Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  “What the fuck?” asked Mr. Delafield, and, at that moment, Terri hated every adult in River Run who had fought his helicopter, even her own parents. If Mr. Delafield still had his helicopter, she would have heard him coming from a long way off.

  “I’m the babysitter. Terri.” She fought the impulse to cross her arms against her chest, as that would only draw attention to the gun in her hand.

  “Oh,” said the blond man with a ruddy face—it was impossible for him to turn even redder, yet Terri thought he seemed embarrassed. For her or himself? “And—that? Do you bring that to all your babysitting jobs?”

  She glanced down at the sweet silver gun, held at her hip as if it were a small purse. “No. No, that’s not mine. It’s yours.”

  “Not mine. You mean it’s Jakkie’s? Jakkie has a gun? Son of a bitch. Why would Jakkie have a gun?”

  Terri shrugged, not wanting to tell Mr. Delafield that she had always assumed it was because his wife feared him, with his big, shambling body and red, red face. Now she wondered if he feared his wife, if she had overlooked some menace in Mrs. Delafield’s ditziness.

  “Where did you find it?” Terri’s right hand, the one holding the gun, gestured loosely toward the open drawer, and he ducked his head, as if expecting it to go off. “With her pretty little panties, huh? Well, no wonder I never saw it.”

  The situation was so surreal, to use a word of which Terri was particularly fond at the time, that she couldn’t figure out how to behave. She put the gun on top of the built-in bureau and slipped on Mrs. Delafield’s most prosaic robe.

  “I was just looking at it,” she said, as if that explained everything. “No one I know owns a gun.”

  “Well, I didn’t know anyone I knew had a gun, either.” He laughed, and Terri joined him, a little nervously.

  “You looked nice,” he said, as if he didn’t mean it but wanted to be polite. “In the gown, I mean.”

  “It doesn’t really fit right.”

  “Oh. Well, you can get stuff altered, right? Jakkie does it all the time.”

  Did he not know that the gown was his wife’s? Or was he pretending to think otherwise, to spare Terri the humiliation of being caught in violation of almost every rule of good babysitting? Or was it possible that he really liked how Terri looked? Terri was terrified that he might come toward her, or touch her in some way. She was terrified he wouldn’t.

  “Hugo’s asleep,” she offered, reminding him of who she was and why she was here.

  “Hugo,” he said. “You know, I have no idea where she got that name. Maybe from Baby Huey. He has too many chromosomes. Or not enough. If I had married what my daughters call an age-appropriate woman, someone thirty-five or forty, she would have had amnio, and we would have known before he was born. Or we wouldn’t have kids at all. But Jakkie was only twenty-three when she got pregnant, and Hugo’s a freak. He won’t live past the age of five.”

  “He’s just big.”

  “He is. Huge Hugo. But he’s screwed up, too. I don’t know what Jakkie’s going to do when he dies. I wonder if that’s why she bought the gun.” He shook his head, disagreeing with himself. “No, she’ll go in a slow, catatonic decline, refusing to eat, wandering around the house in her robe. In that robe. All these clothes, and she spends most of her time in that robe.”

  “Oh.” Terri had grabbed it because the blue flannel looked so ordinary, the antidote to the expensive lingerie she had probably damaged, stretching it to fit her so-very-different proportions. “I’m sorry, I’ll—”

  “It’s okay.” Waving his hands in front of his face, fanning himself, as if it were a summer’s day instead of a late-winter one. “It’s no big deal. You should keep it. She’ll never miss it. Keep it.”

  She knew, from the River Run Self-Esteem Project, that this was how such things began. Men gave you gifts or money, then asked for favors in return. Teachers, coaches, neighbors—the girls at River Run had been taught to assume they were all potential predators, far more sex-crazed than their male peers.

  “I couldn’t possibly,” she demurred.

  “Suit yourself. Put, um, everything back where you found it.”

