The Little Friend (16 page)

“Randy? Is that your name?”

“Say yesm, Randy.” She jostled the baby on her hip. “Say, That there’s Randy and I’m Rusty,” she said, speaking for the baby in a high-pitched, acidic little voice.

“Randy and Rusty?”

Nasty and Dirty, more like it
, thought Harriet.

With scarcely concealed impatience, she sat on the swing tapping her foot as Allison patiently coaxed all their ages out of Lasharon and complimented her for being such a good babysitter.

“And will you let me see your library book?” Allison was saying to the little boy called Randy. “Hmn?” She reached for it but, coyly, he turned himself away from her with his whole body, grinning infuriatingly.

“It aint hisn,” said Lasharon. Her voice—though sharp, and richly nasal—was also dainty and clear. “It’s mine.”

“What’s it about?”

“Ferdinand the Bull.”

“
I
remember Ferdinand. He was the little fellow who liked to smell flowers instead of fight, wasn’t he?”

“You’re pretty, lady,” burst out Randy, who until this moment had said nothing. Excitedly, he swung his arm back
and forth so the pages of the open book scrubbed against the sidewalk.

“Is that the right way to treat library books?” said Allison.

Randy, flustered, let the book drop altogether.

“You pick that up,” said his big sister, making as if to slap him.

Randy flinched easily from the slap and, aware that Allison’s eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.

“Why don’t
her
say nothing?” said Lasharon, squinting past Allison at Harriet—who glowered at them from the porch.

Startled, Allison glanced back at Harriet.

“Is you her mama?”

Trash
, thought Harriet, face burning.

She was rather enjoying Allison’s stuttering denial when all of a sudden Randy exaggerated his lewd little hula dance in an effort to wrench the attention back to himself.

“Man stoled Diddy’s car off,” he said. “Man from the Babdist church.”

He giggled, sidestepping his sister’s swipe, and seemed about to elaborate when unexpectedly Ida Rhew charged from the house, screen door slamming behind her, and ran toward the children clapping her hands as if they were birds taking seed from a field.

“Yall go on and get out of here,” she cried. “Scat!”

In a blink they were gone, baby and all. Ida Rhew stood on the sidewalk, shaking her fist. “Don’t yall be messing around here no more,” she shouted after them. “I call the police on you.”

“Ida!” wailed Allison.

“Don’t you Ida
me.
”

“But they were just little! They weren’t bothering anything.”

“No, and they aint going to bother anything either,” said Ida Rhew, gazing after them steadily for a minute, then dusting her hands off and heading towards the house.
Ferdinand the Bull
lay askew on the sidewalk where the children had
dropped it. She stooped, laboriously, to pick it up, grasping it by the corner between thumb and forefinger as if it were contaminated. Holding it out at arm’s length, she straightened up with a sharp exhalation and started around the house to the garbage can.

“But Ida!” said Allison. “That’s a library book!”

“I don’t care where it come from,” said Ida Rhew, without turning around. “It’s filthy. I don’t want yall touching it.”

Charlotte, her face anxious and blurry with sleep, poked her head out the front door. “What’s the matter?” she said.

“It was
just
some little kids, Mother. They weren’t hurting anybody.”

“Oh, dear,” said Charlotte, wrapping the ribbons of her bed jacket tighter at her waist. “That’s too bad. I’ve been meaning to go in your bedroom and get up a bag of your old toys for the next time they came by.”

“Mother!” shrieked Harriet.

“Now, you know you don’t play with those old baby things any more,” said her mother serenely.

“But they’re mine! I want them!” Harriet’s toy farm … the Dancerina and Chrissy dolls which she had not wanted, but asked for anyway, because the other girls in her class had them … the mouse family dressed in periwigs and fancy French costume, which Harriet had seen in the window of a very very expensive shop in New Orleans and which she had pleaded for, cried for, grew silent and refused her supper for, until finally Libby and Adelaide and Tat slipped out of the Pontchartrain Hotel and chipped in together to buy them for her. The Christmas of the Mice: the happiest of Harriet’s life. Never had she been so flabbergasted with joy as when she’d opened that beautiful red box, storms of tissue paper flying. How could Harriet’s mother hoard every scrap of newsprint which came into the house—get cross if Ida threw a shred of it away—and yet try to give Harriet’s mice away to filthy little strangers?

