Local Girls

by Alice Hoffman

  I felt great for days.

  We don’t do holidays. We go to my grandma Frieda’s for Passover, but we skip Chanukah, which my father insists is trivial, and Thanksgiving, which he considers a meaningless ritual. We do, however, spend every Christmas at Margot’s house. It’s a holiday she feels entitled to celebrate since she was married to Tony Molinaro for all those years. My father never goes to Margot’s, and this year Jason wasn’t there either. It was just us, and we decorated the tree with all of Tony’s mother’s beautiful old ornaments. There’s an angel that’s always been my favorite, fashioned out of silvery glass. When Tony’s mother was alive she assured me it would bring good luck to whoever hung it on the tree. Tony’s mother always preferred Margot to her own son, and when they broke up she took to her bed and was dead by the following spring.

  Even after Margot and Tony divorced, Margot always included her ex-mother-in-law in the festivities. Tony’s mother must have been at least ninety. Her hands shook as she held out the angel. “Here’s the thing about luck,” she told me on her last Christmas. “You don’t know if it’s good or bad until you have some perspective.”

  This year we made a toast to the old lady and Margot actually cried. Right as we finished the tree, snow started to fall. We all rushed to the front window to look. It was the kind of snow that you hardly ever see, so heavy and beautiful you fall in love with winter, even though you know you’ll have to shovel in the morning.

  Margot had made a turkey with stuffing, a noodle kugel, and a white cake topped with coconut that looked like the snow outside. After dinner, she and my mother put on aprons and did the dishes and laughed. I let them listen to Elvis’s Blue Christmas; I hardly ever saw my mother having a good time, so how could I complain?

  In Jill’s family Christmas was a big deal, and I knew when I went over to her house in the morning she’d have a dozen great presents to show me and I’d have to try not to be jealous. Jill and I had given each other bottles of White Musk, our favorite scent. I envied Jill just about everything, but I didn’t feel jealous right then, listening to Elvis in Margot’s house. Truthfully, there was nowhere else I’d rather be. Lucky for us, Margot lived right around the corner from us. Her house was our house, and vice versa, unless my father was at home. Margot and my mother intended to be neighbors forever; they had dozens of plans, but not all of their plans were working out.

  I’d overheard my father talking on the phone. He was intending to leave as soon as the weather got better. As soon as he could break the news to us, he’d be gone. He was in a holding pattern, that’s what he said, but he wasn’t holding on to us, that much was certain. I didn’t tell my mother what I’d learned. I didn’t tell anyone. I wanted to see Margot and my mother dance in the kitchen when the dishes were done and drying on the rack. I wanted to see them throw their aprons on the floor.

  That night, when we walked home, my mother put her arm around me and told me to wish on a star. She still believed in things like that. We stood there in the snow, and try as I might, I didn’t see a single star. But I lied. I said that I did, and I wished anyway. We stood there while my mother tried in vain to see that same star. My fingers were freezing, so I put my hands in my pockets. The angel was there. I knew that if I tried to thank Margot, she’d tell me to cut it out, she’d say it was nothing, but it was definitely something to me.

  It was late, but we could hear traffic on the Southern State Parkway, even though it was Christmas, and snowing so hard. You had to wonder who all these people in their cars were leaving behind and who they were driving toward, and if they knew that in the distance, the echo of their tires on the asphalt sounded like a river, and that to someone like me, it could seem like the miracle I’d been looking for.

  Rose Red

  The sky was blue all through June, and if you walked along the streets of our neighborhood you could smell cut grass; you could hear the low humming of bees. School had been out for exactly one week, and my best friend Jill and I were already bored out of our minds. We were twelve, that unpredictable and dangerous age when sampling shades of lipstick and playing with dolls seem equally interesting. We both had the feeling that this summer was our last chance at something, and not knowing quite what it was, we started testing our boundaries. We talked back to our mothers. We streaked our hair with a caustic mixture of peroxide and ammonia. We spoke to strangers and didn’t pick up after ourselves. By the end of the month we were climbing out our bedroom windows nearly every night.

