Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  “Gonna tell me anything,” I said automatically, but too harshly, and Joani blushed furiously without repeating my correction, which she usually does. I felt bad and gave her a squeeze on the fanny, but she didn’t smile. And a creepy kind of quiet set in, with all of us sitting there, waiting for something to happen, and The Cosby Show blared on.

  Brenda was right. The story made the front page of both the Tribune and the Globe, with Kerrie Lanouette’s tacky-looking high school graduation picture and stories that said state and local police were searching greater Leicester (that’s the term they used) for a dark-skinned man who fit the description. Even worse, all the Boston news stations covered the stories as well, with thriller-movie-style camera shots zooming over the very dirt road off which they had found Kerrie’s body. There was even a horrible interview with Kerrie Lanouette’s parents in front of their ranch house with the Virgin Mary statue on the lawn and Kerrie’s haggard mother bawling on about what a good girl her daughter was, how she had loved collecting teddy bears and stuffed animals, and how excited she had been because she had just gotten her first Cabbage Patch Doll. (These struck me as strange preoccupations for a twenty-year-old woman, but I guess Kerry hadn’t had a lot of other things in her life to bring her pleasure.)

  “Good girl!” Brenda spat, watching the news with me. “What a crock of shit! She was the biggest friggin’ slut West Mendhem High has ever seen.”

  Brenda was also right about the protest. That following Sunday afternoon, about two hundred people—mostly parents, but a lot of kids, too, including some of my classmates—congregated on the West Mendhem Common and took turns speaking into a megaphone, saying things basically along the line of “We worked hard to be able to move to West Mendhem, and we didn’t move here to watch our children get abducted and mutilated and our property values go down.” Nobody came out and specifically accused the Puerto Ricans, or the Dominicans, or even Leicester in general; it was more like “those who would like to see West Mendhem go down the tubes just like their own communities” and that sort of thing. No one in my family went to the rally; we’ve never been really involved in town affairs. It was Phoebe who told me about it, who said the whole thing was so bourgeois and racist she almost puked. She accompanied her mother, she said, who went as a representative of the Unitarian church, hoping to make a little pitch about harmony and understanding and the need for open dialogue between the two communities. But, Phoebe said, she never got a chance. Kathy Fanuele’s mother, who had organized the rally, kept pushing Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli’s name further and further down the list on her clipboard, until dusk came and they cut the speaking short.

  Other than a lot of random shouting, Phoebe said, the upshot of the rally was this: they were going to put up posters of Kerrie Lanouette’s high school graduation picture all over town, with an inscription that read: “Kerrie Lanouette, 1966–1986. We Won’t Forget,” and start a scholarship fund in her name. They were going to print bumper stickers that read “I Support a Crime-Free West Mendhem.” They were going to lobby for a staff increase at the West Mendhem Police Department at the next town meeting, so all-night patrol cars could cruise the parts of town that bordered Leicester. There were other things they said they were going to do, and over the next few weeks, then months, they did them: they picked up their children after sports practice and dance practice and student council meetings, because they didn’t want them walking home in the blue-gray West Mendhem dusk. They would have started locking their doors at night, but they did that, anyway, so now they bought alarms for their cars and their houses. And what had been a murmur of fear, which piety and guilt repressed, became perfectly audible conversation—accepted fear, justified loathing, a topic of the day in stores, on street corners, after church. People started saying they finally knew why the Irish pitched such a fit over the forced busing in Boston ten years ago. They said you had to see the threat in your own backyard before you realized.

  Meanwhile, the search for the killer continued, and images of Kerrie Lanouette’s dazed teddy-bear face started appearing everywhere, in store windows, in the corridors of schools, on telephone poles—in such profusion that if you squinted in the blue-gray dusk, they almost seemed to float in the streets, populating West Mendhem like a copycat army of townie girls rubbed out even before they reached majority, dispossessed of the storybook riches of growing up, growing old in a sepia-perfect New England village.

