Silver Girl

by Leslie Pietrzyk

  The man with the beard walked gently up the center aisle, as if on tiptoe. He wasn’t a real priest but he was some sort of religion, and he stood up front and talked. I didn’t find his words especially meaningful, just the something that had to be said, but behind me, I heard snuffling and choked tears. Penny stared at her feet, which she flexed and twisted in a kind of distracting way. Now and then she half smiled, and I didn’t know why or what that meant. I couldn’t tell if she was listening to the man or not. I wanted her to, because later she surely would want to know what he said, but even I couldn’t pay close attention, and I was older and had learned in college how to note-take tedious ramblings that might show up on a final.

  I was thinking about Jess. She should have called me at least maybe once. I wondered what was in her mind, what she was thinking about Penny, about her dad, about these crazy things happening all at once to her family. Maybe she was thinking that I should have called her. We’d never had a fight like this before, and I couldn’t figure out what was normal.

  I remembered exactly what she said that morning when she found Penny, after she accused me of betraying her, after grandstanding about fucking saying “fucking”: “I always thought you cared about me, but I see I was totally wrong.” That was fine; I expected her to be dramatic like that, extravagant with the “always” and “totally.” What I didn’t expect was: “Everyone warned me to watch out about you, but I didn’t listen to them.” Everyone who? I wondered. Them who? Before I could ask, she kept on: “You don’t fool me. I know all about you.” And I would have laughed, thinking she had to be joking with such ridiculously melodramatic statements, things my poetry professor would shame with a tidy red ink box on the page; she might as well have announced, Aha! It was Colonel Mustard in the library with the rope, but then she said, “Stop sponging off me. You’re so cheap, I can’t stand it. I’d be embarrassed to wear someone else’s hand-me-downs. It’s like you’re poor.”

  She stood perfectly framed in her doorway, gripping both sides of the door with her hands. I stared at her chipped nail polish, which meant she was back to chewing her nails, a habit she’d really worked hard to break.

  I couldn’t let her know how that felt. The depth of what she’d said. But she already knew. That’s why she said it. So I smiled. Hard. I thought my face would collapse. Finally: “I’m just trying to help a little girl whose mother died,” I said. “Your sister, by the way.”

  “That’s right,” Jess said. “My sister. Not yours. Help your own, why don’t you, if you’re so keen on helping someone’s sister.”

  “My sister is fine.”

  She smiled at me. I smiled right back, matching her. We smiled and smiled. This lasted forever until she surrendered. Luckily, the next thing she said was “That little bitch has my ring, doesn’t she?”

  “She’ll hear you,” I warned. Penny was in my bedroom, door closed. Surely she was pressed up against it, listening.

  “You tell her to give that ring back,” she said, “or I’m calling the cops, and don’t think I won’t. I don’t give a shit what my dad says.”

  “It’s not really yours anymore, is it?” I said.

  That was exactly when she left, lugging an armload of duffel bags jammed with clothes, shoes, and makeup. Maybe I should have been relieved, but I was drained dry. I can explain, I thought, come back, come back.

  Now, the guy was done talking. I hoped there might be someone hired to sing, but no, which seemed depressing. People held back from walking up to the casket, waiting for Penny to go first, but she stayed sitting, staring at her feet, so I sat with her, and eventually people ventured up to pat her shoulder or reach for her limp hand, people crying and sniffling into wadded Kleenex, murmuring about how terribly sorry they were and how her mom was a wonderful lady and promises about heaven and angels. Penny slouched through that onslaught as she had through the service, with the minimum amount of words, the minimum facial expressions. Someone brought over the shoes—which were wrecked, by the way—but she left them there on the ground, and the minister handed me a business card with an official, printed phone number and one he had scribbled on with pen for me to give to Penny later; “For when she wants to process this,” he explained. A young-looking woman in a jean skirt who was the guidance counselor from Penny’s school also gave me a business card, and the principal, with wheezy bad breath, handed me a large sealed envelope filled with letters from students at Penny’s school. The stack of leftover prayer cards was at least an inch thick, and a lady told me I should take them; I guess there was a minimum order, but how sad to see them all. People pressed flowers into Penny’s hand, folded-up bills. Someone asked if they could take a potted plant to a grandmother in a nursing home, and I said, “Why not?” so then a bunch of people grabbed pots. What did it matter? A few people wanted to know where the lunch was, and I said there wasn’t one, which made them shake their heads. No one asked who I was. No one told me they were sorry for my loss, which was okay, because I didn’t have a real loss, unless I was allowed to count Jess and maybe Tommy, not that they were anything like a dead mother. Jess’s dad didn’t come back, which, if he was drunk, maybe was a good thing, but also maybe a bad thing, because he was the one who should collect the business cards and envelopes, and maybe there was a lunch planned that he hadn’t mentioned to me.

