by Noley Reid
“Well,” she says, “we could play Indians.”
“Okay.”
I don’t know what to do with my arms. She is still petting the top of the bear’s head like Enid falling asleep with Floey. But the bear is stuck in mid-yawn and I can feel that yawn stick in me, too—back there, way at the back, one of those yawns that never fully come out. I knit my fingers behind my back; I shrug.
Dawn picks up the front of the bear by its two forepaws and scoots underneath it. “Come on,” she says. “It’s our hide. To keep us warm. Let’s say it’s nighttime.”
“We don’t have a fire?” I say. I don’t tell her I saw her undies when she bent over. Rainbow candy hearts on pink.
We lie here on our backs. Quiet. Under the bear, which is felt-backed and smells like the deep corners of closets. I turn my nose away, toward Dawn. She is watching me.
“Dawn?”
She takes my hand, holds it at our sides between us, holds it beneath our hide. I look up, into the felt. The bear’s head is heavy on us. For all my twisting and turning, it slips more onto me, my nose squashing beneath it. “Dawn,” I say.
“Vivvy.”
“Okay,” I say. We are Indians safe in our tepee, warm under our hide, feeling the weight of death and each other’s hand. I am the girl and she is the boy.
“Did you hear that?” she whispers.
“What?”
“They’re coming!” She throws off the bear and suddenly I feel cold, naked. “Now I’m the cowboy. Scream.”
I hold still, look at her a second.
“Scream!”
I do.
She grabs my arms and pulls me up. “I’m throwing you over my horse now.”
I go with her.
“You have to scream, Vivvy.”
“Help,” I say, but too quietly.
For probably only two minutes she trots circles through the basement, her arms looped through mine, holding me tightly to her back like a human backpack, as I trot backward, trying not to trip her. Finally she stops behind the wet bar.
“Here we are, Indian princess. Home sweet home.”
Enid
After school today, Vivvy rides our regular bus and we walk home—not together but not apart either, sort of diagonally from each other. Clint wasn’t on the bus but we don’t talk about that or anything, until we cut through his yard.
Now Vivvy says, “Dawn asked me over to her house again.”
“What do you want, a cookie?”
“You do,” Vivvy says and tries to pinch my side but I wriggle through the porch door first and she must not care because she goes straight upstairs.
I make a snack, which we can do now. I make cheese and crackers, cut the Muenster myself and arrange enough crackers on my plate, and stand with it at the big counter.
Now Ma comes. I hold my plate like maybe I’ll run downstairs to hide. But I don’t, this time. I set back down the snack and give her a little smile.
She looks at me and my plate. “How was school, Enid?”
She reaches across the counter and snitches a Muenster on Ritz and pops the whole thing smack in her mouth. Ma crunches once and gulp-swallows.
I have three Muensters on Ritz left.
I make a stack of them and chomp through like Daddy eats a Big Mac.
“Did you need all that?” says Ma. Her eyes are on my plate, the sheen of buttery crackers there and now gone, the flecks of salt. “You’ll choke, Enid,” she says. Ma’s head always cocks down at me, and now she stands shaking it some. “Baby, you’re crying,” she says, but only the way she’d speak of the dogs rolling on their backs with their feet up in the air. Like you say of something cute or ridiculous.
I spit it out. Back onto the plate. I don’t pick it up again, that orange buttery mushball. I want it but I don’t.
Sometimes I know I’m gross. I think about it. Think: Do I sit up straight enough in the cafeteria? Because if not, I know what that looks like. I’m not that girl, with my arms wrapped around my lunch tray. I’m not afraid you’ll take my fries or the last pepperoni off my single slice. I wouldn’t like it, but I’m not afraid like Vivvy thinks I am.
Tate
By mid-September, I’ve driven to Dawn’s house to retrieve Vivvy at least a dozen times. The girls are inseparable and tonight they have a group date with some of their other little friends. Vivvy thinks we don’t know, but there was a phone call at dinner a couple of nights ago. She tied herself up in the cord and leaned into the corner to go unheard. She giggled and said “Oh my god” over and over.
