The Suburban Strange Read Online Free Page B

eagerly heard her reaction to the previous one. “You don’t have to like it all. I’m just trying to figure out what your tastes are,” she explained. Celia didn’t understand quite what Regine meant by that, because every new song was a revelation to her. As her collection of dark musical treasures grew, so did her appetite for them. She played some of her new favorite songs for her mother and enjoyed her mystified response.
    After a month, her mother said, “I’ve never heard you talk about anyone as much as you talk about Regine. Why don’t you invite her over?” It took two more weeks for Celia to work up the nerve, and then she was mortified when Regine readily accepted. Celia felt as though she was going to receive a distinguished ambassador, and she judged her own house wanting. She had plenty of conflicted feelings about the house. Her family had started building it shortly before her father had died two springs ago, leaving Celia and her mother to move into it alone. If they had stayed in the old house, memories of her father would have crowded every room, but in the new house it felt sometimes as though she had left him behind. Either way, the white siding and green shutters and evergreen trees didn’t feel impressive enough for Regine. Worse, she thought Regine might actually get a rash if she entered Celia’s pink bedroom, which was dominated by a ruffled pink queen-sized bed. But Regine had come, and if she passed judgment she was too gracious to let it show.
    Perched on the edge of Celia’s bed, seeming every bit the foreign dignitary in a vintage-looking dark plaid jumper, Regine said coyly, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” She handed Celia the sketchbook she had brought. Celia reached for her own and turned it over to her. Before she even opened Regine’s volume Celia could tell it was of a different species than hers. The outside was covered completely with all manner of stickers, most with names of bands or graphic designs. One sticker advertised a Hong Kong company that specialized in obscure rock T-shirts. Celia believed without a doubt Regine ordered T-shirts from Hong Kong, and she was sure T-shirts looked very different on Regine than they did on her.
    On the inside of Regine’s volume, page after page was covered with hundreds of things she had collaged intricately together, no space left blank. The battered binding had stretched almost double to accommodate all the paper. In one picture a rustic woman sat at a farmhouse table piled high with hundreds of crisply folded men’s white dress shirts. There was a black-and-white image that looked like a film still of a wide-eyed Scandinavian woman in a drab room. Another picture showed a woman in profile, her blond hair cut in a severe bob halfway down the back of her head and shaved to the skin underneath. There were portraits of men named Olivier Theyskens and Hussein Chalayan, and photographs of dramatically lit rooms and foggy tree-lined courtyards. She saw a copy of a poem by Emily Dickinson alongside a picture of a dancing woman with her wrist pressed to her forehead as she bent over, kicking her long white skirt up behind her. There was a page on which all the images contained spirals: conches and staircases and raked stone gardens. On another page everything was a shade of blue. Celia thought Regine must have spent years compiling this book. She wished she could look out her window and see the world Regine had pressed into these pages. “This is amazing.”
    “Peter Beard is my idol,” Regine said proudly. “If you’ve seen his books, you’ll know I’m an amateur compared with him.” Meanwhile, she was paging through Celia’s sketchbook as though it were an illuminated manuscript. Celia knew what Regine was seeing: portraits of Celia’s mother and father, sketches of people she’d copied from photographs, a few attempts at landscapes and still lifes, and some self-portraits from the mirror. There were studies