I. Ruby’s Door
She was my sister. I was only four, and I saw it happen.
The end of August 1972, the day before her school started, she and I were catching slow insects, holding them inside an old pickle jar. We had captured a spotted hopper, a damselfly with a missing wing, and a furry tent worm. We were hoping that the damselfly might fight the spotted hopper, but they only crawled over each other, their spindly arms stroking the glass wall. I got tired of examining the blank beads of their eyes, wondering what they saw.
My sister Gale took the jar from me and began to shake it as hard as she could. The insects clinked and rattled desperately inside. When she stopped shaking the jar, the worm was dead. I put my ear to the hole in the lid and heard a high-pitched sound like a teakettle steaming. The damselfly was screaming, or at least, I imagined it was screaming. But that sound, either real or imagined, was enough to send chills down my arms decades later. The spotted hopper was twitching underneath the damselfly, which lay upside down, black legs writhing on tangled wings. Droplets of honey-colored goo clung to the glass. “That’s blood,” Gale said. “That’s how insects bleed.”
Just then her eyes took on a horrified expression, as if she had realized something terribly wrong. “What is it?” I asked. She threw the jar at the fence post. It shattered. “I think I just pissed myself,” she said. I fell to the ground, laughing. She ripped down her shorts and squatted down in front of my face. She stayed like that a long time, her mouth barely open, her hands between her legs. Then I saw blood on her fingers and a trail trickling down her leg. Neither of us knew what to make of it. She swore me to secrecy.
Because she thought she was dying, she ran to our bedroom and turned off all the lights. After putting on her best white lace dress, she knotted her hair into a high and heavy bun then lay down on the bed, perfectly still, her arms folded over her chest.
“I will come back for you,” she whispered, “a kind ghost.”
I begged her not to because I was terrified of ghosts. I asked her if I could keep her body in our closet after she died, and she said I could do whatever I wanted once she was gone. I didn’t know about decay then. By morning, the back of her dress was covered in blood splotches like reddish brown flowers floating on water.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the ruined dress.
“What’ll I do?” she asked.
After some thought, I said, “Just tell everyone it’s ketchup.”
But there were no secrets in our house for long. Father’s mouth opened and closed like a catfish mouth when he saw her, his cigar falling to the carpet. He told me to look away from her and said he would burn the dress right away, before anyone else could see it. But Mother did see the dress and was furious. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, slapping Gale across the face. That was the last day Gale would ever answer to that name. Later that night, she painted the name Ruby in blood on the white door of the room we shared throughout childhood. No one dared to wash the blood away or to speak of the door.
II. Breakdown Door
I heard her talking to someone behind the locked door, even though I knew she was alone. It’s not like she was trying to become another person. She was another person.
Depending on whom I spoke to, she was known by three names: Ruby Canyon, Marilynn Glass, and her legal name, Gale Merman. I was just Andy Merman. Or, rather, I still am. I remember being terrified as a child—terrified of my sister and terrified for my sister. I knew who Ruby was and I knew who Gale was, but I had no idea who Marilynn Glass was. Marilynn scared me more than I have ever been scared by anyone in my entire life. She scares me still. Sometimes in darkness, I see her the way she was the first time she slipped away, a sweet girl with soap-gray eyes, the blue satin ribbon in her amber hair, the frail shadow unraveling over her right eye. She used to be very careful about appearances, smoothing her neck and arms with honeysuckle lotion, flossing her teeth with green wax string, brushing her hair a hundred strokes before evening.
Her hair was so glossy and full that grown men couldn’t stop their hands from reaching out to stroke her. When I was just a boy, I witnessed the most distinguished men of our town pausing with their hands hovering in midair, fingers perched above my sister’s amazed eyes. Her curls were so lush and unruly that men kept gazing at her head until she felt guilty, as if she had done something wrong to demand such attention. Her luxurious mane inspired boys to follow her into many evenings. I had to look out for her, to protect my sister from their cold eyes. When we were children, the back of her head felt as soft as a sealskin coat.
