Such a Pretty Face (16 page)

We all gathered round.

A lizard.

It was a lizard.

“Sam!” Mr. Leod said, tearfully, choked up.

Have you ever seen a man kiss a lizard? It is a sight to behold.

“Sam, are you all right?”

Lance’s Lucky Ladies was starting to boom. King Midas and his twitchy left ankle. The daylight basement of his home was filled with boxes of both blown-up and deflated blow-up dolls and the accompanying packaging. There were more at the office/factory that he owned, where his new staff was working. The president of the company was a fifty-five-year-old, single mother with three sons in college who had previously been laid off. The vice-president was a sixty-two-year-old grandfather who had been “downsized.”

“Here’s what happens with the older guys and gals in corporate America,” Lance told me. “They start making too much money, so the company lets them go. Companies think they want the young guys so they can pay them less. They think the young guys are hot, ambitious, driven. Big mistake. Huge. You lose the experience, the wisdom, the maturity, and the work ethic, and you lose the contacts the older guys and gals have with all the other old guys and gals out there who have all the money. So I got Lizbeth and Harold running my company, and we’re skyrocketing. Plus, I trust them. I felt it in my left ankle.”

Harold’s wife was so grateful Lance hired Harold that she sewed him a quilt of his modern home, complete with the large pine trees in back and the view of the mountains.

Lance was so grateful he cried and hung it up in the entry of the factory.

“All my ladies here,” Lance announced to me and Polly, spreading his arms wide, “are going to make a fortune.”

“It’s like standing in the middle of a freak show,” I murmured to Polly. “All these unmoving, plastic faces. But no one talks. No one moves. They all stare with these cheesy smiles on their faces.”

“You feel that you’re in a crowd, but not in a crowd,” she said.

“These gals are going places, yeah, they are,” Lance said. “They’re travelling ladies. I got orders from Singapore, Russia—oh, yeah, a ton from Russia. Those guys and their dolls and vodka. Can’t blame ’em needing dolls. It’s cold there. The Italians want blondes. The French want Italians. The Americans want all colors and sizes. A bunch of dudes have contacted me and told me that the dolls are too skinny. One dude said, ‘I want a woman with curves I can squeeze. Big ones. Big boobs, big thighs. Big. Send me big.’”

“Big, bouncy babes,” Polly said. She seemed calmer. It was Sunday, so she wasn’t working. She’d told me that she’d slept until four o’clock, went out for a ten-mile run, had a tuna sandwich, then came here. She was about the size of a toothpick with a head. “They’re all freaky, although a stunning group of ladies in their own way. Can we go upstairs now before they come alive and bite me?”

Lance was surprised. “Why? We’ll scoot ’em over and talk about the anniversary party from hell here.”

“Are they listening?” I asked.

“No, they’re not listening!” Lance said, in all seriousness. “They don’t have real ears. Now, I still want you ladies to be part of my team.” His eyes begged us. “Our family, the team. I’ll send you on selling trips all over the world. You can go to Iceland. I’m getting huge business there because they probably don’t go outside much, and I got orders from South Africa and the Middle East. Man, you ladies would have to dress up like giant penguins to get into those countries, but man.
Man!
I got a good business going there, too. You could go to Iran and sell dolls to the sheiks!”

“Thanks. If I wanted to end up in an Iranian prison after getting lashed with a plastic belt in the public square for wearing pants I would go on the double,” I said.

“Me, too,” Polly said. “Nothing better than sitting in an Iranian hellhole trying to make my brother a buck while rats scamper over my ankles and I’m told I have zero rights because I have a vagina.”

Lance’s face changed. It went from ebullient excitement to acute anxiety. “I would never send you two anywhere that would be dangerous.”

“We know, Lance, we know,” I said, trying to be soothing.

“I would never want anything bad to happen to either of you.” He rubbed his forehead, scrunched his eyes shut.

“Lance,” Polly said. “We were kidding you.”

“If anything happened to you two…” Lance snuffled.

“Lance, honey, it’s okay.”

Lance snuffled again, groaned.

