My Sister from the Black Lagoon

A Novel of My Life

Laurie Fox

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439130018
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"I was born into a mentally ill family. My sister was the officially crazy one, but really we were all nuts." So begins My Sister from the Black Lagoon, Laurie Fox's incandescent novel of growing up absurd. Lorna Person's tale is wrested from the shadows cast by her sister, Lonnie, whose rages command the full attention of her parents. Their San Fernando Valley household is off-key and out of kilter, a place where Lonnie sees evil in the morning toast and runs into the Burbank hills to join the animals that seem more like her kin. Lorna, on the other hand, is an acutely sensitive girl who can't relate to Barbie. "Could Barbie feel sorrow? Could Barbie understand what it's like to be plump, lonely, Jewish?" My Sister from the Black Lagoon is a wisecracked bell jar, a heartbreaking study of sane and crazy. Laurie Fox's delightful voice is knowing yet wide-eyed, lyrical, and witty.

Part One

Toast

1958

ulia, my mother, looks like Rita Hayworth, but she is prettier and more read. She is loyal to I me and my sister. This morning as I go off to school, she prays that I won’t be lonely, won’t be nervous, that I will be “okay,” because there isn’t room for another problem in this family.

At the breakfast table there’s already a problem. My sister is refusing to eat toast. It hurts her in some way we will never know, but I believe her. Surely Coca-Cola hurts as it slides down the throat and mushrooms are extremely disagreeable, even monstrous, when you stare them in the face.

Lonnie’s screaming bloody murder at the toast lying buttered and helpless on the Melmac plate. It offends her senses. Mother coaxes Lonnie, “Just try the toast.” (She wants to say “the damn toast” but she’s not going to blame the toast or fly off the handle; it’s way too soon.) All this noise arouses my father, who enters the room with his big stomach, the little hair he has left flapping in the air. “What in Sam Hill is going on here?” he booms.

“Lonnie is frightened of toast this morning. She refuses to eat it,” my mother explains.

“EAT THE TOAST,” my father bellows.

“NOOO!” Lonnie howls. “NO. NO. NO. NO.”

“What do you mean ‘no’? What s toast going to do to you?” He shakes the slice like a rattlesnake.

“I’ve tried everything, Burton. Just let her be.” Exasperated, Mother draws her long, freckled hands through her coppery, shoulder-length locks; she likes peace the way I like peace.

“I’ll get her to eat the damn toast,” my father insists, palm outstretched in Lonnie’s direction.

“Get your hands off me or I’ll strangle you and leave you for dead.”

My sister is direct. She’s taken to talking like a thug to get her way. Too many Cagney films, Daddy says. But I don’t get it. Where does this toughness really come from? I don’t have an ounce of tomboy in me, and Lon’s filled to the brim. Dressed in bright plaid Bermuda shorts and a crisp cotton blouse, she almost passes for a girl. But that telescope slung over her shoulder and that Buck knife clasped to her belt make people uneasy. They make me uneasy.

“Please, Lon,” I plead. “You’ll like the toast with peanut butter on it.”

“No! It’s got sharp edges!”

“You want to see sharp edges?” my father threatens stupidly, the side of his hand cutting the air.

Lonnie runs from the table, shrieking and pushing a stuffed animal with three legs and two heads in his face. She has tailored this creature to fit her idea of the universe: the world has two kinds of creatures, freaks and normal people, normal people being the scarier and far more dangerous species. They kill the freaks and make them do irrational things. Like eat toast.

Lonnie and her two-headed friend scramble down the hall, my father close behind with his hairy arms extended. Lonnie makes it to her room and begins to circle frantically, an animal panicking in her cage. Huddled in the hallway, Mother and I listen to some tragedy take place. Everything is a blur when we peek into Lonnie’s room.

“Stop, Burton,” my mother implores. “Let her be.”

“Daddy!” I scream. “Plee-ease. Lonnie doesn’t have to eat toast. Not everybody likes it.” I am not a little peacemaker. I can’t even be heard above the din of arms and legs and howling mouths.

I have stopped breathing. Now Mother and Daddy are fighting each other, quarreling over what to do next about Lonnie and the toast. While they confer in the hallway, Lonnie springs onto her mattress, fists clenched.

