I chased sleep for a few darting hours in the back of my car. The equivalent of reading a sign between the cars of a passing train. Woke up sticky and peevish. Bought a toothbrush kit at the FaStop, along with the strongest-smelling lotion and hairspray I could find. I brushed my teeth in a gas-station sink, then rubbed the lotion into my armpits and between my legs, sprayed my hair stiff. The resulting smell was sweat and sex under a billowing cloud of strawberry and aloe.
I couldn’t face my mother at the house and crazily thought I’d do work instead. (As if I were still going to write that story. As if it weren’t all about to go to hell.) With Geri Shilt’s mention of Katie Lacey fresh in my mind, I decided to go back to her. She was a mother’s aide at the grade school, for both Natalie and Ann’s classes. My own mother had been a mother’s aide, a coveted, elite position in the school that only women who didn’t work could do: swoop into classrooms twice a week and help organize arts, crafts, music, and, for girls on Thursdays, sewing. At least in my day it’d been sewing. By now it was probably something more gender neutral and modern. Computer usage or beginners’ microwaving.
Katie, like my mother, lived at the top of a big hill. The house’s slender staircase cut into the grass and was bordered with sunflowers. A catalpa tree sat slim and elegant as a finger on the hilltop, the female match to the burly shade oak on its right. It was barely ten, but Katie, slim and brown, was already sunning herself on the widow’s walk, a box fan breezing her. Sun without the heat. Now if she could only figure out a tan without the cancer. Or at least the wrinkles. She saw me coming up the stairs, an irritating flicker against the deep green of her lawn, and shaded her eyes to make me out from forty feet above.
“Who is that?” she called out. Her hair, a natural wheaty blonde in high school, was now a brassy platinum that sprung out of a ponytail atop her head.
“Hi, Katie. It’s Camille.”
“Ca-meeel! Oh my God, I’m coming down.”
It was a more generous greeting than I’d expected from Katie, who I hadn’t heard from again after the night of Angie’s Pity Party. Her grudges always came and went like breezes.
She bounded to the door, those bright blue eyes glowing from her suntanned face. Her arms were brown and skinny as a child’s, reminding me of the French cigarillos Alan had taken to smoking one winter. My mother had blocked him off into the basement, grandly called it his smoking room. Alan soon dropped the cigarillos and took up port.
Over her bikini Katie had thrown a neon pink tank, the kind girls picked up in South Padre in the late ’80s, souvenirs from wet T-shirt contests over Spring Break. She wrapped her cocoa-buttered arms around me and led me inside. No A/C in this old house either, just like my momma’s, she explained. Although they did have one room unit in the master bedroom. The kids, I guessed, could sweat it out. Not that they weren’t catered to. The entire east wing seemed to be an indoor playground, complete with a yellow plastic house, a slide, a designer rocking horse. None of it looked remotely played with. Big colored letters lined one wall: Mackenzie. Emma. Photos of smiling blonde girls, pug nosed and glassy eyed, pretty mouth breathers. Never a close-up of a face, but always framed in order to capture what they were wearing. Pink overalls with daisies, red dresses with polka-dot bloomers, Easter bonnets and Mary Janes. Cute kids, really cute clothes. I’d just created a tagline for Wind Gaps’ li’l shoppers.
Katie Lacey Brucker didn’t seem to care why I was in her home this Friday morning. There was talk of a celebrity tell-all she was reading, and whether childrens’ beauty pageants were forever stigmatized by JonBenet. Mackenzie is just dying to model. Well she’s as pretty as her mother, who can blame her? Why, Camille, that’s sweet of you to say—I never felt like you thought I was pretty. Oh of course, don’t be silly. Would you like a drink? Absolutely. We don’t keep liquor in the home. Of course, not what I meant at all. Sweet tea? Sweet tea is lovely, impossible to get in Chicago, you really miss the little regional goodies, you should see how they do their ham up there. So great to be home.
