them

  She wondered what was wrong with being quiet—people were always saying she was too quiet. Loretta was always after her for having “secrets,” which meant that she was quiet, and Grandma Wendall talked about her “long face.” “She has a long face and she eats with long teeth,” the old woman said sourly. Maureen was puzzled at her grandmother’s dislike: hadn’t the old woman liked her at one time? Hadn’t she liked Jules at one time? Now she sat around, sick and sour, leaning on a cane even while she sat, as if to emphasize her swollen legs and feet, her evil condition, brought so low in a household of enemies. Maureen thought her face was no longer than anyone else’s, and it was not a bad-looking face. She tried to be quiet and composed and orderly, and this perhaps irritated people. “Oh, what a fuss you make!” her mother sometimes screamed when Maureen insisted upon counting every stamp in the stamp-redemption book, or inspected dishes to see if they were really clean, or asked if she could wash her hair more than once a week. But her mother screamed at everyone, her own kids and the Stonewall kids and the kids across the way—it meant nothing. Mrs. Stonewall screamed too. It meant nothing. In the next instant they flopped down and lit cigarettes and forgot about being angry. Maureen’s heart would still be pounding but already her mother had forgotten, would forget anything, and that was why she trudged up the street alone, muttering to herself, and why she daydreamed at school, thinking of punishments that would keep everyone good and quiet so that her mother would never scream again. Those little brats! At school the Mother Superior, a nun with a man’s wise, gnarled face, called Maureen into her office one day and said, “Maureen, it’s up to you to watch your sister at recess. You’re the oldest.”

  “Yes, Sister,” Maureen said.

  “Your sister is quarrelsome and impudent. She’s like your brother. It’s up to you, your mother said, to watch her during recess.”

  So she hated Betty and hated them all and wished they would die. She would like to shovel all their bodies under the veranda, in that dark, musty, leaf-strewn dungeon where spiders and other nasty things lived. Or maybe she would crawl under there herself and hide, let her mind go quiet and blank, give herself a good rest so that she could get her life straightened out.

  In the public library the ceilings were so high she was always glancing up nervously. It seemed to her that the ceiling sometimes floated away. The floors were old but well polished. They were a little uneven. Maureen could not quite believe in the silence—it was like a beautiful glass vase that might be shattered at any moment. She took her books far into the reading-room, where she could sit at a table by the “Great Books of the Western World” and by a hot radiator, and read for hours. The silence in the library really was not broken often, though she expected it to be. People even walked quietly here. There were few children. She read through the Young People’s Shelf, book by book. She did not allow herself to pick books at random, because that way she might miss something important. And each week she made herself go back to the beginning to check whether any new books had been put on the shelf, books returned that week or brand-new books with blank cards in the pockets at the back. Discovering these books, she smiled with a kind of cautious surprise.

  The librarian reminded her of the principal of her school, so Maureen knew that it was best to be shy in front of her. Because she controlled the library she had a terrible authority over Maureen’s life. One day, at the desk, she leafed idly through a book Maureen was returning and discovered a large tear down one page. “How did this happen?” she said.

  “It was there when I took the book out,” Maureen whispered.

  “It was not there. All our books are checked.”

  As if to prove this, she turned a few more pages and came across a mended tear. It had been mended with transparent tape that had turned yellow. “See? Like this. It would have been mended,” the woman said.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Maureen said. “I didn’t do it!” She saw the woman’s eyes move coldly over her, Maureen in a sweater of loose knobby wool, worn at the elbows and uneven in back; Maureen looking guilty, with her legs absurdly thin and exposed.

  “I’m afraid this book was in good condition before you took it out,” the woman said.

  Maureen began to nod, frightened. She must be guilty. Someone must have done it at home, by accident, but it was her fault. Her fault. She should not have brought a library book into such a house.

  “You’ll have to pay a fine, I’m afraid,” the librarian said. “Twenty-five cents.”

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Maureen said.

  “All right. But you can’t take any books out today.”

