Object lessons (21 page)

“Not yet you don’t.”

The two girls were very still. Finally Debbie said, “They’ll kill us.”

Helen smiled. “Maggie, if I pierce your ears, what will happen?” she said, in exactly the tone of voice she had used to ask Maggie what she would be doing twenty years from now.

“My mother will yell at me.”

“And then?”

“I’ll probably get punished. Maybe I won’t be able to go to the club for a week.”

“It’s almost September. The club will close on Labor Day. So what else can happen?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“So you’ll get yelled at, maybe punished. But then you’ll have pierced ears and new earrings.”

Maggie smiled and looked down at the hoops. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Only for a minute,” said Helen.

“I’ll do it,” said Maggie, and Debbie looked at her, her eyes wide. “Oh, this is unbelievable,” she said harshly. “Maggie Scanlan, who’s afraid to do anything wrong?”

“What’s with you?” Helen said.

“Forget it,” said Debbie. “I know you think she’s great, but she’s a big chicken. She won’t do anything that will get her in trouble. Bridget says she’s nun material.”

Helen looked thoughtful. “There’s trouble, and then there’s trouble,” she said. She turned and started upstairs, and Maggie and then Debbie followed her. Helen pulled them into the bathroom. There was a needle threaded with white cotton and a bottle of alcohol on the edge of the sink. “Stay away from Bridget Hearn,” Helen said as she rubbed Maggie’s lobes with alcohol. “She’s a jerk.” Maggie had smiled, and as the needle went in she did not make a sound. But as they went downstairs, their earlobes tingling, their hair carefully combed forward, Debbie had turned to her and said, “I dare you to come out tonight.”

Now, from her window, Maggie watched the guard’s car pull away, the pale beige glowing in the half light from the houses. The lightning leapt again, brighter this time, and there was the dim timpani of thunder far away. The lightning flashed and then remained, and as she narrowed her eyes she could see fire pluming from the roof of the house where she and Debbie had once taken up residence. Even at that distance she could see that this one, the eighth one, would be the one that would count, and she understood Debbie’s valedictory remark. I won’t go, she told herself. I won’t go. Afterward, she wondered whether she had gone because of Debbie’s dare, because she was worried about her friend, or because she was just as hypnotized by trouble as the rest of them.

She could smell the blaze as soon as she left the house, sharp and bitter, a chemical edge to the natural musk of smoke, a perversion of the autumn smell she’d loved all her life and would never be able to bear again. Trotting among the houses, she began to glimpse the fire, throwing the edges of the building into sharp relief. The house looked much as usual, except that in each of its windows there was a glimpse of waving, gaudy orange, like tattered curtains blowing. The lightning throbbed again, and after the thunder she heard a scream. She went in the front door and saw flames filling the back of the house, turning the walls to nothing, and she saw Richard and Debbie leaping about, laughing. Then Debbie gave a little scream again as the fire moved forward with a roar. “We did it,” she cried, her voice shrill. “We finally did it!”

Maggie could see that in minutes the entire building would be alight, and perhaps the ones next to it, too. On the floor there was an empty bottle of Four Roses, its cap filled with cigarette butts, and Maggie wondered for a moment why they’d chosen that to feed the flames. Then she looked at Debbie, who was leaping up and down as though she was on a pogo stick, her hair corkscrewing into little curls in the heat, and realized she was drunk. Her blouse was unbuttoned almost to the waist, and a big bruise purpled her neck just where it met her collarbone. Maggie felt herself flush. She looked over at Richard, and he gave her a slow, sleepy smile and ran his tongue along his lips. He stumbled over and put his mouth against her earlobe, touching his lips to the string Helen had put there until Maggie was ready to wear earrings. Maggie smelled the liquor, a hospital kind of smell, and tried to pull away, but he kept his hand on her shoulder hard, like a vise.

“Hi, sexy,” he said. And he looked over at Debbie and then laughed and turned back to Maggie. He was leaning on her, and Maggie suspected that if she stepped aside he would fall over. “You’re the coolest-looking girl I know. I love your eyes. Your eyes are so cool.”

Maggie shivered. The flames suddenly blazed toward them, leaping toward the ceiling, turning the fresh paint to a pale curdled mess. Debbie yelped and then looked over and said to Richard, “I wouldn’t waste my time.”

