Paint Me a Monster (10 page)

“Please. Can I try it?” I say.

“Tomorrow!” He keeps his head lowered and focuses on making the grooved horse stand out farther from the background. He takes another bite of candy and smears his lips with chocolate.

“You’re going to lose our bet and eat all your Halloween candy before next year. You eat too much at one time.”

“So do you.” His mouth overflows with candy bar, and he’s drooling.

I slide from my stool and shuffle past Liz’s art area to my own, at the end of the counter. My supply cabinet is neat. In one glance, I can see exactly what’s inside. A box of oil paints fastened with a gold latch, my tabletop easel, empty jars for turpentine, linseed oil, water, a box of used ribbons and swatches of cloth, glitter, a sketchbook, glue, colored pencils, an eraser, paper, canvases, and a list of collage supplies to scrounge for around the house. Thanks to Verna, I always have old sponges, rags, and the leftover stubs of soap to use for cleaning up.

I set up my painting equipment and sketch my own horse, eating grass in a meadow, on my canvas.

“Please Evan, if you let me use your woodburning set, I’ll teach you how to use a palette knife.”

“Nope.” he says. “I already know how. Liz showed me.”

“I’ll make you an origami fortune-teller and you can write whatever fortunes you want inside the folded-over sides.”

“I can do that myself,” he says.

“I’ll be your slave for the rest of the afternoon.”

Evan looks up and smiles. “Come over and pick a pattern to trace.”

Instead of tracing a pattern onto the wood, I draw my own design, a fish jumping from the water. With the hot tool, I slowly follow the pencil line, until scales glow the color of burnt umber, fleshy fins are airborne, and a dark striped tail clears the wavy water lines.

“Thanks, Evan. You’re the best brother. My fish looks so good!” Maybe Mom will hang it next to my landscape paintings.

Evan whirls his finger above the worktable, mimicking a tornado, and lands on the creepy crawlers. They’re squished by the twister.

“Rin, get me a Three Musketeers, a Mounds bar, and three chocolate kisses. Oh, and a glass of milk.”

“You know Mom only keeps her favorite candies in the house, fudge or chocolate-covered cherries,” I say. “Besides if you eat all that you’ll get sick.”

“I’m collecting it, not eating it, and you have those candies—in your Halloween bag,” Evan says. “Mine are gone.”

“That’s not fair!” I say. “My candy has to last seven more months, and there’s only half a bag left.”

“You’re my slave, and you have to do what I say.” Evan folds his arms across his chest and sticks his chin in the air where his nose used to be. “It was your idea.”

“This isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” I say, stomping to get my candy bag out of hiding. “I hope you burn your fingers, and I take back what I said about being a great brother.”

“Hey, Rinnie, make that two Mounds bars and twelve chocolate kisses.”

“I brought your coffee,” I whisper, stepping into the darkness of Mom’s bedroom.

It’s Sunday morning. Heavy curtains hide the eleven o’clock sun. Last night was Jeremy Shoen’s Bar Mitzvah party. Maybe the coffee will warm Mom up before I break my news.

“Did you add two
heaping
teaspoons of sugar?” Mom rolls over and flicks on a lamp.

“Sure did.”
Please be excited for me, please be excited.
“And I brought cream and the newspaper. Here.” I hand the cold cluster of pages to her.

Mom props herself against a row of pillows and uses the newspaper as a tray. “What time is it?”

She looks at the clock. Mom’s fingers fan wide, cover her eyes, and massage her face. Her forehead ripples, rises, and relaxes. The sleepy face remains.

I hand her the pitcher of cream and let the glimmer of gold around my wrist catch her eye.
Please be excited for me. Don’t be mad.
Hopefully, it is too early Mom-time for lots of energy and clear eyesight.

“What’s that on your wrist?”

“It’s an ID bracelet.”

“Who gave it to you?” Mom asks, blinking hard and sitting up in bed.

“Jesse Golden,” I say. His name is a parade, and it’s marching all over me. “He asked me to go steady last night.”

Silence, coffee, and dread press hard against the tick, tick, tick of Mom’s clock.

“Leah and Dan’s son?” Mom plumps her pillow and turns to face me. “Do Jesse’s parents know he gave you his bracelet, Rinnie?”

“I think he told them,” I say, holding my arm behind my back, so maybe Mom will forget about the bracelet and ask me more about the party.

