Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  Helen turned in the doorway, the sun lighting her black hair. “I left you something in my top drawer,” she said to Maggie, and then she was gone.

  Maggie ran back upstairs to the bedroom at the end of the hall. On the blackboard Helen had written À BIENTÔT, which Maggie knew was French for something. The single bed had been stripped down to its naked mattress, and the top of the bureau, which had always been a welter of bracelets and postcards and ribbons, was swept clean.

  Maggie opened the top drawer. Inside was the California bikini. She held it to her face and smelled the sharp chlorine smell. The color was faded, and the underwire in one of the cups was bent. Maggie felt to the back of the drawer to see if Helen could possibly have meant something else, but that was the only thing left in there. Then she heard the front door close, and feet on the stairs, and without thinking she slipped into Debbie’s room and shoved the suit to the bottom of her beach bag, under her towel.

  She thought of something Helen had said once about Maggie and Debbie, who had been best friends since first grade, although Maggie was thoughtful and serious and studious and Debbie was often called “pea brain” by the members of her own family: “Debbie likes Maggie because Maggie makes her feel special, and Maggie likes Debbie because Debbie makes her feel normal.”

  She had thought of that all the rest of the day, and now, as she and Debbie sat in the development house, waiting for the boys to come, it kept running through her head: Debbie normal, Maggie special. She took a deep breath.

  She hated the air this time of the summer, the thick heavy air of July, like something woolly twisted around your head, clogging your nose, making it hard to breathe. Her hair felt like wet wash on the back of her neck. During the afternoon she had made a clover chain and had forgotten to take it off her head. The flowers were browning now, and brittle. Debbie’s hair had been cut into a funny kind of pageboy, and each night she took pink foam rollers and rolled the ends over them, so that each morning her hair all around turned under like the curve of a comma, although by night the curve was gone.

  “This must be what Helen will do all the time,” Maggie said. “She’ll just call a bunch of guys and say, ‘Come over, we’ll watch television. If I like you, you can stay. If not, I’ll kick you out. It’s my house, I run things. You’re not my husband. I do what I want.’”

  Debbie looked doubtful. “I don’t think even Helen would kick Richard out,” she said.

  Richard Joseph was the coolest boy in Kenwood. Everyone said so. He was fourteen, but sixteen-year-old girls were interested in him. He was tall and had blond hair and blue eyes and hair on the back of his hands, and a smile that started slowly at the corner of his mouth and then moved to the middle.

  “I don’t know how Mary Joseph ever came to have that boy with the bedroom eyes,” Mrs. Malone had once said about him.

  Richard Joseph played bass guitar in a garage band. He had mooned a table of mothers from the high dive at the Kenwoodie Club and managed to convince the manager that the elastic in his trunks had snapped. And once, at a party during Christmas vacation, he had asked Maggie to dance. She was the youngest girl he’d ever noticed, and most of the girls at Sacred Heart thought he had done it just to embarrass her.

  So did Maggie. She did not know what to expect from the evening. It seemed as though meeting boys, alone, here, on the second floor, was completely different from seeing them at the swimming pool, or in the rec room of somebody’s house. Debbie had told her father she was staying at Maggie’s, and Maggie had left a note saying she was staying at the Malones.

  “They’re coming,” Debbie said in a whisper, which seemed unnecessary, since the two boys were singing “She Loves You” in not particularly close harmony, the flats and sharps carrying like trumpet blasts through the still night. Maggie saw a light go on in a house not far from her own.

  “SSShhhhh,” Debbie hissed, leaning out the window in a great cloud of Chanel No. 5. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” the two boys sang, playing imaginary guitars on the front of their madras shorts, paying no attention. In a minute their heads came into view at the top of the crude ladder the construction men had nailed into place until they were ready to put in the stairs. “Cool,” said Richard, his wavy yellow hair bright even in the dark. “Really cool,” said Bruce, who was Richard’s permanent audience, a thin boy with spiky light hair and long legs who reminded Maggie of pictures she’d seen of her father at that age.

