Mathilda Savitch
The family next door, the Ryders, are having a new swimming pool put in. I don’t know what was wrong with the old one. There’s a bulldozer going, the noise is amazing. When the sun comes through the dust, it’s weird, like poison gas.
On a hill above the pool is a white gazebo. It belongs to the Ryders but they let me have a birthday party there once. When I was ten. I wore a blue dress with yellow ribbons on it. The gazebo doesn’t have any walls, just columns and a roof, and with the dust from the bulldozer blowing through it, it’s like a postcard from Ancient Greece. I hope they’re not going to knock that down too.
Kevin Ryder is by his back door watching the destruction. I go over toward the fence to make him notice me, but he doesn’t. Kevin’s brother was one of Helene’s lovers, by the way. They used to make out in the gazebo.
“Kevin!” I practically have to shout to get his attention.
We both move a little closer to the fence.
“Do you have a light?” I ask him.
He puts his hand up to his ear. I can’t hear you.
I tap the cigarette against my mouth to make him understand.
Kevin looks confused. He shakes his head. He’s wearing a big silver chain around his neck and his hair is blue. It’s a completely different person from when he was little. He also has black fingernails. But his face is still the face of a baby, even though he’s probably thirteen already. I wonder what his mother thinks of his hair. She probably fainted when she saw it. God, I’d love to make Ma faint. Just once, just to teach her a lesson. But the truth is people don’t faint as much as they used to. In the old days people fainted all the time.
Suddenly the bulldozer stops, it’s like a waterfall of silence. Kevin and I stand under the roar of it.
“You smoke?” he says. “You’re allowed to smoke?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, “just not in the house.”
Kevin nods his head, maybe he’s underestimated me.
“What did you do to your hair?” I say.
“I’m not gonna keep it,” he says.
I tell him I like it.
“I don’t know,” he says. He turns away from me and looks at the destruction again. He starts to play with the chain around his neck.
“I have to get going,” he says.
I ask him does he want to go up and hang out in the gazebo. I fake puff on my cigarette. He just stares at me.
“Come on,” I say, “like the old days.”
“I can’t,” he says, “I have homework.”
Homework? I think. A boy with blue hair should not have to do homework.
“How’s your brother?” I say.
Kevin nods his head and then looks at his boots. I wonder is he afraid of me. A lot of people are funny around us, Ma and Da and me. They don’t want to get too close to the curse of the Savitches.
I have a letter from Kevin’s brother under my bed, an e-mail he sent to my sister.
“Does he have a new girlfriend?” I say.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” Kevin says.
I fake puff on the cigarette and blow the invisible smoke in Kevin’s face.
“See you Mathilda,” he says, and then he walks away like a cowboy.
I want to fuck you, is one of the things in the letter.
Also, I am in love with you.
Isn’t language amazing? I can’t get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and it’s like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don’t know if it’s disgusting or beautiful.
The bulldozer comes back to life and when I look up at it I see there’s a man inside. I didn’t even notice him before. He’s in a little cage, like a rat or an astronaut. When I look at him he winks at me.
I turn away but I can feel his eyes still on me. Probably because I’m wearing a skirt. I throw the cigarette on the ground and crush it with my foot. I swoosh my foot back and forth three times. It’s the classic way to put out cigarettes. Watch people if you don’t believe me.
A lot of Helene’s boyfriends looked the same. They had dark hair. They were skinny but they had shoulders. Mostly tall, pale skin. They never carried books. They swaggered. You would have to say they were good-looking.
Helene wasn’t a saint. Have I given you that impression? She definitely had a body. It’s weird to think a dead person is the same person who once had a lot of desire. It’s weird because you don’t want to think too much about the bodies of dead people.
The last few months before the train she was always back from school later than usual and at night she pretty much always came home past her curfew. She had ways of sneaking in and out. She was clever. She knew how to get into bars just from wearing the right shirt and from the way she moved. The funny thing is, she still got all her homework done and passed every test at school. I think that’s why Ma and Da couldn’t say much about what she did at night, they couldn’t really prove it was hurting her. Besides, no one could ever say no to Helene. Imagine the beauty of Anna and add to that a brain.
