There is an alley that separates the building next to Gahagan’s Luncheonette from Mom’s studio. The alley leads through to the next street, and I swing my head around as we pass it. You never know when a car is going to ease out of there and maybe have weak brakes. “Cars are wicked, feet are true,” Mom always will say. For myself, it’s my Birthday and I am some cautious of surprises. But the girls — Lou Ann, Angelica, Marianne, Sue Patterson, Mickey Hill and Precious Pearl Wingard — don’t even give that alley a glance.
“Hey, Pearl, what was it like at the clinic?” I just remembered to ask her, and even I know it’s dopey to ask her now.
None of them take their eyes off that glass door of the studio. Pearl didn’t hear me, I guess. I glance again into the alley, for Sun will hitch Jeremiah back there to the rear of Mom’s building. Right off the corner and just enough space. What I often see looking down the alley to the next street is Jeremiah’s hindquarters and his tail a-switching.
Today I expect I did a second take because I failed to see Jeremiah. No feet stamping or anything. Does it mean that Jack is gone, too? Could I be so lucky as to have my brother, Sun, and his show horse off on an emergency which will keep him away from my Birthday for the whole time?
My Birthday and they have left me. The girls are tripping over themselves at the door. They should wait for me to show them in. Why don’t they go on through if they’ve forgotten their manners? Then the door slowly opens from the inside. Thrust out is an arm with a fist holding a bunch of party hats like a torch.
I come up right behind the Birthday girls and I can see everything. There is that look on some of their faces like a bunch of puppies waiting to be fed. Mom says she tries to get girls into The Dance while they’re young; so by the time they’re thirteen or fourteen they will think about something other than boys.
Sun Run is holding a torch of party hats on his fist, and holding the door open with his shoulder. He is dressed up in corduroys and a white shirt, with moccasins on his feet, old and soft, fitting like ballet slippers. A white felt band holding back his hair and with beadwork fashioned in the cloud design of the southwest Amerinds. There is no one thing that will always set Run off different from anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s the combination of moccasins, headband, shirt. My brother is gifted, and the girls know it and are caught. He knows it, and he gets it from Dad. It would be so nice to have power that is strange and secret, like theirs.
Sun Run and I have a secret. Deep in the night from our home, there is the sound from the roller rink. Only the rough kids go there, and we are never to go there. But late in the night, around and around we roll; at times, never letting on we know one another:
sometimes, rolling, I am gifted.
this I would have liked for my birthday, better even than the rollers.
a name, with power.
4
“Jack. Jack,” Marianne says. Breathless and so shy, you know she could die. “Hi!” she says, standing there in front of him. He looks at her, real belligerent for a second, then he lunges at her and shoves her inside the Beaux Arts. She screams. And some of the other girls giggle really high and silly.
“Hi, Jack!” the other ones think to say, pushing each other to get inside. Hi, Jack, Hi, Jack, like it was something new and original they thought up to say.
These are not your frilly type of girls, either, like Patricia prissy Reynolds. Run says they are the ones who are like a no-man’s-land coming into homeroom the first thing in the morning. Numb-eyed, he says they bring with them the hurt of the last fight with their moms or dads at the breakfast table; that is, if they were able to have breakfast. Sun Run says you’d be surprised how many American girls come to school without breakfast because they are being punished for thinking for themselves and arguing back. He says it takes them half a day to clean out their heads. And only after lunch do they shiver it off and become some kind of individuals that you can reach out and touch.
But not Angel Diavolad. No matter what happens in her house on a morning, she can bring it to school and work through it. But the other girls, Mom and Sun say, will never be your best students like Angelica. Sun says most probably they are the ones who, after going through high school, will hang around home for two years hoping to get married — I don’t know if he’s right about that. And if they don’t marry, he says they will end up as secretaries over at the air base outside of Dayton.
