Femme Fatale and other stories

by Laura Lippman

  Sofia, sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s car—she had insisted on accompanying him, thinking it would shame her father, but in the end she was the one who was ashamed that she had chosen her guitar over Shemp—chewed over this fact. Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Mennonites. She imagined them ringed around a poker table, solemn bearded faces regarding their cards. Mennonites would probably be good at poker if God let them play it.

  Her father spoke of his fortune as if it were the weather, a matter of temperature outside his control. “I was hot,” her father crowed coming through the door Saturday morning, carrying a box of doughnuts. “I’ve never seen a colder deck,” he’d say, heading out Saturday afternoon after a long morning nap on the sofa. “I couldn’t catch a break.”

  You just can’t bluff, Sofia thought. But then, neither could she. Perhaps it was in her genes. That was why she had to outrun the boys on the other team. Go long and I’ll hit you, Joe told her, and that’s what she did, play after play. She outran her competition or she didn’t, but she never tried to fool the other players or faulted anyone else when she failed to catch a ball that was thrown right at her. She didn’t think of herself as hot or cold, or try to blame the ball for what she failed to do. A level playing field was not a figure of speech to Sofia. It was all she knew. She made a point of learning every square inch of the vacant lot—the slight depressions where you could turn an ankle if you came down wrong, the sections that stayed mushy long after the rain, the slope in one of their improvised end zones that made it tricky to set up for the pass. With just a little homework, Sofia believed, you could control for every possibility.

  Sofia’s stubborn devotion to football probably led to the onslaught of oh-so-girly gifts on her next birthday—a pink dress, perfume, and a silver necklace with purplish jewels that her mother said were amethysts. “Semiprecious,” she added. There were three of them, one large oval guarded by two small ones, set in a reddish gold. The necklace was the most beautiful thing that Sofia had ever seen.

  “Maybe you’ll go to the winter dance up at school, Fee,” her mother suggested hopefully, fastening the necklace around her neck.

  “Someone has to ask you first,” Sofia said, pretending not to be impressed by her own reflection.

  “Oh, it’s okay to go with a group of girls, too,” her mother said.

  Sofia didn’t know any girls, actually. She was friendly with most of them, but not friends. The girls at school seemed split about her: some thought her love of football was genuine, if odd, while others proclaimed it an awfully creative way to be a tramp. This second group of girls whispered that Sofia was fast, fast in the bad way, that football wasn’t the only game she played with all those boys in the vacant lot behind Gordon’s Tavern. What would they say if she actually danced with one, much less let him walk her home?

  “I’d be scared to wear this out of the house,” she said, placing a tentative finger on the large amethyst. “Something might happen to it.”

  “Your aunt would want you to wear it and enjoy it,” her mother said. “It’s an heirloom. It belonged to Aunt Polly, and her aunt before her, and their grandmother before that. But Tammy didn’t have any girls, so she gave it to me a few years ago, said to put it away for a special birthday. This one’s as special as any, I think.”

  “What if I lost it?”

  “You can’t,” her mother said. “It has a special catch—see?”

  But Sofia wasn’t worried about the catch. Or, rather, she was worried about the other catch, the hidden rules that were always changing. She was trying to figure out if the necklace qualified as a real gift, one that her father couldn’t reclaim. It hadn’t been purchased in a store. It had come from her father’s side of the family. And although it was a birthday gift, it hadn’t been wrapped up in paper and ribbons. She put it back in its box, a velvety once-black rectangle that was all the more beautiful for having faded to gray. Where would her father never look for it?

  Three weeks later, Sofia awoke one Saturday to find her father standing over her guitar. Her father must not have known how guitar strings were attached because he cut them with a pocketknife, sliced them right down the middle and reached into the hole to extract the velvet box, which had been anchored in a tea towel at the bottom, so it wouldn’t make an obvious swishing noise if someone picked up the guitar and shook it. How had he known it was there? Perhaps he had reached for the guitar again and felt the extra weight. Perhaps he simply knew Sofia too well, a far more disturbing thought. At any rate, he held the velvet box in his hand.

