by Alice Sebold
The space between the stove and counter was a short one, but that day the noise outside was a lengthening agent she could not have predicted. We heard it, and the heat of the casserole burning through the dishcloth my mother held it with made her drop the Pyrex dish on the floor.
"You go," she said.
Panic filled her eyes.
"They want you," I said.
"But I can't. You know I can't."
And I did know.
I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones. I realized then, as I had sensed for years but never named, that I was born in order to be her proxy in the world and to bring that world back home--whether that meant bright construction-paper creations from my first years in school or meeting the angry men out in the yard. I would do it all for her. That was our particular unspoken contract, how this child served this parent.
It had been warm out that day, and I'd changed into a pair of cutoffs upon my arrival home from school. My mother despised cutoffs, thought them cheap and unkempt for the same reasons I loved them, the mangy endless fringe that I could pick at with my nails. I had known I could wear them just as I had indulged in polishing my fingernails that spring. My mother was too weak, for the first time in my life, to make her judgment voluble.
As I tiptoed from the kitchen through the back hall and into the living room, I grabbed the quilt that hung over the side of the couch. I don't know what I thought I was going to do with it, but instinct told me to cover myself as best I could. I remember I wrapped it around my shoulders as if it were a giant beach towel.
One of the men saw me through a window, and the noise in the side yard flared louder. I was barefoot, and my hair, so thin my ears poked through, hung down on either side of my face. I wanted Natalie to be there. As if together we would be an army that could flank and conquer a crowd of men.
I walked through the small living room, and as I put my hand on the doorknob that led to the screened-in porch, I heard my mother risk two words from the kitchen, where she hid. "Stay safe," she said very quietly. I knew the effort this took was heroic for her. But something had happened in the time I had crossed the room and put on, as I later thought of it, my superhero cape. My mother, in that moment, had ceased to exist for me.
The first person I saw, when I came through the screened-in porch and out the door, calmed me. It was Mr. Forrest. He was with Tosh. He was standing off to the side of the cluster of fathers and husbands, and he made a point, when I glanced at him over the waist-high fence, of trying to smile. But it was a sick and worried attempt. Tosh, usually frenetic under the best of circumstances, was hidden behind Mr. Forrest's legs.
"Where's your mother?" one of the men asked. There were six of them, seven if I counted Mr. Forrest.
"She's inside," another one answered him, though he was staring at me. "She's always inside, right?"
This truth, stated so boldly out in the open air, was like a poison arrow coming out of nowhere. I felt a tightness in my chest and paused just long enough to take a breath.
"Can't you speak?" Mr. Tolliver asked. I hated him, and this hatred was unaided by my mother's judgments of how he marched his wife around our block. He kept a small piece of wood painted white and in the shape of a gravestone that said, HERE HE LIES, COLD AND HARD, THE LAST DOG WHO SHIT IN MY YARD! The rhyme was supposed to make it funny. I've always traced my disdain of what generous people call "lawn art" to the first time I read the words of that mock grave.
"Be kind," Mr. Forrest said, his voice coming forth in a higher register than usual. His collar was unbuttoned, but he still wore his necktie from work. I realized later that he must have run into the men while taking Tosh for a walk around the block.
The men grumbled. Most still wore what passed for work clothes--worn slacks and jackets, an occasional Windbreaker with the steel company's logo.
"Helen," Mr. Warner said, "we are here to talk to your mother."
Mr. Warner, whom my mother had nicknamed the "Blusterer," considered himself a spokesman for every occasion. He could hold court on any subject. He had once stood in our front yard, lecturing my father--who knew more about water treatment than anyone within miles--on the benefits of sewage silica plants in Liberia. "He's read an article," my father said when he finally peeled himself away as darkness came. "It's nice that the man's excited, but even I don't want to talk about sewage that much."
I stood on our side of the chain-link fence.
"Come talk to us, Helen," said a father I didn't recognize.
