Palace Beautiful

MY SISTER ZUZU SAYS NO ONE CAN remember the day they were born, but I do. The day I was born, my mother told me the story of how people came into being. As she spoke, the story felt warm and soft like her skin, her voice and her smile, so I knew it was true. The story went like this:

In the beginning, there was nothing, no light, no dark, no air—nothing. Then, suddenly, a Great Dog as big as the universe came into being and then there was something. His hairs were black, and each one was as big as a hundred planets. His teeth were white and filled his immense red mouth, which was as large as a thousand galaxies.

The dog panted and howled with loneliness. He lay his head down on one paw and fell asleep, and as he slept, his dreams leaked from his ear and spilled out over the nothing-ness. Out came planets, stars, moons, solar systems, water, day and night, trees, monkeys, crab apples, lightning bugs and people. The entire universe spilled out of his dreams. When he woke, he howled with joy. Then there was everything.

I remember the way my mother’s breath tickled my ear as she whispered the story. Her long brown hair hung damp and messy down her shoulders. Now and then a strand fell over my face and stuck to my brand-new cheeks. She smelled like roses. I still love the feel of velvety rose petals against my cheeks. It helps me remember.

When a girl loses her mother, nothing is ever the same. Ever. She needs new things, soft things, to fill the empty gaps, and she needs to work as hard as she can to remember.

“I get to choose my room first!” Zuzu shouted as we parked in the street in front of our new home. Dad turned off the car, and the rumbling of the engine and the song “We Are the World,” which we had heard at least ten times on our drive, cut off. It felt unnaturally still and quiet.

“Now, Zuzu, we agreed you and Sadie would draw straws,” Dad said, craning his neck to look at us in the backseat. He rubbed the back of his neck with his thick palm and tilted his head until his neck popped and cracked like old wood. Sherrie slept restlessly beside him.

Dad found Sherrie a year and a half ago. She came from Nieman Marcus in Dallas. Dad saw her working at the makeup counter and they fell in love. He brought her home one day all dressed up with a big red bow on her head like she was a store-bought present. Sherrie’s nice. She smiles a lot and she smells pretty—like expensive shoes. They got married, and now Sherrie’s seven and a half months pregnant.

“It’s no fair, Daddy! Sadie always wins straws!” shouted Zuzu, kicking the front seat with her Sunday shoes that she wore every day of the week. “She gets to do everything she wants and I never get to do anything but chores!”

“Yes, I do, Sadie! I wish I was in Jennifer Meyer’s family,” Zuzu continued. “They let her do anything she wants! She isn’t a maid! She isn’t second all the time! She isn’t treated like a baby! Life is so unfair!”

My mother and I both came from the Great Dog. My sister Zuzu has a different story. My mother died giving birth to her, so the nurses had to whisper her first story, and nurses are poor substitutes for mothers.

There’s the one about Adam and Eve. In the beginning there was nothing. Then God decided to make the universe, so he did, and he liked it. Then He made two people: Adam and Eve. They lived in a beautiful garden, but didn’t appreciate it because they didn’t know better. Then one day, they ate some fruit that they weren’t even supposed to touch, but they did anyway and they started to understand things. The first thing they understood was that they were naked. They felt so embarrassed, they had to run and hide. After a while, though, they started to see and to hear and to taste and to touch and to smell and to understand. They became wise.

There’s a story about red birds, but it starts with an apple tree. The tree lived in an orchard. It was very happy. It held its arms wide and each dripped with apples as round as the earth and as red as a ruby. One day a storm tore through the branches of the apple tree. When the wind hushed and the rain stopped, seventy-seven of the tree’s apples lay in the dirt, torn too early from the limbs that loved them. The tree wept and its arms felt empty. Just then, seventy-seven beautiful birds as round as the earth and as red as rubies came from the clouds and landed on the branches. Their feathers brushed off the raindrops, and the tree felt happy to have full arms again.

