by Tim Curran
6
Bria walked on through soccer mom hell, past a neo-classical aberration with too many windows and a mutiny of dormers. The classic Disney dad was out seeding his golf course lawn and bossing his kids around, a typical over-stressed, overextended muppie hacking his way through the entrepreneurial underbrush, reaching for that first million before the banks buried him alive. He was chatting on his phone, red-faced and miserable. The name on the brick-and-bronze mailbox (in elegant script) said, FALCONI.
This is what is encouraged, Bria thought. In school, in society, keep reaching and scrambling until it kills you. Appearance is more important than content.
Oh, there was Anna Lee Posey out watering her buttercups, forget-me- nots, and zinnias. Back bent, balancing herself with a cane, little more than four feet tall, she’d been a fixture in the neighborhood since the upper Paleozoic. She was a kind old lady (long as you didn’t fuck with her flowers or her cats) and much-loved. She had to be in her mid-eighties if she was a day. Good God, how did she keep going? She coiled her hose back up, cast a sidelong glance at Bria, stared, cocked her head to one side, then waved.
She can’t see you, Bria thought, not at this distance. She’s just waving. Wave back.
So, she did, not that Anna Lee seemed to notice as she fussed over her flowers…
7
Although her eyesight, like her mind, was fading fast, Anna Lee saw Bria quite clearly. So young, oh dear Christ, so deliciously wonderfully young. To be like that again if only for a day! A young beautiful rose and not a withered, dying weed. Thoughts raced through Anna Lee’s mind like clouds across a blue sky. Age, age, age. It took everything from you one day at a time. That was the horror of it. It felt…it felt like you’d been invaded by a parasite that slowly drained your youth and health like a vampire sucking blood. That’s what age was, she knew: a parasite that sucked you dry and ate your soul.
As she watched Bria pass by, she frowned at her youth. Why, there was enough of it in that girl for everyone.
8
Next door, Bria knew, were the Geroys, Tony and Pammy. They were old stoners and everyone knew it, very New Age, tie-dyed, into alternative medicine, herb lore, and crystal power. Bria used to chum around with Autumn, their daughter, who was a med student at Western now. In fact, the first time Bria got high was at Autumn’s thirteenth birthday sleepover when Autumn raided her dad’s stash. Bria liked the Geroys; they were okay. Real easy, tolerant, non-judgmental. People think Tony’s just a pothead, Bria remembered her dad saying. They forget he’s got an MBA from Cornell and knows more about the markets than any twelve Wall Street suits. Pammy was nice, too, but she had an edge. Maybe Tony made the money, but Pammy was the hand that rocked the cradle and ruled the world. Don’t piss her off, Autumn had once said. I’m serious. She’s got three-inch claws, fangs, and eats her meat raw.
Bria looked across the street.
There were the Moodys and the Bakers. In-between, ah yes, another tract mansion where the Tillings once lived in their little house. They were dead now and so was their old home. What had taken its place was unspeakable: a hulking Frankensteinian monstrosity pieced together from the corpses of Colonials, Spanish villas, and Tudors. And next to it, why Mr. DeYoung. A lifelong bachelor, he was considered to be the neighborhood perv who liked to watch all the girls and wives parading by (with his hand down his pants, some said). Another watcher like Mr. Hammerberg, but worse. When they were kids, Bria and the other girls did not trick-or-treat at the DeYoung house…and probably because Megan Moody had told them that Mr. DeYoung snatched kids and tied up virgins in his basement where he tortured them and did far worse things while they screamed.
Bullshit, of course. Yet…Mr. DeYoung was an 8.5 on the old Creep Scale…
9
Mr. DeYoung watched her through the window and thought what a pretty girl she was. Even her name was pretty. Bria, Bria, Bria. He hadn’t seen her in a long time. Now she was back.
