Such a Pretty Face (25 page)

I choked on a slice of pepperoni, then I laughed. “What did he say?”

“Let’s put it this way: I wasn’t invited to dinner, but my friend called me later that night and we laughed so hard we sounded like hyenas.”

Polly was no longer scratching on death’s door from not eating, but she was not feeling well. She’d had a bad run of it the first weeks at the clinic, as usual. She did not want to eat, she did not want to go to counseling, she did not want to talk in group with “I Feel” statements, she did not want to talk to her psychotherapist or go to lectures on nutrition or drink supplements or weigh in, and she did not want to do Tray Watch, where a nurse sat with her until she ate every bite even if it took three hours.

She did not want to do family therapy, and she forbid Herbert from coming anywhere near the place. She called him herself and told him. I was there for the call. “Dad, don’t come anywhere near this place. I do not need you to come and tell me what a disappointment I am, how craziness doesn’t come from your side of the family, it’s from Mom’s. I don’t need a lecture or criticisms, and I don’t want to hear any more about your anti-gay senate campaign and how I might have hurt your reelection chances and damaged the Barrett family name, you narcissistic moron.” Then she grabbed a bag for her face.

She told me and Lance as we sat with her in a courtyard garden, the trees rustling above, birds tweeting, “I’m still in my rebellion and denial stage.”

“How’s it going?” I asked her. Lance started knitting faster. He had brought a blow-up with him named Lucy Desiree so Polly could again see “the curves that real women should have.”

“How’s it going?” Polly asked, pushing her curls back. “Oh, splendidly. I’m enjoying all these doctors and nurses and counselors perpetually bugging me to address my issues. Looking at their food makes me feel sick, I can’t indulge my food rituals, and I feel as if it’s getting stuck in my throat. I shake, I’m cold, I seem to be growing fur on parts of my body, and I’m weak but want to run. It’s been so pleasant, thanks for asking.” She took a bag out of her sweater and breathed into it.

Polly’s weight, at five foot seven, same height as me, was about 100 pounds. She was skeletal, deathly, sickly.

It wasn’t pretty. It hurt me to see what she’d done to herself.

I held her hand. Lance knitted faster. Lucy Desiree grinned maniacally.

“Remember when I was younger and I had to eat all my food in tiny bites? Or six peas only, no more? I pushed my food around my plate, then had to divide it up in equal parts. I used to think about food all the time. Certain foods I would not eat. I would count calories obsessively, usually when I was on one of my long runs. And then I’d come home and have to deal with Dad.” Her eyes focused on the tangled branches of a tree. “He wanted me to be perfect. When I started getting breasts I remember he seemed so angry at me. He told me he didn’t want a ‘slut’ for a daughter and yelled at Mom to get me a tight bra and ‘hide those things.’”

“He told me I was a half-assed athlete and could do better,” Lance said.

“He told me I was a disgrace to the Barrett family,” I said.

Lance stopped knitting and pulled Lucy Desiree into his lap. She grinned maniacally at us. “Hey, ladies! Can we talk about my Lance’s Lucky Ladies Hard Rock Party to launch my business? If I think about Dad for too long I’ll get cramps. Let’s go as triplet punks! We’ll all dress exactly the same—what do you say? I’ll get us black wigs and leather and boots and we’ll put on our makeup together. I’ll even dress up one of my dolls so she’s our twin. We’d actually be quadruplets then, wouldn’t we?” He pondered this.

“Or we could each hold a doll and then we’d be sextuplets,” Polly said. “Sextuplet hard rockers. That’d be a first.”

Lance drew in his breath. “That’s an awesome idea, Polly. Awesome.” He shook his head. She was so brilliant! “And my ladies are going to be all around at the party. I’ve got three hundred people who have already said they’re coming. The band—oh, man, the band! They’re playing eighties music only. AC/DC, Def Leppard, Blondie, Queen, Kool and the Gang, and some love songs from Air Supply. We gotta have them. Slow dances, you know, romantic. I won’t be dancing romantically, though.” He bent his head, sighing.

“Maybe you will, Lance,” I said, hope in my voice.

