Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “People can forget about me,” she said. “If we sit down and talk, people can forget there’s anything different about me at all. It’s what they want to do. I can see it every time I meet somebody. They think: God, let me forget about what’s wrong with this woman.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.

  My mother shook her head. “They want to forget about me, and I want them to forget.” Her feet were on my calves. “But is that fair?” she said. “Why should I want them to?”

  “Because it doesn’t make any difference,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “It does.”

  And at that moment I realized: my mother had let us forget it was a gift she’d always given us. Somehow, she’d let us think she’d forgotten, too.

  “You have a beautiful face,” I told her.

  She let her feet drop to the ground, and her beautiful face was full of doubt.

  Uncle Plazo’s strangeness wore thin on the neighborhood kids soon enough, and they left him alone. Acts that get old lose their luster. The ambassador from Mars, sliding into his seventies, can comb down his now-thinning hair, don shaded glasses, and just look like any pale elderly man. Giants shrink; the fat lady dies young. The sword swallower poisons himself swallowing a neon tube that bursts in his stomach.

  These are all stories Uncle Plazo told me once he found out that his memories interested me, if not my mother. Those who don’t die fall out of fashion or tire of the life or find a new twist: the snake charmer gets tattooed; the Texas Giant and the half-lady become the World’s Strangest Married Couple. And Uncle Plazo, ex-wild man, ex-child, ex-brother, became simply one more confused old guy in Ohio, solo now, smaller than most, perhaps lost for good. But less scared, I think, never disappointed with where his life ended up, happy that he had a new attraction. The Man Who Never Forgets. The Fantastic Ohio Fabulist. Maybe only to me, but I’d like to think I was enough.

  He lived with us two more years, the rest of his life. When he died, my mother tracked down some relatives out East, who had dim memories but no interest in their cousin. One sent a letter telling us that Plazo, she thought, must have been about eighty—which was about fifteen years older than we’d guessed.

  Ma arranged for him to be buried near us and paid to get his brother—whose name was Barney—moved from his unmarked grave to our town.

  “I just want to show that they’re not freaks,” Ma had told the Massachusetts cousins. “I’m sure you’d do the same if you were able.”

  The funeral was a quiet affair. My mother wore a black scarf around her head and a black sleeveless dress. It was perhaps not quite appropriate for the occasion, and she for once did not sew the sleeves closed. Her shoulders were not the smooth, doll-like surfaces you might imagine; there was a soft extra curve to them, and a few small fingers that did not move.

  Zleeno and Plazo, the Lost Aztec Children, were buried under a stone that says:

  GOOD MEN.

  HIRAM CAULKEY 1868–1953

  BARNEY CAULKEY 1869–1951

  Ma slipped her foot from her black shoe and threw the first dirt in.

  June

  I moved to Watertown, Massachusetts, with one thousand boxes and my parents. We arrived one summer day, having driven across country for educational purposes; the boxes came the next morning, with only some broken china as souvenirs. All those cartons were a formidable sight, and at dinnertime we hid out at the Amazing Chinese Restaurant, down the street.

  It was summer, and when we got home from dinner we had to open all the windows: they seemed as unused to the sticky heat as we were, had swelled in their frames and needed to be hit at and spoken to. My parents went from room to room, slamming the windows and peeking in boxes for fans. Outside, some teenage boys fixed cars and revved engines; a few dogs barked. Then we heard a woman’s voice calling her children.

  “June!” she yelled. “Jill! Johnny!” When she got no answer, she screamed, “June! Get your fucking ass home right now!”

  My father smiled; my mother looked stunned.

  “We need to find some fans,” she said quietly.

  “I mean it!” the woman across the street yelled. “Don’t pull this shit! One. Two—” and then a girl’s voice, too close not to have heard all this time, answered, “Okay, okay.”

