by Ruth Lehrer
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My mother named me after a New York highway sign, passing through, passing by, not even stopping to squeeze out my blue body. Going north on the Taconic Parkway, she lay on the back seat and pushed. As I gushed onto gray vinyl, she caught a glimpse of the Carmel/Fishkill exit sign and decided it was not just a highway sign but a cosmic sign, and I was Carmel Fishkill. She even did away with my inherited surname, her name, Jamison, and let me battle my way through six grades of school under the sign of Fishkill.
Overconfident boys used to call me Caramel, like the candy. “Stick-in-your-teeth-Caramel can’t afford a dentist,” they would taunt, tossing chewed gum at me in the cafeteria. When I was Carmel, school lunch was the low point of every day. I had no quarters for lunch on a tray. If I brought lunch, which was rare, my paper bags always contained a bizarre combination of whole cans of sardines and bags of Cheez Doodles.
I decided that in seventh grade, at the new school, in the new school year, I would own that hard-sounding last name. Fish — cold and scaly. Kill — dangerous, you-don’t-want-to-fuck-with-me dangerous. I would be Fishkill Carmel.
So when school started in September, my life as Fishkill also began. The very first day, I decided I deserved lunches like those belonging to the girls with pretty lunch bags and cartons of chocolate milk. I strolled down the cafeteria aisles and surveyed tables. If I saw something that struck my fancy — a chocolate cookie, a hot-dog roll, a Yodel — I took it and gave the kid a look that just dared him to scream. I decided to be fair and only take one item from a tray. I never took from kids with free-lunch passes, only the ones who bought pizza and cookies, which meant their parents gave them money, so they could buy another pizza or cookie. I could tell the free-lunch kids by their sneakers: ragged toe holes, the same as me. After a few weeks on my new Fishkill diet of thievery, my nails grew longer and my hair lost its thin, wispy fingers. Grown-ups didn’t call me boy so often.
As Fishkill Carmel, I instantly developed a left jab and a right hook that rivaled those of TV mobsters, and there were no more caramel-candy jokes. The first week of seventh grade, I punched a boy so hard, he hit the concrete with a crack that turned his face turquoise. It was much better to be Fishkill Carmel.
The last week of September, I met Duck-Duck. It was lunchtime, and she had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich cut corner to corner in two neat triangles. Triangle sandwiches always taste better than rectangle sandwiches. I could see it was chunky peanut butter, and the grape jelly oozed out the sides just enough that the bread was only the slightest bit sticky and her pink napkin was still clean. I wondered if she always got pink napkins or if she’d had a birthday party and it was left over. My hand darted out. Quick like a fish, Duck-Duck’s hand came down on mine.
“What’s the secret password, creep?” she said, squeezing my fingers, not hard like a fist but just gentle enough so the jelly wouldn’t go all over.
I could have socked her with my other hand, but her shiny little earrings — bubbles of starry blue water — distracted me. And she smelled like a vanilla wafer with hot cocoa on the side. I couldn’t think of a smart password.
“Gimme,” I said, and immediately felt stupid. Fishkill wasn’t ever supposed to feel stupid.
“Not a chance,” said Duck-Duck. “What’s your name?”
Here was an opportunity to use my practiced hard stare.
“Fishkill Carmel,” I snarled. But it was hard to swagger with one hand on peanut butter and jelly and the scent of vanilla wafer in my nose.
“Cool,” she said. “I’m Duck-Duck.”
Duck-Duck? I wanted to say, but I was sensitive to bad names, strange names, mismatched names. I’d never seen this girl before. She must have just moved to town. Maybe from another country or even another planet.
“It’s my gang name,” she said, and flicked her blond hair with a small hand.
I didn’t even think to doubt her then. Fishkill didn’t care about other people, but if the gang was big, maybe I ought to be a little careful.
