B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (7 page)

“Yes,” I said. “Other than that.” Other than the fact, I thought, that I drink too much, that I take antidepressants to get through the day. Other than the fact that I can only see my daughter in the presence of her father. Other than the fact that every morning I reach for someone and no one’s there.

“But how about all this?” I said, gesturing vaguely around the room. “What a success you are. This is an amazing house.”

She nodded. “It took a long time. It wasn’t like this when we bought it, I can tell you.”

“We?”

“Jack and I,” she said. “My husband.”

“You’re married.”

“Twenty-six years, yes. I never changed my name, though.”

“Twenty-six years,” I pondered. I hesitated to ask the obvious question, but she answered it for me.

“We have three children,” she said. “Two sons and a daughter. And a grandson.” She grinned.

“Really.”

She told me their names and what each of her children did for a living, but the information skated past my mind. I was thinking:
Two sons. A daughter. A grandchild.

“Frances, why didn’t you call ahead?” she asked me. “I could have given you something better than yesterday’s cake.”

“Oh, gee, Ms. Sparrow”—I could hardly believe I’d just said
gee,
but inevitably I felt like a child next to her—“this is great. Anyway, I—well, you know.”

“Hm?”

“I—” I avoided her eyes. “Well, I—I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

She looked at me and said quietly, “Of course I want to see you, Frances. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well—”

We left it. When I finished the cake and coffee she led me on an extended tour of the house, showing off all the gorgeous restoration work, the antiques, the furnishings. Like all people whose lives are centered on such things, she delighted in talking about how they found a certain piece or what condition a particular banister or wall or floor had been in when they’d bought the place. I didn’t listen to the specifics but I loved the sound of her voice—hearing it again. It was a bit huskier than I’d remembered, but I would have known it anywhere. Lucy had sounded a lot like her, I realized, but it was hard to think of Lucy here, in this shining well-scrubbed home, with this vibrant older woman next to me. In the sitting room I saw a framed photo of the family: Ms. Sparrow, her husband, the three adult children, all smiling in suits and formal dresses. The young woman in the photo held a baby in her arms. Nowhere in the house did I see a picture of Lucy.

“You know, I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Ms. Sparrow said as we sat down on a comfortably overstuffed sofa in the glowing, sunlit parlor. “How old were you back then?”

“Twelve,” I smiled.

“You were such a
serious
little girl,” she said. “I remember you in your very formal skirts. You wore bangs. And you hardly ever looked up from the floor.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You never made eye contact. You were very shy.”

I certainly wasn’t shy with Lucy, I thought; but with the rest of the world, that was probably true.

“And you had—troubles, yes? At home.”

I nodded.

“I remember Louise and Frank,” she said, looking vaguely at some spot near the ceiling. “I can see Frank mowing the lawn on Sundays in his suspenders, with a cigar hanging out of his mouth. No shirt.”

I chuckled, though I didn’t know why. “That was Uncle Frank, all right.” What I didn’t say was: They hated you. They thought you were trash.

“Do you hear from them, Frances? Are they living?”

“No, I—I don’t know. I never had any communication with them after the day I left Quiet. They don’t live there anymore—I just visited the house earlier today. Different people are there now. Aunt Louise and Uncle Frank are probably dead.” I tried to keep from sounding as cold about it as I felt.

“And your parents?” she asked. “I seem to remember…”

“They’re dead,” I said, quickly closing the subject. “A long time ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

We were silent for a moment. The light through the chintz curtains seemed to grow a darker gold, nearly the color of brass, as we sat there in the deepening afternoon.

“I still miss her,” I ventured finally.

She looked away. “Do you?”

“She was my best friend.”

“Yes.” She began to pick at a spot on the sofa’s arm where the thread was loose.

“I hadn’t thought of her in years,” I admitted. “My brain just…buried it. All of it. From that time. Everything. They took me away so suddenly at the end…You know, there was a lot of chaos in my life. My parents. Foster homes. Craziness.” I shook my head impatiently. “I don’t even remember a lot of it. There are years and years which are just blank to me.”

“I’m sure,” she said quietly, listening.

“But then I had this book thing—I told you about it—in Santa Barbara, and I realized I wouldn’t be all that far from Quiet. And I knew I had to come back. It’s the first time I’ve been in California at all since I was eighteen. I had to come back and just—I don’t know. See. Remember. Something.”

She nodded.

“And now it’s been
flooding
back,” I said. “I seem to recall everything now. Things I haven’t thought of in thirty years. About my parents, about Frank and Louise, that little school…about Lucy.”

She was silent, picking absently at the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “Should I leave?”

“What?” She looked at me suddenly, as if coming out of a trance. “Why on earth would I want you to leave, Frances?”

“Maybe you don’t want to talk about…”

“Oh my Lord.” She smiled, shook her head, patted my hand. “Sometimes there’s nothing I’d
rather
talk about.”

We were silent again.

“It’s nice,” she said, “to see someone again who knew her. There’s no one, now. No one that I know, anyway. I’m the only person I know who actually remembers her. Who has memories of her.”

“Well,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it softly, “you know me. Now. Again.”

She smiled and nodded. She looked very old, suddenly, in the yellow light.

“But you got past it,” I said, gesturing around the room. “You moved on. That’s good.”

“I moved on,” she agreed. “But Frances, no. I never got past it.”

