My Tiki Girl (24 page)

Dahlia goes through her bag and pulls out her cigarettes and Troy’s silver bullet lighter, talking about what the cover of our first CD should look like, how we’ll ride around in limos when we hit the big time.

“I’ll buy a huge house for Jonah and my mom. And you and I can have a place on the beach. We’ll lie around in the sun all day, sipping drinks with paper umbrellas and pineapples. We’ll write songs while we listen to the waves.”

I want to know everything about Dahlia: the way the sea spray would taste on her skin, all her childhood secrets.

“Tell me about the Hawaiian birthday party you had,” I say. “The one where the Tiki doll came from.”

“We had shish kebabs with pineapple and listened to Don Ho.”

“Who was at your party?”

“What is this, Maggie, twenty questions? Is this practice for my
Rolling Stone
interview?
Tell us, Miss Wainwright, about your life before
The Paper Dolls
.
”

“No, I’m serious. I want to know. Who were your friends then? What were their names?”

“Mmm. Let’s see. There was Sue O’Bannon, she moved away later that year. And Ellie Abbott, who said her great-grandfather had been the cooper on the
Mayflower
or something like that, and that’s all she ever wanted to talk about.”

We laugh at this.

“Like it made her famous or something, being related to the freaking barrel guy on the
Mayflower
.” She passes her cigarette to me. “What about you?” she asks. “Who was at your ninth birthday party?”

“Mmm, let’s see. I think that was the year my mom made the piñata. It was way cool. It was a pink octopus, full of bubblegum, candy necklaces, and those jawbreakers that turn colors as you suck them. A bunch of girls from school came.”

“Was Sukie there?”

“Yeah, she was.”

“God, how long were you guys friends?”

“Since first grade. We met on the seesaws. I pushed her off and got in trouble.”

“Harsh,” Dahlia says. “And she still wanted to be your friend?”

“She was waiting for me the next day at recess. She didn’t want to seesaw with anyone else.”

Dahlia lights the candles on the coffee table, then takes my hand.

“I have an idea,” she says. “Go get in the confession box.”

“Why?” I ask, suspicious of Dahlia and her crazy ideas.

“Come on, humor me, will ya? I’m not the one who pushed other kids off the seesaw.”

I crawl through the curtained doorway into the dark box. I’ve got that floating feeling again, that sense that I’m somehow separating from my body, drifting up like the smoke from her cigarette. Dahlia goes around to the back and opens the small curtained window, pushing her face against it so that only her eyes and forehead are showing.

“Take off your clothes,” she tells me.

“What?”

“Just take them off. Tiki wants to watch LaSamba get naked.”

“Pervert,” I say.

“Maybe,” she admits. She doesn’t seem to feel much shame.

It’s kind of a thrill to be watched in the box like a peep-show girl. I peel off my Paper Dolls T-shirt slowly. All I can see are Dahlia’s eyes, and it’s kinda creepy because even though I know they’re her eyes, it seems like she could be anyone.

“So what ended your friendship with Sukie anyway?” Dahlia asks.

“God, you know how to ruin a mood,” I say.

“Seriously,” she says. “I’ve been wondering.”

I remember my strange kiss earlier.
We were best friends.

“
I
ended it.”

“Why?”

“After the accident, when I was laid up, she’d call and come by all the time. She’d bring me magazines and candy and stuff. It was really sweet, I know, and she was trying hard to be a good friend. But see, she was still Sukie, all caught up in Sukie world, talking about how gaga she was over Troy, and the dress she saw at Filene’s that she just
had
to have. But I wasn’t Maggie anymore. Sukie was patient at first, then said I was a downer.”

“God! She said that?”

“Mmm-hmm. She was pissed because I wouldn’t go to the mall or something.”

“Some best friend,” Dahlia says. I nod.

“Ninth grade started and so did the excuses. I’d lie about being busy so I wouldn’t have to hang out with her. I’d forget to call her back. I did the same thing with Albert, but that was easier. I didn’t have much invested in him. Poor guy.”

“And Sukie kept waiting by the seesaw,” Dahlia says.