After Grandpa died and Social Services descended on us, I watched a cop show in the Department office while my mother made excuses and tried to fill out paperwork. The cops attempted to outwit gang members who drove convertibles, wore dark glasses, smoked cigarettes, and spit in the gutter. I liked the spitting. I’d never seen anything like that in the little town of Salt Run, New York, though.
“What gang?” I said.
“The G.R.s.”
“G.R.s?”
“The Gumbo Rumbles, featuring Duck-Duck Farina. If you’re in the know, you just call us the Grrs. Take your hand off my sandwich.” She squeezed my fingers again, her soft hand over my hard one. I could feel the white bread bubble under my knuckles.
She had blond eyelashes too, and no one I knew had such blue eyes. My grandfather had had mean black ones, but he’d been dead for two years, and I was glad. My mother claimed her eyes were hazel, but they were really just the color of light mud, the same as mine. Though without a mirror at home, it was hard to remember my own exactly, since I was inside them.
“Off!” commanded Duck-Duck.
I released my grip, even though I was truly hungry and lunch period was almost over.
Duck-Duck pulled out another small pink napkin, peeled a soggy peanut-butter-and-jelly triangle off the wax paper, and took a bite.
“Here,” she said, and she handed me the other half. “Grrs like a little good publicity every once in a while.”
The bell rang, and she ran off with her lunch box and her pink napkins and her blue eyes, my fingers still sticky with jelly.
When Grandpa was still alive and living at Birge Hill with me and my mother, he called me Carmela and hit me with the hitting stick. It was a thick wooden walking stick he kept at the front door just for hitting, just because he could. When Grandpa was still alive, we ate sardines and canned tomato soup every day for a year. When he died of a heart attack so sudden it was like hitting the Delete key, the food got a little better, but not much.
The Social Service ladies came around for a whole six months after he died, wanting to know what was in the refrigerator and if I got to school on time. They lectured us about the importance of good communication and paying bills, and they noticed if the kitchen floor was dirty. They complained about how far we lived from town. They wanted me to cut my scraggly brown hair and wash my hands more often.
“You look like a boy,” they said. “Don’t you want to be pretty?”
For those six months, we kept the floor clean, I went to school, Keely kept an honest job, and finally the Department of Social Services said we could be a closed case and they wouldn’t come around anymore. I’ve always thought my mother and I were just that, a closed case — nothing ever changed. Not now, not never. I didn’t have her last name, so when I grew up, no one would know we were ever a case at all.
The second time I tried to steal Duck-Duck’s lunch, she had a cold waffle with jam. It struck me as an odd meal, but the crisp, browned edges spoke of a real waffle iron, and the toasted top was covered with real jam made from whole cherries. This time, I didn’t try to snatch it — I sat down across from her and stared at the waffle.
“Did you know gang graf
fiti is one of the hardest codes to crack in the world? Cops spend days deciphering just one word,” said Duck-Duck. She licked up a wet cherry and eyed my hands.
“Why is it so hard?” I asked, still looking at the waffle.
“For one thing, we spell our names and certain words differently,” she said. “Cops don’t have much imagination, so it’s hard for them to find us in the phone book.” She took another bite. “Like, how do you think I spell my name?”
“Like the bird,” I said. “But twice.”
“Nope. I spell it D-U-K-D-U-K. It’s more exotic, and the cops will never find me.” Duck-Duck took a sip of milk. A carton of milk cost sixty cents. “Want some waffle?”
I had already imagined those wild ducks in flight, so I couldn’t picture her without the c’s: Duck-Duck. I nodded and held out my hand, and she tore her waffle along one of the dotted waffle lines. She evened out the cherries too, so that there were two whole cherries on my half. She slid it onto my palm, and, just for a second, her warm fingers touched mine. It felt like the cherry tree itself giving me lunch.
The third time I tried to steal Duck-Duck’s lunch, she asked me to write my name in blood. In case she ever needed my signature, she said.
“Blood?” I said. “It has to be blood? Why?”
“Blood,” she said firmly. “Anything else lacks commitment. But ketchup will work in a pinch.”
