The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “When your grandfather told you those stories, did it make you sad?” Jude asked, watching the cowgirl write down the orders of three boys in ducktails who were sitting in a convertible with an elevated rear end and an elaborate chrome tailpipe. PARTY DOLL was painted on the fender. She and Molly had already decided to be waitresses here when they grew up, so that they could wear the cowgirl outfits.

  “Yes. It made me sad to know that people would treat each other that way. It still does.”

  “Why do they?” asked Jude, determined to get this settled once and for all.

  “Ah, the question of the ages.” He wadded up his wrapper and napkin and stuffed them into the paper bag.

  “But what’s the answer?”

  “Jude,” he said, “I’m afraid you may be one of those people who spend their lives searching for that answer.”

  “But what is it?” Jude was starting to feel frantic, as though this was a joke that everyone knew the punch line to but herself.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly, baby.” He turned around to look at her in the light from the flashing neon pig. “The Cherokees used to say that beneath different appearances, all creatures are merely manifestations of the Great Spirit. So that those who harm others unnecessarily disturb the balance of the universe and therefore harm themselves. But many people nowadays seem to feel separate and superior, so it doesn’t bother them so much to hurt others.”

  “Which do you believe?” Molly asked.

  “You don’t need to believe or not believe something once you experience it.”

  Jude and Molly looked at him blankly.

  “That means I agree with the Cherokees,” he said.

  Jude and Molly looked at each other. Jude thought that if anyone hurt Molly, she, too, would feel the pain. But if someone hurt Ace Kilgore, she’d feel glad. So which category did she fit into?

  Your daddy’s so sweet, Molly gesticulated in wolfspeak as he carried their trash to the can and handed their tray to the goose-bumped cowgirl. Jude felt proud of him.

  Since her parents were out of town, Molly spent that night at Jude’s house, and she taught Jude a game she’d just invented called Pecan. Jude lay on top of Molly, stomach-to-stomach, chest-to-chest, nose-to-nose. They looked cross-eyed into each other’s eyes. Then Molly began to giggle. Jude could feel Molly’s chest and stomach trembling and heaving beneath her own, so she started giggling, too. Soon it was impossible to tell who was and wasn’t giggling.

  Molly grabbed Jude’s wrists and forced her over onto her side. Then she scrambled to her knees and sat astride Jude’s chest, pinning her arms above her head. Breathing heavily, she look down at Jude with triumph, eyes so fierce that they were almost purple. “I could pin you like this with one hand tied behind my back,” she announced in her husky voice.

  “Probably,” said Jude. But she hadn’t been fighting back very hard because she had been too interested to find out what Molly would do next.

  Before they fell asleep, they agreed that Pecan was such a good game that they should play it a lot, taking turns lying on top.

  THROUGH THE BARE BRANCHES across the cave mouth Jude watched the river wind through the valley, a slithering brown snake. Holsteins stood to their knees in the water, patches of black spread across their barreled backs like continents on a globe. A hawk, fringed wing tips fluttering, swooped and dipped and floated on a column of air that was spiraling up from the valley floor. The Smokies rippled like blue sand dunes to the edge of the earth. Wispy puffs of smoke rose up from the mountain coves, where farmers were curing their tobacco.

  A dozen yards below, Ace Kilgore was yelling commands to the patrolling Commie Killers, unaware of Molly and Jude overhead. Jude’s father had shown them this cave, high up on a cliff, concealed by a thick tangle of mountain laurel, where Abigail Westlake had hidden while soldiers down below marched her family off to their deaths in the Ozarks. Jude and Molly were sitting on a cushion of pine needles, quiet as hunted game, playing Trail of Tears. They had even persuaded Sidney to halt his amiable panting.

  Although she tried her best to stay out of Ace’s way, Jude often stole glances at him on the playground or in the lunchroom or around the neighborhood. If she and Molly were wolf boys trying to pass unnoticed on the fringes of the forest, Ace was a wolf boy who had refused to come in from the wild. He was completely untamed, frightening but also admirable.

