The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

  The bell rang, and Miss Sparrow glanced up foggily at the class, as if surprised to find herself standing at a blackboard in front of twenty-odd children. Time was not being particularly kind to her. Tiny lines were starting to colonize the spare skin around her eyes, and her lips, once as plump as summer berries, were beginning to thin along their edges. She still bought herself a new pair of high-heeled spectator pumps every year, though, even though she always complained that her toes were killing her and that all the sidewalks in Aberdeen were cracked to kingdom come. She blinked now and clapped her chalk-tipped fingers together dryly. “Recess, children,” she called. She fisted one hand, held it to her mouth, and cleared her throat.

  I waited until everyone filed out of the room, then reached into my satchel and withdrew the mirror. Slowly, I unwound the moth-eaten scarf I’d tied around it. Serena Jane was outside, laughing at something a boy was saying and showing off her new skirt. I planned to leave the mirror on her desk, where Serena Jane would see it and understand. She would wait for me after school, and walk with me to Hinkleman’s to slurp sodas, our heels hooked up on the stools. Here, she would say, and slip off the tinkling charm bracelet. You can have this. She would know how badly I needed something small and frivolous with which to decorate my life.

  I had just laid the mirror facedown on Serena Jane’s desk and was turning the bulk of myself around when I heard Miss Sparrow chirp from behind her desk, “What have we here, my dear?” Her heels clicked in my direction and stopped at Serena Jane’s desk. She picked up the mirror, pinching the palm of her hand in the process.

  “Oh!” she cried, and dropped the mirror at her feet. A spidery crack spread across the surface of the glass, and one jagged shard fell next to her shoe. “What’s this?” She sucked the skin of her hand and nudged the broken glass with her foot. “Don’t you know you’re not allowed to bring things like this to school?” She pulled her hand away from her mouth. A red welt was blooming in the center of her palm.

  “You see what’s gone and happened? Now, what if that had been your sister? I’m afraid I’ll have to take this.” She tucked the handle of the mirror into her waistband, careful to avoid the crack and the raggedy edges of glass, then scowled like a displeased empress. “Now, run along outside.”

  I ducked my head. Arguing with Miss Sparrow was always a losing gamble. “Yes, ma’am.” I hesitated, the tip of my tongue protruding between the buttresses of my lips, then hung my head and shambled out to the schoolyard. Miss Sparrow watched me go, her own lips pinched shut like an old lady’s purse. She waited until I was all the way out the door before she pulled out the mirror and held it in front of her, twisting the glass this way and that in order to catch all the angles of herself.

  “Mirror, mirror,” she whispered, her eyes briefly spreading wide as a girl’s. She caught a flash of Serena Jane’s flaxen hair framed in the window, then sniffed and tossed the mirror headfirst into the trash. Outside, I heard the thump of the mirror hitting the metal trash can. Morosely, I reached into my pocket, withdrew the deck of cards August had given me, and began to thumb through them. I turned over the six of spades, the three of diamonds, and then the unlovely queen of clubs, her face bloated with a surplus of smug regality. In a round of poker, I knew, that card could be worth gold. It could win you the game, if everything else in your hand cooperated. But in a game of twenty-one, the queen could send you bust with a flick of the wrist as fast as she could win it for you. That was the thing about playing games of chance, I was learning—even when you were losing everything, there was always another suit to turn over, always another facet of the die, where things could add up. It was simple. August had told me so. You just avoided clubs, fished for diamonds, and when in doubt you always, always played the joker.

  Outside, Amelia and Marcus were waiting for me on the turtle- shaped rock. “Did you put it on her desk?” they asked, then shut up as they looked more closely at my face.

  I shook my head. “Miss Sparrow took it away.”

  Amelia frowned and stamped at the dirt in frustration. It was Marcus who said the right thing. “Don’t worry, Truly,” he soothed, “mirrors are just a device for throwing light back at you, and light is just thousands of photons—little bitty particles. Miss Sparrow didn’t really take anything from you. Whatever you ever saw in that mirror left it long ago and became a part of you. No one can steal that.”