  * * *

  Walking home from school today, I passed a little group of mothers hanging the first crop of posters of Kerrie Lanouette. They didn’t take me by surprise, because the high school was already one big beehive of talk about the murder. Kids in classes had told the teachers they couldn’t focus on the lessons that day because they were so upset, so—whether this was genuinely true or whether it was a way out of classwork for a warm Friday in the beginning of September—every class turned into a little speakout. A few teachers and a handful of girls said that whether or not Kerrie Lanouette was going out with a Puerto Rican from Leicester didn’t matter, because she was still a victim of a horrible crime, but most, including girls, said she asked for it by going off into the woods with some stranger. Ms. Mahoney-Smith, a music teacher who lives with her sculptor husband in Rockport, wants the health classes to do a segment on rape awareness, but already Mr. McGregor the principal, an overweight army vet, is resisting. He says the word “rape” shouldn’t even be coming up in a “learning environment.” At any rate, everyone’s buzzing.

  A Volvo passed by with a sticker for St. Banner on the back, probably the vehicle of some proud local parent whose kid was a dayhop at the school, a townie charity case. And I thought of the sweet, muggy smell of shrubbery by the side of the road near the stone wall of the St. Banner soccer field from a week before—and I thought that it was my shift at the sub shop in a few hours. My stomach flopped, and I got that strange feeling that I was walking around a town I didn’t know, and that feeling didn’t pass until a little kid on a Big Wheel came plowing down the sidewalk and almost ran me over in my distraction.

  I wasn’t halfway into the house when Brenda, holding the keys to her Mazda, yanked off my backpack, threw it down in the hall, and pulled me back outside.

  “Ma’s making me go to Grandma’s apartment and get more clothes and some other stuff,” she said, stalking toward her car. “You gotta come help me.”

  “I wanted to take a nap before work tonight,” I said.

  “You can take it later, but you gotta come now. I hate prowling around that smelly apartment by myself.”

  Helplessly, I got in. Brenda popped in a Led Zeppelin tape and roared off toward I-95, to the apartment complex where Grandma had lived ever since she sold her big house in Leicester fifteen years ago.

  “Brenda, why does Grandma need more clothes?” I asked, turning the music down just enough so I could hear myself think. “Ma can just wash the stuff she has, and she’s probably going home soon, anyway.”

  Brenda hit the dashboard with the side of her fist. “You really wanna know why we’re getting more stuff for Doris?” Brenda always calls Grandma by her first name, Doris, when she’s talking just to me.

  “Do I?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. It’s ’cause, guess who’s coming to live with the lucky Fitzpatrick family?”

  “Are you serious? Permanently?”

  “Indefinitely. At least, that’s what Ma said, anyway.”

  “But I thought Ma and Uncle George and everybody else were working this out.”

  “Well, it looks like they did. Duh!” Brenda said sarcastically. “They had a huge phone call marathon this morning when I was at work, and this is what they decided. That for right now, anyway, Doris was better off with us than in her own place or in a home.”

  “What did Ma say about that?”

  “What could she say? You know Ma. She’s not as ballsy as Auntie Lani or Auntie Reenie and she doesn’t whine her way out of things like A
untie Winnie. She just said to me, ‘Everybody’s got responsibilities, and this is one of mine.’ And that she thought maybe it would be good, because Doris could cook and stuff and watch Joani while she’s at work.”

  “What does Dad think of this?” I asked.

  “He said, ‘Fine, fine.’ You know him. He’s so fuckin’ dead to the world, he doesn’t care one way or the other.”

  “He’s not dead to the world, Brenda. He’s just got a very laissez-faire attitude about things.”

  “Like I said.” Brenda shrugged. “Dead to the world.”

  I let it go. “What about Grandma? She doesn’t mind giving up her place?”

  “Doris?” Brenda said, more sarcastically than before. “Doris? She couldn’t be happier. She says now she gets to be surrounded by her favorite daughter—she’s calling Ma her favorite daughter now—and three of her beautiful grandchildren, even though I know the woman can’t stand me. And she says she’s gonna make Joani into a real Italian cook, and a seamstress and a wonderful homemaker, even though maybe Joani should concentrate on learning how to add first, don’t you think?”

