Marty gripped April’s biceps firmly with his thumbs and she struggled against him.
“You’re gonna let her talk to me like that?”
“No, babe, but you need to settle. She’s just a kid. Geez Almighty.”
April was in her highest heels, which put her at exactly eye level with Marty. She was trembling with indignation, radiantly angry. “It’s me or the Mouse, Marty. Your choice.”
“Shush now.”
“I won’t have a little liar insulting me like that in my house.”
“She’s only here for a few more weeks is all, anyhow.” Marty stroked her arms shoulder to wrist without loosening his grasp.
April wiggled free and stepped back from him. She sniffed and shrugged coolly. “If she’s not on a bus back to Buffalo tomorrow, I’m outta here, Marty, and I ain’t comin’ back.”
“Geez Almighty.” Marty wiped his fingers over his mouth.
“She’s a liar and a sneak, Marty, I can’t believe you won’t see through it. She’s trying to get between us. She weaseled her way into our bedroom with this monster business, then she snoops through my stuff, lies about it . . .”
Marty took his camouflage hat off and put it right back on. His chest was brown and deflated underneath his white V-neck T-shirt. He glanced over April’s head, out the window.
April grabbed his chin and squared it to her own. “How long I been with you, Marty? How good am I to you? And you’re gonna let someone stay under our roof that talks to me that way? She comes in all cozying up to you, all wanting to be family with you, but nothing’s been the same with us since she came. I’m your family, Marty.”
Marty breathed loud and long through his nose. “It’s a few more weeks is all,” he said. “You know? I haven’t even taught her how to swim yet.”
“A few more weeks, then what?” April scoffed. “You don’t see her for another five years? Or maybe she stays with us for a few weeks next summer, eats us out of house and home again, and disrespects me like she does, then what? Then what, the same thing the next summer?”
Marty’s face was so tired and hollow.
April sighed and ran the back of her middle finger over his cheek. She made her voice sweeter. “Marty, you tried. We tried. It ain’t gonna work. We ain’t cut out for this.”
Marty drove the toe of his tennis shoe hard into the carpet, but he didn’t argue. He closed his eyes and massaged his eye sockets with the heel of his hands. He went to the bathroom and blew his nose into a piece of toilet paper, then went outside to find the Mouse.
That night, April slept at her friend Linda’s house, and the Mouse was gone by the time she came home the next afternoon. The little bedroom was entirely empty. The twin bed was stripped, the lamp with the torn purple shade returned to the living room, the comforter stuffed back into the closet.
April used a falling-apart cardboard box to move her things from the master bedroom back to the little one. She balanced the box on her knee while she loaded it up, and made it into the small room just before the bottom seam gave. She happily unloaded her things into the dresser. It was empty except for a single barrette in the back corner of the bottom drawer.
She ate yogurt from a cup, then poured herself a whiskey.
She decided to try and get Marty cheered up with some company that evening. She didn’t like to see him this way, all mopey and listless. This was for the best, she had to remind herself, and he’d snap out of it before too long. A whiskey or two and he’d remember how good life was before the Mouse ever showed up.
April invited Randall and Denise from across the pond over for dinner. Randall and Denise didn’t have kids either, and they were always a good time. April had prepared a tater tot casserole and bought an angel food cake, along with a carton of Cool Whip and a jar of strawberry syrup. It was Marty’s favorite. She served whiskey sodas in sixteen-ounce Detroit Lions game cups. Denise had brought a six-pack of wine coolers for herself.
She offered one to April, but April could see that she wasn’t too eager to share.
“Love your outfit, April,” Denise said.
“You’ve seen all this before.”
Midway through the meal, Randall leaned away from the table onto the back two legs of his chair, hooking his knees beneath the table’s edge to balance. He wiped his napkin over his black goatee and said, “So did y’all hear about that snakehead?”
“Not at the dinner table, Randall,” Denise said. She turned to April. “This is gross.”
