Durable Goods
by
Elizabeth Berg

Avon Books (Pap Trd);

ISBN: 0380723085

Copyright 1994

Hell, I have broken the toilet.  I flushed, the water rose, then rose
higher, too much.  I stared at it, told it, "No!"  slammed the lid
down, then raised it back up again.  Water still rising.  Water still
rising.  I put the lid down, turned out the light, tiptoed out of the
bathroom, across the hall, and into my bedroom, where I slid under my
bed.

Now I hear the water hitting the bathroom floor.  It goes on and on.

Niagara Falls, where the honeymooners go and do what they do.  There is
the heavy tread of his footsteps coming rapidly up the stairs.  I hear
him turn on the bathroom light and swear softly to himself.  "Katie!"

he yells.  He comes into my room.  I stop breathing.  "Katherine!"  I
am stone.  I am off the planet, a star, lovely and unnamed.  He goes
into my sister's room.  "What the hell did you do to the toilet?"

"I didn't do anything!"  she says.  "I'm doing my homework!  Katie
probably did it!"

"She's not even here," he says.

"She is, too."

Oh, my heart, aching and loud.

He comes out into the hall, yells my name again.  I close my eyes.

"She's not here!"  he says.  "So don't tell me she did it!  You did
it!

And by God, you'll clean it up!"

"I didn't do it!"  she yells, and I hear him slap her, and I know that
next he will drag her by the arm and point to the mess on the bathroom
floor.

That's what I was avoiding.  That's why I am under the bed.  I hear
Diane start crying, hear her go downstairs for the mop and bucket, like
he told her to do.

I open my eyes, breathe.  The next time I go to the PX I will buy Diane
a Sugar Daddy.  I look up at the springs in my mattress.  Uniform and
sensible.  Close together in straight lines.  Spiraling gracefully
upward.

"We live in Texas on an army base, next to a parade ground.  Every
morning when I wake up I hear a drill sergeant yelling pieces of songs
to the straight lines of men marching, marching, all stepping onto
their left foot at the same time, all dressed exactly alike, all
staring straight ahead and yellsinging back to him.  Many of them have
terrible complexions.  They sound like yelping puppies when they sing,
and I feel sorry for them in the same way I feel sorry for puppies:
their pink bellies, the way they do not know what will happen to
them.

The faces on those men do not react, they only obey.  It doesn't matter
that the heat is awesome, that it rises up in shimmering waves like a
live thing, it doesn't matter that later, when those men touch their
car door handles, their fingers will burn or that their feet will sink
slightly in the sun-softened asphalt of the parking lot.  On the
marching field, there are no trees.  The men's skin will turn pink,
then red, but they will not react.  Once I saw a man collapse from the
heat, fall neatly out of line, and lie still.  None of the other men
came to make a circle of concern around him.  They just kept on
marching, and in a while an army green truck pulled up next to the
field and two men got out with a matching stretcher.

My best friend, Cherylanne, and I play with the heat.  We take off our
shoes and, at high noon, walk on blacktop.  The one who gets farthest,
wins.

Also, we make sun tea, and occasionally we try to fry eggs on the
sidewalk.  They don't cook through.  The white becomes solid at the
edges only.  We call Riff, the dog who lives down the block and is
always loose, to come and eat the eggs from the sidewalk.

He does a pretty good job, wagging his tail to beat the band the whole
time.  Then we hose the sidewalk off.  And then we hose each other off,
stun ourselves with the sudden cold.

Cherylanne is fourteen, and she is pretty.  I am twelve and I am not,
although Cherylanne said this is the awkward stage and I could just as
likely get better.  We watch.

Our houses are connected in a row of other houses, six units all in a
brick rectangle.  Cherylanne lives right next door to me.  When we sit
out on our front porches, we can nearly lean over and touch.

Our fathers' names and ranks are posted outside our doors, above our
mailboxes.  We have look-alike bushes in the front and the back.

Before we moved to Texas, my father came home with cowboy hats for all
of us.  "This is not a joke," he said.  "You'll have to wear these down
there.  It's some serious heat."  My mother was alive then and he put a
hat on her first.  It was white.  He stepped back, regarded her while
she held statue-still.  Then he smiled and so did she.  He never hit my
mother.

She was the place where he put his tenderness.  And I knew she loved
him in a way that was huge, but also that she was afraid of him.

Otherwise, she would not have laughed when she was being most serious
with him.  And she would have stopped him sometimes, like when he
lunged up at us at the dinner table.  Once, Diane was eating corn when
he hit the back of her head, and the corn all fell out of her mouth.

At first, I thought it was her teeth.  I saw my mother clench her
napkin, raise her fist the slightest bit, then lower it.  I could feel
an invisible part of her reach out to touch Diane, then come to hold
me, too.

(diane has a boyfriend.  Sometimes when they are down in the basement
listening to records I hear her giggle and whisper, "Why don't you act
right?"  This sets my imagination aflame.

I lie naked on my bed in the afternoons when no one is home.  I find a
place in the sun, where the light is good, and look to see if anything
is happening.  Nothing is ever happening.  "You should see some hair
coming in by now," Cherylanne tells me.  She has her period.  She has
everything.  Nothing is happening to me.  "If you want to know how it
feels to have breasts, put some socks in your sister's bra and wear it
around some," Cherylanne said.  I did it.  It felt fine.  I put on one
of Diane's sweaters, too, then felt myself in a line from my throat
clear to my hips.  I tied a scarf around my neck, put on Diane's
reddest lipstick, stared into the mirror.  "Why don't you " I stopped,
put some Evening in Paris behind my ears.  Then, "Why don't you act
right?"  I said.  I smiled, showing no teeth.  Mysterious.  "Why don't
you just act right, Dickie?"  That is his name.  Dickie.

after an hour or so, I come out from under my bed.  Diane is back in
her room.  She is not crying anymore.  I think my father is probably in
the living room, watching television.

I move down the stairs, holding on to the wall to steady my steps.  I
can hear the television.  Bonanza Good.  I go past the living room, out
through the kitchen and the back door.  Then I come in through the
front and bang the screen door so he'll be sure to hear it.  I go into
the living room, stand before him.  Not in the way of the television.

"Hi, Dad."

"Where've you been?"

"Cherylanne's."

He adjusts the toothpick in his mouth.  "Did you finish your
homework?"

"We didn't have any."

"Go to bed."

"All right."

When I am halfway up the stairs, he says, "Come here, and you can take
my boots off for me."

I sit on the floor before him, unlace his combat boots.  My father is
important in the army, a colonel.  Men on the street salute our car.

Sometimes it was only my mother and me, but they didn't know.  They
stopped, stood up serious straight, and saluted us while we drove past,
giggling.

I like unlacing his boots.  I only have to remember not to make a face
at how his feet smell when I get done and take the boots off.  They are
to be lined up by his chair.  Left boot to my right.  Right boot to my
left.  Sometimes I say this to myself when I am showering.

Diane opens her door as I am going into my bedroom.  She stands mute,
which is worse than anything she could say.

"Hey," I say.

"You broke the toilet and I had to clean up."  Her arms are crossed
over her chest.  The charms on her bracelet hang still.

"How do you know?"  I ask.

she says.

_ _ _ _ She slams her door.  I knock on it.  "Get lost," I consider
this.  Then I knock again.  Nothing.  "I don't know anything about
this," I say through the door.  "I went to the bathroom, okay, and then
I went to Cherylanne's.  I didn't know the toilet broke."

She opens her door.  Maybe she'll let me in.  She has pictures of Elvis
Presley taped to her mirror.  She has a fuzzy pink rug on the floor,
many bottles of perfume on a lacy metal tray, a huge stuffed tiger on
her bed that Dickie won for her at a fair.  But she doesn't let me
in.

She says, "You were under your bed, you little liar."

I swallow, blink.  She shuts her door again.  I go into my bedroom and
write her a note saying I'm sorry.  I sign it and slide it under her
door.

Well, I lied about no homework and so I must do my math by flashlight
under my covers.  The long division makes me cry.  First, I put down
six, and that's too much.  Then I put down five, and that's too
little.

Then I put down six, and that's too much.  I erase and erase, make
holes in the paper.

dickie is waiting for Diane.  He is standing out in the street beside
his truck.  That's how perfect he is, he drives a truck.  I watch him
from the window for a while, then come out to tell him Diane's almost
ready.

"Okay," he says.  "Thanks."  He smiles at me, revealing his dimples.

One thing I love is dimples.  I have tried to make them for myself by
taping plum seeds to my cheeks as I sleep at night, by corkscrewing my
fingers into my face during the day as often as I can remember.  So
far, nothing.

Dickie has on a clean white T-shirt and blue jeans, and black cowboy
boots.  He has green eyes and very black hair, wet-combed carefully
into a perfect ducktail.  He smokes.  When he smiles at me, I smile
back, then laugh a little.  It just happens, like when you drop a plate
loud in front of the whole restaurant.  Giggle, giggle, giggle, like a
dope.  I hate myself.

"What are you up to tonight?"  he asks.

I shrug.  "Maybe the movies."

"Uh huh."  He is tossing his keys from hand to hand.  There is a square
piece of gold hanging from them.  It has his initials: D.M. Dickie Mac,
that's his name.  Once I heard Diane say, "D.M. Know what that stands
for?  Damn man."

She was leaning back against the door when she said that, her face
turned partly away from him.  She had taken his keys, wouldn't give
them back.

"Come on, Diane," he said.  "I've got to go.  Give me my keys."

"What'll you give me?"  she asked, her eyebrows raised like a
teacher's.

She knows everything, Diane.  She knows how to do everything.

After Dickie drives away with Diane, I ask Cherylanne to come over.  I
say to inspect me good, and never tell.  I think there is something
wrong.  I undress, and she looks me over.  "Turn to the side," she
says.

And then, sighing, "Hold in your stomach.  Good Lord, if you're going
to be a girl, you want to learn some things."  She regards me silently,
and my heart sinks lower and lower until she shrugs and says, "Well,
I'd say you have breast buds.  I mean, you can tell they're getting
ready to come out."

"Thank you," I say.  My relief loosens up my insides back to normal.

She lies down on my bed, spreads herself out like a starfish.  "You can
come over for dinner if you want," she says.  "We're fixing to eat.  My
mom made chili."

Cherylanne's mother is named Belle.  She's lived in the same town in
Texas her whole life.  She uses bacon in her chili, and a lot of
salt.

I once watched her put the salt in, shaking and shaking the round
silver container for about fifteen minutes, I swear.  That chili is
good, though.  You always want more.

Belle was good friends with my mother.  Near the end, my mother called
her one day and said, "Oh, please, Belle.  Take her for a while.  For
God's sake.  She keeps...playing her flutophone...for me."

Those days, my mother always sounded like she was saying a poem.  She
couldn't do a whole sentence, it took too much air.  So she would say
pieces like that.  Sometimes, even if you felt bad she was dying, you'd
want to yell, "What!  Just say it!"

Even if you were loving her so much, your fists clenched and your heart
feeling like it had a tight peel around it, you would get mad like
that.

I had to go over to Cherylanne's house until my dad came home.  My
mother didn't know I'd heard her on the phone.  She just told me
Cherylanne wanted me to come over.  I played crazy eights with my head
stuck down.  I'd thought my music might help the pain.

Belle is not a friend to my father.  She doesn't much speak to him.

She likes me, though.  When I eat there she serves me first, and sends
me home with leftovers.  Plus, she won't let Bubba, Cherylanne's
sixteen-year-old brother, tease me, and she lets him do anything else
in the wide world he feels like.  There's nothing about Bubba that
Bubba doesn't like.  he rolls his T-shirt sleeves high up, looks at
himself in every mirror everywhere, even the toaster, with one eyebrow
up a little.  His brain must be near worn out with making up
compliments for him to give himself.

Cherylanne hates Bubba.  She says he is an uncivilized being that no
woman will ever love, that he does not know the first thing about
elegant living.  Once he hit her in the stomach and knocked the air out
of her and their mother didn't do a thing about it.  Cherylanne says
her stomach is permanently bruised and that she could get cancer when
she grows up on account of Bubba.  "this I will never forgive," she
said the night he did it.  I felt bad for her, that her stomach got
ruined so young in life.

She was crying a little, I could see the tears trapped in her lashes.

"Oh, Lord," she said suddenly, closing her eyes and leaning her head
back, "please don't give me cancer of the stomach.  I have a lot of
living to do.  Amen."

"Amen," I answered, humbled as always by the thought that He might
actually hear.

9 am in bed when I hear Diane come home.

My father is waiting.  I hear him start to yell.  She is late, I
guess.

No.  It's not that.  It's her outfit.  He follows her up the stairs.

"All in black," he says.

"What the hell is that?  A rebel or something?  Are you a rebel?"  She
doesn't answer.  I hear her door shut quietly, but then he opens it.

"I asked you a question!"

"No," she says low.  "I am not a rebel."

"You will not wear all black."

Nothing.  I know she is standing there, looking at him straight on.

"Is that clear?"  he says.

"Yes."

"Black is what whores wear!"

"You should know," Diane says, unbelievably.

I hear furniture scrape across her floor.  He pushes her sometimes
before he hits her.  I put the pillow over my head.  I live on a farm,
alone, with many animals.  The sky overhead is flat and deep blue.  No
clouds.

if am going to make Dickie Mac fall in love with me," I tell
Cherylanne.

She is dropping peanuts into a Dr Pepper.  She takes a chew and a
swallow.  "Huh!"

"I can do it," I say.  "And then I'm going away with him."

"Where to?"

"Not Texas."

"Well," she says, "I suppose not.  I suppose New York City."

"I suppose gay Paree," I say.  "I suppose I could go anywhere I want to
that isn't here."

"I suppose your nose is a garden hose," she says, inspecting her
manicure.  Bride's Blush, frosted.  Two coats, with a thorough drying
in between.  Your nails tell a lot about you, Cherylanne says.  A good
manicure is a big part of being well dressed.  Dial the phone only with
a pencil or a pen.  Eat gelatin.

"Well, you can say what you want," I tell her.  "I am serious."

"I suppose your brain is insane," she says.  "Your mind's in your
behind."  She will go on that way, sometimes.

"I mean it," I say.  "I'm leaving here soon.  I'm just telling you."

"Well, Dickie Mac will not take you anywhere.  You don't even have your
figure!"

"So?"

"Men don't run away with girls who are twelve."  She says "twelve" like
she can smell it.

"Oh, I believe they do," I say.  "I have read many a time about that
very thing."

Cherylanne snorts.  "I'm sure.  Where?"

"In novels," I say.  I hat will quiet Cherylanrle down.  She doesn't
read novels.  I believe if you asked her what a novel was, she would
only say, "a book."  It's magazines for Cherylarlne.  She fans them out
on her made bed, saves back issues on the floor of her closet.  She
likes the beauty tips, the romance stories with illustrations of women
with their hair blowing beautifully, the advice columns, the quizzes.

She likes to compare her tan with the progressively darker girls in
the Coppertone ads.  She is second from the best.  "Your gold will
always show up best next to a tan," she tells me.  "The darker you get,
the better you'll look in white.  You want to go for the dramatic
look."  Also, she likes to send away for the things she sees advertised
in the back pages: Garden of Eden Bust Developer, Ever Ageless Night
Cream.  She spends every cent she makes baby sitting on things that
don't work.

"I'm having a party tonight," Cherylanne says.  "And Paul Arnold is
coming."  Paul Arnold, number two next to Dickie Mac.  I try to hold my
face still.  "You want to come?"  she asks.

I shrug.  "Okay.  Who else is coming?"

"Jerry Runk.  Vicky Andrews.  Bill O'Connell.  Gary and Tim Nelson.

Randy Dreaver."

"No other girls?"  I ask.

She is incredulous.  "What for?"

> am under my bed, thinking about the party.  The sun is setting, it is
almost time.  Cherylanne's father ordered a whole case of Coca-Cola.

Belle has set out bowls full of potato chips and pretzels and
California French onion dip.  They will stay in their bedroom while
Cherylanne has the party.  They always do this, at her request.  "You
don't want older people at your parties," she says.  "You want your
guests to feel they can be themselves, and mix."  I know it is more
than that.  Cherylanne likes to play kissing games, spin the bottle.

The kissers go into the kitchen.  I guard the door.  So far, I have not
played.  But tonight will be the night.

I push one hand up idly against the bedsprings, consider whether to
shave my legs.  Cherylanne advised me to.  "The boys call you Gorilla
Legs," she said, confidentially.  And then, seeing the shame in my
face, she said, "Well, they like you.  But they have...noticed."

I recall the nonchalance with which I have displayed myself - legs
stretched out on the lawn before me in the early evening when the boys
out on their bikes stop to talk, legs wet from the swimming pool, the
hair (I now realize with horror) pressed flat and dark against them,
sickening rivulets of water making their zigzag way down, legs revealed
beneath the straight skirts I wore to school in the hopes that they
made me more appealing than the full ones.  Oh, I hadn't known.  I
hadn't known.

Cherylanne knew what to do.  "Get Diane's razor," she said, "and your
dad's shaving cream.  Then soap your legs up good, and go real slow so
you don't cut yourself.  Go all the way up to the top.  You want
everything silky smooth, even the parts you can't see."  I felt one of
Cherylanne's legs.  There were sharp bristles that felt like pushing
your flat hand against a hairbrush.  "This is not silky smooth," I
said.

"Because," she said icily, "I have not shaved yet.  You want to
shave just before the event.  And when I do shave, my legs will be
exactly silky smooth."

"Okay," I said.

Silence from her, except for a short little sniff.

I shrugged, apologized.

Of course I intend to do exactly as she says, except for the shaving
cream part.  Cherylanne doesn't know everything.

I slide out from under my bed, stand at the top of the stairs, yell
down, "Anyone home?"  No answer.

I fill the bathtub with water, get Diane's razor from the linen
closet.

I will shave my legs and tonight I will dance a slow dance with Paul
Arnold.  Sometimes we call ladies' choice.  I get into the tub, soap up
my legs, hold the razor above my ankle, and begin.  I feel a thrill at
the back of my neck.  "I'll be out in a minute," I say.  "I'm just
shaving my legs."

And then, "Well, I was a little late.  I had to finish shaving my
legs."  The thrill travels down into the core of me, splays out like
fireworks.

I pull the razor up in straight, careful lines.  It is not so hard.  I
relax.  There are some other things I need to think about, to remember,
about tonight.  Keep my chin Up.

Cherylanlle at first advised looking down somewhat, in order to make
the boy feel important.  But then when she watched me practice, she
said, "Oh.  Well, We've got a problem I hadn't figured on.  double
chin.  You can work on that.  Twice a day, on arising and before bed,
pat your chin with your hand.  Like this."  She demonstrated a flapping
motion on the back of her hand, a rapid up-and-down attack on her
not-double chin.

"You can expect results in a few weeks," she said.  "For tonight, look
up.  And ask them about sports."

When I come out of the bathroom, I see thin lines of blood running
down my legs.  They are everywhere, like roads on maps.  I've been
warned about this.  I find the individual sources and cover them with
pieces of toilet paper.  Then I go into my bedroom to dress.  I take
off my robe, check for breasts.  Nothing from the side, nothing from
the front.  I put on a T-shirt and underpants.  I put on some Evening
in Paris.  Then I open my top dresser drawer and take out my mother's
bottle of Tabu, put a little of that on, too.

I here a knock on my door, and Diane comes in and stops short,
staring at my legs.  "What'd you do?"  she asks.

I shrug.

"Did you shave your legs?"

I say nothing.

"Dad's going to kill you."

"He won't even notice."

"Ha!"  She sits on my bed, shakes her head slowly.  "Well, you damn
near cut yourself to death!"  she says.  I don't know how she can do
that, swear so it rolls right off her tongue, when she is only
eighteen.  She says "shit" like she's saying "Pass the butter."

I look down at my islands of healing, the pieces of white toilet paper
that have turned dark red, nearly brown.  I pull one off, and the
bleeding starts again .

"Well, don't pull them off yet, dummy!"  Diane comes over, squats down
beside me to inspect the damage.  "Jesus H. Christ."

I step away.  "Just get out," I say.  "I didn't even say you could come
in, for one thing."

She stands up, looks at me for a minute, sighs.  "Come on," she says.

I knew it.  She will fix me.

She puts a towel down on her bed, tells me to lie on it.  "You need to
stop standing up," she says.  "Then it will stop bleeding better."  She
starts counting my cuts until I ask her to stop.  Then she says, "What
did you do this for?"

"They make fun of me.  They call me Gorilla legs."

"Well," she says, "the hell with them."

"I'm old enough, anyway," I say.

She looks at me, her face turned slightly away in the way that she
does.  "How'd you like me to pluck your eyebrows?"  she asks.

I hadn't planned on such remarkable generosity.  I can only nod.

"You've got to hold still," she says.

"I will."

"If it hurts, that's too damn bad.  You've got to keep still or my line
will go crooked."

"I will!"

"All right, then."  She goes to her magic dresser, takes out her
tweezers.  "Close your eyes," she says, and begins.  It hurts, all
right.

