Stop That Girl (6 page)

“Yeah, okay, great!” I say, and run eagerly down the street to tell them about it.

Mom and Roy are raking and weeding in back; Kathy’s burying toys in her sandbox. “Guess what?” I say. “The Footes want us all to come over to see their new room!”

Mom doesn’t look happy at all. Her face knots up, and she begins to pantomime a child throwing a tantrum, hideously shrieking
“Comet! Comet! Comet!”
and storming up and down. Roy bellows with laughter.

It’s kind of funny, but I say, “You know what, I’ve gotten to know her better, and she’s really pretty nice.”

The winter sun is going down directly behind them, and Roy moves into my mother’s shadow. For a moment I can’t see either of them, just one big uppity blob countering my hopes and dreams. “Tell them we’d love to, some other time,” it says.

“You’re not going to come?”

“Well, it’s very nice, but we’re busy.”

“You’re not that busy. Roy, don’t you want to?”

He pauses a second, then says, “No, I think not.” And then I understand, finally. How Roy’s main job, no matter how nice he’ll ever be to me, is to stand by Mom. That’s what Mom wants,
after all she’s been through.
That’s why she picked him.

“Oh, please, come on, it’ll be fun—remember how we had to leave last time? Everybody’s over there, there’s food and all kinds of stuff!” I can’t believe I’m struggling to hold back a sob over this. It’s climbing up into my nose.

“Drop it,” Mom says.

“We
need
to go. Come on, please!
Please!
”

“If you mention it one more time, you’re going to your room!” Mom shouts.

I feel awful my mother’s so mad at me, awful that Roy can’t disagree, and, after getting a grip on myself, make the passage back up my street. Every house I walk by contains a different package of people, like presents we could be opening but never do, and I know all their names and play in their yards, but it’s always just
me,
and I feel too measly and insignificant to pull it off alone all the time. I want some backup. But at least the air is crisp and clear today, and the mountains we can’t see the rest of the year rise up purple and handsome over our valley, and all the front gardens and walkways glow with flowers and berries in the twilight. I really like this neighborhood. I don’t want the Footes to get the wrong idea.

So as I approach, I brighten up. I take some deep breaths and relax my face into a smile. And I make my entrance, looking for the biggest person in the room: Mr. Foote. He’s standing in front of a roaring fire holding a frosty mug of ale.

“Annie, what can I getcha?” he says, when he notices me.

“Thanks for inviting my parents,” I tell him. “They’re in the middle of a huge project in our backyard, and they’d love to join in, but you know how it is, and they told me to bring you
this,
” I say, lifting up a bottle of vermouth I grabbed from the kitchen cupboard.

Mr. Foote examines the dusty green bottle a moment, and it suddenly occurs to me it’s not really nice enough to be a gift. The label’s old and wrinkly, and come to think of it, the bottle’s only half full. I think Mom used some for cooking chicken.

“Well, thanks much,” Mr. Foote says, and gives me a solid pat on the back. “You’re welcome around here anytime.”

“Oh, good, thank you.”

“Now get yourself out back and onto one of those teams!” he commands.

“Right!” I make it my business to look as enterprising as possible, a team player, someone you can count on, someone who never lets you down, and I weave my way out through my neighbors, a whole roomful of them, even ones from around the corners and other streets nearby, all of us citizens of this moment, unanimous in our desire to lift our glasses to the Footes’ new room.

We Know Where We Are, But Not Why

During the . . . summer season, 27 employees and 35 overnight guests at Grand Canyon, Arizona, acquired febrile illnesses compatible with relapsing fever. Sixteen cases were confirmed by finding Borrelia spirochetes in peripheral blood smears or inoculated Swiss mice. Acquisition of illness was significantly associated with persons sleeping in rustic log cabins and acquiring bites of “unknown” insects. From rodent nesting materials found in the walls and attics of cabins where cases had occurred, infective
Ornithodoros hermsi
ticks were recovered. This outbreak, the largest yet identified in North America, establishes the North Rim as an endemic source of tick-borne relapsing fever.

