Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (10 page)

She dropped her toast. Right then she decided, pulling her mind, heart, and groin into a single-steeled purpose. She was finished with Nathan. She was going to, as Uncle Bobby would put it, tell him off.

But how to do it? The phone was out of the question. Because the phone was nothing but voice; even in ideal circumstances with easy people, the phone made her anxious. After loading the dishwasher with the breakfast dishes, she threw herself on her bed where she scrawled a three-page-long letter to Nathan, but after she reread it, she shredded it and flushed it down the toilet, praying it did not clog her grandparents' pipes. No. She would have to tell him face-to-face. And because she knew he would vanish again, she'd have to march herself to his front door, firm up her voice, and ask his mother if he was in. Janie stood at her window and stared at that door across the street. The only arched door in the neighborhood, with dark woodwork and three small stained-glass panes. In her head, Janie began what became a three-day-long rehearsal of her telling-off-Nathan speech.

But Nathan didn't vanish. In the seventy-two hours following that dinner, Nathan was more visible than he'd been since before they started going out, Janie saw him from her upstairs post several times a day. Washing his motorcycle in his driveway. Spending half an hour on the curb with his head stuck inside the car window of a belt-thin boy. Striding back and forth between Scout and house, Scout and house, even cutting the grass when Nathan's father had taken care of that all summer long. And each time she spied him alone, Janie inhaled, braced, silently repeated her first rehearsed sentence, and made to approach. And each time, she exhaled, limpened, and told herself there'd be a better time. Then, just yesterday, she had run head-on into him. Her walking to her Chevette in her popcorn girl clothes for her last shift of the summer, and suddenly there was Nathan, ambling up the street on foot of all things, an absolute anomaly. There was no way to avoid
him unless she turned and fled inside, which she considered, but she kept moving, her insides as roily dark as the Ohio, her dragging her practiced speech into her mouth. Then they were across from each other, and Nathan raised his eyes and looked at her as you would an acquaintance you met on the street, and with a chilly smile, part smirk, part faux polite, he remarked, with sarcasm gauged just subtle enough he could deny it later if anyone asked: “Miss Janie Lambert.” And sauntered right on by.

She had slammed herself into the Chevette and gunned it down the street. By the time she reached the end of Kentworth Drive, rage tears were runneling down her cheeks. Rage at Nathan, yes, but rage at herself a hundredfold that, and as she drove, she actually lifted and bunched her fist, and if she hadn't had to downshift to avoid crashing into a truck, she would have punched herself in her chest. Her cowardice, her stupidity, her muteness, that she'd allowed him to dump her before she could say a word towards dumping him, even though she was certain she was the one who had decided to dump him first.

Now Uncle Bobby plopped back down beside her, and she shot a look along the row to see if the seat reverberations reached the couple on the other end. Uncle Bobby leaned into her ear again, his hygienic odor of Crest and Old Spice, and he whispered loudly, “Remember when Ben forgot his mittens in
Black Beauty
? If that'd been in this puny place, I'd have found 'em in three seconds.”

The truth was, Janie did remember it. In scraps and from the narrow tilted perspective of someone looking up out of a box, which was how she remembered many of her pre-school experiences in Remington. She remembered at eye-level a glamourous brass door handle twice the length of her head that Uncle Bobby pushed with one hand while the other arm bundled Ben and her against him like packages. She remembered how he blocked them with his body the moment they reached
the sidewalk in case they should take a notion to bolt into the street. She remembered the windless cold leaching into them as they stood just beyond the gold and scarlet splendor of the Alexander Henry marquee, its contrast with the monochrome vacancy of Remington's late afternoon winter light. Uncle Bobby was very tall and very wide, like grown-ups were, but Janie felt also, as charged as a mild shock, Uncle Bobby's anxiety. All the potential mistakes and mishaps lying in wait for Uncle Bobby entrusted with taking his little niece and nephew to the show. In the burr of that anxiety, Janie felt only half-safe herself, her understanding that Uncle Bobby was only a makeshift adult, but she knew also that he was the closest thing they had at the moment, and she had no option but to surrender to trusting him. And in that moment she trusted him utterly.

