Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  “I don’t think she’d like it.”

  Frances started for home by herself. She wouldn’t be able to work on the story alone because the page they’d written was at Lydia’s house. It was a cold, windy day but Frances circled past her own block and went to Prospect Park instead of going home. She was still carrying her books. She went to the big oak where they had buried the shoes, but when she came to it, even though she saw no one coming along in either direction, she passed the tree and pretended to be curious about the lake. She went down to the edge of the lake and stood there counting ducks. She even pretended to write down the number of ducks she’d counted in her notebook. Then she went back to the tree. She remembered just where they had hidden the shoes, at a place where a root came out of the ground, and she took a stick and dug in the ground until she felt the sock. She started as if it were alive or as if she hadn’t expected it to be there. She didn’t want to dig up the shoes without Lydia, though. She put the dirt back and covered the ground with dead leaves.

  On her way home she met a neighbor who asked her why she was walking this way when the school was that way. “You still go to the same school, don’t you?” she said. Frances said she’d walked a friend home.

  “I have checked on the shoes,” she said boldly to Lydia the next day.

  Lately whenever Frances had acted as if she were starting a game, Lydia had shrugged and turned away, but this time she answered with the same kind of voice that Frances had used, as if they were already pretending something. “The guilty shoes,” said Lydia. “Were they satisfactory?”

  “Without question,” said Frances. Then, forgetting to change her voice, “They’re right there.”

  “I hope you took precautions.”

  “Of course.” Frances was pleased and Lydia was even willing to play the nurse game that day for the first time in a long while. A week later they spent an afternoon at Frances’s house working on the story, not even using the dolls. The story didn’t really have much to do with the doll game. The game was mostly about clothes; the nurses were always changing, either for dates or to disguise themselves (first to hide from their boyfriends, but lately—this was an invention of Lydia’s—because a criminal wanted to harm a patient in the hospital and the nurses had to be unrecognizable so as to hunt him).

  In the story they wrote, the nurses first had to meet boyfriends, but it took a long time to write that. At the end of the afternoon they spent writing, one nurse had met a boy named Elliott, but the other hadn’t even met her boyfriend yet. The part with the criminal was far off, and Frances wasn’t sure they should use it, although Lydia was firm. Now Frances was full of plans, but the next day Lydia had lost interest again, and hurried home alone.

  Frances’s mother had taken a part-time job doing bookkeeping for a shoe company. She said she’d done similar work when she and Frances’s father were first married. Several afternoons a week, now, she was out until after five. She liked Frances to be home when she was at work. “Especially because of the park,” she said. “I don’t want you wandering in the park by yourself. It gets dark so early now.”

  “I’m with Lydia,” said Frances.

  “Even with Lydia. I’m sure her mother doesn’t like it either.”

  “She doesn’t care.”

  “Well, I care. This is a difficult time for us, Frances,” her mother said, with a frightening catch in her voice. “Don’t make it harder.”

  The next day when they were leaving school, Lydia said, “I think we should check on the shoes again.”

  “I checked on them,” said Frances. She didn’t want to disobey her mother, but she didn’t want Lydia to think she was a baby with lots of rules.

  “That was a long time ago,” Lydia said. “Who knows what might have happened?”

  “I promised my mother I’d be home,” said Frances.

  “She won’t know. She’s at work.”

  “She calls.” It made her feel a little better to say that, because it wasn’t true.

  “They’re stupid, anyway, those baby shoes,” said Lydia. “We should dig them up and throw them away.”

  A few days later they were together in the park after all. Frances’s mother was home, and Frances had dropped off her schoolbooks and told her mother she was going to the library with Lydia. They needed books for book reports. Before going home, they detoured through the park. It was Frances’s idea; she wanted to check on the shoes again, maybe to dig them up, but she said it was because she’d seen something mysterious the time before and she wanted to show it to Lydia. Once again, it was hard to tell Lydia she was thinking about the shoes, as if Lydia might make fun of her for wanting to go back to that game. Yet Frances didn’t want to play a game about the shoes anymore, she just wanted them.

