By the time Sam came out with the dishwashing liquid in a paper sack, the wild girl was walking up Main Street in the same direction we’d come from, those cruel shoes swinging from her hand. “Let her walk ahead,” I told him. “If we tail her too close, she’ll get suspicious.”
We got our bikes and crossed to the opposite side of the street, riding so slowly that we kept toppling into each other. Once, still walking, she stared back at us evenly, but then she tossed her hair and continued on, her bare feet slapping the side-walk. We had almost reached the mill when she made a military left and marched up the steps of a rectangular brick house. It was an ordinary, everyday sort of house, with a birdbath and a statue of the Virgin in the front. It did not look like the house of either a thief or a wild girl. The screen door slapped behind her; the shades were already pulled shut. The house looked forlorn, the way houses look when no one lives inside them.
We rode around the block, buying the time we needed to come up with a plan. We rode around the block again. Finally, we left our bikes and the bottle of detergent behind the hedge across the street and scurried along the side of the house until we found an open window. Because Sam was lighter, I lifted him up for the first look, hoping there wasn’t a dog. His tennis shoes dug into my wrist, smelling of manure and grass.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Let’s try you lifting me,” I said, and we switched places so that I could look for whatever Sam had missed that would tell us what we should do next. As I gripped the shutters I could hear him below me, exhaling in little grunts, and I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold me there much longer. I pressed my face against the screen and saw a shadow moving rapidly toward the window, and then I was staring into the wild girl’s face. Up close, she looked much younger, and she had sweet, crooked teeth. She was eating a Ding Dong, licking the white filling from her index finger. My mother wouldn’t let us eat Ding Dongs, which she said had a shelf life of eighteen years.
“Do you see anything?” Sam called up at me.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Are you trying to see me naked or something?” she said in that low, noncommittal voice.
“No.”
“What?” Sam said.
“Then what do you want?” she said.
I wanted to look just like her, to become her, to lick eighteen-year-old frosting from my finger and survive, but this was not the sort of thing she meant. I knew all about extortion; still, money seemed too much to ask. “A soda,” I said weakly. It was the only other thing that came to mind. My mother didn’t let us drink them, not because of their shelf life but because the sugar would rot our teeth. The girl lifted the last bit of frosting into her mouth. I imagined how it would nestle there inside her, a puff of white growing smaller and smaller.
“Come around front,” she said. I pushed away from the house and tumbled to the ground, pulling Sam down too. His eyes were the feverish eyes of a hunter. “Are we going to arrest her?”
When I shook my head, he gave me a look of absolute disbelief. I could see I was a failure in his eyes, but I was tired of the game, vaguely embarrassed, and I wanted to go home. We weren’t spies anymore—just a little boy and a not so little girl who was too old to play games of make-believe. Self-consciously, I licked my hand and smoothed my hair back from my face. “She’s giving us a soda not to tell,” I said, trying to make it sound like a victory. “Besides, she ate all the evidence.”
When we got to the front of the house, she was already waiting on the porch, holding a can of Jolly Good Cream Soda. She had put on earrings and fresh, orange lipstick. She didn’t look at me—she looked at Sam. “What’s your name?” she asked him, and though I was used to people noticing Sam first, I ached with jealousy.
“Boris,” I said.
“No it’s not,” Sam said.
The girl laughed. “You got a girlfriend yet?”
“He’s got five,” I said, meanly. “One of them’s even married.”
The girl looked at me for the first time. It was a look of approval. “Boys are all the same,” she said, and then she pressed the soda into my hand as if it were a secret between just us two. It was the first time I had seen Sam as a boy instead of my brother, and his face became part of the broken blur of faces that swam to the girls’ side of the gym once a year for square dancing, boy faces with grinning teeth and strange-smelling breath and hands that dug in with short, blunt nails. The wild girl’s fingernails were long peach opals, glistening as if they were wet. She saw me staring at them. “It’s my mother’s color,” she said. “You want me to do yours?”
