Haunted Houses (3 page)

Grace missed her room at home. Small as it was, it was hers and she grew to love it as if it were human. After school she’d kiss its floor, with passion, pursing her lips, opening her mouth slightly, the way movie stars did. In this room she invoked her fantasies, directing herself to choose the best one, going over it and over it, it always giving her pleasure. She directed her friend Celia too. They had a special game and Grace was tyrannical about being the girl, letting Celia be her only once in a while. Celia the man would come upon Grace the girl, unaware, innocent and grab her from behind. The girl would pretend to fight and then abandon herself to the man. They enacted this scene over and over again, Celia fighting Grace more and more about getting the chance to be the girl. They lived in the same apartment building, with older brothers the same age, and mothers who didn’t like each other. Ruth thought Celia’s mother had too many airs. “Like mother, like daughter,” Grace’s mother intoned.

For one of Ruth’s birthdays Grace bought her a cheap pin, a cluster of fake seed pearls around a blue enamel center, which she’d found, all by herself, at a street fair several blocks from home. Returning, she had to pass the gypsies on the corner. They had appeared on the block suddenly, different and strange, and when they beckoned to Grace, waving their arms covered in shiny red and blue material, she hesitated, stuck to her spot on the sidewalk. They waved and smiled, their white teeth bright against their dark skin. Grace stared and ran, not knowing why they wanted her, or what they would do with her. Ruth was given her present. She said it was ugly and that she’d never wear it. She opened the top drawer of her mahogany dresser, put the pin with other junk jewelry and shut the drawer with finality. As she shut it she told Grace that it was important to tell the truth. The gypsies wore much uglier jewelry. Weeks later Grace dreamt that her mother was killed by a runaway train. Ruth had been tied to the tracks and no one could save her. That made sense because Ruth always refused help. If you do things by yourself, you won’t owe anyone anything, she’d tell Grace. Grace woke screaming and asked to sleep with her mother, who told her she was being silly. And added, You’re not a baby anymore.

There was something calm about Celia, as if she had a big secret that she wouldn’t tell anyone, most of all Grace. Grace always wanted to find out what she knew. When Celia refused to play their special game anymore, saying they were too old—they were now ten—they set up a make-believe office, reviving Celia’s father’s dead business files and ledgers. Their business was an imaginary army of women. The names of their female soldiers were alphabetized and placed on cards in a small metal box. From Celia’s room they sent their soldiers on maneuvers and they punished and rewarded them as they had done their dolls. But added to their older responsibilities—discipline and feeding—was administration, end they took to it as if called to it. Grace was stricter, more punitive than Celia, who wanted to give the girls longer leaves and more dances. Grace no longer danced on her bed when listening to the radio, and, wearing real baby clothes that Ruth bought because they were more economical than doll’s clothes, Tiny Tears and Kitty sat on a shelf in the farthest part of Grace’s closet, as if that shelf were her childhood.

Childhood ends in all different ways. One way was by understanding her parent’s fights, which she watched like a spectator at a tennis game. “If you don’t like the way we live,” her father yelled, “get a job.” “I’ve had your children and you’re going to support me,” her mother yelled. He slapped her and she slapped him. Or it ends when the facts of life, as they were called, are flaunted in your mirror, at a stage called puberty, a dumb word Grace thought. Or childhood ends on the playground, where she once played potsy and now was being shown pornography, a word she knew without knowing how but didn’t tell Little Louie. He shuffled the pastel-pink playing cards much too fast, so that the naked bodies blurred as if they too were shocked. Little Louie had dark circles under his eyes Grace attributed, as she did his diminutive size, to early coffee drinking. He was a naughty, ugly boy, in love with Grace, who didn’t know it. They got reported to the principal—Grace’s first brush with the law—and he threatened to call in their parents. Louie acted as if he didn’t care, but Grace cried and begged the principal not to. The principal let the kids off as though he were commuting a death sentence to life. Grace could never again face the principal, and Louie could never again face Grace, and she will have no memory of his presence on that playground or in her life ever again after that time. She was convinced now that she was a sinner, because she had looked at dirty pictures. When she had asked her mother, Do you, we, believe in sin? Ruth had said yes, because there is evil in the world. Real evil, Grace asked, like the devil? Ruth looked at her daughter seriously. She didn’t believe in talking down to children. There may not, she said, be an actual devil, but there is a lot of evil in the world, a lot of sin, and sometimes I wonder. It’s best not to trust people too much. Grace couldn’t trust Louie; he was a little devil, getting her into trouble, making her sin. Grace didn’t tell anyone what she’d seen, learning to distinguish between good and bad knowledge.