Why didn't I see the warning in Mr. Forrest's eyes before I lifted the friendship latch and walked out into the side yard? I must have been looking at the men near the hedge and not at him. Only after I turned and shut the gate behind me did I see his face. I could read fear like tarot cards.
"Where's your mother, Helen?" Mr. Warner asked.
"Helen," Mr. Forrest said, "you should go back inside."
I knew enough, or at least I thought I did, to advance from against the gate and move closer to Mr. Forrest. But as I did, he backed away.
"My mother is unavailable. What can I do for you?" I asked, using the most grown-up voice I had. I was anxious now. I stepped toward Mr. Forrest once more.
"I wish I could help, Helen," he said, his voice hollow. He knew what to fear, and I didn't. I was beginning to hover there, in the vicinity of the truth, but with my bare feet in the grass and my quilt for a cape, I could not yet imagine men like my father, who lived all around us, wanting to hurt me. The Murdochs had moved. It had been eight months since Billy's death. The end of my junior year was only a month away. But what I hid behind the most, the thing that made me blindest up until the minute it happened, was that I was a girl. In the world where I was raised, unlike the one in which I made sure to raise my daughters, girls did not get hit.
Mr. Warner advanced toward me and stopped.
"We have business with your mother, Helen, not you."
This, I now saw, had been simmering ever since the inquest. My mother was never officially held accountable in Billy's death because, according to the report of the medical examiner, his injuries that day had been traumatic enough that he would have died regardless of whether she had stepped into the road. It was the missing hit-and-run driver's fault, not hers. Perhaps she might have held him, as other women would, or rushed to call his family, or an ambulance, but none of these actions, the authorities concluded, would have saved Billy Murdoch's life. Officially, she was merely an innocent bystander.
When I looked behind me, Mr. Forrest was holding Tosh in his arms.
"Mr. Forrest?" I was balancing on the edge of something thin and perilous, and he was the only thing I had to trust.
"You can come with me, Helen. Why not do that?"
One or two of the men laughed when they heard this, and then we all watched Mr. Forrest walk quickly to the three flagstones set into the side of the yard that led to the sidewalk.
"Tony tends toward the hysterical," Mr. Warner said. "No one is going to hurt you."
But I was not relieved by this. If Mr. Warner was my only protector against the cluster of fathers and strangers, then I was in what kids at school called "deep shit." Mr. Warner knew the cuts and quarter cuts on every major meat. He could name them and tell you their qualities. Tender, stringy, chewy, or moist. Perhaps Mr. Warner would not be the one to do the actual quartering, but I could easily picture him pontificating over my corpse.
"Where's the bitch?" Mr. Tolliver said. His face was bright red--swollen with pride.
"Where's the crazy bitch?" said the father I didn't know. Their particular macho one-upmanship involved adjectives.
Phoenixville Steel, I knew, had fired Mr. Tolliver that winter. Men all over the area were losing their jobs. My father, whose own job was secure, took the news hard each time he heard it.
" 'Let go,' " he would say, and shake his head. "I hate that phrase, as if the man's an animal and he's being released into the wild."
&n
bsp; Mr. Warner shot the men a sharp look.
I would find out soon enough that my mother, too afraid to watch, had locked herself in the downstairs bathroom and turned on the transistor radio.
"I don't know what to do, Mr. Warner," I said. He had sons. They were one, two, and three years older than I was and barely spoke to me except to grunt hello in the presence of adults.
"It really would be best if you went and asked your mother to come out. I don't want you to get hurt. You haven't done anything."
He said this with the compassionate care that a physician delivering a temporary reprieve might. But the news I heard was still bad. My mother, if not me, would be hurt.
"I can't do that, Mr. Warner," I said. "Why are you here?"
I knew why, of course, but I wanted to hear them say it.
"Bitch," Mr. Tolliver said.
