Big Mouth & Ugly Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “Is it your knee?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Ursula.” Mom touched my hair, and I shrank from her. She pulled up my sleeve, and I almost shoved her away. “Are those bruises, Ursula?”

  “Nope.”

  “What are they, then?”

  “Dirt.”

  This made Lisa giggle. I laughed too. Ugly Girl had a loud harsh laugh that didn’t invite you to join in.

  Mom started fussing over me. I said, “I’m going to eat in my room. I’ve got a lot of reading to do for tomorrow.”

  “Ursula, you are not going to eat in your room. You’re going to eat with us.”

  “You’re not eating, are you?”

  “I am. I’ll sit with you. Please.”

  “‘Please’—what?”

  “Don’t be rude, Ursula. I’m very tired, and—”

  “Mom, what’s ‘rude’ about having a lot of homework to do? It’s Civil War history. I didn’t choose it.”

  Lisa giggled again. Mom was staring at me with these tragic eyes that looked watery and not-young. “Ursula, I told you I was sorry about missing your game, but my schedule is so—complicated. With your father away so much, and maintaining this house, my life—”

  I hated Mom talking this way. Especially in front of Lisa. You don’t want your mom to plead with you. I remembered hearing this sound in her voice, like a stricken bird, last summer in Nantucket. We have a big old white-shingled house there on the water and Dad flies up on Thursdays and stays till Sunday evenings in August. This time I was thinking of, Dad had just arrived from the airport, and he and Mom were together in their bedroom and the door was shut and I wasn’t listening but I heard the voices, something in her voice, the pleading sound, abject and yet coercive, and Dad’s deeper voice, meant to reassure. I was so scared suddenly. Don’t leave us, Dad. Not yet. Daddy, please.

  Bonnie LeMoyne’s father left them, two years ago. Bonnie swallowed twenty capsules of her mother’s barbiturates and called me on the phone and I came over and made her puke the mess up into the toilet. Chalky-white glop and Diet Pepsi that, I swear, still had some fizzle. That was Bonnie and Ugly Girl’s secret together—no one else knew.

  Ugly Girl would never overdose on barbiturates. Or Diet Pepsi.

  If Ugly Girl did, you can be sure she’d never lose her courage and telephone a friend.

  I gave in and ate downstairs. Lisa lit candles on the dining-room table. Mom sat with us, picking at her tofu and rice and saying how delicious it was. She’d poured a glass of wine and was sipping it slowly. Dad was expected home, she said, around eight—or eight thirty—but who knew? He might call, or might not. It was Dad’s schedule, his life that was complicated; Mom’s life was just busy.

  I’d made Lisa promise not to say anything to Mom about the TV news, and I was surprised—Lisa kept her promise. Or maybe she’d just forgotten? I knew Mom would find out soon, and I didn’t want to talk about it with her. While we were eating, I mentioned maybe I’d be quitting the basketball team, and both Lisa and Mom reacted with disappointment. “Oh, Ursula!” Lisa said. “Don’t quit, you’re so good.”

  My kid sister’s eyes were so beautiful, warm and dark and fine-lashed like a doll’s eyes, that sometimes it was hard for Ugly Girl to be jealous of her.

  “Ursula! Come here!”

  Mom called me downstairs. It was the ten-o’clock news, another station. This time a male broadcaster with a toupee like a flat black pancake fixed over his head was saying gravely that Rocky River police were “not yet releasing the identity of a Rocky River High School student who allegedly threatened to bomb the school and massacre hundreds of his fellow classmates and teachers.” Cut to a very harassed-looking Mr. Parrish backing away, amid snow flurries, from an aggressive reporter shoving a microphone into his face. Mr. Parrish said, with as much dignity as he could muster, “I said—I have no comment at this time.” Cut to a Rocky River plainclothes detective frowning into the camera. “The alleged incident is being investigated. No, no arrests have been made.” Cut to the broadcaster in his studio, with an insert of the facade of Rocky River High in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. “It’s believed that a fifteen-year-old student at the high school has been suspended from classes pending a thorough investigation. At the present time it isn’t known if the boy has a juvenile record or a psychiatric history or even if he was conspiring with others in the alleged plot. And now—” Cut to Manhattan, the facade of City Hall.

