Criss Cross

by Lynne Rae Perkins

  “I know. It sounds like a scary place. I would be afraid to leave the house.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t be afraid if you had a light blue coupe.”

  A bobbing group of people rose into view. Their heads appeared first as they came up over the rise, then their shoulders and torsos, followed by their guitar cases, legs, and feet. There were eight or nine of them, traveling on foot, as a group. Debbie and Patty held their empty plastic boats and watched as the strolling guitarists set their cases down around a picnic table, then lined up at the two windows to order.

  Hector was there. They were both about to call out to him and wave, but something stopped them. Their half-parted lips opened no farther, and their half-raised hands fell back to their laps.

  He was talking to a girl, a girl neither of them had seen before. Talking to her from her other side was Dan Persik. Dan, the handsome. The girl was pretty in a way that made Debbie feel the hopelessness of both Hector’s cause—because it was clear he was interested in her—and her own. Because it was clear that Dan was interested in her, too. She was petite and rounded and tan. She had an unruly mass of chestnut hair, pulled back in a loose bundle. She had large, dark eyes rimmed with long lashes. And dimples. She even had dimples.

  She wore, along with cutoffs and a T-shirt, red platform sandals and an ankle bracelet. Debbie looked down at her own footwear: a pair of beat-up sneakers.

  Also in Hector’s subgroup was a second girl, who was a little older. Sixteen or seventeen. She accompanied them with the friendly, disinterested air of a baby-sitter.

  Presently there came the sounds of guitar cases unsnapping and the bonking of guitars being removed, random bumpings of strings blooming from the acoustic wooden shells, followed by a brief jangly tuning, and Debbie’s and Patty’s attention was drawn to the other subgroup. Russell Kebbesward was in this group, sitting on a picnic table bench with two older people. Mr. Schimpf and a lady with white hair and half-moon glasses. Their leader was a young, frizzy-haired minister. You could tell he was a minister because he wore a short-sleeved black shirt with one of those collars. He stood with one foot up on a bench, his guitar hanging from his shoulder by means of a colorful embroidered strap.

  The four of them began singing “Edelweiss,” from the movie The Sound of Music. The minister sang the chord changes in between the words. His voice was froglike, yet sonorous.

  “Have you ever noticed how much Seldem is like Austria?” murmured Patty.

  A car rolled by on the street, the subwoofers of its sound system thumping like a giant heart.

  “I think the guys in that car were Austrian,” said Debbie.

  “No, really,” said Patty. “With the mountains and everything.”

  Hector’s subgroup had been delayed in getting their cones by some other customers who wandered in front of them, but now three of his group sat at a picnic table near the singers, licking their cones. Hector alone remained at the window, pinning his wallet to the counter with the elbow of his cone-holding hand while with his other hand he tried to work the change back inside.

  He had wanted to treat Meadow, but he hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it without also treating Dan Persik and Meadow’s cousin Robin. He didn’t mind paying for Robin’s cone, but he couldn’t quite believe he had funded Dan Persik, who was now seated in a favorable position next to Meadow.

  The whole thing was going wrong. Starting with when he invited Meadow to go for ice cream and Pastor Don overheard him. Pastor Don took it for a general invitation and broadcast it to the whole class. Everyone thought it was a great idea. Walking over, Dan Persik had proved himself expert at sidewalk maneuvering, and Hector conceded to himself that maybe football training might have practical applications after all. Now this. He wished Rowanne were here to tell him what to do.

  Debbie and Patty sat for a few minutes more, each with a wadded-up paper napkin held loosely in her hand. Then they stood, tossing the crumpled napkins, the plastic boats, and spoons lightly into the trash basket as they passed. They caught Hector’s eye and gave a little wave, and they heard the frizzy minister say they ought to do this every week.

  Russell K. saw them toss their napkins, so lightly and easily, into the basket. They didn’t even stop walking to do it. He thought that looked so graceful. He admired it the way you admire a waterfall or a sunset, or how someone plays a piece of music.

