Paint Me a Monster (8 page)

“Mommy do you want bubbles?” I give her my bottle of Fairy Castle bubble bath. “Look up. Mommy, look up.”

“No, Rinnie, I don’t . . . want . . . bubbles.” Her breath chugs like a train. “I want . . . I want . . . ”

Mommy grabs her heart.

“I want you to go someplace else.”

Her fingers flick the air, and she opens the door the rest of the way with her foot so I can leave.

I look around. The walls look OK and the floor and toilet haven’t changed. Water still runs into the tub. I am confused and want to stay close to someone big, but there is no one to go to. I walk to my room and sit in the closet and play with my Barbie, the most ordinary thing I can think of doing.

Pebbles tap against the window above my bed. I climb on my pillows and look outside. It’s Verna, signaling me in our secret code. Instead of ringing the doorbell in the morning, Verna throws little stones at my window.

“7:00 A.M. is too early to wake Mrs. G,” she says.

I jump out of bed and rush to open the front door. I’m the first person she sees! I’ve been awake a long time waiting to greet Verna and breathe her in. She smells better than the tulip stuck in her buttonhole.

“Hi, Verna!” I say, as if she has been away on a long voyage.

“Hi, Pancake!” she says back and tosses the day’s newspaper on the floor. We go down the basement stairs to the laundry room. Verna takes her sweater off and hangs it on a wire that stretches across the room like a tightrope. She puts on her uniform, ties an apron around her waist, and rubs cherry lotion into her hands and arms.

“May I have some?” I ask.

I get a squirt of the candy-sweet-smelling cream. My mouth waters. The smell makes me hungry for breakfast. We go upstairs to wake Liz and Evan, and then Verna comes into my room and helps me make my bed. I put on my favorite red-flower-print shorts. They’re faded because they used to belong to Liz. The red roses are pink and the washings by Juanita, our laundress, has turned the fabric old-blankety soft.

“Wear this fuchsia tee-shirt, honey-pot,” Verna says. “It’ll jive those shorts right up.” I pick an orange elastic, brush my hair, and put it into a ponytail just like Verna taught me a long time ago.

“Put this on your pony,” she says, handing me a pink and green striped ribbon. “Now you’re lookin’ sharp, girl.”

I grin and give her two thumbs up.

“Tell your sister to hurry up, or she’ll be havin’ cold eggs.”

I follow Liz’s voice to the bathroom.

“Verna says to hurry up if you want hot eggs.”

“Drat these stupid curls!” Liz curses some more and ignores me. “Drat these stupid curls.”

But the curses don’t help. She stretches and tapes curls to her head with her wet hairbrush “Darn it, I hate my hair.”

Since Mommy told her bread crust makes straight hair curl, Liz eats only the inside part of the bread. I always eat my crusts, and my hair is straight. I guess it only works if you don’t want curly hair.

“You look just fine,” Verna says as she heads for Evan’s room. She stops long enough to help Evan find his show-and-tell project for school, something fourth graders don’t do, but I wish we did.

“I need something that moves things,” Evan says.

Verna answers with her favorite morning words. “There’s nothing as good as preparation. At night, before you hop in bed, get yourself ready for tomorrow: Pick out your clothes, lay out your supplies—think ahead. Look in your toy box, boy.”

“I’ll take my bulldozer,” Evan says, reaching under his bed.

While I wait for Liz and Evan to come to breakfast, I take Croquette for a walk. Liz and Evan are downstairs when I return. Verna spoons scrambled eggs and bacon on our plates, fills empty jam jars with orange juice, and goes to wash the pan. Croquette jumps on my lap.

“Good morning, Croquee. Who’s the piddiest doggie in the whole wide world? Who, who, who?” I say.

“You sound like an owl,” Liz says. “Croquee you don’t want to be piddy do you? No, you just want to be patted.”

Evan pretends his eggs are mountains and uses his bulldozer to push them toward the dog. Verna plops the newspaper on the table. Liz and I fight for the comics.

“You two don’t have time for anything but eating,” Verna says. “Ward will be here soon to drive you to school. He won’t wait for you, he can’t be late. . . .”

“For seminary school,” we chime in.

Verna licks her hand and pats down Evan’s hair. “Mrs. G. hired him to take you to school and that’s what he’s going to do. Now finish up. Evan, use your fork and hand me that bulldozer. Never seen such last-minute kids.”

