Girl Waits with Gun (6 page)

If Mother knew what that letter contained, she wouldn't tell us. All she wanted us to understand was that in America, letters were dangerous, as were hallways, bicycles, doctors, and Italians. We could be locked up for any of it, and ruined.

She would have been terrified by our accident, not just because of our injuries and the damage to the buggy, but because it left us so exposed. The thought of the three of us thrown into a heap on Market Street, a crowd gathered around us, everyone watching, everyone wondering who we were—Mother dedicated her life to avoiding that very thing.

And now I had gotten into a fistfight with a factory owner. If my mother had nightmares, this would have been one of them.

FLEURETTE AND NORMA
didn't look up when I walked in. They were engaged in a game of preference, with Fleurette holding two of the three hands.

“Oh, good,” Fleurette said when she saw me. “Come and take Mother's place.”

“You're bidding for Mother?” I said, dropping into a chair across from them. Fleurette was on the divan with a pillow propped up next to her in the place of a third player. Norma was seated across from her with her own hand, wearing a look of high skepticism.

“No, she's bidding for a pillow,” Norma said, “and I have begun to suspect that the pillow is cheating.”

“Constance wasn't here,” Fleurette said. “We'll never have a threesome if you're always running off by yourself like that.”

“I'm not always running off,” I said.

“Did Mr. Kaufman pay?” Fleurette asked.

I had decided that Fleurette shouldn't know what had happened. She was an excitable girl, prone to vivid dreams and wild ideas. If she thought we had an enemy, she'd keep me up half the night with elaborate cloak-and-dagger schemes.

“Mr. Kaufman has received the invoice,” was all I said.

Norma raised an eyebrow at me and put down her cards. “It's nearly dinnertime. Constance and I will finish the noodles.”

“Don't cut them into squares!” Fleurette called as we left for the kitchen. “They taste better as triangles.”

On the kitchen table Norma had rolled out the noodles for
Krautfleckerl
and laid a wet towel across the dough. When we were girls in Brooklyn the entire building knew what the Kopp family was having for dinner when the odor of onions, vinegar, caraway, and cabbage filled the hallway.

“It's what Fleurette wanted,” Norma said, before I could ask why she was making a hot cabbage dish on a sweltering summer evening. “She was missing Mother all day, and you weren't here to do anything about it.”

“It was good of you to play cards with her.” I took a knife and began cutting the noodles. Norma watched me warily from the stove.

“What are you doing?” she asked when I made the first cut.

“Triangles.”

“You're making a mess of them. Just cut them the way we always do and let Fleurette make her own triangles.”

“But she doesn't want it that way. I thought we were making this for her.”

Norma reached for the knife. “I'll cut the noodles. You do the cabbage.”

I pushed her away and sliced a row of perfect squares. “Well, you're right about Henry Kaufman,” I said. “He is the most ill-mannered young man I've ever met. And that gang of thugs he runs around with! What's a businessman doing with a crowd like that?”

Norma dropped the noodles into the pot, and a cloud of steam rose up around her. The curls at the back of her neck were slick against her skin. Without turning around, she said, “He was not so happy to see you?”

“No, he was not. I don't expect we'll be getting any money out of him.”

She banged her spoon against the pot and turned around, waving it at me. “It's just as well that we forget about Henry Kaufman. I've got that boy working on the buggy. He brought over an old runabout the dairy isn't using. We can ride that until ours is finished.”

I took a breath and tried to summon the nerve to tell her what had happened. But the air sailed right back out of my mouth the way it came in, and no words followed. What was the point in revisiting the entire awful encounter?

“That's just fine,” I said at last. “I'd like to forget about it.”

Through the kitchen window I could see the neighbor's pigs pacing in their pen. I tossed our kitchen scraps to them, a small service that earned us a flitch of bacon in the fall. The pigs were still some weeks away from slaughter, but already their bellies dragged in the mud as they staggered around, calling out in their guttural pig language.