  And with that, he was gone. Terri listened to him leave the room and walk downstairs, then waited another minute before going into the bedroom to change. She then returned to the closet and made sure everything was where it belonged. She assumed Mr. Delafield would tell Mrs. Delafield what she had done, and she would lose this weekly gig, an easy $25 by anyone’s standards. But losing her job did not bother her as much as the encounter itself. It was not unlike a dream she had from time to time. A man, an older one—one taller and darker than Mr. Delafield—found her alone somewhere and just…took over. It was at once a scary and comforting dream, one that always ended a little too soon. That was what she was feeling now—relieved, yet desirous of knowing what might have happened if Mr. Delafield had kept going. Would he have been more insistent with a different kind of girl—someone truly beautiful, like Katarina Swann, or someone weak and shy, like Bennie Munson? It was Terri’s lot to fall in the middle of that continuum—pretty enough, but not a raving beauty. Nor was she like Bennie, someone who all but begged to be used and abused by the world.

  Mrs. Delafield came home at seven, as always, and seemed indifferent to Terri’s news that Mr. Delafield was in his den, watching television while working out on his elliptical machine. No one, not even Terri, stopped to wonder why he hadn’t sent Terri home and assumed Hugo’s care. For the next six days, Terri waited for Mrs. Delafield to call and say she wouldn’t be needing Terri anymore, but the call never came. She went back at three P.M. the following week and everything was as it always was—the quiet house, the listless baby (who now seemed more precious to Terri because he was doomed), the gun in the lingerie drawer. Caught once, Terri knew she should turn over a new leaf, but she found herself in the walk-in closet within twenty minutes, modeling lingerie and holding the gun. This time she moved on to Mrs. Delafield’s evening dresses, which she had never dared touch before. She listened for the door to beep, refusing to admit to herself that her ears were straining toward that sound because she wanted to hear it. She had started a diet—for senior prom, she assured her mother, who grudgingly allowed it. Terri’s mom hated diets. But it was working already, she could tell. Mrs. Delafield’s things were not so tight in the waist this week.

  Mr. Delafield did not come home early that day, or the next week, or the week after. He never came home early again. In April, he stopped coming home at all. His absence, like most absences, took time to register. First a neighbor realized the Town Car had stopped gliding in and out of the driveway at its usual hours. Then Terri noticed the pile of bundled-up Wall Street Journals in the three-car garage, placed in a basket, as if Mr. Delafield might return and want to work through two weeks, three weeks, an entire month of business news. It was only when Mrs. Delafield put out the whole collection for recycling—on the wrong day, in the wicker basket, and still bundled in their plastic wrappers, in violation of every protocol—that Terri realized Mr. Delafield was never coming back. The following Tuesday, Mrs. Delafield paid her $20 instead of the usual $25 and Terri finally understood that the extra five dollars had always been a tip, one Mrs. Delafield had decided she could no longer afford.

  On the third Tuesday in May, Terri arrived to find the house full of boxes and Mrs. Delafield flitting around with various lists, shouting into her portable phone as if the connection was bad. Yet she looked radiant, more beautiful than Terri had ever seen her, and her conversations seemed to hum with excitement. “I have so much to do,” she told Terri with obvious delight. “Lawyers, Realtors, moving companies—oh, it’s all so complicated! But a week from now, Hugo and I will be gone, and this place will be on the market. We’ll miss you!”

  She headed out, full of true purpose for once, and Terri walked through the house. It was as if some careless, heedless babysitter had been here first, for all the drawers and closets were open, their c
ontents tumbling out helter-skelter. Yet the little silver gun was still in its place of honor, lying on a bed of emerald-green silk. Terri picked it up, intending to do nothing more than hold it one more time. It fit her hand so well, looked so right. It wasn’t her imagination: she was beautiful when she held this gun. Mr. Delafield had said as much. Take it, he had said, and she had assumed he meant the nightgown. Clearly, he meant the gun. He had been asking Terri to save him, to protect him from his crazy wife, who was capable of anything in her grief and anxiety over their damaged child. Terri had been Mr. Delafield’s last hope, and when she failed him, he had no choice but to leave.

