They left the door open, but she didn’t return. When they were dressed, they went out with umbrellas and circled the house, calling her name, hoping she knew it. “Don’t worry,” their father said, climbing into his car. “She’ll be back. I know all about cats.”
He started the engine. There was a sound like an electric saw cutting wood. He switched the engine off, opened his door, got out and almost stepped on Rapunzel coming out from under the car, dragging her hindquarters. The skirt of the ball gown was all red. She meowed soundlessly at him and dropped sideways on his left shoe.
Lou decided that night that they had to run away from home. No other response seemed honourable or punishing enough. The next morning, after their father had left for work, she told her sisters the two plans she’d devised. Plan A—walk north
through the subdivision to the ravine, where they might find an old boxcar to live in. Eat fish from the river and wild berries. Plan B (in case there were no old boxcars)—take the bus into the city, to the orphanage. Say they’ve escaped from an uncle who beats them. Pretend that the uncle hitting their heads has made them forget certain things, such as the uncle’s name and where they live. Hold out for rich, kind parents.
“Daddy’ll find us,” Norma said, but not dismissively. Plan A appealed to her, the idea of living in peace in the woods, picking up warnings and pointers from the animals.
“We’re going to leave a note behind to foil him,” Lou said, clicking open the circular suitcase that their mother had carried around during the war, when she was a dancer in The Light Fantastics. “We’re going to say we’ve gone to Florida.” She removed their mother’s black tap shoes and packed the plates, forks and spoons and the butcher knife she’d got from the kitchen. Then she packed their underwear. Although it was warm outside, she ordered her sisters to change into their wool slacks and skating sweaters because there wasn’t room for winter clothes in the suitcase.
Sandy went into her bedroom and returned in her best dress.
“What’s the big idea?” Lou demanded.
“Just to make sure I get adopted,” Sandy said, strutting over to the mirror and curling her hair into ringlets around her finger.
Norma said forlornly,“Oh, you’ll get snapped up in no time.” She pictured mothers pulling at Sandy’s arms. She thought that even Lou would probably go fast—to some mother dying to fatten her up. “Let’s make a deal,” she said. “Okay? We get adopted together, or we don’t go. They have to adopt all three of us. Okay?”
“Who will look after Mommy?” Sandy cried, suddenly remembering her.
Lou said,“Don’t worry. Daddy will. He likes
her.”
She was
trying to remember how you told poisonous berries from ones you could eat. She closed the suitcase, opened it again, went back to the kitchen and got five cans and the can opener and packed them. To close the suitcase now, she had to get Norma to sit on it. Next she had Norma and Sandy empty the piggy banks, while she went into their parents’ bedroom looking for more money. Four dollars and thirty-five cents in change was in the top drawer of their father’s dresser, and she took it and put it, along with the money from the piggy banks, in her black shoulder purse that she used for grocery shopping. Then she wrote the note:
“Dear Daddy. We have gone to Florida because you killed Rapunzel. We are gone forever. If you look for us you will waste your time. From your daughters, Norma, Louise and Sandra.”
She lay it on his pillow, on the unmade bed. Never again would she make that damn bed, she thought, feeling as if she were already far away, a lot farther away than she intended to go.
Norma carried the suitcase, Lou carried the purse, and Sandy carried her Miss Flexie Doll. It was a beautiful morning, warm, still, not a cloud in the sky. Between the houses, pale yellow light poured down.
First they went to the cigar store to pick up sunglasses for travelling in disguise. Then they headed north, into a part of the subdivision they’d never walked through before. The streets had names like Deep Pine Woods and Shady Oak Hill, although there were no hills and just a few spindly maple trees held up by sticks, the same as on their street.
Lou tried to keep heading north, but with the streets curling back on themselves and with all the houses looking alike, she wasn’t as sure of where she was going as she pretended to be. Kids stared at the three of them in their sunglasses. A boy in a Davy Crockett hat asked,“Are you beatniks?” and about a half hour later, there he was asking it again.
“Oh, no, we’re back where we started from,” Norma said, setting down the suitcase. Her arm was killing her.
Sandy sat on the curb and took off her sunglasses. Since there’d been no children’s pairs, she’d got a woman’s pair, gold-rimmed ones with red jewels in the corner. The men’s ones were cheaper—Lou bought a pair of them—but Sandy would never wear men’s. Norma had to wear clip-ons over her real glasses.
