Joyland (8 page)

“I guess so,” she said as she chewed on her lip — something she knew, even as she did it, had been picked up from Chris. “Can I have five bucks?” she asked. “Just in case?”

Her mom picked up the white leather purse and opened the car door.

“I’ll walk you. I want to ask Kathy a couple questions.”

Tammy pulled each leg off the sweat-sticky seat individually, using her hands, as if to emphasize the family’s poverty to her mother, the way she made Tammy look in front of others. Everyone else had upholstery. Her mom was the only one who still insisted on giving the money directly to the chaperoning parent. All of her friends got to hold their own. Tammy had an aqua-green velcro wallet with a white grid pattern across it, but what good did it do? With the exception of last year’s class photo of Samantha, and a couple of Scratch ’n’ Sniff stickers, the wallet was always empty.

She stood behind her mother as Mrs. Lane knocked on the frame of the screen door. It was Joyce, Samantha’s seventeen-year-old sister, who came and stood on the other side of the screen. Through the black mesh, her perfect face was cut with lines. A dark half-circle rose above her left lid, but not her right. Not a bruise, but Maybelline.

“I was just doing my face,” she said. She reached out and unlocked the screen door. “They’re in the backyard,” she said to Tammy’s mom, but she opened the door anyway. Her arms grew out of her waist, a glut of baby blue material, silver snaps glinting like eyes up and down her shoulders.

“We’ll go around then,” Mrs. Lane said, nodding emphatically — something she always did when she talked to strangers or mere acquaintances. Even for those four words, her voice had risen half an octave.

A wavering sheet of heat vapours hung in the air above the grill. Through it, the lawn chairs seemed to fold up on themselves and the sky became a mushroom cloud. Tammy’s dad always wound up half cursing, lighting and relighting matches, saying, “God —” and “Holy —” always biting his breath back, cutting himself off before he got to the second syllables. Mr. Riley (“Warren,” he insisted) said the trick was the lighter fluid — lots of it — enough to fry a pig in the pen. Samantha crossed her eyes. Tammy saw Warren notice and pretend not to. He blinked and went on without another glance at Sam.

“They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” Warren began. “But with your mother —” He pointed the pronged fork at Samantha before pushing it into the steak and flipping it onto the grill “— it was the other way around.”

They had always played darts together, Sturgeses and Rileys, but the gang had broken up a year before when Warren’s marriage did. Sam’s dad was on his way out too, in an unrelated toss of events, coming and going, never staying at the house more than a night in his six-month attempt to move out. By now, he was way off the board: a scud.

Sam had said she was glad, but Tammy knew she cried a lot more now, even though the fighting was done. In a moment, with a word, Samantha’s face would constrict and turn colour. Of course, Sam never cried over her parents; it was always something else.

Yet when the hollering had been at its height, Sam had never cried. Tammy had stared anxiously at the hinges of the tri-sectional door between the Sturges’s living and dining rooms, as if she could peer through the cracks, see whether Mr. and Mrs. Sturges were twenty paces from each other, like cowboys in a showdown. Were their elbows bent and ready, fingers twitching at their hips, itching to grab, if not their pistols, the nearest blunt objects or breakables for throwing? But all Tammy had seen was the yellow light, obscured by the pattern in the frosted plastic panes.

“Never mind them,” Samantha had always said, leaning forward to turn up the volume on the gigantic television set. Even when it sounded like Mr. and Mrs. Sturges were about to fall through the doors, her eyes never wavered from the blue flicker of images. The Saturday Shocker.
Twilight Zone
reruns. A magic stopwatch, dropped; a man trapped forever in a timeless world.

Warren was Mrs. Sturges’s white knight. He looked about as heroic as a Playskool figure, cylindrical and shapeless.

The static sound of steel frames on concrete announced their presence before they appeared in the backyard. Dusk had arrived, along with Mrs. Sturges’s relatives, friends, town neighbours, all of them dragging nylon lawn chairs across the driveway.

