Y: A Novel (8 page)

“Look,” says Lydia-Rose. “A rabbit.”

I hook my thumbs together and flap my hands. “A dove.”

A couple wearing Hawaiian shirts walks past us, kicking up sand with their shoes.
They are laughing and talking in another language; it sounds
like German. The man reaches into his pocket and takes the lens cap off a small camera.
He circles the woman, snapping pictures, moving her by the shoulders to get some part
of the beach in, some ocean liner in the background, a bird. Lydia-Rose and I dance
behind them, dipping into the shot as the man hits the shutter, making peace signs,
sticking out our tongues. Lydia-Rose says,
Hey, look, what’s that,
and when I spin to see what she’s pointing at, she lobs a piece of bull kelp at the
back of my head. My teeth gnash together from the force of the blow but I don’t cry.
I look across the ocean. When Lydia-Rose hits me again, I think I see the devil in
the clouds, but it’s only Mount Baker.

At night, I listen to the hiss of the iron, the slosh of water as Miranda lifts it
over her shirts, the high whistle of steam. Ashamed, I roll up a pair of soiled underwear
and shove them under a loose floorboard in the laundry room, wondering where else
I can hide things in this new, foreign house.

After everyone is asleep, I sneak into the kitchen and stick the black beret on my
head. The fridge is a mess of phone numbers and Polaroids: Halloween cape-swirling,
group shots on the beach, Lydia-Rose’s hair in the wind. I wonder how much longer
it will be until Miranda puts a photo of me on the fridge. I look up. The ceiling
feels too close to my head. Winkie hears me open the fridge and comes running, her
little toenails clicking on the linoleum. Winkie thinks the fridge is a small, cold
white room. We survey the contents together. A jar of dill pickles, a packet of ground
beef. No-name mayonnaise. I hold the refrigerator door open until I am freezing.

Winkie and I pace, open all the cupboards. Nothing is wasted here. A kitchen drawer
is devoted to plastic bags and twist ties, and every doorknob is wound tight with
rubber bands from celery and broccoli stalks. A Tupperware container in the pantry
overflows with sticky birthday candles, which are only thrown out when they’re less
than an inch long. We are also supposed to recycle and compost. I hate the fruit flies
and find it impossible to peel labels off soup cans, but Miranda says I must persevere.
She tells me to put all the fruit and vegetable peelings in a small stinky rubber
trash can by the sink, but I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, and when no one is looking,
I stuff them into the bottom of the trash or give them to Winkie.

Outside, a man drinks a beer in the parking lot, and the sky is midnight blue. I see
my face in the window’s reflection. My hair is curlier than it used to be. It’s still
the whitest of blondes. It looks like a giant cotton ball. My face is pale and slack,
some kind of unfinished quality to it. The rest of me: warped from a chink in the
glass.

“Go to sleep,” I tell the face.

Later, Miranda finds me in the living room, bent over a yellow plastic stereo. It’s
two in the morning. I’m wearing the red heels; I’ve scuffed them somehow. Winkie is
watching my every move.

“Good night now,” Miranda says.

I jut my lip and press the Play button. “No sound,” I whimper.

“Okay.” Miranda turns the stereo on its side. “This isn’t a piece of magic. The batteries
are in the wrong way.” She shivers and pulls her bathrobe tight. I lay my head in
her lap while she fidgets with the batteries. I feel so sad and lonely that I wrap
my arms around her waist and don’t let go.

When I start to cry, she carries me up the stairs to her bedroom and shuts the door.
The room is small and square. A queen-size foam mattress sits on the floor, Lydia-Rose’s
old Little Mermaid comforter stretched across it. She sets me at the edge of the bed
and sits down. Her skin smells like Jergens hand cream.

I look around. One of her pillowcases has a hole in it. A pack of menthol cigarettes
lies on the floor beside a coffee tin filled with water. Cigarette butts float at
the top like dead men. There’s a cardboard box filled with paperbacks in the corner
and a chest of drawers with Little Mermaid stickers all over it—must have been Lydia-Rose’s
at some point, too. A tabletop ironing board is set up on the dresser, along with
a stack of her Molly Maid shirts and a pocket-sized Holy Bible. A plastic cosmetics
bag sits on the floor, filled with brushes, eye shadow, and tubes of lipstick. There
is nothing on the walls except a full-length mirror in the far corner, with a crack
in the bottom. The room is lit by a small desk lamp.

“I want you girls to have the nice things,” she says when she sees me looking. She
takes my little hand and flips it, palm up, in her own. She traces the lines on my
palm with her fingertip, something I’ve seen her do with Lydia-Rose. “You used to
beg me to take you up here when you first came to live with us,” she says. “Remember
how scared you were? The first few days you hardly said a word.”

I shake my head. I ask Miranda how long I’ve been here, and she tells me it’s been
three months.

“When I was growing up,” Miranda says, still stroking my hand, “we lived down the
street from a foster family. They had six girls. After I had Lydia-Rose, I thought,
I should do this. Someone out there must need a home.” She puts my hand down and reaches
for the pack of menthol cigarettes, lights one, and blows the smoke into the room.
“I was so lucky they let me have you. There weren’t any available homes at the time—it
just worked out that way, so perfectly. I would have liked to take in more, but I
never made enough money to be able to rent a bigger house.” She sucks on the cigarette
and shakes her head. “I’ve never been any good at making money. I don’t know how people
do it. I really don’t.” She takes one more drag and sinks the half-finished cigarette
in the coffee can. “I wanted to have lots of girls,” she tells me. “I wanted Lydia-Rose
to have lots of sisters. I couldn’t have any more children after I had her.”

