The windows were open. That’s what was different about the house tonight. She was happy for her mother, even if she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live that way.
Eliza headed home along the twisting country roads on which she had learned to drive twenty years earlier. Her driver’s ed teacher had been a horse-faced woman oddly intent on letting Eliza know she had been a popular girl in her day, pointing out the former houses of various boyfriends, providing little biographies of each one. The sports played, hair color, the cars driven. Eliza knew the instructor did this only to girls she perceived to be popular, so she accepted this strange patter as a compliment. But it was irritating, too, a form of bragging, an unseemly competitive streak in a woman who should be past such things. Once, when the driving teacher directed Eliza down a section of Route 40, narrating her romantic adventures all the way, Eliza had wanted to say: ‘You see that Roy Rogers? That’s where I was headed the day I met the first man who would ever have sex with me. He didn’t play any sports, but he had dark hair and green eyes and drove a red pickup truck. And when he broke up with a girl, he usually broke her neck. Except for me. I was the only one he didn’t kill. Why do you think that was?’
‘Mommy?’ Albie said from the backseat. ‘You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.’
‘No, honey, I’m—’ Oh God, she was. She pulled the steering wheel more sharply than necessary, horrified by what she had done, only to glimpse a flash of something white zipping behind the car.
‘What was that?’ Albie asked.
‘A deer,’ Iso said, utterly bored by their brush with death.
‘But it was white.’
‘That was the tail.’
A deer. Eliza was relieved that her children had seen it, too. Because, like Albie, she wasn’t sure what had dodged their car. For a moment, she thought it might be a girl, blond hair streaming. A girl, running for her life.
Chapter Six
1985
‘Wannabe,’ her sister said.
‘I’m not,’ Elizabeth said, but her voice scaled up because she didn’t know what Vonnie meant, and Vonnie pounced on that little wriggle of doubt, the way their family cat, Barnacle, impaled garden snakes.
‘It’s a term for girls like you, who think they’re Madonna.’
‘I don’t think I’m Madonna.’
But Elizabeth secretly hoped she looked like her, a little, as much as she could within the restrictions her parents had laid down. It was rare for her parents to make hard-and-fast rules. They gave Vonnie a lot of leeway – no curfew, although she had to call if she was going to stay out past midnight, and they trusted her never to get in a car with someone who had been drinking. But this summer, Elizabeth had suddenly discovered that there were all sorts of things she was forbidden to do. Dye her hair, even with a nonpermanent tint. Spend her days at the mall or the Roy Rogers on Route 40. (‘Watch all the television you want, take long walks, go to the community pool, but no just hanging,’ her mother had clarified.) And although she wasn’t actually prohibited from wearing the fingerless lace gloves she had purchased when a friend’s mother took them to the mall, her mother sighed at the mere sight of them.
Elizabeth put those on as soon as Vonnie left for her job at a day camp for underprivileged kids, checking herself in the mirror. She had a piece of stretchy lace, filched from her mother’s sewing basket, tied in her reddish curls, and a pink T-shirt that proclaimed WILD GIRL, which even she recognized was laughably untrue. Although it was a typical August day, hot and humid, she had layered a bouffant black skirt over a pair of leggings that stopped at her knees, and she wore black ankle boots with faux zebra inserts worked into the leather. She thought she looked wonderful. Vonnie was jealous.
Vonnie simply didn’t like Elizabeth, she was sure of it. Her mother said this wasn’t true, that sisters were never close at this age, but it was an essential stage through which they had to pass. Her mother sounded hopeful when she laid this out, as if saying it might make it true. Elizabeth was fifteen years old now to Vonnie’s soon-to-be eighteen and all her life she had carried the distinct impression that she had spoiled a really good party, that Vonnie had been miserable from the day the Lerner trio became a quartet.
And Elizabeth couldn’t figure out why. Vonnie still got most of the attention, excelling in everything she did, whereas Elizabeth was always in the middle of the pack. Vonnie was a good student, she had gone to the nationals in NFL – National Forensics League, not National Football League – and placed in extemp, short for extemporaneous, which meant she could speak off the cuff. That was no picnic, having an already combative older sister who was trained to speak quickly and authoritatively on any topic. Vonnie was going to Northwestern in the fall to study with Charlton Heston’s sister. Of course, Charlton Heston’s sister was simply another teacher there, in the drama school, and she had to take whoever signed up for her classes, but Vonnie managed to make it sound like a very big deal: I’m going to Northwestern in the fall. I’m going to study with Charlton Heston’s sister. Although barely two years older than Elizabeth, she was three years ahead in school because her September birthday had allowed her to enroll in school early, whereas Elizabeth had a January birthday. Elizabeth didn’t mind. It meant Vonnie went away all that much earlier. She was looking forward to seeing what it was like, being home alone. Maybe once Vonnie was gone, Elizabeth might discover what she did well, where her own talents lay. Her parents insisted she had some, if she would just focus. So far, all focus had brought her was the uncanny ability to ferret out dirty books in the houses where she watered plants for people lucky enough to go somewhere in this long, boring summer. Erica Jong and Henry Miller and – in one house, hidden behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica – the complete set of Ian Fleming. The Spy Who Loved Me – wow, that was nothing like the movie.
She left the house, with no particular destination in mind, but then – the only places she wanted to go were the ones that were explicitly forbidden. Her parents thought their neighborhood, Roaring Springs, was a big deal, but Elizabeth thought it was boring, boring, boring. Roaring Springs was nothing more than a bunch of old stone houses, remnants of a nineteenth- century mill village not even a mile from busy Frederick Road. But because their house backed up to a state park, thick with trees, no one could ever build near them. The isolation suited her parents, and even Vonnie never complained about living in this quirky stone house among other quirky stone houses, filled mostly with people like their parents, only childless. Everyone in Roaring Springs was proudly, determinedly eccentric, indifferent to trends and what was popular. They all professed to hate television, too. They might as well hate television: The county had yet to extend the cable system out here, which meant that Elizabeth saw MTV and VH-1 only when she went to friends’ houses after school. She wondered, in fact, how her mother even knew enough about Madonna to find her objectionable. Her father had glossy magazines in his office, for the parents who waited while he consulted with their children, but she didn’t imagine there were magazines in her mother’s office. Of course, she had never been allowed to visit there, given that it was in the state prison.
There was a small, old-fashioned family bakery on Frederick Road, and she stopped there, inspecting the various treats on display. Vonnie had said the other day that Elizabeth may be straight-up-and-down skinny, but she was prone to having a potbelly and she better watch it. The problem with Vonnie was that she said some things merely to be mean, but she said other things that were mean and true, and it was hard to sort them out. Elizabeth turned sideways, smoothing down her T-shirt, trying to assess her stomach. It looked okay to her. It would look better if she had boobs, real boobs instead of these A-cup nothings. Real boobs would balance her out. But she was okay with how she looked, today. Gazing in the bakery window, she thought about going in, but the problem was that she wanted everything: