by Ruth Lehrer
“That’s not what we discussed last time,” said the lady. “Do you remember our agreement?”
“Screw your agreement,” said Keely. “She’s my blood. She should do what I say.”
This sounded a lot like Grandpa. Except for the blood part. Grandpa would have been glad to un-blood us if he could have.
“We agreed,” said the lady, obviously not for the first time, “that there were certain conditions that had to be met before you could have more than minimal visitation rights.”
“What right do you have,” said Keely, “to tell me what I can and can’t do? You’re just a lady behind a desk.”
This wasn’t much of a comeback. Grandpa would have said something with much more sting to it. He would have called her a pregnant sow. Or maybe a neutered paper-pusher with a bladder problem.
The lady cleared her throat. “The primary benefit of visitation is for the child. The goal is frequent and meaningful supervised visitation. Did you go to group therapy today?” she said.
I knew the answer to that one, but Keely ignored her.
“Some goon has to watch us the whole time?” said Keely. “As soon as I can, I’m taking Carmel to Arizona, away from all of you wack jobs. Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free. Think about how it applies to you,” she said, and she banged out the office door and tromped down the hall.
In a way, I was impressed. For years, Keely never talked back to anyone. I hoped the Social Service lady appreciated that.
In a way, it made me nervous. If Keely ever cleaned up her act, she might drag me to Arizona. I clutched the fur on the collar of my jacket.
“Arizona?” I whispered to Duck-Duck. “You think she’d really do that?”
We followed Keely back to the truck. This time she poured in the oil and started it up. Green smoke streamed out of the tailpipe as she drove off.
“Kind of like the Wicked Witch of the West,” said Duck-Duck. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I said, and we both giggled so hard we had to stop in the convenience store and buy a Yodel to calm ourselves down.
After school the next day, Duck-Duck suggested we bake cookies. She took a stack of Molly’s cookbooks off the shelf, a pile so high she almost couldn’t see past her arms. We laid them out on the kitchen table; the pictures of shiny food made me hungry for dishes I’d never even heard of before. “We can make whatever kind of cookie you want,” said Duck-Duck. “Just look it up.” She flipped to the index of the biggest book.
It seemed kind of nuts to think you could make chocolate-chip cookies at home. How would you get them all round, chippy, and brown only on the bottom? But Duck-Duck assured me she did it all the time.
For about a week after Grandpa died, Keely had made a go at being a real mother. She did laundry; she bought toilet paper; she washed dishes. On the third day, she tried to make red velvet cupcakes from a mix. Not many people are capable of ruining a cake mix, but somehow Keely did it. The cupcakes were dry and crumbly, sucking moisture out of your tongue the instant you bit in. They reminded me of charcoal, with just a whiff of lighter fluid.
“What did you put in this?” I said, trying not to sound too mean.
“I think they wanted milk or water or something, but I put in sugar-free Red Bull instead. Don’t you like it?”
You’d think I would have caught on to the reading thing then, but somehow it didn’t cross my mind.
“You put in Red Bull?”
“Haven’t you ever had red velvet cake?” she asked.
I hadn’t, but whatever made red velvet cake red, it definitely wasn’t Red Bull.
“It seemed a little dry. I was thinking of putting in some beer, but I ran out,” said Keely.
That was the last time Keely ever tried to bake anything.
“There’s a recipe for everything in the whole world,” Duck-Duck said. “If it’s not in a book, it’s on the Internet. Come on, we can have cooking class.”
I’d never thought about it before, but there were probably people all over the world wanting cookies every minute of the day.
“What kind should we make?” asked Duck-Duck, flipping the pages of the big book.
“Banana,” I said, “with chocolate chips.” That would be the kind of cookie that monkeys would like. Wolf packs, on the other hand, probably ate raw-meat cookies with crunchy ground-up bones in place of nuts and drizzled blood for icing. It made me mad that I felt so grateful Duck-Duck was behaving normally. When we were home, Duck-Duck acted like she had never avoided me in the lunchroom or spent every afternoon with Darsa. I wanted to stay mad at her, but all I could feel was this pathetic gratitude that she wanted to make cookies.
