"The Flamenco Academy" (9 page)

“Hey, Catwoman made a sale,” Didi said, and
went over to study the screen. “Shit! One thousand, two hundred and
eighty-five dollars for a—” Didi read off the “Description of Item”
that she had copied for her mother from the detailed labels Mr.
Steinberg had affixed to the hundreds of archival sleeves he’d
stored his jazz memorabilia in. “ ‘One 1941 cover of
DownBeat
magazine signed by Duke Ellington, two mint
condition B&W, 8 Yen 10s signed by Billie Holiday, one 1944
photo signed by Dizzy Gillespie with Juan Tizol on valve trombone.’
” As she read, the nimbus of manic energy that always surrounded
Didi like a cloud of bees sagged. Finally, she sucked in a deep
breath. “Wonder what he’d think if he knew that all the stuff he
loved most in life was getting turned into frozen margaritas?” She
attempted a laugh, then decided to scoop us out a couple in his
honor.

We locked ourselves in Didi’s room and ate
the margs out of bowls. Even though Didi’s bedroom door was closed,
we could still hear Mrs. Steinberg snoring in the next room. Didi
rolled her eyes at the sound. “You know what we need?” she
asked.

“What?”

“A lair!”

“A lair?”

“Yes, a lair! God, why didn’t I think of
this before?”

She grabbed her marg and rushed out. I
followed her into the garage where Mr. Steinberg had had his
studio. We hadn’t been in it since he’d died. Mrs. Steinberg had
cleared out most of his stuff. Didi stood at the door for a long
time. What hit you first was Mr. Steinberg’s smell, how strong it
was, how much it seemed as if he should still be there. Before I
even really had a chance to miss him, though, I was missing
Daddy.

“Don’t you fucking cry,” Didi warned me. The
muscles in her jaw tightened and she stepped into the empty studio
like someone was behind her jabbing her in the back with a bayonet.
Acoustic tiles covered all the walls and several layers of carpet
had been laid on the concrete floor to absorb noise so that the
garage was not only soundproof but had a cozy, hobbity feel to it.
The old turntables and microphones were gone. Probably sold on
eBay. Mr. Steinberg’s battered headphones had been left lying on
the floor. Didi picked them up and pressed them to her nose. When
she turned around, she had the same expression on her face that I
knew I’d had when I realized I was standing on the edge of a cliff,
and if I fell, I would fall forever because there was no one to
stop me. My face started squirming around. The tears she’d
forbidden me to cry stung like vinegar under my skin.

Didi abruptly hurled the headphones down,
stood in the middle of the old garage, and twirled around. “This is
perfect! Can’t you see how perfect this is? Are you going to be a
total goober and not see how perfect this is?” Her voice started
off wobbly, but got stronger as she got mad at me. I was glad to
hear it. I didn’t know what I would have done if Didi had started
crying.

“We can be out here screaming our heads off
and no one will ever know!” she yelled, twirling faster.

I threw my arms out and started spinning
with her. “We can commit ax murders!”

“We can have giant parties with live
bands!”

“And circus animals!”

Didi stopped, picked up her bowl of ’rita,
handed me mine, and we clinked. “To the Lair.”

“To the Lair.”

I loved the Lair; it was our clubhouse. Didi
moved all the best stuff from her bedroom into the Lair, including
her twin beds. I stripped the primo items from my room and brought
them over. We bought a pair of really cute fifties lamps at the
Disabled Veterans, some great madras bedspreads with lines of
elephants marching across them, threw up some posters, and the Lair
was ready. Pretty soon, I was spending more time at Didi’s house
than I was at my own, which suited Mom fine.

My mother, who had barely left the house at
all while Daddy was sick, hardly came home once he was gone. Every
morning, one of the sistern would stop by and pick her up, then
she’d spend the day at the Compound stitching quilts and dipping
candles or praying and testifying. I couldn’t remember her ever
being happier. She was always singing old-time hymns like “The Old
Rugged Cross” when she came home but would stop when she saw me.
Neither one of us was who the other wanted to see. So I spent more
and more time at the Lair and she spent more and more time at the
Compound.