Right now some of them get tongue-tied around Sun Run and think saying Hi is some new kind of thought. It is just because they are hurt and different by-yourself loners that Sun had me invite them to my Birthday.
“Don’t invite some eleven-year-olds in your class,” he told me.
“But almost twelve?” I asked him, glad he was going to take over and make up my mind for me.
“No almost twelve, either,” he told me. “What you want with them?”
“I know them better,” I told him. “They’re my age.”
“You don’t want some know-nothings,” he said. “You want to invite some girls. Some ones you can learn from.”
“Sure,” I said, although now I can see they can’t teach me much.
“You know it,” Sun had said.
And so we picked them out.
“If it was up to me, I wouldn’t have a party for nothing. I hate getting dressed up like a fool.”
“If it was you,” Sun said to me, “you wouldn’t ask for nothing all your life.”
“Want nothing,” I said. Riding behind him on Jeremiah, we went around to each one of the houses of the girls we’d chosen.
“Moon Mother wants you to have this party, so you are having it,” Sun had said.
I sure felt uncomfortable riding on Jeremiah. Never could I get used to the heat of a horse and the way he bumps me so hard up and down. I don’t know how Sun can stand it. Give me skates, and cars.
“It’s because you’re afraid to fail,” Sun had said, “why you want nothing. All little kids are like that sometimes, but you take the cake.”
I told him, “I am not afraid, you don’t know a thing. Because I just don’t care for parties. And I ain’t a little kid.”
“Hah. Anybody keep on saying ain’t is a little kid.”
We went ahead and invited everyone. Sun stopped Jeremiah in front of each house. I had to slide down while Sun sat so still in the Saturday noon light — heat never seems to make him look wilted like it does me. And that day he never even looked toward a house when one of the girls came out. The first one was Angel. She smiled familiar, knowing me from the secret nights. She stared at Sun. The Diavolads have the nicest veranda in town, I’m thinking when I invite her. All the time I talked, she was looking over at Sun Run. Her face so dark and thoughtful. I remember once talking about her to Mom and Run —
“Diavolad,” I once said. “What is Angelica?”
“Why, black,” Mom said.
“No, but what is she?”
Then Sun said, “She means why does she look so different and act different?”
“Because they are Haitian,” Mom said, “from Haiti.”
“Ferocious Haiti,” Sun said.
“Speaking about what you don’t know,” Mom told him.
“I know Haiti.”
“You only know what you read,” she told him. “You better believe it wasn’t so awful for them with their mystery money.”
“So why did they leave?” Sun asked. “Why is it ‘mystery money’?”
“So why did we leave Cliffville?” Mom said, looking pleased with herself.
“Illogic. We left so my Moon Mother could rule,” Sun told her. Then he was gone on Jeremiah.
All that was some time ago. The Diavolads are still different from me and probably richer than most people around here. I can’t even imagine that Haiti they come from, but I didn’t bother to look it up in the encyclopedia.
Inviting all the girls is far away next to now. Now we are ready to begin my party. Dad will come to the party, but he’ll have to leave
by five-thirty to be sure the evening meal at the college is fixed properly. I don’t ever seem to see enough of Dad.
We begin my Birthday. Sun Run is taking his time, putting on a show with the party hats. The girls are all bunched around him. They wait their turns. Will I wait that way when I am thirteen or fourteen? I hate boys now. Maybe that’s why I hate my brother. Do I hate Sun all the time? When you say brother, you can’t hate. You can’t hate a kin, Mom says. He is my closest kin. But maybe he can. Maybe that’s it. He hates me.
We are standing in the small foyer to the Beaux Arts. Sun puts each party hat smack at the edge of each girl’s hairline above the forehead. He takes time with each girl, stretching that thin gray elastic under a chin to hold the hat in place. Ever so gently, he cups a girl’s face in his palms and slides that elastic through his fingers along her jowl. That done, he touches the hat with both hands once and then smooths out the girl’s hair on each side of her face. After Marianne, Sue Patterson got a hat, green, which tended to make the whiteness of her skin look sick.