With them was Rodney, the now-fourteen so-called
gorgeous
cousin. Upon introduction, he was dismissive, a curt nod and a cooler-than-thou dodge away. His coolness soon wore off, and he became instantly more interesting. He glided back and forth across the grass, pelting his younger brother with a squirt gun. They yelped and hooted, and every once in a while Rodney would look over at the girls like he was waiting for them to watch. Rodney did an army roll through the grass, staining his white jeans, but bringing up the transparent orange plastic, catching his brother in the back with the stream. A dotted, dark curlicue of wet bloomed from the pale blue cotton.

“They got here pretty late,” Samantha whispered, “I don’t think we’ll get a chance to go swimming.”

Tammy felt an unrivalled sense of relief.

Shelly was a hand-me-down friend, the daughter of one of Mrs. Sturges’s neighbours, the Peggs. They lived around the corner from Sam in Forest Hill, and had everything: trampoline, swimming pool, CollecoVision. Everything but brains. Everything about Shelly Pegg was stupid. Even her name was stupid. Shelly looked like a lollipop. A very large head perched atop her scrawny body. She had a nose like a mushroom and a heavy chin which was engaged in a constant struggle to pull down her flat, broad cheeks. She always looked as if someone had given her a piece of bad news.

Smelly Shelly’s shoelaces were lined with friendship pins, though in truth, she had made nearly all of them herself. Small red beads, opaque, beside transparent yellows. Miniature copper pins and large silver ones. If she jumped too hard while skipping double dutch, pins would pop open and big orange beads would scatter in all directions. But she couldn’t skip double dutch anyway. She could hardly do Blue Bells Cockleshells, Eevy Ivy Over. “Poor Smelly Shelly,” Sam would say, and turn the rope even harder, so that it whipped against the side of Shelly’s head. Tammy had to admit that even she couldn’t jump to that speed.

Being dumb was a fate worse than death. Tammy saw the assignment of fortune as an enormous fist, the duke of life held out, an offering. Sometimes there would be a Bazooka Joe or Swedish Berry in one hand but not the other. Sometimes a person would pick right and get to blow bubbles. Other times, she got nothing. Shelly got the kind of nothing that never afforded any other choices. No one was ever going to offer Shelly a free ride. No one was going to say, “Pick a hand.” No fifty-fifty chance. Sam played that joke all the time. Holding out her fists, smiling and waggling her eyebrows. Neither hand ever had anything in it. Tammy fell for it once or twice when she was about nine. Shelly fell for it every time. Trust was a terrible thing. “Poor Smelly Shelly,” Sam would say again, shaking her head.

“I’ve got some more friendship pins,” Shelly said now, dragging her lawn chair to where Tammy and Sam were sitting cross-legged in the grass. Sam leaned closer to admire them, pointing to what was obviously the centrepiece of Shelly’s shoelace — a gigantic silver pin with alternating beads in hot pink and baby blue.

“You can have it if you want it,” Shelly said eagerly.

“Okay,” Sam said, grinning. She gingerly removed the pin and clipped it to her own shoelace.

The last time Shelly had given the girls friendship pins,
Sam had worn them happily for an afternoon. Then at school
on Monday, she’d taken hers off, watched the beads bounce across the tiles, and used the pin to torture the boy who sat
in front of her. “Friendship pins are dumb,” she’d said, even though everyone in the class was wearing them. Sam and Tammy hadn’t — wouldn’t. They
were
dumb, if only because Sam had said so. She’d held the pin, hovering it at the back of the boy’s neck, about a centimetre from the skin, waiting to see if he would lean back. Technically, her hands were still on her desk, she could claim. He was invading her space. His name was Martin Stevens. Samantha said he was dumb, that all people with last names for first names and first names for last names were dumb. But that if she wanted to, she could go out with him,
just like that.

At recess, he and the other boys would offer to play Kissing Tag with the girls, then all the boys would concentrate on Sam, chasing her around until they headed her off and got hold of her. She would dig her fingernails into their arms and always get away. She was so cool like that, Tammy thought. The boys would all rub their wrists and forearms, swearing “Bitch!” But back in class the small cresent-moon marks were an honour — akin to the hickies older kids sported around town. “Look what Samantha Sturges did to me,” boys would hiss across the aisles, trying to top each other with their pain. “Mine go deeper.”

