Words of Stone (4 page)

Floy leaned back in her chair, saying nothing, the veins in her neck pulsing. The conversation seemed to have ended.

Floy looked older to Joselle that morning, and her face and neck had a bluish cast to them as though her skin had turned translucent and light were shining through. Floy had always been thin, but the older Joselle became, the thinner Floy appeared to be. Almost breakable, like blown glass.

“It's true,” Joselle said finally. “I
would
starve. Especially since Rick and The Beautiful Vicki took a class at the community college on developing your ESP potential. They lounge around on the futon for hours—which is hardly unusual—and they go into trances to explore other countries. The trances really freak me out. I used to sit and watch them, wondering if they'd be home in time to fix me dinner. Now I just fix it myself. I've gotten good at it.” Joselle was playing with crumbs in her hand, and only then did she notice that her hands were still dirty from her secret prebreakfast task. Little crescent moons of dirt shone through the places on Joselle's fingernails where her nail polish had chipped away.

“Well, you can cook for me anytime,” Floy said, working at a spot on the tabletop with her thumb.

“I know The Beautiful Vicki's your daughter,” Joselle said, glancing at Floy nervously. “And I—” she said, then hesitated a moment, deciding to change the direction in which her comment was headed. “And I was just wondering what I could make you for lunch.”

“We've got all morning to decide,” Floy said. She rose from the table and reknotted the ties of her bathrobe. “Just tell me one thing—why do you call her The Beautiful Vicki?”

“Because that's her name. And she is.”

Floy turned around to face the sink, and her entire body began to move as if small waves rippled under her robe. Joselle was certain that Floy was crying, and her heart dropped as she pulled Floy toward her. But as their eyes met, Joselle's heart became weightless; Floy had been holding back laughter. “The Beautiful Vicki—that takes the cake,” Floy managed to say between shrieks. “Well, I always thought she should be a beautician. Lord knows she spends enough money on cosmetics.” Floy poked Joselle with her elbow and howled. They pressed together in hysterics.

While Floy went off to shower and dress, Joselle stayed in the kitchen. She opened the silverware drawer and pulled out every teaspoon and tablespoon. She looked at her face in each one. On the back of the spoons, her face was thin and long and right side up. On the other side, her face was wide and upside down. She moved the spoons at varying distances, distorting her face. She was amazed that each time it worked the same—upside down on the inside, right side up on the outside. Vicki had shown her this trick years ago, and Joselle still tested it wherever she went.

Joselle licked a spoon. My mother is smart, she thought.

They had been eating ice cream at the kitchen table right before bed the night that Vicki had presented Joselle with this minor marvel.

“It's magic!” Joselle had said.

“Try another spoon,” Vicki suggested.

Joselle tried every spoon in the house, wide-eyed and mystified.

“Does it only work with chocolate ice cream?” Joselle asked.

Vicki opened the refrigerator. “Let's see,” she said.

Laughing, they tried jam, cold leftover tomato soup, and maple syrup. They tried milk and orange juice, spooning them out of bowls. They tried peanut butter straight from the jar and sugar right out of the sugar bowl.

“
Every
spoon is magic,” Joselle told Vicki, her voice cracking with excitement. “No matter what you're eating with it. Every spoon in the
world
.”

They did the dishes together that night, the radio blaring. They played with the suds and serenaded one another using the spoons as pretend microphones. It was after midnight when Vicki finally kissed Joselle goodnight and tucked her in.

“I love being a single girl with you,” Vicki whispered.

“Me, too,” said Joselle. She had closed her eyes, lulled by Vicki's voice. She was asleep in minutes.

Joselle put the last spoon in its proper place and closed Floy's kitchen drawer. She wondered how her mother could be so perfect sometimes, and other times be as far from perfect as possible.

