When She Was Good (9780545361910)

by Mazer, Norma Fox

  “Have you written in your journal today, class?” she said each day. “Remember to be honest. No faking it. Your inner truth, that’s what a journal is for.”

  “My inner truth is that my stomach feels rotten,” Peter Hamilton said. Everyone laughed, of course. I wondered what it must feel like to make other people laugh, to have them look at you as if you were special. No one had ever looked at me that way for anything I did.

  But then, I did so little. I sat in the back of the room and didn’t speak. I felt I had nothing to say. Then, one day, I wrote a handful of words in my journal that surprised and frightened me. These words seemed to scribble themselves onto the paper, to pour out of my pen without any direction from me. I wrote the first word, and the others followed as if they were on a line and I was only pulling it. “Light,” I wrote, and then here came the others, “at night is sometimes green and sometimes bright and sometimes pale and white.” My pencil shook across the paper. “I wonder if, like birds and words, I could fly in that white green light?”

  I left my journal on Mrs. Karyl’s desk at the end of the period. The next day she was waiting for me. “Em.” She put her hand on my arm. “You wrote something fine, Em.” Her eyes shone at me. “That’s so amazing, Em. Do more! Keep it up!”

  She had never noticed me before and a thought entered my mind: I did something good. No, better than good. Amazing. Amazing — even though Mother had died the winter before while I slept like a pig, never knowing she was leaving me forever. Amazing — even though Father sat on the couch night after night without speaking, his long bony head held between his hands. Amazing even though Pamela said daily how she hated my sad stupid face, and did I know that I looked like a piece of old green crap.

  I started carrying the notebook with me all the time, on the school bus, at home, in the bathroom, in every class. I slept with it under my pillow, my hand on it, believing that sleep might bring me something fine. Everything I wrote in it disappointed me, but every day I wrote something, and every day I hoped for something to show Mrs. Karyl.

  “What’re you doing?” Pamela said one day.

  “Nothing.” I was in the kitchen, sitting at the table. I closed the notebook.

  “Don’t give me that crap. Show me what you’re doing.”

  “It’s just something for school, Pamela.”

  “You’re lying. You’re always writing in that thing.” She raised her hand and smiled at me, as if we shared a secret about that hand. And maybe we did. Since Mother died, she had taken to slapping me now and then.

  “Give me that notebook,” she said.

  “It’s nothing. It’s junk,” I said, my heart jerking at the betrayal of the notebook I loved. “Just some old junk.”

  “I don’t want you writing junk. Or anything. You hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Okay.”

  After that I tried to write in the notebook only in school, but there were moments when I was careless, when I felt I had to write even though I was at home. So it should have been no surprise when, one night, Pamela walked into the room we shared and caught me at it. She stood in the doorway. “Didn’t I tell you not to do that?”

  “Pamela, it’s my notebook for school.”

  “Give that here.”

  I was sitting on the floor. I noticed her hands: they were puffy, like a couple of rolls.

  “Give it to me,” I said.

  “It’s for the teacher, Pamela; it’s for Mrs. Karyl.”

  “Mrs. Crapel, you mean.”

  She came toward me. She had a big, rolling sort of walk. She was big anyway, heavy boned, her thighs large and womanly. Her walk puffed her up bigger. I held my notebook against my chest. I tried to defend it, but she took it from me easily.

  She flipped through it, snorting. “I hate crap like this. All this secret writing stuff. You shouldn’t have secrets from me, I’m your sister.” She went out of the room with the notebook.

  “What are you going to do?” I scrambled after her. “Pamela, what’re you doing?”

  She was in the bathroom, tearing it up, flushing the bits of paper down the toilet.

  “Stop!” I grabbed at her arm. She pushed me away and went on tearing and flushing.

  Into the shower and out — fast, fast — as if Pamela’s in the other room shouting for me to hurry. Listening, listening, always listening for her. Drying myself fast, breasts tiny and soft floating across my chest. Pretty? Are they pretty? Filthy filthy stop that get your mind out of the gutter. I look at myself in the mirror, look closer, look at my face. After Mother died, Father’s face shrank, grew smaller, flesh tightening against his skull. Strangely, he didn’t look older, but like the younger brother of himself.

