True Confections (8 page)

They cut to overexposed daytime courthouse exterior footage, and there I am, a zombie of a teenager in a peasant blouse and a denim skirt, my tear-blotched face masked by a huge pair of sunglasses that aren’t mine, my unruly hair bunched into an indifferent ponytail, shuffling in Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals into the courthouse under a harsh glare that is probably a combination of relentless summer sunshine and the bright lights of the news cameras. I am flanked by my grim, squinting parents (they are willing to appear supportive in public) and our lawyer, the hapless Lou Popkin, with those sideburns, sweltering in his regrettable orange corduroy suit with the pointy lapels (he will commit suicide a couple of years later, for no apparent cause), and suddenly this stupid thing I did by accident a lifetime ago, when I was a child, something having nothing whatsoever to do with Zip’s Candies or the Blessed Chocolate Virgin, this rancid and bitter piece of the past, becomes inexorably blended into the present.

I
KNOW I
will never be able to clear my name completely. I will always be Arson Girl, and nothing can be done about that. I am especially sorry that Julie and Jacob have to live with it. I can only say once again that while my actions did cause that house to burn down, I was a foolish high school kid, and it was an unpremeditated, freakish accident for which I was then and am now truly sorry. (I am not entirely sorry about the Zip’s fire, which I know I probably shouldn’t admit, but my willingness to admit that I am
not entirely sorry should be in my favor, because of what it says about my willingness to be completely truthful and honest about my statements pertaining to Zip’s Candies.)

How was I to know that water pistol had charcoal lighter fluid in it? How was I to know Beth Crabtree’s father always lit their barbecue that way? That’s really stupid and dangerous, when you think about it. Yet he was never charged with reckless endangerment or whatever. I only took the water gun for a joke.

State of mind is important in the eyes of the law. I recall with perfect clarity my state of mind. When I saw the transparent red plastic Luger lying on the windowsill in the Crabtrees’ kitchen, as I waited by the back door while Beth lied to her mother about what movie we were going to see, I picked it up, and feeling that it was loaded—what else but water should it have been filled with, I ask you?—I slid it into my fringed, patchwork shoulder bag, which I had bought on Eighth Street on a day trip to New York’s Greenwich Village with a group of girls from my class a few months before. It was a spontaneous gesture, with no more than a second of premeditation before I took it, if that. (And no, I did not smell the lighter fluid, hard as that may be to believe.)

Why did I take it? I can never answer this question satisfactorily enough. Just on an impulse, to be silly, to whip it out at some point later that night as a joke. My mother used an old water pistol to discourage a neighbor’s cat who liked to dig in our flower beds and shit all over her penstemon. If I had really planned only to use a water gun as a joke, the assistant district attorney, Kevin what’shisname, kept asking triumphantly, why hadn’t I taken that water gun from my home? Which only proves that this was a spontaneous act, my taking the loaded water gun off the Crabtrees’ windowsill, wouldn’t you think? I had no plan!

What did I have in mind? Absolutely nothing. Yes, it is true
that at Debbie Livingston’s party I anticipated that I was likely to encounter Andy Ottenberg, who had developed a nasty habit of mocking me cruelly when I was at my most heartfelt and impassioned. He had done this all through our senior year at every opportunity. He was the managing editor of the school paper, for which I wrote an excruciatingly pretentious advice column called “Go Ask Alice.” But I had no plan. And it really didn’t feel like theft of a potentially lethal weapon. It was just a plastic water pistol.

After Beth’s mother told us to have fun at our movie (we told her we were going to see
Dog Day Afternoon)
, we headed over to Debbie Livingston’s house, where there were no parents, because Mr. and Mrs. Livingston thought their little darling was still the sweet innocent who not so long ago dressed as a bumblebee three Halloweens in a row. They had no idea that these days she was famous not for her imaginative costume skills but for her imaginative and dexterous approach to certain skills of sexual manipulation, which she provided willingly to a select group of the most popular senior boys, and her parents had definitely never heard her personal motto, “It isn’t a sin if you don’t put it in.” Mr. and Mrs. Livingston thought they had no worries at all that night, since Debbie had told them she would do homework and feed the cat, and maybe her best friend, Mara, would sleep over and they might watch some television before bedtime; meanwhile her parents should have a super great time in the city. So off they went to New York, for dinner and a musical and then an overnight stay at the Plaza Hotel. It was their wedding anniversary.

