Stranded (2 page)

NANA WELCOMED US AT HER DOOR WHEN WE
arrived and informed Mom and me that she wanted every box stowed, every extra piece of furniture wrapped in plastic in the garage, and neither of us was to think of bringing inside the purple down comforter with the leaky feathers.

“Right away?” I asked.

“Now.” She turned me to face the truck instead of the kitchen, where I hoped to take a closer look at my split ends under the fluorescent lights.

“Where’s Natalie?”

“At a youth group meeting she couldn’t miss,” Nana informed me.

“Shouldn’t we wait?”

Nana wouldn’t take “later” for an answer, and Mom,
instead of explaining that I often deep-conditioned on Saturdays, mouthed the word “please” behind Nana’s back. I was reluctant to handle such a large project without my cousin. Yet, to stay out of trouble with Nana, I hauled and toted by myself.

Natalie’s ceramic unicorns and lacy pillows filled the shelf space I needed for earrings and a rubber hamster I had won at a birthday party when I was nine. I moved the pillows to Natalie’s bed. When I was finished, I draped a red scarf over a bedside lamp. After all the exertion, I flopped to admire my work.

Mom had retreated to her room to arrange her knickknacks and hair products while Nana assembled a casserole in the kitchen for dinner. Mom and I had lived out of boxes when we had to make previous temporary arrangements, but this time she insisted we settle in. Mom could have told me the reason we were moving during the unfilled time while we drove the interstate instead of discussing her happy high school memories, but for some reason, she avoided the topic.

Nana was in her early fifties. Maybe she grocery shopped in her nightgown and a neighbor called Mom and asked her to intercede. Elderly people can have problems with their brains and maybe Mom was beginning to see signs of decay in Nana. It was
definitely a little deranged that Nana cared so much about leaky feathers. Mom hadn’t waited until the end of the school term before making us leave Des Moines. If we were just dealing with a rental issue, people would have moved our furniture for us, at least to the curb.

While I considered the awful possibility of Nana having a terrible illness, Natalie returned from youth group. As usual, her body shouted ooh-la-la, but the little shout of joy was smothered by the turtleneck she wore, which had tiny umbrellas printed on it like wallpaper. I wondered if Natalie had tried some of the diet tips I had suggested or if she was using a new lotion I could borrow, because even though she was wearing a turtleneck, she seemed healthier and thinner than the last time I had seen her. Natalie was biologically ready for some Tina Louise action, even if she was unprepared for it stylistically.

“Don’t put your feet on the bedspread, Kelly Louise,” she greeted me.

“Why?” I asked.

“You might soil it.”

“Soil—?”

“Socks pick up dust from the floor.”

“My feet are clean.” I showed her the bottoms. The
socks were hers. I hadn’t dug into the jumble of clothes to find my own.

“Kelly Louise,” Natalie insisted, making more of a point about my socks than I would have bothered regarding any subject except the environment or maybe capri pants and their effect on the upper thigh.

I could work myself into a frenzy about Heath Ledger, too. I was quite passionate about him even though he was dead.

“You don’t always have to flout the rules, Kelly Louise.” Natalie reached for my shelf and touched my rubber hamster with her index finger.

She shuddered as if Felix were real.

Natalie paraded around, inspecting my things. I gnawed a hangnail on my right thumb. I decided I needed to do something Nana would find good, like choose which drawer to use for underwear and which for T-shirts. I began shoving piles of clothes together, abandoning the concept of order in favor of the concept of closer-to-finished.

Natalie didn’t seem to notice the miraculous difference in how I handled the clothing level.

“Dinner will be ready in an hour,” she informed me, as if dinner represented a deadline for how much longer I had to achieve a perfect pristine space without
her help. I felt like I was on one of those game shows with a giant clock ticking to zero and a hammer about to smack me on the head.

Natalie flipped her hair over her shoulder. The auburn strands caught the light.

“Do any boys live near here?” I asked. With hair like hers, Natalie must know a few boys worth taking advantage of.

“Kenny Stockhausen next door.” Natalie shrugged and pointed toward his house. We could see it from our window.

The name Kenny sounded familiar.

