How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  By the time I leaned my bike against the bushes above the back of the park, I was boiling hot. I peeled off Arthur’s army jacket and threw it over the crossbar. It was a boy’s bike, obviously. I have two older brothers, remember? Pretty much everything I have used to belong to a boy, except the underwear my mother’s always buying me.

  The voice came from about six inches behind my head.

  “Everything okay here, young lady?”

  I jumped and then turned around. He had his radio in one hand and his cop hat in the other.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you. Why so nervous?”

  I wanted to point to Robbie and say he was carrying shit and he was violent, but everything that was clogging up my throat came back again. I just stood there in my tank top while he looked me up and down. I shivered and wanted to put Arthur’s jacket back on, but I couldn’t move.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Joan Harris.”

  “Where are you riding that bike to at this hour on a school night?”

  “The dog ran away.” I still hadn’t caught my breath. “I was just looking one last time before bed.”

  He asked what the dog looked like, and said he’d keep an eye out. Then he took two steps closer to me, and I backed into the bushes. He walked right inside the invisible wall around me and then said I lived down Jensen Road, didn’t I? Just so I’d know he knew.

  We were both quiet for a minute, but he didn’t back up.

  “Thank you,” I said, because that seemed like a conversation-ending thing to say.

  He waited long enough to let me know he didn’t have to take my cues, and then said, “My name’s Officer Kemp. I’ll see you around, Miss Harris,” and walked away.

  Then I was sitting on the curb with Arthur’s jacket on my lap. I put it on and felt around for cigarettes. I wished I had my scalpel. I wished I had a sledgehammer. Okay, I wished I had Daisy.

  I guess I kind of woke up a few minutes later, on the other side of one of those experiences you can’t tell people about. I couldn’t tell Daisy because he wouldn’t get it, Arthur or Dad because they’d lose their shit, and my mom because why would I? I just pushed that memory under the surface and carried it with me, down through the bushes into the park.

  And yes, Robbie was behind the bandstand, but he wasn’t threatening anybody. He was hanging out with some people, and Teresa wasn’t there. Whatever they were doing, it was mellow. Nobody was saying anything. They all looked like they were listening to the same music, but there wasn’t any music. There was no conversation either. Maybe that’s what people get out of smack, never having to think of something to say. I could see how that’s restful.

  I hung around for a while, then wondered why. Robbie McNamara was a lost-it who was capable of pretty much anything, but I knew that already. I’d known that since I was about eight years old. And whatever he was doing, I sure wasn’t going to tell it to Officer Kemp and his friends.

  For a couple months I convinced myself that I was making a big deal out of nothing. People said that to me so much that I just gave in and believed it.

  You can’t open people up and see how they work, anyway. Everything they do is just the surface effect of some infinite, screwed-up mess of synapses firing and misfiring, complicated by whatever drugs they do to slow that down or speed it up or make it stop. You could open up a brain and look at it for years; it wouldn’t tell you anything about what that person did. Or what they’d do next.

  I went up and got back on my bike. On Baywater Avenue, I took my feet off the pedals and just let go. Like a strong enough breeze could blow everything back into place, put my mother back, and blow away all the silent cobwebs in my house. Wipe away Robbie’s heroin and Daisy’s lies.

  I went back to thinking about the cuttlefish while Arthur’s jacket filled up with cold air and lifted off my body.

  Then I heard one whoop of a siren and red light splashed over me. I leaned back on the brakes and fell onto one foot. I was at the bottom of Main Street looking at the hood of Officer Kemp’s car. He leaned out the window and pointed at me.

  “You should watch out, Miss Harris,” he said. “Another time, the driver might not stop.”

  And that was Highbone. Kids got lost and people freaked out. Every few years somebody crashed into the wall on Jensen Road. Guys sold pretty much anything that would get you high right in our park. Sometimes they overdosed or beat each other up over it. Housewives were drowning in their own living rooms and the cops were hassling us for nothing while the dads went to jail for what the papers called “white-collar crime.” You’d think that would be enough. You’d think everyone in town would already be wandering around with hollow, shocked looks in their eyes.