I
FINALLY SAW
Dog Day Afternoon on
television one night when I was up late with Julie, who was a colicky infant who frequently
needed to be held and rocked and soothed. Howard had gone to bed because he had work in the morning. (I took six months maternity leave for Jacob, and for Julie, but in fact both times I was back at Zip’s before that, working a few hours a week, wearing my baby in a sling.) Watching Al Pacino grow more and more frantic as he realizes he has no good way out of the bank he is trying to rob, I found myself growing more and more regretful that Beth Crabtree and I hadn’t just gone to see the movie to which we claimed to be headed, out by the mall. We would have shared a giant tub of popcorn, watched the movie, and gone home. I would have spent four years at Middlebury College, and today I would be a college graduate with many friends doing who knows what, living who knows where, and if I were to attend my Middlebury reunions nobody would call me Arson Girl.

Perhaps Beth Crabtree and I might have remained good friends over all these years. But we never spoke again after that night. If we had gone to the movie we said we were going to see, the Livingstons would have come home from New York the following day to find their spacious, five-bedroom, neo-Colonial house with its attached two-car garage and its overgrown rhododendrons pretty much as they left it, with no discernable trace of yet another of Debbie’s very popular, unauthorized, parent-free parties. The Livingstons would not have returned to the Plaza after their show in a festive mood (they had a pretheater dinner at Mamma Leone’s and saw
Chicago
, I read in their statements) to find four urgent messages from the New Haven Police Department, and they would not have driven back to New Haven at top speed in a panic after midnight, and they would not have returned to Canner Street to find a smoldering, blackened, three-story neo-Colonial husk surrounded by blackened rhododendron skeletons, with three fire engines still churning,
police cruisers with flashing lights parked all over the street, barricades at both ends of their block, and disembodied radio-dispatcher voices squawking occasionally from the dashboards into the hot, smoky night air. I saw them arrive. I was in the back seat of one of the police cruisers, although I had not yet been arrested.

If Beth Crabtree and I had gone to see
Dog Day Afternoon
that night, then poor old Homer, Debbie Livingston’s ancient orange cat, would not have been found dead three days later, wedged up high in a tree in a neighbor’s yard, his severely charred tail tangled in the branches. Accidental incineration of a beloved pet is not a crime in the state of Connecticut, but it is a terrible, terrible crime. If I were Debbie Livingston, I wouldn’t have forgiven me either.

T
HAT NIGHT IN
the Livingstons’ backyard, when he saw me come through the gate with Beth, Andy Ottenberg said something to the group of his friends with whom he was standing around a rusty and tilted three-legged barbecue grill, which was very close to the side of the house, right by the back steps that led up to the kitchen door. I know this sounds middle-aged and suburban and unlikely for a bunch of high school kids, but that is what they were doing. I have a very clear recollection of the way the grill surface was entirely covered with sizzling hot dogs, and there were several washtubs of ice beside the grill, filled with beer and soda cans, with more packages of hot dogs piled on top, and there were packages of buns on a card table, next to big bowls of potato chips and a stack of paper plates and napkins. I absolutely love hot dogs, and I remember distinctly feeling too self-conscious to be observed eating one at that party, although I was instantly hungry after my first whiff of that alluring, greasy smoke.

The boys around the grill all snickered and turned to look at me and I heard somebody say the words
tits
and
bitch
as Beth and I approached. If Andy had ever sincerely liked me, the feelings had curdled and gone rancid long before this night, and his merciless teasing had become painfully personal and barbed, it is true. I have never denied that.

“What did you just say?” I demanded of Andy, who was leaning one-handed with a studied casual air against the side of the Livingstons’ house, chugging beer from a bottle. Maybe he was a little drunk. Maybe they all were. I was so self-righteous! Why did I care so much? Possibly I was already resenting my self-imposed hot dog deprivation. “What were you saying about me?”

