Seventh Heaven

by Alice Hoffman

  Ace was still facing Rudy; the dog stared up at him, his gaze unblinking, his tongue hanging out. “Good boy,” Ace said. Rudy leaned over and sniffed Ace’s hand, then slowly licked it. Ace gave the dog a pat, then he stood up and started down Hemlock. When he passed the Durgins’, he realized that Danny was no longer beside him.

  “What’s the matter?” Ace called.

  Danny just shrugged. Ace walked back to him, the dog behind him.

  “I don’t like the idea of that dog around my sister,” Danny said.

  “Oh?” Ace said.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I like the idea of you around her.”

  “You’re kidding,” Ace said.

  “She’s sixteen,” Danny said. “She’s my sister.”

  “So what?” Ace said.

  “So she asks me questions about you all the goddamned time,” Danny said. “I know what’s going on. Man, you’re not even allowed in our house because of the Cadillac.”

  “I had nothing to do with that Cadillac,” Ace said. “And anyway, he got a new one.”

  “Yeah. Well,” Danny said.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you’re an asshole,” Ace said.

  “Maybe I am,” Danny said thoughtfully.

  Ace turned without a word and walked home with his dog. Danny stayed where he was and pitched snowballs at a poplar tree on the Winemans’ lawn. He had a decent fastball, but he wasn’t a pitcher. He was a hitter. He had spent years practicing with Ace; Ace couldn’t hit, but he sure could tell someone else how to, and he didn’t mind spending hours in the deserted athletic field when the temperature hit ninety-five degrees in the shade. He was the only one willing to pitch balls to Danny until dark, or until one of their mothers came looking for them.

  They weren’t friends anymore, that was all there was to it. Danny didn’t know it could happen this way, but it had. Maybe something was wrong with him, maybe something was missing; he should have been thinking about girls, or his college applications, which were sitting in the admissions offices at Cornell and Columbia right now. He should have been thinking about his senior prom in June or the fact that his best friend was walking away from him without a word. But he wasn’t. He was thinking about baseball and July afternoons and the way the bat reverberated in his hands when he hit a curveball.

  When he stopped throwing snowballs he had no choice but to go home. He went in through the side door so he wouldn’t track snow onto the living-room rug. He kissed his mother and told her the rolls she had just put into the oven smelled great. She didn’t bother to ask Danny how his day had gone or if he had homework; his days were always great and he always did his homework. He was trustworthy, everyone knew that. He’d be the class valedictorian in June, and he would easily earn admission to either college he’d applied to on the basis of his advanced science projects. He’d been working as a research assistant for Dr. Merrick at the state university every Saturday, studying the effect of vitamin C and cannabis on growth and aggression. He still took the bus up on Harvey’s Turnpike over to the biology department every Saturday, but he no longer bothered to feed marijuana to the hamsters. Instead, he fed them oregano brought from home, falsified his data, and pocketed the marijuana.

  He would never have thought of smoking it and would have dutifully fed the hamsters all semester, if he hadn’t overheard two graduate students joking about how some people would give their eyeteeth to smoke what the damned hamsters were being given for free. Danny stole a cigarette from one of the graduate students, and in the bathroom next to the lab he rubbed the cigarette between his fingers until all the tobacco fell out. Before he left for the day, he replaced the tobacco with marijuana and smoked it on the corner while he waited for the bus. He never wasted the marijuana on the hamsters again.

  After he’d greeted his mother and hung up his coat, Danny grabbed a bag of chocolate chip cookies and went into his bedroom. He was fairly certain that no one on Hemlock Street even knew what marijuana was, but he opened his window a crack just in case his mother came in unexpectedly; she’d assume he was smoking cigarettes, and she’d be crushed.

