them

  “I’m going to run away if she doesn’t quit. If she hates me I’m going to run away. I’ll live somewhere else like Jules—”

  “You’re not going anywhere, so shut up.”

  “I’ll get a job and run away.”

  “You’re not leaving this place! You’re not getting into trouble! Shut up and forget about it!” Furlong said loudly.

  “Then ask her why she hates me—”

  He turned suddenly, with an effort, and slapped her. He hit her on the side of the face, a surprise to them both. What she felt about his hand was its sudden cracking pressure; the blow had not hurt.

  “Now shut up!” he shouted, furious. “Get out of here and go to bed!”

  “You dirty bastard,” Maureen said.

  He jumped to his feet and slapped her again. The chair was knocked aside. Maureen started for the door but he jerked her back. He shook her so that her head bobbed and she thought her neck would snap. “Get us in trouble and see what I’ll do to you—see what happens!” he yelled, then let her go.

  Maureen ran into the living-room, too surprised to cry. She could hear her mother listening, she could see those pinpoints of eyes there in the dark. Why didn’t Loretta get up? Why didn’t she come out here? Why that silence from that room? Maureen opened the door to the stairway and stepped outside. Now that she was safe she began to cry. She sat down with her back to the door. She pressed her fists against her eyes and drew her knees up to her chest, feeling herself safe on the drafty stairway, alone.

  After a while she stopped crying. Hours passed. She made her way back into the apartment. The kitchen light was still on. She lay down on the sofa and fell asleep. When she woke up she had a headache. Her mother was leaning over her. She said, “I told you lots of times he’s got a bad temper. I told you not to provoke him.”

  Maureen lay exhausted on the sofa. She stared blankly at her mother.

  “You better get up,” Loretta said.

  “What?”

  “It’s morning. Time to get up.”

  “Morning?”

  “Stop looking so stupid. You asked for trouble, don’t drag me into it.”

  “I didn’t ask for any trouble—”

  “Reeny, you have that snippy-snotty look—you should see yourself in a mirror! When you look like that there’s always somebody going to slap you.”

  “I didn’t provoke him. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, he’ll be sorry tonight. He’ll apologize when he comes in.”

  “I don’t give a damn about him.”

  “You’d better give a damn.” Loretta looked at her critically, yet with a kind of affection. It was a wavering, hesitant look that made Maureen shiver; she could not understand it. “Maureen, you should even out those bangs of yours. They’re too heavy on one side. You look like a goddam dope that way.”

  “What?” Maureen said, surprised.

  “Your hair. Go get me the scissors and I’ll do it myself.”

  “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “It needs straightening out.”

  “I’ll do it after school,” Maureen said. She was very confused.

  “Get me the scissors. Come on.” She went out into the kitchen and Maureen followed, in a daze. Loretta reached out and made snapping motions with her fingers. Maureen got her the scissors from a drawer. She sat. Loretta leaned over her, leaning against her with her swelling stomach, and began to cut her hair. Maureen sat in a daze, obedient.

  “I’m sorry about last night,” Loretta said, “but you know what he’s like. Men are like that. They don’t put up with crap. Now, keep these bangs trimmed, don’t let them get too heavy. Too much hair up here gives you pimples. It’s from the oil in the hair. You should know that at your age.” Loretta leaned around to look at Maureen’s face. “There are some blackheads on your nose, kid. Take care of yourself. You got a nice face so take care of it, right?”

  Maureen wanted to hide her face in her mother’s dirty old kimono and ask Why? Why? Why was everything so loud and confused? Why was everything ready to fly into pieces?

  She knew she would have to leave home.

  Late that afternoon, when she got home from school, Loretta was wearing a dress and her face was fixed up. The intense red of her lips was matched by two oval spots of rouge on her cheeks. Furlong was home. Loretta said to her, “Reeny, your stepfather has something to say to you.”

  Reluctantly Maureen went into the kitchen.

  Furlong was sitting with an untidy pile of newspapers around him; every day he bought two newspapers. When she approached he glanced up as if he hadn’t known she had come home until now. He said, embarrassed, “Guess I had too much to drink last night.”

  Maureen stared boldly at him.

  “There’s too much going on all over,” he said, gesturing toward the papers with their headlines and photographs. The face of Eisenhower looked up at Maureen. “Well, I’m sorry,” Furlong said.

  Maureen said nothing.

  Loretta came into the kitchen and clapped her hands together lightly. “All friends again?” she said.

  “Sure,” said Furlong.

  “What about you, stuck-up?” Loretta slid her arm around Maureen’s shoulders. “You’re not mad any more, huh? It’s all over?”

  “Sure, Ma,” Maureen said.

  “Sure,” said Furlong.

  He and Maureen glanced at each other by accident and looked away at once. The shame between them was strong and sharp as the bath powder Loretta always dabbed on herself.

  15

  It came to her at night, when she thought she was sleeping: she had to get out. She had to get money. In her dreams she caught up with Jules on the street and asked him, How do you get money?

  She dreamed about her father. Her dead father was sitting at a kitchen table in a room without walls, reading a newspaper. His eyes were vacant and alarmed at the headlines. Maureen came over to see what he was reading, but there was nothing there—they didn’t know the secret, she and her father, to what was in the newspaper. But money was behind it all, surely. Money was the secret.

