Little Wrecks

by Meredith Miller

  There are other, overlapping, sets of bodies. Like the ’Nam vets, they’re sitting in circles on the grass and draped over the bandstand steps. The difference is, none of them are over twenty years old. They haven’t been anywhere at all. Most of them never will go anywhere. It’s all so sick and tragic, Isabel can’t understand how people pretend it isn’t.

  “Where’s Magda, Isabel?” Henry pipes up, and she remembers it’s her job to distract him while Magda and Ruth have a smoke behind the bandstand.

  “She went with Ruth for a minute. Come on, guy, let’s see if we can spot a water rat.”

  “Do they bite, Isabel?” Henry looks askance at the rocks piled at the edge of the harbor.

  “Not when you’re with me they don’t. Look, it’s Lefty!” Isabel waves.

  “He doesn’t have a hand, Isabel. I don’t like it. Magda says one day I’ll start to have dreams about stuff I don’t like.”

  “He does have a hand. Look, the right one is still there. Come on. You won’t dream about Lefty because you’ll talk to him and your little brain will be satisfied. You only have nightmares about stuff you’re chicken about. If you’re ever worried you’ll have a nightmare about something, just walk right up to it and start a conversation. ‘Dark Shadow,’ you say, ‘what’s it like being you? You should know, Dark Shadow, Isabel says you’re not allowed to bother me.’ Try it. It works.”

  Isabel holds out her iced tea for Lefty, because he likes the lemon ice cubes.

  “Hey, Lefty, have you met my friend Henry?”

  “Henry the Fourth,” Lefty says, taking Isabel’s cup with a little old-fashioned bow. “Henry the Fourth estate. Henry the Fifth column.” Lefty is mostly there, and also someplace else at the same time. Nonstop poetry, but most people don’t see it that way.

  “Hi,” Henry says.

  “Hi, small person. Magdalene is your sister, your Holy Harlot Mother, mister. Isabel is nice, too. She’s a good friend to have.”

  “I’m gonna marry her.”

  “You’re a little short, aren’t you? Short change, Mr. Strange. You can’t get married yet.”

  “When I’m taller, I mean.” Henry doesn’t miss a beat. Lefty makes perfect sense to him.

  He does make perfect sense, in the context. He breaks the spell of Highbone. He sees everything they see, but he’s never mad. Gentleness wafts off him. Considering everything, it’s weird that Lefty isn’t scarier.

  Ruth is calling them from the bandstand steps, pointing to the shrubs behind and waving them over. “We gotta go. Oh, Henry, we forgot to look for water rats.”

  “That’s okay. It was nice to meet you, Lefty.”

  “Nice to meet you, Oh Henry,” Lefty says. “Henry the Eighth wonder of the world.”

  Once they’re out of earshot Isabel says, “You’re a good little man, Hank, a very nice guy. Don’t you forget it.”

  “I’m not scared of him, Isabel. I won’t have a dream. Why doesn’t he have a hand?”

  “I told you, he does have a hand. Always be accurate, little guy. What you mean is, why doesn’t he have two hands?”

  “You are the smartest one, Isabel. Why doesn’t he have two hands?”

  “No, I am not the smartest one. Your sister is. Everyone knows that. You need to ask her about Lefty’s hands.”

  Behind the bandstand, Magda is sitting in a patch of slanting sun unscrewing a cassette case with the screwdriver on her Swiss Army knife.

  “What are you making, Magda?” Henry says. “Why doesn’t Lefty have two hands, Magda?”

  “He lost one. Don’t worry, it can’t happen to you. I don’t know what I’m making yet. I’m still dreaming it.”

  “Cop,” Ruth says, looking over Isabel’s shoulder towards the entrance to the park.

  “Where?”

  Isabel turns around, and it’s him, the one with the thing for teenage legs. The one who thinks Isabel is meaningless and disposable just because she isn’t a cheerleader whose dad owns a bank or something.

  “So,” she says, “this is probably a good time to tell you guys.”

  Magda looks at her like she’s already decided it’s stupid, whatever it’s going to be. The cop is making a beeline for them.

  “Uh, I kind of stole something from his car the other day.”

  “From who?” Ruth looks around at Lefty.

