Ariel

Three

The night of the funeral Ariel was afraid to go to sleep. She knew it was crazy, but what she couldn’t get out of her mind was the idea that if she actually did fall asleep she would be dead by morning. Just like Caleb.

And of course it was crazy, because she was too old for crib death, which certainly sounded as though it was limited to kids too young to sleep in a regular bed. And, since she hadn’t heard anything about an outbreak of Bed Death reaching epidemic proportions in downtown Charleston, it stood to reason that she had nothing to worry about.

Knowing this wasn’t terribly helpful. She went to her room after dinner, reading for a couple of hours, and then she got into pajamas and went downstairs to say goodnight to David and Roberta. David picked her up and set her on his lap and put her to work running a pipe cleaner through one of his pipes. That had been a real treat for her some years back, and evidently David hadn’t figured out that she was a little old to go bananas at the opportunity to clean the tobacco spit out of a pipestem. But she did it, and pretended as much enthusiasm as possible.

David kissed her and told her to have pleasant dreams. Roberta, sitting in the kitchen with coffee and a cigarette, told her to sleep well. Ariel went upstairs with no intention of either sleeping or dreaming. She didn’t care whether it made sense or not. She was going to stay awake until morning.

But it was boring just sitting there. After a long time, when she was sure both of them were sleeping, she picked up her tin flute and played it as softly as she possibly could, piping the notes tentatively. She had barely begun playing when she heard Roberta’s footsteps in the hall. She put the flute down and managed to be in bed when the door opened.

“You’re awake,” Roberta said.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“I don’t want you playing that thing.”

“I didn’t think anybody could hear.”

“I don’t want to listen to that tonight. It’s a matter of respect, Ariel. For Caleb.”

“All right.”

“And try to get some sleep.”

“I will.”

Alone in her room she tried to figure out how playing the flute showed a lack of respect for her dead baby brother. I don’t want you playing that thing. I don’t want to listen to that tonight. Fair enough, she thought, but why drag Caleb into it? He’d liked her flute music when he was alive and it certainly wasn’t going to disturb him now. Either he was six feet deep in the suburban cemetery or he was up in Heaven with God and the angels, whichever way you wanted to figure it, and either way her flute wasn’t going to put him off his feed.

Anyway, she’d been sort of playing for Caleb. And then Roberta told her to show respect by stopping.

She made a stab at reading, picking up first one of her Oi books, then a young adult novel by Sandra Scoppettone. Both were favorites, but tonight it seemed to her that she had outgrown the first without having yet grown into the second. She put the books away and retrieved the flute, sitting cross-legged on the bed with the mouthpiece to her lips and her eyes closed. She fingered the notes without blowing across the mouthpiece. In this way she was able to hear the music in her head while the flute remained silent.

Eventually she put the flute back on her desk. After a while she turned off her light. She felt a chill and got under the covers. It was all right to close her eyes, she decided, so long as she didn’t let herself fall asleep. For practice she closed them and lay still, counting her breaths, then snapping open her eyes and sitting up in bed on the fiftieth breath.

Perfectly safe, she told herself. That would get her through the night, little stretches of rest with her eyes closed. As long as she never stayed that way past fifty breaths she couldn’t possibly fall asleep, and if she didn’t fall asleep she wouldn’t die in her sleep. Not that she really believed in that possibility anyway, but why take chances?

She closed her eyes again, counted fifty breaths, and opened them. She closed them a third time, and when she opened them again it was morning. She’d slept after all, and had lived through it, and she felt a little sheepish and greatly relieved.

After that she didn’t have any further worries about Bed Death.

The second week after Caleb’s funeral Ariel stopped at a Meeting Street drugstore on the way home from school and bought a spiral composition notebook. When she got home Roberta’s car was gone and the house was empty. She let herself in and hurried up the steep staircase and down the hall to her room at the rear of the house.

Her tin flute was disassembled on her desk. She fitted the pieces together and put the instrument to her lips, holding the pose for a moment before beginning to play. Then she let herself drift into a melody, improvising, letting the flute lead her fingers to the notes it wanted to sound. She played with her eyes closed, and, as the music caught her up, a remarkably serene expression transformed her face.

