A Crack in the Window

Alice always told mom and dad her room was cold. It was one of those things you just said a lot, when you were a kid. Like, “mossy teeth,” and then you would shudder because you’ve just described a weaker soul in your class – the one with the teeth that could’ve been very nice but instead they are rotting. And they click together every few minutes. 

Like, “Let’s turn on the fan so all the dust gets spun around,” and then you do so with your brothers and all the dust FLIES up into the air, graceful-like, and lands in a big squat on the floor.

Dust is sneaky.

Everyone knows that.

What they don’t know is that dust is elegant. Elegant as in the type that figures a Perplexor all by themselves. Sitting there at the dining room table with a marble top. Sometimes your toes might get stuck in the foundation of it all. There’s lots of metal leaves and swirlies. Not nature like. Not at all.

Phony.

Alice always found she was the best at Perplexors when she did them by herself. Solo. The whole competition outfit didn’t work out too well for her. It was fiery, all right. She enjoyed that portion. But when she wasn’t fiery she became weary, and the fire died soon as it was lit and left her in the dust, all nervous and shaking because her brothers and mom and dad were making progress and she was not.

She could hear all of their pencils scraping. “Dshhhh.” It killed her. Drove her mad it was so funny. She was torn in half because she did SO like that sound but she hated it just then. Really, really hated it.

After a while Alice forgot her room was cold. She jaunted all around, loped even, with a fuzzy blanket thrown across the small of her back. And her pointy shoulders.

It was a cape, but not as secure. She had to make sure it stayed on, which was ok because her hands got cold as well, when she remembered the whole thing about her room being cold.

Chilly.

Frigidaire.

That’s a refrigerator company, would you guess? She was hysterical when she saw that. You know those things you don’t see no matter how often you look at them? The little plaque on the refrigerator was one of those. It said, “Frigidaire,” in silvery script.

Too pretty to notice. That’s how most girls are these days. That’s how the paper cups are, in the cupboard. Hey! One of those words you just don’t see too often – Cup-board. A board for cups. As if the cups are all sitting on the board, just waiting to be plucked up by you or me or Alice.

But that’s not the point. The point is that the cups have floweries all over them and the floweries are green and orange. It just about kills me. I never knew the cups were green and orange until I really looked.

A while ago Alice plum leaped up and loped over to the front door. There was a click of the lock when she slid it back and a “plunk plunk plunk,” when she walked outside. She is not very quiet. She’s a hulk. Give this girl a baby carrot and she’ll take ten bites out of it before it is gone, and all of them right near your darned ear.

I could tell by the noise of her steps that she was stomping down the stairs. There’s about six stairs. I never counted. It’s one of those things you don’t do – count the steps leading to your front door. Even when you’re shoveling in the tickly snow.

Just counted. There’s four and the top is five.

Well, I can see them now. The stairs I mean. There’s no snow even though there could be soon. Right now it’s just scruffy rain but the clouds are getting meaner all the while.

Posh.

The clouds will be just fine.

The rain is just fine.

We are all getting soft around here, you know.

Except for Alice. Alice carries blankets around with her like capes, like she’s the genius Kryptonite of her age. That’s the real hero, you know. Kryptonite. Cause it’s stronger than superman.

I went to the glass front door a while ago, because I’m the older brother and older brothers make sure little sisters are ok.

Mostly I don’t give a dime about that, but I was curious.

Boy was I lit with curiosity under my fungi toenails.

I knew this guy at college and he never clipped his toenails. He said they were beauties. They were very white at the tips and if he clipped them he would ruin them. He had a maniac ego from them.

We all came around and started clipping while he was sleeping, but the sounds woke ‘im up pretty quick and he was waving around like a zombie fool. I was one of the guys hanging around in the back because I didn’t want to be too involved. I had an extra-pair-of-clippers in case the first one or the second one started malfunctioning. It was a job to be sure.

