Geek Love Part 3

I cram the copies into my bag and chug home. There's a note under my door. A pencil smear from Miranda. "Come up and let me draw you."

When I knock, her door explodes inward, her huge frame surrounded by light. "Finally." Reaching for me.

"I can't today. I have some work to do." Her face falls into conventions masking disappointment. My chest lurches.

"But how did it go with that woman, about your tail?"

She flickers for the connection. Not thinking about it.

"Oh, there's no hurry. She says it's fine to wait until the semester ends."

"To decide?"

"No. To do it. Have it done."

"You decided."

"What the h.e.l.l. It's silly not to."

Her insolent look. The careless smirk. She is punishing me for being unavailable. I turn away, sick, and feel my way back down the hall.

She calls after me.

"When can you sit for me again? Tomorrow? The afternoon? Miss McGurk?"

I wave and go downstairs to my room and shut the door behind me and lock it.

Pacing and grinding my teeth. Throwing my wig on the floor and stamping. Why does she make me so angry? My rage terrifies me. I am a monster. I would rip her to shreds. I would swing her up by her round pink heels and snap her long body until that bright, hairy head smashed against the wall. Falling on my knees, shaking. Tangling my hands to keep from breaking something. Sudden grat.i.tude for the nuns, realizing that if she had stayed with me all the years of her growing up I would have murdered her the arrogant, imbecile b.i.t.c.h, my baby, beautiful Miranda.

I end up curled on the floor, blubbering and gasping. No one comes to comfort me. I lie there until I'm bored and embarra.s.sed at having dried snot streaks crackling on my cheeks. I get angry so rarely. Now twice in two days at Miranda.

I take a shower, get into a flannel nightgown, make instant coffee with hot water from the sink, and push the window up so I can see through. The streak of sky visible above the alley is heavy. I sit on the sill drinking death's-head brew and watching the shadow creep higher on the blind wall of the warehouse across the way. I can hear the pigeons fuddling in the eaves. Rain begins to splat a shine over the puddle on the garage roof below me.

Downstairs the phone rings and then stops. Lil's voice comes, shrill up the staircase, "Forty Wuunnn," and from far away a door slams and the redheaded defrocked Benedictine begins his desperate avalanche down the stairs. The pipes gurgle. The heat is coming on.

I drag the big old costume trunk out of the closet and open it. The Miranda Box I call it, though there is little enough of her in it. The shallow tray in the top of the trunk holds it all. School photos. The stack of report cards. The bundled letters from Sister T. that came four times a year for sixteen years. Progress reports: "Miranda is reading two years beyond her grade level. Her disposition is cheerful but marred by stubbornness and a disruptive tendency." The test scores. The list of inoculations. The chicken pox report. An indignant letter folded around a printed form crawling with the results of a medical examination.

She was fifteen that year and had run away and hooked up with an occult guitarist moonlighting as a United Parcel delivery driver who hid her in his "bohemian" - as the report called it - apartment for three weeks until she got bored and strolled back to the school. She was indifferent to repentance, according to the nun, and far from a virgin, according to the doctor. Heavenly Mary had prevented her from getting pregnant or diseased. They threatened to throw her out or to turn her over to the juvenile authorities. In the end my monthly payments increased by 50 percent and she stayed.

Fingering the blistering letter, I remember precisely the hoops my heart went through over the incident. I was terrified for her, but strangely delighted, as though her wildness were a triumph of her genes over indoctrination. I lay the thin sheaf of drawings she gave me on top of the rest, and then lift the tray out and set it aside.

The body of the trunk is crammed with clipping books, thick stacks of paper wrapped in black plastic. Photographs. Sound tapes. A tight roll of posters held by dry and brittle rubber bands.

This fragile, flammable heap is all that's left of my life. It is the history of Miranda's source. She soars and stomps and burns through her days with no notion of the causes that formed her. She imagines herself isolated and unique. She is unaware that she is part of, and the product of, forces a.s.sembled before she was born.

She can be flip about her tail. Or she can try. She is ignorant of its meaning and oblivious to its value. But something in her blood aches, warning her.

I slip the topmost poster from the roll. The paper is stiff, wanting to break rather than tear. Carefully spreading it, uncoiling it, sliding plastic-wrapped bundles onto the corners to hold it down, I open it on the musty carpet.

