The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio
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and blush and red lipstick and glittery blue or green eye shadow that he bought for her at Rite Aid. She holds her long hair up like a glamorous model, and he tells her to get herself a piece of chocolate from the refrigerator, and to pour him some of his Ballantine whiskey. She twists the ice out of its tray carefully, into the freezer bin, and refills the tray. Then she puts three ice cubes in the glass and fills the glass. She chooses a chocolate, taking a few minutes to decide, trying to guess which one is the caramel and which is the cherry or the coconut or, best of all, the one with more chocolate inside. If she dances for Grandpa she will get another piece, and if she brings him a second glass of whiskey he will go to sleep, and she can eat whatever she likes.
It is the end of July, a month before second grade. In June Annabelle went to day camp, where she went swimming in a pool and made several ceramic ashtrays with lopsided scallops. But camp was too expensive to go for the whole summer. Now she has nothing to do all day but sit in the air-conditioning and watch TV, the curtains closed against the hot bright sun. Or she can play in a corner of the lobby with her Barbies, while the phone rings and grownups go in and out asking for the plastic cards that open the doors or pouring themselves coffee from the pot that sits on a burner all day next to the rack of brochures for the caverns. The caverns are the big attraction here, the only thing around that people might want to see, though Annabelle has never been there. The brochures show damp stalactites and rock walls that have folds in them like blankets. The visitors’ children kick at the chairs in the lobby or grab handfuls of brochures and stare at her. They take butterscotch candies from the dish on the counter, which she is not allowed to have, filling their mouths and their pockets and dropping the wrappers on the floor. Annabelle is not allowed to pick up the wrappers, because they have germs. According to her mother, germs are everywhere, waiting to make you sick.
Annabelle is allowed to go behind the counter and sit at the big desk but not to answer the phone. She has a plastic one that she puts on the desk. She picks up the pink receiver and answers, “Burnside Motel,” in a professional voice. She pretends her Old Maid cards are key cards, and she hands them out to her Barbies and tells them how to get to the different rooms and where they should park their cars. She explains that there are three places to eat in town—a Denny’s, an Arby’s, and Sue’s Kitchen—and that Denny’s has the best hamburgers but Sue’s has really good fried chicken.
“Do you want to come sit with me in the office?” her mother says.
“Nope,” Annabelle says. The TV show is interesting, cartoon mice in their furnished mouse hole with its arched doorway, backing away from a big orange cat’s paw that is poking in. Annabelle holds her breath for a second, but the cat can’t get to them.
“Mommy,” she says. “Can I get a mouse?”
“A mouse! Hell, no. Mice are dirty. They carry germs.”
“I want one,” Annabelle says, jutting out her lower lip.
“You want a mouse,” her mother says. “And what if the mouse gets loose? What if it runs into the office, or one of the rooms? We’ll be out on our asses in ten minutes. No way you are getting a mouse, Missy.”
On TV, the mice are tiptoeing into the kitchen, toward a big wedge of swiss cheese in a mousetrap.
“What about a gerbil?” Annabelle says.
Annabelle doesn’t remember her father, who left when she was a baby. The man she thinks of as her father is the one who lived with them when she was in preschool and kindergarten and part of first grade. It’s Joe she remembers, standing at the open kitchen window blowing smoke out into the white-flowered bushes bordering the motel, putting his cigarettes out one by one in the seashell ashtray on the sill. Joe used to read to her—stories about how the leopard got its spots and the loon got its necklace. He fixed the things that broke at the motel, the bathtub drains that clogged and the heaters that wouldn’t come on. Now another man does that, but he doesn’t live with them. Joe left, and there hasn’t been anybody since, because, as Annabelle’s mother explained to her, most men are good for nothing pieces of shit, who can’t appreciate a quality woman.
Since Joe left, her mother has gotten almost as big as Grandpa. There are no sweets in the house, but there is lots of bread, kaiser rolls and English muffins and loaves of Wonder. There are boxes of macaroni and cheese that come in spirals or rounds, and family-sized bags of Fritos and pretzels and Ruffles and Pringles. Her mother can eat a whole tube of Pringles just during Wheel of Fortune. She snacks all day long in the office, too. At night, when she thinks Annabelle is asleep, she cries.
Annabelle lies in bed holding Simba, her stuffed lion, listening to her mother’s sobbing. Usually Simba can comfort her, but tonight he seems indifferent to her troubles—her fears of rotting all over from too much candy, or of burning in hell, where her mother says all the bad people burn, her worry about her mother who is going to die of loneliness unless a man touches her soon and she gets some loving. Tonight Simba does not seem to care that as each day passes there is no man and no loving and her mother is one step closer to dying. Simba is king of the jungle, the most powerful animal, and he can do anything when he wants to.
“Help,” Annabelle whispers, but Simba seems to be sleeping. Annabelle hears her mother hang up the phone, then the crackle of a chip bag being opened. She puts both hands around Simba’s neck and squeezes hard, but his eyes just shine at her blankly and she knows he is not going to come out from behind them.
It’s a few days before Annabelle’s mother notices that there is only one fish in the bowl on the kitchen counter. It is Annabelle’s job to feed the fish; every morning and evening she has been shaking the flakes of food onto the surface of the water and watching the remaining one rise to the surface, its mouth open and working to catch them.
“Where’s the other one?” her mother says one morning.
Annabelle shrugs, trying to be casual. She lifts a spoonful of Cheerios carefully to her mouth. Inside her chest, she can feel her heart flipping like the fish did, before she squashed it. She would like to tell her mother what happened, but maybe her mother will get mad, and then she will shake Annabelle, hard, spank her, and send her to her room.
“It flew away, I guess,” she says.
“Well,” her mother says, “I’m surprised they lived this long. Those things usually go belly-up in a week.”
“Oh,” Annabelle says. Her heart quiets, floating.
When her mother goes into the office, Annabelle returns to the bowl. She puts her index finger to the glass, and the fish swims to it, looking at her.
“Here, fishie,” Annabelle says.
It swims away, returns. In a video Annabelle watched last night, a whale was captured and put in an aquarium, and then some children helped it get back to the ocean. She doesn’t know where the ocean is, though, only that it’s far away from here. She goes into the living room and sits on the couch for a few minutes, but she keeps thinking about the fish. She turns on the TV to distract herself, but the kitchen counter is just beyond the TV, and all she can see are the gold fins waving back and forth, the small beads of its eyes looking at her, asking her to set it free.
She thinks a minute, then goes over and climbs up on a stool. She takes the bowl in both hands, moving slowly so the water won’t slosh over the sides, and carries it into the bathroom. She sets it on the floor and reaches her hand in and takes out the little castle. Then she dumps the water and the goldfish into the toilet bowl. She watches it swim around there, then goes to watch TV for a while and forgets about it.
When she has to pee, though, she remembers. She goes in and pulls down her jeans and underwear, and sits on the toilet. But she is afraid the fish will jump up and bite her vagina, maybe even swim up in there, so she gets up and flushes the toilet, making sure the fish is gone before she sits back down. She takes the bowl back to the kitchen, fills it with water from the sink, and puts