Our math teacher, a young pretty woman right out of college, was in the doorway talking to Mr. Radley, listening to him humming, “No, no, no, no, I don’t smoke it no more.” She was nodding hurriedly, the same way my mother did when trying to get Sally Jean or Mrs. Poole off the phone. I willed her to come in and begin our geometry class. I willed her to come in so the teasing could stop. Misty’s face was still flaming as she sat quietly, quieter than I’d ever seen her. I needed to do something, say something, but I was afraid to speak out.
“Leave me alone, you stupid son of a bitch,” she finally hissed, leaning forward on Merle’s desktop, the fringe of her purple sweater vest falling onto his open book.
“Yeah, your mama,” Tony said, and thrust his hips, legs apart in a suggestive way. “Right,” he said, but Todd was no longer right behind him. “Her mama.” He pointed at Misty and everyone got quiet. Todd Bridger’s face was the one that was red now.
“My mother is dead,” Misty said through clenched teeth, tears standing in her eyes, ready to roll with the least flutter of a lash. “And for your information—” The whole class was listening now, our geometry teacher shifting her weight back and forth as Mr. Radley scratched his thin hair and continued to talk full blast, his hands all over the place like frenzied birds let loose. It was clear that if Mr. Radley was the last human on earth our teacher would, if at all possible, go to another planet; he was so pitiful that you didn’t even want to laugh.
“For your information, Mr. Clearasil,” Misty was saying, “I have done more with a boy than even you know to think about!” My stomach rose with that one and I really thought I’d be sick. They were going to ask for proof and Misty had none. We shared that same boat of no experience. Her brother had kissed me, and her brother’s friend, Ronald, had kissed her. That was our sum total.
“Who?” Tony hissed, still not ready to quit. Threatened pride on top of Napoleon’s complex was like gasoline on a campfire. Misty sat there tossing her hair from side to side. “For me to know and you to find out, Little Zit.”
“Liar.” Tony was leaning over Merle now so that he could get right in Misty’s face, and suddenly Merle’s hand was there grabbing him by the shirt collar.
“She’s my brother’s girl,” Merle said. “You know, the biker? One who just bought the Harley?” He tightened his grip, pushing Tony back so that he could stand up. Merle was not one of the guys left behind; his voice was deep, and he was at least as tall as I was, which was five nine. “You know, the one who slit a guy’s nose because he didn’t like the way he looked?” Again the whole class got quiet, faces white and eyes wide open. “My brother’s in a club, and they look out for their own, you know?”
Perry Loomis stopped her doodling and stared at Merle with her mouth opened in surprise. There was no one more surprised than Misty, who now was grinning at Merle, patting his hand, winking, all to which he responded with only a slight smile and a nudge that was intended to turn her to the front of the room when our teacher finally came in, Mr. Radley still loitering outside the door.
“Sorry for the delay, class,” she said, and without looking out closed the door right in Mr. Radley’s face. Everyone was still stunned, Tony Bracey leaned back in his seat with a bewildered look of both fear and defeat. I could see his mouth dying to say “Greensboro” or “Alexandria,” but he did not utter a peep. Misty turned and put a little folded-up note on Merle’s desk, and he held it, passed it from hand to hand, and then put it in his pocket without even opening it. I imagined her saying something like “Thanks—I owe you one!” or “How will I ever repay you?” or “Merle Hucks, I love you.” I could not really place what I was feeling right then except left out, and though I often glanced to the side to see what kind of drawing Merle was doing during class, I fought the urge that day and did not look at him once.
“Can you believe how he stood up for me?” Misty asked that afternoon as we walked from the bus stop. “I mean that’s got to mean something, right?” She looked at me, earnestly searching my face until I responded with a shrug. “Oh, come on. He wouldn’t have done that for just anybody,” she said. “It means something.”
Lately Misty had found meaning in everything; every little whistle of the wind meant something. It was fate, plain and simple, and it was out of our control, it was just part of a series of happenings like dóminos, like her mother’s death. Her mother’s death was part of a much much bigger plan, and her little prayer about her coming home and never leaving again had nothing to do with it; it was all there, years, maybe centuries before, written in the stars. “I really do believe in predestination,” she had told me many times, and much to Sally Jean’s delight had begun going to the Presbyterian church, leaving me to the Methodists and my own supplying of “in the bed” to the hymn titles.
