She wasn’t silly back: “Guess I’d just draw them on with eyebrow pencil,” she said, distracted as she aimed her tweezers and yanked. “Fix them that way. Act like that’s what I wanted all along. Like it was my choice. Who’d notice the difference anyway?”
TWO GIRLS
(fall, junior year)
There were logistics to discuss. The plan was to drop me off in Evanston. They’d grab Penny’s things, then turn around for Oak Lawn. Penny would stay down there. Jess would stay there. Maybe Jess’s dad would stay there, maybe. I would stay in Evanston. I would get back my bedroom. Jess would return to Evanston and school on Monday. Maybe Penny would stay permanently in Oak Lawn. Maybe Jess’s dad, too, maybe. This was Jess’s mom’s plan, that Penny should move into Linda’s old room, while everyone else sorted things out and talked to lawyers and shrinks and marriage counselors.
The car ride was opposite of the earlier, silent one, as Jess played talk show host, barraging Penny with fifty million questions about school and classes and what music she listened to and her favorite TV shows. Penny answered each question cautiously, as if being interviewed for a job, as if a wrong answer would trap her at the bottom of some list. It wasn’t The Andy Griffith Show for favorite TV, but The Dukes of Hazzard, which I knew she despised but the kids at school liked. Baseball was “okay.” Her face seemed paler, and she tugged at the blouse sleeves, yanking them over her wrists, sliding them as far up as they’d go, unbuttoning cuffs, buttoning them right back. All that scrutiny beelined at her, Jess’s high-beam spotlight of attention. If Jess noticed Penny’s nervousness, she didn’t ease up.
Jess’s father was driving fast again, gunning through yellow lights, flying wide on curves. He was in a hurry. Maybe he was afraid of tipping our fragile balance. This was before anyone fussed about people driving drunk, not that he acted drunk, just quiet and anxious. He barely said a word, even when Jess would say something like “Dad, did you hear that?” It was like he needed talking around him but didn’t care if it was the radio or Jess. It occurred to me that I could have been the one talking on the way down. I could have done that, played Jess.
We pulled up to our street without anyone mentioning lunch, though it was after two o’clock. On TV and in movies, people were always eating after funerals, and now I got why: first, I was starving, and second, and really, eating was something to do that wasn’t feeling sad. Some people at the cemetery had asked about what would happen afterward, emphasizing that word, “afterward,” and they were startled when I said nothing. For a while, I half thought they meant “afterward” like the afterlife, and I was flattered they wanted my opinion, but finally I pieced together that “afterward” meant people expected lunch, possibly with drinks, definitely with a table’s worth of homey food like macaroni and cheese and ham and casseroles.
“I’ll wait out here,” Jess’s dad said as he backed into a space on the street, “while you two girls run in.”
The thing is there were three girls in the car, not two, and his saying “two” like that made me feel like everyone understood something I didn’t, because really fast Jess said, “Got it. We’ll be quick,” and Penny nodded, also really fast, not looking at me. She had barely looked my way this whole time, even with me sitting next to her in the backseat, the two of us a foot apart on the black leather. Only one or two furtive glances, like secretly checking my reaction, and I wondered what Penny had decided my reaction was. I didn’t think I had a reaction. Maybe I had. But they both knew they were the “two girls” and I was only the other girl.
