“Shut up,” Lou said. She came over and shook him again, causing his head to fall to his chest. Then, remembering from somewhere, she tried to feel a pulse in his wrist. Nothing.
The three of them stood close together, about five feet from the chair. “A dead person,” Norma whispered. Her legs went weak, and she grabbed Lou’s wrist to steady herself.
Lou gasped. She had been staring at the old man’s hand that had squeezed the lemons, and she thought it was
his
hand, suddenly a ghost’s, grabbing her. When he swooped her up in the kitchen, it hurt her a little under her arms.
“There’s a bad smell,” Sandy said. She started to whimper,
and a sob jumped into Lou’s throat. Don’t cry, Lou warned herself. Yesterday their father said,“Two days ago you didn’t even know Rapunzel existed. Just pretend it’s two days ago.” They wrapped Rapunzel in toilet paper and buried her in an old shoe box that Lou had kept in her closet because when she was younger she used to think that the picture on it, of a dancing, glamorous lady with high heels and pin legs, was their mother.
A fly landed on the old man’s ear, then burrowed into his beard. “He smells like poo,” Sandy whimpered.
“We better bury him,” Lou said.
Norma gaped at her. “We can’t do that.”
“He told us we could stay,” Lou said. “Didn’t he? So it’s our place now. Right? If people come around, we’ll say he went on a vacation. We’ll just tell them to go to hell.”
Sandy screamed. “It moved!” She clutched Norma’s arm.
“What?”
“His hand. It moved.”
Lou said,“It did not.” She smacked Sandy and told her not to be so damn stupid.
“It did so,” Sandy said, crying. She couldn’t really believe he was dead, since there was no blood. He scared her, though, the way he seemed to be broken. When his head dropped to his chest, she pulled up his other eyelid, and that eye was there, but it was like blue marble, like a toy eye, blind.
She saw his hand twitch again. “He’s waking up!” she screamed.
“Shut up,” Lou said. “Do you want the whole neighbourhood here? Stop crying!” She started to cry herself. She began marching to the other side of the house, to where the garage was. If he had one, she’d get a wheelbarrow and carry him around to the vegetable garden and bury him there.
Norma ran in front of her. “I’m calling the police,” she said, holding out her arms. “I’m going next door and calling them if you dare do anything.”
Lou stopped. “You idiot,” she said, swiping at her tears, enraged that Norma saw them,“they’ll think we did it.”
“No, they won’t,” Norma said. But what if they did? She dropped her arms.
“Bury him!” Sandy screamed.
“SHUT UP
!” Lou hollered.
“Let’s just go,” Norma said. “Okay? Let’s just go home and leave him here. Somebody’ll find him.”
“I’m not going home,” Lou said.
“Well,” Norma said,“I am.”
They stood there looking at each other until Lou turned away. Tears streamed down her face.
“Where’s the purse?” Norma asked. She saw it behind the old man. Taking a wide circle around him, she walked over and picked it up, stepping back to open it and count the money. Three times she dropped change because her hands were shaking. There was plenty of money for the subway and buses, she decided, but where was the subway? Where
were
they?
She went into the house to get the suitcase and Sandy’s doll. Sandy followed her, saying she had to go to the bathroom. They used the downstairs toilet, and while Norma was going, she warned Sandy never to tell anyone about the old man dying. If anyone found out, she said, they’d all go to jail for murder.
“I couldn’t tell
anyway.”
Sandy said, opening her hands, thinking with a melting heart of the dolls she’d left lined up on her bed with a promise to telephone. “We didn’t know what his name was.”
Lou had stolen a ten-dollar bill from the pocket of one of the old man’s jackets, and this allowed them to take a cab once they were finally on a main street. Norma and Sandy climbed in the back seat and slid over for Lou, but Lou got in the front with the driver, then ignored him, so Norma had to give the address.
When they pulled up in the driveway, their father’s car wasn’t there. They went inside and down to the t? room and their mother just said hi as if they hadn’t made her lunch and dinner. Their father had to work late, she said, her eyes returning to the screen. The note was still on his unmade bed. Lou picked it up and read it with a feeling of suspense because she couldn’t remember what she’d written and with a feeling of desolation because she remembered how excited she had felt writing it.
