Local Girls (6 page)

Revolver came up to me as soon as he was free, not in the way he usually did, leaping, being crazy. He just leaned against my legs. His weight against me felt good, but I moved away and slipped off his collar.

“Go on,” I said.

The gate was open.

“Go,” I told him, and for once he actually listened. Revolver disappeared into the shadows. I could hear him though, running across the dry grass. I stood there listening, and then I went back inside.

After I'd gotten into bed, the thunder came closer. Sometime in the night, while we all slept, the cherry tree was uprooted. My brother insisted it had been hit by lightning, but my mother believed the damage had been caused by the wind, which had come up before dawn to shake all the birds' nests from the trees and topple huge willows and the tallest poplars. In the morning, my mother phoned the pound, and the police, and even our vet. Each one gave her the same advice: Wait and your dog will show up. But I knew he wouldn't. I didn't bother to go along with Jason and my mother when they drove slowly through our rain-soaked neighborhood, hopefully whistling and scanning the streets. I didn't bother to inform them otherwise when they insisted that Revolver would still be in the backyard if not for that horrible storm.

It rained all that next day, a drenching rain that filled gutters and left floods in people's basements. Little frogs appeared on front lawns and porches. I threw on my mother's old raincoat, grabbed a pair of fishing boots that my father had left behind, and still managed to get soaked as I ran to Jill's house. The lawns were all squelchy and filled with worms. The air was white and hot and wet. I let myself into Jill's house by the side door, the way I always did, but Jill wasn't there. You can tell when a house is empty; there's a sound it has, an echo that's unmistakable, or so I then thought. I was certain the Harringtons had all gone off for the day, to Jill's grandmother‘s, or to her cousin Marianne's. I gazed at the parakeet that was kept in a cage in the kitchen; I leafed through the calendar on the wall and took a mint from the candy dish. It wasn't until I went to the cupboard for a glass that I realized Mrs. Harrington was there. I may have gasped; I may have grabbed at my chest. I know for a fact that I told myself I'd better breathe evenly, because if I didn't, I'd embarrass myself even further and faint.

“You scared me,” I said, as if that weren't completely obvious. I had already backed up, toward the door. In those days, Mrs. Harrington seemed made out of vapor, rather than flesh and blood. Jill had reported that her mother ate only pink grapefruit and melba toast. She drank only water. She hardly slept at all.

“Well, I'd better go,” I added casually, still desperate to get out of there. “My dog ran away last night, so I should probably go look for him.”

“I saw him,” Mrs. Harrington said.

I wasn't certain if she'd really spoken, or if I'd imagined it. Her words seemed made out of vapor as well, smoky little things you had to bend close to decipher. Even if she was Jill's mother and I'd known her forever, she was spooky.

“I don't think so,” I told her. “He ran away.”

“He was here,” she insisted. “On my lawn.” She sounded a little panicky. “I know it for a fact. He was right here.”

“Okay,” I said. After all, I was equally panicked, but I knew that with adults it was always best to agree. Humor them, that's what Jill and I had decided, and they'll leave you alone. “I'll check your lawn first.”

I let the door slam behind me and started running, in spite of the heavy fishing boots I was wearing, in spite of the rain. I didn't stop when I reached my house. I kept right on going, past the street corners where Jill and I had spent most of our summer, past the high school, where classes would be starting in only a few weeks.

Behind the school there was a creek that was usually nothing more than a dried-out sandy bed. But on this day, it was nearly a river. All the gutters led here, all the flooded streets emptied into this one swollen conduit. Today, the water would rise higher than it ever had before. It would run through the tunnels, it would go on and on, and for some reason, that made me feel better than I had in a very long time.

All the rest of that summer, there were reports of our dog being sighted. People swore he was the reason there were so many overturned garbage cans in the neighborhood; they blamed him when their cats refused to go out at night and when their grass was torn up. The owner of the deli entertained his customers with stories of a black dog who waited for the bakery truck in the morning to beg for doughnuts. The pizza guy would tell anyone willing to listen that a dog often sneaked into his kitchen to steal mozzarella and sausage. Mrs. Raymond insisted that she frequently saw the shadow of a huge dog cross her lawn, and she spoke with such certainty that even my brother grew to believe her and took to leaving bowls of kibble out on the sidewalk. By then Mrs. Harrington had begun to talk as if she hadn't had a lapse of any sort, but she never once mentioned seeing our dog. Occasionally, I saw her looking out the window, surveying her own front lawn, but I was fairly certain that she was as convinced as I was. That dog was gone.

