So Much Pretty (5 page)

White’s body did not have such a wholesome end, wasn’t a victim of drunkenness or impulse or perfectionism. And White’s body was not so fully intact when Brenda Hodge caught sight of it on her way to work. Thought she saw someone crawling out of a ditch near the wooded edge of the Savers Club parking lot.

White’s body, as it turned out, was put to use for months before being found.

Gene

HAEDEN, NY, 1998

“H
UP
!”

Alice extended one leg out straight from her body, her toes pointed, and Gene watched her, standing close in case she fell. He called again for her to change positions. “Hup!”

She bent and put her hand where her foot had been. The homemade balance beam stood two and a half feet off the ground and was nearly as high as she was tall. She lifted her leg straight up, slightly curved behind her.

“Hup!”

She bent and put her other hand down on the beam.

“Hup!”

She gave a slight bounce in her hips to spring up into a handstand on the beam, arched her back, and faced forward, smiling at Gene. Her body was strong and small.

“Want to try to walk on your hands?” he asked.

“Sideways?”

“Yes. Front ways if I hold your legs.”

“No, no. Don’t hold my legs.”

“Okay, then, sideways, please. Hup!”

She lifted her hands slightly and was able to remain straight while taking the first tiny steps on her palms. He could see that she was not gripping the beam but, rather, feeling the way her hands must move and stay stiff, feeling the way there were points on her palms that could balance her whole body. She got braver and extended her reach farther down. Then he watched as she miscalculated where her hand should go and she missed, her body tensed, and she gave a little gasp as her head came down, about to hit the beam.

He grabbed her ankle and pulled her up quickly, upside down, raising her feet high above his head. Her face hung suspended before his. Her eyes were wide, and she opened her mouth in surprise. He could see the ridges on the roof of her mouth and the bone-white buds where her molars were beginning to come in. She giggled nervously, and he kissed her on the nose.

“Wow, Daddy. I almost fell.”

“We better get you some butterfly wings so that never happens again,” he said. He raised her up and down a few times. Then said, “Hup!”

She bent at the waist and grabbed his wrist, he let go of her ankle, and she hung straight down from his arm. He slowly lowered her until she was standing on the ground. “Want to do it again?” she asked.

“Yep.” He smiled. “Hup!”

Alice grabbed the beam and flipped upside down to hang by her legs, then pulled herself up to a sitting position.

“Hup!”

She stood, her hands out to the sides. “Pretend these are my butterfly wings,” she told Gene.

“Which?” he joked with her, pointing at her little hands. “The butterfly wings?”

“Yes.” She wiggled her fingers. “Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

“All right, good. Now you won’t have to get caught. You won’t get caught, and you’ll do it all by yourself.”

EVIDENCE
P47906

4/16/09 8:45
A.M
.

Sgt. Anthony Giles

My Favorite Place

By Alice Piper

Grade 2

Mrs. Major

September 15, 2000

My favorite place in town is Rabbit Run Road. This is a good name. There are rabbits on it sometimes and they like to run. Rabbit Run Road winds along downhill and you can see the river from it. When I get my new bike I am going to ride down Rabbit Run Road to school. It’s my favorite place in the whole town and I like how it is connected by roads like this one that have flowers and pine trees beside them.

My other favorite place is the barn behind our house which has birds in it (swallows). It has a trapeze and a rope and a loft. My father, Gene, painted the barn and now there are big tulips on it. You can learn how to be in a circus there. You can learn how to be an escape artist or you can read up in the loft or you can eat there if you don’t feel like going inside for dinner.

I would invite everyone to live there, especially my whole class. The river meets up with all other rivers and then goes into the ocean. We could find sunken ships like the ship called the Sea Venture which sunk in Bermuda in 1608.

Pirates are very good people because they let everyone
be a pirate. Mermaids attacked people in mythology. Some mermaids were 160 feet tall. In real life they were just manatees but not big. Pirates need to be on the lookout for Selkies which are people who turn into seals.