  “We could get in a lot of trouble if they found us out here,” Maggie said.

  “Jesus, you sound like a nun, you know?” Richard said. “Everybody’s out here. The Kelly twins are out here with a couple of girls from Sacred Heart named Kathy or Kelly or something—”

  “The two Kathys,” said Debbie. “Gross. They do everything together. They get back-to-back appointments to get their hair cut.”

  “So do the Kellys,” said Richard.

  “That’s true,” said Bruce, but no one seemed to hear him.

  “Everybody comes out here now. Wait until they turn the water on,” Richard added. “I’m going to come out here and take a shower.”

  “Gross,” said Debbie.

  “My dad says they’ll have to hire a guard soon,” Maggie said.

  “I like your dad,” said Richard. “He’s a good guy. You ever seen his jump shot? He has a mean jump shot.”

  “I like your mother, Maggie,” Bruce said.

  “Your mother is a babe and a half,” Richard said.

  “Her mother?” said Debbie. “God! Her mother?”

  “Monica, too,” said Richard. “She’s a babe and a half. My brother is friends with her boyfriend.”

  “She has a boyfriend around here?” Maggie asked.

  “What do you mean, around here?” Richard said. “Where else would she have one? I think his name’s Donald but everybody calls him Duck. He goes to college with my brother.”

  Maggie slid down against the wall until she was sitting with her knees in front of her nose. Richard came over and sat down next to her. “Your parents were dancing in your living room just now.”

  “You peeked in the windows?” Maggie asked, and without knowing why, it made her angry, afraid of what Richard might have seen or heard.

  “I don’t peek, I look,” Richard said, slipping his arm around Maggie’s shoulders as though to reassure her. “I look in everybody’s windows.”

  “That’s true,” said Bruce, staring ruefully at the arm in the half light of the half moon.

  “Great perfume,” said Richard.

  “I can’t believe you peeked in our windows,” said Maggie, pulling away from the arm, standing up and starting down the ladder, thinking that she was leaving because of the invasion of privacy but knowing she was going for some other, deeper reason that she could not explain.

  “Hey,” said Richard.

  “God, Maggie,” Debbie said. She leaned out the window and watched her friend come out of the door of the house. “Maggie,” she said again, but there was no answer.

  “Maggie,” said Bruce, scrambling down the stairs.

  “Hey, forget it,” said Richard. “I’m not going to go chasing after her.” But Bruce’s head had already disappeared down the ladder.

  “Bridget Hearn was just saying the other day how strange Maggie acts sometimes,” Debbie said.

  Maggie could hear Bruce calling her as she stumbled across the clumps of dirt and debris that made up the lawn. She walked with her head down, and twice she almost fell, swerving around a framed-in house. “Maggie,” she heard him call behind her. “Yo—Maggie. Stop.” When she came to a big stack of two-by-fours she sat down on it, her chin in her hands. She kept her head down because she knew there were tears in her eyes.

  Bruce came up and sat down next to her, but not too close. For a minute he cracked his knuckles, and finally he said, the timbre of his voice shaky, “He didn’t really do it. Look in the windows, I mean. Not really. He always says stuff like that so that people will think he’
s cool.”

  Maggie looked up. She could tell immediately that Bruce was lying, trying to be nice.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I don’t know why I did that. Everything’s sort of messed up. I can’t really explain.”

  “That’s okay,” said Bruce. “I feel that way all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I never felt that way until a little while ago. Now I feel like everything’s crazy.”

  “I know,” Bruce said. He began cracking his knuckles again. “Richard likes you,” he finally said. “He told me he really likes you. He said you’ll be a babe and a half someday.”

  “Right,” said Maggie sarcastically.

  “No, really. He told me.”

  “I don’t see why he’s your friend,” Maggie said.

