My Tiki Girl (2 page)

I want tenth grade to be different. I want someone to get me, not just pretend to out of pity, but to
really
get me. I’ve been watching Dahlia Wainwright for two weeks now—long enough to think that maybe she’s the one.

Dahlia’s wearing a black beret and these red-and-white-striped tights with a pair of torn-up jeans over them. The jeans are more hole than fabric. She wears a hippie-dippie Indian print shirt with little bells on the strings used to tie the V-neck closed. Her pale face is made paler still by the blood-red lipstick she’d expertly applied in a neat bow. She’s reading Sylvia Plath. Clearly, this is a girl who out-freaks even me. One who isn’t going to be scared off by my sorry-ass limp and tragic dead mother story. Now, if I can just not blow this by saying the wrong thing. But Dahlia saves me.

“Listen to this,” she says, without looking up from the page. She starts to read in a theatrical voice, clear and crisp. It’s a poem, but it’s like no poetry I’ve ever heard. It’s all about being broken, asking if you have a glass eye or a hook, stitches or scars. It’s mean, but sort of funny.

Dahlia snaps the book closed, and looks at me.

“ ‘The Applicant,’ ” she says, in a normal voice. “The opening stanzas. Freaking amazing, yes?”

She reaches into her huge patchwork purse and pulls out a bag of candy.

“Licorice allsorts?” she offers.

It’s like she’s been waiting for a broken girl with a limp to come along to read those lines to. Like she’s been expecting me.

Now, the truth is, I’ve always hated licorice, and the candy she holds out is black and white with pastel colors mixed in. I can’t imagine anything less appealing.

“Sure,” I say, opening my hand, taking a few pieces gratefully, popping them into my mouth like, well, like candy.

“Sylvia Plath is my second-favorite poet. She put her head in an oven, did you know that?”

“No,” I mumble. My mouth is full of candy that is grossly sweet and bitter all at once.

“My first favorite, is, of course, the Poet God Himself: Jim Morrison.”

I nod like I’ve heard of him.

“Hey, I’m starting this band. A beatnik, rock, jazz fusion kind of thing. You play any instruments?”

I shake my head. “Just the clarinet. I was in marching band in junior high.” I roll my eyes like,
Can you believe it?

“Perfect!” she squeals.

“But I’m not really that good. I haven’t played in forever.” I am officially in panic mode now. My throat feels tight, and when I speak, the words come out high and breathy, like a dog’s squeak toy.

“You’ll be great. I can tell,” she says, then gives me this smile that makes me almost believe her.

“So what happened to your leg?” she asks, and I have to admire her for having the guts to actually ask the question that every other stranger who sees my limp-walk is wondering. The other tenth graders all know the story; half of them sent cards and flowers saying
Get Well Soon
back in eighth grade when I was stuck in the hospital forever. Now they can’t even look me in the eye. It’s like they’re scared of me. Like tragedy is catching.

I think about lying to Dahlia, saying I was shot from a cannon or kidnapped by aliens and experimented on.

“Car accident,” I say, unable to lie in the end.

“Let me see,” she says.

I’m wearing this totally embarrassing pink skirt my father got me that screams of my old life, my pre-Frankenstein girl life, and I lift it up, pull down my kneesock, and show her the long, ragged scar that runs from my knee to my ankle.

“Jumping catfish!” she says, then reaches out to touch it.

I don’t even think of stopping her.

2

Dahlia’s mom, Leah,
has been to the loony bin, and it’s there, she tells us, that she was given her first doll. She holds the doll in her hands, fingers stained with nicotine from smoking unfiltered cigarettes all the way down, and tells the story for what must be about the millionth time, but we never get tired of hearing it. She makes it sound like it’s not her who’s telling the story, but Birdwoman. The doll is a woman in a calico dress with the head of a bird. I don’t know my birds real well, but this one doesn’t look like a songbird or bird of prey. It looks like a crow or a raven maybe, its head all glossy black feathers, its eyes two tiny glass beads. When Birdwoman speaks, Leah’s voice is a cackle, and I inch nearer to Dahlia. Our bodies are pressed close now, side to side like Siamese twins, and Dahlia’s brother, Jonah, is lying stretched out like a snake on the back of the couch behind us. His breath is faint, so faint that I think he’s holding it, waiting for the story to be over so he can exhale, finally relax.