Katie came back with a crystal pitcher of sweet tea. Curious, since from the living room I saw her pull a big gallon jug out of the icebox. A hit of smugness, followed by a self-reminder that I wasn’t being particularly frank, either. In fact, I’d cloaked my own natural state with the thick scent of fake plant. Not just aloe and strawberry, but also the faint strain of lemon air freshener coming from my shoulder.
“This tea is wonderful, Katie. I swear I could drink sweet tea with every meal.”
“How do they do their ham up there?” She tucked her feet under her legs and leaned in. It reminded me of high school, that serious stare, as if she were trying to memorize the combination to a safe.
I don’t eat ham, hadn’t since I was a kid and went to visit the family business. It wasn’t even a slaughtering day, but the sight kept me up nights. Hundreds of those animals caged so tightly they couldn’t even turn around, the sweet throaty scent of blood and shit. A flash of Amma, staring intently at those cages.
“Not enough brown sugar.”
“Mmmhmm. Speaking of which, can I make you a sandwich or something? Got ham from your momma’s place, beef from the Deacons’, chicken from Coveys. And turkey from Lean Cuisine.”
Katie was the type who’d bustle around all day, clean the kitchen tile with a toothbrush, pull the lint from the floorboards with a toothpick before she spoke much about anything uncomfortable. Sober at least. Still, I maneuvered her to talk of Ann and Natalie, guaranteed her anonymity, and started up my tape recorder. The girls were sweet and cute and darling, the obligatory cheery revisionism. Then:
“We did have an incident with Ann, on Sewing Day.” Sewing Day, still around. Kind of comforting, I suppose. “She jabbed Natalie Keene in the cheek with her needle. I think she was aiming for the eye, you know, like Natalie did to that little girl back in Ohio.” Philadelphia. “One minute the two were sitting nice and quiet next to each other—they weren’t friends, they were in different grades, but Sewing’s open. And Ann was humming something to herself and looking just like a little mother. And then it happened.”
“How hurt was Natalie?”
“Mmm, not too bad. Me and Rae Whitescarver, she’s the second-grade teacher now. Used to be Rae Little, few years below us…and not little. At least not then—she’s dropped a few pounds. Anyway, me and Rae pulled Ann off and Natalie had this needle sticking right out of her cheek just an inch below her eye. Didn’t cry or nothing. Just wheezed in and out like an angry horse.”
An image of Ann with her crooked hair, weaving the needle through cloth, remembering a story about Natalie and her scissors, a violence that made her so different. And before she thought it through, the needle into flesh, easier than you’d think, hitting bone in one quick thrust. Natalie with the metal spearing out of her, like a tiny silver harpoon.
“Ann did it for no clear reason?”
“One thing I learned about those two, they didn’t need a reason to strike out.”
“Did other girls pick on them? Were they under stress?”
“Ha Ha!” It was a genuinely surprised laugh, but it came out in a perfect, unlikely “Ha Ha!” Like a cat looking at you and saying “Meow.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say school days were something they looked forward to,” Katie said. “But you should ask your little sister about that.”
“I know you say Amma bullied them…”
“God help us when she hits high school.”
I waited in silence for Katie Lacey Brucker to gear up and talk about my sister. Bad news, I guessed. No wonder she was so happy to see me.
“Remember how we ran Calhoon? What we thought was cool became cool, who we didn’t like everyone hated?” She sounded fairy-tale dreamy, as if she were thinking of a land of ice cream and bunnies. I only nodded. I remember a particularly cruel gesture on my part: An overearnest girl named LeeAnn, a leftover friend from grade school, had displayed too much concern about my mental state, suggested I might be depressed. I snubbed her pointedly one day when she came scurrying over to speak with me before school. I can still remember her: books bundled under her arms, that awkward printed skirt, her head kept a bit low whenever she addressed me. I turned my back on her, blocked her from the group of girls I was with, made some joke about her conservative church clothes. The girls ran with it. For the rest of the week, she was pointedly taunted. She spent the last two years of high school hanging out with teachers during lunch. I could have stopped it with one word, but I didn’t. I needed her to stay away.
