Magnetism Page 22

  They are both looking at me. He says, quietly, ‘A suicide attempt is a very frightening thing in a family.’

  ‘You said it was a gesture,’ she says.

  ‘A failed attempt could be classified as a gesture. It’s hard to determine actual intent. However, we cannot ignore an overdose.’

  ‘I think I’d like it to be a gesture.’

  ‘We can refer to it as a gesture.’ He smiles meaningfully at me. I give him another sort of gesture, under the table.

  ‘These things rarely happen suddenly. Was there a precipitating incident?’

  Mom appears to consider this for a minute. He will be imagining her reflecting about hints she ignored over the course of my childhood, feeling remorseful about her own failings, or my dad’s failings as a parent, or neglect, or a sudden trauma. Perhaps he thinks she is climbing back up the family tree to re-examine her ancestors for familial mental illness. But she’s not. This is the pause and this is the facial expression she uses when she’s about to say, No, I will not accept an exchange. I want a refund, or, No, I cannot help you at the PTA.

  After a while she says, ‘She’s my daughter. I know how she is. She’s always been thoughtful and quiet. This is a blip.’

  ‘She’s acutely depressed and needs treatment.’

  ‘She needs to be free and living her life, doing things, not stuck in here with a bunch of fruitcakes. That’s what’s depressing her. Being where she does not belong.’

  ‘The drugs we have tried have not shifted her mood.’

  ‘Find another pill. One that works. And let her come home.’

  ‘I think that we should talk about another option.’

  She suddenly rises and goes to behind my chair. Hands on my shoulders, she growls at him, ‘What are you thinking of doing to my daughter?’

  ‘A tried and tested treatment that we should consider.’

  ‘I will fight you tooth and nail if you’re thinking what I think you are. Not shock treatment. She is a minor. I do not give permission. It is an assault.’ She is screaming now. ‘I don’t know what Judy Glutzman saw in you, but Judy Glutzman is an idiot. I am not. I will sue you and I will sue this crappy joint right into the gutter if you go anywhere near her precious brain. Don’t think I don’t know. I know about these things.’ She is panting when she finishes. She clutches me to her tightly and I can feel the heat from her body.

  He shakes his head. ‘I can see that this is getting us nowhere,’ he says, and slowly backs out the door, shutting it behind him, leaving us alone.

  I shut my eyes. All I can hear is noises. Everywhere.

  1975

  Whispering Pines

  There is a six-foot rat snake baking in the sun on the middle of the service road that runs beside the pool house in this subdivision. The development is new, like they all are out here. In our case, moving here was nothing to do with urban spread, or (as my friends’ parents complained about) increase in crime and property devaluation as a result of the number of black families moving into the suburbs; our move to Whispering Pines was because Mom just up and listed our house and then sold it. There were vacant units here and we have to live somewhere.

  The townhouse has lots of space inside. My room is on the top floor and big, and a block away there’s a clubhouse for residents of the subdivision with two swimming pools in the pool house, one indoor, one outdoor. But I miss the house I grew up in and I miss the old neighbourhood and my friends, and almost every house in this place, like ours, is rental. Everyone here will be moving on sometime. Us included. Dad still doesn’t want to move to another state, and he hasn’t got another job yet, but we will go. Mom won’t talk about it; they’re not arguing any more, but she won’t take no for an answer. It’ll happen. ‘Getting rid of the house is step one,’ she said. ‘He can get with the programme.’ Once Mom is set on forward motion, nothing can stop her.

  ‘How do you know it’s a rat snake?’ I ask Kelly, who seems to know everything.

  ‘The colour, dummy. Go ahead and stroke it. It’s cool.’ She bends down and pats the snake’s midsection like a person petting a dog.

  ‘Well, sure. That’s because it’s cold-blooded.’

  Just then Rick, the lifeguard, and Darryl, the creepy maintenance guy, come out from the side of the clubhouse. Darryl is the last person I ever want to see.

  ‘She’s scared to touch the snake. It’s non-venomous.’ Kelly says.

