The Lost Girls

by Laurie Fox

  “Peter, our story is not some comedy,” I told him. “It’s a tragedy. An especially tragic one.” Once again I sniffled and rubbed my nose, destroying any chance to look fetching.

  “Girl, the way you talk!” Now he was mimicking the black vernacular he’d picked up from listening to a popular sitcom. So he’d visited the States recently—was he seeing other girls?

  “The way I talk isn’t the problem,” I said. “It’s the way I make decisions. Just think, I could’ve stayed on with you and the Boys—where the hell are they, anyway?—and had a perfectly interesting life as some sort of mother. But I don’t know if I want to be a mother. I can hardly take care of myself! If I feel any pull at all, it’s towards you, Peter, and that thing we can never speak of.”

  “Pull? Thing?” He vaulted off the hammock and stuffed his hands in the back pockets of his jeans.

  “Don’t be cute.”

  “Can’t be helped. I am cute.”

  “I mean, girls have needs. There’s a human need for . . . intimacy. Attachment.”

  Peter crouched in the dirt, resting his forehead on his knuckles à la The Thinker. He appeared to be deep in thought—but was that possible for a boy who defined “reflection” as his handsome mirrored visage in the Mermaids’ Lagoon?

  After a stagey pause, he sat down on his haunches. “Wendybird, I, uh, can’t. I just can’t. Not after Jane.”

  A shudder ran up my arm, though it was undetectable beneath my commodious nightgown. What did Jane have to do with us?

  “Grandma Jane?” I asked, quaking.

  “Dead right,” he answered.

  I couldn’t believe I was competing with a phantom girl—a relative no less! Maybe she was still around here, hiding, biding her time. “Is she here, Peter? Is my grandmother . . . on the island?”

  He took inventory of everything in the room—everything but me. “Haven’t seen the bird for ages,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “What was she like, Peter? Was she anything . . . like me?”

  “She’s exactly like you, but even taller and skinnier!” His eyes widened as if reviewing some delicious memory.

  “I meant her inner qualities, her personality.”

  “Oh,” he said, furrowing his brow. “That’s what’s so strange.”

  “What’s strange, what?” I asked.

  “Well on the inside, Jane’s exactly like me. Fearless, resourceful. The girl fancied me so. I, uh, tried to indulge her needs, but it was a nightmare. I mean, I found all the soppy stuff stupid.”

  For the first time in a thousand days, I was voiceless, struck dumb by life’s cruelty. Had Peter experienced s-e-x in all its sweet and playful variations? Had he and Jane revealed themselves to each other, and then entwined their naked bodies until he recognized that he was a part of her—and she a part of him? Had he understood with any gravity that sex was flawed, that you can never truly know someone inside out?

  I looked into Peter’s unblemished face: despite the appearance of those few pert whiskers, he still had that Tiger Beat thing going for him. The guy was Davy Jones cute, Peter Noone cute. If any experience had etched itself onto his creamy features, its mark had promptly vaporized in the Neverland air. Only Peter’s eyes betrayed how lost he really was, abandoned too many years ago to remember anything of substance about his ignoble beginnings. The image of the bars his mother had installed on his nursery window remained just that—a memory he could no longer be certain of—though surely his heart would recall this injustice whenever a new girl he brought to the island decided to return to her family. No, Peter didn’t seem to know sex. If he did, it was one great adventure that hadn’t registered a whit.

  Stock-still on the hammock, I wiped my face with the hem of my nightgown. I no longer felt so completely tragic; in fact, I detected a little objectivity creeping into my feelings for Peter, the sort of distance that might even save one’s life. I turned my back on him and crossed over to a rock that, fortunately for me, was shaped like an easy chair. In crude calligraphy, the letters M + P were carved into the stone, a schoolgirlish heart circling the sentiment. So Mummy had gotten here first! Her slimy snail tracks were everywhere I went on the island. Any youthful proclamation of mine, any poetic expression of my love, must have been considered so redundant by Peter as to be trite. But look what Mummy had done with her adolescent yearnings—turned them into polemic, not poetry! Poor Peter had ended up as fodder for Margaret Darling’s diary, not to mention its unavoidable follow-up, a suite of self-improvement books. Surely I had a chance to do something more literary and enduring with my experience—but what?