  “I’ll buy you new ones,” he said.

  He meant the strings, of course, not the necklace or the amethysts.

  “But you can’t sell it,” she said, groping for the word her mother had invoked so lovingly. “It’s a hair-loom.”

  “Oh, Fee, it’s nothing special. I’ll buy you something much better when my luck changes.”

  “Take something else, anything else. Take the guitar.”

  “Strings cut,” he said, as if he had found it that way and believed it beyond repair. “Besides, I told this fellow about it and he said he’ll take it in lieu of … in lieu of debts owed, if he finds it satisfactory. I don’t even have to go to the trouble of pawning it.”

  “But if you don’t pawn it, we can’t ever get it back.”

  “Honey, when did we ever redeem a pawnshop ticket?”

  This was true, but at least the pawnshop held open the promise of recovering things. If the necklace went to a person, it would be gone as Shemp. Sofia imagined it on the neck of a smug girl, like one of the ones who whispered about her up at school. A girl who would say: Oh, my father bought me this at the pawnshop. It’s an antique. My father said the people who owned it probably didn’t know it was valuable. But Sofia did and her mother did. It was only her father who didn’t value it, except as a way to cover his losses.

  “Please don’t take it,” she said. She tried to make her face do whatever it had done the day he had backed down before, but it was dim in her room and her father was resolved. He pocketed the beautiful box and left.

  But he didn’t leave the house right away. He never did, not on the glum Saturdays that followed his bad nights, the ones that came and went without doughnuts. He went down to the breakfast table and wolfed down a plate of fried eggs. Sofia followed him down to the table, staring at him silently, but he refused to meet her gaze. Her mother might intervene if she told her, but Sofia didn’t feel that she had earned anyone’s help. She had sat by while the candlesticks left, turned her back when Brad cried over his bicycle. She was on her own.

  Her father took a long nap on the sofa, opening his eyes from time to time to comment on whatever television program was drifting by. “Super Bowl’s going to be a snorer this year.” “Wrestling’s fixed, everyone knows that.” It was going on three by the time he left the house and Sofia followed behind, shadowing him in the alleys that ran parallel to Brighton Avenue. She thought she might show up at the last minute, shaming her father, then remembered that hadn’t worked with Shemp. Instead, she crouched behind a row of yew bushes at the end of the property that bordered the vacant lot. She had retrieved many a mis-thrown football from these bushes, so she knew how thick and full they were. She also knew that the red berries were poison, a piece of vital information that had been passed from child to child as long as anyone in the neighborhood could remember. Don’t eat them little red berries. They look like cherries, but one bite will kill you. When she was little, when she was still okay with being Fee, she had gathered berries from the bushes and used them in her Hi Ho! Cherry-O game at home. For some reason it had been far more satisfying, watching these real-if-inedible berries tumble out of the little plastic bucket. She was always careful to make sure that Brad didn’t put any in his mouth, schooling him as she had been schooled.

  A man was waiting for her father behind Gordon’s place. He held himself as if he thought he was good looking, and maybe he was.
He wore a leather jacket with the collar turned up and didn’t seem to notice that the day was too cold for such a light jacket. When he opened the velvet box, he nodded and pocketed it with a shrug. But he clearly didn’t appreciate the thing of beauty before him and that bothered Sofia more than anything. At least Shemp had gone to a man who thought he was a good dog deserving of a good home. This man wasn’t worthy of her necklace.

  She watched him get into a red car, a Corvette that Joe and the other boys had commented on enviously whenever it appeared in Gordon’s parking lot. He wasn’t an every-weeker, not like her dad, but he came around quite a bit. Now that she was paying attention, it seemed to her that she had seen the car all over the neighborhood—up and down Brighton Avenue, outside the snowball stand in spring and summer, in the parking lot over to Costas Inn, at the swim club. He came around a lot. Maybe Joe knew his name, or his people.