I was home, though, getting foam board and
my X-Acto knives for our world cultures class project, a scale
model of the Temple of Dionysus we were constructing in the Lair,
when my mom came home early. That day, she was so happy she didn’t
stop singing when she saw me, just looked my way and beamed. It had
been so long since she’d smiled in my direction that it didn’t
bother me that her smile was for her goofy church, not me.

“What?” I asked, after she’d stood there
grinning for so long I started smiling too. “What is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t
know how to make you truly understand.”

“Understand what?” I was still smiling but
had started to worry.

“Understand what a glorious day this is for
me. For us.”

“Us?”

“Oh Cyndi Rae, we’ve been approved to move
to HomeTown.”

“You mean Houdek?”

“No, silly. Our real, true hometown. The
home of our heart and spirit.”

“You mean that place in Mississippi.”

“Georgia. HomeTown is in Georgia and we’re
going to move there. I’ve already made all the arrangements. We
could move right now, but you’ll probably want to finish high
school.”

I wanted to say something snippy like
Yeah, finishing high school, that little detail.
But I knew
I had to control myself. My mom’s eyes were glittering. She was
high, high on Heartland, high on group approval, high on
sanctimoniousness, high on subjecting herself to a higher will,
high on goopy pieties, high on a dream of a simpler life, in a
simpler time that never existed. All those things had given her a
strength she’d never had before, a strength that made her
dangerous. I had to be very careful.

“So, we’ll move after you finish high
school.”

“We? We’ll move?”

“Of course. You’re my daughter. A mother
would never think of abandoning her child unless the mother’s very
soul was under mortal threat of eternal damnation. We’ll go
together as soon as I make the rest of the arrangements.”

As calmly as I could, I asked, “ ‘The rest’?
What, uh, ‘arrangements’ have you already made?”

“The usual. Finances, assets, shedding all
the unnecessary complications of the modern world.”

I felt sick but had to go on, had to get the
answers. “So what happened to all these unnecessary
complications?”

“The brethren are handling all of that. All
of my finances and such.”

“
Your
finances?” Panic crept into my
voice. “You turned our money over to those people?”

My mother clicked back into full android
mode as she parroted Scripture at me. “ ‘For the husband is the
head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he
is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto
Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.’
”

“What are you saying? Those men, those
brethren, aren’t your husband. You don’t have a—” I stopped
myself.

“They are my brothers in Christ. You have
never understood that. Never even tried. I put up with your
willfulness, your lack of respect while your father was alive.” The
pink fragility that had encased my mother for as long as I could
remember was gone. Self-righteousness pumped through her like
steroids, giving her new muscles of determination and will. “I
endured your abuse for his sake.”

“Abuse? You’re kidding, right? Tell me
you’re joking.”

She wasn’t listening to me. “For his sake, I
allowed a friendship that has corrupted you to continue.”

“Didi? Didi corrupted me? Didi saved
me.”

“This is my fault. I blame myself. You are
lost. Unruly and spoiled children are among the most miserable of
children. They are not the blessings that the Bible says they
should be to parents. ‘Withhold not discipline from the child, for
if you strike and punish him with the rod, he will not die. Thou
shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.’
It was your father’s decision to raise you without boundaries and I
was subject to him in everything.”

“This is insane. ‘Subject?’ You were
‘subject’ to Daddy? Daddy and I spent our entire lives tiptoeing
around you and living in fear of your nervous fits and depressions
and migraines—”

“It’s true. I was lost. Lost without the
light of Christ’s love in my life just as you are lost. Just as you
will always be lost unless you are consecrated. You can’t
understand now. Your heart is closed. You will never live a
Christ-filled life until we get you away from bad influences. Until
we are living in HomeTown.”

“I can’t talk about this anymore. I have to
go.”

“You’re going to her, aren’t you?”

Something in my mother’s tone gave me the
creeps. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You people, so smart and witty. We’ll see
how smart and witty you are on Judgment Day.”

“ ‘You people’? I’m your daughter.”

