You peered out the front window in the dining room just to check on the reality of things, and saw only Leo Spivak backing his father's car out of the driveway, a woman leading a dog on a leash, a boy on a bicycle pedaling past. So it seemed that nothing had changed after all, and maybe that was a relief or maybe it was a disappointment, you couldn't be sure which. You went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and then closed it again. You were hungry and not hungry, both at the same time. Some indefinable longing nagged at you.
You were wearing cut-off blue jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt, no underpants, no bra, and this seemed to you to be positively daring, so womanly, sexy and comfortable and grubby and accidental, all at once. Your wild hair was held back by a knot of silk ribbon. Your white canvas sneakers were worn and grimy and torn. There was an appealing unintendedness about the way you looked just then, and it felt suddenly beautiful to you. With no one around to notice, no one there to see.
You stepped out the back door and into the yard. It was a nice warm day, balmy and sunny as it hasn't been in months. You imagined that Libbie was watching you. That she was upstairs at her window, looking out but for some reason not saying so. You lingered there on the grass, thinking of Libbie's eyes on you even though you knew they weren't, not really.
In fact, you could be pretty sure that Libbie wasn't even home. Places to go, things to do for a popular girl, with bunches of friends. On a Saturday afternoon like that one, why would a girl like Libbie Grandon be at home? She had gone to watch her brother play baseball, maybe. She was at the movies with her dad. She was at the library, working on a report. She was at her catechism class. She was downtown, shopping for clothes with her mother. She could have been anywhere, and even though you knew this, still you were pretending that Libbie was right there, watching you. You basked in the warmth of that imagined gaze. You tried to see yourself as you were guessing Libbie would have seen you. In the cut-offs and the sweatshirt, your hair, the ribbon, the shoes.
Lately your legs had lengthened and your breasts had begun to fill out. The angles of your body—shoulders, hips, knees—had started to soften and curve. You had already been wearing a bra for months, but not today.
Mayflowers had begun to poke up through the floor of leaves and debris under the trees up in the woods. And jack-in-the-pulpits, nodding. Bluebells and jonquils. It wouldn't be very long before this all became a riot of green nettles and then the only way to get up the hill unharmed would be along the narrow path. But now it was early still, and still pretty bare.
You took your time climbing the hill. You zigzagged across it before slipping away from where Libbie could see you, if she were watching, which you knew she wasn't, but...
You faded into the shadows of the trees.
At the top where the property ended there was a wire fence and a wobbly wooden stile that crossed over it at the corner. From there you could see the red roof of Dowland, as it was called, poking up toward the tops of the trees. This was one of the largest and most extravagant properties in Wellington Heights—it was a massive white structure with a red tile roof, gaudy as a wedding cake. There was a ballroom on the third floor and a swimming pool in the back yard.
Mrs. Grandon used to warn you and Libbie away from there. The pool was dangerous, she said. She told you that the youngest of the Dow children had drowned there, but whether that was true, it was impossible to know. Supposedly his body had been found floating. Or was it at the bottom, after a party, all the grownups drunk and no one paying any attention, no one even noticing he was gone, until the next morning, and even then it was hours before they found him, though they said they looked at the pool many times but somehow he'd been hidden, in the shadows or the illusion of blue paint and green water and blinding sun. Until the sky clouded over and it began to rain, and then one last search of the grounds ended when a maid saw the shadow at the bottom of the pool, and she began to scream. Sometimes, Libbie said, you could hear the screams even now. But surely that was just the wind.
This was meant to be a story about the dangers of the world, but what it really was about was the carelessness of the adults who were supposed to be in charge and were expected to know what they were doing. With their money and their gods and their rules and their ghosts and their atom bombs.
You climbed over the fence and crept through the bushes. The path ended at the grass, as the woods opened out onto the long lawn that spread toward the house, around the swimming pool. Drained, empty, it gaped like an open wound. Black stains spread across the bottom from a puddled murk of old leaves and dirty water.
