by Cathy Lamb
“Now Tilda’s face goes all red and the other girls in the shop made sure all the dryers are off so it’s quiet. Pretty soon the ladies in the resting room are in there, too, because ladies sniff out fights, like they can sniff out burned marshmallows. Your momma is brandishing not one but two pairs of scissors in her hands, and she starts swinging them around like knives.
“ ‘Tsk-tsk! Marie Elise,’ Tilda says in this squeaky voice because everyone’s glaring at her and you can feel those women’s fury. ‘At any time your girls could have told you, and that would have been that. They could have run away. But they didn’t. They stayed and went back again. I can’t help thinking they liked it.’ She wriggled her bottom in the chair, her face all red, and I thought of Shakespeare’s, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth’ and she is ‘the portrait of a blinking idiot.’ I thought your momma was going to pop. She couldn’t even speak for a minute. She turned and stabbed, I mean, she stabbed, the scissors into her work station, then whipped around and trapped Tilda in the swivel chair, her arms on the handles.
“ ‘My girls,’ your momma said in the meanest voice I’ve ever heard out of that darling woman’s mouth, ‘my girls did what they did to protect my life. They are heroes, and here you are with your triangular-shaped head and your blubbery stomach telling everyone in town that they wanted to be a part of it. That they wanted to be attacked. How could you? How could you?’
“ ‘Maybe . . .’ Tilda choked out, ‘it’s because you always wear fancy clothes, always in pink, and heels, and I think your girls got that from you and they might . . . might want . . . a man’s attention. . . .’
“Your momma,” Trudy Jo said, laughing, “she swiveled that chair around so fast that Tilda and her dimply bottom went sprawling, and she leaped and stood over her and shoved her pink heel deep into Tilda’s flabby stomach and said, ‘I feel like squishing you, Tilda. I do. I could do it.’ The Reighton triplets, you know those ladies, they’re the three oldest triplets on the East Coast, they started yelling, ‘Squish her, squish her, squish her!’ and one said, ‘Mean women gotta go!’ to which her sisters chanted, ‘Gotta go, gotta go!’
“Your momma leaned down and said, ‘Look, you gigantically bottomed, squid-faced idiot. You are to leave this parlor right now. You are never to come back. If you ever set foot in this parlor again, I will shoot you. Do you have that? Has that sunk in through the fat? And if you don’t tell everyone in this town that you lied about my sweet girls because you are a jealous, demented woman, I will sue you for defamation of character and I will take everything you have, you pitiful slug.’”
Trudy Jo was enjoying the story, I could tell. She clapped her hands and rocked onto her toes.
“Sugar, your momma was in a pink and red mood that day. Tilda’s hair came out pink and red. One side red, one pink.” Trudy Jo sighed. “The Reighton triplets clapped their hands and started a cheer. ‘One side red, one side pink, you are a pig, Tilda, and you stink!’ ”
Trudy Jo laughed. “Tilda screamed and ran out. But I have to tell you the best part. When Tilda was leaving with her pink and red hair, your momma grabbed a bottle of green spray paint that Shell Dee confiscated from her son Derek when he was helping Jessie Liz’s boy, Shoney, paint another outline of a naked woman on the back of Hal’s Hardware. She sprayed a line of green right down that woman’s back and swore at her.”
I gasped. “My momma swore?”
“She called her a bitch. A mean, skunky green bitch.”
I gasped again. “My momma never swears.”
“I know, sugar, but she did that day. She screamed it, screamed it!” Trudy Jo fisted her hands above her head in victory. “Everyone clapped! It was a wonderful day at Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor. Your momma showed that her magic extends to revenge and vengeance. The triplets did a victory dance.”
I giggled. A tight and captured giggle, but it was a giggle. It was one of very few giggles at that time, but I enjoyed it.
I loved my momma so much.
“Happy dagger!” Trudy Jo said, up on her toes and using a quote from her favorite man. “Asses are made to bear, and so are you, Tilda!”