I’ll kill ya, I’ll kill ya, I’ll drag you in the gutter. I swear I’ll get you an’ drain your blood on the pavement. I mean it. I’ll get ya when you’re sleeping.” Then she laughs maniacally, not like a mentally ill person but like a cartoon villain. She drools and spits to scare us, and it works. We know she is the consummate actress and loves to play everything to the hilt. But we also know this blond little girl with a Buster Brown haircut and a murderer’s imagination is to be taken seriously.

Later, when I come home from elementary school, I see that the cold, butter-stiff toast is still on the table. I lift it up to my lips. I’m hungry, but will eating toast change that? I decide at the last second that the toast is ruined.

Lonnie lumbers into the kitchen like George Raft. “Oo-zy! Ooze!”

Oozy is her special name for me. She calls me Oozy because, when we play cats, she makes a deep ooze sound through her nose instead of the traditional purr. Somehow she associates this sweet, contented sound with me, her baby sister. But I don’t feel very sweet today, just beat.

“What?” I snap.

“Ya gotta spend time with your good-for-nuthin’ sister.”

To stave off my guilt, we drink chocolate milk from the carton and eat Cocoa Puffs from the box. To stave off my loneliness, we play with dolls and stuffed animals, and wrestle like all siblings do. Except that Lonnie crunches me with so much love I wonder if I’ll live through the afternoon.

Leon the Leopard

1959

am riding in the backseat of our cream-colored Chevrolet, en route to my sisters dark-haired, dark-hearted therapist. We make the trip twice a week, but I am not good about going. Lonnie’s even worse. She has put out a contract on Mrs. Mancini because this therapist—her fourth—doesn’t put up with any nonsense. My mother and I put up with all manner of nonsense; we are afraid of being less than good, and frankly it’s messing up our lives.

The Heinz-Heinz Clinic is far away from Burbank. Studio City must be in another country, and there is no freeway yet. We go the long way through the flatlands, past NBC and Warner Bros. studios. I am only seven years old, so the long way is hard on my sense of time and history. Surely I have other things to do at this age, but my vote doesn’t count.

Today, as we approach the Cahuenga Pass, the last stretch of undeveloped land connecting Burbank to Studio City, the hillside is a blur. I see five separate moving clouds of dust; they portend some sort of magic. Within seconds, wild horses emerge from the dust clouds; they run riotously every which way. Mother says somebody must be filming a cowboy movie, and my eyes widen. I consider the movies a reason for living! Ever since I was five, I have inserted myself into every movie I’ve seen and gratefully, humbly found succor there. I’ve not been on this planet long, but the idea of “elsewhere” appears to be the definition of a happy life. I’ve learned that “here” is a major disaster, a massacre of possibilities.

The unruly horses are now streaming toward the highway like they might not stop in time. I imagine being trampled to death, metal and horsehair mingling. Lonnie’s yelping “Yahoo, ride ’em cowboy!” like a wild thing herself. Animals seem to soothe her, the wilder the better. Just before we will be certainly mowed down, the horses change direction, and our Chevrolet crosses over the pass undeterred.

By the time we get to the clinic, the day has become a pressure cooker. Lonnie’s upset over the idea that we won’t buy her a monkey or a Tokay gecko. She tears off in the direction of the corner drugstore to drool over the latest monster magazines and ogle the Nestlé Crunch bars. Mother drags her back by the wrist, and for half a block Lonnie’s screaming, “Meeshy, those horses are going to mash your face with their hooves! They’re going to get you for giving birth to me, because I’m a stupid, stupid creature who has to attend this hell-house for maniacs instead of going to a real school—like Oozy.”

“You’re not stupid,” I protest, both hands raised to the heavens like some actress wearing a toga in a biblical movie.

“Oh yeah? Then why am I the only schlemiel who’s gotta get his brain scanned and body wrapped in bandages like the Mummy? Why do I gotta go to the torture chamber to be probed by Dr. Mayhem?”

Lonnie’s always trying to scare us big. I cover my ears and blink away tears; movies have not prepared me for her brand of savagery. Gazing up at my mother, hoping she’ll play God here, I see a woman who, like me, can’t quite believe her bad luck. She’s stuttering, “I … I,” and petting Lonnie’s white-gold locks. Fear and kindness make her lips twitch. “Such a pretty girl,” she says to my sister. My mother is a saint.

“Grrr!” Lonnie exposes her fangs to prove she’s the picture of ugliness. “Don’t call me a girl. Call me Mad Dog!” She flings Captain Eyeball, the stuffed animal she’s been toting everywhere for weeks, into Mother’s eyes full throttle. Mother smiles a strange, close-lipped smile that’s at odds with her sharp hand movements. Captain Eyeball is newly quarantined in her navy leather purse, while Lonnie brays like some animal I’ve never heard.