  “Brenda!”

  “Well, it’s true! I mean, who the fuck needs school when you have Doris Ianelli living in your house, pretending it’s the old country and helping you beef up your dowry?”

  It occurred to me that Brenda could be very cutting when she wanted to, but I didn’t flatter her by letting her know it. “What are you gonna do over the next few months, now that she’s going to be around every day?” I asked. I figured it had to be on her mind.

  “I’m just gonna tell her I’m getting fat from all her delicious pastafazooli meals. And then, when it comes—” Brenda suddenly stopped and violently popped the Led Zeppelin out of the deck. “I’m sick of this fucking tape,” she said, and popped in another.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “When it comes, I’m gonna tell her it was an immaculate conception. She’ll believe it, she’s so fuckin’ religious. She’ll believe anything, if you tell her Jesus did it.”

  “She’s not that religious,” I said. “When you start to show, she’s gonna know.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll go live somewhere else until it comes,” she said.

  “You could go live with Frank. Maybe you two could get a place together. You’re going to be doing that anyway, right?”

  “I’m sure it will all work out” was all she said. Then, out of nowhere, she asked me, “Eric, are you going out with your little Jewish friend?”

  “Her name’s Phoebe, Brenda, and she’s only half Jewish. You always call her my little Jewish friend. It sounds very anti-Semitic.”

  “What?”

  “It means not liking Jews.”

  “I don’t have anything against the fucking Jews,” she snapped at me. “You’re always looking for a fight, Eric. I just wanted to know if you two were, you know, going out or something, because you spend so much time together.”

  “We’re just friends,” I said, sullenly. I didn’t feel like telling her about Phoebe and Charlie. Somehow, telling people that my two best friends had started going out made me feel like an underdeveloped eunuch.

  “Oh,” Brenda said, giving me that I-don’t-really-care-about-your-business look. “Well, it’s nice that you have girl friends. I mean, you know, girl friends. Not girlfriends.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “Anyway, I was just curious.”

  “Is your curiosity sated?” I asked.

  “Huh?” she asked, pulling into the parking lot of Grandma’s apartment complex.

  “Is it satisfied?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Sure.”

  First, Brenda pulled all of Grandma’s mail out of her box—mainly bills, grocery store circulars, and parishioner bulletins from St. Agnes’s Church—and stuffed it into her pocketbook. After fumbling with the key combinations for a moment, we got into the apartment, which smelled, as it always had, of Grandma: a funny mixture of oven grease, oregano, mothballs, and Oil of Olay. It hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and a particularly thick layer of dust lay on everything—the old cedar furniture, the dozens of graduation and wedding photographs framed and propped up on doilies, the colossal old hi-fi with the straw weaving over the speakers, the huge, maudlin-looking crucifix hanging over Grandma’s bed. I had to agree with Brenda: it was a little depressing, a whole framed legion of smiling children and grandchildren, even Jesus himself, collecting dust, waiting for Doris Ianelli to return and beam complacently back at them.

  Brenda pulled an old suitcase out from under the bed, blew off the dust, and flung it open on the bed. “Ma gave me a list of stuff to get,” she said, pulling a piece of paper out of her pocketbook. “What’s first here? Underwear. Okay.” She opened the top drawer to Grandma’s dresser, pulled out a clump of plus-size panties and bras, and dumped them into the suitcase.

  “Don’t you want to count them out and fold them?” I asked.

  “What difference does it make?” she said, throwing in a pile of nylons, even more sloppily than before.

  “I don’t know. Ma’s gonna be mad when she sees that mess.” I went over to the suitcase to start putting things in order.

  “Eric, just let me fuckin’ do it!” Brenda screamed at me, slamming the top of the suitcase down over my hand.

  “Jesus, Bren, that hurt! What are you, on the goddamned rag or something?” I yelled back, rubbing my hand, before I even knew what I had said.

