In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “Isn’t it hot, though!” She wore a flowered, filmy skirt, and high-heeled sandals with ribbons that wound around her ankles. The ensemble ached for a large-brimmed hat and a cup of tea. “I thought this day would never end. I’m not sure my stamina is up to summer sessions anymore. I must be getting old!” She put her hand to her mouth to muffle a Scarlett O’Hara titter that begged for a gentleman’s denial of what she’d said.

  The gentleman present failed to respond properly. “We were talking about the missing girl,” Five said instead.

  Phyllis adjusted her face to the solemnity of the topic. “So dreadful—the police disrupting class and all. It took me forever to get my people back in stride.”

  “Pretty dreadful about her being abducted, too,” I said quietly.

  “Of course. I didn’t mean I don’t care about little June.”

  “April,” I said.

  “I knew it was a month. Besides, that wasn’t her real name.” Phyllis sounded triumphant, as if she were revealing something important we’d missed. “She picked it out of the blue. I was told that she’s really something like Your Duck. The girl Americanized it for us, although how you get from duck to April beats me.”

  “Maybe that’s what the Vietnamese meant.” I didn’t see what was noteworthy about making her name easier and less conspicuous, but Phyllis looked scandalized, as if any defection from Your Duck constituted betrayal.

  “And where was that girl’s common sense?” she asked. “Hanging around a neighborhood like that late at night, alone. Honestly!”

  “She worked in Chinatown. At a café.”

  “I heard a—”

  “A café,” I repeated.

  “I find the term Chinatown offensive,” Phyllis said. “It isolates one ethnic group, and besides, shouldn’t it be Chinesetown if that’s what they meant?”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Actually,” Five said, “with all the different sorts of people who live there now, maybe it should be Orientaltown.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, my, no! That’s truly offensive. Nobody says that anymore. Orient means the East, and what does that imply—that some other place west of it is the center of the universe?”

  “Asiatown, then?” What in God’s name were we talking about? “Pacific Basintown?”

  “But don’t you find it offensive to label a geographical area by the country of origin of its settlers?” She beamed a large-toothed smile at Five. “We wouldn’t say Irishland, would we? We make some groups so conspicuous—denigrate them, really. I consider it themism, the verbal ostracism of the perceived outsider.”

  “Of course you’re right,” he said. “That’s why I never refer to New England, or Germantown, or New York, or New Jersey, or even go near them.”

  “If you’re going to be that way,” she said, but gently, flirtatiously.

  I’d had it. “I’m bushed,” I said. “As you can tell, my room tends to overheat, even on a dull day like this, and I find it difficult staying awake all day. But be my guests as long as you like. Just close the door behind you.”

  And damned if they didn’t say they would. Well, more accurately, Five made moves to leave, but Phyllis implored with small, cooing sounds. She had a question about grade-averaging. Apparently, she wasn’t interested in my opinions on the subject.

  Five checked his watch and agreed to stay a few minutes.

  “Thanks,” Phyllis said, as if she’d been given the world’s most valuable gift.

  What the hell—at least she was having a grand day. It’s only right that somebody in the known universe should.

  *

  It bothered me that I didn’t like Lowell Diggs. It felt prejudiced and narrow. Another example of us-against-themism, as Phyllis might have put it.

  I told myself that it wasn’t his fault that his features had been put together the wrong way, or that his sweat glands were hyperactive. The absence of a chin is not a sign of unworthiness, a thin and whiny voice doesn’t necessarily reflect a worldview, and the fact that he was shaving-impaired should have provoked pity, not contempt. But I couldn’t squelch my annoyance at the inevitable missed clump of hair and the tissue-covered specks where he’d cut too deeply.

  And yet once again, as I left school, he called my name and hurried to walk beside me, and I fixated not on Lowell’s hidden potential but on the scraggly patch below his left nostril. I disliked it—and him, by default. And me, for my pettiness.

