“It's just gross,” the girl said emphatically as she steadied herself against Ginger's shoulder and slipped off her mother's backless high heels.
They continued walking along the soft shoulder and she got quiet for a while, then started asking Ginger questions about Ted. How long had he had the scar and why had he shot himself in the face? Ginger said it'd been nearly a year now and that she wasn't sure why he did it, probably just to see what it felt like. The girl said wasn't love a funny thing, horrible and wonderful all at once, like her parents—they'd made the cutest couple but they had to break up because they never agreed on anything. Ginger looked down and saw that the girl's toes trapped in the nylon panty hose looked like the delicate hoofs of a deer. She told Ginger about the boy she liked from school, how he was teaching his dog hand signals and that by using the computers at school he could activate the fire alarms any time he wanted. He stole CDs for her at the mall. The only bad thing was that she'd noticed particles of wax suspended in his ears. Once they made out at a boy / girl party, but she still wasn't sure if he liked her because they didn't really have a choice—everybody paired up on the couch or chairs or laid out over the rug.
Ginger half listened. They were nearly home now and the fast-food restaurants were coming up, each set on its rectangle of striped asphalt, bold signs advertising Coke and burger combinations, happy kid meals, two-for-one fries. Ginger thought she saw a cat jump up on the Dumpster in back of Burger King. But the animal couldn't be a cat; it had coarse, furred hind quarters and thick nailed hoofs.
“What's the matter?” the girl asked.
“Let's just keep going,” Ginger said.
The mall came into sight, lit up like a blank movie screen, the loading doors glimmering in weird green light. The girl sensed Ginger's apprehension and, in cockeyed solidarity, told about a creep in her neighborhood. “Once, a long time ago,” she started, “a girl was selling candy for her school and she rang his doorbell. He answered the door with his penis hanging out.”
“Let's just be quiet for awhile,” Ginger snapped. “Can we do that?”
Twelve: SANDY
As the principal made his morning announcements, castigating the students about the home-economics teacher's stolen purse and the rampant food fights in the cafeteria, the unicorn snuck by the school secretary and slipped into his office. Rainbows emanated from the crystal horn, so potent in color that they intoxicated the fat principal, made him drop his donut mid-sentence and fall forward onto his page of notes.
“I have some sad news to tell you all.” The unicorn took the antiquated microphone from the principal's clenched fist. “Carl Levitt shot himself while cleaning his gun yesterday afternoon and Sally Dyers died last night of the leukemia that has kept her bedridden for so many months. It may seem cruel,” the unicorn said, “but eventually everyone has to make the transition from animal to mineral.”
The troll nodded emphatically. He wore a black beret today, cat fur stuck to the wool. He sat on the edge of the mattress holding her hand and said, “There used to be a real nice girl who stayed in this room named Sandy Patrick.” His glasses reflected a patch of her dirty T-shirt and a slender white arm. She braced herself by arching her back and cataloging her brother's features and the way her furniture was arranged in her bedroom, but these were loose footholds on a slippery slope. Memories wore dangerously thin; like a notebook left out in the rain, letters ran together, geometry proofs smudged, only an occasional configuration reminding her of the freckles on her mother's collarbone or the time her class went to the flower show and she'd watched a tiny Japanese lady in a red silk jacket arrange orchids in a way her teacher called sublime.
The troll said “like a big girl” she could eat with him at the kitchen table tonight. He was making Mediterranean spaghetti with black olives and capers and she smelled the onions turning translucent like chips of ice, the garlic moving around the house like a bully. The food activated a sideshow in her stomach. The fat lady laughed deeply and the flame swallower, a Latin-looking man with a singed mustache and a red silk shirt, gave her a knowing look. The girl in the silver leotard balanced on the high bar, swinging gracefully this way and that.
In a spirit of festivity he left the door to her room open so she could listen to him cooking and the TV tuned to QVC. A retired lady called and said the teddy bear she bought looked so cute on her bedspread and how, since her hip replacement, QVC kept her company day and night. Sandy smelled the browning sausages and heard the troll sing one of his stupid songs. One little sausage sizzling in a pan. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Bam!
She imagined herself swimming up from the bottom of the pot, careful to avoid chunks of garlic and bits of basil leaf, climbing up on a sausage log, wringing olive oil from her hair and lying out in the warm range light. The butterfly brushed his powdery wings against her cheek in a showy if insincere butterfly kiss. His hands were folded and his eyes wet.
“Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Rodkey of San Antonio, Texas, waved to her father, then jumped into her boyfriend's pickup truck,” the butterfly began, ignoring her sour facial expression. Like the bear before her, she wanted to let the butterfly know to keep it short. “As the twosome headed to school, danger was the furthest thing from their minds. But as her boyfriend rounded a steep curve, the truck gained a will of its own and skidded off the road. The truck flipped, trapping her beneath its crushing weight. This is it, I'm going to die, Jennifer thought in terror as her eyes got blurry and she passed out. Her boyfriend, John, crawled from the wreckage, but Jennifer was not breathing and had no pulse. She can't die, not here, not now, he thought to himself. He gripped the edge of the roof and lifted the one-ton truck off the ground. A second later Jennifer drew breath and cried out. ‘Everything's okay now, sweetie,’ John said, holding the truck up until the emergency crew pulled her out.”
