The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

by Laird Koenig

  She held the book, turning .the cover to study the face from another angle.

  Yes, she was certain, they did look alike.

  Her father had said so.

  She began to read.

  That Love is all there is,

  Is all we know of Love;

  In seats facing the aisle in front of her, two girls shrieked with laughter. They carried sticks with felt pennants bright with snarling cat faces and WILDCATS blazoned on the cloth. The two friends talked in loud voices for the benefit of the girl who pretended to read. All of it was about boys and "The Game," and Rynn assumed what they meant by that was American football. Huddled together over their secrets, they were giggling, whispering, and bursting—every few seconds—into new shrieks of laughter.

  Once Rynn met the eyes of the girl with glasses.

  Rynn found herself wishing her eyes were as large as the girl’s, although she told herself the glasses undoubtedly magnified their size. When the girl laughed and briefly showed braces on her teeth, Rynn’s envy vanished. The other girl had a muddy complexion and nothing to envy but a red wool coat of a color that reminded Rynn of the Queen’s horse guards.

  The two stole glances at the girl who sat by herself, and the girl with the glasses and the braces, making no effort to conceal a whisper, turned to her friend who was preparing to blow a pink bubble from pouting lips. The girl with the growing bubble listened and then almost strangled on her gum as she nodded, burying giggles against her friend’s white wool scarf.

  Rynn told herself if this was what having a friend meant it was a waste of time. It was silly.

  The mouth with braces again whispered to her friend, and both girls yelped with laughter.

  Rynn knew they were talking about her, and she felt her cheeks and forehead go hot.

  Slowly she turned a page, showing deep concentration on her book, yet after a moment of pretending to read, she found a poem so beautiful that she shut her eyes and thought of the quiet New England village where Emily Dickinson had lived and died. Her village, Rynn thought, probably wasn’t all that different from the one she lived in—giant elms, quiet streets, small wooden houses, an ancient graveyard. Snow in the winter, lawns with long shadows in the summer.

  Emily Dickinson, one could be certain, didn’t have silly friends. She didn’t need them.

  A pink bubble of gum swelled till at last it burst, and the girl who blew it lapped its pink remains back into her mouth, unperturbed. Eyes streaming with laughter, they wiped their tears with a shared wad of Kleenex. Suddenly they screamed and tugged violently on the cord signaling the bus to stop.

  They fled out the back door in a final burst of giggles crying:

  "Yeah Wildcats!"

  On the seat they left behind a thin magazine which Rynn picked up. A boy in vivid colors on the cover smiled at her. His was the face of an exceedingly pretty English lady one might see in a posh shop in Knightsbridge or standing knee deep in heather in a perfume advertisement. She studied the boy. His eyes were huge (she wished hers were as big), his complexion flawless, and his hair long and soft enough to be the envy of any girl. Beneath his picture bold print announced that the lady-faced boy’s latest record album had shattered all sales records. Rynn, turning the pages, found photographs of the singing star swarmed by girls of her age, open-mouthed, gazing lovesick at this slender boy who forever smiled and most often clutched a guitar. WHY—the headline of the story demanded—DO THEY TELL US WE’RE TOO YOUNG TO LOVE?

  "Why, indeed," Rynn said with an exaggerated yawn as she tossed the thin magazine back on the aisle seat and rode the rest of the way into town with Emily Dickinson.

  First on her list of errands was the bank.

  Her father had chosen a bank that was open on Saturday mornings, and because of the heavy rain she was surprised to see so many people—entire families in bright-colored coats and scarves and muddy boots. Even dogs trotted into the bank, including a Dalmatian who expressed his happiness by barking and lashing his white tail against her.

  She was the only one at the safe deposit desk, and a tap on the little push bell brought a clerk, a tall girl who wore a thick makeup, almost a spun-sugar pink, which failed to cover a deeply-pitted complexion. The little girl had already written her signature and the box number on a slip of paper which the clerk used in a search for a file card.

