Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  Doreen’s mother politely smiled. “Well, we had better get going,” she said.

  “I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” Anne said.

  Eva grew more animated. “Oh, are you leaving now? We were just about to leave, too. Would you like to come back to the house with Anne?”

  “Mom!” Anne said.

  “My house is always open to Anne’s good friends,” Eva said, and Anne could have sunk through the pale rose carpeting.

  Anne saw the way Doreen gently tugged at her mother’s sleeve, drawing her away. “Another time,” said Doreen’s mother awkwardly. “We have errands.”

  “Well,” Eva said. “It was so nice to meet vou, Doreen.” She took both of Doreen’s hands in hers, impulsively squeezing them. Doreen quickly removed her hands. “I’ve heard so many, many wonderful things about you from Anne.”

  “You have?” Doreen said.

  “Mom—” said Anne.

  “I’m sure we’ll see you again,” Eva said, “I look forward to it.” Doreen’s mouth fell open a bit. She gave Anne a quick, sidelong glance, as if she were taking her measure, as if she didn’t know her anymore, and then she followed her mother out of the store.

  “Why did you do that?” Anne asked. “Say all those things? You don’t know her!”

  Eva looked perplexed. “But you do. You told me she was your friend!”

  “Not really. Not yet—we’re just in-school friends. We have lunch once in a while. How could you invite her to the house like that?”

  “Well, sometimes you have to push these things. Make an in-school friend an out-of-school one. Don’t look at me like that—I just wanted to make her feel welcome. And I was just trying to help you.” The saleswoman scooted back, smiling expectantly, and Eva leaned across the counter. “I’ll take the face cream,” she said.

  Eva charged the cream and took the burgundy bag. “You’ll come back a changed woman wanting more,” the saleswoman said, smiling. “I guarantee it.”

  Anne didn’t feel like shopping anymore. “Why don’t we hike in the mountains?” Anne blurted.

  “Hike? And break my legs?” Eva said.

  Anne picked a skirt from the rack, plucking at the ruffled hem.

  “She must have had her daughter when she was fourteen,” Eva said abruptly.

  “Why’d you wait so long to have me?” Anne asked.

  “It’s just the way things happened.”

  Eva took the skirt from Anne and put it back on the rack. “It’s not really me,” she said.

  They only shopped for a little while longer.

  “I’m tired,” Eva admitted. “Let’s get home to your dad,” she said, and then Anne thought of her father, the way he came home and was tired, the way he fell asleep in the chair after dinner, the way his glasses got thicker and heavier on his nose. She hated the way he referred to himself as “your old man,” almost as if he were proud of his age. It seemed stunningly unfair and terrifying that she had such old parents. We choose our fates, Flor had told her. We create our own reality. Flor believed in reincarnation now, and all that New Age stuff. She was sure you chose your own parents before you were even born, that you did it to give yourself a life lesson. But why would Anne have chosen such old parents? What possible lesson was there to be learned in that? Eva coughed and thunked her chest. “I can’t get rid of this pesky cough,” she said.

  “Maybe you should call the doctor,” Anne said, and Eva laughed. “You don’t have to call the doctor over every little thing. You talk like I’m dying.”

  Anne gave her mother a sharp look. Dying! She hadn’t thought about that! What would happen to her if her mother did die? she worried. What if her father died? What would she do? She felt a sharp pull of tears and blinked hard, stricken.

  “Allergies, honey?” Eva asked, but Anne shook her head. There was a girl in her math class whose father had dropped dead of a heart attack in the backyard while he was barbecuing hot dogs. A year later, her mother had died of cancer, and now she lived with her aunt and didn’t crack jokes the way she used to. Where would Anne go if something happened? She had a grandfather on her father’s side who was ancient, whom she saw once a year, for barely a week at a time. He didn’t really know her and she didn’t really know him. Would she end up in a group home sharing a room with a girl so tough she’d take to carrying a nail file for protection? Would she end up in foster care with some awful family who would treat her more like a slave than a daughter? Surely, no one would adopt someone her age, someone right on the cusp of independence. Someone who looked the way she did. She scratched at her arm, uneasy.