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” Maureen said. In her relief at being released so easily, she forgot her disappointment at not being able to take out any books. For a moment she felt the desperate gloating of a criminal. She was allowed to walk out of the library and walk home and nothing had happened to her.

  At home she did not bother to ask Loretta for the money but waited until Jules came in. She hung around the bathroom while he washed his face. He took off his shirt and leaned over the sink. She saw that the hairs on his arms were thick and dark and that his chest was hairy. He looked very tired.

  She said shyly, “I got in some trouble today and need some money for a fine.”

  “How much?” said Jules.

  “A quarter,” said Maureen.

  “Okay, here,” he said, giving her a quarter, and she felt a little sickened to think that she was deceiving her brother. She really had a few cents saved, out in a tin can in the garage, but it was money for something special and she had made a vow to the Virgin not to use it for a year. Saving money was a secret no one else was to know about and a secret that made her different from all of them.

  She wondered if Jules too was saving money: he was like her, secretive beneath the prominent open bones of his face.

  There were so many crowded in their half of the house—besides Grandma Wendall, from time to time there was Aunt Connie, who was sick off and on but who worked in a laundry when she was well. Aunt Connie had had a bad life, Grandma Wendall said in a whisper. (Her insides operated on? Her husband killed in a car accident or run off to California? Which was it?) Aunt Connie was heavy and seemed very old, older than Loretta, and sometimes her very sluggishness brought her so low that Loretta wanted to help her up again, and therefore liked her, but at other times her sluggishness got on Loretta’s nerves so that she ran next door to Flora Stonewall and cried, “That bitch! That fat-ass bitch! Either she goes or I go, tonight I’m telling him for sure!” And of course Betty, who shared a room with her, and Jules was in and out of his room, not making much noise but still a presence, a human being, crowding upon her. Their father had a job that paid well, he said, but where did the money go? Where did it go? He was a stout man who carried a lunch pail and wore the same pair of grimy dark trousers all the time, on workdays or days off. His shirts were blue. He seemed often to be contemplating his own big hands, lying on the kitchen table or on his lap. He seemed to approach everything with a sideways look: food, ale, people, the television set. He was cautious, suspicious, closed. Then, as minutes passed, he opened himself up to supper or television, moving in, beginning to sweat—he liked to eat and drink, he ate and drank passionately, and he liked all television shows. He was suspicious at first and then he opened himself up. Maureen had learned this. His favorite place was a tavern a few blocks away, the Holiday Grill, which had two large dusty plants in its windows, plants with spearlike leaves—seeing plants like that always made Maureen think of her father, even years after he was dead and no longer any threat. Leaves like spears. There was something dense about her father and, beneath the density, a sharpness that was frightening.

  One night he’d moved sideways into supper, eating and sweating, and only when supper was almost over did he look at Jules. Then he said, “What’s this about Malone?”

  Maureen had noticed her
brother’s alarm, which was a giveaway. He tried to cover it up by saying smoothly, “I don’t know, what about him?”

  “He got himself roughed up, heh?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “Duane Tracy was saying something—”

  “You little shit, don’t you lie to me! You know all about it!”

  “I don’t know all about it!” Jules said.

  “What the hell happened to him?” said Loretta.

  “He got beat up. He got his goddam smart-aleck face kicked in for him,” Maureen’s father said angrily. It was hard to tell why he was angry: was he happy that Ramie had been hurt, or sorry? “Yeah, what happened?” Loretta said.

  “That punk thought he’d pull something smart—I heard it down at the corner—he stopped a nigger kid over on Hastings who was carrying a bag with some cash in it, and the stupid goddam bastard never thought he’d get caught! Them niggers caught up with him in an hour!” Maureen’s father said. His face was shining and vicious; again he was not looking at Jules. Jules was not looking at him either. “What kind of a stupid son-of-a-bitch of a punk would hustle a runner for the numbers, eh? What kind of a punk? A nigger kid twelve years old that’s running with four thousand dollars in a bag ain’t no kid on his own, you stupid bastard! You think a kid with four thousand dollars in a paper bag is out on his own going shopping? You think he’s maybe buying his mama a present?”