  Three months later. The clocks had been turned forward and the days were milder. There was another dance at school and Sofia was going this time. Things had changed. She had changed.

  “Why isn’t Joe picking you up?” her mother asked.

  “We’re meeting there,” Sofia said. “He’s not a boyfriend-boyfriend.”

  “I thought he was. You’ve been going to the movies together on weekends, almost every Saturday since St. Patrick’s Day.”

  “Just matinees. Things are different now. We’re just friends. This isn’t a date. But he’ll walk me home, so you don’t have to worry. Okay?”

  “What time does the dance end?”

  “Eleven.”

  “And you’ll come straight home.” A command, not a question.

  “Sure.”

  Sofia shouldn’t have agreed so readily; it made her mother suspicious. She studied her daughter’s face, trying to figure out the exact nature of the lie. Reluctantly, she let Sofia go, yanking her dress down in the back as if she could extend the cloth. Sofia had grown some since her birthday and the pink dress was a little short, but short was the fashion of the day, as were the platform shoes she clattered along in. She had practiced in them off and on for two weeks, and they still felt like those Dutch shoes, big as boats around her skinny ankles, Olive Oyl sandals. Thank God they had ankle straps or she would have fallen out of them in less than a block.

  Two blocks down, where she should have crossed the boulevard to go up to the school, she turned right instead, heading for the tavern. She didn’t go in, of course, but waited by the back door, which was just a back door on Saturday nights, nothing more. Within five minutes, a red Corvette pulled into the parking lot.

  “Hey,” said the man in the driver’s seat, a man she now knew as Brian. He wore his leather jacket with the collar turned up, although the night was a little warm for it.

  “Hey,” she said, getting into the car and pulling her dress so it didn’t bunch up around her.

  “Never seen you in a skirt before, Gino.” That was his joke, calling her “Gino” after Gino Marchetti.

  “And I’ve never seen you in anything but that leather jacket.”

  “Well, technically, this is our first date. There’s a lot we don’t know about each other, isn’t there?”

  Sofia smiled in what she hoped was a mysterious and alluring way.

  “Maybe we should get to know each other better. What do you think?”

  She nodded.

  “My place okay?”

  She nodded again. It had taken her three months to get to this point—three months of careful conversation in Gordon’s parking lot, which began when she threw the ball at the red Corvette, presumably in a fit of celebration upon scoring a touchdown. Brian, who had just pulled up, got out and started screaming, but he settled down fast when Sofia apologized, prettily and tearfully. Plus, she hadn’t damaged the car, not a bit. After that afternoon, he would stand in the lot for a few minutes, watching them play. Watching her play, she was sure of it. He brought sodas for everyone. He asked if they wanted to go for ice cream. He took them, one at a time, on rides around the block. Sofia always went last. The rides were short, no more than five minutes, but a lot can happen in five minutes. He told her that he managed a Merry-Go-Round clothing store, offered to get her a discount. She told him she was bored with school and thinking about dropping out. He said he had been married for a while, but he was single now. “I’m single, too,” Sofia said, and he laughed as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

  “Maybe we should go out sometimes, us both being single and all,” he said. That had been yesterday.

  The date made, it was understood that he would not come to her house, shake hands with her father, and make small talk with her mother while Sofia turned a round brush in her hair, trying to feather her bangs. Other things were understood, too. That it would not be a movie date or a restaurant date. Sofia knew what she was signing up for. Her only concern was that he might want to drive someplace, stay in the Corvette, when she wanted to see where he lived.

  So she said as much, when he asked what she wanted to do. “Why don’t we just go to your place?”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Why not?” He passed her a brown bag that he had held between his legs as he drove and she took a careful sip. It wasn’t her first drink, but she recognized that this was something sweet, liquor overlaid with a peppermint flavor, a girly drink for someone assumed to be inexperienced. Thoughtful of him.

