The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (4 page)

Through the window, a game of kick-the-can leaked in, the kids yelling and the clunk of the can off the curb. She never played. When she asked Alice if it was fun, Alice laughed at her. Mustn’t think of her here. She had promised God not too. She stared at the text, trying to make it sweep her head. Her turn to read, and she must decide how to say it, the right way so the words would banner. “O God, thou my God; early will I seek thee …”

It was Easter vacation, but Mother kept her busy in the house all morning.

“Gone to sleep in there? I don’t hear that sweeper.”

“I was moving a chair.” She put down “Watchfires of the Iroquois.” She read all she could on Indians. Mother had spoken to her, saying they were Christians now and some even belonged to the Brethren of the Tabernacle. She’d answered, “The real ones are dead.” The ones who fought, those were the real ones.

“Deborah, look at those crumbs.” Mother stood with thin arms folded, her pins in the teeth expression. “You’ve been eating in the front room again!”

“Why clean up every speck? It only gets dirty again.”

“Just because your father’s away doesn’t mean you can start sassing me.” She drew herself up to deliver a small
sermon in Dad’s manner: “To be careless in any duty is to give the devil a foothold. A clean house is as important as a clean body.” Her voice dropped to its ordinary singsong. “Don’t I have enough worries trying to keep this house running on peanuts and never knowing when your Dad’ll be home, and five calls to make for the Brethren this week? One of these fine days, it’ll send me to my grave. But till then, no daughter of mine is going to be known as a sloppy individual.”

No daughter of mine: as if there were ten of her. Did God care if the floor was swept? You never could tell, like that poor clod putting out his hand to keep the ark from falling, and ffffft. Moving the sweeper mechanically, she reached into her mind for the scene always waiting, half played out. She had been a renegade lately. There were villains in the books, but the books were unfair. The Indians had been right, and if she had been there and not an Indian, the only thing right thing would have been to join up with them anyhow.

Finally, after three, she got away, saying she was going to the library. She ducked her head into the wind’s rough grasp, liking even the grit that stung her eyes. Of course she was off to Alice’s with the feeling of having paid for her afternoon. She was not allowed to play with Alice any more than the other girls were, but since she couldn’t hang around with them either, she had made friends with Alice. When she was little she could not play dolls because they were graven images, and now she could not wear lipstick or go to parties. But the other girls were silly, giggling and trading stupid pictures, and Alice was brave like an Indian.

At last she came to the end of sidewalks, where the blocks of little houses like her own opened into a marshland of canals and cat o’ nine tails, patched together houses and railroad tracks, bounded by the horizon of steel mills. Pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. Yanking off the scarf Mother made her wear so she wouldn’t get earache
(she never got earache), she stuffed it into her pocket. The mud felt springy though the soles of her tennis shoes and she ran until she had put a hummock tall with the prongs of old weeds between the neighborhood and herself, till she was really in the Dump, as the area was called for the slag heaps smoking far to her left. The outside place, where she did not even feel God watching, the place where everything came alive.

She was crossing enemy territory to send a danger message to the tribe. She moved warily. Her head was light. Two days before she had chewed her last pemmican. She scanned the footsteps with the grim eye of the practiced scout. It was many sleeps since they had passed, slim dark figures on the ancestral trails. The mark of their burden poles was light in the earth. They traveled quickly, alert for danger. They did not make camp by the waterholes or the thickets where game would lurk.

The grasses moved against the wind and she froze, fingers on the hilt of her hunting knife. A stillness, then an orange barred cat craned out, watching with stolid amber eyes. Hunting here, play and real: like me? She coaxed with her lips and the cat leaned: then turned with a deep meow and tail-up slipped into deeper weeds.

Coming out on the tracks, she balanced along a shiny rail for a hundred feet. A row of empty boxcars squatted weatherworn on the far tracks. Scuffling from one. A cracked adolescent voice called, “Hey kid, looking for action? Hey, c’mere.” Somebody inside laughed in a squeal. Her foot slipped, twisted.

“Hey kid, you wanna see something?”

