The Sugar House

chapter 10

HIGHWAYS WERE TOO CONDUCIVE TO THINKING, AND Tess didn’t want to be alone with her own thoughts. She bypassed 97, smooth and new, and took Route 2, the old Governor Ritchie Highway. It was a relief to concentrate on the stop-and-go traffic and potholes, rather than reflect on her almost-dinner with Arnie.

The thing was, he was right: She did take things too personally, and now she had made an enemy for no good reason. Even sleazeballs had their uses. Especially sleazeballs. Her mother’s voice scolded inside her head, recounting the virtues of honey versus vinegar, vis-à-vis fly catching. Then Ritchie Highway rewarded her with its endless snarls and wretched drivers, and Tess managed to crawl outside of her own head and stay there for most of the way back to Baltimore.

Her brain kicked in again as she crossed the Patapsco on the Hanover Street Bridge. By force of habit, she glanced west first, toward the boat house. No one on the water at this time of day, this time of year. Then her eyes tracked east, toward the Key Bridge, Fort McHenry, and Locust Point.

Locust Point. What if Sukey had been lying about everything? Or not lying exactly, but so desperate to please that she had made up the little shred of conversation with Jane Doe, just to have something to say, just to please another grown-up. Tess decided to detour through Locust Point and question the girl again, ever so gently. She couldn’t get back the time she had already dribbled away, but she could stop throwing good effort after bad. Why did she even care who owned Domenick’s? The bar’s screwed-up license didn’t have anything to do with Jane Doe. Once again, she had mistaken momentum for progress.

So, find Sukey, put it down. The only problem was, Tess couldn’t remember the girl’s last name, or where she lived, and she didn’t want to wander the streets of Locust Point, asking if anyone knew a round-cheeked girl named Sukey, given to fantastic tales.

The mini-mart at the gas station seemed a logical place to start.

“ Try Latrobe Park,” advised Brad the convenience store manager. “She got a new book out of the rack today, said she was going to read.”

“A little raw to read outside, isn’t it?”

“She always says to me she doesn’t like to be inside unless she has to.” Brad tapped his forehead. “She’s odd, that girl. She’ll tell you blue is orange, and not know the difference herself. She can’t help it. When she’s saying it, she believes it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.”

Tess left her car and walked to the park. Locust Point was a strange mix of residential and industrial. It seemed amazing that people would have chosen to live cheek by jowl with marine terminals and manufacturing plants, but this had been the norm for Baltimore ’s lower-middle-class families after World War II. If there were still good jobs here, it might still be the norm. Today’s kids, faced with so few opportunities, left these neighborhoods readily enough, but the older folks stayed on and on. Down at Wagner’s Point, where the neighborhood was little more than a toxic dump, people had fought leaving even when the city announced a buyout.

It was home, they said. How can you put a price on my home?

Tess found the swings, but Sukey was nowhere in sight. She sat in one, imagining she could channel Jane Doe, that the young woman had left some trace of her identity on this rectangular piece of wood. The autopsy said she could be anywhere from her late teens to her early twenties, but Tess knew, just knew, she was on the younger edge of that range. Maybe seventeen, eighteen tops.

She dragged her toes in the groove beneath the seat, much too long-legged to make it go. And much too old, not that such a consideration would have stopped her. She remembered the wondrous discovery that a swing would move, would soar ever higher, through the simple pumping action of one’s own legs. Her earliest physics lesson. Actually, her only physics lesson. At seventeen, informed that she was not required to take any more science classes under state law, Tess had decided she knew enough about light and particles and inertia.

At seventeen, she thought she knew enough about everything.

Seventeen. Junior year. She had a boyfriend, she was on the honor roll and the track team, and she could make calories disappear by sticking her finger down her throat. She ate whatever she wanted and never gained weight, thanks to her magic finger. Poor Billy Baker. She couldn’t have been fun to kiss, given her hobby, but he never complained. They had met in his parents’ basement rec room after school, stealing shots from the wet bar, messing around, solving a few algebra problems in their downtime. Latchkey kids. Funny to think about all the dire predictions people had made about such arrangements.

