My Tiki Girl (5 page)

You’ve got to be careful in Leah’s room—there are mounds of clothing covering the floor and towers of battered cardboard boxes leaning against the walls. She calls the boxes her files, and they hold all kinds of junk: old bills, coupons, photos, broken necklaces, and recipes cut out from magazines that she says she’ll make one day. Sometimes things get filed accidentally, like Jonah’s report on snakes before he turned it in, or the light bill that never got paid—the power company turned off the electricity for a few days until Leah got her next check.

Leah’s on welfare, plus she gets child support from Dahlia’s and Jonah’s fathers. They don’t have the same dad. Dahlia’s father lives in California picking fruit—tangelos, blood oranges, things you never see at the A&P. Jonah’s dad is an Air Force pilot and lives in Arizona with a wife and kids of his own. That’s what Leah says anyway. There are no dolls for these men, which shows how tiny they are in the big picture.

When Leah sleeps, she makes funny noises. She mumbles and gurgles, sounds like she’s on the verge of laughter. In her dreams, she goes to giant parties and drinks cocktails with famous people. She sees her old friend Pam, who wears a calico dress and has her hair decorated with black feathers. We’re there too sometimes—Dahlia, Jonah, and I—but we’re all our alter egos, our doll selves. I’m LaSamba, face painted white, ever silent, doing my mime routine and juggling. Dahlia is Tiki, the hula dancer in a grass skirt who hypnotizes people when she moves. Jonah is the Great Zamboni, boy wizard, who can turn men to lizards with a wave of his wand.

On her dresser, in front of the mirror, Leah has the dolls lined up on a silky cloth. Every other surface in the room is littered with tattered paperbacks, half-burnt sticks of incense, a pair of reading glasses with one lens—but the dresser is pristine. It’s like a shrine up there, and none of us are allowed to touch it. It’s only Leah who can take the dolls down, arrange them, have them act out scenes of what is to come.

I study my doll, the sad clown no more than four inches tall, with a rag-doll body in a blue satin suit and porcelain face full of hairline cracks. My soft-bodied doll is stuck in a perpetual slump, never really straightening up. The doll looks old, like a hundred children have played with it, but I know they haven’t because I’m sure kids aren’t that careful—the head would be smashed by now for sure. It’s a delicate head, my doll’s.

Zamboni is a plastic wizard with a blue robe and wand. He has a long white beard and pointed cap. He’s from a medieval play set that Dahlia had when she was younger. Some of the toys survived and live in Jonah’s room now: the plastic dragon, the princess, a knightless horse. The castle broke long ago, and the king was lost.

Tiki’s doll is a small, hard plastic figure of a hula girl wearing a grass skirt and a lei. In her hands, she holds a tiny ukulele. She’s smiling and dancing a hula dance, one hip raised slightly above the other. She doesn’t like to be still, this doll. She wears a cardinal-colored bikini top that shows her bronze belly. The doll was a cake decoration from a Hawaiian-themed party Dahlia had when she was seven. She is long and tan—even all plastic, she seems exotic. She is the most beautiful of the dolls, but she is not the most important. She stands with the others, always dancing, while my doll looks on and Zamboni the wizard holds his wand in the upright position forever, some new spell always being cast. It is the figure who sits on the shelf above them who has the most power. She’s the one to watch.

The doll Leah has chosen for herself is the best of all: she is Mother Mary, the chipped plaster figure of the Blessed Virgin from their old family Nativity set. She is kneeling, bare-foot, wearing a pale blue dress and white kerchief. Her eyes are closed and her hands are clasped in prayer. Mother Mary sits carefully perched on the edge of an old fruit crate turned on its side. She hovers above the other dolls, keeping watch. She is separate, but not distant. Her eyes are closed, but she sees us all.

Circled around the group of dolls are three trolls, because, as Leah says, there must always be evil and you might as well give it a name and be able to look it in the eye. I don’t know where the troll dolls came from, but they are gruesome. They are carved from wood and painted in dark colors. They are hunchbacked and bearded, have open mouths with pointed yellow teeth—you can almost smell the rotting meat of children on their breath. The clothes they wear are rags, and their hair is a painted-on mass of tangled snarls.

