Love, Stargirl

  The first thing I did was pick up the plastic toys and toss them onto the grass. Obviously, a little kid lived here—a boy, judging from the army tank and water pistol. Then I started in on the deadheading. (Sounds gruesome, but all it means is snipping off dead flowers, so the plant can direct all of its energy to the living.) I was pulling off some cone-flowers when I heard an agonized scream coming from the house. Then a second scream. Then a voice: “I’ll kill you!” And another voice: “I’ll tell Mommy!”

  I was debating whether to go into the house and thinking that first voice sounded familiar when a brown-haired little boy in nothing but Batman underpants shot out the back door screaming and made a beeline for me. He was followed a second later by none other than…Alvina!

  The boy crashed into me and swung around behind me, hugging me, his ear buried in my rear end, his arms wrapped around my hips. Alvina came up short when she recognized me.

  “What are you doing here?” she snarled.

  “I’m grooming the garden,” I said. “Do you live here?” I realized I had never known her last name.

  “No,” she sneered. “I’m Goldilocks. I just snuck into Baby Bear’s bed.”

  She reached for the boy. I saw that her hand was bleeding. He dug his fingers into my waist. She kicked him. He howled—and kicked her back. She howled.

  “Stop!” I shrieked, surprising myself. This was a quiet neighborhood.

  I peeled the boy off and made him face me. I growled at Alvina, “Back off.” She glared hatefully at me but backed off. “Is this your brother?”

  “It’s the pimple on my butt,” she said.

  “She’s the pimple on my butt!” the boy retorted.

  “Enough!” I said. “What’s your name?”

  He said it as if spitting at her: “Thomas!”

  To Alvina: “Where’s your mother?”

  “At the dentist.”

  “So you’re supposed to be watching him?”

  “Watching it,” she sneered.

  Alvina’s breath came in hissy snorts. Her teeth were bared like a snarling dog’s. This was vintage Alvina. What surprised me was the little brother. Sure, he was cowering, but only in a pound-for-pound-mismatch sort of way. He was no more afraid of her than Dootsie had been in Margie’s. I thought: Alvina, when he gets bigger, you’re in trouble.

  “Your brother is a he,” I said, “not an it.”

  “It’s gonna be dead as soon as you get outta here,” she said.

  “Then I’m not going till your mother gets back.”

  Thomas crowed, “Yeah!” He took a step forward and flicked out a bare leg at her. She came for him. I jabbed my finger in her face. I tried to look stern. “Stay!”

  He laughed. “Yeah! Stay, doggie!”

  Before I knew what was happening, he turned around, bent over, pulled down his little black and yellow Batmans and mooned his sister. This was clearly nothing new to Alvina. She showed neither shock nor disgust. She simply reared back and spat on the moon. He screamed bloody murder and pulled up his Batmans and rubbed his hiney. Alvina seemed to sense the advantage. Again she came forward. I put out my hand like a crossing guard. “Alvina—not another step.”

  She stopped, gave me a sneery grin. “Yeah? What’re you gonna do? Hit me?”

  What was I going to do? I had no idea. Tickle her? We locked eyes for the longest time. Finally she blinked. Her face changed. She jabbed her hand at me. “Look what he did!”

  Her little finger was bleeding, the one with the elegant nail, only now it was an un-elegant stub.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He chopped it,” she said, whining now, telling me the whole gruesome story. He had gotten hold of his father’s nail clippers. As soon as their mother left, he started clipping himself: fingernails, toenails, eyebrows, eyelashes. Since he was doing this at the breakfast table, Alvina took her cereal down to the basement den. Which is where she was sometime later, nestled in the arms of her father’s super-duper reclining easy chair, watching Comedy Central, except not really watching it, because that easy chair for some reason has the strangest effect on her—whenever she climbs into it she wants to doze off. And that’s what she was doing, not really sleeping but just nodding off in the chair, half hearing the TV sounds, when suddenly she heard a snippy little noise and felt a little tug on her little finger and she opened her eyes and there was Thomas with a mile-wide grin on his face, holding up a full half inch of pink, glittery fingernail that he had just clipped off. Which was bad enough, but that wasn’t all. So shocked was she at the sight of her mutilated fingernail that her hand shot out and knocked her father’s bowling trophy from the side table onto the floor, where it broke in half. Which was bad enough, except that her hand hit the sharp edge of the trophy base and came away with a nasty, bleeding cut. Which is when the screaming started.

