Some Can See Page 2
Gram Ruth’s long dead cat, Felix, lived eternally in the pink velvet bed.
****
Jude
Jude pressed both hands against the window frame and pushed up. The cool night air kissed her neck, a patch of goose pimples lighting along her arms. The muscles of her thick forearms grew taut as the glass pane slid skyward, the wooden frame rubbing roughly along. She smiled at her own reflection in the glass, the bone lit moon as stark white as her gleaming teeth, her red lips almost black. Her dark ponytail had loosened and electrified flyaways stood out along her temple, erasing the two hours of ironing she had done that evening.
Swinging a bare leg through the window, she searched for the satin covered step stool she had left that evening when she snuck-out. Her red pump waved wildly, then kicked the stool which didn’t tip, but bounced and settled. As she straddled the window ledge, the ridged wood pressed painfully against her pelvis, she imagined the look of horror on Gram Ruth’s face if she saw Jude climbing back through the second story window after eleven pm. Such would be her grandmother’s shock, Jude considered staying in place, her pelvic bone bruised by morning. Her pencil skirt was hiked around her thighs for easy climbing, exposing her left butt cheek to the dark estate.
Jude could see Gram’s high bushes clinging desperately to the driveway like frantic hitchhikers trying to catch a ride out of hell. When Jude had been a little girl, she and Peter had often played in the bushes. In places, their branches grew so thick she could climb on top and crawl their length. Peter, a husky boy, born eleven minutes Jude’s senior, always fell straight to the bottom.
After securing her foot on the stool, Jude slipped into the room. No lights shone, but she moved across the plush cream carpeting with ease, safe passage guaranteed by a full moon and fifteen years of familiarity.
As a baby Jude had not slept in this room. According to her father she’d slept in a raw silk bassinet that Gram Ruth bought in China when she was a newlywed. The bassinet, Jude’s father said, belonged to Chinese royalty, but was sold for a bargain when the child of the Chinese couple took ill and died. Jude moaned at this point and complained that she might have died of whatever plague or pox had killed this baby, but her father only laughed. The story worked better on Hattie who found such notions romantic, suiting her strange flights of fancy.
Jude slipped her skirt to the floor and stepped out, kicking it toward a pile of wet towels clumped in the corner. Gram would have a fit if she saw the towels: mildew and mold, she’d say, but Jude didn’t give two shits. Gram had too many rules, too many long sighs and disapproving looks.
She slid her slender fingers over her sleeveless blouse, plucking the buttons. Danny had busted two buttons, greedy and desperate as usual. He thought it turned Jude on, his frantic sucking and licking, tearing at her bra like some puppy after its mother’s teat. Jude sometimes wanted to slam a fist in his head when he did that, just cock back and let one go, crack her knuckles against the hard sheet of his cheekbone.
Jude did not love Danny, hardly liked him, but he had a car and his dear old dad had a big houseboat stocked with whiskey and gin. Danny would wait at the end of Gram Ruth’s long drive, his sleek blue Corvette like a heavy, haunched animal crouching in the dark. Sometimes he brought friends, other fast girls and rich boys with their windblown hair and sun ripened cheeks.
Jude would make Danny buy her a new blouse.
****
Hattie
For a long time, Hattie stared at the stuffed cat; its oily black fur abrasive in the pink velvet bed that held him. His pink satin collar held a heart-shaped platinum plate, Felix engraved in loopy cursive letters. A single diamond dotted the i on his name. His eyes were black rubies, his nose a dried crust with sunken warped nostrils. Hattie could see two pointed white fangs peeking beneath his black gummy smile that looked more like a grimace. She slid her palm over his back, the bones moving beneath her fingers like a string of pearls, down along his tail, wiry and stiff.
Her heart beat faster, a flush moving from her chest into her face as she stroked the animal, her stubby fingernails buried in fur, disappearing beneath black tufts. Felix’s body was hard, like a store mannequin, not giving in the fleshy way that a body should. Just a skeleton wrapped tight with leather and covered in fur, but not really: he was a cat who had lived, a cat whose staring face hung throughout Gram Ruth’s sprawling house.
