Outside Beauty (11 page)

I had no idea what he was talking about, but when we walked into the emporium, I saw a woman standing at the counter. She had no neck. Her head was just planted right there on her shoulders.

Mrs. Sherwood was a small, squat woman with a happy face. I admit I was curious about how she turned her head. Did she have to turn her whole torso to look left and right? Jiro eyed me warningly.

Even though I was curious, I didn't judge Mrs. Sherwood for not having a neck. I thought again about Chuang Tzu's heroes like Cripple Lipless and Uglyface.

Jiro set his box of gum on the counter, and Mrs. Sherwood smiled widely, not at the gum, but at me. The store didn't look much different from any little store in Chicago or Nebraska or wherever. There were the usual brands of bread and soft drinks and everything else. But there was also my father's gum, prominently displayed on the counter.

Jiro said, “My daughter, Shelby.”

“My husband says you mentioned once that you had a daughter! Isn't she lovely?” And she smiled as if I really was lovely.

“She play piano. Take lessons for,
anooooo
, ah . . .”

“Well, it was only four months,” I mumbled.

“Isn't that wonderful?” Mrs. Sherwood said, as if it truly was wonderful. She radiated happiness. “I wish Mr. Sherwood were here so he could meet her. When my kids grew up and moved out, I never felt so proud, but it broke my heart at the same time. It's nice to have young people around, isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Jiro, but I couldn't tell whether he meant it.

Mrs. Sherwood leaned toward me. “You should be very proud, because your father makes the best gum I've ever tasted. If this were a fair world, he would be as rich as the Wrigleys.”

She handed my father a check, and we left.

As we drove again in his boat car, he said, “Some children make fun of Mrs. Sherwood for not having neck. I'm proud of you.”

“I wouldn't make fun of someone!”

“I know. You're good girl.”

Our next stop was twenty miles of scenic road away. There wasn't much along the road, just occasional clusters of frame buildings. I leaned out the window like a dog and tried to imagine gold stars lying along the highway. After a while we stopped at a place called Ark-Mart.

According to Jiro, the owner, Mr. Lumpkin, briefly “went crazy” more than a decade ago. Then he opened this store. He had studied zoology at an Ivy League school, and in his professional life he had specialized in coyotes, helping to eradicate them for the government. He later decided killing coyotes was only making them smarter in the ways of not getting killed. And he began to love the coyotes. “This is when he go crazy,” Jiro said.

He chuckled. “Mr. Lumpkin say he once swallowed live fish to see if he could feel fish soul when it died.”

“Could he?” I asked.

Jiro frowned as he turned off the engine outside Mr. Lumpkin's store. He seemed very deep in thought. “In Japan some people take live shrimp, cut off head and tail very quick, and swallow. They say this best way to eat shrimp and get full flavor. I try once, but I don't feel soul.” He smiled at me. “Good question.”

When we got out of the car, Jiro said, “You carry box.” He opened the trunk and I paused. My mother probably would have been appalled: She was not raising her girls to be gum salesmen. Even though I was tidy, I had never done much work. Our mother actually hired a housekeeper when the apartment got out of hand. But Jiro was waiting patiently, so I picked up the box and followed him inside.

Mr. Lumpkin looked perfectly normal, except maybe a little stiff—he had a military haircut and his face was chiseled. I noticed about a dozen pictures of coyotes behind the counter.

The first thing Jiro said was, “My daughter, Shelby.”

Mr. Lumpkin nodded, but severely, and handed Jiro a check. “Last batch didn't seem as fresh,” he said.

“Very sorry,” Jiro said. “This batch excellent.”

Mr. Lumpkin nodded severely again, and we left.

After we'd driven a few miles, Jiro said, “Last batch very fresh, but why argue?”

We rarely passed other cars on the road. I had no idea who would actually shop at these tiny stores and buy Jiro's gum. But he seemed to be making a passable living.

Next we stopped at someplace called Farmer Pete's. Jiro walked straight to the animal feed section, picking up a sack of oats specially prepared for goats. He told the clerk that he also needed some hay. To me, he said, “Don't overfeed. Goat keep eating and eating. You need to be strong and not feed him just because he begs.”

