Snap

by Alison McGhee

  Snap, went the yellow rubber band.

  And then the door opened and Jill was there. She stood in the doorway. In that moment, looking at her as she stood in the doorway, I saw how shy Jill was. When you’re a kid you don’t often think of grownups as shy. Jill pointed to the door and inclined her head, and I understood that Sally and I were to go with her. Where to? I didn’t ask.

  We crammed into Jill’s car, Jill at the wheel, Sally next to her, me next to Sally. We made our way up to Queen of the Frosties. It was a late-summer day, and the sky was absolutely blue, and the foothills were the dark green they are just before the orange and the red and the gold.

  I had never been to Queen of the Frosties with Sally or Jill. Sometimes, when he’s not on the road, my father takes me up there on Saturday morning and we sit in a booth together, me next to my father, and his friends sitting across from us. I had never sat at the counter before.

  But I did on this day, on a twirlable stool next to Sally. First I started twirling, and then she did. When two people sit next to each other on stools that twirl, each pushing off, pushing off, pushing off, the danger of catching knees and elbows midtwirl is great. It adds to the excitement.

  Bang!

  That would be me and Sally colliding. You twirl and twirl and twirl, the diner flashing by, a merry-go-round gone nuts. Your brain scrambles. The world spins itself into a not-world. There’s a flash of red, a flash of chrome, a flash of dooropening-doorshutting-plateofeggsonthe-counter-Sophiethemorningwaitresspouringcoffee-rowofphotosclippedabovethegrilland bang!

  You’re on your behind on the linoleum.

  Sally started to laugh the way she laughs, her head going up and down, her long braids trembling against her back. I had not seen her laugh in so long.

  Jill and Sophie, the morning waitress, looked down at us on the floor. Dinerworld spun around me, because my brain hadn’t caught up to the fact that I was no longer twirling.

  Sally and I hauled ourselves back up onto our stools. Our breakfasts were there in front of us.

  Me: the 222 special.

  1. Two scrambled eggs.

  2. Two pancakes.

  3. Two pieces of bacon.

  Price: $2.22.

  Sally: the farmer’s breakfast.

  1. A cast-iron pan with hash browns at the bottom.

  2. Corned beef hash on top of the hash browns.

  3. Two fried eggs on top of the corned beef hash.

  4. Cheese melted on top of everything.

  Price: $3.60.

  A man two seats down from Jill: blueberry pancakes. If you order blueberry pancakes at Queen of the Frosties, you get a plate with three giant blue circles on it. They mix the blueberries into the pancake batter at the outset, rather than ladling a spoonful onto the pancakes when the pancakes are on the grill, so everything turns blue. The yellow lump on top is butter, scooped with an ice-cream scoop out of a big butter pail. That’s how they do it at Queen of the Frosties. Price: $3.10.

  Jill: coffee. Black coffee. Price: on the house, because Sophie is her friend.

  That’s exactly what Sophie said: “On the house, Miss Jill, because you are my friend.” Sophie has the same color hair as Sally, but Sophie’s hair is straight. Not a curl or even the hint of a wave in Sophie’s hair. And there’s a teeny bit of gray even though Sophie is young, younger even than Jill. Sophie doesn’t seem to care that Jill doesn’t talk.

  When we were halfway through our breakfast and Jill was on her second cup of coffee, Sophie handed Sally and me a paper bag.

  “Here,” she said. “My treat. Maybe you can use them down at your hut when you go camping.”

  Sophie knows how much I love the hen-and-rooster salt and pepper shakers at Queen of the Frosties, the salt hen, the pepper rooster. You could say I covet them. When I go to the Queen with my father, Sophie sometimes gives me the job of refilling the salt shakers while he talks with his friends. You always put in a few grains of rice when you refill a salt shaker. That’s so the salt doesn’t clump together.

  In the bag was a new pair, with the price tag still on them. Queen of the Frosties salt and pepper shakers are popular. The Queen is right on Route 12, so it gets a lot of trucker traffic, a lot of tourists heading up north into the Adirondacks. The shakers were disappearing, so the Queen ordered a ton and started selling them. “Buy Yourself a Bit of Adirondack Folklore,” the sign says.