She turned and went back inside without waiting for me to answer. The soda was sweating in my hand. I gave it to Sam without looking at him, dried my palm on the back of my shorts. “How come girls color their nails?” he asked reasonably.
“They just do,” I snapped—it had never occurred to me to wonder why—and then the girl came out with the nail polish and led me to the porch swing. She put my right hand on my own bare thigh. I felt my own flesh, warm and slightly damp, and I was conscious of the dark silky hairs that grew there.
“I want to go home,” Sam said.
“Spread your fingers like this,” the girl told me, and then she painted swift peach strokes across my pasty nails, brushing the edges of my chewed cuticles. It stung, but I didn’t say anything. I was hoping she would do the other hand too. “You’ve got nice hands,” she said. “Not too big, like mine.”
She seemed to be waiting for something, and I struggled to figure out what it was. I hadn’t yet learned to speak an adolescent girl’s language of false denials and subtle cues. I looked at her hands, which were perfect, and then I understood. “Your hands aren’t too big,” I said, and I glanced meaningfully at Sam. His lower lip stuck out in the peculiar way that meant he wanted to cry.
“You have stupid hands,” he said.
I started to laugh—I couldn’t help it—and suddenly Sam laughed too. The girl’s face grew longer, thinner, and she pushed my hand away. “I’m going into the house now,” she said, “and if you don’t get out of here I’m calling the police to report you for trespassing.”
“I’m calling the police!” we mimicked in high, shrill voices, scuttling down the steps, racing for our bikes. The clouds that had banked the horizon all day were finally moving inland, bringing the cool east wind along with them. We rode home one-handed, no-handed, holding hands, passing the soda between us, choking as the unfamiliar carbonation fizzled in our noses. The fields around us bucked like ocean waves. I’m calling the police! we shrieked again and again, our words swallowed into the clouds. Lightning winked inside them, delicate, darting tongues, but we were not afraid. For the moment, we’d forgotten we were late, that my mother would be worried. We’d forgotten that my father would be home from work by now. We’d forgotten the peach polish that glistened on my hand.
My father was fifteen years older than my mother, away at the car lot most of the time, and before that night he’d never seemed as real to me as she did. He was the shape on the couch after supper, the distant whine of the drill coming from the shed, the crunch of gravel in the driveway that meant he was leaving for the car lot, or else coming home. The absentminded voice that told me to be a good girl. The sharper voice that said to simmer down. On holidays, he lit a fire in the fireplace, cursing the bursts of smoke, the newsprint on his hands. In summer, he mowed the lawn in grim, unswerving lines, and whenever I heard the cough of the mower, I rushed outside to rescue grasshoppers, butterflies, the occasional terrified toad. Sundays, he gave me and Sam each a dollar to put in the collection basket. Unlike my mother, he did not tell amusing stories about when he was our age, or make up silly knock-knock jokes, or join us in games of Sorry! He seemed to have a lot of rules; he worried about what he called appearances. My mother always took his side, saying he was no more strict with us than with himself.
He did not talk much about his family. It was my mother who told us he’
d had a younger brother, our uncle Arnold, who had died in World War II. It was my mother who told us that their father, our grandfather, had liked to drink whiskey and gamble, and he’d liked these things so much that he’d died with barely this farm to his name. My father was known throughout Horton as the farm boy who’d made good, honored for valor during his own tour of duty before coming home to work his way up through the ranks at Fountain Ford. He was the absolute head of our household, the decision maker, the one we approached—my mother included—to request our allowance or a new pair of shoes. He was sort of like God; we knew he was supposed to love us, but it was an all-powerful, distant sort of love, a love that was not given to explanations. A love that wasn’t quick to forgive mistakes. “This is my house,” he’d say, and those words were enough to silence any disagreement.
At home, I told my mother Sam had gotten a cramp, that we’d had to walk our bikes and that’s why we were late. She accepted the lie, as well as the detergent, and sent us straight into the kitchen for supper. My father had already helped himself to the mashed potatoes and roast, which were drowning in a muddy slick of pepper-and-flour gravy. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” he began. There was nothing he hated worse than cold food. I crossed myself and closed my eyes, folding my hands beside my plate. Outside, it had started to rain, and the rumbling in my stomach matched the distant thunder. Food smells rose around me like a thick, warm mist.
