Freaky Green Eyes (4 page)

The scarfs Mom began wearing. Beautiful bright-colored silky scarfs. And shawls. And long-sleeved shirts, pullovers. Sometimes the sleeves drooped to her wrists, hiding her wrists.

Hiding what? Bruises on her wrists, on her neck and upper arms? Angry red welts made by a man's strong fingers?

I could not ask. The words gathered in my throat but stuck there. In Mom's presence I began to be very quiet. And Mom was becoming ever more quiet with me.

Always it was late night, my sleepless time when I sent e-mail messages in my head. And sometimes, maybe a little desperate, I'd get out of bed and check my messages (mostly there were none: I checked my messages compulsively and answered them at once) and send one, as I did to Todd. How many times, I'd be ashamed to recount.

Another night—

I know, it was pathetic. Signing my name like that. Lots of things I did, those months, were pretty pathetic.

Todd never replied to any of my e-mail messages. I guess I knew in my heart that he wouldn't.

You'd have to have a big brother to understand.

It used to be, when I was little, that Todd was my friend. Then he got obsessed with high school sports, which took up all his spare time. There were
months—years, I guess—when I hardly saw Todd; he was in and out of the house, always in a hurry, only taking time to sit down for a meal if Dad was home. Depending upon how Todd was getting along with Dad, that's how Todd would get along with Mom, Samantha, and me. Then he left home, began college at Washington State in Pullman, joined the biggest jock fraternity (where, he said, “Reid Pierson is a household word”), and rarely came home for weekends. And when he did, he didn't have time for me.

Mom wasn't Todd's actual—biological—mother. Maybe that explains Todd's estrangement. His mother (Dad's first wife) had died a long time ago, and no one ever spoke of her. So Todd might have thought of Mom, Samantha, and me as partial relatives, not whole.

In the family, only Dad was real to Todd.

At first Mom complained, smiling, that she never saw her “big, handsome son” any longer. Todd never confided in her as he used to do, and he wouldn't allow
her to come into his room, or tousle his hair and tease him. Saying good-bye, Todd only just let himself be hugged and kissed, standing stiff as a soldier at attention. This past year, Mom had stopped joking. If she spoke of Todd at all, she sounded hurt, and baffled.

Through May, Mom was smiling. The Freaky thought came to me to ask,
Is that smile stapled onto your face, Mom? Does it hurt?
I wanted to ask if she smiled like that while she was sleeping. If someone shone a flashlight into her face, waking her, would she be smiling like that? I wanted to ask, but I didn't.

I began to resent Mom, that she was acting so strange. I resented worrying about her, I guess. Your mother is supposed to worry about
you
, not the other way around!

There was a new stiffness between us. On my part, anyway. I wasn't her little Francesca any longer; she couldn't expect me to snuggle up to her and behave like Samantha. I knew she was sensing a change in my attitude, but she didn't say anything for a while. (That
was like Mom, too. Not to speak of something that's bothering her, like possibly it will go away.) But one day she broke down and asked if something was wrong. “You seem so . . . withdrawn, honey. You haven't spoken five words to me since you've gotten into this car.”

We were driving home to Yarrow Heights, same as usual. Mom had swung by Forrester to pick me up after swim practice. She'd been doing other errands, too; the rear of the station wagon was crammed with art supplies.

My father hated the smell of acrylic paints and modeling clay. On my mother's fingers and beneath her short-filed nails, what looked liked dried mud.

For God's sake, Krista. You look like a field worker
.

I was slouched in the passenger seat. Sliding a Laurie Anderson CD into the tape deck, the one that begins with eerie whale music.

“Okay, Mom. ‘Five words to me.'”

Mom laughed, sounding a little startled.

We listened to Laurie Anderson's breathy voice. Strange undersea sounds. It suited the atmosphere of
Seattle in May: mist, threat-of-rain, rain.