The Binewskis are revealed, dressed in glittering white, enchanted against sea greens and blues, smiling, together still on wide paper. The poster has a fountain format with the whole family spewing upward from Chick, during his brief "Fortunato - The Strongest Child in the World" period. Papa killed this poster, along with Chicks act, before the public saw either of them. But it is my favorite family portrait. Chick, six years old and golden, is smiling at the bottom, his arms straight up with his parents standing on his hands. The beauteous "Crystal Lily" in an openly amorous pose, one leg kicking high out of her dance skirt, wrapped in the arms of the handsome "Ring Master Al," our Papa, Aloysius, in high boots and chalk jodhpurs-their smiles leaping upward in yellow light toward our stars, our treasures - "Arturo the Amazing Aqua Boy," afloat with his flippers spread angelically in hinted liquid in the upper right corner, his bare skull gleaming and haloed. In the left corner, at a cunningly suggested keyboard swirling out of the blue, "The Magnificent Musical Siamese Twins, Electra and Iphigenia!" Elly and Iphy with their long hair smoothed into black buns, slim white arms entwined, pale faces beaming out in shafts from their violet eyes.

And I am there also. "Albino Olympia," viewed from the side to display my hump, bald n.o.bbly head tilted charmingly, curtsying with one arm pointing at the glorious Chick and his miraculous burden. Chick was six and I was twelve but he loomed a full head taller. The arched banner across the top in joyous glitter, "The Fabulous Binewskis."

The wallet-sized school picture from Mirandas senior year shows her face the same size as the Binewski poster faces. I slide the photo around, next to Chick, to Arty, to Papa Al. It is Arty she looks like. Those Binewski cheekbones and the Mongol eyes. Would she see it?

BOOKII.

Your Dragon- Care, Feeding, and Identifying Fewmets

4.

Papa's Roses

The Olympia McGurk profile in the personnel computer of Radio KBNK lists my training as "Elocution and diction, and micro-phonic presentation as taught by Aloysius Binewski," which I wrote calmly and confidently into my resume as though every well-trained voice would recognize the name of the master.

That was Papa, sitting in the back of the tent at the soundboard, wearing headphones and glaring at me as I stood on one foot on the stage with the old ragged microphone waving aimlessly near my mouth. Papa, hollering, "Boring!" at my fiftieth delivery of "Step right this way, folks!" or mimicking cruelly, "Ya-ta, ya-ta, ya-ta!" if I fell into a repet.i.tive rhythm on "From the darkest mysteries of science, a revelation of poetic grace."

"Move your lips, for s.h.i.ts sake!" howled Papa, or "Stop with the mouse farts and project!

"That's a double-reed instrument! It is called a voice! It is not a comb wrapped in waxed paper! I gave it to you from the love in my guts for your scrawny and unmarketable carca.s.s, so be kind enough to use it properly!"

And me all the while having to pee - coughing into the mike when my throat was tired and raw - eyes stinging and lips and chin crumpling in grief at his anger. The sweet tinkle of Electra on the ba.s.s and Iphy on the treble with Mama's voice counting, "One and two and ... " as the twins had their piano lesson inside the trailer. The gurgle and hum of the pumps that filtered my brother Arty's "Aqua Boy" tank. And the dim round moon of baby Fortunato's face peering at me from the dark of the risers above Papa.

If I finally did it right and got all the way through from "Step up, friends" to "A vision of the miraculous extravagance of Nature for the same simple price as an overcooked hotdog" without a single bellow of rage from my beloved papa, then he would swoop me up in huge arms and tuck me onto a shoulder, where I could grab his astounding hair in my fists and ride high through the tent flaps into the light, with Fortunato's golden head chugging along far below, and we would parade the long street of booths with me laughing down at the red-haired girls who sold the candy and at the toothless wheelman and Horst the Cat Man all nodding at Papa's instructions, and hearing, feeling his huge voice rumble out from beneath my legs, "This little beetle did her lessons just right today."

It's funny, in a dingy way, that I make my little living by reading. I have to smile because I used to avoid reading. It scared me.

It never bothered Arty. He read constantly - anything - but his favorites were ghost stories and horror tales.

When we were still children I was the one who turned his pages. He'd lie in bed reading late when everyone else was asleep. I lay beside him and held his lamp and turned the pages and watched his eyes move in quick jerks down the print. Reading was never a quiet pastime for Arty. He rocked, grunted, muttered, and exclaimed. He was in one of his toilet phases at that time. "Sweet rosy-brown a.r.s.ehole" was his expression of pleasure. "s.h.i.tsucker" was the pejorative.

