So Much Pretty (6 page)

A lot of guys who stayed had plans to build nearby. Two of the boys she went to school with were going to “live off the grid” on some land left by somebody’s grandfather. They said soon everyone would be living off the grid. This made her dad laugh out loud every time she told him about it. They were making a straw-bale house, said they would put up a windmill. Her father said it was all just making a big deal out of the way things used
to be back before construction got easier. The only people who could afford the houses were rich people, he said. That’s the joke! Next rich people will want to live in a cave. They’re already paying four dollars a half gallon for unpasteurized milk!

Some boys from her class went to Iraq or Afghanistan. Her dad said more people from rural places like Haeden were fighting in the war than people from cities. Said it was always like that for farm boys and working boys. And he told her don’t ever date those boys when they come back. On slow days, she and her dad would sit in the office and talk, tell stories about her nieces, and think about what the future would be like. She would read over the specs he got for projects and try to picture what the houses he was working on would look like when they were finished.

She loved hanging out with her dad. When she was little, she used to sit in the shop and eat saltines and draw houses. He taught her how to plot out the interiors. She was pretty great at drawing houses inside and out, and at doing the finances.

They also gossiped. Talked about how people lived, how folks knew everybody’s business and still liked each other, pretended they didn’t know all about each other’s private lives, or forgot about them, or gave them the benefit of the doubt. Slow days were a mixed blessing. She worried about her dad’s business, but she liked having him around.

Eventually, he had enough time to do all his own invoicing, and she took a waitressing job at the Alibi on Main Street, a block from the dollar store, half a block from the Rooster, to earn more money. She got an apartment a few miles from her parents’ house on Town Line Road, near the little woods and the Savers Club. And over break, when her friends were home from college, they helped her move in, had a housewarming. The place was beautiful.

The Alibi was busy during happy hour. When the men got off work from the Home Depot and the contractors and painters came in to eat dinner, they sat at the polished wooden bar on red
stools, drinking PBRs and looking up at the TV, or they crowded into booths. On Thursdays a band of three skinny guys in Carhart pants and flannel shirts played old-time music. Banjo and bass and fiddle. They sang “Cotton Eyed Joe” in unison, sitting in a circle with their heads raised toward heaven and their eyes squinting. People gave her their orders and chatted. She knew nearly everyone by name. And they all knew her.

The men in their late twenties and thirties talked to her about old teachers they had in common, and whether they could buy her a drink, asked if her brother was ever going to buy that land. They were responsible, like her dad, and didn’t yet have a wife and kid like her brother. There were one or two of them she would think about later, like Dale Haytes, who graduated when she was a sophomore. She wondered what he was doing. Dale was twenty-two now and came into the bar quite a lot. Dale and his uncle, who was actually just a little older than him, and a bunch of men from the dairy. He always had his little brother with him, too, which Wendy thought was sweet. Bruce was a stocky quiet boy who played JV football and had really clear skin. He reminded Wendy of herself sometimes, like he was thinking a lot but happy to watch instead of talk. Dale would be the kind of boyfriend her parents would love. They had a lot in common even though he was older and his family had money. They both made the best of what was around them, respected their families. They both had been so dedicated to their teams in school. And there was something about the way people could almost dismiss Dale, kind of overlook him, the way Wendy had been overlooked. She remembered him from when she was a sophomore and he was playing ball. Didn’t remember if he’d had a girlfriend. She could imagine someone calling him plain. Could see there were things he was thinking about but didn’t say.

In the slow time after prepping and before she had to serve, Wendy smoked menthols with the cook and the dishwasher, sitting on the rail of the back deck overlooking a narrow creek.
They talked about movies, and Chad, the cook, talked about other places he’d worked and how busy things were or what kind of food they had. The dishwasher, Bill, talked about using the whipped cream to do whip-its.

“Nah, man. That shit is no good for you, and it wears off way too soon,” Chad told him.

