Going Away Shoes (20 page)

The leader is talking about how he hates their old math teacher. “And I know where she lives, too.” He circles the block, drives slowly past a neat gray Colonial with a bright red door, the big Electra parked in the drive. “What’s the magic word?” he mimics in a high southern voice and reaches over to grab Lauren’s thigh then inches up, gripping harder as if daring her to move. He motions for her to unzip her jeans, wanting her to just sit there that way, silver chain from her navel grazing the thin strip of nylon that covers her. Lower, he says, even though there is another boy in the backseat hearing every word. She feels cold but
doesn’t say a word. Her shoes and jacket and purse are locked in the trunk of his car. “For safekeeping,” he had said. She is about to readjust the V of denim when he swings the car off the side of the road behind a tall hedge of ligustrum, where they are partially hidden but can still see the house. “Like this,” he says and tugs, a seam ripping, and then he slides across the seat toward her, his mouth hard on her own as he forces her hand to his own zipper. The boy in the backseat lights a cigarette and she focuses on that, the sound, the smell; she can hear the paper burn.

Erin and her friend
, Tina, sit in the backseat, and Gregory is in the front with his Power Rangers sleeping bag rolled up at his feet. Paula will drop him off at the party and then go to the cinema and then she will still have time to sit and collect herself before driving seven miles down the interstate to the Days Inn where he will be waiting. The children have said that this car —their dad’s —smells like old farts and jelly beans. They say he saves up all day at the bank and then rips all the way home. Gregory acts this out, and with each “ewww” and laugh from the girls, he gets a little more confident and louder. He says their grandmother smells like diarrhea dipped in peppermint and their grandfather is chocolate vomick. They are having a wonderful time mainly because it’s daring, the way he is testing Paula, the way they all are waiting for her to intervene and reprimand, but she is so distracted she forgets to be a good mother. When he
turns and scrutinizes her with a mischievous look, she snaps back.

“Not acceptable, young man, and you know it,” she says, but really she is worried that they are right and that
she
will smell like old farts and jelly beans when she arrives at the motel. Her cell phone buzzes against her hip and she knows that he is calling to see if they are on schedule, calling to make sure that she doesn’t stand him up again.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Erin says. “Who is it, Dad looking for underwear? Some lame friend in need of a heart-to-heart?” The laughing continues as Paula turns on the street where a crowd of eight-year-olds and sleeping bags are gathered in the front yard of a small brick ranch.

“One of my lame friends, I’m sure,” she answers, but with the words pictures him there in the room, maybe already undressed, a glass of wine poured. They have already said so much in their little notes that it feels like they have not only already made love but done so for so long that they are already needing to think of new things to do. Her pulse races and she slams on brakes when Gregory screams, “Stop!”

“Pay attention, Mom,” Gregory says. “See, they’re everywhere.” She thinks he means her lame friends or kids at the party, but he picks up one of those little gourmet jelly beans, tosses it at his sister, and then jumps from the car. “Thanks, Mom,” he says, and Paula waves to the already frazzled-looking mother who has taken this on. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. That’s when the jelly bean
frenzy started. And then after her husband said something cute and trite about sharing the desires of a president, since he was now a vice president at the bank, all his workers gave him jelly beans, because what else can you give to someone you don’t know at all who has power and authority over you? He got all kinds of jelly beans. And now if people at the bank hear about the neighborhood wildlife, that will be the theme of the next many years of useless presents —coyote and raccoon and bat figurines and mugs and mugs and more mugs. She will write and send all those thank you notes. She will take it all to Goodwill.

