What The Dead Know

CHAPTER 6

“Take your sister,” their father said, in both girls’ hearing, so Sunny couldn’t lie about it later. Otherwise, Heather knew, her older sister would have nodded and pretended agreement, then left her at home anyhow. Sunny was sneaky that way. Or tried to be, but Heather was forever catching her in her schemes.

“Why?” Sunny protested automatically. She must have known that the argument was lost before it began. It was pointless to argue with their father, although, unlike their mother, he didn’t mind when they talked back. He was happy to have long discussions in which he debated their points. He even helped them shape their side of things, build their cases like lawyers, which he was always reminding them that they could be. They could be anything they wanted, their father told them frequently. Yet in an argument with him, they could never be right. It was not unlike playing checkers with him, when he would guide his opponent’s hand with small shakes and nods of his head, letting the girls avert disastrous moves that might result in double-or even triple-jumps. Still, he somehow claimed victory in the final play, even when he was down to just one king.

“Heather’s only eleven,” he said in what the sisters thought of as his reasoning voice. “She can’t stay home alone. Your mother’s already left for work, and I have to be at the shop by ten.”

Head lowered over her plate, Heather watched them through her lashes, still as a cat studying a squirrel. She was torn. Normally she pushed for greater privileges whenever possible. She wasn’t a baby. She would be twelve next week. She should be allowed to stay at home alone on a Saturday afternoon. Since her mother had started working last fall, Heather was alone for at least an hour every afternoon, and the only rules were that she mustn’t touch the stove or have friends over. Heather liked that hour. She got to watch what she wanted on television-The Big Valley, usually-and eat as many graham crackers as she wanted.

That bit of freedom, however, had been forced on her parents. They had wanted Heather to wait in the Dickey Hill Elementary School library after school until Sunny could collect her, the same plan they had used when Heather was in fifth grade and fourth grade before that. But Dickey Hill got out at three and Sunny didn’t get home from junior high until past four now that her bus ride was so long. The principal at Dickey Hill had told Heather’s parents in no uncertain terms-that was her mother’s recounting of the story, and the phrase had stuck with Heather, in no uncertain terms-that her librarian was not a baby-sitter. So Heather’s parents, always eager not to be seen as people who expected special treatment, had decided that Heather could be in the house by herself. And if she could be by herself for an hour every day, Monday through Friday, then why couldn’t she be alone for three hours on a Saturday? Five was greater than three. Plus, if she won the right to stay home today, maybe she would never have to spend another deadly dull Saturday in her father’s store, much less her mother’s real-estate office.

But that long-term possibility paled alongside the prospect of a Saturday at Security Square Mall, a place of great novelty to Heather. Over the past year, Sunny had fought for and won the right to be dropped off there on Saturday afternoons, once a month, to meet friends for matinees. Sunny also got to baby-sit, earning seventy-five cents an hour. Heather hoped to start doing that, too, once she was twelve, which was just next week. Sunny complained that she spent years trying to gain her privileges, only to see Heather awarded them at a younger age. So what? That was the price of progress. Heather couldn’t remember where she had heard that phrase, but she had adopted it for her own. You couldn’t argue with progress. Unless it was something like the highway through the park, and then you could. But that was because there were deer and other wildlife. That was the environment, which was more important than progress.

“You can go to the mall today if you take your sister,” their father repeated, “or you can stay home with her. Those are your choices.”

“If I have to stay at home with Heather, shouldn’t I be paid for babysitting?” Sunny asked.

“Family members don’t charge one another for doing things for the family,” their father said. “That’s why your allowance isn’t chore-based. You get spending money because your mother and I recognize that you need some discretionary income, even if we don’t always approve of the things you buy. The family is an entity, joined in a common good. So no, you don’t get money for taking care of your sister. But I will provide bus fare for both of you if you want to go to the mall.”

“Big whoop,” Sunny muttered, chopping up her pancakes but not really eating them.

“What did you say?” her father asked, his tone dangerous.

“Nothing. I’ll take Heather to the mall.”

Heather was elated. Bus fare. That was an extra thirty-five cents to spend as she wanted. Not that thirty-five cents could buy that much, but it was thirty-five cents of her own she didn’t have to spend and could therefore save. Heather was good at saving money. Hoarding, her father called it, and he was being critical, but Heather didn’t care. She had thirty-nine dollars in a metal box bound with a complicated system of elastic bands, so she could tell if anyone had tried to get inside it. But she wouldn’t take her money to the mall today, because then she couldn’t be tempted to spend it. No, she would compare prices and study sales, then return with her birthday money when she had made a careful decision about what she wanted. She wouldn’t waste her money on an impulse as Sunny often did. Last fall Sunny had bought a poor-boy knit sweater, off-white, with a red placket. The red trim had bled on the first washing, creating twin tracks on the sweater’s back. But it was the kind of sale that said no returns, and Sunny would have been out eleven dollars if their mother hadn’t gone to the store and berated the salesperson, embarrassing Sunny so much that she wouldn’t even say thank you.

Their father put the dishes on the drain board and left the kitchen, whistling. He had been fun this morning, much more fun than usual, making pancakes with Bisquick and even throwing in chocolate chips, real ones, not the carob ones he normally used in baking. He had let Heather pick the radio station, too, and although Sunny made fun of her choice, Heather knew it was the same station that Sunny used to listen to in her room, late at night. Heather knew lots of things about Sunny and what went on in her room. She considered it her business to spy on her older sister, and it was another reason she liked her hour alone on weekdays. That’s how she had come to find the bus schedule in Sunny’s desk drawer yesterday, the Saturday times for the Number 15 carefully highlighted.

Heather had been looking for her sister’s diary, a miniature book of Moroccan leather with a real lock. But anyone could figure out how to jiggle it open without the key. She had found Sunny’s diary only once, more than six months before, and it had been sadly boring. Reading her sister’s diary, she had almost felt sorry for her. Heather’s life was much more interesting. Maybe that was how it was: People with interesting lives didn’t have time to write about them in diaries. But then Sunny had tricked her, drawing Heather into a conversation about one of the entries, only to point out that Heather couldn’t know of the incident on the bus unless she’d read Sunny’s diary. Heather had gotten into quite a bit of trouble for that, although she didn’t understand why. If the family was supposed to share everything, then why was Sunny allowed to lock up her thoughts?

“Heather just admires her big sister so,” their mother had told Sunny. “She wants to be like you, do everything you do. That’s how little sisters grow up.”

Wrong , Heather wanted to say. Sunny was the last person to whom she would look for guidance. Almost in high school, Sunny didn’t even have a boyfriend, while Heather sort of did. Jamie Altman sat next to her on field trips and paired up with her whenever the teacher made them go boy-girl. He also had given her a Whitman sampler on Valentine’s Day. It was the small one, only four chocolates, and none of them with nuts, but Heather was the only girl in all of sixth grade to receive chocolates from a boy other than her father, so it made quite the stir. Heather didn’t need Sunny to show her how to do anything.

She picked up the Accent section and read her horoscope. In just five days, there would be a horoscope especially for her. Well, for her and the other people born on April 3. She couldn’t wait to see what it said. And next week there would be a party, bowling at Westview Lanes and a bakery cake-devil’s food with white icing and blue roses. Maybe she should buy something new to wear. No, not yet. But she would take her new purse to the mall, an early birthday gift from her father’s store. It was actually multiple purses that buttoned to the same wooden handles, so you could match it to your outfit. She had chosen denim with red rickrack, a madras plaid, and one with a print of large orange flowers. Her father hadn’t planned to stock the purses, but her mother had noticed how Heather studied the samples and pressed him to include it in the orders he made back in February. They were by far the most successful new item in his store this spring, but that just seemed to make her father grumpier.