I was on the traffic side of the car, and because the road was busy I couldn’t right away open the door, and in that time, as Jess and Penny scrambled out and I waited, Jess’s dad said to me, “Hang on,” so I lifted my hand off the door handle. Then I didn’t know what to do with my arm, which suddenly felt annoying plopped in my lap and annoying hanging at my side, so I wedged it behind my back, leaning onto it, which was totally uncomfortable, but which also made me feel better. It occurred to me that he told me to hang on because he had my fifty dollars. I looked out the window, at Jess and Penny getting to the porch steps, Jess fumbling around her clutch purse for the key. She didn’t like key rings, so it was just a loose key that she was always losing. She was wearing a boxy, old-ladyish, nubby black suit that maybe was her mother’s and that looked exactly appropriate for a funeral. Maybe Jess’s mom wore it to Linda’s funeral. And the dramatic black hat. That was pure Jess. I imagined Jess gazing at her reflection in the mirror—hat on, hat off, on, off—and finally her mother touching her shoulder and saying, “I like the hat, lovey.” Jess and Penny stepped inside, and I couldn’t see them, only think about the two of them alone together for the first time, ignoring my mess in the living room as they went searching for what Penny needed. I’d cleared a drawer for her and space in the closet, but mostly she flung her clothes everywhere. At least the new stuff was in shopping bags, easy to pack up. Then I’d get my bedroom. I hadn’t missed it much, only that the bed was less lumpy than the couch. It wasn’t a space that felt like mine. No space ever felt like mine. Penny’s baseball mitt was out on the coffee table, for when she watched baseball playoffs. I wanted to tell her don’t forget it, or her blank scorecards that I’d copied on the Xerox machine in the work-study office.
Penny would know that it was smarter not to mention Tommy. Anyone would know that. Penny owed me. I wondered which stories Jess would tell about Linda, if Jess’s dad would take a picture of Penny and Jess to put in a frame and display on his desk.
Jess’s dad had been talking and now was at the end: “. . . so, yeah, I’m chickenshit for not sitting up there. I couldn’t do it.” He watched me in the rearview mirror, sunglasses back on, but they looked wrong on him, borrowed, like they actually belonged to Penny. I wondered if he had cried while he hid in the car. I was feeling like I might cry right now, though I’d be so angry if I did. I crushed my shoulder into the seat to make my twisted-up arm throb. That sharp clarity.
I said, “This was the first funeral I went to.” I thought he might turn to gaze at me full-face, but no. He stayed shrunk to the sliver of sunglasses in the mirror. I added, “It was so sad. Even not knowing her, I was sad.”
“That bastard,” he said. “Killing random people for kicks. What kind of sick mind...?”
“Think they’ll catch him?” I asked.
“Hell yeah,” he said. “They have to.”
“Or what?”
“Huh?”
“They have to, or what?” I said.
Two motorcycles ripped by, both with girls riding on back, their long hair whipping like flags. We watched them, and then for a moment after, we watched the space where they’d been.
He shook his head. “I just can’t get over the sick mind that takes away a kid’s mother for absolutely no reason and no logic. What kind of world are we living in? Nothing can be the same now, not with that kind of evil loose among us. Mark my words.”
I imagined my poetry professor boxing up those sentences, scribbling “melodramatic” in the cramped angles of his handwriting. Any time the word “evil” showed up in our poems, he’d scorn us with “melodramatic.” Mostly what that did was send people to the thesaurus: “wicked,” “malevolent,” “immoral.” There was a bunch. But it seemed wrong not to be allowed to call something evil if it was. I said, “I know. They think it might be a disgruntled employee.”
“Then have the balls to shoot your goddamn boss in the face,” he said. “Or quit your goddamn job. Don’t take down innocent people.” Red flooded the section of the back of his neck that I could see. “What law says you’re going to love every minute of this life?” He yanked off his sunglasses and tossed them on the passenger seat. Then he wiped both eyes with his thumb (crying?) and angled his gaze back at me in the mirror. I wished he would just turn around. “That’s something important to learn,” he said. “I tell Jess, but she doesn’t want to listen.”
“Actually, I think maybe I kno
w that already,” I said.
“Good,” he said forcefully. “Better than what they’ll teach you here. School of hard knocks gets you somewhere, is what I always say.”
I nodded thoughtfully, fake-pondering his advice. Really, what I was wondering was if maybe he created the second life for himself because he got tired of not loving every minute of his first life, or if a shrink would explain that he needed love or power or danger. All those lies like confetti everywhere, and dashing between two houses, the double “How was your day?” Exhausting to keep up, if not impossible—I mean, impossible if you weren’t Clark Kent—and I realized right then that Jess’s mom knew all along. She had to know. What he did was too much to hide. How else could Penny be on her way, accepted, to Oak Lawn this soon? Because someone could know something and not like it and just pretend it wasn’t there. Someone definitely could do that. They could make that choice, imagining it would be easy.