Joselle was pleased. She had accomplished everything she had set out to do for the entire day, and it wasn't even 9:00
A.M.
Not only had she shown Floy how much she loved her by making her breakfast, Joselle had also made Floy laugh harder than she had ever seen anyone laugh. But more importantly, Joselle had done something daring and original. Something that she thought could shake up someone's life. She wasn't exactly sure why she had done it—except she sensed that if she could make someone else more confused than she was, the weight of her own emotions might be lifted. It was worth a try. “Misery loves company,” Vicki often said. The idea had begun during the night as a tiny seed that kept growing inside her until she was consumed by it and there was absolutely no way to fight it.

It was amazing how everything had come together so easily. Floy had said that he spent a lot of time on the hill. She knew his mother was dead. And she remembered that there were rocks and stones on the hill. In the weak light before breakfast, Joselle had done something that she hoped would complicate the life of Blaze Werla. She knew that if the situation were reversed, it would surely complicate hers. Joselle giggled with delight. She played the themes from “The Brady Bunch” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on her teeth.

She was in the bathroom with the door locked, sitting on the clothes hamper. When she had finished her tunes, Joselle began decorating her thighs with ball-point-pen tattoos. At first she was going to put them on her arm, but she didn't want anyone to see them. So she settled on her thighs—so far up that they would only be visible if she were naked. And no one ever got a glimpse of her in that condition.

REENA
was the first tattoo she gave herself. She was using her four-color pen and chose blue ink, pressing so hard that it hurt. Beneath it, she drew a rose in red ink and a leaf and thorns in green. It looked professional. She admired it.
REENA
.

This was the second time she had written the word
Reena
that morning. She wanted to write something else with stones on the hillside in a day or two. She practiced on her thighs. In black ink she wrote
FIRE!
And then in red she wrote
YOU'RE ON FIRE,
encasing the letters with jagged flames.

Just then Floy pounded on the door. “Joselle, are you upset in there again?” she asked.

Joselle hopped off the hamper, made sure her tattoos were concealed, unlocked the door, and greeted her grandmother holding her pen as if it were a cigarette. “I've never felt better, Grammy,” Joselle said, grinning. She waltzed down the hallway blowing pretend smoke haughtily. “By the way,” Joselle said, stopping and turning toward Floy, “what do you think is the worst way to die?”

T
he air was dizzy with insects. And Blaze was dizzy under the black locust tree. He had been twirling himself about, his arms outstretched like a propeller, until he was too unsteady to stand. He fell to the ground, and everything continued to whirl.

He had been talking to Simon in his head. About his mother. One piece of information for each full turn. Making a game of it.

She died when I was five and a half.
Turn around
. The last thing we did together was to ride the Ferris wheel at the fairgrounds.
Around
. She was already very sick.
And around
. It's my last memory of her.
Faster
. She was wearing a pink scarf.
Faster
. And there were blue rings under her eyes.
Faster, faster, faster
. . .
stop
.

Blaze looked straight up. Things were slowing down. He was shielded by a gigantic green canopy that shimmered as the wind blew, throwing shadows across his body. The pieces of sun that filtered through were so bright they hurt his eyes. For a couple of weeks in the spring, the canopy was white and fragrant. And on a clear moonlit night with a breeze, the canopy was silvery, as if made of stars rather than leaves or blossoms. He never thought you could love a tree, but he did. The black locust was perfect—except for the thorns that spun out from the branches like teeth, making it nearly impossible to climb. Blaze took a deep breath. Summer afternoons on the hill smelled of heat and dirt and grass and weeds and laziness. And—lately—of vigilance, caution, suspense. Blaze felt like an alarm clock just waiting to go off.

It had been two days since Reena's name appeared on the hill. Blaze had reconstructed his semicircle of stones around the tree, each marker in its proper place. The other stones he left dotting the hillside here and there. Everything looked exactly as it should, and yet there was a peculiar feeling in the air, as if someone or something strange were lurking nearby. Blaze circled the tree several times, then glided down the hill toward home in a zigzag fashion, his legs scissoring the sunlight.

He waved to Nova, who was bending over in her garden. She stood tall and waved back, calling out his name from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat. Blaze turned and cut across the lawn, angling toward Glenn's studio. Blaze often peeked in one of the huge windows to see what his father was working on. He tried to be invisible and quiet, careful not to disturb Glenn.

