I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel (11 page)

1985

AS SEPTEMBER DRAGGED ON,
Elizabeth began to petition Walter to let her attend school. He said he would take her request under advisement. That was his preferred term for anything she sought but obviously could not have—more clothes, dinners in restaurants, a call home, a friend. “I'll take that under advisement,” he would say, and nothing would change.

“I won't misbehave,” she said, knowing how doomed her request was, yet incapable of not trying. “I just want to go to school, study. Education matters to me. And you always say you think it's important.”

“That's good,” he said. “But I don't see it working out. We'd have to settle down somewhere.”

“I'd like that,” she said, amending quickly, “I think you would like that.”

“Not in the cards, not right now. We've got to keep moving.”

“It's illegal,” she said, “not to attend school if you're under sixteen. So if someone sees you with me, they might stop, ask questions. It didn't matter, at first, when it was summer. But now it's fall.”

“Not quite, not by the calendar.”

But the weather was fall-like. Autumn had once been her favorite time of the year, the days full of promise, the nights cool and crisp. She always felt anything could happen in autumn. She liked the very word:
autumn
. She would head back to school with her new clothes—Vonnie was so hard on what she wore that Elizabeth had seldom been forced to endure hand-me-downs—her plastic pencil pouch full of reinforcements, her binder unsullied. She would be neater this year, better prepared. She would work for As instead of settling for Bs. Those dreams were usually worn down by Thanksgiving, but September and October were golden days.

“There are all sorts of reasons a fifteen-year-old girl might not be in school,” he said. “I can't imagine anyone noticing. No one ever has.”

He was right. People didn't seem to see them,
her
. Their eyes swept over her, by her, around her, but never made contact with her gaze, even as she silently screamed for them to see her, take note of her. Was it because he had cut her hair short and dyed it brown, meticulously keeping up with the roots, if not the cut. (“Nice'n Easy,” Walter had scoffed. “Maybe for some faggot beautician.”)

Sometimes, though, she saw women noticing Walter with tentative approval. But it was very brief. A waitress, a store clerk, would rake her eyes up and down him, draw him into conversation. Then, just as quickly, they would pull back, retreat. Elizabeth, who had read reams about the mistakes girls make with
boys, wondered what kind of mistakes boys made. Walter was too…eager. No, that wasn't the right word. He was polite, interested. He tried to draw them out. But women, grown-up women, moved away from him as if he smelled.

Elizabeth's request to go to school put a strange bug in Walter's ear, and he decided that they would spend their evenings at various libraries, reading. He insisted on approving her choices, sometimes making her put back a novel and read a nonfiction book, although he never seemed to notice that the texts on history, science, and mathematics were much too simple for her. Walter usually read history or magazines about cars, but one day—Fredericksburg, Virginia, Elizabeth believed, although the places kept getting jumbled in her head—he found a pale green book called
When the Beast Tames the Beauty: What Women Really Want
and he began reading it with great interest.

Walter, it turned out, was not a particularly fast reader, and although they stayed in Fredericksburg for several days—he had found work with a private moving company, whose owner didn't mind if Walter's “little sister” tagged along—he managed to read only the first third of the book in the hours he had available.

But when they moved on at week's end, Walter was dismayed to find that the next library didn't have the book. And the library in the next town over had it on the noncirculating shelf, which required library patrons to sign for the book at the front desk, because it was a best seller. He made Elizabeth ask for it.

Say it's for your mother,
Walter said, and she did, only to find herself almost choking with tears. Her mother would never read such a book. Her mother would laugh at such a book.

The librarian didn't seem to notice how emotional Elizabeth was. She gave her the book, saying only: “We've got a waiting list for the circulating copies. More than fifty names.”

Walter stole that copy of the book, an action he later justified at length to Elizabeth. “Taxpayers pay for those books,” he
said. “And I'm a taxpayer, and I hardly ever use the library, so why shouldn't I take just this one book?”

“But you're not paying taxes now,” Elizabeth said. “Everyone you do jobs for pays you in cash. And you never paid tax in Virginia.”