“Misty is searching,” my mother had told me. “Some things are hard to understand.” I wasn’t sure if she meant that Misty’s sudden interest in theology was hard to understand, or if she was speaking much more generally about all of us, how when in doubt, we search for answers.
“I mean,” Misty continued. “Maybe Dexter Hucks does like me.”
“Misty,” I said, cringing at the thought of Dexter Hucks. “You don’t even know him.”
“But I know who he is,” she said. “He rides by here, you know? And I do know R. Dubya.” She laughed. “Hey, maybe that’s who likes me.” She went on and on, the same way my father might arrange and rearrange one of his twisted plots.
We stopped in front of Misty’s house; Sally Jean was standing in the yard, stooping and standing, occasionally slipping something into her pocket. When she saw us, she straightened up and acted like she wasn’t doing a thing.
“She’s picking up rocks,” Misty whispered to me. “It drives her crazy to find one of Mama’s little Japanese garden rocks, and now that everything’s dead and she can see better, she’s determined to get them all.
“What are you doing, Sally Jean?” Misty yelled, shifting her books to her other arm. “Picking up rocks?”
“Well, no, that’s not why I came out here.” Sally Jean looked flustered. “Occasionally I might see a rock and I pick it up, because you know if Dean was to hit one with the mower it could be dangerous. It may not look like that much grass now”—she shook her head, pointed to the sparse brown patches—“but by summer I’m hoping to have this yard covered in a fine blanket of grass, and a rock hit by that mower would be a catatonic thing. Could break a window, put an eye out. That’s why I just pick them up when I see them.”
“Well, if it happens it happens,” Misty said, and smiled in a way that seemed to make Sally Jean even more uneasy. “I mean, it’s all out of our control, right?”
“Right.” Sally Jean kept her hands in the pocket of her khaki overcoat, while Misty ran and put her books inside and then came back out to go over to my house.
“See you later, Sally Jean,” Misty called cheerfully and Sally Jean stared after us, mouth open. As we walked up my driveway, I heard the plunk, plunk, plunk of rocks being dropped into the manhole. Her pockets were full of rocks.
It was dark by five o’clock when Misty and I went out on the sleeping porch to get my transistor. “Why is it out here anyway?” Misty asked. “It’s too cold to sit out here.” She flopped down in the rocking chair and propped her foot up on the railing. She was wearing lace-up boots with heavy treads, like what a mountain climber might wear, and bright red-and-yellow striped socks.
“Hey, look,” she said suddenly, and sat up straight. I followed her hand as she pointed to Merle’s house, and I focused on the water-pipe sounds coming from below, where my mother was in the kitchen.
“So?” I finally asked.
“Why, you can see right in their windows,” she whispered. Then she slapped at me in the same way a cat might toy with a lizard. “Don’t try and tell me that you don’t ever look over there.” She paused and crossed her heart with her hand to indicate a solemn swear. “If you do, you’re a liar
and will burn in hell.”
“Shhh,” I whispered, and pointed to the floor of the porch, though I knew there was no way my mother could hear us talking because the windows were all closed.
“All those times I’ve called, and your mama said you were sitting on the porch.” Misty could mimic my mother to a tee, and she did it then with her shoulders thrown back and mouth sucked in. “You sit here and look at the Huckses’ house. It’s like Rear Window. You spy on your neighbors.”
“No, I don’t.” I sat down in the glider and then followed her gaze, a bare bulb sharpening the walls of the Huckses’ kitchen. We both just sat, watching like a movie, and then Merle came out the back door and, in the yellow glow of the outside light, started moving around some old tires and other junk that was stacked back there. Dexter came up on his Harley and sat in the dark driveway gunning the engine.