The silence didn’t feel especially comfortable. I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to leave now and wondered why he didn’t just hand over my money. No cars were coming up the street, so I could push open the door if I wanted. I unfolded my arm, that creepy pins-and-needles sensation cascading down the cramp. “Well,” I said.
“I thought Penny would lose it,” he said, sort of abruptly, as if he’d been having a conversation in his head and this answered a question that had been asked. “Poor kid. She’s some tough cookie. My mother died when I was nineteen and that about killed me. I’m not ashamed to admit I talk to Ma out loud every day. God, but I miss her. I was her baby, the youngest, spoiled rotten to the core, and everyone knew it. But I didn’t cry, not one goddamn tear.” He sounded proud of himself, proud of Penny, but I was ready to explode into a mess of sobs, even though it’s not like I had something specific like a dead mother to cry about.
I squinched shut my eyes and counted backward from a hundred, an old trick I taught my sister that didn’t work but always felt like it might. He was going on about his mother, a “perfect angel,” but I didn’t listen. Numbers marched through my head. My sister said when she counted each number glowed a different color, all the way from a hundred down. A hundred was always silver, she told me. I didn’t know there were that many colors. I wondered what she was doing right now. Maybe she was at a birthday party, watching someone twist balloon animals. A cake with pink frosting roses and a choice of chocolate or vanilla ice cream. My sister would choose chocolate. She loved chocolate ice cream. She even wanted it when I treated her to Baskin-Robbins during the summer—out of thirty-one flavors, she wanted chocolate. That’s how she was, very loyal.
I was crying, but silently—streaking tears that I couldn’t rub away fast enough with my sweater sleeve, hoping Jess’s dad wouldn’t notice while he rambled about his mother. But he shut up and suddenly blew his nose with a startling honk, and maybe he wouldn’t count that as real crying, to keep intact his record of “not one goddamn tear.”
“What’s taking so long?” he asked.
“Want me to go see?”
“Better leave them alone,” he said. “Let them get used to the idea that they’re sisters.”
He switched off the car, and the silence was disorienting. My armpits were sticky sweaty, as if they’d been that way for a while but now was the first time I was noticing. And still the tears, so I lowered my head so he wouldn’t see. I felt trapped in this car, in this day. I should be reading The Portrait of a Lady for class on Monday, worrying about Isabel Archer, not myself, worrying about the next paper I’d have to write. I liked the book so far because I liked any book where women were stressing about getting married. There was something so quaint about that being your biggest problem, though I knew the professor would explain that it was a serious problem and a serious book and not quaint at all. “Quaint” was one of my favorite words, and I barely found occasion to use it.
Quaint, quaint, quaint.
Jess and Penny were sisters, which I had known all along. I had known that. Like Linda and Jess. Me and Grace. It shouldn’t be any kind of bombshell to think of them this way. It was biology.
I straightened up and flung back my hair. Gave a fake yawn. “You said you’d pay me fifty dollars for helping with Penny today.”
“Right,” he said, distracted. He slapped both hands along his suit jacket, the hokey way men do when it’s time for money to show up and they pretend they don’t have any. But this wasn’t that old trick; he dredged his wallet from an inside pocket and flicked through the bills. He pulled out three and folded them in half and half again and then stretched his arm backward over the top of the seat without looking at me. “Sixty,” he said. “A little bonus.”
I reached for the money and left it folded, sensing that to examine it would be tacky. Sensing that taking it was tacky. Sensing that I was tacky. “Thank you,” I said, trying to keep my voice low enough that he might not hear.
“Buy yourself something nice.” His voice was normal enough, but I wondered what he meant: “Something nice” versus those too-high shoes? Versus my thrift store skirt? But I realized these were probably the casual words he threw out any time he doled out money to women—his wife, Jess, Penny’s mom, Penny. Buy yourself something nice. It should have been nice that he said them to me, but it didn’t feel nice, so I said, “Actually, I’ll be buying groceries and paying my half of the electric bill.”
