Lucretia and the Kroons (2 page)

Monique and Susan watched Priya, who held a sheet of paper that she’d folded into a flower shape. Little numbers had been written on different flaps of the paper. Priya flicked the paper so it looked like the flower’s petals were opening and closing. All three girls counted out loud as the petals moved.

“… five, six, seven, eight.” They didn’t even look up when Loochie’s mother walked in the room.

“Ladies,” her mom said, wearing an exaggerated smile, “may I present the birthday girl, Lucretia Gardner!”

Mom clapped and the three girls at least had the good manners to look up from their game. But they all seemed aggravated, as if Loochie and her mother had interrupted them in
their
homes.

Loochie’s mother stepped aside, still clapping (a bit too enthusiastically at this point), and Loochie inched forward in her role as birthday girl and emerald princess. She told herself not to throw her arms out, that it was too theatrical and embarrassing a gesture, but then she couldn’t help herself. She did feel good in the dress, after all. And it was her birthday. She raised her hands and flung open her arms and because the Shakira song was still playing she even twisted her hips much like her mom had done in the bedroom.

The star had arrived.

But the audience didn’t respond to her shine. All three girls watched Loochie for a moment and then, almost as one, they scanned her green dress from the ruffled front down to the hem. Then Priya offered a tight grin and said, “Happy birthday, Loochie.”

Monique and Susan followed the leader. Same tight grins, same bland birthday wish.

And that was it.

Loochie dropped her hands as her mother left the living room. “I’m going to get the cake,” her mother called with great enthusiasm. “It’s a Cookie Puss!”

As soon as her mother was gone the girls looked at each other again and hunched forward over Priya’s folded paper game, as if Loochie weren’t standing right there.

Monique whispered, “That’s a dress for a six-year-old.”

Susan actually looked up at Loochie again, scanned the dress one more time, and nodded her agreement with Monique.

Priya threw out one hand, mocking Loochie’s gesture. “Look, everyone,” she said. “It’s Princess Broccoli.”

Lucretia Gardner’s stomach dropped. Her cheeks felt hot and her hands trembled. For a moment the living room was silent. Then the silence was broken.

“You
whores
can get out of my house!” Loochie yelled.

Loochie’s mother walked into the living room with the Carvel ice-cream cake, a candle in the shape of the number twelve on top, and before she could sing the happy-birthday song she witnessed her daughter menacing the girls, hands on her hips,
screaming
.

“Get up! And get out!” Loochie commanded.

Loochie’s mother almost dropped the cake.

The three girls rose together. They’d lost their cool demeanors. Even Priya, usually composed and masterful, dropped the toy she’d made. The plucked paper flower fell to the floor. Susan took one step toward the door and inadvertently crushed it. Loochie didn’t move aside. The girls had to go around her to reach the front door. Her mother was so confused that she didn’t know what to do so she just stood there, balancing the cake in her hands.

Loochie couldn’t see her mom. Her vision had tunneled. “Walk out the door,
whores
!”

“Loochie!” her mother finally managed. “What happened? Girls, wait.”

Loochie’s mother tried to step in front of Priya, but Priya frantically stumbled around her and toward the door. The other two girls did the same. Now Loochie stood alone in the living
room. Sunlight streamed in from the windows behind her, and to her mother, this made it look as if she was actually on fire, burning with rage.

“You
whores
can use the front door or I can throw you
whores
off the fire escape!”

“Where did you learn that word?!” Loochie’s mother shouted. “What happened? I was just gone for a minute!”

All three girls reached the apartment door. Loochie’s mother still hadn’t put the cake down and poor Cookie Puss was already melting. A few drops of vanilla ice cream fell from the serving tray and landed on the living room carpet behind her like a trail of little white tears.

Priya couldn’t get the apartment door open fast enough. She unlocked it and leapt into the hall. The others ran after her. Despite their terror, or maybe because of it, they laughed so loud that people must’ve heard them out on the sidewalk. Loochie’s mother kicked the apartment door closed with her foot and it slammed.

