“Your mother has something to say to you girls,” Stan heralded, palace guard before queen.
“Deane,” Linwood began, “was picked up by the police last night.”
Automatically, I felt guilty.
“She ran away from school.” Stan took over.
“Again,” June said.
Stan and Linwood exchanged glances. He got up, paced a minute, and sat down in the green chair, lighting a cigarette with a show of despair. He looked like a movie star. So did Linwood, of course. “She ran away three days ago. They finally found her last night.”
“What did the nuns do to her?” Jane Eyre had made a great impression on me.
Everyone looked at me like I was a dope.
“When they found her, she had her hair cut short and dyed black.” You could tell this part was one of the worst for Linwood; her voice was especially regal.
“An improvement, no doubt.” June was mumbling into her fingernails, which she was biting.
Linwood started to cry.
I felt guilty again, but what could I do?
“We thought you girls were old enough. We thought you should know what’s going on,” Stan said in his best adult voice. Then, to Linwood, “Oh, hell!”
“What else did she do?” June looked up. “We know she did more than run away.”
“That isn’t any of your business.” Stan stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. “I’m going to put some TV dinners in the oven. There’s one beef and one fried chicken.”
I thought about Deane’s long golden hair. I liked it best right after she washed it, before she pinned it into the beehive. “Beef,” I said, knowing June preferred the chicken.
At bedtime, while I was waiting for Linwood to come kiss me good-night, I opened up my cigar box, the one that my friend Gaylin had gotten from her father for me. Linwood’s cigars came in regular packages, and they were really cigarillos, anyway. All my special stuff was stored in the box. When I opened the lid, the world was made of delicious, endless possibility. Item by item, what I had wasn’t so thrilling: a silver dollar from Las Vegas, a crisp five-dollar bill, and three freshly minted quarters; some hand-pulled taffy left over from Bible School (but wrapped in wax paper and still fairly tasty); my unopened copy of Jesus’s life—it began with a black sheet of paper. You were supposed to show this to someone and tell them, “This was the color of my heart before I found Jesus.” You kept flipping the pages, all solid colors, through the blue of the sky and the green of the grass and the red of His Blood until you ended up with a pure white page, the color of your redeemed heart. I loved the whole thing—it was so simple yet effective!—and I had shown my first copy to everyone in the family many times, until Linwood took it away from me. I was saving this untouched copy for the future. Also in the box was a mysterious piece of brick with the single letter P. I’d found it one recess on the playground, as if it had been left for me. And my first-place certificate, neatly folded, along with the blue ribbon, for the Vista Junior Talent Contest. And the silver badge Gaylin had sent me from Carlsbad Caverns that said HI PET LOVE GAYLIN. And my tiny mammy doll from New Orleans, made out of a clothespin. There was some other stuff, but that was the best.
Sitting there with those things, I had the strangest feeling… I almost wanted to pray to them, but pray wasn’t exactly right. Contained in their box, faint aroma of cigar, they exuded energy, real energy.
And that energy was only for me.
But the weirdest part was, I had this sudden, intense feeling that somehow, someway these objects were with me for life. It was as if they had attached themselves to whatever it was that made me me. Plus, there was something that could be done with them—what?—as if they could be made into a kind of machine, a generator to manufacture… what?
Linwood walked in as I was contemplating my cigar box.
The expression on her face was as remote as the Snow Queen’s. But her flamingo-colored lounging pants, decidedly not Snow Queen garb, matched her lipstick exactly.
Her absentminded kiss on my forehead didn’t connect: no splotch for me, no smear for her.
“Good night, dear.” She turned to leave.
“What about the three good deeds?” I was one of those overly conscientious children who would never screw up if she found herself ensnared by a magic toad or stranded in the woods with only the enchanted ax for company.
“Oh, yes.” Resigned, conscientious too, Linwood sat down on the edge of my bed.
“June tripped me in the hall this morning and called me lard bucket. Later, I put the fancy Ginny doll nightgown under her pillow.”
Linwood nodded. Obviously, she was thinking about other things.
“Then, I gave a beggar woman a hundred gold coins.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“And when I traveled to the planet of Xtbay, I declared a fortnight of feasting and rejoicing.”
She patted me on the arm, mumbled something about doing unto others, and out she went, Emeraude wafting in her passage.
Then the magnitude of it all struck: for the first time in my entire life, I had lied.
Interesting, I thought, cross-legged on the bed, I lied. I’m still alive, nobody cared, and it was fun!
Was this my first entry into the world of crime? Was this how Deane got involved in the shadowy world she seemed to inhabit? First you lied, then you cheated, then you snuck around….
As if contained in a spinning pink globe before me, I saw the planet of Xtbay that my lie had created: bright purple fields, shining orange water, men and women dressed in silver suits like astronauts, their faces the faces of unknown animals. Already they’d begun to celebrate; I could smell the unfamiliar, intoxicating odors. A whole fortnight—lucky them!
Then I felt crummy. A lie was a lie and the Bible told you that was no good. Deane was in some cold dark jail, and Linwood was sick with worry, but I was exulting in deceit and its own accompanying power.
Perhaps there was something I could do to get God’s attention?
I could stay up all night, praying and fasting, though the fasting bit was moot since who ate at night anyway. Or… a brainstorm! I could do like they did in the Old Testament: I could make a sacrifice.
Remembering Cain and Abel and what God had to say about that, I considered Rose and Pansy, my two small green turtles, who fretted out their miserable existence in a kidney-shaped plastic pool, complete with green plastic palm. As consolation or company, their contribution was minimal. And real blood was a more-appreciated sacrifice than, say, flowers or ears of corn.
I watched them sleeping on their plastic island.
No way. I couldn’t do it. I hated to step on an ant or squash a sowbug. Perhaps one day I would move to India.
I scanned the shelves where my dolls lived. I had thirty-three of them, ranging in size from my Teri Lee doll to Roberta, my favorite with her glossy cap of dark curls, to the six Ginny dolls grouped at the far end. But I had qualms there, too. Year after year of The Nutcracker Suite had convinced me that those hard bodies really lived, if only you knew when to look, or what to look for. Even as I slept, they danced around my bed, the night progressing in increasingly frenzied circles.
The poodles (unthinkable; June would kill me) and my stuffed polar bears (forget it), my dolls, a pair of dim-witted turtles: except for my box, that was the sum of my possessions.