Kaleidoscope Eyes

  Now and then we had a hope

  that if we lived and were good,

  God would permit us to be pirates.

  —from Life on the Mississippi

  by Mark Twain (1835–1910),

  American writer and humorist

  For Neil

  Part 1

  Quietly turning the back door key,

  Stepping outside, she is free.

  —from “She’s Leaving Home”

  by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

  I wake up every morning

  to Janis Joplin.

  My sister, Denise, has a life-size poster of Janis—

  mouth open in a scream around the microphone,

  arms raised, hair frizzed out wildly,

  an anguished, contorted look on her face—

  thumbtacked right above her desk,

  which is directly across the hall from my bed

  and one hundred percent dead ahead

  in my direct line of sight.

  Janis is the first thing I see when I return from sleep

  and reenter reality.

  In a normal house, the simple answer to this would be:

  close the door. But I do not live

  in a normal house. I live in a tumble-

  down, three-story, clapboard Victorian

  where the rooms get smaller as you climb the stairs,

  mine being barely larger than a closet and having—

  like all the other rooms on the third floor—

  no door (Dad says the former owners, who went broke,

  used them for firewood before they moved),

  across the hall from my sister, who’s nineteen

  and who believes anyway

  that walls and doors “interrupt the flow” of her karma,

  and so of course this leaves me no choice

  in the matter of Janis.

  When I pointed out to Denise

  that my future mental health was probably in jeopardy

  because of it, she just sneered and said:

  “Get over it, Lyza—you’re already a Bradley,

  so mental health

  is out of the question for you anyway.”

  Whoever said “the baby of the family

  gets all the sympathy”

  was clearly not

  the baby.

  It’s been almost two years since that day,

  when our family began to unravel

  like a tightly wound ball of string

  that some invisible tomcat

  took to pawing and flicking across the floor,

  pouncing upon it again and again,

  so those strands just kept loosening

  and breaking apart

  until all we had left was a bunch of frayed,

  chewed-up bits

  scattered all over the house.

  Mom had left twice before,

  after she and Dad had a fight

  over money. She stayed away overnight,

  but both times she came back, acting like

  nothing had happened. This time, the three of us thought,

  would be the same … it just might take

  a little longer.

  Days became weeks. I finished sixth grade.

  Dad, who already taught math full-time

  at Glassboro State, started to teach at night.

  We almost never saw him.

  Denise tore up her college applications,

  got hired as a waitress at the Willowbank Diner,

  started sneaking around with Harry Keating

  and his hippie crowd.

  Still, we hoped Mom would come back.

  For the entire summer,

  Dad left the porch light on

  and the garage door unlocked every evening

  around the same time

  Mom used to come home

  from her art-gallery job in Pleasantville.

  I’d lie awake until real late,

  wondering where she could be,

  if she was OK, if she might be

  hurt, lost, or sick.

  Denise sent letters through Mom’s best friend,

  Mrs. Corman, the only one who knew

  where Mom had gone.

  Mom answered them at first, but she never

  gave a return address. Then, for no reason,

  her letters to Denise and to Mrs. Corman

  stopped.

  Even so, I had hope.

  Every evening, I set her place

  at the dinner table and bought candy

  on her birthday, just in case.

  When September came, I started seventh grade.

  I kept my report cards and vaccination records

  in the family scrapbook

  so that when she came back, she could pick up

  mothering

  right where she’d left off.

  Long after Dad and Denise

  had made their peace

  with the reality of our broken family, I still believed

  Mom would come home.

  I believed the way I had once believed

  in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

  Then one day last year, I was

  walking home from Willowbank Junior High

  when I noticed the library flag

  flying at half-mast,

  so I asked

  Mrs. Leinberger, our town librarian,

  why.

  “Charley Prichett, Guy Smith, and Edward Cullinan

  were killed in Vietnam,” she said.

  I knew them all—

  their families lived on our end of town.

  Charley, Eddie, and Guy

  had graduated from Willowbank High

  with Denise.

  Mrs. Leinberger put her hand

  on my shoulder. “They’re not coming back

  to Willowbank, Lyza—I’m sorry….”

  Not coming back…. Not coming back….

  Her words thrummed against the inside

  of my head

  like the machine guns I’d seen and heard

  on the evening news.

