The Night Gwen Stacy Died (6 page)

As soon as Sheila said it, she wished she hadn’t. Anthony was looking down at the
crumbs now on the table and he was biting down on the inside of his cheek. Don’t say
it, Sheila prayed, Please don’t say anything. But it was too late.

“I guess I was kind of thinking we could go together,” Anthony said. “I mean I know
dances are a waste of time and everything but it’s our last year.”

Sheila felt all the blood rush to her face. She placed her sandwich down slowly, diplomatically,
on the table. “Let me think about it,” she said, and though she had tried to say it
with as even a tone she could manage, she could tell that she had said the wrong thing,
because Anthony shoved the rest of a half-eaten apple in his backpack and walked away.

“I saw you in the bar the other night,” Sheila told Peter Parker when he came into
the station between fares.

“Yes,” said Peter, “I saw you too.”

“Do you usually go there?”

“I don’t go out that much.”

“Do you think I’m pretty?” asked Sheila.

“How should I know,” he said.

“Because of how you were looking at me.”

A glazed look went over his face. “You had your hair pulled back that night at the
bar. At first I didn’t recognize you. There was something with the light: your hair,
your chin, your neck, your jaw—” He reached across the counter then like he was going
to touch her jaw, but he stopped himself. He shook his head. “I think you’re interesting,”
he said finally.

“But not in a sexual way, I guess?”

Peter smiled. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” said Sheila. “How old are you?”

“Shouldn’t you already know that? You checked my ID enough times when I first started
coming in here.”

“It’s state law,” said Sheila. “Anyway,
Mr. Parker
, I know that’s a fake.”

“You’re a fake,” said Peter.

“You think you can say whatever you want to me,” Sheila said. She was playing with
him, testing him. Then she felt herself lift her palm and open it. Before she’d thought
the action through, she had raised her hand and pulled it back, as if she planned
to strike him. She had seen a woman do this in a French movie once, and when she did,
the man she was after took her to bed.

Peter raised his hand in reflex and caught her hand midair.

The force of his hand stung in her palm. She paused, rubbing her hand with her fingers.
“Oww,” she said.

Peter stared at her strangely. He didn’t look like he wanted to take her to bed at
all.

Sheila exhaled slowly and slapped a pack of Camel straights on the counter. “Was there
something else you needed, sir?” she asked. “Or will that be all?”

Peter Parker looked from the cigarettes to Sheila. “That will be all,” he said finally,
and he laid down $6.25 before leaving, which Sheila made a point to ring into the
register, though she would have given them to him for free. She felt furious. She
had two hours before her shift would be over, and she could hardly stand the thought
of it. She stared at the shelf of forty-ounce beers in the cooler directly opposite
her counter for another five minutes before pulling open the cooler door and selecting
one.

“Est-ce que vous êtes libre vendredi prochain?” the French woman on the CD asked.

“Je suis désolée,” said Sheila. “C’est impossible.”

“C’est toujours pareil!” the French woman gasped. “Tu n’es jamais libre!”

Someone was throwing an important birthday party in the world of the French CD, but
Sheila expressed regret that she didn’t feel up to attending. Sheila declined each
one of the French woman’s pleas until her regret for not attending the party and her
general regret grew into something amorphous and inconsolable. She was sorry for everything.
She was sorry that she had worried her parents. She was sorry that she couldn’t seem
to communicate with the only person who stirred something in her. She was sorry that
she had disappointed Anthony. She wished she could be the kind of person who could
want the things she was supposed to want. She sat behind the counter of the gas station
and drained her forty ounces of beer and willed herself to want those things.

She stood outside of Anthony’s window for a few minutes before she threw the first
rock. She had been to his house a bunch of times when they were younger, but lately
they had stopped hanging out when they weren’t in school. His house looked smaller
than she remembered, the landscaping more overgrown. Anthony’s parents were sometimes
away on business for stretches of a few days at a time, so when this was the case,
Anthony was always helping his dad out around the house on the weekends. It seemed
like he had slacked a bit lately, which probably meant he was home alone tonight,
but Sheila figured she’d better not take any chances. It took the contact of three
rocks for Anthony to come to his window and open it.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked when he saw Sheila standing on the sidewalk.