Sexy and brainy, that’s the best combination. That was Helene for sure, and I bet Ma was like that once too. The librarian who takes off her glasses and lets down her hair. She wears a white blouse buttoned to the neck but suddenly she undoes it a little and it’s devastating. You see her in a whole new light as she makes herself comfortable on the bed. Even her voice goes deeper.
Ma and Da used to be great sleepers and so it was always me who woke up if there was a creak when Helene snuck out. One night around three in the morning she climbed into my bed. When I clicked on the lamp, I saw she was still in her dress and her face looked blurry like someone had tried to erase it. And her mouth was like the mouth of a little kid when they eat too much jelly. I asked her what was the matter and she said, nothing, go back to sleep. I kept looking at her though because I was pretty sure she wanted to tell me something. She kept staring right back at me and finally she sort of smiled and said, salagadoola mechika boola, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, which is the magic song from Cinderella. The lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense but for a long time it was my favorite song in the world. Helene was hugging me so tight that I didn’t think I’d be able to fall back asleep, but I did. I think the words of that song do something to you, especially late at night when you’re in bed with your sister and suddenly she loves you. Which wasn’t always the case.
Sometimes Helene seemed mad at all of us and we hadn’t even done anything. Other times it was fits of crying. She was very emotional. Her and Ma used to get into some big fights. For some reason Ma didn’t like it when Helene fell in love, which she did quite often. I guess Ma didn’t want Helene running off and ruining her life. “I’m not you,” Helene yelled at her once, and Ma yelled right back, “Yes you are!” The fighting used to scare me, but when I think of it now I’d give them both Academy Awards. In my mind the fights are like a beautiful movie I wish I could watch again. Sometimes Helene would end up crying in Ma’s arms. And every once in a while I’d catch them on the couch downstairs, whispering to each other and laughing. Half the time they’d go mute when I walked into the room. It used to drive me crazy. What did they think I was, a spy trying to get at their secrets? “Come here,” Ma would say, “sit with us,” and of course I would, but it always felt like a test. I used to try to come up with something really funny just to impress them.
When I have a fit now, Ma just walks away. She won’t fight back like she did with Helene. Sometimes my fits are real, sometimes I make them up, but I don’t think Ma can tell the difference. The nightmares were real, the first few months, but it was always Da that came into my room. I still have bad dreams every once in a while, but my parents don’t know because I don’t cry out for them anymore. The Tree taught me how to breathe when I wake up from a bad dream, and how to train my thoughts. When you learn things like this, you can pretty much get along by yourself. You don’t need other people waiting on you hand and foot.
I spend a lot of time in H’s room. Sometimes I picture myself sleeping in there and Ma comes to the door and sees me under the covers and for a second she doesn’t know it’s me. She thinks it’s you-know-who. If that ever really happened, I wouldn’t say boo or anything, I wouldn’t want to give her a heart attack. I’d just lie there and keep the covers over my head and let Ma sort it out for herself.
A few weeks after Helene died, there was a night Ma and Da and I were having dinner and the phone rang. Except it didn’t come from the kitchen, it came from upstairs. It was the phone in Helene’s bedroom. Her princess line, as Ma called it. It rang like twenty times but nobody moved. The next day Ma had it disconnected. Did you ever see the movie where that grown woman goes back in time to the house she grew up in and the telephone rings and it’s the woman’s grandmother calling? And the two of them talk about nothing special but you can see the woman is crying because in the future where she came from the grandmother is dead. Movies can do stuff like that, that’s why they’re so important. Movies don’t have a problem with time and space. They’re not as restrictive as real life.
Even H’s cell phone is dead because it was crushed by the train. Apparently it was given to Ma and Da in a plastic bag. At least I have the love letters, if you can call them that. Based on my calculations there were about ten boys Helene was involved with. Not all at the same time of course, but in the last few years. Most of them I can picture because they’ve been to the house. But the most interesting one is a boy I’ve never seen, the boy of the last six months. He writes in full sentences and they’re good sentences too in my opinion. Louis is his name. LDM@blueforest.com. I’m almost a little in love with him and I don’t even know who he is. I can’t find a single Louis in H’s yearbooks so he’s probably from another school. He’s a bit of a sad sack in his messages, but he also has a sense of humor. I’m really quite fond of him.