For this was exactly what happened. Last October, the mouse family had vanished from the top of Harriet’s bureau. After a hysterical search, Harriet unearthed them in the attic, jumbled in a box with some of her other toys. Her
mother, when confronted, admitted taking a few things that she thought Harriet no longer played with, to give to underprivileged children, but she seemed not to realize how much Harriet loved the mice, or that she should have asked before taking them. (“I know your aunts gave them to you, but didn’t Adelaide or one of them give you that Dancerina doll? You don’t want
that
.”) Harriet doubted that her mother even remembered the incident, a suspicion now confirmed by her uncomprehending stare.

“Don’t you understand?” cried Harriet in despair. “I want my toys!”

“Don’t be selfish, darling.”

“But they’re mine!”

“I can’t believe you begrudge those poor little children a few things that you’re too old to play with,” Charlotte said, blinking in confusion. “If you’d seen how happy they were to get Robin’s toys—”

“Robin’s
dead.
”

“If you give them kids anything,” said Ida Rhew darkly, reappearing around the side of the house, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, “it be nasty or broken fo they get it home.”

————

After Ida Rhew left for the day, Allison picked
Ferdinand the Bull
out of the garbage can and carried it back to the porch. In the twilight, she examined it. It had fallen in a pile of coffee grounds and a brown stain warped the edge of the pages. She cleaned it as best she could with a paper towel, then took a ten-dollar bill from her jewelry box and tucked it inside the front cover. Ten dollars, she thought, should more than cover the damage. When Mrs. Fawcett saw the condition the book was in, she would make them pay for it or else give up their library privileges and there was no way little kids like that would be able to scrape up the fine on their own.

She sat on the steps, chin in hands. If Weenie hadn’t died he’d be purring beside her, his ears flattened against his skull and his tail curled like a hook around her bare ankle, his eyes slitted across the dark lawn at the restless, echo-ranging
world of night creatures that was invisible to her: snail-trails and cobwebs, glassy-winged flies, beetles and field mice and all the little wordless things struggling in squeaks or chirps or silence. Their small world, she felt, was her true home, the secret dark of speechlessness and frantic heartbeats.

Fast ragged clouds blew across a full moon. The black-gum tree tingled in the breeze, the undersides of its leaves ruffling pale in the darkness.

Allison remembered almost nothing from the days after Robin died, but one strange thing she did remember was climbing up the tree as high as she could, and jumping from it again and again. The fall usually knocked the air out of her. As soon as the shock jangled away, she dusted herself off and climbed up and jumped again.
Thud
. Over and over. She’d had a dream where she did the same thing, except in the dream she didn’t hit the ground. Instead, a warm wind caught her up from the grass and swept her up into the air and she was flying, bare toes brushing the treetops. Falling fast from the sky, like a swallow, skimming the lawn for twenty feet or so and then up again, twirling and soaring into air and giddy space. But she was little then, she hadn’t understood the difference between dreams and life, and this was why she’d kept jumping from the tree. If she jumped enough times, she hoped, maybe the warm wind from her dream would gust beneath her and lift her up into the sky. But of course that never happened. Poised on the high branch, she’d hear Ida Rhew’s wail from the porch, see Ida running towards her, panic-stricken. And Allison would smile and step off anyway, with Ida’s despairing scream shivering delicious in the pit of her stomach as she fell. She’d jumped so many times she’d broken down the arches in her feet; it was a wonder she hadn’t broken her neck.

The night air was warm, and the moth-pale gardenia blossoms by the porch had a rich, warm, boozy smell. Allison yawned. How could you ever be perfectly sure when you were dreaming and when you were awake? In dreams you thought you were awake, though you weren’t. And though it seemed to Allison that she was currently awake, sitting barefoot on her front porch with a coffee-stained library book on the steps
beside her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t upstairs in bed, dreaming it all: porch, gardenias, everything.

