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ROSE "Nine is green," my grandmother said. "Four is red. Mint tastes like flashes of light." My parents decided it was time. They said I could stay with any friend I wanted. Oleander, I said. They were so busy gabbing on the phone to the social worker in Massachusetts and the Hertz people on 77th Street and my grandmother’s bank, they didn’t say no. "I don’t see why you have to put her away," I said, watching my mother fold tissue paper into her clothes—a winter-white sweater, because fall came early to Massachusetts, and a herringbone silk scarf. My mother hated wind in her hair. "Leah, this is tough for me too, my father said. He was talking from the hall, where he was tethered to the phone. "She sees sounds; she hears shapes," he said. "How can she communicate her needs? Her mind is deteriorating." Grandma Rose’s mind, I decided, looked like her bedroom. I loved her bedroom. Hair pins napped in the rumpled bed. Dark hairs from her wiglet drifted into the cold cream. Tubes of Bain du Soleil lost their caps and slid into open drawers, releasing the oily fragrance of summer into white nylon bloomers. Nor did my grandmother seem to register, when I was allowed to stay with her, that I smoked in the basement, riffled through her pocketbook and skimmed every paperback with a passionate couple on its cover. "Why do they mix up the colors?" my grandmother said, peering over my shoulder at a title. "O isn't red." The word was "romance." Red like a heart, I said. "Listen, shayna maydelah," my grandmother said gently. "O is as white as an onion." "She’ll burn the house down if she keeps baking the plates," my father said. "Maybe that’s how she wants to go," I said. "Maybe the flames will talk to her in Hebrew." "Yiddish," my father said. He took his palm off the receiver and said, "Do we need a lawyer for that?" "I wish I heard colors," I said loudly. "I bet red sounds like a piano. I bet purple sounds like Joan Baez." When my mother peered into the closet I tapped the suitcase, three left and three right. But my parents kept getting ready to drive off and kidnap my grandmother. Oleander, when I telephoned, said sure. "Don’t you have to ask your mom?" I said. "Ask what?" said Oly. "Just bring your stuff. You won’t believe what’s going on here."
The night roof was alive. It ticked and scraped. Tarpaper crackled where no one walked. Ventilation fans flashed in their cages. "This is where we're gonna do it," said Pansy. She hugged a damp Sloan’s grocery bag containing two smuggled towels plus two joints, one for before and one for after, and a rubber stolen from her and Oly’s father’s room. Ten stories below the night roof, the brakes of buses sang. I wondered if I could make myself jump off a parapet. Then I couldn’t stop wondering. Fly or die, fly or die. It was like standing in the bathtub and wondering should I touch the switch. Some thoughts I couldn’t control when they cycled through my brain. Mrs. Prideau, who was Pansy and Oly’s mother, did not have this problem. When we left the apartment she was standing in the kitchen, spooning ice cream out of the Schraft’s box and writing on some typed papers in red pencil and ignoring the most amazing things. She ignored the leak under the sink that was wetting the grocery bags, she ignored the paint hanging from the ceiling like notepaper, she ignored that Oly and me threw eggs from the windows sometimes or that Mr. Prideau slept in the second bedroom because it was cheaper than divorce. "Going to howl at the moon?" she said. "Don’t fall off." God, I loved Mrs. Prideau. Standing pipes, tall as people, stuck straight up from the tar. I try to act casual in the face of the enemy so I just said, "I bet those pipes move when we're not looking. I bet they’re like the roof police." The pipes tried not to look alive. Meanwhile I was tapping like crazy, fingers jammed in my pockets so no one could see. Oleander fixed it. She knew what scared me. She touched each pipe, calling PLP—public leaning post. Fly or die. Pansy started up the metal ladder to the water tower, which stuck up high above the roof. The water tower had no windows. It had no mercy. I imagined climbing, metal rungs pressing into my arches, and in my mind I spilled over the edge and fell in, gasping in cold water, grasping at walls all slimy below the waterline. I whispered fly or die, fly or die, and prayed God would lift me out, and while I prayed I forgot to breathe, and while I stopped breathing Pansy crammed the Sloan’s bag between the ladder and the curving base of the tower wall and came down again, flipping her hair. "No one’s gonna notice that," she said, and then I remembered where I was, remembered how Pansy slept on her stomach because she rolled her hair around Minute Maid cans, remembered how Oly neutralized the roof police, and how Mrs. Prideau was downstairs letting ice cream melt in her mouth and reading and maybe smoking at the same time, and that tomorrow night me and Oly would try to sneak back up and watch Pansy do it. We held the roof door open and waited. Pansy stood at a parapet, looking down at the singing buses. A plane blinked through the black sky toward her ear. It disappeared into her head, then eased out the other side, propelling itself through waves of her Minute Maid hair. That's when I inhaled—worshipped the night roof, remembered to breathe. * Saturday morning the milk smelled bad, so we got to eat Trix from the box. Then we went stealing. I