Silent Girl

by Tricia Dower

  I knocked a couple of times before Tereza’s half-brother Allen opened the door and shouted, “Tereeeeeeeeze!” I’d seen him riding his bike but not close up. His sharp little nose and wingy ears made me think of Tereza’s chicken remark. The door opened into the living room, bare of furniture except for a TV. Allen left me standing at the door and sat on the floor next to a man in work pants and undershirt. Tereza’s step-father, I assumed. They were watching Flash Gordon, sitting so close they would ruin their eyesight, for sure. Tereza rescued me, finally, and led me into the kitchen where her mother stood barefoot by the stove.

  “Hey,” she said as if she’d known me forever. Her voice was low and thick. “Whacha got there?”

  I held out the cookies.

  “You make them?”

  “No, my mom.”

  She smirked at that. Her lips were fat like Tereza’s and her hair just as black but her skin was lighter. She looked all loose, like a pile of laundry ready for the wash. Nipples showed through her white scoop-necked blouse, the outline of her legs through her wrap-around skirt.

  “Get the chair from your room for Linda, Tez,” she said. Tereza left the room.

  “How long you lived on this street?” Mrs. Dobra asked me.

  “Since I was born.”

  “Ah, good for you.”

  She said that so sadly I looked around for something nice to say. “I wish we had painted walls. Our kitchen has so many tea kettles on the wall you get dizzy staring at them. My dad couldn’t match up all of the strips, so some of the kettles are cut in half.”

  She coughed out a laugh. “If we weren’t renters, I’d give your daddy all the beer he could drink to come over and slap up some wallpaper.”

  I didn’t tell her my father disapproved of beer, didn’t want her to think we were stuck-up.

  Tereza returned with a chair.

  “Allen! Jimmy!” Mrs. Dobra shouted, making me jump. “Chow’s on!”

  We ate in the kitchen on a yellow painted wooden table that wasn’t quite big enough for five people so we had to squeeze together. Jimmy – it was hard to think of him as Mr. Dobra – straddled the chair between Allen and me, his thigh pressing against mine. It was his nose and ears Allen had gotten, along with hair the color of peanut butter. Jimmy was thinner than my father and the muscles on his arms stood out. It didn’t look as though he shaved often. He was a construction worker, Tereza had told me. They moved whenever he ran out of work.

  Mrs. Dobra took two pans right off the stove and set them on the bare table top without the slightest concern about scorch marks. “Help yourself,” she said, looking at me. Canned corn and stewed tomatoes. Pieces of hot dogs swimming in baked beans. A huge bowl of potato chips. Allen stuck his hand in the chips. Jimmy filled his plate with the bean mixture. No one said grace.

  “You got a name?” Jimmy asked me.

  “It’s Linda,” Mrs. Dobra said. “Tez’s friend. You know that.”

  “Did I ask you?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. He was smiling but his eyes were mean.

  “Linda,” I said.

  “You ever eat wild boar, Linda?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s pig, like these hot dogs are pig, but it tastes like polar bear.”

  Tereza made a rude noise. “How would you know?” she said.

  “Looking for trouble?” Jimmy said to her.

  Mrs. Dobra’s voice rushed in. “Before Jimmy and me met, he worked in the North.”

  “I can tell my own stories,” Jimmy said. He waggled his fork at Tereza. “It was in Thunder Bay, Miss Smartass. That’s in Canada, in case you haven’t learnt that yet. I’m not the dumb fuck you think I am.”

  “Jimmy,” Mrs. Dobra said softly.

  Nobody spoke after that. We just applied ourselves to getting supper over and done with. The tattooed anchor on Jimmy’s right arm twitched as he ate. I offered to do dishes, but Tereza’s mother said she wanted to sit in the kitchen by herself for a while and smoke a cigarette.

  Tereza took me into the room she shared with Allen. A blanket draped over a rope divided the space. There wasn’t much on her side besides a narrow, unmade bed, a chest of drawers with a Dale Evans lamp on it, and a poster for a movie called Rogues of Sherwood Forest. It featured a man in tights pointing a sword.

