Leigh looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. She’s probably gonna have the baby and mooch off of my mom.”
I’m thinking how sometimes girls in Withensea get pregnant in their senior year, like Annie, and never make it out of Withensea. They marry their high school boyfriends and get stuck here.
“You know the new kid Timothy Zand who lives in your neighborhood? The one with the gorgeous eyes?”
“No.” The first time I heard his name was the other day when David told me he’d brought my books to our porch. I don’t know him. I don’t even know what he looks like. I have a feeling there are lots of peripheral things that have been going on all around me that I can’t remember.
“He lives right around the corner from you. He’s in high school, a freshman. He walks to school sometimes. I’ve watched him walk by my bus stop on his way.”
“What about him?” I smile at her to continue.
“Well, I have a huge crush on him. There’s something different about him. It’s almost like he comes from another country. We should try to meet him.”
I almost laugh. Leigh is totally boy crazy. This crush counts as one in fifty she’s developed since I became her friend. She’s gone on dates with lots of boys in the past—dates to school dances, dates at the bowling lanes. Her mother makes strict rules about dating, however. Leigh’s not supposed to be dating boys her mom hasn’t met. So she invents a cover for most of her dates. That was always me in the past. I wonder who has been covering for her in the last few weeks. “What have you been doing since we stopped talking?” I ask.
“Nothing much. I hang out with the chess club guys and my sister, but I only see her once in a while, after school and on the weekends she doesn’t spend with her boyfriend.” She squints down at the rocks on the beach. “Yesterday I joined the Methodist church down the street from the library.”
“Church?”
“Yeah, they have a teen group. Methodist Youth Friendship. I made some new friends there. I might date a guy there too, Edgar. …”
I decide I will see how much Leigh has noticed about what happened to me before telling her about my memory loss. “So, when we stopped talking, do you remember what happened? I mean, why do you think we haven’t been hanging out?”
Leigh seems thoughtful. She’s making a decision about what and how much she will say. “Please don’t think you’re going to hurt me. I want you to be honest. What happened?”
“I don’t think any one thing happened. I mean, we would hang out and everything, but you never wanted to do anything or go anywhere. You only wanted to go to the library and read. I got sick of reading. I felt like I had to talk you into doing stuff all the time. Every time I asked you to go somewhere, like to Quincy or something, you didn’t want to. You started acting weird. We would finally make a plan to do something, like go to the park or to a movie, and you wouldn’t show—or you’d show up an hour late and act like you were on time or something … I don’t know. And there was other weird stuff.”
“Like what weird stuff?” I ask.
“I don’t know … like the time with locking the door?”
Locking the door?
I don’t know what she means, but I think I should pretend I know, that not knowing might be even more bizarre-sounding.
“Yeah, I guess it seemed weird.”
I hope she will tell me more. I wait.
“Yeah.” Leigh avoids my eyes.
I stay quiet.
Leigh speaks softly. “Can you explain why you did it?”
I suck in a deep breath. I know this is the moment to tell her, to try and explain that I can’t remember what happened. But I’m terribly afraid of what she might think. I’m afraid of the complexities of my own secretive mind, which has become a maze that hides its entrance and its exit in a spot I can’t find. “I have something to tell you. It’s hard to talk about. I think you need to know something about me if you want to be my friend again.”
I take another big breath while Leigh waits. “On Friday, walking back to my house, I realized I didn’t know where I’d been. It seemed like I was waking up from a dream. When I got to school today I wouldn’t have known what we were studying if I hadn’t found some homework or a recent quiz. I can’t remember last week. I can’t even remember the weeks before.” I add.
I realize as the words hang in the air how completely scary it is and how freaky it must sound to someone else. Leigh doesn’t say anything for a while. I can tell she can’t decide whether to believe me or not. I think she’s waiting for me to tell her I’ve been teasing or tricking her.
“When’s the last day you remember?” she asks.
I start to cry. I can’t stop. I heave and choke and my body shakes violently. I bend over to try to catch my breath.