  I had loved Portland. It was a clean city, with weather so delicate that at night you had to look at the streetlights to tell whether it was raining or snowing. Everything was heavier near Boston: air, accents, women. Even the candy was difficult, sugary capsules that caked your teeth, aggressive licorice or cinnamon or even coffee; jawbreakers that jacked my ten-year-old mouth wide open; caramel wrapped around clots of powdered sugar. In Oregon, I had eaten sweets from the Japanese fruit market, candy so willing to be consumed that even the rice-paper wrapper dissolved on my tongue.

  I couldn’t make sense of the ways things worked in our new neighborhood. Ours was the only single-family house on a street of duplexes; I couldn’t imagine two families living under one roof. Mac’s Smoke Shop, where I bought my candy, also sold work pants, dusty canned goods, and, I was later to find out, illegal numbers. There was a bar next door to Mac’s, a doughnut shop, a Woolworth’s, and nearby the wide turnpike, noisy as an ocean. The buildings were jammed close at either side, like heavy traffic. My first morning there, I walked to the bridge that ran over the Pike and looked down, as if I were examining some raucous new animal life.

  We’d been there four days when my father opened the door to have a cigarette (by order of me, he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house), and said, “Oho.”

  “None of your doorbells work,” said a girl’s voice.

  “Well, thank you for bringing that to our attention,” Dad said. I stood in the hall behind him and couldn’t see past.

  “Can the girl come out to play?” said the voice.

  “Ask yourself.” My father stepped out, eager for his smoke. “Phoebe? For you.”

  The girl on our porch had sandy, boy-cut hair and store-bought terry-cloth rompers. She was bigger than me, though probably not older.

  “You play kickball?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, my first lie in a new state.

  “I’m June. I live over there.” She pointed at the huge lime green house across the street. Instead of a front lawn, it had a patch of concrete painted with yellow lines, like a parking lot.

  “You got brothers and sisters?” she asked.

  I told her no.

  “Lucky.” She brushed her hair to the side and gave me a world-weary look. “I got about a ton.”

  Our houses were at the elbow of an L-shaped street, and we played right out in the middle of it. I understood the basic rules of kickball, since they were the same as the baseball games my father had made me watch in preparation for the Red Sox. Because only two of us were playing, June used a complicated system of invisible runners. Her runners were always bringing in points; mine seemed to start running and then make a break for freedom down the street. She creamed me, then decided she liked me.

  June had only three brothers and sisters—an older, sullen brother named Jeff, and the twins, Johnny and Jilly, who were nine. She had other things I lacked: cowlicks, cavities, Barbie dolls, a number of relatives who lived with her, a record player and some glossy 45s, and her period. I, she explained to me, had these advantages: long hair, a resident father, my own room. June told me I was lucky in a voice that made me sure I was not.

  After kickball, we wandered down to the grocery store parking lot at the end of the street. From half a block away, we heard: “JUNE GET YOUR FUCKING ASS HOME RIGHT NOW!”

  I looked at her wide-eyed, though I recognized the voice—I’d heard it every night since we’d been there.

  “My mother,” June explained. “Gotta go.”

  “Glad you found a friend,” my mother said to me that night, our fifth at the Amazing Chinese Restaurant; we hadn’t found the kitchenware yet. “She in your grade at schoo
l?”

  “I guess,” I said. June thrilled me, in the way that a bully who befriends you can. Other things didn’t sit as well. She and her immediate family lived in the downstairs of their duplex, with her mother’s folks upstairs and aunts and uncles on both floors. Terry, June’s mother, scared me. I had finally met her close up when we walked back from the lot. She was doughy fat, slack-skinned and slack-voiced from all the cigarettes she smoked. “New kid,” she’d said upon our meeting. “There goes the neighborhood.” (“She’s kidding,” June had to tell me.) Terry’s slick flowered shirt gapped over her stomach. I was a precocious child, a terrible prude: the fact that Terry was a mother, like my mother was, terrified and fascinated me.

  “Well, Phoebe,” said my father, raising a can of beer, “here’s to our new town.” My mother lifted her Coke; I hoisted my ginger ale. The sound of the three full cans meeting was dull and disappointing.

