The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton

by Richard Fifield

  I thought about consequences, and I thought about Irene’s DNR. She lived her life without fear. She wasn’t afraid of anything, even death. “I’ve never belonged to a club before,” I said. “I guess I just joined the feminists.”

  “You’d better wear deodorant,” said David, as he arrived with a thick pile of sketches in his hand. “Don’t be that kind of feminist.” Behind him, all four cheerleaders, measuring tapes draped around their necks, carrying pincushions and freezer bags filled with spools of thread. He had done a good job making them look like seamstresses, but I knew the girls had just taken these things from drawers or cupboards their own mothers rarely opened. We’d learned to sew a button in home economics, and that was the extent of our education, and David, of course, was the only one with any flair. He sewed his buttons, and then got frustrated, and finished the buttons of the rest of the class. The teacher was used to this.

  “Good morning, ladies!” David didn’t even comment on the new stage, just rushed the row of stars and stripes, and stuffed sketches in their hands. From the front row, I could see the detail, the color. I know he’d spent days on this. Behind me, the varsity squad took a row of seats. I could smell last night’s booze, probably Becky, who seemed to be on some kind of bender, carbs be damned.

  “I’ve got costume designs!” The stars and stripes studied the pages, some holding the paper a foot away from their face, to get a good look. “And I’ve got the costume department!” He swept his hand to gesture at the cheerleaders behind me. Immediately, Betty Gabrian raised an eyebrow.

  “You can’t put an elderly woman in a corset,” she said. “If you even try to cinch us in, you’ll break ribs. And if you do manage to cinch us in, it takes fifteen minutes to unlace, and I don’t think the paramedics would appreciate that.”

  “Okay,” said David. “No corsets! We don’t need them, really. All of you have gorgeous figures!”

  “We’ve got two months to go,” said Betty Gabrian. “I think it might take half a year just to find a crinoline in this town, let alone eight crinolines, and I hate to sound so negative, but I’ve sewn plenty of ruffles in my time. They are a pain in the ass.” Betty Gabrian stood, and took the sketches from the other women, flipped through them quickly. “You’ve got ruffles on everything.”

  “That’s my vision,” said David. “You will be resplendent!”

  “We will look like bed skirts, young man.” Betty Gabrian cast a glance at the varsity squad. “Four seamstresses, working full-time, cannot accomplish this.” She pointed at the sketch at the top of the pile. “You have Miss Julie in a three-tiered headpiece. She’s not a showgirl in Las Vegas.”

  “Okay,” said David, and I swear he shrunk, withered. Betty Gabrian had sucked all the lofty juice right out of him, and now he was just a raisin. “I went too big. It’s a bad habit of mine.” He never would have admitted such a thing, and Betty Gabrian continued to dehydrate him.

  “Those are your seamstresses,” said Diana Whipple, emboldened, pointing behind me. “I don’t see a lot of fashion there. I don’t see any personal style.” Unfortunately, the cheerleaders had arrived in their normal outfits, strappy tank tops, sparkly butt jeans, flip-flops.

  Kaitlynn, always the diplomat of the group, called out from behind me. “Don’t talk to me about style, old lady. All I see is the Shopko clearance rack. The Fourth of July was over a month ago. Jesus. I’m not going to be insulted by some lady who wears stupid black sneakers with white socks.” David turned, probably to admonish her, but it was too late, and we all watched Kaitlynn stomp toward the door. She threw a pincushion shaped like a tomato at the wall just above the nurse’s head before she left.

  “These are orthopedic,” said Diana. Four of her fellow Soiled Doves wore the same exact shoes, and they nodded. “And the three of you can sew?”

  David didn’t give them a chance to respond. “I bought them a book. They’ve been studying.” I knew the study habits of the varsity squad, and this was not a comfort.

  “If we can execute a herkie jump from a pyramid of four people, we can do anything!”

  “Thanks, Becky. See? They are willing to take on any challenge.”

  “It’s a matter of supplies,” said Betty Gabrian. “And budget, really. No matter how quick they sew, they aren’t going to be able to find that many yards of lace.”