“Faddish,” he said. “You won’t want to carry it a year from now.”

Of course , Heather thought. Next year there would be another purse or top that was the thing to have, and her father should be glad for that. Even at eleven she had figured out that you couldn’t run a successful store if people didn’t keep buying things, year in and year out.

SUNNY, FRUSTRATED ALMOST to the point of tears, watched silently as her father left the kitchen. He had been so odd this morning-making pancakes, letting Heather listen to WCBM, singing along and even commenting on the songs.

“I like that one,” he said of each song. “The girl-”

“Minnie Riperton,” Heather said.

“Her voice sounds like birdsong, don’t you think?” He attempted to imitate the cascading notes, and Heather laughed at how poorly he did it, but Sunny simply felt uncomfortable. A father wasn’t supposed to know songs like “Lovin’ You,” much less sing along with them. Besides, her father was the biggest liar. He didn’t like any of these songs. The very fact that a song was Top 40-the very fact of popularity in anything, whether it was music or movies or television or fashion-disqualified it from serious consideration in her father’s life. On his headphones, in his study, he played jazz, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead, which seemed as formless and pointless as jazz to Sunny. Listening to the radio with her father and sister made Sunny feel queer, as if they were reading her diary in front of her, as if they knew what she was thinking late at night when she went to bed with her transistor radio plugged into one ear. Her tastes were changing, but she still found certain love songs irresistible: “You Are So Beautiful.” “ Poetry Man. ” “My Eyes Adored You.” Twitching in her seat, cutting her pancakes into ever-smaller pieces, she had yearned to jump up and turn the radio off.

Then Ringo came on with the “No No Song” and her father did it for her, saying, “There’s only so much a man can take. When I think-”

“What, Daddy?” Heather asked, playing up to him.

“Nothing. What do my girls have planned today?”

And that’s when Heather said, “Sunny’s going to the mall.” She spoke with a lisping baby quality, a voice she had long outgrown, a voice she never really had to begin with. When Heather petitioned for a new freedom for herself-permission to ride her bike to the shopping district in Woodlawn, for example-she spoke in her regular voice. But when she was trying to show up Sunny, Heather used this little-girl tone. Even so, their mother was onto her. Sunny had heard her mother tell someone on the phone that Heather was eleven going on forty. Sunny had waited to hear what her relative age was, but it hadn’t come up.

Sunny added her dish to the stack her father had left on the drain board. She tried to come up with a rationalization not to do them now, but she knew that was unfair to her mother, who would be left with a pile of sticky dishes at the end of a long workday. It never even occurred to her father to wash them, Sunny knew, although he was liberated, compared to other fathers. The kids in the neighborhood called him the “hippie,” because of the shop, his hair, and his VW bus, which was a simple robin’s-egg blue, not anything remotely psychedelic. But although their father cooked-when he felt like it-and said he “supported” his wife’s decision to work as a real-estate agent, there were certain household chores he never attempted.

If he had to wash the dishes every day , Sunny thought, scraping the leftover pancakes into the trash, he wouldn’t have been so dead set against putting in a dishwasher. She had shown him the ads for the portable models, explaining how they could roll it from the sink to the covered back porch when it wasn’t in use, but her father had said the machines were wasteful, using too much water and energy. Meanwhile he was always upgrading his stereo. But his study was a place of contemplation, he reminded Sunny when she complained, the place where he conducted the sunrise and sunset rituals known as the Agnihotra, part of the Fivefold Path, which wasn’t a religion but something better, according to Sunny’s father.

“Have you been spying on me?” Sunny asked her sister, who was humming to herself and winding a lock of hair around her finger, lost in some secret joy. Their mother often said that their names should be switched, that Heather was always happy and bright, while Sunny was prickly as a thistle. “How did you know I planned to take the bus to the mall?”

“You left the schedule out on your desk, with the departure times underlined.”

“What were you doing in my room? You know you’re not supposed to go in there.”

“Looking for my hairbrush. You’re always taking it.”

“I am not.”

“Anyway”-Heather gave a blithe shrug-“I saw the schedule and I guessed.”

“When we get there, I go my way and you go yours. Don’t be hanging around me. Okay?”

“Like I want to follow you around. The only thing you do is go to the Singer store and flip through the pattern books, when you all but flunked out of home ec at Rock Glen last year.”

“The machines there are all torn up, from so many kids using them. The needles are always breaking.” This was the excuse her mother had offered for Sunny’s poor grade in home ec, and she had been happy to take it. She just wished there had been excuses for her other not-great grades. Dreaminess was the kindest reason that her parents could muster. Does not work to ability, her homeroom teacher had written. “The shift dress I made at home, with Mom’s help, was perfectly good,” Sunny reminded her sister.

Heather gave her a knowing look. Technically, the dress had been well made, and Sunny had executed even the tricky parts-the darts in the bodice, the cutting of the fabric so the pattern was consistent-with finesse. But Heather seemed to have been born knowing things that escaped Sunny. Heather would never have chosen the heavy, almost muslinlike material, with its motif of ears of corn in vertical rows. In hindsight the teasing that Sunny had suffered was so predictable. Corny, cornpone, corn-fed. But she had felt so pretty getting ready that morning, her hair pulled into side ponytails and tied with green ribbons, so they played off the shiny gold ears encased in green stalks. Even their mother thought she looked nice. But the moment she stepped onto the bus-even before the shouts of “Cornball!” and “Corn-fed!”-Sunny knew that the dress was yet another mistake on her part. It didn’t help that the darts, while properly executed, made the bodice pull tightly across the breasts that she wasn’t quite ready to have.

“Anyway, once we get there, you’re not to tag along after me. Dad said he’d pick us up at five-thirty, outside. I’ll meet you at Karmelkorn at twenty after.”

“And you’ll buy me one?”

“What? Sure. Karmelkorn or Baskin-Robbins, if you like. Whatever you want. In fact, I’ll give you five dollars if you’ll promise to leave me alone.”

“Five whole dollars?” Heather loved money, money and things, but she hated to part with money in order to have things. Their parents worried about this streak in her, Sunny knew. They tried to pass it off as a joke, calling her the little magpie, saying her eye was drawn to anything shiny and new, which she then took home to her nest. But this wasn’t Bethany behavior, and Sunny knew that her parents worried about Heather. “She has an eye too soon made glad,” their father said gloomily, paraphrasing some poem about a duchess.

“Yes, so you won’t have to dip into your savings at all.” And, Sunny thought, so you won’t open your metal card box and see I’ve had to borrow money from you, so the five dollars I’m giving you is actually yours. Heather wasn’t the only person who sneaked into other people’s rooms and poked at things that she wasn’t supposed to touch. Sunny had even figured out the pattern of the rubber bands that Heather used on the box.

Served her right, for being a spy.