“Look at that,” my father said.
It was a tone I’d never heard before.
“Ten years old and it’s starting already,” he said, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at my fingers. “Where were you this afternoon with those painted nails? Showing off for the boys?” Foolishly, I tucked my hand under the table. My father had never hurt me before, yet, strangely, it didn’t surprise me when he rippled like a shadow over the space between us, grabbed my hand, jerked me up out of my chair. “This I’m going to nip in the bud,” he said as I dangled there absurdly. What I felt in my shoulder was not pain but color, and that color ripened into a grand, glowing rose as my father hooked his free arm around my waist and carried me out of the house, slung over his arm like a garment bag, to the shed, where he dumped me onto the low stepladder. The rain on the roof was gentle, sweet. It reminded me of spending the night at my grandmother’s house and falling asleep in the attic bedroom, closer to the stars and to God.
I have often wondered what my mother did while my father selected a rusty can from the row on the high wooden shelf, the way one might choose a good book, and fed oily turpentine into a strip of cloth from the rag box by the door. His expression wasn’t angry anymore; he looked tired, distant, resigned, the way he did when he came home from a long day at the car lot. It took him several minutes to remove the last sliver of peach-colored paint, working the rag deep into the crevices around my nails before, in an odd, uncertain gesture, stuffing it into my mouth. Perhaps my mother simply ate her supper, pretending nothing was wrong so that nothing would be wrong, the way she believed if you thought you couldn’t catch a cold, you wouldn’t catch one. Perhaps she helped Sam fill his plate and told him, Eat now; this is between your father and your sister. My father interacted with us so infrequently—small children, he believed, were best left to their mothers—that she might have felt this was, at base, something good.
“No makeup,” he told me. “No nail polish, no high heels. None of that nonsense. Is that understood?” He went back to the house, and I waited, and still my mother did not come. I spit out the rag, licked my hot lips. After a while, I got down from the stepladder and crept into the house and up the stairs to the room I had shared with Sam since he was a baby. My shoulder had begun to throb. I held my arm against my side and listened to the familiar after-dinner sounds of the dishes being washed and stacked to dry. My head ached from the turpentine smell, which seemed to lift me in a glistening cloud until I could see myself far below: a dark-haired girl sitting on the edge of a neatly made bed; and, beside her, a stuffed pink rabbit, with its ears tied into a bow beneath its chin; and, across the room, another bed, hastily made, the rumpled sheets decorated with trains and octagonal signs that said STOP! The girl was rubbing her feet back and forth, back and forth, on the braided rug, and I watched her for a while, thinking it was an odd thing for her to do.
The rain had ended by the time Sam came in to get ready for bed, both hands full of the green beans he’d swiped for my supper. The air was cool and still. I kept my hurt arm against my side and ate the smashed bean pieces with my other hand. “You OK?” Sam said. I didn’t know. When the beans were gone, Sam went downstairs and told my mother there was something wrong with my arm. She came in then, but she wouldn’t look at me. “You better not be faking this,” she said.
Dr. Neidermier met us at Saint Andrew’s Clinic in Fall Creek. It turned out that the shoulder was sprained. A nurse gave me a sling for my arm and a shot that made me very sleepy. As we walked back out to the car, breathing in the clean after-rain smell, I leaned against my mother out of habit, but her whole body flinched away. Without touching me, she unlocked the car door. “Fasten your seat belt,” she told me, and I did.
The movement of the car towed me into a warm, rich sleep, and I thought it was part of my dream when I heard my mother crying. She cried all the way home, as I tried to open my eyes to see if it really was her or just another liquid thought I couldn’t hold on to long enough to understand. When we got home, she lifted me carefully and carried me into the house. My father was there. I twisted to hide my face, and I felt how tightly she was holding me. She stepped past him and started up the stairs. Then she stopped. I felt us both sink a little.