“It’s fucking great!” Bill said. “I saw a flock of birds, like those bluebirds from Snow White, flying right at me and straight through my head, I could feel their wings, and then it was over like right then and you’re good to go. You can buy it at the store.” He sang, waving the can back and forth, “You can put it on ice cream. I’d say it’s pretty practical.”

Wendy laughed. She liked the way Bill talked. How he didn’t care what anybody thought about him. He was someone she could go out with maybe, too. Not care. Do whip-its. Ask him to teach her how to skateboard. So what if he was thirty?

“Oh my God!” Wendy said. “My nieces love Snow White, but they can’t pronounce it. All they talk about is Thnow White and Thindawella.” She didn’t know why it made her laugh so hard right then. Maybe she was just happy. “I’m Thindawella!” she said again as she exhaled and flicked her cigarette off the porch.

“You
are
Cinderella,” Bill said, grinning at her.

“Yeah?” she said, laughing and holding her foot out. She was wearing red plastic gardening clogs from the Agway. He leaned forward and curled his arm around her waist, looked up into her pretty face, and Wendy thought for a second he might kiss her. Then Chad said, “Order up.”

With running from the kitchen to the tables, missing meals at her parents’, and then the walk to her apartment every day, Wendy began to get fit, even more fit than when she was a swimmer and still had some kind of softness about her. She could feel it. Her arms getting stronger and leaner from lifting trays. She began to look rosier. Baby fat began to shrink and show the line
of her jaw, her cheekbone, the definition of her calf. She started to worry less about her hair and let it grow, wearing it up in a clip. She felt free. Like she could be in Haeden and shake off the silly pretensions of being
from
Haeden, the habits of talking about who owned what land, where you vacationed or who your grampa remembered, and the almost required speech about how you just loved the pretty pretty views, even when you didn’t notice them or had never seen anything else to compare.

Wendy was a late bloomer, stepping elegantly, surprisingly, into the beauty of her youth. She still went to her sister-in-law’s salon, but mostly for manicures and highlights. She wore dark pink lipstick and a little mascara. And she was tender in that way, that soft, angular, seamless way she was supposed to be. The way she had wanted to be all along.

She thought now that she looked like this, maybe people would see her. Be able to read her face better. Stop calling her “polite” and “friendly” and asking “Aren’t you a White?,” which always made her want to burst out laughing in their faces. Or “Aren’t you Danny White’s little girl?,” which she thought was hilarious back before she dropped the weight. People must have felt sorry for her, but she never felt sorry for herself. Must have felt sorry and assumed she was dumb or shy or naive or that she couldn’t possibly think anything bad about thin, rich, friendly people. Couldn’t have her own thoughts about things. But now they’d be able to see her. The less makeup she wore, the thinner she got; people would just assume she was getting smarter, too. Wouldn’t think she’d been smart all along, wouldn’t realize that she’d been pretty all along, either. And she had to admit, she liked being noticed. She liked the freedom that came with it. Being the pretty girl. The girl people looked at like they were getting an unexpected present.

One day, after she poured a beer for her dad’s friend who owned the dollar store out on 227, she put his change on the bar and he said, “Well, thanks, Miss America.”

Wendy smiled at him. Noticed that he and his friends were all looking right at her.

“Don’t you love blondes, though?” said the man sitting next to him. It was Doc Green. He was a large-animal vet, worked for the dairy. Came and talked at her school one time.

“
Oh
, yeah,” her dad’s friend said. Then he winked at her and left a dollar fifty where his beer had been.

Flynn

T
HE TRUTH IS
, after they found the body, after I put out the paper, I didn’t want to go back to work. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to know anyone. I didn’t even want to go to my apartment. I thought of leaving town that day.

I watched men who had no business doing anything other than writing traffic tickets, working the crosswalk, or wrangling drunks handle the series of intimate procedures involved in packing and shipping a body that had once belonged to their friend’s daughter or their kids’ babysitter.

The night they found White’s body, I wanted to be alone. Because this complete quiet had settled over everything. Like a radio that had been playing for so long you don’t even notice it had suddenly been shut off. Noise didn’t fix the problem; it only became more obvious when people spoke. Their words hung in the air. As if all peripheral thought, all the ambient observations, the things I would picture or think of saying, were wiped out.