"Don't you get dreams?" I asked him. "Don't you get scared reading those at night? They're supposed to scare you."

"Hey, nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that's what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys - that's you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath - that's me. And the rustling in the brush and the strange piping cries that chill the spine on a deserted road at twilight - that's the twins singing practice scales while they look for berries.

"Don't shake your head at me! These books teach me a lot. They don't scare me because they're about me. Turn the page."

Maybe it's mean to think, but the best time was before Chick was born. Things were simple. Papa would tell us about the hard times and explain that Arty had brought success to the show, and that Elly and Iphy had helped the business and, because he was a kind man, that even Oly had "done her part." There was always work but it was good.

Mornings were our time. After lessons and before the stage shows began at 2 P.M. we were free creatures. Papa connected two chunks of tire tread with a nylon web, and attached web straps to fit over Arty's fore and aft fins. With this rubber-tread armor on his chest and belly, Arty could slither almost anywhere.

Papa thought we should be mysteries that the townies couldn't see without paying. But, if we were in the country, we were allowed to ramble as long as we stuck together.

"Get your a.s.ses the h.e.l.l out of that tree!"

The farmer snapped his belt, doubled against itself, the strap wide enough to sting the air all the way up beside us among the Bings. Arty pressed his head back against the trunk and peered down at the man with the belt. He was old and strong and his eyes clicked on me as soon as I moved. I dodged out of sight and the belt snapped again. The leaves quivered above where Elly and Iphy were perched. They'd been bickering about how many cherries they could eat without sharing a bellyache and the runs. It must have been their high voices that drew this old codger. They were silent now, scared as usual.

"Come down now, or by all that crackles I'll be up there after you!" He didn't really sound mad. He'd stopped a ways out from the tree, too smart to come underneath where things might drop on him.

Arty's mouth moved close to my ear. "You first, then Elly and Iphy. He thinks it's kids."

I crammed my voice into the top of my mouth and pitched it silly, "We're coming, mister, don't hurt us!" I took my dark gla.s.ses off and poked my head past the edge so he could see my ears sticking out from under my watch cap. I squinted so he couldn't tell the color of my eyes. The farmer's shrewd eyes tightened on me. His mouth quirked into one corner for a spit.

"I'll hurt you in a minute."

"We've got to help our brother, mister, just a second." Arty stretched his neck and clamped his jaw onto the last twig of cherries I held as I began climbing out of the tree crotch. "Elly," I called deliberately, "Iphy, help me get Arty down." A long leg appeared with a crumpled pink sock and a white sneaker. I peeked at the farmer. He cracked the folded belt against his high rubber boot. He was watching but he'd loosened a bit. The girls' names did that, soft, old-fashioned things. And the "Don't hurt us" had him disarmed.

"Psst!" Iphy was looking anxiously down at me while Elly maneuvered the descent. Arty muttered softly up at them, "Oly goes down first. You hand me down to her and then come."

"We're coming down, mister," I called, and then slid away from Arty, down the trunk, gripping with toes and fingers in the deep cracks of the bark to slip down the easy slope of the tree on the side away from the brown-faced man with the belt. When I hit the ground I stepped back, bent forward, and rubbed my cap off against the trunk. I was reaching up for Arty when I heard the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d grunt. He'd seen my hump and my bald head. The twins were lowering Arty with three hands and hugging the tree with the fourth. Arty's clothes hissed and snagged on the bark as he slid. I caught his hips on my chest and he slid down my belly to the ground. The twins bounced down the trunk, peering from both sides at the farmer. I turned to look at him. His eyes slit into suspicious surprise. Arty started humping toward him quickly. I jumped after. The twins caught up and Elly held my hand as we moved toward the farmer. He fell down on his b.u.t.t in the gra.s.s. His belt rolled out flat beside him. We went past him fast and out of his cherry orchard.

Later in bed I decided Arty was smart. It was the order of our appearance that got the guy. Here he was cracking his belt and chuckling inside about another summer's batch of kids in the cherry trees. He'd be rehearsing the story already, to tell his wife over chicken and biscuits in the kitchen, as he sat with his sleeves still damp from scrubbing and his hat off showing the pale stretch below his hair where the sunburn ended.