“I am Birdwoman,” Leah croaks. “I once was human, but a human life is no place for a bird’s spirit, so I released myself of earthly burdens.” Leah closes her eyes when she speaks, holds the Birdwoman doll so that it’s facing us, the beaded eyes staring, glossy in the light, two tiny crystal balls.

Leah got Birdwoman in the loony bin, a gift from her friend Pam, who had a tattoo of an ankh between her thumb and pointer finger. The ankh, Leah explains, stands for everlasting life. Leah’s painted the symbol on the front of the doll’s dress with gold fabric paint. Dahlia and I draw it on our hands in permanent marker, our own little tattoos. The kids at school say,
What’s that supposed to be? You two in a cult or something?
Dahlia laughs and says,
Yeah, we are. The cult of Birdwoman. Caw!
We’re total freaks to them anyway. The tattoos are just further proof.

The ankh looks like a cross with a loop on top. The loop reminds me of the hole in a sewing needle, like the ankh is supposed to be used for mending. Not for mending the holes of dresses, but holes in your spirit, which is, according to Leah, what Pam suffered from until she threw herself off the top of the hundred-foot tower in Lake Crest Park.

“She spent the night there,” Leah explains, “then jumped as the sun was rising.”

It seems to me that this is backwards somehow. Like if you were really going to off yourself, you’d do it with the setting sun in front of you, but I’m no expert. I’ve never known anyone who killed themselves before. Only famous people like rock stars and Marilyn Monroe. Pam feels more real to me than these people. When I look at the doll she left behind, it’s like I knew her too; like I would know just how to describe her to a stranger. I’d begin and end with the ankh.
Everlasting life,
I’d say, proving my point by explaining how her spirit slipped so easily from human to doll, the way a hermit crab finds a new shell. It’s that easy. This is the first lesson we learn from Leah, from Birdwoman: the dolls are vessels, waiting.

“No,” Leah corrects, still making Birdwoman do the talking, “Pam didn’t jump, she flew. You don’t know you’ve got wings till you have to use them. You just have to trust they’re there. Believe in the power of flight. Do you believe, birdlings?”

We nod our heads. We’re all real quiet when Leah tells her stories. It’s like being in church. And it’s not just Jonah who is holding his breath—all three of us are, because we’re never sure of the ending.

Jonah believes, like we all do in a way, that Leah can make things happen when she pulls out her dolls. Like she can use them to predict the future, or maybe even control it. Leah says that on the morning Pam threw herself from the tower, Birdwoman jumped too, falling off Leah’s dressing table for no apparent reason. It was then that the power of the dolls was revealed to her, and she’s been collecting them ever since.

Leah has a doll for each person in her life, and dolls for people she hasn’t met yet too. Like my doll, for instance. She picked it up at a flea market last year and put it on her dresser with the others, not knowing who it would come to be. The doll sat there, waiting, a rag-doll clown with a porcelain face full of hairline cracks, two blue tears painted on its white cheeks. She says that in that way, she invited me into their lives, and when I first came home from school with Dahlia three weeks ago, Leah knew the flea market clown was me. A few days after knowing me, she named it—named us both, really. I am LaSamba, the worrier, the sad clown.

