Authors: Susan Palwick
“It’s not safe,” I said, looking straight at Jane. There were two of them. She didn’t have her baseball bat with her, and I’d be no help at all. I’d never been any good at fighting. “The boat’s not ours and we have to go study. We shouldn’t have come here anyway.”
“It was your idea,” said Jane. She looked a lot like her mother when she frowned. “I think the boat sounds like fun. We can put it in the water, anyway, see what happens—”
“I want to study,” I said. “I’m not as good at math as you are, I’ll fail the test.”
Tad was scowling, but Billy just laughed. “What the fuck, Emma, you’d get straight A’s if you didn’t open a book all year. You didn’t come out here to do algebra, did you?”
“She’s just scared she’ll sink the boat,” said Tad. “She must weigh double what I do.”
I felt myself turning red. Jane made a face at Tad, and Billy said, “If she does, it’s ’cause she’s got twice as much brains and manners.”
Jane grinned. “Tad, you’re a jerk. Emma, don’t mind him. You go back home and study, and I’ll go with them. That’s easy, isn’t it?”
What was she saying? There were two of them. She’d be outnumbered. “You have to help me,” I said. I remembered the round balloons with their little stubby legs. That was what I looked like; even Jane probably laughed at me behind my back.
I couldn’t stand the idea of Jane making fun of me, so I thought about the swimming lessons. “Don’t let the racers intimidate you,” my father had said. “You’re not fast, but you’re steady.”
I had endurance, and I had to keep her from going out in the boat. I took a breath and said, “Please, Jane. You said you’d help me.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, and I knew she was talking about the ladder. A breeze had sprung up and her nipples showed under the tank top, and Tad stared at her chest even harder than he had before.
“I don’t feel well,” I said. My own nipples hurt just watching him look at her. “I want to go back to your house and study now so I can go to bed early. The sun’s not even out anymore.”
“It went behind a cloud,” Billy said. “A little cloud, Emma, see? Here it comes again. Shazam!” He gestured dramatically at the sky just as the sun reappeared, and Jane giggled. “See, I’m a magician.”
Go back in, I prayed to the sun. Go back behind a cloud. Catch up to the sun, cloud, and cover it the way Jane should cover her breasts, the way we should all cover ourselves so no one stares at us.
The sky didn’t listen to me, any more than Jane was listening. “Just for an hour,” she told Billy and Tad, “and then I really have to go home and study. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Emma. I’ll help you with math after dinner. You’re still coming over for dinner, right?”
“Yes,” I said, defeated. But where was I going to go until then? The dock wasn’t safe anymore, and if I went home Mom would find some way to keep me from going to the Hallorans’ to eat. I could go to the library and study, but I knew it wouldn’t work. I hated math; I’d just sit there feeling miserable because I was fat. Or else I’d keep thinking about Ginny and worrying about whether I was crazy.
I had to find out. Mom wasn’t expecting me home; she wouldn’t hear me if I snuck into the house. I’d creep around and look for the key some more. I’d pretend I was Nancy Drew.
The plot didn’t make me happy, though, because I’d be doing it by myself and we lived in a big house. I knew I could search for years, dig up all the floorboards and sift through every bit of dust in the attic, and still never find the key. To give myself time to think of new places I took the long way home through the woods, or what was left of them after the ravages of the highway Tom Halloran had helped build, but that didn’t work either. I kept hearing highway noises through the trees and imagining truckers pulling over to the side of the road, crashing through the underbrush to find me; with each flicker of sunlight on leaves, I seemed to see Ginny flitting through the branches, mocking me with her beauty.
The route would have taken me to our back door, but before I reached my house I had to pass the Hallorans’, and there was Myrna in her tomato bed, pulling up weeds. Snarky, Snotty, Slimy, and Spot, tethered to chains from which they inevitably escaped, set up a four-part mongrel chorus when they saw me. No one else was in the backyard.
“Emma!” Myrna said, looking up from her tomatoes. “There you are. I thought you and Jane would be upstairs with your noses in the books. Where is she?”
“With Billy and Tad,” I said. “In a rowboat on the lake.”
“Sounds like fun. Why didn’t you go with them?”
“I didn’t feel like it. I have to study.”
“Those are good reasons,” Myrna said cheerfully. “How
do
you feel? You look a little better than you did this morning.”