This silence feels like calm. But really, it is a point beyond rage.

Nobody could do a thing about Wendy White. No one could do anything to her or for her ever again. And nothing that might be done to the people who put her where she was would change that. All your passions and ideals and understandings about justice and humanity, all your autopilot notions and senses and “beliefs,” are just things your brain lets you entertain so you will have somewhere to focus your grief.

The silence lets you know it’s already had the answers for a million years. Answers comprising not words or sounds but smells you were unaware you recognized, gestures shared by animals.

When I went home after putting the paper to bed, I stood in the bathroom for a long time, looking in the mirror with the water running in the sink, just to hear something. But the quiet soon drowned it out. My face and hair covered my skull, and my round wet eyes stared back at themselves. In the quiet, I was yards and yards of skin, autonomic responses, little hairs and pores.

How disposable is a woman’s life? How expected. How unsurprising. How normal. How many times a week, a month, a year does this happen?

I wanted to be alone. But I could not have been alone in thinking those things that night. And in fact I didn’t end up spending the night alone at all.

Wendy White told me a story with her body, one that I already knew. One that, until that moment, I had been unable to relay. And I wrote it all down. I told it to Alice.

I still don’t know if I am sorry. I only know that when I think about it now, I see that moment at the edge of Tern Woods like the opening of the tinderbox. And for better or worse, I know White’s death was not in vain.

EVIDENCE
P47907

4/16/09 8:40
A.M
.

Sgt. Anthony Giles

Hibernation

By Alice Piper

Grade 5

Mr. Kennedy

September 23, 2003

When people think of hibernation they picture bears in caves, wearing stocking caps and slippers, or moles or badgers or hedgehogs or porcupines, asleep huddled together for warmth. People don’t think of insects because insects do not live long and there aren’t many images in stories or in textbooks of them sleeping.

This essay (and accompanying diagrams) will give an explanation about one of the most interesting topics I have come across in many many years of liking science. I had to go to the library at the University of Elmville to find all of this out . . . BUT (drumroll please):

Insects hibernate! Usually as larva. Cricket and grasshopper eggs freeze for the winter before hatching in the spring. Ants hibernate. Wasps, beetles, and some species of butterflies also hibernate as adults (see diagram A3 for geographic information on varied species of grasshopper).

Hibernation for insects is called diapause. It does not just occur in winter but in any time when the insect has to survive “predictable, unfavorable conditions such as cold weather, drought, or starvation” (see drawing 7.) Diapause is a resting state similar to what occurs in seeds when
they are in the ground but have no water. It can also be described as: “the suppression of questing activity.” Once it is dormant, special stimuli are required to release the insect from its sleep, not unlike a kiss on Rose Red (see diagrams A8–A12 and drawing 8).

While environmental factors cause and stop diapause, changes in the environment and unpredictable weather patterns (global warming!!!) can have an adverse effect on insects by releasing them from hibernation too early. Some scientists think this is causing extinction of some insects. At particular risk of extinction are the following species of butterfly: Mourning Cloak, Comma, Question Mark, and American Snout (see diagram B2, timeline 1).

Bees and butterflies are important for our whole ecosystem (see diagram B3), so it is important they not be disturbed while sleeping (see drawing 4). So . . . shhhhhhhhhhh!

______

Stokes, Donald. (1993) Stokes Butterfly Book:
The Complete Guide to Butterfly Gardening, Identification and Behavior
.

C.A., Masaki, S. (1986)
Seasonal Adaptations of Insects
. Oxford University Press.

Flynn

I
HAD NO TROUBLE
getting information about Alice Piper. Even though she was a kid, a teenager, when it happened, she had already had a very public life in Haeden. I’d written several profiles on her, met her about a month after I started at the paper in 2003 because she got first place in the middle-school “verbal advantage” contest. After that, she went on to beat all the other brainiac nerds in the eastern U.S. I interviewed her back then, and we ran a feature.