“This is bad,” Maggie said. “You guys better get out of here. This is going to burn down the whole house.”

“Good thinking,” said Richard, who did not move. “Watch it burn with me. You’ll like it. Relax. Just for once. You’d be so cool if you’d relax.”

“You’re crazy. The police will come now. We could all get arrested for this. Look at her. How are you going to get her home like that? What if her mother smells her?”

“She smells good,” Richard said, and he ran his hand inside the back of Maggie’s shirt. “So what if we get in trouble? Who cares?” He turned his face to her, streaked with soot, smelling of gasoline. “What difference does it make?”

“Deb, don’t stay here,” Maggie said. “They’ll be here soon. You guys are going to get in so much trouble.” But Debbie just stood there, staring. “Look at it,” Richard said, and he moved toward the burning wall. And then as though the fire had reached out to throw its arms around him, a flame leapt out and flared on his sleeve, played around his hair. Debbie screamed and finally ran from the house, stumbling, and Richard ran behind her, panting, coughing, falling. Maggie knelt down beside him, and by the light of the fire she could see the shriveled red flesh of his hand and arm, and his singed hair and eyelashes.

“Ah, shit, Maggie,” he said evenly. And then he began to sob with great wrenching heaves. “I think I blew it.”

A few steps away, Debbie was sitting on the ground, her head turned to one side, being sick all over her hair. Maggie went over to her. “You have to get up,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”

Debbie lay back and stared straight up at the stars. “You tried to take my boyfriend, too,” she said, slurring her words.

“Shut up. They could put you in jail for this. Come on.” She pulled Debbie into a sitting position and then hooked her arms beneath her armpits. Richard was starting to wail.

“Go away,” Debbie said as Maggie pulled her to her feet.

She went limp in Maggie’s arms and Maggie dragged her to a house across the street that was almost finished. Gently she lowered her onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor. “Stay here,” she said, looking down, but in the dimness she could tell that Debbie had passed out. Maggie buttoned up her friend’s blouse and then ran between the houses, leaping over pieces of lumber and discarded cardboard, trying to keep from falling. Her own house was still dark. She saw a light in the window of the construction trailer, and veered toward it. She knew someone was there; she had watched Joey Martinelli’s car pull up an hour before, moving with a series of little jerks like hiccups. Maggie had laughed out loud because it reminded her of the way her aunt Celeste drove, swearing at the clutch and the gear shift as she stalled in intersections, her middle finger stuck out the window as other drivers blew their horns and pulled around her. Then the lights had gone on in the trailer, yellow squares reflecting down on the dirt, picking up the little silver trajectories of moths dazzled by the beams. Maggie disliked Joey Martinelli, even though she knew in her heart that he was probably a nice person; it seemed that he was always hanging around, the edges of his mustache wet, half-moons of dirt beneath his square nails. She hated it when he asked about her grandfather. She knew that if her grandfather ever met Joey Martinelli, the man would barely be out of earshot before John Scanlan would start calling him a guinea. One afternoon he had come over to talk to her. “You’re almost done over there,” Maggie had said to be polite, pointing to the row of model homes.

He nodded. “Shelley Lane,” he said.

“You’re calling a street Shelley? Like Shelley Winters?”

“Like Shelley the poet,” Joey said, his hands in his pockets. “Every street is going to be named after some famous writer. There’s a Dickens Street, a Wordsworth Street. The models are called the Emily Dickinson, the Lord Byron, and the Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Which one’s the Edgar Allan Poe?”

“The ranch.”

Maggie shook her head. “I hope no one who comes to see it has ever read Edgar Allan Poe,” she said.

“The guy wanted to be an English professor,” Joey continued, “but instead he went into construction with his father. He says it shows the best-laid plans of mice and men do something or other. I can never follow half of what he says.”

“Weird,” Maggie had said.

Now she ran along the tamped-down dirt of the sidewalk until she came to the end of what would be Shelley Lane and knew she had to ask for help whether she liked Joey Martinelli or not. The construction trailer lay across a wide swatch of untouched land, a boundary of grass the developers had planned in the mistaken belief that it would placate the residents of Kenwood, when all it did was to make Tennyson Park seem like another country, like a raw-looking mirage floating over their backyards, distant and unsubstantial, somehow hostile. Maggie could hear music from inside the trailer, the Beatles in harmony, Paul’s strained soprano, John’s lower, thicker voice as the backdrop. “Things We Said Today.” There was a window in the door, and she pulled herself up until she could see through it.