We made a few more stops before returning home to eat sandwiches and sit on the porch. I put out some hay and fresh water for my goat. He ran right up but stopped a few feet away. “Don't worry, I'm
leaving,” I told him. “I don't want to scare you.”

I hurried to my bedroom and peeked out the window. The goat was eating the hay. It seemed to me he looked happy. Jiro knocked on the door. “I'm going back to office,” he said.

“Okay, bye!” I said. I watched my goat until he finished eating and went wherever it was he went.

I always ran outside whenever the mailman came, but I didn't get a letter until a week later, when I got three from Maddie. They were just to me, not one of our chain letters.

Dear Shelby
,

I dont like it here. You said you were going to vissit me. Did you tell a lie? I have to put this letter under the matress. Else my father will get it. I wet the bed last night and he spanked me again. Can you come visit me? Please? Please
???

Lihthegove,
Maddie

The next two letters said pretty much the same thing. She thought I'd abandoned her. I pictured her big eyes when she wrote “please.” I could see her face perfectly in my mind. The letter sounded so serious. I had a big responsibility to save her from living with Mr. Bronson. I tried sending her thoughts about how everything would be okay. I tried to think of ways that I could go get her. Maybe if our mother knew Mr. Bronson was spanking her, she would insist Maddie stay here. I called Marilyn to see what she thought, but no one picked up.

As soon as I hung up the phone, it rang. I knew it was one of my sisters, because we thought we were all psychic, so I figured that if I was thinking about them, then they were thinking about me. “Hi,” I said.

“Are you going to come get me?”

“I am, Maddie,” I said. “I said I would, and I'm going to. I just—”

“Who is this?” said Mr. Bronson's voice in my ear.

“It's me, Shelby.”

“She doesn't have permission to call you.” The phone clicked.

That evening I was so quiet that even Jiro, himself quiet, asked me if anything was wrong. I said no, and we listened to the cries of crickets and watched
the sun setting over the hills. A grasshopper jumped onto the screen, and then a bird slammed into the screen before righting itself and flying away. Jiro said thousands and maybe even millions of birds were killed each year, flying into glass on skyscrapers. “You should be on
Jeopardy!
,” I told him.

“What jeopardy?”

He was just like my mother asking about Yellowstone. “You don't know what
Jeopardy!
is?”

“Ah, jeopardy is when in danger. I read that in dictionary.”

Was anyone ever as out of it as my father? “It's a TV game show,” I said.

“Oh, TV,” he said, as if that were the end of it.

Later, when I got in bed, I felt angry that Maddie wasn't even allowed to call me. I hadn't even been able to tell her anything. When I pictured Maddie wetting the bed as she dreamed about our good friends the bugs, I just wanted to kill Mr. Bronson for spanking her. In fact, I felt so angry I couldn't sleep. Then I got angrier and angrier, and when I did fall asleep, I dreamed of Mr. Bronson losing on
Jeopardy!

I CALLED MARILYN AGAIN THE next day, the second Jiro left the house.

When she answered, I said, “It's me.”

“Hi, Shelby.”

“Maddie says that Mr. Bronson spanked her for wetting the bed. And then she called me and he made her hang up.”

“He's such a jerk. She can't help it! I can't stand him.”

“Me neither. I was thinking we should ask Mom if Maddie can stay with you and Mack or me and Jiro. Then at least she'll be with one of us.”

“I already asked,” Marilyn told me.

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. She said she didn't want to rock the boat with Bronson at the moment because of some legal stuff.”

“When did you ask? Maybe you can ask Mom again next time you see her. Tell her Mr. Bronson spanked her. Is she getting any better?”

“I see her every day. Her arm's getting better. But she's pretty depressed.”

“But she's getting better.”

“She looks bad,” Marilyn said. And that told me everything. “Shelby, I know you're worried about Maddie, but I don't want to upset Mom. She's very emotional right now. I don't think it's a good idea to ask her something that will only worry her.”

