Only Begotten Daughter (11 page)

She shut off the water and crept out of the shower, the most miserable point guard in the entire division.

Eerie silence reigned in the locker room. At Brigantine High, defeats were not discussed. Toweling off, she rehearsed what she intended to say to Phoebe. “Yes, of
course
I can score anytime, sink the damn ball from midcourt if I want. Don’t tell me what to do with my life, Sparks.”

“I’m
not
telling you what to do with your life,” Phoebe insisted the next day. “I’m simply saying you’re an outside shooter—you wouldn’t have to get physical, nobody’d suspect anything supernatural.” They wove through the clattering cafeteria, found a table, slammed down their trays. “If the point spread stays under twelve at the Saint Basil’s game, I’ll walk away with sixty dollars. Naturally I’ll go halves with you.”

Surveying the food, Julie winced. Why did she have to work so hard at maintaining a half-decent figure while Phoebe lived on sugar and never gained a pound or grew a zit? “I’m not throwing a game just so you can make thirty dollars.”

“You throw a game when you lose it, not when you
win
it.” Phoebe shoved lemon meringue pie into her mouth. “Hey, you think it’s easy being your friend, Katz? You think I’m at peace about it? I mean, here you come ripping into the world like Grant took Richmond, and you’ve got these damn powers, and some sort of God exists, and I have to keep
quiet.
It’s driving me absolutely nuts. Mom too.”

“Be patient. My mission’s not worked out yet.”

“I
am
patient.” Phoebe devoured a doughnut. “Hey, did I ever ask you for help with my shitty grades? When my cousin got knocked up, did I ask you to fix it?”

Julie’s face grew hot. “There’re
lots
of things you never asked me to do.” She pointed across the cafeteria to Catherine Tyboch, her stocky body suspended on crutches. “You never asked me to make Tyboch walk. You never asked me to cure Lizzie’s anorexia.”

“I was getting to them.”

“I’m sure you were.”

“Let’s face it, buddy, running up and down a basketball court isn’t exactly fulfilling your potential.”

Vengefully Julie forked a hunk of Phoebe’s pie and ate it. “There’s a room in my house you’ve never seen.”

“Where you and Roger hump? Hope you take precautions. Like Mom says, ‘His bird in your hand is worth two in your bush.’”

Phoebe’s genius for sex did not surprise Julie. Phoebe’s face was gorgeous, her shape lithe, her dark skin creamy and iridescent. Typically, God had given better flesh to Phoebe than to her own daughter. “Roger and I don’t do that. He worships me.”

Phoebe giggled. “Worships the water you walk on.” She ate a brownie the color of her skin. “Really, can’t you do better than Roger? I mean, isn’t he sort of boring, isn’t he sort of a prude? You’re smart, friendly, got nice boobers, and score twelve points a game. Not like me with my F in math and these acorns for tits. Why waste yourself on Roger?”

“He’s a good Catholic. I need that. It helps me.”

“Helps you to love your mother?”

“Helps me to stop hating her.”

“You shouldn’t hate your mother, Katz.”

“I hate her.”

“What room?”

Her temple, Julie called it. Once it was the Angel’s Eye guest room, now the place that kept her sane. The project had begun modestly, nothing but a few tragic stories clipped from
Time
and the
Atlantic City Press
and pasted in a scrapbook. But soon it spread to the walls, then to the ceiling and floor, until all six inside surfaces positively dripped with humanity’s suffering, with earthquakes, droughts, floods, fires, diseases, deformities, addictions, car crashes, train wrecks, race riots, massacres, thermonuclear bomb tests.

Was all this really
essential?
Pop had wanted to know.

It would keep her off the high road, Julie had explained.

He never questioned the project again.

“Impressive,” said Phoebe, surveying the collages on the afternoon following the Lucky Dogs game, “but what’s the point?”

Julie approached the altar, a former card table on which two brass candlesticks, thick and ornate as clarinets, flanked the sailor’s skull she’d recently taken from the bay. “Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.”

“You mean you simply sit here, staring at everybody’s pain? All you do is
look
at it?”

“Uh-huh. Just like God.”

“That’s sick.”

Julie lifted the skull, holding it as if about to make a free throw. “My mother could’ve saved this sailor. She didn’t.”

“Maybe she has her reasons.”

“Maybe I have mine.” Julie stretched out her arm, extended her index finger. Slowly she turned, three hundred and sixty degrees, then another rotation, another … “Look, Phoebe, it never stops. Round and round—forever!”