  Danny lit up and lay back on his bed and thought some more about baseball. His mind was clear and cool. He listened to the sounds in the house. His mother making dinner in the kitchen, a dinner his father would, as usual, be home too late to share in. His sister in the bathroom, washing her hair in the sink. People thought they knew you, but what did they really know? Danny stubbed out what was left of the marijuana-filled cigarette and put it in an ashtray he kept hidden in his closet. He flipped on his clock radio and watched the dial glow. He had absolutely nothing in common with anyone anymore, and he didn’t know why. He loved Ace, but every time Ace started to talk Danny felt like punching him in the mouth.

  The music gave him a headache, so Danny turned the radio off and listened to the sound of the parkway. He hated the feeling that everyone was passing him by, but he couldn’t stop listening to the Southern State. He fell asleep to it, and woke to it, and, if he wasn’t careful, he was about to go nuts to it. He forced himself to get off his bed and change into a clean shirt, then went into the bathroom to wash up for supper. Rickie was still in there; she sat on the rim of the tub reading a magazine. There was a plastic bag over her hair.

  “Yikes,” Danny said.

  “Do you mind?” Rickie said haughtily. “I’m conditioning my hair.”

  Danny ignored her and went to the sink to wash his hands and face. The water that came out of the tap stung him, as if there were tiny bees in the droplets.

  “Notice anything strange around here?” Danny said as he reached for a towel.

  “Like?” Rickie said.

  Danny closed the bathroom door, then hoisted himself up to sit on the counter.

  “Like Dad is never here.”

  “He’s getting ready for April fifteenth,” Rickie said.

  Danny wondered if Rickie was truly an idiot or if she had to work hard to be so thick.

  “All right,” Danny said. “How about this one: Ace McCarthy.”

  Rickie took the plastic bag off her head and ran her fingers through the goopy conditioner. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and stood up to get a better look. She might have a chance to be really pretty if she could only get rid of her freckles. Sometimes she just about went crazy covering each freckle with pancake makeup until her face seemed to be dissolving in the mirror.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rickie told her brother.

  She and Ace had been meeting every night when he went out to walk the dog. He would never have anything she wanted, but she couldn’t stay away from him. She was frightened by Ace’s silence and the way her pulse seemed so hot and fast when she was with him. But more than anything, the dog frightened her. It followed too closely as they walked along the fence beside the parkway; it nipped at the backs of Rickie’s legs and made peculiar sounds, so that Rickie was never quite certain if it was growling or trying to speak. Ace never said much, but when they were far enough from home he always put his arms around her and kissed her for such a long time Rickie didn’t know if they’d ever be able to stop. Each time Ace was the one who kept them from going too far; he’d pull away and whistle for the dog, and on the way home he’d walk so far ahead of Rickie she’d have to run to keep up.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” Danny said. “I’ve seen you.”

  Rickie ran the water in the sink and reached for her shampoo.

  “Mind your own business,” she said.

  “Dinner,” their mother called from the kitchen.

  “All right, stupido,” Danny said to Rickie. “But you’re making a big mistake. Ace is definitely not for you. You’re the cashmere type, so you might as well face up to it.”

  Rickie let the water run in the sink; she looked over at her brother. “I thought he was your best friend.”

  “Was,” Danny said softly. “That’s the operative word.”

  In
his clean white shirt and blue jeans Danny looked the same as he had when he was ten years old. He never had to be told to take the garbage out on trash nights. You could trust him with your life, but you couldn’t talk to him; you had the feeling that if you even tried he’d dart away from you, he’d disappear under layers of glass. Rickie put her head under the water and lathered up some shampoo. She didn’t ask her brother what had happened between him and Ace because she didn’t want him to question her.

  Danny was used to being smart, but he didn’t know everything. He didn’t know, for instance, that on New Year’s Eve Rickie and Ace planned to do a lot more than kiss, or that Rickie had been the one to suggest, once again, that she leave her bedroom window unlocked. He might know biology and he might know calculus, but he certainly didn’t know that Rickie had already planned to be wearing pink satin baby doll pajamas that would drive Ace crazy when he finally came in through her unlocked window. He had no idea that, sitting there on the bathroom counter, he looked so lonely you had to wonder how he could stand it. You had to wonder if loneliness like his was catching and if, in spite of everything you were feeling, you’d better just steer clear.

