Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry Page 14

  “Just keeping a lookout,” he said.

  Meanwhile, someone was beating up June, too. It started with bruises on the pale skin of her upper arms, which made me feel, I’m sorry to say, good—I had the same marks bestowed on me by Annette and by June herself when I beat her at a board game. One day, though, she had a black eye; another, a split lip.

  “What happened,” I asked.

  “You know,” she said. Such an answer always stopped me, because I felt I should know; I had once been smart and known things. Now I didn’t.

  June found a copy of Valley of the Dolls upstairs in Annette’s room, and I decided that was how she’d come by her injuries—Annette had figured out who had taken it, but stubborn June had refused to confess. The spine was worn at the dirtiest parts before we ever got our hands on it; all we had to do was let it fall open. We especially liked a scene that took place in a swimming pool.

  “Listen,” June would say. In a high voice, she said, “‘Oh Ted, not in the water, don’t,’” then, gruffly, “‘Why not. We’ve done it every other way.’”

  It was that line that grabbed at my stomach. Every other way. I couldn’t imagine many other ways—truth be told, if it hadn’t been for Valley of the Dolls, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine one. I knew the physical details, but I had no notion that most people did such things lying down. That information was not part of my mother’s informative talks: and then the man puts this here, as if he were replacing a quart of milk in an empty fridge.

  One day, after June had read that scene out loud three times, she said: “We could do that.”

  “We don’t have a swimming pool,” I said cautiously.

  “No duh,” she said. “Come here.”

  I followed her to the bedroom she shared with her mother, who was upstairs visiting her parents. Through the small window, the sunset looked like June’s black eye. I could see my father smoking on the porch, scanning the street. June flicked on the overhead light. The dresser drawers were missing half their pulls; Terry’s bed was a jumble of sheets and huge nylon underpants. June’s cot had been folded up and tucked in a corner.

  She crawled into her mother’s bed. “Okay. I’m the girl and you’re the man.”

  “I don’t want to be the man,” I said. In the games of play that I knew, the best parts were always female.

  She stretched out on her back. “Get on me.”

  “Sit on you?”

  “Sit here,” she said, and touched the front pockets of her shorts. I climbed onto her and rested, side-saddle; she took one of my ankles and spun me so that I was straddling her.

  “Now,” she said. “Pretend you’re madly in love with me.”

  “How?”

  She bucked me with her hips. I was so small I nearly bounced off her, but I felt too big. Big enough to hurt her just with my weight, too close to the ceiling, getting bigger all the time. I hated it, I said, “I don’t want to play.”

  “We’re having sex,” said June.

  “We are not. I’m not that dumb.”

  “Okay, we’re pretending. Go on.”

  “I don’t know how,” I told her.

  “Yes you do.”

  I looked at her stupidly, empty of questions.

  She sighed, the way she did when she explained anything—cowlicks, kickball—that escaped me.

  “Okay. Get off and lie down.”

  I did, and she climbed on me.

  “You’re so pretty,” she said. For a minute I thought maybe she meant it—she said it in her usual angry tone—but I saw her dreamy face and understood she was pretending.

  “Turn off the light,” I whispered.

  She said, “I want to see you.” That was a line from Valley of the Dolls, and I knew she said it to win me over. But her eyes were closed, the good one and the black one, which was turning into stripes of color. I managed to reach over to snap off the lamp, which only made the light from the living room brighter.

  “Shut the door,” I said.

  “Nobody’s here.” She spread her hands on the air and moved them awhile. I thought she was casting a spell. Then she said, “You have great big boobies.”

  I laughed out loud. She tried to open her black eye, but couldn’t raise the lid fully or angrily enough, so she closed it and rearranged her hips, still sitting up. Suddenly she lay down on top of me, our hips aligned, legs touching the length, though my toes were up against her shins. She stuck her face in mine—and sometimes, still, when I kiss a man, it’s June’s face I see, and it seems a pity that everyone looks so similar close up, but now it’s obvious I’m stalling, because it’s not true. She was a little girl with a crusty lip and a bruised face, her eyes tight, which I thought must have hurt. She swished her hips a little.

