It is no secret to her that she is not a femme fatale. She is a four-eyes. She is a stork. Her feet are already bigger than her mother’s. In her basement, in a cupboard under the bar, there is an electric cocktail shaker that is a black-haired lady with huge bare breasts and a round rump skimpily covered in a hula skirt and with tiny, tiny hands glued to a glass. Now
that
is Marcy’s idea of a femme fatale. When she notices a boy staring
at her own button breasts she is always surprised. What does he see worth gawking at? At the same time she doesn’t dismiss the possibility that boys can see more somehow, just as dogs can hear sounds humans can’t.
Gary is the only boy who has ever seen her
bare
breasts. Who has ever touched them under her undershirt or squeezed them (he has resumed squeezing). By now her right breast is almost numb, and she is thinking of saying something when he stops and takes a long, satisfied-sounding breath.
“I’m cold,” she says.
He hikes up his blue jeans. “I can fix that.” The next thing she knows his arms are around her, and his mouth is clamped on her neck. She lets herself go limp to feel him holding her up. For his age—thirteen—he might be small, but he’s no weakling. “He is fearfully and wonderfully made,” she has told Joan. “His lips are like a Negro’s, but a lighter colour, like a hot-dog bun.”
Does she ever wish he’d kiss her on the mouth. He never has.
The hickey ends with a loud smack. “Okay, you’re branded,” he says.
Shy now, she folds her arms over her bare chest, and rubs her upper arms with her gloved hands. “Can’t I give you a hickey?” she asks. She has asked once before.
“Well—“ He tightens his lips. Sighs. Finally gives his head a shake. Years from now she will be reminded of him by car mechanics and men working in hardware stores. “It’s getting late,” he says, looking past her at the garage doors, and she knows that he is worried about Cedric in the house waiting for him.
His house is in a well-to-do neighbourhood twenty minutes away from her quadrant of identical, garageless bungalows. When she is halfway home the streetlights come on, producing splashes of light that she walks more slowly through in case they contain heavenly light. The cleansing light of heaven is
everywhere, she believes, but in disguise. “Verily, verily,” she has been chanting off and on the entire way. “Verily, verily, verily,” her nervous, irresolute prelude to certain prayers.
It’s not as if she is a fornicator or an adulteress. It is not as if she has been selfish or mean. She has yielded to temptation, and she has been a temptress. “But I have loved much,” she protests, thinking of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and hair and was forgiven. Being forgiven isn’t even the point, though. The point is, if she has loved much, why does she need to be forgiven in the first place?
It’s an old argument, and she knows who will win. She jumps into it anyway, straight to her biggest weapon—the Song of Solomon. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins,” she thinks, and as always feels shockingly rude and deeply, deeply excited. “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him!”
She could keep it up, she could remind Jesus of almost every verse after all these months of reading the Song of Solomon aloud to Joan. As the only person in her family who goes to church Marcy has taken Joan’s religious education upon herself, and the Song of Solomon is Joan’s favourite book, Marcy has decided, containing as it does the passage about a little sister. A little sister who “hath no breasts.” Reading this part, Marcy is liable to laugh, which is why she usually leaves it out and goes straight from “We have a little sister” to “What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?”
The answer is: “If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver.” Here Marcy slows down. “And,” she reads, “if she be a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar.” Joan always sucks in her breath at these last words.
A wind has come up. Marcy walks faster. “Just get it over with,” she orders herself and she manages to think “Dear Jesus” but then goes blank. A roar is shuddering through her, a multitude in her bones. She starts to run. “I charge you, ?
daughters of Jerusalem!” she says out loud. She leaps over a hedge. “Thy breasts are clusters of grapes!” She begins to laugh, she can’t help it. “O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother!” she says and has to stop, she is laughing so hard. “I’m not joking,” she says, addressing Jesus now. Despite her laughter, she is deadly serious. These are the words of God. More than that, they are weapons.
The music is coming from
her
house. Piano music. Somebody must be blaring the radio, Marcy figures, that’s how good it sounds. Then she remembers that today is the day the piano was supposed to arrive from Grandma Gayler’s and she dashes inside, kicks off her boots and races up the stairs to the living room.
