Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “Me too,” Emily said faintly.

  “Good.” She plugged in her phone and turned her PARTY-PARTYPARTY playlist up to a deafening volume. No one sang along this time. I dropped off Sapphire, then Emily, and turned along the train tracks. We were a couple blocks from Kenzie’s house when she shot forward in her seat and screamed over the pumping music, “Stop the car!”

  I slammed on the brakes in the middle of Avondale; if there had been someone behind me we would have been smashed.

  “Jesus! What is it?”

  “Pull over.” Her voice had gone soft and dangerous.

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  I flicked on my turn signal and pulled to the curb. As soon as I put the car in park, though, I realized what was going on, but now it was too late to correct my mistake. Kenzie had already unbuckled her seat belt, thrown open the passenger-side door, and was striding across the road to where Alexis, violin case under one arm, was walking along the train tracks, her ears obliviously wrapped in a big white pair of headphones. A fine snow had begun to fall, dusting the road and the sidewalk. Nobody was around but us.

  “Kenzie, wait!” I turned off the car, and ran after her across Avondale just as the 9:45 freight came screaming by, filling the snowy quiet with its prolonged roar. Kenzie trotted across the street and came to a halt directly in the middle of the sidewalk. Alexis, who’d been walking along staring at the ground—counting the cracks in the concrete, I guessed, like she’d done when we were kids—jolted to a surprised stop. When she saw Kenzie, it took a moment for her to register who it was. The slack, contented expression she wore whenever she listened to classical music still lingered on her face, as if she was being shaken unwillingly out of a pleasant dream.

  I couldn’t hear what Kenzie said because the train was still roaring past. I could only see what she did. She reached out, almost casually, and smacked Alexis’s violin case from under her arm. The leather case, curved softly like a woman’s body, clattered to the ground, leaving skid marks in the new snow. Before Alexis could pick it up, Kenzie had kicked it away, sending it skittering into the street. Alexis, her headphones still over her ears, chased after it, but Kenzie got there first. She snatched it up, snapped open the brass clasps, and lifted out the lovely, mahogany instrument by its neck. The last of the train cars were now vibrating away and their echo rang around in the silent air.

  “Give it back,” Alexis said. Her voice reverberated in the snow and the quiet street. It had a tenacious strength in it that I nearly didn’t recognize.

  “How much do these things cost, anyway?” Kenzie turned the violin over in her hands, examining it. “Probably more than my grandma’s car, I bet. It’s always the spoiled brats who play the violin, isn’t it?”

  “Give it back,” Alexis repeated.

  “Or else what—you’ll tell on me?”

  Alexis said nothing.

  “I bet you practice this in your little pink bedroom with the pink canopy and all those frilly decorative pillows.” Kenzie ran her fingers over the smooth wood. “And your Disney posters on the wall.”

  Alexis’s cheeks reddened. When she looked at me, her face was filled with an old hurt. Kenzie could only know what Alexis’s bedroom looked like because I’d told her. Because I’d made fun of it to her. It was such an intimate insult, the kind that can only be inflicted when someone betrays you. I looked away, ashamed.

  “Give it to me!” Alexis said it more forcefully this time, and her eyes scanned the empty street, willing someone to come around the corner, a witness, a car full of Mount Carmel kids, anybody. But it was freezing and snowing and nobody was out.

  “Kenzie,” I said, stepping between them, my heart slamming in my chest. “Come on. Give it back to her. This has gone far enough.”

  Kenzie turned the violin over in her hands, ignoring me.

  “It’s a pretty cool-looking instrument,” she said. “I’ve never really seen one up close before. I wonder what I could get for this on Craig’s List.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, you know,” Alexis said to her.

  “You’re not?”

  “No.”

  “Well. I guess we’ll have to change that, won’t we?” And with the same grace, the same fluidity with which she’d swum up and down the length of the Sister Xavieria Schmidt Memorial Swimming Facility for forty-five solid minutes, Kenzie grabbed the lovely mahogany violin around its neck with both hands, lifted it above her head, and smashed it onto the sidewalk. It splintered down the middle, making a high, keening, almost human sound, and the lovingly polished pieces scattered down the length of the deserted street, so that all Kenzie held now was the neck, tangled with jagged pieces and broken string. “Oops,” she said, tossing it, or what was left of it, to the curb.

