Read an Excerpt
She Is This Girl
She always keeps her heroin inside her beehive hairdo. The white powder hidden in the tease and spit. The cops can’t find it. The drug addicts can’t find it. Suzanne holds her head high. She’s carrying a world without corners. She’s holding up the sky. Slight enough to go down chimneys, Suzanne looks like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes. She wears Love That Red lipstick by Revlon and has blue-black hair and white skin. She closes up all the buttons on her shirt.
Suzanne can knit, ice-skate, sing, read palms and smoke dozens of cigarettes to keep warm inside. Little girls love her because she tells them, “Hey, little missy, I can hear your heart.” They think she’s a music box.
When Suzanne was ten years old her mother said, “Let’s have a tea party.” They sat together at the kitchen table. It was the first time Suzanne ever drank tea. She put four teaspoons of sugar in it. She said, “It’s too cold.”
Her mother said, “I’ll only tell you this once so mark my words.”
“I broke the rocking horse,” Suzanne said.
“You of all my children were made like an angel. But you want to look over the edge to hell. Always know where that line is and never cross it. And here are nine kisses,” her mother continued, “for every year of your life.”
While she kissed her again and again on the forehead, Suzanne wished her mother wore lipstick so that the kisses would be painted on her and everyone would know.
She wanted to say, “But I’m ten really.”
Worn With Sounds
Suzanne’s mother claims to be a witch. She puts her head down, claps her hands and concentrates. She calls this “cursing people.” Once a man who owned a television store in town asked her, “Who winds you up in the morning?” That night his store burned down. But she can’t stop Suzanne’s father from beating up the kids.
“He’s an Arab,” she says, “What can I do? Curses don’t get into those black eyes.”
Suzanne has a scar on her forehead from when he threw her down the stairs. It is shaped like the number 5.
Her childhood is worn with sounds: chairs against walls; “You good-for-nothing punk!”; the snake-belly slide of a belt, the soft drum sound of a three-year-old’s head against a wall; “You good-for-nothing punk”; tears that mix with Cap’n Crunch cereal; “You good-for-nothing punk”; a hand the size of a maple leaf slapping; the twist and crack of arms and wrists; “Walk on tiptoe, shhh,” whisper. “He’s home.”
“Don’t worry, honey,” Suzanne’s mother says to Suzanne. “One day you’ll set the world on fire.”
Paper Dresses
Four draft dodgers and Suzanne sit at the kitchen table. Suzanne’s mother is known in the underground of draft dodgers so men come to Orangeville, Ontario, Canada, to sit at this table dressed in love beads and leather bracelets to ask Suzanne where they can get some pot. Suzanne giggles and pulls some plastic bags filled with marijuana out of her white knee-high boots.
Suzanne wears paper dresses and maxi-coats. One draft dodger likes to tease her by burning cigarette holes in her dresses. Another one tells her if the war ever ends he’s going to come back and marry her.
“I’ll never marry anyone,” Suzanne says. “No man is big enough for my arms.”
I had very hardworking parents. My father had a painting/ construction business that at its height employed forty men. My mother had a nursery school in our house. She took all children. She did not close the door to any child. There were normal, autistic, blind and crippled children. There was nowhere for these disabled children to go. My mother was a real radical. During the Vietnam War she took in American draft dodgers. I was too young to know what this meant. These hippies with long hair and beards would just appear at the dinner table. During those Vietnam years my mother must have taken care of forty of these young men. My father was against this and I heard them fighting over it. My father thought they were cowards. My mother thought they were pacifists and she thought that they were too young. My mother became known in the underground of draft dodgers, and boys from all over America came, knowing they would get food and a roof over their heads. They would sleep on the living-room floor.
My father was intelligent and hardworking. He taught himself everything. He drove a big Cadillac so that we would be like the children of the doctors and lawyers. However, he was domineering and violent. He believed that we would respect him if we feared him. We feared him.
Only One Chromosome Is Missing
Suzanne walks down the steps from her bedroom. In the hall her mother is feeding a child who is tied with a rope to a chair. The little boy is tied up so he will not mutilate himself. He scratches his face until it bleeds. The doorbell rings and two more children with Down syndrome arrive. This is Suzanne’s mother’s latest business venture. There are no facilities for abnormal children in Orangeville.
Suzanne thinks, “These are the children that need to go to the doll hospital.”
For three years the house shelters three or four of these children a day. Their hands get washed, their backs get rubbed, they break things they find. But this house doesn’t shelter black-and-blue children.
The black-and-blue children are thinking about running away. They think, “We don’t fit in this house.”
Suzanne loves one of the kids called Sammy. Sammy is a six-year-old black girl. Suzanne knows only one chromosome is missing in her beautiful little face. Suzanne braids Sammy’s hair and buys her candy.
Suzanne makes her dresses that she copies out of Vogue magazine and she teaches Sammy to count to five.
One day Suzanne and Sammy are sitting in the garden when Suzanne’s mother comes outside. “Now, you girls be careful, you’re going to turn your skin too dark,” she says.
Once she gave Suzanne a whole case of bleaching skin cream. “If you think about it hard enough,” Suzanne’s mother says, “you can change the way you look.”
“If you think about it hard enough,” Suzanne tells Sammy, “you can make that chromosome grow in you.” Sammy looks straight at the sun. She can do that and not even squint or blink.
The Magic Horsetail
Suzanne’s mother has a magic horsetail. Out of a short, carved ivory stick hangs a white horse’s tail. It was given to her by her great-aunt for luck when she was little, growing up in England. She took it with her to Beirut, where she was a British naval officer. It was here that she met Suzanne’s father. Together they moved to Canada as Palestinian refugees. The horsetail has always been with her.
Suzanne braids the horsetail, shakes it around. “Make lots of wishes with it, Suzy,” Suzanne’s mother says.
“Did you make wishes with it?” Suzanne asks.
“Oh, millions and millions. But I don’t believe in making wishes.”
Suzanne’s mother always tells lies. She says she saw a woman in Beirut who had transparent skin. She says there are forty-two ways to cut an apple. She says she’s seen the vaults with the gold reserves of England. She says the Earth has two moons. She says she has eaten sheep eyes, ant larvae and raw eggs because she was working as a spy.
She tells Suzanne, “You have your father’s barbaric blood. You are genetically more Arab than your brothers and sisters. You will always have problems with hysteria, rage and jealousy.”
Every time Suzanne thinks about her mother’s sulfur-blue eyes it rains.
