The Fates Will Find Their Way (4 page)

4

S
arah Jeffreys was twelve years old when she got into the backseat of Franco Bowles’ Dodge. They were neighbors. They’d grown up together—if you can say that a twelve-year-old and a nineteen-year-old can grow up together. But they’d lived on the same block, gone to the same pool parties—those ageless affairs where mothers and fathers and high schoolers tolerated the company of middle schoolers, even lower schoolers, because they were related, because it passed the hour, the day, the summer. Time needed to be passed, days needed to go by. Pools needed to be swum, skin tanned, bellies fed. One pool party ended and the next was planned. It was that simple, that easy, that fun. And by the end of the summer, the fun was so monotonous that we were thankful for it to be over, for school to have begun again.

In this way, then, you can say that Franco Bowles and Sarah Jeffreys grew up together. She was in the shallow end when he was in the deep end, but they were in the same water. She was closer to Tommy Bowles, of course, because of their age. But she knew that at night when the families were reunited—when brothers were returned to sisters, and children returned to parents—Tommy went with Franco and the two of them went with Mr. and Mrs. Bowles and the four of them crossed the street together to the gaudy two-story Colonial across the street with what some of our mothers referred to as an unnecessary and showy addition.

In all those summers, at all those pool parties, there’d been nothing special between Sarah and Franco, not that we’d seen. There’d been no inappropriate flirtation, no quick aside in the bushes, no rumors of the two of them accidentally overlapping in one of the changing rooms. Nothing. And when Franco left for college, it was no different for Sarah than when any other neighbor’s older sibling left that year. She didn’t pine his absence. She didn’t even say goodbye.

That fall we entered seventh grade, and Sarah, like almost every other seventh-grade girl, realized that we paid a little more attention if she rolled her skirt a time or two at the top. Just one or two more inches exposed at the knee and we were done for. And Sarah liked the attention. Every girl liked the attention—it’s true—but Sarah was willing to talk to us, to flirt with us. She added an extra wiggle when she walked, an extra half skip to every step that allowed the skirt to rise just a centimeter more in the wind, and that centimeter made Sarah a sort of darling among us—Danny, Winston, Drew, Chuck, Stu Zblowski (who named every dog he was ever given after himself, which was either really strange or really awesome), even Trey Stephens admitted she was somehow sexier than the others.

The thing about Sarah was that she’d never even kissed a boy. At least not any boy that we knew about, and we would have known about it if it had been any of us. We were boys, after all, which means we were creeps—our mothers’ word—which means we were indiscreet and couldn’t help ourselves when it came time to trading what we’d done or not done or when and with whom and how.

Wasn’t it Jack Boyd who put his fingers in our face after putting his hands down Lily Bunker’s pants one night? And wasn’t it Chuck Goodhue who liked the idea so much that he stopped washing his hands, insisting that the only way to measure the day when he went to bed at night was to hold his hands to his face and breathe the evidence of everything that had or hadn’t happened? God, we were creeps! But children also, which is what makes it excusable—excusable but perhaps for this reason also frightening, disconcerting that there wasn’t someone there saying no, stop, don’t do that. At least don’t do that
yet
. But there wasn’t. There was only each other, us; Chuck Goodhue was Winston Rutherford’s gauge, and Trey Stephens was Danny Hatchet’s, and so on. Our only limitation was our imagination, and that school year—and every school year after—our imaginations seemed to grow, to outdo what we’d ever believed possible. We outran our wildest fantasies. That is, until Nora Lindell went missing, and the only fantasy we could ever conjure suddenly involved her or some aspect of her, like her little sister.

I
f we lost Sarah Jeffreys after high school—lost her in a more euphemistic way than we lost Nora Lindell—then seventh grade was the year we found her. It was the year before the rape, when she was always around, at every basement party, at every truth-or-dare. Always the instigator, never the disciple. It was the year she got not just good with a pool cue, but really good. She was a guy’s girl, which is maybe why the other girls didn’t relate to her. We liked her too much; they couldn’t be her friend, they could only be jealous.

