“Meerrroooowwwww!” Merle had yelled. It was three years before, a springlike day. I was stretched out in the sun, thinking about Angela and Ferris Beach. The memory was harder and harder to grasp those days, Angela’s face coming and going, distant and then near, much like the shapes and colors on my eyelids as I faced the sun, my schoolbooks tossed to one side, my old tabby cat, Oliver, rubbing his nose against my cheek with a strong wheeze of a purr. We were both alarmed by the loud catcall. I sat up suddenly, and poor Oliver clawed my chest and then took off under the house where it was safe. I knew it was Merle’s voice, but all I saw at the far end of my yard was the thick hedge of abelia, the small white blossoms already appearing with the approach of spring, and then the tangled overgrowth, strawlike weeds and briars that tumbled around old discarded boards and pieces of chicken wire which did not belong to us. I felt my heart beating faster and faster as I waited, almost holding my breath, and then slowly I got to my knees, began gathering my books.
“Yeah! I see London, I see France!” I looked that time to see a flash of bright yellow-white hair and pale skin. Once a boy at school said that the Huckses were albinos, and when Merle got wind of that, he beat the boy in the stomach until the principal came to break it up and sent Merle home for the day. I had never had the nerve to speak to Merle, tried not to look at him, and if I felt I had to look at him, made certain I did it while he wasn’t looking. And there were times when I felt that I did have to look; there was no good reason except that I had to. It was like I imagined poor Lot’s wife must have felt when she had to get just one more glimpse of Sodom; she had no good reason for looking back except that she was able to swing her head around and do it. I felt sometimes I had to look just to make sure he didn’t have pink eyes as a real albino would have.
“Yeah! I see London, I see France, I see old puss face’s underpants.” His hair was unusually clean that day as if he had just taken a shower or gone swimming; instead of being slicked back, it looked like pale thistles, like a fluffy baby duck’s down. There was no shaking to Merle’s voice by then. He still got called out of class once a week to go out to the little mobile classroom where the speech teacher stayed, and we all assumed that it was because of these visits that his voice was so clear. It was rumored that he also met with the guidance counselor every single week, but nobody had seen him come out of the counselor’s trailer and nobody dared to ask.
“Meeerrroooowwww.” I heard a laugh and leaves shredding from branches as he slid from his perch and landed just within vision on the other side of the hedge. “What’s your problem?” he yelled, but I ignored him and went quietly up the back steps. I prayed that Oliver would stay put, up in the cool shadiness beneath the house. I had such a clear picture in my mind of the cat that was supposedly destroyed by a firecracker that it made me jerk to think of it, my hand automatically reaching and covering my cheek.
“Why you hiding your face?” Now he had disappeared behind the bushes, and I could only hear the faint rustle of his feet and and knees in the brambles. “Trying to hold in the ugly?”
“Go away!” I yelled, my voice high and foreign-sounding as I crawled up under the house where the cat had gone. Then I just sat there for the longest time, leaning against the high brick pillar, that damp musty smell comforting in that it reminded me of all those rainy afternoons or hot summer days when Misty and I had played under there, drawing Barbie-house floor plans in the dirt. I had one day taken a red Magic Marker and very carefully colored in my Twist-n-Turn Barbie’s left cheek, thinking it would make me feel better, but when I looked at her, I hated her. I knew she would never be touched again. I pulled her head off and threw it out into the kudzu.
“Buttermilk might make your place go away,” Misty had offered. She was sincere and yet her choice of words—your place, like a scab or some unfortunate accident—stayed with me. “I bet it’ll be gone by the time we’re in high school,” she told me, her eyes the palest blue I’d ever seen, her skin china-white without a trace of the freckles like on her legs and arms. “And I’m going to be thin and glamorous.” Her plumpness and thin fuzzy hair were only reminders of my own imperfections and still I clung to Misty every step of the way. She didn’t seem bothered by her own appearance; if she ever did cry about the way she looked, she did it behind a closed door at 202 Wilkins Road, where no one could see or hear her. I sat under the house feeling trapped, wishing that Misty would come over, that I’d hear her familiar steps on our long gravel drive.