  It was a gray day. Leaves blew in their faces, and the leaves’ sharp edges and veins—all that was left of them—stung Frances’s cheeks. Lydia didn’t even want to walk in the direction of the tree, but Frances, after going the other way for a while, away from the wind, said the mysterious thing was back this way.

  “What is it?” said Lydia.

  “Wait,” said Frances, hoping she’d think of something. “Just keep quiet and come this way. It has to do with ducks. The number of ducks.” Sometimes, in the past, this would have been all that was required to start Lydia on a wonderful theory about strange aberrations in the number of ducks, requiring that they hide behind trees and spy on passersby, studying them for proof that they’d committed some fantastic, indistinct crime.

  But this time she only said, “Ducks? Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and trudged resentfully next to Frances. After a while she turned away from the wind to talk. “I don’t see anything unusual about the ducks,” she said.

  “Well, let’s dig up the shoes, then,” said Frances, risking everything.

  “No, let’s not.”

  “Why not?”

  “None of your business.”

  “What do you mean, none of my business?” said Frances. “They’re my shoes.”

  “They’re not yours,” said Lydia, surprisingly—yet Frances was not surprised. “You stole them from your mother.”

  “I didn’t steal them!”

  “I don’t know what else to call it.”

  “Tell me why not, anyway,” said Frances.

  “You tell me what’s mysterious about the ducks,” said Lydia. “I think you just made that up. You lied. There was nothing mysterious.”

  “Yes, there was,” said Frances, but she still couldn’t think of anything.

  In the end they went home, and Frances kept talking, uneasily, about other things. A few days later the teacher asked them again about the story. Lydia said they were going to work on it that afternoon after school. The first pages were at Lydia’s house, and when Lydia suggested that Frances come home with her, Frances was so pleased that she disobeyed her mother and went.

  “We have to work on our story,” Lydia told her mother.

  “You mean doll clothes all over the place again.”

  “No, we’re writing a book. I told you.”

  “All I know is, whatever you do, there’s a mess,” said her mother.

  “We’re just writing.” They went into Lydia’s room, which had obviously been cleaned up by her mother. The bed was made and the dolls were stacked on a shelf like bodies, not sitting up, some dressed and some naked. Lydia got the story out. There wasn’t much written.

  “Dawn should meet her boyfriend now,” said Frances. Dawn was one of the nurses.

  “Wait. Just before she meets him, she sees a shrunken skull on the porch of a house.”

  One of Lydia’s dolls was larger than the others, a big baby doll named Dawn who had no hair, just curls molded on her plastic head. She had been an awkward participant in the nurses’ game because she was so big and her clothes were all baby clothes, but she could drink and wet and Lydia said that trait might come in handy. “The nurses aren’t going to wet their pants,” Frances had said, b
ut Lydia had liked using Dawn. They had used the dolls like puppets. Becky, the other nurse, was Frances’s doll. Now, sitting on Lydia’s bed while Lydia sat on the floor biting her pencil, Frances found her eyes picking out Dawn in the stack of dolls dumped unceremoniously on the shelf. She was at the bottom and she didn’t have any clothes on, but she had shoes. Frances was thinking about whether there should be a shrunken skull on a porch, but part of her mind stayed with the shoes, white shoes such as a baby might wear. Frances began to feel frightened even before she’d had the next thought. The doll’s shoes were the ones she and Lydia had buried in Prospect Park.

  “Lydia,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Did you dig up the shoes?”

  “No, of course not, silly, why would I do that?”

  “What are those shoes Dawn is wearing?”

  Lydia turned around and looked over the stack of dolls. “I found them,” she said. “I found them a long time ago. I’ve always had them.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Of course I have. You played with them yourself. We put them on her one time when she was being the nurse.”

  It wasn’t true. “You dug them up,” Frances said. She pulled Dawn out from under the stack of dolls, and the others fell to the floor.

