Local Girls

  “Cut what out?” I said. I suppose he thought I was crying, which I absolutely was not. “Does Mom know?” I asked when our house came into sight. It was just like every other house on the street, but for some reason it looked more decrepit than all the rest. At least to me.

  I guess it was no longer possible for my brother to answer a direct question. “They’re picking us up at six,” he told me, and he slammed through the front door.

  Our house was dark in the summer, because of the two cypresses my father had planted in the front yard, but it was still stuffy and hot. I went to the doorway of my mother’s bedroom. She was under her quilt in spite of the heat, and I couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or not.

  “I hear the stinker is coming to see you,” she said.

  Since she was awake I went to sit on the edge of the bed. She had cups of water and orange juice on her night table, but she didn’t care; her throat was too raw to swallow anything. Her eyes were more fevered than ever. Sometimes it seemed as if she could see everything, as if she could look directly into your soul.

  “If he takes you to a restaurant, order the most expensive thing on the menu,” my mother instructed. “It doesn’t matter if you eat it or not. Have three appetizers. Start with shrimp cocktail.”

  We laughed over that, since my father hated to spend money. He also hated unkempt girls, he thought they were a terrible disgrace, so I put on my oldest jeans and a shirt that was torn and stained. My hair was growing out from a horrible haircut I’d given myself only a few weeks earlier. I looked pretty much the way I felt, and I didn’t bother to talk when Jason came out to wait with me on the stoop.

  At six-fifteen my father’s car pulled up to the curb. That awful Thea was behind the wheel. We’d met her a couple of times, but hadn’t paid much attention. Now, as she honked the horn, I realized she was my mother’s exact opposite—self—centered and ravenous. That was the thing about my mother—there was hardly anything she’d ever wanted for herself. She’d had her eye on a dining room set once, and she never even got to have that.

  “Hurry up,” Thea called to us. “We’ll be late.”

  It turned out my father was coming directly from work and would meet us at the restaurant, Luarano’s over in Rose Village, an expensive, place a few towns past ours that I’d never been to before, although I was pretty certain they’d have shrimp cocktail. If I was lucky, they’d have oysters too.

  Thea tore through our neighborhood as if running over some kid playing kickball would be a far better option than keeping my father waiting at a restaurant. The windows were open and when the car turned onto the parkway the air was like a rocket of pure heat blasting right through us.

  Thea was talking about what a great place we were going to for dinner, and how they liked people to dress nicely, which of course was a dig at me, not that I cared about her sense of style. Then she started in on her real agenda—how the house she and my father had recently bought might look big, but it was really just right for two people. I guess she wanted to squelch any ideas we might have about moving in with them, although frankly we would have preferred to nest with spiders. I could see Jason’s profile, and he looked absolutely blank. He was doing that lately. You could knock and knock, but he wouldn’t let you in. During a period of three months he’d gone from someone who had always planned his career at Harvard to a deli boy who appeared to have undergone a lobotomy.

  Thea was driving much too fast and talking even faster. I guess she was telling us the score, in her sly, understated manner, informing us that we were second-class citizens, as if we didn’t already know that. If my mother had been one of the passengers, she would have demanded Thea pull over. Once, when we were little, my mother went right up to our bus driver who’d been speeding all the way to Atlantic City, and smacked him. Some of the other passengers actually applauded, and you can bet the driver slowed down after that.

  Thea finally turned off the parkway, but she kept right on speeding. Every minute she was spending with us was probably killing her, so she took the shortcut through the forest. It was a creepy stretch where the county police sometimes trained recruits; some people said that beneath the ivy and the wild grass, there were sinkholes that could suck you right into the ground if you wandered off in the wrong direction.

