Delia told me about Myrna Jade, a silent film star of the 1920s. Delia said she hadn’t heard of Myrna Jade when she bought the house. “It was an absolute wreck. Completely falling apart. You never would’ve imagined a movie star had lived here.” Myrna Jade had been forgotten, her films out of circulation, until a historian wrote a book about her in the 1970s, which was turned into a popular film in the 1980s. “Myrna mania,” Delia called it. “Now my house is on one of them star maps and people drive by at all hours of the day and night. It’s mostly Europeans. I know it’s annoying, doll—believe me, I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so don’t pay ’em any attention.”
I wasn’t sure I believed Delia, thinking a movie star would live in a castle, not a small stone house. I wondered if she was trying to make me feel better. I went to my bedroom for the rest of the evening and when it was time for bed, I put on my pajamas and peeked outside. A flashbulb. Pop. Then two more. Pop. Pop. Electric flowers in the night sky.
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THE WOMEN WHO CAME BEFORE ME were black-and-white. My grandmother, mother of my mother, died before I was born, but there are photographs of her. In my favorite one she is a young woman, standing next to her sister on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, the two of them clasping their arms and smiling as they look into the camera lens. I like to think that my grandmother was looking through time toward my mother and me, though she couldn’t have imagined us then. She’s a teenager in the photo, her hair bobbed in the style of the 1920s. She and her sister are wearing polka-dotted dresses and both of them are round all over. Even as a girl I saw myself in them. I knew we were connected, like a string of round white pearls stretching into the past.
When my mother was little she was black-and-white like them, but not round like them. On the day I was born, she looked at me and knew she would call me something other than the name she’d put on my birth certificate. “You had the darkest hair,” she said, “long enough to wrap around my fingers. Your skin was rosy pink. You were so succulent and sweet, my little Plum.”
A pearl, a plum—roundness defined me.
Every year on the first day of school the teacher would take attendance, and when she reached my name, she would say, “Alicia Kettle?” and then I’d have to tell her I was called Plum.
Plum. Plump. Piggy.
Alicia is me but not me.
We lived in the house on Harper Lane for five months and then we moved to our own apartment. My father stayed in Idaho and my parents got divorced. My mother’s salary as a secretary in a university biology department afforded us a place with dark woodwork that sucked up the sunlight, and carpet a vomitous orange. We lived in the apartment for a few years, until Herbert died of a stroke. Delia was so unhappy living alone that she begged us to move back to the house with the starers, the gawkers, the photograph-takers.
The schools near Delia’s house were better for me, my mother said, and she was excited about the possibility of escaping the apartment complex with the dirty diapers floating in the pool. She had made up her mind to go, and so we went.
In the house on Harper Lane we were under constant surveillance. Sitting at the breakfast table, I’d look up from my oatmeal to see a figure outside the front window, which would bolt away like a frightened mouse when my slipper hit the glass. In my bedroom I kept the curtains closed, but I knew they were out there. Delia and my mother didn’t seem to mind the strangers’ stares and camera lenses. When they were away from home they could escape—for them it was only temporary.
At school, there was nowhere for me to hide. I was surrounded. There were so many of them that I never knew for certain who was looking. All day I felt the urge to turn away, to close up like a flower in the shade.
I kept what happened at school to myself. Sometimes at the end of the day I would find spit in my hair or a note taped to my back that read DO ME A FAVOR, POP ME! My first year of high school, after an older classmate was raped in the vacant lot behind Von’s, the school offered self-defense classes for girls. When I showed up, two girls snickered and said, loudly enough for everyone else to hear, “Who’d want to rape her?”
On the telephone to Idaho, I said: “Daddy, do you think I’m pretty?” I knew he would say yes because he was my father.
During my sophomore year of high school, a boy asked me to the homecoming dance. I was suspicious of boys, since they never paid me any attention unless it was for name-calling or worse, but my mother insisted that I go. She dropped me off outside the school gym and I waited for the boy in the parking lot for more than an hour, the wispy ends of my homemade lavender gown dragging in pools of motor oil. The boy never came and everyone knew. They had seen.
I wanted to become smaller so I wouldn’t be seen.
If I was smaller they wouldn’t stare. They wouldn’t be mean.
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