Neighborhood Girls

by Jessie Ann Foley

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Aunt Kathy called from the kitchen while I stood before a bookshelf, sipping my champagne and running my fingers along the titles—Pulling your Own Strings: A Guide to Self-Improvement, Sexual Empowerment in your Pre-Menopausal Years, Doing You: The Journey to Finding Your Authentic Self—“but Simon and I are on the Paleo Diet. That means dinner tonight will consist of only real, whole, unprocessed foods. The same foods that would have been available to our ancestors two hundred thousand years ago.”

  “You mean to tell me that the cave men drank champagne?”

  She smiled. Her cheeks were flushed from the cooking, and the windows overlooking the lights of Millennium Park had gone foggy. “For champagne,” she said, “we make an exception. This is a holiday, after all.”

  I helped Kathy bring dish after dish of unidentifiable food to the table—prosciutto cups, salmon mousse on cucumber chips, carrot soufflé, and a giant, shining red lobster, arranged on a hammered copper tray and edged with lemon wedges. A line popped into my mind from our Honors Brit Lit class, a poem that we’d read just before break that I had secretly loved, even though I didn’t understand a word of what it meant: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” I must have said the line aloud—the champagne had made me feel babbly and dreamy, because Kathy and Simon looked at each other, impressed and pleased.

  “They’re teaching T. S. Eliot at that stuffy old place?” Aunt Kathy wanted to know. “In my day, it was all religious texts and indoctrination.”

  “Well, I have a cool teacher, Ms. Lee,” I said, embarrassed. “She teaches honors American and Brit Lit. And journalism.”

  “Go figure.” Aunt Kathy shrugged, snapping a lobster leg in half and dragging the flakes of white meat through a smear of butter on her plate. “The place finds some enlightenment just in time to close for good.”

  “So, is that what you’re into?” Simon asked, sipping his wine. “Poetry?”

  “I’m not into anything. I mean, I’m into my schoolwork. Getting good grades. Getting a scholarship and getting the hell out of Chicago.”

  “Here’s to that.” Aunt Kathy raised her glass.

  I have to admit: the paleo food, though weird, was actually pretty good. There was music playing over the gleaming speakers, a fake fire burned in the slate-trimmed fireplace, and outside was the Bean and the Pritzker Pavilion, cold and steely in the snow, the blinking red march of cars down Lake Shore Drive, the gray line of water and then the dark nothingness of Lake Michigan’s horizon. It was hard to believe that this place of culture, of sophistication, of Miró and Matisse, was the same city I’d lived in all my life. Chicago was where I was born and raised, where my parents and grandparents were born and raised, where my great-grandfathers had slaughtered pigs in the stockyards a couple miles to the southwest. This was a city that beat inside me like blood, but in that moment, looking out at the park and the street and the water, I felt like I was seeing it for the first time.

  After dinner, there was dessert: little peeled crescents of clementine oranges dipped in hardened dark chocolate. In the contented silence that followed our meal, Simon and Kathy drank sherry out of these blown-glass tumblers they’d bought during a trip to Venice, and I drank my Dr Pepper and thought about things. I thought about my mom and her antidepressants and antianxieties and sleeping pills. I thought about her monthly confrontation with the laptop as she paid our bills, her face lonely and lined in the computer’s glow, figuring numbers using my old graphing calculator from Algebra II class. Rent, electric, gas, cable, cell phones, car insurance, Chase, American Express. Groceries. Lawyer fees. And on and on. I thought about how she once told me that Aunt Kathy has such a sad life, because, I guess, she never married or had children. But what I couldn’t figure out was where the sadness was. Aunt Kathy had money and freedom and a ponytailed boyfriend who played the sitar and designed unisex clothing, who still kissed her in a way that older people, according to my theory, aren’t supposed to kiss. Maybe she’s just hiding it, this sadness, I thought. Because she doesn’t want me to see and because it’s Christmas. But no, that wasn’t right. She wasn’t hiding any sadness. It wasn’t there in the first place. It occurred to me, watching Aunt Kathy and Simon drinking their sherry on the couch with their feet intertwined beneath a striped chenille blanket, that there are so many more ways to live your life than I’d once thought.