Enid stared. Francie and I bit our lips to keep from laughing.
When Vivvy came back to the table, she popped a small broccoli floret into her mouth and chewed.
“I know who that was,” said Enid.
“Do not,” said Vivvy.
“Hush, girls,” I said.
Vivvy looked off toward the kitchen. And Francie studied Vivvy as our middle child made grand movements with fork and knife. And then we were all done looking and each of us made just the noise of cutting, forks and knives scraping, and went on eating. Our first sign from the outside world: we are getting on with life.
Francie
Vivvy holds up a blue swan shirt inside an off-white wrap sweater with the hood and the sash that all the girls had two years ago, when these were the must-have. It makes her look homeless but this was the style and she hasn’t outgrown it yet.
“Do you think this goes, Mother?”
I start to speak but find myself just standing here looking at this tiny girl who positively vibrates with hope and expectation.
“It has to be right,” she says. “I need everything just right.”
I sit on Enid’s bunk and call Vivvy to me. She sits down and our thighs touch. I see, for the first time in years, our legs are different sizes. Vivvy’s remain as tiny as birds’ ankles. Mine, now, they spread beneath me. I lift my heels to raise them up off the mattress. I stand.
“You are such a good girl, Vivvy. Such a lovely, lovely girl.”
“Why are you crying?” She swats my chin off of her head and runs back to the bathroom, her hands slipping off her blue headband to reapply at the mirror. “Oh my god.”
Vivvy
When Dawn and I meet up at McDonald’s, she looks like a high schooler. She’s wearing her blue-and-yellow paisley shirt, the collared one that buttons and hangs to her knees because it’s supposed to be that long. She has electric blue leggings beneath and her navy, point-toed MIAs.
Her mom lets her out at the drive-thru/employees-only door and pulls back out of the lot. She was singing to something but definitely not on K92. She would have flipped the station if I were in the car, too, but Dawn says when they’re alone, her mom makes her listen to the God stations. One time, her mom picked her up at school and I was going home with her that day, too. When I got in the car, Dawn said, “Thank god!” and we started crying we laughed so hard. Her mom gave us dirty looks and didn’t say much all the way home after that.
Right now, Dawn stands at the first real door she comes to and cups her hands around the outer edges of her eyes to block out the sun and the reflection of all the parked cars and me—hello, I’m right here on the far curb if you will just turn around. It doesn’t even make sense that she’s looking inside; we never go in.
“Oh my god,” I say.
She spins around. “Vivvy! Hide why don’t you.” She steps back off the sidewalk and looks for traffic both ways. She fake-jogs over. Her hair swings out in front of her face.
I goof around, swatting at her behind up inside all the extra room of her shirt. “Oh my god,” I say. I have been waiting here twenty minutes.
She reaches her hand down into the front pocket of my corduroys. It kind of jostles me and I stumble against her. She laughs, looking down like this is a private joke only for her. Her hair covers her face now.
“What are you doing?” She swats away my hand before I know it’s mine and that it is going to touch her,
to move her hair out of the way. “Aha!” she says and holds out the money I had in my pocket.
I don’t try to swipe it back.
Now we walk together to the Wendy’s parking lot. Wendy’s is better than McDonald’s for a date because of the stained glass lamps and because they clear your trays and trash when you’re done. It is a bit swanky. She’s going with Andy, because she has been going with him since the first week of school. She swears they’ve never even kissed, at least not frenched.
We cross at the light, come around the corner, and there they are: Andy sitting on the curb, one foot trailing into the gutter, Travis standing up, balance-walking along the edge of sidewalk.
Dawn drops my hand. She runs over to Andy and I walk behind, watching how she stops short of him, seems to stand outside a box he is in. And I smile.
Enid
“Tell me,” I beg.
“No, Enid. Give it a rest!” says Vivvy, rolling onto her elbows to read.
“Did you do it?”