“I said everybody knows you’re a bitch because you’re sexually frustrated,” Andy said with a smirk, putting his beer down on the ground so he could thrust the curved end of the barbecue tongs up and down through circled fingers in a lewd and monkeyish gesture. His friends erupted in knowing laughter again. “You want some of this, tat for tits?” he added. (And you question why I took the name Ziplinsky gladly and willingly, so happy was I to be done with my tainted Tatnall name.)

And that’s when it happened, in an instant. I lost my temper. I had turned away, but then I turned back toward Andy and took a step forward, swinging my shoulder bag at him in frustration and anger, and some embarrassment. He ducked, and I missed, but my bag, which was weighted with makeup; a thick, dog-eared paperback of
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins; my wallet and keys; the loaded water pistol; and a hardcover copy of
Slaughterhouse-Five
(from the New Haven Public Library, which many months later began to send me a series of importuning letters about this overdue book until finally, without telling me, Howard very gallantly went there one autumn day and paid for the lost book in order to stop the letters), flew off
my shoulder and out of my grasp. It hit the barbecue grill, which tipped over in a shower of sparks, scattering white-hot coals and all those hot dogs on the flagstones, and then there was an enormous
whomp
of an explosion.

In an instant, the side of the Livingstons’ house was a blue sheet of flames. Was this a nightmare? Time stopped and started again, and then everyone was shouting in the yard, and someone started screaming inside the house, and the sheet of flame grew and spread, the front line of inexorable flame advancing on a tide of curling, blackening, burning, melting vinyl siding. Wisps of lacy black smoke leaked along the edges of the siding in lengthening tendrils that curled together and knotted the air with a thickening haze. Now billows of poisonous black smoke poured from behind the siding, sifting through the seams, as another and another segment softened and smeared and then melted.

Smudgy plumes leaked around the edges of the kitchen window frame for a long moment before that, too, burst into flames as it was engulfed in the upward melting tide that advanced up the side of the house in a sheet of thin blue flame. Acrid black smoke was now pouring thickly from several places at once as the fire spread across the wall of the house and ate its way up toward the roof.

Everyone was screaming and shouting, and kids came pouring out of the house coughing and gagging and crying as the house filled with clouds of choking black smoke, and the flames spread unbelievably fast. And then the inside of the house was completely on fire, and windows were breaking, and the sound of the fire was ferocious as it roared and consumed everything; now the roof was on fire, and the scorching heat coming off the house was like an invisible wall that kept pushing everyone back, back, back.

Big black flakes wafted through the air, hideous confetti, some still glowing with a rill of toxic flame at their edges, and they floated up and down and up and down on the weirdly billowing hot air that surrounded us, before landing in the trees and on the parked cars with a festive glow, leaving faint scorch marks. Everyone standing there gaping and screaming and crying and shouting had to dodge and dance out of the way as these enormous glowing flakes of bitter ash rained down.

The police and the fire trucks arrived after what seemed like hours but was in fact nine and a half minutes from the first 911 call (not a great response time, really, now that I think about it as a tax-paying home owner), and I stood across the street with everyone watching the house burn while Beth Crabtree stared at me in horror, saying again and again, “Oh my God! What did you do? Oh my God, Alice! Your life is over! Oh my God!” until I told her to shut up, could she please just shut up, and she did. She left me and went to stand with the other kids, and then some parents began to arrive, and I was alone, and I could feel everyone looking at me.

F
RIEDA OBVIOUSLY THOUGHT I
was trouble from that very first day I walked in the door at Zip’s Candies. She couldn’t keep her beautiful son away from me; she couldn’t even keep her unbeautiful husband from being charmed and amused by me right from the start. She recognized these defeats, but she never let me win her over completely, though she permitted numerous temporary small victories, which was, in its own subtle way, deceptive and controlling.

When Howard told his parents we wanted to get married at the end of that summer, they were having dinner at Kaysey’s, their downtown favorite in those days (Frieda loved the big, high, red leatherette booths, which reminded her of sophisticated New York places like Sardi’s, and Sam loved the potato pancakes with applesauce). Howard told me that Sam was elated, which irked Frieda considerably. “If you don’t marry that girl, I will!” was probably not a good thing to say in Frieda’s earshot, even if he didn’t mean it literally.