“Dear Daddy. We have gone to Florida because you killed Rapunzel.” But she doubted now that he’d believe it, because he didn’t really kill Rapunzel, not on purpose, anyway. He wouldn’t believe that they’d run so far away over something that wasn’t his fault.
She crumpled the letter, threw it in the wastepaper basket and started making the bed. What if, she wondered, she’d written,“We have gone to Florida because it hardly ever rains there. Not like here. Cats don’t have to climb into car motors to keep warm in Florida.”
He’d probably believe a note like that. He’d like a note that blamed the cold weather, which he hated, instead of blaming him. He might even let them go. She could picture him saying,“What the hell. They’ve got a point.”
Not that it made any difference now.
C
hristmas morning there was only one gift under the tree for each of them. Ugly green pedal pushers with the “sale item” tags still on for Norma and Lou, and for Sandy, a beatnik doll with a string in its back that you pulled to make it talk. Their father let them be miserable for a while, and then he sprang the surprise. He was going to take them to Disneyland in a top-of-the-line trailer that slept five.
“When, Daddy? When?” the girls cried.
He pulled the string on Sandy’s beatnik doll. “I’m hip, like, uh, you know, beatnik,” the doll said.
“This summer,” their father answered. “So for the next six months, thrift is the watchword.”
In January air-raid drills started at school for when the Russians dropped the bomb. The principal made a speech in the gymnasium. If it ever suddenly got very light, he said, like a huge flashbulb going off in the sky, you were to cover your eyes with your hands and crouch under your desks until the teacher said it was safe to come out. Then, two by two, you were to file down to the cellar. You were not to try to run home.
“The hell with that,” their father said when they told him. “You run home.” In spite of the watchword being thrift, he had decided to build a fallout shelter. He had a pamphlet that he’d sent away for called “Pioneers of Self-Defence,” all about how to do it.
As soon as the ground was soft enough, around the end of April, he hired a man with a bulldozer to dig a big hole in the back yard. The next day another man in a truck delivered a pile
of concrete blocks and some pipes and boards and sheets of metal, and their father went right to work.
It took a month. Every minute that their father wasn’t sleeping or working, he was down in that hole. He even ate his meals there. He let Norma help, and she got pretty good at mixing mortar and hammering nails, as long as he didn’t yell at her that she was doing it all wrong, which, if he stood over her shoulder, she did. In the morning she woke up yearning for the feel of the hammer in her hand, all day at school she dreamed about hammering. She wished she could do it when he wasn’t around, and yet sometimes, when he wasn’t mad or tired, she liked the fact that they worked as a team: she mixing the mortar, he setting the blocks; he sawing the boards, she nailing them down. He had to have everything perfect, and the longer she helped him, the more she wanted everything to be perfect, too, the more she couldn’t blame him for his tantrums. She wondered if he wished he had a son—Jimmy (who would have been thirteen by now)—to help instead of her.
When the outside was done, the man came back with the bulldozer to shovel the earth back on the roof. Inside, Norma and their father built shelves and fold-up bunks and painted the walls canary yellow, which was supposed to add a note of cheerfulness. Even though Norma said that they never played hopscotch anymore, their father painted a hopscotch on the floor, as recommended by the pamphlet.
He bought two weeks’ worth of canned food, jugs for the water, candles, lanterns, paper plates, a chemical toilet, canned heat, a fire extinguisher, a camping stove, and a bow and arrow for hunting game when the bullets ran out. The rest of what the pamphlet said he should buy—bedding, Band-Aids, a transistor radio, a flashlight, batteries, board games, a shovel in case they had to dig themselves out from the house falling on top of them—they already had. A small library of books on nature and American history would prove useful and inspirational, the
pamphlet said, but he said, did they know how much a book cost nowadays? and he carried down a box of his old
Life
magazines. He also brought down his World War II gun and three cases of their mother’s whisky.
