Rhonda the Rubber Woman

by Peterson, Norma;

  Florence dropped her gym shoes on the floor with a thud and looked at me. “Oh, my God,” she said. “That’s the most terrible thing I ever heard.” It was so terrible she wanted to know every detail, where he sat, what he said, what the mechanical hand looked like. I told her everything, trying to pretend I was repeating something I’d memorized from a book. “Yes, the hand was wood. Light colored. Maple maybe. Or Hollywood blond. His breathing went funny, like he was breathing through his mouth instead of his nose.” The more I talked, the more I felt like just a voice in the air rather than a real person, a shadow that the wind could blow through.

  By Wednesday morning, everyone in school knew, but things didn’t turn out the way I expected. A girl in my homeroom hissed in my ear, “My mom says you must have asked for it.” At noon in the lunchroom, a boy stared at my chest and asked, “Hey, when do I get a turn?” and later another one said, “Hey, how about I give you five cents for a real feel?”

  The principal, Mr. Ecoles, called me in after school on Thursday and scolded, “We have a serious problem here, Nancy.” Mr. Ecoles had a pale thick face, and the collar of his white shirt stuck out from his neck like one of the rings around Saturn. “If you don’t stop spreading rumors about Reverend Mackey, I’ll have no alternative but to suspend you. I’ll have to call in your mother.”

  I knew I couldn’t allow that. My mom had been avoiding me more than ever. The day after the reverend groped me she decided to clean the kitchen cabinets while Eddie was on the road. The next day she started on the closets, hauling out boxes of summer clothes, examining each halter top and sundress under the kitchen light, shaking her head. She washed and ironed every piece and then stashed the boxes away again, kicking at them until she got them in just the right tight spot in the backs of the closets.

  In the end, even Aunt Cora let me down. The next Saturday afternoon when she came to Marysville, I told her what the principal had warned. We were sitting on a bench at Marysville Park. It was a gray, overcast day. The air in the park had a sickly sweet smell, like rotting flowers.

  My aunt sighed. “Well, maybe it’s better if you just…” She put a hand over her forehead “… just join another church.”

  “But why can’t we report him? Why can’t we get him arrested?”

  “Because he’ll tell them you’re lying.” Aunt Cora pressed her lips together. “Because he’s a minister. It’ll be his word against yours, and people don’t like to believe anything bad about a reverend.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just sat alongside Aunt Cora in the gray afternoon and inched closer to her warmth, wishing I could go back and live with her in Clinton.

  “I’m sorry, Nancy.” My aunt studied her red fingernails. “But another thing, Walt says I’m spending too much time coming up here, he needs me himself these days.”

  I looked at my aunt, saw her jawbone move underneath her skin, and felt guilty. My breathing became shallow, as though I shouldn’t take so much air.

  “How is Uncle Walt?” I asked in a tiny voice.

  “I don’t know. One day fine, next day terrible. He goes along okay, and then suddenly something happens like no cold beer, and that’ll set him off. Plus he won’t put on civilian clothes. He’ll only wear his khakis. He and some other vets sit around and drink and talk about the war.”

  I glanced at my aunt. She was so smart and gorgeous, it didn’t seem fair. Uncle Walt had made her quit modeling school, but she’d got a job modeling anyway for the Finkel’s Department Store Mail Order Catalog. “Only corsets, but it’s a start,” she’d giggled and told us, “You know what they say, if you want to be a success in a career, you need a good foundation.”

  Aunt Cora looked at me and sighed. “Sometimes I think he resents my modeling, resents that I’ve got a good job, but I need it. For the money, God knows. We both need it for the money, but I need it for me, too.”

  She squinted her eyes and looked up toward the sky. The sun came out for a minute and turned the tiny hairs on her cheeks golden. “I know women are supposed to stand by their men,” she went on, staring at the white clouds, “but we need to take something for ourselves, too. We only go around once, you know.”

  “Oh, Aunt Cora, I bet Uncle Walt is real proud of you, being a model. Everybody is.”

  She turned and smiled sadly at me and I noticed how haggard she looked. I couldn’t ask her to do anything else for me.

