Lila Blue (2 page)

"You're putting me on a
bus?"

"You have to help me here, baby.
I need to change, and this is my chance. Please try? For me?"

What choice did I have? What
choices do kids ever have?

I stared out the bus window at Lake
Shasta in the afternoon light. Imagine forty giants kneeling in a circle gouging
a deep sloppy hole in red dirt and then filling it partway with muddy water.
That's Lake Shasta for you. Not pretty.

This was not how I planned to spend
my twelfth birthday. Not that I had planned anything, but I certainly never
imagined being banished to the wilderness all by myself. I felt like Hansel and
Gretel, only worse. At least they had each other. I wished I could talk to
Shelly. She always made me laugh.

Then I remembered Shelly's gift,
the only real birthday present I’d received this year. I took it out of my
backpack, where I had kept its gold wrapping paper safe by folding my
sweatshirt carefully around it. While I unwrapped my gift, the gold paper
crinkled enough to attract the attention of the bus driver, who glanced at me
and smiled when he saw what I was doing. Everybody loves presents.

The gift turned out to be some kind
of book, covered in green brocade satin, luxuriously soft. Inside was a blank
journal with creamy heavy paper. The book was just the sort of elegant gift
Shelly always chose for me. There was no card, but she'd inscribed it on the
first page,
Happy Birthday, Sandy. Write all the most delicious words of the
summer in here. All my love, Shelly.   PS  Remember,“Girls Just Wanna Have
Fun!”

I smiled, remembering how we’d sing
along with Cyndi Lauper’s newest hit songs on the radio, not caring what anyone
else thought about us when we were together. Having a friend like Shelly made
everything easier.

I dug a pen out of the front pocket
of my backpack and wrote underneath her inscription,
I love you, Shelly.
Thank you for the perfect birthday present.  PS  I'm sitting on a Greyhound bus
on my way to Oregon. Help! This is NOT my idea of Fun.
Then I closed the
lovely book, wrapped the gold paper around it again, and found a safe spot for
it in an inside compartment of my backpack.

While paying for a ham sandwich
during the lunch stop, I found the card to Lila's shop in my jeans’ pocket.
Back on the bus, I used it for a bookmark in the dictionary I carried with me
at all times.

The dictionary has always been my
favorite book. In my suitcase I carried a hardcover college edition. In my
backpack I had a pocket edition nearly as thick as it was wide. I'd put clear
tape all over the cover to reinforce it, but the poor thing was frazzled from
constant use.

Ever since Grandma Betty gave me a
picture dictionary when I was four, I've loved words. I never worry about being
bored if I have a dictionary. I guess I'm addicted to it the way some people
are to crossword puzzles or to those tiny breath mints. I open it anywhere and
study the first word my eyes land on. I flit around from page to page tasting
words, the way bees visit blossoms on apple trees. Some words are sweet, like
memorabilia
and
willowware
, and I say them over and over in my head or out loud if
I'm alone. Others are bitter or salty. Or sour, like
propitiate.
Or
sharp, like
cataract
. I feast on words. That's what Shelly meant by
delicious
words
of the summer.

The dictionary is guaranteed to
calm me down and help me get through hard times, and there had been more hard
times than ever lately.

Janice wasn't doing so well. She
hadn't smiled in weeks. She'd stopped going out with her girlfriends, and her
last boyfriend had gotten mean to her and too interested in me. Three
babysitters in a row quit because my mother came home so late, and she'd run
out of ideas for where to get new sitters. I told her I was old enough to look
out for myself, but she felt too guilty to leave me alone.

The last two sitters had been
useless. They should have paid
me
for doing their homework. How do some
girls get to be seventeen without developing brains?

I was worried about my mother, and
I was worried about me. She was all I had, and she was in trouble.

Grandma Betty couldn't help us that
much, because she had two other daughters with all their kids who used her
house for a motel. Her fourth husband, Hugh, was tolerant, but he limited
houseguests to one batch at a time, and Janice's sisters always seemed needier
than we did.