“You got pollution?” Phoebe caressed the scabby door, pausing atop a photo of a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums sitting in a landfill like unexploded bombs, oozing pink poison. “Oh, I see …”

“I mean, where do I even
begin?
”

“Great place to do drugs.” Phoebe’s laugh was high and uneasy, like the yip of a dog barking on command. “There’s
plenty
of it, I’ll give you that.”

“A girl could spend every waking minute performing miracles …”

“And not scratch the surface,” mused Phoebe. “Shit, here’s a tough one.” She punched a
People
magazine clipping. A four-year-old boy with spina bifida had undergone sixteen separate operations and then died. “I’ve been giving you a hard time lately.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorry, Katz.”

“You should be.”

“Sometimes I get jealous of you. That’s stupid, isn’t it?”

“My life’s no picnic.” Julie slumped to the floor, eyes locked on an Ethiopian infant’s bloated belly and matchstick legs. “Remember when we snuck into that hotel? I don’t want there to be famines or poverty, Phoebe, just beer and Tastykake and you.”

“Oh, my poor little goddess.” Dropping, Phoebe gave Julie a magnificent kiss, wet and tasty as a slice of watermelon, right on the lips. “You’re under a curse, aren’t you? You’re all torn apart.”

Phoebe, dear Phoebe: she understood. “I can’t win,” Julie moaned. “If only I could be just one way, caterpillar or butterfly, one or the other. My mother never says a word to me. I know I’m supposed to have some amazingly beautiful and earth-shaking purpose, but God won’t talk. She won’t say if there’s a heaven, or whether I’ll die, or
anything.
”

“You’ll always love me, won’t you?” The second kiss was even juicier than the first. “Wherever you go, you’ll take me with you?”

“Always,” said Julie, thinking intently about her friend’s lips.

No local theater was showing the double bill Roger wanted to see,
Ten Thousand Psychotics
followed by
The Garden of Unearthly Delights,
so they went all the way to the Route 52 Cinema in Somers Point. It was an unusually passionate Roger who sat next to Julie, comforting her during the zombie attacks, feeling her up during the sex scenes. “He made me promise not to tell,” Phoebe had revealed earlier that day, “but I will anyway, that’s what friends are for. Sin no longer exists for Roger. God, Satan, hell—gone with the tooth fairy. In short, if you’re ready to become a girl with a past, he’s ready to give you one.”

Phoebe’s date for the evening, Lucius Bogenrief, had the complexion of strawberry yogurt and the smell and general contours of a submarine sandwich, but he also had
Ramblin’ Girl,
his family’s Winnebago, a kind of terrestrial yacht complete with kitchenette, bar, and private bedroom. As the four of them ambled into the lobby after the show, Lucius drew out his keys and ceremoniously presented them to Phoebe. “Your pilot for this evening is Captain Sparks.”

“Some people will give anything for a properly done blow-job,” Phoebe explained, winking. “The whole sixty-nine yards, eh?”

Roger cringed and pretended to study the poster for
Ten Thousand Psychotics.
Julie felt ice in her gills. Phoebe driving? The point of the evening was to experience sex, not to die.

They piled into the Winnebago, Lucius taking the passenger seat, Phoebe grasping the steering wheel as she might the handlebar on a roller coaster. Nuzzling like newborn puppies, Julie and Roger slipped behind the kitchenette table. “It’s like a clubhouse,” she noted excitedly.

“I used to have a treehouse,” said Roger. “It blew out of the tree.”

Julie did not really understand Roger’s interest in her, unless his Catholic instincts told him who she was. He ran the student council, edited the school paper, and looked remarkably like the portrait of an extremely handsome Jesus hanging in Phoebe’s old catechism class. His only defect—as Phoebe would have it, his only virtue—was his fascination with the grotesque, particularly monster movies and Stephen King novels, enthusiasms Julie attributed to the way the pre-Vatican II hell, so gaudy and voluptuous in its horrors, had captured his childhood imagination.

Phoebe lifted the microphone from the dashboard. “This is your captain speaking.” Her amplified voice rattled around the van like a marble in a vase. “The party begins at midnight.”

“Party,” echoed Roger, sounding half thrilled, half terrified. “Great.”

Predictably,
Ramblin’ Girl
brought out the worst in Phoebe. “Christ!” Julie screamed as the Winnebago rocketed away from the Route 52 Cinema. “Not so fast!”

