All-Season Edie (14 page)

“Your turn,” Mean Megan says.

I push the mute button on the clicker and start to clap slowly and steadily. “With me,” I tell Mean Megan. We clap together. “Yes,” I say and stop clapping, letting Mean Megan continue on her own. I close my eyes and stamp my feet and lift my hands high over my head and start to dance.

“Show me how to do that,” Mean Megan says when I'm done.

We're dancing while my family says good-bye to the last of the guests at Grandma's house and clears away the dirty dishes and mounds of leftover food and does the dishes. We're dancing while my family kisses and hugs Grandma, who says she's fine on her own and doesn't need to borrow our guest room again. We're dancing while my family drives home along cold dark streets, not talking, each in his or her own sealed bubble of tired sadness. We're dancing when my family parks the car in the garage and unbuckles their seat belts and slowly, sadly gets out of the car. We're dancing when my family comes quietly through the front door, in case we're asleep, and follows the sound of laughing and foot stomping to the den. Mean Megan and I have pushed the furniture back and are dancing with our eyes closed. The
TV
shows a man with long blond hair whapping a guitar against a tree because it's
All-Metal Power Hour
, but we've left the mute on and haven't noticed.

“What are you
doing
?” Dexter asks.

We're hot and red-faced and breathless, and when we see Dexter we both start to laugh.

“You too, Dexter,” Mean Megan says. “You have to dance too.”

I say, “Dex too.”

Maybe Dexter is too stunned to say no, because she starts making her pretty swan movements while I snap my fingers and stomp my feet and Megan grooves and swerves her head around and makes her hip-hop moves. Mom and Dad stand in the doorway of the den, watching us and saying nothing.

A few miles away, Grandma hangs up her clothes and puts on her dressing gown and brushes her hair and cleans her teeth and checks the front door and the back door. Then she slowly goes upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Grandpa, where she lies in bed and speaks to him for a long time before she closes her eyes and makes herself lie still, alone in the big bed, waiting and waiting for sleep.

Dexter in a Whack of Trouble

Up in my attic room, I suddenly cock my head to one side and begin to shake it, like a swimmer trying to get water out of her ear. I've been tracing bugs. This is a slightly unusual Edie activity, but Grandma recently gave me a book called
Insects of the World
, full of excellent words like “mandible” and “thorax,” that so bothers Dex she won't be in the same room with it. I've been giving an Egyptian scarab beetle the blackest, shiniest possible carapace (carapace!), experimenting with a combination of black pencil and black crayon, layering them on top of each other and pressing very hard, snapping the tip on the pencil again and again and wearing the crayon's sharp nose down to a blunt snout. Then I felt the tickle deep in my left ear, very slightly annoying. It could be a drop of water left over from my pre-bedtime bath, when I ducked my head under because I was a coelacanth, very bug-eyed and ancient. I start whacking at my head with the heel of my hand to dislodge it.

After a few minutes of this, I go downstairs to get a Q-tip and bump into Dexter in the hall. Dexter is obviously heading for the bathroom too, so I'm forced to make a dash for it, which Dexter thwarts by grabbing at my hair, which I counter by stamping on her foot. An all-out brawl is only averted by the appearance of Mom at the top of the stairs with a laundry basket full of Dad's clean but wrinkled shirts.

“Megan phoned for you earlier,” Mom says to Dexter. “I told her you would talk to her at school tomorrow.”

“Ha, ha,” I say.

Dexter lets go of my hair. “Why didn't you just come get me?”

“You were doing your homework.”

“If you were downstairs doing laundry,” Dexter says, “and somebody phoned for you, I would get you. I wouldn't say, ‘She can't come, she's doing laundry.'”

“Don't argue with your mother.” Dad squeezes past the three of us and into the bathroom. The lock clicks.

“No!” I whack my ear a few more times and make my eyes go round to demonstrate to Mom the proven futility of this gesture.

“No!” Dexter points after him. He was carrying his newspaper.

“You'll live,” Mom says.

“I was going there!” Dexter says.

“Me first!” I say.

“First up, best dressed!” Dad calls from behind the closed door. I hear the rustle as he turns a page of his newspaper.

“I don't know what that means,” Dexter says. “I need to brush my teeth. You can hardly accuse me of wasting time in the bathroom. I don't take reading material in there, like some people.”

From behind the closed door, Dad starts to hum.

“Mommy,” I say. Thumping my own head again has made me dizzy.

“I have a Q-tip and a spare toothbrush,” Mom says. “Just let me go get this ironing squared away and I'll find them for you. You can go wait in my bedroom.”

“Can I look in your closet?” Dexter asks.

“Yes.”

“She can't look in my closet!” Dad calls from behind the closed door. “It's private!” The newspaper rustles again.

Dexter and Mom exchange a look that means, Ignore him, puh-leese.

The appeal of Mom's closet is the square blue garment bag that hangs at the far, far right. It has a peaked top where the hanger pokes out, like a tent top or a pavilion, and falls all the way to the floor, with a zipper running down its full length. Inside are Mom's very best clothes: a skinny black dress with black threads for straps; a long, strapless, dark red dress with a skirt that poufs out all the way to the ground; a green and gold sari; a pair of very plain black wool pants that Mom loves for some reason; and an orange silk blouse, light and frothy as candy floss, that always makes Dad say, “She's turned into a pumpkin!” when she puts it on. I love my dad and can't imagine much about being married, or what kind of person I'll be married to, but I know for certain it won't be someone who accuses me, in my best favorite clothes, of looking like a gourd.