  Though it was dark in the woods, Thea didn’t bother to switch on her fog lights. She was too busy talking about the furniture she’d just picked out. That’s when I started to take things out of her purse. It had been sitting there beside me on the back seat all this time, a fat leather bag with gold clasps and a nasty disposition. The first thing I got was her wallet, crammed with credit cards. I slipped them out the open window, one by one, then went on to the cash. It felt so wonderful to release all those tens and twenties into the wind; I couldn’t have felt any better if I’d been freeing caged parakeets to nest among tropical palms. I should have kept it to that, nice flat items like money and credit cards, but instead I went on to harder stuff: vials of prescriptions, silver tubes of lipstick, brushes, tortoiseshell combs, opal earrings in a velvet box.

  Maybe Thea caught sight of what I was doing, or maybe she looked in her rearview mirror and spied her belongings scattered across the road. There was her chiffon scarf, caught in the bushes. There were her sunglasses, floating in the drainage ditch. She pulled the car over so fast our heads snapped back. We probably would have had just cause to call a personal injury lawyer and claim whiplash, but Thea wasn’t the type to give you time to consider your options.

  “Your father is right,” she said to me. She formed her words carefully, the way people do when they want to hurt you. “You are a little bitch.”

  Our mother always told us that people will surely reveal what they’re made of, if you only give them the chance. What’s deep inside always surfaces, no matter how hidden.

  “Wait a minute,” Jason said to our new stepmother. “You can’t talk to my sister like that.”

  But the truth was, she could. She told us to get out and get out fast. She was already putting the car into gear.

  “Here?” Jason said. “You’d just leave us?”

  He had a funny look on his face, and for a moment it seemed as if he might actually hit Thea, simply reach over and slap her. But instead, he slammed the door open and got out. I followed just in time; Thea stepped on the gas before I could close the door, and as the car took off down the road the door flapped open and shut, like a broken wing.

  “You are a moron,” my brother told me as the car exhaust rose above us in thick black clouds.

  I thought about how people threw each other away, as if they were tissues or trash. I thought about my mother, asleep beneath her quilt on this hot summer evening, and the way things moved away from you if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t hold on tight.

  “Don’t worry,” I told my brother. “I know the way home.”

  The sky was the color of ashes and we both studied it carefully for some sort of sign. Behind us was a ribbon of road and woods so thick you’d need an ax to find your way. It was only dinnertime, but it felt later.

  “Face it,” my brother finally said to me. “We’re lost.”

  Tell the Truth

  Our dog. Revolver, ran away and I can’t say that I blame him. He was a cat chaser and I guess he had to pay, because when my mother received her twenty-first complaint about his activities she had my brother tie the dog up to the cherry tree, which was the tallest, sturdiest thing in our yard. All the same, Revolver was so exuberant and single-minded, in the way of Labrador retrievers, and so intent on freedom, that the kids in the neighborhood began to take bets, first on whether or not Revolver would manage to get away; then, as the summer wore on, hotter and hotter still, until the sky was perfectly flat and white, wages were laid on the exact hour and day of his escape.

  “Do you think he’s strong enough to pull the tree out of the ground?” my best friend Jill wanted to know. We were out beneath the cherry tree, sneaking cigarette
s, on a morning when the heat was so dense that smoke refused to rise.

  “Physically impossible,” I said, but it was just a guess. Who can gauge strength under pressure? What about those women who lifted two-thousand-pound Oldsmobiles off the ground in order to rescue their babies? What about men who walked over burning-hot coals?

  My mother had been sick all summer and Jill’s mother had been ill too, although what Mrs. Harrington had was all in her mind. Jill’s father insisted the problem was nothing more than exhaustion, but it was another nervous breakdown, and they obviously did something major while she was away at the hospital, because this time when she came home, Mrs. Harrington wasn’t speaking. Not one word.

  “I think of it this way,” Jill had told me, about her mother’s current state. “One less person to boss me around.”

  All the same, it was creepy over at Jill’s house. You’d go into the kitchen and rifle through the fridge looking for a snack, thinking you were alone; then you’d turn and there Mrs. Harrington would be, watching you, all quiet and white, a ghost in the corner, a person who’d had a piece removed from her soul.

