My Tiki Girl (6 page)

Jonah’s room is pretty dark now, and our reflections in the mirror are just vague outlines.

“What will I be for Halloween?” Dahlia asks. I move closer until I’m right behind her, breathing on her neck through the net that covers my face. She reaches out and takes my hand in its heavy leather glove, gives it a squeeze. I’m staring at us in the mirror, still thinking about the soft shape of Dahlia’s mouth, of the live-wire feeling I got when she accidentally touched my breast. I catch myself and stop. This is Dahlia, not some boy I’m all crushed out on. I take a step back, glaring at my freakish self in the mirror. She doesn’t let go of my hand.

I look like a monster hovering, taller than Dahlia and glowing in my suit. I’m like one of those people sent to clean up radiation spills. Reactor leaks. Chemical calamities. The buzzing in my ears starts again, and I think I may faint. It’s the closeness of Dahlia that does it. It somehow hurts to be this close to her. It’s like being in the thick of a nuclear meltdown and just staring at the beautiful glow, not caring if you’re radiated to death in your stupid white suit.

“Dead Aunt Mary!” Dahlia shouts, dropping my hand as she runs from the room, flinging the door open. Light from the hallway spills in. I turn to Jonah.

“Who’s Aunt Mary?” I ask, sure she must be some crazy, sad relative of theirs I haven’t heard of yet. The only relatives I know of are Dahlia’s and Jonah’s missing fathers and Leah’s sister, Elsbeth, who lives in Ithaca and sends grocery-store gift cards on birthdays and holidays.

Jonah shrugs. “No idea.” And he’s following Dahlia out and into the living room, where Dahlia is explaining the vision to Leah, who is at the machine working on her own costume now. She won’t tell us what she’s going to be, but she’ll wear a dark purple dress, this much we can see.

“She’s not my aunt,” Dahlia gasps, nearly out of breath with excitement, “just
somebody’s
aunt. Anybody’s aunt. And she died this terrible, gruesome death.”

“Did she kill herself?” Leah asks.

“No,” answers Dahlia. “She was murdered.”

So Dahlia starts to work on her costume, telling us, in bits and pieces as she works, the story of Dead Aunt Mary, which she makes up as she goes along.

“Aunt Mary was an old-maid aunt who had a terrible secret that no one knew.”

“What was the secret?” Jonah asks.

“It was the secret that got her killed,” explains Dahlia as she picks one of Leah’s black dresses to be her Dead Aunt Mary costume. The dress is missing buttons and ripped under the arm. It’s been filed in the mending box, probably for years.

“Aunt Mary was in love once, but it was a forbidden love to a married man.” Dahlia is telling the story as she walks to the bathroom with the dress. She closes the door only halfway so we can still hear her talk while she changes.

“It was her sister’s husband,” Dahlia calls out, her voice as theatrical as she can make it, “and they had an affair. Aunt Mary got knocked up, and her brother-in-law gave her money for an abortion, then she left town. When she returned two years later, her sister and brother-in-law had had a little girl. Aunt Mary was totally resentful of her sister, jealous of the child they got to raise together. Her brother-in-law was in actual pain when he watched his daughter and Aunt Mary play. See, he realized it was Mary he truly loved, not his stupid, kind of ugly wife, and he felt terrible about the child he and Mary had aborted. And Mary’s sister was miserable, too—she was no dummy. She saw the look in her husband’s eyes when he watched Mary and the little girl play.

“So one day, during this we-can’t-go-on-this-way argument between Mary and her brother-in-law, it came out that Aunt Mary didn’t go through with the abortion but went and had the baby, a little boy, and put him up for adoption. Mary threatened to tell her sister the whole story, just to put an end to all the secrets.”

Dahlia comes out of the bathroom, her mother’s black dress fitting perfectly, making her already pale skin seem to glow white. She’s teased her dirty blond hair so that it is all snarls and put black eyeliner on thick beneath her lower lids. Her eyes are a murky gray.

“Did she tell?” Jonah asks.

“Did he kill her?” Leah wants to know.