I waited.

“You don’t,” she said, “get past something like that.”

She looked toward the sun-filled windows.

“You still—you still think about her a lot, then,” I said.

“I never stop thinking about her. In thirty years I’ve never stopped thinking about her. Not for one single day.” She looked around the room. “I put everything away years ago,” she said. “All the pictures, school assignments, the Mother’s Day cards, all of it. I couldn’t stand it. Neither could Jack. He said it was like living in a cemetery. This was back when we were first married. But,” she said, glancing at me again, “the family’s wonderful. Jack’s wonderful. He understands. So do all my kids.”

“They know about it?” For some reason this surprised me.

“Oh, of course,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to hide something like that. She’s their half-sister, you know.”

I nodded. The thought was strange.

“I wasn’t a good mother,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was too young, too inexperienced. Too immature. And I was gone too much.”

“Well, you worked a lot, I remember.”

“Yes, well…I was neglectful. Didn’t pay attention. It came from having a child at the age I did. And I’ve got to live with that. Later on, after…after what happened, I realized that I had to—I had to fix my life.” She smiled, sadly.

We sat silently for a moment.

“She’s buried near here,” she said. There was a long silence. Then she asked: “Would you like to go and visit her?”

—Six—

SOAMES ELEMENTARY WAS abuzz with talk of Lucy Sparrow’s friendship with the new girl—me. None of the talk was nice. From that very first day I’d isolated myself, cut myself adrift from my new peers by becoming pals with a girl who, I increasingly came to understand, was considered beyond the pale. The other girls made fun of her behind her back (she was fat, stupid, lumpy, dirty, except that she
wasn’t
), and sometimes even within her hearing. Soon enough, inevitably, I was included as well. In English class, first thing in the morning, Lucy sat two rows in front of me, while Miriam Doyle and Company sat two rows behind; as a result, I could clearly hear their
sotto voce
whispers, designed to carry both to me and to Lucy.

“Lucy’s here today,” one of them would say. “I mean
Lezzie.
”

“Uh-huh. I’ll bet she wants to kiss a
girl.
”

“I’ll bet she wants to kiss that
new
girl. What’s her name? Bitchy-britches.”

“
Frances
,”
one of them said mincingly.

“She looks like she lives in a concentration camp!”

Muted giggles from behind me.

“The fat girl and the skinny girl. They’re like Laurel and Hardy.”

“Nuh-
uh.
Laurel and Hardy were funny. They’re just gross. I
hate
lezzies.”

“Why doesn’t Lezzie wash her face, anyway?”

“Or her hair?”

“Or her armpits?”

“Frances could wash them for her.
She’s
clean.”

Giggles.

My cheeks would burn with rage and humiliation at such times. I would have fantasies of whirling on them, screaming at them to
Shut up!
and knocking their pretty little heads together hard enough to cause a resounding
thwack.
Although society tends to concern itself much more with issues surrounding high school, for many girls elementary school is much worse; the judgments there are swift, severe, and final, unleavened by any concept of empathy or pity and unredeemed by the tendency boys have to hash out their differences in sports competition or fighting. If it’s true that, as Sartre puts it,
L’enfer, c’est les autres—
“Hell is other people”—then it might be that, at least for some girls, Hell closely resembles the hallways and playgrounds of a typical elementary school.

Outside of class these girls were even ruder, and I quickly learned to be at Lucy’s side virtually every moment. For however cruelly they teased her, the abuse had its limits, because they were also afraid of her. She was much bigger than any other girl in the school, partly because, as I soon learned, she had actually been held back one year (“Fifth grade wasn’t too great,” she told me), but mostly it was just how she was built. Actual fights, common among boys, were a rarity among the girls, but nobody wanted to risk tussling with Lucy Sparrow. She was not only large, but intensely
physical
:
in the first days of our friendship I’d never done such running, such jumping and throwing and catching. Lucy would quickly become restless if I suggested we simply sit under a tree at lunch. She would always urge me to join her for tetherball or tennis (she wasn’t that much better than I was on the tennis court, but she hit the ball
hard
). It didn’t matter what we did as long as we moved—the faster the better.

Still, the bitchy behavior never stopped. Once or twice the girls happened to catch me without Lucy, and away from adult supervision: this happened one afternoon in the girls’ bathroom, when I realized on walking through the door that all three of them were standing there in a huddle near the sink. The smell of a cigarette filled the room. Melissa Deaver was the first one to see me, and for a moment she said nothing, until she saw that Lucy wasn’t following me in. Then all three of them moved in for the kill.

“Well, if it isn’t Concentration Camp,” Melissa said, brushing her gorgeous locks out of her eyes and moving toward me. I didn’t realize until too late that Susan Roselli had slipped in behind me, so that when I tried to turn to leave I was blocked.

“Let me go,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Miriam said. She was the one holding the cigarette. She took a long drag on it and blew the smoke in my face. “Nobody’s holding you here.”

“Fine.”

But when I turned, I bumped into Susan again.

“I want to
go
,”
I insisted.

“To the toilet?” Miriam asked. “Go ahead. Leave the door open. We’ll watch. I know you’ll like that. You watch your lezzie friend go, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t
lie
,”
she said, pushing me lightly on the shoulder. “Tell us how you watch your lezzie friend pee and then you can go.”

“I don’t watch her pee.”