—American Journal of Epidemiology

What are you doing this summer?” I asked my friend Raoul, one spring day at lunch as we paced the perimeter of the schoolyard.

“Committing suicide,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “What else?”

“Probably helping my mother around the house,” he added.

“What a drag,” I said.

“She speaks in monosyllables and has no idea what’s going on in the world, but she’s otherwise pretty decent.”

We stopped and lit cigarettes, at the farthest point from the gym. “I’m like my mother’s guinea pig,” I told him.

“Why?”

“I’ve told you already about our summer plans. It’s like she’s set up an experiment and wants to see what it does to me.”

We were putting our hands through the chain-link fence, sticking our lips out through the openings, so that officially speaking we weren’t smoking in the schoolyard.

Raoul said, “Did you know, in Spanish, we call them little rabbits of India?”

“What?”

“Guinea pigs.
Conejillos de Indias.
”

“That means guinea pigs?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“There’s no direct translation of
guinea
or
pig
?”

“Nope.”

“Wow,” I said. “Instead of stupid, experimental drones—” I looked back. I could see Mr. Poplick, the English teacher, who had mentioned the word
orgasm
almost every day since the beginning of the year, coming across the grass toward us.

“Yes,” he said. “We imbue them with a certain exoticism.”

We flicked our butts into the street outside the fence, dug our hands into our pockets, and turned to face Poplick, who would snidely cut us down for favoring tobacco over marijuana. How could something be a pig in one place and an exotic little bunny in another? It made me wonder what I could be, if I ever had the chance to switch worlds.

It was the year I turned sixteen, the year my mother, who had been for some time housebound in the smallest world she could fashion for herself, suddenly accomplished an amazing feat. She decided to be cheerful—all the time, no matter what. “I use self-discipline to pick you up from school on time and make dinner every night,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I make myself be happy?”

In the fall she enrolled in some extension classes at UCLA, which loosened her up about driving to a destination, getting out, and interacting with people. But her breakthrough came when she found a part-time job at a special backpacking store in Glendale, not just a shop but a
hub,
a center for wilderness types, a place where activists posted flyers and meetings were held and talks were given and she was there in the thick of it, selling boots and mole-skin and providing tips on which dehydrated foods tasted best and pouring over USGS maps with hikers and dispensing her knowledge of river trips and trails. She was a hit there, and she liked it. I was happy for her. But somehow this led her to apply for a summer job as a ranger at a certain national park, and—calling upon some contacts from the old days, including some higher-ups in the Park Service and the Sierra Club—she got the job.
An actual
ranger.
She’d have a ranger car, wear a ranger outfit, give nature talks, lead nature walks. Truly grotesque.

“We get our own cabin in the compound,” Mom was saying. She was losing weight to fit into the uniform, giddy over her accomplishment. “No way on earth are you staying home. You and Kathy can roam and play.”

“But I was planning to hang around with my friends and maybe go to Tahoe with Susie’s family,” I said.

“Don’t be so shortsighted,” she said. “You can do that any summer.”

“No, I can’t,” I said. “It’s probably the only summer I’ll
ever
be able to do that.”

“You depend too much on your friends,” she said.

“What about you?”

Mom said, “It’s time I met some people of substance.”

My mother had an assortment of new friends from the backpacking store. River rafters and oarsmen, with names like Connie Bohn and Spencer Chang and Ned Martinez. Hikers like Lewis Blaustein and Dena Fladeboe. Independently wealthy adventurers like Angus Frey. They were coming by our house all of a sudden, and Mom and Roy were having raucous dinner parties, and Kathy and I would clean up in the kitchen while they hooted out in the living room, pretending we were hunchbacked scullery maids in a manor house, scraping the plates and hand-washing the good silver, then stabbing it away in its felty sleeves.

Angus Frey was an Australian, a man with a head the size of a bull’s, a rumpled, bulbous face, thick dark hair like a pelt, and a voice used to speaking to crowds, a man who tossed laughs from his chest like bricks and spent his time traveling and doing good deeds, such as protesting new dams in the Sudan or spreading the word about endangered species in the Amazon, or about timbering, or littering, or oil drilling: you name it. He’d written books on his exploits. He talked up a storm, words hammering on everything within his range. Spokesman for a group founded in Sydney, he roamed the world, but somehow, lately, here he was in our living room.

