How Long Has This Been Going On (79 page)

"Yeah, but what do I know about antiques?"

"You'll learn by watching the customers. They spot the object of desire, their eyes light for the flash of a moment, they assume a disinterested pose—but you have caught them, and, quick!, the price shoots high. Come, you know you'd love haggling. And doesn't the whole idea remind you a bit of Thriller Jill's—the browsers and bargainers spilling into the place of magic where they may find something to make them feel loved?"

"What would I call this place?"

"'Bull in a China Shop,' of course!"

In fact, Lois loved the work. Tooling around the crisp green land on her "hunts" for merchandise made her feel liberated of cares and responsibilities, even of age. Sixty-seven when she opened the store in 1987, she felt as tough and confident as when she had taken over Jill's, and though Bull in a China Shop looked like any other New England antiquery along the tourist trails, Lois delighted in her unique touches, such as stocking plenty of men's items like canes and hunting gear, and hiring the only Hispanic woman in a six-town radius, Estella Vargas. The building that Lois opened her store in was so antique itself that none of the locals could remember who had put it up or for what purpose: a small clapboard rectangle sitting by itself just outside of Lenapee, where Lois and Elaine had been living for eighteen years.

"Okay, what's
that
thing?" says Lois, already adding up what the buy is going to cost. Probably break three hundred, but she'll unload half the haul inside of a week for twice that, easy.

"Now
that,
lady," says the guy, "is a bear trap."

"Vicious mother."

"This here's a tricky proposition. An't even legal to own, but for on your personal property. I wouldn't have brung it, 'cept I know you got a specialty in items of the kind."

"How's it open?" asked Lois, examining the huge metal crescent, its halves bit closed in a murderous embrace of serrate teeth.

"See this safety latch here?" The guy indicated a lever with the toe of his boot. "Warn, now, you don't go near this bitch except you're in the heaviest footwear you own. All righty-roo. The whole thing's done with the edge of the boot. The tip edge, watch. First, hit the safety," as he did. "Second—carefully avoiding any contact with the teeth, break the jaws open, secure the bottom line with your foot, and very steadily—no, it's sort of like a jerking—pull the top line up and up till you hear it..." With a click, the bear trap held open, one great ready yawn of terror for when the time comes.

"Any ground rules?" Lois asked.

"Don't open it unless you want to kill something."

"I want to, all right. Just can I get away with it?"

The guy broke into a waterfall of laughter. "Ma'am, do you know what a pleasure of business it is to conduct with you, after the nonsense they give me upstate?"

"Always told you, come to me first."

"No, I paw the lazy Susans and sheet music over to them. I hand those right over, say it's Lois wants the
real
stuff."

"Close up that bear trap and let's talk money."

"Got something you don't need any more of?"

Lois handed him one of her hundred Souvenir of New Hampshire paperweights, a miniature metal tray in the shape of the state.

"Watch this," he said, tossing the piece at the open trap, which sprang closed on it with the bite of a kraken.

"Shoot,
that thing takes off!" said Lois.

* * *

When Lois and Elaine first moved to Lenapee, Elaine decided that she needed something to take her out of the house every so often; all writers do. Lois, who—long, long before—had put in a stint as a grade-school teacher, suggested that Elaine fill in as a "teacher's assistant," the Other Woman who assists in kindergarten, directs the Thanksgiving Pageant, and rides along on field trips.

"You'll like the work," Lois told her. "Kids are wonderful, because they're still enchanted. They haven't got mean yet."

"Oh, yes! It would be so lovely to go among people who couldn't possibly say, 'So you're the one who writes those frightful books.'"

Elaine eventually became the Lenapee School System's field-trip assistant, helping to squire the Third Grade to the Hagerford textile mill, the Fourth Grade along a length of the Merrimack River, and the Fifth Grade to the fish hatcheries just beyond Grasmere. As we speak, while Lois was making her best offer on the bear trap, Elaine was riding with the Fourth Graders to Grasmere when the back half of the bus erupted in groans, jeers, and cries of "Get him off!"

The teacher, by herself in the front seat behind the driver, turned, seemed to assess the event, and turned back again, ignoring it.

