“She’s an ex-nun and the principal of Fat River High, and before that my English teacher. The whole town knows her as the Grammar Nazi. She’d flunk you if you didn’t dot your i’s, which was how I got in the habit of dotting my i with a smiley face,” Patti explained without taking a breath. “When we bought our house six months ago, I had no idea that she owned the one next door. Roger, my husband, says I’m obsessed with her. But he doesn’t understand. He’s not from this town. I feel like she’s still watching my every move, just waiting to flunk me at something. I mean, it’s like living next door to the pope.”
Across the street, Miss Frankfurt minded her own business. She picked up her garden hose, opened the nozzle, and a shower fanned out in a perfect unbroken arc. Each drop crested and caught the light before falling with a patter onto her flower bed. When she was done, she grabbed her newspaper off her stoop and went back inside.
Patti took a breath.
A pair of yellow moths caught her eye; one landed on her brownies.
“Oh my God,” she blurted as if surprised she still had them, “I almost forgot. These are for you,” and she handed the brownies to my mother. “They got a little burnt around the edges and the bottom, but the middle of them should be pretty good.”
After that first batch of burnt brownies, Patti showed up almost daily with something equally inedible. At first she brought over whole things—a whole pie or tart—then she started bringing over pieces. And once she brought over just a few bites; a sad little pile of white frosting and cake. Before long, she just showed up empty-handed and she never knocked.
She’d stick her head in the door and yell, “Yoo-hoo?” as she let herself in. She usually came by first thing in the morning with her mug full of coffee. Initially we offered her a seat, but she always said, “Oh, no, I can’t stay,” and then that’s exactly what she’d do. She’d stand at the door smoking and talking nonstop.
One morning we saw her heading our way. She’d slipped on Roger’s work boots and was wearing one of his flannel shirts. Her pale yellow nightgown billowed out beneath it as she swooped across the street.
“Quick,” my mother said as she locked our door, “in the bathroom.”
Patti and Roger had just gotten a new set of binoculars from Walmart. “It’s amazing how sharp they are,” Patti had told us. She’d been using them to spy on Miss Frankfurt and every day she reported her findings in painstaking detail. “She eats cornflakes, without milk, for breakfast. She bends over and touches her toes every morning. She has a nightcap of whiskey before bed. She brushes her teeth up and down instead of sideways. Pancake sits on her lap when she reads. And she kneels at her bed every night when she prays.” The details of Miss Frankfurt’s life were endlessly boring.
“Yoo-hoo,” Patti called as she approached our door. When she discovered it was locked, she rattled the knob. “It’s me. Anyone home?” She knocked and pulled at the knob again. “Rita, Ruthie, are you in there?”
Then she started making her way around the house, peeking in all the windows.
Just before she got to the bathroom, my mother and I stepped into the shower stall. Through a crack in the shower curtain, I watched her. She reached up, cupped her hands, and tried to peer in, but a layer of dirt coated the window. She took her fingernail, scraped off a peephole, and shoved her eye up to it. It blinked and looked around.
Then she stepped back from the window and yelled, “Are you guys okay in there?” A moment passed. She pressed her ear to the peephole and listened. “If you guys are in there and you can hear me, don’t panic! I’m calling the police!”
A minute later we relented. My mother barely opened the door. “Oh, thank God,” Patti said, and wedged herself in. “I thought you were tied up in here or something. Didn’t you hear me knocking?”
“Oh, we heard you all right,” my mother said.
Patti cocked her head and looked at her, trying to decipher what this meant, but she couldn’t quite make the leap.
“Well, anyway, thank God you’re all right.” Even though it was August, she stood there cupping her mug in a pair of pebbly gloves that didn’t match. She had bad circulation in the morning, she’d told us.
I was making toast and my mother stood at the kitchen table sorting through her stack of Crate and Barrel catalogs. She collected them and dog-eared almost every page.