But I don't react.  "Left!  (humph) Left!  (humph) Left!"  I am saying
in my brain.  When it is over, she hands me a face mirror.  There is a
little redness along my new, thin brow line.

Otherwise I look good.  I hold my chin up high and stare at myself
while Diane gently picks at the toilet paper on my legs.  "Ugh!"  she
says.  I love her so much I want to reach out and touch her black
hair.

But I don't.  Diane doesn't like to be touched by hardly anyone.

When Diane has finished, I stand up and thank her.  "What are you
wearing?"  she asks.

"My black straight skirt, and my hot-pink blouse, with the big
buttons."

"All right," she says, and I exhale, relieved.  "You can wear a pair of
my nylons," she says.

"I can?"

"Don't run them, and you wash them out good when you're done."

She hands me her garter belt and a pair of light-brown stockings rolled
up perfectly and smelling like baby powder.  She sighs then, a sadness
in her, and waves me out of her room.  I close her door quietly, to
thank her.

(I arrive first.  Cherylanne is wearing a light- t pink blouse and a
pink skirt, nylon stockings, and pink flats with jewels all over the
tops of them.  "Well, I didn't know you were wearing pink!"  she
says.

She doesn't even notice my eyebrows.

"Mine's hot pink," I say.

"Well, I am going to have to change," she says, scowling.

"I will," I say.  "Sorry."  I go home and put on a yellow blouse, the
first one I put my hand to.  I want to get out of the house before my
father comes home.  He has already told me I could go, but he is an
expert at changing his mind.

(downstairs I hear the grandfather clock strike one.  I cannot
sleep.

I feel a sweet warmth lying across my chest.  I have gone over and over
the events of the party.  I want only to know how to work time, to make
the party come back again and stay longer.

I get up, bring my pillow with me into the living room to press it
against the air conditioner for a moment.  Then I stretch out on the
couch, lay my head against the coolness.  I close my eyes, feel myself
again in the arms of Paul Arnold.  We slow danced to "Theme from A
Summer Place," moved around and around in our intimate circle.

Cherylanne turned the lights off as soon as her parents shut their
bedroom door.  I pushed my face into Paul's neck, felt the bristles at
the end of his haircut, smelled his aftershave, its mysterious
combination of scents that were not woman's.  He was wearing black
pants, a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a watch, and a ring
with a red stone.  He danced with me over and over, pulling me closer
each time.  I knew he was tired of Cherylanne and he didn't like Vicky
Andrews for the way she bragged, so he was mine for the night.  When we
played spin the bottle, he was first and he cheated.  He put his hand
on the bottle to stop it when it pointed at me.  Then, despite the
complaints from the others, he looked right at me, held out his hand.

He led me into the kitchen while Cherylanne watched the door.  I had
never felt so mature.  I stood still in the center of the dark.  "Have
you done this before?"  he asked.

"No."

"I didn't think so."  He put his hands on my shoulders.  "First, you
relax."

I stepped back and he followed me.  I stepped back again, bumped into a
kitchen chair, and nearly fell.  I looked up, laughed, and he kissed me
on the lips.  I felt electrocuted.  I never knew bodies were capable of
this.  I put my arms around his neck.  I kissed him back.  And then it
was over and he took me by the hand and led me out.  Cherylanne grabbed
my arm and pulled me aside.  "Now," she whispered in my ear, "you are a
woman."

I was the one.  I was the most important one at the party.

I run my hand across my chest.  Something.  Yes.  I can feel
something.

Maybe when your brain decides you're a woman, your body gets going.

I flip the pillow over, breathe in deep.  Sometimes life is so hard and
then bingo, it's like happiness is pushing at your back, waiting to
come out your front.

The next day, I see Paul at the swimming pool.

I am ready.  I have Vaseline on my lips.  But he has forgotten
everything.  He waves casually at me, then keeps talking to a girl in a
polka-dot bikini.  She is wearing a matching headband and a gold ankle
bracelet.  I cannot turn away.  I stare at them like you watch a cut
bleed.

"Well, what did you expect?"  Cherylanne asks later as we lay by the
side of the pool, drying offf.

"Just cause they kiss you doesn't mean they love you!"

She says this with her eyes closed, her face pointed at the sky.  I
turn toward her.  I want to ask why not.  I feel why not.  But I say
nothing.  I sit up and draw with the water that drips from my
fingertips onto the concrete.  I make a little heart, then an X then I
say, "I do mean to leave here, Cherylanne.  I want to run away."

She turns toward me, shields her face from the sun.  "Is this more of
your little Dickie Mac dream?"

"It isn't a dream.  Maybe he doesn't have to fall in love with me, but
he likes me and he has a truck and I know I can get him to take me
somewhere."

"What about Diane?"

"She can come, too.  So can you."

"why should I come?"

Why, indeed.  Cherylanne likes Iexas.  Her father has a job in the
army where he can stay put.  Plus, he never hurts her.  He doesn't even
yell.

He gives her extra money when she asks for it for the movies, tells her
with a wink not to tell Belle.  If Bubba would die, her life would be
perfect.

"You're not going anywhere, either," Cherylanne says.  "So just stop
talking about it.  Let's go practice back dives."  She stands up, hikes
up the straps of her suit, pulls down on the bottom, puts her hand
petulantly on her hip.  "Come on!"  I have to come.  I can't get her
too mad at me.  I am always on thin ice, being so much younger than
she is.

At school, I am not allowed to sit with her in the lunchroom or say
anything to her in the halls.  But in the neighborhood, I can know
her.

I stand up, but rather than concentrate on back dives so I can assign
them a number value, I let my own thinking in.  Cherylanne is probably
right: Dickie will never agree to take me away, even if Diane sits
between us.  But there is an alternative.  My mother could come back.

This thought is dangerous, something I shouldn't do, like a sin.  But I
fall into the luxury of it, let it have me like quicksand.  I think,
she could be not dead.  Her sickness made her look dead.  But then
right after we left the grave site, she woke up and said, "Just a
minute, just a minute, I am still alive."  Someone helped her out of
the casket and said, "Well, for heaven's sake, let me call your
family."  But she said, "Oh, no, let me rest a little and surprise
them."  Now she was ready, and when I got home from swimming, there she
would be, making dinner, and she would see me and rush to take the wet
towel from me, say, "Why, honey, look at you.  Why don't you dry off
and I'll fix us a snack."  She would give me red Jell-O, slices of
banana suspended in it like magic.  She would be making scalloped
potatoes and ham for dinner because they were my favorite.  She would
be singing in her shy voice, and when it was time for my father to
come home, she wollld watch out the window for him.  She always did.

And he would come home and his happiness in seeing her would set him
right.  I knew rightness was in him.  I'd seen it.  Once Cherylanne and
I were in the book section of the PX.  She was picking out magazines,
and I was reading a horse book, one of the Black Stallion ones.  I saw
my father at the same time he saw me.  I put the book back fast, waited
for some punishment.  But he wasn't mad.  He took the book off the
shelf, asked me, "What's this?"

I shrugged.  "I don't know."

He flipped through a few pages, then looked down at me.  "You want
this?"

"I don't know.  I guess.  Okay."

"Come on, then," he said, and he bought it for me.  The only thing
better would have been if he'd said, "Give me your magazine,
Cherylanne.  I'll take care of that, too."  But that would have been
too much.  I have a bad habit of doing that, wanting too much.  Once I
kissed a horny toad to see if he'd change into a prince.  I thought
all I had to do was believe hard enough.  I kissed him where his lips
would have been if he'd had any.  Then I watched him carefully.  No
blinding flash.  No small, seizurelike tremors to show he was ready to
turn.  No glimmer of humanness coming to his round, yellow eyes.

He stayed a horny toad through and through.  Still, looking at him
close up like that let me see his holiness.  I rubbed his tough
underbelly and he cut loose on my hand.  Scared, I guess.  I dropped
him too hard and he ran away.

But my father did buy me that book, for no reason.  I know it happened,
because I still have it.

And always at Christmas, he buys everything we put on our lists.

Except not my mother's.  On her list she would put "Stationery.  Bath
oil.  Gloves."  He would buy her negligees, filmy things the color of
butter or twilight.  He would buy her cashmere sweaters, ropes of
pearls.  She would hold them up and say, "How beautiful.  Oh, how
lovely," and then put them away.

I never did see her wear any of those things.  I was allowed to look at
them, spread them across her wide bed in different arrangements when my
father wasn't home.  I couldn't put anything on, though.

He did it this past year, too, the first Christmas without my mother.

That part stayed the same.  He bought so much for Diane and me and
watched us open everything, and it made me so ashamed, that bigger and
bigger pile of presents.  "Oh, thank you," we always say after we open
each one, and he nods, not saying a word.  He's sorry, that's all.

Sometimes he tells you he is sorry about the way he is.  And then, you
can't help it, you feel sorry for him.  My mother in her apron,
breaking off the ends of the green beans, then putting them into the
colander: "You must understand that he doesn't always know what he is
doing.  He doesn't mean it."  Her forgiving hands along either side of
my face, her eyes close and still look into my eyes.  "You must understand
this, all right?"

Me, taking a bean, being so bold.  Saying, "Okay, all right," and then
leaving a room full of lies that could burn you if they took another
the Sherylanne surfaces like a seal in the blue water.  She stays in the
spot where she came up, treading water, pushing her hair off her face,
squinting in the sun.  "How was that one?"  she asks.

I hadn't been watching.  "Ten," I say.  "Perfect."

"I thought so!"  she yells and then swims to the side of the pool,
pulls herself up the ladder, swaying her butt back and forth, her
happiness dance.

I see the lifeguard Cherylanne has a crush on come out of the changing
room.  He will take a dip before he mounts the chair, he always does.

When Cherylanne comes over to me, I point in his direction.  "Look
who's here."

She pales slightly, sets her mouth for duty.  "Let's go."

The lifeguard is in the shallow end of the pool, splashing water on his
muscles.  The woman he is talking to is wearing a black suit made
strictly for a grown-up.  She has a puffed-out blond hairdo, drawon
eyebrows, and spiky black lashes.  She has kept on her dangly silver
earrings and a bracelet.  It's a cinch that woman will not be swimming
one stroke.  She moves her hands through the water gently, her fingers
ballet posed.

Then she leans over slightly, revealing her big bosom, looks up to
smile at Cherylanne's man, and he smiles right back at her.  I have
told Cherylanne she should forget about this lifeguard.  Obviously he
is too old for her, way in his twenties.  But Cherylanne likes older
men, ever since she read some story a couple years ago about what she
called a May-December romance.  "What's that mean?"  I asked.

"You know," she said.  "She is May, and he is December."

"I don't get it," I said.

But I know now, and I know, too, that my job is to splash the
competition to make her makeup run, to make her hair flatten against
her cheeks.  I slide into the pool, take a deep breath, swim underwater
until I am nearly beside the lifeguard and the woman.  Then I surface
and swim close by them, kicking violently.

"Hey!"  The lifeguard jumps back, pulls his sunglasses off his face.

the woman giggles, holds her hands up before her as though they were a
shield.  Cherylanne smiles at me from the edge of the pool, nods.  But
nothing happens.  The lifeguard resumes his conversation with the
woman, stands even closer to her.  He does not stand back in horror as
we'd hoped, then swim over to Cherylanne to say, "Ah.  A natural
type.

Not afraid to get her hair wet, and a good back diver to boot."

Cherylanne's smile fades.

I swim over to her, spread my arms out along the side of the pool.

"Didn't work," I say.  I let my legs rise up, kick them slowly under
the water.  My cuts are all healed.

Cherylanne is still watching her competitor.  "I hate her," she says.

"She's so trashy.  She probably paid ten cents for that bathing
suit."

I look across the pool and see that Paul Arnold has stretched his towel
and himself out beside the girl in polka dots.  He is tuning her
transistor radio.  I turn to Cherylanne.  "Let's go.  We are about all
struck out here."

We are at the snack bar, eating french fries covered with enough
catsup to be camouflage.  Cherylanne sighs, pokes at one fry with
another.

"What?"  I say.

"I am so tired of only waiting," she says.  Here is why we are
friends.

Sometimes she says something and I know so much what she means I could
have said it myself, and at the same exact time, too.

I reach out to touch her arm.  "I know."

Her eyes widen and she sits up.  I think for a moment I have cured
her.

But then she says, "Your dad's coming."

I turn around and see him crossing the room toward me, covering the
distance quickly with his long strides.  He is a tall man.  But
that's not what people say about him.  They say he is big.  I am
confused by the urgent look on his face.  I think for a moment that he
is coming again to tell me my mother has died.  But it is not that: he
is upset about something else.  When he reaches our table, I wave, say,
"Hi."

"Where's your sister?"

I shrug.  "I don't know.  Sometimes on Saturdays she goes shopping."

He looks away, considering this, then back at me.  "What are you doing
here?"

I point to the french fries.  "Eating."

He stares at the towel wrapped around me, the plastic sandals on my
feet.  "Get home."

Cherylanne has not moved.  She has barely looked up.  "I have to go," I
tell her.  She nods.

I walk ahead of my father.  I believe this is happening because I am
dressed wrong.  But I'm not sure.  I try to walk straight, not too
fast, not too slow.  When we are outside and no one is in sight, he
takes my arm and turns me around.  "Just what do you think you're doing
in that snack bar?"

Well, I have answered one way already.  He needs something else.

"Cherylanne was hungry."

"Hungry for what?"

"French fries, obviously."

There it is, his hand across my face, the familiar sting.  "don't get
smart!"

I stare up into his eyes.  They are only blue, like a movie star's.

And yet.

"And get that look off your face!"

Now comes the part where I must rearrange my face so that a definite
change can be seen.  But the change must be in the right direction.  If
you do it wrong, he gets madder.  I make myself blank, all on the
inside, all on the outside.  Wrong.  He hits me again, harder.  But it
is only on my arm this time.  And we are almost home.

I am sent to my room, where I am glad to go.  He told me he knows
french fries are not why I went to the snack bar.  And I am sitting at
my desk wondering what it is I don't know about myself when I hear the
screen door bang shut.  Diane is home.  And then I hear him start in
with her.

I open my top drawer quietly, lift up some things to find the poem I am
working on.  It is about the beauty of dusk, about the peace of people
going to sleep.  I like to believe that there are no time zones, that
all of us could at the exact same moment crawl under our blankets and
close our tired eyes.

I'm outside sitting on the porch, waiting for Cherylanne.  We are going
to the movies, and whenever we do she makes a big fuss over herself,
takes forever getting ready.  Anyone could be there: The lifeguard.
Rock Hudson.  A talent scout looking for someone exactly like
Cherylanne, driving all around the world in his white Cadillac car
until he finds just her.  You might as well be prepared, is how
Cherylanne feels.  She'll take a double shower, wear her Tigress
perfume from the bottle with the fake-fur top.

The sun is setting, I can feel the concrete beneath me losing its
heat.

The door opens, bangs into me slightly, and Diane comes out.  Her face
is still red from crying.  He's been gone for hours, but she has not
left her room until now.  She sits beside me, doesn't look at me.  "I
hate him," she says.

I stare straight ahead, peel thin strips from a fat blade of grass I am
holding.  "I got it, too."

"What for?"

"I was at the snack bar eating french fries."

"So? What did he say?"

"I was in my bathing suit."

"Oh."

"Is that why?"

She looks at my chest.  "I don't know.  He said I didn't go
there for french fries."

She nods.  "Oh.  That."

"What?"

"He thinks you're going there for boys."

"What boys?"

"Don't boys come to the snack bar?"

"Well, yeah"

"Well, that's it.  He
thinks you're looking for boys."  I am actually a little flattered.

Diane smiles.  "He started that shit with me when I was the same
age."

She looks at me carefully, then away.

"Hey, Diane," I say.  "Remember when we used to pull down our pants to
look at our butts in the mirror, to see his handprints, see whose was
darker?"

She leans back on her elbows, stares up into the sky.  "Yeah."

"That was funny, wasn't it?"

"No.  None of this is funny."  She sits up.  "It's not right, Katie.
He's not supposed to hit us like that.
I'm going to tell someone, I swear.  I'm going to get him into
trouble."

"Don't."  It comes out before I think it.  I laugh, surprised.  But
then, again, I say, "Don't.  I don't think you should."

Diane puts her head down into her lap, her arms around her head.  "I
don't know," she says.  "I don't know what to do."

I see Riff coming around the corner.  He looks like he's just gotten up
from a nap, walking stiffly, his hair standing up a little on one side
of his head.

He takes a few steps, sniffs at the ground, takes a few more.  Then
he sees us, gets a glad-dog look in his eye, and gallops over.  I pet
him, but Diane keeps her head down, busy with her private sorrow.  Riff
noses her elbow, and she puts out a hand to push him away.  "Don't."

Her voice is muffled, new sounding.

Riff sits down, his face leaning forward, his ears on full alert.  Then
he gets up to walk behind her and investigate, sniffing carefully.  And
then, unbelievably, he lifts his leg against her.

Diane straightens immediately, her mouth a perfect O. Then she is up on
her feet, yelling, "Riff!  Jesus!  Goddamn it!"  She holds the back of
her blouse away from her with two reluctant fingers, stares crazy-eyed
at Riff, who, in his mournful confusion, has sat firmly down and now
watches her, stonelike, waiting to hear what to do for forgiveness.

Diane turns around in a small anguished circle, trying to inspect
herself.  "Jesus, Riff!  You pissed right on me!  Oh, God, it's
warm!"

Riff blinks at her, his whole heart in his eyes.  He wags his tail
one-half time.  And then, despite herself, Diane starts to laugh, and
so do I.

"You shithead!"  she says, and Riff barks happily.

The woman who lives next door, Ruth Conway, comes out holding a
cleaning rag.  Belle says she dusts her refrigerator coils.  "What in
the world ?"  she says.  "Whose mouth is that I hear?"

Diane stops dead.  Ruth Conway is a grown-up tattletale.  "That dog
peed on me," she says, pointing.

"Who, Riff?"  His tail thumps: once, twice.

"Yeah, Riff."

Mrs.  Conway frowns.  "Oh, I don't think so."

Diarle shows her the back of her blouse, the huge wet circle.  Mrs.
Conway leans forward to look, wrinkles her nose, steps back.  "Well,"
she says.  "I hardly think it's something to talk that way about!"

Diane takes in a breath, pauses.  "I'm sorry."

Mrs. Conway nods, lets her screen door gently bang shut, returns to
her cleaning.  "What an asshole," Diane whispers.

Cherylanne comes out of her house, walks over to us.  Her powder-blue
purse matches her outfit.  She reeks of Tigress.  "Let's go," she
says.

"We'll be late" it happens, Cherylanne is right tonight: there is
someone there she likes almost as much as the lifeguard.  He is a
sophomore, famous for his looks, and, according to rumors, recently
broken up with his equally famous girlfriend.  When the lights go down,
he is still sitting alone.

"I can't believe this," Cherylanne whispers.  And then, "do you
mind?"

"No," I say.  "Go."

And she does.  She walks down the aisle as though she has just arrived,
her purse swinging at her side.  She slides into the seat behind him.

Then she taps him on the shoulder, gives a flutter-fingered wave when
he turns around.  They talk a little and then she gets up and moves
beside him.  She gives me a hidden signal, a victory sign.  I am
dismissed.

I watch the movie for a while, but it is only about handsome men riding
around in chariots trying to put one another's eyes out.  I leave.

No one is home.  I make a mayonnaise sandwich.  For dessert I have
sweetened condensed milk on graham crackers.  Then I go outside and lie
in the backyard, look up at the stars.  I hear the back door open, and
sit up quickly.

"What are you doing?"  he asks.

"Nothing."

"Well, you're doing something."

"I'm...I was looking at the stars."

"Uh huh."  He walks over, lies down heavily beside me, looks up into
the sky.  "Do you know the names of any of the constellations?"

"Of course."  Careful.  "I learned them in school."  Safe.  I show him
the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion.

"Some of the light you see," he says, "is from stars that no longer
exist."

"Yes."

"How do you like that?"  He is so satisfied, like he made it up.

"I don't," I say.

He looks over at me.  "You don't, huh?  Why not?"

"I don't know.  It makes me sad.  Like when we move and right before we
go I make a new friend and then I can never know them."

"Well."  A hard edge.  His disapproval.  He doesn't like to hear
complaining about the way we move so much.  We are not allowed to cry
when we drive away or at any other time, either, about any place we
leave behind.  Sometimes it aches so hard, the thought of all you can't
have anymore, your desk the third in the third row, the place where you
buy licorice, the familiarity of the freckles on your friends' faces,
the smell of your own good bedroom.  You will have to be the new girl
again, the one always having to learn things.  But you cannot cry about
it in front of him.  You have to hold it in, hold it in, stare out the
car windows at the cows in the fields and the endless telephone poles
and the hopeful buildings in the small towns you pass through and you
have to hold it in.  Later, in the luxury of aloneness, you can call
back the sadness to let it out.  But sometimes it has gone somewhere.