She played for perhaps ten minutes. Then she put down the flute and took the new spiral notebook from her bookbag. She uncapped a green felt-tipped pen and began writing on the first page, forming the letters in a neat angular hand. The words flowed as effortlessly as the notes had poured forth from the flute.

I am Ariel, the Adopted.

“I am the beautiful stranger.” I liked that book. I didn’t finish it, though. I don’t know why. I do that a lot, start a book and get interested in it and enjoy it and then not finish it.

Anyway, I am not the beautiful stranger. It’s the beautiful part that doesn’t fit. I don’t hate my looks but I would never stop traffic, not unless I flung myself in front of a car and maybe not even then.

I can just about picture that, like a cartoon. Me lying dead under the wheels of a car and a crowd of fools all standing around gawking and one of them saying, “Well, poor child, she just wasn’t pretty enough to stop traffic.”

Sometimes it scares me, the kind of thoughts I have. All the wrong things make me laugh and none of the right ones.

I just looked in the mirror to see what it is about me that isn’t beautiful. I can’t exactly say because beautiful is how things all add together or how they don’t. But my whole head is long and narrow and my chin comes to a point and that doesn’t help a great deal. I remember one Halloween when I was young enough for that sort of thing I was got up like a witch and it could chill you how much I looked the part. It’s the shape of my head that does it, and what are you going to do about that? If I were one of those Jewish girls with big noses in all those books I start but don’t finish it would be simple enough. But where is the plastic surgeon that will change the shape of your head?

Plus my eyes are too small. Correction: the eyes are big enough but the irises are too small. There was an expert on the Chinese art of face-reading on Merv Griffin who said eyes like mine are a sign of a small and insignificant character. I got mad and turned the set off. Like it would teach the fool a lesson.

Roberta used to tell me I was pretty. She used to talk to me a lot even if I was never much at paying attention to her.

She hardly talks to me at all now. I don’t know when it was that she decided she didn’t like me anymore. Maybe she never liked me but I used to be too dumb to know the difference, and maybe as I grew up she got tired of pretending, plus I began to notice things.

She was through liking me by the time Caleb was born and now that he’s dead she hates me. For being alive, I guess.

For a while I thought things were going to change. When she came into my room the night of the funeral, I thought she would say how she couldn’t sleep either, and we’d wind up having one of those mother-daughter talks.

I tend to expect too much.

I never really believed her when she told me I was pretty. I knew she didn’t mean it. It’s something you do, you tell your little girl she’s pretty. David told me the same, and when he tells me I believe it. Not that I am pretty but that he thinks I am.

I wonder who I look like. My mother or my father.

No way on earth I’m ever going to know.

I think about this a lot. When I think about my mother sometimes I’ll just stand staring into the mirror over my dresser and try imagining my face the way it’ll be when I’m older. Of course I don’t know how old my mother was when she had me, but what I usually decide on is that she was seventeen or thereabouts, because that seems a usual age for having a baby and putting it up for adoption. This is just guessing because she could have been forty for all I know but I usually settle on seventeen. Well, I am almost thirteen now. That is just four years shy of seventeen, so the face in the mirror isn’t all that different from hers when she had me.

I can just hold that thought in my head and fool with it for hours.

That’s if I look like her. I could just as easy look like my father, and I don’t even know where to start when I try thinking about him. He could be anyone at all, anyone in the whole world. He could be old or young or dead or alive, and no way in the world for me to know anything about it.

That gets to me sometimes. It really does. I could pass either of them on the street and never know it.

Twice in recent months Ariel had seen women on the street with faces that seemed to remind her of her own. Each time she found herself following the woman, hurrying along on the opposite side of the street trying to sneak quick peeks at her. She began working out in her mind an elaborate sequence in which she and her mother recognized one another and had a whole joyous family reunion.

Then in each case she had seen that there was really no strong resemblance after all. And if there were, what would she do about it? Just tag along until she was noticed, she supposed, and then slink off like a whipped dog.

Oh, I am not beautiful, but I am the stranger.

Well, that is obvious. I would not be writing in this book if I had anyone in the world to talk to. It isn’t even a real diary. I looked in Woolworth’s the day before yesterday and they had diaries but I didn’t have any money with me. Then yesterday Erskine walked me home and I couldn’t exactly say, “Let’s stop in Woolworth’s so I can buy a book to write secrets in.” And by this afternoon I decided I couldn’t see myself buying one of those books that say things like My Secret Thoughts in gold on the fake leather cover.

