The Queen of Everything (3 page)

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"You should've eaten your vegetables!" at him
from their car windows.

Outside, Melissa held out the waxed bag to me.
I took out a maple bar and we ate as we walked. When we reached the entrance to
our neighborhood, I looked down the street. "Dad's not home yet if you want to
come over," I said.

In our driveway, I had seen only my father's
red Triumph, an old one covered by a tarp, which he called his midlife-crisis
car. I guess he felt the crisis was over; he never drove that Triumph as long as
I could remember, though he started it on occasion to make sure it still ran.
The Ford Taurus that he actually drove, and that he washed and vacuumed once a
week and wouldn't let you eat in, was not there yet.

"Oh, God, don't look" Melissa said. She grabbed
my arm to hurry me along, clasped the collar of her shirt, and raised it to
cover half her face. I was sure this strategy had never succeeded in hiding
anyone.

"What's he doing?"

"Don't ask," Melissa said. "Probably seeing if
the trees are talking to him."

Melissa's older brother, Jackson Beene, lay
under the big tree in their front yard, staring up at the branches, hands
forming a pillow behind his head. Ever since Jackson got lost in the woods on a
hike on Mount Conviction three summers ago, he "hasn't been quite right,"
as

22

Mrs. Beene put it. He had gone backpacking with
a friend, who during the hike fell down a ravine and broke his leg. Jackson
tried to get help. The friend was found that night by the searchers, but Jackson
had gotten lost and was missing for five days. On the sixth, he appeared at a
ranger station. Melissa said he'd lost something like twenty-five pounds and
couldn't eat at first without throwing up. What saved him, Jackson had said, was
the sound of bagpipes, which he followed to safety. He was sure he had been
rescued by a spirit; after that, he mailed away for instructional tapes and took
up playing the bagpipes himself. He would play them in the front yard or over at
Point Perpetua park or across from the ferry terminal on a busy weekend. The
Beenes tried to be supportive (if you looked up Larry and Diane Beene in the
dictionary, you'd see that word), but you could tell this embarrassed them as
much as it did Melissa.

I sometimes saw Jackson playing his bagpipes at
the old oil tank, which sits on its side on a mound of grass at the crossroads
of Horseshoe Highway and Deception Loop; a place you must pass to get anywhere
on Parrish. Usually the oil tank is a patchwork of messages: happy 40 th wayne
with a couple of black balloons stuck on, and discount chakra readings this week
at the theosophical society , along

23

with some old stuff painted on, like class of
'79 rocks ! I would pass on my bike, hearing the music get louder as I got
closer, and when I saw Jackson standing on the oil tank with his tasseled
instrument, I was glad he wasn't my brother. Strangely though, I was also just
plain glad. That music--it was both mysterious and sad at the same time. It
could make you feel things you couldn't quite explain.

Melissa and I sat on the step of our front
porch and finished our doughnuts. We licked our fingers, then washed the
stickiness off under the garden hose. Dad finally arrived home, looking happy.
He teased Melissa and me about something I don't remember and carried in a fat
bag of groceries with a bunch of celery sticking out the top.

That was the day I met Gayle
D'Angelo.

It's funny, but when I think about that day, I
don't think much about Gayle D'Angelo herself, or the fact that when I came back
out from the weigh-in room, the brochure I had given her was left behind on the
counter. No, what I think about is that fat girl. She never came back to True
You. I never even saw her again, although I thought I did once, leaving Bonnie
Randall's bookstore.

But she's what I think about. The way our eyes
met. The way, right then, she seemed more real than me. I think about the way my
own

24

laugh had made my insides twist, made the pink
polish on my fingers seem hateful, fingers that had so recently touched her
skin.

Fingers that had only moments before slipped a
tape measure around her fleshy arm.

25

Chapter Two

Everyone who lives here knows that in early
June some kind of strange tonic floats in the air on Parrish Island. My mother
says this is a magic brew, ignited when the first warmth of the year penetrates
the fir trees and the saltwater, peels the bark of the red madrona in papery
strips, and soaks deep into the ground where the island potters dig their clay.
She really talks like that. But those are the smells--she is right about
that--earthy, sweet, and warm.

You can see the effects everywhere, something
like spring in other places, I guess, but with the volume turned up high. Class
size always doubles at the Rufaro School of Marimba, next door to my mother's,
the new students playing their instruments with the frenzy of a
tropical

26

storm, and Cliff Barton gets dangerous again in
his biplane, buzzing the ground and making everyone scream. The Franciscan nuns
who work the ramp at the ferry terminal Tuesday through Saturday, guiding the
passengers to their destinations, get all red-cheeked from the warmth of their
habits; and all the old men on the island get out their nets to try to catch the
rabbits that now swagger out of their holes in droves. I think the rabbits and
the old guys are a good match, both of them frisky without anyplace to put it.
When you see the way they stare one another down, those rabbits so sure of
themselves and those codgers so fierce with their nets, you can't help but think
those old guys are reliving some big battle they fought in World War
Two.

As with those bottles of aromatherapy that
prune Cora Lee sells at the Theosophical Society, you can be sure June air will
affect you, but there is no guarantee just how. Once in June a man went insane
and shot himself on the ledge at Point Perpetua, the place that pods of orcas
and porpoise have come home to for hundreds of years. You can still see blood on
some of the big stones out there, by the lighthouse. I know because I've seen
it. And once, a young woman claimed to have felt the effects all the way in
Chicago, where she packed up her belongings and suddenly moved west after seeing
a postcard

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of Parrish Island slide across the counter of
the post office where she worked. The man who went insane was Big Mama's
husband, Clyde Belle; the woman who saw the postcard was my own mother when she
was eighteen.