Girls. They were strange creatures that were real and yet lived in the twilight world of his dreams. Sometimes he had the most awful, sweaty fantasies of laying his hands on them and making them cry out. Aunt Selma told him long ago that good boys did not do such things and he always, always did what Selma said. When he didn’t, she punished him. Thinking of the terrible things she did to him, he found himself getting excited. He saw Bria but thought of Selma with hot forks and cigarette butts and hurting hands. The memory made him so excited he began to masturbate.
10
Bria stopped because she saw someone she recognized: Lara Stromm. Lara was a tall, striking blonde whose husband—was it Joe? Jim?—was a Class-A jack-off that didn’t deserve her. Bria liked Lara. But Lara had issues and lots of baggage, which was probably why she married the turd she did. Her father (it was said) was some kind of holy roller preacher that beat her and her sisters when she was a kid. He died in state prison where he was serving life for molesting children. Somebody stabbed him like ten times. Poor Lara.
She was painting her little white picket fence. She had a baby in a carriage nearby. Bria had heard she’d been preggers.
“Hey, Lara,” she said.
Lara looked at her, slid her black Ray-Ban Wayfarers up onto her head, peered closely with her bright blue eyes, flicking a long strand of wheat-colored hair away from her face. “Bria? Oh my God! When did you get back? I haven’t seen you in ages.”
Lara gave her a brief but warm, crushing hug. Long-limbed and lean-muscled, she was everything Bria wanted to be as a clumsy teenager. God, she even smelled like honey and fresh air. Some people just had it going on.
Look at her complexion, it’s perfect. She probably doesn’t even have sweat glands.
“I’m just back for a couple weeks and then it’s off to a job downstate and back to school in the fall.” Bria shrugged, self-consciously running a hand through her burgundy-streaked pixie haircut, all the while studying Lara’s long golden locks which she knew were perfectly natural. God.
“English major, I hear.” Lara seemed pleased. “Creative writing is what I’m hearing. Are you working on a novel?”
Bria chuckled. “Of course. Every English major is.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about everything I’ve ever seen and all those things I don’t understand.”
“Wonderfully vague. I like it.” Lara put an arm around her. “Oh, here to see your ma, eh? Well, if you need to escape, come and see me. We’ll get drunk and talk. I’m alone most all the time. Save for the grub over there.”
Bria looked at the boy in the stroller. Well under a year, very blond and Nordic like his mom. Adorable. He smiled at her and went back to his bottle.
“You can call him Billy if you want, but he’s better known as the Grub.”
They had a laugh over that and Bria hesitantly went on her way, gathering strength for 2314 Birch. She had promised Lara she’d stop by. She intended to keep that promise, one way or another…
11
Lara watched her leave and badly wanted to leave with her because she didn’t seem to know who she was anymore. Joe had tried again and again to teach her her place in the greater scheme of things, just as her father once had. She remained confused. Sometimes she thought no one was who they claimed to be, and she was trapped in the center of a spinning alien cosmos.
12
Walking on, Bria studied the neighborhood in more detail and began to get a crawly feeling along the back of her neck that told her she was being studied. She instantly thought of Mr. DeYoung or Mr. Hammerberg even, but it was neither.
She stopped dead there on the sidewalk.
Like any other college-age girl, she’d had her share of weirdos and pervs stare at her. It was unwanted, often unpleasant, but rarely threatening. Unlike this. Somebody was watching her with burning eyes. She felt like an insect writhing beneath a magnifying glass. The eyes (if that’s really what this was about) were literally crawling over her.
Not just her neck, but down her spine and over her ass and legs and right back up again.
She looked around, icy to her core despite the heat, as if she had just been splashed with freezing water. There was nobody. Nobody that she could see at any rate.
Still, the feeling of being studied persisted. It could have been any number of busybodies in the nabe. The same ones that had spread malicious gossip about her when she was a teenagerthat she was strung out on drugs, pregnant, suicidal, and having affairs with older men. When she was sixteen and going through some very hard times, they decided she was a violent lesbian that worshipped the Devil and all because she had gone emo like a lot of girls at school, dying her hair purple, getting her lips pierced, and wearing torn black t-shirts.