CHAPTER 7

There was a vending machine in the motel room, actually in it, not down the hall or tucked away in a breezeway. Miriam lingered in front of the machine, testing the knobs, scooping her fingers in the change bin the way a child might. The wrappers on the candy bars looked a little faded. Given that it cost seventy-five cents to purchase a Zagnut or a Clark bar that could be had for thirty-five cents in the machine back in the lobby, cheaper still at the grocery store across the street, it had probably been a while since anyone had tried to justify the novelty of an in-room candy bar purchase. Still, how Sunny and Heather would have gloried in this machine, so many forbidden marvels crammed into one silvery box-sugary candy sold at exorbitant prices, yours for a quick yank on a handle. If they had ever stayed in such a motel-unlikely enough in itself, given Dave’s preference for motor courts and campsites, “real” places, as he called them, which also had the virtue of being cheap places-the girls would have pleaded for coins to feed the machine as Dave grumped and harrumphed about the wastefulness of it. Miriam would have caved, and he would have remonstrated with her for not presenting a united front, then been cold and distant for the rest of the evening.

What else would happen on this fantasy trip to a motel not even five miles from where they lived? They would have watched television as they did at home-each girl picking one program-then turned it off and read until bedtime. If the room had a radio, Dave might have tuned it to a jazz station, or Mr. Harley’s Saturday-night show of standards. She imagined them seeking refuge here during a storm, one not unlike Hurricane Agnes three years before, when the rising creek waters a few blocks away had briefly trapped them on Algonquin Lane. The lights had gone out, but it had seemed like an adventure at the time, reading by flashlight and listening to the news reports on Dave’s battery-powered radio. Miriam had almost been disappointed when the water had receded and the electricity returned.

A key turned in the lock, and Miriam started. But it was Jeff, of course, returning with the filled ice bucket.

“Gallo,” he said, and she thought for a moment that it was some sort of play on “hello,” then realized he was introducing the wine he had brought.

“It will take some time to chill,” he added.

“Sure,” she said, although Miriam knew a trick to speed the process. One put the bottle in a bucket of ice and then rotated it clockwise one hundred times, exactly, and voilà-cold wine. It was when Miriam discovered herself rolling the neck of a bottle between her anxious palms at two o’clock in the afternoon that she decided she should get a job. Yes, they had needed the money-rather desperately, in fact-but that had been less urgent to her than the prospect of becoming a pickled, desultory housewife, boozy breath washing over her children as they ate their after-school snacks and recounted their days.

Jeff stepped closer to her, taking her chin in his hand. His hand was still cold from carrying the bucket, but she didn’t flinch or pull back. Their teeth bumped painfully as the kiss began, and they had to adjust their mouths, as if they’d never kissed before. Funny, they had managed to make love so gracefully in a variety of tight and inconvenient locations-a closet at the office, a restaurant bathroom, the backseat of his little sports car-and now that they had space and, relative to what they were used to, time, they couldn’t be clumsier.

She tried to shut down her mind, give in to her usual urgency for Jeff, and it started to work. This was, what, their seventh time, and it still amazed her how much fun it was. Sex with Dave had always been a little somber, as if he needed to prove his feminist credentials by making the act joyless for both of them, plying her with his endless earnest questions. Socratic sex, as Miriam thought of it. How does this feel? What if I do this? Or if I vary it this way? If she had tried to explain this to her girlfriends-if, in fact, she had female friends, which Miriam did not-she knew this would sound grumpy and ungrateful. She would not be able to convey her sense that Dave, in pretending to care for nothing but her pleasure, was actually intent on making sure she didn’t enjoy herself. He had always seemed to pity her, just a bit, and regard himself as a gift he had conferred on her, the dark, sheltered girl from the north.

Jeff flipped her over, planted her feet on the floor, and placed her hands on the still-made bed, locking his fingers over hers and slipping into her from behind. This wasn’t new to Miriam-Dave was also a dutiful student of the Kama Sutra-but Jeff’s silence and directness made everything feel novel. Physiologically, according to Dave-yes, Dave was forever explaining her own anatomy to her-she shouldn’t even be able to come in this position, yet with Jeff it happened frequently. Not yet, though, not just now. With an entire afternoon to spend in a motel room, they were taking it slowly. Or trying to.

Miriam had not been thinking of an affair when she entered the work world, or even an office flirtation. She was certain of that much. Sex wasn’t important to Miriam, or so she had reasoned when she decided to marry Dave. Her sexual experience was somewhat limited, as the mores of her time had dictated. Not just the mores but the stakes-birth control was far from perfect and hard for a single girl to get. Still, Miriam was not a virgin when she met Dave. Jesus no, she was twenty-two and had once been engaged for six months, to her college sweetheart, with whom she had wonderful sex. “Mind-blowing,” as they said now, but Miriam’s mind had blown only when her fiancé decamped suddenly and without satisfactory explanation, fulfilling her mother’s dire prophecies about cows and free milk.

A nervous breakdown, they called it, and Miriam thought the term quite perfect. It was as if her nervous system had ceased to function. She was spastic and off-kilter, with all the basic bodily functions-sleeping, eating, shitting-unpredictable. One week she might sleep no more than four hours, while eating nothing at all. The next she would rise from her bed only to gorge herself on odd foods, a pregnant woman’s cravings-batches of raw brownie mix, coddled eggs with ice cream, carrots and molasses. She had dropped out of school and moved back home to Ottawa, where her parents saw her problems as a direct consequence of her dalliance not with the college boyfriend, whom they had quite liked, but with the United States itself. They had not approved of Miriam’s insistence on attending college in the States. Perhaps they suspected that it was the first step in a plan to leave Canada forever and, by extension, them.

Jeff pushed Miriam’s entire body onto the bed. He had not said a single word since “It takes some time to chill,” had barely even grunted. Now he flipped her again, as easily as if he were turning a pancake, and buried his face between her legs. Miriam was self-conscious about this act, something else she blamed on Dave. “You’re Jewish, right?” Dave had asked the first time he tried that. “I mean, I know you’re not observant, but that’s your heritage, isn’t it?” Stunned, she had been able only to nod. “Well, the mikvah has its utility. There’s a lot about your religion that I don’t like, but a careful cleansing after menstruation doesn’t hurt anyone.”

Dave had odd pockets of anti-Semitism, although he always insisted that his biases were about class, not religion, a reaction to the rich neighborhood where he had been the only poor kid. Miriam hadn’t resorted to milk baths, but she had become, briefly, the world’s great consumer of sprays and douches. Then she read an article that said the whole industry was bullshit, another manufactured solution for a problem that didn’t exist. Still, she’d never gotten over the idea that she perpetually tasted of blood, rusty and metallic. If so, Jeff clearly didn’t care. Jeff, who just happened to represent everything Dave hated-a rich Pikesville Jew with a country-club membership, an ostentatious house, and three indulged, bratty children. Miriam wasn’t stereotyping. She’d met the children at the office, and they were hideous. But she had not chosen Jeff because he so neatly encapsulated everything that Dave loathed. She had chosen him, to the extent that such a decision could ever be called a choice, because he was there and he wanted her, and she was so pleased to be wanted that she couldn’t imagine how to say no.

It was dangerous, meeting today. Their spouses weren’t stupid. Well, hers wasn’t. Tomorrow, when Dave read the Sunday paper, he might notice the dearth of open house notices, given that it was Easter, and wonder why Miriam had been needed at the real-estate office on a weekend when there was nothing to do. The whole affair was dangerous, because neither Miriam nor Jeff wanted to leave their marriages or disrupt their lives. Well, Jeff probably didn’t. Miriam was no longer sure what she wanted, what she was doing.