  We’d meet in Jill’s backyard, in the moonlight, beneath a ceiling of distant white stars. We dressed in dark colors, so not even a sleepwalker could spot us. Jill wore black shorts and a black sweatshirt; she hid her pale blond hair under a baseball cap. I always borrowed my brother’s old windbreaker and threw on the same pair of black jeans. What we were doing on those midnights, beneath a crooked crab apple tree, was plotting our revenge. It was not simply our neighborhood that we hated, but the entire adult world, which, regretfully, we were soon destined to join. Perhaps this is what made us so giddy and daring, so sure of ourselves, so intense. Ordinarily, we were good girls. We baby-sat, we handed our homework in on time, we washed supper dishes without being asked. But that was all over now. We made a list of the people we hated most: those who had insulted us, or treated us badly, or simply ignored us. Those who were rude or nasty or full of themselves. The names of our neighbors appeared on our list, spelled out in Jill’s neat, orderly script.

  Mrs. Brandon, who owned the variety store and phoned your mother if you happened to take a pack of gum and forgot to pay, was number one. Then came Mr. DiPietro, who screamed at his wife so loudly you could hear every word when you walked past their open window on warm evenings. There was also Mr. Richie, who had been our fourth-grade teacher, and liked to lock you in the coat closet if you talked out of turn. When our list was complete at last, it was time to take action. We worked at midnight, the hour when every street was silent and every house dark. With our neighbors safely asleep in their beds, we were as free as a nightmare to settle wherever we wished without a witness, except perhaps for prowling cats, let out until morning. We wrote with pieces of coal on Mrs. Brandon’s garage door. We emptied an entire container of cottage cheese into Mr. DiPietro’s mailbox. When people in the neighborhood began to talk about gremlins, we bit our tongues. We winked at each other and tried not to laugh. Deep inside, we felt the true power of secrecy and revenge.

  “Did you hear what somebody did to Mr. Richie?” my brother, Jason, asked me one morning as I was heading over to Jill’s and he was dragging our trash out to the curb. “They poured buttermilk into his garbage cans. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Wow,” I said.

  I didn’t have to fake being impressed. I still couldn’t believe Jill and I had had the nerve to pull that one off. We’d dumped in two quarts of warm, rancid buttermilk and afterwards we’d run back to her house so fast we both wound up with stitches in our sides. I’d had to kneel down on the ground in order to catch my breath, and Jill had been laughing her head off, and then, from out of nowhere, we’d heard a siren. It sounded as though it was right on our block. Jill and I stared at each other in a complete panic.

  “We’re insane,” Jill said to me in her clear, sweet voice.

  She was probably right, and I was about to suggest that we never play these sorts of tricks again, but then the police car turned onto another street, and as soon as the siren faded, so did my resolve. Revenge did that to a person; it caused even the insecure and the meek to take foolhardy chances. After a while it became a way of life: the risks felt as natural as drawing a breath.

  The day after the buttermilk incident, Jill and I spent the afternoon at the municipal pool, in awe of our own daring. Everyone was talking about Mr. Richie’s garbage cans. It was legend now; it was all over town. Jill and I wore big sunglasses to hide our true natures. Who knew the real us? No one. Who knew what we were capable of? Not a single soul.

  We sprawled on beach to
wels we’d arranged on the cement near the deep end of the pool. I couldn’t help but notice how much longer Jill’s legs were than mine. This was the summer when she’d suddenly become beautiful; by August people she’d known all her life wouldn’t recognize her. Jill? they’d say, as though she were a mirage. Is that you?

  “Maybe we’d better stop while we’re ahead.” Jill was eating a melting Almond Joy. I, as usual, was on a diet, and had brought carrot sticks along for a snack. I rarely ate anything else and my fingers and toes had a distinctly orange tinge.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I sounded like a rabbit, but I kept right on crunching. “We’re just getting started. And what about Mr. Castle?” I reminded her. “We haven’t gotten him yet.”

