Shiver

4

From nine to twelve Wendy worked steadily, rarely looking up from her word processor. She typed briskly and accurately, using two fingers; in time with the tapping of the keys, columns of radium-green characters marched across the display screen, forming sentences, paragraphs, chapters. But not the great American novel or anything-just another booklet for Iver amp; Barnes Consultants, Inc.

Iver amp; Barnes was an actuarial firm specializing in pension plans for medium-size corporate clients. The people in the communications department, Wendy among them, had the task of explaining the complex plans to the clients’ employees. The most common approach was a pamphlet ten or twelve pages long, written in simple declarative sentences and illustrated with goofy little cartoons. Once you got the hang of it, the actual writing was ridiculously easy, almost mindless; long ago Wendy had learned that each new job involved merely rearranging the same basic phrases in slightly different patterns.

The department functioned as a halfway house for aspiring writers. They arrived fresh out of college, worked for a year or two, and moved on. All of the people who’d been there when Wendy arrived five years ago were long gone. Many had gone into publishing; a few of the braver ones had saved up money, then embarked on a freelance writing career.

But she remained, grinding out paragraphs and pages, going nowhere.

At noon she broke for lunch. She pushed the keyboard away from her and rose from her chair, yawning hugely, then damned Jennifer and her stereo system for the hundredth time. God, was she ever tired. Maybe food would revive her.

She walked the length of the department, passing rows of particleboard cubicles identical to her own. Her lunch was stashed in the compact refrigerator under the water cooler. Kneeling, she opened the fridge and found the brown bag marked with her name.

She was turning to go when she saw two of the newer writers, Kirsten Vaccaro and Monica Logan, approaching. They were deep in whispered conversation. As they came closer, Wendy caught a reference to the Gryphon.

Oh, no. She didn’t want to hear this. But before she could walk away, Monica spotted her.

“Hey, Wendy, you live on the Westside, right?”

Glumly she nodded. “Half a mile from here.”

“So are you scared out of your wits or what?”

“I… I guess so.”

“Sure glad I’m out in the Valley. You know, I’ll bet when they get this guy, he turns out to be one of those released mental patients.”

Kirsten frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“Because he’s obviously crazy. I mean, totally insane.”

Kirsten was thoughtful. “I don’t know. He’s got to be at least somewhat rational to avoid getting caught.”

“Rational? Him? No way. He’s foaming at the mouth.”

Having lingered long enough, Wendy felt she could permit herself to leave. She had taken her first tentative step away from the water cooler, the paper bag clutched in her fist, when Kirsten turned to her.

“What do you think, Wendy?”

She froze.

“Me?” she asked stupidly.

“Yeah. Is the Gryphon a certified psycho or not?”

She faced the two women, who were watching her expectantly. Hot panic swelled inside her. Nobody ever asked for her opinion. She had no idea what to say. Her mind had gone blank.

“Well, I…” She groped desperately for words. “I think… I think he probably can’t help doing what he does. Because none of us can really help it, right? Whatever we do. It all goes back to our childhood.”

Monica pursed her lips. “You’re saying the Gryphon is a victim of his childhood?”

Was she saying that? She supposed she was. It sounded kind of ridiculous, didn’t it? Or maybe not. She wasn’t sure. Monica and Kirsten were still looking at her, still waiting.

“He might be,” Wendy said cautiously, searching for a way to squirm free of the snare of words. “I mean, you could look at it like that. But it’s just an idea, that’s all. I guess I’m not really sure one way or the other…”

Her voice trailed off into embarrassed silence.

“Well,” Kirsten said dryly, “I don’t feel sorry for him, no matter how lousy his childhood might have been.” She turned back to Monica. “And I don’t think he’s crazy either. I think he’s just bad news, and when they catch the guy, they ought to string him up by his balls.”

“Ouch,” Monica said. “Nasty.”

“That’s me. The Torquemada of the typewriter,”

The two women laughed. Discussion continued. Wendy slipped away unnoticed. She was trembling.