Funny to think how many of them had come true. And yet here she was, relatively unwarped, and Billy was a lawyer last she heard. Corporate, on a partner track with a staid firm, but with a little do-gooder vein, which he indulged through the board of some nonprofit. The thing was, every generation had done such things, but parents once had the good taste not to confront their children so directly. The more the behavior was dragged out into the open, the worse things seem to be. If Tess’s parents, God forbid, had sat down with her and tried to have a Meaningful Chat about contraception and alcohol and marijuana-and how using the second two tended to compromise one’s ability to focus on the first-she would have felt obligated to find other ways to rebel.

A string of popping sounds and a girl’s high, thin wail jolted Tess out of Billy Baker’s basement. Once, she might have mistaken the strangely hollow sound for gunfire, but Tess knew the kind of noises guns made. Yet the girl’s cry was clearly a distressed one, almost involuntary. The sequence repeated itself-pop-pop-pop, the thin, keening wail.

Tess jumped to her feet, but the source of the noise was hard to track in the open park, where sound bounced erratically, competing with the chatter of seagulls and the traffic along Fort Avenue. Tess began to walk swiftly in what she hoped was the right direction. She climbed a small rise, so she was now looking toward the Patapsco River ’s Middle Branch. The day was cold, but bright, and the water appeared darker and bluer than it normally did, with diamond-bright froth on the breakers. Three boys ran into her line of vision, tossing something. She heard the pops again, saw long thin lines of smoke rising above their heads. Firecrackers.

Another scream, and there was Sukey, well ahead of the three boys, but steadily losing ground, perhaps because she was running with her hands clutched to her head, a paperback book pressed against one ear.

“Jesus, drop the book, Sukey,” Tess muttered to herself, even as she found her own legs sprinting across the park. “You can always get another goddamn book.”

She was running on an angle, trying to intersect the boys before they reached Sukey. She wished she had her gun, then damned the wish as irresponsible and callow. Waving one’s gun in public was not effective problem solving. Besides, any one of these boys might have a gun, or another weapon.

The bottom line was, she had nothing.

Except her mouth. A stray piece of poetry flickered through her brain-All I have is a voice-and she found a banshee cry rising in her throat. If it startled her, it flabbergasted them. The boys stopped, taking in this strange apparition, this Amazon of the Patapsco, this Valkyrie, running toward them and screaming.

“What the fuck?” one asked, while the others merely gaped, open-mouthed, providing an excellent view of South Baltimore dentistry, or the lack thereof.

Now just a few feet from the boys, Tess slipped her backpack from her shoulder and began swinging it by the strap, screaming all the while and continuing to run straight toward them. She thought, to the extent that she was thinking at all: They’re going to stop in their tracks from sheer shock, and then run away, or they’re going to attack me instead of Sukey, and she can run for help.

Instead, they began screaming and laughing, pointing their fingers at her and chanting, presumably the same chant they had been using to torment Sukey.

“Fat pig, fat pig, fat pig, fat pig.”

The words hurt, nonsensical as they were, or would have hurt if she hadn’t been almost blind in her rage and fear. How could anyone tell children that only sticks and stones caused pain? Tess felt as if she were thirteen again, running from the neighbor boy, Hector Sperandeo. He had done far more harm with his taunts than with the lacrosse ball he slammed repeatedly into the small of her back. But she wasn’t running away this time. These boys were thin and gawky, South Baltimore rednecks so malnourished from their junk food diets that they probably had rickets or scurvy. She could take them.

She saw the tallest boy pull another firecracker from the pocket of his denim jacket and light it with a Bic, holding it aloft with a snarky grin. Twirling her knapsack like a bolo, she swung it forward and landed it in his midsection, knocking him to the ground, the burning firecracker still clutched in his hand.

“Let it go, Noonie, let it go,” one of the others screamed as the stunned boy tried to get his breath. “You’ll lose a finger, the way Joey Piazza did.”

The boy uncurled his fingers and the firecracker rolled away, but only a few inches. One of the other boys then kicked it with his foot, just before the fuse burned out. Set off in the grass, it seemed so innocuous. Pop-pop-pop, a small puff of smoke. Tess watched to make sure it didn’t ignite the dry grass.