“Sales tax,” Walter said. “Gasoline tax. I pay my share, and I'm not getting any services back. I'm not like that lady who drives her Cadillac to pick up her food stamps.”

“That's a myth,” said Elizabeth, who remembered her father discussing the matter heatedly at the dinner table, just last year. Had it really been only a year ago? Now 1984 seemed impossibly distant. Her parents had been Mondale supporters, of course, and Elizabeth had gone to a rally in hopes of catching a glimpse of Geraldine Ferraro. Later, at school, some of the cooler boys had ridiculed her, and she had backpedaled, saying she didn't like the Democrats, that her parents were for Mondale, but she wasn't. She felt guilty for that now, and for all the dozens of small betrayals against them, the endless denial of their existence. True, her mom didn't dress like the other moms and she wore her hair too long, loose, and unstyled. She hadn't understood when Elizabeth wanted a bubble skirt. She never understood why Elizabeth wanted anything. She said she did; she was a psychiatrist, after all. But Elizabeth could see that her mother was puzzled by her, that she didn't understand why, in a family of cheerfully loud, opinionated nonconformists, Elizabeth was determined to be like everyone else, never standing out from the crowd.

She had thought it was safer to be that way.

Walter read aloud from the stolen book to Elizabeth at night. He appeared to think it was wonderful, wise, and profound, and some of it was interesting to Elizabeth. The book counseled women to return to a more “natural” relationship with men, to celebrate their “inherent softness” while accepting that men were rough, a little wild. Meanwhile, women should realize that the
best men were those who would care for them—not financially, but emotionally. They should not judge men by external things, such as clothes and looks, but learn to find men who were kind and supportive.

“This is the problem,” Walter said. “I do these very exact things and it doesn't help at all. Not at all.”

Elizabeth was thinking about what it meant to be “natural.” Wouldn't that mean not shaving your legs, not blow-drying your hair? Her mother might wear her hair long and loose, but she still shaved her legs. Elizabeth had not been able to shave her legs since the day that Walter took her, and they were now covered with soft fuzz. She wouldn't want anyone to see it, but she liked the feel of it. At night, alone in her bed or sleeping bag, she stroked her legs, felt under her arms. Perhaps she was transforming into something new and formidable, an animal who could fight Walter or run away from him, swift and fleet.

Only she could never get away. Never.

Walter began to prefer his book to the stories that Elizabeth told and sometimes asked her to read from it as he drove. His favorite chapter was about a cold, driven businesswoman who thought she wanted someone exactly like herself.

“‘Maureen, twenty-nine, appears to have it all,'” Elizabeth read. “‘A willowy brunette, she works for a large department-store chain in Texas, part of the team that oversees its expansion plans. By day, she wears tailored suits, her sleek brown hair pulled back in a chignon—'”

“What is that?” Walter asked. “A shin-yon?”

“Like a bun, but fancier,” Elizabeth said. She pushed back her own short curls, which could no longer be arranged into anything. “You spell it
c-h-i-g-n-o-n
.” She knew that later, when Walter reread this section—and he always reread the sections she had covered during the day—he might challenge her, ask her why she had given him the incorrect word.

“Okay. Go on.”

She had lost her place in the text, needed a moment to locate it. “‘But at night, she lets it fall loose to her shoulders, as she prowls the clubs and nightspots of Dallas, looking for a man. She thinks she knows exactly what she wants—a professional, at her level or above—and she can tick her “no-nos” off on her fingers. “No mama's boys, still living at home.”'”

“Living at home doesn't make you a mama's boy,” Walter put in.

“‘“No mama's boys, still living at home. No fatties. Bald is okay, if he's really cute and fit. In short—no losers.” Yet Maureen, for all her calculation and precise ideas about what she wants, never seems to find the right man. Oh, she finds professional men with good salaries and chiseled physiques, but they always disappoint her because Maureen has broken faith with her own femininity. She is trying to be a huntress. She has violated the natural order of things and will never find the right man until she learns to sit back, relax, and wait for him to find her.'”