She returned to her cubicle and sank into her swivel chair. She stared at the computer screen. A paragraph of text stared back at her, the cursor winking maliciously like an evil eye.

Slowly she opened the brown bag and removed a chicken-salad sandwich sealed in Saran Wrap, a can of Diet Sprite, two paper napkins, and a banana. While she ate, she scrolled through the work she’d done this morning, not seeing it, not seeing anything except her own humiliation.

She asked herself why she’d always been so deathly afraid of taking a stand, any kind of stand. Why she froze up like a deer in a splash of headlights the minute anybody asked her anything more controversial than the time of day.

She sighed. The answer, she supposed, was obvious enough; it was contained, in fact, in what she’d said at the water cooler, even though her presentation had been so inept that the logic of the idea had been impossible to follow.

Childhood was the key, the key to everything. The origins of any adult’s secret terrors and painful inadequacies could be traced back to those few precious years when a young life was molded and shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel.

That serial killer must have had a horrible childhood; people like him always did.

But not just people like him.

Wendy could point to no physical mistreatment that had scarred her as a child. No whippings, no molestations, no incarcerations in locked closets. But there were other forms of abuse.

For her entire adult life, she’d found it painfully difficult to think about her childhood or even to remember it. Those years were masked by a fog of amnesia. She hated that fog. Pieces of herself lay concealed behind it, hidden from her-stolen from her-erased from memory as if they’d never existed. But when she tried to poke holes in the fog bank, when she tried to see the truths veiled by smoke and darkness, her mind usually would make a sharp detour, and all of a sudden she would find herself thinking about what to make for dinner or what to wear at work. Oh, the mind was a wonderful thing, all right, and what it was most wonderful at was protecting itself. It put up walls and smokescreens and No Trespassing signs to keep you away from dangerous, forbidden, hurtful memories.

But sometimes she forced her mind to stay on track, to bring up the past and relive it, no matter how frantically some small scared part of herself tugged like a dog on a leash, fighting to pull free of such thoughts. Then, for a little while, she became a girl again, the timid, frightened girl who’d grown into the woman she was.

That girl’s father, Stanley Marshall Alden, had been the products inventory supervisor for the Cincinnati office of a nationwide manufacturer of metal containers. Wendy had never quite known what a products inventory supervisor was; she’d been afraid to ask. Stan Alden did not take kindly to any question that could be taken as a derogation of his responsibilities, his attainments, his earning power, or his manhood; all these concepts, she’d understood in the wordless way of a child, were intimately bound together in his mind.

Her mother, Audrey, had been a housewife and a Red Cross volunteer. Her duties at the Red Cross, which were never clearly specified, conveniently required her to be out of the house during most evenings and many weekends. Wendy was ten years old before she realized that Audrey Alden used her charity work as an excuse to avoid contact with her husband. She was fifteen before she permitted herself to know that her parents hated each other.

Why they’d stayed married, Wendy had no idea. That was another of those things she’d never dared to ask. She knew they were unhappy, though they tried desperately not to show it. She remembered her mother’s smile, a smile made of gritted teeth, and her father’s medicine cabinet, the shelves lined with antacids and headache pills. The internal pressure of all that unvoiced, unadmitted anger must have been considerable. To survive, her parents had needed a safety valve. They found one; it was named Wendy.

Their common misery, the one thing they shared and nurtured together, had been taken out on their only child. Her parents had been her constant critics, their appraising eyes and chilly voices the ceaseless barometers of her own worthlessness.

Whatever she did was wrong. If she got good grades she was called a perfectionist, a know-it-all, a smarty-pants; if she let her schoolwork slide, she was accused of being lazy, stupid, undisciplined. When she was quiet, she was told to stop acting so damn sullen; but if she forced a smile and fumbled her way through a joke, she was ordered to pipe down. She tried to please her parents by anticipating their criticism and using it on herself, remarking humbly on her clumsiness and obstinacy. “Show some self-confidence, for God’s sake,” her father would growl. Desperately she complied, fixing her hair and wearing her best dress, then announcing how pretty she looked. “Bragging doesn’t become you, young lady,” her mother would say in a flat scolding tone.

