Into Thin Air (8 page)

“I have hair like my mother,” Lee said.

In the heavy silence Janet cleared her throat. “I bet I'm going to love Philadelphia,” she said.

Lee was mute the rest of the way home. She climbed from the car and went to her room, shutting the door. She could hear them talking downstairs. “She'll come around,” Frank said. “It's hard for her.”

“It's to be expected,” Janet said. “It doesn't hurt me.”

“What about this?” Frank said, laughing. Something rustled and knocked along the wall. “Does this hurt?”

“You stop that.” Janet giggled.

Lee picked up one of her mother's silver forks; she thought of Claire carefully polishing each piece the day the letter had come. “Dear heart.” Janet wrote that. She must have been the one Frank called late nights when Claire was sleeping fitfully. She pronged the fork into the lace doily on her dresser. She heard the voices climbing the stairs, the soft, sipping kisses, just outside her door.

“Good night,” Frank called, and Lee reached up and with one hand roughly wrenched the silver locket from her neck.

Frank, telling the police, glossed over details. He said only that Lee had been furious, that she had waited until the next morning, while he was shaving, to accuse him. “
Janel
wrote that letter to Claire, didn't she?” Lee cried. “I know she did.”

“No, she didn't,” Frank said.

“She did too. Why are you lying?” Defiant, she edged in front of him. Exasperated, he put down his shaving brush.

“The letter was to me,” Frank finally said. A bud of foam from his shaving brush settled on the white porcelain. “Look, she made a mistake.”

“No,
yo
u
made the mistake,” Lee said. “Claire
knew
about Janet,” she cried, “and it killed her.”

“It did
not
kill her,” he told her. “Cancer did.”

“How could you have done that to her?” Lee shouted. “How could you do it to me?”

The spigot splashed open. He doused water on his face, then, dripping, turned to face Lee. Droplets sprinkled his face, shimmering. “Baby.” he said gently, “no one plans anything. How come you don't know that by now?”

Janet appeared suddenly, blue towels folded across one arm. She was already dressed in a tailored black wool suit. “Why don't you speak a little louder,” she said quietly. “I don't think all the neighbors can quite hear yet.”

“It's none of your business,” Lee cried.

“It is my business,” Janet said, but Lee shoved past her, past Frank, to the stairs.

Frank and Janet were married by a justice of the peace in a private ceremony Lee refused to acknowledge or attend. There wasn't a honeymoon, not then, but there was a new move, to a larger colonial in a better suburb, with a whole separate attic for Lee, “Starting fresh,” was how Frank described it. “Ruining,” was what Lee said.

Lee felt banished. Suspiciously she watched the house unfold. Janet's taste, she decided, was trashy. Janet favored framed watercolors of ocean scenes, Black gulls like check marks in the sky. Glazed porcelain cats and gazelles crouched on the washed blue shag carpeting, The furniture was clumsy beige leather that Janet claimed was cool even in the hottest Texan summer. Lee examined the rooms. Playing house, this time solely on her own, she decided the house was dangerously sweet, as calamitous as too much candy.

Lee tried to keep her room exactly the way it had always been. She hung her framed poster of Nike running shoes. She unfolded the silverware she had inherited from Claire and carefully laid a few pieces on the top of her dresser. “Why, isn't that darling,” Janet said doubtfully.

“They were my mother's,” said Lee.

Janet kept away from Lee. She didn't work, but she didn't stay home, either. She'd wake and breakfast with Frank and then go off shopping for elaborate dinner ingredients or for dresses she hung carefully in her closet. She was the one Frank sometimes took to scout empty houses, not Lee. She wasn't there when Lee got up in the morning; she wasn't there when Lee came home, and when she spoke to Lee it was always in relation to Frank. She wanted to know if Lee would pick up Frank's shirts from the Chinese laundry, if Lee knew whether Frank liked Mexican food. “I like it,” Lee said, but that night they had spaghetti.

Upstairs, in her room, Lee wept. She missed Claire, and what was worse, she couldn't help missing Frank, Every time she heard the house creak, she was certain he was coming to find her, to make amends, but instead he seemed more and more removed.

