Even Miss Park’s loud, jovial voice couldn’t cover up the ominous sound of the word check. “I don’t think I quite understand. Why should you check on Cathy?”
“Purely routine. The school doctor and the health department like to keep records on how many cases of measles or flu or chicken pox are going the rounds. Right now it looks like the season for mumps. Is Cathy all right?”
“She seemed a little feverish yesterday afternoon when she got home from school, but she acted perfectly normal when she left this morning.”
Miss Park’s silence was so protracted that Marion became painfully conscious of things she wouldn’t otherwise have noticed—the weight of the binoculars in her lap, the thud of her own heartbeat in her ears. Across the canyon, the Smith child was playing quietly and alone on the patio. There is definitely something the matter with that girl, Marion thought. Perhaps I’d better not let Cathy go over there any more, she’s so imitative. “Miss Park, are you still on the line? Hello? Hello—”
“I’m here.” Miss Park’s voice seemed fainter than usual, and less positive. “What time did Cathy leave the house this morning?”
“Eight, as usual.”
“Did she take the school bus?”
“Of course. She always does.”
“Did you see her get on?”
“I kissed her goodbye at the front door,” Marion said. “What’s this all about, Miss Park?”
“Cathy hasn’t been at school for two days, Mrs. Borton.”
“Why, that’s absurd, impossible! You must be mistaken.” But even as she was speaking the words, Marion was raising the binoculars to her eyes: the little girl on the Smiths’ patio had a straw curtain of hair, and eyes as blue as the periwinkles along the creek banks.
“Mrs. Borton, I’m not likely to be mistaken about which of my children are in class or not.”
“No. No, you’re—you’re not mistaken, Miss Park. I can see Cathy from here—she’s over at the neighbor’s house.”
“Good. That’s a load off my mind.”
“Off yours, yes,” Marion said. “Not mine.”
“Now we mustn’t become excited, Mrs. Borton. Don’t make too much of this incident before we’ve had a chance to confer. Suppose you come and talk to me during my lunch hour and bring Cathy along. We’ll all have a friendly chat.”
But it soon became apparent, even to the optimistic Miss Park, that Cathy didn’t intend to take part in any friendly chat. She stood by the window in the classroom, blank-eyed, mute, unresponsive to the simplest questions, refusing to be drawn into any conversation even about her favorite topic, the Smiths. Miss Park finally decided to send Cathy out to play in the schoolyard while she talked to Marion alone.
“Obviously,” Miss Park said, enunciating the word very distinctly because it was one of her favorites, “obviously, Cathy’s got a crush on this young couple, and has concocted a fantasy about belonging to them.”
“It’s not so obvious what my husband and I are going to do about it.”
“Live through it, the same as other parents. Crushes like this are common at Cathy’s age. Sometimes the object is a person, a whole family, even a horse. And, of course, to Cathy a nightclub dancer and a baseball player must seem very glamorous indeed. Tell me, Mrs. Borton, does she watch television a great deal?”
Marion stiffened. “No more than any other child.”
Oh, dear, Miss Park thought sadly, they all do it; the most confirmed addicts are always the most defensive. “I just wondered,” she said. “Cathy likes to sing to herself, and I’ve never heard such a repertoire of television commercials.”
“She picks things up very fast.”
“Yes. Yes, she does indeed.” Miss Park studied her hands, which were always a little pale from chalk dust, and were even paler now because she was angry—at the child for deceiving her, at Mrs. Borton for brushing aside the television issue, at herself for not preventing, or at least anticipating, the current situation, and perhaps most of all at the Smiths, who ought to have known better than to allow a child to hang around their house when she should obviously be in school.
“Don’t put too much pressure on Cathy about this,” she said finally, “until I talk the matter over with the school psychologist. By the way, have you met the Smiths, Mrs. Borton?”
“Not yet,” Marion said grimly. “But believe me, I intend to.”
“Yes, I think it would be a good idea for you to talk to them and make it clear that they’re not to encourage Cathy in this fantasy.”
The meeting came sooner than Marion expected.
She waited at the school until classes were dismissed, then she took Cathy into town to do some shopping. She had parked the car, and she and Cathy were standing hand in hand at a corner, waiting for a traffic light to change; Marion was worried and impatient, Cathy still silent, unresisting, inert, as she had been ever since Marion had called her home from the Smiths’ patio.
Suddenly Marion felt the child’s hand tighten in a spasm of excitement. Cathy’s face had turned so pink it looked ready to explode, and with her free hand she was waving violently at two people in a small cream-colored sports car—a very pretty young woman with blonde hair in the driver’s seat, and beside her a young man wearing a wide friendly grin and a baseball cap. They both waved back at Cathy just before the lights changed and then the car roared through the intersection.
“The Smiths,” Cathy shouted, jumping up and down in a frenzy. “That was the Smiths.”
“Ssh, not so loud. People will—”
“But it was the Smiths!”
“Hurry up before the light changes.”
The child didn’t hear. She stood as if rooted to the curb, staring after the cream-colored car.
With a little grunt of impatience Marion picked her up, carried her across the road, and let her down quite roughly on the other side. “There. If you’re going to act like a baby, I’ll carry you like a baby.”
