Batshit

Abstract

Batshit Ashley Wurzbacher (bio) They're crammed in the cab of George's blue pickup, Rose and George up front and the three kids—two hers, one his—sharing the bench seat in the back. Fourteenyear-old Lili, Rose's youngest, sits in the middle, feet on the hump, plastic fruit on her head; her sixteen-year-old sister Alex—or Lexa, as she demands to be called now—is smushed against the window behind George, thumbs drumming on her phone's screen. Rose can't see Aiden, George's fifteen-year-old, behind her, but every now and then she feels the press of his knees into her seat back in a weird, covert nudge to her spine that makes her squirm, and she can sense Aiden's eyes flicking with interest to Alex—Lexa—as keenly as if they were trained on her own body. This is Rose's sixth date with George, and his interest in her is even more palpable than his son's in her daughter. Rose reads it in the warm enthusiasm in his voice, his seemingly practiced questions for her girls, his preoccupation with temperature control, and the brand new, vanilla-scented air freshener fighting back a vague but not unpleasant manly musk. She's less certain of her own [End Page 362] feelings, but she's keeping an open mind. They are on their way to the Sawmill Theater, where Lili will appear in the Northwestern Woods Youth Theater's production of Copacabana, and this excursion, this—what should she call it? Family date? Audition?—is a sort of test, one that so far, they're failing; it's been all forced joviality and pent-up longing. Rose imagines the five of them aglow with infrared light, the truck's cab illuminated with clouds of radiant energy: father and son pulsing red with romantic ambition, Rose and Lexa pools of cool blue. And Lili? Rose turns to glance at her. She's a rainbow of shifting colors, temperatures, textures. What's it like inside that strange and lovely head? Rose reaches back to touch Lili's knee. Like a fawn, she's all limbs; she's nearly Rose's height already—five-eight—and will soon overtake her. Her dancer's legs are folded into the tight space of the truck's back seat, her knees peaks rather than plateaus, her skirt slipping down the slope of her thighs. It's too hot for pantyhose, which Rose has tucked into Lili's costume bag. She gives the hem of Lili's skirt a tug, and Lili smiles blankly, humming without melody, and lovingly adjusts her headpiece. "Are you sure they want you to wear this?" Rose asked the other day as she helped Lili affix a plastic banana, dredged from the tubs of the girls' old toys she stores in the basement, to an old winter cap with hot glue. Lili's sketched design seemed overly elaborate for a girl without a speaking role. For Lili with her singing voice like a bobcat's shriek, Lili who struggles to stick to even the simplest script. Lili was "company," she was "ensemble"; she would appear in the playbill tonight as Dancer 1. And this headdress—Rose set the glue gun down in the pie tin she was using to catch its drippings, watched a clear drop of hot glue bulge, bubble, and drool in an oozy string onto the aluminum—was meant for someone more … [End Page 363] central to the story, surely. But Lili was insistent, and so Rose had helped her hollow out a wicker cornucopia, an old Thanksgiving centerpiece, tossing the dried ears of corn and the silk sunflowers that had filled it and replacing them with a plastic pineapple, a mango, half a grapefruit, and then, since they'd run out of fruit, a plastic bell pepper. Rose supposed Lili was capable of gluing the items herself, but she took over anyway, nudging the girl aside when she reached for the hot gun. Lili didn't seem to mind, just arranged things where she wanted them to go and pas de bourréed around the kitchen island as Rose...