Local Girls

Gretel stands by the gate, her fingers wrapped around the metal fence post. There are the roses, which she planted herself. Once, they were nothing more than seedlings packaged in brown paper and string, but with time they’ve become a gorgeous torrent of blooms, tumbling over the fence. Where the cherry tree had been, there is now a bed of English ivy, the growth so dense and thick anyone would guess it had been there forever. The sky is terrifically blue and clear; it’s the only thing which has remained constant. Those clouds have always turned to castles when you squint your eyes, but once you blink, they’re gone. Blink again, and you’ll come to believe you never even saw them in the first place. It was all your imagination, that’s what you’ll start to think; it was all in your mind.

Today the weather is hot, a June day close to perfection. Bees are hovering above the lawn; Gretel can hear them, in spite of the noise echoing from the Southern State Parkway. She sits cross-legged on the grass, although this is no longer her house and hasn’t been for some time, nearly five years. She leans down and listens to the droning of bees and she can’t help but wonder why she never heard them during all those years when she lived here. Maybe she wasn’t paying attention, but she’s paying attention now. There’s Jill, Gretel’s oldest friend in the world, walking down the street. Gretel can divine Jill’s presence intuitively; she knows the slap of Jill’s clogs on the cement and the bone-chilling squeak Jill’s son Leonardo manages to summon forth when he rides his bicycle.

“What are you doing over there?” Jill calls.

Gretel waves from the lawn, then shades her eyes against the sun so she can see her childhood friend more clearly. There Jill is, at the edge of the driveway, with her three children: Leonardo, aged seven; Eddie junior, who’s called Doc; and the baby, Angela, who at eleven months is already walking. Jill’s blond hair is pulled into a ponytail; even after three pregnancies, she still has the legs to wear short shorts. Now she plops the baby down on the lawn and marches over to Gretel.

“Are you crazy? We hate these people.” She nods to Gretel’s old house. “Nobody in the neighborhood talks to them. Get up.” She gives Gretel a little kick in the shin to prove her point. “Move it.”

“Ow,” Gretel says, but she moves it all the same.

“They’re a horrible family.” Jill heads for Angela, who is tearing leaves from an ornamental shrub. “If they see us on their property, they’ll call the police. Pigs,” she calls over her shoulder. “They never come to the block party,” she tells Gretel. “But then again, neither did you.”

“There used to be block parties?” Gretel asks.

Jill shakes her head when she considers what a pathetic specimen Gretel was, and perhaps still is, in spite of her degree from NYU and the five years she’s spent in Manhattan. “Every August,” she informs Gretel, who clearly still has her head in the clouds. “My mother always made macaroni salad. Your mother was always working.”

Gretel and Jill have looped arms; they’re following Jill’s kids down the street to the Harringtons’ house, Jill’s house now, since her parents have moved to a condo in Fort Lauderdale, allowing Jill and her husband to take over the mortgage.

“We’ll still be paying it off from our graves,” Jill has cheerfully told Gretel, not that she has to tell anyone that Eddie is not exactly a financial genius. Luckily, the LoPaccas have taken him into the family business, and he’s got his own delivery route, way out on the Island. His sister, Terry, is the real heir apparent, and runs the LoPaccas’ bread factory.

“Terry has a shrine to your brother set up in her bedroom,” Jill tells Gretel as they follow the kids along.

“Still? You’d think she’d be over him.”

“Jason’s like a saint in her eyes. I think she’s forgotten anything negative. I pity her husband.”

“She got married?” Gretel asks. Everyone’s doing it, it seems. Except for her.

“Hey!” Jill suddenly stops, hands on her hips. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asks Leonardo, her oldest, who has just narrowly escaped being hit by a car.

“Nothing,” he answers.

“You’d better watch where you’re going,” she tells her son. “No driver’s going to watch out for you.”

Gretel feels so dreamy being back here in June. It was always her favorite time of the year, this glorious, untrustworthy month when anything seems possible. Here they are at Jill’s house, a destination Gretel has reached a million times before. She takes a good look now and realizes how small the house is, how impossibly green the grass seems to be.

“Is this real?” Gretel leans over and pulls out a handful of turf.

“Yes, it’s real,” Jill says. It’s never easy to tell whether or not Jill’s insulted; she still has a permanent pout. “Eddie works like a dog on this lawn. You’re just used to asphalt and cement.”

There’s a little pool set out in the backyard, just as there was when Jill and Gretel were kids. Back then, Jill’s mother was too distracted and depressed to notice much of what they were doing, but Jill watches her children carefully.

“Don’t you push your sister,” she shouts at Doc as she fills the pool up with the hose. “And don’t think I can’t see everything you do.”

