In Zanesville (2 page)

“The fire was contained to the third-floor bathroom,” he tells her. “And it wasn’t even a fire, actually, although we
soaked the room pretty extensively—you just have to,” he explains apologetically. “It looks like what they said: matches and
toilet paper. This thing”—he inclines his head toward the melted plastic pail, a hunk of brown diaper still visible—“is where
the noxious smell came from. Second and first floors, they need some fans going for a couple of hours and it’ll clear out
okay. We gave them free air-conditioning on the third floor.”

My mother and her friends talk in low voices while the men roll up the hose and kick the shards of glass off the driveway.
One of the ones wearing his rubber coat open over an undershirt points to the bare feet of the children and then to the glass.
Feet, glass. Get it? The children nod obediently, struck dumb by the dazzling celebrity of all this.

Miles, clasped against my dampening T-shirt, takes a plastic shovel out of his mouth and points it at the big red truck in
the driveway.

“Fire fuck,” he whispers.

My mother takes her colleagues back to the office and then returns with two old, clattering fans to add to the ones that are
already going, and a grocery sack full of worn-out bath towels. When all the fans are set up it’s like a terrible, rattling
wind tunnel, smelly, and then my mother makes me and Felicia wipe down the front hall with damp rags.

The kids sit at the kitchen table while my mother scrubs the vinyl tablecloth and then makes them lunch from what she finds
in the icebox.

“We’re having chicken!” Stewart cries.

“It’s tuna fish, poophead,” Wanda says. She looks at my
mother with a mixture of challenge and awe. “Huh? He’s got poop on his head.”

“
Hey,
” my mother says. She stares down at Wanda until Wanda closes her eyes, picks up her sandwich, and takes a bite, then sets
it back down, half on the plate and half on the tablecloth.

“She’s blind,” says Dale helpfully. “She can’t even see the poop on her
own
head.”

“If I hear any more of that, you’ll all be spanked,” my mother says. “I don’t fool around.”

“They’re finally gonna get it,” I whisper to Felicia. Our bucket is full of black, oily water now and we’re done cleaning,
just waiting for my mother to leave, slapping at the walls and the baseboards only when she walks by the doorway.

“
We’re
the ones who are gonna get it,” Felicia whispers back. “We burned up their house.”

For a moment, we both have an image of Chuck, in his boots and cracked leather jacket, the overhang of the stomach, the walrus
mustache, the way we have seen him grab Yvonne by the waist in order to say something in her ear. She’s not exactly petite,
either—Felicia saw her pick up Stewart by the neck once and give him a toss. In going through their dresser drawers, we’ve
come across black-and-white photos of Yvonne and Chuck and some of their friends, all stark naked in a variety of shocking
tableaus. The pictures are mostly of couples and groups, squirming around on gray bedclothes or outside on blankets with rocks
in the background—all except one, of an older woman wearing a sailor’s hat and nothing else. She’s lying on a bed grinning
into the camera and saluting. We used to stare at it every few days for a long time, trying to make sense of her pose, her
expression, the deep dirtiness of the
whole endeavor. Then one day she showed up at the house, with a very large teenage girl in blue jeans. The two of them sat
on the back steps, smoking and drinking Pepsi, and ended up leaving right before Yvonne and Chuck came home. The older woman
was wearing a tank top and she didn’t have on a sailor hat, but it was definitely her.

We can’t even anticipate what these people are capable of. Derek is missing, my mother is trespassing, the house is coated
in soot, the ice cream bars are melted. Felicia begins to cry.

“Don’t cry or she’ll never leave,” I beg in a whisper.

“W-w-w-we’re deh-heh-head,” she sobs. “
Deh-
heh-head.”

A crowd appears in the doorway, the kids clustered behind my mother.

“No use in crying, Flea,” she says briskly. “This isn’t your doing, it’s theirs.” She means Derek, Yvonne, Chuck, the entire
crew of Kozaks, for calling all this attention to themselves. The children gaze up at her, a tall, sandwich-making woman with
a deep voice who can make the babysitters mind.

“She better go home,” Renee suggests to my mother. “Right?”

“Wrong,” my mother replies.

