Prepare Her

by Genevieve Plunkett

  The next morning, Renee found a Bible in her locker. She did not have to guess who had left it there. Arla Hoffman had even fewer friends than Renee. And while Renee’s lack of friends was due to her tireless search for adult praise, Arla did not seem to want to impress anyone. She kept a raw head of garlic in her desk, which she snacked on during lessons. She did not recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead, she would walk right out of the classroom, proud, like a gymnast. The students disliked her for this, not because they were old enough to have their patriotism challenged, but because it reminded them, every time, of how they were no longer allowed to have holiday-themed parties at school. No more secret Santas, no more Easter candy. Valentines were forbidden, but “special someone” cards were permitted. Arla had opened her desk to a heap of them that year, all very clever in their interpretation of the word special, although one simply said, “yer a dag.”

  After finding the Bible, Renee met Arla standing by her desk.

  “I believe this is yours,” she said. Arla was a skinny girl with narrow, reddish eyes. She took the Bible and placed it inside her desk without a word. She was the only person that Renee knew who owned ferrets. Arla had brought three of them in for show-and-tell, transporting them in what looked like a large laundry sack. Ever since, Renee thought she saw a resemblance between the girl and her pets: a kind of twitchy boredom.

  Arla had horses too, which was why, shortly after the Bible incident, Arla had invited Renee to go riding; she could come over the next day, if it was all right with Renee’s parents.

  “It will be a fun activity,” she had added, as though reading from a cue card. Her eyes had narrowed as she waited for an answer. A thick-skinned look, like a drowsy lizard in the sun. Over dinner, Renee found herself defending Arla to her parents.

  “We didn’t know you were friends with her,” Renee’s father had said through a mouthful of food. It was a rule in Renee’s house that no one was allowed to chew with their mouth open, except for Renee’s father, who had sinus problems.

  “We don’t have to be friends to go riding,” Renee had said. The argument felt very sound to her. She had an urge to repeat herself, just to hear the evenness of her own voice. She took a bite of food and chewed it slowly, looking at her father.

  “Horses can be very dangerous,” said Renee’s mother. “A horse has to close its mouth entirely before it opens it again. Imagine what that would do to your finger.”

  “Arla’s horses wouldn’t do that,” said Renee. She knew that this argument was not as sound but discovered that it did not matter. Just by saying it, she had inadvertently committed herself to liking the girl.

  Arla’s was the last bus stop, far into the woods, where the bus had to turn around on a steep stretch of road in a maneuver that made Renee sick to her stomach. Once off the bus, the girls walked up a deeply rutted road. It was late March, and the green or newly yellow shoots were pushing up the leaves. The woods smelled dank, Renee thought, like a wet dog. They soon came to a house on a bare patch of ground. The horses were immediately visible, off to the side, their mud-streaked backsides protruding from a lean-to. Burrs were clumped along their tails, and Renee could see gray balls of mud clinging to the hair around their hooves.

  Chickens roamed around the front step. They perked up when they saw the girls and surrounded them, trembling with hope that something would be dropped. If they had any emotion to show, it was revealed through their feet, which lifted and lowered with great dexterity and feeling.

  “The guinea hens were worse,” Arla said as she shut the front door against the cooing chickens. In her delight at having a visitor, it seemed, Arla had become aloof. She kicked off her shoes and walked across the kitchen to the refrigerator. There was something not quite finished about the interior of the house. Areas in the kitchen were exposed: some of the cupboards did not have doors, cans of food were stacked in the corners, and there was a large patch of plaster on the wall by the window. A rotary telephone clung to the wall with a clean, yellow shell. And there were no curtains. Not anywhere. Arla came back with two paper cups of lemonade and the girls drank, right there, on the welcome mat.