“Then honor thy mother!” She was starting to
lose her HeartLand android cool. She’d balled her hands into tiny
fists and was drawing them up toward her ears where they would
vibrate in one of the nervous fits that had controlled Daddy and me
for my whole life. For a second I was lost, ready to collapse in a
sobbing blob. But Didi’s voice spoke in my head telling me that if
I caved in, I’d end up in Hookworm, Georgia, with a doily on my
head.

“You want me to honor you as a mother? Then
start acting like one!” For one second, she was so stunned by the
sound of my raised voice that her fists dropped and she fell
silent. “Start acting like you care about me! About my life, my
future. You want to abandon me for that cult, just say it. Say
it!”

All the toughness that lurked behind her
baby-doll prettiness gathered itself up. “I have made provisions
for you to come with me provided you accept the discipline of the
brethren.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you will renounce Satan and live a
good Christian life.”

“I don’t have to renounce Satan. I do live a
good Christian life and I am going to leave now because there is no
point in talking to you.” I slammed out of the house because I
hated her so much at that moment I wanted to squash her puffy,
bratty face in. Worse, the X-Acto knife in my hand had started to
tingle. I ran all the way to Didi’s house.

When I got there, she was in a pissy mood,
PMSing wildly. Even though our cycles were synched up, she was the
only one ever allowed to have PMS. She was playing the Strokes so
loud it made my bones ache. I knew she wanted me to tell her to
turn it down so she could bitch me out, but I’d had enough of being
screamed at by crazy women for one day. Of course, she hadn’t done
anything on our group project, the scale model of the Temple of
Dionysus and Altar of Zeus. So I just got out the foam board and
graph paper and started making a pattern. Even though Mith Myth
would never know the difference, I did a long series of
calculations to translate the altar’s original dimensions into a
perfect scale rendering. I did it to keep the fidgety numbers
synapses in my brain occupied. To block out Didi, my mother,
HeartLand, everything.

After about an hour, Didi turned down the
Strokes and started sniffing around the temple like a curious
woodland creature. She decided we needed to cover the temple in a
mosaic and started smashing up Catwoman’s old liquor bottles. She
sorted through the green, blue, and brown shards to find the
perfect chips and slivers.

Didi liked ancient civ since she took all
the doings on Mount Olympus as a sort of template for what life at
the top was going to be like for her when she arrived. Zeus,
Jupiter, Steven Tyler, Julian Casablancas. They were all the same
in her book. Gods were gods as far as she was concerned.

Didi got so into the project that after we
finished the temple and altar, she made tiny Sculpey sculptures of
Apollo, Zeus, Athena, and Callisto, along with some satyrs and
centaurs. We baked them in the oven and the house filled with the
smell of burning plastic. It was four in the morning when we
finally finished and went to bed.

I’d forgotten it was Easter until Didi woke
me up and sent me to the backyard where she’d hidden speckled eggs
and malted milk balls. It was more fun than you would have thought
finding candy tucked into chinks in the patio wall, under the toe
of the garden gnome, balanced on the limb of a desert willow. But
that was Didi’s gift. When she wanted to, she could turn anything
into a party.

After we finished gluing the last pieces of
glass onto the temple, Didi drove me home. The desert willow tree
that had been a twig when we’d moved in had grown into a taller
twig that had sprouted a fluff of lilac blossoms. A few lilac
petals were scattered across the brick red lava rocks. Random stuff
was strewn on top of the petals: my CD player, a couple of
spaghetti-strap tops, the Swollen Members CD Didi had burned for
me, my makeup kit, all the old copies of
Raw
,
Spin
,
and
Crud
that Didi had passed along. Even a package of
Summer’s Eve douche and my Lady Epilator.

Didi surveyed the scene and figured out what
it meant before I could. “Wow, an official wig snap.” She nodded at
the church van parked on the street. “Obviously, she needed her
brethren and sistern around to do something like this.”

I tried to open the front door, but it was
locked. “Mom? Mom! Mom, are you in there! Could you open the door,
please?”