Afternoon of the Elves (10 page)

Sara-Kate shrugged. “She's okay. She says you really can stay for lunch, if you want to that is.” Her eyes skirted Hillary's.

“Want to? I'd
love
to!” Hillary said. “Do you know that you've never invited me in before? Not once. I mean the last time I was here it wasn't really... well, I just came by accident. I wasn't spying on you, honest,” she ended quickly. Sara-Kate had given her a look.

“It's all right,” the older girl replied. “I know you didn't tell.”

“I wouldn't have even gone upstairs except that I thought the elves were there,” Hillary explained.

“Elves in this house?” Sara-Kate produced an explosive hoot.

“Well, I was sure they were, and I still think—”

“Hey!” Sara-Kate cut in. “We're wasting time. Let's have a party. Come on! We've got everything.” Then, in one of her wild leaps of mood, she began to race around the inner room, snatching a knife from a drawer slot, tossing the bag in the air, dumping its contents on the stove top.

“Bologna sandwiches!” cried Sara-Kate. She trumpeted through her fists. “Toodle-tee-toot-tee-too. Charge! That's what they do at the football games at the high school,” she said to Hillary. “I go over and watch on Saturdays when I feel like it. It's neat. Do you want to come next time?”

“The high school is way across town!” Hillary protested.

Sara-Kate didn't hear. She was blowing more blasts on her trumpet and charging into the making of the sandwiches. Two slices of bread down flat, slap, then a thick stack of bologna slices on top of each one, slap, slap, and more bread on top of that, slap, no mayonnaise, no lettuce, no mustard. So what?

“I'd like to go see a football game,” Hillary had to admit in the middle of the slappings and trumpetings. “In fact I guess I'd love to.”

They sat side by side on the ragged, falling-apart chairs. Sara-Kate devoured her sandwich like a lion. Hillary took polite bites and chewed thoroughly, as she'd been taught at home.

“Want another one?” Sara-Kate was up and flying again before Hillary had finished her third bite. She grabbed two mugs from the shelves in the drawerless bureau and filled them to the very top with milk.

“Watch out!” cried Hillary. “They're spilling.”

Sara-Kate giggled. “Would you like to see how Pierre the Package drinks out of a cup?”

“Who's he?”

“He's awful,” Sara-Kate whispered. She rolled her tiny eyes. “He's horrible. I read about him in one of those newspapers they sell in the bus station. See, he's got no arms or legs. Just a little stump for a body. It's all wrapped up in cloth, like a package. Anyway, here he is drinking.”

She lowered her lips to the rim of a cup and, with her arms bent at a painful-looking angle behind her back, slurped at the milk.

“Want me to do your cup, too?” she asked, looking around.

“Ugh. Okay.”

“Pierre the Package had to learn to do everything with his mouth,” Sara-Kate went on, more seriously, when she had finished slurping Hillary's milk.

“Don't tell me,” said Hillary. “I don't want to know.”

“He types letters to people by holding a stick in his mouth to hit the typewriter keys. He turns on lamps and faucets with his teeth. He makes sandwiches and feeds his dog. Yup, he has a dog, a cute little terrier that jumps up in his wheelchair and licks the mess off his face after dinner. And listen to this. The way Pierre reads a book is by flicking the pages over with his tongue.”

“Ugh! Ugh!” Hillary covered her own mouth with her hands, a thing Pierre the Package wouldn't be able to do no matter how disgusted he felt, she thought suddenly.

“We should try reading that way sometime,” Sara-Kate was saying. “Who knows when it might come in handy. You know, you can learn to do practically anything if you really want to hard enough.”

“Sure, let's try it,” Hillary murmured, while Sara-Kate tore into another bologna sandwich and poured herself another mug of milk.

“This is the greatest,” Sara-Kate said, leaning back with the mug in one hand. “Isn't this the greatest party? Are you having a good time? See, it's not as bad in this house as you probably thought it would be.”