  Darryl sniggers when Rick says, ‘I dare you.’ Even though Darryl is there, I’m excited that Rick has noticed me. He’s never spoken to me before today. I decide to do it.

  The snake is not really cold but it feels like solid muscle, strong and thick beneath my hand. The shiny black skin is rough, even though I can’t really see any proper scales. I fix my attention on the small section under my hand. I hear some kids squealing in the pool behind the fence. I stretch my fingers and fix my palm on it. I’ll count ten Mississippis, which I think will be fine for a first effort. Maybe the snake finally feels the pressure because, at seven, it twists suddenly and I jump back.

  They all laugh then Rick goes to fetch a broom. Darryl winks at me like we’re friends or something, which makes me feel sick, and then Kelly and I watch as Rick gently prods and encourages it off the road on to the scrubby grass. We don’t wait around to see it disappear into the woods. Later, after we get out of the pool and Kelly goes home, I go to look where the snake headed for, but it’s so gone, it’s like it was never there.

  The day before yesterday I walked into Dad’s study and thought someone had broken into the house because Dad was supposed to be at work. Then I saw what I thought was a girl with long hair kneeling in front of this man in my dad’s chair. The man turned out to be Dad. I didn’t recognise him at first and I didn’t realise it was even a guy with him there until Darryl looked up when I knocked the trash can over. I stumbled over it as I backed out. Dad grabbed a magazine and tried to cover himself.

  Darryl was there, in our house, with my father, on the floor in front of him.

  ‘You know Darryl,’ Dad said. ‘He’s been doing the grass. It’s perfectly innocent … ’ he called after me.

  I ran down to the clubhouse, and Kelly was there. We got wasted on Quaaludes. She wanted to know what was wrong, and why I’d been running, but there wasn’t anything I could tell her. Before we left, Darryl slunk in to put something away and he sidled over to where we were lying, fully clothed, on the sunbeds by the pool. Everything was happening in slow motion. ‘Hey, sorry,’ he whispered, ‘Forget it, huh?’

  I didn’t answer him, and I wouldn’t look at Dad when I came home. I still can’t speak to him. Later that evening I asked Mom if she knew Darryl was hanging around the house lately. Darryl, the faggy guy with the long blond hair who did the lawns and worked out of the clubhouse. Did she know he was here? Did she know him as well? Or was he just Dad’s friend?

  ‘I don’t know him,’ she said. She slowly shut her eyes and eventually I left the room.

  Rick’s friend Fernando arrives in his pickup. He wants some help. Rick does this when he can. Today he says he’s noticed I never have anything else to do but hang around here, so do I want to come with the two of them? It’s business.

  Fernando waves at Rick from the driver’s seat. I climb up the other side of the pickup then slide over to the middle to make room for Rick.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, but Fernando says, over me, to Rick, ‘Hey, she’s a kid.’

  Rick says to Fernando to shut up. It’s not like that. I’ll be cool.

  Squeezed between the two of them I speak. ‘I’m nearly sixteen. I have a name.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s Jailbait.’ Fernando revs the engine and accelerates up the hill to the highway to take us into the city. Forty minutes later we’re downtown.

  As far as I can tell it’s Rick who is doing all the work. Rick makes the deliveries and collections while Fernando waits in his truck with his arm stretched behind my shoulders on the back of the seat. He taps the fingers
of his left hand on the dashboard. ‘Hate this place,’ Fernando says out the window more than once. I figure it’s best to keep quiet. Even though he’s slight and energetic, from the side view of him I see that his neck has wrinkles. He might be nearer my dad’s age than mine.

  Finally, after the last stop, Fernando relaxes. He puts a tape in the player. He whacks up the sound and sings ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ as we head back. The scenic route, he calls it. We drive through the first of the suburbs on the outskirts of the city, and spread out sound as we wind through roads beside larger houses with wider and wider lawns, then out beyond the empty afternoon roads back towards my subdivision, but before we reach my suburb Fernando takes a sharp left right where St Mark’s Hospital is set back from the road and we head west. I guess this is where he lives.

