A Room on Lorelei Street

by Mary E. Pearson

  Zoe takes a sip. “It’s very good,” she says, and means it. She takes another sip. It is fragrant and light and delicately sweet, nothing like the tea at Murray’s. She settles back in the Adirondack and rests the glass on the wide arm. “What’s fate to you, Opal?” she asks.

  Opal leans back, too. “Oh, lots of things. Lots and lots of things all pushed up against each other that make something else happen. So much pushing it just can’t happen any other way—unless you push back to make it not.”

  “Not?”

  “Not happen.”

  “Oh,” Zoe says, but the sense of it is floating in and out of her reach, like a season deciding to come or not come.

  They sit, enjoying the quiet, the tea, the purple Adirondacks curved just right to their backs, Zoe watching Opal cock her head to the side now and again when a bird takes up a song. Zoe’s eyes travel down the arm of the chair to Opal’s short leg and thick-soled shoe. What things pushed up against each other to make that happen? She watches Opal absently rubbing her thigh.

  “Your leg bother you much?” Zoe asks, and then thinks it was a rude question. Rude to notice. A short leg. She should have looked away.

  But Opal rolls right over the rudeness, eager to answer. “Just these later years now and again. Never bothered me before. I think it’s arthritis settling into the break. Heard that happens.”

  “You broke your leg?”

  “Oh sure, that’s what made it shorter in the first place. It broke in just the right—well, just the wrong place for an eight-year-old. It still grew after that, but not near as much as the other.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I didn’t move fast enough or jump high enough to please my pap. Don’t remember the why of it so much as the how. He had a temper shorter than Count Basil’s tail and broke a two-by-four across my thigh. My ma joked later that if he had hit it over my head I would have been just fine. I did have a way about me, I suppose.”

  “Your mother joked about it?”

  Opal snorts and waves her hand like she is swatting at a fly. “Oh, years later. By then she had killed the old man, so it seemed all right to do.”

  Zoe cannot find graceful words to respond, and the ones on the edge of her lips won’t do. It is too bizarre. Not so much the killing but how Opal speaks of it. Like she is speaking of someone else. Like she is so detached she can still be happy. How can she drink tea and smile at another birdsong in the same breath as the telling of her mother killing her father?

  Opal sips more tea and shakes her head. “Seems like five lifetimes ago. I hardly think of it anymore.” A faint, dreamy smile crosses her face again, and Zoe wonders how such a memory could bring a smile. Or maybe the smile is having almost forgotten? Or just that it doesn’t matter so much anymore? Could something like that ever get so distant that it doesn’t matter? Or maybe the smile is just that she survived it? Is that it? Surviving? But Opal seems like she is doing much more than surviving. She seems to squeeze the most from every moment. Zoe thinks of Opal’s squeal at finding her in the garden and then hurrying away to make the tea. Every moment is the moment for Opal. Like she can’t let a single one get past her. Or maybe all these moments push out the others. Make up for the others. Push them as distant as five lifetimes.

  New moments of Opal’s own making.

  Zoe picks at an orange-yellow-purple indentation, seasons and seasons’ worth of distant painted-over moments, as far away as Opal needs them to be.

  A gentle cooing cuts into her thoughts. “Do you hear that?” Zoe asks. She cocks her head to the side as she has seen Opal do. “Mourning doves. I’m sure it’s mourning doves.”

  Opal cocks her head to the side, too, alert, but the cooing has stopped. “They’re shy,” she says. “Won’t come near the feeders with the other birds, but sometimes early I will see them there. Gentlest creatures. And loyal.”

  “Yes,” Zoe agrees. “I know.” She and Kyle used to feed them bread crumbs on the walk in front of their house. They came back morning after morning. The doves were the closest thing to pets they ever had.

  Zoe drinks down the last of her blackberry tea. “So you think it’s the end of the season?” she asks.

  “According to my berry bushes. But a few others are hanging on. Still have a few apricots on the tree. Can you believe that? September and still apricots! It’s the shade of the mulberry, I suppose.”

  Kyle loves apricots, Zoe thinks. Mr. Henderson always brings over bags full of them from his tree, but it is finished up by the beginning of August. Kyle probably hasn’t had an apricot since then. Neither has she.

