Orphea Proud (4 page)

Around that time, Lissa and I began to hang out at the diner where Icky and Marilyn worked. They had an open mike every Friday night. Lissa’s mother had to talk a blue streak to convince Rupert and Ruby that it was okay for me to go. We were the youngest there, since it was mainly a high school crowd. Lissa’s mom told Ruby it would be educational. That’s what won her over. She also promised to pick us up and drive me home. Silly, really, since I lived walking distance from the place. But those were the conditions. Rupert even
said that I could stay out beyond my eight o’clock curfew, since the open mike didn’t begin until nine.

Lissa and I had been coming for about three weeks when I decided to bring something to read. But it was hard to find the nerve to go up to the mike. That night we’d heard a poem about food, a poem about fat, and one about sex and politics. The puny poem that I’d brought couldn’t compete. Compared to the fast talkers up at the mike, I might as well have not had a tongue.

“When are you going to read?” Lissa kept nagging. I’d ordered a burger from Icky at the grill, and she’d ordered a tomato and cheddar cheese sandwich. That was in the days before she went vegan.

“I changed my mind. I’m not going to read.”

“You have to!” She was practically yelling. Icky glanced at me from the grill.

“Put your name on the list, kiddo. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

“I can’t. My poem isn’t memorized.”

“I’m signing up for you,” Lissa said, hopping off of her seat.

“Don’t worry, honey,” Marilyn murmured, placing the burger in front of me. “These big kids won’t bite you.”

I was sweating. If you’ve ever done open mike, you know it’s kind of like free fall. I was terrified—dry mouth, shaking legs, the whole bit. But when they called my name out, I somehow made it up there. My poem was in my pocket on a crumpled piece of paper. When I spoke into the mike, it started to squeak;
come to think of it, maybe it was my voice that was squeaking.

When I was finished, there was actually applause. I looked over at Lissa; she was beaming. Icky reached across and shook my hand when I got back to the counter.

“Good job, kiddo.”

“Thanks.”

I grabbed Lissa’s hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Are you okay?” she asked, once we were outside.

“I guess. I didn’t get booed anyway.”

“You sounded great. I can’t believe that your poem was about my painting.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just a silly little painting, Orphea.”

“Well, it was just a silly little poem.”

“My mom won’t be here for another ten minutes,” she said. “Want to go back inside?”

“No, let’s wait out here.” It was a chilly fall night, but there was a silver moon in the sky. We sat down on the sidewalk, leaning our backs against the outside wall of the diner.

“Look what I’ve got for us,” Lissa whispered, digging into the pocket of her jacket and producing a lighter.

“What’s that for?”

She reached into her other pocket and pulled out a half-smoked cigarette.

I felt a twinge of jealousy. Lissa was so square, but somehow she always seemed to be a few steps ahead of me.

“Wow, when did you pick that up?”

She grinned. “Yesterday. I found it in my sister’s dresser drawer. I only smoked half and saved the rest for us.”

She lit up and took a puff, then passed it over. I inhaled too deeply and coughed.

“I’m not sure I could get into it.”

“Me either,” she said, taking a drag. “But I figure, if you don’t try something once, how can you give it up?”

“I guess …”

The wind began to rise. We huddled closer.…

She had gray eyes, gray the color of a cliff or gray the color of an ocean in a storm, depending on what mood she was in. People were always staring at her;
her face was a gorgeous puzzle. She was adopted, mixed with Korean and something else that she couldn’t quite figure out.

“My birth mother didn’t know my birth father’s history,” she told me. “She just knew that he was half Korean. So, I could be mixed with practically anything. My dad says who cares what the recipe is, just bottle it.” Her gray eyes lit up. Lissa’s dad adored her. I could barely remember my dad. Of course Nadine loomed large. Those big kisses, those swooping hugs. Ruby couldn’t compete. Swooping a kid up into her arms just wasn’t her style. To give her credit, she tried hard to take care of me. The meals she made were painstaking, a real labor of love considering that on most evenings she went to some kind of class, and that she ate so little herself. But when I ate with her before Rupert came home, I always felt like I was ruining something. I have terrible table manners—I slurp.

Anybody in the audience a slurper?

Well, you know what I mean; it’s a way of eating that once you start you just can’t break. Probably because it makes eating more fun. I find that if I make a little noise when I eat, the food tastes better.

When Ruby ate, she was silent. You couldn’t even hear her chewing. Needless to say we weren’t the ideal match at the supper table. There she’d sit carefully nibbling some curry or other that she’d spent at least an hour on, while I uncontrollably slurped. She flinched with my every forkful. When we had soup, things really got bad.

“Orphea, please make less noise. This isn’t a barnyard.”

Or else she’d say something less direct like: “What are little girls made of?”

That was my cue to close my mouth when I chewed.

“Sugar and spice and everything nice,” she’d answer for me.

I’d stop slurping and take very small sips of my soup. That’s what “everything nice” meant—small sips. But it was no use; two minutes later, I’d slurp. She was such a good cook, all I could think of was tasting. Forget the manners.

Pretty soon, Ruby didn’t sit down with me. She waited to eat something quick with Rupert. So unless I was at Lissa’s, I dined alone, slurping everything from French toast to mashed potatoes.

