Acts of God (6 page)

But for years I used to dream of going inside the house once more. In the dreams there were doors I'd never seen before that opened into secret rooms. One room opened into the next until I found myself in a completely different house—a place I'd never been. Now I stood looking at the house in the moonlight. It made me feel odd to know that other people were sleeping inside. I'm sure if they'd seen me, they would have phoned the police.

I don't know how long I stood there before I got in my car. I decided to take the highway home. I put myself on automatic, turned the radio on high, and tore down the road like I was a kid again and my curfew was coming up fast.

6

Horse chestnuts come in hard
shells with pointy thorns, looking like instruments of medieval torture. When they split open, out slips the smooth, dark seed, like polished stone. I didn't know what it was, this sharpness and this smoothness, but in the fall of the year they held infinite interest.

The best place to collect them was in front of the old Episcopal church, where the flowering chestnuts bent with bursting white flowers in late spring, cool shade in summer, and the chestnuts in their green, thorny pods in the fall. On my way home for lunch I paused there, scooping what I could, filling my pockets with prickly pods or, when I split them, with the wondrous polished seeds. I would spend my lunch hour collecting them.

If Jeb saw me, he'd shout, “Hey, Squirrel, last one home's a rotten egg.” That's when they really started calling me Squirrel. When they'd find me under these trees.

I didn't care if he beat me home. I was always late, wolfing down the peanut butter and jelly sandwich with chips on the side and chocolate milk that waited for me in the breakfast nook. But during chestnut time it didn't matter to me if I got home for lunch or not. I couldn't get enough of these seeds, couldn't slip enough into my pocket. I was greedy for their touch. I never ate them or asked my mother to cook them, but I wanted to have them in my pockets, or on the shelves in my room.

Vicky and I and the rest of the gang found endless things to do on our way to and from school. We took this walk four times a day. Up and back, up and back. Sometimes we got a ride, if it was very cold or inclement, but mostly we traveled on foot, books strapped to our backs. We liked to kick leaf piles, taking care that no smoke came from them. If there was smoke, there was fire. We gathered gold and scarlet maple leaves, pressed them into our math books, and had our mothers iron them between sheets of wax paper. We put them in the windows of our rooms where the light shone through as if they were stained glass. And we collected horse chestnuts.

Now suddenly a new girl was there with a paper sack, digging under the leaves. She'd grab a pod, split it open with her bare fingers, hold up a shiny chestnut. “Look,” she'd say, that wide grin on her face, “I got one.” Her black hair tumbled over her shoulders and leaves got caught in its thickness. Her blue tweed coat was frayed. When she stooped down, I could see where the lining was torn.

*   *   *

I don't remember when anyone else came to town, but I remember when Margaret Blair did. Like magic, one Indian summer morning she suddenly appeared, sitting at the desk I coveted in Mrs. Grunsky's fifth-grade homeroom—the one in the sun, a little off to the side, not far from the turtle's bowl.

She didn't come at the beginning, but almost in the middle of the first term with her neat pile of pencils and books. Already the sugar maples were golden and there she was with her thick black hair and her rosy cheeks, her round body, her face that smiled as if she knew us already, as if she'd always been there.

Mrs. Grunsky said, “This morning we have a new girl.” And that's what she'd be from then on. She'd always be the New Girl. What is she? we wondered. Spanish or Italian? Eastern European? Our parents spoke of Gypsy blood. The boys called her a spic or a wop. A dago or meatball or just the girl from the other side. She was trash or beautiful. Strange or mysterious. She'd be whatever we wanted her to be.

The year when Margaret appeared, I had the best homeroom in the world. Our gang formed a neat, little clique. Ginger Klein, who told great jokes, was there and Samantha Crawford, who lent me her clothes, and, of course, Vicky Walton, and we all sat near one another. Lori Martin was just down the row. The year Margaret Blair arrived was the one when we got to move from classroom to classroom and carried our books.

And now this new girl was here, walking between classes, waiting for us after school. Thinking she could just be one of us, but, of course, she couldn't. We wouldn't let her.