Exasperation and anger rose in me. But I also felt guilty for being mad at someone going through surgery after surgery. I wasn't sure what my mother even looked like now. Marilyn said her looks were going through a “challenging” period.

The next day Marilyn called back. She'd talked to Mom about Maddie after all. “Mom started crying and saying there was nothing she could do. She said Bronson was taking advantage of the situation.”

So the days formed weeks, and still Maddie cried whenever we talked. During that time, our
mother was released from the hospital once and then readmitted a few days later to have the plates put in her forearm. Meanwhile, as summer ripened, the last kousa dogwood blooms dropped from the trees in Jiro's front yard. The hillsides were all the same deep green, and at night the air was thick with mosquitoes. No matter how careful Jiro and I were about closing our screens and getting quickly into and out of the house, every night I would lie in bed and hear buzzing in my ears. Sometimes I turned on the light and went on a mosquito hunt, smashing a few mosquitoes and seeing blood squirt out.

One day I sat outside with my new goat friend and some nail polish. At first the goat was curious, maybe wondering if this new activity involved some kind of snack for him. When he saw it didn't, he walked a few feet away and folded his legs under himself and watched me.

Painted nails never helped my feet look any better. It seemed to just make my funny toes look even funnier. My feet had never been soft and pretty. In fact, they were so bad that when Maddie was a toddler, she asked me if my feet were “broken” because they were as cracked as a drought-stricken field.
They were even worse now. Since my sisters and I had always painted our nails together every week, it just made me lonely to do it now.

I went inside and got the
A
volume of Jiro's encyclopedia set. Jiro had shown it to me and said I could read it when I had nothing to do. He said he'd read the whole set from
A
to
Z.
I randomly opened up the volume and read,
Marie Antoinette is perhaps most famous for her alleged line “Let them eat cake.”

I looked at the goat. “Who cares what she said?” I said. “She lived a million years ago.”

Jiro said that not only had he read the entire encyclopedia set, he'd also read two different dictionaries. Nobody read one entire dictionary, let alone two. I took a dictionary and got through one fourth of one page before I stopped. All I was able to focus on was that I couldn't wait to go back to Chicago and be with my sisters again. We had such a great time together. Without them, I didn't really seem to be living my life. It was like my life was on hold and I was living in some kind of temporary world. The only thing important to me was writing my sisters and getting mail from them. Later that day I got Maddie's next batch of letters:

Duhthegear Shelby
,

I hope you are doing well. My father is helping me to write my letters. I sincerely hope you are doing well. I am doing well and am grateful to Father for helping me get through this difficult time
.

Luhthegove,
Madeline

The letter struck me as really creepy. I pictured Mr. Bronson sitting next to her, okaying each sentence as she wrote. Maybe he even dictated the words to her. I ripped open the other two letters, and they were the same way. By the time Jiro got home I'd started to worry that Mr. Bronson didn't have to dictate anything to Maddie—he'd beaten her down so much, he was changing her personality. I ran up to greet my father. “It's an emergency!” I cried out, holding a letter out to him. He looked concerned when he started the letter, but not when he finished it. “Why is this emergency?” he said.

“He was dictating the letter to her!” I said.

Jiro looked confused. “How you know that?”

“It doesn't sound like her.”

“Who it sound like?”

“Nobody,” I said. I got a little irate with Jiro. “Nobody! That's the point.”

“I have long day today. Lost account because I charge more than competitor. I can't afford to charge less.”

“But . . .” But I couldn't say more. I guess I felt kind of like I had to defend Jiro from this competitor. But I also had to take care of Maddie. Why did the world give you twice as much as you could handle?

Sitting on the porch had already become a tradition. That night I sat out there before Jiro did, and he came and joined me.

“So can we have Maddie up for a visit?”

“Ahh, that would be up to Bronson-san.”

“You don't have to call him
san
. Also, I was wondering, why do you keep a goat?” I asked Jiro.

“I don't keep. He just decide to live here one day.”

“He's my friend.”

“I know,” Jiro said. “I see you out there when I get home.”