“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”
– Virginia Woolf
Women curve themselves around the television screen, whipping their hair against their backs, smacking it over bare shoulders, bending low and shaking it at their knees. The beat is steady and they seem steady too, always the same, always the same, like identical parts in a moving machine. But there is always one who catches my eye, throws the beat off, just a little. Today her hair is yellow. Not blonde, or gold. Not a color I’ve seen on heads before. It is crayon-yellow, the color of the sun in the pictures on the social workers’ offices, drawn by the younger foster children, taped to the walls you sit under while you wait to go from one life to the next.
These same women are on every television screen—not just at the social workers’ offices, but at the homes, too, even the new one where I am now. This home is different from all the others. I have been to four by now, two per year since I turned ten the year before last. Most of the houses are loud with children and always smell like food, but here there are no children here besides me. The woman here, my newest mother, has never brought children in before. “I’m surprised we got you,” she tells me. “They never would’ve given you to me alone. Must be because of Obette.”
While the crayon woman dances on TV, the mother, Cheryl, talks about Obette. She says Obette is the responsible one, the clear-headed one, the one with the good job and the plans. She says Obette has taken care of her, and soon she will take care of us both. Cheryl stirs grits at the stove and says that Obette will come back soon. She says Obette will love me, that she’ll be so glad I’m here, and the three of us will be a pack.
Cheryl tells me about the dreams she has, and I’m not sure what kind she means at first—nighttime dreams or day. After a while, though, I know she means the better kind, the kind you can hold in your hand as long as you stay asleep. The other dreams—the day kind—are far away, like planets or imaginary friends. To me, sleeping dreams are better; they are all the way real, right up until they’re not.
Cheryl tells me that, when she wakes up in the mornings, she does not know where she is, how things work. She thinks people can move without touching the ground, or that her mother is holding her hand. She tells me she does not know what world is real until she sees Obette beside her. Then she settles into herself like bubbles into a pan of dishwater, and they can begin the day.
I listen and do not say anything. I catch words here and there and mix them in my juice glass. Pack, hand, ground, mother. I wonder about the crayon woman, if she speaks, what she does when she is not dancing behind a screen. I wonder if she has someone like this Obette, someone who helps her settle into herself. Sometimes, I imagine myself dancing like her, a little out of step, my hair a neon shock on top of my head. But then I think about what other people would say about me—the social workers, the kids at the school, my next mother, whenever my next life comes. So I sit by the screen, I watch and I listen.
It never smells like food here, even though we eat fine every day. Mostly it smells like a woman working hard to build things—smells like paint and metal and wood and cinnamon tea. Every day, Cheryl talks and works on the house, sawing things, bringing in pretty lighting fixtures that she says Obette will like. She tells me her plans for the house, how the two of them will sleep in the big room upstairs and my room will be the one right next door. I don’t wonder why they would share a room until Cheryl asks if I’m wondering. I shake my head and say, “No, it makes sense to me.” I think for a second what my past mothers would say about it, but then I think, How much can they matter, if they aren’t here?
Cheryl tells me we’ll all play games and dance together in the back room, but the front room will be just for Obette. “She’s like a man, but better,” Cheryl says. “Time alone is how she keeps her magic.”
I listen and watch the television, and then I go to the new school and I wait. Sometimes I’m waiting for someone to come—a police officer, a social worker—and take me to my next life. Sometimes I’m just waiting for the day to end. One time I try to wait for Obette, like Cheryl has been doing since I came here, but I don’t know how. A new life usually comes, the day always ends, but people are harder to wait for.
Soon I figure out that Cheryl is nice, and sad. I don’t know how she takes my silence. Sometimes I think that she likes how I listen. The dead space between her talking gets shorter and shorter, and I think that if I wanted to I could leave the house and go dance on the corner while she talks, do all the dances the video women do, and then come back to find her right there, still talking, just fine. But in the end, I wouldn’t want to go outside. I wouldn’t know anyone, and no one wants to know a girl who dances by herself.
Soon, I start to like Cheryl. I like the stories she tells me about all the places she and Obette have been, all the things they have done together, and the things we will do, the pack of us, when Obette comes back. Soon, I stop waiting to leave. I stay and make Obette up in my mind, mix her in with the video women, only the strange ones, the ones with sad faces or candy hair.
“She’ll be here tomorrow,” Cheryl says one day after she picks me up from the school. I am watching a video, but I turn to her and listen. “Or maybe sometime next week. Obette is afraid,” she says. “And fear slows people down. Do you understand?” But she doesn’t wait for my answer.
One day, in the summer, Cheryl’s dream is about ducks. They are half real and half fake, she tells me, with dirty feathers and ugly voices, but perfect orange feet. She tells me about their yellow color, how it’s bright but tinged with gray. She thinks they could fly, she says, because one of them, the biggest one, said something like that to her in the dream. “There were three of them, but then there were six,” she says, “and sometimes they were all just one. And when they were one they were Obette. They smelled like soup, the way she smells when her body is working hard.” And this makes Cheryl feel she should never wake up from the dream.