You have not lost it, just the ability to get rid of it by crying.  It
will be part of you now, steal up on you at unexpected moments.  You
will be watching your team play baseball, yelling for them, and all of
a sudden feel a jag in your throat.  You will be reading, lying on your
side on one elbow, and you will have to stop and lie flat and stare
into space for a while.  That is how that sadness is, insisting on a
place in you, but never quite cooperating.

"I like that there are comets," I say to my father.  "And I like the
planets, especially Saturn."

"The rings, huh?"  he asks, and I am so pleased that he knows.  We lie
still for a while.  The grass is blue-green in the dark, rich
smelling.

I wish suddenly that I could have a horse standing nearby eating that
grass, making the satisfying sounds that horses do.  I rip some grass
up with my hand, a little imitation.

"Do you like horses, Dad?"  I ask.

"I guess."

"Do you think we could ever get one?"

He shrugs.  "Oh, who knows?"  It's not mean, how he says it.  It is low
and easy, from a rare place.

Once, shortly after my mother died, he was being this way, and he asked
me to sing for him.  I told him I would if he wouldn't look.  So he lay
on his bed with his handkerchief over his face while I sat on the chair
and sang "Beautiful Dreamer."  When I was through I sat quietly,
waiting for him to say something.  But he didn't.  I saw the small rise
and fall of the handkerchief as he breathed.  When, finally, I got up
to leave, he said, "Katie."

"Yes?"

He pulled the handkerchief off his face.  "That was good."  There were
tears in the corners of his eyes.  They caught the light of the sun,
sinking in the sky outside his window.

I could hardly stand it.  I said, "Thank you," and fled.  I'd heard it,
too: my mother singing, out of my mouth.

"Dad?"  I say.

"Yeah ."

"What did Mom die from?  What happened to her?"

"Cancer.  You know that."

"I know.  But what happened exactly that made her die?"There is a long
silence.

Then he clears his throat and says, "I am not prepared to talk about
that now."

"But you will be sometime?"

"Go to bed, Katie."

I go to my room, and he stays outside.  I watch him from my window,
lying on his back, his arms under his head, looking up into the sky as
though he is searching.  I look up, too, and find the same thing:
everything, written in a language we just don't understand.  My mother
sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched cup of coffee before her,
her head in her hands.  "I don't know," she is saying softly.  "I just
don't know."  lXubba has found Cherylanne's and my secret basket.  Some
time ago, we strung a rope between our two hall windows, over the porch
roof that connects our houses to each other.  We send messages back and
forth in an old Easter basket, yellow and green and still smelling
faintly of chocolate.  We have long yellow yarn pulls on either side of
the basket.

"What the hell do you need that for?"  Diane asked when she found out
we had built it.

"Messages," I told her, and truly I expected her to understand.

"You can't hardly breathe in one of these houses without someone next
door hearing you," Diane said.

"That's why we need it," I said.  This was not strictly true.  The last
message I sent Cherylanne had said, "What are you having for dinner
tonight?"

Diane had frowned.  We'd been doing the dishes.  I liked to watch the
way she plunged the soapy rag into the glasses, wiped around and around
on the plates until they squeaked, squeezed hard against the messy
tongs of the forks so that they came out clean and shiny.  I couldn't
wait to be the washer: so much variety, control of the bubbles.  For
now, I had to be the wiper.  "Put this message in your basket," Diane
had said.  And then she sang softly in her flirty voice, "I hear the
cotton woods whispering above."  I sang back sincerely, "Tammy, Tammy,
Tammy's in love."  Diane was always Tammy, I was always the chorus.

You can expect that when you are the wiper.

But now Cherylanne's brother has found our basket and is wearing it
around on his head.  He has tied the yellow yarn pulls into a bow under
his chin.  "Don't you love my new chapeau?"  he asks Cherylanne.  And
then, "Man, you act like a five-year-old!"  He has a barklike laugh,
cruel and stupid sounding.

"You don't know a thing about it," Cherylanne says.  "You don't know
what we do with that basket."

"Espionage, I suppose," he says.

"Let's go," Cherylanne tells me, and slams out the front door.  Once
outside, she asks, "What's espionage?"

"James Bond," I say.  "Spies."

"Well," she says, midway between flattered and insulted.

"We could pay him back, you know," I say.

"Who?"

Bubba."

She sighs.  "No, no, you can't.  You can never get Bubba back.  He will
only do twice as much back to you.  You can't do anything to him."

Sometimes I feel as if I am Cherylanne's mother.  I feel sorry for her
in the tender, smiley way.  "You just do it wrong," I say.

"What do you mean?"

"You try to do things to him yourself."

"Well, what else?"

"Sit down," I tell her, indicating our alcove in the backyard bushes.

This is where we sit in the heat of the day sometimes, watching life
work around us.  Cherylanne sits down, sighs.  I like when something's
almost lost and you are there to save it.  I sit beside her, then ask,
"What does Bubba really love?"

Cherylanne frowns.  "Janie Atkinson, of course.  What do you think?"

Of course.  I hadn't thought of that, though I should have.  Bubba's
love for Janie Atkinson nearly wears out his face every time he sees
her.  The only thing good about Janie, with her smooth heart face and
her everyday nylon stockings and her mother driving her back and forth
to school like she has a problem, the only thing good about her is that
so far she has resisted Bubba's charms.  No other girls have.  He has
so much ammunition it can be discouraging.

"Let's call her," I tell Cherylanne.

"Janie?  For what?"

I shrug.  "To wreck it."  Sometimes things are just there, just like
that.  You step out of the shower and see something on your skin.  You
feel an unwelcome prickle moving along your arm and know that it is a
live thing before you look.  Here is the knowledge, so easy and mean:
find what they love, and wreck it.  Simple.

"What do we say to her?"  Cherylanne asks.

"Something about him, about Bubba.  Something disgusting so that every
time she sees him, that's all she'll think."

Cherylanne frowns, bites her lip.  She is wearing Love that Mango, the
newest shade in her collection.  It's case has a little fake tip of
lipstick on top.

"I could tell her that when I was five he stood right in front of me
and ate my goldfish - alive."

I must be patient.  "No, Cherylanne.  You don't say who you are.  If
she knows it's you, she'll think you're lying."

"Well, what, then!"  She gets mad fast when she's not the leader.

"You just real quick tell Janie something bad about Bubba that doesn't
have you in it.  You can make something up.  Then you hang up."

She looks at me, kind of in wonder.  "Like say anything I want?"

"Yes."  I lean back, pull a drop-shaped leaf from the bush, rub it
between my fingers, smell it.

"I could say..." she stops, blushes.

"It's good," I say.  "Tell me."

"It's bad," she says.  "It's really disgusting."

"Good!"

Her eyes narrow.  "You know Simon LeBlanc?"

"Ugh, yes."  Way too big to be in ninth grade.  Creepy skin and hair.
Hates everything.  Wears things that jingle like the clasps on galoshes
when he walks.  But they're not galoshes, of course.  Not in Texas.
Galoshes and Texas don't match.

"I heard about this thing he did at a party."  She shivers happily.

"It is so disgusting I could puke right now!"

Oh, the day has turned so interesting.  "What,"' I ask.

She turns to put her head close to mine, talks quietly and fiercely
between her teeth.  "Don't you tell I told you."

"I won't."

"Don't you tell anyone else."

"I won't."

She sits back, lips prissy-pursed with anticipation.  "Well.  There was
this party, and of course they were playing spin the bottle."  She
widens her eyes, shudders deliciously and long.  I want to ask how come
Simon got invited, anyway, but that will only make her take longer.

"So," she says.  "Simon got the bottle, and he said, I can screw
this."

" She covers her mouth with her hand, dainty, then pulls it down
fast.

"And eeauuwwww, he does it!!!"

"Wait," I say.

"Can you believe it?"

"Wait."

"What?"

"What do you mean?"

Cherylanne rolls her eyes.  "He screwed the Coke bottle!"

I think for a while.  Then I say, "I don't get it."

She sighs loudly.  "You
know what screw means, right?"

I look up nervously at the windows of my house.  I know he's at the
golf course, but it's a habit.  Then I make a face at Cherylanne while
I say, "Yes, I know what screw means!"

"So?"

"So, how do you screw a Coke bottle?"

She looks away.  "Well, I just don't believe

"You are the one," I tell
her, "who told me how big it gets.  You showed me, remember?  You drew
on my history paper how big around it gets.  That would not fit in a
Coke bottle."

She speaks slowly, wags her head from side to side to punctuate each
word.  "Well, I guess I know that."

"So what are you talking about?"

She stands up, stamps her foot.  "He screwed into it, you dummy!  Into
it!"

Well, I don't know.  There are some things you only can wait for time
to give you.

"Oh!" I say, just to be done with it all.

"So that's what I'll tell Janie, that Bubba did that!"

"Euuww!"  I say.  "Yep.  That should work."

We use my phone.  Cherylanne looks up Janie's phone number.  Wouldn't
you know it, a lot of sevens.  Even her phone number is lucky.  I give
Cherylanne a Kleenex to put over the mouthpiece so she can disguise
herself, then, for safety's sake, give her two more.  She dials the
number.  I hear a faint ring, then an eager, "Hello?"

"Yes," Cherylanne says.  "Is this...Miss Atkinson?"

So professional.  Cherylanne is good at this.

I hear a faint reply.  Probably she said, "Why, yes, it is," and sat
down with her legs crossed like she was going to win a million
dollars.

"Well," Cherylanne says, "we have some information that may be of use
to you."

A short response.

Cherylanne widens her eyes at me, holds back a laugh.  I cover my
mouth, nod at her.  Go on, go on.

"Also, we think you should know he screwed into a Coke bottle in front
of everyone at a party."

A longer response.  Cherylanne stops laughing and hangs up.

"What'd she say, what'd she say?"  I ask.

She turns slowly toward me.  "You want to know what she said?"

"Yes!"

"She said, That was Simon LeBlanc, Cherylanne Benson.  I was there, and
you were not."

I have lost all my inside air.

Cherylanne is pale with fury.  "I cannot believe I listened to your
stupid idea!"

"Well," I say.

"I cannot believe I did."  I start to follow Cherylanne out the door.

She turns around, eyes wide.  "Don't even think of coming with me!"

"I wasn't.  I'm going out."

"I am ruined.  My reputation is just in shreds starting right now on
account of you."

"Well, I don't think -"

She holds up a hand.  "Don't even say it.  Don't
even try.  I cannot believe I listened to your stupid idea."  She goes
out the door.

I lean my forehead against the screen, watch her walk away.  "It was
your idea, anyway," I say.

She turns around, murder in her eyes.  "What?"

"Nothing."

She walks off toward Vicky Andrews's house.  I go outside, do a
handstand against the wall, look at the concrete close up.

I hear a truck coming.  I kick down, straighten my blouse.  Dickie lets
Diane out.  "See you tonight!"  she yells after him, then walks up to
stand before me.  "What are you doing?"

"Nothing."  I follow her into the house.  "Where you been?"

"Out."

She never tells me.  "You can't go out tonight," I say.  "It's
Sunday."

We go to the Officer's Club for dinner every Sunday night, wear
dresses, he wears a suit.

"After," Diane says.

"He'll say no."

"He won't know."

"Oh."

She goes upstairs.  I hear
the door to her room close.  I wonder what she does in there all the
time.  It's a small room.  She plays records, I know, paints her
nails.
But then what?  I am more an outside type.

I think for one second about getting Cherylanne to go swimming, then
remember.  She wouldn't even go to the PX with me, now.  She'll be off
limits for a good three days.

I go up to Diane's room, knock on the door.  "Can I come in?"

"No."

I slide under my bed, regard the dust motes.  Sometimes they are
beautiful.  They are how you can see air.  I think about Simon
LeBlanc.

Sex is so shaky and mysterious.  I will never unravel it.  "Mom," I
whisper.  "Are you there?"  Not today.

(there are times I try to understand.  "He was raised by very cruel
parents," my mother said.  She was wearing the blue apron, making apple
crisp.  She shook her head, waved her arm like she was pushing her own
thoughts away.  "Believe me, you don't want to know what he went
through."

I think, what else?  What else could have happened to him?  He might
have had another job, and been different.  I do not believe the army is
a good idea for people with regular human hearts.  He could have been a
thing like a janitor in a school.  Everyone likes the janitor at my
school, a gentle Mexican man named Juan who speaks no English but
smiles and nods at every one of us like friends.  He stands with his
mop like a dancing partner, smiling, smiling.  We have a special
relationship, Juan and I.

I once asked too late to be excused to go to the bathroom, and I
vomited on the hall floor.  Juan was at the other end.  He started
walking toward me.  I wiped my mouth quick with the hem of my dress.  I
was so ashamed that he would have to clean up after me, and i began to
cry and say, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."  He touched my shoulder and
shrugged, said, "Hey, is okay, okay," and then some soft things in
Spanish, and I didn't feel embarrassed anymore.  I don't know, there
are everyday miracles: that mess lying in the hall, and I felt fine in
front of a stranger.

So maybe my father could have been a janitor.  Or the owner of a
bakery.

Or of a toy store.  He could have been something where he wasn't
supposed to yell.  I think that would have helped.

We are at the table, waiting for dinner to come.  I ordered a club
sandwich.  I need to say more than thank you, which is not enough.

When the sandwich comes, I will admire the tomatoes, say how red they
are.  I won't leave anything over, of course.

My father's suit is dark blue, his shirt so white against it, it is
shocking.  He wears a tie, sideways stripes of red, white, and blue.

He has gold cuff links with blue stones in them.  My mother, on his
birthday, "Do you like them?"  her hands clasped and held close to her
heart until he looks up and she can see yes.

Diane sighs.  My father raises his eyebrows at her.  "You got a
problem?"  he asks.

She almost starts to laugh.  "No.  I don't have a problem."

"Good."  A little too loud, but nothing will happen here.  Still, you
can see the sides of his cheeks going in and out, his prelude to
anger.

When you see that, you don't provoke him, my mother said.  You just
don't push him.  Or you are asking for it.

They are at each other a lot, he and Diane.  It seems almost constant
lately.  Maybe Diane is just too old.

"Are we getting dessert?"  I ask, though I know.

"Yes," he says, "you can have dessert."

"Are you?"  I ask Diane.

"No."  We both look at her.  "I just don't want any dessert, all
right?"

He looks away, scowls, and nods, agreeing with himself.

The food comes.  Oh, the food is here, and we can eat.

I am in bed that night when I hear Diane's door open.  It is so quiet,
but I hear it.  I see her shadow going down the hall.  She is doing it,
sneaking out with Dickie.  I cannot imagine her courage.  I go to look
out her window and see her meet him across the street.  He is in the
shadows at first, but then he steps forward to hold her.  Only to hold
her!  I wonder where his truck is.  I sleep a little, but not much,
until she comes home two hours later.  I hear the front door, her
movement up the stairs, then her bedroom door shut.  Then silence.  She
has done it.

I close my eyes tight, squeeze them with relief.  I imagine Diane lying
back on her bed, quietly removing her shoes, exhaling a long line of
air noiselessly.  Her room is dark, the edges of her furniture softened
by the dimness.  Her eyes are wide open, and she is thinking.

After several days, Cherylanne still has not forgiven me.  We are
infected.  She spoke to me only to say that perhaps we are drifting
apart.  I reminded her that we are not characters in her stupid
magazine stories and there you are, I earned more time.

I read, I write poems to keep in my red folder, I take walks along the
creek bed.  I see schools of minnows, excited with their new lives,
swimming fast to somewhere they've never been.  I want to bring some
home, but they will only die.  And so I lie on my belly to watch them,
make defective dams out of my fingers for them to swim through.  I
wonder if for them, their lives are long.

I take Riff to walk along the edge of the golf course.  When I go into
the PX, he lies outside by the door, waiting for me.  In my backyard I
sit close to him, watch the movement of his busy eyes, the
back-and-forth movement of his tongue when he pants.  Once, on a daring
day, I call Paul Arnold, but I hang up before the phone rings.  I lie
on the living room floor, my legs up against the bookcase,
contemplating human circulation.

One evening after dishes, diane comes into my room.  "What's up?"  she
asks.

"What do you mean?"

She holds up my bottle of Evening in Paris, checks the level, puts it
carefully back down in place.  "How come you're all alone?"

"I'm doing my homework."

"I mean alone all the time.  Are you fighting with Cherylanne?"

"I don't know.  She is."

"How come?"

"She's just that way sometimes.  She just is.  She's not my only
friend."

I am hoping Diane doesn't ask for a list of others.  She doesn't.  She
stretches out on my bed.  "Ummm," she says.  "You have a good bed."

I get up from my desk, sit down beside her.  "Diane?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you ever think about leaving, about running away?"

"What happened?"

"Nothing.  I just...  Nothing happened.  I just think sometimes I'd
like to live somewhere else."

There is a shift in her face.  "Where you're not a punching bag,
huh?"

It is too bold, how she does it.  It is too much out.

"I don't know, I mean just...  I think I would like to leave,
that's all.  Go somewhere else."

"Without Dad."

"Well, yeah.  I think he likes it here."

Diane's laugh is like a short cry.  "I don't.  I don't think he likes
it anywhere."

"If you asked Dickie, would he take you away?"

Diane stands up, goes over to my window.  "If I asked Dickie to do
anything, he would do it."  Her back is to me.  The truth of what she
is saying is in the line of her spine: she stands tall with it.  Then
she turns around, a half smile on her face.  "Why?  You want to
come?"

I once wanted a certain ring for Christmas.  It was a gold oval, and
you could get your initials engraved in the center.  It was too much,
but I asked anyway.  And one day in early December, when I was looking
through my mother's nightgowns in her dresser drawers, I found a velvet
box with the ring inside it.  My initials.  In fancy, fragile script.

I looked up.  There was my face in the mirror, tight with happiness.  I
put the ring back, closed the drawer, waited until Christmas, and
opened the box I knew it was in last.

"I would come," I tell Diane.

She sighs.  "I'm going to finish high school, Katie, and then I'm
gone."

"Oh."

"I can't bring you."

"Oh, I know."

She starts to say something, then stops.  It is hard for her, what is
in her face.  She pulls her beautiful hair back, holds it for a moment
in one hand.  "You want to come swimming with us tonight?  It's open
till ten."

I nod.

"Okay," she says.  "We'll do that."  tven when Cherylanne and I are
fighting, we don't knock.  I go into her house, yell, "Hello?"  There
are the smells I've missed: new carpet and the food and the sun trapped
in the fabric of the sofa, that ironed smell.  My mother: "Now, fold
his handkerchiefs exact when you iron them.  He likes them straight."

I hear Cherylanne's bedroom door open, and she starts to come down the
stairs, then stops halfway to look coolly at me.  "What?"  Her hand is
graceful on the railing, like she thinks she's Loretta Young.

"I'm going swimming tonight with Dickie and Diane.  You want to
come?"

This is it.  If she says no, this is it.

There is a heavy moment of silence.  She is wringing out the cloth but
good.  But then she shrugs, says, "I guess."

Here happiness must be quiet and slow.  I say, "So what are you doing
now?"

"Come on up," she says.  She plays me a forty-five she bought
yesterday.

She shows me how she is now the darkest Coppertone girl possible,
holding her skin next to the magazine page.  She is right: she couldn't
be tanner.  "You've moved up, too," she says.  "You're in between the
best and the next-best now.  In a way that's even better, because you
still have a dream."  I show her the new blond streak in my hair,
sun-done, not fake.

She says we could make some cookies.  We talk faster and faster.  I can
feel relief in my throat like a cold.

"I like swimming at night.  The water, black and deeper looking.
The lights making crossover rings on the waves.  The diving board,
glowing a pearl color, the sound of its springboard action carrying
far.  Not many people swim at night, and the lifeguards don't use
whistles.  They just say, "Hey, off the rope," in their normal voice.

Diane is telling me to dive off the high board.  "I can't," I say.

"Yeah, you can," she says.  "It's the same thing you do off the low
board.  It's just higher."

"No," I say.  "I can't do it."

"I can," Cherylanne says.  "I can take a running dive off it."

"I know you can," I say.

"Watch," she says, and ascends the ladder to the high dive.  She is
barely visible in the dark.  I hear her voice like it is its own
thing.

"First, a big breath in, to show yourself your confidence."  I hear her
take in a breath.  "Now," she says, "a slow breath out."  I watch her
carefully even though I am a little mad at her.  She walks to the end
of the board, pivots gracefully, walks three steps back, pivots again,
puts her arms out straight before her.  Her face is impassive, serious,
I know.  I see her take her steps, bounce up once, then dive down and
slice nearly noiselessly into the water below.

"Great dive!"  Dickie says.  Diane and I look at him.  "f at" he
says.

"That was a great dive!"

I fill up my cheeks with air, let it go, head for the ladder.  Even
this is hard for me.  I don't like heights.  My breaths get shorter and
shorter the higher I get.  I feel lightheaded by the time I reach the
diving board.  I hold on to the rails, look down at my sister in the
lamplight.

The lifeguard is watching, too.  I wave.

"Do it!"  Diane says.

I look up into the night sky, the peaceful stars.

that is higher.  I walk out to the end of the board.  There is no
sound.

They are all watching."a slight tremor along the board, I turn, and walk
quickly back to hold onto the rail.