Repeatedly, during the day, as she drifted around her own house or through the chilly, antiseptic-smelling halls of her high school with her books in her arms, she asked herself: Am I awake or asleep? How did I get here?

Often, when startled all of a sudden to find herself (say) in biology class (insects on pins, red-haired Mr. Peel going on about the interphase of cell division), she could tell if she was dreaming or not by following back the spool of memory. How
did
I get here? she would think, dazed. What had she eaten for breakfast? Had Edie driven her to school, was there a progression of events which had brought her somehow to these dark-panelled walls, this morning classroom? Or had she been somewhere else a moment before—on a lonely dirt road, in her own yard, with a yellow sky and a white thing like a sheet billowing out against it?

She would think about it, hard, and then decide that she wasn’t dreaming. Because the wall clock said nine-fifteen, which was when her biology class met; and because she was still seated in alphabetical order, with Maggie Dalton in front and Richard Echols behind; and because the styrofoam board with the pinned insects was still hung on the rear wall—powdery luna moth in the center—between a poster of the feline skeleton and another of the central nervous system.

Yet sometimes—at home, mostly—Allison was disturbed to notice tiny flaws and snags in the thread of reality, for which there was no logical explanation. The roses were the wrong color: red not white. The clothesline wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but where it was before the storm blew it down five years ago. The switch of a lamp ever so slightly different, or in the wrong place. In family photographs or familiar paintings, mysterious background figures that she’d never noticed before. Frightening reflections in a parlor mirror behind the sweet family scene. A hand waving from an open window.

Why no
, her mother or Ida would say when Allison pointed out these things.
Don’t be ridiculous. It’s always been that way
.

What way? She didn’t know. Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

————

Pemberton Hull was driving home from the Country Club in his baby-blue ’62 open-top Cadillac (the chassis needed realigning, the radiator leaked and it was hell to find parts, he had to send off to some warehouse in Texas and wait two weeks before they arrived but still the car was his darling, his baby, his one true love and every cent he made at the Country Club went either to putting gas in it or to fixing it when it broke down) and when he swept around the corner of George Street his headlights swung over little Allison Dufresnes sitting out on her front steps all by herself.

He pulled over in front of her house. How old was she? Fifteen? Seventeen? Jail bait, probably, but he had an ardent weakness for limp, spaced-out girls with thin arms and their hair falling in their eyes.

“Hey,” he said to her.

She didn’t look startled, only raised her head so dreamily and vaporously that the back of his neck tingled.

“Waiting for somebody?”

“No. Just waiting.”

Caramba
, thought Pem.

“I’m going to the drive-in,” he said. “You want to come?”

He was expecting her to say No or I Can’t or Let Me Ask My Mother but instead she brushed the bronze hair out of her eyes with a jingle of her charm bracelet and said (a beat too late; he liked this about her, her lagging, drowsy, dissonance): “Why?”

“Why what?”

She only shrugged. Pem was intrigued. There was an … off-ness to Allison, he didn’t know how else to describe it, she dragged her feet when she walked and her hair was different from the other girls’ and her clothes were slightly wrong (like the flowery dress she had on, something an old lady would wear) yet there was a hazy, floaty air about her
clumsiness that drove him crazy. Fragmentary romantic scenarios (car, radio, riverbank) began to present themselves.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll have you back by ten.”

————

Harriet was lying on her bed eating a slice of pound cake and writing in her notebook when a car revved swankily outside her open window. She looked out just in time to catch a glimpse of her sister, hair in the wind, speeding away with Pemberton in his open-top car.

Kneeling on the window seat, her head stuck out between the yellow organdy curtains, and the yellow taste of pound cake dry in her mouth, Harriet blinked down the street. She was dumbfounded. Allison never went anywhere, except down the block to one of the aunts’ houses or maybe to the grocery store.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Harriet felt a small pinch of jealousy. What on earth could they have to say to each other? Pemberton could not possibly be interested in someone like Allison.