Siren Queen(19)

Now she lounged at the table like a union teamster, dressed in canvas pants that hung off her boyish hips and a man’s shirt untucked and unbuttoned to show the thin singlet underneath.

“Thank you,” I said suddenly, and I walked around the table to hug her, wrapping my arms around her from behind as she sat on the kitchen chair. We weren’t a family that touched each other like that, but I had seen it done enough times in the movies. At first, she was as stiff as a doll made of wires. Though she never hugged me back, she did finally loosen up. Luli tilted her head back to look at me, a slight smile on her round face.

“Been waiting for you to say that,” she said cockily.

It struck me with the force of a blow how beautiful my sister was. She had lived, like my father and my mother, in a peculiar blind spot for me for years. If I wasn’t on set, I wanted to be. I was in a waking sleep at home.

But it was true. My sister at fifteen was a beauty. When Mrs. Wiley talked about girls prettier than me on Ord Street, my sister could have been one of the ones she was thinking of. In her boys’ clothes with her rough-cropped hair and too-old-for-her smile, Luli would make people sit up and take notice. If she would look down and blush, she would be made in the model of Su Tong Lin. Her voice, a little husky and with a funny upturn at the ends, would have broken hearts.

I must have looked at her for too long, because she tilted her face, still looking at me upside down.

“What? What are you thinking now, sissy?”

“Come with me,” I said impulsively. “Come with me when the car comes on November third. We’ll both meet Oberlin Wolfe, and I’ll tell him all about you…”

My sister exploded from my embrace so hard that the chair tipped. It would have clattered to the floor, making an enormous racket, if I hadn’t caught it on my hip.

“Don’t you dare,” Luli said, her voice deadly serious. “I don’t want to go anywhere near any of that crap.”

There were still some things that could make me flinch, apparently; I drew back as if she had reached out to pinch my arm like my mother sometimes did. I stared at her in shock, making Luli shake her head.

“I didn’t say anything when Ma made a doll for me as well as you. I mean, I was sad about it for a while, because I thought I should be, but in the end, whatever, right? He wouldn’t let me run around like I do, and eventually he would have gotten after me just like he got after you.

“And I think you mean well, because that’s everything that you’ve ever wanted and more, but, no. No way in hell.”

“But why?” I asked, unaccountably hurt.

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she shook her head. Just then, she felt far older than I was and far more wise and tired.

“Because I don’t want it,” she said roughly. “That sounds like hell to me, and the studios are evil. They’ll murder you to see if you get up again, and if you don’t, oh well. Where I go, they don’t do that.”

“Where do you go, Luli?” I asked, thinking of the paint under her fingernails.

She grinned, suddenly shy. The realization that she was far more beautiful than I was was like a shower of gold over my head, heavy and gilded.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked diffidently, but I could see the eagerness in her face.

“Yes, very much so.”

She led me back to her room, where she pulled down a thick scrapbook. I sat down on the edge of her bed next to her, another thing we never did, as she opened it.

It was full of sketches in ink and drawings in colored pastels and crayon. They were beautiful on their own, but even I could see that they were plans for something else. I started to ask what, but then I saw a picture that I realized was familiar, its blues and golds an explosion of some alien sky.

“Luli, is this the mural on Mrs. Ramirez’s store?”

Her brilliant smile told me everything I needed, and now that I looked down, I could see the smudges and smears of old pigment on her dark trousers.

As she pointed out the details I had missed, the little bird that served as her signature, a curl in the blue that recalled the ends of our mother’s braid, I thought with relief that Luli was going to be fine.





X


It was an agonizing two-month wait for November third. I read everything I could about Oberlin Wolfe in the magazines and in the papers, I went to watch Luli paint a mural on our old Chinese school, I helped at the laundry, but everything was beginning to feel stretched and flat. I didn’t belong to this world anymore, and as I approached the border to another place entirely, my parents’ house took on a wavering quality, like something seen through glass.

The end of October offered a bit of a respite in that Hungarian Hill hurried to the annual work of preparing for the dead. Most of our neighbors hung up garlands of marigolds in welcome, and all around us were the brightly painted skulls to make the dead feel at home. Those whose dead came to visit them walked boldly out in the street on Halloween, arm in bony arm as they went to the places they had enjoyed while they were living. Everywhere, people sang, songs for all and songs that could only be heard long after the meat had fallen away from your bones.

At the laundry, we locked the door and lit up the red bulb over the family altar. Our dead were a long way away, but the bulb told them they would be welcome if they came. My mother sat by the window keeping an eye out for her father, who slept under the Colorado mountain, and my father said nothing to anyone, perhaps ashamed that if his dead came, his wife and daughters couldn’t speak with them.