Criss Cross (14 page)

“Where should I put this?” she asked. “I mean, where would you like it?”

“Just in here,” said Mrs. Bruning. She made her bulky way past the hall-filling obstacle of Debbie and the laundry and, a few seconds later, a switch clicked and a light came on over a kitchen sink.

“The overhead bulb is burnt out,” she explained. “I can’t reach it without climbing up on a chair, and then I’m afraid of falling. Just put it in the corner, on the floor. I will take care of it later.”

Debbie nudged aside a small stack of newspapers with her foot and set the basket down. She stood up and turned around. The dimly lit kitchen seemed at first to be a cluttered, disorganized mess. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw spotlessly clean surfaces. Polished fixtures. The impression of disorder came from a variety of projects that Mrs. Bruning had not managed to complete. A bag of groceries sitting on one of the chairs was only half unloaded, and what had been removed from it had only made it as far as the tabletop. Next to the cans of soup, standing in tidy rows along with a box of cereal and a loaf of bread, an old typewriter held a letter in progress. Just beyond that, a neatly folded pile of bathroom towels, pink with roses, waited to be delivered to a closet somewhere in the murky house. A glass of milk and a plate with a partially eaten jelly sandwich sat nearby with a folded paper napkin tucked under its edge like a still life. On the counter by the wall were two boxes that had been neatly labeled “Christmas Ornaments: Attic.” The room was full of efforts abandoned in midstream.

Mrs. Bruning caught Debbie’s gaze and laughed. She picked up the glass and the dish with the jelly sandwich and carried them to the sink.

“And then again,” she said. “Maybe I won’t.” Over her shoulder, she added, “I’m going to have to think about it.”

Rain pelted the windows; the kitchen felt cozy. Yellow light from the shaded lamp illuminated a calendar printed on a dishtowel hanging on the wall. The months, and the verse above them, were in German. Debbie was in her second year of German, and she could tell that the rhyme was about baking a cake, though she didn’t know all of the words.

“ ‘
Schieb, schieb in Ofen nein
,’ “ she read aloud. “Why does it say not to put it in the oven?”

Mrs. Bruning looked at the dishtowel, then back at Debbie.

“It’s not
nein
as in ‘no,'” she said. “It’s a shortened way of saying
hinein
, which means ‘in there.’ As in, ‘shove it in there.’ A colloquialism. A slang word.”

“I didn’t think German would have slang words,” said Debbie. “It always sounds so precise. Except for the
schl
and
ch
sounds.”

Mrs. Bruning chuckled. “I can guarantee you,” she said, “we are as lazy as anyone else. Just take a look around you.”

Debbie did.

“I can change your lightbulb for you,” she said.

And while she did that, Mrs. Bruning put the kettle on the stove to make tea, and fished a package of vanilla sandwich cremes out of the grocery bag on the chair. That’s how it had started: they liked each other.

Debbie tossed the
Gone with the Wind
program on the “done” pile and picked up a pamphlet called “Just Us Girls.” She had looked at it before; she had looked at all of them before. This one had a drawing of three females on the cover, a mother and two daughters sitting close together on a sofa. All three were drinking from the type of mug that might hold hot cocoa. Wavy lines indicating steam and warmth rose out of the cups. The mother and the younger daughter, who wore braids, were both in their nightgowns, robes, and slippers, and were listening intently to the teenaged daughter, who sat between them in a beautiful evening gown. The idea was that she had just returned from a big date. She looked like the kind of girl who would have big dates frequently.

The pamphlet had been put out by a sanitary napkin company, so there was a lot of information about periods, and which company’s products were best to use. Some of this information was not very modern, since the pamphlet was thirty or forty years old. It talked a lot about being modern, though, and how lucky a thing it was to be modern. It seemed to suggest that emergence from the Dark Ages had been recent, a narrow escape facilitated largely by the sanitary napkin industry.

There were also sections on health, grooming, and how to be popular. The popularity section was big on “confidence.” Debbie didn’t feel a need to be popular, but she thought she would like to feel confident. The information on how to do this was vague. It mentioned being friendly, having good manners, and being clean and neat. She already did all that. Maybe not the neat part.

But perhaps the exercises in the health section would help.

She positioned the pamphlet, open to the exercise page, on her bed and moved to the epicenter of her room. By extending her legs past the desk into the space between her bed and the closet, she was able to do sit-ups. And leg raises. A breeze. She stood up and aligned herself for toe touches. All of the exercises were easy. Confidence was oozing through her. The challenge was in doing the exercises without banging into the furniture. She stood in the small hollow of her cocoon and did arm circles. Small ones, and medium. Large were not possible.

She wondered if the confident feeling only lasted while you were actually doing the exercises. That could be inconvenient, and awkward.

Yesterday, for example. The last day of school, everyone clearing out their lockers of hairbrushes, gym clothes, mirrors, photos, and magazine pictures. They had to peel off all the tape. The lockers were going to be inspected.

Debbie had a lot of tape to peel off, and she concentrated on that so as not to be undone by the protracted nearness of Dan Persik. She had, of course, tried to think of something to say, something really funny or interesting that would get his attention and reveal her true self. She was mistaken in thinking that’s what it would take, but she was thinking it.

She pictured herself, now, pausing in her tape peeling to do a few arm circles. It would be hard to explain. Maybe she could have repaired to the restroom for a few minutes, to do them there.

But she hadn’t. She had just peeled away silently, adding pathetic scraggly layers to her sticky little ball of tape.