“Snakehead fish,” Randall continued. “Right out here.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, in the direction of the pond. “God-awful things, from Asia, I reckon.”
“What is it now?” April said.
“Nasty suckers,” Randall said. “They get three, four feet long and they’ve got these big teeth. Meat eaters. Go after other fish, frogs, birds, each other, whatever they can find.”
April swallowed hard. The hot casserole in her mouth went down slow and tight in her throat. She looked at Denise, who shuddered to confirm the story. Marty had stopped eating. Denise finished her wine cooler and handed Randall another one from the six-pack at her feet. Randall came crashing forward onto the front legs of his chair and rose to access his back pocket. He pulled out a single loose key and popped the top off her cooler after a few tries.
“Worst part about these snakeheads,” Randall continued, sitting back down, “is they come up outta the water. They can survive on land for days. Move like this.” He swiveled his arm back and forth in a tight slither.
“Randall, please,” Denise said, absently peeling the label off her cooler. “We’re eating.”
“What on earth are they doing in our pond?” April said quietly.
“Who knows,” Randall said. “I wonder if some jackass didn’t bring one in to get rid of the geese or something, keep ‘em from shittin’ all over our lawns. You notice how all them geese disappeared?”
“Mm,” April said.
“Well, who knows. But Jake, you know Jake? He caught one of these snakeheads the other night, and he reckons he’s seen at least two or three more.”
April said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
She glanced sideways at Marty.
He was staring out at the pond.
April cleared her throat and tipped her cup toward her in order to draw a small black bug out the side of her whiskey with her fingertip. She smeared the bug into her thigh.
“Who wants seconds of something?” she said.
“Hey, Marty,” Randall said, “That’s really somethin’, isn’t it, a snakehead fish in our pond. Isn’t that somethin’ else?”
“Yeah,” Marty said softly, still peering out the window.
He wore an expression April had not seen on him before. Something else escaped his lips and April didn’t ask him to repeat it.
She followed his gaze out the window. A few scarlet streaks of daylight remained at the horizon. Cattails shuffled like sleepy dancers in the breeze. A skin of mint-green algae covered the outer edge of the pond, and beyond it the water looked as thick and black as ink.
REAL GOLD
Laura and Shelly were in the same Sunday School class, even though in real school they were two grades apart. They got along fine at church but Shelly didn’t really speak to her at real school, so Laura was surprised to receive an invite to Shelly’s birthday party sleepover in her parents’ church mailbox one Sunday. She hoped it was Shelly’s idea, not her mother’s. The invite had a navy rubber-stamped cupcake on the back seam of the envelope and a small yellow crumb smashed flat onto it. Laura’s mother called Shelly’s mother to RSVP Laura’s “yes” to the birthday party. Laura picked out a lip gloss set for Shelly at Target. She wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in a flashy birthday bag with headphones and roller skates all over the outside.
There were nine girls at the sleepover. Laura was the youngest and the smallest, and the only one with short hair. She’d recently gotten it cut up to her chin after
her favorite girl on television had hers cut that way, but it didn’t sit the same on Laura, whose hair just went high and wild at this length. For the party, she wore half of it pulled up on the top of her head with a little green band. She was hoping it would grow out a lot before school in the fall. Laura was also the only girl there without a proper sleeping bag. Her family didn’t camp, so her mother had sent her with a comforter in a zippered transparent plastic case and said if Laura folded it over twice it would be just like a sleeping bag.
Shelly’s house smelled like Shelly’s clothing always smelled at church and her basement had big squares of wiry blue carpeting laid across the cement floor, a television, and a few beanbag chairs. Beneath the staircase sat a washer-dryer, a few big bags of cat food, a wicker basket of potatoes, a cardboard box full of books crumbling at the spines. The girls laid out their sleeping bags on the carpeted floor of the basement, five of them lined up next to one another across the center of the room and the others perpendicular, at their heads and at their feet. Laura introduced herself to the girls she would be sleeping next to.