Noonie clambered to his feet, still breathing heavily. All three looked at Tess uncertainly. Logic must have told them she was no threat-she was alone, and a female at that, armed with nothing more than a knapsack.

Then again, what kind of adult acted this way? They smelled something crazy on her. They backed away, sneers in place, but just barely.

“Fat pig has a dyke friend,” said the one she had knocked down. Noonie, the group’s alpha male.

“Dyke,” the others echoed. “Ugly dyke.”

They turned and ran, Noonie calling back over his shoulder. “Too bad for you. You have to be a boy to get the fat pig to drop her pants. Not that any boy wants her.”

Tess didn’t bother to reply. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb from her body; she needed to concentrate so her legs wouldn’t shake too visibly. When they were out of view, she turned and walked over to Sukey. Good thing she hadn’t needed the girl to run for help. She was rooted to the spot, silent tears coursing down her bright red cheeks, her latest paperback novel held so tightly in one hand that it had started to bow.

“What was that about?” Tess asked, then realized what a stupid question it was. What was it ever about? It was about being an adolescent, about needing to make someone else as miserable as you were.

“They do it all the time,” Sukey said, her voice casual and grown-up, as if she were trying to deny the tears on her face. “They steal firecrackers from the rail yard, throw them in people’s yards and back porches. They don’t like me because I won’t…go with them. We’re in the same class, and I do better ’n them. That’s all.”

Tess knew it wasn’t close to all, but she let it go.

“Let me walk you home.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.” Sukey’s usually sweet voice was fierce.

“Well I do. Walk me to my car?”

Those were terms Sukey could accept. They began walking. Tess noticed the girl was studying her in a sidelong glance, trying to match her stride for stride, although her legs were so much shorter.

“Were you scared?” Sukey asked, as they waited to cross Fort Avenue.

“Petrified. But I was angry, too. So angry I didn’t have time to think. I shouldn’t have hit the one boy, Noonie, but I couldn’t think of anything else. It would serve me right if there was a cop on my doorstep tonight, ready to take me in for assault.”

“It was self-defense,” Sukey said. “And everyone knows Noonie is an asshole.”

“Strangely, being an asshole is not considered a mitigating circumstance. Besides, it’s not up to the cops to sort out whether something is self-defense. That’s why it’s a better idea not to resort to violence. Luckily”-Tess grinned-“they didn’t get my name. What are they going to do, go to the district and swear out a complaint on Tall Dyke with Braid?”

Sukey laughed. A little shakily, but she laughed.

“Are you a dyke? I mean-a lesbian?”

“No. You know, someone calling you a name doesn’t make you that name.”

Sukey’s voice was about as low as it could be and still be audible. “I’m fat. They say I’m a fat pig, and they’re right.”

It was a test, and Tess wasn’t sure she could pass it. What did Sukey want her to say?

“Here’s a break in the traffic. Let’s run for it.”

They scampered across the lanes. A pickup honked, some Baltimore grit boy, grinning stupidly at them.

“Wanna get high?” he called from his window.

“Not with you,” Tess said, then regretted her flippancy. But if she had gone into some zero-tolerance swoon, Sukey would have fingered her for a hypocrite.

On the other side of the street, Sukey said: “See, he asked you, not me. Because I’m fat.”

“He didn’t ask me. He asked some girl he saw flouncing across the street. He asked an ass, he asked a pair of breasts. Not me, Sukey. My parts. When you’re a female between the ages of fifteen and fifty, life is a chop shop and you’re a Toyota Corolla.”

Sukey would not be comforted. “Maybe they start with your parts and work up to seeing a whole you. It has to begin somewhere, somehow. But with me, all they see is a blob.”

“You’re not a blob.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me I have a pretty face, too?”

Tess stopped walking. She wanted to touch Sukey, to pat her arm or take her hand, but she sensed the girl would recoil at any physical contact, no matter how small.

“Do you brush your teeth every day?”

“Huh?”

“I asked if you brush your teeth every day.”

“Of course I do, after every meal.”

“Then you’ve looked in a mirror and you know you have a pretty face. I don’t have to tell you that. No one can tell you that. Oh, they can tell you, but they can’t make you believe it. And Sukey-”

She had the girl’s full attention now.

