Up From the Blue (7 page)

Finally we pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store. “Hungry?” she asked, tapping my leg. I wasn’t in the mood to be touched.

I hadn’t had breakfast and just the mention of food made my stomach rumble. Still, I didn’t speak as she pulled the key from the ignition. I simply got out of the car and stood beside it. Anne slammed the door with surprising force, and I followed her inside, keeping several paces behind her.

“Who’ve you got there, Anne?” a woman wearing a store apron asked.

“Long story,” she answered. “I’ve got her for the week while her father relocates.”

“Her dad’s that big shot you work for?”

She nodded, then turning toward me, noticed for the first time that I was still in my nightgown. I fixed the strap on one of the high-heeled sandals I’d taken from my costume box. The shoes were a good deal larger than my feet, making my steps unsteady.

“Oh, dear,” Anne said. “We’ll have to make this quick. This is not exactly proper dress for grocery shopping.”

I stood still, hands hanging loose at my sides.

“Look at those red eyes,” she said. “They must sting.” She sighed and tried to put her hand on the side of my face but I ducked.

“Okay. I get it,” she said. “We’ll just get on with the shopping.” She began to push the cart down the aisle. “I suppose you should know I don’t believe in junk food.”

This was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. How could she not
believe
in junk food? It was right there on both sides of us, real as could be: cheese that sprayed out of aerosol cans, cereals that turned the milk pink, and chocolate donuts like Momma bought us.

Thinking of her right then gave me a sharp pain in the chest.

“Will you eat fruit leather?” Anne asked.

“No.”

Her shoulders hunched and she took a deep breath. “Well, you can try it, at least,” she said and dropped a package into the cart.

A man with a handlebar mustache wheeled beside us, and said, “I heard about your new addition.”

“Very funny, Walter.”

“Can’t wait to hear how
this
happened,” he said.

“Well, Tillie’s father is very busy working on a space-based navigation system for the Department of Defense, and she’s going to stay with me while he unpacks and gets settled in at the Pentagon.”

“Oh, so this is the colonel’s kid,” he said. “But why isn’t she with her mother?”

“Her mother is …” and suddenly whispering, she said, “troubled.”

He made a not-too-subtle cuckoo sign by his temple, and Anne nodded, putting her finger to her lips.

“You don’t even know her,” I said in the same quiet voice they’d been using, and then I swept my arm across a shelf, causing two cans of tuna to hit the floor.

“Careful now,” the man said, staring at me with one eyebrow raised. I stared back at him and did not, would not, make a move to pick up the cans.

Anne was bent over a bin of cheap sneakers, oblivious to our staring match. “What size shoes do you wear?” she asked.

“I won’t wear those,” I said.

“She’s spitting mad,” Walter said.

“Like a cat,” Anne said.

“A bear,” I said.

“What?”

“My mother calls me Bear.”

“Yes, but you’re not one,” Anne said. “You are not a bear. You are a young lady.”

“Not yet, she’s not,” Walter laughed. He rolled his cart ahead of ours, and still laughing, said, “Good luck to you, Anne.”

“We’ll manage just fine,” she called over her shoulder.

When we got back in the car, the windows were so coated in red dust it felt dark and cramped inside. Anne promised the ride to her house would be short, so I sat ready to get out, not even touching my back to the seat as we passed cactus, sage brush, more of the mountain I knew, and the colorful houses of her neighborhood. The driveway led to a yellow cottage, and when she got out of the car, she once again slammed the door with surprising force, locking the seatbelt on the outside of it. We walked into what looked like a hotel room—carpet striped by the vacuum cleaner, artwork that matched both the sofa fabric and the wallpaper. Then there were the violins, barely noticeable at first, like music in a waiting room, but soon it was what you noticed above all else.

I walked over to the couch. “Just a minute,” she said abruptly.

A moment later she returned with a towel and laid it down, indicating where I was now allowed to sit. I decided to stand.

“I’m sorry,” she said, finally, as if only just noticing what a weird idea it was. “It’s expensive fabric. My house isn’t very well
equipped for children.” She walked to the kitchen, her floral dress blending with the wallpaper as she reached to a shelf of fruit-themed teacups and saucers. “I want you to be happy here, Tillie. Juice?”

Though I hadn’t answered, she poured something brown into a teacup painted with tiny strawberries and set it at the kitchen table. I stayed where I was.

“Would you like to play backgammon?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I’m afraid there aren’t any girls your age nearby,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

I opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard.

“Maybe get dressed first?” she suggested, but I was already outside.

There was nothing in the backyard but a wilted garden and some chairs stacked in a corner of the patio. Most of the yard was grass—dry as straw—that poked my ankles. There was no reason to stay outside except for it was not
inside
, where Anne sprayed Windex on the glass to wipe away my fingerprints.

My brother would have thought up a good way to spend the time. Before he got so serious, before everyone became so fond of calling him the young soldier, he was a kid with a lucky rabbit’s foot attached to his belt and was the best at inventing games just when you thought there was nothing to play. We made our own ink by pounding flowers with rocks, adding water, and stirring with our fingers. We danced to the cardboard records we cut off the backs of cereal boxes. And sometimes we pretended to steal Dad’s briefcase full of top secret work. We’d blow things up, then run back to invent bigger weapons as we needed them.

Without my brother, I only thought of things like how hot I
was and how much I didn’t like to be tickled, even by grass. I stood on that blazing patio for as long as I could stand it until, defeated, I went back through the sliding glass doors and sat on the towel.

