Mathilda Savitch
Have you ever seen a picture of Krishna? He has blue skin and he was actually born that way, it’s not a dye-job. Sometimes he has two arms, sometimes four. He wears a gold crown with a peacock feather at the top. He’s fairly attractive, in a foreign sort of way. In the introduction to the Bhagavad Gita there’s a whole history of his life. When he was young he hung out with the cows and the milkmaids and he was quite the prankster. Once he stole a bunch of cheese and stuffed it in his cheeks, but when his mother pried open his mouth she didn’t see the cheese, she saw the whole universe. She nearly pooped her pants. That’s not a verbatim quote, the poop part. I just thought to modernize it for you a little bit, give it a little more pep. I bet I could be an excellent translator if I wanted. The job is basically pretending you’re a foreigner, but in your own language.
When Da saw me later with the book, he asked me what I was doing with it. I told him I was just looking at the pictures. Da’s not too keen on religious books. Plus it probably reminds him of you-know-who. The day she bought it she had it with her at the dinner table and she read all of us a passage. I was able to find the sentence because it’s one she underlined. When Arjuna saw many of his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he became overwhelmed, confused, and filled with compassion. The scraggly pencil line under the sentence is so pale it makes you want to cry. I’ve been carrying the little book around the house for hours, like it’s an expensive purse that goes perfectly with my outfit. Ma hasn’t noticed yet, or if she has she’s biting her lip.
I don’t know what I want exactly.
I guess in some ways I’d like to see her. A lot of people have seen the dead, it’s pretty well documented. One of the main ways they come back is in dreams. For some reason people used to see them a lot more in the old days. Supposedly poor people see them more than rich people. And old people more than young. Dogs supposedly see them all the time. I read a whole bunch of information on the Internet.
Sometimes when you see dead people they’ll want to give you something, but if it’s a piece of food you’re not supposed to eat it. Even if they try to give you money, don’t take it is the general rule. Because stuff from the land of the dead can be poison or it can bring you bad luck. You might suddenly be sucked into another world and you’d never be able to come back. If Helene wanted to give me an apple or a dollar bill, I would definitely take it. I wouldn’t hesitate.
But I’ve never seen Helene. She hasn’t come in a dream, not once, not in the right way, in one piece. She hasn’t ever stood under a tree in the backyard or under a streetlight at night. She hasn’t appeared in the house, floating down the hallway and tempting me to follow her. The only person who ever comes in a dream is the man who pushed her, but he doesn’t even have a face. Sometimes it’s just dreams of trains.
One of the things I wonder is: Do the dead want us to be dead too, or do they want us to be alive? Sometimes I wonder if Helene is jealous of me. Is she mad at me, does she wish we could swap places? And then I wonder does she even have a mind to think of me at all. Is there anything left of her out there? I’m glad I have the letters and the e-mails and the drawings. But the password is the most important thing, it’s like a locked door and behind it might be ghosts. Maybe it’s just old-fashioned ghosts that try to give you apples. Modern ghosts probably have new ways of doing things. They wouldn’t be against getting through to you electronically.
I also think Helene could be playing with me. The last year she was alive she ignored me all the time, so it could be the same game she’s up to now. But after a person is dead they should be different. After a person is dead they should be full of love and compassion. They shouldn’t be so cold.
Like for instance, Helene never let me wear her clothes. She had some pretty nice things. Tomorrow, I’ve decided, I’m going to wear one of her dresses. It’s part of my plan. The dress probably won’t fit perfectly but it doesn’t matter. I could almost be Helene if I wanted to. It might take a bit of work but so what. It’s an interesting idea. What would Ma think of that, if Helene suddenly showed up in the living room?
Tomorrow is the big day. One year exactly.
It’s funny, in a few years I’ll actually be older than Helene. Unless the dead grow old too. I don’t know how that works exactly. I remember a long time ago Ma used to have an ATM card with a secret code. Sometimes she let Helene and me punch in the numbers when we were at the grocery store or the bank. Ma made us promise not to ever tell anyone the magic numbers. And she told us a clever way to remember them. When Helene is twenty-six, she said, I’ll be forty-six.