You crossed the lawn and stood at the edge of the pool with the toes of your grimy white sneakers hanging out over the marbled edge. You stared down into the mess at the bottom, entranced. You were squinting into it and studying it hard, looking for a pattern, searching for some sign of a drowned child that wasn't there.
Disappointed, you went home. Later that night it rained.
A few weeks later you went back to look again. You couldn't help it. You just had to. You fought the temptation, without success; somehow you couldn't stay away. Drawn by death and all of that, maybe—thinking of dead babies, dead boys, drowned children, lost children, goblins and ghosts. You were wallowing in the muck and murk of your own misery at that time too, so steeped in your own black unhappiness that it had started to feel like pleasure, in a way. Poor little motherless child, friendless girl, abandoned babe, you were Meena Krejci dawdling in the shadows by yourself.
By then it was the middle of summer already, and there was no pretending about what Libbie might have been busy with, because you knew for sure that she was not up there at her window, silently watching you. Libbie was back up at Lake Vermillion again, with her family. This time you hadn't been invited to go along, and when Libbie told you this you shrugged it off, acted as if it hardly mattered to you, one way or another. Even if it did. Even if it mattered to Libbie.
Instead Libbie had taken Gingi Noone. Gingi Noone of all people. Poor Gingi Noone. Crazy Gingi Noone. That same girl that the other kids used to torment—skinny Gingi Noone with her chopped black hair and sharp white face, who could believe it that Libbie Grandon would have started hanging around with her? They'd got to be friends in catechism class, because Gingi was a Catholic girl, too.
"She's really funny," Libbie said. "She cracks me up." Shrugged, bit her lip, tipped her head to one side and squinted at you. "And she's not all moody all the time like you are," she said, then added, quickly: "I know you can't help it. It's not your fault and it's just the way you are and I'm not saying you should change yourself or anything like that. But..." She paused, shrugged, and finished it: "Gingi Noone and I have fun."
Gingi Noone, poor white goblin girl, who lived on the edge of Nowhere's white trash squalor. The same girl that Libbie used to call Crazy Gingi whenever she saw her riding down the street on her bike, bent over the handlebars, legs furiously pumping, sweater flapping out behind her. Or when she came into the store with her mother.
Gingi Noone laughing too loudly. Shouting across the playground. Running down the street in bright red shorts, the skin of her bare legs so white and exposed that it seemed like she was naked. But she ran on anyway, unashamed and fearless. Shouldn't she have been embarrassed to be herself?
"She doesn't care what anybody thinks," Libbie said. "It's amazing. You should see her in catechism, asking Father Loferski to explain again about Hell." Gingi Noone talked back to a teacher and was sent home. She overturned her lunch tray on the table in the cafeteria, pronounced the food—hamburger gravy and green beans and mashed potatoes—inedible. Once she'd punched a boy in the belly for teasing her. "It's a free country," Gingi Noone would say. "I don't have to answer to anybody but God." "Just try to stop me," she would warn. "See what happens then."
But the fact was, you had explained to Libbie, you couldn't go to the lake with the Grandons that summer anyway. You hadn't been planning on it. You were supposed to be working in the groc
ery store every day, you said. And looking after your grandmother. "You know how that is," you finished. You rolled your eyes. "My dad..."
Libbie had nodded, pursed her lips, rocked on her heels. "Sure," she said, "I understand."
"Besides," you went on, just to seal it forever, "I didn't really like it up there all that much." There were leeches in the water and mosquitoes in the air. Sunburn. Poison ivy. Chiggers. Too hot in the daytime, and then too cold at night. Not to mention Libbie's parents, yelling at each other all the time. Her mother acting crazy. Her father getting drunk.
Libbie had nodded again. Sure, she knew all right. Better for everybody, then.