We called her Wishbone. Not to her face, though sometimes we did. We called her that because of the way her legs shaped themselves into those smooth, arching curves you felt you could just snap in two. Bow legs, my mother said, from a vitamin deficiency or from sitting on a horse.

Later we liked to taunt her. Make a wish, Wishbone, we'd shout, and we'll break you in two.

*   *   *

I'd never seen hair so long and thick, or the color, almost blue black. We weren't even sure it was real. During recess some of us placed candy bar bets, daring one another to go up and tug on that hair. Some of the boys raced behind her and tried to grab it, but I just went right up and asked. “Can I touch your hair?” I said. In the corner of my eye I saw the gang, huddled, giggling.

“Sure,” Margaret said, giving me a wide smile, the way you do when you think someone's going to be your friend. I reached out and touched it. It felt like a horse's tail and was wavy as a snake. I thought it would turn itself into a serpent and wrap itself around my neck, but it didn't. It just lay there, compliant, agreeable in my hand. It was smooth as silk and, though I was only doing this on a dare, I kept on holding it like a rope you could use to slide down the castle walls. To escape with. “You can touch my hair whenever you want,” Margaret said.

“It's like a horse's tail,” I announced when I got back to the huddle of the gang. “It's real.” Still nobody believed me.

She'd never catch up. How could she? She'd missed fractions and pioneer history. Half the social studies curriculum on petroleum. We'd already read three books for English, so we knew she couldn't catch up. But she did. The first question Mrs. Grunsky asked, her pale hand shot up.

She'd never be one of us. She'd never belong.

We didn't know anything about Margaret. Who she was or where she came from. We didn't know how she got to and from school. She just appeared out of nowhere on a street corner and walked with us before we even asked her. We assumed she lived with her family in a house on the Winonah side of town—our side. For in Winonah we all had our visible histories. We had our families, our brothers and sisters. People by whom we located ourselves in space and time. We knew who we were. We never had to ask. Until Margaret came to town, there were no question marks after our names.

Then one day my mother asked Elena, the Italian woman who ironed my father's shirts, if she knew anything about the new family and who they were. Because that little girl kept coming around. And Elena told my mother that they'd moved into an apartment above Santini's Liquor Store in Prairie Vista. Elena told my mother that there was just the mother, who dressed in short skirts that were too tight, and there was talk about her. Just that woman and her daughter. No man in sight.

My mother was shocked, not because there was no man or because Mrs. Blair wore short, tight skirts, but because it was so rare that a child from Prairie Vista crossed over to Winonah. The lowest place you could live was above one of those stores across the tracks in Prairie Vista. And my mother made it clear, though I don't remember how, that it would be better if I didn't have much to do with someone who came from that part of town.

*   *   *

On weekends we went to one another's houses. Vicky lived in a one-story ranch, like the one we first lived in before we built our two-story white Colonial. I didn't know what any of this meant, but I knew that's how our parents referred to our houses—ranch, prairie, Colonial. Colonial was best, I knew that. Vicky's father was a CPA and every morning he took the same train and came home on the same train like clockwork. Her mother had pure white hair even when we were small.

We cut pictures out of magazines and glued them onto paper, making collages. We could do this endlessly. Time had not occurred to us yet. It was amazing we ever got from A to B, as Vicky's mother liked to comment. Vicky's mother was a large woman with square bones. I was afraid of her. She never hit us or yelled at us, but she just looked at us in a way that was frightening.

Vicky was afraid of her as well. Vicky's mother had little china things all over the house. Bone-china plates and china statues—dogs and one statue that we always laughed at of two lovers in an embrace. You had to be very careful when you played in Vicky's house. Vicky had a big garden and once we got in trouble for eating green beans on the vine. We loved the taste of those green beans that we plucked, snappy and sweet. One day when we were eating beans, Vicky's mother came outside. We tried to hide in the vines near the corn, but she found us. She stood in front of us, shaking that big finger of hers, telling us never to eat beans out of the garden again.

