The Rust Maidens

by Gwendolyn Kiste

  “Come on,” I said, and we hurried away from tonight. But we only made it halfway down the block before we saw them. Another set of footprints, gray and uneven and leading toward the abandoned mansion at the end of the lane.

  I shuddered. “Lisa really marked up the whole neighborhood, didn’t she?”

  “Phoebe,” Jacqueline whispered, “Lisa lives in the opposite direction.”

  She was right. We’d seen Lisa departing the other way, toward her home. These colorless prints couldn’t be hers.

  Jacqueline shivered again, her slight form fragile and uncertain. “What’s happening?”

  I wished I knew. But I was certain of this: we shouldn’t go home. Not tonight, not without each other. So we went to the only place we knew.

  Up in the elm tree, the butterflies and cicadas and lightning bugs were waiting to greet us. This wasn’t the greatest hiding place—anybody could discover us here if they wanted, but we already knew they wouldn’t. My parents had stopped bothering to worry about my whereabouts sophomore year when I’d disappeared for three days to attend a Dead concert in Pittsburgh, and Aunt Betty would rather let Jacqueline be wicked and stay out all night with me so she could dangle something over her later like a rotten carrot, a punishment in the making.

  Jacqueline sat back in the corner, her face obscured in shadow. “What’s wrong with Lisa?” she asked. “What would cause that?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe some weird injury or accident?”

  All I could do was guess. Nothing they taught us about in health class looked anything like Lisa Carter did tonight.

  In the dark, Jacqueline exhaled a wheeze. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

  I hesitated. “No, I don’t,” I said. “But did you really think Lisa would be okay before today?”

  This was perhaps the unkindest thing I could say. It was also the truest.

  Jacqueline buried her finger in a knothole on the wall and didn’t say anything else about it. We should have kept talking about Lisa, but after everything, we were so tired. Side-by-side, we curled up on the bare floor, watching the butterflies sleep beneath the milkweed leaves.

  “Do you know all of them?” she asked, and I nodded. I even had names for some of them. Lyssa. Atropos. Maia. But in the dark and sometimes in the light, I couldn’t be entirely sure which was which, so try as I might, I occasionally called them by the wrong name. They never seemed to mind, though.

  But they were resting now, and we didn’t disturb them. Instead, Jacqueline and I closed our eyes too, and the night slinked away from us.

  THREE

  At dawn, the world resurfaced with all its usual patterns. The paperboy went on his route, the news thudding against front steps. On the street, a car radio surged and then cut out, the driver too courteous to let Gary Numan play so loudly. A mile away, the flame above the mill burned brightly, reminding our fathers where they were due. Like it or not, Denton Street slowly awakened around us.

  The treehouse was awakening, too. In the morning light, monarchs glimmered and nested in Jacqueline’s red hair. I smiled and watched her quietly. My sweet cousin, always looking like a fairy-tale princess in exile.

  She opened her eyes, and all the butterflies scattered.

  “We have to go now,” I whispered, and she stretched out and yawned before nodding at me.

  “It was nice to escape for a while,” she said, and together we climbed down the rope ladder and back into the dusty world.

  On the sidewalk in front of Jacqueline’s house, I held her hand tightly, not wanting to let go. We knew what was to come. She’d sneak in through the door, and Aunt Betty would be there, waiting in her work smock, a single foot tapping in dismay. She might have stayed up all night just to savor this moment. She’d chastise Jacqueline for skipping out on the graduation parties yesterday, and for staying out all night without calling, and for picking a friend so feisty and thoughtless as me.

  “Do you think everything will be all right?” Jacqueline asked, and at first, I thought she meant with her mother. Then the memory of Lisa washed over me, and I realized it wasn’t all just a bad dream. Last night had happened. Lisa murmuring about the moon and oozing gray water. Dawn being rushed off to give birth at midnight. It was all real.

  I swallowed hard, my mouth dry. Part of me wanted to scream, but I couldn’t upset Jacqueline, not moments before she had to return to her mother.