Loochie was already unzipping her dress and kicking it off. She stood there in the living room in a matching pair of green underwear. The dress pooled around her feet, hiding her black patent leather Mary Janes. Someday very soon Loochie wouldn’t be so willing to stand nearly naked in front of her mother. But for now she stood there, in her underwear, shivering with anger.

She finally pointed at the ice-cream cake in her mother’s hands.

“Put it in the freezer. I’m saving it for Sunny.”

It took two months before Sunny was back from her treatment and ready to mingle. The whole time Loochie suffered through school, banished from the clique of Priya, Monique, and Susan. And to her own surprise, Loochie found herself yearning for a second chance with those three. Sure they’d been terrible to her, but when she spied them in the school cafeteria, hunched together and gleeful, she couldn’t help but feel a tug in her gut. She’d see them out in the schoolyard, clumped together like socks that had just come out of the dryer, and she’d want to go talk with them again. Most of the time she found herself sitting alone at the other end of yard, too close to the boys who were busy acting like wild beasts, screaming and wrestling and bashing at one another. At least they had each other. Loochie had no one.

Loochie’s life went on like this for a month and a half. At school and at home, alone on the weekends. Her mother did all she could to help, offering to take her out to movies or even to go outside and play in the winter snow but those offers only made Loochie feel more pathetic. It was starting to look like her best friend was her mother. It was so embarrassing.

At the end of two months, Sunny had returned to her apartment, but was still being kept from Loochie. Loochie couldn’t understand why.

“I want Sunny to come over,” Loochie complained one evening in late December as she and her mother ate dinner. “You promised I could have a party with her.”

“She’s still too sick.”

“You promised! She’s back and I want to see her.
Please
, Mom.”

For dessert they ate some more of the birthday cake. Her mother had pointed out that two girls couldn’t eat the whole thing alone. Why let the rest go to waste? Since the failed party Loochie and her mother had been slowly trimming it down. As they debated the issue Loochie’s mother cut herself a slice. Loochie had a little, too. There wasn’t much left.

“I’ll ask her grandmother,” Mom said. They ate at the kitchen table.

“And I don’t want you there,” Loochie added. “Just me and Sunny.”

“That’s impossible,” Mom said between bites.

“We’re twelve. That’s old enough. Do you know what other girls are doing at twelve?”

Loochie’s mother shut her eyes, shook her head. “Don’t tell me.”

But Loochie pressed her case. “I’m not a baby. I walk to school alone. I do my own dishes and my laundry. I can take care of myself.”

“And Sunny?”

“If something bad happens I’ll call your cell phone,” Loochie pleaded.

Really she was embarrassed by her mother. But she couldn’t say that out loud. It would hurt her feelings.

“Just let us have the apartment for a little,” Loochie said. “I want to show her my Christmas presents.”

Mom finished her piece of ice-cream cake and wiped her face with a paper napkin. Then she reached over and wiped Loochie’s face, too. Loochie didn’t resist the touch.

“How long?” Mom finally asked.

“Four hours,” Loochie said.

“Two hours.”

Loochie could tell there’d be no further negotiation and she’d gotten so much already. “Two hours,” she agreed. And she felt confident about what she’d said. What bad things could really happen in so little time?

Sunny and Loochie’s playdate was made through go-betweens. Loochie’s mother and Sunny’s grandmother. Sunny would come down to Loochie’s second try at a twelfth birthday party on a Saturday, the last in December. Loochie had done a little better than normal with gifts that year because her mother felt so bad that Loochie had spent so much time alone, waiting on her sick friend. Loochie even got a new bike. No training wheels and emerald green, just like her dress had been. It was her favorite color. Loochie knew that Sunny’s grandmother would likely tackle
the pair before she let her sick granddaughter ride around on the sidewalk. But Loochie and Sunny could pedal the bike back and forth in the living room. The night before she and her mother had rearranged the furniture in the living room. They’d pushed the dining table against one wall. Moved the coffee table from in front of the sofa. This turned the living room into one twenty-foot-long, carpeted track. Loochie couldn’t wait to see Sunny holding the handlebars. And best of all, she and Sunny were going to be in the apartment alone! For two hours. A fact that hadn’t been shared with Sunny’s grandmother. If it had, Sunny grandmother would’ve been perched right there on the living room couch all afternoon, scowling while she watched everything, and what the hell kind of fun would that be?