  “Thank you, Sophie,” I said. That was all I said. Sophie isn’t the kind of person you gush around. “Sophie is a girl not given to melodrama,” I remembered Willie saying once about her.

  Sally was eating her way through layer after layer of her farmer’s breakfast. She didn’t excavate all the layers in a single forkful. She ate her way down: first the cheese, then the eggs, then the corned beef hash, then the hash browns.

  “You always get Sunday off?”

  That was Sophie talking to Jill while we sat on our stools and ate our breakfasts. Jill nodded.

  “Me, I’m thinking of asking for every Sunday off. Think of it, every Saturday night and the whole day Sunday too.”

  Jill nodded again.

  “How’s your mom?” Sophie said.

  Jill looked away, down the counter. Sophie studied her.

  I watched them, the grownups, semi-grownups because they seemed so young — Jill in a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, Sophie in her Queen of the Frosties T-shirt and her jeans and her white sneakers — Sophie talking in her quiet voice to Jill, Jill nodding or shaking her head, while I ate my way down to the china on my plate and Sally’s fork started scraping against the cast iron of her skillet. I pictured Willie in her bed at Sally’s house. Did she know it was a Sunday morning, and did she wish she could get up and walk down Route 274 to Jewell’s and come back with a white waxed paper bag filled with sprinkle doughnuts?

  “Willie has good days, and she has bad days,” my mother said when I asked.

  On the good days, Willie walked down to Fraser Road and back with her pail. Willie’s a cattail picker. She especially likes the ones that grow in the swamp on either side of 274 just before it intersects with Fraser Road. To me, cattails have always looked like brown velvet hot dogs.

  Jill dropped us off at Sally’s house after the diner. Willie was sitting at the kitchen table. She smiled when we came in. Sally started toward her and then stopped. I knew, I could feel in my own skin, how much Sally wanted to sit on Willie’s lap. But she didn’t.

  “How’s the hovel these days, girls?” Willie said. “Still holding?”

  Sally said nothing.

  “Still holding,” I said.

  “Then, isn’t it about time you girls went camping?” Willie said.

  I looked down at the table. The red-and-white-checked tablecloth was on. Willie must have spread it when she got up. Sally said nothing. I traced one of the red checks.

  “I decree that you, Sally Wilmarth Hobart, and you, Edwina Stiles Beckey, shall go camping at the Cabin next weekend,” Willie said.

  We were silent. Willie looked from Sally to me and back. She looked tired. You could see it in her eyes, and in the lines around her mouth, which I had never noticed before.

  “Do you want me to do your hair, Sally?” Willie said.

  Sally shook her head. Her hair was loose, floating around her head like a nimbus, which is a word we had learned that year in earth science.

  Willie had decreed that we would go camping, so we went camping.

  When we got to the Cabin, Sally and I took all our food out of our grocery bags. We use doubled-up grocery bags instead of backpacks, forgetting every time that a mile through a cornfield, through woods, and down a hill while lugging a doubled-up grocery bag in front of you is not all that easy.

  This is what we had before us:

  1. Hot dogs.

  2. White bread.

  3. Cinnamon-apple instant oatmeal.

  4. Breath mints.

  5. Salami.

  6. Jar of cracked green olives.

  7. Loaf
of French bread.

  8. Plastic container of blueberries.

  9. Can of pineapple rings.

  10. Can of baked beans.

  Here is some of what we forgot, which was a lot:

  1. A pot.

  2. A can opener.

  3. Graham crackers and marshmallows and chocolate bars.

  4. Matches.

  Here is what we couldn’t eat because of what we forgot:

  1. Instant oatmeal.

  2. Pineapple rings.

  3. Baked beans.

  Here is what we did eat:

  1. A cold hot dog each, Sally’s wrapped in white bread, mine solo.

  2. Four slices of hard salami hacked off with my pocketknife.

  3. Some French bread broken off the loaf the way Willie told us they break it off in France.

  4. Twelve green olives.

  Sally then ate one half of another cold hot dog, wrapped around with another slice of white bread, and five breath mints.

