—she has to break the vein, once she’s done prepping, a task she performs as fastidiously as her laundry duty and for some reason makes me think of a black-and-white cartoon Jack had framed and hung in his office. A group of surgeons hover over a patient with his head cut open and one of them says: “Lighten up guys, we’re not making a TV commercial!”
My mother told me there were no dress rehearsals in life. No pain, no gain. If you can’t beat them, join them, she said.
Angel holds out her left arm, veins bulging beneath the strip of cotton they’d cut from a pillowcase. Chandon slaps them down with two fingers and the crack of Angel’s skin sounds painful. It’s probably low-dose next to sinking a needle into your vein or having a baby ripped from your side. Apparently, my birth had been so harsh that Nancy had her entire system shut down afterwards. And she didn’t even have a C-section; she kept the scars bottled up inside, self-medicated.
Chandon takes Angel by the elbow and shoves the needle into her arm, carefully depressing the end with her thumb. She wears rubber gloves that stink of bleach and baby powder—Mimi’s smells—and has her shirt sleeves folded above the elbow. She knows her turf and is experienced. One of those things everyone always said she did better than most. Silently she removes the needle. Angel shuts her eyes and leans back with her mouth hanging open while Chandon pulls off her gloves and cracks the plastic wrapping on another needle. Mimi would not like this. Their wasting clean needles on drugs. I try and warn Chandon but she laughs. As if Mimi is only Mimi in my imagination.
“She get too damn preachy sometimes,” Chandon says. “Got all that Nancy Reagan shit in her head.”
“It’s not about that.”
“Just say this, just say that … Who the fuck she think she is?”
“Her little brother OD’d.”
“Nope. Sorry. Don’t need it from her, don’t need it from nobody, that’s why I left the church, praise Allah,” she says as she fixes her works on top of the paperback copy of the Koran she carries everywhere. Practicing her Islam, like Nancy’s practicing to be a Buddhist. These are dangerous times. Everybody’s got something. Chandon wraps the sheet around her upper arm. “Hey, Long Island, grab this for me? I can’t get the vein.”
I hesitate. She sighs, says come on, she won’t tell Mimi or nothing. I sit down next to her on my bed. Angel lies behind us, her legs against my back, warm. I tie the ends of the sheet together and tug hard, staring down at the Koran. “You read any of that yet?” I ask.
Chandon sucks up a thimble full of liquid with another needle. “It’s not really what the book says that’s interesting,” she says, “it’s how we interpret it.”
“And how do you interpret this?”
“What?”
I nod down at the needle, her thick vein busting through the crook of her elbow.
“Allah forgives,” says Chandon, and pushes the needle into her arm.
We are silenced momentarily out of fear—or reverence. It’s actually peaceful watching the drug flood into her, witnessing the transcendence. A triumph over all of this gray. If only I could give over that easily. Shoot up. Carry the words of an all-forgiving prophet in paperback. But some things are not forgivable. Chandon pulls the needle from her skin and leans back over Angel’s legs with a cozy, satisfied look. The two of them stare at the bedsprings and striped mattress above their heads. I settle in, floating through osmosis.
“What’s this?” Mimi’s voice startles me.
I jump up. “It’s not me, I didn’t do anything.”
“I give you a little time to yourself and this is what you make of it? You were supposed to be watching them, this is trouble.”
She turns to Chandon. “And you, you said she wanted a tattoo. You lied to me.”
“No I didn’t,” Chandon says. “She just needed a little muscle relaxer, is all. For preparation. You gonna draw her something nice?”
“His name,” Angel says.
“You think I can work on her now? Like this? Forget about it.”
“I only want his name.”
“Don’t be so cold,” Chandon says.
