When She Was Good (9780545361910)

by Mazer, Norma Fox

  One of the librarians is coming toward me, and I half rise. I think he will tell me I’ve been here too long. He bounces past me with a smile. I sink back into the leather. This must be the best day so far. I can stay here as long as I want. Nobody cares. I can stay or go. My choice. I can think or not think. Another choice. Remember or not remember. But that’s the trouble right there. I do remember, keep remembering. Remember so much I sometimes feel nauseous with it. There is the past and the present. Now and then. This and that. Pamela and Em. And then the questions. And the orders: they’re all there in my head. Get a job. When are you going to look? Why aren’t you working right now?

  A little girl sitting on the floor nearby is looking at me. She is with another little girl, one is blonde, one dark haired. Their mouths are soft and red; they’re talking talking talking like two little women. They finger their hair, bump shoulders.

  The dark one bends over, touching the toes of her red space boots. “Your boots aren’t as soft as mine,” she says.

  “Yes, they are.” The blonde frowns and touches the toes of her gray boots with tiny, pink-nailed hands.

  “Your boots aren’t red,” the dark one accuses sweetly.

  “But they’re gray. Gray is good. It’s good, isn’t it?”

  “My boots are slippery,” the dark one says.

  “So are mine. Slippery.”

  “They are not. Is your hair as soft as mine?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  The dark girl’s hand lovingly strokes her own head. She is watching me. “My hair is much softer,” she says.

  “Mine is soft too,” the blonde says desperately.

  Are they sisters? They don’t look alike, but Pamela and I didn’t, either. Pamela was big, born big. She had lots of flesh. Nothing ever scared her, she did anything she wanted. She screamed at everyone, wore Father’s undershirt to school and two skirts and different shoes, and if anyone asked her why she dressed like that, she stamped on their feet and said, That’s why, asshole. She wouldn’t comb her hair or take showers, but she loved her feet, she was vain about them, they were like Father’s feet, long and slender. I always thought those feet were strange on Pamela, but they looked good on Father.

  The dark girl’s gaze lights on me again, and something passes over her face, something I’ve seen before. Her face is speaking: you can’t kid me. I know what you’re like, I know who you are.

  I know her too. She and the blonde are the same kind. They belong to the same tribe. The better and smarter tribe. They’re the ones who push aside the duds, the dupes, the dopes like me. They’re the ones who know what to do, how to do it. They know what they want. How do they get that way? Are they born with that knowledge? Do they learn it somewhere? I’ve always felt like a stranger everywhere, unsure what to do, how to act, waiting for someone to tell me the rules. What are they? Would somebody please tell me? The dark girl knows. The blonde knows. What are they, six, maybe seven years old? — and already they know things I don’t know. And they know that I don’t know. And they hate me and scorn me for it. The dark one is leaning toward the blonde, their heads touch. “She’s cuckoo,” the dark one whispers.

  “Cuckoo cuckoo,” the blonde agrees.

  It’s high school all over, girls in the halls veering toward me, whispering so only I can hear, “Screwed anyone lately, sweetie?”

  The two little girls look at me and laugh. They whisper, whisper. One is light, one dark. Bright eyes and little pointed faces. Little wolf faces. Little wolf whispers. I remember walking the halls, my name muttering in my head against the whispers. Em-Em-Em-Em-em-em-em-mmm, the e disappearing, only the whining murmur of “mmmmm” in my head and the fear, the fear that that, too, would disappear.

  I stand, clumsy, knocking against the chair. The little girls laugh, happy child laughter. I walk away, saying to myself that they’re little girls, little little girls, only little girls.

  Watching Oprah’s show, I wish I was there with her, right there in the studio. I’m on my hands and knees, cleaning the floor and watching. I could get a mop, but you get the floor cleaner this way. This is the way Mother cleaned our floors. I have such a strong feeling that I’d like to be close to Oprah, sitting next to her and talking like a mother and a daughter. She’s gotten heavy again, and she’s worrying about it, but I’d tell her not to fret, I’d tell her I like her better this way. Really, I do.

