by Sara Shepard
“Nothing. Just taking a walk.”
“Were you down at Philip’s house?”
“Who’s Philip?”
She licked her palm, then stubbed out the cigarette. It sizzled. The butt had blood-colored lipstick marks on it. “Just this asshole. He doesn’t talk to people. He thinks he’s too good for everyone. Just hangs out with his family. I hear they’re religious freaks.” She stretched her long denim legs out and considered me out of the corner of her eye, as cagey as the Smitty dog. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“So am I. I had sex this spring. With two guys. How many guys have you slept with?”
I looked away.
Samantha’s laugh was a bitter, horrid snort. “You haven’t slept with anyone, right? My first time was with this guy David. He’s twenty-four. Drives an F-150. We used to fuck in it a lot. A big deer stepped out one time when we were doing it. Stared straight at us. It was awesome.”
Her voice did a little dip on awesome. I watched her face, expecting her expression to crumple, but her smile became even brighter.
She shook another cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and blew a plume of smoke toward the outdoor thermometer. Samantha’s parents used to send us a Christmas card every year. They’d include a letter catching us up on the family’s goings-on—a new car purchase, a minor health scare, a vacation to the Grand Canyon. “Who on earth are Leonard, Ginny, and Samantha?” my mother would always say, tossing the letters aside, but I liked reading them. Samantha’s family seemed so normal. They went to church, Mrs. Chisholm volunteered for a soup kitchen, and Samantha performed in piano recitals. My father told me that when her parents died in the fire, she was in Disney World for a piano competition. Her teacher told her right after she and a few other pianists got off the Maelstrom ride at Epcot Center.
“So you moved here in the winter, right?” I asked her. “After your parents…you know?”
Her eyes flashed. “You have a problem with that?”
“I was just asking.”
“I heard stuff about you, too.” Her face was pinched. “Your mom left you guys. Probably because your dad’s a basket case, huh? Apparently he has this big reputation here of being, like, mentally unstable, even when he was younger.”
“That’s not true,” I said quickly.
“How do you know?” She put her feet up on the porch’s railing. “That’s pretty despicable. A woman leaving her husband. Her children.” She said it like she was sitting behind the bench on The People’s Court. “Did she leave because your dad’s nuts?”
“No!” I cried.
“Do you think she was having an affair?”
“No!”
She smiled. “Everyone knows that people only leave marriages when they’ve found something better.”
“That’s not true.”
“So you’re not angry? She left you before Christmas! Did you even get any presents?”
I shrugged and looked away.
Samantha took drag after drag, her flip-flop hanging off her toe. “I tried to have sex with that Philip kid from down the street, but he didn’t want to. He’s not going to have sex with you. His whole family wears special religious underwear.”
“I don’t even know him,” I protested. “And I don’t want to have sex with anyone.”
She barked a laugh. “Sure you don’t. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
seven
Here you go.” Stella shuffled into the sitting room with a coffee mug. “Some nice hot chocolate.”
“It’s ninety degrees out,” I answered.
“Oh, now. It’s good for you. I made it with whole milk. You need to gain some weight.”
My father and Petey had just left to see my grandmother’s body. Stella decided to stay home with Steven and me, and no one fought her on it. Everyone, I’d noticed, was being extra-nice to Stella. Perhaps it was because she’d discovered my grandmother was dead when she came into her room to rustle her out of bed for breakfast.
Upstairs, Steven made the floor thump with what sounded like jumping jacks. Earlier, he’d gone running, crunching down the gravel road and disappearing onto the highway. To my knowledge, this was the first time he’d ever run in his life. I pictured him out there, gasping, cars narrowly passing him at sixty miles an hour. I saw him in camouflage, running an obstacle course, out of breath while the other recruits easily scaled a twenty-foot wall.
“So.” Stella sat down across from me. “Tell me about yourself, Summer.”
“There’s nothing to tell.” I looked down at my hot chocolate. It was the kind with mini marshmallows, which I hated.