She was ahead of us all in some ways. What’s clear now is that she knew what it would take years for the rest of us to learn—that none of it mattered, that all of the ins and outs and chagrins of childhood were meaningless. What mattered was what was ahead, so fuck it. Do it, say it, be it. She was a go-getter and that scared the hell out of us, but it also intrigued us, as did the fact that the other girls steered clear of her. And so of course she became the girl we championed. How could she not?

The summer after seventh grade was the summer Sarah discovered cutoffs. Chuck Goodhue used to clutch his heart when she walked by and say, “I’m a goner, boys. Those legs are going to do me in.” Chuck was the son of a merciless flirt, the kind of dad who might pull you aside and say, “If you love her, let her kill you, kid. My god, look at the melons on that one.” Merciless and completely inappropriate. Chuck, of course, was Mr. Goodhue’s best mimic.

It’s funny now to think back on the image of that underweight and acne-covered boy, grabbing at his chest like an old man. But at the time, his pantomime made sense to us. We felt it just the same in our own chests, maybe even stronger. That feeling was life or death, all or nothing, and truly, truly we believed our summer depended on the frequency and length of Sarah Jeffreys’ cutoffs.

Even now it’s unclear exactly how or why the events in the backseat of Franco Bowles’ Dodge occurred. Because charges were never pressed, because nothing was ever confirmed, because our gossip was always shushed by whichever mother was closest, we were never able to put it all together. We could never confirm or deny the theory that Franco was an incurable pervert any more than we could confirm or deny the chance that the entire incident was an accident, a misunderstanding, a misstep that might have been avoided.

All we knew—all we know—is that Sarah wasn’t the same after getting into the Dodge. Sarah wasn’t the same, Franco left town, and Mr. and Mrs. Bowles didn’t attend a single pool party the summer before our eighth-grade year. Tommy was allowed to attend, perhaps even forced by his parents. Probably they knew that his presence would keep us from ever being able to sort out what really happened. That was the summer Tommy’s face got so sunburned it boiled, and ever after he blushed at even the slightest mention of flirtation or girls or sex, as if his skin never fully healed from that one summer’s burn. Punishment, somehow, for his brother’s trespass.

When school started the next fall, we noticed the other girls were nicer to Sarah. She made friends with the cheerleading squad and eventually joined. Senior year she was captain. Her mother made sure the best parties happened at Sarah’s house. And after Nora Lindell disappeared, there were times when we actually forgot that Sarah had been compromised. Almost every single one of us dated her at some point. The one thing we refused to say was whether we’d all also had sex with her, though by the time we graduated, it’s probable that at least a half dozen of us had.

Danny Hatchet was the one who took the little time he actually got to spend with her the most seriously. He was the first to go on a real date with Sarah, and was somehow unaware of the rape. Blame the fog of medication his doctors kept him on. Who knows? But somehow Danny alone made it through eighth grade without knowing what everyone else seemed to know.

It was ninth grade, the year Mrs. Hatchet would eventually kill herself, when, out of nowhere, Danny approached Sarah at lunch one day and asked her on a date. Just like that. He put his pill bottles back in his lunch bag, took a final swig of chocolate milk, and walked over to Sarah’s table without saying a word to any of us about what he was doing. We were torn between thinking Danny was a retard and a god.

Lily Bunker was there when it happened—was, in fact, sitting right next to Sarah—and she’d tried to answer for her. She’d said, “I don’t think so, Danny,” not in a mean way, more in a sympathetic way, like she was looking out for someone who happened to lack common sense. And being girls, a few of them at the table giggled and, okay, maybe from where we were sitting, a few of us giggled too out of sheer nervousness. But Danny, somehow the least embarrassed of all of us, said, “Okay,” and turned to walk back towards us. Again, retard or god? We couldn’t tell, but we were, at that moment, in awe.

It sounded like a mouse squeaking when Sarah finally spoke. Danny had already turned away from her and so was forced to walk back to the table of girls, none of them giggling now, and say, “What?” And Sarah, just like that, said, “Yeah, okay. Sounds good.”

