The Terrible Girls

by Rebecca Brown

  To call a thing a private thing was one of your favorite methods of denial.

  I heard you plop down on the ground and cry.

  Do you know what will happen to me if he figures out I come here?

  Yes, I answered. Also like a Father, I know everything.

  I wouldn’t have brought it back if I thought you’d tell, you pouted.

  Well …

  Through the crack in the door I saw you lift your head because you thought you detected some crack in my resolve.

  No one will find it here.

  You sighed in relief.

  I’ve sent it back to you.

  What! You leapt up.

  In exchange for letting her use the xerox to make some trendy collage stationery, the flashlight and umbrella girl had not only agreed to help me put the flyers up all over town, the way the old gang used to do, but also to drag the bag back to your place.

  But I don’t want it now.

  You wanted it enough to steal it once, I snapped. I didn’t sound like your Daddy anymore.

  I can’t keep it, you mumbled.

  You should have thought of that before.

  You never thought of anything before.

  You ran home as fast as your ridiculous little shoes would carry you. You found it where you knew I’d have left it – your bed. You dragged it out. You couldn’t leave it where so many different people could come across it. You had to hide it where no one could get it without your knowing. You hid it on your person. You tied it to your body underneath your skirts.

  I saw you pick it up and press the sturdy, leather-like material next to your skin and I saw you tie the cord that tied the top of it together to your body. I saw you suck your gut in to accommodate the bulk and I saw your trembling lower lip as you were thinking how unfair, how unkind of me to not allow it back. I saw you tie the knot around yourself and pull it tight. I saw you think that if you held it close to you, as close as skin, no one would see. I saw you turn and preen before the mirrors in your room so you’d discover which positions hid it best. I saw you bite your nails when you wondered how you’d hide it from Lord B. Then shake your head and exhale quickly as you remembered how single-minded and otherwise unaware he was when you performed your duties: he probably wouldn’t notice what you removed from underneath your skirt as long as you removed it quickly. I saw you press it and try to shape it to fit the contours of your body. And though you hid it well still it was heavy.

  When you first left I dreamt you would come back. I dreamt and I imagined, every day and every night when I was herded down to work, that you’d come back. I dreamt that you had not done what you’d done. Or then I dreamt that you had done it, but had changed, no really, truly changed, and that your coming back was good and final. I dreamt that you returned and you were strong and true, immovable, a saint who was made pure by true repentance.

  But after you stayed gone for long, when I imagined you back at the door, I saw you shamed, I saw you low and begging to be let in. The upright figure I saw in those dreams was me. I stood at the door and opened it and held my head up proudly, and when you saw the essence of the noble, heroic, unbroken spirit in me, you felt such remorse for what you’d done you fell down on your knees and wept. This scene continued as I leaned down to you, magnanimous and saintly, and I, of all us poor, unfortunate and horribly mistreated girls, held out my holy hand to you and took the bag you’d crawled back with and let you in.

  But that’s what I dreamt long ago.

  You came to me at night. I worked the day shift. Not that it mattered. The hours we worked, whether night or day, meant we were waking up in the dark and returning home after dark again. When it was time for our shift we were summoned by their lights and by the clattering of hooves. We leapt up from our mats and stumbled to the ghetto gate where the horseguards herded us. They made us keep our heads bowed low as they corralled us to the mines. They sat on their horses and prodded us. They snapped their whips in the chilly air. Sometimes one of us didn’t move quick enough or fell and was trampled. When we got inside the pit-head they handed us shovels and axes and ropes and bags. They packed us in the metal cage and sent us down. It was long and dark and rattly going down. There was always the fear that the cable would break and send us hurtling to the bottom of the hole. Some of us kept our eyes closed to try to snatch some sleep as we descended. I looked out at the hollow shaft while we were being sucked down. There were two guards on the elevator. They wore lights on their helmets and when they talked to one another those lights bobbed. When they stared at us the lights shone in our eyes and we saw spots of light and impossible color. By those small lights sometimes I saw the hard column around us, the shiny black seams and powdery dull grey patches, sometimes an illusion of something wet or red or moving or alive.