  “How’s that friend of yours your mom is always telling me about?” Aunt Kathy wiped a bit of chocolate from her lip with a black-painted fingernail. “Kenzie, right?”

  I cleared my throat. I’d been having such a nice time because everything about Aunt Kathy and Simon felt so far away from my real life. I told them about how Kenzie had snuck Evan into the pool on a dare, about her probation, and about her five tattoos. But I didn’t tell them about Alexis’s violin. Mischief and rebellion were one thing: Simon and Kathy understood it and approved of it. Bullying was something different.

  “A real wild child, huh?” Aunt Kathy smiled. “If I were in high school, Kenzie would be my best friend, too.”

  “No,” Simon corrected her, “you would be Kenzie.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” I said a little too quickly. Aunt Kathy looked at me curiously for a moment.

  “Except for the tattoo part,” Aunt Kathy said. “Needles aren’t my thing. It’s how I managed to avoid heroin all throughout the nineties.”

  Kathy and Simon helped themselves to more sherry.

  “What about boyfriends?” she asked. “Got any of those?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good for you, Wendy! I always felt sorry for the girls who anchored themselves down to boyfriends in high school. Like your mom. She married her high school boyfriend—your dad—and look how that turned out for her.”

  I concentrated on peeling the chocolate away from my orange and didn’t say anything. I don’t know why it bothered me, her criticizing my dad. I mean, I hated him anyway. So what difference did it make?

  Later that night, after I went to bed, I settled into the thick, cotton sheets that were so crisp I was sure they’d never been slept on, and was leafing through one of the architectural magazines I’d found in a stack on the nightstand when I heard a soft knock on my door.

  “Yeah?”

  Aunt Kathy, dressed in a satin kimono and matching embroidered slippers, stuck her head in the door. She was holding another tumbler of sherry and a self-help book entitled Dynamic You! Techniques for Living Your Best Life.

  “Can I come in, honey?”

  “Sure,” I said, putting the magazine on my lap.

  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, what I said about your dad. I’m just so damn angry at him.”

  “It’s cool.” I shrugged.

  “I just worry about your mom,” she said. “How’s she doing? She never talks to me. Not about important things, anyway. She thinks I’m flighty or something. That I wouldn’t get it. That I don’t care.”

  “She doesn’t think that,” I said, though it was probably true. Aunt Kathy stood there quietly for a moment.

  “Anyway,” she said, smiling, “I forgot to give you your Christmas present.” She reached into the pocket of her kimono and handed me a small black Bloomingdale’s box, wrapped in a thick red ribbon.

  “Thanks, Aunt Kath!” I untied the ribbon and lifted the lid. It was a makeup set—lipstick in a gold tube, a blush compact shaped like a seashell, a tube of mascara, and a small vial of perfume.

  “Now, I know you weren’t always much of a girly girl,” Aunt Kathy said as I lifted the items, turning them over in my hands, “but your mom tells me you’ve been wearing more makeup these days. And sometimes just knowing you have this stuff in your drawer makes you feel a little more sophisticated. Besides, every girl deserves a little Chanel.”

  The makeup was so beautiful—the lipstick a rich, creamy nude tapered to a perfect point, the compact a pat of pale, shimmering
pink stamped with two interlocking C’s—that I knew I would probably never use it. But still, I loved the gift. I could put it on the sink in our tiny bathroom with the mold etched between the cracked peach-colored tiles, next to the toilet with the yellow ring that would never come clean. I could let my mom borrow it, in the event that she ever got invited out for drinks with the other cop wives again.

  “Well?” she asked, hovering nervously over the bed. “Do you like it?”

  “I love it.” I smiled up at her. “Thank you.”

