Y: A Novel (7 page)

Miranda, my new mom, is a cinnamon-colored woman who works as a Molly Maid and was
once married to a man named Dell. Her bedroom is on the top floor of the town house,
and I am prohibited from going up there, as is her daughter, Lydia-Rose. It is “off-limits,”
she says. She “needs her space.” Lydia-Rose and I share a bedroom on the second floor,
across from the living room, bathroom, and tiny kitchen, a beaded curtain hung in
the doorway. A short flight of carpeted stairs leads down to the first-floor laundry
room and front door.

There are rules here: no staring, no chewing with my mouth open, no sugar before bed,
no wasting food, no talking back. I can handle most of it, but I can’t stop staring.
I want to stare at Miranda forever. I am fascinated with her. She wears her hair in
a tight bun at the top of her head and has a big bright face, as if the moon itself
had walked into the room. After work, she pads around the town house in Chinese slippers
and a plaid housecoat. She makes us lentil soup, then slides an ice cube into each
of our bowls until it cools.

Each morning she wakes at five, showers, puts on her Molly Maid outfit (a pale-pink
polo shirt with
Molly Maid
stitched over the left breast pocket, khaki pedal pushers, white tennis shoes), fusses
with her impossible hair, and then makes breakfast. There is always something different:
creamed honey on toast, boiled eggs, Cheerios, jam on toast; on Saturdays, dollar
cakes with fake maple syrup. She teaches me her trick: she fills a saucepan with one
or two inches of water, brings it to a boil, then adds spoonfuls of brown sugar until
it is thick and golden. If we’re lucky, she stirs in a little butter at the end. This
is something I will grow to despise—this cheapness—but for now I find it ingenious.

Miranda’s real daughter, Lydia-Rose, looks just like her, with her big face and honey-brown
skin. I’m told that she looks like her father, too: she is a tall, intimidating girl
who wears his thin smile, and her lips curl up with every laugh. Her hair, thick and
copper-colored, rests in a messy clump at the nape of her neck, a yellow crayon in
the fold of her ear. She is six months older than I. She has long skinny legs and
runs as though
she were flying. Her face is fierce and determined; her eyes, impatient and keen.

Miranda loves to play dress-up with us, give back-scratches and spend hours French-braiding
our hair. She dresses us in shades of pink and purple, always matching, always bright.
Although we never go to church, she tries to get me to believe in God. She says I
only need to have faith the size of a mustard seed. This seems reasonable, doable,
and so, for about an hour, I am a Christian.

But the most exciting thing about this place is that Miranda has three cats and a
rangy-looking dog. The cats’ names are Scratchie, Midnight, and Flipper. Scratchie
and Flipper are from the same litter; Midnight is a stray. Flipper is a longhaired
Siamese. He has ten toes on each paw, which is why he is named Flipper. Scratchie
is tortoiseshell-colored and a fighter. He and Flipper are best friends. Midnight,
the stray, is black with a white blaze. She is the only shorthaired cat among the
herd.

The dog’s name is Winkie and she is part fox terrier and part something else that
has given her long, gangly legs that don’t work very well. We don’t know why. Miranda
found her one day, soaking wet and whining, by the side of the road. She is mostly
white, with a black saddle and a little brown head. She has big goofy eyes and the
longest tongue in the history of tongues. She only harasses the cats if her legs are
hurting her, and, for the most part, it’s a peaceable kingdom.

Lydia-Rose and I aren’t so lucky. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to call Miranda,
and so I start calling her Mom. Lydia-Rose drags me around the bedroom by my hair
until I promise never to say it again, then she cries so hard that Miranda takes her
to the forbidden upstairs bedroom and they don’t come down for hours.

Once a month, a social worker comes by for a home visit to make sure I’m okay. Her
name is Bobbie, and she’s a great big woman who wears long gypsy skirts and has leathery
red skin from fake tanning. She and Miranda drink coffee in the kitchen and talk about
me while I pretend not to listen. Am I adjusting? Am I sleeping? Am I still crying
out in the
night? Bobbie talks about the difficulties of raising a child with a “history,” one
who might be “special needs.” She puts her hand on Miranda’s shoulder sometimes, as
though she needs to be comforted. Later, she pads through the house, checking the
smoke alarms and making sure there’s nothing poisonous lying around. She asks Miranda
to put the Lysol on a higher shelf, “just in case.” Lastly, she comes into the living
room and eases herself onto the floor, where she stares at me intensely and asks me
questions about myself, about Lydia-Rose, about living with Miranda. I whisper that
I am fine. I want to tell her that I think I really love Miranda, but I can’t yet
find the courage.

When Bobbie leaves, Miranda holds my hand and asks if there’s anything she can do
to make me feel happy. She agrees to paint the bedroom pink when she next gets paid,
and when I ask for a neon-pink bedspread, she buys dye and throws an old white one
in the washing machine. When Lydia-Rose protests and accuses me of getting special
treatment, I hear Miranda whisper to her that “at least she wasn’t rattled by such
a stark beginning.” She expects her daughter to be fair, to be kind, to be nice to
me.