“Oh, no. Couldn’t do that. Don’t know what to say, how to dance, no—but we’re gonna have those little white lights, and I called the caterer. Only steak, and salad for the vegetarian people. Can’t understand people who don’t eat meat. I like to sink my teeth into a cow sometimes. Lambs are yummy, too, right on the tongue. And I got five giant guitar cakes coming.”

“What about the invitations?” Polly asked. “When are your invitations with the electric guitar and the skull going out?”

“Soon. I talked to Trixie. She says they’re all going out right away.” He started laughing. “We thought of this funny thing. When people open the invitations for the Hard Rock Party, they’re going to get a lapful of these tiny naked ladies in pink and purple glitter to advertise my dolls, plus the pop-up doll in the middle. Isn’t that, well, genius?”

“Genius,” I said. It was hilarious.

“And then we also got this tiny recorder in each card, and it’s going to play that song ‘Big Balls’ by AC/DC. You know the lyrics, ‘I’ve got big balls, she’s got big balls. We all have big balls.’ People are gonna dig it.”

“I love it.” Polly laughed.

“I do, too. I can’t wait to come,” I said. “We’ll need to celebrate after the anniversary party.”

“No, we’ll need valium sandwiches,” Polly said.

“So you gave Trixie the photographs of Janet and Herbert, and she knows to put their wedding picture on the front, that it’s to be a formal white color with gold engraving around the edges and on the inside there’s to be the photo of them now with the party date and time and all that?” I asked.

“Yes, the photo where Mom is choking back tears, or it looks that way,” Polly said. “She’s wearing that pink blouse buttoned to her neck and clearly can’t stand Dad’s hand on her waist and Dad looks like the arrogant shit that he is.”

“That’s the one. Trixie’ll do it. She’s smart.” Lance rubbed his head. “I think she’s pretty smart…. She got a little confused about a couple of things…flipped around some information, addresses…but I think we’ve got it now—yeah, I think we do. Yep.”

“Are you sure?” I eyed him as two birds noisily flew back to the tree branches above us.

“Yeah, you bet, sure, all wrapped up.” He appeared worried, then it vanished and he sat forward and grasped our hands. “We’re gonna get through the anniversary party torture on Friday night, and on Saturday night, we’re gonna rock out, the three of us!”

“Rock out,” Polly said. She leaned over and kissed Lucy Desiree on the mouth. Lance was clearly touched. Lucy Desiree smiled maniacally.

I had sanded and primed the chair and painted it blue and now it sat there, waiting for me.

I remembered Herbert’s rant against Aunt Janet and her college classes. How he was going to cut her “allowance” and “forbid” her to go to school in the future if her “domestic responsibilities” were not met.

I thought of her going to school on that beautiful campus in Portland. I thought of her in class, participating in a discussion, and chasing her dream that she had finally dared to chase. I thought of learning and growing and how your mind opens up in school, whether you’re studying literature or history or politics, and how your classmates and their diverse backgrounds and opinions make you think, and think hard, about the world, and life, and yourself, and where you are and want to be.

I painted until one o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t stop.

I called it my Learning Tree Chair. The legs became the roots, the seat the trunk, the back of the chair—which was a full wood back—an old oak tree with books hung from the branches. The titles of the books were
Shakespeare, World War II, Spanish, Central America, The Revolutionary War, Feminism, The Sixties, Jerusalem, The Depression, Current Events.
I had sawed off another piece of wood in the shape of an apple, attached it to the top, and painted the word
FREEDOM
in black.

Because that’s what Aunt Janet was getting, freedom.

Freedom from the life she had led to this point.

She had dared, she had insisted on change, she had—on her own—decided to be more.

More than she had been, more than her fears, more than the forces that held her back.

She was more.

I crossed my legs and stared at that chair, the light of the moon tunneling on in.

Who knew that the woman I had always seen as meek, weak, and scared would motivate me to be more, too?

But it was the truth. Aunt Janet had motivated me to be more of me.

More of Stevie.

Ashville, Oregon

F
or some reason, a bunch of priggish white executives came to town and decided that Ashville needed chain stores.

They had to go to the mayor, Grandma, and town council with their idea. The men wore their fancy-pants suits, hair slicked back, shiny shoes. They smiled but, as I told Grandpa, leaning across Helen on the bench that evening, “I think they’re human snakes with teeth.”