  After a long time it was over.

  Men gathered along the perimeter, needing us to go, wanting the folding chairs and white ribbons, waiting to roll up the Astroturf, ready to bury the body. Even the reporters and TV vans and cops had driven off in crunchy sprays of gravel. The only car left was Jess’s dad’s, and now parked across the road from it was—I was pretty sure—Jess’s Volvo. But I said to Penny, “Are you done here? Do you want to pray or something?” She shook her head and trudged toward the cars, finally removing the sunglasses, folding them shut. I watched for a moment, certain she’d return, that it couldn’t be so simple to leave behind her mother’s body, but maybe it was the only possible way. Like tearing off a Band-Aid, though the comparison felt stupid even to think. Nothing to do but follow. Halfway to the car I realized I’d forgotten the shoes, which I decided to leave behind. I wouldn’t want to wear them after today, no matter how great my legs looked.

  I caught up and touched her shoulder, the pointy knob of one of her bones jabbing the thin fabric of the blouse, then I pulled back my hand. “Hold up,” I said. “I’m thinking Jess might be talking to your dad. That’s her car parked there anyway.”

  “I’m not afraid of her,” she said. But she stood still, arms crossed. Lipstick smeared one cuff. Impossible to soak out that stain. “Think she still hates me?”

  “She showed up,” I said, which was as hopeful as I could be. “So maybe she’s getting more used to the idea that she’s got another sister now.” Not that it mattered if she was used to the idea or not, since Penny was her sister, like it or not.

  Penny said, “I guess I shouldn’t care. He’s my dad, too. Even if he’s crappy.”

  “He’s not crappy,” I said. “Maybe he’s confused.”

  “No,” Penny said. “I’m pretty sure he’s crappy. Don’t pretend.” She sighed, lifted one foot, extended her toes, gazed down at them for a moment. “Not like we’re walking home, so let’s get it over with.”

  “We could take the el,” I said, having no idea how far an el stop was or why I said that. But why not grab Penny and whisk her safely out, away from Jess’s fury? If there wasn’t an el, there’d be a bus. I could get her home. I could rescue her, be the one “speaking for the Mitchell family.”

  “You’re afraid,” she said.

  I shrugged. “No.”

  “I said I wouldn’t tell,” she said. “I mean, I know you didn’t have to let me stay. So I owe you something, right?”

  I looked back. The chairs were already being loaded onto a truck. Different sad people would be sitting on them tomorrow. That fast.

  “What I said before—”

  �
��Stop,” she interrupted, and her eyes went glossy.

  “I shouldn’t have—”

  “I mean it, stop.” She hunched away from me, scraped roughly at her cheeks with two fingers, which she flicked against her thumb, as if the glittering tears would fly off and disappear into the grass. “I’m not going to cry. You wouldn’t trade places with me for all the money in the world. No one would.”

  An uncomfortable silence built. My mind flashed to watching Grace color, the comfort of crayons gliding over paper. But I was here, and I pondered what might be the right thing to say. I hoped it was this: “Sounds like the cue for ‘Opie learns a lesson’ music,” and I crooned my bad imitation: “Waa-wah-waaaaa. Sittin’ with Paw on the porch, talkin’ it all out.” Laugh, I thought, please. “Waa-wah-waaaaa. Honesty is the best policy. Crime doesn’t pay. Bullies hurt inside.”