  Apart from the massive glass coffee table with thick chrome legs there is hardly any furniture in Fernando’s apartment, so Rick and I sit cross-legged on spotless white carpeting and he sits on his black leather chair. Fernando gets Rick to roll a couple of joints while he takes a shower. Rick explains that this is the build-up to him getting paid and we have to be patient. Hardly anyone comes to this place. ‘He trusts me,’ he says. ‘He’ll take us back when all this is done. Won’t take long.’

  When we finally leave, Rick asks if I’m okay and he squeezes my hand.

  His red Mustang is still parked outside the clubhouse. We go to get something to eat. He tells me he loves this car. And, when we get there, that he loves Arby’s. The smell inside is amazing. We sit side by side in a booth. Everything is red.

  ‘My mother is crazy and my father is a big fat liar,’ I say. ‘I can’t tell you about him.’ Rick pats the top of my hand, says he understands, says he knows that parents are always a disappointment. I don’t have to tell him the details. I’m too ashamed to, anyway. Darryl is just a nobody and, even if Rick has to work around him, it’s not like they’re friends. It’s obvious Darryl is a creep. I feel like crying, then Rick says that he believes in me, he knows I will be okay, this is just how it feels to be my age. It’ll all change. I don’t need to be scared.

  Later we find that while we’ve been talking it’s got dark. When he drops me up at our townhouse, he tells me to relax and then he kisses me. It’s like I’m falling in a spiral and it makes me dizzy and breathless. Like I haven’t got any edges. When we stop he says he knows nothing can happen; I’m only a kid. I might be precocious but he’s not going to be stupid.

  Doc, Kelly’s stepfather, runs a diet clinic in a strip mall near the subdivision.

  Doc is not a real doctor, he’s some sort of chiropractor who decided to help fat people. Kelly says his clientele adore him and he can write prescriptions. He’s also always good for money. When we go in, the receptionist knocks on the door to his office and he doesn’t make us wait.

  ‘Hi there, doll,’ he says. Kelly’s long blonde hair falls in front of her left eye. She’s always sweeping it away and she does this now. Then she cups her hand around her mouth and whispers into his ear like she was seven instead of seventeen and then Doc peels off bills in exchange for her kiss on his cheek in his waiting room.

  We’ve been gone minutes but the car is baking when we get back. She turns the engine on with the doors open to get the AC going. ‘Great,’ she says. ‘Funds. Let’s go get some candy and play.’ She laughs.

  Back at Kelly’s house the furniture is big and dark. The TV is always on, which makes you feel like there are people around downstairs, even though it’s only her and me up in her room. She rolls a joint. Her folks don’t mind, she tells me, whatever she does. ‘They’re really cool.’

  Her pointy tongue licks the paper shut; she twists the end delicately. When she smokes she holds it lightly between her thumb and forefinger, like it’s a cigarette holder or something.

  We sit on her bed, backs to the wall, and listen to music. We both think school is pointless. She wants to be a vet. She’ll graduate high school next year. We both don’t want the summer to end even though it will soon be over. I start to notice how much her laugh is like a waterfall so I ask her to laugh again and again.

  When Doc comes home he comes upstairs and right into her room and sits on the floor. He asks for a toke, asks about friends, about boyfriends. He says he can put me on the pill, if I want, that Kelly is already taking it. ‘Oh, Doc,’ she says. ‘Don’t bug her. She’s a kid.’

  ‘No, I’m interested,’ I say.

  There are cat hairs everywhere here. It’s like her whole bedroom is furry. I ask Kelly if she remembers The Cat in the Hat. She laughs again. ‘Because I think I am the fish,’ I say. ‘That’s my problem. I’m the fish. I see everything and no one believes me.’

  Doc gets up off the floor. He leaves the door open, but she bounces off the bed to slam it shut behind him.

  This morning I face six empty boxes stacked in my bedroom. Mom says that they’ve agreed on a house in Phoenix. Dad’s got a job that starts in six weeks and we’ll be moving to Arizona within the month.

  Last night when I put on the halterneck dress to go out with Rick again it made me feel grown-up. I haven’t told my parents about him. Neither one will ask what I’m doing. And, if they ever do ask, I’m learning how to lie.

