Helen Hath No Fury (3 page)

Petra could remain silent, the way other girls had done. Starve herself and wear ever looser garments. And then what? No one could forget the news stories of young girls giving birth in motels and at proms, then killing the babies.

Or Petra could seek adult help. She could find a safe place for the pregnancy and find adoptive parents, although I wondered what the cover story would be to her father. It isn’t easy finding an alibi for being missing four or five months.

Or Petra could tell her father what was going on, and
he’d banish her to her grandmother’s. I could even understand why he’d believe that the best course, although his daughter considered it justification for suicide.

But if Petra didn’t tell her father or her stepmother—who, she believed, wanted only to have her out of the house and gone—and get parental consent, then despite the laws of the land, the laws of Pennsylvania wouldn’t permit her to terminate this pregnancy, if that was what she wanted.

“I wish I were dead!” she said. Again.

That was twice. It didn’t feel like teen histrionics of the passing kind. Besides, I would never take a teen’s death threats lightly for a myriad of reasons, at the head of which was the memory of Addie Winters, an eleventh grader who last year had been thought to be posturing, overdramatizing her miseries. Until she drank half a bottle of vodka, took the family car, and rammed it at ninety miles an hour into a wall.

However stupid their adolescent reasons for ending it all seemed, they were their reasons.

“If I were dead, they’d be sorry. Even Valerie.”

“No. Bad, bad idea.” I took her hands. “This is serious, Petra, but it’s not the end of the line. This has happened to countless millions of girls. Life goes on.”

“Like my mother. I’ll be just like my mother.” She laid her head back on the desktop.

I could hear the received hate she now conveyed, and how their history had been told to Petra and her sister. Not with love or compassion or understanding, it sounded like.

Of course, Petra could run away to a more accommodating state like New York. But where? It was an enormous state, and as for the city—it didn’t feel savory, sending a frightened fifteen-year-old pregnant girl alone to that massive and overpowering place. But accompanying
her without her parents’ permission would land somebody like me in jail as a criminal. It had happened already, made the headlines, made its point.

We were back to the rock. And the hard place.

“Petra.”

She pulled herself out of a near trance, but I saw that was about as much action as she was capable of taking. She had no more fuel, no more resources.

“Promise me one thing and then I’ll leave you, and you rest here as long as you like.”

She didn’t even raise her head from the desk, merely rolled it so that she watched me with one eye.

“Promise you won’t make any decisions about this—
none
—until tomorrow. Nothing will be worse tomorrow, so give me that time to think about all your options. To come up with a workable solution. Give it twenty-four hours. Promise me that.”

The eye, gray-green and prehistoric looking, did not blink.

“Promise.”

She exhaled in a frustrated-sounding sigh, then, still not raising her head, said, “Okay.”

“That’s for real?”

She closed her eyes and it felt like a door had slammed.

That was about as much as I knew how to do at the moment. I wished there was a tribal council waiting under a tree in the village. A council of elder women, good and hardened souls who’d have accumulated more wisdom than I, who together would know things about the world and how this powerless girl could fit into it and save herself.

The closest thing I could imagine to that village council was my book group, with all its good-natured disagreements and detours that lay atop years of hard-won knowledge about how it was to be a woman. They’d laugh at
the image of themselves as fonts of wisdom, but they’d nonetheless know—after lots of simultaneous thinking out loud—what a girl in this oldest of stories and dilemmas should do. They’d have a dozen solutions and opinions as to what should happen next.

But we weren’t meeting till another month was gone. That would be too late to ask.

T
HE GOOD AND BAD NEWS ABOUT A HIGH SCHOOL IS
that it’s like life—one damn thing after another. There is no time for real reflection, for dwelling on any one class or event, so once lunch was over, my fears for Petra were pushed to the back of the bus by the next mass of humanity to enter my classroom. Almost immediately, I had to direct my antennae to whether Patrick’s jitteriness was due to hormones or controlled substances; what I was going to do if Nonnie Carter continued to lie about having given me her essay; and whether the shaky, immature-looking handwriting on Brett’s excuse note was really his mother’s, or his.

After that class, another with its own set of concerns and amazements. A lot of hair issues that hour: Baby John, for so he insisted on being called, had sculpted his into a checkerboard pattern, and Cara had dyed strands of hers to replicate, she explained, what you see through a prism.

Of course, hairstyles aren’t actual problems—not when they aren’t mine—but the distraction and comments Baby John’s and Cara’s heads engendered were.

At times, I understand why conservative Muslims insist on the chador. Cover everything except slits for the eyes so nobody trips and falls. Only thing is, I’d want it on boys as well as girls.