  THEY WERE HAVING A PARTY OVER AT THE WINEMANS’ just the way they’d planned, in spite of Donna’s disappearance. They decided they had to, and not just because Marie McCarthy had already baked two banana cream pies and Ellen Hennessy had fixed a cheesecake and Lynne Wineman had learned how to make sloe gin fizzes. They went on with it because it was the last night of the decade and it would never be the first minute of 1960 again. They did it because they needed to put on earrings and high heels. They needed to see that their husbands still looked handsome when they put on their suits and ties, that their arms still felt strong when they danced to the slow songs down in the Winemans’ finished basement.

  Nora Silk was trying her best to have a party of her own. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and she’d made pigs in blankets and cheddar cheese balls, which she set out on a silver tray. She fixed a highball for herself and a Shirley Temple for Billy, but after eleven she couldn’t get him to stay awake and watch Guy Lombardo with her on their new TV. He fell asleep on the couch, clutching his blanket, while Nora went into the kitchen to freshen up her drink.

  It was a cold, starry night. It was the kind of night when, if you left your two sons sleeping and went to stand on the front stoop, you could hear the music from a house halfway down the block. Nora had taken her highball out with her, and she took little sips as she watched the stars. Ten years earlier, when it was almost 1950, she’d gone dancing with Roger, and later in the night he’d gotten so drunk he’d thrown up on Eighth Avenue. She had been completely in love with him. She’d taken him back to their apartment and put a damp washcloth on his forehead and fixed him coffee that was so strong it made him gasp. Then they’d gotten into bed, just a mattress made up on the floor, and made love until it was light. So maybe he was a better magician than Nora had ever admitted, because for years he’d made it seem as if what they had was enough. Washing diapers in the kitchen sink, walking up four flights of stairs with her groceries—it was enough when he kissed her, when he brought home the gold charm bracelet, when he put on his tuxedo and combed his hair back with water. If they had never had children, they might be together still, in Las Vegas, where the light was thin and purple and New Year’s Eve was a drunk and sweaty night, celebrated as it should be.

  It caused Nora great pain to hear the music from the Winemans’, physical pain, as if she’d drunk sour milk that was turning her stomach. Who were these people who danced in the dark, whose children taunted Billy and threw rocks? Good people, she had to believe that, people who tucked their children in at night, who packed school lunches with tender care, who made the same sacrifices she did, maybe even more, so that their children could play in the grass and sleep tight and walk to school holding hands, safe on the sidewalk, safe in the streets, safe the whole night through. And it was not their fault, or anyone else’s, that tonight Nora felt as if she were the only person on the planet who was all alone.

  But two houses down, at a quarter to midnight, Rickie Shapiro would have given anything to be alone. She had just decided that she had made a terrible mistake, and, if she wasn’t careful, she might never recover. Something as simple as this could ruin her whole life. She had never let anyone touch her before, and he had somehow gotten his hand under the elastic waistband of her pajamas and was moving his fingers in and out of her. Her lips were swollen from all their kisses, and her skin was hot and flushed. There were marks on her breasts, as if his touch had burned her. If she wasn’t careful, he would reach up and pull off her pajama bottoms and then it would be too late. But nobody could make her do this if she didn’t want to. He looked like a complete stranger, like somebody on fire and far away. And what would she get from him, what did he really have to offer her? Nothing. Her mother’s heart would break, and her father would weep and tear out his hair, and her brother would tell her, You’re so stupid, I told you not to. She had twelve sweaters folded in her bottom bureau drawer; she had college to think about after her senior year; she had boys dying to go steady with her, boys who were in the chemistry club and on the football team both, who’d be too shy to put their tongues in her mouth when they kissed her.

  She’d have these marks on her breasts for days. She knew that. She would open her blouse and unhook her bra and run her fingers over the marks, and her eyes would fill with tears. Girls like her didn’t do this, and that was why Rickie Shapiro was changing her mind. Because if she didn’t stop him now, she never would.