Mrs. Grandon had asked you to pick up the mail and the newspapers for her while they were gone. She had given you twenty dollars and a key to the back door. You saw yourself as a shadow moving across the bright background of the Grandons' lives, your stormy hair wild as you wandered through the clean, quiet rooms of their empty house. You didn't snoop around, nothing like that. You were fully respectful of their privacy. Besides, what could there be that you didn't already know about them? You'd been in that house a million times, and had seen all of what there was to see. Such as, Mr. Grandon's dirty paperback books—on the bottom shelf of his nightstand, under a stack of otherwise respectable news magazines. Mrs. Grandon's prescriptions in the bathroom medicine cabinet—valium, codeine, sleeping pills, something called Edrisol, for cramps. Her "face" as she called it—makeup that you and Libbie had experimented with on yourselves plenty of times. John's telescope. His own collection of dirty magazines under the bed, a box of tissues, a bottle of lotion—more of the old Deep Eddie. Libbie's diaries—page after page of nothingness, the boring drivel that Libbie felt compelled to write about herself and her friends. "Went to school. Jeff W. smiled at me. Came home. Not much happened. Rags has ticks."
You'd read all this before, at one time or another. Either when Libbie had shown it to you herself or when you sneaked a peek when she wasn't looking. What's worse than reading someone else's diary? Writing in it, maybe. You flipped through and added words or even, sometimes, whole sentences. That Libbie never said anything to you about it meant that she never noticed—she never went back and read her own pages, probably—but maybe someday, you thought, in some distant future, when she was older and married, with children of her own, maybe then she would want to look back again at herself at this time, to find herself there maybe, or to take the measure of how far she'd come, or how far she was gone—and then she'd see it clearly, your contribution to her life, to her memories, a clarification here, an amplification there. Who is Jeff W. and what happened in the lunch room and how did it feel to have a best friend?
"I love Meena K.," you wrote in the margins. More than once.
Otherwise you didn't bother poking around in their stuff. Instead you just sat there in the living room, with the lights off and the curtains drawn, and you were careful not to disturb a thing. You didn't move, and you didn't make a sound. You listened; you waited... for what? You didn't know. Something. Nothing.
After a while you got up and left. You locked the door behind you, crossed the driveways to your own back yard, set up the sprinkler there, turned the water on, and watched the gentle sway of the spray, filled with sunlight, glistening.
In midsummer the woods were overgrown in wild ragged weeds, impossible tangles of mean nettles, briars, thistles, thorns. Avoiding these, you followed the path up to the fence and the stile at the top. You climbed over and crept to the edge of the yard, where you hovered like a wayward balloon caught up in an electrical wire.
The swimming pool had been cleaned and filled, and it looked nothing now as it had before, because in the middle of that bright blue chlorine rich water there was a canary yellow canvas raft, and on it a youth with gingery hair lay supine, dozing as he sunned himself, one leg bent and one arm folded back behind his head, the other arm outflung, long fingers dabbling the clear clean water, glistening with heat.
So the Dow boy hadn't drowned, after all?
Hidden, you watched him as he floated languidly on his raft. His skin was pink, freckled, his body hairless and slim. There was a movement at the house, a door opened, and a woman in a green dress stepped out, holding one hand up to shield her eyes from the blinding sun, and she called, "Fox! Lunch!"
He opened his eyes and rolled to the side, off the raft and into the water, then glided to the edge of the pool, pulled himself up and shook his head so water spun off his hair in crystal threads that glistened in the sunlight. You covered your eyes, and when you looked again, he was gone.
After that first sighting, you couldn't stop thinking about him. Wondering, who was he? Had you only imagined him? Was he real? Fox. Was that his name? Fox Dow. You longed to go back up the hill to see him again and later that night you did, but Dowland was dark, there was no one home, he wasn't there.
Josef Krejci knew all about the Dows, as you had correctly guessed he would. You brought it up at breakfast the next morning, keeping your eyes on your plate, furiously trying to suppress the heat in your face as you waited for his response, though he didn't seem to notice anyway, his thoughts were somewhere else. He put his fork down and looked out the window—up the hill, toward the trees beyond which the roofs of Dowland rose—dabbed his lips with his napkin, breathed a sniff of contempt. Or was it bitterness? Some struggle in his own mind between his envy of what others had—a world beyond his own reach that could only be accommodated through an effort of denial and disdain—and a sense of unfair disadvantage to his own pursuit of what he had been led to believe was the American Dream, available to anyone who worked hard enough and long enough to make of it whatever they could. But the Dows' dream was a longstanding one, set in motion long before anyone named Krejci came to town. They were one of the oldest families in Linwood— along with the Fairchilds and the Cookes—and they were builders, quarrymen, heirs to a fortune made of limestone. Country Club people, Josef said. They did not shop at Krejci's. Their children were sent away to schools in the east. Old families, with old money. Streets and buildings and mausoleums in the Linwood Cemetery were marked with their names. Oh yes, he knew all about them, all right, everything except anything about this boy whose name was Fox.