Sometimes Agnes watches
television in the dark. She likes a lot of these new shows that are all about humiliating people until they confess that they are fat and need to lose weight or that they are inept workers who need to be fired or bad members of a team who need to be rejected and banished from the island. Her pug, Oliver, died not long after Edwin, and she misses the way he used to paw and tug and make a little nest at the foot of her bed. She misses the sounds of his little snorts in the night. How could there have been a moment in life when she wished for this? The quiet. The lack of activity and noise. The clock ticks, the refrigerator hums. She could call Preston. She could give him an apology whether she owes it or not. What she could say is that she is so sorry they misunderstood one another. Or she could call him and pretend nothing had ever happened.
She keeps thinking of the boy at the grocery, trying to place what year she taught him. Who were his parents? What is his name? There were some children she gave things to over the years, her own son’s outgrown clothes and shoes, but then she stopped, dumping it all at the church instead because the children never acted the same afterwards and that bothered her. They never said thank you and they never looked her in the eye, as if she had never made a difference in their lives, and that was what hurt so much when she thought of Preston, how easily he had let a few things make him forget all that she had done for him in his life. She stated the truth is all. When Preston planned to marry Dee, Agnes told him how people might talk about them, might call their children names.

Right after Edwin’s funeral, he called her Miss Christian Ethics, Miss Righteous Soul. He told her he wished he could stay and dig into all that ham and Jell-O but that Dee was at the Holiday Inn waiting for him. “They let dogs stay there, too,” he said as he lingered over his father’s prize rod and reel that she had handed to him. He put it back and left. She hasn’t seen him since. Now her chest is heavy with the memory and her head and arm and side ache.

The parking lot stretches
for miles it seems, kids everywhere in packs, snuggly couples, the occasional middle-age settled-looking couple Paula envies more than all the others.
The Cinema Fourteen Plex looms up ahead like Oz, like a big bright fake city offering any- and everything, a smorgasbord of action and emotion as varied as the jelly bean connoisseur basket her husband’s secretary sent at Christmas, a woman Paula has so often wished would become something more. Wouldn’t that be easier?

“He’s here,” Tina says and points to where a tall skinny kid in a letter jacket is pacing along the curb. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“Puhleeze,” Erin says, sounding way too old. “Chill out. He’s
just
a
boy
.” And then they collapse in another round of laughter and are out of the car and gone. Paula’s hip is buzzing again. Buzzing and buzzing. What if it’s Gregory and the sleepover is canceled? Or he fell on the skate ramp and broke something or needs stitches and her husband can’t be found because he’s out in the woods with a flashlight looking for wildlife? Or maybe her husband really does need her. He just got a call that his mother died. Does she know where he put the Havahart trap? And when is the last time she saw
their
cat?

Lauren is feeling frightened
. The other boy, the one from the backseat, who is always quiet and refuses to talk about the bruises on his face and arms, has announced he’s leaving. He can’t do this anymore. The leader calls him a pussy. The leader says that if he leaves that’s it, no more rides, no more pot, no more anything except he’ll catch him some dark night and beat
the shit out of him. “I’ll beat you worse than whatever goes on in that trash house of yours,” he says, but the boy keeps walking, and Lauren feels herself wanting to yell out for him to wait for her. She has always found him scary and disgusting but now she admires his ability to put one foot in front of the other. He says he’s bored with it all —lame amateur shit —but she sees a fear in him as recognizable as her own. “Let him go,” she whispers. She is watching the flicker of television light in the teacher’s upstairs window. “Please. Can’t we just ride around or something.”

“Afraid you won’t get any more tonight?” he asks and leans in so close she can smell his breath, oddly sweet with Dentyne. The lost possibility of his features makes her sad, eyes you might otherwise think a beautiful shade of blue, dimple in the left cheek. He pulls a coiled rope from under the seat. “You gonna stay put or do I need to tie you up?” She forces herself to laugh, to assure him that she will stay put, but she makes the mistake of glancing at the key in the ignition so he reaches and takes it.

She cautions herself to keep breathing, to act like she’s with him. “Next one,” she says. “I need to collect myself.”

