The Belief in Angels (20 page)

They laugh.

Dorothy says, “These are too fucking small, I’m gonna grab another pair.”

She peels the jeans off and walks over to the closet. She stops directly in front of me.

“Your clothes are far out! You could sell the clothes you never wear and raise money that way. Jesus, you’ve got twenty million things in here.”

Dorothy reaches up and grabs a bunch of jeans off the rack right in front of where I’m hiding. She sees me standing there, staring with eyes as frightened and
surprised as hers. She whips the hangers back up on the bar and pulls the closet closed before Wendy can see me, although I can still see a sliver of them.

“If you think that’s a lot, you should see the shitload of stuff I have downstairs I never even wear. It’s all in storage in the basement,” Wendy says.

“Far out! Let’s go see. I’ll bet you’ve got stuff you could sell for lots of cash!”

“Now? I’m tired, Dorothy, I wanna …”

Dorothy walks over to the bed, grabs Wendy’s arm, and pulls her until she rolls off the edge of the bed onto her feet.

“I know you wanna take a fucking nap, Wendy—you fall asleep at every party. Don’t be a drag. Get your ass downstairs and pick out some shit to sell.”

Dorothy pushes her toward the door.

Wendy argues, “How am I gonna sell the clothes?”

“You’re shitting me, right? You’ve got a crowd of buyers right here, right now! Go sell, Mama! Hell, I’ll buy a pair of jeans if I can find a pair that fits me.”

Dorothy stays in the middle of the room.

“Aren’t you coming with me?” Wendy asks.

“You go ahead; I wanna start here and try on a few things. I’ll meet you down there to help you haul it up.”

“All right, all right. You don’t have to pay me for the jeans, only no Raindance or Old Glory labels. Those’re new threads from the last show.”

Wendy leaves.

Dorothy waits a beat, then opens the closet and pushes the clothes aside. “You can come out now, Jules. What are you doing in the closet, little woman?”

I pull my blouse up to reveal the vests I’ve taken.

“There’s a school dance tonight and my friend and I want to wear these.”

“I don’t think she’ll miss anything in this mess, but you better bring them back in case she does and thinks I took them. Throw them on the closet floor when you’re done. She’ll think I dropped them. Have fun at your dance.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say, “Get thee to a nunnery.”

Dorothy laughs and I do too.

I make my way toward my room at the end of the hall. As I pass the bath I see two people sitting in the empty bathtub while someone sits on the toilet.

I open my room and breathe a sigh of relief. No one in here. No pot stink. Just the smell of the sunbleached shells I left on my window ledge.

I post a huge sign on my door: JULES’S ROOM - KEEP OUT OR SUFFER EXTREME PAIN.

Most of the time the sign preserves my privacy in our very public house, but occasionally I find people using my bed. Not for sleeping. It grosses me out.

I stuff the vests into my overnight bag, along with a pair of underwear, socks, pajamas, a shirt, and—as an afterthought—my swimsuit, in case it warms up again tomorrow.

Before I leave, I check my art supplies and set up the trap I created to alert me if someone ignores my sign and tries to sneak in: a rubber band tied to a ribbon that stretches from the back of the knob to an old hook nailed into the wall. I cover the knob with half a rubber ball pushed through with straight pins that stick out like porcupine quills to thwart the efforts of anyone who tries to release the band from the inside. I love inventing things.

At David’s room I knock. We practice this courtesy with each other. Wendy completely ignores it.

“Yeah?” he yells.

David, thirteen, looks more like Wendy than Moses and me. We all have her almond, almost Asian, eye shape. But he also has her olive skin, brown eyes, and kinky, dark brown hair.

He lies on an unmade bed reading a comic book and eating a Butterfinger candy bar. The room smells like moldy socks. Dishes, books, magazines, even his muddy football uniform, cover the floor. I yell over the blare of the music. “What are you doing? You’re not supposed to be reading those.”

Comic books are forbidden. Wendy considers us immune to abuse, neglect, drugs, and alcohol, but adamantly swears that comic books will rot our brains. We’re all punished if they’re found and one of us doesn’t confess to the crime. David never does.

“Have you done your homework? Where’d you get candy? Make your bed, pick up your clothes. Put your uniform right into the washer, please, and put those bowls in the sink or you’ll attract ants again.”

He jumps up toward me. “Out of my room, you bossy hen. It’s Friday and I don’t have to do homework until Sunday night. Moses got the candy at the store. You can’t have any and you’re not my mother.”

He slams the door in my face. A second later he whips it back open, smiles, and says, “Did you do the laundry? Did you wash my blue shirt? I wanna wear it tonight. Oh, and Dad called. He said he’s coming back into town for a while to stay at Aunt Doreen’s and he’s coming to pick us up on Sunday.”

“Your crummy blue shirt’s done. It’s in the laundry basket downstairs. You’re welcome. Oh, and I’m not making dinner tonight. You should make sandwiches or a TV dinner, okay?”

“Thank you, Julie-Bo-Bulie, you’re a skinny ninny. Too bad you have no boobies.” He points to my chest, laughs hysterically, and slams the door again.

I open his door again without knocking.

“And feed Moses dinner. And feed Felix. I’m sleeping over at Leigh’s. I can’t.”

