Little Red Lies (6 page)

Loudness must be a family characteristic because Vera bellows back, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Anyway, it’s your turn to take their coats upstairs.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“We can take them up,” I say, my voice a mere whisper by comparison.

“You can help me,” Hazel hollers as she and Vera practically rip the coats off our backs. “I need a chance to talk to you, anyway.”

Oh, oh. Why?
Immediately, my arms start to itch with little pinpricks of nervous fear. Will this be about
Rachel, the hard-hearted woman
? Is Hazel just getting around to blasting me for sounding so mean to her when she bungled her lines?

We dump the coats on a bed covered in coats and sit down on top of them. I scratch; Hazel sighs.

“I need you to help me,” she says.

“Me?”

“I wonder if you could come over sometimes after school and help me rehearse my lines? I can’t seem to get them into my head.”

“I’m sure it just takes practice,” I say, trying to sound helpful. Privately I’m thinking she’d probably have trouble getting the words to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into her head.

“I do try to practice on my own, but it’s not working. I’m afraid everyone thinks I’m too stupid to play the lead.”

She trains those huge hopeful eyes fully on my guilty ones, and I have to look down. Making people feel guilty, whether they are or not, is an art form. With me, it doesn’t take much art. I sweat guilt.

“Nobody would think that,” I say.

“Some would. Some think I got the part only because I have a loud voice.”

I have to swallow once or twice while I come up with a reply.
Did Hazel overhear me talking to Ruthie? Did Ruthie rat?
I have an intense need to scratch the backs of my knees now. I know my face is deep pink.

“You have a voice that carries,” I say helpfully. “A good thing for an actress to have.”

Hazel gets off the coats and grabs me by the arm, grinning broadly. “Thank you for saying so.” She pulls me after her, out of the room. “So, can we start on Monday after school?” she roars.

“Yes,” I whisper.
What else can I say?

Downstairs, Hazel leaves me to my own devices while she dashes off to shout at her sister to turn up the music. I don’t think the party will be as quiet as my mother predicted. It turns out the Carrington parents are out of town for the weekend. The living room doorway is a good place to stand and mull things over. Maybe a sharp tongue is a bigger handicap than a loud voice.

Soon I catch sight of Jamie moving about the room, chatting with the people he knows, his limp more pronounced than usual. For a mere second, I wonder if he’s exaggerating it slightly. But, no. That’s something I might do—put on a little act to make sure people see me suffering—but not my brother. I join him and instantly hear his intake of breath. When I follow the direction of his eyes, I gasp, too. Across the room, his back to us, is Coop.

We both let out our breath. “It’s
Will
Cooper,” I say.

“Right.”

I survey the dimly lit room. A small knot of boys laugh at someone’s joke. A tight circle of girls, Mary among them, gasps over some piece of gossip. In a chair pulled back out of the way, in a blue fog of smoke, someone slouches and lifts a punch glass to his lips.

Jamie joins Will just as Roy Armstrong, a guy who’s more in Jamie’s age group than mine, smiles nonchalantly at me and takes my hand. “Let me get you some punch.”

I’m flattered. It sounds like a line from a cocktail party scene in a movie. When no one’s looking, I undo the top button of my blouse. No one notices. Not even Roy Armstrong, who hands me a glass of punch and immediately starts flirting with someone else.

I eventually make my way back to the living room. Will has moved on, and Jamie is talking to Vera Carrington now. Playfully, she shoves a plate of sandwiches under Jamie’s nose, yelling, “Eat! You look half starved.”

He takes the smallest sandwich on the plate, while she tries to get him to take two. “Is that Tom Klosky over there in the corner?” he asks, diverting her attention.

Vera nods. “He’s in terrible shape.” She manages to lower her voice a little. “I used to think he was a nice enough boy, but now … well, I just invited him out of pity, poor guy.”

“I’d better say hello.” Jamie crosses the room, while I snag a sandwich and follow him. “Tom, you old son of a gun, when did you get back?” Jamie offers his hand as Tom gets shakily to his feet. To steady him, Jamie reaches for his elbow but grabs only an empty shirtsleeve. “Sorry, pal,” he says. “I had no idea. Where did …?”

“Normandy. Listen, be a good chap and get me a drink. A real drink. None of the cat piss our gracious hostess is pouring.”

