The Girl Next Door (9 page)
Their own garage blocked my view, though, so I couldn’t see what the problem was. I kept waiting for Meg to show up, to see how she was taking being called a stupid shit.
And then I got another surprise.
Because it wasn’t Meg.
It was Susan.
I guessed she’d been trying to help with the laundry. But it had rained last night, and it looked as though she’d dropped some of Ruth’s whites on the muddy, scruffy excuse for a lawn they had because you could see the dirt stains on what she carried, a sheet or maybe a couple of pillowcases.
She was crying, really crying hard so that her whole body was shaking as she walked back toward Ruth standing rigid on the landing.
It was pathetic—this little tiny girl moving slowly along with braces on her legs and braces on her arms trying to manage just this one small pile of whites tucked under her arm that she probably shouldn’t have had in the first place. I felt bad for her.
And finally, so did Ruth I guess.
Because she stepped down off the landing and took the stuff away from her and hesitated, watching her a moment as she sobbed and shook and stared down into the dirt. And then slowly you could see the tension go out of her as she raised her hand and rested it lightly, tentatively at first on Susan’s shoulder, then turned and walked back to the house.
And at the very last moment just as they reached the top of the stairs Ruth looked in my direction so that I had to throw myself back fast and hard against the garage.
But all the same I’d swear to what I saw before that.
It’s become a little important to me, actually, in retrospect. I try to figure it out.
Ruth’s face looked very tired. Like the burst of anger was so strong it had drained her. Or maybe what I was seeing was just a little piece of something—something bigger—something that had been going on unnoticed by me for quite a while now and this was just like a kind of crescendo on a long-playing record.
But the other thing I saw was what strikes me to this day, what puzzles me.
Even at the time it made me wonder.
Just before I threw myself back, as Ruth turned looking skinny and tired with her hand on Susan’s shoulder. In just that instant as she turned.
I’d swear that she was crying too.
And my question is, for whom?
Chapter Ten
The next thing was the tent worms.
It seemed to happen practically overnight. One day the trees were clean and normal and the next day they were hung with these heavy white sacks of webbing. In the bottom of the sacks you could see something vaguely dark and unhealthy-looking and if you looked closely enough you could see them moving.
“We’ll burn ’em out,” said Ruth.
We were standing in her yard near the birch tree, Woofer, Donny and Willie, Meg and I, and Ruth, who had on her old blue housedress with the deep pockets. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Meg had just finished her chores. There was a little smudge of dirt beneath her left eye.
“You boys gather up some sticks,” she said. “Long ones, thick. And be sure to cut them green so they won’t burn. Meg, get the rag bag out of the basement.”
She stood squinting into the morning sunlight, surveying the damage. Virtually half the trees in their yard including the birch were already strung with sacks, some just the size of baseballs but others wide and deep as a shopping bag. The woods was full of them.
“Little bastards. They’ll strip these trees in no time.”
Meg went into the house and the rest of us headed for the woods to find some sticks. Donny had his hatchet so we cut some saplings and stripped them and cut them roughly in half. It didn’t take long.
When we came back Ruth and Meg were in the garage soaking the rags in kerosene. We wrapped them over the saplings and Ruth tied them off with clothesline and then we soaked them again.
She handed one to each of us.
“I’ll show you how it goes,” she said. “Then you can do it by yourselves. Just don’t set the goddamn woods on fire.”
It felt incredibly adult.
Ruth trusting us ith fire, with torches.
My mother never would have.
We followed her into the yard looking, I guess, like a bunch of peasants heading out after Frankenstein’s monster, our unlit torches aloft. But we didn’t act so adult—we acted like we were going to a party—all of us silly and excited except Meg, who was taking it very seriously. Willie got Woofer in a headlock and ground his knuckles into his crewcut, a wrestling move we’d picked up from three hundred-pound Haystacks Calhoun, famous for the Big Splash. Donny and I marched side by side behind them, pumping our torches like a couple of drum majors with batons, giggling like fools. Ruth didn’t seem to mind.
When we got to the birch tree Ruth dug into her pocket and pulled out a book of safety matches.
The nest on the birch tree was a big one.
“I’ll do this one,” said Ruth. “You watch.”
She lit the torch and held it a moment until the fire burned down and it was safe to use. It was still a pretty good blaze, though. “Be careful,” she said. “You don’t want to burn the tree.”
She held it six inches or so below the sack.
The sack began to melt.
It didn’t burn. It melted the way Styrofoam melts, fading, receding back. It was thick and maultilayered but it went fast.
And suddenly all these writhing, wriggling bodies were tumbling out, fat black furry worms—smoking, crackling.
You could almost hear them scream.
There must have been hundreds in just that one nest. A layer of the sack would burn through to expose another layer and there were more in there. They just kept coming, falling to our feet like a black rain.
Then Ruth hit the mother lode.
It was as though a clot of living tar the size of a softball spilled out directly onto the torch, splitting apart as it fell.
The torch sputtered, there were so many of them, and almost seemed to go out for a moment. Then it flared again and those that had clung to it burned and fell.
“Jesus shit!” said Woofer.
Ruth looked at him.
“Sorry,” he said. But his eyes were wide.
You had to admit it was incredible. I’d never seen such slaughter. The ants on the porch were nothing to this. Ants were tiny, insignificant. When you tossed the boiling water on them they just curled and died. Whereas some of these were an inch long. They twisted and writhed—they seemed to want to live. I looked at the ground. There were worms all over the place. Most of them were dead, but a lot of them weren’t, and those that weren’t were trying to crawl away.
“What about these guys?” I asked her.