  He closed his guitar case and reached for the jacket his mother had insisted he bring along, even though it was practically summer (“It’s going to be chilly later.”). He picked it up at the collar by two fingers and twirled it around, over one shoulder, in what he thought might be a similarly graceful move. But he hadn’t properly gauged his distance from his classmates and the twirling jacket knocked Mary’s glasses right off her face. She wasn’t angry, or hurt, but she did cry out in surprise, and then there was the searching for one of the lenses, which had popped out, and no one, or almost no one, noticed the contents of the jacket pockets sailing through the air.

  A wrapped stick of gum flew straight up and fell uneventfully down.

  Some loose change arrived at a variety of locations, with a variety of semi-musical pings.

  A cigarette lighter Russell had found somersaulted to the edge of the pavement, where it fell in with a crowd of other lost cigarette lighters and some black plastic combs.

  And a necklace hurled itself toward the picnic bench where Hector was talking to Meadow, trying to make up for lost time. But it was Dan Persik who saw it land. He reached down and picked it up. He wondered why Russell was carrying around a necklace that said Debbie. Maybe that was his little sister’s name. There were a lot of Debbies. There was, for instance, Debbie Pelbry, who had been at the Tastee-Freez a few minutes ago, whose locker was next to his. Who had, he was pretty sure, a crush on him. He could make her blush just by looking at her. It was kind of fun. Thinking maybe he could have some fun with this necklace, he put it in his pocket.

  CHAPTER 18

  In and out of the Cocoon

  When the idea came to Debbie that she needed a room of her own, and she was talking her parents into letting her have “the spare room,” an alcove off the living room that barely qualified as its own room, because it was the only other room there was, they pointed out how small it was. They pointed out that there was no door between the little room and the living room, just an arched opening in the wall. And they pointed out that the piano had to stay in there, because there was nowhere else for it to go.

  Debbie, focused on her vision, said that was all okay; she didn’t mind. So her mother made a drape and hung it from a rod inside the room, and they moved Debbie’s bed and desk downstairs from the room she had always shared with Chrisanne.

  She didn’t admit to anyone that once all the furniture was in there, the room felt smaller than she had thought it would. It was only slightly more spacious than a storage locker, which it resembled, furniture arrangement-wise. Everything was right up against everything else. There was a small empty space in the center of the room where Debbie could stand up or sit down. Sitting down had to be done with crossed legs, or at least with bent knees.

  Still, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, or on her bed, she felt she had found something. A sanctuary, though she didn’t know from what. A secret entryway. To go where? She didn’t know that, either.

  The room had a small closet, which she had to share with a few of everyone’s out-of-season clothes, some winter boots, and a couple of boxes.

  One of the boxes, a round hatbox, held Helen Pelbry’s collection of small figurines from when she was Helen Brandt. They were wrapped in tissue paper that had been wrapped and unwrapped so many times that it was soft and crepey with folds and wrinkles. The figurines were all dogs, of different breeds and made of different materials. Some porcelain, some wooden, some glass.

  There was a small, heavy, rounded one with perky rounded ears, made of solid iron with blue-gray paint that had begun to chip and fal
l off, revealing dark metal and the beginnings of rust. There was another sitting dog, also of a geometric breed, but this one was tall and triangular, of creamy porcelain with polkaspots in undoglike colors: persimmon and yellow and lime green. A dog that had been carved barking straight up into the air to fit into the rectangular shape of a block of wood. A carved Irish setter, painted china collies, black and white Scottie dogs that were salt and pepper shakers. There was a whimsical dachshund, twisted and snipped from a hot glass rod, light and delicate. A marble schnauzer. A brass poodle.

  Her mother never got them out and looked at them, as far as she knew. Debbie was the one who had unwrapped and wrapped them all those times, since first discovering the box when she was six or seven. She liked taking them out and looking at them. When she asked about them, her mother said they were just souvenirs; there was nothing special about them. All the same, she didn’t want Debbie to keep them out. She didn’t exactly say why.