  It wasn’t the dinner we had pictured. Most aren’t, at the Cabin.

  That’s because of the no-list rule.

  I went inside the Cabin after our undinner, which because of the falling-downness of the Cabin and its lack of windowpanes is in a way like being still outside. I sat at the table, which Sally’s grandmother — Willie — had bought for us at a garage sale in Remsen.

  “Consider this a hovel-warming gift,” Willie said the day she dragged it down to the Cabin, tied onto Sally’s old red wagon. Willie had to take off two of the legs to get it through the tiny door, which meant another trip back up the hill and through the cornfield to get a screwdriver.

  I watched from the paneless window as Sally picked up her meander stick and walked over to her measuring spot. She stood next to the meander, the stream that flows into Nine Mile Creek, and lowered her stick into the water. She picked that stick up one day a few summers ago. She scraped all the bark off it so that it was smooth and shiny. Then she created a measuring system on the stick, lines and dots and slashes, incomprehensible. Every time she’s at the Cabin, she goes to that one spot and puts her meander stick in the water to measure its depth.

  She didn’t say anything to me, even when I went over and sat beside her, watching her writing down her incomprehensible notes.

  It was late August, the cornstalks in the field as high as our heads. On hot days Sally and I used to play hide-and-seek in the cornfield. I used to count to one hundred and then stay still and listen for the sound of leaves brushing against Sally as she snuck around the rows.

  Have you ever walked through a cornfield when the corn is higher than your head? The sun filters through the green. The roots of the stalks grip the ground like claws. In a summer of enough rain and enough sun, you wouldn’t believe how tall the corn can get by the end of August, so much taller than you, so much higher than you ever expected it to be.

  I dragged first one folding chair and then the other out of the Cabin and set them up next to the meander, where Sally was crouched with her meander stick.

  They were bright red, our folding chairs. Willie had gotten them for us at a garage sale in Sterns: two dollars each. A little green price sticker was still affixed to the back of each.

  “Sit,” I said.

  Sally sat. I sat next to her. I closed my eyes so as to see if I could sense the sun on my face growing cooler as the sun went down. I wanted to use only my sense of the air, warmed by the sun. It was the next-best thing to playing Blind. I tipped back to catch the long slanting rays of the sun on my face.

  “Don’t do that,” Sally said.

  “Do what?” I said. My eyes were closed. It was hard to tell if the air was growing cooler or not. I realized how much I used my eyes to determine how something felt. I wonder how it is for people who are truly blind. Their sense of touch must be so much better than mine, not having sight to help it along.

  “Don’t tip back in your chair.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

  I tipped my chair back upright and squinched my eyes shut so as to block out all sense of light. But then colors started swirling behind my closed eyelids. You know how that happens.

  Snap!

  A sharp pain stung my wrist.

  My eyes flew open. “What!” I said. “What did you do that for?”

  A bright red line flushed up across my skin from where Sally had snapped my yellow rubber band.

  “Because you were tipping back in your chair again,” she said.

  “So what? I’ve been tipping back in chairs my whole life,” I said. “And so have you.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Since when?”

  She didn’t answer me. She just sat back in her red folding chair and folded her arms and scowled at the setting sun. I suddenly wished that she had a rubber band on her own wrist, one that I could snap. Hard.

  “What is wrong with you?” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you, you mean.”

  “Tip, tip, tip,” I said. “Big deal.”

  “You can get hurt that way.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  I tipped back as far as I could, so far that I felt a moment of fright when it seemed as if I was about to go splat on my back. But I kept a poker face, just in case Sally was watching, and I stared up at the sky. The moon was already out, and pretty soon stars would start to reveal themselves.

  Boom!

  I was slammed back down to earth, all four folding-chair legs firm on the ground. Sally stood over me. I stared back at her.