“I think so, too, honey. Now you listen to me. If your gut level about a man is that he’s a snake, believe it. Don’t you try to convince yourself he’s not. Listen to your gut. It’s not gonna lie to you.”

“Snakes rakes,” Helen said, fiddling with the wildflowers she’d stuck in her dress. “Rake the snakes. Bake the snakes. Put the snakes in tiny cakes and burn them up to tiny stumps.”

So the snakes began their presentation with their shiny pictures and their cheesy smiles and their ingratiating airs, with most of the town watching.

“You need more shopping—”

“Hell, no, we don’t,” Shade Diamond said, standing. “My wife shops enough. We got all we need right here. We got Chris and his family running the hardware store. Mabel and Sister and Dot run the clothing stores. We got two families running grocery stores, which have been in business since my great-granddad got here. What do we need more shopping for?”

“We have better shopping, a wider selection. You only need to go to one place—”

“Excuse me,” Katy Wy said. “You say that you got better shopping than my store?”

“We know what we’re doing. We’ve made studies of towns and people, we know the numbers, we know how these things work, and you’ll be glad that we’re here.” Mr. Snake smiled. His co-snakes smiled. “You haven’t experienced this type of shopping, so you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t know how great this is going to be!” He fisted his hand and raised it in the air.

There was silence and then, as if the entire town was thinking together, they all raised one fist in the air and hollered.

It about scared the pants off Mr. Snake and crew, but then he reddened and started to reargue his points. He was frustrated with us country bumpkins.

“You need the money here, the taxes, the income.”

Grandma nodded at Devon Wilts. He recited, in detail, how Ashville was quite on top of things financially. He knew all the info down to the cents, and he regaled us with those numbers and the amount in our savings.

“Don’t you get it?” the Snake said, gritting his teeth, his hair thick with goo. “Your town is gonna go belly up without us. You have an antiquated system of doing business.”

Grandma nodded at Evie Webster.

“Nothing antiquated about it,” Evie said. “We bring in the modern and new when needed, and we keep the traditions and the values that are important. Sprawling, ugly stores are not something we value, young man.” She then detailed Ashville’s comprehensive business plan.

“We don’t have to follow these laws. We’re trying to be nice,” the Snake snarled.

Grandma nodded at Connie Santiago.

“Oh, yes, you do have to follow the laws,” Connie Santiago said, then launched into said laws and repeated the ones that applied, verbatim, by number, with all the tricky language.

“Hey! People, we don’t want to get nasty here. We don’t want a fight,” Snake said.

“Then don’t pick one,” Cason Phillips cracked out. “If you do, you’ll lose. Simple. Now get your heads out of your asses and go home. We’ve got the town picnic to talk about.”

Helen was examining a piece of silky purple material she’d been hauling around with her for about a week but when Mr. Snake raised his voice at Grandma and said, “Mayor, this is not the end of this issue,” his flushy face flushed, Helen’s head snapped right up. “I don’t know what kind of town you’re running, I don’t know who you think you are to stand in our way—”

“What?” Helen hissed again. “What?”

I knew she was talking to the voices.

“Oh, shut up,” she hissed. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’m taking care of this.
That’s my momma.
” She got up and quick as a wink was in the aisle. She marched halfway up and then shouted, “You! Hey, you!”

The snakes turned around and stared. Helen must have made quite a picture. She was wearing a pair of blue fairy wings and a black coat, with her polar bear hat on her head. As usual, she had on her boots and chicken wire to stop the voices from being so noisy. “You! You asshole!
Asshole.
”

“Excuse me!” Snake said. “Do not call me an asshole.”

“I have to!” Helen said. “Command Center told me to do it. You pipe on down. That’s my momma.” She pointed at Grandma. “And you are a Kaboomerat. That’s it. A Kaboomerat. A rat.”

Mr. Snake turned to Grandma and raised an eyebrow. “A problem child?” he said, smirking.

Oh, how that pissed people off, especially members of The Family.

“She’s not a problem!”

“You’re the problem!”