They have locks a baby could open with a toothpick, if a baby happened to have a toothpick, and all Roberta has to do is find a locked book called My Secret Thoughts. That would be like writing Be Calm and Relaxed on a red flag and showing it to a bull. Plus it wouldn’t matter where I hid it. I could bury it six feet deep in the flower bed and she would “just happen” to dig up that particular bed and come across my diary.

Plus I’d probably just lose the key my own self.

So instead of a diary I have this notebook, and so instead of hiding it where I’d never find it but Roberta would, I’ll keep it in my schoolbag with my other notebooks. Yes, like The Purloined Letter, which I actually read all the way through, short as it was. Roberta could never resist a diary, but who on earth would want to read a kid’s dumb notebook?

My name is Ariel, the Adopted.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” Names, names, names. Sometimes I think ninety percent of school is learning the names of things, whether they’re cities or presidents or parts of the body or whatever they are. I wonder if it makes any difference whether you know something’s name or not. Say a bird flies by and you say, “Hark, there goes a Great Crested Flycatcher.” Now what have you actually said? You’ve only proved that you just happen to know what other people have decided to call that bird. It’s not as if the bird knows he’s a Great Crested Flycatcher. He just hangs in there catching Great Crested Flies, or whatever he does for a living.

I can just ramble on and on. I wonder does everybody have thoughts like these or am I crazy. I can just say that easy and all, or sometimes I can worry about it. Not exactly working up a sweat, but more like lying in bed at night ready to sleep and getting a chill at the thought and sitting right straight up in bed for a few minutes.

My name is Ariel and I don’t know if I like it or not. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t and I don’t know which feeling generally has the upper hand.

The first thing about my name is that it is unusual. When you are a little kid that is awful because all little kids want is to be like everybody else. Anything different is bad and embarrassing. Especially your name because that is something everybody else knows about you.

Ariel.

I used to be teased about my name. Kids would all make the same stupid jokes about car aerials or TV aerials. Or they would call me Antenna. Hysterically funny. Thinking about it now I wonder why I even bothered to hate it, but I did. You tease a little kid about anything and it’s going to hurt, even if the teasing doesn’t make any sense.

I started to like my name about the same time I started becoming the unbeautiful stranger. I guess everything started happening in the early part of the year. We moved here and I left my old school and started in my new school and Caleb was born and I got my period and Roberta started not liking me anymore and I started turning into a private person.

I don’t think I became a different person, exactly. I changed by becoming more completely the person I really was all along. As if I was always a stranger but never knew it before.

Ariel the strange stranger.

What I like about the name Ariel is partly what I used to hate about it, namely that it is different. It is just fitting that I should have an unusual and uncommon name. Plus it makes me think of flying, soaring high in the sky above the ordinary people, gliding effortlessly like a hawk in the autumn sky, just floating on air currents and having a great old time.

There is a book of poems called Ariel by a crazy woman who killed herself as soon as she was done writing them. I found the book in the public library over the summer. My heart jumped when I saw it. I had never heard of it and there was my name on the cover of a book. It was the oddest sensation seeing it like that, as if the book had been put there just for me to notice it.

I was almost afraid to touch it, but I’d no more not pick it up than Roberta would pass up a book that calls itself My Secret Thoughts. I sat at one of the long reading tables with it and my first reaction was to be disappointed because it was poetry. I like poems but I guess I thought the book would be about me and tell me who I was or some such silly thing, and then it was poems.

Before I ever tried to read them I read on the book cover about Sylvia Plath, who wrote them, and how she kept writing her poetry and thinking about suicide until finally she stuck her head in the gas oven.

And I got so mad! I don’t know if I was ever so mad before or since. Because I thought they named me Ariel after that book of poems, named me after somebody putting her head in an oven and turning on the gas, and I thought, God, what a hateful thing to do to a baby!

That book was published after I was adopted. I checked the dates. They just went and named me Ariel. Maybe Crazy Sylvia named her book after me.

Oh, who cares? She was crazy and her poems are crazy, or at least I can’t make head or tail out of them. Anyway I don’t want to make head or tail out of them. They make me feel all cramped, all that hate and blood and anger, all that screaming without any noise.