How to Talk to the Dead

Two days after Gretel Samuelson's grandmother moved in with them, Gretel discovered her down on her knees in the kitchen, looking up past the chandelier, as though she could see through the ceiling, right into heaven. To get a true cleanliness fanatic like Grandma Frieda onto a floor which hadn't been mopped for a month was some sort of inverted miracle in itself. Usually, Frieda would have attacked the sticky traces of jelly and tomato sauce with Lestoil and a scrub brush. Now, she didn't even seem to notice the dirt. Right away Gretel thought,
Heart attack.
She thought,
Stroke.
She thought,
I really cannot go through any more sorrow.

The truth was, Gretel had become cynical and snappish. Her family had fallen apart, and Gretel had too. She'd started to chew her cuticles until they bled. She smoked too much; she was unable to sleep. She had come to believe there were little stones in her veins where the blood used to be, hard, cold things that rattled and rolled whenever any real emotion was called for.

On the day when her grandmother spoke to heaven, Gretel had been wasting time as usual, sneaking cigarettes out behind a large catalpa tree and feeling sorrier for herself than any person has a right to. As soon as she walked through the back door to find her eighty-four-year-old grandmother kneeling on the linoleum, Gretel knew something was seriously wrong. She could feel the stones inside her hit against each other.

“Grandma?” Gretel said.

Frieda's mouth was moving a mile a minute, but no sound escaped. This was not a woman who wished to engage in idle conversation. All the same, Gretel took a step closer. “Are you trying to say something?” she asked.

Gretel's grandmother waved one hand in the air and didn't bother to answer. She loved her granddaughter dearly, but Frieda did not like to be interrupted, especially while she was making a deal with the powers that be. This was the sort of bargain you make only once in a lifetime. The deal was simple and pulled no punches; there were no fancy addenda, no clauses, no strings of any kind. All Frieda was asking for was her daughter's life in exchange for her own. Her daughter, Frances, was supposedly cancer-free since her last operation, but Frieda never had trusted doctors. You wanted something done, you had to do it yourself.

Frieda got up off her knees, refusing her granddaughter's offer of help. Immediately, she began to get ready to die. First, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty.

“Get a pizza,” she told her granddaughter, a nice girl in spite of her gloomy attitude. “Bring me the change.”

“You get sick when you eat pizza,” Gretel reminded her grandmother.

“Watch and see.” Frieda wagged a finger as if to suggest that Gretel still had a whole lot to learn.

Gretel went to her mother's bedroom and knocked on the door. They'd moved the TV inside and Frances was sitting up in bed, watching a movie about true love and crying. Frankly, Frances had a lot to cry about. Whenever she thought about her ex-husband, she was brought to tears. She had even gone to a hypnotist in Brooklyn to remove his betrayal from her mind, but by the time she was walking back to her parked car, she was already imagining her ex and his new wife picking out furniture for their house.

Franny,
her ex had always said with a sigh when she was the one who wanted anything.
You know we can't afford that.

But, as it turned out, he could afford plenty, although that didn't change the fact that there still wasn't a decent piece of furniture in the house he'd left behind. Frances knew it was all worthless; on the day Sam left she'd called the Salvation Army, hoping to get rid of everything they had owned together, but the pickup guys had refused to accept the living room suite. Too worn, they'd said. Too ratty and beat-up.

“Grandma wants me to get her a pizza,” Gretel threw herself down across the foot of her mother's bed. “I think she's lost her marbles.”

“Is she cleaning?” Usually, the house was enough of a mess to keep Frieda busy and out of everyone's hair.

“Nope. She's not even vacuuming. She's just talking to the ceiling and asking for pizza.”