People sometimes have a hard time reconciling tearful, emotional Lance with the ex–pro football player with shoulders the size of an ox and the height of a sequoia. “Lance, it’s okay. We’re not going to an Iranian prison to hang out with a bunch of women who had the audacity to participate in a protest against a fraudulent election.”

“I was fine, but then you two had to give me a terrible thought for my imagination and now I got it stuck in my head and it’s bad.” I put my arm around him. “I’m seeing both of you in those jail cells all beaten up, and it’s wet in there and damp and dark and there’s a bunch of men with long beards gawking at you in those sheiky white pajama things they wear, and you’re sick, all because of my dolls!” He drew in a shuddery breath. He has a very vivid imagination. “I would have to hire that group I hired the other time to rescue you.” He sighed. “They were so damn good.”

He wasn’t kidding. He has a couple of businesses in dangerous parts of the world, and three of his employees were kidnapped once in Honduras. He refused to pay the ransom and sent a team in to rescue them. All came out alive and well, but I later read blurbs in the newspaper about an “unexplained incident…bombs…Honduras…special teams…casualties…details sketchy.”

“Lance, relax,” I said. “I’m not ever going to sell your dolls, and neither is Polly. We would probably resort to selling earwax before we’d promote blow-up dolls with vacant stares, so stop crying, stop that imagination of yours, and sit down.”

“You’re never going to sell my dolls?”

“No!” Polly and I said together.

Lance wiped his tears away. “Okay. Now at least I don’t have to be up nights worrying about you two girls in prison in Iran eating termites or snails.”

“That’s right. Now let’s sit down and figure out this party.”

We scooted the dolls here and there, and the three of us sat down.

“What do you think of Daisy? I love her eyes!” Lance said, taking a shaky breath. “There’s Pam. A boring name, but take time to get to know her. So friendly. And Sage. She’s already a hit. Red hair, curls. Good-sized rack.”

Polly elbowed a doll off the couch.

“Now be careful with Titus. She’s sensitive,” Lance said. “Here, Stevie, you can put Buxom over here by your feet…. And add Bouncy Beatrice next to her. For company.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

Polly laughed, too.

Then she threw Pam at me. I threw Sage at her. She flung Bouncy Beatrice back. I kicked Buxom over to her.

It didn’t go over well with Lance, all these ladies going here and there, bopping about.

“Treat them with respect,” he insisted. “Don’t hurt their feelings with your disregard!”

“I regard them well.” I giggled.

“Me, too,” Polly said. “I regard that they have giant boobs, and I think you should rename your company Boob City.”

“Or Vagina Rama.”

“Or Penises and Plastics, Don’t Go Spastic.”

“Or Tittle my Tittles.”

Lance did not appreciate our suggestions.

I woke up, choking, sweating, tangled in my sheets, my heart hammering.

I dreamed I was stuck in Helen’s paintings. The tiny marks, the circles that swirled on forever, the twisted chairs she always drew, the ominous weather, the tilted barns, the animals that weren’t quite animals…I was thrown from one painting to the next. The circles made me dizzy, the tiny marks jolted my body, and the chairs wrapped themselves around me, squeezing tight until I couldn’t move.

I flipped off my sheets, pulled on my curtains, and stared up at the moon. No red-gold haze, thank heavens.

I sagged back on my stack of pillows. It was Helen who had left me with this legacy, this pervasive fear, these chilling nightmares.

Had she left me with something else, too? Something that would come later, something that was lurking, in the darkest recesses of my brain, that would squirm and grow and bust, until I was just like her? Had she left me with that? Wasn’t I too old to get it now?
Probably.
But would it come for me in a different form later in my life? I hugged my pillow to my chest as my body shuddered.

I saw Sunshine’s pixie face, and I sank back onto my pillows.

I could have saved her.

I should have saved her.

I didn’t.

I closed my eyes as the tears came.

I never bother to hide my tears in the middle of the night.

No one can see them except me.

Ashville, Oregon

P
ainting made Helen growl.

