“All right, then,” Louise said. “No more nighttime visits with your friend. I want you in before dark.”
“That’s not fair.”
She gestured toward the television with her cigarette. “Frances, for God’s sake, you saw that story! It’s a dangerous world out there. You don’t understand.”
I thought of the crashes and cries in my own home, pictured my mother with a syringe in her arm, glassy-eyed, saw my father moving toward the door, shouting Get out of here! as he slammed it in my face.
“I know it’s a dangerous world, Aunt Louise. But Ms. Sparrow is usually there—” a bald-faced lie—“and Lucy just lives across the street.”
“Frances, I want you to be safe.”
“No you don’t!” I exploded. “You don’t! You don’t care one bit!”
“Stop that. Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I’ll talk to you any way I want to! You’re not my mother!”
“Frances…”
“You’re not my mother!” With that I ran to my room, slammed the door shut, threw myself onto the bed, and gave myself over to tears.
Thus it was that I became a rebel.
A very timid rebel, to be sure; but a rebel nonetheless. I started to leave my dirty clothes on the floor of my room instead of picking them up, knowing it would mean that Louise would have to come get them. I left dishes and glasses around the house. I stopped organizing my closet and bureau with such obsessive focus—they were still quite tidy, in truth, and I knew Lucy would have laughed if I’d called my room sloppy; still, they weren’t as they had been. More importantly, I began to let my schoolwork slide a bit. Again, the slide was very slight, but I found a grim, dirty-feeling satisfaction to see the occasional B on a quiz sheet. Even Lucy was surprised at me.
In truth, the moratorium on after-dark visits didn’t have much practical effect on our relationship. I just left a little earlier each night, that’s all. We still played, and danced, and horsed around; I still ate bologna-covered pizza with them when Ms. Sparrow was at home. But I had to leave before the Mystery Theater came on, so I got Uncle Frank to loan me an old radio of his that was sitting in the garage and I listened to it myself, in my room. It wasn’t the same, of course. But at least Lucy and I could talk about the stories on the bus the next morning.
The weekends were unchanged, too. We rode everywhere, discovered strange things. One afternoon we wandered into the market down the street and found to our astonishment Mr. Cox, the bus driver, standing behind the meat counter. Lucy and I stared at each other wide-eyed, ran back out of the store before he saw us. By the time we reached the curb we were doubled over in laughter.
“Mr. Cox has another job!” I shrieked. It seemed scandalous, somehow.
“Yeah, Dick Cox and his meat!”
I don’t think even we could have explained why we found this so gasp-inducingly hilarious, except that it was one of those childhood shocks: to learn that an adult in our lives was something else, something more than just the bus driver was a bizarre, giddy-making fact. I’d once had the feeling when I was walking and noticed Mr. and Mrs. Lowther, packages in their hands, unlocking the door to a house and stepping inside it. A house? I wondered. Mr. Lowther lives in a house? With Mrs. Lowther?
Another time, a sunny April day, Lucy had decided to root around in the garbage behind the little row of shops on Main Street. “C’mon,” she said, “it’s fun! I told you, I get a lot of my stuffed animals from dumpsters. You find great stuff in here!” She climbed up onto the big metal bin that squatted there. The lid was already open.
“Lucy, I’m not digging around in garbage!”
“Don’t have a cow, Franny-Fran. I’m not gonna dig around in it. I’m just gonna take a look-see.” She leaned over into it, her rump in the air. “Sometimes,” she said, “you can find, like, candy and stuff. I mean, still wrapped up. They throw it out when it gets old. Once I found a whole bunch of comic books. And—” She stopped then, rooted energetically for a moment, then pulled something out. “Oh, wow!” she cried.
“What? What is it?”
“Ha! You won’t believe it!”
“What?”
She climbed back out, stood triumphantly with a rolled-up magazine in her hand. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said.
“What? Tell me, Lucy!”
“No!” She stuffed the magazine, cover facing her, into the front of her pants.
“Tell me! Come on!”
