Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Is this her?” Ben’s father asked, nodding at Mouse.

  “Yes,” Mouse’s mother said, as if it pained her to admit it. “That’s my daughter.”

  Mouse shied back a step, thinking that the tall man might be about to hit her, but instead he turned to his son and said, “Well?”

  Ben sighed, and with an almost theatrical effort made himself look Mouse in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Apparently this wasn’t sufficient; no sooner were the words out of his mouth than his father smacked him hard on the back of his head. “You’re sorry what?” Ben Senior said.

  “I’m sorry about the bet I made,” Ben recited grudgingly. “I’m sorry I tried to trick you. It was wrong.” He glanced up at his father as if to add: Is that enough?

  “All right,” said Ben Senior. “You go wait in the car for me.” Ben eagerly obeyed.

  “Well,” Ben Senior said, turning his attention to Mouse. He seemed to expect her to recite something now, but she only blinked at him, so he cleared his throat and went on: “As you can see, my son got your message. Or rather, we all got your message.”

  My message? thought Mouse, and Ben’s father, noting her perplexity, growled: “Oh, for pity’s sake!” Mouse shied back another step.

  “For pity’s sake…” Ben’s father jammed a hand in his coat pocket. “The message I’m referring to, young lady—as if you didn’t know—is the one you pitched through our living-room window earlier this evening.” He brought out a chunk of brick with a tattered sheet of paper wrapped around it. Mouse had never seen the brick before, but when Ben’s father smoothed the paper out she recognized it as her memorandum. For a horrified second she wondered what she had done. Then she remembered her mother’s “errand.”

  “Penny!” Verna Driver’s feigning of outrage was flawless. “Penny, my goodness, what’s gotten into you? How could you do such a thing?” As she said this she turned, and when her back was to Ben’s father she let the outrage-mask drop, revealing impish glee beneath; she stuck her tongue out at Mouse, and winked. “Oh, Mr. Deering,” she continued, putting the mask back in place, “Mr. Deering, I’m so very sorry, I can’t tell you how shocked I am by this.”

  “The boy acted badly,” Ben’s father said. “But”—he hefted the brick—“vandalism is not an appropriate response.”

  “Oh, of course not!” Mouse’s mother said. “I don’t know what Penny—”

  “Neither is what you did at the school today, young lady,” Ben’s father added. “Yes, my son told me about that, too.”

  “At the school today?” The outrage-mask slipped a bit. “She did something…at the school?”

  “An uncontrolled temper is a dangerous thing,” Ben’s father said ominously. “I’ll leave these with you,” he continued, offering the memorandum and the chunk of brick to Mouse’s mother, “and ask that you keep your daughter away from my son and away from my house.”

  “You can be sure of that,” Mouse’s mother said, the mask slipping a notch further, revealing an edge of malice. Then she caught herself, and went on soothingly: “Of course we’ll pay for the damage to your window.”

  But Ben’s father, perhaps sensing that something was not right here, said: “Never mind the damage. You just rein in your daughter before she hurts somebody. An uncontrolled temper…” he concluded, jabbing a warning finger at Mouse. He turned and left.

  “‘You just rein in your daughter before she hurts somebody,’” Mouse’s mother mimicked to his back, discarding the mask. As the Deerings drove away, she asked: “What happened at the school?”

  Mouse had just been wondering the same thing. Casting back over the events of the day, she recalled something that hadn’t really registered at the time: when she’d passed Ben and his friends outside after class, Ben’s hair was mussed, and his jacket and shirt were covered with splotches: dried food stains. “I think I dumped my lunch tray on Ben,” Mouse said, in her smallest voice.

  “You think you did?” Her mother shot her a sideways glance, and for a third time Mouse shied back. But then her mother burst out laughing, and threw an affectionate arm around her. “Well, I guess we showed those Trash Town bastards!” she crowed. “So, would my little Mouse like some ice cream?”

  That was the end of the Ben Deering matter, at least as far as her mother was concerned. For Mouse herself it wasn’t really over, of course; word of the brick-throwing and food-dumping incidents spread quickly at school, and Mouse, now a certified “crazy girl,” became a magnet for taunts and abuse.

