The Blue Girl (5 page)

Eventually I found a way to stay. I met a townie boy with long hair and gangly limbs who made me laugh. We danced in those ripples out at that lake, and in those ripples I
got myself pregnant. My parents wept. They said,
This boy will bring you no happiness, Magdalena
, and I said,
To hell with happiness, you said so yourself
. Mama said,
Said who?
And I said,
You did, Mama, you
.

Year after year, the town more grew increasingly dull. The summer people seemed to grow younger. The children grew. My parents died. My brothers said our parents had never seemed as happy as they had in their old age, playing durak and telling jokes in Russian. Meanwhile the townie boy became a man. He still keeps his hair long but no longer makes me laugh.

One day toward the end of summer, when the children were fighting, Greg and Caroline—Greg the Boy, who helped keep me here, and sensible Caroline, who reminds me of why I stay—I left the house and drove out to the lake to throw stones. They skimmed the water the way my brothers had taught me when we were summer people, embarrassed by our parents' English. When the ripples floated toward me, I went into the lake in my jeans and sandals and stood until the first big ripple broke through my body. Right after, the blue girl came from nowhere, and I thought,
Now I have to stay
.

In bed at night when I can see traces of the townie boy in my man-husband, I sing,
Tell me your secrets, I'll tell you no
lies
. He smiles and says,
You used to sing to me all the time. Do you remember?
I smooth back the graying longish hair with my fingers, an old habit, and say,
No, I don't remember. What did I sing?

Of course I remember, but there is such a thing as telling too much, Mama used to say. Some things you should keep inside. And so I do.

Greg the Boy swears in the house. When I named him Gregorio and nicknamed him Greg, Mama took him in her arms and said,
This boy will always be a boy, Magda, this Gregorio, this Greg the Boy
.

He has always been impetuous, this boy of mine, reluctant to take direction, even at three-and-a-half. Try to teach him to ride a tricycle, this boy knew better. But this swearing is new,
fucking this and fucking that
, and all of this grabbing he does. I don't remember my brothers having mouths like his or moving their hands the way this boy does, but I think Mama was right about him.
Greg the Boy
.

He comes into the house and throws his sneakers on the floor and says,
That fucking blue girl, man, she is so fucking blue, how the fuck does someone get so fucking blue?

This is the son who kept me here, who grew inside me and became this swearing, freckled, lanky boy who can't
keep his hands to himself. Such a boy this boy is, with
fuck
on his mouth. He wants a rise out of me, but I won't give it to him. Mama taught me too well how to play along.

I say,
Listen, boy, this is no way to talk in my fucking house, and there are other girls you should be worried about. Leave the blue girl alone
.

I can play his game.

He laughs and says,
Ma, you are such a fucking gas
.

He walks about the kitchen with his hands moving around in his pockets, his head slung low like it's too heavy to carry, like he hopes his head will snap off. I know the feeling. I am making the pies, baking the cookies for the tops and the bottoms, mixing in the chocolate, because we're meeting tonight, and I need to assemble all the parts of the pies. I had never heard of moon pies before this, before Irene said we should visit the girl and bake moon pies for her. She called this morning and said,
We need to go tonight, Magda, it's Tuesday, don't forget
, and I said,
Don't worry, we'll go, there is no way I can forget what day it is
.

Greg with his sloping shoulders and freckled hands thinks he can get away with standing in my kitchen while I make the pies, but I say,
Get out of my kitchen, boy, you are failing biology
.

He says,
How the fuck do you know?

I say,
I have my fucking ways
.

I get out the bowl and mix the vanilla and the egg whites and the marshmallow cream into the filling. He's failed biology, this boy who kept me here, this boy who cannot understand cells when it was the splitting of cells that made me stay in this sorry town.

Zygote
, I say, shooing him with my spoon.

He says,
What's that?
And I say,
You should know, my boy, you of all people should know, before you have one of your own
. He lumbers out with his hands at his sides, his arms like puppets with the hands broken.

After the filling is ready, I start melting the chocolate. This is the best part, the stirring of the chocolate as the bubbles rise up and then pop. I move my spoon around and around, stabbing at bubbles with the wooden handle. When I stir the chocolate, I imagine each dark brown bubble absorbing my secrets, one at a time.

Are they secrets or little white lies
, I wonder,
and what is really the difference? Who's to know when you break them into small bites and watch them disappear down a girl's throat?
I watch the chocolate bubbling. Tiny bubbles, my life in a pot.

Tiny bubbles
, I start to sing.

Caroline shuffles into the kitchen. Her hair is pinned back in barrettes, an unflattering zigzag part in her hair that all the girls are wearing now. But when she came down the stairs this morning, she leaned down to show me her
scalp and the butterfly clasps that held her hair back from her forehead and asked me how I liked it, I thought,
Why make a fuss?

Very much
, I said.

Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles
. I don't know the rest of the words.

As she leans against the sink with her arms crossed over her chest, the butterflies look trapped.
Mama, you look so happy when you make your little pies
, she says.

I turn to her and toss her one of the broken cookie tops from the cooling rack on the counter. She's getting thick at the waist, the Russian blood coming out in her with her heavy hands and squat legs. If only Mama had lived to see her grow up.

I say,
Who said anything about making pies?

The cookie disappears inside her mouth. I throw another and another piece to make her laugh. Anything to keep her from the pies.

