It was a lucky seven years ago, on my first day at a new school that I met her. I remember it well: she had stood in front of me, by the swings at recess. I could read the blue veins on her face and the underside of her wrists as clearly as the highways on my father’s collection of road maps. Her blonde hair was bobbed, a child of the jazz age living in the present. In between her words to me a wad of pink bubblegum blossomed and burst from her thin lips.
It was just another move for the Carmody family, this time to the sleepy town of Norbury, Massachusetts. At twelve, I was used to being the new kid, and used to being alone at recess. But here was this girl sticking out her hand for me to shake.
“My name is Matilda Brake, but you can call me Mattie.”
“I’m Arielle. Arielle Carmody. But you can just call me Arielle.” She sat on the swing next to me.
“Are you new?”
Swinging into the sky I told her about all the houses and towns my father’s jobs had brought us to and she told me about Norbury. By the end of recess I had plans to go over her house that night.
My father wrote out the directions on a scrap of yellow paper and told me not to talk to strangers. I decided to be smart and tell him that her parents are strangers, so wouldn’t it be rude if I didn’t speak to them? He pinched my cheek and told me I was one hot ticket.
It was a warm night for May and the ride was short. When I reached her house I straddled my bike, toes pointed down into the dirt. I had to look nearly straight up to see Mattie’s house, high on a hill. The light changed around the Brake mansion, turning hazy and ambiguous insects danced in the nectarine-yellow air. Dewy fog seemed to emanate from the lush lawns and rise up to the tall windows and towering doorways. The fog made everything appear like it wasn’t really there, as if I had dipped into a waking dream.
I rapped on the door until my knuckles paled and Mattie finally came bounding to greet me.
“Hello, hello Arielle! Come on in.” Mattie grabbed my hand and led me around the house somewhere between a run and a skip. In a blur I saw elegant room after elegant room. Jewel colored velvets, Persian rugs, crystal chandeliers clotted with cobwebs, and all of it in disarray. When the merry-go-round tour came to a halt we were ascending mahogany stairs. Both sepia and color photos framed in gold lined the walls and I couldn’t resist looking. Mattie told me about the antique pictures first. She didn’t know the names of any of her old relatives, so she said she made them up sometimes.
“Is this you?” I pointed to a color photograph of a baby in the arms of a little boy with a crown of black hair.
“Yeah, and that’s my brother, Leopold.” We climbed further up the stairs and I watched Mattie go from a baby to the girl before me, but her brother seemed to be frozen forever as a first grader in five by seven color prints.
“Do you wanna meet my mom?” she asked me as we stood before a closed door at the top of the stairs in a hall of cranberry carpet.
“Sure,” I answered and Mattie knocked on the door.
“Come in,” a wavering voice beckons on the other side, sweet and sad. Mattie swung the door open and all I could see was a silk, cream bed as big as my kitchen. Dust has settled in the lace canopy and the covers are in disarray from a night’s sleep but it is clearly still a bed grand enough for Versailles.
“Mom, this is my friend from school, Arielle Carmody. She just moved here,” Mattie told a women sitting at a glass vanity in the corner. She had to raise her voice over music I couldn’t quite place, but now I think it was Les Misérables.
“Ah, how nice to meet you. Where did you move from?”
“Sort of like, everywhere,” I told her honestly. She was younger than my mother, and very beautiful, but the skin on her face and above her eyes was as powdery as a butterfly’s wing. Her yellow hair was fluffy, like a braid picked apart. Aside from palettes of blush and jars of cream, she had only a tray of crystal bottles and steel shakers on her vanity.
“A world traveler? I can’t imagine what you must think of our little town. I keep telling Matilda we have to get out more, see more.” She looked both wistful and jealous and I felt sorry for giving her the wrong idea. After a sip of orange juice from a martini glass as big as a soup bowl she asked Mattie our plans for the night.
“Eh, I dunno” Mattie sighed and dipped her finger into a tub of rouge mindlessly.
“Well, get out of here. Go live your lives, have fun,” her mother told us. “I have a date later tonight.” She twisted her hair into a ballerina’s bun on the top of her head.
“With Mr. Cera?”
“No, with Tom. So skedaddle!”
Mattie led me further down the hall and into her room; it was like a miniature pink version of her mother’s. She swan dove onto her bed and, following her lead I flopped down next to her. On her ceiling there were small clusters of cadmium glow-in-the-dark stars. I imagine what it must have been like for her to fall asleep under them every night; floating into orbit and sailing through plastic constellations.
“Do you want to go swimming? You can borrow my bathing suit.”
“You have a pool?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s in the backyard.”