2646
I wonder if Ma still has the card. If she does, she needs to change the code.
1646, for example. Ma could really put whatever age she wanted on her side and she’d never have to worry about doing the math for Helene. Even if the dead grow old in outer space, on Earth they stop where they stopped. Period, end of story. On Earth she’ll always be sixteen.
Dear Helene,
Sunday would be good for me, after 4. I have something for you, you’ll laugh when you see it. Working on a new song, I could use your help, it’s a fucking mess ahhhhhh. Let me know about Sunday.
Love, Louis
Helene had some ingenious hiding places for her letters and e-mails. I only found the ones from Louis a few months ago. Most of them were folded up and shoved inside a secret zipper compartment in the belly of a stuffed bear. I think I’m the only person who’s ever seen them. Not even the police noticed them when they came to the house and rudely went through H’s room like she was the criminal.
I keep the letters in the basement now, which is basically no-man’s land since Helene died. Ma and Da never go down there. It’s where Helene used to practice her singing when she didn’t want to be disturbed. Sometimes, if she was singing loud and you were in the kitchen, you could hear her voice come right up through the floor.
And I guess she sang with Louis. Which sort of breaks your heart if you think about it too much. Which I don’t!
I’ve been trying to call Anna for about an hour but there’s no answer. I wanted her opinion on what to wear to the play tonight. In the end I just called Kevin Ryder because I had to call someone. My heart was racing for some reason. Reading the love letters always puts me in a funny mood.
Kevin and I didn’t have much to say to each other. I asked him if he still had his hair.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“The blue,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s permanent,” and I asked him if his mother fainted.
“Practically,” he said.
We both laughed a little, which was nice.
“I’ve been thinking of changing my hair too,” I say.
“Maybe a different color,” I tell him.
I ask him can he recommend a good hair colorer.
“You can do it yourself,” he informs me.
I ask if maybe he can show me sometime, and he says, “sure.”
“It’s chemicals,” he says.
“I’m not afraid of chemicals,” I say.
“Don’t go blue,” he says.
“No,” I say, “I wouldn’t.”
“That’s your color,” I tell him.
Sometimes I know just what to say to people.
“Blue wouldn’t look good on me anyway,” I say.
“You could go black,” he says.
Black. Just the word gives me a heart attack.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I say.
And then that’s pretty much the end of the conversation.
“I have to go,” I say.
I don’t tell him I’m going to the theater with my parents. I don’t want to give him the wrong impression. Like I’m some kind of baby afraid to be alone in the house.
I want him to think of me as the girl with black hair, even though that’s not exactly the color I was thinking of. Red is more like it. But if I did red, I’d probably get struck by lightning. The watchers might not be too pleased. Or, who knows, maybe they’d be ecstatic. One thing I can tell you is they would definitely notice it, that’s for sure. Look at her, little miss redhead, we better keep our eye on that one. I can practically hear them already.
10
The play had absolutely nothing to do with space, nothing to do with planets. It was all about Joe and Judy Moon and their mentally retarded daughter who live—guess where? Pluto, Missouri. Which is not even a real place.
The play was definitely not my cup of tea. You believed everything but it was boring. You kept hoping the mentally retarded girl could secretly fly or read people’s minds, but this wasn’t the case. She was just retarded, and she hardly had any lines. What a role for an actor, it was mostly about drooling.
Ma wore a black dress with silver flowers on it. I forgot what a wonder she can be when she tries. She put her hair up and let a few snakes of it fall down the back of her neck. Da wore a black suit that made him look like a millionaire. It could have been the two of them before I existed.
I just wore jeans and a sweater. I’m saving the fashion fireworks for tomorrow. I’ve already chosen Helene’s dress. My dress. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better by then. My stom-ach’s still a little funny from everything that happened at that stupid play. My head’s not too great either. What a night, I’m telling you. Odious. Odious with cherries on top.