I stared forward at the TV set, though it was not on. We didn’t have a TV at home—not one that worked anyway. Dad once bought a kit, and successfully built the heavy wooden frame, but the electronics proved more difficult. The picture was snowy, and stripes moved up the screen, then started again from the bottom. After several attempts at taking the tubes and coils out and putting them back in again, he declared the kit “defective” and the frame became just another place to set things on in the living room. Some of the fathers in our neighborhood liked to tease him for this, saying, “How are you supposed to shoot a missile into space if you can’t put a television kit together?”

Anne, for the longest time, tidied the already-clean room, humming along to the violins and arranging a collection of painted thimbles into a circle. When the last thimble was in place, she said, “I’m trying to do your father a favor. I wish you wouldn’t take it out on me.”

I don’t think she expected me to answer. It seemed that she just needed to say it out loud. She turned on the TV, and even before an image appeared on the screen, I heard a couple having a painfully slow conversation with an organ playing in the background. The picture of the fancy living room that emerged was neither black-and-white nor color, but a mix of various grays with occasional pink and green bands running through it. Even so, I was glad to pretend I was in that living room instead of Anne’s. But what I enjoyed the most were the commercials that showed familiar scenes from the air force base—the hangars, the uniforms, and close-ups of the American flag.

Later that night, she remembered my suitcase in the trunk of her car and brought my things to the bedroom where I’d stay for the week. Though I was already dressed for bed, she insisted I change into clean pajamas.

When she left me alone in the room, I opened my suitcase to find Dad had packed two butterscotch candies and the
World Book Encyclopedia
for the letter D with photos of every breed of dog. Beneath the book were clothes that smelled like home. I simply tipped my face into them, holding my stomach tight as I bent over, though it did nothing for the ache.

By the time Anne came back to check on me, I was under the covers with an armful of clothes, and when she leaned down to say good night, I pretended to be asleep.

My mind was full of images that had piled up through the day: miles of cactus; painted thimbles, perfectly spaced; the man making a cuckoo sign in the grocery store; the gray American fag with green and pink horizontal stripes. One week. One long week, but then I would be back with my family.

I tried to imagine Momma beside me, opening
Alice in Wonderland
to the last chapter while I touched the remaining rubies and the spots of glue where the jewels had once been attached to the cup. I tried to feel the warm, bitter drink moving down into my limbs, tried to feel her right there, staying at the edge of the bed until I fell asleep. But when I shut my eyes, I saw us screaming each other’s names, and getting farther and farther apart.

IT WAS THE SUDDENNESS
of leaving Momma that had upset me the most—the shock of being warm and sleepy one moment and then confused and hurried the next. When I woke up in the
strange bed, I had that same feeling of disorientation, of being wrenched from all that was familiar and known.

My neck was sore and there were creases on my arms and legs from the clothes I’d tucked under the covers. I opened the door and headed into the violins.

“You’re not an easy sleeper,” she said over her teacup, taking a different vitamin with every sip.

“Momma usually tucks me in.”

“Well,
I
can certainly tuck you in.”

I shook my head so violently I could feel the beginning of another headache.

“Okay. It’s okay. Here, sit down for breakfast.”

She set a steaming bowl in front of me, something lumpy like tapioca but without the sweet smell. When she went to the sink to wash her hands, I unwrapped both butterscotch candies my dad had given me and put them in my mouth.

“Do you want something hot to drink?” she asked, picking up her teacup and taking another sip.

“Muh-uh,” I said, trying to keep the candy in my mouth without clicking them against my teeth.

“Oh, you tried the porridge. Do you like it? I added dates and walnuts.”

She peeled a tangerine at the sink, and popped one section after another into her mouth. “Your family will probably arrive at the new house sometime tonight,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll hear from them any day now.”

She smiled, finishing the last piece of fruit, then ran the peel down the garbage disposal. Between this news and the effect of the candy, my spirits improved so much that I crept up behind and tapped her. Startled, she flicked the switch and the noise of the disposal stopped.

“Sometimes, don’t you just want to put your arm down there and chop it up?” I asked her, giggling.

“Tillie! Why would you say such a thing? That’s a horrible thought!”

For the rest of the morning, I sat on the towel, embarrassed, fuming, and waiting for the phone to ring.

The next day I woke up feeling sorry for myself. I was out of candy and not looking forward to eating breakfast that was
good for me
. When I left the bedroom, I found Anne pulling clothes from a hamper, folding them and setting them on the coffee table.

“Are those
my
clothes?” I asked.

“I found them under your covers when I checked on you last night.”

“They’re my property!”

“Tillie, Tillie, it’s okay. I just washed them.”

But I had already grabbed an armful as I ran back to the bedroom. When I brought them to my nose, there was no smell of home or Momma. They just smelled like detergent. Not even
our
detergent. I squeezed my fists around the ruined clothes and yelled while I threw them.

When Anne came to my room, I was facedown on the bed with my arms out to the sides, furious that Phil was, at that moment, enjoying a long drive with Momma. I imagined him riding behind her, listening to her sing. When they reached the new house, he would be the first to help Momma decorate with books and colorful pillows and the dolls with button eyes.

“Tillie, I was trying to help. I didn’t mean to upset you, but you will not behave like this here.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you listening to me?”

“When can I go home?” I whined into the covers.

“Just a few more days,” she said. “I talked to your father last night.”

I turned over to hear better, and also to move her hand off of me.

“You have a great big house with a beautiful yard and a swimming pool in back. The school’s just down the street so you can walk or ride your bike to it.”