I pushed a drawer closed and recalled Nana muttering things like, “That child of the devil Kenneth ran down my lilies on his bicycle, what’s to stop him from putting dog poo in my mailbox?” and, “The sheriff will regret not doing something about that hellion while he is still young.” The Stockhausens’ unmowed lawn and rusting cars, which were visible from where the curtain was drawn back, made me wonder if the Stockhausens were messy or just practicing environmental restraint.

“What does he look like?” I asked. I hoped Natalie might say “tall, dark, and handsome” or “like Heath Ledger.”

Natalie ran a finger over a box, checking it for dust.
She snorted an odd noise that sounded like the uncorking of a bottle. She noticed the veil I used to cover the lamp and tugged it off. Suddenly we were back to basic white-and-pink girl motif. Natalie obviously hadn’t consulted the latest
Cosmo
and learned that every girl’s bold and sassy boudoir should cultivate an aura of lusciousness.

“He’s probably your brother,” Natalie informed me.

“No?”

“Kenny’s uncle sleeps around. His father probably did, too.”

I remembered Katy’s warning.

“But you know, I can see you with Kenny Stockhausen.” Natalie maybe sensed me getting nervous.

She removed Felix from the shelf and dropped him into her garbage can. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or whether she was really having a premonition about my relationship to Kenny Stockhausen. Katy and I sometimes read horoscopes, and I believed people could be clairvoyant without knowing it.

Or just pests.

Once, when we were nine, Natalie broke the head off my new Barbie. She said she was punishing me because I had not politely listened to carolers at the front door, but she was really reacting to something her mother, my aunt Denise, had done while drunk.
Natalie sometimes resented me for having blonder hair (thanks to Katy highlighting it for me) and a better mother. The sad thing was Barbie was going to take a million years to decompose in the landfill. Natalie shouldn’t have treated her as a disposable commodity.

In order to avoid more discussion of how close I was to sleeping with a boy who might be my brother, I pried open a box on the floor.

“Look.” I lifted one of my mother’s teddies.

“Is that yours?” Natalie stepped closer.

“Yes,” I lied.

We
could
get along. We once placed stew pots on our heads and played Bulgarian chef. The game was dorky, but fun. Mom’s box was rife with all kinds of things Natalie and I could get into trouble with. I found a red silk garter belt.

“Kelly Louise.” Natalie put her hands on her hips as I dangled Mom’s alluring undergarment.

“What?”

She lectured me about how Nana and Pastor Jim felt about people who tampered with other people’s things.

“Tamper?” The word wasn’t as powerful as
soil
but still seemed to originate from the top shelf of her Christian vocabulary. Natalie was tense. Someone must
have discussed homosexuality during youth group. Gay people always tightened Natalie’s coils.

“Is he a hottie?” I asked, trying to pester her.

“Who?” Natalie wondered.

“Pastor Jim?”

“Kelly Louise, that isn’t appropriate.”

She tugged a nightgown from the box and stroked the fabric.

“Why not?”

“Pastor Jim is special.” She looked down at the gown spread across her chest.

“Mom won’t care if you try that on,” I assured her. “You can ask.”

We heard a thump in the next room—Mom unpacking and maybe listening to our conversation; the walls were thin.

“Men get the wrong idea about this sort of thing.” Natalie kicked off her bunny slippers and twirled with the nightgown across her body.

She didn’t raise the subject of Baby Grace, but Grace’s ghost hovered in the room with us, a little angel with pink wings hoping to be the reason teenage girls should never play with their mother’s underwear. I flapped out my teddy while Natalie told a tale about a pervert she had seen reading magazines at the QuickMart. I
never understood why the owners didn’t call it the KwikMart—like someone might have in Des Moines.
K
was a much more modern letter than
Q
.

“He kept staring at the pictures.” She went on with her story.

I learned from Mom one night while we were trying new hand lotions that my aunt Denise broke three of Natalie’s ribs once. Afterward, the state revoked Aunt Denise’s custody. She wasn’t in Las Vegas starting a new household like Nana pretended but long gone somewhere in the bottom of a bottle. Natalie, as a result of being abandoned, suffered some kind of disorder in which she became particular over small things that the rest of us couldn’t care less about.

“Pull the arm strap tighter,” Natalie said, halting the pervert story to call attention to my drooping teddy.