“Sure there is! I bet you’ve got tons of things to tell me about you.”
Her glasses were on crookedly, which made her look a little drunk.
“I’m pretty boring,” I answered.
“That’s too bad.” Stella pulled a pack of cigarettes from her front pocket and lit one. She took a drag and eyed me. “Do you want a little?”
I shifted my gaze the other direction. “It’s all right.”
“Come on. It’ll relax you.”
I lowered one eyebrow. “There are all sorts of health warnings on the box.”
“These? Nah.”
I took the cigarette from Stella to avoid an argument. She looked overjoyed. As I put it to my lips, I glanced at the stairs, both in hope and fear that Steven would come down and see. “Thanks,” I said, handing it back to Stella.
“You want your own?”
I shook my head no. We sat in silence for a few moments, Stella smoking. A car horn sounded. Stella cleared her throat. “Nice day,” she remarked, even though we were sitting indoors, couldn’t see out the heavily curtained windows, and even though I was pretty sure it was still overcast out. “Hope we get a day like this for the funeral. And I hope people bring over a lot of hot dishes.” She leaned back. “Minnie Elkerson makes the best pierogis. And Marcy makes a good ham. And Liza makes cabbage rolls. You ever had a cabbage roll?”
“Nope.”
“What? No. Never?”
“No. They sound disgusting.”
She exhaled. “Ruth used to make terrible cabbage rolls. She was Suzy Homemaker, but her cabbage rolls smelled like shit.” She leaned back into the cushions. “At least this holiday, I can make my own cabbage rolls.”
“Well, that’s good.” It sounded as if Stella really hated her sister. She hadn’t said one nice thing about Ruth since we had arrived.
Stella looked at me. “And you’ll come for Christmas this year, won’t you?”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. Upstairs, Steven made an unusually loud clunk. There wasn’t anything wrong with exercising, nor was there anything wrong with wanting to enlist in the Marines…at least I didn’t think so. But this had come on so fast, and Steven seemed so possessed. That was what made it so scary.
“You got a best friend?” Stella asked.
I thought of Claire. “Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
I sighed. Every time I went along with Claire to the diner, Claire looked at me with pitying, questioning eyes. Are you having a good time? Are you having a good time? It was pathetic, how willingly she gave me the benefit of the doubt. All I thought of was how she’d told me my mother had resigned from her position at Mandrake & Hester. How plaintively she’d said, Maybe we could help one another. It felt like she continued to say it, inside, every time we were around each other.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “We’ve grown apart. We’re into different things.”
“My husband was my best friend when we were growing up,” Stella said. “But back ’39 or ’40—the twelfth grade, I guess—we went through a period of hating each other, too. He thought I was too coarse for him. He liked girls who wore twinsets, who didn’t swear. A year later, when we were nineteen, we fell in love again.” She stubbed the cigarette out on a large, lopsided pea-green ashtray. “I guess you never me
t my husband before he passed, huh?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “I mean, unless it was when I was really young.”
“His name was Skip. We got married six weeks after we remet. He was a crane operator in a rock quarry.”
“Like Fred Flintstone?” I blurted.
“Exactly!” Stella grinned. “Only, working in the quarry didn’t make you much money. I had to take on all sorts of jobs to make ends meet. I was an assistant to a lawyer downtown—now, that was a good job, but then he died. So I became a hair-washer at a beauty salon. It was my idea, you see, and as far as I knew, no one else was doing it. There should be a girl who does the hair, and a girl who washes it. Now everyone does it.”
“That’s true,” I said slowly. “The last time I had my hair cut, there was a girl who washed my hair.”
Stella shook her head. “I should’ve patented that idea. My life could’ve been so different. Anyway, I worked there until it closed. Then I had a friend who was getting into the Jane Fonda workouts. She got me into them, too, and got me teaching aerobics at the Y.” She leaned back into the couch. “I had a pink leotard and leg warmers and everything. That’s back when I was in better shape.”
“What did my grandmother say about that?”
