Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Jude shrugged. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell.”

  After a long strained silence broken only by Sidney’s panting, Molly said, “Noreen passed a note around class today saying that you’re my boyfriend.”

  “What? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of.”

  “And during recess this afternoon, she and all her creepy little friends started singing, ‘Molly and Jude, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.…’”

  “But I don’t even know how to kiss,” said Jude, outraged.

  “You don’t?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I’ll teach you,” offered Molly.

  Jude looked at her quickly. “How do you know?”

  “I watch my parents—in the living room at night, when they think I’m asleep. I sneak halfway down the stairs and look through the banister.” Laying aside her cards, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and opened her lips as though about to take a bite out of it. Then she pressed her lips hard against her hand and closed her eyes, twisting her hand and head in opposite directions.

  “Okay. Try it,” she said to Jude.

  Jude copied her, sucking the back of her own hand with feigned fervor.

  “Good,” said Molly. “Now try this.” She clutched the hand she was kissing with her other hand and turned her mouth aside to murmur, “Oh, my darling, I love you so much.”

  “Oh, my darling, I love you so much,” Jude murmured to her hand, trying to imagine Molly’s mother, who was as fragile as a flower, doing such a disgusting thing with Molly’s father, who was covered like a bear with coarse, black hair and spoke in a voice that was almost a growl.

  “There. You’ve got it,” Molly said with satisfaction.

  “But why can’t Noreen just leave us alone?” demanded Jude, letting her adorable hand collapse into her lap. “We’ve never done anything to her.”

  “Momma says she wouldn’t tease us if she didn’t like us.”

  They considered this bit of adult wisdom for a long time. It sounded far-fetched.

  “What do you think we should do?” Jude lay back on the slick, fragrant pine needles, hands behind her head.

  “You may have to prove to her that you’re a girl.”

  “How?”

  “If you show her you haven’t got one of those dumb penises, she’ll know you aren’t a boy. And if you aren’t a boy, then you can’t be my boyfriend.”

  Jude giggled. “Maybe it would be better just to spend less time together.”

  “We can’t let anyone come between us,” said Molly.

  “Nobody could ever do that.”

  They glanced at each other doubtfully.

  “No,” said Molly.

  “But if we ignore each other at school,” insisted Jude, “they’ll think we don’t like each other anymore, and then they’ll leave us alone.”

  “We could still meet here every day after school,” said Molly, looking relieved.

  “Yeah. We’re safe here. Nobody could ever find us.”

  After finishing her homework that night, Jude put on her pajamas and pulled the shoe box out from under her bed. Extracting one of her mother’s letters, she climbed under the covers and decoded another paragraph: “This afternoon on your parents’ lawn, while I was watching your father drive his golf ball across the river, Jude got a cardboard box from the garage and hung a dish towel over an upright stick inside it. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained that she was making a boat so she could sail down the river and across the sea to visit her daddy in France. Our child is the light of my life in these dark days, darling. Thank you for her, and for our nights of love that brought her into being.”

  Smiling, Jude reread this several times. She had been the light of her mother’s life. Wrapped in this new knowledge as though in her mother’s arms, she sniffed the perfume emanating from the letter and caressed the back of her hand with her lips and remembered her mother leaning down in her long sleek mink coat to press her bright red lips against Jude’s cheek as she lay in bed. If she woke up before her parents got home and smelled the smoke from the baby-sitter’s cigarettes in the living room, she would get up and look in the mirror and touch the red lips imprinted on her cheek and know that everything would soon be fine again.

  The next day, Jude was playing Red Rover with the other second graders when she spotted Molly helping Noreen mat down the tall grass in the far corner of the playground to form a warren of interconnected rooms. Noreen appeared to be the mother bunny and Molly the father. The other girls were apparently baby bunnies, because they were hopping through the grassy chambers sucking their thumbs and wiggling their noses.

  Jude caught Molly’s eye and glared at her. Molly gestured in wolfspeak when Noreen wasn’t looking: Don’t worry. You’ll always be my best friend. I will never play Pecan with Noreen.