The Pegg children went to a private Christian school, where they didn’t play Kissing Tag. Shelly said the boys thought it was gross.

“Maybe the boys just think you’re gross,” Sam said. Tammy flinched at the meanness that time. No one had ever tried to catch and kiss her either.

This evening, Shelly was wearing a Garfield sweatshirt and carrying a Cabbage Patch Doll — two items Tammy noted immediately as “issues” they would need to discuss with Shelly before the night was over if they were ever going to help her “improve” herself. Shelly was dumb, dumb, dumb. To prove it, Sam and Tammy gave each other knowing glances whenever Rodney raced by.

“What, do you guys like him or something?” Shelly asked.

“Or something,” Tammy said.

“We’re psychically communicating,” Sam said. “If you can’t say anything in our language, don’t say anything at all. You’ll break our concentration.”

“Rodney!” Shelly hollered across the yard.

“Shut up!”

“These girls like you!” Rodney didn’t turn. A stream of water flew from his gun and zipped across the dead air. Shelly cupped her hands to her mouth. “These girls — Owwww!”

Sam caught Shelly by the ponytail. The bobble on top tilted with the strain, and then snapped. Shelly clutched at loose strands and eight or nine falling bobby pins. Shelly’s hair wasn’t really long enough to wear in a ponytail anyway. Or so Tammy told her, as consolation.

Mrs. Sturges lay a blanket across the seven or eight feet of sand Warren referred to as the Beach. The sand was cold, almost comforting, as Tammy dug her feet in, let the granules spill between her toes. A small grey spider inched its way toward her. She quickly pulled her toes up onto the blanket. All down the Beach, neighbours from the other houses were sitting together in rows, getting ready to wait. Another hour until the fireworks would start, a long ways away, down the river, but still, they claimed, better from here, with the reflection falling into the water. A couple of girls younger than Tammy and Sam were playing hand-clapping games, with a more complex diagonal crossover than Tammy remembered from the last time she’d played. They began singing faster and louder. Their voices wobbled out over the water and bounced back as if they were singing into tin cans . . .

Miss Molly had a steamboat. Her steamboat had a bell.

When Molly went to heaven, her steamboat went to hell — o

operator, please give me number nine,

and if you disconnect me, I’ll kick you in the be —

hind the yellow curtain, there was a piece of glass.

When Molly sat upon it, she hurt her little ass — k

me no more questions, I’ll tell you no more lies.

The boys are in the bathroom, pulling down their — flies

are in the garden. The bees are in the park.

The boys and girls are kissing in the d–a–r–k dark.

Somebody shushed them — and people began to settle in more closely, shoulder-to-shoulder, a strange sense of family among strangers as hems of blankets touched. Warren brought out some Mason jars with holes punched in the lids.

Across the yard, Shelly squealed, screwed the jar lid on, and ran over to show her mom and little sisters. Shelly was actually good at something. The first catch. Not a firefly but something rarer: a sleepy white tuft of caterpillar curled in a green leaf.

Inside Sam’s and Tammy’s jars, the fireflies lit up sporadically, and only from their back ends. Tammy studied her insect as it crawled over the glass on eyelash-thin legs. She thought of the story Chris had told her that afternoon. Even in the dark, her head grew hot, as if from the sun.

After the frog race, Chris’s fellow entrants had lined up along the dock. Frogs had been returned to the massive pickle jars that had been used to transport them — seven jars in a row stood in direct sun. The boys stretched out on their bellies, watching. A roll of silver duct tape braceleted David White’s wrist, the air holes in the lids Xed over. From a distance, Chris too had watched as the frogs jumped up against the glass more and more slowly until eventually they fell backward and died. Laughing, the boys pushed the jars one by one into the water. When they got up, they loped away silently — shoulders hunched, like dogs who’ve been caught pissing on the floor, tails between their legs. Except, Chris had said, no one had caught them. He didn’t even think they knew he’d seen. Where he’d stood on the bridge, Chris had watched the jars float by beneath him. Inside them — bloated and brown — rubbery carcasses he wished he could forget.