Glenn painted large canvases crammed with a multitude of figures and objects that were out of proportion in reference to one another. A man might be holding a plum swollen to the size of a basketball, or a woman might be walking a dog that was as large as a horse. Dragonflies and airplanes with the same dimensions flew side by side. Everyone in Glenn's paintings seemed detached, lost in a cool, claustrophobic dreamworld. There was often a red-haired woman in Glenn's paintings; Blaze knew that she was Reena. Sometimes Blaze spotted himself in his father's work—a pale, reedy boy hiding in the background among trees or floating in the air like a cloud. He liked that. It made him feel proud.

At the end of the school year Glenn would build wooden frames and stretch enough canvas to last the summer. Blaze would help. Blaze's favorite part was attaching the canvas to the wooden frames with Glenn's silver staple gun. It was heavy, and Blaze had to concentrate and push hard to get the staples into the frames as deeply as possible. The staple gun had a nasty little kick that jolted Blaze's arm, and it made a whooshing noise that reminded Blaze of getting a vaccination. Sometimes Glenn had to remove the staples and Blaze had to try again. Blaze noticed that it became easier each summer. He was growing stronger.

After the canvases were stretched, they had to be gessoed.
Blaze helped with this, too. He had his own brush. Father and son would work together in the hot studio, perspiration beading above their lips like mustaches, first brushing the gesso in one direction, letting it dry, sanding it, then brushing it in the opposite direction, letting it dry, sanding it, brushing again, repeating, repeating, repeating. Canvas after canvas after canvas.

After a couple days of work, the studio was filled with about a dozen taut, white rectangles of various sizes, just waiting to be painted.

“This is either promising and exciting, or scary as hell. It all depends on how you look at it.” Glenn would always say something like that as he stared at the empty fields of white laid out flat on the studio floor like perfect rugs. It would often take him a few days to actually begin. And then he would work passionately, as though painting were as important as eating.

Earlier that summer, their annual ritual completed, Glenn gave Blaze one of the canvases. “It's about time you had a real canvas to work on.”

Blaze was dumbstruck. He loved to draw and paint, but he usually worked with colored pencils on newsprint tablets, or with watercolors on the back of heavy, dimpled paper that Glenn had done studies on. Most often, he drew television cartoon characters from memory, or he copied panels from comic books. “I don't know what to paint on it,” Blaze said. Cartoon characters didn't seem important enough for a real stretched canvas.

“I'll let you use my paints and brushes when you think you're ready,” Glenn said. “Do some sketches first.”

The canvas was hidden away, leaning against the wall in Blaze's closet. He was waiting for a good idea. Something worthy enough.

Glenn worked in oils, and Blaze liked the way the combination of turpentine, linseed oil, and varnish smelled. When he reached the open window, Blaze inhaled deeply.

He heard laughter and froze. Glenn and a woman Blaze had never seen before were standing face-to-face in front of Glenn's easel. They were both barefooted. The woman had long grayish blond hair that fell to her waist. She was wearing a thick shiny band around her upper arm and an orange sleeveless dress that moved like water in the breeze that swept through the studio. Blaze watched them kiss. He considered closing his eyes, but intensified his gaze instead. Now Glenn stood behind the woman and coiled her hair into a nest on top of her head. He pulled a pencil out from behind his ear and positioned it in the woman's hair so that the bun stayed in place. Blaze had to catch his breath.

Glenn had dated other women before. A few—particularly a nurse named Carol—Blaze had liked. She talked openly and comfortably with him, and she gave him small gifts—shells, pens, and candy bars. She wasn't afraid to touch Blaze's arm or lightly rest her hand on his shoulder, but she never hugged or kissed him as if she were trying to be his mother. Carol didn't come around very long, however; maybe two months after Blaze had met her. And Blaze never asked why.

Some of the women Glenn introduced to Blaze made him feel squirmy and shy. They often looked at him with wide pitiful doll's eyes and their voices dripped with a sweetness that said, Oh, you poor motherless boy. His self-consciousness grew in their presence.