The Lonely (4 page)

Easter Story

One morning a bell rang from downstairs in such a strange and ferocious way that it woke Easter right up. She could tell from the light through her curtains that she'd slept in later than usual, which made sense considering the fact that she blew right through bedtime last night watching movies on the couch alone, secretly, while everyone else was asleep.

She'd watched a movie about a girl who woke up one morning beneath different sheets in a different bed in a different room in a different house, with a different family carrying out a most unfamiliar morning shuffle downstairs. Her whole life before that moment might have been a dream, a very real dream, but now she was waking up to her actual life. Easter dragged a hand along her face to see if the same thing had happened to her. Same face, same sleep smell between the sheets. She could feel the familiarity as plainly as a burn.

That bell was very different, though. Not only unique to her regular mornings, but also a strange way for a bell to sound. It didn't sound like it was in someone's hand, a wrist shaking ever so slightly, the sound of the bell filling the air like incense from a thurible, but rather this bell was being banged against something hard. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

She walked to the stairs in socked feet, avoiding the creaks in the hardwood known well to her and even better to Julia. She sat slowly down on the middle step and peeked through the vertical dowels beneath the banister, her arms and feet all tucked in the way she imagined a spy's would be if they were peeking in on someone.

The Mother appeared to have attached a bell to the basement doorframe and was now testing it vigorously, bringing the door back and forth and back and forth and back and forth so that it sounded more like a gong than a bell. Her hair looked sweaty, her head warm, and Easter thought about the way The Mother never touched her face with her hands. She was all forearm and wrist when it came to daubing up beads of sweat and swiping hair from her face.

She always did the same for Easter, too; no hands on the face, just soft inner wrists and arms because, as Easter knew very well, The Mother believed that touching your face would cause unsightly blemishes to sprout. And The Mother didn't want Easter to have unsightly blemishes just as much as she didn't want herself to have unsightly blemishes, because Easter knew that The Mother wanted only good things for her and loved her more than she loved herself. Wanted her as beautiful and happy and perfect as she could be, even though she was very bad at making Easter feel beautiful and happy and perfect.

Easter sometimes felt like a cherished heirloom, a vase sitting in the middle of the table, there but not really there, kept clean and filled with lovely living flowers, watered and tended to, but also ignored. Listening and seeing everything in secret.

Easter watched. The Mother struggled with the nails lying on the floor. They rolled along the circular path set out by the size of their heads, little synchronized swimmers evading her grasp. She wore a long white T-shirt and jeans. Easter knew they were her most “hard working” jeans. And when The Mother got up for a glass of water, Easter noticed that she'd even tied her running shoes extra tight in readiness for a morning all full of physical labor.

Easter knew The Mother so well. Knew everything she'd do and say before she did and said it. Because The Mother had passed The Lonely along to Easter, the same Lonely but different because it had moved, contracted differently: the way a secret whispered into ears and through mouths mutates; a disease from genome to genome.

The Mother returned to the doorframe and began testing the bell again. Easter rose from the stairs and approached her with her hands over her ears.

“What are you doing?” she yelled.

The Mother suddenly stopped and Easter saw beads of sweat on her upper lip. She daubed them delicately in her soft, wristly way, her eyes red-rimmed and wide.

“Oh hello, honey. I'm putting bells on the doors.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know, I'm tired of not knowing where you people are all the time.”

“So you're putting bells on the doors?”

“That's right.”

“So you know where we are.”

“Yes dear.”

“Like a jingly collar?”

“What's that?” Her voice hit a skip somewhere in the middle.

“Like a jingly collar on a cat.”

Her eyes grew even wider and she might have nodded a bit, but it was hard to tell. She turned around again and resumed banging the bell against the door.

Easter turned around and thought about bells on collars. What those bells might do to a person or a cat, jingling all the time, some times more than others. She pulled a bowl from the cupboard, a spoon from the drawer.

And then she banged them together to get The Mother's attention again. The Mother jumped and landed on a couple of her tiny rolling nails. Easter imagined them squishing like bugs.

“Easter! What is it?”

“Well, I was just getting my cereal here and had a question.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to install those on every door?”

“Every door.”

“Even my door?”

“Even your door, Easter.”

“I don't know if I like that.”

“How come, honey?”

“I don't know.”

The Mother frowned and gave Easter a kiss on the cheek.