  “June,” I said, my stomach jumping. All the time I’d been in Boston, I felt dumb, because there were so many things I didn’t know. Before, I was cocky and assumed I’d always owned my knowledge: I remembered the lessons but not the teacher. Suddenly, I realized, some things you must be taught.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “You know,” she said.

  “I don’t. Tell me.”

  “Brian,” she whispered in my ear. “He’ll show you, too, if you want. He told me not to tell anybody else, but I bet he would.”

  I was quiet and horrified. Annette’s greasy boyfriend. I hadn’t ever heard him say anything; I’d thought of him as harmless, maybe the only harmless person in the whole house.

  June opened her eyes, the good one as narrow as the bad. “I think,” she said, “I think we should take our clothes off.”

  I’d never heard June say anything tentatively. It made me brave.

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  She still had me pinned. “Phoebe,” she said. It was not the Man talking to the Girl; it was just June, lonely in the dark. I reached up and touched her hair and felt another scratch beneath. I whispered, “I don’t want to do this.”

  She rolled off me and snorted. “Shoulda known,” she said, back to old June. Then she sat up and combed her hair with her fingers. She was wearing a red tank top, and when she let her arm drop, one strap slid down her shoulder.

  “What’s your father looking for?” she asked, nodding toward the window.

  I got up and started for the bedroom door. “I don’t know. Whoever’s doing the stuff to the cars and houses.”

  “Well,” she said, hitching up her top, looking at me for just a second, “he’ll never catch me.”

  I tried to get her eye again without saying anything, but couldn’t. When I said, “June,” she did look up at me, and stared, and rubbed her shoulder, and we both understood that this was a threat. Nothing more could be said.

  When I went out the front door, Brian and Annette were drinking on the porch. I stood in the doorway, hating them.

  “Hey Feeble,” said Annette. “Shithead. Having fun?”

  I was going so fast my foot didn’t even touch her outstretched leg.

  In bed that night, I touched my hips where June’s hips had been. I didn’t want to think about that afternoon, because every time I did, I wondered if Brian and Annette had been peering through the window, watching us. Sometimes I thought: maybe they didn’t see. Sometimes I thought: thank God I didn’t take off my clothes. I did not think of June and what she had said about my father not catching her: thinking about it risked telling; telling meant terrible danger for me, I was sure.

  In the morning we heard that three of the neighborhood cats had been killed, each one strangled with twine.

  My father’s vigilance was not paying off; my mother thought his worry was silly. Still, Dad took to sleeping on the sofa, hoping to hear footsteps in the night. A ridiculous hope, since he slept heavily, noisy himself. When I went out that night in my pajamas, he didn’t even move.

  I had never been outside by myself so late. I could hear a car whooshing down the busy street at the end of the block and then just some faint clicking, s
treetlights or electrical lines. Even Mac’s was closed now, I knew—and they were only closed four hours of every day, 1 A.M. to 5. Nobody’s lights were on. The street, at least, was asleep.

  I took a crowbar from the Friels’ parking lot, crept partway down the street, and started swinging. Puny me, I couldn’t lift the bar to reach the newly repaired windshields, rearview mirrors: I went right for the bodies of the cars, and the bar was heavy enough to leave deep dents, the paint flecked off in the middle. My arms got tired after a few cars, and I left the crowbar in the gutter.

  Did June feel like this? I threw a handful of rocks at a car; they clattered to the ground without effect. The truth was I didn’t know exactly what I felt. June has been keeping secrets, I know I thought that much. At the same time, I was furious at her for letting me know, for giving me a secret, too. I pushed at a side-view mirror with my bare hands, punched at it with the heel of my palm. Not a thing. June was better at this than I was, better even at this. I kicked a chain-link fence and listened to it shiver.