  Jill and I both avoided going home. We stuck to street corners and backyards. Early in the morning we’d sit beneath the cherry tree and plan our day; then we’d return at twilight. Revolver was always there, tied up and panting, studying us with his big brown eyes, as if he understood us completely. There are times when certain people can’t seem to avoid pain; it’s everywhere you go, it sticks like glue, and that was what seemed to happen to me and to Jill. It may have been our age, or our inclination, but somehow we’d gotten stuck in the middle of sorrow, and the dog was right there with us, tied by his thick rope, the prisoner of a twenty-foot radius. Ordinarily, Revolver was a great runner; he put his whole heart into it, for better or for worse. Once, when I was walking him, he’d spied a squirrel, and he’d just taken off, pulling me so hard I’d fallen in the street and broken my wrist. But I didn’t hold it against him. It was inhuman to keep an animal like Revolver tied up, or maybe it was all too human to be so cruel.

  “This is a crime against nature,” I declared as I stroked Revolver’s big, square head.

  “Oh, yeah?” Jill said. “What isn’t?”

  It was the summer when Jill first became cynical. Before that, before all the sickness and heat, she was the sweetest girl you’d ever met. But lately, she saw the dark underside of everything. She even insisted that my brother, who had always been close to perfect, would come to no good. Everything was bad news, in Jill’s opinion. Everything was a game you couldn’t win.

  It certainly looked that way for Revolver; all he could do was stare at the birds on the lawn, sparrows and wrens he knew he’d never catch. My father had bought him years ago, assuming his dog would be a perfect companion, silent and strong and obedient, everything his family was not. But as it turned out, my father couldn’t get Revolver to behave. The dog always jumped on him as soon as he walked through the door, then would refuse to sit or stay. Still, when my father moved out, Revolver howled all night, a terrible sound we’d never heard before, the kind of noise you wouldn’t dream a dog could make. That was when he started chasing cats, although he never once killed any he managed to snag. He just kept them between his front paws and chewed the fur along their spines, which was fine until Mrs. Raymond’s old Persian died of fright while in Revolver’s grasp. Mrs. Raymond’s had been the twenty-first complaint, the call which had sealed our dog’s fate, and now she looked out her window through a pair of binoculars each day, just to make sure Revolver was still tied up tight.

  “Bitch,” Jill said to Mrs. Raymond, over the fences and across the yards.

  On this morning it was so hot that the sky had begun to rumble, as if ready to explode. There was a fly on the edge of Revolver’s nose, but he didn’t move. He looked like the animals you see in the worst zoos: monkeys who gaze at you with vacant eyes, gazelles who can no longer run, birds in cages, lions who refuse to roar.

  All that day I thought about the fly on Revolver’s nose. Jill and I went swimming in her cousin Marianne’s backyard pool even though Marianne herself refused to join in because of the distant thunder.

  “You’ll get hit by lightning if there’s a storm,” she warned us.

  “Good,” we told her as we floated on our backs, hair trailing behind us like seaweed. “We’d be glad if we were.”

  That night the sky kept on rumbling, and I couldn’t sleep. It was past midnight when I went into the yard, so dark it was impossible to see Revolver’s black coat against the black night. But I could hear the thump of his tail as I approached. I could feel him, curled up at the base of the tree. Your eyes can get used to shadows, quicker than you’d think. I carefully sawed through the rope with a steak knife; it was a job well done, but after that I always knew which knife it was: the dull one. The one that could barely cut through butter.

  Revolver came up to me as soon as he was free, not in the way he usually did, leaping, being crazy. He just leaned against my legs. His weight against me felt good, but I moved away and slipped off his collar.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The gate was open.

  “Go,” I told him, and for once he actually listened. Revolver disappeared into the shadows. I could hear him though, running across the dry grass. I stood there listening, and then I went back inside.

