When our mother died, Dad said Alice lost her skin. Any little thing could penetrate her; a light breeze could set off a crying jag. We kept Alice away from the evening news, butcher shops and sad movies—none of those Disney things with the brutality-of-life lessons.
When I was nine years old, I took Alice to see a matinee. Charlotte’s Web was playing and we couldn’t wait to see it because Daddy said that Paul Lynde from Hollywood Squares would be playing the rat. He dropped us off in front of the Orpheum with three two-dollar bills and we stood under the marquee a few moments, making plans for buying up the entire refreshment stand.
Minutes later we were sitting in the grand old theatre, its red velvet curtains and gilded banisters far too sumptuous for its new role as a movie house, slurping our drinks and shoving more popcorn into our mouths than would fit. Gorging on licorice and Smarties and fizzy orange pop, Alice and I turned to each other and stuck out our tongues, each attempting to exhibit the more gruesome display of chew-goo possible before the lights went down.
We squealed as the curtains closed and reopened to signify that the feature was about to begin.
It went downhill from there.
Alice’s face shone with tears from the point at which Wilbur the baby pig died and was resuscitated—basically, right from the start—until the end when Charlotte, the spider, died and was not. She shrieked as Charlotte sighed her last breath and fell away from the cartoon barn rafters. Then she wailed in a way that brought the ushers running. Her sobbing seven-year-old body had to be lifted from her seat and carried out of the theatre.
I wanted to call our father, but Alice fell into hysterics. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight for even a minute and I had to tell the manager our phone number so he could make the call. My eyes and throat ached as she sobbed grief into my neck. I thought then that Alice’s sorrow was heavier, more lush, a truer blue than any I could ever feel.
Dusty peered across at the guy who had just sat down one table over. He had a little more blue-collar appeal than the patrons who generally hung out in Caffe Barney, which was, despite its name, more bar than café. Windowless but for the sidewalk facade, and one or two skylights overhead, the front third of the room sported an aged wood bar. Farther back were heavy tables set close together and running deep into the café, which was easily five times as long as it was wide. At night the place jumped with alt-rock for the jeans-clad university crowd that bantered about their respective intellectual pursuits as they sucked up microbrewed beers and Australian shiraz thick as jam in a glass.
The new guy’s hair was something like Dusty’s own but a little less wild and cut to his jaw. My niece appeared to be trying to inspect him surreptitiously. Feeling around in the bib pocket of her overalls as though for something small and precious, she ogled him through her tangled mop. I could see her eyes dance up his thick arms, across his chest and down over a gently protruding belly that also matched her own.
Dusty cupped the side of her mouth, asking me in her little girl’s whisper, “Do you think he’s pretty?”
I guess he was attractive: pale eyes, brawny and solid. He looked like a landscaper or something. But I’d lost my eye lately. I felt drained and indifferent to sex.
I leaned toward her. “Don’t whisper about strangers.”
Dusty bent forward so that our foreheads were nearly touching and said, staring deep into my eyes, “You’re like a crabby old gramma, you know.”
When Alice turned fifteen she told me she liked girls as much as boys. I was startled, I suppose, but it wasn’t as though it were out of character. I’m sure she thought being bisexual was fair. She had always brooded over justice, the equality of souls, but this idea exhausted me, as if it were yet another stray she wanted to bring home.
“What do you mean, ‘as much’?”
Her laughter jangled around the room. “Am I freaking you out?”
She had climbed into my bed, the way she usually did on Friday nights, weaving her limbs through mine, rustling with gossip and whispering nonsense that sent us both into fits of laughter. When she was in her teens, her joy was as frenetic as her sadness was bleak.
“No,” I said flatly. Frankly, I thought, she should come up with a better reason for trying sex with a girl—or sex with anybody. Life wasn’t, after all, just one big chorus of “How Much Is that Doggy in the Window?” There were real people involved. Other people besides herself.
“Are you scared I’m going to squeak your boobies?” she teased and then grabbed one of my breasts like a squeeze-toy.
