I stood there, hating myself for watching and not protecting Ginger, but I was afraid, afraid of what they’d do to me if I stood up for her. Until that moment, I had thought of myself as brave and bold, but watching those girls torment poor Ginger made me realize what a coward I really was.
“Stop it!” I shouted, but it was too late. It was over. The other girls ran away, giggling and shrieking, and Ginger just sat there, looking blank and lost, with the snow breasts stuck on her sweater like Christmas-tree ornaments.
I went over and wiped the grotesque balls away, but it was too late. Ginger looked at me without saying a word and we walked home in silence. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg for her forgiveness; I wanted to chase after those girls and tell them off, tell them how cruel they’d been and that I didn’t want to have anything to do with them any more. But I knew I wouldn’t. “Coward!” Margaret shouted. “Craven!” Cotton Mather sneered, and they were right. I was a yellow-belly, standing back, doing nothing, and I suddenly realized that it wasn’t Ginger’s forgiveness I wanted—she’d forget all about it in two days—but my own forgiveness, which I would never give to myself. I was horrible and weak, vile, the kind of person who could close her eyes and let a world be destroyed and then when it was over, open them wide in disbelief and say, “How could this have happened? I didn’t see a thing!”
But that was last year and now it was as if nothing had happened. Ginger had long since made it up with Cindy and her gang and at Cindy’s pyjama party it was Karen Harmon who got attacked, with Ginger joining right in, holding down Karen’s arms while the other girls pulled open her pyjama top.
I didn’t understand it, even though it was perfectly clear. Cindy was cruel to Ginger; Ginger attacked Karen and Karen would undoubtedly take out her rage on someone else. Once it was done, once the rage was set free, it was over and everything was supposed to go back to normal. But for me, it never did. I couldn’t forget. I would always see the look of horror on Ginger’s face when Karen was holding her arms and Cindy was coming at her with those snow breasts, and even though what they did wasn’t the worst thing in the world, I didn’t think that mattered. What mattered was the terror Ginger felt when she was being attacked, not knowing what was coming, not knowing what they’d do, and when they just smacked those stupid snowballs on her it must have been a relief and it was easy for her to forgive them because it hadn’t been as bad as it could have been.
I was always secretly grateful that it wasn’t happening to me, but I knew that someday I’d get mine; someday it would be my turn to have them come at me like a bunch of banshees and no one would help because why should they? I’d take it; I’d see that slitty look in their eyes and I’d know it was coming and I’d quickly turn myself off, make myself fly away and then they could do whatever they wanted to my body.
“Let’s get Maggie,” they’d say. That was always how it started, “Let’s get Ginger or Karen or Pauline.” There didn’t need to be a reason; it was usually a whim, and who knew how it started? There was no way to protect yourself from it because it could be anything—I could show up at school in a dress Karen had coveted and she’d run to Cindy and say, “Let’s get Maggie,” and they’d attack me, drag me into the woods and rip holes in the dress and Karen would be happy, free, and the next day she’d invite me over to her house for ice cream. And I would go, because that was the way it worked. I’d go to her house and eat her ice cream and it would be as if nothing had happened. No apologies, no accusations, no discussions, just a bowl of Neapolitan with a glass of milk.
GINGER Moore had been crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked but she wouldn’t say; she just wiped her nose and got up off her porch step and followed Goober and me into the woods.
Ginger was always crying and that was because her mother was crazy. She’d waltz around the neighborhood in nothing but a mink coat, “visiting” people, sprawling out on the living-room davenports, holding the mink tightly against her chest with one hand while easing the other along the back of the davenport like a furry snake. “Ah’m nekkid,” she’d drawl and Mother would stare at her in dismay while Daddy blushed and I’d shriek with laughter. I always thought it was some kind of joke, that she really did have something, her bathing suit perhaps, on underneath.