“I guess so.”

“You never kissed her or anything, right?”

“No way!”
Tonight doesn’t count,
I tell myself. Sukie was drunk. Trying to reach me whatever way she could. Dahlia doesn’t need to ever know about it.

“Did you ever want to?” Dahlia asks.

I think of those afternoons in Sukie’s closet reading the magazines we took from her brother. I don’t remember ever wanting to kiss her, only this vague ache to be kissed by someone. I didn’t think of the phantom kiss as coming from a boy or a girl. I just wanted lips on mine, a warm body to lie on top of me.

“I don’t think I ever thought about kissing Sukie. I don’t think I ever thought about kissing any girl until I met you.”

I slither out of my jeans. It’s awkward in the confines of the confession box; my feet and elbows graze the cardboard, threatening to collapse the walls around me. I don’t know why I’m doing this—because Dahlia asked me to or maybe because I want to. Because there’s something kind of thrilling and dangerous about getting naked here in the confession box with Dahlia watching.

“When did you first start thinking about it? About wanting to kiss me?” she asks.

“I think I always thought about it. Since I met you, I mean. I dunno. That seems kinda weird, but it’s true. Sometimes I would look at you and wonder if maybe you were thinking it, too. Sometimes I was afraid I’d go crazy wanting it so much.”

“Do you want to kiss me now?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, and she moves so that her mouth is showing in the little window, and I kiss her through the opening in the cardboard, but it seems like some crazy kind of torture because we can’t touch, it’s just lips and teeth and tongue.

It doesn’t matter that she’s a girl. I don’t think of it that way. She’s Tiki, and loving Tiki is bigger than all that boy-meets-girl crap you read about in books and see in movies.

I don’t tell Dahlia that other than Albert, she’s the only one I’ve ever kissed. I’m sure she kissed lots of boys back in Delaware, but I don’t want to know the details. There is only one kiss I still want to understand.

“That night . . . when you were with Troy in his car. Why’d you kiss him?” I ask.

Tiki pulls away. “Because he wasn’t you,” she says.

“What?”

“I don’t know how to explain, really. I guess it’s just that I’d been thinking about wanting to kiss you, and being a little freaked by it, you know? And I thought maybe if I made out with Troy, it would go away. Troy’s so . . . so normal. I thought maybe kissing him would make me normal, too.” She shakes her head, laughs. “But who wants to be normal, right?”

I shrug my shoulders, thinking,
You do. You want to be normal. Popular. Rich even.

“Do you forgive me?” Dahlia asks.

I put my mouth back to the hole in the box, answering her with a kiss.

Tiki tells me I’m the only one she’s ever loved, and I believe this part of the story. I believe she knows what love is after all.

Love is a country we’re learning to make a map of. Like the Pilgrims who came over on the
Mayflower
, we think we’re the first, and the New World looks awesome and huge. This world is what we make it. It can be full of mermaids and starfish, or time bombs ready to be ignited by a silver bullet lighter. We roam the countryside as Tiki and LaSamba, two doll girls with the power to change everything. With the blink of our eyes we can change the scene from ocean to desert, we can turn from mermaids to horses, but always, always, we run together, side by side.

Our love is a secret that moves, writhes, slithers just under my skin. It makes me feel so much more alive than all the other people dumbly shuffling through what they think is the real world. It makes my heart race to think of it. We are so very lucky, Tiki and I. It’s like we get to live inside a dream. Each day we wake up and it’s Christmas and we’ve gotten each other as gifts. How could I ever even begin to tell anyone how special that makes us?

“Tell me about our house on the beach,” I say, pulling away from our kiss, catching my breath.

“Our bedroom will overlook the ocean. We’ll go to sleep listening to the waves crashing,” she says.

“Our bedroom . . . I like the sound of that.”

“Now,” Dahlia continues, “why are you still wearing your underwear?”

“What if your mother comes out?”

“She won’t.”

“Jonah?”

“Dead asleep.”