“Get out!” I smacked her hand away and giggled despite myself. “No. I’m just—I don’t know. I never heard of anyone your age being into girls before.”
“What’s the difference? Why can’t I fall in love with a girl same as a guy? If I was a French writer-chick, no one would give it a second thought.”
“Ana’s Nin was a self-absorbed twat,” I announced. Which made her squeal with pleasure.
“So, now what?” I pressed on. “Are you going to get yourself a girlfriend or something? If Dad finds out, I’m the one who’s going to have to pick up the pieces, I’m the one who’ll have to talk him down off the water tower.”
She wrapped herself a little tighter around me. “If Dad’s pissed off, it’s my problem.”
I sighed. “Fine. Your problem.”
“Promise you’ll still love me like stupid even if I turn out to be a lezzie?” Alice sang “Lezzie girl, lezzie girl” to the tune of the Spider-Man theme song. Soon she had the two of us bouncing with sleep-deprived laughter because the only thing that seemed to rhyme with girl was squirrel.
Our giggles eventually eased and as we caught our breath, Alice broke the spell. “Do you think she killed herself?”
A non sequitur, but the subject in question was clear. There was no other “she” at this time of night.
“It was a car accident. Why would you think she killed herself?”
“I don’t know. Who knows.”
Our mother was an overripe fruit, plump and succulent, and ready to burst out every which way. She was like Alice, emotionally. Or Alice was like her. Daddy was wrong about Alice becoming thin-skinned when Momma died. That’s not what happened, I don’t think. His memory has painted Momma as a perennially joy-filled Mother Earth. And she was that. But she could also be struck down by grief the same way Alice can. She could watch the news, hear of famine, rape and murder, and soak the sofa with her tears. Sometimes she would get up in the night, enveloped by fear.
I remember the first time I woke to the sound of frantic jabbering in the dark hallway outside my room. It was a woman’s voice, sort of like Momma’s—maybe a dark cousin of hers. I listened to the creak of hardwood as light footsteps passed from one end of the hall to the other, followed by the sound of Daddy’s murmur, heavy feet hurrying after hers. Alice was in my bed, tiny snores wheezing from her, as I crept to the door.
I could hear whimpers and hoarse half-made words, but nothing intelligible. I could hear my father soothing—there-there, come back to bed. I cracked the door open, moon and street-light cutting a stark bright swathe against the long hall wall. My mother was nude, and the way the light hit her it looked as though she were two-toned, black and white, cream breasts and charcoal legs. Tossing her head like a spooked horse, she shifted from one foot to the other outside their bedroom door. Her nightclothes were strewn on the hall floor and her hands plucked as if at invisible garments, pulling them from herself as she shook her head. “No, no, h-h-huh, get out, too hot, no, go-go-go.”
My father spread his arms, trying to corral her without embracing her.
“Georgia, Georgia, it’s me, it’s Arnie, Georgia, you’re by the ocean where it’s safe. You’re safe, Georgia.”
My mother’s arms hung in the air and she stood still a moment. By now I was in the hall.
“Georgia?” My father moved slowly, brought one hand up to her face but got no reaction. As he brushed her hair from her eyes, my mo
ther’s spirit seemed to settle back into her body, and she began to sob, quietly.
“Arnie? Oh no, Arnie. Not again. Make it stop. Oh no.”
Tall and bony, my father took hold of her then as if she were porcelain. “It’s okay, you’re okay,” he said, and then, catching sight of me, “Sweetheart, you go back to bed now. Your mother’s just had a bad dream.”
The little pot-belly that swelled above his narrow hips somehow made him look even more vulnerable than she did at that moment. Shadows cut deep holes where his eyes should have been. He looked to me like a stretched and mournful ghost.
“I’m five-and-a-quarter,” Dusty told the beefy landscaper at the next table—her current opening line.
“Really?” He smiled at her. “Well, you look fabulous. I wouldn’t have guessed you were a day over four.”
