Rouge(97)

* * *




Four times the flies darken the window. Four times the river turns the color of mud-blood. Four times the world turns the color of Mother and melts away again. And then the buds are on the branches, and they give way to green leaves. I’m fourteen years old going on fifteen in three weeks. I’m sitting with Grand-Maman in her bedroom watching Wheel of Fortune, watching the rickety wheel turn and turn. I’ve made us dinner. I know exactly what jars to use now. Spring is in the window. Looking out at the blue sky over the drab apartment buildings, I feel alive and awake in a way I never have before. Grand-Maman is telling me that Mother wants me to be with her in California. She’s all settled in a place called La Jolla now. There’s a high school I will go to in the fall.

“What about Hollywood?” I ask.

“Well, that didn’t work out quite like Mother planned,” Grand-Maman says. Now she has some sort of shop. Dresses.

“Like Ladies Apparel?”

“Like your mother’s idea of it. You know.”

I nod at Vanna White. Yes. I know. Sometimes I play a game where I flip through Vogue magazine and I imagine Mother somewhere among her palm trees, the sun in a different place in the sky, flipping at the very same time as me. What would she call style? What would she call a fucking eyesore? What would she point to and say, Now that’s sharp. I never knew before. I’d look at the glossy page of a girl Mother was pointing to and have no idea what she was talking about. Now I see. It’s in the cut and how it falls. It’s in the clothes and the girl and the spirit they make between. I wish I could tell Mother how I can see it from a mile away now. What’s sharp.

I stare at upside-down Vanna White on the television screen. Still clapping her hands. Still smiling white and wide. I had a feeling this was coming. Mother has been signing Love next to the N. She’s been addressing the postcards Dear Belle. She even called once. How are you? she said.

I’m okay, I answered in French. I’m going to school on the island.

Mother was silent at first.

I heard, she answered in French at last. And how is that?

Good.

But Mother wasn’t listening. She hadn’t called to ask me how it was. I do love you, Belle, she said in English.

I love you too. It’s the truth. Just not the whole.

“I don’t want to go,” I tell Grand-Maman in the beige room now.

“I know,” Grand-Maman says. “But she’s your mother. And you’re still a child.”



* * *




“But you weren’t a child anymore, were you, Belle?” Tom says, calling me out of the beige room, back with him in the Treatment Room, under the sky of water. Where we still lie side by side on the floating table. My lips are deader than ever. I can’t move my body. He’s touching my face and I can’t feel his hands. Tracing it like he made it himself, made every shape and shadow that lives there. The forgotten touch I somehow still longed for each night in the beige dark, watching the flies in the window, watching the leaves of fire, watching the glittering white snow and then the green buds. Closing my eyes to the beige and the paintings in their gold frames and the mirror ghost. Finding him only in the very corners of my dreams. Turning to smoke the minute I reached out my hand.

I shake my head at Tom but it still won’t shake. He’s blurrier around the edges, his face flickering on and off like the most beautiful light.

“Not a child anymore,” I say. Beside us, in the glass tank, our red jellyfish has grown bigger now. Nearly the size of the glass tank itself. Not quite the size of the red jellyfish floating up there in the sky of water, but close.

“You blossomed in that beige room, didn’t you? Grew up faster than the seasons change. Raised up out of the dirt just like I said you would. Bloomed like a hothouse flower, the red throat of you opening. It was stunning. Even with the mirror gone from the wall, you knew. You could see it in all their eyes whenever they looked at you. Teachers. That sleazy priest. Even the dumb, cruel children at that stupid island school. The dark, aching want in their eyes. That wants in spite of itself. That looks in spite of itself, transfixed. That consumes and is consumed.”

I nod with my eyes.

“Envy,” Tom and I both say, basking. A smile ripples across his face. He loves how I can say the word even with my dead mouth, clear as a bell.

“You knew that feeling, didn’t you? Because you’d looked at someone else like that once. Who did you used to look at like that?”

But he knows the answer.

The answer is up there in the sky of water.

Her face. Its pale eyes looking surprised. Then troubled. Very troubled at what they see…



* * *




…Me. Arriving in San Diego to meet her after so many years away. She’s standing at the foot of the escalator, a long airport escalator at arrivals. I’m at the top and she’s at the bottom and I’m making my slow way down.

I’ve just flown over the clouds for six hours. Staring at the sky going bluer and brighter the farther west we went. On the plane, a movie called A Few Good Men played, starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, both very good actors. I mostly watched the screen while I listened to Nirvana on my Walkman that Grand-Maman bought me as a going-away present. To watch Tom Cruise made me feel strange. Made me grip the armrests whenever he came on the screen. Wanting the truth that Jack Nicholson told him he couldn’t handle. Still wanting it.