Such a Pretty Face (23 page)

“You’re a natural!” Mr. Pingle shouted.
“A natural.”

I stomped my chicken feet.

“I knew you would be one of our best chickens!” he announced, stomping back. “I knew it! Cluck cluck!”

I clucked, clucked, clucked at him.

He clucked back, did a stiff chicken dance.

I danced back at him with my red chicken feet.

He handed me a sign that said, “Chicken meals only $8.99!” and turned me toward the door. I was to dance about for thirty minutes at the corner, “to get a feel for being a chicken before the grand event!”

I stood at the corner, waved my wings, and held up the sign.

I passed the cluck-cluck chicken test and I had my second job. Friday nights for four hours and four hours each on Saturday and Sunday. I would make $10.00 an hour.

I sighed.

Cluck cluck.

Zena dropped an entire box of condoms on my desk. They were the fun type, colorful, sparkly. “I checked out your friend Jake Stockton. Go ahead. He’s cleaner than a whistle. Now let him whistle your whistle.”

I leaned back in my chair, threw my arms and legs up in the air, and wiggled. I leaned too far back, though, and fell all the way over, somersault style.

I suppose this is dating in this century. You don’t just take men’s word…you take what you find on the computer about them as “word.”

Zena grabbed a condom and started blowing it up with her mouth.

I ripped it out of her hand.

I was ready to rock and roll in my garden. I’d used two-by-twelve-foot lumber and angle brackets to create the beds. I had used a soil–compost organic mix. I knew that I would have to plant my seeds and seedlings a week or two apart from each other so I wouldn’t be buried in lettuce all at once and have none weeks later. I knew I had to figure out which were weeds to pull and which were vegetables and how much water the whole thing needed.

I squished a gardening hat on my head. It wasn’t yellow. That I could not do.

I dug into my raised beds and prepared to plant seedlings for tomatoes, squash, zucchini, radishes, carrots, peas, beans, etc., so I, Stevie Barrett, could have a vegetable garden with no corn. No corn at all.

Ashville, Oregon

W
hen Helen returned from the mental ward with the reddish-brown stain on the back of her dress, she refused to shower or enter the bathroom alone. She insisted that Grandma or Grandpa or me stand inside the door frame, door open, to “guard her from the voices.” We initially turned our backs to give her privacy, but that made her cry out in the most pathetic voice, “They’re coming. They’re coming. Help me, help me.” She would leap off the toilet, midstream, if there was the slightest indication we were leaving.

“Look at me,” she’d beg, scared, sometimes shaking, way too skinny.

I went eye to eye with her the whole time she was doing her business. I don’t think she noticed my tears at all.

“Don’t leave. I can’t be alone.” Then she would lower her voice and hiss, “Barry might be coming, Barry might be coming, Barry might be coming. He’s always after Tonya.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. I still played with stuffed animals.

“And me,” she breathed, nervous. “But especially Tonya.”

“Who’s Tonya?”

“Tonya. You know. With the long brown hair and the big lips? She cries all the time.”

“Oh. She’s sad.”

“Yes, she’s sad because of Barry. He’s mean. I hit him when he grabbed her. That’s how I got that.” She pointed at her wrist cast. “Then we both had to go in the dark room with the pads. They turned off the lights.”

I studied the wood floor, not understanding, scared, confused.

“Look at me! Look at me!” she shouted, fear crushing her. “I don’t want Barry back.” She hobbled up, her sprained foot hurting her, and wiped.

Helen insisting that someone watch her while she did her business on the toilet was especially hard for my grandpa. He was an old-fashioned gentleman, and a woman’s business was a woman’s business. A lady was a lady and should be treated as a lady at all times.

But Grandpa did it. He stood in the bathroom door, his wide shoulders almost the width of the doorway, his cowboy boots spread apart, and he watched his daughter urinate and wipe her bottom, often saying, “Yuck. I’ve been poisoned with brown.”

I don’t think Helen noticed his tears, either.

“What did they do to her?”

I was supposed to be in bed, but I had come downstairs for milk. Grandma’s anguished cry made me sit down in a tight ball on the stairs to listen.

“She’s worse than she was before,” Grandpa said, his voice gruff. Through the doorway I saw that they were holding hands across the table. They always held hands. Good or bad, my grandparents always held hands. “This new medication isn’t working any better than the old stuff. In fact, I think it’s increased her paranoia, her suspicions, her fear…” Grandpa brought their clasped hands to his forehead and Grandma leaned toward him.

