Zelda

The definition of a little girl is standing in the doorway, asking me in a half-whine to please try to catch that butterfly in the backyard. Looking out the door, I see a wavering ocean of overgrown plants. Poking out of the grass are two playsets, but the determined backyard has reclaimed them both in the name of nature--anyone sliding down the slide would get a mouthful of spiderweb. I squint. The butterfly is actually a papery moth, and would require extensive navigational tactics. I say I don't think I can get to it in time, but maybe today's goal should be to catch a butterfly. Zelda gives me a Lucille Ball-like grimace, her eyes inflating and the corners of her mouth dipping down comically. This is my favorite face.
We're standing barefoot in the kitchen, on a floor covered in glazed pieces of brightly colored pots and crockery, cool under our feet, as we're essentially walking on dishes. Her mother designed it. A small cd player is in the middle of the kitchen floor, and my voice is drifting out of the speakers. Zelda seems to feel my songs; she starts to sing a little while moving in a distracted half-dance, smiling at me almost encouragingly, like i should dance to my own voice with her. I'm very anxious for her opinion. I find children to be the most honest critics, if not the most important. At six, Zelda is at a ripe age for honesty.
"So do you like it?" I venture, squatting beside her.
Her face gets serious. She says plainly, "Why don't you make more of these CD's and sell them?" which wraps me up warmly inside the center of a star.
As we sit on the porch, eating strawberry jam directly out of the jar, I contemplate my love for Zelda. She's named after Zelda Fitzgerald, and that's all she really knows about that. She has aspirations of being a paleontologist, surrounding herself with as much literature about dinosaurs as she can check out from the juvenile section of the local library. A plastic bin crammed with dinosaurs and one stray My Little Pony waits in the bathtub.
I don't know why, but I correlate the fact that she doesn't go to school with the fact that she's consistently pleasantly unkempt. If I might adopt the six-year-old criteria for friendship, where ties form very quickly with a lack of forethought on either side, then Zelda and I are best friends. We've eaten popsicles together in the crawlspace of my attic, where we took turns peering out of the beautiful window that opens out rather than up, like a drawbridge. We've played cards together (war and crazy eights) using her special dinosaur-themed cards. We've covered my driveway in chalk. She left her favorite stuffed animal, a bunny with no face named Patricia, in the back of my car, and, after a flurry of questions about why i wanted to know and making me swear I wouldn't tell anyone, especially not her sister, she showed me the best hiding place in her house. She makes a lot of faces at me throughout the 3 hours I babysit her, all under a tangle of blonde hair, and usually baring her teeth slightly. The front teeth must have come in early, and they're oddly chipped; they look like two tiny square paws.
We're allowed to sit on her roof, and we did yesterday, with her older sister (11, harder to read). The roof and our presence felt nearly holy, or at least oddly nostalgic, like someone was using a gold filter over the moment.
Zelda's mother was on the porch below, nursing a cigarette. I'd just spoken to her downstairs, or rather she spoke to me, warbling through her southern drawl "Ah get a little jealous sometimes, Ah get short with Zelda sometimes. Cos I never got to be six." blows out smoke and laughs. "And then she says 'mama whaddya mean you never got to be six?'"She's a doughy woman, wears dresses that look a lot like Zelda's in terms of how much they cover up. She's occasionally bra-less and her legs are always bare, and flecked with brightly colored paint, the same colors I often find all over her children. I imagine her hips as having indentations where her fists fit. Sometimes her face has a flash of Zelda in it. It's not quite a physical likeness of her, but more like the expression Zelda has when I pose her a question like 3+1+1. "But, if you've got one foot in the past and one in the present, then you're just pissin' on today, you know?" she follows this with a volume of laughter that I really wish I could match, because then I would feel more like a woman.

On the roof, Zelda leans next to me and I ask her, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?
She looks at me and says whaddya mean?
Well, if one is low and ten is as happy as possible.
She still looks confused.
Out of 1 to 10, how happy are you?
"A hundred!" she yells, incredulous that I could limit the possibilities like that.

Ten minutes later, as I'm leaving, I can't find her. Her mom points me into the bathroom, where she is standing in the corner by the sink, her face buried in a towel.
"Bye Zelda," I say nicely.
"Bye," comes muffled through the towel.
"Can I see your pretty face before I go?" I touch her shoulder lightly.
No.

here she is in a video her sister shot on her phone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJPplWaExxU
sometimes i feel like if i don't write i will explode, and i guess that is a good thing.