A Touch of Lavender Read online

  My Mom listened until they were done. The big purple-crested Skoag watched her listen to them. His big flat eye-spots were pointed toward her all the time, calm and dead and unfocused like all Skoag eyes are. He was looking over the heads of the tourists and hecklers, straight at her.

  When the song was finished, they didn't go right into another song like usual. Purple stood there, watching my mother, and letting the air leak out of his puffers. The other Skoags looked at him, and they seemed puzzled, shifting around and one made a flat squawk. But then they let their air out, too, and pretty soon they were all empty and bony, their puffer things tight against their bodies again. My Mom kept staring at the Skoag, like she was still hearing music, until I shook her arm.

  "I'm coming," she said, but she didn't. She didn't even move, until I shook her arm again and said, "I'm hungry."

  Then she jerked, and looked down at me finally. "Oh, my poor little kid," she said. She really meant it.

  That bothered me. I thought about it while we walked home. I wasn't any more selfish than any kid is, and kids have a right to be selfish sometimes. So I walked along, thinking that she really did know how awful this month was going to be, and how much I hated squidgy macaroni, and she probably even knew that the sole was coming off my sneaker. But she'd still given the check to Teddy. And that was a hard thing for a kid to understand.

  So we went home. Mom switched on the stereo and went right to work. She was real methodical and practical when there wasn't a musician to distract her. She sorted out what groceries we had and organized them in the cupboard. Then she went through all the pockets of her clothes, and dug inside the chair and got together all the money we had. It was ten seventy-eight. Then she sat me at the table with her, like I was one of her musicians, and told me how she was going to get us through the month. She explained that if I went to school every day, I'd get the free morning milk and vita-roll, and free hot lunch on my aid ticket. So I'd be mostly okay, even if there wasn't much for dinner. We'd get through just fine. After all, we were pretty tough, weren't we? And couldn't the two of us beat anything if we just stuck together? And were we going to let a month of crummy groceries knock down tough guys like us? All that stuff. But suddenly, in the middle of the pep talk, she got up and knelt by her stereo. She twiddled the knobs, frowning. "Signal's drifting, or something. Damn, that's all I need. For this to drop dead on me now." She tried about three different stations, then snapped it off. "Lousy speakers," she complained to me. "Everything sounds tinny."

  It had sounded okay to me, but I didn't say anything. Instead, I sat still and watched her take out a pot and run water and take things from the cupboards for dinner.

  We had oatmeal for dinner, and toast with peanut butter melting on it. Mom gave me the last of the brown sugar for my oatmeal. "Good grains and protein in this meal," Mom said wisely, as if she had planned it rather than scraped together what we had left. I nodded and ate it. It wasn't so bad. At least it wasn't macaroni.

  That evening Mom sat at the table, reading a paperback that Teddy had left and wearing his old sweatshirt. I guess she felt pretty bad. Every so often, she'd turn on the stereo and fool with it for a while, then shake her head and snap it off. She'd read a little longer, and then she'd get up and turn the stereo on again, searching through the stations, but never finding what she wanted. In between, I was listening to the building sounds, spooky at night. The water heater in the utility room was growling and gurgling through the wall. I was coloring a "Don't Do Drugs" handout from school, wishing they'd given me more than three crayons. I wanted to color the spoon and syringe silver. Yellow just wasn't the same.

  Mom had just snapped the radio off for about the twelfth time. In the quiet I heard a sound like someone dragging a bag of potatoes down our steps.

  Mom and I looked at each other. She lifted her finger to her lips and said, "Shush!" So I sat perfectly still, waiting. There came a slapping sound against the door, and whatever was slapping pushed against it, too. The door thudded against the catch.

  My Mom's dark eyes went huge, scaring me more than the noises outside the door. She went to the kitchen and got our biggest knife. "Go to my room, Billy Boy," she whispered. But I was too scared to move. Like a monster movie, when the music screams and you know they're going to show you something awful, but you can't look away. I had to know what was outside. And Mom was too scared to make me obey. Instead she crept a little closer to the door, holding the knife tight. "Who's out there?" she yelled, but her voice cracked.