  She laughed, sort of, more like a choked-back squawk, and wiped away another line of tears. Money can’t buy happiness, I imagined Andy drawling on that porch, scuffling a loving hand over Opie’s black-and-white cowlick, Aunt Bea beaming behind the screen door with homemade cake for everyone. I squinted at the sun, until my own eyes teared and I looked away.

  The car horn did a quick staccato, and Penny jerked as if she’d been shot. Delaying was making everything worse, and I marched us to the car and pulled open the backseat door and slid all the way across, and Penny came in next to me.

  “Look who’s here,” Jess’s dad said, unnecessarily, unwaveringly flat and neutral, as if this statement truly could be an observation.

  Jess turned to peer at us from the passenger seat. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat, as if dressed for the extremely dramatic part of Grieving Woman, and I realized she had intended to sit at the funeral. Her father had asked her to come. And she had. Because she cared about him, because she loved him. No fifty-dollar bribe. Her head tilted as she examined Penny, light and shadow carving the same hollows in her cheekbones that were in Penny’s cheekbones, and she twisted further in her seat, for a deeper, longer, harder stare, then sucked in a big breath and said, “So you’re Penny.” Not one quiver.

  I smelled a tinge of alcohol, either on her breath or in the car in general. I imagined her and her father swigging down the same glove box bottle. I remembered what Jess’s mother told her once: keeping a family together was everything.

  Penny nodded, her body shrinking deeper into the leather. Jess’s dad got all still. I didn’t know what would happen next. Or what I wanted to happen next. I mean, I wanted them to get along. That was what I wanted.

  “Hi... Jess,” Penny finally said. Her voice was small. “I, um, always thought I would like a sister, a cool older sister.”

  Jess said, “First thing is get you a haircut,” then she reached—She doesn’t always like being touched, I almost said—to stroke the hair draping Penny’s face, coiling a few strands around one finger, before letting them spring free so she could push back the hair from Penny’s forehead. “No one thought to clip these bangs? We’ve got to show off this pretty face.” Penny started to speak, but Jess rolled on: “I’m excellent at cutting bangs. I can do it when we get home.”

  No lie. She really was good, caring about being perfectly straight. She trimmed her mother’s hair, and Linda’s, and mine. But she didn’t trust anyone with hers.

  Jess’s father laughed, though nothing sounded funny to me, and started the car. The monotonous AM radio voice prattled, but immediately Jess spun the dial to XRT for music, which came up with Muddy Waters’s “Sweet Home Chicago.” “I love this song,” she said, “don’t you? Doesn’t everyone?” She didn’t need an answer. She knew she was right.

  I was the only one still not breathing as we wound our way out of the cemetery and merged into traffic. “What about Jess’s car?” I asked at one point, and because no one answered, I glanced out the back window and there it was, trailing us, breaking away at the first light to go the opposite direction we did, Jess’s mom driving it home to Oak Lawn. That’s when Jess said, “You know, Penny, me too. Sisters are amazing. They just really are. I wish you knew Linda. She sure was a character, right, Dad? We all miss her like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Strategies for Survival #7: Balance

  (summer, after freshman year)

  I hadn’t paid Janey the money I owed her. I told myself it was a gift. No one said “loan” or “pay back,” or if they did, I didn’t remember. The first time I saw Janey in Iowa the summer after freshman year, we talked really fast about a hundred different things, tumbling words as if that could make us the same as who we were, as if that would catch us up. But I was playing a part. Being away had changed me, and she was still here, which was impossible to overlook. One thing she said was that she’d thought about visiting me in Evanston, almost did it; that she was desperate to blow out of town and I was the only person she knew who’d gone anywhere. I told her to visit any time and stay as long as she wanted. Then we ran out of things to say. I hadn’t mentioned Jess’s name, and I wasn’t going to.

  Instead I asked about her pothead brother, how he was.

  “He only likes boys now,” she said.