“Just make me,” Merle yelled, and I spied pale yellow hair as he crawled up closer to our hedge, but I didn’t move from my spot under the house. I scooped Oliver up in my arms and held him there, my breath warm in his fur. “I know you’re under there! Hey!” He stood then, just his eyes and the top of his head showing over the bushes. He waited for what seemed like forever. “Hey girl, I know you can hear me!” His words were slow and deliberate. If Misty had been there she would have asked him if that’s what he learned in the mobile speech trailer. “Do you hear me?”
“I don’t know if she does.” It was my father I could hear his footsteps just over my head as he crossed the back porch and stepped out onto the steps, the screendoor whining and held open. “But I sure do hear you and I can’t hear myself think.” I saw Merle’s head disappear and then there was that same scrambling sound as when he’d crept up to the hedge. “I think he’s gone now, Kitty,” he said. “Where are you? Under the house?” I heard him shuffling there, waiting, and I knew exactly what he looked like: coarse hair disheveled, pants baggy and wrinkled, faded bedroom shoes, but his white dress shirt with sleeves rolled three-quarter would look like it had just been starched and pressed. Even my mother pondered this phenomenon, this perfectly clean creased shirt like the eye of a storm, still and untouched. “Under the house,” I heard him say and the door creaked shut over my head. “Of course, the body is under the house. It came in a roll of insulation the day after the murder. Kitty? Kitty, are you down there?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come on out, honey. I think there was a boy over here to see you.” By then he had let the door slam shut, and he had gone through the side porch mumbling his nutty plot. I got to the top step just in time to see the back of his perfect shirt and to hear him trying to decide how many yards of insulation should have come on the roll.
“MMMMeeeeoooowwwwwww.” The leaves rustled again but I didn’t turn around. I ran inside, ignoring my father’s request that I roll him up in our living room rug and see if I could drag it.
That was three years ago. Now, I saw Merle run from the glare of the headlights and into the darkness of his yard and I knew the tea was over. I knew that within minutes Mama would be home and calling for me to come downstairs to set the table. I twisted the knob of my transistor, but it was still too early to pick up anything far from Fulton. The rain was pouring again, making my clothes and hair damp from the mist. Across the field, through the lighted window of the Huckses’ house, I glimpsed Merle’s pale yellow hair. He stood with his back to the window, and then his mother was there, placing her hand on the top of his head. I still caught myself thinking, from time to time, about when he called me ugly and trapped me under my own house. I was somehow surprised by the fact that he had spent so much time just trying to bother me. I had been afraid to go to school the next day but it turned out he just looked at me and grinned, handed me a piece of candy, an old hard-as-a-brick Mary Jane, all flat from being in his nasty back pocket. When he was safely out of view, I promptly threw that candy to the ground, and hoped that no one, not even Misty, had seen.
The phone rang, breaking the quiet rhythm of the rain hitting the roof, and I watched Merle move away from his mother and the window and disappear beyond my view. “Katie?” My mother’s voice carried from where I knew she was standing at the head of the stairs. “Misty is on the phone, and then you need to come set the table.” Now the window was empty, just the stark white of the wall showing through. Misty was calling to say tha
t she couldn’t talk on the phone that night, that her family and Betty and Gene Files were going to see Airport over in Clemmonsville. “I would’ve invited you,” she said. “But there’s not room enough in the car. That brat kid of theirs is going, too. They say he’ll sleep in a dark theater. Oh brother. Well, I gotta go. Listen to NightBeat and see if they play a song for anybody we know.” She paused, and I could hear lots of voices in the background, Mo’s laughter. And then she whispered, “You are not going to believe how purple this carpet is. Oh man, it is purple”
At the Halloween carnival that fall, Misty draped herself in the carpet remnants and went as the One-Eyed Purple People Eater, and I painted my face red and went as the devil. R.W. Quincy and Dexter Hucks came as themselves, which everyone agreed was the worst they could be. Todd Bridger, who came as Ironside, won first prize; if he had not borrowed his grandmother’s wheelchair he wouldn’t have stood a chance. “Originality is nine-tenths of the prize,” Mrs. Poole said and grinned at Todd, handing him a five-dollar gift certificate to The Record Bar in the Clemmonsville mall. “And though you look nothing like Raymond Burr, you are original.”