Though Hattie had never met Felix, in life his eyes had been yellow, like the tiny orbs that bobbed in lanterns during the night. Gram said he was a true aristocrat, but Hattie hadn’t a clue what she meant. None of it mattered really, Felix’s life before the box. Hattie knew him only as this prized jewel. Perhaps in life he’d been just an ordinary house cat with an upturned nose and clumps of cat litter caked in the crevices of his padded feet. In the velvet casket, he was a Julius Caesar, a Babe Ruth, forever immortalized - in death infinitely more mysterious and grand than he’d ever been in life.
For several long minutes, Hattie stared, transfixed; petting his matted glossy fur and tracing his jeweled eyeballs with her free hand. She swayed to a music that only she could hear, a symphony of nostalgia not yet laden on her young brain, but already snaking in, leaving its slimy trail to stumble upon further down the line.
Without thought, for if she’d had one she’d never have dared, she plucked the cat from his velvety bed and thrust him to her chest inhaling his intoxicating scent of mothballs, castor oil and something deeper and fruity like melon. Hattie did not realize it then, but Felix would stay with her - the night a marked reminder of the end of life as she knew it.
Chapter 2
July 11, 1955
Jude
Once naked, Jude stood in front of her tall mirror.
She turned once, flexing her right calf forward and pointing her toe, evaluating herself from toe to hair roots and then back down again, appraising every centimeter. The way her toes spread out, thin and then widening into small square blocks, her toenails painted a deep red. Her ankles were narrow and opened into shapely calves, not too big, but a single wide line distinguishing the muscle from bone. Her small round knees became thick thighs then tapered off to her shaved crotch.
She stole razors from her father, refusing to make do with the tiny pink girl razors that barely cut the hairs, let alone scraped to her skin. She always left a single neat black line of hair, no complete baldness because it looked too juvenile and small, like an off-limits area rather than the sexy hideaway she hoped to cultivate. From the small streak of black curls came her flat belly that widened along her hips and then dove back in to stretch over her ribs and up to her plum sized breasts, small dark pink nipples pointed and severe. Her shoulders were wide, her muscular biceps hinged with thick forearms.
Her face sat proportionally on her thin short neck. Jude did not hate her face, but neither did she love it. Her upper lip was thin, barely disguising her long white teeth that Peter called buck. Her nose was small, a good feature, as were her wide almond-shaped brown eyes. Finally, her slightly bushy dark eyebrows and then her hair, just past her shoulders, chestnut, and wavy, neither straight nor curly. Her grandmother said her hair came from her great aunt Lynn, a woman she’d never met who died of syphilis - according to family legend. Perhaps more resemblance than Jude wanted to admit.
At fifteen, Jude had already entered her age of sexual enlightenment in full splendor. Though still a virgin - barely - she boasted to all of her girlfriends she’d done everything but go all the way.
Her breasts looked dented, pale finger marks creasing the milky flesh. Danny’s short, hard grip imprinted on her tender skin, not that she cared, a means to an end. Tomorrow there would be bruises, maybe long red streaks, and Jude would have to wear her halter bikini to hide the marks, but she didn’t mind. When she let Danny touch her, she owned him.
****
Hattie
The candle was near death, its life flickering and shuddering and threatening to cast Hattie into a dark, off lim
its room with no beacon to guide her out. She leaned into it, holding the candle close as if that might stop the non-existent wind from blowing out the flame, but to no avail. It gave a closing wave and then sagged sideways, the wick taking its final sleep in a bed of molten wax.
In the darkness, Hattie’s eyes burned, and white spots danced in a canvas of black. Felix was nestled against her chest, his hard body comforting, his dry nose pressed into her neck, the way Gram Ruth held babies. Suffocating them, Jude said.
In the far corner, Gram’s big grandfather clock tick-tocked the seconds away. To fight her fear, she whispered them out loud, soothed by her voice in the silence, but also afraid of waking someone, of waking Gram. After counting three hundred and thirty-two seconds, she took a step and then another.