  “John Derek,” Tereza said. “Ma says my real father looks like him.”

  “Your real father’s Robin Hood?”

  “No, you nincompoop. Robin Hood ain’t real.”

  “I know. I was making a joke.” John Derek’s moustache was thin but food could still get stuck in it and smell if you were an actress and had to kiss him.

  “Look at this,” Tereza said. She opened a drawer in the chest. “Ma found it.” She pulled out a newspaper and began to read aloud as slowly as a third grader. It made my jaw ache.

  “Here, let me,” I said, holding out my hand.

  James Michael Haggerty, born March 3, 1907, died June 19, 1955, of natural causes. Predeceased in 1943 by his wife Eileen. Survived by his daughter Miranda. Funeral closed to the public. Burial to be handled by Markinson Funeral Home.

  Miranda. She had a name. “What about the boy?” I said.

  “They don’t want nobody knowing that crazy old man knocked her up.” Tereza took the newspaper from me and put it back in her drawer. “My mom got knocked up with me.”

  “Who says?”

  “She told me.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  Tereza laughed so hard I wanted to punch her. “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “No, wait. Let’s go peek in the windows. The dog ain’t there no more.”

  I didn’t want her to call me a chicken again, and I was itching to learn more about Miranda. “As long as you don’t tell your folks where we’re going. My dad might come looking for me. I gotta be home before dark, okay?”

  The sky was still holding its light as we crept along the riverbank, approaching Crazy Haggerty’s from the back. Anyone on the other side of the river would have been too far away to see us. A metal stake in the ground and a heavy long chain made me hesitate until I remembered the German shepherd was gone. We had to step around mounds of dog poop. “I never saw him walk that dog,” I said.

  A small stack of firewood leaned against the wall by a back door. Tereza tried to open the door but it was locked. Shutters secured with combination locks completely covered picture windows on the outside.

  “I can break ’em open, easy,” she said.

  “If you do, I’m not staying,” I said. “I won’t tell, but I won’t stay.”

  “Look up there,” Tereza said. She pointed to the second floor, to a small window that wasn’t shuttered. It was close to the corner of the house. She monkeyed up a drainpipe, grabbed hold of the window ledge, and chinned herself over and over until she’d had a good look. Back on the ground, she said, “The kitchen. Nothing to see in there except a wood stove. Everything clean as spit. Nothing in the sink. No table or chairs, neither.”

  “They must have eaten in the dining room,” I said.

  “Or not at all,” she said. “They could be zombies from outer space.”

  Tereza exasperated me with her lack of knowledge of how some things worked. “Zombies are already dead,” I said. “Crazy Haggerty wouldn’t have had a heart attack if he was a zombie.” I noticed two small basement windows that were barred but not shuttered. “Maybe we can see something through the bars,” I said.

  Each of us took a different window. Kneeling on a piece of wood so I wouldn’t get my knees dirty, I peered in. The light was dim but I could make out two white pillars with black drapes hanging between them. In front of the drapes was a table with tall white candles and a book as big as my father’s unabridged Webster’s.

  “I s
ee a cape on a hook,” Tereza called over to me.

  I scooted over to see it. I knew all about Dracula and the cape made me frightened for the girl – for Miranda – though I supposed she was safe now.

  “Too bad I didn’t move here sooner. I would ’a sprung her,” Tereza said.

  “How?”

  She didn’t have an answer.

  “Maybe she’ll be back,” I said. “It’s still her house, right?”

  I considered the possibility she might be a lunatic Haggerty had saved from the horrors of an asylum. I had learned about asylums from a comic book somebody passed around the playground. They tied you up and turned hoses on you, attached wires to your head and cooked your brain. I wanted to believe he had been protecting her from that or something worse.