  “Need a ride, Mandy Pepper?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks anyway. I’m walking to school and back these days. Easy exercise.” I would have accepted a lift from almost anyone else. The air stuck to me like a damp, sour washcloth, like a whole mildewed laundry basketful dumped on my head. We needed a cleansing storm, a King Lear kind of production number, to wash away this oppressive atmosphere.

  But I, with my prejudice and prejudgment now extended to his possessions, didn’t want to encounter the inside of Lowell’s car. I knew it would contain the automotive equivalent of unshaved patches.

  “Mind if I walk with you a while, then?” he asked.

  Could I say no? I didn’t want to hurt him gratuitously. A parallel walk was just that and nothing more.

  One of the problems I had with Lowell was that every time I saw him, I could imagine my mother saying “What’s so bad about him? Give him a chance.” So even though I didn’t want to give him the time of day, let alone a bona fide chance, my guilt at not wanting to obliged me to give him the chance I wouldn’t otherwise have given him—if that’s what my mother, even long-distance, wanted. Is that intelligible? How about mature?

  “You seem down,” Lowell said. “Not your usual cheery self, Mandy Pepper. What’s bothering you, if I may be so bold as to ask?” He spoke his silly lines with jolly ineptness. I thought of all the girls who must have turned him down, and I tried to be kind, even though what was bothering me at the moment was, in fact, him.

  “The weather. Fatigue.”

  “No, no, no,” he said with a finger waggle. “I know you too well to believe that. Can’t fool Uncle Lowell.”

  That did it. He’d had more than a fair chance and had blown it. I opened my mouth to say something scathing, but he interrupted.

  “Besides, you don’t have to tell me. I already know.”

  “How would you?”

  “Because you are a sensitive and caring person, so of course you would be affected by the evil you feel encircling us.”’

  “The—” Us?

  “The girl who was stolen, and Flora, what was done to her room. Well, to her, really.”

  “Are you saying the two events are related?”

  “Many events are related,” he said in a solemn, albeit high-pitched voice. “Don’t you feel the rising tide of evil? I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “Like, um, what other things are in the tide?” I eyed him nervously. People don’t talk about evil. Not people I want to hear. Even Lowell hadn’t talked about it the other times he’d intercepted my walks and lunches. He’d talked about math, computers, and his aunt Melba. He’d even talked about the woman who’d unceremoniously shaken free of him three months ago. So what had provoked this? I checked out Lowell’s small, gray eyes, made sure they weren’t spinning.

  He shrugged. “There’s much more in the tide. Vandalism. The old graveyard that was spray-painted. That wasn’t random violence. That was hitting a definite target.”

  Rebecca Gratz’s grave. Weeks ago. Old news, nearly forgotten. Lowell was paranoid. Graffiti in a graveyard is, unfortunately, nothing exceptional. Graffiti anywhere is, unfortunately, unexceptional.

  There were spray-painted stigmata all over the city. I couldn’t believe some people wanted it classified as art. If so, then every time a dog lifted a leg and marked a fireplug as his turf, that, too, should be declared a work of art. There’s no difference between that and the taggers’ sprayings—except that the dog’s product is biodegradable. In any case, graffiti isn’t a sign of c
onspiracy or evil.

  “It was a Jewish cemetery. Are you aware that Pennsylvania has more racist and anti-Semitic activity than any other state?”

  “Oh, Lowell, surely not. That’s the job of the South, isn’t it? This is Pennsylvania. Quaker tolerance and all.”

  “You’re an innocent. There’s even an anti-Semitic group who believe that the computer bar codes on food packages are part of a Jewish plot to kill Christians.”

  The idea was ludicrous enough to be funny. Where did Lowell do his research? In an asylum for the incurably wacko?

  “There’s more evil on the loose than ever,” he said firmly. “Often in disguise. Be careful who you befriend.”

  Meaning what? Whom? Himself? That was the trouble with being nice to people you didn’t like. They turned out, too often, to be people you didn’t like.

  “I can trust you, Mandy Pepper,” he said. “After all, we’re friends.”

  There was no empirical basis for his feelings, but I couldn’t think of a humane way to say so.