I squalled when he woke. It wasn’t too bad he was awake, I’d sure like to wake if anyone pulled a fast one on me. The pity was in the meat of things – one foot was done and the other laid waste, all mossy like with the growths and fungi hanging around on the inside next to his cuticle. They were very white at the tips.

Alice has nice feet. I always thought that, as an older brother. My feet and toes are all soiled andcrusted on bottom and pure as white dove angels on the back sides of them. It must be the sun. I think the bottoms of your feet get all crusted because they never see the sun.

Alice’s bottoms of her feet see the sun. You know why I can tell? I am looking straight through the window of our front door and it is shimmery light stained glass without color but it’s clear as the Elven River in some parts of it.

In those parts I see her laying on the grass, all Kryptonite-like, trying sorely to catch that rain in her purple mouth.

She’s opening her pie-hole and shutting it. Sure there’s water droplets on her closed lips sometimes. I wonder if she’s catching any drops in her mouth. Bet not. It’s real hard to catch those buggers in your mouth, probably because your mouth is so wet already and if you caught up you wouldn’t notice.

The process is similar to catching moths when the foul cage is already full.

Did you know when ducks fly their bodies look all still-like? Hardly moving but forward, moving in the direction they are going in.

It’d like to be like that when I fly.

Real consistent.

Alice flies like a dove, with her feet up trailing round the sun. Her feet are Trailing Lobelia. Sorry. I get real bummed out. Posh. All those posh folks trailing around but they are not pretty like my little sister.

My little sister Alice can grin and get the whole crumby world to grin back. Even the stinking sky took a liking to my little sister. She wants rain in her mouth, she gets it. She wants sunshine, it peeks through the clouds and gives her a wave and a raisin cookie.

You really should see Alice when she puffs out her cheeks and makes her eyes real wide. The babies even know how silly she is. The babies show her their dimples and then Alice’s eyes are even happier. A vicious cycle. Alice doesn’t have dimples. Alice doesn’t need dimples. Alice is equipped with her own, internal dimples that are always dimpling even when she’s not happy. They dimple when she’s frustrated too, and they carry a kind of maddening aura and you can tell she’s using her manipulation juice and you just about want to spit but

You look down and see she’s wearing your soccer socks and they come right up to her white thighs.

Normal sisters don’t do that. Wear your soccer socks.

The yellow ones, I mean.

When she sees me looking she shrieks and runs off, and so we play hide and seek all around our little shack house with the dimples on the inside but I cannot find her. She’s usually out in the yard. We are not allowed to leave the house when we play hide and seek, but she is not allowed to wear my soccer socks either.

Alice breaks the rules.

Right when I locate her little white face in the yard she starts screaming hysterically because she knows I will pick her up and toss her in the air or something. She pulls the socks off and hands them to me, real neat-like, and they’re all covered with mud or something. She bows, doing that thing with her hand – that butler kind of bow with a princess wave stuck in there. Rotten thumb.

I tell you what, you get a headache when you use most of your brain late at night. It’s inevitable. Posh, even.

I got bored of watching her pretty fast so I opened the shiny glass door and hollered at her, “Hey, you catching any rain in your hole?”

“Yes,” said the victor. “I caught one but it was hard to get.”

“Well,” I whimpered. “Must be God’s blessing,” I said louder.

My voice has always been a petering machine. It wavers and wivers and wafts. Posh. No direction. I try and push it in one direction and the wind comes back at me. I tell you what – I play soccer but I never was one of those jocks. Kind of glad I wasn’t a jock, actually. Not because of the stereotype. Because of the way things are.

Maybe I would have been a fine jock. There’s a whole lot of fine jocks out there.

Na. I would have been a selfish brute. Still am.

I can see my own ego in the whites of my eyes, something like the cracked eggshells we throw into the compost heap.

Alice acted as if she didn’t hear me – about God’s blessing I mean. She ignores stupid stuff like what I say. Sentimental stuff.

