Howie and I have not just hit on a path to victory, but the jackpot for being smothered in love gravy. It’s a bonanza of affection that satisfies so many needs. But the warm glow of any success proves challenging to sustain in the midst of a Salem winter. The bricks freeze, the streets empty, and the natives get restless.
And so does Amanda. Feeling left out of the adventure Howie and I are on, she voices her dissatisfaction and Howie promptly offers to take her on a date. He wears a sports jacket similar, but frumpier, to the corduroy job he wore in the Mr. November spread, and dons a pink tie, to the amazement of all. “A bit of dining at the York Steak House for the lady?” he asks in his best Clouseau, pinning a corsage to her red gingham dress. “Followed by a little Revenge of the Pink Panther?”
“Mama!” Amanda squeals. “A corsage! A corsage!”
My sister’s joy can’t be contained.
* * *
The next morning Carly tells us an odd story of how she and Howie put Amanda to bed after the movie and then Amanda sleepwalked into their room in the middle of the night. They called to her but she ignored them and proceeded to step into a big bag behind the bathroom door filled with toilet paper rolls.
“It looked like she was in a sack race,” Howie chuckles.
“It looked like she wanted to pack up and live with us,” Carly gives her own impression. “Poor little pooh seemed so lonely.”
Atjeh and I retreat to my room after breakfast, reading comics and Hustlers on the bunk. The door swings open without a knock and Gretchen appears, shaking a Howie flier at me from down below.
“My sistah found this in the guhls’ room at the high school yestahday,” says Gretchen, her voice like foil on fillings.
“What are you doing in my room?” I groan. Atjeh, who I’d pulled up the slatted ladder to laze alongside me, raises her eyebrows sleepily at the sound of Gretchen’s voice. She makes a jealous Her again? teeth gnash, smacks her lips, and drops back to sleep.
Gretchen climbs the ladder, jamming herself between me and my dog. I let Howie’s Hustler slip down the back side of the bunk between the bed and the wall, safely out of sight.
“How come you didn’t ask me to bring it ovah there? You know my sistah goes to the high school.”
“I don’t know. It was some girl from Dunkin’ Donuts. I didn’t do it.” I feel defensive, and annoyed.
“Who? Mahcy? Was it Mahcy Dubriel?”
“I don’t know her name. She does gymnastics.”
“That’s Mahcy. She’s a wicked bitch. I can’t believe yuh gave these to huh!”
What is it about me? I’m like a magnet for the weirdos—mutant girls, outcasts, bullies.
“She seems nice to me.” Nicer than you, I want to say. It’s a miracle Howie likes me at all, now that I think about it. The one person in this town I genuinely want to be around who feels the same way.
“Whatevah,” Gretchen repeats, then starts to explore my room. She leans over the edge of the crate to look at Bunny Yabba. “There’s no rabbit in here. Just his dookies.”
OK, two people. Grandma Wini never equivocates—the unambiguous maharani of love.
“Good-bye…” I nudge from the top bunk, staring at the ceiling.
“What’s in this closet?”
I pop up. A shriek of adrenaline stabs me in the throat. She fingers the latch. “Stay outta there!” I shout as the door flings open.
“Oh my gahd. There’s a frickin’ million paypahs in here. Didn’tcha delivah these? What the hell?” She laughs, kneels down to rifle through the little landslide that’s spreading across the shiny green paint of the floorboards. “And Hustlahs? Lookit all these dirty mags!”
I flip over the side of the bunk, scraping my stomach on the wooden lip as I slide down. Atjeh leaps after me, spinning on her paws before banging into Bunny Yabba’s crate. I try to slam the door to the closet shut but it’s blocked by the surge of yellowing North Shore Sundays. Papa can’t know. Atjeh starts digging at the pile as if a wharf rat just disappeared down a hole in the floor. She shreds dozens of papers as she burrows, destroying the collector’s edition scratch ’n’ sniff issue of Hustler—“WARNING: to be smelled in the privacy of your home”—before I can tackle her. Not anymore.