Easter vowed then in her head to never attach a bell to an animal's collar, because she decided that hearing a bell all the time, every time you did something, loud around your neck near your ears, keeping you from doing things that you wanted to do, forcing you to do things you didn't, making you like certain things not because you really liked them but because they wouldn't make the sound of the bell, or like them because they would make the sound of the bell, would be just awful.

The Mother, with bells inflating her pockets now, proceeded to pinch the little nails from the floor and into her palm and make her way up the stairs to start on the bedrooms (she also managed give Easter another kiss, this time on the forehead). Easter promptly wiped the kiss off and moved to the fridge to get the milk for her cereal.

And the bell rang often. So often that she'd even stopped noticing. So often that instead of waking her up, the bells simply tucked themselves neatly into her dreams and in the morning she had no memory of their ringing at all.

The Tooth house—Bathroom

Cold against my cheek, my breath showed itself on the mirror. Because sometimes I put my face against it. The side of my face. So my eyelashes swept and folded as I blinked. My nostrils puffed smaller prints of breath on the mirror, a glimpse into the world of things not seen, like water splashed against the invisible man. I'm not sure why I did this, but I did. The bathroom was the place to do strange, socially unacceptable things. And I think that pushing your face up hard against the mirror would be as socially unacceptable in a public bathroom as not closing the door to take a crap. So I did it in the bathroom, and not in my bedroom or the hallway or the living room or the kitchen.

The bathroom. Small and white and sanitary.

A tub, occupied for hours by The Mother on Sunday nights.

A toilet over which I'd once found a dead Julia, her pressed-against-the-seat-cheek prying open already-gray lips, peeking tongue still pink, one arm stiff and planked over the open bowl as though she were trying to hide what was inside, bare legs tucked neatly so that her snow-white toes made a string of pearls beneath her.

A sink that Julia had once spit bits of teeth into for weeks for no good reason, then choked on one night in her sleep, coughing white puffs of powder-pulverized tooth into the air while I watched, helpless, next to her in bed.

She'd been dying like this, over and over again since we were young. Or I was young. I don't remember Julia ever being as young as I was the first time I watched her die. Crushed to death by the contents Phyllis's basement.

Across from the toilet and the sink: a little chest of drawers with no rhyme or reason. Half-empty tubes of things rarely used mingled with loose, gifted bath beads. Snapped elastics moved like trapped worms when you picked them up. Bobby pins in every size; worn, thumb-smudged business cards; for a while a plastic knife and fork.

And between the toilet and chest of drawers: me, sitting with my legs crossed in front of the mirror, which hung from the door. I moved my face back, off the mirror, and examined what I'd left behind. Wetness. Recent. A few moments ago an oyster was sucked from its shell and now that shell looked the same as what I'd left on this mirror.

What I saw as I pulled my face back was as terrible and disgusting as an oyster.

Because my name is Easter and I have a terrible and disgusting face.

It really is the most terrible and disgusting face. Even if I tried my hardest I couldn't come up with a more frustrating set of features. Every little thing about it is just the tiniest bit off. I don't have any glaringly obvious issues like a huge birthmark or sideburns or a witch nose, but I would almost prefer something like that to the collection of irritating little problems that make up this
thing
I have to put between myself and the world.

My nose is exactly three millimeters too wide for my face. Either that or the little marble end of my nose is too small, which makes my nostrils just too bulbous, like I stuffed invisible wine corks in them or something. It's really hard to tell without a second opinion. Which I would never ask for. I wouldn't want people to think that I cared so much.

I have about thirty too many freckles. In other words, just enough for it to stop being cute.

My forehead is roughly half an inch too long, and it gives my whole face the bottom-heavy look of a soaking wet
wool coat. Picture a too-freckly Richard Nixon with long brown hair. But uglier. There you go. That's me. My face is also about an inch too wide, and when I stare at myself for a
really
long time, I stop looking human. The way that a word starts to seem unreal as you repeat it, my face unravels.

My mouth is all right, but still suffering from some decidedly unfixable flaws. At first you might think that the main problem is that it's too wide, and of course you would be right. My mouth is quite easily too wide for my face. When I smile it extends even past my horribly round eyes. But that isn't the real issue, and it was only after years of examination that I realized what the actual problem was. It's that my Cupid's bow is less of a little dip and more of a greedy scoop.