We looked through the endless index, and Duck-Duck was right: there were banana cookies — but with walnuts, not chocolate chips.
“Don’t worry,” said Duck-Duck. “We can swap out the walnuts for chocolate chips. One should not be confined by words on a page.” She started clearing the table. “It’s not creative to follow recipes exactly.”
Recipes were like word problems, said Duck-Duck. You had to read through the whole thing first so you knew what was coming.
“If you can read, you can cook,” she said.
That was definitely comforting. As long as I could read, I was set for life.
“The only reason I ever wanted to be a Girl Scout was because of the cookies,” I said while we were cleaning up the spilled flour and the egg I had dropped into the silverware drawer. “I told my mother I wanted to go camping, but it wasn’t true.”
“This is better,” said Duck-Duck. “You can have all the cookies you want without that organizational bureaucracy.”
We preheated the oven and then watched through the window as the batter turned golden-brown and the chips melted into little chocolate pools. When they were done, all the bottoms were brown, not black. They were perfect.
“You think we could make Yodels at home too?” I asked.
“You can bake anything at home. Just Google the recipe,” said Duck-Duck. “Not tomorrow, though, I have soccer practice. Oh, that reminds me, we should pick up some Lemon Energy. It’s so much better than lemonade.”
Lemon Energy was a sports drink, apparently the kind marathon runners drank at the Olympics. Darsa now drank it, which was why Duck-Duck had started drinking it. Darsa also ate energy bars. Duck-Duck had brought one home a few days ago. It tasted more like stale crackers than anything healthy, but Duck-Duck said it was good because it had scientific research behind it. With anyone else, Duck-Duck would have called that bad logic. With Darsa, it was like she forgot all about reason and proof. It made my stomach hurt.
I wanted to make a joke about Darsa and her Lemon Energy and Keely and her Auga-L shakes, but I didn’t. It was the kind of joke Duck-Duck would have thought was funny before but maybe not now. Yesterday I couldn’t even find her at lunch. I spent the whole time looking for her and finally found her outside playing soccer when she was supposed to be inside eating lunch.
I didn’t get soccer. I didn’t get lemon drinks. My stomach started hurting a lot.
The next day while I was at my locker, I spotted Duck-Duck halfway down the hall. I called, but she didn’t turn around. Had she heard me or not? When I got to the lunchroom, Duck-Duck was sitting with the wolf pack.
I knew I couldn’t sit with the wolves. Head wolf Darsa made the rules, and it was an unbreakable rule that you couldn’t sit with Darsa unless Darsa invited you to sit with her. Once, a new girl sat down there by mistake, and she spent the rest of the month sitting with the boys because no one in the wolf pack would risk pissing off Darsa.
I went and hid in the bathroom for a long time.
While Duck-Duck went to after-school soccer practice, Molly picked me up. We bought fruit smoothies and brought them home and watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone together.
“You okay?” asked Molly.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“Want to talk about it?”
> “Talk about what?” There was no way I was going to tell her what happened at lunch.
That night I was sick. First, I didn’t want to eat dinner. Then I felt puke waves, and then I was throwing up in Molly’s nice clean toilet. Molly heard me, and the amazing thing was that she came in and held my forehead while I was puking. I never imagined anyone would get so close to another person’s puke. It was nice of her, keeping my face from dipping too close to the gross toilet water. Afterward, she cleaned up everything too, like it wasn’t me who had made the mess.
“You just rest,” she said. “In a little while, I’ll get you a Popsicle. Maybe you caught a virus.”
The Popsicle was cold and wet, and after I sucked it all down, I somehow fell asleep. When I woke up, I didn’t feel like puking anymore.
Duck-Duck was already in the kitchen when I made my way down to breakfast. I could hear her and Molly talking.
“She was sick last night,” Molly told her.
I heard the rustle of cereal boxes and the thunk of the refrigerator door.