Leigh puts her hand on my back. “Oh God, are you gonna be okay?”
I try to tell her I’ll be fine, but I can only shake my head from side to side.
“N-n-noo,” I stammer.
I’m not okay. My brain’s been hijacked. Nothing is okay. Leigh sits still with me while I cry. We sit like that for a long time. She lets me cry and puts an arm around me when the shaking gets more intense. After a while, my body feels weak and I’m tired. I lie across one of the flat rocks. After a while I start to drift into sleep in the warmth of the sun.
I must have slept for a few hours, because the sun has shifted over the horizon. I squint up to see where the sunlight bends over the sky. Finding the northern point on the horizon, I look behind me for my shadow and see it reads about two o’clock. I search for Leigh. The tide has gone out and the rocky sand stretches far out beyond the boat launch. At first I can’t find her, but then I see her down at the water’s edge, her head a small sunlit pale-reddish speck against the black rocks.
She’s crabbing. The bay side of Withensea is the best for crabbing because there are tons of small tide pools. The crabs cling to the sides of the rocks and slide inside pools loaded with seaweed and snails. Leigh found a bucket somewhere. She drags it beside her.
“Hey,” I shout out to her.
Leigh turns around. “Hey!” She yells back and waves at me join her. It takes me a while to walk out to her.
“I fell asleep.”
“Yeah, I figured I should let you sleep a bit, but I didn’t want to leave you out here alone. I saw a crab and found this bucket. I’ve got lots. See?” Leigh’s bucket swims with crabs.
“Let’s go to your place and boil these. Do you think your mom’s home?” she asks.
“I have no idea if she’s there today or not. Jack’s in California. It’s hard to say. But let’s go anyway. If there’s a party, we can go down to your place, right?”
“Okay, but if we go to mine we’ll have to wait until later, when school is out, or my mom will know we skipped. Oh, and we don’t have a big enough pot for the crabs. Remember?”
I do remember this. Ms. Westerfield doesn’t like shellfish and never cooks it. David and I practically live on the stuff we dig out of the sand when the weather allows. Crabs, clams, snails.
Leigh and I take turns carrying the bucket of crabs and walk along the bay beach so no one can see us and catch us out of school. We have one section of Withensea Avenue to cross that lies out in the open, and we run as fast as we can when we get there. I hold the bucket this time. As we make it over to the ocean-side beach we hear a car cross the land bridge. We duck behind tall beach grass and watch as Ms. Westerfield drives by.
“That’s so weird. What are the chances? Do you think she saw us?” Leigh asks.
“No. But it freaked me out.”
We crack up with laughter until our sides hurt.
“How lucky that I caught you outside class today. I’m sorry we went this long without talking, Jules. Let’s never do it again.” She squeezes my hand tightly.
“I know,” I say. “It was serendipitous.”
Leigh giggles. “Serendipitous,” she mimics me playfully.
She turns serious. “I’ve missed you so much. I’m sorry. I thought you didn’t want to be my friend anymore, like maybe I asked you too many questions about Moses. I even thought you blamed me because I kept you late that morning and maybe you would have made it back to go fishing with him or something.”
“Oh, no. I don’t blame you. I never blamed you. It’s my fault I stayed. It’s my …” My throat catches. “It was all my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault Moses drowned,” Leigh says angrily.
At first, I can’t meet her eyes. I have wanted someone to say those words to me for a long time, but she sounds angry and I can’t figure out why.
She goes on.
“I wish we could have adopted you after it happened. I asked my mom if maybe you could come to live with us. I think she considered it, but decided you should stay with your family. I think she knows how much you take care of everything, and she said …” Leigh stops.
I can tell she’s leaving things out. Things she thinks she shouldn’t say, because I haven’t said them to her, but that we know are true.
“She said you needed to stay put and take care of David.” Leigh shakes her head and says, “I wonder if your memory is having trouble because you feel so badly about Moses. Maybe you just want to forget everything so you don’t have to remember the one really sad thing?”
