Vanity Insanity (12 page)

“That was weird. Who was that lady with Mr. Morrow?” Hope whispered as the car went out of sight.

Now for the next moral dilemma. Did I tell Hope that we needed to keep this a secret? I didn’t want Hope to feel any guilt about today. She’d done nothing wrong, just gone looking for a dog and found a neighborhood affair. She shouldn’t feel bad about this afternoon.

“Hey, Hope. Your mom would really worry if she knew you had come down here. Let’s not talk about it. OK?” I wondered if the “it” had covered enough.

“Yeah.” Her word was numb.

“You were just looking for Grandma and then went for a walk. OK?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t really need to tell anybody…”

I may have worked hard to eliminate guilt for Hope, but I could never take away the sickening guilt that started seeping into my heart about my decision not to talk about what we had seen. Was that wrong? Was I responsible to report what I’d seen? Was it any category of sin not to tell the truth if you thought the truth was worse than silence? I hadn’t asked to be here.

Guilt was something that I usually left to Lucy. She knew all the sin levels and stuff for Catholic guilt—it was what defined her as a good little Catholic girl. Lucy would say, “You’re not alive if you’re not feeling guilty.” If that were the case, I had never felt more alive. But why was I feeling such guilt? I hadn’t had the affair. I felt bile in my mouth mixed with TaB.

We would walk the back way up the hill from the creek and enter the neighborhood as if we were coming from outside Maple Crest Circle. Everyone would be happy to see Hope. I would be a hero.

So I walked up the hill with Hope.

The perfect day was just a mirage slowly dissipating into one of the worst days of my life. I worked hard to catch my breath as Hope took my hand. I looked up at the Wicker Witch’s green house and saw a curtain move in the back window. My stomach hurt as I trudged up that creepy, twisted hill with Hope, carrying a much greater, more uncomfortable guilt than that which had started my day.

9

Lucy Mangiamelli: Something Like Olivia Newton-John, Graduation Dance

Tuesday, May 24

1977

I
’m not sure when giggling girls turn from obnoxious to interesting, but I know that it wasn’t in 1977 for me. Though I was intrigued by their bodies, I was confused and annoyed by their minds.

As I stood at the top of the stairs to my mother’s shop, I heard obnoxious girl laughter coming from below. I knew that Lucy was coming to get her hair done for her junior-high graduation from Saint Pius, and it sounded as though she’d brought her backup singers. To avoid any awkward exchange with those who were of the opposite sex, I yelled down the creaky stairs to the basement to let my mother know that A.C. and his dad were driving over to pick me up to go see
Star Wars
—for the seventh time that year.

A year after the incident with Hope at the creek, most of the neighbor kids no longer played outside, as we focused on more mature interactions than getting dirty and planning forts. We were all getting older. Before you think that I’m some kind of
Star Wars
freak, I need to explain that A.C.’s dad was the one driving every time. He drove and paid. We went. I’m not saying he’s a freak. I’m just saying.

Better than the movie was the theater that we went to each time: the Indian Hills Theatre, the coolest theater ever known to mankind. All movies there were shown in a Cinerama wide-screen format. A 105-foot screen, inclined, purple plush seating, a smoking section, a balcony, and the biggest variety of candy offered to my imagination to date. For A.C. and me, Indian Hills was the best movie-going experience of our lives; however, at almost sixteen, we were pushing the age factor and realized that we needed to start acting like teenagers. Sneaking into R-rated movies and going to concerts were next on the age agenda, and we begrudgingly yet excitedly decided that we would let go of our youth and grow up that year—after we saw
Star Wars
, just one more time.

“I’m heading out, Mom!” I yelled, sounding hurried.

“Hey, Ben. Come down for a minute, would ya?” Mom yelled up.

I took a breath and descended the creaky stairs. Walking into my mother’s salon, I could hear the voices talking hairstyles and colors of dance dresses, and with that, their beauty quickly dissipated before my eyes.

