Spoiled

by Caitlin Macy

  The little girl was standing behind the sofa in her tattered eyelet nightgown; Stacey hadn’t managed to get her dressed this morning. “I wanted to do flying saucers,” she said to Stacey, her eyes bright with the drama of what she had done. Stacey followed her gaze to the bricked bit of floor in front of the fireplace, where half a dozen of the cups lay shattered on the floor.

  “Oh, dear, Helena! We’d better sweep all this up now!” Stacey started to say, trying to hide her despair in the can-do voice she’d heard Mrs. Larsen, one of the other mothers she worked for, use with her girls, when Margery appeared, treading heavily down the stairs as if she wanted to give them plenty of warning.

  “Mommy, there was a big accident!” Helena cried excitedly.

  “I’m so sorry,” Stacey said, her voice shaking, she was appalled to find, at the confrontation—at the knowledge that while one tea cup might have been excusable, there was no explanation for this; she would certainly be fired.

  A look of alarm flickered across Margery’s face, which she immediately hid with a vacant, irritated smile. She avoided looking at the fireplace at all, keeping her eyes up, first on Stacey, then glancing past Stacey down the hall to the kitchen. “I’ve had an unbelievably trying morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stacey mumbled, as Margery went on in just the bright, unflappable manner she had used when a boy asked her a rude question at Addison (“What base did Karen and Theo get to when they were making out?”). “You see, Scholastic is supposed to flow through the money for Gin and Anything Right but what they don’t seem to understand is that if I don’t get the money, the bank doesn’t get the mortgage!” For the last several words of the sentence Margery’s voice grew more and more emphatic until she came gasping up like a swimmer barely making it to the far end of a long pool.

  “Silly, silly, silly bank, Mommy, right?” Helena cried, and she clapped her hands together in a manner so contrived Stacey looked away in disgust.

  “Silly bank indeed!” said Margery. Her eyes darted to the brass clock on the side table by the sofa. It had Roman numerals and, as Stacey was beginning to learn, could lead to tragic misreadings of the time. “Well, it’s lunchtime, isn’t it?”

  Stacey didn’t know what to say so she nodded, flushing, though she didn’t know why.

  “I was thinking we’d have ice cream for lunch,” Margery said.

  “Yay! Ice cream for lunch!”

  “I’ve only got ten minutes, Helena, then it’s right back upstairs for me.” She looked at Stacey. “You’ll join us, won’t you?”

  Stacey swallowed and gave a tight smile.

  Another mother, Mrs. Thibeaud, had taught her always to throw out broken glass and china in paper bags, not plastic. She got a broom and dustpan and a brown grocery bag from the closet in the kitchen and swept everything up.

  THE AFTERNOON, ONCE Margery had retreated into her study, was hot and endless. (Supposedly Margery was working all day but once when Stacey had to go up to Helena’s room to fetch a pair of shoes, she found Margery sitting at her bedroom vanity with her compact mirror out, making eyes at herself and pursing her lips.)

  Helena wouldn’t, of course, look at a book or be read to; she wouldn’t play “Colonial Times,” a game of Stacey’s devising that was a favorite of the Larsen girls; she tired of drawing—began to scribble on her hands, marker her face. She seemed to have a nose for anything that gave Stacey the smallest modicum of pleasure, anything remotely intellectual, and to be automatically suspicious of it.

  “No!” she said when, sitting up in her bedroom now, Stacey suggested crazy eights. She snatched the deck of cards from Stacey’s hands and tossed it impudently into the air, scattering the cards across the floor.

  “No,” Stacey was surprised to hear herself say. She narrowed her eyes at Helena in some unfamiliar expression, one that was not compromised, as her face usually was, by the desire to be liked; the fear of being overheard; the desperate striving to set the right—maternal yet authoritative—tone. “Bad Ghost doesn’t want you to do that,” she said in an ominous murmur. “Bad Ghost is very, very mad at you.” At the look of surprise on Helena’s face, Stacey stopped short. What the hell was she doing? She started to make light of it when Helena gave a little squeal and said, “Am I going to get in trouble?”

  “Umm …” Stacey hesitated. Helena was nodding vigorously and whispering, “Yes! Yes! Say I’m in big trouble.”

  “You’re in big trouble!” Stacey said obediently.