  He held out his hand, and I accepted it, choosing—for that moment, at least—to believe him.

  Chapter Eight

  One of the things you learn growing up in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business is that desire is communal. And for as long as I could remember, Bob Bob Morgan had only ever wanted two things out of life: to be a doctor and to possess my sister.

  Becoming a doctor was no problem at all. History was on his side. Every male in his family from his great-great-grandfather on down had been a doctor. He would be one, too—all of us knew it. It was practically predestined. He could flunk his medical boards, and the school in Buffalo would still have to take him. He could faint every time he saw blood and still get a degree with honors. Serena Jane wasn’t so easy to come by, however. Everything about her—from her Kewpie lips to her black-fringed eyes and flossy yellow hair—was like some fancy pony on show parade. No matter how much Bob Bob oohed and aahed, she never spared a glance in his direction.

  Not that Bob Bob didn’t give it his best shot and amuse the rest of us trying. In the third grade, he climbed the drainpipe up the side of the school building and dangled from it by one arm until he fell and broke his wrist. Serena Jane merely yawned and started picking at the scab on her knee, but I have to say, I was mesmerized by the way the bone protruded sideways out of his arm and his face turned the color of old washing water. When he was ten, he rode his bicycle around and around the school during a violent thunderstorm, risking electrocution, until Miss Sparrow came with a ragged, flapping umbrella and made him go inside. He ate worms for Serena Jane’s benefit and tangled with a stray swarm of bees that left his face as juicy and plump as a plum. I enjoyed that week. For once, I could say with confidence that I wasn’t the ugliest one in the class.

  When Bob Bob wasn’t showing off for Serena Jane’s benefit, he was thinking up novel ways to torture me. He put thumbtacks in my chair to see if I would feel them when I sat down, then looked blankly amazed when I did. He filled my galoshes with snow, stole my lunches, and routinely peppered my hair with tiny spit wads. The only thing I was glad about was that he left Amelia alone—maybe because she was so quiet—and Marcus, too, because he did Bob Bob’s homework for him.

  “We could say something to Miss Sparrow,” Amelia insisted wanly, brushing flecks of spittle-soaked paper off my collar after class one day, but she knew as well as I did that such a suggestion was fatally flawed. Miss Sparrow loved Bob Bob almost as much as she hated us.

  “We could concoct some kind of revenge,” Marcus chimed in, rubbing his hands together, his brain already humming with the elaborate machinery of retribution.

  “No,” I almost shouted, startling the three of us. “That would just make it worse. Don’t you think?”

  “I guess.” Marcus stared down at his hands, depressed by possessing the lore of a thousand comic books and being unable to act on any of it.

  “Let’s just let time take care of it.”

  “That could take forever,” Marcus almost wailed.

  I shrugged. “I can wait.”

  In the sixth grade, as his hormones kicked in, Bob Bob upped the ante in trying to impress my sister. He stole the pipe from his father’s study and learned to blow smoke rings, but Serena Jane just snorted and turned up her nose. By his senior year, Bob Bob must have been getting a little desperate because he kicked up his courting a notch. For three months, he sulked and moped, begging his parents to buy him a convertible, until he hit on an ingenious strategy his father couldn’t refuse. One evening at dinner, Bob Bob fanned his fork and knife across hi
s plate like a winning hand of poker, kicked himself back on two legs of his chair, and rubbed his pointy chin with one hand.

  “Don’t do that with your chair,” his mother said without looking up.

  Dr. Morgan just glowered at his son. “You heard your mother.”

  Bob Bob didn’t move. “You might want to hear me out.” He drew the words from his mouth like a rope of taffy. “I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  His father let out a hiss of air and laid his own knife and fork across his plate. “This better not be about the damn car. We’re done discussing it.”

  Bob Bob let his chair fall back to the floor with a thud. “That’s too bad. I guess I won’t go to medical college, then.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Dr. Morgan’s cheeks turned puce.

  “Think about it. Without a car, I won’t be able to come home very easily, will I? And I know that would break Mom’s heart.” Maureen fluttered her hands and turned her eyes toward her husband.