  Brian lived out Essex way, in some new apartments advertising move-in specials and a swimming pool. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long because she had only so much time, but she was surprised at just how fast it happened. One minute they were kissing, and it wasn’t too bad. She almost liked it. Then all of a sudden he was hovering above her, asking if she was fixed up, a question she didn’t understand right away. When she did, she shook her head, and he said, “Shit,” but pulled a rubber over himself, rammed into her and yelled at her to come, as if he were a coach or a gym teacher, exhorting her to do something difficult but not impossible.

  “I … don’t … do that,” she panted out.

  He took that as permission to do what he needed. Once finished, he pulled away quickly, if apologetically.

  “Sorry, but if you’re not on the Pill, I can’t afford to hang around, you know? One little sperm gets out and my life is over. I’ve already got one kid to pay for.”

  That detail had not come up in their rides around the block.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You ready to go back?”

  “Can’t we watch some television, maybe try again?”

  “Didn’t get the feeling that you cared for it.”

  “I’m just … quiet. I liked it.” She placed a tentative hand on his chest, which was narrow and a little sunken once out of the leather jacket. “I liked it a lot.”

  He chose the wrestling matches on channel 45, then arranged the covers over them and put his arm around her.

  “You know, wrestling’s fixed,” she said.

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody.” She didn’t want to mention her father.

  “So? It’s the only decent thing on.”

  “Just seems like cheating,” she said. “I don’t like games like that. Like, for example … poker.”

  “Poker? I hardly knew her.” He gave her rump a friendly pat and laughed. She tried to laugh, too.

  “Still,” she said, gesturing at the television. “It doesn’t seem right. Pretending.”

  “Well, I guess that’s why you don’t do it.”

  “Wrestle?”

  “Fake it. You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to act like you liked it, just a little. If you’re frigid, you’re frigid, but why should a guy be left feeling like he didn’t do right by you?”

  “I’ll try,” she said. “I can do better. Maybe if there could be more kissing first.”

  He tried, she had to give him that. He slowed down, kissed her a lot, and she could see how it might be better. She still didn’t feel moved, but she took his advice, shuddering and moa
ning like the women in the movies, the R-rated ones she and Joe had been sneaking into this spring. At any rate, whatever she did wore him out, and he fell asleep.

  She didn’t bother to put on her clothes, although she did carry her purse with her as she moved from room to room. When she didn’t find the velvet box right away, she found herself taking other things in her panic and anger—a Baltimore Orioles ashtray, a pair of purple candles, a set of coasters, a Bachman-Turner Overdrive eight-track, an unused bar of Ivory soap in the bathroom. Her clunky sandals off, she was quiet and light on her feet, and he didn’t stir at all until she tried a small drawer in his dresser. The drawer stuck a little and Sofia gave it a wrenching pull to force it open. He whimpered in his sleep and she froze, certain she was about to be caught, but he didn’t do anything but roll over. It was the velvet box that had made the drawer stick, wedged against the top like peanut butter on the roof of someone’s mouth. But when snapped it open, the box was empty. In her grief and frustration, she gave a little cry.

  “What the—”

  He was out of bed in an instant, grabbing her wrist and pushing her face into the pea-green carpet, crunchy with dirt and food and other things.

  “Put it back, you thievin’ whore, or I’ll—”

  She grabbed one of her shoes and hit him with it, landing a solid blow on his ear. He roared and fell back, but only for a minute, grabbing her ankle as she tried to crawl away and gather her clothes.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m thirteen.”

  He didn’t let go of her ankle, but his grip loosened. “Bullshit. You told me you were in high school.”

  “I’m thirteen,” she repeated. “Call the police. They’ll believe me, I’m pretty sure. I’m thirteen and you just raped me. I never had sex before tonight.”

  “No way I’m your first. You didn’t bleed, not even a little.”

  “Not everybody does. I play a lot of football. And maybe you’re not big enough to make a girl bleed.”