  “Not Lefty. The cop.”

  “You what?!” Well, the look on Magda’s face isn’t superior and dismissive anymore. Ruth just gets up and walks away towards the water. Henry follows her.

  “Well, I was kind of pissed off. He was weird to me. Anyway, he’s so arrogant he just leaves his wallet sitting in the car with the window open. He thinks no one can ever touch him.”

  “No one can, Isabel. Welcome to America. So, I just wanna check, you stole a wallet from a cop?”

  “Yeah. He deserved it.”

  “Okay, good. I’m sure that’ll really teach him a lesson about the basic humanity of people like you. Where’s the wallet now?”

  “I threw it away.”

  “Well, there’s a silver lining. Here he comes; try not to do anything stupid for the next five minutes.”

  “I see you’re wearing shoes today, Miss . . . ?”

  “Ferguson. I’m Isabel Ferguson.”

  The cop turns around to watch Ruth skipping stones with Henry by the water. It’s some cop tactic, pretending Magda and Isabel aren’t there. Also, all guys look at Ruth. All the time.

  “You didn’t see anyone hanging around my car the other day, did you, Miss Ferguson?” Subtle. He obviously thinks he’s Columbo.

  “No. Why?”

  But he is already walking away, without looking at them or saying good-bye.

  “So which part of ‘don’t do anything stupid’ did you not understand?” Magda spreads out a bandanna and lays the open cassette and its little screws out.

  “What?”

  “You told him your name was Ferguson. That seemed like a plan?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t want him to look me up.”

  “This isn’t the Bronx, Isabel. It’s Highbone. He doesn’t have to look you up.”

  “You know what, Magda? Never mind. I have an idea.”

  “Another one. Great?”

  “Ruth! Come back.”

  Henry comes first, and Ruth walks half backwards, still staring out over the harbor.

  “So,” Isabel says, “this robbery plan of Charlie’s. What if we do it?”

  “Henry, can you go over there and throw this away?” Magdalene hands him some tissues from one of her pockets. “Just to fill you in, Ruth, Isabel thinks she’s a criminal mastermind now. She stole a wallet from that cop.”

  “Yep, I heard the first time. What does that have to do with Matt’s weed?”

  “Nothing,” Isabel says. “Well, I mean, no one ever thinks we matter. No one even thinks we’re important enough to be in the way. Charlie thinks we can’t do anything remotely useful or dangerous because we’re girls. If we stole the weed and then surprised Charlie with it, he’d have to admit we’re as good as him.”

  “Oh, I get it. Charlie’s about to dump you. Again. So you think me and Ruth should go to jail so you can impress him enough to make him keep paying attention to you.”

  “Okay, look,” Ruth says. “Matt’s mother is sick. In the head, sick. She goes all catatonic. He used to have to spoon-feed her, until they took her away. He lives by himself, watching Twilight Zone and reading about outer space. He’s a person. This idea is messed up.”

  “Everyone is a person, Ruth.” Magda points to the edge of the park, where an English Ford swishes past the shrubbery on Baywater Avenue. Behind the wheel is Mrs. Hancock, who’s married to the guy who owns the yacht club. She has orange lipstick and big round sunglasses on. If Isabel had those glasses and that car, she wouldn’t waste them on Baywater Avenue.

  “That,” Magda says, pointing at Mrs. Hancock, “is a fucking person.”

  Henry runs back full tilt from
the garbage pail and Magda puts out an arm to keep him from stepping on her bandanna.

  “Mrs. Hancock is the person I never want to be,” Ruth says. “Which, you know, is my point.”

  “What’s so wrong with Mrs. Hancock?” Isabel cranes her neck to see over onto Baywater Avenue. “She looks kind of cool, for a suburban wife, I mean. Maybe she’s just trapped.”

  “Ruth’s mother works for her, Isabel. She’s married to Harold goddamned Hancock, Mr. Big Man Yacht Club Owner. She’s climbed the pathetic social ladder of Highbone and now she thinks she can spit on us from the top. She’s not remotely cool.”

  “One of the first things I remember,” Ruth says, “is trying to sit perfectly still in that woman’s kitchen while my mother was cleaning. Mrs. Hancock always noticed me, though, no matter how still I sat. She has freaky weird eyes that kind of gather up light and use it on you like a knife.”