  “You can die that way!” she shouted. “Grandma’s friend Sara died that way!”

  I woke in the night. Sound, familiar, was all about me: crickets, a whippoorwill whooping in its endless way, the breeze in the tops of the white pines. It took me a minute to realize that I was in a sleeping bag, camping out at the Cabin.

  The sound that woke me was not familiar, although it was a cornstalk sound. It didn’t have the rustle of raccoons prowling around, shaking the stalks for ripe ears. It was the sound of someone moving through the cornfield, someone who was familiar with this particular darkness, who knew where the Cabin was.

  I reached to shake Sally’s sleeping bag but she was asleep, deep asleep, and I remembered how she had snapped my yellow rubber band against my wrist, so hard, and how we had gone to bed without saying anything to each other, without counting the calls of the whippoorwills out loud, our routine, and I did not want to wake her.

  The rustling grew closer.

  I felt for my purple rubber band.

  Snap.

  Fight or flight, we learned one day in earth science. It’s the natural response to fear. You either run and hide, or you stay and fight with everything you have in you. You are focused only on survival. Nothing else matters. I can still see Mr. Tyler and the way he stroked chalk onto the chalkboard with big sweeping moves of his arm. He prefers yellow to white. He used to take a box of white chalk into Mrs. Fencher’s next-door room, knowing that he was a lone yellow-chalk man among users of white, and return triumphant with a box of yellow.

  Mr. Tyler is a tall man with gray hair and a big belly that he slings his belt under instead of into. I can imagine Mr. Tyler fighting, but I can’t imagine him fleeing.

  He told us that if you’re scared enough, you will pee your pants. I was more scared than I had ever been, listening to that rustling coming toward me, and one part of my mind was waiting to feel my sleeping bag turn warm and wet, but it didn’t happen.

  Rustle.

  I wanted to wake Sally. I wanted her to listen to the sound and tell me what it was. I wanted to hear that tone in her voice, the tone that means: The answer has come to me. I’ve seen answers come over Sally. Occasionally in class, when the teacher asks a very difficult question — one that he asks with the tone of voice that lets us know he doesn’t expect anyone to know the answer and has in fact asked the question just to let us off the hook, a sort of introduction to that particular topic — Sally will sit up a cert
ain way. Her hand will raise itself into the air. All fingers will be extended and rigid. The look will be on her face. Her lips will be parted. The class will turn to look at her as maybe all those people standing on the coast of the Red Sea might have looked at Moses as he parted the waters and passed right on through.

  “Yes? Sally?”

  And the answers come spilling forth.

  The power of one thousand.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Zeno’s paradox.

  Sojourner Truth.

  Macbeth, by William Shakespeare.

  That’s the kind of answer that Sally comes out with. You wouldn’t expect it, because usually Sally is thought of as smart but not extra smart. A pretty ordinary student. An ordinary girl who, even though Willie can do her hair any kind of way she might ever want, likes her hair best in braids, ordinary braids.

  Rustle.

  I forgot about how hard Sally had snapped my yellow rubber band.

  I wanted to wake Sally and have her tell me what the sound was, but in the moonlight her face looked so peaceful, and I realized that it had been some time since I had seen her look that peaceful, and again I could not wake her.

  I turned my head, searching the sky for signs of the mountains rising up. Where were they? They needed to be there, my foothills, rising up out of a pink and orange sunrise. Please be there. I squinted my eyes, and twisted my head so that I was looking straight up at the sky. A pale fingernail of moon hovered in the far west, and stars glimmered faintly above me. When next I looked to the east, the sunrise was there, but in its very beginnings, more of a lightening of the darkness than anything you would call light.

  And there was Jill, sitting next to Sally on the damp ground.

  I knew her by the outline of her shoulders and neck, bent as they were over Sally. Sally was asleep, and I lay as still as I could, hardly breathing, watching Jill watch Sally sleep. Jill’s hand came up, two fingers, and she stroked the wisps of hair back from Sally’s forehead.