And, of course, there were always and ever the semi-intelligible notices from the principal to his staff, notices that had an ever more pronounced edge of hysteria as summer approached. And there was always the glower and stare of Helga the Office Witch, with whom I had to deal at end of day because I wanted a word puzzle duplicated. Helga frowned, pulled her cardigan tighter across her front, and seemed affronted by the request. Helga considered the marks teachers put on her pristine paper pedagogical graffiti that defaced her stock and insulted her aesthetic sense.

“I need it for Thursday,” I said. Two days’ notice to press one button—we dangerous, vandalizing teachers were not permitted to use the copy machine ourselves.

“I don’t know …” She let her sentence drift off into an imaginary world of incredibly weighty duties. “You need how many copies?”

“Twenty.” I controlled the urge to grab back the master sheet and say that I’d do the copying myself, at a commercial spot. I’d done that too often already. That’s her master plan as she accumulates the world’s largest blank-paper collection.

She shrugged and sighed. You’d think I had asked her to carve the twenty sets in stone.

It was a further slide downhill with the journalism club after school. The
InkWire’s
current editor in chief was an elfin creature named Cinnamon Stickley, a name I thought cruel, but she apparently enjoyed. Cinnamon also emphatically wanted our final issue of the year to be completely devoted to “Philly Phashions,” detailed descriptions of what each student was wearing to the prom. This would be beneath even our lax standards.

Today was our second round of discussions about it.

“This is a student-run paper, isn’t it, Ms. Pepper?” Cinnamon’s gamine smile didn’t begin to hide the steel
behind it. She was going to be one formidable whatever it was she intended to be. I was, in fact, suggesting topics like that—life beyond the prom and graduation—but apparently I was the only one aware that there was such a thing.

“A student paper with a faculty adviser,” I reminded her. “As in one who’d give advice. And I’m that one.”

“Advice is a suggestion, right? Not like
law
or anything.”

A smart cookie with a stripper’s name. That combination would spell doom for a whole lot of people in her future.

“So while we’re all so glad for your input,” she said, gesturing toward the various other editors who were playing “yes, Cinnamon,” “we don’t agree.”

I had a sense of déjà vu. I’d been through this—or something sufficiently close to this—before. Last spring, in fact. Or the spring before. Maybe déjà déjà vuvuvu.

We wasted two perfectly good hours in further democratic student-involved discussion. There are times dictatorship sounds irresistible, but at least we found a midground in which student plans and aspirations would be recorded, along with news of summer programs and a roundup of the year just past. I could live with that.

I
T WAS RAINING, AND
I
DIDN’T HAVE MY RAINCOAT
.

Which, I suddenly realized, I hadn’t brought home last night. I raced around behind the school to my car. Then, damp and disheartened, I sat there listening to the motor, too lethargic to move on.

Every day, as I settle into the car alone, in that adolescent-free moment, I feel like I’ve just competed in an Olympic event. I am drained, exhausted, and stunned. Only the elation’s missing.

Going to Helen’s, stopping the car, finding parking, and retrieving my raincoat felt overwhelmingly difficult.

I told myself that as I was already damp, there was no point getting the raincoat now. Closing the barn door after, et cetera. Next outing, I’d bring along an umbrella and that would do the trick. And I’d stop at Helen’s when I had more energy.

Which was stupid, I answered. Really bad time management.

I hated these arguments I had with myself. Since I took both sides, I always lost. I put the car in gear and headed for Helen’s, which was at most four blocks away.

By now, Petra had become a thin glaze of worry atop whatever else had happened. I’d asked for twenty-four hours while I came up with a decent idea. Several of those hours were already gone, and I still saw only bad choices for her.

Helen’s street is one-way. I had to go past her block on a parallel street, so I could turn back in the right direction. Traffic was its usual late-afternoon clog, and with every stop and start, I regretted the decision to retrieve the coat. Naturally, as I crept along, the rain dwindled to near nothingness.

But finally I was there. Ahead of me on the opposite corner, I saw the short side of the yellow Dumpster that had become her “annex.” She said it had been there so long she was getting it its own address.

A patrolman was on the corner, and as I made my turn, I saw another one near Helen’s front door. Both wore slickers and plastic covers for their hats. Neither was doing anything in particular.

My first thought was that with them there, I couldn’t park illegally on the pavement, which had been my plan.

My second thought was slightly less self-centered. Something bad had happened.

My third was back to me and ridiculous. My raincoat had been stolen! As if my raincoat would be a prize in a house that was a treasure trove.

A block and a half away, I found a space that was at least 75 percent legal, and I hustled back toward Helen’s. As I approached, the front-door sentry straightened up. I smiled and pointed at the door. “I left my raincoat here last night,” I said. “I’m here to pick it up.”