  “Everything will be fine,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll see Lisa today and she’ll have some silly explanation for it.”

  Not that I could imagine any explanation that would set me at ease.

  A shadow passed by the front window of Jacqueline’s house. Aunt Betty knew we were outside.

  “I should go,” Jacqueline said, and squeezed my hand before disappearing inside. After she was gone, I waited for her to come to the window to wave goodbye. I counted to ten, and then to twenty, but the curtains never fluttered.

  Alone, I walked the quarter-block back to my house. Somehow, despite the same routine of the street, nothing looked quite the way we’d left it yesterday. The houses were there, of course, just like they should be. But the draped windows stared out at me, drowsing eyes that never rested, and a scent of rotten earth and restlessness breezed through the neighborhood. Maybe it was the possibility of the strike that did it. Or maybe it was because this was tomorrow, the first morning of adulthood, of not belonging to anyone or anything. Maybe I was imagining things that weren’t there.

  At home, my father had already left for the mill, so I slipped upstairs and into the shower to avoid my mother’s silent judgment. She would chastise me soon enough for sneaking off from the parties. I’d rather have a moment to myself first.

  But as the water cascaded over me, I wasn’t alone. Lisa’s face shuffled in and out of my mind like the visage of Death in a tarot deck. There and gone, something to try to decipher but never to understand, not truly. Maybe there was nothing to understand. What we saw last night could have been nothing more than a prank. Lisa had always been a strange, superstitious girl, babbling under her breath about things the rest of us couldn’t imagine. Maybe she’d perfected this arcane magic trick just to terrorize the local girls.

  That had to be it. A joke. She was probably at home right now, giggling over her caper.

  The water cut out in the shower and I shivered, wishing I could invent better lies to tell myself.

  With my hair wrapped in a towel, I gathered yesterday’s clothes from the floor. Violet’s Polaroid of Jacqueline and me crinkled in my back pocket. I’d forgotten it was there. I was already forgetting so much of yesterday. I practiced remembering all of it: the commencement, the lackluster barbeque, the beach with Jacqueline. That was the last day, and today was the first. Something new. Something unknown.

  In my bedroom, I placed the picture in a dresser drawer with the others, dozens of them. Thanks to Violet, I had snapshots from choir recitals and Fourth of July parties and birthdays I’d rather have forgotten. Some of the images weren’t half-bad. It was something Violet loved, I guessed. Junior year, she’d brought home college brochures from the Art Institute in Pittsburgh, desperate to convince her parents to let her attend. No dice.

  “No girl of mine will waste her time at some silly art school,” her father had said, and put the brochures in the fireplace for kindling. The next day, I found Violet sobbing under the bleachers, where I’d sneaked off during study hall. Without a word, I’d passed her my flask, and she downed the rest of the vodka. Four shots’ worth. I didn’t complain.

  This dresser was stuffed with other things, too: mood rings that never worked and a Pet Rock I never wanted, and all our notes and diaries, the ones Jacqueline and I kept when we were girls. When she was done with a journal, she would pass it to me.

  “I don’t want my mother to discover my secrets,” she’d told me, and gave them to me instead.

  With a heavy sigh, I closed the drawer and got dressed.

  Downstairs, I tiptoed
to a corner of the living room and tucked myself next to the bookshelf brimming with my mother’s favorites. Madame Bovary and Wuthering Heights and Anna Karenina, and all the other classics where women succumbed to fates not their own. There was a Bible too, as uplifting as all the other tragedies, but in this house, we rarely read that one. Sunday sermons were more than enough for us.

  “You shouldn’t have left early yesterday,” my mother said from the kitchen. “Betty was livid.”

  “So what?” I tossed my wet hair out of my face, moving out of the corner and toward the oak cabinet filled with vinyl. Anything to occupy my nervous hands. “It doesn’t matter what I do. She’d find something to complain about.”

  “You don’t have to help her along.” My mother peered at me through the doorway, and one eyebrow twitched up. “That’s some dress.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and smiled. In my bedroom, I’d wiggled into a red velvet sheath, the micro mini one that always made my homeroom teacher frown. But now I was an adult with no homeroom and no teachers until fall, so I could wear whatever I wanted, Mother’s modesty be damned.