I just say it because my brain is so full of pessimism that if I don’t try and stuff it with something else, it might explode.

The other tactic doesn’t work too well – letting the pessimism leak out. It likes to leak, for example, but then if I started cursing or whatever to Alice, well, I’d probably kill myself.

I correlate certain times of my life with certain immovable pains.

I had four sores on my scalp, once, and they never went away because I kept furiously picking at them. You never remember how things like that show up, ever, because they just stay for eternity and get all scabby and the like.

Eternity’s not so long.

The sores went away, beginning of senior year of high school.

I had sores in my mouth during our trip to Boston. Right before seventh grade I swear it. Wow those burning white misers. From too much sugar, I heard on the radio.

Ya. That’d be about right. Sugar is about the poshest thing I’ve had to eat ever, except for carb-o-hy-drates, but I just recently learned that carbohydrates are sugar all the same.

So sugar must be the best, even though it’s sort of evil. Kind of like how Kryptonite is better than Superman. Creepy with control, like the sound I hear when I’m typing downstairs on the couch and it sounds like someone else is typing too so I stop typing for minute.

I could swear it was me imagining things, but the sound continues from the other couch, a flickering typing noise – uneven, like the casting of a flame’s shadow. The unfurling of a flag in the wind.

Disillusioned. A denouement that does not satisfy.

Then all at once I know the origin of the creeping noise. It is something over by the vent, rattling. But I don’t feel any better. Things don’t just rattle for no reason. Everything has a reason. You betcha the rattling will stop when the heater goes off. You betcha. If it doesn’t….

Nevermind. Alice never was an immovable pain. Well, only for a little while. She grew up pretty quick and she knows grammar better than I do anyway.

I make things flow but she makes them proper.

Boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. She’s come in now and now she’s out on the back porch trying to catch some more rain. I thought about telling her she is gonna catch pneumonia and drop dead die, but you don’t tell kids things like that. If it happens it happens, and nothing can be done. If not, you’d nag them a thousand times before any good came out of your old wagging mouth. That’s not how to make things grow. Maybe you tie a vine to a stick after its head is good and showing, but first they’ve gotta get through the dirt all by themselves.

Anyway, it’s not the brother with the twine it’s the mom. Amen.

Thirty-eight degrees and I’m not just making that up either. I think it’s posh how people make things up just to put them in stories – the exact number and all that. If you don’t know just estimate, ok? If you don’t care than nobody else does either, except your character and you just lied them out of their wits and they don’t stinking trust you anymore.

Blimey.

Fly me.

Flyyyy me to the moon….

I don’t want to go to the moon. It’s a pretty light but it’s a cold light. Distant. White. I’m sure if you got there it would either burn you straight up or there’d be no light at all. All an illusion. A mirage.

Well. Seeing as there wasn’t much I could do about dear Alice, as I did not desire chastisement darken my soul, I loped straight up the stairs to her room and I sat in there for a while.

I will be back to college soon. Really.

Back to the mossy toenails. Back to the windy moors and the idiot girls and the guys who carry around fine-tooth combs with them. Saber toothed tigers.

I’ll be back and Alice will be here.

It just makes me want to write the word “posh” on the visceral lining of my stomach and see if I puke. At least puke would be real and I could look at the chopped peas I ate for supper and then I could wash it down the toilet and clean the Tupperware and already I would feel like a new man.

This feeling is not going away. I realize now, that I am homesick but I am home. Quite a bind.

I really wish I could stick Alice up here in her room and shut the door and not let any of the world come inside.

Knock knock,

Who’s there,

No joke just go away I don’t want your poisonous barbs sticking to my sister’s flannel that she stole from me.

I know what the world is like, now. I know how boys treat girls. How they look at their little white thighs. I’ve been on the other side of things, because I’m the boy and I greed just like all of them. The girls greed too, just not as much.

Anyway, it’s not nice. The world I mean. Instead of thriving the world just greeds. Action verb.

