Pew

by Catherine Lacey

  A fine idea, Mrs. Goodson, Harold said. Hilda, make sure you write that one down. And, Kitty, I would just like to say that we’re all very moved by you taking that poor child into your home. Could there be anything more Christian than that?

  Everyone in the room applauded, and as they applauded, Mrs. Goodson turned to smile at each person in the room, waving at everyone with one hand, then the other.

  A woman with raised eyebrows stood. I have something I’d like to tell the group.

  Go on, Mrs. Robertson, Harold said.

  Now I was just sitting here talking to Minnie Sims about Pew and I must tell y’all, we have some real disagreements about what … Pew looks like. I mean, to me, it’s so obviously a girl and definitely not white, I’d say about thirteen or fourteen years old, but Minnie, she is convinced that Pew’s a boy and white and at least fifteen!

  More white than not white is what I said, Minnie clarified.

  But you can see how drastic our difference of opinion is, the standing woman said, her eyebrows arched high on her forehead. It’s almost like we’re looking at two different people! And I don’t feel comfortable letting Pew be around other teens—you know—if we don’t even know if they’re this way or that. Does everyone else have such different ideas about what Pew looks like?

  A burst of voices, raised hands. Harold tried to conduct them with a little knife against a glass, then with a fork against a ceramic plate, then by shouting.

  A voice from the back cut through the noise—We ought to have Pew baptized—and the room quieted around that suggestion.

  Oh, yes, Harold said. We should take care of that this Sunday. A very important point. Thank you for bringing it up, Bill.

  No sweat, Bill said.

  In the meantime, I think perhaps we’ll have a short break, freshen up our plates and coffees? Everyone began to stand and their voices grew into a low rumble. Marlena Dean made her famous pimento cheese, so don’t miss that.

  There’s pie on the side table in the dining room, Kitty said to the room.

  Yes, there’s pie, Harold repeated.

  THE WOMAN IN THE WHITE APRON was washing dishes as Kitty led me into the kitchen.

  Maria, if you could just keep an eye on Pew for the next—I don’t know—might take an hour. Just take Pew back to the den, please, if you don’t mind—the walls are thin up here and I don’t want the discussion to bother, uh—to bother anyone.

  In the den, yes, no problem. Maria dried her hands on a towel and came toward me, chewing at one corner of her lip.

  A girl appeared at the back door’s window, looked at me carefully, then opened it slowly and came inside.

  Annie, what on earth!

  Why are there all these cars here?

  Why aren’t you in school?

  Are y’all meeting about the Forgiveness Festival?

  It’s not particularly your business what it’s about, when I haven’t any idea about why you’re not in school.

  Annie put her backpack on the floor and took a cube of cheese from a ravaged platter. Kitty held her open palm under her daughter’s face—Spit it. Annie puckered her lips and slowly pushed out a half-gnawed cube of cheese. Maria immediately removed the waste from Kitty’s hand and wiped it clean.

  I clearly don’t have time for this, Annie. There’s company and I’m expected back in there at this very moment.

  Annie looked to me, back at her mother.

  You remember Pew from dinner on Monday, don’t you? The Bonners’ guest?

  Annie looked at me again. A half smile passed over her face.

  Don’t be rude, Annie. Say hello.

  Hello.

  Maria was just taking Pew back to the den, so I want you to go immediately to your room and do your homework until I come get you, do you understand?

  Fine. Annie left through one door as Maria took me through another.

  I HAD BEEN SITTING on the edge of a bathtub for some time when there was a knock at the door. Ah, Pew? You need something? Maria’s voice.

  I hadn’t heard her footsteps so she must have followed me, must have been sitting at the door the whole time.

  Knock once to say you’re OK?

  A long silence.

  Just let me know.

  I picked up a bar of soap and threw it at the door. It fell to the tiles, dented.

  OK. I’ll leave you alone. Come check later. Her footsteps pattered, faded.

  I lowered myself into the empty tub, felt the cool porcelain slowly warm. Elsewhere in the house there were voices overlapping, laughing, a clang in the kitchen, then a sound came closer—something just behind the wall.

  A vent in the corner popped off and a thin leg appeared, then another leg, then Annie slid out onto the bathroom floor, at first looking surprised to see me, then seeming steely and defiant.

  It didn’t sound like anyone was in here, she whispered.

  She looked at me awhile and I looked back at her. Her hair was tangled. She went to the medicine cabinet, got out a little blue tube. She squeezed something thick out of it and smeared it across her face as she stared in the mirror.

  Everyone’s talking about you at school, she said to her reflection. Not that you should care. They’re all so stupid. Jack started it. He’s such an asshole. He knew he wasn’t supposed to talk about you except with people from church who already knew, but he told pretty much everybody. He’s so dumb.

  She had covered half her face in a thick sky-blue paste when she stopped and examined herself more closely in the mirror.

  Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

  She turned to me.