  Jill and I both baby-sat for the Castles; they had two cute kids—Amy, who was four, and little Pearl, who was just about the most adorable baby in the world. Twice last month, Mr. Castle had tried some really disgusting things with Jill when he drove her home. Once, he’d insisted she kiss him goodnight, and the other time he did something Jill was too embarrassed to tell me about even though she knew every single detail of my life. I asked and asked; I crossed my heart, vowing never to repeat a word, but still she wouldn’t speak.

  Well, Jill wasn’t baby-sitting for the Castles anymore, and in a show of solidarity, neither was I. Mrs. Castle had called me three times and practically begged, but I told her I had mononucleosis and the prognosis for my recovery wasn’t good. To tell you the truth, I felt sorry for Mrs. Castle—she was the type of person who bought extra potato chips and Coke when you baby-sat for her kids, and she always asked what was new in your life, which very few employers bothered to do—but I stuck with my mono story. When Elinor Nagle informed me the Castles had hired her to sit, I told her that Amy was a monster who threw food, and that the baby had diarrhea constantly, and that it was best never to walk barefoot in the Castles’ house, since a black widow spider had gotten loose in one of their kitchen cabinets. Later, I heard Elinor never showed up at the Castles’, and even though she wasn’t a particularly close friend, I was glad she’d had second thoughts.

  Taking our revenge on Mr. Castle was different than all the others, and we knew it from the start. We were long past buttermilk and cottage cheese and coal. We were in far more serious territory now. When we met in Jill’s backyard we didn’t feel giddy anymore; now we were out for real retribution, and there was no backing down. We discussed possibilities we knew we’d never go through with—fires and floods, even vermin. We’d set his garage on fire with kindling and matches. We’d stick the garden hose through his basement window and turn it on full blast. We’d have Monica Greeley’s younger brother release the squirrels he trapped down by the creek into Castle’s garage. But the truth was, neither of us wanted Mr. Castle’s family to suffer, which is why we zeroed in on his car, a new Lincoln he was so crazy about he wouldn’t even let Mrs. Castle drive to the store.

  Their house was on Maple Avenue, right at the end of the development, next door to the original farmhouse that had been built nearly two hundred years earlier. People we knew avoided this part of town, which made perfect sense. There was nothing beyond this border but a weedy field, and after that a service road which led to the parkway. It was a place that made you feel lonely and disoriented, and that was the way we felt on the night we went to play our last trick. We had appropriated three gallons of paint Jill’s father kept stored in their basement. I was only carrying one paint can, but it was heavy; as I walked it bumped against my shins and my knees. Still, I didn’t dare complain. After all, Jill was carrying two gallons, and she certainly wasn’t whining. She was looking straight ahead, into the dark. The weather was humid and warm; every mosquito in town seemed to have hatched, and each one was hungry for blood. It was the sort of night that feels like a dream, when you’re suddenly about to do things you only thought yourself capable of imagining. Before you know it you’re inside of something that feels as unavoidable as destiny.

  We planned to prepare for our attack behind the hedges that separated the Castle house from the old farmhouse. I had taken a screwdriver out of my brother’s tool-box, and had grabbed two pairs of old leather gloves from the coat closet, to ensure that we wouldn’t leave fingerprints. Although I hadn’t yet informed Jill, I’d already decided this was to be my last revenge. Since we’d begun our paybacks I’d developed a nervous stomach. I’d become afraid of the dark. Even walking on this street in my own neighborhood was giving me the creeps. It seemed as though we could fall off the face of the earth at any time. Just one more step, that’s all it would take, and we’d be goners for sure.

  “Maybe we should think this over,” I whispered to Jill after we reached the Castles’.

  “What do you mean?” Jill said. “You were the one who said we should do it.”

  “I know. But all the other stuff was fooling around. This could be considered a felony or something. I think I changed my mind.”

  “Well, I haven’t,” Jill said.

  I had always believed that of the two of us I was the leader. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  “What if damaging a motor vehicle is a federal offense?” I asked. “We could go to jail.”