I saw the line of distress cross Mr. Warner's face. This was not, at least, what he had intended. It was also not what two or three others had wanted. I could see them splitting up behind Mr. Warner. There was Mr. Tolliver and the man I didn't know, both of them wearing Phoenixville Steel softball jackets. And there were the others, like Mr. Forrest before them, who were beginning to edge closer to the corner of the yard, tripping into the front vegetable garden in which, since my earliest childhood, my father had planted and tended and snipped herbs for my mother.
It was this that finally pushed me to make a move. When Mr. Serrano, who was an accountant and had a young daughter, crushed my father's Italian parsley, I dropped the quilt from my shoulders and stepped forward.
"You'll kill it."
It was that word.
Mr. Tolliver's friend was suddenly to my right, but I was watching Mr. Serrano step carefully back from the border of the herb garden. Just as I exhaled, I felt the sting of a slap across my face.
I fell onto the grass, my own hand going up to my cheek. Mr. Warner was jumping past me to restrain the unknown father, whom Mr. Tolliver was patting on the back. I saw Mr. Serrano look down at me as he fled the yard. It was not my first awareness of the pity people had for me, pity like a vast sea that was impossible for me to cross.
The good men left with sincere apologies thrown over their shoulders, but not to me. They apologized to Mr. Warner. I was on the ground. I was a teenager. I didn't matter. Mr. Warner said, "No problem." He said, "Talk later." He said, "Take care."
He had stopped the man who'd slapped me from doing more, and so I supposed I should have been thanking Mr. Warner, but I wasn't. I was edging toward the quilt, which I'd dropped a few feet behind me. It seemed the only thing in the yard to offer protection.
Mr. Tolliver and his friend had appeared ready to storm the house and find my mother, but they were no match for the law Mr. Warner laid down, and, I imagine, a female teenager in cutoffs and T-shirt lying on the ground was probably scary to them. The sight of me begged a question neither had intended to pose. Mr. Warner told them to go sober up and get some food. "Go home to your wives," he said.
The spring evenings stayed light for a long time, but the day had just crested that point where darkness was inevitable and the sun had begun to descend into the line of fir trees that separated our yard from the Levertons'.
I had reached the quilt, and sitting up, I grasped it to my chest. I would not cry. I remember promising myself that, despite the sting in my cheek. What was oddest was that my father's crushed parsley seemed worse to me than the slap. It was one of the joys he brought into the house for my mother. When he did, clipping rosemary or marjoram or thyme, the scent would linger on his fingers, and he would run them through my mother's hair to make her smile.
"You can tell your father," Mr. Warner said, standing above me, "that it is the consensus of the neighborhood that your family should move."
"We have the right to stay," I said. I had chosen my side.
He stared at me a moment and then shook his head.
He left the yard, and I wrapped myself tighter in the quilt. It was a memory quilt that we'd bought at the Kutztown Fair. "See that?" the woman who sold it to my father said. "That's all handwork. No machines at all."
My father had bought it, sure that my mother would be impressed. She had been. She put it over the arm of the couch, and during aimless afternoons when Natalie was busy and I had to keep myself entertained, I would spread the quilt out over the sofa and make memories up for my family.
"This bright red patch symbolizes a slap on the cheek to Helen when she was sixteen," I whispered to myself that night in the yard. Already it worked. The slap fell into the hole that was my accumulating past, and I stood, walked inside to clean up the casserole from the floor, and heard the scratchy sound of a big-band radio station as I passed the bathroom door.
NINE
The night the men came to our yard, there were two adults within my reach: my mother, hiding in our downstairs bathroom, and Mr. Forrest down the street.
As I grabbed my jacket off the hook by the kitchen door, I spied one of the photographs of my mother from years ago. It was a small one, 4x6, and in it she wore a slip with an ornate lace bodice. The ecru one. It sat propped up among a grouping of knickknacks beside the red-velvet love seat, which to me was the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in existence.
"It encourages people to leave sooner," my mother would say when I complained.
"What people, Mom?" I'd respond.