Elizabeth pondered this. Her hero, Madonna, wore a belt that said
BOY TOY
, but it was clear that she was the one who toyed with the boys, who used them and moved on. Elizabeth had seen the movie
Desperately Seeking Susan
four times since it appeared last winter and yet never felt thoroughly satisfied by the ending. There was Rosanna Arquette, cute enough—cute enough that her rock star boyfriend had once even written a song about her—but it seemed strange that she was paired up with the really handsome guy, while Madonna was with the less desirable one, the one with the spiky hair. And, at the very beginning of the movie, Madonna had been in bed with someone else, so it wasn't true-true love for her and the spiky hair guy, no matter how passionately they kissed. At the movie's end, they seemed more companionable than lovestruck, chomping popcorn and laughing. Just last month, Madonna had gotten married to Sean Penn as helicopters
circled. She was thinner now, not that she had ever been plump, her hair short and sleek. Elizabeth remembered reading about the couple's decision to wed, how she had proposed to him because she knew it was what he wanted. She wondered what it would be like to know that a man wanted to marry you, to have the confidence to ask first. The author of this book clearly would not approve of Madonna.

“I wonder,” Walter said, “if Maureen ever found anyone?”

Elizabeth looked up, startled. “I don't think she's a real person.”

“Of course she is. It's nonfiction. Says so right on the spine.” He pointed to the library label. Elizabeth wondered if they should scrape that off, if they would get in trouble if someone glimpsed it, so obviously far from home. But maybe if someone reported them for the stolen library book, the police would finally find her.

“I mean, she's real, but they probably changed her name and some details.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don't know why, I only know that they do. My mom explained it to me once. She has a friend who works for one of the women's magazines and they create these—I can't remember the word. They find real stories, only the people are kind of fake.”

“Oh, no. Maureen is real,” Walter said. “Real as Mr. Steinbeck and Charley and the people they met.”

Elizabeth felt a small flush of panic. What would happen if Walter found out that she had been making up adventures for John Steinbeck and his poodle? What if Walter figured out
Travels with Charley
was in the library, decided to read it? He didn't like deception of any kind. Yet he was allowing himself to be deceived by this book. It's true, Elizabeth hadn't always understood the license that such writers employed, she had once read
Seventeen
and
Mademoiselle
and believed that every word was gospel. But she was glad when her mother explained to her that the stories were not quite true, that the writers shaped real people's stories and
matched them to these glamorous, made-up people because that's what people wanted to read about. Walter, however, would not be pleased by this information.

“I'd like to meet this Maureen,” Walter said. “I bet she's still single. Of course, she's older than me, and that's probably one of her rules, too. Women are funny that way. They ought to be grateful that a younger man finds them attractive. One day they will, but then it will be too late and no one will want them. I never understood that, in high school, how the freshman girls all wanted to go out with juniors and seniors, instead of freshmen.”

Elizabeth, who was missing her sophomore year of high school, thought about the boys her age. They were so small, most of them. Not just short, but small. Even Elizabeth, who was not particularly tall or filled out, felt huge among them.

“I could show that Maureen a good time,” Walter said. “She'd be begging for it.”

If the book hadn't been open on her lap, Elizabeth might have brought her knees to her chest, hugged herself. Walter had never touched her. Well, never touched her in that way. Sometimes, he tugged the neck of her jacket, if he thought she was walking too fast, or yanked her arm to change direction. She had lain in bed, those first nights, wrists and ankles tied, expecting he would force himself on her. He had raped the other girl, the one he buried. He must have. He never said as much, but she was sure of that. She thought about that girl often, although all she knew of her was her first name. Maude. Such an old-fashioned name. The kids at school had probably teased her, called her—Maude the Odd. Unless she was really, really, really pretty and popular. Pretty girls could survive anything. But a pretty, popular girl would never have gotten into Walter's truck. Elizabeth wouldn't have, given the choice, and she wasn't that pretty or popular. Still, she knew better than to get in some strange man's truck.