The Truth About Celia (12 page)

We were eating our sandwiches when I realized something. “Hey, where’s your sister? I think this is the first time I’ve seen you without her.”

He stared into the middle distance for five seconds, ten seconds, twenty, and then dropped the bread crust onto his paper towel, a look of shock washing over his face. His skin was turning the same translucent white as candle wax. “My sister!” he said, and he pushed his chair from the table and turned his head from me and—

And another: It was Oscar Martin’s birthday, and there were ten or twelve of us huddled around the coffee table in his living room, watching as he opened his presents. A Nerf football. A bicycle helmet. An X-wing Fighter video game. I had given him a SuperSoaker water rifle, the kind with the extra storage tank which he had told me he wanted the summer before, rattling on about it whenever our parents took us to the swimming pool: “Man, I wish I had one of those! Nobody could stop me! I’d be invincible! G-doosh!” But one of his aunts, it turned out, had given him one for Christmas, and so, apparently, had one of his uncles, and when he opened it he rolled his eyes and showed it to his mom. “Well, that makes three,” he said, and then: “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Celia.”

After he had opened his presents, during those few shuffling minutes when we were still waiting to see what would happen next, I watched Kristen Lanzetta and Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa touch their fingertips together in a pyramid and say, “Wonder Twin powers,
activate
!” They were the only other girls at the party. I recognized the slogan from a superhero cartoon, and even though I hated superheroes, I asked, “Can I be a Wonder Twin, too?”

“Sorry,” said Andrea, and she rattled the beads on her wrist. “You have to have one of the Wonder Twin bracelets.”

Kristen nodded. “Those are the rules. We can make you our pet monkey, though. Do you want to be our pet monkey?”

I shook my head and looked away. Oscar was tossing his Nerf football into the air and trying to catch it as it fell, but it kept tapping the light fixture and angling off to the side, bobbling around in a heap of wrapping paper and bows and Dixie cups stained with fruit punch. Kid was sitting with his back to the television and paging through one of Oscar’s comic books while his sister slept beside him in her baby carriage. A cartoon was playing, filling the space around his body with a toneless white light. Finally Oscar’s mother said, “Oscar, why don’t you kids play one of the games we talked about?” and Oscar dropped his football and said, “Oh yeah. I forgot what came next,” and announced, “Okay, guys, now we play Stoneface.”

The rules were simple: two of us would stand eye to eye with blank expressions on our faces, and we would try to keep from laughing. The first to crack a smile was the loser. I was going to ask Kristen to be my partner, but before I got the chance she had paired up with Robin Unwer, and Oscar Martin had paired up with David Kuperman, and Andrea Onopa had paired up with William Miller. Kid and I were the only two players left, and though he said he didn’t want to play, he wanted to keep reading his comic book—“Just staring at someone like that . . . I don’t know, I just don’t like it”—I convinced him to join me anyway.

I had played Stoneface before and I knew that the trick was to look directly at one of his eyes—
at,
not
into
—which would dull the expression on his face; otherwise his personality would come teasing and flickering out of him like a flame from under a carpet and I would laugh almost immediately. Also, if I tried to keep a watch on
both
his eyes, or, even worse, on his whole face, I would start to feel my own eyes looking back at me, my own cheeks stretching helplessly into a smile, and I would not be able to stop myself. Within half a minute I found myself laughing anyway, but for the first few seconds I was staring at Kid, I could see a reflection of the room in his right eye, or patches of the room at least—the table, the walls, and the window, but not the VCR or the television; the bookshelves and the carpet, but not the stereo or the artificial houseplant.

When the final round of the game was finished, Oscar gave a box of chocolate-covered cherries to the winner. “Here’s your prize, David, so eat it.” Then he clapped his hands and said, “All right, our next game is going to be Scavenger Hunt. Everybody needs to pick a teammate, and then I’ll hand out the instructions.”

I tugged at the sleeve of Kristen’s purple jacket. “Do you want to try this one together?” I asked.