  Meanwhile, Oscar, who had been kept back two years and was twice as large as the other second graders, had identified Mary, the frail girl who was holding Jude’s hand, as the weak link in his opponents’ line. He charged the two of them with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils. As Jude fell to the ground and was trampled beneath his pounding feet, she simply switched off the playground, like changing stations on the radio.

  And there was her mother, dressed in her long mink coat, standing in the doorway of her mansion in heaven, arms outspread for Jude.

  “How have you been, light of my life?” she asked.

  JUDE SET HER ALARM for the middle of the night. Tiptoeing into her father’s room, she stood by his bedside listening to his soft steady snoring. She felt guilty waking him up when he worked so hard, but it had to be done.

  “Daddy?” she whispered.

  He sat straight up from a deep sleep, well trained from his years of people pounding on the back door in the middle of the night, bearing the bloody victims of family feuds up in the mountain coves.

  “I’ve been throwing up,” she announced in her most pitiful voice. It was only a small lie, because she’d felt like throwing up ever since she saw Molly playing Father Bunny with Noreen.

  He reached over to feel her cheeks and forehead with a cool hand. Then he got up, took her back to her own room, tucked her in, and laid a towel along her bedside with instructions to call him if it happened again.

  The next morning, he came into her room in his navy-blue corduroy robe and thrust a thermometer into her mouth before going to the bathroom to shave. While he was gone, she held the thermometer against the bulb in the lamp on her nightstand. Then she furiously scrubbed her wool blanket back and forth across her chest and arms until a rash appeared.

  When her father returned, dressed in a white shirt and smelling like cinnamon toast, he read the thermometer in the lamplight, placed a damp hand on her forehead, poked her rash with his fingertips, and told her to spend the day in bed.

  Jude ended up spending the entire week in bed, eating meals Clementine brought her on a tray and listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio while Clementine ironed by her bedside. Her father ransacked the hospital library trying to diagnose her mysterious rash and fever. Molly came over every afternoon after school, bearing candy or cookies she’d saved from her lunch box or bought with her allowance at the drugstore on the highway.

  “So how’s Noreen?” Jude asked each afternoon.

  Each afternoon, Molly averted her eyes and answered, “She’s all right.”

  After Molly left, Jude would take out her mother’s letter in which she called Jude the light of her life and sniff its fragrance and remember stroking her mother’s calves with her hands as she straightened the seams down the backs of her silky stockings.

  On Friday afternoon, Molly’s reply to Jude’s stubborn question was, “Noreen and I had a fight. We aren’t speaking anymore.”

  To her father’s relief, Jude was out of bed and back on her feet for the weekend.

  MOLLY AND JUDE, KNAPSACKS on their backs, were weaving through the tangled maze of rock ledges and mountain laurel
in the Wildwoods the afternoon following Jude’s abrupt recovery from her unidentified disease. They had agreed it might be a good idea to play Pecan when they reached their cave, to make up after their week of estrangement. But when they arrived beneath the limestone outcropping, they found hacked, withering laurel branches strewn around the leafy forest floor. And printed across the pale gray rock face in red paint was DEATH TO ALL BOY-GIRLS!

  Inside the cave, their playing cards, torn and twisted, were scattered across the pine needles. And in the middle of the floor, cold and stiff, a necklace of blood around its throat, lay a baby rabbit. Molly and Jude glanced at each other.

  “I think we need to talk to Sandy,” whispered Jude, groping for Molly’s hand.

  Molly extracted her hand to say in wolfspeak, Let’s get out of here. They may be hiding somewhere, watching us.

  Sandy lowered the ladder to his tree house, and they clambered up it as though pursued by enraged yellow jackets. Some maniac was screaming opera from a record player in the corner. A large, black typewriter sat on a low table. Stacks of paper lay everywhere.

  “I’m writing a novel,” said Sandy, fair hair as scrambled as though he’d combed it with an eggbeater. “It’s about alienation on the playground. It’s a metaphor for life.”

  “What’s alienation?” asked Molly as they sat down cross-legged on the carpet.

