Stop That Girl (4 page)

“You drew on a wall. Are you saying that wasn’t wrong?”

“Did you even
look
at it?”

“I want you to tell me right now,” Mom choked, “that you understand it was wrong!”

“Dr. Frost liked it,” I said. “She said people would be studying it for years.”

“Oh, my God, what am I dealing with?” Mom cried.

Tears began to flow down her face, as we motored down the highway.

“Mom?” I said, after a while. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better.”

“Can we stop and get something to eat?” I said. “I’m really hungry.”

“No, I just want to get home.”

“All I’ve had since yesterday is an orange,” I said.

“You can wait,” she said.

“Can’t we go back, and you two apologize?”

“What for?” my mother said. “I didn’t do anything!”

“I know, but—”

“We can’t go back.”

“Are you sure?”

“Be quiet and watch the road!”

I wish I’d said something like, If you don’t make up now, you won’t speak to each other again until I drag you together on a quiet Tuesday morning near the end of the century, which is a very long time from now. But I didn’t know that then, of course. Instead, I said something like, “Look at this neat thing I got for Kathy,” and pulled a small screaming head from the pocket of my clothes.

Life on Comet

It’s the first time we’ve been invited to a barbecue, a real barbecue with corn and steaks and lemonade, my whole family together with people from our neighborhood, and over in one corner of the yard, up in a leafy mulberry tree, our bare legs hanging down like exotic gourds, Leslie Foote is testing me on the solar system. We’ve been studying the planets at school.

“And Comet,” she says.

“No, there’s only nine.”

“You forgot Comet,” Leslie says. “It’s the smallest.”

“There is no planet called Comet.”

“Let’s ask my dad,” she says.

We swing from the branches, drop to the grass, and bound over to the adults, who are clustered under a bamboo trellis to keep from the valley’s grinding light. Bowls on the patio table brim with nuts and dips and sturdy chunks of cheese skewered on tooth-picks. Mom is holding Kathy on her lap like a shield.

“Hey, everyone,” I say. “So, there’s no planet called Comet, right?”

Leslie elbows through to her father, the party’s host, Mr. Foote. “Dad, tell her, there is!”

“What, doll?” Mr. Foote, insurance adjuster, former football star at USC, all-around-daddiest of the neighborhood dads, wraps his arm around her. His public concern over her knitted brow creates a stab of envy in me I don’t really understand. After all, Mom’s already convinced me the Footes are boring and stupid and “bourgeois” in a way that ensures we’ll never connect with them on any level.

I see Leslie’s brow too, but I know it’s a ploy. I say, “I’m just trying to explain there’s no planet called Comet.”

Roy says, “That’s right, Ann. A comet is a fragile chunk of matter moving through space.”

A bloodcurdling yell rises from the gullet of Leslie Foote, the girl who reveals her beauty secrets to me, like how she brushes her hair a hundred strokes a night, sleeps with a stocking on her head, and uses Prell.
“Comet’s the
smallest!”
she screams.

Mr. Foote shrugs and sends Roy a sporty wink, directing him out for the pass. “Yes, all right, and then there’s little Comet. Right, Weeks?”

Roy glances around the table at the faces of our neighbors, settles last on Leslie, then manages a sickly smile. “Yes, right, little Comet. Of course.”

“Told you!” Leslie says. I gape at Roy, and Roy forwards the wink on to me.

“No way,” I say.

“Here’s to Comet!” our neighbor Mrs. Lewis says, raising her martini.

“To the first man on Comet!” Mr. Lewis chimes in.

“Roy,” I cry out, “come on, tell her the truth!”

Then Leslie laughs and says, “Why do you call him Roy?” and I suddenly feel like I’m going to burn up. Doesn’t she know Roy’s my stepfather?

“Hey,
Howie,
” she yells to Mr. Foote.

“Move,” I say.

“You move!”

Now we’re in a pushing match. I make ground, then she takes it back, but she’s got linebacker blood. She’s going to ram me into the house.

“Break it up,” Mr. Foote says.

“Stop it!” Mom says, wrestling me from the grip of Leslie Foote. I shrug her away. “I think we’d better go home,” she says.

Kathy starts to cry, trembling on the bricks in her best shorts with sunflowers on them. “No, I want to be at the barbecue!”

“Helen, have a seat,” Roy says. “It’s just kids.”

“I’m suddenly not feeling well,” Mom says.

I don’t want this to happen. No. It can’t. I hastily dry my palms on my sides. “We’re having a good time, Mom, it’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just not feeling well,” she says.

“No, it’s because of this, isn’t it?”

“We’re going home now,” Mom says.

“Oh, well, nice visiting with you all,” Roy says, getting up.

“Seriously?” says Mr. Foote.

My mother has already bolted, out of the Footes’ backyard, down their ivy-fringed driveway, up our elm-shaded street, Kathy calling “Wait!” and galloping to keep up with her. Roy and I amble down the block, doing our worried little walks. The moment we enter our house and close the door, Mom yells at Roy, “Why did you let that monstrous little girl bully you into agreeing there is a planet called Comet?”

“For crying out loud,” Roy says. “I thought you wanted to make friends with the neighbors.”

“Do we have to pretend we’re idiots to fit in around here?”

“No one thought I
believed
it!” Roy says.

“You embarrassed Ann,” Mom says. “You embarrassed
me
!”

“So this is
my
fault?” Roy says.

“Stop making such a big deal!” I hear myself yelling at Mom.

“Don’t yell at your mother!” Roy yells.

“Don’t yell at Ann!” Mom yells at Roy.

“Stop . . . making . . . everyone . . .
mad,
” Kathy cries, hitting me with a pillow.