  “Why is Debbie your friend?” Bruce asked, and Maggie remembered Helen again. Bruce made Richard feel normal and Richard made Bruce feel special. Maybe that was the key to every relationship.

  “She just is,” Maggie said.

  Bruce smiled. Maggie noticed in the dim illumination from the streetlights on the next block that he had hair on his legs. He was looking at the dirt, and, as she watched, he picked up an old nail and tossed it in front of them into the darkness.

  He picked up another one, silvery against the tan of his palm, and rolled it around. Wordlessly Bruce handed her the nail. “That looks pretty,” he said after a moment.

  “What?”

  He pointed to her head and Maggie put a hand up and felt the wreath of clover. She started to pull it off. “Don’t take it off,” he said. “It looks nice. My mother made those things for my sister when she was little.”

  Maggie lowered her head again. Bruce’s mother had died when they were in fifth grade. She felt terrible because she suddenly remembered why Bruce would feel the world was topsy-turvy. “Who cooks dinner in your house?” Maggie finally said, without meaning to.

  “The housekeeper,” Bruce said. “She cooks dinner and then she leaves. She’s not too good a cook. She makes hamburgers a lot.”

  “I don’t know why I asked you that.”

  “It’s okay. Everybody asks me stuff like that. I think people can’t figure out what it would be like to have a family that’s not like anybody else’s family.”

  “I can,” Maggie said, and again she felt as though the words had slipped out.

  “Why? You have the normalest family in the world. How would you feel if every time you went to church you could tell that people were pointing at you and saying ‘There’s the ones with no mother.’”

  Maggie didn’t know what to say. Bruce picked up another nail. Maggie thought she had never been involved in a conversation with so many silences, except for the ones she had with her grandfather Mazza. Finally Bruce cleared his throat and said, “I remember when you came to my mother’s funeral. You had on a black dress with a red tie around the collar. You sent a Mass card. That was really nice.”

  “The whole class sent flowers.”

  “I know. That was nice, too. I just hated the way everybody looked at me when I went back to school. Like I was sick or something.”

  They sat there for a long time, the small night noises clear in the darkness. Maggie suddenly sniffed the air.

  “They’re smoking cigarettes,” Bruce said. “Richard stole a pack of his mother’s Salems.”

  There was a funny clicking sound from inside the development house, and then a little scream. Maggie saw Debbie stick her head out the window. “Come here,” she hissed.

  “Leave me alone,” Maggie said, and her voice sounded loud in the still air.

  “It’s important,” Debbie said, and suddenly behind her there was a flash of orange, like the sun over the horizon of the beach first thing in the morning.

  “Oh, hell,” Bruce said.

  “What?”

  Silently he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, and they began to run across the field, leaping over the bigger clods of earth. Maggie stumbled a little. She knew she should concentrate on where she was going, but all she could think of was his hand holding hers.

  Inside the development house the smell of smoke was stronger, and a glow was coming from the open square at the top of the ladder. They scrambled up. In one corner a pile of cardboard boxes was burning brightly, the flames hugging a corner of the wall and blackening the two-by-fours of the ceiling. A stray breeze seemed to lift the center of the blaze and send it higher, and in the orange light Maggie could see that Debbie’s eyes were dazzled, and Richard was smiling faintly and running his long fingers through his hair.

  “Jesus,” Bruce whispered.

  “I’ll get some water,” Maggie said, but Richard reached for her arm and held her there, turned toward the fire.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” Maggie said. “You’re really crazy.”

  “You’re crazy,” Richard said, mocking her in a high voice, twisting her arm a little.

  “We’re going to burn the whole place down,” Debbie whispered, but even as she spoke the flames began to shrink, the boxes collapsing into a pile of rose-gray ash, the wood concave where the heat had eaten it away. The four of them stood and stared until finally there was only a great cloud of gray smoke.

  “Damn,” Richard said. “The wood must be damp.”