  My left eye bulges at me. It might not be mine are you crazy might be Pamela’s. Mother once said the dead always leave something behind them.

  CALL THE FUNNY FARM, LOCK HER UP!

  My stomach thumps with quick beats. Will she never stop, never be quiet? I pull on clothes, run out. Must get away, away from her, from her voice, her voice always telling me telling me telling me.

  “Hello, Em!” William, on the bench in the lobby as I fly past.

  “Hello, William.” Open the door. Get out. Get away.

  “This is my place, Em.”

  “I know, William.”

  “This is where I sit.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  His voice darts after me, trying to snag me. “You can sit here too. You’re pretty. Are you happy today, Em?”

  Yes, oh yes, William, I’m so happy. Why does he always ask me that? I walk around the side of the building, across the grass strip and into the field. Waste field stretching a city block. It belongs to the university. People say they’ll build something here someday. Now it’s nothing but weeds, stones, trash. Pamela didn’t like the rough ground. She hated the stones. It made walking difficult. “Remember the sand on our road,” she’d say. It was the only time I ever heard her speak about our old life with regret. “Remember how you could walk down that road barefoot in the good weather?” She never came to this field, never. It used to be my special place, but this last year, after I came back from Vermont, she wouldn’t let me out of the apartment for anything, not even a walk. Every day was the same. The same walls, the same rooms, the same TV shows, the same food, same words, same blows, everything the same.

  I kick aside a beer can, walk swiftly. So good to walk. So good to walk across a big space, to breathe air, to look around, to keep going, to think of nothing.

  At the other end of the field, I push through a tangle of bushes and come out on Davis Avenue. Nice neat Davis Avenue. Nice houses, nice lawns, nice people, nice children, nice parents, everything nice. Not like me. Me and Pamela. We are not nice. Not normal, not regular. We are crazy, dirty, stupid, and nobody must know. Nobody nobody. Did you talk what did you tell them keep your frucking mouth shut. In my chest, something alive, chewing on me, like mice — softly softly chewing, noiseless, soft, steady chewing.

  I don’t want to go back to the apartment, not if she’s there, not if her voice is there. I won’t stop, just keep walking like this, walking away from her, swinging my arms, passing the pretty houses. I would like to walk like this forever, thinking of nothing, only going forward, moment by moment, hour by hour, day after day. I could walk across the country from here, the middle of New York State, to California crazy you are crazy down the coast — the beautiful rocks and ocean, I’ve seen the pictures — across to Texas you’re gone a goner over the edge Louisiana, Florida, up the East Coast, all the states, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland crazier and stupider every day your brains are spaghetti — “Stop,” I cry into the air. “Shut up, Pamela, I want you to shut up,” I plead.

  “Thurkill,” I say, holding the phone close to my mouth. “I want to leave a message for him. He’ll come in and —”

  “Who?” the man says.

  “Thurkill,” I say again, making it two clear syllables. “Raymond
Thurkill. He’s my father,” I add, as if that will help the man’s hearing. We had always picked up our messages at the grocery store at the crossroads that everyone called the Corners, but this man is new, and I have to repeat Father’s name again and then spell it. “Thurkill. T-H-U-R-K-”

  “Thursday?” he says. “I can’t hear you so good. Speak up, will you?”

  “Thurkill.”

  “Thurkis?”

  “Kill. ‘Kill’ like ‘die’!”

  When I hang up, I’m trembling: I feel strange and wild. I wanted to scream at that man. I wanted to leap through the phone and get my hands around his throat. I pace up and down the room. The furniture watches. Pamela’s chair leers smugly. I can still see the imprint of her in the cushion.

  Will Father get the message? Is he even still alive? I’ve sent him postcards, but there’s never been a reply. Not once in four years. I think of falling on the floor and pounding my heels until Mr. Foster downstairs bangs the ceiling with his broom handle. I think of lying there, staring at the ceiling or at nothing. Lying without moving or eating or speaking. Without breathing. But it’s not possible. I have tried it, and I know that the body has a will of its own. You may want not to breathe, but the body breathes, and it forces you to breathe with it.

