Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  In moving to collect a weight from the back of the beast so as to place three pounds in the crook of her knee and do one hundred side thigh raises, she remembered her sister Carly. Remembered it was June. Remembered today was Carly’s birthday. A day for a call. Pictured Carly’s long face, her short pixie hair, the way they’d hold each other’s hands during emotional parts of movies but never suffocate each other with drapey, needy snuggles. The just-enough, the just-perfect kind of love between two independents. She remembered being with Carly for a full eight weeks every summer at camp in Carmel, California: the Carmel Camp Calitoga, also known as the Triple C, “for Adventurous Girls.”

  “Carly,” she whispered one night at the Triple C from her top bunk. She must have been seven. The air of the cabin smelled like fresh-cut cedar, and as the night was windy—no mosquitoes buzzed her ears. Big sis Carly happened to be the counselor of the grade-school cabin, and yes, Carly gave her little sis special dispensations over the other girls.

  “Carly,” she whispered again.

  “Go to sleep, you little maggot.”

  “Carl, come on, get up.”

  “Oh my God, you are such a pain in my ass.”

  “Shh,” cut in her bunk mate Laura, who was the real pain in the ass, a dry seven-year-old who was always everywhere—like a quiet, creeping fog.

  “Zip it, Laura. Carly, you promised. Come on. Let’s sneak out to the bales and shoot. I hate during the day when the other girls get turns. They suck. I want to do it by myself.”

  “I don’t suck,” Laura offered in her patented monotone.

  Neither sister responded to Laura, because the comment was absurd as either wildly un-self-aware or a strategic joke. At the time, it was well known that Laura was the worst shot in the whole camp, to legendary proportions. The week prior, Laura had somehow shot the camp nurse in the ass with an arrow, the nurse standing behind the backs of the shooters, and behind a cabin. The shot was outrageous and impossible and, actually, hysterical, once they knew the nurse would be fine as long as she slept sunny-side up. It was years later, when she formed a special secret with Laura, that she learned there was more to the story with this impossible shot, but at age seven, Laura was just a bumbling clod to her. Just another girl she had to wait in line behind for a turn on the archery course.

  “It’s windy. Your arrows will go all over,” Carly said, ignoring Laura.

  “That’s totally not true and you know it. Come on. You promised.”

  “Put your shoes on, Maggot. Only fifteen minutes, though. I’m fucking tired.”

  At the highway rest stop yesterday, a navy Buick pulled up to a pay phone and broke her reminiscence on this camp night of long ago. She’d been eyeing the pay phone while doing her dawn exercises. The phone was so perfectly placed, only thirty feet from her beast and out in the clear, wide open. A slight-built, mustached man in a short-sleeve, collared shirt, tie, and polyester brown pants exited the Buick and nodded a hello. With the thigh weight in her hands, she scanned every half inch of his face. The cheekbones, the hairline, the thin mustache, the nose. She rewound his aging in the mental processing unit in her brain, overlaid it on the man-woman in the Bing’s security video with the mustache and hat, the disguise that monster used, and—she almost said her verdict out loud—in her mind said, Bzzzzzzz, fail. No match.

  “Morning,” the man said.

  She chin-upped toward him and turned her back, indicating this was not any kind of rest-stop solicitation, if in fact this dude was a druggie or pervert, here to score drugs or sex before trotting off to his depressing, fluorescent-lit work cubicle. Yes, she profiled him. She profiles everyone. She set the weight in her left bent knee, leaned on the beast with her right hand, and began a series of one hundred thigh-and-glute lifts.

  The Buick man finished his call, reentered his car, and drove off. She checked everywhere all around, and all else was still sleeping. No other cars driving in. No rest-stop workers shuttling trash. It seemed safe to leave the beast for a moment. She walked up to the pay phone. The time was only 3:00 a.m. where she was calling, but she was just so anxious to hear her sister’s voice.

  Carly answered on the first ring.

  “Maggot?”

  “Hi, Carl. Happy birthday.”