  I got most of the story as I dragged her into the house, asking her where’s the bathroom, where’s the medicine cabinet, Batman pattering after us—“Is she gonna bleed to death?”—putting her hand under the running water, rubbing on Neosporin. I sat on the edge of the bathtub. The cut was so long I had to use overlapping Band-Aids. “Show this to your mom,” I told her. “She might want you to get a tetanus shot.”

  She didn’t answer. I hadn’t been looking at her. Now I did. Her lip was quivering. A tear—a real crying-type tear—was rolling down her cheek. She was staring at her lopped-off fingernail. I stood and hugged her. I thought she might resist, but she didn’t. Batman gaped at us. “You loved your fingernail, didn’t you?” I said softly. Her head nodded against me. I looked at Thomas. “Batman,” I said, “go get some clothes on.” He ran off.

  As we walked back down the hallway, we passed something I had been too preoccupied to notice before: a double-life-size cardboard cutout of the snarling face of a pit bull. It was tacked to a door. “Your room?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Nosy me: “Going to invite me in?”

  She pushed the door open. I went in. I had to step around a scattered deck of cards, a pile of poker chips, and a hockey stick on the floor. In a corner: a one-legged teddy bear, its head lost in a football helmet. Tacked to the wall was the front page from a gag newspaper with the headline:

  ALVINA KLECKO CROWNED

  NEW HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMP

  Hanging from a bedpost: a pair of black nunchucks. No frills. No pink. But…on a shelf above the head of the bed: a lineup of dolls. They seemed to go from the youngest on one end to the oldest on the other, from baby to glamorous model. Several were Barbies. I counted them—there were eleven. One for each birthday, I guessed.

  I kept looking at the dolls, trying to make them fit with the girl I thought I knew. I would have expected them to be G.I. Joes and Hulks and Terminators.

  I looked at her. “Barbies?” I said.

  “You got a problem?” she said, ending that discussion.

  She pulled the clipped-off half inch of pink fingernail from her pocket. She fitted it to the end of the remaining stub. “Can it be fixed?” Her voice was peepy.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “We’ll do something about it.”

  She looked at it some more. Her expression hardened. She threw the clipping to the floor and stomped on it. “Who cares? I don’t give a crap.”

  She took something else out of her pocket—a penknife. She opened it and began scraping at the stub. Glitter flakes went flying.

  “Hey”—I grabbed her wrist, took away the knife—“stop that.”

  “I don’t give a crap,” she said again. She pulled the nunchucks from the bedpost. She clacked them together. She smacked her feet down into a karate stance and began swinging the nunchucks around—“Hee-ah! Hee-ah!” Thomas returned then, but when he saw the whirling nunchucks he bolted for the hallway and down the stairs. I had a strong feeling he had been a nunchuck target more than once in his life.

  As I watched Alvina twirl and swoop and “Hee-ah!” with her clacking nunchucks, grinnin
g Pooh Bear bouncing on her shoestring necklace, I felt a pang of sadness for her. Maybe I was thinking of my own worst days at Mica High, when I danced but danced alone.

  When she finished, she twirled the nunchucks over her head like a bola and flung them toward the far bedpost. They caught, wrapped around it, and drooped to a stop.

  “Impressive,” I said. “You practice that?”

  “No,” she lied.

  She fell silent. She kicked the hockey stick. It clattered across the floor and against the wall. She just stood there, staring at it, looking lost, misplaced between her past and future. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to say, Be patient. You’re between two Alvinas. The next one awaits you down the calendar.