He had each of them by the hand then, Uncle Bobby craning his neck up and down Fourth Avenue. “Look for your granddaddy's car,” he told them. It was then Ben mumbled, “I think I left my mittens in there.”

Janie could remember Uncle Bobby's face: three seconds of naked shock, disintegrating into blinking confusion, eventually gelling to horror. Now, eighteen years old herself, Janie could translate: the horror of being the most responsible person present. Of having no choice but to take charge in a crisis.

And he had taken charge. All by himself he'd approached an usher—a trauma in itself since Uncle Bobby secretly feared all authority figures, which in Uncle Bobby's mind an usher was—and the four of them reentered the theater. While she and Ben stood in the aisle, Uncle Bobby and the usher searched under the back-row seats with flashlights. And the mittens were found.

They walked out of
Reds
two hours into it when Uncle Bobby's snoring got louder than the soundtrack. They found themselves swept
into the exiting
Jedi
crowd and Janie glad of it, knowing Tommie Sue would ignore her when she passed and that would be less humiliating if she were veiled by a group. She and Uncle Bobby currented along with the others out the brass-handled doors, Janie groping in her purse for her keys, rooting among contraband and tampons, and she halted in the stream under the marquee lights, Uncle Bobby dutifully stopping with her. She finally shot a hand to her jeans pocket outside, and of course, there the keys rode, and at that moment, she heard Uncle Bobby shadow-say something, which struck her as strange because he'd said nothing first to make the echo. She looked at him. His expression was a déjà vu of the lost-mitten afternoon.

Janie followed his stare. Moving away from them, not twenty feet distant, clearly part of the
Jedi
crowd, waddled a globe-shaped woman. It was the large-print smock that gave Tessa away. She walked hand in hand with a squatty man in a purple tank top, his shoulders and neck a snarl of dark red hair the length and texture of granddaddy long-legs. Janie gawked, mesmerized by the repulsiveness of that thicket, vivid under the streetlights, and suddenly in the folds of the neck, she thought she glimpsed, although later she could not be sure, the glint of a gold chain.

The couple vanished into the alley shortcut to a parking lot.

For several seconds, she and Uncle Bobby stood silent. They were alone now, the crowd dispersed to cars and bars. And then her uncle threw back his head and exploded into laughter. His most crazed and out-of-control variety, the kind forbidden by her grandmother, the kind that made everyone within earshot turn with a “what on earth?” stare, the kind that had made Janie run away and duck behind the nearest object in mortification when she was a kid.

“WUUHHHHHH wuh wuh wuh, WUUHHHHH wuh wuh wuh.” Uncle Bobby bent in half at his waist, his fist beating his thigh, his face
the color of wine. “WUUHHHHH wuh wuh wuh, WUUHHHH wuh wuh wuh.” Until finally, after depleting himself, he gasped for breath, caught it after a few strangled tries, and said, “I think that's so funny, Janie. I think that's just so funny.”

ONE ESPECIALLY SLOW
weekday afternoon in early August when Gus was gone for a funeral, Ronnie had volunteered to take them behind the screen and below the floors. Tommie Sue, in her single act of magnanimity that summer, said of course she could cover concessions and egged them on. Janie and two of the sorority girls trailed Ronnie and his flashlight down the side aisle of the big central
Jedi
theater, Hillary and Nicole deliberately bumping into each other with muffled chortling. Janie brought up the rear, breathless with disbelief that this was happening and already buzzing with the anticipation of telling Uncle Bobby when she got home.

Ronnie led them up a short set of steps at the corner of the stage and then behind the screen. Janie nearly tripped in astonishment.

And we were standing there with the Star Wars people right alongside us
—

—
What, Janie? What? I don't get what you mean
.

You could see them on the screen, just we were behind it
, Luke and Leia and the Ewoks,
they were the same size as us
, the characters' feet and Janie's feet on the same level so it was like walking among them, and Janie stopped, faced them, and gaped, but Ronnie was hissing, “Hurry! C'mon!” motioning them to the rear of the stage to what turned out to be a longer flight of stairs.