Dusty’s smiled drooped. “No. I’m—What?”
He laughed and glanced at me. “She yours?”
“For the time being.” I searched my purse for the right amount to pay our bill so I could avoid waiting again for our oozingly slow waiter.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Dusty inquired.
He paused a moment, then asked, “Is she hitting on me?”
“Oh, definitely,” I told him. “She’s a regular Sadie Hawkins.” Money on the table, I got up and came around to Dusty and pulled her sweater back on. “Come on, y’little tart, let’s get out of here.”
She smiled slyly at her quarry. “We’re going to see my mummy in the loony bin.”
I cupped a hand over her mouth and kissed the top of her head, trying to manage some sort of departing maternal grin as I whispered threats into her hair.
By sixteen, Alice was losing faith in just about everything. One Sunday, in a particularly indigo state of blue, she had gone into our basement to look at photos of us all together, wallow around in our once-upon-a-time storybook family perfection.
Rushing into the living room an hour later, she stopped and stood staring at me staring at the TV, dark wet shadows of mascara around her glittering pupils, a sheaf of papers under her arm, she demanded I turn off the TV and come with her up to my room, her safe place.
There she sat down on the bed, and I stood by the door, dread munching my insides as I watched her take short, panicked breaths.
“Why was she naked on the front lawn?” she asked.
My gaze dropped to the papers on her lap.
“No, look at me. I remember this, I remember police out front and her screaming and crying with no clothes on. And cops, there were cop lights and they had—What did he do to her? Why was she crying?”
On the night in question Alice would have been about Dusty’s age today. Five sounded so blindly naive to my mind. A five-year-old.
Alice glared. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Did he hit her? I swear to Christ, if he—”
“Of course he didn’t hit her.” Like a stone kicked up by the lawn mower, this sort of hard suspicion would pop from Alice when I was least expecting it.
“Children don’t know everything their parents are capable of,” she said.
“Alice. Daddy feels guilty beating an egg, for god’s sake. It was her. She was crazy.”
“Don’t say that. She was not crazy.”
Craving a solid surface, I sat down on the floor beside the bed. “Is this the first time you remembered that night?”
Alice pushed her lips out, looking scared and indignant. “Yes. I mean no. I’ve remembered flashes sometimes but I always thought it was a dream or a movie I’d seen, but then I saw this picture of her in one of the boxes downstairs, laughing, and at first it looked like she was screaming, like she was in pain. Then it just hit me—her on the lawn, her big—” she caught her breath a moment “—fleshy self and her arms covering her chest and then a blanket around her and police lights.”
I leaned my head back against the bed and took hold of Alice’s ankle, pulling her foot into my lap. “I think she just—She had some sort of disorder or something, these spells that were like night terrors where she’d think the house was on fire. I guess she thought she was on fire, because she’d start ripping off her clothes and tripping out. Like a panic attack but she was asleep. She’d get so freaked, I thought she might claw right through her skin to get it off her, the fire or clothes or whatever. Then that one time she ran out on the front lawn. Before that, Daddy’d always pulled her out of it. They were kind of tussling at the door, but he must have been scared he’d hurt her so he let go, and she went running down the road, banging on people’s doors like someone was trying to kill her. One of the neighbours finally called the police. God knows what they thought.”
“Where was I during all this?”
“In bed. You woke up and came outside. Daddy didn’t want you there so I took you to my room and I drew you some pictures.”
“Fairies?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Sometime around then I had taken to copying the sweetest of the creatures from a book of fairies our mother had given me. Seeing them come out from the nothingness of my white page enraptured Alice.
“Easy to distract me,” she said sombrely.
“I made up some story about how they were filming a movie and Momma was going to be a movie star.”
“And I bought that.”
“Why wouldn’t you. And in the morning you put my fairies up on the fridge.” I squeezed her toe, remembering Alice’s susceptible little face. Alice, the child, was a luminous golden cherub, unsettlingly beautiful, just like her daughter was now. Few adults could pass without stopping to look.