  The Commie Killers swept down the cliff face on their mission of national security. Jerry Crawford, Ace’s best friend, brought up the rear. He was much taller than Ace, but he always hunched over in an attempt to be the same height. A couple of the others, twins with sleek dark hair whom Jude and Molly called the “Panther Twins,” were stronger and faster than Ace. But they always trailed around after him like docile guard dogs, executing his nefarious orders without a flicker of hesitation.

  As their shouts faded, Jude extracted Girl Scout cookies and strawberry sodas from her knapsack. She handed Molly a candy cigarette, lighting it for her with an imaginary match. Cigarette dangling from her lips, Molly dealt hands for Over the Moon. Setting aside their soda bottles, they began drawing, exchanging and discarding in an arcane pattern understood only by themselves, since they had invented this game in which low cards were worth more than high ones. Sucking their cigarettes, they cheered and giggled and cursed.

  When the game ended, they used the cards to outline the floor plan of the cabin they were going to build on the ridge overhead when they grew up. It would be filled with books and records, and there would be a separate room for drawing and painting. Outside would be a stable for their dogs and horses, with a fenced-in paddock. Their jobs at the Wiggly Piglet would pay for it all.

  Jude inspected the floor plan that stretched across the pine needles. “What’s that room for?” she asked, pointing.

  “I just added it,” said Molly. “It’s for our babies. We can each have one.”

  Jude looked at her. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not me.”

  “But it would be fun.”

  “Babies kill you.”

  “Not always they don’t.”

  “Molly, I don’t want you to die. Promise me you won’t have a baby.”

  “Okay. Relax, Jude. It was just an idea.”

  Stomach knotted, Jude looked out the cave mouth as a huge, puffy white cloud drifted past like a giant cotton ball. Her mother was reclining on it, dressed in a skirted bathing suit, a white rose in her black hair.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Molly.

  Jude had told no one about sometimes seeing her mother. Everyone said she was dead. But Molly was her best friend. They told each other everything. “It’s my mother.”

  Molly glanced around the cave. “Where?”

  “Out there. See that cloud?”

  Molly looked out the cave mouth. “Yeah, it does look kind of like a woman.”

  “No, I mean my mother is there, riding on that cloud. Lying on that thing that looks like a throne. Wearing a bathing suit. Now she’s waving at us.”

  Molly stared at the cloud for a long time. “I don’t see her, Jude,” she finally said.

  “You don’t?” Jude blinked her eyes several times and then looked back at the cloud. Her mother was still there, tossing her a kiss.

  “No. But I believe you, Jude. I believe she’s really there.”

  But Molly’s frown lines didn’t go away, even after they returned to Over the Moon.

  Finally, Jude rested her handful of cards on the pine needles. “What’s wrong?” she asked, worried that Molly might be wondering if she really wanted to be best friends with someone who saw ghosts.

  “Nothing.”

  Jude shrugged. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell.”

  After a long strained silence broken only by Sidney’s panting, Molly said, “Noreen passed a note around class today saying that you’re my boyfriend.”

  “What? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of.”

  “And during recess this af
ternoon, she and all her creepy little friends started singing, ‘Molly and Jude, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.…’”

  “But I don’t even know how to kiss,” said Jude, outraged.

  “You don’t?”

  “Why would I?”

  “I’ll teach you,” offered Molly.

  Jude looked at her quickly. “How do you know?”

  “I watch my parents—in the living room at night, when they think I’m asleep. I sneak halfway down the stairs and look through the banister.” Laying aside her cards, she put the back of her hand to her mouth and opened her lips as though about to take a bite out of it. Then she pressed her lips hard against her hand and closed her eyes, twisting her hand and head in opposite directions.

  “Okay. Try it,” she said to Jude.

  Jude copied her, sucking the back of her own hand with feigned fervor.

  “Good,” said Molly. “Now try this.” She clutched the hand she was kissing with her other hand and turned her mouth aside to murmur, “Oh, my darling, I love you so much.”

