The Most Dangerous Thing

by Laura Lippman

  “That’s okay, buddy,” his father says, tucking him in, something he seldom does in the summer, when the boys are allowed to stay up as late as they wish. Something he seldom does, period. “It was your costume, you get the prize, spend it on whatever you want. Where’d you get the idea?”

  “I found a hockey mask.”

  “Where did you find a hockey mask?”

  “In the woods.”

  “In the woods. I thought we agreed you weren’t going to go into the woods alone.”

  “At the end, in the vacant lot on Tucker Lane. Not in the woods-woods.”

  “OK. So you found a hockey mask, just lying there?”

  “Yeah. At first I was going to be the killer in Friday the 13th. I didn’t get to see it, but Sean and Tim told me about it.”

  “That wouldn’t have been a very nice thing to be on the Fourth of July, buddy. It’s your country’s birthday.”

  “I know. Besides, that would mean I was a girl because in the movie, it’s a lady who wears the hockey mask so people don’t recognize her when she’s killing them. I don’t want to be a lady.”

  “Of course you don’t. You’re a boy. You’re all boy. And what you did, that was better. Jim Craig—that’s in the right spirit.” A pause. “Where’d you get all the other gear, buddy? The stick and the pads?”

  “Oh, some boys lent it to me.”

  “Really? What boys?”

  “I have to give it back. Not the skates. I wore my own skates. Do you remember when you taught me how to skate?”

  Go-Go’s memory is generous. Tim didn’t exactly teach him how to skate. He left that to the older boys. He does remember the rink at Memorial Stadium, a bone-cold frustrating day of Go-Go walking on his ankles. Tim hated every second of it and kept retreating to the car to “get warm” and listen to the Colts playing out of town. Turns out that all that walking on his ankles had prepared Go-Go well for today. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “That was a good day.”

  “If that was a good day, then I guess today is a fantastic day.”

  “Yeah.” Go-Go frowns. “It is, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. Things aren’t as good as when I was little.”

  That fuckin’ freak in the woods. For all Tim knows, that monster gave Go-Go the hockey mask last summer, that’s how he lured him into his house. That man took his boy’s childhood and there’s not a damn thing Tim can do about it. Talking makes the least sense, he doesn’t care what anyone says. Nothing can undo what happened. He and Doris are united on this front at least. No psychiatrists, no talking about it. She prays and he does his best to set a good example of what a man is. OK, he wasn’t doing a very good job there for a while. But he’s back at work, he’s earning again, providing. He will take care of his family. He just lost his way there for a little while. Go-Go showed him he needed to get it together.

  “Things are as good as they were when you were little,” Tim says. “It’s only that all memories get better the further you get away from them.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he says. “Good memories get better and bad memories just disappear.”

  “Really?” Go-Go’s voice scales up, awed, as if this has never occurred to him.

  “Really.” One day you won’t think about it. I promise, I promise, I promise.

  “I wish we could go to the ocean this summer.”

  “Me, too. Maybe we will for a day.”

  “Can we have saltwater taffy?”

  “Sure.”

  “And Grotto Pizza?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Thrasher’s fries?”

  “And funnel cake. I bet you’re tall enough to go on the bumper cars this year.”

  He is. It’s mid-August before they make it to Ocean City for a day trip and the drive is miserable, even though it’s a weekday. But the traffic and the sticky hot car are worth the headache to see Go-Go in a bumper car. His smile is tight but real, jamming his car into his brothers’ less-fleet vehicles. He’s nimble behind the wheel, eluding them when they try to exact their revenge. He does get in a little trouble for going against the flow and creating a few head-on collisions, but hell, that’s Go-Go.

  That night, driving home, boys and mother dozing as Tim listens to the final inning of the Orioles game, Go-Go suddenly says from the backseat, almost as if talking to himself: “Today is a good memory already.”