“You should know this. Whatever you weigh, whatever you look like, there are boys who are going to tell you that you’re pretty. That you’re beautiful, that they love you, that there’s no one like you. And at the moment they say it, they mean it. Boys will say anything to get what they want. It’s the moment after they have it that you have to worry about.”

Sukey tossed her hair. “Boys. I don’t need to go with boys. Lots of older guys ask me out.”

This, Tess suspected, was not one of her lies. Or if it was, it wouldn’t be for long.

“Yeah, I know about those men. Guys in their twenties who come around girls your age, who seem so mature and cool. They’ve got cars and spending money. They followed me home from school, too. But the thing about a twenty-five-year-old who goes after a fifteen-year-old is that he’s already been turned down by a whole decade of women, you know what I mean? He just keeps moving down the ladder until he hits someone young enough and”-she had started to say “dumb enough” but stopped herself-“and naïve enough to buy it.”

Sukey looked unconvinced. Tess understood. As frightening as it was to have an older man call to you from his car, it was exciting, too, and pleasurable. Sukey wasn’t ready to give up that tiny bit of fizz in her life, the consolation prize for the boys who threw firecrackers and called her names.

“What if it’s true love?”

“What if?” Tess wanted to tell her it was almost never true love, but Sukey’s books told her something different. It wasn’t just paperback writers who believed in love, either. The guys themselves thought it was love, at least for a minute. Strange love, perverted love, twisted love, but always love. She decided to change the subject.

“You know, I was at the swings for a reason, Sukey. I was looking for you, thinking about Jane Doe. Are you sure she said what she said, about how she had been at a place that sounded like Domino’s, and lived in the Sugar House?”

“It wasn’t the swings.”

Great, the story was already changing.

“You said-”

“We ended up at the swings. But I met her up at Fort McHenry, on a bench overlooking the water. A bench where I go to read. She said she was supposed to meet someone there. She said it was the only place in Baltimore they both knew, where she felt safe, because you can see so far in all directions, and no one can sneak up on you.”

Tess tried not to show her exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“You made me nervous, you didn’t give me time to tell it from beginning to end, and Brad was there, doubting every word I said. We walked down to the swings together. That’s when she told me the stuff about the Sugar House, and a place like Domino’s, only not the same. Don’t you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you.” I believe you believe what you say, which makes you even harder to fathom. “But I haven’t been able to find any place quite like that. Not a place that knows Jane Doe. What did she look like?”

Maybe it hadn’t even been Jane Doe, just another woman wandering through at the same time, and Sukey’s imperfect memory had dressed her in Jane Doe’s wardrobe.

Sukey thought about this. “She looked like a painting.”

“A painting? Any particular one?”

“No, I mean-even though she was dirty and her hair was tucked up in this hat, you just wanted to look at her. For a moment, I thought she might be somebody famous, because she didn’t look like anyone you see on the street, you know what I mean? It was like Julia Roberts, or some big movie star, but different. I just wanted to…look at her.” Sukey blushed. “I mean, I’m not queer, I don’t like girls, but she…I’d never seen anybody like her.”

“So you walked down to the swings-”

“SUKEY BREWER.” A woman’s voice, shrill and frantic, cut through them like a hard wind. Tess saw Sukey at age forty, short and round beneath a towering brunette beehive, bustling toward them.

The older Sukey grabbed the girl by the elbow and swung her around. “I have been looking everywhere for you. I told you to come straight home this afternoon, because I needed you to watch your baby brother while I go shopping. You were supposed to be home an hour ago, not hanging out in the park, telling stories to whoever will listen.”

The woman dragged Sukey away, with hardly a glance in Tess’s direction. Red-faced Sukey stared at the pavement, mortified, not even bothering to say goodbye.

Then again, for an adolescent, the mere revelation that one actually had parents, had emerged from another person’s flesh, was enough to cause acute embarrassment.

Tess walked back to her car and wondered where Sukey had been going with her new version of the “I met Jane Doe” story. Then she wondered why she cared. As surely as Fort Avenue dead-ended at Fort McHenry, she had come to her own dead end. Nothing to do but turn the car around and go home.