After Betsy leaves, Laurel Smith sits on the wicker couch in her tiny living room and looks out at the marsh. The sunlight is so bright it hurts her eyes.
Laurel realizes she needs to get out, she needs fresh air. She decides to go to the small market up the road, and Stella, the cat, follows her there. Laurel buys rye bread, a package of cheddar cheese, and three chocolate bars-Kit Kats, her favorite candy the whole time she was married and so depressed. At the last minute she asks for a box of low-tar cigarettes.
She has not smoked for four years, but now, on the walk home, she takes the cellophane off the box and lights one of the cigarettes. The smell of sulfur brings tears to her eyes. She has taken the long way home, and as she passes the dirt path that leads to the pond she notices the tire tracks of a bicycle. Laurel Smith dislikes and distrusts Betsy Stafford, but she realizes that some of the stink of Betsy’s fear has rubbed off on her. That is why she had a sudden urge for a cigarette, to replace that dank odor of panic with anything, even sulfur.
“Come on,” Laurel says to Stella. “Don’t you dare go in there. “
Stella is poised near the path leading to the pond, ready to run off through the brambles and weeds so she can hunt for turtles and geese.
Laurel crouches down. She stubs out her cigarette and claps her hands, then makes the hissing sound her cat usually responds to. Stella looks over haughtily, then jumps off the bank and walks down the road, ahead of Laurel. All the way home, Laurel thinks about Polly. She thinks of Polly putting in a new roll of film and mentioning a daughter, whose name Laurel has forgotten. A dancer, she thinks she remembers Polly saying, or a gymnast.
Polly, who had never divulged anything about her personal life before, had said to Laurel, “My daughter would love your hair. She wants to grow it till it’s as long as yours.”
Laurel turns off the road into her driveway.
Here, the ferns and maples give way to sea grass and sea lavender and reeds. The sight of the plastic lawn – furniture set out on the deck makes Laurel’s throat grow tight with longing. She realizes that Betsy Stafford is wrong. She has not lost the knack.
She has simply grown tired of talking with the dead.
■■■
The school board members ask Ed Reardon what will happen if Amanda cuts herself and bleeds on another child; they want to know if her saliva is dangerous. Not one of them is really listening when Ed explains that siblings of children with AIDS have shared toothbrushes and not come down with the virus. They don’t hear him when he insists their children are more likely to be run down by a truck in their own backyard than to contract AIDS from Amanda. Now Polly knows why she, Ivan, and Ed Reardon have all chosen to sit together on one side of the table. The accused.
■■■
“I don’t look sick, do I?” Amanda says.
“You look great,” Jessie says. “Your dress looks fantastic.”
Amanda smiles, but when they get to the door she feels scared. Scared she might throw up or something worse. She hesitates, until Jessie says,
“If anyone says anything mean to you, I’ll hit them.” Amanda laughs at that, especially because Jessie is so small. It’s strange, but even when she laughs she feels something hot behind her eyes. Sometimes she holds her breath and tries to imagine what it’s like to be dead. How would it be to leave her body behind?
She has never believed in heaven, but now she wonders. Sleep, white clouds, wings. Could she actually believe in that? No, she does not. It’s easier to think about becoming one with the earth. She could believe that; out of her body will come grass, roses, black-eyed Susans. She could almost believe that, if it weren’t happening to her.
■■■
Amanda knows he has come up behind her and is watching her, so she bends even deeper. She’s waiting for him to shout at her, but he doesn’t. He could kick her off the team if he wanted to, because of her illness. She has been thinking all summer about the meet next June, because it would help rank her in junior high. For a while she thought she wanted to be ranked first in her school so she could put it in her letter to Bela Karolyi when she wrote to him to beg him to take her on as his student. She has stopped thinking about trying to get Bela to be her coach, she has stopped thinking about junior high school. She wants to win the meet at the end of the term just to win it.
■■■
He and Sevrin were born in the same month, February, and ever since they were three they’ve had their parties together. They’ve been planning a dinosaur party for this year; they’ve already ordered rubber claws and fangs from a mail-order catalogue.
