Just as I began to catch my breath, I saw my parents standing side by side, positioned like a team in front of me. Instead of telling them I was fine, I held my breath and threw my hands around my neck. My mother panicked, full of fear, and her eyes linked with my father’s.
“She’s blue, Steven. Do something.”
“Get water,” he ordered, and he yanked me from my chair. He held my arms over my head with one hand and smacked my back with his other. My mother returned with water, and my father held the glass for me while I drank. I took a breath.
“Thank God,” my mother said.
My father hugged me and insisted I sit on his lap for the rest of dinner. I asked if he would play airplane and, overjoyed, he circled his spoon above my head, made engine noises, and landed every bite safely in my mouth. My mother was too nervous to sit still, so she stacked plates and cleared the table. “Never a dull moment,” she said.
After dinner she gave me a bath, and I waited on her bed for her to fix my hair. She carried in a stack of pillowcases and stuffed pillows, fluffy as clouds, inside them. My father carried in a box, put it down, turned from side to side showing off his muscles like a weightlifting champion, and said, “Who’s the man?”
“You are, darling,” my mother said, as if he’d been home helping her unpack all day.
My father lay down next to me bare-chested and pulled the sheets to his waist.
“I want to comb your hair,” I said, pointing to his chest.” Raking the comb through his black curls, I said, “See, no knots.”
With sweet eyes my father looked at my mother, and then he smiled at me. “You’re right, my love. No knots at all.”
I ran to my room and got my free chicken hat and the plastic egg with the chick inside. I climbed back into bed between my parents and because of all I’d been through they let me stay. Smiling in the dark, I wore my chicken hat and cradled the egg.
THE JOKER
He pinned her arms above her head. Callie squirmed beneath him. He brought his face close to hers and stuck his tongue out as if to lick her, then pulled back.
He tickled her. Callie thrashed on Mama’s bed, messing the coverlet, and I was petrified she’d ruin it. I got in trouble last week for eating chips in Mama’s bed. I left crumbs behind, and they jabbed at her all night long. She didn’t like people horsing around on her bed. And it wouldn’t matter if it was Daddy’s fault that their blanket got messed up. She’d still go crazy when she saw.
He reached for a jump rope off his architect table and giggled like the Joker as he tied Callie’s hands behind her back. Callie yanked at the fastened rope. I sat behind them cross-legged on the blue velvet chair, and watched. “Stay there, Willow,” he said to me. And I didn’t move.
He uncovered a gold cylinder and red lipstick shot up, a flash of vibrancy. He drew close to Callie and marked her cheeks. First the right and then the left. Red lines like scars ran along her face, and we giggled at the absurdity. He loved to play like a boy. “Silly, Daddy.”
The humidity was fierce, like it always was that time of year in New Orleans, and the mirror behind his bed became foggy, our images blurred. He raised his finger and swept it down the center. “Come here, Willow.” And I climbed on his bed. “Careful,” he said.
“You’re on this side,” he said to me. “And Callie, you’re on this side.” He untied her, and the jump rope lay like a snake dividing the coverlet. “There are alligators down there,” he said, eyeing the carpet. “Don’t fall in.” He looked at both of us, one and then the other. “When I say three you can start playing but don’t cross the line,” he said, pointing to it. “Or you lose.”
BLIND MAN’S BLUFF
Hungry, I look in our kitchen closet for something to eat. It’s difficult to see since the light went out a few days ago, but I can still make out a box of bread crumbs, a bag of sugar, French’s Yellow Mustard, and a can of coffee.
My brother has learned from me to hide the good stuff in the back on top, so I step onto the bottom shelf and lift myself up. The fingers on my left hand cling to the top shelf holding me, while my right hand skims over sticky contact paper searching for anything acceptable—a cookie, a bag of chips, some raisins.
Reaching far back into the darkness, I find something that feels familiar. In my excitement, I jump down from the shelf with the bag held tight, and my elbow hits the frame of the door. It hurts. My arm feels numb, and it takes me a few seconds before I realize that the bag I’ve found is empty, and I know my brother got the last Oreo. My instinct is to complain, but there’s nobody home for me to complain to. I storm out the back door, hearing the screen slam behind me.
The bright sun burns my eyes, and I look down, staring at my pink Keds as I walk, one foot in front of the other, toward Willow’s house.
Willow is my best friend and our backyards connect. Our ranch-style houses share a well-traveled path lined with blooming trees, now wet with the smell of soil. The greenery brushes against me as I shuffle from my house to hers. Separating the yards, at the end of the path, there is a broken fence with a hole in it, splintered from years of exposure to sun and rain.
When I crawl through the fence, Willow is there. She looks up from what she is doing and says, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I say, moving toward her.
“Look,” she says as she points to a doodlebug. “When you touch it, it curls.”
I touch the doodlebug and watch it curl into its shell.
“Do you want to go inside?” Willow asks as she stands, and I wonder if she can read my mind.
Willow’s mother makes us drink milk with lunch, peanut butter and jelly on white bread. I watch as she cuts the ends off the bread, an act that seems natural and foreign at once. The house smells of garlic and home cooking, and I can almost taste what she stirs in the pots beside her.
Later Willow suggests that we polish our fingernails. We ask her older sister, Ashley, if we can use her polish. Ashley is a cheerleader, and she wears her short green-and-white uniform like a trophy. She has big boobs and a boyfriend and in between football games and varsity parties, she tells me things she thinks I should know—like how to take care of my frizzy brown hair by putting my head in between my knees, brushing all of my hair to the top of my head, attaching a ponytail holder there, and rolling the dangling hair onto an extra-large roller or an empty vegetable can, with both ends cut off for the bobby pins. Given the recent humidity, this is invaluable information, and when I part my hair down the middle after taking care of it in this way, I no longer look like Bozo the Clown.
“A girl should always look her best,” Ashley says. And she always does, never relaxing long enough to let her hair curl or her mascara wear off.
Willow’s sister doesn’t tell me these things out of kindness. I think she likes how I look at her, how I study her every move. She gives me these beauty tips as though they are facts, definite, like a theorem, if a = b, and b = c, then a = c. But I’m not convinced, even if I bother to follow all her beauty advice, that I will be beautiful too.
She lets us use her polish and I paint one finger bright orange; the next, fire engine red; and the next, wine, and then start over again, bright orange, fire engine red, wine. I am content with this attempt at creativity until Willow looks at what I am doing and snickers.