  That night a huge black bug climbed onto my back. It was so big and heavy, I couldn’t breathe. I must have screamed because my mother came into my room. I was glad it was her. “Hush, angel, it’s only a dream,” she said, rubbing my back.

  One August morning, Dad informed me Mom was going to the hospital for an operation. “A female thing,” he whispered in the kitchen. That was the first I’d heard about it.

  “Take care of your father,” she said as he helped her into the car.

  She was supposed to be home after ten days but the doctor decided to keep her in longer due to complications. “I can’t afford any more time away from work,” Dad said as if it was something he had to write a check for. “You’ll have to take care of things around the house.”

  I rummaged around in my brain for everything I knew about being a wife. Keep your hands out of the wringer washer. Start with the collar of the shirt when you iron, then the yoke, then the sleeves. Skim the cream off the top of the milk for his coffee. Be sure all evidence of your housework is out of sight by the time he comes home.

  I figured out how to make scrambled eggs and Jell-O. I knew how to use the can opener, so I made soup. Dad’s favorite was split pea. I sat outside with him every night after dinner while he smoked his pipe and talked about his secretary and his boss. He helped me with the dishes before our nightly hospital visit. During the day, when he wasn’t around, I opened cans of expensive Queen Anne cherries Mom had hidden in the pantry behind a broken toaster. I ate them all by myself.

  I sat at her mahogany dressing table and smeared my face with Pond’s – as cool and creamy as Junket pudding. I opened her little red box of mascara, stuck two fingers in my mouth like I’d seen her do and moistened the tiny brush before dipping it into the box. I thought about Miranda in that big house with Crazy Haggerty. Did she know she was supposed to brush her hair a hundred strokes each day? I washed my own hair for the first time and needed every bobby pin in the house to set it.

  One night in the car on the way to visit Mom, I asked Dad, “How come nobody knew Mr. Haggerty had a daughter?” I was in the front where Mom usually sat. Got to look at the little scar on the side of his face and watch him shift gears.

  “People were scared of him. Your mother went over there once to collect for the Red Cross and he greeted her on the porch with a shotgun.”

  “But why wouldn’t he send her to school?”

  “No idea.” He reached over and patted my leg. “If only we’d known. Everybody just thought he was eccentric. We left him alone.”

  “Where did he work?”

  “He didn’t, as far as anybody knew. His mother left him that house before we moved in. She must have left him some money, too.”

  “I used to call him Crazy Haggerty,” I said.

  “You weren’t the only one.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You said he had strange stuff in his pockets when he died on the train.”

  “Did I? Why are you so interested in Mr. Haggerty?”

  “I want to know, that’s all.”

  “Well, kiddo, there are some things we’re just not meant to know.”

  After fifteen days, my mother was able to dangle her legs over the side of the hospital bed. I didn’t have as much time with Tereza as before, since she didn’t want to help me dust or vacuum or wash floors.

  “I’m never getting married,” she said. “If I have to clean somebody’s house I want to get paid for it.” She started hanging around with the greasy-haired boys who prowled the neighborhood in a pack. Some of them were in high school already. I didn’t like the way they took up the entire sidewalk and laughed when you tried to walk past. She followed them to town during the day and to the river at dusk. On weekends, Dad took over the chores so I could be with her but she had lost interest in Swiss Family Robinson. She turned up on The Island one day wearing dungarees that didn’t fit.

  “Somebody gave ’em to Allen, but they ain’t his size,” she said.

  “They’re too big in the waist for you,” I said.

  “Yeah, and they cut into my crotch. I feel sorry for boys. Ever seen a penis?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Some are stubby like punks. Others are kinda worm-like.”

  “How many have you seen?”

  “Well, my brother’s, natch, but that don’t count.” Then she named the neighborhood boys. “They smoke cigs,” she said. “They let me take drags if I kiss ’em.”

  “Their penises?”

  “No! Their mouths.”

  “Can you taste what they’ve been eating?”

  “Natch.”