  After a moment, Mrs. Hoffman entered the kitchen, carrying a small child. She smiled at Renee in a friendly, expectant way, as if someone had just told her that Renee was good at telling jokes. Mrs. Hoffman put the child down and the little girl walked over to Renee, took her hand, and then lifted it to her mouth so that she could suck her thumb and hold Renee’s hand at the same time. The three of them—Arla, Renee, and the little girl—made their way upstairs, to Arla’s room. On the wall, along the stairway, there was a series of school portraits, three of Arla wearing a large bow in her hair, and a number of pictures of an older boy with straight-cut bangs. The boy got older as they climbed the stairs, and Renee had a considerable amount of time to look at him, as she was still holding the hand of the small child. She watched as his chin became more pronounced, then, all of a sudden, pimply, his teeth larger. She felt vaguely embarrassed for him, that his features were on display like that. It was like watching a potato grow above ground.

  The ferrets lived in Arla’s room, in a tall cage with many levels. Renee saw the familiar masked faces peering out of a fleece tube inside the cage. Their noses were pale pink, almost white. There was a strong odor upon entering the room, which Renee attributed to the ferrets, and in the corner by the closet, she spotted a pile of something like a clump of tar, which she could not identify. The little girl unclasped her hand and went to the full-length mirror by the bed, stepping over piles of laundry. She stood in front of the mirror and Renee watched the reflection of her face become weepy, drawn in an almost clown-like frown. The girl turned her head from side to side and her frown became even more pronounced.

  “Tabbie likes to practice her sad faces,” Arla said, still aloof. She opened the cage and three ferrets slid out and began to scamper around the room. They had a way of moving, of veering this way and that, as if their front and hind legs were not completely in accordance. One of them wandered over to the closet and defecated in the corner and Renee understood what the tarry substance had been. I know someone who, she found herself thinking, although she didn’t fully understand why.

  “One of these guys got his head smashed in the door,” Arla said and snatched up a ferret, studying its face. She dropped it and it ran off with its back arched, as if it had broken a bone and didn’t care. Arla picked up another and held it at eye level.

  “This one,” she said, and she gave it to Renee. The ferret’s claws were sharp on her bare arms, like a kitten’s. Renee looked into its face and saw only that squinty look of tolerance, the same look that Arla had when she marched out of class in the mornings. Renee imagined Arla sitting in that quiet hallway, hearing the school-wide squeal of chairs being pushed back, the soft crackle of the loudspeaker followed by a sea of voices, reciting the lines that, although they had never crossed her lips, she must have known by heart. Renee envied this exemption. It was hard for her to imagine that it might not be Arla’s own design that set her apart from the other students. To Renee, it was all Arla, this focused courage that allowed her to sit while others stood, to stare ahead while others laughed. She did not even celebrate her own birthday. It was a feat of tremendous self-control.

  The horses were waiting at the gate when the girls stepped out into the backyard. Tabbie had gone back to her mother, who had scooped her up and buried her rosy face into the child’s stomach. Renee was not accustomed to displays of affection and ascribed it to something rural, as if affection were like raising pigs: earthy and commendable. She could still smell the rye scent of her father’s beard when he would bend down to kiss her goodnight, the uncomfortable sensation of being cherished. After he left, she’d throw off the heavy covers and wait for the kiss to evaporate, rising into the dark room.

  “Watch out,” Arla was saying. She had gotten hold of a very long whip, which she held with one hand, while hugging an armload of hay. Renee
watched as she pushed open the gate with her shoulder and began to wave the whip around above her head. The horses, she saw, were hardly afraid, although they kept just enough distance so that they would not get whacked. They nipped the air with large bared teeth, ears flat to their heads. Arla, it seemed, was looking for a good patch of ground, where the mud was hard enough and where there were fewer piles of manure. She found a spot by a large water trough and tossed the hay down, away from herself, so that the rabid horses would not run her over.

  While the horses ate, the girls got to brush them. It was a great task to rake up the dried mud and dust from their hides. Renee was surprised at the force with which Arla went to work, grinding the teeth of her metal brush into the horse’s rump, around the base of its tail, which lay flat, tolerantly, now that there was hay to be eaten. They massaged, scraped, and smacked the dirt from those horses, until Renee felt the hot prick of sweat around the collar of her sweater. She set down her brush and pulled the sweater over her head. It clung to her shirt and she accidentally pulled both layers up past her armpits. Arla stared.