I've seen whales in the ocean. Not many, but a few. Killer whales, so-called. In the Juan de Fuca Strait (between northern Washington and British Columbia) and in the ocean, a forty-minute drive to the west. It's awesome! When you see the whales surface, leap, frolic in the glassy-green water, your heart lifts. You stare and stare at the water waiting for whales to reappear.

Mom murmured something approving about the music. It was Mom's kind of music, too. Then she turned the volume down so We Could Talk.

“How was swim practice?”

“Okay.”

“Were you diving?”

“No. Not today.”

(I had been diving, actually. I mean, I'd tried. My knees were weak. I had trouble concentrating. “Not a diving day” is what we call it, diplomatically.)

Mom drove. I wasn't looking in her direction. Yet I could see that her smile was beginning to slide on
one side, as if the staples there had loosened. Her eyes (bloodshot, but I wasn't going to look) seemed to pucker as she stared into the rearview mirror, driving a little more jerkily than usual. As if this familiar way home to our house on Vinland Circle wasn't so familiar to her; there might be surprises. Mom said hesitantly, “I wonder if you're distracted by something, Francesca. At school, or . . .” But here Mom paused. Not wanting to say
at home
.

I said, annoyed, “Mom, I really don't like ‘Francesca.' It's so pretentious. Like, are we Italian or something? Samantha is bad enough—it's such a cliché. But Francesca.” I sighed. I turned the CD volume up, to hear Laurie Anderson singing about somebody she loved slipping away.

Mom seemed hurt, so I added, “Everybody calls me Franky, y'know? Like it suits me. Who I am.”

I'd have liked to tell Mom about Freaky. But not today.

“Oh, we've been through this a thousand times!” Mom tried to laugh. “All right, ‘Franky.' If that's how
you wish to be perceived.”

How I wished to be perceived? I'd never thought of it that way. Always I'd assumed that other people called you what they chose to call you, beginning with your parents, and you had no choice.

I said, “Even my teachers call me Franky, Mom. Except if they're scolding.”

Mom tried to laugh. “Well. ‘Franky.' I've been noticing that you've been unusually quiet lately. Since I went to Santa Barbara . . . you've been withdrawn. I hope there isn't some connection?”

I squirmed in my seat. “Mom, no.”

“The other day, when I drove Twyla and Jenn home, I noticed you were so quiet, they did all the talking. . . .” Mom hesitated, knowing this was dangerous territory. “I hope you always feel that you can talk to me, Francesca. I mean, Franky. If . . .”

“Sure, Mom. Okay.”

Something very weird had happened at Santa Barbara, I think. Dad was gone that Saturday morning saying he had “emergency business” in L.A.,
but from things I overheard after Mom returned, I guess he'd gone to the arts-and-crafts fair to check on her; he hadn't made contact with her, only just “spied” on her. Then he'd returned.

I guess this was what happened. There was nobody I could ask.

I'd overheard Dad say
Your lezzie friends. Palling around with your lezzie friends. I saw you
. What Mom replied I had not heard.

Mom was telling me blah blah blah. When she'd been my age blah blah. In St. Helens, Oregon. As if I didn't know. Her small-town background she'd loved. I wanted to turn the CD volume up high to drown out her voice.

No. I wanted to squeeze over against her and nudge her. Like I'd done all the time when I was little. Nudging Mom, pushing against her so she'd pull me onto her lap. “My big girl,” she'd say, laughing. “My big beautiful girl.” This was fine for Samantha, still; she was only ten. But not for Franky, who wanted to smooth away the smile lines at the corners of Mom's
mouth and eyes, which looked as if they'd been made by tiny knife blades.

I wanted to grab her hands. Tell her her hands were beautiful. Even with the unglamorous short nails. Even if there were telltale ridges of clay or paint beneath them.

The Freaky impulse came to me, to pull away the turquoise scarf Mom had knotted so carefully around her throat.

At the same time I was wishing I could escape somewhere. At least that I was sixteen and had my driver's license. (Dad had promised me my own car, if I was a “good girl.”) That way I wouldn't be so damned dependent on Mom to drive me places. It was too intimate, this mother-daughter thing. Too much!

