In Zanesville

by Jo Ann Beard

  Otherwise, not much fascinating. A lot of dogs: the clean-faced Jeffy; a white dog with a blue eye named Chief; a black toy poodle named Trinket; our own dog, Tammy, a rat terrier who bites when cornered; and Curly, Old Milly’s thick-shouldered, bowlegged, and unpredictable dog. All the dogs in the neighborhood are tied out, so there’s a lot of ambient barking and animals on their hind legs at the end of chains, staring at back doors. Curly is the only one who never gets to come inside. He’s pumpkin colored with a gnarled head, and he lives in a four-foot dirt circle underneath an apple tree, with a lean-to for cover. Old Milly is the only one who goes near him, feeding him every morning from a rusty cake pan. A few times each winter, if it’s going to get thirty or forty below, she’ll snap a leash on his collar and drag him to the cellar door and push him down there for the night. That’s his entire life, twelve years and counting.

  He lifts his orange face as I go up the back walk, and then settles it back on his paws. Our dog, Tammy, is inside, tethered to the basement door, up on her hind legs watching everyone eat dinner. She runs immediately under the table when I unclip her leash.

  Dinner is fried chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, hot rolls, et cetera. My dad is sober, it looks like. He’s wearing lawn-mowing clothes, listening to my mother tell him about the fire. She stops, chicken leg in hand, when she sees my face. “Now they’ve had you crying?”

  “No,” I say. My older sister, Meg, looks me over briefly and then goes back to her book and her sculpted tower of mashed potatoes. My brother has a full plate but is eating from a bowl of cornflakes and milk. Tammy has stationed herself underneath him so he can pass things down to her—a dinner roll, a glob of potatoes, and a leaf of iceberg lettuce, which she is standing on.

  “You should’ve seen this crew,” my mother tells my dad. “Kids running loose everywhere. Boy, she must be a real doll, that woman.”

  “Uh-oh,” he says.

  My dad is a door-to-door siding salesman. He is tall and tanned, with the haunted brown eyes of someone who does something terrible for a living. Some days he can’t even bring himself to leave the house, but sits at the kitchen table clearing his throat and making notes on a clipboard that he keeps pushing back and forth, lining it up with different edges of the table.

  “Don’t ever be afraid to call the fire department,” my father says to me. “It’s those guys’ job, they don’t mind.”

  “Firemen can do kung fu,” my brother, Raymond, says. He is seven and has a light brown forelock and the same warm, shattered eyes as my father.

  “That older girl was a snot,” my mother continues, reaching behind her to the cluttered counter to take a drag off a cigarette. “And the baby looked half-anemic.”

  The front of my T-shirt is stretched out from Miles gripping it. I’m childless now, and unemployed.

  My mother looks at me, cigarette held above her head with the elbow cupped in one hand. “I’ll bet you ten bucks they didn’t even bother disciplining that kid, did they?” She exhales and the top third of the room swirls with smoke.

  “Did they?” she asks again.

  After the dishes, I’m heading over to Felicia’s to stay overnight; we’re going to make a pan of fudge and try to figure out how to get our clothes out of hock. I press my spoon into a bowl of red Jell-O, carving out a big shimmering piece for myself.

  “That’s fine, but it isn’t your whole dinner,” my mother says.

  I’ve had other bad babysitting experiences, once locking a scratching girl in a bathroom, once eating five jars of blueberry buckle baby food and claiming to the parents that their baby ate it, and for several months being the Saturday night babysitter for a four-year-old named Daniel who couldn’t move or talk—a large, beautiful child with creamy white skin and black hair. Before they went out for the evening, his parents, Trent and Lisa, would carry him out and place him on a stack of quilts on the floor in the living room so he could stare at the ceiling while I watched TV. I did have to change his diaper, which was disorienting at first because of how big he was, but eventually it was just the same as changing a baby—even easier, because he never struggled at all, just watched me with his wide, damp eyes.