The noise continued, and Elaine, herself turning, saw a boy way at the back who was obviously the target of the activity. He was crying, yet he appeared not frustrated and hurt, as children so often do when persecuted by their fellows, but rather scared, as if oppressed by more than ridicule.

"Shouldn't you do something about that?" Elaine asked the teacher, whom she didn't like.

"Why don't you try?" asked the teacher, neither unpleasantly nor helpfully. Neutral.

Elaine made her way down the aisle into a sea of kids holding their noses or pretending to vomit.

"Save us from Diarrhea Donny!" one cried.

"He's the end of the world!"

"Eeughw, I can't breathe!"

"Off the bus," the chant began, and most of the kids joined in. "Off the bus! Off the bus!" The teacher remained in her seat, looking straight ahead.

Elaine went up to the sobbing boy in the hindmost seat. It was obvious that he had befouled his clothes, and his classmates were grinning like ghouls as they sang away. "Off the bus!"

"That's enough," Elaine told them. "How would you like being mocked if you'd had an accident?"

"I wouldn't
have
an accident!" one boy snickered.

"He's always doing this!"

"Yeah, he's such a sick mess!"

"Stinkball Donny strikes again!"

"The teacher hates him."

"All of you be quiet!"
Elaine roared, and, in the ensuing silence, one little girl quietly said, "My mommy says he has the AIDS epidemic."

Elaine stared at her.

"Because he is getting thin day by day," the child added.

Another moment, and Elaine sat next to Donny and put an arm around him. He was shivering, like a small animal surprised under a tree. "Just hang on," Elaine said. "We'll stop somewhere and get you cleaned up. Okay?"

Crushed with humiliation, Donny wouldn't look up.

"The rest of you leave him alone," said Elaine as she got up. "It's ignoble to laugh at someone in trouble."

At the front of the bus, the teacher was gazing out the window.

"And you just sit here, Scheherazade?" Elaine asked her.

The teacher turned a bland face to Elaine.

"We have to stop and remedy the situation," Elaine said. "Immediately."

"We can't stop the whole bus just because—"

"There's a filling station," Elaine told the driver. "Up on the right."

"Lady, nobody... Look—"

"Pull over and shut up." To the teacher, Elaine said, "What you are doing could easily lose you your job. It may be illegal, too."

"I do my job!"

"I believe we should let the authorities decide that one," said Elaine, adding, to encourage the driver, "That goes for you, too."

The driver pulled into the station; Elaine took Donny into the washroom and fixed him up as best she could. She was very frightened, because he had a few purplish spots on his skin, and, like most people, she wasn't clear on where the risks lay. Was the child ill? But then how could his parents send him to school without... Well, what does an ailing child go to school
with?
I'm sixty-eight and a tower of health, Elaine thought. I've never suffered anything but the usual childhood stuff and the annual cold or two. I can chance it.

Elaine used up the paper towels and decided to abandon Donny's soiled underpants in the garbage can.

"Please don't tell my mother" was all that Donny said at this time.

When they came out into the serene New England spring morning, a busload of young faces was watching them through the windows. Still faces, no song. Kids don't know the terminology, but they ken what's happening.

"It's quite some day," Elaine told Donny. "We'd best get you home now."

"My mother doesn't like it when they send me home."

The driver played a game of "not seeing" Elaine, and she had to bang on the door to get it open. Two steps into the bus, Elaine told the teacher, "We're going to turn around and go back to school. I'll drive this child to his home."

Wearily officious, as if this were some bureaucratic squabble late on a Friday afternoon, the teacher began, "I happen to be in charge of—"

"Or I'll call the police here and now," Elaine said calmly. "A bluff? Ah, check her eyes."

The driver looked questioningly at the teacher. "Oh, do what she says," said the teacher, shrugging. The ride back was pretty quiet.

At school, Elaine took Donny to the nurse, who agreed that Donny needed a doctor. At this, Donny became frantic, though he quieted down when Elaine said she would talk to his mother herself.

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?" Elaine asked him in the car: "Do you like video games? What sport do you play?" But conversation was fitful, Donny clearly dreading what was to come at home. The only full-out sentence he uttered was "I don't know why this is happening to me."

