by Terry Reed
And then I have to admit I went on a total roll, on and on, recounting for Mickey every image of abject poverty I could remember, until I was nearly pleading with her that it had to be stopped, and since nobody else had done it, it was up to us for sure.
• • •
When I looked to Mickey, I was surprised she wasn’t working on herself anymore. She was staring at me through the mirror with her mouth all puckered, a tube of red lipstick poised in hand. She had so many coats on already, her lips weren’t even close to red. Like old roses, they were almost black. “Mickey? What color is that?”
She glanced at the label on the bottom. “Chanel. Fatal Red.”
“You better stop. It’s too dark. You’ll look dead.”
She dropped the tube in her makeup kit. “So does this poverty thing mean you don’t want me to make you over?”
“Oh. No, but, see, I have this theory, but I just can’t remember what it is. It’s designed to make everyone rich. If it works, just imagine.”
“Well,” she said, “then maybe you should think about it some more. Jo’s home thinking. You’re here thinking. You guys are unbelievable. But go. Go ahead. Think.”
I shrugged and took her advice. I lay there for a while, very still. It was the first time there had been silence between us all day, but I figured it was for a higher purpose and all. But no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember how to make everyone rich. Mickey was patient, she didn’t say anything. I mean all she said was “You know, pearls don’t really go with a tee shirt.”
But you wouldn’t believe it. Something when she said that. I suddenly sat up, feeling lucky. “Hey, Mick? You know the death wish?”
Mickey grabbed her eyelash curler, and applied the metal instrument to her right eye, the left glued to me through the mirror.
“Well, the death wish is this thing that everyone has, that they wish they could die. But just to see what it’s like. But, it’s just curiosity. But my question is, if everybody has a death wish because they’re curious, how do we know everybody isn’t dying … of curiosity?”
She had begun with an eyebrow brush in furious strokes, so I excused her from answering.
“So listen. What if the most uncurious person in the world comes along? I mean they’re very curious on the one hand, but not at all on the other. They’re curious only about life. And it’s a woman. And she’s a teacher, and she starts a school, called a Lack of Curiosity School, to teach how not to have the death wish. And she teaches all the little children. She channels and guides all their little curiosity. She totally fills them up with it, but only on the one hand, see, and not on the other. Because of her, there is no space left in the children’s minds for the death wish. Then maybe a whole generation would grow up without the death wish, and maybe, if it worked, nobody would ever die!”
I lay back down to think it through. “But that’s probably unrealistic. Because everyone has to die.”
I rolled back over and looked at Mickey. She was vigorously removing makeup with a huge wad of cotton balls.
“But,” I continued, “that’s just the theory. Like in science class, we simply extract the method. We invent schools just like the lack of curiosity schools, but not to end death, to end poverty.”
She winged the whole wet wad of cotton balls into my brass wastebasket. It sounded like a gun.
“People have to die, but they don’t have to be poor.”
Now she was clawing at the lid to a fat, flat jar, then banging it on the edge of the vanity table, then slamming it with the handle of my antique silver brush. I was about to ask if she’d like me to try, when, with a grunt, she finally got it open.
She began to smear clay masque all over her face.
“And at these new Lack of Curiosity Schools we invent? Just like we could have done with the death wish if everybody didn’t have to die, we just eradicate the thought of poverty from the children’s minds, and replace it with the thought of wealth. The words poverty and hunger no longer exist. There is no way to say to them. There is no way to think them. Then there could never be a hungry person in this world, because poverty and hunger would have become unthinkable!”
There. I blinked up at the ceiling, to see if that was finally it.
But no, it wasn’t. Not the brilliant solution I had arrived at earlier. That, the real solution, perhaps it was gone forever. But I had thought of it. I know I had. But the mailman. I shook my head and closed my eyes, idly playing with my pearls, rudely forgetting my friend at the mirror.
When I came to, she was hanging over me. She had covered her whole face, except for her black lips and one black eyebrow, with the wet clay masque and she was as gray as a ghost. But her eyes. Was it fear? Yes, plus it was fury, like to the hundredth power. “Mickey,” I whispered, stunned at the transformation. She didn’t look like an After anymore. She looked worse than the worst Before. “What happened?”
“Lack of Curiosity Schools?” she said, the one eyebrow twitching wildly, cracking the forehead of her masque.
I didn’t dare defend them. They had really ticked her off.
“So far we’ve got you on crutches, writing a letter to your dead grandparent, and doing something I can’t even explain to poor people. Are you on painkillers?”
I couldn’t even answer, because it was riveting, fascinating, what was happening to Mickey’s face as the masque on it dried. Her eyelids began to droop, her lips began to curl, her right eyebrow arched up, and then her whole face fixed, like a photograph just done developing. And then, I don’t know, she seemed set, as in for life.
She said one last thing, though, before that happened. “Would you do me a favor. Boyce?”
I nodded.
“Would you stop talking about poor people?” I nodded.
“And can I give you a little advice?”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t even look at the masque anymore. “This is not the way to get made over.”