A funny thing had happened, though. Involving Dan Persik. When they were almost done, he had said, “Oh, hey—Debbie.” She had looked up (startled bunny look) from where she was kneeling. He smiled and said, “I have something for you.”

He fished in every pocket of his jeans, then went through them all again, even pulling his front pockets inside out. Debbie waited, unable to imagine what would happen next. Something good? Something embarrassing? Her heart hopped up and down.

“Jeez,” he said. “What did I do with it?”

He went around once more, then said, “I guess I lost it. Never mind. It was just something I found. I thought you might like it.”

There was a teasing note to his voice. Debbie didn’t know what to think.

She smiled, shrugged, and said, “Oh, well.” She thought she was quite cool, under the circumstances.

Mr. Dysleski arrived at her locker, glanced at it, and told her she could go.

“Have a nice summer,” he said.

“Yeah, have a nice summer, Debbie,” said Dan. “See you around.”

“Thanks,” she said. “You, too.”

And walked down the hall and out through the doors into summer vacation. A place and time that promised many pleasures. But it didn’t look like romance was going to be one of them.

She put the pamphlet back into the box, the box back into the closet, stretched out on her bed, and gazed up at the blank movie screen of the ceiling. The white walls of her cocoon. The blank, arid desert of the summer.

The voices of her mother and Fran, which had blurred into a murmur, now disentangled themselves and spoke alternately and distinctly.

“I wonder if Mike will win again today,” said Fran.

“I hope he doesn’t,” said Helen. “He’s won enough. It’s someone else’s turn.”

They were heading down to the basement. It was time for
Jeopardy.

Debbie went out onto the front porch. Maybe a change of scenery would help. Maybe a miracle would help. Maybe nothing would help.

T
he necklace had escaped from Dan’s pocket by working its way through a hole, a young hole, not yet big enough for a coin to pass through. He felt a light tickling sensation on his thigh as the chain bounced against it, waiting for the letters to be jolted out, but he didn’t pay attention to it; his thoughts were elsewhere.

As he walked down the street on the morning of the last day of school, he passed Hector’s house and smiled to himself, thinking about last night at the Tastee-Freez.

Sorry, Hector, he thought cheerfully. Old buddy, old pal.

The back end of Rowanne’s old beater was poking out over the sidewalk, and as Dan made an exaggerated movement to juke around it, the necklace slipped down his pants leg and fell out onto the ground.

A minute or two later a couple of little girls spotted it. After some discussion, they decided that whoever had lost it would find it more easily if they put it on the trunk lid of the car, closer to eye level.

For twenty minutes it remained there.

Then Rowanne, running late, burst through the front door and down the steps, leaped into the driver’s seat, and sped away. The necklace shimmied back and forth over the lid of the trunk as the car stopped at stop signs, then surged forward again. Somewhere in the middle of Prospect Hill Road, it dove from the car onto a freshly poured ribbon of road-patch tar. The gold letters of Debbie’s name hit the tar, sank in at a variety of angles, and waited to be run over.

I

H
ector was letting his hair grow. Rowanne had mentioned in passing that he looked like a buffalo. He didn’t think she necessarily meant this in a bad way.

II

The third time Debbie went to Mrs. Bruning’s house, Mrs. Bruning asked Debbie to cut off her hair.

“It’s too hard for me even to wash it,” she said. “Cut it all off, except leave me an inch and a half or maybe two inches all over.”

Just pulling out the bobby pins and unwinding the two braids from around the old woman’s head took a while. Unwound, they fell down over her bosom and her lap, to a little past her knees. She looked like a very old milkmaid.

“Go ahead and chop them off,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

“Do you want me to put a rubber band at the top of the braids, so you can save them?” asked Debbie.

Mrs. Bruning said, with a snort, “What would I save them for?”

Debbie didn’t know what you would save them for, but she thought that tossing them in the trash was going to feel sacrilegious. Though keeping them would feel creepy. Putting them out so that birds could use the hair in their nests would probably result in frustrated birds grounded by hair-entangled feet. So she chopped them off and dropped them in the plastic wastebasket under the sink, on top of the used tissues and coffee grounds. She half expected them to rebel, to rise up like cobras or cast indignant spells from where they lay. But as far as she could tell, they stayed put.

The next step was to trim the remaining hair all over. Mrs. Bruning didn’t want a style, or anything she would have to fuss with. She was done with fussing. She wanted it all short and out of the way.

As she snipped, Debbie grew alarmed at the sparseness of what was left. Pink scalp was plainly visible under the white fluff. In some places, particularly right in front where it was most noticeable, there was almost more pink than white. Even though she had only followed Mrs. Bruning’s instructions, she felt queasy. She felt like a vandal. She had a panicky desire to laugh, not out of mirth but hysteria. She swallowed it. She had single-handedly sheared away Mrs. B.'s dignity and left her half bald.

“It’s pretty thin,” she said nervously. She had the thought that maybe they could still retrieve the braids, shake off the coffee grounds, and wrap them around Mrs. B’s head.

“You’re worried,” observed Mrs. Bruning. “Let me see. Go and get my mirror, from on my dresser.”

Debbie went, and returned with the mirror. Mrs. Bruning took it and looked in, moving it up and down and from side to side. Her face was unreadable.

“It’s the new me,” she said finally. Then she quoted the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., who she admired. “'Free at last, free at last,'” she said in her German accent instead of his southern one. ‘"Great God A’mighty, I’m free at last.'”