by Susan Perabo
“What’re you gonna get?” Louise asked. “Think your mom’ll take us to the mall this weekend?”
We were in the Hanleys’ basement again and I felt like I’d swallowed the twenty dollars—in pennies. My stomach seemed to be sagging to my thighs.
“What’s wrong?” Louise asked.
“We’re gonna get caught,” I said. “We’re gonna get caught and my parents are going to kill me.”
She rolled her eyes. “They’re not going to kill you. What’s the worst thing they could do to you, legally?”
“They could be very disappointed,” I said. In my mind I could clearly see my parents’ Very Disappointed faces, the unique mixture of grief and ire and guilt and pity I was fairly sure the two of them had begun assembling the moment they’d met, so profound and effective it was.
“Tough life,” Louise said. “World’s smallest violin, Anne.”
I had known for years that Louise envied what she perceived as my perfect life and family. What she didn’t know was that sometimes—like today—I envied hers. Whenever I did something I knew was wrong I wished my parents would die in a tragic car accident ASAP, before the truth of my flawed character could be revealed. It was an extreme solution, but the only one I could conceive of. Lucky Louise . . . the news of her own flawed character would cause little disruption in the Hanley house. Her mother probably wouldn’t even look up from the paper.
“We could get two records each,” Louise said. “Or we could save it to spend at Six Flags this summer.”
“What if we bought something for Ms. McDaniel?”
She stared at me. “What?”
“I don’t know.” I dug my hands into the shag carpet. “Just, you know. We could buy her something. You know, with part of it.”
She shook her head slowly. “You’re a freak, Anne. Do you know that?”
“So?” I said. “You’re a freak too.”
“But you’re a different kind of freak than me,” she said thoughtfully. She twisted some hair around her finger. “I come from freaks. But you, like, sprouted up all on your own.”
“So?”
“So fine,” she said. “I’m just making an observation. What d’ya want to buy her, ya freak? Frilly underwear?”
“No,” I said, my cheeks warming. “Something cool. Like, drawing pencils or something.”
“Drawing pencils,” she said flatly. “You’ve thought about this.”
I shrugged.
She gazed at me impatiently, with the look of someone who in two or three years would no longer want to be my friend. We were two weird kids who had leapt from the ship of fools and splashed blindly toward each other, scrambled aboard the same life raft. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before we leapt again and made for separate shores.
She threw me one of the tens. “It’s your money,” she said.
The next day I ditched recess after lunch and ran with a full heart to the art room. Ms. McDaniel was sitting at her desk nibbling on celery sticks and reading a thick book that bore no title on its cover. I shifted from one foot to the other in the doorway until she noticed me.
“Hello, Anne,” she said, sliding the book into a desk drawer. She cocked her head cheerfully in the way of young teachers and enthusiastic babysitters. “What can I do for you?”
“I found these,” I said. I approached her desk with the pencils held at arm’s length in front of me. “Yesterday my mom needed to go to Art Mart and she gave me five dollars to spend and the thing that I wanted cost three-fifty so I picked these up off the sale table that was right next to the cash register and I thought you might want them.”
Exhausted from the lie—I’d practiced it a dozen times that morning in the shower—I dropped the pencils on the desk beside her lunch bag. She looked at them curiously, then at me.
“Well, thank you,” she said. “That’s quite a story.”
“It’s what happened,” I said emphatically, thinking she was on to my lie, but shortly thereafter realizing she was merely making conversation.
“You’re very thoughtful,” she said. She brushed a wayward hair from her forehead. “I love working with pencils.”
“I know,” I said. “One time you said that. In class, I mean. You mentioned that.”
“I don’t think I realized you had such an interest in art,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. I looked at her as she smiled expectantly, and I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to do all those things to Dr. Dunn, even if he was the principal. “Art’s good,” I said. “It’s, you know, it’s really . . . it’s amazing.”
“What did you get at Art Mart?” she asked.
