by Ruth Lehrer
That night, under the pink covers, I decided dykes, lesbo-queers, and lesbians all fell under the Opposite Rule.
In kindergarten, I once told Nellie Robbins that storytime was for sissies. I was repeating what Grandpa had said when I asked him to take me to Saturday storytime at the library.
Nellie looked at me like I was nuts.
“Who told you that?” she asked.
“My grandpa.”
“Your grandpa is a dumbo,” said Nellie, and she ate her entire peanut-butter cookie in three bites. I had been hoping she would share.
Even though she moved to California in second grade, I thought about Nellie a lot. When Grandpa growled noisy opinions, Nellie Robbins would pop into my head, and I would think, “That’s dumb. It’s really the opposite.” Eventually it became just the Opposite Rule. Whatever Grandpa thought, the opposite was true.
Ice cream, storytime, library cards, seat belts, fluoride, and garbage pickup were all good. I could tell because Grandpa hated them.
I added lesbians to the list.
I lay in bed, wondering what Ellen looked like, and why Molly and Ellen got the divorce. I wondered if Ellen could make cupcakes, and if she did, what kind they would be, and then I fell asleep.
The day after our gene conversation, Duck-Duck started helping me with my math homework. She decided I shouldn’t be in the dumb class.
“It just takes a little concentration,” she said. “Just like law.”
So, first she corrected my homework. And then she made me do the next lesson, the one ahead of the teacher. She even skipped soccer practice one day to make sure we were on schedule.
“If we catch you up, next year we could be in the same math class,” she said. “You still have a lot of time, but college-prep classes want you to be at the top of your game.”
When she explained word problems, they didn’t seem all that bad anymore. Every day, I did an extra lesson, and pretty soon we hit the end of the book.
“How am I going to tell Miss Treadway I need to be in a new class?” I said.
“We’ll have to draw up a legal document. With signatures and everything. You’ll have to take a test too, I’m sure. They won’t take our word for it, but legal paperwork always helps.” We were lying on her bed with our books propped up with pillows. The sun coming in the windows, even though it was November, made it feel like a September afternoon. “Write it up,” she said.
I had never written a legal document, but if I had finished the math book, maybe I could be a lawyer too. I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook and thought for a second.
I wrote, “This paper promises that Fishkill Carmel finished the Blue Group math book and is totally ready to go on to the next group now and not wait for next year.” I drew two lines for our signatures, like they did on the free-lunch form. Underneath the lines, I printed my name and then hers. I rolled over in the bed and showed her the paper.
“That’s not the right spelling,” said Duck-Duck. “Remember? I told you, it’s D-U-K-D-U-K.”
I knew I should spell it her way. But I couldn’t let go of the image of wild ducks flying in the fall — brown against blue — high above the dirt roads near Birge Hill.
“It’s prettier with the c’s,” I said, and then I blushed. I didn’t know why.
Duck-Duck didn’t answer, but she looked at the paper again. “Okay,” she said. “We shouldn’t really use our gang names, but maybe just this once.” She didn’t look mad or offended. She actually looked a little pleased. Maybe she liked taking risks.
“Why doesn’t your mother call you Duck-Duck?” I asked.
“She says I already have a perfectly good name. Chrissy. Doesn’t that sound like a laundry detergent? Chriissssy.” She hissed the s’s loudly, and you could just hear the soap bubbles.
I started laughing. “Chrrriissssy.” She was right.
“Chrrrrisssssy,” she said, giggling, and she poked me.
“Chrrrris-ss-sy,” I said between gaspy breaths. I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t talk straight. Her little fingers were poking me between my ribs, making me twitch and hop and giggle. I grabbed at her pink fingers, but they were too quick for me. She tickled me so bad I almost fell off the bed. She stopped, but I still lay there giggling about soap bubbles and how her hands felt like liquid with candy edges, and all of a sudden she was just looking at me with her blue, blue eyes.