My jaw is wide, but my chin is small, and it makes my whole head look like there is far too much face occupying it. Which is of course exaggerated by the fact that my head is the size and shape of an overripe picnic watermelon. At first glance I probably just look like a face with legs.

My eyes are a serious problem too. The shape of golf balls and a dull greeny blue. Like the Alkylphenol River, a small body of water named after the most concentrated chemical compound found within it, or perhaps the name of the native tribe that originally lived around there. I can never remember. Either way, these eyes are the color of someone who has frozen to death. In the Alkylphenol River. And was finally found, weeks later, with the spring thaw.

So that's what I'm working with in this world. My face, like a bad logo, holding me back from being as successful, or in this case as happy, as I knew I could be.

Five Days with Phyllis the Fucking Bitch

The first time we ever went to Phyllis's house, we had to stay there for five whole days. If we'd had a friend we could have stayed at her house, said The Father when I wouldn't stop crying about it. I remember the house looked surprisingly ticklish. Surprising because it was strange that a house should look ticklish at all, but also because Phyllis was such a nasty old bitch that I couldn't imagine the house had any reason to feel tickled.

We expected it to be yellow and brown and rotting: bricks like dead teeth, floors weak as wet toilet paper, amnion of dust wrapping up every chair and carpet and cutting board.

But it turned out that wasn't the case. There were no bricks at all but clean blue panels that rippled along the sides. A narrow wrap-around porch grabbed around the middle like a one-armed hug. And succulents, a wadded mass of succulents, billowing from dark soil against the covered section of the porch. The front lawn glowed like a million test tubes of radioactive goo.

She would sit on her porch and watch people admire the lawn as they passed by. Her legs crossed at the ankles, appearing smooth and mercifully unscathed by veins beneath the ruse of the too-tan nylons she clipped to some unimaginable device beneath her skirt. She seemed to have an endlessly refreshed supply of those too-tan nylons. A smartly pressed white shirt too unbuttoned, her hair up and sprayed stiff like a character from Clue.

Periodically she would stand up, remove the cushion from her seat, and use it to protect her nylons from the concrete when she kneeled down and examined her blades of grass, which were as straight and erect as the hair on a soldier's head.

When we first approached her, she was waiting for us on the porch. I was hanging off The Mother's arm, my small red suitcase bouncing behind me, chipping into the edge of her army of green-haired soldiers. She stood up suddenly, the teacup in her lap tumbling down the front of her skirt and performing a loud pirouette on the porch before it came to a complete stop.

“Easter, for god's sake, would you quit dragging that bag? Lift it, girl, use your arms! You're going to gouge a hole in my lawn!”

The Mother stopped abruptly and picked up my bag with her other arm. I clung to her tighter.

“You should let her do that herself.” Phyllis picked up the teacup from the porch as she continued. “She's got two working arms, doesn't she?” She placed the teacup on a small round table next to her chair. “She knows what to do.”

Then she pulled an eyebrow up ever so slightly.

For Phyllis to even attempt to move an eyebrow indicated a depth of seriousness I'd not yet encountered. The Mother seemed to swallow the last millisecond of time on earth, reversing it, like how a videotape jerks backward when it's paused. The suitcase was suddenly back in my hand again and The Mother spoke to me through a forced smile: “Be careful, honey.” We started to walk again. I did my best to control the hair-trigger plastic wheels but it was hard.

“Sorry, Mom. Did you stain your skirt?”

The Mother was always apologizing to Phyllis the Fucking Bitch.

“No, I don't think so,” Phyllis replied.

And she got a funny look on her face, like The Mother should have known that already. Phyllis never stains her clothes because all she consumes after two o'clock p.m. is hamster-sized sips of vodka.

“Well, sorry anyway.”

“It's fine, dear.”

All the while I'd been pulling my unpredictable suitcase as slowly as possible, trying my best not to touch Phyllis's lawn, the flat green beast seeming to snarl at me whenever I moved too close for comfort. Tiny steps, as slowly as possible, inch by inch, wormlike, the sound of the wheels thundered like an old engine idling.

Phyllis and The Mother watched silently with widening eyes until The Mother gave my arm a little tug and laughed nervously and said, “Come on, dear, we haven't got all day.” But I couldn't make myself go any faster. I had to be as careful as possible.

The Mother, forcing laughter, grabbed my suitcase again and pulled me up to the steps quickly. Then she said to Phyllis,

“So we'll be back on Friday night.”