So I take off my bra and black cotton panties while Dahlia watches. It’s the first time she’s really looked at me naked, the first time she hasn’t followed the rules and closed her eyes. And maybe, I wonder, the first time she’s looking at me and seeing Maggie, not just LaSamba.

I’m watching Dahlia’s eyes watching me, studying me really, and it sounds strange, but what this really reminds me of is a stuffed mermaid I saw years ago at one of those freak shows at the fair. She had a small, shriveled, dark humanlike face and torso, and her body was fused with the tail of a fish. It was a bad taxidermy job—sewing some shrunken-headed monkey torso to the dingy scaled tail of a mackerel, but this tiny mermaid fascinated me. I stood for a long time staring down into the glass case at it, knowing it was a fake, but still unable to take my eyes away.

“I feel like a mermaid,” I say to Dahlia, knowing she’ll never get what I really mean.

“Me too,” she answers. It’s still only her eyes I see, and they, as well as her voice, are tinged with desperation. “I love you, LaSamba.” Then her mouth is in the window again and my lips meet hers. I want to get out of this box, drag her to her bedroom; to our beach, where I’ll insist that we break our rule and keep our eyes open this time.

“Abomination!” Mother Mary’s voice cracks like thunder.

Dahlia jerks her mouth away from mine.

“Mom!” Dahlia gasps. “We were just . . .”

I scramble to find my clothes in the dark confines of the confession booth.

“Mother Mary knows what you were doing. Mother Mary sees all! It’s an abomination. LaSamba, show yourself!”

I’ve tugged my T-shirt on, unable to find my bra. I’m pulling up my panties, crouching on one leg to get my jeans on. I lose my balance and topple the confession booth over. My legs are sticking out the bottom, jeans half on as I kick to right myself. I scramble out of the box and jerk my jeans the rest of the way on.

Leah is there in her dirty orange robe, holding Mother Mary in one hand, a glass of gin in the other.

“You are banished, LaSamba,” she cries. “Get out!”

“Mom, stop it!” Dahlia yells.

“Get out of my house, you filthy troll-girl,” Leah spits at me. Her teeth are clenched, her eyes wet and bleary.

I pull on my boots and grab my coat, practically running for the door. I can’t look at Dahlia, but I can hear her crying.

“Pervert!” Mother Mary shrieks behind me. “Sick, sick little girl!”

Isn’t it funny how one minute, you have everything you’ve ever dreamed of, the world is yours, then it’s all gone in the blink of an eye, the wave of a doll in someone’s hand?

24

I wake up
to the sound of voices in the kitchen. I look at the clock. 7:12 A.M. It’s Sunday morning. Who is my dad talking to? We are not the sort to have friends and neighbors dropping by, and it’s a little early for Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. Besides, I don’t think they’re out pounding the pavement on the Day of Rest.

I rise and limp over to the window and look out at the driveway to see Leah’s VW, Gertrude. Her battered yellow form looks pitiful behind my dad’s gleaming silver Saab.

What would Leah be doing at my house at this hour of the morning?

Then I remember last night.

Abomination.

This creepy foreboding feeling spreads through my body, starting in my stomach and radiating outward. Before I know it, my heart is beating double-time and my legs feel all rubbery.

I hobble down the stairs, still in my T-shirt from last night, and find my father and Leah in the kitchen at the table, cups of coffee in front of them. They both look very serious. My father seems a little puzzled when he sees me, like I wasn’t who he expected. Like I didn’t live here at all, and I’m just some random stranger barging in.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Hello, Maggie,” Leah says.

This shakes me up even more. I’ve always been LaSamba to her. I guess she’s just trying to be polite and formal in front of my dad. The regular rules don’t apply here. The world of the dolls is its own country.

I try again. “Um, what’s going on?”

Leah just nods, then stands up to go. She’s not looking me in the eye. My mouth suddenly feels very dry.

Leah looks so out of place in our tidy yellow kitchen. Unkempt, in stained jeans and her ratty old peacoat. Her hair is tangled in the back, and she’s done this botched makeup job with orange lipstick and mascara so thick that her eyelids are practically glued together. She looks more like a has-been streetwalker than the keeper of the dolls.