  “Oh, my darling, I love you so much,” Jude murmured to her hand, trying to imagine Molly’s mother, who was as fragile as a flower, doing such a disgusting thing with Molly’s father, who was covered like a bear with coarse, black hair and spoke in a voice that was almost a growl.

  “There. You’ve got it,” Molly said with satisfaction.

  “But why can’t Noreen just leave us alone?” demanded Jude, letting her adorable hand collapse into her lap. “We’ve never done anything to her.”

  “Momma says she wouldn’t tease us if she didn’t like us.”

  They considered this bit of adult wisdom for a long time. It sounded far-fetched.

  “What do you think we should do?” Jude lay back on the slick, fragrant pine needles, hands behind her head.

  “You may have to prove to her that you’re a girl.”

  “How?”

  “If you show her you haven’t got one of those dumb penises, she’ll know you aren’t a boy. And if you aren’t a boy, then you can’t be my boyfriend.”

  Jude giggled. “Maybe it would be better just to spend less time together.”

  “We can’t let anyone come between us,” said Molly.

  “Nobody could ever do that.”

  They glanced at each other doubtfully.

  “No,” said Molly.

  “But if we ignore each other at school,” insisted Jude, “they’ll think we don’t like each other anymore, and then they’ll leave us alone.”

  “We could still meet here every day after school,” said Molly, looking relieved.

  “Yeah. We’re safe here. Nobody could ever find us.”

  After finishing her homework that night, Jude put on her pajamas and pulled the shoe box out from under her bed. Extracting one of her mother’s letters, she climbed under the covers and decoded another paragraph: “This afternoon on your parents’ lawn, while I was watching your father drive his golf ball across the river, Jude got a cardboard box from the garage and hung a dish towel over an upright stick inside it. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained that she was making a boat so she could sail down the river and across the sea to visit her daddy in France. Our child is the light of my life in these dark days, darling. Thank you for her, and for our nights of love that brought her into being.”

  Smiling, Jude reread this several times. She had been the light of her mother’s life. Wrapped in this new knowledge as though in her mother’s arms, she sniffed the perfume emanating from the letter and caressed the back of her hand with her lips and remembered her mother leaning down in her long sleek mink coat to press her bright red lips against Jude’s cheek as she lay in bed. If she woke up before her parents got home and smelled the smoke from the baby-sitter’s cigarettes in the living room, she would get up and look in the mirror and touch the red lips imprinted on her cheek and know that everything would soon be fine again.

  The next day, Jude was playing Red Rover with the other second graders when she spotted Molly helping Noreen mat down the tall grass in the far corner of the playground to form a warren of interconnected rooms. Noreen appeared to be the mother bunny and Molly the father. The other girls were apparently baby bunnies, because they were hopping through the grassy chambers sucking their thumbs and wiggling their noses.

  Jude caught Molly’s eye and glared at her. Molly gestured in wolfspeak when Noreen wasn’t looking: Don’t worry. You’ll always be my best friend. I will never play Pecan with Noreen.

  Meanwhile, Oscar, who had been kept back two years and was twice as large as the other second graders, had identified Mary, the frail girl who was holding Jude’s hand, as the weak link in his opponents’ line. He charged the two of them with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils. As Jude fell to the ground and was trampled beneath his pounding feet, she simply switched off the playground, like changing stations on the radio.

  And there was her mother, dressed in her long mink coat, standing in the doorway of her mansion in heaven, arms outspread for Jude.

  “How have you been, light of my life?” she asked.

  JUDE SET HER ALARM for the middle of the night. Tiptoeing into her father’s room, she stood by his bedside listening to his soft steady snoring. She felt guilty waking him up when he worked so hard, but it had to be done.

  “Daddy?” she whispered.

  He sat straight up from a deep sleep, well trained from his years of people pounding on the back door in the middle of the night, bearing the bloody victims of family feuds up in the mountain coves.

  “I’ve been throwing up,” she announced in her most pitiful voice. It was only a small lie, because she’d felt like throwing up ever since she saw Molly playing Father Bunny with Noreen.