Greg's failing biology again
, she says.

The chocolate thickens. I stir and stir. The cookie pieces are setting on the cooling rack, not quite ready for their chocolate covering.

I know
, I say.

What?
she asks.

Nothing
, I say.
Never mind. But I have my ways, you kids should know, I have my ways
.

Under the cabinet I find an oven mitt with faded sunflowers, part of a pair my mother bought me when I first got married.
To bake bread for that blond boy of yours
, she explained, but I've never baked bread for him, not once. I can cook, it's true, but I've never liked it. Moon pies are all I've been able to enjoy.

They are ready for the chocolate, the cookie tops and bottoms that make up the pie. I let out a little whoop inside myself so Caroline doesn't hear. She can't have a mother whooping about the kitchen, it will give her ideas. The girl's mouth appears inside my mind, open, with blue skin giving way to a pink tongue, like a cat's, except without ridges.

Are those for us?
Caroline asks.
I'm hungry
.

I am ever the disappointing mother.

No
, I say, and when she looks down at her sneakers and bends to tie the laces, I say,
I'm making something special for you. These are for the bake sale, too sweet anyway, no good, they'll rot those beautiful teeth
.

This much is true. If Caroline has one beautiful thing about her, it's her teeth. They shine. As a child, her baby teeth always glowed. At the lake the summer people would stop me as I paddled her in the water and ask,
How do you get your baby's teeth so white?

I'd say,
Baking soda
.

They'd look at their own babies' teeth with the milky film across them and squint their eyes at me.

Something from the old country that I learned from my mother
, I'd say.

I never touched her teeth. What she brushes with now, I have no idea, but it's not with baking soda, that much I'm sure of. What kind of mother would shove baking soda into her baby's mouth?

Caroline smiles when I mention her teeth and slides one of her barrettes off. Now, with just the one strand hanging loose, she looks so much softer, so much less severe, so much less like my mother.

Mr. Davis made Greg get in front of the class today. I was so embarrassed
, she says.
And Audrey, I thought Audrey was going to cry when I asked why the girl out there is blue
.

The mitts feel tight around my hands. I set the tray on top of the oven to cool and think of Audrey sprinting toward the water, bone thin, pulling the girl out.

I tug at the oven mitts on my hands and look at her.

Why would you ask such a thing?
I say.

Caroline says,
Because everyone wants to know. Everyone asks about the day she almost drowned
.

Steam rises from my cakes. When I smell something in the air, I rush back to the stove and lift the pot off to keep the chocolate from burning.

I ask,
And what did Mr. Davis say?

Caroline looks at the moon pies that I won't allow her to eat. The filling is nowhere near as white as her teeth—even bright marshmallow filling can't compete with teeth like hers.

He said there was no such thing
, Caroline says, and I smile at her and say,
Smart man
.

Greg comes back in and hovers over the stove. He has always been a hoverer, this boy, always lurking.

One of the cookies falls to the floor. My son—with his gangly arms and freckles the size of quarters, freckles no one in my family has ever had—picks up the broken cookie and takes a bite.

With a mouthful of cookie he says,
Fucking blue girl
, and I say back to him,
Now that is fucking enough
.

I call Irene to ask her what time we should meet, and as I'm dialing I think her name is the name of a song, maybe a song I used to sing. What were the words?
Irene, good-night Irene
—what was so special about Irene?
Something
, I think,
made the Irene in that song special
, but what it was, I can't remember. Maybe the visits to the blue girl are taking my memory. I don't know. I don't remember.

Irene, good-night Irene
, I sing into the phone when she picks up.
What time, Irene?
I ask.

She whispers. I can hardly hear her.

What?
I say.

Same as always
, she says, and hangs up.

Irene's a nervous woman with a nervous daughter and a crazy husband, though I can't blame Audrey for being nervous after saving the girl that day. She's thinner than ever, and once I asked Irene,
Is she eating?
Irene said,
Of course she's eating, I cook for her every night
. It was the wrong question. I knew it as soon as it came out of my mouth. I have that way about me, like Mama did. She once asked a woman at a fruit stand if she shaved her legs above the knee.

So smooth
, she said,
is why I asked
.

Mama
, I told her,
some people don't like observations made about them, even if the observations are nice
. And she said,
What observation? I like things smooth
.

The nights we go to the woods, I miss my mother. Papa not as much, since he was quiet and let Mama do most of the talking, but Mama—I miss her humor, I miss the way she phrased things, even though they embarrassed me as a kid. I even miss her disappointment in me. I wonder what she'd say about this girl who lives in our town out in the woods with an old woman.
No family?
she'd say.
But you feed her. Feeding is good
.

Not even in my imagination do I let her ask me what I feed her.

David's on the couch watching television when it's time to go, belching up my stroganoff.
Tastes even better coming up
, he laughs. I sit on the couch beside him and think of the blond boy who swam after me in the lake and first slipped his fingers inside in a way that made my head fall forward against his chest like I might never be able to lift it again. David, I told myself, slayer of giants. A good name for a man to marry, regardless of the boy who grew inside me who actually made me marry him. Now he owns the kayak rental at the lake and serves the summer people, but that is what marriage will do.

I tell him I have to go. I have to meet the girls to deliver the pies for the bake sale.

Another bake sale?
he asks.

You should know what kind of town this is
, I say.
You grew up here, not me. It's not my fault we're in this fucking town
.