Local Girls (4 page)

So I kept cranking out term papers. I went through the great religions of the world, then turned to literature—Shakespeare's comedies for the juniors, tragedies for the seniors. I wrote dream journals and essays about my various families, some so moving I brought myself to tears. At least, writing these papers kept my mind off the heat, which was nearly unbearable that June. I had a lot not to think about back then, including the horrible noise the cicadas made all day and night, an echo that could lead you to believe little bombs were going off on your neighbors' front lawns. I certainly didn't want to dwell on the fact that I'd probably ruined my hair for good. I had dyed it black and cut the front much too short, using a dull nail scissors, so that I now looked as though I were in a constant state of shock. Well, maybe I was, and maybe I had good reason to be. Not long ago my father had moved out and now my mother barely left her room. Even our dog, a Labrador retriever known to do little but sleep, had attacked Mrs. Fisher's cat across the street and now, instead of roaming the neighborhood, he was chained up in our yard, eating cicadas, making himself sick.

Through it all, the heat just kept getting worse. At school, people fainted during homeroom. There were fights in the parking lot of the Franconia Mall, real fights that were bloody and unforgiving and hot. After a while, all anyone could hear were those horrible cicadas and the whirring of air conditioners. It got so that I hated everyone—not Jason of course, who was too pure to hate, just everyone else who lived and breathed inside the Franconia town limits.

The only one who seemed to understand me at that point in time was Eugene Kessler, and this notion was just about as scary as any I'd ever had. On truly hot nights, when the air was so humid and thick it was a triumph to draw a deep breath, I would sometimes see Eugene out in his yard. Somehow, I knew how alone he felt, and it gave me the shivers to think that alienation could be a shared experience. Eugene had found a great horned owl at a rest area on the parkway two summers earlier. Now, on nights when everyone else was at home with the air conditioner turned on high, Eugene would let the owl fly free. He'd been informed by a lieutenant down at the police department that he'd better keep the owl caged at all times, because of an incident involving a toy poodle that had been carried off, but Eugene had his own view of natural selection. He figured that the Yorkie who lived on the corner, and the Chihuahua who snarled from behind a fence over on Maple, had better run for cover when they spied the owl's shadow above them. In Eugene's opinion, their fate was in their own paws.

Jason was different. He wasn't like Eugene, and he certainly wasn't like me. He always played by the rules. My brother was so serious and straightlaced that teenage girls were constantly after him. Several had spent all year attempting to seduce him, but Jason had other things on his mind. He'd devoted every free minute to his senior science thesis. Twenty hamsters were kept in cages in his bedroom. Ten had been given a balanced diet of seeds and grains, but the other ten had eaten nothing but Twinkies. My brother hoped to finish his research before leaving for college, although to me it already seemed obvious that the Twinkie ten were not only fatter but far more intelligent. As soon as they heard my brother's bedroom door open, they ran to their feeding stations, while the grain and nut hamsters just went on running on their wheels, making the same hopeless circles they spun every night.

Maybe Jason would have finished his research if Eugene had remembered to write Joey Jergens's history paper, but Eugene was too busy planning his future, plotting his imminent escape, to pay much attention to our schedule. Eugene had missed the delivery date and Joey was outraged when he called me. I had to soothe him with promises of ten pages on the Salem witch trials by eight the following morning.

“Don't be mad,” Eugene said as soon as he saw me the next day.

We were in the field behind the high school and Joey was headed straight for us. Of course, I refused to speak to Eugene. I had slept for two hours. I was in no mood for this.

“I'll do the
Romeo and Juliet
for Sue Greco,” Eugene vowed. He knew I dreaded Shakespeare papers, and had one of my own past due. “The Industrial Revolution for Horowitz?” Eugene whispered. “Consider it done.”

By now, Joey Jergens was upon us. “Got my paper?”

Joey was not a conversationalist, but it was enough that he had taken fifteen dollars out of his jeans pocket. I started to hand over the opus I'd written, but Eugene grabbed for it. “Let me check for typos,” he said.

“No way,” I said. “Who sat up all night with this thing? This paper's mine.”