I dropped the pitted stalk of the cabbage into a bowl and looked around for something else to feed them.

“Take the potato peelings,” Norma said, and I did, walking them across the road in the unrelenting heat. The cicadas whined from some distant grove, and the crickets in the tall grass around the dairy pond raised their own chorus, which was not a song at all but just the dull scraping of a hundred blades against each other.

The pigs grunted and shuffled toward the fence when they saw me coming with my bowl of scraps. With the drone of the countryside all around me, I didn't notice Henry Kaufman's motor car until it was nearly on top of me.

He was driving and there were three men with him. The setting sun kept me from making out their faces, but I thought I could see the young man with the droopy eyes gaping at me, his mouth half open, his front tooth jutting out in a look of perpetual, confounded surprise, and the great hulking figure of the man with the stovepipe arms next to him. The car fired and coughed as if it was about to die, then roared again and swerved right at me. I fell back into the weeds. One of the men leaned out and yelled, “Take your pick, Henry! Which one of these girls do you want?”

Another one laughed and said something I couldn't hear.

“The French girl. What was she—”

Another mutter, and then he did the most intolerable thing. He shouted her name down our drive, as if he knew her, as if he knew anything about us at all.

“Fleurette! That's the one! Here, girly!” and then there was nothing but rough and drunken laughter and the thunder of the engine and dust everywhere. A bottle flew out the back of the car and hit a rock, shattering to pieces as the men disappeared down Sicomac Road.

The bowl slipped out of my hand. I watched the sand-colored cloud of dust settle back into the road, and then the air was still. Even the crickets had been shocked into silence. I stood and tried to pick the burrs and foxtails out of my skirt, but my fingers trembled and wouldn't take hold of them.

Across the way Norma stood in the half-opened front door, Mother's old kitchen apron tied crookedly over her riding clothes. Fleurette perched on her toes and peered around her to get a better view. They looked like those fuzzy figures in a picture postcard, frozen in place, staring out from some world that no longer existed.

THE THREE OF US
retreated to my bedroom. Our dinner was forgotten and the noodles were a sticky mess in their pot. Fleurette was red-cheeked and wild-eyed. Norma was as grim as I'd ever seen her. She kept her eyes on the floor, and her breath came out noisily as she worked up to whatever she was going to say.

“How did he find us?” Fleurette asked, bouncing on my bed.

“I wish you'd stop fidgeting,” Norma said.

“I can't. How does he know my name?”

They both looked up at me expectantly, Fleurette eager for the rest of the story, and Norma dreading it.

“Well—the letters. I put our address on them and our names.”

Norma tied a knot in a loose piece of piping around her knees. Fleurette considered it a waste of her talents to make undergarments for us, when a complete set could be purchased so inexpensively from the catalogs, but Norma had grown attached to a particular style of nainsook chemise that was no longer offered. She wore them until they frayed at the hems and then had to bribe Fleurette to make her a new one.

“Don't pull on it,” Fleurette whispered. Norma pulled her hands away but kept her eyes on the fraying edge.

“I'll go to the police tomorrow,” I said.

Norma snorted. “I take a dim view of the police in this county.”

“What do you know about them? We've never so much as spoken to a police officer.”

“I read the papers. They can't even catch a pickpocket. Do you remember just last week, at the train station—”

“Norma,” I said, giving a great sigh of exasperation, which was what I so often did after saying her name. “It's a simple matter for the police. He has wrecked our buggy and refuses to pay, and now he's harassing us.”

“And why is that?” Norma said.

“Why is he harassing us? You saw the crowd of hooligans he runs around with. They probably have nothing better to do. They—”

Norma raised one eyebrow at me, a particular talent of hers that she deployed whenever she wanted to assign blame.

“You don't think I'm at fault!” I cried. “If he'd been any kind of gentleman, he would have paid the damages straightaway. All I've done is to try to collect what we were owed.”