“Oh, you know.” Stella’s expression shifted. “She never came to any of the workouts or anything.”
“But didn’t you live here? In this same town?”
She shrugged, ignoring me. “So anyway, Skip was from a couple towns away. First time we met, we were in ice-skating lessons together. Our mothers couldn’t pry us apart. We were friends until twelfth grade, when he started going steady with Muriel Johnson. I hated her—she was a twinset girl. And you know what her yearbook motto was? She is pretty to walk with and witty to talk with.” Stella snorted and shook her head. “I wouldn’t speak to Skip when he was with her. Then there was that accident.”
“Accident?” It couldn’t have been the same accident my father was in. She had to be talking about a different era.
Stella nodded. “Muriel went out on the Doyle boys’ pond that November, because she’d bought a new ice-skating skirt that would twirl around when she spun—of course she knew how to spin, Muriel. So she was out there, wearing a twinset and that skirt, spinning, and everyone was watching her and saying how pretty she was, and then the ice cracked.” Stella clucked her tongue. “Muriel knew just as well as the rest of us that the Doyle’s pond takes a while to freeze all the way through. But she just couldn’t wait to start the skating season.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, she fell through.” Stella waved her hand. “One minute she was spinning, that gray skirt all twirly, the next she was under the water. The boys made a human chain to get her, but by the time they got out to the middle, it was too late. They had to wait to get her body out until the ice thawed—months, really. That skirt didn’t look quite so pretty, all soggy and covered in frost.”
I gaped. “They waited until spring? They didn’t drain the pond and get her out that day?”
Stella blinked rapidly, as if I’d awakened her from a dream. “Oh. Well. I don’t know, really. It was so long ago. Anyway, I consoled Skip at Muriel’s funeral, and the rest is history.” She coaxed another cigarette from the pack. “We weren’t apart until he died.”
The room was starting to fill with blue smoke. In Stella’s stories, a story about a girl plummeting through thin ice to her death was on emotional par with, say, someone waiting in a line at the DMV. I swallowed hard. “My dad was in an accident a long time ago, right? A car accident?”
“That’s right.” Stella turned her neck toward the kitchen, as if she’d heard a noise.
I shifted positions. “So was he…hurt from it?”
“No…” Stella didn’t meet my eye. “I don’t think there was a scratch on him.”
“He talks about it sometimes,” I said quietly.
Stella extinguished her cigarette in the pea-green ashtray. “So I bet you miss your mom, huh?”
I sat back. “Excuse me?”
She kept grinding the cigarette out. “I hope you know it had nothing to do with you, whatever it was or wherever she is. But you’re okay now, aren’t you?”
“Sure,” I said weakly.
“And your father, too?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Stella smiled. “Well. Wonderful.”
In some ways, I wasn’t lying. Aside from the snow globe incident, my father seemed okay. He went to the lab every day now. He saw a therapist named Dr. North, and I had a feeling Dr. North had him on some drug. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to have to think about it. Sometimes Dr. North called Steven and me. “If you ever want to talk, the door is open,” he said if he happened to catch me on the phone, as if he were my roommate and was talking about the door to his bedroom. Several times I’d dialed the first six digits of Dr. North’s office number, wanting to ask him if the time I’d blamed everything on my father could have led to what happened. I always hung up, though, before I dialed the seventh digit.
My father still wrote his on-the-fly diaries on cab receipts and phone bills and flyers the local grocery delivery service left in our mailbox. He wrote one on the day of the snow globe incident, on a slip of paper from a Duane Reade drugstore. Summer is selling Toblerone chocolate for French class. I took a box into the lab and everyone bought one. They’re tearing down the deli next to the lab to build a coffee shop, probably a Starbucks. Four hours sleep. Nothing about whether or not I’d hurt him, blaming him like that. Nothing indicating what was to come.
I pored over the receipts like a cryptologist, certain I’d find something that would lead me to understanding him, what he was going through, or if there was something he wasn’t telling me. But there wasn’t much there. He made a lot of references to drift mines. He sometimes mentioned the name Jo or Josie or just J. He also talked about encyclopedias, Leonard Cohen, Dairy Queen.
