CRUDDY by Lynda Barry Page A

And then the door flew open and two claws went into my face.
    It was just Julie. The mother wasn’t even home. She wasn’t home when Julie came home from school. “WHERE WERE YOU?” Julie was screaming, we were on the floor tearing at each other. She’s smaller than me but not by much and she is strong and fearless when she’s mad. She was gouging my skin and trying to bite me. She spit and I spit back and I shoved her against the furnace, which made a loud blamming that traveled the ductwork.
    She lay on her side making noises like she couldn’t breathe and I was thinking she was faking, what a faker, and then I saw her eyes go wide and I turned to see what she was looking at. The mother was standing in the doorway.
    A man stepped into the room behind her. A skinny man with a black suit on. He had a long yellowish face with a lot of folds, old dry hanging folds and a long nose with emerging puffs of nostril hair and spotted sagging lips looking like two bad internal organs with curved rodent teeth bucking out between them. His hair was very blond and obviously a wig. And his eyes were blue. That terrifying pale blue you see on dolls that have eyes that open and shut. His looked like they would shut forever once you knocked him over. His smell was very clean, slight antiseptic mixed with lavender. A rich person’s smell. He was perfect. He was the kind of man the mother had been dreaming of.
    “This is Dr. Canning,” said the mother. She was smiling. Her hair was fixed. Her hand gestures were very graceful. She had a new gold bracelet on. She didn’t tell him our names. What she did was flick her fingernails at us and say, “Get upstairs.”
    Julie instantly started putting on her pajamas. “You’re dead,” she whispered. “You are killed.” It wasn’t any use to ask Julie not to tell the mother. Begging didn’t work with Julie. Neither did beating her up. She might bust me to the mother and she might not. There was no way to tell.
    Her elbow got bent-jammed in her nightgown sleeve hole and she hopped in a circle trying to get it loose. She said, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” She said, “Help me.” And then the nightgown ripped and she started crying. She just fell onto the floor and cried.
    The mother’s feet came up the stairs. I said, “Julie, get up, get up. She’s coming.” But the mother was going to her own room. We heard the padlocks on her door unlocking, we heard some bumping on the other side of the closet. Her suitcase. She was getting her suitcase down. Drawers opened and closed, and then the door padlocks were snapped shut.
    Then it was quiet. Perfectly quiet. She was standing outside our door. The mother did this. She made you wait. She made all the freaking gather hard within you and then she made her move. Our door opened about a foot and the mother’s head came in and the mouth of it opened and some words were said and then the head retracted and the door shut. For a million dollars I could not tell you what she said because of the scream-whistle flooding my head. I saw her but all I heard were the scream-whistles blowing my mind out.
    The mother and the suitcase went downstairs. The voice of the pancreas-lipped doctor came up the stairs. Then came the sound of the mother’s fizz-laughing, sounding very fake, and her voice calling to us in a merry way, saying Aunt Caroline would be over any minute and for us to be good and mind Aunt Caroline, and the mother would see us next week. The front door closed and then there was just the TV sounds of a very excited person singing about their toothpaste.
    “Who’s Aunt Caroline?” said Julie.
    We both minorly started to laugh. It was a weird giddiness that sometimes hit us both at the same time when the mother left the house.
    “What’s wrong with your eyes, Roberta?”
    I got up to look out of the bedroom window, making sure it was real, that she was really gone. I saw the red taillights moving away, leaving cherry red trails