All Alone in the Universe (10 page)

 

A couple of days later the phone rang at our house, but I didn‧t hear it. Or I didn‧t notice it, because I had forgotten that a ringing phone might ever have anything to do with me; it was just another sound, like a car going by on the street or the heater coming on in the basement.

I didn‧t even notice the first few times Chrisanne called my name. I was sitting on the bedroom floor, listening to Chrisanne‧s records and knitting an eight-foot-long scarf, in burgundy and cream stripes.

 

I did hear a pounding on the stairs just before Chrisanne burst through the door, and said, “Debbie-telephone,” and bounded back down to sit on the couch next to her new boyfriend, Dale. I figured somebody needed a baby-sitter and followed her down, wondering whose kids I would be giving baths to that evening.

But it was Patty, Patty Tsimmicz. She was inviting me to go to a movie. Maybe get pizza after.

I said, “Sure.”

I hung up the phone. I looked at it for a minute. I rose onto my tiptoes. I bent my knees and did some dance-type leaps and spins around the dining room table and into the living room. I sang some opera notes for Chrisanne and Dale as I walked past them and out onto the porch. It was an exceptional day out there. Huge, wild gusts of wind were hurling the rain sideways, in buckets. Yellow leaves were being slapped onto the wet sidewalk and the street in tangled, cheery patterns. I worked my hands Chinese style into the opposite sleeves of my sweatshirt and watched some cars go by with their lights beaming out bright tunnels of raindrops, their wheels spinning silvery plumes of spray into the air. I was getting wet, not from the cars but from the rain blowing in under the porch roof. I inhaled one more gulp of the beautiful, cold, damp air and went back inside to the also beautiful dryness and warmth.

Something good was happening.

eleven

 

 

S
OMETIME IN
O
CTOBER
M
ARIE HAD FOUND ANOTHER
boyfriend with a car to drive her to school. Larry Hlotva was the only ninth grader who already had a driver‧s license. He was sixteen. He was big and bulky. He and Marie lurched around school with Marie tucked under Larry‧s armpit This can‧t have been all that pleasant for Marie, but she didn‧t seem to mind. She was wearing his chain and a fake class ring wrapped in angora yarn. They were ‘going together.”

 

Larrys hair was the color of cornsilk, with sulfury highlights. It hung down over his ears in a limp, wavy helmet, and his bangs flipped up like a visor, just at eye level. Downy blond hairs sprouted over his lip and here and there across the pale, pocky skin of his puffy face. A group of them had burst through at his chin. Looks-wise, he was a few steps down the ladder from Don, but maybe he was nicer, who knows?

 

Marie and I still said hi, but I didn‧t see her much outside Larry‧s armpit When I did see her, I didn‧t think that she might be unhappy. I mean, I knew that her mother was living somewhere else and that she had big problems with her dad and some junior juvenile delinquent brothers. Maybe Larry Hlotva was “any port in a storm.” But I thought Marie could handle whatever came along. I thought of her as someone who did whatever she wanted to. That‧s what she would have said. She skipped school a lot. and when she did come, no one seemed to care what she did. The principals and teachers at school had already given up on Marie. They hardly even saw her, except as some kind of blemish. She could have stood on her head wearing a burlap bag, and nobody would have noticed it all that much. They thought she was stupid. She wasn‧t stupid.

One Saturday in November, I saw the
FOR SALE
sign in the Prbyczkas’ front yard. Someone had mowed the grass, but everything else looked as ratty as ever. The car was not in the driveway, but I thought I saw someone moving past the window, and I thought it was Marie. All of a sudden I felt like talking to her. So I walked up the sidewalk and knocked. I stood there for a minute waiting. Then I heard footsteps, and Marie opened the door. No one else seemed to be at home. Marie wasn‧t wearing makeup, and I was surprised to see that she had freckles and fresh, clear skin. Her eyes looked naked and shy. She invited me in and offered me a pop.

I followed her from room to room with my glass of pop. She was packing the clothes of all the Prbyczka kids in boxes. There wasn‧t much to pack, and most of what there was, was scattered on the floor or hanging from doorknobs.