  Well? Don’t you think so, or what?

  She turned back to the mirror, kept applying the pale blue paste to her face.

  Mom said I would talk to a wall if I felt like it was listening. Anyway it’s her dumb idea I have to put this stuff on because she caught me sneaking one of her cigarettes and got mad at me because she said it gives you premature wrinkles and gray hair. I have a gray hair—do you want to see it?

  She washed the stuff from her hands and began combing her hair, staring into the mirror.

  There! She came toward me, leaned over the tub, and pinched a single white hair. See it? Mom saw one on the back of my head a couple weeks ago and she yanked it out so I have to hide this one so she doesn’t get it. I like him.

  Annie sat on the tiled floor. The paste was turning pale and dry at the edges. Some of her hair clung to it.

  Anyway. You’re lucky they don’t send you to school. I almost wanted to be mad about why they sent me home today, but I was just too glad to leave.

  She leaned back onto her elbows and looked up at the ceiling.

  It was in science class. She was teaching us about flower reproduction and she said that everything that was alive could reproduce, and everything that could reproduce was either male or female and I raised my hand and even though she saw me, she didn’t call on me, so after a while I just interrupted her and said it wasn’t true, that some things that reproduced didn’t have a sex. I’d been studying about this on my own because of something I saw on TV about starfish—that a starfish reproduces all by itself without having to mate or anything. And snails. And there are plants like that, too, and some animals even switch back and forth, and I always thought that was just something that happened in science fiction but it’s not just in science fiction. So I said this, I said to Mrs. Goldwater, I said, What about dandelions and how they’re all asexual and reproduce all by themselves? And Mrs. Goldwater just said, Maybe that’s why they’re considered to be a weed. But she didn’t even know what she was talking about, and she just said that so the class would laugh and they did, even Jeremy, who I know is gay because he told me himself, plus everyone can tell, so I kept asking Mrs. Goldwater a
bout the starfish and about how seahorses do it the other way around, and the boy seahorses carry the babies, and most of the class was laughing because they’re so dumb and then I got sent to the principal’s office.

  Annie lay fully on her back and was quiet for a while.

  In the library I also found a book about revolutions that had a whole section just about people who set themselves on fire as a protest. It makes you wonder, don’t it? Makes me wonder.

  She got up to look at her face in the mirror. The paste had mostly dried out and turned faintly gray. She touched it.

  Almost. She hoisted herself to sit on the edge of the sink and kicked her feet into the air for a while, then stilled them and looked at me.

  So are they going to make you go to the festival?

  I just looked at her awhile, then said, I don’t know.

  How old are you?

  I sat up a little. I don’t know.

  I’m fifteen. Do you answer everything with I don’t know?

  Sometimes.

  That’s really Nelson’s thing, you know. He hates talking.

  Annie turned around and rinsed her face clean in the sink, speaking into the water as she worked. And how come you were sleeping in that church? Was it just because you don’t have a home or did you pick our church in particular? Or did you run away from somewhere?

  She stood up and dried her face with a white towel. For the first time I could almost remember where I’d come from before all the walking, before the searching every night for a place to sleep. I wanted to tell her something. I wanted to begin speaking and not know what I was going to say, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak.

  You know, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I’m not trying to make you tell me anything, you know. My dad says I ask too many questions anyway. It’s just that, if you don’t have a home, I think that’s really … well, it upsets me, that’s all. It makes me sad and I wish I could do something about it.

  She dropped the towel onto the floor and went over to the window, peeked between the blinds she parted with two fingers.

  In civics class last semester we had to write these essays about something we could do to make the world a better place. It was only supposed to be a page but I wrote seven and a half pages about how everyone should get exactly the same stuff—everyone could live in the same normal-sized houses, and there should only be public schools that everyone can go to instead of private ones that only rich people get to go to, and when people die, they shouldn’t be able to give all their money to their kids. It should all get split up between the poorest people because otherwise rich people’s kids start out way ahead of everyone else just because of where they were born and poor people’s kids start out worse off than everyone else just because they were born somewhere else. And anyway, I had all these other ideas in there because it was seven and a half pages, typed up and everything. But guess what happened when my teacher read it? She said I had to go talk to the school counselor because I was a communist. And I told her I never said I was a communist and she had my essay and she held it up and said, Miss Goodson, this is very troubling, and I said, Because I want people to be treated the same, and she said something about how ideas were dangerous and I really needed someone to talk some sense into me before it got worse and this is not how the world works and I said that I knew that wasn’t how the world works but it was how I think the world should work, then she wrote me up for talking back. Isn’t that stupid, too, getting in trouble for talking back? No offense to you because you can do whatever you want, but aren’t we supposed to talk back to each other? That’s like—a whole half of discussion. It just seems to me that part of some people having a lot of things depends on other people having less things. The school counselor wasn’t much better and basically she made me so mad that I threw a chair across the room, which I know wasn’t the right thing to do, but it ended up proving one of my points about how everyone gets treated unequally because when a guy did that last semester, he got suspended but the school counselor just laughed at me. Didn’t even write me up or nothing. Which isn’t fair.