“Good luck making the soccer team,” Charlie says.
He knows that Sevrin’s crying, but he doesn’t care. He’s thinking about the ride home if you time it just right and take the bump on Ash Street at full speed your bike will go right up in the air and fly over the curb. He’s a little too old for birthday parties now anyway. They’re stupid. They’re for kids. They’re something he’s not even going to think about anymore.
■■■
Laurel does not know what all the children in town know; there is a shortcut, a dirt path through the pines, which allows them to ride their bikes from the marsh to the outskirts of town without having to pass the graveyard. The children have been taking this shortcut for so long most of them don’t even remember why they avoid this stretch of road. Some of them still get the chills just before they make the turn off into the woods. There is a sharp curve just before the graveyard, a place where the pines are especially tall; in bad weather the place is like a wind tunnel. Laurel always races her bike at this turn in the road, especially when there’s a moon and she can see the iron fence in the middle of the woods. She wonders about that fence, whether it’s meant to keep people out, or in.
It is dusk when Laurel stops, suddenly, as though she’d been pushed off her bike. The fence around the cemetery has turned green, and even from a distance it gives out a peculiar mossy odor, a mixture of rust and tears. There are not more than thirty headstones, and several of them have been cracked. Angels have been split in half, rain has worn away the features of little stone lambs and made them blind. There is a new cemetery on the other side of Route 16, so no one has been buried here for two hundred years, no one is remembered. It’s a place where grass can’t grow, where mockingbirds and crows nest in the boughs of the trees; they have plucked out so many of their feathers that in one or two of the hollows the earth looks black.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Laurel says out loud. Her head chums like a caldron, but she stands where she is, beside her bike. She waits for the dead, but they don’t come out to greet her. They don’t even whisper. Two inky feathers fall from the sky. “Say something,” Laurel Smith commands, but the silence goes on, broken only by twigs cracking and wind.
Laurel touches the tip of one of the iron brackets of the gate; it is sharp, it could easily cut her finger.
Darkness has fallen by the time Laurel gets back on the road, and when she finally turns onto Chestnut Street, she’s certain she won’t be noticed. After the blackness of the road and the woods, she’s always shocked to see the white houses on this street, the globes of light behind the windows, the tubs of chrysanthemums beside the front doors. Laurel rests her bike on the grass across the street; she can see into their kitchen window from here. Sometimes she sees them all at dinner, she can smell vegetable soup and broiled chops when the wind is right. She’s checked some of the other houses on Chestnut, peered into other kitchens and living rooms. She feels giddy when she does this,-she balances on the edge of window wells like a cat on a ledge. Sometimes she thinks the Farrells are just like anybody else, and it makes her feel good. She believes she knows what’s going on at their table, in their beds, just because she sees them through their window, but she has no way of knowing that Amanda can barely eat and that her lack of appetite seems catching, for half of the food Polly cooks is scraped into the trash. She has never imagined that as soon as dinner is gotten through, Charlie escapes to the basement like a turtle into his shell; that Polly and Ivan can no longer kiss, that their lips seem broken and their tongues don’t work; that Amanda can no longer swallow the vitamins her father gives her. She saves them in her cheek and when no one’s looking spits them out, her head leaning far into the toilet.
■■■
Dinner is over and there are plates of chocolate cake on the table.
■■■
Of course. He wants to telephone a hotline and speak to a stranger because there is no one he can talk to in this house anymore, there aren’t even words to use. Amanda glares at her parents, defying them to try to comfort her.
“Amanda,” Polly says. “Please.”
“Please what?” Amanda fires back. “Please just die and get it over with?”
■■■
Nobody tries to stop Amanda as she runs outside. The screen door slams behind her and her breathing is coming hard. It’s black outside with just the first few stars high above the trees. Amanda runs into the driveway and then in a zigzag across the lawn, but when she gets to the sidewalk she stops and starts to cry. Stupid, but it was only at the dinner table that she realized in order to die of a disease you really have to die and not come back. She stands on the sidewalk with her sneakers straddling the cracks in the cement and covers her eyes with her hands.