“I’m not in your gang,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be or not, even if it was a real gang. Fishkill Carmel was tough all on her own. On the other hand, it was the first time Duck-Duck had wanted something from me, and I was quickly learning that it was hard to say no to her.
“But you want to audition to be in it, right?”
“Audition?” I said, stalling.
“You have to sign your name in blood before I can tell you our secret signs and passwords.”
Duck-Duck opened her lunch box and surveyed its bounty. Her blond hair hung down like a shining curtain, shielding the contents from my view. She handed me a fistful of grapes and continued.
“We only accept the best, most nasty. You strike me as having great potential,” she said, and dug out the most beautiful lemon cupcake I had ever seen.
No one had ever told me I had great potential before. My schoolwork was average, my athletic skills unremarkable. The only gift I found I had was the ability to knock a boy to the dirt in the time it took a teacher to look away. Personally, I was very proud of this new skill, but no one, kid or grown-up, gave me credit for the achievement.
She looked up from cupcake heaven. “What do you say?”
I had no idea how to respond. I ate a grape.
“Blood oathing is only the first of several trials,” she said. “You need to pass all of the trials in order to become a full-fledged Grr member. You have to prove you’re worthy.” She licked her little finger, which had grazed the lemon icing.
“Did your mother make the cupcake?” I asked; for some reason my heart was pounding. I saw what looked like candied lemon peel on top of the frosting.
“No, she bought it,” said Duck-Duck, and she plunged her pink fingers into the little cake, separating it into two pieces with gooey mathematical precision.
When my mother picked up dessert, unusual in our life of church-pantry food, she put it away in the metal bread box, giving me a slice the thickness of a postcard every day until it was gone. It always seemed to disappear much faster than it should, even though she swore she had only been eating slivers too.
“Okay,” I said, and accepted the golden cake. Lemon cream trickled from the middle. It tasted like the iced-sugar lemonade I once stole from the August county fair.
“Meet me after school at the famous people cemetery,” Duck-Duck said. “We’ll see if you’re up to par.” She sucked down her half of the cupcake and licked her fingers. When she stood to pack up, she was exactly the same height as me. Then she flicked that blond hair with her hand again and skipped down the hallway to the gym.
Most kids joined after-school teams or groups: soccer, drama club, track. Me, each time I had been in a crowd, it had gone wrong. When I was in second grade, I desperately wanted to join the Girl Scouts, but at the first meeting, my mother showed up drunk, and the Scout mother had asked us not to come back.
In my old school, I had been in detention a few times, condemned to the library with other young terrorists. I learned how to do an Internet search for the exact book report I was assigned to write that day. Once when I was just a click away from a perfect report, Sherman Howe caught me behind the library stacks and got as far as a hand in my shirt before I could run. Charlie Peeker squeezed my butt and said he’d tell on me for cheating. As Carmel, I did nothing. As Fishkill, I would have hit them before they got too close. Girls didn’t squeeze butts, but after fifth grade, they started to run in dangerous packs. I stayed away from all group gatherings.
In spite of this, I found myself making my way to the gang meeting at the town cemetery where, as Duck-Duck said, all the famous people now “lived.” There was the lady poet we’d had to read in sixth grade. There was the politician who ended some kind of war. There was the guy who invented the spiral binding. At least his descendants claimed he had.
I was thinking about how notebooks’ spiral bindings tend to unspiral and the pages get all raggy when I noticed that I was being followed by Worm and Frank. Worm’s real name was Norm, but Worm made more sense. He was as big as the high-schoolers, and he was fat. No one called him fat, though, because they would have been punched in the eye. Frank was not as big, but he was just as mean. They were puffing on cigarettes and blowing smoke at each other, but I could tell they were aiming for me. Two against one was lousy odds. I might get in a few punches, but then I’d have to run. I was still planning my getaway when they suddenly sprinted, catching up to me and stepping on my heels. There was the hard slice of a boot, and I could feel blood start up in my sock. I flipped around and faced them, fists up.