  "Jacobs, Leslie A.?" the girl asked in a flat voice. She stared at the little girl.

  "And Rynn. R-Y-N-N. That’s my signature there. It’s what you call, here in America, a joint account."

  The clerk compared the signatures. "You got your key?"

  The little girl held up a silver key which she had taken from a chain around her neck. The clerk pressed a button and the lock on the door beside the desk buzzed like a bumble bee Rynn had once caught in a glass jar.

  In a room flashing with fluorescent light, the clerk opened a shiny steel door and stepped aside to let Rynn draw a black box from the wall.

  "Now you take it into one of those rooms," the clerk said, indicating a row of booths.

  "Yes, I know.

  A few minutes later, when Rynn returned the black box to the wall inside the safe and the clerk had locked the door and returned the key, a junior officer, a young man with sideburns and yellow teeth, joined the clerk to watch the little girl leave the safe deposit department and cross the shiny marble floor to join a line at a window.

  "Isn’t she awfully young?" said the yellow teeth.

  "Seems to know what she’s doing," said the clerk with the pink makeup.

  Rynn wrote her name on two twenty-dollar traveler’s checks. A young teller, who was attempting, unsuccessfully, to grow a moustache, frowned as he studied the signatures. He looked at the little girl, then at the two checks.

  Rynn felt her heart pounding. Why was he doing this? They were her checks. She had every right to cash her own checks.

  "These are yours?" The teller’s thin moustache barely moved as he talked.

  "Why don’t you call an officer of the bank?" she asked rather sharply.

  The man glanced around, but if he was looking for someone to authorize the transaction, he found no one. He slid a piece of blank paper across the counter at her.

  "Sign your name again. On this."

  Didn’t anyone ever say please?

  Without a word the little girl wrote her name in the same careful handwriting that appeared on the check.

  The teller waved at a plump woman with several loops of clacking beads swinging around her neck. The beads clattered on the counter as she joined the teller in studying the signature. She shot a doubtful look at the girl.

  "Do you have any identification?"

  From her duffle-coat pocket, where she carried her wallet, Rynn drew out a British passport.

  The teller opened the document and held it in front of the plump woman.

  "She’s only thirteen."

  The plump woman untangled glasses that hung among her beads to inspect the girl who was only thirteen years old.

  "You traveling with your mother and father?"

  "My father has an account here."

  The Dalmatian bounded past Rynn, his tail lashing her legs.

  "Jacobs. Leslie A.," the girl said.

  The plump woman gave her another long look.

  "It’s okay," she said.

  Apparently it was not okay with the teller, who showed increasing annoyance when Rynn asked for her money in one-dollar bills. Finishing the transaction, he motioned for the little girl to move on to count her money. Others, he said, were waiting in the line behind her.

  But she did not move. "May I have the paper with my signature, please?"

  The thin moustache contracted in annoyance as the young man pushed the paper across the counter. As she walked away, Rynn tore the paper into bits and dropped it in a waste paper basket.

  So many people on the street. So much hurrying, so many packages.

  Rynn’s second errand, a plumbing supply sto
re, was several streets away in a quieter part of town where she found herself the only person in the shop. She wandered around looking at the models of heaters, diagrams of central heating systems, and cutaway displays of airducts that kept Americans so hot. A large advertisement that stated that winter was the wise time to air-condition your house urged a refrigerated summer. After minutes alone in the reception area she wondered if anyone was in the warehouse in the back of the counter.

  "Hello?" Silence. She called again.

  An unusually cheery man, very old and turning up the amplification on his hearing aid, hurried to the counter munching a bologna sandwich. "Morning," he said, gulping down a large chunk of sandwich. "What can we do for you?"

  "My name’s Jacobs. My father and I have the Wilson house—in the lane."

  "Here in town?"

  ’The village."

  The man nodded and took another crescent-shaped bite from the sandwich.

  "Our wall heater you put in for the Wilsons has a label that says it came from this shop."