“I’m cold? Stupid yunkie shit … mierda.” Mimi looks at me trying to gauge whether I’m high. She knows I’m not into drugs but hasn’t trusted me since the fat lady appeared in my cell. The funny thing is, I can barely remember it and I’m testing the president’s psychology: If I can’t remember it, then it never happened. Even if it all goes down in my single cell, the one with the empty top bunk. I reach into the pillow, take out my legal pad, and on a fresh page write ALEJANDRO in big block letters. As if Mimi isn’t mad enough with Chandon begging her to do Angel’s tattoo and Angel mumbling the kid’s name over and over, my scribbling is another violation. What’s she going to do, shove more carrots up my ass? Stick needles in my eyes? This is supposed to be jail, not some degenerate carnival. I am here for my rehabilitation. To learn to forgive myself and speak in anonymous phrases.
The more Chandon pleads Angel’s case for the tattoo, the icier Mimi’s words become. She says no way will she touch her when she’s so fucked up, bad enough she’s got the virus. “It’s too much negative energy,” Mimi says, “we’ll wake the demons.”
Angel bursts into tears, still calling out for her son.
“Look what you’re doing to her,” Chandon says.
“It’s not my doing.” Mimi shakes Angel by the shoulders. “Calla … calla … shaddup!”
“Puta! “ Angel spits at Mimi.
Mimi slaps Angel’s face, Angel punches her arm, and they’re into it. Chandon grabs Mimi by the elbows and hurls her to the floor. Angel cowers against the wall as if she could slip inside it.
Her body convulses, reminding me of Nancy’s cliché-spouting lips. Mimi calls her a disgusting infected yunkie, her pronunciation making it sound much worse than it is. “You have lost all tattooing privileges!” she shouts. Angel wails, younger now, a screaming infant.
A new mission sends me to the shoe box beneath my bed. I retrieve my Walkman and Bic pen, although there are no more needles. I look up at the towering figure that is Mimi, the anger distorting her face worse than the master distorter himself could have envisioned. In her hand, the two drained hypodermics.
“You’re not ready yet,” she says. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Yes I do, you taught me.”
“You know nothing about her energy. This is the worst mistake—you never wondered why there are so many bad tattoos? ’Cause it’s not about the picture, it’s about the energy, and this is really bad. If you can’t see that …”
“I don’t care.”
“So big and strong you are now.�
��
“Give me the needle, Mimi!” I shout, amazed by the force of my own voice. So is everyone else. For the moment it even quiets Angel.
The glaring Mimi crosses herself, then slips a needle into each palm, cupping her fists over them. She holds out her arms, wrists upright, and it’s the first time I can see the extent of her suicide tracks. It’s crazy but I want to hold her like I wanted to hold Nancy, only she doesn’t deserve it. She’s got no heart. Angel had tried to warn me, those weeks when she schooled me, stroking my head as she relayed the most disgusting stories I’d ever heard. Tales of human autopsies and digging out people’s kneecaps. I’d stopped listening soon after and hummed the World Without End opening she loved so much. I never wanted to be street smart, but I really liked the feel of her fingertips in my hair.
Mimi stares down at her fists, then back at me. “You’re playing with fire, chica.”
I hold her gaze.
“Go ahead, then … your choice,” she says, and because Angel’s tattoo has become the most important event in my life, I point to Mimi’s left hand. She slowly uncurls her fingers. I take the needle and hook it to the siphoned inner tube of the Bic. Armed with black ink, I sit down next to Angel and touch her shoulder, so smooth and brown it looks like candy. Sweet enough to eat despite the poison lurking below. Like the shiny red apples with razor blades inside that mean people supposedly hand out on Halloween. As if she’s reading my mind, Mimi says, “I’m warning you, she’s got the evil blood. This is your last chance.”
Her words fuel my determination; I put the needle to Angel’s arm and turn on the Walkman. The current surges through my fingers for the first burst of the A. You can etch a tattoo with just a needle and ink, you don’t need the motor, but it makes it easier. And there’s less blood. Mimi crosses herself again and shouts a few sentences in Spanish. She cannot take me from my work, not with Angel staring at me, her eyes sadder than my grandmother’s on the day she walked into the courtroom for my arraignment. Enough to tell me this tattoo, my work, is all that matters. Mimi says I’ll be damned to hell. My mother said there is no hell, just endless repetition, and Chandon … Allah forgives!