  A strangled cry emerged from Alexis’s throat, as sweet and broken as the sound of her violin, and she ran to the ruined instrument. Tears had filmed over her eyes as she gathered up the neck and the broken pieces, placing them gently into the crushed velvet of the case, which lay hanging open like a broken jaw. Kenzie loomed above, all six feet of her, arms crossed, leaning her weight on one foot, smiling with satisfaction as Alexis crawled around in the whirling snow, gathering up the shards of her violin. I just stood there, frozen, numb. When Alexis finally straightened up, clicking the case shut and holding it to her chest like a wounded child, she finally spoke. Not to Kenzie, but to me.

  “You know, Wendy, I feel really sorry for you,” she said. “Because I know you. It must be so freaking lonely, this new life of yours. Being friends with people like this.”

  “Like what, bitch?” Kenzie called after her as Alexis began to trek down Avondale, her violin case clutched to her chest, its broken pieces jangling horribly. “Someone cool? Someone pretty? Someone normal?” Alexis kept walking. “Just remember, next time you decide to tattle on me about anything, I’ll do the same thing to your fucking face that I just did to your violin.”

  Once Alexis had disappeared around the corner, Kenzie turned to me and laughed. “Oh, don’t give me that look, Wendy. You know she deserved that. I warned you I was going to get back at her. And now it’s done, okay? I’ll leave her alone now. I promise.”

  “How could you do that?” I asked quietly.

  “Oh, relax,” Kenzie said, putting her arm around my shoulder and guiding me back across the abandoned street. “Girls like that make me sick. Girls who think they’re so perfect. Who get straight As and violin lessons. Who have moms who probably cut the crusts off their sandwiches every day.”

  “Not the crusts,” I murmured. “The turkey skins.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  We climbed back into Red Rocket.

  “You know,” she said, “she’ll probably thank me one day for toughening her up. As my dad likes to say, life’s a shit storm. If you want to get through it, you’re gonna need a pretty strong umbrella.”

  After I dropped Kenzie off, after I watched her disappear inside her house, after I drove home with tears streaming down my face, hating her but hating myself even more, I climbed into my bed, hiding under the worn flannel sheets, and thought to myself that if being a bully is bad, being a coward is even worse.

  PART TWO

  BLESSED ARE THE BITCHES

  12

  I KNOW IT’S NOT VERY ORIGINAL TO say this, but Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. I love the twinkling lights on houses, the snow, that annoying Mariah Carey song that takes over the radio, the red velvet top that my mom wears to holiday parties that makes her look younger and happier, almost resembling the mom I used to know. I even love Christmas Eve mass—the dimly lit church, the altar lined with fragrant boughs of pine, the wooden crèche threaded with white lights, and the warm smell of incense that settles in your clothes and hair.

  When we were younger, our family would make an annual excursion to see the giant tree in Daley Plaza. On the ride downtown, my dad couldn’t resist lecturing us about subw
ay safety—how we should never sleep on the el or play with our phones; how, if someone wants to sit next to us we should always move to the aisle so they can’t pin us against the window and grope or rob us; how, if we have to look at the station map we should do so nonchalantly so nobody thinks we’re from out of town. Once we got off the el, though, he visibly relaxed. He would buy us hot cocoa at the Christkindlmarket, and at Macy’s, Stevie Junior and I each got to choose one gift that would then be wrapped up and presented to us on Christmas morning. Then we’d go for burgers at Monk’s, where my dad would order a tall beer and my mom would get a glass of red wine and they’d sit in the booth across from Stevie Junior and me, giggling like teenagers while Stevie and I made gagging sounds to each other, and we’d throw our peanut shells on the floor and watch all the office workers bustling up and down Lake Street, huddled in their winter coats and talking importantly into their cell phones. On Christmas Eve we’d go to the special policeman’s mass at the Mercy Home for Boys and ask for a blessing from Saint Michael, the patron saint of the police, to protect our father for another year as he worked the streets of Chicago’s west side.

