Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (13 page)

“They're redoing both of these galleries—the Main Chinese and our Buddhist temple,” he says, adjusting the screen. “Just conservators and the construction crew allowed.”

“I used to come here . . . with my m—mother,” I say.

He smiles. “That's nice. Well, it's getting all spiffed up. Come back for the opening. They invited Buddha himself, and he's
coming
!”

*  *  *

Ralph points at my eyes. “You're all puffy.”

“So are you,” I say, pointing to his butt.

Ralph grabs the seat of his new pants. “I know. Mom. She always gets them too big. But so what?” He gives me a look. “You've been crying.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.” I tell him about the dragon pearl and Gone Mom and me and the wrist rest and how I sneaked into the gallery.

“Were you crying
while
you were creeping around in there?” he asks.

“No, in the women's bathroom.”

“You were creeping around in the women's bathroom?”

“
No.
In the gallery.”

Ralph shuts up. He is petrified of what girls my age do in the bathroom. He looks over at me, eyes wide. “You
could have been arrested for trespassing! I could be visiting you in the penitentiary.”

“This isn't
Dragnet
. I wasn't planning to
steal
something; I was just looking around.” I shake my head. “Maybe we went there because Gone Mom was homesick for China.”

“Or maybe
she
was an art thief,” Ralph says. “I can't wait to see that dragon ball.”

*  *  *

Catty Piddle, formerly known as Patty Kittle, telephones me out of the blue. There's lots of phony, superficial talk, but I know she's going to get to something eventually. She cannot truly care how I liked reading
Jane Eyre
or whether I had a fun Valentine's Day. I hear about how she hates geometry and gym.
So . . . nausea. Questioning the point of this phone call, Catty. Insincerity practice? Need to borrow my diary?

“A
friend
of mine”—she says the word almost apologetically—“likes
Elliot James
.”

Nerves sizzle in my stomach. Dead silence from my mouth.

“And since you
know
him, we're wondering if you know if he already has a girlfriend. He's so
mysterious
and all.”

Since I have swallowed my tongue, it takes a moment to respond. Answering would also be easier if I
had
an answer, which I don't. “Uh . . .” Through the phone I hear another really faint conversation; wires are crossed somewhere. Real girls are yakking it up and laughing. It sounds nice.

“Yes, he does,” I say with quick authority.
“Sorry.”

“But . . .”

I know Catty wants more info, like
who
? Of course I don't have this information either, but she doesn't need to know that I don't. “See ya,” I say with a
ching-chong
lilt. I hang up. Clunk! Flunk! Junk! I shake my hand, getting Catty's pure, transparent
nerve
off of me.

I sit back in Dad's cigarette chair, the one Ralph calls “Old Smoky.” Dad's sandbag ashtray and the evening paper are on his ottoman. I heave a deep sigh and imagine Elliot James in an embroidered robe, with his scholarly forehead knit and a branch of ink bamboo growing from his brush onto rice paper. I see his steamy hair in the Chows' kitchen, and his profile flashing under the streetlights when he drove me home, and him pounding his problems into the track at school. I picture him
embracing
the naked lovers with his charcoal pencils. I see him every which way, except with Catty Piddle.

“Sorry, George Washington,” I say to his picture on the front page of the newspaper. “I know today's your birthday, but I lied anyway.” I glance at the telephone. Sigh. And if Patty had asked me if
I
have any girlfriends, I would have lied twice and said: yes, I do.

It's small and scary. I should have seen it coming—the new political cartoon pinned to Miss Arth's bulletin board.

A Chinese guy with a shaggy Fu Manchu mustache holds a shower nozzle and a scrub brush. He aims the stream of water down into a U.S. GI whose head has been sliced off above the eyebrows. The Chinese guy's face looks robotic. The caption reads: “China's Red masters brainwash our boys.”

Neil Bradford comes in, stops to absorb the cartoon, and announces, “My brother would
never
fall for that.”