Some shouting starts in the other cells. Soon the guards will come. I pick up the speed and by the letter N find my fingers are spotted with ink and blood. Angel shuts her eyes, and I can actually feel her limbs relax. “Mi hijo,” she whispers, as if by inscribing his name on her shoulder I am bringing him back to her.
When the banshee calls finally draw the guards, I am on the last curves of the O. There is no explaining this madness: all the banging and wailing, stolen needles, my dirty fingers wiping Angel’s shoulder, Mimi and Chandon nowhere to be found. Before I can say anything, Angel is wrested from me. As the guards drag her off, she points to her tattoo and says, “Thank you, Long Island! God bless.” My eyes swell, and I’m certain there is no justice in this world.
I hold up my stained fingers begging your forgiveness. Then I smear the bloody remains of Alejandro across my lips.
ANGEL IN MOTION
IN THE BACKYARD OF THEIR LEMON-YELLOW farmhouse was a swing Tom Harrison had built when the girls were young. It hung from the branch of a large sugar maple. A tree as indigenous to the Northeast as the inhabitants of the house it shaded in the summer; a tree no less spectacular for the predictability of its fall colors, the leaves of red and yellow and orange and gold that glistened as if they’d been kissed by the sun. It was a tree with a history predating the couple who’d stumbled upon the house in 1964, a chemical engineer and the bride he’d known barely six months. When Mildred thought of herself back then, she liked the picture that came to mind: an ebullient young woman recently sprung from the dorms of Penn State and deposited into her “real life.” She was so plucky then. So much in love. Within a year she gave birth to her first daughter, and although we now know the significance of that event in the annals of daytime television history, the happy parents had nary a clue their baby girl would grow up to be the first in three generations to leave the East Coast.
After Brooke had settled in Los Angeles, she told Mildred that what she missed most about home was the old maple with its swing and coat of many colors. She remembered vividly the day her father had pushed a silver extension ladder against the tree and tucked beneath his arm the piece of wood attached to two thick ropes before beginning his ascent. In her version of the story Tom was a tall, mysterious man who’d disappeared into the leaves and sent down a swing, the object of her youthful contentment. Brooke could sit on that swing for hours, her shins thrusting back and forth, catapulting her into a world normally inhabited by birds, tiny buzzing creatures, and the occasional Frisbee. Brooke recently told Mildred she’d never been as comfortable anywhere in the world as she was on that swing. In motion. Imagining what it was like to fly.
Mildred would have felt less nervous if their conversation had not been predicated on another speeding ticket and failed breath test that landed Brooke in drunk-driving school, where she said she knew practically everyone in her class and viewed it as a de facto networking opportunity. Such flippancy Mildred could not understand. She feared Brooke’s drinking was becoming a problem, and her traffic violations from major to minor seemed nothing less than insolent. But the young soap star had a predilection for fast cars. What was the point, she said, of owning a roaring red Porsche if you were going to stay the speed limit? It was speed that made driving fun. Made Brooke feel like she had wings. Besides, the fearful succumbed more frequently to accidents than the carefree, Brooke said, reminding her mother of the time Cynthia had let go of the swing and glided into the neighbor’s hedges. Tiny Cynthia, afraid of pumping beyond a forty-five-degree angle with the ground, normally held so tightly to the ropes her knuckles went white. Nobody had imagined she would one day bounce high enough to lose control of the ropes and shoot across the sky. At least that was how it seemed to the eight-year-old Brooke who watched her sister’s torso arch peacefully before crashing into the bushes.
