“Well, she’s trying to shock us,” Phil Needle said. He could not take his eyes off the girl on the cover of the magazine. He was under the impression that they couldn’t be like that, spread so wide, at least not on the cover. She had one hand between her legs, not to cover herself but to stretch herself open even further. She looked like she was explaining exactly where it hurt. He was guessing. “I mean, Gwen’s not into schoolgirls. She
is
a schoolgirl. If she wanted to see naked schoolgirls, she’d take a bath, or ask Naomi.”
“Naomi?” Gwen had a friend, this girl Naomi who hung around the condo with her eyes everywhere like she was itemizing the place. “You think Naomi’s involved.” Marina was thinking about it. “I don’t like the way she looks at us.”
“No, I just mean, I mean, Gwen didn’t steal that to look at.”
“She didn’t do it to shock us,” Marina said. “She didn’t know she’d get caught. She
stole
it. It’s
shocking
is what it is.”
“Maybe she was trying to steal another magazine,” he said weakly, and Marina just looked at him until he thought of something else. “Why do you have it? How did you get it?”
“
Gwen
stole it,” Marina said.
“But what’s it doing here?”
“I paid for it,” Marina said.
“Why did you want it?”
Marina licked the last of the icing off the wrapper of the cupcake and then looked wildly at Phil Needle’s. “I can’t believe I ate that,” she said. “I can’t believe you brought those damn things home.” Marina slid down the couch and grasped her belly with both hands through her shirt. “I wanted to show it to you.”
“You didn’t have to show it to me,” Phil Needle said irritably. “I know what naked schoolgirls look like.” He heard himself and grinned over at Marina in her ugly pose on the couch. She agreed to laugh, and they both shrugged to indicate that something was over, but Phil Needle could not for the life of him think of what it was.
“Do you really think this is an isolated case?” his wife asked him.
Phil Needle looked out to sea but was distracted by his own face in a photograph sitting on top of the piano, among the ones of his ravenous wife and the little thief they’d conceived. He could not hear if Gwen was still crying down the hall. “She seems isolated,” he said finally, and got up without his cupcake or wife. He walked through the kitchen and passed the office and the room where Marina did her painting and paused for a moment at the door to the bathroom. He walked very quietly on the carpet, but he could not hear anything when he got there. He could open the door, or knock on it, and in the small room try to hug her and make her feel better. She would be crying into those dumb towels. He could tuck her hair, again, behind her ears. But he had to decide on a punishment. She would be punished, and, or, also, maybe, she hated him. So Phil Needle walked away and stood for a minute in the office doorway looking at the projection of the fake tree rattling against the fake window and the desk with the last of the invitations. On the other side of the wall, Gwen was furious, with furious words on her hands, although of course Phil Needle did not know, and could not have known, the terrors on the horizon, the bloodshed and the ravaged citizens. And yet at that moment he might not have been surprised. He felt unready. He had raced home to face the alarums of trouble, stopping only for cupcakes, and then had not been able to make himself useful. He’d said nothing. He’d ruined his wife’s diet. He was in a room by himself, sinking into his old couch to stare at a window that wasn’t even there. He was a landlubber, with no sea legs even in his own house, and his daughter, his baby, was storming in the next room, unhinged, unanchored and grounded.
Don’t start with Gwen. She lay grounded and alone in bed looking up. In her old room in the better house, there were stars on the ceiling. They weren’t real stars, of course, and they didn’t even look like real stars, but they were stand-ins, a reminder that over the roof was the sky, full of airplanes and other planets. Her new ceiling was white and reminded her of nothing. In a few minutes everyone would start with her, but right now it was 5:51 A
.M.
She was supposed to get up at 5:45, but the clock radio her father had bought for her, at this point in her life, ran the numbers too quickly when you were setting it. Her father had said it was her responsibility to get herself up on time, though Gwen could not see how that could be true. It wasn’t her responsibility. It was everyone else who wanted her to go to every single place she went.