Every summer Grandma bought me and Helen new paints, pastel crayons, colored pencils, and sketch books. I always ended up watching Helen. She had inherited her talent from her grandma, who had inherited her talent through the family line, via her aunt.

“I’m going to draw my mind…I’m going to draw what’s in it so you’ll understand where Punk is, girl kid,” she’d tell me. “I’m not going to draw Command Center. He said no. He’s bad.”

The drawing of her mind? A mass of swirls, a collage of angry animals with sharp teeth, pieces of limbs, a dead cat, flowers that appeared to have their own demented minds, open doors with blackness behind them, a noose, a woman cowering in a corner.

“I’m going to draw this place, with all the spies.” Our red barn became a blurry, curving building, every blade of grass in front of it twisting. Behind the barn, she’d drawn a shadow. “That’s Punk,” she told me. “Always watching me.” For days or weeks she would work on the same picture, every crack in each board of the barn drawn with copious care, every hair of a horse or dog individually drawn, until they were living, thriving things on their own.

She would growl softly, as if she was stalking something. Sometimes she’d add something truly sinister, perhaps a knife stuck in a fence post or the outline of a body. “That’s Punk,” she said, pointing at the body with red eyes. “But he’s not dead yet. He wants to tear me to pieces.”

“Punk,” as far as I could tell, was the evil assistant to Command Center.

Helen drew chairs, too. White chairs, usually, the type you would find in a hospital. Or a mental ward. The chairs would be twisted, curving, alive, and she always drew a rope around them, handcuffs, chains, black claws. It was not unusual for there to be blood on the chair. Once there was a limp left hand, detached, hanging from the seat.

“Chairs are duwomberbangs,” she told me. “Chairs twist and take your breath away and then they poke you and hurt and burn.” The chair drawings drew out the worst growls, the scared growls, the sound an animal would make when cornered.

But when she drew our house, which used to be the town’s school, so we called it the Schoolhouse House, she used only white or pastel colors. Our white Schoolhouse House wasn’t twisted, it was drawn with the bell tower on top; the stained glass windows and two sets of French doors that Grandpa had installed; wildflowers; the sprawling addition that Grandpa had built with a family room, den, and bedrooms; and the huge back deck with potted flowers. The sign above our red front doors read
ASHVILLE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
, 1925.

She worked with no growling, flowers lined the walkway, and a sunrise or sunset glowed in the background. She added tomatoes, corn, carrots, two different types of lettuce, peas, radishes, onions, and sunflowers in the garden. She drew the floppy yellow hat she always wore in the garden, which she’d found in the attic squished in a trunk. She thought the sun was sent by the government to burn her head and the yellow hat thwarted them.

Now and then when she was done, she would pick up the canvas she had been working on and balance it on her head under whatever hat she was wearing and walk around our barn and property, “to show them I’m the boss of the bad battle.” Other times she would tear it up and put the pieces down her dress, “for protection.” And sometimes she’d walk away and leave the drawings. “I won’t have that drawing talking to me.” That’s when I took them for myself. I put them under my bed unless they were small enough for me to put them in my carved wooden hope chest that had been Grandma’s great-grandmother’s.

The drawings scared me, the growling scared me, but they were something Helen had done, and I wanted them. I wanted that piece of my momma.

If one has to live in chaos, Ashville, where we lived, was the place to be.

Although I have not returned since leaving there as a child, closing my eyes as we drove through town for the last time in a numbed, semiconscious state, I remember it as being charming and small with a downtown street where you could buy ice cream, go to Victoria’s Cutting Station for a trim and style, and stop at the candy shop. It was about a ten-minute drive from our farm, tucked between rolling green hills and farmland in southern Oregon. We were related to at least a third of the town by blood, more by marriage, and most by friendship.

All of Ashville knew us, we knew them, and people were used to seeing Helen in various states of craziness. Everyone would know exactly where to find Grandma and Grandpa so they could come and get them if Helen escaped their watch.

