To Die For (18 page)

When I said that her head snapped around like she got an electric shock. “What are you saying?” she said. “What did you mean by that?”

See, I think it was me that put the idea in her head in the first place, saying what I did. It wasn’t her at all that started the whole thing, it was me. And now it’s me that told on her and got her in trouble. It’s me that deserves to rot in jail. No wonder everyone hates me. Sometimes I make my own self sick.

I should’ve just killed myself. It would’ve been the only smart move I made in my whole life.

She said she sometimes wished Larry would just die. Then they’d all be better off, including him. Because even though she didn’t love him anymore, she knew he loved her and she didn’t want to break his heart. If someone just killed him it would almost be like they were doing him a favor.

If he was dead, she said, then she could just start out fresh. Go to California. Take this new broadcasting workshop that she’d heard about at the conference in the city, only Larry said it cost too much money, and they were just taking advantage of people. Which just went to show you how he didn’t understand. Didn’t support her dream stuff.

“I know you’re going to make it on television someday,” I told her. “I just know it. And then I’ll be able to tell everyone we’re friends. Every night I’ll turn on the news and watch you and say, ‘See her? I know her.’”

“But now it looks like it can never happen,” she said. “Larry doesn’t even want me being friends with you anymore, because it takes up too much of my time, he says.”

“I couldn’t stand it if I didn’t get to see you anymore,” I told her. Which was true. Once I was friends with Suzanne, I’d look back on my old life, before, and wonder how I ever stood it. Before I knew Suzanne, there wasn’t anything to live for. “I’ll help you,” I said. “I’d do anything for you. I know Jimmy would too.”

It was like a movie or a soap opera. Nothing like this ever happened to me personally—I mean knowing someone that had something that big going on in their life. The kind of thing you only hear about in songs, it’s that intense.

“You’re the best friend a person could have,” she said. She said she’d been thinking, when she got on a talk show or something, she’d need a secretary. To answer her fan mail and so on. She wanted it to be me.

Right around then we got to my house, and she dropped me off out front like always, on account of I never liked her to see my mom, I was too embarrassed of her. So I just jumped out of the car and grabbed my books.

“You know what?” she said to me. “I think you’re looking slimmer these days. That diet’s paying off.”

F
IRST TIME
I
SAW
that Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is I said Erica. From “All My Children”? That’s who she reminds me of. If you put a brown hair wig on her. She’s got that same evil look in her eye. That same kind of attitude like all she has to do is wiggle her rear and the whole world will kiss it. She’s trouble, I said. You watch soaps as long as me, you get so you can spot the type.

Then when she started getting all pally with Lydia there. Well you tell me—what’s a credit-card bitch like that want with my daughter? You think she picks Lydia so they can trade recipes?

And Lydia. She’s what you might call bewitched. I heard about this on “Geraldo.” It’s not like the only way a person does it is hang a gold watch in front of your face and swing it back and forth. There’s other techniques. Mind control and such. You know where she lived, at that condo complex of hers? Number 6. Satan’s number. I could give you more examples. Plenty.

So my daughter comes home from school one day like she’s on drugs, she’s so excited. Talking about how she’s working on making this television show with this news reporter named Mrs. Maretto that said, “I can tell you got a knack for the communications field.” And how someday she’s going to be Mrs. Maretto’s personal assistant on her talk show. Is that a crock or what?

Now that we know what’s what, I’ve done some research. They had this show on one night, the Christian channel. All about how they sneak these messages in between the words of those rock songs there. Right before your eyes, they showed these videos of certain groups the kids all listen to, and then they played them real slow, backwards. I didn’t want to listen, on account of they could be doing it to me, right then and there, sneaking those messages in my brain, but Derek, the host, said, “Don’t worry, as long as you keep Jesus in your mind, Satan can’t ever get to you.” So I just did that.

And you know what you heard, when they played those tapes backwards? One of them, this group where all the guys look like they just swallowed Drano, they’re saying “Satan I love,” over and over. On this other one it’s “Kill the lord.” Can you beat that? And this is what our kids are listening to day and night? The very group this Mrs. Maretto person is evidently such a fan of. I mean, you don’t have to be Dr. Joyce Brothers to see the writing on the wall.