"Awwww!"  I hear Dickie say.

Diane cups her hands around her mouth.  "Do Something," occurs to me.

"Why?"  I ask.

She puts her hands down, turns away, then looks back up at me, her hands
on her hips.  "If you do it, I'll take you to see Dickie's puppies."

"Do you have puppies, Dickie?"  I call down.

"Sure do," he says.  "Six of em.  All little girls."

Well, there is no point in negotiating from this position.  I start to
come down.  "No!"  Diane says.  "Dive off that board right now.  You can
do it."

"I just...I think I'll come down first."

"Don't," Diane says.  "Or you won't do it.  Just se!  Then we'll go see
the puppies.  We'll get them some ice cream at Dairy Queen."

Dairy Queen.  Me, dressed in dry clothes, in a car, on the ground,
finished with this.  I walk halfway down the diving board, stop.

"Okay.  Take in your deeeeep breath," I hear Cherylanne say.

"Quiet," I say.  "I know."

I walk to the end of the board, put my arms up over my head in the dive
position, start to bend down.

"It's easier to take a running start," Cherylanne says.  "The first
time's the hardest."

"Quiet!"  Diane tells her, and she is.

There are different kinds of time in the world.  When you get called
on and you don't know the answer and the teacher waits, that is one
kind of time and it is like this.  I straighten up, bend down halfway
again.  The water sparkles from the lights, waits.  The puppies will be
so cute.  I close my eyes.

I can't do it.  I come down the ladder.  No one says anything.  "Can I
still see the puppies?"  I ask.

"No," Diane says.  "I told you.  You have to dive."

"Let her see them," Dickie says.  "For Christ's sake."  Diane turns to
him, her voice deadly soft.  "No."

Cherylanne takes my hand.  "I'll show you how," she says.

I let go.  "In the daytime," I say.

"You won't do it in the daytime, either, will you?"  Diane asks.  And
then, almost forgiving, "Will you?"

"It happens.  It comes to me.  When I get up on Friday morning, I
go to the bathroom and see the evidence.  At first, I don't believe
it.

I stand so that the light falls on my pajama bottoms better, and there
it is.  It looks a little like South America, the outline of the
stain.

I go to the mirror, check for other changes.  Yes, a certain softening,
a more knowing look.

So much can happen now.

I know exactly what to do.  I go to the linen closet and take a pad
from the blue box.  But I don't have a belt.  I knock softly on Diane's
door.

No answer.  I open it a little.

I can smell her sleep Her shade is down, her room quite dark, but I can
make out her shape beneath the covers.  "Diane?"  I whisper.

"What?"

"Could you...I have to tell you something."  She pulls the covers
from over her head, squints at the light coming into her room from the
hallway.  "What happened?"

"I started."  The word takes up all the space in my mouth.

"Started what?"

I look down at my feet.  "You know."

"You started your period?"

"Shhh!"  I'm not ready for him yet."

She sits up, laughs.  "Well, congratulations.  That's just when I
started, right at twelve."  She nods her head, thinking.  "Mom said it
was a gift, can you imagine?  She was such a sap, sometimes."

I don't know.  I think it's a gift, too.  It occurs to me that I am
standing in my sister's room on a Friday morning, able to have a
baby.

These are the same pajamas I went to bed in last night.

"Do you have what you need?"  Diane asks.

"I need a belt, that's all."

Diane gets up and takes a belt out of her underwear drawer.  "Here.
You should get your own, but you can borrow one of mine.  Do you know
where to get them?"

"Yes."  Of course I know where to get them.
Next to magazines and makeup, they are what I have looked at most.

And now one will be mine, tossed carelessly in with my lady
underwear.

Diane gets back into bed, yawns.  "You might not have it again for a
while, you know.  It can skip a few months before it starts coming
regularly."

Well.  All the more reason to pay attention.  I walk carefully back
into my room, on new feet.  I get dressed, start to carry my pajama
bottoms to the laundry hamper.  But then I put them in my closet in an
empty shoe box, and go over to tell Cherylanne.

Sherylanne covers her mouth, squeals high.

"You did it!"  she says, and then her face collapses into pity.  "Are
you cramping real bad?"

"What do you mean?"

"Does it hurt?  You know, in your stomach?"

I put my hand on myself.  "No."

"Oh."  Her voice is sorry for me and pleased mixed together.

"Why should I hurt?"

"Well, it's.... You know, generally, women have some pain.  Not all
women, of course.  It's your more feminine types that suffer most.  I
take Midol."

I send my mind down to my stomach to check around.  Nothing.  But I
say, "Well, I mean, I thought you meant like hammer-on-the-head pain.

I have pain!  But it's...not real bad."

Cherylanne moves her face close to mine.  "Like somebody pushing down
on you a little?"

"Yes, like that."

She straightens.  "Well, that's it."

I have passed.  Cherylanne tells me that a woman must treat herself in
special ways on special days.  I can't go swimming or horseback riding,
I know that, right?  I should nap when possible, and drink weak tea.

And always check to be sure you don't need a girlfriend to walk close
behind you when you come out of the classroom.  "There was this girl
once," Cherylanne tells me in her delicious confiding tone, "and she
was wearing a white skirt..." I lie on her bed, hold one of her stuffed
animals close to me, listening, until we have to leave for school.

He has a date.  That night when he comes home he calls Diane up from
the laundry room, me down from my bedroom.  "I'll be going out with a
lady this evening," he says, "and I'm bringing her here first.  I want
you to behave."

I don't know what to say.  He might as well not be speaking English.  I
might as well be saying, "Excuse me, excuse me, I don't understand"
real slow, my face working to convey what my words can't.

Diane leans up against the wall.  It is sadness pushing her, I know.

"Who is this you're going out with?"  she asks.

"Pardon me?"  he says.  The summer storm.  The sudden sound of the
thunder, the rolling of the black clouds.

She straightens.  "I just wanted to know her name.  Please."

"Nancy Simon."

Diane nods.  "Where did you meet her?"

"When I am ready to tell you details about Miss Simon, you'll know."

Diane nods again.  I have some questions, too.  I have a lot of
questions, too.  But never mind.

She is black-haired, Nancy, her hair pushed back hard and high and
see-through.  Beehive.  She looks younger than my mother did.  She
wears deepblue eye shadow and two silver bracelets and a black dress
and heels.  She sits at the kitchen table, smoking, smiling at me.

There is a trench coat lying across her lap, tan, soiled at the
cuffs.

"So you're twelve, huh?"  she asks.  There is a tiny dot of spit on the
corner of her mouth.  I rub my own mouth to tell her, but she doesn't
understand.

"Yes.  Almost thirteen."

She raises her too-black eyebrows, jets out a stream of smoke toward
the ceiling.  Cherylanne and I used to play dirty lady, just like
that.

Cherylanne's name was Mitzi, mine Titzi.  We swung our crossed legs,
twitched our bottoms on our pretend bar stools, drank ginger ale from
Belle's good glasses, smoked pencils.  We smoked just like Nancy Simon
does.

"Almost thirteen," Nancy says.  "Well.  Big girl!"

There is a place just before they make fun of you.  That is where Nancy
is.  I look down, think of a reason to leave.

"Well," I say, finally, "I have to do some homework.  Very nice to meet
you, thank you for coming."

She stands up, totters a bit on her high heels, reaches out to touch my
shoulder.  "Nice to meet you, too, honey."  I smell her perfume,
unwelcome in my mother's kitchen.  Unwelcome in my mother's house.

"I hope to see you again," she says.  It is flirty, like I am the
guy.

Of course it is aimed for my father, who stands, arms crossed, at the
other side of the kitchen.  He doesn't have anything army on.

"Okay," I say.  "Well, have a nice time."

She looks at my father.  Oh.  I see.  They already have.

I go upstairs and knock on Diane's door, open it.  "Are they gone?"
she asks.  I nod.  "What a bitch," Diane says.  She is seated before
her dresser mirror, combing out her hair.  "What a whore."

I shrug.  "Are you going out?"  I ask.

She sighs.  "Yes."

"What's wrong?"

She turns around, her eyes suddenly blank.  She laughs, a small
sound.

"I don't know."  She looks up at me.  "I really don't."

Later, when I am alone, I take out the shoe box.  I stare at my pajama
bottoms.  What secrets lie in us.  What perfection.  I touch the dried
blood.  What told me to do this?  What was the first step?  Hormones, I
know, but what were they?  Can you see them?  And if not, how do they
know?

When I asked these questions during our special hygiene class, the gym
teacher told me to stop acting up.  "That is not what we are talking
about now," she said.  "Keep your mind focused.  You have the same
problem in basketball."  She was right.  I am hardly ever focused.  My
mind is a slippery thing.  Last time we played basketball, when the
ball was thrown to me, I took off and ran with it like a football.  It
just made more sense to me at the moment.

I fold up my pajama bottoms into a neat square.  My mother gave them to
me.  They are too small, but I am running out of things she touched to
put next to me.  I slide under my bed, lay the pajamas across my chest,
close my eyes.  "I hate you," I say.  "Look what you are missing."

Her, on a half-circle kind of throne, little gold five-pointed stars
floating around her head.  She is wearing something blue that does not
show the outline of her body.  She glows.  And she says back through
healthy pink lips, "I miss you, too."

She used to tell me, when I went to bed at night, that I should hurry
and fall asleep.  That way, the fairies would come and paint stars on
my ceiling faster.  I wanted to see them.  It irritated me that I had
to be asleep before they came.  But it did teach me one good thing:
just stop looking, and the magic will come.

I opened my eyes.  "Where are you?  Is that heaven?"

Nothing.

I slide out from under my bed, put my pajamas in the hamper.  I stand
by my window and look out at the dark parade ground.  It has a fierce
presence, even empty.

Cherylanne is at the movies with Bill O'Connell.  Diane is with
Dickie.

I have started my period and I am alone.  I put a wide blue ribbon I
saved from a birthday present into my hair.  I climb into bed with a
book.  I lay my hand across my stomach, feel the outline of the belt.

Just making sure.  It's always that way with the biggest things: they
never feel real.  You have to keep on checking them forever.

He comes into my room later that night, turns on the light.  He is
holding my pajama bottoms in his hand.

"Are these yours?"

I swallow, nod.  Diane does the laundry.  Did she tell him?

He looks around the room, sighs, then looks at me.  "You know about
this?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"School."

"All right."  He starts to leave the room, then turns back.  "You soak
bloody things in cold water.  I guess they didn't tell you that,
huh?"

"No."

"Well, now you know."

"Okay.  Thank you."

"All right."  He turns out the light.  I hear his steps going
downstairs.

there is the thing: other ways are unfamiliar and, in a way, they only
hurt.  A month ago, when his father died, he burst into my room, stood
still for a moment, then said, "Your grandpa died."

"Oh," I said.  My grandfather held himself unto himself.  I never sat
on his lap.  He never smiled.

When I saw him, he would ask how old I was, and I would tell him, and
he would shake his head, as though he were a little angry.  That would
be our conversation.  He would lean forward onto his cane, groan a
little, adjust his upper half, then settle back into himself, staring
straight ahead.  I didn't love that grandfather.  And the fact of his
dying made no difference to me.  But I knew I needed to react and so I
made myself cry.  I put my hands over my face and thought of a book I'd
read recently where the dog died.  I was sitting at my desk and my
father came over to me, pressed my head into his stomach.  I cried for
him until he was finished with something deep and private inside.  Then
he left my room.  I felt a terrible relief.  I stood up and shivered,
like I was shaking things off me.

It is better when he doesn't touch.  We are used to it.  Mostly when he
offers you a kindness, you only feel bad, wondering how to hold
yourself, how to be now.  And wondering, too, about the other times.

In the morning, I forget for a minute about my miracle.  But then,
when I go into the bathroom, I remember and suck in air, happy-quick.

I run back to bed, lie still with my eyes closed.  I can get
pregnant.

I can have something its own self, and yet part of me, growing
inside.

Cells of all kinds, serious and dividing.  Hair sprouting underwater.

Fingers, and fingernails coming.  An ear on each side of a new head,
eyelids, moving legs and arms.  This is too much!  Why can I be
pregnant already?

At some time it must have made sense.  At some time you were not in
junior high at this age, but ready to be making your own dinner and
rocking your babies to sleep.

I get up, pour cereal into a bowl, turn on the television to a low
volume.  I like Saturday-morning television: the drama of Fury and Sky
King, the jerk-back kind of watching you do when the Three Stooges are
on.  I also like Popeye, though why Olive Oyl chooses him over Pluto I
do not understand.  Those misshapen arms.  Never mind that after some
spinach they can become helpful things, like mallets.  The rest of the
time you have to look at them, i i and the tattoos do not help one
bit.

Pluto is better looking.  His character is a little rough, but I
believe that in the long run Olive would be better off with him.

Once I told some GIs that Cherylanne and I watched Popeye.  We were at
the PX looking at records and they asked us which ones were the most
popular.  I said we didn't know.  "Don't you watch American
Bandstand?"
one of them asked.  He was grinning, flirting a little.

"We like Popeye better," I said.

Cherylanne gasped slightly, then stormed out of the record area into
Young Juniors.  "Don't you ever tell anyone that again!"

"Why not?  We do like Popeye better."

I saw her face change around with the beginnings of a few answers to
me, but she didn't pick any.  She just walked away, left me fingering
some pleated skirts.  I didn't understand how those skirts were made,
how they kept those permanent dents.  I looked at them for a while, on
the outside and on the inside, stretched them in and out like an
accordion, and then I went home.

That was the end of Cherylanne watching cartoons with me.  It made
me kind of sad, because I thought she still wanted to.  There were
these forces.  They would grab her like canes grabbed cartoon dancers
around the neck and pulled them off the stage.

"This can be a very difficult time of life," Cherylanne recently
said.

She was using her big lavender powder puff to perfume between her
breasts.  "Adolescence is studied by many famous people because it is
so hard."  She sighed deeply, then noticed a chunk of mascara loose on
one upper lash.  She picked at it, holding her face perfect, until she
got it.

Then she started in with some lipstick.  She stretched her mouth open,
talked funny through it while she smeared on a creamy layer of Rose
Petal Pink.  "There are pamphlets at the guidance counselor's if you
want to read them," she said.  She closed her mouth, rubbed her lips
together, looked at me.  "If you want to know what you're in for when
you're my age, I mean."  And then, generous, "Some are right for you
even now."  She smacked her lips together hard, checked the mirror,
stopped a smile just short of itself.

after breakfast, I go over to Cherylanne's.  It is ten-thirty.  My
father and Diane are still sleeping.  It's good when this happens.  I
like to run the day for a while.

No one answers when I call out.  I stand for a while in the living
room, then move into the kitchen, pretending I live there.  I open the
refrigerator door, sit at the kitchen table.  It doesn't work.  The
smell is not right.  Your own house always has the right smell to you,
the one that quiets a nervous place, no matter what.  I hook my feet
around the rungs of the chair, look around, then hear the low sweet
sound of voices being carried on the air outside.  Belle and
Cherylanne.  I get up and look into the backyard.  Belle is hanging out
sheets.  She carries them, huge and fragrant, in a creaking wicker
basket, clothespins in a faded striped bag.  When the sheets are on the
clothesline, they make an inviting U shape.  I always want to lie in
that damp bed, be rocked by the wind and look up at the clouds.

I used to stay near my mother when she hung out clothes.  I made people
out of the straight wooden clothespins, the ones with rounded heads.  I
didn't like the spring-type ones, which could surprise you with their
meanness.  I took the round ones, wrapped them in Kleenex for clothes,
and made families: two parents, many children, clipped all in a row on
the edge of the basket high above the other clothespins, which lay
naked and unchosen below them.  I used to help peg things on the
line.

I liked the slight resistance you felt, the satisfying muffled squeak
of wood anchoring cloth.  And I liked the clothespins' dependability.

Say you used them to hang out some towels and then forgot about them:
you could come back in three days and there they would be, just as
you'd left them, still holding something up, even though days had
passed and it had been dark, even though you had sat at the table
eating your second dessert, with those clothespins a million miles from
your mind.  They kept on working until you said they were done.

Our laundry goes in a dryer now.  He doesn't like hanging out
clothes.

Sometimes it catches up to me in a rush, all that has changed.

Cherylanne is lying on a beach towel near Belle,
sunning herself.  She has an alarm clock beside her, I know, to
go off every twenty minutes to remind her to flip over - and a fat new
magazine wrapped around itself to hold its place.  I want to know what
she and Belle are saying but I can't quite hear.  Whatever it is, it is
a warm and friendly thing.  I have known it.  My mother and I, walking
to the grocery store together: I had a sunburn and was wearing my
mother's Mexican kind of blouse with the stretchy neckline pulled down
like a gypsy, to spare my blistered shoulders.  You could see fluid
move inside the blisters like little oceans if you touched them.  I
carried an umbrella to shade myself.  I felt glamorous, like someone a
little bit famous.  My mother told me about when she had to get
glasses, when she was my age.  "Oh, they were so ugly," she said.  "Not
like the cute ones they have now.  They looked just like Coke bottle
bottoms, and the frames were ugly gray metal.  All the kids made fun of
me."

"Even your brother and sister?"  I asked.  She smiled.  "Especially
them."

"What did you do?"

She stared ahead, remembering, "Well, I cried, of course.  And I hardly
ever wore them.  I tried to get by without them."

"Oh."  I took her hand, held it for a while, turned the wedding ring on
it around and around.  Then I said, "I think you look pretty in
glasses."

"Thank you," she said, but she was out of the moment and on to her
list.  "Baked potatoes or mashed tonight?"  She stopped walking, leaned
close to me.  "Or scalloped?"  she asked, a little excited.  "How would
you like that?"  It was a whole thing for her, rich and satisfying,
planning what we would eat each night.  She worked to make things
match.  She clipped recipes constantly, filed them in scented
envelopes, used them like friends.

I come out the back door and wave to Belle.  "Hey, Katie," she says,
and Cherylanne sits up, squints at me.

"Oh, good," she says.  "Put some on my back, will you?"  She holds up
the Coppertone bottle.  I squeeze some in my hands, rub it on in the
way I know she likes.  You aren't supposed to get it on her swimsuit
straps.  "Want to lie out with me?"  she asks.

Well, I don't.  I find it boring, suntanning in the backyard.  It's
strictly for tanning emergencies.  The only sounds you hear are
airplanes droning, army men calling out army things, the cars going by
in the distance.  Ants can crawl on you whenever they want.  When you
lie on your back, you get a wet itch all along the middle of it, and
when you turn over, you get it on your stomach.  I like lying out at
the pool, the sound of water keeping you cool even if you aren't in
it.

"Let's go swimming," I say.

She looks at her watch.  "Can't.  I have an afternoon date."

I have never heard of such a thing.  "What for?"

"I'm going bowling."

"With who?"

"Bill O'Connell."

"Again?"

"We haven't been bowling."

			 "I know, but you just saw him last night."

Cherylanne looks at her mother, then at me.  In a low voice, she says,
"I know that."

Belle anchors the last towel on the line, pulls the empty basket up to
rest on her hip.  "You can help me bake," she says.  "I've got to make
a cake today."

I shrug.  "Okay."  I like helping Belle.  Even when I'd never broken an
egg before, she just went ahead and let me do it.

"I might mess up," I had warned her, the shame already curled low in
the bottom of my belly.

"Try it," she said.  Her voice was as comfortable as a quilt.  I held
my breath, cracked the shell against the side of the bowl.  The yolk
smashed, pieces of shell fell into the bowl with it.  I was so sorry,
and feeling scared to look up, and all she did was give me a clean bowl
and another egg.  "Try again," she said, and walked away.  She started
humming.  Country western was what she really liked.

"But I messed up," I said.

She stopped singing, came to stand by me.  "Do you like scrambled
eggs?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, you didn't hardly mess up, then."

I had to keep my smile tight, so much was in me.  And that wasn't
all.

Next she said, "You know, if you didn't like scrambled eggs, you still
wouldn't have messed up.  You're just learning, Katie.  That's all.
You go ahead and mess up all you want.  Hell, I got a million eggs.
They're on sale over to Piggly Wiggly."

I didn't do anything else wrong.  I figured I might not.  I'd been
taught tenderly, and that's how a lesson stays.  I can separate eggs
now, one-handed.  It's all Belle's.  It's so easy to go the other
way.

One of the reasons I have trouble with math is that the teacher
punishes you for being wrong.  When you miss too much, he draws a
circle on the blackboard just above the level of your nose, and then
tells you to put your nose in it.  Naturally you have to be on tiptoe
to do it.  He has you stay there till your leg muscles feel shaky.  He
divided our class up the third week of school into smart, middle, and
dumb groups.  All that trouble I have with numbers this year, that's
all Mr.  Hornman's.

So I will help Belle today.  When I am done, I will try to think of a
way to thank her.  You have to give back.  Last time, I gave her a new
tin of chili powder with gold Christmas ribbon wrapped around it.

Later, I lied to my father when he was looking for it.  That was the
secret part of my gift.  He would have gotten mad if he knew Belle was
teaching me things.  "Something special about Belle?"  he would ask.