  “How nauseating.” Nauseating was my favorite new word that summer and I was not allowed to say it at the dinner table. “Don’t your folks mind you going with them?”

  “They don’t ask and I don’t tell.”

  The next Monday, after Dad had gone to work, I looked up penis in Webster’s Unabridged; then, the words in the definition I didn’t understand. Eventually I got to “intercourse” and “impregnate” and began to think about Miranda and Crazy Haggerty. It made my stomach hurt. I did the laundry and pictured Dad’s boxer shorts hiding something worm-like. I stopped sitting on his lap. Over the next week or so, I paged through every book in our house – books I had no interest in before – searching for the rules of intercourse. Seeking reassurance that what happened to Miranda was out of the ordinary, something I didn’t have to be afraid of. I retrieved the Growing Up and Liking It kit from the bottom of my mother’s bureau. The books and the kit were silent on the subject. Maybe Miranda’s father had kept her in because he knew she’d be like Tereza, wandering off whenever she wanted, kissing boys and looking at their penises.

  Tereza was old enough for eighth grade but she got put into seventh with me. We walked together every morning, me with my head down looking for lucky pennies, she with her head twisting like a periscope, searching for boys. A month after school began, she turned thirteen and started hanging around the playground with older kids after school. Told me not to wait for her. The first time she said that I went right to The Island and cleaned everything out of the log, spread it all through the woods. I wanted the wind to take her precious tobacco, but the Wonder Bread bag was gone.

  My mother had returned from the hospital in time for Labor Day but, within a few weeks, she slipped into a sort of sadness the doctor couldn’t explain. She’d be in bed when I left for school and in bed when I returned. I brought her ginger ale and dry toast every afternoon but it didn’t make her better. “Is your father home yet?” was all she would say. Her uterus had been removed, he told me, finally, and he thought she’d be happy to be rid of it, but she wasn’t. I went back to keeping house. Dad and I went back to the routine we’d fallen into when Mom was in the hospital although it felt different with her in the house. Like she was the daughter.

  “She says she feels too heavy to move,” Dad would say. Or, “She says she can’t see colors anymore.” He’d squint at me as if I could do something about
it, as if I could make everything hunky-dory in the few hours I had after school before he got home.

  One afternoon I found a playing card in one of his jacket pockets where I’d gone looking for Life Savers. On it was a picture of a woman naked except for a garter belt, nylons, and high heels. I wondered if my father thought she had “spunk.” I decided I’d never grow an ugly clump of dark hair between my legs, never grow anything men might want to stare at. I wanted to rip the card into a zillion pieces but I put it back inside the pocket. I began to look at my father differently after that, was ashamed of all the times he had seen me naked when I was little. I got to hate the way he cleared his throat every morning and held his pipe at the side of his mouth like he thought he was a big movie star. I withdrew to my room when I got tired of him.

  I could see the highway from my bedroom window and liked to watch the cars go by. I’d pretend I was in one of those cars going all the way down to Florida, stopping at every White Castle along the way. I could see Tony’s garage, too. It was on the corner of our street and the highway. The lot was always full of cars. Drivers passed by the garage on their way to bigger towns each day and a sign saying Repairs While U Work attracted business. Every morning you could see men dropping their cars off and waiting in their suits and hats for the bus. Late one afternoon, I thought I saw Tereza getting into the back seat of a car parked around the side of the garage. I couldn’t be sure it was her but whoever it was had Tereza’s shape and wild hair.

  After dinner that day, Dad took his newspaper upstairs to spend the evening with Mom. I went over to Tereza’s and knocked on her door. Allen said she wasn’t there. I went back to my house, sat on the front stoop and waited for her. The moon was out by the time she came scurrying along on the opposite side of the street, wearing tight, little white shorts and a bubblegum-pink sweater. It was almost Hallowe’en, too cold for shorts.

  “Hey!” I called out.

  She looked in my direction but didn’t slow down.

  “Hey!” I got up and ran after her. “Wait up!”