The butterfly closed his wings dramatically and bowed his tiny head. “Can I tell you one more?” he asked, rushing into his own moment of silence. “About the lady in New York City who survived a subway collision, or my best one about the teenaged drug dealer who planted a dahlia bed in an abandoned, trash-filled lot.” Before Sandy could dissuade him, the troll's footsteps frightened the butterfly and sent him flapping into the dark corner where the bear, the unicorn, and her little brother all waited, opaque as ghosts and just as helpful.
Mattress springs shifted, crunched, and the troll knelt next to her, all the time whispering his strange prayer. God help me for I have sinned and I do not know the difference between water and wine and I am an on person trying to be real God help me. . . . The bat flapped its wings fiercely against the cave wall, the rat just behind him, rapacious and noisy in the garbage. The troll choked monosyllables from his clenched throat, using his black magic to go back, turning himself into a sea lamprey, a mollusk, a carnivorous plant that loved flesh and bled curdled cream.
It was long after midnight before she found herself staring at the candlelight wavering over the carefully set kitchen table. The troll poured a little more wine into her teacup as she examined her plate of spaghetti, saw the black olives and tiny green capers, but there were also what looked like cat's-eye marbles, limp crickets, and furry spiders’ legs floating like junk in the tomato sauce.
“The girl that used to be here was an ugly duckling,” the troll said, “afraid of everything, always worried.” He waved his hand, “But she's long gone now.”
Sandy flayed tendrils of consciousness around her mother's favorite dress, sunset pink silk with a scalloped neckline, and the citrus scent of her father's shaving cream. When these didn't work, she dug her fingernails into the skin of her forearm, but even pain was ineffective in connecting her former life to this one.
The troll wore a velvet bow tie, his eyes magnified by his glasses, teeth like bits of charred wood. He stared at her and asked why she wasn't eating.
“I'm not hungry,” she said, looking at what must be a mouse's pink tail curled in with the spaghe
tti noodles.
“That's absurd,” he said. “You haven't eaten in two weeks.”
“My stomach has shrunk to the size of a kidney bean.”
He smiled. “No matter, soon all this will be yours,” the troll said, motioning to the sink full of dishes, his love letter spread out over the Formica.
QVC sold plastic taco stands and queen-size cabana sets. His anxious attention exhausted her and she wanted to go back to her bed.
“It's perfectly natural for a girl to watch her figure,” he said, covering her free hand with his own long-fingernailed one and using the other to lift her chin up. Unshored eyes and the swaying candle's flame reflected in his lenses and she smiled at him as convincingly as she could.
Thirteen: GINGER
“Looks like creepy man has a date,” the girl whispered as they squatted on the cement front porch and peered into the big bay window. All the houses were dark except the dandelion of muted light in the window of this split-level. Ginger watched the old man, dressed like Klass in bow tie and plaid vest, pour beer from a beaded can of Budweiser into a teacup. A white candle dripped liquid wax over a green wine bottle. The man was talking animatedly, tipping his chin down as if listening intently, then throwing his head back and laughing. Though she couldn't see the sides of the table, Ginger knew this was a lonely heart's dinner, or like the tea parties she'd had as a child, arranging dolls in chairs, setting a table of tiny ceramic cups and saucers and making polite, one-sided conversation about the weather and the price of limes.
Though the man was clearly disturbed and there was no excuse for leaving your penis out ever, Ginger felt sympathy for the old guy. The way he dressed reminded her of her father's vestments, old-fashioned and slightly seedy, and she realized that the new church members connected her father's antiquated robes to something gothic and dangerous. Ginger's minister's-daughter mechanism churned, turning the man's perverted past into pity. He'd never been loved enough.
“What do you think he's saying?” Ginger whispered.
“Something creepy,” the girl hissed back, “impressing his date with his knowledge of pornography or his love of small animals.” At first thrilled to see the old man so dissolute, the girl's grudge no longer gave her pleasure and she was getting bored, glancing up the block at her own dark house.
“Let's goooo!” she said loudly. And almost simultaneously they heard a thud, saw that the man had bolted up so fast that his chair fell back behind him. His face quivered, underlit by the candle's flame. The girl screamed and ran across the front yard. Without moving his eyes from the window, Ginger watched the man extend a long-fingernailed hand and extinguish the flame between thumb and forefinger. Ginger turned toward the street but hesitated.
“Come on,” the girl screamed from where she'd paused at the end of the driveway. “Are you crazy?”
Ginger heard the man's footsteps crossing the living room and she bolted up the driveway and joined the girl by the mailbox. They ran full speed over the sparkly asphalt. The girl, young enough to still enjoy being chased, shook her hair out and laughed as they beat back driveways. The road tilted up toward the moon, hanging like a gypsy's earring among pinpricks of light. Blood beat against her temple and the intense effort of her legs made Ginger feel light-headed, as if her body flew weightless down the block. She felt more guilt than fear, remembering the night she'd gone with Ted and Steve to the state-subsidized condo complex. Steve made her ring the first doorbell; then they'd all hid behind the boxwood bushes. A middle-aged man came out, bald head surrounded with black fringe wearing a pair of nylon pants and a white dress shirt. His face was grayish, his eyelids so sunken Ginger figured he hadn't slept in days. “Who's there?” the man asked, flaying his open hand out as if to test the temperature of the air, and Ginger realized he was blind.