Steve kept trying to talk to me, but I ran away from him.
“Madeline, what’s wrong? Madeline!” he’d yell, chasing after me until he caught up. “Why can’t we be friends? I won’t hurt you, like they did. I’ll never hurt you. Don’t you want to go to the lake and chase frogs? Don’t you want to draw together anymore? I brought you a chocolate.” He opened his hand. My favorite chocolate, only slightly melted, was in his palm.
“I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.” That was a lie, I wanted to be friends with Steve, but I couldn’t. I was dirty. I was ashamed. I was mentally screwed up, emotionally ripped. Steve knew about the photos, I knew he knew, and I couldn’t be with him. He was clean and innocent, and I was in bad pictures and had done bad things.
“Get away from me, Steve!”
“But . . . but why?” His voice was strangled. He didn’t bother to hide the tears in those blue eyes.
“Because I don’t like you anymore.”
“You don’t?” he whispered, so upset. “You don’t like me?”
“No, I don’t. Get away from me.” I ran off as fast as I could. He ran after me, too, calling my name, pleading with me, but I pushed him away one more time, both of us crying, and I ran off again, blinded by tears.
It was so hard to run, I wet my pants, I still remember the feel of that hot urine searing my legs, like defeat. I remember that.
Steve and I were never friends again, even though he has tried, off and on, throughout all these years to contact me. He has not done it in a stalkerish sort of way, but a friendly, funny, how are you doing sort of way.
Some say that young people cannot be in love, they cannot know love, that they believe they are in love, but they are not. It is passion only, infatuation. This is false. They can fall in love. They are in love, and their love is intense and real.
I was twelve years old and this is what I knew about Steve: He was my best friend next to Annie. I trusted him, believed in him. He made me laugh. I was happy when I was with him. I could see a future with him. I had daydreams about him, giggled when I thought of kissing him or holding his hand. Those loves we have when we are young are true, and deep, and those people stay in our hearts, and there they last forever.
Steve has been there forever.
Not long after Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin went to jail we received the first of several letters.
The first one appeared on our doorstep early one morning at our house by the sea, when the clouds were angry.
It was brief, it was terrifying.
It said, “Sweetie, drop the charges or the girls will die.” It was smeared all over with something red. It was blood.
I found the letter after I caught my momma, who dropped to the floor in a dead faint.
My momma called the police. Sheriff Ellery was livid. He called the warden, Carman’s uncle. Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin all ended up in isolation for weeks after that. But Sherwin and crew had accomplished their mission: They had scared the liver out of all of us.
How did the letter get there? I figured it was Sam, Pauly’s son, who had snuck peeps at us through the window of the shack and dropped his pants and underwear two times in front of us while his father laughed.
“They aren’t going to get off, Marie Elise,” the prosecuting attorney, Arthur Benning, said. “But they won’t stay in jail that long.”
My momma, my grandparents, and Arthur were downstairs at our kitchen table late one blustery frightened night as Annie and I crouched against a wall, our flowered nightgowns over our knees as we listened, hidden by the shadows.
“What do you mean they won’t stay in jail that long?” My momma’s voice sharpened to steel strength. She dropped the ice pack she’d been holding to her head, her tumor stretching, growing.
“He means, honey,” Granddad said, his voice seared wi
th barely contained rage, “that Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin will go to jail, but they won’t die there. They’re coming out.”
“That’s correct,” Arthur said. He was about fifty and a former marine. His back was rigidly straight, all the time. He was an iron wall with a head.
“What?” My momma gasped. “I thought when the judge saw their past records, when he understood what they did to my girls, they would go to jail for decades!”
“No, they won’t,” Arthur said. “I’m sorry. They’re going to jail for years, Marie Elise, mark my words on that, but one day they’ll get out. It might be seven years, five, maybe less, but they will get out. This is not a life sentence they’re looking at.”
Momma listed the crimes that had been committed against us, her voice razor sharp.
“I don’t agree with it, Marie Elise,” Arthur said. “I’m telling you the reality here.”