  On the kitchen table, the portable radio crackled with the day’s news, but I didn’t want to listen, so I dropped the needle on Stranger in Town. Bob Seger rushed through the speakers. There was something about that voice, gruff and working class and just like us. That was what I wanted to hear today.

  Perched at the sink, my mother didn’t flick off the radio. Instead, “Hollywood Nights” competed in a stalemate with a drone of staticky updates. Today’s temperature a high of 79 with a chance of precipitation. The Indians lost a game to Seattle last night, and they’d probably lose to Oakland tonight. The DJ shouldn’t even have to announce that. With the season the team had been having, defeat was practically implied.

  My mother scrubbed a Corelle dish, and I swayed in the doorway, trapped between two rooms, unsure what to do with myself.

  And then, the words that stopped our hearts.

  “This just in: the Steelworkers Union Local 13232 has gone on strike.”

  In an instant, the whole house seized up, and I couldn’t hear a thing. No creaks of a floorboard, no rotation of the record. Just a blank din where the possibilities of the day had been only a moment ago. Our breathing, our lives, everything suspended in those syllables.

  Gone on strike.

  We knew it was coming. Nothing about this was unexpected. But that didn’t make it any less agonizing.

  Slowly, the world seeped back in, one piece at a time. The rush of the kitchen faucet. The crackle on the turntable. The DJ moved on to a story about Ronald Reagan and how yesterday would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 54th birthday. A thousand miles away, in the living room, Bob Seger was still singing about California coasts, but here in this place, we couldn’t be further from Beverly Hills and sunshine and freedom.

  My body surged forward a step, feet slipping out of my woven sandals, and I wanted to run, to flee this feeling of helplessness and pointlessness, of a future that was worse than a mirage. A future that was nothing at all.

  My mother was more practical.

  “Go down to the corner store, Phoebe.” Her hands shaking, she opened her purse on the counter and removed a five from her wallet.

  On the nearby wall, the phone rang, and she and I both froze. We already knew who it was: one of the Denton Street housewives, eager to call an emergency meeting.

  My body went numb. I refused to stay in this house and be anywhere close to that conversation as our mothers pretended their talk could fix what had happened. With my head down, I took the cash and disappeared out the back door. My mother and I didn’t discuss a grocery list. She trusted I already knew what we needed. Barbeque sauce, a pound of ground beef, and a bright yellow box of Velveeta for Sloppy Joes, my father’s favorite. My mother couldn’t soothe his soul, but she could soothe his stomach.

  This journey was a familiar one, and I could make it with my eyes closed. Past the religious knickknack shop and a row of abandoned houses to McMillan’s Corner Nook. The bell dinged over me as I scurried inside. I detested it for announcing me. My mother wouldn’t come to this place for the same reason I didn’t want to be here: the woman working behind the counter.

  Aunt Betty turned toward the door. “Phoebe,” she said, and for once, my name wasn’t blasphemy on her lips. “I just heard on the radio.”

  I nodded solemnly at her before ducking down the condiments aisle. The world was inside out today: I was a graduate with nowhere to be who had a father with no job, and an aunt who liked me. By the time I reached the counter with the rest of dinner, Betty already had the ground beef taped up in heavy white paper spotted with blood. It was almost worse when she didn’t loathe everything about me. This made me wish things were different every day.

  She rang me up and took the five-dollar bill like it was a sacrament. “Tell your father I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it.

  “I will.” I gathered up the brown paper bag in my arms, doing my best to hide the quiver deep in my muscles. The only thing that outweighed Aunt Betty’s disdain for my mother and me was her adulation of her brother, my father. It was also why she detested us so much in the first place: my mother, the woman who stole him, and me, the child who kept him away. But moments like this made me see her for what she always was: a little sister too dependent on her big brother. So dependent that years ago, she’d insisted on moving to Denton Street with her new husband and newborn Jacqueline, just because we’d bought a house there. Part of me hated her for that, for continuing to torment my mother from down the block. But part of me was grateful, because I got to have Jacqueline so close to me.

