A Life of Bright Ideas Read online

  “Only when I roll it in juice cans, or iron it. Otherwise it’s frizzy,” I confessed. I tucked my hair behind my ears, hoping Winnalee would notice that I’d finally grown into them.

  Winnalee set my hair free, then reached out and gave my boobs a quick bounce. “And look at your knockers!”

  “Knockers?” Boohoo asked, giggling, as my face heated.

  I licked my index fingers and wiped under my eyes where I knew mascara was smeared. Winnalee didn’t go for the “natural look” by wearing foundation, pale blue eye shadow, and gloss to give her lips that just-licked look like I did—but then she didn’t need to. She was beautiful as she was, with fair skin that showed no signs of ever having been invaded by zits, and lashes that were naturally brown-black and curled to her eyebrows in a feather-soft arc, not mascara-crunchy and creased like the letter L from an eyelash curler, like mine. Her sun-streaked loops flowed in the wind, brushing across petite boobs that actually fit her body—and were obviously not strapped into a bra, judging by the fact that her nipples were showing through her dress like pencil erasers. She was curvy like Freeda, but smaller, and she had hips, unlike yours truly. Nice hips, too, not too wide, not too narrow. She was cute and pretty at the same time, like Goldie Hawn, on Laugh-In, but I didn’t get to say that out loud because Winnalee was hugging me, saying, “You’re still my best friend. I can already tell,” and I was smudging my mascara all over again. Aunt Verdella came forward and wrapped her arms around us both, and the three of us laughed as if we’d found fairies.

  We were all talking at once then, bombarding one another with questions we were too excited to answer, when Winnalee stopped and looked down at Boohoo, who was twisting two strands of her hair together at her hip. “Okay … this has to be your little brother, Button. He looks just like Uncle Reece!” She bent over so that her face was level with Boohoo’s.

  Aunt Verdella went up behind Boohoo and gently pulled his hands free from Winnalee’s hair. “This is our little Robert Reece, but we call him Boohoo. He’s six years old,” Aunt Verdella said proudly.

  Boohoo was staring at the braided hemp Winnalee wore around her wrist, two turquoise beads dangling from the tied strings. “I like your wristlet,” he said.

  “He likes yarn,” I added quietly, embarrassed because his fixation with strings and tying was starting to slip over to the weird side.

  “Are you Crackpot?” Boohoo asked. Winnalee laughed as though his question made sense.

  “Maybe. Nice to meet you, Boohoo,” she said, giggling, either over his name, his question, or because Boohoo himself was giggably cute. Boohoo didn’t answer. He was too busy staring at her long hair again.

  The next couple of hours rushed by like playful winds. Winnalee ran through the downstairs of Grandma Mae’s house like a sugar-injected kid, pointing out all the things she remembered. She crawled up on the counter and sat propped on her knees, just because she remembered doing that when she was little, then she rushed to the bathroom, where she hiked her dress to her thighs and stepped into the claw-footed tub and sat down, just so she could see if it was as huge as she remembered. (It wasn’t.) When we got upstairs, Winnalee lifted the strap of her army bag and tossed it onto my bed, then turned in circles as she looked at the room that used to be hers, hurrying to the window seat and bouncing on it, even though it had no give.

  Aunt Verdella tugged Boohoo by the hand and announced that she was going home to cook Winnalee a nice homecoming meal.

  “Oh, oh! Would you make bunny pancakes?” Winnalee asked, referring to the rabbit-face, raisin-eyed pancakes she remembered. The ones Aunt Verdella still made for Boohoo, by dropping batter onto the griddle in three blobs, rounding the rabbit’s face with the back of her spoon and stretching the two blobs on top into long ears.

  That evening when Uncle Rudy came home, Winnalee grabbed my hand and tugged me outside. “Well, lookie who’s back!” he said. His face went purple from Winnalee’s tight squeeze, and she patted Knucklehead until his back legs buckled. “Wow, this old dog isn’t long for this world, is he?” she commented. Aunt Verdella and I winced because Boohoo was standing right there.

  “That’s quite the Volkswagen Camper you’ve got there,” Uncle Rudy said. “What is it? About a ’61, ’62?”

