She left me there listening to Billie Holiday sing while she made clicks and clatters in the kitchen. I didn't offer to help. In a minute, she was back with glasses, a bottle of brandy, and coffee on a tray. So perfect in every way, even the way she put the tray on the table, keeping her back straight, bending her knees.
"Look," she said, sitting down next to me. "Next time I'll send you a postcard, how's that. Wish you were here, love .. . Brandy." She poured cognac into the snifters.
I drank mine down in a swallow, not even trying to savor it. It was probably five hundred years old, brought over on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. She looked down into her glass, swirled it, smelled it, sipped.
"I'm not the world's most considerate person," Olivia said. "I'm not the type who sends birthday cards. But I'll try, Astrid. It's the best I can do." She reached her hand to touch my face but couldn't bring herself to do it. The hand fell on my shoulder instead. I ignored it there.
"Oh for Christ's sake," Olivia said, removing it, sitting back against the pillows. "Don't sulk. You're acting just like a man."
I looked away and caught our reflection in the mirror over the fireplace, the beauty of the room, of Olivia in her silver nightgown like mercury in moonlight. Then there was this wretched blond girl who looked like she had wandered in from another movie, her face scored with welts, her 99-cent sweatshirt, her unbrushed hair.
"I brought you something from England," Olivia said. "You want to see it?"
I wouldn't look at her. What, did she think presents would make it all better? But I couldn't help watching that beautiful slow walk as she went into the back of the house, silver satin trailing her like a pet dog. I poured myself some more brandy, swirled and watched the liquid separate into trails and meet in the amber pool at the bottom. The smell was fire and fruit, and it burned as it went down. I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.
She came back out with a small white box and dropped it into my lap.
"I don't want things," I said. "I just want to feel like someone gives a shit."
"So you don't want it?" she teased, moving to take it away.
I opened the box marked Penhaligon, and nested in tissue was an antique perfume bottle, silver and glass with a lace-covered bulb, filled with a perfume tinged a slight pink. I set it on the table. "Thanks."
"No, don't be like that. Here, smell it." She picked it up and squirted me with it, a fine mist propelled by the lace-covered bulb.
I was surprised at the scent, not at all like Ma Griffe, it smelled like small flowers that grew in leafy English woods, like a girl who would wear pinafores and pantaloons and make chains of wild daisies, a fairy-tale girl from the Victorian age.
When Olivia grinned, the charm of her overbite got to me in a way her perfection never could. "Now, isn't that you?" I took it away from her and sprayed it over my head so the mist fell like light rain. Wash my sins away. Make me a girl who'd never seen the firestorms of September, who'd never been shot, who'd never gone down on a boy behind a bathroom in a park. A nursery-rhyme girl in a blue dress holding a pet lamb in a cottage garden. It was me, after all. I didn't know quite whether to laugh or to cry, so I poured some more brandy in my glass.
"That's enough," she said, taking the bottle away.
The threads of my scars throbbed with alcohol. I knew it wasn't up to Olivia to love me. She did the best she could, bought me a bit of childhood in a bottle, by appointment to the Queen. "Thanks, Olivia, really," I said.
"That's better," she said.
I WOKE UP the next morning painfully curled on Olivia's couch. Someone had taken my shoes off, the bottle of pink perfume still clutched in my hands. Either it was hot, or I had a fever, and a headache that beat the sides of my skull like an African drum. I slid my feet into my shoes, not tying the laces, and went looking for Olivia.
She lay on top of her bedspread in her crewel paisley canopy bed, completely passed out, still in her robe, bent legs at right angles like she was running in her dream. The clock past her pillow read eleven. I ran down the hall and hit the door.
I was halfway across Olivia's garden when Marvel came out of the turquoise house, Caitlin's Barbie car in her arms. She glanced up. Her mouth opened wide. The only color left on her face was the Autumn Flame of her hair.
If I hadn't been so hungover, something might have sprung to mind. But we stared at each other and I knew I was caught, knee-deep in rosemary and alyssum, frozen as a deer. Then it was all screaming and confusion. She ran out the gate as I took a few feeble steps back toward Olivia's. She seized me by my hair and yanked me back. Her head jerked as she smelled my breath.
"Drinking with the whore? Did you sleep with her too?" She smacked me in the face, not caring about my scars, her voice reverberating in my tenderized skull like a shot in a cave. She smacked me as she dragged me back over to the turquoise house, head, arms, anywhere she could get me. "What were you doing over there? Is that where you spent the night? Is it? Is it?" She hit me square on the ear and the Penhaligon perfume leaped from my hands and smashed on the blacktop.