  “Don’t call me names, I wasn’t mixed up in it,” Jules said.

  “You’d better as hell not be. But if you were, they’d of got you by now. Kicked your teeth in for you, how’d you like that?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “No, you’re too smart! Jesus Christ, that’s one good thing,” Maureen’s father said, but without relief, still with a kind of perplexed anger. “They kicked the kid’s teeth out. Half of them out. They banged up his eye for him. They broke four of his ribs for him. What they did to the rest of him I don’t know, but they didn’t hold back, I bet, and even if they are niggers I got to admit he got what’s coming to him—that smart-aleck little bastard always roaming around on the street!”

  “Look, I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Jules said.

  “But you know all about it, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You sit there and lie to me, eh?”

  They were not looking at each other, and Maureen could feel the tension building up between them. She wanted to put her hand on Jules’s arm and whisper, “Give in,” but Jules, his pale face strained, showed all his hatred in the very set of his mouth.

  Loretta steered them out of it by saying, “Hey, I made some pudding tonight. You all want pudding?”

  Later on that night Maureen’s father said with a sullen sigh, “Them niggers will get control of this city yet. They’ll put a padlock on it and put up roadblocks and, brother, that will be the end!”

  Loretta sat watching television with him, in her spangled straw bedroom slippers. She said, “The police should get them for beating Ramie Malone up. I don’t care what you say, they didn’t need to kick his teeth out. He was sort of a nice-looking kid.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised they cut him up fine. They like to cut people up,” Maureen’s father said slowly. “Down at the plant, if you fool around in the parking lot after the other guys have gone, you’re taking a chance. They don’t just take your money, they cut you up. They like to do that. It’s what they do for fun.”

  On other nights Maureen heard him talk about the Polacks, who stank, and the greasy spics, who were moving into one end of Bagley Street itself, all of them jabbering away like crazy, carrying knives, drinking and fighting each other right out on the sidewalk…

  Jules, making fun of his father to Maureen, said, “Them niggers, them Polacks, them spics! Jesus Christ, how I’m sick of having to hate them all! What a pain in the ass it gives me!” When he imitated their father he made his face turn gross and his jaw droop, so that his eyes took on a moronic expression. Maureen had to laugh, but then she felt a warning, which had to do with their grandmother’s constant remark: “Make a face and your face will freeze.” Make a face and your face will freeze.

  She saw them all with their frozen faces, her mother and father, her sister, her brother, her grandmother, her aunt, the faces of the nuns at school, the faces of the priests, the faces of the kids in the neighborhood, the faces of all the world—frozen hard into expressions of cunning and anger, while she, Maureen, having no hardness to her, crept in silence among them and waited for the day when everything would be orderly and neat, when she could arrange her life the way she arranged the kitchen after supper, and she too might then be frozen hard, fixed, permanent, beyond their ability to hurt.

  Her mother concentrated attention on faces, as if she’d learned this style from Grandma Wendall while, having no knowledge of its origin, she adopted a singsong joviality when she and Maureen went out shopping, indicating people by saying, “Look at the horseface!” “Look at the sow’s-face!” “Look behind you and see the monkey!”—getting Maureen to look over her shoulder and into a mirror. Loretta’s face was sometimes flabby and ugly, sometimes rather pretty, sometimes the pores of her nose loomed large and black, sometimes not, it was up and down, ugly and pretty, messy and neat, and who could tell which Loretta would step out of her cluttered bedroom? All this made Maureen concentrate upon herself. Her mother directed attention that way anyhow; she often said, squinting at Maureen, “Is your face breaking out? You’re about at that age now for lots of pimples.”