  “Look what you’re doing,” said Lydia. “You’re dumping everything out. Why are you so interested in dolls, anyway? Aren’t you ever going to grow up?”

  Frances sat down on the floor where she was, crying, and took the shoes off Dawn’s feet, but Lydia grabbed her hands and peeled her fingers away easily, her nails digging into Frances’s hands. “Do you want me to tell your mother?” Lydia said.

  “Tell her what?”

  “Tell her you stole the shoes from the drawer.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe I would.”

  “Well, if these aren’t them,” said Frances, “let’s go to the park and dig up the real ones.”

  “I can’t. My mother says I can’t go to the park. I saw a man peeing there. My mother says the park is full of perverts. She says your parents don’t care about things like that, but she does.”

  “My parents do too care,” said Frances. “Anyway, I’m going.”

  “What do I care?” said Lydia. They had not worked on the story, but Frances put on her coat and left. Lydia’s mother was in the kitchen, and she turned as Frances passed her. “Waltzing out already,” she said.

  Frances walked straight from Lydia’s house to the park, a long walk. It was starting to get dark when she got there. She crossed the bridle path and stepped onto a path darkened by trees on either side. She hurried to their tree and picked up a stick. She dug for a long time and found nothing. It was difficult—the stick broke and she had to find another one. She wished she had a shovel. The ground was hard. By now it was dark, and Frances was not sure she was digging in the right spot. She couldn’t persuade herself to leave, even though she was terribly cold. She kept widening the hole, squatting beside it. She longed to sit or kneel, but she didn’t want to be questioned about dirt on her clothes or knees. She kept hoping that at any moment her stick would meet the softness of the sock. Someone walked by, a man alone. Frances stood and hid herself against the trunk of the tree, squeezing her face into the rough bark. Her thighs ached.

  The man went down to the edge of the lake and stood there for a long time. Finally he walked away. When he was gone, Frances, whose heart was beating hard, walked as quickly as she could along the open path between her and the park entrance. She was sure she heard someone following her, and ran until she was out of breath and in pain. Crossing the soft soil of the bridle path, she couldn’t go fast, and after that she had to walk. Her apartment house was two blocks from the park. When she passed a store and caught sight of a clock inside, she was surprised that it was only 5:25. She had thought it would be late at night, that her parents and the police might be searching for her as they had looked for Simon. She hurried to her own block and her own house. There was a light in their apartment window—third floor, third window from the end—so she knew her mother was home, but probably her father was not home yet. He went to meetings after school and was the faculty advisor of the current events club. Today was Wednesday, current events day.

  Her mother heard her at the door and came to meet her. “I called Lydia,” she said. “You left a long time ago.”

  “Not so long,” Frances said.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was coming home.”

  “You must have gone someplace else,” her mother said.

  “No, I was coming home,” said Frances. There was dirt on her shoes, but her mother didn’t notice. In her room, she scraped the dirt off and tried to gather it into a piece of paper which she folded and threw away. She had not considered telling her mother the truth. She could never tell her mother about the shoes, would never mention the shoes. Yet sometimes she imagined a conversation in which her mother asked about them. She might have checked the drawer and found them missing. Frances would deny knowing anything about them, but if such a conversation happened, maybe her mother would go on to talk about the baby who had died, about how she had died.

  In a book, the girl who had taken the shoes would tell her mother, and in the end, she and the mother would be closer because of it. The mother would draw the girl up against her, on her lap or next to her if the girl was big, and tell her the whole story. Maybe they would cry together. All this might be preceded by anger. Maybe the girl would be punished for taking the shoes. Frances knew that her mother would not punish her. She might even want to sit and draw Frances close to her without being angry, but Frances could not let that happen. When she imagined it, it was as if she were a baby. She was small enough to sit on her mother’s lap. She was both entranced and disgusted, in her imagination, by her mother’s smell and the softness of her body. Her mother would cry, thinking once more about the baby who had died. It would be Frances’s fault that she was reminded.