I shrugged. “I’m okay.”
“Are you?” She stood up, dusting earth and bits of grass from her slacks. “Come inside and let me look at that bruise, and then I’ll give you some lemonade.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m going home now. You don’t need to look at my arm.”
“No?” She raised one eyebrow. “Well, all right. Would you like the lemonade anyway?”
I reddened again. Myrna was being nice to me because she knew I didn’t feel well, and I was being rude back. I didn’t need Mom to tell me that Ginny never would have behaved so badly. “Yes, please.”
“Good,” she said, leading me inside. The house was unusually quiet now that the canine opera in the backyard had faded to whimpers. I couldn’t hear anyone talking; the TV wasn’t even on.
“Where is everybody?”
Myrna laughed. “Tom’s working and there are no kids here—can you believe it? Jane’s on the lake and Mike and Andrew are at track practice, and Rob’s over at the Smiths’, and Greg’s playing touch football with some of the Wilson boys and David’s at a play rehearsal. And John and Tom Jr. are busy with their own families and haven’t even spared me any grandchildren to spoil. You’ve never seen this place so empty, have you?”
“No,” I said. During the time she’d been talking, three of the Hallorans’ five cats had wound themselves around my ankles, and the four dogs had resumed their commotion. They clearly weren’t used to the quiet either, since there were usually at least two children of various ages—not to mention nieces, nephews and hangers-on—to lavish affection on them. My mother called the Halloran household a rabbit warren, but Myrna’s philosophy was simple. “There’s always room for one more,” she’d say, and set another place at the table.
As a result, the Hallorans’ kitchen always looked like a bomb had exploded somewhere: the dishwasher remained perpetually open and half full, and piles of dishes—both dirty and clean—dotted the counter. The refrigerator was papered with layers of cartoons, grocery lists, first-grade art, recipes, and newspaper articles about health tips, local elections, and gardening. The strata of clippings probably went back ten years; I often wondered how long it had been since the actual surface of the refrigerator had been visible. Next to the telephone hung a huge bulletin board similarly festooned; the only piece of paper not partially obscured by ten other pieces of paper was a large list, carefully lettered in bright red marker readable halfway across the room, of emergency numbers. With the Hallorans’ usual excess, the list extended beyond the standard trio of police, fire, and ambulance to include the Animal Hospital, the Poison Control Center, and the National Guard.
My mother hated the Hallorans’ kitchen. I found it comforting. Myrna plucked a glass from one of the clusters on the counter—I trusted her to know that it was clean—and poured a glass of lemonade from a huge Tupperware jug, “Here you go, hon. Any idea when Janie’ll be back?”
“She said an hour.”
Myrna laughed. “Maybe by dinner, then. Whose boat was it?”
I hesitated, unwilling to tell on Jane. Myrna’s undivided attention was making me claustrophobic. I bent down and patted one of the cats so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”
“Cramps again?”
“Yeah. But they’re better now.” Even if I’d been able to talk about Tad staring at Jane’s breasts, I wouldn’t have been able to tell Myrna I was worried because a boy was paying attention to her daughter. It would sound like I was accusing Jane of not noticing, of being stupid or foolish.
But Jane herself entered the kitchen at that moment, soaking wet, the thin cotton tank top plastered to her breasts just as I had feared it would be. They must have grabbed her in the boat; she must have had to dive overboard to get away from them. No one could swim as fast as Jane could. She was lucky she could swim so fast.
“What happened?” Myrna asked, both eyebrows raised.
“Tad tried to touch me,” Jane said cheerfully, grabbing a towel from the laundry hamper sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, “so I punched him and he fell into the water, and it turned out he couldn’t
swim—
can you believe that, I mean, he takes this old boat out when we aren’t even sure it will float and he can’t swim, is that dumb or what?—so I had to go in after him so the idiot wouldn’t drown. And him bigger than me and everything! Boy, was he ever embarrassed. Trying to feel me up and then I saved his life. Billy thought the whole thing was hilarious. He was laughing so hard he could hardly row the boat.”