While she tells me this, she is frying sausages in a pan. She waves the spatula around, and I wonder if it will drip grease into the fire. Then I notice that I am afraid, and Cheryl is not. She presses the sausages into the pan and smoke puffs up, thick and almost blue. The grease makes a smear on the white wall that Cheryl has just painted. I worry that the house will burn down, that me and Cheryl and all the dreams will float away into ash. The smoke alarm goes off, but Cheryl just looks at me. I decide that I will cook from now on.
Later in the summer it gets hot and there is too much time to spend it all just waiting. Most summers, there is something new—a new mother or another child in the house, or some kind of problem. But this summer there is just me and Cheryl, going grocery shopping and making trips to the hardware store. Cheryl does all kinds of things to the house. She makes new banisters with ends that curl like thick wooden snakes and stains them in what she says is the color of Obette’s palms. She buys putty and scrapes it along the bottoms of the walls, then presses long cylinders of wood into it so the cracks between the wall and the floor disappear. “Obette likes things to be seamless,” she says, and I don’t think I know what she means, but I nod.
On the day she paints the front room—Obette’s room—Cheryl spends an hour standing in the middle of the floor, frowning. “It’s not right,” she says. “The walls are too flat for her.” Again, I’m not sure I know what she means.
While she works I watch the video women dance behind the glass, and I make a game of counting the ones I will like. I follow the rhythm while I wait for Kool-Aid hair, a set of green fingernails, or a pair of talking eyes to flash across the screen. There is always noise outside the house. Children from the school are listening to music, doing all the dances, rapping and singing and tagging the stoops. I would not say this to anyone, but sometimes I do imagine myself with them. Sometimes, when Cheryl talks about Obette—all the thing she has done and the things we will do, the three of us—I get a feeling that I could dance with the kids, that they might not bother me for not talking, that I might not have to fight girls to tell them who I am, to prove I belong here, in this life. Other times, when Cheryl talks, I am afraid I am like her, and then I want to run hard and fast, through the plaster and the brick, to get out. But I don’t want to leave Cheryl talking alone to the walls. And, also, I like her dreams. If I left, I would be alone, too, and I would miss them.
One morning, while I’m cooking, I hear Cheryl’s voice loud in her bedroom. I turn the flame off and go quietly to her door. She has pushed the bed to the middle of the room and is cooing like a dying bird. When she sees me she begs me to help her.
“I can’t move,” she says.
She calls me Obette and tells me all of her dreams over again, all the ones I’ve heard already and new ones, too. She crawls over the mattress and kicks the sheets to the floor. She tells me that she needs me.
When I don’t speak, she says, “Fuck you!” Her eyes tell me that in this dream she could tear a body apart. But when she moves to the edge of the bed, she shrieks like she’s been shocked, then she whimpers and lies down. “Come back, please. Please.”
On my way down the stairs I think of what to do. I think of the people I should go to—a social worker or a police officer, a teacher at the school or the nice man at the corner store—but I am afraid I will not know what to say. By the time my hand curves around the banister’s tail, my voice is gone already. I feel like my mouth has melted away and all I am is limbs. My legs carry me into the front room, Obette’s room. I step over the newspaper and the plastic tarps, the nails and the hammer and the cans of paint.
I feel strange, light, like I’m not sure where the ground is. I wonder if this is how Cheryl feels when she wakes up, if this is why she thinks only in dreams. My hands go soft and they sink toward the paint cans, pry them open. At first I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m scared, but then I’m excited, my whole body filled with breath. I dip into the yellow and feel my fingers soak in the cool of the paint. Then I am at the wall, making smears that turn to yellow balls, and balls that turn to tufts of yellow fuzz, and fuzz that turns to feathers. I am painting ducks for Cheryl, hoping this will help her. Time disappears into Cheryl’s voice as I fill the room with round yellow bodies, sculpting sloped heads and pulling perked tails up toward the ceiling. I run down the hall for the orange paint, and then I make long open beaks and webbed feet that float along the room’s white sky. I am whirling, making ducks, Cheryl’s ducks, no one else’s. But when I look at them I see the yellow, and it makes me feel good, too. I feel like I am dancing in my own way, waiting for nothing, for no one. And so I keep going, my body bright and whirling in color, flying in its own directions, bouncing against nothing but air.
As I walk up the stairs, I can feel things bubbling in me. I put my hands in my hair, and I don’t worry about the color I have left there. When I open the door, Cheryl is sleeping. She smiles when she feels me coming toward her.
“Obette?” she says.
I tell her “no,” but I say it softly. Then I say my name.