Go home! Home, where it’s somebody’s job to babysit
us.
We wish fervently that we’d listened to ourselves and not taken this job. All to get clothes! Specifically, a pair of tweed
wool culottes with a matching jacket for me and a navy blue sweaterdress for Felicia. Those are the outfits that started the
whole problem, which has now expanded to fisherman’s sweaters, Nehru shirts, two-toned Capezios, a plaid wool miniskirt, green
corduroy flannel-cuffed shorts, et cetera. And all on layaway at the Style, a store we wouldn’t even have the nerve to go
into if we weren’t hopped up on all this income.

We do enjoy our Saturdays, though, after a hard workweek. Our pattern is to sleep late, at one or the other of our houses,
and then walk uptown to eat at Weigandt’s, a soda fountain run by a family with prominent noses. Even their littlest kids
have to work there, counting jelly beans and putting them in Baggies with twist ties; their grandmother sits slumped at the
cash register with her hands tucked in her armpits; one of their teenagers waits on us. I always order the same thing: iced
tea with sugar and two bananas sliced into a bowl of mayonnaise. Felicia gets navy bean soup, fried baloney, and the same
thing as me to drink. From there, we walk downtown to shop at the Style, picking out new items and laying them away along
with the old ones; then we go to Carlson’s, our downtown’s department store, to use the bathroom on the fifth floor, which
has pale blue carpeting that I once threw up on. Then we go to the dime store and poke through bins of crap—buttons, hairnets,
shoehorns, clothespins—until we’re in a bad mood; then we go to Felicia’s mom’s office and wait to get a ride back up the
hill with her.

The optometrist’s office is grubby and stale, with withered, dusty plants climbing all over inside the front window, and the
optometrist himself wears thick, smudged glasses; it’s like peering into a pond to look him in the eye.

“Here they are again,” he always says, leaning out from behind his curtain. “Frick and her friend Frack.”

Felicia’s mom’s working at an optometrist’s office is why Felicia had contact lenses before anyone else had even heard of
them. They are virtually invisible and yet still have to be located when they pop out onto the floor or float off their mark,
drifting like unmoored rafts into the farthest bloodshot reaches of her eyeballs.

My mother disapproves of the whole concept of contact lenses—the idea of putting a shard of glass in your eye! “I don’t know
what Phyllis is thinking,” she said. “This doctor has her over a barrel.”

“It’s a new thing!” I tried to explain.

“Yes,” she replied, arching a brow. “They’ve got to have the crème de la crème over there.” She’d never forgiven Felicia’s
mother for buying a blue fur couch and armchair. Not fur like a real animal, but fur like a stuffed animal.

Right now the smoke and the crying have irritated Felicia’s eyes to the point where she has to switch to glasses, turning
her into an earlier horn-rimmed version of herself. She immediately resumes the unconscious habit of wrinkling her nose upward
to reset the heavy glasses when they slip down.

“Here comes the witch of witcherton,” she says, staring at herself in the hall mirror. Actually, if one of us is good looking,
it’s her. She’s tall and elegant, green eyed, although her teeth are slightly out of order, and she isn’t particularly neat.

I, on the other hand, am neat, but that’s about it. The body is wrong, scrawny; the face is pale and nondescript under its
suntan. I talk with a faint sibilance that people think comes from the gap between my front teeth but that actually comes
from me trying to be like Dee Jurgenmeyer, a girl from my childhood who had a real lisp. Once I started it, I couldn’t stop,
even when they sent us both to speech therapy and Dee was cured. The hair is the best feature, limp but long and silky. I
don’t particularly like having nice hair, though, because it gives people the wrong impression about me.

It’s like a mysterious stranger I saw in a movie once, who everyone thought was a beautiful lost child in a red cape. From
a distance all you could see besides the swirling cape was a
head of lustrous hair. A man finally grabbed the child by the hood and turned it around and it was a leering dwarf; the man
screamed, and everyone at the movie screamed too. That’s why I mostly wear my hair in braids.

In fact, my mother does finally return to work, after taking it upon herself to leave her phone number and a note of explanation
on the kitchen table. She also put the kids down for naps, something we never even bothered trying before.

“That’s a good way to get a fire started,” Felicia says as they troop upstairs.

As soon as my mother’s gone, we tear up her note and the phone number. One by one the children drift back downstairs to stare
at us.

“That lady was mean,” Wanda says admiringly.