They were playing Tortuga. “You Ain’t Hittin’.” This was one of the few things she liked. She held an imaginary cigarette to her lips and blew white smoke at the ceiling. Her room was still ransacked, with drawers gaping open and empty because her mom had thrown all her stuff out, thinking it was stolen. Well, it was stolen now. Everything had been stolen from her. Tortuga, who grew up on the streets, she was pretty sure, would understand. Over the sound of his smooth, angry voice and the throb of the song she could hear her father faintly peeing, something she never heard in the old house. It was embarrassing, but then her father was always embarrassing. Also her mom, her school, the Embarcadero, her clothes, her own voice on the phone, the color orange, television, old music, the coaches, fancy food, being Jewish, blue jeans, clips in old women’s hair, sweat, kids, long sweaters, and everything else except six tracks on the Tortuga album. She stood up and looked at the view of the water and the bridge. Already people were driving. Gwen was going to have to grow up and get up in the morning and drive to a job. In a minute everyone was going to start with her and it was never going to stop.
In her new bathroom she washed the last of the ink off her hands. It went down the drain to stain the ocean. On the other side of her bathroom mirror was her dad’s bathroom mirror, so it felt like he was staring right through the mirror at her messy hair and bad breath. She was always a mess, because she had to get ready for school in the locker room at swimming. She didn’t want to be a Marionette anymore.
Her dad was making her toast as usual. Gwen felt the weariness of waiting forever for someone to finish a simple, menial task, just so you can say thank you and move on. “Am I still grounded?”
“You were grounded yesterday,” said her mother, of course. “For stealing. There’s punishment for you, and yes, you’re still grounded also.”
“Except swimming,” said her father, to cheer her up. The top of his swimming trunks was peering over his wide, pale blue jeans. Gwen had heard him tell people that the two of them swam together because it produced better results. “You think that little Glasserman kid will be fast today? What’s his name?”
Cody Glasserman was fast most days. He was skinny as a stem, but he’d beaten all the boys in Competitive. Her dad talked about him for some reason. He wore a tight, smooth swimsuit, so Gwen could not look at Cody Glasserman at this point in her life. “I don’t know,” Gwen said, and her father finally finished the toast and slid the plate over to her. They stood side by side at the kitchen counter while her mother stared out at the courtyard. Toby II was making embarrassing noises at his bowl.
“I don’t hear you saying thank you,” said her mother.
“I just
got
it,” Gwen said sourly. “Thank you for the toast.” Her father had put too much butter and swirled honey on top of it.
“What was that?” her father asked.
“Thank you for the toast,” Gwen said, worse.
He held up his hands like he was getting arrested and it was fun. “No, no,” he said. “I mean what were you listening to this morning? I heard the thump, thump. It sounded pretty cool.”
Thump, thump, she almost pitied him. “Tortuga.”
“Tor-whata?”
“I’m really into him,” she said. “If you get Tortuga tickets, I’ll totally go. Don’t give them to Allan.”
“Okay.”
“Can you really?” Gwen asked him. Or, she thought, are you another one torturing me. “Can you really get tickets to that show?”
“Let me get back to you,” her father said, and Gwen knew what this meant. She slapped the toast in half and forced it into her mouth, picking up her backpack and sliding the sliding door open. The air was boring, neither cool nor hot.
“You forgot your juice,” her mother said.
Why didn’t they say what everyone knew, that Gwen was a mistake? She strode across the courtyard feeling the burn on her leg. Gwen rode the elevator down to the garage level to sit in her father’s car, the second-best part of the day. She spat half the toast in a garbage can full for some reason of batteries, but couldn’t get herself to stop chewing the rest. It was delicious. She wanted it. She deserved it, for having to get up and for her parents’ thinking she stole a dirty magazine. She clicked her father’s car unlocked and got in. It wasn’t her responsibility to remember the keys. It was a favor she did for him, because he never remembered them. She did people favors. Where were hers? Her mother had said last night, dishing out the punishment, that Gwen was ungrateful. It was not ungratitude. She sat and waited for her ride to something else she did not want to do, bobbing her finger over and over on the thing that opened the door to the condo parking garage, three floors up, like she was poking a bruise to see if it still hurt. Down here the signal was too far away to work. It was a useless device, with a useless button. What did this longing matter, or the sky far, far above this dark place underground? What did it matter where she
wanted
to go? Nothing would change, and in twenty minutes she would be changing and getting stared at in the locker room, for her burn.