  “What’s happening, baby?” Peter drawled. He must have caught Wolfman Jack’s show while squatting on the windowsills of America.

  “Peter, so much is happening I don’t know where to begin.” He raised an eyebrow. “For one thing, I’m married.”

  There followed the kind of silence that can only be filled by birds and insects and the movement of stars. Then, in a contained outburst, Peter kicked up dirt with his work boots and batted a thick ivy hedge with his fists; this before scrambling up a far branch of The Hanging Tree to settle in and stew.

  I seated myself on the chairlike rock and remained on red alert: I didn’t want to miss a thing. Even when the sun took me in its gentle arms and joined forces with a swell of aromatic breezes, I resisted napping. I was far too agitated. The very idea of Peter pissed off at me! But I must have passed out in spite of myself, for I awoke to a sky specked with constellations that were completely unfamiliar. No matter; I was at home among the unfamiliar. I shook my legs and tried to get the blood flowing. I slapped my cheeks and watched as a fine silver dust, perhaps some sort of glitter, purled off. For minutes, I devoted myself to smacking my skin, fascinated by the opalescence I was stirring up.

  At last I spotted a figure moving along the horizon; Peter cast a golemlike shadow under the plump, full Moon: his head appeared swollen, his arms two snakes. As he came around in front of me, I could see that he was toting an enormous basket woven out of straw, twigs, and odd bits of cloth. I hopped off the great rock to meet him. “Hey there, handsome,” I said, hoping to negotiate a truce.

  “Hiya,” he said softly, glancing down at his dirt-caked boots.

  “Listen, there was no right way to tell you,” I said. He continued to study the ground. “I mean, you never showed me the slightest interest and I—”

  “Well, I’m showing you something now,” he said, raising the basket in the air between us. He turned the whole business upside down, and out tumbled scores of buttons. Pearl buttons, tortoise-shell, abalone. Bakelite, brass, and gold. He must have been saving buttons for months, years even.

  “I brought you all the kisses I’ve collected over the last couple of days,” he announced matter-of-factly. The effect was so beautiful I began tearing up again, the glitter on my cheeks illuminating my surprise. “They’re incredible, Peter. I’ve never seen so many buttons in one place!”

  He turned away before I could check out the reflecting pools of his eyes. When finally I was able to find my voice to say “Oh my god, thank you,” Peter was nowhere on, or above, the horizon. He had vanished in the strong light of the Moon. I screamed out his name—“Pee-ter!”—and sifted through the soil with my hands. Like fine jewels, the buttons—Peter’s kisses—sparkled in the moonlight, offering palpable proof of the beauty in this world. “Peter!” I cried again, the buttons I’d just amassed spilling every which way.

  “OH SHIT.” I pounded my head and bit my lip and pulled on my hair. It wasn’t long after this childish display that I found myself curled up on the shower tiles, Freeman shaking his head and wearing his now-habitual mask of chagrin.

  “Sorry, your little friend’s not here. Just me. You ended up with me.” He turned on the water, made sure it was good and hot, slammed the shower door, and walked out without further comment.

  By now, we were beyond arguing the fact of Peter’s existence. Sometimes Freem
an humored my romantic ravings; other times the mere mention of Peter’s name made him tense up. But I never forced him to believe me: I sensed the potential for being deserted was at an all-time high.

  I hauled my pregnant self up, peeled off my soaked clothes, and began to scrub every inch of my dazed body. No one had ever given me so many kisses.

  VIII

  JUST seven months after Freeman and I tied the knot (as tightly as we could under the circumstances), our baby girl arrived. All too quickly it dawned on me: it would be my duty to inform her about the ways of women, to help her distinguish between kisses and buttons. It would be my mission and my burden, and, if I could remember how, it would be my pleasure.