  Debbie arranged them on her desk, then wrapped them up again and put the box back down in the closet. Then she hauled out the other box and lifted it onto her bed.

  This was also her mother’s. It was a cardboard carton filled with scrapbooks, yearbooks, photo albums, and other odds and ends from Helen Pelbry’s youth, her life before marriage.

  In the official photo albums, the ones that were kept in the bookcase in the living room, Helen had a brief childhood. She began as a toddler in white muslin, trimmed with lace. Standing in a doorway, her chubby hand on the doorknob, her serious face and her little hand in a wash of sunlight. She was momentarily a ten-year-old, in braids and a cowgirl outfit. A senior in high school, pretty and composed in a sweater and a string of pearls. And then suddenly a bride, in a white satin dress with tiny satin-covered buttons from her wrist to her elbow, and down her spine. All of this happened in black and white, on three pages.

  The cardboard box had more information, though still not enough. Debbie wasn’t sure what she was looking for, what she needed to know. Helen Brandt’s seventeen-year-old face smiled out of the yearbook page. She looked lively and confident. She looked poised. In some ways the past looked like a nicer place than the present. More golden, even in black and white, with less cruddiness. Probably that wasn’t true. She had heard about the Depression, polio and scarlet fever. About her grandfather coming home from work with his white collar gone gray, from all the soot and ash, just in the air, from the steel mills.

  Still, the girl in the picture looked like she knew how to make things be golden for her. How did she do it? Maybe that’s what Debbie wanted to know.

  She pulled a wad of pamphlets and programs out of the box, propped her pillow against the headboard, and leaned back. The one on top was a booklet of instructions for crocheting lacy collars to set on top of a sweater or a dress. It seemed a little like putting glitter on a grocery bag, but many people in those days only had one sweater or one dress. It was hard to believe, but that’s what her mother said, and that’s how they spruced up for special occasions.

  The next booklet in the pile was a collection of recipes for faded holiday cookies, followed by a book put out by an aluminum foil company that showed a myriad of creative ways in which foil could be used, mostly unrelated to cooking and requiring dozens of square yards of foil. The effects were pretty spectacular. A swan centerpiece, for example, molded from crushed foil, holding a red rose in its beak, placed on a green tablecloth that was reflected, along with the light from two white candles, in every crinkle of the foil.

  As she flipped through a calendar year of special occasions expressed in aluminum, the voices of her mother and their neighbor Fran entered the living room from the direction of the kitchen and filtered in through the flowered curtain.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, Helen,” said Fran. “It might never happen.”

  “I’m not worried, really,” said Helen. “It kind of makes you wonder, though.”

  The sound of squeaking couch springs. They were settling in for a chat.

  Debbie picked up a program from the premiere screening of the movie Gone with the Wind. Apparently it had been a big deal. The program was fifty pages thick.

  “By the way,” Helen was saying. “Did I tell you that Debbie is going to go down to old Mrs. Bruning’s house on Saturdays, to help her out with housework? I guess she’s getting very arthritic.”

  Debbie’s ears pricked up when she heard her name and she half-listened to her mother’s version of the story. She usually sounded pretty good in her mother’s stories, though not quite like herself. The stories themselves were that way, too; more entertaining than what really happened, though close enough that you could think, oh, so that’s how it was, even if you had been there and it hadn’t seemed that way at all. You could find out in this way that something you thought had been a disaster had actually come out quite well.

  In her mother’s version of the Mrs. Bruning story, Debbie was a take-charge kind of girl who saw a frail old woman in distress and went right to the rescue.

  She didn’t mind being cast by her mother as a heroine. But the way it happened was more accidental. And it was more equal. Mrs. Bruning lived in one of the older houses near the bottom of Prospect Hill Road. Her house was on a corner lot, facing the side street. As you walked past it, up or down the hill, you could see into the backyard. The yard slanted up steeply away from a concrete patio, which was shaded by a corrugated fiberglass awning of faded yellow, held up by metal bars that enclosed ornamental scrolls, painted black, barnacled with scabs of rust. The house was built of gray stone and had a castle-y appearance, if you could sift it out from the awning, and the big doorway that had been fitted with plywood to accommodate a small modern door with a crescent-shaped window, the bent and cockeyed Venetian blinds hanging behind the leaded and stained glass windows, and the sun porch tacked onto one side, shingled up to the windows with roofing shingles in variegated shades of purple, brown, and green.

