The Onion Girl

  “So what if you’re not an artist? Where’s the magic then?”

  “Life’s an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: ‘If there’s no magic, there’s no meaning.’ Without magic—or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom—nothing has any depth. It’s all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there’s more to everything than that, whether it’s a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.”

  “I don’t know,” Annie said. “I understand what you’re saying, about people and things, but this other stuff—it sounds more like the kinds of things you see when you’re tripping.”

  Jilly shook her head. “I’ve done drugs and I’ve seen faerie. They’re not the same.”

  She got up to stir the stew. When she sat down again, Annie had closed the sketchbook and was sitting with her hands flat against her stomach.

  “Can you feel the baby?” Jilly asked.

  Annie nodded.

  “Have you thought about what you want to do?”

  “I guess. I’m just not sure I even want to keep the baby.”

  “That’s your decision,” Jilly said. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll stand by you. Either way we’ll get you a place to stay. If you keep the baby and want to work, we’ll see about arranging day care. If you want to stay home with the baby, we’ll work something out for that as well. That’s what this sponsorship’s all about. It’s not us telling you what to do; we just want to help you be the person you were meant to be.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good person,” Annie said.

  “Don’t think like that. It’s not true.”

  Annie shrugged. “I guess I’m scared I’ll do the same thing to my baby that my mother did to me. That’s how it happens, doesn’t it? My mom used to beat the crap out of me all the time, didn’t matter if I did something wrong or not, and I’m just going to end up doing the same thing to my kid.”

  “You’re only hurting yourself with that kind of thinking,” Jilly said.

  “But it can happen, can’t it? Jesus, I … . You know I’ve been gone from her for two years now, but I still feel like she’s standing right next to me half the time, or waiting around the corner for me. It’s like I’ll never escape. When I lived at home, it was like I was living in the house of an enemy. But running away didn’t change that. I still feel like that, except now it’s like everybody’s my enemy.”

  Jilly reached over and laid a hand on hers.

  “Not everybody,” she said. “You’ve got to believe that.”

  “It’s hard not to.”

  “I know.”

  10

  This Is Where We Dump Them, by Meg Mullally. Tinted photograph. The Tombs, Newford, 1991.

  Two children sit on the stoop of one of the abandoned buildings in the Tombs. Their hair is matted, faces smudged, clothing dirty and ill-fitting. They look like turn-of-the-century Irish tinkers. There’s litter all around them: torn garbage bags spewing their contents on the sidewalk, broken bottles, a rotting mattress on the street, half-crushed pop cans, soggy newspapers, used condoms.

  The children are seven and thirteen, a boy and a girl. They have no home, no family. They only have each other.

  The next month went by awfully fast. Annie stayed with me—it was what she wanted. Angel and I did get her a place, a one-bedroom on Landis that she’s going to move into after she’s had the baby. It’s right behind the loft—you can see her back window from mine. But for now she’s going to stay here with me.

  She’s really a great kid. No artistic leanings, but really bright. She could be anything she wants to be if she can just learn to deal with all the baggage her parents dumped on her.

  She’s kind of shy around Angel and some of my other friends—I guess they’re all too old for her or something—but she gets along really well with Sophie and me. Probably because whenever you put Sophie and me together in the same room for more than two minutes, we just start giggling and acting about half our respective ages, which would make us, mentally at least, just a few years Annie’s senior.

  “You two could be sisters,” Annie told me one day when we got back from Sophie’s studio. “Her hair’s lighter, and she’s a little chestier, and she’s definitely more organized than you are, but I get a real sense of family when I’m with the two of you. The way families are supposed to be.”

  “Even though Sophie’s got faerie blood?” I asked her.

  She thought I was joking.

  “If she’s got magic in her,” Annie said, “then so do you. Maybe that’s what makes you seem so much like sisters.”

  “I just pay attention to things,” I told her. “That’s all.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The baby came right on schedule—three-thirty, Sunday morning. I probably would’ve panicked if Annie hadn’t been doing enough of that for both of us. Instead I got on the phone, called Angel, and then saw about helping Annie get dressed.

  The contractions were really close by the time Angel arrived with the car. But everything worked out fine. Jillian Sophia Mackle was born two hours and forty-five minutes later at the Newford General Hospital. Six pounds and five ounces of red-faced wonder. There were no complications.

  Those came later.

  11

  The last week before the show was simple chaos. There seemed to be a hundred and one things that none of them had thought of, all of which had to be done at the last moment. And to make matters worse, Jilly still had one unfinished canvas haunting her by Friday night.

  It stood on her easel, untitled, barely sketched in images, still in monochrome. The colors eluded her. She knew what she wanted, but every time she stood before her easel, her mind went blank. She seemed to forget everything she’d ever known about art. The inner essence of the canvas rose up inside her like a ghost, so close she could almost touch it, but then fled daily, like a dream lost upon waking. The outside world intruded. A knock on the door. The ringing of the phone.

  The show opened in exactly seven days.