Outside a rectangle of turquoise carved it’s way into the rolling hills of their overgrown yard. I felt a small thrill that the glitter blue fabric was a bikini. My mother would not let us wear them until we were sixteen. At the steps I put my feet in; it was absolutely freezing.
“No, no, you can’t test it!” In a burst of chlorine the still water broke into sprays of white when she cannon balled into the deep end. Seeking her approval I dove in from the top step. We floated for a while, talked about school, and I watched the mosaic of aquamarine pieces dancing over our pale legs. In the shallow end we practiced our handstands and summersaults, and then I asked.
“Are your parents divorced, or something?”
She spit water through her front teeth, stalling maybe. “I guess its ‘or something’. I don’t know my dad. It’s the great mystery of my life,” she said, finally.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“ My mom won’t tell me, no matter how much I ask. Trust me, I’ve tried. She always says it was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter now.”
“Does your brother know?”
“Leopold? They say he’s dead.” She dove under, and I had only a moment to recover. When she broke the surface she smiled and asked if was hungry. I hadn’t noticed that the sun fallen into the trees we were swimming in purple light.
“I’m starving.”
After a dinner of peanut butter and jelly on saltines, I sat on her bed and I couldn’t resist asking, even though I knew it was very bad of me, “How did your brother die?” She didn’t look too upset, she just sighed.
“My mom doesn’t like to talk about it. And I was just a baby then so I don’t remember him. Whenever I ask her she just says that he got sick.”
“How old was he?”
“Four, I think,” Mattie said. The subject quickly changed to comfortable matters of music and first kisses.
Through her window I saw the headlights of my mother’s minivan coming shakily up the hill. She didn’t want me to ride my bike home in the dark. When we hugged goodbye she smelled like chlorine and bubblegum.
“How was it?” my mother asked.
“A lot of fun.”
“Oh yeah, what did you do?”
“I don’t know; we went swimming for a while.”
“That’s nice. I’m really glad you’re making friends Ari. This is a nice town, huh? Did you like her family? Were you polite?”
“Of course I was polite. They’re sort of weird. She doesn’t know her dad. And her mom was, I don’t know, like a movie star. They have tons of money from her great-grandpa’s factory. And her brother died when he was four.”
“Oh, that’s horrible. How did he die?”
“He got sick,” I told her.
“Imagine- losing a child. I would die if I ever lost any of you.”
“I don’t know if she really thinks about it all that much. She seemed pretty happy.”
“Of course she thinks about it. Any mother would. Trust me, its killing her.”
I went over the next day, and the day after that. Soon spring became summer and school was out, allowing us to spend hours and days together. It didn’t matter what we were doing, whether it was swimming, going to the movies, dancing, dressing in her mother’s clothes, eating or just living in the warm air, it was always golden. Sometimes Mattie would ask to go to my house, but I think we both knew hers was a sort of magical world you could just slip into. Even at the tender age of twelve being there, with one another, made us feel young again. I learned about the Brake family until I knew nearly as much as Mattie, which always seemed insufficient to the both us of. They only ate a proper dinner together about twice a week, usually a Tuesday, or whenever her mother was not off on dates. But when we did eat with Ms. Brake she would tell us lovely stories about living in New York City when she was in college. She had wanted to be a stage manager for Broadway, but she had Leopold instead. Then the phone would ring and she would laugh and laugh, spilling her whiskey sour on the floor while speaking in circles to some deep voice. Then Mattie and I would whisper about our ugly classmates, our disgusting menstruation and the wonders of the ouija board before being excused to climb trees or braid each other’s hair.
Each afternoon that summer, among the wildflower fairies and flickering blades of grass, all of our conversation turned to Mattie’s father. Why wouldn’t Ms. Brake tell her? What was the big deal? We ran through every possible candidate in Norbury, all of whom Mattie turned down with a “too fat”, “too young” or an “are you joking?” Mattie, perhaps in the same way she made up stories about the pictures on the stair, made up the story of her father. She believed wholeheartedly that he was a Broadway actor who fell in love with Ms. Brake during college. Soon they had their two children and a lavish apartment on Park Avenue, but something happened. Something tragic and awful that tore their idyllic family apart. To this day her father and Leopold, not dead but a healthy sixteen-year-old, were living the high life in that same apartment. And every night, after another star performance at the theater, Mr. Father would cry for his long lost love and the baby girl he had rocked to sleep too rarely.
At first I would try to be Mattie’s tether to earth. “What if you and Leopold had different fathers?” She told me not to be disgusting. “What would have happened to make your mom never want to talk about him again?” She wasn’t certain; maybe he disliked Ms. Brake’s drinking. Soon I gave up on being a cynic- the world she painted for us in New York was too enchanting to resist. In any case it was worlds better than her life with a lush and my house hopping with five brothers and sisters.