  “Which is why I want to warn you about our Five, as he likes to be called.”

  Enough of the search for polite ways to handle this man. “What are you saying? Could you be more precise?”

  “I understand. You women like him. You women are overly influenced by classic features and a smooth manner. In your biologically programmed imperative to find excellent specimens to father your children, you’re too often attracted to superficial qualities. But Satan can wear a handsome face, you know.”

  “I’m really uncomfortable with this, Lowell.” He was pathetic. Painfully obvious and pitiable. And still unlikable.

  His face took on a fanatic’s glow. “He’s cunning. Nothing you could link directly to him. But things, Amanda. Trust me. He is not what he seems.”

  “People seldom are.” I could, for example, have pointed out to Lowell that I had taken him for a poorly groomed bore, while he was actually a poorly groomed madman. I wasn’t sure this man should teach anybody’s children.

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

  “Thanks for sharing that.” I took a deep breath. “I’m sure that as a mathematician, you require proof. You want things to add up.” I was proud of my analogy, and I savored it before continuing. “Well so do I, and I’m sorry, but you aren’t offering anything tangible.” Except jealousy. Understandable, but repugnant all the same.

  “You’re a bright woman, Mandy Pepper, but childish in many ways.” His tone was darkly disappointed.

  We had reached the corner where I should have turned right toward home, but I was sure Lowell would escort me, and I didn’t want him overly familiar with my address. “I nearly forgot where I was going,” I said. “I’m supposed to meet my friend Sasha. We’re having dinner.” I took a deep breath to stop the babbling that usually accompanies my lies. “This has been a real treat,” I said when I was ready to speak like a normal person, “but I’m going down to Society Hill. Sixth Street, quite a way off. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  It should have worked. It would have, if he hadn’t been Lowell. If I hadn’t still been aiming for nice-girl politeness. “Get lost” would have been less ambiguous. As it was, he claimed that he was invigorated by the exercise and the scintillating—truly, he used that word—company, and he’d walk a bit longer, if I didn’t mind. He even patted his spare tire and said the exercise would do him good. He was much too sedentary, he told me, spending all his free time keeping up with the literature of his field and working at his computer, surfing the Net.

  I wondered what I’d do when we actually reached Society Hill. I wasn’t sure whether Sasha was in town, let alone home. And in fact, Mackenzie was coming to my house for a dinner for which I was totally unprepared. How would I get out of this? Get rid of Lowell and turn back without antagonizing him, without putting pennies in his insane-o-meter?

  So on we walked. It wasn’t all that unpleasant. I didn’t have to utter a syllable. Lowell waxed poetic about the Infobahn, as he loved to call it—many times.

  I was relieved to see no one I knew. In particular, I cringed at the thought of a student seeing me with Lowell and making drastically wrong assumptions. It was very third-grade of me, I know, but it was also the truth.

  However, I didn’t recognize a soul, and Lowell wasn’t overly interested in either architecture, history, or fashion, so he didn’t dawdle or stop to admire or despair of anything along the way and our progress was speedy. I, on the other hand, studied the ever-increasing displays of personal flags hanging out of homes. Close to the Fourth, as we were, some were patriotic fantasias in red, white, and blue. One was a sunflower. Presumably, in autumn, the owner changed it to corn or chrysanthemums. Some reflected private passions—a fish biting a hook, a sailboat against the sun, a golf ball and club. I wondered what the one with a whale meant. Maybe Ahab lived there.

  And although the custom flags were too expensive a decorative object for me to consider, I still wondered what I’d put on one if I could. The question used to be what your sign was. Given these outfront signs all over town, was the question: What’s your symbol?

  “Your friend lives in Society Hill?” Lowell asked.

  That was indeed Sasha’s address—but only when she was in town. We turned right on Sixth Street while I considered my options. I thought of the dire warnings I’d been given as a child about the snare we set when first we tell a lie.

  I could go in her building and wave Lowell off. I could buzz somebody else. I could…I could perhaps stop acting as if this were an old I Love Lucy script? Maybe I should just come clean. Admit that I wasn’t to meet Sasha, after all.