  They stopped the cage and pushed us out into the seams. We worked in pairs; one of us dug at the earth while her partner collected the chunks. The chunks had to be solid and of a certain size, the chips and dust were useless. The partner collected the chunks in a bag and when the bag was full she carried the bag to a cart and poured the contents in the cart which went to the surface. It took years to work a seam, to gouge it out.

  When the inside had been hacked away, the openings were supposed to be filled in and sealed. But some of them weren’t, and sometimes when we were ascending in the cage at the end of the shift, we’d notice there were fewer of us on the way back up; some misbehaving or provocative or merely ordinary girl had been had in an abandoned seam. Though actually what was done unto the girls by guards occurred more often above than down below. And some girls, figuring their odds were better beneath the ground, chose to stay down there. And eventually, like the eyeless horses bred underground, they lost the desire, then the ability to see.

  The ones of us who did come up again were escorted home in darkness by the guards. There was always the push and always the pressing of our tired, unresisting bodies against each other. The guards let us go at the ghetto gate and gave us a few minutes to scurry back to our huts. Once we were in our huts we were under curfew. We didn’t have lights in our huts. The only lights were theirs. Sometimes when they were making their rounds, they’d shoot their flashlights in to make sure we weren’t moving. We didn’t want to move. We wanted to sleep. But every night we heard the clacking of the hooves. And sometimes in the night we’d hear stampeding. We’d hear the hooves run back and forth over the body of some broken girl who had tried to get out.

  We knew what would happen if we disobeyed. On the other hand, being a good girl didn’t guarantee one’s safety. Sometimes, not because she’d tried to escape, but just because, they’d pick a girl. They’d drag her off her mat and out of her hut and into the street and play with her. After she collapsed they trampled her.

  How different were the rest of us from those who’d stayed beneath the ground and couldn’t see? It took us so long to envision that the way we’d been for so long, the way we had been told was our just lot, could change. One day one girl threw down her shovel. She sat up and wiped the dust from her eyes and threw the chunks she’d gathered against the wall. When the chunks hit the wall and shattered to bits, the girls around her looked up in shock. To break a chunk was wicked and all the girls, especially her partner, were afraid.

  I’m not going to do this anymore. Her voice was matter-of-fact. She stood up, brushing the black dust from her clothes. She raised her voice. You don’t see those bastards down here doing this, do you? But who gets this stuff? Them. I’m not going to —

  She didn’t finish. A couple of guards swooped on her from behind. They threw a cover over her. As they hauled her off we heard her thrash. They don’t live like this, she yelled, Look how they live, Look, Look —

  We heard their boots. Her shouting stopped. We tried not to listen to what the workhorses and guards were doing to her in the abandoned seam, but neither the rattle of the carts, nor the sounds of our clawing and scraping, could drown out the noise of the hooves.

/>   We shifted around to fill in for her. We hoped we would forget what we had witnessed. For a while we tried to think of her as crazy, an aberration. But no matter how hard we tried to make excuses for her act we couldn’t convince ourselves she was wrong. On the contrary, we started whispering to one another she’d made sense.

  When we were being shoved to work, we started to lift our eyes and glimpse, in the openings between the tenements, the brightness of the streets beyond. We saw convertibles and bronze skinned people having drinks beneath Cinzano umbrellas at riverside cafés. We saw a blue bright shiny river. We realized the popping sounds we’d heard from there weren’t sounds of work, but champagne corks. They were having all-night parties. Even the horses on the other side weren’t guarding; they were cruising. The only things they worked on were their tans. Beyond the ghetto where we worked like curs, those lazy, lying bastards led the good life.

  Our whispering turned to rumbling. And when Lord Bountiful, ever-wise padrone, sensed an eruption brewing underground, he took preventative measures. Lord Bountiful’s guards explained to us that though the plight of poor unfortunate working girls was natural, Lord Bountiful, in his enlightened mercy, would initiate reforms on our behalf. These promises appeased us until we saw they were merely cosmetic. Lord Bountiful launched Bountiful Times, a propaganda organ designed to educate us about how our lives were getting better under him. But the social service improvement programs the paper announced never got further than front page photo opportunities. We got pissed off.