She couldn’t win. There was no way to satisfy them. If she changed her behavior, they changed their standards.

At times her parents, perhaps skewered by guilt, actually found something positive to say about her. The rare, unexpected praise only made things worse. She could have learned to accept any amount of criticism, as long as it was consistent; at least then her world would have been predictable. But switching signals were impossible to live with. She felt like a laboratory rat tortured by electrical stimuli that changed without warning from pleasure to pain. She could never adjust to a universe as plastic and shape-shifting as a nightmare.

And so, gradually, she retreated inside herself, hiding from life. As she grew older, she rarely went out, lost the few friends she’d made, began living vicariously through TV shows and books. She became afraid of people, not just her parents but people in general, all people. They were unpredictable and dangerous. She feared their watchful eyes, their closed faces, their secret judgments.

Yet at rare moments, impelled by some unstated need, she still had dared to reach out for life, to take risks. Small risks, to be sure, like a toddler’s mincing hesitant steps, but risks nonetheless.

Moving to Los Angeles had been the biggest chance she’d taken. After four friendless years at a local college, she kissed her folks goodbye, boarded a DC-10, and watched the Ohio River shrink into the haze of spangles frosting the airplane window. She’d never been sure, then or later, quite why she’d chosen L.A. as a place to relocate. Perhaps because it was a place where people went to start over, a big anonymous place without history or tradition, a place where the past didn’t count. Or perhaps merely because L.A. was about as far from Cincinnati as it was possible to get.

Whatever the reason, she’d chosen to make some kind of stand in this city, to become a new and better person, to leave childhood behind. But making a fresh start was harder than she’d expected; changing her life turned out to be more difficult than changing her address. And childhood, she learned, could not be left behind. Not ever.

The sudden shrilling of the phone on her desk startled her. She blinked, coming out of her reverie, and picked up the handset.

“Communications Department,” she said.

“Communicate with me,” a male voice purred.

“Hello, Jeffrey,” she said, automatically lowering her voice, even though there was no company rule against taking personal calls.

“Hello, dollface.”

Nervously she swiveled around in her chair, away from the doorway of her cubicle. “Don’t… don’t call me that.”

“You like it.”

She didn’t, actually, and she’d told him so, but Jeffrey never listened.

“You doing anything tonight?” he asked.

Silly question. Of course she wasn’t doing anything.

“No,” she answered.

“How about dinner, then? Six o’clock at the Mandarin House?”

“Okay.”

“Remember where it is?”

“I think so. The dragon place, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember.”

The dragon in question was a large papier-mache model that hovered over the central part of the restaurant, suspended from the ceiling by what looked like monofilament fishing line. She and Jeffrey had agreed it was the tackiest objet d’art they’d ever seen.

“Look, I’ve got to go,” Jeffrey said suddenly. “I think the key spot is melting the wax fruit. See you.”

He hung up before Wendy could reply.

As she cradled the phone, she found that she was smiling. She was glad Jeffrey had called. Even if he never gave her jewelry or… or much of anything.

With a shake of her head, she brushed that thought aside, then tossed the remnants of her lunch in the wastebasket, shrugged on her coat, and left for her walk. She took a walk every day on her lunch hour; and she always walked alone.

Quickly she made her way through the suite of offices to the reception area, then out into the long gray corridor. The elevator dropped her eight stories to the lobby, a mausoleum in brick and marble, enlivened by a few trees in large planters. She passed by the security guard at the front desk, pulled open the glass door, and stepped outside, blinking at the brightness of the day.

Within a short walk of the high rise was the Century City Shopping Center, an outdoor mall crowded with art galleries, clothing stores, a multiplex movie theater, and three department stores. Bullock’s, Crane’s, and the Broadway. She entered the mall and strolled down the main concourse, passing carts stocked with popcorn, hot pretzels, and cappuccino. A man selling flowers was serenading potential customers with a rendition of “On the Street Where You Live” in a loud, pleasant voice. Pausing to listen to the song, Wendy considered buying herself a flower; she decided against it. Too expensive.