Suddenly I heard a clear, little voice from above and somewhere behind me. It wasn’t just in my head; Worm and Frank heard it too. They started and looked around. Up the cemetery hill on the stone wall, swinging her legs, the afternoon sun on her hair, was Duck-Duck.
“Cut the crap,” she said with the clarity of a little lemon bell, all clear and sharp and bright. “Don’t you know if you commit a heinous crime when you’re a juvenile, it affects your ability to get into the college of your choice? Even if the files are sealed, it’s the Internet Age — all hoodlum identities are public. And smoking reduces your sperm count by about eight hundred percent. You will care about that later in life when the doctors test you and you come up deficient. Each inhale makes the little swimmers weaker. You can tell how many have died by taking your pulse. The higher your pulse, the more you’re killing.”
She jumped off the wall and put her right fingers to her left wrist.
“Count!” she commanded, and to my surprise, and perhaps the surprise of the thugs themselves, Worm and Frank grabbed their wrists and started counting.
“See?” said Duck-Duck. “High already, isn’t it? Better go home and lie in a dark room until your count gets back to normal.” She swung her pretty blue lunch box and gestured to me. “Come on, Fishy.”
I would have protested the nickname, but I was in shock at how quickly my enemies had been neutralized. Duck-Duck was as accurate as a can of Raid, and she hadn’t even touched them. The two had dropped their cigarettes and backed off with something that looked very much like fear.
“How’d you do that?” I asked, running after her.
“Oh, it’s easy. When boys start thinking about their weenies, they forget everything else,” said Duck-Duck as she climbed over the timeless stone wall.
I had never seen a weenie up close. I had never wanted to. I wondered how Duck-Duck knew boys would think about theirs to the exclusion of everything else. It was something to remember.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Now you
have blood all ready for the blood oath.”
I looked down at my heel. Blood had seeped through my sock with the burning sensation of a scab forming. I followed Duck-Duck as she trotted over four cemetery rows. Then she took a quick left turn, and we were under a low quince tree, just behind a refrigerator-size gravestone. It was like a little nest, hidden by dead people.
I looked around and saw only tree, stone, and Duck-Duck. If this was to be a group initiation, everyone else was late or lost. “How many gang members are there?”
“We’re low on membership just now,” said Duck-Duck. “That makes you all the more important.” She spread a pink napkin out on a flat rock. “You know, a blood oath can’t be undone. Once you oath, you’re oathed for life.”
Oathing for life made me nervous, and I wondered why blood would be more permanent than, say, Magic Marker. I didn’t want to seem dumb, though, so I said, “Well, sure. I know that.”
“So first you take a stick or pencil or something and scrape up some oath blood.” She dug in her backpack, handed me a Popsicle stick, and gestured to my heel. “Quick, before it dries up.”
The Popsicle stick was a little sticky and just a little orange, as if it used to live inside a Creamsicle. I wondered if there were any more Creamsicles packed away in Duck-Duck’s freezer. I sat down on the ground and wiped the stick along the back of my heel where Worm’s boot had scraped off skin. It stung and started oozing like a cigarette burn. That was good, according to Duck-Duck. She tore a piece of lined paper from her spiral notebook and laid it down on the grass.
“You want to write your whole name. If you run out of blood, it means you are only partially committed to the cause.”
After several minutes of scraping ooze and blood with the Popsicle-stick pen and trying to write with it, I began to wish I had a shorter name. I got as far as FISH when my blood started to dry up. On the paper, it looked reddish black.
“Just do a Y and we will call you oathed,” said Duck-Duck. “You have good-quality blood. The high clotting ability corresponds with high loyalty.”
Ignoring my stinging heel, I poked and grated until I had enough new blood. Y, I wrote. I wanted my whole name, but the entire back of my foot was burning, and I didn’t know how I was going to get my sock clean.