  “Does your mother know that you are growing breasts?” she asked. Her arms were at her sides. There was something a bit robotic about Arla, the way emotions seemed to shed from her as soon as they were born. Renee covered her chest with her sweater.

  “Am not,” she said.

  Arla did not argue. “I can show you how to stop them,” she said. But Renee just shook her head. They continued brushing. They brushed until the sun began to set and Renee’s mother showed up, her station wagon coming to a lopsided halt with one tire resting in a pothole.

  “How was your ride?” she wanted to know when Renee was in the car. Renee shrugged. She felt somehow defensive, as though their failure to finish brushing the horses validated her mother’s doubt from the night before.

  At home, her mother sat down at her sewing machine to make a quilt from some of Renee’s old dance-recital costumes, which were flimsy and sequined and did not take to being cut, the material bunching around the scissors. Last week, she had created a throw pillow from a baby blanket. These creations were hideous, but it did not seem to matter. What was important was the tying together of the end of an era. There would be no more dance recitals, no more babies. Everything had its proper retirement. It would have bothered her mother to know that the girls had spent all their time simply brushing the horses, just as she was often irritated at Renee for surfing channels on the TV, never getting to the point. So Renee told her mother how they had ridden through the fields behind Arla’s house, how they had leaped over a little stream by the tree line, until one of the horses had started limping and they were forced to go back. It all sounded so convincing that she had to stop herself from fabricating more. The horses, she said, were named Dusty and Moe.

  Yes, she thought, just likely enough.

  The next week, Renee found herself on the bus to Arla’s house again. They sat in the back and watched as the other children were dropped off, one by one, by rows of mailboxes and long driveways lined with dirty mounds of snow. When they came to the end of the road, the bus had to turn around, backing up that steep drive again, like a ship peaking on a wave. Renee’s stomach lurched. She wondered if they were going to ride that day, if they would have time to. Arla sat beside her with her eyes forward, the light fuzz of her profile glowing with sun. They rarely spoke in school. In gym class, when they played dodgeball, Arla threw the ball with inert, brutal force. In music, she blew on her recorder until her cheeks were red. You couldn’t say that she was doing a bad job. She hit all the marks. You couldn’t say that she wasn’t trying. Still, there was something that bothered Renee about her new friend, as if her attitude was a mark of an acknowledged superiority, a snobbishness that Renee felt had not been earned.

  The ferrets were already out of their cage, tunneling through laundry on the floor, when the girls got to Arla’s room. Renee noted the same foul odor as the week before and hoped that they would go outside soon.

  “I want you to tell me something,” Arla said, taking a seat on her bed. She had a ferret in her lap. It ducked its head, blinking, every time her hand came down to stroke it. “I want you to tell me about the end of Fantasia.” Renee did not know what Arla was talking about. She assumed that “the end of Fantasia” had something to do with religion, like the End Times, or the Rapture—subjects that left Renee feeling claustrophobic, because she imagined that the kind of people who believed such things felt a perverse pleasure in believing them. These imaginary people were old and impenetrable and conceited. They brought up God as a parent might mention an embarrassing memory, in an aggressive and precious way. It made Renee’s face hot to think of it. She said, “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Yes you do.” The ferret twisted in Arla’s hands and flopped onto the floor. “I know you’ve watched it.” It occurred then to Renee that her friend was referring to the film Fantasia, with Mickey Mouse. Renee had indeed seen Fantasia and would for the rest of her life associate Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” with the agonized, sweltering faces of dinosaurs facing extinction. Also, her mother had no opinions about the movie.

