The Murderer's Daughters (8 page)

“Why don’t you crawl back under your rock?” Janine said.

I sucked in my breath at her words. Reetha did remind me of a slug, all sweaty with a face like the goop around gefilte fish. Jagged pink lines on her forehead showed where her mother had scraped her against a wire fence.

“Why don’t you go eat shit?” Reetha reached over and grabbed the silver and gold crayons.

“Hey, we’re using those,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to snatch them out of her hand.

“Why don’t you have your grandma buy you some?” Reetha put her wormy face up to mine. “Look, Prison Girl! I found some new drawing paper. Maybe I’ll use it to line my box.”

I recognized the paper Reetha held, my father’s handwriting, the blurry Richmond County Correctional stamp.

“Dear Merry,” Reetha read aloud before I could grab the letter. “Grandma wrote me you got an A on your spelling test. Congratulations, Sugar Pop!”

Crystal tore the paper from Reetha, leaving Reetha with a scrap corner of the letter.

“Oh, it’s torn,” Reetha said. “Don’t cry, Sugar Pop! So, how bad was your mother that your father had to kill her? Was she a whore?”

Janine got between us. “How ugly were you that your mother named you Urethra?”

“My name is
Reetha
.”

I grabbed at the crayons she’d snatched. She screwed up her face to bite my hand, but I held on to the waxy tips anyway, tired of losing stuff to her. She clamped down on the tip of my thumb.

“Ow!” I screamed, letting go of the crayons.

“Retard,” Janine said.

“Wino,” Reetha screamed back as she grabbed the violet and red crayons next to Crystal. I hated her. I hated her so much I could have grabbed the scissors from the pickle container and shoved them in her throat.

“Ugly scar-face,” I yelled. “Everyone hates you.”

The next day I woke up with the kind of bad feeling you get when something is wrong, but you don’t know what. It was seven-thirty on Sunday morning, and breakfast was in half an hour. Sunday’s breakfast was the best meal of the entire week. Pancakes, three each.

I ran my finger along my chest. The smell of shampoo from my previous night’s shower hung in the air. I reached up to fluff out my hair from the ponytail in which I’d slept.

My ponytail was gone. A short, bristly stump stuck out from the rubber band.

I tried not to cry, not to show anything, because crying only made things worse at Duffy. I tasted the tears in my throat. I touched my head again, patting the stump where my long ponytail had been.

Reetha smiled from her bed. I dug my nails deep into my palms. Enid sat cross-legged on the floor—probably looking for crumbs to eat, the porky pig.

Everyone in the room stayed silent.

“What’s the matter?” Reetha asked. “Crybaby doesn’t look so cute today?”

Curls from my ponytail lay scattered on my pillow. My hands twitched. I wanted to run to the mirror, but I wouldn’t give Reetha that satisfaction. Instead, I snatched a thick hardcover book, the largest I could find, from Olive’s shelf and ran over to Reetha’s bed. Her pajamas looked like a boy’s, and she smelled like she never washed down there.

I grabbed the book with both hands, lifted it over my head as high as possible, and slammed it down on Reetha’s head.

“Ugly skank.” I hit her again, aiming straight at her forehead scars.

Reetha rolled over and kicked me in the stomach. “Stuck-up Jew-girl.”

“Stop it,” Olive warned. “Someone’s coming.”

I ran back to my bed and leapt in, clutching Olive’s book in my trembling arms.

Our housemother walked in. “What’s going on?” She inspected us bed by bed. “Merry, what happened to your hair?”

I bit down on my lip. “I cut it,” I said.

I faced the wall, tracing a doggy face on the dirty beige paint with my finger. Circle, circle, circle, tongue. Floppy ears. Everyone was in church. I pulled the stretchy headband Janine had lent me tighter, lower around my ears, pretending no one could notice how ugly I looked. Strings of long hair mixed with short curls sticking out like loose wires. The housemother said I’d have to get a pixie cut, which made you look like a boy. When the
weekday housemother for the older girls, the one who took care of haircuts, came tomorrow she’d finish Reetha’s job. I kicked the wall.

As soon as all the girls had left for church, I’d torn up my father’s letters and flushed them down the toilet. My hiding place had turned out to be useless. I walked my feet up and down the wall. Quietly. Because if Mrs. Parker-Peckerhead came in and found me doing it, she’d make me wash the wall down with the brown disinfectant that practically left holes in your hands.

You think people want to see your footprints on the wall, Meredith?
Mrs. Peckerhead would say as she handed me the scrub brush stuck in a pail of soapy water. When she made me move my bed from the wall and saw the real mess, she’d really punish me.
Look at this,
she’d yell.
Candy wrappers. Where did you get those from?

I’d be in big trouble for having my own candy stash. We were supposed to give any treats we got to Mrs. Peckerhead for the community box, but I tried to keep all Grandma’s treats, except, of course, I gave half to Lulu. Anything you handed over to Mrs. Peckerhead, you’d never see again, except for horrible things she didn’t want, like the dried apricots one girl got from her grandfather.

The empty room reeked of poison brown disinfectant and talcum powder that smelled like flowered feet. Duffy girls got it from John’s Bargain Store on Flatbush Avenue—those who managed to beg money from relatives if they had them, or steal it from the girls who did, if they didn’t—and sprinkled it under the cheap, scratchy dresses they wore to church.