  A vein in Dr. Morgan’s temple began to throb. He pounded a fist on the table. “All right. We’ll buy you a damn car. But it won’t be new, understand?”

  Bob Bob didn’t care. He drove it up to the front of school the morning after he got it, one arm hanging out of the side, and immediately attracted a flock of gaggling girls, their knees rubbing together under their skirts, their eyelids fluttering like the tender throats of songbirds. Next to me, I heard Amelia suck a clean whistle of air through the gap in her front teeth, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. At the Dyersons’, the criterion for transportation was a little different. We didn’t care about spit polish and chrome. If it had wheels and you could push it, we took it.

  “It’s a ponycar,” Marcus breathed on the other side of me, reminding me that he was still a boy and prone to falling under the spell of automobiles, even if they were owned by Bob Bob.

  I wrinkled my nose. “A what?”

  “A 1967 Mustang. That’s a 390-cubic-inch V-8 there under the hood. Mustang won the Trans-Am cup last year with this baby.”

  I rolled my eyes. Marcus hadn’t gotten any better as he’d gotten older. I’d just gotten used to him. There was a rustling among the girls, and then Serena Jane sashayed up to the car. I held my breath, wondering if this was it, if this was the day that she would surrender and swoon into Bob Bob’s arms the way we all wanted. But what do you think she did? Nothing, that’s what—or not exactly nothing. It was a little worse than that. First she cocked her head like a chicken puzzled by its own egg. Then she swayed up close—so close that Bob Bob could have just grabbed her if he wanted—and reached deep into her pocket and took out a lipstick. She bent over to the little rearview mirror, puckered her mouth like a sour old blackberry, and just barely touched the makeup to her lips.

  Just from the angle of Bob Bob’s jaw, you could tell he wanted to kill her, and at that moment, I think about half the girls would have jumped in to help him. The thing about Serena Jane was that she was never very good at following other people’s rules—especially not the rules of a small town, which said that the prettiest girl must belong to the luckiest boy. No matter how she felt about it, Serena Jane was supposed to be Bob Bob’s, pure and simple. It was as bald a fact as her beauty, August Dyerson’s bad luck, Marcus’s brains, or my enormity.

  I was born knowing the rules, which was why I could see what was going to happen to Serena Jane coming like a freight train on fire. My whole life, people could never understand how someone like Serena Jane had ended up with someone like me for a sister, but the answer was easy, if you thought about it. The reason the two of us were as opposite as sewage and spring water, I thought, was that pretty can’t exist without ugly. Even without looking at my puddle-brown eyes first, everyone still would have noticed that Serena Jane’s eyes were the promising blue of the Atlantic in July, but I made it a sure bet. I made my sister beautiful without her even trying.

  People in Aberdeen may have thought that I was better left a sight unseen, but of course they looked at me all the same. They had to. Even in my flat-soled men’s shoes, I was as tall as any of the boys. Had the football team allowed me to, I could have blocked three of the players on the field without a second thought. My hands could have spanned the oblong pigskin with the easy grace of Vince Lombardi. Running could have been a problem, though, for in spite of my robust exterior, my innards were plagued with mysterious aches and pains. Some mornings I woke up with a neck so stiff, turning my head was like pushing a rusty locomotive a mile down a track, and other mornings it was my heart again, skipping beats and flip-flopping in my chest as though it couldn’t decide on a music station. But no matter how bad it got, even on the days when my head thumped and the corners of my vision crimped down tight, I didn’t say a word, for it always seemed to me that the Dyersons had it worse with their falling-down luck.

  Sometimes I thought about going back into Dr. Morgan’s office, remembering how kind his eyes were over the tops of his glasses, but the thought of what he might say always stopped me short. That, and the prospect of running into Bob Bob. When you were a girl like me, you stayed away from boys like him at all costs. When I looked at Bob Bob, I saw a dangerous boy with eyes too calculating for his childish nickname. He winced when the soda jerk at Hinkleman’s called out his order, scowled when Miss Sparrow replaced “Robert” with “Bob Bob” on the autumn roster, and glowered when his own mother addressed him. In fact, the only people in life he ever forgave the use of his name were his father and my sister—his father because Bob Bob knew he wouldn’t think twice about skinning him alive and Serena Jane because she was so beautiful.