  I was ready to give up on the human race when Bobby Felker stopped me the next Monday after school at the edge of the playground. He had a serious look on his face, like Buster Keaton.

  “Listen, Nancy,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to call you. I—uh—had a real good time that night in Clinton.”

  “Oh, sure, thanks.” I held my breath. If he made some kind of cheap remark, that would be it. God might as well whoosh me off the face of the earth, because if He didn’t, I’d find a way to do it myself.

  Bobby studied his hands. “Look, I’m real sorry about what happened with the reverend.”

  I felt like a dam was bursting in my brain. I couldn’t talk.

  He looked up at me with a pained expression. “I—uh—think you did the right thing, speaking up.”

  My breath caught. “You do?” My voice was a whimper.

  “Yeah, I do.” Bobby looked around. A breeze ruffled his hair. “It’s a small town. People are narrow-minded. I know they’re saying unkind things, but what you did was so brave, I wanted you to know I think it was the right thing. Speaking up, it might keep the reverend away from another kid.”

  I looked at Bobby, grateful, but suspicious, too. How come he’d practically looked right through me ever since I got back to Clinton until now? My skin seemed too tight, and my eyes felt like deep tunnels in my skull.

  He started to reach his hand out to me but I jerked away. He pulled his arm back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do … anything out of line.” He blushed.

  “Sure.” Tears started up in my eyes. I stared at Bobby. Maybe being a musician, maybe he understood things better than the others. He backed away. “Well, I better go,” he muttered.

  I wanted to cry out, “No, don’t go.” There was something about Bobby that always made me think things would turn out all right. But I hesitated, afraid I’d sound too pathetic. I just lowered my head and nodded.

  “So—I’ll—see you around,” he said and hurried away looking like one of the cross-country racers you sometimes saw in newsreels, all arms and legs, while I stood in the afternoon sun with tears streaking down my cheeks, my legs turning to jello.

  I watched Miss Sandercock’s homeroom kids file out, then I stumbled in. She was erasing the blackboard. When she turned and saw me in the doorway, she rushed over.

  “Nancy, I’m so glad to see you,” she said. We sat at two empty desks. “I’ve wanted to talk to you, but I … ah … I didn’t want to interfere.” She reached out and took my hand.

  Hers was warm. She looked cute sitting at a kid’s desk wearing a brown knit dress with a pocket over the heart. A bright red hanky peeked out, like a flower.

  I knew I didn’t have to explain why I was there. “What would it be like if I wanted to take the reverend to court?” I blurted out. A thin slab of sun fell on the old waxed oak floor. “My aunt said Reverend Mackey would claim I lied, and people would probably believe him.”

  Miss Sandercock bit her lips. “She’s probably right.”

  “My mom already doesn’t believe me. She doesn’t like to talk about it at all.” I didn’t mention all the lies I’d told in my life. I didn’t mention how I went to bed at night torn between hating my mom for siding with the Reverend and hating myself for being the wages of her sin.

  Miss Sandercock took my other hand. “Sometimes in life,” she said, “you have to take a stand even if you can’t win. You have to stick up for your principles.” She had a warm, powdery smell. “If you want to go to court, I’ll help you. If I can.”

  “Oh, Miss Sandercock, I don’t know.” I
looked up at the ceiling. There was a string of stains, like little amoebae chasing one another. “What would I have to do?”

  “Umm.…” She ran a finger over one of the grooves in the old wood desk. “I’m not exactly sure, but I think your mother would have to press charges for you. At the very least, they’ll want her to testify.” Miss Sandercock cleared her throat. “They could ask her questions about her personal life. It could, I suppose, get … ah … nasty.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture my mom in court. I saw a stern-faced judge with beady eyes like Herbert Hoover ask her questions. I saw her look confused and watched her hands begin to flutter. I saw her start to bounce.

  Miss Sandercock shifted in her seat. Her knee bumped the desk. “On the other hand,” she said, as though she’d read my thoughts, “it might be harder on you and your mother than on anyone else. It might be you’ve already helped enough, speaking up. People may rally around the reverend in public but deep down they’ll always wonder.”

  “Do you think so?” I asked. I looked at Miss Sandercock’s face, her pale skin. “A friend told me the same thing yesterday.”