“Take her, Gordie. Please,” she said, and I was in my father’s arms, my sore shoulder trapped painfully against his broad chest, and he carried me up the stairs and tucked me into bed with the blanket folded down and my rabbit half under the covers just right, like this was something he’d been doing all my life. “Shh, sweetheart,” he kept saying. On the other side of the room, Sam was lying in his bed, eyes open wide, as if I were the strange girl I’d seen earlier, and he didn’t recognize her any more than I did.
That night, I lay awake for hours, listening to the rise and fall of my parents’ voices coming from their bedroom across the hall. As soon as I closed my eyes I felt I was slipping through the floor of the earth, an endless whirling distance. So I kept my eyes open and listened for the sound of the POWs moving through the fields; I listened for the scratching of whatever lived under the bed; I listened, and I heard nothing at all. Mysterious things, it seemed, did not bother to hide themselves. That’s what made them so frightening, for they drifted before your eyes in the brightest daylight, clothed in everyday, human forms. Suddenly I was suffocating. Beneath the sling, my arm was slick with sweat, and an odd smell came from my body. I sat up and pushed the window open as wide as it would go. Under the hushed moon, the sunflowers raised and lowered their heads in the slow night wind. After a while, I went over to Sam’s side of the room. He was sleeping in his usual arc, his hands thrown out oddly in front of him. I nudged them together, so they folded into themselves like hands in prayer. I meant it to keep him safe somehow, but when he sighed and rolled onto his back, I realized I had arranged him into a corpse. Was he dead? I got in bed beside him and pressed my hand against his chest. His heart was beating, just like my own, and the sound of it absorbed the terrible silence. I rolled up against him, propped my sling on his shoulder, and slept.
At breakfast the next day, my father announced he had decided to turn the southwest corner of the basement into a bedroom, with wood-paneled walls and a lowered ceiling and a special subfloor to resist the damp. This was going to be Sam’s bedroom. I would remain in our old room upstairs, which my mother would help me redecorate. Sam stared into his cornflakes, and I looked down too, embarrassed, ashamed, as my mother explained I was growing up, perhaps faster than she and my father had realized, and it was time for me an
d Sam to sleep in rooms of our own. Nobody mentioned my bright white sling, and I wondered for an odd moment if it was part of a terrible dream, something that I had imagined. But the ache in my shoulder was real. When I’d finished eating, my father pulled me into his lap, and I perched on his knee for a polite moment, uneasy as a cat waiting to be put down, gathering strength for the leap.
After breakfast, in a controlled and careful voice, my mother explained how bad he felt about the night before. “It frightens him to think about his little girl growing up,” she said. She was washing the breakfast dishes with extra vigor. I had been excused from table chores, and now I fumbled with the thought of having made my father afraid.
“But why?” I said. He had taken Sam to the lumberyard to pick up materials for the new room.
My mother sighed. “Because you’ll be a young lady pretty soon, and you’ll have boyfriends and dates, and then you’ll start wanting a family of your own.” She stopped, considering. “It makes him feel old, I guess. Maybe a little uncomfortable. People didn’t talk about things like this when your father was a boy. It’s scary for him, that’s all.”
I put my head down on the table. I didn’t feel like a person who might make another person afraid, but then again, I didn’t really feel like myself either.
“Not that it’s an excuse,” my mother said quickly. “Not that what he did wasn’t overreacting. But he didn’t mean it, sweetheart, do you understand? He asked me to make sure to tell you that.”
I tried to nod without hurting my shoulder. My mother gave me two aspirins and a cup of tea with a tablespoon of whiskey. “Why don’t you go back to bed,” she said. “I’ll be up in a bit to see how you’re doing.”
I finished my tea and went to bed, and I didn’t wake up until late in the afternoon, when the sound of hammering poked me out of my sleep. Soon I heard the scream of the circular saw biting wood, and I realized my father had already started working in the basement.
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