  I’d say, You look beautiful all the time. I wish I could hug her right now and feel her solidity and tell her that. She’d hug me back and look in my face and tell me something that would help me. She’s had pain and trouble, and she knows what those things are like, she knows how it is to feel sorry for yourself, to be confused and scared. I crawl over the floor, scrubbing. Oprah’s strong and good, she’s really good, and she hasn’t forgotten other people, even though she’s famous.

  Every day there are ordinary people in the studio, on the stage, sitting in their chairs and telling their stories. They shout too much, they get excited and cry and yell, but Oprah says they are survivors like her. If I were on the show, I wouldn’t shout: I’d be calm, I’d sit in the chair up there and talk in a low voice, pleasing. Maybe I should write her a letter, tell her if she ever does a show on sisters, I could be useful, I could tell her some things. Just try just you try and see what happens I’ll come back and kill you, kill you for once and all.

  “Shut up, Pamela. Shut up shut up.” My voice is a whisper. Little voice. Tinny tiny teeny voice. Pissy scared of everything voice. I want to kill too, kill that voice, choke it, murder it out of me. I scrub harder and crawl over the floor until my knees ache.

  * * *

  Everyone knows your thoughts are in your brain, yet it’s clear to me that my thoughts are in my stomach as well. My stomach churns with thoughts. Pamela thoughts. Father thoughts. Did-he-ever-get-my-message-about-Pamela? thoughts. Where-is-he? thoughts. Does-he-remember-he-had-two-daughters? thoughts. Does he remember? Does he? He still has one daughter. Does he care? I shouldn’t be thinking this way. I feel bad and I’m nervous today. Nervous is when I have too many thoughts; it’s like ants crawling over my skin. “Act normal,” I shout at my face in the mirror. “Eat! Calm yourself with food!”

  Food will make me feel better. Maybe it will. Pamela believed food could fix anything. Sad? Eat. Bruised? Eat. Sorry? Eat. She always had food with her. Bags of chips and cheese puffs on the table near her chair, her pockets stuffed with gumdrops and peppermints, peanuts and cookies, and little cream cakes in her bureau, and candy bars stashed under her pillow. They’d melt there, and she’d eat them, licking her fingers, then the paper. She especially loved one candy bar, the one with coconut filling. Whenever I wanted to get her a little something, I’d buy one of those bars.

  It’s Wednesday, omelette-with-onion day. I break eggs into a bowl, pour in milk, grate in cheese. This is the way Pamela must have her omelette and this is the day she must have it. Tomorrow, it will be macaroni and cheese. Friday, tomato soup and fried potatoes. Saturday, tuna-with-mayo sandwich. Oh God, there are no onions for the omelette. I check the drawer again. Above the refrigerator, Pamela’s cupboard sneers at me. Private cupboard, Pamela cupboard, secret cupboard. Hinges like ears, lock a taunting mouth.

  I search again: the drawer, the refrigerator, even in the oven. How can I make an onion omelette with no onions? My heart is going tump-a tump-a tump-a. Pamela will be furious. She will be —

  No.

  She will not be. Furious. Or anything. Can’t be. Isn’t here. Gone. Dead. I sit abruptly. I am a fool. I don’t have to make an onion omelette. Not today. Not ever.

  Never. Never again. And that is good, because I hate onion omelettes.

  Now there’s a thought for me. I. Hate. Onion. Omelettes.

  I lay my head on the table, breathe into my folded arms, and think about this. I have eaten onion omelette after onion omelette after onion omelette, week upon week, month upon month, year upon year. I have eaten so many onion omelettes and always
on Wednesday. And now it’s Wednesday again, and I think this thought, which is not actually a new thought, but which is a thought I have not let myself consider before this.

  And now another thought occurs to me, equally a revelation. I can eat anything I want for lunch. A can of potato sticks. A loaf of bread smeared with jelly. A quart of ice cream. That is what I want. Ice cream. Cold, smooth, lovely ice cream.

  I open the freezer, take out the carton, get a spoon and, standing right there, begin eating. The cold slides down my throat, throbs in my temples. Ice cream for lunch moron this is Wednesday I will kill you. I go on eating, eating ice cream, even though it’s Wednesday. I go on standing there, eating and holding the container against my belly, cooling cooling cooling my thoughts.