“So, I gotta tell you guys something.” Patti took a sip of coffee, put the mug down, and lit a cigarette, preparing herself for what promised to be another longwinded story. “So last night she was getting ready for bed. At first it was the same old routine. She brushed her teeth, she let her hair down. But then”—Patti took a drag off her cigarette, widened her eyes, and paused for effect—“after she knelt and said her prayers, she had trouble getting up. She gripped the edge of the mattress, but her hands slipped and she fell backwards! She had to crawl across the floor and hoist herself up on a chair. It was like watching a disabled crab. It was horrifying! I tried to get Roger to look but he just threatened to take the binoculars away. ‘They’re for the birds!’ he shouted. But I can’t help it.” Patti raised a hand to the side of her mouth and whispered conspiratorially, “I mean she lives right next door.”
She dropped her cigarette butt into her now-cold coffee. A single line of smoke rose up out of the mug with a sizzle. “Well,” Patti sighed. She reached up, divided her ponytail in half, and pulled both sides to tighten it. “I better go check my laundry.” Then she turned and walked out.
CHAPTER TEN
Kindness
Peter Pam wasn’t much of a waitress. She dropped her trays all the time. She wobbled on her mules and her wig was always getting in the way, but I really liked her. She was smart and knew all sorts of interesting things. Like a cockroach can live for nine days without its head, a sneeze can exceed speeds of one hundred miles an hour, the oldest known vegetable is the pea, and ants never sleep. And we both agreed: the earth was burning up. Based on our assessment of this and many other things, we believed that God had traded his robe for a business suit and quit his job as savior for a more lucrative one, most likely in banking.
At the end of August, Peter Pam found me a bike in someone’s trash. She was an expert at reusing and repurposing other people’s garbage. It made her feel like she was doing something for the planet.
The bike was a bright-blue, three-speed Schwinn with a fender on the front and a rack on the back. It was on a Saturday morning when I first took it for a ride. No one was out so I coasted down the hill in the center of the road toward Main Street. The air cooled my cheeks. I arched my back and spread my arms like wings. The wind fluttered the loose fabric down the sides of my T-shirt. For a split second, when I closed my eyes and rode with no hands, it felt like I was flying.
In my mother’s lifetime, she’d worked at donut shops and nursing homes. She’d worked in retail and the fast-food industry, she’d cleaned rooms in hotels, been a cashier at a grocery store and a million different Walgreens. She almost never had just one job and not a single one of them ever paid enough, but here in Fat River we were breaking even. I had no idea what stability was until then. Life, it turned out, could open up and offer peace and space for friends.
Half of the stuff Peter Pam pulled from the trash was broken. And Mel could fix anything. He’d retreat into the basement with a broken motor and within minutes have it working. But the things that Peter Pam collected from the trash were beyond even his repair. Broken chairs and step stools, an old toaster oven, a baby carriage and various other items were piled behind Tiny’s at the bottom of Peter Pam’s apartment stairs. Once in a while she’d pick something up, an electric toothbrush, for example. “It’s so wasteful,” she’d sigh, examining it. “And look.” She’d hold it up and rotate it for me to see. “It’s perfectly good.” Then she’d toss it back down in the heap.
What Peter Pam meant by “perfectly good” was anyon
e’s guess because when I finally had to pedal, the chain fell off. I tried to fix it but it kept skipping, so I glided to an almost stop. I was on Main Street by then in front of Hanson’s Hardware Store. The chain was rusty and needed greasing. I circled in the street debating whether to go in and buy a can of oil.
The owners of the hardware store, Dotty and Hank Hanson, were a frail elderly couple. They both used walkers with wheels on the front and tennis balls on the back, as if thwack, thwack, they’d lifted their walkers just in time to catch the balls there. Dotty and Hank stooped at the exact same angle. From a distance, the only way to tell them apart was by Hank’s hat. He wore a black beret at an angle like an artist.