  He reached over to feel her cheeks and forehead with a cool hand. Then he got up, took her back to her own room, tucked her in, and laid a towel along her bedside with instructions to call him if it happened again.

  The next morning, he came into her room in his navy-blue corduroy robe and thrust a thermometer into her mouth before going to the bathroom to shave. While he was gone, she held the thermometer against the bulb in the lamp on her nightstand. Then she furiously scrubbed her wool blanket back and forth across her chest and arms until a rash appeared.

  When her father returned, dressed in a white shirt and smelling like cinnamon toast, he read the thermometer in the lamplight, placed a damp hand on her forehead, poked her rash with his fingertips, and told her to spend the day in bed.

  Jude ended up spending the entire week in bed, eating meals Clementine brought her on a tray and listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio while Clementine ironed by her bedside. Her father ransacked the hospital library trying to diagnose her mysterious rash and fever. Molly came over every afternoon after school, bearing candy or cookies she’d saved from her lunch box or bought with her allowance at the drugstore on the highway.

  “So how’s Noreen?” Jude asked each afternoon.

  Each afternoon, Molly averted her eyes and answered, “She’s all right.”

  After Molly left, Jude would take out her mother’s letter in which she called Jude the light of her life and sniff its fragrance and remember stroking her mother’s calves with her hands as she straightened the seams down the backs of her silky stockings.

  On Friday afternoon, Molly’s reply to Jude’s stubborn question was, “Noreen and I had a fight. We aren’t speaking anymore.”

  To her father’s relief, Jude was out of bed and back on her feet for the weekend.

  MOLLY AND JUDE, KNAPSACKS on their backs, were weaving through the tangled maze of rock ledges and mountain laurel in the Wildwoods the afternoon following Jude’s abrupt recovery from her unidentified disease. They had agreed it might be a good idea to play Pecan when they reached their cave, to make up after their week of estrangement. But when they arrived beneath the limestone outcropping, they found hacked, withering laurel branches strewn around the leafy forest floor. And printed ac
ross the pale gray rock face in red paint was DEATH TO ALL BOY-GIRLS!

  Inside the cave, their playing cards, torn and twisted, were scattered across the pine needles. And in the middle of the floor, cold and stiff, a necklace of blood around its throat, lay a baby rabbit. Molly and Jude glanced at each other.

  “I think we need to talk to Sandy,” whispered Jude, groping for Molly’s hand.

  Molly extracted her hand to say in wolfspeak, Let’s get out of here. They may be hiding somewhere, watching us.

  Sandy lowered the ladder to his tree house, and they clambered up it as though pursued by enraged yellow jackets. Some maniac was screaming opera from a record player in the corner. A large, black typewriter sat on a low table. Stacks of paper lay everywhere.

  “I’m writing a novel,” said Sandy, fair hair as scrambled as though he’d combed it with an eggbeater. “It’s about alienation on the playground. It’s a metaphor for life.”

  “What’s alienation?” asked Molly as they sat down cross-legged on the carpet.

  “What’s a metaphor?” asked Jude.

  “Oh, never mind,” Sandy said with a sigh. “What’s up?”

  “We’re in trouble,” said Jude.

  “As usual.” Sandy smiled tightly. “Now what?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors at school,” said Molly. “That Jude is my boyfriend?”

  He nodded. “The solution is simple. I’ve been wanting to tell you, but you haven’t asked.”

  “What?” they asked in unison.

  “Wear dresses and Mary Janes.”

  They looked at each other.

  “It’s the only way.” Sandy pointed to the socks and sandals on his feet. “I wear these at home, but I wear high-tops at school. I play softball even though I prefer chess. If you look the way they look and do the things they do, they’ll leave you alone. You can be yourself in private. Play their game, but know it’s a game. Pretend you’re double agents. Like on ‘I Led Three Lives.’ That’s the theme of my novel: the gap between appearance and reality. It’s called The Naked and the Clothed.”

  “It might work,” said Molly, studying Jude. She started giggling.