I smile, satisfied. I know dinner for Moses and David will be meager. TV dinners or spaghetti. But we have all existed—during the two years post-divorce and before the motorcycle accident—on not much more than cereal, school lunches, and the kindness of our friends, and we’ve done okay.

I’m not sure David will feed the cat, though. I make a mental note to do that before I leave. We smuggled Felix inside a while back. Wendy didn’t notice we were living with a cat for a long time—a good thing, because she doesn’t like animals. But for some reason, she’s letting us keep her.

David is three years older than I am, yet Wendy leaves me in charge of him and Moses. This creates still more anger between us. He’s pissed that I’m in charge. I’m pissed he isn’t more grateful. David can be crude and annoying. He never listens to me. He speaks like a robot, asks ten questions at once without waiting for answers, and ends conversations abruptly. At times, he makes loud, nonsensical pronunciations to no one in particular. He avoids doing anything he can cajole me or pay Moses to do. Sometimes I hate him.

Howard’s call surprises me. We’ve hardly seen him since his hasty departure during Wendy’s hospitalization. He lives in California now. Wendy says he’s started a new scam with business card placemats that he sells to restaurants.

After Wendy came back from the hospital, she pretty much put me in charge of running the house while she recuperated—doing all the laundry, cooking, cleaning, caring for and keeping tabs on my brothers, and feeding Felix.

It’s been over a year since her accident, but when Wendy became mobile again, she never resumed the chores she handed me. She tells me I’m “obviously old enough to handle it,” because I’m doing “such a good job.” She’s the queen of manipulation.

I never receive or expect anything resembling an allowance in return for my service, but I’ve progressed in my cooking ability from TV dinners to boiled pastas and broiled meats. I never explore beyond these simple dinners. Salt is my main spice for taste, and when I feel especially daring, I add pepper to the recipe. Still, my cooking is more proficient than Wendy’s. My brothers are, I think, happy to have regular dinners prepared for them.

I’ve also become a pretty good baker. I bake casseroles and lasagnas, as well as occasional treats. Even though we buy them at the store all the time, sweets and soda are not really allowed. Our “dental health” is the excuse Wendy gives, although we know the real reason: her inability to control her binging if they’re
present. However, if I
bake
something sweet, like lemon cake, chocolate-chip cookies, or raspberry tarts, the rules are off. It’s as though “home baking” makes sugary things somehow healthier. Maybe she can’t resist home-baked food. But it’s probably Jack, with his sweet tooth, who she tries to please by allowing it.

The laundry is done with much more regularity, and the house, though a mess most of the time due to the almost constant party of people, is generally cleaner and more organized than it was before the accident.

I don’t understand why Wendy, who rejects the social rules for women’s behavior, gives me all the stereotypically female chores while my brothers are left with a minimal amount of stereotypically male chores. They split taking out the trash and mowing the lawn in the summer months. Everything else falls to me. I argue they ought to help out with laundry and dishes. Wendy says they’re “women’s jobs.” Until my friendship with Leigh, I had plenty of time to fulfill my role as mother to the family. Now, I’m ticked off I don’t get to be a kid and my brothers aren’t helping out more.

I knock on Moses’s door. He doesn’t answer, and when I peek in, he isn’t there. I step inside and snoop around.

Although I cherish my privacy and guard it with small weapons, I’m nosy and often sneak into the stuff that belongs to the rest of my family.

Moses is seven and, like me, small for his age. This makes him seem a bit younger than he is, but his eyes are the eyes of an ageless person. Wise and sad. His eyes are navy blue, not muddy brown like Howard’s, Wendy’s, and David’s. No one else in our family has blue eyes except our Grandfather Samuel. But I know he isn’t our real grandfather because of Wendy’s adoption.

Somehow, despite all the meanness in our family, Moses remains remarkably sweet in nature. He idolizes David, almost six years his elder, and spends too much time and energy trying to win his approval. He does most everything David asks, including regular runs to the local grocery for David’s junk food desires.

But Moses did figure out how to profit from David’s laziness: he developed a financial deal involving a percentage split and transportation allowance for any errands he runs for anyone, including myself, Wendy, and Jack. I admire his business sense. Moses is a whiz at saving money. He buys himself expensive items for a young kid, like bikes, with the money he saves. He also loans the money he saves back to us (with interest, of course). I think Moses is going to grow up to be a multimillionaire or something.

I wonder where he could be. Moses has one friend-—a school friend who lives on another part of the island. He doesn’t see him outside of school unless
his friend’s mom arranges to drive him back afterwards. Wendy doesn’t drive us around anymore, and she doesn’t arrange carpooling. This would mean a call to another parent, which she avoids. No doubt she finds it too parental. She calls stuff like that “suburban rituals.” As a result, we walk, ride the bus, or ride our bikes everywhere.

Moses hasn’t mastered the bus schedule yet. His choices are to play by himself or to hang around our neighborhood. But our neighborhood harbors an unusual demographic for an Irish-Catholic town, where Catholicism and the rhythm method usually produce an abundance of girls. Our neighborhood has an army of boys—and tons of them are David’s age, but none are Moses’s age. He sometimes tags along with David, though the arrangement is less than desirable for David.