“Do I look awful in it, Jack? I bet I look gross.” Giving with her giggle that slides up the scale, where it ends before it falls.
Sue is the whitest girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life. If her eyes were pink, she would be albino.
“You’re looking cool,” Sun tells her.
Even the hair on her arms is white. I’m not talking about your color, like your black people and your white people. I mean that on a scale of white from one to ten, Sue wouldn’t register because she is in a different place altogether.
“Am I sharp?” Giggling out of control into a screech. Blushing wild.
But, like all the girls, she finds my brother, Sun, fascinating. But, different from most of them, she won’t get tongue-tied around him. She gets kind of loud and mouths a mile a minute, which is okay, since she is funny and kind of sweet.
“Oh, I know I’m ugly!”
“I’m not going to take you fishing,” Sun tells her.
I like her a lot. She’s a musician, too, like Angel. You can forgive her the way she is laughing and playing with Run, it’s not her fault. But in school even the basketball boys will slow down as they run out of the gym past the music room when Sue is practicing. With the violin nestled by her chin and cheek, you wouldn’t think she was the same girl. That sad tremolo of hers, they call it, in clean string tones, spilling down the hall and washing over the sweaty ballplayers. The guys just heaving, with their necks and backs dripping wet. The music melts the tiredness out of them, I swear you can see it happening. And she just smiles a little at them, not embarrassed at all the way I’d be, the way she will get with Sun. But seeing the guys and not even missing a beat, but just going ahead and wrapping the music around half the school.
It is sure something to have a first violin like her to soothe the middle school on a heat-aching day. Add Angelica Diavolad joining with Sue at lunch time on her cello to make a bigger, stronger sound that will take in everything you ever thought music could do. The one girl is snow white and the other is coal black. And the two of them are exactly alike, the best of one kind you hope will just live forever.
Arilla Adams, me, is the last to get a party hat. They never even gave me a middle name. Moon-flower? No, but I remember old James False Face used to call me something like that. The girls have on their silly party hats and file inside Mom’s studio. You’d think I count for nothing. Sun doesn’t take any time adjusting my hat, either.
“Just remember it’s my party!” I have time to whisper to him.
“You didn’t want it,” he says, but I pass him by, leaving him to come in last. I hear him slam a door off the foyer and know he is going to waste time in the bathroom.
I never take for granted that Mom is mine, and I sure wonder sometimes how I ever got so lucky. But this I never would’ve imagined she would do with her studio. Mom’s studio is one huge room, all hardwood floors cleaned and polished, and with a bank of windows across one side. There is a mirror the full length of the other side — it cost a fortune to put there — with a bar in front of it for the dancers to extend their legs. Except for a few chairs, that is all the room ever had in it for dancers to take turns resting on. Most the time they lay dead tired on the floor with towels slung around their necks. Mom never uses a piano, just records and a player in the corner, and a tape recorder and a drum to beat with the hands. It’s a conga drum with a few maracas on the floor beside it.
But this! Over the ceiling lights there is something that looks like cotton candy to make the glow shimmer in great cobweb circles. There are balloons hanging in bunches down from the cotton candy and on the walls and in every corner. There are streamers all different colors hanging down the mirrors so that it looks twice as much. There is a table all decorated in bright crepe paper with a glass punchbowl full of ice, with these cartons of ice cream and big bottles of soft drinks. There are paper plates next to the bowl, cups, and there is a big cake. I am just drawn to the table and the cake. I know I am moving, but it’s like walking on air. The cake has white icing with pink and green letters and candles. It says: ARILLA! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
There, right there on that crepe paper I didn’t see a present. A big box, I wasn’t even looking for it, so I didn’t see it. A big square box about five inches high. This present must be from my family. The card without an envelope, I see it says: Arilla! For you, from Mom.