  As soon as they got home, Anne headed for her room. “Is everything all right with you?” Eva studied Anne. “Would you like to talk about it, honey?” Her mother’s voice scratched against her like kitten claws.

  “I’m going to go in my room and write,” Anne said.

  “You’re always writing, can’t you talk to me for a minute?” her mother asked.

  Anne hesitated, filled with grief. She started to open her mouth but the words were jammed in her lungs and only a sound came out. “Mom—” she started to say, but her mother had already turned away.

  “All right, all right,” Eva said affectionately, “I can take a hint,” and she left the room. Anne saw her mother in the hallway, taking out the tube of anti-aging cream from the bag, squinting at it, then digging her glasses out of her purse to read the fine print. Anne turned away. She could see both their reflections in the mirror, her wild mop of hair and ragged features and her mother’s aging beauty, and both images made her want to crumple up and die. She bent, plucked up her sweater from the floor, and draped it over the mirror so that when she passed by it, all she would see was soft green wool.

  She was starving. She glanced at the clock. Nearly six now. She had been writing so furiously, she had lost track. She put the notebook carefully under her mattress and then came out into the living room. Eva was huddled around George, talking quietly, the two of them conferring like a matched set of worry dolls. She knew what they were discussing. His practice wasn’t doing so great, hadn’t been for a while, and now that a cut-rate dental clinic had opened right near him, she heard him telling her mother that it was doing even worse. He came home later and later, past dinner, taking every emergency case that came his way because if he didn’t, the clinic would. Most nights, he fell asleep in his chair watching TV, like he was a cliche instead of her father. When her parents were together like that, instead of making her feel relieved to be let alone, it made her feel as if they were purposely ignoring her, blaming her for the lines on their foreheads, for her mother’s white hairs threaded among the yellow. And the thing of it was she didn’t have a clue what she had done to get blamed.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  He looked up, startled. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said.

  “This Friday, for our day, can we go to Spitfire’s for dinner?”

  He blinked at her. “Sure,” he said. “Sure we can.” And then he and Eva were silent, waiting for her to leave, and so she wandered into the kitchen. Something was boiling on the stove and she lifted the lid. Beef stew. Bubbling with carrots, a scrim of fat along the top. Disgusting. She grabbed a handful of potato chips and sat at the kitchen table.

  She and her father had their day together once a month. Or whenever she wanted. “Just give me a few days’ notice,” George told her. “You’re my number one priority.” They went to a fancy place for dinner, just the two of them, or out bowling, or to a movie, loading up on Twizzlers and popcorn.

  Anne ate another chip. When she was little, they didn’t have to plan a day. He was always taking her places on the spur of the moment, jangling the car keys and saying, “Come on, princess, let’s go.” Museums, zoos, the botanical gardens. He didn’t care if she talked. He never said, “A penny for your thoughts.” And oh, the way he looked at her! As if she were the most special person on earth! Anyone could see how much he loved her. And how much she loved him. Well, she c
ould wait until Friday. Maybe she didn’t go skiing, but her mother took her shopping, and her father took her to dine.

  By Wednesday, Anne was feeling so out of sorts, she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She spotted Doreen going toward class, walking with another girl, and for a moment she felt the same flicker of embarrassment she had had in Saks when Eva had tried pushing them together. “Hi, Doreen,” she said. Starting, Doreen pointed at Anne and then whispered something to the other girl, and they both burst out laughing.

  Anne veered the other way, her head down.

  Room 242. Writing and composition. Anne grabbed a seat in the first row, which wasn’t difficult since just about no one wanted to sit that close to Mr. Moto. Instead, the class congregated to the back, keeping heads lowered, voices mute.