“Oh,” she said softly. A tiny smile flirted across her lips as she recalled something light and winged and sweet.
“What is that stuff anyway?”
She stared into her lap and those papers she’d found took hold of her brain once more. “Exactly. The accident report says her car had a gas can in the front seat. And matches.”
“What accident report?” I snatched the papers from her. “Where did you find these?”
It was Alice who could spot the fairy dancing on the soft bare palm my mother would hold out. Our mother worked hard at teaching me to suspend my disbelief, to show me magic and glory, angels and other winged things. To me all that whimsy stuff was corny and embarrassing. Meanwhile, Alice could tell what colour skirt the invisible fairy wore, the shape of her ears, the length of her hair.
I attempted to argue once. “No, she’s not. She’s wearing overalls.”
The two of them regarded me with mirthful pity, the same expression that so often met my father’s remarks.
Given all this, you would think the fairy book would have gone to Alice. But, seeing the way I preferred to pass tools to my father and observe the arts of plumbing, carpentry and flat-tire repair, Momma must have felt I needed fairies much, much more than Alice did.
In the end though, the functional purpose was really all I ever saw in fairies. I started out by tracing them overtop of the book’s pages, but the figures themselves didn’t seem to be what engaged Alice. It was the magic: from a milky void, came shape and form. Something from nothing.
“It was love that made it come,” my mother would say of my figures.
I would giggle. Lunk-headed and cripple-winged, they hardly resembled the nimble sprites I used as a template. It seemed utterly hare-brained to me, childish and fatuous, but at the same time I couldn’t help but be struck by the purity of their response, the awe with which my mother and Alice held this ordinary activity. Unable to feel it myself, I did my best to generate it in them.
“Mummer!” Dusty spotted my sister outside her room at the end of the long medicinal-smelling hall and yanked free of my hand, charging down the shiny brown linoleum. “Mummer, wummer, bummer!” she crowed and hurled herself headlong into Alice’s belly.
As I followed I glanced around. This was the first time I’d ever been in a mental health facility. I had expected impassive-faced men in two-piece white cotton suits wandering th
e halls with electrodes, waiting to zap the unruly. It looked more like a youth hostel, with its easy-to-clean surfaces and plain, functional waiting area. Beige, brown and a sickly-pink were the dominant colours.
My sister oofed and stared down a moment before letting her hands settle on Dusty’s head. She looked nervous, as though she’d forgotten what to do. “Hey, Chum-bum,” she said. On fawn legs, she unsteadily picked up her girl.
Dusty put a hand on her mother’s cheek and stared into her eyes. Alice kissed her, and Dusty pecked back and then hugged her hard.
Alice watched me over Dusty’s shoulder, her eyes dark and a little spooked. She glanced at the man coming up the corridor toward us. His attire was expensive-casual and I wondered if he was another inmate, but his spine looked too erect for that, his gaze too easy.
“Heyyy,” Alice said softly as I came near, and she reached out to pull me close.
“Hello, Alice,” the man said, passing slowly but not stopping. His smile verged on adoring. “You must be Dusty!” he exclaimed to my niece.
“This is my baby,” Alice said, smiling finally.
“This is ma bebayy,” Dusty repeated in her Southern shtick.
“My shrink,” Alice whispered to me, nodding after the man.
“Do you want to kiss him?” Dusty asked her.
A startled laugh escaped Alice and she looked at her kid. “I missed you,” she said, and like a Labrador retriever, my sister licked her baby’s face.
Dusty shrieked and wiped, then licked back.
“Care to see my abode?” Alice walked us down the hall.
Passing the door next to hers, she jerked her head toward it. “Obsessive-compulsive,” she whispered. “I walked in there by mistake a couple days ago and I think she’s still disinfecting the place.”
I glanced in and saw a young, thin woman, her hair pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, on her hands and knees in the corner, rubbing at the linoleum.
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