  “It’s a 1962,” Winnalee recited, proudly. “It’s my hippie mobile. It runs good, too.” While they talked, Boohoo combed over the murals on the side of the van like it was a “find the hidden picture” page in Highlights magazine, shouting out a number every time he found another delicate fairy peeking from behind a bold flower, sliding down an arched rainbow, or dancing over bright swirls.

  Things didn’t calm down until we settled at the table to eat our pancakes, eggs, fried potatoes, and ham. Winnalee dipped down and kissed her pancake when Aunt Verdella set down her plate. “I’ve missed you, Bunny!” she said. I started laughing and Winnalee looked up and grinned. “What? I did!” She looked at Aunt Verdella, who was ha-ha’ing, and suddenly Winnalee’s eyes narrowed and her lips parted, as though she just realized it wasn’t 1961 anymore, and, in spite of still having the oomph of a shaken can of soda pop, Aunt Verdella had aged to old.

  Aunt Verdella passed out plates to the rest of us and sat down. “How’s Freeda?” she asked, talking with her mouth full. “Oh, I miss that girl! I wish she had come with you.”

  Winnalee dipped the maple syrup jug upside down and drowned her plate—eggs and ham and fried potatoes and all. “She got her hairdresser’s license and opened a beauty shop a couple of years ago,” Winnalee said, while licking two fingers. I don’t think Aunt Verdella noticed how Winnalee’s face hardened when Freeda’s name came up, but I did—it morphed just how I imagine my face did when folks asked me about Dad.

  “A beauty shop?” Aunt Verdella slapped the table hard enough that the silverware jingled. “Now if that ain’t just perfect for Freeda! Remember when she fixed me and your ma up, Button?” Of course I remembered. They had raced to the mirror and laughed themselves silly. Then later, Aunt Verdella had strutted in front of the TV so Uncle Rudy could see the new her, and he asked who that “looker” was and joked that Verdie was sure going to be mad when he saw that Winnalee and I had brought him home a glamour girl. But Dad only grumbled when he saw Ma’s new look, and asked where the Phillips screwdriver was. I hated the way my mind kept a record of every one of my Ma’s hurts, and mourned them when I remembered, wishing only that every single hour Ma had on this earth had been happy.

  “Freeda was a fairy godmother when it came to helping women gussie up and feel good about themselves, that’s for sure,” Aunt Verdella said.

  “She’s always giving them tips on their hair, clothes, makeup … filling them up on psychobabble bullshit.” Boohoo covered his mouth and giggled over Winnalee’s cussword. “She likes telling people who they should be.”

  Aunt Verdella missed the sarcasm in Winnalee’s voice. “Oh, isn’t that wonderful!” she said. “Where’s her shop?”

  “Northville. A little place outside of Detroit.”

  “You always wanted to go to Detroit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, her elbow coming up to rest on the table, her hand curling against her cheek. “But then, I wanted a lot of things back then.”

  Aunt Verdella gave a feeble smile. “At least you got to Detroit,” she said.

  “Yeah, except that Freeda decided it was a dive once we got there, so we pulled out in less than a year.”

  Winnalee’s face brightened. “Hey, right after we eat, let’s go to your place, Button. Your old place. So I can see Aunt Jewel and Uncle Reece.”

  Everything stopped.

  Time.

  Forks.

  Mouths.

  Breath.

  Everything.

  Well, except for Boohoo, who was making bomb-dropping sounds and little screams as he dropped forkfuls of scrambled eggs over his bunny’s remains.

  I set my fork down. I didn’t want to say what happened. I looked at Aunt
Verdella for help, and she looked at Uncle Rudy. He grabbed a couple of strings of ham fat off his plate and got to his feet. “Hey, little buddy, what do you say you and me take Knucklehead out to do his duty?”

  Boohoo leapt to his feet and snatched the flubber out of Uncle Rudy’s hand. “I wanna give it to him,” he said. He hurried over to Knucklehead’s mat. “You wanna go do your poopy duty?” Knucklehead struggled to get to his feet. “Hoppy’s going out, too.” He tossed Knucklehead the ham, then ran to get his toad, who was now living in a secondhand aquarium Aunt Verdella bought last summer when she was going to set up a fish tank for Uncle Rudy, but never got around to it.

  After they were gone, Aunt Verdella reached over the corner of the table with both arms, one hand coming down over Winnalee’s and the other gently touching her elbow. “Jewel isn’t with us anymore, honey,” she said, stroking Winnalee’s arm. “She was killed in a storm four years ago this August.”