So what I mean to say is, June was not a good
time for Gayle D'Angelo to become a part of my father's life.

The windows of my creative-writing class were
opened halfway, and I could hear Custodian Bill on the riding lawn mower
somewhere out on the football field. Ms. Cassaday should have shut the windows.
She couldn't compete with that air--though, if you ask me, she was the only one
of my teachers who was right to think she might. I was glad to be there in her
class, where I had a chance of putting aside, at least for a while, the uneasy
feeling I'd had since that morning when the phone rang at breakfast.

At first I thought it was Melissa. Dad liked to
give me a ride to school every morning to "Start the day off on the right foot,"
as he said. Sometimes Melissa came along.

"You can come if you don't mess with my dad's
radio station," I said into the phone. "Peppy Johnson or no ride."

"Jordan?"

It was not Melissa on the phone but Bonnie
Randall, who'd been Dad's girlfriend forever. A long time ago, Bonnie had
written a book,
The

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Milkweed Diaries,
which I tried to read
once but it was so boring I couldn't get through it. How much can a person stand
to hear about the inside of a flower? Other people must have felt that way too,
because she hardly sold any. I guess she had a book signing in Seattle and
signed only one book, which she later found out had been stolen. So she gave up
writing and now had a bookstore, Randall and Stein Booksellers. She was Randall,
of course, but Stein was this dog she'd once had, named after Gertrude. That
woman was scary looking, if you ask me. Gertrude Stein, not Bonnie. Bonnie is
sweet and quiet and has freckles. If you want to look at anything in her store,
you've got to step over the two dogs she has now, Daisy and Jay. They always lie
right where you want to be, as though they can read your mind.

"Oh, hi, Bonnie," I said. I was on the kitchen
phone, and my father was seated at the table with his bowl of Total and mug of
coffee and the newspaper propped up in his left hand so he could eat with his
right. That was my father. A Total man. A Shredded Wheat and All-Bran guy. At
the sound of Bonnie's name, his head shot up.

"Is your dad there?"

He met my eyes, shook his head to say he didn't
want to talk to her. This surprised me. Bonnie's voice sounded as propped up as
Dad's newspaper. I could tell she was about to cry. It

29

wasn't like my father to be cruel to her, even
if they had been fighting. He took after my grandmother Margaret that way. A
calm person. His car, a broken toilet, finding a spot on a shirt he thought was
clean when he was running late-- those were the kind of things he got mad at.
Not people.

"Just a minute," I said. I held the phone
against my shoulder. "She sounds upset," I whispered.

He set down his paper and locked my eyes in
that firm way that is supposed to make me reconsider who is in charge. "I'm.
Not. Here," he mouthed.

"Okay, okay," I whispered.

He went back to his paper, to show he was
finished with the topic, but I could tell he wasn't. His eyes were focused in
one place, not reading a word. His chin tilted up, concentrating on making sure
I did as he instructed.

I didn't understand what the hell was
happening, why he was suddenly treating her like this. His coldness startled me.
"Bonnie? He must have gotten in the shower."

"Oh." She knew I was lying. I've never been a
good liar. People always hear my guilty conscience. My stomach felt a little
sick.

"He's going to be late." She laughed. The laugh
was for my sake, but she shouldn't have bothered. It was that high, forced kind
of laugh that walked too close to the edge of something

30

out of control. "Have him call me?" she
said.

"I sure will," I said, but she had already hung
up. I looked over at my father, who was reading again. I felt terrible, and he
didn't look in the least bit disturbed. In fact, who he looked like was Max,
whenever Mom or Nathan gave in to one of his tantrums.
The-world-is-going-my-way-
again-just-as-it-should-be look. It made me mad.
Me, I had no problem with anger.

"That was mean," I said to my father. I liked
Bonnie. She was plain, and her sweaters sometimes smelled of dog, and she and
Dad spent too much time pretending they didn't have sex, but I liked her. And
I'm sure she guessed that Dad was on the other side of the phone, waving his
hands around so he didn't have to talk to her. Not many things could make you
feel worse.

He ignored me, still wearing that cocky look
like he could give a shit. Let me tell you, this was just not him. "Mean," I
said again, louder.

He kept reading. Or rather, at least his eyes
perused the paper oh-so-casually. He threw a few words out at me in the way
you'd brush a fly off your shoulder. "Ah, well. If you've declared it, it must
be so," he said.

Apparently he'd had a little taste of being an
asshole and found it to his liking. A bolt of fury shot through me. I nearly
jabbed the back of his paper.

I didn't though. Because in that room
I

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suddenly felt the barely restrained fury rise
between us, the kind you know might just tip to something ugly if you let
yourself make that small move. It was the tension of a face-off, animals on the
brink of a fight, where violence bubbles up inside and feels so much like a
thrill it can be hard to tell the difference. Later that's what bothered me.
Never in my life had I been in that place with my father before, though I'd been
there with my mother a hundred times. That place where the space between two
people is so charged that a flinch can turn into a slap and words can suddenly
draw blood; that place where one movement can unleash a viciousness that leaves
you feeling awful for days after.

I turned and left the room, shoving my
schoolbooks in my backpack. In the car, my father acted like his usual self,
though he kept the radio on, loud, so we wouldn't have to talk. During the ride,
Peppy Johnson argued the pros and cons of tourism with a caller.

When we got to school, my father turned the
radio down. He took my hand for a moment. The self-satisfied look was gone. Now
he only looked concerned. I was relieved about that.

"Honey," he said, "some things are my
business." With that, it was as if he had taken his two hands and shoved me into
the same corner he had shoved Bonnie Randall. I wondered what we were doing
there together.