“Not me!” I say. “I’m ready.” And I stand by the front porch.

Mommy likes Ward a lot. I don’t know why. He doesn’t say much except hello, sit still, and good-bye. In three years, he’s never asked any of us about school. I guess that’s fair. We don’t ask him what a seminary is.

Tomorrow is Evan’s sixth birthday. My birthday won’t be here for two months. Mommy took us to pick out a cake and party favors for his cowboy party. Evan chooses a white cake with horses made from chocolate frosting and cowboys swinging black licorice lassos. Water pistols are the party favors. I pretend the cake is for me. At camp, birthday girls and their friends get cupcakes in paper holders, and there is no such thing as party favors.

I sit between Mommy’s legs, on the queen-sized bed. She brushes my hair. Tangles snag the bristles, but Mommy works them smooth. I feel the soft skin of her hands on my neck as she lifts my hair and wraps it into a French knot. Mommy lets go and it tumbles down my back—heavy, hot.

“Try a bun, Mommy,” I lean into her body.

“Your hair is the best thing you have,” Mommy says. “Don’t ever cut it. It’s your personality.”

Why can’t people sleep with their eyes open?

How does a pebble in your shoe cause so much hurt?

Why doesn’t soap get dirty?

Why does a kid in my class have one green eye and one blue eye?

Why is it “I before E except after C”?

Why are fire engines red?

What is a personality?

It is very late, past my bedtime. Brownies meet tomorrow. I take the Brownie dress from my closet. I love my uniform. It is the color of a chocolate bar. I am excited to wear it to school. I look good in it. My uniform smells clean. I check the hem. Mommy promised to fix the side that fell down last week. The hem still hangs down. I take my uniform and show her.

“I’m too tired to start sewing. Wear something else tomorrow, Rinnie,” she says.

“Please, Mommy. All the other Brownies will have on their uniforms. It’s the rule. We have to. Please.”

“Tst, OK, OK.”

“Really?”

“I promise, Rinnie.”

“And do a GOOD job. Verna told me it is important to be your best self in every way, especially when you meet new friends. The Brownies are sort of new friends,” I say.

Mommy takes the dress and scoots me out the door with her hand.

The hemmed uniform is on my bed when I wake up. All day in school I think about Brownies. I will paint my macaroni-covered jewelry box with real gold paint at the Brownie meeting. I’ve worked hard to make sure every noodle is in the right place. Today, I finally get to bring it home. I’ve known all along it is a present for Mommy. This is my favorite project so far—better than making butter from cream or braiding plastic for bracelets. It’s even better than the running, jumping, and climbing I do at recess.

Finally! The bell rings, and it’s time for Brownies.

A girl from a different class points at me and whispers to her friend. “Go back to the prairie! Did you leave your bonnet at home?”

A little group forms and giggles with her. I dash to find the bathroom mirror.

“NO!” From the back, I look like a pioneer in a long chocolate-colored dress. I fold the hem and press it hard with my fingers to make it stay up, but it doesn’t work. I wet the hem and try again and again. The hem stays down. Now the back of my brownie uniform is wet and long.

“Mommy, you promised to do a good job!” I scream to the mirror.

When we stand for the Brownie pledge, I try to hike up my dress and lean forward so the back of my dress seems shorter. As soon as the pledge ends, I sit and don’t dare get up until it’s time to go.

I am the last Brownie in the room.

On the way home, I decide to keep the gold jewelry box for myself.

I wake up. The smell of ashes burns in my nose. A fire burns in my head. My ears want to drench the promise that repeats itself:

If you ever, ever, ever
Try to sneak away,
I’ll be waiting in the night.
I’ll be waiting in the day.
You never will escape me.
You never will be free.
You’re my forever, ever, ever
You’re the lock that fits my key.

It’s the monster. I don’t understand. But
it is
the monster.

“Get your bikes!” I yell. “Here comes the DDT truck.” Evan and I ride into the spray of fog, our own cloud on Earth. “Whoopee! Don’t breathe. Hurry! Hurry! The truck’s getting away,” I say.

The cloud of insecticide evaporates until it is nothing but haze.