Then Margaret showed up at Vicky's uninvited on a Saturday morning and broke a porcelain dog. “My mother will kill you,” Vicky said, but Margaret just went calmly into the kitchen where Mrs. Walton was, the fragments of the porcelain dog in her hands. I'm not sure what we expected—screaming, Mrs. Walton's shouting. We hovered by the kitchen door and I heard Mrs. Walton say, “That's all right, dear. Accidents happen. You did the right thing by telling me.” When we peered into the kitchen, we saw Margaret munching on fresh-baked cookies and drinking milk.

The next Saturday she showed up at my house. My father must have answered and let her in. He didn't even ask who she was. He just assumed she was one of the gang, which she wasn't. I don't know how she knew the others were at my house, but she did. The gang and I were in the upstairs playroom, eating chips and drinking tall glasses of chocolate milk.

The playroom was above the garage and in it there was the cedar closet. My mother was adamant about putting the summer clothes in the cedar closet during the winter, and winter clothes in the cedar closet during the summer. Inside it smelled like forests, the deepest parts of forests and ravines, the places you have to walk a long way to get to. There were shelves and cabinets inside the cedar closet and they made very good hiding places. When we played hide-and-seek, I always hid there.

It was one of the rules of the gang that we made ourselves at home in one another's houses. I could open a dozen refrigerator doors in Winonah and take anything I wanted and no one would think twice about it. Margaret wasn't one of the gang, but still she was eating chips, changing stations on the radio.

“Let's play hide-and-seek,” Samantha Crawford said.

Lori Martin wanted to play too and said she'd be it. She started counting to ten, but when I went to my spot in the cedar closet, Margaret was already hiding there. I looked at her, shocked. “Who said you could hide there?” I spoke in an angry whisper.

She just shrugged. “It seemed like the best place,” she said. Then I hid behind the sofa and was found right away.

When the gang went home, my sweaters lay on the bed; books had been taken down from the shelf. My collections so neatly arranged on the shelves were suddenly in disarray. Feathers were where the shells should be. I had a cardinal feather and a bluejay's which I couldn't find. None of the gang would do this. I yelled at Jeb and Art. “Did you guys go in my room? Did you mess up my stuff?”

“Take it easy, Squirrel,” Jeb shouted back at me. “Who'd wanta mess with your things?”

7

Jade was waiting at the
airport when I arrived. Her hair was cut short and she'd spiked it with goo. She wore ripped jeans that were much more expensive than jeans you just buy and rip yourself. She had four rings in each ear and a new one in her nose. The blue lipstick gave her face an eerie, spectral air and I tried not to look at this concoction that was my daughter as she told me that our house was slipping down the cliff.

It isn't anything noticeable, she assured me as she stood there, tugging at the crystal amulet around her neck. She informed me matter-of-factly that the insurance company had sent an appraiser by while I was away who noted that the northeast corner of our house needed to be shored up and that the foundation seemed to be giving way.

Under normal conditions I would have considered this news very bad, but Jade is such a warm, friendly girl and she greeted me with a great big hug and a no-big-deal smile on her face. Smacking her gum in my ear, she said, “Don't worry, Mom. Like you always say, there are only solutions. No problems. How's Grandma?”

“The same.”

“How about that old boyfriend of yours? Did you see him?”

“Oh, we spent some time together. He's on his second divorce.”

“So you have things in common.” Jade gave me a big wink. I stared at my daughter with her close-cropped hair, her sharp, bony body.

On the way home we stopped at Half Moon Bay Diner, a little cappuccino and sandwich place I'd stop at for the name alone, perched up high on the edge of the road so you can look down at the Pacific. It's a place where I love to sit and Jade knew that, which is why she stopped there.

Since I first saw it, this part of Northern California has always been just right for me, with its dramatic vistas, its crashing sea. But now as I munched on an avocado and sprout sandwich on pita, I felt distracted the way you do when you think you've left home with the coffee pot on.

“So, Mom,” Jade said, “did you see anyone? Did you do anything?”