“My feet hurt,” Sandy said.
“I told you not to wear those damn party shoes,” Lou said. “Hey, kid,” she said to the boy. “How do you get to the ravine from here?”
“What ravine?”
“Where the trains go through.”
“Search me.”
“Why don’t you just ask him how we get out of here,” Norma said, sitting beside Sandy.
“Go that way, then that way, then that way, then that way, then that way,” the boy answered, zigzagging his arm.
“I’m thirsty,” Sandy whined.
“Shut up,” Lou said. “Just everybody shut up and let me think.” She was thirsty, too. And boiling hot in her skating sweater, but she couldn’t take it off because she didn’t have anything on underneath. She stared at the boy, who stared back, obediently quiet. Nothing occurred to her except to go on to Plan B. “Okay, kid,” she said. “I’ll make you a deal.”
For a can of pears he led them back to the shopping centre. Sandy took off her shoes and socks and walked on lawns until a bee stung her foot, and then Norma had to carry her piggyback, and Lou had to carry the suitcase.
At the shopping centre again they bought three Cokes, some Bactine for Sandy’s foot and a purple wax hairband that Sandy would wear for a while and they could all have a piece of later to chew on. But they waited at the bus stop for so long that the
hairband melted on Sandy’s head. The only way Lou could remove all the wax was to cut off the hair it was stuck to. She used the butcher knife.
“I want to go home,” Sandy whimpered.
“Forget it,” Lou said. “We’re never going back to that dump.”
It didn’t cross Sandy’s mind to go home alone. Clutching her doll, she sat on the suitcase.
“The bus will be along any minute, honey,” Norma said. How long had they been waiting? she wondered. An hour? There were no trees. No shade. Only the thin strip that the busstop pole made. A lady who’d waited with them for a while and then decided to walk said she bet the bus had overheated and was stalled somewhere. She also told them that about a half hour ago, behind the drugstore, a man collapsed from sunstroke, and the druggist called an ambulance.
Norma saw a piece of cardboard by the curb. She picked it up and brought it over to fan Sandy with. Sandy lowered her head, and on her neck where her hair parted, Norma saw a heat rash. Poor baby, Norma thought. To distract her, she said,“I spy with my little eye, something that is …” She glanced all around for a colour. “That is grey.”
“Movie stars,” the driver said as they were boarding the bus. They kept forgetting about their sunglasses. When Lou was paying him, she asked if this bus went downtown. He said they’d have to go on the subway, but he’d take them to the station.
They sat on the seat behind him. Norma’s legs were dripping perspiration inside her winter slacks. The woman across from her was holding a squirming baby boy, and that made her think of their brother, Jimmy. Sometimes she dreamed about him, of finding him, still a baby, in a carriage on the street. “Why haven’t you looked for me?” he asked sadly, and she thought,
“Wow! A talking baby!” Another dream she had was that she was playing with a boy who had Lou’s thin dark face and who kept trying to kiss her. “It’s okay, I’m your brother,” he said. But she knew he was lying because their brother would be full of grace.
“I’m too hot,” Sandy said softly. She dropped her doll on the bus floor and just sat there, watching it slide as the bus turned.
“Your doll,” Norma said, picking it up, and then she saw how pink Sandy’s face was. “Lou, look at Sandy,” she said, lifting her clip-on glasses.
Lou thought of the man fainting behind the drugstore. “We’ve got to get her a drink,” she said. “We better get off.” She rang the bell for the next stop.
The bus driver let them off a block past the stop, where there was a restaurant they could go to. Sandy wouldn’t walk, so Norma had to carry her piggyback again. Behind her jewelled sunglasses Sandy closed her eyes.
They sat at the counter and Lou ordered three large Cokes. By the cash register there was a little fan that she turned to blow on Sandy, who lay her head on the empty plate in front of her.
The waitress, a fat, humming woman, asked if Sandy was sleepy.
“No,” Lou answered. “She just likes to put her ear on a plate.” Which happened to be the truth.
But the waitress looked unconvinced. “That kid should be home in bed,” she said.