  “What?” Winnalee asked, in a small voice that made her sound as if she was nine again, and someone had just confirmed that fairies don’t exist.

  “She’d gone down into the basement to level the clothes in her new washing machine because it was thumping, like they do when they get out of balance. She was standing in a couple inches of water, because the sump pump hadn’t tripped on, and lightning struck the house.” Aunt Verdella’s voice was shaking, and so were my insides. I knew why her eyes were closed, and she rubbed her temples. I’d overheard her tell Ada once that she couldn’t think of that day without remembering my frantic phone call (the one I didn’t remember), and the sight of me running down Peters Road toward her house, Boohoo in my arms, both of us soaking wet and sobbing.

  “Oh God,” Winnalee said, shock pooling in her eyes. Then she turned to me, as if she needed confirmation that it was true.

  Winnalee reached for me just as Aunt Verdella did, and the three of us held hands across the table like we were praying.

  “Button’s daddy isn’t the same anymore. After Freeda helped Jewel feel better about herself, those two were happy for maybe the first time in their marriage. Oh sure, they bickered now and then about the money she spent, and the messes he left, but there was real tenderness between them, wasn’t there, Button?” I nodded as I thought of how sometimes when Dad passed Ma in the kitchen, he’d lean over and whisper something in her ear, and she’d blush and slap his arm as she giggled, and, how sometimes when I got up at night to pee, Ma would be watching the Johnny Carson show, Dad stretched out on the couch, his head on her lap.

  We were silent for a time, then Winnalee looked at me and asked, “Did you see her get struck?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I looked to Aunt Verdella again.

  “She doesn’t remember anything about that day,” Aunt Verdella told her.

  That wasn’t exactly true, though. I did remember some things: earsplitting lightning and thunder that rumbled the windows, and the whooshing of heavy rains. I remembered Ma, bent over Boohoo’s high chair wiping tomato sauce from his pudgy hands, then her straightening up and asking, “Is that wash machine thumping again?” I remembered her opening the basement door to listen, then sighing hard and talking to Dad as if he was home, saying, “Dang it, Reece. When are you going to level that washer?” Then, when she was partway down the stairs, adding, “About the same time you build a decent platform so the sump pump doesn’t keep tipping over, I suppose.” I was pulling Boohoo out of his high chair when she cried out, “Oh no! The floor’s soaked clear to the boxes of our winter things!”

  That’s all I remembered. Well, except for one more thing I wished I could forget: that her death was Dad’s fault.

  “Oh, Button,” Winnalee said, tears flowing now. She got up and came to me, leaning over my chair and putting her arms around my neck, her hair spilling down over me like a lemon-scented waterfall. And then she did something that would have dropped me to my knees, had I not already been sitting. She recited the last few lines of the poem—by Yeats, I believe—that Aunt Verdella had recited to us right here in this room, when we were little:

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild.

  With a fairy, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  CHAPTER

  7

  BRIGHT IDEA #33: If you decide to wear your new underwear on the outside of your pants because you think they’re pretty and nobody will see them if you wear them right, old people and kids who get A’s are probably going to stare.

  I didn’t want our first night together to be sad, and luckily, it wasn’t.

  We hugged Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy and Boohoo good night, then headed out the back door, laughing as we ran.

  Winnalee moved her van into my driveway, then yanked open the double side doors. “Come on in,” she said, as she hoisted herself inside. “I had the seats ripped out back here to make more living space.”

  There was a string of hippie beads hanging from a suspension rod behind the front seat, the strands pinned to the floor by two droopy potted plants. Winnalee kicked the thin mattress with tangled sheets against the wall, and shoved a Styrofoam cooler out of the way.

  “It’s a mess, I know,” she said. And it was. Crumpled potato chip bags and candy wrappers sat in nests of wadded clothes that were everywhere but in the white laundry basket propped beside the plants. A cardboard box was buckled against the wall, a sketch pad curved to fit inside. Winnalee reached down to pick up a half-crushed blue pastel and tossed it in a box.

  “Oh! Oh! I’ve got something to show you!” she said as she grabbed a fat duffel bag off the floor. She made like she was going to unzip it, then stopped. “I’ll wait until we’re inside.” She pulled a few record albums out of the collapsed stack and shoved them in my arms, then muttered, “shoes … shoes.” She found a pair of sandals with frayed straps under the rubble, then rescued a pair of flattened moccasins from under the mattress, holes in each sole the size of quarters.