  And Mama. Mama loves apricots, too.

  “Then I guess according to your apricots it’s still summer,” Zoe says, and with the passing of a warm breeze across her arms, she thinks it must be true.

  Twenty-Six

  Filthy money, Murray calls it.

  Dirty from so many germy hands touching it.

  But as she slides soft, wrinkled bills—

  thirty-four singles,

  two fives,

  and one,

  two,

  three,

  four

  quarters—

  across the counter, the echoes of dozens of yes ma’ams, yes sirs, my pleasure ma’am, groaning arches, smiles on cue, extra mayo, no mayo, orders that beg to be confused but aren’t, anything elses, and come back agains…they follow the money like ghosts, make it more than money, and she can’t describe it as dirty because

  as she lets go,

  it feels amazingly clean.

  “Forty-five,” the clerk says. “Here’s your receipt. We’ll send a copy to your coach so he knows you’re clear on your transportation fee.”

  Another bill checked off. Accomplished. Done. Day by day.

  It’s working.

  It was close. After the Food Star groceries, one pack of cigarettes, and a single gallon of gas to top off the fumes she’s been driving on for two days, she only has five cents left from her Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday tips combined. But close is good enough, and the satisfaction of a paid bill spreads over her like new paint on a dingy wall. No excuses. No talk. Just done.

  And no crawling back.

  “Something else?” the clerk asks.

  Zoe realizes she has used the clerk’s counter and time to wade through her thoughts while a line grows behind her. “No, nothing,” she says. Her victory is her own, solitary and unnoticed.

  She starts to turn away and feels each elbow being caught up.

  “So when were you going to tell us?”

  “You got a secret to share?”

  Reid pulls on one side. Carly on the other. Monica and Jorge squeeze close by. Their attention doesn’t lift Zoe. They know. It cuts her open. Her world is not theirs. It never has been. A brittle shade separates them—or did. But now the dirty secrets of her life are bared, and embarrassment laps in. How did they find out? Please, not Mama. I hope they didn’t talk to Mama. She is stupid. Of course they would call eventually. Now appearances, even thin ones, are gone.

  “What I want to know is how you can afford it.”

  “It’s called a job, Monica,” Jorge says.

  “Shut up, shit-for-brains. I wasn’t asking you. Besides, I have a job, and I could never afford an apartment.”

  “It’s not an apartment,” Zoe says.

  “Well, what is it then? A house?” Jorge asks.

  “I—”

  Reid stops and spins her to face him. “Did you rent a whole fucking house?”

  Carly breaks in. “No. She bought it. She bought a whole house, you idiot. Would you let her talk!”

  “It’s a room,” Zoe says, “on Lorelei Street.” Her words are like a stamp. A final approval. Or maybe more like full disclosure. No going back.

  “Where’s that?”

  They guide her to the parking lot, and during the ten minutes they have before the bell rings, they share a smoke between cars while she answers their questions. “It’s off
of Carmichael about six blocks from the diner.”

  “How big is it?” Carly asks.

  “I told you. It’s a room. That’s all. And a bathroom. And sort of a kitchen in one corner. A sink, a hot plate, and a refrigerator.” She leans against the car that hides them and takes the shared cigarette from Reid’s fingers. Their enthusiasm cinches her up, edges away the embarrassment. She squints and wants to have some fun. She inhales and blows a long dramatic trail out. Effect for Reid. Pause. Timing. It all matters. “Came with a dog, too. I share the room with a bulldog. A big, fat-ass bulldog.”

  “No way!” Reid says. She knows he is more impressed with her delivery than the dog. Monica and Carly both laugh and scream “What?” at the same time. Jorge maintains control. He is not interested in the dog. “What about a Jacuzzi?” he asks.

  Zoe and Monica exchange a look. The question goes unanswered. The warning bell rings, Zoe passes the cigarette to Carly for a last puff, and they walk to class. At the 200 wing the group splits—Zoe goes with Carly, and Reid, Monica, and Jorge head off in another direction.

  “How’d you find out?” Zoe asks. “You called the house?”

  “Yeah,” Carly answers.