  As is expected of every Darling female, no matter how book smart, I learned about women’s wiles in The Neverland. More precisely, I learned about fairies, who seem to have appropriated the worst qualities of my sex and made a go of it. This species lives openly on the island, though it’s true the fairy population isn’t what it used to be, given the great number of skeptics who prevail nowadays. As one might expect, fairies are comely creatures and whimsical to a fault. But anyone who thinks it’s a party to live among fairies should beware: they are fiercely loyal and fiercely jealous, resentful, bitter beings!

  God knows, I’m not a woman-hater. But these “fairies” give fairies a bad name. They hitch themselves slavishly to the human male and it’s all over—you can count on their jealousy to undo any progress you’ve made in the relationship department. One can always try to befriend a fairy, reason with a fairy, even fly alongside a fairy (though I don’t recommend the last: their baroque loop-de-loops and flamboyant figure eights will have you crashing in no time).

  The sprites love to triangulate and manipulate; they thrive on one-upmanship and will expose your ineptitude at every turn. While your indignation at being outmaneuvered will make you long to squish the creatures as if they were gnats, you will be forced to shelve this idea. Before you ever get the opportunity to swat one, a nymph will limp over to your beau and complain about your bullying her. “No way!” you will cry, and she’ll answer “Yes, way!” or something to that effect, but more literary. Remember: fairies excel at everything, especially proper English.

  So, what is at the root of the fairies’ taste for rivalry? Quite literally roots—white snakeroot. Fairies nibble at clusters of this brilliant white flower, which everyone knows causes tremors. Curiously it also triggers a rabid suspicion in fairies. An ethnobotanist would have a field day with the chemistry of this plant! Still, let’s not discount the fairies’ fabled origin as the source of their spitefulness. J. M. Barrie speculated that fairies came to life when the world’s first baby’s scream matured into a melodious giggle, and this single laugh broke into thousands of funny sound bites that evolved into light-emitting pixies (don’t ask me how, the New Physics is quite daunting). The mites soon found themselves whizzing about The Neverland with no natural enemies—until one of the Lost Boys lured a girl from the Mainland onto the premises, and lo, the fireworks began. It is said the boy’s patron fairy went ballistic as she watched the human skillfully romancing her guy; without a shot fired, the fairy had fallen from number one on his list to a devastating number two. Her humiliation complete and broadcast ’round the island, the fairy’s bright twinkle soon dwindled to a dull, diffuse luster, not unlike that of a cheap night-light. In short order, human girls became the fairies’ foes—not even the nymphs’ contempt for sea dogs could match their antipathy for girls.

  Now, competition for a man’s attention is an old, sorry story. I know of what I speak: I’m still flitting around Daddy vying for his. And with so few girls finding true love these days, you’d think the fairies would lay off our case. I mean, couldn’t we sympathize with each other about being dismissed so abruptly or just plain forgotten? With children turning their attention to video games—taking their noses out of books and pointing them at computer screens—the fairies’ days are numbered. They need a quorum of believers to survive.

  Finding myself in my forties and still adrift, I admit that I feel the same way: if I can encourage you to believe in me, perhaps you’ll stick around. If I can convince me to believe in me, perhaps I’ll finish this story.

  My first brush with females of the fairy persuasion occurred on my second day in The Neverland. Just minutes after Peter had given me a tour of the island—a rather hurried, perfunctory expedition that shared much in common with the Universal Studios tour I once took with Daddy (“You got your pirates, you got your Indians, and then there’s me!”)—I was assaulted by a pest no larger than Great-Nana’s cocktail ring. And just as gaudy. It (she?) appeared to be swathed in a silver-sequined bathing suit that was positively blinding in the glossy sunlight. Mummy always said that a little Bob Mackie goes a long way.

  “Wendy, meet Cher,” Peter announced with swollen pride.

  The tacky bug buzzed around me like a Russian MiG. The rhythmic batting of her wings against my cheeks made my skin itch, but her sparkly aura cast a certifiable spell. I was agog in her presence. Surely, fairies come with a load of apocryphal baggage: their ability to guide lost persons is said to rival bloodhounds’; their charitable acts have been written down indelibly in the great children’s books; their ethereal attire has inspired countless Halloween costumes and froufrou prom dresses. Indeed, what young girl hasn’t prayed for a fairy to help her out of a jam, to lead her out of the woods and into the arms of a happier family? Despite the warning bells that Great-Nana had sounded, I still expected fairies, at their core, to be good-hearted.