"Something better?"  He'd done things like that before.  And of course
there were no answers to those questions.

None that you could say.

We make chocolate cake, and I give Belle a tea ball.  It was my
mother's.  There isn't much chance of him missing that.  My mother used
to talk on the phone and dunk that tea ball.  I liked to use the phone
after her, the receiver still warm, the smell of her tea breath on the
mouthpiece.  I wished I had someone to talk to on the telephone like
she did.  "Oh, uh huh," she would say, and wait a long time.  "Yes!"
she would say, nodding as though the person on the phone were there
before her.  It was exciting.  When I was little, I would get on her
lap and look through her apron pockets while she was talking on the
phone.

I found Kleenex and safety pins, mostly, but sometimes something good:
an earring.  A shiny dime.  Tickets from somewhere she'd been.  She
saved them all, proof of something.

I am lying on the living room rug, staring at the radio, at the thin
red line that finds the station.  The radio is a big black rectangle
with a long antenna, kept here on the floor, next to my father's
chair.

It is always tuned to his station.  I turn it on, hear the loud sound
of the baseball announcers.  They get so excited.  I used to wonder if
they were being hit, their surprised "Oh!"s sounding just like it.

"Oh!  Would you look at that!  OH!"  But they were just watching the
game, telling how it was to see it.  I turn the dial, get some fancy
piano music.  I listen with my eyes closed.  This kind of music draws
pictures in my head, takes me places, acts out whole stories.  Diane
doesn't like it, she always makes me change the station.

But when I grow up I will play it loud in my own house, open the
windows wide.

Once, when I was listening to his radio, my father came home.  I sat up
fast.  You weren't supposed to play his radio without asking.  But he
wasn't mad.  He sat down and asked me did I know how a radio worked.  I
told him that when I was little, I thought there were real people in
there, swaying before their microphones.  There were tiny girl singers
in formals, little men in tuxedos, their eyebrows wrinkled from singing
like Eddie Fisher.  And there were little instruments: saxophones you
could fit into matchboxes, pianos no wider than a quarter.

He interrupted me.  "You know better than that now, though, don't
you?"

"Oh, yes," I said.

"So how do radios work?"

"Well, I...I think there are tubes."

"Yes?"

"And some electricity."

"Yes?"

"You have to plug it in."

He laughed.  And then he told me how radios worked.  I watched his
mouth move, and his eyes, so close to me now, but different than
usual.

I was trying so hard to listen that I couldn't.  There was a bad hole
in my brain.  And so when he finished and asked me did I understand, I
had to disappoint him.

His face lost something.  I could feel him pulling back in, like a
turtle.  I remember thinking that so much about him was unfair.  And
that starting right then, there was clean space inside me that let me
know it was not all my fault.  It's like looking at the pictures of
those artists who paint with millions of dots.  You stand close for so
long and see nothing.

You stand back one time and say, Oh.

Diane comes in, stops when she sees me.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing," I say.  "Music."

She leans over to turn it off.  "I hate that music!  It's for
funerals."

I move to turn it back on, stop.  Later.

Dickie comes in the door, stops there.

"Come on in," I say.  "He's gone."

"Where?"  Diane asks.

I shrug.  Diane looks at me, then at Dickie.

"Come on," she says.  "You can come with us."

The air has gotten rare.  I stand up, pull down my shirt, tighten my
ponytail.  "Where we going?"

"To Dickie's house.  I'll show you the puppies."

She turns to him.  "All right?"

He spreads his hands wide.  "Okay with me."

I heard about someone the radio called up.

They won something and they weren't even listening.  Sometimes all it
takes is to be there.  I have never even seen Dickie's house.  Of
course, I have always wanted to.  And I am going there right now,
invited like a guest.  Any jealous feelings I had about Cherylanne's
being on a date go down like water in the last suck of the drain.

It is pale green, Dickie's house, and it has dark-green shutters.

This surprises me: I thought only grandparents had shutters.  The lawn
is patchy bald here and tufted there -like a crazy man haircut.  There
is a bush with flowers nearly given up on it, light-pink things with
their heads hanging down.

Dickie pulls out his keys and opens the front door, waves us in.  Diane
goes first, confidently, and I follow.  I am suddenly shy, and wish I
had stayed home.

The living room has a gold rug, a black leather chair, a pole lamp,
and a sofa that looks like anybody's.  There is an empty bag of Fritos
by the chair, and a newspaper, unopened.  There is nothing on the
walls, no curtains.

"Want a beer?"  Dickie asks me, and winks.

I smile, look down, and then hear the faint urgent sounds of puppies.

"Is that them?"  I ask.  "The puppies?"

"They're in the kitchen," Dickie says.  "Come." Diane has stretched out
on the sofa, kicked off her shoes, closed her eyes.  "Go ahead," she
says.
"I've seen them a million times."

They are in the corner, in a cardboard box lined with a once pink
blanket.  They are in their own made jumble, paws over heads over
rumps, tails sticking out every which way.  When they see Dickie, they
leap up on wobbly legs, push forward toward him.  He kneels down, holds
his hand out to them.  "I swear they think I'm their father," he
says.

He pats each head, and I am amazed to see their tails wag.  Their eyes
are shiny-new, and their coats, when I touch them, too soft for this
world.  I sit down on the floor beside them, sigh, smile.  "They're so
cute," I say.  This is not it.  What I mean is more.  I want them.  All
of them.

Dickie stands up.  "Yeah, they're cute.  But another week and I don't
know what the hell I'm going to do with them."

I stop petting them.  "Can't you sell them?"

He laughs.

"Or give them away?"

"Maybe some," he says and goes to the refrigerator, takes out a Lone
Star.  "Beer?"  he asks again.

And I do an amazing thing.  I say, "Yes, please."

Dickie laughs.

"Can I?"  I say.

"Hey, Diane," he calls.  "Should we get your sister drunk?"

Diane comes into the kitchen, leans against the wall, looks at me.

"What the hell," she says.  "You want a beer?"

"Yeah," I say.

"So have a beer," she says.  Her voice is not her own.  She is in her
own movie.

Dickie opens a bottle of beer, hands it to me.  I take a sip, nod.

"It's good."  It is not, though, it's bitter.  But I like it anyway.

"I'll have one," Diane says, sitting down at the table, and when Dickie
gives it to her, I see this is old for her.

I take another swallow, watch the puppies.  "Do you think we can have
one, Diane?"

"No."

I pet one head, another rump, feel along the side of yet another leg.

"Why not?"

"Oh," she sighs, tips her chair back on two legs.  "It would be too
much work, something like that.  I don't know.  He wouldn't want a
dog."

"What if we just came home with one?  He'd see how cute she is.  He
might like her."

"Try it," Dickie says.  "They need another week, then take your
pick."

"Shut up, Dickie," Diane says, but it is a warm thing, not what it
seems.

He comes over to her, picks her up like she is nothing.  "Come here,"
he says, and starts carrying her off.  She is laughing, relaxed.  I
hear their voices disappear down the hall.

I drink more beer.  The puppies are sleepy, arranging themselves like
toys.  I wonder where their mother is.

I hear low talk from Dickie and Diane.  They have closed a door behind
them.  I actually don't mind.  It is nice, sitting in a new place by
myself.  By the time I finish the beer, I am making plans.  I have this
confidence, like a good new outfit I'm wearing on the inside.

I can have a puppy.  I can have a boyfriend.  I can have a good
husband, live in a house with him.

I go into the living room, think how I'd decorate it.

Well, curtains, for one thing, it is only civilized.  And something
baking in the oven, to make smells you can almost hold.  Some plants.

Some pictures we would pick out together: "Do you like that one?"

"Well, of course, if you do, dear."  Yes, and an ash tray for guests
who smoke, and a candy dish, all with wrapped-up toffees.

In the mornings I would have my friends over.  There would be a big
blue plate of doughnuts, powdered sugar and whatever else they wanted,
and we would talk about what we were going to do that day.  "Well, he
is taking me somewhere tonight, but I sure don't know where," I would
say, and my friends would rustle a bit, excited and glad for me to have
a romantic husband.  Millions of times I would tell them it wasn't
always so easy for me.  "Oh!"  They'd wave their hands.  "You are just
so lucky!  You have always been so lucky!"

"Well," I would say, "I know it seems so."

I would vacuum with a new loud cleaner, wash clothes and hang them out
on my own rope lines.  I would be a mother to beautiful children I
would fold into my skirts and keep safe.  At night we would all watch
our favorite TV shows and if someone wanted to talk, well fine let
them.

I sit in the black chair, close my eyes.  This makes me dizzy, so I
open them again.  I hear some one coming down the hall and I stand
up.  Diane comes into the room, smiles at me.  "Sorry."

"For what?"

She leans closer.  "Did you drink that whole beer?"

"Yeah."

"Shit!"  She starts to laugh.

"Shit!"  I say, too.  It's easy as pie.

I start to march around the room.  "I shit, you shit, he shits," I
say.

Then, confidentially, "Conjugation ."

"My God, Dickie," Diane says, "look what you did."

"Oh, no, Diane," I say.  "This is me talking."

Dickie comes into the living room, tucking in his shirt.  Then he pulls
a comb out of his pocket, pulls it expertly through his hair.  He looks
at me for a minute, then smiles.  "Hell, she's shit-faced."

Diane is suddenly serious.  "This is bad, Dickie.
Jesus.  We can't take her home like this."

He raises an eyebrow.  "She doesn't have to go home.  Let's take her
out to dinner with us."

Diane looks at me, hands on hips.  "You want to come?"

I am their pet girl.  They are having a good time with me.  "I can make
us dinner," I say.  "I'm a good cook."  A vision: us at the table, an
embroidered cloth in place, pastel bowls of potatoes, corn, green
beans, a square meat loaf, apple pie waiting on the side.  Me saying,
"Pass me another beer, will you?"  and Dickie saying, "Damn, she is a
good cook, Diane!"  and Diane getting, oh, yes, just a teensy bit
jealous.  Diane is beautiful, but all she makes are brown-sugar
sandwiches.

"Let's go to A&W," Dickie says.

Well, that's fine, too, of course.  My contentment is thick and
lasting, like butter on bread.  A&W...
is fine.

By the time we arrive home, I am sober again.  It is seven in the
evening.  Dickie and Diane let me off, then drive away.  I regret their
going, though I knew, of course, it would come to this.  I stand by the
side of the road, sighing.  The sun is low in the sky, deep red.

"Katie!"  I hear Cherylanne calling me from her bedroom window.  "Hey,
Katie!"  Then, as I get closer, "Where have you been?"

I go into her house, climb the stairs slowly.  She is waiting in her
bedroom, dressed in a flowered bathrobe and her pink fuzzy slippers.

She has silver clips on either side of her head, to make spit curls.

There is a thin layer of cold cream on her face, making her appear
slightly ill.

"Where are you going?"  I ask.

"Where have you been?"  she answers.

I lie down on her bed, stretch out luxuriously.  "Drinking with Dickie
and Diane.  Drinking beer."

She stands still, then offers, as though offended, "I doubt it."

I shrug.  "Doubt it.  That's where I've been.  I had Lone Star beer.  I
bet you can smell it on my breath."

She steps closer, leans in, sniffs delicately.  "All I smell is
onions.
You'd better eat some parsley right away."  That tip she got from
watching Miss america, I know.

"I don't care if I smell like onions," I say.  "I like onions."

Cherylanne sits on her dresser stool, regards me carefully.  "Did you
really drink beer?"

"Sure did."  I hold my arm up in the air, let my wrist flop, my fingers
fall.  Say I had some rings and bracelets on, I'd look like Cleopatra
herself.

"Huh.  Well, I wouldn't be so proud and mighty if I were you.  It's a
dent in your character.  It's something, once you've done, there's no
going back."

"What do you mean?"

She turns to her mirror, fiddles with her clips.  "You just can't go
back.  Now you have gone and drunk alcohol."

"Well, la de dali."  I make a scared face.  "I guess I'm going to hell
now."

She stands up.  "Since you are in such a bad mood, you can just
leave.
I had plenty to tell you.  But now you can just forget it.  Why don't
you just go drink some more?"

I rise, languidly.  "I think I will.  I think I'll have a big, fat
whiskey."

Cherylanne is painting her toenails.  Hard.  She is trying to act like
I'm not there.  And here is some blessed and new strong thing: I don't
care.

I come into the house, see him at the kitchen table.  He is reading
through a stack of official looking papers.  "Where you been?"  he
asks.

"Cherylanne's," I say.

"Doing what?"  He doesn't look up.

I lean against the doorjamb.  "Oh, we went and tried clothes on at the
PX.  Then we played cards.  I won every round.  We ate some popcorn.
And some cheese."

"Uh huh."  He turns a page.  "Where's your sister?"

"Beats me.  I haven't seen her."

He looks up, something in his eyes, then changes his mind.

"See you," I say.  I go up into my room, lie on my bed, stare at the
ceiling.  My brain is saying my name to itself.  That is all.  Just my
name.

When Diane comes home, he calls us into the kitchen, tells us to sit
down.  This could be anything.  We sit straight, not looking at him or
each other.

"We're moving," he says.

Now we look at each other.  We have heard this many times, and yet I
know that what we are both feeling is surprise.  Each time, you learn a
place forgetting that you must leave it.  Each time, there is a
pulling-away pain when it is time to go.  I have been in so many
classrooms, looking out the window and thinking about the others going
on without me.  Thinking that someone else will take my desk and I will
be in a new one.  I will stand before my-age strangers, kids jiggling
their knees and smirking a little while the teacher lays her arm heavy
and apologetic across my shoulders.  "Class, this is Katherine.  She's
our new girl."

"It's Katie," I will say.

"What's that?"

"It's Katie," I will say again, and the teacher will say, "Oh, well, I
guess she likes to be called Katie."

I will be looked at, my shoes and my hair and my outfit and the line of
my lips.  Then I will be talked about outside at recess or in the halls
between classes, in old, formed groups.  "She, She, She..."  is all
I will hear for a while.  Faces will close up when I appear, smiles
will be thin and false.  Oh, one person will be nice to me at first,
someone who also doesn't belong, and we will sit together at lunch,
lonely, anyway, knowing we are temporary to each other.  Then,
eventually, I will find my place.  It is too hard to do this so
often.

Really, it is too hard.

Diane sighs, picks at her thumb.  "Where are we going?"

"St.  Louis," my father says.  "Missouri."

I realize I don't know where Missouri is.  Somewhere in the middle.

And there is nothing I can put to Missouri.  I envision the people
there, all adults, standing in a circle, in dark clothes, their mouths
open a little.  The men have their sleeves rolled up, and they look
suspicious.

The women are stupidly kind.  The land is flat and all one color.  I
don't know why this vision comes to me.  I accept my own wrongness.

"When?"  I ask, and hear the lightness in my voice, the pain
disguised.

"Three weeks," he says.  Then he stands up.  We are done.

"There's eight more weeks of school," Diane says.  "Can't we finish?
It's my last year.  I'm almost done."

"Three weeks," he says.  His shirt is open two buttons, and I see the
defeated sag of the top of his T-shirt.  The light from the kitchen
hums, shines down on the bits of scalp you see between the standup
hairs of his crew cut.  There is a little perspiration there, slick and
see-through.  I am afraid, seeing so much of him.

Diane swallows, looks left, then back at him.  "Please?"

"There's nothing I can do," he says.  "What's the difference?  You'll
finish there."  He turns to leave.

"Where are you going?"  Diane says.

"Into the living room.  That all right with you?"  His back is straight
as he leaves, his tread heavy and certain.  There is no touching a back
like that, asking it to wait.

After he is gone, Diane sits quietly, her face blank.  Then she tells
me, "Well, I'm not going."

"You have to."

"No, I don't."

"You do, too!"

She stands up.  "No.  I don't."

She goes upstairs to her room and I follow.  "Can I come in?"

"What for?"

"To talk."

"Not now, Katie."

"Okay."

I go into my room, look out the window.  No stars, all clouds in the
sky.  I take in a deep breath, hold it, let it out.  First, I'll tell
Cherylanne.  She might cry.  She thinks she looks pretty when she
cries, she has told me.  "I have a lovely laugh," she said, "and I also
look good when I cry.  That is very unusual."

I put on my pajamas, sit on my bed with my poetry notebook.  I write,
"Oh," and nothing else comes.  I cover my face with my hands.  I make
almost no sounds, crying.

On Monday morning, I go to Cherylanne's house before school.  She is
seated before her mirror, making her hair into what she calls a Grecian
ponytail.  It is a bun toward the front, a ponytail in the back.  When
she has finished, she paralyzes it with hair spray.  She centers her
necklace, turns her face this way and that, bends over to pull up her
nylons in the knee area.  Then she stands, inspects her whole self.

"Okay," she says.  "Ready."

"We're moving," I say.

She stops, turns toward me.  "You are?"

I nod.

"When?"

"Three weeks."

"My Lord."  She reaches for her necklace.  "Well.  You can sit by me on
the bus."  She regrets herself for a moment, I can see her thinking
about how to take away what she has just given me.  But she doesn't
take it back.  And she lets me leave her room first.  She is my friend,
I have always known it.  You can have a lot of shakiness on the outside
and still know the inside is steady.  Before we get off the bus, she
removes her necklace and tells me I can wear it.  I love that
necklace.

It is a gold heart, with rhinestones lined up along one side.  Her
name is engraved on it in fancy script.  "You can keep it all day," she
says.  "But now," she bites her lip, mother to child, "this is real
jewelry.  Be careful."

I clasp the necklace behind my neck.  I have seen princesses bow their
head for the crown, nuns kneel down for the veil.  This is better.  The
pendant lies in my new valley, between my coming breasts, shows them
off a little.  The weight of the necklace is heavy and good.  It seems
like borrowed things are always that way, better than your own.  All
day long I will reach for that necklace, I know.  And all day long I
will find it there.  All you have to say is, "I'm leaving," and mean it
true, say it to someone who would rather you not go, and little fancy
things will start happening to you, bang, bang, bang.

Between math and geography, I tell Marilyn Mayfield, my in-school
best friend, that I am moving.  She covers her mouth, the outside edges
of her eyes slant down, and she says, "Oh, no" in slow motion.  Then
she hugs me tight.  She asks where I am going, and I tell her.  She
nods.  And then we are done.  There are lots of army kids at this
school, and so the civilian kids, they know.  What can you do?  What
can you say?  You just keep on acting the same, even though there is a
bright hard edge to things now.  Sometimes I think it is like dying.  I
always think that, when I am getting ready to move, then I forget it,
and then I always remember it when it comes time to move again.

On Friday afternoon, Diane comes home with one of Dickie's puppies
and a large box that toilet paper came in.  My mouth hangs open to let
some happiness out.  "You got one!"  I say.

"Help me," Diane says, and I take the box from her.

"Where should I put it?"

She shrugs.  "The kitchen, I guess.  She's used to that."  I put the box in the
corner.  There is newspaper on the bottom, and I am sorry for all the
puppy has lost.  "She should at least have a blanket," I say.

"She's all right," Diane says, lowering the puppy into the box, and she
does seem to be.  She has her dog-in-love look on.  She sits
expectantly in the middle of the box and then, suddenly, barks.  It is
such a pure and perfect sound, high and ringing slightly.

"What's her name?"  I ask.

"Bridgette."

I look at Diane, and she shrugs.  "Dickie made me promise.  He likes
that name."

I pat the puppy's head, pull her ears gently through my fingers.  They
are something like silk, but warm with lifeblood.  "She looks like a
Bridgette," I say.

"You want to feed her?"  Diane asks.

We are mixing baby cereal and milk with dry meal when my father comes
in.  He walks over to the box, looks in.  "What the hell is that?"

"It's a puppy," Diane says.

"What's it doing here?"

"Bridgette is her name," I say.  "Pick of the litter."

He doesn't acknowledge me, he looks at Diane, who says, with a
kind of weariness, "She's mine.  I'm keeping her."

"The hell you are."

"Dad," Diane says, "now is as good a time as any to tell you: I'm not
moving with you.  I want to stay here.  I'll finish school and find a
job.
Mary Jo Anderson said I can stay with them."

"You're not staying with anyone.  You're coming with us.  Now get rid
of the dog.  That's the last thing I need."

"I'll take care of her," I say, but apparently I am invisible.  There
is something mounting between Diane and him, blocking the view of
anything else.

"I am keeping that dog," Diane says.  "And I am not going with you."  I
see his color darken, his cheek begin moving in and out.  I back out of
the kitchen, go into my room, close the door.  There is a lot of math
homework.  And reading in geography.  I open my Nations of the World
book, find the place.  I hear Diane yell, "I am eighteen years old and
you can not stop me.  I don't want to go.  I don't want to live with
you!  I don't want to and I don't have to!"

Well, he hits her, of course, and now I hear it getting louder, the
mess of him at her.  She runs up the stairs and bursts into my room.

He is right behind her.  I keep my eyes on the book, start to read
about exporting soybeans.  "Stop it, stop it!"  she screams.  I look
out of the corner of my eye and see him straddling her on my bedroom
floor.  He has her wrists pinned down and he says between his teeth,
close into her face, "Don't you ever, don't you goddamn ever tell me
what you will and won't do!"  She starts to slither away but he grabs
her, slaps her, slaps her again, slaps her again.  I read.  Soybeans.
Exported.  Soybeans.
Exported.  I think I'd better be quiet with my breathing, and so I
stop.