palmed a Chunky at Manny's Fountain on Broadway just to feel it nest in my hand, silvery and square, like a ring box from a jewelry store. At Ahmed's Candy & Cigarette, Oleander slid a comic down the back of her jeans. I knew how the cover felt against her spine: cool and slippery and stiff. I wanted to read it but she trashed it down the block. No one reads Archie anymore, she said. Oly was almost fourteen so I kept my hands out of the garbage. I liked to look at Veronica’s bust, but I knew enough not to say it. Me and Oly, we were magnetic. Sweet things clung to us. When we stole, we had secrets, and when we had secrets, we shone. We ducked under the turnstiles on Eighty-sixth and changed subways twice and did Lord & Taylor's, where we tried on five brassieres each. I put back four and Oleander put back three. Then back down the clacky wood escalators to the main floor, where Oly stole the White Shoulders eau de toilette tester without even smelling it, just vacuumed it into her purse. "You ditz," I said. "My grandmother wears that." Then I browsed at Christian Dior, smiled at the lady and stole the Diorissimo tester. I didn't smell it because I knew it from the heartbeat of my mother's wrist. I almost knew it from the hollow of her neck, but I had never laid my head there. My mother dispensed strange and dangerous facts. She said department stores had lady guards who pretended to be shoppers. They lingered over gloves or garters, but were actually spies. "They watch your hands, and they look for women who glance around," my mother said. "At night they look in the toilet stalls, so no one sleeps over on those lovely chaises longues." My mother was eating again, 800 calories a day, and she worked for a decorator, ordering fabrics and sketching drapes. At night she studied pictures of fancy chairs. "Don’t glance," I told Oly, who had stopped at wallets. But she couldn’t help it. What I did was, I listened with my skin. My skin was electric and it knew when I was invisible, and that’s when I made things disappear. Then I tapped on the counter or in my pockets or even on the floor, as if I'd dropped a safety pin. Three left, three right. It made me safe, plus it was something I had to do. Oleander and I burst out of the same glass slot in the Lord & Taylor's revolving door. We walked fast with our heads down, except Oly kept glancing back. "Holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Amen," she said. Her eyes were like penlights. "When can I throw up?" I said. Because that’s what stealing made me want to do, after. "In the park," said Oleander fiercely. "Puke in the park." In Central Park I threw up behind a bush and spit nine times, three times three, to clean my mouth. We bought Creamsicles and walked to Oly’s apartment, except on the way we did the Grab Bag on Broadway, where the clothes were all burlap and ribbon and lace—artistic, my mother said, but she lifted the burlap with two fingers like it might be dirty, and she never bought. Under glass, silver earrings lay on black velvet and tarnished in their sleep. On the counter, beaded earrings dangled from a rack; you could strum them with a finger. "Steal me," they whispered. Things spoke to me often. I did what they said.
Saturday evening no one said a word about dinner. Mrs. Prideau sat on her bed and turned her manuscript pages and watched Pansy get ready, as if this was what daughters were supposed to do, go out with boys. Sometimes all Mrs. Prideau said about dinner was "Oh, just forage," and I hoped she would say this soon so we could eat more Trix. Pansy leaned over the bathroom sink, dabbed blue shadow on each eyelid and stared at herself in the mirror. Then she smiled, or snarled, so her teeth showed. Pansy had a face like a Madame Alexander doll, the expensive kind in glass cabinets at F.A.O. Schwartz—round glass eyes in a creamy round face. Pansy looked like a cross between seven and seventeen. I watched her from the doorway, hoping to learn something. What I learned was how to put on blush. First you grin. Then you rub lipstick on the part of your cheek that sticks out like a cherry tomato. Oleander opened bureau drawers and slammed them, looking for a bandanna halter top she stole last week. No one at Oly’s had private drawers or private shirts or even private beds, because Mrs. Prideau and Oly and Pansy shared two big beds in the one room and didn’t have space for private anything. Sometimes this made me so jealous I could die and sometimes it made me want to go home and straighten my desk. The bandanna halter came out with a froth of socks and Oly put it on and went in the bathroom and sprayed a cloud of Right Guard around her armpits. "Oh, good, deodorize the toothbrushes," said Pansy, fanning at the cloud. "Any toothbrush of yours it’s automatic B.O.," said Oleander, and sat the can on the sink, where I knew it would mark the porcelain with a ring of rust. "Any toothbrush of yours it’s automatic pus," said Pansy. "Oh, shit, here they go," said Mrs. Prideau, and looked at me like I might actually share some sliver of understanding with her. She lit a clean cigarette with the old one and jabbed the old one out. The butts in her ashtray were all kissed red at one end and bent jagged at the other. "Your parents go anyplace fun?" she said. "Massachussetts," I said. "They’re