“Well, I promised Robin I would do everything with her today. But maybe Andrea will be your partner.”

“But Robin was with you last time! It’s not fair,” I said. “How come you never—”

But she interrupted me: “We can’t be partners all the time, you know, Celia,” and she shook her head and took Robin’s hand and said to her, “See, it’s just like I told you. Every single minute of the day.”

I felt a stinging in my eyes, a pulsing heat, and I blinked a few times.

I—

I cannot remember where I was or what I did, how I felt or what I said.

Sometimes I close my eyes, and they all come back to me, my friends and family, not as the people they were in this particular moment or another, when they shared in my life, but in a bundle of their own quirks and habits and eccentricities, as closely connected as a cluster of blackberries. All I have to do is think of them by name.

My mom,
for instance—who played the clarinet, and who would press the bell against my stomach when she came to tuck me in at night, blowing a warm buzz of air through the pipe that made me giggle and twist and squirm. She wore blue jeans and a sweater around the house—or, in the summer, blue jeans and a T-shirt—but occasionally, when we went out to eat, she would wear a wonderful sheer crinkly skirt that made a swishing sound when she walked that I liked to pretend was the ocean, rolling in and away, in and away. She kept a small, square vegetable garden filled with carrots and tomatoes and lettuce. She sang along to the music on the radio, and she always seemed to know all the words. Whenever she heard me talking with my friends about Oscar Martin or William Miller or John Pelevin, she would tell us that we were all
boy crazy.

Kristen Lanzetta
—who had long black hair that had never been cut,
never once, in all her life,
and which she pinned together in the back with a brown and yellow butterfly clip that was shaped like an actual butterfly. I had been friends with her ever since I was a baby, and we knew all the same stories and liked all the same people and invented hiding games, clapping and rhyming games, pony-riding games. She had a collection of plastic rings from the gum machine at the grocery store, and so did I, and we liked to trade them with each other on rainy days: her ruby ring for my diamond, my sapphire for her emerald. She had a cat, Simon, who hated both of us.

Oscar Martin
—who was not only in my class at school but who also lived down the street from me, so that he came over to play with me sometimes even though I was a girl. He had wide clear green eyes, with a comma-shaped flaw of blue in the left one, and in the dream I had, when he kissed me on the lips, his breath had tasted like vanilla wafers. He was the fastest boy in the first grade, and on Track and Field Day he had won three separate races, one of them against the second- and third-graders. When there were no adults around he used words like
“damn”
and
“hell”
and
“sucks,”
and once I had even heard him say
“bitch.”
He was the most popular boy in our class.

Robin Unwer
—who put stickers of unicorns on all her notebooks, and was allergic to peanuts and bee stings, and had a swimming-pool-sized trampoline in her backyard. She liked to ice-skate, and whenever she was in my house she would take her shoes off and slide across the long kitchen floor in only her ankle socks. Sometimes, and more and more often, I saw her whispering at recess with Kristen Lanzetta.

Kid
—who wore dark blue denim overalls and a white button-up shirt, the sleeves of which he rolled to his elbows, and whose sister wore a loose pink sleeper that looked like a pillowcase. He said that he had been living in our neighborhood
as long as
he could remember,
though we had only met him recently, and he moved about so quietly that we never saw him coming or going: he was either there or he wasn’t, like a light switch with only two settings. He walked with a limp in his right leg from a disease he had had when he was smaller—it was not the chicken pox, and it was not the measles, but something I had never heard of called polio, and he was worried that his baby sister was going to catch it, too. I never learned his name.

And there was, of course,
my dad
—who liked to cook and read and stare out the window. Whenever I complained about my chores, he would make up stories about the hardships of his childhood:
When I was your age I had to take fourteen naps a day,
one every hour until it was time for me to go to bed,
or:
When I was
your age I ate nothing but creamed corn, bowl after bowl of it, and if I
didn’t finish every single bite, I would have to take a bath in whatever
was left.
He had broken his arm once, before I was born. He sometimes got headaches. He did not know how to whistle. In the evening he stood talking on the lawn with the real people who were our neighbors, and in the morning he wrote books filled with the imaginary ones who lived only in his head, and at times I think that if I wish or pray or concentrate hard enough, I will be able to tell my story through his hands.