Gretchen starts laughing again, that Salem townie laugh that betrays an accent, even though there are no r’s or aw’s to soften it. That chortling version of fahkin’ A versus fucking A, yuh muthah versus your mother. Atjeh must smell my shame over the scratch ’n’ sniff because she turns from the tattered ribbons of newspaper and hops to her hind legs, black nostrils flaring, white eyes reddening with fury, and slams her front paws right into Gretchen’s little boobs, pointed teeth clacking shut with a spray of tongue lather, a hairsbreadth from Gretchen’s stunned face. The girl falls backward, wailing: “Get yuh dahg offa me! She’s gunna kill me! She’s gunna kill me!”
I grab Atjeh by the collar and fling her aside, watch her spin across the floor.
I turn back to Gretchen but she’s out of the room and down the hall, shrieking at the top of her lungs: “That dahg tried to kill me! I’m tellin’ my fahthah! I’m tellin’ my fahthah!”
I trail her down the stairs, through the second-floor hall, and around the bannister to the second set of stairs, which empty at the door to the living room. Carly is leading her first women’s group, and Mama is sitting on the stairs just outside, within earshot but not participating, reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
“Shush!” Mama hisses. “What the hell is going on? Gretchen? What are you … What’s wrong honey?”
“His stupid dahg…” Her normally alabaster cheeks are splotched red. She can’t catch her breath. “My face … bit … my sweatah…”
“That’s it,” Mama says, menacingly. “That dog is out of here this weekend.”
“What? No! It’s not her fault. She didn’t bite her … she was … defending me. She thought Gretchen was going to…”
“Was going to what? Gretchen? Little Gretchen? What was Gretchen going to do to you?” She points at the frantic girl who is pulling on her down vest and heading for the foyer. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“He nevah delivahd his paypahs,” Gretchen shouts, standing before the open front door and pointing at me. “Look in his clahset. Theahs a million paypahs in theah. And pahno magazines! I’m tellin’ my fahthah that. And he can get yah fieahd from the Naht Shah Sunday and get tha dahg catcha’ to come and put that stupid mutt ta sleep. That’s what he’s gunna do!” She screams this last part at the top of her lungs. Her voice cracks in a way that makes me laugh out loud. Mama whips around and glares at me. Gretchen, hair flying in all directions with the wind, screams again, even louder, as impossible as that seems: “I FAHKIN’ HATE YOU, YOU LOOZAH!!!” And with that, turns and runs down the front steps without closing the door behind her.
“Jesus Christ,” Mama says, palms out toward me, begging for an explanation. “Are there papers in your room? Papers you never delivered?”
“A few,” I lie to the defunct iron heating grate at my feet.
“I want you to go upstairs,” Mama says softly, moving to close the door against the wind, “and get Atjeh and get those papers and go bring them to the houses that are still waiting for them.”
“Mom! They’re old. And it’s Thursday! Come on!”
“Deliver every last one of them, and then take that dog and tie her up in the backyard.”
“I’ll keep her in my room. I’ll bring her food up…”
“In. The back. Yard.” She grabs me by the ear and drags me to the stairs.
“I’ve never had an orgasm…” A woman’s voice trails from the living room. “I mean, not with Bruce.”
“Go!” Mama whisper-yells.
“I come all the time, but only when I’m watching the soaps.” A chorus of women’s laughter erupts from just beyond the doorway.
“Ugh!” Mama pushes me to the stairs. “And don’t come back until they’re all where they belong.”
“So what is it about the soaps that allows you to let go?” Carly’s tender voice rises from below and slows my climb. She’s been attracting more women to these groups which, until now, have been held at semipublic locations. It’s no wonder—her gentle, embracing style carries over seamlessly to the work. “And how can you bring that spirit into your bedroom so you—and your husband—can both enjoy it?”
“Can we bring Dr. Chuck Tyler in with us? That would be a good start!” The suggestion is rewarded with huge, raucously dangerous lady laughter.
