So Much Pretty (13 page)

Theo hadn’t brought a jar, so they took off their shirts, making them into pouches to hold the crayfish, and they left the shirts on the bank churning and crawling slowly in different directions as they swam.

This was where they used to pretend to be animals when they were little and their parents brought them there, and they felt it again now—the desire to change into animals. They avoided looking at each other for a while. But it was too much for Alice. She looked right at Theo and raised her eyebrows, hunched her shoulders. Then she waited. She could see when he had become Mole. He didn’t need to tell her. When he first did it, she felt a little sick to her stomach, so embarrassed that they still did this—played Wind in the Willows and Circus and came to their special place when the rest of their class was trading Pokémon cards and going to Little League practice or watching TV. Something about what they were doing was wrong. No one played this way except babies. That was made clear to them when they were overheard on the monkey bars at recess. She felt queasy because it was actually dangerous for Theo to play like that. They pulled his sneakers off and hit him in the face with them. They slammed him on the floor in the hallway coming in from the playground, slammed their shoulders into his back. The kid whose hair was cut with dog clippers, who wore a Buffalo Bills sweatshirt, whose cheeks were rosy like in pictures of Snow White, he was Theo’s age but a big boy. His wide-set eyes were too wet. He had big chapped lips and really straight teeth. He was the one who knocked Theo down for saying “Quite, quite, Ratty.” That kid knocked into
Theo and called him a girl and a fag and told him he had a girlfriend. And that his dad was a fag. He called Alice a slut and said her parents were on welfare. She didn’t know what welfare was, but it sounded pretty bad. He also said she was wearing queer Kmart pants. Claire had made the pants and Alice didn’t know if they were queer. When she asked if they were queer or not, her mother laughed. She didn’t laugh about what the kid said, though. She put out her arms for Alice to come lie on the couch and read with her. It wasn’t just the kid with the straight teeth. Alice didn’t want to think about the number of boys who had understood everything that kid said. And her not understanding what he said was the worst part about all of it.

Claire said, “When people do stuff like that, pumpkin sauce, they are in a lot of pain, and they want someone to keep them company, so they try to give them the pain, too. Bring them that bad feeling they have. You have to ignore what they say.”

Claire obviously didn’t know how much company the kid had, because Alice hadn’t told her the whole story. There had to be another reason. The kid with the chapped lips wanted them to stop playing a game they always played—and even to stop wearing the clothes they wore. Somehow Alice really hated her pants now, which didn’t make sense, because they had been her favorite pants. Bright orange with side pockets.

She thought about it. People hurt other people when they were in pain or if they were crazy—if a person is in bad pain or for too long, they go crazy on reflex, like a dog that bites you if you step on its tail. People tell other people what to do if they are crazy. Like the way inbreeding makes people crazy or retarded, kings and queens and that kind of thing. Claire had it mixed up. She thought the kid was in pain, but he was royalty. He was not in pain. You could see he wasn’t unhappy. He was happy. He was so happy when he knocked Theo down that you could see it in the way he breathed.

“I’ll never keep him company,” Alice said, amazed and confused
that Claire had even suggested it. You’re not supposed to encourage the bossiness or crazy ideas of rich people. Or ignore the bad things they do. You’re not supposed to be scared of them.

Standing in the river with the queasy feeling, she glanced at Theo to see if he had changed. She watched his eyelids droop, then he squinted. And somehow he actually made his nose pointy and his chin shrink back. He was nervous but dignified.

“It’s ever so good of you to come here, Moley,” Alice said to him, pulling a strand of her long hair out of her swim cap to make a wispy blond tail that would hang down her back. This was why she’d worn the cap in the first place, but didn’t want to say so out loud.

“My pleasure, Ratty,” he said. “But we’ve got to act fast today, I’m afraid. We’ve got to
do
something about Mr. Toad.” Theo’s English accent was perfect, and he was proud of it. He was the best actor in the whole world. She no longer felt sick or worried.

“Pretend we have to break him out of jail,” Alice whispered.