The girl led her across the yellow grass, up the front steps, where gasping and giddy she pulled a rabbit's-foot key chain out of her raincoat pocket and fumbled with the lock. Ginger glanced back. The man hadn't left his house, though she saw his silhouette behind the curtains, one keen eye in the material's slit watching as the front door swung wide and they rushed inside the house.
“Would you care for a ride?” Mulhoffer offered through the window of his paused Cadillac. “Lucky for you I was late at the factory.”
Ginger hung back by the guardrail. After checking all the window locks and helping the girl wedge a broom handle in the track of the basement sliding glass doors, she was making her way home along the highway.
“I enjoy walking,” Ginger said, “but thanks anyway.”
“It's one o’clock in the morning,” Mulhoffer said, annoyed. “Get in.”
Ginger looked across the road at the deserted mall parking lot; there was no way around it. She pulled open the heavy car door and slid onto Mulhoffer's deluxe leather upholstery, sat so close to the window she felt the cold air coming off the glass. Mulhoffer smelled of wood chips and industrial-strength glue, a stack of his company's furniture catalogues beside him. A cross hung down from the Cadillac rearview mirror, and he had rolls of quarters piled in the spotless ashtray.
“How are you?” he asked formally as he accelerated up the highway. They passed under the streetlight into darkness and then back again into the light.
“Fine.” Ginger glanced at Mulhoffer. His jaw clicked and he cleared his throat. She felt herself trembling. As a little girl she'd put books inside her underwear before getting spanked, and in the same spirit now she tried to build up an exoskeleton that would make anything Mulhoffer said easier to take.
He obviously disapproved of her roaming the highway. He disapproved of her low-life boyfriend and her lack of respectable girlfriends. As a minister's daughter she was expected to act like a lady. Even her father was less concerned with the authenticity of her religious sentiment than with the appearance of propriety. And though her father made less than a shoe salesman, much effort was spent in grooming her with Latin and ballet lessons. She was encouraged to socialize with doctors’ daughters and to date lawyers’ sons. Her father read chapters of Jane Austen to her before bed and her mother's highest compliment was that Ginger looked like a member of that horsey set. She had grown up with the presumption that the circumstances of need under which the family existed were in-appropriate to its quality. She had been taught by her mother to look forward to some betterment of this condition. But her mother's long illness changed all that, cracked and splintered the varnish her parents worked so hard to apply, and Ginger realized she had to give up her phony friends, her intellectual pretensions, and trade her white gloves for bread.
“You know,” Mulhoffer said, “I don't think you're a bad kid. In fact, I think you're a pretty serious gal and that you've probably taken the words of Jesus a little too seriously.” He used the same gentle and instructive tone he employed when flirting with his secretary. “You know that if Jesus came down today he wouldn't say the same sort of things he said back then. No,” he slowly shook his head, “Jesus wouldn't want us to give away all our possessions, ‘that's impractical. If Jesus came down today he'd be a big fan of technology. Heck, I think he'd enjoy a little TV. Let's face it, life is usually a pretty raw deal and good entertainment is as close to heaven as most people are going to get here on earth.” Mulhoffer put the car on cruise control and sank back into his sheepskin-covered seat.
“That's why I manufacture the most comfortable chairs and sofas in the world. I don't care that they look like dead elephants. As long as when a man comes home, he can plop down in my chair and flip on the old Technicolor dream machine.”
Ginger snorted.
“You don't watch much television, I take it,” Mulhoffer said ruefully.
“No,” Ginger said, “I can't stand it much.”
“That's too bad,” Mulhoffer said, shaking his head. “I've noticed at the factory the fellows who don't enjoy a little TV are always the ones making trouble.”
Ginger smiled.
“You think it's funny
?” Mulhoffer asked, his voice veined with anger. “Your attitude, young lady, is disturbing. As a representative of the Lord you should have more dignity. You need to shepherd those around you to higher standards. Christianity is evolving. Times are changing. These days people want entertainment. The new members still have mud on their shoes and they've brought their creek-bank mentality with them. They may have gone to college, but they've just come to town and they want to see the same thing they always came to town to see—a good show.”
“So what are you trying to say?”
“That we don't need your father explicating theological passages or exploring his own mystical connection to evil. His sermons are off base. Religion has more to do with personal well-being now. That's why telemarketing is so important to our cause. We need to find out what our community needs. Aerobics classes for the ladies, basketball leagues for the men. We need to lure people to us by offering them services, like baby-sitting and marriage counseling. It's like the visiting pastor said to me after the service last week: Faith is a forward-moving phenomenon. It challenges us to press the very edges of innovation.”
“How do you expect to bankroll all this?”
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