My stomach was a lump of ice. Now we’d really get it, especially since there was no one else around to provide distractions. What were you doing in a leaky boat? Why were you wearing that clothing alone with two boys? What right did you have to punch him when you’d excited him by wearing that clothing? Emma, why didn’t you tell me Jane was going out in a leaky boat? Why didn’t you make Jane come home instead of going out on the lake? Why didn’t you give her your sweatshirt to wear over the tank top, if she was going to be alone in a leaky boat with two boys?
“Are you all right?” Myrna said.
“Huh? Are you kidding? Of course I’m all right!”
“Well, that’s good.” Myrna sounded like she was trying very hard not to laugh. “Is Tad all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine, thanks to me.” Jane shook her head, showering the kitchen with lake water. “He was more scared than anything else. And embarrassed because he’d tried to grab my boobs—”
“Jane!”
“Oh, breasts, all right, anatomically correct hoo-has, anyway, he did it once like it was a joke and I yelled at him and Billy said he’d better not do it again, but Tad said girls were supposed to like that and tried to do it again anyway, so I punched him. I think I may have knocked one of his teeth loose.”
“How did you feel when he did that?” Myrna said.
“Huh? Mad!”
“Good. Tell me what you would have done if you’d been alone on the beach, and a grown man had tried to do that to you.”
A grown man. What if it’s a grown man and he’s in your bedroom and he’s breathing on you? You don’t do anything. You lie there and wait for it to stop, because if you do anything else he’ll wire your mouth shut and put staples in your stomach. He can do anything he wants to, because if you try to tell anyone your mother will die.
But Jane just said, “Oh,
Mom
,” the way she complained about being told to eat her spinach, and recited, “I’d scream as loud as I could and go for the crotch and the eyes, and when I broke away from him I’d run like hell, and if I couldn’t break away or it was too dangerous to try, like he had a gun or something, I’d outthink him until I could.”
How could I outthink somebody who’d gone to medical school? Where would I even start? But Myrna just nodded and said, “Good. Emma, do you know all of this?”
“All of what?” I asked, my throat very dry.
“Self-defense techniques.”
Self-defense techniques. You’ve got to be kidding. “Yes,” I said. Sure, I know how to defend myself. You keep your mouth shut and pretend to be somewhere else, because if you say anything he’ll hurt you more than he’s going to already, and if Mom finds out—
I could no more knee him in the groin than I could fly to the moon. That would only make it worse. Myrna didn’t understand anything.
“Show me,” she said crisply.
“What?”
She reached into the forest of coats and sweaters growing on hooks from the back door and deftly extricated a thick down vest. “Show me,” she repeated, putting it on. “I’m going to try to grab you and I want you to fight me off. I know how to block blows, so don’t worry about hurting me, all right? I taught Janie this way. Hit as hard as you can.”
I couldn’t hit at all. “Can’t I just scream?” I asked.
“It’s good if you can scream,” Myrna said, nodding approvingly. She seemed to think it had been a serious question. “A lot of women can’t; they just freeze. But pretend you’ve screamed and it hasn’t worked. Show me what you’d do then.”
Jane was perched on a clear spot on the counter, eating an apple she’d found somewhere. “She’s ticklish,” she said, grinning. “That’s what the vest is supposed to protect her from. You have to go for the back of the knees—”
“Janie! Don’t tell her these things.” Myrna was coming towards me, laughing, bundled in the thick vest and raising one thick arm. “Now turn around, okay, pretend you’re just walking—”
“No!” I couldn’t breathe. “Don’t touch me! You’re making this into a game and it’s not funny—”
“No,” Myrna said, not smiling anymore. “No, it isn’t funny at all, and I wasn’t trying to make it a game. I’m sorry I upset you. Emma, what’s wrong?”
She knew too much. I was telling her too much; she was going to find out. I swallowed, fighting for air, and said, “Why don’t you ask her about the boat? They stole somebody’s boat and they didn’t even know what kind of shape it was in. And Tad—he was—he was
looking
! If she’d had her eyes open she’d have known! If she hadn’t been wearing that shirt—”
I stopped, appalled. What had I said? How could I have said that? Jane, white-faced, slid off the counter in one quick movement and darted towards me, her fists clenched, but Myrna put an arm around her shoulders and held her. “Janie, be still. Emma, I was going to ask about the boat later. I was. The boat’s important, but what Tad did is more important, and what Jane did to defend herself is even more important than that. Do you understand? Emma, please tell me what’s wrong.”