We watched the girls and the girls watched us. It was the beginning of something, an opening in the doorway. We eyed them in wonder and they eyed us in disbelief. This date between Sarah and Danny felt like a secret between the ninth-grade girls and the ninth-grade boys. Suddenly, we were complicit. Suddenly, we had something to talk to them about. It was the true beginning of adolescence, the change we’d been waiting for, and it was all because Danny Hatchet, our weirdo friend in the sweatshirt, had decided to ask the only girl that we knew for a fact had been hurt already on a date.

I
t’s likely Mrs. Hatchet put him up to it. It’s likely Mrs. Hatchet recognized Sarah’s internal scars and was trying to preempt the girl from turning out the same way—sensitive, frazzled, unhinged. Which is not to say that Mrs. Hatchet was taken advantage of in her youth or even messed with, which is also not to say that she wasn’t. We don’t know. What we know is she was a skittish woman who, just before Thanksgiving our ninth-grade year, locked herself in the garage and started her car. How could she not have seen a kinship—from however far away—in Sarah Jeffreys?

Danny Hatchet didn’t find out about the rape until after they’d crawled under the pool table in his basement, until after he’d forced his hand down her pants. He found out not because Sarah objected to his hand, but because when he told us about it, Chuck Goodhue called him a fucking idiot and then repeated the story of Franco Bowles and the backseat of his Dodge.

What we remember about that day is the way Danny kind of closed his eyes while Chuck was talking, the way his face eventually fell forward and into his hands. When he finally looked up all he said was, “I should go home. Sorry.” And for the rest of high school Danny did act sorry, like it was his job to apologize for not only Franco, but for all of us, for men in general.

We didn’t try to comfort him when he went home that day. We didn’t try to tell him that everything would be okay, because we didn’t think it would be. What’s funny is that he actually went on a few more dates with Sarah. For a couple weeks it looked like maybe they were right for each other—as right as two ninth-graders can be. But then Danny’s mom died and his dad started drinking again and, just like that, he stopped calling Sarah. Probably he thought he was being nice. Probably he thought she didn’t want anything to do with a kid whose mom was so crazy she had to kill herself, whose dad was such a fuckup he had to drink himself to sleep every night.

C
huck Goodhue dated her next, and Marty Metcalfe after that. It’s sad, because we all genuinely liked her; we all remembered that one glorious school year when Sarah was nothing but confidence and moxie. But what’s really sad is that Danny Hatchet was probably the only one who really cared for her, was the only one of us who genuinely seemed to understand her, which is funny—right?—because what could a ninth-grader really have understood about another ninth-grader? And there’s a good chance he was the only one of us that she ever really cared for.

But life got in the way, and ultimately Danny couldn’t cope with what another boy had done, and after graduation, Sarah disappeared. We think she went to college, though somehow not one of us—not even Danny—ever seemed to ask which one. Her mother and father left town, moved someplace coastal. Our mothers mentioned a house that one of them had inherited. And that was the end of Sarah. We’d been too busy with Nora Lindell to understand that they were just biding their time until high school was over—feigning normalcy as best they could, as if leaving before graduation would have undermined any chance Sarah still had for complete recovery—and they could leave the mid-Atlantic behind, leave all of us behind. And from time to time we now remember—alone in our bathrooms, shaving before going in to work—that while that memory comes and goes for the rest of us, the backseat of Franco Bowles’ Dodge is something that Sarah will never forget.

5

A
fter school, walking home, we would make snack stops at the various houses of our friends. Mrs. Epstein’s for Rice Krispie treats, Mrs. Price’s for bananas and peanut butter, Mrs. Rutherford’s for cake batter, Mrs. Hatchet’s—before she died—for fruit roll-ups or Coca-Cola gummy bottles (nothing was ever from-scratch in that house, everything store-bought, pre-made). Mrs. Dinnerman’s house wasn’t really good for snacks—at most there was a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table—but we went there anyway just to see her.