I know what you’re thinking. How does a mother let something like this happen to her child? And don’t think I haven’t asked myself that question. All I can say is, I had enough other worries on my mind I just didn’t face what was going on. I’m not well. Diabetes, if you want to know. They were telling me I might lose the leg. And look at me. I can’t keep the weight on. Then Chester up and left, and disability says unless I got a letter proving I don’t have a husband to support me they can’t send the checks, but how am I supposed to have a letter like that when the whole reason I need the check is I can’t find him, he’s gone? It’s a crazy world.

You see what you want to see. It’s like on “As Long as We Love,” where Jennifer won’t admit to herself her husband’s gay, even though she finds this picture in his drawer of Roger. And her mother said she saw them together at Le Café. I mean, the writing’s on the wall, but she won’t let herself see. That was me. I just had too much heartache already to deal with any more.

So when Lydia starts coming home with these expensive clothes from the mall, and jewelry, I just swallow my doubts. You should be happy, Valerie, I tell myself. Knowing you don’t have the strength yourself to take her places and buy her nice clothes, be glad someone else does.

She puts this picture of herself that Chester took one time, her and me in our shorts, up on the refrigerator, along with this diet the teacher cut out of a magazine. You should’ve seen the stuff the teacher wanted her to live on. Breakfast, one rice cake, whatever that is. Lunch was this milkshake kind of thing with fifty million ingredients you never heard of from some health-food store. They talked about potions on “Geraldo” too, incidentally. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on out there. People sacrificing their pets. Babies even. You don’t want to know.

She doesn’t tell me about none of it, unless I ask her. It’s like I wouldn’t understand, like I’m this vegetable sitting here. She just comes home, fixes these carrot sticks of hers and goes to her room. I try talking to her. “You’ll never guess what they had on ‘Oprah’ today,” I say. Thinking we’ll have a mother-daughter talk. Maybe she’ll open up. Kids that come from these broken homes, which I guess is what we have here now Chester’s gone, they need to get it off their chest. They were just talking about that on “Sally Jessy Raphael.”

But she doesn’t answer me. “I probably wouldn’t,” she says.

Can you beat that? It’s like this man I stopped in the drugstore one time and I asked him, “Do you have the time?” “Yes,” he says. That’s it. Yes. I mean, people treat each other like dirt.

I know she was hurting, and it was breaking my heart. Sometimes this boy, Jimmy, would come over and they’d sit out on the front step. They always pretended like they just had to work on this TV business, but really you could tell it was more than that. She was nuts about him, you didn’t have to be Kreskin to see that. Only one who didn’t get it was him, that all he could do was go all moony-eyed over the teacher.

It gets to be every day my daughter goes off for the afternoon with this Mrs. Maretto. Then round about supper time, which Lydia isn’t eating anymore of course, the boy, Jimmy, stops by to find out what they talked about, and was it him? If she had my daughter hypnotized, that was nothing compared to what she did to him. You had to wonder how the kid got dressed in the morning, he was going around like he was a zombie. She could’ve told him to go jump in the lake and he’d of done it.

I
’M WALKING DOWN TO
the beach. No place special to go. Just hanging around, looking for something to happen. Then she pulls up alongside me in her Datsun and rolls down the window. “Want to go for a ride?” she says.

I get in, no questions. Wherever she’s going it’s better than anyplace I had in mind.

“You shouldn’t be so trusting,” she says. “How do you know I’m not kidnapping you?”

“So what if you are,” I say. “Only if you are, you’d better not be looking for no ransom. My ma would be glad to get me out of her hair.”

She’s got her music blasting, same as always. “I had a boyfriend in the rock-and-roll business one time,” she says.

This isn’t what I want to be doing. What I want is to be kissing her. I want to be rubbing my face in her hair.

“He was a sound man for all these rock shows,” she says. “He got us backstage passes to see Aerosmith one time. I even met Steven Tyler.”