  Now all of that feels like a very long time ago. I’m older, wiser, and maybe a little more bitter, and the holiday has lost most of its magic. So this year, when my mom was offered a bonus to work the overnight Christmas Eve and Christmas Day shifts at the hospital, she ran it past me and I just shrugged.

  “We could really use the money,” she said apologetically.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I can just hang out at home and catch up on Teen Mom 2.”

  “Absolutely not. You’re not spending Christmas in front of the TV. It’s a day for family.”

  “Well, let’s see,” I said, counting on my fingers. “Stevie Junior is in the South Pacific. Uncle Jimbo and Aunt Colleen are in Rockford. Dad’s in jail, Grandma’s dead, and you’re working. So what do you suggest I do about that?”

  “You’re forgetting someone.”

  I thought for a minute.

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “Yes.” My mom smiled broadly. “I already checked with Aunt Kathy, and she is absolutely thrilled to have you spend Christmas with her.”

  “But she’s crazy! Dad always said so.”

  “Well, that crazy woman has been footing the bill for your education for the last two years, young lady,” my mom said, finally admitting what I had long suspected. “You’re going to have a great time, I promise.”

  My aunt Kathy is a food stylist who lives downtown in a fifteenth-floor exposed brick loft overlooking Millennium Park. We don’t see her all that often because she’s always doing things like backpacking through China or attending meditative retreats in New Mexico, and even when she’s living in Chicago, she sticks to the trendy areas. She considers the northwest side neighborhood where she grew up and where I now live a hellish backwater where you can’t even get paella or a decent deep tissue massage, and avoids coming here whenever possible. She used to make an exception and show up to our family parties every once in awhile, but even that stopped after the legendary political argument she got into with my dad at my First Communion party. I don’t know what they fought about—I was eight—but I do know that he called her a stupid liberal and she called him a fascist thug before throwing her white wine in his face and storming out of our house in a whirlwind of clacking jewelry and spicy perfume. In her free time, she goes ghost hunting.

  “Go with an open mind,” my mom said, draping an arm around my shoulder. “You just might surprise yourself.”

  So that was how I found myself, on a snowy Christmas Eve afternoon, dragging my duffel bag up the stairs of the Jackson Avenue blue-line station and scanning the snow-swirled street for my crazy aunt and her boyfriend, Simon. When she saw me she began waving furiously, the bangles on her wrists jingling like sleigh bells. While she gathered me up in a furious assault of embroidered scarves and gardenia perfume, Simon, his graying blond ponytail edged with falling snow, bowed deeply, like a butler or a Japanese karate master, and took my bag for me.

  “Look at you, Wendy!” Kathy trilled, grasping my shoulders and looking with such pleasure into my face that I felt a little guilty for how badly I hadn’t wanted to spend Christmas with her. “You get more and more lovely each time I see you!”

  Simon, holding my duffel bag over his shoulder like a woman’s purse, led us down Jackson toward Michigan Avenue.

  “Now don’t tell your mother,” Kathy said, throwing her arm around me as well as someone wearing a large velvet cape can throw her arm around anything, “but we’re going to give Christmas mass a skip this year.”

  I felt a twinge of disappointment, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell that to Aunt Kathy.

  “Fine by me.” I shrugged.

  We walked to a restaurant on the top floor of the Art Institute, with floor-to-ceiling views of Michigan Avenue. It had white walls, white tables, white chairs, and a white marble bar lined with opaque white containers of unlabeled liquor.

  “How do they know which bottle is which?” I asked, pointing.

  “Oh, honey, at this place, no one actually cares what the drinks taste like,” Kathy explained, scanning the menu above her rhinestone-bedazzled reading glasses. “It’s just the fact of being seen here.”

  I looked at the drinks list and had to do a double take. Twenty-five bucks for a glass of wine? I thought of my mom and Aunt Colleen, sitting on our little balcony drinking their cheap bottle of chardonnay from the 7-Eleven down the street. They were going to love this story. Aunt Kathy’s food stylist business had taken off—who knew there was such a booming market for people who arranged french fries at just the right angle?—and she was rich, at least by our standards. One of my mom and Aunt Col’s favorite topics was discussing how their younger sister spent her money, usually with a mixture of envy and disapproval. After all, they had followed all the rules, while Aunt Kathy had skipped college and marriage, choosing, after high school, to hitchhike out to North Dakota to shack up with a landscape artist and work as a line cook on a cattle ranch. Now she made more money than her two sisters combined.