Stubbornly she kept her pace, jumping on every third tie. A train made the rails hum, so when she was well past the boxcar, she crouched in the cinders of the embankment, waiting. A diesel pulling a long freight. As it rushed toward her, she caught her breath and could not let it out until the
engine had ripped past. She felt torn as it rolled away, leaving her in the cinders. Names on the cars rode above. Where it would go, cities shone like scrubbed metal; when it came from prairies spread wide and towns with names like Crazy Horse were flung against the tracks and sullen under too much sky, mountains rose into wilderness and eagles and glaciers.

She followed the sluggish brown canal to Alice’s in a straggle of two-families with faces to a road and backs to the canal and rickety docks. An old Dodge stood on blocks in the yard, and Jackie and another kid were kneeling on the springs. As she passed by they sprayed her with noise: “eheheheheheheh, you’re dead!”

She went up the outside stairs, pushing a pop bottle and broken bamboo rod out of her way, rapped, then stood back and yelled, “Alice!”

Livy, the nine-year-old, let her in. “Allie! Deborah’s here!”

Alice came languidly from the kitchen, twisting a rubber band between her fingers and letting it snap into her palm. “Boy, am I sick and tired trying to clean this mess,” she said like a mother. “Ma’s coming back early today. Or so she says.” Dropping on a cot, she grabbed Livy. “Let me do your hair.”

“Don’t stick your dirty nails in me!”

Alice took Livy’s stringy yellow hair and plaited it deftly, looping the rubber band around the end. “So look who’s here. Big deal. Where you been all week?”

“We had company one night, and Mother had me cleaning. She wouldn’t let me out.”

Alice smiled her closed little smile. She was only a year and a half older, but she’d been menstruating two years already and her body was rounding. She had whitish hair, silky and sparse, which she teased out like a winter bush. Her eyes were long and silver-grey. She had almost no brows. “Go play with Jackie,” she told Livy.

“Go screw yourself.” Livy threw herself on a chair, letting her feet swing as she waited in bored expectation.

“Want to go out, Alice? Let’s take the rowboat.”

“It’s too cold.” Alice picked at the loose polish on her thumb. “Besides, I got to clean. Didn’t you hear?” She sauntered into the kitchen, Deborah behind her, and began running water for the pile of dishes. Wary and disappointed, Deborah took a towel to dry. Out in the boat in the maze of canals, they were a gang hiding out, explorers in the Amazon. Alice stepped into her games with a matter of fact readiness, for behind her mask she dreamed too. Best, Alice was a serious Indian or explorer: she asked what they would eat, she insisted they have shelter and histories. If she were a man that day, she peed with her legs apart standing because she said that was how men did. And the game was real and it worked.

The door slammed behind Livy. Alice smiled with her wan mouth. “Saw Crow yesterday.”

“You didn’t talk to him.” She heard her voice pleading.

“It’s a free country. He was standing on the corner by Jaegar’s. He whistles, but I just look right through him, just like I never seen him. He yells, ‘Hey Blondie,’ but I keep on walking. So he starts cussing me, so I turn around and give it back good. He tried to make a date for Saturday, but I told him where to go.”

“Why did you talk to him?”

They finished the dishes in silence. Crow was skinny and mean and leathery, the first in their class to carry better than a jackknife. Deborah hated Crow because Alice had gone in the weeds with him. Alice said he was the only one, but that was a fib. She would never say anything, or Alice would keep at her till she pretended to believe, but she longed for Alice to be grandly bad, flamboyantly bad, in big proud gaudy awning stripes of evil.

“Guess what, Georgia’s knocked up again.” Georgia was Alice’s older sister who lived downstairs.

“Again? They’re crowded already.”

“That pig Ralph. He won’t use nothing.”

“Use something?”

“Cheez, don’t you know anything?”

“Use something? You mean like you told me Nancy did?”

“No. There’s things you use. Know what Trojans are?”

Helen of Troy and the pagans: but that wasn’t what Alice was on. “No.”

“Look, come in Ma’s room and I’ll show you what she uses.”

Alice felt around in a bureau drawer until she pulled out a hot water bottle with a long cord. Deborah frowned. “Hey, I’ve seen them. My mother has one. She said it was for enemas.”

Alice laughed. “The lines she hands you sometimes!”

Her mother in the nether world of the Dump. Sister Gentry had no children. Was that why?