  “No!” Helena cried savagely. She whacked at Stacey’s calves in frustration. “Not like that! The other way! Do it the other way!”

  “Shut up!” Stacey barked. And with her right arm, she swept a load of stuffed animals violently off the bed. “You will do as I say. Or Bad Ghost is going to come and get you.” Helena was watching her avidly. “And you will be very fucking sorry.” The fucking slipped out—more than she intended—but Stacey gulped and ignored it. “Now go and stand in the closet,” Stacey snarled, “and count to ten!”

  “No, a hundred!” Helena said under her breath. “Tell me to count to a hundred. Make me stay in there a really long time!”

  “I don’t know, Helena …” Stacey said weakly.

  “Tell me to count to a hundred” Helena demanded, her little face gone hard, irritating.

  “Fi-ine!” Stacey agreed huffily, as if she were talking to a peer of hers. “What the hell do I care? A hundred. Count to a hundred if it makes you happy. Go wild.”

  “Yay!” Helena jumped up and ran to her closet. She closed the door on herself, then opened it, beckoning Stacey over to murmur to her again. “I’m bad, right? That’s why I have to stay in here.”

  “Helena! Of course not,” Stacey said, flushing.

  “No!” Helena banged the door open so hard it slammed the bedroom wall. “Say I’m bad, Stacey. Say I’m really, really, really bad—like the baddest person you’ve ever seen.”

  “But, Helena—”

  “Say it, Bad Ghost!”

  OVERNIGHT, HELENA BECAME tractable and easy She actually seemed to like Stacey now—rushed to greet her when she arrived in the morning, jealously seizing the older girl’s hand to draw her away from whatever small talk Stacey was making with Margery. Stacey always hoped that Margery would detain her for a minute or two, share something else about the book she was working on—gripe about her agent, who ought to have gotten her more money for this one, her editor, Renata, who had completely misunderstood a passage in Where Were You on Sunday? and whom Margery was therefore not convinced she could really trust. The bits of shoptalk were thrilling to Stacey, and she was quick to think up follow-up questions that would keep the conversations going. But the instant Helena appeared, Margery would hurry away, snatching her legal pad and mug of tea from the mess on the kitchen counter. “I’ll leave you two to play!” she would sometimes say, which cut Stacey to the quick, because it was as if Margery thought of Helena and her as peers.

  If Helena was suspicious of Stacey for her interest in books, what Stacey suspected in Helena was how fast she took to the new game. The girl’s instant preference for it reminded Stacey of the kids at school who passed around Flowers in the Attic, with the lurid, half-obscured face on the cover. What sort of person, she wondered, was attracted to the trappings of evil?

  BOTH GIRLS, AT least, seemed to hit upon the necessity of the game’s having a narrative arc—or at least a daily trajectory of punishment—to keep it interesting. According to this never-stated but mutually agreed-on principle, in the mornings, like a felon starting with minor infractions, Helena would commit petty crimes only. She would refuse to make the bed, for instance, forcing Stacey, as Bad Ghost, to make it for her, with the understanding that the little girl would pay later. “You are going to be in such big trouble,” Stacey would say ominously. “Now get out of my sight!” Helena would shriek and run to hide in the closet, emerging (when Stacey pretended not to be looking—when she went to the bathroom or overcasually opened a book) t
o mess up her room, throwing stuffed animals against the wall, seizing books from the little painted bookshelf and chucking them to the floor.

  (Stacey, raising her hands to join in the clapping that follows Renata Townsend’s remarks, flinches in her seat remembering having to watch the books land sacrilegiously open, the pages getting smushed, the spines splayed. Helena’s clapping, too, clapping and looking at her watch.)

  If, at any point in the day, Stacey made the mistake of talking in a normal voice, say to ask Helena if she had to go to the bathroom (“Don’t worry, Helena, you won’t miss anything—I’ll wait for you!”), the little girl would erupt in an indignant fury. “I’m going to pee all over the floor!” she had screamed in response to that particular question. And she’d squatted down in a corner of the room saying, in an alarming way, “Psss, psss, psss!” until Stacey hissed, “Stop it! You go and use the bathroom or … I’ll whip you with chains for five hours!”