“Don’t you dare speak to Helen or Glory with that sneer in your tone—”

I stood up before I even knew what I was doing and said, “Shut up, snake faces!”

My grandpa was up and standing behind Helen in a flash, but Helen was not to be swayed. As you know, she had an innate talent for rhyming, and so she made up a song, singing it to the tune of “I Could Have Danced All Night” from
My Fair Lady.
I don’t remember all the words, of course, but I do remember a few lines.

“You’re a snake, you freak, you’re a snake.” Her voice deepened, then climbed, the notes reaching each corner of that building as she threw her arms out. “Slimy and sneaky, poked with a rake.” The rest of the song was about the size of his balls (small), the size of his dick (a thumb tack), and the size of his nose (gargantuan). She made mention of a flopping bottom, ears like a donkey, sloping shoulders. Her chorus was, “You’re a sly one, wet and slick. We don’t trust you, tiny nipples.” Her notes soared and dipped and swirled around, and if you didn’t listen to the words, you would think you were at a Broadway show listening to a Broadway star, which you were.

At the end she hit a high C and ripped open her coat, showing off a fluffy pink negligee over her rainbow pajamas. She carried that long note until the rafters shook.

It was a stunning performance—funny and theatrical, with words perfectly rhymed, and right on target.

There was a standing ovation, and the applause was deafening. She tossed that silky purple material into the audience and bowed.

The Snake and his cohort snakes hardly knew what to do.

When it was over, Grandma said, “Gentlemen, the answer is no.” She brought her gavel down again. “Get out.”

They started to argue. Stupid people.

Then Grandpa Thomas got in trouble again, darn it. He shot off that darn gun. Three bullets, one for each fancy-pants slicker, straight at the ceiling.

The snakes slithered right on out, lickety-split.

Later the snakes complained to the sheriff.

But, funny enough, when the sheriff went to talk to the people at the meeting, no one saw Grandpa Thomas shooting his gun off. Not one. Not even the sheriff’s wife, who was there that night.

“Case closed, boys,” the sheriff said. “Now you head on out of town. Your business is finished here.”

But poor Grandpa Thomas.

He was suspended for two town council meetings, and he so enjoyed them.

The harmonica songs he played, right outside the doors, were more woeful than ever.

Grandma made him a chocolate banana pie. His favorite.

Helen had been complaining about feeling dizzy in the morning, and then she started throwing up on her bedspread.

“I’m being poisoned!” she hissed at me. “Poisoned! I think it’s the CIA!”

“It’s not the CIA,” I told her, patting her shoulder with one hand, holding my nose with the other. I thought I was going to be sick, too.

Every morning Grandma washed that pink flowered bedspread. By the end of the week, she gave up, threw it out, and bought two more. Helen refused to get up and run to the toilet to vomit unless someone was in the room with her because she did not want to be in the bathroom alone in case Barry came.

“I’m being poisoned by the CIA!” Helen told us, sitting on the toilet later, not letting me or Grandma move an inch as she did her business. “But don’t put me in a can when I die.” She pointed at both of us, then her lips trembled, and her voice shook. “Do you think Tonya’s in a can yet?”

There were many conversations between Grandma and Grandpa that I needed to hear around that time, because Helen had got a baby in her stomach when she was at the mental ward even though she had no husband. I spent a lot of time hiding near the stairs late at night.

“We have a mentally ill daughter who was raped in a mental ward and now she’s pregnant….”

“I don’t know what to do about the baby, I’m so worried….”

“The baby may already be damaged from the drugs she was on….”

“Can we raise another child? Can we even handle a baby here with Helen?”

“Remember when she was pregnant with Stevie? She thought she had Punk in her stomach.”

“The baby may be mentally ill, too….”

“Stevie’s not, honey.”

“Stevie’s not now. But Helen seemed pretty normal up until her last couple of years of high school…. She did get awfully depressed now and then, she complained about a buzzing in her ears, she didn’t want the TV on, she had some grandiose plans, but she did okay.”

I put my hands to my face. What were they talking about? Would I end up like Helen? Did I have the fighting-with-voices-disease, too? Would I end up wearing tin foil and getting the bugs? Would I end up in a corner crying? I felt my whole body go cold with panic and dread.