kidnapping my grandmother." "Old folks home," I said. "Her mind is deteriorating." "Really," said Mrs. Prideau. She looked at me like she was trying to figure out where to insert a key. "How can they tell?" I lifted one shoulder and dropped it. "She sticks plates in the oven and they melt," I said. "They’re plastic. She’s going to burn the house down." "She might," said Mrs. Prideau. "That’s called dementia. Your parents are probably doing the right thing." In the bathroom, Pansy sang, "Up on the roof," and Oleander nudged her out of the mirror so she could put blue eyeshadow on too. "Plus," I said, "she sees things. She says nine is green, vowels are white, stuff like that." I hated the way I sounded, as if she were someone else’s crazy grandmother, so I started biting my cuticles. Mrs. Prideau sat straight up and looked at me. She didn’t say stop biting. "Well," she said, "I don’t know about the vowels. A is light pink and E is almost scarlet. But nine is definitely green." Mrs. Prideau was not beautiful like my mother. She had short spiky hair and she wore black turtlenecks and jeans. She had ink on her hands instead of nail polish. But there was some kind of light that went on inside her, and at that moment I thought if I stood very still, the light might shine on something I needed to see. "Not all vowels," I said carefully. "She said O and I were white like onion. I thought it was because they’re in the word onion." "No, it’s because they’re white," said Mrs. Prideau. "I also see Q and X as white, but you don’t run into those as often." I didn’t move. Tap now, my brain instructed, but for the first time in my life I disobeyed. "It’s called synesthesia,” said Mrs. Prideau. “It runs in families, but it missed my daughters. You too?" I shut my eyes and concentrated on her voice, praying it would have a scent, a shape. I thought it might smell like Diorissimo, or float like a string of pearls. "It missed me," I said. Pansy walked out of the bathroom with frosted white lips. She looked perfect. I wanted to lay her down flat to see if her eyelids would glide shut. "Tell her what her name tastes like, Mom," she said. "Mine tastes like tea biscuits." "The very thin kind," said Mrs. Prideau. "Leah tastes like cucumber." "It could be worse," Pansy said. She spotted my new earrings on the bureau, threaded one into her ear. "We had a babysitter once named Rene´ whose name tasted like pennies." "Syn, together, aisthesis, perception," said Mrs. Prideau, not even flicking her eyes toward Pansy, who was taking one of her cigarettes. "It means the senses work in pairs. It’s a gift. Synesthetes are often artists," she said. "Scriabin had it. Kandinsky, though he may have been faking. Nabokov. Is your grandmother creative? "No," I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. "I bet she is," said Mrs. Prideau. Kandinsky said synesthetes were like fine violins that vibrated in all their parts when the bow touched them. The doorbuzzer made its jagged rasp. "Oh my God," said Pansy, and left the cigarette burning on the bureau, a fringe of ash hanging over the edge. Oleander glanced at her mother, whose lap was spread with red-pencilled pages, picked the cigarette up and brought it to her lips. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My parents would have a coronary. "We are the bows from which our children as living arrows are sent forth,'" said Mrs. Prideau. She looked at her younger daughter with the cigarette and closed her eyes, as if she were searching for something inside herself. "Kahlil Gibran," she said, opening her eyes and, as I wondered if I would ever understand her, "Don't be discouraged, Leah. We never know what we inherit."
We watched her. We hid behind the elevator shed and watched her on the roof. He did everything exactly in order, first base, second base, third base, home. I liked it, liked the way his hands traveled on her and the way she let her body be a highway for them. He pulled her jeans off. There wasn't any underwear. This was a revelation, that a person could not wear underwear. We saw his hands move where his fly was and then he pushed onto her and Pansy made a sound like she had stepped on a piece of glass, and he stopped and put his hand over her mouth. When he took it away he kissed her. Then he pushed some more. It got boring after awhile but Oleander kept saying "Jesus" under her breath, so I just hung back a few minutes and didn't look and thought about what it as that we might have inherited, me and Oleander and even Pansy, who was fifteen and barely spoke to me. Then we saw the boy peel something off his penis and toss it away like a piece of skin he had shed and pull up his jeans. He lit a joint and gave it to Pansy. The roof police didn't do a damn thing. They just stood there. They were just pipes. "Was that home?" I said. "Yeah," said Oleander, "Jesus," and we were breathing words more than talking them. We carried our sandals so we wouldn't scuff and moved toward the stairwell cautiously, as if we were stepping over puddles. "It hurts," I said, amazed. "Only when you lose it," said Oleander, and I felt a rose open in my body, all shadow and no color, felt a release as its petals fell open and soft and flew apart, and I wondered what I had lost, and why it did not hurt.
Dylan Landis is currently writing two interlocking books: a novel, Floorwork, and a collection of stories. Her fiction has won numerous awards and appears in the anthologies Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. She lives in Santa Monica, CA.
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© 2007 Swink, Inc.
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