Model Home, page 14
TWENTY-SIX.
Elijah loves living in a house of noise. Her aunties, her cousins, her great-aunt and -uncle, and her yoyo spark like fireworks. The warmth between them heats her up.
Elijah’s own home is quiet, lonely. She and her yoyo have their routine. Ramen Monday nights and fixing whatever in the flat is broken. Vegan pizza with jalapeños every Friday. Every once in a while, Chabad. True crime every night or sometimes one of Yoyo’s incomprehensible films like Eraserhead or Edward II.
Elijah will say something, and Yoyo will smile and nod. And Yoyo will listen while Elijah speaks, for sometimes an hour without a break.
This is when Yoyo is there. Sometimes, Yoyo is not there. Sometimes, Yoyo is far, far away in their head. They’ll stalk the house, a brooding ghost, or they’ll snap at slights that are not slights at all, or they’ll sob because they’ve burned the rice.
None of this bothers Elijah because she understands it. The world doesn’t make sense, so why should we, as inhabitants of that world, make sense? Though Yoyo never speaks of it, it is clear their past is one of heartbreak. No one would ask a girl mid-rape why she is screaming. Yoyo is always in the middle of something just as awful in their head, Elijah reckons, and has found a thousand different ways to scream silently.
“I’m sorry for all the fighting,” says Yoyo, emerging from Eve’s bedroom to find Elijah in the living room. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” says Elijah. Her aunts, great-aunt, and great-uncle are in the backyard smoking a joint and drinking, a reality Elijah’s yoyo unsuccessfully tried to hide from her. “Why? What about you? Are you okay? Do you wish you could be out there smoking?”
Yoyo shakes their head. “Weed makes me paranoid.”
Elijah would like to ask, But do you miss America? Your family? Do you want to move back here and leave me behind in England? Send me back to Mum? Be free? Unburdened?
But she doesn’t want the answer to be yes, and fears that it will be.
Elijah is a clever girl. She doesn’t ask stupid questions.
When Elijah’s marks were poor in early primary and she was identified as a struggling reader who needed serious intervention with phonics, Mum took this as a personal attack. Every day after school, for an hour, she quizzed, chided, goaded—forced Elijah through worksheet after worksheet after worksheet. All in the name of love, perhaps, and care. This is what mothers are supposed to do for their babies, but Elijah learned early on that there was nothing she could ever do that would be good enough for Caroline.
When Elijah was diagnosed with dyslexia, she hoped there might be some relief, but Mum’s strategies for compulsion simply became more specific. They worked daily together through a book aimed at dyslexic children that did turn Elijah into a fluent reader, but she does not feel gratitude. She remembers only Mum’s disappointment. Mum’s sighs. Mum’s ability to turn any moment of joy into a lesson.
Yoyo never cared about Elijah’s academic performance. In fact, they actively eschewed all investment in it, except at one point to suggest to Mum a Steiner school, since she could afford it, where early reading was less stressed and there was more time for art, imagination, dancing, and play, the activities Elijah seemed to enjoy and excel at.
Mum said, I’m not sending our daughter to some stupid fucking fairy-worshipping school. You need to talk to her. You need to work with her. She actually likes you, God knows why, maybe she’ll listen. She thinks I’m the devil, and I’m tired of being the bad guy.
I do work with her. We read together all the time. It’s all we do.
It was true that at that age, when Elijah was around six or seven, Yoyo did very little but make her cheese-and-ketchup toasties and read aloud to her, like if she only stayed reading, she could not mess anything up, say the wrong thing.
Elijah would draw, or play with Playmobil, while Yoyo read book after book after book.
They never went to the playground because Elijah was shy, uncoordinated, and preferred always to be drawing and playing with her imaginary characters. Briefly, Yoyo put Elijah in swim lessons, but those lasted for two weeks before Elijah’s anxiety got the best of her and she cried and cried and cried not to be made to get in the water.
You need to push her out of her comfort zone, Mum would say. She’s never going to learn anything if you don’t push her.