“You’ve talked to Chad?”

Chad was Grandpa’s best friend and our lawyer.

“Yes, I talked to him. He says the head of staff there is watching Barry and they’ll have an answer for us soon.”

“And what about this Tonya she keeps crying about, telling us we have to save Tonya? I can’t bear the thought of this Tonya being hurt. Honestly, Albert, I know we don’t believe most of what Helen says, but this has a ring of truth to it. She’s honestly scared to death for her friend Tonya.”

“Chad says he’s trying to get a report on her, too.”

“I can’t believe this. We met Helen’s doctors. We met the nurses. They seemed competent; they seemed as if they knew what they were doing. They reassured us she would be safe, that they would try new medications…. She’s crumbling, her mind has crumbled.”

I saw Grandpa’s huge shoulders sag. “I’m afraid you might be right, Glory. I’m afraid you might be right.”

Grandma wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and then I heard a sound I never wanted to hear again: Grandpa, strong and mighty Grandpa, who ran a company and a farm, sobbing.

He sobbed and sobbed, shaking, rocking, keening, and Grandma joined him, her tears running with his, the two most miserable people I have ever seen in my life clinging to each other.

I crept upstairs, crawled deep into my covers, and cried till my eyes swelled.

The light of the moon shone on my broken frog.

“They put the dead people in cans.”

Helen rocked on her rocker as me, Grandma, and Grandpa turned to her in shock.

The sun was going down and it made the sky behind our cornstalks turn into brilliant golds and yellows and oranges. We had Helen’s favorite opera record on, too, and she was singing along.

She had let me and Grandma get her in the shower to wash her hair earlier that day, although I had to get in there with her with my bathing suit on because “Barry might come, Barry might come. I think he’s spying on me here.”

“You need to eat more cookies,” I’d told her, water streaming down our faces. She was too skinny and I could see her ribs.

“I’m not going to eat brown cookies,” she told me.

“How about pink?”

She nodded. “Okay to pink cookies.”

We made pink sugar cookies.

She ate one of the ones I’d decorated. “I did that one,” I told her.

Surprisingly, she smiled at me. “Very delicious.”

Grandma sniffled when she heard that.

The day would have ended so well, one of our best, had not Helen decided to tell us, “They put the dead people in cans.”

Grandpa put his beer down. Grandma put her drawing of the cornfields aside.

“What do you mean, Helen?” Grandma asked.

Helen continued rocking in her chair. “At the Bad Place”—that’s what she called the mental ward—“there was a man named Andrew. They put him in a can.”

I put my pink heart cookie down on my plate. I wasn’t so hungry anymore.

No one said anything for a while.

“I saw him. I saw Andrew in a can.”

“Do you mean that Andrew went to a room by himself? Do you call the room a can?” Grandma asked, knitting her hands together.

“No. That’s not it. Andrew died.”

My throat felt like it had a fist-sized gumball stuck in it.

“When did he die?” Grandma asked.

“He died at the Bad Place on a Wednesday. Barry killed him. He sat on him. Squished him. Andrew couldn’t breathe.”

Grandma and Grandpa exchanged a horrified glance. I hugged my knees in close as the sun kept sinking toward the corn and the dark blue started blocking out the yellows.

“Andrew said, ‘Help me Tonya,’ but they grabbed Tonya. The men in the white coats. They always grabbed Tonya. Me, too, sometimes. They grabbed these.” She held her boobs. “And this.” She stood and grabbed her butt, then sat back down. “He said, ‘Help me, Helen,’ and I tried but the men threw me on the wall.”

Grandma cried. Grandpa made a roaring sound, but Helen didn’t notice.

“Tonya tried to save Andrew. She tried. His face turned red, then purple, then good-bye.” Helen snapped her fingers and her chin wobbled. “His tongue came out like this.” She dropped her tongue in the corner of her mouth. “And his eyes were like this.” She rolled her eyes back in her head. “I miss Andrew. Barry is mean.”

“Was Andrew a friend of yours?” Grandpa asked.

“Yes, he was my friend.” Helen’s eyes flooded with tears. “He watched when I was in the bathroom so Barry wouldn’t find me again. He watched out, and that made Barry mean mad.”

I saw Grandma lean over, her hands on her head. Something was wrong with Grandpa, because even in that dim light I could tell he was white as a ghost.