  I said, “Alvina…there’s a man I see down by the stone piles at the old cement plant. He always wears a green watch cap. He always says—”

  “‘Are you looking for me?’”

  “Exactly.”

  “Crazy Arnold.”

  “Arnold?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everybody knows him. He’s wacko.” She let out a quick giggle burst. I had never seen her come that close to laughing.

  “What?” I said.

  She shrugged, the grin gone as fast as it appeared. “Nothin’. Little kids walk behind him and he don’t even know it. Then you poke him and say, ‘Gotcha!’ and he turns around and you scream and run. Just little kids.” Abruptly she walked out of the room. “I’m blowing this dump.”

  On the way out I noticed the inner side of her bedroom door. There was a picture tacked to it, a 3 © 5 school-type color portrait. It was a boy. A blond-haired boy. Where had I seen him? Suddenly it came to me—the Dogwood Festival! It was a picture of the boy she had beaten up. Good grief, I thought, love punches?

  How I wanted to grill her! But I held my tongue (not easy for me, as you know). I finished my gardening, and when Mrs. Klecko came home, I gave her a cleaned-up version of the Great Fingernail Disaster and took Alvina downtown to Lin’s Nailery and got her fitted with a new pink, glittery masterpiece.

  It wasn’t until I got back to my house that I collapsed onto the sofa and finally laughed myself silly at the memory of tiny Thomas mooning his big sister.

  July 13

  Arnold.

  I’ve been thinking about him. I picture him as a child. Or should I say, a younger child. Little Arnold. Here’s what I see: pudgy little kid in a moss-green knit cap with a tassel. Summer. After dinner. Playing with the neighborhood kids down by the cement plant, the stone piles. Playing hide-and-seek. Almost every time they play this game, Little Arnold is the first one to be caught. This time he’s determined that won’t happen. While the It boy covers his eyes and counts aloud to one hundred, Little Arnold takes off. This time he doesn’t go to the usual places: behind a stone pile, behind the great wheel of a cement truck. This time he runs and he keeps running. Down the railroad tracks and over the canal bridge and down by the river’s edge until he can’t even hear the It boy counting anymore.

  And still he keeps running, along the riverbank, up to the road, along the road—but no, he’s in the open, they’ll see him, they’ll catch him—“Yer It, Arnold!”—so across the farmer’s field he goes and back into the trees, running, running, up hills, down hills, his footsteps beating out a tune, Not this time Not this time. And finally somewhere near the end of the world he comes to this wonderful hiding place—maybe it’s a tunnel into the invisible middle of a thicket of brambles or a woody little nook between two tall stacks of railroad ties—and he squeezes in and settles down and begins to hear the silence beyond his own breathing, and he waits. And thinks, as there’s nothing much else to do.

  Then a smile comes upon his little round face. Maybe he even giggles—he can’t help it—as he thinks of them looking for him, looking for him, looking at each other, saying, “Where’s Arnold?” and then—this is the best part—“Arnold’s the only one left”—no, this is the best part—“Arnold won!” And he waits and thinks and smiles and sometimes he thinks he hears them calling—“Arnold!…Arnold!”—and sometimes he thinks they’re right there, outside the brambles, and sometimes he even flinches because he can feel a hand just over his shoulder ready to grab him like they always do as they shout, “Yer It, Arnold!” But they don’t…and they don’t…and the summer bugs are buzzing and somewhere a train whistle calls Ar-nollllllllld…and when did it get so dark? He holds his hand before his eyes. He cannot find himself.

  Sooner or later he comes home—maybe that night, maybe the next day—to frantic parents, police maybe. Life goes on. Games go on. After dinners. Summers. Years. But that night, that game, that’s the one he can’t forget, that’s the one that never ends.

  And I thought, Arnold knows something that Alvina doesn’t know, something that none of the little kids know: he likes it when they poke him from behind and say, “Gotcha!”

  July 18

  Another scorcher. It’s too hot here! And dry. We’ve had nine days over 90 degrees in July and hardly any rain. Grass looks like straw. Not even weeds are growing. My Garden Groomer business is hurting.