Now she too had a secret, a secret she took to camp with her, where she was sent away for three weeks. An unwilling camper—Ruth told her it was time to grow up—Grace lived in a bunk with seven other girls her age, but her friend was Sandy, an older girl of fifteen who had a broken nose and biceps. All the girls thought Sandy was strange, but she was devoted to Grace, doing favors for her, taking pictures of her in front of the bunk. And late at night, giving her back rubs, and Grace knew her power, another secret. She played the special game when things were innocent, because one was unaware, or thought to be unaware. Sandy went home unacknowledged. Years later Grace wondered what had happened to all those pictures of her looking so cute, and what had happened to Sandy.

That summer her breasts grew and Grace mailed away for “Sally, Mary and Kate Wondered,” a twelve-page pamphlet with diagrams and line drawings of the girls in the title. When it finally happened, Ruth announced it at dinner. Richard looked like he was about to laugh and her father cleared his throat and said, Now you’re a woman. Grace stared at him, then continued making drawings on a paper napkin, remembering that two years before she thought she might be an adult. Out shoe-shopping, the salesman had measured her feet and told her mother Grace was now a size five. “We’re going,” Ruth stated, as if insulted by the salesman, who had always measured Grace’s feet. She pulled Grace after her, leaving him with a shoe in his hand. “That’s an adult size,” Ruth whispered to Grace, marching her toward that other world, Ruth’s favorite shoe store, and Grace felt her childhood had reached another ridiculous end. Now, at the table two years later, her father pronounced her a woman. Was there such a difference, she wondered as she colored in, with a Crayola, the tiny patterns on the paper napkin. Richard was horrible, she thought, looking at his familiar face, but one of his friends was so cute, Grace died whenever he came to the apartment. She hoped he wouldn’t say anything to him about her being a woman.

All the girls stopped speaking to Grace. It was her turn. The last year before high school, the girls ignored her for months and months, way beyond the normal time for exclusion. It did something to Grace, walking to school alone, being ignored in the halls, or whispered about behind her back. “You must have done something wrong,” Ruth said, perceiving her daughter’s imperfections as personal insults. Even her brother assumed it was her fault, but he took her to a movie now and then, meting out the angry sympathy a seventeen-year-old boy offers a younger sister. She made friends with a nice, unpopular girl called Marlene, who was striking in her indifference to her unpopularity. This distinguished her in Grace’s eyes, and while Grace couldn’t understand how she could stand it, she admired her for it. The boys kept talking to her and asking her to parties she couldn’t attend because the girls would be there. Grace was set strangely upon her own devices.

During the trouble, as her family called it, as if Grace were pregnant out of wedlock rather than out of sympathy with her friends, she tried to see herself as enduring a trial by fire from which she had to emerge stronger. She read more than she ever had and wrote down sentences that applied to victims like herself, to read over and over when the phone rang and she knew if she picked it up someone would just hang up. Her dog Lady kept her company. Ruth had gotten Grace the dog three years before, for her birthday, mother and daughter still linked by their love of animals, although Ruth got rid of them when they got in the way or were too much trouble.

Lady was pregnant when they rescued her from the ASPCA, and Ruth said that’s why she was abandoned. Terrible people do things like that to defenseless animal, but they’ll be punished. Every time Grace hurt herself Ruth said that God was punishing her. When she was older she asked Ruth if she believed in God. Ruth told her she was an agnostic, someone who doesn’t know, was the way she put it. She was washing dishes. Then why do you say that God is punishing me, if you’re not sure? Ruth put out her cigarette, which was wet with a rosy stain where she sucked it. If I don’t believe in God it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t or don’t have to. Ruth looked out the window over the sink. I’m an agnostic because an agnostic is a realist. You will be too. Grace considered this a compliment, since they fought most of the time, even during the trouble. She repeated the comment to Celia, who had continued to speak to her, but not at school, where the trouble might at any time happen to her. The two friends didn’t discuss the terms of Celia’s neutrality; it just existed.