Jeff was getting impatient with her. She was usually so fast, almost too fast, but today she could not still her thoughts. And Jeff, while generally polite, would abandon her eventually and pursue his own pleasure if she didn’t get going. She focused on that one part of herself, syncing her movements to his mouth, aligning things better, and soon she felt it. Her orgasms with Jeff were like the trick of a soprano shattering glass; it was the resonating frequency, not the pitch, that broke her. She was useless afterward, barely able to move, but Jeff was accustomed to that. He arranged her rag-doll limbs beneath him and pushed into her rather violently until he also was done.

Now what? Usually they just pulled their clothes on, not that they had ever gotten them totally off before, and returned to work, or home, or wherever. Jeff fetched the bottle of wine from the plastic ice bucket. “No corkscrew,” he said, amused by his own mistake. Casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he broke the bottle’s neck on the rim of the bathroom sink and then filled the water glasses, picking out a few glass fragments that were caught when the wine flowed over the bottle’s broken neck.

“I like screwing you in a bed,” Jeff said.

“Our first time was in a bed,” Miriam said.

“That didn’t count.”

Why not ? she wondered, yet didn’t ask. Their first time had been in a client’s house, and the violation of the space with which they’d been entrusted had seemed more shocking than the actual fact of adultery. When Jeff asked her to go over to see the new listing, she had known that they were going to have sex, but she pretended naïveté. The woman always sets the pace, her mother had told Miriam in her euphemistic way when probing for the reason behind Miriam’s breakdown. Miriam liked to pretend that Jeff had controlled everything, as easily as he manipulated her body in bed. Jeff made Miriam feel wispy, featherlight, almost as if she were in her girlhood body again. She had not gained weight as she aged, but she had thickened a little, a fact that she had been able to ignore until she noticed her own daughters’ bodies, so impossibly narrow and slim-hipped. Both looked as if they could be snapped in half at the waist.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now, as in here, this specific moment? Or now as in tomorrow and next week and the month after?”

She wasn’t sure. “Both.”

“Now, here, today, we’ll have sex again. Maybe twice, if we’re lucky. Tomorrow, while you’re in church, acknowledging Jesus’s alleged resurrection-”

“I don’t go to church.”

“I thought-”

“He didn’t ask me to convert. He just told me he didn’t want the girls raised in any organized religion or exposed to anything but the more nonsecular traditions. Christmas trees, Easter baskets.”

She had broken an unwritten rule, mentioning her children, and the conversation stalled awkwardly. Miriam didn’t know how to raise the topic she really wanted to discuss. How do we end this? If we’re doing this just because the sex is fun, will it stop being fun in a convenient and mutual way? Will I yearn for you while you move on to someone else? Or vice versa? How did affairs end?

Theirs was ending that very moment, Miriam would realize later, in ways both banal and cataclysmic. Maybe it had always been this way. A mushroom cloud formed over Hiroshima, and some of those who ran through the streets, stunned and burned, had been routed from beds not their own, from places they shouldn’t be. Tsunamis washed over illicit lovers, adulterers were put on the train to Auschwitz, just not for that particular reason.

This was her legacy, this was her before, the moment she would return to again and again. When Miriam tried to remember the last time she was happy, all she could summon up was a warmish glass of Gallo wine with slivers of glass in it and a dusty Fifth Avenue candy bar that was, in fact, quite stale.

CHAPTER 8

The bus shelter on Forest Park Avenue was a more-than-familiar place to Sunny, part of her school-day routine going back almost three years, but she found herself studying it that afternoon as if seeing it for the first time. Although its purpose was basic-keep bus riders from the damp, if not the cold-someone had cared enough to add a few nonessential flourishes so it might be mistaken for attractive. The roof was off-green, a shade their mother had wanted to use for the trim on their house, but their father had said it was too dark, and their father, as the artistic one, always won such arguments. The pale beige bricks had a rough texture, while the slatted bench inside the structure was the same shade as the roof.

Boys in the neighborhood, indifferent to the bus shelter’s efforts, had scrawled rude graffiti on the walls in chalk and paint. Someone had come behind them and tried to remove the worst of it, but a few stubborn curses and character assassinations remained. Heather inspected these solemnly.

“Do they ever-” she began.

“No,” Sunny said swiftly. “They leave me alone.”

“Oh.” Heather’s tone sounded almost as if she felt sorry for Sunny.

“They don’t like me because of the fight. The kids on the bus.”

“But they don’t live here,” Heather said. “The graffiti is done by people who live here, right?”

“I’m the only one who goes to Rock Glen. Everyone else is older or younger, by a lot. That was the problem, remember? ‘We had right, but they had might.’ Majority rules.”

Bored with this family story in which she had played no part, Heather sat on the bench, opened her purse, and examined its contents, humming to herself. The bus was not due for another fifteen minutes, but Sunny hadn’t wanted to risk missing it.

The battle over the school bus route had been Sunny’s first brush with gross unfairness, a lesson in how money can triumph over principle. Most of the students on Sunny’s bus lived far up Forest Park Avenue, all the way on the other side of Garrison Boulevard. But under the city’s open-enrollment plan, they could choose to attend school wherever they liked, and they had bypassed the all-black school nearest them and picked Rock Glen on the city’s southwest side, which was still mostly white. A private bus service, paid for by all the parents, was set up. Sunny’s stop, the little shelter on Forest Park Avenue, was the last stop every morning and the first one every afternoon. For two years this seemed a logical plan to everyone involved. And then it didn’t.

Last summer the parents at the far end of the route began to grumble that their children would have a much shorter trip if the bus didn’t have to stop on the lower part of Forest Park Avenue for Sunny. Or, as they called her, “Just the one.” As in, “Just the one student.” Or, “Why should just the one student inconvenience so many?” They threatened to find another bus service, leaving the company with “just the one,” which would never cover the cost of the route. Sunny’s parents were appalled, but there was nothing they could do. If they wanted to continue using the bus service-essential, given that they both worked-they had to agree to a compromise: The route would be reversed in the afternoon. So every afternoon Sunny watched her own block fly past as the bus headed to the beginning of its route and dropped students off in reverse order, backtracking to Forest Park Avenue. Given that their families had won, the other students should have been gracious, but Sunny discovered it didn’t work that way. They disliked her more than ever because her parents had all but called their parents racists. “N.L.,” one of the larger boys hissed at her. “You and your parents are N.L.ers.” She had no idea what it meant, but it sounded terrifying.

The mass-transit system, unlike Mercer Transportation, could not be bullied. If it took twenty-five minutes to get to Security Square, with stops, then it took twenty-five minutes to get home again. The MTA was egalitarian, a word that she picked up from her father and particularly liked because it reminded her of The Three Musketeers with Michael York. When Sunny started Western High School next year, the plan was for her to take the MTA, using the free coupons distributed to students in monthly packs. To prepare for this, her parents had started allowing her to take practice runs-trips downtown, to Howard Street and the big department stores. That’s how she had come to reason that she could take the bus to Security Square and not tell anyone. Sunny was practically blasé about taking the bus places.