  Today I cooled off at the swim club. I went as a guest of Alvina and her mother. They have a family membership. The three of us jumped in and splashed around for a while. Then Mrs. Klecko and I headed for the shade of the pavilion. It was from there that I looked up and saw someone climbing the chain-link fence that borders the back of the club. He was far away and I couldn’t see his face, but I knew instantly it was that boy. Perry. Quick as a monkey, he was up and over the fence, jumping to the ground, popping up from a forward roll, leaping over two sunbathers, and sprinting straight for the pool. He leaped over the NO RUNNING sign into the deep end. He didn’t have to change clothes—he was already wearing nothing but ragged, knee-length cutoffs. It must have been ten minutes before I saw him climb out—and before I realized I hadn’t taken my eyes off the deep end for a second.

  Now he was climbing up the ladder to the high dive. He swaggered out to the end of the board—and just stood there. He was obviously enjoying himself. Not in an arrogant or disdainful way. It was something more like comfort, a sense that he was home, that this was where he truly belonged, poised in his cutoffs at the edge of space, the squealing, splashing multitudes below, glistening in the sun, all the world before him—the King of Pennsylvania.

  And then he jumped.

  Next time he climbed from the pool a hand reached out and grabbed his ankle and pulled him back in. There were girl screeches and laughing and splashing, and a girl head—red hair—was bobbing next to his, and the two heads kept appearing and disappearing in the sun-spangled water. When they finally emerged it was at the shallow end. The girl wore a pale blue two-piece bathing suit. They flopped onto a brightly colored striped beach towel. The towel was big enough for two, so long as they lay very close to each other.

  They were lying there for only a few minutes when suddenly another girl—it was Alvina—ran toward them from the baby pool and dumped a bucketful of water into Perry’s face. She ran off screaming, flinging the bucket, as Perry took off after her. They jumped into the pool, where I lost sight of them. When he emerged, he was alone. He did not return to the girl on the blanket. I don’t know why, but this made me a little bit happy.

  He jumped again from the high dive. That’s when I found myself walking through the sunbathers and squealing children and lowering myself slowly into the water. I waded around. I felt the skin of bodies I brushed by, swatted a volleyball. I paddled underwater, keeping my eyes open for a glimpse of cutoffs. And suddenly there he was, the back of his head popping up in front of me. “Hi!” I said. He turned. I got the impression he didn’t recognize me at first, wet hair and all. And then he smiled. And then he dipped his chin into the water and took in a mouthful and spat it into my face, still smiling. And then he was gone. I just stood there, blinking sunwater. A few minutes later I saw him climbing back over the fence and trotting away.

>   Later, in the pavilion, I said to Alvina, “I saw you with that boy. Perry.”

  She played with her Pooh Bear necklace. “Yeah. I got him back for taking the donuts from Mrs. Wacko’s porch.”

  “You sure chased him a long way that day.”

  She was studying her new fingernail. “Did I?”

  “I’m surprised you thought a boy was worth chasing that far.”

  “I woulda smashed his face if I caught him.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  I changed direction. “So I get the impression you know him. Perry.”

  She shrugged. “I know a lotta people.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He comes in sometimes.”

  “You mean to Margie’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably shoplifting donuts, huh?”

  “Yeah.” She bit one of her nine un-elegant fingernails. “He’s a criminal.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, for some reason wanting to defend him.

  “He is,” she said. “He was in jail.”

  Whoa, Nellie!

  “Jail?” I said. “Really?”

  “Boot camp.”

  “Boot camp? Army? He’s too young.”

  “It’s for kids. It’s like the army but it’s not. It’s for criminal kids. He had to clean toilets with a toothbrush.”

  “He was sentenced to boot camp?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For what? What did he do?”

  “Stealing.”

  “How long was he in boot camp?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. A year.”

  I thought of him climbing the fence. Maybe he did that sort of thing on the boot camp obstacle course every day.

  “Does he have girlfriends?” Why did that pop out?