Greedy Little Eyes (23 page)

“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 mother’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.