I stuffed a few socks into my bra (which I was still wearing), and Natalie assisted by fixing the straps.

“Not bad, Kelly Louise,” she remarked. She pulled one pair of socks back out.

“But let’s be realistic.”

She slipped her satin nightgown over her clothes. The gown bunched around the top of her jeans, and the static from the silky material made her hair fly sideways.

“You should go look too,” I said, impressed by her
ability not to need any sort of stuffing.

She checked to make sure Nana was in the kitchen and, when she thought it was safe, tiptoed down the hall toward the full-length mirror attached to the bathroom door. While she was away, I returned my rubber hamster to the unicorn shelf and slid a few unicorns closer together. I heard Mom speaking to Natalie. Mom probably thought the footsteps that had been lightly padding down the hallway were mine, ditching the unpacking. I could imagine Mom emerging from her bedroom, preparing herself to redirect me. Nana put a lot of pressure on Mom to be a more active and observant parent.

I overheard Natalie apologize for wearing the nightie. “I’m sorry, Aunt Francine.”

“Don’t you look beautiful,” Mom fawned. “This blue is a lovely match for your eyes.”

More lovey-dovey murmuring followed.

I tossed the veil back over the lamp. A red glow suffused the room and I wondered what else I could add, what other stamp of individuality the space needed: some sexy man posters, maybe a candle or a Chinese lantern—they had ones I could order online if I could talk Nana into believing in the moral fiber of high-speed internet connections. I noticed Natalie’s diary as
I moved two unicorns to her desk. I had once read a few entries, during one of my holiday visits a year earlier, when I was having trouble sleeping. My cousin isn’t exactly Lindsay Lohan with the dirty tabloid secrets—reading Natalie’s diary was better than cold medicine at putting me out like a light.

Natalie sashayed into the room wiggling a better Tina Louise than Tina Louise. One dose of Mom’s flattery had transformed her. Knowing how to compliment well was what made Mom such a fabulous hairdresser.

“What do you think?” Natalie asked, spinning a small circle in front of me.

“About what?”

“About how I look?”

She resembled Mom (all of the Sorenson women are babelicious or verging closer every day). What took two pairs of socks to produce in me sprouted from Natalie’s chest naturally. It was maybe unfair that so much physical potential belonged to someone who had taken her virginity pledge when she was twelve.

“Well?” Natalie continued to pose, her arm bent onto her hip so her curves were more obvious. If it wasn’t for the turtleneck underneath, she might have made it into a calendar.

“Am I pretty?”

“I know at least four lesbians that would do you,” I admitted.

Natalie gasped.

“I’m kidding.” I slapped her on the shoulder.

The person who usually posed sexily before me, Katy, could handle jokes about sex and retaliate by calling me either jailbait, hotsy-tot, Cindy Blow Job, or Mary Want to Do Me (my Indian name). Natalie continued to exhale strangely, a sign she wanted me to take the insult/compliment back.

“I was just trying to say you look super sexilicious,” I tried to explain.

I
had
been being nice to her, but Natalie ripped Mom’s nightgown over her head so forcefully a shower of sparks snapped from her hair. When she was free, she raced down the hall and a few seconds later returned with Nana, the old S.S.
Unpack This Second
. Nana sailed into port, tsk-tsking at the sight of the room littered with things I hadn’t found a home for: Mardi Gras beads, rolled posters, a fuzzy footstool, an inflatable beer bottle, clothes I hadn’t washed before leaving Des Moines, and the racy evening wear falling out of the box and pooling on the floor.

Nana wasn’t pleased to see the mess in what had
once been an orderly room. She also wasn’t happy to see me wearing a teddy even though I had left my jeans on underneath. She lectured me about respect for my cousin and idle hands being devil’s tools.

“What about this closet, Kelly Louise?” Nana asked.

I had tossed a few things inside, hoping to get to them later or just close the door. I worried about how hard Nana gripped my arm. With whatever illness she maybe had, the days ahead were likely to be bleak if she didn’t save her strength.

“Clothes should be hung, not flung, Kelly Louise,” Nana reminded me.

In theory, I knew what she meant.

Natalie, meanwhile, pulled the veil from the lamp. The world returned to birthday cake frosting—the badly packaged kind, from a can.