“We could kiss,” she said. “Like they do in the movies. You know?”
I had never seen a girl-kissing movie, but I hadn’t seen many movies. “Sure,” I said. “Chrissssy.”
She giggled, and to prove I’d seen kissing movies, I leaned over and kissed her on her pink mouth. She gave a little hiccup, like she wasn’t done giggling, but she kissed me right back, with the soap bubbles in my belly and the candy on my tongue. Her fingers on my ribs felt like really they were down there, you know, between my legs, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. Lying on the bed, I was sure I was going to pop from all those bubbles.
“You should open your mouth,” she said. “It’s called French kissing.”
I was going to ask why French, but when I opened my mouth to ask, she put her soft little tongue in my mouth, and I knew why. Speaking French sounded like talking with someone else’s tongue in your mouth as well as your own, and now it felt like her tongue was down there too. I didn’t want to say anything about that. It was hard enough just breathing.
We kissed some more and French-giggled, and I think we fell asleep, because then Molly was calling us to get up and come to dinner. I could smell melting cheese and tomato sauce.
Unlike Birge Hill, Duck-Duck’s house was close to school. If we called Molly and told her we were doing homework at the library, we could go to the cemetery or the store, or spy on the teachers through the office windows. Social Services insisted that Molly know where I was at all times.
“Mom just has to believe she knows,” said Duck-Duck. “That way she’ll never have to lie under oath.”
Teacher-spying had been our plan the afternoon we saw a bunch of the boys running out back of school toward the rear entrance of the bus garage. There were at least four. One of them was Worm.
“Let’s follow them,” said Duck-Duck. “If something is going down, we should find out.”
I thought this was a horrible idea, but Duck-Duck ran after them, keeping low in the grass, running up to the bus-garage wall, and creeping around the side. I reluctantly followed.
Duck-Duck and I plastered ourselves against the metal siding of the garage near the front doors and peeked around the corner. We saw four boys: Worm, Frank, and two others who I knew brought bologna sandwiches for lunch every day. At first it was confusing; it seemed like everyone was hitting everyone else. Then I sorted out that three of them were all hitting the fourth, Worm. Even Frank, who was supposed to be Worm’s buddy. They pinned Worm up against the wall and two of them tried to hold him there while the other one punched him in the face, but they couldn’t do it. Worm was like a bear holding off foxes, an elephant fighting dogs. The dogs bit him and jumped up to scratch, but he would bat one away and then another, even as the others managed to pull his pants down and kick him in the balls. Three against one. Despite the bloody heel Worm had given me, despite how he treated Duck-Duck, I found myself cringing each time they landed a punch in his gut, and then silently cheering him on when he twisted Frank’s arm behind his back.
“It’s like rooting for the Mouse King in The Nutcracker,” whispered Duck-Duck.
I’d never seen The Nutcracker, but I thought I knew what she meant.
“We should call for help,” she said.
I knew she was right, but the problem with calling for help was that it made you involved, almost as guilty as the attackers. Plus, Frank and his boys would know we had ratted on them, and then they would be our problem too, not just Worm’s.
“Hold on,” I said. I slid around the corner and ran back to the front. The garage doors were all open, s
o if I wasn’t careful, they would see me at the front through the rear doors. I sneaked along the inside of the garage and worked my way back to the fire alarm, making sure I was never in view of the fight. I jammed the alarm lever down and then ducked as the alarm screamed and the three attackers ran for it, through the garage, right past me toward the school.
I crept back to Duck-Duck and we watched Worm try to pull his pants up. Adults were pouring in, but we were invisible, hunkered down in the grass. Worm’s face was bloody, and he was limping, but he still cursed the teacher who arrived first to help him and wouldn’t touch the vice principal, who reached to take his hand.
“What are they going to do now?” whispered Duck-Duck. “Call an ambulance?”
“Naw,” I said. “He’s conscious, and he can walk. They’ll take him to the nurse’s office and call his father.”