“I sung Andrew songs. He gave me crossword puzzles. I didn’t do them. All the noise in my head made it too buzzy, but I have them still.” She reached into the flowered bag by her side and pulled out crossword puzzles. Each of them had a picture on it. I could tell that she’d done the artwork because of the minute detail to each one, every line and dot perfect. Over one crossword, she’d drawn a stark bed, but the bed was twisted into a pretzel. Another one had a window, crooked, swerving, done in blacks and grays.

“They put Andrew in a can after they squished him,” she said.

“How do you know this, sugar?” Grandpa asked.

Helen hummed part of the opera song that came floating out to the porch. “I know because Barry took me and Tonya down to the room. Down down down the stairs.” Helen bit her lip as her voice cracked. “He made us!” she shouted. “He made us! I didn’t want to. I said no and Tonya said no, Momma, but he made us!”

Grandma reached out a shaking hand and put it on Helen’s arm. The cornstalks swayed in the distance as the sun continued to sink.

“Me and Tonya held hands, we held hands, but Barry said we needed to know what would happen!” Helen wrapped her arms around her head and rocked.

“What do you mean, what would happen?” Grandma asked.

I felt sick. I knew that Grandma and Grandpa had forgotten I was even there.

“He said if we were bad, if we were bad!
If we were bad!
” Helen started keening back and forth, her voice a low, raw rumble. A bat flew across our field.

“What, honey? What did he say?” Grandma asked. I saw her hands shaking. I saw Grandpa taking deep breaths, as if he didn’t want to hear what she was going to say but knew he had to.

“He said if we were bad, if we told,
if we told what happened,
that he was going to put us in a can, too! Me and Tonya! In a can.” She stomped her feet in place, her face twisted. “He did it to our Andrew. They put Andrew in a can. I saw it, I saw it in that dark room.”

Another bat followed, then a third.

“What room? Where was the room?” Now it was Grandpa’s turn.

“In one of the houses. Outside. Down the long, dark hall. All the dead people that got squished. They burn them up and put them in a can and put them on the shelf and I saw Andrew’s can. He was there.”

Helen started crying, quietly, her shoulders shaking. “I saw Andrew’s can. It said his name. There was a date. A number. When he died. Yep. They squished him and put dead Andrew in a can. He saved me from Barry. The voices told me to kill Barry, but I couldn’t.” She cried harder now. “I wanted to.”

Grandpa and Grandma were up and hugging their daughter, rocking her back and forth. “Sweetheart, sweetheart.”

“Poor Andrew, poor Andrew with the crossword puzzles. I don’t want to go in a can. Do you think Tonya’s in a can now? You know, Tonya? My friend?”

We were out there till the sun dropped away, the darkness descended, and the bats flew in swarms.

The next afternoon Helen started drawing on a canvas with a charcoal pencil. She drew a row of silver cans. The tin cans were labeled, “Charlotte. Andrew. Patty. Harry.” Sticking out of the cans she drew fingers or toes, human hair, and a hand. A left hand, I noticed. Each rim was painted red.

“That’s blood,” she told me. “Blood of my friends and the friends I didn’t meet there.”

The background was black and brown. In the upper right-hand corner there was a window with bars over it.

“You can’t escape. The bars will eat you.”

In the left-hand corner there was a door leading into a black room. Sitting on a bench in the dark room was a woman in a blue dress, her blond head buried in her hands.

“They put you in there first,” Helen told me. “That’s where you wait before they squish you and put you in a can on a shelf.”

Then she painted her left hand with red paint and pushed her hand over Harry’s can. “He’s dead. He’s gone. I’ll be gone soon, too.”

I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I still played with clay and jump ropes.

“But I’ll save you, girl kid,” she told me. She put her red-painted hand right over her face and held it there. When she pulled it away I could see the handprint.

Red. A bloodred handprint over Helen’s face.

“I’ll save you.”

Whenever Helen got her period she informed my grandpa, not my grandma, that the enemy was “bleeding her, torturing her, stabbing her stomach. Can you help me?”

The enemy did not arrive after Helen returned home from the mental ward.

So besides carrying a number of drugs, the tortured vision of Andrew in a can, and injuries from her leap from a window with no bars that would eat you, she was also carrying my sister, Sunshine.

Sunshine’s father, we learned later, in all likelihood, was Barry.

Barry the rapist.

Andrew’s murderer.

Grandma was one tiny step from hysterical.