  Not coming back…. Not coming back….

  Like the blades of choppers

  lifting half-dead men

  from the swamps and jungles,

  the phrase sliced through any shred

  of hope I had left.

  That night, I threw the scrapbook

  in the trash,

  set the dinner table for three,

  and gave Denise

  a large heart-shaped box of chocolates,

  which she took down to the record store

  to share with Harry

  and the rest of their hippie friends.

  Some nights, before I go to sleep,

  I look through the lens of the

  one Mom gave me.

  for my tenth birthday, just to see how, when I

  turn the tube slowly around,

  every fractured pattern that bends and splits

  into a million little pieces

  always comes back together, to make a picture

  more beautiful than the one before.

  He’s thirteen

  —like me.

  He lives in a three-story clapboard Victorian

  on Gary Street

  —like me.

  He’s an eighth grader

  at Willowbank Junior High

  —like me.

  He’s in Mrs. Smithson’s homeroom,

  Mr. Bellamy’s Earth Science,

  and Mr. Hogan’s Math

  —like me.

  He roots for the Phillies

  —like me.

  He’s the younger of two kids

  in his family (but his brother, Dixon, is

>   a LOT nicer than Denise)

  —like me.

  You see, Malcolm and me,

  we’ve been friends since we were little,

  since the day I finally got tired of trying to tag along

  with Denise and her girlfriends.

  That afternoon, according to Dad, I looked out

  the window and saw Malcolm playing in the street.

  I went outside, told him my name, then rode

  my tricycle down the block to his house,

  where we played every outdoor kids’ game

  we could think of:

  Cops and Robbers

  Red Light, Green Light

  Jump rope

  Hide-and-Seek

  Dodgeball Hopscotch

  until it was time for supper and my father

  came to take me home.

  “You’d never thrown a tantrum,

  but that night you and Malcolm hid

  under the Duprees’ front porch,

  where none of us could squeeze in

  and reach you. You refused to come out unless we promised

  you could play again the whole next day, just the same.

  Of course we promised … and ever since,

  you two have gotten along

  like peas in a pod.”

  You’d think

  with a beginning like that,

  and with all those things in common,

  that Malcolm and me would spend a lot of time together

  at school.

  But we don’t.

  We sure didn’t make the rules

  about who can be friends with whom,

  and we don’t like the rules the way they are …

  but we are also not fools.

  There are three hundred other kids in our school

  and as far as I can tell, not one of them has

  a best friend

  who’s a different color.

  And so—

  in the halls, at lunch, and in class,

  Malcolm stays with the other black kids

  and I stay with the other white kids

  and most of the time

  it isn’t until we leave the building at 3:05

  that we even say hi.

  there’s my other best friend, Carolann Mott,

  who lives across the street

  with her mother, father, and younger twin brothers—

  Scott and Pete—

  whom I still can’t tell apart

  even after five years of trying.

  Anyway … aside from the color of their skin

  and the fact that Malcolm’s a guy

  and Carolann’s a girl,

  my two best friends could not possibly be

  more different.

  Malcolm is the quiet, thoughtful type … careful

  about everything he does. If he were a bird,

  he’d be one of those great blue herons

  that we often see at the edge of the river,

  wading cautiously on long, skinny legs,

  planning his every step.

  Carolann, on the other hand,

  is more like those sandpipers

  you see at the beach:

  small and quick, always on the move,

  checking out the surf, then scampering back.

  Carolann hardly ever sits still—unless

  she’s snacking or reading one of her mystery books:

  The Scarlet Slipper Mystery

  The Phantom of Pine Hill

  The Secret of the Golden Pavilion

  Someday, she wants to be a private investigator.

  After Carolann’s family moved here six years ago,

  it took a while for her and Malcolm

  to trust each other.

  Malcolm said she was nosy (she does love to gossip);

  Carolann said Malcolm was a snob.

  “He’s just quiet around kids

  he doesn’t know,” I told her. But they stayed

  apart.

  Then one night when our family was

  at the movies in Williamstown, there was a bad

  storm. Two big trees and some electrical wires came

  down on top of the Motts’ roof. Malcolm’s dad

  was the first one on their doorstep,

  offering to help. The Motts had to get out,

  but they didn’t want to

  split up their family.