  If Jill had argued or called me a big baby, maybe I would have turned and walked home. But instead, she started to cry. She stood there, beside the hedges, all dressed in black, and she lowered her head so I couldn’t see, but I knew anyway. Her shoulders always shook like that whenever she cried.

  “Oh, what the hell.” I gave in. “He deserves it.”

  We crept through a hole in the hedges in complete and utter silence. We were barely breathing, and we were thinking even less. We set the paint cans down, but before we went farther we realized something was different on this side of the hedges. We breathed deeply, and deeper still. The air was amazingly sweet, and when we crept forward we saw the reason why. The old farmhouse was covered with roses, little red roses that were all opening on this night. There were so many blossoms they covered the peeling clapboards; vines twisted over the roof, making it impossible to tell how many shingles had been blown away by last winter’s storms.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked Jill, but she wasn’t listening. She had already pulled on her black leather gloves; now she handed me the other pair.

  “Hurry up,” she told me. “Let’s get the tops off the paint cans.”

  I’d been past this old house a thousand times and never noticed roses before. Could it be that they bloomed only at this hour, or on this day? Could it be I’d never bothered to look? I just had to have one of those roses. I had to have proof that something like this could grow in our town.

  “I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Jill, and before she could react I went right up to the house. I had never seen anything as lovely. It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you beautiful too. I was so involved with looking at the roses that I didn’t even realize someone was out on the front porch until it was too late for me to run. I knew it was Mrs. Dennison, even though I’d never seen her before. People in town said she was a hundred; she’d grown up in this house and her family had owned the potato farm that had been chopped into tiny lots when the land was first developed. Mrs. Dennison was wacko, that’s what I’d heard. She kept a shotgun in her parlor; she hated people. If you dared to walk across her front lawn, you’d better beware.

  “I wasn’t doing anything,” I said as soon as I saw Mrs. Dennison, though, certainly, I looked guilty as sin.

  “Well, go on, take it,” she said to me.

  “Take what?” I said, but I could see right then that Mrs. Dennison wasn’t easy to fool.

  “Go on,” she told me. She nodded at the roses.

  “All right. Fine.” I took a flower from the branch closest to me.

  “Do you have those gloves on for a reason?” Mrs. Dennison asked.

  I could have lied to her then, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have done an
y good, I could see that. One thing people didn’t bother to report about Mrs. Dennison was how smart she was, a hundred years old or not.

  “If I told you why I had these gloves on, you’d be a coconspirator, so I’d better not say any more.”

  “Don’t say another word.” Mrs. Dennison seemed to understand.

  Jill was signaling to me like crazy.

  “Your friend’s upset.” Mrs. Dennison could judge things in an instant, that much was clear.

  “She’s got her reasons,” I said.

  “I planted these roses when I was your age,” Mrs. Dennison told me. “And look at them now.”

  “Pretty impressive. Actually, they’re amazing.”

  By then I had tears in my eyes. Sometimes, the world cracks open to reveal itself to you in a single instant. Standing there in the dark, humid night, I realized there was no turning back. We could try to stop it, we could drag our feet, but we were going forward, no matter what. When Mrs. Dennison went inside, I brought the rose with me and walked back to where Jill was crouched in the dark.

  “Well, that’s the end of this plan.” Jill’s voice sounded shaky, as if she were exhausted.

  “Why?” It was the oddest thing how the scent of roses stayed with you.

  “Because she’ll turn us in. She can identify us.”

  “She won’t,” I said.

  “You can’t know that,” Jill insisted.

  But some things you do know, you know them fo sure. For instance, I was certain that when I ran into the Castles’ driveway and lifted the can, white paint would spread out in pools on the roof of that Lincoln, then spil down over the hood. It was oil paint, so white it was hypnotic, almost like watching the stars. I might have stooc beside the car forever if Jill hadn’t grabbed my arm. As we ran we left footprints of paint on the asphalt, but Jill wa clearheaded; she made sure we stopped and took off ou: shoes before we made too much of a trail.