Donny lived in a part of Lenapee that Elaine had seldom seen, a residential section just off the Goffstown Road that was known as Backtown for reasons that the locals typically kept as obscure as possible. Hemidemisemi-lapsed working-class, Elaine thought, driving through it. Welfare checks and blighted elms, denial and anger. I should write about it.

Donny wouldn't get out of the car when they reached the address that the nurse had written out, so Elaine went alone to the door to confront Donny's mother.

"Sent him home again, eh?" she said, glancing at and then dismissing Elaine's car, child and all. "He says he's sick, is that it? I know, sure."

"He
is
sick. I was going to ask you what medical care he's getting. Because his condition... Well, I was—"

"It's none of your beeswax, is my guess." She called out, "Well, come on, why dontcha? Got another holiday fer yerself!"

Donny came reluctantly; when he reached the doorway, his mother slapped him so hard he went down.

"That's fer givin' me yer trouble," she said calmly.

Speechless, Elaine helped Donny up. She loathed this woman so much that she couldn't bear to address her by name. "This child isn't faking. He's helpless. He needs a doctor."

"You need to take your nose out of other folk's lives, Missus Fancy Fluff. You an't his teacher, I know that much. You from the county? An't seen you before."

"Who I am doesn't matter. This boy is your responsibility, not your rag doll. What you just did to him is... Don't any of you disgusting people have any respect for human
feelings
? His classmates jeer at him, his teacher ignores him, and meanwhile he's shitting his guts out on the school bus, with his skin turning purple, and his mother—his
mother!—
doesn't even..."

Why am I doing this? She's not listening. Nobody's listening to this at all, anywhere. It's not real to them. So nature's found a new way to mug people, so what?

The woman was looking at Elaine, just looking; now she spoke. "Purple skin's all the rage, din't you hear so?" she said, rolling up a sleeve of her blouse. "It's the new look in Lenapee, they all agree."

Her arms were dotted with purple lesions, some small, others quite large.

"I could show you some real pretty ones on my paps," she went on. "Right where he sucked as a tad. Medical care, is it? I'm sure you got some doctors in mind. Some fancy fluff doctor from the other side of town who works for potatoes?"

She pointed the boy inside, staring Elaine down as he passed, then closed the door behind her.

Driving home, Elaine worried it over and over. What was she supposed to do? She saw herself appealing to some authority and finding the same cold Who Cares What You Think? that she had found in the teacher and bus driver. Donny's mother haunted her, too, because she was... well, let's say it: not unlike Lois, without the smarts and gumption and hidden kindness. A plain woman, blunt, unaware of the seemly dressings and disguises mothers teach daughters in this world, to make them safe for men. But something saved Lois—or Lois saved Lois, and Lois saved Elaine, for surely those who attempt to wear the disguise when honesty is their only proper fit must go insane in the end.

"Peter Smith is in the spare room," said Lois, when Elaine got home. "He's had another fight with his... What's that black look about?"

"A bad day."

"Huh? On a class trip? What, did Polly Pigtails grow a hangnail or something?"

"One of the children is..."

"Chick, you need a sample of the teapot. It's that spearmint flavor you like so much." Pouring it out. "There. Steaming away. You're wondering why I'm home in the middle of the day. Well, I made a buy that you would not—"

Elaine burst into tears.

"Well, what's this, now?"

"I'll be fine, just let me—"

"I could use some tea myself," said Peter, coming into the kitchen.

"Thought you were napping it off," replied Lois as she watched Elaine.

"Yeah, then I heard all the excitement down here and I couldn't keep away."

Peter was seventeen, funny, weird, and gay: slim and handsome to warm the heart and so desperate for affection that he made you feel a saint if you said, "Lovely tie."

Actually, it was Elaine who would say it. Lois would say, "You wear stuff like that around here, they'll run you out on a rail."

Peter wore stuff like that, to school, a cookout, the store. He grew his hair long. He got on better with girls than boys. His father beat him for sport—not whenever he was drunk; whenever he was around—and Peter's mother would leave the room. That is: She allowed it.