Mrs. Moore was the whitest woman on earth, whiter than white; if she were any whiter she’d be invisible. She stayed in the house all day, being pale and fragile, and never came down to the beach to watch us swim, or played bridge with the other ladies, or even gardened in her own yard. She only ventured out at night, always in her mink, even in the middle of summer.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” I asked Ginger and she nodded, crawling into our fort, and I didn’t press it. Offering comfort is a delicate business and I knew that there were times when I wanted it and other times when I would have murdered anyone who tried to give it to me, so I let it rest and pulled my surprise from under the branches.
“What is it?” Ginger asked in wonder, taking the little metal container and examining it.
I beamed. “I found it behind the Bensons’,” I told her and she gasped—I’d gone into the woods alone! Why not? I wasn’t afraid of the Pervert. If he got me, I’d just turn myself off, I’d just click the switch and escape to my safe place and whatever he did wouldn’t matter because I wouldn’t be there. I’d close my eyes and feel my body getting all hard and rigid, like a mannequin in Peterson’s window, a fake kid. I’d open my eyes and I’d be blind; I’d stare straight ahead and see nothing. I’d put on my mean look, my You-Can’t-Get-to-Me look, and once that was in place I’d flick the switch and fly off. I’d watch. I’d know everything that happened but it wouldn’t be real because I wasn’t real. I was nothing but beautiful blue, blending into the sky, the Lake, and that girl, that hard little rubber girl with the staring eyes and the mean look—she wasn’t real, either. She was just a punching bag, a phoney, a storefront dummy and they never knew they were hurting nothing.
I never told anyone about my ability to escape. If they knew, they’d find a way to prevent me from doing it, to keep me inside so I’d have to feel things. They’d plug me up, stuff up all the holes and I’d never be able to get out again.
“Do you think it’s his?” Ginger asked. “What do you think he used it for?”
I shrugged. “Mother uses them to keep casseroles warm when she has a buffet,” I said. “I guess maybe he was cooking something.”
“Toes!” Ginger screeched ecstatically. “He was probably boiling some little girl’s toes!”
“The favored appetizer of Perverts,” I said like a TV announcer, “a rare delicacy!”
“Marinated toes!” Ginger squealed.
“Toe à la King!”
“Toe-na noodle casserole!”
We shrieked and screeched and Ginger had to put her hand between her legs to keep from wetting her pants. She laughed so hard her face turned pink and when she laughed like that, so that the color came to her face and her eyes sparkled with tears, she was beautiful. Usually she was scrawny and pale, nearly as white as her mother, and when they first moved to the neighborhood, everybody said she was an albino, what with her mass of long stick-straight white hair and her skin whiter than eggshells, white as ice, not a color but a lack of it. “Albino aliens!” Tom Ditwell declared and dared anyone to go into their lair. They didn’t call him Ditbrain for nothing.
Ginger tossed the container on our pile of Evidence and took two sandwiches from a paper bag. “I bet I know who it is,” she said. “I bet it’s Marvin Peabody.”
I said I didn’t think so. Marvin Peabody was the biggest creep in the world and a sicko to boot, but all his sickness was on the outside, for all the world to see, and that wasn’t the way it was with Perverts. The thing about a Pervert was, it could be anybody. Somebody you’d never suspect, somebody nice on the outside but ugly and warped inside.
“It’s like being a werewolf,” I told Ginger. The Pervert probably had a per
fectly normal life and was respected and well-liked and a Pillar of the Community and most of the time he was just a regular person, somebody’s father, and then WHAM! He’d be overwhelmed by moon-rays or something and he’d be turned inside-out and he couldn’t help himself, he’d be in a trance and he’d have this insatiable urge to do terrible things to little girls, because they were young and pure and innocent and he’d have to crush that innocence, blot it out, he’d have to stomp on it, as if it were a June bug, because when he was inside-out, everything that was good seemed bad.
“You’ve been watching too many horror movies,” Ginger said. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. People don’t turn inside-out, only mutants.”
And it doesn’t have to be a man, I went on, but she didn’t want to hear it.