  The mornings were all setups for the afternoons, which officially began after lunch—when the little girl would go on a crime spree. A Barbie, whose head, arms, and legs popped conveniently off, suffered the most. She broke her neck being thrown down the stairs; she was drowned in the bathroom sink; she was defenestrated out the back of the house. The trickiness was that Stacey had to think up punishments that were commensurate with the offense. Nothing aroused Helena’s ire so much as getting away with murder. Sometimes Stacey, her imagination dulled by the monotony of the game, would distractedly throw out a tired, sub-par sentence: Bad Ghost is going to put you through the spanking machine! “You already did that!” Helena would scream. If Stacey didn’t think up anything better, and fast, Helena would throw a tantrum and Stacey had no choice but to raise the stakes again to keep the girl in her thrall. Throwing her in jail (the closet) would work for days and days but occasionally it went flat and that was when Stacey gave in to Helena’s wishes, and improvised a new, harsher-than-the-last-time “Bad Ghost telling you how bad you are.” This involved Helena’s lying on the bed, or the sofa if they were downstairs, and Stacey creeping up to her to whisper in her ear that she was the naughtiest, most awfully behaved girl she’d ever met, the worst child she’d ever babysat for. And so on and so forth.

  As the days went by Stacey’s face felt tired, with keeping it in a threatening scowl, her throat ached from the constant, disgusted berating that now constituted her days. She felt hot and sweaty cooped up in the house all day, and she caught herself, when Helena was doing her jail time in the closet, looking wistfully out the little girl’s window at the backyard, where Margery’s garden went unweeded and a spotted bouncy horse rusted on its springs.

  ONE MORNING TOWARD the end of July, Margery announced with a self-satisfied air that she would be working in the Dulwich library doing research all week on adolescent drunk driving, “which can start as early as sixteen if the parents are uninvolved or unaware!” she informed Stacey and Helena. This was a boon for Stacey, who felt she could give rein to the game and please Helena more, since she could worry less about Margery’s wondering what they were up to—not that Margery ever had.

  They were playing in Helena’s bedroom, the shades drawn so it was dark. Books, toys, and clothes had been dumped and scattered willy-nilly all over the floor. Stacey was lying on her back on Helena’s bed, trying to raise and lower her feet, as they’d done this year in gym, by tightening her abdominal muscles, while berating Helena for her bad behavior. Helena was “locked” in the closet, a large crate of books blocking the door so she couldn’t escape. “You’re a horrible, horrible girl,” Stacey was shouting. “I’m never going to be able to forgive you. I’m doubling your punishment, do you hear me? I’m so mad at you I might just leave you here all by yourself and go home! You’re so bad you don’t deserve a babysitter!”

  “No, tripling it!” came Helena’s yell—muffled from the closet so that Stacey barely heard her. And of course, a person coming up the stairs, she realized, straightening up, as they creaked, would not have been able to discern the little voice at all. Now there was a noise, right outside the door. Stacey sprang from the bed and pulled it open, coming face-to-face with Margery.

  Helena’s mother took in the trashed room without a word. “We were just playing!” Stacy cried. She fumbled and tripped, scraping her forearm as she yanked the crate from in front of the closet door, so Helena could come out.

  “We’re playing Bad Ghost, Mommy!” Helena said. “Stacey’s telling me how bad I am and punishing me—I’m in jail! I’m really bad today!”

  Margery didn’t say a thing. She walked straight across the mess on the floor, not bothering to pick her way, grinding toys and books beneath her heels, and went to the window where she gave the bottom of the shade several jerks until it snapped up around the roller, letting in the daylight. Her eyes lowered toward the bed where Stacey had been lying, she said, with extreme irritation, “You don’t want to pull it down so far. It’s a good way to break it.”

  “Margery, I’m sorry—it’s this game—” Stacey blurted out in dismay, but Margery had strode from the room.

  Trembling on the bed, Stacey clutched a stuffed animal to her chest as Helena called after her mother, “Mommy? Are you done with your research for today? Mom-my! Answer me!” The little girl stepped out into the hallway. “Mommy, I hate you! Mommy, do you hear me? Mommy, you’re not my mother anymore!”