  Annie’s baby was almost two weeks old. She was a happy, satisfied infant, the kind of baby that was forever making contented little gurgling sounds, as though talking to herself; she never cried. Annie herself was a nervous wreck.

  “I’m scared,” she told Jilly when she came over to the loft that afternoon. “Everything’s going too well. I don’t deserve it.”

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby propped up on the Murphy bed between two pillows. Annie kept fidgeting. Finally she picked up a pencil and started drawing stick figures on pieces of paper.

  “Don’t say that,” Jilly said. “Don’t even think it.”

  “But it’s true. Look at me. I’m not like you or Sophie. I’m not like Angel. What have I got to offer my baby? What’s she going to have to look up to when she looks at me?”

  “A kind, caring mother.”

  Annie shook her head. “I don’t feel like that. I feel like everything’s sort of fuzzy and it’s like pushing through cobwebs just to make it through the day.”

  “We’d better make an appointment with you to see a doctor.”

  “Make it a shrink,” Annie said. She continued to doodle, then looked down at what she was doing. “Look at this. It’s just crap.”

  Before Jilly could see, Annie swept the sheaf of papers to the floor.

  “Oh, jeez,” she said as they went fluttering all over the place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  She got up before Jilly could and tossed the lot of them in the garbage container beside the stove. She stood there for a long moment, taking deep breaths, holding them, slowly letting them out.

  “Annie …?”

  She turned as Jilly approached her. The glow of motherhood that had seemed to revitalize her in the month before the baby was born had slowly worn away. She was pale again. Wan. She looked so lost that all Jilly could do was put her arms arou
nd her and offer a wordless comfort.

  “I’m sorry,” Annie said against Jilly’s hair. “I don’t know what’s going on. I just … I know I should be really happy, but I just feel scared and confused.” She rubbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “God, listen to me. All it seems I can do is complain about my life.”

  “It’s not like you’ve had a great one,” Jilly said.

  “Yeah, but when I compare it to what it was like before I met you, it’s like I moved up into heaven.”

  “Why don’t you stay here tonight?” Jilly said.

  Annie stepped back out of her arms. “Maybe I will—if you really don’t mind … ?”

  “I really don’t mind.”

  “Thanks.”

  Annie glanced toward the bed, her gaze pausing on the clock on the wall above the stove.

  “You’re going to be late for work,” she said.

  “That’s all right. I don’t think I’ll go in tonight.”

  Annie shook her head. “No, go on. You’ve told me how busy it gets on a Friday night.”

  Jilly still worked part-time at Kathryn’s Café on Battersfield Road.

  She could just imagine what Wendy would say if she called in sick. There was no one else in town this weekend to take her shift, so that would leave Wendy working all the tables on her own.

  “If you’re sure,” Jilly said.

  “We’ll be okay,” Annie said. “Honestly.”

  She went over to the bed and picked up the baby, cradling her gently in her arms.

  “Look at her,” she said, almost to herself. “It’s hard to believe something so beautiful came out of me.” She turned to Jilly, adding before Jilly could speak, “That’s a kind of magic all by itself, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe one of the best we can make,” Jilly said.

  12

  How Can You Call This Love? by Claudia Feder. Oils. Old Market Studio, Newford, 1990.

  A fat man sits on a bed in a cheap hotel room. He’s removing his shirt. Through the ajar door of the bathroom behind him, a thin girl in bra and panties can be seen sitting on the toilet, shooting up.

  She appears to be about fourteen.

  I just pay attention to things, I told her. I guess that’s why, when I got off my shift and came back to the loft, Annie was gone. Because I pay such good attention. The baby was still on the bed, lying between the pillows, sleeping. There was a note on the kitchen table:

  I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just keep wanting to hit something. I look at little Jilly and I think about my mother and

  I get so scared. Take care of her for me. Teach her magic. Please don’t hate me.

  I don’t know how long I sat and stared at those sad, piteous words, tears streaming from my eyes.

  I should never have gone to work. I should never have left her alone. She really thought she was just going to replay her own childhood. She told me, I don’t know how many times she told me, but I just wasn’t paying attention, was I?

  Finally I got on the phone. I called Angel. I called Sophie. I called Lou Fucceri. I called everybody I could think of to go out and look for Annie. Angel was at the loft with me when we finally heard. I was the one who picked up the phone.

  I heard what Lou said: “A patrolman brought her into the General not fifteen minutes ago, ODing on Christ knows what. She was just trying to self-destruct, is what he said. I’m sorry, Jilly. But she died before I got here.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just passed the phone to Angel and went to sit on the bed. I held little Jillian in my arms and then I cried some more.

  I was never joking about Sophie. She really does have faerie blood. It’s something I can’t explain, something we don’t talk much about, something I just know and she denies. But she did promise me that she’d bless Annie’s baby, just the way fairy godmothers would do it in all those old stories.

  “I gave her the gift of a happy life,” she told me later. “I never dreamed it wouldn’t include Annie.”