  After I’d gotten into bed, the thunder came closer. Sometime in the night, while we all slept, the cherry tree was uprooted. My brother insisted it had been hit by lightning, but my mother believed the damage had been caused by the wind, which had come up before dawn to shake all the birds’ nests from the trees and topple huge willows and the tallest poplars. In the morning, my mother phoned the pound, and the police, and even our vet. Each one gave her the same advice: Wait and your dog will show up. But I knew he wouldn’t. I didn’t bother to go along with Jason and my mother when they drove slowly through our rain-soaked neighborhood, hopefully whistling and scanning the streets. I didn’t bother to inform them otherwise when they insisted that Revolver would still be in the backyard if not for that horrible storm.

  It rained all that next day, a drenching rain that filled gutters and left floods in people’s basements. Little frogs appeared on front lawns and porches. I threw on my mother’s old raincoat, grabbed a pair of fishing boots that my father had left behind, and still managed to get soaked as I ran to Jill’s house. The lawns were all squelchy and filled with worms. The air was white and hot and wet. I let myself into Jill’s house by the side door, the way I always did, but Jill wasn’t there. You can tell when a house is empty; there’s a sound it has, an echo that’s unmistakable, or so I then thought. I was certain the Harringtons had all gone off for the day, to Jill’s grandmother‘s, or to her cousin Marianne’s. I gazed at the parakeet that was kept in a cage in the kitchen; I leafed through the calendar on the wall and took a mint from the candy dish. It wasn’t until I went to the cupboard for a glass that I realized Mrs. Harrington was there. I may have gasped; I may have grabbed at my chest. I know for a fact that I told myself I’d better breathe evenly, because if I didn’t, I’d embarrass myself even further and faint.

  “You scared me,” I said, as if that weren’t completely obvious. I had already backed up, toward the door. In those days, Mrs. Harrington seemed made out of vapor, rather than flesh and blood. Jill had reported that her mother ate only pink grapefruit and melba toast. She drank only water. She hardly slept at all.

  “Well, I’d better go,” I added casually, still desperate to get out of there. “My dog ran away last night, so I should probably go look for him.”

  “I saw him,” Mrs. Harrington said.

  I wasn’t certain if she’d really spoken, or if I’d imagined it. Her words seemed made out of vapor as well, smoky little things you had to bend close to decipher. Even if she was Jill’s mother and I’d known her forever, she was spooky.

  “I don’t think so,” I told her. “He ran away.”

/>   “He was here,” she insisted. “On my lawn.” She sounded a little panicky. “I know it for a fact. He was right here.”

  “Okay,” I said. After all, I was equally panicked, but I knew that with adults it was always best to agree. Humor them, that’s what Jill and I had decided, and they’ll leave you alone. “I’ll check your lawn first.”

  I let the door slam behind me and started running, in spite of the heavy fishing boots I was wearing, in spite of the rain. I didn’t stop when I reached my house. I kept right on going, past the street corners where Jill and I had spent most of our summer, past the high school, where classes would be starting in only a few weeks.

  Behind the school there was a creek that was usually nothing more than a dried-out sandy bed. But on this day, it was nearly a river. All the gutters led here, all the flooded streets emptied into this one swollen conduit. Today, the water would rise higher than it ever had before. It would run through the tunnels, it would go on and on, and for some reason, that made me feel better than I had in a very long time.

  All the rest of that summer, there were reports of our dog being sighted. People swore he was the reason there were so many overturned garbage cans in the neighborhood; they blamed him when their cats refused to go out at night and when their grass was torn up. The owner of the deli entertained his customers with stories of a black dog who waited for the bakery truck in the morning to beg for doughnuts. The pizza guy would tell anyone willing to listen that a dog often sneaked into his kitchen to steal mozzarella and sausage. Mrs. Raymond insisted that she frequently saw the shadow of a huge dog cross her lawn, and she spoke with such certainty that even my brother grew to believe her and took to leaving bowls of kibble out on the sidewalk. By then Mrs. Harrington had begun to talk as if she hadn’t had a lapse of any sort, but she never once mentioned seeing our dog. Occasionally, I saw her looking out the window, surveying her own front lawn, but I was fairly certain that she was as convinced as I was. That dog was gone.