  “Nightgowns,” said Loretta McQuilkin. “Easy to find, easy to alter. That’s your solution.”

  “This play takes place at high noon,” said David. “I don’t think prostitutes slept in. There were roosters and stuff, and porridge to make.”

  “I can change it,” I said. “Early morning. Judith goes outside to kill a pig for breakfast. Or whatever. She sees the fire had grown during the night, and she rushes inside to wake the ladies.”

  “I worked for days on those sketches,” said David. “I did research! I had to watch Gunsmoke, and that was the worst!”

  “These will be the most glamorous nightgowns in the county,” said Betty Gabrian. She yelled to the back of the room. “Nurse! Bring me my purse!”

  “Not my job,” said the nurse, and returned to her crossword puzzle.

  “Good lord,” said Betty Gabrian. I rose from my chair, and at the back of the room, pointed at the row of purses, one by one, until Betty Gabrian nodded. It was not nearly as impressive as my mother’s, but what it lacked in girth, it made up for in gold appliques. Betty Gabrian did not have to fish around like my mother, removed a black leather billfold, and called out for the costume department. “You!”

  Becky, Caitlyn, and Victoria were terrified, I think, and leapt to the front of the stage, useless measuring tapes still dangling from their necks. From where I sat, all I saw were sparkly butt jeans, cowering before a wall of red, white, and blue. This was America.

  Betty Gabrian removed a crisp stack of money, fanned it out to double-check. “There is four hundred and fifty-two dollars here. I want receipts. For everything. No chewing gum or trashy magazines. Got it?”

  She slammed her billfold shut, stuffed it back in her purse. “Make a list, my dear.” I realized she was pointing to me—I was the writer, after all, and the only person in the room with a clipboard and paper. “Shopko has them on clearance. The rack closest to the drinking fountain. Yesterday, they were fourteen dollars. Do not, I repeat do not, pay a nickel more. Eight nightgowns. Medium or large. Anything else won’t work. Peach, black, or pink. Absolutely no white. We do not want to look like ghosts.”

  “No,” said David. “Not ghosts.”

  “Do you have a glue gun, young man?”

  “Of course,” said David. I knew he had two, at the very least.

  Betty Gabrian continued her dictation, and I dutifully transcribed. “At Ben Franklin, twenty yards of lace trim. If Shelly is working, make her do the cutting. The other girl can barely count to ten. Three bags of craft feathers, any color will do. I take that back. They have a bag that looks like murdered parrots. Don’t buy those. Four bottles of fabric glue. One bottle of Liquid Stitch. Ten bags of rickrack. Go through that hateful tub next to the shoes, and buy every single bag of crystal beads they’ve got. Six packages of glue sticks.”

  “Sequins?” David’s voice was meek, and Betty Gabrian was silent. Her icy glare said it all.

  “Receipts, ladies. I mean it.”

  Becky handled the cash like it was radioactive.

  David gave orders to Victoria. “If she eats anything and doesn’t write it down, you’d better tell me,” and the remainder of the varsity squad left for their mission, Becky’s heels clicking like a metronome.

  Outside, we heard the Geo squeal as it sprang to life.

  “That idiot girl needs to change her belts,” said Erika Hickey. “I have little hope for your generation.”

  FROM THE DESK OF TIFFANY TEMPLETON

  I’ve only got two secrets about Dogwood. The first is that I
didn’t mind being there. Being a girl was actually a good thing. The detention center for boys has over three hundred juvenile delinquents, and they have to run it like a prison.

  I finally belonged somewhere. Literally, those were the exact words from the court: this girl belongs in the detention center. Being put in a box gave me comfort. Maybe it was the drugs.

  I was sentenced to three months, but only served eighty-three days, and for once, it was not my fault. There were sixteen girls when I arrived at the school, and by the time I left, three had graduated, and one had found another way out.

  We were told to call it a school, and not a juvenile treatment program, but we knew the truth. They don’t give you medications at regular school. At regular school, you have to get your drugs in the parking lot.