“So what does ‘going steady’ mean exactly?”

“That I’m his girlfriend.” The next thought clots in my throat. “He thinks I’m pretty, smart, and important.” I don’t say
we kissed
.

“You know,” Mom’s voice rises, “if you go steady with Jesse, that means no other boys will give you the time of day.”

“Uh huh,” I chirp.

“No one else will be interested in you.”

She beckons me to her, so she can take a closer look.

“This is an expensive piece of jewelry,” she says and looks at me. “Too expensive for you to take. I think you should give the bracelet back—today. You don’t need to go steady in seventh grade.”

“But I really like him and other girls go steady,” I say.

She shakes her head again. “No. I think I’ll call Leah and Dan and see if they know Jesse gave you his ID bracelet. It’s valuable.”

“Don’t call yet,” I plead. “I’ll think about what you said.”

I walk to my room and hug Jumper, my stuffed rabbit, who’s so old he can’t hold his head up anymore. We sit in my rocking chair and Croquette joins the sway.

Jesse is sooo cute, guys. He has dimples. And, he has braces like me, freckles like me, and is short like me. Best of all, he picked me, Me, ME to go steady with!

The rest of the weekend I leave the bracelet on my dresser, covered with a red heart I cut from construction paper. On the paper is a list of Jesse’s favorites: Color—blue, Sport—baseball, School subject—math, Food—mint chocolate chip ice cream, Girl—ME!

At dinner, Mom says I can keep the bracelet. Jesse’s parents don’t mind if I wear his bracelet as long as I give it back when we break up.

When we break up? What?
I can’t believe I have something so special for my own. I love going steady.

“Does anyone want chopsticks other than me?”

It’s Sunday, our new day to visit Dad. Tonight we eat in at Dad’s apartment. That means Chinese for dinner. It’s Liz’s job to set the table. Evan picks the television program this week, another western, and I help Dad unload the food. The perfectly folded white boxes are treasure chests waiting to be pried open. Dad says next year when I’m twelve like Liz, we’ll switch jobs, but I like opening the boxes.

“Did you get extra fortune cookies?” Evan collects the slips of paper and tapes them into the fortune-tellers we make out of folded paper. “It’s too hard to write so tiny,” he says.

Dad holds a small sack open for Evan to inspect.

“Eight. Two for each of us,” Dad says. “That enough?”

Evan shakes his head, smiles, and jerks his right arm down in a motion of victory. He knows after reading our fortunes, Liz and I will give them to him.

“I’ll put the food in bowls,” I say. Liz leaves the kitchen, hands stretched around napkins, plates, and chopsticks. Dad and Evan follow with glasses and a carton of milk.

The minute I’m alone, my heart speeds up as if it heard the starting gun of a race. It is a race. How quickly can I put everything in bowls, steal shrimp from the lo mein, swallow a spoonful of gravy from the egg foo yung, count the wontons in the soup to see if there is more than one per person, and pluck the biggest wood ear from the vegetables before someone wants to know what’s taking so long. A little pinch of roast duck skin, another shrimp.

“Hurry up, Rinnie,” Dad yells. “I have to get you home by nine.”

I rearrange the food, so it looks untouched.

“Hereeee’s dinner,” I say, carrying a tray from the kitchen to Dad’s coffee table.

By the third commercial, plates are empty, napkins are tossed aside, and the sheriff has shot the bad guy.

“Does anyone want the last egg foo yung?” I ask. Evan burps. Dad frowns at him, and Liz holds her nose. I take the gooey pancake and scoop the last bit of gravy onto my plate.

“Where do you put that, Rinnie?” Dad asks. “You’re such a little runt.”

“I dunno.”

My stomach is already stretched, but I’m not ready to stop eating. There’s still room for more.

“Stop! Stand against the wall,” I order.

Tricia’s arms drop to her sides. The look on her face is how I feel when Mom barks my name. The afternoon sun is still high enough to create shadows, and mine is tall. And menacing.

Tricia inches toward the stucco wall of the garage. A lift-the-flap book falls from her hands and lands near her patent leather shoes. Lizards and dogs stare from under the open flaps. Tricia whimpers like the puppy in the book. For a moment, I think of her older sister, Becca, who is a year younger than I am. We swim together at the club and play shuffleboard.
Will Tricia tell Becca I made her cry?
I hope not—it’s my turn to push someone around.