They lived right next door to us, “but you won’t see them,” Patti had said. According to her, they never went out and their hardware store was slowly going out of business. Whatever you were looking for, you could now find it cheaper at Walmart. Patti had warned us that Dotty now motored up and down her aisles looking for customers. “ ‘Here, you need this,’ she’ll say, nabbing you and shoving some useless trinket—a key chain or screwdriver—in your hand.”
The chain fell off again, so I stopped and parked the bike against their building. The mortar between the bricks was crumbling. The window display was a jumbled disarray of items. A hammer, partially buried under a blanket of spilled birdseed, sat next to an upright vacuum cleaner lying on the floor. There was a ladder leaning up against the window, a coffeemaker in one corner, and a screw gun in the other. It was like a Salvador Dalí painting I once saw in a book; no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to build a cohesive narrative.
A distant chime sounded when I stepped in. The floorboards moaned. Fluorescent lights hung overhead. Half the bulbs were out. A haze of dust drifted in the air. A ceiling fan squeaked.
I managed to get what I needed and make it all the way up to the register without Dotty catching me.
Displays of impulse buys—mini hammers and screwdriver sets, flashlights on goosenecks, magnetic retrieval tools, pocketknives, mousetraps, dog whistles, fingernail clippers, Chapstick, an endless variety of key chains—were crammed on the counter. Racks of things for sale ran up and down the wall behind it.
Pinned above the register was a mishmash of warning signs: no smoking, no pets, no loitering, shirts and shoes required, and a sign that said beware but didn’t tell you of what.
I leaned over the counter looking for someone to ring me up. At first he blended in with all the stuff around him, but then I spotted Hank sleeping on a stool—his head down, his chin resting on his chest, his beret held loosely on his lap.
I cleared my throat once, then louder before he looked up and mumbled something. He gathered himself, replaced his hat on his head, hoisted himself up off the stool with his walker, then shuffled slowly to the register.
Without saying a single word, he picked up my can of oil, checked the price on the bottom, and put it down again. His hair was sparse and gray. A handful of rebellious coils sprang out from each eyebrow. The loose pockets of skin under his eyes pulled his face downward. He searched the register for the right numbers and when he couldn’t find them, he lost track of what they were and had to check the price again.
In my peripheral vision, Dotty appeared. She maneuvered herself behind the counter with a clamor.
“For Chrissake, Hank!” she honked like a goose, “get out of my way.” She nudged him with her walker. He fell back on his stool and almost lost his hat.
It was hard for me to imagine, but Patti swore that the Hansons used to be fun, and Arlene confirmed this. Apparently they used to come into Tiny’s for early Sunday dinner every week, Dotty in her gloves and hat and Hank in a suit. They thought Peter Pam was a riot and, according to Arlene, Peter Pam knew it. She’d stand at the end of their table, doing all sorts of exaggerated things with her hips and hands, hamming it up for them on purpose. “You should have seen the way Dotty blushed and giggled like a schoolgirl,” Arlene told us.
Without even looking at the merchandise, Dotty punched in some numbers, then grabbed a mini tape measure off a display and, without asking, charged me for it.
“It’s half off!” she barked. She made it hard to feel sorry for her but I paid for it anyway.
When she handed me my shopping bag I grabbed it, but Dotty wouldn’t let it go. I tugged a little, and she tugged back. I stopped and looked right at her.
Her scowl had completely disappeared. Her whole being had softened. She lowered her glasses down her nose and I saw in her eyes a well so deep you could never hope to see the bottom.
“You got my grandbaby’s eyes,” she said to me. “Hank, look. Don’t she have Stephie’s eyes?”
Peter Pam had told me the Hansons used to be religious. But they lost their faith years ago when an E. Coli–laden spinach salad killed their only granddaughter.
Hank got himself up again and the two of them looked at me as if I were their last morsel of food.
A shiver rose up my spine.
Dotty’s grip loosened on the bag. I pulled it away and headed for the door.