Then there’re the people that come from the cabbage patch. Cabbages sit on the ground where they sprouted and never move until someone makes them. Their roots are deep, firm and solid, and their heads are hard. They don’t do much looking past their very own patch of dirt, and they don’t appreciate being taken from it. People from the cabbage patch can be stubborn and hardheaded like a cabbage. That’s where Zuzu came from. That’s why she spends so much time with her feet firmly rooted to the floor, crossing her arms and shouting “FINE!” like there’s no other way to think about things.

Dad didn’t come from anywhere. He was just there waiting like the tree for the red birds when my mom and then Sherrie went looking for a husband. I suppose some people come from somewhere and other people are just waiting for them with their arms wide. Dad is one of the waiting ones.

Another story is one I heard a few years ago in health class. I don’t want to write it here because it might shock you. We had to bring permission slips signed by our parents just to hear that story, and when I did hear it, I was so embarrassed, I felt just like Adam and Eve.

A person can always tell what story another person heard first by the way they live. People who hear the Great Dog story first are sometimes lonely. They howl in their own ways for what they miss and need to express themselves any way they can. Sometimes they end up as artists like me.

A person who first hears the Adam and Eve story always looks at their feet and blushes like they are embarrassed. Sometimes they pretend they are something they aren’t so people won’t know how embarrassed they are. Others open their eyes and ears and become wise and happy. Those who are from the red birds keep trying to fill in the empty spaces left by the loss of something they loved.

Each story comes to a person for a reason and it helps that person find their place. The stories are meant to be remembered. My mom said if a person thinks really hard way back to the day they were born—thinking not only with their head, but their eyes, ears, nose, mouth and fingers—they will remember and their great question will be answered. The key to it all is to remember.

I stared out the window at the new house. New is an entirely relative term. Our house in Houston was built in 1971, the year before I was born, and we had lived in it all my life.

But the houses in Salt Lake City looked very different from the houses in Houston. This house looked like it was a million years old. It’s pretty, don’t get me wrong. It’s red brick with white wood trim like the gingerbread and frosting of a fairy tale house, but it is definitely not “new.” Grandma Brooks has lived in the neighborhood for decades and decades. She probably rode past this house in a horse and buggy. Grandma Brooks was the reason we moved to Salt Lake City. She’s old. Her health is still good, but she sometimes feels uneasy about living in her very own state away from us. Grandpa Brooks died ten years ago and she has been living alone ever since. She’s the kind of lady who makes the most of stuff no matter if it’s good or bad.

Our house sat on top of a little hill all its own. A small brick path lined with round bushes stretched from the sidewalk at the bottom of the little hill all the way to the front porch. It almost looked like the house was reaching for us and was glad to see us, like it needed new people to fill it up. I knew right away that I loved it. I knew right away that this was my home.

I looked up at all the windows and wondered who had looked out those windows before. I wondered if a long time ago, another girl saw this house for the first time and knew it was home. I wondered if a home can belong to so many people that even when they move away, the house still misses them.

I drew the bigger one. Zuzu dashed out of the car and scrambled up the front walk. She stood on the front steps hopping up and down, ordering Dad to hurry up with the house key.

“Thanks, Sugar,” she said. Sherrie’s voice was like honey, slow and sweet. She had a Texas accent generations deep. I figured even if we lived in Utah the rest of our lives, Sherrie would still sound like the South.

“It feels good to stretch my legs,” she said, putting her hand on her cheek. “A long car ride sure makes a girl need to powder her nose. Hand me my purse, Sugar.” I did, and Sherrie took out a little silver compact. It clicked open, and she dabbed her forehead and nose with a little pink puff. “Thank you, Sadie. I feel like a new woman!” She put the compact back in her purse, walked up to the front door and put her arm around Dad.

After my mom died, Dad spent the next few years looking out windows, sighing, with his arms dropping limp at his sides. When he met Sherrie, he started spending less time looking far away and more time smiling and sometimes even laughing. Dad loves Sherrie. Zuzu and I love Sherrie. Sherrie loves all of us. But sometimes at night, I take out the shoe box that has a picture of my mom in it, and most of the time, I still cry.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” shouted Zuzu as Dad fumbled with the house key. The door opened with a groan, and Zuzu was inside and up the stairs before anyone else could get across the threshold.