“I wouldn’t know where to look.”

“Kitchen. Follow your nose, if it hasn’t been blown off your face.” Klosky sways. He notices me and grins stupidly. “And here’s the little sister. All grown up, eh? You turned out pretty good. Who’da thought.”

“Hi,” I say. “I better go help Jamie.”

Jamie’s elbowing his way through a cluster of boys and young men in the kitchen by the time I catch up. I know many of them by sight. I think they were in lower school when Jamie left, and now they’re swaggering upper school boys, not quite comfortable with cigarettes but working on it. Will’s there, too.

I’m the only girl. I sidle in next to the fridge, where I won’t be too obvious.

A guy named Eddy puts a bottle behind his back, but not quickly enough. “Give us a shot of rum for my friend Tom Klosky,” Jamie says.

“For Tom? Oh, sure, poor sucker.” He finds a used glass among the plates of cold cuts and pickles and bread and cheese that litter the kitchen table, flings the contents into the sink behind him, and almost fills it with rum, adding a splash of Coke. Nobody takes any notice of me, or else they don’t care that I’ve invaded their inner sanctum.

“I had no idea he’d lost an arm,” Jamie says.

“That’s not all he lost,” Eddy says.

“Oh?”

“Let’s just say he’ll never be a family man. Here,” he says, scrounging up another glass, filling it with rum and Coke, and handing it to Jamie. “Cheers! Came out of the conflict pretty good yourself, eh?”

“I was one of the lucky ones.”

“I’d have gone over if it had lasted longer.”

“It lasted plenty long enough,” Jamie says. He raises one of the glasses in salute and leaves.

I’m about to follow him, when Will Cooper notices me. “I’d be happy to walk you home, now, Rachel. I’m thinking of going.”

“But, why? The party’s not over.”

“It could get a little rough. Just thought I’d ask.” He sounds hurt, which makes me feel a bit, I don’t know … hard-hearted?

“Um, I better wait for my brother. I promised I would.”

“Sure.”

When I catch up to Jamie, he’s with Mary in front of Tom’s now-empty chair. “Where’s Tom Klosky?” I ask. “Has he left already?”

Mary says, “His brother took him home. All he does anymore is get stinking drunk and try to pick fights. Poor guy.”

“Poor guy,” Jamie echoes and downs Klosky’s drink. It must have burned all the way down because it makes his eyes water, and he chokes a little. He starts working on his own. I’ve never seen him take a drink before.

“Come on,” Mary says to him. “Stop moping around, and let’s at least dance. Everyone says you’re a wet blanket.” She tries to soften the accusation by looking up through her lashes, her head tilted, a playful smile on her lips.

Dance music blares from a record player, and Mary drags the two of us toward it. Behind us, we hear the tail end of a crude joke. Jamie says, “Rachel shouldn’t have come. I think we should head home.”

Too late. Roy Armstrong grabs me by the waist and pulls me in among the dancers. He spins me around and moves me from one hand to the other, like a rag doll. I didn’t even think I knew how to dance. A friend of Roy’s grabs Mary, and soon she’s dancing as wildly as I am.

When the music stops, Vera gets everyone’s attention by shouting, “Game time!” She holds up two oranges and orders people to form two lines—boy, girl, boy, girl.

Amazingly, we follow her orders without an argument, and soon, while Jamie watches, we play a silly game that involves a guy tucking an orange under his chin and passing it to the girl behind him in line, who must receive it under her chin, no hands allowed. It looks like everyone’s necking.

Before it’s my turn, a girl screams, and the game abruptly stops. All eyes are on Jamie, blood spurting from his nose. He dashes from the room with his handkerchief to his face and bounds up the stairs. Mary and I follow, but he barricades himself in the bathroom. “Are you all right?” I call lamely, pounding on the door.

“Do you need an ice pack?” Mary asks. “Do you want more handkerchiefs? What do you need?”

“I don’t need anything,” is his muffled response. “Go away and leave me in peace.” I wait for him near the bathroom door, but Mary goes back to join the necking game.

At last, he comes out. The bleeding has stopped, but he looks pale and wary, as if he’s been attacked by a furtive enemy. I hurry to get our coats.