  “This is so wrong. My God, this is so crazy, and so wrong.”

  Mom was all agitated, as I knew she’d be. Asking if I knew about this. If the school had been “evacuated.” I told her it was nothing but a rumor. “Then you know about it, Ursula?”

  “No! I mean—I know about the rumor.”

  “How do you know it’s only a rumor?”

  Because I was there, I was a witness.

  I ran my hands through my hair, leaving it spiky. Lisa was still up, in her pajamas, staring at me wide-eyed. Dad hadn’t come home yet, evidently. I hoped for Mom’s sake that he’d called in, but I didn’t remember hearing the phone ring. I started back upstairs, and Mom called after me, “Ursula! What do you know about this? Do you know the boy?”

  It was too complicated to get into with Mom. She’d been drinking, I could tell. Her skin flushed and a look about her lower face like it was soft bread dough, sagging.

  I shut the door to my room and locked it. Mom followed me and knocked on the door. “Ursula? What are you doing? Please—” I knew after a few minutes she’d get discouraged, if I didn’t fall into the trap of exchanging shouts with her through the door.

  I was trembling, the TV news had made me so pissed. Not a bit of it was true—I’d heard exactly what Matt Donaghy had said in the cafeteria, and I’d seen what he’d done. It must be a nightmare for him, I thought.

  I wanted to call him but had trouble finding the right Donaghys in the phone book. I didn’t know his father’s name or where they lived. At the first number I called, there was a busy signal. The phone must’ve been off the hook. The next number I called, a surly character answered—“If this is another goddamned reporter, you have the wrong number.” The receiver was slammed down hard.

  I tried the last two Donaghys and got only answering machines. I hung up.

  Sure, I knew this was “impulsive” behavior. My mom—and also my dad—were always warning me not to behave “impulsively.” But I knew what I had to do, and I was going to do it, which is Ugly Girl’s way, so I looked up Russ Mercer’s phone number in the directory, and called him, and the phone just rang; and I looked up Cal Carter, and no luck. It was like Matt Donaghy’s friends had all disappeared. I hated that guy Skeet—squirmy, smirky little creep who rolled his eyes at girls when he thought they couldn’t see and, behind Ugly Girl’s back (so the jerk thought), made lewd female-figure gestures with his hands. So I couldn’t call Skeet, for sure. But I got along really well with Matt’s friend Denis Wheeler, who was in my biology class, so I called Denis, and thank God he answered, sounding nervous, and he didn’t want to talk about Matt (like he’d been warned against it, by his parents maybe?) but he was nice enough to give me Matt’s e-mail address so I e-mailed this message:

  Thurs 1/25/01 10:23 PM

  dear matt—

  please call me, its urgent.

  your classmate URSULA RIGGS

  I left my number and at ten forty-seven P.M. the phone rang.

  SEVEN

  URSULA RIGGS! THIS HAD TO BE A JOKE.

  One of Matt’s friends, pretending to be URSULA RIGGS.

  None of the guys he’d e-mailed had answered him yet. Not one.

  Maybe this was Skeet’s way of answering? Skeet had a weird sense of humor, sometimes cruel. . . . On this nightmare day, Matt figured anything could happen to him. He’d never even been told who his accusers were. He’d been suspended from school for “at least three days, pending a thorough investigation.”
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  Like Matt had AIDS. Some kind of airborne AIDS that was contagious by just being in the same room with one so afflicted.

  Matt’s mother and Mr. Leacock had protested. But Mr. Parrish’s decision was final. A three-day suspension—minimum. But my son has done nothing wrong. Not a thing wrong! Pending a thorough investigation. But Matthew is the one who’s been wronged. This is so unfair!

  Hearing he’d been suspended, Matt had come close to bursting into tears.

  Police would sift through “evidence.” Matt Donaghy’s academic and personal files at Rocky River High. His IQ score. (What was Matt’s IQ? Somewhere around 135. There were brainy kids at Rocky River whose IQs were way beyond that.) His “psychological” profile. They would interview his teachers, and his friends. They would interview classmates who weren’t his friends. They would examine his satirical-humor columns for the student newspaper, and they had in their possession (Matt had given them a copy, disgusted) the play manuscript William Wilson: A Case of Mistaken Identity. Matt winced to think of strangers reading his silly, sophomoric sketch, highlighting with Magic Markers the passages that were “violent.”

