Destiny (22 page)

"Hi, Helene. Hot, ain't it?"

"Yes. Very." Helene gave her a poUte Uttle smile, and then looked the other way. The woman took a last drag on the cigarette in her mouth, then tossed the butt end in among the plastic flowers. Helene felt as if she

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suddenly wanted to scream: Don't do that — don't do it. It's dirty and ugly and horrible — horrible.

Her mother wasn't home, but that was nothing unusual these days. She'd come back with a couple of packages around six, and say she'd been to the market, that she'd just realized they'd run out of bread, or sugar, or tea. Helene used to mind, once. Not now. Now she wouldn't have to account for being late, which was a relief.

The trailer felt like an oven. She opened all the windows and the door, but it hardly made any difference. There was no breeze, and all the flies came in, that was all. She dumped the bag of books down on the table and poured herself a tall glass of cold milk. She was just so hot. And dirty. What she'd like right now was just to stand under a shower, a proper shower, and let the cold water run and run and run. Or go down to the pool, maybe, with Billy, and swim. But she hardly ever did that anymore. All the hours God made, it seemed, Billy worked. And when he wasn't working, it seemed to her that he avoided her. She couldn't understand it. She thought he liked her still. He seemed to like her, but every time she mentioned swimming, or even just going for a walk, Billy's gaze slid away, and he turned red, and made an excuse. She could go on her own, of course—nothing to stop her. But she was a little afraid. It was so quiet down by the pool. She'd done it once, and she hadn't enjoyed it—not the way she did with Billy. All the time she swam she felt as if someone were watching her, in behind the cottonwood trees. And in the end she'd just clambered out fast, and run through the bushes all the way home.

She kicked off her shoes, went into the bedroom, and flung herself down on her bed. Her mother's bed wasn't made, and the room smelled slightly sour, like unwashed linen. Helene closed her eyes. Sometimes she thought her mother didn't care so much—not anymore.

She thought of Priscilla-Anne's bedroom, with its pink frills. She thought of the new bathroom Merv Peters had had installed, which Pris-cilla-Anne had showed her on the way out: all gleaming tiles, and the bathroom suite pink, not white. She'd never even seen a pink one before, didn't know they made them.

"Don't you just love pink?" Priscilla-Anne had sighed. "I guess it's just about my favorite color."

Helene opened her eyes again. A fat bluebottle buzzed. The walls were stained with rust; it came through the paint no matter what you did. There was practically no color left in the thin little cotton draperies: they hung at the window like rags. One of the legs on her bed was half broken, and the screw her mother had put in was coming out, so the bed tilted crazily to one side every time you moved. The old yellow chest seemed to Helene to get yellower and yellower and uglier and uglier by the day.

DESTINY • 141

She didn't go to church, never had, though her mother wrote "Episco-paUan" with a flourish on the school forms, in the section headed rehgion. Nationahty: Enghsh. Age: twelve. Religion: Episcopahan. Helene shut her eyes again. She didn't even know what it meant, not really. But she did pray sometimes; lately, she did. Always the same prayer. She said it now, silently, screwing up her eyes. God. Jesus. Dear God. Sweet Jesus. Get me out of here.

After a bit, feeling better, she added, And Mother. Then she swung her long legs off the bed. She rummaged around under her mother's bed. There was a real litter of stuff there—her mother was a real magpie, a hoarder. Helene pulled some of the stuff out and looked at it in disgust. Why did she keep all this junk?

Bits of cheap lace off petticoats long thrown away. A box of old buttons and glass beads. A pair of dirty white cotton gloves gone yellow now, and with holes in the fingers. Her mother used to wear white gloves—when? Centuries ago. A lady always wears gloves. Leather, not fabric . . . had her mother said that? Well, these were fabric all right, dime-store stuflf. Horrible. Helene tossed them aside.

