Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (5 page)

“Do you have any of her old stuff?” he asks.

“Nope.” I sigh, retrieve my fortune cookie from my pocket, and crack it open. It reads:

Bodhisattvas surround you.

I turn the strip over. No translation. I hand it to Ralph.

“What's
bo-dee-sat-vaas
?” he asks, holding the fortune up to the bus window.

“Who knows?” I close my eyes.

“We gotta go eat at the Chow House sometime. They've got an aquarium full of red fish and a shop that sells finger tortures and these neat dragon kites.”

“I won't ever go in there. Plus it's not
Chow House
, which sounds like a cowboy diner. It's the House
of
Chow.” My voice sounds a little haughty.

“Right. Chinese cowboys only.” Ralph tosses part of my cookie and catches it in his mouth while I sit back wondering why in the world I care what the Chows' restaurant is called.

When we get home Mother is playing solitaire at the kitchen table with the radio on:
Yes, folks, we bring the world to you. . . .
I hear Ralph sneak to the attic. I sit on my bedroom
floor, hold my new notebook between my palms, and let it fall open to a random page. I write, and then whisper the name: “Gone Mom.” I tape my “Bodhisattvas surround you” fortune on another page. I stretch my legs and shut my eyes. More scraps of my Gone Mom memory-dream appear.

I'm little. She's standing and I'm sitting on her arm. The room is dim with lacy shadows on the floor. We look up at a ceiling filled with lighted dragons. They bite each other's tails with pointy fangs. Gone Mom holds her palm flat against my backbone so I won't fall. She counts and says, “
Gau luhng
.”
Nine dragons
. Footsteps echo around us. A glowing ball, the dragon pearl, hangs from the center of the ceiling. I stretch my hand to grab it.

My eyes pop open. I look up at my own raised hand.
Where in the world were we?

My vanity mirror reflects snowflakes shoved by the wind. I walk over, sit down, and search my face for bits of Gone Mom. My door bangs opens. No knock. I grab a Kleenex and turn. Ralph stands in the opening hiding something behind his back. “Hey! I—”

“Disappear, Ralph! Have you ever heard of the term ‘privacy'?”

He looks from me to the mirror and back. “Staring at your face isn't gonna
change
it, Lily.”

“Well, don't
you
ever try it,” I snap. “Yours is getting all bumpy.”

Ralph blinks, shrugs. “I was gonna say your face was
fine
, but forget it.” He flips off my ceiling light and slams the door.

I'm sorry. I'm awful.
I touch my cheeks in the dark. They're wet. I wipe my face, imagining Gone Mom's fingers are mine, wondering if the only place in the whole raging world she exists is in me. I slide my new notebook between my bed and the wall. With her name written in it, it's already too full . . . and too empty.

I have cleaned out my bobby pin box, tossed the rusted clippies, finished my geometry homework, and started reading
Jane Eyre
for extra credit. I have emptied the wastebaskets, dusted the downstairs, and now I am in the basement plowing through the ironing basket without being asked. The reason?

Guilt.

I am sprinkling and pressing my father's cotton boxer shorts because guilt will make a person do many fantastic and insincere things. Guilt will motivate a person to iron underpants and complicated pleated skirts.

Why do I feel guilty? Because I stood up for my Chineseness. I stalked the House of Chow. I gave my birth mother a name and wrote it in my notebook and if my parents knew, they would die.

Unlike me, Ralph is not bullied by guilt. He can fake
his voice to sound like Mother, hide his cruddy Scout collection, grind gravy into the rug, and feel fine. He can do anything. He's free because he's their natural-born son. He fixed our mother's life by being born. He is the guilt-free answer to everything.

I should hate him, but I don't. He is real smart and loyal and funny and always thinking.

Pinned to our basement clothesline is an army of Mother's girdles. Two white, one flesh-toned, and a black one with a lace front panel. Ralph refers to her putting on a girdle as the “Fat vs. Elastic” battle. The girdle always loses.

