Mr. Pacifaker’s House
He let his wish graze on the seared grass in his yard, let it display its ribs to the town so that nobody would envy it, want to steal it—as he let the paint peel and flake away from his house, as he left the porch sag, as he let the rats run and play.
At thirteen, Garnet Manon understood disguises. She knew that heroines arose from unlikely origins, were scorned by their peers, and driven to free and reveal their true natures. She knew that she, too, was disguised.
She’d figured out what kind of fairy Mr. Pacifaker really was, but she pretended that she hadn’t. She pretended that he really was the magic kind, and that he’d cast a disguising spell over her, to keep her safe from them boys. She pretended that the spell was benevolent, and would break as soon as the right boy came along. She pretended that Mr. Pacifaker would know the right boy when he saw him.
How else could she bear the acne that turned her face into a moonscape? How else could she stand her painful mouthful of braces? How else could she reconcile her name, Garnet Manon Volentine, a heroine’s name, with the reflection of herself in the mirror, and in the sneering, faked love-words them boys yelled out at her to make her slouch and cry?
“You stay away from them boys,” Mr. Pacifaker warned her. “Don’t you listen to their talk. They got one thing on their minds, and once they do it to you, they’ll drop you like a hot potato, and then where the hell will you be?”
Garnet Manon slouched down on the seat. Her knees pressed up against the dashboard. “Nobody wants to do it to me,” she muttered.
“Ha,” said Mr. Pacifaker. “That’s what you think.”
“Then I got up off the bed,” she said, “and I walked out of the room, and into the awful filthy falling-apart kitchen.”
“He never let me in there,” said Sarcastic Talking Horse, “so don’t blame me.”
“I wasn’t. Anyway, there was Mr. Pacifaker, just as alive as you please, sitting on the counter between two stacks of dirty dishes. He didn’t look any younger, but he seemed healthy, and kind of shiny. A pair of delicate iridescent wings grew from his back, and they fanned the air and made it cool and sweet.
” ‘Don’t gawk at me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t look like this if you weren’t so goddamn literal-minded.’ ”
Garnet Manon dreamed of French Canadian waltzes spiraling her across a ballroom floor. She had only heard one in her life, when she was thirteen years old—a duet of hammer dulcimer and folk guitar performed at the county fair. She’d found it more opulent than all the arts and crafts in the exhibition hall. She’d packed it and taken it with her into adulthood, though she remembered it not as music but as movement—the movement of the guitarist’s hands as he picked and strummed, the movement of the dulcimer player’s wrists as she lightly, rapidly hammered the strings, the movement of her own body, constricted by adolescent shyness. The energy of the music was stored in her body, tensed for release, as though every muscle and tendon were a rubber band pulled to nearly the breaking point.
She imagined defloration as thousands of tiny scissors snipping through each rubber band, orgasm as the sharp snap, a volley of little stings that burned and throbbed against the skin. ‘Defloration’ was Mr. Pacifaker’s word, ‘orgasm’ belonged to Cosmopolitan.