“Listen here, girls, do you know the story of Truganini?”

“No,” we said. We crowded at his enormous feet.

“Before the settlers came to Tasmania, it was peopled by a race which had lived there for thousands of years. And of course when the British arrived in 1803 they had to clear the slate, and they killed these people off by the thousands. Truganini was the last woman of her kind. She lived a government-subsidized life and was subject to all manner of unwanted exposure, and one of her greatest fears was what would become of her remains after she died. Promises, promises. Sure enough, they strung up the woman’s bones in a museum in Hobart.”

“Is that good or bad?” said Kathy.

“Bad,” said Angus Frey.

“Aren’t you slanting it, by using the words
strung up
?” I said. “If you’d said
commemorated
or
protected
the story’d have a whole different twist.”

“My word, yes, you’ve got me, I’m a propagandist at heart,” he said. “But you see, no matter how you say it, it was a tragedy.”

“Indeed it was,” agreed Roy.

“The girls have been very moved by the plight of the American Indian,” Mom threw in.

“We have?” I said.

“Your favorite book is
Island of the Blue Dolphins,
” Mom said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Not for a long time. My favorite book is
Das Kapital.
”

“That’s right, I keep forgetting you’re an intellectual now.”

“My favorite book is
Little House on the Prairie,
” said Kathy.

“I also greatly relish the works of Kafka and Dostoevsky,” I added.

“As well you should,” Angus Frey said.

“All right, girls, say good night,” Mom said.

“I want to ask something,” Kathy said, standing on her toes.

“Yes?” Mom said.

“I want to ask
him.
”

“Ask away,” Angus Frey said.

“Your sister was eaten by a shark?” she said, obviously hoping it was true.

Mom blanched. “I’m sorry, Angus. Please go to bed now, both of you.”

“It’s all right,” said Angus Frey. “Happened long ago. Don’t fret over it, I’ve made my peace. I often tell people about the rough water down our way, teeming with life, with so much to offer and just as much to take away.”

“You shouldn’t mention things like that to people,” Roy said to her while we were brushing our teeth.

“Why?”

“Because it’s probably a very painful memory.”

“Sorry,” said Kathy.

“No, really, I hope you understand. It’s similar to the way we don’t talk about your mother’s mother, because it hurts her,” Roy said.

“But I think we
should
talk about her,” I said.

“It’s not really up to you,” Roy said.

“I knew her too, doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Mama doesn’t like it when you talk about her,” Kathy said.

“You didn’t even know her,” I said.

“All right,” Roy said. “Pajamas.”

“I’m spitting,” Kathy said.

“After spitting.” Roy sighed.

And then it was June, the night before our trip. I had plans. I tore off on my bike after dinner to meet up with Raoul because we were invited to a party at Mindy’s, and as soon as I started to move of my own accord, I felt somewhat less depressed. Warm air rose from the pavement in waves, gusting up my arms, fanning my face with twilight. I knew these streets down to the different grades of asphalt they’d been surfaced with, recognized like geological formations every bump and crack in the road. I also spent a lot of time inspecting the ways people tried to make their properties distinctive, with flags, or eagles over the doors, or special mailboxes, or pudgy mounds in the middle of their lawns appointed with birdbaths and gnomes. I told myself to relax, that I wouldn’t miss much. I’d be back soon.

I met Raoul at the designated corner, and we cycled over side by side. By the time we arrived at Mindy’s, a small stucco house north of Victory Boulevard, Pat and Randy were making out on the couch, Beth and Mark were making out in an armchair, Louise and Alan were making out on the grass in back, and Carole King’s album
Tapestry
was going around and around on the turntable, making Diane cry because Diane still loved Randy.

I picked out a few Doritos from a big bowl, took another look around the darkened living room, and said, “Let’s go.”