“We need to take the train out to Elmville,” Mole said, as if he hadn’t even heard her—but he had. “I’ve an idea. A dangerous idea.”

“Quite,” Rat said as she put her hands on the silty, stony bottom and let her legs float on the gentle current. She blew a pink bubble. “Quite so, old chap,” Ratty went on. “We should go to Badger’s at once and bring him these lovely crayfish, and maybe he can help us. They’re holding Toad in the dungeon, I hear.” She gestured toward the only large building visible from the riverbank, the flat white architecture of Haeden Medical Center.

Mole was standing up to his waist in the river, holding a stick in the water and watching the current ripple around it. “Badger will know what to do once we’ve freed him,” he said. “He has tunnels that go all the way to Elmville and even farther. But we need a plan.”

“Yes, quite. A plan,” said Rat. “Toad can’t quite leave as himself, can he? I say we sneak him out, disguise him as an old washerwoman. So long as he keeps quiet, no one will know. Then it’s down to the riverbank and past the wild wood to safety.”

They stared into each other’s eyes, standing shirtless in the green-gray water. She knew the gravity and danger of what they were about to do was immense. Outrageous! But she had no idea what it was or when they would do it, and suddenly, she started to feel like this had all happened before and she was remembering it, felt goose bumps break out all over her skin. She was filled with a sense of awe at their bravery. There was no one in the world they could trust more than each other with the task of saving Toad.

Mole looked at her and squinted. “Come now, we’ve a good deal of work ahead of us.”

They got their crayfish shirts from the bank and began walking in the shallows, following the river in the direction of Alice’s house.

Connie can be Mr. Toad
, Alice thought.
He can hide out in the barn. We have to show him the new trapeze anyway
. Beneath the bridge, she and Theo began to howl, and the concave metal canopy drew their voices up into the sky and out into the town, echoing, their last ghostly tones still resonating as they left the riverbank behind.

Wendy

HAEDEN, NY, 2008

I
T WAS HARD
to tell at first why Dale Haytes looked good. He was tall and stocky, and his cheeks were often red. He wore expensive clothes. His teeth were perfect. He had a flattop, and his neck was shaved and sometimes pimply. He was always on his way to play golf, or coming back from playing golf, and he drove a shiny dark blue truck with an extended cab. He liked to play cards and was friends with all kinds of different men. Men who worked in business, men who traveled, and men who hung around the Alibi. People you wouldn’t necessarily think he’d talk to, real different types of folks. Like Wendy, he had watched his friends leave for school and go on to college. Like Wendy, he worked for his father’s business and was proud to sit in the office. The farmwork was rarely done by family members because the farm was a big corporation now. She’d heard them talking about it at the bar, how people didn’t get that. It was a business. They had more than eight thousand head now that they were working as a subsidiary of Groot Dairy Development. Groot had offices in Holland and Argentina. Dale had told her how he traveled to Europe a couple times a year.

She liked the way he had explained it. Like it was simple, just another place. Dale was a hometown boy connected to the wealth of the wider world. But he wasn’t phony, like the college boys who went traveling. He said what he felt, no matter what it was. And he didn’t seem too worried about it. He didn’t seem too worried about anything. Though Wendy thought sometimes he pretended to be worried so it would make people feel better about themselves, and that made her like him—the way he
changed his confident attitude to help out the little guy. “Throw him a bone,” as she’d heard him say.

At twenty-two, Dale possessed a demeanor that Wendy thought seemed suited to an older man. He acted much older than the guys she worked with, though he was ten years younger. That was probably because he liked to talk about tradition and said things like “Gotta play hard to work hard,” “You snooze, you lose,” and his favorite, “It’s all about attitude.” Sometimes he’d abbreviate this to “Attitude!” or say, “Attitude is more important than facts.” Wendy had heard him explain this last phrase to some of the workers from the milking parlor, who came in one evening and stood around shooting the shit with him. It was part of a long inspirational piece his mother had framed and hung in their kitchen, where most people hung a “Bless This House.” He told them the piece went on to say that attitude could color a situation “gloomy and gray or cheerful and gay.” And that working in the office and talking to salespeople had improved his attitude and his vocabulary. Wendy didn’t know how she felt about that. She’d had to talk to wholesalers and bill collectors on the phone, and she thought they were just people who spoke like they were on teams while really, they were sitting in cubicles and talking on phones. Still, it was no secret that attitude and communication and team spirit were the things that had made Dale’s family so successful. Not college education. And Wendy could relate to that.