I would like to lock Alice in and lock the world away. I would die so she could have that. That security. That charm without the seduction. The soccer socks she gets from me, not some other heartless jock her own age. She’ll be my age soon, I know it, and it’s not a pretty scene.

Makes you want to look away from the scene altogether, in fact. I do. No I don’t. I try. I’m really an actor in this scene, and I can’t get away from it. If I try….

Alice’s window is really something. It’s a normal window at the bottom, but at the top there’s a whole curvy do-dad and we covered it with a pretty floral design full of bright purples and pinks, and we put a white foam cut out thing on the inside so the light didn’t just stream in when she was trying to sleep. The light does that here, in Alaska.

We just pulled down the foam, though, because we are showing the house to nosy mongers, and we are packing up the U-haul, and lots of nosy things are happening that I don’t want any business with. Alice doesn’t like it either, I can tell. She gets a mousy look on her face when the parental units talk about new windows and having enough cardboard boxes to pack up the antique dolls.

I know why. She doesn’t want to leave the misty mountains. There’s three peaks that we just almost sit right on top of. She doesn’t even have any pictures of them either. She will just have to remember.

Good. Alice is good at remembering, unlike me. Some boys don’t have a lot of wind in their lungs because they’ve been smoking so long. Me, I don’t have a lot of wind in my head. I’m smart. I can say a whole lot and say it clearly. I’m a real crack at English. There’s some parts of Anatomy that I like, and not just the funny ones. I like the terminology. It’s like learning another language but you still get to speak English. Posh.

But for the life of me I can’t remember what I did when I was little, or whose face that was from Boy’s State, or

You know what’s sad? I could play Claire De Lune just a little while ago – the whole socking piece on the piano-forte. I played it for my last piano recital in high school, when I still thought I could do a lot of good in this world. I remember the recital was in this posh Lutheran chapel with poky blue heads in the tile frame, supposed to be the peninsula of Israel I think but it looked like a dragon to me. And the first came out of its head. White fire and all it was so white. The whole tile thing was dark blue and white.

I remember the tile but for the sake of my life I cannot remember but one part of Claire De Lune – the part that starts low and repeats for a little bit. I can play the same part all over the piano – high and in the middle and so on, but nothing else. The whole denouement of the song is flat out missing, when I play it. I just start making things up when I try and remember. I get so bored. Posh, I say, to get bored. I look at the mirror my parents hung by the piano. I make a face. Posh my lips say, and I watch them move. I am not bad looking. Not too much to describe. Not ordinary. Not extra-ordinary. I know what my eyes contain but you can’t guess just by looking. People think eyes are the windows to the soul but they are not. Eyes are for looking out not looking in.

I looked out Alice’s window again. The pretty one. The one at the top.

HOLY PTARMIGAN. There was a crack.

A large streaking crack, just hovering where you couldn’t see him real easily but he sure was there. That crack just kind of squatted there, peering back at me when I tried to look at him. That evil crack stretched the entire length of the window like a prostitute stretched out on your honeymoon bed.

All I did was gape for a while and shuffle around trying to get a good look at him. I stood up on Alice’s bed in my socked feet and felt bad because I had to step on her old jelly cat stuffed animal to get high enough to really see.

Yep. Peppers the crack was there alright, that nasty crack squatting in my little sister’s window. For some reason I wasn’t surprised. Just like the old wind and the old nature of man to break into my little sister’s room. I would expect nothing less. I spit into her trash can. Sometimes a wad of spit shoots up when I am disgusted and the mucus has got to go straight into a trash can. God’s grace Alice had a trash can. You never know, might have ended up trailing down her window like Lobelia.

I frowned a lot and tapped Alice’s glass desk. I went around her room and picked personal stuff up, chucking them on the bed to see what was behind them and then putting them back all nice and neat.