Fleurette had been looking back and forth between the two of us like a spectator at a tennis match. But she couldn't stay silent any longer. “Where does Mr. Kaufman live? Let's go to his house tonight. We can all wear disguises, and we'll wait until he's gone to bed, and—”

Norma shushed her and put her hand over mine. “I don't think you know how you look sometimes,” she said, patting me in a show of sympathy.

I pulled my hand away. “How I look?”

“At the accident. You towered over him, and you shoved that car door closed so he couldn't get in. How do you think that made him appear to his friends?”

“Like a fool,” I said.

“He is a fool,” Fleurette added.

“And what about today? Were his friends with him again?”

“Oh, they run in a pack,” I said. “They're like wild dogs.”

“And by any chance did you make Henry Kaufman look like a fool again today?” Norma asked, her voice still quiet and steady. “In front of all those wild dogs?”

I closed my eyes and pictured his head hitting the plaster, a detail I was now glad I hadn't shared with Norma. “But that's no reason to come after us. He's the one who ran us down.”

“I don't believe he sees it that way.”

“Well, it's nice of you to take his side,” I snapped, and tugged at my bedcovers, dislodging Norma. Hunger got the better of Fleurette, and she persuaded Norma to go downstairs with her to see what they could salvage from our ruined dinner. I stayed in bed, feeling that I deserved to be sent upstairs without my supper. The very idea of food turned my stomach anyway. I was made nauseous by the idea of drunken lunatics charging at us in motor cars and strange men hurling threats at Fleurette.

Fleurette, who had seen so little of the world, who Mother kept even more carefully hidden away than her other girls. Fleurette was like a little jewel, small and bright and easy to steal. And now, with me in charge of her welfare for only a year, these men were driving by the house and shouting at her.

What was I to do? Mother would have wanted me to put up the storm shutters and bar the doors and hide in the root cellar every time an automobile drove by. Norma, who saw the farm as some sort of fortress designed to keep the rest of the world at bay, would have agreed. But I was tired of hiding out here in the country.

Francis would have wanted me to sell the farm and move in with him, where we could all be properly supervised. But I wasn't about to become one of those women who serves out a life term as her brother's housekeeper.

The only way I could fall asleep was to tell myself that I was making too much of the situation. I had made one small miscalculation in confronting Mr. Kaufman and had brought a little trouble our way as a result. It would not happen again.

THE NEXT MORNING
, Norma and I sat down with Fleurette and warned her to be wary of automobiles driving past our house and to stay away from unfamiliar men in all circumstances.

“You two sound like Mother,” Fleurette said, rolling her eyes. She still had the long dark lashes that some children are born with, and she had a habit of fluttering them at us dismissively.

“This time it's real,” I said. “This time it's serious.”

“Mother thought everything was serious.”

I didn't appreciate being compared to my mother, but Mr. Kaufman did seem to pose a fresh new danger. “Promise me,” I said. “No automobiles. No strange men. We must stay away from him until he forgets all about us.”

She promised. “But we're still going to Paterson next week, aren't we?”

I looked over at Norma for an explanation. She reached into the basket next to her chair and pulled out yesterday's newspaper.

“I might have seen something about a moving picture concern coming to town,” she said, thumbing through the pages. “They're going to film a motor car running into a trolley as part of a safety campaign.”

“I think we've had enough of motor cars running into things,” I said.

“Oh, we have to go,” Fleurette said, jumping up from her chair. She wore an outlandishly large pale pink dahlia in her hair. It seemed to be placed purposefully next to her face as if to offer a comparison. “Norma promised you'd take me.”

Norma kept her face behind the paper. “I would go myself, but I couldn't possibly. You know I take my pigeons out on Thursdays.”

“You take them out on Wednesday and Friday, too,” I said, “and on Monday and Saturday. Tuesdays are—”

“They dislike any change to their routine,” Norma said. “It would put them out of joint.”

“Well, I can't go, either,” I said, although I didn't have a reason.

Fleurette tugged at my arm the way she used to when she was a little girl. “But what if they're looking for actresses?”