“And I’m not?” Misty whispered to me, just as Merle Hucks, dressed in white coat with a round piece of aluminum foil stuck to his forehead, passed. We weren’t sure if he was supposed to be Marcus Welby or a spaceman and no one asked. After the judging, he took the circle and coat off anyway and spent the rest of the night keeping apples in the bobbing tubs and loading empty Coca-Cola crates in the corner of the cafeteria. He seemed oblivious to everything going on around him, even when R.W. Quincy stole Todd’s wheelchair and pushed Dexter around and around before running him into the wall. Todd was standing there laughing nervously, acting like he wasn’t worried about anything, though it was clear that he was. Without his wheelchair, he was just a little guy in a suit, and in that moment as fear and lack of courage drained his face, he looked as insignificant as I always felt at these functions. I looked for Misty so I could tell her about this realization and spotted orange hair and purple shag at the other end of the cafeteria, where she was cheering and clapping for more stunts from R.W. and Dexter. Mrs. Poole’s hand was moving like crazy in her purse, and it was just a matter of minutes before she ran to the teachers’ lounge where she could sit primly like a lady and suck on a Salem, leaving my mother in a state of bewilderment as she attempted to oversee the carnival and explain to R.W. Quincy why he had to stop doing wheelies in the wheelchair.
Five
“It’s a birthmark,” my mother said over and over. “Lots of people have birthmarks.” She had said it so many times that by the time I was in the eighth grade, those words made me sick. I always wanted to say that if it was a birthmark it must be her fault, in the same way she was to blame for my legs getting so long that I was a head taller than almost every boy in my class. I wanted to tell her that I’d rather take my chances drawing a mother out of a hat, that I wished Mo Rhodes would adopt me, wished I was an orphan like Angela.
“Think of the birthmarks some people have,” she said, holding my shoulders so that I had no choice but to look at her. “Some people are born without limbs. Some people are born without brains.” I hated her right then. I hated her for not simply saying, “I’m sorry. I am truly sorry that this bothers you.” But no, instead she wanted me to think of everything in the world which was worse, famine and earthquakes, the young black woman recently murdered in the county, her last breath choked and broken by a man’s sock twisted around her neck. There are some children who cannot dress or feed themselves; there are people who have no homes and wrap their legs in Saran Wrap to keep warm. There was no end to the heartache and sadness of the world, and again I wanted to drag up Angela, young girl without a mother, shunned by her only living relatives.
“Well, let’s make her feel real good,” my father said and stepped into the kitchen. “Let me go get the paper and we’ll read the police report aloud to one another. Even better, let’s watch the local news.” I stepped away from my mother, hand on my face, and watched her spine go more and more rigid with every word he said. There had been something going on anyway, something to do with one of his trips to Ferris Beach, something about him loaning her money again, and this was the outlet they had been looking for, a channel for this anger that hung in the air like fog. If I asked why or whats wrong, they pretended not to hear, immediately becoming civil to one another and discussing their days as if they were Ward and June Cleaver.
“And after dinner how about this?” He clinked the ice cubes around and around in his glass. “Let’s ride down to the hospital emergency room and sit there in the lobby for awhile, you know.” He chuckled and pinched her hip softly, but she pulled away, dishtowel raised as if she meant to swat his face. “Yeah, let’s see the sights.” I laughed with him, relieved momentarily by his playful pinch of her hip. Things could go either way; we were straddling the wire, there in the kitchen, where my mother’s cornucopia spilled colorful fruit and vegetables onto the table. In less than a week we would be sitting there, the three of us plus those without relatives like Mrs. Poole, naming what we were thankful for. I would be thankful if the conversation at hand just passed overhead like a cloud, but I knew it would only take a few more exchanges before she would go silent and he would return to his study and leather recliner, which she had ordered for a birthday surprise and he had thanked her by absentmindedly sticking the tip of his cartridge pen in and out of the arm. He would play his scratched-up old Al Jolson and Judy Garland albums that bumped and gristled under the hard prehistoric needle of the ancient hi-fi. He would play their Swanees back to back as if it were a contest or that he HAD to decide which version he preferred. It became difficult not to fall into the rhythm if I was walking or washing dishes or just swinging my leg. Sometimes “Swanee” lingered in my head as I tried to sleep, gradually fading like the gray glow around a TV turned off in a dark room. I couldn’t help but wonder why he loved that song so, what in the world he thought about as it played over and over.
