My Tiki Girl (4 page)

“Put it on, put it on!” urges Dahlia.

“No. Not now. It’s only for very special occasions. It won’t work unless you really need it to,” Jonah explains.

“A ring of invisibility will come in handy at the end of the world,” says Leah, and we all agree.

“Leah’s next,” says Dahlia, and we watch Leah pull two gray plastic walkie-talkies from her bag. Leah doesn’t usually shoplift; it’s too risky. See, she went to jail once (it was a total setup) and the cops look at that as having a record, which means she has to be really careful—if she went to jail again, Dahlia and Jonah could end up in foster care, or worse, with their Aunt Elsbeth in New York.

Leah probably bought the walkie-talkies at the high-tech outlet with one of her credit cards. She has a ton. One gets rejected and she just pulls out another.

“It’s so we can stay in touch and give each other important messages when the end of the world comes,” Leah explains as she takes the walkie-talkies from their box. She shows us how they even have a button that makes a beeping alarm, and there’s a guide to Morse code on the side.

“Now you, Maggie,” Dahlia says, and I reach into my pocket and pull out the knife I swiped from the case at Valley Sports. It’s a hunting knife, with a locking blade folded into the curved wooden handle. It feels heavy, covers the length of my open hand. I pull open the silver blade carefully; this knife is razor sharp. It’s for gutting deer—slicing through skin, muscle, and tendon.

I chose the knife because it was the most dangerous thing I could think of. It seems to fit my new life. My life where I do dangerous things like shoplifting and siphoning gas. BTA Maggie would never have carried a knife. ATA Maggie is an outlaw girl. The knife is a symbol that anything goes.

“Jumping catfish!” says Dahlia, her eyes wide as she stares at the knife, reaches out to touch the polished brass end. “You could kill an army of bears with that thing! You’ll use it to build us a shelter; hunt and gather; defend us from the marauders. Such a practical tool for the end of the world. LaSamba, the practical clown.”

I push down on the safety catch, close the knife, and slide it into my pocket. I’m blushing like some kind of idiot just because some crazy girl with pink plastic rosary beads called me a practical clown.

Dahlia reaches into her bag and pulls out a Polaroid and several packs of film.

“It will be important to document the end of the world,” she explains. She’s ripping open the packet of film, loading the cartridge into the camera. She points the camera at us. Jonah, Leah, and I are leaning against the wall of the skating rink. Shoppers are walking past us. Behind Dahlia are the escalators, carrying an endless stream of people up and down, up and down. It reminds me of watching ants in an ant farm.

“Smile and say ‘apocalypse,’ ” says Dahlia.

“Apocalypse,” we all say in unison, singsongy, grinning, as the flash goes off in our eyes. We hear the camera’s motor working and the picture is spit out. We gather around Dahlia to watch it develop. It’s all cloudy at first, then we can make out forms. The forms turn into people and suddenly, there we are, looking up at ourselves as Dahlia holds us, waves us around a little to help bring us into focus.

There’s Jonah, magic ring in one hand, a gray walkie-talkie in the other. He looks small for a ten-year-old, skinny, with dark brown hair and eyes, just a sprinkling of freckles. Maybe it’s the oversize robe that makes him look so tiny. It’s dark blue terry cloth with a hood, and Leah has sewn gold lamé stars to it. His gold belt is a thick, tasseled rope that used to hold a curtain open. You can just see the toes of his black Converses peeking out from under the hem of his robe.

And there’s Leah, holding the second walkie-talkie in her hand, Birdwoman hanging out of her low-slung pocketbook. She’s wearing the old peacoat; her hair is bleached blond and straight like Dahlia’s. She’s got bangs that nearly cover her eyebrows. She cuts her own hair, and Dahlia’s and Jonah’s too. Leah looks more like a teenager than a woman about to be forty. I know she’s thirty-nine because she tells us she’s going to have a big fortieth birthday party in June. She’s going to rent a riverboat and we’ll all go riding up and down the Connecticut River, drinking champagne and launching firecrackers off the side.

