First Sign of the Badger Page 6
Through the dusty door of the floor invades a woman with a smirk. Her fake fingernails are soiled from looting and she’s fussed to keep her make-up in place. She owns this attic and everything in it now a little more than anyone else.
As always, a similar woman, who can’t shake her baby fat other than a few side-effect jiggles here and there, follows a moment later. Her faded purple sweats she’s wearing have dirt knee pads from treasure hunting under the workbench in the garage. Starting the day inventing herself as a casual princess, her sweat and bad smell show evidence that her lifelong streak of awful little tragedies won’t end today. Despite her best efforts, she’s never able to not let shadows fall on her and wonders why she even bothers to go outside. The fact is, although feminine witchcraft has been her religion, she’s just not at the same level of talent in superficial skills her blessed predecessor appears to be. She doesn’t compare, but the urge to compete damns her.
In the constant struggle to catch-up, the follower scavenges for loot behind the hole where the weasels popped out. Feeling that the only thing there will be to show for it, once again, will be defeat, she begins emergency negotiations with her technically older sister.
“How’re we gonna split this stuff up, Mariah?” To prevent defeat by eye contact, the baby of the family peeks into a random box and makes a claim. “Look!” Fantasizing a kinship to Christopher Columbus, she behaves as though she’s been reintroduced to something that’s been dearly missed. Random do-dads of no particular value fill the cardboard box she sets her flag on. Stacks of plastic cups taken home after buying a large fountain drinks at a gas-stations, amusement parks, sporting events, and the like put time on display like the wind and rain hammered scars of the eroded rock at the Grand Canyon among the scattered parts of a dismantled rotary phone.
Mariah postpones her pilfering to roll her eyes at the trash digger. “That’s great, Shania. Maybe, if we put all that stuff back together it’ll make a dinosaur. You think?” She punctuates her condescending with a declaration, “Almost all of this stuff we’ll leave for the estate sale. We’ll take all the things we want to keep back to my house and split it up there. You know, like sentimental knickknacks and stuff.”
Realizing, as any American woman would, that home field advantage will increase Mariah’s dominance, and she won’t have more than meager scraps tossed on her plate from the estate sale, Shania uncorks a whine for sympathy, “I just can’t believe Momma’s gone,” to get a solid foothold to push for as much victory on a neutral-ground as possible.
“I know. I know.” Mariah succumbs to political instincts, “We thought this day would never come. But, finally, it did. And now, we have to make the best out of it we can.”
“Yeah…”
“We should be glad that it’s over. Relieved. Everyone has suffered long enough.” Mariah moves to check, “If you would like to just go, I can handle things here.”
“Yeah…” It takes a moment until Shania realizes she needs to castle, “No, I would just like something to remember her by.”
“That’s what we’re here for. We should be grateful that she left so much behind. Our inheritance is the greatest gift she can give us now.”
“Absolutely, we must. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Not only that, it’s the best thing.” Exercising her car salesman-versus-sucker type of control, Mariah rounds-up Shania with an outstretched arm and herds her towards the exit.
Shania stops the momentum before she’s ejected. “Are you sure Mom wanted to be cremated? Because that’s what I did.”
Mariah calls the shots. She got the truck, planned the rummaging. She’s setting up the sale, and assigned the funeral plans to her sister.
“Of course she did. We couldn’t have an open casket could we? She was absolutely hideous.”
“No, I guess not.” Shania talks to escape Mariah’s clever tractor beam. “So, we’ll meet at your house early Wednesday and go to the funeral then?”
“Oh, no. I’m not going. I don’t like funerals. Too depressing. I don’t think I can handle all that weeping.”
“Look at these!” Shania dances as if her name was called to be the next contestant on The Price is Right. She mixes skips and jumps to arrive at a pair of unclaimed mirrors. “Look at these frames. Look at these are terrific frames!” Shania’s mouth waters as her imaginary tail wags.
The circus-cheesy frames are meticulously hand-crafted in gold wire with themes of performance animals trying to survive in the jungle. On one, the animals wearing clothes are entertaining the naked animals. On the other, the clothed animals are being stripped by their annoyed audience. To these two these mirrors have high quality because of their fancy shells–both beautiful although tacky, but expensive either way.
Shania compares pawn shop potential to decorative value as she decides just what to do with them. “Frames make the mirror. All mirrors look alike, you know what I mean? I like these. Let me take these. I want these.”
“I wonder why Mom never showed us these.” Mariah’s heart rate escalates as she screams bitch! in her thoughts to deal with the shock.
“I don’t know. It is kinda weird, like she hid them up here.”
Shania moves to close the deal, “But it’s what I want.”
Mariah clamps down like a bulldog after she digests the fact that she might lose her birthright, her mother’s mirrors. She baits the hook with a sweet voice, “We’ll take them back to my house and deal with it there,” but this time Shania doesn’t bite.
Instead, Shania plays the type of hardball she practices in her living room, intentionally taking a larger bite than she’ll digest, monkey-do. “No, I want them. We don’t have to deal with it. I want them. The other stuff we’ll worry about, but let’s not worry about these. I want them.”
As the opposition, there is no way in hell that Mariah is leaving without a mirror. “I don’t…”
“Come on, help me carry them.”
Teeth grind to concede that Mariah can’t win them all. She compromises to show the illusion of good faith. “Don’t take both of them. Give me one, greedy. You don’t need two mirrors. Are you tryin’ to see the back of your head or somethin’? Take one and you can also have the twenty-fifth anniversary plaque.”
“I don’t want the plaque. I’m not Pete or Marjorie. You take it, I want these mirrors.”
Mariah is shocked by Shania’s bluntness and gambles away more credibility to get what she can. “I don’t want it either. Just give me a mirror. It’s perfect. Two sisters, two mirrors–a mirror apiece.”
Shania smiles from her small victory and rubs it in with a petty act of charity. “They make a nice pair, but okay. Which one do you want?”
Mariah shoves the gesture back, “I don’t care. Whichever one it is is going into my personal bathroom. I don’t like the mirror in there. It’s too plain,” as some sort of a last word.
“Yeah. I don’t have any mirrors that I like.”
Inspecting the mirrors, waiting for the other to speak, they stalemate. Mariah realizes that one has a more attractive theme and beats Shania to it. “I guess I’ll take this one.”
“Okay,” Shania finally walks away from a rigged carnival game with a stuffed-bear. “That’ll be fine.” She takes what is left and pretends it is her first choice.