  But how could we resist? How could we fight their rifles and machine guns, their horses and money and nukes?

  One evening when the elevator came to bring us up, some of us didn’t go. We stayed below the ground and when the guards were escorting the day shift home, we raided the upper rooms. A couple of old girls had volunteered to divert the guards in the street. They started talking out loud and talking back. They said the things the crazy girl had. The guards responded eagerly. While these girls let themselves be trampled, we carted off a generator and a printer and a copier, and cases of paper and an old Sears manual typewriter from Shipping and Receiving. While the horseguards ground those sacrificial girls to bits, we set up shop as the underground resistance.

  We chose a particularly shabby hut at the end of a far-away alley. We worked there all night. The next day the world had suddenly turned spring. On the route to work the hitching posts and fence posts and the walls and gutters were flowering. The buds were flyers that showed our mutilated, hoof-marked dead. The breeze that rustled through the streets seemed to tell the names of who’d been had and whisper their terrible secrets. The awful spring recurred each morning after that. Each morning all the mining girls and the big-stick toting, leather-booted horseguards saw the evidence of who had disappeared beneath Lord Bountiful’s regime. The news was spread so thick no one could anymore deny the truth.

  Each night the underground resistance met. We snuck to the hut to record the atrocities. We xeroxed photos of the hoofed. We were not shy. We didn’t mince. The few of us who dared to risk the streets all night slipped out through a back window, packs and pockets stuffed with posters and tape. Slipped thousands of copies to other huts and hung news from posts and taped it to walls and folded it into paper airplanes and flew it over the walls to the part of the city where Lord Bountiful and his fat-cat hoodlums lived.

  Sometimes the girls who snuck out to take the word around did not come back. After a couple days we’d find what was left of her – her ass and mouth stuffed full, her arm cut off, her eyes gouged out, a copy of the news speared to her chest, her bloody remnants ground by horses’ hooves. Sometimes they’d hang her carcass over the ghetto gate to remind us what awaited the resistance.

  But each girl who was sacrificed made the rest of us more sure of our commitment. We knew that given their arms an open rebellion would be suicide, but we did the things we thought we could get away with. Our tiny acts of sabotage – the few chunks we stole home with us, the padding of the carts with dust, the pee in the cans of lighter fluid – were merely irritations to them, but they meant a lot to us. We liked seeing them made helpless by the simplest things. We liked revealing that the things they’d always called petty, not worth the bother, were in fact the things they couldn’t handle. They were not only lying, lazy bastards, they were also incompetent boobs.

  How could you have joined them, Lady B?

  Apparently very easily.

  It wasn’t that you had greater things in mind. No, greater things we would have forgiven. If you had said, It’s hopeless, girls, I’m jumping ship, we would have understood. If you had told us you’d come to believe we were wrong or wicked or unnatural, we would have respected your opinion. If you had said you were embarrassed. Or tired. Or if you’d admitted you just felt like a change of air. If you had told us anything at all, we would have agreed to disagree. Unlike yourself, the rest of us actually believed what we said about self-determination, right to choose, and even, heaven help our innocence, allowing one another space.

  But you didn’t have the decency to tell us.

  I remember the night you left. I remember how slowly I reacted because I couldn’t believe you were doing what you did.

  All of us resistance girls were working, as we did each night, in this small hut where you and I once lived. We were all intent upon our tasks. There was so much bustle and activity we didn’t notice you. You were supposed to be printing some oversize posters and stacking them on the bench next to me. (We always worked together, you and I. We knew each other’s moves by heart.) I was cropping some photos. I was good at knowing what details of a picture were true and what were decoration. Only when I noticed the stack wasn’t getting bigger did I see you weren’t working. I was flustered; always before I had sensed when you were near and when you weren’t. But the night you left, this extra sense in me broke down. I saw some movement in the corner where we kept our mat. It was you, bending over and moving as quick and evasive as a rat. You were putting something in my bag.