  Though my dress has been washed a hundred times, a perfume lingers: the smell of the dyes and the patchouli-filled head shop where I’d bought it. Now there are bright purple stains around my neck and shoulders; bruises splodge my arm, one on my breast.

  My outside matches my insides.

  A T-shirt just about covers all the worst love bites. But in the kitchen Mom looks at me sidelong and then decides not to say anything. I think up until the other day we’d hardly spoken for weeks and now we won’t.

  Today Mom is busy stuffing ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper, cinnamon and allspice into an already full container. All the cabinet doors are open and some of the shelves are already empty. I grab a bowl, some Cap’n Crunch and a carton of milk from the refrigerator and go to watch TV while I have my breakfast.

  The phone rings before I’m finished eating. It’s Rick and I tell him I’ve got to pack, there’s stuff I’ve got to do, and he says, lightly, ‘Too bad. Catch you later.’

  Upstairs the cream walls are pristine. My closet doors glide smoothly open and shut. The green carpet still smells of plastic. This room looks exactly the same as when we arrived.

  I stand still and think about Rick’s red Mustang and how far it could take us. I think about my dad and his pitiful red face. My mom and all that anger. I think about what’s happened here, and what it might be like in the new place. I have no choice about anything and I can’t escape. It’s like being on a high sided travelator and unable to turn around or get off.

  Even though the AC is on and I’m not supposed to, I edge along the glass of the window to let some real air in to my room just so I can breathe. Ours is the very end townhouse at the top of the hill, the end of the subdivision. I am very high up here on the top floor. To my right, through the fine mesh of the screen, I see the hodgepodge buildings in timber and stone with matching wrought-iron balcony rails and, below, the green between them. The flat mown lawn runs right to the border of the darkened, uneven wooded area to the left. Suddenly only the white wood windowsill seems solid and I want to rest my head here before I fall.

  The restless tops of the pine trees are murmuring. They tell me that they whisper all night and that I’ve not been listening. I should listen while I have the chance. I think about how we, too, will soon be only ghosts here.

  Nothing is important. Nothing lasts. Nothing is real.

  1974

  Magnetism

  We’ve been driving through the Midwest from south to north for hours and I’m starving. This is not a bad sensation. I’ve learned to love feeling hungry. My stomach is concave and shrinking and every time I stroke my middle this fact pleases me.

  Mom and I had an argument earlier. She wanted me to eat breakfast.

  ‘
You’re always forcing food down my throat. I’m not a baby. I’m going to be fifteen in a matter of weeks,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone’s supposed to eat breakfast. It’s good for you.’

  ‘Who says that? And what do they know? I’m just fine. I have the right to make choices for myself.’ This is the sort of thing she says herself, so she could hardly complain.

  Mom has become very big on equality lately. She asks people in stores how they feel about their work, she yells at the TV when the oppressor persecutes the underdog, cheers at it as if she can be heard when some bad guy in a movie gets his come-uppance. She’s taken to clipping odd articles from the newspaper and putting them on the dinner table for us to read and discuss. Yesterday it was about Nixon’s impeachment. Most of the time I don’t know what to say so I just ask her what she thinks and then don’t listen to her ‘blah, blah, blah’ reply. Dad says that we need to be patient, that she’ll settle down again. I’m not so sure. Not now that she’s decided to leave him.

  She told me that I was going with her on this adventure yesterday and swore me to secrecy. Mom says Dad has some thinking to do and this will help him. He was at work when we left the house. She said we were going to see her oldest friend Charleen, that the trip would do us both good too and Charleen and her haven’t seen each other for years.

  I put on the radio and tune in a local station. She reaches over and clicks it off, then she seems to remember that she’s not like that any more, that we’re equal, and she switches it on again. I tell her thanks because she’s also always saying about how a person needs encouragement, that without encouragement people wither. This makes me think of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz suddenly shrivelling up in hissing smoke, which seems to be what’s happened to Mom’s brains lately, but I think she means what happens when you don’t water plants, which, in fact, she doesn’t. In our house the plants gradually wilt and then turn brown and have to be thrown away.