Her hair was still soft and legendary when I was thirty-two years old and Ruby Canyon was thirty-nine, the night I walked the dark road to find her collapsed beside her car. Never a drinker myself, I often set out on long night walks, wondering where I might find her. I traipsed past Jimmy’s One Stop, past a deer skull, a shrunken cat wailing, an open-bellied armadillo with its head smashed and tracked by tires, a broken turtle writhing on its back, covered with tiny white worms. I was scared when I saw my sister from far away, her face toward the ground, her hand reaching out to me. But I had seen her that way many times before. I decided to save her again that night by walking to her, lifting her body off the dusty road, and taking her back to the dark house.
“Be nice to me,” Ruby Canyon said as I leaned over her. She had her hands in her hair, her fingers working at tangles. The night was warm, and her face was damp with sweat. She crouched down on the asphalt and leaned her head against the front tire of her car. I couldn’t see her face anymore, only her long disheveled hair reaching the roadside. “I wanted to make you happy,” she said.
“We were,” I whispered, knowing she wouldn’t believe me. That night was like all the others. Once she started in on herself, there was no stopping her. She could go on for hours, cursing herself, destroying what little she loved, tearing up her car and the rooms of her house. Every time it broke my heart to stand back and watch it happen.
“Andy, Andy, Andy,” Ruby Canyon said to me.
“What?” I asked.
“Oh, God, Andy.”
I walked to the other side of her car. We jokingly referred to it as the blue nightmare, a monstrosity of crushed metal, rust, and glass. At the time, I was very much into cars and motorcycles, even the crappy ones that looked like scrap piles and broke down in the middle of nowhere. I was an idiot then. I started to ignore her and began checking out her car.
The windows reflected the field and its black trees in warped ways. I saw my face grimacing ironically, my hair lost to leaves, the shadow of my beard scraggily across my sharp jaw. The clouds above her far-away house loomed darkened gold in the greenish haze of trash fires smoldering beyond us. I knew the old man on the hill would be burning his refuse in rusted barrels until early morning light. He had been poking a long charred cane into the flames on the third Wednesday of every month ever since I was just a boy and my sister was a slender girl swinging from a board roped to high branches. He was our father.
I was embarrassed by his habits and my affection for him, ashamed that everything he touched smelled of smoke and ashes. Ruby Canyon always loved flames. Her long hair looked lavender like an evening lake in orange light descending. She used to think our father was the kindest man in the world. Then he broke down the door to her room and burnt the door in a fire while Mother cried, both of them hoping to make the voices silent.
III. Door to the Mirrors in the Woods
The first time she mentioned the mirrors in the woods we were just kids fighting over the television. I wanted to watch the masked phantom. She wanted to see the ice-skating competition. I told her I hated her and her eyes looked like twin, leaf-eating beetles. Even though it was a lie, she started shaking, and I couldn’t get her to stop. It really scared me the first time I saw her that way, no control over herself whatsoever. Her tongue began to lash out like the soft, pink head of a blind worm exiting her mouth, rising out of darkness, terrified by light. I tried to pry her jaw open to make the worm go back inside.
When she finally put her tongue back in her mouth, she just looked at me. “One of these days I’ll be gone,” she said. “No one will know how to find me.”
“Where will you go?” I asked, turning off the television.
“To the mirrors in the woods,” she whispered.
That night I woke in our room to find her bed empty and the window open. She was gone.
In my powder-blue pajamas, I waded through the stench of road kill to reach her, the summer wind putrid against me. The trees were black against cobalt sky, leaves tussling, glimmering like coiled hair under half-moon light. The trunks grew so close that some were knotted inside, so hunched and whirled they would die if a man tried to twist them apart.
If deer ventured out of the woods, I would have chased the animals back into the darkness. There was safety away from the light where the ground was velvet with the dust of disintegrating leaves.
I didn’t know what to think when I first saw the distant brightness. The lights were out of place, a signal or a warning in the far trees. When I crept closer, I discovered the source—moonlight reflected off shards of broken mirrors that were fastened to the branches with wire. My sister stood in the middle of the circle of light, her face captured in several angled reflections.
She was talking to herself again.
“Gale, this is Ruby,” I heard her say in a cheery voice. “Ruby, this is my friend Marilynn.”
She hadn’t seen me yet. I started to run.
The next morning she was asleep in her bed as if nothing had happened. The mirror in our room was gone.
“What do I look like?” she kept asking.
“Fine, fine,” I lied. She looked strange. Her voice and hair were different again.