“Paper,” I said.
“Drawing paper?”
“Yes,” I said. “White.”
“Well, it’s very thoughtful of you to think of me,” she said again. She wadded up her brown paper bag and turned to throw it in the trash can, and when she did, the collar of her shirt shifted so that I could see her bra strap. In a burst of vivid color I imagined Dr. Dunn sinking his teeth into that shoulder, tugging on that bra strap like a dog with a rope, and I felt so dizzy I had to hold on to the desk to keep from falling over.
“Anne?” Ms. McDaniel said, turning back to me. “Honey, are you okay?”
Dear Dr. Dunn,
If you want to keep your affair quiet, place forty dollars in the envelope and put it in the appointed place.
The x’s
ps Don’t you think you’re a little old for Ms. McDaniel?
Louise frowned. “What the hell is this?”
We were sitting on the school bus in our usual seat, fourth from the back on the right. This particular bus, for reasons none of us understood, always smelled like tuna salad in the morning and Bit-O-Honey in the afternoon.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
She ripped the paper in two and dropped it in my lap. “This is about blackmail,” she said. “This is not about you being the pope or something.”
“She’s nice,” I said. The bus went in and out of a pothole and the boys in the back seats whooped. “He’s just using her for sex.”
“Anne,” she said. “You don’t know anything about this. You don’t have any idea what it’s like to be an adult.”
“Neither do you,” I said, though I was realizing more and more this wasn’t really true.
“I’m the letter writer from now on,” she said. “We’re just gonna stick to blackmail. We’re not going to get into stuff we don’t know anything about.”
We dropped off the note the next morning, with directions that forty dollars be left in the usual spot by sixth period. Right after lunch, Louise went to the nurse’s office and—according to another kid who was there with a splinter in his palm—barfed the Thursday Special (Sloppy Joe, Tater Tots) in a steaming pile at Nurse Carol’s feet. So Louise got sent home to the loving arms of her mother, and I was left alone to secure the afternoon’s payoff.
We had planned poorly; my sixth period class was in the west wing of the building, three halls and a flight of stairs away from the bathroom in question. By the time I reached it the warning bell for seventh period had already rung. A couple girls were drying their hands and rushing out when I bolted myself into the middle stall and reached behind the toilet. Despite my tardiness (the final bell was sounding as I grasped my prize), I remained in the stall and tore open the envelope. Inside was a 3 x 5 notecard on which was printed, in tidy black letters:
Anne, Louise: There is nothing to tell. This foolishness ends right now.
Something that felt like cold water rushed from behind my ears all the way down to my heels. My brain flailed about senselessly for at least ten seconds before lighting upon the first thing it could recognize—I have to get to social studies. Hands trembling, I started at the latch, then froze when I heard the door to the hallway whoosh open. Six footsteps on soft-soled shoes, then silence.
“Louise?” I whispered hopefully, though I knew full well that Louise wa
s at home safe in bed, which is exactly where I wished I were.
“It’s not Louise.”
It was Ms. McDaniel. I stood in the stall, my knees quaking, wondering: If I didn’t open the door, didn’t come out willingly, how long would she stand there? An hour? Overnight? Until school let out for the summer? I imagined my family sitting around the dinner table waiting for me, years passing, my mother’s patience waning, my father’s smile turning melancholy, my brothers stealing away with their own Ms. McDaniels.
I slid the latch to the side, let the door swing open of its own accord. She was leaning against the wall next to the paper-towel dispenser. Her face was all blotchy and her lips were somehow crooked, but she wasn’t crying. She looked like she should be in the emergency room.
“Well?” she said.
“Hi,” I said.
I was standing there holding the index card; I could have run but it seemed pointless. Suddenly she sprang from the wall and grabbed my wrist, twisted it until the note dropped to the floor. Still gripping my wrist, she leaned over and picked it up, read it once, then read it again. Then she straightened up, loosened her grasp, and regarded me coolly.