“She probably has jungle fever,” said Duck-Duck.
“When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras,” Molly said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means the most likely and commonsense conclusion is usually the right conclusion. The commonsense conclusion in this case would be the flu, not jungle fever. If you heard hooves, the logical conclusion would be horses, not zebras,” said Molly.
“Unless you live in Africa,” said Duck-Duck.
Then I realized my mistake. If I hadn’t been living in this exotic new land of Africa with Duck-Duck and Molly, I would be able to just start over and pretend Duck-Duck didn’t exist. I could totally avoid her in the lunchroom. I could leave school by the back door so I wouldn’t see her walking home. I could disappear and never have to think of zebras again.
But I was living on Cherry Road. Even if I avoided Duck-Duck all day, even if she stayed for extra soccer, I still had to see her at night. I still had to see her in the morning eating cereal. I still had to pretend in front of Molly that Duck-Duck hadn’t turned into a Darsa wolf-girl.
I started having more sympathy for Harriet in Harriet the Spy. Even if she did have two parents, a nanny, and a cook, she had lost her best friends, and no words could fix that.
A few days later, when Keely showed up at Cherry Road, she didn’t even knock. She just walked right in. “My casa is your casa,” she said, as if that made it okay.
That was stupid, since it wasn’t her casa in the first place. It was Molly’s. Keely learned the word casa from the Spanish-speaking gas-station guy. She used it so people would think she knew Spanish.
“Hi,” I said. “Whatever.”
I had no idea Keely even knew where Molly’s house was. We had always met at the Family Center. That was the rule. She definitely wasn’t supposed to be here, but if I said so, she might get upset and take me to Arizona. Or maybe Mexico.
I looked at the clock. Molly had gone to pick up Duck-Duck from soccer practice and wouldn’t be back for a while.
Keely sat down at Molly’s table, pulled out a bag of tobacco and some dirty rolling papers, and spit on her fingers. Grandpa used to roll tobacco on the kitchen table, scattering dust and leaves to get wicked up by your sardines. Mom had moved on to a cheaper brand, but she still rolled just like he did.
“It’s all natural,” she said. “Harvested by Native Americans who fast while they say smoke prayers so that the energy is just right.”
Spitting at Molly’s clean table sure didn’t seem just right. I would have to wipe it down before Molly and Duck-Duck got home.
“Got anything to eat?” Keely said.
I knew she could smell cookies. Those Auga-L shake people couldn’t make up their minds. Apples were bad, but cookies were okay? I crossed my arms and looked at my mother.
“Why’d you take the SNAP card with you?” I asked. “What was I supposed to eat?”
“I didn’t take it on purpose. I was on my way to Reno, and I found the card. I thought about mailing it back, but you always were very resourceful and independent. I figured you’d be okay.” She finished rolling her cigarette and then lit it on Molly’s stove. She took a puff and blew smoke into the room. I realized I should have banned the cigarettes, but it felt too late now.
“You got anything to eat?” she asked again.
No way was one of my and Duck-Duck’s cookies getting mixed up with rolling papers and smoke prayer energy.
“Nope,” I said. “All out.”
“I wasn’t worried about you,” Keely went on, as if I hadn’t said anything. “I knew the elements would take care of you.”
I thought about my summer of carrying backpacks of canned baked beans all the way across town. I thought about stealing strawberries from neighborhood gardens and the occasional Yodel.
“What a shit-poor excuse,” I said. “There were no ‘elements’ taking care of me. I took care of me.”
Keely fiddled with her tobacco. “Cleaner, Concentrated, Secure, and Free, as everyone who knows Auga-L would say,” she said. “Think of how it applies to you. I figured if I left, the Department ladies would come back and set you on the right track better than I could anyway.”
I was stumped. Nothing stuck to her. She was like Jell-O, words just slipping through and out the other side without making a dent.
“Didn’t you feel guilty, even a little bit?” I asked.