  Mr. Dupree, who’s the pastor at Willowbank A.M.E.,

  asked his parishioners to set up

  blankets and cots on the second floor,

  and he let Carolann’s family live there

  in the church for two weeks. Mrs. Dupree brought them food.

  After school, Malcolm and Dixon entertained the twins

  so Carolann’s parents could meet with the insurance men

  and supervise repairs.

  Ever since then,

  Malcolm and Carolann have been

  almost as good friends as Malcolm and me.

  Especially in the summer, when we don’t have to worry

  about school or who

  sits with whom at lunch or in class,

  the three of us are often together.

  And whenever I’m with Carolann and Malcolm

  at the same time, I become

  the monkey in the middle between

  a tall, shy black guy and a small, hyperactive white girl

  and that’s when I feel

  almost normal.

  So far,

  this year’s not been so great.

  In January,

  the North Vietnamese came by the thousands

  out of the jungles

  and into the cities

  and attacked our embassy.

  In February,

  Walter Cronkite went on TV

  and told everyone

  that what was actually happening in Vietnam

  and what our government

  was telling us was happening in Vietnam

  were two entirely different things.

  In March,

  at a Tennessee rally for peace and civil rights,

  sixty people got hurt,

  lots more got arrested,

  and one sixteen-year-old boy

  was killed.

  In April,

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered

  by a hidden assassin

  at a hotel in Memphis.

  Malcolm’s mom cried for two days straight.

  Malcolm stayed locked in his room

  and didn’t come out

  till after the funeral (they showed it on TV)

  was over.

  In May,

  in Paris, France,

  students took to the streets

  to protest their government,

  and nine million French workers

  went on strike.

  Soon it will be June,

  and as we close the textbooks, take out the lawn mowers

  and wicker chairs,

  everyone here in Willowbank, New Jersey,

  is desperate

  for signs of improvement.

  “Like ants to a picnic,” Dad loves to say.

  And that really is how it looks

  every summer Saturday

  as families in cars on their way to the beach

  form an endless stream—the entire length of Main Street—

  smack through the center of town.

  When Mom was still here, when Denise and I

  were little, we used to go to the beach

  almost every weekend …

  stay to swim and play for the whole day,

  buy tomatoes and fresh peaches at the farm stands

  on the way home,

  be back in Willowbank by dark. But the last time

  we went as a family,

  Mom and Dad had a big fight.

  We left the beach early, didn’t stop for peaches

  or tomatoes or even ice cream.

  We w
ere home by midafternoon.

  Wildwood, my favorite beach, is less than an hour away

  from Willowbank …

  but I haven’t been there since that day.

  Instead, starting on weekends in late May,

  I’ve taken to sitting on the bench

  before Miller’s grocery store,

  watching those same cars going home. I stare into each

  and every backseat

  until I see a face that looks sad or angry or both,

  till I get my proof

  that having a regular family and time to spend with them

  doesn’t necessarily make you

  happy.

  Denise is scribbling this word

  on her calendar

  in the box for July twenty-second.

  I don’t know what it means.

  It sounds like the name

  of some Greek or Roman queen,

  or like one of those countries in Asia

  that I can never remember on my geography tests.

  I ask Denise, but she pretends she doesn’t hear me

  and sings loudly along with “People Got to Be Free,”

  which is playing on WABC,

  while she gets dressed

  in the layers of gauze she calls a shirt,

  a too-long macramé belt, and a skirt

  that’s so short

  you could mistake it for a headband.

  Tonight she’s meeting Harry Keating

  and a bunch of his friends

  so they can plan

  a peace rally with the students in Princeton.

  (That I’d like to see … the young geniuses of America

  taking orders from Denise

  and a bunch of amateur disk jockeys.)

  When she leaves, I find Mom’s old dictionary

  and look up euphoria.

  It says: “rapture,” “ecstasy,” “joy,”

  which can only mean one of two things:

  a. Denise plans to leave us that day and join some flower-child commune.

  b. Blues goddess Janis is performing somewhere near us.

  Sadly, my money’s on Janis.

  Part 2

  Freedom’s just another word for nothin’

  left to lose.

  —from “Me and Bobby McGee”

  music and lyrics by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster

  sung by Janis Joplin