Minka Dinnerman’s mother had been imported from the old world sometime in the seventies. Supposedly, it was Mr. Dinnerman himself who brought her back from a business trip to Russia. This seems unlikely, since Minka’s dad never showed much initiative at anything other than importing Mercedes, but that’s how our mothers explained her arrival and that’s where the story stands. A full-fledged Soviet, a cold warrior, Mrs. Dinnerman liked to scold us when we asked about St. Petersburg. “Leningrad,” she would say. “My home is Leningrad.”

We would mimic her and spit would fly from our mouths, the vitriol somehow inherent in the language.
Leningrad.
Impossible to say without a snicker sneaking through.

“I can tell of you about Leningrad, little boyz. I can tell of you many things that you should not know. Do you want to know of about dead babies? I can tell you of about dead babies in tiny glass bottles. Seven-headed babies.” She frowned. “We are collectors. It is true. We are a country of collectors. Do not talk to me about Peter.”

We steered the conversation away from Russia, towards snacks and the fruit bowl in the center of her kitchen table. We liked that she liked the fruit of our country, that she was, in fact, fascinated by its endless variety. We often had the impression that she’d never actually eaten any of it, but that she continued to buy it for its color, for its shape, for its size and smell and sponginess. “This color of green, boyz,” she might say, running her finger down the edge of an apple or a watermelon. “This color ought to be ashamed of about itself. So slootry”—a combination, we assumed, of sultry and slutty—“so tempting. A prostitute of color.” When we blushed, crisp, tingly bubbles of laughter came from her mouth and nose that seemed to confirm her own deliberate role as temptress.

If any of us had ventured to touch the day’s chosen fruit, she would have slapped the audacious hand. The fruit was a display, not an offering. In the two decades she’d been in our country, she hadn’t learned what snacks were, hadn’t cared to learn. Doubtless this troubled Minka, kept her skinny and sickly and pale, but we loved Mrs. Dinnerman for it, for how decidedly
not
our mothers she was.

T
he house—two-storied, Greek Revival, pink—smelled of mothballs and dill and eggs. The eggs alone should have kept us away, and the dill a nightcap to the boiled, fried, stewed sulfur of the eggs. But we didn’t stay away.

She wasn’t Jewish, which might have been a problem for Mr. Dinnerman’s own mother had the Russian import not been so unapologetically attractive. “You will give me beautiful grandchildren,” is what Mr. Dinnerman’s mother said, and it was the closest either of them came to getting her blessing.

But Minka—Minka was decidedly not beautiful. It’s not that she was unattractive; she just wasn’t her mother. Mrs. Dinnerman was what you might call statuesque. She was six-one, velvet-skinned, honey-eyed, and blond. There is always a mother like this—a mother who eclipses not only all the other mothers, but the daughters as well. And the daughter who was hurt worst by this mother was, of course, Minka.

Maybe if Minka had been Mrs. Jeffreys’ daughter or Mrs. Epstein’s, we might have thought she was something special—a cute girl, perhaps, a sweet little piece of something. As it was, we could only see her as not–Mrs. Dinnerman. Minka was plain, round-faced, pale, inexplicably short, and undeniably Jewish. To her credit, she was athletic, which behooved our school but not our hearts. Her mother, on the other hand, was a klutz, a kind of off-kilter gazelle, and this only made us love her more.

D
rew Price was the only one with fast enough hands to ever dare reach across to the fruit bowl and rip grapes from the vine to throw them one by one—when Mrs. Dinnerman wasn’t looking—into various corners of the kitchen. Sometimes she wouldn’t notice them, but when she did, she would bend over and we would sigh with gratitude for that lovely Russian ass—round and high and firm. Again, thankfully, deliciously, nothing like our own mothers. And nothing, for that matter, like our female counterparts.

To be fair, we went to the Dinnermans’ not just for the view, but also for the stories. Of all the mothers, Mrs. Dinnerman was the least tight-mouthed, the most unrestrained. She would talk about anyone, everyone. There were no boundaries. It was as if she didn’t register that we were there, as if we’d caught her in the middle of a monologue that had started before we arrived and would continue once we’d left. Either that, or she didn’t care that we were children. There was no distinction between us and our mothers or our fathers. There was only the fact that we weren’t Russian, weren’t her own, and because of that we didn’t matter. Loyalty didn’t exist for her in our language. Everything was public domain. Whatever the reason, we didn’t care. We liked going and listening—to her stories, to her gossip, to her strange and terrifying way of speaking.

