Silent Girl Read online

  Silent Girl

  Silent Girl

  stories by

  Tricia Dower

  INANNA Publications and Education Inc.

  Toronto, Canada

  Copyright © 2008 Tricia Dower

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Kesh Kumay first appeared in Cicada Magazine.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council

  for the Arts for its publishing program.

  The publisher is also grateful for the kind support received

  from an Anonymous Fund at The Calgary Foundation.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dower, Tricia, 1942-

  Silent Girl : stories / by Tricia Dower

  (Inanna poetry and fiction series)

  ISBN 978-0-9808822-0-9

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3604.O939S45 2008---813’.6---C2008-901857-5

  Cover design by Val Fullard

  Interior design by Luciana Ricciutelli

  Printed and bound in Canada

  eBook development by WildElement.ca

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.yorku.ca/inanna

  To Colin,

  come rain or come shine.

  Contents

  Not Meant to Know

  Silent Girl

  Kesh Kumay

  Deep Dark Waves

  Nobody; I Myself

  Passing Through

  Cocktails With Charles

  The Snow People: 30-46 AGM

  Backstage

  Glossary of Terms

  Acknowledgements

  The stories in this book are inspired by the plays of William Shakespeare.

  Not Meant to Know

  I have done nothing but in care of thee / Of thee, my dear one, my daughter.

  —Prospero to Miranda in The Tempest

  I WAS UNDER STRICT ORDERS TO STAY AWAY FROM THE RIVER THAT meandered through our town. But on that sticky hot day when Tereza Dobra said, “Let’s go smoke punks, it’ll be cooler there,” I said okay. She had moved in across the street two weeks earlier and was my new best friend. She seemed to do whatever she pleased. Possessed a magic power I lacked. Maybe because she was twelve going on thirteen and I was only eleven.

  What Tereza called punks – cattail flowers that look like cigars – grew in stagnant water at a particular edge of the river. To get there we had to go down a narrow road past Crazy Haggerty’s house – the biggest in our neighborhood. It sat high above the water, all by its lonesome. The drapes were drawn tight, not a window open to catch a breeze. You couldn’t tell if Haggerty was in there watching. I’d only ever seen him on my way home from school – heading toward town, weaving back and forth, always wearing the same red shoes and satiny black suit with sequins. He’d scowl if you gawked, tell you to get lost. A house as grand as his would have to give out more than a handful of candy corn on Hallowe’en, but I was too afraid to get close to it.

  “Not me,” Tereza said. “If I’d ’a moved here sooner, we’d ’a trick-or-treated it by now.” I could see her climbing the stairs in that quick, sneaky way of hers, standing on the shadowy veranda demanding a treat.

  We crab-walked down the riverbank, taking care not to slip in the mud. Any noise or sudden motion made me jump: the call of a tree frog, a fluttering swallowtail, a red-winged blackbird flushed from reeds. If I was found out, I’d be banished to my room without dinner.

  Tereza pulled a penknife from her pocket and cut us a couple of punks, leaving short stems. She had a small box of wooden matches, too. The punks weren’t dry enough to flame up and she wasted a couple of matches before they caught and smoldered. “Mmm,” she said, waving hers under her nose, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”

  I stuck the stem of mine in my mouth and puh-puh-puhed as I’d seen my dad do when he was getting his pipe going. The stem tasted like potato peel.

  Tereza snorted. “Ain’t nothing to inhale, genius. This your first punk?”

  “Course not,” I said. “It’s just more fun this way.”

  She tried puh-puh-puhing, too, and then sucked on the stem so hard her eyes crossed, making me hoot out loud. “No it ain’t,” she said.

  Both of us wore pedal-pushers but they looked better on Tereza. She wasn’t pudgy and her skin was the color of a root-beer float. “There’s more than a little gypsy in that girl,” I’d overheard Mom tell Dad. “And her hair! A regular rat’s nest.”

  I definitely had it over Tereza in that department. My mother washed and set my hair in pin curls every Saturday night. I was fortunate to be an ash blonde, she said, as the gray would blend in and be hardly noticeable when I got old.

  “Your name means pretty in Spanish,” Tereza said, plopping down on the ground.

  “No kidding?” I stayed upright, couldn’t show up at home with mud on my behind. I hid myself behind a tall bush and held my punk down by my knees so the smoke wouldn’t give me away. I could still see the street, Crazy Haggerty’s, and anyone coming.

  “My real father speaks three languages,” Tereza said. Her history was more complicated than mine.

  “Did he tell you Linda means pretty?”

  “No, I’ve never met him.”

  A police car came slowly and silently down the street. “Quiet,” I whispered, scooting over to Tereza. We snuffed out our punks and crawled like spiders, on fingertips and feet, to get closer to the road.