Over the years, I came to realize she had a problem with perception. When she was a young girl, unable to remember what her face looked like when she turned away from mirrors, she used to ask me what I thought of her hair, her dress, and the thin silver necklace resting on her collarbone. I never could say exactly what she looked like, even with her standing right before my eyes. She changed every time she came out from behind a locked door.
I kept waking in the night alone, finding her gone. My normal dreams of red balls falling from the sky and finned hummingbirds swimming among long, violet fish under the sea were replaced by nightmares of my sister losing her hair in a fire.
Now, decades later, she lives alone in a dark house that looms shakily at the highest rise where the road ends in a dusty lane that leads to her trees, her mirrors. Inside her house, the floorboards are warped and faded by sunlight and water stains. The plaster is dented. From the look of the rooms, it seems as if no one lives inside. There’s no way of knowing how often she slips away to the mirrors in the woods, how many nights she actually spends inside the house she calls her own.
IV. The Door to the Blue Car
Old, scarred by crashes, the car kept my sister and me together because she needed me to fix it often. An ancient Plymouth with paint peeling away from its doors, it hobbled along on bald tires, jittering and diving with every rise and fall in the road. Without warning, it would die in the middle of a highway and refuse to restart.
I loved that car almost as much as I loved her, and it gave me less trouble. There was something wonderful about knowing whenever it broke down I could fix it and make it right. But sisters are nothing like cars. I should know. Once Ruby Canyon started to go wrong, I could never help her, never set her right. I could never take her apart and put her back together, never make her look the way she used to look, never make her speak the way she used to speak to me, as if I were her brother and not just some man whom she met at the bar. No matter how I tried, I could never turn Ruby back into Gale, especially after she walked offstage and into the dressing room to don Marilynn’s white-blond wig.
Marilynn bought the car her last year of high school with all the money she saved from stripping at the Horny Toad, the old topless bar on Bentley’s Road. In fact, after Father broke down the door to her room, my sister began to live in her car. Yet I knew she hated the car from the day she bought it off the cluttered lot. Maybe it reminded her of getting hollered at, “losing her mind and body,” as she later called performing, swaying slender hips toward dollar bills.
I don’t know. I wasn’t there every night.
After Ruby Canyon wrecked the car the tenth time, I was convinced she had done it on purpose. She stopped stripping altogether in her early thirties. On her last night at the Horny Toad, she left the car in reverse while she danced inside, flinging her hair. The car rolled down the hill, through a rickety fence, and into a scrubby pasture where it crashed into a tree trunk wider than a man’s outstretched arms. It took a long time for me to locate enough spare parts to put the car back together, but I found them after visiting eleven junkyards. In a year, I restored the car to perfect condition, repainting it that exact shade of metallic blue. The same year I fixed her car, Ruby Canyon was beyond repairing, and I realized Gale was gone for good.
V. Secret Door
No matter how she hated the car, whenever she drove, she seemed to become incredibly gorgeous, her dark hair billowing like water, her lips as glossy as her eyes. Boys called her Ruby Canyon because she had the face, eyes, body, and hair of a stripper. Just like a doll, she hardly said a word. Then through the hidden door behind the scarlet curtain, Marilynn would come onstage with white hair and laughter, demanding more money than the one with dark hair who sometimes made fun of Gale.
Men and women and boys and girls loved my sister. Many different types gravitated towards her—dancers, children, businessmen, teenage runaways, college boys, truckers, preachers, lawyers, teachers, fathers, even men who loved men and men who loved women so much they became women. My sister would go wherever they wanted, her hair flying in the breeze as she rode along silently in their pickups through the night. At the Horny Toad, she wore a different costume and dressed and undressed according to the whims of those who bought her. She was anyone’s precious baby-doll reflecting flames of candles and cigarette lighters in her mechanical jeweled eyes.
“Andy, oh God, Andy.”
That night she collapsed in front of her car, she was just my sister, so I reached into the car window.
I put her car in drive and started to push it down the road. “Give me a hand,” I said. The car rolled slowly along. “I had that dream again last night,” she said, shaking her head so her hair swung away from her eyes. She looked at me and was silent, her breath coming deeper, heavier.