Our seats were good but at a bad play good seats are the last thing you want. It’s like death row. Da sat on the aisle and Ma sat next to him and then me. At one point Da took Ma’s hand. It was the sad part of the play when Judy Moon is talking about her life before Joe, when she was a professional ice skater. The signs outside the theater said “funny and touching,” but I didn’t laugh once. Da laughed exactly three times but only through his nose.
What was interesting was thinking about how these people were not really Joe and Judy Moon. They weren’t married in real life because in real life they were actors. In real life his name was William Miller and her name was Cynthia Callis. I kept feeling sorry for them except I didn’t know who I was feeling sorry for, Joe and Judy or William and Cynthia.
At intermission Ma ran into the bathroom. Da and I waited in the lobby. He had a glass of wine and I had a juice and a cookie.
“What do you think?” Da said.
“I thought it was supposed to be funny,” I said.
“It’s a different kind of funny,” Da said.
“What kind?” I asked him. But he didn’t answer me. He sipped his wine and looked up at the paintings on the ceiling.
“How about that?” he said. He sort of got lost up there.
Lately I’ve noticed Da is starting to disappear. He’s basically following Ma, but where is she even going?
“How’s your cookie?” he said.
“Awful,” I said.
I glanced around at the snazzy crowd in the lobby and I thought about the people who died at the opera last year. Drinking wine and eating cookies just like us. Da kept looking toward the bathroom. He looked nervous.
“She’s been in there a long time, huh?” He said it like maybe he wanted help.
I asked him did he want me to go get her. And just then the lights went on and off a few times, which means get back to your seat.
“You go and sit down,” Da said.
I just stood there. For some reason I felt like the three of us should stick together.
“Go on,” Da said. “That way you can tell us what happened if we miss anything. You know where our seats are, right?”
I nodded and then I just left him standing there with the glass of wine glowing in his hand. I didn’t look back. I’m superstitious about looking back at someone when you’re walking away from them, on account of that story about the musician who messes everything up when he’s walking out of the underworld. He gets the chance of a lifetime, but he’s twitchy and he blows it.
In the theater the curtain was closed but you could feel people breathing behind it. When I got to my seat the woman next to me looked over and smiled. “Are you having a nice time, honey?”
She was old and smelled like potpourri.
“Yes,” I said.
“I love that little girl,” she said. “Breaks your heart.”
“Do you think it’s funny?” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “The mother’s a card.”
I said to the old lady how I didn’t hear her laughing and she said she was laughing inside. Which I thought was an interesting comment. She patted her chest to show me where the secret laughter was hiding. And then the lights went down and she said, “Shhh,” as if I was the one who started the stupid conversation.
When the curtain parted it was a completely different world. The living room had vanished and the whole stage was white. You couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be the North Pole or heaven or were they just trying to blind us. The light was crazy bright.
Lucy Moon was onstage all by herself. Lucy was the daughter. She just stood there and for a long time nothing happened. It was like a mistake. Then finally Lucy started to make sounds. Half animal and half baby. I thought maybe this was supposed to be the funny part. I looked at the old lady next to me and she had her hand over her mouth and her eyes were all buggy.
When I looked back at the stage it had started to snow. It was fake snow but somehow even better than real snow. It was pretty amazing actually. Lucy Moon looked to her right and then to her left and then all of a sudden she screamed. It was the cry of the wild.
When Lucy stopped screaming she looked out into the audience. She looked right at me. I was in the third row, pretty close. “Help me,” she said. I didn’t like the sound of that. I turned around but I couldn’t see Ma or Da anywhere. When I looked back at the stage Lucy was still staring at me.
“I want to go home,” she said. But retarded-like. She was practically crying.
I could feel the heat moving up my neck.
I turned to the old lady. She made a gesture like I should get up and do something.
“It’s a play,” I said.
I had no idea what the hell was happening, it was like I was dreaming.
The old lady put her mouth by my ear. “Audience participation,” she said.