“Keep going, let’s go around the block,” Evan says. We fly past the Myer’s house, past the Behrs’. We zoom by Stephan and Virginia Silbern’s house. It looks perfect from the outside, a red-brick rectangle with white pillars growing out of the green lawn. Something is not perfect inside. Virginia is retarded. She doesn’t have many friends in the neighborhood. Occasionally, her nurse walks her to our house. Verna always welcomes them with a plate of jelly donuts. Virginia laughs and waves her hands when she gets to the jelly part. It’s fun to eat jelly donuts with Virginia, and we invite her to come back. Nobody is in the Silbern’s yard when we zoom past. It’s just the pretty brick house with white pillars and green grass that’s always cut short.

Around the block we go, fast, as fast as our legs will turn the pedals. When we reach our yard, we jump off our bikes and run them to a halt.

“We have to feed our horses,” Liz says. “Turn your bikes upside down and spin the wheels to help them cool off.”

My horse’s name is Bike, and I push the front wheel hard so it will still be going in circles while the back one spins.

“Good Boy, Bike, good boy.”

“Evan, you turn the tires. We’ll get more food,” Liz says.

Hunks of grass stain our palms when we yank them from the lawn. We toss the grass into the spinning wheels. “Down the hatch,” Liz says.

We pull grass and throw it as fast as the horses spit it into the air.

“My hands are tired,” Evan droops his fingers. “The lawn is getting bald.”

“You’re right,” Liz says looking at the shorn places. “Let’s take the horses to the stable.” I’m careful to walk my horse around the oil stain on the garage floor. I push Bike against the wall between the garbage cans and the snow shovel.

“Be back later. Rest up,” I say.

“Did you eat the sloppy joes at lunch today?” I ask Liz on our walk home from school.

“The buns smell like rose perfume.”

My legs travel in the direction I talk.

“No, and stop bumping into me. Stay on your side of the sidewalk.”

I try, but after a few squares of concrete, I drift back into her lane, so she bumps me back. We thump bump all the way to Shady Lane.

“Shady Lane is our own temple of beauty,” Liz says, looking up at the canopy of trees. “We have to take a rest. Stop here.”

We spread out on the little hill that butts up to a green-shuttered house on the corner. Alongside the house is the darkest dirt I have ever seen and growing in it are yellow daffodils. A cement squirrel about to eat a cement nut stands guard over the flowers. I press my body into the ground as if I’m a mound grown by Mother Nature.

“I’m growing, Liz. Look how long I am.” My feet nearly touch the sidewalk; my head is an arm’s length away from the flowers.

“Watch out for bees,” she says, gazing toward the sky. Above our heads are three trees with leaves bunched up so tightly it looks like they are holding hands and praying.

“Magic is over our heads. Can you see it?”

I look hard and say, “Yes,” but I’m thinking, how does Liz know so much about magic?
My
favorite place is around the corner. I gather my school supplies and smooth the lawn in reverse, the way Liz showed me last time, so the flattened grass stands up. She gets up too and waves her hands over the indented grass.

“We have to make it look good, so the owner won’t mind,” she says.

Crocker Thall’s house is next door.
Crocker, Croc-ker, Cr-oc-ker, what kind of name is that?
Maybe it means boy with lips that curl into a snarl. He’s mean. He ditches in the recess line, hogs the monkey bars, and puts his pencil shavings on the floor.

Around the corner, the sun shines on a driveway layered with stones. This is my “temple of beauty” as the rabbi says. “Ten minutes,” I say.

“Five minutes, Rinnie. Verna will worry if we’re not home soon.”

I squat and pick over the stones. Flat stones, streaked stones, stones with flecks of mica that sparkle and look like a wizard’s wand touched them. “This one is beautiful, look. Look! See how pink it is? It looks like a pink diamond. Don’t you think so?”

“You’re right,” Liz says. “Put it in your pocket. Now, let’s keep walking.”

“You go. I’ll catch up.” I sit on the sharp rocks and turn over more stones, looking for the best ones to fill my pocket.

“Lizz-ie! Lizz-ie! Let me in.” I pound on her door with my fists.

“No! I need some private time. Go to your room.”

“But I want to play. I want to play,” I whine, beating the door.

“Stop pounding on the door. I can’t read.”

“Let me in! No one wants to play with me, and I don’t have anything to do.”