I was the only one she ever really confided in. But I hated hearing about her recurring nightmare in which Marilynn Glass stood in front of a white-lit window, curtains of burgundy, black flowers. The way Ruby Canyon told it, Marilynn threw a yellow scarf over the lamp, and the whole room was bathed in golden light. Miss Glass, as Ruby sometimes called her, wore a sheer green dress that ruffled when she walked, revealing the curves of her silhouette.
“The room in the dream was wonderful,” Ruby said, “except for the crying behind the walls.” Marilynn put on a jazzy record, but she could still hear it, so she left the golden room, and the crying stopped. When she came back, she was holding a small child with hazel eyes. Marilynn kept calling the child “Gale” as she kissed the child’s hair. Then, Marilynn stepped out onto the balcony and tossed the child over the edge without looking down.
I was scared because the dream didn’t make sense unless she secretly loved a very young girl or had somehow forgotten who she was. I asked what happened after the child was thrown out the window. She said, “None of your business, Andy.” If she wasn’t going to tell me how it turned out, I don’t know why she bothered to tell me the dream in the first place.
“What the hell’s wrong with you tonight?” I asked.
“You have to know?” she asked, lighting a cigarette, the flame singeing a wisp of her hair.
“Her face was my face,” I thought she whispered.
“What?” I asked, a little too forcefully. Her smoking always angered me, especially because she used it as a way to create pauses in conversation whenever I asked a question she didn’t want to answer.
“I dreamed I was born dying.” She lit a new cigarette with the old one.
“Fair enough,” I said, remembering Gale was still a girl when she became a woman. I guess she’s like most women that way. She painted the Ruby door the second evening after her blood came.
The blood was the first real barrier between us, and from that summer on, she saw me as a traitor.
VI. Dark House Doors
We had to push the car all the way to her driveway. I was exhausted. “Good God, Andy” she said, panting, “I can’t push any farther.” So I left her car just outside her garage and let myself into her house. The front door was always unlocked, but the bedrooms were locked inside. The house was dark because she had allowed all the lightbulbs to burn out and never replaced them with new ones. I decided to replace them quietly the next week. The floors were filthy. The two of us stumbled often, trampling bottles and stray papers under our feet.
I lit a single candle so we could make our way to the bedroom, careful to keep the flame away from her wispy hair. She unlocked the bedroom door, crept inside, and immediately fell on the bed. I went into the kitchen to see what I could throw together for dinner. After searching the cabinets, all I discovered were a few dead beetles and a single can of tomato soup.
Ruby Canyon was already asleep when I returned to the bedroom to check on her. I carried a large turquoise bowl full of deep red soup. “Can you feed yourself, honey?” I asked as I approached the bed.
“Yes,” she whispered, lifting her head off the pillow. She reached for the soupspoon with her delicate hand.
“I can also bathe myself and wipe my own ass,” she said.
“All right,” I said. Before I left her and locked the bedroom door, I placed a porcelain bowl of water and a pink cloth on the table beside her so she could bathe her face and arms.
VII. The Door to the Green Man
It was almost midnight and I had a building to clean before dawn, but first I would have to walk back to my own house and get my motorcycle. After I left Ruby Canyon with her soup, I ran to my bike then rode straight to work. Using my key to enter through the back door, I swept the better part of that night, cleaning the halls of the anatomy labs at the morticians’ college on Cliff Street.
Because I’m a big man with lots of tattoos, I’m afraid women are afraid of me, just because I drive a motorcycle and work alone. As a night janitor, I feel like wearing a navy T-shirt with big white letters that read, I Won’t Hurt You. And I would, but I know the T-shirt would only make women fear me more. My sister was the only woman who was never afraid of me after I got out of prison, but prison was another life. I’ve paid my dues for what I did to that drunken man who couldn’t keep his hands out of her hair.
I was thinking of all the women’s names I had tattooed on my body, and then a girl with funny red glasses walked out of an empty classroom. She screamed when she saw me watching her.
“I’m the janitor,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Oh,” she said, taking a deep breath. “You’re Andy.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Jessie.”
I thought about the way her name would look in blue ink on my left shoulder and what image I might transform the large J into after she left me. A hook, perhaps, or even a boot of some sort.
Her short brown hair was cut straight across her forehead, her bangs falling into her eyes. She had a nice smile and a kind voice. I could tell she was a good girl, but I couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing alone in the building at night.