  “I’m glad.” She watched as I uncapped the perfume and breathed in the expensive scent. “Hey, do you mind if I sit down for a minute, hon?”

  “Sure.” I closed the perfume and scooted over in the bed to make room. She climbed in next to me, the cool silk of her kimono rustling against the sheets.

  “How are you doing, anyway?” she asked, crossing her slippered feet and leaning against the headboard. “With ASH closing and everything?”

  I shrugged.

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “If it had happened when I was in high school, it would have been a dream come true. I hated that place. But you, you’re different than I was.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. Thank God.”

  “What were you like?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “Well, I was exactly like I am now, only a natural blonde with an ass that didn’t sag.”

  I laughed. I had to admit, it was nice, sitting side by side like this with my eccentric aunt. It had been so long since I’d had someone to talk to.

  “But, I mean, like, who did you hang out with? What were your friends like?”

  “Oh,” she waved a hand. “I was one of the misfits. You know. The type that sits in the back row reading The Bell Jar and piercing my ears with a safety pin.”

  “So you didn’t ever have friends that, I don’t know, were sort of . . . bitchy?”

  “Wendy.” She put her arm around me gently. “In this family, we believe in female empowerment. As a feminist, I would appreciate it if you didn’t use that word.”

  I laughed. “You sound like Sister Dorothy.”

  “I have to say, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been compared to a nun. I don’t know how I feel about this.”

  “It’s a compliment, I guess.”

  “How about ‘unkind’? That’s the meaning you’re getting at, but it’s gender neutral.”

  “Well, I don’t think ‘unkind’ really cuts it for the type of friends I have, Kath.”

  “Is this Kenzie we’re talking about here?”

  “Yeah. And Emily and Sapphire, but yeah, mainly Kenzie.”

  “Okay. Well, what has she done that you feel has been unkind?”

  “Well, let’s see.” I sat up and began counting on my fingers. “She dared Sapphire to steal a case of Abraham Lincoln’s silverware from a party. She snuck her boyfriend into our gym class, which basically made him lose his football scholarship and got our PE teacher fired in the process. She throws Pop-Tarts at people. And, you remember the girl I was friends with in elementary school? Alexis Nichols?”

  “Of course I do. What a sweetheart. How’s she doing, anyway?”

  “Well, probably not great. Alexis snitched on Kenzie about the gym class thing. So Kenzie took Alexis’s violin and smashed it into, like, a thousand pieces.”

  As I sat there, rehashing the events of the past school year, Aunt Kathy’s eyes grew wider and wider.

  “Are you finished?” she finally asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well then, I’ve got a question for you, Miss Wendy Ann Boychuck. Why in the name of Christ are you friends with a bitch like that?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain.” I opened the compact and looked at the small oval of my face, pale and plain, in the little mirror.

  “Try me.”

  “It’s because . . .” I snapped the compact shut and looked down at the Christmas lights twinkling on the street below, trying to figure out how to explain it. “I don’t know. There’s something powerful about being popular, I guess.”

  “Oh, come on, Wendy. Don’t tell me you’re one of these teenage girls who actually cares about being popular. Who’s always talking about how fat she is, or how fat other people are. I can’t stand those girls. They are so terribly boring.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s not that.”

  “Well, then what is it?”

  “It’s like, popularity is this magic shield. It kind of protects me from my own last name. If I’m friends with Kenzie, no one can make fun of me or—or worse—just because I’m a Boychuck.”

  “Ah. So that’s what this is about. Your dad.”

  “Well, I guess so. In a way.”

  She sat up straight, and examined me with her pale gray eyes.

  “See, that’s what the neighborhood does to you,” she finally said, settling back into the pillow. “Makes you feel like it’s the whole world. Everybody so insular, so obsessed with each other’s business. It’s like living in a small town, but with rats and muggings.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I laughed.

  “Oh, it’s worse. Trust me—I grew up there, too! But now I live here. Downtown. Do you know what the best part about living in this building is? It’s that Simon and I don’t know anybody who lives in it. Nobody knows my business, and nobody cares!”