  Zoe feels a stiffening to her cheeks. A bracing to keep the turn of her lips and the tilt of her chin just so. “So you talked to my mom,” she says.

  “No. I talked to your grandma. She’s the one who answered.”

  Grandma? Her room was revealed by Grandma? A corner is stolen. A patchwork pillow. A star. A bulldog. A fingerprint smudge. Damn you, Zoe. Why didn’t you tell them first? The careful bracing is gone. “What did she say?”

  “Just that you moved out. Gave me the address and then said something about secrets that I didn’t get.”

  Secrets.

  Carly’s voice becomes careful. Delicate. “She…sounded a little…funny. Just said you moved out because you were tired of secrets. Kind of leaned heavy on that word. What’d she mean?”

  She meant for you to tell me, that’s what she meant, Zoe thinks. She wanted to steal a piece of my day. My life. Make her thoughts my thoughts. To throw my words back in my face. She meant to control me without ever speaking to me. But Zoe says none of those things to Carly.

  “I don’t know,” she answers in a voice that even Reid would have believed.

  Twenty-Seven

  Zoe stares at the whiteboard, watches Mr. Crain scrawl numbers across it, but the white, the glare, the white that seems to wrap around her and hold her, white that squeezes her, glimmers, white that shines like water, like porcelain,

  the white is all she sees.

  Shimmering white that holds water and secrets. Grandma knows. She tosses the word secret to Carly, knowing she will toss it to Zoe, like a key that will let Grandma in. Let Grandma control her. The porcelain white that she sees every day of her life. Mr. Crain dissolves away. She only sees a glimmering white tub, and her mind travels around and through every shiny inch of it.

  Is it possible for a grown man to drown in sixteen inches of water? To be so drunk that when he slips beneath the surface he can’t find his way up again, so that up mixes with down, dry mixes with wet, air mixes with liquid, until all is blackness and he is gone? Was it possible for Daddy to be so stinking drunk he could slide beneath the water and not know it? To breathe in the warm, gray water and think it is air? Not even convulse automatically upward for a breath? Can anyone be that drunk? The investigators said maybe, yes, probably, and then they saw that the overflow was clogged. A few extra inches in the tub. How could that make a difference? Maybe. It could. But then again. But Grandma hollered and wailed, and the insurance company settled. A few extra inches and Daddy being drunk didn’t matter anymore. He drowned in their tub because of a clogged overflow. But there was more they didn’t know. Would never know. Only she, Grandma, and Mama knew.

  They knew more about that night he drank himself into oblivion in a tub full of water. Some secrets were worth money. Some secrets were worth silence. And now Grandma throws it in her face. The night Daddy died and the bath he never should have taken. The suspicion. The night and the wondering that can never be answered because Daddy is gone. The wondering that eats. Daddy is gone because he couldn’t face staying.

  The official story is it was an accident. The investigators said so. The insurance company said so. Grandma said so. It probably was. But Mama never said a word. She just cried. The secret was not mentioned. Couldn’t be mentioned.

  Daddy never took baths.

  The bell rings, and words and numbers appear on the whiteboard. Numbers that have no place in her secret white world. Zoe closes her book. She doesn’t write down the homework assignment. It doesn’t seem to matter.

  Two points for Grandma.

  Twenty-Eight

  Reid holds her arm. “Well? Tonight, okay?”

  “Reid, I’m going to be late!”

  He holds on, waiting for an answer. She managed to maneuver away at lunch. She can pull distractions from thin air. But Reid has caught on. He holds her so distractions can’t slip in, not even being late to class.

  “You mean all of you?” Zoe asks. She doesn’t have to emphasize the “all,” she knows he will catch it. Words and delivery are his life.

  Reid squints. “Yeah.” He pauses, nods. “All of us.”

  She knows that may not have been his plan. Not all of them. But so what. Life sucks. Get over it. “Sure,” she says. “Nine or so. I gotta—”

  The bell rings.

  “—go.” Shit. She is only three steps from Mrs. Garrett’s door. Three lousy steps, but it might as well be three miles. She slips in the door, her breath tucked in. The room is seated. Silent. Mrs. Garrett does not look up from her lectern; her eyes are fixed on the folder she is fingering, penciling with marks. Two seconds. Three. It is a breath, a pause, a big fat nothing, before she is in her seat. She barely slices the silence. So what?