No one is home when we get to my house. We cook the crabs, but of course there’s no butter or lemon in our refrigerator to flavor them. Still, they’re a sweet and salty treat. We play a killer chess game. Leigh teaches me all the new sequences and openings she’s been learning from her new friends on the chess team. Later,_Wendy waltzes in and asks us how school went. I don’t answer. Leigh speaks up. “It was boring.”
Wendy smiles and chats with Leigh a bit. She acts like a normal mother even though she’s wearing platform shoes, a blouse made of crochet flowers, and a miniskirt that shows the bottom of her butt when she bends over.
I’m annoyed with how Wendy acts all fakey nice around other people, and I’m relieved when she walks upstairs and leaves us alone until it’s time for Leigh to go home.
“I’ll meet you in front of school tomorrow and we can figure out your schedule together, okay?” Leigh says.
“That would chase all my mimsy away,” I answer.
“Serendipitous!” Leigh shouts as she rounds the corner.
She’s teasing me. It’s wonderful.
Two days later it’s my thirteenth birthday. Leigh throws me a surprise party after school at her house. She’s invited the chess guys, a few kids she knows from school, and her new church buddies, which is weird, since I don’t hang out with them, but Leigh is friends with everyone and they’re all nice to me anyway. It’s probably the best birthday party I’ve ever had.
I manage to stumble through the next few weeks at school until the summer break, recovering my reality as I go.
But I dream the drowning dream almost every night.
Eighteen
Jules, 13 years | Late June, 1974
A GRAPE-SIZED SPACE
LEIGH CALLS ME on a Wednesday morning. We’ve been out of school for a week, spending most of our time down at the jetty swimming. The song sparrows chirp like crazy. There’s no breeze and I can already smell muggy seaweed in the air. It’s going to be a hot day. I’m thinking we should head down to the beach early to find a good spot, but Leigh calls to ask if I want to go into Boston on the bus and go shopping.
I know she’s already been this week. She went with her sister and got lots of really cool new clothes. Since Annie decided to have an abortion and not to go to college, Ms. Westerfield’s been trying to help her get a decent job somewhere. According to Ms. Westerfield, Annie needs a more professional wardrobe, so Leigh’s helping out with that since Annie and her mom are still not talking.
Leigh tells me she wants to show me something.
Later that day we’re in Gilchrist’s, shopping, and Leigh pulls me aside to show me a shirt stuffed under her blouse. I am so blown away I blurt out, “What are you doing?” She shushes me and then drags my arm and pushes me out of the store. She steals the shirt.
Leigh tells me how easy it is and when we walk into another store she dares me to stuff a bra she wants inside my shirt. I grab a handful of bras and consider whether to do it or not. My heart beats a mile a minute and I think I might throw up with nervousness. I do it. I’m exhilarated.
I’ve broken another rule. The day we skipped classes was the first time I did something delinquent, even though I’ve been brought up by criminals. Now I’ve stolen something. I feel like a real kid and not somebody’s mother.
We spend the rest of the day shoplifting from different department stores. It’s a total blast.
That night, I have my nightmare again. I’ve started keeping a log of it. The dream doesn’t come every night, but it comes often. I also write down the events of the day before I fall asleep every night. I want to see if they contain a pattern I might be able to interrupt. I keep a count.
I think there might be a magic number? Maybe if I dream the dream fifty times, or a hundred times, it might go away forever. It seems crazy to me that I keep having the same one over and over. I’m certain most people don’t do this. Trying to sort out a pattern might be a good way to track my craziness in case I’m ever sent to the loony bin. I’m sure that can happen at any time.
The next few weeks are roughly the same. Leigh and I go into Boston every weekend and shoplift from stores. The trip to Boston is quick if we take the ferry—just an hour. But if we want to travel in by bus, we have to catch three buses, and that takes hours.
A couple of times I talk Leigh into visiting my grandfather’s apartment with me since we aren’t far from where he lives, off Commonwealth Avenue. We take the T after the buses. Those visits are sad, though, because he acts sweet and gives me money, which makes me feel guilty for shoplifting.