She wandered the neighborhood evenings. She joined the Future Teachers of America club at school, not because she had any real urge to teach, but because she somehow felt it was a connection to Claire. For two hours every week she sat in a room full of girls in pleated skirts and listened to them talk about motivation and lesson plans until she was so bored that she had to pinch her thigh to keep from sleeping. In groups of ten they trooped to elementary schools to monitor afternoon classes; tirelessly they critiqued their own high school studies. Still, afterward, one of the future teachers would always ask Lee to go shopping or to have a malt. Lee always said yes.

To fill her evenings, she began running. The new neighborhood was dark and heavily wooded, and she had to watch for the more raucous of the dogs, for the occasionally thuggy kid who jettisoned a rock at her moving target, Sometimes, when she was running the hardest, glazed with sweat, she felt Claire right behind her, just out of view. Her breath stitched up. Huh huh huh. She sprinted ahead, faster. She heard whispering, and the more speed she picked up, the clearer the sound. Claire's voice wrapped around her, telling Lee something. Something important. Lee whipped around, panting. The black gleaming road stretched behind her. In the distance a dog barked hysterically. She ran home, her face wet, intently listening. Her shoes slapped on the pavement.

The next evening she came downstairs in black sweats like Claire used to wear, her hair pulled back the way Claire's used to be, fastened with the torn-off ribbing from an old sweat sock. Frank was in the living room, watching a TV movie with Janet, and when he saw her he started. “Want to run with me?” Lee said. Janet arched her feet in high silvery heels.

“I'll let you beat me,” Lee said.

He was silent for a moment. Janet rubbed his shoulder. “Tell you what,” he said. “You go run, and when you get back, maybe we'll make some popcorn.”

Ripping through neighbors' hedges, kicking up flower beds, Lee ran. Moving the anger out, was what Claire used to call it. She cited hospital studies where depressed inmates benefited from a fierce run. Lee ran four miles, tensed for Claire's presence, waiting for her fury to weaken. She looped back around, her face damp, her shirt glued to her body, skimming the lawn to the house.

The driveway was empty. The house silent. The heater clicked on, making the sound of footsteps, “Hello?” Lee called. In the kitchen she gulped water so icy, it tightened her throat, On the table was a note, “Went to get ice cream. Be right back.”

She wandered upstairs to their bedroom, Peach wallpaper with a thin silver stripe. A white goosedown comforter on a brass bed. She opened the top drawer of Janet's oak dresser and pulled out a blue chiffon scarf, drifting it around her sweaty neck. On top of the dresser was a crystal falcon of White Shoulders, and she opened that, too, daubing it on the back of her neck. She smelled musty, of sweat and dirt and too much of Janet's perfume. Spreading herself across their bed, she gazed out the window, drinking in the night.

They did come back with ice cream, but not until two hours later. “Chocolate, your favorite,” Frank said, but when Lee touched the container, it was warm. She pried open the top. Inside, it was soup. “It'll freeze right up again,” Janet said brightly. “Pop it right in the freezer.”

“Never mind,” Lee said. “I think I'll just go to sleep.”

“We'll eat it all,” Frank warned.

“That's okay,” Lee said. But she noticed that the ice cream stayed in the freezer all that week, finally replaced by a fresher, firmer pint that was eaten away in one hot afternoon.

They began going out more and more, and always without her. She'd come home to notes scattered on the kitchen table. Gone to the movies. Gone to a play. Gone to dinner. And when she asked her father why she couldn't come, he was silent for a minute. “Why, you'd hate the kind of plays we go to see,” he told her finally. “A girl like you, you should be out with your own friends, anyway.”

Lee's resolve turned steely. She had no intention of letting Frank erase her the way he had Claire. There were other ways of being seen, of getting attention.

At fifteen, Frank said, Lee became beautiful. She dug out the old photographs she had salvaged of Claire and studied them, miming the poses. In front of her oak mirror she smiled the way her mother had. She crooked her arm behind her head, a 1950s pose. When Frank called her to dinner, she sauntered down with her hair in a braided tail down her back, the way Claire had worn it. She smiled at him with Claire's smile. He was still for a moment, and then abruptly he excused himself from the table. “What got him?” Janet said, putting down a steaming plate of green beans. “I think he's seen a ghost,” Lee said calmly.