Grandma was willed our farm from her parents, who got the land from her maternal grandparents, who got the land, and a crumbled-down barn and farmhouse, from her maternal great-grandparents, pioneers to Oregon. Grandma’s mother donated the land for the schoolhouse, and when the schoolhouse was no longer big enough for all the kids as Ashville grew, a new school was built, in town, and the family got the schoolhouse and the land back.

Family history was that Grandma’s pioneering ancestral family all came out together, about thirty of them. They were from the backwoods of West Virginia and they went west via Independence, Missouri. One relative committed suicide by jumping off a cliff because he saw visions of ghosts on the plains midway through. An uncle was of almost no help because he was “daft in the head” and “talked to himself as if he was the best company there was.” There was also a cousin who got here, took a look around, and started collecting piles of sticks. That’s all she did all day long. She piled up sticks.

They did not get much work out of Agatha, so the family considered her “lost.” Apparently she lived to be 101. She gathered a lot of sticks.

Grandma’s father died when she was sixteen, the fourth of six siblings, and Grandma’s mother didn’t blink an eye. She couldn’t stand the man. But I don’t think the rumor about her trying to kill him, circulated by a few of the senior members of the population, via cyanide is true.

Grandma’s mother was normal except that she washed her hands all the time and, when they were clean, she refused to take off her white gloves, even at night, even while gardening.

Now, Grandma’s aunt Charlotte clearly had bipolar disorder, which was documented by doctors and in a biography written by a renowned writer. Aunt Charlotte was a very famous artist, who would hardly sleep for months at a time and who’d produce the most mind-boggling, inspiring paintings of flowers and landscapes I have ever seen. The paintings were troubled, sad, and confusing. One day you would think you understood the painting, and the next day you’d see it totally differently. The paintings made you want to cry, as if they were tapping into your own tragic problems and the secrets that were killing you.

Charlotte smoked incessantly and guzzled whiskey while painting, and when all the paintings were done, she would lapse into an almost comatose depression. Her paintings are in museums all over the country. Grandma told me you could always figure out which ones were Aunt Charlotte’s and which ones were fakes because Charlotte always drew a picture of a dead blue bird with a noose around its neck in the left-hand corner of the back of the canvas. She died alone in a shack in Wyoming, where she’d gone the week before.

But Grandma herself was completely with it, as was Grandpa, the middle of five boys and a sister. Grandpa’s family here in Ashville also had pioneer roots, via Alabama, although no one lost their mind on the way in on wagon trains.

One of Grandma’s relatives shot one of Grandpa’s relatives in a brawl over, you guessed it, a cow. He lived. Two sets of relatives were engaged and broke up. This caused one jilted bride to set a torch to her ex-fiancé’s wagon. The other jilted groom owned an ice-cream saloon and barred his ex from entering it for ten years. In retaliation she didn’t let him buy any of her mother’s pies at the bakery her family owned. He was super mad about that.

There are long-standing, generation-long friendships and enemies between the families. Two cousins twice-removed lived next door to each other for forty years and never spoke. They fought over a woman. The woman ran off, literally, with the circus. The men never forgave each other.

Two women, one on Grandpa’s side and one on Grandma’s side, lived together their whole lives. They were teachers, and in summer they left town and travelled the world. They lived to be ninety-six, dying one month apart. They weren’t gay. In fact, it was rumored they each took to their own romances every summer. There was suspicion that they weren’t even travelling together in summer, but took off separately to find their man and their adventures. One new man a summer, got all their passions out, and came home and taught math to Ashville kids, their hair in buns, shoes flat and comfortable.

We have all types in “The Family.” Millionaires, paupers, drunks, ministers, teachers, Marines, air force pilots, gamblers, doctors, nurses, business owners, artists, writers, executives. It’s an eclectic lot. One thing we have in common? Each other. I grew up going to parties all over town and having mobs of people at our house, when Helen wasn’t home.

That was a good thing, I think, because I was raised among people who were relatively sane, although Grandma had a cousin who dressed as a Revolutionary War general all the time and talked about the “hell-damned English and their poisoned tea.” He was one of the millionaires. He bought and traded war memorabilia.