Doc, who’s just turned five, sits contritely on the grass. They can all hear Leo’s bike out on the street, squeaking and whining as he rides in circles and figure eights. Gretel sprawls in a lawn chair. She used to see this yard from her own bedroom window, but no one in her family lives here anymore. Her mother and brother are dead, her father lives on the North Shore with his second wife, even her cousin Margot moved to Florida, where she lives with her husband and their son, Frankie, a sweet little whirlwind who likes to call Gretel on the phone and tell knock-knock jokes.

Jill has gone into the kitchen for some Kool-Aid and paper cups, and after she returns to give everyone a drink, she throws herself down on the plastic lawn chair beside Gretel’s. “Give me the strength to go on,” she cries. Jill pulls a pack of cigarettes from her shorts pocket and offers one to Gretel.

“I quit,” Gretel informs her friend.

“Seriously? Completely?”

Whenever Jill came into the city, she and Gretel would go to clubs and smoke and drink and complain about their lives, but of course Jill hasn’t been into the city since Angela was born, and during that time Gretel has quit a lot of things. She stopped cutting her own hair, for instance, and now pays for it to be styled. She stopped crying in the middle of the night. She stopped feeling that everyone’s bad fortune was her responsibility—all right, maybe she feels it occasionally, but whenever she does, she goes out and buys a new pair of earrings, or a blouse she can’t afford, and that seems to help. Now she has gone even further: at the base of her wrist is a small blue tattoo——the symbol for courage.

“I can’t believe it!” Jill cries. “You went and got that without telling me!” Jill is actually jealous. Of Gretel. Jill’s husband, Eddie, would never allow her to have a tattoo. Why, he won’t even let her have Angela’s ears pierced, even though she would look so cute with little pearl studs. Sure, Jill could sneak Angela over to her cousin Marianne, who pierces ears with a sharp needle right at her kitchen table, but it wouldn’t be worth the fight she’d have to have with Eddie. Not that she listens to him. Not really. He never liked her going into the city to see Gretel, to all those crummy apartments, with all those weird room-mates, and that never stopped Jill. If Eddie knew the half of it, the ratty clubs they went to, the lunatic roommate who stood out on a window ledge above Fourteenth Street convinced she could fly, he would have gone berserk.

The real reason Jill and Gretel haven’t seen each other much in the past two years has nothing to do with Eddie, at least not in that way. It’s jealousy, that’s the problem; it’s coveting something you’d never actually want in real life, but still desire in your dreams, the silliest dreams, the ones you simply can’t shake, even now, when you’re not a kid anymore and should know better than to traffic in envy. Each wants a bit of the other’s life. Not the whole thing of course, not the loneliness or the exhaustion; just the best parts, the prizes.

“Angela is the cutest girl in the world,” Gretel decides.

The late afternoon is more scorching than ever, even in Jill’s shady backyard. Gretel has been drinking Kool-Aid, which is a great deal sweeter than she had remembered; the kids are all in the pool, making so much noise the sound blends together into one deafening blast. She believes her appraisal of Angela to be unbiased, even though she is the child’s godmother.

“I know,” Jill agrees. “Especially when she’s sleeping.”

They can hear Eddie’s truck when he pulls into the driveway, sputtering with a defective muffler, and they look at each other and laugh. Eddie always made sure you knew he was around.

“Hey,” he shouts when he sees Jill and Gretel. “Great to see you,” he tells Gretel as she greets him. He puts his arm around her and pulls her too close. “You have never looked better. Wow.”

“Oh, shut up,” Jill tells him.

“You shut up,” he says, and he leans down to kiss her, a real kiss, as if they were madly in love.

Maybe Jill and Eddie are still crazy about each other, maybe they always have been. Gretel has always had a difficult time understanding why people are drawn to each other, and why they break apart. Still, she knows one thing for certain: Never judge a relationship unless you’re the one wrapped up in its arms.

“Terry’s coming for dinner,” Eddie says as he heads for the house to take a shower.

“Thanks for telling me,” Jill shouts after him. “How about some notice next time?” When he turns on the porch to take a bow, Jill laughs in spite of herself. “Idiot,” she says warmly.

Gretel can’t help but wonder if she’s genetically incapable of forming a lasting relationship. Her only real boyfriend in high school was a disaster, and everyone she dated in college was a disappointment of one sort or another. She’s here at Jill’s for the weekend before heading to California, where Eugene Kessler, an old friend of her brother’s who disappeared years ago, has resurfaced to publish a magazine in Menlo Park. Gretel has been hired as associate editor, and Jill is green with envy. At last.

“You’ll have an expense account.” Lately, Jill gets a shimmery look whenever she talks about Gretel’s future. You’d think she was the one who’d soon be returning people’s manuscripts and fixing French-roast coffee. “You’ll wear really short skirts.”