I keep thinking to write him from my own e-mail but I’ve never done it. The funny thing is, H’s e-mail is still alive. Ma and Da set up Helene and me on the same account. When I sign on I always see H’s screen name right above mine, but I can’t get her mail because I don’t know the password. I’ve tried about a million words. I haven’t given up, though. I still make lists of words in my spare time.
Helene’s screen name is HeyGirl. I’m MattieSays. We’re both at mindfield.com. If you ever want to find us, that’s probably the best way to do it.
8
Anna and I are sitting in her living room. The TV is on but we’re barely watching it. Anna’s trying to get a splinter out of her finger and I’m making a tattoo of a snake on her ankle with a blue ballpoint.
“Don’t press so hard,” she says.
Helene used to draw tattoos on me. One time she made a masterpiece of red lips on the side of my shoulder. For a while I was really crazy about tattoos and I made Helene do a new one on me every week. Mostly we did it in secret because Ma worried about blood poisoning. But once, in the summertime, I was sunbathing on the lawn and she drew a giant flower right on my stomach, with the petals coming straight out of my belly button. When she was finished she sealed it with a kiss. “You’re a rock star,” she said, and I pretty much believed her.
The snake I’m doing on Anna is coming out pretty crappy and I consider turning it into an octopus. On television a man is having a conversation with a deaf boy. The boy is doing signs with his hands and grunting. Anna sighs and changes the channel with the clicker. She goes past a hundred things until she gets to the plastic surgery. At first I don’t even know what it is, for a second I think it’s a cooking show.
“Look,” Anna says, but I’m already looking. A doctor is pulling a loose piece of someone’s face, you can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.
“Gross,” Anna says, but she doesn’t change the channel. “Oh my god,” she says. An assistant to the surgeon is sucking up blood with a tube. I get a funny feeling in my stomach. I used to be able to watch gross-outs but lately it’s not so appealing.
“I’m going upstairs,” I say.
Anna doesn’t move, she can’t take her eyes off the stupid television.
I really can’t stand it when other people have control over the clicker. No one ever watches what you want to watch. And then they always shut the TV off at the wrong moment. When I’m watching TV by myself my rule is to shut it off only after something good has happened, or when the last words you hear are not going to hurt you. You don’t want to shut it off in the middle of two people having an argument or someone saying pig or death or my car broke down. You want to make sure the last words are something like that would be great or world of your dreams or magically delicious.
When you go up the stairs in Anna’s house, you pass all these pictures of gardens painted by Anna’s mother. The flowers are good but the people are just blobs in the distance, they don’t even have faces. The blobs are standing under trees or sitting down to blobby picnics. Why even paint people if you’re not going to give them some character?
Anna’s bedroom is the perfect room of a girl, pink and white and fluffy. Everything is in its place. It’s easy to imagine people visiting this room in a hundred years. It would be like a museum. the bedroom of a girl would be the exhibit. This would be in the future when people sleep in pods and live forever. But I bet the room would still make them jealous. A huge bumblebee is knocking on the window. I kick off my shoes and sprawl on the bed.
“What are you doing up there?” Anna shouts. “Are you coming down?”
“No,” I say, “you come up here.”
I arrange myself on the bed like pornography but when Anna sees me she doesn’t get it.
“Why are you lying like that?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, and I close my legs.
The bumblebee is still doing a number on the window, bonking its head. You have to feel sorry for animals like that, you really do.
Anna comes and sits next to me on the bed. She tilts her head like a doll. Suddenly she’s my nurse. She pushes the hair out of my face. Around us on the bed are pillows shaped like hearts. It really is another world.
You’re probably wondering how a person like me could have a friend like Anna. Why am I not surrounded by other brains? Why would Anna choose me is your question. But it’s not even the right question.
Beauty is not the boss. The mind is. The truth is, I chose Anna.
The beginning of Anna and me is historical. The place is the pool club at Randolph Park. The time is only five months ago.