  Once, when I was sick and had to stay home alone, I found a shoe box in the back of Mother’s closet. In it were all the notes that our teachers had written through the years about Pamela and me and sent home to Mother. I read the ones about myself first. “Em cries easily,” my second-grade teacher wrote, “but is an eager student and loves to read….” “Shy, but never a problem,” my fourth-grade teacher said, “a good child.”

  No one wrote that Pamela was a good child, although Mr. Emberly, a teacher Pamela had liked in sixth grade, commented that she was trying to control herself, which I knew meant cutting down on the farting and whistling, on the foot tapping and muttering. It was true that if Pamela liked a teacher, she would do homework for that teacher, she would even pass a test for that teacher. And then Mother would get a note like Mr. Emberly’s. “Pamela is really trying this term!” But that was unusual. Most of the notes had an uneasy tone. “Pamela can certainly amuse her classmates if she wants to, but she’s sometimes way out of control….” “… has a wit, but her temper really gets in her way….” “… she sometimes makes me think of a planet rocketing along in a parallel universe.”

  The phrase parallel universe slipped into my mind. I read that note four years after it was written, when I myself was in sixth grade. By then, Pamela was in high school and fighting to quit, raging that she hated everyone in the damn school and they hated her and she wanted out.

  “Out! Out, out!” she screamed one night, pacing through the rooms.

  “Just graduate, Pamela,” Mother begged. “Only two more years to go, you won’t be sorry.”

  Buried in the armchair, I shrank back as Pamela shouted and kicked the walls until they shook. The same way I’d chanted happy home as a child, I droned now, under my breath, “parallel universe parallel universe parallel universe …” The image of Pamela rolled up around herself and, like a star or a planet, burning through space, absorbed me and removed me, took me away from the storm she created. And when, suddenly, she sat down, knee to knee with Mother, and in a furious, almost pleading, tone barked into Mother’s face — “All right, you win! Damn, you win. I’ll do it, but only because you’re making me!” — I understood that she was trying to be better, she was really trying at this moment to be good, but that, like the burning star, she was helpless to change her course.

  * * *

  Every morning Mother rose early to drive into the city to her job at the paper-box factory. Weekends, she shopped and cooked for the freezer and did the laundry. She was rarely still, and I thought nothing of it. That was the way it was, and I didn’t know any other way, until one day I went home with Lois Merkin.

  I was ten then, and astonished by Lois’s tall mother, who didn’t work, and whose cheeks were red and tight with health. I was even more astonished by the shining beauty of her house. Maybe I had known that such mothers and such houses existed, but if so, I had known the way you “know” what you have seen in a store window you hurry past. Yes, those exquisite mannequins, that beautiful dress, that waterfall of decorative silver foil — all are present in the world, but not in the real world, your world.

  In the house, there were pictures on the walls and neat stacks of magazines on little tables. Shining green plants wreathed every window, and the furniture glowed and smelled of delicious lemon oil. I wrapped my fingers together to discipline them against their need to touch and caress each satiny surface. I left in a state of frantic greed to be invited back, and I was, and each time it was an astonishment.

  How it happened that Lois and I were friends was the first astonishment. She had sought me out in school. She sat with me at lunch and told me about herself. She was going to be a missionary and save souls. Her blue eyes ignited, and enthralled by them and her dear voice and even more by the amazing fact that she knew her future, I said I would do as she did. I would be a missionary too.

  “You will?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Really, honestly, truly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear,” I said passionately.

  We linked pinkies. “Now you can be my friend,” Lois said.

  For two weeks, I went to her house every day after school. We had a snack in the large, clean kitchen, taking food from the refrigerator, which hummed powerfully and offered up such delicacies as barbecued chicken legs and cinnamon raisin bread. Then we went upstairs to her room, where Lois talked about her ballet lessons, her clothes, and how she would go to missionary college when she was seventeen.

  “Yes, oh yes, oh wow,” I said to everything, smiling, dazzled, in love. We would lie on her bed; hug each other, kiss, vow to always be friends and save souls together. One day we unbuttoned our blouses and looked at each other. Lois touched my nipples.