  June and I spent some days in the grocery store parking lot. She showed me how to place shopping carts near the cement parking blocks so that the semis that delivered food might back into them and knock the baskets off the wheels. Sometimes it worked. We’d try to turn them into go-carts: they didn’t steer, they were uncomfortable, but they rolled and the store didn’t mind if we took them. Later, we’d walk back and play in the street in front of our houses. We loved it when a confused car would come the wrong way down our one-way street: we jumped on the curb and screamed, “ONE WAY,” at the top of our lungs, happy we knew something they didn’t.

  Playing in the street, my mother told me, was dangerous. I knew that, but the whole neighborhood seemed dangerous; I felt like I needed to learn a new set of rules. Reckless bravery. So as the cars drove by, I rested only my heels on the curb and dangled my toes in the street, the way June did; sometimes I threw rocks at passing hubcaps; I leapt off June’s front porch and hit the pavement on my knees. None of this seemed quite brave enough. So one afternoon at the end of the summer, I followed June into her house for the first time.

  The front room was dark; I could smell old smoke and dirty children. A clock shaped like the sun hung over the beat-up sofa; the coffee table was covered with magazines and crumpled tissues. I heard Terry, June’s mother, cough from somewhere deep in the house.

  “Ma’s got polyps in her throat,” said June. I nodded.

  One of the doors opened, and a huge woman dressed in men’s pajamas stepped out. Her blond hair was kept back with two rubber bands and a battery of bobby pins. I’d seen her before, sitting out on the porch: she was Terry’s youngest sister, June’s aunt. I knew from June’s stories that Annette was mean to the bone, if she had any bones, and looking at her, it was hard to believe she did. Her skin looked packed tight with dense, explosive fat; it shone as if it were being strained to its limits.

  “Don’t be playin’ in here,” she said.

  “It’s my house, too,” said June.

  The woman blinked. “What did I just say?”

  “I’m allowed, Annette,” said June.

  Annette grabbed June by the arm. “Don’t be a shithead,” she told June. “And don’t bring your shithead friends around.” Then she pinched me on the arm.

  I considered running. Instead, I said, “See you later, June,” and walked out casually.

  “They’re a very unhappy family,” my mother told me when I complained that night. “You should feel sorry for them.” My mother believed in liking most people and pitying the rest, which is fine if you’ve the temperament for it. I didn’t.

  Neither did my father. He advised me to ignore Annette or to stop playing with June if it bothered me that much or to counter with comebacks he concocted for me. “Tell her, You’re hysterical, but looks aren’t everything,” he said helpfully. Now that I’d been inside June’s house, she invited me all the time, and Annette was always there, always angry. One night when I came home particularly upset, Dad offered to talk to Annette, if I thought that would help. I pictured my father going over there, armed with his list of insults, and refused.

  I never wanted to go back inside the house, but I knew I had to. The only thing worse than being frightened of doing something is trying it once and giving up for fear.

  Annette had a sullen boyfriend named Brian, and when he was around she quieted a bit; the bite went out of her swears, and she stuck her leg out to trip me so lazily when I went by that I was able to dodge it. Brian rarely spoke. He spent a lot of time fixing cars out front, usually with crowbars and hammers. “He’s handsome,” June said, but all I could see were his pimples, his leather vest, his black feathered hair. I thought of what my father said when he first noticed him: There goes the Neighbor Hood.

  My father stood on the front porch, staring at the car. “Who the hell would do this?” Someone had pulled the metal trim off all around and left it attached only at the edges. It hung off like peeled bark. The same someone was terrorizing the neighborhood. It had started as what seemed to be early Halloween mischief—egged cars, garbage strewn on doorsteps—but had lingered and turned malicious.

  The neighborhood terrorism enraged my father, who assumed that it was one of the Friel boys, Jeff or Johnny. Dad tested theories on me at dinnertime: since June was my friend, he thought I’d have some inside information.

  “It has to be a boy,” he said, “since he instinctively goes for cars. And it has to be a kid, since it’s all so unimaginative.”

