Robert Butler - From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction

They're in the living room, on the floor, but it's dark in there so I can't see if they are dressed or not. Gracie is really wailing now and I take her and put her in her crib, try to give her a bottle which she knocks away from her face. I keep saying sssh but she won't even look at me, her eyes are sweeping over the room like a searchlight.

"What's wrong with her?" My sister is suddenly there, picking up the baby who is hiccupy from all of her crying.

I almost say she wants her mother, because that's the first thing I think and the first time it's occurred to me. But I don't want to admit it.

"I think she's got a fever."

Sheila starts pacing slowly up and down the room, running her hand against Gracie's forehead, bouncing her. Gracie is quieting.

I go into the living room and Paul is sitting on the couch, reading one of Jack's magazines. He looks up at me.

"Come here and talk to me," he pats the sofa beside him. I sit in the chair next to the sofa, look out the window behind him.

"Did you have fun?" he asks and I wonder if he expects me to ask him the same question. I shrug. He looks at my face.

"So, you're sixteen, huh? Sheila tells me you're sixteen."

I look down at the floor but remember they were just there, doing something I don't want to think about now.

"You and I should get to know each other, spend some time alone together. Sheila talks a lot about you," he says, moving closer to my chair.

I look at him. Why do I think he's lying? His Sheila doesn't even know me, maybe that's why.

"I want to get to know Lilly, the woman of mystery and babysitter extraordinaire," he is leaning on the arm of the sofa, whispering and smiling like he's telling me some great news.

"Sure," I say.

"What do you want?" he asks.

"What are you talking about?"

"You know, what do you want out of life?"

"Oh, what do I want to be when I grow up?" This is the question adults love to ask, like they're taking a survey.

"No. No one ever knows that and even if they do, who cares? What do you want now? What does Lilly want, right now?" he pokes his finger at my chest, a few inches away. I pull my shoulders in tighter.

I shrug. "Everybody wants something," he says.

I wonder when my sister is coming back in. I can hear her singing to the baby.

"Why do you want to know?" I decide I don't have to be as nice to him as I am to regular adults.

"If you find out what somebody wants, you know who they really are. I just want to know you."

"What do you want?"

"I just told you: to know you."

"You know my sister."

"Lilly has claws. Good for her. Come on, Lilly, if you had three wishes, what would they be?"

Wishes? Is this what he teaches at his community college?

"World peace."

"Come on, that's a cop-out."

"There's nothing wrong with world peace," I say, sitting up straighter. He's somehow honeyed his voice so that the words seem smooth and inevitable.

"Boring."

"I'd wish for everyone to be happy, including me." I know I don't want to be unhappy but I haven't given much thought to the alternative.

"You're a regular fucking Girl Scout, aren't you?"

"If everyone isn't happy and you are, then they have a reason to want to make you unhappy. The only way to guarantee you can stay happy is to make sure everyone else is." I'm making this up as I go along but it makes sense to me. I like it.

"No one stays happy, Lilly." He puts his hand over mine on the arm of the chair, like he's consoling me. I just look at it.

He leans closer and says, his voice thick now, "You're a virgin, aren't you?"

I get up and lock myself in the bathroom. My sister hasn't gotten into the bathroom for a shower yet. She's in her bedroom. She always showers after Paul. Sometimes when I get back she has already showered, sitting around the living room in her robe with her hair still damp, smoking and listening to the same albums she listened to when she still lived at home.

I take off my clothes and leave them in a pile on the floor. I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I can hear them saying good-bye to each other. It takes a long time. I wish there were a full-length mirror in here but the only one in the apartment is in Sheila and Jack's bedroom and they don't really like it when I go in there. Or worse, they think it's funny when I look at myself for too long, or Jack does anyway.

Sheila pounds on the door. "Let me in. I need to take a shower," she yells.

"I'm in the tub," I call out sweetly.

"Well get out!"

"Don't you need to be fixing Jack's dinner anyway?"

She hits the door again hard but goes away.

In this mirror I can see down to my waist. Once I took the little stepladder in with me and stood on it in front of the mirror.

I could see almost all of the way down to my knees and it looked like a painting, or something someone should paint. But Jack saw me taking the ladder out of the bathroom and kept asking me what I was doing with it.

I don't like my face so much but I like my body though I know girls my age aren't supposed to. My face is a little too sharp, wolfish in the wrong light and bad pictures, pale with always at least two pimples at any one time, like there's a demon beneath my skin with a pimple quota. My lips are like Sheila's but without lipstick it isn't all that noticeable really. My chin is a little pointier, my nose a little bigger. And my eyes aren't brown like hers, soft like a puppy's or something. My eyes are not any color really, sort of gray, sort of blue, sometimes kind of green, a little gold. One day a tall girl all in black in the lunch line stared at my face and then started saying real loud, "Your eyes is two different colors. That's creepy. Look, look, Charlene. One's blue and one's green." They peered into my face and I didn't know what to do so I just stood there. "You must be the devil or something," she concluded. After I finished my lunch I went into the girl's bathroom and put my face close to the mirror.

I like my ribs, just a faint ripple under the skin, the belly and the belly button (which isn't a button at all, more like a little tunnel and I imagine it going clear through me so that if I stood outside naked I could feel a breeze blow all of the way through my center), my breasts which my hands can cover completely when I want them to, my collarbone, my shoulders, my arms which I position to look like women in paint' ings or pictures. I pretend I'm an artist's model and hold a pose for a valiantly long time.

I run hot water in the tub and put one of Sheila's red bath oil beads in the water, watch the skin of the ball peel away and the oil creep out like timid schoolchildren. I lower my body slowly into the hot water, having to let my skin get used to the heat. I take the wash cloth and cover my pubic hair, the edges of the square of yellow fabric almost touching my hip bones. I relax my body and the cloth drifts away.

I used to sit in the bathroom with Sheila while she took a bath, before she moved out of Mom's house. Sometimes I'd even wash her back for her. She'd tell me about the people at her school, Stonewall Jackson High School, where I'd go too one day. She'd tell me who said what, who liked who, who wore what, who was getting fat (and that ugly girls got fat and the pretty girls got pregnant).

I raise up my wrist. I'd forgotten to take off Sheila's watch. I unclasp the silver buckle of the black band and lean over to put it on the toilet lid. I used to borrow Sheila's stuff all the time; I loved wearing her clothes, her jewelry, her makeup. I don't like wearing her watch now. My wrist has a pasty white indent around it from where I strapped the watch on too tight.

Sometimes my sister would sit in the bathtub and cry. She would let me stay sometimes or she'd yell at me, tell me to get out, and call me names. One night, just after she'd started eleventh grade and I'd started sixth, I sat on the toilet lid talking and talking, telling my sister what my teacher Mrs. Cline had said about my art project, and about this girl I couldn't stand. The little window high over the tub was open because it was still warm out, and I could hear crickets. My sister just sat in the water, staring at the dripping faucet.