  “Let’s murder her,” Stacey said. Her heart beating like crazy, she got up off the bed and drew Helena back inside the room. “Bitch!” She picked up the Barbie and kicked her across the floor, then snatched her up and started snapping off her limbs, throwing them into the “fire” (a red blanket). At some point in the midst of the mutilation she noticed Helena sitting on the floor, back up against the wall, watching her. When she saw Stacey looking at her Helena smiled and that just killed Stacey—the idea that the little girl felt she had to fake that she was having fun. “Helena?” Stacey said at once. “You know it’s just for pretend, right? I mean, we’re not really killing or hurting anyone.”

  “I know! I know! I’m not stupid!” said the old furious Helena, and Stacey felt a fool for letting her guard down.

  “Well, then, come on—what’s your problem? Why are you sitting there watching me? I can’t do this by myself, Helena! Don’t you want to do something really bad so you can get punished?”

  A few days later the girl seemed to weary of the game altogether. She got into her bed, pulling the covers over her head, and made the muffled suggestion “Maybe we ought to play something else.”

  But the truth was it made the afternoons pass faster. Even though the monotony of the anger and crime bored and exhausted Stacey, too, there were no more scenes in Bob’s Market. Nothing else got broken. They hardly ever left Helena’s room.

  For days after the incident, Stacey thought up explanations for what Margery had seen, from the straightforward “She likes it when I pretend I’m mad at her” to the slightly more far-fetched “Why don’t you try controlling your fucking brat of a daughter, you fucking bitch?” At the end of the week, the summons finally came. Stacey was to put on the television for Helena and come up to Margery’s office for a word. For the first bit of the conversation Stacey was so nervous thinking she’d be fired that she couldn’t concentrate on what Margery was saying. She stared at the framed book jackets and reviews and blow-ups of Margery’s author photos on the walls—something about a trip that Margery was meant to be taking with Helena in August but would have to cancel … Stacey must have looked fearful, for Margery hastened to reassure her, “Of course I understand if you can’t do. it … These edits—they’re just taking longer than I’d expected. You’d think that with my fourth novel …” She went on and on and on about the book, talking faster and faster, going into more and more confusing detail, and when she finally stopped short, Stacey could only mumble, “So, I guess … Helena’s okay with this plan, then?”

  Margery rose hurriedly from her desk. “So, you’ll stay then,
Stacey?” She hardly ever used Stacey’s name, and Stacey was distracted by the flattering effect this had on her. “Till the very end of August?” Margery had opened the door and Stacey walked through it. On the landing she could just barely hear the violent cartoon Helena was watching two floors below, the muffled bells and blasts and shrieks. She swallowed and nodded. “Sure,” she said. “Anything I can do to help.”

  WHEN THE SPEECHES end, the crowd floods into the lobby for wine and cheese. Gulping down the syrupy white, Stacey cranes her neck around for Helena and her friend. Bizarrely, they left about two-thirds of the way through the program, standing up just as a young editor, of about Stacey’s age, began to read a passage from Where Were You on Sunday?, the book the editor said had made her want to go into publishing. They attracted a few glances as they left, clumping awkwardly in their high heels; crashers, people must have thought, as Stacey had, though in fact the event was open to the public. Now catching sight of the two of them pushing sheepishly up to the drinks table, Stacey has an urge to play a trump card—surprise someone here by revealing Helena’s identity. But this hasn’t been her crowd for years and there’s no one she can tell. Keeping an eye on the two young women, who retreat hastily with their cups to a corner of the lobby, Stacey gets herself another and follows them over to where they’re making fun of something, snickering and sipping.

  “Helena.”

  Stacey plants herself in front of the two of them, surprised at the undercurrent of anger in the word. She remembers herself and says awkwardly, “I’m so sorry about your mother. When my mother told me …” But at once there seems to be nothing more to add. Helena is looking down at her wine, her expression wan and discomfited. Stacey can’t believe how much the girl has changed physically. As a child she was slight to the point of frailness, a slip of a girl. Full grown, she seems to have put on bone density as much as weight—the line of her jaw is strong, her shoulders broad. She’s tall and thick around the middle, too; she has the kind of normalish body you see outside New York and L.A., the kind that always makes Stacey feel gauchely thin and toned. She glances at the other girl, wondering if she’s made a mistake by seeking Helena out when Helena did not seek her but perhaps she wished to remain anonymous. “I thought you guys left!” Stacey says finally, her mind going blank and panicky at the cool reception she’s being given.