  Anyone would have thought it was the perfect job, but it began to get to me, the way his slim, pretty mother, who looked exactly like Daniel except for her lipstick, would hug him and arrange his legs on the quilt, then the long evenings of television shows, broken only by me kneeling next to him on the floor, checking for drafts and dabbing his mouth with the soft bib that was snapped to his collar. They bought special food for me, each week something different—boxes of Ding Dongs, bags of corn chips, cookies—and would send what I didn’t eat home with me. They paid me more than anyone ever had. “Daniel just loves you,” Lisa would say insistently, as I stared uncertainly at the cash.

  After a few months I began to feel a terrible skin-prickling loneliness as soon as they left, in the shadowy house with nothing but a bowl of Bugles and the champagne music of Lawrence Welk. I was unable to quit and needed my mother to do it for me, but she wouldn’t. It was just the idea of hurting Lisa’s feelings—of her thinking I didn’t love Daniel as much as he loved me—and the thought of her there every day, all day, in her sneakers and apron, hair tied in a bandanna. The last time I babysat for them, I got so lonely and upset that I called home so my mother could hear how unraveled I had become, but my parents were at the tavern—it was a Saturday night—and so my sister walked over in the dark and kept me company. We sat eating caramel corn out of a bucket-size tin until the parents’ headlights swept across the ceiling, at which point Meg got up and put her shoes on, leaving through the front as they were coming in the back. We passed her when Trent drove me home a few minutes later, a tall girl in a white blouse, walking along in the dark.

  “At least these ones weren’t retarded,” Meg says now, of the Kozak kids, dumping silverware into the rack and spraying it, and me, with scalding water. Meg’s style of dishwashing is all sleight of hand—swishing, spraying, and summoning clouds of steam to confuse my mother.

  “The dad is,” I tell her. That’s all I’m willing to say. She can take my own arm and beat me with it, but right now she’s in neutral mode, which is where she’ll remain until her girlfriend arrives to spend the night, at which point she’ll switch over into mean.

  I actually like her friend, Edwina, a girl with an extraordinarily long face and shiny, palomino blond hair. Grown-ups call her Edwina, Meg and her other girlfriends call her Whinny, and everyone else calls her Mister Ed. Although my sister has a number of questionable friends, Mister Ed isn’t one of them. She rarely tortures younger kids even though younger kids have been known to torture her.

  “How’s it hanging?” she asks Meg upon arrival.

  “It’s hanging down,” my sister admits.

  “How’s it hungigungadin?” I say inanely, just to insert myself in the conversation.

  Meg reaches over, takes my wrist with both wet hands, and twists the skin in two different directions. Mister Ed diplomatically looks away as I struggle silently against the pain and then give up and holler out.

  “Company will go home if you can’t get along in there,” my mother calls from the dining room.

  I go to the doorway. “I’m sleeping over at Felicia’s,” I tell her.

  “You don’t tell me what you’re doing, you ask,” she says, without looking up from her sewing. She’s remaking a wool shift that I made last winter in sewing class.

  “Can I sleep over at Felicia’s?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, holding up the dress, which she has cut down and removed the darts from. “See? I could have told her: you needed darts like a hole in the head.” She believes the home-ec teacher at our junior high to be incompetent. Besides the sleeveless shift, we also learned something called huck toweling, which is a made-up name for a cross-stitch design on a dish towel, and how to make a reversible three-cornered scarf. The shift my mother is working on actually has a matching
scarf made out of wool, which gave me a rash under the chin.

  “I’m leaving now,” I tell her.

  Right at the halfway point, Felicia materializes out of the darkness.

  “I thought I was coming to your house,” she says.

  “No, I’m coming to yours,” I tell her. From where we’re standing—on a sidewalk shielded by a hedge—we can see right into the Casper house, where another kid I went to elementary school with lives. A boy with the ruinous name Milton, and a buzz cut to go along with it. Inside the Casper living room, a man is sitting on the sofa folding laundry.

  “What did your mother make for dinner?” Felicia asks. “My mother made french fries out of a bag.”

