Keeper of Dreams (51 page)

That is not a nice thing to do.

So I turned around
again
and forced myself to swallow my fears and write
Magic Street
after all.

Someday, though, I’ll have at this tale again and see if I can make it into the book I think it’s supposed to be.

You want to know what Deeny’s life was like? It can be summed up in the sentence her father said when she got a cellphone.

“Who the hell’s gonna call
you
?”

Deeny said what she always said when her father, otherwise known as “Treadmarks,” put her down. She said nothing at all. Just left the room. Which was what ol’ Treadmarks wanted. But it was what Deeny also wanted. In fact, on that one point they agreed with each other completely, and since their relationship consisted almost entirely of Deeny getting out of whatever room her father was in, one could almost say that they lived in perfect harmony.

In the kitchen, her mother was thawing fish sticks and slicing cucumbers. Deeny stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what possible dinner would need those two ingredients, and no others.

“You’ve got a zit, dear,” said her mother helpfully.

“I always have a zit, Mother,” said Deeny. “I’m seventeen and I have the complexion of dog doo.”

“If you washed . . .”

“If I didn’t eat chocolate, if I didn’t eat fatty foods, if I used Oxy-500, if I didn’t have the heredity you and Treadmarks gave me . . .”

“I wish you wouldn’t call your father that. It doesn’t even make sense.”

Come on, Mom, you
wash
his underwear. “It’s because everyone rolls right over him at work. I feel kind of sorry for the old guy.”

Mother made a show of speaking silently, mouthing the words, “He can hear you.”

“Come on, Mom, you know what a nothing he is on the job. He’s nearly forty and so far the only thing he ever accomplished was getting you pregnant. And he only did
that
the one time.”

As usual, Deeny had gone too far. Mother turned, her face reddening. “You get out of this kitchen, young lady. Not that you
deserve
to be called a lady of any kind. The mouth you have!”

Deeny’s hand was already in her pocket. She pressed the button on her phone. It immediately rang.

“Excuse me, Mother,” she said. “Somebody actually
wants
to talk to me.”

Her mother just stood there looking at her, a fish stick in her hand.

Deeny made a show of looking at the phone. “Oh, not Bill again.” She pressed the end button.

“Who’s Bill?”

“A guy who calls sometimes,” said Deeny.

“You’ve only had that cellphone for a couple of hours,” said Mother. “How would he get your number if you don’t want him to call?”

“He probably bribed somebody. He’s such an asshole.”

“Deeny, that language just makes you sound cheap.”

“Well, I’m not cheap. I’m priceless. You said so yourself.”

“When you were four and used to sing that little song.”

“That little song you made me rehearse for hours and hours so you could show me off to your friends.”

“You were darling. They loved it. And so did you. I never saw you turn your back on an audience.”

“Oh really?” said Deeny. Holding the cell phone above her head like castanets, she sashayed out of the kitchen, heading for her room.

When she got there she flopped back on her bed, feeling sick and lost. It would be different if her parents weren’t right about everything. But they were. She was exactly the loser her father thought she was. And she wasn’t a lady, or darling, and she probably
would
be cheap, if she could get a guy to look at her at all. But when there are no buyers, what does it matter whether your price is high or low?

Even though she tried to tune out everything Treadmarks said, he made sure she never forgot for a single day how tragically disappointing she was as a human being. It’s like he couldn’t stand for her to feel good about herself for a single second. An
A
in a class? “Study hard, kid, it’s a sure thing you’re never gonna have a husband to support you.” A new top? “Why didn’t you leave it in the store where it might get bought by somebody who can wear that kind of thing?” At the office on the days she helped out after school, she tried to do everything right but it was never good enough. And if she tried to talk to him, ever, about anything, he’d get this impatient, bored look and about two sentences in he’d say, “Some of us have things to do, Deeny, will you get to the point?”

It would have been different if she didn’t agree with him. She really did screw up everything she touched. She really was a leper at school. She never got calls from boys. She never even got
looks
from boys.

It wasn’t that she had no friends. She had plenty of friends. Well, two. Both losers like her, when she looked at it rationally. When they were together, though, they fed on each other’s insanity and fancied themselves the superior of everyone else at school.

Rivka, alias Becky, always sneered at the popular girls’ sheeplike insistence on dressing alike and wearing their hair alike and even having the exact same half-inch of absolutely smooth, no-pudge abdomen showing between their thin little tops and their tightass jeans. Deeny kept it to herself that it was all she could do, when she saw those perfect waistlines, not to pinch her own little three-quarter-inch flab slab just to remind herself that skimpy little tops were only the stuff of dreams for her.

Lex, on the other hand—who had tried to get them to call her Luthor in fifth grade and Alexis in ninth, to which they had responded by calling her Blecch for an entire month—always mocked them for how airheaded they were. Even the smart ones. Especially the smart ones. Maybe Deeny would enjoy Lex’s wit more if she were actually smarter than the girls whose lack of brains she made fun of, but half the time it was Lex who was wrong, and it just made all three of them look like idiots.

Yeah, Deeny had friends, all right. The way some people got impetigo.

Not that she didn’t like them. She liked them fine. She just knew that, socially speaking, she’d be better off alone than hanging out with these two aggressively hostile Jewesses—the term they both insisted on.

All the way to school on the bus next morning (another mark of Cain on her brow), Deeny rehearsed how she’d get into school another way and absolutely avoid them all day, except when she had classes with them, which was every period except A Cappella, because neither of them could carry a tune in a gas can.

