by Robin Black
Late in the morning, Teacher Margie clapped her hands twice, the signal for us to stop what we were doing and ready ourselves for something new.
“Today, as you know, is Self-Expression Day. It looks to me as though we have a wonderful array of special things. Why don’t you each go get yours and come back to the circle, where we’ll share.”
I rose from my beanbag, took the folded kimono from the floor, and sat down on the shag rug next to Mary, who held a doll from Holland in her lap. Soon Ben, with a wooden zebra, joined us there, and before too long, the circle was formed.
First, we peered through Jenny Wilkerson’s microscope at something her father had prepared. Shapeless, wobbling forms and speckles shifted slightly in our view. We all said it looked cool, in flat, uncommitted voices that resisted the admission that we’d failed somehow to recognize a wonder we’d been shown. She waited until everyone had their turn before she told us what it was.
“It’s spit,” she said. “It’s my father’s spit.” And all of us said ewww in unison. “Your mouth is dirtier than a dog’s,” she told us. “It’s the dirtiest thing in the world.”
Then we stared without expression at the zebra Ben had brought.
“I think my uncle got it on safari,” he said. “Anyway, I know it’s real.”
And I was just old enough to wonder what real meant—about a wooden zebra brought to school. My kimono was met with silence, except from Teacher Margie, who said it was lovely and that maybe I could bring it back in the spring, when we’d be studying Japan. I said I would.
When Harriet Elliot’s turn rolled around, we all exchanged expectant looks. The Princess hadn’t brought anything. Once again, she’d gotten it wrong. She stood, her hands hanging by her sides. For a moment, she looked downward at our laps, filled with statues, silken fabrics, elaborate tools.
“I didn’t know we were supposed to bring in an object,” she clicked. “I thought we were supposed to tell something about ourselves.”
“That’s fine, Harriet. That’s perfectly fine.” As Teacher Margie spoke, we sucked in our cheeks, rolled our eyes to the ceiling, then looked down, barely hiding smiles on our lips. “Anything that expresses who you are. That’s what today is all about.”
Harriet Elliot nodded, slowly, before she spoke.
“Well, when I was three years old,” she began, “I was kidnapped by bandits. In Italy. My mother left my stroller outside a butcher shop, and when she came out, I was gone.”
We looked at one another now, deciding whether to laugh. Or make some other kind of noise.
“She said it was the worst moment of her life, because she knew I was the only child she could have. Because she’d been sick after me and there couldn’t be any more babies. Her inside parts were gone. And anyway, she loved me. And my father wasn’t there to help. Or to watch me. She was all by herself. Then an old Italian man saw her crying on the sidewalk…”
We looked at her now. All of us. Her blue eyes seemed to stare past our heads, as though she were speaking to herself.
“They called the police, who blocked the whole street with motorcycles and cars. And after a while they found my father, so at least my mother wasn’t alone. But nobody knew where I was.”
She stopped then. Ending there. And began to sit down, her hands tucking the skirt of her dress under her behind.
“But what happened?” Teacher Margie asked. “How did they get you back?”
“Oh.” She straightened up. “They didn’t. Not for a very long time. It took three weeks. It was almost a month. And then my parents got a phone call asking for money. In Italy, everything is in billions. They wanted billions and billions of Italian money for me. My father left it in an empty house, and the next day I was returned.”
There was silence.
“They never caught the bandits,” she said. “The men who took me. They’re still at large.”
This time when she stopped, she didn’t move. And after a moment, we all looked at each other, again. Because there was a decision we had to make. Ben’s face, close to mine, looked doubtful; but Mary, with her deep, habitual kindness, looked concerned. It was our teacher, though, who asked, “Is this true, Harriet? Or is this just some kind of story?”
“Oh no,” she said. “It’s really true.” And for the first time since we’d known her, she seemed upset. Even when we’d called her Princess to her face, she’d stayed implacable as a mannequin. Now her eyebrows drew together, her lips pulled into a thin line. Again she scanned the array of improbable objects tipping and folding in our laps. “I know it wasn’t what we were supposed to do. But it is true,” she said, looking out at Teacher Margie again. “I was taken. By bandits. I was. And they’ve never been found.” And then she sat down.
In the square we were subdued. There was no running up and through the crisscrossing paths. No hopscotch. Just the low murmur of our voices trying to decide what we thought.
“Who would want her?” Freddy asked, rubbing at the ooze around his eye. “Who would steal her, even if they could?” We all looked over to the bench where she sat, the bench that had become her daily place. “Who would pay billions and billions to get her back?”
I thought about the father who had told her she was a princess.
“It was definitely a lie,” Peter Walker said.
And by the time Teacher Margie clapped her hands, this was the opinion that we voiced.
But newly, unexpectedly, I wasn’t sure that I agreed with us.
