Local Girls (2 page)

Jill told me that when you're really in love, you know right away. I'm not exactly sure how this happens. Is it like a flash of lightning? Like an angel tapping you on the shoulder? Or is it similar to choosing a puppy? You think you're picking the cutest one, but really you wind up going home with the one who keeps insisting on climbing into your lap. That's how we got our dog, Revolver. We thought he was so crazy about us, but it turned out that Labrador retrievers adore everyone. Well, maybe that's what love is, a state of mind ready to grace anyone willing to accept it. Anyone who cares.

School s out. Hurray. Life, however, is still so boring that I'm writing to Jack Rabbit every day. I go to the pool with Jill and take along my notebook and write until I think I'm going blind, then jump into the deep end. We are not going on vacation because no one in my house is talking to each other, so going anywhere together is definitely out. My brother's on the summer science team at the high school, so he's never home. My father is on an exercise kick and has joined a gym, so he's never around either.

My mother and Margot and I spend a lot of time going to movies. It's dark and it's cool and no one knows if you're crying, except for the person sitting directly beside you. Margot buys me anything I want, even Jordan almonds, which are so terrible for your teeth. She's the kind of person who knows about love. She has men calling her in the middle of the night, but they're all no good, or so she says. Just like Jill, she insists she'll know when she meets the right man. But unlike Jill, she tells me exactly what love's evidence is.
I'll just want to kiss him till I die.
To me, this doesn't sound like something to hope for, but people seem to hope for it all the same.

 

 

 

 

Jill is camping with her parents, and has sent me a postcard that it has happened. The miracle we've been searching for, the great event, the angel's secret. It's love, it really is. It's the boy in the tent next to hers who she sneaks out to meet after her parents are asleep. I sit on my front stoop while Jill is away and think things over. I've smartened up and am no longer waiting for the mailman. Jack Rabbit isn't writing anymore. He went to camp to be a junior counselor and I guess he broke his arm or fell in love with somebody new. Doesn't it figure that I would miss his letters like crazy? Sometimes I read the old ones late at night, and I wonder what was I thinking when I got them. How could I have thought he was boring? Well, I'm the boring one now. When Jill comes back I may have to lie to her. I may tell her Jack Rabbit died in a canoeing accident. My name was the last word he said, or so they tell me. My name brought him comfort with his last dying breath.

 

 

 

 

Jill and I are not in the same class at school. We never are. The administration doesn't want people who like each other to be together. They think it builds character when they stick people who hate one another in the same room, day after day, and nobody winds up getting killed or maimed. I'm not supposed to know that Jill's mother is seeing a psychiatrist, just as Jill is not supposed to know my parents are no longer sleeping in the same room. My mother spends her nights on a quilt on my floor, and she doesn't cry until she thinks I'm asleep.

Recently, Margot and I went out for ice cream. We had butterscotch sundaes with vanilla ice cream. Margot asked for my advice. She had spotted my father at an expensive restaurant, the kind he'd never take us to, with some woman she'd never seen before and she didn't know whether or not to tell my mother. I have never been much of a tattletale myself, although I understand that there are times when the truth serves its purpose. This didn't seem to be one of those times. For all we knew, this woman could be some business associate, although Margot and I probably would have both been willing to bet our lives that she wasn't.

Don't tell. That was the advice I came up with. My mother was already crying and sleeping on the floor, what good would the truth do her now? Margot didn't eat any of her sundae, and when she offered it to me I realized I was sick to my stomach. I think I've pretty much figured out that in this world, it's better to stick to hot fudge.

 

 

 

 

On Halloween Jill wore all black and made ears out of felt which she glued to a plastic headband. She was a black cat. She had a tail that was braided out of three silk scarves. I borrowed thirty silver bangle bracelets from my grandmother. I was a fortune-teller. We should have suspected something when we saw the moon. It was orange and so big we couldn't believe it. It was like we could take one big step, and there we'd be: moon girls who had fallen off the rim of the world. My brother laughed at us. Weren't we a little too old for trick-or-treating? Well of course we were, but we didn't care. We went up and down the block, collecting candy; then we walked beyond the high school through the field so we could smoke cigarettes beside the creek. Jill had stolen the cigarettes from her mother's purse, and I had gotten the matches from my grandmother.