The class gives Neil
you bet!
nods, but they're not convincing. Everyone's edgy. Another cunning chink tactic. Another atrocity. The idea of Reds scouring the brains of our soldiers and filling them with Communism is horrid. And if we lose the Korean War, the Red Horde will wash our American minds too. Resisters will be blown away by
atomic bombs, except the few underground survivors lucky enough to have fallout shelters.

Fear lives in our peanut butter jars, parks and baseball fields, barbershops and beauty salons. If you look up a pole, the American flag can only momentarily block the atom bomb on its way.

Miss Arth shows us a newsreel of the “concussion,” the aftermath of the atomic bomb President Truman dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. In a flash the city was transformed into flat nothing with agony on top. There's a picture of what remains of the “little man Jap”—a ghostly sidewalk imprint after his encounter with heat at the speed of light.

What
is
to stop the Communists from turning the USA into a giant photographic negative?

Brainwashing. Bombs. Brainwashing. Bombs.

Where can a sane person go?

Underground?

Art room?

Crazy?

*  *  *

After school I turn on the art room lights and take a deep breath. It smells good—wet clay, oil paint, and shellac. The sink drips its rusty recital. Mr. Howard's prisms hanging in the windows spray the spectrum everywhere. He calls them his “reminders of miracles.”

I wander over to Elliot's stool and sit down, hook my feet around the legs the way he does, and stretch my arms across his drawing table. Elliot could never be brainwashed. He seems totally untouched by what other people think. Maybe being a genius just takes care of that.

The Art 3-D class has made sculptures. They sit on racks across the room in varying stages of dryness. The surfaces have distracting polka dots of lighter gray clay, so it's hard to tell how they are going to look. They're free-form. Creating something out of the clear blue, with no anchor in the real world, seems impossible, just squishing your guts into a wad of clay with the chance it will turn out looking like throw up. As Mrs. Van Zant says, express what's inside you!

I walk over, hold a chunk of wet clay, and balance its cool weight in my hands. I feel the details of the Gone Mom
sculpture
inside me accumulating. I've got her incense smell and the sound of her laugh. I've decided coriander is her flavor, since pungent pulls tears from our eyes. I can touch what she touched—the wrist rest and the bootie—and I have our memory now anchored in the art museum. But her sculpture is still hollow.

Even though I remember her face, it is the woman reflected in Picasso's mirror I see when I picture her
now
—empty inside, ghostly, shrunken from life, with a hard tear scarring her eye. Not good. It matches my feeling that she's
g
one
, not just from me, but also from the earth—sucked behind the mirror of time.

But gone or not, I'm still shoved around by her.

She is powerful. She's everywhere. She's changing me.

People who have lost something—a dream, a soldier son, their country, a baby—can go backward and then go forward. Sister Evangeline and Mr. Howard and Picasso and the Chows are proof of it. They are reaching out, figuring things out. They are so different from my mother. The hint of something painful stops Vivian Firestone dead. Fear shoves her around. It makes her slam doors and twist the locks inside.
Do not live in reverse!
Wash, starch, and iron the past away. Brainwash yourself. Use bleach to remove every trace.

But Picasso's
Girl before a Mirror
reaches out, touches her hurt.

My mother says,
Hands off! Don't go backward.

But I say,
Sorry, Mother, it's too late.

Mr. Howard's response is “Phooey” when I unload my brainwashing and atom bomb fears on him.

“Isn't that kind of an
understatement
?”

“Brainwashing will never work.” He sits on the edge of Mrs. Van Zant's desk. “When I was stationed in Okinawa, we hated the Japanese, and the Chinese were our allies. Now, with the Korean War, we hate the Chinese and befriend the Japanese. Minds can change fast.”

“It makes everyone crazy. All Oriental people are stirred together into one big enemy.”

“Fear thwarts thinking.” Mr. Howard shakes his head.

“I feel like the enemy all the time.”

“Yeah. That's real hard. Real unfair. What does your family say?”

“Nothing. My mother is
adverse
to my past.” I look off a moment. “She's also adverse to my present.”