Inside, her mother was standing at a gray table, and as Maggie watched she pushed back her hair with her fingers and looked up at Joey Martinelli, a look of such intensity on her face that Maggie drew back. When she looked again Connie had her head down and Maggie could see that the man was arguing, using his hands, finally putting them on Connie’s shoulders. Maggie thought of the feeling of Richard’s hand moving softly over her collarbone. On the table was a magazine, the same issue of
Life
Monica had been reading on Sunday, the one with Paul Newman on the cover in an undershirt. Next to it was a half-eaten Three Musketeers bar. As Maggie watched, Joey Martinelli let his hands drop, and Connie looked up again. She took his big fist in her small hand, opened it, and placed something in the palm. For a moment it lay there, under the fluorescent light, and Maggie saw that it was a key. She wondered whether it was the key she had seen on the kitchen table that day she had found out her mother was learning to drive, or the key her grandfather had tossed into her mother’s lap, the key to the new house in which they were all meant to live happily ever after.

Joey Martinelli’s fist closed around it.

Somehow Maggie was not surprised at what she was seeing, only a little sickened, as she had been the time she had found the dress that was to be her Christmas present on the top shelf of the closet and tried it on, smoothing the skirt until she looked into the mirror and saw her mother standing behind her, her face soft and dark with betrayal and disappointment.

Slowly she backed down the steps and went around to the end of the trailer. The car was parked there, a dark-blue Plymouth sedan, like the company cars that her grandfather’s salesmen used on their rounds, anonymous, undistinguished. Her grandfather always said you could pick out plainclothes cops in the city because they always drove cars like this; plainclothes city cops and the priests in the neighborhoods the cops patrolled. “Show me a priest in a Cadillac,” said John Scanlan, “and I’ll show you a priest who is doing things he shouldn’t.” Maggie could see in the light from the trailer that the car was empty. She peered in the window on the driver’s side. On the seat there was a pink cardigan sweater with little pearl buttons up the front, and another Three Musketeers bar.

She heard the door to the trailer open, and for a moment she was still; then she loped around behind the trailer and made for her own backyard. As she reached the edge of the development, she tripped over a stray cinder block and went sprawling in the dirt, her knees and chin stinging. Turning, she looked back and saw the orange rectangle of the burning development house, and all around began to see lights go on in other houses. From far away she heard screams, and then she realized they were sirens, getting louder and louder. She ran inside the house, upstairs to her own room, and crouched by the window again and watched as the fire engines pulled in, the men shouting to one another to hook up hose after hose to reach the hydrant outside Maggie’s house that had been base for tag for as long as she could remember. “We’re going to need an ambulance,” one of them shouted, and then she knew she no longer had to worry about Richard. Someone stood in her backyard, watching, and then she heard the screen door slam, and footsteps running up the stairs.

“Maggie?” her mother called in the dark. Connie moved to the bed and felt the smooth cover. Then she turned on the overhead light. Maggie was facing the window, and her mother said “Maggie?” again and then stood beside her and looked down at her face.

“Oh no,” Connie said. “Not you. Oh Jesus. Not you.” Maggie raised her hand to her own hot face and when she brought it away it was black with soot, and even she could smell the gasoline on her fingers.

“How could you do this? How could you? Look what you’ve done. And you stink of booze.”

“Me?” said Maggie. “Me? What have I done? What about you? What about what you’ve done? You’ve done worse than I have tonight.” Her head dropped onto her knobby knees and the tears streamed down her legs, but instead of cooling her face they only made it hotter. She felt as if she could not breathe and then she raised her head and wiped it with her arm.

“There are rules,” she said in a treble voice like Damien’s. “There are rules. And if you break the rules you hurt people.”

“I haven’t done what you seem to think I’ve done,” Connie said softly, and Maggie saw that her mother was wearing a clover chain on her head, and with one movement she rose and snatched it off and held it broken in her hand. Connie didn’t move.