“There he is,” Misty whispered, ignoring my attempts to go inside. “He is kind of cute in a real rough way, isn’t he? Sort of like a small Charles Bronson.” I started to say “or Charles Manson” but bit my tongue. In a few minutes R.W. Quincy pulled up on a smaller motorcycle, and then the three of them were standing there. Then we saw a flare of light as Merle lit a cigarette.
I kept thinking of Merle coming to Misty’s defense, so easily, not giving a damn what anyone might think, not giving a damn that one of them might sneak to one of the clean slick walls and write “Merle & Misty.” All of a sudden I realized that Merle had changed, slowly, occasionally lapsing into his old ways, but nevertheless changed; I couldn’t help but wonder when the softness had begun. Had there been some person, some teacher who pulled him close, an embrace of Wind Song or Tour Je Moi filling his head with hopes of a future other than that of his father? I wondered if it could be Mrs. Landell, the way she wrapped her arm around him that day in Mrs. Poole’s kitchen. What had touched Merle that made him so different from Dexter or R.W. Quincy? Or did it just happen, all planned from the beginning of time like Misty chose to believe?
“What did that note say?” I asked suddenly, and Misty looked away from the dark yard, nudged me with her foot.
“What note?” she asked slyly, and I just looked at her, waited. “Oh, you must mean that note I passed to Merle Hucks.”
“Yes.” I watched Merle go back inside, the light go off, and in a few minutes, the engines revved and Dexter and R.W. rode away; we hadn’t noticed before but there was a girl on the back of Dexter’s bike, their bodies pressed together as they sped down the dirt road.
“Are you jealous that I wrote a note to Merle?” she asked, and I shook my head, shrugged. “Oh, it was nothing.11 She laughed and slapped at my arm again. “I wanted it to look like something, you know, to scare that old sourpuss Tony a little bit more.” She rocked slowly, turned up the collar on her fake fur. She had taken Angela’s advice and begun streaking her hair with summer blond and it really did look good, much less orange. “It just said ‘Thanks for helping me.’ You know, I really did need some help.” It was quiet as she waited, and I knew I owed her something, an explanation, an apology.
“I’m sorry, Misty.”
“It’s okay. It’s not your style.” She laughed again. “But, I wouldn’t have thought it was Merle’s style either, would you? And do you think something’s going on with Merle and Perry Loomis?”
“Why?” I was glad we were on the dark porch because I felt my face go hot with the mention of their names together. I had never told Misty about when I talked to Perry in the bathroom; I had tried to forget that it ever happened.
“I don’t know. They look at each other an awful lot.”
“Oh,” I said, twisting the radio knob for the local station since it was too early to get Indiana. “I haven’t noticed.”
“Of course,” she said, voice rising along with her thin, penciled eyebrows. “I see him look at you, too.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said, and she just smiled knowingly, stared over at the lit window. There was hope in her expression and I knew what would come next, what always came next. “You go for Merle, and I’ll go for R.W. Quincy.” I was surprised by her suddenly serious tone.
“Have you ever thought about really looking in somebody’s window?” she asked, her voice a whisper. “You know like that time we tried to spy on Mrs. Poole?” We had many years earlier, on a dare, tiptoed onto Mrs. Poole’s porch and peeked in until we saw her pass by the foyer in a nightgown. It was nothing, but we had never forgotten the fast rhythm of our hearts and the way we both grabbed at each other with sweaty palms and stifled giggles until we were safe in the darkness of the Rhodeses’ carport. It was the same sensations we got when we carried out our dares in Whispering Pines: touch the gate, touch the tree, would you dare go as far as the caretaker’s shed, as far as the Wilkins churchyard with its rusty iron fence. Misty had told several younger neighborhood kids that we had seen Mrs. Poole in some black lace underwear and no bra, a thought that horrified most.