  On what she would later claim was an impulse, Terri stuffed the gun in her knapsack, grabbing the emerald-green slip as an afterthought. After all, she needed something to muffle the sound of the metal. She couldn’t afford the possibility that the gun might rattle when Mrs. Delafield took her home later this evening, or assume that Mrs. Delafield, like Mr. Morrow, would be polite enough to pretend that a mysterious sound was nothing more than a faulty car heater. She swaddled the gun with great tenderness, placing it in the outside pocket of her beat-up bag, assuring herself all the while that when something makes you beautiful, it should be yours to keep.

  HARDLY KNEW HER

  Sofia was a lean, hipless girl, the type that older men still called a tomboy in 1975, although her only hoydenish quality was a love of football. In the vacant lot behind the neighborhood tavern, the boys welcomed her into their games. This was in part because she was quick, with sure hands. But even touch football sometimes ended in pile-ups, where it was possible to steal a touch or two and claim it was accidental. She tolerated this feeble groping most of the time, punching the occasional boy who pressed too hard too long, which put the others on notice for a while. Then they forgot, and it happened again—they touched, she punched. It was a price she was more than willing to pay for the exhilaration she felt when she passed the yew berry bushes that marked the end zone, a gaggle of boys breathless in her wake.

  But for all the afternoons she spent at the vacant lot, she never made peace with the tricky plays—the faked handoffs, the double pumps, the gimmicky laterals. It seemed cowardly to her, a way for less gifted players to punish those with natural talent. It was one thing to spin and feint down the field, eluding grasping hands with a swivel of her nonhips. But to pretend the ball was somewhere it wasn’t struck her as cheating, and no one could ever persuade her otherwise.

  She figured it was the same with her father and cards. He knew the game was steeped in bluffing and lying, but he could never resign himself to the fact. He depended on good cards and good luck to get him through, and even Sofia understood that was no way to win at poker. But the only person her father could lie to with any success was himself.

  “That your dad?” Joe, one of the regular quarterbacks, asked one Friday afternoon as they sprawled in the grass, game over, their side victorious again.

  Sofia looked up to see her father slipping through the back door of the tavern, which people called Gordon’s, despite the fact that the owner’s name was Peter Papadakis. Perhaps someone named Gordon had owned it long ago, but it had been Mr. Papadakis’s place as far back as Sofia could remember.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s he doing, going through the back door?” That was a scrawny boy, Bob, one of the grabby ones.

  Sofia shredded grass in her fingers, ignoring him. Joe said, “Poker.”

  “Poker? Poker? I hardly knew her.” Bob was so pleased with his wit that he rolled back and forth, clutching his stomach, and some of the other boys laughed as if they had never heard this old joke before. Sofia didn’t laugh. She hated watching her father disappear in the back room of the tavern, from which he would not emerge until early Saturday. But it was better than running into him on the sidewalk between here and home. He always pretended surprise at seeing her, proclaiming it the darnedest coincidence, Sofia on Brighton Avenue, same as him. On those occasions, he would stop and make polite inquiries into her life, but he would be restless all the while, shifting his weight from one foot to another, anxious as a little kid on the way to his own birthday party.

  “How’s it going, Fee?” That was her family nickname, and she was just beginning to hate it.

  “S’all right, I guess.”

  “School okay?”

  “Not bad. I hate algebra.”

  “It’ll come in handy one day.”

  “How?”

  “If you get through high school, maybe go on to community college, you won’t be stuck here in Dundalk, breathing air you can see.”