I was sitting on a chaise longue, reading a novel. The Straw Hotel. It wasn’t on the summer reading list, I found it at a garage sale. The story concerns a woman with amnesia who might also be a killer, I won’t say in case you ever want to read it. Highly recommended.
Anyway, Anna was in the pool. She had on a yellow bathing suit. She was treading water and talking to another girl. I think it was Cheryl List but the other girl isn’t important. The two of them are whispering and laughing. Their hair is perfectly dry.
Standing at the side of the pool there’s a group of boys, also whispering. There’s a lot of intrigue at the pool club if you’re into that sort of thing.
This was the first time I noticed Anna’s eyes. They were like something you wanted to steal.
Suddenly one of the boys, Michael “Bigtooth” Flatmore, jumps in the water. His jump splashes Anna and so she splashes him back. Then Michael moves toward Anna and he dunks her. He lets her up for air and then he dunks her again. He has complete control over her, it’s disgusting. For sure, Michael is in love with Anna but all he can think to do is push her underwater. That’s how boys are. Probably he’s sexually frustrated.
Anna is gulping for air. Cheryl List doesn’t even help. When I jump in the water, Michael Flatmore turns and I pull him away from Anna. I call him a fucking idiot, even though that’s not an expression in my vocabulary. It just comes out of me. By accident I scratch his face. Anna is coughing and I lead her over to the edge. I was suddenly madder than I’d ever been in my whole life.
“Fucking idiot,” I scream back to Michael. The fat lifeguard finally wakes up and blows his silver whistle. “Keep it down,” he says.
I help Anna out of the pool. I ask if she’s okay, and she nods. But I can tell she’s suspicious of me. Why am I helping her? She can’t figure it out.
Michael Flatmore is out of the pool now. He walks past us. He’s completely humiliated. There’s even a little bit of blood on his face.
Anna and I stand there dripping for a long time.
“Do you want to get something to eat?” she finally says. “At the snack bar?”
In The Straw Hotel, Beatrice, the woman with amnesia, will only eat fruit.
“Let’s have smoothies,” I say.
“I’ll be right back,” Anna says. She goes into the bathroom and I wonder if she’s really going to come back out again. I can see Cheryl List on the other side of the pool talking to Michael Flatmore. Unbelievable. I’m still dripping and it almost looks like I’m peeing. Suddenly I think maybe someone is playing a trick on me. I start to feel sick. This still wasn’t the best time for me, as you can imagine.
But Anna did come out of the bathroom. Her wet hair was parted and combed. She even smiled at me. When I think of that day it was like Anna just appeared. Someone had to, and it was her.
When I sleep at Anna’s I always sleep in her bed. It’s huge. The sheets smell like milk. Hours after the bumblebee that’s where we were again, talking with the lights out. I noticed there was a lot of moonlight coming in the window, there was a nice patch of it on the carpet. We were talking about fall projects at school but neither of us were coming up with any brilliant ideas. I suggested we take off our clothes and lie in the moonlight.
“For fall projects?” Anna said. She gets confused if you change the subject too quickly.
“No,” I said, “just for tonight.”
“Why?” she said.
But I didn’t really have a reason.
“I’m not stripping,” she said. But she laughed.
“Nymphs do it,” I said.
“Do what?” she said.
“Bathe in the moonlight,” I said.
Anna’s eyes were glowing in the dark. “I don’t even know what nymphs are,” she said.
I told her that nymphs were beautiful young girls that live in the woods. “Spirits,” I said.
She said she didn’t want to be a ghost and I told her they weren’t ghosts exactly. I mentioned how they were related to the Greek gods.
“Are they immortal?” she said. Boy, did she know how to irritate me.
“Sometimes,” I said, “not always.”
“Most of them live for a long time,” I explained, “unless they have an argument with one of the gods. And they never lose their beauty or grow old,” I told her.
I also said that a woman’s breasts were born to live in the moonlight. I was really hamming it up until I had Anna blushing and laughing. I knew she wanted to do it.
“Just for a minute,” she said.
So we did it. We took off our tops and settled down on the floor, on our backs. We made ourselves cozy in the little box of moonlight.
“I don’t think the door’s locked,” Anna said. She started to get up but I grabbed her hand.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “no one can get in. And if they do,” I said, “they’ll be punished for looking at us.”