  But that’s the way it works in fairy tales, too, isn’t it? Something always goes wrong, or there wouldn’t be a story. You have to be strong, you have to earn your happily ever after.

  Annie was strong enough to go away from her baby when she felt like all she could do was just lash out, but she wasn’t strong enough to help herself. That was the awful gift her parents gave her.

  I never finished that last painting in time for the show, but I found something to take its place. Something that said more to me in just a few rough lines than anything I’ve ever done.

  I was about to throw out my garbage when I saw those crude little drawings that Annie had been doodling on my kitchen table the night she died. They were like the work of a child.

  I framed one of them and hung it in the show.

  “I guess we’re five coyotes and one coyote ghost now,” was all Sophie said when she saw what I had done.

  13

  In the House of My Enemy, by Annie Mackle. Pencils. Yoors Street Studio, Newford, 1991.

  The images are crudely rendered. In a house that is merely a square with a triangle on top are three stick figures, one plain, two with small “skirt” triangles to represent their gender. The two larger figures are beating the smaller one with what might be crooked sticks, or might be belts.

  The small figure is cringing away.

  14

  In the visitors’ book set out at the show, someone wrote: “I can never forgive those responsible for what’s been done to us. I don’t even want to try.”

  “Neither do I,” Jilly said when she read it. “God help me, neither do I.”

  Raylene

  LOS ANGELES, WINTER 1998

  It’s easy to be nobody in this city. At eight million plus, it’s twice the size of Newford. Hell, I don’t even want to think about how much bigger’n Tyson it is. All I know for sure is, you want to get lost, this is the place for it. You can just disappear yourself into the woodwork and nobody gives a good goddamn.

  I look back now and I understand I was fighting me a big-time depression once I done my time and got outta the county jail. Aw, who’m I kidding? I wasn’t fighting it none. I was just three years or so a-laying in bed most of the time, when I weren’t laying on the sofa. I watched me more soaps and talk shows and game shows, not to mention those damned videos of Pinky’s than you’d think it’d be humanly possible.

  I don’t know why I watched them videos of Pinky’s. All they’d do is make me want to cry, ’cept I couldn’t cry. I’d get me a burning up behind my eyes, and my chest’d feel like it was damn near gonna crush me, it was so tight. But the tears wouldn’t come, not nary a one. I hadn’t cried me none since my sister left me and after that I swore I’d never cry again. I tried to take it back during them years of being depressed, ’cause I had the feeling that crying’d help, but something deep inside me went and took that oath seriously. Whatever that piece of me was, there weren’t no give to it. Which is more’n I can say ’bout the rest of me.

  So I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t barely get up offa my ass and when I worried on it, I didn’t know what to do. On the talk shows, they was forever talking about this therapy and that drug, but you need money to buy you your Prozac, and I just couldn’t see myself paying anybody to listen to my troubles. When Pinky went to work, I had me the four walls of our apartment to do that. But I didn’t lay none of my troubles on her.

  Where’d it all go wrong? Damned if I know. It just did. Karma, I guess, if you want to use fancy words that belong to some foreign religion. Payback’s what they’d call it back home in Tyson. It’s like whoever’s in the big upstairs of the sky is making sure I get my due for all them folks I robbed and hurt. Funny how there was no one looking out for me when it was me that was being hurt, back when I was just this little kid.

  I can’t imagine it now, but I must’ve been innocent at some time in my life. A baby don’t just get itself born bad, do it?

  But it’s the same difference now, I guess. Born bad,
grew up bad—who cares how it happened? It’s all gone now anyways. I got no spine, got no skill, got nothing of worth to nobody, leastways my own self.

  Sometimes I think back on that night in my bedroom when I took the knife to Del. I never did nothing like that again. Never had to. Or maybe I just never got me into another situation where I had to. I pulled a knife on more’n one fella, pulled a gun, too, but I never used neither.

  Time was, I’d consider that night with Del and I’d know this as sure as anything: the darkness that woke in me then, it weren’t never going away. I always knew that I could do it again, do even worse, if I had to. The capacity I had in me for violence was this dark secret that only Pinky shared and I thought for sure I’d carry it to the grave. But in those days of my depression …

  Hell, I was lucky I was able to kill me a ’roach when it went skittering ’cross the floor.

  Pinky, she worried something awful over me and that just made me feel worse. But there weren’t nothing I could do. I just went a-moping around. I didn’t put on no weight, though. If anything, I just got scrawnier, ’cept for my chest and that was getting an old lady’s hang to it—on account of there being no meat on my bones no more, I guess.

  When we first come to L.A. I thought the bigness’d work for us. We could run our scams all we wanted and then, just fade back into the crowds. But it weren’t the same as back in Tyler, or even in Newford. Everybody’s hustling here and if you ain’t in the know, you’re never gonna connect with the high rollers. No point in ripping anybody off they ain’t got much more’n you, but it got so’s I was even doing that.

  When I was in the county lockup for that six months is when Pinky up and took charge. Got her turn on the casting couch and I guess she must’ve impressed ’em, ’cause for a long time there she never run outta work.