Just as suddenly as the trouble had begun it stopped, and Grace was allowed back into the fold. But this was never, never going to happen to her again. Never. For she had determined that when it was over—the word over had magical properties—when it was over, she would have emerged a new person, a girl much too irresistible and tough for that to happen to ever again.

The house was never quiet. Ruth and Grace fought about everything. Grace took her dinner in front of the TV or in her room. She hated the way her mother chewed, she hated the sound. Ruth called her names and dumped her dresser drawers, and Grace fought back by ignoring her, or giving her dirty looks. You’re bad, you and your stupid friends, her mother would yell. Grace had been told by her algebra teacher that when she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad she was better. Now that Grace was a freshman in high school, or a fresh girl, as Ruth put it, when she got to school, home didn’t exist.

She wanted to be the most popular girl in her class. With the boys or with the girls, Celia asked tartly. Both, Grace said. Are you going to let them feel you up? Maybe, Grace answered, if I feel like it.

Seeing herself as leading a double life, not unlike Philbrick in
I Led Three Lives
, she kept to herself at home, smiling very little, staying in her now too small and messy room. She kept the door shut. It didn’t have a lock. Grace could hear her mother outside, moving around, doing things. She talked to her dog, and waited for phone calls, or made some. You talk on the phone too much, Ruth would say angrily. And what happened to that nice girl, Marlene? It’s none of your business, Grace would say, looking for food in the refrigerator, finding only raisins. You never buy anything good to eat, she flung at her mother, returning to her room, closing the door hard behind her. Ruth was gaining weight and wearing housedresses most of the time. Grace followed her diet, and although she was thin, she thought she looked fat.

Your room’s a mess, Ruth yelled, you can’t leave it like that. Leave me alone, Grace yelled back, slamming the front door, going to meet Celia at the diner. As she walked she pulled herself together, into her other self, the popular girl she was when she wasn’t at home. Celia surprised Grace because other people simply liked her while Grace continued to feel two ways about her all the time. But she was already there, in the diner, waiting, as she had always been in Grace’s life, just there. Grace ordered a bran muffin. Bran muffins were delicate food, the right thing to eat, and not fattening. Celia and she watched who came in and who walked out and drank a lot of coffee, Little Louie’s cautionary dark circles and stature absent even from memory. Grace drank carefully and without sound. My mother tried to hit me again but I held her hand, she reported sarcastically to Celia. Grace’s face hardened. I hate her guts. Just then a cute boy walked in and Celia didn’t have to reply, while Grace’s face recomposed itself into a prettier picture. Celia didn’t know what to say anyway.

Grace watched Celia’s eyes widen and freeze, then set; she enjoyed shocking people, or scaring them. Her drive for popularity was hindered by a bluntness that bordered on meanness. Celia would tell her that some of the girls didn’t understand that she was just being honest. Girls are so critical, Grace told Celia, meaningfully. She envied Celia’s ease with friends, her girlfriends, and said, I think I like boys better, and watched Celia’s eyelids open and close like a venetian blind. Envy made Grace feel weak and sinful, and she didn’t like not feeling strong. She prided herself on being reckless.

When Grace got called down to the principal’s office to discuss her grades and her attitude, he told her she was sullen and uncooperative. My aptitude is much higher than my performance, she repeated in the coffee shop, to which one of the guys, a senior, responded, Did you ask him about his performance? Her cool face reddened as she drank in their attention with her coffee; later, the senior asked her out. Why not, she answered, as if she were thinking it over, weighing his performance neutrally. “Did you let him kiss you?” Ruth asked. “Sure,” Grace answered. “Where?” her mother asked. “Where do you think?” and Grace slammed out of the house. A gunshot of fear traveled up her mother’s body from her toes to the top of her head where it settled as wounded anger.