Kimberly, on Laura’s left, was friends with Shelly from horse-riding camp, where they were in the same cabin even though they rode different styles. Shelly rode English, Kimberly explained, whereas she rode Western. Kimberly’s horse at camp was a big gray stud horse named Zipper.
Laura had never ridden a horse. “Were you scared the first time?” she asked.
“No,” said Kimberly. “You just get on and the horse pretty much knows what to do. Zipper bucked once, but I didn’t even fall.”
The girl on Laura’s right was a head taller than all the other girls there, and one of her eyebrows was more arched than the other, which gave her a mean look. She had very pretty, blackish eyes. A thick dry-looking line of dark lipstick circled the outside of her lips. She said she was Shelly’s cousin, and Shelly’s next-door neighbor too. Her name was Tracy. She was thirteen years old. Laura asked if she had Shelly’s last name.
“No,” Tracy said, “Because it’s our moms that are sisters. They don’t speak anymore, our moms, but they still let Shelly and me be friends.”
“Are your moms in a fight?” Laura asked.
“Yeah,” Tracy said. “I think it’s something about my dad.” She had silver wraparound sunglasses pushed back over her forehead and she adjusted them. “He’s pretty much outta the picture, my dad, but I think it’s something about him. My dad’s like a professional fisherman,” she continued.
“Yeah?”
“He caught a forty-pound tiger muskie in Lake Superior.”
“Geez oh Pete!” Laura said. She hadn’t a clue what this meant.
Tracy continued to discuss her life. She had a boyfriend from Cheektowaga. He lived right next to the Buffalo International Airport and could hear jets coming and going all night long, she said. Sometimes when he and Tracy were on the phone and a big one came, he would hold his phone out the window so she could hear it too. They were pretty serious for their age, she said. Her boyfriend was fifteen and part Indian. She showed Laura a faraway picture of a guy in a football helmet.
“My granddad played for the Bills,” Tracy said. “So anyway, I’m real into football players.”
Laura complimented Tracy’s boyfriend, then Tracy’s gold bracelet.
Tracy spun the bracelet over her wrist bone. “It’s real gold,” she said. “So how do you know Shelly?”
“We go to the same church.”
Tracy wore a T-shirt knotted at one side so her whole stomach showed. She tightened the knot. “Oh, eff church,” she said.
Laura felt her jaw fall open. She felt like she might want to say that too.
For dinner, Shelly’s mother served sloppy-joe sandwiches and macaroni and cheese from a glass casserole pan. The girls sat on the floor with paper plates. “You can give your scraps to my cat,” Shelly said. She went to the screen door and scooted a cinder block over to prop it open. A little black cat trotted in the door. It had a crust in one of its eyes. It licked sloppy-joe juice from Laura’s plate. Shelly got out a long piece of white elastic with a catnip-filled sack tied around one end. The cat leapt wildly after the toy when Shelly drew it across the floor and made it fly through the air.
Tracy said, “That stupid cat scratched my dog’s nose up.”
“That’s because your stupid dog was snapping at her,” Shelly said.
The girls talked about pets and gym class and television. Kimberly told a story about the pet iguana in her homeroom, how some kid let it crawl up his shoulder and through his hair until it bit his ear. Laura tried to add a few small things to the conversation at sensible times, hoping Shelly would notice how well she was fitting in with the older group, but everything she said got lost or covered up by louder voices. When the girls got onto summer vacations, the places they had gone and all the places they dreamt of visiting, Laura wanted to tell them about the Zen gardens in Japan that she had just learned about in Geography class. They were called the Ryōan-ji gardens, and the picture in her textbook was so beautiful that she had torn it out to keep for herself. Her Geography book was really beat-up anyway; she was certain no one would notice. The photograph showed a glassy black pool filled with orange fish, and a little gray-haired gardener in a kimono. But by the time she thought to offer this to the list of destinations, the other girls were already on to another topic. They talked about their boyfriends. Laura didn’t have a boyfriend yet, none of her friends her age did, but she was starting to think she might be ready by the time school started this fall, depending how much the boys in her class had matured over the summer. Or better yet, she thought, if she and Shelly got to be friends at real school, maybe one of the older boys in Shelly’s class would want to be Laura’s boyfriend.