“As long as you're not smoking cigarettes,” my grandmother had said to me, which pretty much ruined the whole thing. I couldn't enjoy a single puff. Grandma Frieda was visiting for the weekend and she had the ability to put a hex on any form of high jinks. She was sleeping on my floor too, and it was getting pretty crowded there in my room. I could never find my sneakers. I couldn't find my underwear. Every night, as I fell asleep, I'd hear bits of whispered conversation, and every single one seemed to include the word sorrow.

Jill had been practicing and knew how to blow smoke rings. She was blowing a misty ring when some guys from the high school intent on trouble approached. Jill looked older than she was, and even in costume, you could tell she was beautiful. The high school guys tried to kiss her, and when she refused, they grabbed her. The whole thing happened so fast I just sat there, as though I were the audience and the whole thing was a play. And then it wasn't. I hit one of the guys, and all of my silver bracelets were so heavy he fell backwards. The shock of me smashing one of them gave us time to run. We ran and ran, like we really could get to the moon if we had to. We ran until we turned into smoke; we could float across lawns and drift under windows and doors.

“I can't believe you did that,” Jill said when we finally made it home. She had lost her tail and her ears, but her face was shining. “You hit him.”

I felt great for days.

 

 

 

 

We don't do holidays. We go to my grandma Frieda's for Passover, but we skip Chanukah, which my father insists is trivial, and Thanksgiving, which he considers a meaningless ritual. We do, however, spend every Christmas at Margot's house. It's a holiday she feels entitled to celebrate since she was married to Tony Molinaro for all those years. My father never goes to Margot's, and this year Jason wasn't there either. It was just us, and we decorated the tree with all of Tony's mother's beautiful old ornaments. There's an angel that's always been my favorite, fashioned out of silvery glass. When Tony's mother was alive she assured me it would bring good luck to whoever hung it on the tree. Tony's mother always preferred Margot to her own son, and when they broke up she took to her bed and was dead by the following spring.

Even after Margot and Tony divorced, Margot always included her ex-mother-in-law in the festivities. Tony's mother must have been at least ninety. Her hands shook as she held out the angel. “Here's the thing about luck,” she told me on her last Christmas. “You don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.”

This year we made a toast to the old lady and Margot actually cried. Right as we finished the tree, snow started to fall. We all rushed to the front window to look. It was the kind of snow that you hardly ever see, so heavy and beautiful you fall in love with winter, even though you know you'll have to shovel in the morning.

Margot had made a turkey with stuffing, a noodle kugel, and a white cake topped with coconut that looked like the snow outside. After dinner, she and my mother put on aprons and did the dishes and laughed. I let them listen to Elvis's
Blue Christmas;
I hardly ever saw my mother having a good time, so how could I complain?

In Jill's family Christmas was a big deal, and I knew when I went over to her house in the morning she'd have a dozen great presents to show me and I'd have to try not to be jealous. Jill and I had given each other bottles of White Musk, our favorite scent. I envied Jill just about everything, but I didn't feel jealous right then, listening to Elvis in Margot's house. Truthfully, there was nowhere else I'd rather be. Lucky for us, Margot lived right around the corner from us. Her house was our house, and vice versa, unless my father was at home. Margot and my mother intended to be neighbors forever; they had dozens of plans, but not all of their plans were working out.

I'd overheard my father talking on the phone. He was intending to leave as soon as the weather got better. As soon as he could break the news to us, he'd be gone. He was in a holding pattern, that's what he said, but he wasn't holding on to us, that much was certain. I didn't tell my mother what I'd learned. I didn't tell anyone. I wanted to see Margot and my mother dance in the kitchen when the dishes were done and drying on the rack. I wanted to see them throw their aprons on the floor.