  As I leaned on the fence, trying to pull it out of shape, I wondered what would make a person do something like this. There I was doing it, and I still didn’t understand. Maybe if I’d done it more than one night, I would have figured it out, but I was caught, of course, not only by my father but several neighbors and one policeman who, since the cat murders, had decided it was time to patrol the neighborhood.

  I was sent to a battery of psychologists, who thought they understood why I’d admit to everything but the cats. It wasn’t fear for myself or disgust, but a simple love of cats. I didn’t want my parents to forbid me from ever having one.

  I was grounded, of course: less for punishment, more because my parents believed I needed constant love, reprimands, snacks. My mother watched me with sad eyes, sure she was the one who’d caused me to do such despicable things; she thought it was her ambivalence about the new neighborhood that made me so angry at it.

  “Invite your friends over,” she said. “Ask June to come in.”

  But I’d lost June. She would not talk to me or let me come near. Sometimes I’d see her at the end of the street. I’d recognize her right away: no one else stood like June, with her feet wide apart and her hands resting in her back pockets. When I went to look for her, she was gone.

  I took to visiting Terry, June’s mother. She was the only one who treated me as she had before; maybe she expected all kids to go bad eventually. I sat on the porch with her while she drank, and she told me the neighborhood gossip. The old woman who lived across the street made her husband sleep on the porch; the fat girl next door was pregnant. I thought I’d earned it, that I now belonged to the neighborhood and maybe even to this family, and June would come to recognize that. We’d be sisters, the way she’d suggested we might be if my mother left Watertown.

  Finally Terry told me that I shouldn’t hang around so much, because June wouldn’t come home if I were anywhere near the house.

  “She’d stay out all night,” said Terry. “Probably like it fine. But you know, she’s my kid and you got parents and you got a house.”

  I wish I could say that things worked out for June, that I had somehow saved her. But I took blame I was unworthy of and therefore got attention that was likewise not mine: so many people asking me what was wrong, what had moved me, that eventually I felt loved and interesting. This was all rightly June’s. I wasn’t sixteen till I realized she might have needed it; it was some time after that I realized she might not have gotten it anyhow, not the way I did, because of who she was and who I was. Because of who our parents were.

  The next year, she went to the local junior high and I was sent to one across town—“A change of venue,” my father called it—and when we saw each other, we said nothing, hurried into our houses.

  Sometimes I dreamed of moving again, so I could relive the scene I still remembered clearly from Portland: one little girl in the back window of a car, another on the pavement, both crying and making promises. I was sure if I left Watertown June and I could be friends again. But we both continued to grow up on that street, and I went to college and June got pregnant and married. All the old businesses are gone now, the buildings torn down and replaced by Italian restaurants. But when I visit my parents, I still see June, her two children, though her husband is nowhere in evidence. It might be her I see, sitting on the porch in the black night, sipping at the air through a cigarette.

  Secretary of State

  I

  Benny, Fannie, Rosey, Mosey, Abie, Libby, Idy, Sadie, Essie: the Barron brood in descending order of age, my mother, the baby, at the tail end. She could recite the names faster than anybody, until they blurred into a poem, a nursery rhyme, a run of music—Benny to Essie in two seconds flat. It didn’t matter that Uncle Abraham had always been called Bram, never Abie; it didn’t matter that Uncle Mose couldn’t stand that sweet y at the end of his name. She’d race through to hit all of them, each a base that had to be touched. You’d think she was afraid if she forgot to say one name aloud, that brother or sister might disappear or, worse and more likely, find out and take it badly. A sudden knock at the kitchen window, a stern familiar face pressed against the glass.

  They could do anything, these people.

  It wasn’t that my mother married an inventor that bothered them; it was that she didn’t marry Thomas Alva Edison himself. Of course, had Edison come calling for little Essie, her brothers and sisters would have found plenty wrong with him, too.