He seemed startled but ultimately uninterested. “Okay then.”
“I mean, this is a lot of money for me,” I said. “That’s why I asked you for it. I didn’t want to, but I really need this money. I need it.”
“Do you want more?” he asked.
Finally he turned around. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look angry. He looked like he was waiting.
I didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t want to ask him to explain, because I felt like I should know, I should know exactly. He should mean nothing. He should mean, I have lots of money and it’s no big deal to give you some of it. But I wasn’t sure if that’s what it was. There was that dinner where he held my hand and told me I was pretty. I knew secrets about Penny’s mom. This was the second time I was alone with him. Hang on, he had said then, that other time. Maybe he told everyone to “hang on,” and I hadn’t noticed. Maybe “hang on” meant something, too.
“Do you want more?” he repeated.
“Well,” I said. “I mean, well. What did you have in mind? What would I have to do for it?” As soon as I spoke, I knew I had made a disastrous mistake.
“Good god,” he said, his eyes drilling down into me. “What do you think I am? Jesus fucking Christ. Nothing. I have nothing in mind. You have to do nothing.” He yanked more bills from his wallet and thrust them at me, fanning them out. “Take it.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean...” but I didn’t finish, because there were three fifties in that fan. Three fifties and a twenty and a five. That was books next quarter. That was a month at my work-study job. That was more than my half of the rent. “I don’t want—”
“Take the money,” he said, shaking the bills. “It’s all I got on me.”
He wouldn’t miss it. This was a pair of shoes or a bracelet for Jess’s birthday, or a couple of nights at the Palmer House after getting kicked out of home.
I took it, folding it in quarters like the other bills. He would have just stuffed it back into his wallet. No one had to know. I mumbled, “Thank you,” which seemed like a safe thing to say. I squeezed the wad of cash in one hand because I was too embarrassed to grab for my purse on the floor. Also, because I liked gripping so much money at once, $235 combined. I got dizzy thinking of it, but also thinking how it wasn’t that much, that $235 was what he walked around with all day as if it was no big deal.
He spoke in a professor’s lecturing voice: “And just so the record’s straight, this thing with Penny’s mother wasn’t about money. I loved her. And I love Penny. And maybe this is too complicated for someone like you to understand,
but I love my wife and I love Jess, too. Goddamn if some college know-it-all is going to judge me.”
For him, I thought, for him maybe it wasn’t about money. But what about her? He shouldn’t be so sure, is what I thought. But I said, “I know you loved her. I’m sorry.”
He barreled on, maybe not hearing me: “And you should be more goddamn careful. Not everyone...”
A sudden pause, maybe him thinking he should stop. I remembered the hard, glinty angles in his eyes and Jess telling me he always had to be right. He wasn’t going to stop. I squeezed the thick wad of money in my hand. Mine. No matter what he said next.
He said, “Think before you go slapping prices on everything. It makes you look cheap. Don’t be cheap.”
I repeated, “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “You’re not someone I want associating with my daughters.”
It was a struggle to speak. Finally this, a whisper that he heard perfectly: “You don’t get to choose.”
“My checkbook says I do,” he said. “Ask.”
Another pause. My stomach lurched. I should jump out of the car. I should tell Jess. I should call him a hypocrite. I should scream. I should scream rape. I should ask how much. I should not be cheap. I should shut up. I should shut up.
I felt shitty, just as he intended. He might as well be my father leaving the dark room, that final brush of his hand along the top of my head lingering on my skin. Pushing me underwater, leaving me to drown.
The front door slammed, and Jess and Penny emerged, each loaded with a row of shopping bags, and a big black Hefty slung over Jess’s shoulder like a Santa pack. Penny pressed her raggedy pillow between her ribs and one arm. Her baseball mitt was looped off the tips of her fingers, and she waved it, as if explaining something to Jess. The Doc Martens clumped heavily on the wooden porch.
Silver Girl Page 23