A
t the time it never made sense to us—Trey Stephens’ insistence that he didn’t find Mrs. Dinnerman sexy—but looking back on it, we begin to understand. Women—adult women—would never hold him captive in the same way a girl—teenaged, yes, but a girl all the same—could preoccupy his mind.

We thought he was being tough, coy, all those nights we stayed up late in his basement, sitting with our backs against the wall, our knees splayed in various directions, talking about Minka’s mother.

“Nope, boys, she doesn’t do it for me,” he said.

“Bullshit,” said Chuck Goodhue, his arms crossed over his chest, his hands sunk deep into his armpits. “Minka’s mom does it for everyone.” Funny that it would be Minka Dinnerman, not her mother, who would one day threaten the integrity of Chuck Goodhue’s marriage.

“Seriously,” said Stu Zblowski, whose parents had recently given him a yellow Lab that he’d naturally named Stu. “I’d consider naming my dog after her if she’d show me even one boob.”

“Not for me,” Trey said. “She’s an oldie. That face. Makes me sick to think about looking at that face while I screw.”

“Bullshit,” again Chuck Goodhue.

Trey’s final comeback: “Give me a girl in uniform any day.”

Thirty years later those words, for those of us who remembered them, made us shiver.

A
fter Nora disappeared, Mrs. Dinnerman’s role in our lives changed slightly. We still visited her kitchen, still threw grapes onto her linoleum floors, still admired the perfect roundness of her foreign rear end. But we visited now to hear her version of Nora’s fate. While the other mothers discouraged our fascination, Mrs. Dinnerman sought it out.

“I have a gossip, boyz.” She waited for Minka to take her book bag upstairs; she never had gossips for Minka. “Do you want to hear my gossip?” Before we could answer: “Nora is not deed, boyz. The facts is no, Nora is not deed.”

“Then where is she?” Paul Epstein often carried the conversation. Mrs. Dinnerman appealed to him, sure, but she didn’t make him dizzy the way she made the rest of us. After all, he was already in love with Sissy by that time, already completely preoccupied with another female.

“Feh. And why would I know where she is? No, I do not know where she is, bet I know that when I go missing from my family house at sixteen, I do not go missing as deed. I go missing as alive and—” she pinched her lips together with her fingers, a gesture so sexy that its effect required most of us to cross our legs in a show of attempted decency “—as a wolunteer.”

I
t was during these afternoons with Mrs. Dinnerman—Minka and her friends, sometimes even Sissy, upstairs, safely out of earshot—that we learned about Mrs. Lindell, famously absent from our lives, famously absent and undeniably dead.

“She was
kraseevaya
, you know, beautiful.”

Probably what we wanted to say was, “No, Mrs. Dinnerman, you’re the beauty. We love you.” But probably what we said was nothing. Probably we waited, sitting on her awful, tall stools, positioning and repositioning our feet, crossing and re-crossing our legs, for her to say something else.

“The mothers,
your
mothers, boyz, they were nice to her like they are nice to me.” The sibilance in her speech was mesmerizing, snakelike and sharp. Russian, so very, very Russian. How strange and wonderful to be with a woman who understood her beauty and was not embarrassed by it. How very un-American. “Yes, I see you turning red, Chuck Gootyue. You know of what I am talking about.” She wagged her finger in our directions. “They were nice to her only as of much as
patreeabny
, you know, as much as they must be.”

Drew Price threw a grape on the floor. We listened to it bounce.

“When she is round,” she made the shape of a baby in front of her, “they like her wery well because she no longer has her shape, you know. Because when she is not round,” again the gesture in front of her own belly, “she has a wonderful shape.”

She spotted the grape where it lay against the base of Danny Hatchet’s stool. She picked it up, blew on it, and popped it in her mouth. Then she dusted off her hands and looked at us. “Bet den she die. Baby number two is too much baby for her. Out you go, boyz. Baby Minka and her papa must eat.”