  Then one morning about two weeks later, a school circular appeared mysteriously in Mouse’s book bag. Mouse found it as she was packing away her homework, and her mother, who was hovering nearby, snatched it out of her hands before she could get a good look at it.

  “What’s this?” her mother said, scanning the circular. Her eyes widened, and she began to read more carefully, growing more and more excited. “Why, this is wonderful!” she exclaimed. “What a wonderful opportunity!” She turned, casually jabbing Mouse in the head with her elbow. “Why didn’t you tell me about this last night?”

  Mouse, wincing from the jab, could only shrug. When her mother was finished reading she took the circular back, and examined it herself. “Dear concerned parent,” it began,

  This is to inform you of an exciting new extracurricular program being made available to exceptional students such as your daughter. Through a special arrangement with the prestigious English Society of International Correspondents, we…

  Right away Mouse noticed something peculiar. The paper was official school letterhead, but the text was typed, not mimeographed the way a regular circular would be, and the typewriter’s tendency to drop its u’s was oddly familiar. Some years ago Mouse’s grandmother had given her an old Underwood manual typewriter that had dropped its u’s that way; then Mouse’s mother, irritated by the gift, had gone out and bought Mouse an expensive electric typewriter, and insisted she throw the Underwood away, which as far as she knew she had. But it seemed strange that the school’s typewriter would have the exact same fault as the discarded Underwood, and the same typeface too—strange enough to make Mouse wonder why she couldn’t remember actually putting the Underwood in the trash.

  The “exciting new extracurricular program” described in the circular was pretty strange, too. What it was, once you got past the fancy language, was a pen-pal program. The English Society of International Correspondents set up letter exchanges between “exceptional” American high school students—Mouse had a very hard time applying that adjective to herself—and even more exceptional British boarding-school students, many of whom, the circular hinted, were members of the nobility. The apparent purpose of this, on the American side at least, was a sort of cultural osmosis—through long-distance exposure to the young lords and ladies of England, the American high schoolers would be elevated from exceptional to superexceptional status, thereby ensuring the brightest possible futures for themselves. What the British kids were supposed to get out of it the circular didn’t say.

  To Mouse, the whole thing seemed frankly ridiculous. It also seemed like a prank. There was a pen-pal program at school, but it involved sending postcards to poor village kids in Africa and Asia, an activity about as suitable for Verna Driver’s daughter as volunteering at a soup kitchen in Trash Town.

  “You’re signing up for this,” Mouse’s mother said. “You’re signing up for this today.”

  “OK,” said Mouse.

  And she tried to. She skipped out of lunch early and went to the after-school-program office, where the administrator Mr. Jacobs scratched his head and said he’d never heard of the English Society of International Correspondents.

  “I’m sorry,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I could sign you up for the Third World Postcard Buddies program, if you’d like…”

  “No thank you,” said Mouse.

  “Well, then.” He handed the circular back to her. “If I do hear something, I’ll contact you, but it see
ms like this is probably a joke of some kind.”

  Of course it was a joke. But now Mouse had a problem, because she was going to have to go home and tell her mother that she hadn’t done as she was told, that she couldn’t do it. Thinking this, she felt a tickle in her left palm, and looked down to find a graffito written on her bare skin in ballpoint pen: JUST PRETEND YOU DID.

  And Mouse nodded to herself, and washed her hands, and after last bell she went home and told her mother she’d signed up for the letter-writing program. And a surprisingly short time after that the first of many envelopes from the English Society of International Correspondents appeared in the Drivers’ mailbox. Mouse, who found it there, shook her head in disbelief at the return address, and also at the stamp: a colorful two-pence stamp, with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and a smudged cancellation mark that did not extend onto the envelope itself. The stamp looked as though it had been glued in place with rubber cement.

  Two pence, Mouse thought. Two pennies. Was that enough to mail a letter all the way from England to America? She very much doubted it, and her doubt churned up a memory of being in Bartleby’s on Third Street with her mother not long ago. Bartleby’s sold fine stationery, and also had a small section devoted to stamp and coin collecting. You could buy canceled foreign stamps there…or steal them, Mouse supposed.

