tone of voice promised adventure and threatened menace if it wasn’t obeyed. So Nicky obeyed.
“Lift them higher.”
He lifted his arms higher. I slipped the cap-sleeved nightie over his up-stretched hands and wriggled it down until his head stuck out. I pinched and straightened with the attention and expertise I usually reserved for Barbie.
He stood still while I brushed his wet hair straight back and tied a purple ribbon around his head. He lifted his face while I rubbed berry lipgloss into his lips and wrapped a length of beads around his neck. Finally, I painted his nails red.
“I christen you Nina,” I said, turning the comers of my mouth down and curtsying.
Nicky made a face. “I don’t want to play with that name.”
I considered. “Nicole. How about that? It’s close to Nicholas. Or Nicola. What about Nicola? It’s pretty.”
“Okay,” he said. His face shone.
The crinkly fabric looked bright and crisp on his dusted skin. His winter skin was a hard beige, like the rinds of certain melons. Streaks of missed dirt showed through the white powder and his body looked strange compared to mine. I stood in front of the mirror. Nicky fixed his eyes on me and would not look at his reflection.
I patted his shoulders and hips and twirled him. around. No matter where I moved him, his eyes gripped mine.
I looked in the mirror, hoping he would do the same, and saw two girls: me and the one I had named Nicola. I stared at Nicola in her flouncy crinkled dress and brazen purple ribbon over dark wet hair, and finally Nicola’s eyes darted off my face. She glanced back at me then slowly turned to absorb her full reflection. Her chest expanded.
With one hand on my waist, Nicola took my hand and two-stepped me across the wooden floor. Her feet were unfettered, expressing complex rhythms with natural confidence. The powder was like silk under our toes. I let my own feet go, and threw my head back in long, toothy laughter. As the room spun past and Nicola’s purple and green image cut across the mirror in the golden taffy evening light, Nicky didn’t seem to care one bit. Who could care? In that moment he was Nicola. It was enough.
In the evenings I lay in bed and listened for the crunch of Sam’s car in the driveway. Every night he went to committee meetings for the town or to play ball or to umpire or referee. When I heard the gravel, I pushed my chin into my chest and pulled my shoulders up around my ears. Some nights I called downstairs for my mother, but Sylvia no longer responded. Nicky called for her, too, but it was like yelling into a vacuum. She was in the bedroom below or sprawled on the couch. Maybe she was ignoring us. Neither of us had the courage to get up and check if she was there. What if she had left, crawled out the window and left us behind?
Nicky’s bed shared a wall with mine. With my lips against the blue fleur-de-lis wallpaper, I whispered of mutations: “Sylvia’s nose has grown into a long dirty parsnip. Her eyes are little piggy beads. Her teeth are black smelly Doberman’s balls and her mouth oozes green poo. She is getting fatter and fatter and has developed a taste for plump juicy boy-flesh. My flesh is too stringy. But I am sure a witch like her would appreciate a meal of a boy like you, Nicky.”
Nicky grew silent. I pictured him in emptiness, his mind sucked into the witch’s void.
“I know you sleep curled in a ball near the bottom of your bed so the witch-mother can’t find you.”
The possibility of frightening my brother until he cracked spurred me on. I stopped the story only when I had convinced myself the witch-mother’s eyes were glowing red outside my own door as she stood, drawn by her daughter’s words, head tilted, waiting for me to get the story wrong.
In the quiet after my stories, I saw cobwebs forming in the night sky where the ceiling should have been. Spiders crawled over the webs, some hanging from threads. The longer I looked, the more the spiders multiplied and soon I saw them dropping on my covers, felt them creeping on my skin and pricking me. I scratched, leaving long red ridges on my cheeks and neck and arms.
In the morning the witch-mother was gone and Sylvia sat smoking at the kitchen table. The welts escaped her detection but Jenny Taylor pointed them out on the bus. Eventually I turned the bedroom light on when I went to sleep. No one seemed to mind.
That spring, Sylvia’s eyes assumed a new position: up and to the left. Over and over, I was fooled, turning to look where they pointed only to find she was staring at a clay mask on the wall or the painted rung of a chair.
I avoided any space Sylvia’s eyes might rest, in case my mother saw something she didn’t want to and that something was me.
Nicky couldn’t tolerate Sylvia’s eyes not resting on him. Nicky wanted to be noticed.
He experimented. When he wore his tiny red stretch bathing suit to school, Sylvia didn’t bat an eye. He wore Sam’s boxers or his own pajama bottoms with a belt looped around his waist. He wore the same T-shirt for days on end. He went shirtless. He didn’t comb his hair so it become a matted helmet. Each morning, Sylvia sat looking at a potted baby’s tears on the windowsill, sucking on her cigarette and letting the smoke trail out her nostrils.
One day Nicky came downstairs with his nails, his knuckles and part of his neck painted with pink polish. The time I had painted his nails was already fading from my memory. I had removed the polish right away then so no one had seen it. This time Nicky had made sure that no one would miss it.
I was in the kitchen when Nicky came in. These days, if we wanted breakfast we had to get it ourselves. Nicky made toast, covering it with chunks of peanut butter, then tossing the knife into the sink with a clatter.
“Shit,” said Nicky, louder than he needed to. Sylvia didn’t flinch. Nicky sat and tapped his fingers on the table but Sylvia stayed facing the window, the heater on her cigarette burning until it was over an inch long, then dropping. I glared at Nicky. He wasn’t supposed to wear polish on his own. I stood beside Sylvia at the edge of her vision and pushed the ashtray so the ashes would fall into it.
At school I was dying to say something, to use those freakish pink nails as a way of getting Nicky back for using my polish in the first place. Nicky walked around with his chin out and a big grin and somehow it was okay. I didn’t know how he did it. He didn’t have a good memory like mine and his grades were average but there was something about my brother — maybe something he’d said — that made the other boys want his approval. Maybe he’d blamed it on me. Making fun of him would make things worse.
Sam didn’t see the nails until dinner time. Though more and more Sylvia’s dinners came from a can, that night she served up a meatloaf, loosely-packed ground beef swimming in a yellow sauce. The table was set with no tablecloth or napkins, and the forks and knives were on the same side of the plate. Sam got out the milk and ketchup.
Despite the liquid, my first bite crunched.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
Sylvia looked around with a smile, not meeting anyone’s eyes.
“Soup. Tomato soup and mushroom.”
“Are there onions?”
“Onions. Corn flakes. Mustard. Whatever was around. Maybe even some peanut butter.”
My throat rose but I kept my mouth closed. Sylvia had slumped and didn’t notice. The meat