“Are you satisfied?” she asked.
I had no idea what she meant. More important, I didn’t know which answer would get me out the door faster. “Yes,” I said, then changed my mind. “I mean no. Yes and no. Not really. Sort of.” I bit my lip.
“Someday you’ll know what it’s like to really love someone,” she said. She said it kind of gently, like she was talking to a little kid. “Some day you’ll know what it’s like to look at a man, his neck and his knees and his warm hands, and know that everything that was missing in your life has come knocking.”
“Ms. McDaniel—” I said. I’m not sure what I had it in my mind to say, but it didn’t really matter, because she wasn’t listening.
“And someday, Anne Foster,” she said. “Someday some awful little girl you don’t even know will ruin your life for no reason. And when that day comes I want you to think of me.”
Louise called that night and my father came to get me. I buried my head in my math book and told him I had to study for a test tomorrow. When she called again I told him the same thing. He returned to my room a few minutes later.
“Louise says you don’t have a test in math tomorrow.”
“She wouldn’t know,” I said. “She had to go home early today.”
He leaned in the doorway. “Everything okay?”
I wanted to tell him what had happened in the bathroom. I wanted him to sit on the edge of my bed and explain point for point what had transpired, help me understand what Ms. McDaniel had said to me. But I knew, somehow more than I’d ever known anything, that even had I the courage to ask the questions (which I did not) that he would be unable to answer a single one of them. It was a realization that left me cold: the machinations of the human heart were inexplicable, not only to me, but to my parents as well, and thus, apparently, to anyone. Was this what Louise had known all along? I wondered. Was there truly no one in her life from whom she had ever, ever, expected a satisfying explanation?
“Everything’s fine,” I said.
“You’re gonna have to tell me sometime,” Louise said from her seat at the desk behind me. We were in math class.
I turned to her, deliberately put my finger to my lips.
“What the hell?” she said. “What happened to you?”
“When Mr. Payne was alive . . .” Mrs. Payne began.
Mrs. Payne, a pain in the butt, a punch line to the joke of every fifth grader. Yesterday she’d been as flat and clear as a pane of glass. Today I gazed through her sagging breasts and jowls and saw her as a young woman, as young as Ms. McDaniel, a mystery slipping out of her nightgown and into the arms of her beloved.
MICHAEL THE ARMADILLO
They’d made it through all the Michaels, Carrie and Dan believed, made it through Michael Jordan and Michael Douglas and Michael Moore and Michael J. Fox, made it through the terrible summer when Michael Phelps won all those gold medals in swimming, and then the next terrible summer when Michael Jackson died on every channel for days and days, dodged a bullet when Michaels, the crafts store, canceled plans to open in their town (that would have been hell—Dan drove by that strip mall every day on his way to work). Once at a library program when Chloe was two they’d been forced to sing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” but Dan was in the bathroom and missed the whole sordid tune, and by the time he returned everyone was mechanically rolling their fists around to “Wheels on the Bus.” They had survived the Michaels, hadn’t bumped into a big, noisy one for over a year, seemed to have found their most solid footing, and when the occasional Michael was mentioned on television, or when their waiter at Chili’s wore the vulgar name on his name tag, their world did not lurch to an awkward halt and the piece of them that had already perished a thousand times did not perish again. They, Carrie and Dan both, had pulled through. It had taken six years and one baby girl but they’d made it, together, they’d weathered the storm of Michael, and they were going to be okay.
And then out of the blue one day late in February—no birthday or holiday in sight, no earthly reason—Dan’s mother sent Chloe a package with a stuffed armadillo puppet inside and Chloe snatched the animal from the box and hugged it and exclaimed: “Michael! Michael!”
It was early evening, the best time of the day, the sudden, painless shedding of work and preschool complete, the familiar comfort of worn couch cushions and the temperamental garbage disposal. They were in the kitchen, Chloe and Dan at the table (Chloe kneeling on the chair) and Carrie standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot—she couldn’t have said what it was in that moment, not if someone had had a knife to her throat.