So I guess I should have seen this
coming, but you don't know how bad something is when you are smack in the
middle of it. Like a bad smell that you've been breathing in day and night. You
don't know how horrid it is until you've been in fresh air long enough to
regain your senses. Then you walk back in and, whoa, this place really stinks.

Somewhere around the Oregon border,
after all that scenery and all those passengers embarking and debarking, I
thought, "Whoa, my life really stinks."

I spent a few miles wallowing in
that realization, and then I became curious about what was coming up next.

I studied the white business card
that was the ticket to my future. On it was a tiny picture of my newly
discovered grandmother. Lila looked old. Her white hair was braided on her head
like a crown and it had red flowers stuck in it. My grandma Betty dyed her hair
black, the way my mother did, so I was not used to white-haired relatives. I
wondered how many other ways Lila would surprise me.

Her card had raised blue lettering
that said,
Carefree styles for the whole family at Lila Blue's Family
Barbershop, Highway 101, Rainbow Village, Oregon.

"She will pick you up"
were my mother's parting words. I sure hoped Janice had remembered to tell Lila
I was coming.

The rain started at the Oregon
border and didn't show any signs of letting up. The whole world turned gray and
black. In some places the rain was so heavy the bus's giant windshield wipers
could not keep up with it. I strained to help the driver see until I gave
myself a headache and had to close my eyes and try to rest. I snuggled in the
hooded sweatshirt from my backpack, leaned against the cold bus window, and listened
to the tires splash rooster tails of water over everything in our path.

Jane and I had to change buses in
Corvallis to get to the coast highway. She was still in horrid condition when I
woke her up and gathered her belongings for the transfer. If my mother
considered Jane a reliable person, she was delusional.

After I'd ridden a full twelve
hours, I finally limped off the bus at the Rainbow Village stop, which turned
out to be the village post office, which was closed. By then the clouds had
rained themselves out, so even though I was tired and crumpled, at least I
wasn't sopping wet when Lila found me.

She looked exactly like the little
picture on her card, red flowers tucked in her white braided crown and all. In
fact, she looked like Santa's grandma, not mine.

Grandma Betty was an older version
of Janice, only with better tastes in shoes and men. Lila Blue was something
new. She wore red shoes and socks, a baggy red sweater, and a long black denim
skirt.

"Cassandra," she cried,
circling me in a hug that smelled of carnations and fresh ocean air. "And
so beautiful," she said, holding me away from her to study my face.
"Simply beautiful. I'm so happy you are here. So grateful."

She hugged me again, and for some
reason, tears ran down my face and dripped on her sweater. I wasn't crying. The
tears must have been from exhaustion.

"I'm all muggy and
smelly," I said, pushing away from her. My mom hadn't hugged me since I'd
started getting breasts. It felt weird to have someone touch me.

Lila pulled my grimy hands up to
her face and kissed the tops of them. "Well that's so easily
remedied," she said. "You're here now. That's what matters."

She dropped my hands and marched
over to get my bag. The suitcase had tiny wheels on the bottom, but when we
tried to pull it along the wet sidewalk, it kept falling over. Finally Lila
lifted it and marched along to her little red Honda car. She was strong for an
old lady.

At least her house wasn't red. It
was made out of big, smooth gray rocks, and it perched at the top of a hill
overlooking the ocean. When we walked into the kitchen from the garage, my
mouth dropped open.

A huge picture window, practically
the whole wall was glass, looked over the cliff to white sand, waves breaking
on a rift of black rock, and gray ocean out as far as I could see. A high
blanket of clouds covered the sky but didn't obscure the bright horizon, where
the ocean made a crisp, dark line miles away on the edge of the world.

I had never imaged a house could
have that kind of view. It made me dizzy, and I grabbed the back of a padded
wooden chair tucked in under the kitchen table.

"Sorry," Lila said.
"The floor slopes downhill in the kitchen, so everyone feels woozy at
first."

I nodded, gulped, and looked around
slowly, trying to keep the world from spinning. When I stood still, my body
remembered the motion of the bus, which didn't help. While I clung to the back
of the chair, Lila lugged my suitcase and backpack into the living room.

"You have a choice of
rooms," she said when she returned. "We can fix you up in my sewing
room or you can have the middle bunk in the Crow's Nest upstairs." She
seemed so happy and relaxed that I took a deep breath.