“Only the animals can look at us,” I said. And in fact Anna’s cat was doing just that. Staring at us from the bed.
The moonlight was coming in the window and it was almost like something definite. It wasn’t just empty air, it had fingers, it attached itself to our bodies. I noticed how Anna’s skin was a lot whiter than mine but I tried not to look because I didn’t want to make her nervous.
I told her how one day it wasn’t going to be just moonlight all over us.
“I know,” she said. “I think about it sometimes.”
“I think about it almost as if they were already on top of me,” she said.
Once I tried to get Luke to lie on my stomach to see what it would feel like. I don’t mean sex. I wasn’t naked or anything. I just wanted to understand the weight of another person. But it didn’t work. Luke just put his head on my stomach and then I petted him until we fell asleep.
“It’s going to hurt,” Anna said.
“Probably,” I said.
All of a sudden we burst out laughing. Then it was quiet for a while, except for my heart which was going about a mile a minute.
“What do you think of Kevin Ryder?” I said.
“Guukh,” Anna said. “Horrible.”
“Why?” I said.
She looked at me like I was off my rocker. “The clothes,” she said. “The hair.”
“Who does he think he is?” she said. “The devil?”
“He’s pretty nice,” I said.
Anna just shrugged and yawned. She was getting pretty comfortable on the floor, and so I peeked at her belly again. Boy, I couldn’t get over the whiteness of it. It looked like it was dusted with powder. It really did.
The heat was blasting in the house but I could feel the chill of moonlight on my skin like the invisible fingers of aliens. Plus other things, also invisible, passed between Anna’s body and mine. I bet I could have become pregnant with something that came off of her, some of that white powder. The alien fingers were moving it back and forth between us like bees.
If I could only put the white belly and the blue hair together, I’d have the most beautiful monster in the world.
Suddenly I noticed Anna was crying. It wasn’t sobbing, it was just quiet lines down her face. I looked at her and she looked at me.
This is happening, I think. Anna is crying. For some reason it made me happy.
“I don’t know,” Anna says to herself.
“I’m bleeding,” she says.
I don’t understand, and then she touches her stomach. “It started this morning.”
I ask her if it’s her first time and she says, “yes.”
She wipes her eyes.
“Maybe we should do some homework,” she says. “I don’t feel like sleeping yet.”
She stands up and puts her shirt back on. She gets her books and brings them to the moonlight. It’s the same world we’ve been living in, but different now. Everything starts to glow. The cat sees it. He sees the miracle. He comes over and rubs himself against Anna’s leg. Anna opens a book and inside is a picture of a bird, as well as the bones of a bird.
Awful, I say to myself. Lufwa.
Anna puts the book between us and we begin to do our homework inside the miracle. We’re in no rush. We have all the time in the world. We’re like the secretaries of god.
The first time I bled I thought I was going to die. I also cried.
When I first found out about Helene I didn’t cry right away. I was too busy noticing how many people were screaming in outer space and wondering why I had never heard them before.
There are a lot of worlds we don’t even know about.
In the moonlight I remember thinking: Anna bleeds today. In four days H.S.S.H.
9
Today I tried all the planets. Plus I tried about a hundred new Spanish words because it’s a language she studied in school. There’s still a Spanish dictionary in her room. And the planets probably popped into my mind because of the play. The Moons of Pluto. Tonight’s the big night, my big date with Ma and Da. Yesterday I had a terrific fit, with tears and everything, and Da called to get an extra ticket.
But as for the planets and the Spanish, nothing worked. Incorrect password, it said every time. After a while I started to feel like a criminal. Finally I moved on to the Bhagavad Gita for some inspiration. Do you know that book? I remember the day Helene bought it. We were coming out of Greenways Market with Ma, and a lady in colored sheets came up to us in the parking lot. I guess she was some sort of religious book dealer. Ma said no thank you but Helene wanted to take a look. Helene was pretty generous when it came to people in parking lots. Plus the book only cost five dollars and it had full-color illustrations. So I tried Krishna, Sanjaya, Arjuna, plus a bunch of other interesting names. Incorrect password, down the line.