Things I’ll Never Say (7 page)

“She's at work,” Ruthie told me. She dropped her books and coat onto her bed, kicked off her shoes, and wiggled her chartreuse toes. “Let's do beauty makeovers.”

“What?”

“Come on. I'll show you.” She led the way down the hall to another bedroom. The shades here were lowered behind half-closed curtains, and clothes were thrown into furious heaps in every corner. The whole room smelled of sour sheets and tobacco. Ruthie marched to a satin-skirted dressing table with a cracked mirror. She turned on a light that bounced off the glass sides of perfume bottles and gave her round face romantic hollows just below the cheekbones. “Sit there,” she said, pointing to a little stool with a stained pink skirt that matched the one on the table.

“Won't your mother be mad?” Once, when I was in first grade, a friend and I took a hatbox out of my mother's closet. We emptied its contents — dried corsages, cracked photos, and yellowed invitations — all over the floor. When she found us a few minutes later, Mommy had screamed at us the same way she screamed at our cat when it peed on her bed. “You little beasts!” she'd yelled. “Get out! Get out!”

“Nope.” Ruthie pulled the cap off a mascara wand and bent over me. I closed my eyes. “Momma don't care.”

“What if she comes back?”

“She won't.” Ruthie began to hum while she worked, her warm breath a strange comfort against my eyelids. Another one of my mother's rules: no lipstick until high school. But I couldn't remember any rule about mascara. I ignored the flutterings of guilt and focused instead on an image of Courtney in black stockings and a sequined bra.

When she finished, Ruthie stepped from in front of me so I could see myself in the mirror. My lids were swept with violet that shimmered with tiny points of silver. My darkened lashes were so long I could feel them brush against my cheeks when I blinked. My skin, under the mauve blush, was as seamless and perfect as the beautiful faces in magazines.

I sighed, unwilling to say a word, afraid to lose the vision in the glass. Ruthie made up her own face while I continued to stare at myself, besotted. She worked quickly and easily behind me, pursing her glossy lips, arching her brows. “There,” she said at last, allowing herself the slightest of smiles. “I'm done.”

“You look neat, Ruthie,” I told her through the mirror.

“I'm not Ruthie,” she said. “I'm someone famous. Someone who kicks butt and lights up the sky.” She disappeared from the mirror then, walking to a dresser across the room and pulling a black chiffon scarf from the top drawer. Whirling, she let the dark fabric fall like night around her shoulders. She looked at me with new confidence. As if a tipping point had been reached. “Wanna sleep over?”

I was caught off guard. “Tonight?” I took the peach-colored shawl she handed me and tried to fling it around my neck the way she had tossed her scarf.

“Sure,” she said. “We can stay up as late as we want.” She opened a perfume bottle and touched the stopper to her wrists, then walked toward me. “We can telephone a Seven-Eleven at midnight and ask them do they have Dr Pepper in a bottle.” Gently, she passed the stopper behind my left ear. The smell opened me, made me dizzy. “When they tell us yes, we'll say they better let him out, on account of he can't breathe in there.”

Praying that Ruthie wouldn't tell anyone in school, and deciding that I could always say my mother had insisted I accept her invitation, I called home and got permission to spend the night. I had to promise, of course, that I'd do everything Mrs. Kepner told me, and that I'd thank her before I left. There was an audible sigh, a whoosh of pleasure from Ruthie when I finally hung up. I felt, in spite of myself, proud to have made anyone so happy. “Hoo-ray!” she said, pushing hard on the first syllable, sounding like plantations and cotton fields and
Gone with the Wind.

When I said I was hungry, Ruthie took me back downstairs. We bustled around the kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards with decisive flourishes. In the end, all we found were three bruised grapefruit and a can of beef stew. Still, it was liberating not to have to eat at a table, or put two forks to the left of our plates, or talk about “pleasant things.” Instead, we carried our steaming bowls back upstairs and ate on Ruthie's rug.

“Mom lets me do this most every night,” Ruthie told me. She knelt beside me, napkin-less and daring, no longer the shaggy misfit she was at school. “She lets me do just about anything I want, long as I stay in my room or play outside.” Behind her words, I glimpsed another world, a world where mothers didn't smother, where the sweet wind of freedom blew through cracked windows and left everything in wild, suggestive chaos. “She says I handle myself pretty good for a kid.”