  And if they read the Edgar Allan Poe story, they would think—what? This kid is psychotic. This kid is really, really sick.

  At the police station Matt came to understand why a person in custody, though innocent, suddenly “confesses.”

  He understood why a person in custody, in the presence of police officers he knows to be armed, suddenly goes crazy and starts to fight them.

  Or runs from them. Like a panicked animal, desperate to escape.

  Even with his mother present, and his attorney, and the well-intentioned woman from Family Court, Matt had come close to breaking down in the interrogation room. Shouting in their faces—“Yes! I do want to murder you all.” Attacking the detective who was asking most of the questions, trying to strangle him, trying to wrestle his gun away from him. Like a movie scene it would be, so fast, and Matt would manage to shoot the bastard even as he was himself shot, riddled with bullets. Dying in a pool of warm blood on the dirty floor.

  Anything to escape their questions. To say No more!

  Instead, he’d jammed his fingers against his mouth to keep from crying.

  He’d halfway thought, at first, back at the high school, that this was some wild comical adventure he could write about for the paper, and entertain his friends with. Girls would be impressed, wide-eyed. But now he knew: They’d never understand.

  He would never be able to express to another person the weakness he was feeling, and the rage.

  At home, he’d quickly e-mailed Russ, Skeet, Cal, and Neil. And not one of them had answered.

  He’d e-mailed Russ and Skeet a second time.

  Hey guys: where’re you hiding?

  You can come out. All clear.

  And, to Russ, a third time.

  Russ, it’s OK. I mean, I think it is.

  Could you call? Thanks!

  But Russ hadn’t answered.

  (At least not yet.)

  And now there glimmered on his computer screen this message from URSULA RIGGS that was possibly a joke?

  If it was a joke of Skeet’s, the number would be Ursula’s actual number. Leave it to Skeet to see to details like that.

  He couldn’t take a chance, though. Couldn’t call her.

  Ursula Riggs. It would be ironic if, out of the whole school, of Matt’s numerous friends and acquaintances and classmates, only Ursula Riggs, whom he scarcely knew, was contacting him.

  But no: It was Skeet.

  Had to be Skeet . . .

  “Damn you, Skeet.”

  Matt resented it that Skeet wasn’t in trouble too. Skeet had been the one to egg Matt on. If Skeet hadn’t been there in the cafeteria, and the other guys looking to Matt for laughs, none of this crap would have happened.

  It was like, that time when Matt was twelve, he’d dived from a high board at the community pool without knowing what the hell he was doing, only that the guys were there grinning up at him, and Matt was clowning around for them as usual. He’d struck the surface of the water with a slap that left his chest and belly raw-red afterward, and somehow his nose was bleeding. He’d smacked his nose against his knees?

  Even after they saw Matt’s nose bleeding, the guys laughed.

  And another time, doing a handstand on a step, a marble step in a flight of stairs at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where their eighth-grade science class had been taken on a field trip. Crazy! Matt might have broken his neck, his back. Might be in a wheelchair for life.

  Would the guys want to have lunch with him in the cafeteria, in his wheelchair? Would they come visit him at home?

  Or that summer he’d turned into a skateboard freak. Gliding in and out of traffic near the mall until a cop caught him and gave him hell and brought him home to his mom. He’d been fourteen, and knew better. And he couldn’t blame any of the guys for that.

  “You could be killed, Matt!” Mom cried reproachfully. “Don’t you care?”

  Maybe he hadn’t. Or maybe he’d needed to impress his friends.

  Now Matt’s dog, Pumpkin, a golden retriever, was nudging her head, her damp cold nose, against Matt’s hands. She knew. She knew something was wrong. She worried when Matt didn’t come directly home from school, and today he’d been gone for hours. She’d heard Matt on the phone with his dad for an hour and forty minutes. Before that she’d heard the raised voices as they’d come into the house from the garage, Matt and his mom.