  “Mag,” Carly said, saying her actual nickname, drawing out the name in a tone of requited relief.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LUCY

  Mom is in a not-speaking mood. We pop the Volvo’s trunk and grab our regular luggage, two boxes of special keepsakes, and Allen from the back seat, which takes all of a half hour, including me placing my clothes in built-in drawers in the closet in my room. I’m sensing Mom wants space on her side of the house, so I sit on the blue-with-pink-coral bed and flip through a Stephen King, a first-edition Dolores Claiborne. The book’s theme of fractured mother-daughter relationships cuts a little too close to home, so I abandon Dolores and browse the other selections on the shelves.

  Forty-five more minutes pass, and still Mom hasn’t come to talk to me.

  Given we now have about fifteen minutes until Jerry and Gretchen return with the lease and the subs and the story behind this mysterious allusion to boundaries and rumors, there’s a rising tension in the rental. A coarse quiet with no talking and no music. Some of the time when quiet lingers between me and Mom, I don’t notice, because the quiet is nothing, just the sound of comfortable calm, of settled domesticity. But other times, like right now, while we wait for Jerry and Gretchen, and with Mom’s odd outburst over the name Gretchen hanging over us, this silence holds the weight of all the fights we’ve ever had, all the moments of mother-daughter tension balled together, girding the oxygen with brackets of steel.

  I hate this feeling. This feeling of fighting with no words. That no matter what I say or ask, anything at all I do will cause one of us to blow the heavy-laden oxygen, and then we’ll have to breathe in the particulates of tension until we clear and filter all the barbs out. All that takes work, and I’m tired. I crave the settled feeling, the calmness.

  I need to be the one to blow this up and get the fight over with, because I insist on keeping my new blue-pink bedroom with the wind sounds. I want—no, I need—to live in the ranch’s colorful spaces, while also having the potential of a friend who lives right here, built-in. Easy, convenient, like the shelves of books in my room.

  After walking down my hall and past the dining area, a dividing line of plants, red love seats, and down another hall, I step to Mom’s master bedroom. I note her bathroom is adjoined, but otherwise, our bedrooms are similar. Her bedspread is the same blue-with-pink-coral pattern as mine. The wall opposite her bed has a framed, shellacked puzzle, the same mermaids-in-layered-leaves image, but a different design and with a few additional details. Mom is concentrating on the contents of one of the special keepsake boxes she’s set on her bed. Even though she must hear I’ve walked to her door, and I’m breathing a mattress width from her, she doesn’t look up. The air is not only girded with steel but titanium, too, and the ceiling is lowering, crushing us in the thick tension.

  She removes a metal box from within the cardboard keepsake box, lifts her eyes to me, and says, “You know to never open this unless I’m gone and there’s an extreme emergency, right, Lucy?” The key for the metal box is on a long leather strap around her neck. The key itself is tucked behind her shirt. Only I know a key is at the end of the leather.

  “God, Mom. Holy shit, how many times are you going to tell me not to open that box? Do you think I’m an idiot?” I’ve never opened this damn metal box, which holds, she says, a stack of emergency cash, intended to be used if we have to run without hitting any of our—her—other cash hiding places around the country.

  “Lucy. Stop.”

  “No, wait. Why were you freaking out about the name Gretchen? Are you becoming unglued or something?”

  “You’re going to talk to your mother like that? Who do you think you are? And what the hell? You tell Jerry we’re all hu
nky-dory with turkey clubs when he tells us there’s rumors around town about this place? You know damn well we’re not staying long. Please. This is way off. And you know it. Way off.”

  The air is all blown apart, and metal oxygen shrapnel is raining inside. We’re both supposed to be filtering the air, but it feels like I’m the only one doing all the work, because I’m so super freaking mad and I’m on my tiptoes and my face is hot and I want to scream, but she’s staying calm and not raising her shoulders or yelling, and this makes me even madder.

  “We are staying,” I scream.

  “Watch your voice. They’ll hear you.”

  “They live way up on the top of a hill, in a fortress of brick, and the wind between the properties is a sound moat. I will yell!”

  “You know what? We’re leaving. Get your things.”

  “No, we absolutely are not. What’s with Gretchen? What’s with the name Gretchen?”