“Wait,” she said. “Please.” I grabbed for the handle, but something stopped me. “I got something for you.”
When I turned around, Dotty started rummaging through the shelf below the counter.
“Move it, Hank,” she snapped, and down he went again on his stool. She gripped the edge of the counter. As her head went farther underneath it, her knuckles turned a pinkish white.
“Here,” she exclaimed, triumphantly standing and holding up a small box. She took the box, shoved it into her apron, and shuffled around the counter with her walker.
“It’s been sitting on the shelf for years,” she explained, moving toward me. “It’s probably antique by now.” She reached into her apron and held the box out to me. For the first time, I noticed her name tag—my name is dotty. ask me for help—pinned on upside down.
“Go on.” She nudged the box closer. “Open it, it’s yours.”
The box fit in the palm of my hand. The lid slid off easily. I moved aside some tissue paper, and nestled inside was an old brass bicycle bell. A mermaid was sculpted on top. As if she were perched on the bow of a ship, her hair blew back in an invisible wind. The sides were engraved with elaborate latticework patterns. The thumb handle was shaped like an oyster shell.
“You like it?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I smiled. It was the coolest bell I’d ever seen. “Thank you.”
“Hank!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Get over here with your screwdriver! Help her put it on and fix her chain while you’re at it!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Resilience
Through the dense patch of woods behind our house, we could see the McDonald’s on Route 6. The soothing scents of french fries and burgers wafted through the air and made us feel at home. But when the breeze of autumn set in and my mother registered me for school, the smells scattered and a cold dread replaced the summer’s warmth.
“You’re going to do great, honey.” I had just turned fourteen and it was the day before my first day of high school. I was sitting on a stool in the bathroom while my mother cut my hair.
“When they find out how smart you are,” she said, snipping away with the scissors, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they let you skip ninth grade altogether. Yup,” she said, nodding, “I can see it now. Yale and Harvard are both going to want you. I’m sure of it.” She stepped back and lit a cigarette. “I was just thinking the other day,” she continued. “You’d make an excellent president.”
My political aspirations were meager to none. I did, however, have ongoing conversations with Hillary Clinton in my head. She complained to me about Bill and she knew all about my mother.
My mother stepped back with the scissors limp in her hand. “Yup,” she agreed with herself again, “with you as president”—she moved in and cli
p, clip, clipped at my hair—“there’d be no need for a vice one.”
She kept starting and stopping and diving toward my head with the point of her scissors until she finally put them down. Propping her hand up with her elbow, she took a drag off her cigarette and examined her work. She tilted her head and blew the smoke out. Not quite finished, she rested the cigarette on the edge of the sink, pulled at my bangs, and clipped some more.
“And you know what else? . . . I think I make a damn good haircutter, don’t you?” she asked, rotating me on the stool.
The haircut set the mood for the whole school year. It was unusually bad. My hair had been short to begin with but now it was way too short and it was totally uneven. I never told her, but for a week I wore a hat.
I hated every school I’d ever been to. Kids used to tease me for being plain looking, boyish, and poor. And my mother said I came into this world reading a book, so I’d worn glasses since I was five.
Fat River High was less than two miles from my house so I could avoid the bus and ride my bike there. But that was the only good thing about it. I wasn’t afraid of much, but high school kids scared me. I was nervous and awkward around them and their behavior made no sense to me. The girls all acted stupid and the boys acted cocky and smart. When really you could tell just by looking at them that the opposite was true.
On my first day of school, it became immediately clear to me: avoid Sally Milander at all costs. In an instant, I could tell that she controlled the school. She left the boys awestruck, and when she moved down the hall a gaggle of girls traveled with her.
On my third day, I accidentally found myself standing behind her at the vending machine. The fleshy tops of her feet swelled in her rhinestone-studded heels. Encased in tight jeans, her ankles tapered up into a set of ample thighs. Her legs looked like sharply drawn Vs making it difficult to imagine how she balanced on her feet.
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