“Burning the midnight oil?” I asked, trying to hide the tattoos on my neck. I looked down at my feet and dipped the mop into the water bucket.
“Yeah, we’re about to dispose of our cadaver, and anyone who stays late to do the cleanup gets extra credit, but I’m the only one who stayed,” she said with a sweet smile that showed the lovely gap in between her front teeth. “Nice tats, by the way.”
She led me to the anatomy lab at the end of the hall. The large windows were what first caught my eye, the oak leaves bright under streetlights. She guided me to a far table where a cadaver was stretched out in a large black zipper bag, the flaps opened so I could see the dead man’s face, arms, and part of his chest. He seemed entirely too thin, bruises and veins standing out on his arms. His head and chest were shaved, and some of the skin was cut away from his breast, revealing sticky organs and chipped, yellowed ribs. There was a terrible chemical smell that made me choke.
“Why is he so old and thin?” I asked.
Jessie ran her fingers through her short, clean hair. “Probably because he got sick and died,” she said.
“Why is he green?” I asked, thinking my voice sounded slightly off, almost high-pitched.
“Oh,” she said, smiling, “interesting, isn’t it? People turn different colors. Everyone is unique, so their bodies react to chemicals differently.”
She told me she had to crawl around the floor, using tweezers to pick up every bit of stray matter that had dropped from the body. Then she had to put all the pieces back into the body bag.
“I think I know this man,” I tried to tell her. She didn’t seem to understand. “I think this man is my father. No one told me he had died.”
“No,” she said, ushering me out of the room. “That can’t be right. Do you want to get a drink?” she asked, tucking the tweezers into her pocket. “You look like you need a drink. Is the Toad all right?”
“Yes,” I said without thinking. I was still wondering if the dead man really was my father. He and I hadn’t spoken for years. I was halfway wishing he really was dead, so I wouldn’t have to see him ogling the dancers. In the old days when I had just begun tattooing my own body, he used to sit near the stage where Ruby danced and pretend like she wasn’t his child. Years ago, I’d etched the dancers’ names across my chest and later transformed the undesirable names into clouds above the tattooed angels on my belly.
That night when I went back to the old bar, I rode my motorcycle as Jessie followed in her small white car. We met just outside the Horny Toad where a green neon sign flickered, We’re getting ready. Are you?
I had to pay a cover charge at the door, but admission for women was free, and if they came without a date, they got an endless supply of free beer just for coming inside. Jessie was the only woman who wasn’t dancing, and some of the strippers tried to get her to come on stage. She wouldn’t go.
At the far end of the room, a bachelor party was in full swing. I knew what that meant. All hell was about to break loose, and I just stood back, waiting for it to happen. What else could I have done? When the atmosphere first started to get bizarre, I said to Jessie, “You ready to go?” She said, “No, let’s stay awhile.”
A group of young men, all drunk out of their minds, surrounded the stage where a tall woman in black lingerie and high heels pranced from side to side, holding up a large white sign with the words Real Women printed in bold letters. Two identical twin girls followed her onto the stage and started undressing each other. They coaxed a boy with crooked teeth onto the stage and began to fiddle with his belt buckle. He was trying to act like he was enjoying it, but I saw the look in his eyes. “Hey, what’s going on here?” he asked, and the strippers laughed at him.
Jessie and I left soon after. “Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked as she got into her car.
“Yeah,” she said.
After watching Jessie drive away, I was relieved she had left on her own, without so much as a goodnight kiss. She was a good person, very smart, and I liked her too much for kissing. I admired her so much that even though I never saw her again after that night I tattooed her name on my shoulder.
VIII. The Door to the Body
By the time I rode back to Ruby’s house, it was already morning, just after dawn. I was surprised to find the bedroom door unlocked and wondered if someone had visited her in the night. Her hair was different, even though she seemed to be sleeping. There was just enough light coming in the window for me to see without lighting candles. I leaned close to her face.