  I reach for the phone. Mary Uth is the one other person I can think of who might want to know about Pamela. “You have reached 693-5593,” her voice says on the answering machine. “Leave a message after the beeps.” Then there’s a snort and a giggle. “Not bad for an old lady of seventy-five, huh?” she says. “Now watch those beeps. A lot of them.”

  Six, in fact. “Uh, hello,” I say, “this is Em Thurkill.” And think how stupid I am; think why should Mary Uth care if Pamela is dead or alive?

  Mary Uth is Mother’s fourth, or maybe fifth, cousin. She’s seventy-five and so far as I know my only relative. We met once, not too long after Pamela and I moved into this apartment. I had found my first job and I wanted, I think, to show us off to someone. Here we were in our own apartment, with food in our refrigerator. Doing good, I thought, and I looked up Mary Uth’s number in the phone book. I called several times, whenever I could without Pamela’s noticing, but hung up as soon as I heard the answering machine.

  One day, finally, she answered. I told her who I was. “Veronica’s daughter,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” she said. Oh yes, she would come to see us.

  I was curious to meet her, and happy. She would be our first visitor. She was our cousin. I remembered Mother talking about her, and I thought that Mother would be glad if she knew. I didn’t tell Pamela about the visit, though. I guess I thought to surprise her. What could have been in my mind? Did I really think I would please Pamela? She was flabbergasted when Mary Uth appeared, and then furious. She screamed a long scream, a long stream of insults and abuse. Old bitch frucking bag of bones did you ever come to see our mother do you even care she died get that disgusting ugly face away from me or I’ll puke on your head.

  Mary Uth was an old woman, an old skinny woman with a small beaky face, like a skinned baby bird. Her thin old mouth opened in surprise. She looked at me, buttoning her coat back up with hands spotted with dark age marks. Pamela, I said, Pamela don’t. Don’t, Pamela. She took Mary Uth by the shoulders, shoved her out the door, slammed it, and went after me. She dragged me around by my braid, thumping my head until she was worn out and crying. That was the signal it was over. Then there was ice wrapped in a washcloth and the darkness of the room, and the trembling, and finally the long hard sleep. A few days later I began to cut my hair: I did it in secret, bit by bit. She never noticed until it was too late.

  That is what I think of now as, for the second time, I leave a message on Mary Uth’s answering machine, telling her that Pamela has died and there is going to be a service in two days.

  * * *

  “Hard to make up your mind, isn’t it?” the man says. We are looking at toothbrushes in the drugstore. We have arrived in this aisle at the same moment, but from opposite directions. I wonder if the bristles on his old toothbrush are as splayed out as mine; they’re like drunk dancers what the hell are you babbling about now OR RAGGEDY FENCEPOSTS I shout silently at her. The light in the drugstore is white, blaring, like a horn that won’t stop. What am I doing in here anyway? Why am so I intent on buying a new toothbrush today? There are two dozen other things I could have done, should be doing. A hundred other things, a thousand other things. Tomorrow is my sister’s funeral, and I’m standing here trying to find the perfect, the exactly right, toothbrush.

  “I always have toothbrush trouble,” the man says. He has eyes like a baby. Round, brown, and staring. He’s wearing a checkered sports jacket and baggy dark blue pants. “Which size, which color, which brand? So many decisions,” he says, popping his eyes.

  Maybe I’m buying a toothbrush because I want to bury my old one tomorrow. Two funerals. Toothbrush funeral, Pamela funeral. She was always nagging me to get more “mileage” out of my toothbrush. As if it was a car, the car she would never agree to buy. Damn right it’s my money you want to throw around.

  Not now it isn’t, I say.

  The man blinks at me. Did I say it out loud? I pick up a toothbrush. It says LONG HEAD on the box. Father has a long head. Is that better than a short head? What kind of head do I have? Stop, I tell myself, stop thinking like this.

  “This is a good drugstore,” the man says, waving a hand over the rows of colored toothbrushes like a benediction. St. Toothbrush. “Definitely pro choice,” he says, giving me a sly smile.