Frances took a sip of water and considered. She'd lost weight, and her right side, where they'd operated, still felt weak. In the last few months, she'd had a lot of time to consider the state of mankind, and she'd decided that people actually had very few choices in their lives. Most things happened to you. Most things rolled right over you and then kept on going.

“Get her the pizza, if that's what she wants,” Frances told Gretel. “Let her enjoy herself.”

That night, Gretel's grandmother had a terrible case of indigestion, but she didn't care. Her doctor had warned her not to have salt, sugar, fat, MSG, Tabasco, wine, spices, or anything cooked in oil. But the following day, when Gretel came home from school, Frieda was waiting for her with the menu from the Chinese take-out place up on the turnpike, a place called Ho Ho's known for its especially hot, oily food. It was years since Frieda had last tasted three-spice chicken, and nearly a decade since she'd dared to order barbecued spareribs.

“You're kidding, right?” Gretel said when her grandmother handed over the menu.

“Make sure to get a few extra packets of soy sauce,” Frieda said. “They'll give you plenty if you ask.”

“This is some kind of suicide thing. That's what it is!” Gretel saw the whole picture clearly now: food used as a weapon. Grease and spice aimed directly at the heart and arteries. “Well, I'm not going to participate, Grandma, so don't ask me.”

“Fine.” Frieda had faced down a lot tougher customers than her little pip-squeak granddaughter. Who had called her son-in-law a liar right to his face when he said he couldn't afford to pay child support? Who had taken a cab out to his fancy new house when the checks were late? “If you don't want to go, fine. They deliver.”

That night they all sat on the edge of Frances's bed, with plates of Chinese food on their knees. There was an old movie on,
Now, Voyager,
and Gretel and her mother were both crying so hard they could hardly chew. Gretel's brother, Jason, who continued to be less verbal and more handsome—as if the two traits were genetically linked—rolled his eyes as he finished up the spareribs.

Grandma Frieda nudged Jason. “They think crying's going to get them someplace. It's not going to get you anyplace,” she told her daughter and granddaughter.

“Oh, Mom.” Frances put down her dinner plate. She couldn't take her eyes off Bette Davis. She couldn't stop thinking about the man who'd abandoned her. “Leave us alone.”

“Never,” Grandma Frieda said.

As it turned out, the Chinese food seemed to have no ill effects on Frieda's digestive system. The following day she took off to Atlantic City with her canasta-playing cronies to see if they could make a killing at the Tri-State Championships. They went once a year, and although they hadn't made a killing yet, they still had hope.

When the time came, Gretel went out to the front stoop to wait for the taxi that would take her grandmother to the bus station.

“Don't you have a suitcase?” she asked when Frieda came out of the house with only a purse.

“Who needs the extra baggage?” The taxi was approaching and Frieda signaled wildly to the driver, even though there were no other people on the street. “Listen, honey,” she said to Gretel just before she got into the cab. “I'm not really leaving you.” Facts were facts—Gretel was her favorite, and there were tears in Frieda's eyes.

“You think crying's going to get you someplace?” Gretel teased.

She hugged her grandmother and stood out on the curb so she could wave goodbye. She waved and she waved until she couldn't see the taxi anymore; then she sat down on the edge of the curb and cried.

Frieda died that night at the Copper Penny Motel, the place where she and her girlfriends always stayed in Atlantic City, since the rooms were clean and breakfast was free—a bagel, eggs any way you liked them, and what the management vowed was fresh-squeezed orange juice. On the evening when she died, all the canasta cronies had gone to a Hungarian restaurant, and Frieda's friends wondered if it was the chicken Paprikash that had done her in, although the official coroner's report suggested that Frieda had a congenital heart defect—it had simply taken eighty-odd years to affect her.

Now when Gretel came home from school in the afternoons, she locked herself in her room. There were times when nothing seemed to matter, and this appeared to be one of them. A girl had to care if she was to comb her hair, eat a decent meal, wash her face with Ivory soap. Gretel no longer gave a damn about any of it. What was life anyway? Only a continuous vale of sadness and tears. Such were the thoughts she was entertaining, and perhaps this is why Gretel began to fade. She grew paler and paler until you couldn't quite distinguish her form when she leaned against a white wall. Frances became truly alarmed. At last she telephoned her ex and demanded he do something.