From bed that night, I heard my father yell. And then my mother in response. I rolled over, my back to the door, and took the pillow from under my face, rested it on my head. I felt the cool unyielding flatness of the sheet beneath my cheek, and I tried to escape from the space their voices filled. With the pillow pressed over my ears, I conjured the sensation of sitting on our couch between my parents, equal portions of warmth on either side. And then I attempted, once again, to conjure God, wondering whose fault it was that he was so utterly invisible in me. And when, as always, he failed to appear, I thought about Harriet Elliot. Her father’s little princess. And how much I hated her for those clothes, and for her drawings of fairytale landscapes, and most of all for her disregard of our disregard of her.
As the voices of my parents burrowed through the darkness into me, I decided I should have told them what had happened. How she had been kidnapped, in Italy. I decided they should know. A sensation of danger was swelling, beneath my covers, beneath my pillow, a feeling so real and so polluting that suddenly anything bad seemed like it must be true; and I was certain that we had been wrong. She had been stolen by strangers. She had lived for three weeks in the company of bandits. I pictured her at first, just as I knew her only younger, but prim and clean and dressed in ruffles and lace. I imagined her captors as unshaven men in black masks and black leather coats. She must have cried for her mother and her father. She must have cried out her eyes. But then, at some point, she must have stopped—an even more frightening thought. And her tights must have faded from white to the pale gray of dirt, and maybe eventually to black. She couldn’t have worn the same dress for three weeks. She must have had to change. Change her clothing. Change herself. She must have had to stop being a princess, if only for those days.
I rolled over. From my bed I could see out into the hallway. I could see the pine cabinet that had sat there all my life. And at that moment, my mother’s voice from below sounded as though she were singing—singing something sad and worn; a memory that would come to me always with the notes of certain melancholy hymns. I could hear the dishes clattering, water running. But underneath, her voice. As I stared and I listened, I saw my sister cross the hallway from the bathroom to her room. I thought of calling out her name. But then I heard her door squeak closed.
HARRIET ELLIOT APPEARED the next morning in a blue satin dress. At her collar were rings of lace that matched her tights. She hung her coat in silence, made her way to the bookshelf, chose a book, and retreated to a corner,
by herself. Throughout the morning, as I went about my tasks, I watched her there.
In the park, during break, she sat on her bench with a box of crayons and a pad. Mary had brought out a big thick piece of chalk and gone over the lines we’d drawn on the pavement two days earlier, faded during showers overnight. A few of us climbed on the bronze statues dotting the square. A pair of boys tossed a Frisbee back and forth. Teacher Margie moved without pause from one group to the next, her little dog trailing just behind.
I skipped straight through the hopscotch board, two feet, one foot, one, then two, then one, then one. And done. And I kept on walking. When I reached Harriet Elliot, she looked up from the drawing in her lap, silent. For some moments we just stared into one another’s eyes, hers blue, as if painted. China-doll blue, and powerfully uninterested in me. As though she could choose to blink and I’d be gone.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked. “You really were kidnapped, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was. I said so.”
“Nobody believes you,” I told her—though I did. “Everyone thinks you’re a liar.”
She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a piece of old newspaper. “Here,” she said, holding it to my face. “This proves that I’m not.”
The headline wasn’t English, I couldn’t read it, but there was a picture underneath, a tiny girl with a mop of curly hair, held aloft like a prize in a man’s arms. “That’s me, on the day they got me back. I was on Italian TV too.” The child in the photograph wore rags, nothing more than a sack, her bare legs and bare feet sticking out. “And that’s my father.” The man was smiling, his mouth open wide. Not facing the camera; facing her.
“How do I know that’s you?”
She ignored the question and put the picture back in her coat.
“Someday I’m going to find the men who took me,” she said, “and make them pay.”
“What?”
“I’m going to go back to Italy and hunt them down. And kill them for what they did.”
In the background I heard Teacher Margie clap her hands.
Harriet began packing up her crayons, arranging them carefully in their big box. “We’re supposed to go in,” she said. “Look, they’re all lining up.”
“What do you mean you’re going to kill them?”
She shrugged. “I just am,” she said. “But first, I have to grow up. Go through all of this. That’s the boring part.”
I looked over at my classmates in their line.
“How’re you going to find them?” I asked. Then: “That’s just stupid.”
She smiled. “I remember every second. I was there, wasn’t I? I was there the whole time.”
She walked away, toward our classmates, and I followed, just behind, so I had to take her place as last.
Soon after that day, my sister began treating me much more cruelly than she ever had. In the car, as our mother drove us to our schools, she would whisper to me that I was ugly. And fat. That I smelled like I never took a shower. At meals she would reach beneath the table, with arms that seemed to lengthen for the task, and pinch my legs until I cried. When I spoke, she mimicked me, anticipating each word as it formed, rendering all my expressions foolish, meaningless. At night, as I lay in the shoulder of the hallway light, she would walk over and pull my door shut tight, leaving me to lie there in the dark.
One night, uninvited in my room, she first told me that I was too old to sleep with all the stuffed animals I had, then swept them from my bed, onto the floor.
“You’re just so stupid and babyish. I can’t even believe it. You act like you don’t know what’s going on.”
I said nothing.