“No.” She grinned. “C’mon, let’s get out of here!” She jumped down from the dumpster, leapt on her bike. “Well, are you coming?”
I scowled, jumped on the bike. As she pulled onto the sidewalk I tried to grab at the mysterious magazine in her pants. She batted my hands away. “Cut it out,” she giggled. “You’ll see. When the time is right.”
“Oh, I’ll bet it’s nothing anyway. Just an old Tiger Beat or Dynamite.”
“Oh, no it’s not.”
“Well,” I sniffed, “I don’t care.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not a liar.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!”
I grabbed for the magazine again. She batted me away.
We rode out to the rest stop, where the usual assortment of travelers was coming and going. Lucy stopped the bike in front of the women’s restroom and we jumped off. “C’mon in,” she said.
“No, I’ll wait out here. I don’t have to go.”
“Come in,” she insisted, grabbing my hand and pulling me.
She checked to make sure the bathroom was empty, then pulled me into a toilet stall and locked the door behind us.
“Lucy, what are you doing?”
She grinned, pulling the magazine out of her pants. “Look.”
It was a copy of Playgirl.
“Oh my God!” I whispered, awestruck.
“Told you it wasn’t Tiger Beat,” she said. She was whispering too.
I felt nervous suddenly, terrified, positive that the police would come crashing through the door at any second to arrest us, haul us off to jail. I could see my aunt and uncle having to come get me, being told that I’d been detained for the crime of looking at dirty pictures. I knew what Playgirl was—every girl did—but I’d never actually seen one.
She opened it, flipped quickly to the centerfold, and I beheld my first naked man.
“Ew,” I said quietly. “Gross.”
We stared at the magazine for a long moment.
“Why is he so hairy?” I whispered. “He looks like a gorilla.”
“All grown-up men have a lot of hair, stupid. So do ladies.”
“Not that much. And not there.” I pointed.
“Yeah, there.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
I frowned. “How do you know?”
“’Cuz I’m smart. I’m a lot older than you, Franny.”
“We’re both twelve.”
“Yeah, but you just turned twelve. I’m almost thirteen.”
We flipped furtively through the pictures.
“Do you think,” Lucy said, “that Art Green’s is like that?” Art Green was a boy in our class.
“No. I don’t think anybody I know is like that.”
She looked at me, giggling. “The teachers are. Mr. Lowther is.”
“No he’s not!”
“He’s a grown-up man, isn’t he? And Mr. Blatt. And”—she giggled again—“Mr. Dick Cox.”
We shrieked with laughter, with embarrassment, a giddy criminal high. The thrill of standing in a public toilet stall looking at pictures of nude men sent electric jolts through me, made me tingle and sweat.
But suddenly the bathroom was filled with noise: a bunch of little girls had burst in. We heard the voice of their teacher or whoever it was telling them to line up, wait your turn, and then one little girl’s voice saying, There are two people in that one!
Lucy and I gasped, dropping the magazine. We stood frozen. My heart was smashing against
my chest.
“Come on,” Lucy whispered.
“No, we can’t go out there!”
“Yes we can. Don’t say a word. Don’t look. Just go straight out.”
“Lucy…”
But she unlocked the door, opened it, and walked unflinchingly across the length of the bathroom. I followed sheepishly behind her, staring at the gleaming tile floor. When we reached the outdoors, we scrambled to her bike.
“Hey!” a little blonde girl called, standing in the doorway. “You forgot something!”
“Forgot what?” Lucy said. Even she seemed a little scared.
“You forgot to wash your hands!”
We both laughed then, and rode away as quickly as Lucy could pedal.
We realized only later that we’d forgotten something else, too: we’d left the magazine on the floor of the stall.
Later that afternoon we sat under the pepper tree in the backyard, thumbing listlessly through an issue of Hit Parader.
“I wish we hadn’t forgotten it,” Lucy said, tossing pebbles against the trunk of the tree.
“I’m glad we did,” I said. “It was disgusting.”
She looked at me and chuckled, shaking her head. “Fran, you’re a spaz.”