“How do you know that’s his name?” Dan asked, in the most nonchalant tone he could muster.
“Michael! It’s Michael!” Chloe said, joyfully, bouncing on her knees. She stuffed her hand into the hole in the armadillo’s belly, wiggled her fingers into its head, then thrust it toward her father’s face. “I’m Michael,” she said, in her armadillo voice, which was her voice for every animal, a low monotone with a hint of a speech impediment.
“Is he on TV?” asked Carrie from the stove, a panicky, hopeful lilt to her voice, as if she were calling up the stairs in an empty house. Dan looked briefly in her direction, but his eyes were not able to land on his wife. His glance began darting uncontrollably around the room, fly-like. It had been years since this had happened and he was furious and humiliated to find it happening to him now, in front of his daughter, as if she’d notice, as if anyone but him had any idea.
Dan looked at his shoes. This was the only thing that helped.
“What d’ya mean, TV?” Chloe asked. She tried to spin the armadillo around on her finger and it flew off her hand and skittered across the floor to Carrie’s feet. Chloe leapt up to retrieve it.
“Does he have a TV show?” Dan asked, looking up, his eyes back under his own power. “Have you seen him on some—”
“No,” Chloe said, smacking a kiss on her mother’s knee with the fuzzy, twisted mouth of the puppet. “He’s just here, in our house. He’s mine. He’s—”
—goddamn Michael the goddamn armadillo, Carrie thought, standing in the backyard, smoking her cigarette. An armadillo! Really? What a stupid animal! Who sent a child an armadillo? Who would even make a stuffed armadillo, ugly and scuttling, awkwardly prehistoric? She took a deep drag and let it out as slowly as she could. She allowed herself one cigarette in the backyard every night, after Chloe was asleep and Dan was watching TV or doing the dishes. She also allowed herself to eat a small Baggie of gummie bears before lunch, at her desk. She allowed herself to sleep late on Sundays. She allowed herself to be ten minutes late for work, as long as she was thinking about work (and thus, more or less, working) during the ten-minute drive to her office. She allowed herself to buy the expensive toilet paper. She allowed herself to take showers that were en
vironmentally irresponsible. She allowed herself to think about Michael, but only when she was stopped at a train crossing and alone (completely alone—not even Chloe) in the car, and then the ca-clack ca-clack ca-clack was her permission to disengage from her current situation—her family, her home, her life—and when the train had passed and her car was bumping over the tracks she stopped thinking about him and allowed herself to go on with her day.
She’d been with Michael six years before, very briefly—one week at a professional workshop in Boston. It had been a whirlwind: three days of friendship, two days of courting, then two frantic, ecstatic days in her room when she felt so unlike herself, so shameless and reckless, so joyfully unguarded, that in moments she wondered if she were dreaming or dead. She told herself on the Sunday morning before they parted, as they lay tangled in bed, You will tell yourself that you did not feel like this. You will tell yourself that it wasn’t extraordinary, but you will be lying in order to not torture yourself. You will tell yourself this didn’t mean anything, but that will not be true. It was a terrible thing, what she did to herself that day. In that tangled moment she pretended it was a gift she was giving to her future self, but really it was pure cruelty—cold-blooded, premeditated murder—because she knew her own weaknesses, and she chose to exploit them, and she knew she would cripple her future self with doubt and misery, possibly for the rest of her life. And yet she—this present Carrie—had thwarted that cruel self, that old murderer. It had taken some time, but ultimately she had triumphed, limiting that self, that curse, to the ca-clack ca-clack ca-clack of the swiftly passing train, and she really did not think about Michael, or that vicious trick she’d played on herself, at any other time, not anymore. It was another life, six years that seemed like sixty, a life before Chloe, before she’d figured out what was important, what she really wanted. It was a stupid mistake, a moment of recklessness. It was not who she was.