  It takes all Tim’s strength to keep his car heading straight in the westward-bound lane on the Bay Bridge. Oh, if only he could, he would make the old Buick rise in the sky, truly Shitty Shitty Bang Bang, farting black smoke all the way home. Anything—anything—to make Go-Go laugh again.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Autumn 1980

  Tally is surprised how hard the news hits her, although she supposes one is never prepared for this. Her mother, after all, had to cope with the same situation when she was much younger. Implacable time, the one thing that never stops, that’s the real certainty behind death, if not taxes. Time is relentless in its forward drive. She grips the phone, the cherry red wall unit in the kitchen, one of the few notes of color allowed in her all-white oasis, seeing details she stopped noticing long ago—the paper disk in the center of the dial, the tendons in her hand, the large squash blossom ring she wears on her right hand, scuff marks on the wall. Most rings like this are turquoise, but Tally’s stone is coral. It clashes terribly with the red of the phone—

  “April,” Miller says. “I hope you don’t mind that we waited.”

  “Of course not,” she says. She thinks of an old phrase—butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. To her, it has never connoted anything but coldness, and she has never understood why others think it indicates charm and good manners. But she gets it now. Her mouth is like a covered butter dish, cool and contained and proper, presenting what is expected of her. She calls over her shoulder. “Clem? Clem?” The acoustics in the house are so odd. He could be steps away and oblivious. He could be upstairs and hear every word.

  “What?” he calls back. It sounds as if he’s on the second floor.

  “Pick up the extension. Miller has news.”

  She stays on the line while Miller repeats his big announcement, makes the proper happy noises, then excuses herself, insisting that father and son should have a father-to-father talk. In hanging up the phone, she misses the hook and the receiver clatters to the floor on its long curlicue of a cord. She stoops to pick it up and slides it onto the cherry red base. She’s going to be a grandmother. This is what happens to women who have children at nineteen. They become grandmothers at forty-three.

  Nothing has changed. She looks as young as she did two minutes ago, when Miller called, taking advantage of the Sunday rates, as he always does, thrifty boy. It is only 3 P.M. out in Denver. Here, it is the end of a perfect autumn weekend, which Gwen has wasted by spending it indoors at a roller-skating rink. Tally is skeptical of Gwen’s enthusiasm for such a wholesome activity. She worries it might be used as a cover for something else, something done out in the parking lot, assuming they really go to the rink at all. But what’s the worst thing that could happen? Gwen will get pregnant. So what? Tally’s already going to be a grandmother.

  She knows her reaction makes no sense. If she had anticipated this development, prepared herself, she would be elated or at least somewhat enthusiastic. But it feels messy, being a grandmother when one child is still in high school. It makes her feel old and young at the same time—a grandmother at forty-three, but still a mother to a high school freshman. Clem, she knows, will have no ambivalence, and she steels herself for his arrival in the kitchen, his eagerness to celebrate.

  Sure enough, he comes in and kisses her with an excitement he has not shown in—well, let’s not add up all those weeks, months, she thinks. A year, at least.

  “What are you looking for?” she asks, for Clem has released her and is rummaging through the small collection of wine they keep in a stackable Formica holder on the counter.
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br />   “Something worthy of the news.”

  “What news?” Gwen says, clattering up from the basement. Her cheeks are ruddy, her hair mussed. A completely normal by-product of roller skating, but also of other activities. And why did she enter through the basement?

  “Your brother’s going to have a baby.”

  “How advanced of him,” Gwen says, going to the refrigerator and staring into it, a habit that makes Tally wild because she never takes anything, only studies the food with an almost voyeuristic delight. “I would have thought that Sylvia would have the baby, but I guess Miller is superevolved. Kramer vs. Kramer must have hit him pretty hard.”

  Tally knows that Clem hates this new tone of Gwen’s, a flip sarcasm honed over the summer, but he ignores it today, determined to have his moment of joy. “If you like, you can have a glass with us to celebrate.”