"Caught Jethro's grandkids in the Bings today," he'd say, "all up one tree, same as their daddy and his sis twenty years ago." And he and his wife smiling at each other and her pouring the iced coffee and saying she hoped he hadn't scared them too much. But while all this was readying behind his eyes we stepped out and dropped him. First me, twisted under my hump, the watch cap popping its bald shock, and then the seconds for him to register the shape of Arturo and the way he moved, and, most important, which direction he was heading. If that had been all he might have taken a pitchfork to us. But then came the night-haired girls, milk-skinned, flower-eyed, and their two long legs in the slumping pink socks. The old man had thirty years of shooing kids from trees yanked out of him. I wondered if he would say anything at all about it to anybody.

Arty's head jerked around and his eyes ripped at me. The shadows of sharp bone and muscle strained at his tight skin. Anger.

"Pick me up. Now. Pick me up." He was heavy but I hoisted him from the middle until he leaned against me, upright, then crouched and hefted him onto my shoulder. His head and chest faced the rear, his round b.u.t.t curving into my arms.

"I hate long gra.s.s. Hate it." His voice came into my left ear as we moved slowly through the field. "You try humping along with your nose in the snakes and cow s.h.i.t for a block or two."

Arty always talked to the people. It was a central charm of his act that, though he looked and acted alien, part animal, part myth, he would prop his chin on the lip of the tank to talk "just like folks." Only it wasn't quite like folks.

At first, when Arty was tiny, Al was his enthusiastic master of ceremonies. Arty gradually worked his way in and took over the talking entirely. Before too long Al just stood out front and lured the crowd in.

Arty started with explanatory chat about his own physique but soon discovered the power of piffle and vapor. Greeting-card sentiments, intoned pretentiously in the stage-lit waver of the tank by such an intriguing little deviant, packed a surprising wallop.

Arty and Papa experimented. Arty's show changed in small ways - a pink spotlight instead of red - or, occasionally, in big ways. It was always a sit-down show, a bench-and-bleacher act. The tank and Arty were the only focus. For a while Arty made a dry entrance. He came out on the platform above the tank before diving in. Then he decided that folks wanted to think that he lived in the water all the time - maybe even breathed water. After that he always made his first appearance in the water. He used a screen in the water for a while, hiding behind it and swimming out into the brightly visible part of the tank when Papa signaled. Arty got sick of waiting and had a big tube tunnel run up through the tank floor so he could wait dry in the back and make a dramatic swoosh entrance when the lights came up. Arty spewing upward in a burst of luminescent bubbles with a thrumming fanfare of recorded music. It got the crowd going.

Eventually Arty grew bored with the Gilled Illusion of Aqua Boy, and in his Arturan phase enjoyed parading before his throng (at a distance, in a golf cart) on dry land, but he stuck to the submariner ident.i.ty for a long time.

As he bitterly pointed out, he wasn't extravagant enough looking to hold a crowd for twenty minutes (the length of the show in those early days) by just lolling around and letting them gawk. He had to do something. The seal tricks of his infancy soon palled on him. Swimming was useful. The bright tank in the dim tent was a focus. The water and his floating form were soothing, hypnotic. People stared at the tank and his undulating figure as they would at a bright fire. The tank made him exotic but safe. "They can relax," Arty theorized, "because they know I'm not going to jump up into their laps." (Arty tended to be snide about laps, not having one of his own.) "It's a fiendish waste to get 'em into a beautiful sucker zone of mind and then not do anything with them," Arty would lament. So he learned to talk. He recited rhymes, quoted the more saccharine philosophers, commented on human nature. The standard approach, and the line Papa always wanted Arty to take, was jokes, comedy, a creaking stand-up patter that would seem unique coming from the Aqua Boy. But Arty wouldn't go for it. "I don't want those sc.u.mbags laughing at me," he'd snarl. "I want them amazed at me, maybe scared of me, but I won't let them laugh. No. Oh, a little chuckle because I'm witty, sure. But not a running line."

Arty's few jokes, the brief crackling relief from a mystic format, were always dry and biting and directed outward, away from himself.

The misty cauldron of the act was a constant. "They want to be amazed and scared. That's why they're here," Arty said.

Gradually, inevitably, he discovered the Oracle. "The guy who asks the question and thinks he hears an answer is the guy who makes an Oracle." He'd been reading books on Oriental philosophy and was spouting it solemnly over the lip of the tank one day when a pale woman on the bleachers stood up and asked him whether her fifteen-year-old son, who had run away months before, was alive or dead.