  Her mother makes the food I like and my mother makes the food she likes. All the extra fried chicken Raymond didn’t eat and I didn’t eat is back there, sitting on the counter, waiting for my dad to get hungry again. Nevertheless, we can’t go back to my house because there are too many people over there. We have to sleep on the living room floor when Meg has a guest, and last time we did that was in the spring, and Felicia fell all the way down the stairs after a trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She cracked her tailbone, had to be taken to the emergency room, and was then made to carry around what looked like a foam rubber toilet seat for a month. At school she shoved it in her locker first thing in the morning and winced her way up and down the halls, sitting on the side of her hip in class and crying in the bathroom. Only at home and at my house would she use the rubber donut, which made a discouraged sighing noise when sat upon.

  She’s fully recovered now, able to slide down the mossy terrace in a yard patrolled by a bitten-up cat named Zero. We cross the street and go into her house, the bottom half of a rambling duplex. Felicia’s father works the night shift, but her mother is here, still in the white optometrist’s dress, lying on the sofa with her shoes off and a cool cloth across her eyes.

  “Girls?” she calls out. “Girls? Is somebody there?”

  Felicia crosses the room silently and leans over her mother’s still form. When Phyllis calls out again, she says, WHAT? scaring the washcloth right off her mother’s face.

  “Hi there, honey,” Phyllis says to me. She gets up on one elbow. “I’m going to tell you like I told Flea: call the fire department if a fire starts in any house, I don’t care whose.”

  “We did,” I say.

  “Well, you did and you didn’t,” Phyllis says firmly. She settles back onto the couch and drapes the cloth again. “Get yourself some french fries if you’re hungry.”

  “We’re sleeping in the camper,” Felicia tells her. She puts the afghan across Phyllis’s feet and tucks it in. She looks at me and pretends to punch the feet. I pretend to poke her mother’s eyes out.

  “What are you laughing about?” Phyllis asks. “And I will look out there at eleven o’clock and if I see a light on, you’re coming in here to sleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “You won’t see a light on.”

  * * *

  The camper is a dented metal box on wheels that cranks open and pops out into a half trailer, half tent, with canvas walls, zippered screens, a table nook, a foot of damp carpeting, and a tiny efficiency kitchen. We sleep in the popped-out ends, on wide bunks covered with foam pads, outfitted with sleeping bags and pillows that smell like rain.

  We get the lantern lit and zip everything up so nobody can see inside, and then we creep out, down the pitch-dark alley to an abandoned garage, cobwebby and collapsing, where our kittens live. There are three of them—a sick one, a friendly one, and a wild one. I don’t even know why we went in there in the first place, just looking to see what they had, and the friendly kitten came running up to us. We’ve been feeding them and playing with them all summer with no one finding out, and we hope to keep it that way.

  The wild one is named Ruffles; it has long spiky fur and has to be caught using an old T-shirt. The sick one is mine, a rickety little tortoiseshell named Freckles who has something wrong with his fur. The friendly one is Felicia’s, pure shiny black with an intelligent, trustworthy face. We named him Blacky Strout, after a man running for sheriff, whose name and face are on billboards all over town. Once we catch Ruffles and get him tied into the T-shirt, the other two are easy; when they’re released inside the camper they go crazy for a while, clawing their way up onto the benches and bunks, attacking our feet.

  “Yours is drooling,” Felicia says.

  It’s true, there’s more foam on him than usual. He doesn’t seem to notice, though, and sits purring on my lap for a few minutes, running his claws reflexively in and out as I pet him. I have an affinity for anything that has peeled-off fur or looks terminal, or, for that matter, for anything that seems to notice me, which this kitten does. When he finally hops down, he turns his freckled face to look up at me. His nose and the rims of his eyes are a tender, sore-looking pink.

  “He looks a little bit like the Rebabbit,” I tell Felicia. This was her sister’s former pet rabbit, which had black-and-white fur and pale pink features. About a year ago the Rebabbit hopped away while we had it out of the cage, went under a series of sticker bushes, and was never heard from again. For a while we’d been able to see it in there, pretending to eat grass, whiskers trembling, crouched over its long velvety paws, waiting to be pounced on either by us or by something worse. Every time we tried to reach it, we got scratched by thorns and the rabbit took a further hop, until eventually all we could glimpse was a disappearing blur of white. The stickers went on for some ways and then blended into the tangle of a dense neighborhood ravine. In there were festering communities of garter snakes, looped over fallen logs, draped haphazardly along the reeds, et cetera. We wouldn’t go down there if it were our own rabbit.