  Despite all of its prostheses, Debbie thought that the ivy climbing up the stone, and the stained glass, and the small porchlike recess on the second floor with the crenellated half-wall gave the house an elegance and a personality. She had always wondered what it was like inside.

  She saw Mrs. Bruning out in her backyard and waved. Mrs. Bruning waved back. Then she held her hand up, as if to say “Wait a minute,” and started making her way purposefully across the grass. She was short and solid, bottle-shaped. A bottle of vinegar, or Pepto-Bismol, with legs. She was one of those elderly women whose cleavage starts about two inches below her collarbone and your main response to it is an intellectual curiosity about how that can even physically work.

  She moved toward Debbie with determination, but her steps were small, baby steps, and effortful, as if each one was costing her. It was a big yard, so Debbie stepped into it and walked over to meet her, to save time. Not that she was saving it for anything in particular.

  Debbie knew two things about Mrs. Bruning. One was that she had never cut her hair. At least that’s what people said. It may or may not have been true, but her hair seemed as if it might be pretty long. She wore it in a heavy braid arranged around her head in a complicated way, held in place with bobby pins. The hair closest to her scalp was white and fluffy, but as the braid narrowed, it became carrot colored, then dwindled into a faded russet wisp weaving in and out of the pin-prickled coronet. It wouldn’t have been that surprising to see baby birds peeping out over the top of it.

  The other thing Debbie knew was that, when Mrs. Bruning’s husband was still alive, the two of them had owned and operated the Idle Hour Restaurant. They were German. From Germany German. Although they had been in America for a long time.

  “It’s going to rain,” said Mrs. Bruning as they met. She was short. She only came up to Debbie’s shoulder. It was an odd sensation, looking down at someone you felt you ought to be looking up to. Debbie was fairly certain Mrs. Bruning had been larger, in the past.

  She looked at the sky, a dropped ceiling of
soft gray wool. The air had a pre-rain stillness to it.

  “Yeah,” she said. She said it pleasantly, but immediately wished she had said, “Yes,” or even “Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Bruning had that effect.

  “Yes,” she corrected herself. “I think it is. Going to rain.”

  “I can’t get my laundry down from the clothesline,” said Mrs. Bruning.

  “Oh?” said Debbie. She still thought they were just making conversation.

  “Why not?” she asked. It seemed like the logical next line in the conversation.

  “My hands,” said Mrs. Bruning. “And my shoulders. Arthritis. For some reason they were working better this morning, I was able to hang it all up. But now they are so stiffened up on me, I can’t do it. I can’t get the laundry down. And it’s going to rain.”

  She looked at Debbie expectantly. She demonstrated how her arms would only go so high, how her hands would not do what she needed them to do.

  “You see what I’m saying?” she said. She had bright brown eyes, like a bird’s eyes.

  She didn’t actually ask for help, but Debbie finally realized what she was supposed to do here. She glanced at the lowered sky, the waiting laundry, and Mrs. Bruning’s knotted hands.

  “Oh,” she said. “Let me help you.”

  The first cold heavy drops of rain fell on Debbie’s shoulders as she carried Mrs. Bruning’s laundry into the house, where it was dark. Gray light hovered outside the windows, but it couldn’t penetrate the ivy. Debbie bent awkwardly over her burden, the big basket, piled high.

  “Where should I put this?” she asked. “I mean, where would you like it?”

  “Just in here,” said Mrs. Bruning. She made her bulky way past the hall-filling obstacle of Debbie and the laundry and, a few seconds later, a switch clicked and a light came on over a kitchen sink.