What are You Looking At? by Ruth Edgett
Joseph doesn’t beat Wanda. With his fists anyway. He’s shouting up the stairs at her as we sit on the bed listening to her mother’s records and trying on make-up I brought over. “Hiding up there painting your face and what-not are ya?” When she doesn’t answer he says, “Whatsamatter? Scared to speak?” He lets go a laugh, but it’s not funny. Wanda reaches over to the bedside and turns up the volume, then turns it down again because he could yell at her for it being too loud.
“Plaster that stuff on all day and it won’t fix the hound dog face you were born with,” he says. Wanda swallows, like you do when you’re about to barf. We can tell he’s right at the bottom of the stairs. Then we hear paper rustling. Which means he must have found our books and her sketch pad, the one Teacher gave Wanda today when she told her, “You could be a really fine artist someday.”
“What the hell’s this?” he says. “Dog, or…” We know he’s looking at the drawing she made of Buster when we got home from school. “Oh! I know,” he says. “Self-portrait,” and gets a laugh out of this.
Joseph’s not supposed to be home this early. Something must have happened at the lobster wharf again. Buyers are tight with the prices this year, they say. As soon as Wanda and I saw the car rocking into park before the wheels had even stopped moving, we knew it was too late to run downstairs and pick up our things. He cursed at Buster and banged around outside for a while, but now he’s come into the house.
We’re on the bed, staring at each other over make-up and mirrors between us on the spread.
“You better go,” she says, not looking at me, pushing my stuff across.
“But—” I say, thinking she could use a friend, that maybe I can soften the blows somehow—and I know they are blows because she flinches every time he sends another zinger.
“Whoever told you that you could draw?” he says, and we both shrink at the sound of those thick pages hitting the floor and sliding.
“Pain in the ass!” he says. “All you’ve ever been. Goddamn Jeezlus pain in the ass! Now you’ve brought home something else I’m gonna have to pay for,” and he’s fallen into that whining kind of sing-song rhythm he falls into once he gets warmed up.
Teacher told Wanda she didn’t even have to pay for the pad. It’s hers, she said, to draw whatever she wants, and not worry about whether she’ll be graded on it. So you can develop your talent, Teacher said.
“Nothin’ but a long, lanky streak of misery…” he moans from downstairs. That line’s one of his favorites.
“Just go,” Wanda says to me, eyes still downcast, blue eyeshadow shimmering in the light from the bedroom window. She picks up a Kleenex and begins to rub it off.
Leave it on, I want to say. It’s pretty on you. Way prettier than on me, but I say nothing. Somehow I know that’s not what she needs right now. What she needs is for her best friend not to hear her father telling her how worthless she is. So, I get up off the bed and try to force some cheer into my good-bye as I head for the door. “Alright! See you tomorrow then.”
“Yeah,” she says, unfolding her long legs (way longer than mine) and following me off the bed. She goes to the record player and picks the arm off the vinyl just as Neil Diamond’s winding into the chorus of “I Am, I Said.”
“Why your mother even decided to take you home…”
That fetches me up. I turn to her.
“Go!” Wanda says, voice urgent, eyes pleading.
So I do. And pull the door firmly shut behind me—maybe the words won’t hurt so much through a closed door—and start downstairs.
Joseph’s sitting on the living room couch facing the stair rail. Guess I’m staring because he’s staring back.
He doesn’t think much of me. I can tell by how he often jokes around in his sneering way: Mommy and Daddy bought you a pretty lunch box, did they? Little Lady’s too good to carry her peanut butter and jelly in a paper bag like Wanda.
I never give an answer because I know he never expects one. Never wants one. At about the middle stair, my legs stop moving.
Wanda’s pretty, and she loves her dog, and she’s smart, and she can draw better than anyone else in school. Who do you think you are? Joseph is still glaring at me and I don’t turn away.
Wanda’s too good for what you say to her! She doesn’t know that but I do. And you’re just a big old bag of wind. Need someone to poke a hole in you.
Joseph breaks the silence with that same whiney-shouty voice he’s been aiming upstairs at Wanda. “What the hell are you lookin’ at?” he says.
I’m holding the rail, looking right back at him. Not too goddamn much. That’s what I’m looking at.
I could say that. I could say that right now and cut him down; a little five-foot-nothing thirteen-year-old, saying what a six-foot-six-heavy-thug knows is true. And I could run the last few steps down and out the front door before the words even register.
But what about Wanda if I do?
So, I bite my bottom lip, take my hand from the rail, wrench that door open and run wild for the road. Then my top blows: “Not too goddam much! That’s what I’m looking at,” I yell. “I’m not looking at fucking anything at all!”
Artist’s Statement
I love examining a particular situation, then allowing characters who might have lived through it to speak, “warts and all”—not just the beautiful stuff, but the ugly stuff as well. For me, the most thrilling part of being a writer is allowing unheard voices to speak and finding the stories only I can tell.
A Maritime Canadian by birth and upbringing, Ruth Edgett is a former print journalist and prize-winning short story writer with fiction and non-fiction published and forthcoming in books, magazines and journals based in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. She is author of A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007), a narrative non-fiction book about her mother’s family. A novelist in waiting, Ruth is seeking a home for one manuscript and is writing a second. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Prince Edward Island and a MS in Communications Management from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University.