  I was so surprised I said outloud, What are you doing?

  The girls around me shushed me. We never spoke outloud. We had to avoid making any sounds that might give us away to them.

  Ssssh, you joined our comrades in silencing me.

  They turned back to their work and didn’t watch you.

  I dropped my work and hurried to you. You were filling my bag.

  What are you doing? I whispered.

  You hid the bag behind you.

  Nothing, you lied. You were never a very creative liar.

  What are you doing with my stuff? I nodded at the bag.

  Your pretty brown eyes got as wide as an innocent baby’s.

  What are you —

  The girls turned around to shush me again. You put your fingers to your lips to tell me, Ssssh.

  When I was quiet you started walking to the door.

  No one went out the door at night. Opening the door would let the light and noise of our machines out in the street and alert the guards.

  You can’t go out, I whispered.

  But you kept walking. I could feel your body pulling away; the band between us was pulling tight and thin. When you put your hands up to open the door I screamed. Don’t leave me!

  You flung the door open and ran. I started to run after you but a girl grabbed me. She slapped her hands over my mouth. Another girl slammed the door and others cut the lights and machines. I was thrashing around in my comrade’s arms.

  They’ll get her! I yelled.

  Settle down, said a girl who held me down. If they don’t find us by the commotion of the machines, they’ll hear your screaming.

  But what’ll happen to her?

  She’ll be all right, they mumbled.

  She’s got my bag. What’ll happen to my stuff?

  Don’t think about that now, she said. None of the others would answer me. In a few minutes they slumped back to their tables and started the printers and copiers again to
get back to work. Though I kept asking what would happen to you, they wouldn’t answer me.

  I wanted there to be a reason for what you did. I wanted someone to tell me you were doing something right.

  But no one did.

  We tried hard not to think of you. But I couldn’t stop worrying about what they’d do to you. I couldn’t put out the picture in my mind of you, and how you’d be when they found you.

  Then one day, on the way to the mines, while glancing up to see our last night’s posters, I saw, in the slice of the other part of town that was visible through the crack between our tenements, sitting up on the back of a gaudy Cadillac convertible, in a shiny, strapless slinky bright red dress – you.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I believed I was mistaken. I believed I was bad for having imagined such a wicked sight. When I told the girls they shook their heads or hurried away or mumbled how I was suffering.

  But a few days later, someone waiting for the last elevator load down saw, through one of the control room windows where the guards kept watch, Lord Bountiful himself. He was giving a personally guided tour of his productive mines to his special guest. His special guest wore a pillbox hat. His special guest was you.

  The horrible fate I’d feared for you would have been a better fate than what you sought. I couldn’t anymore deny the reason you had left. You left us without honor.

  Those of us who’d been with you the night you left remembered what we’d repressed about your leaving. How brazenly, how easily you’d stolen away. The tawdry truth of what you’d done discouraged some of us. Some of us lay down in the street to await the hooves. But some who had been close to you, who’d shared the greater passion of our cause, tried to keep the fact of your defection from escaping. For a while we considered fabricating the story of a martyr’s death for you, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to dishonor our true martyrs by naming you among them. We hoped the memory of you, like you, would leave us easily.

  But the story of what you had done, like any tale of the perverse, spread rapidly. You were the example of the riches of betrayal. Some who heard what you had done used you as proof that the efforts of the underground would never pay off. They argued that you showed that no one, surely never us, could change or diminish the power of Lord Bountiful. Others chided what they called the waste of energy on manifestoes and statements and declarations. Some began to advocate the Second Wave, the New Realism, suggesting the horseguards weren’t really all that bad, we just needed to re-evaluate our interpretation of what they did. And how were we to re-interpret the beatings and the tramplings and abuse? That the guards like us, were merely fulfilling natural urges and natural divisions of labor within society. And these unnaturally brainwashed girls said we needed to stop being so strident and so obsessed with the past, and learn to accept our lot in life; i.e., they wanted us to all lie down and take it. It was hard to argue with them; they didn’t consider it natural for us to argue.