Lazing in tree branches, muggy air filling our lungs and downy bodies, we poured over the clues and planned our escape. All we had was Ms. Brake’s love of musicals, particularly Annie and The Phantom of the Opera, and two photos. One of baby Mattie in her hospital blanket held by a seated man who showed only the crown of his flaxen head. The second was Leopold with a man with a dark mustache and darker sunglasses. When we asked Ms. Brake she insisted it was only Uncle Charlie.
In the middle of July my parents determined that it was again time to move and they would not hear any objections from the kids. At dawn the next morning, I biked to Mattie’s in tears and we determined that now was as good a time as any to make our escape. We loaded out initialed backpacks with a travel umbrella, framed photographs, kiwi lip gloss, two gossip magazines, toothbrushes, gooey body glitter, and one granola bar. Mattie took her mother’s credit card from her purse and we followed my father’s map to the Braintree train station on our bikes. We had to bike on the highway and just about every car honked at us, but on the shaky train we felt safe and excited. I was a little sad that I had to leave my blue bike out by the parking lot, but Mattie promised her father could buy me another.
Once we got off the train we spent the last of our paper money on sugary peanuts and slushy lemonades at a pushcart in the park before walking to Chinatown to catch a Fung Wah bus. I had never been to Boston before and though I could have spent all day looking up at building tops. Mattie dragged me past wonderful shops, people and statues, insisting that we didn’t have much time. The woman at the bus station looked at Mattie through squinted eyes for an eternity before accepting the credit card. I held my breath until we were safely tucked into two cramped seats and on our way. We arrived at Pearl St. at six-thirty that sunny evening, and at the station we came up with the ingenious idea of taking out eighty dollars at the ATM. We told the cab driver “Times Square, please” and felt a wonderful buzz in each and every cell. We had nothing to do until ten that night, when the shows let out so we wore out our feet walking around, seeing things.
The city reminded me of one of those paintings of water lilies where it is beautiful from afar, but when you get closer you see it is just blobs of dried paint. We had fun, and yet the thought of being alone was encroaching on our adventure as I looked at grizzled men asleep in the sun and crushed papers tumbling down sidewalks. By nightfall, standing outside of Rent, the city tasted harsh and metallic in my mouth and smog settled on our skin like an iridescent vapor. We had chosen Rent after looking at every musical poster in the District, and it was one of the four plays that had a blonde actor. It seemed a logical start. It was close to midnight when the cast walked out the backdoor. The crowd of fans screamed and waved autograph books as two women and one redheaded man walked out. Mattie was nervously looking for the blonde man, clutching the metal barricade. A few more actors walked out, and then the blonde man to a sea of “Anthony! Anthony! Can I have your autograph?” It was incredible; looking at him was like seeing far into the past, before Mattie’s birth. Aside from brown eyes, not blue; he was Mattie in male form. In the time it took me to recognize that maybe Mattie was right, this was her father, she had leaped the barricade and attached herself to the man. “Dad? Dad? It’s me, Matilda! Do you remember? Do you remember me and Leopold?” The man only got out, in a high-pitched and melodic voice, “What? No! Get-” before a team of security untangled Mattie’s spider legs and clawing hands.
The policemen were actually very nice; maybe they were used to dealing with pubescent vagabonds in New York. Under sick florescent lights I answered all their questions and as it turned out my parents were already on their way to the city because the Norbury police were able to trace our activity through the credit card. Mattie didn’t say a word for all the hours we sat side by side on the station benches. I tried to laugh about the matter with her, but to no avail. I made friends with a policewoman with bright hair, read old magazines, and tried coffee for the first time.
The ride home in the battered minivan was filled with anger, then relief, then threats and then quiet. Mattie cried silently the whole way home. When we arrived in Norbury the next morning, I noticed that the mist around Mattie’s house had thinned into only wisps of pewter. My mother let me walk her to the door. I hugged her limb body and not knowing what else I could do, I kissed her forehead. I waited a moment for her to say something, but when nothing happened I turned and walked back to the car. I watched her from the rear window until we turned a corner and she disappeared. I will never forget how she looked standing under that archway, her tiny hand raised in a dead wave and tracks of salt dried onto her oleander cheeks.
That was the last time I ever saw her. I still find myself going over clues from the mysteries we created as children, and in my wasted years I have seen the truth transpired from the fog of illusion. I often wonder if Mattie has stepped out of our wavering mirage and into the aching reality of growth. And yet, when I look back on the trees and the travels, as selfish as it may be, I hope she hasn’t.
*January 2008