“Please turn on your magic beam,” her mother sings along. “Mister Sandman, bring me a dream …,” looking over her shoulder and miming “Shh” when Marcy charges in, as if Marcy was the one singing.
To make space for the piano the chesterfield has been pushed in front of the bookshelves. There is that smell, that earthy, wormy smell of Grandma Gayler’s basement, and what’s this green on the carpet? Marcy bends to touch it. Moss. A trail from her to her mother and Sonja, who stand behind the piano bench with an arm around each other’s waists.
Her mother and Sonja are exactly the same height and have exactly the same dark springy hair, but Sonja is twice as wide from the back and she’s not moving, unlike her mother, who is bobbing and pitching. As Marcy crosses the room she hallucinates that Sonja is the husk that her mother is thrashing out of. For just a second, her mother is Sonja emerging from hibernation, she is the not-so-fat dancer whom Marcy can remember, with a pang of longing, from a time before Joan was born.
Marcy stands beside her mother. Joan’s miniature femmefatale
fingers hop over the keys, picking out a jazzy version of “Mister Sandman,” while her right foot pumps as if it reaches the pedal. Even Marcy’s parents, who say they don’t know if God exists, agree that Joan’s piano playing is a miracle. “Forgive me, Lord,” Marcy manages to think at last. Her eyes burn. “Play ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ “she says, and without a missed beat Joan does.
That night Marcy runs her fingers through Joan’s hair in an act of worship over its silkiness. Her own hair, which is coarse, is as a pack of dogs, she would say. Joan’s hair is as a flock of angels. While Marcy combs with her fingers she talks about the striptease and being felt up. Joan hums and looks at herself in the mirror, a
Life
magazine opened in her lap.
Every night Marcy sits next to Joan in the closet and reads aloud from the Bible. Then she removes the barrettes and ribbons from Joan’s hair and reviews the day with her, taking for granted that the questions and concerns popping into her head are Joan’s wordless, humming half of the conversation. “We don’t know,” she says now, answering the silent question Which one do we love the best? (Marcy still refers to either of them in the plural when they are by themselves.) “We don’t
know,”
she repeats anxiously when the question is rephrased as Who is our. one and only? She then hears, What if Ziggy sees it? and touches her hickey and says, “He won’t.” What if he did, though, what would he do? Marcy bites the side of her thumbnail. “We’d be in for it,” she murmurs, “that’s for sure.”
Ziggy is her handsome boyfriend, blond and tall and another strong, silent type, another outcast, in his case because he thinks everybody hates him for being a Nazi’s son. People claim to have seen a swastika tattoo on his father’s arm, but Ziggy told her that on Remembrance Day his father burned it off using paint stripper. “I’ll never forget his screams in the night,” he said.
Screams? Considering that his father’s voice sounds like a record played on slow speed, Marcy detected a lie. “Everybody thinks it’s kind of neat about your father’s swastika,” she said.
“Maybe
you
think its neat,” he muttered. “Everyone else hates me.”
“Nobody hates you.”
He stabbed a finger at his eyes. “It’s in their eyes!” he shouted. “The eyes don’t fib!”
They don’t? Marcy tried to make her eyes pools of love. Never does she love him more than when he blows his stack.
She fell in love with him the usual way for her. One second not loving him and the next second identifying him as an innocent target. Doomed, fingered. One second it was just Ziggy the German boy up ahead of her and the next second it was a boy in some dire peril… of anything, there was no telling what. A car accident one day, a girl like her.
It was a Friday, and she was by herself, having given up waiting for Pammy, who, when you walked with her, kept stopping to gasp over whatever you were talking about. Now, on this stretch of the road, there was only Marcy and Ziggy. She mentally scrambled for a good excuse, got one, ran up and delivered it: “My mother was wondering if your mother wanted to join her bridge club.”
Her mother doesn’t belong to a bridge club. On the other hand his mother doesn’t speak English, which Marcy happened to know.
He stopped and frowned at her. “I don’t think so,” he answered uncertainly, and it occurred to her that he had no idea what a bridge club was.
“Oh, well, that’s okay, my mother was just wondering.” She continued to walk alongside him, chatting about school, homework, their teacher—Miss Torg. “Did you know she shaves her arms?” she asked.