  I wish I could tell you that I held my own against the sprite. Instead I fell backwards and tumbled over a bottlebrush bush that had no business being there. This made the fairy twitter so hard she practically snorted, a trait unbecoming in any species.

  As Nana had predicted, Peter, who happened to be at my side, sided with the fairy when it came to enjoying my misfortune; he hooted and whistled as if I were a circus act. The fairy and Peter were in cahoots, too, when the nymph settled on my nose for a prolonged, if agitated, nap. Peter asked me to take this as a compliment but I knew better. Plus, my nose itched. The irritation became so intense I caved in to baser desires: I flailed at the pest with a bottle-brush branch, swatting and screaming, “Off, you little creep!”

  In response, she bit me hard on my right nostril and took a fair-sized chomp out of my right earlobe, all the while issuing dainty bell sounds that might have been considered “pretty” under other circumstances.

  Ever so helpful, Peter was quick to translate: “Cher says she’s sorry—”

  “Oh, well. I guess I can accept that,” I said, rubbing my nose with my free hand.

  “Let me finish,” Peter continued, winking at the fairy; she’d taken refuge under a biggish grape leaf.

  “Cher says she’s sorry, but your nose was simply too tempting—it’s constructed so generously and all.” My jaw dropped. “She adds: ‘I’ll wager you could land a B-52 on that thing.’ ”

  “Well,” I said, massaging a tender earlobe, “you tell the bug that at least I have character. I mean, I can’t even see her nose. How much character could her face possibly have? You can’t even make out its features.”

  The fairy tinkle-screeched, if there is such a sound—like arpeggios of the highest notes on the piano, but worse.

  As before, Peter translated: “Cher says, ‘Ha!’ ”

  “Ha?”

  “She finds your fixation with character priceless,” he explained. “She says that character can’t hold a candle to beauty. That character never lasts.”

  “What?!” I shrieked.

  “That character never—”

  “I heard it. I just can’t believe it. Where did she grow up? In a cave?”

  By now the tinkling was so high-pitched I expected every mutt on the island to come running.

  “Yes. The answer is yes,” Peter interpreted. “Fairies protect themselves from inclement weather by making their homes in
caves, you know.”

  “Oh, I give up,” I huffed, still brandishing the bottlebrush. But there was no use in poking the fairy in the eye when I couldn’t find an eye. “Peter,” I sniveled, “why does she hate me so much?”

  “She says you smell of devotion. That, in the vernacular, you stink. Remember, Wendybird, she’s protective of me and the Boys.”

  “Well, isn’t devotion a virtue?”

  More insane tinkling; even Peter covered his ears.

  “Give it to me straight,” I begged as the racket subsided.

  “Uh, you’re not going to like this. Cher called you a busybody, a meddler, the worst kind of wench. A tall, skinny girl whose fat heart gets in the way of her wings.”

  “I don’t have wings,” I protested.

  “‘Precisely,’ she says.”

  Peter took my militant swing at the fairy as a strong exit cue. With impressive foot- and wing-work, the two retreated to another part of the forest, leaving me alone with a sore nose and a confusion about women that, I’m loath to admit, hasn’t cleared up to this day.

  * *

  AS if fairies weren’t role models enough, I also learned about women from mermaids, those alleged sirens of the deep. They’re deep, yes, but not profound in the way one would hope. They don’t read and they’re not that self-aware or emotionally complex. It’s intuition that keeps them afloat.

  Through the years, mermaids have acquired a bad reputation, but they’re really not so awful. True, they have a gift for seduction—but should they have to apologize for their beauty? They could try to be a little more conscious of the effect they have. Mermaids—as a rule—give such little thought to their actions, claiming to be instinctive creatures and not responsible for men’s myopia. That may well be so, but it doesn’t set the stage for healthy relationships. (The sailors don’t usually drown, you know; they’re just too humiliated to report back to their captains. After being lured from their boats and reported dead or AWOL, it’s simply too embarrassing for them to show up on deck with those lovesick looks and telltale love bites.)