But Heather, who had never taken a public bus anywhere, bounced with excitement on the wooden bench, one hand clutching her fare, the other wrapped around the handle of her new purse. Sunny also had a purse from her father’s store, a macramé one, but they didn’t get such things for free despite what the other kids assumed. If the item wasn’t a gift, like Heather’s purse, then they were expected to pay the wholesale price, because their father said his “margins” wouldn’t allow for freebies. Margins always made Sunny think of her typing class, which she was failing, although not because of margins. Her problem was that she performed horribly at the timed trials, making so many mistakes that she ended up with a negative word-per-minute score. When she wasn’t being timed, she typed very well.

Sunny wondered why her parents had insisted that she take the typing elective in junior high, if they thought she was going to have to type for a living. Ever since sixth grade, when most of her friends were placed in the “enriched” track at Rock Glen, while she was merely “high regular,” she couldn’t help worrying that her future had been derailed while she wasn’t paying attention, that she’d lost options she never knew she had. When she was little, Grandpoppa and Grandmama had given her a nurse’s kit, while Heather had gotten a doctor’s kit. At the time the nurse’s kit was the better thing to have, because it had a pretty girl on its plastic cover and the doctor’s kit had a boy. How Sunny had lorded that over Heather. “You’re a boy.” But maybe it would have been better to be the doctor? Or at least to have people tell you that you could be the doctor? Their father said they could be anything they wanted to be, but Sunny wasn’t convinced that he really believed this.

Heather, of course, was going to be enriched when she entered Rock Glen next year, not that the placements had been announced yet. Heather would be enriched and then, most likely, in the A course at Western, which meant that she would skip the last year of junior high and enter high school in ninth grade instead of tenth. It wasn’t that Heather was smarter than Sunny. Their mother said that IQ tests showed that both sisters were smart, near genius. But Heather was good at school, the way someone else might be good at track or baseball. She understood the rules, whereas Sunny seemed to trip herself up by trying too hard to be creative and different. And while those were the very values that her parents professed to cherish above straight A’s and rote memorization, their expectations for Sunny had clearly flagged when she didn’t make enriched. Was that why she was so angry with them all the time? Her mother laughed and called it a phase, while her father encouraged her to argue-“But rationally,” a directive that only made her more irrational. Lately she had taken to challenging his politics, the thing he held most dear, but her father had remained maddeningly calm, treating her like a little girl, like Heather.

“If you want to support Gerald Ford in next year’s election, then by all means do it,” he told her just a few weeks ago. “All I ask is that you have reasoned positions, that you research his positions on the issues.”

Sunny wasn’t going to support anyone in the election. Politics was stupid. It embarrassed her to think of her impassioned speeches for McGovern back in 1972, part of her sixth-grade teacher’s current-events debates on Friday. Only six kids in a class of twenty-seven had voted for McGovern when their mock Election Day came-one fewer than had voted for him in the initial poll when school started. “Sunny talked me out of it,” Lyle Malone, a smugly handsome boy, said when asked if he wanted to explain his change of mind. “I figured anyone she liked that much couldn’t be much good.”

Yet if Heather had spoken for McGovern, then everyone in her class would have followed her. Heather had that effect on people. People liked to look at her, make her laugh, win her approval. Even now the MTA driver, a type that usually screamed at anyone who dawdled at the open door, seem charmed by the excited girl with the denim purse held tightly to her chest. “Drop your fare here, sweetie,” the bus driver said, and Sunny wanted to yell, She’s not that sweet! Instead she climbed the steps, looking at her shoes, wedgies purchased just two weeks ago. The weather really wasn’t right for them, but she had been dying to wear them, and today was the day.

CHAPTER 9

Woodlawn Avenue was busier than usual the Saturday before Easter, with steady streams of people in and out of the barbershop and the bakery. The impending resurrection of Jesus apparently required fresh Parker House rolls and trimmed, exposed necks, at least for those Baltimore throwbacks who still believed in haircuts. There also was a spring festival at the elementary school, an old-fashioned fair with cotton candy and goldfish free to anyone who could land a Ping-Pong ball in the narrow neck of a fishbowl. This is a city where change is slow to catch on, thought Dave, an eternal outsider in his own hometown. He had traveled all over the world, determined to live somewhere else, anywhere else, yet somehow ended up back here. In opening his shop, he had rationalized that he might bring the world to Baltimore, but Baltimore wasn’t having it. For all the people on the sidewalks, not a single one had stopped to inspect his window displays, much less come inside.

Now that it was almost 3:00 P.M., according to the “Time for a Haircut” clock over the barbershop across the street, Dave had run out of ways to occupy himself. If he hadn’t agreed to pick up Sunny and Heather at the mall, he might have packed it in and closed up early. But what if a customer arrived in that final posted hour, a customer of taste and means, determined to buy lots of things, and he lost that person’s business forever? Miriam worried ceaselessly over this scenario. “It just takes once,” she would say. “One time, one person pulling on the door when it should be open, and you’ve lost not just that customer but whatever word of mouth he or she might have generated.”

If only things really were that simple, if all that success required was showing up early, leaving late, and working hard every minute in between. Miriam didn’t have enough experience in the professional realm to realize how touchingly naïve her views were. She still believed that the early bird caught the worm, slow and steady won the race, all those clichés. Then again, if she hadn’t held those beliefs, she might not have agreed so readily to his plan to open the store, given that it meant leaving his state job, a job that was all but guaranteed for life. Lately he had begun to wonder if Miriam figured that she would benefit either way. The store would make them rich or provide her with something to hold over Dave’s head the rest of their lives. She had given him his chance, and he had blown it. Now every disagreement between them was rooted in that unspoken context: I believed in you / You blew it. Had she hoped all along that he would fail?

No, Miriam was not that Machiavellian, he was sure of that much. Miriam was the most honest person Dave had ever known, quick to give credit where credit was due. She always admitted that she had never seen the potential in the house on Algonquin Lane, a rambling, run-down farmhouse that had been the victim of repeated architectural insults-a cupola, a so-called Florida room. Dave had restored the house to its original bones, creating a simple, organic structure that seemed of a piece with its large, untamed yard. People who came to their house were always exclaiming over Dave’s eye, pointing out objects he had collected in his travels and demanding to know how much they had cost, then announcing they would pay five, ten, twenty times as much if he would only open a store.

Dave had taken those words at face value. He still did. Those compliments could not possibly have been social niceties because Dave had never inspired that kind of effusive tact. Quite the opposite-he had always been a magnet for blunt, unpleasant truths, aggression disguised as candor.

On their very first date, Miriam had said to him, “Look, I hate to tell you this…”

He was familiar with such beginnings, but his heart still sagged a little. He had thought this trim young woman, with her Canadian manners and vowels, would be different. She was working as a clerk-typist in the state Department of Budget and Revenue, where Dave was an analyst, and it had taken him three months just to ask her out.

“Yes?”

“It’s about your breath.”

Reflexively, he had clapped his hand to his mouth, Adam shielding his nakedness after a bite of the apple. But Miriam patted the hand that remained on the table.

“No-no-no-my father is a dentist. It’s really quite simple.” It was. With the introduction of dental floss and Stimudents and, eventually, gum surgery, Miriam rescued Dave from a life in which people had always reared back, ever so slightly, when talking to him. It was only when this behavior ended that Dave understood what it meant when people pulled their chins in and lowered their noses. He stank. They were trying not to inhale. He couldn’t help wondering if those first twenty-five years, the fetid years, as he thought of them-had damaged him irreparably. When you spend a quarter of a century seeing people recoil from you, can you ever expect to be embraced and accepted?