  “You did that on purpose?” Maggie said.

  “Wasn’t it cool?” Debbie said. “You should have seen it at first. It just went woosh like a wave. It almost caught our hair.”

  “Lighter fluid,” said Richard.

  “You could have burned the whole house down,” Maggie said.

  “Jesus,” said Richard, “are you always like this? It’s not a house. Nobody lives here. Nobody got hurt. Don’t you want something to do? Can’t you stand a little excitement?” Richard twisted her arm some more. “I give excitement lessons free.”

  Debbie giggled.

  “You’re all crazy,” said Maggie. She started down the ladder again. “God, is she always like that?” she heard Richard say again.

  “I’ll walk you home,” said Bruce, coming up behind her.

  “I know how to get to my own house.”

  “I want to.” They walked together in silence, not looking back, until finally Maggie said, “I wish I could figure out what’s going on with people.”

  “He’s easy to figure out. He gets bored.”

  “That can’t be the only reason why people do the things they do. It’s got to be more complicated than that.”

  “I think it’s pretty simple.”

  Maggie could feel the nail in the pocket of her shorts. They walked along in silence until they got to her backyard and then Maggie ran ahead, across the lawn. She thought she heard a small voice call “good-by”; then there was no sound except the crickets. But when she got upstairs to her bedroom, before she turned on the light, she looked out and she could see Bruce still standing at the edge of the yard. She thought he’d seen her, too, because as soon as she’d looked out the window he’d turned and walked back into the development, his head down.

  Her door opened, and her mother was standing in the doorway. The light from the hallway fell through the pale folds of her nylon nightgown, and Maggie looked away.

  “I thought you were staying at the Malones,” Connie said.

  “I changed my mind.”

  “I could hear your voice outside,” Connie said, still standing in the half-dark. “Were you with some boy out there?”

  “I was talking to a boy I know. Bruce.”

  “That poor boy whose mother died?”

  Maggie winced. Connie added, “Aren’t you a little young to be hanging out at night with boys?”

  “How old is old enough to be hanging out at night with boys?”

  Connie shrugged. She looked tired. The lines from her nose to her mouth seemed deeper than usual. “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

  “Don’t a
sk me. You’re the mother.”

  “Then I think you’re too young.”

  “I’m getting older,” Maggie said, wanting to say much more. “I’m getting a lot older.” She expected her mother to ask her what she meant by that, but instead she just sighed. “Yes,” Connie said, “I know.” She sniffed and Maggie was afraid she could smell the smoke, then realized it must be the Tabu. Connie turned on the bedside lamp and looked at Maggie sadly. Then she smiled. “That’s pretty,” she said, pointing to Maggie’s head.

  Maggie took the clover chain off and held it, limp and dying, in her hand. “Where did you get that?” Connie said.

  “I made it,” Maggie said. “It’s easy. You just tie them together. Mrs. Malone taught us. Don’t you know how?”

  Connie shook her head.

  “Your mother didn’t teach you?”

  Connie shook her head again. “I don’t know whether she didn’t know how or she just didn’t want to teach me.”

  “I think if she didn’t do it, it was probably because she didn’t know how. If she could have, she would have.”

  “Maybe,” said Connie. “Go to sleep.” Then she ran her hand along Maggie’s upper arm. “What did you do?” she asked, and Maggie looked down to see the marks of fingers purpling on the tan skin above her elbow.

  “I fell,” she said, drawing back. Her mother looked at her for a long minute, and then turned and left, closing the door behind her.

  When her mother was gone Maggie stared at herself in the mirror. She looked at the bruises and put the nail from her pocket into her jewelry box, the red leather one Celeste had given her for her birthday. She lay in bed, the moon casting a silver shaft of cold light across the ceiling, and wondered whether in the morning she would be saddled with another dreamlike memory, half real, half incredible. For a long time she kept her eyes open wide in the darkness, and finally, still smelling smoke, she fell asleep.