That morning you went to the store as usual, and you worked at the cash register there until noon, then walked home in the muggy heat, stopping to pick up the Grandons' mail and take it inside their house, before you allowed yourself to begin to think of going back up there to look at him again. Half believing that you had dreamed him, that he didn't really exist but was a ghost, a drowned boy who had been dead now for many years.
But there he was, sitting at a patio table in the shade of an umbrella, reading a book. You crouched in the brush and watched him. He wore silver-rimmed glasses, and now that it was dry you could see that his hair was longish, longer than any other boy's you knew, shaggy around his ears and on his neck, falling in his eyes so he tossed it back with a snap of his head, a gesture so sudden that it startled you. He was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt with a button down collar and wrinkled khaki shorts, black high top sneakers without socks. He turned a page, sighed, shifted in his chair. He was so still, and the afternoon was so hot, the air around him shimmered—he might have been a painting and again you found yourself doubting whether he was real.
A plane passed overhead, its engine rattling as it sliced across the perfect blue dome of the airless sky, and he looked up, then turned his intent gaze toward the woods, where you had hidden yourself. You jerked back and, hearing you, he stood. One finger tucked into the book. A hand up to shade his eyes. You were a good fifty feet away, on the far side of the lawn, and you might have slithered back into the shadows and escaped his notice but instead you stood up and stepped forward into the light.
What did he see? A girl with wild dark hair outlined against the trees, pale face stricken with embarrassment and fear as you gaped at him, before you turned and ran, careening through the brush, your
blood hammering so loudly in your ears that you hardly heard him call out, "Hey!" and you didn't stop, but tore through the woods, crashed past the fireplace, scrabbled over the stile and skidded wildly down the hill, tromping on mayflowers and crushing bluebells along the way. You sprang into your own yard, blinded by the dazzle of sunlight that languished in the grass.
When you went back the next day, to see him again, and then the day after that, he was gone.
That fall, as you and Libbie entered seventh grade, Mrs. Grandon finally got her way, and Libbie went to the parochial school while you stayed where you were in the public system and moved up from Johnson Elementary into John Adams Junior High. For you this was a nightmare, and at first you wholly retreated from it. You sank into sleep and went through the days in a half-doze. Where was Libbie?
You kept thinking that it was as if your friend had altogether disappeared from the horizon, a sinking sun. She might have been abducted from the neighborhood, taken away and transformed as surely as Julia Bell had been, and you could almost see it: Libbie's body drifting, floating face down in the water, turning with the current, tumbling over the roller dam, and heading down the river toward the deep eddy, drowned. You could almost see it, but at the same time you knew that what you were almost seeing wasn't anything that was real. It was just an image that kept popping into your head. You knew that Libbie was still Libbie and that she still lived in the house next door, that she went to school every day, and every night she came home again, that she ate meals and worried about her hair and fiddled with her clothes and smirked at her mother and grinned at her father, that she hadn't moved away or gone away or died, and the proof of this was in the fact that you did still see her every now and then.
Mount Mercy School required its students to wear uniforms, so there was Libbie Grandon in a flirty gray skirt that she rolled up at the waist so it wouldn't hang down too far, knee high socks, brown oxford shoes, a green cardigan sweater. When you asked your father if you could go to Mount Mercy too, you saw a flash of anger in his eyes so mean and bright that you knew better than to ever ask him that again. He hated Catholics, that was the long and the short of it. All that pomp, red velvet and holy water, bleeding saints and virgin mothers, incense and Latin, mitered Cardinals, the Pope, even the President of the United States!
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 13