His daughters had offered his only chance at a clean slate. After all, even Miriam had known bad-breath Dave, however briefly. The girls’ hero worship of him had been so pronounced that Dave had been foolish enough to believe that they would never tire of him. But now Sunny seemed to regard him a corporeal embarrassment, the walking embodiment of a fart or a belch. Heather, precocious as ever, was already imitating big sister’s coolness at times. But although his daughters now tried to keep him at arm’s length, they could not keep him from knowing them. He felt as if he lived inside their skulls, saw the world through their eyes, experienced all their triumphs and disappointments. “You don’t understand,” Sunny snarled at him with increasing frequency. The real problem was that he did.

Take this newfound obsession with the mall. Sunny thought Dave hated shopping centers because of their emphasis on cheap, mass-produced consumer pleasures, the diametric aesthetic to the one-of-a-kind handicrafts sold in his store. But what he really disliked was the mall’s effect on Sunny. It called to her as surely as the sirens had serenaded Ulysses. He knew what she did there. It wasn’t that much different from what he had done in his own teenage years in Pikesville, walking up and down the business district along Reisterstown Road, hoping that someone, anyone, would pay attention to him. He had been very much the odd boy out, the son of a single mother when everyone else had parents, a nominal Protestant in a neighborhood of well-to-do Jewish families. His mother had worked as a waitress at the old Pimlico Restaurant, so their household’s fortunes were tied to the generosity of his classmates’ fathers, men who sat in judgment of Dave’s mother at meal’s end, taking her tip up twenty-five cents or down fifty, and every penny had mattered. Oh, no one had taunted him openly for being poor. He wasn’t worth the bother of ridicule, which seemed worse in a way.

And now Sunny was stuck in the same life. He could almost smell the yearning on her. And while desperation was sad enough for a teenage boy, it was downright dangerous for a girl. He was terrified for Sunny. When Miriam tried to minimize his fears, he wanted to say, I know. I know. You can’t begin to understand what goes through a man’s mind at the sight of a girl in a tight sweater, just how base and primary those urges are. But if he told Miriam this, she might ask what went through his mind, every day, when he saw the girls from Woodlawn High School stroll past, heading to the bakery or High’s Dairy Store or Robin’s Nest Pizza.

Not that he wanted anything to do with teenagers, far from it. Sometimes he wanted to be a teenager, or at least a man in his twenties. He wanted the freedom to wander in this new world, where the girls’ hair swung long and free and their braless breasts bounced in slinky print shirts. The freedom to wander and gawk, but nothing more. When he was still working for the state, he’d seen plenty of colleagues succumb to this desire. Even in the cultural backwater of the accounting division, men suddenly sprouted sideburns and bought sharp new clothes. About ten months later-really, Dave could have put together a chart, predicting that the appearance of sideburns on a man presaged the end of his marriage by exactly ten months-the guy would move out of the house and into one of those new apartment complexes, explaining earnestly that his kids couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t happy. Uga -duh, as Sunny might have snorted. Dave, having grown up in a fatherless household, would never subject his daughters to that.

The hour hand on the “Time for a Haircut” clock crawled toward 4:00 P.M. Almost six hours into his day, and not a single customer had come into the shop. Was it possible that the site was cursed? A few weeks back, Dave had chatted up one of the counterwomen at Bauhof’s Bakery as she dropped cookies into a waxed-paper bag. The bakery still used the old-fashioned counterbalances, the ones that were being phased out by electronic scales that could measure weight to one-hundredth of a pound. Dave preferred the inexact elegance of the old scales, enjoyed watching them slowly align as each cookie dropped.

“Let’s see,” said the counterwoman, Elsie, who had to stand on tiptoe to reach the scale. “For years and years, it was a hardware store, Fortunato’s. Then, in 1968, the old man got upset by the riots and sold, moved to Florida.”

“There weren’t any riots in Woodlawn. The trouble was miles away.”

“No, but it aggravated him all the same. So Benny sold to some woman who sold children’s clothes, but they were too dear.”

“Dear?”

“Pricey. Who’s gonna spend twenty dollars on a sweater that a baby’s gonna wear all of a month? So she sold out to this restaurant, but it just didn’t take. The young couple just didn’t know which end was up, couldn’t get a western omelet on the table in under forty-five minutes. And then there was a bookstore, but what with Gordon’s up to Westview and Waldenbooks at Security, who’s gonna come to Woodlawn to buy a book? And then there was the tux rental-”

“The Darts,” Dave said, remembering the round-shouldered man with a measuring tape about his neck, the shy woman who peered out from a great curtain of long, prematurely gray hair. “I took over their lease.”

“Nice couple, sensible types, but people go to where they’ve always gone when they want formalwear. Tuxes is traditional. Like funeral homes. You go to the place where your dad went, and he went to the place that his dad went, and so on. You want to open a new place, you got to go to a new neighborhood, where people don’t have loyalties.”

“So four different businesses in less than seven years.”

“Yep. It’s one of those black holes. Every block has one, the one store that never works.” She brought her hand up to her mouth, the waxed grabbing paper still in her hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bethany. I’m sure you’ll make a go of it with your little, um…”

“Tchotchkes?”

“What?”

“Nothing.” In a German bakery that sold “Jewish” rye bread, without irony or apology, it was probably too much to expect Yiddish to be understood, much less the self-lacerating mockery in Dave’s use of the word. Tchotchkes indeed. The items in his store were beautiful, unique. Yet even the families he knew through the Fivefold Path, like-minded people when it came to spiritual matters, had been slow to embrace his material goods. If he had been in New York, or San Francisco, or even Chicago, the store would be a hit. But he was in Baltimore, which he’d never intended. Then again, it was here that he’d met Miriam, had his family. How could he wish that away?

The wind chime over the front door keened softly. A middle-aged woman, and Dave wrote her off instantly, assuming she must be in need of directions. Then he realized she was probably only a few years removed from him, no more than forty-five or so. Her clothes-a fussy pink knit suit and boxy handbag-had thrown him off.

“I thought you might have unusual items for Easter baskets,” she said, stumbling a little over the words, as if worried that this unusual store required an unusual etiquette. “Something that could be used as a keepsake?”

Fuck . Miriam had suggested that he stock more seasonal items and he had ignored her. He had done Christmas, of course. But Easter had seemed far-fetched. “I’m afraid not.”

“Nothing?” The woman’s distress seemed disproportionate. “It doesn’t have to be for Easter, just Easter-themed. An egg, a chick, a rabbit. Anything.”

“Rabbits,” he repeated. “You know, I think we have some wooden rabbits from Mexico. But they’re a little large for an Easter basket.”

He went to the shelves that held Latin American art and gently pulled down one of the rabbit carvings, passing it to the woman as if it were an infant that needed to be cradled. She held it in front of her with straight, stiff arms. The rabbit was simple and primitive, a sculpture created with a few swift, sure cuts of a knife, far too nice to be a consolation prize in some child’s Easter basket. It wasn’t a toy. It was art.

“Seventeen dollars?” the woman asked, looking at the handwritten price tag on its base. “And so plain.”

“Yes, but the simplicity…” Dave didn’t even bother to finish his own sentence. He had clearly lost the sale. But he thought of Miriam, her poignant faith in him, and made one last attempt. “You know, I might have some wooden darning eggs in the back room. I found them at a West Virginia craft fair, and they’re painted in bright primary colors-red, blue.”