  I like his joke, but mine is better. Two funerals. He’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something. My turn. That’s the way you do it. First one person speaks, then the other. I could tell him about the funerals. The checks in his jacket vibrate under the glassy light, and I realize I hate checks. Checks and plaids both. Why is he talking to me? He seems okay, but how can you be sure about these things? How can you be sure of anything?

  My eyes throb. I grab a toothbrush, the first one my hand finds, not even a nice color. He’s saying something. I nod as if I’m listening, then walk away, past the shelves of hair oil and soap and perfume, and I’m thinking that I don’t know how to act around people anymore. I feel like crying, but I don’t know how to do that anymore, either.

  The sky is powdery blue after last night’s rain. The custodian’s stone cottage gleams as if it’s just been washed. If you didn’t notice all the gravestones, you’d think you were someplace enchanted. In the middle of the city, the cemetery, with its birch and oak trees is like something out of a fairy tale. “Hansel and Gretel,” maybe. I always liked that story, but I wanted them to keep going, go far enough to get away from the wicked witch, far far away.

  A car comes down the road and parks. Two people get out, a man and woman wearing matching dark blue overcoats. The woman unfurls a red umbrella and holds it up, as if to fend off torrents of rain or maybe witches. Or maybe bad luck. Is the umbrella good luck? Is red a good-luck color? Pamela hated red. Once I had to throw away a pair of socks because they had red toes. The man and woman walk slowly by me.

  Another car clatters to a stop, and I raise my hand, call out. It’s my cousin, Mary Uth. She gets out of the car and begins wiping the dust off the windshield with a cloth. She wipes the headlights, front and back, and then does the windshield again. “I’m particular about my car,” she says.

  I wanted a car, but Pamela wouldn’t hear of it. What for? she said. So we can take a drive, I said. Where? she said. Anyplace, I said. It doesn’t matter. Just a drive, Pamela. In the country maybe, to see things. You wouldn’t have to get out or anything. No, she said. No car. I don’t like cars, and I don’t like going places and having to see people. Forget it.

  Mary Uth folds the cloth carefully into a plastic bag, puts the plastic bag into the shiny black handbag hanging over her shoulder, and walks toward me. “Em?” She puts out a bony hand and peers into my face, as if to be sure it’s me. Her eyes are
small, red streaked.

  “Hello, cousin Mary Uth. I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I got your message,” she says. “Still too skinny, aren’t you?”

  Am I? I look down at myself, see my feet in the old black shoes. Feet look enormous.

  “I have to say I was one surprised party. I didn’t think anything could finish that one off. Too mean to die, like they say, no offense. Is anyone else here from the family?”

  The “family”? What is that? There was a family once. Four of us. Now it’s something else, some creature or thing that’s been reduced, or changed, or maybe no longer exists. Am I a family, me alone?

  The minister arrives then, bounding boyishly out of his car. “Hello! I’m Kevin Fletcher.” He does something complicated with my hand, shakes and pats and squeezes it. A ministerial handshake. He has fine, floppy hair and a jaw that angles off to one side. “Tell me about your sister. I want to say something meaningful about her, Em.” He hums my name, Emmm, and draws me to him with that hum. I think Mother might have said my name that way.

  “You were special to each other, and now death has parted you,” he says. “What can you tell me about your sister?”

  Nothing, I think, nothing at all. What is there to say about Pamela? She is gone. That’s what matters. Do we have to talk? Can’t we just bury her and get this over with?

  “What was she like? What do you want me to say about her, Em? Tell me any little thing. Just speak about her in a natural way, anything you can think of, so I can get a feeling for her character.”

  What can I tell this man that won’t be disgusting, appalling? I focus on the patterns of threadlike marks in the soft mud. Maybe birds’ feet left those marks. Or mice. Or moles. There must be something to say, I think, as he waits, as Mary Uth looks at me knowingly, as a familiar tide of heat and shame rises across my back, a tide that will leave behind (I know this as I know my name), a trail of red bumps that will itch tormentingly, as if a horde of minuscule horses has galloped in a frenzy across my skin, rubbing it raw with tiny muscular hooves.