Alice stood at her mother’s dresser applying a thick coat of makeup. “Want to show you something. I tried this yesterday, and wait’ll you see.” She dabbed mascara awkwardly on her few lashes. “I’ve been practicing.” Giving her hair a fluff, she turned for admiration.

“You look fifteen or sixteen, honest!”

“Pretty good, huh?” Alice made eyes at the mirror, rolling her thin hips and tossing her hair. “I’m getting rigged up like this some night when Ma’s not home,” she said grandly. “You bet the boys will pay attention.”

Deborah sat at the mirror, picking up a lipstick. She pressed too hard and a hunk broke off. Her face looked young and crowded next to Alice.

“My mouth’s too big.”

“Don’t let it get you down,” Alice shrugged. “They’re supposed to be good for kissing.” They scrubbed their faces at the washbowl. The towels always felt like frog skin.

Alice peeled potatoes at the wobbly table. “That shitheel
Ralph makes me see red. I’m never getting married. I won’t end up with a man kicking me around and telling me what to do. Do that! Stay outa there! None of that for me.” Alice’s favorite topic.

“Listen, how soon is your Ma really coming home?”

“Two hours, maybe. Three?” She chopped the potatoes and dropped them into a pot of water on the sink.

It was no good, making all those promises, ever since that Saturday she had secretly gone to a movie with Alice. Afterwards, they had been acting it with Alice as the outlaw and her as the girl he held prisoner. In the movie, he kissed her, but Alice said she would show her what really happened, and she put her hand under Deborah’s skirt. Since then, they played the captured girl with pirates and spies, but touching was always part of the game. God and her mother would damn her anyway for coming to see Alice, so she might as well be damned all the way. “Let’s go in your Ma’s room and play prisoners.”

Alice smiled tightly. “Don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“I want to go down to Brand Street. I want a coke.”

“We could go later.”

“No, I want to go now.” Alice reached up in the cupboard and took change from a cup. She looked over her shoulder as she put on the coat that had been her Ma’s. “Sometimes I’m sorry I showed you. You’re as bad as a guy.”

“You taught me because you wanted to! You do this to keep me in line.” She pulled on her jacket, shoving her fists into the pockets where her scarf was knotted. “Needn’t be so sure I’ll go with you.”

“Don’t bother. I got friends. Maybe I’ll see Crow.”

“Shut up. I’ll go. But I’m broke.”

“I’ll treat you.”

She was angry all the way and would not talk, but she knew that was useless: Alice could sit with that little smile
for days. She never spoke in school. If the teacher called on her, she would only say “I don’t know” in a flat voice. Usually Alice didn’t know, but Deborah heard her say it even when she did. They sat diagonally in homeroom, in opposite corners, because the pupils were seated by grades and behavior. She felt rotten when the teacher would start needling Alice, trying to show how stupid she was. She would feel guilty, especially if she were called on right after and she would have the answer. She wanted to say that she too did not know, but she couldn’t. And to anybody, she was a good girl and Alice was bad. That ate at her, and she thought sometimes that she should stand up and explain, but who would listen?

“Alice, I’m sorry I was snotty. But you shouldn’t push me. You do it too often.”

“Let’s go in the dime store.”

Her stomach squeezed itself. The test again. She followed Alice between the garish counters under the hillbilly screech of the loudspeaker, a brave facing his initiation. But an Indian proved his right to his adult name once, while she was tested and tested by Alice. If she lost her nerve, Alice would turn away, lumping her with the girls who giggled, who traded singers’ pictures, who gave parties to which neither were invited.

At the jewelry counter, Alice palmed a charm bracelet. Deborah’s job was to watch the salesgirls and shield Alice. At the candy counter, Alice bought a quarter bag of nonpareils, and took a fire-engine whistle off the toy counter to join it. “For Jackie.”

She left Alice abruptly. Today she must press her nerve, test herself harder than Alice tested her. She stopped by cosmetics. “Can I help you?” The saleslady was fat. As she leaned on the register to ease her feet, her large breasts flowed forward like melted butter.

“Do you have any polish remover?”

“Over here,” As the girl turned, Deborah shot out her
hand and grabbed a bottle of nail polish. She stuffed her clenched fist into her pocket, hiding it under the scarf. “That’s not big enough.” She felt sweated. She had not even looked to see if anybody was watching. The manager might be right behind her.