Mockingbird (7 page)

“Fat chance. Mind you,” Candy added, “it wasn't like I knew you were married. I don't remember a ring or anything. I saw you and him and the baby, and I assumed . . .”

“Maybe he was just visiting over business.”

Candy shrugged. “You looked pretty friendly to me. Pretty happy.” Which was no big surprise; as you remember, all Candy ever saw in the future were happy things. Apparently a time would come next fall when I would be tickled pink to be sitting there in the garden with Bill junior handling my baby. But at the moment all I could think of was his ugly mouth and damp handshake.

Candy shrugged “
Quién sabe?
Well, it's a good omen. Someone like you could do a hell of a lot worse.” I stopped dead and Candy bumped into me. “Ow. What did I say?”

We reached the store directory. I looked at my dumpy reflection leaning out of the dark glass toward me. Round head, round face, stocky limbs. The nicest thing you can say about my face is that it's “amiable.” And that's only in my rare good moods. High-school gym teachers looking to praise me used words like “dogged.” In softball, I played catcher. In track—no, let's not even talk about track. I always walked with my head down, looking at the floor, which was just as well, as I had a tendency to trip over things. Unkind classmates had told me I was bowlegged. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Harris, used to fuss at me for “stumping” and “trudging” and “clomping.” I was the only woman wearing Doc Martens in the Rice Mathematics Department, and this was years after they weren't cool anymore.

I considered trudging over Candy's toes by accident. Or stumping on them. Or clomping. Unfortunately, I needed her. “Okay, fairy godmother. Make me beautiful.” I scanned the directory of stores. “Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.”

“Okay, Cinderella.” Candy started up the stairs, then looked back over her shoulder. “Don't take this the wrong way, Toni, but I can't honestly promise Prince Charming, okay?”

“Prince Breathing will do.”

“Gotcha.”

She led me into the strange regions of the Galleria's third floor. I have to say I felt stupid to be there. First, because I had always despised the kind of women who spent all their time hanging out in the Galleria trying on glamorous clothes. Second, because I was afraid the glamorous clothes weren't going to look good on me. Go figure.

“Help! We've crashed on the Planet of the Babies,” I murmured as we left the stairs. There were babies in strollers, babies in backpacks, babies in Snuglis on their fathers' chests. Babies tucked into Mom's tummy, waiting to come out. A snot-nosed toddler gimballed by, dragging a crying sister behind him like a teddy bear. If the kids weren't crying or peeing or drooling or actually throwing up, their noses were running, or a sort of thin cottage-cheeselike substance was hiccuping from their tiny mouths. “I never realized how
damp
children are.”

“Buy permanent press,” Candy said.

“Hey—Versace,” I said, stopping in front of a shop window. “I've heard of this guy, haven't I?” The mannequins were all incredibly thin and had this Italian arrogance to them and sported clothes that looked like what Jackie O. would have worn if she had been a streetwalker: pleated stirrup-pants, or little sleeveless lemon-yellow dresses that came a third of the way down their thighs, or tall leather boots in black and white checks.

Candy winced. “You could never wear this stuff.”

“Why not?”

“Toni!” She waved at the models. “You, you've got, oh . . . too many knees or something. Trust me on this.”

“Too many
knees?
”

“Here. Definitely more your speed,” she said, stopping in front of the Gap.

“Candy, you're patronizing me. No. No! I told you. I want something new. Something different. Something with some style, not just . . .”

Candy tried to smile. Candy with the great tits and the little waist and the ass men would pay to slap with a Ping-Pong paddle. “Toni . . . let's keep the training wheels on for a bit, okay?”

Unlike Candy, whose figure you could appreciate from the front, I only had contours when viewed in profile: a little slope forward on top, a little shelf down on the bottom. In the middle, only a dictionary would call what I had a “waist.” “All my parts function,” I said. “What's this fascination with topology, anyway? If I had a great pair of breasts stuck to my elbows, would that be a turn-on?”

“
What?
”

When I told Momma I didn't care about makeup or hairstyles or what dress I was going to wear, she used to say to me, “Honey, I've been pretty and I've been ugly, and ugly's worse.” Another one was, “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean down to the bone.”