  “That is so fucking funny, you asshole,” she said to me in a low voice.

  “Brenda. I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

  “Just forget it,” she said, suddenly looking wildly around the room before she landed back down on the list. “Look, Ma says here she wants some books, and there’s a whole pile under the stereo in the living room. Why don’t you go pick them out, being the literary one of the family? I’ll get the rest of her shit in here.”

  “All right,” I said, desperate to make up for my gaffe. Sure enough, underneath the hi-fi, I found books—dozens and dozens of paperback romance novels with covers of uncorseted women held captive in the arms of huge, strapping shirtless pirates and royal-looking types. I laughed out loud to discover that Grandma had such prurient reading taste, and I spent about ten good minutes picking out about a dozen of the trashiest titles I could find.

  Finally, I scooped them all up in my arms, hoping Brenda would get a kick out of my choices. But in the doorway of Grandma’s bedroom, I stopped. Brenda was sitting on Grandma’s bed, her back to me, holding and staring at our parents’ wedding picture, which Grandma kept on her dresser. I heard her make a funny kind of croaking noise, and before I could tell if she was crying or not, I slipped back out into the living room and sat in the rocking chair for a few more minutes, pretending to be engrossed in one of the Harlequins.

  “Brenda, you’ve got to see these books Grandma’s got!” I finally yelled, trying not to sound too fake-cheery, and when I went back in the bedroom with the books, Brenda was looking busy, folding up the underwear and putting it back neatly in the suitcase. She was trying to look as though she’d never stopped packing, although when I glanced over to the top of the dresser, I noticed that our parents’ wedding picture was skewed out of place from the rest.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s there?” she said with a little I’m-pretending-to-be-interested smile.

  “Look at this pulpy stuff!” I said, putting the books down on the bed. “She’s got tons of these in there under the stereo.”

  “Shit.” Brenda laughed without really seeming to see.

  I started helping her fold Grandma’s enormous underwear and she didn’t object. We were both quiet for a little while, until, not stopping her folding, Brenda said to me in her matter-of-fact-sounding voice, “Eric?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know how when we were little, Grandma was always, like, ‘If you do that, you’re gonna go to hell’?”

  I laughed. “Yeah?”

  “I mean
, do you think she really believes that shit?”

  “It’s what she’s been taught to believe, and she’s probably never questioned it,” I said.

  “Well, I mean, that’s what we were taught, too. I mean, do you believe it?”

  I laughed again. “Well, I guess—no, of course I don’t believe it. That’s just ridiculous Catholic doctrinology. It’s just a control mechanism. You know what they say, Brenda: religion is the opiate of the masses.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Marx.”

  “Mark who?”

  “Marx. Karl Marx. The founder of Marxism—you know, like communism, like in Russia. He believed that religion was just a device used by those in control to keep the poor in their place.”

  “Oh,” Brenda said, looking slightly annoyed. “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “Oh. Well, what did you mean?”

  “I mean, do you think if— Okay, say, if Ma had gotten pregnant with me before she got married, do you think she ever might have thought of not getting married—and just having me anyway?”

  I put down Grandma’s underwear and looked at Brenda. She was still folding, but she glanced at me with her matter-of-fact face.

  “Well, that’s hard to say. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t have been in her mind if that had happened.”

  “But, do you think?”

  “But Brenda, she supposedly loved him. I mean, she wanted to get married.” Then I laughed. “And even if she hadn’t, she probably would have anyways, she’s so into duty and responsibility and all that stuff. Why?”

  Brenda looked uncomfortable, even vaguely miserable, like she wanted to run to the bathroom and puke. Instead, she sat down on the bed and started rocking and making creaking noises, running her hands through her big hair. “Why? Why? Eric, I don’t know why.”

  I put down the underwear and sat down next to her, wanting to put my arm around her, but feeling like she might throw it off if I did. Instead, I decided to be direct.

  “Brenda, do you want this kid?”

  “What?” she almost screamed, throwing back her head.