  The pressure on the door stopped, and for a moment all was silent. Then there was a sound, sort of like a harmonica wedged in a trumpet, and someone blowing through it anyway. It was a silly cartoon sound, Doofus Duck smacked with a rubber mallet, and my mother looked so startled that I burst out laughing. It was a dorko noise. Nothing scary could make a sound like that. Then a voice spoke, a low, low voice, like cello strings being rubbed slowly.

  "That is my name on my world. But Humans call me Lavender."

  "The Skoag?" Mom asked, but I was already past her and undoing the flimsy deadbolt on the door. I had to see it. It was so impossible for a Skoag to be outside our door at night that I had to see it was real. "Billy!" Mom warned, but I dragged the door open anyway.

  The Skoag was there. The same purple-crested one we had listened to earlier. Only he looked a lot smaller with all his bladders deflated, not much bigger than my Mom. He was wearing a sort of pouch thing on his front, and in it was a brown grocery sack, a bouquet of flowers wrapped in green tissue paper, and a skinny brown liquor store bag. He was draped in the transparent plastic robe Skoags were supposed to wear in Human dwellings. His skin glistened through it in the watery street-lamp light like oil on a puddle, iridescent and shifting. His fat little flippers waved up and down slowly, like a fish underwater. His murky blue eye spots fixed on my mother.

  She stared back at him. She still had the knife in her hand, but she had forgotten it. She crossed her arms, a closing, denying gesture. "What do you want?" she demanded, in the scared stubborn voice she kept for the landlord.

  A little bladder above his eyes pulsed with his cello voice. "To come in."

  "Well, you can't," she said, at the same time as I asked, "How did you get down the steps?"

  "With great difficulty," he pulsed at me, but there was a violin squibble above the cello that made his answer a sort of joke. I grinned at him, I couldn't help it. He'd noticed me. He'd answered my question before he paid attention to what my Mom had said, and he'd answered it in the way one buddy might kid with another. I felt two feet taller.

  He looked back at my Mom, waiting.

  "Go away," she told him.

  "I cannot," he said, all cello again. "Earlier today, I heard you listening to us. I think. My companions tell me it was not so, that I am tricking myself because I want too badly. But I am not deceived. I have hope only. I have brought gifts. Flowers and wine for you, as is fitting, and food for your child, who said he was hungry. May I come in?"

  She just stood there, staring at him. A car shushed by in the rainy street outside, and the wind gusted, blowing cold air down our steps and in past the Skoag. And still they both just stood there, waiting for something.

  "I love you," the cello thrummed and the sound swelled like a big warm wave washing through our apartment. The sound didn't end with the words, it went on with music, like embroidery on the edges of the thought. I listened to it pass and fade, and then the silence came behind it, separating us again. The silence seemed unbearable.

  "Come in," said my mother.

  So Lavender came to live with us.

  Everything changed.

  Everything.

  Within just a few days, the neighbors stopped knowing us. I'd walk down the streets, and rocks would bounce around me, but I'd never see who'd thrown them. The radio was never turned on again. There was real food, every day. Mom stopped looking at street musicians and haunting the open mikes. The street people called her ugly names,
and our mailbox got ripped off the wall in the upstairs lobby. I got into so many fights at school that the principal said I had to stay in at recesses for the rest of the year. After that, I was left totally alone. I didn't care. Because I had Lavender at home.

  Every day I went to school, because Lavender said I should. It would be important, later, he assured me, and that was enough for me. Everyday I came home and slid down the ridged ramp that had replaced our steps. And Lavender was always waiting for me to come home, even if my mother wasn't there. Always before, Mom's musicians had tolerated and ignored me, treated me like a cat or a houseplant, a semi-annoying creature that lived in my mother's house. Not Lavender. He knew I was there, and he was glad. He made me important. We would have a snack together, he rubbing his sludgy porridge through a membrane on his chest, me munching cookies and milk. Then I had to show him every single paper I'd brought home, read aloud from every library book I'd checked out. All I did amazed him. But mostly we'd talk and laugh. His laugh reminded me of a giant grasshopper chirring. Once he told me that Skoags had never laughed before they came to Earth, but the idea of a special sound made just to show happiness was so wonderful that now it was the first thing that all exiles were allowed to do. Each Skoag got to make up his own kind of laugh. He said it like it was some big favor for them. Then he told me that my laugh was one of the best ones he'd ever heard. That first day, when he'd heard my laugh in the street, he'd known that anyone who could create so marvelous a sound had to be very special indeed. And then he laughed my own laugh for me to hear, and that set me laughing, and we laughed together for about ten minutes, in harmony, like a new kind of song.