I’m standing between them in the photo, my hands dug deep into the pockets of my jeans, touching change, a house key, and the new knife. My own hair is dull brown and straight, not as long as Dahlia’s, just long enough to tuck behind my ears. I’m skinny—too skinny, everyone says. Before the accident, it was a good thing—
God, you’re so thin, Maggie, you can wear anything! Must be nice, Maggie!
Now that I’m a cripple, suddenly it creeps people out. Plus maybe I lost some weight after the accident. It’s true—in the picture, I’m hardly there. I look as lost in my white fisherman’s sweater and denim jacket as Jonah does in his robe. Behind us are the shadows of skaters going in circles. I think I look a little like one of those shadows when I see myself next to Leah and Jonah. If Dahlia was in the picture, you probably wouldn’t see me at all.

We play the photo game next, where we go around the mall putting Birdwoman different places and taking her picture. Dahlia takes pictures of Birdwoman sitting on the shoulder of a mannequin, riding alone on the step of an escalator, resting in a display of fine china, and—my favorite—Birdwoman sitting on the second-story railing, getting ready to jump. Leah lets go of her, and Dahlia takes another one of Birdwoman in flight while Jonah gets ready to catch her. Birdwoman lands safely in Jonah’s hands, but the picture just shows a dark blur. The camera can’t freeze motion.

We make fun of the skaters, drop popcorn on them from up above until a security guard chases us away. While we’re up there looking down, I’m kind of almost wishing I was there on the ice again, showing off my moves. I want to show Dahlia how close skating is to flying. I want to lean into her on the turns, to laugh until our teeth hurt as we hurtle through space on metal blades.

In the car on the way back, we sing “We Will Rock You.” It’s by Queen, who Dahlia says is a totally underrated band. Jonah whispers to his ring. Dahlia rests against me, her head on my shoulder, the blanket covering us both. She puts her hand on my knee, then slides it down, reaching for my scar, only my jeans are in the way.

My scar is like a magnet to Dahlia. She wants to see it all the time, and she always looks sort of relieved each time I pull up the leg of my pants, like maybe she was worried it had gone away.

The backseat smells like gasoline and we’re cold, but happy with the success of our mission. We’re heroes going home.

Back in their apartment, I call my father to ask if I can spend the night. I tell him Dahlia and I are having band practice.

“I guess you forgot,” he says.

“Forgot what?”

“Pizza night.”

How could I forget? I should apologize, hang up, and hurry home to him. But not yet.

“I’m sorry. Can’t we do it tomorrow? Tomorrow will be okay, right?”

“I picked up the pizza on the way home,” he says.

There’s a pause that seems to go on forever. I can practically hear the pizza getting cold, the greasy cheese congealing.

“I’ll put it in the fridge,” he says. “It’ll keep till tomorrow. We can heat it up.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Do you have your pills, sweetie?”

“Yup.”

“Don’t forget to take them,” he says just before hanging up.

Dahlia thinks it’s cool that I take antidepressants. I tell her the pills don’t do much except make me thirsty. She says it’s good that they don’t turn me into Suzy Sunshine. “If you weren’t depressed, you wouldn’t be LaSamba,” she says, and I think of those two blue tears on my doll’s cheeks, of how Leah calls me The Sad Clown, like everything that’s happened the last two years is written all over my face in bold print.

I’ve never talked about the accident to Leah. I told Dahlia the basics, but not the whole truth. My mom died, my leg got messed up. How when I came back to school, none of the kids knew how to talk to me. Then last year, when I started high school, everyone thought I was going to magically be over the whole thing, and when I wasn’t, people started avoiding me, saying I was a downer. One girl said she didn’t know how I could go on living.
If my mother died,
this stupid girl said right to my face,
I’d kill myself.

About halfway through ninth grade, when it became clear I wasn’t going back to my old, cheerful, BTA self, my father and my psychiatrist had a meeting and decided antidepressants were in order. Happy pills, I call them. Only they haven’t done a thing to make me happy. Which I guess means that deep down inside, I really am like my doll self, a clown of sorrow, and no pill in the world can change who you really are.

Leah has a prescription for lithium, but she never takes it. When she does, the dolls stop talking. She says it turns life into a merry-go-round when what she wants is a roller coaster.

Once I’m off the phone, Leah gives us each a glass of champagne, the smallest glass for Jonah, and we make toasts, put on a Janis Joplin CD in honor of Pam, and dance around. Dahlia takes pictures with the Polaroid. We talk to each other from room to room with the new walkie-talkies. Jonah gets into the bathtub, closes the curtain, and pretends he’s radioing us from space.