  The man nodded. He knew the Wilsons.

  "Trouble?" He carefully placed the rest of his sandwich down on a piece of office stationery.

  Rynn explained that she did not know if she had trouble or not, but when she had been housecleaning the other day she had read on the dial that at night one turns the dial all the way down to a setting marked NIGHT.

  "That’s right." The man smiled. "But why don’t you let your mother and father worry about that?"

  "Shouldn’t I?"

  With another smile the man shrugged. "Like I said, what can we do for you?"

  "When one turns the dial all the way down, there’s still a flame that keeps burning. Quite high actually."

  "Pilot light."

  "Is that perfectly safe? After all, it is gas and gas can be dangerous." As if this were an accusation she felt demanded proof, she found herself adding, "I mean in London, one of our neighbors was found dead because something had gone wrong with the gas."

  "Haven’t got a thing to worry about." The man’s words were muffled by his mouthful of sandwich. He came around the counter and led the girl to a model: It was the same as the wall heater at Rynn’s home.

  "Show you why." He pried the cover off the heater and explained how the pilot light, the little blue flame, fired the burner. More important he showed the girl how the gas was fed through one little copper tube. From the burner an air vent opened through the wall of the house to the outdoors.

  "See?" he asked with a smile that included a considerable portion of unswallowed sandwich.

  "Yes I do," the girl said in her rather crisp way. "And I do feel ever so much better about it:" She turned to the door. "Thank you very much indeed."

  The man was still smiling and munching as Rynn left, and she imagined that very likely he thought it strange that a girl of thirteen would come into his shop to ask a question about one, of his heaters. Why? Should little girls not be interested in, things like that?

  She had saved her next errand till last, because it was what she most wanted to do. Even now, on the street in front of a book store, studying the shiny jackets of masses of books on display as eagerly as a starving urchin might stare into a bakery window, she was postponing the ultimate happiness, the moment when she would actually set foot inside the bookshop. Then she would be in a world she felt was far more wonderful than Alice found down the rabbit hole or the astronauts discovered out in the black vastness of space.

  Once inside the shop, surrounded by tables of books, shelves of books, stacks of books, she repeated the process of postponing what she wanted most—the magic moment she stood before the shelves crowded with thin volumes of poetry.

  Two hours later she still sat on the floor devouring page after page in books whose bindings cracked with newness each time her careful hands turned back the cover. Of the shoppers above her moving through the aisle, she was oblivious.

  No one bothered her. No clerk asked to be of help or suggested that she move on. But a moment came when her throat was choked with so much emotion and her face felt so hot with excitement that she ran from the bookshop into the cold street.

  She spent another hour in a record shop surrounded by sound and imagining the joy of carrying away armloads of albums. As she left the bins of classical records and trailed slowly toward the door, she saw the boy on the magazine cover. From a poster, his enormous eyes stared down at her, his dazzlingly white grin held her for a long moment.

  At a counter stool in Woolworth’s, Rynn gave up trying to eat a greasy hamburger. She forced down an orange drink, flat and flavorless, which a black girl had brought after considerable confusion when Rynn had asked for an orange squash. The black girl kept looking at the English girl and the English girl kept drinking.

  On the street, waiting for the bus, she tried not to think about what she must do next, for that thought filled her with dread.

  She stayed on the bus all the way to the village square with its cannon from the Revolutionary War and pyramid of cannon balls. Leaving the bus she forced herself to hurry under the bare branches of the elms toward a red-brick building with white columns, the town hall.

  The front door was open, but inside the halls and offices were as silent as Rynn had hoped they would be at this time on a Saturday afternoon. The silence was so complete, she wondered if she would find anyone to complete her errand, anyone to answer her question.

  As she walked down the hall she heard a typewriter tapping. Someone was here.

  At footsteps, she turned. A tall woman in a raincoat, her hair under a scarf, was hurrying down the corridor toward her. The woman stopped. Her face looked very English. Hair that tumbled from the scarf was gray. Rynn was certain the woman was English, but when she spoke she was unmistakably American.