I saw Grandpa shaking his head, then tears coursed down his cheeks. “But she’s almost three months along. My poor girl.” He slammed his fist three times into his open palm, his face twisted in grief and anger, and my grandma linked her arms around his neck.

Later, as an adult, I grew to understand him better. He loved his girls. Loved his wife, loved his grandchildren. And he had not been able to protect Helen. In fact, he probably felt as if he’d handed his daughter over on a platter to a rapist. He was not to blame, but he never would have stopped blaming himself.

Never.

That guilt sat on my grandpa’s back like a serpent, I’m sure of it.

I didn’t speak for days.

Grandma and Grandpa grew more worried, constantly asking me what was wrong.

Finally, in the living room of the Schoolhouse House, which was where the students used to study (I swear I still smelled that chalk), with the sun shining through the stained glass, I told them.

“I’m afraid I’m going to become Helen.”

They didn’t understand what I meant at first, but then their faces cleared and raw pain creased every line.

“Am I going to have a Command Center when I’m older? A Punk? Am I going to hear voices and wear weird clothes and throw things?” I was distraught, almost beside myself.

Grandma and Grandpa comforted me, told me that I wouldn’t. “Honey, you don’t have the same thing….”

“But I might get it!” I insisted. “I heard you talking! It might come out when I’m in high school! Helen was in her twenties!”

“Sweetie, you don’t have it…. You won’t be like your mother…I’m sure of it…. We thought something was off when Helen was a little girl, didn’t we, Glory? She was different at your age, way too imaginative, talked to imaginary friends…. She’d be happy one day, sad the next….”

They tried to reassure me.

But I was smart. I could spell schizophrenia, and I could read their loving, frightened eyes. I saw the desperate hope that what I was suggesting wasn’t true, but I knew that there was at least a possibility that I could end up having the same problems as Helen.

That overriding fear, the fear of becoming Helen, chased me down my entire childhood and into my twenties. I read about it, I learned about it, and it shook me to my core. The fear of a collapsing mind, the fear of a Command Center and a Punk, were a huge part of my eating problem.

And the primal, all-encompassing fear of living in a mental ward as Helen had and facing nightmares of my inner mind and nightmares on two feet stalked me like a phantom stalks his victim for decades.

Helen was the one who brought the baby to Grandpa’s attention weeks later as she was sitting on the toilet. Her fear of being alone in the bathroom continued. Sometimes she refused to go to the bathroom unless Grandpa was home. She’d started peeing outside rather than be in the bathroom without him. Even in her delusions, she knew that Grandpa would protect her at all costs.

“The enemy didn’t come to bleed me,” she told him. “Did you see that? There’s no blood. And there’s a mystery here.” She pointed to her stomach and stood up, straddling the toilet. “I think they put something in me. It’s right there. It’s moving.”

She bent down to see herself and poked her stomach with her pointer finger.

“What. Is. That?”

She glared at Grandpa.

“What the hell is
that?
”

Grandma and Grandpa took Helen to see Dr. Lindy Woods, an OB-GYN in the city. Lindy was a cousin on Grandpa’s side and used to hang out with Helen in high school.

Helen wore her hair in six braids, lay down in the backseat of the car, and made up poems. Most of her words rhymed with the F word. She was mad at Punk, one of the loudest voices in her head, because he was “so bossy, so rude. Always bugging me, he’s crude. Punk the funk, soon I’ll give you a deep dunk.”

I was dropped off at the house of my best friend, Lornie Rose, but later, when we were back home, I heard Grandma talking on the phone to my great-aunt Cinnamon, who was an attorney, when she thought I was out in the vegetable garden pulling carrots and onions and squash.

“We took Helen to the clinic to see Lindy. She was fine for a while, she sat straight up in Lindy’s office, hands clasped tight in her lap, but when Lindy and another doctor and a nurse entered in white coats, she started screaming, backed right into a corner and covered her head with her hands. She was terrified, absolutely terrified. Then she started yelling, ‘I’m not going back there! You won’t put me in a can! I don’t like that dark room, I don’t like the hall. He’s bad, he’s bad! Help me, Dad! Help me, Dad!’