“Enid! I am not having this conversation,” she says. “You are so gross. You’re so disgusting. You don’t even know what that is. God, you’re stupid.” She laughs.
“Did you kiss?”
She ignores me, goes back to her book.
“Like with Clint?”
Nothing.
“Like me with Clint?”
She peers down over the rim of the bunk bed at me. Vivvy studies me. Makes my skin feel hot and the bridge of my nose burn. “Clint didn’t kiss you. When did Clint kiss you?”
“I told you before! A lot and for a while now,” I say.
“How long a while?”
“A while—I don’t know.”
“Well I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care,” I say. I take a book from our little half shelf by the far window. Any book, doesn’t matter. I lie on my mattress, propped up on my elbows, and I look at it, every page.
“Be careful, Enid,” she says.
“Who cares.”
“Be careful.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so, stupid baby.”
“Jealous.”
“Couldn’t care less,” she says.
“Ha.”
“Ha!” she mimics me back. Then her whole head comes swinging down over the side of the bunk, her hair hanging half behind her, half in front of her face. “Think about it,” she says and throws her book at me.
“I’m not a baby.”
Tomorrow I’ll go to Clint’s house.
20
Francie
Sometimes I remember it wrong.
“They don’t grow out of it,” said Dr. Gibson. “They eat until they explode.”
I bought Master locks, like for gym lockers, hung them from loops of dog chain and synchronized the combinations. Tate asked for the slip of paper on which I’d written 12-27-3—no significance at all, and that was the point, because Tate’s nothing if not a worrier of all puzzles and mysteries, until he’s got them figured out. So when he asked for the slip, I placed it in my mouth, wet it really well on my tongue, and swallowed.
Vivvy
I wait for Dawn after school, stand just shy of her bus’s doors and wait. Then I see her with Andy, holding hands and stepping up onto his bus. I go walk behind the school. Nobody is there anymore. The buses are leaving. I hear the air rush out of their brakes. The field behind school is big without kids running around on it. I lean against the bricks in the cubby where I first did with Evan, then Marco, then Travis.
The back door swings open, but it’s the janitor. He stands in the doorway tossing trash sacks in the air. They clang down into the dumpster and rattle the flip-top lid against its side. I like the sound, how big it is. How long it goes on rattling. I kick the dumpster, kick it again as hard as humanly possible.
Francie
That was last night. I cleared every shelf. Anything in a box. Any mix or sack. But the butter and flour and sugar, too. Cookies and bread, the girls’ graham crackers and oatmeal packs. None of it stayed but the carrots, the milk, and orange juice.
Today, I rebought it all and more.
I stood in the checkout pretending there was a party and I was trash who won’t cook: store-made cookies, a quarter sheet cake, Doritos to stain my fingers orange. Pop-Tarts and Pringles, banana wafers, and caramel squares.
The house was empty so this lot I ate standing at the counter, looking out the windows to make sure no one would see. All the wrappers and boxes I bagged, double-bagged, and hid beneath old magazines in the trash. I gloved one hand in one more bag, walked out to the back corner of the yard where the dogs like best to shit between the wall and black currant bushes—I told Sheldon they were poison so many years ago; I don’t know why I did that—and placed their mess on top. Just so to be sure.
•
“Come to bed,” Tate whispers tonight.
He has already walked the dogs so they stretch out long on the carpet.
“In a bit.” I’m trying to read.
“Francie, come to bed.”
Enid lies belly-flopped on her baby blanket. She pretends to sleep so maybe we will let her be, let her stay down here. She squints one eye open to see, then flips her head the other way. Vivvy is puzzling through a crossword at my feet.
Tate has folded up his last section of the paper. He’s highlighted what he likes in one of his texts he keeps stacked around the side of the chair. He leans my way. Pushes his lips to my ear: “Darling,” he coos, “come to bed.”
“I’m busy here. Dammit, Tate!”
“Da-ddy,” says Vivvy, though she keeps to her page and pencil.
He lays aside his book. “It’s late is all,” he says to the room.
