Greedy Little Eyes (22 page)

After he was arrested, Ed used his one phone call to reach me. He whispered, “Sorry I called you a bitch, but I needed your reaction to be genuine. I sounded pretty nuts, huh? Mouse money?” He said he knew a guy who worked in a place for the criminally insane. They do therapy and job training, he said. Most guys spend a year there and then they’re rehabilitated back into society. “It’s a real program.”

“This is crazy, Ed.”

“Would you testify to that?”

Officer Mike lays me carefully on my bed. As he straightens, he is so giant-like that I find it difficult to take the whole of him in at once. Beside the bed, he lowers himself on one knee and says again, “Whatever I can do for you.”

“Would you switch places?”

He doesn’t question, only replaces my body with his own, lies calmly over the space I just occupied. As I stand, I marvel at what it must be like to come in and out of places so fearlessly. I move my feet to where he stood a moment before and try to let it fill me, that bigness.

The phone rings on my dresser. There is no call display on my bedroom phone and Officer Mike and I watch for three rings before I decide.

The voice at the other end says, “It’s me.”

My heart spasms.

“I’m here at the place. I had a counselling session already, baby.”

Ed has never called me “baby” before. I don’t like it.

Ed whispers, “I think they’re still evaluating me.”

I don’t respond.

“My buddy,” he says, “the guy I told you about. He let me use the phone.”

Officer Mike’s eyes are on the ceiling.

Silence from the receiver. Finally Ed whispers, “If they talk to you, make sure, you know—tell them I need help. I’m not a criminal.” He laughs, a bit breathlessly.

I turn my free hand palm up and stare at it. “The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene,” I say and drop the receiver back in its cradle.

Turning my gaze back to Officer Mike, who is floating on my vast bed as if it were an ocean, I back up to
the space where he stood earlier and position myself just so. Still staring down, my splayed fingers fade out of focus and then I see my feet. This time I feel it like Alice must have felt it in Wonderland and I am amazed.

Georgia, It’s Me

“Y
OU’RE NOT AS FUNNY AS MY MUMMY
,” said Dusty’s cake-y scrambled egg.

“Dusty, stop making egg-puppets and eat your breakfast,” I told her.

Loose springs of blonde hair dangled above her plate, longer straighter bits stroking her bacon. “
Mummer is way funner
,” she sang. The hand holding scrambled egg drooped at the wrist and Dusty did her impersonation of a wealthy Southern gentleman. “Lovey,” she drawled, “this is not egg”—she jiggled the yellow mess toward me—“it’s unborned chicken baby.”

“Yup, I know it.” I picked the plastic honey pack off the table and drizzled the rest into my tea. “Your mother tell you that?”

“Yepper depper, yes she did.” Dusty pointed at the honey. “And
that
, my darlin’, my honey-bunny, is bee barf.”

“You’re grossin’ me out, kid.”

This from the waiter who Dusty also thought was way funner than me. Jeans slumped around his hips, and a T-shirt hugged his reedy torso as he refilled my aluminum teapot with hot water and let the lid clank down. The smudgy transfer on the front of his T-shirt said
Supertramp
and was so old its black dye had faded to a sulky grey. His clothes were likely older than he was, and that irritated me. I could imagine him using the expression
back in the day
when talking about music from five years ago. I was not in the mood.

He picked up Dusty’s crumpled napkin and waved it across her mouth before he took a fresh one from his back pocket, shook it with a flourish and laid it in her lap. “It’s lucky you’re so good-lookin’ or I’da tossed you outta here by now.”

Aren’t you droll,
I thought.

Dusty giggled ferociously as she wiggled in her seat, sounding like her mother—my sister. God, I could just see her in a few years, smiling so hard her eyes would well with tears, just exactly like my sister, my little skinless sister.

When our mother died, Dad said Alice lost her skin. Any little thing could penetrate her; a light breeze could set off a crying jag. We kept Alice away from the evening news, butcher shops and sad movies—none of those Disney things with the brutality-of-life lessons.