  I could feel the soft thumping of her heart and the up-and-down movement of her throat as she sipped her sherry.

  “You know, there are other forms of protection, Wendy. Self-esteem, for one. A jujitsu class. Hell, even a religious relic is probably going to protect you better than some snotty sixteen-year-old ‘friend,’ and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t really even believe in God.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s just so hard to walk away.”

  “Well, what is it that you’re afraid of? So what if people say your dad did some awful stuff? Guess what, honey? He did do some awful stuff. And now you and your mom and your brother have to live with that. It’s not fair, but that’s how it is. You can either let it crush you or you can let it make you tough. Your choice.”

  “Aunt Kathy, you don’t remember what high school was like! It’s a freaking war zone, okay?”

  “Wendy, look at me.” She took both my hands in hers, her long nails tickling my palms. “I wish I could make you understand just how young you are. But, as the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. So here’s what I’m going to tell you instead: the average life expectancy of an American woman is eighty years. And you’re in high school for exactly four of those years. That’s, what, five percent of your life that you spend in high school? And yet, everybody acts like it’s some big goddamn deal. Like what happens to you there, who you hang out with, what your grades are, should somehow define you for the other ninety-five percent of your life. Please. It’s all so silly. There are so many people you still need to meet, so many experiences you still have to live. Life is so fun, honey! It’s so wonderful! And it’s so big! It’s a road that just keeps getting wider and wider. So it’s just plain stupid to think that these are supposed to be the best years of your life.”

  She put her sherry on the end table, leaned back against the headboard, and closed her eyes. Even at this time of night she was perfumed and pedicured, her face dewy with night cream. She was the picture of confidence and self-possession, a woman entirely satisfied with her own widening road.

  “You’re going to do so many great things, Wendy,” she said, her eyes still closed. “You won’t believe how many great things you’re going to do. And once you get out there in the world? No one is going to give the littlest shit who your dad was.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so, honey. As someone who’s lived plenty and always has to learn things the hard way.”

  We lay there, side by side in the bed, my head resting on the cool silk of her kimono. Kooky, my dad had called Aunt K
athy. Goofy. A flake. A wingnut. But who cared that she wore capes and kimonos and ate paleo and drank too much sherry on Christmas Eve? When you actually talked to her, she made a hell of a lot more sense than most of the other adults I knew. I’d never met someone who was so comfortable being exactly who she was. She made being true to yourself seem easy. No, more than that: she made it seem like a party.

  For a minute, I thought she’d fallen asleep. I put the compact aside and lay there for a while, feeling her warmth and watching the snow and the cars zipping by in a blur of light down Lake Shore Drive. From where I sat everything was so frighteningly far away, fifteen floors down, except for the flakes of snow, which sifted against the window like little fingerprints, scratching to get into this warm, cozy space that smelled like flowers and cooking and Aunt Kathy’s peppermint foot cream.

  Her eyes fluttered open, as if she was startled into waking, and she leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, leaving behind a smear of her rose-scented lip balm. “Merry Christmas, honey.”

  “Merry Christmas, Aunt Kathy.”

  Before she left the room, she stopped and turned back.

  “Oh, and Wendy?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Get some rest. We’re going to be up early tomorrow—we’re going ghost hunting.”

  13

  I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO the rich smell of brewing coffee. A gray light had filtered through the pale pink curtains of my bedroom, and when I opened them, I saw the whole city, the frozen scallops of shoreline, the cold waves of Lake Michigan on Christmas morning. I padded out into the kitchen, where Kathy and Simon were sitting on the leather fainting couch, dressed in his-and-hers satin kimonos and reading the New York Times.

  “Oh, you’re up!” Aunt Kathy swished over and gave me a hug. “Merry Christmas! There’s coffee in the pot. Sorry, though—no cream or sugar—remember, we’re a paleo home, honey, but there’s maple syrup if you really need to sweeten it.”