I stared through the Gap window at racks of sensible cotton pants and comfortable casual sweaters and cheeky girl-next-door vests of the sort you wore to spruce up that old blouse you were getting tired of. “Oh, Candy. It's so . . . me.”

My sister regarded me. “You're a mess, aren't you?”

“I know,” I said humbly. “When did I get to be an old maid? You know, lately I've been having this fantasy. I'm at a party, like an office Christmas party. All of a sudden, across the room, I see a man.”

“I know the fantasy. He sees you. Your eyes lock.”

“And I know, I know at that instant, it's . . . it's . . . it's
Mr. Anybody!
”

Candy sighed. “You're not making me look forward to turning thirty. Okay. Are you really sure about this style thing? You're in the Galleria. Style is going to cost.”

“Let it. I
want
to spend money. You know what
Time
magazine rated the best job in America? Actuary. Most money for the least risk. And by God I spent seven years with no life, taking my damn exams, and now I'm making some money and I deserve to spend it. I deserve to.”

Candy grinned. “You sound just like Momma.”

“Don't ever say that.”

“You do, you do, you do,” she said, making a face. “Nyeah nyeah. Okay, then: thumbs down on the Gap. Keep walking.”

The next store was full of lingerie. Gorgeous cantaloupe-breasted models in black underwire bras gave us their best sultry looks from seven-foot-tall posters. “Victoria's Secret Supporters,” I said, reading the display. “What are those?”

“Girdles,” Candy said briefly. “Come here.”

I joined her at the next shop entrance. “Bebe?”

“They're out of San Francisco. And I guarantee you can spend some money here.”

She was right. I left the store forty minutes later and six hundred dollars poorer, but in possession of the most beautiful jacket in the world. It had the New China look, small square shoulders and tailored at the waist and it was made of this incredible stuff called silk shantung that shimmered and changed color when you looked at it because all the warp threads were brilliant gold-green, while the weft ones were sapphire blue. That's what the sales clerk said, anyway, and she said that silk shantung was in all the magazines, and that this season you could wear it over a casual blouse for lunch or at work, and then throw it over a dress for the classiest evening wear. It was beautiful stuff, soft to the touch, and also textured with little knots and tufts of this sea-foam thread. I loved it. I also got a pair of slacks to go with it, and then we sailed off to a shoe store to buy a pair of pumps in peau de soie—I made the clerk spell it for me—which is French for “silk shoes” and I loved everything I bought very, very much, as I had not ever allowed myself to love clothes before.

Momma was dead. I didn't have to be the plain one anymore.

“I feel this incredible energy these days,” I told Candy as she led me to the Starbucks coffee joint at the end of the floor. “This freedom. As if I had spent my whole life holding back my natural strength, and finally it's come bursting out like . . . like a kinked hose when you straighten it.”

She laughed at me. “Splash!”

“Exactly! I used to drag myself out of bed after eight and a half hours of sleep. Now I'm staying up until one every night.” I had moved back into my parents' house for the last six months of mother's illness and was sleeping once more in the bedroom Candy and I had shared as girls. I had pulled up the blinds on every window because I couldn't bear to miss a minute of daylight, and by six-thirty every morning I was sitting on the balcony watching the garden resolve out of the darkness, developing like a Polaroid from a mass of humped shadows into trees and monkey grass and palm fronds and ferns, and every now and then the cobalt flash of a bluejay.

I slept less and I ate less. After years of turning down cheesecake in public and sneaking to the Empire Café for a furtive eclair, I didn't even want dessert. “Half the time I was eating, it was like a bribe, this way of killing time, of dulling my spirit.”

“Are you sure you're not in love?” Candy said.

I hugged my jacket in its crinkly paper shopping bag. “Not yet, but here's hoping.”

At Starbucks I let Candy examine the tags and turn the shoes over, plotting makeup, while I sipped my cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, the recommended special. I felt giddy and lighthearted, watching the ice skaters three stories below, bumping and circling. Putting an ice-skating rink in the middle of a mall in sweltering Houston was a stroke of genius, I thought, a perfect way of saying that at the Galleria, you really could get
anything.