There was a great stack of magazines too. Years old, some of them. Her mother brought them back from Cassie Wyatt's. They were thumbed and stained, and smelled acrid from hair lacquer. Helene flicked the pages. Smart bright women: bright red smiles, and crisp hair, shiny shoes with high heels and neat, tailored suits. These women didn't hve in dirty old trailers. You only had to look at them to know: they Uved in smart new houses, with a car in the driveway, and dinner in the oven. They had husbands, and the husbands wore suits, and came home at six every day. They had a barbecue in the backyard, and they all went to the beach for vacations. They had TVs and electric ovens, and big iceboxes. They had showers, too, just like Priscilla-Anne's, so they could wash anytime they felt like it. She flicked a page.

They used something called Tampax, too, because they were women who led an active life, and there were photographs of them doing so—on a beach, or horseback riding even. She knew what Tampax was, but you couldn't use it if you were a girl—Susie Marshall said so. It wouldn't go up; you weren't big enough. She thought they sounded dangerous—what if they got stuck? But they had to be better than what she had to wear: that horrible pink elastic belt, and those thick napkins. Napkins! Her mother called them "towels": napkins were what you put on your lap at dinner. But whatever you called them, they were horrible. If you were stupid enough to wear pants then, they stuck out, and all the boys nudged one another and smirked. They made her feel dirty; they made her feel ashamed. But maybe that was just her mother. Once she'd really wanted to

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Start. The older girls made such a drama of it: clutching their stomachs and saying the pain was real bad, and bringing in notes from their mothers saying they couldn't do gym or go swimming. She didn't care then how painful it was, she just wanted to start. And then when she did, her mother wouldn't talk about it, not at all. She made it quite clear that what had happened was something that was never, ever discussed. She went out and bought the belt and a blue packet of the things and hid them in back of one of the drawers. "They're in there," she said. "When you need them."

So she talked to Priscilla-Anne about it, and then she felt a whole lot better. She could talk to Priscilla-Anne, and she couldn't talk to her mother. Not the way they used to talk. Not often, anyhow. Sometimes it was like her mother didn't want her to grow up, didn't want her to become a woman. All that stuff" about not needing a bra, for instance. Sometimes she thought it made her mother angry, angry in a funny hopeless kind of way, her growing-up. Other times she thought it was just that her mother was too tired, or too busy. She often looked tired now. In the mornings, she was puffy under the eyes, and there were thin little lines now around her mouth that weren't there before. Evenings, sometimes, she looked really exhausted and worried. She'd fall asleep sometimes right there in the chair.

She was still beautiful, Helene thought. But not quite as beautiful as she used to be. And sometimes when Helene met her in town, she felt embarrassed. Her mother was so old-fashioned! She still wore her hair the same way, all those careful waves and a side part. She didn't have a perm like most of the mothers, or bangs over the forehead. Out in the sunlight, her makeup could look funny too. That pale powder she wore, and the way she still painted her lips in that bow: no one else did that anymore. And then, the way she talked! So English, still. Using fifteen words when she could have used three. "Z>o you think I could possibly have . . . How do you do . . ." when everybody else just said "Hi!" and had done with it. Helene had seen people stare; seen the sideways glances, the smirks. In Cassie Wyatt's; in the market.

She frowned. Her mother didn't belong. And Helene felt as if she didn't belong either. She wasn't English, and she wasn't American. She could talk like the other girls when she wanted. She had a quick ear; she knew it. Oh, she could mimic them all right. She did it now, quietly, to herself, listening carefully. Just like Priscilla-Anne, that slow, lazy drawl. But still, she didn't do it. Not unless she was alone. Because she wasn't sure in her own mind if she did want to be like the other girls. She didn't. Not altogether. They'd jeered when she first went to school; she used to cry about it every night. And she'd never forgiven them—never. Take no notice.

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darling, her mother had said then. They're rude and ignorant. They don't know any better. . . .

She'd believed her mother then. Her mother did know better. Her mother knew about England, and big houses and green lawns and balls and ladies and wearing gloves and not cutting bread with a knife at the dinner table.

But sometimes, now, she wasn't so sure. Sometimes that whole world— the world her mother had once talked about all the time, and now mentioned more and more rarely—sometimes that whole world seemed unreal. It existed, she supposed, but maybe not quite the way her mother described. And even if it did—did she care for it? Why should she, when she was stuck here in the trailer park? And if God didn't do something soon, she'd be stuck here forever.