She was in high school then. Philadelphia High, a small middle-class school with a strict dress code Lee made it her business to ignore. She began wearing nothing but black, her skirts so short she couldn't walk down a hallway without a teacher pulling her aside. “Why bother to wear a skirt at all?” a teacher demanded. “It's no bother,” said Lee. She disdained the order to go to the sewing room and stitch on an extra hem of cloth and instead walked out the door and home.

She looked for friends. She had dropped out of FTA because the few girls she had befriended had transferred to the Catholic high school a block away and the other girls didn't trust her simply because she was now so different. She spent lunch hours contentedly reading by herself in a corner of the cafeteria; in the girls' room she ignored the girls trading eye shadows and lip glosses; she listened to girls planning on going shopping and pretended she didn't care.

If she couldn't have girlfriends, well, then, she centered on boys. The boys Lee was drawn to, though, were the ones who had somehow become high school legends. There was Dana Lallo, wiry and shaggy looking and bright enough, whose very presence was responsible for intricate love notes carved into numerous desktops and walls, scratched into an occasional gray metal locker. He never stayed with any girl for longer than a week, and it was rumored (though some said Dana himself had started and sustained this particular story) that he had fathered a son in Tennessee.

There was Tony Santa, the first and only punk rocker at Philadelphia High. He sauntered around with his black hair shellacked into stiff fingers. He borrowed safety pins from the sewing teacher to wound his T-shirts with. The endearments he whispered to his fascinated following were the names of New York City subway stops. “Astor Place,” he murmured knowingly, “Columbus Circle, Eighth Street.” He had a tattered New York City subway map that he studied in class, sometimes passing it to one of his groupies. On Thursdays he drove his motorcycle all the way to the edge of town, to the one newsstand that carried the
Village Voice
, and even then it was an issue that was a week late.

Lee planned. She scouted Dana in the cafeteria and picked her way through the sour milk-smelling tables, stepping gingerly over the luncheon meat pasted onto the floor, avoiding the slippery pats of yellow butter tossed like Frisbees. Dana ate with an entourage of steadily blonding girls. You could always pick out his latest girlfriend by the whiteness of her hair. Lee sat down at the very next table, reading
The Sound and the Fury
, feigning a disinterest so mesmerizing, Dana finally leaned over her table. “That book more interesting than me?” he said. Behind him, four pairs of blue eyes impaled Lee in their gaze. Lee refused his first date, but not his second.

They went to a movie. He picked her up at home, and Frank shook his hand, his face pleasant. “Have fun,” Janet said, Dana carried two cans of Pepsi, each covered with a thin lip of foil. “I don't like Pepsi,” Lee said coolly. “I'll buy myself a Sprite.” He grinned at her. “This you'll like,” he promised.

They sat in the second row, feet propped on the seats ahead of them. On the screen, aliens demolished a farmhouse. A woman in the audience screamed. Dana handed Lee a can. Tipped against her mouth, skin to metal, she smelled the alcohol. Rum spiked with a little Pepsi. Dana swigged his down. In the flickering light he put one hand on Lee's thigh.

She wouldn't let him touch her. Not then, not two dates more, when he finally got angry. “What are you, a good little Catholic girl?” he said. Instead she let him teach her to smoke cigarettes, and when she felt she had it polished, she dropped him, bored. He didn't read; he didn't talk about anything but himself and the patch of land he was going to buy in Vermont someday. “It's done with,” she told him, and when he followed her, moony-eyed, in the school, no one was more astounded than Dana. In the girls' room, Patricia Ryan, head cheerleader, looked at Lee for the first time. “Lend me a mascara,” she said, friendly,

After Dana, it was easy enough to get Tony, She loved riding on the back of his Yamaha, her arms clutched about his hips, her head thrown back. They'd pull up to the school, Lee's skirt hiked up, and she could make an entrance. She loved it, too, that he was always ready to leave, always talking about just going to New York City where anything was possible. Her popularity at school soared. Boys began appearing at the front door, asking a startled Frank what time he thought his daughter might be home. The phone rang at night with calls from boy after boy, with dates she turned down simply so she could have some time to herself. “The belle of the ball,” Janet said. Frank rubbed Janet's shoulders. “Oh, it's just kids' stuff,” he insisted. “Doesn't mean a thing.”