Since she was sound asleep, I decided to caress her hair, just to smooth away some of the tangles with my fingers. It was softer and thicker than any hair I had ever felt in my life, the ideal hair for any woman to have. Whenever I stretched out a curl, it sprang back to its original coil. My finger caught on a single tangle, and I decided to make it right. I tugged at the knotted strands, gently at first because I didn’t want to wake her. The tangle was stubborn and wouldn’t come out. So I pulled again, harder. When she still didn’t respond, I thought something was wrong. I thought she must have been numb from drinking through the night, so I decided to punish her.
I yanked the tangle one last time, as hard as I could. At first, it took me a moment to realize what had happened. I knew what I saw, but I couldn’t understand what it meant. All her hair was dangling above her head from the single strand still wrapped around my finger. Her head was completely bald on the pillow, the long bulk of hair I held suspended above her, shadowing her sleeping face.
When her hand moved to touch her naked scalp, her eyes flew open. Suddenly, she was wide awake, her furious gaze directed toward me.
“I told you not to touch my hair,” she said. “Now look what you’ve done. You just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Andy, Andy, Andy . . .” She began to laugh hysterically, revealing gaps in her teeth. “I fooled all the bastards who worshipped me for the way I looked.”
“What did you do to your hair?”
“I shaved it off, and it feels so damned good to be bald. You wouldn’t believe it!”
“You’re ugly,” I said, so angry I didn’t realize what I was saying. “The ugliest woman I’ve ever seen.”
She ran out of the room. It took a long time to find her, even though I knew she was somewhere inside the house. I heard a rustling from inside the fireplace and saw her crouching in the ashes. “I’m sorry,” I said, holding the wig out to her. She threw something little and hard at my face. It felt like a pebble hitting me right under my eye. When I picked it up off the tile, I saw it was just a fake fingernail like the kind she glued on her pinkies.
After I helped her glue the nail back on, we held each other, without speaking. Then I took off my work shirt and let her find the women’s names in the clouds above the angels, my sister’s fingers gliding over the letters on my chest. Before I let go of her, I told her we would be all right, that she didn’t have to hide anything from me anymore, that she could do anything she wanted to herself, and we would get through together somehow.
I told her that no matter what she did, no matter what happened to us, I would never hide her name in a cloud. All three of her names were etched deep on my arms.
IX.The Stupid Kid’s Door, or The Door to My Childhood
Ruby, Marilynn, and Gale—they are all alive in her. My sister, who is not insane, is a bald woman with a history of wondrous hair, a woman who thinks too much about becoming other women. To me, she is just like every performer I knew in this town or any other. She always wanted to save herself, but she had no idea who she was.
When she danced on the mirrored stage, she was everywhere and nowhere at once. She was any type of woman the men wanted her to be.
“No one knows our secret thoughts, our dreams, unless we tell them,” Marilynn once leaned down and whispered to me before walking offstage, gathering her tips and thrown clothes.
“I guess,” I whispered, looking down at my boots and imagining that we were children.
When she reappeared on stage, she was wearing a white wedding veil. It was hard to see her dancing and to realize she often pretended to be a bride when she was a young girl.
When she was ten and I was barely three, we had a fake wedding in our backyard, saying our vows behind the tool shed, the roof-tip shadow barely touching her toes. I never wanted to let go of her strong arms as she lifted me high into the air above her. My face shadowed her face. As she kissed me and swung me through the air, she was so much bigger than me, and she was still Gale Merman.
For years, I thought the wedding was real. I walked all over town, bragging to everyone that she was my wife and I was her husband. We took baths together and slept in the same bed. I kissed her at night. I held her hand whenever we crossed the street. I saw no difference between our marriage and our parents’ marriage. I was proud of Gale, so I was wounded when she pulled my ears and said, “Are you crazy, boy? Why don’t you shut your trap?”
I didn’t understand why people were laughing at us. “Why that’s your sister,” some people said. Others asked if I knew right from wrong or simply laughed, insisting we were too young to be married. Looking back, I think may be we really were married.
Because I was a child when I was her husband, hers were the first names written on my body. With hidden needles and stolen pens, I tattooed her names on my arms the nights she left without warning.
Even though everything has changed, I know who I am.
Inside this huge tattooed man is just a stupid kid who wanted to marry his own sister. That’s what keeps me awake at night.
After fearing her and loving her for so long, I’m convinced that no dreamer can ever tell a nightmare the way it was. The words we use for dreams don’t make sense because our dreams unfold in wordless ways.