In Leah’s world, trolls can be hiding anywhere. They live in sewer systems, lurking in tunnels under metal grates. They also work security at the mall. You may not know a troll right away: they are stupid, but tricky with disguises.

“Trolls will eat you alive,” Leah warns, so we’re always on guard. Jonah wears a special necklace Leah made to protect him. She made it when the trolls started invading his dreams, when the nightmares made him scream himself awake. It’s a talisman, powerful magic: a pouch sewn from white cloth with a clear piece of crystal and a dried pink rosebud inside. Trolls hate anything beautiful.

Dahlia nudges aside a book about astral travel and a copy of
TV Guide
from last year and gently sets the tray down on the bed. Leah mumbles, stirs, sits up slowly. It’s the coffee smell that gets her, and she lifts the purple satin mask up away from her eyes, pushing it up so that it holds her hair back like a headband. Leah smiles sleepily, and we know the dreams have been good.

Leah says she has something to show us, something special, and after breakfast we gather around her as she sits up in her bed like royalty, all her pillows fluffed behind her, a soft and perfect throne. She asks Jonah to get her pocketbook, which he does, and she rummages around for a minute, then pulls out a clump of white tissue paper, which she unfolds to reveal a small ceramic figurine. It’s a dog. A brown dog with a white chest and a foolish smile. He’s standing on his hind legs, upright like a person. He wears blue overalls and carries a stick with a red-checked bandanna tied at the end like a hobo’s.

“Who is this?” asks Dahlia, the only one of us brave enough to speak.

“I don’t know yet,” Leah says, “but he’s coming, I can feel it.”

Leah picked up the dog in the gift area at Penney’s last night after she got the walkie-talkies. She says she walked by the glass shelves with the ceramic figures, and this one called out to her.

“He’s coming,” Leah says, rubbing the dog’s head, touching the bundle he carries over his shoulder.

“Should we name him?” asks Dahlia, forgetting she knows the rules.

“No,” says Leah. “It’s not time. We have to wait for a sign. We have to meet him first.”

“Are you sure he’s a he?” asks Jonah.

“Mmm, yes. I think it’s a he this time. And I think he’s going to change things. There will be more to this dog than meets the eye.”

5

Halloween is a
week away, and today we’re making costumes. Dahlia and I are fifteen, too old really to trick-or-treat, but Leah says no one is too old and she has the whole night planned. First, all four of us will hit the rich neighborhoods, using pillowcases for our loot, our pockets stuffed full of toilet paper, soap, and firecrackers. Jonah will bring his wand. When our pillowcases are full, it’s off to the cemetery to have a tea party with the dead, which is an official Wainwright Halloween tradition. We’ll bring a thermos and eat special cookies decorated with skeletons. A cup of tea will get poured out on the ground, and some cookies will be set at the base of tombstones for our dead companions. Leah tells us this is called “leaving libations.” She says the veil between the worlds is thin on All Hallows Eve, and we need to treat the spirits with respect. If we bring them offerings, they’ll be on our side in the year to come.

Last Halloween, I stayed home with my dad watching old monster movies and passing out candy. The year before, Sukie, Troy, Albert, and I went to see
Creature from the Black Lagoon
in 3-D. We wore those cardboard goggles with red and blue lenses, and Albert tried to explain to me what made 3-D work. Having a tea party with the dead kind of blows my last two Halloweens out of the water. This will be a Halloween to remember.

Leah has the sewing machine going, her foot pumping a steady rhythm on the pedal. She’s sitting at an old wooden table in the living room, a wicker basket beside her overflowing with half-finished projects, crumpled patterns, and mismatched scraps of fabric. She holds a lit cigarette between her lips as she works, and soft gray ashes fall onto the shiny blue fabric.