“Really?” She seemed oddly excited by this prospect. “Would you get them for me?”

“Well…” The request was a delicate one, for it would mean leaving her alone in the shop. This was the consequence of not being able to afford a part-time helper. Sometimes Dave invited customers into the back room, made it seem like he was conferring special honor on them, rather than insult them by suggesting he was worried about theft. But he couldn’t imagine this woman pocketing anything, or trying to get into his cash register, an old-fashioned one that would ring clamorously if opened. “Wait here, I’ll see if I can find them.”

It took longer to find the eggs than it should have. In his head, Miriam’s voice nagged him-gently, but a nag was a nag-reminding him about the need for inventory and procedures and systems. But the point of the shop had been to escape such things, to set himself free from the rigors of numbers. He still remembered his disappointment when Miriam had failed to understand the significance of the store’s name.

“The Man with the Blue Guitar-won’t people think it’s a music store?”

“You don’t get it?”

“Well, I can see it’s kind of…zany, the way things are now. The Velvet Mushroom, that kind of thing. Still, it might confuse people.”

“It’s from Wallace Stevens. The poet who was also an insurance agent.”

“Oh, the ‘Emperor of Ice-Cream’ guy. Sure.”

“Stevens was like me-an artist trapped inside a businessman. He sold insurance, but he was a poet. I was a fiscal analyst, but that didn’t fulfill me. Can’t you see?”

“Wasn’t Stevens the vice president of an insurance agency? And didn’t he keep working, even as he wrote poems?”

“Well, yes, it’s not an exact parallel. But it’s the same emotionally.”

Miriam hadn’t said anything to that.

The eggs located, he carried them out to counter. The store was empty again. Immediately he checked the register, but his meager supply of cash was there, and a quick survey of the more precious items-well, semiprecious, by definition, jewelry made from opals and amethysts-indicated they had been left undisturbed in the glass case. It was only then that he noticed the envelope on top of the counter, addressed to Dave Bethany. Had the mailman come and gone while he was in the back? But this was unstamped, with no designation other than his name.

He opened it and found a note, the handwriting wavy with emotion, not unlike the voice of the woman in the pink suit.

Dear Mr. Bethany:

You should know that your wife is having an affair with her boss, Jeff Baumgarten. Why don’t you put a stop to this? There are children involved. Besides, Mr. Baumgarten is very happily married and will never leave his wife. This is why mothers do not belong in offices.

The letter was unsigned, but Dave had no doubt that it was written by Mrs. Baumgarten, which meant that her Easter mission had been an elaborate bit of fakery. Dave didn’t know much about Miriam’s boss, but he knew he was Jewish, prominently Jewish, probably just a few years ahead of Dave at Pikesville High School. Perhaps Mrs. Baumgarten had planned to drop this letter on the counter without being seen but had been undone by the empty shop. Or she had written it as a fallback, in case she couldn’t summon the nerve to confront him directly. How odd, that last line, as if she needed a larger social issue to buttress her position as the wronged party. In the split second it took Dave’s mind to find the word cuckold and apply it to himself, he felt a twinge of pity for this proper middle-class woman with her anonymous note. Not too long ago, the local news had been full of stories about the governor’s wife, who had to learn from her husband’s press secretary that she was being divorced. She had holed herself up in the governor’s mansion and refused to come out, sure that her husband would return to his senses. She had been a woman not unlike this one- Northwest Baltimore, Jewish, plump and well dressed, an integral part of her husband’s success. Affairs were a man’s perquisite, something that wives either tolerated or didn’t. The women in affairs were young and toothsome and unencumbered-secretaries and stewardesses, Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower. Miriam couldn’t have an affair. She was a mother, a good one. Poor Mrs. Baumgarten. Her husband was clearly cheating on her, but she had lashed out blindly, settling on Miriam because she was a handy target.

He dialed Miriam’s office number, and let it ring, but the receptionist didn’t pick up. Ah well, Miriam was probably still out at an open house, and the receptionist had left for the day. He would ask her about it tonight, something he should do more often anyway. Ask Miriam about her work. Because surely it was her work that had given her so much confidence recently. It was the commissions that accounted for the glow in her face, the bounce in her step, the tears in the bathroom late at night.

The tears in the bathroom …but no, that was Sunny, poor sensitive Sunny, for whom ninth grade had been a torture of ostracism, all because he and Miriam had tried to fight the other parents over the bus route. At least that’s what he’d told himself when, sitting in his study late at night, he had heard those muffled sobs in the bathroom at the head of the stairs, the one that the whole family shared. He’d sat in his study, pretending to listen to music, pretending he was respecting the privacy of the crying female just a stair climb away.

Dave tore the letter in pieces, grabbed his keys, and locked up, heading down the street to Monaghan’s Tavern, another Woodlawn establishment doing a booming business on the Saturday before Easter.

CHAPTER 10

You were supposed to stay away from me,” Sunny hissed at Heather after the usher dragged them both out of the movie theater and said they were banned for the day. “You promised.”

“I got worried when you didn’t come back from the bathroom. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. Certainly Heather had wondered why Sunny had left fifteen minutes into Escape to Witch Mountain and not returned. And she’d been worried that Sunny was trying to dump her, so she had gone outside, looked in the bathroom, then sneaked into the other side, where the R-rated Chinatown was playing. Sunny must have been pulling this trick for a while, Heather figured, buying a ticket for the PG movie on one side of the theater, then using a bathroom visit to gain entrance to the R-rated one while no one was looking.

She took a seat two rows back from Sunny, the same maneuver she’d used in Escape to Witch Mountain. (“It’s a free country,” she announced airily when Sunny had glared at her.) This time she’d gone undetected until the moment the little man had inserted his knife in the other man’s nose. Then she had gasped, quite audibly, and Sunny had turned at the sound of her voice.

Heather had assumed that Sunny would ignore her, rather than draw attention to both of them. But Sunny came back to where she was sitting and, in urgent whispers, told her that she had to leave immediately. Heather shook her head, pointing out that she was observing the rules that Sunny had set down. She wasn’t with her. She just happened to be at the same movie theater. Like she said, it was a free country. An old woman called the usher, and they were both thrown out when they couldn’t produce the proper ticket stubs. Heather, being Heather, had lied and said she’d lost hers, but slow-thinking Sunny had produced the ticket for Theater One, where Escape was playing. A shame, because busty as she was, Sunny might have passed for seventeen. If their ages were reversed, if Heather were the older one, she would have been able to get them out of it-lying smoothly to the usher about her lost ticket, claiming to be seventeen and arguing that a sister counted as the adult supervision required for an R movie. What was the good of an older sister if she didn’t act like one? Here was Sunny, on the verge of tears because of a stupid movie. Heather thought it was crazy, spending precious mall time to sit in the dark, when there were so many things to see and smell and taste.

“It was boring anyway,” Heather said. “Although it was scary when that guy got his nose cut.”

“You don’t know anything,” Sunny said. “That movie was directed by the man with the knife. Mr. Roman Polanski, whose wife was killed by Charles Manson. He’s a genius.”

“Let’s go to Hoschild’s. Or the Pants Corral. I want to look at the Sta-Prest slacks.”

“Slacks don’t wrinkle that much,” Sunny said, still snuffling a bit. “That’s stupid.”

“It’s what all the girls are wearing now that we’re allowed to wear pants to school.”