“I know.”
“You’re gonna marry one of ’em someday, you know.”
“No I’m not.” I shook my head vehemently.
“What, you’re gonna stay alone all your life? Become a nun or something?”
“Maybe. But I’m not going to marry somebody like that.”
“You will,” Lucy said confidently. “You’ll have kids, too, I bet.”
“I’m never having kids. I hate kids.”
I found an article in the magazine about Linda Ronstadt and read part of it aloud, but my mind wasn’t on it. Neither was Lucy’s. After a while I stopped.
“What’ll you do, then?” she asked me.
I thought about it, but I couldn’t imagine a thing: the future just seemed to be filled with empty space, cold, desolate. There was no way I could ever be a grown-up.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What about you?”
“I could get married,” she said, tilting her head thoughtfully. “I think I could. Someday.”
“To a man?”
She laughed. “Well, who do you think I’d marry?”
“And—” My face burned as I thought of it. “And—and you’d have sex with him?”
“Sure,” she said casually. “Why not? I bet it’s not that bad. I mean, people do it, don’t they?”
“Perverted people, maybe!”
“Franny…all the grown-ups we know have sex.”
“No they don’t.”
“Sure they do. Look at Mr. and Mrs. Lowther. They have two kids—where do you think they came from, the stork? Mrs. Petrie is married too. And I even heard Dick Cox say something about his wife once.”
“Don’t, Lucy. It’s too…weird to think about.”
But she was enjoying needling me. “Imagine,” she said in hushed, teasing tones. “Imagine Mr. Lowther naked, with a hard-on. Big as a cucumber and poking out.”
“Don’t—”
“And Mrs. Lowther spreading her legs open and him sticking it into her…”
“Don’t!”
“…and humping away on top of her, squirting come into her pussy and making babies…”
“Don’t!” I covered my ears.
She laughed suddenly, her usual big bark, and threw a handful of pepper leaves at me.
“Spaz,” she said, without malice, smiling.
“Please stop talking about gross things,” I said, seriously.
Her face softened a little. “Oh, okay. Forget it. Hey,” she said, “you don’t even know from gross, anyway. Wait ’till you get your period.”
I looked at her. “Have you gotten yours?”
She nodded. “Since last winter.”
“What’s it like?”
She glanced at me and, I could see, made a decision to spare me the gruesome details. “It hurts,” she said, “but it’s not that bad.”
“You get it every month?”
She nodded. “It’s no fun. But don’t worry about it, Franny-Fran. There’s nothing you can do about it, anyway. It just comes. You’ll be okay.”
I was aware that she was sparing my feelings. “I hope I never get it,” I said, but even as the words came from my mouth I knew they weren’t entirely true. On one level I did hope I’d get it. It would bring me closer to Lucy, make me a little more like her, give us one more thing to share. But it also seemed the passageway into another world, a dark, frightening one from which there was no return. Lucy got her period, I thought. That means she could have a baby.
I felt lonely then, as the sun dropped behind the house and we were enveloped in shadows. Lucy inhabited a different world from mine. I didn’t like that thought. I didn’t like it at all. I started to cry softly.
“Franny-Fran, what’s wrong?”
“Just—can we please talk about something else?” I was embarrassed, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “I don’t want to talk about—about naked men and—and—and periods—and stuff…”
“Franny, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you worked up.” I felt her hand on mine and I grabbed onto it, held it tight. “C’mon,” she said gently, cajolingly, “cut it out. You cry too much, Franny. Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know.”
But I did. All the talk of grown-up things had made Lucy seem distant, beyond me. She was going places I wasn’t ready to go, not yet.
“Lucy?” I said. “Please don’t…don’t go away. From me.”
She looked at me, puzzled at my sudden emotion. Then she tousled my hair playfully. “What are you talking about, Franny-Fran? I’m not going anywhere. You’re my sister, remember? Blood sisters.”
