The kitchen was warm and smelled of garlic and exotic spices. I didn’t want to leave it. But I once again followed Fiona, this time upstairs to her room. Instead of a door, a curtain of beads hung in the doorway. She parted it for me and then flopped onto her bed, which was really just a mattress on the floor, covered with Indian bedspreads.
“You like Jethro Tull?” she said, putting the arm down on an album before I could answer. “Aqualung,” she said. She sighed. “We won’t be here long. We just sort of, you know.” She moved her hands like a hula dancer and smiled to herself. “Pass through. Usually my father does something terrible and there’s some kind of scene.” She squinted up at me. “I bet your father never makes a scene.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging.
“I bet your mother does though. Right?” before I could answer she said, “Isn’t this flute like so, I don’t know?”
Then she closed her eyes and moved her head in time with the music.
I listened but I didn’t like the music. There was nothing to look at in the room. No posters on the wall. No place for me to sit, unless I climbed on the mattress beside Fiona, which seemed uncool. I stood awkwardly by the curtain of beads, until I realized that Fiona had actually drifted off to sleep. Her breathing was slow and even. “Fiona?” I said softly. But she didn’t wake up.
As quietly as I could, I moved between the beads and out into the hallway. Leaning against the wall were framed posters from museum shows in London and Los Angeles and Chicago. All the doors were shut except for one room where the door was off its hinges and propped at an odd angle in the frame. I stepped inside.
Mrs. Bishop was in there painting. This was the room I could see from my bedroom and now I saw what was taking her so long. She was painting a mural that spread across all four walls, a mural of a garden filled with bright flowers—asters and zinnias and dahlias and marigolds—all of them thick with paint and color, oranges and yellows and purples and reds.
She didn’t stop painting when I walked in. She said, “Oh? Is it dinner already?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just looking around.”
“Find anything interesting?” she said. She was working on a section of tulips.
“This is pretty interesting,” I said.
“I always paint a garden in a new house. Always,” she said.
I nodded. I was thinking about birds, how their bills developed depending on the food they ate. The shrike, the cardinal, the wood thrush, the crossbill, the yellow throat were all in the same family, yet their bills all looked different.
Mrs. Bishop looked up then and smiled. Her teeth were horsey and big, but they only added to her unique look. “I guess we should see what’s cooking, hmmm?”
My mother would have showered and primped before joining her guests. But Mrs. Bishop didn’t bother. She stayed in her paint splattered clothes, her hair in a messy ponytail, without even bothering to put on shoes. When we walked into the kitchen, my mother smiled her Queen Elizabeth smile.
“Babe,” she said. “I was wondering where you were.”
My father sat at the table eating olives and looking miserable.
“Upstairs,” Mrs. Bishop said.
“She’ll have to show you her masterpiece sometime,” Mr. Bishop said.
I wanted to say that it was beautiful. But something stopped me. Perhaps it was the way Mr. Bishop had said the word masterpiece. Or the way my mother smiled when he did. Or maybe it was just the air in the kitchen that night, which seemed oddly charged, the way the air feels just before a cold front moves in.
ONE DAY TO my tonsillectomy and I spiked a fever during School Meeting. In School Meeting, all the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders sat on colorful cushions in the Activity Room and aired our feelings. Susan Markowitz wanted to talk about male chauvinism, how the boys dominated certain areas of the school. Trini Randall wanted to discuss changing the morning snack from peanut butter and crackers to fruit and nuts. Fiona Bishop used her red cushion as a pillow, stretched out with her head on it, and went to sleep.
I raised my hand.
“Alice?” said Bob, my literature teacher.
“My throat hurts. It feels like I have razor blades in it.”
The health teacher, Patty, came over to me and touched my forehead with her large cool hand. “You have a temperature,” she said. “Do you want me to call your mom?”
“I’ll just go home by myself,” I said.
“Do you want Trini to walk with you?”
I shook my head. As I gathered my things, I heard Felix Crawley saying that the school should write a letter to the president about the MIAs. Once, at a Saturday night dinner at the Crawleys’, I had let Felix French-kiss me. Now his voice made me nauseated. His tongue had felt cold and slimy and ever since I had hated him. With my head hurting and my throat sore, I practically ran out of there and the six blocks home, past the bodega with its weird chicken smells and the Irish bar with its stale beer smell and the head shop with its strong incense and B.O. smell. Finally I was home and all I could think of was a blue Popsicle and TV game shows.