Love Letters to the Dead(9)

I was scared suddenly and I couldn’t keep my head straight. I worried that bad things were coming into my mind, so I went to find Hannah and Natalie. When I walked through the wooden gate into the backyard, I saw them there on the trampoline. They were kissing. Real kissing. And jumping all at the same time. They looked up for an instant and saw me watching, and then they kind of fell. Natalie started screaming. She had chipped her tooth on Hannah’s tooth. She started looking everywhere for the lost piece of her tooth. I tried to help find it, but it was nowhere on the smooth black surface of the trampoline, and it was nowhere in the dirt. She got worried that she swallowed it. And Hannah got worried that I would tell everyone at school what Natalie had been doing when she chipped her tooth, even though I swore I wouldn’t. Hannah started telling me I had to kiss Natalie, too, or else I would tell. I couldn’t be the only one who wasn’t kissing, she said. But I didn’t want to. They weren’t listening. Natalie grabbed me and said she was going to kiss me to seal the secret. Suddenly it was hard for me to breathe. I gasped for air. I ran.

I ended up in the park near school. I sat down on the swing and started swinging as high as I could, higher and higher, until it felt like the night was rushing into me, until it felt like I would go all the way over the bar. And then I jumped, and flew, and landed in the sand. I climbed onto a jungle gym like the one that used to be our ship when I would go to the park with Mom and May. We had to sail through a sea full of sea monsters to rescue the mermaids. And I started to cry.

The air smelled like fire smoke and fall leaves. It smelled a way that makes you feel how the world is right up close, rubbing against you. My head was starting to really hurt. It was late, and I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to Natalie’s. She and Hannah were asleep on the trampoline. I crawled underneath and slept on the ground.

The next day when we woke up with dew on our clothes, Natalie’s mom was making pancakes and bacon and called us in for breakfast. It smelled in the kitchen the way you want home to be. She said we were silly girls for sleeping outside. She was being nice, I think, because of her date. Natalie’s mom doesn’t look like other moms. Natalie said she works as a secretary in a law office, but for the weekend morning, she was wearing a shirt knotted above her belly button with cutoffs, and her dark hair up in a high ponytail. We all ate and were pretty quiet, just answering her mom’s questions, which were too cheerful. When she asked Natalie, “What happened to your tooth?” Natalie looked nervous for a minute. I knew it was my chance to show her I would keep their secret, so I said, “We got burgers from McDonald’s, and hers had a bone in it!” Hannah started laughing and said, “Sick, huh?!” I think since her mom felt guilty about sleeping over at her date’s house, she didn’t notice that we were guilty, too. Hannah picked a leaf out of my hair and handed it to me. Its veins threaded in tiny patterns through the yellow skin.

We never talked about the kissing, and at school on Monday, we acted normal. I made sure to have enough money for Nutter Butters at lunch, and I shared them with my friends. I looked at Sky and laughed when Hannah said he was undressing me in his mind. It was like nothing had happened. I tried not to, but I noticed the tiny piece of one of Natalie’s perfect teeth missing.

Kurt, I have this feeling like you know May, and Hannah and Natalie, and me, too. Like you can see into us. You sang the fear, and the anger, and all of the feelings that people are afraid to admit to. Even me. But I know you didn’t want to be our hero. You didn’t want to be an idol. You just wanted to be yourself. You just wanted us to hear the music.

Yours,

Laurel




Dear Judy Garland,

When parents talk about their pasts, the stories start to stick in your head. But the memories that you inherit look different from the now-world, and different from your own memories, too. Like they have a color all their own. I don’t mean sepia-toned or something. My parents aren’t even that old. I just mean that there is something particular about their glow.

When I think of the stories that I know about your childhood and your family, I see them in almost the same color that I see my parents’ stories. I’m not sure why, but maybe it has to do with the happy-sad of it all. Or maybe it’s because of how my mom used to say that your movies gave her hope when she was younger.

She loved to watch them with us, so I don’t only know you from The Wizard Of Oz. We saw you in everything—Easter Parade, Babes on Broadway, Meet Me in St. Louis. On movie nights, May and I used to get up from the couch and sing along with you—“Zing zing zing went my heartstrings,” May would belt out as she pranced through the living room.

Mom said that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be like you. My dad came from a pretty perfect family, but Mom didn’t, and maybe that was the biggest difference between them. Mom grew up here, in Albuquerque. She never told us specifics, but her own mom (who died when I was little) was more or less an alcoholic, and I think her dad was pretty hard on her and Aunt Amy before he got cancer. He died when she was eighteen and Aunt Amy was twenty-one. Afterward, Mom’s mom kept drinking too much, Aunt Amy found God and got a job as a waitress, and Mom moved into a studio apartment and got a bartending job so she could start saving up money to go to California to follow her dream of becoming an actress.

In the meantime, she took acting classes and starred in shows at the local theater. Her best part came right after her twentieth birthday. She played Cosette in Les Mis, and the papers gave her rave reviews. She saved them in a scrapbook that she used to show to us when we were kids.