I love to swim with my parents and Theo and the river might be one of their favorite places too (mermaids). We could talk to them and put them in the circus. But it is a really bad thing to keep an animal in a cage or make them do tricks. They don’t understand it. Bears and lions don’t know what a circus is. So they shouldn’t be there. People think mermaids were sirens in Greek mythology with their beautiful voices, but sirens were birds, not fish. A siren is not a beautiful sound now. Mermaids have beautiful voices. But it is doubtful that we would be attacked by mermaids because apart from manatees they aren’t real. No one has ever ever really seen them. They only hear people talk about them. So you can’t prove they ever happened.

Wendy

HAEDEN, NY, 2006

P
EOPLE HAD ALWAYS
described her as “fair,” “big-boned,” “a classic country girl.” They remembered her mother at that age, remembered her aunts. They talked about her smile. How it revealed her to be a polite, well-loved girl.

People noticed and remarked that she had an easy relationship with traditions. Commented on how she liked cooking with her mother and grandmother. Wendy was someone who appealed to parents and teachers because she kept her thoughts to herself. Was not shy but had those rarer qualities: composure, common sense. Wendy always tried to play the hand she was dealt.

She wasn’t bothered by her family’s tight budget, accepted it as part of what made them who they were, gave them their sense of humor. She helped out and she made do. Wendy liked babysitting for her brother. She did filing and invoicing for her father’s drywall business. Her sister-in-law cut her hair for free every month or so into a blunt shoulder-length bob.

If she found this life boring, if it hurt or embarrassed her, she didn’t say so to her family. By comparison to many families around they were well off, and it would just be wrong to talk about it. Sometimes, though, she looked very, very tired. Sometimes she felt she had fallen asleep inside herself while she was wide awake working.

Being outside kept her happy. She went snowmobiling with her dad in winter, and in the summer she swam across the lake with the girls from swim team. She was a big girl and fit, and she loved to swim.

People called Wendy friendly. And practical. They praised her for not moving away from home until she knew what she might want to do. Said she liked home. And it was pretty much true. She loved her brother and sister-in-law and couldn’t imagine not seeing them or not seeing her nieces.

But there were other reasons Wendy decided to stay in Haeden. Working in the office it wasn’t hard for her to see when the money was coming in and where it was going. She’d been writing the monthly checks for White Walls loan payments since she was fifteen and setting them out for her father to sign. Making dinner in the weeks leading up to the holidays so her mom could work the Christmas-crunch time at Wal-Mart. Wendy understood the delicate balance of the system and her family’s part as people who were from Haeden. People who worked. And were patient. Did not take handouts, did not take student loans, did not run up credit cards or miss payments. Did not make a move until they knew right where they were going and had a solid thing like her dad’s business.

Wendy recognized the obliviousness of her friends, how they couldn’t seem to see the difference between each other’s houses, how they would eat a whole box of cereal at another kid’s house after school, not even because they were hungry, not even stopping to think where it fit in that family’s budget. And she hated it. Hated being the only one who saw it. Silently doing the math and making the petty point in her mind again, but never out loud.

It was because of her father that the Whites were not poor, and her father was one bad back or slip on a ladder away from having to reconfigure the balance of the whole family. She didn’t want to be self-righteous. And she didn’t want to draw attention to their situation. But it was senior year, and people were applying for school. And that changed some things. Made her feel things.

Every day she had to hear from friends who couldn’t wait to graduate and get out of this “hellhole.”

“But there’s nothing quite like a hellhole to raise kids in,” she joked.

And her friends laughed. All their parents said they had stayed there because of how safe Haeden was and how everyone knew each other. Yet that was what kids hated about it. Wendy wasn’t going anywhere soon and she knew it, but it wasn’t a big deal like the other girls made it out to be. It was stupid to make a fuss about something you had so little choice in. She thought it was funny that people wanted to be from somewhere big or dangerous. She could shrug off a couple of years at home and save money if she had to. Sometimes that made her feel tougher and smarter than her friends. Her dad always told her that was what built character.