  “Her and my mom hung out,” Magda says. “I wonder if she sends her letters.”

  “I used to sit on a chair in their kitchen and Mrs. Hancock would come in and cut right through me with those eyes. When I was little, I had dreams where she was standing in my bedroom doorway, staring at me and sucking all the air out of the room, like in the movies when there’s a hole in an airplane. She’s just messed up, Isabel. Trust me.”

  “It looks like bicycle wheels!” Henry says, reaching for the pieces of Magda’s cassette.

  “Don’t touch, big guy. I’ll let you play with it when it’s all done.” Magda stands up and slips the tiny screws into the watch pocket of her Levi’s.

  “We’re not helping Charlie rob Matt, Isabel,” Ruth says. “If you try, I’ll tell him it’s you.”

  When did Ruth stop being the sidekick? She stands there in the falling sun looking full of scary purpose, like she just slew a dragon or robbed a bank and got away with a million dollars and not a scratch on her. Actually, maybe two million. Ruth already looks like a million dollars anyway. All the time.

  seven

  RUTH WALKS INTO Old Mr. Lipsky’s living room and finds him sitting on the couch under the picture of his beautiful, dead wife.

  “All done, Mr. Lipsky,” she says. “Everything’s shipshape. Even my mom would approve.”

  Manny Lipsky’s apartment is above his son’s bookstore. You get to it up the stairs in the alley behind Main Street. She took the job off her mother because Old Mr. Lipsky is probably the coolest person in town. You can talk to him about pretty much anything. Also, he gets that most people in Highbone are boring.

  “Sit down. I’ll make coffee. And call me Manny or you’ll get me confused with the kid.”

  “Nah, I definitely won’t. And let me make the coffee.” Ruth puts her cleaning bucket down by the door to the stairs.

  While the coffee is percolating, she stands in the kitchen doorway and watches him. He looks like he forgot she’s there at all. In the picture above him, his wife has that hair that people’s grandmothers had when they were surprisingly beautiful in black and white. Even though she is long gone, Ruth can see that she hovers over Manny like some kind of angelic ghost. Ruth brings two coffee cups out from the little kitchen and puts coasters on the glass coffee table.

  “So, what is it today, little movie star?” He always calls her that.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Lipsky. Everything seems like it’s shifting around lately. It’s like I woke up from a dream where all the crazy stuff made sense and in the awake world it doesn’t. Sometimes, I’m just really mad. I mean, why do people keep going around in pointless circles? It just gets to me.”

  “I told you, call me Manny.”

  “Sorry, Manny. I think I just want to start taking charge of stuff, you know? I mean, it doesn’t seem like anyone else is gonna do it right.”

  “You know what I think? I think you’re meant for bigger, faster places. You were born sparkling. Life should be like one long roller coaster for you. If you like roller coasters, I mean. I don’t think it’s this place moving around; I think it’s you.”

  “I used to think that about Magdalene’s mom,” Ruth says. “You knew her, didn’t you? I always thought she wasn’t supposed to be here. Now she isn’t. I keep trying to imagine her new life.”

  “Irene, you mean? Irene Buonvicino she was, before she got married. Your little friend, the daughter, looks just like Irene used to look.”

  “Milk or black, Mr. Lipsky?”

  “Milk. Stomach goes when you’re old. Black coffee could kill me instead of waking me up.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Mr. Lipsky. You have too much left to say. You can’t die yet.”

  “It could happen midsentence; don’t kid yourself.” He chuckles and puts both hands around his coffee cup. That’s what Manny Lipsky has decided to do about age and death, laugh in its face. He does it all the time.

  “Little Irene was a looker,” he says. “You know, all the boys wanted to take Irene Buonvicino out on Saturday night. Her parents were old-world though, and the boys had to get past her brother, little Tony, too. It was gonna take guts to marry that girl.”

  “You know, Mr. Lipsky.” He points a finger at her. “Manny, I mean. I used to think Magda’s mom was a queen or an angel. I’ve been going to their house since I was really little. When my mom read me stories like ‘Bluebeard’ or The Lord of the Rings, I pictured all the women to look like Mrs. Warren. I thought Professor Warren was the ogre.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Mrs. Warren had something shining out of her, you know what I mean? Like your wife.” She points to the photograph, and Old Mr. Lipsky beams at her. “Luminous,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. “Luminous.”