Mr. Howard's eyes narrow. He stops his next question before it exits his mouth. “She's scared
for
you, you know, protective. Mine sure was.”

Mentioning Mother flares her up in me. I can't stand that she believes she really knows me. She thinks she's so right and worldly with her timid little brain, all shampooed and shaped and shellacked with hairspray.

Mr. Howard heaves the art room trash can and dumps it into the container on his cart. “It's hard to keep a whole group of people your enemy if you get to know one or two of them personally. Challenges your mind. Do you think my relationship with the Chows happened overnight? Very tricky territory at first, but so worthwhile.” I think of Sister Evangeline's theory about important changes requiring a gestation period. Mr. Howard starts to wheel his cart out of the room, turns, and says, “I remind you, Miss Firestone, it's real easy to start believing in your own inferiority. Disowning yourself. It's the biggest battle of all.”

Mr. Howard leaves. I check out the window. Elliot's usual parking spot by the track is empty. A rainbow dances on the drawing pad he has left on his desk. Elliot's
diary
. About half the pages look drawn on. Okay, I will look at only one. I flop the cover back, leaf through, and
stop at Meleager's strong, beautifully foreshortened arm reaching right out to me.

*  *  *

It's Sunday and I'm waiting for Ralph, who is taking forever getting ready for our visit to the museum. He's jammed something from Mother's dressing table into his Scout pack along with binoculars and gum.

I hold my little slipper on a blank notebook page and try a new tactic, tracing around it in the hope of understanding it better, which is ridiculous. I have decided against trying to draw the gory pictures and the lizard tail and the camels. It takes me several tries to get all the way around the shoe without my pencil slipping. I hold the outline up, study it from every angle. The toe is the strangest part, the way it's bent straight up. But tracing it makes me wonder if it's just my imagination or if the sole of the bootie is ever so slightly curved.

My heart flips. I sit back, stare at the paper, chew my pencil. Of course, it's half of a pair. I've learned something new. But I don't understand a thing.

*  *  *

After visiting the wrist rest in the Scholar's Studio, Ralph and I stand by the opening to the Main Chinese Gallery, still blocked by screens. The Buddhist temple beyond is brightly lit. Wall painters are working on Sunday. Ralph sets his pack on the floor, pulls out his compass, and turns
it, whispering to himself, “North, where's true north?”

“Don't you mean east? Isn't China east?” I say. “Plus what good's a compass in
here
?” A
shut up
look comes in my direction. Ralph scratches his behind, wipes his hands on his pants. He's wearing the Scout neckerchief slide he carved to look like a matchstick. I take his shoulders and turn him toward the screen. “Look, in the far room, beyond the ladders. The dragon pearl's hanging right there.”

He stands on tiptoes, cranes his neck, breathing through the crack. He turns; his eyes are lanterns. “Whoa!” He peeks again, his cheek pressed against the screen. “God. Lily. Look on the table back there.” We trade places. I focus on a folding table draped with white cloth. On it sits a sculpted hand cut off above the wrist. It's pale golden-brown and has a wide band of carved gold bracelets. “That's the hand in your picture,” Ralph says. “I swear.”

I look again. The severed hand is balanced right there with the fingers spread.

“Wow! I bet the rest of the body parts are under that tablecloth,” Ralph says.

There's static where my voice should be. A dark-haired lady has walked into the temple through a door hidden in the wall. She stands by the table with her hands on her hips. She lifts the hand, examines it. “A lady just picked it up,” I whisper.

I fix my eyes on her, freeze. Animal instinct. The museum shrinks to a closet containing only her and me. Tears roll.
“God! Ralph!” I screech in a whisper. “It's Gone Mom. I swear. She just walked in and walked out. It's her. She went to the other end of the room. I can't see her now!”

Ralph nudges into my place, looks, turns, shakes his head. “Damn. I need Mom's compact!” He paws through his pack.

“What? You have her
compact
?”

“Yup.”