I heard you and Mum talking, Elijah told Yoyo on the train to Oxford.
Oh?
About a new school.
You were eavesdropping?
Embarrassed, Elijah didn’t answer.
It’s okay. I wish you hadn’t heard that, though. The truth is, your mum’s right; I don’t know that a Steiner school is right for you anyway.
Why not? asked Elijah. The idea of a place that Mum denigrated as “fairy-worshipping” sounded perfect to her.
Honestly, Steiner was just short of a Nazi, said Yoyo. Fuck it, he was a Nazi, and so much of the roots of his educational philosophy revolves around an idea of a perfect, Aryan childhood that mythologizes European histories, cultures, and lifestyles. I think there are good—great—people in the Steiner world, and it’s possible that a Steiner school could give you what you need, but. Yeah.
Yoyo! You said fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
With a smile, Yoyo said, Some days I feel it’s the only word that matters.
How do you spell it? asked Elijah, then regretted it immediately, because when she asked her mum, Caroline would painstakingly make her sound it out until Elijah would give up, and Mum still wouldn’t tell her how to spell it. This is motivation to learn, she would say.
F-U-C-K, said Yoyo.
F-U-C-K, fuck! F-U-C-K, fuck! F-U-C-K, fuck! Fuck the man! Fuck the police! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!
Yoyo laughed. You’re going to get me in trouble, they said.
Are you fucking with me right now?
Again, a laugh from Yoyo.
Elijah loved repeating phrases over and over again that she’d heard on the street, on telly, from the world around her.
Things are different now that she’s older. That day with Yoyo on the train was seven years ago now, and life had become worse in the intervening time. Life seems to her an ever-expanding gap between what is possible to others and what is possible for her.
Elijah wants to understand everything but knows she never will. She wants to be loved so fully and completely that her heart explodes from the pleasure of it, but knows that she never will. Elijah isn’t the sort of girl people fall in love with. Timid, anxious, acne-faced, and fat, she is finding that all life has to offer is not meant for her.
“I think I’m going to go to bed,” Elijah tells Yoyo, con scious of the time. Eden and Echo are already sleeping. The rest of the family will be in the backyard smoking until very late, if previous nights were any indication. If she crawled out the bedroom window now, she could have a whole night with Lily.
“Okay, kiddo,” says Yoyo. “Love you.”
They’re hugging themselves where they sit on the couch, mind elsewhere. A part of Elijah wants desperately to stay, to pull Yoyo into now and say, Hello, hello, hello, look at me; but again, she is a clever girl, has learned from the past that that action would bear no fruit for either of them.
TWENTY-SEVEN.
When I am seven, I am accused of killing the class pet. Athena, a black guinea pig with a flamboyant white beard, comes home with me for the weekend, as is dictated by the rotation schedule, and does not make it back Monday morning.
Athena is not my first dead pet. At five, shortly after moving into 677, our tropical fish die, suddenly and all at once, an act of God. We wake up in the morning to find nine of the fish dead in their aquarium.
Fish die. It is a thing that happens with regularity, but it’s notable that fish who’d been with us for years have all, in a single bound—like members of a suicide pact—ceased to be. Mama and Pop assume disease, or a problem with the sensors that control the water temperature, or any of the myriad things that kill fish. Still, these fish aren’t goldfish, whose deaths come frequently, expectedly, like sunrise. An attitude of suspicion remains.
You didn’t do anything, did you? Mama asks. It’s okay if you did. I know marine life is a curiosity of yours.
It’s true that I’m in the middle of a fish phase at this time. We take trips twice monthly to the Dallas Aquarium. Biology, physiology, and anatomy have always interested me, since the first time I accidentally cut myself open and saw red water from the river of life stream out of me. Recently, Mama and I read a book on evolution and how life emerged from the sea.
Whales, sharks, octopodes, and fish were fantastical in their abilities and their shapes, and they fascinated me more than dinosaurs ever did.
What do you mean, Mama? I ask.