My table manners were only one of the things about me that Ruby found irritating. You can’t blame her, I guess. She didn’t ask to be my new mother.

Lissa’s parents, on the other hand, had picked her out. She was adopted. And she was an expert at doing just the right thing. Her mom would order outfits for her out of clothes catalogs without even asking Lissa’s opinion—some ghastly checked shorts ensemble, for instance—and Lissa would
oooh
and
ahh
as if she adored it. Then she’d actually put the thing on and wear it to school.

“Why don’t you ask your mom to let you pick out your own clothes?”

“That would ruin her fun.”

“What about your fun? That outfit is geeky.”

“Who cares?” That was courageous, believe me. In the place we went to school, people were scrutinized down to the toenail. If you lacked the right handbag, you could be ostracized; forget about growing your armpits, which is something I was secretly into. But Lissa would wear these Mom-picked outfits and hold her head high. The funny thing is that she could pull it off, because she was so gorgeous. But in her entire sixteen years, Lissa never once said no to her parents, about anything. I know that for a fact. Could be because of Annie, her older sister. Annie was her mom and dad’s biological child. At the age of fifteen, she stole one of the family televisions to pawn for a bus ticket. The police had to bring her back. Lissa told me about a fight at dinner one evening, when her sister threw a fork at their dad and nearly put his eye out. Shortly after that, Annie ran away again, leaving behind all her stuff, and that time she didn’t come back.… So, Lissa had to be the good one. But don’t get me wrong—she was still her own person. She just managed to say yes to her parents about everything while doing precisely what she wanted to at the same time. She had a snake tattooed on her ankle that they never even knew about. I don’t know how she hid it; she must have worn socks at the lake when she went swimming. When she got the tattoo, I went with her. The guy at the tattoo parlor asked for ID and Lissa gave them an old one that had belonged to Annie. Somehow it worked.

In high school, Lissa’s paintings changed. She got into flowers, massive, fleshy flowers in psychedelic colors. A three-foot-high sunflower of hers won first place in the school art competition. The art teacher told Lissa that the painting was like Van Gogh. Lissa smiled politely when she heard that, but she wasn’t pleased.

“I want to be like Georgia O’Keeffe,” she said. “Lascivious.” No mention of Picasso. I’ll never forget a rose that she did—huge and velvety. But my favorite will always be the leaf she painted for me when we were twelve.

Let me take a breath.

After she peeled away in the van, I kept myself barricaded inside. I lost track of time. Three hours might have passed. I stayed huddled on the floor in front of my dresser, hunkered down for the next attack. I was scared to go downstairs. I didn’t know what to do. Then the phone rang. I held my breath. I was sure it was Lissa on the line. She would have been worried about me; probably afraid that Rupert had killed me. Ruby had tried to protect me. Maybe if she answered she’d call me to the phone. But she didn’t.

After that, silence. Or rather what I heard was a lack of noise, as if I were in the center of a vacuum. I hugged my knees and buried my head. The blood I’d tasted earlier had been coming from the side of my eye.
When Rupert had struck me, I’d been cut somehow, maybe by his wedding ring.

I wanted Nadine so much in that moment. I wanted her to pick up my whole room with me in it and toss it out of the window onto a gliding cloud that would take me and Lissa straight to a different world where it was no big deal for girls to French kiss. A world where people would let each other be who they are and mind their own business and concentrate on doing kind deeds or making poems and paintings or finding a cure for brain hemorrhages.

Finally, I stood up and began pushing the furniture away from my door. My mouth was dry as cotton and my legs were shaking. I had to call Lissa. One of the many weird features of life with Rupert and Ruby was that there was no phone above the first floor. And I wasn’t permitted a cell phone. If I couldn’t get to the phone downstairs, I decided, I’d go to Lissa’s house instead. If Rupert tried to stop me, I’d fight my way out.

I picked up a shoe. If Rupert made a move to touch me again, I vowed to whack him in his teeth. That man loved his teeth. I pushed the bed away and cracked the door open. Rupert and Ruby were climbing the stairs.

“Come out, Orphea,” my brother said. He sounded more grim than angry. He even sounded a little sorry.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Ruby. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“You’d better not. I’ll call the police!”

Rupert pushed the door open the rest of the way. They stood facing me.

“Move!” I tried to brush past them.

Rupert stopped me. “Don’t go to Lissa’s.”

“I’ll go where I please. Get out of my way.”

“We have something to tell you,” Ruby said timidly. She peered at my face. “Your poor eye …”

“Yeah! And who did that?”

Rupert cleared his throat. “I lost my temper.”

“I’ll say.”

Ruby stepped closer. “Lissa’s father just phoned.”

“I hope she told him what Rupert did.”

“I don’t think so. You see, something bad happened.”

“What could be worse than being beat almost senseless by your own brother?”

“Shut up and listen,” snapped Rupert.

“Say what you have to say and let me out of here!”

Ruby touched my arm. “Lissa’s spleen was ruptured.”

“Her spleen?”

“The van skidded. An ambulance came—”

I felt a sick feeling inside. “Is she in the hospital? I have to see her.”

“You can’t. She’s dead.”