“Forget them,” she said. “They’ll just die. Or the birds will get them.” She laughed. “We opened the oven before they were ready. Not quite baked yet.”
“They’re sure baked now,” said Willie.
“We could get a rock,” said Woofer. “Crush ’em!”
“Listen to me when I talk. Forget them,” said Ruth. She reached into her pocket again. “Here.” She started handing us each books of matches.
“Remember. I want a yard left when you’re through. And no going back into the woods. The woods can take care of itself.”
We took them from her. All but Meg.
“I don’t want them,” she said.
“What?”
She held out the matches.
“I ... I don’t want them. I’ll just go finish the laundry okay? This is ... kind of ...”
She looked down at the ground, at the black worms curled there, at the live ones crawling. Her face was pale.
“What?” said Ruth.
“Disgusting?
You offended, honey?”
“Disgusting?
You offended, honey?”
“No. I just don’t want ...”
Ruth laughed. “I’ll be damned. Look here boys,” she said. “I’ll be damned.”
She was still smiling, but her face had gone really hard all of a sudden. It startled me and made me think of the other day with Susan. It was as though she’d been on some sort of hair trigger all morning with Meg and we simply hadn’t noticed it. We’d been too busy, too excited.
“Look here,” she said. “What we’ve got here is a lesson in femininity.” She stepped up close. “Meg’s
squeamish.
You understand how girls get squeamish, don’t you boys?
Ladies
do. And Meg here is a lady. Why sure she is!”
squeamish.
You understand how girls get squeamish, don’t you boys?
Ladies
do. And Meg here is a lady. Why sure she is!”
She dropped the heavy sarcasm then and you could see the naked anger there.
“So what in the name of Jesus Christ do you suppose that makes me, Meggy? You suppose I’m not a lady? You figure ladies can’t do what’s necessary? Can’t get rid of the goddamn pests in their goddamn garden?”
Meg looked confused. It came so fast you couldn’t blame her.
“No, I...”
“You damn well better say no to me, honey! Because I don’t need that kind of insinuation from any kid in a T-shirt can’t even wipe her own face clean. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She backed away a step.
And that seemed to cool Ruth down a little. She took a breath.
“Okay,” she said. “You go ahead downstairs. Go on, get back to your laundry. And call me when you’re finished. I’ll have something else for you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned and Ruth smiled.
“My boys can handle it,” she said. “Can’t you, boys?”
I nodded. At that moment I couldn’t speak. Nobody spoke. Her dismissal of Meg was so complete with authority and a strange sense of justice I was really a little in awe of her.
She patted Woofer’s head.
I glanced at Meg. I saw her walk back to the house, head low, wiping at her face, looking for the smudge of dirt Ruth said was there.
Ruth draped her arm across my shoulder and turned toward the elm trees in the back. I inhaled the scent of her—soap and kerosene and cigarettes and clean fresh hair.
“My boys can do it,” she said to me. And her voice was very gentle again.
Chapter Eleven
By one o’clock we’d torched every nest in the Chandlers’ yard, and Ruth had been right—the birds were having a field day now.
I stunk of kerosene.
I was starving and would have killed for a few White Castles just then. I settled for a bologna sandwich.
I went home.
I washed up in the kitchen and made one.
I could hear my mother in the living room ironing, humming along to the original cast album of
The Music Man,
which she and my father had bussed to New York to see last year, just before the shit hit the fan about what I could only assume was my father’s latest affair. My father had plenty of opportunity for affairs and he took them. He was co-owner of a bar and restaurant called the Eagle’s Nest. He met them late and he met them early.
The Music Man,
which she and my father had bussed to New York to see last year, just before the shit hit the fan about what I could only assume was my father’s latest affair. My father had plenty of opportunity for affairs and he took them. He was co-owner of a bar and restaurant called the Eagle’s Nest. He met them late and he met them early.
But I guess my mother had forgotten all that for the moment and was remembering the good times now with Professor Harold Hill and company.
I hated
The Music Man.
The Music Man.
I shut myself in my room awhile and flipped through my dog-eared copies of
Macabre
and
Stranger Than
Science but there was nothing in there that interested me so I decided to go out again.
Macabre
and
Stranger Than
Science but there was nothing in there that interested me so I decided to go out again.
I walked out the back and Meg was standing on the Chandlers’ back porch shaking out the living-room throw rugs. She saw me and motioned me over.
I felt a moment of awkwardness, of divided loyalty.
If Meg was on Ruth’s shit list, there was probably some good reason for it.
On the other hand I still remembered that ride on the Ferris wheel and that morning by the Big Rock.
She draped the rugs carefully over the iron railing and came down off the steps across the driveway to meet me. The smudge on her face was gone but she still wore the dirty yellow shirt and Donny’s old rolled-up Bermudas. There was dust in her hair.
She took me by the arm and led me silently over to the side of her house, out of sight lines from the dining room window.
“I don’t get it,” she said...
You could see there was something troubling her, something she’d been working on.
“Why don’t they like me, David?”
That wasn’t what I’d expected. “Who, the Chandlers?”
“Yes.”
She just looked at me. She was serious.
“Sure they do. They like you.”
“No they don’t. I mean, I do everything I
can
to make them like me. I do more than my share of the work. I try to talk with them, get to know them, get them to know me, but they just don’t seem to want to. It’s like they
want
to not like me. Like it’s better that way.”
can
to make them like me. I do more than my share of the work. I try to talk with them, get to know them, get them to know me, but they just don’t seem to want to. It’s like they
want
to not like me. Like it’s better that way.”
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