“This is Zamboni, passing Saturn, on my way to Uranus,” he says into the walkie-talkie. We’re sitting at Mission Control, on the living room floor beside the iron mark.

“Roger that, bring back some stardust,” says Dahlia, pushing the red talk button.

When he comes back from space, Jonah gives his sister a pinch of sand taken from the jar on the back of the toilet full of beach treasures they collected one summer in Cape Cod: sand, shells, well-worn pebbles, and sea glass. Dahlia rubs the tiny grains between her fingers and smiles like it’s a gift straight from heaven.

I have this idea of heaven as being a real place up in the stratosphere where dead people go, and sometimes they look down. I think it must be a little like us watching the skaters earlier. It freaks me out to think that my mother can see me now, here, beside Dahlia, my hand on this scorched iron mark, the stolen knife in my pocket. What must she think? Her daughter drinking champagne, shoplifting, tasting gasoline. Would she throw popcorn if she could? Does she still recognize me? Am I going to go home and find a card pulled from the stack under the bed, one I didn’t know existed, that says something like,
You are a complete and utter disappointment
?

We dance some more, this time to Elton John. My dancing is clumsy, limping. My leg throbs, but I don’t slow down. “Rocket Man” is blasting from the speakers, and it’s a song to celebrate the safe return of Zamboni, boy magician and astronaut. The four of us hold hands and spin in a circle the way you do in kindergarten. Birdwoman is on the floor in the middle and it’s her we’re dancing around. She’s the maypole. She’s birdie in the middle. She’s a small fire we’re dancing around to stay warm. We’re kicking up our heels and laughing. I’ve got my new stolen hunting knife in my pocket, making me feel all bad-girl dangerous. Dahlia’s put on a long silk scarf and some of her red lipstick. She kisses us each on the forehead, leaving her mark. We hold hands and dance some more. We wait for the end of the world to come, but it doesn’t, so we just keep dancing.

4

Leah is sleeping
in—Dahlia, Jonah, and I are in the kitchen. The boy wizard has his gold-starred robe on over his pajamas, and Dahlia and I are wearing the pale blue hospital scrubs we slept in. Dahlia’s got a drawer full of them, stolen by Leah on her various trips to the state hospital back in Delaware, which, according to Dahlia, is where they send you when you’re a mental case and poor. DSH, they say on them in thick black letters, branding us, making us feel close to crazy while we sleep nestled together on her single futon mattress on the floor. There’s a poster of Jim Morrison tacked to the ceiling above us. He’s wearing leather pants, no shirt, beads around his neck. He’s like God up there looking down. Some curly-haired, bare-chested poet God.

“Isn’t he gorgeous?” Dahlia asks all the time. “Aren’t you just totally in love with him?”

“Yeah,” I say. “He’s so hot, it’s unreal.” And we talk about what we’d do if he climbed down off the ceiling, who’d be the first to jump his bones. The little fact that he’s long dead doesn’t seem to put a damper on our Jim Morrison fantasies.

Dahlia has read his biography,
No One Here Gets Out Alive
, a thousand times. It sits on her cinder-block-and-board bookshelf with its torn cover and dog-eared pages, next to books of poetry by Sylvia Plath,
The Little Prince
(a gift from Leah), and
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, by Carl Jung.

The only books I have on the shelves in my bedroom are a set of World Book encyclopedias my dad got me when I turned ten. I really wanted those books. It was all I thought about for weeks. How embarrassing is that?

Jonah has the wooden tray out and he’s arranging it for his mother. He’s chosen the prettiest plate and folded a real cloth napkin under the silverware. The coffee is perking and the toaster is spitting out waffles like it doesn’t like the taste of them. Dahlia is melting a clump of frozen strawberries in a saucepan, and I’m searching for the can of whipped cream in the fridge. We’re being quiet so we don’t wake Leah up. Dahlia pours the rest of last night’s champagne into a goblet half full of orange juice and puts it on the tray. Jonah mixes the coffee just the way Leah likes it: black with three sugars. He stirs the sugar in like he’s mixing a potion—he’s that focused. I squirt the whipped cream from the red and white can onto the waffles and strawberries. Dahlia gets to carry the tray in, with Jonah and I creeping behind. It’s like Christmas morning.