“You shouldn’t want a thing just because everyone else has it. You don’t want to run with the herd.” That was their father’s voice coming through Sunny’s mouth, and Heather knew that Sunny herself didn’t believe a word of it.

“Okay, let’s go to Harmony Hut, then, or the bookstore.” On her last visit to the mall, Heather had sneaked a look at what seemed to be a dirty book, although she couldn’t be sure. There were lots of promising descriptions of the heroine’s breasts pressing against the thin fabric of her dress, usually a good sign that something dirty was about to happen. She was trying to work up her nerve to read the book with the zipper on the cover-not a real zipper, like the Rolling Stones album cover that Sunny owned, but one that nevertheless revealed a portion of a woman’s naked body. She needed to find a bigger book to put in front of it, so she could read it without drawing attention to herself. The staff at Waldenbooks didn’t care how long you stood there reading a book without buying it, as long as you didn’t try to sit down on the carpet. Then they chased you out.

“I don’t want to do anything with you,” Sunny said. “I don’t care where you go. Just do your own thing and come back here at five-twenty.”

“And you’ll buy me Karmelkorn.”

“I gave you five dollars. Buy your own Karmelkorn.”

“You said five dollars and Karmelkorn.”

“Fine, fine, what does it matter? Come back here at five-twenty and you’ll get your precious Karmelkorn. But not if I see you hanging around me again. That was the deal, remember?”

“Why are you so mad at me?”

“I just don’t want to hang out with a baby. Is that so hard to understand?”

She headed toward the Sears end of the mall, the corridor with Harmony Hut and Singer Fashions. Heather thought about following her, Karmelkorn notwithstanding. Sunny had no right to call her a baby. Sunny was the babyish one, crying so easily over the smallest things. Heather wasn’t a baby.

Once Heather had loved being the baby, had reveled in it. And when their mom had gotten pregnant, back when Heather was almost four, and they had started talking about “the baby,” it had bothered her. “I’m the baby,” she said hysterically, pushing a finger into the middle of her chest. “Heather’s the baby.” As if there could be only one baby in their family, in all the world.

That was when they moved to Algonquin Lane, to the house where everyone could have her own bedroom. Even then Heather could recognize a bribe when she saw one-you can have a bedroom, but you won’t be the baby. The house was huge compared to their apartment, big enough so that four children could have their own bedrooms. That made Heather feel better somehow. Even the new baby wouldn’t always be the baby. And Heather would get second dibs on whatever room she wanted. She thought she should get first dibs, given that she was losing baby status, but her parents explained that because Sunny was older, she would be in her room a shorter amount of time before going to college, so she should have first choice. If Heather really wanted the room that Sunny chose, then it could be hers for three years, most of high school. Even at four going on five, something in Heather rebelled at that logic, but she didn’t have the words to make an argument, and her parents were never impressed by tantrums. Her mother said exactly that when she tried: “I’m not impressed, Heather.” Her father said, “I don’t respond to that kind of behavior.” But he didn’t respond to any behavior that Heather could see. Look at Sunny. She played by their rules, marshaled her arguments and presented them in orderly fashion, and she almost never got what she wanted. Heather was much sneakier, and she usually got her way. She even got to stay the baby, although that wasn’t because of anything she did. As it turned out, the baby just hadn’t been strong enough to live outside their mother’s stomach.

When the baby died, their father made a point of telling Heather and Sunny exactly what a miscarriage was. To do that he had to explain how the baby had gotten inside their mother in the first place. Much to their dismay, he used all the proper words-penis, vagina, uterus.

“Why would Mommy let you do that?” Sunny had demanded to know.

“Because that’s how babies are made. Besides, it feels good. When you’re a grown-up,” her father had added. “When you’re a grown-up, it feels good to do that, even if it doesn’t make a baby. It’s a very sacred thing, the way you show love.”

“But…but-pee comes out of there. You might have peed inside her.”

“Urine, Sunny. And the penis knows not to do that when it’s inside a woman.”

“How?”

Their father started to explain how the penis grew when it wanted to make a baby, how it had this different kind of liquid inside filled with seed called sperm, until Sunny put her hands over her ears and said, “Eew, I don’t want to know. It could still get confused. It could still pee in there.”

“How big does it get?” Heather wanted to know. Her father had held out his hands, like a man showing the size of a fish he’d caught, but she didn’t believe him.

Given that she knew everything about baby making before she entered kindergarten, Heather was surprised when she got to Dickey Hill Elementary and discovered that sex education was not taught until the sixth grade and it was considered a big deal, requiring permission slips from all the parents. Still, she didn’t brag about her knowledge or draw attention to it. That was another thing that Sunny never understood, that it was good to keep things back, not volunteer everything at once. No one liked a show-off.

In fourth grade, however, Heather’s friend Beth’s mother got pregnant, and Beth’s parents told her that God had put the baby there. Like her father, Heather could not bear to let misinformation stand. She convened a quick class beneath the jungle gym on the playground, recounting everything she knew about baby making. Beth’s parents complained, and Heather’s parents were called to school, but her father was not only unapologetic, he was proud of Heather. “I can’t be held accountable for those who prefer to lie to their children,” he said, right in front of Heather. “And I won’t ask my daughter to say she was wrong for speaking the truth about something natural.”

Natural was good. It was her father’s highest form of praise. Natural fabrics, natural foods, natural hair. After he opened the shop, he had grown his hair into a large, woolly Afro, much to Sunny’s embarrassment. He even combed it with a Black Power pick, one whose handle ended in a clenched fist. He would, in fact, not approve of the Sta-prest pants, which definitely had something unnatural in them to keep them unwrinkled. Yet Heather was sure she could persuade him or her mother to let her have a pair, if she used her birthday money.

She walked toward the Pants Corral. Mr. Pincharelli, Sunny’s music teacher, was playing the organ at Jordan Kitt’s. Sunny once had a crush on him, Heather knew from reading her diary. But the last time they’d come to the mall together, Sunny had hurried by the organ store, as if embarrassed by him. Today he was standing up, playing “Easter Parade” with a lot of energy, and a small crowd had gathered around. Mr. Pincharelli’s face was shiny with sweat, and there were pit stains along the underarm seams of his short-sleeved dress shirt. Heather couldn’t imagine having a crush on him. If he were her music teacher, she never would have stopped making fun of him. Yet the crowd seemed genuine in its admiration and enjoyment, and Heather found herself caught up in the mood and she perched on the edge of a nearby fountain. She was puzzling over one of the phrases-you’ll find that you’re in a photo so pure?-when someone grabbed her elbow.

“Hey, you were supposed to-” The voice was angry, not loud, but sharp enough to be heard above the music, so those standing nearby turned and looked. The man dropped her arm quickly, mumbled, “Never mind,” and disappeared back into the throngs of shoppers. Heather watched him go. She was glad she wasn’t the girl that he was looking for. That girl was definitely in trouble.

“Easter Parade” gave way to “Superstar,” a Carpenters song, not the one about Jesus. Just last week Sunny had given Heather all her Carpenters albums, proclaiming them lame. Music was the one area where Sunny’s taste might be worth imitating, and if she thought the Carpenters lame, then Heather wasn’t sure she wanted any part of them either. Five dollars-that was enough to buy an album and still have some left over. Maybe she would go down to Harmony Hut after all, buy something by…Jethro Tull. He seemed pretty cool. And if Sunny happened to be at the record store, too-well, it was a free country.