I have been in bed for a long time, and the house is quiet.  I will
see if Diane is all right.  And then I will feed the puppy.  I don't
think anyone fed the puppy.

I push Diane's door open, whisper her name.  Nothing.  I walk over to
her bed, reach out for her.  She is not there.  I snap on her light.

The bed is made, the window beside it open.  A breeze comes in, stops,
starts again.  Did she go out the window?  I wonder.

I sit on her bed.  I do not think this is a regular sneak-out.  I think
she is gone.  I wrap my arms around myself.  I could go downstairs and
look, but I already know: the puppy is gone, too.

Now I am alone with him.  And I don't know anything.  I go back into my
bedroom, stare into the mirror.  "Help me," I say.

Bubba comes to sit beside me when I am out on the porch after school.

He nods his head as though we have been having a conversation.  Then,
"Yup," he says.  I wonder if he has lost his mind.  Finally, "Hey,
Bubba," I say.

"Hey, Katie."  He looks down at the ground, fuels up, turns toward
me.

"I heard y'all were moving."

"Yeah.  To Missouri."

"Well, I just wanted to tell you, you know, it wasn't you or nothing.
I can't stand my sister, is all.  That's why I was...you know."

I nod.

"But you're all right, Katie."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."  He stands up, socks his hand with his fist.

"Okay.
Well, I hope you like Montana."

"Missouri."

"Oh, yeah."  He walks away, his strides long and loping.  Sod-buster
walk, Cherylanne calls it.

Cherylanne bangs the door shut, walks past Bubba without acknowledging
him.  "Gnats out, huh?"  she asks and points at Bubba, makes big-eyes
at me.  She sits down, leans against me, sighs.

"Your sister back yet?"

"Nope."

"It's been over twenty-four hours."

"I know."

"Well, didn't he call the MPs or anything?"

I look at her.  "He's waiting."

"For what?"

This is too hard to explain.  And so I just say, "For her to come
back."

"Oh."  Cherylanne rubs alongside of her neck, leans her head far back,
and shakes her hair.  A girl can add fullness simply by tossing her
curls gently behind her.  She rights her head, gives it one more shake,
turns toward me.  She really is quite pretty.  She has a mole on her
cheek in just the right place.  "Want to eat over?"  she asks.

"Sure."  This is it, my normal life, evaporating.

Bell passes me the fried chicken, slaps Bubba's hand for taking a
piece off the platter before I get it.  "I'll tell you something,
Katie," she says.  "You're really going to make something of
yourself.
Your mother and I both always said so."

I smile, shrug.

"Oh, yes," she says.  "You mark my words."

From now on until the day I leave, I will be like the birthday girl.

I need to talk to her.  I go under the bed to call her.  I close my eyes,
try to bring back the vision I had last, the blue robe, the throne.

She appears, but there is no throne.  She is the only thing in a
background of soft blackness.  I think, well, now it's Missouri, and
she nods her head.  I think, this will be a new place, where you've
never been.  She nods again, kindness.  Out loud, I say, "That's what
bothers me, that you will never have been there."  And out loud, I hear
her voice answer, "But I will still be with you."  I gasp, open my
eyes, and see her still.  She is floating above me.  "Oh," I say.  "Is
this real?"

"I am only your mother and I love you," she says.

"Oh," I say again.  I am so afraid, I can't move, even to blink.  She
reaches out a hand and lays it along my cheek.  Her touch is cool and
light.

"You'll be all right," she says softly, and I feel tears come the way
they always do when something is too true, when something is named by
another that you felt only by yourself before.  "You'll be fine, Katie,
I promise you."

I close my eyes and when I open them again she is gone.  I climb out
from under my bed, lie on top of it.  I think, I will never tell anyone
this.  But I will know it for the rest of my life.  I understand
suddenly that everywhere in the world are people with secrets too much
to be told: a man in China, a woman in India, bending down at the
river, a baby too young to speak.  I see that things get delivered,
invisible and long-lasting and created for reasons felt but never
said.

Once a bunch of IIS went to see a man who was supposed to be a mind
reader.  He was old and a little crazy, dressed in layers of things
that didn't go together, gray whiskers roughing up his face, stick-out
ears, long uncombed hair.  He lived in a falling-down house at the edge
of the army post.  After we knocked at his door and asked him to show
us something, he came outside with a greasy deck of cards.  We sat in
his backyard, in high grass, in a nervous circle.  He looked at each
one of us full in the face, nodded.  We were scared, tittering a
little.  He held the deck of cards up in the air.  "Now," he said.
"Which one will I pull out?"

We all guessed, one by one.  I said, "An
ace.  A black one," full of an odd kind of sureness, and suddenly very
aware of the space between me and the kids beside me.  The old man
closed his eyes, ran his dirty hands over the deck, and pulled out the
ace of spades, showed us.  The kids looked at me and hooted but the man
said serious and straight to me, "Yes.  You got the gift, little
lady.
I saw it when y'all was walking up here."  And of course he had seen
it, despite his house and his clothes and the knee-high grass in his
yard.  He knew.

I let it go.  I made fun of him all the way home with the other kids.

Now I see how that was a bad sin.  I see lots of things now, and the
knowledge takes its right place.  I turn onto my side and go to sleep,
another mystery, really, if you only think about it.

Sherylanne is sitting beside me on her bed, teaching me to make spit
curls.  "You make a lyingdown C," she says, bobby pins coming out of
her mouth like bad-made teeth.  "You anchor it down tightly, with two
bobby pins lying at opposite angles from each other.  Then, to make
sure your curl will stay flat and flattering to the contours of your
face, you can use some tape over the bobby pins.  When you comb out,
you can fluff with your rat-tail comb for a more natural look."  Her
magazine would be proud: she has memorized all this.  Probably inside
her head as she speaks, little black-and-white how-to pictures run by,
step by step.  Still, it takes a talent.

Cherylanne knows just how many petticoats to wear to make her skirt the
right fullness.  Her bangle bracelets jangle and collide on her arm and
she ignores them professionally.  "Generally, you always want to look
natural so the man won't know what you do to look so good, he'll think
you just are that way," Cherylanne says.  She finishes my spit curls,
pulls her head back to regard with pride her excellent work.  "Now,
when you sleep tonight, you keep your pillow below your spit curls, or
you'll mess them up good.
They'll be sticking out of your head like handles."

"What happens when you get married?"  I ask.  "What do you do then?  If
you wear your curlers to bed, he'll see."

"Well, you do it in the day, when your husband's at work.  Make sure
it's after your marketing - don't be wearing rollers around on the
outside.  That's tacky.  You take your hair down just before he gets
home.
Spray your brush with his favorite cologne."  She throws that last one
in, free.

Cherylanne may be right about all this.  It is pretty much how my
mother did it.  Just before it was time for him she'd comb out her
hair, too, though it was naturally curly, so she didn't have to 
mess with making spit curls.  She'd wash her face, put on a clean
apron and red lipstick.  She'd watch out the window for him.  She loved
for him to come home.  Remembering her in her apron, the folds of it
warm and fragrant with the smells of dinner, sets up in me a longing so
strong I become breathless and have to lie down and close my eyes.  I
believe for a moment I am meant to be taken from this earth, float up
straight to heaven, held in the center of a brilliant shaft of white
light.  It does not happen.  My breathing returns, regular and
imperfect.  My eyes open.

Cherylanne is leaning over me, saying, "Well, do you want to learn this
or not?  You'd better stop goofing around.  "Now, this is important."

Apparently miracles are over for the time being.

Finally, he does call the MPs and the next day they bring Diane home.

My father, Diane, and the two MPs have a short low-voiced meeting in
the kitchen.  I am not allowed to be in the room with them.  I lie on
the sofa, listen to murmurs, to the clock tick, to the wind rise up and
settle down again.  I can't make out one word except for one of the MPs
saying, "circumstances."  But when they are done, I see that something
has changed.  The puppy is here, for one thing.  And there is a line
around Diane that he can't cross.  They pass by each other with
straightahead eyes.  Their silence is whole and complete.

The packing boxes come.  I like this part, seeing ordinary things get
wrapped like presents, get taken from your sight until they reappear at
the new place.  You can count on some fragile things being broken,
always when we moved, my mother cried a little when she found the
shattered china cup, the arm off the porcelain ballerina.  "Why do you
keep buying that stuff?"  my father would ask.  "Buy durable goods,
that's what's going to make it."  But even with the sorrow of some
things being broken, you are mostly happy when you unpack.  You are
glad to see a frying pan with a curved handle your hand already
knows.

You are glad to have your own same bed back again, your old clothes
hung in the new closet.  You flip through pages of your books before
you put them away.  In the lonely first few weeks, you take all you can
from your old things.  Then one day the kids come to get you, and your
regular time starts.  Then you like to get new things again.

On Friday, five days before we are to leave, Cherylanne invites me to
spend the night.  Though I have always been honored whenever she's
asked me in the past, this time I am not so sure I want to go.  I am
almost done here.  It seems important to keep things the way they
usually are, so I'll remember.  "I'll let you know," I tell her after
school.  I have no homework.  I have no books.  My arms felt curiously
light on the bus ride home, as if they were going to rise up and off
me.  I had only my bucket purse, a rabbit's foot hanging sickly off the
side.  My report card will be sent to my new school, as soon as I know
what it is.

"What do you mean you have to let me know?"  Cherylanne asks.

I shrug.  "I don't know."

"Well," she says, "I could make other plans, you know.  A lot of other
ones.  I turned down plenty of people in school today.  I could have
gone out in a car."

I look at her, check for lies.  This seems true enough.  "Okay," I
say.
"I'll be over after dinner."

"We'll do the Ouija board," she says.  "We can stay up all night and
inquire of the oracle."

I go into the kitchen, open the cupboard for a snack.  Oreos.  A
handful is six.  You fill the milk glass three quarters up, dunk one
cookie, eat the next one dry.  In the cardboard box, the puppy is
sleeping.

Diane has been coming home from school to let her out, and my father
has not complained one time about her.

I go into my room, lie on my back, contemplate the ceiling.  There are
some good things about being in a new place.  You have to remember
where the bathroom is every time you need to go, and that is
interesting.  You sit in your new kitchen, looking around for fun.  You
notice.  You have an edginess in you, like when you are waiting to be
called on to read the long poem you were supposed to memorize.  You are
waiting for your new life to happen.

Downstairs, I hear the back door open.  Diane.  I come down to see if
I can help with the puppy.  But it is not Diane, it is my father.  I
stop short when I see him.  He has not seen me.  I can go back
upstairs, free.

He bends over the cardboard box, looks at the puppy.  His face is plain
and clean, like it is resting.  He reaches out a hand, pets the dog,
says words to her in a voice too low for me to hear.  Then he sighs,
stands up, hands on hips.  When he sees me, he drops his hands,
straightens, nods.  "Has that dog been out?"

"No, Diane does it when she comes home."

He nods again.

"How come you're home?"  I ask.

He sits at the table.  "Why?  Are you about to get caught doing
something?"

"No."  Well, this could be a joke, him warming up.  I sit at the table
with him, finger the embroidery on the tablecloth.  On the sofa,
shoulder to shoulder with my mother, laying out colors of floss before
she began this.  The light coming in through the window at a four
o'clock angle.

I suggested deep pink, an apple green, a dark yellow, and she used
every one.

"I've invited Nancy over for dinner tonight," he says.  "Would you like to
join us?"

"Can't," I say.  "I'm going to spend the night with Cherylanne and I'm
eating with her, too."  I hope Belle won't mind.

He unbuttons his top button.  "Get me down one of those cans of Vienna
sausages, will you?"

We are going to have a little party, refreshments.  I get out the can,
ask if I can open it.  I like turning the church key, seeing the little
sausages all lined up like eager kids saying, "Pick me!"  I am almost
through when my finger slips down onto the edge of the can.  I know I
am bad cut because I see so much blood, but I can feel nothing.  I hold
my hand over the sink.  It's the pointer finger on my right hand.  I
won't be able to write, I think.  I won't be able to do my homework.

And then I remember I have none.

I touch the top of my finger, and it wiggles.  It looks as though it's
ready to fall off.  "Dad," I say, and then I start to hurt.

He leaps up when he sees the blood, grabs a kitchen towel and wraps it
around my hand.  "Sit down," he says.  He unwraps the towel, whistles
low, looks up at me.  "Does it hurt?"

I nod.

"Yeah."  He wraps it back up, goes to the cupboard, gets out his
whiskey.  He pours some in a coffee cup, hands it to me.  "Drink
this."

I look up at him, unsure.  "This?"

"It'll help," he says.  "You're pale.  You need stitches.  I'm going to
have to bring you into the dispensary."

I take a drink, shudder big.  I feel a wave of nausea, shudder it away,
stand up.  "Okay," I say, "let's go."  He crosses his arms over his
chest, smiles.

At last I have done something right.

Sherylanne has rollers in her hair, a black net around it.  I have six
sutures in my finger, a white Band-Aid around it, serious and medical
looking.

"Who do you think I'll marry?"  Cherylanne asks the Ouija board and
happy-sighs.

"Wait," I say.

She looks up, irritated.  "What?  Now look, now you have gone and
wrecked the mood and it won't answer."

"I want to know what you mean.  Like, are you looking for a name?"

"Well, I don't know," she says.  "You don't ask questions you already
know the answers for.  What is the point of a Ouija board if you
already know?"  She sighs, leans back.  "I don't think you're the one
to do this with.  Let's do you a make-over."

The sting of her insult is overtaken by my stubborn excitement at
getting a make-over.  I don't know why.  Cherylanne has given me
make-overs before, and every time we get to the end, there is just my
plain old face hanging out, breaking through all the tricks.  Not that
Cherylanne sees that.  She thinks she is Makeup Queen of the
Universe.

She tells me about mistakes she sees on the stars when we go to the
movies.  "See, she has the wrong kind of eyes for that type of shadow,"
Cherylanne whispered to me once about Elizabeth Taylor!  like the movie
people are just sitting around the set all sad, doing the best they can
until Cherylanne can get there.

I sit down on her dressing-table chair, look at myself in the mirror.

One time she did manage to cover up a lot of freckles.  She ties a
scarf around my head to hold my hair back, and then spreads on a layer
of cold cream to remove the damage of everyday living.  Much of the
dirt on your face is microscopic, Cherylanne says.  She says if you
could see your skin under the microscope you'd about throw up.  I don't
believe anything under the microscope would make me throw up.  That
would be like making fun of someone's house when they invite you
over.

Looking at things so close up, that's a modern privilege, and you owe
what you see some respect.

"Now you just relax," Cherylanne says in her makeup lady voice, "and
I'll be right back."  It's a too-slow voice, like she's talking to
someone stupid, or a dog.  She puts her robe over her yellow pedal
pushers and matching blouse, ties it tight and efficient.  Now she will
go into the bathroom and make her selections for transforming me.  I
will be turned away from the mirror.  I can't look until she's all
done, and then I'm supposed to nearly pass out with pleasure.  I have
figured out the number of compliments I have to say to keep her from
being mad:  four.  Of course, more are always welcome.  She likes best
when I ask for tips on doing it myself.  Then she can rattle off some
prepared beauty speech like the Gettysburg Address.

Well, I don't mind any of this so much, especially since at the end I
get to have my hair done, and Cherylanne does it so gentle.  She makes
me a French twist with two spit curls, and I am happy it takes a long
time for her to get it right.  It is so relaxing to have someone do
your hair.  It is near to a tickle, without the torture.  You close
your eyes, and all in the world you hear is a blurry voice asking you
for a bobby pin every now and then.  Your brain is near asleep.  You
lean into those slow, fixing hands and you feel so good you could be
Doris Day on the French Riviera, wearing your one-thousand-dollar white
bikini, Rock Hudson leaping up to get you lemonade.  "How's this,
darling?"

"Oh, fine, Rock."

"Well, good, darling."

When Cherylanne is done, I have to sit up straight while she takes my
picture.  She always takes pictures of her work.  She keeps them in a
special scrapbook decorated with pictures of makeup products: compacts
and lipsticks and creams and blush and brushes and
pencils float across the cover.

So far I am her only customer.  I wonder who she will do when I move,
and the question is like a pin in the balloon.

"Okay, you can turn around and look," she says.  Well, I have on
two-tone green eyeshadow and bright-red lipstick.  My eyebrows are
black and long as the Mississippi.  My blusher looks like a twin
slap.

Obviously, Cherylanne is having an off day.

"Well," I say.  "It's good."  One.  "I really like the dark-green
color."
Two.  "I could pass for twenty."  Three.  And then, I can't help it, I
say, "But I sort of look like a stop-and-go light."

"Well," she says, "you don't know fashion at all.  This is the English
look, and it's very popular."  She begins untying her robe, the flush
of her displeasure moving into her cheeks.  "Whether you can appreciate
it or not," she says, a little under her breath like she is having a
conversation with herself, "I have a real gift.  I can bring out the
best in everyone.  I do my mother's makeup every time she needs to look
good."

"I didn't say you don't," I say.  "I know you're good.  Just, sometimes
I have to get used to it."

She is on her bed, looking away from me.

Then, turning back, she says, "I mean, look at those spit curls.
Exactly alike."

"I know," I say.  "That's what I mean.  I know you're good."

She is silent, staring now at her feet.  White sneakers, yellow
pom-poms on them.  Then she looks up and asks me, "Do you think you'll
ever come back here?"

I wait a while, then tell her what I know is the truth.  No.  We don't
do that ever, go back.  You remember a place for a while, and then it
fades like you're going blind, and then you start making it up.  You
know you're getting things wrong, but you make it up to not lose it
all.

And it's like the places want to try, too.  They jump into your head, a
scene every now and then, like the too-bright light of a camera: your
hallway, here, flash don't forget.  The line of bushes in your front
yard, here, flash don't forget.  All of it fails.  All of it fades.

"Well," Cherylanne sighs.  "Do you want some angel food cake?"

Sometimes it seems to me that the only thing in the world is people
just trying.

We are in Cherylanne's bed, our voices drunk sounding, showing how
near to sleep we are.  "The man puts it in the hole and moves it
around," Cherylanne is patiently explaining.  "When he does it long
enough, sperm sprays out.  And that's what makes the baby."

"That makes me puke," I say.

There is a long pause, and after a yawn Cherylanne says, "Sex is a
beautiful mystery you can't understand until you do it with the one you
love."

Well, it sounds to me like the man has all the fun.  The woman must
just lie there, thinking about what to make for dinner the next day,
and the man moves it around until he gets some sperm out, which,
according to everything, he enjoys quite a lot.  And all this done pure
naked, everything hanging out and unprotected!  How would you ever be
comfortable?  How could you not be embarrassed forever?  And then the
next morning, the man right there, knowing everything that happened the
night before.

"Do you really think you'll like it?"  I ask.  "Marybeth Harris says it
hurts like crazy for the woman.  Her cousin did it and told her
everything.
She bled from down there, and it wasn't the curse, it was just from
getting hurt!"  Silence.  "Can you imagine?"

Nothing.  I rise up on one elbow, look down into her face.  Her
breathing is deep and regular, her own and private.  I look at her
eyelashes, long and curled slightly upward, the pretty shape of her
mouth.  I would like to wake her up and give her a big present.

I hope she will find the right husband.  Lately she wants a
veterinarian.

I get out of bed, pull the sheet up over her.

Everyone in her house is sleeping, and I feel the quiet over me like
clothes.  Outside, the clouds could be gauze pulled thin across the
stars, and the moon is near-transparent, as though someone tried to
erase it.  Cherylanne's window faces the parade ground just as mine
does, but the angle, of course, is not the same.  It can be so
different to be only next door.

Once Cherylanne and I fell in a river together.

We were walking at the edge of the bank, picking flowers.  She slipped
in some mud, and all of a sudden there was her surprised and scared
face sticking out of the muddy water.  "Get out of there!"  I said.

And she yelled, drifting along in the current, "I can't!  I can't!"

I ran along beside her, reached out my hand, and when she grabbed hold
of it, I fell in, too.  We held on to each other and worked to keep our
heads up.  I yelled for help once, but it embarrassed me and, anyway,
there was no one around.  I don't know what happened - the current
shifted, maybe but we were suddenly propelled straight toward the
shore, and we were able to get out.  I'd lost a shoe, and Cherylanne
had ripped off some nails trying to grab on to things she passed.

Otherwise, we were only wet.  We laughed, but it was with our eyeballs
wide around.  When we got home, we went to my house first.  My father
asked what happened to us and I told him.  I was a little bit proud.