  Felicia’s younger sister, Stephanie, had gone predictably berserk. “He was mine and they let him loose!” she sobbed determinedly, assessing us from behind her fogged glasses, strands of blond hair stuck to her face.

  You’d never have guessed Stephanie had not paid one bit of attention to this rabbit and left him moldering in his cage for days at a time, a rubbery uneaten celery stalk poked through the mesh.

  Stephanie finally threw a handful of marbles at us, chipping a mirror, and was carted away to the pet store, where she was given the first in a series of doomed goldfish, which suited her much better—the frenzied sprinkling, the eager nibbling, the pomp and circumstance of the funerals.

  “What if he’s dying?” Felicia says. She holds her toes still as Freckles sniffs at them, his sides heaving back and forth. He produces a wet sneeze and then sits down to clean himself. In the middle of it, he closes his eyes and just sits motionless.

  “Uh-oh,” Felicia says.

  We stare at him together, willing him to perk up. Eventually he opens his eyes again and settles into a catlike crouch, purring and watching us watch him. I feel such an immense and sickening love for him that I panic and have to get out of the camper.

  “Food,” I say.

  Felicia unsnaps the window, peers at the house, and snaps it back up again. We get our berry cups, pour more milk in the kittens’ saucer, and tiptoe forth. We forgot shoes, so we have to sneak into the house and get them, then sneak back out again. Phyllis is in the same spot, sound asleep on her side, the washcloth soaking into the blue stuffed-animal fur of the sofa. There’s a record player going behind Stephanie’s closed door, an off-key voice singing along.

  The mulberry patch is four blocks away, in the perfect nighttime yard of some people we’ve never seen. A neat house, a span of swept patio, a flower garden with a six-inch fence around it, and the mulberry bushes hulking in a black patch of shadow. We crouch on either side of the laden bushes, Felicia in the yard, me in the alley, filling our tin cups silently. Recently we’ve seen a movie about little English boys who steal out of necessity, and ever since then we’ve felt better about taking people’s fruits and vegetables.

  “Plee suh,” Felicia says, thrusting her cup through the
branches at me, “may oy hev samoa?”

  By the time we’re done, both of us are purple. We go through alleys to get home, eating berries and listening for cars, stopping only once, at the end of Felicia’s block, at the house of a parochial school teenager who has no curtains in his bedroom and does strange things that can be viewed from the street. So far we’ve seen him hanging from a bar in his underwear, hauling himself up and down in a flurry of desperate chin-ups; we’ve seen him with a nylon stocking on his bushy hair, pressing it flat; we’ve seen him doing his homework, tugging at his earlobes and probing gingerly inside a nostril with the point of his pencil; we’ve seen him talking on a telephone, lying on his stomach across a bed with one leg bent coyly, its sock foot up in the air. It was a girl’s pose, actually, although when he hung up he plunged around the room for a while with a Nerf ball jammed in his fist, bobbing back and forth and making leaps. Eventually he stopped and stood there listening, then opened his mouth and yelled something back. Tonight, the whole house is dark.

  “Woy, ee ain owm,” I say.

  We walk along.

  “Ay,” Felicia says. “Way fugoat to mike the fudge. Fudge. Fudge.” She thinks about it and tries again. “Fudge.” It can’t be said with a British accent.

  “Ellow, ow abowt some fudge?” I try. It’s true, they must call it something else in England.

  Back at the camper, the kittens have worn themselves out and are in their various states of repose—hiding, dozing, or trembling. At the table sits Felicia’s sister, a small smug apparition in shorty pajamas and kneesocks.

  “You’re in for it,” Stephanie says quickly. “In for it. Dead. You’ve got kittens that you aren’t supposed to.” She points to Freckles. “That one’s sick, and you’re probably catching it.” She nods, up and down, and waits. “Its eyes are sticking shut,” she adds.