  “So,” said Simon, after the waiter came over and I ordered a Dr Pepper, which was brought to me in a vintage green bottle along with a tall glass filled with a single ovular ice cube, “your aunt tells me that you’ve never been to the Art Institute before.”

  “We’re not exactly an artsy family,” I explained.

  “Nonsense!” Aunt Kathy slurped loudly from her French martini. “Art has no social class or creed. You either like it or you don’t. For me, it’s a better religious experience than going to a damn Christmas mass.”

  “What’s so bad about the Catholic church anyway, Aunt Kathy?”

  “Nothing,” she said, “except everything. Three hundred years ago, those God-fearing Christians would’ve called me a witch.”

  “Because you ghost hunt?”

  “No, because I’m not married. Because I’m not a conformist. Because I’m a strong, independent female.”

  “She’s right on that score,” Simon said, squeezing her knee. “Your aunt Kathy, Wendy, is a woman who knows how to take control.” And he leaned over and started kissing her, and it was gross, and I had to clear my throat to remind them that they were in public.

  Aunt Kathy paid our bill, and we spent the rest of the afternoon walking from gallery to gallery so they could show me their favorite pieces of art. Simon’s was a bronze sculpture of a boy’s head, one shoulder lifted, eyes closed, chest frail. It was called Suffering. Aunt Kathy’s was Woman Before an Aquarium by Matisse, who apparently is kind of a big deal painter considering she almost passed out when I told her I had never heard of him. The one I liked best was The Girl at the Window by Edvard Munch. Aunt Kathy suggested that sometimes the art that draws us in the most is the art in which we see ourselves reflected. Which made sense to me. In Munch’s painting, a figure stands hunched by a window in her nightgown, and she looks so afraid. Not afra
id to go outside, but afraid of the act of even lifting the curtain. That’s me, I thought. Afraid of my friends and afraid of my life.

  On our way out, Aunt Kathy stopped to study a Miró painting called The Policeman.

  “Remind you of your father at all?” she asked as we stood in a row before the canvas.

  “That doesn’t even look like a person,” I said. “It’s just, like, a bunch of shapes.”

  “I don’t know.” She cocked her head. “See that thread of dark mustache? That’s entirely befitting. The assertive pose, leg forward, arm out, hands splayed? Powerful and conceited . . . that’s your father.”

  “It’s quite impressive,” Simon agreed. “I love the way Miró plays with abstraction and representation.”

  “That’s supposed to be a leg?” I squinted at the painting. “See, this is why I don’t like modern art.”

  “Honey, you can’t dislike something until you’ve educated yourself about it,” Kathy said. “Great art is like great literature. Or music. Once you fall in love with it—fall in love not with your senses but with your soul, I mean—you’ll never be alone again.” At her words, an image bubbled up into my consciousness of Alexis’s face, resting, at peace in her music, just before Kenzie confronted her on the sidewalk. I shook the thought away.

  We stepped down the marble staircase and into the darkening street, then entered the shiny lobby of Kathy’s building and rode the plushy carpeted elevator to the fifteenth floor. Simon brought my duffel bag into the spare bedroom while Aunt Kathy started dinner and I laid out a set of stylishly mismatched cobalt plates on the low table. There were no chairs, just puffy tasseled cushions that I guessed we were expected to sit on. Sitar music began to pipe through the surround-sound speakers. Kathy opened a bottle of champagne and poured me a glass in a crystal flute, handing it to me as if it was the most natural thing in the world to serve expensive alcohol to your sixteen-year-old niece. As I took a sip of the fizzy, crisp champagne, it made perfect sense why my dad, my chain-smoking, cursing, sports-obsessed cop dad, had never gotten along with Aunt Kathy. But I was beginning to think that there was no reason why I couldn’t get along with her.