Most of the skaters were hapless: eight-year-old boys trying it on a dare, or thrill-seeking visitors from Panama in rented skates. An elderly couple I judged to be transplanted Canadians did better. But the class of the field was one young woman who had clearly trained as a figure skater. While the rest of them milled and slipped and tottered their way about, clinging to the boards or creeping gingerly along, she swept around the rink backwards, her head cocked over one shoulder to see where she was going, controlled and wholly beautiful. The hair she wore in a short swing was the same beautiful auburn shade Momma used to get out of the Clairol box. She was going terrifically fast, but her strides were long and smooth, nearly motionless, so that she seemed to glide swiftly and effortlessly among the other skaters, soaring like a gull among pigeons.

(“You will never be as pretty as your sister.” We're at Candy's junior high-school graduation. Momma has leaned over and whispered it to me, so softly that Daddy, on the other side of her, can't hear. “It's not just the dress and the smile,” she whispers. “She is pretty and you are plain.” I sit stiffly in my chair. “O baby,” she whispers.

Her breath is warm against my neck. I can smell her hair-spray. “Oh, baby, and I'm just so sorry.” Something wet and hot touches my neck. It's one of her tears. I know the way they feel, oh yes.)

“Candy.”

“What?”

“I got lost for a minute,” I said carefully. “In my head.” The whiteness was back, the whiteness that had eaten my thoughts away just before the Widow mounted me the day we buried Momma. “Candy. Candy, help me.”

“Oh shit, Toni, what can I do?”

A cold whiteness, like the ice below.

The light in the Galleria's atrium dimmed, as if it were a movie theatre and the show was starting. Silence fell over the two Mexican women who had been bantering at the table next to us. Down below, the skaters faltered and looked up, all except for the young woman with auburn hair. The light failed and darkness came on, but still she soared and circled, gathering speed, weaving between the boys cluttering the ice and their parents and the teenaged girls and the elderly couple who stood still, looking up at the darkening sky as if suddenly afraid. A silence stretched out, carved by her skates cutting into the ice. She gathered herself and then she leapt, high, high in the air, arms and legs spinning, and her auburn hair.

I didn't see her come down. Blindness washed through me, and I smelled peaches.

“Sugar!” I tried to push back my chair, tried to stand up and keep moving, tried to look away from the ice and the skaters circling, circling. My right foot froze to the carpet, ice racing up it from the rink far below. I wrenched it up, pulling with both hands. People were staring but I didn't care. All I cared about was living, living, not letting the goddess come for me, not letting her blot me out.

The smell of peaches suddenly redoubled and my head spun with it. Heat, flies, fruit and liquor. Secrets. Sex. “No,” I whispered.

It didn't save me.

d

“Toni? Toni—come sit out here with me for a minute. I'm going to tell you a story.” I am eighteen. It's later on the night of Candy's junior-high graduation. I am still angry, so angry at what Momma said to me, whispering that Candy was pretty and I was plain.

Momma is sitting in the garden with her back to the French doors, but somehow she has sensed me tiptoeing barefoot across the kitchen tiles. I could pretend not to hear her, but I don't. I have come to dread Momma's stories, but living in this family has made me honest. Bitterly, resentfully honest. I scorn to lie.

Momma has the most beautiful voice. Sometimes she claims to have been an actress in her younger days. I can't prove that, but no one who hears her speak can deny the power of her voice; not clear at all, but worn soft with smoking and tears and bourbon, and laughter too. I don't think I've told you how much my mother laughed, or how much her laughter sounded like crying.

When I was a little kid, I use to love it when she told me her stories. If she was lying propped in bed in her pink nightgown of Chantilly lace I would come curl up with my head on her lap while she stroked my hair. On summer nights out in the garden I would sit next to her and close my eyes to listen better. Texas folk legend has it that Skin-So-Soft moisturizing cream works as a mosquito repellent, so we spent all summer wiped down with it, and I would breathe in the skin lotion and cigarette and hair spray smells that drifted from Momma into the lilac-scented night. As I grew up I began to suspect that her stories had a point to them. Maybe they always did, and I just hadn't noticed.

“Come set yourself over here.” Momma pats the arm of the wrought-iron chair next to hers. Her voice is lazy, calm as a slow creek in dry weather. “No, I'll tell you what. Get us a couple of those little Cokes out of the fridge and bring them here, would you, honey? It's a night for it.”

“Yes, ma'am.”