“I don’t think so.” Although if she did they would all be black—her color.

They’re carrying cups and toys into the kitchen, which is broiling-hot. There’s a lasagna in the oven, hopefully enough now that Terry and her husband have been added to the dinner table.

“You’ll meet somebody in a band the first week you’re in California. A guitarist. No, a drummer. They’re cuter and they don’t have such big egos.”

“Dream on.” Gretel laughs, but all the same, she’s feeling little pinpricks of hope.

By the time the salad is fixed, and the kids’ hands washed, Terry and her husband, Tim, who works in the accounting department at the LoPaccas’ bakery, have arrived.

“Oh, my God, Gretel, you look terrific.” Terry hugs Gretel as if they were once best friends, instead of acquaintances who might or might not smile when they passed each other on the street. “Jason’s sister,” Terry informs her husband. “It still breaks my heart,” she tells Gretel. “Every time I think about what might have been.”

When Eddie comes in, his hair wet from the shower, he makes a show of greeting his guests, as though the overcrowded, stifling kitchen really was his castle.

“No lasagna for me,” Tim says when Jill is about to serve him. “Just salad.”

“You don’t like lasagna?” Eddie asks.

“Let me put it this way,” Tim says. He has always been a fanatical Beatles fan, and refers to the group to prove any possible point. “I used to be Paul. Now I’m John.”

For some reason Gretel laughs out loud, then quickly covers her mouth with her hand.

Eddie stares at his brother-in-law. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Eddie,” Jill warns as she serves Terry, then the kids.

“No, really. Is that supposed to mean something?”

“It means nothing,” Terry tells Eddie. “Why are you even listening to him?”

“Who’s the walrus?” Tim goads his brother-in-law.

“Am I supposed to be Paul, and you’re John because you’re a superior being? Is that what you’re saying?” Eddie asks Tim.

“Will you just shut up?” Jill says. “Maybe you’re Ringo.”

“I don’t think so.” Eddie grins. “No way.”

When he smiles, Gretel can see why Jill fell for him in the first place. He definitely has his appeal. Later, as Jill is putting the two youngest kids to bed, and Terry is clearing the table, Eddie comes up behind Gretel while she’s washing the dishes.

“Did you ever think all you needed was a really great fuck?” he asks Gretel. He loves to do this, play with her, test her loyalty to Jill.

“You know what I’d really like?” Gretel whispers, her voice low and sweet.

Eddie puts his hands on her waist and moves closer.

“For you to do the pots.”

“Hey, baby, it’s your loss,” Eddie tells her when she tosses him the sopping-wet sponge. “Suffer.”

Gretel goes out to the patio, where they’ll be having drinks and dessert. There’s the smell of grass and of a barbecue in someone else’s yard.

“What a moron Eddie is,” Terry says as she pours Gretel a glass of wine. It’s still light enough so that Terry’s husband can toss a ball around with Leonardo, light enough so that Gretel can see tears in Terry’s eyes.

“Sorry.” Terry wipes at her tears. “I get this way when I think of your brother.”

Gretel knows this often happens when someone dies young, before he’s had time to completely disappoint or betray those who love him.

“You wouldn’t have been happy with him,” Gretel tells Terry, and it’s the truth. Her brother, Jason, was too wounded and too pure for anything as simple as happiness. “You would have been miserable.”

Out in the grass, Tim throws the ball to Leo, who manages to catch it every single time.

“I’ve got it!” Leo shouts. “Look at. me!”

“I try to tell myself the past is the past. Let it go.” Terry wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and pulls herself together.

Gretel stares past the fences which separated her yard from Jill’s. It was so long ago when they used to climb out their windows at night. In the summer, everyone else would be fast asleep with their windows wide open or their air conditioners turned on, but not them. They had too much to accomplish; they had their whole lives ahead of them.

“You know what they’re calling this street now?” Eddie asks when he comes out with some plastic chairs and a cooler of beer. “Suicide Alley.”

“What’s suicide?” Leonardo calls from the grass.

“Thank you so much for that lovely addition to his vocabulary,” Jill says to Eddie. She’s brought out the cheesecake she fixed early that morning, which she cuts into slices and serves on the little rose-patterned plates that her mother always said were too fragile for everyday use.

“Hey, it’s life. You want to protect him from everything.”

“That’s right,” Jill says. “I do.”

Gretel cracks up, and Jill joins right in.

“Was that funny?” Eddie asks. “Did I miss something?”

“Two girls killed themselves right down the street,” Terry informs Gretel. “Was it last week?”

“The last day of May,” Jill says. “Easy,” she calls to Tim after he pitches a fastball to Leo. “I want him to keep those teeth.”