“Bad?” Hillary said.

“I mean, I do okay here as long as they don't switch off the electricity. I try to keep that bill paid up. I used to get heat from a furnace like everybody else, but it broke. It takes big bucks to fix something like that. Upstairs I've got three good electric heaters. Usually I move us up there in the worst weather. Nothing much works down here when it gets really cold.”

Hillary stared at the lean planes of Sara-Kate's face and noticed for the first time the odd little dark marks under her eyes, like tired smudges in a grown-up face.

“One good thing is I've got two of these hot plates so I don't have to haul them up and down stairs,” the elf-girl went on. “Wherever I happen to be when I want to cook, I can cook.” She smiled. “I bet you don't have that in your house.”

“No, we don't,” Hillary said.

“And you don't have a big, friendly stove like this that you can lie back with and put your feet up on.”

“No. ”

Sara-Kate stuck her work boots up on the stove and stretched out luxuriously in her chair. “And you can't have parties like this either, with just two people or whoever you want to invite, and whatever you want to eat. Are you still hungry? How about a cup of coffee? Whenever you've got a space left you can always fill it up with coffee.”

Hillary leaned toward her suddenly. She put her hand on Sara-Kate's arm and said: “You do everything around here, don't you? You run this whole house.”

Sara-Kate sat up. “What do you mean?” she asked, on guard in an instant.

“You keep pretending that your mother is the one telling you what to do, like everyone else's mother. But that's not right, is it? She doesn't tell you anything. She's too sick. You're the one taking care of her.”

“That's not true!” Sara-Kate replied. “My mother does tell me what to do. She tells me things all the time.”

“But you're the one who does everything in the end,” Hillary went on. “You buy all the food and do all the cooking.”

“So what?”

“You pay the bills and wash the clothes and when something breaks, like the furnace, you decide what to do about it.”

“So what?” Sara-Kate spat at her. “I learned how. I can do it. I help my mother, that's all. I bet even you have to help your stupid mother sometimes.”

Hillary didn't get angry. She looked at Sara-Kate hard, as if she were trying to bring her into focus. “It's all right,” she said. “I would never tell anybody. I was just imagining how it would be. What happens if there's something only your mother can do, like sign something, or talk on the phone? What if she needs to go somewhere, to the doctor or the hairdresser?”

At that, Sara-Kate sagged in her chair. She sighed. She looked at Hillary as if she were two years old instead of nine, and folded her arms across her chest in that all-knowing, impatient attitude so characteristic of her.

“Look, whatever happens, I fix it,” she told Hillary. “I sign it if it needs to be signed. I write it if it needs to be written. I learned my mother's writing. I talk on the phone, too, when it's working. I tell people what to do and they do it. Or, if they don't, I find some other way. I'm good at things like that. My mother used to get upset all the time. Her mind's not always right, so then she gets sick. See, sometimes the envelope comes and sometimes it doesn't come. I learned what to do when it doesn't come.”

“What envelope?” Hillary asked.

“You know, with the check, the money,” Sara-Kate answered. “A lot of times, my father can't send it. He's not exactly rich. So then we run out.”

“Run out! But then what do you do?” Hillary said, appalled. “How do you buy things like food and...” Her hands were rising up to her mouth again. She was looking at Sara-Kate over the top of them. “Like food and...” She couldn't think, suddenly, of all the things that Sara-Kate would need to buy. All the hundreds of things. “Like food and, you know,” she ended lamely.

Sara-Kate shrugged. “I know,” she said.

The afternoon was passing. Through the torn shade of the window over the sink, Hillary detected the sun's shifted position. It was no longer overhead, hot and bright, but lower in the sky, half-screened by trees and neighboring houses. She thought that she ought to be going home soon. Her mother would begin to wonder where she was. She might be looking out the Lenoxes' dining-room window at this very minute, peering down at Sara-Kate's shadowy house:
Where is my child?