After Moses died, my grandfather met and married a woman named Ruth from his synagogue. He seems happier than I’ve ever known him to be before. Ruth is younger than him and he perks up around her, almost like a teenager. Ruth speaks perfect English and is nice to us. I’ve grown to love her as much as I loved Grandmother Yetta. The best thing is the way the two of them act so in love. I never saw my grandfather kiss Grandmother Yetta, but he kisses Ruth all the time.
When Leigh and I visit, Ruth makes us lunch.
It’s the same lunch Grandmother Yetta used to make: chopped liver and chicken soup with rice. Ruth even gives me the poopach. They treat Leigh and I like we’re kids, but I don’t mind. I know if my grandfather had any idea about what I’ve been doing he would be horrified. His life seems pure and innocent compared to mine. He doesn’t seem to understand what my life is like. The one time I tried to explain what a horrible mother Wendy is he got angry with me for being disrespectful and ungrateful. I gave up trying to make him understand. David and I pretend everything is normal when we see him and he seems to want it that way.
Maybe he feels like he can’t change it.
One day in Boston, a few weeks after we’ve started becoming delinquents, I’m having a smoke outside of Bloomingdales and Leigh walks out of the store with one of those lighted makeup mirrors right on her head. “If you put it somewhere obvious, no one questions you,” she says.
I’m completely freaked out. “That’s it! I’m not stealing anything anymore. We’re probably one eye shadow away from juvenile hall.”
“Nobody’s paying attention to us. Don’t worry!”
“Listen, if I get in trouble, they could send me away. If I go, who’s gonna take care of David?”
“Okay. Okay. Nobody’s getting sent away. Probably best if we quit while we’re ahead, anyway.”
I don’t feel like I’m ahead. I feel like I’m right in the path of punishment.
That punishment comes swiftly.
Back at the house, Wendy drives up with a Burger King dinner for David and me. As we s
tart eating in the kitchen, Wendy announces that David and I will be spending the rest of the summer at camp. David’s been to summer camp a few times since Moses died. Wendy gets him into a free program at a two-week camp every year. This time we’re both going for the whole summer and my grandfather’s paying. David loves it, so he’s thrilled. But I’ve never been to camp. The prospect of being away from Wendy and the madness is intriguing, but I’ve been looking forward to a summer with Leigh and our normal, non-shoplifting summer activities—swimming, reading, riding bikes, and making trips to the library and the beach. Wendy has apparently arranged for me to go to a YMCA girl’s summer camp in Cape Cod with the daughter of a friend of hers, a girl named Smith. I do not like this girl.
Smith is a summer dude. Her family owns a bungalow in Withensea and they come to live on the island every summer. Her parents have tons of money and send her to a private girl’s school in Cambridge. She acts spoiled, stuck up and childish even though she’s a year older than I am. She’s always bragging about something she can do better than everyone else. She thinks all the “townies” are poverty-level ingrates with no sense of culture or sophistication. I have no desire to change her mind about this and even encourage her perception so she won’t try to be my friend.
It’s true that Withensea is more a place to leave than a place where people arrive.
I’ve been to the suburb she lives in outside of Boston. It has prettier houses, but practically no natural beauty. Withensea has that in spades.
Also, and this is a big also, I’ve seen her parents naked and having sex with Wendy on one of those orgy nights. The connection grosses me out. However, Wendy and Smith’s mother, Betty, have decided we should become friends. They are unaware, as parents usually are, of the fact that we are mutually repelled by each other.
The next day I’m coerced by Wendy into spending the morning with Smith at her house so that we can “make plans about camp.” She promises we’ll go and visit my grandfather afterwards. Smith gamely plays the hostess and makes an effort to entertain me by showing me her bedroom, which includes her extensive collection of small crystal animal figurines. This lasts about an hour, as all the animals have names and individual “personalities” that Smith describes in detail. It’s like she’s trying to be Laura in the Glass Menagerie. Smith is a huge phony.
The Belief in Angels Page 21