Downstairs again, I signal to Mary that we should go. Either she doesn’t understand or doesn’t notice, she’s so busy pressing against Roy Armstrong, passing the orange.

Jamie says he doesn’t like to leave without her. After all,
he brought her. “People are treating us like a couple now that she’s left school and works full time in Woolworths.”

Mary drops the orange and is out of the game. “It’s okay,” she calls to him. “Go ahead. I’ll go home with Stella. She wants me to stay overnight at her place.”

Jamie and I walk home from the party through the gently falling rain. “Getting pretty cold,” he says. “This is a false spring. I shouldn’t wonder if it turns to snow.”

“Jamie, stop! You’re turning into Dad.” I pull my collar tight against the wind and glance at him sideways. “Are you all right?”

“Never better.”

“You look awful.”

“You’re not too terribly stunning yourself.”

“You know what I mean.” I think I
do
look fairly stunning, with my
Little Red Lies
lipstick applied ever so discreetly.

I wish I had a scarf to cover my head so that my hair doesn’t turn into the end of a mop. In my good shoes, I slip and clutch at Jamie’s arm for support. He lets me hang on as we walk briskly along a side street.

When we near the corner, he says, “I feel like I’m dying.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Because of a nosebleed?” I pull at him to stop. I need to look at his face under the streetlight. “Look, you’re not dying. You got safely home from the war. The war is over.”

He disengages me from his arm and walks on quickly. We’re about to cross Main Street, alive with the usual Saturday night tribes of oglers and bored young people. I have to trot to keep up. On Wakefield Avenue, where we live, he starts to say something but seems to lose his nerve. I skip a little ahead of him in order to see his face.

“Okay,” I say. “I guess we’re all dying from the minute we’re born. What a ghastly thought!”

“You don’t understand.” We turn into our own walk, heading for the side door. “Everything’s slipping away from me,” he says, “you, Mother and Dad, Granny, even Mary. Everyone’s aging or changing somehow. I feel like there’s a split growing between us all, as if there’d been an earthquake leaving me on one side of a huge fissure and everyone else on the other. Like a nightmare, only I’m awake.”

I skid on my heel again, but he catches me by the elbow.

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. Anyway, skip it. I’m just talking through my hat. Too much rum at the party.”

It’s after midnight. Our parents are in bed but probably not asleep, not Mother at any rate.

“Has this earthquake thing got something to do with the war?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I’m not talking about it anymore.”

“Maybe you should write a book about the war.”

“Nobody would read it if I did.”

“Of course they would. Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because everybody dies at the end. Like possibly Coop and a few of the other guys I knew.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Jamie, you’re just being morbid.”

“I didn’t know you knew big words like that.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Children?” From upstairs our mother’s voice reaches us in the kitchen, where we stand bickering. “It’s late. Go to bed and don’t forget to lock up. And turn out the lights.”

Jamie goes straight upstairs, leaving me alone to turn out the lights, a task I hate as much as he does. Neither of us likes to be left alone in the dark.

The true spring arrives at last. After the weekend’s freezing rain, Monday opens onto a sunlit stage. It’s almost a pleasure to walk to school. The sun has stopped being phony. It’s beginning to warm things up.

There’s no rehearsal this Monday, so I’m hoping to spend some time in the public library looking for a book of plays. Nearly every night, I make myself read five minutely printed pages of a Shakespearean play from the
Complete Works
before I go to sleep, the way some people read chapters of the Bible. I hope that some spark of play-writing talent will seep into my brain while I sleep. Night after night, this keeps not happening.

Shakespeare’s all right as far as he goes, but, if you’re trying to figure out how to write a play, when you get right down to it, there
are
other playwrights and other plots written in up-to-the-minute English. I need something
more startling than “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”

I try to dodge Hazel Carrington as much as possible, but, inevitably, she corners me after math, last class of the day. “Rachel!” she calls in a voice that carries down the corridor and into the cloakroom.

I was hoping to grab my sweater and leave the school as quickly and quietly as possible, not exactly sneaking out but moving with a certain amount of stealth.

Hazel dashes in and catches me by the arm. “You said you’d help me, remember?”

“Oh, sure. I guess it just slipped my mind.” I keep up with Hazel’s long-legged stride until we reach her house, only a few blocks away. Inside, Hazel asks me to wait for a moment while she tells her mother something.