Leah’s making a wizard hat for Jonah, who is looking over her shoulder expectantly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He doesn’t want to be anything else for Halloween. He’s a wizard every year. Every day, even. And he’s always the same wizard, but this year, he’ll have a blue peaked satin hat with gold stars sewn onto it instead of one made from a cone of stapled poster board.

Dahlia and I are going through all the closets, looking for costumes. The apartment is full of them—grass skirts, silk scarves, gypsy dresses, cowboy hats—there’s even a beekeeper’s suit Leah picked up at a yard sale back in Delaware. The suit is a light cloth like muslin, bright white. There’s a pith helmet covered in a head net and thick leather gloves that still hold stingers, but smell sweet.

“I want to wear this,” I announce, and already Dahlia is helping me into the suit, zipping the front up, adjusting the helmet so that it fits my small head. The netting is like a wedding veil, I think, and it makes me feel farther away from things. Dahlia is standing in front of me adjusting the white suit. Her hands are sure and quick. She passes me the heavy gloves and I put them on; they cover my arms all the way to my elbows. Immediately, my hands are sweating.

“It’s perfect, Maggie!” Dahlia exclaims. “Sylvia Plath was a beekeeper, did you know that?”

Dahlia’s smiling, and I’m staring through the netting at her mouth; her full lips, the way her teeth are like movie-star teeth—they’re that white. She’s all around me now, surrounding me the way she does, fixing the zipper of my thin white coveralls, straightening my veil, and I’m staring at her mouth wondering if that’s where all this sound in my ears is coming from. This pounding buzz, this whirring sound of danger and movement. I hold still, too afraid to move. Afraid, for the first time, of the way Dahlia makes me feel.

Is it my imagination, or are her hands lingering a little longer than necessary at my hips? And did she hear my stifled little intake of air when she reached inside the suit to fix the zipper and the back of her hand brushed across my left breast?

I think I’ll die if she keeps her hands on me much longer, but it will be even worse if she stops.

I bite my lip and make myself concentrate on being as still as the store mannequins at the mall. Dahlia’s hands are all over me like a swarm as she pulls out old stingers, straightens seams, moves my arms this way and that, making me—limping, undeserving, secret-licorice-hating, girl-with-a-dead-mother me—her doll.

“Bring in the bees!” Dahlia shouts, stepping back from me, still buzzing softly, so softly I think I’m the only one who hears it.

The sewing machine stops. Leah looks up. I let myself breathe.

Jonah’s hat has a cone of cardboard inside to make it hold its shape. He puts it on and bounces around, casting spells. The hat shifts, covers his eyes, and he has to keep stopping to push it up.

“Maybe it needs a chin strap,” suggests Leah.

“A real magic hat does
not
have a chin strap!” Jonah says back, still dancing around the room, bumping into things, shoving the hat back.

“It’s fine,” he says. “It’s perfect!” Then he’s off to his room, where no doubt he’s standing in front of his full-length mirror, the magic looking glass he uses to see into other worlds. Jonah can stare at himself for hours in that mirror, and he claims that if he looks long enough, he sees visions. Last night, he used the mirror to practice using his ring of invisibility, which, he promises us, works very well indeed and will come in handy one day.

Now there’s this huge crisis: Dahlia does not know what to be for Halloween. She’s tried on all the costumes, raided both her closet and Leah’s, torn through the heaps of clothes on Leah’s floor, and still she’s not inspired. Jonah’s back in the living room now, watching his sister carefully, knowing he has to do something before she gets into a mood. He hates it when she’s quiet and sulky, her eyes the color of storm clouds.

“Come with me,” he says, taking her hand. I follow, too, still in my suit, walking like an astronaut, crinkling with each step. Jonah leads Dahlia to his room and puts her in front of the mirror.

“Stay here and hold still,” he instructs. I’m behind her, looking over her shoulder at the both of us in Jonah’s mirror. Jonah shuts the door to his room, runs to the window, and closes the blue plastic slatted blinds. It’s still not dark enough, so he takes a blanket from his bed, stands on a chair, and uses it to cover the window.

“Now look in the mirror and ask what you will be for Halloween. Keep asking the question until the mirror shows you.”