  But no, there was more coming. Before New Year’s, all that had faded into the background and no one talked about it anymore. Highbone had become a completely different place by then. Someone had peeled back the surface of our town, and the whole country saw what was underneath. By Easter 1980, we were creepier than Amityville.

  That Saturday, I left a note for Daisy and took the train to Hicksville. I knew Teresa lived right behind the station, so it was easy to find her. She was on the balcony, combing a little boy’s hair. She was talking to him, but I couldn’t understand. I figured that was because I sucked at Spanish. I passed the tests, but they were hard, and I forgot it all right away.

  Teresa was wearing a jean jacket and a floppy hat. She looked like she just got back from Woodstock.

  “Joan from Highbone. Hey, it rhymes!”

  “Hi. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “Mind? Only if you’re here to preach at me. You’re not gonna try to make me pray or anything, are you? ’Cause the Jehovahs just left.”

  “I’m not really religious.”

  The little boy was squirming. She tightened her legs around him and said, “This is Clygee.”

  “Hi, Clygee.” I waved and felt stupid. I’m not that great with little kids.

  “Clyde, you’d say. C-L-Y-D-E.”

  “I guess you must ace Spanish in school. I barely pass.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish.” She smirked at me. “It’s Portuguese. My parents are from Brazil.”

  “Wow.”

  “Not really.” She waved a hand at everything around us and rolled her eyes. “I was born here.”

  “Sorry. I’ve never been anywhere. Well, North Carolina a couple times, but it was just a housing development and one trip to the beach.”

  “You better come in. My mother will want to look at you to see if you pass the test.”

  “What’s the test?”

  “Nobody knows, but it’s definitely a pass/fail. My mother doesn’t really do anything in between.”

  Teresa’s mother had the blender going in the kitchen. Teresa leaned her head in to introduce me.

  “Mom, my friend Joan. Joan, Mrs. Maia.”

  Mrs. Maia took her hand off the blender and smiled in the sudden quiet. That was it.

  “I think you passed.” Teresa went down the hallway in a zigzag, using her hands to push back and forth from wall to wall. She threw her head back and shouted, “Come on down!” at the ceiling.

  She shared her room with Clyde, but you could tell which side was hers. There was a poster of Princess Leia, half-covered with pastel drawings of butterflies and flowers and sunsets. She had one of those collapsing hat racks nailed up, full of necklaces and scarves.

  “You’re a real girl,” I said. “My mother would be so happy if my room looked like this.”

  She hung her floppy hat over her necklaces and sat down on the bed.

  “You think I’m a slut.”

  I sat down too, even though she hadn’t asked me. She’d knocked the breath right out of me. I’d come all the way on the train, thinking we could be friends.

  Her mother came in right then with two tall glasses of juice, grapefruit and lime.

  “Drink it. It’s good for you.” She said and smiled at me before she l
eft.

  “You definitely passed if she’s worrying about your vitamin C intake.”

  The juice was full of pulp, but it was good and it gave me something to do for a minute.

  “I don’t think you’re a slut.” It sounded like a lie, but it wasn’t, and I felt helpless. Language is so messy. The meaning of everything changes depending on what voice you use to say it. “I just figured you might not know about Robbie. He’s not as nice as he seems.”

  “Look around, Joan. This is where I am all the time, unless I’m in school. During the summer, it’s work. Sometimes I just want to get out a little.”

  “I get it. Trust me.”

  “Don’t go all social worker on me, either. My parents are good people. We all work hard. I get good grades. A lot of shit goes on around here, but we stay out of it.”

  “A lot of shit goes on in Highbone, too. It’s just that in Highbone everybody refuses to talk about it.”

  She gave her bitter laugh. The cynical one.