  “Now do it to me,” she said. She lay back with her tiny chest exposed. “You can touch them again if you want to,” she said, generously. I wanted to, and that night, on my knees, I prayed for our friendship never to end.

  Toward the end of the second week, Lois said it was unfair that I didn’t invite her to my house. “My father says everything should be equal when you’re friends. We should go to your house today. My mother said it was okay.”

  We took the school bus and got off at the Corners. Going down our road, I walked as slowly as possible. Maybe Pamela wouldn’t be home. Maybe if she was, she wouldn’t say anything wrong. Maybe she would like Lois and be nice. Our home came into view.

  “I feel so sorry for the people who live there,” Lois said.

  I looked at the trailer, seeing what she saw: a long, narrow, rusty tin can sitting on concrete blocks. I walked toward the door. “Where’re you going?” she said. In the kitchen, I wiped the table and took a box of gingersnaps from the cupboard. Lois edged in slowly. “You live here?”

  I put milk and two glasses on the table. “You can sit down.”

  She bit into a cookie with her tiny teeth. Her eyes flashed from corner to corner. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Working. You want to see my room?”

  She nodded, but Pamela came in then, banging the door. “Who’s this?” she said, chewing on her lip, and I knew that everything was lost. Her hair was yellow and tangled, her eyes alight with the pleasure of what she was about to do. “Who’s this weird-looking person, Em? Who’s this pale piggy ghosty girl?”

  “This is Lois.”

  “LO-kiss?” She leaned over the table. “What’s the matter with you, little LO-kiss?” Pamela hung her tongue out of her mouth, playing the idiot. “Why don’t you say something? You got a little poker stuck up your little BEE-hind?”

  “We’re going to my room, Pamela.”

  “Your room?” Pamela dipped her finger into Lois’s milk, licked it, and dipped it in again. “That’s my room, turdface, and you don’t go in there unless I say so. Right, LO-kiss my ass?”

  “You should have your mouth washed out with soap,” Lois managed to say.

  “And you should have your mouth washed out with raccoon crap,” Pamela said. “I got a nice fresh lump of it right here in the fridge.” She opened the refrigerator. “You want some?”

  Lois went out the door and I went after her. We walked to the grocery store at the Corners, where
she called her father to come get her. “My sister was in a bad mood today,” I said.

  Lois stared up the road. “You don’t have to wait with me.”

  “She’s okay most of the time.”

  A car appeared around the bend and Lois let out a scream. “Daddy!”

  “She really is mostly okay,” I said again. “Really!”

  Lois ran and got into the car. I stepped to the side of the road, and as they passed I waved my arm and called, “Bye! Bye, Lois! See you in school tomorrow!”

  Friday was payday. Father always went out for beer and came home, as Mother said, “late, foolish, and sleepy.” Every so often, though, he would drink straight through the night, and then Mother would wake us, whispering into our faces, “Girls, girls, wake up. Wake up, go hide.” And the next day, putting ice on her bruises, she would murmur apologetically, “He didn’t mean it. He just got out of hand.”

  Hiding behind a chair or crouching under the table, I would stare, fascinated and horrified, at Father’s hands. They were brown and long, slender, hard, sinewy, like all of him. If he got out of hand, then he must have been “in hand” to begin with. In his own hand. How was this possible? In the mysterious way of adults, he had managed an amazing feat! Held himself in his own hand! And then jumped out and maybe hurt himself and got mad? And was that why he hurt Mother? I wished he would never get “out of hand” again. And for a long time, for months at a stretch, he wouldn’t. Later, when I was older, I heard Mother say, “The drink has him,” and I understood and thought, Poor Father.

  But on those nights when Mother woke us, there was no understanding, no thinking, only something thick and suffocating, crowding my throat. Only running, and bare feet pounding, sweaty hands, and the slap of night air on my face. Sometimes Pamela led me into the woods, where we pressed against the trees and she told me to shut up shut up and stop crying or else. And sometimes we crawled under the trailer where, lying with my face pressed into the iron-smelling earth — Mother’s cries in one ear, Pamela’s curses in the other — I counted backward, recited rhymes, and told myself stories as the hours passed.