  “I like it here.” She did. The water was nearby and although it wasn’t the kind you could swim in—if you fell in, you were supposed to tell your mom so she could take you for a tetanus shot, but no one ever told—the view from the water’s edge made the world feel big, yet comprehensible. Dundalk wasn’t Baltimore, although the map said it was. Dundalk was a country unto itself, the Republic of Bethlehem Steel. And in 1975, Beth Steel was like the Soviet Union. You couldn’t imagine either one not being there. So the families of Dundalk breathed the reddish air, collected their regular paychecks, and comforted one another when a man was hurt or killed, accepting those accidents as the inevitable price for a secure job. It was only later, when the slow poison of asbestosis began moving from household to household, that the Beth Steel families began to question the deal they had made. Later still, the all-but-dead company was sold for its parts and the new owner simply ended it all—pensions, health care, every promise ever made. But in 1975, in Dundalk, a Beth Steel family was still the best thing to be, and the children looked down on those whose fathers had to work for any other company.

  “Go home and do your homework,” her father told Sofia.

  “No homework on Fridays,” she said. “But I want to eat supper and wash the dishes before Donny and Marie comes on.”

  They never spoke of his plans for the evening, much less the stakes involved, but after such encounters Sofia went home and hid whatever she could. She longed to advise her mother to do the same, but it was understood that they never spoke of her father’s winning and losing, much less the consequences for the household.

  “I bought it for you, didn’t I?” her father had told her younger brother, Brad, wheeling the ten-speed bicycle with the banana seat out of the garage. Brad had owned the shiny Schwinn for all of a month. “Why’d I ever think we needed fancy candlesticks like these?” her father grumbled, taking the grape-bedecked silver stems from the sideboard, as if his only problem was a sudden distaste for their ornate style. One Saturday morning, he came into Sofia’s room and tried to grab her guitar, purchased a year earlier after a particularly good Friday, but something in her expression made him put it back.

  Instead he sold the family dog, a purebred collie, or so her father had said when he brought the puppy home three months ago. It turned out that Shemp had the wrong kind of papers, some initials other than AKC. The man who agreed to buy Shemp from them had lectured her father, accusing him of being taken in by the Mennonite puppy mills over the state line. He gave her father twenty-five dollars, saying: “People who can’t be bothered to do the most basic research probably shouldn’t have a dog, anyway.”

  Sofia, sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s car—she had insisted on accompanying him, thinking it would shame her father, but in the end she was the one who was ashamed that she had chosen her guitar over Shemp—chewed over this fact. Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Mennonites. She imagined them ringed around a poker table, solemn bearded faces regarding their cards. Mennonites would probably be good at poker if God let them play it.

  Her father spoke of his fortune as if it were the weather, a matter of temperature outside his control. “I was hot,” her father crowed coming through the door Saturday morning, carrying a box of doughnuts. “I’ve never seen a colder deck,” he’d say, heading out Saturday afternoon after a long morning nap on the sofa. �
��I couldn’t catch a break.”

  You just can’t bluff, Sofia thought. But then, neither could she. Perhaps it was in her genes. That was why she had to outrun the boys on the other team. Go long and I’ll hit you, Joe told her, and that’s what she did, play after play. She outran her competition or she didn’t, but she never tried to fool the other players or faulted anyone else when she failed to catch a ball that was thrown right at her. She didn’t think of herself as hot or cold, or try to blame the ball for what she failed to do. A level playing field was not a figure of speech to Sofia. It was all she knew. She made a point of learning every square inch of the vacant lot—the slight depressions where you could turn an ankle if you came down wrong, the sections that stayed mushy long after the rain, the slope in one of their improvised end zones that made it tricky to set up for the pass. With just a little homework, Sofia believed, you could control for every possibility.

  Sofia’s stubborn devotion to football probably led to the onslaught of oh-so-girly gifts on her next birthday—a pink dress, perfume, and a silver necklace with purplish jewels that her mother said were amethysts. “Semiprecious,” she added. There were three of them, one large oval guarded by two small ones, set in a reddish gold. The necklace was the most beautiful thing that Sofia had ever seen.

  “Maybe you’ll go to the winter dance up at school, Fee,” her mother suggested hopefully, fastening the necklace around her neck.