  I’m blocking the doorway, and because I hit puberty and have kept growing, I’m no longer the girl she could easily set aside. I’m tall, like really tall. I basically fill the doorframe in height. She doesn’t even attempt to round the mattress to leave the room. She turns her back, the metal box clutched to her chest. As if I’d tackle her and take it. As if I’d break any of her steadfast rules. I never have and wouldn’t. Underneath, I do love and respect her—she’s given so much of her life to protecting me. But I also want to hate her in this moment and scream.

  “Who is this Gretchen that has you so freaked out?”

  She sighs, her back still to me.

  She walks to a wicker armchair with a flowered cushion in a corner of the room. As she sits, I set my palms on each side of the doorjamb and hold solid. She folds her arms around the metal box. When she lifts her head, the lids on her eyes are low; she won’t look at me.

  “Lucy, some things I can’t tell you yet. I don’t want you searching around on the internet and getting yourself in trouble. They’ll find you again. They’ll take you. Don’t go asking questions. I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have reacted like that. It’s nothing. Nothing.”

  “I don’t even have a computer here, Mom. Your work laptop is always locked, unless you’re watching me download music on my crap Nano, which has no internet. Our phones are shitty burners. You keep the iPad and don’t let me look up or watch anything without you monitoring—and we have to use other people’s Wi-Fi. Do these people even have Wi-Fi? So, whatever. I’m not going to school this summer. How the hell am I supposed to search anything?”

  There are several ways any basic fifteen-year-old girl, who’s not a stupid dumb brain-dead moron, could get on the internet, and she knows I know it, so my feeble argument is met with her rolling her eyes.

  The problem for us is my age. I’m asking questions now. I’m not a little girl who’s satisfied with simple answers anymore. But our other problem is that when Mom digs in and wants something her way, she is impossible to beat. She fights dirty and won’t hesitate to hurt my heart. I’m playing with fire taking on this fight right now, but I want to stay here that bad.

  “What’s with the name Gretchen?”

  She shakes her head. “Lucy, we’ve always agreed, right, when you’re eighteen, we won’t run anymore. I’m sure the risk will be gone then. And you know, I’ve let up quite a lot in the last few years, because with every birthday, the less attractive you are to your father’s family. We’re not homeschooling anymore, right? You’ve been in schools a few years, right?”

  “You are totally changing the subject. What’s with the name Gretchen?”

  She inhales long through both nostrils and swipes her head fast to the side. We’re almost matched in how we argue; we know exactly the ways the other one of us tries to shift topics, shift blame. This is another one of our mother-daughter problems.

  “Fine. Fine.” She takes a moment to pause and look past me, not at me, and I know this lifeless face she’s wearing now. Shit. She’s actively removing herself from the cloud of emotion she’s been in since hearing the name Gretchen. She’s intellectualizing and calculating, and I know she’s mad at herself for having the outburst of emotion in the first place. Her weakness. My mother finishes crosswords as an afterthought while cooking three-course meals. My mother writes whole books on birds in a month, edits novels for her clients overnight. One time she decided to write a symphony based on bird chatter she’d recorded in the forested Burton Peninsula on Vashon Island. Somewhere along the way, she mentioned she’d skipped two grades. Point is, I’m contending with a literal genius here, and now that she’s stepping out of her emotion, this argument just got harder for me to win. I do well enough in school, straight As and all, but it’s not like I could solve the theory of relativity or have whole conversations with ravens. And I suck at math.

  “Lucy,” Mom says, her tone not fighting me anymore, her tone settled. The metal parts in the air have lessened, but that also means I’ll have to retreat. “Look,” she says. “I’m sorry, okay? It was a huge mistake for me to react over a name. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have wound you up. I should let us stay here at least a little while longer, and I will. I shouldn’t make you feel uneasy, I’m sorry. You should be enjoying life. You shouldn’t be worrying about my strange reactions to things and thinking I’m losing my mind. You should be worrying about growing up and doing well in school. And you do do a great job.”