“Be careful with that,” Joey Jergens warned me, and maybe I was clutching on too tightly. But Eugene was trying to pry my hard work away, and I wouldn't let him, and that was how Mr. Prospero, the vice principal, found us, struggling over a report neither of us cared about, enmeshed in a battle that would only cause us grief.

By nine-fifteen we were all suspended. Joey Jergens had been expecting to go to summer school, so it didn't matter much to him, but now Eugene wouldn't graduate. Maybe he stood there for a while, staring at the high school, and maybe he didn't. I don't know. I immediately headed for home. I was thinking about myself and no one else. I had just lost the summer, after all. Other people would be having a life, I'd be reading
Romeo and Juliet
in a classroom hot enough to bake bread on the desks.

Naturally, my brother blamed me for everything. He didn't care that Eugene had started the business and had practically drafted me.

“He can still go to Cambridge with you,” I told my brother, even though I knew it wasn't true. You couldn't enroll for more than two classes in the summer, and Eugene would be missing four credits.

My brother phoned Eugene, ready to let him have it for throwing his future away for fifteen lousy dollars, but when Jason came back into the living room he didn't seem mad anymore. Eugene had already been to the bank and withdrawn our entire joint savings. Then he'd gone home and left a note for his mother in which he swore he would pay me back someday, although I certainly wasn't about to hold my breath. Eugene had also informed his mother that he was buying a plane ticket and by the time she read his note he'd already be on his way to San Francisco. Maybe I should have been angry about working all year for nothing, but I wasn't. I went over and let Mrs. Kessler tell me about the way Eugene had taught himself to read the dictionary when he was two and a half, even though I'd heard the story about a million times before. Mrs. Kessler had a weird look on her face, and it made me think of my mother, just after my father had left her. It made me think that summer would never be the same, not now and not ever.

I guess deep inside I did believe everything that had happened was my fault. I must have, because sometime between the moment when I got to the Kesslers' and the moment when I left, I told Eugene's mother I'd be glad to take care of the owl until Eugene returned. Of course, Mrs. Kessler was delighted to get rid of the owl. She got down on her knees and helped me coax it into its cage. I walked home carefully, trying not to jostle the owl, but as soon as I set the cage down on our living room floor, I realized my mistake. Somehow, the owl looked much bigger in our house. Its feet were as big as our Labrador retriever's. I couldn't even stand to be in the same room as Eugene's horrible pet. I went to the kitchen and telephoned everyone I knew to announce my suspension from school, but it wasn't the same as talking to Eugene. Still, I talked for a long time, long enough so that Jason was the one who discovered that the owl had killed every one of his hamsters. Either the cage had been left open or the owl knew some tricks I wasn't aware of. Frankly, its method of escape didn't matter. By the time Jason walked into his bedroom, the owl was sitting on the air conditioner, distressed and thwarted, its feathers ruffled; although it had managed to kill all the hamsters, it still couldn't get to them through the meshing of their cages.

My brother had hoped to finish his experiment before leaving for college; now he didn't have to worry. It was over. If the owl hadn't belonged to Eugene, I think Jason would have killed it. Instead, he went out and bought six live chicks at the pet store. But the owl wouldn't eat. We watched over it for days and then weeks, but the owl never really recovered. Maybe the heat was what caused its feathers to drop out, one by one, as it perched on the air conditioner. Or maybe it was only longing for someone who wasn't afraid to let it fly above the poplars and crab apples, searching backyards, a streak of lightning in our dark sky.

Gretel

It was a bad summer, and we all knew it. We liked to phrase it that way, as if what was happening was an aberration—a single season of pain and doubt—instead of all-out informing people that our lives were falling apart, plain and simple as pie. I knew too much for someone who was fifteen, and with the way my luck was running, I'd probably soon know more. I was no longer one of those human beings who blithely assume that everything can't go wrong at the same time. Even my best friend Jill, who was without a doubt the most cheerful person I'd ever met, shook her head and said “Wow” whenever I told her what was going on in our family. She sat cross-legged on my bed, obsessively eating M&M's, and informed me that in light of my family's bad luck it was only natural for me to experience a crisis of confidence. But Jill was good-natured and liked to see the best in every situation. Frankly, I didn't see the difference between a crisis of confidence and a nervous breakdown.