  Pumpkin had heard Matt’s brother, Alex, asking in a scared voice what was wrong. Alex had been alone and had turned on the news. . . . “What’s going on at your school, Matt? Is this guy somebody you know?” Alex had looked both frightened and excited, and Matt had shouted at him, “Fucking no. Fucking mind your own business.”

  Mom was on him then for that, using “the f word” in her hearing.

  And for shouting at his brother—“Matt, you should be ashamed. You of all people.”

  What did that mean?

  You of all people. We expect better of you, Matt.

  Next, Matt had to speak with his father on the phone. It couldn’t be avoided. Dad was in a hotel in Atlanta; he’d been scheduled to fly home that evening, but his flight was cancelled due to bad weather. Dad tried to speak calmly to Matt, but Matt could tell he was distraught, anxious.

  Matt noted how his dad, just like his mom, began by asking, in a voice like a tight-strung wire, “Is there—any truth to this charge, Matt?”

  Matt said flatly, “No.”

  Of course, they had to ask. It was a natural instinct.

  Matt sat hunched on his bed. Listening to Dad’s voice, and trying to answer Dad’s rapid-fire questions. Thank God for Pumpkin: He could bury his warm face in her fur. Dad kept wanting to know if his name—“our name”—was in the news yet, and Matt said no, he didn’t think so. “You’re a minor. There’s a law, I think. They can’t release a minor’s name. I think.” Dad sounded as if he was thinking aloud. “. . . what a time for this to happen! I haven’t told you and Alex but . . . I’m in a kind of transitional phase with the company. They’re downsizing my department, and . . .”

  Matt wanted to shove the phone receiver from him. No! He couldn’t bear to hear this. He only half heard, as Dad talked in a rambling, incoherent way. (Had he been drinking? Maybe.) Away in the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta he was alternately dazed, angry, disbelieving, optimistic. “Don’t worry, Matt. You’re the wronged party here. We’ll see that justice is done.”

  Sure, Dad.

  There was an awkward pause before they hung up. Matt thought his father was going to ask him again if there was “any truth” to the charge, but finally Dad said, embarrassed, “Hey. I love you. You and Alex, my big guys. You know that, right?”

  Matt mumbled, “Yeah. Thanks, Dad.”

  “Hey Pumpkin. You know I’m not a psycho, don’t you?”

  Pumpkin, rescued from an animal shelter
when she was six weeks old, was now seven years old, with a thick torso but a beautiful wavy golden-russet coat and a dog’s sympathetic dark-brown shiny eyes; she snuggled against Matt and assured him: She knew.

  Even if Matt was a psycho, Pumpkin loved him anyway.

  Pumpkin had been Matt’s dog from the start. He’d promised his parents that he would housebreak her and train her, and he had. (His parents were impressed.) To Matt, Pumpkin would always be a puppy rolling over on her back in an ecstasy of being tickled by Matt alone.

  “What do you think, Pumpkin? This ‘URSULA RIGGS’—is it a joke, or real?”

  Pumpkin’s tail thumped tentatively. She’d give it a try, sure!

  One thing Matt loved about Pumpkin: She was optimistic.

  Please call me, its urgent.

  It had to be about the trouble Matt was in, of course. Maybe Ursula Riggs was one of the anonymous “witnesses” who’d reported him to Mr. Parrish? But no: not Ursula. That big-boned brash girl with flyaway dark-blond hair and studs in her ears like chips of broken glass and the soiled Mets cap on her head and the frank insolent blue-eyed stare. If you looked at Big Ursula, Big Ursula looked at you right back. She’d stare down any guy, or guys. Matt had to admire a girl like Ursula, though she made him uneasy, self-conscious.

  No. Ursula wouldn’t report anyone to any authorities; she was an anarchist by nature. Matt knew: He’d have liked to be an anarchist himself.

  Instead he’d been a good boy. Dutiful, polite, only just pretending to be rebellious with his “humor.” His instinct was to brownnose any adult in authority. And where had it gotten him? Suspended for three days. Minimum.

  Twice Matt dialed the number Ursula had given him and twice he hung up quickly before the phone could ring. So damned shy. The third time he dialed, he let the phone ring and it was answered at once. “Hello?” The girl’s voice was husky, guarded.

  “Hi, this is . . . Matt. Is this Ursula?”