Yet when she got to school, her mind had wandered onto another subject—her cellphone, as a matter of fact—and it wasn’t till she heard Becky’s greeting—that endlessly cheery “Hey, tush flambee!”—that she remembered that she was supposed to be doing evasive maneuvers.

What the hell. Her social standing was past saving. And she didn’t care anyway. And besides, she had the phone. Not that she’d ever have the courage to use it.

So on their way up to the front door, threading their way among the other kids, Becky and Lex talked loudly on purpose so everybody could hear them being crude.

“Is there something about being Jewish that makes us have huge boobs?” said Lex. “Or is it because our ancestors lived in eastern Europe for so many centuries and all that borscht and potatoes made them cows?”

“I don’t have huge boobs,” said Deeny quietly. “I hardly have any boobs at all.”

“Which makes me wonder if you aren’t secretly a shiksa,” said Lex. “I mean, why do you even bother to wear bras?”

“Because I have nipples,” said Deeny grimly, “and if I don’t wear a bra, they chafe.”

“You’ve never heard of undershirts?” said Lex.

“You two make me sick,” said Becky. “These things aren’t accidents. God gives big boobs to the women he wants to send babies to. The boobs bring the boys, the boys bring the babies, God is happy, and we get fat.”

“Is that a new midrash?” asked Lex.

“So I’m meant to be a nun?” said Deeny. “Why didn’t he go all the way and make me Catholic?”

“You’ll get them,” said Becky. “You’re a late bloomer, that’s all.”

If there was anything Deeny hated worse than when Becky and Lex flaunted their udders, it was when they tried to make her feel better about her unnoticeables. Because she didn’t actually feel bad about them. She looked at what the two of them carried around with them and it looked to her like it was about as convenient has having two more big textbooks to carry to every single class all day.

So, as they talked about the curse of bigness—while sticking their chests out so far they could barely open their lockers—Deeny fidgeted. Her hand was in her purse. She was turning the cellphone over and over in her fingers. And somewhere along the line, without quite deciding, she pushed the button and the cellphone rang.

She ignored it for the first ring.

“These morons who bring cellphones to school,” said Becky. “And most of them aren’t even drug dealers, so what’s the point? What kind of emergency is it where someone says, ‘Quick! Call a teenager! Thank God they’re all carrying cellphones now!’ ”

Perfect moment, thought Deeny. Because she was actually blushing for real, just imagining the embarrassment of pulling out a cellphone in front of Becky at this exact moment. So . . . she pulled out the cellphone and pushed the
TALK
button.

Of course, all that happened was that the “test ring” shut off and the last number called got dialed—but since that number was her home phone, and nobody was there during the day, and her last-century parents didn’t bother with an answering machine, what could go wrong?

She held the phone to her ear and turned away from the others. As she did, she saw both Becky and Lex do their oh-my-god takes.

“Not now,” Deeny hissed into the phone.

“Sellout,” murmured Becky.

Deeny knew she was joking.

“No,” said Deeny. “I told you no.”

“She’s dealing,” said Lex. “I knew it.”

“It must take every penny she earns at her dad’s office to pay for a cell,” said Becky. “How needy can you get?”

“Maybe her parents are paying.”

“Shakespeare based Shylock on her mother and Simon Legree on her father. I don’t think so.”

“Oh, right, from Shakespeare’s famous play
Uncle Hamlet’s Cabin
.”

As they nattered on, Deeny retreated farther from them and said, very softly—so softly that everyone around her was bound to be listening and hear her—“I told you I can’t talk at school and no, I wasn’t faking.” Then she punched the
END
button, turned the phone off, and jammed it back into her purse.

Becky and Lex were looking at her skeptically. “Oh, right,” said Lex. “Like . . . faking what? An orgasm?”

They weren’t buying it.

But she said nothing. Stuck with the charade. Let her face turn red with embarrassment. Walked to her own locker and opened it—no combination to spin, she had deliberately broken the lock the first day of school and made it a point never to keep anything in the locker that she cared about keeping. “So the homework elf didn’t come back,” she said.

“Oh, now she’s pretending that she doesn’t want to talk about it,” said Becky. “Like she isn’t dying to feed us some line of bull doo about some imaginary boyfriend.”

“There’s no boyfriend,” said Deeny.

“Give me that,” said Lex. And before Deeny could register what Lex was doing, she had snatched the purse right off Deeny’s shoulder and in an instant was brandishing the cellphone.

“Hey, give that back,” said Deeny. Immediately, those words made her flash on all the times in grade school when one of the Nazi children—i.e., the popular kids—grabbed something away from her—a sandwich, her homework—and how futile and pathetic Deeny had always sounded, whining, “Hey, give that back, give that back, don’t throw it in there, please, please.” Sickened at the memory, she shut her mouth and folded her arms and leaned against her locker to tough it out. Which might have made her look cool if her locker hadn’t been open so that leaning made her fall right in.

Becky smirked at her as she awkwardly pushed herself back out of the locker. “You know, if you had boobs you couldn’t fall into your locker. At least not sideways.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

“Redial last number,” said Lex as she pushed
SEND
. She was looking at the little LCD display. So she’d recognize the phone number at once, having called it a thousand times since they met in fourth grade.

Only Lex didn’t say a thing about the number. And when she held it to her ear, her eyes widened.

“Sorry,” she said. “Wrong number.” She pushed
end
and handed the phone back to Deeny, blushing as she did.

Deeny hadn’t known that Lex could blush.

“Well?” demanded Becky.

“Ask Dinah,” said Lex. “Apparently she’s been seeing somebody without telling us.”

Deeny was stunned. Lex was playing along. Unbelievable.