After dinner, Ruthie led us back downstairs to watch TV. We stepped over a pair of high heels on the hall rug. They weren't perched neatly upright the way my mother's always were, but lay on their sides like birds shot down in midflight. The living room was still dark, but when we walked in, a moan went up from the couch.

“Hi, Mom,” Ruthie said, turning on a small lamp on an end table. The light was dim, but it was enough to throw Mrs. Kepner into startling relief. She lay stretched across the sofa on her stomach, her stocking feet dangling over one end. She looked less like the free and wild wind than like someone who'd been flattened by it. Her swollen red elbow was bent at a crazy angle, her hand wrapped around a glass on the floor. Beside the glass, an ashtray stuffed with half-smoked, still-lit cigarettes sent ragged smoke signals toward the ceiling.

I glanced at Ruthie but stayed frozen just inside the door. Mrs. Kepner regarded me with moist eyes that seemed lit from the inside. Her hair was pushed back from her face, and even though the room felt chilly, her forehead glistened. Ruthie ignored us both. She walked purposefully into the kitchen and came back with two chairs, placing them together to form a cozy orchestra row in front of the TV. “Come on, why don't you?” She looked at me and patted the seat of one of the chairs. Next she picked up the remote and settled into her own chair, arms folded.

Avoiding the stares from the couch, I walked cautiously into the room and took my place on the other chair. “This is Cynthia, Mom,” Ruthie said, adjusting the volume. “She's in my class at school.”

Mrs. Kepner moaned noncommittally. I didn't turn around, but I could tell from a fat sucking sound that she'd retrieved one of the cigarettes from her ashtray. “This is a great episode,” Ruthie told me, eyes fastened to the screen. “I've seen it three times.”

The whole room had a sour, off smell like the one in the bedroom where we'd done our makeovers.

“Turn the sound down, will you, baby?” Mrs. Kepner's voice was soupy and thick, as if she hadn't spoken all day, had just been lying there on the couch, waiting for us to find her and bring her to life. “What do you want to watch that dumb show for, anyway?” She sat up and heaved herself forward to grab the remote from her daughter's hand. “I could tell you stories better than this junk.” The screen blinked out.

“Mom!” Ruthie had finally been reached; her grown-up veneer melted. She turned around, angry, embarrassed, and whiny all at the same time. “What'd you do that for? We don't want your stories.”

What we wanted didn't seem to be an issue for Ruthie's mother. She cleared her throat theatrically and, clutching the remote to her chest, began: “Once upon a time there was this princess, see.” She studied us both, and now that she was vertical, noticed our makeup. “Is the light in here lousy?” she asked. “Or am I sharing my goddamn living room with a couple of freaking movie stars?”

“Mom, please!” Ruthie rose from her chair, but I stayed where I was, mesmerized. I'd never heard anyone but Courtney use the words Mrs. Kepner did. And I'd never known anyone who made stories up out of thin air.

“This princess, she was all gussied up like you two, so she figured she'd go downtown and kiss a handsome prince.”

“We have an English assignment, in case you forgot.” Ruthie looked at me, one dedicated scholar to another. I was glad to stand quickly, but my acting skills didn't match Ruthie's. I was reduced to stunned silence in the face of this prissy reminder coming from someone who, I knew, never, ever did her homework.

Mrs. Kepner must have known it, too. She barely missed a beat. “But there was this problem, see, this big problem. Every time the princess found a hot prospect and planted one on him, damn if he didn't turn into a frog.” She was no longer looking at us, but stared at the empty TV screen instead. “That happens a lot. You'll see.

“‘Crap doodle,' the princess said, ‘I'm probably using the wrong brand of lipstick. Or maybe I need a new dress.' Poor nitwit was always ready to blame herself, know what I mean?”

No one answered her. Ruthie, a finger across her shiny painted lips, slithered by the sofa and headed for the stairs. I sort of wanted to hear the rest of the story, but I definitely didn't want to be left alone with Mrs. Kepner. So I followed my hostess upstairs, while her mother went right on talking to the empty room. I'd never walked out on an adult before, and the sound of this one, rambling on and on behind us, filled me with guilt and dread in equal measure.