  Except there she was. Big as life—which is quite big, indeed—and in Technicolor, a camera balanced near the tip of her nose. She was in front of Mother Bethel, the church that former slave Richard Allen began two centuries earlier, when he and other black members knelt in the white pews of their Methodist church and were told to leave in mid-prayer.

  “Sasha!” I called. “I thought you’d be home, whipping up dinner. I’m starving. What are you doing out here?”

  She lowered the camera and looked at me intently.

  “This is Lowell,” I said. “He graciously kept me company on my walk here to my dinner date with you.” As blatantly put as I dared. She either got the message or was off my list of friends.

  Lowell studied her warily. Dressed in a fuchsia scarf crisscrossed around her chest and what seemed a bedspread, emerald and ocher this time, draped into a sarong low on her hips, she towered above him, her six feet enhanced by clogs that looked like hand-me-downs from the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “I told you dinner would be casual,” she said. “I’m using the kitchen as a darkroom today. Which means takeout. Thought we’d hit Reading Market and make a choice. Hi, Lowell. Pleased to meet you.”

  “The pleasure is all mine,” he said with mortifying earnestness, as if he’d just invented the phrase. “Besides, any friend of Mandy Pepper’s…”

  His approach was a little backward and a lot overconfident. I’d known Sasha since elementary school, and Lowell superficially for three weeks.

  “Oh,” he said, “well, not exactly any friend of Mandy Pepper’s, because we were just talking about one of her friends who isn’t as worthy as others.”

  “You were talking,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

  “No problem,” he answered.

  Sasha blinked. “Well, sure,” she said. “Whatever you say. I’ll be with you in a sec. I’ve been trying to catch a sense of it on film. I’m not sure it’s possible, though.”

  Surely, the African Methodist Episcopal mother church was too massive in its High Victorian brick and stone for Sasha to capture at close range.

  “So violent,” she said. “And meaningless.”

  The street was deserted, the only oppressive element the heat. Violence seemed far away in spirit and geography.

  She waved toward the recessed entry, dark in shadow. “Come look if you
want to be depressed.”

  I came and looked and was depressed. The building had an arched doorway with a stained-glass window over it. Its doors, designed to be solid and welcoming, ready to swing open and admit the visitor, had been defaced. Rough red circles with a spray can’s aureole of fuzzed spatters, and one long drip, like a bloodstain, down to the threshold.

  “I tried to get into the pure aesthetics of it,” Sasha said. “The brightness of the red, red blood, rebellion—but I couldn’t. It feels like violation.”

  Lowell squinted in the direction of the doors. “You’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “This isn’t meaningless.” His face was flushed, not from the heat, I feared, but from unwholesome excitement.

  I wanted to warn Sasha about Lowell’s fixation on evil, and I raised my index finger and pointed it at my temple, meaning to spin it in that universal body-language indication of craziness. But Lowell straightened up and looked at me with a bright and expectant expression. I put my index finger to work scratching my eyebrow.

  “Further evidence of the pervasive menace that sprayed those graves, Mandy Pepper. Perhaps related to the mud in Flora Jones’s room today as well.” He sighed and grew silent.

  “Did you finish that thought? Are you going to?” Sasha felt no need to suffer fools gladly, or at all.

  “Those aren’t circles.” Lowell pointed at the doors.

  They surely weren’t squares, or stars, or random shapes. There were four circles—ineptly drawn, but circles nonetheless.

  “What do you think they are, Lowell?” Sasha asked with absolutely no inflection in her voice.

  Lowell looked at her with a poorly shaven face full of contempt. “I don’t think they are. I know they are. And what they are is eights.”

  That didn’t sound nearly as crazy as I had feared. Eights weren’t much. I’d never cared for them particularly, had trouble with their times tables, never got excited about Crazy Eights, either. But still and all, two eights seemed fairly innocuous.

  “Eight-eight,” Lowell said.

  “Really,” Sasha said. “I would have sworn it was just a swing or four of the spray canister.”