Back in my room, Atjeh watches with that unconditional dog love face as I pull all the papers from my closet. I put about thirty or forty in my paperboy bag and set it by the door. The rest I bunch into seven stacks, each about two feet high, bind them with kite string and, one by one, hoist them out the window onto the thin blanket of snow covering the flat roof. I’ll deal with them later.
I take Atjeh outside, tie her to the Seckel tree with the long rope, and leave her whimpering between the frost heaves and roots. It’s too windy and cold to ride the Apollo so I set off on foot, heading up Winthrop Street. I turn on Endicott and stop, staring at a slick and steaming manhole cover. Wherever I start dropping these things, it’s going to be arbitrary. And whatever papers I deliver might be a week old, or they might be six months old. Whatever sequence there might have been—and there wasn’t much of one—it’s been completely disrupted by the avalanche Gretchen started, then scrambled into an Atjeh omelette. I twirl slowly in place, looking for a spot to dump them, but there’s nothing—just houses and yards and open streets. No garbage cans. No Dumpsters. I wish I could just open the manhole and stuff the whole load under the street.
I resume my trudge, turn on Summer, again on Prescott, and make a quick loop back to Winthrop. Halfway down there’s a large wooden box on the sidewalk, hinged and latched with a rusty, open padlock. I scan the neighborhood for spies and, seeing none, unhook the lock with an angry metal scrape. A shiver, uncontrollable, shakes me beneath the stiff wool of my peacoat.
The box is full of salt, oversized gray and black crystals stored for snow emergencies, piled so high there’s virtually no room for the newspapers. But having started this thing I can’t seem to stop, even if the mission is utterly futile. Every drop of blood in my body surges with a message to my brain: ABORT. But my muscles are acting on their own, desperate to be rid of the secrets that have been piling up. I can’t come home with them again, but I can’t leave them on my neighbors’ doorsteps, either. They’ll know. They’ll report me. I’ll lose my job and everyone will say He never delivered! He stole our stupid Naht Shah Sundays! They’ll brand me with a scarlet T for thief.
I force the musty papers into what small spaces are left inside, smooshing them, folding, crumpling, and rolling them into the salt box. A fine spray of sea air and February rain twists around me and showers the belly of the box as I lean into it, softening the newsprint and turning the secrets from my closet into a formless batter of guilt. Sharp moles of dirt and salt freckle the mass. It’s melting. Melting. And then …
“Get the hell outta that frickin’ salt box, ya dumb kid!” The lady, still in her sweat-stained nightgown at noon, is apoplectic, squawking from a rickety porch above me.
I freeze, face cast down into the dark mess of the box.
“Get outta theah, I said! It ain’t yah trash can, dumbass. Out!”
I refill my bag with the sludge and skulk through the back side of our neighborhood where I am less likely to be seen. The people who live in the house behind ours are renovating their garage. A Dumpster sits on the curb, filled with fragments of wood and plaster. I sigh at the nasty irony—it was here all along—and dump the salty bolus of bad memories into its belly.
I return to find Atjeh croaking against her collar, unable to escape the confines of that pitiless rope. The last of her claws have been scraped raw in a circular trench she’s dug racing round and round the pear tree. She barks sharply, trapped in the turned and frozen dirt of her backyard prison. A squall hits: thousands of loose pages of remaining North Shore Sundays I had left on the flat roof two stories above, their reports of weeks long past, cascade and whip around me in a vicious circle, the sorry smell of my closet lost at last to the gray skies of Salem.
* * *
“Not delivering the papers … not getting good grades … not doing the Hebrew study…”
“You said you don’t care if I get a bar mitzvah,” I latch onto this sole chink in my father’s angry armor.
“I don’t. That’s off the table. But I care that you work. Hard.”
“But—”
“And I don’t mean the ‘campaign.’ No more play time.”
I suck in my breath, “You’re not—”
“Oh, yes, I am. Discussion over. Get to work. From now on, you focus on grades raised and papers delivered. Votes come last.”