Keely got this serious look on her face. But it was a practiced look. When the Social Service ladies first started coming around after Grandpa died, she would look bored, or mad, or just blank. She hadn’t quite mastered the serious look. Now she could look like she had given an idea a lot of thought. It was a lot like the lipstick she’d started wearing. Her hair and eyes were still dirt-brown, but now she wore lipstick, and she could put on a new serious look.
“I only ran away one other time.” She blew out smoke. “I was pregnant and I thought it was my last chance to get away. I mean, who would have a baby while living with someone like Pop?”
I had to give her credit for that one. I never knew she had even thought about it, even once. Then I realized she hadn’t answered my question. Maybe there were so many things she couldn’t answer that she didn’t even try anymore.
“I left with my boyfriend, Jack,” she said. “We’d been going out for a few months, and he said he wanted to go make it big in New York City. I couldn’t think of anywhere else. New York would be a good place to have a kid. That’s where Sesame Street is.” She clicked her teeth.
That’s what happened when you didn’t read books: you decided where to live on the basis of one TV show — a kids’ show. Didn’t she know Law & Order happened in New York City too? Duck-Duck was forever telling me about Law & Order plots with people who got killed for money or because they used bad logic, or worse.
Keely click-clacked her teeth. “For a couple months, I thought we had it made,” she said, “but then Jack held up a Seven-Eleven, and he got caught. I had no money for an apartment and no job. I was too young to drive. All I had was two packs of Tic Tacs. I had to call Pop to come get me.” She gave this little sigh-sniff, but she didn’t really sound sad. She sounded like she was reading a newspaper article reporting the facts.
“Pop left me on the streets for weeks before he finally drove down to get me. He told me I was a fat slut and that I looked like a cow and no wonder Jack left me. Pop just hit me, threw me into the backseat of the borrowed Ford, and started driving. That was the one nice thing he did — not make me ride in the bed of the pickup. Then, just as we left the city, my water broke. I begged him to stop at a hospital. All the way up the Taconic Parkway, I yelled and screamed, but he said, ‘Hey, you wanted me to pick you up. Well, here I am, so now we’re going home.’ I kept begging, and he said, ‘Shut up, bitch. Who else would save your worthless ass?’ When the baby came out, it almost fell off the seat. It was bluish and I thought it w
as dead, but then it started to cry.” She ground her cigarette butt into a saucer. “Pop told me I was gonna have to work off the money it would take to redo the seat cushions.”
She talked about “the baby” as if it were someone, some thing, neither of us had ever met, when actually it was me. It was weird she was telling me this now, when what she should have been telling me was what happened in the river.
“Next time, smoke outside,” I said. I was too stunned to say anything else.
Keely just shrugged and stood up. She gave one last look around the kitchen, maybe looking for those cookies, and wandered out the door without even saying good-bye.
I wondered if she ever really connected me with “the baby.” Or “the baby” with me. It occurred to me that no one else would ever believe this story: a father picking up his pregnant fifteen-year-old daughter and then, after calling her names, forcing her to give birth in the backseat of a moving car? I was the only person who would ever believe it, because I was the only other person alive who knew Grandpa like she did. Those Social Service ladies probably thought she made shit like that up.
I wiped away Keely’s cigarette ashes and opened the door to air out the kitchen. I never told Molly about Keely’s visit.
Grandpa’s rules had changed every day. And every day it was Keely’s and my job to guess what the rules were. Be quiet. Don’t be quiet. Set the table. Don’t set the table. Answer the door. Don’t answer the door.
At the beginning of every school year, teachers talked a lot about Rules and the Real World. They went on about how we weren’t babies anymore; if we didn’t learn to follow the rules, what did we think was going to happen when we got to high school? They had rules for eating and not eating, for peeing and not peeing, for talking and not talking. Don’t think the real world is this easy! they said. Don’t run, but don’t be late. Don’t wear short dresses. Don’t wear long earrings. They had rules about swearing and teasing and back talk. They had rules about bikes and skates and scooters. They banned cell phones and knives and cigarettes. It was all online too, in case you forgot.