At least I was in the right place. People in our town had nervous breakdowns all the time. It was one of Franconia's claims to fame. The luncheonette was a regular hotbed of lunatics. Not that you could tell by looking at them. They appeared normal enough at first glance, but if you kept on looking you'd see that the woman who had ordered black coffee was crying hot tears into her cup, and the man beside her, who liked his eggs sunny-side up, was talking to himself, having a grand old conversation with the person he most respected. Even Jill's mom, who was the head of the PTA and made the best chocolate chip cookies in town, had received shock treatments last fall, and although she was nowhere as depressed as she'd been before, her baking was the victim of her new emotional state; it was all bland and soapy now, not worth the calories or the time it took to chew.

My mother had always been an eyewitness to other people's problems, yet refused to have any of her own. She was smart and funny; she told good jokes and smoked Salem cigarettes and continued to believe in true love even though she had married my father, who could put anyone through a crisis of confidence.

After he left, my father became involved with a woman named Thea, whom he married on the Fourth of July. Anyone needing to know the facts about the wedding had better ask someone else, since I was not invited. I didn't even find out about it until a week after it happened, when my brother came over to Jill's house, something he never did. Jason was going off to college in the fall, or at least that had been the plan, but lately he didn't seem to be going anywhere fast. The week after his best friend, my former business partner, Eugene, had run off to California, Jason had gotten himself a job at the Food Star, in the deli department, and something had shifted. He was starting to seem comfortable in the deli. He was even dating a girl who worked in fruits and vegetables—Terry LoPacca, who wore huge hoop earrings and was so inarticulate she merely smiled if you asked her a question. To be honest, Jason wouldn't have looked at Terry when he was still in school. He probably didn't even know she was alive until he found her beside the lemons and the limes, her pretty face upturned, alight with her glorious smile.

When my brother came to get me at Jill's he didn't even look like himself. Who was he? That's what I wanted to know. What was happening to our family, anyway? Jason had won every science prize at school and had gotten early admission to Harvard, but now he wore an old, grungy T-shirt and was smoking a Salem that he'd swiped from my mother; he had smoked that cigarette right down to the filter, and he wasn't done with it yet. I think he had stopped sleeping, because his face, which was usually open and sweet, had a twisted look. Even Jill, Miss I-See-the-Silver-Lining, could detect the toll our family's bad fortune had taken on Jason.

“Wow,” she said when she saw him coming, cutting across the Fishers' yard, completely unaware that he was trampling the impatiens and the dahlias. “He looks awful,” she sighed in her sunny little voice, which made everything seem even more hopeless than it was.

The worst thing, of course, was that our mother was sick. She'd been diagnosed in May, but she'd kept her illness from us. At first we thought she was sleeping all the time because she was depressed that our father had taken up with Thea, who, naturally, was ten years younger than my mother, just to add insult to the injury of their affair. My mother, you understand, was not a person who slept much under normal circumstances. Ordinarily, she'd still be talking to her friends on the telephone at midnight, or trying out a new recipe; at the oddest hours imaginable you'd find her repainting the kitchen tiger-lily orange or pale green. Her eyes were fiery and black and she talked back to the TV
Big shot,
she'd say to the actors who treated their women all wrong.
Get a life,
she'd cry to any woman who dissolved in a heap of makeup and tears. But now things had changed. She stayed in bed all afternoon, and she'd lost a lot of weight; late at night, when she thought I was asleep, I could hear her crying.

It was Jill's mom who told me that my mother had cancer. I was over for dinner and Mrs. Harrington took me into their backyard and put her hands on my shoulders as we stood beside the jungle gym we were all too old for, and then she told me. Right there and for my own good. That's the way we always found out things about our own family, in a roundabout fashion that made us feel even sadder than we would have if we'd known the truth straight out. Now, in July, when the heat was unbearable and the cicadas sang a maddened song all day long, my brother nodded to me in the manner he'd recently affected, as if there was nothing he cared about in the whole wide world.