The good friends that they were, Marty and Theresa wanted to make sure that Lucy looked beautiful for her first dance that followed the Mass and graduation in Saint Pius church. Following a graduation Mass, Cool Father Whalen would bless their junior-high souls and push them out of the puddle. The boys in their suits and the girls in their long dresses would march right out of the big box church, across the black top/ playground, and over to the big box gym where cookies, punch, a DJ, and the moms and dads who signed up to chaperone would be waiting. The parents would gawk at their kids the remainder of the night, occasionally offering a steep karate chop between two bodies that had snuggled too closely. Of course,
they would remind the couple, “Let’s just keep enough room for the Holy Spirit between you two while you dance…”

Eighth-grade graduation was a rite of passage. In the Catholic universe, eighth-grade graduation was the almost equivalent to a Jewish bar/bat mitzvah.
These boys and girls are growing up to be such fine pubescent Catholic individuals that they should start to take responsibility for themselves. Heck, why don’t we have a big dance and send them off to the next phase of life: Catholic high school? A big send-off from the puddle to the pond.

Suits? Long dresses and a dance? Really? This was not college or high school.
For heaven’s sake
, it was just eighth grade. Maybe the Catholic schools could have learned a thing or two from the Omaha public schools in the seventies. I survived without the party.

Theresa and Marty stood on each side of Lucy during the great transfiguration. Marty stood taller and thinner than ever with her Dorothy Hamill haircut, which looked like a goofy eraser top to a really long pencil. Theresa smiled with the hair of the day, flowing and feathering with an effect that would make Farrah Fawcett look dumpy. They stood behind her and giggled a hello.

“Hey,” I said.

“Ben, we’re getting Lucy ready for her big dance tonight. What do you think?” my mom prompted me. What did I think of what? Hair? Long Dresses? Stupid graduation dances?

“You bet,” I guessed.

The trio laughed with Lucy leading, of course. “What do you think of my hair, Ben? I’m going for an Olivia Newton-John look.”

This was going to be harder than I’d thought. Lucy and her frizzy dark hair looked about as much like Olivia Newton-John as I did John Travolta.

“Looks good, Lu—” I started walking toward the stairs.

“Wait, here’s the really exciting part! We’re going to pick up our dresses from Theresa’s aunt. Mrs. Morrow made all three of them from the same pattern.”

“I’m subtle peach,” Marty said.

“And I’m sky blue,” Theresa added.

“And I am mint green,” Lucy said, concluding the wimpy rainbow parade. My mother smiled weakly, and then I heard my own voice speak the very words I was thinking.

“And you did that on purpose?”

The giggling stopped. The three looked at me, confused and annoyed. The room was quiet with disappointment in me. Fine by me. I was about as interested in their fluffy conversation about bland-colored dresses as I was in the final episode of
The Brady Bunch
when they went to Hawaii and found a Tiki doll.

“What a lovely plan, girls. You’ll all look lovely,” my mom said as she shook her head and gave me a dirty look. I guess I was dismissed.

I was then sharply ignored as the discussion moved on to the dance, ABBA, Lucy’s love of her life, Tom Ducey, and the movie
You Light Up My Life
. I hadn’t realized it could be that easy to get out of a silly conversation. Of course, Lucy would later scold me and then forgive me. Lucy always forgave me. “Blinded by the Light” played on the little black radio on the windowsill.

I ran up the stairs and walked out to my front yard, praying for more intellectual stimulation than the Pale Rainbow Coalition. A.C. was the kind of guy who was always pontificating, and I was the friend who not only didn’t mind but truly enjoyed his mountain of insight. Out of the blue, A.C. would proclaim, “The devil wears a Girl Scout uniform…Why else would Girls Scout cookies be delivered during Lent?” This was some profound thinking for kids our age.

Once A.C. got to my house, we would talk sports and music and about that whole plan to grow up this year. Sometime this summer we were hoping to sneak into the movie advertised all summer that would be coming out in a few months:
Saturday Night Fever
. I looked up toward the Wicker Witch house and waited to see Mr. Perelman’s Cadillac appear. It was actually pretty impressive that A.C. and I had stayed connected through the years. We hadn’t lived near each other for what seemed forever. A.C. went to the private high school Brownell Talbot while I attended Burke High School. Still we managed to keep the ties tight—thanks to his dad driving us to movies and his mother getting her hair done.

The white Cadillac seemed to emerge from the green Wicker house as the car turned the corner onto the circle. When A.C. got out of the car, he looked like he could throw up on the lawn. I wondered if he was sick.

“You look white!” I commented before I could filter the words.