The birthday cake was marble with Funfetti icing, and Shelly’s trick candles sparked and relit even after she’d blown them out. She got a second wish, and a third, before all the candles were completely dead.
She said, “It’s my birthday so we used paper plates instead of the regular ones, so I don’t have to load the dishwasher. I have to do it every night usually.”
One of the other girls piped up and said, “I have to do that too, then unload it when I get home from school.”
Laura thought hers was just as good as anybody’s, so she said, “I have to vacuum cleaner the whole house every Saturday.” The other girls actually heard her this time, and she found herself suddenly unnerved by the attention of everyone in the room. She couldn’t tell how it was going over. Her voice sounded tiny and peculiar to her own ears.
Tracy said, “I have to do that too. But you should do what I do, if your mom doesn’t pay too close attention: just run the vacuum over the floor so it makes the stripes, but you don’t actually have to sweep.”
“That’s a really good idea,” Laura agreed, and some of the other girls said they were going to start doing that too.
Tracy asked Shelly if she could have a Tylenol. “I’m on my period,” she explained to the group. “Are any of you having periods yet? Probably not.”
When Shelly disappeared to the bathroom to retrieve a Tylenol, Kimberly asked the girls if any of them had played Light as a Feather. “We could do it after dark,” she said. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board. It’s really scary.”
“No it’s not,” Tracy said. “It’s not real. I did it once and we dropped my friend Ashley.”
Kimberly looked down into the carpet. She picked at a single thread, pulling and twisting it until it was scraggly and longer than the others.
Tracy said, “I’ll tell you what’s scary, though, is Bloody Mary. Anybody done that?”
None of the girls had played Bloody Mary.
Tracy picked up her Styrofoam cup and shook the ice. “We’ll play later,” she said. “But don’t say anything about it in front of Linda,” she nodded down the hallway, in the direction of Shelly’s mother. “She does church and she’s really uptight.”
She turned suddenly
to Laura. “You do church too.”
“Just because I have to,” Laura said, her face immediately hot like she’d been caught in a lie.
Shelly returned a few minutes later and someone asked her what birthday presents she’d gotten from her mother.
“A jean jacket,” Shelly said, “and a pair of riding pants and a Baby-Sitter’s Club book set. And now my allowance will be a dollar more. I’m saving for a camera.”
One of the other girls said, “I’m saving for a phone and it’s going to take forever.”
“You guys should do this,” Tracy said, “if you want more allowance. My dad, he lives in Michigan but he sends me an allowance every week, and I says to my dad a while back, because we’re talking about making my allowance more, and I says, because I just learned this in school, ‘How about if we make my allowance one penny a week, and double it every week?’”
The girls thought about this for a little bit.
Tracy said, “My dad even agreed to it and I’m up to two dollars something.” She laughed. “He hasn’t figured it out yet, he’s so funny.”
“Hasn’t figured what out yet?” somebody asked.
“This,” Tracy said, “I’ll show you.”
Tracy went to a kitchen drawer and returned with a piece of Best Western stationary and a short, yellow eraser-less pencil. The girls crowded around Tracy while she wrote out a series of additions and multiplications to demonstrate how quickly the amount got huge. She was going to start getting a whole lot of money from her dad soon.
“See?” Tracy said.
All of the girls were impressed, except for Shelly, who seemed very annoyed. She stood at the window with her cat in her arms. It bit her spaghetti strap over and over again.
Kimberly said, “I’m telling that to my mother tomorrow.”
Laura stared at the paper. She wanted Tracy to keep going and going, to see the numbers go higher and higher and higher, to infinity.
Another Place You've Never Been Page 3