  "What are you doing here?"

  Rynn told herself the woman had no right to challenge her this way. And yet she found herself searching desperately for an explanation.

  Before she could speak the woman demanded: "Why aren’t you at the game?

  Why indeed? Rynn knew she would have to answer, and though she now saw there was nothing but kindness in the woman’s smiling face, and certainly her question, once it was understood, was not a challenge but nothing more than a pleasantry, still—it did require an answer.

  "Do you work here?" she asked.

  "Not exactly," the woman said with smile. "I try to help out on some of the committees."

  "I’m doing a paper on government," Rynn said. "I need to know when the school board holds its meetings."

  "Would it help to visit one?" the woman asked.

  "Actually, all I really need to know is when the board meets."

  "Twice a month, the second and last Thursday. Eleven o’clock. They met this week. The next won’t be for another two weeks ..." She stopped. "No, that’s Thanksgiving so it’s canceled."

  The woman thought for a bit.

  "I can get you the bylaws; would that help?"

  She went into an office and returned with a brochure.

  "This is rather complete, but if you find you need any more help ..."

  "It’s fine," Rynn said. "Thank you very much."

  "But you shouldn’t be working now. You should be at the football game. The Wildcats need all the help they can get."

  The girl nodded.

  "Whose class are you doing the paper for?"

  Suddenly Rynn’s green eyes lit up. "Excuse me," she said with a kind of excitement which she seldom showed to others, "do you really think it would be all right if I went to the game?"

  The woman glanced at her watch. “If you hurry you’ll get there by half time."

  Rynn turned and ran down the hall. Still smiling, the woman walked toward the sound of the typewriter’s tapping.

  Rynn ran all the way home in the rain.

  "The school board doesn’t meet for another two weeks! And even then it’s canceled!" She laughed and her breath came out in a mist. "Mrs. Hallet, you
’re a liar!" She laughed aloud. "A liar is what you are Mrs. Hallet! Liar! Liar!"

  She burst into her little house to reach the telephone book where she searched for a number. As she dialed she looked across the room to a cardboard carton full of jelly glasses that stood on the gateleg table.

  As she waited for an answer to her call, she listened to the rain drumming on the roof.

  "Mr. Hallet? This is Rynn Jacobs. Fine, ye—is your mother there? I see. She wanted some jelly glasses I wasn’t able to get for her yesterday. If you’d tell her I have them ready anytime she wants to come round. Yes, I’ll be here...."

  Suddenly the girl’s voice was surprisingly cold. "No. It would be better if she came. You see, Mr. Hallet, my father may have something he wants to talk with her about. Thank you, Mr. Hallet."

  5

  A SHARP KNOCK brought Rynn to the hall. Still excited by the discovery of Mrs. Hallet’s lie, she flung the door open to find not the woman, but an unexpected caller. She stifled a gasp, for the man standing in the rain was enormous, a giant looming large at the door of a doll’s house. He said his name was Police Officer Ron Miglioriti.

  The girl said her name was Rynn Jacobs and after that said nothing.

  She had no fear of policemen. In England she never knew these young men to be anything but polite, unfailingly friendly and helpful: She never saw them in any activity but strolling, almost ambling along the sidewalks as if the only emergency they might face was to help the next old lady find the location of a street or a bus stop. In America, Rynn had never met an officer, but she had no reason to believe them any different. This one stood before her, his glistening rain slicker streaming water. Something absurdly like those plastic covers she snapped over dishes before putting leftovers in the refrigerator covered his policeman’s cap. He had blue-black sideburns and heavy black eyebrows that almost met over shining black eyes. His nose had a rather odd look as if it might have been broken, but every one of his teeth was perfect and his smile was positively radiant, full of enough morning sunshine to light up the doorway even on this gray day. Looking at him standing on her porch in the rain after he asked to see her father, Rynn felt she had no choice but to let him come into her house.