  The envelope was a prank, like the circular before it. Mouse would have destroyed it if she dared, but she didn’t dare, and anyway by now her mother had seen it and grabbed it from her and was cooing over it, with none of Mouse’s skepticism.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Mouse’s mother said. Too impatient to get a letter opener, she attacked the envelope like a grizzly bear ripping into a honeycomb. The simile was apt: having torn open the flap, she actually stuck her nose inside—and jerked back, as if stung. She tried again, reaching in more carefully with a pawlike hand—and jerked that back too. “Damn it!” she swore. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! FUCK!” The fit of fury vanished as quickly as it had come, and was replaced by a sullen petulance. “Here,” she said, shoving the envelope at Mouse. “You do it.”

  When Mouse carefully spread the top of the envelope and peeped inside, she found neither honey nor stinging bees, but a second, smaller envelope, addressed simply “From Miss Penelope Ariadne Jones, To Miss Penny Driver.” Mouse saw at once what had upset her mother: the inside envelope was purple.

  Purple, her mother’s unlucky color—a color that, like garlic to a vampire, produced an almost allergic reaction in Verna Driver. Mouse’s head rocked back and forth on her neck, not-quite nodding. Her mother couldn’t read the letter; the letter was for her eyes only.

  “Well go on!” her mother snapped, raising a threatening hand. “Open it!”

  Mouse opened the purple envelope. The two sheets of stationery inside were also purple, and covered in longhand, a longhand she knew. “My Dear Miss Driver,” she read, “it is with the greatest pleasure that I begin what I hope will be a long correspondence with you…”

  The letter’s brief overview of life in “Century Village, Dorset” was as transparently fake as the return address on the outer envelope. Large portions of it appeared to have been plagiarized from a Jane Austen novel, or possibly a Harlequin romance. But it acted like a balm on Mouse’s mother, the grizzly bear getting her honey at last; she ate it up, giving no sign that she suspected it was anything other than what it purported to be. Meanwhile Mouse had to fight to stay focused on what she was reading—she kept glancing ahead, looking for a hidden message, a letter-within-the-letter, meant only for her.

  Eventually she found it: at the very end, beneath “Penelope Jones”’s signature, there was a line that said, “DO NOT READ THIS PART ALOUD,” and beneath that, a postscript that turned out to be a memorandum, warning her about something that Cindy Wheaton was planning to do to her in gym class.

  After she’d gotten over her initial surprise, Mouse decided she was angry with the memorandum-writer for choosing such a complicated and potentially risky subterfuge. What if her mother’s enthusiasm for things British had overcome her phobia for purple? Then she would have read the letter herself, including the memorandum, and realized it was all a trick—and who knew what she might have done to Mouse then? Even if the trick were never exposed, this method of delivering memoranda created extra work for Mouse, because of course the first thing her mother did after Mouse finished reading was tell her that she must write back, immediately. She insisted on supervising, too: hanging over Mouse’s shoulder as she crafted her reply, criticizing every sentence, every turn of phrase.

  It was only later that Mouse realized that tricking her mother—and tricking her in as blatant a manner as possible—was not just a means to an end but was in fact one of the memorandum-writer’s goals. The memorandum-writer was angry, too; this was made abundantly clear by Penelope Ariadne Jones’s second letter to Mouse, which began:

  My Dear Miss Driver,

  Greetings to you and your family from enchanting Dorset. On behalf of myself and my fellow Englanders, please tell your mother that she is an ugly old CUNT, we woud love to take a big stinking SHIT on her and stick her fucking nice things up her motherfucking ASSHOLE…

  Mouse, reading this aloud, stopped short on “please tell your mother that,” and gaped in horror at the words that followed.

  “Little Mouse?” her mother said, in the abrupt silence. “What is it? What does she want you to tell me?”

  And Mouse looked up, choking on dread, and then she was folding the letter away as her mother said, “That was so beautiful, what a nice girl, why can’t you be more like her?”