Lulu walked in as I bicycled my feet in the air with my hands holding up my hips.

“Where are you going?” Lulu asked.

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

Lulu sat next to me. “Are you okay?”

“Reetha will kill you if you sit on her bed,” I said.

“I’m truly scared.” As if to prove her point, Lulu lay down, even daring to put her shoes on the bed. Lulu had become tough since she’d turned thirteen. Grandma called her a juvenile delinquent in training.

“Really, get off,” I begged.

“Okay, okay. Stop being a baby.” She switched to my bed. “So, are you okay?”

She pointed her chin at my head, and I tried not to cry, instead air-bicycling faster and faster.

“I’ll make sure they never do it again,” she said.

“No,” I screamed. “Don’t. It’ll just get worse. I know it. Unless you kill them. Ha ha.” I reached up and felt where hairs popped out of the headband. “Why does she hate me?”

“Because of Daddy,” Lulu said.

“You blame everything on him.”

“How’s Grandma?” Lulu always changed the subject the minute Daddy came up.

“She’s okay.” I banged my feet against the railing on the end of the bed. “Daddy said to say hello.”

“Did I ask?” Lulu turned on her side, facing me, cradling her head in her hand.

I sat up and crossed my legs. “Lulu, do you think Daddy will be alive in twenty or thirty years?”

Lulu frowned. “Why?”

“Because he said maybe he’d get out then—in twenty or thirty years.” I studied my sister’s face.

“He’ll probably be alive. Unless somebody kills him in prison.”

“Don’t say that.” I drew up my knees and put my chin down, tucking in my face. “Don’t you miss having parents, Lu?” I said to a scab on my knee.

“I just don’t think about it.” Lulu poked me with her foot. “Neither should you. Forget it. It’s over. Come on down to the rec room. We’ll play Clue.”

“Do you think I might die here?” I asked.

Lulu grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up. “Why are you asking that?”

“What if someone here kills me?”

That wasn’t what I really meant. What I really meant was, What if I killed someone? Then I really would be Prison Girl.

“I hate it here. I don’t want to grow up here.” I pushed Lulu away and fell back on my bed. “I’d rather be dead than live here.”

Merry drove me nuts as we walked toward Grandma’s house. Every step I took, she insisted that I move faster. I couldn’t rush enough for her, and she refused to copy my snail pace. I lifted my boots through the slush covering Caton Avenue as though I had bricks glued to my soles; that’s how much I wanted to go to Grandma’s house.

“Come on,” urged Merry. She grabbed my arm. “We have to be there by twelve. For lunch.”

“Quit it.” I pulled away from her. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

Merry frowned from under the floppy hat hiding her pitiful haircut. Three weeks’ growth hadn’t helped her raggedy look, but more than her hair, I worried about her dying talk. She needed to leave Duffy. I could handle the place, but Merry wasn’t tough enough.

“She’s going to be looking out the window!” Merry hopped around me like a baby bird, her need to please Grandma making me insane. “Hurry.”

Grandma usually glued herself to the window, her chair angled so she could swivel her head between focusing on the television screen and
watching for us coming up the street. Saturdays were tough TV days for Grandma—no game shows, none of her stories—but she watched anyway. She said TV kept her company while she waited to die. Even when she read the oversize, large-print
Reader’s Digest
magazines she borrowed from the library, the television stayed on.

As we approached the red brick entrance to Grandma’s apartment building, Merry waved wildly toward Grandma’s window. “She can’t even see you,” I said.

“You don’t know for sure.” Merry yanked open the door, still rushing even though we’d arrived. The worn-out lobby smelled like an old mop. A messy stack of unclaimed mail almost blocked the mailboxes.

“Grandma can barely see.” I tugged at the hem of my short skirt as Merry pressed the doorbell next to Grandma’s name. I’d reprinted “Mrs. Harold Zachariah” last month when the ink on the old slip faded to unreadable. Grandma insisted I write “Mrs.” because she thought being married seemed more respectable. As I’d slipped the fresh paper rectangle into the brass slot, she’d said, “If they know a man wanted you once, they treat you better.”

Grandma went on for hours about old people never getting respect anymore.
Just look at these hippies with their hair hanging down to their
pupiks,
they look like ragamuffins. Do they even stop to say, “Hello, Mrs. Zachariah”?

College kids crammed four, five, and six into the thimble-size one-and two-bedroom apartments in Grandma’s building. She complained they were making the place into a beatnik building. Hippies were old hat to everyone in the world except Grandma, who hated them. When I turned thirteen in July, she’d given me her only real jewelry, a pair of pearl earrings and a pearl necklace, scolding me all the while that a young lady wore something like this, not those crazy fruit seeds the hippie girls had hanging around their necks, and reminding me to give Merry the earrings when she got older.

Naturally, two days later someone at Duffy stole the earrings and the necklace.

Grandma buzzed us in. Merry raced up to the third floor while I forced myself up the scuffed stairs one by one. Odor of cabbage and onions fried in chicken fat mingled with the smells of patchouli and pot. I
recognized the pot because girls at Duffy-Parkman snuck into the bathroom at night and smoked it. Then they’d drench everything with White Rain hair spray to cover the odor. I totally expected the bathroom to blow up one day when some girl blasted White Rain while another lit a match.