Our basement is the opposite of the art room. It smells like Spic and Span and it stays exactly the same—tidy stacks of canned beans and tuna fish, snow chains on hooks by the furnace, the crate of empty pop bottles rinsed and wiped. Ash bin spotless. Neat as a pin.

With a few additions it would make a perfect fallout shelter. Or if the Pope dropped by our basement one day, he'd hire Mother to be God's housekeeper. She could organize His medicine cabinet, arrange His manicure kit, and starch His halo. She would wipe God's fingerprints off His bottle of Squirt.

Ironing, my contribution to the clean and orderly world of our house, is better than going to confession if I want to be rid of guilt. It's the perfect penance.

I gather Dad's handkerchiefs, Ralph's rolled socks, which I did not iron, and head upstairs. Out of nowhere I picture Elliot James's paint-spattered pants, the scarf hanging around his neck, and the gray sweater stretched across his shoulders. He looks like he lives in an art studio. He sure doesn't try to look like everybody else. He seems unaffected by what people think, except maybe his girlfriend if he has one. Surely he does. I drop Ralph's socks. They bounce behind me all the way down the steps.

*  *  *

No trace of Elliot today. Mrs. Van Zant's art quote for the week on the chalkboard reads:

If you want to understand something, try drawing it!

She has just walked out after hanging posters of famous artists along one wall. Each has a biography and an example artwork: Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, Salvador Dalí, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso. I scan the artists. The only fact I know about any of them is that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear. His own
ear 
! How could he?

One poster describes Michelangelo, who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy. God wears a blue nightgown that needs ironing while riding across heaven with a squad of angels. He reaches to touch fingers
with “Man,” who is naked. They are both white. Man's and God's fingertips almost touch, but not quite.

Did they ever touch? What did Michelangelo believe was supposed to happen then?

A stained-glass window at Our Lady of Sorrows showed God on His heavenly throne with fiery eyes and His sword of righteousness. He isn't reaching out to touch anybody. He's in a bad mood. His helper angels look miserable. God's hard to work for.

Salvador Dalí's surreal poster is a nightmare landscape—melted pocket watches crawling with black ants.
The Persistence of Memory
. Memories of what?

Pablo Picasso's
Girl before a Mirror
painting looks like two exploded clowns staring at each other. The background is clashing red and black diamonds and green polka dots. It's crazy, more hideous than all the self-portraits combined.

I grab some rags, turn and bump the pedestal with the still-life arrangement. The water bottle wobbles. I grab it and knock the pipe and shells on the floor. I put it back all wrong. “Why do people
care
about this junk?” I bark at the ruined arrangement. “Can't a normal person just
see
something and go about their day without drawing it?”

“I knock it every darn time I clean in here,” a voice answers. It's the janitor, Mr. Howard, who seems perfectly fine to have witnessed me yelling at a pile of pure junk. “I just sorta”—he walks over, patting his big hands on the
air—“put it back.” Mr. Howard scrutinizes it and adjusts the bottle. “It needs to be closer to the edge, and the cloth needs to be slightly more crinkled over the pipe. There, that's a nice reflection on the candlestick. Don't you agree?” He steps back, tilts his head this way and that. He kisses his fingertips. “Perfect. Nobody will notice. They never do! Art rooms aren't supposed to be
clean
, they're supposed to be cluttered with inspiration and new ideas.” He pauses a moment. “How are
you
, Miss Firestone?”

I know he's referring to the horrible social studies fiasco he witnessed from his ladder. “Okay,” I mumble, the way I might say it's
okay
that my house burned down or that I have contracted polio.

Mr. Howard nods. He checks the kiln, rewraps a block of wet clay, then turns with a hand against his chest. “As you may already know, Miss Firestone, I can
work
here, but my kids can't go to school here. Negroes can't live in this neighborhood.”

I blink at him, tongue-tied. He stands there ten feet tall. I can't tell if he thinks it's a good or bad thing not to be able to live around here. For an awkward moment we both turn to Picasso's mirror painting. On the left side is a girl whose face is a mix—half-yellow, half-white. The white part is a profile with a triangle-shaped nose, a black oval eye, and black slash for a mouth. The yellow part looks forward with pink cheeks and red lips. “I think Picasso's
saying that people can treat an artwork like a mirror and find themselves in it,” Mr. Howard says.