“They’ll come and get the girls. Sherwinn will, I know he will. My girls will never be safe. They’ll never be safe.”
In the shadows Annie and I clutched each other, trembling. “Marie Elise,” Grandma said, reassuring, “you’ll come and live with us on the farm. We’ll put up an electric fence, we’ll hire guards, we’ll track them through an investigative agency, we’ll get restraining orders—”
“That’s not going to do it!” our momma said, screechy, pounding the table. “It won’t keep him from them. I know it won’t. He’s psychotic . . . he’ll come after them. He’ll hurt the girls, he may well kill them, I know he will.”
No one argued with her.
Why? Because they knew Sherwinn, knew the truth. Knew him. He would come for us.
My momma wasn’t worried about herself. She never said, “They’ll come and kill me,” because she knew she’d be dead. That was her reality.
Annie and I cowered in that threatening, black shadow, sickened by fear. I heard my granddad swear, followed by my grandma’s useless comfort, before Momma dissolved into broken, choked gasps.
“I’m not going to let him do this to them,” I heard my momma weep. “I won’t. I will take care of this and I will protect my girls. I will protect Madeline and Annie.”
She did protect us.
That, she did.
If my dad had been around he would have protected us.
I closed my eyes and saw him. He was still crying.
That night I snuck downstairs in my flowered nightgown, the stars scared, cowering behind the clouds. I watched my momma staring at the fire and saw an expression on her face I’d never seen before—intense, focused, restrained.
When I squiggled a bit, she turned to me, her tense mouth turning upward into a smile. One has to understand her position at that moment in life. Her beloved husband had drowned. She had a brain tumor that was inoperable. She was going to die young. Her daughters had been abused and photographed. The criminals had threatened to kill us.
“Momma?”
“Come here, my love,” she said, her voice soft, melodious. I sat on her lap and she hugged me close and spoke in French, her face softening. “You are my heart, my daughter, my everything, you and your sister, and I love you both so much.” She kissed my forehead. “I will protect you always, Madeline, and Annie, too. I didn’t before”—her voice caught as her tears mixed with mine—“but I will not fail you again. Never again.”
“You didn’t fail us, Momma. We love you. You didn’t know. We didn’t tell you.”
She didn’t hear me. As the fire flickered across her face and around the shadows, her eyes were seeing something else. “I didn’t protect you girls. I didn’t protect the family. Family is all there is, my daughter. All there is. Family is what God gave us to get through life. I will protect you, and Annie, I promise you.”
My momma’s decision? In order for her girls to be safe forever, Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin would have to die. She did not believe she could control them, and she was right. She did not believe her daughters could live in peace, in safety, be guaranteed a life that would see them holding their own grandchildren, without them dead. In her head she had failed us and she would not fail us again. She did not see any other way around it.
Frankly, even now, as an adult, I don’t see another way around it, either.
Some people do not belong on this planet with the rest of us.
Steve waited a week after our last tearful conversation when I told him I didn’t want to be friends before he dropped off terrariums for Annie and me with all kinds of plants and rocks and plastic frogs. I dropped tears into the terrarium.
When I went back to school, Arty Painter made the mistake of saying to me, “Hey, can I see you in your naked pictures, Madeline? I want to see your boobies.”
Steve was right behind me and he whipped around so fast, he blurred. He pounded the tar out of that kid. Steve was suspended for three days, over his parents’ loud protests. Arty was suspended for a week. No one would sit with Arty at lunch for weeks. Steve made him apologize to me.
Arty was so upset, he blubbered his way through “I’m sorry.” Arty’s parents called to apologize and brought my momma a side of beef for winter.
Another boy, Runi Saleh said, “Is your boyfriend Sherwinn? Did you do it with him? You had sex!” Steve knocked both his front teeth clean out, blood spurting all over the playground in gushes.
Steve was suspended for three days, over his parents’ loud protests. Runi was suspended for a week.
Runi’s father wrote my momma an apology and built us an upraised flower bed and planted one hundred bulbs with his son.