Hattie had visited the room often, only with Gram Ruth, of course, and knew the layout well. If she walked a direct path to the door, she would leave Felix’s cabinet to her left, Gram Ruth’s blue crushed velvet chaise would stand to her right. The only other obstacle would be the big, round marble table that held a crystal vase of flowers. This table stood in front of the glass French doors that opened into the room.
Hattie shuffled forward, sliding each foot out and then sliding the other to meet it, a snowshoer in socks. The darkness was not whole; it slithered away as her eyes adjusted, hulking shapes staring at her, their shadowy bulk a welcome sight. Her shin brushed the chaise, the velvet scratching along her bare calf inches below the hem of her rose-colored nightgown.
The glass doors were propped open and Hattie used a single hand to slide each closed. They ghosted over the plush carpeting in silence, only a single metallic click to give her away.
If taller, she might have taken the stairs two at a time, rushing to the sanctuary of level two, a faster ascent to her child’s pink bedroom. A Victorian-flavored room with curls and tendrils of pink, like the sugar plum dreams of such unfathomable innocence that only a child could stand it.
Hattie adored the room, loved it so fiercely she often cried just standing in its center, staring out across the expanse of decadence: the tall doll house carved of real wood and expertly decorated by a keen eye and tiny adult fingers. The front of the house opened, exposing the interior to any interested eyes, such a naughty privilege to peak so unashamedly into, not only the lives, but the furnishings of another. What child slept in that miniature cherry maple bed, its sky-blue lace coverlet tucked into the creases of wood, whittled for that very purpose? Hattie longed to climb into that house, to roam freely the rooms that flecked her dreams like sugar sprinkles on morning pancakes. A house so similar to Gram Ruth’s, but so distant, so unconnected, impossible to imagine how one could live within the other. And this, this spectacle, took up mere feet in her opulent bedroom.
Speak nothing of the downy stuffed toys heaped on the floor, but not haphazardly, no, carefully arranged on a wide chenille throw of periwinkle color. Then the vanity, gilded with a gold powder so fine it might have brushed off when touched, but didn’t, somehow clung like enchanted fairy dust to its delicate legs, to the smooth mirrored edges. The glass table was adorned with bottles of fragrance - perfume in aquamarine bottles, or amber hued, shaped as smooth round crystal balls or tall thin feminine bodies. Aromas not meant for any child and surely not meant for a child such as Hattie. A child whose own mother preferred the scents of strong ivory soap and the bitter odor of burning wood.
Though Gram Ruth lived in a mansion, it was an old mansion. Haunted old, Jude said. Creepy old, according to Peter. And it was true, all they said. Many times Hattie had stayed awake long into the night whispering with her mother about the spirits who wandered Gram Ruth’s home and property, but that was their little secret.
Hattie maneuvered, like a stealthy cat, leaping with the wistful air of a floating feather, landing on the spongy front pads of her feet, defying the house in its desire to ferret her out to her heavily sleeping grandmother.
At the top of the Grand Staircase, Hattie stopped. The hall was dark, and yet at the far end, she could see the girl in the yellow dress. She stood outside Hattie’s door, her eyes vacant, one hand swinging against her side like a rag doll’s.
“I don’t want to see you, right now,” Hattie whispered, repeating the words her mother taught her.
She stared at Felix for a long time, saying it over and over again. When she looked back up, the hall was empty.
****
Jude
Jude longed to shower, her skin was smeared with the salty saliva of Danny’s wandering mouth, but Gram had a hard rule of no showers after nine pm. She reigned over her grandchildren like a frigid nun supervises orphans.
Jude did not even play at liking Gram Ruth, who also did not feign at liking her. They were two opposing female forces, on such opposite ends in the world of what female meant, they could hardly be lumped together solely based on their sexual parts.