“I’m going to get the air mattress for Sherrie,” said Dad. “There are two bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs. You and Zuzu have the upstairs rooms.”

“Isn’t this exciting?” Sherrie whispered in my ear. “I bet I know which room you’re going to have. When your dad and I first saw the house, I thought, ‘This room looks just like Sadie! We’ll take it!’” She smiled. “Besides, it’s your season, and I think sitting in that room, you’ll look just like Jackie O.”

Sherrie loved Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She sold Bonnie Mae cosmetics, and every time she did a makeover, the ultimate compliment she could give was that the “after” looked just like Jackie O. The thing is, they usually did. “Go on. I’ll be up in a few minutes to see your new room.”

The downstairs had a front room—in houses this old, they’re called parlors. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a formal dining room. One of the downstairs bedrooms belonged to Dad and Sherrie. The extra downstairs bedroom was to be made up as a nursery for the new baby until Grandma Brooks got too old and needed to move in.

The house smelled old—the good kind of old. I looked at the banister as I went up the stairs to find my new bedroom. Dents marked the shiny dark wood from years of use. It felt like the house had seen a million things and wanted to tell us about them with little marks that a person had to look closely to see.

When I got to the top of the stairs, Zuzu was already hanging up a kitten poster in one of the rooms, so I knew the other was mine. My room was painted a color I would call far-far-away blue, and at the far end of the room was a large window. As soon as I saw the window, I knew it was my first choice—no matter who drew the smaller pencil.

Outside the window swayed a large sycamore tree. Its peeling bark looked like a paint-by-number picture, and its branches stretched all the way to the window, tapping the old flowing glass panes. Past the tree was the street and beyond the street, the mountains.

I opened the window. It creaked and groaned like it hadn’t moved in decades. A breath of spicy air from the canyons drifted in and swirled around the room. The smell reminded me of the good things that came with visiting Grandma Brooks. To me, it smelled like Grandma herself.

I turned and looked around. I touched the walls and window and wondered who had lived in the room before me. It felt lived in, like it was crammed full of history and stories. I wanted to know who had been here before. I wanted to know the history and stories of the room as I added my own.

The closet was deep and I went all the way to the back. It felt good to be in the dark where I could just feel the space with my breath. Zuzu would say I was being weird. Something crunched under my tennis shoe. I bent down and picked it up. It was a brass button with a scene of a Chinese pagoda and a crane with open wings. It looked like the kind of thing a person sees in a grandma’s sewing basket. I felt like the room was welcoming me. I set the button on the windowsill so I could see it and remember.

I didn’t mind moving to Utah. Zuzu did. She had about a billion friends in Texas, and she threw tantrums every night for months when she found out we were leaving. I don’t have a billion friends. I’m not as pretty as Zuzu. She looks a bit like Shirley Temple with her halo of golden curls and cherub face. She even has a dimple in each cheek. I don’t have any dimples. Most people call me the smart one. I guess they mean it as consolation for my not being pretty, but I don’t mind. I know I’m smart, and I’d rather be smart than pretty. Pretty doesn’t get you into gifted and talented classes where you get to read more advanced books and do more advanced art and all that. Zuzu has to sit in her boring regular classes looking beautiful. I don’t think she minds.

I’m thin and I have straight brown hair that gets stringy if I don’t wash it every day—and sometimes I don’t. I have blue eyes like Zuzu’s, but mine aren’t framed with lush black lashes like hers. I have freckles that Sherrie calls adorable, and naturally straight teeth. I suppose those are my good points as far as looks are concerned. I’m not tall or short or anything out of the ordinary. I guess that is what you could call my looks—ordinary. I’m fine with it.

They walked out of the room and down the hall to Zuzu’s. I heard Sherrie say, “Oh, I knew you’d pick this one! Sitting on your bed in here, you’ll look just like Jackie O!”