  Around the five rooms that made up their half of the duplex everything was in Loretta’s domain. She presided over them all. As soon as their father returned in the early evening his bulk fitted into the overheated rooms; he made his way around the piles of clothes that needed to be washed or ironed or were just lying around, and Betty’s junk underfoot, and Maureen hunched over the kitchen table trying to do her homework. He ate the food Loretta made for him. Even when Maureen actually prepared it, it was still Loretta’s food, and the house smelled of her—her “bath salts,” her perfume, her cigarette smoke. Even when he ran out of silence finally and slapped her, shouting something into her face, she was still at the very center of the house, passive and indolent and vicious.

  Through all this, Maureen worked at her homework and tried not to be distracted. She was fairly good in school. Betty was no good at anything except showing off. Jules hadn’t even brought a report card home in months. His eyes looked dark and hollow and he lived a life of secrets: a girl at school told Maureen that Jules went out drinking with other boys, that he went out with a girl named Rose Ann, that he was a friend of Ramie Malone and you know what happened to Ramie. Maureen looked through his pockets and found odd things—a broken black plastic comb, filthy, a matchbook with “Manhattan Lounge” on the cover, Kleenex crumpled and smeared with lipstick, a broken key chain, loose coins, slugs, peanuts, various junk. She knew he was flunking out of school but did not dare ask him about it. And Betty, Betty was a little brat—she was so loud and dopey that Maureen would rather take the long way home from school so she wouldn’t have to walk with Betty, though that meant she would miss the store windows and the Rialto Theater, whose posters changed once a week and were of great interest. Monday was her mother’s day for having her hair washed and set by her friend Ethel, and plucking her eyebrows and doing her nails. On Monday her lips and her fingernails would be the same shade of dark grape. So Maureen understood that her mother was a woman like the women on those movie posters; they wanted certain things and were willing to take risks to get them. Maureen’s mother took her shopping in a supermarket and they brought back food in paper bags with red and black squares, and yellow stamps for the book; that was her mother’s way of getting things.

  On those Saturdays when it was too cold to go to the library Maureen had to stay
home. She hated home. She sat for hours looking out the window. There was nothing to see. Just the partly crumbling concrete base of the house next door, a house as old and ugly as theirs. Not that this house was theirs; every month Maureen’s father grumbled about paying the rent. What he paid was a secret. Adults had many secrets, mostly dealing with money. It could be shouted out that Loretta was a bitch or Howard was a lazy bastard, anything might be shouted out that had to do with people, but nothing about money—the facts of money—could be mentioned out loud. It was a secret to all children. It was a secret how much her father made every week, and how much he gave her mother; it was even a secret how much some things cost. Aunt Connie complained about making only fifty dollars a week when she worked, but that was just like her—she was always whining, always coughing up things you didn’t want to hear. When she came in the kitchen to complain about her life to Loretta, Maureen sighed and moved closer to the window of her room, wanting to get out, to go deaf, wondering why the winter glare that made everything so hard and colorless was somehow better than the close, stale odor of their house. After all, she did love her mother and father. She loved Jules. She even loved Betty, if only Betty would wise up, and so why did she want to see them all dead and buried under the front porch? Even Jules, dead and buried and put to rest.

  Most of the time Maureen daydreamed. In her mind she shouted commands, like a soldier; all the kids obeyed her and lined up. There were no adults anywhere to punish or even to praise. It was peaceful and good without them now that she was taking their place and doing what they should have done. Or she closed her eyes and played school. She was the teacher, a nun, and all the kids on the block were sitting in rows; she made them read their lessons one by one, going up and down the aisle. She made them go to the blackboard and add up long columns of figures. If they made mistakes they were scolded in front of everyone and not allowed to make excuses—if they were allowed to make excuses they would only say, “I couldn’t do my homework last night, there was some trouble at my house,” or “I had to go out last night and I couldn’t get any sleep.” No, this was like no other school. “Here you’ve got to work. To work,” Maureen would tell them. Her heart would begin to pound, thinking of the captive children and herself watching over them, guarding and bullying them, a different Maureen from the girl everyone knew. Why couldn’t people be perfect? Why did they make such mistakes? Doing her homework, Maureen checked and rechecked everything, fearful of making mistakes. Even when she played, even in her imagination she was somehow afraid of making a mistake.