Cruddy - Lynda Barry [81]
I peeled away the cotton batting. My hands were shaking at the thought of seeing her again. Little Debbie. My savior.
Under the batting was my Ace bandage, stained and slightly powdery. There is a thing people say about elastic. That it has memory and that it can lose its memory. The Ace bandage was expanded and could not shrink back down. The tiny elastic threads had crumbled.
Under the bandage was the Crown Royal bag and inside the bag was the money. I had stomach jolts when I saw it. In the time of the father I became very used to seeing wads and wads of cash. But it had been a long time since my eyes saw so many twenty-dollar bills. Five hundred dollars worth tightly rolled around Little Debbie’s flexible leather sheath.
What would she look like? I’d taken the steps every knife person knows about. I’d oiled her and wrapped an oiled piece of cloth around her blade and folded a piece of waxed paper around that before I put her into her sheath. I did not want to see rust on her. I prayed not to see the tiniest bit of rust on her.
She gleamed. Seeing her made my eyes wet. The father was right, I am a knife person. Knife-loving blood circulates within me. There is a symbol for infinity, a line that describes a sideways figure eight. X marks the spot in the center. X marks the spot of recirculation. That is where you should plunge the knife to stop the blood of time past from infecting the blood of time future. I held her. It would be so easy. Slicing up from the wrist toward the inside of the elbow.
According to the mother, all emergency room doctors hate people who cut short-ways across the wrists. It’s a secret not well known outside of hospitals, that all medical workers despise the people who cut and fail. Even the ambulance drivers can’t stand them. It was the mother who showed me the way to do it. Who said water will keep the blood flowing. That very warm water was the best, not because it was more comfortable, but because cold water would constrict the vessels and water that is too hot would be hard to stay in. These are not the only instructions the mother has given me on how to cut one side of time away from the other. She has seen the inside of my arm, she has read the keloid letters and she actually believes the carved words of apology are for her. I didn’t disabuse her of this notion, called disabuse when you let someone know they are incredibly wrong, even hilariously wrong. I could tell she was flattered.
“RoBERta!” Vicky was banging on the door and then twisting the doorknob. I turned the water off. “RoBERta, come ON! Open!”
“One sec,” I said.
“Open the door. I have to pee so bad.”
“One sec!”
And so I had to move very quickly. And so behind the toilet went the deflated body of Trina. And so the money and sheathed Little Debbie were tucked in at the center of the bra, the crushed velvet Santa Claus outfit was in place. I opened the door.
Vicky pushed past me and sat on the toilet. I started to leave and she said, “Prude. Can’t you be in the same room as a person who is peeing?”
I stepped into the hall and saw the Stick standing in his bedroom doorway. He looked at my dress and drew a backwards question mark in the air with his finger.
I drew an exclamation mark.
He started laughing and Vicky heard him. “Don’t talk to him, Roberta! You need to keep away from him.” The toilet flushed and the Stick stepped back into the darkness of his room.
Vicky sat me in front of the vanity. I noticed a weird burning smell, kind of an electrical melting smell. Vicky had her hot curlers plugged in. She had two bottles of Sun In and she planned to use both of them on me.
“Normally you spray this on, OK? Normally you spray this on and go in the sun and you magically get highlights. But I have to do my own method. I