Grandma had another cousin who had agoraphobia and had to be taken care of her whole life, as did an aunt of hers who killed herself at fifty because she thought the end of the world was coming via an asteroid. A second cousin also had a slight hoarding problem. Okay, it was huge. She saved
everything,
but she was very nice.

Grandma and Grandpa met in kindergarten when Grandma threw a block at his head. It gushed blood. He had knocked down her block tower.

The kindergarten teacher, the sister of an ex-wife of a great uncle on Grandpa’s side, sewed him up right there. Grandma held the thread and, she noted, “Your grandpa didn’t shed a tear.”

They were best friends from then on out. They got married right out of high school because Grandpa said, “I cannot resist you anymore, Glory. And I will not disrespect you by making love to you in our barn or my car or in some field. You deserve more, and I will give you more. So, you tell your momma to get a dress ready and let’s say our vows. I love you, I’ll love you forever, you love me, and that’s that. Set a date, any day you want, as long as it’s this weekend.”

That weekend it was. The mob of family showed up, and except for one cousin pulling a gun, briefly, on another, everything went smoothly.

Grandpa founded a company that made all those machines that mass produce food, and it grew and grew, and they even sold nationally and internationally. Their only sadness? For some reason, my grandma could not get pregnant. It took her twenty-two years to get pregnant with my aunt Janet, a nervous, anxious sort, but together in the head, although a mouse compared to her sister Helen. When she was pregnant with my momma she had German measles and was deathly sick. The doctor feared Grandma would die. The Family came over all the time to care for her. Two brought incense, one brought herbal remedies, another brought her fortune-telling cards and said Helen would be born with a galaxy in her head.

My grandma said she spent the whole time praying for God’s sweet intervention. “I prayed to Mary and Joseph as well, to cover my bases. I figured they could talk to their son.”

Well, God’s son intervened and Grandma’s daughter lived. But there was one problem.

Helen was not together in the head. One could say there was a galaxy in there.

The girl who was not together in the head drove Grandma’s gray car into the town fountain when I was six.

She zoomed down the hill and away she went. Me and Grandma dropped our paintbrushes and Grandma said, “Oh, Lordie, help me with that girl,” and we hopped in the old pickup truck and sped after her.

We choked on Helen’s dust as she took one curve after another too fast. I heard Grandma praying as we went. “Lord a mercy, Lord a mercy, help me….” That was often Grandma’s prayer during those years. She told me that God only needed to hear two words, “Help me,” and he listened straight up.

Ashville had flowers hanging from every lamppost, the sidewalks were wide, and off the center of town we had a huge fountain inside a huge city park, complete with a meandering river, picnic tables, a covered area, a gazebo, and basketball courts. It was maintained by a mentally disabled man named Callender who called it “my park” and worked there every day.

I don’t know how Helen made it down Main Street without hitting anybody. Maybe it was Grandma’s increasingly louder prayers or the honking of her own horn, but we chased Helen, and Grandma’s gray car, to the fountain. Helen smashed through the brick and plunged all the way in. Grandma said, “Mary, mother of God,” and parked the pickup truck with a screech of her brakes. “Stay in the truck, Stevie,” she ordered, and sprinted for the fountain, where a crowd was gathering.

I did not stay in the truck, scrambling right on out. I worried that my friend Natasha Golobev and her little brother, Vladimer, were in the fountain, under the wheels of the car. They loved playing in that fountain. Apparently, Grandma was worried, too, because she jumped into that fountain lickety split, put her face under the water, and swam, her cowboy boots sticking up. Keaton Seo, a cousin, and cousin Cane Michelles jumped in and did the same thing.

When they stood up they were soaking wet and panting. I think the thought of smashed kids got their hearts going. A crowd had formed, half of them family and friends, but they knew enough to let Grandma handle things with Helen.

“Stay away from me,” Helen yelled out the crack of the window, her feathered hat from a New York performance falling over her face. “Stay away from me. I know what you want and you can’t have it. I have my own brain and you’re not going to shove it in a jar and watch me think! You’re not opening my head!”