He smiled. I must have been a pathetic sight, rain running off my hair into my eyes. But not sufficiently pathetic to let him bend the rules. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “This wouldn’t be a good time.”

There was no better time for a raincoat than when it was raining, but I didn’t point that out. “Should I wait?” I asked.

“No, ma’am.” His smile looked painful, the grimace of a man trying to appear good-natured when he is not. He remained planted at the base of the three marble steps leading to Helen’s front door.

“Then could somebody else retrieve it for me? It’s in the hall closet.” I had no idea how I’d describe my tan raincoat in a way that singled it out from the Coulters’ undoubtedly tan raincoats. By the amount of crumpled tissues in the pockets?

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.

“Could you tell me what’s happened here?”

“No.” He didn’t even pretend to be sorry about that one.

I didn’t know what to say. I had a million questions, of course, but there was no point in offering them up to this man. “Well, then … thanks.” I expected him to say, “For what? I haven’t done a damn thing to help you,” but amazingly, he didn’t.

I was halfway down the block when I heard, “Hey, hey, you!”

I looked back toward the policeman.

“Not there, here! My house, my house! Don’t make me shout!” She was across the street, huddled on the top step of an entryway, wrapped in an afghan, holding an umbrella. Had she not been adamant about the “my house!” business, and had not Delancey Street short shrift for squatters, I would have assumed she was homeless.

She waved me in to her, closer. “I saw it.”

I crossed the street. How lovely that even Helen’s most elegant of streets had its resident busybody. That’s what I’d like as my next career. And on a great street like Helen’s.

“Yes?” I said again.

“Up there at that house? On the corner?”

I nodded.

“She fell.” The woman was tiny, shrunken looking, and her face—the half I could see under the umbrella—was seared with wrinkles. She could have been pulled from a fairy tale, except for the orange and purple afghan. “I was going to the store, and I reached that corner and saw it happen. Like that.”

“Fell? Who? Where? Like what?”

“Like that.” She angled one hand down, fingers pointing to the street. “Boom. The lady of the house, they say. I couldn’t tell.”

I could see so little of her except for her umbrella, that I felt as if I were talking to a toadstool. “When was this?” It felt long ago the way this woman was telling it.

Her mouth turned down. “The police asked me, too, like I would know the very minute. I don’t go by watches, I go by my stomach. I was going to the store to get bread. My son’s wife, she knows I like a sandwich for my lunch, but she leaves for work and never remembers to buy my bread.”

“The police—why are they … was she badly hurt? Did she break a bone? Did you see her trip? Was it down the front steps?”

“Slow down, Missy. I don’t hear so good anymore.” And then she spoke as if I were the deaf one, slowly, each word overenunciated. “She. Fell. Off. The. Roof.”

“My God!” I looked up at the rooflines stories above my head. I was beginning to understand the police entourage, but I didn’t want to believe what this woman was saying.

The umbrella she held shook from left to right and back again. “Fell into her own Dumpster. I didn’t go over, was too afraid. Besides, what could I have done? I’m old. I screamed, nobody came, big surprise, so I went to the store two blocks away and called the police from there. And bought bread for my sandwich while I was at it.”

“Is she … please, do you know if she’s … all right?” The one thing I knew for certain was that she wasn’t “all right”—but I couldn’t make my mouth say either
alive
or
dead.
Those words were too freighted.

“All right? She fell three stories—or I think her house is four—into a Dumpster! Probably hit it coming down, because there was blood on the sidewalk—even I could see it when I went up there later, and my eyes aren’t too good.”

I was glad I hadn’t walked around the corner, hadn’t seen more than a blur from the car when I turned. “Is she … alive?” I whispered.

Nothing. I wondered if she knew it wasn’t raining anymore.

“Is she alive?” I repeated, more clearly.

She tilted her umbrella back so that she could look up at me more directly, and her maze of wrinkles rerouted themselves into a combination of incredulity and annoyance.

“Was that a stupid question?” I muttered.

“I sure think so,” she said, keeping the umbrella tilted as she studied me. She must have caught something in my expression. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear. You know her?”

I nodded.

“Then what would I know? I’m just an old lady sitting on her steps. She’s probably getting all better right now in the hospital. Don’t you worry yourself.” She stood laboriously, cataloguing what parts of her didn’t work “so good” anymore, folded her umbrella, said good-bye, and unlocked her front door.

I stood there, afraid to walk, because doing so would mean I’d accepted what I’d just heard, that it was real, that I was pulling it in and making it just one more piece of my life, and then, moving on.

But the old woman turned just before she entered her house, looked at me. Her crackled old voice grew soft at the edges. “Best get going, dearie,” she said. “I’ve lived a long time and what I know is that’s what you have to do. There isn’t any other choice. One foot in front of the other, again and again. It’s the only way.”