“No woman could be a Pervert,” she declared. “It’s physically impossible.”
But no it wasn’t. And she didn’t have to be a Spinster or a Lesbian. She could be a regular woman, a mother, who was usually loving and soft and pliant and kind, the perfect mother for plopping your head into her lap and sinking into safety, but boy, when those moon-rays got her, watch out!
I thought we should start looking for high-heel tracks, but Ginger said I was crazy.
“How do you know?” she said. “What makes you such an expert on Perverts?”
“I don’t know,” I said and I started to get that panicky feeling, that feeling that I was doing something wrong. My heart started pumping like Goober’s tail on the carpet, thwack, thwack, thwack, faster and faster until I thought it would leap out of my chest and splot down right there on our pile of Evidence. I should have kept my mouth shut; now I was going to get it, God was going to punish me, He was going to poke me with His prickly thunderbolts until I took it all back, until I screamed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m making it all up, I don’t know anything about Perverts. Of course no woman could ever be a Pervert, except maybe a Nazi war criminal, but never a normal woman, never a mother!”
“If you say one more word about lady Perverts,” Ginger threatened, “I’m not going to play Pervert with you any more.”
Pervert was the sex game we played sometimes; we’d hide in our fort and take off all our clothes and Ginger would be the Pervert and I’d be the Victim, and she’d make me open my legs and she’d look inside me and then she’d hold my legs down and put a stick up me and say stuff like, “You are my captive,” and I’d float off to that world where I was blue and wait for my other parts to take over. Margaret would get mad that I always played the Victim, and Cotton Mather would have a fit. “Dirty! Filthy! Sinners!” he’d blather, so horrified he could hardly shout. “Hell and Damnation!” Trixie kind of liked it, which scared me and made me think maybe I was crazy. And a couple of times, Peggy appeared, just her eyes, just staring, so scared and pathetic I’d get scared myself and start screaming for Ginger to stop and then Peggy’s eyes would disappear.
“Let’s go look for Evidence,” Ginger suggested and we crawled out of the fort and started searching for “things.”
“Are you going to be in the Parade?” she asked and I shook my head. She should have known better than to ask; of course I wasn’t going to be in the Parade, I was an Outcast. Most of the time Ginger was pretty good about it. She never asked what happened and she never acted like I was crazy and she didn’t wrinkle up her nose when I walked by, as if I had kooties. Not that anyone else did, but the way they looked at me it felt as if they wanted to, as if they wanted to hold their noses and say, “P.U.! It’s Pittsfield!”
“I’m going to be a squaw on Cindy’s float,” Ginger said and I nearly had a heart attack.
“WHAT!?” I shouted. “How could you?” How could she betray me by joining Cindy and her squaws, how could she do that to me?
She shrugged. “I want to be in the Parade,” she said, “and Cindy’s the only one who asked me.”
Oh, great. Just what North Bay needed—an albino squaw.
“I’m sure she’d let you be on it, if you wanted,” Ginger said and my mouth dropped open a mile. Sure, she’d let me be on it, because if she didn’t her mother would murder her. “Why, just because Maggie’s in a little trouble,” Mrs. Tucker would say, “that doesn’t mean you should shun her.” But I would never ask Cindy to let me be one of her stupid squaws—I’d rather throw myself down the cement-plant smokestack than go crawling to Cindy for a place on her float.
I looked at Ginger, who was bent over, searching through some wild rhubarb. Maybe it was a set-up. Maybe she was supposed to lure me to Cindy’s garage so they could “get” me. Maybe my turn had come and Ginger was paying me back for just standing there, watching, while they went after her.
“You’re paranoid,” Donald always said; it was his favorite word. “You’re paranoid,” he’d say when Mother cried over the broccoli. “You’re paranoid,” he’d say when Ruthie would fly off to Birdland. Everybody was paranoid. He thought it was because the Russians had infiltrated Canada and were sending thought-waves across the Lake to make us turn on each other so they could come over and pick up the pieces after we blew ourselves to bits.