  “What’s a metaphor?” asked Jude.

  “Oh, never mind,” Sandy said with a sigh. “What’s up?”

  “We’re in trouble,” said Jude.

  “As usual.” Sandy smiled tightly. “Now what?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors at school,” said Molly. “That Jude is my boyfriend?”

  He nodded. “The solution is simple. I’ve been wanting to tell you, but you haven’t asked.”

  “What?” they asked in unison.

  “Wear dresses and Mary Janes.”

  They looked at each other.

  “It’s the only way.” Sandy pointed to the socks and sandals on his feet. “I wear these at home, but I wear high-tops at school. I play softball even though I prefer chess. If you look the way they look and do the things they do, they’ll leave you alone. You can be yourself in private. Play their game, but know it’s a game. Pretend you’re double agents. Like on ‘I Led Three Lives.’ That’s the theme of my novel: the gap between appearance and reality. It’s called The Naked and the Clothed.”

  “It might work,” said Molly, studying Jude. She started giggling.

  “What?” asked Jude.

  “You in those stupid Mary Janes!” Molly began rolling around the carpet, laughing. Sandy and Jude joined her, the tree house rocking on its branches.

  After they calmed down and were lying on the floor gasping for breath, Molly said, “Sandy, you’re a genius.”

  “So they say.”

  That night in bed, Jude read another of her mother’s paragraphs under her sheets with a flashlight. This secrecy was unnecessary, since her father let her stay up as late as she liked. But public school was taking effect: She was starting to enjoy the rush of terror at possible discovery by a punitive authority figure.

  “Darling, Jude wakes up crying in the night, and nothing will console her but to bring her into bed with me. Sometimes as I doze, I almost imagine it’s you there beside me. But when I open my eyes, I see it’s only Jude. She’s an amusing little creature, but it’s you I need, my precious love, in the way only you can provide. You are everything to me.…”

  Ripping this letter into tiny pieces, Jude carried them into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Then she stuffed the shoe box into the back of her closet and placed her dead doll patient on top of it. It didn’t really matter if her mother hadn’t loved her best, because she and Molly would wear Mary Janes and spend the rest of their lives together in their cabin on the clifftop.

  CHAPTER

  5

  ACE BRAKED HIS BICYCLE in front of Jude and Molly one afternoon as they were walking home from the grade school up the hill from the highway. He was wearing chinos, with a bicycle clip on one leg, a pinstriped oxford cloth shirt, and spotless white bucks, and he reeked of Old Spice. There was a faint shadow on his upper lip, and his chestnut hair was pomaded into a rigid flattop. Smiling so his braces glinted in the weak autumn sunlight, he said in a cracking voice, “Hey, ladies. How you doing today?”

  “Fine, thank you,” said Jude, glancing at him suspiciously over her books, which she was clutching to her chest with both arms. He had the same dull, dark wounded eyes, but everything else about him seemed different now that he was in junior high. She and Molly had heard that the Commie Killers were taking ballroom dancing lessons at the Youth Center in case the graduates of Miss Melrose’s Charm Class invited them to be their escorts for the Virginia Club Colonial Cotillion. The notion of a room full of those gorillas waltzing in tuxedos with matching plaid cummerbunds and bow ties had reduced them to hysterics more than once.

  “Mighty pretty day,” he suggested.

  As they walked, Jude noticed that the hand with which he was pushing his bicycle had nails chewed down to the quicks.

  “Not bad,” said Molly, eying this pleasant young Rotarian with curiosity.

  Ever since Jude and Molly had started wearing skirts to school three years earlier, they had eaten lunch in the cafeteria and hung out together on the playground every day without being harassed by Noreen and Ace and their mobs. And after school, they donned blue jeans and raced their new horses down through the Wildwoods and along the river. Jude didn’t really mind that her father had married his nurse from intensive care and moved her into their house, because Jude now spent most nights at Molly’s, curled up with her and Sidney beneath the dotted swiss canopy like puppies in a litter. The only thing that bothered her about this arrangement was that she sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, to hear Molly’s parents arguing in their bedroom. Occasionally, there were thuds, as though someone was throwing something. And then Molly’s mother would start crying. But Molly always seemed to sleep right through it.