"Take your time," she
said, prying my hands off the back of the chair and pulling it out for me to
sit down. I sat and closed my eyes to stop the sensation of being on a ship
bobbing in the sea. I don't know what I expected, but this wasn't it.

I opened my eyes enough to peek
through the archway into the living room. I could tell by all the light it had
a huge ocean-view window too. Beyond the back of the couch, which sat in the
middle of the room, I saw a piano and a small desk with a curtained window
above it. I was curious about the rest of the house, but too weary and wobbly
to investigate.

My mother's idea of home decorating
was white leather sofas, glass tables, and pink satin pillows. I didn't mind
that, really, although I would never choose it for myself. The part that
bothered me was she liked to top it all off with some grinning boyfriend whose
only chore was to flatter her. She was a bartender, so what did I expect? When
I suggested she might like to try working in a bank or maybe a dress shop, she
said the tips were good at the club and she liked the hours. Right.

I was glad there wasn't the
slightest whiff of leather in Lila's house so far. It smelled of salty sea air,
vanilla, and something fruity and sweet.

With my eyes closed, I stayed
still, breathing. The roar of the ocean, a constant crash swoosh crash swoosh,
was punctuated by seagulls crying. I clung to the table, feeling adrift.

"You poor thing," Lila
said, sitting down beside me. "Here, drink this. Peppermint tea and honey,
to calm the Nellies." She guided my hands around a heavy mug of fragrant
tea, and the smell of it did help. After a while I was able to sip the tea,
breathe normally, and open my eyes all the way. Then I felt incredibly tired.

"Which first," she said,
"shower, sleep, or supper?" Then she laughed at herself and said,
"My, that was sibilant, yes?"

"The sss sounds," I said,
nodding, "Yes."

"Ooh, another word person in
the family. Excellent!" She clapped her hands and bounced up and down like
a child.

"Shower," I said.

"Perfect," she said, and
she brought me a big shopping bag full of wrapped birthday presents. Even
though I was tired, it was fun to open the gifts, which were wrapped in layers
of white tissue paper and bright red ribbons. The first gift was a soft,
beautiful white flannel nightgown with ruffles on it. Next was a fluffy long
blue robe that felt warm and luxurious. And the last package was a pair of
fuzzy blue slippers to match the robe. These gifts were so pretty I felt
ashamed of my big pity party on the bus earlier.

Lila remembered my birthday. And
she went out of her way to make it special. I thanked her, and she carried the
presents to the bathroom to get out towels for me. I followed her, and she
showed me where everything was and told me to take my time.

Before I stepped into the shower, I
tried on the slippers to see if they fit. They fit perfectly, which was truly
amazing because I had already passed through the Big Foot stage of puberty.

First came the long arms and legs,
then sore little breasts, then zits and shiny skin and stinky armpits, then
little curly hairs popping out overnight in strange places, then big feet. All
my body parts seemed to have agendas of their own. I was completely at their
mercy.

I even had my period, once, kind
of, enough to be yucky. When I had shown my mom my underpants, she'd said,
"Great! My daughter has the curse at eleven." She'd wadded up my
underwear and thrown them in the trash. "Don't I have enough trouble
taking care of you without worrying about this too?"

She'd pushed me in the bathroom and
handed me a box of sanitary napkins and a box of tampons. "Read the
directions," she'd said. "You'll live." Then she'd closed the
door on me.

The nurse at school had called menstruation
"our monthly visitor."

I had memorized the textbook
diagram of the vulva and vagina and uterus and ovaries and fallopian tubes, but
all that knowledge did nothing to ease my loneliness as I sat on the toilet and
read all the directions on the blue and white boxes of sanitary products.

When I emerged from that bathroom,
I knew what it meant to be unclean.

Now, less than a month later, I was
six hundred miles away from home in the bathroom of a grandma I never knew I
had. The sturdy grab bar in Lila's tub helped me survive my first shower in
Oregon. Every time I was in danger of passing out from exhaustion and fragrant
steam, I clutched it, closed my eyes, and took three deep breaths.