  Now that she and Furlong were “friends,” it was Maureen who had to get him when he stayed too late at the garage. In the past he had drifted home by way of several bars, taking his time, but now Maureen went to get him to see that he got home. His back was not good. It wasn’t getting well the way it was supposed to. So Loretta sent Maureen out, never Betty. “Look, you’re the favorite,” she would explain. “You’re his favorite. Get him to come home and eat.” Maureen hated going the three blocks down to the garage, hated the risk of going out on Michigan Avenue at twilight, hated approaching the cluster of men inside the gas station, whether Furlong was there or not. Sometimes he wasn’t there. Standing in the cold halo of light from the garage doorway, she watched the men before they noticed her, wondering what men did talk about when they were alone—what secrets they had. She hated their looks of surprise and then their smiles, their knowing smiles. She was Pat Furlong’s stepdaughter. She was Maureen Wendall, standing out in the cold and waiting, come to take her stepfather home. Furlong, reluctant and swaggering, always took time to say good-night to his friends, ignoring her.

  Sometimes she waited out by the gas pumps for ten, fifteen minutes, while snowflakes fell slowly about her and traffic out on the wide street dwindled, the car headlights misty and expanded in the moist air. She wondered where those cars were heading. Would one of them stop to give her a ride? She caressed her arm through the thickness of her coat sleeve, puzzled, unable to figure out why she was puzzled, as if the feeble pattern of traffic before her held some knowledge she should have possessed. In the deepest part of her was a question: Why was she herself and not someone else? But then, as if to muffle this question, she would think, I might as well be here as anywhere else.

  When Furlong finally came out she often glanced up in surprise, no
t exactly remembering that she had been waiting for him. “Okay, come on,” he would say, already in a hurry. She had to walk fast to keep up with him. He took impatient, yard-long strides, as if trying to escape her.

  One evening she said to him, “Why won’t Ma let me get a job?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Won’t she? I don’t know.”

  “Will you ask her if I can get one?”

  “Sure.”

  “Please, will you ask her? She says she doesn’t want me to work. She doesn’t want me out of the house. But I need a job, please, please ask her.” She was conscious of her voice annoying him. It was a mistake to talk too much to men, to this kind of man. They didn’t want to hear the voices of women pleading with them. “Now that she has the baby she says I should stay home to help her, but I could help her at home and have a job too. I could do it all, I could do everything. Will you ask her?”

  She was pleading with his back. He wore a short jacket, zipped up to his throat. Maureen leaned forward as she walked, and Furlong, though in a hurry, seemed to be about to turn back to her.

  “Okay, I’ll ask her.”

  “If she says no, ask her again. Keep asking her. I need to make money.”

  But Loretta was against it. Maureen was needed at home. “Anyway, I don’t like her hanging around places. I don’t like her running around any more than she does, like going to the library like she says.” The words like she says were ironic; Maureen caught that but did not understand. What was wrong with the library?

  She woke up at night thinking about a job. She thought about it constantly, a job, having no job in mind but only the idea of it, only the word itself. Loretta stood in her way, stubbornly. She needed a job, needed money. But Loretta would only say, her face closed, “I need you around here, I said! You’ll get in trouble soon enough.”

  “Ma, I don’t get into trouble!”

  “Don’t you talk back to me, Reeny. I told you my opinion.”

  “But you never believe me. You make up things. I go to the library, that’s the only place I go—not even to the movies—here, look at the books in my room! Aren’t those library books?”

  “Now, don’t start bawling. You always did have a long face, like Grandma Wendall said. You always take things too serious.” Maureen wandered away, clutching at her head. She thought something was going to snap. She needed to be free, out in her father’s car with Jules driving it, the two of them liberated, in the open, on their way out of the city and up north. “Why can’t I get a job?” she shouted back at Loretta. “A part-time job? After school? Why not? Why do I have to be home all the time? Why me, why not Betty? What’s there to do with the baby you can’t do? How come Betty can run wild all she wants but I have to stay home? Why is it? Why is it all so crazy?”

  “Don’t you yell at me! I told you my opinion and that’s that.” The baby’s crying began to get on Furlong’s nerves, or so he said. He wouldn’t come home when Maureen went to get him. “The hell with supper,” he would say. So she stopped going to get him and instead waited up for him. Everything had to do with him, with that man, and nothing had to do with Maureen herself. She had to stay up late to warm up his supper and make his coffee. He couldn’t do it himself and Loretta was too tired; she was always in bed. Sometimes he stayed out overnight, and around two o’clock Maureen would go to bed herself, giving up on him. But then she would have to stay home the next day, cutting school, because Loretta would feel sick and wouldn’t want to face Furlong alone. So Maureen had to stay home from school and wait out the morning until he came back. She hated him. Her hatred for him was so violent that it was always with her, in the foreground or the background of her mind, everywhere with her. She felt that he was turning into her real father, being always with her in her imagination.