“Bleeder!” Lydia-Rose shrieks. It is six in the morning, a few weeks after I arrived,
and she is in the twin bed across from me. She clutches her bloody nose and falls
out of bed onto the floor, hitting her head on the edge of the bed frame. The cats
stampede out of the room, outraged. I clutch my new pink bedspread and wait for further
violence. But this is just the way Lydia-Rose is: everything with her is physical.
When she’s angry or sad, she pushes or punches me and then her nose bleeds—huge rushes
of blood that last an hour. She holds her head back while Miranda wads the Kleenex
and presses it hard against her nose. Miranda tells me that Lydia-Rose has bled everywhere:
the mall, the church, the grocery store. Concrete, tile bathrooms, hardwood floor—each
surface absorbing the blood in a different way, the carpet in our bedroom forever
stained.

Once it stops, Miranda tames her daughter’s hair with a bristle brush and forces it
into two long braids, the elastics ready to burst. Flipper and Scratchie groom each
other on the floor, and Winkie is asleep on my bed, on top of my feet.

At breakfast, Miranda talks and we fidget. The phone is busted and two guys from the
phone company are busy ripping up the walls, drilling, pulling phone lines out of
little cardboard boxes and then slinging them all over the house, creating a kind
of spiderweb of white wires that beep and fizzle and spurt when they walk by. The
men have some kind of thing attached to their pants that makes these little lines
crazy.

“When we lived on Saltspring,” Miranda begins over the noise of staple guns and all
the beeping, “we were chased by a white bull. Lydia-Rose’s father and I were in our
old minivan. We were going to visit friends and the drive was very long.”

“What was I doing?” asks Lydia-Rose. Her voice is impatient, a whinny. I push my Froot
Loops around, roll the soggy ones into balls with my fingers, and stack them like
snowmen. Occasionally I reach down and put one into Winkie’s mouth.

Miranda folds her hands in her lap. “You were napping in the backseat, sweetie.” She
tries to salt her eggs but the salt is clumpy from moisture and won’t come out. She
tries to work the pepper mill but it’s stuck, too. “Your father spotted the bull first,
coming from the middle of a field—who knows what the bull was thinking, maybe that
our white van was a little girl bull, I don’t know! His head was the width of this
table, Lydia-Rose. No lie.”

“There are no ‘little girl bulls,’ Mom,” Lydia-Rose says. “You mean a cow.”

Miranda’s face reddens. Lydia-Rose kicks me in the shin and I kick back. The table
rocks. It’s painted orange and flimsy, something found at a garage sale. I put a spoonful
of Froot Loops in my mouth and let them sit there. Midnight jumps on the breakfast
table and Miranda swoops her off.

“Did Daddy gun it?” Lydia-Rose grins.

“We left the bull in a dust cloud,” Miranda replies.

After we’ve cleared the dishes and the men have fixed our telephone,
we spend the morning sorting through bags of clothes. Miranda has a consignment business
on the side. Women come around on weekends and look through the dresses, the freshly
pressed shirts, the old shoes. Miranda kneels in front of one of the bags and tosses
shoes over her shoulder. Lydia-Rose finds a black beret and sets it at a jaunty angle
on my head. Then she pinches my earlobe until I wince, but I know by now not to complain
to Miranda—if I tell on her, the next time she’ll pinch harder. Instead, earlobes
hot and ringing, I paw through a pile of clothing as though I were digging a hole.
I hold up a leather miniskirt and smirk.

“Someone will want these,” Miranda says, and a pair of red heels clatters to the floor.

Lydia-Rose reaches first. “Let me.” She slips her feet inside and jerks around the
bedroom like a marionette, her cheeks sucked tight in concentration. She pauses in
front of the mirror and pulls a face. I laugh and she smiles at me. That night, we
pour salt in Miranda’s wineglass when her back is turned. Lydia-Rose is spanked and
sent to her room, and I am lectured about maturity and sentenced to morning Winkie
walks for a week. But I don’t care. It is the first time that Lydia-Rose and I have
banded together as sisters, and it is great fun.

On the weekends, Miranda takes us to Willows Beach. Lydia-Rose and I catch suckerfish
and try to make them mate. We spend all day investigating hermit crabs and plunging
our hands into tide pools, making all kinds of sea creatures run for their lives.
When Miranda is out of earshot, we run down the beach, screaming Fuck! as loud as
we can. Lydia-Rose loves to swear. Backlit by the sun, we giggle at our shadows, long
and lean. Lydia-Rose wiggles her toes in the wet sand and practices Indian burns on
my arm. Winkie flattens out in the surf, her belly coated with sand. We make shadow
puppets with our hands.