Soon after Mickey Knight went peeling down the driveway in the re-hot-wired red MG, I took my crutch and went to Cabot’s room and poked her with it and woke her up. That is, I didn’t exactly wake her, because I could see her eyes were half-open beneath her blond hair, which always looked perfectly brushed, even when she was lying in bed under her canopy. Now it was spilled all over the pillow, shimmering like anything in the moonlight from the window. “Sis,” I said. “Wake up.”
“I am up. Did that friend of yours leave?”
“Guess what?”
“Did she drive herself home?”
I wrapped my free arm around the post at the end of the bed. “Dad got an envelope back in the mail.”
“Oh. How come her parents let her have that car? She’s only fourteen years old.”
“It’s hot-wired. They’re always away.”
“She looks about forty though. I mean, what do you say all day to a forty-year-old?”
“Are you going to listen?”
“You won’t tell me? Oh, I guess I’m not as cool.”
I almost said she was too cool, but caught myself in time. You start telling your sister she’s cool, and she immediately starts thinking she’s cooler than you are. “Listen, Dad wrote a story or something, and it got rejected.”
Cabot sat up, instantly forgiving me for Mickey Knight. “Wow”
“Andrew John the mailman brought it back. And he writes stuff too. And he gets rejected. He’s a poet or something. You should have heard him in the hall.”
Cabot said, “Well, I think Dad’s smart.”
I said, “Well, I think he’s smarter than Andrew John.”
I hopped closer with my crutch and sat on the edge of the bed. “Cabbie? Do you think it’s possible to end poverty once and for all?”
She looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d frightened her.
“Don’t be scared. Just yes or no.”
She hugged her knees to her chin, forming a white mountain out of her eiderdown. “I’m not sure, but maybe. Bu
t I don’t think so. Not completely. No.”
“Okay. So if you knew that in your heart, you’d never mention it, right?”
“Uh, I guess so.”
“See. That’s like Dad.”
Her face tightened up with the effort of concentration. “But I don’t get it, though.”
“People who don’t talk much … maybe they do it because of injustices or something. Because you really can’t do anything about injustices. A smart person like Dad knows it’s better just to keep your mouth shut.”
“Really?” She started thinking about it, rocking back and forth.
“Yes. In his heart, he knows it doesn’t make a difference what anyone says. Remember? Every picture tells a story. Maybe the story doesn’t tell the story.”
Cabot asked uncertainly, “But what’s that got to do with poverty? And Andrew John bringing that envelope back?”
I said, “See?” But the truth is, I didn’t have a clue anymore. I was tired, I was injured, I had thought all day long beyond my abilities and I now I couldn’t remember any of it anymore. What I might have said was that there are some things that were never intended to be expressed. Certain visions, dreams, flashes of understanding, the fleeting hold we sometimes have on knowledge or compassion, are simply not transferable. But I didn’t know how to say that, and realized now it was useless to try.
Cabot fell back on her pillows, staring sadly up at her huge canopy, which Dad liked to call the other roof over her head. I reached for my crutch, feeling sorry that all day long, I had more or less promised something I hadn’t been able to deliver. Cabot watched me get to my feet. “So you think that explains everything? Dad included?”
She was really trying to understand it, you could tell. But for sure, neither of us knew what we were talking about anymore. “Definitely.”
“Does she have anything to do with this?”
“Who?” I asked innocently.
“Your old friend.”
“Of course not.”
“In that case, I’ll think about it.”
“No. Don’t.”
Her head rose from the pillow. “Don’t? What is this?”
“It’ll only hurt you in the end. It’s hopeless.”
She sat full up, in protest. “Hey, it’s not hopeless. It’s just hard.” Then she fell back down.
Hard. It was just a kind word, but I was awfully happy to hear it anyway.
I started for the door. “Well, good night, sis.” I liked calling her “sis,” don’t ask me why. “I have to go finish a letter now.”
I turned and stood in her door a second. She looked so nice lying there, I heard myself saying, “You know, you look a lot like the princess and the pea.”
“Oh. Thank you, if that’s good.”
“It’s good. It’s very good.”
“I guess it depends whether it’s the princess, or the pea.”
“The princess wouldn’t have been anything without the pea. But you look more like the princess.” I left her little suite of rooms and limped sleepily down the hall. Then I heard her call “Zu!” and turned around.
I leaned against her doorway.
She was sitting up again, all awake again. “Just so you know. Now that I’m a princess, I think I’ve changed my mind. I think you could end it, if you really were a princess, and were really rich, and very kind.”
Knowing what I had only briefly known of hope, and would never again attempt to convey, a congenial silence like Dad’s seemed the only generous response. So in keeping with that, I murmured, but strictly to myself, “Good night, sweet princess.”
THIRTEEN
I never really asked her if she lost her job or resigned it, but on Fridays by now, Cabot too was always early for school. So we often ran across each other in the empty halls. Cabot also went to the Academy, but she was one year behind.
Anyway, one Friday, “Hi, sis,” I said.
“Hi, Zuzu.”
Nothing to write home about. We both walked on. But a moment later, the girl who had been sitting ahead of me in Assembly since we were four-year-olds in preschool came up behind me at my locker. “Boyce?” she said, very softly, as if being careful not to make me shy like a horse would if you came up too quick from behind.