I move in close and stare down at Tricia’s face. Her eyes are huge and her mouth quivers.
Good.

“Why are you cutting across our driveway? Who said you could do that?”

Tricia’s silent.

“Answer me!”

I stare at those huge eyes, but I see myself using the same short cut in reverse. I often cross through her yard on my way home from school. My shadow swallows Tricia’s.
Power
. I’ve got what I want. Then it’s gone.

Empty. I’m empty, and mean, and smaller than Tricia is. I want to run away . . . from me.

“Go home, Tricia,” I murmur. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you anymore.”

Tricia stoops to pick up her book. She searches the ground with her hands as if she were blind. Her eyes fix on mine like I might kick her. She finds the book and runs through the gap in the bushes into her yard.

Have I turned into an animal?

Today is Sunday, and Dad will be here soon. We wait on the front porch and squish the red berries that grow on the bushes nearby and threaten to wipe berry goo on each other.

Like a lit jack-o’-lantern, Evan’s round face twinkles with satisfaction. He’s just swatted a handful of berries across the driveway. If it weren’t for his huge chocolate eyes with eyelashes that curl back to his lids, happy buck-toothed smile, and funniness, he’d just be another fat boy. Liz and I aren’t allowed to call him chunk-o, big boy, or anything that might let him know he’s fat. He’s the biggest kid in his fourth grade class.

Mom says if we call him names, he can get a complex. I’m not sure what a complex is, but Mom is determined Evan isn’t going to catch it from his sisters. Mom describes Evan as “husky.”

It could be all the folded-over butter and sugar sandwiches he eats while watching television, or, maybe it has to do with the divorce. Evan wore normal-size clothes before Dad moved away.

Liz looks at her watch. I am not sure if she is counting how much time she will have with Dad or how much time must pass before she returns home. She doesn’t visit Dad every Sunday like I do. Dad doesn’t question her about it often, but when he does, Liz shrugs and says she has work to do. Liz doesn’t tell him she is Mom-sitting. She doesn’t tell Dad it was more fun when we played miniature golf and went bowling by ourselves, before he had a girlfriend. She doesn’t tell him she misses the smell of Old Spice on the towels and his scrawled signature on her report card. I watch Liz step back from Dad. Am I supposed to tell Dad that Liz told me these things?

I do what I am supposed to do. I always visit Dad and follow the unspoken rules that come to me from inside. I don’t act too excited to see him until we pull out of the driveway, and I don’t act too happy when he brings me home. I am very careful. It makes life with Mom easier.

Mom is angry that we want to spend time with Dad. Dad is angry because Liz sometimes snubs him. Liz is angry because Dad doesn’t insist she visit. Evan is angry because Dad is gone. I am angry because my parents are changing my world, and I can’t do anything about anything.

School is over. The water ripples blue in Gaga’s pool. Evan, Liz, a few friends from school, and I take a break from swimming to play SLAM. We take turns hurling a ball against the cement deck to see who can make it bounce the highest. Between each attempt, Evan gets dibs on the ball.

Liz yells, “Flubberize it! Flubberize it!”

He is the only one with the power of flubber. He catches the ball and rolls it on his stomach. Around and around, the ball follows the folds of skin hiding Evan’s red swimsuit. They are like layers on a sagging cake. His flab transfers its bounce to the ball, flubberizing it for the next slam. Mom hates this game, but Liz and I know Evan thinks it’s cool. His smile and eyes blaze as bright as the summer sun as he looks up to catch the ball. I’m glad Evan feels important.

“One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. There are six pairs of shorts for camp. Check them off the list,” Mom says, putting them in the trunk and counting one more time, “One, two, three, four, five, six.”

Verna is in the laundry room ironing the last of the white T-shirts to be packed. Every afternoon after swim lessons, it’s the same old thing: Come home, listen to Mom count, listen to Mom count again, find a place to put a new pile of stuff, and count one more time. It’s been the same list since I changed camps when I was eight. How hard can packing be?

“I don’t want to have to send you kids anything this summer,” she says.

“Mrs. G., those clothes aren’t changing. Why do you keep counting them?” Verna says, shaking her head, hands on her hips.

“Rinnie is thirteen now. She may need something she didn’t need last year.”