But that’s the sort of neighborhood Birch Street was, shiny and friendly and spotless on the surface, but vile and prejudiced and hypocritical underneath.
“Hey! Is that you, Bria?”
She turned and there was Mr. Bagmore. He was strictly warmed-over 1960s stock with a withering seam of anti-establishment still ruminating in his soul. He’d been friends with her dad and later with Giggling Roger. If anyone knew the lay of the land, it was Mr. Bagmore.
“The prodigal daughter returns with a head full of higher education.”
“That’s what they tell me, anyway.”
Mr. Bagmore smiled, swallowed. “I ran into Alice the other day. She’s pretty proud of you and so am I.”
“Thanks.” She could see by the sparkle in his eyes that he was indeed proud of her, and she could also see that he was lying about her mother. Oh, Alice said something, all right, but whatever it was, it had little to do with pride.
Bria swallowed that down. Negativity. Dispense with it. There would be enough of that later. For right now, there was that sense of being watched. It had not lessened; it had intensified.
“I wish Tanny had lived to see this. You were always one of her favorites. We always knew you’d go places.”
Tanny, his wife, had died two years before. They had three kids, but the oldest was probably in his forties. They were scattered across the country and Mr. Bagmore was most certainly alone. All he had now was his dog and his baseball games on the radio…
13
Except he no longer had the dog because Dozer wandered away one afternoon not three weeks before and got his ass pasted on 7th Avenue. The one time Mr. Bagmore didn’t tie up the silly old mutt, he got his guts splashed for thirty feet by a UPS truck. How’s that for fate kicking you in the nuts when you’re down? With Tanny being gone via the big C, old Doz was all he really had.
Now his only entertainment was watching the neighborhood go by and realizing that he was not really part of it and maybe never had been. Ah, quaint peaceful suburbia, lily-white, conservative, and Christian, an ode to those non-threatening years of the 1950s. The kids played ball in the green grass, the wives—born and bred to keep up with those damn Joneses—gardened and perused Reader’s Digest or some equally white-washed periodical for sock puppets, and the men worked twelve- and fifteen-hour days in investment brokerages or insurance offices or pallid little start-ups, busting their asses so they could be the first to have a stroke or a major coronary before they were forty. Mr. Bagmore watched it all go by, the synthetic lives, the greed, the muppie social status, the elusive first million. The only thing that really disturbed him was that the kids would all follow the same path of misery set by their ladder-scaling parents and the cycle would repeat itself ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Would there ever be an end to it?
Of course, he didn’t say any of that to Bria. He wasn’t sure she’d understand. At the same time, something in her eyes told him she understood too well.
14
“Glad to have you back, Bree,” he said. “Stop by.”
She promised him she would.
A tall, pretty redhead in a sports bra and yoga shorts ran by, her face beaded with sweat. Now there’s some candy for Mr. DeYoung to watch. The woman said, “’s up?” and jogged away, her small, perky breasts bouncing happily. Bria waved to Mrs. Standish across the street (her babysitter back in the day) and said hi to Margie Blowers who’d been her Girl Scout leader once upon a time. She didn’t stop and chat with Margie because Margie was Mother Alice’s best friend and her daughter—Polly Pukebag in school—was her sworn enemy. Margie watched her, stroking her little white Pomeranian the entire time. Its name was Bigsby and it was only slightly less annoying than she was.
Bria had no doubt that all the nasty gossip about her had originated with Polly, Margie being its primary vector.