“Well, we’d like to go home,” Lou lied, detecting a soft heart,“but we don’t have any money for the subway tickets.” She held the straw to Sandy’s lips. “Come on, honey,” she said lovingly, for the benefit of the waitress. “Drink it. That’s it, sweetie pie. That’s it, honey.”
Sandy listened in drowsy amazement. Right now, she thought, anything I want, Lou will give me. She wondered what she wanted.
“Do you have money to pay for the Cokes?” the waitress asked. Lou shook her head.
Sandy made her decision. She put her lips to Lou’s ear. “I want to go to the orphanage now,” she whispered. (Sandy would go through life rewarding people for words of love.)
They had a map to the subway, which the waitress, who also gave them seventy-five cents, had drawn on a napkin. Stick to the shady side of the street, she warned, but even there it was sweltering. The heat made everything look like its reflection in a lake. They passed a drugstore, a shoe-repair store, a hardware store—rows of buildings, two and three stories high with people leaning out of the upstairs windows. Poor, sad, foreign people, Norma thought, who couldn’t afford to live in the suburbs. She waved up at a baby whose mother waved its hand.
“We’re not in a parade,” Lou scolded. Now that Sandy was out of danger, Lou was worried again about discovery. She shoved them into a doorway when a blue Packard like their father’s drove by. She walked ahead, as the lookout, so she was the first one to see the kitten, sitting in a doorway and washing itself. Except for a big black spot on its back it was all white.
“Rapunzel!” she cried.
The kitten went still, one hind leg sticking out. Lou ran up to it and kneeled down with her hands reaching. “Rapunzel, it’s me,” she said. “Lou.” The kitten took off.
Crying its name, they chased it around the side of the building, over a stone wall and across a lawn. Lou dropped the napkin. Sandy’s sunglasses fell off. Norma, who was carrying everything, couldn’t keep up and imagined her sisters disappearing forever, leaving her with no trace except the doll and this suitcase full of their underwear. But in a minute they were running back, calling out of breath, did she see her?
There was no sense running now, since they didn’t know
where to go. To cool off, they walked through sprinklers. A woman shook a white cloth out of a window, and that caught their eye, the white. They were searching for white. There were white flowers, a white porch chair, white pillars, a man in a white shirt cutting grass. No, he answered Lou, he hadn’t seen a white kitten with a black spot on its back.
In the middle of a street with huge trees and no moving cars Lou called a halt.
“It couldn’t have been her, anyway,” Norma said. As Lou didn’t seem that worried about discovery anymore, Norma raised her clip-ons.
“She didn’t have the gown on,” Sandy pointed out.
“Boy,” Norma said,“it sure looked like her, though. Maybe it was her sister.”
“It was
her!”
Lou said furiously. “I saw her. I found her. She was my damn cat.” She turned away.
Norma snapped the clip-ons down. She had an urge to lay her hand between Lou’s shoulder blades, to feel how hard and straight and familiar Lou’s thin back was, like the side of their house. Instead she slipped her hand into Sandy’s, and Sandy squeezed it. “Are you okay, honey?” Norma asked her, only now thinking that Sandy shouldn’t have run right after a heatstroke.
Sandy gave an extreme, childish nod. She pointed to a stone building with a turret. “Is that a castle?”
While they’d been chasing the kitten, Norma hadn’t paid attention to where they were. Now she saw that the street was paved with red bricks and that the houses were gigantic. “I think it’s a mansion,” she said. “This must be where rich people live.”
“Come on, let’s go,” Lou muttered. She started walking.
“Shouldn’t we go the other way?” Norma asked.
“This
way!” Lou yelled without stopping. But she wasn’t sure. She was mad enough to kill somebody with the butcher knife.
“Stupid shitface cat!” she yelled. There was no one to hear. The man cutting the grass was gone, and there weren’t any children playing. All the lawns were bare of children and dandelions.
Under the trees it was almost cool. Lou thought that if they didn’t find their way out of here by dinner time, they could sleep under one of these big trees. Maybe they’d even hang around for a few months. Beg for scraps from maids, have the parks all to themselves. They’d passed two parks with swings and slides and not one kid. Where were all the people?
Just as she was wondering this, she saw somebody. An old man who looked like Santa Claus in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. He was clipping a hedge. He waved at them, and Sandy waved back.
“Are you running away from home?” he asked in a kind voice when they walked up to him. He smiled over little round glasses.