Loochie’s mother was in the bathroom, getting prepared to go out with Louis. Loochie found her in front of the bathroom sink and watched her, perched at the threshold.

“Louis is late,” Loochie said.

“Your brother always is,” her mother said absently.

She and Loochie were the primary team these days. And Louis was like an alternate member. He was ten years older than Loochie and had moved out of the apartment to Brooklyn when she was seven. She loved him but didn’t really know him anymore. Loochie’s mother, of course, had a different relationship with Louis. She had wrestled and cajoled him into seeing her that day. He didn’t want to come to Queens, but their mother could be persistent. She’d been pestering him to come home for months now.

“Now you don’t tell Louis where I’m taking him, right?” Her mother stopped applying her foundation and looked at Loochie directly.

“Debt counseling,” Loochie said, though she didn’t know what it meant.

“I’m taking him to
lunch
,” Loochie’s mother instructed. “Because I miss him.”

Loochie and her mother nodded conspiratorially. Then Mom brushed Loochie back, out of the doorway. She grabbed the door handle and pushed the door. “Mom needs to be alone in here for a few minutes.”

Loochie stepped farther back and the door shut and she heard the sound of her mother
settling down onto the toilet. Loochie walked away from the bathroom and back into the living room. She went to the front door. She was too short to see through the peephole yet. They kept a footstool right by the door for this reason. Loochie pulled it over and stepped up and peeked out into the hall. Louis was late, but so was Sunny.

Loochie wore a pair of jeans and a thin green sweater. Her kicks were bright white Keds. Her mother had done her hair that morning, tight little box braids. It was her sporty look. Even though Loochie knew Sunny would never make fun of her she was too embarrassed to try showing off the green gown again.

Loochie checked on the bike, parked at the far end of the living room. She rifled through the small stack of board games her mother had set out on the dining table. Life, Sorry, and Risk. (The last one was left over from her brother’s days in the apartment.) She set out a pillow and blanket on the couch in case Sunny would need to lie down at some point.

She left the living room and went to the kitchen. She opened the freezer and found what was left of her birthday cake. Over the last two months, bit by bit, she and her mother had really chopped that cake down. Cookie Puss wasn’t looking so good. She and her mother had eaten its sugar-cone nose, its ice-cream chin and cheeks. All that was left was one of its big eyes. The “eye” was really just a Flying Saucer ice-cream sandwich. Loochie had guarded this last piece fiercely for the past week. It was for Sunny and no one else. Now she took it out of the freezer and out of the box. She set it on a plate and put the plate on the kitchen counter. She wanted the ice cream to soften enough that even Sunny could get it down. Sometimes she had trouble with solid foods.

As she set the plate on the kitchen table she heard a clunking sound outside the kitchen window. Something small falling down the fire escape. She knew what that sound meant. She heard it again. She watched the window and saw a penny careening down. It pinged against her fire escape and slipped through the grating and fell to the third floor below. She didn’t need to wait for a third penny to drop.

Loochie smiled and ran to the kitchen window, pulled open the security gate, lifted the
sash, and peeked her head out. She saw a small hand dangling out of the window right above her own. Sunny! The hand went back inside the apartment slowly. Loochie looked over her shoulder for her mother, but her mother was still in the bathroom. When she looked out the window a second time the small hand was shaking slightly and holding another penny. The slim fingers parted and the penny fell. Loochie reached out to try to catch it but the penny hit the floor of her fire escape landing and shot off wildly, then fell four stories down to the ground. If it had been anything much heavier than a penny, like an egg, or a little girl, it would’ve cracked in two.