If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up.
Now that Mother has driven away with Chip, I brace myself for Grand-Maman to tell me about the end of the world. The horse-filled dark. Her eyes going black. Mother doesn’t tell me about it enough, Grand-Maman says. Mother’s forgotten herself since she moved down to Montreal from the north. Speaking English to her unbaptized daughter. Not even going to mass most Sundays. If it weren’t for Grand-Maman, Grand-Maman says, my soul might be lost entirely to Darkness. But today Grand-Maman says nothing. Just stares at All My Children like she’s not even seeing it. She tells me to go to my room and play.
“Okay,” I say. And on this day, I walk down the hall like I’m going there. But I’m not going there. I keep going down the hall. To the very end of it. To the blue-and-white room I love that smells like dreams. I’m careful to turn the knob of the door a certain way so that Grand-Maman doesn’t hear the sound. When I open the door, I sigh. Blue walls the color of the sky. Blue velvet curtains that filter out the light. There’s the great white wicker bed with the clean blue-and-white sheets. There’s her closet on the left. There’s her white wicker vanity on the right with her tray of perfume bottles in so many glass shapes. Tears and stars and strange flowers, gifted by Mother’s friends at the beauty counters. I have to be so careful in Mother’s bedroom. Because of the wicker, everything hisses when I sit on it, when I touch it, even.
The closet door is white and tall, very closed. I see Mother saying, Don’t open this door. Promise me. When I open the gliding door, I’m very slow. I’ve done this before. I know how to glide it very quietly.
Dark in here. Can’t seem to find the light switch. But I feel Mother’s clothes hanging on either side of me. I smell their violets and smoke. Mother sorts them by color, but mostly there’s just the three colors she loves best: white and black and red. She loves red most. Because of her hair and her eyes, she says. Also her skin—what she calls her coloring. Everybody has a season based on their coloring, Belle. Mother read this in Vogue magazine. Mother is a Winter, she says. What am I? I asked her. Probably a Fall, she said, because of my coloring. It’s all coloring, Sunshine.
What colors am I if I’m a Fall?
Olive, Mother said. Earth. Rust. Mustard. Don’t those sound nice?
No. Those all sounded like nightmare colors to me. What if I don’t want to be a Fall?
Well, Glum Drop, I don’t make the rules, do I? And Mother pointed to her magazine. See? It was Vogue that made the rules, not Mother.
Still can’t find the light in the closet, but I can sort of see in the dark now. Anyway, I know what I’m looking for. I sense them there. Second shelf from the bottom, third pair from the left. Glowing like a wish. Red satin with pointed, feathery toes. Spiked high heels. They show off Mother’s white feet in a red strappy web. Like lingerie for the feet, Mother said when she bought them. And I said, What’s lingerie? And she said, Never mind.
Carefully, I reach out my hand and pick them up. Slip them on while sitting on the floor. How come you never wear these outside? I asked Mother once.
Because they’re not for outside.
There are shoes for only inside?
There are shoes for everything.
What are these for, then?
Never mind, Belle.
But I knew. These shoes were for sex. Knowing that made me as red as the shoes. Thinking of Mother having sex. Mother and Chip. Mother and the Troll. I heard sounds sometimes through the bedroom wall at night, and I wondered if what I was hearing was sex. I didn’t know what sex was, not exactly. Apart from what Mother had shown me in a children’s book called What’s the Big Secret? It starred two ugly old people, a cartoon man and a cartoon woman, who were always naked and smiling and holding hands. I hated that book. My secret best friend, Stacey, who is two years older than me because I skipped a year and she was held back a year, says sex is nothing like that dumb book at all.
What’s it like, then?
I can’t say, Stacey says like she has secrets. Stacey’s like that with me. I’m only her secret best friend, after all. Stacey wears Black Honey on her lips just like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, and she walks in a cloud of Love’s Baby Soft because innocence is sexier than you think. If anyone knew that we actually hung out, that would be very bad for Stacey, Stacey says. Socially. In terms of boys, Stacey’s had what she calls experiences. The only experience I’ve ever had was in a dream of Stacey’s. She once told me she dreamed that I slow danced with Gabriel Gardner to the song “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House, and then he Frenched me right on the dance floor full of fog. “Frenched” means he kissed you with tongue, she said. I almost died from happiness when Stacey told me this. I’ve since asked her to tell me this dream again and again—what was I wearing, what was Gabriel Gardner wearing, how did he look just before he Frenched me, in what part of the song did we French?—but Stacey always says she doesn’t feel like it right now. The last time I asked her was when she slept over, and Stacey said she was too tired, then closed her eyes. I looked at her closed eyes through her feathery blond bangs. All I could think was that dream of me was in there somewhere. Floating around inside her skull like one of those jellyfish I once saw at the aquarium. Slippery. Fragile. Mine.