Well, I'm here. Don't worry, Hillary answered her mother in her mind. I'm inside where I wanted to be, with Sara-Kate. And we're having a party in the magic inner room. At least I think it's a party.

Hillary gazed about herself and wondered suddenly if “magic” was quite the right word for this place, which now looked rather grim with the sun at its new angle. There was a hole in the floor near the sink, she noticed. Beside her, Sara-Kate was flipping her hair carelessly over her shoulder, preparing to answer the question about the envelope that didn't come, the money that ran out.

“So what
do
you do?” Hillary asked her again. She was met by yet another of Sara-Kate's weary shrugs.

“I get by. I know some ways.”

“What ways?”

“People are always leaving their stuff around in a town like this. There was a whole shopping cart of food in the supermarket parking lot one time. At school there's lost and found. I could wear all designer clothes if I wanted. I don't take that kind of stuff, though. Who wants to look like those dumb show-offs?”

Hillary nodded.

“Hey, I should show you how to get into the movies for free sometime!” Sara-Kate exclaimed. “It's really easy. I'm not always broke, you know, but I never pay for the movies because it would be a waste. We should do it together. You'd see.”

“What happens if you get caught?” Hillary asked uneasily.

“Who gets caught?” Sara-Kate's small eyes skimmed over her. “I bet you think I'm dumb because I got put back in school. That's what a lot of people think, and it's too bad for them. Just when they've decided how dumb I am and how smart they are, right then is when they happen to lose something. Something of theirs just disappears out the window.”

Perhaps the sun had settled another inch. A finger of cold air caught the back of Hillary's neck and she shivered.

“You shouldn't do that,” she said to Sara-Kate. “It's not right at all. You should ask someone for help instead of stealing all the time. If people knew you were living here taking care of your mother by yourself, they'd have to do something about it. They'd have to—”

“Wreck everything! That's right,” Sara-Kate interrupted with a flash of anger. “Nobody knows how to take care of my mother except me. They've tried to do it. Even my father tried, but he couldn't so he left. Now I'm doing it. I've done it for a year so far and nobody even knows. People are stupid. They can't see a thing. They don't have a clue to what's going on right under their noses, in their own backyards.”

Hillary stared at her.

“Do you know what would happen if I called somebody up on the phone and asked for help? Do you know what they would do?” Sara-Kate stood before Hillary with her hands on her hips and the whole rest of her body moving—twisting, jumping, quivering, kicking. It made Hillary think of the elf in her, the strange elf-ness that came at certain moments and then hid away again, came and went, so that Hillary could never finally decide who this small, fierce person was. She could never decide if she was cruel or warm-hearted, magic or ordinary, thick-skinned or fragile, a friend or a fraud.

“They would take my mother away,” Sara-Kate said, without waiting for Hillary to decide this time either. Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

“But why?” Hillary asked. “Where would they take her?”

“They would put her someplace far away, out of sight.”

“But why?”

“Listen Hillary, regular people don't like us, that's why. They don't like other people who live different from them, other people who are sick. They don't want us around. They don't want to look.”

“Don't want to look!”

“So if you're thinking of going somewhere and getting help for us, don't do it. The only help we'd get is the kind that would look away and shake its head. Then it'd grab us by the neck and drag us off someplace we didn't want to go.”

“But...”

“Help is the last thing you want to ask for when you're somebody like me,” Sara-Kate told Hillary. “People like you can ask for help. People like me have to steal it.”

Sara-Kate sat down abruptly in the other ragged chair. She sat without looking, knowing exactly, to the inch, where it was behind her. She knew everything about this crazy room-within-a-room because she had made it herself, Hillary understood. She was the one who had turned the drawers into tables, the bureau into shelves. She had positioned the fan on the stove to spread the heat around. She had organized everything, figured out everything, pushed everything together and forced it to work. And she had done it by herself. No one had told her, “Do it.” No one had explained, “This is the only way.” She was all by herself, separate from the world. She was her own single, strong, secret person.