That same night we had also rolled Mrs. Poole’s yard in bright-pink toilet paper. We told Mo that some mean old boys must have done it, and she just nodded wide-eyed, asked question after question about wonder how many rolls it took to do such a good job, and wonder how on earth those boys had decided to pick pink toilet paper. We had all laughed about it, speculated on who those mean boys were and then opened Misty’s bedroom door to find everything in there wrapped at least once in green toilet paper. “Wonder who did this?” Mo had asked, and gone back to the kitchen where she was preparing one of her made-up recipes, “Chop Gooey Ole” or pork chops smothered in melted Velveeta and jalapeño peppers, served on a bed of rice. “I cook by ear, by nose, and by tongue,” Mo had said, and kissed Mr. Rhodes several times on the cheek and neck. It was so hard to believe that she was the same woman who had been unfaithful, that that Mo was the same woman Angela had described; it amazed me to think that something of that magnitude, one life and two lovers, could become as commonplace as juggling pork chops and Velveeta.
“Well?” Misty was asking, and I shook my head. I never told her how often I thought of her mother, how there were times when I felt so homesick, only to discover that what I was missing was Mo. Now just the thought of sneaking and spying, of being in that wide-open yard with the shadows and hedges sent a chill over me. I shook my head again, hoping the idea would pass from her mind.
“Let’s sneak over there later,” she whispered. “We’ll wear black, and we’ll sneak through the brush, climb that magnolia tree there at the far end of the cemetery.” The magnolia was a dare we’d never made, a huge tree that grew right near the Wilkinses’ graves.
“Well, what do you think?” Misty asked again. “It’ll be the most exciting thing that’s happened in a long time.”
“No way,” I said. “No.”
“Think about it,” she said, and stood to go. “You know I could get Dean’s tent and sleeping bags, and we could sleep out in your yard. We haven’t done that in ages.”
“It’s winter.”
“But those sleeping bags are made for cold weather. Besides, no mosquitoes.” She turned back to me. “And you know we could sort of let it slip out that we were camping, and maybe they’d come over, Merle and Dexter and R.W.” I was panicked by the time Misty left to go home, all the while telling me to think about it.
“What are you two planning?” Mama asked as she watched Misty whispering in my ear.
“Your Christmas present, Mrs. Burns,” Misty said, and then she bounded out of our house and across the street to her own, where in place of Mo’s silver tree, Sally Jean had a real one, trunk cut and branches flocked with fake snow, all white lights and a big white star on top. It really was a beautiful tree and on their door was a cross-stitched sign, silver on navy, that simply said, “Peace on Earth.” Clearly it was the best sign that Sally Jean had ever made.
Nineteen
Much to my relief, my mother said that it was way too cold to camp out in the yard, and soon Misty gave up on the idea. Inst
ead we spent many of the nights over the holidays just wrapping packages, baking cookies, and listening to the radio out on the sleeping porch; from there we could see the blinking Christmas lights scattered about. I had to prove to her that it was the solitude, the peacefulness of the quiet nights, that led me out on the porch, the distant whoosh of the highway noise, the frozen branches brushing against the screens, rather than the glimpses into Merle Hucks’s house.
It was after nine when Misty left the night of the twenty-third and I returned to the porch, where we had left the radio playing. The house next door to the Huckses’ had lights of all colors, string after string, wrapped around the eaves of the roof and every window and stick of a shrub. Carnival was the word my mother and Mrs. Poole had batted back and forth. Psychedelic was Misty’s choice. They had a manger scene with life-size plastic figures, a flood light fastened to the floor of the manger so that the baby Jesus could be seen even from my spot on the porch, a bright glow in the distance. Early in the evenings, the people put their stereo speakers in the front windows and played Christmas music—Do you hear what I hear?—and my mother responded that she did and in fact she had heard all she wanted to hear. It was times like that when my father called her feisty and offered her a smoke, looked at her with genuine pride and love.
“And imagine what they must’ve spent on that plastic manger.” She shook her head and sighed a sigh the magnitude of one sighed for murder and pestilence. “They could’ve bought food for a month.”
Now, the house was silent but the lights still shone and Jesus still glowed. It was odd that of all the houses I could see from my spot, this was the one that did not leave me feeling empty. I didn’t know the people, had only seen them, a young couple with two small children; I imagined the excitement that must course through them each night when it was time to plug in the lights and blast the music. I imagined that any parents who would go to such lengths to proclaim Christmas joy must truly feel it with every colored bulb that blinked and every chord of every carol.
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