Dahlia’s breath is sweet, like the clove cigarettes she smokes: Djarums from Indonesia that crackle and pop as they burn. Her fingers are long, the nails perfect, unlike my own—fingernails chewed to the quick, cuticles swollen and bloody. Dahlia says she used to bite her nails too, but cured herself of it by taking up smoking. Her body is all smooth curves and freckles. Her eyes are grayish blue, the kind of eyes that change shade with her mood or depending on what color shirt she wears. Her dirty-blond hair is straight and thick—she wears it back in a ponytail or tucked behind her ears under the beret. I like the feel of her beside me when we sit like this on the couch listening to Leah talk the doll talk. Dahlia’s got on the Catholic school uniform she found at the thrift store: a pleated navy blue skirt with a crested blazer that says
St. Christopher’s
. She wears this with her combat boots, a Doors T-shirt, and a pink plastic rosary around her neck.

Maybe later we’ll put on our grass skirts and hula dance, compose a new song for our band, or listen to Jim Morrison (I know who he is now, I know all about The Doors).

Birdwoman didn’t have much to say tonight, which could be a good omen, but may be a bad one too. We’ll just have to wait and see. Now Leah is up, spinning in circles around the room, Birdwoman in her outstretched hand flying up by the ceiling. It’s Jonah who’s off the couch first, running behind his mother, flapping his arms like wings, his blue and gold magician’s robe trailing behind him like the tail of some tropical bird. Dahlia and I join the dance, and soon we’re all there, running in circles around the living room floor, flapping our wings, caw-caw-cawing, and I’m getting dizzy, staggering around like a drunk. I’m spinning with Dahlia, Leah, and Jonah, Birdwoman soaring above. I’ve forgotten all about my limp, the dull pain that radiates from my knee to my ankle. I’m thinking this is it, we’re flying and we may never come back down.

“What shall we do now, my little birdlings?” asks Leah.

We’re all lying collapsed on the floor. The steel gray carpet is full of faint stains and cigarette burns. In the corner next to me is the mark left by an iron put down when it was still too hot. Leah is clutching Birdwoman, but she’s holding her face-down, which means the doll is done for now. Dahlia is on her back, breathing hard, and Jonah is nestled against her, his head on her arm, his robe covering both of them like a beach towel. Like maybe they’ve just come out of the water and have had too much sun.

“A trip to Jupiter,” suggests Jonah.

“The mall,” says Dahlia.

Leah laughs. “Aren’t they one and the same?” she asks, and we all agree, so we’re off to the mall.

“Keys, keys!” shouts Leah as she’s putting on her old navy peacoat. The coat has holes in all its pockets, so she can never keep anything in them. Dahlia and I scramble around, looking in all the usual places for the car keys: on the kitchen table, in the dove-shaped vase by the front door, in the holeless pockets of other coats.

Jonah shuts his eyes, says a key-finding spell, his fingers moving like sea anemones.

“Keys that are lost will now be found, by the power of Merlin, by the force of the River Nile, so mote it be!” Just as he’s opening his eyes, Dahlia shouts, “Found them!” and there they are, pulled from a boot in the closet. Jonah smiles.

“Boy magician strikes again!” shouts Dahlia.

“All hail the Great Zamboni!” calls Leah.

“Zamboni, Wizard of the West Winds!” cries Dahlia.

“Zamboni, bringer of rains that make floods, finder of lost keys!” I cheer.

Jonah pulls his robe around him tighter and grabs his magic wand for our trip to the mall, because who knows what evil forces we might encounter on the way.

The Wainwrights live on the third floor of the only apartment building in town. It’s a big brick building that used to be a dynamite factory. No kidding. Canal Street Explosives turned into the Canal Street Apartments, the factory boxed off into four floors of little homes, the ghosts of explosions and careless workmen missing fingers long gone. We’re the only noise now. We sound like thunder racing down the stairs, Birdwoman taking flight in the lead. We’re cawing and laughing, Jonah is chanting a safe-journey spell as we leap down the steps two at a time. The stairway smells like curry and men’s aftershave, no trace of gunpowder left. Just when I think the heavy air may suffocate me, we’re out the door, running down the sidewalk that leads to the back parking lot where Leah’s yellow VW bug named Gertrude waits. The magician rides shotgun because he’s the best navigator; Dahlia and I take the back, sitting close.