Without thinking at all, without missing a beat, he whipped out, "Weeping at night alone and yearning for you, working like a man in daylight, silently." She burst out bawling and hollering, "Bless you, thank you, bless you, thank you," as she crawled out over a row of knees and left snorking into her hanky.

She must have told her friends because the next two shows were pimpled with shouted questions from the bleachers and Arty's vague, impromptu answers.

He had the redhead who sold the tickets hand out three-by-five cards for people to write questions on. The act took on a distinct odor of palm reading and advice to the love-or-otherwise-lorn. Papa had thousands of "Ask Aqua Boy" posters printed and slathered up everywhere we went.

I never knew the twins very well. Maybe Arty was right in claiming I was jealous of them. They were too charming. The whole crew loved them. The norm crowds loved them. In towns we pa.s.sed through regularly pairs of young girls would come to the show dressed in a single long skirt in imitation of the twins. Arty wasn't delighted with their popularity either, of course. But he had a way of splitting them. To me they were inaccessible. They didn't need me to do anything for them. Iphy was always kind to me. She was kind to everybody. But Elly was careful to keep me in my place. They were self-sufficient. They needed only each other. And Elly, rest her hard and toothy soul, ruled their body.

I remember Lil with a bundle of costumes in one arm and a bag of popping corn in the other as she stood rigid in the sawdust of the midway and lectured me sternly: "We use the plural form, Olympia, whenever we refer to Electra and Iphigenia. We do not say 'Where is Elly and Iphy?' We say 'Where are Elly and Iphy?'"

If you stood facing the twins, Elly was on your left and Iphy on your right. Elly was right-handed and Iphy was left-handed. But Iphy was the right leg and Elly was the left leg. If you pulled Elly's hair, Iphy yelped too. If you kissed Iphy's cheek, Elly smiled. If Elly burnt her hand on the popcorn machine, Iphy cried also and couldn't sleep that night from the pain. They ran and climbed and danced gracefully. They had separate hearts but a meshing bloodstream; separate stomachs but a common intestine. They had one liver and one set of kidneys. They had two brains and a nervous system that was peculiarly connected and unexpectedly separate. Between them they ate a small fraction more than one norm kid their size.

Jonathan Tomaini, the greasy-haired music-school graduate who became their piano teacher when they had gone past Lily, claimed that Iphy was all melody and Elly was rhythm exclusively. They were both sopranos.

Arty speculated that their two brains functioned as right and left lobes of a single brain.

Elly punished Iphy by eating food that disagreed with them. Iphy would sink into depressed silence, eating nothing. Elly's favorite trick was cheese. Iphy hated constipation like cancer.

Elly varied the treatment by gorging on chocolate, even though she didn't really like chocolate and it made her chin break out in zits. Pimples were very obvious on her milky skin. Iphy loved chocolate and never ate it for fear of pimples. Elly's eating the stuff never gave Iphy pimples. The punishment was that Iphy had to sleep next to Elly's pimples, had to live within inches of the molten eruptions.

Iphy felt sorry for everybody who wasn't a twin. Elly despised me.

When Chick came along, both twins adored him. He was such a meek little feather that he worshiped them. Lil and Al were just loved. But Arty was different. He was separate. He fascinated Iphy and he terrified Elly. Elly's harshness flared against anyone who might distract Iphy's attention from her. The rest of us were just fantasy opposition. Arty was dangerous. He flirted with Iphy. He toyed with her.

Elly hated him. She acted, sometimes, as though Arty could tear Iphy away from her.

The Binewski family shrine was a fifty-foot trailer with a door at each end and a one-dollar admission price. The sign over the entrance said "Mutant Mystery" and, in smaller letters, "A Museum of Natures Innovative Art." We called it "the Chute." Like everything else in the Fabulon, the Chute grew and changed over the years. But the Chute had started with six clear-gla.s.s twenty-gallon jars, and those jars-each lit by hidden yellow beams and equipped with its own explanatory, push-b.u.t.ton voice tape-were always the core.

The Chute was Crystal Lil's idea, and she supervised it. She visited the Chute every day before the gates opened and polished the jars lovingly with gla.s.s cleaner. Later, when Al wanted to put the stuffed animals in, he had to clear it with Crystal Lil. She insisted on the maze at the entrance so that the six jars remained the climax of the walk through.