  Two uniformed cops got out of the car and went up Crazy Haggerty’s stairs. You could hear barking even before they got to the door. They knocked a few times and the door opened a sliver. The barking turned to growling and one of the cops took his gun out of the holster. After a while the growling stopped and whoever had opened the door let them in.

  “Somebody must ’a got bumped off,” Tereza said.

  “No one gets murdered in this boring town,” I said. The river never flooded, either; at least it hadn’t as long as I’d been alive. That I was forbidden to be there didn’t make sense. It wasn’t as if we were still at war with the Japanese and had to worry about them skulking up the river, signaling each other with jars of lightning bugs. (According to my mother, not long after she and Dad married, just after Pearl Harbor, she’d lie awake at night picturing that very thing.)

  A truck came down the street and pulled in back of the cop car. Two men emerged, opened the back of the truck and pulled out a huge butterfly net and a big cage. They went inside the house and reappeared a while later with a muzzled German shepherd. It took both of them to carry the cage.

  Tereza and I crouched for ages – my knees and thighs were burning – before one of the cops walked out the front door carrying a small, tan suitcase. The other cop followed, holding the elbow of a girl who looked to be fifteen or sixteen. On her hip, a child of maybe two.

  “Who’s that?” Tereza said.

  “Somebody visiting the old man, I guess.”

  “What’s wrong with the kid?”

  “Beats me.”

  The child’
s head was freak-show small. The girl had cocker spaniel hair down to her waist. I couldn’t see enough of her face to tell if she was pretty. She wore an old-fashioned navy blue dress with a Peter Pan collar and shoulder pads. The child’s arms around the girl’s neck and the sway of her hips as she walked to the cop car filled me with wonder.

  Tereza stood. “I’m gonna find out what’s going on.”

  “No!” I yanked the back of her pants and pulled her back down. “They might tell on us. I’ll get in trouble.”

  “With the cops?”

  “No. My folks.”

  “What’s the worst they can do to you?”

  I couldn’t think of anything that would impress Tereza. Her legs always had a raw welt or two. Due to her getting “too lippy,” she said when I asked her, like you might explain away a rash from eating too many tomatoes.

  “You can’t imagine,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose as though I’d just farted and dropped back to the ground. “My brother’s a big chicken, too,” she said.

  The car and the truck drove away. We stayed a while without talking. Tereza relit her punk but not mine. The sun slipping down the side of the sky chased us home.

  Dad returned from work that night long after Mom had exchanged housedress for shirtwaist, pumps, and nylons. Dinner was more than ready. As he hung up his suit jacket in the hall closet, he said, “James Haggerty died yesterday. Heart attack or stroke, they’re not sure. I stopped in at Tony’s for a new wiper on the way home and he told me.”

  He came into the dining room where I’d gone to stand behind my chair as soon as I heard him at the door. I never thought of Crazy Haggerty having a first name.

  “I didn’t think he was that old,” Mom said, carrying dishes out from the kitchen.

  “Forty-eight, according to Tony.” Dad took his position behind her chair. His white shirt was damp under the arms and wrinkled along the back.

  “Must’ve been the drink, then,” Mom said.

  “Did he die in his house?” I asked.

  He gave me a surprised look. “Hello, Sunbeam. I forgot to give you a hug.” He opened his arms and I walked into their damp, solid warmth. He smelled of starch and underarms.

  “Did he die in that big house?” I said into his chest.

  “No, on the train back from Penn Station. He’d gone into the city for some reason. Had bags of strange stuff in his pockets, so they say.”

  “What kind of strange stuff?”

  “I think that’s everything,” Mom said, surveying the table. Dad pulled out her chair and she sat. He took his place opposite her and I sat. We bowed our heads.

  “For what we are about to receive,” Dad said, “we are truly grateful.” We removed our napkins from under our forks and spread them on our laps.

  “What kind of strange stuff?” I asked again.

  Mom put a thin slice of roasted chicken, a small mound of mashed potatoes, and a fistful of green beans on my plate. A canned peach-half waiting in a small dish on the sideboard would be my dessert. Since I had inherited my father’s build, she said, I’d have to watch what I ate for the rest of my life.

  “He had a child, apparently,” Dad said, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. The hair on his arms was sweaty dark. “Possibly two. Tony had quite a bit to say about that.”

  “Really.” A statement, not a question. The look she gave him warned not to say more in my presence. When I was younger, they spoke in Pig Latin. Eally-Ray.

  “What did you do today, Linda?” Dad asked.

  “Hung around with Tereza.”

  “Interesting expression, that. Can you be more specific?”

  “I don’t know. We just talked and stuff. How old’s his child? Boy or girl?”

  “That’s not open for discussion,” Mom said.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t argue with your mother. Did you help around the house?”

  “She peeled potatoes and set the table,” Mom said.

  “Good. He had a teenaged daughter and there’s a little boy who might be hers.”

  “Roger!”