I wonder who picked the name. David or Roberta?

I guess they like unusual names. Their names are ordinary ones but they picked Ariel and Caleb for their children. Caleb Oliver Jardell. I wonder if Caleb would have liked his name, or if they would have teased him about it.

My middle name is Emily. For David’s mother. I hate it.

I liked Caleb’s name. The sound of it, and the way it looks on the page when you write it. It looks like Cable with the letters switched around, and once you see that you keep switching letters and trying for other words, but all you get is gibberish.

Elbac.

Laceb.

Blace.

Oh, please don’t let me think about Caleb. I feel terrible when I think about him.

I don’t care for the name Roberta. I don’t like women’s names that you get by tacking an ending onto a man’s name. Pauline, Georgette. There’s a girl in my geography class called Davida and I really feel sorry for her. It’s as if her parents are telling the whole world right out that they wanted a boy so much they couldn’t be bothered thinking of a girl’s name.

I wonder what my real name is.

That sentence looks so weird I decided to leave plenty of space around it. But I know what it means and it makes sense to me.

I have thought about this a lot. How when my mother was pregnant with me she decided to put me up for adoption. Maybe she had no choice. I don’t know anything about that.

But she carried me for nine months, unless I was premature (which I probably was, just to be different), and during that time she must have done some thinking. In the hospital, waiting to give birth to me, she must have had thoughts. Even knowing she was putting me up for adoption, even knowing that she would never set eyes on me, she would have been wondering if I would be a boy or a girl.

And she would have picked out names. She might not have wanted to, knowing it would just hurt her, knowing it would make it that much harder to give me up, but I honestly don’t see how she could have helped herself. Oh, I myself will sometimes think up names for kids, and I am only twelve years old and not pregnant, nor likely to be, thank you all the same! But I will now and then imagine myself married and with children, which I can imagine easily enough, and I’ll think, well, I would call the boy Ethelbert and the girl Davida, or whatever names I am crazy about that particular day.

Now she must have done this. So she had a name in mind for me. So in a sense that is my real name and Ariel is just what they call me.

They call me Ariel, the Adopted.

I don’t have a nickname. Back when she used to like me Roberta would sometimes call me Honey or Darling but they were never specific names for me, just all-purpose pet names that she used. And David used to call me Little Pooch. I don’t know where he got the name from. Now that I think about it, I don’t guess it’s awfully flattering. But I used to like the idea that he had a special name for me.

Now he generally calls me Ariel, like everybody else.

There was a girl, Linda Goodenow, who was sort of my best friend two years ago, but not quite. I didn’t have anyone I liked better but I never felt close enough to Linda to call her a best friend. Anyway, the point is that she used to call me Airy. She didn’t ask if I wanted to be called that. She just one day called me Airy and went on with it.

I hated it. Thinking back, I don’t know why I didn’t ask her not to call me Airy. How was she to know I hated it if I never said anything? But I never did and she went right on calling me Airy, probably because it made her feel more like best friends to be the only person to call me by that name. Some best friend to be the only person in the world calling me by a name I hated!

But then her father got transferred and they moved. All the way to California. She wrote me four letters. I answered the first one and it took me forever to think of enough things to write to fill a page, even writing large. Then I didn’t answer the next three letters and I guess she took the hint. She doesn’t even have my new address since we moved. I guess if she wrote to the old one they would forward it.

Linda called her parents Jack and Rita. She said that was what they taught her to do. She called them that from the time she was a little kid, which is weird to imagine, a little kid calling out, “Hi, Jack! Hi, Rita!”

If I called Roberta Roberta I think she would shit. I don’t know what David would do. Needless to say I have never called either of them by name, or even referred to them by name to other kids. I suppose I would to Erskine if we got to know each other well.

So far I only call them David and Roberta in my mind. And nobody knows what’s in my mind.

Sometimes I don’t even know—

Back to David and Roberta. I was just thinking. I don’t really call them anything. I always used to call them Mommy and Daddy. Since I am going to be officially a teenager soon I suppose I ought to switch to Mother and Father. But lately I don’t use a name of any sort when I talk to them.