  On these quiet, dopey mornings she read through books she had already finished, her mind desperate, her body sluggish and sullen. Loretta moved the television set into the bedroom, and since Maureen did not want to be in the same room with her she couldn’t even watch those stupid daytime shows—there was just nothing to do, no escape. The old daydreams were all finished. She could not summon up out of her imagination the classroom scenes she had once gloried in, with herself as a teacher. She would never be a teacher. She could not make herself imagine Furlong dying in an accident—the vision faded, she forgot to keep it going. There was nothing in her but a hatred for him so diffuse that it was like her own blood, coursing mechanically through her. She ransacked her mind but there was nothing in it. Everything was emptied out, exhausted. She might have been inhabiting her mother’s body. The only richness was in books, but the books lay on the sofa, read and reread, emptied. They could no longer stir her.

  Sometimes she thought idly about earthquakes, fires, buildings cracking in two. She thought about accidents in which automobiles piled on top of each other, one after another.

  She thought about money. At first she thought about the idea of money, as she had thought about the idea of a job. But then she began to think about the feel of money; she took a dollar bill out of her room, out of a hiding place, and stared at it. In this way she could pass an hour or more. She remembered how easily Jules had given her eight dollars; it had happened so quickly, like magic! Furlong carried his wallet in his back pocket. It was tight in that pocket, wrinkled and worn out. In it he had lots of bills. She wondered how much money he had. He got a check twice a month and Loretta got a check once a month. How much money did they have?

  She imagined a hiding place for money: the veranda of the old house on Labrosse. She could crawl under the veranda, into that dirty secret place, and hide everything there. No one would find it. She could stay there herself, hiding, and no one would find her.

  Her schoolwork began to come back to her with grades of D. Even in English, her best subject, she got D’s. She sat stunned and ashamed, sliding her test papers into her desk, hiding them quickly. Everything was so precarious. She had always gotten A’s and B’s, but now she had slid down to D and could honestly not understand why. It just happened, by itself. She should have asked her teacher about it but instead she remained in her seat or hurried quickly out of the room when the bell rang, anxious to get away. She walked home daydreaming. She sat in school daydreaming. She was getting slow, silent. There was a slight insolent edge to her stare when she was scolded. What the hell did it matter? Homework, schoolwork, oral questions, all that junk…

  She imagined finding an old paper bag on the sidewalk—with money inside! No one would bother to pick it up except her. She imagined finding an old paper bag next to her on a bus, in a movie house, in a corner of a restroom—filled with bills, all kinds of bills!—money that was all hers and that no one else knew about.

  There was something aching behind her eyes that told her she had to get this money, had to get out, never mind where, had to escape—as if, while she tried to read her homework or a novel from the library, a certain passage struggled to make itself clear to her. It was magic that did not quite work. She might open a book anywhere and let her eye fall upon a paragraph and that would be the paragraph that could tell her what she needed to know—but when she read it, she could not understand. Sometimes she could not even understand the words. What was this code? Did it make sense to other people?

  She said to her friend Carol, “Do you ever think about running away?”

  “Not any more,” Carol said slowly.

  “Doesn’t it bother you—I mean, at home?”

  Carol shrugged her shoulders.

  “But you don’t want to run away?”

  “They just bring you back again. To the same place,” Carol said.

  Maureen talked to another girl, an older girl, who had run away and was caught in Buffalo. “Where did you get the money for the bus?” Maureen said.

  “Stole it,” said the girl.

  “Why did you run away?”

  “I wanted to.
You know.”

  “Are you going to run away again?”

  The girl was slightly embarrassed at Maureen’s attention. “Naw, it was too much trouble. They just think you’re going to have a baby and they take a test of you. They got minds that low,” she said with a laugh, measuring a foot or so off the floor.

  She tried to hunt Jules on the street. He was seventeen now and should know everything. Sometimes she believed she saw him ahead of her, but it never turned out to be him. She found the brother of a friend of his, a kid with greasy hair and tight pants, and asked him about Jules; he looked evasive. “Tell him I want to see him. I want to talk to him,” she pleaded.

  And then, after time passed, something happened to her. A change came over her one morning as she sat staring out the window of the apartment at nothing. The baby was crying, Loretta was bathing him. Maureen felt a certain hardness come over her, as if something invisible were blessing her, as if a shell were shaping itself out of her skin. She drew back from the window, thinking it was a draft of cold air. She shivered. Her muscles cringed and then relaxed in acceptance. She felt herself change.

  The next day she left school early, soon after lunch. She told Sister Mary Paul that she had a bad headache, which was true. Her head always ached. But on the way home she dawdled—it was a clear sunny day—and as cars passed she glanced up at them, mildly surprised, as if she had no idea where she was going or what she could expect. Her expression was pleasant, wondering. When she had walked about a mile, aiming toward downtown Detroit, she saw a car slow in front of her and pull over toward the curb. She walked along the sidewalk without hurrying and without fear. When she was passing the car the driver leaned out and said, “Would you like a ride?”

  She thought for a terrifying moment that he was Furlong, in a different car. But then she saw that he was a stranger and that he looked nothing like Furlong. She took in his face at once; it was all right. It did not matter who he was. “I could use a ride maybe,” she called out. She got in.