“Your sister is like us times three. And she has a major mean streak.”
“Mean streak how?”
Katie pulled a soft pack of cigarettes from the endtable drawer, lit one with a long fireplace match. Still a secret smoker.
“Oh, she and those three girls, those little blonde things with the tits already, they rule the school, and Amma rules them. Seriously, it’s bad. Sometimes funny, but mostly bad. They make this fat girl get them lunch every day, and before she leaves, they make her eat something without using her hands, just dig her face in there on the plate.” She scrunched up her nose but didn’t seem otherwise bothered. “Another little girl they cornered and made her lift up her shirt and show the boys. Because she was flat. They made her say dirty things while she was doing it. There’s a rumor going around that they took one of their old friends, girl named Ronna Deel they’d fallen out with, took her to a party, got her drunk and…kind of gave her as a present to some of the older boys. Stood guard outside the room till they were done with her.”
“They’re barely thirteen,” I said. I thought of what I’d done at that age. For the first time I realized how offensively young it was.
“These are precocious little girls. We did some pretty wild things ourselves at not much older.” Katie’s voice got huskier with her smoke. She blew it up and watched it hover blue above us.
“We never did anything that cruel.”
“We came pretty damn close, Camille.” You did, I didn’t. We stared at each other, privately cataloguing our power plays.
“Anyway, Amma fucked with Ann and Natalie a lot,” Katie said. “It was nice your mom took so much interest in them.”
“My mom tutored Ann, I know.”
“Oh, she’d work with them during mother’s aide, have them over to your house, feed them after school. Sometimes she’d even come by during recess and you could see her outside the fence, watching them on the playground.”
A flash of my mother, fingers wrapped between the fence wire, hungrily looking in. A flash of my mother in white, glowing white, holding Natalie with one arm, and a finger up to her mouth to hush James Capisi.
“Are we done?” Katie asked. “I’m sort of tired of talking about all this.” She clicked the tape recorder off.
“So, I heard about you and the cute cop,” Katie smiled. A wisp of hair came unhooked from her ponytail, and I could remember her, head bent over her feet, painting her toenails and asking about me and one of the basketball players she’d wanted for herself. I tried not to wince at the mention of Richard.
“Oh, rumors, rumors.” I smiled. “Single guy, single girl…my life isn’t nearly that interesting.”
“John Keene might say different.” She plucked another cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled while fixing me with those china blue eyes. No smile this time. I knew this could go two ways. I could give her a few tidbits, make her happy. If the story had already reached Katie at ten, the rest of Wind Gap would hear by noon. Or I could deny, risk her anger, lose her cooperation. I already had the interview, and I certainly didn’t care about staying in her good graces.
“Ah. More rumors. People need to get some better hobbies around here.”
“Really? Sounded pretty typical to me. You were always open to a good time.”
I stood up, more than ready to leave. Katie followed me out, chewing the inside of her cheek.
“Thanks for your time, Katie. It was good seeing you.”
“You too, Camille. Enjoy the rest of your stay here.” I was out the door and on the steps when she called back to me.
“Camille?” I turned around, saw Katie with her left leg bent inward like a little girl’s, a gesture she had even in high school. “Friendly advice: Get home and wash yourself. You stink.”
I did go home. My brain was stumbling from image to image of my mother, all ominous. Omen. The word beat again on my skin. Flash of thin, wild-haired Joya with the long nails, peeling skin from my mother. Flash of my mother and her pills and potions, sawing through my hair. Flash of Marian, now bones in a coffin, a white satin ribbon wrapped around dried blonde curls, like some bouquet gone stale. My mother tending to those violent little girls. Or trying to. Natalie and Ann weren’t likely to suffer much of that. Adora hated little girls who didn’t capitulate to her peculiar strain of mothering. Had she painted Natalie’s fingernails before she strangled her? After?
You’re crazy to think what you’re thinking. You’re crazy to not think it.