  As soon as she was alone, Mouse tore that letter into shreds, not even checking it for a memorandum. “No more,” she said—half commanding, half pleading—as she flushed the remnants of the letter down the toilet. “No more, no more, no more.”

  But there were more, of course. The envelopes from the English Society of International Correspondents continued to turn up in the months and years that followed. Mouse’s mother never caught on to the trick, though she did destroy a number of the letters herself, during rages of frustration brought on by Penelope Jones’s persistent refusal to switch to a more agreeable color of stationery. So some of the memoranda were lost, but most got through; and even after Mouse left home, even after her mother died and was put in the ground, the memorandum-writer continued to send important messages in care of the English Society, as a kind of inside joke.

  And now here is another one. Mouse takes a butter knife from the silverware drawer and neatly slits the top of the envelope. She extracts the smaller envelope from inside it, secretly pleased by the rich purple hue, magic ward against her mother. “From Miss Penelope Ariadne Jones,” she reads, “To Miss Penny Driver,” and that pleases her too. Though the memoranda within typically refer to her as Mouse, on the outside of the envelope she is always Penny, and she likes that name. She wishes desperately that she could convince people to call her by it, but almost no one ever does.

  She slits open the top of the purple envelope, too, and pulls out a single sheet of lavender stationery. On it is written:

  THINGS TO DO TODAY (Sunday, 4/27/97):

  SHOWER.

  DRESS NICE.

  MEET ANDY GAGE OUTSIDE HARVEST MOON DINER AT NOON.

  LISTEN TO HIM.

  Odd. It’s not a memorandum at all, it’s a list. For it to be delivered this way must mean it’s important, but Mouse is puzzled. Meet Andy Gage? What for? And listen to him about what? What could he possibly have to tell her that would warrant such special notice?

  Maybe it’s not such a mystery. Maybe she’s only pretending to be puzzled, to conceal the fact that she’s been expecting something like this. Because the thing that comes immediately to mind, when she asks herself what this could be about, is that strange conversation she overheard at the Reality Factory on Monday. The conversation between Andrew and Julie, that Mouse eavesdropped on from between the tents. The conversation tha
t seemed to be about her.

  Yes, that’s definitely it—Mouse is all at once sure, without knowing how she is sure. But she doesn’t have time to mull it over further now. It’s almost eleven o’clock, and if she is going to get herself cleaned up, dressed, and out to Autumn Creek by noon, she will have to move quickly.

  She hobbles back through the apartment to the bathroom, trying not to track too much blood on the floor in the process. As she sits on the edge of the tub and pulls the glass sliver from the sole of her foot, her hands shake, but not from pain.

  Mouse is excited.

  Mouse is afraid.

  11

  When she first spots Andy Gage in front of the Harvest Moon Diner an hour later, Mouse flashes back on a photograph of her father. Not the solemn honeymoon photograph that brooded over her mother’s dining table, but another, more congenial portrait that sat on the fireplace mantel in her grandmother’s house.

  The mantelpiece photo was taken on the morning after her father’s high school prom. Morgan Driver and his friends had gone out cruising after the last dance, and ended up crashing their car into a ditch. Though no one was seriously hurt, they were far enough out in the countryside that it took them the rest of the night to get back to town. Around dawn, Mouse’s father’s date had snapped the picture: Morgan Driver, walking backwards along the side of the road, thumb outstretched to flag down a passing car. He had his jacket slung over his shoulder; his black tie hung loose around his collar, and his shirt was untucked. An unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and he was smiling, despite a nasty-looking gash above his left eye.

  This photograph no longer exists. Mouse’s mother burned it, along with several scrapbooks’ worth of other photographs, shortly after Grandma Driver’s death. Those pictures were undignified, she said when Mouse asked her why. By this she meant that the pictures did not fit the image of her husband that she wanted to perpetuate—like Grandma Driver’s stories, they seemed to refer to a different person altogether, a Morgan Driver who smoked, and drank, and told dirty jokes, and, when he was eight, jumped into mud puddles with both feet.