The Heinz-Heinz Clinic gives me the creeps. Sunlight floods the place, but its dark core manages to bleed through. In the waiting room I squirm on a pea-colored Naugahyde couch; my butt squeaks noticeably on the fabric. Those little flecks of dirt on the Naugahyde just might be boogers. Mother distractedly rubs my hand while she tells Lonnie to settle down, settle down. Shyness tugs at me like a strong tide, threatening to pull me under. I need a disguise, because I want it made abundantly clear that I’m not one of them—one of the patients.

Lonnie has been a patient here for the last million years. She began her biweekly trips to the Heinz-Heinz—Bloody Ketchup Clinic in Lonnie’s lingo—at the age of four. Although she’s nine now, two years older than me, she’s both my older and younger sister. Older in years and because she physically overpowers me—she can have me at the mercy of her gyrating fists in two seconds—and she’s smarter too. Although she’s been put in a class with mentally ill children her age, she can read and write at the twelfth-grade level. Her vocabulary is astonishing—words like “reticulated,” “Australopithecus,” and “inhumane” fall off her tongue. But she’s my younger sister because she’s worse than a baby when it comes to controlling her feelings. They spill out of her body and flood our house all day long. I mean, we’re soaked. And younger because, as much as she hates to hear it, a babylike sweetness leaks through her tough-guy stance when she’s not on guard. In public, I am sworn to protect my “little” sister; if anyone even looks at her funny, I will clobber them. Well, I’m a wimp so I do my clobbering in a silent, private way.

After five years of brain picking—both Lon’s brain and my parents’—the Heinz-Heinz doctors can’t decide what’s wrong with Lonnie. The director says she’s “schizophrenic,” but Daddy says that’s a bunch of baloney. “Lon does not straddle two worlds. She’s definitely in one world, albeit her own irrational, insane little universe.” The Freudians blame Lon’s troubles on The Environment—“the home environment,” they told Mother during last week’s session, whispering so as not to offend. The non-Freudians believe my sister’s problems are chemical, that her chemistry got gummed up inside Mother’s womb and that she was autistic for the first three years—before she could express this unique chemistry. One lone doctor insists Lon is “borderline,” which doesn’t sound so bad to me. When he added, “With paranoid tendencies,” he winked in a way that made me want to do some of that silent clobbering. But Lon likes the sound of “paranoid tendencies”; she calls it “piranha tentacles” and laughs a little too heartily to be convincing. All of these diagnoses enrage Daddy—he has little faith in “headshrinkers”—and they make Mother feel so guilty that she also regularly sees Mrs. Mancini at the Double H.

My own idea of what’s ailing Lon doesn’t count for much, but Mother says it’s the most creative. Basically, I think Lon is onto something big. That she knows stuff we can’t even imagine. Like what’s out there beyond the Milky Way or what goes on where the deep blue sea turns black. Even what’s behind our eyes when we shut them tight and see stars. But all of this magical, wise stuff that she picks up like a TV antenna gets mixed up with the drab, normal junk of life and creates static in her head. That’s why she makes sense half of the time and the other half she’s so bizarre that no one will give her the time of day. Poor Lon. She may be a genius like Albert Einstein and no one will ever know.

Lonnie is intently studying the person directly across from us, her eyes bugged out in obvious pleasure. Hand propped under her chin, she looks like a thoughtful scientist. Hiding unsuccessfully behind The Saturday Evening Post, the tall object of her scrutiny has her hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail; her legs are clad in worn, soiled dungarees. Now the figure’s staring back at Lon, equally amused. When the ponytailed lady abandons the magazine, Lonnie’s confronted with a confounding beard.

“Are you a man or a woman?” Lonnie asks with utter sincerity, moving into range of the mystery f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• Let Me Entertain You
• Part One
• Toast
• Leon the Leopard
• Miss Universe
• Normal
• Certifiable
• Nutcracker
• Conflict My Love
• Hollywood Babylon
• Glinda The Early Years
• Part Two
• You Move Me
• We Have Arrived
• Confessional
• Here Comes the Sun
• Creature Feature
• A Whole Lotta Love
• The End of Nate
• Part Three
• Out of Los Angeles
• Stop the World I Want to DieOff
• I Tragedienne
• Glinda The Dark Side
• Sister Savior
• The Dance
• The Circle Game
• About the Author