“I know, I know, you've told me a thousand times now, dear. It's not like I'm going to forget an event that I'll likely be looking forward to in half an hour.”

“Don't talk like that, Mom. She's not going to bug you. And you can just let her do whatever she wants, okay? She's not the kind of kid to take advantage.”

“I know. She's a very good girl. Go.”

“All right.”

The Mother squatted down, my fingers still suctioned to her cool white arm.

“Easter. Let go.”

I let go of her and a fat tear rolled down my cheek.

“What's the matter, Easter? It better not be that you have to stay with your grandmother, because if it is, I think I'm going to lose it.”

“You can't
leave
me with her, Mom. You can't. She hates me.”

I tried to control my volume so that Phyllis couldn't hear, but the tears made it very difficult, forcing my voice up into shrillness as unpredictably as my suitcase moved over the bumpy walkway.

The Mother stroked the hair from my hot face and held it behind me in a ponytail. Let cool air onto the back of my neck and through perfectly puckered lips blew a stream of chilled breath over my face, bringing creaminess back into the angry red blotches. She said,

“Look, I'm sorry, Easter. She doesn't hate you. She's just not good at making you think otherwise. I know this might seem awful right now, but I promise the next five days will fly by. And when we get back, we'll buy you something. Whatever you want.”

“A dog?” I asked in my hissy whisper.

“Anything but a dog.”

“A pool?”

“Anything but a dog or a pool.”

I crossed my arms and entered hot-face-first into a full-on skulk. The Mother stood up, kissed the top of my head, and trotted to the car. She reached over The Father and gave the horn two cheerful honks and they motored quickly down the street and out of sight. Phyllis the Fucking Bitch walked up behind me and her shadow swallowed me whole.

The sound of a screen door creaking caused us both to look up and see Phyllis's neighbor emerge from his front door. He wore a blue shirt with a stiff collar and his hands had a thin, lettuce-like quality to them that made me feel queasy. The sun bounced off his bald head and his steadily darkening transition lenses. Short, wired frame and a mouth that moved as slightly as a sphincter.

“Hello, Phyllis! Who've you got there?” blew out of his mouth.

I imagined his breath and suppressed a gag.

“Hello, Norman. This is my granddaughter. Her name is Easter, don't ask me why.”

Norman didn't seem to notice Phyllis's unnecessary jab at a helpless kid. He kept his eyes on her and smiled. It was mostly gum. Weak-looking teeth sprouted like an afterthought at the bottom.

“Hello, Easter.”

“Hi,” I mumbled.

I looked up at Phyllis to indicate that we should make our escape into the house but she was leaned over backward, her skirt pulled up high as she fiddled with a run in the thigh of her nylons. Or perhaps that unimaginable device that held them up had malfunctioned. Norman was watching her hungrily, lowering both of his crisp hands into his pockets and bringing his bottom lip up over the top one, over and over again in a slow unconscious way.

“Have you been using any of that fertilizer, Phyllis?” he finally hollered, moving his fingers around behind the pleats of his khakis.

The sound of her name broke Phyllis from that momentary fascination with her snagged nylons.

“What's that, Norman?”

“I was just wondering if you'd used any of my fertilizer yet?” he repeated anxiously.

“Oh, no, Norman. I think I'm doing just fine without your fertilizer. But thanks for leaving it in my sun porch. It was lovely to walk in to the smell of hot shit that morning.”

Norman's smile transformed into a frown. His hands stopped moving.

“Oh,” he said, “right. Well, I'm sorry, but it looked like your lawn could use the nourishment.”

He removed his hands from his pockets and stood stiff-armed and foolish-feeling. Phyllis let the last drops of unspilled vodka slide into her mouth from the teacup and then herded me with the back of her hand up the walk, onto her porch, and through the front door.

“Goodbye, Norman,” she replied just before the screen closed shut.

The inside of her house looked like the inside of any other house, except that it smelled like an old silverware drawer and there seemed to be an inexplicable breeze trapped inside, fondling the tassels on the pillows in the living room and squeezing the slightest tinkling sound from between the champagne-colored crystals on a chandelier that hung in the foyer. I don't think that Phyllis noticed the breeze anymore. It swirled around her, bounced off her decorative plates, wove around the banister, all without her so much as batting an eyelash.