One day, a few months ago, he and I went for a walk on the Promenade. It was one of those placid days when all the big buildings across the water had definite, flat edges, Manhattan unfurled like on a map. We leaned against the railing and looked into the oily black water, not saying much. He took my small hand in his big, rough, squeezy one, the same hand that spliced off moles and held my mother’s body close and petted me, cradled me, when I was a baby. “I hope this never happens to you,” he said.
It didn’t take me long to realize what he was talking about. I was my father’s daughter.
When Stella placed her mug of hot chocolate on the coffee table, she bumped a stack of magazines sideways. Underneath a National Geographic from 1982 was a color photograph of a young girl, about seven or eight, with dark hair chopped to her chin. She stood next to a tire swing and a rusty blue pickup truck. Its right headlight was cracked, just like the truck out front.
“Who’s that?” I pointed at the girl. She didn’t look like Samantha. And she certainly wasn’t me.
A muscle next to Stella’s right eye twitched. For a few seconds she watched me searchingly, as if waiting for me to say something else. When I didn’t, she picked up the photo and slipped it into her cardigan pocket. “It’s just…you know. A neighbor girl.” Her other hand fumbled for a fresh cigarette. After she lit it, she patted my hand. “You know what? I have just the thing for you.”
She walked into the kitchen and started to bang around through drawers. I expected her to come back with something priceless—an explanation, maybe. An old slip of paper with my father’s handwriting, perhaps an account of his accident. A recording of my mother’s voice, the last time she visited here. The answer.
Stella held two small pieces of cardboard and ceremoniously handed one to me. “Now. I just know you’re going to win.”
It was a scratch-off lottery ticket. The theme was pot o’ gold, and there was a drawing of a deranged-looking leprechaun with a long goatee shooting rainbows from his fingers. Stella wordlessly passed
me a penny, then turned to her own ticket and started feverishly scratching. My windows revealed $5, $15, a pot of gold, a horseshoe, and some kind of unidentifiable blob.
“Nothing for me, I don’t think,” I said.
“Me neither.” Stella brushed the rubbed-off debris onto the carpet. She sounded astonished, like she truly expected me to win the million bucks.
After a while, my father and Pete, his cousin, returned from the funeral home, quiet and clumsy. I had a feeling they were drunk. My dad opened a beer too fast and sent foam frothing to the linoleum. Pete hit his head on the bathroom doorjamb. “Does it smell like smoke in here?” he asked. No one cared enough to pursue it further.
“How was it?” I asked my dad. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the place mats, which were the map of the world circa 1954. Most of Eastern Europe was named something I didn’t recognize.
“Oh, she looked beautiful.” Peter smiled at me. “Really nice.”
The kitchen’s wallpaper was divided into squares. Each square contained a fruit, a vegetable, or a flower, and then the big letter of the alphabet they all started with. A was an avocado, B a banana, and so on. It was all done in pastel greens and browns and oranges. On the butter-colored fridge were heavy lacquered magnets molded into the shapes of common American dinners, a mini hamburger and french fries, a plate of pasta, a steak and baked potato.
Stella started on dinner, spaghetti, plopping a big wad of butter on the noodles before pouring the sauce on top. The meat in the sauce looked like little gerbil poops. Pete wafted in and out, a ragged paperback book in his hand. I’d met Pete a few times—he visited us in Brooklyn after my mom left, driving all the way from Arizona, where he lived. Last summer, my father suggested I visit him there—Pete lives in a geodesic dome, he singsonged, as if this were temptation. He’s a nature guide. You could go on some amazing hikes. He raises parakeets!
Pete drove across the country to get here, too. When he found out Steven and I were good students, he showed us the books stacked in the passenger seat of his old Honda Civic. “You know how some people eat to live?” he said to us, his eyes wide. “Well, I read to live.” Except Pete hadn’t attended college. My father was the only one in the family who had done that.