After Dexter has unzipped the bag just enough so that we can take turns reaching in and identifying each special outfit by feel—we know the textures by heart— she takes down the three shoe boxes from the shelf above the garment bag and lays them in a line on the bed. These, too, we know by heart, but Dexter seems to enjoy the little Christmas shiver of opening each box, each time. I sort of understand, the way I sort of understand the appeal of the clothes—this is Dexter's version of playing dress-up— though I have trouble getting as worked up about them as Dexter. The first box holds Mom's plain black pumps with the two-inch heel. These she keeps nicely polished and shaped by stuffing a wad of tissue paper up into the toe whenever she isn't wearing them, which is most of the time. These are the shoes she wears with the black pants and orange blouse, which is her School Concert and/or Dinner At A Nice Restaurant outfit. The next shoe box contains Mom's sandals: open-toed, whippy straps and a high, pencil-thin heel. They look teetery but Mom always manages, even though she only wears them maybe once a year, when she and Dad go to a concert at the Orpheum. I know Dexter covets these shoes particularly. The closest Dex is allowed to high heels at the moment, despite much reasoning, pleading, begging and groveling, is a pair of platform sneakers with the word “angel” written on the side. These are all very well, Dexter says, but not really the same thing at all.

The last box is my favorite and Dexter's too, though she always pretends otherwise. These contain the low-heeled gold sandals that go with the sari. I've never seen Mom wear the sari and don't know for what possible occasion she could have bought it. Mom is always vague on the subject and says she bought it In Another Life. I covet the sari for my dress-up bag but have never even been allowed to try it on.

Dexter puts the shoe boxes back and turns to Mom's dressing table, where she picks up a lipstick.

“Telling,” I say.

“My word against yours.” Dexter has the cap off and is twisting up the colored part for a quick swipe at her mouth when the door opens and Dad comes in. “There's trouble in River City!” he says, seeing the lipstick in Dexter's hand. She drops it like it's burnt her and then picks it up calmly and puts it back in its place as though she has nothing to feel guilty about.

“I was looking at the color,” she says.

“Trouble with a capital T!” He puts the newspaper by the bed and goes out again.

“Ha,” I say.

When Mom comes, Dexter asks if she might phone Megan back now.

“I thought you wanted a toothbrush,” Mom says.

“Quit changing the subject!” Dexter yells, and then she stomps into her room and slams the door. This is what Mom and Dad call Going Off Like A Firecracker. Dexter often goes off like a firecracker. She can't seem to help it. I suspect she often surprises herself as much as everybody else with her fits of sudden, intense anger directed at nothing and everything.

“Dexter and the telephone, sitting in a tree,” I say.

“You should be nicer to your sister.” Mom rummages around in her top dresser drawer and pulls out a jar of Q-tips. “You hurt her feelings more often than you know, always laughing at her.”

I say, “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?”

“I don't know,” I hear Mom say to Dad much later, long after I'm supposed to be in bed. I've gotten up to go to the bathroom one last time and hear their voices from the living room. “Every little thing sets her off lately. She's getting so rude. I just don't know what to do with that girl.”

Dexter? Perfect Dexter? Princess Dexter?

Mean Megan slumps in Dexter's bedroom doorway like she'll fall over if something doesn't prop her up. “Dave and Celine say I can have a party,” she says, as though this is the most boring news on the planet. “After final exams. Girls and—”

Dexter shrieks, making Mean Megan jump. Dexter has just found my drawing of an Egyptian scarab beetle, with a carapace blacker than the night, leafed between the pages of her English binder. I'm able to observe all this from my hiding place in the linen cupboard with the latticework doors. I have an excellent view of Dexter's room from here as long as she leaves her door open. If I get caught, I can simply say I'm looking for the key chain I left in the pocket of my jeans when I threw them in the laundry. I got this idea from seeing Mean Megan casually twirling the key ring that hangs from the big loopy chain on her belt.

“Get it away!” Dexter says.

Mean Megan, who's not so squeamish, takes the beetle paper, crumples it and throws it into Dexter's garbage can.

“—and boys,” she finishes.

“Ooh,” Dexter says, shaking her hands to rid them of the feel of the big paper bug. “Who are you inviting?”

“I don't know,” Mean Megan says. “Practically the whole school, I guess. Dave and Celine say I shouldn't make anyone feel alienated.” Mean Megan calls her parents by their first names. She wants Dexter to come over to her house after school every day since her parents don't get home until suppertime or after, but Mom thinks that's too much. She worries about them spending too much time together without adequate supervision, almost certainly ignoring their homework and getting up to who-knows-what. Once a week is quite enough Megan-time, in Mom's opinion.

“You hate Megan,” Dexter says.

“I like Megan very much,” Mom counters.

“You hate me,” Dexter says.

“Don't be a goof,” Mom says.

“Don't call me a goof!” Dexter says, and Mom laughs.

“I don't hate anybody,” Mom says. “I wouldn't think you'd want to spend every single day with your friend anyway. You two get into enough arguments as it is. You'll enjoy the time you spend together more if you don't have so much of it. Anyway, when would you practice your dance if you spent every day at Megan's?”

“I am a prisoner,” Dexter says, and Mom tells her not to be morose.

“Yeah,” I say from the back seat. “Morose.”

“Shut up, little garbage,” Dexter says.

“See, that right there,” Mom says. “We don't speak to each other that way in our family.”

Mean Megan tends to speak her mind because Dave and Celine say that's healthy. This makes other kids a bit afraid of her: so cool and pretty and quick-tongued. Sweet as vinegar, Dad said once about Mean Megan. But I knew from the afternoon of Grandpa's funeral that Mean Megan envies our family as much as Dexter envies Megan's freedom, and I found myself in the odd position of wanting to defend Megan, though against what I wasn't quite sure.

“Want a tea?” Mean Megan says. She takes a couple of cans out of her knapsack. The cans are pink and green and have Chinese characters on them.