  Often, Mr. Moto was late. He’d rush in, with no excuse or apology, and instantly start the class. A few times, he had ended the class halfway through, his long, bony fingers stroking his brow, and then he had dismissed everyone, saying curtly, “I have nothing more to give today.” Mr. Moto was famous at the high school. Everyone had names made up for him. The more stupid boys called him Ichobod Crane because he was so tall and lanky, with a shock of yellow hair and tiny blue beads of eyes, and an Adam’s apple that moved and shivered up and down his throat like a blob of mercury. He had lived for ten years in Prague, and he had actually published a novel called The Long Rust of Winter, a book he never failed to talk about in his lectures, though it had been published over fifteen years ago, and he hadn’t published anything since, and when Anne had tried to order it on-line, she was dismayed to find it wasn’t even listed.

  When Anne had found out she was in his class, she was both terrified and exhilarated. She began to work harder than before, studying her stories, rewriting them until her fingers cramped. She read biography after biography of the writers she loved: Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers. A lot of them were loners like she was. A lot of them suffered self-doubt, too. When she read how Fitzgerald drew picture after picture of Gatsby until he felt he knew his character, she tried to draw her latest character, a waitress named Carolyn, over and over. When she read that Richard Price (oh, how she had loved The Wanderers) regularly gave his characters Rorschach tests, she did the same for Carolyn.

  Carolyn, she decided, had amnesia. Carolyn woke up on the side of the road and made up a new name and re-created herself. Walking into a diner, she got a new job, a new name, while she struggled to figure out who she was, and when people asked her about her life, rather than reveal her confusion, she made up stories about her life. She even started to believe them. “You can be anything you want,” Anne wrote. “Clouds don’t part, bells don’t ring to announce it. The future is more subtle than that.”

  She had it planned. No one in the class ever turned in more than two pages at a time, and even then, they bitterly complained about it. But when she had fifty pages, she was going to give them to Mr. Moto. She was going to tell him it was part of a novel. God, she couldn’t wait.

  Mr. Moto strode in five minutes late, his hair raked back and damp. He frowned at the class as if his lateness were their fault. “This week I want an original essay on a theme I choose,” he said. Anne took out her notebook and the boy next to her groaned. “Temperance,” he said. “Something all of you could surely use an education in.” He tightened his tie and frowned again. “Five hundred words,” he ordered. “Typed.”

  “Moto taught at a boys’ school before this one.” Ron Cotter, who sat beside Anne, snickered. “Bet he wasn’t too temperate then, if you catch my drift.”

  “Ron, would you care to stand in front of the class and enlighten us with your wit?” Mr. Moto asked. “All of you, read until the bell,” he ordered.

  Anne stared at the page, the words swimming in front of her, and then the bell rang and everyone sprang to their feet.

  “Ah, the Exodus,” Mr. Moto said dryly, parting his clasped hands like the Red Sea.

  Anne sat at her desk that evening, trying to write. Temperance. She couldn’t write about that. She didn’t drink. The one time she had tried, standing behind the school with June and Flor, sipping beers from cans Flor had stolen from her dad’s stash, Anne had thrown up in the bushes. “Oh God,” she had said, standing, and then she had seen how sly and soft June’s face looked, how Flor was listing, and the two of them were giggling as if they had a great secret Anne couldn’t understand even if she tried. But still, Anne didn’t begrudge anyone else wanting to drink. She could understand wanting escape, wanting to get out of your own life, but that was something she could do with writing.

  She tapped her pen. She wanted him to see how good a writer she was. “I’m showing this to my publisher,” he might tell her. She imagined herself giving readings, her parents in the first row, her mother making friends with everyone, telling the woman next to her, “I used to nag her when she shut herself up in her room, but not anymore!”

  Why did she have to do a dull, boring essay? Why couldn’t she write a short story instead? She looked through her Carolyn story. She thought about what might make Carolyn want to drink and then she thought about Eva. Maybe Carolyn had been a kindergarten teacher in her other life, and something reminded her of it. Maybe she had a memory of how she had been fired for drinking in class at the end.

  She wrote in a fever. Four pages, and then six, and then she pushed back the pages and sat back, amazed and finished. She touched the words with her fingertips as if they were living, breathing things.

