The Full Cleveland (8 page)

•   •   •

It was an almost heroic feat, to sustain a dialogue as long as we did. We punctuated, or accented, it by going from the bed to the vanity table to apply Mickey's makeup. Leaning shoulder to shoulder at the mirror, the mascara, lipstick, and eyeliner became our alternate tools of expression; our heightened color, blackened eyes, reddened lips, visible evidence of the depth of our search for meaning. And we hadn't even gotten past the neighborhood boys.

Then, out of the blue, Mickey asked me, “Hey, what did you do all day anyway, with that cast on your leg? I'd kill myself if I had to just sit in a chair.”

“Me? Nothing.” It reminded me of my injury though, and how my knee hurt, and I rubbed off all the makeup and took my crutch and went to my bed. “I sat here too.” I meant, not just in a chair.

“See? I'd die. You sat on a bed and a chair.”

I shrugged, “It's not so bad. You can read a book. You can write a letter.”

Mickey brightened. “You wrote a letter? Who to? A love letter?”

I didn't really know what to call it, so I didn't answer. You know, you don't want to lie. But my silence made her suspicious.

“It better not be to Thomas.”

I shook my head it wasn't, but it just made her more curious.

“Really. Who'd you write it to? Was it Thomas? It was, wasn't it?”

“
No.”

“You did so! You wrote it to Thomas!”

“I wrote it to my grandfather!”

Mickey blinked at me in the mirror. “But. But I thought both your grandfathers are dead.”

“Well, they are.”

“Then … then how did you write them a letter?”

“In my head. I just wrote it in my head.”

“But…”

I wasn't too crazy to explain it to her further. But she was kind of waiting to hear it, you could tell. She was staring at me pretty hard in the mirror. I said, “Relax, I just wrote it in my head.”

She still just stood there staring at me, though. But eventually she asked, “Well, then which one did you write it to?”

“My father's father.”

“The one who gave you this house for a dollar?”

I nodded. “I really liked him. Besides, I owed him a thank-you note.” I was wearing the pearls, and took them out from under my tee shirt to show her. Of course, I had already told her all about them on the phone.

Mickey nodded they were nice, and went back to applying makeup. But after that, she kind of kept one eye fixed on me through the mirror.

Then I remembered what else I'd done today. I felt so close to Mickey by now, what with all the talking we'd done, I thought I could say anything. Even ideas that were all messed up and just half formed. “I also thought about what to do about poor people.”

Mascara wand stopped midair, Mickey said, “Who? Who's poor?”

“Poor
people.
They're everywhere. I almost fixed the problem though.” I grinned at her via the mirror. “I thought so long and hard about it, I almost gave the whole world a makeover.”

She carefully closed the mascara wand, not to clump it. “That sounds like fun.”

“I'm not kidding. I actually solved world poverty. But then the doorbell rang and the mailman came. And now I have to start all over again.”

“Oh boy.” She opened the mascara wand again. I guess she'd decided to start that all over again.

“The thing I think about poverty is, I'm not so sure it should be, like, acceptable. You know what I mean?”

But then, having said that much, I couldn't even begin to remember my original solution to the problem. I began to feel that the idea I'd had about making everyone rich now might elude me forever. I began to blame it on the post office. I began to wonder how many brilliant solutions to global problems had been lost because of the post office. Because the world is full of mail trucks screeching up driveways, doorbells piercing into the void, men in blue suits delivering bad news, wrecking your hopes and dreams, ruining everything.

“I mean, Mickey, nothing's black and white, right? So why does poverty always win?”

No, that wasn't what I was trying to say either, not at all. I was never going to remember the solution now. But then I thought I had better. I'd just have to go back to the very beginning.

So I began to tell Mickey what I'd seen downtown on the Easter drive with Dad. I told of the little children with the dirty faces and the houses without doors and the old people sitting on cement steps because they didn't have any chairs. I told of the woman who had tried to get dressed up for Easter with her hat, but then sat down on the sidewalk when she didn't have shoes.

Then I went even further, recounting pictures I'd seen in
Time
magazine, of an African country where the people were starving. And in
Life
, a picture of a tiny Mexican Indian boy standing next to a tall American girl, whom the story said was the same age as the boy, only the boy's growth had been stunted because half the year there was no rain where he lived, and nothing grew to eat.

And then I have to admit I went on a total roll, on and on, recounting for Mickey every image of abject poverty I could remember, until I was nearly pleading with her that it had to be stopped, and since nobody else had done it, it was up to us for sure.

•   •   •

When I looked to Mickey, I was surprised she wasn't working on herself anymore. She was staring at me through the mirror with her mouth all puckered, a tube of red lipstick poised in hand. She had so many coats on already, her lips weren't even close to red. Like old roses, they were almost black. “Mickey? What color is that?”

She glanced at the label on the bottom. “Chanel. Fatal Red.”

“You better stop. It's too dark. You'll look dead.”

She dropped the tube in her makeup kit. “So does this poverty thing mean you don't want me to make you over?”

“Oh. No, but, see, I have this theory, but I just can't remember what it is. It's designed to make everyone rich. If it works, just imagine.”

“Well,” she said, “then maybe you should think about it some more. Jo's home thinking. You're here thinking. You guys are unbelievable. But go. Go ahead. Think.”