This was all pretty weird to me. Last time I seen her I was laying on top of her, fucking her brains out. Now we’re just shooting the breeze. You act like everything’s normal, when you both know it’s a fucking lie.

Seems to me it should work like this. Once you fuck someone, then everytime you see them after that, you just go right over to them and jump them. Go up to them, take off their shirt or whatever. None of this “nice weather we’re having” crap. Who’s she kidding?

Everyone tries to pretend fucking never happens. First your parents. You know they done it. Only once they’ve had you, they spend the rest of their life acting so fucking shocked any time you give them any idea you might be interested in a little nookie yourself. Like what kind of animal are you? When if it wasn’t for them fucking you wouldn’t even be there?

Mrs. Maretto, she was the same way. We’d screw our brains out one afternoon over at the clam flats and then next time I run into her it’s “Did you know we’re scheduled to do some taping next Tuesday?”

I’m going crazy from being this close and wanting to kiss her so bad. I’m too desperate to be like some movie star type, all cool and smooth. So I say, “We fucking today?”

She laughs. “Watch your language, James,” she says to me.

“OK,” I say. “We having intercourse?”

She don’t say nothing. Just keeps driving. We’re way out of town by now. No houses or nothing anyplace nearby. I can’t keep my hands off her one more minute. “Please,” I say. But no sound comes out of my mouth.

She pulls over by the side of the road. Opens her trunk, that has one of them aerobics mats inside. It’s blue, with pictures of all these exercises printed on it, in case you forget I guess.

She hands me the mat. She’s walking a little ways in front of me, so I follow her. I know what’s coming, naturally, so I’m getting pretty hot. I mean, it got to where basically the minute I laid eyes on her I’d get a boner.

“Here,” she says. She’s pointing to a spot on the ground with plenty of bushes around, so nobody could see us or nothing. Then she lays down and pulls up her skirt. For the first time it hit me that she never looked so excited about doing it as me. I mean, to look at her that afternoon you’d almost think she was doing her job. Not that I cared at that point, I was wanting to get in her pants so bad.

So we fucked. Whole thing was probably over in four, five minutes max. I just couldn’t wait, and that didn’t seem to matter to her.

When it was over, I was just laying there same as before, wishing we could do it again and knowing she was going to jump up in a second and say we had to get going. Only this time, she sits up but she don’t seem in her same rush.

“So,” she says, “We can’t keep putting off taking care of Larry. I’m getting all stressed out.”

“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea after all,” I say. “I been thinking about that. Maybe you two should just get a divorce.” I mean, up till this point, I don’t think I really believed she was serious. I thought it was kind of like a game, talking about killing Larry. I didn’t think it would ever really happen.

“I thought you understood,” she says. “But I was wrong about you. You don’t really love me like you said.”

“I love you more than anything,” I tell her. I wished I was better in English, so I could think of how to tell her. I just didn’t know the words for it. “Only I just don’t think I could kill anybody is all.”

“Right,” she says. She’s real quiet and cold all of a sudden. “I should’ve realized it was too much to ask. Forget it. Let’s just forget the whole thing. Forget we ever met.”

“Please,” I say. “You don’t understand. I want to be with you. I just don’t want to kill nobody.”

“Well grow up, little boy,” she says. “You can’t have the one without the other. You can’t ever be with me again so long as Larry’s around.”

I’m frozen there, just looking at her. That perfect face. Her golden hair. Her hands, with those delicate fingers of hers, that used to touch me all over. “It’s just that I never did something like this before,” I say. “It’s different from ripping off a cassette or something.”

“Well you never made it with a twenty-five-year-old married woman before either,” she says. “That’s unusual too.

“It would be better for everyone, you know,” she says. “Even him.”

I forgot how she figured that, but if I asked her to remind me she might think I was dumb. So I just said, “Right.”

“It would look like an ordinary robbery,” she says. “Nobody would ever know.”

“Yup,” I say. It’s like I’m hypnotized. She could’ve told me to stick a fishing knife in my own hand right then and I’d of done it.

“And then afterward of course, there wouldn’t be anything getting in the way of you seeing me anymore. We could get together as much as you wanted then. You could sleep over and everything.”