Across the street, Laurel Smith grabs the sleeves of her cardigan and pulls the wool over her fingers.
Amanda’s pale hair hangs limply, like unwound silver thread in the dark. She doesn’t make any noise when she cries, but her whole body shakes. After a while someone opens the back door.
“Amanda?” Polly calls in a high, frightened voice. “Honey?”
Laurel doesn’t move until Amanda turns around and walks back to the house.
Her breath is all jumpy, filled with strange little sobs that don’t quite come out and don’t stay inside either. She thinks of herself watching, peeking into other people’s lives through the dark, and she’s disgusted.
When she goes inside she rifles through the kitchen cabinet, gets a can of tunafish and eats standing up, as though she’d been starved. Then she takes down a bag of flour and some brown sugar, and by midnight she has finished a perfect fluted crust for a pie. In the morning she gets into her car and goes back to Chestnut Street. The pie is wrapped in aluminum foil and Laurel has also brought a bunch of pink mallows, marsh flowers so huge they look as if they’ve been grown on another planet. The apple pie is still warm, the flowers only slightly wilted. As she waits for someone to answer the door, Laurel switches the strap of her canvas pocketbook from one shoulder to the other. Being here in the daylight, Laurel feels nervous, much the way her clients react to their first seance. As she walked up to the Farrells’ back door, things looked unbalanced and out of focus. She has never been at ease with people,- when she was married she could never call her husband by his name, and he often complained that she never looked him full in the face but went out of her way to crouch down and greet stray cats.
“I heard that your daughter was sick, so I came to visit her,” Laurel says. “I brought a pie.”
“You should have waited,” Polly says. “She’s not dead yet.”
Laurel steps backward, as if she’d been slapped.
She catches the heel of her shoe on the step that needs fixing and winds up sprawled on her hands and knees. Polly quickly opens the screen door to help.
She picks up the pie and lifts the foil,- only one side of the crust has been bashed in. She folds the foil back over the pie tin.
“You have to watch out for that step,” Polly says.
“We’re all so used to it, we never trip.”
“You don’t have to invite me inside if you don’t want to,” Laurel Smith says.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” Polly says. “Why are you here?”
“I just thought most kids liked apple pie,” Laurel says. “I always loved it.”
The pie tin feels warm in Polly’s hands.
“I’ll get Amanda,” Polly says.
Laurel Smith follows Polly inside,- she sets the flowers down on the table while Polly calls down to the basement for Amanda.
“She’s practicing gymnastics,” Polly explains.
■■■
“Amanda,” Polly calls again.
“I’m practicing,” Amanda yells, and her voice breaks a little with the effort.
“Come on up anyway,” Polly calls.
Amanda is lying about practicing; for the past two hours all she’s been doing is sitting on a gray mat listening to her Madonna cassette. Today when she woke up she thought to herself, I’m not going to be in woke up she thought to herself, I’m not going to be in the finals, and as soon as she thought it she knew it was true. She doesn’t have the strength or the stamina. Her legs have been aching, simple moves she knows by heart leave her dizzy and short of breath. Amanda pulls her knees up and hugs them to her chest. She bends her head down, and when she breathes out she can feel her warm breath on her skin. Where, she wonders, does the breath go when you die?
Laurel Smith is still standing when Amanda comes upstairs,- she has not been invited to sit down.
Amanda’s wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans,-she knows her mother has a guest, but she doesn’t look at either woman. She leans up against the refrigerator and studies the floor.
“This is Laurel,” Polly says. “The woman I’ve been photographing. She brought a pie.”
Amanda looks up. “I don’t eat pie,” she says.
“It’s fattening.”
Amanda is so thin Laurel can see her bones, fragile as a bird’s.
“Maybe you’d like these,” Laurel says. She holds out the flowers.
“Are they real?” Amanda asks. And, before she can stop herself, she adds, “They’re beautiful.”
“Pink is my favorite color,” Laurel says.
“Mine, too,” Amanda says carefully as she appraises Laurel, staring mostly at Laurel’s hair, which hangs to her waist, except on each side where the hair is pulled back into an intricate French braid.