Now, that’s funny. You mean there are more presents from Jack Sun and my dad? No time to think about it now. For this room looks like a prom night for a hundred kids.
Mom has hurried the girls to put down their books out of the way under the table. She has hurried them to place their presents next to the big one of hers on the table. She is hurrying and arranging them around me where I stand at the cake. I feel her hand and then her arm around my shoulder. I look up and straight into the mirror. Here we all are through the mirror. Seeing us, myself, is like seeing strangers all dressed up going to a party. Looking at us, the strangers don’t feel like us at all, but they are still us. Me in one of Mom’s dresses she altered for me. I always did want it. It’s this soft, combed cotton material with a curled-collar sweater dyed to match. It and the dress are beige. I like the outfit, even if I do look dumpy in it. I always look dumpy in anything on the knee. I look best in blue jeans and tank top.
I wouldn’t’ve known my mom, seeing her in the mirror. She’s all made up — not in your regular performing make-up. But like a clown. No — what do they call it? Like a mime! Like those who say nothing and will act out with hands and bodies. Mom’s wearing this white paint on her face like a mask, with lines of black paint in star points above and below her eyes. She outlined her mouth in a droopy night blue. I start to turn to look at her, but she holds my head so I can just see through the mirror. Slowly, she performs this wondrous thing.
With her face on a level with mine, she lets her head jiggle and shake until it appears to wobble off her shoulder. It lands on my shoulder right next to my head. All at once I have this sad, painted face with great, round eyes and fluttery lashes. I have two faces. One face is pale and blank, but the other face shows everything I think and feel. Mom, you know so much about me.
The head wobbles off my shoulder and back onto my mom’s. She bows to me in the mirror. It gets me so embarrassed but so happy, too. The girls just laugh and clap their hands.
There’s my dad through the mirror. I didn’t see him standing off a ways from the rest of us. Then comes Sun Run leaping into the mirror. Sun has black war paint on his face. He wears just enough to make his nose stronger and his forehead broader. Always just enough to make the rest of his skin look sunburnt, of The People. Why did he have to wear a war bonnet? He bows to me in the mirror, and white and black feathers of the bonnet wave and flutter.
My dad has no paint on and no war bonnet. He stands there in just a nice, clean white shirt and creased trousers, with his hands deep in his pockets. He will never take his hands out of his pockets.
Looking at me, coming close up to the mirror. I’m so glad to have him always himself.
Through the mirror I say, “I didn’t know for sure you would get here.”
“For sure,” he said, “I wouldn’t miss your Birthday. Happy Birthday, Arilla Nixa.”
Now all the girls say, “Happy Birthday, Arilla Nixa.”
Sun Run laughs at them and they know they’ve done it wrong.
“Not her middle name,” Sun tells them. “Nixa mean number-two person, and Nixa mean boy or girl grandchild; also mean much more.” Pretending he’s giving them a lesson. “Arilla have no middle name, since I took the sun. She can have moon, but she always afraid of moonlight.”
When my brother wears his war bonnet, he has to speak like a dumb actor playing an Indian in some western. Like he’s just learning English and he thinks he’s being funny.
I know why Dad called me it.
To remind me he has always cared and always will. To say his caring is more than just himself; maybe it’s all of his who lived and all who died, caring.
Knowing things and not knowing how I know. Where do they come from like that, even on my Birthday?
Jack-Run brings some chairs for the party girls. All this time they’ve been watching Sun and Mom and Dad. They’ve never seen people act the way their own families never would.
I sit cross-legged on the floor with my dad and Pearl. The other girls scramble for chairs.
“You pretty excited, huh?” Pearl says. Everybody is laughing and talking, although as soon as the talking goes in my head, I forget what it was about. Parties are like that, I guess, making you all hot and bothered. You want to open presents right off, but kids here will wait, pretending they aren’t thinking a thing about them.
Arilla Sun Down Page 5