“Anything I want to do, I can do right here,” Wendy had told Jenny Hollis, walking home after swim. She felt good saying it. She was fucking sick and tired of Jenny talking about SUNY Geneseo and how great the campus was, and what she bought for her dorm room, and how “intense” it was going be when she was finally bilingual and a physical therapist. Wendy was sick of Jenny, too, her bright red hair and round pale face and double chin. She looked like an eight-year-old boy. And talked like she was always earnest or astonished. Like she was giving a pep talk—worse, like she was giving a pep talk and was also feeling kind of sorry for herself at the same time, keeping her chin up even though people had let her down.

Jenny reminded Wendy of dogs she’d seen in obedience class who always looked out of the corners of their eyes at their masters, like they wanted to do something bad and the only reason they didn’t was because they had a choke collar on. Jenny wasn’t free or out of a hellhole because she was going to school. Jenny was spoiled. She thought her blob of features was pretty the way only rich girls could. Expensive shirt and no one notices you have weird-looking tits. Two years of braces and no one remembers that your real teeth were more crooked than the trailer trash
you won’t even talk to. It was gross. Wendy was freer and happier hanging out in her dad’s shop than Jenny would be trying to make people like her for her personality instead of the clothes she wore. Wendy wouldn’t miss this walk home at all.

“Yeah, but don’t you want to see the
world
a little?” Jenny asked. This also annoyed Wendy—when people talked about “the world” as if Haeden were another planet. Wendy stared at Jenny and knew the girl couldn’t read her expression, knew that she didn’t think Wendy was pissed or that she had her own ideas. Jenny was starring in a play about Jenny in her own head.

“Haeden is actually a part of the world, you know,” Wendy said.

“Uh . . . not really?” Jenny said. “I mean technically? But—”

“It’s not that big a deal to leave the place you’re from anymore,” Wendy told her. “Everybody does that. It’s more unusual to stay in your hometown—especially if it’s been your family’s hometown for a hundred years.”

Jenny looked at her pityingly. Wendy knew that the Hollises had lived in Haeden for 150 years, and so did everyone else, because of Hollis Road. And they had no problem coming and going. Of course they didn’t. Wendy suddenly felt like she might laugh out loud because smart, earnest Jenny didn’t realize the conversation they were having was about money.

At times like these, Wendy liked her family more than ever. But there was no way to say so without seeming uncool or poor or insecure. And then when she got home, she kind of couldn’t stand them again.

It wasn’t just Jenny or her parents or nieces who were wearing on her. She was beginning to talk back to people in her head and answer their questions in a funny way to herself. She knew her mother noticed. One time at dinner, her nieces and sister-in-law, Beth Ann, were visiting and being so loud, and her mother looked up at her with such a funny smile that Wendy thought she could read her mind. That they were making the same silent
jokes. Maybe her mom and all her aunts had always done this. Maybe she was only just starting to catch up to them.

Sometimes, out walking on Sunday with the girls and Beth Ann, Wendy had the urge to throw all her things in the river. All her things—her purse, her schoolbooks, her stupid jewelry, her shoes—she wanted to stand there at the bridge and drop everything, watch it go by in the current until she was free, not free of Haeden but of some person Haeden expected her to be and that she hadn’t been strong enough to resist.

Things got better in the fall when people left for college. Wendy missed them at first, even Jenny, but most of her girlfriends went to schools nearby, and she could visit them if she wasn’t working on the weekends. She didn’t like the dorms, which seemed trashy, and the hallways were too narrow. The campuses all looked the same: concrete buildings, mazes of parking lots and walkways. She liked it better when her friends visited home and stayed at her place, and they would go shopping, stay up late watching movies or drive into Elmville to go dancing. And it felt like her town now. She knew everyone, not only her friends’ parents and her parents’ friends—she knew all the working people. Liked the working people. Her friends only knew each other.

There were some boys from her class who had taken jobs in Haeden or Elmville, or lived at home helping their fathers out while they figured out what they wanted to do. But the girls didn’t. The girls always left.