  “Mmmm hmmm. I do think so.” She gave me a glimmer of a smile and squeezed my hand. “It sounds like you’ve got a good friend.”

  One day the next week Sylvia Staples came up to me on my way home from school. “You live over Doc’s, don’t you?” she asked. Sylvia came from a poor family with a ton of kids.

  “Yeah. So?” I glared at her. She had a lopsided face. Everything on one side was a little bit higher than the other. She made you want to tilt your head. Her hair was only combed on the top and sides. A hunk in back looked like it hadn’t been touched since Columbus discovered America.

  “How about if I walk with you? I have to go buy some Pepto Bismol for my mom. She don’t feel good.”

  That just showed how low I’d sunk. Ordinarily Sylvia wouldn’t have the nerve to ask to walk to Doc’s with anybody. Sylvia was even lower on the totem pole than I was.

  “It’s a free country,” I muttered. A shadow flitted across Sylvia’s eyes, but she smiled again. Her cheeks were chubby even though she was skinny as a stick everywhere else.

  Walking alongside me, she smelled a little like sour milk. “I thought that was really funny, the joke you made at the spelling bee last month,” she said.

  “The spelling bee? Jeez. What did I say?”

  “Oh, you should remember.” Sylvia stopped for a minute and scratched her ear. “You spelled archaic and then said, ‘Like in the saying, we can’t have archaic and eat it, too.’”

  “Ha ha ha.” I laughed loud, like my mom. “I said that, huh? I’d forgotten about that.” The truth was I hadn’t forgotten at all. It was one of my best jokes. I looked at Sylvia in a new way. “Well, our team won, huh? You were on it, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I spelled hyacinth.”

  “You did?” Sylvia wasn’t much of a student.

  “Yeah, but only cause I have a cousin named it. Hyacinth. My aunt never made it to the hospital. Her baby got born in the hyacinth bed outside the house so that’s what she named it.”

  “No kidding.” By the time we got to Doc’s I decided to take Sylvia under my wing, show her my list of insults, teach her a few quotations. I liked the idea of having a friend I could feel superior to. I invited her up to the apartment for cocoa.

  “This is Sylvia,” I told my mom with a bright smile when she arrived home from work and I saw her eye the cocoa stains that dribbled down the sides of Sylvia’s cup.

  “How do,” Sylvia said. She scratched inside her ear, then inspected her finger.

  My mom cringed, and after Sylvia left, she said, “I’m not sure I like that girl. She doesn’t look … uh … clean.”

  “That’s not a very Christian thing to say,” I shot back, and then I knew I was going to make Sylvia a bosom buddy.

  The next day I went home with her after school. She lived in a dump on Division Street with peeling paint and a rusted car without wheels in the yard. The grass was overgrown. We went in the back door, across a saggy porch with old egg cartons and empty potato chip bags strewn around.

  Sylvia’s mom was ironing in the kitchen. She was scrawny as a bean, with the longest arms I’d ever seen, as though too many kids had pulled on them. Two boys in torn shirts stood slurping Kool Aid through straws. One had a smudged bandage over his chin. But what really caught my eye was an older girl sitting at a tiny table in a corner, writing.

  “That’s my sister, Clarissa,” Sylvia said. “Clarissa’s seventeen.”

  Clarissa glanced up and smiled. “Nice to meet you.” It was hard to believe she was part of the same family. She had creamy skin like the Noxema girls and eyes as green as a cat’s and shiny black hair.

  “Clarissa writes to soldiers,” Sylvia said. “She cheers them up.”

  Clarissa laughed and pulled a magazine called Homefront out from under a box of airmail paper with red and blue borders. Sylvia and I moved closer. The magazine cover had a picture of a beautiful girl and a slogan that said, “There’s Something about a Man in Uniform.”

  “Soldiers who want to get mail send their names in,” Clarissa explained.

  “Clarissa already got a marriage proposal just from one soldier looking at the pitcher she sent ‘im,” Sylvia piped up. Clarissa blushed.

  “Are you going to marry him?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Clarissa laughed. “I’m saving up my money to go to commercial school. I thought I might move to a bigger city someday. Maybe get a job in a nice office. There are lots more opportunities for women these days, you know.” She drew circles on a scratch pad.