By the time Mom turned into our driveway, I had my hand on the door handle. By the time she braked to a stop, I was halfway out, dragging my backpack behind me. I called back over my shoulder in a perfectly innocent not-blaming Franky voice,
“Mom, I'm fine. I'm great. I have my own life, okay? Like you have yours.”

The first time Twyla Lee came home with me to have dinner and stay the night at our house, she looked around, rolled her eyes, and whispered in my ear, “This is cool, Franky. But do you guys actually
live here
?”

Twyla was joking of course. The Lees' own house was pretty special. But I knew what she meant.

When my father began to be really successful in his TV career, he wanted a new house custom built for him and his family. He purchased a lot in Yarrow Heights overlooking Lake Washington and the Evergreen Floating Bridge, a few miles from Seattle to the west. Dazzling lights after dark. When you could see through the mist.

The house was designed by a famous Japanese American Seattle architect. It's what is called “postmodernist,” meaning it doesn't look like a house exactly, more like a small high-tech building. Glass
walls, skylights, poured concrete, some chilly glaring metal like pewter. There are tubular glass-walled “galleries”—not old-fashioned halls. There are module units, not rooms. There are sliding Japanese screens that “create” rooms, or “remove” rooms. The rooms are echo chambers with “minimalist” furnishings: metallic chairs, translucent tables, halogen lamps that give off a faint blue light. Neutral nothing colors like faded black, pebble gray, sickly white. Low, long sofas with scattered dwarf cushions. What seem like acres of bare gleaming tile, dull black, dead white, with only incidental rugs. Even the lighting fixtures are minimalist, recessed in the walls and ceilings, so they seem to cast shadows in all directions. My mother had hoped to furnish the house herself, but my father insisted upon the most fashionable Seattle interior decorator.

My father said they couldn't afford to make any mistakes. The “eyes of the world” would be on them, quick to mock and deride if they slipped up.

In one of the so-called galleries Dad's football trophies
and photographs with fellow athletes and celebrities were displayed. It was pretty spectacular: photos of Reid Pierson shaking hands with Seattle politicians, the governor, even then-president Bill Clinton at the White House. Both Reid Pierson and Bill Clinton were good-looking, confident men smiling with their earnest, boyish appeal into the camera. Dad marveled at Clinton's charisma, which he said you had to experience first-hand to appreciate. Dad said, “You couldn't help but love that man. You can see why, if people love you enough, they'll forgive you anything.”

I was in eighth grade when The Pierson Home in Yarrow Heights, Washington, was featured in
Seattle Life
, a new student at the preppy Forrester Academy, with almost no friends; overnight, even older students took notice of me, singling me out to say they'd seen the article in the magazine and were impressed by it. I have to admit I was flattered. (“And your dad is Reid Pierson, what's that
like
?”) I'd just started ninth grade when the house was featured
in
Architectural Digest
, with dramatically posed shots of Reid Pierson (in a tuxedo) and his wife, Krista Pierson (in a skintight black silk dress, shoulder-length red hair glossy as fire), amid the minimalist furniture, with a glimpse of Lake Washington in the background; this time, even teachers I didn't have sought me out, as well as the school headmaster, to tell me they'd seen the article and were impressed. Mr. Whitney, the headmaster, had already met my mother, of course, but not my father. Earnestly he said, “Tell your father I've always been a fan, Francesca. Going back to his Seahawks days. Tell him I hope he'll drop by Forrester someday soon.”

That was about eighteen months ago. Dad hasn't gotten to Forrester yet, but every time Mr. Whitney sees me, he says, “Francesca! Remember, the invitation is always open.”

Actually, the postmodernist look is mostly for show, on the first floor in what the architect called the “public space” of the house. On the lower floor, our “private space” rooms are more or less normal.
Bedrooms, guest rooms, bathrooms, closets. (Though not enough closets.) Here things were built to a smaller scale, as if the architect hadn't any interest in where his clients might actually live.