“Well, you just collect,” he says. “I’ll be back to deal with you in a minute.” She doesn’t ask what he plans to do. His outlines of all the ways such an event might go are lengthy and varied, some of them tame and pointless and others not pretty at all. He has already said he wants to scare the hell out of the old woman, let
her
know what it feels like to have someone make you say
please
and
thank you
every goddamn day. The girl watches him move into the darkness, numb fingers struggling to finally zip her pants back up, to pretend that his rough fingertips never touched her there. She will get out and run. She will leave the door open and crawl through the hedge until she reaches the main road. She will call her parents, beg for their forgiveness. There is no way now to get her shoes or phone but she moves and keeps moving. She thinks of her bed and how good it will feel to crawl between clean sheets, to stare at the faces of all the dolls collected before everything in her life seemed to go so bad. Now all the things she has been so upset about mean nothing. So what if she let the handsome clean-smelling track star do everything he wanted to do. She liked it, too, didn’t she? Not making the soccer team last year. Being told on college day that she had no prayer of getting into any of the schools she had listed —most of them ones he was considering if he could run track. Losing or getting rejected. That happens to a lot of people, doesn’t it? She can still find something she’s good at, go
somewhere
. But now, she just wants to get home, to shower herself clean with the hottest water she can stand, to soap and scrub and wrap up in a flannel robe. She once watched her uncle skin a catfish, tearing the tight skin from the meat like an elastic suit, and she keeps thinking of the sound it made, a sound that made her want to pull her her jacket close, to hide and protect her own skin. She feels that way now, only there’s nothing to pull around her, the night air much cooler than she’d
thought —and she keeps thinking she hears him behind her so she moves faster. She is almost to the main road, the busy intersection, the rows of cars heading toward the cinema. Her foot is bleeding, a sliver of glass, and she is pinned at a corner, lines upon lines of cars waiting for the light to change.

Paula’s cell phone
buzzes again and she takes a deep breath and answers. “Where are you?” he asks. She can hear the impatience, perhaps a twinge of anger, and his voice does not match the way she remembers him sounding there in the stairwell. When she pictures his face or reads his tiny penciled scrawl, it’s a different voice, like it’s been dubbed.

“Almost there,” she says and tries to sound flirtatious, leaving him a promise of making up for lost time. Then she glances out her window and sees a girl in a torn shirt and barefooted she thinks she recognizes. They certainly won’t let her in the theater that way. The girl is so familiar, and then Paula remembers, her daughter’s school, story time in the library. But that was years ago when the girl’s hair was light brown and pulled up in a high ponytail. She knows exactly who she is. This is a girl parents caution their
good
girls against. She is rumored to be bulimic. She locks herself in the school bathroom and cuts her arms. She once tried to overdose on vodka and aspirin and had to have her stomach pumped. She gives blowjobs in the stairwell of the high school in exchange for drugs. She has blackened ghoulish eyes and jet-black
hair, silver safety pins through her eyebrows and lip. Paula has heard parents whispering about her at various school functions. They say, “Last year she was perfectly normal, and now this. She was a B student with some artistic talent and a somewhat pretty face, and now this.” She is the “Don’t” poster child of this town, the local object lesson in how quickly a child can go bad.

Agnes is trying
to remember what exactly it was she said to anger Preston so. She had tried to make it complimentary, something about skin like café au lait. She had often seen black people described that way in stories, coffee and chocolates, conjuring delicious smells instead of those like the bus station or fish market across the river, which is what a lot of people might associate with black people. Her maid once used a pomade so powerful smelling that Agnes had to ask that she please stop wearing it, but certainly Agnes never held that against the woman; she couldn’t help being born into a culture that thought that was the thing to do.

“Sometimes it’s not even
what
stupid thing you say,” Preston shouted, the vein in his forehead buckling like it might burst. “It’s
how
you say it. So, so, goddamned godlike.” He spit the word and shook all over, hands clenched into fists. But now she wants him to come back and be with her. She didn’t know coffee would be insulting. She is going through her phone numbers, she has it somewhere. That same day she reminded him that even the
president of the United States said things like that. The president had once referred to his grandchildren as “the little brown ones.” Why is that okay and chocolate and coffee are not?