Chapter Ten
“What do you girls think about spending Christmas in New Orleans?” Stan asked.
We’d both been asleep in the back seat. It was late afternoon somewhere in Florida. The sky was all light blue and the palm trees had squirrel-colored stalks and dusty green fronds, but you could still tell it was winter. The ocean looked sort of lonely.
Miami at Thanksgiving had been kind of neat and kind of odd. The wind always blew, like the breath of South America calling you down, and everybody walked around in Hawaiian shirts. Stan and Linwood had been dead set on Cuban food, but it turned out to be like Mexican only beanier. Except for the fried plantains. Nobody but me liked them, so that’s what I had for Thanksgiving dinner. I let June eat the whole rest of my meal, including the mango ice cream.
“Christmas in New Orleans!” Linwood echoed Stan, sounding surprised and delighted, though no doubt it had been her idea in the first place. Stan wouldn’t dare make something like that up all by himself.
Funny, I had this bad feeling about New Orleans. Why? I’d certainly loved it last summer.
“What about snow?” June had been making this point for weeks. She wanted one of those old-fashioned sleigh-ride holidays.
“Children.” Linwood used her Hollywood voice. “They’re the most conventional people in the world, don’t you think, Stan?”
I looked out the window. We were driving up the east coast, along the beach. The sign said twelve miles to Daytona. A man in blue jeans was walking five tiny French poodles, which had been dyed, I guess, all different pastel colors: they looked like one of those special desserts, five different flavors of sherbet. I nudged June but she ignored me.
“What’s wrong with that?” she asked. “What’s wrong with wanting to be normal? Why can’t we ever, ever be like other families?”
“When you grow up,” Linwood said coldly, “you will be surprised to discover that there is no such thing as ‘normal.’”
Was that true? Gaylin’s family seemed exactly like the people on television: they didn’t have expensive stuff around their house like we did, but they always had lots of regular food in their refrigerator. For instance, Mrs. Rezek let Gaylin eat cookies and cake for dessert, instead of fruit and cheese like we did. We even had wine. Linwood would give us tiny glasses of sweet sherry because, she said, that’s what children drank in Europe. And sometimes there wasn’t any actual food in the house at all. Linwood hadn’t felt like shopping or cooking, so we’d eat out every day until that phase passed and another began. Also, obviously, other children generally called their parents “Mom” and “Dad.”
“Not in this family, that’s for sure.”
“Very well,” said Linwood, fitting one of her new cigars into the rhinestone holder. “I suppose you’d all like me to be exactly like that dreadful Mrs. Nutter everyone’s so wild about.”
Mrs. Nutter had been June’s 4-H leader, and a drabber, better-natured woman didn’t exist in the world. She smelled of flour, and her stomach was soft like stuffed animals. Pole, that is, not the poodles.
“I suppose you’d like to move up to one of those remote villages in New England and sit around singing hymns and making ornaments out of apricot pits or whatever.”
Stan sighed, right on cue.
“And that’s just fine with me.” The cloud of smoke she exhaled hung around her head. Alice’s Caterpillar. “Far be it from me to try to make you girls into interesting human beings. The world is rife with mediocrity, and it can always use plenty more Mrs. Nutters.”
“What’s wrong with Mrs. Nutter?” June demanded. “Why does everybody always make fun of what I do? Nobody ever makes fun of Pet—”
Ha.
“—I suppose it isn’t stupid for her to take those tap-dancing lessons? And ballet and acrobatics and Hawaiian, for God’s sake!”
“Goddammit, don’t swear!” said Stan.
I felt a real pang, thinking how much I missed those classes. Not that I was any good. I only won that talent contest with cuteness and spunk. Plus, adults like to see kids making total fools of themselves.
“EVERYTHING I DO YOU MAKE FUN OF!” June started in with the shriek and the wail. She hadn’t had a major fit in a long time.
I looked out the window again: a pink stucco house, with a tile roof and big pots full of geraniums, right on the water’s edge. A young girl, her brown legs sticking out of perfectly faded blue jean cut-offs, was pinning a few pieces of fluffy white laundry to the clothesline. Her blond hair hung down her back like a sheaf of wheat.
I wondered where I could buy some hair dye. What would they do if my hair was bleached to look like Hannah’s? Shave my head? No one had seen Linwood’s real color in years. I never had. But then I remembered that dyeing her hair had been one of the things that upset Linwood the worst about Deane.
Deane, darn old Deane. Everything revolved around her, even though she wasn’t there. If nothing changed, she’d be like this great big tree hovering over the landscape of our lives. Everything we did or didn’t do would get measured against her shadow.
“And Deane,” said June, as if reading my thoughts. “You’re so wrapped up in her, you’re so worried about Deane. You spend all that money on clothes and records, and she’s no better than a convict!”
No response from the front seat. Apparently, Stan and Linwood were going for Freeze Her Out, the stance they adopted when they hadn’t the inclination or the energy to out-yell her. Casually, they both scanned the landscape, shoulders relaxed, as uninvolved with June’s ranting as with the upholstery of the car or the signs we passed advertising Wonder Bread.
“How much farther to Saint Augustine?” Linwood inquired pleasantly.
“Thirty-five minutes, hon.”
“What about the golf clubs you said I could have on my twelfth birthday?” June insisted. “The archery set? What about how you said I could redecorate my room? A new carpet? Bedspreads?”
I decided to stop listening, watch the ocean and detach myself from my surroundings, exert an invisible control over my natural environment. Lately, I’d been getting these peculiar thoughts about the way in which the world worked, things it seemed I hadn’t made up by myself, and I hadn’t read them. Maybe they came to me in my dreams? Every now and then, one of these tidbits would pop into my head, like: Show your own energy by holding your hand like a goblet in front of you. Things like that.
The ocean looked solid, metallic. I missed the way the sun would not set beneath it, as it did in California, but only reflect a faint rosy glow from the other side of the sky. The beach itself was visible from time to time through clumps of palmetto and sea oats. The sand was white, holy, untouched by human feet, or so you wanted to imagine. But every now and then you saw a woman and two black dogs bounding into the waves like big rubber balls; or a father and his twin daughters, tiny, their chubby knees scarcely able to support them. They held hands, for balance.
Then, for a few minutes, the scrub brush opened up, and there was a vast stretch of sand with nobody on it. You wanted to lie right down and go to sleep in the final bit of sunlight.
But then I blinked and there was somebody on it. How could I have missed her? She was dressed in red and purple robes, and a shiny gold sun, moon, and stars glimmered from the back of her outermost cape. Raven hair, flashing like glass in the last of the light, shot out from her head in a tangled vine. A small dog followed along beside her, its neck decorated with an orange and green ruffle, except that as I watched, I saw it wasn’t a dog—it was a cat, a white Persian cat, her tail as fluffy and upright as sea oats. Lately, I’d seen all kinds of things.