“I can’t wait to see what happens to you when you… when you have to…” But she didn’t finish the sentence. Just threw my pillow to the ground, stood, and walked away. “God. You’re such a spoiled brat. You and those other stupid co-op kids.” She slammed the door so hard, it bounced open wide. “You’re so fucking dumb!”
I told no one about Harriet’s plan to seek revenge. I knew that they would laugh at her. And I knew that if they laughed at her, then I would too. And something in me didn’t want to do that. So a new wall of privacy came up. A new realm of secrecy. And a new us began.
Some days I would join her on her bench and I would ask her not about the future, but about how it had felt to be there with those men. To be taken from her family, not knowing if she would ever be returned. She told me stories that I believed, stories in which she never shed a tear, and never spoke, but only stared at the people around her—not just the bandits, but the strange women who cooked her food, the other children there who pulled her hair and tore at her clothes.
“I wouldn’t let them see me cry,” she said. “They wanted me to. But I wouldn’t do it.”
I nodded, aware of my classmates’ occasional looks our way.
“I was very brave,” she said. “I still am. I have never been afraid.”
I didn’t tell her how very afraid I was, every day. Every night. I watched her, instead, wondering how to be brave like that. In profile, beside me on the bench, Harriet Elliot’s chin stayed slightly raised, as though she were always on alert, her eyes seeming to see past whatever was in her path.
THE CO-OP WAS CLOSED for Veterans Day, though we called it Resolution Day and passed the week before constructing peace signs out of popsicle sticks and out of tiny pinecones and out of mismatched buttons and even out of the lima beans with which we learned our math.
It was Harriet’s father who called that morning, inviting me over, and it was her father, the man from the newspaper, who came to the door and waved my mother away, who took my coat off my shoulders, hung it up, told me my friend was upstairs in her room, then asked if I would please take off my shoes.
“It’s the carpet,” he said, smiling broadly, as though he had never stopped smiling since his daughter was returned. “We try our best to keep it white.”
His hair was short, like a soldier’s, and mostly gray. I thought he looked too old to be anyone’s father. I thought there was something vaguely wrong with a father who answered the door and took your coat, who spoke to you as though you were interesting. Like a mother would do. “Overalls, huh?” He picked my boots up off the floor, setting them on a small bench. “Maybe we should buy Harriet a pair of overalls. Though I don’t think she’d wear them.”
I didn’t know what to say. Of course she wouldn’t wear them. And by then I didn’t think she should. “Probably not,” I said.
“No. Probably not.” Then he told me to run on upstairs. He said he would call when it was lunch.
My stocking feet were silent on the carpet. As I padded through their home, I wondered what it would be like to walk on such softness every day. The floors of my own house were wood, battered oak, and bare except for a few scattered rugs from my father’s travels, all too often sliding underfoot. I wondered what it would be like never to hear footsteps, so never to listen for them.
“I have been making plans,” she said.
We sat on pale yellow chairs, at a pale yellow table, in her fairy-tale room, a room in which all of the colors were pastel, all of the surfaces softened, all of the light bulbs shaded, the three tall windows covered with lace, the sun diffused. Even the canopy bed cushioned the air, as though the atmosphere itself might be too harsh.
Harriet’s chin was slightly raised as always, her eyes focused just above my head, and she was dressed like herself. Only the shoes were gone, so the white legs below her green velvet hem dwindled unexpectedly, seeming to melt into the carpet. “I have been working on details,” she said.
“What details?”
“You’ll see. There are things I have never shown anyone. But I think I will show them to you. Today.”
I didn’t speak, afraid that if I did she would change her mind about whatever exceptional quality she thought she had detected in me. I only tried to look special.
Harriet stood and walked
toward a closet door, then opened it, revealing a row of dresses pressed together so tightly I decided she had to wear one every day, because the closet couldn’t hold any more. She reached into the middle and pulled out a filthy rag. It was the rag from the photograph. The rag she had worn. I knew at once.
“We’ll need this. And a few other things,” she said.
She moved around the room, collecting objects, arranging them in front of me. First, the tattered baby dress, and then a lock of hair. Then a diary, a ring, a piece of crackly paper rolled into a scroll and tied with string, and finally a miniature bottle of amber glass. Then she sat down.
“Do you know anything about killing people?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“There’s a difference between how men kill and how ladies do.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. It was a phrase I used a lot with her, a phrase that asked her to go on without admitting how much I wanted to hear her words.
“Women use poison,” she said. “And men use guns. My father says if he ever saw them, he would shoot them. But that’s not what I’m going to do.” She picked the ring up from the table. “This one doesn’t work,” she said. “It’s just a toy. For practice. But there are rings in Italy that open up so you can pour poison in your enemy’s food.” She tapped the black stone with her thumb. “That’s how women kill. Especially in Italy. They invite you for dinner, then they poison you. That’s how I’m going to kill. Here,” she said. “Try it on.”
I straightened my fingers as she slid the ring down. Her face was closer to mine than it had ever been. Each blue iris, I saw, was ringed by black.