  And, later, me, but that was different. I didn’t really count. I guess I was so unsightly that when I said his name, it was almost as if I hadn’t uttered it at all.

  Contrary to popular belief, Serena Jane was not a natural blonde. Over time, her hair faded from flaxen to a brackish brown, so that by the time Serena was fifteen, she was expert at dyeing it. No one in Aberdeen knew this about her except me—not Amanda Pickerton, who would have felt betrayed by this visible chink in my sister’s beauty; not Miss Sparrow, who would have felt vindicated by it; and certainly none of the other girls, who would have spent the rest of the year huddled in malicious knots, whispering evil little rumors about her. As it was, they sighed when Serena Jane drifted by, her hips lilting, her dimpled chin tilted, and the boys went glassy-eyed, but they never imagined Serena Jane at home in jeans, her regal head bowed over the sink while she combed globs of beer and mayonnaise through her hair. They never in a thousand years would have guessed that the incandescence of her curls came from a simple mixture of chamomile, lemon, and hydrogen peroxide that she put on when Amanda Pickerton was busy attending her committee meetings and Reverend Pickerton was in his parish office and the housekeeper was waxing the floors upstairs.

  The only person who might have suspected would have been our father, who gave the recipe to Serena Jane in the first place, never predicting that his ten-year-old daughter would have the wits to gather together the ingredients and then never noticing when she did. Actually, I was the one who gathered the supplies the first time, stuttering that I wanted to disinfect a cut when my father asked why I needed hydrogen peroxide, but Serena Jane was the beneficiary. Her hair came out so shiny and smooth, it was like river water. Dad looked at her a little funny that night, but after his third beer, he didn’t see anything different from usual, and that was another reason I supposed Serena Jane was glad our father was dead. Now, no one would ever blurt out her secret. No one would ruin her plans for the future, and she had them all right. Plenty of them.

  “I’m going to be an actress,” she breathed to me in Amanda’s kitchen in early March of her senior year, lighting one of the cigarettes she’d purloined from Reverend Pickerton’s pockets. “And not just any old actress, either, but a star. A Marilyn. An Ava. A Rita.” I believed her. She had posters of the three of them pinned up on her bedroom wall. One goddess for each color
of the hair rainbow.

  “Except I’ll be blonde, of course,” Serena Jane continued, blowing out a lazy stream of smoke. “Brunettes probably have more longevity, but there’s just no denying a blonde. You’re simply compelled to look at them.” I knew what she meant. People were always staring at Serena Jane in long, greedy gulps.

  Lately, her friends had taken to drinking beer on Saturday nights, swigging right out of the bottles like the boys. On Mondays, whispers about who had Frenched whom, who had gotten to third base or gone all the way, circled and swirled like witches in flight. But not for my sister and never for me. I didn’t have any choice. I spent my weekends cocooned in the Dyerson barn, a deck of cards slipping through my fingers, the warm breath of horses steaming in the air, but Serena Jane was just too good for everybody. Dressed in sleek trousers when the other girls wore jeans, her hair slippery but still neatly arranged, she was as composed and removed as the Buddha. “Let the rest of the girls waste themselves on small-town boys,” she said. “Let them sprout little roots in the ground here. I’m getting out.”

  I handed her a towel and watched her wind it up around her skull. “You look Egyptian,” I said.

  Serena Jane cocked her neck. “I do, don’t I? Liz Taylor wears turbans, and men fall at her feet. Not that she cares, of course. She really only loves Richard Burton.” Serena Jane sighed, and I could tell that she wished there were someone like that in Aberdeen—someone heroic and immensely broad-chested. Someone who could light her cigarette with one hand and keep the other one cupped delicately on her elbow. She patted her towel. “All I get is Bob Bob, who has acne on his chin, still drinks milk at dinner, and who’s trying to grow a beard and can’t.”