Through his pale face, A.C. smiled. “Well, I am, partly.” The smile disappeared. “You won’t believe what we just saw.”

At this point Mr. Perelman got out of the car. A.C.’s dad always reminded me of a gentle giant. I think A.C. told me that his dad was six-four or something like that. He always seemed taller to me. Though he hadn’t practiced his Jewish religion in years, John Perelman looked like an oversized rabbi with his beard and olive skin. I guess that made it even more peculiar that this colossal, quiet professor liked
Star Wars
so much.

“We don’t have to talk about it, A.C.,” he said softly.

“I can with Ben, Dad. He can handle it. We aren’t even sure what happened. We were driving near Ak-Sar-Ben Racetrack when we saw all these police cars. Maybe twenty. Don’t ya think, Dad?”

“About ten.”

“Well, they were all surrounding this tiny little house. Tiny.”

A.C.’s body moved as he told the story. He was thin like me with gigantic feet that made him look like a clumsy puppy. He seemed puny at fifteen, but A.C. would grow into those feet some day and into his own father’s shoes. He admired his quiet parents, though he was anything but. Rather than attempt to disappear so that his blended racial and religious inheritance did not draw attention, A.C. chose to embrace the anomaly of his state of affairs and demand attention through humor, strong opinions, and animation of the moment. His sister Elizabeth took the quiet path. I barely knew her.

“The house was right off the golf course, you know, about seven blocks or so from my house. Twenty cop cars. Can you believe it?”

“Ten police cars, A.C. We still don’t know the details.” His father grew more uncomfortable as A.C.’s story progressed.

“OK, ten. Anyway, Dad and I turn on the radio and find out that a woman was murdered last night. They think it’s some guy who worked at
Ak-Sar-Ben. He walked horses or something. He murdered her and then just left her. Her parents were worried when they hadn’t heard from their daughter…”

Their daughter was twenty-six-year-old Jane McManus. Harold Lamont Otey, who was also known as Walkin’ Willie, a nickname he’d acquired from handling horses at the Ak-Sar-Ben track in between races, was in custody and arrested for her murder. Per usual, stories through the years varied. Some say he was high on PCP, saw her through the window, and just decided to attack her. Another account claims that he walked by her house after he left work and decided to steal a few things. He took a stereo, but when he reentered to remove other items, McManus awoke. They say that Otey raped McManus, then stabbed and finally strangled her with a belt.

A.C. had been that close to such a gruesome scene. I was standing near him at that moment. By the theory of transitive property, I felt somehow too close to something pretty evil. Other than the disappearance of Johnny Madlin, I was unaware of such shocking events in Omaha. A.C.’s dad quietly rushed us to the car, explaining that Luke Skywalker couldn’t be waiting all day for us.

When Mr. Perelman, A.C., and I got to the Indian Hills Theater that evening for our farewell-to-immaturity viewing of
Star Wars
, all three of us were not as focused on Princess Leia Organa as we had been the first six times. I noticed that A.C. was quiet when he and I usually whispered our favorite lines from the movie.

We sat in the comfortable, purple plush seats in the darkness of the theater, feeling unsettled with the residue of A.C.’s story sloshing around in our heads. Our fair city was a safe city. Now something was awry. And just where should we direct our fear and anger now? Willie Otey looked like a good bet.

As we left the theater and walked to Mr. Perelman’s car, we spotted Corky Payne walking up and down the rows of cars. At first I didn’t recognize our strange neighbor from Maple Crest. His hair was long and dirty now, and he had grown a much-disheveled beard that matched his wrinkled
shirt and pants. I closed my eyes and prayed that we would get into the car before he neared us or recognized me. Corky spotted Mr. Perelman first and then noticed A.C. and me behind him. Mr. Perelman politely waved and acknowledged the sad man we all knew.

“Hey, Corky, haven’t seen you in a while.”

Corky tilted his head and squinted. “John?”

“That’s right. John Perelman. How are you, Corky?”

Corky didn’t answer but looked over at us and then directly at me. “Keller?”

I nodded my head. Guilty.

“How old are you, son?”

“Fifteen.”

Corky shook his head and mumbled something that sounded like “See ya, John” to Mr. Perelman, and then continued on his aimless journey through the Indian Hills Theatre parking lot.