Really?

He empties the waste can, turns with his cart, and says, “This is my favorite spot in the whole building, best place in the world for a detention.” He smiles. “Good afternoon, Miss Firestone.”

I walk closer, squint at Picasso's crazy painting. The girl's reflection in the mirror on the right side is mysterious and disturbing. Her profile is dark purples and blues with a thick orange tear hooked on her eye and a pregnant-looking stomach that's hollow—no baby inside.
Gone Mom.
I cover my face with my hands.
Go away.

I grab my coat and walk out the side door onto the practice field. I swallow the chilly, busy air, my coat flapping against my legs. An airplane whines. I follow the sound up to a speck of glitter crossing the pale sky. I imagine the passengers as tiny, distant dolls. If one of them really needed God, she could break the rules—just open the airplane window, reach out, and brush fingertips with Him.

Toward the end of dinner these words pop from Ralph's mouth and crash on the table. “Say, everybody, I have something!”

Uh-oh . . . here come the Chows.

Ralph gives me a look. My eyeballs return bullets. “It's more a question, really.” He turns to Dad.

Dad holds up his hand—
halt!
“Ralph, if this is another rendition of your when-are-we-going-to-get-a-television-set campaign . . .”

“No, Dad. It's a legal question.” Ralphie takes a deep breath. “When kids get adopted . . .” He pauses. “Adopted” shatters our chandelier, pierces the ceiling. Mother dabs her mouth, leaving two mauve smears on her napkin.

“. . . when they are four or five years old or something . . . does the orphan get to bring all his stuff with him to the new
people—pictures and clothes from the orphanage, or, you know, what happens to all his stuff?”

Mother leans in, grips the table edge, and glances at my father. “It is gotten rid of.” Dad tips his head, blinks, presumably considering the correct legal answer.

Our mother shivers, turns to her husband. “It's best. Why should a child be encouraged to live in reverse?” Her face looks a mix of
amen
and
dammit.

My mind exits the dining room and enters the little girls' dorm at the Sisters of Mercy Children's Home. I see the scratchy green wool blanket on my metal bed—seventh down on the right side—and my pink plastic hairbrush labeled “Lillian” and my locker stacked with pajamas and undershirts. I smell the incense smoke floating in the chapel. My
reverse.

“But, technically, shouldn't the things still belong to the kid?” Ralph insists.

Dad does not look at me. He chuckles a phony
ho-ho-ho, now there's a doozy
kind of laugh and says, “If you don't follow in my footsteps in the construction business, son, you've got the makings of a fine attorney.”

No one has asked Ralph why he's asking such a question. No one has asked what
I
think. Mother stands like a juggler who has lost her pins. She turns and studies her face in the mirror above the buffet, then glares at her precious crystal cabinet. She walks out, lifts a new
McCall's
off the mail pile
in the front hall, and heads upstairs to that tidy upholstered place inside herself with no adopted Chinese daughter, no smarty eleven-year-old Boy Scout, no old orphan belongings, no commies or chinks or Korean War—just bridge club, manicures, darning, and solitaire.

Don't live in reverse!
That's my mother, always summing things up, exiting a difficult conversation before it starts. In our house hard topics are either swirled away in a glass of bourbon or wrapped in sandpaper and swallowed.

*  *  *

“Why are you stealing my misery?” I ask Ralph upstairs. “Why are you so interested in
adoption
all of a sudden? You're all rooted here and fertilized and growing your nice branch on the family tree.”

“I was asking a general question.”

I nod. “Sure you were.”

The phone rings. Ralph leaps downstairs to answer it. “Lily!” he yells, loud enough to awaken our neighbor's dead parakeet buried in the side yard.

I walk down slowly, reviewing who it could be. Patty Kittle? No. Anita, who acts married since she and Neil Bradford's best friend are going steady? No. Mr. Thorp reporting that I walked out early on my detention?

“Hello?” I croak.