  Friday was sunny and clear, the sky hard and blue, and George had come to work early. His last patient had asked him what he thought about the new dental clinic. “‘Course I’d still come here for the important work,” she said, touching George’s arm.

  Well, the last patient had come and gone, a woman who had casually admitted that she didn’t like to brush her teeth. “You don’t like to?” George asked, amazed. Now, the office was hushed. George wanted nothing more than to go home and soak in a hot bath and go to sleep, but tonight was his dinner with Anne and nothing was going to make him miss that, not lack of sleep, not nerves, not the dull ache in his lower back. No, he’d go and be charming and order dessert, and if his daughter wanted to go to a movie afterward, well, he’d do that, too, if he had to pinch his thigh to keep himself awake.

  George had a jacket in the closet. He had the tie Anne had given him for his birthday, bright red and printed with dancing Elvises, tucked in the pocket, and he had arranged his schedule so he could get out early. He missed his daughter. He found everything about her interesting, even the sullen teenage stuff. He could wait for it to pass.

  He hated it whenever people talked about how parents only have their children for a little while and then they’re gone. How every step a child took was one step away from you, every milestone another stone on your grave. “God gave us teenagers so we can break away and lose interest in them, the same way they do in us,” one of his patients had said dryly. Well, George wasn’t like that. His wonderful surprise had been falling in love with his daughter as a baby, and he hadn’t stopped falling. He couldn’t imagine not being crazy about her, not being interested in everything she said and did when she was in her twenties and thirties and forties, too, for that matter. Growing up didn’t mean banishment. He had patients who had terrific family relationships their whole lives. Daughters who married and lived half an hour away from their parents. Daughters who brought their kids over every Sunday, and sometimes even more. There was such a thing as lifelong respect in a family. Relationships could be honored. It was all in the way you played it, wasn’t it?

  Dinner was at eight, and it was just seven. George was getting ready to change when the doorbell rang. Maybe it was Anne. He had told her to meet him at the restaurant, but she had been so excited that morning, that he supposed she couldn’t wait. He opened the door and there was a woman he didn’t know. “I called,” she said defensively and winced, one hand flying to her cheek. “I kept getting the machine.” She
looked around at the dark rooms in the back. “You can take me, can’t you?” she said miserably, and she looked so sad and defeated that George ushered her in.

  He glanced at his watch. “I was just on my way out—” he said. “My daughter—”

  “Oh, ow, ow, ow,” said the woman, “I can go back to the clinic, I suppose—” And then George took his jacket off. He had some time to take a look, to do what he could, and still be able to make it to dinner. “Just let me make a call.”

  He called home, but no one picked up. Eva said she was taking herself to a movie, and Anne had probably left for the restaurant. But just in case, he left a message. “I’ll be a little late, honey, can’t wait for our dinner,” he said. He called Spitfire’s, and asked a waitress if she’d look out for Anne, if she’d tell her what happened. “Yah. Sure,” the woman said and hung up.

  George walked the woman to an examining room. He snapped on latex gloves when the woman held out one hand and grabbed his wrist. “I’m allergic to latex,” she said.

  He peeled off the gloves. “Good you told me,” he said, thinking, oh God, why hadn’t he asked that? What was the matter with him?

  The woman’s name was Meg Emberlon, and when she opened her mouth, George flinched. There was a definite swelling by her molars, a raw tenderness, and he touched it, and she jerked away from him. “Oh, don’t!” she cried.

  “Let’s take some film,” George said.

  He took the film, but before it even developed, he knew what he’d find. Abscess. He cleaned it out as best he could, he gave her a prescription for an antibiotic and set her up with an appointment for tomorrow.

  He didn’t notice the time until after Meg left, thanking him so profusely he was almost embarrassed. “That’s what I’m here for,” he told her.

  He rubbed his wrist thoughtfully, and then he glanced at his watch.

  Fuck. Oh fuck. He was an hour late and Anne was waiting for him.