  “I like you,” she said. “I’m not a slut. It’s just sometimes I want to do the thing that isn’t safe. I just want to go the wrong way on the escalator and see how it feels, you know?”

  “I guess. When I see someone going the wrong way I just want to know why. I want to yell at them to turn around.”

  “You’re fucked up too, you know.”

  Teresa doesn’t exactly pull punches. Maybe she takes after her mother. No gray area. No in between.

  So that was when I started riding trains around Long Island. When everyone who mattered started to spread out along the big network of steel and sleepers that connects the seamy underside of all the towns. I used to have a tide table; now I have a timetable. The world is so much bigger than it was a year ago.

  The guy on the loudspeaker is calling the Montauk train. I laugh when he gets to Speonk, even though Daisy isn’t here. People look at me like I’m crazy, and I head down the ramp into the platform for the Huntington train, breathing in the smell of crowds that have been dead for decades, looking at a hundred years of dirt lying on the sleepers. If Daisy were here, he’d tell me when they electrified. He’d put his face up to the window and shade it with his hands so he could see the sparks fly up off the rails.

  Daisy

  ONE WEEKEND AT the beginning of October, I took the boat across to Carter’s Bay in the dark, so I could call Beatrice before anyone was up. At five in the morning it would be the middle of the day where she was. I went into the phone booth by the Wheelhouse Inn and filled it up with cigarette smoke while I worked up my courage.

  A raccoon flashed its green eyes at me from the edge of the parking lot before it wandered off into the woods. There was a rat, too, by the Dumpster. It was just me and the rodents and the moths hanging in a cloud around the streetlight. Then the hiss and clicking of the long-distance line, and then Beatrice’s voice.

  She didn’t say “pronto”; she just picked up and said my name.

  I said hers.

  “It must be very early,” she said. “Are you well?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. You should not call me in the day. Nighttime is better.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. We have school now. It might be my last chance for a while.”

  “Are you going to ask me if I’m well?”

  “I think I’m not well really, Beatrice. Something’s wrong with my mother.”

  “Marriage is like prison,” she said, and I had to laugh. “It is not a joke.”

  “No, it’s just that my father is in real prison. You know, he got arrested. He’s in jail.”

  “Is he a bad person?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. He fixed some books. Sorry, I mean he helped some people hide money.”

  “Oh. That is bad. Not the money, but what they do with it. It could be very bad.”

  “Anyway, my mother needs him. She kind of floats off, you know? She can’t pay attention to anything when he’s not around.”

  “Once, my husband hit me.”

  “God. I’m sorry, Beatrice.”

  “With his hand open, but still it hurt me. He hit me because I wasn’t happy. It did not make me happier.”

  I looked up at the sky getting lighter over Highbone. We listened to the hissing on the line and to each other breathing.

  “She needs to know he will come back,” she said.

  “If your husband went away, would you want him to come back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Your mother, she needs hope. She needs something to get ready for. A family house is like a prison for the wife. We love the jailer. Like . . . hostages.”

  “Beatrice?”

  “Yes?”

  “No one should hit you.”

  “Go and play, Daisy. Go and be happy today.”

  I rowed back across and tied up to our post. The bottom of the boat scraped into the sand as the water lapped its way down and away. I closed my eyes and listened for the sound of the Harrises’ kitchen door opening. For Andre’s music, for Arthur running up the front stairs. I waited to smell the coffee Mr. Jensen, Joan’s grandfather, likes to drink on the back porch. Beatrice’s voice melted into the air over the road, chased away by the sounds of Andre’s radio and Mr. Jensen closing the screen door. Maybe I fell asleep. The sound of them moving around each other, every one of them awake and connected, made me feel safe.

  I didn’t hear Andre’s window open. The clicking of the shutter melted into my dream and then woke me up. I opened my eyes and Andre was leaning over me with a Pentax.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “You look like you’re dead.”

  “Thanks.” I shut my eyes.

  “I meant it in a good way. Like a dead Viking or something. Like you’re in The Lord of the Rings.”