  “A glass of what?” She’s interested, Tally can tell. Gwen likes being treated like a grown-up. Tally was the same way at this age. Still, it makes her nervous, the way Gwen brightens at the thought of drinking something with alcohol. Don’t move so fast, she wants to tell her daughter. Or next thing you know, you’ll be on the verge of being a grandmother.

  “This white Burgundy, I think. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

  “It won’t be cold in time,” Tally says. “Dinner’s at seven.”

  “I’ll put it in an ice bucket. That will be good enough. Does it go with what you’re fixing?”

  It will, actually. She’s making poached salmon, a light green salad for dinner. A summer dish, but it is technically summer for one more day, although the seasons also seem to be rushing, impatient as Gwen. The light is pulling away. The days are darker at both ends. Tally hates to feel the ebbing of the light, even though she made very little progress over the summer when there were daylight hours galore. The new painting, which began with so much promise, is torturing her, has been torturing her for almost a year. But for once she’s not going to give up.

  While Tally wishes she could stop time, she understands Gwen is eager for the calendar to move forward. She is wearing fall colors today—a plaid skirt with burgundy knee socks, a navy sweater. This is Gwen’s “new look,” straight from The Official Preppy Handbook, and Tally objects to it on every front. It is expensive, first and foremost, and materialistic. She hates Gwen’s sudden attachment to labels, the insistence on branding herself with tiny alligators, polo players, a socialite’s signature.

  But Tally also finds it confounding that her daughter wants to dress in this conservative, rigid style. If Tally had been a high school girl today, she would be listening to punk bands, embracing the most outrageous clothes possible. Why does Gwen want to look like a Junior Leaguer? Clem loves the new Gwen, but Tally suspects that the clothes are a cover, that the boys in plaid pants and crewnecks are much wilder than the scruffy hippies that Gwen brought home last year. She is dating a Gilman boy now and seems to attach a lot of importance to that. Her goal, Tally understands, is to get a bid to as many private school proms as possible. She has turned into a horrible flirt.

  “You are turning into a horrible flirt,” Tally told her just that morning, after listening to Gwen’s end of a phone call. She wasn’t eavesdropping. Tally was in the kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast, and Gwen chose to take the call here rather than run up to her bedroom. She wrapped the extension cord around herself, then uncoiled, all the while talking about her various conquests.

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Gwen said.

  “I’m not a flirt.”

  “You don’t flirt often,” Gwen conceded. “Maybe that’s why you make such an ass out of yourself when you do.”

  “Gwendolyn Eleanor Robison.” She is named for the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. And a maiden aunt of Clem’s, but Tally prefers to credit only the poet.

  “Remember that time with Mickey’s stepdad?”

  She doesn’t. She can’t even remember his name. Then she does.

  “I wasn’t flirting with him.”

  “That’s not how Mickey’s mother saw it.”

  “That’s not what happened—”

  “Oh, don’t spazz out about it,” Gwen said with a flippant wave. “It’s not important.”

  Then why bring it up? Probably because she knows Tally will brood on it for the rest of the day.

  Tally must have seen Rick here or there—at the Exxon, sitting in Rita’s car when they dropped Mickey off—but she first spoke to him at the end of Mickey’s eleventh birthday, a Friday-into-Saturday sleepover. Gwen was not a whiny or demanding child, but she had lobbied relentlessly to attend this party for her new friend. Clem didn’t want her to go. He was dubious about Mickey’s home situation. But Clem didn’t have the heart to tell Gwen his true objections, and she easily batted down the straw men he tried to put up—you won’t get enough sleep, you’ll eat junk, what about homework? All Tally could think was that Rita was a stronger woman than she was, having a sleepover for eleven-year-old girls.

  Tally wanted to think she was better than her neighbors—and Clem—when it came to such snobbery. Mickey’s house called her bluff. From the moment she crossed the threshold that Saturday afternoon, she was in distress. The smells—onion, bacon, a never-quite-clean diaper pail somewhere. The noise—there was clearly no quiet corner in the house. And the house, although newish, was showing its seams. Then again, so was Clement’s dream house. Whatever the modern world had wrought, it did not include better-built structures. Old houses got scuffed and dirtied, true, but new houses gapped and sagged and peeled. Gwen seemed oblivious to it all. But Tally noticed, and Mickey’s mother, Rita, noticed her noticing.