  “Could be.” I assumed Annette had to be the cause of such plain meanness. Or maybe Johnny, who even his own mother called a rotten fucker. This wasn’t so much an insult as a scientific classification. But my father was right; I was a girl, and I wasn’t interested in vandalism—my own or somebody else’s.

  “I have a secret,” June said to me one day.

  She was wearing a midriff top, and absentmindedly scratched her belly with a box of lemon drops. At any moment she was going to drop it into the pocket of her shorts. Then I was supposed to do the same thing: this was a lesson.

  I shushed her. I didn’t know how to shoplift, but it did seem to me it should be done in silence.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  I did, of course, but I was sure the old woman behind the counter was going to catch me any minute. She’d already accused me of stealing once, when I hadn’t been, which is why I felt it was okay to do it now. But even the candy at Mac’s was dusty and unappealing.

  “Phoebe,” said June.

  “What?” I hissed. “What is it.” I started to study the candy rack, three graduated shelves. The candy on the bottom was a nickel a piece, six for a quarter; the second, a dime, three for a quarter; the top, fifteen cents, two for a quarter. I suddenly felt great sorrow at the idea of stealing any of it, it seemed so cheap.

  “You know my Aunt Annette?”

  “Like I could miss her.”

  June dropped the candy into her pocket; it hit bottom with a rattle. “She’s not really my aunt.”

  “What is she, the family gorilla?” I fingered a package of Bulls-Eyes, which I hated.

  “She’s really my sister.”

  “What?” In my limited understanding of how a family worked—and it was changing all the time—I didn’t understand how this was possible.

  “Ma had her when she was fifteen before she got married and Nana took her over.”

  “Why doesn’t her name start with J, then?” I asked. This seemed like impeccable logic, but June just grabbed some licorice.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “No. You have to. You said you would.”

  I looked at the candy again. “No.”

  “You girls gonna buy anything?” The old woman leaned over the edge. “Hey,” she said to me. “Din’t I just kick you outa here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah I did.”

  “So anyway,” said June. “Like I was telling you—”

  “You girls get outa here,” said the woman. “I know your mothers. I’m gonna tell them.”


  “’Scuse us,” said June. “So, do you believe me?”

  “About what?” I said, sidling to the door.

  June grabbed my arm. “What I just told you,” she said. “You have to tell me before we leave.”

  “I’m countin’,” said the woman. “One. Two—”

  “Yes!” I yelled. “I believe you! Whatever you said!”

  June dropped my arm. “That’s not the secret, anyway. That’s not the real secret.”

  We pushed open the heavy glass door and let in Ghost, the dog who lived at Mac’s.

  “What is it, then?”

  June was already sucking on a Fireball. “Wha’?”

  “The secret,” I said.

  She shrugged. I knew she wouldn’t tell me now; I’d failed a test. She tossed the box of lemon drops in the air and caught it. “Your mother hates it here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Betcha she’s gonna leave.”

  “We might leave,” I offered. “I think we might move back.”

  “No,” said June. “I mean, just your mother. She might leave you and your dad. Ma’s betting on it.”

  I felt outraged at the idea that June thought my mother was so fickle she’d choose the Pacific Ocean over me. It scared me, too, since some nights I myself dreamed about hitchhiking back to Oregon and throwing myself on the mercy of my quiet bread-baking ex-neighbors. Besides, Terry had said this? She was stupid, she had no right to talk about me and my parents.

  “Your mother’s fat,” I said.

  “So?” said June. The Fireball in her mouth was turning her lips pink. The lemon drops shimmied and clacked in their box as she flipped the box, higher each toss.

  “You don’t know anything about anything,” I said.

  June laughed. “Look who’s talking, dummy.”

  The vandalism continued, got worse. Somebody scratched swear words into the paint of all the cars in the neighborhood, then turned their interests on the houses, smashed windows and snapped pickets off fences. Dad was right. It was uninspired criminal activity, notable only for its absolute democracy. My father started getting up in the middle of the night to smoke on the porch.