  Isabel is friends with the son, the bookstore man, but the dad is the one with the soul in the Lipsky family. Why can’t she see that?

  Ruth shouts good-bye and closes the door at the bottom of the stairs behind Mariner’s Maps and Books. It’ll be dark soon, halfway Highbone all over again. She heads down to the end of the pier and sits where she can’t see anything but water. No Danny, no Isabel, no Magda, no kid from Macanajian’s garage. No lurching terrible visions of how the world really is. No decisions to make about whether she’s brave enough to change anything at all. If you can just let go, all the thoughts get washed in sea and sky.

  When the orange is gone from the clouds Ruth stands up and heads in, just in time to see Doris and her boyfriend roar up to a parking space at the end of Main Street. They’re not on the trike, they’re in a green Impala. Doris opens the passenger door and shouts hello. Her hair and her pink fingernails stand out on Main Street like colors from a different movie. Her boyfriend cranes his neck out the driver’s window to look Ruth up and down. Doris says, does Ruth want to go to the beach, and waves at the backseat.

  “This is Marvin.” Doris points at her boyfriend. Marvin? Really? “Come with us down to Fiddler’s Cove.” It isn’t an order, but it isn’t a question either.

  Doris throws herself over the front seat and opens the back door for Ruth, then sits back down, puts Golden Earring’s “Leather” in the tape deck, and starts singing like she forgot about Ruth already. Once they’re moving, Doris throws her head back on the seat and sings louder.

  They park at Fiddler’s Cove, and the three of them sit smoking and looking at the water like people do, acting like the beach is a drive-in movie. It’s too loud for conversation anyway. Ruth tries to think what to do about her mother and Danny, about this new language that the world seems to be speaking to her, and about how no one else is going to understand it. Not even Magda, who has been telling her what everything means for so long, it’s like she’s inside Ruth’s head, even when Ruth is alone. The water here is not as comforting as the harbor was, not as empty somehow.

  When a voice comes from the seat next to her, Ruth actually jumps. She was spacing out and didn’t hear the car door, but there he is. Doris and her boyfriend are still facing the sea and singing with their eyes closed. Marvin, the boyfriend, is doing a l
ittle head-banging against the driver’s seat.

  “Seen you with those other kids downtown,” the guy next to Ruth says. “You don’t belong there.”

  She looks over, and the first thing she notices is his hair. It shines, like Magda’s. Only this guy’s hair is fine and straight, and it looks like he brushes it a hundred strokes a day. The color, though, that black with secret browns and reds in it when you look up close, that’s the same as Magda’s. His hair is like Magda’s hair would be if it belonged to some kind of unholy angel.

  “I looked at you and saw you right away,” he says. “It’s like you’re lit with a different light.” When he says that, she can see a rip in the fabric of space and time, with light shining through it. An eerie gold light, falling only on her.

  When she asks him his name he looks into her for a long minute, then tells his last name first. “Mackie.”

  “That’s it?”

  “My first name’s Virgil, but that makes me sound like a cracker. My parents are from South Carolina. People just call me Mackie.”

  And that’s how it starts. Before she knows it, she’s telling him things she’s never told Magda, things she’s never even made into language before. Words are coming out of her so fast; she keeps on making sentences that don’t really say what she wants them to.

  “Sometimes I feel like there are two layers to everything, and I’m the only one who can see them both,” she says. “Does that make any sense at all?”

  He just nods and looks at her, while the music keeps blasting out of the front speakers. In the backseat, Ruth and Mackie are in a bubble where the noise in the car can’t reach them. Mackie hears every word she says.

  “I draw pictures, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m doing it. It feels like they force themselves out of me.”

  Saying that out loud makes the air around her turn suddenly cold, like there is no atmosphere, no earth under her, no right or wrong. It feels good. Stuff just keeps coming from her mouth into the waiting space Mackie seems to make. When she finally runs out of breath, he leans over and whispers to her.

  “You’re mad, aren’t you? You’re mad at all of them.”