Jude fancied herself a feminist, an empowered woman, a young, hot-blooded sexualized animal intent on carving her place out in the world of men. Gram Ruth may have considered herself a feminist as well, though the kind that settled into patriarchy as if it were good manners rather than direct oppression. At sixty-five, she continued to wear girdles heavily laced up her back, tighter and tighter until the softly lined skin of her aging bosom toppled over the stiff fabric. Her panties were large, bleached white, and covered everything, including her sadly sloping ass and the pouch of curdled belly that hung below Gram’s bellybutton like an alien twin. The type of secret body anarchy that besieged all aging peoples, women especially, slowly taking over their body as a final ‘fuck you’ to the chaos of life already endured.
Showers were not permitted after nine pm, nor was music, television, loud talking, telephone calls (unless for Gram Ruth), playing outside, playing inside, visitors and anything that might be remotely fun.
In previous years, Jude had avoided breaking the rules. She followed Gram’s stern instructions, taking only minor consolations like late night reading or an occasional midnight snack after Gram had already stated, “the kitchen is closed.”
However, all that had changed when Jude’s parents had dropped her and her siblings at Gram Ruth’s door that summer. The act did not look different from the outside; there were no teary-eyed goodbyes or strange melancholy silences. Her parents had stopped for a quick chat with Gram, pecked the kids on their already sun-burnt cheeks, and loaded back in their station wagon, bumper bruised and rust peeking from the tire wells. Nothing out of the ordinary was said that day, no slip of the tongue, or overheard conversations, but Jude knew. Something was amiss - the careful alignment of their small family had fallen off its tracks. She knew her parents’ scowls, smiles, forehead creases, clammy hands, tone of voices, body postures. She recognized a good hug (full body contact) versus a bad hug (shoulders and arms only).
Something was amiss, had been amiss for weeks.
Her mother had changed. Her face had grown gaunt, haggard, her youthful beauty ravaged by some unseen enemy. Jude’s father bounced between apathy and fervor, one moment staring in silence at some impossible puzzle and the next seeming to find the perfect piece. Jude had theories: illness, adultery, depression. Sometimes she logged them in her journal, once an emotionally charged depiction of girlish enterprise, now a scrupulous recording of her two uninformed subjects. On the flimsy pages of her dime store diary, the lock a cheap silver clasp, laid the minute details of her parents’ lives.
Jude loved her parents fiercely, and sometimes considered herself their protector. They both had a dreamy quality that frightened her for their place in the big bad world. They kissed and laughed. Sometimes they lay in the yard with Hattie on her back between them looking at the stars, or the clouds, or even allowing the rain to fill their mouths. Jude rarely joined in such sensory adventures, but she secretly delighted in her parents’ way of living. Her mother painted wild pictures of blazing sunsets or fields of flowers and Hattie would sit next to her smearing splotches of pai
nt on the green grass in their backyard.
Except, that summer they had not done those things. One afternoon the fizzy lightness of their little life seemed to pop and rush into the sky allowing a darkness to slip in.
Jude yearned to talk to Peter, her twin, her second soul, but High School had severed the invisible umbilical cord that slithered between them. Peter now lived football, football, football, and girls. His hormones raged so constantly that Jude felt them within herself, and could not deny at least a portion of her fuming sexual desire was born directly of his loins. He had beat her to sex because he was a boy and would, in the course of their futures, beat her to most of the things she would claim as her own.
Peter had slipped away, into the strange world that teenage boys vanished into, and Jude could not follow.
Knowing she must forego the shower, Jude slipped on a pair of silk bottomed pajamas and matching top. They were a gift from her parents the previous Christmas. She fumbled around her nightstand, pulling open a drawer. A bible sat inside and though Jude rarely prayed, something unsettling gnawed her once the lights were out. She touched the bible, and whispered her own prayer, made up weeks earlier when the darkness had first settled on their home.
“God, please fix it. Please make my mother well if she’s ill, bring my father back from the edge. Just make us whole again. Amen.”
Putting the bible back, she hurried to the bathroom to brush her teeth before bed.
****
Hattie
Hattie slipped down the hallway on tip toes, the home stretch, the walls rising up on either side like a vice that might begin its slow crank at any moment. Hers was the room at the end of the hall, the last door on the left. A long blank wall stretched between the kids’ bathroom and her bedroom, for hers was the largest of the children’s rooms and the most isolated.