Her floors were nothing like wet toilet paper. They were hardwood with a perfectly shaped red rug running through every hallway and up the stairs and expanding to cover each room except for the bedrooms, which contained thick, swampy carpets of various colors that sucked on your feet as you walked.

There wasn't an amnion of dust covering everything up, but I'm sure that it was because it would be impossible for it to settle with that trapped breeze bouncing around all the time like a rambunctious pet.

Phyllis took us up the red-carpet stairs gesturing toward rooms and objects and saying things like “towel cupboard” and “finicky flusher.” We started down a long hallway that ended at a brown door. The red carpet was even softer than it looked and impressed beneath my warm, socked feet.

“Well, this is your room. I hope you find it comfort-
able, dear.”

I looked up at her.

“Go ahead, open the door.”

So I did.

Inside was a double bed, with a pilled orange blanket on top of it that she'd tucked between the mattress and the box spring so the whole thing looked like a giant shoebox.

A large, cream-colored radiator with diagonal slats in it like a garden fence lined the far wall of the room, and on top of it spread a vast collection of framed photographs, some as big as doormats, others smaller, like the kinds of pictures that people keep in their wallet accordions.

Most of the pictures were of people that we'd never seen before: a pair of men in neat white tuxedos, standing on a cruise ship with life preservers around their necks like leis and short glasses in their hands. Their throats were bloated like a pair of warbling frogs and big smiles distorted their faces. Behind that, a picture of a woman holding together a thick orange coat with one elegantly clasped hand. She had short hair and windblown cheeks that were squeezing her mouth into a sort of straight-across smile. A blurry city behind her. Beside that picture, a man dressed up as a colonial general, complete with oversized elephant gun. A proud-looking pose: one fist on his waist, one foot on a woman dressed up like a tiger. She lay on the floor next to him with a face mocking death, two hands mimicking claws. Purple and black streamers hung behind them while a cauldron-shaped fondue pot bubbled to the right.

And
there
was a picture of The Mother. At the zoo. Her hair was long and her cheeks were pinched with youth and the sun. A fat brown snake hung over her shoulders and she smiled at the camera. In the background you could just make out the fuzzy shapes of other young girls with bashful boyfriends to take their portraits with a snake.

The walls of the room were lined with floral-patterned wallpaper, predominantly green, that had suffered and bubbled from years of damp winters and humid summers. The red-runner carpet became a green carpet in this room and had sucked up our feet to the ankles.

“Is this all right then?” Phyllis asked.

“Yeah.”

But of course it wasn't. Nothing was going to be all right until I got to go home.

“Good. Well, I'll be around. I like to sit on the porch most of the time. Think about the ways I could get some poison into Norman's food.”

She waited for me to laugh, so I did.

“All right, dear, dinner is usually at seven or so. But I guess you probably ate before you came.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, dinner is at seven most nights, anyway.”

“Thanks, Grandma.”

I think I really was sinking into the floor. Should I tell someone about this? The carpet was going to eat my knees if I didn't take action and move. So I moved. I turned and sat on the bed, pulling my feet up quick to cross my legs. Phyllis took that as her hint to leave.

“Well, have fun then,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Julia had already made herself comfortable on the other side of our bed.

“You'd think the old bitch could give us each a room. This place is certainly big enough.”

“I'm glad I'm not alone.”

“You're such a baby Easter.”

“I am not, Julia. I know that you're glad, too; you just won't admit it.”

Julia rolled over on to her side and I lay down too. The ceiling was spackled and little drips hung stiff, in mid-drop, like on the walls of a cave. Itty bitty stalagmites. I closed my eyes and imagined myself to be as still as one of those drops. Stopped in my tracks, flash frozen. Maybe those little drips were still moving but they were just going so slowly that no one could see. Something small inside of them that still crawls forward, that's still as alive as I am. And they live their whole lives in that small-moving something.

Maybe to someone bigger and faster, I'm barely moving. There's someone watching me, thinking that I'm still as a stalagmite, that I'm a figurine, but I'm not. There is something still alive in me. I began to hear the wet, dripping sounds of a cave echoing through the room. Cold, stagnant, shallow breath. Air like a vacuum, anxious to crack. I should really let Phyllis's breeze in here. This cavernous air would be cleared out in no time. But I couldn't move. I was as still as those frozen drips above my head. And before I knew it, I was asleep.