  “I’m so not, but okay.”

  “You can move now. Why are you sleeping in the boat?”

  “I went to Carter’s Bay. I had to make a phone call.”

  “You’re weird, McNamara, but I guess Joan gets you.”

  Andre made me a print of that picture, but I gave it away. I wish I had it now, so I could use it to help me remember that morning. The feeling of the warm wood with the sun on it. The sound of the boat, scraping the sandy mud.

  An hour later Joan still hadn’t come out. Waiting for her in the mornings was making me jumpy and sick. I never knew when she would be there and when she wouldn’t. If she went off somewhere without telling me, I’d have to sit at home under the weight of my mother’s dreamy silence and her disconnected smiles.

  I thought I could hide at Hatchet Mary’s, lie by the ponds, and think about Beatrice. I could make another plan for getting my mother to the beach. Maybe to Planting Fields, where she always loved the greenhouses. If I worked her up to it, maybe I could get her to the water-lily room at MOMA. We could sit on the benches and imagine what it would be like to love nothing but color and then lose your sight. She would smile a sad smile, but it would be relevant.

  At the bottom of the hill on Seaview Road, where you turn off to the beach, there’s a wooden fence and a load of brambles. If you crouch down and crawl under them, you come out into an abandoned estate. No one ever seems to care that kids hang out there. Even now, after everything, I don’t know what that place connects to, where you would be if you walked all the way through.

  Later, in the papers, they called the place the name of the people who owned it, but all the kids in Highbone call it Hatchet Mary’s. I don’t know why, maybe it has something to do with the graves.

  By the pond at Hatchet Mary’s, everyone whispers. There are willows, and the water has a layer of duckweed on the surface. The green in there presses down on you from above, turning the sunshine into underwater light. The gravestones are covered in yellow lichen that looks like lace, and the light filtering through the leaves makes everything seem sleepy. You feel like if you’re too loud, you might wake up the dead world in there. The ground will heave up and the pond water will cle
ar and the leaves will fall away, leaving you exposed in the middle of some rich Victorian guy’s lawn. You’ll be thrown backward into some other Long Island, without Levittown or malls or police.

  It was hot and still under there when I found Ray Velker and Patrick Jervis sitting by the little waterfall.

  I’ve known Patrick my whole life because he uses our bus stop. If he didn’t wear a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off, he’d be a nerd. He’s round and freckled and his hair is the straightest, shiniest hair in Highbone. He pulls it off somehow, though, mainly by slouching a lot and not saying much.

  “Hey, little McNamara.” Patrick’s voice was quiet, like I said.

  “Hey.”

  “Wanna smoke?”

  Ray had a baggie full of some strangely clean gold weed and a brass pipe with a chamber. He nodded and said nothing at all. That was cool; I’d gone to Hatchet Mary’s for the silence anyway.

  Looking back, I guess the weed didn’t look normal. Also, it was really harsh, and we all kept coughing.

  “Where’s Joan?” Patrick said. “Don’t think I ever saw you without Joan before.”

  “Don’t know. I think she might be avoiding me.”

  “Remember when nuns weren’t allowed to walk around alone?” Patrick said. “When my brother was little he saw a nun alone and he pointed and shouted at my mom, ‘Look, Mom, half a nun!’ Without Joan Harris, it’s like you’re like half a kid right now.”

  That is probably the only perceptive thing Patrick Jervis has said in his whole pointless life. It definitely seemed profound after a couple bowls of Ray’s weird gold weed. I looked into the pond and thought about where I ended and Joan began. I thought about my beating heart and the blood in my veins, like a dead open circuit that didn’t complete. No pathway for current. No spark and no wave.

  I looked at the carp turning and slipping under the cloudy water. One day all Joan’s practice would pay off and she would finally be able to stop breathing. She’d slide into the water and never have to come out again. She’d turn into who she was meant to be all along, and I wouldn’t be able to follow her without drowning.