  With the grocery bag heavy in my arms, I headed back out to the street. Only a couple miles away, a thick breeze pirouetted off the lake. It caught the bottom of my dress, and in a whirlwind, red velvet tented up around my body.

  Breathless, I stopped in front of the window of the Holy Heart Curio Shop and used the reflection to adjust my wayward sheath. Even unfolded and smoothed around my hips, the hem hit only a smidge above mid-thigh. Far too short for the Holy Ghost’s approval, but just right for me. Probably just right for Marilyn, too.

  My gaze shifted past my own reflection and into the store, where a purse-lipped shop lady stared back at me, clutching her crucifix and glaring at my scanty attire. I recognized her. It was the preacher’s wife, Helena’s mother. I smiled at her before scurrying off.

  I took the long way home, not realizing where I was going until I’d already stopped in front of Lisa’s house.

  From the sidewalk, I tilted my head and squeezed one eye closed. That was the only way this place looked straight and durable. Otherwise, the house was just an epitaph. The once-baby blue siding had grayed and peeled from every corner, and there hadn’t been gutters on the roof since the last time the Browns made the playoffs. Half the slate shingles lay sullenly in dead rows where flowers once grew, and the whole foundation was crooked, as if it longed to escape itself.

  No one on Denton Street wanted to visit here, but today, I knew I should. After last night, somebody had to check on her.

  At the front door, I knocked and held my breath, praying silently that Lisa would answer. She didn’t.

  Her father appeared, hunched over and almost growling, more shadow than man.

  My stomach somersaulted, and I gripped the paper bag tighter in my arms. I hated speaking to him. I hated the very idea of him. He always looked one minor slight away from a barroom brawl.

  In place of hello, he grunted, looked me up and down, and showed his teeth.

  “Whatever you’re selling, girl, I’m not buying,” he said, and I almost laughed aloud and spat in his face, because if I was selling what he was really thinking about, he’d purchase it in a heartbeat.

  “How’s Lisa?” I asked, my gaze locked on him, not faltering, not flashing my fear for him to see.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “Now.”

  Not a terrible idea—this wasn’t
my fight, after all. But if he didn’t care about her, then whose fight was it?

  A car backfired on the street behind me, the discordant noise punctuating the silence between us. He puffed on a Marlboro Light and blew the smoke in my face. I didn’t blink. I didn’t slink off the way he thought a woman should. I just stared at him.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Nowhere that’s your business.”

  With the bag still pressed into my chest, I tightened my hands into fists. “I’ll call the police.”

  He shot me an ugly grin. “They wouldn’t come if you did.”

  Defeat fizzled in my blood. He was right. The Denton Street housewives, nosy ones and genuine ones alike, had placed a bevy of anonymous calls about this house, but it never did any good. Mr. Carter went to the mill and always clocked in on time, and how could a man who was a good worker ever be a terrible father?

  But he wasn’t there today, of all days. A day of solidarity, when the men would walk out together and form their picket line in front of the mill’s chain-link fence. That meant he’d stayed home for a reason. My breath heaved, and I knew for sure it was worse than I thought. Lisa was in serious trouble, and maybe dead already. I envisioned her body leaking and twisted and limp on her mattress upstairs, her father draping her with a stained Raggedy Ann bedsheet and calling it a day.

  I needed to get into the house. I needed to check on her. So I kept talking, anything to fill the space.

  “Shouldn’t you be at the mill?” I gritted my teeth to keep them from clattering. “Or did the other men not want you there? Sent home early, huh?”

  For a moment, I was certain he would strike me. Instead, he reached into his back pocket—slowly, as if to frighten me, as if he was about to show me a magic trick with a switchblade—but he only pulled out another cigarette. He made me watch while he lit it and took a long drag.

  “You think you’re so clever,” he said finally. “But everybody in this neighborhood talks about you. The little troublemaker. Drunk half the time, and hanging out with bugs the other half.”