  True enough, like most inventors, my father was not quite successful. Not a failure in the usual sense, because what he invented frequently worked. My childhood was full of small comforts of his devising: self-turning magazine stands, a never-fail ice cream scoop, furniture that folded up neat as books. Big things, too. As a young man working for Eli Lilly, he invented an anesthetic for heart patients that is still used today, but because he was a salaried chemist, he got neither money nor credit for it. This was seen as a great tragedy among my mother’s family, who thought credit was vital to living. Only my Uncle Ellis—a non-Barron—admired Dad for the pure wonder of the invention. “Whenever I see your father,” Ellis once told me, “I think: this man has saved more lives than anyone I know.”

  Despite my father’s life-saving tendencies, my mother, under the direction of her family, convinced him to quit his chemist’s job. The Barrons, the Aunts and Uncles, voted on everything. What course of action should the U.S. take abroad? What movies deserved to be popular? Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty? Unlike Lyndon Johnson and John Wayne, my father had the good sense to have married into the Barron family, and was therefore obliged to follow their counsel. There are times I thought—still do—that I had ten parents who fell into two camps: my father, and the Barrons. My practical education I got entirely from Dad: how to cook, order airplane tickets by telephone, how to install venetian blinds and rewire a lamp and drive and iron and balance a meal. He taught me the alphabet, algebra, thrift. My mother, on the other hand, filled me with Barron philosophy. Be brave, be recklessly truthful, be smart and funny and entertaining. But the Barrons couldn’t tell me how to do these things, and the skills I inherited from my father were the skills of a modest man.

  Most of the Aunts and Uncles lived near Chicago, near us, where they’d grown up. Only a couple of them scattered—my Uncle Bram was a doctor in Indianapolis; Ben lived in St. Louis; Aunt Libby had married a crazy dentist and moved with him to Vermont. In the minds of the Aunts and Uncles, you’d have to be crazy to live in Vermont. Every now and then, one of them would storm off there for a visit and return with stories of the odd, taciturn inhabitants; primitive and inedible meals; all that green, as if Vermont had been left unattended and had gone bad. “Move all those mountains and trees,” you could hear them tell the natives, “and then we’ll teach you how to make the perfect soft-boiled egg. You’ll be up to snuff in no time.”

  None of my mother’s brothers and sisters had large families—only one or two children, though Li
bby in Vermont had three. No mystery there—though they liked the company of their siblings, I think they each felt short-changed somehow. I imagine each Barron in bed soon after his or her wedding: the new spouse says, “Lots of kids, don’t you think? Let’s have a bunch,” and the Barron, without so much as a romantic pause, says, “Honey, I’m the expert on that. Let’s not.”

  Instead, they stuck with the original big family. They got together every Sunday for what was basically an organized brawl with refreshments. The Aunts and Uncles dressed up in their best, although they were not snappy dressers. They appreciated nice clothes and good bargains, but there was usually something slightly off in the execution—I don’t think my mother ever wore anything that wasn’t a little snug across the bust; skinny Aunt Sadie favored stiff dark skirts that made her look like an umbrella blown wrong by the wind. Uncle Mose’s patterned shirts never quite gave up the squares they’d been folded into in the drawer: he was as relaxed and garish and dizzying as a well-read map.

  My mother was closest to Ida of all her siblings. Aunt Ida was exactly like Mom, but more so. She was heavier, but in the same bosomy, skinny-legged way; her voice cracked constantly in the broad nasal twang that my mother’s only tended toward. She was even more of a worrier and had to say aloud every small fear that crossed my mother’s mind.

  My mother had been Ida’s responsibility when they were children: every older Barron had a younger Barron to take care of. Ida, a fretter even as a child, would once a month get up in the middle of the night and dress my mother before leading her out to the lawn. It wasn’t that she’d smelled smoke, exactly: it was just that she’d remembered a fire was possible.

  Fire was possible, death was possible, a broken nose because of a careless shoelace was downright inevitable. Ida wasn’t a pessimist. Worry was her religion, what if the mantra that kept disaster away. What if and I knew someone once and I just know it. And my mother was Ida’s disciple. On the cold grass those nights as a child, she’d learned. Fire was possible, but there was never a fire. They must be doing something right.