First he shook his head, disgusted.  Then, "What were you doing by that
river?"  he asked.  "What have I told you about that goddamn river?
You had no business down there!"  I stood wet and embarrassed and I
felt more than heard Cherylanne leave.  Later, I went to her house and
threw up.  Belle called my father, saying, "She's sick.  She's in
shock.  These girls could have drowned!  Don't you know that?"  He gave
a long answer, and Belle said nothing and then she hung up.  She
turned around to look at me, her eyes wet and sorry, and I wanted more
than anything for her just to be quiet, not to tell me things I already
knew and could do nothing about.  And she was quiet.  She walked away, made
us some peanut butter cookies.  At school the next day, Cherylanne and I
told everyone how close we came to dying, how we swam out of the clutches
of death in the nick of time and if they thought that was easy they were
crazy.

I sit down at Cherylanne's dresser, barely make out the outline of my
head in the mirror.  I put my hand out, search for a bottle of her
perfume, find it, put some on my wrist.  It's the one that smells like
baby powder and has an exclamation after its name, it is so happy about
itself.  I find her brush, I run it through my hair, see the beautiful blue
sparks electricity fly out.

Cherylanne has a pink plastic pstick holder, swirled with white like
marble.  It is Led with six tubes of lipstick, all in order according to
shade.  Barely There is the first one.  I feel for the middle one, put
some on.  I cross one leg over the Flier, swing it, rub my lips
together good.  Her jewlry box is on the far right, with her many
necklaces and rings and bracelets and pins.  I start to reach for 
the jewelry box, then stop.  I am me and I live next door.

I want suddenly to be in my own room, with my faded blue sheets, with
my cigar box full of dried flowers and horse chestnuts and the fragile
bird's nest I found at the base of a tree.  A cat was hanging over that
nest, evil coming out its eyes like headlights.  I think about writing
a note to Cherylanne, but it is too dark and, anyway, what would I
say?

She will forgive this, we were done with the best part of the
sleep-over.

I tiptoe down the stairs, close the door quietly behind me.  The key to
our house is under the mat, and I slide it noiselessly into place, let
myself in.  I feel like a new person in my own living room.  Say I were
a thief, I think: what would I take?  I would want the grandfather
clock, the rocking chair.  I would want the pillows on the sofa and the
sofa, too.  I would want the coffee table, the magazines on it, the
sweet potato plant my mother started on the kitchen windowsill that now
has overtaken the table at the side of the sofa.  I would want the
curtains, the air conditioner, the radio next to my father's chair.

I would want the floors, the ceiling, the pattern of the shadows made
by the setting sun.  The Egyptians had a good idea - take it with
you.

Get buried with all you can, just in case.

I sit on the sofa, breathe in deep.  I am not tired at all.  I believe
I will stay up all night, something I have never done but have always
wanted to do.  At some point, day and night are exactly equal.  I want
to see when it is neither one.

I do fall asleep, though, because a noise outside wakes me.  I sit up
straight and extra-alive.  There is the screen door, then a slight
creak as the front door opens.  This is a real thief, and here I am
sitting right in his aim.  I swallow, bite my lips.  "Don't think about
taking anything," I will say.  "I am right here, with a gun."  Then I
will yell for my father, loud.  I am a little worried about this
part.

In dreams, whenever I need to yell, nothing comes out.

But it is only Diane.  She is on tiptoe, moving slowly toward the
staircase.  "Hey, Diane," I whisper.

She stops in her tracks, grabs her chest, spins around.  "What are you
doing?"  she asks.  "What are 
you doing?"

"Shhhhhh!" I say.

"Never mind!  You scared me to death!"

I shrug.  "Sorry."

"What are you doing down here?"  she whispered.  

She comes closer, sits down beside me.  "Well, what do you think?"  She
sighs, shakes off the last of her scare.  The clock strikes three.

"I guess you're sneaking in again," I say.  "You haven't gotten caught
one time."  Three o'clock in the morning, and she's coming home!  You
can't help but admire Diane.

She leans her head back, undoes her ponytail holder, shakes out her
hair, and then looks at me, thinking something over.  Then, "I'm just
here to pack.  I'm leaving again, Katie.  I'm not coming back this
time."

I start to laugh.  This is too familiar.  And it doesn't work.  "You
can't."

"We're leaving right now for Mexico.  Dickie went to get his things.
He'll be back in about twenty minutes."  Her whisper is so quiet but it
seems to me to echo around the room.

"Oh," I say.  And then, "I won't tell."

"I know you won't."  She
pushes my hair back from my face.  "Will you be all right?"

"Yeah!"  It is too quick.  We have both heard it.

"Why don't you come?"  she asks.  "Go pack some things, I'll take you
with me.  I'll take care of you.  I'm going to get a job down there.
It's cheap to live.  Come on, you can come."

"I can't," I say.

"Yes, you can."

"I don't think so."

"Well," she says, "I'm going.  I've got to pack."

I watch her go upstairs, and then I go up to pack, too.  Sometimes
these things happen.  You are walking along with only your legs saying
where to go.

I creep into my room, turn on the light, find my suitcase at the back
of my closet.  I put it on my bed, open it.  Then I stand still,
listen.  How can he sleep?

I put in some underwear, a clean pair of jeans, three tops.  What
else?

I put in my toothbrush, a hairbrush, some barrettes, my mother's
perfume, my poetry notebook, and the book I am reading.  But then,
since it is from the library, I take it out.

Mexico!  I believe it is orange and yellow there, the good smell of
corn in the air.  We will live in a house made of stone, with
multicolored rugs and a fireplace stove.  We will have lots of silver
bracelets.

Dickie will work and Diane will keep the house and I will go to school
and speak Spanish.  Whenever our Mexican phone rings, it will be a
fresh new friend.

I hear Diane leaving her room, and come out into the hall to meet
her.

"I'm coming," I whisper.  She puts her finger to her lips, nods, points
downstairs.  Yes.  I will meet her there.  We are experts now at
something we've never done.  I go into my room to close my suitcase,
then turn out my light.  I feel a kind of excitement in me that seems
false, like scary-movie excitement, when your heart is crying out and
your brain is saying this is just fake so why don't you relax.  I
think, this is the last time I will be in this room, forever.  I think,
I didn't tell Cherylanne goodbye.  Then I think, again, how can he
sleep?  I pick up my suitcase, go to stand beside his open bedroom
door.  "Dad?"  I whisper.

The shades are drawn, his room is purple black.  "Good-bye," I
whisper.

And then, "It's all right."  Dickie is waiting outside, and he is
surprised to see me, I can tell, though he is trying to make his face
mainly polite.  "Hey, look who's coming," he says, and then, to Diane,
"Is she?"  Diane nods, hoists my suitcase, then hers into the back of
his truck.  "Go ahead, get in," she tells me, and I guess that I am to
sit in the middle, just like I imagined.  Everything they say to each
other will have to pass over me.

I can stay quiet as can be and still be in the conversation.  I get in,
Diane gets behind the wheel, and Dickie goes to the back of the
truck.

At first I think he is walking away, giving us the truck.  But then
Diane shifts into neutral, nods at him, and he begins to push.  A
silent leave-taking.  This must be how they've done it before.  I hold
my breath until we are a good block away.  Then Diane stops the truck
and hops out to move to the other side.  Dickie gets in and starts the
engine.  We are going.  And in his bed, he...
IS sleeping.

once I got into bed with him and my mother.  I was sick, full of
longing for the feel of someone else's normal flesh, and so I crawled
in beside her.  She awakened instantly, felt my forehead, and got up to
get me something.  "Don't wake your father," she said.

I lay still and listened to him breathe.  There was a smell to him that
I felt in my nose and in my throat.  He was wearing a T-shirt on top, I
didn't know what on the bottom.  I took in a ragged breath, closed my
eyes, opened them.  I could see the green glow of their alarm clock,
hear a muffled, rapid tick.  Where was my mother?  He stirred then,
reached out, and lay a heavy arm across me.  I jumped, thinking he'd
been going to hit me, and the movement must have awakened him.  "What
are you doing here?"  he said.  "What happened?"

"I'm sick," I said, and then, "Mom said to wait here."

"What's wrong with you?"

I shrugged.  "I don't know."  he felt my forehead.  "You have a
fever."

"Yes."

"Does anything hurt?"

"Just my throat.  And my ears.  And some in my stomach."

"That's a lot to hurt."

"Well, only a little in my stomach."

"All right."  He turned over, went back to sleep.

He doesn't like people to talk about pain.  Once he had to have an
operation on his stomach.  He never said anything about it - not before
and not during and not after.  When we went to the hospital to visit
him, I saw him from outside his door before he saw us.  His face was
like before you have to make a big jump across something deep.  Then
when he saw Diane, my mother, and me, he changed into normal.  He
nodded and said to give him his robe, and he sat up and said he was
taking us to the hospital cafeteria.  And he did, walked slowly beside
us in his paper slippers.  His face was sick white and he was pushing a
pole with a big bottle swaying on it.  I got french fries and Diane got
an ice cream sandwich and my mother got tea and he said, no, he didn't
want anything, he wasn't allowed to have anything, but he paid.  I was
glad to see his same old wallet in his robe.  He watched us eat and
then he went back to his room and got into bed and told us to go
home.

Before we left, he called my mother back.  "Lock the windows," he
said.

"Check the basement before you go to sleep."

"I love you," she said, and bent down to kiss his cheek.  He stared
straight ahead, nodded.  After she turned to leave, I saw him pull one
hand up slowly over his stomach, then the other.  In school the next
day, I cried thinking about it.  I said it was because I had a
headache, and I got to go home.  My mother put me on the sofa under the
afghan, brought me tomato soup with crackers crumbled on top, and
looked at the Sears catalog with me.  What I wanted - a red lawn mower,
circle-stitch brassieres, a canopied bed - I circled in black.  What she
wanted - an electric dryer, new carpeting, and a yellow V-necked sweater,
she circled in blue.  All in all, it was worth it to lie.
a while.  When I was younger, I used to pretend-run-away all the time.  I
would dump my doll out of her suitcase and use it to pack all my
underwear in, and go far into a field that was behind the house we
lived in then.  There I would sit on a big rock and contemplate the
distance around me in four directions.  I would listen to the buzzing
insects, make up ideas for new parents.  Mostly they were tall and
slender.  She had long red hair with a wave over one eye.  He had short
blond hair and wore a blue blazer with a family crest.  They had many
kinds of drinking glasses and two servants.  "Look at her!"  they would
say, introducing me to their astonished and jealous friends.  "Lost,
can you imagine!  Turns out she's real intelligent, too.  Why, we just
took her right in!  Of course it helps that we're millionaires, but we
would have taken her even if we didn't have one red cent."  I'd heard
that phrase, "one red cent," and it appealed to me.  I used it whenever
I could.

I never went any farther than the rock.  I would sit for a while and
then go home.  My mother would give me peaches from the can and
then together we would put away my underwear.  "I'm so glad you're
home," she would say.  "Shall we read a little?"  I knew not to let my
father catch me running away, even if it was pretend.

And now it is not pretend.  It is so real we have a truck and the
driver is drinking coffee.  Later I might get scared about what will
happen when my father finds out.  But now there is wide-open night
outside the rolled-up windows, the road passing under the two front
tires of the truck and out from under the two rear ones.  Imagine if I
fell out, I think suddenly, and had to watch the taillights get smaller
in the dark.  Imagine if I had to be all alone somewhere far from
anywhere Texas is scary vast.  But I am in the middle, where I couldn't
fall out without someone taking notice.  I close my eyes, listen to the
drone of the tires on the pavement.  It is a high song, and it can
hypnotize you in that way where you just can't move your eyeballs even
though you know you are awake.  I like when you know you're going to
fall asleep any second.  That is the time for the last thoughts of the
day to come into your brain like the tail end of a long parade.  It's
colors I think of tonight: the corals you see on seashells, the swirls
of white through pink on Cherylanne's lipstick holder, the shy blue of
the sky when the day is coming new.

I wake up to the crunch of gravel.  Dickie has pulled into the parking
lot of The Welcome Inn.  Well, the "W" is off the "Welcome," but what
else could it be?  It is light outside, but gray, the clouds hanging
low and swollen above us.  The motel looks like a shoe box, long and
narrow with about twelve doors leading to different rooms.  The doors
are painted yellow, red, green, yellow, red, green.  I hope we get a
red one.

Diane is sound asleep, her head resting against her window.  Dickie
smiles at me, whispers, "I'll be right back," and heads for the room on
the end with a sign saying office leaning against its window.  A motel
room!

For all of us!  In the daytime!  Already we are making up our own rules
for whatever we want.  After we get going again, I'll bet if I want to
stop and look at something, I can ask 
and Diane will say, "Why certainly. Go ahead."  We could never do
that before.  My father drove and drove and we couldn't look at
anything even if my mother asked.  Once she begged him to let us see a
cave only one mile off the road.  He was quiet for one terrible moment
and then he turned to her and said between his teeth, "I am trying to
get there.
Could you please make some effort to understand that?  I am not
interested in side trips.  I am interested in getting there."  Her
earring jiggled a little from her starting to turn toward him.  But
then she stopped, just looked down, I'm sorry.

She packed a freezer chest with food for us.  We ate ham sandwiches and
slices of pie and potato chips and apples.  We fought noiselessly, and
every time we slept it was like a miracle, because we weren't tired at
all, we were ready to bust out of our skins from plain boredom.  But we
couldn't stop, except for every four hours to pee and fill up the gas
tank.

I hear the rumble of thunder and think how perfect it will be to sleep
now, while it rains.  Then I remember how my father never uses an
umbrella.  "Customs of the service," he once told me, and showed me in
The Oficer's Guide where it said, "There is a long-standing Army taboo
against an officer in uniform carrying an umbrella."  I thought that
was so queer I learned it by heart right then.  My father doesn't have
a single question about it.  He never uses an umbrella out of uniform,
either.  He stands straight up in the rain and lets it have him.

Little streams of water slide down his face, into his eyes, down his
neck, and under his shirt.  Remembering this, something inside me takes
an elevator to the next floor down.  I don't know why I get sorry for
him this way.  All of a sudden, I just do.

Of course he will be all right without us.  Nancy Simon can cook him
dinner in her own aprons, which probably look stupid.  Maybe he will
get truly sad sometimes, drop his face in his hands, and say, "Oh, I
have gone and lost my children."  But Nancy will lay his roast beef on
his plate, saying, "Now, now.  What's done is done," and kiss him with
her greasy lips.  She will not do anything right, and I only hope he
will notice.

I cannot sleep.  For one thing, I am on the floor.  It is the fair
place, there is only one bed.  Dickie volunteered to let Diane and me
sleep there, but Diane said no.  She said, "You don't mind the floor,
do you?"  but it wasn't really a question.  She was a little sorry, but
she is shaping her new life and she figured she might as well get
going.

The floor is hard, of course, but that is not the problem.  One problem
is that there is a chemical smell to the carpet, mixed with cigarette
smoke, and the combination is about to kill me.  I am breathing through
my fist over my nose.  Also, the air conditioner is leaking.  I can
hear drops of water, see a fat stain spreading out on the wall.

Another problem is that Dickie is snoring so loud that at first I
thought he was just kidding around, trying to make me laugh.  But he's
not kidding, he's sound asleep and I guess Diane is, too.  I've been
watching her and she hasn't moved even to turn over.  I guess she
stayed awake with him until the end.  But I fell asleep almost as soon
as we left, and I am done sleeping.  Every time I close my eyes my body
gets nervous, like I'm making a big mistake and it had better let me
know.  My eyelids jerk right back open like a Laurel and Hardy
windowshade.  The day is trying to get around the pulled-shut drapes,
the world is in the go position.

I get up and quietly open the desk drawer.  If there is some paper,
I'll write a letter to Cherylanne.  "Guess where I am!"  it will
begin.

But then I realize I don't know where I am.  There is no paper,
anyway.

There is only a brown book, with Holy Bible written in gold across the
front.

I flip open to a page where Jesus is giving another speech.  Everything
He says is in red.  I used to like Jesus.  I thought He knew me.  When
I took communion, I believed that as long as the wafer was in my mouth,
Jesus was in my heart.  He was in my heart miniature but whole, with
His own heart lit up and exposed and circled with roses and thorns.

His arms were outstretched and His eyes were raised upward, which meant
he was paying serious attention to me.  I could speak with Him
one-on-One, for as long as I could make the wafer last.  The fact that
other people had wafers made no difference: they had other
arrangements.  I was careful not to move my tongue against the wafer,
which was lodged against the roof of my mouth, except for rare times
when I really didn't have much to say.  Then I would release Him
early.

After all, He was busy.  People everywhere were calling Him in
languages you never heard of, night and day.  But I asked Him to let me
keep my mother, and He said no, and so I had no more interest in Him.

I put the Bible back, shut the drawer, take an eyeball tour of the
room.  A double bed, brown-andorange-striped bedspread, and iron-smell
sheets.  Two pillows, no extra - I used Dickie's jacket for my pillow.  A
high, narrow rectangle of a window.  A small desk below it.  An orange
chair in the corner, wooden arms.  A nightstand and there you are, that
is it.  Oh, and a closet, small, with a few lonely hangers, not new.

I tiptoe into the bathroom.  Here is a tub and a sink and a toilet that
comes with a break-away paper band that makes you feel like the Queen
of Sheba, even if the toilet is five hundred years old.  There are
white towels and little bars of soap stacked up, enough so we can each
have our own.  Well, I could wash.  I open a soap, smell it, turn on
the water slow and quiet.  I wash my face and hands, dry off, fold up
the towel, wrap up the soap.  Then I tiptoe to my suitcase, get my pen,
and go back to the bathroom to write my name on my soap wrapper.  I
will use the soap here, then bring along what's left.  We will need
soap.  I look into the mirror for a while.  I wish I'd brought a nail
file.  Cherylanne always carries one in her purse.  In a nothing-to-do
emergency, she will pull it out and get to work.

I go out into the room and sit in the orange chair, watch them sleep.

I am a little hungry.  Where will we eat?  I wonder.  Probably at a
restaurant with booths, and place mats with stars for cities.  Who has
money?  I think only Dickie does.

I get out my poetry notebook, close my eyes, and wait for an idea.

Sometimes they are swirled around in there deep, and I have to tell
them they can come out.  But nothing comes to me.  X, I think.

Nothing.  B. C.

Nothing.  D. E. Eternity.  Eternity.  I write: I hate eternity.

Really, friend, don't you?

What could stay good so long?  Not even a great zoo.

l Well, this is silly.

I write: Think of how long Eternity can last Nothing.  I take in a
breath, sigh, then worry that it is too loud.  I'll go outside.  I
don't like to think about eternity.  It scares me.  It's like a
too-tight winter muffler, acting like it's there to help you when all
it's doing is cutting off your breathing.  What could you do for so
long?  Sometimes when I think of heaven, I think all it is is people
looking down and missing things.  And if God came walking through and
said, "Anybody want to go down there again?"  everybody would raise
their hand yes, even if their time here had been hard.

I open the door.  The rain has stopped, the sun is out, and the slice
of day that leaks in falls directly on Diane's face.  She opens her
eyes, crabby.  Well, there is nothing to do about it now.  "I'm going
out," I say, and she frowns, nods, turns over on her other side.

I guess I have messed up.  I will make it up to her later.  But who
could sit in a small dark room that is not your own, with nothing but
two people sleeping, and you don't know for how long?

There is a small swimming pool in front of the motel.  No one is in
it.  I wish I'd brought a suit, but of course I didn't know you could
go swimming when you are running away.  I open the gate, go sit by the
edge of the pool to hang my feet in.  The water feels cool and fine,
like liquid silk.  I close my eyes, spread out my toes, make the pool
bigger in my mind to feel more luxurious.

I won't get to go to the pool anymore with Cherylanne.  The last time,
I didn't know it was the last time.  I should have paid more
attention.

The best was our diving, how good we got at back dives.

Of course, I never did learn the high dive.  I see Cherylanne coming
off it, one smooth letting go.  She often smiled when she dived, I
wonder if she knew it.  I see myself back up on that high board, and
hairs on the back of my neck rise up to remember it too.

My father must know by now.  He must have seen our empty rooms.

Maybe he looked for me at Cherylanne's.  "I don't know!"  Cherylanne
would say and he would not quite believe her, probably.  Belle would
have to come, put her arm on Cherylanne's shoulder, say, "She was here
last night, and then this morning she was gone.  We don't know anything
more about it than that."

He would go home, mad.  He would sit in his chair, think, I'm going
to let them both have it this time.  I shiver, pull my feet out of the
water.  They shouldn't sleep too long.  Only enough to be able to drive
again.  We can sleep in Mexico for a thousand hours.

I get up, take a walk around the parking lot.  There is a restaurant
across the highway.  I'll have cereal.  Maybe some eggs if they're
cheap.

I'll walk around the building slow fifteen times.  If they're not up,
I'll go make some noise in there.

On my tenth time around, a man comes out of the office and asks if he can
help me.  "Oh, no," I say.  "I'm just getting some exercise."

He nods, looks at me like maybe I am crazy.  But then he just goes back
inside the office.  I follow him.  "Do you need any help?"  I ask.

"Pardon me?"

"Is there anything I can help you with?"

He waits, opens his mouth, closes it.  Then, "What unit are you in?"

"Seven," I say.  "A green one."

"I think you'd better go back there," he says.

Well, now I have messed up twice.  He could get suspicious.  I could
wreck everything.  I will go back inside, sit quiet until they get
up.