“I saw the Smiths!”
“All right. What are you so excited about? It’s not very unusual to meet someone in town whom you know.”
“It’s unusual to meet them.”
“Why?”
“Because it is.” The color was fading from Cathy’s cheeks, but her eyes still looked bedazzled, quite as if they’d seen a miracle.
“I’m sure they’re very unique people,” Marion said coldly. “Nevertheless, they must shop for groceries like everyone else.”
Cathy’s answer was a slight shake of her head and a whisper heard only by herself: “No, they don’t, never.”
When Paul came home from work, Cathy was sent to play in the front yard while Marion explained matters to him. He listened with increasing irritation—not so much at Cathy’s actions, but at the manner in which Marion and Miss Park had handled things. There was too much talking, he said, and too little acting.
“The way you women beat around the bush instead of tackling the situation directly, meeting it head-on—fantasy life. Fantasy life, my foot! Now we’re going over to the Smiths right this minute and talk to them and that will be that. End of fantasy. Period.”
“We’d better wait until after dinner. Cathy missed her lunch.”
Throughout the meal Cathy was pale and quiet. She ate nothing and spoke only when asked a direct question; but inside herself the conversation was very lively, the dinner a banquet with dancing, and afterward a wild, windy ride in the roofless car...
Although the footpath through the canyon provided a shorter route to the Smiths’ house, the Bortons decided to go more formally, by car, and to take Cathy with them. Cathy, told to comb her hair and wash her face, protested: “I don’t want to go over there.”
“Why not?” Paul said. “You were so anxious to spend time with them that you played hooky for two days. Why don’t you want to see them now?”
“Because they’re not there.”
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Smith told me this morning that they woul
dn’t be home tonight because she’s putting on a show.”
“Indeed?” Paul was grim-faced. “Just where does she put on these shows of hers?”
“And Mr. Smith has to play baseball. And after that they’re going to see a friend in the hospital who has leukemia.”
“Leukemia, eh?” He didn’t have to ask how Cathy had found out about such a thing; he’d watched a semi-documentary dealing with it a couple of nights ago. Cathy was supposed to have been sleeping.
“I wonder,” he said to Marion when Cathy went to comb her hair, “just how many ‘facts’ about the Smiths have been borrowed from television.”
“Well, I know for myself that they drive a sports car, and Mr. Smith was wearing a baseball cap. And they’re both young and good-looking. Young and good-looking enough,” she added wryly, “to make me feel—well, a little jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Cathy would rather belong to them than to us. It makes me wonder if it’s something the Smiths have or something the Bortons don’t have.”
“Ask her.”
“I can’t very well—”
“Then I will, dammit,” Paul said. And he did.
Cathy merely looked at him innocently. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then listen again. Why did you pretend that you were the Smiths’ little girl?”
“They asked me to be. They asked me to go with them.”
“They actually said, Cathy, will you be our little girl?”
“Yes.”
“Well, by heaven, I’ll put an end to this nonsense,” Paul said, and strode out to the car.
It was twilight when they reached the Smiths’ house by way of the narrow, hilly road. The moon, just appearing above the horizon, was on the wane, a chunk bitten out of its side by some giant jaw. A warm dry wind, blowing down the mountain from the desert beyond, carried the sweet scent of pittosporum.
The Smiths’ house was dark, and both the front door and the garage were locked. Out of defiance or desperation, Paul pressed the door chime anyway, several times. All three of them could hear it ringing inside, and it seemed to Marion to echo very curiously—as if the carpets and drapes were too thin to muffle the sound vibrations. She would have liked to peer in through the windows and see for herself, but the Venetian blinds were closed.
“What’s their furniture like?” she asked Cathy.
“Like everybody’s.”
“I mean, is it new? Does Mrs. Smith tell you not to put your feet on it?”
“No, she never tells me that,” Cathy said truthfully. “I want to go home now. I’m tired.”
It was while she was putting Cathy to bed that Marion heard Paul call to her from the living room in an urgent voice, “Marion, come here a minute.”
She found him standing motionless in the middle of the room, staring across the canyon at the Smiths’ place. The rectangular light of the Smiths’ television set was shining in the picture window of the room that opened onto the patio at the back of the Smiths’ house.
“Either they’ve come home within the past few minutes,” he said, “or they were there all the time. My guess is that they were home when we went over but they didn’t want to see us, so they just doused the lights and pretended to be out. Well, it won’t work! Come on, we’re going back.”
“I can’t leave Cathy alone. She’s already got her pajamas on.”
“Put a bathrobe on her and bring her along. This has gone beyond the point of observing such niceties as correct attire.”
“Don’t you think we should wait until tomorrow?”
“Hurry up and stop arguing with me.”
Cathy, protesting that she was tired and that the Smiths weren’t home anyway, was bundled into a bathrobe and carried to the car.
“They’re home all right,” Paul said. “And by heaven they’d better answer the door this time or I’ll break it down.”
“That’s an absurd way to talk in front of a child,” Marion said coldly. “She has enough ideas without hearing—”
“Absurd, is it? Wait and see.”