“I thought you were my friend!” I cried, the tears starting to form behind my eyes. My throat was getting all tight and I knew if I didn’t get out of there, I’d start crying, and it was against my rules to cry in public.
“I am your friend,” Ginger insisted. “I just want to be in the Parade!” She jumped out of the rhubarb and came towards me, but I held out my arm—Don’t come near me, I thought, and Goober growled at her.
“Maggie, Jeez,” she said, “don’t get so upset!”
But it was too late, I was already upset—my best friend, my only friend left in the world, was deserting me and telling me not to get upset about it, but what else could I be?
“I hate you!” I cried, but my throat was so tight from holding back the sobs that the words just came out like little peeps, little Ruthie bird-sounds.
I had to get out of there I had to get away from Ginger before Sarah took over and started wringing her hands and crying and saying stupid stuff like, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to get mad, don’t desert me, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault!”
“I hate you!” I peeped again and ran further into the woods, towards the Bensons’.
“WELL, now I’ve done it,” I told Goob as we hid in the rhododendron bushes behind the Bensons’, “I’ve lost my only friend.”
Goober wriggled her way onto my lap, as if to say, “You’ll always have me.” Why couldn’t people be more like dogs, I wondered. They always loved you no matter what and even if you got mad at them, if they’d been on the beach rolling around in dead fish and then wanted to crawl all over you and you pushed them away and said, “Yuck! Go away!” they’d just go lie down in a corner and watch you and as soon as you were nice again, they’d be jumping up and down and as happy as ever. Why couldn’t people be like that? People always pretended they forgave you, but they never did. They just stored it up and the first time you did something wrong, they’d dig it out of the filing cabinet and wave it in your face and say, “You’re always mean and nasty, remember that time you spat on me when we were two?”
I was more mad at myself than at Ginger. “You idiot,” Margaret said. “Now everybody hates you.” I was mostly mad because Ginger and I were going to go to the Parade together and watch it from the roof of the bank building, where her father had his law office. We could have stood up there, giggling and making fun of Cindy and her squaws, but it was no fun going alone. Who could I make jokes to? Besides, if I went downtown by myself, everybody would say, “There’s that Maggie Pittsfield. No one will be friends with her,” and the awful thing about it was that they would be right.
It was getting late and cold and I supposed I should go home, but I didn’t want to. I wondered what would happen if I stayed there all night. I doubted that the Pervert would come, because the whole point of his being there was to trap little girls and since
there weren’t any little girls in the woods at night, there was no reason for him to be around.
I could hear mothers calling their kids—Mrs. Keller calling for Rick’s little sister Casey and Mrs. Peterson Jr. calling for Kevin. I baby-sat for both of them, not overnighters, just if their parents were going out for dinner or something. Mother couldn’t get over it: “They must like you!” she’d say in wonder as she handed me a message from Mrs. Peterson Jr. or Dr. Keller But getting kids to like me was easy, the trick was not trying to control them, not trying to strap them into the rules their parents handed over to me, along with the keys to the house. We’d become friends, conspirators, staying up way past their bedtime and eating popcorn and playing the one last game or reading the one more story their parents would never allow So when I’d look at the clock, the kids would be as amazed as I was and skip docilely off to their beds while I stayed up to watch the horror movie on TV or write in my diary, and we were all perfectly happy. Sometimes I worried about breaking the parents’ rules, thinking they’d find out and brand me a Bad Influence and ban me from baby-sitting circles, but I suspected they already knew and that they didn’t really care—it was worth it to them to get out of the house without their kids kicking and screaming and clutching their evening gowns.
“Casey! Casey!” Mrs. Keller called and I felt kind of sad. My mother never called for me and I suspected she didn’t care if I came home or not, even though when I did come in the door she’d make a big deal out of it and say, “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!” Maybe she was embarrassed to go running around the neighborhood calling for me, because she thought it made her look like she hadn’t trained me well enough to be home on time.
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD Page 5