“No.” He sounded worried.
“At about three o’clock they get five-o’clock shadow. Haven’t you noticed?”
He shook his head.
“Well, it’s pretty disgusting.”
It was a dirty lie but she had his attention. She told him that her old babysitter shaved her arms
and
ate worms. This was only half a lie. “I used to give her baths,” she said. “I washed her bare breasts!” She giggled, startled at herself.
He stopped again. Had she gone too far? In her mind a Nazi shot a silly woman. “I was only six,” she said quickly.
He nodded over his shoulder. “Here is my snazzy house.”
They were in front of a little red-brick bungalow, the last house before the railway crossing. It was a real dump. The lawn all weeds and piles of dog dirt, a picket fence gaped like an old comb, the front door and eaves feathered with peeling green paint.
He lived
here?
“The picture of order and efficiency,” he said.
She glanced at him. There was a red perfect circle, a bull’s-eye, on each of his cheeks. With a jerk of his head he loosened his scarf and extracted a key that hung from a black shoelace around his neck. Oh, so his mother worked, Marcy thought. She began to twist her thumb. If only she could twist her thumb right off! Console him with a catastrophe way worse than his house. “It’s exactly like my Grandma Gayler’s place,” she lied. “Gee,” she said, clasping her homework books to her chest, “I just adore picket fences!”
She beamed at his awful house, keeping it up because she could feel him studying her. A Nazi’s son, a German boy. There was no imagining herself in his eyes. Was she too skinny? Too forward? Was he homesick for plump, yellow-haired girls in braids and white blouses with short puffy sleeves?
“When we moved in it was a nest of rats,” he said, “but my dog broke their necks. One by one.”
She gave him another glance. Either he was trying to scare her off or this was him upgrading his house from humiliating to petrifying. She went on smiling. She was dedicated to being absolutely charmed so she ignored the rats and leapt at the fact that he had a dog. “What kind of dog?”
“Mutt. Part beagle.” The bull’s-eyes were fading.
“Can I see him?”
“Her.
Yulia.”
“Can I see her?”
He frowned, and she thought she’d been too pushy again. “She has a problem,” he said. “When she meets a new person she barks like crazy and then her eyeballs, they sometimes do”—he flung open his fingers in front of his face—“pop out and hang.”
“Pop out?” she said.
“And hang by the nerve.” He shrugged. “She lets you put them back in. She is gentle with people she knows.”
“Wow,” Marcy said.
“But it is like you said about Miss Torg. Pretty disgusting.”
In his tiny, cabbage-smelling kitchen she watched him kneel before a roly-poly, pus-coloured dog with an ugly bat face and a bunch of tits drooping to the floor. “Yah, yah,” he cooed, and the dog, who a minute earlier had been yapping furiously and attempting to bite the bobbing yoyos that were its own eyes, now sat still and silent while Ziggy first wet both hands in a bowl of warm salted water and then carefully lifted the right eyeball up into its socket, tucking in, as he went, the purple elastic band that Marcy presumed was the nerve.
“Why do you go and get so excited?” he said. “It’s just a girl. She won’t hurt you.”
Marcy was reminded of Gary and Cedric. Did every loner have a repulsive creature waiting at home for him? Or was this just the case with the loners
she
loved? With the boys she loved, because when she thought about it, even Al, her popular
boyfriend, lived in the same house as a blind, cranky aunt who peed in her chair, and maybe he didn’t clean up after her but he read her the newspaper. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, Marcy thought apprehensively, wondering what it meant that she found herself surrounded by them.
When its eyes were back in, the dog waddled out of the kitchen, piggy tail churning, toenails clicking on the grimy red-and-green linoleum, and Ziggy carried the bowl of water to the sink. A big, pink-skinned boy, his shapely little ears like the handles on china teacups. Her beloved. What was he doing in this filthy kitchen? Right up from the floor, grease spattered the pea-green walls so that her first impression had been that they were papered in a modern design, similar to her family’s green living-room drapes whose flecks she believed to be real silver.
Oh, that she could offer him a robe of her living-room drapes.
He turned on the tap. A thin wail issued from the water pipes, a sound that seemed thrown from her throat. She took a step toward him. Another step. With one finger she touched the small of his back.