Cathy, listening from the back seat, smiled sleepily. She knew how to get in without breaking anything: ever since the house had been built, the real estate man who’d been trying to sell it always hid the key on a nail underneath the window box.
The second trip seemed a nightmarish imitation of the first: the same moon hung in the sky but it looked smaller now, and paler. The scent of pittosporum was funereally sweet, and the hollow sound of the chimes from inside the house was like an echo in an empty tomb.
“They must be crazy to think they can get away with a trick like this twice in one night,” Paul shouted. “Come on, we’re going around to the back.”
Marion looked a little frightened. “I don’t like trespassing on someone else’s property.”
“They trespassed on our property first.”
He glanced down at Cathy. Her eyes were half closed and her face was pearly in the moonlight. He pressed her hand to reassure her that everything was going to be all right and that his anger wasn’t directed at her, but she drew away from him and started down the path that led to the back of the house.
Paul clicked on his flashlight and followed her, moving slowly along the unfamiliar terrain. By the time he turned the corner of the house and reached the patio, Cathy was out of sight.
“Cathy,” he called. “Where are you? Come back here!”
Marion was looking at him accusingly. “You upset her with that silly threat about breaking down the door. She’s probably on her way home through the canyon.”
“I’d better go after her.”
“She’s less likely to get hurt than you are. She knows every inch of the way. Besides, you came here to break down doors. All right, start breaking.”
But there was no need to break down anything. The back door opened as soon as Paul rapped on it with his knuckles, and he almost fell into the room.
It was empty except for a small girl wearing a blue bathrobe that matched her eyes.
Paul said, “Cathy. Cathy, what are you doing here?” Marion stood with her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the scream that was rising in her throat. There were no Smiths. The people in the sports car whom Cathy had waved at were just strangers responding to the friendly greeting of a child—had Cathy seen them before, on a previous trip to town? The television set was no more than a contraption rigged up by Cathy herself—an orange crate and an old mirror which caught and reflected the rays of the moon.
In front of it Cathy was standing, facing her own image. “Hello, Mrs. Smith. Here I am, all ready to go.”
“Cathy,” Marion said in a voice that sounded torn by claws. “What do you see in that mirror?”
“It’s not a mirror. It’s a television set.”
“What—what program are you watching?”
“It’s not a program, silly. It’s real. It’s the Smiths. I’m going away with them to dance and play baseball.”
“There are no Smiths,” Paul bellowed. “Will you get that through your head? There are no Smiths!”
“Yes, there are. I see them.”
Marion knelt on the floor beside the child. “Listen to me, Cathy. This is a mirror—only a mirror. It came from Daddy’s old bureau and I had it put away in the storage room. That’s where you found it, isn’t it? And you brought it here and decided to pretend it was a television set, isn’t that right? But it’s really just a mirror, and the people in it are us—you and Mommy and Daddy.”
But even as she looked at her own reflection, Marion saw it beginning to change. She was growing younger, prettier; her hair was becoming lighter and her cotton suit was changing into a dancing dress. And beside her in the mirror, Paul was turning into a stranger, a laughing-eyed young man wearing a baseball cap.
“I’m ready to go now, Mr. Smith,” Cathy said, and suddenly all three of them, the Smiths and their little girl, began walking away in the mirror. In a few moments the
y were no bigger than matchsticks—and then the three of them disappeared, and there was only the moonlight in the glass.
“Cathy,” Marion cried. “Come back, Cathy! Please come back!”
Propped up against the door like a dummy, Paul imagined he could hear above his wife’s cries the mocking muted roar of a sports car.
The Cost of Respectability
Kathleen Hershey
“Who says it never rains in southern California?” I grumbled as I drew on my yellow slicker. January second, and my New Year’s resolution to take a daily walk was going to be harder than I had anticipated. The sedentary life of a freelance writer, not to mention the ten pounds I had gained during the Christmas holidays, were reason enough to make my daily walk appear normal to my neighbors, unused to people outside of cars who weren’t in elaborate jogging gear.
It was misting rain as I started up the steep hill. I was looking for something, some inspiration, to use in my writing.
The yards were consistently tidy, some edged in scalloped brick, and many flecked with junipers. Most of our neighbors had replaced their asphalt driveways with smooth concrete, a symbol of their continuing affluence despite inflation. It was lucky I had found a fresh approach to my writing that increased our total income enough to allow Jim and me to continue to live in this neighborhood.
There had been a time, a little over a year ago, when my husband had suggested my creative writing be put aside for something more lucrative.
“Even with my raise, I can’t afford to keep up the payments on this place,” he had said.
“Give me a little time, Jim. Maybe the novel will sell,” I’d pleaded. However, soon after that I discovered a new market for my talent, and was able to take the pressure off Jim.
I stopped to catch my breath by Mrs. Marshall’s terraced rose garden. A persistent red blossom was leaning precariously with the weight of the unexpected rain. Only one of the Marshalls’ Lincoln Continentals was parked in their driveway. A sodden cloth doll lay at the edge of the sidewalk. Getting careless, I thought in alarm. With a quick step, I kicked the wet toy out of sight into the ivy bordering the Marshalls’ yard. Then I crossed the street and walked downhill.
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