When I was nine years old, I took Alice to see a matinee.
Charlotte’s Web
was playing and we couldn’t wait to see it because Daddy said that Paul Lynde from
Hollywood Squares
would be playing the rat. He dropped us off in front of the Orpheum with three two-dollar bills and we stood under the marquee a few moments, making plans for buying up the entire refreshment stand.

Minutes later we were sitting in the grand old theatre, its red velvet curtains and gilded banisters far too sumptuous for its new role as a movie house, slurping our drinks and shoving more popcorn into our mouths than would fit. Gorging on licorice and Smarties and fizzy orange pop, Alice and I turned to each other and stuck out our tongues, each attempting to exhibit the more gruesome display of chew-goo possible before the lights went down.

We squealed as the curtains closed and reopened to signify that the feature was about to begin.

It went downhill from there.

Alice’s face shone with tears from the point at which Wilbur the baby pig died and was resuscitated—basically, right from the start—until the end when Charlotte, the spider, died and was not. She shrieked as Charlotte sighed her last breath and fell away from the cartoon barn rafters. Then she wailed in a way that brought the ushers running. Her sobbing seven-year-old body had to be lifted from her seat and carried out of the theatre.

I wanted to call our father, but Alice fell into hysterics. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight for even a minute and I had to tell the manager our phone number
so he could make the call. My eyes and throat ached as she sobbed grief into my neck. I thought then that Alice’s sorrow was heavier, more lush, a truer blue than any I could ever feel.

Dusty peered across at the guy who had just sat down one table over. He had a little more blue-collar appeal than the patrons who generally hung out in Caffe Barney, which was, despite its name, more bar than café. Windowless but for the sidewalk facade, and one or two skylights overhead, the front third of the room sported an aged wood bar. Farther back were heavy tables set close together and running deep into the café, which was easily five times as long as it was wide. At night the place jumped with alt-rock for the jeans-clad university crowd that bantered about their respective intellectual pursuits as they sucked up microbrewed beers and Australian shiraz thick as jam in a glass.

The new guy’s hair was something like Dusty’s own but a little less wild and cut to his jaw. My niece appeared to be trying to inspect him surreptitiously. Feeling around in the bib pocket of her overalls as though for something small and precious, she ogled him through her tangled mop. I could see her eyes dance up his thick arms, across his chest and down over a gently protruding belly that also matched her own.

Dusty cupped the side of her mouth, asking me in her little girl’s whisper, “Do you think he’s pretty?”

I guess he was attractive: pale eyes, brawny and solid. He looked like a landscaper or something. But I’d lost my eye lately. I felt drained and indifferent to sex.

I leaned toward her. “Don’t whisper about strangers.”

Dusty bent forward so that our foreheads were nearly touching and said, staring deep into my eyes, “You’re like a crabby old gramma, you know.”

When Alice turned fifteen she told me she liked girls as much as boys. I was startled, I suppose, but it wasn’t as though it were out of character. I’m sure she thought being bisexual was fair. She had always brooded over justice, the equality of souls, but this idea exhausted me, as if it were yet another stray she wanted to bring home.

“What do you mean, ‘as much’?”

Her laughter jangled around the room. “Am I freaking you out?”

She had climbed into my bed, the way she usually did on Friday nights, weaving her limbs through mine, rustling with gossip and whispering nonsense that sent us both into fits of laughter. When she was in her teens, her joy was as frenetic as her sadness was bleak.

“No,” I said flatly. Frankly, I thought, she should come up with a better reason for trying sex with a girl—or sex with anybody. Life wasn’t, after all, just one big chorus of “How Much Is that Doggy in the Window?” There were real people involved. Other people besides herself.

“Are you scared I’m going to squeak your boobies?” she teased and then grabbed one of my breasts like a squeeze-toy.

“Get out!” I smacked her hand away and giggled despite myself. “No. I’m just—I don’t know. I never heard of anyone your age being into girls before.”

“What’s the difference? Why can’t I fall in love with a girl same as a guy? If I was a French writer-chick, no one would give it a second thought.”

“Ana’s Nin was a self-absorbed twat,” I announced. Which made her squeal with pleasure.