15
When Margie saw Bria and acknowledged her limp wave, she had the most horrible feeling deep, deep inside her that something unspeakable was just over the horizon. Then it vanished, and she shook it off. Bria. Alice’s headstrong daughter. She’d come home and she would make trouble for Alice because that’s what girls like her did. In their independence, they did not realize or accept the wisdom of their mothers who were only trying, after all, to mold them into a better version of themselves…
16
Other than the infestation of ugly architecture, the neighborhood looked mostly the same. Bria saw many of the same people she’d known in high school. Maybe they were more stooped over or graying, fatter or thinner, but other than that and a slight influx of newbies, it was the same old, same old.
But it’s not, a voice in her head informed her. There’s something in the air and you know it. Birch Street looks like a kid’s playset, Malibu Barbie dreamhouses and pretty plastic figures, a synthetic world of synthetic people…but there’s something behind it, something dark.
That was what passed through her head. Then it was gone and she pretty much forgot thinking it in the first place.
As a teenager, her emotions and impulses were always in hyperdrive, teetering dangerously from one extreme to the next. Some days she cried her eyes out and sneered at who she saw in the mirror; on others, she was cold as ice, incapable of even smiling, quarried from stone.
But now, at twenty, she told herself she was different. That the old Bria was gone.
Ah, the rose bushes of 2314 Birch. This was home. This was where Mother Alice would be waiting behind the whitewashed door. This was endgame.
She moved up the flagstone walk to the porch, her guts filling her throat, sensing danger as if she was approaching the dark cave of a grizzly bear.
She looked up and was startled that a small white face was watching her from the octagonal attic window. It was Sady. By the time Bria got her hand up to wave, the face was gone.
Why the hell would she be up there?
Bria realized that was a foolish question. This was the same kid who used to lock herself in the closet and read by flashlight. She was always hard to figure.
As was Alice.
At the bottom of the steps, Bria paused, breathing in and out again.
It was time.
17
“So, you’re here,” Alice said.
Bria’s voice shriveled in her throat. She’d had high and randy plans of storming into the house and letting her mother know that she was not the person who had left years before, but someone else. Someone strong and assertive who walked tall. Someone who had her own ideas and opinions and would happily go to the mat for them. A strong, confident young woman who did not take shit. At least, those were her plans…but being confronted by Mother Alice took the guts and steam right out of her. She had no voice. No willpower. No resolve. In fact, she had nothing. She was a skinny, gangly, scatterbrained thirteen-year-old again beneath Alice’s feral gaze. Alice had a way of making you always feel like an undignified oaf with gravy on your tie, asparagus wedged in your teeth, and your fly wide open.
“Is there something wrong?”
Bria shook her head nearly spasmodically. “No.”
You’re on the fencing team, dear, so defend yourself.
Alice adva
nced. “Well, why are you just standing there? You look like you want to cry.”
Attagirl, Mom, don’t parry, plunge the blade in deep.
Bria swallowed, pulling something up from inside herself. She either struck back now or Alice would dominate her for the next two weeks, humiliating her at every turn until she was reduced to the same weak-kneed, pudding-gutted wallflower she’d been when she left.
Time to lunge. “Well,” Bria said, not catty but firm, “it’s long been known that you have a gift for exaggeration.”
Alice reeled. She didn’t see that coming. Point. She licked her lips repeatedly (it was an unpleasant habit of hers when she was upset). “Hmm. Well, well, you might have a learned a few things at the university—” she said this with absolute derision “—but manners are not among them.”
Bria was still standing in the doorway, hanging onto her bag. She did not feel like she was home, a place that was safe and comfortable. No, this was like a poor imitation of what a home should be. Alice was appraising her like a TSA officer. Maybe a cavity search would be next.
“Speaking of manners,” Bria said, pressing her attack, “you might want to brush up on yours. It’s customary to greet someone when you haven’t seen them in a while.”
Alice was grinding her teeth. Another point. She was trying to think of something polite yet cutting to say but coming up short. As Bria stepped toward her, she stepped back. Classic Alice. She was a study in fear—fear of getting too close and fear of getting too far away, fear of investing herself and divesting herself and losing control. There was a constant struggle going on inside her, an emotional blood sport.