Maybe you were curious about what would happen if you pulled the plug at the wall, then got scared when you saw what happened, plugged it back in before morning?
The fish need the plug, Mama, I explain to her, as she had explained to me many times when I was at an age where pushing and pulling things in and out of their place seemed my life calling.
Right, baby, says Mama.
After the fish, there are the ants from my ant farm. I awake to shattered glass sprinkled around the edges of my bed, splitting each of my feet open against the shards shortly after waking. I scream, and it is Pop, for once, who comes. Later, I put together that he got in late the night before and couldn’t sleep upon arriving home.
What is it, Firstborn? It’s a name he calls me with tongue in cheek. He comes to give all of us such names. Eve is Monday’s Child (fair of face), and Emmanuelle is Baby.
Pop sees the mess of blood and glass as he bursts in, and rescues me from the carnage. He carries me to the bathroom to tend to my feet, and even as I am crying, he is jovial and exuding love. Damn, boo, how your feet get so stinky, he says, and I laugh.
Not too stinky to eat, though, he says.
He wakes Mama and we go to the ER, all of us, with Eve, too, who’s a delightfully calm, sweet, and agreeable toddler. It is much later, when we arrive home after the six-hour saga at the hospital, that the question of the glass’s origin arises.
Then we find the ants—not crawling freely as one might expect of insects released from their glass cage—but dead on the kitchen floor, their thousands and thousands of corpses arranged to say, hi.
I despair over my ants. I’d collected the first several hundred of them and kept them in a jar for over a year, feeding and watering them, watching them expand and grow into the thousands. Pop picks me up, tries to calm me, but I am hysterical. No amount of rocking, shushing, or singing can console me.
The death of Athena the guinea pig is different, because I wake up Monday morning to see that one of my sharpened colored pencils has been stabbed into her eye. Mama and Pop look at me the way you look at the husband who calls the police after his wife has been murdered by an “intruder.”
Athena’s death calls into question my previous innocence. The ants. The fish. What the—? Pop says when I appear in his and Mama’s bedroom in the morning, holding the cage, which has become a coffin in my hand.
Maybe he was sleepwalking or something and did it then, Mama says, defending my honor.
What compels a child to sharpen a pencil to a fine chiseled point, then stab it into an animal’s eye, sleepwalking or not, unless that child is seriously disturbed? We need to get him help.
Baby, my mother tells me later, you got to tell me what’s going on with you. You can tell me. You can tell me and I will protect you, but I have to know the truth. I can’t be in the dark on this.
Mama, I didn’t do anything.
She closes her eyes tightly and pinches her lips, frustrated by what she perceives as my lie. It hurts when she grabs my shoulders and tells me to look her in the eye.
I don’t know what happened, I try to tell her, which is more of an admission to her than my previous statement, because at least now I’m not swearing complete innocence.
You don’t know what happened, or you don’t want to tell me what happened?
I woke up and it was like that, I say.
But already, Mama is aware of my awayness—how sometimes I am bright and sweet, and other times wild and angry, and other times an old, toothless witch-woman who speaks in wise riddles. To her, I am always Ezri—what is a person if not their body, no matter how many selves they hold?—but she knows that I am not a being who has perfect memory of everything I’ve ever done, that I am vast.
Mama takes my hands so my palms are facing up. That’s blood, she says. Do you see that?
I’m tearing up now.
Don’t cry. It’s not necessary. But I need you to try to remember what you did.
But I don’t. I don’t. I was sleeping.
And what about nightmares? Did you have any last night?
I think for a moment, but there’s no need; I do it only to give my answer more credibility. Every night I have nightmares. Yes, I tell Mama. I did.
And what happened in your nightmare?
I groan. I don’t know, I say.
I need you to try to remember. This is important.
But when I try to look back onto last night, everything is smoke, disintegrating before I can get any hold of it.
A ghost, I say finally, half making it up, half holding on to a memory.
Okay. A ghost. Tell me about the ghost.