These dropped into a dark warren that under Ronnie's flashlight revealed itself as an elaborate skeleton-work of broken rooms.
It was pitch-black down there, a bunch of rooms with no walls
, naked beams, snapped lathes, heaped bricks—
Oh, Janie, I didn't know that
—and
they were weaving around piles of dismembered tables and chairs and clambering over flattened doors and plaster piles, everything saturated in an odor both moldy and dry—
Were you scared, Janie? Were you scared?
—and Hillary and Nicole clung to each other for drama and screamed when one stepped on a board that kicked up a couple bricks at its other end, but to her bewilderment, Janie was not scared at all. Because it was too ruined to host ghosts? Because it was too real to? Then Nicole was asking, “Is this the basement that runs under the whole city block?” and Ronnie was saying, “No, there's a whole 'nother level yet below this one. I'm gonna take you all upstairs first.”

And then we climbed two more flights of stairs—were you scared, Janie?—No, not yet
.
But by then, I tell you, I was completely turned around, I had no idea if we were on a side of the building, or in back, or even in front—I wouldn't have been scared, Janie
.
I would have laughed at it!
Halfway up the second flight they were coming back into natural light, and finally they reached a shortish corridor. “The dressing rooms,” Ronnie explained. “There's three levels of them. The best ones are on the top.” So even higher they climbed, these stairs narrower and steep as loft ladders, the sorority girls quieter now, the light having sobered them.
And then we started peeking in the rooms
.

What were they like?

Dressing tables under a strange white dust as plush as felt and chairs painted in festive colors, aquas and limes and yellows. Decaying clothes looking like dead animal pelts tossed over their backs, and
their makeup in some rooms was still sitting open
, as though all the actors had leapt up to flee a disaster.
They weren't like dressing rooms on TV and in movies
because while every dressing room Janie had seen there had been windowless, insular, lit only by artificial light, these dressing rooms were open, spacious, every fourth wall a window that started below her waist and rose nearly to a ceiling twice as tall as she.
It
was weird
.
It was really weird
—
Yeah, it sounds really weird, it sounds spooky, how come you weren't scared, Janie?
—and Janie knew these rooms were smack dab in the middle of downtown Remington, Janie knew she should be seeing out each window just another brick wall. But every last one, the spattered ones, the fractured ones, the ones missing panes, were flooded with the opaque glary white the sky took on all over West Virginia in the summer, but especially in Remington.

The other popcorn girls were giggling again, teasing each other, while Ronnie smiled shyly, uncomfortable in his authority. “Okay,” he said. “The best for last. I'm gonna take you on down into the bottom basement now.”

Janie turned to follow, then stopped. For some reason, she wanted that last dressing room for herself for a minute. Without even Uncle Bobby accompanying her in her head. She heard the other three voices receding and again she marveled at her lack of fear. If she'd been asked what she felt, she would have said just a little sad. On the dressing table's surface, a single open jar of face cream, yellowed and parched to cracks. In the ornate gold scroll framing the mirror, a wasp nest. And then Janie noticed the mirror itself.

In the other rooms, the mirrors had been fissured on walls or lay shattered on the floors. Two mirrors had been still in one piece, but reflectionless, just stippled black glass. This mirror looked back. It framed Janie's red-smocked torso. Cut her off at her neck.

Abruptly, Janie stooped. She seized either end of the dressing table with a hand. She scanned the mirror's whole surface. And finally the fear flared, but Janie didn't turn away. The mirror held just her. And to see one's face in such glass, in such light.

MOUSESKULL

I
PUT MY HAND
on it while shinnying down a wall in the barn, fleeing my sister Mavis in a game of Witch, and when I grab a side-running beam to slow my fall, my fingers graze it on a little ledge there.

I nest the skull in my hand. Drop the rest of the way down. Throw up my face to make sure no brothers or sisters saw, but they're still shrieking in the haymow, and only Mickey, the biggest and wisest dog, watches me. I tuck my mouseskull in my jacket pocket, stoop-run to a manger, and wiggle in.