When they disappear, and they always do, I imagine that a thick gray mist has surrounded me, rising from the ground in a thousand ribbons, and I can no longer see them through the haze. I might just as well imagine the opposite—that I am waiting in a park, the sun beating down on my shoulders, and they have run behind a hill or a stand of trees, chasing a leaf of paper that has just now caught the wind. I watched them go, and they will be right back. I could call to them, and I’m certain they would hear me.

There is little to do here but watch and remember.

The day before everything changed began as one of those late winter mornings where the first touch of sunlight melts the frost from the grass and became, as the sun lengthened and took the sky, one of those early spring afternoons where the wind carries the sound of a thousand birds.

It was recess, and I was kicking a trench into the gravel by the merry-go-round, waiting for my turn on the swingset. The older kids were all playing soccer in the parking lot, and around me on the playground were only the kindergartners and the other first-graders, coasting down the slide and climbing up the fireman’s tower. Shocks of grass were pushing up through the gravel, and the first tight honeysuckle buds had appeared along the vine at the back fence. When the recess monitor blew her whistle, the four kids who were on the swings stopped pumping their legs, the two on the low swings skidding to a stop and the two on the high swings making soaring leaps into the gravel. I grabbed hold of the ropes and lifted myself into one of the high swings.

There was nothing I liked better, when I was a girl, than sinking my weight into a swing, feeling the ropes tighten in my hands, and sailing back and forth as high and as fast as I could. As I surged forward, I would stretch myself out as though I were pushing back into a reclining chair, and then, as I dropped back to the ground, I would tuck myself into the narrowest possible ball. It was a continuous fluid motion, almost effortless, and I liked to imagine that I didn’t even have to breathe—that all I had to do was open my mouth and the air would flow into me and drain back out with the force of my swinging. I could see the whole playground from the height of the swingset: the boys climbing on the jungle gym, the girls crawling through the tunnel, the row of houses across the street. Kristen Lanzetta was sitting cross-legged on top of the picnic table with Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa. Oscar Martin was having a gravel war with one of the other boys in our class, hiding behind the fireman’s tower so that the recess monitor wouldn’t see them. When the whistle shrilled, I let go of the ropes and jumped to the ground.

I landed crookedly, wrenching one of my knees, and I felt a queer tightness in my leg when I began to walk. I hitched over to the picnic table where Kristen was talking with Robin and Andrea.

Their voices fell away, and Andrea looked me up and down. “Why on earth are you walking like that?”

“I don’t know. I think I hurt my leg.”

“Well, stop it,” she said. “You look like a retard.”

I hoisted myself gently onto the picnic table, holding my leg rigid so that it wouldn’t jar against the corner. “What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Talking,” Andrea said.

“About what?”

“About you. We all think you’re a retard. We took a vote.”

Kristen cocked her finger and gave Andrea a hard thump on the ridge of her knuckles. A small red mark blossomed there. “Cut it out, Andrea,” she said, and she slid over so that I could squeeze into the circle. “We were talking about who we wanted to be our boyfriends. I picked Nathan.”

“And I picked William,” Andrea said.

“And I picked Oscar,” Robin said.

I remembered the dream I had had about Oscar, the one where he kissed me and asked if he could be my boyfriend. Ever since then I had been a different person around him. His seat was right across the aisle from mine, and when we lay with our heads on our desks during Quiet Time I would stare at the back of his neck from behind the covering of my hair, until one day he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, wadded it into a ball, and popped it across the aisle to me. “Would you knock it off?” it read. My dreams seemed as rich to me as my life (though now I remember very few of them), and I was always a bit surprised when somebody I had dreamed about behaved as though nothing had happened.