She has a lot of junk. But you just know everything means a particular something to her. There’s a miniature seal there and a blue jean box there and a Popsicle stick that’s been chewed on and

 Good God I found a whole list of my soccer socks in her sock drawer. She must’ve been hoarding them for years. They were not in pairs. Red, yellow, yellow, blue, yellow.

I counted them.

Five, like the stairs. Four steps and then the top.

I could hear when she clomped back up the steps. She’d been out there for a while. I am not surprised. She was probably looking for frozen beetles or rabbits down the rabbit hole or something. I make fun of her name sometimes but she likes it a lot. It’s a nice name.

I could tell she couldn’t find me in the living room, because obviously I was upstairs.

She was bored. She wanted me. It’s nice to feel needed.

She tromped upstairs and when she saw my shaggy head in her room she stared very suspiciously at me as if I had a receding hairline, but instead of scowling she put her hands behind her back and stood all still-like. A silhouette under the door frame. She would be safe if an earthquake struck. I was glad.

I hated her, she was so still. How did I get all the nerves, huh? I can’t hold a ligament still even if I’m dreaming. For Pete’s sake. Poor Pete. We are always taking his name in vain.

Alice waited for me to say something. I did not.

“Watcha doing in here?” She asked. Her eyes still spewed suspicion but we both knew the trouble making was shared.

Like a cheesecake on a stick the mischief was shared. Cut squarely in half with both folks supervising to make sure it’s even. You cut I pick. I’m too sentimental these days. I must stop thinking so much. Not all of life is as serious as cheesecake on a stick. Not very much of life, even. Everything is a small issue compared to something serious like cheesecake on a stick.

“I’ve been investigating.” I said. I’ve always been Frank. Not really though. Alice looked quite pleased, in that doorway of hers. She frowned but when I looked deeper I saw dimples. You can’t help but see dimples when you look at Alice.

She’s always sort of looking at you as if you bought her a Three Musketeer candy bar and then took half of it for yourself. But then she realizes you went to Costco and bought a fifty pack of those whopping fat pills and so she plunges into the garage so that you can both split another.

She likes the texture of the Three Musketeers. I like Milky Way better, because it has more caramel. Ah, the caramel is unnecessary, she declares. Suit yourself. Always suit yourself because I am not buying you a suit.

“What did you find out?” She walked forward, towards me, away from the safety of the doorframe. I pray to God there will be no earthquake now. Not safe not safe.

“I’ll show you,” I smiled with my eyes because I knew I don’t have dimples. Ok, maybe a tiny bit of dimples but they aren’t worth beans compared to hers.

“Come on,” I said, and then I scooped her up and stood on the bed except this time I did not stand on the jelly cat stuffed animal because I did not want to offend Alice. You never want to offend Alice. Not only because she’s so sweet but because something nasty might happen to you in the middle of the night, or you will end up being some bloated character in her next story by the ocean. She writes like Agatha Christie, truly.

She did not see the crack at first, I could tell. “Look closely,” I invited. I placed one foot on her desk to gain a little more height.     

She breathed in and I feel the weight of her body change.

“You saw then. Good. There is a crack in your window, Alice darling. Can’t tell for quite how long it’s been there, but a while for sure.” I set her down. “Dad and I will fix it once we give it a good look and a little time to ferment.” I smiled. The heat came back on and I heard rattling again.

“So what do you say?” I asked. She was just standing on her clean carpet looking perfectly astounded.

“You figured it out.” Her smile was all the warmth I needed, despite the new found breach.

“I always knew my room was cold, even when mom and dad said it was alright. You believed me.” She paced a few laps in the middle of the floor. God, I’m gonna miss this kid. She looks at you like you just replaced the kitchen trash bag for her.

Her eyes flashed green when she turned to face me. “Thanks brother,” And she flat out shook my hand. A big business lawyer federal agent handshake, firm right up to the flesh around my thumb.

She shook my hand. That just about killed me.

Then she turned on her heels and walked out, as this was my room and not hers.