“Oh.”

I can tell she is telling me something important, something meaningful, but my eyes
are heavy and one of them is twitching.

“Let’s go to bed now, honey,” she whispers, and we pad down the stairs to the bedroom
together. Miranda scoots my pillow around, tugs the blanket to my chin. She puts her
hand on my forehead for a second. Outside, the neighbor calls for his dog. “Yogi,”
he cries. “
Yo
-gi.”

Lydia-Rose and I like to lie the same way: on our backs, arms folded across our chests.
Lydia-Rose wakes up and shivers. The cold night air blows in from a draft in the window.
It smells like wisteria. “Why do we have to share a room?” she asks suddenly.

Miranda leaves my side and pulls the blanket tighter over her daughter. “Go to sleep
now, girls.”

“But—”

“Just stop.”

Lydia-Rose huffs and rolls to her side. “I want my own room.”

Miranda kisses my forehead and leaves. I listen as Lydia-Rose’s breathing turns deep
and slow. I want her to like me.

A few hours later I wake again. Winkie is rooting in the bathroom for mice, and I
want only to be asleep. The house is so still. I slide out of bed, then tiptoe to
the kitchen. The floor is like ice beneath my feet. I scan the Polaroids on the fridge:
Miranda’s old house, the park, the time Lydia-Rose dressed as a pixie for Halloween.
A brochure for a single mothers’ support group, the address circled in red ink.

Lydia-Rose keeps a Polaroid of her father in our sock drawer, and sometimes I stare
at it. He looks distinguished, handsome. He looks noble. I never learn where he went.
It’s not something Miranda ever talks about. Lydia-Rose looks at me with no expression
on her face when I ask about him. She tells me she does not remember.

I don’t know why I can’t stay in my bed. This goes on for years, these secret sojourns
to the kitchen. I stand in front of the fridge, yearning for this place to feel like
home, Winkie by my side, tongue hanging out of her mouth, hoping for something to
eat.

Sometimes, when Lydia-Rose and I have nothing better to do, we practice dying. Lydia-Rose
tells me that when her grandma died, they were all listening to a song from
The Big Chill
—that
old
movie, she says—and when it came to a certain part of the song, her grandma died,
and Lydia-Rose whispered,
Mom, she died on that note. That’s the note she died on.
Lydia-Rose and I take the cassette tape and walk to Clover Point with the yellow
stereo, and when it gets to that note, we just kind of let go.

It’s very nice dying, we tell Miranda.

The dizziness starts about six months after I move in with Miranda and Lydia-Rose.
I am always nauseous, and I keep walking into things. My
shins are covered in bruises, my elbows red and raw. Miranda takes me to the doctor
and asks him to look at my left eye, which she says has a funny look to it, as if
it’s not seeing. The doctor isn’t nice to her at first, and it’s only years later
that I realize he was the doctor who used to see me when I lived with Moira and Julian.
He puts his hand on the top of my head and asks me, in a quiet voice, to wait outside
with the nurse, and then I hear shouting from behind the door. Miranda emerges, red-faced
and weeping, and takes me into her arms. She carries me back into the room and pleads
with him that she is not hurting me, and would he please look at my eyes. She puts
me on the examining table and bangs her fist on the counter. I reach for her hand
and tell her not to cry. Something in the doctor’s face softens and he obliges. He
shines a red light into my eyeball and asks me to follow the light as he moves it
around. It is an easy game, and I leave the office bursting with pride because the
doctor makes such a fuss about how well I have done, all things considered.

“All things considered, my dear,” he says and waves as we walk out the door. On the
bus ride home Miranda explains to me what he means. I am going blind in one eye.

Late that night, Miranda crawls into my bed and tells me that people with a sense
disability sometimes make up for it by having another heightened sense.

“I know a blind woman,” she says, slipping her hand under my pajama top and rubbing
my back, “who can play anything on the accordion or the piano. Anything at all.” She
speaks so quietly I can hardly hear her. Lydia-Rose is breathing heavily in her bed
and Winkie is waiting expectantly at the end of mine, waiting for Miranda to leave
so she can resume her place on top of my feet.

I ask Miranda if this blind person is some kind of prodigy and Miranda says no, not
really, but that she
really
is a good player. I tell her that I don’t think I have any such heightened sense
to make up for my bad eye, though I’ve noticed that my nose is as strong as a bloodhound’s.
But no one’s going to celebrate that: the little blind girl with a snout so keen she
can tell you what you had for breakfast. Big deal.

I’m blind because of amblyopia. Lazy eye. My right eye got so good at
seeing, it told the other to give up. It takes too much energy to look after a sick
thing. The world is flatter; I see in a dimension just under third. Rembrandt had
this problem and some scientists think he was a better painter because of it. I think
it makes me trip. Where’s that stair? How far from my foot? I can’t tell. It’s all
by feel. It’s not my mother’s fault. I wasn’t born blind. Amblyopia comes later, when
one eye fails to thrive. I could have worn an eye patch if someone had noticed this
earlier, but now, well, why kick a dead horse. In the doctor’s office, the eye chart
starts with E. For eye, for easy. Everyone can see the E.