  Annie leaned back into the window, and the blinds clattered.

  I’m probably talking too much. They all say I talk too much. I know I shouldn’t but there’s so much that bothers me and everyone just keeps acting like it’s normal. But it doesn’t have to be normal. You probably just think this is stupid.

  No, I said.

  Well. You might be the only one who thinks so. I don’t know how anyone can stand this place. My mom said that saying you hate your hometown is the sign of a boring person who thinks they’re better than everyone else. And anyway this week is the worst of it—right before the festival. I already know about three different girls that— Well, it’s the worst for girls, I think. Everyone’s more worried about their houses or cars getting broken into, since everything gets forgiven at the festival and it all goes away. Anyway, most of the time the girls don’t even say anything about what happens to them because then they get into trouble for it … and anyway they’d just tell you to pray about it at the festival anyway, that there’s nothing they can do about it now …

  We heard footsteps in the hall and Annie braced, looked toward the door.

  It’s locked, she whispered, isn’t it?

  I nodded.

  I better go anyway. As she started to crawl back into the vent she’d come from, she turned to me again and whispered, Pew isn’t your real name, is it?

  I shook my head.

  Does anyone know what your true name is?

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Somebody does know your true name, don’t they?

  I just kept sitting there, breathing in and out, running my fingers along the slick sides of the bathtub. Annie began to cry a little, silently, her face crumpled up and reddened. She slapped herself hard in the face, once, then twice, then once more.

  Somebody should know, she said, then she slid herself back into the vent and crawled away, replacing the slatted cover from the inside.

  Bye, she said, within the wall.

  Alone again I felt a prickling sort of illness. I shut my eyes, flattened my body against the bottom of the tub, tried to hide myself into nothing the way snakes do when a storm is coming. I tried to remember what a damp field smells like in the morning, in that kind of morning before the true morning, those hours before the sun has risen and the earth feels like a lung. I tried to breathe in the way the field breathes then.

  Several hard knocks at the door. Harold’s voice came from the other side—Pew, my friend?

  A long pause.

  It seems you’ve had quite enough time in the bathroom, my child. There’s some people down there in the living room that would like to say goodbye to you and it’s just not polite to keep them waiting so long.

  I came to understand that I was not a field. I was not, today, just dirt and seed and grass. A field is a living thing. Fields began and ended. Every plant has a true name that no one had to give them. People were the end of something. The body is already dead.

  If I need to, Harold said through laughter, I can pick the lock, but I don’t need to do that, now, do I?

  People cannot be kept waiting. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck and no one will do anything about it for many years, so many lifetimes of necks being held. I know what I am. The body is already dead.

  Wouldn’t you like to walk out on your own accord?

  All breath is taken and given through the throat. All air is borrowed. People cannot be kept waiting.

  HILDA DROVE IN SILENCE. Whatever had made it possible for her to look into my eyes, it seemed, had now expired. There would be no more of that. She cleared her throat several times, trying and failing to fully clear it. I stared out the window and saw, every mile or so, a plain white sign with red type. The first one was beside a large, gnarled tree—

  THE FESTIVAL

  SAVES.
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br />   And sometime later—

  FORGIVENESS:

  FOR OR AGAINST?

  And the last one, stuck crookedly in the grass of a highway median—

  THE

  FORGIVENESS FESTIVAL:

  SOUL HEALER!

  Harold—well, he’s very prominent. People respect him and when he gets going on something, well, he can be a little overactive. That’s all.

  By the time we had arrived at her house, she had submerged into silence again. On the front porch a potted plant had somehow been knocked over.

  Oh, Hilda said as she passed.

  The plant was trying to grow toward the sun again, bending, trying. Soil spilled out through the cracked ceramic. Dark afternoon clouds crept into the sky, turned the house ghostly and gray. I could hear two different clocks ticking, each to its own count.

  Hilda opened the door to the attic, and as I climbed the stairs, she said I was free to come down whenever I wanted, but that she and Steven had agreed that the attic door would be kept locked just to be safe and should I need to come downstairs I should just knock on the door as loudly as I could and she would come let me out and sit with me in the living room or the porch or wherever I would like to be. Her focus fell from me to the floor, to a wall, to a stair, to the door, to the knob in her hand, to the floor, briefly to me again, to a wall.

  I knew I would not leave the attic. I nodded.

  And it’s not that we think you’ve done anything wrong—it’s just that we don’t know what you’ve done. We just want to be careful.

  She stood there quietly awhile, no longer breathing from the top of her lungs and no longer letting her focus drift from one place to another; it seemed she wasn’t breathing at all, that she wasn’t looking at anything.