I can play checkers in my head.

I open the door and Diane rolls over again.  "Close it!"  she whispers,
hard.  I close it and she gets up, points to the bathroom.  I go in and
she follows me.  "What the hell are you doing?"  she says.  "We've been
up all night!  You need to be quiet."

I nod, look away from her at my soap.  That was from when everything
was going fine.

"What's the matter with you?"  she asks.

I shrug.  "I don't know.  I'm not tired."

She sighs, looks away, then back at me.  "I'll give you some money,"
she says.  "You can get something to eat.  There's a restaurant across
the highway."

"I know," I say.  And I want to add all the other f things I know are
here: many varieties of weeds.
Wildflowers, purple and pink and yellow.  All the same kind of
yellowish rock.  One horny toad, at least.  It takes forty steps to
walk along the front and the back of the building, ten to get past the
side.  I guess I know there is a restaurant across the highway.  I
guess I don't need Diane to tell me.

She goes out of the bathroom, comes back with her purse, hands me a
fiver.  "Be careful crossing," she says.

"Do you want anything?"  I ask.

"Yes.  Sleep."

"Okay."

I go outside, sit by our door.  I don't want to eat alone.  I'll wait
until I'm too hungry to be scared of it.  And then I'll eat slow.  For
now, I'll just watch whatever happens.  Or doesn't.

We are on the road again, and I am sitting in the back of the
truck.  There's some privacy here.  Nobody is la-de-dali minding you.

I can't wait for this day to be over because it is nothing but bad.  I
ate a candy bar for breakfast, because I sure wasn't going to sit in
that restaurant alone.

All the tables full of people sitting together, kids playing with their
straws and talking a mile a minute, adults drinking coffee and smiling
at them.  Aren't you cute?  The hostess dressed in her puffy sleeves and
little hat asking me, "Can I help you?"  her eyes squinty with
suspicion.

Well, I just said no thank you, and went over to the vending machine.

I got some change and bought a Nestle's Crunch.  I ate it by the pool
and then I sat outside the motel room until they were ready to go.

Dickie came out first, smiling and sleepy, and I was not in the mood to
try to come up with something, so I didn't say anything.  He and Diane
went to get coffee and I said, "Oh, no, I just ate," and then I had to
wait some more.  I might as well have been Chinese-tortured.  I made
the bed in the motel room.  I opened the drapes all the way.  I dusted
the tabletops with some toilet paper.  And then they came back, Diane
put the suitcases in the truck, and Dickie spread the map across the
hood.  Here was the dangerous part, with all of us thinking, Can he
find us?

And now we have passed through Beeville on our way to Corpus
Christi.  The ocean is there, I know.  Diane wants to live near the
ocean, but in Mexico, and so naturally that is just exactly where
Dickie is taking her.  I knock on the rear window.  It's hot, I want
back in the truck.  Dickie slows, pulls over to the side of the road,
and I climb in the middle.

"Did you get burned?"  Diane asks.

I shrug.  She must have been struck blind: I believe I look like
Crayola violet-red.

"We'll stop for lunch soon," Diane says.

"Okay."

She turns to look out the window.  Silence.  This happens when you
travel.  First everyone talks a lot, then a little, then only the road
talks.  We haven't stopped to look at anything.  We are just getting
away.

"Armadillo," Dickie says, pointing to the side of the road.  It is
dead, lying on its side, a sick cloud of flies above it.  At their dirt
home, I think of Mrs. Armadillo saying to her children, "Where could
he be?"

By now my father has called the MPs, probably the civilian cops, too.

"Find my daughters," he has told them, and they have said, "Yes,
sir."

When they leave, he walks around the house.  I know the walk.  I know
the eyes.  I look behind us.

Off in the far distance, one other truck.  Black.  Nothing else.

Dickie slows the truck, starts pulling over to the side.  There is a
man hitchhiking there.  He comes up to the window and Dickie nods at
him.

"Need a lift?"  The man nods back, grateful.

"Back of the truck okay?"

"Fine with me," the man says, and climbs in.  He is old, and I wonder
what he is doing hitching.  Anyone can end up any way.

"I'll go in back, too," I say.  Dickie looks at Diane.  She leans over
to look at the old man, shrugs all right.

I climb out, get into the back of the truck.  "Hi," I say, and the
truck pulls out onto the highway.

The man extends his hand.  "Theodore Bender."

"I'm Katie," I say.  No last names.  He could turn "Where y'all
headed?"  he asks.

"Oh, just out for a ride," I say.

The man nods.

"Don't you have a car?"  I say.

"Nope.  Nor a house neither."

"Oh."  I look out at the flatness we're passing through.  The sky is
deep blue, empty of the variety of clouds.  The man stretches out, puts
his head on his backpack.

"I never have liked to be in one place only," he says.  "I like to keep
moving.  I do a few odd jobs, move along.  You should stay out of the
sun, little lady."  He closes his eyes.  We are done talking.  I had
hoped for more.  This trip is not turning out right one bit.  All I
have gotten everywhere are bad signs.

When Dickie pulls into a restaurant parking lot, the man wakes up.

"Guess this is my stop," he says, and winks at me.  Then he goes to the
road and sticks his thumb out again.  When will he decide to stop?  I
wonder.  What will say to him, this is the place.  When I come into our
kitchen, it's the dish rack I always look at first.  The pots and pans
always lie slanted on top of the plates and bowls, the silverware
always stands up in neat rows, the dish towel always hangs folded on
its circular hanger.  But sometimes you don't know what it is that
tells you you are in the right place, there is just a kind of lying
down of your insides, a message from yourself to relax, you are home.

I am suddenly very tired.

The restaurant tables are all lined up against the window.  There are
red-and-white tablecloths, and groupings of salt, pepper, and sugar all
huddled together like family.  The menus are old and good looking.  I
ask for a burger and fries and I can't wait to get them.  Dickie gets
chicken-fried steak and Diane gets a BLT.  Cokes all around.

When the waitress leaves, I can see we are all in a good mood, the way
ordering food makes you get.  Well now, you think, your hands folded on
the table.  I am taken care of.  All I do is wait now.

Dickie looks out the window at the old man, who is still asking at the
side of the road for a ride.  "Wonder who he is," he says.

"He does odd jobs, and then he moves on," I say.

Dickie smiles.  "What a life."

"I think I'd like it," Diane says.  "I do!  Never stay anywhere."

"You don't like to move all the time," I say.

"I don't like somebody else telling me where to move," she says.  "But
if I could decide when and where, I'd like to move around."

"Not me," I say.  I shift in my seat.  Sometimes I forget how different
we are.  Diane never liked dolls.  She doesn't like to read.  She can
watch a sad movie like Imitation of life, where I saw even GIs
crying, and only say, "That was stupid!"  at the end.

I excuse myself to go to the rest room.  I pass by a phone booth and it
is empty, the door open.  I go in and close the door, lean my head
against the cool glass.  A little fan is whirring and an overhead light
has come on.  We are open for business.  I know how to do it.  You dial
0, say, "Make this collect."

I close my eyes, think of my old life.  And when I see my things in my
room, they lean forward to call me back.  I think of Cherylanne, how
when she sits on the low back porch her knees go together while mine go
apart, and I wonder is she lying on her bed reading magazines, with
hurt feelings.

I put a dime in, dial O. I tell the operator I want to make a collect
call, and I give her Cherylanne's number.  Cherylanne answers and I
hear her asking Belle, "Can we accept a collect call?"  Then there is
Belle on the line saying yes, she will accept, and then, "Katie, for
God's sake, where are you, honey?"

"Oh, I'm with Diane," I say.

"Where?"

"Well, we're on our way somewhere."

Belle's voice gets low and serious.  "Katie, your father is very
upset."

I want to hang up.  I have made a big mistake.  "Just one minute!"  I
hear Belle telling Cherylanne.  And then, back to me, "Katie, honey,
you need to come home.  Can you tell me where you are?"

"I don't think so."

"Can you just tell me where you are?"

I swallow.

"Katie?"

"Can I talk to Cherylanne?"

She sighs.  I hear her muffled voice tell Cherylanne to give her back
the phone when we are through.

"Where are you?"  Cherylanne asks.  "Did you run away?"

"Yes."

"Oh my God."

"So.  What are you doing?"

"Katie, you can't do this.  This is not right.  Your father is really
mad."

"What did he do?"

"He came looking for you, of course.  And I didn't know where you
went.
When did you leave?"

"It was late.  I don't know."

"You'd better come back.  This is not right."

Well, I am getting annoyed.  How does she know what is right?  "I told
you I was leaving," I said.  "You never did believe me.  But here I
am."

"Where are you?"

I look out at Dickie and Diane.  Our food has come.  They can't see me
in here.  "I am pretty far away," I say.

"Where?"

I wait, then say it.  "Bayside.  At a restaurant called Jenny's.  It's
on Highway 80.  I don't think you should tell."

"Should we come and get you?"

And there it is.

"Should we come and get you, Katie?"

I hang up.

I go to the bathroom, wash my face.  Did I do that?  I'm trying to help
you.  What do you want, to go back and live with him?  I am burned a
sorry red, all right.  My skin will fall off later, like dandruff.  I
dry off carefully with a paper towel that feels like steel wool.  I go
back to the table, sit down.  I'm not hungry anymore.  You would think
someone would notice my burn.

"There's your burger," Diane says.

I nod, pick up a french fry, put it back down.  Diane stops chewing.

"What?"  she says.

"I think I'll go home," I say.

Her eyes widen.  "Did you call him?"

"No.  But I think I'll go home."

"Jesus!"  She is angry-hurt.  "Jesus!"

"Take it easy, Diane," Dickie says.  "Lower your voice."

"I'll bet she called him!"  Diane says.

"Did you?"  Dickie asks.

"No," I say.  And then, "Cherylanne.  I called..."  Diane stands up, grabs
her purse.  "Well, that's it.  He's on his way.
Let's get the hell out of here."

Dickie sighs.  "Look, Diane.  He won't be here for hours.  Eat your
food."

She sits back down, stares at me.  "Why'd you?"  Oh, the answer is
sorrowful to me, too.

We make the arrangements: they will leave.  I will wait on the bench
just outside the restaurant.  Before they pull away, Diane hugs me.

She's hardly ever done that.  I don't know her smell.  "When we get to
Mexico, I'll write you," she says.  "Okay?"

"Okay."

"Don't you leave here, no matter how long it takes, okay?  This place
is open twenty-four hours, someone will be here all the time."

"Okay."

She is desperate looking, suddenly, and I feel sorry for her.  "What
will you do?"  she asks.

"I'll just wait," I tell her.  "I have a good imagination."

She hugs me again, and there is a kiss on my hair.  And then the truck
pulls away and she is gone.

I sit in the shade and chart the progress of the clouds.  Later, I will
eat again.  I have a twenty dollar bill in my pocket from Dickie.

Diane is right: he is a good man.  Picks up hitchhikers.

Gives out money.  Takes a woman wherever she wants to go.

He brings the puppy.  When he gets out of the car, he is holding her.

She is wearing a little red leash and a collar.  She stops to pee when
he puts her down, and he is standing there holding onto the leash, and
I walk up to him slow.

"Where is Diane?"  he asks.

"She went on.  She's with Dickie."

He nods.  "Do you know where she went?"

"Mexico.  She doesn't want to come back."

No words.  The space between us nearly solid.

"Would you please get in the car now?"

"Okay."  I come closer, take the leash from his hand.  "You brought
Bridgette," I say.

He nods.  "Nobody to watch her."

He can drive for hours and hours, it doesn't bother him.  All he would
ever ask is for my mother to rub his neck, get after the stiffness.  He
could go sixteen hours easy.  I sit in the front for a while, then go
to lie down on the backseat.  When I wake up, dark is coming.  I sit
up, rub my face.  The puppy is awake in her box, her two paws lined up
neat in front of her like she is ready for inspection.  "I think we
should stop and let this puppy run around a little," I say.

He says nothing.

"Dad?"

"Maybe later."

"I think she needs out now, though.  Could we just pull over?"

He puts on the turn signal, pulls over.  We take the puppy out, let her
sniff.  He stretches, rubs his neck.  I let the puppy run, give her a
stick to carry.  "Where are we?"  I ask.

"Not so far," he says.  "Couple more hours."

He sits down on the ground and I sit beside him.  "I'm sorry."

"Yeah."  He sighs.

I pick upp the puppy, put her in my lap, but she wants down, so I let
her.  I let the silence be, too.

Occasionally a car passes.  There are grasshoppers here, leaping up
all crazy about something every now and then.  I am wondering what they
eat, when I hear my father speak softly.

"Pardon?"  I ask.

He turns to me.  "I was talking about your mother."

"Oh."

"I know how much you miss her."

"You do?"

"Oh, yes.  She was...There's nobody like her."

"I know."

"Her disease started out in one place, but then it just went
everywhere.  Nothing in her body could work right anymore.  What killed
her..."  He stops, and I am careful not to move.  Finally, he says,
"What killed her is that she couldn't breathe anymore."  He is saying
this like the teacher called on him and he is giving the answer anyone
would know.  Silence.  A car goes by, kicks up a piece of gravel that
flies toward us, lands at my father's feet.

I would say I saw it and didn't.  "I want you to know she died
peacefully, Katie."

There.

"She talked about you and Diane before she died."

And there.

He looks away from me, shakes his head.  Then he turns back and
sighs.

"Okay?"

I nod quick.

"I don't...I don't think I'd ever like to talk about it again,
Katie, okay?  But you deserved to know.  I should have told you when
you asked."

I stand up, lead the puppy along on her leash.  I guess she believes
she is in a New York City parade: her step is high, her ears are
swinging flirty.  Not many people know about dogs' moods, but I do.

"She walks good," I say.

"Yes.  She'll be a fine dog, I guess."

"We should go home, Dad."

He is quiet for the rest of the way.  All he says is "here we are"
when we get home.  Then he goes into his bedroom and closes the door,
and so do I. All my things, eager.  I lie on my bed, then slide under
it.  I think, what happened?  Well, I learned that the rest of the
world is closer than I thought.  There's that.  I cry a little, but
mostly I only get peaceful.  She would rub my back when I cried.  She
would say, "Oh, now.  Look at this.  Oh, my.  Oh, dear.  Yes, I
know."

She knew the short little words to grief.

Sherylanne and I go swimming the next day.  I have everything back for
a little while and I am so grateful.  I memorize the light that bounces
off the water.  I study the bones in Cherylanne's wrist.  The towels
that we lie on touch.

Paul Arnold comes up to us as we are drying off after the first swim.

He has hair above his belly button in curly rows.  "I heard you ran
away," he says.  I can see Cherylanne's lips tighten.  Happy as she is
to see me again, she can't stand that I am so interesting now.

"Yes, I did."

"With your sister?"

"Yes, and her boyfriend, Dickie.  He has that truck?"

Paul nods.

"Well," I say, "it was pretty exhausting and dangerous.  I'm actually
glad to be home."

He nods.  Say he was my husband: I would have told him about running
away while we were in bed.  He would have pulled me over, into the crook of
his arm.  He would have had me say the good parts
twice.

I would feel low down how much he loved me.  Low down and all around.

"We're having a water war," he says, interrupting my fantasy.  "Want to
be my partner?"

Ride on his shoulders while he walks around tough.  The idea is to
knock another girl off another boy's shoulders.  I have never been
asked.

"Okay," I say.  And then, "Is there someone for Cherylanne?"

He shrugs.  "Sure."

"I am tanning," she says, and closes her eyes snotty, but then when
Bobby Simpson comes up to ask her to fight, she is on her feet in one
second flat.

I unseat three girls, but not Cherylanne.  When we come up against each
other, neither one of us tries.  At the end, it is the two of us and we
say we both win.  Then we all go to the snack bar together, two boys,
two girls, and I guess I have had a date.  We are moving in three days,
but it all counts.

On the last day, after the moving van has gone, I walk around the
empty house.  There are marks on the walls, evidence of how we were.

It is the loneliest thing, to see those last pieces of you that stay
behind.  I go into the laundry room, remember her ironing and
folding.

In the kitchen I turn the water on and off, open and close a cupboard
door.  I hear, "Kaaatie!"  Dinnnnnner!"  and I whisper, "Coommming!"

I push shut a partially open drawer.  The sound echoes off the walls.

I walk through the living room, which is bigger-seeming now.  I am
standing by the door when it opens and Cherylanne comes through it.

She has been crying, and so of course this starts me in, too.  We hug
each other, make our little sob sounds together.  It is a comfort to
me that she feels so bad.  "I brought you something," she says,
finally, and pulls out a small gift from behind her back.  I open it,
find an all-in-one makeup kit.  Even Cherylanne doesn't have this.

There is miniature everything: shadow, mascara, lipstick, liner, blush,
all in a beautiful shiny black box with a mirror on the inside lid.

"Oh, thank you," I say.  "Did you get one, too?"

"No," she says, shaking her head, her eyeballs glued to the kit.  "Not
yet.  And I'm waiting a good week to get one, in your honor."

"Well," I say.  "Thank you."

"Will you write me?"  she asks, and her voice is shaky sad again.

"Of course," I say.

"Maybe you could send me some poems."

"Well," I say, "you never liked them before."

"I know," she says, and pulls out a lacetrimmed hanky to dab at her
nose.  "But now they will be mailed."

"Oh," I say.  "That's right."

"Well," she says, and sighs big.  "I hate this part."

"Me, too."

"Okay.  So - have a good trip and write me.
Every day."

"I will."

"And I will, too."

"Okay."

"Okay."  She shrugs, goes to the door, turns back."  Bye."

I watch her going back home, and though the distance is very short, she
runs.  "Shut up, Bubba!"  I hear her yell.  He must have made fun of
her crying.

I wipe my eyes.

I go upstairs, walk past my father's empty bedroom, mine, the bathroom,
then come to the closed door to Diane's room.  I open it and see him in
there, just standing in the middle of the emptiness.

"Ready?"  he asks, as though he has come in and found me.

"I guess."

"Okay."

I look at his hands in his pockets.  I believe he has put something in
there, something he found in diane's room.  I wonder what it is.  But I
won't ask him.

It is his.  He looks around, scans the ceiling, the floor, the walls.

I take him by the hand and lead him out.

We have gone one hundred miles.  We are going to go five hundred, he
said.  I see a billboard for A&W.  One half mile up the road, turn
right, go three hundred yards.  "Look!"  I say.  "Can we stop?"

He shakes his head no.  "I want to make time, Katie."

I turn around to check on Bridgette.  She is lying quietly, her nose on
her paws, thinking.  She is a good traveler.  She doesn't know she's
going to live in Missouri.

I turn back, say quietly, "We could just get one root beer float."

"Did you hear me, Katie?  What did I just say?  What did I just sey?"

His voice is louder, on its way up.  Now is where you must be quiet for
a good ten minutes and let him cool off.  It is better not to move
anything on your body either.  Invisible.

And yet.  "This could be the last A&W in the whole world, with
everything on sale today only," I hear myself say.

He sighs, slows down, and puts on the turn signal.  Well, I certainly
know not to say thank you.

What must it be like, I think, driving out of Texas, in the opposite
direction from your other daughter?  Whatever he is feeling is letting
him get me a root beer float, I know that.  We see the A&W, a good big
one.

"I thought Diane was the one crazy about A&W," he says.

"No.  It's me, too."

"Okay."

We crunch in over the gravel and find a spot.

"Two root beer floats," my father tells a silver speaker, then adds,
"And a burger, plain."  He looks at me, shrugs.  "For the dog."

I roll my window down all the way, lean my elbow out.  It's hot, the
float will taste good.  I realize suddenly that I am seated in my own
place.

This air, and the air around me, is mine, I know now.  I look at my
father, see Diane lost in his face, his own true regret.  I feel some
part of him come into me as though there were a thin wire connecting
us, heart to heart, with all that must most be said translated into
barely visible vibrations.  I see his leg, see his bent knee, remember
the times when I got to sit in the front for a while, between my
mother and him.  He would occasionally reach out to give me a horse
bite.  It hurt a little, but it tickled, too.  I would look up at him,
ready for my part, but he stared straight ahead, not acknowledging
himself.  He can only go so far in a good direction.  Then something
happens.  He is all apart broken.  For a moment I see him as someone
other than my father, and he seems so curious to me, and sad, like an
animal wrongly tied up.  Then he is my father again and I see that he
is only what I was given first.  There are other places to look for
things.  I lean back against the seat, close my eyes.

I am back on the diving board, small against the night sky.  The board
is much higher now, silvery in the moonlight.  And I walk toward the
end of it, three steps, bounce high, point myself toward the water.  I
feel my hair straighten in the wind, it is such a long way down Ifeel
the cool night air against my body the most just before I enter the
water.

For a long time, I am propelled downward toward the bottom of the pool,
but then all I do is arch my back, change direction, kick my feet once,
hold my body straight, and let myself rise up.

I hear the inviting rattle of glasses, smell the hamburger.  And now
there is my father's voice, his hand lightly touching my arm.  "Hey,
wake up," he is saying.  "Everything is here."

the end.