  The word I knew for that was “fag,” but I couldn’t say it. It felt ugly on my tongue and would be uglier in my voice, not right for that fuzzy-haired boy with wistful brown eyes who had kissed each of us with sweet delicacy. Desi, he had crooned, the only one trusted with the silly secret of my imaginary French class name, Desiree. It would be boys now: boys relishing his kisses, whispers filling boys’ ears. But if I didn’t say that word, I didn’t know what I could say. Something big had changed, or maybe it hadn’t changed at all, because maybe he liked boys all along, even when he was kissing me.

  “My dad kicked him out of the house,” Janey said. “My mom cries all day. No one’s talking to anyone. Our whole family’s shredded to bits. I don’t want to be there. Or anywhere. I don’t know where I want to be. Just out.” She sighed and looked up at the ceiling, then back at me like what she wanted wasn’t up there. “No one else knows. And I’m not talking about it.”

  We were at Country Kitchen off Highway 6 where she waitressed. I came in to apply for a job, but they wanted experience and didn’t count answering phones at a pizza takeout. The manager wouldn’t even pick up my application form to file it somewhere when he trudged away. Janey was on break, slumped across from me at one of those narrow two-person booths. A colorful stand-up card was tented between us, my side advertising the Country Boy burger. She was drinking coffee, black. I’d never seen her with coffee before. She grimaced as she sipped, like coffee was one more chore. “Why did I tell you?” she said. “Damn it.”

  “I can keep a secret,” I said.

  “Still”—she pointed to my application, my neat printing, the blue ink—“you should’ve lied,” she said, “told them you were a waitress anywhere. They never check.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Maybe you don’t really want to work here,” she said.

  I shrugged, gave a glance around, but not one thing registered as memorable. “Seems okay enough.” That was the lie. She knew it. Janey wasn’t dumb. The air smelled like bleach and burger grease.

  “Maybe you think you’re too good now,” she said.

  “Come on.” I forced a smile, forced it to look natural.

  Her face went sour as she tilted her cup to get at the last of her coffee.

  “Just remember,” she said. She clutched the cup really hard, so hard it shook the tiniest bit. “I know who you are. I’ll always know who you really are.”

  I wanted to jump up or at least stand. I even kind of wanted to hit her. But the tiny booth pressed me in and clambering out would turn me awkward as a giraffe. So I leaned in close enough that my breath puffed the table card forward half an inch as I said, “Like how you knew your own brother? You don’t know anything.”

  “You owe me,” she said. “And always will. Even if you give me all the money in the world. How’s that?”

 
She slithered from the booth, then spun and clunked her coffee cup into a plastic bus tub perched on a folding stand. It hit with a clatter, shifting other dishes, but Janey kept walking.

  I couldn’t park there forever, and I wasn’t about to pay for a Country Boy or even a Tab at a place I wasn’t invited to work at, a place I was too good to work at, but I sat for a moment, waiting for Janey to get back to the kitchen so she couldn’t watch me leave.

  I thought about her brother, kissing me, kissing all of us, while secretly longing to kiss a boy. I knew what he gave us, but was it possible he got nothing back? I thought about his tongue gliding the contours of my mouth, how soft and gentle his every movement was, the trace of his fingertip skimming my cheekbone; how fragile this was, not because we might get caught, but because the moment would dissolve into the flatness of memory once we stepped aside. I thought of all the girls he had kissed back then, our names pattering in my head like summer rain.

  I thought about Jess for some reason, and the time I was hanging out in her dorm room, watching her peer into her lighted magnifying mirror as she plucked hairs from her eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. “Shaping them into perfection,” she said. Once she finished, we’d be off to a frat party I didn’t care about. Pinpricks of pink welts rose at the root of each hair as she extracted, one by one, swiping the tweezers across a Kleenex after each go, entirely focused on this task. Left brow, the right, the left, the right. Like Ping-Pong. Perfection. The repetition and her solemn concentration turned me silly. “What if you accidentally end up plucking them all out trying to keep even?” I had asked, uncomfortable, unwilling to stroke my own bristly caterpillar brows, fearing the tedium and pain of tearing individual hairs out of my flesh even as I envied the task and its precision.