  After dinner they sat in the backyard while I did the dishes – a chore I rarely objected to. It let me pick at the leftovers. That night it also let me eavesdrop through the window over the sink as I dipped plates in and out of the hot, soapy water, quiet as I could, my ears on full alert. At first their voices were as faint as fly hums. The sound drifted in on the fruity smell of my dad’s pipe smoke. Then came buzzing, and a hornet-like crossness loud enough for me to pick out words.

  “He should have been shot.”

  “No point poking a stick in his dead eye, Betty.”

  “Why are you defending him?”

  “I’m not. I don’t know enough about it to blame or defend. Neither do you.”

  “A teenager with a baby and nobody knew she existed. Isn’t that enough?”

  Their voices dropped again and then tapered off. Mom came in and went up to bed. It was what she usually did when she was peeved. Dad stayed outside for a while, smoking his pipe. Later, he and I watched TV together, ignoring my mother’s empty armchair. I sat on his lap like I did most nights. His lap never objected to my build. I fell asleep to him stroking my hair.

  Tereza and I met the next morning, as usual, in the small woods we called The Island. I wore new Keds with laces that criss-crossed my ankles like a Roman soldier’s, hoping they’d win back a few of the points I’d lost with her the day before. I waited for her on the hollowed out log in which we stashed scavenged props for Swiss Family Robinson: a bent spoon, some string, the silver foil from gum wrappers. The ebb and flow of cars and trucks on the highway half a block from my house was the sound of the sea that had shipwrecked us.

  Tereza saw uses for things I considered trash – like cigarette butts. She stripped them and collected the loose tobacco in a Wonder Bread bag. Said we could sell it for food when we escaped from The Island. She showed up that morning with a handful of cattails, punks and all.

  “What are those for?”

  “If we let the punks dry out they’ll be better smokes. When they turn to fluff we can make pillows. We can weave the leaves into sleeping mats.”

  “The rule is we live on whatever we find on The Island. Punks don’t grow here. Berries and acorns do.”

  “It’s our game, right? We make the rules.”

  “It’s my game. I played it a whole year before you came.”

  “Yeah, and what have you got to show for it? You didn’t make a tree house. You didn’t make nothin’ we could sell when we get off The Island.”

  “What if I don’t want to get off?” I said. “What if I want to live here forever?”

  “That’s just plain dumb. Nothin’ to do here. Nobody to see. Might as well be Crazy Haggerty’s kid, locked up in that house.”

  “Maybe she liked it there.”

  “My old man said her father must ’a parked his car in her garage.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She made a gesture with her hand that I could tell was dirty. “My old man tries that with me, I’ll kick him in the balls,” she said.

  I sucked in my breath. You weren’t supposed to say balls; at least I wasn’t. My cousin’s dog was always licking his, making my uncle laugh. I didn’t like to think of my father having them.

  “Maybe your old man is wrong,” I said. The way the girl walked out of that house had stuck in my head. She didn’t look scared or in any hurry to leave.

  “Nope,” Tereza said. She stuffed the cattails inside the log and sat beside me.

  “Do you think Haggerty’s daughter ever went to school?” I said.

  “Probly not. Lucky her.”

  I didn’t think that was lucky. I liked almo
st everything about school: getting escorted across the highway by the safety patrol, waiting on the playground for the bell to ring, learning about the solar system, using the pencil sharpener. Most kids hated grammar but I appreciated knowing there was a right way to speak and you could learn it.

  I often tried out new expressions on my parents, to see how much information they’d let loose without realizing it. That night at dinner I said, “What kind of car did Mr. Haggerty park in his daughter’s garage?”

  Dad started to laugh – he had a deep chuckle that tickled your insides – then stopped and put on a serious face. “As far as I know, he didn’t have a car.”

  I told them what Tereza had said.

  Mom looked at her plate. Dad looked at the ceiling. “You and your mother need to have a chat,” he said.

  I knew we wouldn’t. Earlier that year the school nurse had sent us sixth grade girls home with a kit and instructions to “chat” with our mothers. The kit contained a sanitary napkin, a belt, and a booklet called Growing Up and Liking It. The booklet had tiny illustrations of hidden female body parts, none of which I could envision inside me. My mother put the kit in the bottom drawer of her bureau. “We won’t need this for at least another year,” she said.

  I was invited to Tereza’s house for dinner later that week. Supper, she called it.

  “I’m not wild about the idea,” Mom said. “We don’t know anything about them.”

  “It’s only across the street,” Dad said.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “Why don’t you walk over there, then? Welcome them to the neighborhood. Poke around in their garbage can.”

  “Very funny,” Mom said.

  “I like Tereza,” Dad said. “She has spunk.”

  I ended up going, taking along a plate of oatmeal cookies to show I had manners. I had waited for Tereza on her porch a bunch of times but never gone inside. She lived on the lower floor of a multiple-family house. The hallway leading to her front door was dark and smelled like my grandmother’s attic. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.