“Waking your ass up,” said Sheila. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Anthony laughed, “It’s nine o’clock. I’m not sleeping. You could have rung the doorbell
like a normal person.”

“Oh well,” said Sheila. “Are you coming down or not?”

Anthony closed his bedroom window and was downstairs with an extra hoodie in his hand
within two minutes. He offered the hoodie to Sheila. “You cold?”

“I don’t get cold,” said Sheila. “I’m superhuman.”

“Oh, not this shit again,” said Anthony.

“I’m kidding,” said Sheila. “I just rode my bike pretty fast over here, that’s all.”

There were woods close to Anthony’s house, and without saying so, Sheila began navigating
in that direction.

“Listen,” Anthony said as soon as they had stopped in a clearing where moonlight rendered
one another visible. “I’m sorry about the other day. I shouldn’t have tried to push
you about the dance thing.”

Sheila leaned in and hesitated only a second before kissing him on the mouth. Anthony
pulled away from her in surprise, only slightly, but then he started to kiss her back.
Anthony was directing the kiss now, slowly, quietly, in a way that let her know that
he respected her, that he wanted her to feel safe with him. As soon as he started
to lead the kiss, Sheila regretted what she had started. But it was Anthony who pulled
away first.

“You taste like beer,” he said. He said it like a parent.

Sheila stared at him. She shrugged. “Do you want some?” she asked. “I brought another
one with me.” She looked at her backpack in the dirt where the other beer was waiting.
Beside her backpack a tiny trampled plant was trying to wrestle its way through the
soil. It was spring. Everything was trying to figure out how to come back to life,
and it seemed like it should have been an easier thing to figure out.

Anthony took a step back. “Why are you doing this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Sheila slowly. “I thought it was something you wanted.”

“And what do you want? Is it something you want?”

Sheila stared for a minute before she began to shake her head, slowly. She wanted
to say she was sorry but the words wouldn’t come. Maybe she had exhausted her capacity
for regret already with the people throwing the French birthday party, because now
that she really needed to produce a genuine version of the feeling, the sentiment
stalled in her throat. “That’s fucked up on so many levels, Sheila,” Anthony said,
and when still Sheila said nothing, Anthony turned and started walking back to his
house alone.

She awoke with a headache. There was a pounding sound coming from somewhere, and at
first she thought that it was inside her own brain, but when it started up again she
realized there was someone knocking on her bedroom door. After Anthony had left her
alone in the woods behind his house, she had spent another few hours sitting on a
log. She had polished off a reasonable portion of the second forty-ounce beer on her
own. The knocking started up again. Sheila stood and walked to her door then opened
it. Behind the door, her father stood with the newspaper in one hand and his reading
glasses in the other.

“It’s eleven-thirty,” he said.

Sheila blinked. “So?”

“So, your mother asked me to come up and check on you. We weren’t sure if you were
alive up here.” He smiled.

“Oh, I’m alive,” Sheila said. She rubbed her sore head in her hand.

“What time did you get home last night?” her dad asked. “And don’t feed me any B.S.”

Her father never swore when the girls were younger, but now he had started in his
own way, through a self-censoring system of initials he used that let him really say
what was on his mind: “What the F. is going on here?” he’d ask. “Looks like a whole
lot of B.S. if you ask me.”

“Not so late,” said Sheila. “Before midnight?”

“And Tuesday night?”

Sheila paused. She tried to remember. “I slept at Andrea and Donny’s.” It had been
the night they went to the bar.

“Yeah,” her father said. “I know that because I talked to Andrea. But you didn’t call
us and let us know you weren’t coming. We’ve barely seen you all week.”