  Once you’ve been shipped away by the state, you no longer need a permission slip from your parents. They can do whatever they want to do with you.

  The doctor came from some town thirty miles away, and he had real patients to attend to. The girls’ school was a side job, I guess. The nurse’s office was tiny, held three metal folding chairs, and a cot folded in half and tucked into the corner.

  “Do you have any allergies to any medications?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a history of addiction or mental illness in your family?”

  “Of course,” I said. He didn’t even look up from his clipboard. My parents had been addicted to food, and Ronnie was delusional. I guess those things didn’t matter.

  “Have you ever taken Seroquel?”

  “I only take multivitamins,” I said.

  “Being institutionalized is traumatic,” he said. “We like to make things easier for the girls and for the staff. I’m going to start you on a low dose.”

  “I think I’d better ask my mom.”

  “Young lady, it’s too late for that.” He stood up, and I followed him out of the room. He gave the clipboard to the nurse on duty, and I never saw him again.

  The Seroquel was prescribed for “behavior modification.” I saw what it did that first night, as the girls slowed and moved like they were underwater. The nurse rolled out a cart after dinner, a tablecloth draped over top, but this was not a fancy restaurant. It did not contain desserts. On the metal trays, a row of tiny paper cups, each stuck with a Post-it note, all the names of all the girls.

  I shared a room with three other girls, and by six o’clock, they slurred their words, wobbled down the hallway, weaving their way to the bathroom or the lounge or the yard. There was a name for it: the Seroquel Shuffle. Some of them liked it, that feeling of being heavy in the body and light in the mind. Every single one of us took Seroquel, and I was already numb from the arrest and the court hearing.

  At Dogwood, I didn’t have to be the toughest, because it wasn’t a contest. We didn’t have fights, even though some of the girls had been sentenced for assault. When I met the girls from the oil fields or the reservations, I saw what a real tough girl was like. We didn’t have any murderers, however. Those girls were sent to regular prison, or shipped out of state. To the girls at Dogwood, I was a nerd from a small town, and I didn’t have any sex stories or high-speed chases to recount after the lights went out. Most fell asleep after telling stories, but a girl down the hall was afraid of the dark, and it took me a week to get used to her crying.

  At Dogwood, I was needed. Especially when it came to math and science. My public school in Gabardine was apparently like Harvard, and I tested out of everything, but I still had to go to classes during the day. When I wasn’t helping the teacher help the girls, I wrote in my notebook.

  We had a library, and I spent a lot of time there, looking out the windows at the flat desert, a part of Montana foreign to me. I came from mountains and trees, and this was dry prairie.

  I looked out at that flat horizon and read crappy romances, and the Seroquel hangover lasted all day, made my thoughts loop like a drunk you can’t talk out of a bad idea. For me, I couldn’t stop thinking about destroying my hometown. I wanted to burn it down again. Outside the windows, I knew the prairie wouldn’t satisfy my desire for fire. At Dogwood, the flames would have to leap thirty yards and leapfrog from scrub bush to scrub bush.

  After my first week, we were encouraged to write our families. I had nothing to say to anybody in my hometown, but I wanted to know about fire, so I wrote Betty Gabrian. She responded right away, in beautiful cursive on thick sheets of paper. When she asked if I wanted a care package, I only requested her material about the Slightly Less Bigger Burn. A package arrived within five days. I know they checked our mail at Dogwood, but I wasn’t there for arson, so nobody was concerned. The packages kept coming, and I sent her a handmade Thank You card every single time, and I know there is irony in that.

  I read about the giant forest fire of 1911, but I imagined present-day Gabardine, the gas station exploding, the trailer park disintegrating into melted plastic and blackened cinder blocks. I imagined my classmates seeking refuge in the grocery store, the flames visible and creeping closer to the parking lot, as the cheerleaders screamed.