I shrugged and took her advice. I lay there for a while, very still. It was the first time there had been silence between us all day, but I figured it was for a higher purpose and all. But no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I couldn't remember how to make everyone rich. Mickey was patient, she didn't say anything. I mean all she said was “You know, pearls don't really go with a tee shirt.”

But you wouldn't believe it. Something when she said that. I suddenly sat up, feeling lucky. “Hey, Mick? You know the death wish?”

Mickey grabbed her eyelash curler, and applied the metal instrument to her right eye, the left glued to me through the mirror.

“Well, the death wish is this thing that everyone has, that they wish they could die. But just to see what it's like. But, it's just curiosity. But my question is, if everybody has a death wish because they're curious, how do we know everybody isn't dying … of curiosity?”

She had begun with an eyebrow brush in furious strokes, so I excused her from answering.

“So listen. What if the most uncurious person in the world comes along? I mean they're very curious on the one hand, but not at all on the other. They're curious only about
life.
And it's a woman. And she's a teacher, and she starts a school, called a Lack of Curiosity School, to teach how not to have the death wish. And she teaches all the little children. She channels and guides all their little curiosity. She totally fills them up with it, but only on the one hand, see, and not on the other. Because of her, there is no space left in the children's minds for the death wish. Then maybe a whole generation would grow up without the death wish, and maybe, if it worked, nobody would ever die!”

I lay back down to think it through. “But that's probably unrealistic. Because everyone has to die.”

I rolled back over and looked at Mickey. She was vigorously removing makeup with a huge wad of cotton balls.

“But,” I continued, “that's just the theory. Like in science class, we simply extract the method. We invent schools just like the lack of curiosity schools, but not to end death, to end
poverty.”

She winged the whole wet wad of cotton balls into my brass wastebasket. It sounded like a gun.

“People have to die, but they don't have to be poor.”

Now she was clawing at the lid to a fat, flat jar, then banging it on the edge of the vanity table, then slamming it with the handle of my antique silver brush. I was about to ask if she'd like me to try, when, with a grunt, she finally got it open.

She began to smear clay masque all over her face.

“And at these new Lack of Curiosity Schools we invent? Just like we could have done with the death wish if everybody didn't have to die, we just eradicate the thought of poverty from the children's minds, and replace it with the thought of wealth. The words poverty and hunger no longer exist. There is no way to say to them. There is no way to
think
them. Then there could never be a hungry person in this world, because poverty and hunger would have become
unthinkable!”

There. I blinked up at the ceiling, to see if that was finally it.

But no, it wasn't. Not the brilliant solution I had arrived at earlier. That, the real solution, perhaps it was gone forever. But I had thought of it. I know I had. But the mailman. I shook my head and closed my eyes, idly playing with my pearls, rudely forgetting my friend at the mirror.

When I came to, she was hanging over me. She had covered her whole face, except for her black lips and one black eyebrow, with the wet clay masque and she was as gray as a ghost. But her eyes. Was it fear? Yes, plus it was fury, like to the hundredth power. “Mickey,” I whispered, stunned at the transformation. She didn't look like an After anymore. She looked worse than the worst Before. “What
happened?”

“Lack of Curiosity Schools?” she said, the one eyebrow twitching wildly, cracking the forehead of her masque.

I didn't dare defend them. They had really ticked her off.

“So far we've got you on crutches, writing a letter to your dead grandparent, and doing something I can't even explain to poor people. Are you on painkillers?”

I couldn't even answer, because it was riveting, fascinating, what was happening to Mickey's face as the masque on it dried. Her eyelids began to droop, her lips began to curl, her right eyebrow arched up, and then her whole face fixed, like a photograph just done developing. And then, I don't know, she seemed set, as in for life.

She said one last thing, though, before that happened. “Would you do me a favor. Boyce?”

I nodded.

“Would you stop talking about poor people?” I nodded.

“And can I give you a little advice?”

I closed my eyes. I couldn't even look at the masque anymore. “This is
not
the way to get made over.”

Soon after Mickey Knight went peeling down the driveway in the re-hot-wired red MG, I took my crutch and went to Cabot's room and poked her with it and woke her up. That is, I didn't exactly wake her, because I could see her eyes were half-open beneath her blond hair, which always looked perfectly brushed, even when she was lying in bed under her canopy. Now it was spilled all over the pillow, shimmering like anything in the moonlight from the window. “Sis,” I said. “Wake up.”

“I am up. Did that friend of yours leave?”

“Guess what?”

“Did she drive herself home?”

I wrapped my free arm around the post at the end of the bed. “Dad got an envelope back in the mail.”

“Oh. How come her parents let her have that car? She's only fourteen years old.”

“It's hot-wired. They're always away.”

“She looks about forty though. I mean, what do you say all day to a forty-year-old?”

“Are you going to listen?”

“You won't tell me? Oh, I guess I'm not as cool.”

I almost said she was too cool, but caught myself in time. You start telling your sister she's cool, and she immediately starts thinking she's cooler than you are. “Listen, Dad wrote a story or something, and it got rejected.”

Cabot sat up, instantly forgiving me for Mickey Knight. “Wow”

“Andrew John the mailman brought it back. And he writes stuff too. And he gets rejected. He's a poet or something. You should have heard him in the hall.”

Cabot said, “Well, I think Dad's smart.”

I said, “Well, I think he's smarter than Andrew John.”

I hopped closer with my crutch and sat on the edge of the bed. “Cabbie? Do you think it's possible to end poverty once and for all?”