After a while, the toddler came out, a little blond girl with large, transparent blue eyes. She didn't know how much I feared the color turquoise, that I wanted to vomit thinking of her mother reading my file. If only I could have stayed in the hospital, with a steady Demerol drip. The baby headed for the sandbox. I wanted not to care, but found myself getting up, scooping out the catshit with a pail, throwing it over the fence.
ED AND MARVEL Turlock were my first real family. We ate chicken with our hands, sucking barbecue sauce off our fingers as if forks had not yet been invented. Ed was tall and red-faced, quiet, with sandy hair going bald. He worked in the paint department of Home Depot. It didn't surprise me to learn they got the turquoise paint at cost. We watched TV all through the meal and everybody talked and nobody listened, and I thought about Ray, and Starr, and the last time I saw Davey. Boulders and green paloverde, red-shouldered hawks. The beauty of stones, the river in flood, the stillness. My longing seesawed with hot prickling shame. Fourteen, and I'd already destroyed something I could never repair. I deserved this.
I finished out the ninth grade at Madison Junior High, limping from class to class on my cane. My fractured hip was mending, but it was the slowest thing to heal. My shoulder was already functional, and even the chest wound that cracked my rib had stopped burning every time I straightened or bent. But the hip was slow. I was always late to class. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers' mouths opened and butterflies burst out, too fast to capture. I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?
IT WASN'T LONG before my role in the turquoise house was revealed to me: babysitter, pot scrubber, laundry maid, beautician. This last I dreaded the most. Marvel would sit in the bathroom like a toad under a rock, calling for me just the way Justin called for her, relentlessly. I tried to escape by thinking of gamelan orchestras, creatures in tide pools, even the shape of the curtains, navy and green, noticing how the stripes created the curtain by the way they flowed or broke. I thought there was a meaning there, but she kept calling.
"Astrid! Damn it, where is that girl?"
There was no point in pretending, she 'd keep calling until I came, exaggerating my limp like a servant in a horror movie.
Her face was red when I got there, hands on her wide hips. "Where the hell have you been?"
I never answered, just turned on the water, tested the temperature.
"Not too hot," she reminded me. "I've got a sensitive scalp."
I made sure it felt a little cold to me, because the Percodan I was doing around the clock made it hard to sense temperature. She knelt on the rug and stuck her head under the faucet and I washed her hair, stiff with dirt and hair spray. Her roots needed touching up. She went for a blond shade that on the package looked like soft butter gold, but on her more closely resembled the yellow shredded cellophane lining kids' Easter baskets.
I worked in a conditioner that smelled of rancid fat, rinsed, and sat her on the stool she 'd dragged in from the kitchen. I covered the sink with newspaper and started to comb. It was like combing tangled pasta. One good yank and it would all come out. I combed starting at the bottom and worked my way up, thinking how I used to brush my mother's hair at night. It was shiny as glass.
Marvel talked continuously, about her friends, her Mary Kay customers, something a woman saw on Oprah — not that Marvel watched Oprah, only Sally Jessy because Oprah was a fat nignog and not good enough to scrub Marvel's floor, though she made ten million a season, blah blah blah. I pretended she was speaking Hungarian and that I couldn't understand a word as I put on the gloves and mixed the contents of the two bottles. The smell of ammonia was overwhelming in the small windowless bathroom, but Marvel wouldn't let me open the door. She didn't want Ed to know she dyed her hair.
I separated the shreds of hair, applied bleach to the roots, set the timer. If I left the mixture too long, it would eat huge bloody sores into her scalp and all her hair would fall out. I thought that might be interesting, but I knew there were places worse than the Turlocks'. At least Marvel didn't drink, and Ed was unattractive and barely noticed me. There wasn't much damage I could do here.
"This is good practice for you," Marvel said as we waited the last five minutes before working in the color to the ends. "You could go to beauty school. That's a good living for a woman."
