They left Paige to the orphaned and wounded animals in her room, which was crowded with fish tanks and terrariums and plastic turtle ponds and hamster wheels and a maze of interconnecting gerbil tubes that ran all over the place like berserk plumbing.
When Paige was fifteen, her grandparents died within a month of each other, and Paige was passed around the family, attending four different high schools in four years, and she started talking even less. There are many roles in a high school: star quarterback, prom queen, class clown, brain, stoner. Paige was an extra.
Maria learned to talk early, and she never stopped.
“What’s this?” “What’s that?” “Why is that?” “Can I have one of those? What is it?” “You know what I think?…”
It accounted for her parents’ permanent expression of having teeth cleaned.
Maria demonstrated at age four her talent for mismatching clothes. “Can I dress myself?” “I want to dress myself.” “I’m going to dress myself now.” She ran into her bedroom and came out in a raincoat and bikini bottom. “I’m ready to go to school now.”
Maria had lots and lots of accidents, big scary-looking tumbles, skinned knees, twisted ankles — her parents awakened every other night by a loud thump, Maria falling out of bed in her sleep again, then yelling down the hall, “I’m okay!”
They thought she might need glasses, but the tests came back twenty-twenty. The spills seemed to bother Maria less than her parents, who would jump out of their chairs on the porch and grab their hearts before Maria dusted herself off and guaranteed nothing was broken. It finally dawned on them that Maria never cried, no matter what, going over the handlebars of her bike, popping right up, “I’m okay!” Jumping back on the bike and taking off again into the side of a parked van. “I’m okay again!”
Maria seemed to have a high threshold for pain, and she could definitely take a punch, which were administered by boys everywhere.
Maria’s true passion lay in the arts. Maria was a frustrated painter, a frustrated musician and a hopeless romantic. She tried oils, pencils, watercolors, all to no avail. That hemisphere just wasn’t firing. Same problem with music, made that much more glaring by her fondness for the tuba. She was an open book, all things to all people, wanting to be liked and trying to become whatever you wanted, except quiet. She dated a lot, but was saving herself for marriage. Trying to at least. But boys will be boys, and there were lots of struggles in backseats of cars outside dances and burger joints, a car door finally popping open and the other students seeing Maria tumble out of the car with a broken bra strap. “I’m okay!”
You couldn’t help but like her. And hate her. She was the kind of gentle person who made you feel horribly guilty every time you lost patience with her. She made the other members of the pep club suicidal. Then there was the cheerleading squad, where her natural zest won her the top position on the human pyramid — each game the parents pointing in alarm, “Jesus, did you see the fall that girl just took?”
“I sure hope she’s okay.”
“She said she was.”
Rebecca was one of the most well adjusted children you’d ever meet, which meant she was weird. Her parents were semiprofessional folk musicians, playing in bars and coffeehouses in the Tampa Bay area, taking Rebecca along since she was five.
The nightclub experience made her a bit precocious, and life in the sandbox was never quite as exciting after that. She spoke a different language from the other children, refusing to play dodge ball because it was “too much like Vietnam.” But she was able to duck the menu of neuroses that afflicted her peers, mainly because her parents were so well adjusted and weird, too.
Her friends’ bedrooms were covered with the usual teeny-bopper pinups, but they didn’t recognize any of the posters on Rebecca’s walls: Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, Donovan, Joan Baez. “Who are all those old people?”
It was a stress-free life, and Rebecca was content to just lie in a field and watch the clouds. That was Rebecca all over, ephemeral and surreal, like some kind of unicorn.
Not quite of this world, catch it while you can because it won’t be here for long, and it definitely can’t be possessed.
“Daddy, how come poor people are poor?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“But that’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair.”
“It should be.”
“I know, dear.”
