Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,218

announced: “I HATE my hair. I want YOUR hair.”

Loving me too much to laugh, Mother still couldn’t prevent her lips from playing with a smile. Her hands moved like silk, in sweeping brushstrokes. “Well, your hair isn’t exactly like mine, but that makes it no less beautiful, barefoot contessa.” She was wearing a chemise that skimmed the tops of her thighs. In the day she lived in chemises.

“What’s a contessa?” I asked. I was still disconsolate with my lot in life.

Lana French-inhaled her cigarette. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “A contessa is…a beautiful rich lady who lives in a castle.”

I straightened suddenly. “On the Isle of Capri?”

Lana let out an explosive little laugh. Smoke jetted through her nostrils. “Yes, yes, yes, on the Isle of Capri.”

I settled back, satisfied, sinking into her hypnotic brushstrokes. “Daddy wants to take us to the Isle of Capri someday,” I reminded her. Daddy had been to Capri. He’d told us he’d take us there lots of times.

“Mmmhmm….”

I dreamed awhile. Idly, I supposed: “Would Daddy marry you if you were a contessa?”

Mother stopped brushing, just for an instant. The hairbrush tightened in her hand. A crackle of static. In my daydream I hardly noticed.

“Daddy can’t have two wives,” Mother said. She set the hairbrush on the vanity with a finality that was lost on me.

I thought about Daddy’s wife, Cassandra, the crazy lady who lived next door. The one who called Mother a whore and who was always watching us from behind the curtain. Cassandra was rich and almost as beautiful as Mother, and the glossy white house she and Daddy lived in could almost have been a castle. But I was pretty sure she’d never been to the Isle of Capri.

A thought struck me. “Do you think Frank Sinatra would marry me if I were a contessa?”

Lana, distracted, suddenly looked at me. She laughed unexpectedly and wrapped her arms around me from behind. “Why not? You’re Sicilian and Catholic. You could make an Angel’s Kiss to knock his socks off.” She smiled at me in the mirror. “He’d go wild for you. Coo-coo crazy.”

“I’m only half Sicilian,” I corrected her. My tone was reproachful and smacked of Sister Constance-Evangeline’s elocution class.

“But you are a full Catholic, and to show my devotion to thee, I consecrate to thee my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart, my entire self. Shake with it, sugar, shake with it.”

Shake with it, I did not. I hated convent school. I hated the dour nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow who refused to let me run barefoot through the arched courtyard where the pear trees burst with juice and there was cool black soil I was dying to sink my toes into. The pears, I was warned sternly, were not to be eaten. They were full of worms.

Mother’s breasts were like the heavy flesh of ripe pears. After she and Daddy were dead and buried I’d sit beneath those trees for hours, sucking the golden skins and thinking of nothing, nothing at all, until there was nothing but a pile of rotting cores.

Kicking my heels at Lana’s vanity table I complained that Sister Constance-Evangeline was always after me to get to confession.

“A little confession is good for the soul,” Mother said, painting my lips with a little stiff brush. She had never attended convent school. She said it was too late for her; that she’d been on God’s shit list for years.

I surmised I probably had been, too.

“Oh, no, honey. Not you. Make like you’re going to kiss someone,” Lana instructed. “Like this—”

I exaggerated a movie-star pout. I had never kissed anyone. Not for real. Sometimes the girls practiced with movie magazines they hid under their pillows. But kissing boring old pieces of paper with ads for underarm deodorant on the backs wasn’t like it would be in real life. Was it?

“Perfect!” Mother dabbed with the brush. “You look like Frida Kahlo. Or Carmen. Tell Daddy to buy the opera for you, you crazy chick!”

Later Daddy came in with some of the boys, Sam and Luis, and Chuy Hernando, and Tino Alvarez and Domingo. Daddy laughed and said, “Hey Tino, she looks more like Carmen Miranda!” Then he swirled me up in the air with my glitzy red lips and glitzy red toenails the color of the wax cherries on the Chiquita’s famous turban. He swung me around just like Lana said Frank Sinatra would at our wedding, and the boys clapped a quick Latin rhythm and