  Mrs. Garrett looks up, stares at the bug Zoe has become. She sweeps her eyes across Zoe, slowly, like the effort barely interests her. It’s three fucking seconds. Three. But it’s more than that. Zoe knows. More than three seconds, more than the word fuck spoken aloud in a classroom on the first day of school, more than a mispronounced name.

  It’s being. Wanting to be. More than. Less than. Something. Anything. She can feel it. It pushes against her ribs; it is heavy in her stomach. She holds it in. Pins it away to a secret part of her soul. Mrs. Garrett thinks Zoe will break. In what reality? She has said it before. She tells herself again. Mrs. Garrett is a cakewalk. She opens her book and prepares to enter her invisible world for the next hour. She is getting used to it. Cake. Walk. I. Am. Not. A.

  Bug.

  A paper is returned at the end of class.

  Zoe barely glances at the grade scrawled across the top before she slides it into her notebook. She can’t let on that it matters. It’s all about maneuvers. Her face is blank. But the B-minus pushes at the corner of her mouth. She is making it. Zoe Beth Buckman. Zoe, who can hold it in. Zoe, fourth on the tennis team and moving up. Zoe, who pays her bills on time. Zoe, a B student. Zoe, having friends over to her room. Her own room at 373 Lorelei Street. The room that is working. Cakewalk. Yeah.

  Twenty-Nine

  The usual afternoon breezes vanish. Heat wells in layers, one pressing on another. The black asphalt surrounding trailer 10A shimmers like tar, like the late summer heat has melted it back into ooze. Zoe is melting, too. But still, she would rather be on the courts getting in more practice than sitting in an air-conditioned trailer with Mr. K. She has a match today. Practice matters.

  The ramp pings and warps as she walks up, but this time she doesn’t care if he knows she is coming. It is her third meeting, and she understands Mr. K now. She knows his game. Waitressing has been good for her in that respect at least. If you hope to make decent tips, you have to know what people want. Not just food. Food is nothing. It’s more than that. It’s when to be quiet, when to be chatty, when to smile, when to fade a
way. Mr. K wants chat. She can give him that without revealing a thing, and in return she might get an early release from this tin prison. Leaving early will mean catching the bus to the match, and that means saving gas. Like practice, gas matters. It all works together to keep the room.

  The door swings and barely cool air hits her face. It smells of dusty carpet, stale popcorn, and body odors that should be reserved for second grade. Thank you, Mr. K, but in her next cool breath she knows it is not Mr. K who must be thanked.

  “Come in. Here. Come.” A twitchy, hawk-nosed man motions to where she sat last week. She doesn’t move. He is nervous. Sweaty. Why? He swings his angled body toward her and holds out his hand. Cripes! Who is this geek? “Mr. Beltzer. I’m filling in for Mr. Kowalashosky. From the district office.”

  She doesn’t like him. His eyes move too fast. His skin is waxy and colorless. And he does strange things with his upper lip. It crinkles and smacks like something is wedged in his front tooth. This was not part of the deal. Suddenly she wants Mr. K. She wants his calmness, his rounded belly, his slow, smooth movements. Suddenly she thinks she did want to talk to Mr. K after all. She wanted him to listen. She wanted to think thoughts aloud and have his quiet way make sense of it all.

  “Where’s Mr. K?” she asks.

  “Out.” He twitches, smacks, and sits down. “Looks to be a while. He’s in the hospital, something to do with his back.” He shuffles through papers, avoiding Zoe’s stare. “Traction, I think.”

  Traction. Zoe sits. She thinks of Mr. K’s rounded belly, tight against his white shirt, pulling, pulling against his back, pulling to slide out a vertebra, and then one thing, one small thing finally does it. Maybe a jelly bean. Did one little jelly bean make everything tumble out of line? Make everything fall apart? Even Mr. K, who listens and thinks and knows, could not have known one little jelly bean could make everything come undone. One little jelly bean and his spine careers out of control like a car wreck.