“We had Newsday here interviewing everybody, and who do they pick to talk to? Those creeps who bought your old house, Gretel. They said this is an alienating neighborhood. Well, they’re definitely alienated now. No one will ever talk to them—not on this block. That’s for sure.”

“Sounds like they don’t care,” Gretel says.

Twilight is already falling, like ashes, in wavy purple clouds.

“Everybody cares,” Jill says.

 

 

 

 

That night, in the lower bunk of Leonardo’s bed, Gretel can’t sleep. It’s not the heat, or the sound of Leo grinding his teeth, that keeps her awake. It’s the deepness of the night; it’s the way her memories won’t leave her alone. A long time ago, Gretel set up a tightrope in her backyard, stretching a jump rope between two pine trees. She wore black ballet slippers that her grandmother had given her, and she carried a small paper parasol. She practiced for hours, but she couldn’t take a single step on the rope without falling. Once, as she was falling, she looked up to see Jill out in her yard. Through the grid of metal fences, Jill had been watching, but she never mentioned Gretel’s failure. In fact, if Gretel remembers correctly, Jill was the one to turn away.

Who will watch her now and not fault her for falling? Who will she call in the middle of the night? Who will talk until there’s nothing more to say? Gretel gets out of bed in the dark, silent and careful not to wake Leonardo. She pulls on some shorts, tucks in her T-shirt, and makes her way through the house, navigating with one hand on the wall. When she gets out to the yard she can see her old house, the angles of the roof, the chimney, the ivy. There is her bedroom window. There is the front door. There are the roses, whose scent carries in the thick night air.

It’s no surprise to find Jill out on the steps, drinking a cold beer. Jill always had trouble sleeping. Some people said it was a complete and total waste when Jill got pregnant and dropped out of school, and if truth be told, Gretel was one of them. Now, she’s not so sure.

“Bad dream?” Jill asks.

Gretel wishes nightmares were all that kept her awake. She cannot tell which disturbs her sleep more, the future or the past.

“It’s too hot,” she says.

If this were Gretel’s last night on earth she would want the moonlight to be like this, spilling out over the lawns.

“Too hot to handle.” In the silvery light, Jill looks as young as ever. She hands Gretel a cold beer from the cooler and grins. “I was the pretty one, you were the smart one.”

“Screw you,” Gretel says. “I was the pretty one.”

Jill starts to laugh. “Sorry,” she says when Gretel shoots her a look. “I love you anyway. Even if you are smart.”

They walk around to the front of the house, barefoot, and although Jill has finished her beer, Gretel brings hers along. They’re both tired, but the night is so hot, and by now they know they’ll never get to sleep. Gretel has to leave for the airport at five-thirty a.m., so she may as well stay awake and catch a nap on the plane. In only a few hours, she and Jill will cry beside the boarding gate, but now they’re sharing Gretel’s beer and taking their time, walking slowly, like tourists, even though this is a landscape they know inside out. The streetlamps cast a hazy glow, the light of a dream you’re not quite finished waking from. Fireflies drift across the lawns.

“This is the place where the two girls died.” Jill points across the street to a house that looks exactly like all the rest. “They killed themselves in the garage.”

Gretel wishes now that she’d worn shoes. The concrete retains heat; if anything, it seems to grow hotter at night. “What a way to go.”

“They made a secret pact. Their lives were screwed up. Boy problems. Family problems. The same exact troubles we had.”

Jill sounds calm, but her face looks funny. If she were anyone else, Gretel would swear she was about to cry.

“Stupid girls.” Jill shakes her head. “They should have just waited. That’s all they had to do. They would have grown up, and everything would have been all right.”

“I’m glad we waited,” Gretel says.

They stare at the garage where the two girls died. There’s a car parked in it now, and the door is locked, just in case any neighborhood kids get it into their heads to claim a souvenir. But there hasn’t been a news story about the incident in days, not even in the town paper, and over at the high school most people have dropped the subject completely. It’s only Jill who still comes here, and after tonight, even she won’t return. She’s glad that the weather is so perfect. The air is mild and wraps around you; it’s sweet when you breathe in and when you breathe out.

“Hey,” Gretel says. “Look at this.” She holds out her arm to show Jill that a firefly has landed on her skin. It blinks a pale yellow light—an SOS. A signal to the soul.

“Should we kill it?” Jill says.

They laugh like crazy at that. Two crazy girls on the sidewalk in the middle of a June night when everyone else in the neighborhood is safe in bed. As they’re laughing, the firefly floats away; it rises so high it’s impossible to tell where it is among the stars.

“It decided to live,” Gretel says.

Some things, after all, are as simple as that.

“Well, good for it.” Jill stares up through the trees, even though she knows she’ll never see that firefly again. “Good for us,” she says.