Lucy was holding out her hand toward me.
“I don’t know the lines,” I said. My neck was really burning. Even my throat was on fire.
“Be a good sport,” the old lady said. And she pushed me a little.
I looked at Lucy and I shook my head. Everybody was staring at me. I could feel the cookie moving around in my stomach. Finally Lucy turned to someone else thank god, a man in a red shirt. He got up from his seat and climbed the stairs toward the stage. The old lady clicked her tongue at me. Fuck you, I said. Except I didn’t say it for real. I said it inside ha ha like her stupid laughter.
And I don’t even know what the man in the red shirt did for Lucy because I’d turned to look for Ma and Da again. But the next thing I knew the snow had stopped and Lucy was kissing the man’s cheek. Thank you, she said. Dank you. I watched the man go back to his seat, smiling and brushing the fake snow from his shoulders like he was some kind of hero. And when I looked back at the stage all the furniture was there again, I don’t know how they did it. And there was Lucy, safe and sound, smack in the middle of her living room. And then Joe and Judy entered like nothing had happened and the stupid chitchat started up again.
That’s when I threw up on Ma’s empty seat. I kept my head down in case it happened again. I felt a tap on my shoulder. But it wasn’t them. It was the old lady.
“Here,” she said. She was trying to pass me a hanky.
“Wipe the seat,” she said.
When I sat back up I didn’t watch any more of the play. I closed my eyes and counted. My face felt like it was melting. When it was finally over I ran down the aisle while everyone was clapping. I realized I still had the old lady’s hanky and I threw it on the ground. Ma and Da were by the back door and I wanted to grab onto them but I just stormed past them.
“Hey hey,” Da said, “slow down.”
I ran outside. It had turned cold and the wind was snapping some flags.
“They wouldn’t let us back in,” Da said.
I looked at Ma.
“You didn’t see it?” I said. It made me crazy that she might not have seen the snow or the screaming or how I got sick on her seat.
“We watched it from the back,” Da said.
“You can’t just disappear,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Ma said.
Da asked me what was wrong.
“I don’t feel well,” I said.
Ma touched my forehead but it didn’t mean anything. She didn’t keep her hand there for more than a second.
“You don’t have a fever,” she said.
“How would you know?” I shouted.
Da coughed. “I’ll get the car,” he said.
I stared at Ma as hard as I could.
“I thought it was going to be about space,” I said.
Ma laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
My old feelings came back and I hated her stronger than ever.
“The acting was good,” Ma said.
“Drool school,” I said.
Ma was half-smiling but I could see how fake it was. Cynthia Callis would have done a much better job. Ma’s dress was flapping in the wind and I thought, just fly away if that’s what you want.
“What did you say?” Ma said.
“Nothing,” I said. I felt like the streetlights were punching me in the face.
“Here,” Ma said, and she put her sweater over my shoulders.
“I’m not cold,” I said. But I was freezing.
I could seehow scared Ma was that I might start screaming. The way I used to scream the first few months, when I woke up from the dreams. In some ways, I thought, I have Ma in the palm of my hand. I imagined breaking her in a million pieces. I wanted to put my fingers around her throat and make her start singing.
“Here comes your father,” she said.
Da came around with the car and I ran over to it. I lay down on the back seat and wrapped Ma’s sweater around my head, which meant, Keep Out, Private Property.
No one said anything the whole way home. Ma’s sweater had perfume on it, the kind I love that smells like powder, but tonight it just made me sicker. I thought I heard Ma and Da whispering at one point but when I poked my head out of the sweater I realized it was just the radio. Da had put it on real low. It was the voices of strangers.
I have to get out of here, I thought. I started crying but I swallowed it.
“What are you eating?” Ma said.
That’s when I stopped breathing. I made myself into a dead person.
But then I had to breathe again, I couldn’t help myself.
When we were pulling into the driveway I saw Da’s eyes in the mirror. I guess he saw me as well. We looked at each other for a second, and with the mirror between us it was almost like the truth was coming out.
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