That night, when we walked home, my mother put her arm around me and told me to wish on a star. She still believed in things like that. We stood there in the snow, and try as I might, I didn't see a single star. But I lied. I said that I did, and I wished anyway. We stood there while my mother tried in vain to see that same star. My fingers were freezing, so I put my hands in my pockets. The angel was there. I knew that if I tried to thank Margot, she'd tell me to cut it out, she'd say it was nothing, but it was definitely something to me.

It was late, but we could hear traffic on the Southern State Parkway, even though it was Christmas, and snowing so hard. You had to wonder who all these people in their cars were leaving behind and who they were driving toward, and if they knew that in the distance, the echo of their tires on the asphalt sounded like a river, and that to someone like me, it could seem like the miracle I'd been looking for.

Rose Red

The sky was blue all through June, and if you walked along the streets of our neighborhood you could smell cut grass; you could hear the low humming of bees. School had been out for exactly one week, and my best friend Jill and I were already bored out of our minds. We were twelve, that unpredictable and dangerous age when sampling shades of lipstick and playing with dolls seem equally interesting. We both had the feeling that this summer was our last chance at something, and not knowing quite what it was, we started testing our boundaries. We talked back to our mothers. We streaked our hair with a caustic mixture of peroxide and ammonia. We spoke to strangers and didn't pick up after ourselves. By the end of the month we were climbing out our bedroom windows nearly every night.

We'd meet in Jill's backyard, in the moonlight, beneath a ceiling of distant white stars. We dressed in dark colors, so not even a sleepwalker could spot us. Jill wore black shorts and a black sweatshirt; she hid her pale blond hair under a baseball cap. I always borrowed my brother's old windbreaker and threw on the same pair of black jeans. What we were doing on those midnights, beneath a crooked crab apple tree, was plotting our revenge. It was not simply our neighborhood that we hated, but the entire adult world, which, regretfully, we were soon destined to join. Perhaps this is what made us so giddy and daring, so sure of ourselves, so intense. Ordinarily, we were good girls. We baby-sat, we handed our homework in on time, we washed supper dishes without being asked. But that was all over now. We made a list of the people we hated most: those who had insulted us, or treated us badly, or simply ignored us. Those who were rude or nasty or full of themselves. The names of our neighbors appeared on our list, spelled out in Jill's neat, orderly script.

Mrs. Brandon, who owned the variety store and phoned your mother if you happened to take a pack of gum and forgot to pay, was number one. Then came Mr. DiPietro, who screamed at his wife so loudly you could hear every word when you walked past their open window on warm evenings. There was also Mr. Richie, who had been our fourth-grade teacher, and liked to lock you in the coat closet if you talked out of turn. When our list was complete at last, it was time to take action. We worked at midnight, the hour when every street was silent and every house dark. With our neighbors safely asleep in their beds, we were as free as a nightmare to settle wherever we wished without a witness, except perhaps for prowling cats, let out until morning. We wrote with pieces of coal on Mrs. Brandon's garage door. We emptied an entire container of cottage cheese into Mr. DiPietro's mailbox. When people in the neighborhood began to talk about gremlins, we bit our tongues. We winked at each other and tried not to laugh. Deep inside, we felt the true power of secrecy and revenge.

“Did you hear what somebody did to Mr. Richie?” my brother, Jason, asked me one morning as I was heading over to Jill's and he was dragging our trash out to the curb. “They poured buttermilk into his garbage cans. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Wow,” I said.

I didn't have to fake being impressed. I still couldn't believe Jill and I had had the nerve to pull that one off. We'd dumped in two quarts of warm, rancid buttermilk and afterwards we'd run back to her house so fast we both wound up with stitches in our sides. I'd had to kneel down on the ground in order to catch my breath, and Jill had been laughing her head off, and then, from out of nowhere, we'd heard a siren. It sounded as though it was right on our block. Jill and I stared at each other in a complete panic.