As she reached the section of the mall devoted to restaurants, she encountered crowds of office workers from the nearby high rises. She disliked crowds. On impulse she entered Crane’s, hoping the store would be emptier.

It was. She wandered among the racks of women’s fashions, picking idly at dresses she knew she would never wear. Nearby was a glass display case crowded with wristwatches, cufflinks, rings, bracelets, and necklaces. Necklaces…

She stopped, staring at a necklace of gold squares strung together on invisible thread. It was exactly the sort of thing she’d been wanting for so long. The sort of thing she would have bought for herself in Santa Barbara, if she’d had the courage to go there.

“Oh, God, it’s gorgeous,” she whispered to herself, then glanced anxiously over her shoulder, afraid someone might have heard.

She took a step toward the display case, imagining how it would feel to have that necklace-so beautiful, so luxurious-touching the bare skin of her neck. Her hand rose, trembling, to her throat.

A thought ran through her mind, a crazy thought: How much does it cost?

She shook her head. It didn’t matter. Whatever the price, it was more than she could afford, even if she did pull down thirty grand a year and even if she did have a great deal of it squirreled away in a savings account-such a nice, safe, federally insured place to put your money, a place with no risks, no challenges, no excitement… like the lifestyle of a certain someone she could name.

I’ll think about it, she told herself.

She almost walked out of the store, then stopped, knowing that if she left, she would never come back.

Her gaze returned to the necklace. She touched her purse, silently reminding herself that inside it she would find a Crane’s charge card.

“No,” she whispered. This time she did not look around to see if anyone could hear. “You can’t. It’s crazy. It’s too… too impulsive.”

But that was the whole problem with her life, wasn’t it? She was never impulsive. Here at last was a chance to go a little wild, to buy a costly present for herself on the spur of the moment, for the sheer hell of it-a chance to blow a small chunk of her savings on something utterly impractical, something she didn’t really need, something she just wanted, yes, wanted, in the simple, uncomplicated way an animal or an infant wants food.

She had to have that necklace, dammit, simply had to. She ached to clasp it on her neck and feel its sinful weight against her breastbone.

“No,” she said again, but she barely heard herself; she was already walking up to the counter near the display case, where the male sales clerk was installing new batteries in an elderly man’s wristwatch.

She waited restlessly till the watch was ticking and the customer was satisfied. Then the clerk turned inquiringly to her. She asked in a voice that trembled only slightly, “How much is that necklace?”

He smiled. “Two hundred forty-nine dollars. It’s on sale.”

Oh, that was far too much. She couldn’t possibly. Just couldn’t. There was no way.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

The clerk raised an eyebrow. “Would you like to try it on first?”

“No. It’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine.”

He shrugged. “Okay.” He reached inside the display case and removed the necklace. It glittered magically. “Will that be cash, check, or charge?”

“Charge.”

The card was already in her hand. She gave it to the clerk, who ran a scanner over the bar code. Information on her charge account came up on the display screen of his computer terminal. The amber light glinted on his glasses as he briefly checked the file to see if her account was in good standing. It was, of course. She always paid on time.

The clerk smiled, apparently arriving at the same conclusion. “Here you are, Miss Alden,” he said, handing the card back.

A moment later the necklace was in a box, and the box was in a shopping bag, and the bag was in her hand.

“Thank you for shopping at Crane’s,” the clerk said as she walked away.

She nodded in reply, afraid to say anything, afraid to slow down, afraid she might change her mind, ask for her money back, do some crazy thing. And then she was out the door, free of the department store, having made her purchase, and she felt fine.

I did it, she thought proudly. I didn’t chicken out this time. I really for-God’s-sake did it.

When she went back to work, the words came easily. She tapped her foot as she wrote, keeping time to some melody playing in her head, a high, sweet, wonderfully secret melody only she could hear.