  I grabbed the laundry basket. “Here,” I said. “Let’s fill this with your dirty clothes and take them inside. We’ll wash them at Aunt Verdella’s in the morning. That’s where I do my laundry.”

  “I don’t think all of them are dirty,” Winnalee said, as I scooped them off the sand-pocked floor. “I’ll come back for my plants.”

  Loaded with her things, we headed to the house, the sunset spinning our hair to gold.

  Winnalee spilled the contents of her duffel bag over my bed. Deodorant, a bar of soap, a bottle of Breck shampoo, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a fistful of hemp chokers and bracelets, a tangle of beaded earrings, and, a package of Trojans! I looked away.

  Winnalee started shaking wrinkles out of her clothes, sniffing them when she wasn’t sure if they were clean or dirty: granny dresses in bold patterns, prairie dresses with tiered skirts in fairy-floating fabrics, a few mini-length dresses, empire-style, with big bell-shaped angel sleeves, or elastic gathered-at-the-wrist cuffs. A couple of faded tie-dyed T-shirts, the necklines haphazardly expanded with scissors, a couple of pairs of denim cutoffs with frayed hems, and two pairs of blue jeans, the bottoms of the bells ragged and brown from walking on them, just like mine. She picked up a fringed leather jacket and tossed it aside. “Won’t need this until fall,” she said. She gathered a bunch of dirty underwear, rolled like socks, and tossed them on our heap for washing. I didn’t see any bras, but then I’d already guessed I wouldn’t.

  Winnalee rummaged through the army bag that apparently served as her purse and grabbed a rubber band, slipping it onto her wrist, then continued to dig. “I must have left my brush somewhere,” she said. “Shit.”

  I opened my drawer and took out the hairbrush Winnalee had left behind that magical summer. The one I once grabbed out of Penny’s hand and put back on my vanity, telling her it was not for using, but for remembering. “Do you recognize it?” I asked. “It was yours.”

  “Oh. My. God! I can’t believe you kept
this thing!” I glanced at the scuffed blue plastic cup on my nightstand, the cup Jesse drank from the first time he stopped at my house, and the gum wrapper chain, yards long, that was looped over the curtain rod above the window seat, and made from the silver foil wrappers of every piece of gum Jesse gave me, or chewed himself when I was around him in the last three years. “I keep everything the people I love leave behind,” I said. But that was only partially true. Ma’s things—every last thing she owned—was still in Dad’s house, untouched. Even her Kenmore sewing machine, though it was better than the old Singer Aunt Verdella picked up for me after the motor burned out in my first one. Aunt Verdella believed I should have all of Ma’s personal belongings, but I wasn’t sure Dad agreed, so I left them where they were.

  Winnalee laughed as she unwound a tangle of blond hair from the bristles. “Wow, this is nine-year-old hair.” She grinned, then stopped. “Okay, that’s kind of gross,” she said, flicking the snarl of hair into the air.

  Winnalee brushed, then swirled her long loops over to one side and cinched them at the shoulder with the rubber band. “I like keepsakes, too. That’s what I want to show you.” She rooted around in her duffel bag until she found a sandwich bag. “Don’t look! Don’t look!” she said, turning her back to me.

  She tossed the empty plastic bag on the bed and spun around, holding out what I thought was a movie ticket. “Ta-da—my prized possession!”

  I stared down at the ticket in my hand. “A three-day pass to Woodstock? You were going to go to Woodstock?”

  “I did go!”

  “But this is your ticket.”

  Winnalee’s eyes were close to bursting—as if she’d gone to the festival yesterday, rather than over nine months ago. “They weren’t taking tickets by the time I got there. The mob had flattened the fences, so I poured in with everybody else. I drove there myself, too. All the way from Northville, Michigan, to Bethel, New York, even if I’d just gotten my license the day before and couldn’t drive worth a shit. It wasn’t hard finding my way once I got to Route 71—you just followed the caravan. The traffic stalled miles from Yasgur’s farm, so I just left my van parked on the road like everybody else and walked. Blistered the hell out of my feet—I didn’t think to grab my sandals—because the pavement was hot as hell. But it was worth it!”