“No.” Dahlia shakes her head slowly, almost sadly. “Come on, you guys, he was in love with her, remember? He didn’t do it. It was her sister. She overheard the argument and knew the truth. Mary’s sister stabbed her with a kitchen knife.”

Dahlia reaches down and touches her chest, just between her breasts.

“Right here,” she says, pointing to the spot. “I’ll need a knife. And some blood. Fake blood. Lots of it.”

Sometimes when I watch Dahlia, I know she’s the powerful one. She stands in the middle of the living room in her black dress, the center of everything. She has Leah’s gift for storytelling, but there’s this sense of desperation when Dahlia tells things. This crazy urgency. She’ll do and say anything to get your attention, then leave you hanging so that she knows you’ll come back for more. I imagine that one day her powers will far outshine those of her mother and wizard brother. She won’t need dolls to make things happen. She’ll be able to do it with the wave of her hand; it’ll be as easy as putting on thick black eyeliner, as pointing to her chest and saying,
Here. The knife should go here.

We have band practice in our costumes. Dahlia makes up a song about Dead Aunt Mary. The chorus goes, “I’ve got a knife in my heart, a knife in my heart, a knife in my heart.” I blow on my clarinet, the bee veil pushed up over the top of my plastic helmet.

We practice almost every day after school now, and I guess I’m getting better.

I dug my old band clarinet out from the back of my closet the day Dahlia asked me to be in her band. I soaked the reed and tried a few scales. It was bad. All I could play were some scales and a few bars from “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “The Pink Panther Theme.”

My dad stuck his head in when he heard me playing. He looked overjoyed.

“Thinking about joining the school band?” he asked.

When I told him this girl at school asked me to be in her band, he practically did a backflip.

“I suck,” I told him. “I can’t remember anything.”

“It’ll come back to you,” he said. “You just have to practice.”

That’s my dad. He always thinks I can do anything if I put my mind to it, but that was BTA Maggie.
This
Maggie is lucky if she can get herself a bowl of Lucky Charms and make it to the bus stop in time each morning.

So I practiced for a week, then brought my clarinet to Dahlia’s after school and played her some scales, and she was totally impressed. When I asked if there was going to be sheet music for the songs we’d be playing, she laughed.

“We’re doing original compositions,” she said.

“But . . . but I need music,” I told her.

“Just make it up,” she said. Then she took out her notebook and started reading this poem she wrote about how people were just like jigsaw puzzles. She told me to play along. So I played as quietly as I could while she read. I tried to improvise, but my fingers kept going back to the music I knew.

She closed the notebook and scowled. “You’re playing marching band music.”

“I can’t help it,” I told her.

“You’ll get better,” she said. “You just need to loosen up a little. Try to forget everything you once knew.”

So that’s been my goal these past weeks: to try to forget everything and start from scratch. Not just with the music, but with my whole life.

Now I play along the way a snake charmer does. Sometimes Dahlia sings, sometimes she reads poetry in this dramatic voice. Sometimes she just dances with her eyes closed and says whatever words pop into her head. I watch and I listen, and I try not to screw up too bad. But now it seems like I’ve blown it, because Dahlia has thrown up her hands and screamed, “Cut!” which is what she always says when she means stop playing, like she’s a movie director, not the lead singer of a band.

“Oh, LaSamba,” she says. “I’ve got it! I know what we need. What’s been missing all along.” She’s chewing on her lip like she does when she’s got one of her big ideas.

“A guitarist,” she says, dreamily fingering her teased Dead Aunt Mary hair. “Then we’ll be a real band.”

6

We’re eating reheated
pizza in our lemon yellow kitchen, and I’m shaking my good leg, the ball of my foot resting on the floor, my heel thumping on the bright checked linoleum. It drives my father crazy when I do this, but I can’t seem to stop. I’m all twitchy, the way I imagine drug addicts get when they need a fix. Being home does this to me. My dad has taken his contacts out and is wearing his black-framed, Buddy Holly glasses with thick lenses. The contacts were my mother’s idea. She said they made him look younger. He only wears the contacts to work now, and puts on the glasses as soon as he gets home. The Coke-bottle lenses have this unfortunate way of magnifying his eyes, which are always red and runny from allergies. I feel obligated to do whatever I can to make him smile. I picture his face on a poster somewhere: HOWARD KELLER: SADDEST MAN ALIVE.