  “We were living up in Wakefield, but there were only two bedrooms,” she said. “After I got pregnant with Joey, we needed three bedrooms, but I didn’t want Mickey to leave the school district. We didn’t have a lot of options.”

  “Oh, that’s good. That you were able to maintain that stability for Mickey. She’s a very special little girl.”

  Rita squinted at Tally, as if suspecting she was being ridiculed. “We like her. Although I wish she would help more with the baby.”

  “I just turned eleven,” Mickey said. “And he weighs, like, ninety pounds.”

  “Try twenty,” put in Rick, the baby’s father, although this dark, good-looking man didn’t resemble his son, a white, doughy blob. Most babies were white doughy blobs, in Tally’s opinion. Why did people pretend to find them fascinating? Tally hadn’t even found her own children mesmerizing. She loved them, of course. But it had been hard, being a twenty-one-year-old girl with two children under the age of three. Hard and, well, boring.

  “He’s adorable,” she said, flicking a finger under his chin. Chins. His mother shifted him on her hip. Rita was a pretty woman, despite being a little hard and faded. If Rick left her, she could still find another man. But after that? She wasn’t going to have much of a shelf life.

  Tally automatically made this calculation upon meeting another attractive woman: How many more men were in her future? It was like assessing another person’s bank account. What are you worth? Do you have more than me or less than me? Most women had decidedly less. Rita was harder to judge. She was earthy, practically reeking of sex. Clem was a bigger prize than Rick, but Rick was a catch. He can probably fix things, Tally thought. He didn’t bother with this place because it was a rental. But if he owned his own home, everything would work, always. His dream house would function, no corners would be cut, no mistakes would be made.

  “Would you like a beer?” Rick asked. She said she would. Gwen shot her a look. The look said many things. Such as: You never drink beer! If there’s no rush to get home, why are you here already? What are you doing? But Tally was just being polite.

  Later, on the short trip home, Gwen said: “You acted sappy.”

  “Sappy? What do you mean?”

  “Weird. Drinking beer. Staying late, when you always say that good manners mean not hanging on and on.”
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  “I thought you wanted to spend more time with Mickey. She is your best friend.”

  “Mickey said—” Gwen paused. “Mickey said you were flirting with her dad. She said women do that all the time, right in front of her mother.”

  “I thought he was her stepdad and not even that, not really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not married, right?”

  Gwen’s face clouded with hard thought. Oh dear, what was so obvious to an adult could fly over a child’s head. Gwen honestly didn’t know that people could live together and have babies without being married. Tally remembered her playing Barbies with a friend back in the old neighborhood, Gwen informing the friend solemnly: “They can’t have babies if they’re not married. It’s a law.” Her daughter was naive in a way Tally had never been.

  “I didn’t mean they’re not married, darling. Just that they didn’t have a big wedding. But that’s typical of second marriages. Forget I said anything.”

  Talk about naive: children never forget what they are asked to forget. Within a week, Gwen had hurled this accusation at Mickey, after some silly argument, and Mickey reported the insult to her mother, who had, lord help them, driven to the Robisons’ house to confront Tally. Tally claimed a migraine and asked Clem to take charge of the mess, but he insisted that she at least be present while he defended her.

  Rita was headed to work, her hair in a messy upsweep, sort of a deflated beehive. Her fury was so palpable that one could almost imagine real bees buzzing furiously around her head.

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Clem said. “Tally never meant to say anything to Gwen.”

  “Misunderstanding? More like wishful thinking, if you ask me. I’m used to women throwing themselves at Rick. I’m not used to them using little girls to carry their ugly gossip. Maybe Mickey shouldn’t be coming over here, if you have problems with my lifestyle.”