They plunged down Shore Road as if Phoebe had a large bet riding on her getting a speeding ticket. New Jersey rushed by—its shabby farms, grubby refineries, garish billboards exhorting you to win big at Caesar’s and the Golden Nugget. The Winnebago rattled like a treehouse in a hurricane.

“Was anybody
in
the treehouse?” Julie asked.

“I was,” said Roger. “It’s a miracle I survived.”

That explained a lot, Julie figured. Nothing like a brush with death to make somebody a good Catholic.

“Ah, hah!” shouted Phoebe, swerving into the parking lot of Somers Point High School. It didn’t matter that none of them went here; they were all in the vast travel club called adolescence, and the parking lot was theirs, as friendly and inviting as a country inn. Phoebe guided
Ramblin’ Girl
toward an unlighted area, killed the motor. Julie laughed, kissed Roger’s cheek. Mangy basketball nets, twisted bicycle racks, gallowslike lamps—yes, they belonged.

Lucius and Phoebe joined them in the kitchenette, pulling bottles from the liquor cabinet. The labels fascinated Julie—Cutty Sark, Dewar’s, Beefeater—each logo dense with staid print and Anglo-Saxon dignity, as if alcohol were really a type of literary criticism and not a leading cause of traffic fatalities and brain rot. Phoebe mixed the drinks, starting with her own rum and Coke, then doing Lucius’s vodka and tonic. Julie’s affection for liquor hadn’t increased one jot since she and Phoebe had guzzled beer in the doomed Deauville, but she agreed to try a “Black Russian,” which definitely sounded like something her mother wouldn’t want her to have.

“Might I trouble you for one of those?” Roger asked cautiously.

“Sure,” said Phoebe.

“Saw you on the court last Tuesday.” Lucius served Julie her Black Russian. “You looked good.”

“Julie always looks good,” said Roger, smiling stupidly.

“Sixty-four to thirty-one, that sucks,” said Julie, sipping. Sweet, sinful, exquisite.

“Julie can get a basket whenever she wants.” Phoebe swizzled Roger’s drink with the crazed competence of the mad scientist in
Ten Thousand Psychotics.
“She’s tuned in on the cosmos.”

Lucius opened the bedroom door, its back panel decorated with
Playboy
centerfolds. Julie pondered a certain Miss March. What an incalculable debt she owed whichever playmate had inspired the donation that was her gateway to flesh. Still, Miss March seemed pathetic. Why did males find breasts erotic, why did these mongrel solids drive them crazy? Yes, there were far too many unwanted pregnancies around Brigantine High, but certainly her mother shared some of the blame, wiring up guys’ penises like that.

“Don’t worry.” Lucius winked lewdly. “Around here we knock first.”

Roger led her into the little boudoir and set their Black Russians on the nightstand. Lucius closed the door. Julie and Roger jumped simultaneously. What a couple of overbred dogs we are, she thought, what a pair of skittish virgins.

The Winnebago’s engine snorted to life. “Hey, what’re you doing?” Julie called.

“What’s going on?” shouted Roger.

Phoebe’s voice zagged out of the bedroom loudspeaker. “This is your captain speaking.” The van chattered and rolled. “Next stop, a deserted and romantic section of Dune Island.”

Steadying their drinks, Roger called, “Do me a favor, Phoebe.” Always so polite. “Go slowly.”

“Do her a favor, Roger,” came Phoebe’s amplified reply. “Go slowly.”

“You shouldn’t be driving,” said Julie.

“Should I help you ravish Roger instead?”

Julie wasn’t sure how much of her dizziness traced to the Winnebago’s movement, how much to the Black Russian. She drew a deep breath, sipped her drink. A private bedroom with a pornographic door. Well, well. A mattress jutting from the wall, white sheets wrapped around it, tight as drumheads. Well, well, well. Did she really want Roger inside her, pushing and stabbing? Would her chunky body suffice to make it work?

He didn’t wait for Dune Island. Like a soldier ducking machine-gun fire, he hit the mattress, pulling her down with him. His fingers were everywhere at once, massaging her blouse, tugging at her jeans.

Julie drew away.

“Sorry,” said Roger. His favorite word.

“Ground rules. We need some—”

“We’ll use this.” Roger pulled a condom from his corduroys, flashing it like a press pass. “If that’s all right.”

“I meant our relationship.” Beyond curiosity, beyond her need to provoke God, the night had to be what Aunt Georgina would call cosmic. “Do you love me, Roger?”

“Of course.”

“Truly?”

“I truly love you, Julie. It doesn’t bother me a bit you’re Jewish.”

“Say it again.”

“Say I love you?”