And she liked his voice. Dale had the flat upstate drawl and terse truncated way of speaking that was ingratiating to old-timers and funny to his friends. Parents and teachers loved him. And he had a kind of lost quality: charm. She could tell Dale read people and then adjusted his language accordingly.

The phrases he chose seemed at once ironic and full of authority and respect, a genius way of speaking that couldn’t quite be pinned down—that he could turn serious or into a joke depending on the responses he got. Sometimes all it took was a quick
wink. “A man’s got work to do,” he’d say about himself, or “You don’t disturb a man when he’s trying to eat.” He might believe it or it might be sarcasm, or he might be mocking someone else by contrast. And it was brilliant when the things he said achieved all three. Dale was a joker.

This was part of his appeal to Wendy. He even said things out loud that she’d been thinking. He was a joker but also conscious that he was a man, tied to his family and property, his appetites, tied to his body. Maybe part of being a man was being a joker. He was definitely not like a boy—or even like a friend of her brother’s, who worked in the trades. He was a part of the town’s history, a name that could be found on a map, a fixture. And his square jaw and slight double chin could be traced back through family photos and old people’s memories for generations.

Dale lived in an apartment in his parents’ house, a big colonial on the corner of Haytes and Town Line roads. His brother, Bruce, and their parents lived in the main part of the house, and his uncles lived in the house next door that had once been quarters for farmhands. Not one of them had left that land yet.

The things that made Dale attractive to Wendy ran deep, and she knew it by the way she felt when he was around, the way she tried not to look at him when he came in and sat at the bar. She knew most girls didn’t look at him this way. Even though he was a Haytes and had been a football player in school, her friends and other women in the bar acted like they were too good for him. Maybe it was the smell of the farm. Wendy thought it was pretty superficial for people to judge him because of a by-product of the family business. She figured the poor guy had to deal with it all the time. She’d heard him talk about girls from his class being stuck up. How they were off at college pretending they loved city life or faggy guys or some shit they’d never even heard of until they were nearly grown. Moving away to chase some career pipe dream. Some of them going to college after college and living
like they were poor. It was one of the only times he sounded angry to her—but maybe that was partly in sympathy for the guys he was sitting with. None of them had girlfriends, though some of them had wives.

One evening when she set his drink down, he grabbed her wrist gently and looked up at her for a long time. It was a dramatic gesture, and she wondered if he would have done it if he was alone, if he were just doing it as a joke for the guys he was sitting with. She smiled at him and felt her face flush. Then, still looking in her eyes, he said, “You sure got pretty, Wendy. You’re almost breaking my heart every time you run down to the other end of the bar and leave me all alone here.” He’d looked down at her hand as if he just realized he was holding on to her, then he gave her a shy look and let go.

She glanced toward the kitchen, pulled her tickets out of her apron pocket, and set them nervously on the bar so she wouldn’t look like she was doing nothing but flirting with a boy her boss already knew she had a crush on.

“A man can only take so much pretty walking back and forth in front of him.” He said pretty like he meant something else.

“Well, I’m sorry, Dale. That’s my job. I mean, the walking to the kitchen. I didn’t mean being . . . I mean, that’s . . . Are you kidding around?”

She watched his mask of confidence falter for a second as if he hadn’t made up his mind yet, hadn’t decided whether he was using her as a joke for the boys, or using her to show he had a serious and romantic side, or maybe right then, she hoped, right in that moment he had fallen in love with her.

Then he said, “You just bloomed like a rose right in front of us all.”

She felt the corner of her lip twitch. She picked up her tickets again and shuffled through them for a minute.