Every Monday and Friday the girls had to empty the water jugs and refill them with a fresh supply. They didn’t mind this chore. It was small payment for the notoriety and security of being the safest children in the subdivision. Their friends begged to be able to come in when the bomb dropped, and Sandy said “Sure” to whoever asked her. Norma, understanding just how strictly the shelter was designed for a maximum of five people, said she didn’t think so—at first she always said that—but she ended up saying “Oh, all right,” because how could she leave her friends to die? “Cash in advance,” Lou said. By the end of the school year Lou had made three bucks.
Their father started to have drills, which were nothing like the ones they’d had at school, where the most important rule was to stay calm. He would blow a whistle, sometimes in the middle of the night, and the girls had to run like crazy to do their assigned tasks: Norma, shut and latch the windows and lock the front door; Lou, pull off the electricity switch and turn off the valve to the water heater; Sandy, shut off the furnace switch. The next morning their mother always claimed she’d slept right through, despite the fact that he went on blowing the whistle and shouting “Move it!” until they were lined up in front of the shelter hatch. Down inside he shone the flashlight on his stopwatch and announced how long it had taken. He shone the light in their faces and told them how they could shave off those precious seconds.
He slept down there. He put in an electric outlet so that he could listen to his Judy Garland records. The girls imagined him dancing with the shovel, smooching it: “How’s about a little kiss, baby.” They loved him being out of the house in the evenings, because they could change the channels, say whatever
they felt like and go to bed late. As long as their mother’s mug was filled with whisky, and the t? was on, she didn’t care what happened.
The Saturday before the last week of school their father announced that they were going down the bomb shelter for two weeks. All of them, including their mother.
The girls didn’t get it. Did he mean have a drill every day for two weeks? No, he meant stay down for two weeks. Sleep there? they asked. Sleep there, he said, eat there, not come out for two whole weeks.
“Oh, my lord,” their mother said quietly.
“Watch t? down there?” Norma asked.
“No t?. We’ll be living as if the bomb’s dropped and all electricity is out.”
Sandy wanted to know what if the phone rang?
“We’ll tell everyone where we are beforehand.”
“But won’t you have to go to work?”
“Nope. I’ve got two weeks coming.”
They still didn’t get it. “Two
more
weeks, Daddy?” Norma said.
“Alrighty,” he said, clapping his hands,“we’ll be going down a week from today. So this Friday I want the sheets and blankets out on the line for an airing. I want the water changed. I want you all to have baths.”
“But when are we going to Disneyland, then?” Lou asked.
“We’re not,” he said.
They weren’t down the shelter an hour when Norma got her first period. Thinking the cramps were from gas, she went into the little closet bathroom and sat on the toilet.
A few seconds later she called Lou in. “I’m dying,” she whispered, touching the blood in the crotch of her underpants and holding her finger toward the lantern.
“You moron,” Lou whispered. “It’s the curse.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, what else? What a goddamn moron.”
“Do you have it?”
“No,” Lou said, as if she wouldn’t be caught dead.
Norma looked at the dark stain on her underpants. She was dripping blood into the toilet now. “What am I going to do?”
“Use Kotex. But I guess there isn’t any down here.” She scanned the shelf beside the toilet. Band-Aids, toilet paper, Turns. “I know there’s some in Mommy’s closet, because I just bought her a box.” She opened the door. “Mommy? Can you come here?”
“What’s going on?” their father asked.
“Nothing. Mommy?”
Their mother’s slippers flapped as she crossed the floor.
“Norma’s menstruating,” Lou whispered to her.
Their mother covered her mouth with both hands.
“Do we have any Kotex down here?” Lou asked.
“Jim,” their mother said, turning around. “Lou just has to scoot up to the house for a sec.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he yelled. “There’s radiation out there.”
“Well, there isn’t really, Jim.”
“Yeah, but we have to act like there is, or we ruin the whole exercise.”
“Norma has become a woman.”
Silence. Norma shut her eyes.
“What the hell are you talking about?” their father asked again.
Their mother said, very distinctly,“Ruby Keeler,” which must have been a code name, because their father said,“Jesus Christ.”
“So Lou just has to scoot up and bring down some napkins,” their mother said.
“She’s really bleeding?” he said.
‘Well, yes, Jim.”
“Alrighty. We tear up a sheet.” He grabbed a green-striped flannelette sheet from the shelf where the linen was and ripped it in half. “What do ya think the pioneers did?” he asked.