I am not like the other girls, who ask her questions about her clothes and her hair and her nails, who listen giggling in a circle around her desk at recess as Mrs Haritsen tells them something cute her husband said, or something “wild and silly” she did in college. I don’t like it when she talks about how much she misses Idaho, and how much we are all missing by growing up in “this wild place.” She feels so sorry for the other little girls, and her pity makes them vaguely insecure, wondering what wonderful things they are missing that evokes so much condescension from her. I don’t want her pity. If she doesn’t like Alaska, she can leave. Does she really think the woods will turn into a city because she wants them to, that the roads will widen and be paved, that the winters will become less cold and dangerous because petite Mrs Haritsen thinks they should? She’s stupid. I force her to give me As, and hope she will go back to the states soon. I pray that a nun will teach me next year.
Home is almost as bad. My sisters fight over boyfriends. Jeffrey met Sissy at a dance, but when he came to visit her at our house, he met Candy, and now he’s asked her to the movies instead of Sissy. My mother is at a loss as to what to do about it. She tells my sisters that they must sort it out for themselves. She asks them, rhetorically, if either of them really wants to date a boy who could be that insensitive. Of course they do. He has a car. My mother folds her lips and irons a mountain of laundry, refusing to listen to any more squabbling. So Sissy cries and calls Candy “that bitch” when I am the only one around to hear it. And Candy primps endlessly in the bathroom mirror, ignoring the pleas of those with bursting bladders, when she isn’t sulking because Sissy won’t lend her blue eye shadow to her.
It makes my life miserable. First, Kimmy tells on me when, in agonized desperation, I go into the woods across the lane from the house and pee. Never mind that Candy was the one hogging the bathroom. I am “uncivilized” and my mother scolds me for it, not privately but in the kitchen where my little brothers hear and giggle endlessly about it. “What did you use for toilet paper,” they demand, interrupting the scolding. “Leaves? Moss? Birch bark?” They giggle wildly, uncontrollably, even when my mother turns her scolding on them. They are unremorseful, and I am able to escape her, leaving her to tell them “It’s not funny” as I tiptoe down the stairs.
But the room I share with Candy and Sissy is a sulfurous and brooding place. Candy is pulling her hair out of curlers, and Sissy is lying on her bed, reading, and not watching her. She is not watching her so intensely it is like the sharp edge of a knife blade pressed into the silence, and I am tempted to beg her to watch Candy, to stop ignoring her. One glance would be all it would take to ignite the storm, and then they could shriek and wail and slam hairbrushes down. The tension would be broken, and I could relax then, could read a book while they quarrel as imperturbably as I can sit out a storm under a spruce tree.
But Sissy won’t look, and Candy is so miffed that she turns from the mirror and attacks me instead. “Did Mom tell you to stay in the basement when Jeffrey comes to pick me up?” she demands.
“No,” I say, trying to make it withering, but not succeeding. I am too surprised, and I am not able to hide it.
“Well, she said she was going to, so make sure you do.” Candy turns back to the mirror.
This may be the opening Sissy has been waiting for. She slams her book and sits up ramrod straight, her face going rocky with righteous indignation. “She did not. She said you could ask Evvie nicely, and that sure wasn’t nicely. I’m telling.”
“Go ahead. Who cares? Not you, for sure. You don’t care what people think of our family. Look at Evvie, for crying out loud. Look how she runs around. Susan Adams told me that Kerry Pierce asked her if Evvie was a girl or a boy. He couldn’t tell by looking at her. No one could! Look at her! Last time Jeffrey was here, she was running around in that same shirt, and I swear the same dirt on it. He’s going to think that’s the only clothes she owns!”
“She’s just a little kid!” Sissy jumps to my defense. “Leave her alone. She can’t help how she looks!”
“Maybe not, but she could at least be clean. Look at her! Mud on her knees, God knows what on her chin, her hair full of twigs, probably from shitting in the bushes somewhere. Like a little animal.”
“Whose fault is it that she couldn’t use the bathroom?” Sissy demands.
I don’t say a word. I am looking at myself in the mirror, over Candy’s shoulder. It is a large dresser mirror, and I can see nearly my entire body. I stare at myself. I cannot remember the last time I studied myself in the mirror. I suddenly see what it is about, why Mrs Haritsen hates me, why I eat my lunch alone. I suddenly see the raggedy dirty jeans and the shirt with the elbows out. I think of what I wore to school on Friday, the green pleated skirt with half the hem dragging out, the yellow blouse with the little flowers on it that has a coffee stain on the stomach. I wonder why I have never thought about it before, why I have seen everything else so keenly and never myself. I wonder why my mother lets me run around this way, and then I know. She doesn’t have the time to worry about it. Squeaking wheels get oiled. If I don’t demand new clothes, a trip downtown to get my hair cut and styled, money for hand lotion and nail polish and new socks, new shoelaces, jeans that aren’t hand-me-downs, I will never get them. The money is already stretched as tight as it will go. Thank God for one child who doesn’t nag and whine and beg. I think of Sissy’s new nail polish, Candy’s white mohair sweater, Kimmy’s new Barbie doll camper, and I know that it should have been mine, my new dress, my new jeans. But what I don’t demand I don’t seem to need, and if I am content, no one will jar me from it.
I come back to the room and they are still fighting, my sisters, screaming at each other, ostensibly over me, but actually over Jeffrey. “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings, not Evvie’s, not mine, no one’s, as long as you get what you want!” Sissy is saying, and tears are running down her face.
“That’s not true. You know that’s not true. It’s not my fault that Jeffrey liked me better, and it sure isn’t my fault that Evvie looks like a pile of barfy rags!”
I snatch up Sissy’s book from her bed and I let it fly. It’s only a paperback, it shouldn’t matter, but when it hits Candy in the face she screams, and even before the book is all the way to the floor, I can see the blood rushing out of her nose. She screams again, air bubbling past the blood from her nose, the blood that is falling on her white mohair sweater, and then I am gone, up the stairs, eeling past my mother as she comes down, making my escape before she knows I am the culprit. I grab a knife and a small bucket from the kitchen as I dash through it, trusting they will help me buy my way back into her good graces when I return. Rinky picks up on me as I race out the door and attaches himself to me like a sidecar. We careen down the lane and across Davis Road. And into my woods.
The path under my feet is hard, bare earth, beaten out by my own feet, and I fly along it, jumping fallen logs, veering around boggy spots. I could run this in the dark, I know it so well, and frequently do. It is fairly clear at first, as my path follows an old grown-over survey cut, but then it gets to the slough, still full of water this time of year, and I veer off, paralleling it, crouched over to run down an old rabbit trail, ignoring the branches that snatch at my hair and clothing, going to earth like an animal, fleeing into deeper forest. I run until I am sure I won’t be able to hear them call me, even if they send one of the boys up to stand by the mailbox on Davis Road and yell for me. Then I stop and drop, panting, onto the deep moss. Rinky gives me one sniff, to be sure I am all right, pushing his cold black olive nose against my cheek and into my ear, and then goes off on his own business, whatever that is. I am alone with my images of Candy’s blood bubbling over her mouth and onto her sweater. Dark red blood, clashing with her nearly auburn hair. I can’t remember that she has ever had a bloody nose before, at least not one from getting hit with something. I know she will blubber for at least an hour, and Jeffrey is due to pick her up in only half an hour. I am betting the blood won’t come out of the mohair sweater, even if they soak it in cold water and put meat tenderizer on it. Well, I reflect savagely, at least I won’t be around to humiliate her when Jeffrey does come.
My small bucket is beside