Dale is staring out the window. Suddenly he bolts for the back door. “Here come the cops!” he shrieks. “Here come the cops!”

The children disperse like vapor, all but Miles, who clings to my leg, sobbing.

There’s a cop on the front porch, fitted out with a gun and holster. Felicia and I open the door together; Miles goes limp
and lets me lift him off my leg and onto my hip.

“Who’s in charge here?” the cop asks.

“The parents are, but they aren’t home,” Felicia says in a whisper. “We’re here right now, but her mother was in charge.”
She gestures toward me and quickly retreats behind her hair, the straw curtain.

“She stepped out,” I lie. Felicia nods vigorously at the floor.

“So, you the babysitters?” he asks.

“We were, we aren’t sure now,” Felicia says evasively. She looks steadfastly past the barbered edges of his head. Behind him,
next to the door, is a round leaded-glass window with a number of BBs lodged in it.

“You didn’t call the fire department when you had a fire,” the cop states, as though he’s reading it off a police report.
“Out of ‘embarrassment,’ that right?”

“No,” I say. “We did call.” He’s slightly fat and has got several things swinging from his waistline, including a radio, a
leather nightstick, a long-handled flashlight, and a pair of handcuffs.

“Well, next time keep in mind,” he says, “you could end up literally dying of embarrassment.”

“We called!” Felicia insists, looking at him directly for the first time. In fact, glaring. “How else do you think the firemen
got here?”

He stares at us, chewing a thin strand of gum, one hand resting on the knob of his nightstick. We stare back for a while and
then give up and look off to the side. “I need to talk to the boy who started the blaze,” he says finally.

“We don’t know where he is,” I tell the cop. “Nobody knows.”

A voice comes ringing down from above. “He’s at Victor’s!” Renee calls out. A moment later she appears on the landing, wearing
a swimsuit and a pair of boots. “He thinks the whole house is burned down.”

“Well, I’ll be sure and let him know,” the cop says generously, “if you tell me where Victor lives.”

She stares down at us, scratching at her leg inside the rubber boot. The cop looks at me.

“Tell him, Renee,” I order her.

She turns and runs up again, into the farthest reaches of the ruined house.

Felicia sighs and heads outside the back way; Miles puts his hands on my cheeks and turns my face toward his. “Cah?” he asks
moistly.

“Cop,” I tell him, and then feel confused. Is that wrong, to say cop? “Policeman,” I clarify.

Felicia returns in half a minute with Stewart; she’s got his arm twisted behind his back so he has to walk sideways up the
front steps.

“Okay, I don’t like to see that,” the cop tells her. She lets him go.

Stewart’s face is streaked with tears, and his white hair is pressed against his pale pink head. His shorts are a size too
small. He tugs at the front of them.

“Let me ask you, pal,” the cop says to Stewart. He moves closer and then tries to crouch, but his gear rides up on him. He
puts a knee down to steady himself. “Can you tell me where Victor lives?”

Stewart nods.

Normally, right before the parents get home we do all the housework we were supposed to be doing during the day, dividing
up the tasks and either bribing or forcing any of the kids we can get our hands on to help us. Today all we can do in the
final hour is walk around in circles, eating the last of the bag of chocolate chips.

“Them are for cookies,” Wanda says, appearing in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Here,” Felicia says. Wanda holds out her hand and receives a pile.

“Mr. Vandevoort wants to talk to you,” Wanda says, putting all of them in her mouth at once and then holding out her hand
for more.

“Why?” I ask her.

She holds out the hand insistently.

Felicia and I go into the backyard, pick our way barefoot across the glass-strewn lawn and over to the driveway, where Mr.
Vandevoort is standing in his work clothes—a short-sleeved shirt and a narrow necktie—staring at the upper stories of the
Kozak house.

“I got glass everywhere,” he informs us. “It’s clear out on the street.”

We don’t know what to say.

“Those kids said there was a fire,” he goes on. “Normally I wouldn’t believe it, but I see where all the windows are knocked
out up there.”

We turn around obediently and look along with him. The third floor is gaping.

“There’s liable to be slivers where I parked my car,” he says, shaking his head. “And I don’t know what was done in my yard—I
hope nothing—but I see over there where somebody has left some empty aquariums under the picnic table.”