“But you just moved here,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Pine Township,” she said. It wasn‧t that far away, but it was a different school. Probably I would not see her much. Maybe not at all. Maybe never.

There was a crescent-shaped redness just below Marie‧s lower lip. It looked raw or sore, like an injury. I was about to ask her what it was, or how it happened, when she bit down onto it, in a quick, nervous movement, like biting your fingernails. I looked away, down to where her hands were putting a little pair of slippers into a box.

“At least you won‧t have to live with your dad anymore,” I said.

“I wish,” she said. “Him and my mom are back together. They‧re acting like lovebirds. That should last a couple weeks.” She tossed a balled-up sock into the box.

“Oh,” I said. “So why are you moving then?”

Marie shrugged. “We can‧t afford this place, I guess,” she said. “I don‧t care, though. People here are boring. And stuck up. Not you. But most of them are.” She sat down on one of the beds and tapped a cigarette out of a pack that was lying there. She lit it and took a puff.

“You should see the dump we‧re moving into,” she said. “You have to go outside to turn around.” She grinned and knocked some ash into an empty glass on the windowsill. “My mom is calling it a cottage,” she said, “but if you ask me, that‧s just another word for rathole.”

She squinted at the smoke from her cigarette gracefully unfurling in a shaft of sunlight and dust in the still air. Her face was the face of a little kid under the spell of soap bubbles. Bobby‧s face, only prettier. She drew her knees up inside her sweater. I leaned back on my hands. We sat there watching the smoke make lazy, winding patterns.

The spell was broken by the sound of a car dragging its muffler down the street outside. Marie bit down on her lip again. I winced. She caught me looking at her, and something passed between us. Understanding or friendship or truth or something, I don‧t know quite what it was. Then, instantly, she was the usual Marie, breezy and tough. She crossed her legs and stubbed her cigarette out in the glass. “You don‧t have to feel sorry for me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

“I don‧t feel sorry for you,” I lied, or half lied. And since one of the reasons that I felt sorry for her was Larry Hlotva, I asked, “Do you think you‧ll still go with Larry after you move?”

Marie nodded.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He wants us to get married. We have to wait till I‧m sixteen, but he can quit school next year and work at his cousin‧s garage.”

This sounded like a really lousy idea, but then I wondered if my own probable future life as an old maid would be any better.

“Wow,” I said. “I wonder if I‧ll even go out on a date by the time I‧m sixteen.”

Marie laughed. I liked making her laugh.

“Or ever,” I said, and she laughed again.

“You will,” she said. “It‧s too bad you have to wear glasses, though. Do you really need them?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “But I‧m hoping I can get contacts when I‧m older.”

“That will help,” said Marie.

“I hope so,” I said.

“It will,” she insisted. “Take your glasses off for a minute.” I did.

“That‧s so much better. You should go without them.”

“I kind of like being able to see, though,” I said.

“What for?” said Marie.

A wave of voices floated into the house, then footsteps. Then the whole horde of Prbyczkas was inside. I helped carry boxes out to the car.

“Drop by and see us,” said Mrs. P. “We love it when Marie‧s friends come to visit.”

“Okay,” I said, even though in the first place, I didn‧t even know where it was, and in the second place, I had never even walked down the street to visit Marie, not before today. “Okay,” I said. “Good luck.

 

“I‧ll miss you,” I said to Marie. I meant it.

“Like fun you will,” she said, but she was smiling.

Her dad smiled, too, through the windshield, a dazzling smile that I couldn‧t help smiling back at, even though I knew from Marie that he was kind of a jerk. Marie got in the front seat next to her mother and shut the door, muffling the noise from all the little Prbyczkas in the backseat to a dull roar, which faded to silence as the big car rolled down the street and disappeared around the corner.

At least until they reached Pine Township, the car would hold them all together. Who knew what would happen once they got out of it? The furniture was still there inside the house, but by the end of the day that was gone, too.

The street breathed a sigh of relief. The house waited like a scraped knee.