The burn had been there forever, like an island on Gwen’s leg, with the odd torn boundaries of sea-smacked land. It sat there for years, familiar on the horizon to anyone who surveyed the region. But then like America it was discovered, under the flag of Naomi Wise.
“What is that?” she said, pointing her finger as close to Gwen as she could without touching her. Gwen was taking her bra off under her shirt.
“What’s what?”
“On your leg.”
“I told you about it.”
“I never noticed it before.”
This was unlikely. Naomi Wise noticed everything. She and Gwen had become friends, if they were still friends, when Naomi had leaned forward one day and murmured about Stacey Gleason: “That’s the same outfit she wore to the party Friday.” Gwen had not been invited to the party Friday, but she grinned anyway as Stacey stood oblivious with her face in the wind. Only the most popular had been invited. Naomi had risen to fame by inventing the fad of tying your hair up with a bikini top. At this point in her life Gwen knew that was idiotic and important. She could not afford to lose Naomi and had tagged along at a studied, careful pace since then. Gwen was not the most popular. She was somewhere between twenty-ninth and thirty-fifth, in her estimation, and in Naomi’s. Naomi was ninth.
“I was four,” Gwen said patiently, “and I reached up for a doughnut and spilled a carafe of coffee. It was boiling hot. It was a second- and third-degree burn. I ruined my grandmother’s birthday, because we all had to leave the hotel and wait in the emergency room.”
“Now I remember,” Naomi said, with a nod Gwen didn’t like. Naomi was her best friend. She was very excited a lot. She watched everything. She scouted, and Gwen’s role was to be there, in the right place at school or on the other end of the phone, when Naomi returned with the little secret animals she had caught, and to tie them up in the shed, or split them open so Naomi could mess around with their insides. It was often mean, but it was always fun, and there was so little fun when you couldn’t take the bus by yourself. Lately Naomi’s breathless excitement had become a little wary, and their phone calls were curdled ever so slightly around the edges of the sentences. Gwen could see the way this would go but had no maneuvering skills to make it go any other way. She had no other friends at school, really. It was complicated. Gwen watched Naomi now, staring at the burn again, and knew she would go down in this ship.
“Can’t doctors fix something like that?”
“Maybe when I’m older,” Gwen said, and then thought of something to say. “I’m in trouble. Grounded.”
Naomi nodded like this, too, was something she remembered. “Why?”
Gwen felt she could not close her eyes without seeing
Schoolgirls.
“My mom’s mad at me. And my dad, he took my mom’s side. As usual
.
”
“But what did you do?”
Gwen stood up in her suit. She could remember a time when she did not worry about her hair. Her face was clear, but she felt all the pimples that were yet to come, standing on their marks waiting for their cues, a crumb in her teeth, her body stuck everywhere with pins like a well-worn map. The burn stood out worse now that Naomi had claimed it. “I took some stuff,” Gwen said finally. “From the drugstore.”
“What, like shoplifting?”
“I don’t know. I was bored.”
“What did they do?”
“I’m grounded. I’ll have punishment.”
“They could have filed charges,” Naomi said, like a pro. “What’s the punishment?”
A hair dryer went on, and two toddlers from the toddlers class screeched with delight as the hot air hit them, and an old lady, part of a slow, smiley troupe called the Aquadettes that was the most embarrassing thing in the world, tucked her ancient, scary breasts away. “Can I tell you something too?” Naomi murmured in Gwen’s ear. Gwen nodded in the noise. “I have a crush on someone. Someone who’s here.”