see us sitting on the stone steps the way we’d look from the second floor of the house, Mary Lou sprawled with her legs apart, her braided hair slung over her shoulder, me sitting with my arms hugging my knees my backbone tight and straight knowing I was being watched. Mary Lou said, lowering her voice, “Did you ever touch yourself in a certain place, Melissa?” “No,” I said, pretending I didn’t know what she meant. “Hans wanted to do that,” Mary Lou said. She sounded disgusted. Then she started to giggle. “I wouldn’t let him, then he wanted to do something else – started unbuttoning his pants – wanted me to touch
I wanted to hush her, to clap my hand over her mouth. But she just went on and I never said a word until we both started giggling together and couldn’t stop. Afterward I didn’t remember most of it or why I’d been so excited my face burning and my eyes seared as if I’d been staring into the sun.
On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.
A few days later I came back by myself. Through the ravaged cornfield: the stalks dried and broken, the tassels burnt, that rustling whispering sound of the wind I can hear now if I listen closely. My head was aching with excitement. I was telling myself a story that we’d made plans to run away and live in the Minton house. I was carrying a willow switch I’d found on the ground, fallen from a tree but still green and springy, slapping at things with it as if it were a whip. Talking to myself. Laughing aloud. Wondering was I being watched.
I climbed in the house through the back window and brushed my hands on my jeans. My hair was sticking to the back of my neck.
At the foot of the stairs I called up, “Who’s here?” in a voice meant to show it was all play; I knew I was alone.
My heart was beating hard and quick, like a bird caught in the hand. It was lonely without Mary Lou so I walked heavy to let them know I was there and wasn’t afraid. I started singing, I started whistling. Talking to myself and slapping at things with the willow switch. Laughing aloud, a little angry. Why was I angry, well I didn’t know, someone was whispering telling me to come upstairs, to walk on the inside of the stairs so the steps wouldn’t collapse.
The house was beautiful inside if you had the right eyes to see it. If you didn’t mind the smell. Glass underfoot, broken plaster, stained wallpaper hanging in shreds. Tall narrow windows looking out onto wild weedy patches of green. I heard something in one of the rooms but when I looked I saw nothing much more than an easy chair lying on its side. Vandals had ripped stuffing out of it and tried to set it afire. The material was filthy but I could see that it had been pretty once – a floral design – tiny yellow flowers and green ivy. A woman used to sit in the chair, a big woman with sly staring eyes. Knitting in her lap but she wasn’t knitting just staring out the window watching to see who might be coming to visit.
Upstairs the rooms were airless and so hot I felt my skin prickle like shivering. I wasn’t afraid! – I slapped at the walls with my springy willow switch. In one of the rooms high in a corner wasps buzzed around a fat wasp’s nest. In another room I looked out the window leaning out the window to breathe thinking this was my window, I’d come to live here. She was telling me I had better lie down and rest because I was in danger of heatstroke and I pretended not to know what heatstroke was but she knew I knew because hadn’t a cousin of mine collapsed haying just last summer, they said his face had gone blotched and red and he’d begun breathing faster and faster not getting enough oxygen until he collapsed. I was looking out at the overgrown apple orchard, I could smell the rot, a sweet winey smell, the sky was hazy like something you can’t get clear in your vision, pressing in close and warm. A half mile away Elk Creek glittered through a screen of willow trees moving slow glittering with scales like winking.
Come away from that window, someone told me sternly.
But I took my time obeying.
In the biggest of the rooms was an old mattress pulled off rusty bedsprings and dumped on the floor. They’d torn some of the stuffing out of this too, there were scorch marks on it from cigarettes. The fabric was stained with something like rust and I didn’t want to look at it but I had to. Once at Mary Lou’s when I’d gone home with her after school there was a mattress lying out in the yard in the sun and Mary Lou told me in disgust that it was her youngest brother’s mattress – he’d wet his bed again and the mattress had to be aired out. As if the stink would ever go away, Mary Lou said.
Something moved inside the mattress, a black glittering thing, it was a cockroach but I wasn’t allowed to jump back. Suppose you have to lie down on that mattress and sleep, I was told. Suppose you can’t go home until you do. My eyelids were heavy, my head was pounding with blood. A mosquito buzzed around me but I was too tired to brush it away. Lie down on that mattress, Melissa, she told me. You know you must be punished.
I knelt down, not on the mattress, but on the floor beside it. The smells in the room were close and rank but I didn’t mind, my head was nodding with sleep. Rivulets of sweat ran down my face and sides, under my arms, but I didn’t mind. I saw my hand move out slowly like a stranger’s hand to touch the mattress and a shiny black cockroach scuttled away in fright, and a second cockroach, and a third – but I couldn’t jump up and scream.
Lie down on that mattress and take your punishment.
I looked over my shoulder and there was a woman standing in the doorway – a woman I’d never seen before.
She was staring at me. Her eyes were shiny and dark. She licked her lips and said in a jeering voice, “What are you doing here in this house, miss?”
I was terrified. I tried to answer but I couldn’t speak.
“Have you come to see me?” the woman asked.
She was no age I could guess. Older than my mother but not old-seeming. She wore men’s clothes and she was tall as any man, with wide shoulders, and long legs, and big sagging breasts like cows’ udders loose inside her shirt not harnessed in a brassiere like other women’s. Her thick wiry gray hair was cut short as a man’s and stuck up in tufts that looked greasy. Her eyes were small, and black, and set back deep in their sockets; the flesh around them looked bruised. I had never seen anyone like her before – her thighs were enormous, big as my body. There was a ring of loose soft flesh at the waistband of her trousers but she wasn’t fat.
“I asked you a question, miss. Why are you here?”
I was so frightened I could feel my bladder contract. I stared at her, cowering by the mattress, and couldn’t speak.
It seemed to please her that I was so frightened. She approached me, stooping a little to get through the doorway. She said, in a mock-kindly voice, “You’ve come to visit with me – is that it?”
“No,” I said.
“No!” she said, laughing. “Why, of course you have.”
“No. I don’t know you.”
She leaned over me, touched my forehead with her fingers. I shut my eyes waiting to be hurt but her touch was cool. She brushed my hair off my forehead where it was sticky with sweat. “I’ve seen you here before, you and that other one,” she said. “What is her name? The blond one. The two of you, trespassing.”
I couldn’t move, my legs were paralyzed. Quick and darting and buzzing my thoughts bounded in every which direction but didn’t take hold. “Melissa is
“She isn’t my sister,” I whispered.
“What is her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know!”
“ – don’t know,” I said, cowering.
The woman drew back half sighing half grunting. She looked at me pityingly. “You’ll have to be punished, then.”
I could smell ashes about her, something cold. I started to whimper started to say I hadn’t done anything wrong, hadn’t hurt anything in the house, I had only been exploring – I wouldn’t come back again . . .
She was smiling at me, uncovering her teeth. She could read my thoughts before I could think them.
The skin of her face was in layers like an onion, like she’d been sunburnt, or had a skin disease. There were patches that had begun to peel. Her look was wet and gloating. Don’t hurt me, I wanted to say. Please don’t hurt me.
I’d begun to cry. My nose was running like a baby’s. I thought I would crawl past the woman I would get to