We cut a big circle around the playing field and beat all the adults and Worm back to the school. We ducked into our spy place, in the bushes under the window, and waited. Sure enough, ten minutes later, a huge man drove up in a Jeep and went into the school, his head grazing the top of the door frame. He looked mad and scared, even though he was as big as a tractor. An elephant tractor. Elephant tractors probably didn’t like their baby tractors being beat on.
“You know,” said Duck-Duck, “if Worm plays football in high school, all his problems will be solved.”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“Everyone will like him for what they hate him for now,” she said. “He’s big and mean, and he doesn’t care if he gets hurt.” She added, “And they tend to be more lenient about academics for top football players. He’ll be a lot happier in ninth grade, if he can make it there.”
She was probably right. It was too bad the middle school didn’t have a football team.
We watched Worm’s father almost carry him to the Jeep. On the way, he dropped Worm’s backpack. After installing Worm in the rear seat, he walked back to get it. He had on a prison-guard jacket and was moving like it had been him who had been beaten up. Without thinking much about it, I stepped out from our spy position.
“Hey,” I said, and the giant man turned.
“It took three of them to take him down,” I said. “I just thought you should know.”
He smiled at me, just a little. “Yeah,” he said.
“Make sure he tries out for football in high school,” called Duck-Duck. “It would be a pity to waste such potential.”
Worm was out of school for three days. When he came back, he had a blue Velcro arm cast and everyone avoided him like he had cooties. Before, he had one nasty friend. Now, it seemed, he had no friends at all.
If boys were bad, girls were worse. If you had a boy fight, he would hit you in the face and maybe you would have a black eye for a day or two. If a girl was after you, you might never know until everyone in school had already seen the locker-room picture she snapped of your ass. Girls were invisible enemies.
When I was in first grade, I had a best friend for a month. I only knew I had a best friend because one day Darsa Peterman told me, “If anyone asks, we’re best friends.” For a month we ate lunch together every day. We sat together in music class when you had to share the recorders and tambourines. I even loaned her my one colored pencil. At the end of that month, Darsa got invited to Wanda Scurtley’s birthday party, and she never needed to talk to me again. She never gave me back my pencil either. I moped a little — I was only seven, after all — but later I just took it as a good lesson. Girls were more dangerous than boys. I didn’t need a best friend.
Darsa became one of the popular girls with pretty lunch boxes who smiled over their white-bread sandwiches and ran in a pack like wolves. Darsa was the head wolf; the other girls, her doggy attendants. When they saw me in the halls, they called me Fishbreath and fanned their noses as if overcome by stench.
I hadn’t worried about Darsa or her wolf pack in a long time, until Molly and I went to pick up Duck-Duck at soccer practice and I saw that Darsa had joined the team.
“She’s got a great block tackle,” Duck-Duck was telling Molly. “You should have seen her at the last game.”
Duck-Duck had only been in real school since September. Why hadn’t she asked me about Darsa? I could have told her about more than just block tackles. Half the girls in school had been burned by Darsa.
But I didn’t say anything. I was quiet, since in Molly’s house they didn’t keep grudges the way Grandpa did. And besides, it would have looked like I was jealous, which I wasn’t.
Since that time we kissed like in the movies, Duck-Duck hadn’t mentioned it at all. Sometimes I would look at her fingers and feel bubbles, but she acted like everything was the same as it had been before. Maybe it was. I wasn’t sure.
Homeschooling might have helped with hard math, but it didn’t help with understanding wolf packs. While Molly was cooking dinner, I tried to explain them to Duck-Duck, scientific-like so she wouldn’t think I was bad-mouthing anyone or being illogical, but would understand my warning.
“Girls adhere to the M&M theory,” I said.
“M&M theory?”
“Yeah,” I said, “it goes like this: If you’re a popular kid — if you have a nice lunch box and good sneakers and good block tackles and everyone talks to you — you’re inside the M&M bag with all the other M&Ms. If you’re someone everyone ignores or picks on — if you have bad sneakers or you’re in the slow math class — you’re outside the bag, on the counter, all boring and stale.”