  Probably, Frances thought, the baby had died suddenly in the hospital and a nurse had told her mother. The baby might have choked on her pillow. Hilda must have fed the baby. Then the nurse took her to the nursery. Hilda was in her hospital bed, reading a magazine. Suddenly she heard nurses calling to one another and to the doctor. She ignored them, thinking the confusion had nothing to do with her, and went on reading. At last a nurse came into the room and sat on the edge of Hilda’s bed. Frances found she was imagining Becky, the nurse played by her own doll in the story she and Lydia had been making up. “Mrs. Levenson,” Becky would say, “I have to tell you very sad news.” She would take Hilda’s hand and then Hilda would guess.

  A few days later, Lydia brought their story to school and showed it to Mrs. Reilly. She didn’t say anything to Frances, who watched from her seat. Later the teacher called Frances over and asked Lydia whether they hadn’t written it together. Lydia said both of them had written the beginning, but she had finished it. Frances waited until school was over. She asked the teacher if she could look at the story, which the teacher had put into a folder.

  “Why didn’t you keep working on it with Lydia?” the teacher asked.

  “I didn’t want to,” said Frances. She took the story and read it, sitting at her desk, while the teacher went around the room watering plants. In the story, Dawn and Becky and their boyfriends saw a series of shrunken skulls in their neighborhood. As they walked past a broken-down, abandoned house, they found a pair of baby shoes on the sidewalk. Then Dawn heard a baby’s cry. The two nurses and their boyfriends opened a window and went into the house, where they found two men about to murder a baby with knives. The nurses were able to call the police and stop the men, who had kidnapped the baby.

  Frances returned the story to the teacher and went home. The next day she saw Lydia showing something to another girl, and when she got closer she saw that it was the pair of baby shoes. She approached Lydia as soon as she could be alone with her. “Would
you please give me the shoes?” she said.

  “They are magic shoes. I will not part with them. You have not shown yourself worthy to possess them,” said Lydia in her make-believe voice.

  “It’s not funny,” said Frances.

  “These aren’t those shoes, stupid,” said Lydia. “I found these.”

  “But somebody dug up the shoes we hid,” said Frances. “I looked in the park. They’re not there.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” said Lydia.

  The next day Frances saw her show the shoes to Mrs. Reilly. “The real shoes?” said Mrs. Reilly. “The shoes in the story?”

  “Sort of,” said Lydia.

  “You can read the story in assembly,” said Mrs. Reilly. “Then when you’re done, pull out the shoes. What do you think of that suggestion?” Each class had a turn being in charge of an assembly and their turn was coming in a few weeks. Most classes put on a play about a holiday, but Mrs. Reilly had said they should have a talent show. Someone was going to play the piano, someone else would sing, and so on. “Maybe Frances will read the part she worked on,” she continued. “Or maybe you’d like to write a different story, Frances.”

  Frances said she would do something else. Parents came to assemblies, and her mother might even take time off from work if Frances were in the talent show. Frances and a group of girls had planned to sing. If she were one of a large group, maybe her mother wouldn’t come.

  She considered telling Mrs. Reilly that Lydia had taken shoes that belonged to her, but she was afraid that if she seemed upset, Mrs. Reilly would tell her mother. Or Mrs. Reilly might think she was jealous of Lydia. Lydia didn’t claim that she herself had burst in on robbers who had kidnapped a baby, but Frances found that when she pictured the events of Lydia’s story, it was Lydia who climbed through that window, wearing a nurse’s uniform that was more like a Halloween costume.

  Frances sat in the kitchen at home, watching her mother cook dinner. Hilda moved around the small kitchen as if she knew the pots and knives she wanted would come to meet her, rising slightly from the table or sink when she reached for them. Frances thought that her mother must sometimes think about the baby who had died. Maybe she had loved that baby more than she had ever loved Frances and was always a little disappointed in what she had gotten instead. She had scarcely known that baby. How much love could you have for someone who was only a few days old? Yet right at this moment, Frances thought, her mother might be thinking about that baby. “What are you thinking about?” she said.