  I stared at the pad as though it might tell me secrets about life, then peeked back up at Clarissa. She had a look about her as if she knew where she was going. I’d seen that look sometimes in Aunt Cora. I wouldn’t in a million years have thought Sylvia had a sister who talked about moving out of Marysville, as though she could do anything in the world she wanted.

  Sylvia and I started hanging out together. I didn’t have much to lose. Most of the other kids looked down their noses at me anyway except Bobby Felker, and all he ever did was stop me once in the hall after an all-school assembly. “How are you doing?” he’d asked, books cradled under one arm. “Oh, great,” I’d lied. “A lot better.” He’d opened his mouth and then closed it again. He put his free hand on my elbow. “Well, that’s good,” he said and took off, and that was it, as though he’d done his good deed for the week.

  I didn’t care. I liked Sylvia. She wasn’t as dumb as she looked; she laughed at my jokes, and treated me like a queen. I liked the attention and I liked that Sylvia had a sister who had turned out as well as Clarissa, as though some of what she had might rub off on me.

  It was an added attraction that Sylvia got my mom’s goat. I felt smug bringing Sylvia around, watching my mother’s eyes darken, knowing she wouldn’t complain again. I knew she still didn’t know what to make of me since the day I yelled at her on the street and spilled the beans on Reverend Mackey.

  I looked for more ways to irritate her. I brought home dust from the cloakroom at school and scattered it under the kitchen table and bed. I placed a little hairy ball in one of her blue satin bedroom slippers. I put on some of her Tantalizing Red lipstick and smudged two coffee cups so she’d think she hadn’t washed them well enough.

  One night I put a poem on the kitchen table that said, “I am pain and anger, I am a wild scream in the night. I am manicured red claws yearning to rip into creamy flesh. I am a heart that beats unnoticed.”

  The next morning the poem was gone and when I asked about it, my mother swiped away with a dishrag at the tile behind the sink and said I shouldn’t leave scraps of paper around, it probably got thrown out with the trash, but I noticed that she swallowed hard as she spoke and I got an evil satisfaction from it. Being spiteful was the only way I could help quiet something that was building inside me, as though I’d swallowed one of
those firework capsules that you light and it burns into a snake of ashes that grows and grows.

  13

  NANCY, 1944–45

  In December, after two months of hanging out with Sylvia, I got antsy. Sylvia looked up to me too much. I wasn’t used to it. I’d wake up at night from vague dreams with icy shivers on my arms. I’d scramble in a panic for my lists of insults and quotations and sit hugging them against my chest for dear life. That was the other thing. I couldn’t use the insults and quotations with Sylvia. I’d tried a couple of times but Sylvia had looked at me with an odd expression as though she knew all the recitation was just a cover. I’d felt my face flush and my stomach tighten and eventually I gave up.

  I started eyeing Joanie Bonnadona, who sat across from me in math. Joanie wore huaraches even in the winter, sassed teachers, and snuck off at lunchtime with Itchy Kessler to smoke on Beale Street behind the school.

  One day in January when the lunchtime bell rang, I leaned across the aisle and asked her, “Hey, how about if I come along with you and Itchy for a cig?” Joanie lifted her fuzzy eyebrows at me. “You smoke?”

  “Hey, where there’s smoke, there’s Nancy.” I had a couple of squished Raleighs tucked into my pea coat pocket and a cooked throat from practicing the night before in the lot behind our apartment.

  The next day Joanie and Itchy, who had teeth like stalactites, and another guy, Darryl, came to my apartment after school. Itchy pulled a flask from the hip pocket of his dungarees and passed it around. We all took swigs, smiled goofy smiles to hide how bad it tasted, and announced, “Hey, great!”

  Itchy was a card. He grabbed the phone, dialed a telephone number at random, put on a fake voice and said, “This is yoah president speaking. Remember, I hate wah. Eleanor hates wah.” He slammed the receiver down, and we howled. We decided to call the Golden Nursery and ordered six fruit trees to be delivered to Mr. Fenstermeyer, the math teacher. Itchy got on the phone.