  Looking back, I know he didn't understand much of basic human needs. Because he learned mostly from me, he had a seven-year-old boy's idea of what was important. Food he understood, and he always made sure there was plenty of it, though he tended to buy the same kinds over and over again. He loved bright, simple toys that moved, yo-yos and tops and plastic gliders, marbles and super balls and frisbees. I'm convinced he thought that flowers were essential to my mother, and he filled our little apartment with graceful glass vases full of them. I never thought to ask for anything more than what he brought and I know my mother never did. She was too used to giving to learn taking easily. Still, Lavender tried to provide for us. I remember the day I came home and found him cautiously touching his flippers to the protruding nails and scabs of sheetrock on the two-by-four wall studs. "This pleases the Mom?" he asked me.

  "No. It's really ugly. But it's all we've got," I told him. A wrinkling ran over his deflated bladders, a gesture I had learned was like an excited grin. "This would please the Mom?" the cello thrummed, and he began pulling yards and yards of stuff out of his belly pouch. Shiny like plastic, but soft like fabric, and so thin you could crumple a square yard of it up in your fist. He began fastening it to the wall, in graceful drapery, and as it fell straight, the room warmed with both color and heat, the musky basement smell faded, and a gentle light suffused the room. Then we hid in the closet until my Mom came home and was surprised by it. "Oh, Lavender, you cover up all the rough edges of my life," Mom told him. For a long time, I thought she meant the wall studs. He could make the hanging different colors, and he adjusted it almost daily, though I never asked how. If I had, he would have told me. I just didn't ask.

  He told me anything I wanted to know. I knew more about Skoags than any of the «experts» of that time. Anything I asked him, he answered. I knew that they had been exiled to our world because they sang in public, and that was not permitted on their home world. I knew that they sang only other people's music, because making up new music was something only a holy leader could do. The earth Skoags were religious rebels, sort of like the Pilgrims. They believed singing was so worshipful that Skoags should do it all the time, everywhere, and that everyone should do it, not just priest-Skoags. On their own world, that was heresy, and anyone caught at it had to choose between exile or "a most unfortunate happening." For a long time I didn't know what he meant by that. A lot of what he told me was puzzling. Lavender kept trying to explain to me that singing was a circle, and that if one sang well enough to make the perfect music, it would create the one that would close the circle. My Mom, he said, was "Close. Almost the end of the circle. The one, but not quite." I never understood what he meant, but it was very important to him. A day didn't pass without him trying to make me understand. There just weren't human words for the Skoag ideas. It worried him very much. It was the only hole in our communication. He told me other stuff, like how some Skoags had long, articulated flippers like my fingers, and how they were dehydrated for their space journeys, and how they thought of Humans as «half-sexed» because we weren't self-fertile. Anything I asked, he answered. But if I didn't ask, he didn't bother me with it. I never asked him if he had come to end his people's exile, or if he were a very important Skoag on his world or how their spaceships operated. Or he would have told me. But I didn't ask.

  In the long evenings, Lavender made music for us, playing anything we wanted. He knew every song my mother ever asked for, and could do them in any artist's style. She would sit on the end of my couch, my feet warm against her, listening raptly while Lavender played until I fell asleep. Mornings I would waken to his slaps on the door and run to let him in. He'd be laden with cereal and milk and fruit and a packet of his own gruelly food, and always fresh flowers for my Mom. He'd play back to me all the new sounds he'd heard in the night city, not just the music that drifted out from the bars, but sea-gulls crying over the bay, and the coughing of winos and the barking of dogs. It was always hard to go to school. I was sure they had fun without me all day at home, but to please Lavender, I went.

