Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

The woman nodded sagely. Her eyes were the no-color of ice. “The sign didn’t say Hannah was human.” Her voice turned kind. “It’s a sort of a joke.”

But not my kind of joke. “Then who’s the lady out front?”

“Lady out front?” She shrugged. “Why, it’s nobody. It’s just a pitcher.”

“But—” What was the use? “Well, who painted it?”

She shrugged again, and her face looked a little older. “Guy name of Fred? He does all the billboard stuff around here.”

“Did he have a model or anything?”

“Honey, forget it,” said the woman, losing patience. “It’s just a pitcher. It ain’t alive.”

Ka-boom! Stan put his hands on my shoulders. This gesture was meant to look friendly but felt like the yoke of doom. “Leave the lady alone, Pet.”

“Hannah’s a mule!”

“So what?” He tightened his hands around my neck. “You and June can each pick out whatever you like, as long as it’s under two dollars.”

I couldn’t quite give it up. I sensed it was hopeless, but I still couldn’t quite give it up. “Is there any woman in the world who can lift a thousand pounds?” I asked the two adults.

“Your mother,” said Stan. The woman laughed.

But even as we drove away, and I realized that once more Sammy had failed me (though to be frank, it didn’t seem like his sort of place), or I had failed him by expecting him, or simply failed because I was a child, without power, and couldn’t understand, I stared out the back window at Hannah in her pink and green polka-dot bikini, white-blond hair wafting around her powerful chest and shoulders, and I knew she was around somewhere. Maybe not there, maybe not then, but she damn well existed.

“Piece of fudge?” June offered her box.

“No, thanks.”

She looked relieved.

I opened up the bag with my trinket. It was a copper bracelet, a big one. I pulled up the sleeve of my sweater and fastened it to my upper arm, the left one in hopes that June wouldn’t see me. Furtively, I raised my arm muscle-man style. Wasn’t that just the barest bulge of a biceps?

“You won’t believe what Pet’s doing!”

Linwood whipped her head around, so fast I didn’t have a chance to resume a normal posture.

“Honey,” she was trying not to laugh, “what’s all that?”

Talk about feeling like a dope. Coolly, I rolled the sleeve down over my bracelet, crossed my arms, and stared out the window. Green trees and more green trees.

“She thinks she’s that Amazon on the billboard.”

The front seat snickered.

I wasn’t going to cry. I felt the warmth of my new bracelet spreading energy through my upper arm. I should have gotten two. But never mind. This was only one more thing nobody understood.

June beat her chest and yodeled. “Me Tarzan,” she said. “You Fatso.”

But out in the greeny woods I thought I saw the shadow of a great big woman, climbing the trees as easily as pie, her broad back fit to carry the weight of the world.

“What do you girls think about spending Christmas in New Orleans?” Stan asked.

We’d both been asleep in the back seat. It was late afternoon somewhere in Florida. The sky was all light blue and the palm trees had squirrel-colored stalks and dusty green fronds, but you could still tell it was winter. The ocean looked sort of lonely.

Miami at Thanksgiving had been kind of neat and kind of odd. The wind always blew, like the breath of South America calling you down, and everybody walked around in Hawaiian shirts. Stan and Linwood had been dead set on Cuban food, but it turned out to be like Mexican only beanier. Except for the fried plantains. Nobody but me liked them, so that’s what I had for Thanksgiving dinner. I let June eat the whole rest of my meal, including the mango ice cream.

“Christmas in New Orleans!” Linwood echoed Stan, sounding surprised and delighted, though no doubt it had been her idea in the first place. Stan wouldn’t dare make something like that up all by himself.

Funny, I had this bad feeling about New Orleans. Why? I’d certainly loved it last summer.

“What about snow ?” June had been making this point for weeks. She wanted one of those old-fashioned sleigh-ride holidays.

“Children.” Linwood used her Hollywood voice. “They’re the most conventional people in the world, don’t you think, Stan?”

I looked out the window. We were driving up the east coast, along the beach. The sign said twelve miles to Daytona. A man in blue jeans was walking five tiny French poodles, which had been dyed, I guess, all different pastel colors: they looked like one of those special desserts, five different flavors of sherbet. I nudged June but she ignored me.

“What’s wrong with that?” she asked. “What’s wrong with wanting to be normal? Why can’t we ever, ever be like other families?”

“When you grow up,” Linwood said coldly, “you will be surprised to discover that there is no such thing as ‘normal.’”

Was that true? Gaylin’s family seemed exactly like the people on television: they didn’t have expensive stuff around their house like we did, but they always had lots of regular food in their refrigerator. For instance, Mrs. Rezek let Gaylin eat cookies and cake for dessert, instead of fruit and cheese like we did. We even had wine. Linwood would give us tiny glasses of sweet sherry because, she said, that’s what children drank in Europe. And sometimes there wasn’t any actual food in the house at all. Linwood hadn’t felt like shopping or cooking, so we’d eat out every day until that phase passed and another began. Also, obviously, other children generally called their parents “Mom” and “Dad.”

“Not in this family, that’s for sure.”

“Very well,” said Linwood, fitting one of her new cigars into the rhinestone holder. “I suppose you’d all like me to be exactly like that dreadful Mrs. Nutter everyone’s so wild about.”

Mrs. Nutter had been June’s 4-H leader, and a drabber, better-natured woman didn’t exist in the world. She smelled of flour, and her stomach was soft like stuffed animals. Pole, that is, not the poodles.

“I suppose you’d like to move up to one of those remote villages in New England and sit around singing hymns and making ornaments out of apricot pits or whatever.”

Stan sighed, right on cue.

“And that’s just fine with me.” The cloud of smoke she exhaled hung around her head. Alice’s Caterpillar. “Far be it from me to try to make you girls into interesting human beings. The world is rife with mediocrity, and it can always use plenty more Mrs. Nutters.”

“What’s wrong with Mrs. Nutter?” June demanded. “Why does everybody always make fun of what I do? Nobody ever makes fun of Pet—”

Ha.

“—I suppose it isn’t stupid for her to take those tap-dancing lessons? And ballet and acrobatics and Hawaiian , for God’s sake!”

“Goddammit, don’t swear!” said Stan.

I felt a real pang, thinking how much I missed those classes. Not that I was any good. I only won that talent contest with cuteness and spunk. Plus, adults like to see kids making total fools of themselves.

“EVERYTHING I DO YOU MAKE FUN OF!” June started in with the shriek and the wail. She hadn’t had a major fit in a long time.

I looked out the window again: a pink stucco house, with a tile roof and big pots full of geraniums, right on the water’s edge. A young girl, her brown legs sticking out of perfectly faded blue jean cut-offs, was pinning a few pieces of fluffy white laundry to the clothesline. Her blond hair hung down her back like a sheaf of wheat.