“I heard about your mom,” he told me. “A little prostitute, that’s what I heard.”
Looking back, I can see the word was as foreign to him as it was to me, but neither of us was too young to understand an insult when we heard one. He’d picked up some ammunition and was set to deploy it.
“Should’ve kept her knees together.”
Baffling. But accompanied by howls of appreciation from the boys, along with other words I did understand.
“Slut.”
“Whore.”
“Trailer trash.”
My wit deserted me. I ran sobbing to the girls’ room and sat in crumpled agony for the rest of the day, trying to make sense of what was clearly a monumental insult. When I got home that afternoon, I told Nana all about it.
I had never seen her so angry. Usually Nana’s temper was quick and loud, easily triggered and quickly forgotten. This anger was different. This was slow, deliberate, maternal fury. Her face hardened and flushed a plummy red.
She folded up the dishcloth and sat next to me at the wobbly Formica table. Pulled my chair around slightly to face her.
“Did you start this?” she said.
I opened my face to her, tried to hold my eyes steady. “No, he started it, he—”
She held up a hand.
“I see.”
We sat that way for a minute or two.
“Lovey,” she said, “when someone insults your mum, when they use that kind of language, you mustn’t let it pass. There are some words that... There are things that require a response. You understand?”
I nodded.
“If you were a boy, I would tell you to knock the piss out of him. But you can’t very well do that, can you? You’ll have to think of something different. You’re a clever girl, Alice. Learn to use what you have.”
She dismissed me after that, but called to me as I left the room.
“Don’t mention any of this to your mother,” she said.
The next day, and the days after that, I worried over the problem of Danny Kukal. He was the large centerpiece of a straggling army, and I was a loner, now more than ever. I had no ally, no rebuttal to what he’d gleefully hit upon as a successful series of taunts that the group repeated now and then, with gradual loss of interest, as at a joke that has played out. I kept my face still and thought about what Nana had said.
On my way home from school about a week later, I stopped in front of the Kukals’ double-wide. The family dog came rushing up to edge of his pen, broken teeth bared, snapping and growling as he did every day. He was junkyard ugly, a bad-tempered nuisance with a grizzled brown coat and one missing ear. All the neighborhood kids hated and feared Schultzie. Everyone but Danny Kukal. He was proud to be the only one the dog didn’t bite.
“Hey, Schultz,” he would croon, tossing down his backpack after school. “Hey, Schultzie, I saved you a cookie.”
Danny really loved that dog.
That afternoon, most of the boys were at baseball practice, so the house stood empty. No car in the driveway, no bikes in the street.
Learn to use what you have, Alice.
I went around the side of the dog pen and sat down in the grass with my back to the fence. The dog made repeated runs at me, barking dementedly, snarling with his muzzle stuck through the chain links. For several minutes I sat quietly, braiding strands of grass like hair, and let him carry on. When the barking turned to grumbling, I took out what was left of my ham sandwich, broke off a piece and fed it to him carefully, keeping my fingers out of reach and avoiding his filmy eye. He devoured it with grunts and wet snorts, slapping his nose with his wide pink tongue. A bite at a time I fed him all I had, followed by a few leftover chips I was saving for an after-school snack.
He ate it all, thinking he’d made a friend.
That night, after my mother and Nana went to bed, I snuck into the laundry room and found Nana’s rat poison. I mixed it with a gob of peanut butter, made a sandwich and stowed it in my backpack.
I thought about the sandwich all day. Several times when the teacher spoke to me I didn’t hear her, and during the morning’s math test I thought I would be sick and had to run without permission to the girls’ room, where I stayed until the teacher came to get me.
At lunch I took the sandwich out and looked at it. Sniffed it. Turned it over in my hands.
“You should eat that,” Danny called from across the cafeteria. “Maybe you’ll get fat. Maybe you’ll get boobs like your mom.” And then, “Would take a lot of sandwiches, though.”
The boys hooted and carried on, chanting. Eat it, eat it. I didn’t look up. Just kept turning the sandwich over in my hands. Eat it, eat it, eat it.
After school I walked alone to the Kukals’ house and sat down at the far end of Schultzie’s pen. This time the dog didn’t bark as much. He put his muzzle through the pen and flapped his tongue at me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I rolled up the sandwich and stuffed it through the chain-link fence.
The poison didn’t take effect immediately the way I thought it would. At first the horrible old mutt rolled his eyes almost comically, nipped and growled at his stomach as though he was angry at whatever was happening inside him. He was so ridiculous about it that I began to smile, with the beginnings of a sort of relieved remorse bubbling in my chest. The stupid dog was too tough and mean to die. This was a lame attempt on my part. I’d let it go and find some other way to get even with Danny Kukal.
But then Schultzie began to cry. The comical expression on his face became a grimace, freakishly exaggerated with the whites of his eyes unnaturally wide. He limped in circles, tearing at the skin of his flanks, stretching it, letting go, biting again, drawing blood. He flopped to the ground like a fish, stiffly one way, then the other, crying. Crying. At last his body flexed so far sideways that it stuck that way. He didn’t roll then, he simply lay there, strangling, a string of sandwich-flecked foam oozing out the side of his mouth.
The filmy eye rolled back and locked on me, and the life dimmed from him like a flame sinking into wax.
I walked into the woods, sat down on a stump and rocked forward and back, one arm clamped around my stomach, the heel of my hand shoved into my mouth. My teeth dug small blue trenches into my skin, then drew blood.
My mother came in that night and said she’d heard the Kukal’s dog had been poisoned.
“Poor old guy,” she said. “How could someone do a thing like that? They’ve had that dog since he was a puppy. I remember when they brought him home from the pound.”
Nana was in her chair, watching TV and working on a crossword puzzle. She looked up slowly, looked right at me, and winked.
* * *
The gray house sits like a stump in the grass at the end of a long suburban street on the south side of the island, slightly apart from its neighbors and surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence and a tangle of weed-choked shrubs. The miniblinds in the front window are dented; the tumble of bricks in the side yard has not been moved. The house looks the same today as it did when my mother and I moved in a dozen years ago.
In the park across the street, I sit alone in a rubber swing, rocking idly forward and back, forward and back, an exhausted pendulum.
Sometimes I leave the park and walk through the neighborhood, past the small elementary school where Danny and his friends used to torment me, past the salon where my mom and I once got the two most awful haircuts, to the corner where the ice cream shop used to be. Ice cream was our Saturday ritual after my soccer practice. My mom liked to get a scoop of butterscotch and one of