“Can you be out on the counter and then get back in the bag?” asked Duck-Duck.
“There’s only one tear at the top of the bag,” I explained. “So it’s possible for an M&M to fall out, but it’s really hard for it to fall back in.”
“It must be lonely on the counter,” Duck-Duck said.
Now I felt bad. “Yeah, but it’s crowded in the bag. And if it gets hot, you’re stuck all glued together and you can’t breathe. It’s better to be on the counter.”
“Free the M&Ms,” said Duck-Duck, pulling out the plates to set the table. “That would be a good secret password.”
I didn’t know if Duck-Duck really got my point. It didn’t seem like she understood what a wolf pack could do.
Salt Run cops were used to a town where everyone was home in their kitchen by six, provided they didn’t work the night shift and weren’t the type to go drinking till eleven. If you needed to arrest someone who wasn’t home, you just went to their boss and told them to call you when they got there. Our cops weren’t used to missing persons who might or might not be dead.
Duck-Duck said if we lived in a big Law & Order city, the cops would have tracked Keely’s DNA, hacked into surveillance systems, and searched databases bigger than ten libraries. Because we lived in Salt Run, it was just Officer Sam and Officer Greg looking into the “disappearance of a mother of one.” They had to call the state cops in to help. I secretly agreed with Duck-Duck that they had no clue.
Three weeks after we reported Keely as a missing person, the cops came to the door. Molly had just pulled the vegetarian shepherd’s pie out of the oven when we heard the gold knocker against the door. I knew it wasn’t good news, or they would have called on the phone. Then I wasn’t sure what would be good news and what would be bad news. Then I felt guilty that I didn’t know.
“I’m really sorry to have to tell you this,” said Officer Sam, with his cop hat in his hand.
He did look sorry. Maybe he was sorry he was missing dinner.
“They found a body in Carrieville that matched the description of your mother. It had been in the water for a long time, so the time line seems about right too.”
“Did you do a dental match?” asked Duck-Duck.
The cop didn’t look at her. He kept looking at me. He hadn’t known Grandpa, but maybe Officer Greg had filled him in, because they both looked real sorry for me. “Ms. Jamison had no dental records that we could find,” he said. “The one dentist who had an
y knowledge of Ms. Jamison didn’t have any X-rays on file. All he had in his notes was that she would probably require a partial set of dentures soon. That fit the description of the body.”
He kept using the words the body as if the body wasn’t actually a person, which I guess it wasn’t anymore. Would you still be a person if you weren’t alive? Maybe you would be if afterward you were buried with a name and a stone like the lady poet.
“Does she have a face?” said Duck-Duck.
“Christine Farina!” said Molly. “Stop being so insensitive!”
“Mom!” Duck-Duck waved her hand at Molly. “I’m not being insensitive. You should watch more TV. They could be totally wrong, and Fishkill will be all upset her mom is dead when really she’s not. Fishy needs a good lawyer.”
“You don’t have to be rude to be a good lawyer,” said Molly, but then she looked at the cops too. “Well?” she said to Officer Greg.
Greg looked mortified. “No face, ma’am,” he said. “The body was found two months ago. Since there was no matching missing-person report and no one claimed the body, it was released for cremation and buried in the Carrieville General Population cemetery. We’re really sorry.”
General Population probably meant poor. Special Population probably meant rich.
Duck-Duck was stubborn. “What about DNA? Surely someone took a sample? You could compare it to Fishkill’s to see if they are related.” She looked at her mother. “They do it on CSI all the time.”
“You’re right, miss,” said Officer Greg. “We can do that. If we take Fishkill’s sample, we can send it off to the lab to be compared. We can swab her cheek and send it away to be tested.”
It was weird that the inside of my cheek might have a bit of Keely in it, but I let them swab it with the Q-tip, which they then dropped into a vial.