Sometimes it used to bother me, calling them Mommy and Daddy. I had the feeling of being disloyal to the real mother and father I had wandering around somewhere in the world. But I never got too worked up at the thought because I had brains enough to realize it’s not terribly logical.

I may be crazy but I’m not stupid.

But what’s hysterical is Linda Goodenow with real parents she calls by their first names, and me, adopted, calling mine Mommy and Daddy.

Call me Ariel, the Adopted.

Or call me Ishmael, if you prefer.

There’s another book I didn’t finish. Moby Dick. Twenty pages in the library was enough to convince me I didn’t care all that much about whales, and what I did care about whales was that people would stop hunting them to extinction, so the last thing I wanted to read was a book about men hunting whales.

I loved that opening sentence, though. “Call me Ishmael.” It really grabs you.

Imagine being the last individual of a vanishing species. Like if you were the last whale in the universe. Except how would you know you were the last one? Although whales are supposed to be super intelligent and God only knows what they know and don’t know.

My Secret Thoughts, by Arnold the Whale.

I was just standing over at the window. It’s been raining on and off all day. I can get mournful just from the weather. You would think the funeral would have been on a day like this one instead of a good bright day with the sun shining.

Let’s think of something else.

At least it’s interesting here looking out the window. When we lived on Coteswood you could stare out the window all day and never see anything more exciting than someone mowing his lawn. Now there are always people walking around, and a lot of interesting dogs that don’t have to be on leashes.

I like this house so much better. The first day we moved in I was completely at home here. It’s big and it rambles and Roberta and David kept getting confused at the beginning. They would try to walk from the kitchen to the downstairs lavatory and wind up in the living room instead. But I never had this problem. As though I had a map of the inside of the house in my head before I ever saw the place.

A floorplan, I mean. Couldn’t think of the word.

I think that’s Roberta’s car. I’ll go look.

Yes it is.

I even knew what this house would look like before I saw it. I guess I must have heard them discussing it. But when we first came here and parked down the block I knew right away which house we were going to look at. I mean I just knew, as if I had seen a picture before and I was recognizing it.

I never mentioned this to them. I think they already figure I’m crazy so why make trouble?

She’s on the stairs now. Roberta. “Hello?” But it’s easier not to pay attention.

The stairs always creak when she climbs up or down them. They never creak when I do.

It’s funny.

I’ve got homework, arithmetic and social studies, and I just don’t feel like doing it. Of course that’s what Roberta thinks I’m doing right now.

This is great. She’s standing in the doorway of my room watching me and I’m pretending I don’t even know she’s there. She thinks I’m doing homework, writing in my spiral notebook, and I’m writing about her. This is really neat.

There. She left. Because of course she wouldn’t want to disturb me when I’m busy with my work. Just another way this book has it all over My Secret Thoughts.

Footsteps on the stairs. Creak creak creak!

Homework is boring and stupid, so of course she wouldn’t dream of interrupting it. But if she knew I was doing something that mattered to me, like what I’m writing now or like my music, then she’d make a point of cutting in.

Caleb used to love it when I played the flute for him. At least I think he did. I would go to his room and play for a long time and he just loved to listen.

Nobody else in this house does. They think I’m just fooling around.

I think Roberta’s finally beginning to get the message that I don’t want flute lessons. She says if I were to take lessons I could have a real flute. What popped into my head the first time she said that was that I don’t want a real flute, I want an adopted one. Another example of the kind of thing I think is hysterical but nobody else would.

I like my flute. It’s sort of tinny but I like the sounds it can make. It fits into the kind of music I want to play. As hard as it is to play, I don’t think you could call it a toy.

I never heard another instrument that makes just this sound.

That’s why I like it and I suppose that’s why Roberta doesn’t.

Oh, I’ll get at my homework in a few minutes. I always do. I’m always prepared and I always do well in school and get good grades. When I switched schools they were doing completely different things in some of my classes on account of being in the City of Charleston school system. I picked it all up in the middle of the term and got good marks right from the beginning without even having to kill myself doing it.

It’s how I am.

I guess I must have had intelligent parents. Even if they did manage to be stupid about one particular thing.

At least my mother decided to have me. She could have had an abortion, and then where would I be? And who would be having all these thoughts?

I wonder what she was like. I wonder about both of my parents, but I especially wonder about my mother.

I wonder if she was evil.