“I could teach you to do your hair like this,” Laurel says.
Polly narrows her eyes; she realizes that she has read Amanda’s mind just as easily as Laurel has.
“Yeah?” Amanda says.
“Would that be okay?” Laurel asks Polly.
“I’m sure you’re busy,” Polly says.
“No,” Laurel says. “The most important thing I have to do today is buy cat food.”
“You have a cat?” Amanda asks, as if this were the most fascinating piece of information she’d ever heard.
“Grandma and Grandpa are coming over,” Polly says weakly,
“Not for a while,” Amanda says. She looks very small, and younger than her age. “Oh, please!” Polly and Laurel Smith look at each other.
“All right,” Polly says.
Amanda runs off to get a brush and some rubber bands.
“Why are you doing this?” Polly says, suspiciously. She figures she has a right to be suspicious when a woman who communes with spirits wants to brush her daughter’s hair.
“She’ll look pretty with her hair braided,” Laurel Smith says. “Don’t you think so?”
Amanda and Laurel go out onto the porch.
Through the window, Polly can see Laurel, sitting behind Amanda, brushing her hair. Polly should tell Laurel Smith to leave; they don’t need any help from strangers. If one of their friends or neighbors had offered them anything at all, Polly would have taken the pie from Laurel Smith, then shut the door and put the pie in the refrigerator, behind the cartons of orange juice and milk. Instead, she watches through the window and cries.
“How long did it take you to grow your hair that long?” Amanda asks Laurel.
“The last time I cut it I was fourteen,” Laurel says. Then she adds, “I can tell you use conditioner. You don’t have any knots.”
Amanda smiles. She’s usually shy around adults, but Laurel Smith doesn’t seem very much older than she is. It’s as if they were both teenagers, and Amanda’s glad she’s not wearing her stupid Smurf T-shirt.
“Have you ever been in love with anybody?” Amanda asks Laurel.
“Not yet,” Laurel Smith admits.
“Me either,” Amanda says.
“I’ve been in like,” Laurel Smith adds.
“I don’t think that’s the same,” Amanda says.
“No,” Laurel says. “You’re right, it’s not.”
Laurel reaches into her pocketbook for a mirror.
“Take a look,” she tells Amanda.
Amanda stares at herself and smiles broadly, forgetting to keep her mouth shut so her braces won’t show.
“I love it,” Amanda says.
“Maybe someday you can visit me at my house,” Laurel Smith says. “I know you’d like it. It’s right on the marsh.”
“Are you just saying that because you think I’ll die before I can come over?” Amanda says.
Laurel can feel bumps rise along her arms and legs.
“That was a horrible thing for me to say,” Amanda says. “I’m horrible.”
Laurel and Amanda are sitting side by side now, their legs swung over the broken step.
“Sometimes I make chocolate mousse tarts with chocolate chips,” Laurel Smith says. “If you want me to, I can teach you how to make them.”
“All right,” Amanda says. “That sounds great.”
■■■
Amanda couldn’t eat lunch today, and now she feels like crying. They hate her, she knows. She doesn’t even blame them; she hates herself too, not all of her, just this thing that’s inside her. At first, she didn’t really believe it because when she looked at herself in the mirror, she looked exactly the same, just thinner. She used to tell herself all she had to do was wait and they’d find some shot or pill they could give her. Now, every night before she goes to sleep she tells herself that she’s going to die. She repeats it to herself, calmly, carefully, rolling the words on her tongue.
■■■
She is never going to be one of Bela’s students.
She will never go to college or drive a car. She wonders if it will feel blue and watery, the way things felt when she was knocked down by a huge wave at Crane’s Beach two summers ago. Sound overtaken by soundlessness. Heat replaced by cold pressure.
Amanda runs her tongue along the silver band over her teeth. “Dumbbell,” she tells herself. “Dope.”
She wants to make it to the last meet in June.
That is all. She thinks no further than that. Practice is hard for her now. She feels sick afterward; once, she had to leave the gym so she could lock herself into one of the toilet cubicles and throw up. At least her floor exercise hasn’t suffered; she’s got a great routine.
hexafu 