“Sorry,” Sheila said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

As a girl, Sheila had been closest to her father. He was her favorite. When the family
played games or sports of any kind—badminton, Monopoly—it was always Mom and Andrea
versus Sheila and Dad. They won at everything. “Ten to zip, we whip!” Sheila would
taunt through the checked wires of the badminton net, and her dad didn’t care at all
when she threw her racket into the air to celebrate their victory, even when it got
stuck in the branches of the sycamore tree, although Sheila’s mother thought this
behavior illustrated poor sportsmanship. But lately, when she tried to crack a rare
joke with her father, even the idiotic sort of joke dads are supposed to love, Sheila’s
dad would give a forced snicker and look back at the television.

“Are you making it a point to spend as little time here as possible? We haven’t seen
you for dinner,” her father said.

Sheila looked at the carpet on the floor of her room. She understood how she looked
to her father—like a girl without a brain in her head, without a sense of place, of
pride, of respect for her roots or thought for her actions. But she sometimes felt
that she thought too much, that she considered every option too deeply, took every
half-thought of a possibility too seriously.
Bloom, bloom, bloom where you’re planted
, the choir from the church where Sheila’s mother had taken her as a child used to
sing. But what about cross-pollination? What about those shockingly colored hybrid
plants you sometimes saw at the farmers’ market? No one ever sang about them. She
said nothing.

“I guess it’s your life,” her father said finally. “You’re going to do what you want
with it.” Then he turned to walk down the stairs.

“That’s right,” said Sheila, and she backed away from the door and willed herself
not to cry.

She sat on her bed for only a few minutes before deciding to leave the house for the
day. Sheila sometimes spent her Saturdays at Andrea and Donny’s, sifting through the
newspaper, painting her toenails, writing out French flashcards. Today, she dressed
as fast as possible and went to Andrea’s without eating or brushing her teeth or hair.

“Hello?” Sheila called as she opened the door to her sister’s house. She could already
hear the whirring sound of early spring landscape maintenance—the neighborhood determined
to take back the lawns frost had destroyed—and through the sliding back door of her
sister’s split-level house, she saw Donny in a sleeveless undershirt, pushing a lawnmower
in slow diagonals across the yard. “Andy?”

She found her sister sitting on the couch in the living room, hovering over a needle
and thread that she moved between two hands. “In here,” Andrea called out, but she
didn’t look up from her lap. Sheila went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water.
Then she sat down next to her sister.

“Hey,” she said.

Her sister smiled.

Andrea had recently joined a cross-stitching circle, and she was working on a throw
pillow that was going to say
LOVE MAKES THIS HOUSE A HOME
, but so far it just said
THIS H
, because you were supposed to start from the middle and work out to the ends to make
sure it came out even.
Love Makes This H. a Home
, thought Sheila,
Love Makes this F-ing H. a G.D
.
Home
.

“What’s the big difference supposed to be between a house and a home?” she asked.

“Who knows?” said Andrea. “The words are really just decorations.”

The cross-stitching group that Andrea had joined called themselves the “Stitch-n-Bitch.”

“I’m not going to lie,” Andrea said. “The bitching is more fun than the stitching.”

They met every Wednesday evening in somebody’s basement.

“It’s a good hobby,” Andrea said. “You could use one.”

“I have my own hobbies,” said Sheila.

“Yeah, like what?”

Sheila cleared her throat and pulled a French flashcard out of her purse.

“Words,” her sister nearly spat. “They don’t mean anything. What if you needed to
actually say something?”

“Like what?”

Her sister frowned at the needle and thread in her lap. “How should I know?” she said.
She seemed to think about this for a second. Then she said, “Say you were in trouble.
Say you needed to say, ‘I demand to be released. I’m a citizen of the United States
of America and I want to speak to a lawyer.’ What if you needed to say something like
that?” asked Andrea.

Sheila knew the verb
to want
, but not
to demand
. She knew
to leave
, but not
to release
. The limits of her skills in the language were considerable, the gaps in her knowledge
more gaping than she’d realized.

Sheila exhaled and clutched at her glass of water. “I guess I couldn’t say it,” she
said. It felt awful to admit to it.