I still shied anyway. I knew who it was, and I whirled around. “Yes, Mary Parker?”
There were several reasons to fear this girl. She was brilliant, and her father was a bus driver. She was the smartest, the poorest, and probably the coolest girl in school. Actually, she was too cool for school. Except she didn’t get credit for it, because her father was this bus driver.
“Oh,” she said, “nothing.”
“Oh,” I said, “okay. Cool.”
She was going to go now. Then her famous curiosity got the better of her. “But why did your sister just call you that name?”
She quickly looked both ways down the empty hall, as if she were already sorry she’d brought the whole thing up, and was going to go now. We had sometimes talked in class, but we had never, in ten whole years, talked like this in the hall. “But if you don’t want to tell me, I’ll just … leave.”
Not at all. Mary Parker, school genius, had just asked me a question I knew I could answer. “It’s my name. I mean, my nickname, I guess.”
She brightened up a little. “Z-u-z-u, right? I can’t think of an alternate spelling.”
The truth of it is, I didn’t know. But I wasn’t about to tell the school genius I couldn’t spell my own name. “I guess my father thought the whole thing up.”
“Did he say where he got it, though? I just want to make sure.”
“Uh, I think from some movie?”
Her face broke into a smile, which didn’t happen to this particular girl all that often. “I had a feeling when I heard it.”
Then she kind of packed up, moving her books from one arm to the other like she was getting all packed and ready to go. Instead of good-bye or see ya, or actually just going though, she added, “Not a bad namesake for you.”
It was kind of understood, once I agreed this was so, she would go. All I had to do was just nod confidently and it was over. But I couldn’t, see, because I had no idea who this Zuzu person my father nicknamed me after even was. Now I felt really dumb for never asking my father. Like I had the intellectual curiosity of a dormouse, whatever that was.
Mary Parker said, “Zuzu was Jimmy Stewart’s little girl in It’s a Wonderful Life. I mean, that’s the reference, right?” But she already knew I had no idea what she was talking about.
I nodded confidently. I thought she would go.
“I sure hope what happened to her father doesn’t happen to yours.”
“What happened to hers again?” But I was thinking, Come on, what so tragic could have happened to a man in a movie called It’s a Wonderful Life.
Mary Parker studied me, her eyes like arches within arches, her thin brown brows raised, an expression that gave you the feeling she had just made a rather earthshaking scientific discovery about you, but was taking it all in stride. When we were little girls in lower school, she’d once turned around and asked me if I didn’t find the size of our desks “somewhat ironic.” And didn’t I agree that the school should have either smaller desks or bigger teachers? With the same detached concern, she now asked, “You mean you’ve never seen the movie?”
“I must have missed it.”
Mary Parker blinked. “But it’s a classic. It’s on every Christmas. Like ten times every Christmas. You missed it a lot. But you know the story, right?”
“Is Santa Claus in it?”
“Okay, the protagonist, George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart? The actor?”
It was a little annoying, her having to point that out, that the guy playing the part was an actor. “Yeah?”
“Well, he gives up on his dream of leaving this small town he lives in and he gets married and has a lot of kids and takes over the building-and-loan association but then he loses everybody’s mon
ey and then he tries to kill himself.”
“That’s a wonderful life?”
She shrugged. “It has a happy ending.”
“Like, how happy?”
Mary Parker looked up the hallway. “You know. All happy endings are alike. Just like happy families.”
No, I didn’t know that. I looked up the hallway with her, but in the opposite way. People were arriving for school. Mickey Knight was coming in the door with the club; Jo came right behind with another. Jo was so beautiful, she got her own club. I glanced sideways at Mary Parker. “So the guy doesn’t die?”
“George Bailey? No way.”
I didn’t tell her that “George” was my father’s name too. But I was already planning on telling Cabot. This was a new development.
“Anyway, your father must know movies, to nickname you after Zuzu. Zuzu was quite a character.”
“Was she smart?”
Mary Parker winced. “Well, she was young.”
“I see”
“Actually, she wasn’t that bright at all, for a three-year-old. She had this single red rose she got, and when the bloom drooped on the stem, she wanted her father to Scotch tape it back together. Like then it would live. Pretty pathetic, actually.”
“She got a single red rose?”
“The point is, Zuzu was sort of a moron. But let’s just call her a little loser.”
All right already. I started moving books around on the shelf of my locker. The two clubs passed by, but they didn’t pick me up today because I was busy talking to Mary Parker. I was kind of ticked off at my father, to nickname me after some three-year-old moron in a movie. I was beginning to wish I had Mary Parker’s father. He sounded like a smart guy, just naming her “Mary.” Then she turns out to be this genius and all.
The clubs turned and went into class. Mary Parker was still there at my locker. I was still moving my books around, like it was rather important that they be moved around today, and not only today, but right now, immediately, and without further delay. I kept wishing I could ask Mary Parker a few things about her father. But I couldn’t even think of asking Mary Parker about her father, seeing as her father was this bus driver. “You going in?” I asked instead, real casual, clicking my locker shut.