  “Mom. Can you please tell me what the deal is with Gretchen?” I’ve lowered my tone and indicate I’m resigned to the fact that she might not tell me, and she’ll win, like she always wins fights about my past. With fights on this topic, she plays the card of her genius against me. I take my hands off the door sides and drop my shoulders.

  She says nothing, stares past me, still not at me, and smiles—because she knows she’s in control again.

  I turn my back to leave. But as I’m stepping away, she says, “He tried to rename you Gretchen. On the passport they had for you, they used the name of one of his home-country ancestors, Gretchen Foulin. A native name. They didn’t print that in the papers or anything, nobody knew that part. Because I snatched you back before your father and his sister could take off with you, and I took and burned that damn passport. They fled the country.”

  I turn around. Set my palms on my face. “He tried to name me Gretchen Foulin?”

  “Yeah. He and his sister had you and were ready to fly out the next day. But I anticipated all this. I took you back. The passport, long gone.”

  “If none of this is in the papers, why are you worried about me doing an internet search?”

  “Lucy, hello. I’ve never told you his last name before. Foulin. Foul, I, N.” She stresses the pronunciation and spelling of his last name, as if she wants this name to sink in. But yet she doesn’t want me doing research—I’m so confused.

  I guess I’m shocked, because this is indeed the piece, his last name, I should have homed in on. In fact, this is the piece I am shocked about. His last name, my father’s last name, has been the highest coveted secret kept from me all these years.

  “Baby, please promise me you won’t go search on the name Foulin? Please? Give us until you’re eighteen, okay?” Her voice cracks when she says this, so the air is safe to breathe again, filtered and clean. I walk over to her in her wicker chair and give her a hug. She can’t hug back because she’s still clutching her locked metal box like I might rip her heart from her chest.

  “Of course, Mom. Yes. I won’t go searching him out.” My heart is racing like a swarm of electric jellyfish. My father’s last name is Foulin.

  A rap on Mom’s window startles us, and I’m reminded we’re in a one-floor home. We turn our heads to see Gretchen peering into Mom’s bedroom window with her bright face.

  “We’ve been knocking! Lunchtime!” she sings.

  Gretchen walks away from Mom’s window and presumably toward the front door. Mom furrows her brow, and I have to admit in my own mind that that was intrusive.

  “I think she�
��s just a nerd, Mom. And she seems pretty lonely out here. Maybe she needs a good friend,” I say. “She’s obsessed with jigsaw puzzles, even makes them, so I think she’s an artist, and that’s good, right? She seems pretty creative.”

  Mom winces, a derisive scowl on her face. I’m imagining things, thinking things are wrong with me, but I note, she did not once look me eye to eye this entire fight.

  Should I call her out? Ask? Not now. The air is filtered. Let it go.

  “So I suppose we’re going to learn about boundaries and rumors?” she says. “From some girl obsessed with puzzles and her father, who, by the way, is a fancy-pants Boston Symphony concert pianist. So that’s the plan? Right? I guess this day is just going to get weirder and weirder.” Her voice is resigned. She knitted together this litany of oddball facts the way she always knits oddball facts, to make some cynical point about the dark-comic surreality of life.

  “Or maybe everything’s fine, Mom. Let’s give her, this place, a chance.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Inside the rental, Gretchen opened the turquoise refrigerator to show it stocked with a six-pack of complimentary Coke and ten bottles of water. Three of us grabbed a drink, and all of us headed outside for a “stroll of the property,” as Jerry said.

  Jerry didn’t grab a drink. Jerry doesn’t hold a sub. Jerry says he needs to be careful with his hands.

  We are walking toward the cattail and lime snake-grass patch that caps the parking area between our ranch and the low, long shed with the KEEP OUT signs. Three of us are eating turkey subs and drinking drinks as we walk. Gretchen explains how she wrapped each sandwich with wax paper so we could “walk and talk and eat.” Jerry mentions how he ate buttered pastina with a rubber spoon while Gretchen made the sandwiches. This dude is obsessed with caring for his hands. Whatever. My mom is afraid of a name and won’t look at her own daughter. So we’re all fucked-up, all of us. Who cares?