  “Say, ladies,” said Ace, running his hand up the front of his new scrub-brush hairdo, “Mill Valley has challenged Tidewater Estates to a football game. But we’ve only got eight players. Any chance you two would play?”

  Molly and Jude glanced at each other. It might be a trick. Although the ancient wounds had healed, the scars remained to remind them.

  “We need a full team if we’re going to stand a chance.” He smiled at them smoothly, and Jude realized that he could have a fruitful career ahead of him as a horse trader.

  “That’s still just ten,” said Molly, leaning over to straighten one of the white bobby socks that was sagging below her crinolined poodle skirt.

  “Can you think of anybody else?”

  “How about Sandy?” asked Jude.

  Ace smiled with polite incredulity. “Sandy? Sandy Andrews? Sandy Andrews on a football field?”

  “I played catch with him last year,” said Jude. “He was working on his aerodynamics project for the county science fair. And believe me, Sandy knows how to throw a football.”

  “If Sandy doesn’t play, we don’t either,” announced Molly.

  Ace sighed with a sweet, long-suffering smile, a new facial expression in his rather limited repertoire. “All right. But you all ask him. He’s not too crazy about me.”

  “I wonder if this is a good idea,” mused Jude as Ace rode off down the hill. “Clementine always says that leopards don’t change their spots without a whole lot of scrubbing.

  “But he seems pretty scrubbed,” said Molly. “We may as well give him a chance. If he’s too obnoxious, we’ll just quit the team.”

  ON THE FIELD ONCE pocked with their trenches, the former Commie Killers watched with amazement as Sandy repeatedly sailed the football over the heads of the enclosing tacklers and into Jude’s or Molly’s outstretched arms. Impressed, Ace promoted him to quarterback and Jude and Molly to ends.

>   Then they divided into two opposing lines. Crouching for drills like three-legged pit bulls, they collided time after time at a signal from Ace. The tenth time, Ace locked shoulder pads with Molly. Grinning at her with clenched teeth, he butted her backward down the field while she grimaced fiercely and struggled to dig her cleats into the turf and break his advance.

  During the tackling drill that followed, Ace kept hurling himself through the air at Molly, bringing her crashing to the ground beneath him. Once, he continued to lie immobile on her like a sack of concrete, smiling up at Jude as Molly writhed and twisted beneath him.

  “Get off me, you big lug!” Molly yelled.

  Jude felt her hands clench into fists as she stood there watching. Apparently, the new, improved Ace Kilgore still had a few of his old tricks up his sleeve.

  Laughing indulgently, he allowed Molly to push him aside.

  “Drop dead, creep,” she snarled as she struggled to her feet, face flushed and helmet askew.

  Jude leaned over and asked her in a low voice, “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay,” she snapped, glaring at Ace as she straightened her helmet.

  CLOUDS WERE SCUDDING LIKE hockey pucks across the bright blue sky. Noreen’s crew wore red-and-white corduroy skirts, saddle shoes, and junior-high letter sweaters. Most sported jaunty ponytails.

  “Girls?” the Mill Valley Butchers exclaimed when they dismounted from their bicycles and spotted Molly’s black braids hanging down from her shiny red helmet.

  “I know that ole girl,” said one, pointing at Jude in her red jersey and padded khaki knickers. “She ain’t nothing but a fifth grader.”

  “The Commandos got fifth-grade girls on their team! Oh, man!” They slapped one another’s helmets with hilarity.

  “You won’t be laughing by the time this is over,” snarled Ace from behind his plastic face guard.

  “Better face it, rich boy,” sneered Joe Sneed, “your ass is grass.”

  Joe’s older brother Clyde, a former football star at the high school, home on leave from the marines, had come along as referee. The boys on both teams kept glancing at him as he stood there straight as a linesman’s stake in his severe blond brush cut. He’d survived boot camp at Paris Island and killed Commies in Korea.