I walked over to the photograph and paused. I wanted to hurt her, but she was always crumbling and crying, barking and biting, and to reach her seemed impossible to me. I lifted it and traced the outline of her body with my finger. I slipped the frame into my jacket pocket, and I left as quietly as possible through the front door. There was no way my mother could have heard me over the noise of the radio.
After twilight the streets seemed deserted. No one was outside on their lawns anymore. I thought briefly of what an aerial view of our neighborhood would look like with all the roofs sheared off. In how many houses would happy families be settling in for the night, watching TV with bright bowls of popcorn in their laps? In Natalie's house her mother would be slowly passing out, assisted by what she called "a little splash." Natalie would be up in her room, mooning over Hamish Delane, who had just moved to America with his family. Over and over again she'd drawn inscrutable lines on a page until she confided it was "Mrs. Natalie Delane."
To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.
His door opened before I could ring the bell.
"I hoped I might see you," Mr. Forrest said. "Come in, come in. Let me take your coat."
"I brought you something," I said.
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the framed photograph.
Mr. Forrest took it from me. I stood in the hallway and looked around, past the porcelain umbrella stand and into the drawing room, which I had seen only from the outside, and into the dining room behind that, which was elevated by three wide wooden steps.
I had been fuming on my way over, and inside his house I could feel the heat of it on my cheeks.
"She's a beautiful woman, your mother," Mr. Forrest said, looking at the picture.
"Right."
"Let's sit down in the drawing room, shall we?"
It had taken me this long to notice that Mr. Forrest was being incredibly nice to me, even solicitous. I knew how extraordinary this was. Mr. Forrest had no use for almost anyone in the neighborhood other than my parents. He was never rude, but he was perfectly pleasant in a way that, I would realize as an adult, was the suburban equivalent of a stiff-arm.
He had been in our house multiple times over the years, but I had never stepped inside his home. Now I stood on the edge of a silk rug in front of his fireplace, uncertain what to
say.
"Sit," he said. As I did, he whistled loudly, and bounding into the room came Tosh. "I know who you really came to see," he said, and smiled.
Tosh slowed to an obedient halt in front of Mr. Forrest and sat down on the floor beside him, facing me.
"I owe you a deep apology," Mr. Forrest said. "I shouldn't have run away. I've never felt exactly comfortable here. In that, I'm not unlike your mother."
I spied an oval tray near the mantel. It sat on a spindly cherry-wood table, and arrayed upon it were crystal bottles that refracted light. Mr. Forrest followed my eyes.
"Yes, you deserve a drink," he said nervously. "I know I'd like one. Come, Tosh." He led Tosh over to the white-slipcovered couch where I was sitting and patted the space beside me. Tosh jumped up and immediately leaned into my side. "That's a good boy," Mr. Forrest said.
While Mr. Forrest's back was to me, I hugged Tosh and held him to me, petting his floppy ears.
"Port is my choice for you," he said. "We can sip it and talk about disgusting people before putting them aside."
He handed me the bloodred liquid and went to sit opposite me on a gold velvet chair that made his knees jut up into the air in front of him.
He laughed at himself. "I never sit in this chair," he said. "It's called a slipper chair, and ladies used to have them in their boudoirs. It belonged to my great-grandmother."
"I see you through the window sometimes," I said.
"A dull thing to look at," he said.
I had my arm around Tosh and was scratching the space beneath his right ear. His mouth hung open in a panting smile, and occasionally he would tip his head back and look at me. I took a mouthful of the port and immediately wanted to spit it out.
"Sip," he said, seeing my face. "I did say that, didn't I?"
What felt like the longest minute in the world passed as I tousled Tosh's fur and swerved my head around the room.
"Helen, what happened after I left?"
"Forget it," I said, suddenly not wanting to talk about it, wishing instead that I could be alone with Tosh.
"I'm sorry, Helen," he said. "In general I leave the neighbors alone, and if I don't go flouncing over to their houses, they let me be."