  “Wait a second,” Ace said, when she pushed him away. “This was your idea.”

  Her parents were out at their favorite restaurant, a French place in Freeport, and Danny had left the rest of the math club at the bowling alley and was down at the creek behind the high school smoking marijuana and listening to his transistor radio. She would never get caught, but she just might get trapped.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  She had let him in her window nearly an hour ago. She made him leave his dog outside, in the yard, and every once in a while they’d hear a faint yelp, but they had gone on kissing, they had gone crazy. Now the sound of the dog got through to Rickie and made her panic. She thought about Cathy Corrigan and the other girls like her, the ones who used too much hairspray, and put on eyeliner so thickly they looked beaten up, who sometimes disappeared weeks before graduation, mysteriously removed to an aunt and uncle’s in upstate New York, to return the next fall subdued and sullen and treated like poison.

  Rickie wrenched away from Ace. She was shaking when she stood up.

  “All right,” Ace said. He had his shirt off, and now he reached up and put it on and began to button it. “Don’t get upset.”

  Rickie was breathing too fast. It seemed to Ace that she just might hit him if he moved too quickly.

  “I made a mistake,” Rickie said. She went to her closet for her bathrobe and put it on. “I could never be with you.” She reached toward her bureau and grabbed her brush, the expensive kind, made in France, with a real tortoiseshell handle. She brushed her hair with hard, even strokes. “You can’t even write your own term papers.”

  Rickie put the brush down; she felt like crying. Ace looked up at her blankly. “You don’t even know when you’ve been insulted,” Rickie said.

  Ace stood up and tucked his shirttails in and grabbed his jacket off the wicker chair.

  “You can’t tell anybody about this,” Rickie said. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

  Ace went to the window and opened it. He stepped on the wicker chair to hoist himself up.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Rickie said. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “What makes you think you did?” Ace said.

  At the very least he wouldn’t give her that. He wouldn’t turn to glass and let her see into his soul. He went through the window and dropped to the ground. In the dark, the dog was waiting; he
rose to his feet and shook himself, then stood close to Ace, leaning against his legs.

  “Good boy,” Ace whispered.

  He was so empty that he didn’t question Rickie’s change of heart. He’d never believed he deserved very much, and now he could see he would get even less than he’d imagined. The air was sharp and clear; it hurt to breathe. He went through the Shapiros’ yard, the dog at his heels. He could have cried, if he’d had anything left inside him. He stopped in the Shapiros’ driveway and took out a cigarette, but before he lit it he held his hand over the match, and when the flame touched his skin, he didn’t feel a thing.

  He had nowhere to go, and maybe he never had. But he started walking anyway; if he didn’t move he’d turn to stone. It was getting cold fast, dropping one degree every second. As Ace passed the Winemans’ he could hear music from inside. The sound was muffled because a dense white fog had begun to rise from the lawns. He kept walking, even though he was afraid, and the hair on his arms rose up, as if he’d been charged with internal static electricity. But it was the air that was electric. The crab apples and the poplars crackled and their branches turned blue. The sidewalk was the color of bones, the stars formed a constellation no one had ever seen before, like the spine of a dinosaur arching above the rooftops, brilliant and terrifying. And it was no use to walk any farther, because at the far end of Hemlock Street Cathy Corrigan’s ghost had appeared on her father’s front lawn.

  She stood between the azaleas and the ivy and her feet were bare. He knew it was Cathy because she was wearing white, because her earrings were bitter globes and there were rings on all her fingers. He knew it because no other ghost could fill him with such despair or make him bleed from a wound that wasn’t even there. What was the blue light that surrounded her, like a moon of the wrong color or a thumbprint of sorrow? The dog had stopped beside Ace on the sidewalk. He didn’t bark or growl, but he cocked his head, then took a few steps forward, as if he’d been called. Ace reached out and grabbed the dog’s collar.