The bloody-faced girl came up wailing. Brooke carried her upstairs where she dabbed her face with a hand towel to assess the depth of Cynthia’s wound. It was worse than she’d thought. Blood gushed from her sister’s forehead, and Brooke could see the white cauliflower that must have been her brain. All the direct pressure in the world wouldn’t close a hole that big. She needed help. Calmly, though, she assured Cynthia it was nothing. She said she was going downstairs for Band-Aids and found her mother in the kitchen. “Whatever you do, don’t stare,” Brooke counseled. “We don’t want to scare her.” And Mildred had obliged her precocious firstborn, knowing how easily Cynthia frightened and realizing she would not go anywhere—especially not to the hospital—without Brooke by her side.
There had been many days when Mildred worried that Cynthia would someday start resenting Brooke for all of the trials the older girl had put her through, all of the games constructed to test her will and her loyalty. But the accident seemed to further entwine them in each other’s identities. Neither girl seemed to have many friends, Cynthia retreating behind her hardcover books and black walls, while Brooke complained of the endless parade of obsequious faces, each willing to do whatever she asked, no matter how rotten she behaved in return. Being on TV could bring out the worst in you, Brooke had confided to Mildred and said she was more grateful than ever for her daily phone calls home. The connection to Blue Bell was the only thing that kept her grounded, the only way she could bring herself to venture out, and she was at a point when making the scene still mattered. For some time she had been auditioning for movies, convinced that elusive part on the big screen would rectify the hardships she’d endured as a daytime ingénue: her second-rate status in Hollywood, the year-round work schedule, and all of those luncheons with screaming fans, benefits for causes she could barely keep straight, and the torturous appearances at shopping malls. She said it was downright degrading at times, and Mildred knew exactly what she meant. They couldn’t walk down the street anymore without hoa
rds of people rushing up to Brooke and hugging her tearfully as if they were part of the family. That was the hardest part for Mildred, the lack of separation between her public and private lives. Brooke said it was like that for soap stars. “All of these emotions are, like, bubbling up to the surface,” she explained. “People start thinking they really know you.” But Mildred couldn’t see how a movie career would make things any better. People would still know her, even more people. Mildred envisioned nonstop drunk-driving and traffic tickets, additional sleeping pills and skin creams. Since she was a child Brooke had attracted epidermal ailments of biblical proportions. Dermatitis, hives, eczema, boils. It often amazed Mildred how porcelain-smooth her face appeared on television.
Cynthia was lucky, the doctors had said. She could have been blinded. As it was, she needed forty stitches above her right eye, which left behind a birdlike scar that spread its wings whenever she raised her eyebrows. Brooke had said the scar was a wonderful symbol of her flight and told Cynthia she should wear it proudly.
Through the years Mildred found it increasingly ironic that Cynthia trod the earth wearing wings when it was Brooke who had always been enamored with flying; Brooke who was routinely described as “angelic,” “cherubic,” and “lamblike,” and who adored her sister even more for the proof of the heavens she carried on her forehead. What Mildred didn’t understand was that Cynthia, too, welcomed her celestial responsibilities. As if the child in her few minutes of flight and its aftermath had made a tacit agreement to bear the weight of her sister’s desires. As Brooke slipped further into the world of impulse on the West Coast, Cynthia took on the mission of spiritual cleanup crew. She had already been leading an ascetic life, sleeping on her air mattress and wearing nothing but drawstring cotton pants, generic sneakers, and sweatshirts. Nor did she indulge in any of the usual teenage vices: cigarettes, beer, diet soda, chocolate, potato chips, cheeseburgers, and the like. Since the age of thirteen she had been a strict vegetarian; she wouldn’t even eat fish or eggs. Yet she was no proselytizer. The last thing she wanted was to convert anyone else to her lifestyle. It was her crown jewel much like the wings on her forehead, a daily affirmation that she’d broken with the teenage world of stadium concerts and slumber parties in favor of a more cerebral existence. She cultivated her mental prowess by watching over her world-famous sister.
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