It’s all too much. I run outside and smash the tetherball around the pole in the driveway, over and over until my knuckles burn, then pace the fence. Late afternoon, Indian summer, the sun wilting the world, my sneakers leaving a stampede of prints in the perishing grass. It’s probably over 100. Smog covers the sky like a gray glove, and sometimes, when you breathe hard, it hurts. My chest feels heavy today. I edge my way back inside through the sliding door and find the house quiet, except for the sound of Roy flipping through a newspaper in the kitchen and, as I tiptoe down the hall, the intermittent sniffling of Kathy rocking in a chair.

Mom’s door is shut tight. She loves to pull the blinds and crawl into bed. And all of us in limbo until she comes out again.

In my room, the sun burns through the peachless peach tree, and I stomp over a purple throw rug that slips until I’ve worked it under the bed. Who needs it? I don’t like my throw rug, matted and full of burrs. And who cares if Roy’s not my “real” father. What’s so bad about that?

There IS such a planet as Comet, and we’re the only ones
on it.

Kathy nudges my door. She’s four, has strong square toes she can walk on the tips of, and always wants to pretend she’s something else. Like,
I’ll be the refrigerator, you be the
stove!
or any kind of animal, even weird, unappealing ones, like chuckwallas and musk oxen. “Let’s be frogs,” is all she asks today.

“I don’t want to.”

She hops over and grabs my leg.

“Go play frogs with Roy,” I say, kicking her.

She jumps on me. “I want to be frogs with
you.
”

I fall back on my bed. I’m tired, very tired. I haven’t been sleeping well. Last week we hit on the idea of rearranging my room: the bed against the wall, not sticking out into the room
exposed,
where killers can come at you from both sides. But it’s still not quite right. I’m often up roaming the house, knocking things over, and sometimes Mom has to tuck me back in, or bring me milk and pat my head, and I hear them saying maybe something is wrong,
maybe something’sbothering her.

“Want to make things fall into hot lava?” Kathy says.

I groan. “I guess.”

“I love that game!” says Kathy, running off to collect the supplies.

My room looks so innocent by day. Just a regular room painted pastel green, with white curtains and a big cork-board on one wall so I can pin things up. On it I’ve got flower-power stickers and
MAD
magazine covers and John/ Paul/George/Ringo and anything psychedelic I can cut out of magazines. And then there’s my bureau, and my bookcase, and my desk. It’s just right for me. Just about all I could possibly want in a bedroom. But I’ve fallen prey lately to so many bad dreams (people chasing me down halls, shooting through walls, and then suddenly the inside of a meat locker, full of horrible-looking sausages and flesh) that Mom finally took me to see Dr. Todd, esteemed pediatrician, who prescribed a bitter green syrup with a sedative in it. I can’t swallow it. I clench my jaw and it oozes out of my teeth.

(While we’re talking about my dreams, about how I’m gloomy and combative, and about displacing those feelings onto my pillow instead of my loved ones, I notice a family portrait on his desk. Dr. Todd and wife and four kids. Puffy-cheeked and greedy-eyed. Yet because they’re his, Dr. Todd displays them with pride.
We are the amazing family of Dr.
Todd!
is what these ugly kids seem to be bursting with.
Us!
The family of Dr. Todd! Wherever we go it’s great! Wherever
we are, it’s the best!
I want to stomp on the family portrait. I want Dr. Todd to tear off his mask and confess they’re a band of materialistic gluttons, and that he wakes every morning praying for a new life. But no. We have to talk about
me.
)

Kathy returns, her T-shirt rolled up around a load of victims. We build a huge volcano out of socks. One by one, we drop plastic animals and people into the center. I start to enjoy it. As they fall, we shout out their last words to the world.

“Oh, dear God, forgive me!” I cry, letting go of a duck, and Kathy giggles intensely.

“Why?” She laughs. “What did the duck do?”

Dr. Todd would say I’m
displacing guilt
onto the duck. Last week at school, new year, and there I am stumbling into the girls’ bathroom in time to discover some of the older girls wadding up paper and stuffing it into the toilets. Looks fun, so I join in. I’m grabbing paper hand over fist, flushing and stuffing, and at last I manage to create a wad that throws the toilet into cardiac arrest. It sucks and gasps and finally lets out one final burble. The next flush pours water over the top. “Way to go!” says one of them, giving me the nod and fleeing. I feel competent, a success. I leave wet footprints all the way back to class. But someone follows my tracks, and next thing I know I’m on my way to the principal’s. Miss Wrist.

“Now what? Last week five girls came into class after recess with their hair lathered up in shampoo. You were the ringleader.”

“Mrs. Hagman said her class last year was Head and Shoulders better than us. We were protesting!”

When I arrive home that afternoon, Mom opens the door and says, “Why?” Now I know we’ll never go to the back-to-school sales and get the white vinyl boots everyone’s wearing. I want them more than I’ve ever wanted anything. Mom says no, partly because of my misdeed, but also because the feet can’t
breathe.
I want to go shopping at real stores, but we never do; no matter how much I squirm and stand lopsided, my mother measures me and makes my clothes instead. They’re made out of strange fabrics and buttons she’s been collecting for years, and they hang on me like sandwich boards. Luckily my friends think I wear them to be funny.

Not everything’s funny. I cry when something unfair happens, like when Mom suddenly gets mad and disappears into her room.

And even when I’m mad at her, I’m always ready to cry thinking that someday, somewhere, Mom might not be alive. For some reason, I’m more afraid of that than anything.

Later, no sign of Mom, Kathy settled down in front of our black-and-white Zenith with a plum, and I have an idea. I take a pack of matches outside with some Oscar Mayer weiners. Half-burned coals line the bottom of the barbecue from the last time we cooked outside, and I attempt to light them. There must be a secret to it. I’m holding the matches until they singe my fingertips, winging them last second into the grass. It’s then I notice Roy staring at me from the back porch.