  Life was good. There was food and talk and warmth at home and that's all most kids ask. But on top of all that, I had Lavender. The value of that is too great to tell. For over a year, the world was as good as it could possibly be.

  One day my mother touched him. By accident. I know, because I was there when it happened. So simple, so stupid. She slipped on the kitchen floor, reached out to steady herself and caught Lavender's flipper. Lavender's bare flipper tip, shining with Skoag slime, caught my mother's hand, steadied her, and transported her to ecstasy. Her face changed, she cried out, a simple «oh» like a kid seeing his first Christmas tree, and sat down on the kitchen floor: She just sat and smiled. Lavender gently pulled his flipper free of her grip, but it was too late. His dark blue eye spots fastened on me.

  "You didn't do it on purpose," I told him. "It wasn't your fault." But my heart was shaking my whole body.

  A scant second later, my Mom was standing up, saying, "I'm all right. Don't be upset, Lavender. Stop flapping like that. Billy, don't stare, I'm fine." She caught at the edge of the kitchen table, sat down in one of the chairs. "Shit. What a rush!" she said a moment later, and then sighed. And got up from the table and went to the stove and started stirring the spaghetti sauce again. And that was that. "Whew," I thought as my mind darted to my Don't Do Drugs book at school. "I'm glad Mom didn't turn into a Skoag gropie."

  But, of course, she did.

  At first she never touched Lavender when I was around. And kids don't notice gradual changes. I'd get home from school, and she'd be sitting at the table, humming to herself. It got harder to get her attention. More and more, she told me to fix my own supper. At first she'd tell me what to cook, but later she'd just wave at the fridge. After a while, Lavender learned about frozen dinners and bought them for us. One day when I got home, I found that Lavender had replaced our little aid-issued microwave cooker with a more elaborate one. I cooked all the meals from then on. But even then, I didn't catch on.

  If I suspected anything, it was only that Mom and Lavender were growing closer. That first night he had said he loved her. That had never seemed strange to me. I loved my Mom, a lot of musicians had said they loved her, so why shouldn't a strange Skoag standing on the doorstep say it? I never doubted it was true, and I don't think Mom did eithe
r. Lavender never missed a chance to show how important "the Mom" was. Not just the flowers, or the way he played whatever she wanted him to play. It was the way he respected her in a way no one else ever had. He made her listening as important as his playing.

  And it started being more and more important. Now when he played for her at night, he'd stop, sometimes in the middle of the music, and say, "Is that it? Is that right?"

  "No," she'd say, and he'd deflate with despair.

  Or, "Almost," she'd say, and hum a bit to herself, a swatch of music nothing like what he'd been playing, but he'd say, "I think I hear," and try again.

  And if she said, "Yes, yes, that's it," he'd play the piece over and over again, while she sat and nodded and smiled.

  Slowly she changed. She didn't care about her clothes anymore, and seldom went outside. She got fat, and bought big men's shirts from the secondhand store to cover her belly. She became fussy about her hair, brushing and combing it like a fussy fiddler tuning his strings. Her voice changed, becoming dreamy and muffled, the ends of her words blurring. Sometimes when I got home from school, she'd be sitting at the table, dreaming with her eyes open. I'd talk to her but get no response until Lavender came to stand beside her. Then she'd focus on me, and answer my questions in a sweet dreamy voice.

  It was easier to talk to Lavender instead. He always knew everything anyway, and Mom was so happy and dreamy that I didn't worry about anything being wrong. She wasn't like the filthy, skinny Skoag gropies in the school book. She was clean, and shining with health and dreams, plump and pretty. About then I found out Lavender didn't always leave at night anymore, but sometimes lay on the bed beside her, with Mom gripping his flipper all night, her head pillowed on his plastic coated body. So I should have known she was a Skoag gropie, right, and realized she was stone deaf? How could I? I was a kid, she didn't look like a gropie, and even if she ignored me a lot, she was still my Mom. And she still listened every night to Lavender's playing.