She doesn’t have a face. She holds me down.
Mama pulls me close to her. I am remembering, remembering the dream.
She holds me down and gets inside of me.
And she possesses you? This ghost? Does she make you do things?
Yes, she makes me do things, I say.
Mama nods her head, and at school, she tells the teacher that Athena died in her sleep over the weekend.
Oh, dear, says the teacher. That’s so very unfortunate.
We are happy to supply the class with a new pet.
No, no, of course, that won’t be necessary.
I bet you killed it, says Cole, a boy in my class who hates me because I always beat him when we do Times Tables Speed Wars or History Jeopardy or Geography Jeopardy or Spelling Bees, and when his dog died a couple of months ago, I’d said I was glad because no dog deserved Cole as an owner because he was crusty, ugly, and mean.
The teacher shuts down Cole’s accusations, but it’s out there now. I am the Pet Killer, according to class 3B, and not to excuse their taunts, but I do not make the most innocent-seeming of defendants. I’m a constant thorn in the teacher’s side with my non-sliver antics. Disrupting the class. Not paying attention. My head in dreamland.
Once, for a day, I speak only in Old Timey talk, Old Timey talk as I’ve come to understand it from the classic books I’ve read. I refuse to answer to any name but Little Mary. When asked to read aloud, I say, I apologize most profusely, ma’am, but I am a slave, and therefore do not know my letters. I start bringing my lunch in a tied tea towel: a lunch that is merely apple and a hardened, stale roll.
I am crazy, that much is clear, and so I can’t say it now, nor could I say it then, that no, of course not, it isn’t me, it isn’t me who is the ghost, the ghost who kills.
TWENTY-EIGHT.
In the days leading up to the funeral, journalists email and call in droves. They long for a comment or explanation. They want to feast on our grief like we are crawfish, to pick away shell and get to the meat of suffering.
How they get our contact details, we do not know, but each of us three spends as much time talking to reporters as we do to florists, caterers, musicians, relatives. We talk to a sobbing volunteer at the Gallery of Black Texan Art where Mama sometimes worked who wants to know if there’s anything she can do, then to a reporter. We speak to Pop’s half brother, who Pop hadn’t seen in twenty years, then to a reporter. An organist who wants to go over the repertoire, then a reporter.
To accommodate the number of family coming into town, we decide against hosting the wake at Eve’s, which would be traditional for our family, something homegrown. Instead, we rent out the basement in the church where the funeral will take place.
For those who know our parents from their lives of affluence—business colleagues, country club companions, hold ers of season passes for front-row seats at Mavericks and Cowboys games, fellow private school moms and dads—the funeral will likely be unsettling. The location is a traditional Black Baptist church where we often went as children when Mama or Pop got nostalgic for their youths of after-church banquets and creek baptisms and church ladies in giant hats, singing so good you started to dismiss any critiques of Black Christianity as simply not getting it.
We’ve paid for elaborate flower arrangements and for catering from a local fried-fish and barbecue place for the wake. It’s Emmanuelle who suggests that Elijah might want to play something on the piano at the service. I am certain that my shy, anxious daughter will say no, but she nods seriously. “Would an arrangement of ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken?’ work?” she asks.
“Perfect,” says Emmanuelle.
And then—“Would it be okay if I sang, as well?”
“Obviously, yes, of course,” says Emmanuelle, excitedly clapping her hands together once. “That will be so beautiful. I haven’t heard you sing since your bat mitzvah. I still kick myself for not recording it.” I feel the same as my sister. Elijah’s bat mitzvah was the first time I’d properly heard her singing voice, when she’d chanted her Torah portion—something I never got to do as a convert. I finished my conversion in Oxford, through the ultra-Orthodox Chabad. Some kind of woman at the time, I wasn’t ever going to be let up to the bimah to sing. This never bothered me. Made me feel more like Yentl.
“Would you like to rehearse with the church’s choir as backing, or would you prefer to be completely solo?” asks Emmanuelle.