I broke away from her, knelt down, the bottle broken inside its silver cage, perfume already soaking the pavement. I put my hands in the puddle. My childhood, my English garden, that tiny piece of something real.
Marvel gripped my arm, hauled me to my feet, screaming, "You ungrateful thing!"
I grabbed her around her arms and yelled in her face. "I hate you so much, I could kill you!"
"How dare you raise your hand to me!" She was much stronger than I had thought. She broke my hold in a second, smacked my face so hard I saw patterns. She caught me under the armpit and marched me back home, kicking me every few feet. "Get in the house, get in there!"
She opened the door and shoved me inside. I sailed into the wreckage of Christmas Eve, dirty glasses and bowls and gift wrapping. The kids looked up from their new toys, Ed from his football game. I staggered into the knickknack shelf and Marvel's Little Women plate fell off and smashed.
She screamed and hit me on the side of my head, I saw patterns again. "You did that on purpose!" She shoved me on the floor, I was afraid she was going to grind my face in the broken glass. She kicked me in the ribs. "Pick it up!" The kids were screaming.
"Assi —" Caitlin ran toward me, arms spread. Marvel snatched her away. She bundled them out to the yard while I picked up the pieces, crying. I hadn't done it on purpose, but I might have if I'd thought of it. She'd broken my perfume, something real, by appointment to the Queen, made from pounds of English spring flowers, not a copy of a copy of a kid's book illustration. When she came back she threw the broom at me. "Now sweep up the rest." She turned to Ed. "God, you can't believe where I just found her. Coming out of that nigger's house, she spent the night there. This is what we get, for all the work and trouble?"
Ed turned the sound up on the game.
I threw out the big pieces, Jo and Amy and Beth, the other one, and Marmee. Broken. Well, that's the way it is, Marmee. One little accident, and it's all gone forever. Jo won't like foster care, she'll get moved around, shot. Amy'11 get adopted, she's cute, but you'll never see her again. Beth'll croak and the other one'11 turn tricks in a park for dope. Say good-bye to the fireside, welcome to my life.
I swept the shards into a pile, careful not to leave any slivers, Caitlin always went barefoot.
"And when you're done with that, start cleaning this place up. I'm going to go give that nignog whore a piece of my mind." I watched out the kitchen window as Marvel marched from our yard into Olivia's, heard the chain-link gate slam but not click, bang open again. She was hammering on Olivia's door, screaming, "Wake up, whore, you rat's ass, piece of living crap. You stay away from that girl, hear me, nigger?"
Everybody in the neighborhood was home on Christmas morning, listening to this as they celebrated the birth of the newborn King. Nice, Marvel. You go, girl. Show everybody what you're really made of. My only consolation was that Olivia couldn't hear it, passed out as she was at the back of the house.
Marvel tore out handfuls of Olivia's flowers as she stormed back to our house, flinging the uprooted plants at the shuttered windows.
Nauseated and headachy, I nevertheless spent the rest of the day wadding up foil gift wrap and stick-on bows, vacuuming popcorn and Styrofoam peanuts, hauling trash and washing sink after sink of dishes. Marvel wouldn't let me lie down. She kept saying, "You made your bed, now sleep in it."
Later in the day, the cops arrived. Schutzstaffel. The kids wanted to see them, but Marvel stepped out and closed the door. We watched from the living room as Marvel's mouth flew and she gestured to Olivia's with a meaty arm.
"What do they want?" Justin asked. It was three in the afternoon and he was in his pajamas, glassy-eyed from TV and sugar and new toys.
"Someone lost a dog," I said.
Marvel opened the door and called me.
I went out, burnishing the sapphire of my hatred. "Jawohl, "I said under my breath.
Marvel's eyes sprayed me with Mace, my skin blistered under her gaze. The older of the two white men drew me aside. "She says you spent the night with the woman next door. It's technically a runaway."
I shifted from leg to leg, the throb of my headache accompanying each heartbeat. If I breathed carefully, I could smell English flowers. The football announcer shouted excitedly from the house, and the cop's eyes flickered briefly in its direction. Then he remembered what he was supposed to be doing and they returned to me.
"This woman gave you alcohol?"
"No. Marvel and Ed had a big Christmas Eve party last night.
The eggnog was spiked." The sparkle of my sapphire, Officer Moody. See how it shimmers. Nothing up my sleeve. "They make you work on Christmas?"
"Triple overtime," he said. "I've got child support you wouldn't believe. So what did you do next door?"
"Listened to records, talked."