The stuffed animals in their lit gla.s.s windows were the usual humdrum collection of two-headed calves, six-legged chickens, and the mounted skeleton of a three-tailed cat. The only live exhibit was a trio of featherless hens that Al picked up from the chicken rancher who had bred them to save plucking costs on his fryers. He couldn't sell them because customers were used to the pimply "chicken skin" of birds that had their feathers yanked. They didn't trust the smooth-skinned look. These three were cheerful, baggy-fleshed creatures with floppy combs and wattles. They lived for two years before Lil found them, heaped dead in a corner of their cage, done in overnight by some microscopic enemy of innovation. Al had them stuffed and they stayed on in the same cage. One bent over, with head extended as though about to peck at the straw that would never again need changing. One stood alert, with its round yellow eye c.o.c.ked at the pa.s.sersby and its right foot curled as though in the act of stepping forward. The last sat cozily in a corner with one wing spread and its head tucked underneath, apparently looking for lice.

Lily would take her pills after breakfast and then go over to the Chute with her cleaning gear. She left the dark green floors and walls to the power-vacuum crew but the gla.s.s she did herself. Sometimes I would help, sometimes the twins. Mostly Lily did it herself. She would do a quick, decent job on all the gla.s.s windows in the maze, but her true purpose was her visit to the "kids" as she called them. The jars were Al's failures.

"And mine," Lil would always add. She would spray the big jars and polish them. She would talk softly, all the while, to the things floating in the jars or to whoever was with her. She remembered the drug recipe Al had prescribed for her pregnancy with each one, and reminisced about the births.

There were four who had been born dead: Clifford, Maple, Ja.n.u.s, and the Fist. "We always say Arty is our firstborn but actually Ja.n.u.s was the first," Lil would say as she peered into the fluid that filled up the jar, examining the small huddled figure that floated upright inside.

Ja.n.u.s was always my favorite. He had a down of dark hair curling on his tiny scalp and a sweet sleeping face. His other head emerged on a short neck at the base of his spine, equally round and perfect, with matching hair. This rear brother squinted in perpetual surprise at the tiny b.u.t.tocks under its nose. The four sets of minuscule eyelashes fascinated me and I wondered how the two would have gotten along if Ja.n.u.s had lived. Would they have bickered like Elly and Iphy? They could never have seen each other except sideways in a mirror. Probably the top head would have controlled everything and made his poor little b.u.t.t-brother miserable.

Lil always fussed over Maple, who looked like a big rumpled sponge. Maple had two eyes but they didn't relate to each other. Lil said Maple had no bones. She and Al had decided Maple was female because they couldn't find a p.e.n.i.s. Lil also clucked and sighed over Clifford, who looked like a lasagna pan full of exposed organs with a monkey head attached. The twins and I called Clifford "the Tray" when Mama wasn't around.

The Fist wasn't full term but it was obvious where the name had come from. "I only carried the Fist for five months," Lil said, and that was her excuse for spending a shade less time on his jar.

Apple and Leona were the two who had lived long enough to die outside Lily's belly. Apple was big but dull. She looked like a Tibetan cherub. Her coa.r.s.e black hair grew close to her rumpled eyes. I myself could dimly remember her sleeping in the top drawer of Lil's big bureau. She never moved anything but her lips, her eyelids, and her bowels. Her eyeb.a.l.l.s were still pointing in vaguely different directions. Lil had fed her from a bottle and changed her, washing her limp body three or four times a day. Lil would talk to Apple and rub her and move things in front of her eyes, but there was never any response. Apple grew fat and there was a smell of old urine around her and the drawer. She was two years old when she died. A pillow fell on her face.

Arty always claimed that Al did it. Elly and Iphy would squeal when he said that, and I would shake my head and change the subject, but we never asked Lil and we never brought it up in front of Al.

Leona was the last jar before the exit and had four spotlights focused to pierce the formaldehyde in which she drifted. Lil would linger over the jar and once or twice I saw her cry as she pressed her forehead against the gla.s.s and crooned. "We had such hopes for her," she would sigh. Leona's jar was labeled "The Lizard Girl" and she looked the part. Her head was long from front to back and the forehead was compressed and flattened over small features that collapsed into her long throat with no chin to disturb the line. She had a big fleshy tail, as thick as a leg where it sprouted from her spine, but then tapering to a point. There was a faint greenish sheen to her skin but I suspected that Arty was right in claiming that Al had painted it on after Leona died.