My dad is so excited that I’m here, that we’re actually having pizza night at last, that he’s hardly eaten a thing. He burned the pizza by accidentally turning the oven to broil. Then he set the oven mitt on fire.

My dad is dressed in his weekend outfit: clean blue jeans and a freshly pressed yellow oxford shirt. He wears running shoes, really expensive ones, even though he gave up running years ago when he blew out his knee.

He stares into his yellow-and-white-checked coffee mug filled with Diet Pepsi. Everything in our kitchen matches, even my father in his carefully ironed shirt.

“How’s school, Mags?”

“Fine.”

“Seen much of Sukie and Albert?”

I cringe. “Uh, yeah. In the halls and stuff. We say hello.”

“You should ask them over sometime,” he says.

“Maybe,” I tell him, but actually I’m thinking,
When hell freezes over.
I know he’s bummed about not seeing them anymore, which is weird because they were my friends, not his.

“You given any more thought to Cedar Brook?” my dad asks.

“Nope.”

I can’t believe he’s still bugging me about switching schools. I mean, I know he was disappointed when I told him I just wanted to go to a normal school, that I wasn’t going to be the drama-star girl anymore, but that was over a year ago. Time to get over it.

“I’m happy at Sutterville High,” I say. The truth is, I’m not. But now, Sutterville High is where Dahlia is, so I can’t imagine going anywhere else.

“How’s the band going?”

“Okay. Dahlia says we need a guitarist.”

He nods. “I’d like to hear you guys play sometime,” he says.

I cringe a little. I don’t know which part worries me more: him actually hearing us, or introducing him to Dahlia.

“Sure,” I say. “Sometime. When we’re a little better.”

“Hey, I got you something.” He gets up and practically runs out of the kitchen. When he comes back, he’s holding this big paper bag and is just beaming. “A present,” he says, handing it over to me, “from an old musician to a new one.”

See, my dad used to play piano. Howard Keller: sales manager by day, jazz musician by night, hammering out Cole Porter kind of stuff. He’s still got his piano set up in the living room, but I don’t know why. He hasn’t touched it since my mom died. Sometimes she’d sing along. Sometimes we all would. Just picture it: me singing “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Anything Goes.” When I look back on my old life it’s like watching a movie starring some other girl.

I look in the bag. Two CDs, one by a guy named Artie Shaw, the other by Benny Goodman. Jazz. Big-band stuff.

“Thanks,” I say, trying to conceal my disappointment with a smile. My dad knows I hate jazz. Why couldn’t he have picked out a Rolling Stones or Doors CD? It’s not like I haven’t told him about all the cool old music I’ve been listening to at Dahlia’s. The fact that he tries so hard and still gets it wrong makes my stomach hurt.

“These guys are masters of the clarinet,” my dad explains. “Just give them a listen. I thought they might inspire you.”

“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”

Now he looks disappointed.

“Really,” I say. “Thanks.” I manage a bigger, brighter BTA Maggie Keller smile.

He shuffles his feet, pours himself another cup of soda.

“So how’s the leg?” he asks, clearly relieved to be changing the subject. “Have you been doing your exercises?”

“It’s fine. Yeah, I do them every night.”

Of course my leg is killing me lately, and I haven’t done my exercises in like a month—but it’s not like I’m actually going to tell him this.

I watch my father pull a piece of pepperoni off his slice of pizza and pop it into his mouth, chewing slowly and carefully. A string of cheese is hanging off his stubbled chin, and just now, he seems more like a nervous little boy than somebody’s dad.

When I really think about it, there’s a lot that’s wrong between my dad and me—things that all the pizza nights in the world could never fix. First off, there’s the fact that I feel like I have to lie to him to keep the peace. And then there’s the big unspoken problem. The famous elephant in the room.