There was surprisingly little talk of the Maria Sanchez case in Quiet, but it may only have been that adults were circumspect in what they said around children. Too, there was an assumption on the part of many people, even law enforcement, that this was something personal: a family member, a boyfriend whose mind had gone haywire. Tragic, horrifying, but most likely nothing of any further importance. Anyway, Maria Sanchez was a Mexican; her mother worked as a cook and her father as a gardener. That shouldn’t have made a difference but, I understand now, it did. When the victim’s boyfriend was arrested, that seemed to slam the matter shut forever.
Everything changed with the Trista Blake case. Maria Sanchez’s boyfriend was in custody when Trista Blake’s body was found in the same riverbed, a mile north of the first location. Her body, what remained of it, was fresh; she’d been killed within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of the discovery of her dismembered corpse. Trista Blake and Maria Sanchez had gone to the same high school, but they inhabited different worlds. Maria Sanchez had been quiet, unobtrusive, her English less than fluent; she was chubby, not notably attractive; she had mostly hung out with the handful of other Hispanic students in the school. Trista Blake, on the other hand, was the daughter of the man who owned the grocery store downtown; she was a junior varsity cheerleader, she was in drama club, she was on the staff of the school newspaper. She was pretty, a willowy blonde with feathered hair. She was one of the popular kids. And now she was dead.
I wasn’t much aware of these events then; I wasn’t interested in TV news, and the headlines in the paper caused me a momentary sinking sensation, no more. To be killed, I remember thinking. To be murdered. But it was impossible to visualize; I knew no details of the cases, only that girls I’d never met, never even heard of, had disappeared and then their bodies had been found in the riverbed. There was an unreal quality to it, as if this were a movie, not life. It wasn’t something I thought a lot about.
But the impact in the town was immediate. Lucy and I rode across the bridge one afternoon, staring with fascination at the numerous police cars and dozens of uniformed men a hundred feet below. And suddenly policemen seemed to
be everywhere on the streets of Quiet, not talking, not interacting with people, just strolling the sidewalks, cruising Main Street in their vehicles. It created an odd, uneasy atmosphere.
Aunt Louise was nervous, pensive. “When you come home,” she told me at dinner one night, “come straight in. Don’t go to your friend’s house. I want you home.”
“Why?” The situation was still unreal to me. “I’m just as safe at Lucy’s house. Nothing’s going to happen, Aunt Louise.”
“You’re not as safe at Lucy’s house. That woman, her mother, is never home.”
“Well, then, let Lucy come here,” I said.
And, to my surprise, that was what happened. Aunt Louise couldn’t in good conscience argue that a child, even one with a mother she despised, should be left alone in a house by herself at night, not in these days of girls turning up dead in riverbeds. And so Lucy began coming to our house.
Those were some of the finest times we had together, even though we didn’t have the run of the place the way we did across the street. We couldn’t charge through the hallway, toss Nerf balls at each other, gorge ourselves on ice cream. These occasions were quieter; it was a quiet house, after all. Even funereal. Lucy and I stayed in my room, chatting, doing homework, drawing, and listening with the lights off to the nightly Mystery Theater (together! together again! I thought joyfully), my own brushes now making their way through Lucy’s ever-tangled hair, the two of us enraptured by the suspense stories we heard and then drowsy afterward.
Once we were inspired by a story Mrs. Petrie had read to us in class. Somewhere in the Midwest a company had been excavating a former school site, preparing to build a shopping mall there, when they discovered a metal box under the ground. On opening it they found that it was a time capsule. Placed there as a class project during World War II, it was filled with relics of thirty years before: photos of the students in the class, contemporary news magazines, a baseball glove, a food rationing coupon, a Captain Midnight secret decoder ring, and much more ephemera from that lost era. With all of it was a letter from the class that began: Hello, People of the Future. We are burying this time capsule on March 3, in the Year of Our Lord 1943. Newspaper writers had made much of the find, looking up students at the school from three decades before who had memories of the project (and of the school, which had closed twenty-five years earlier). Mrs. Petrie suggested that Soames Elementary should do something similar, and for a few days there was considerable excitement about the idea, but for some reason it never materialized.
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