Long after we'd fallen asleep, two firemen tramped into Ruthie's bedroom and woke us up. Apparently, Mrs. Kepner had gotten up from that couch in the middle of the night. She'd tried to make popcorn with a lot more oil and a lot less popcorn than most people use. A neighbor smelled the fire all the way across the street and called 911. Which was fortunate because Mrs. Kepner wouldn't move. Even after the firemen brought Ruthie and me downstairs, she refused to leave the kitchen. She just stood by the stove, the vivid pink arms of a sweater tied around her waist, her mascara streaming. Over and over, she rattled the charred kernels in the frying pan, sobbing into the smoke. “Can't do anything right,” she told the youngest fireman, shaking her head and sniffling. “Can't do any damn thing right.”

“It's okay, Momma.” Maybe it was being woken from a sound sleep. Or perhaps it was seeing her mother in such distress. Whatever the reason, Ruthie's voice had acquired a soft, purring tone. But the tearful woman shrugged her off.

“Get away,” she commanded. “Wouldn't none of this happened in the first place if you didn't insist on having your uppity friends over.” Briefly, she looked at me, and I was filled, not with guilt but with remorse. I wished intensely that I had never accepted Ruthie's invitation. “Trying to make a treat for you and Miss Fancy-pants, is all.” Mrs. Kepner sighed, then turned her baleful stare on the firemen's shiny yellow jackets as the three men packed up to leave.

After the fire, I wasn't allowed to visit Ruthie anymore. My mother had a new strict rule: don't trust your only child to a drunk. But I never forgot the wild laxity of my one night at Ruthie's, and my secret concerts profited from the experience. I pictured Ruthie flipping that black scarf over her shoulders, and my lyrics grew more outrageous, my body loosened up. Best of all, underneath every song there was a hint of sadness, of stale smoke and old dreams. I imagined Courtney Love behind me in the mirror. She'd fold her bare arms, flex her tattoo, and howl,
Tell 'em, Cynthia. You tell 'em, girl!

Still, I wasn't sorry that Ruthie's house was now off-limits. Being her friend would have cost me too much at school. I spent perhaps six hours a week on my secret rock career, but popularity was something I cultivated every waking minute. My entire life, from the 7:45 a.m. bell to the last phone call I was allowed at 8:00 p.m., would have been destroyed if I'd joined Ruthie in the ranks of the untouchables. Fate had stepped in and saved me from having to choose between my permed and perfect clique and this strange, sloppy siren whose mother told stories and burned houses and popcorn.

So I took a grim satisfaction in telling Ruthie each time she asked that I had too much homework. Of course, we both knew it was a lie, a polite one. As polite as the one she told me back. “I guess you're right,” she'd say. “I'm going to start that history paper soon as I get home.”

But if the inside of the Kepner house was off-limits, I was still allowed as far as their porch. That was where I met them on Thursday afternoons, when Lenore and Ruthie went shopping. Since Mrs. Kepner didn't drive, my mother let me walk them to the store to help carry back bags. “People who have,” Mommy said, not without a certain smugness that indicated which side of the equation we were on, “should help those who have not.” After my first trip to the store with our have-not neighbors, I decided it was the least I could do. Because it was on those walks that Ruthie's mother told us more stories.

From these twisted tales, from the way they turned everything upside down or broke into sudden, breathtaking riffs, I picked up again the scent of the wildness I both craved and feared. Mrs. Kepner's version of Snow White, for example, was a strangely reassuring departure from the sweet Disney tale I'd grown up on. According to Ruthie's mother, the Evil Queen's magic mirrors had to be replaced every week: “‘Lord, sweetness,' that new Magic Mirror said, on account of it couldn't keep its big mouth shut, ‘you got a face that'll shatter glass!' Now, there are some folks who, when they ask you a question, want a straight answer. But Snow White's stepmother, as that tell-all mirror found out a split second later, was sure not one of them.”

It wasn't just the queen's fist through her mirrors, though, that riveted me, that made me hungry for backbone and truth. Where Disney's princess succumbed to a poisoned apple, Mrs. Kepner's was lured by the free trial of a curling iron and felled by knockout drops in a brownie; where Disney's story ended with a magic kiss and happily ever after, Lenore Kepner's finished with morning breath: “If you was to go and fall asleep for years and years, would you want someone's tongue down your throat soon as you opened your eyes? 'Sides, when you snooze, you lose; you miss your first date and prom night and necking in the backseat. So once His Princeship woke her up, Snow White was gone like a shot. She had a whole lot of living to do, you know?”