•
I hid the doughnuts in the basement toy chest because the girls are too big for sock puppets and building blocks.
Pink box. Glaze flaking overtop, gooed to the box on their bottoms. One cinnamon cake, one cruller, sour cream sugared, custard squishing out of chocolate. It’s not impossible to taste glaze on the finger. It’s also not impossible to gain 18 pounds in one week. And it’s certainly not impossible to prefer carrot cake under cream cheese to anything a man can say or do.
I’ve hidden a sack of pretzels here amid the toys, too. A bag of peanut M&M’s.
I kneel here at the chest, both hands buried in them now, and feeling, feeling—I touch the candy first, each piece’s round slickness.
Down the steps come Floey’s toenails clicking at the slippery painted wood she hates and fears. If the reward is right, it seems, we can all fight demons. I wait stock-still for Tate on her heels, but the house is quiet so I go back to the blocks and collapse to the floor there, my spine no longer bones pressing hard against the toy chest. I let the dog lick my face.
Eventually there are my own slow feet moving through the house. The water in the bathroom. The bedsprings.
He pretends I wake him. “I love you,” he says.
Tate
When I pick up my office extension, I hear only the clack and click of Francie’s rings sliding across the handset. It’s an old habit; I wait.
Beside me sits a tidy stack of graded essays on the feminization of platonic love, each in its slick, transparent report sleeve of red, blue, yellow, green, or clear. By the light of only this desk lamp, they glow like a roll of Life Savers set on end and peeled clean of the foil and wax paper.
“Are you there?” she says.
“I’m here,” I say and take down the top paper. The cover is red. I peel it open and the title page clings to it. I fold it back and smooth in the crisp crease I made in them all this week upon first reading.
“Francie,” I say. “I’m here. What is it?”
“We’re not on the same schedule,” says Francie.
“Okay, I can’t do this right now. I have more papers to grade. I’ll be home later.”
“Don’t you think I’d be her again if I could?”
“I have to go now.”
<
br /> “You never have to think about it at all, you just live.”
“I think about it plenty.”
“Not the same.”
“No, I’m sure it’s not,” I say.
“I don’t know where I begin.”
“How about with choosing to spend time with your girls and me?”
She is quiet. Just breathing there into the mouthpiece holes.
Francie
No more tonight.
Tomorrow, nothing until dinner and just one or two bites then.
21
Vivvy
October begins strangely: “Eat something, please,” says Mom to Enid.
There are cheddar biscuits, beans, and potatoes done in the roasting pan, golden around the edges and crisp; pork Parmesan, which she invented when it was just Mom and Dad together.
“Won’t you eat a bite?” she asks Enid again, moving her fork around in the beans on Enid’s plate and skewering a potato for her. “It all looks so delicious, doesn’t it?”
I pinch Enid’s fatty inch, look at her and jut my head out at her: Eat, I’m telling her. I pass her the butter, which is still a perfect stick. That never happens in this house.
“Not hungry,” whispers Enid.
Mom begins snatching our silverware and dumping each of our plates into her salad bowl. Floey stands up and the other dog comes jangling from his bed in the corner because she is using a knife to scrape the plates clean. She knocks her chair back, storming away from the table.
“Why didn’t you eat it?” I ask. “What do you care? You could have eaten it, Enid.”
Dad doesn’t hush me. Mom has the faucet on full blast and clangs the dishes around in the sink before shoving them into the dishwasher.
“You could have made her happy,” I say. “You are such a cow. Can’t you at least eat when it matters?”
“I hate you, Vivvy!”
He does not say, Go after your sister. Talk to her. Be her friend. You’re in this together. Love her, baby. He just stares.
But I do follow her. Enid is in the corner of our bedroom, where she has had a tippy stack of books leaning since she got them for Christmas. She is sitting with her knees up inside her T-shirt. I open my desk drawer where I hid Mom’s good scissors and I pick up the top book, which is photographs of Black Beauty. I slide the open scissors beneath the cover and stand there in front of Enid.