  “I don’t know what you like so much about it,” her mother would say, halfheartedly, and then stare at the television for a good five minutes, tapping her finger to the music, as if her mind had been erased. Renee’s mother was surprisingly fastidious about music, especially when it came to Christmas music. On December 1, the Christmas tapes would come out and so would begin the most solemn time of year in Renee’s household. Her mother’s favorite was “The Coventry Carol,” which went “Bye-bye lully lullay,” in mourning for infants doomed to die. She liked anything minor in key with the word sinner in it. Renee did not necessarily dislike these songs. She found that they gave Christmas a kind of dark history, a bleak, esoteric quality, complicated even further by her mother’s atheism.

  “You may believe in God if you want to,” Renee’s mother had said, as if God were an ugly hat.

  Renee knew that Arla was talking about the last segment of the film, “Night on Bald Mountain,” in which a giant devil with black, flexing wings stirred up demons and summoned spirits from their graves. Of course Arla would not have been allowed to watch that part, Arla, who was sheltered from the mention of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Arla, who was afraid that someone might accidentally give her a birthday present. Renee began to describe the scene, while Arla listened, hungry and alert, like her classmates had been when Renee told the story about her stepfather and the black lung. Her eyes widened and her mouth became slack, completely unguarded, as if her tongue might slide gradually out. She reminded Renee of the large fish in Woolworths, which was too big for its tank and merely flopped itself back and forth, staring in wonder out one side and then the next, as though it could not keep up with the changes in the world. Renee stopped talking. She felt embarrassed—for Arla’s sake—similar to the self-consciousness that she felt whenever sex was discussed: that tingling fear that your features will reveal anything more than stony comprehension. She could not go on, not if Arla was going to break open in front of her like an egg.

  “Let’s ride the horses,” she suggested and was relieved when Arla seemed to shake off her trance. And so the girls went outside to the paddock, where the horses were standing in the mud. They got to work, pushing the teeth of their brushes into the shaggy winter fur. There was much to be done: the horses’ tails were bound up in burrs, in fat clumps, like birds’ nests, and the bottoms of their hooves were padded with a thick layer of manure. There was mud in their ears, in the creases of their buttocks, and speckled across their bellies. And in the animals’ eyes, a distant satisfaction, as if they knew that the girls would never finish in time.

  Single

  Sometimes I would imagine what it would be like to be single, to have my own room again. A room like in a poem, with soft ponderous light. Curtains. Old-fashioned colors, like faded yellows and olive green. There would be a
book open on a tidy desk beside a bed with a single pillow. The only thing that would be fit to occupy this room would be my mind, and my mind would be exquisitely made up, like the bed. I would dress differently, a new, convent-inspired wardrobe of blouses and long skirts. I would take on an attractive plainness with my pale lips and my dark eyes, which would always be strained from reading. Perhaps I would become nearsighted and need glasses. The thought excited me.

  We were married in his backyard, on a little postage stamp of grass. The guests sat in tall, upright chairs dragged out from the dining room. Others sat in lawn chairs and one took the swivel chair from his father’s office and rolled it across the grass. It had only been ten years ago that Eli and I had stood outside in that very spot, putting on a play for his parents, dressed in his parents’ clothes. All that I could remember about the play was that we were supposed to be very old. This was conveyed on his part by a bowler hat and on mine by a kerchief tied below my chin. I had also worn his mother’s blue sundress, which was long and straight beneath large shoulder pads and had made me look like a stack of books. Afterward, I had snipped out the shoulder pads with shears, not knowing that in ten years I would be performing the same surgery on my mother-in-law’s wedding dress. There was something so potent about that dress, with its pearl neckline and its stiff basque waist. It reminded me of a museum that I had been to once, which held drawerfuls of the many small, fatal objects that have caused choking: buttons, bottle caps, fish bones, and pins, so many pins, I recalled. The dress was similar in its gravity; I was still young enough to believe that the dress was a product of certainty, that it carried the same weight as a medal or a weapon. I still believed that the older generations lived more solidly, with more integrity. They found lovers with intrinsic wisdom. They had all the babies that they were fated to have. It seemed that I was the only person in the world whose life was ruled by chance. Every decision that I made seemed accidental—not that it was wrong, but extremely shaky, as if I had only just teetered into place.