A birthmark. I was at an age when, instead of getting easier, it was getting harder to deal with. It was my weak spot, like a bruise, and it seemed people knew that was the place to seek. Misty and I had been on a church retreat just the weekend before and had had a horrible time. I don’t know why we went to begin with except maybe for lack of something better to do. It was at Lake Merriman, and we hadn’t even gotten to walk along and throw rocks in the water because of all the activities, like making big felt banners that said PAX or had big white doves carrying olive branches, or thinking of rock songs that could be sung in the sanctuary with the accompaniment of an electric guitar; it was a time when controversy was in and so the more old people like Mrs. Poole you could distress during a service, the better. Jesus Christ Superstar wasn’t good enough; these people were set on writing their own opera that weekend. The climax came when Jesus went up to the Woman at the Well and sang “Hello, I Love You”; somehow it didn’t seem to be what either Jesus or Jim Morrison had intended.
“Agape” I had been renamed, because we all had to give each other new names for the retreat. The girl, newly named Charity, had studied me a long time before coming up with it, ignoring a whispered suggestion that I be named Cain. Cain, with his face marked like a cow branded for slaughter. The suggestion came from R.W. Quincy, who had read to page three of the Old Testament and had retained this bit of information since it had just filtered in that very morning. “She’s a marked woman,” he said and elbowed Merle Hucks, laughing.
“That means God’s love,” Charity said. She was real plain and quiet until she took her role as the Woman at the Well and then she was in with the best of them, clapping and singing, responding to “Hello, I Love You” with “Bend Me, Shape Me,” which she said was a modern version of “Have Thine Own Way.” You were supposed to wear your new “reborn” name on a tag all weekend; I’d hear “Agape” and I wouldn’t even turn around until tapped on the shoulder. For one thing instead of
putting that accent on the end, I simply heard the word as a-gape, like my mouth was most of the time, and that was because of the frightening proclamations I heard around me: “Jesus is coming. He is coming soon.”
“To which theater?” R.W. Quincy asked. “The Cape Fear or the Clemmonsville?” Misty and I laughed, until we realized that it was just as bad to be on R.W.’s side as that of the girl who had given me my name and the others who spoke in scripture all day long. The retreat cost fifteen dollars for the weekend, and everybody knew that R.W. and Merle Hucks were there on donation gifts from Mrs. Poole’s Sunday school class. Dexter was not there because he was with his biker club, which R.W. said he was going to be joining soon. R.W. said that the only reason he and Merle had come in the first place was because it was free, free food, and free women who were in need of a man in the worst way.
Much to my horror, I was instructed to rename Merle, and it took most of the weekend to do it. I’d watch him creep up into the woods to smoke a cigarette, and rack my brain for something appropriate. I kept thinking “Whitey” because of his pale straight hair, but there was nothing in the Bible that matched. I thought of Samson because his hair was long and scraggly and because he was one of the strongest boys in eighth grade, but I was afraid that he’d think I liked him. It was after Misty and I had laughed along with R.W. that she suggested names for both of them.
“It’s easy,” she said when she had gotten everyone’s attention. “You are Frankincense,” she said, pointing to R.W. “And Merle is Myrrh.” She threw back her head and laughed, her hair frizzing all around her face, her hands on the hips of those red-white-and-blue spangled jeans she had had a fit to buy; she had lost five pounds and had squeezed into a size thirteen to prove it.
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