  Betty Gabrian thought I was writing another paper, and she was the only person I cared about pleasing. I don’t know why it took the shape it did, but I started to write for Betty, and the scribbling became a stage play. Maybe I thought it would be easier to just write dialogue and stage directions, and not focus on building an entire universe of women who had all been forgotten. I lost myself in the writing, and my obsession with fire was abated; the inferno took place offstage. Instead, I chased the skinny myth of the Soiled Doves of Gabardine, and didn’t stop until I had fed them fictional lives, fattened them with a history I could control.

  I started writing, and it consumed me. I no longer heard the girl crying down the hallway, even ignored a whole week of erotic Harry Potter fan fiction that my roommates read aloud. I was eaten up by another story, and to me, the Soiled Doves became real. My story was just like life in Gabardine, too miserable not to be true.

  I saw myself in those stubborn women. Like me, they had been warned repeatedly, had been given chances. They ignored the confluence, even as things burned down all around them. When the firefighters came to town, they only saw customers. All eight perished, and none were mourned.

  At Dogwood, one of the therapists took the most-damaged girl out into the snowy yard and pushed and pushed until she elicited a scream. The therapist pushed harder, until the scream became an unholy thing, the sound of a natural disaster, so shocking and so overwhelming that it seemed it could only come from underground. The sound startled us, and we dropped things, ran to the windows to watch the girl exorcise her intimacy issues in zero-degree weather. At that temperature, breath is visible, but I think her primal scream had an even greater heat. As she pushed the rage out of her belly and into her lungs, it escaped her mouth in an enormous cloud, thicker than fog, darker than smoke.

  In a quiet way, the play was my scream to the universe. I wanted to control the story.

  The day I was finally satisfied, I had written ninety-one pages, single-spaced, spit out of the ancient mimeograph machine in the nurse’s office.

  That night, I held the script in my hands, an actual stack of paper. In the dark, I drew on the smooth pages with one finger, listening to the girls tell stories, trailing off as the Seroquel finally swallowed them, one by one.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ON THE LAST DAY OF August, I almost forgot about David’s allergy appointment. School was starting next week, and for the first time ever, I was preoccupied with the first day back. I was worried about my clothes, about Bitsy, about my new allegiance with the cheerleaders. I knew I was going to be treated differently. Maybe this time for the right reasons.

  As I neared the reader board, the first thing I noticed was the solitary balloon, dangling from the numbers of my mother’s weight. In the heat, and without helium, the orange bal
loon hung like a testicle. I rounded the sign, and saw the new car, dark gray like cigarette smoke, sparkling in the sunlight. I did not think of testicles. I saw the dealer plates, and I knew my mother had finally hit her goal weight. The balloon was from David, obviously, but the car was my mother’s gift to herself. I examined it closely—Buick Regal. I did not know if this was a nice kind of car, but it looked expensive and sporty, and these days, my mother believed she was both of those things.

  Behind the counter, she dangled the keys in her hand, held them out in the air, jangling noises. I was sure she had done this exact same thing to every customer that day.

  This had all been planned. My mother had no time to drive to the dealer in Fortune, so it had been pre-ordered, all paid, just waiting for that final tile to flip on the reader board.

  “Drove it right off the lot,” she said. “Still made it back here in time to open the store.”

  “Wow,” I said. “So, it’s fast.”

  “Fully loaded,” she said. “I earned every single bell and whistle.”

  “Yes, you did,” I said. “I’m proud of you.”

  “If I let you ride in it, you will be sitting on a garbage bag. No arguments. David insisted upon white leather.”

  “David?”

  “He helped me pick it out.”

  “Where is he? I’m supposed to take him to the allergist.” I looked out in the parking lot, but it was completely empty. I hadn’t noticed that the PT Cruiser was missing. “Wow,” I said. “You traded it in.”

  “What? Of course not. Getting their offer would have been embarrassing. I’m not that woman anymore, Tiffany. I am a woman who knows her own worth.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Did you leave it at the dealer? How am I going to pick it up? You don’t get off work for five more hours, and I’ve got David’s appointment.” I looked up at the clock for the first time. “Crap. He’s supposed to be there in twenty minutes.”