One more classmate, Daphne, the daughter of Tilda Smith, she of the pyramid head, which is why she is so stupid, and cannonball bottom, said, “You did bad things with men. I would never do that. You’re bad now. You’re not a virgin. You can’t wear a white wedding dress.”
Steve found out and he isolated her so fast she didn’t know what hit. No one would talk to her, and her friends walked away when she approached them.
Her mother never apologized.
But that was that. I wasn’t teased at school anymore, and neither was Annie.
It is amazing what one popular kid like Steve can do.
But Steve and I, we weren’t friends again. He kept sending gifts—a frog in a fish tank and flowers he pressed between books and glued to cards. He drew a picture of him and me together, fishing, a light cloud of “red magic” encircling my head, because he saw so clearly the gift from my Irish dad.
I still have the picture.
But I was emotionally dead. It was too late.
The trial made everything worse.
23
About a month before I was to give my speech at the Rock Your Womanhood conference at the convention center, I received a bouquet of purple tulips in a clear, curving, glass vase. At the bottom of the vase were a bunch of heart-shaped, glass rocks in a rainbow of colors.
The card read, “Good luck, Madeline. Steve Shepherd.”
There were at least twenty-four tulips.
They were very pretty.
They were my favorite flower.
He remembered.
I sniffled.
What to do? What to do with a boy named Steve Shepherd who grew up to be a man named Steve Shepherd?
What would happen if I called him?
Later, when I swung by my house to pick up mail, I pulled out the envelope I had with photos and articles about him. I pulled out my wallet, too, and stared at the photo of him and me and Annie, when we were kids, standing at the lake fishing with our poles. I held those photos for a long time.
I wouldn’t call him.
I couldn’t.
I was still too dirty.
“The Giordano sisters are here,” Georgie said. “They’re looking quite cat-ish today.”
“Prepare for a meowing good time and send them in.” I stood up and pulled at my gray skirt with my hands, slipped my arms into my suit jacket, and patted my hair, which had been flat ironed until not a curl would da
re show itself. I was in my armor. I don’t like my armor.
The cats entered. They had outdone themselves. The sisters were dressed in world-class cat outfits, head to toe, their makeup like a feline from Cats on Broadway.
“Madellllliiiine!” Adriana sang out, hands up in cat claws as she scratched the air. “You have given us purpose!” She was a black cat with white paws. “Fun and fun!”
“Direction!” Bella said, twirling her tail. She was a golden cat. “Wicked naughty!”
“Goals!” Carlotta said, twisting a whisker. She was a striped gray tabby cat. “Fantabulous!”
“And to celebrate!” Adriana enthused.
“To embrace you and the wisdom you have brought into our lives!” Bella yelled.
“To thank you for what you’ve done for us!” Carlotta sang out.
“We have a present.”
“A gift from the heart.”
“We’re including you in the gift you’ve given us. Ready, ladies?”
And with no further ado, they opened a large black bag and pulled out a fourth, yes, a fourth, cat costume.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Today, Madeline, you’re going with us! We’re doing good cat deeds. You’re going to be an English shorthair, and we’ve brought the makeup, too!”
“I’m going to be a cat?”
“Yes! Meow meow!” Bella said. “We heard of a woman named Makeesha who’s battling lymphoma, and we’re going to her office building to give her a gift!”
“A gift? What are you giving her?” I envisioned a basket with goodies.
“It’s a cruise! We’re sending Makeesha Jefferson on a cruise with her best friend!”
I did not think I looked bad as an English shorthair. With all the cat makeup on, no one could recognize me, Madeline the Cat. The sisters had a limo and chauffeur out front. The limo dropped us off at the pink building. We took the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor. The receptionist was in on our Good Cat Deed, and he laughed and led us to the conference room, where Makeesha sat with a bunch of other businesspeople. She had an embroidered blue scarf wrapped around her head, but I did not miss the exhaustion, the lack of hope, the despair.