Heartsick

CHAPTER 3

Susan didn’t want to be there. Her childhood home was cluttered, and its tiny Victorian rooms reeked of cigarettes and sandalwood. She sat on the gold thrift-store couch in the parlor, occasionally looking at her watch, crossing and uncrossing her legs, twisting her hair around her fingers.

“Are you done yet?” she finally asked her mother.

Susan’s mother, Bliss, looked up from the project she had spread out on the large wooden wire spool that served as a coffee table. “Soon,” Bliss said.

On the same night every year, Bliss burned a likeness of Susan’s father in effigy. Susan knew it was crazy. But with Bliss, it was easier to just go along. Bliss made the foot-tall father figure out of bundled straw, wound round with brown packing string. It had been an evolving process. The first year, she had used dead bear grass from the yard, and it had been too wet and hadn’t burned. Kerosene had been required to get the thing ablaze and sparks had set the compost pile on fire and the neighbors had called 911. Now Bliss bought straw ready-packaged at a pet-supply store. It came in a plastic bag with a picture of a rabbit on it.

Susan had said she wouldn’t come this year, but there she sat, watching her mother wrap the packing string tighter and tighter around the little straw man’s femurs.

Bliss cut the string, tied it in a knot around the straw man’s ankle, and took a drag off her cigarette. That was Bliss for you: She drank green algae every day and smoked menthols. She embraced contradictions. She wore no make-up except for bloodred lipstick, which she wore every day without fail. She refused to wear fur except for her vintage leopard-skin coat. She was a vegan, but she ate milk chocolate. She had always made Susan feel, in comparison, less beautiful, less glamorous, less crazy.

Susan would admit that she and Bliss did have two things in common: a shared belief in the artistic potential of hair, and poor taste in men. Bliss cut hair for a living and wore her bleached hippie dreads down to her waist. Susan colored her own hair, dyeing her chin-length bob colors like Green Envy or Ultra Violet or, most recently, Cotton Candy Pink.

Bliss appraised her handiwork with a satisfied nod. “There,” she said. She got up from her cross-legged position on the floor and bounced into the kitchen, her dreadlocks flapping behind her. She reappeared a moment later with a photograph.

“I thought you might want to have this,” she said.

Susan took the color snapshot. It was a photograph of her as a toddler, standing in the yard with her father. He still had his heavy beard and was bending down so he could hold her hand; she was looking up at him and beaming, all plump cheeks and tiny teeth. Her brown hair was tied up in messy pigtails, and her red dress was dirty; he was wearing a T-shirt and holey jeans. They were both sunburned and barefoot, and they appeared completely happy. Susan had never seen the photograph before.

She felt a wave of sorrow wash over her. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

“It was in a box of his old papers.”

Susan’s father had died when she was fourteen. Now when Susan thought of him, he was always kind and wise, a picture of paternal perfection. She knew it wasn’t that simple. But after he was gone, both she and Bliss had fallen apart, so he must have had some leveling influence.

“He loved you so much,” Bliss said quietly.

Susan wanted a cigarette, but after spending her childhood lecturing Bliss about lung cancer, she didn’t like to smoke around her. It seemed an admission of defeat.

Bliss looked like she wanted to say something motherly. She reached up and sweetly smoothed a piece of Susan’s pink hair. “The color’s faded. Come into the salon and I’ll touch it up. The pink is flattering on you. You’re so pretty.”

“I’m not pretty,” Susan said, turning away. “I’m striking. There’s a difference.”

Bliss withdrew her hand.

It was dark and wet in the backyard. The back porch light illuminated a half circle of muddy grass and dead sedum planted too close to the house. The straw man was in the copper fire bowl. Bliss leaned over and set the straw on fire with a white plastic lighter and then stood back. The straw crackled and burned and then the flames crept up the little straw man’s torso until they engulfed him fully. His little arms were splayed wide, as if in panic. Then all human shape was lost to the orange blaze. Susan and Bliss burned Susan’s father every year so that they could let him go, start fresh. At least that was the idea. Maybe they would stop if it ever took.

Susan’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away. That was the thing. You thought you were emotionally steady, and then your dead father went and had a birthday and your crazy mother went and set a straw doll on fire in his memory.

“I’ve got to go,” Susan said. “There’s someone I need to meet.”