Helene Craig, she whispered to herself quietly. Helene Fortescue. But even that didn't help anymore, not the way it used to. The names sounded hollow. Sometimes she felt as if she didn't exist at all, as if she were nobody.

And sometimes she wondered if colored people felt like that, belonging and not belonging, all at once. She pushed the pile of magazines away angrily. That was stupid. Better not say that. Not ever. Not to anyone.

The tin box was right at the back of the bed, all covered in dust and fluff. When had that last been opened? Helene opened it now, and looked inside. There were the two dark blue English passports, her mother's and her own, because she had been bom in England. And there was the money— quite a lot of it. Crumpled dollar bills, a few fives, lots and lots of quarters and dimes. Once upon a time she and Mother used to do the arithmetic. If they saved so much, every week—not that much really, no more than the price of a packet of soap powder, or a box of cornflakes—if they did that every week without fail, and never raided the box, not even at Christmas, then in so many weeks, and so many years . . . Helene sighed. How much did it cost for two people to go to Europe, to England?

Five hundred dollars, her mother had said once, and then laughed. It was a nice round figure anyway, she said. But that had been a few years back. Would five hundred still be enough?

Helene wasn't sure. There wasn't five hundred in here, anyway, nowhere near. She frowned, trying to concentrate. The last time they had counted it, yes, she was pretty sure, had been her eleventh birthday. She remembered, because it was not long after she'd first started her period, and the birthday had begun all right, but ended badly. Her mother had started crying—for no reason Helene could see. But she'd cried a lot, and said Helene was growing up so fast, and then she'd gotten the box out and counted the money, and there had been . . . two hundred and thirty dol-

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lars. Yes, she was sure, because it sounded like so much. A few odd nickels and dimes as well, but basically, two hundred and thirty dollars.

Slowly and carefully, she reached into the box and began to count the money. She put it in neat stacks, fives in one pile, ones in another. After a while she sat back on her heels. Then recounted, to make sure.

But she was right. It had gone down, not up. There was a little over a hundred and fifty dollars in the box. No way would a hundred and fifty dollars get two people to England.

She stared at the money for a while, till her head felt tight and hot, and she knew if she looked at it any longer, she would start to cry. Then she gathered it all up, stuffed it back into the box, and stuffed the box under the bed again. Where had it gone? She couldn't imagine. On schoolbooks? Clothes? It might be clothes. Her mother did have new dresses sometimes, and she never said where they came from, except that she had got them cheaply, they were a bargain. And she was growing so fast; her mother bought material and made her new clothes. It might be that.

Helene stood up and stared out the window. God, she thought. Please God. If I don't stop growing out of things, then we're just never going to get to England.

Her mother came back around six. She was wearing a pink dress Helene hadn't seen before, and it suited her. Helene could see right away that she was in a good mood. She sang to herself while she made supper, and she asked Helene a lot of questions, about school, about homework, the way she tried to do the nights she wasn't tired. Helene thought she didn't listen to the answers too carefully, because her eyes had a dreamy half-focused look. But she didn't mind. She felt guilty now for all those things she'd thought about her mother earlier. It wasn't her fault she talked the way she did. And she was pretty. Tonight her eyes were shining, and she looked almost beautiful again, the way she used to do.

Helene was wondering if she should ask her about Cassie Wyatt's and that mixup over her mother working afternoons, but even though she seemed in a good mood, Helene didn't quite dare. Her mother hated being questioned about her movements, Helene had learned that now: she called it prying. So instead, she decided to risk telling her about Priscilla-Anne, about stopping at the Peters' house on the way home. And it was all right: her mother just nodded and smiled, and never said a thing.

Encouraged, Helene went on. She told her about the soda fountain and the walkie-talkie dolls, and the frilly pink bedroom. Her mother's eyebrows arched; a little smile played about her lips.

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"It was lovely, Mother. So pretty. Oh, and they have a new bathroom too—and you know, that's pink as well? A proper shower, with a glass door. And shiny pink tiles. And the bathtub is pink and so is the wash basin—just imagine! Even the ..."