The Little Giant Of Aberdeen County Part 7

At night now, tucked up in my cot under the dormer window in Amelia's room, I listened to Amelia's ragged snores and thought about Serena Jane's rose-sprigged room at the Pickertons'.

Amelia's bedroom had old horse blankets thrown on the mattresses and flour sacking for curtains. When darkness fel , we would light the stub of a candle to see by, the same one for days, until it was little more than a nub. Even in the dark, it wasn't a room that inspired fantasies of tiaras and bal gowns. Neither was it a room that required the glossy sheen of a tortoiseshel mirror. I could see plain enough what was around me without it. I wasn't like my father, however. I couldn't just get rid of things.

"Why don't you give the mirror to Serena Jane?" Amelia suggested one night after I'd told her a Bugaboo story. Earlier, she'd come in the room and caught me staring miserably at my reflection. "I bet Serena Jane would like to have something from your mother." She didn't say that she thought Serena Jane deserved to have the mirror more than I did, but she didn't have to. Between my sister and myself, Serena Jane was the pretty one, with the pretty life.

She'd have a better time staring at herself than I ever would.

I rol ed over and slid the mirror back under my bed. It was the last piece I possessed of my mother, but maybe Amelia was right, I thought.

Maybe if I gave it to Serena Jane, the gift would tie us together again. I slept badly that night, tossing us together again. I slept badly that night, tossing and turning but resolved. Before I set off for school, I wrapped the mirror in an old scarf and stashed it in the bottom of my satchel, careful y doing up the straps.

Al morning, through a tedious math lesson, I squirmed, eager for recess when I could give Serena Jane my present. I watched my sister bend her head over her paper, then straighten up and stare out the window, bored. Beauty didn't need long division, I thought, a stump of pencil clenched between my fingers. Beauty had its own system of part.i.tioning up the world.

The bel rang, and Miss Sparrow glanced up foggily at the cla.s.s, as if surprised to find herself standing at a blackboard in front of twenty-odd children. Time was not being particularly kind to her.

Tiny lines were starting to colonize the spare skin around her eyes, and her lips, once as plump as summer berries, were beginning to thin along their edges. She stil bought herself a new pair of high-heeled spectator pumps every year, though, even though she always complained that her toes were kil ing her and that al the sidewalks in Aberdeen were cracked to kingdom come. She blinked now and clapped her chalk-tipped fingers together dryly.

"Recess, children," she cal ed. She fisted one hand, held it to her mouth, and cleared her throat.

I waited until everyone filed out of the room, then reached into my satchel and withdrew the mirror. Slowly, I unwound the moth-eaten scarf I'd tied around it. Serena Jane was outside, laughing at something a boy was saying and showing off her new skirt. I planned to leave the mirror on her desk, where Serena Jane would see it and understand.

She would wait for me after school, and walk with me to Hinkleman's to slurp sodas, our heels hooked up on the stools. Here, she would say, and slip off the tinkling charm bracelet. You can have this. She would know how badly I needed something smal and frivolous with which to decorate my life.

I had just laid the mirror facedown on Serena Jane's desk and was turning the bulk of myself around when I heard Miss Sparrow chirp from behind her desk, "What have we here, my dear?"

Her heels clicked in my direction and stopped at Serena Jane's desk. She picked up the mirror, pinching the palm of her hand in the process.

"Oh!" she cried, and dropped the mirror at her feet. A spidery crack spread across the surface of the gla.s.s, and one jagged shard fel next to her shoe. "What's this?" She sucked the skin of her hand and nudged the broken gla.s.s with her foot.

"Don't you know you're not al owed to bring things like this to school?" She pul ed her hand away from her mouth. A red welt was blooming in the center of her palm.

"You see what's gone and happened?

Now, what if that had been your sister? I'm afraid I'l have to take this." She tucked the handle of the mirror into her waistband, careful to avoid the crack and the raggedy edges of gla.s.s, then scowled like a displeased empress. "Now, run along outside."

I ducked my head. Arguing with Miss Sparrow was always a losing gamble. "Yes, ma'am."

I hesitated, the tip of my tongue protruding between the b.u.t.tresses of my lips, then hung my head and shambled out to the schoolyard. Miss Sparrow watched me go, her own lips pinched shut like an old lady's purse. She waited until I was al the way out the door before she pul ed out the mirror and held it in front of her, twisting the gla.s.s this way and that in order to catch al the angles of herself.

"Mirror, mirror," she whispered, her eyes briefly spreading wide as a girl's. She caught a flash of Serena Jane's flaxen hair framed in the window, then sniffed and tossed the mirror headfirst into the trash. Outside, I heard the thump of the mirror hitting the metal trash can. Morosely, I reached into my pocket, withdrew the deck of cards August had given me, and began to thumb through them. I turned over the six of spades, the three of diamonds, and then the unlovely queen of clubs, her face bloated with a surplus of smug regality. In a round of poker, I knew, that card could be worth gold. It could win you the game, if everything else in your hand cooperated.

But in a game of twenty-one, the queen could send you bust with a flick of the wrist as fast as she could win it for you. That was the thing about playing games of chance, I was learning-even when you were losing everything, there was always another suit to turn over, always another facet of the die, where things could add up. It was simple. August had told me so. You just avoided clubs, fished for diamonds, and when in doubt you always, always played the joker.

played the joker.

Outside, Amelia and Marcus were waiting for me on the turtle- shaped rock. "Did you put it on her desk?" they asked, then shut up as they looked more closely at my face.

I shook my head. "Miss Sparrow took it away."

Amelia frowned and stamped at the dirt in frustration. It was Marcus who said the right thing.

"Don't worry, Truly," he soothed, "mirrors are just a device for throwing light back at you, and light is just thousands of photons-little bitty particles. Miss Sparrow didn't real y take anything from you.

Whatever you ever saw in that mirror left it long ago and became a part of you. No one can steal that."

He held out his hand, and I accepted it, choosing-for that moment, at least-to believe him.

Chapter Eight.

One of the things you learn growing up in a smal town where everyone knows everyone else's business is that desire is communal. And for as long as I could remember, Bob Bob Morgan had only ever wanted two things out of life: to be a doctor and to possess my sister.

Becoming a doctor was no problem at al . History was on his side. Every male in his family from his great-great-grandfather on down had been a doctor. He would be one, too-al of us knew it. It was practical y predestined. He could flunk his medical boards, and the school in Buffalo would stil have to take him. He could faint every time he saw blood and stil get a degree with honors. Serena Jane wasn't so easy to come by, however.

Everything about her-from her Kewpie lips to her black-fringed eyes and flossy yel ow hair-was like some fancy pony on show parade. No matter how much Bob Bob oohed and aahed, she never spared a glance in his direction.

Not that Bob Bob didn't give it his best Not that Bob Bob didn't give it his best shot and amuse the rest of us trying. In the third grade, he climbed the drainpipe up the side of the school building and dangled from it by one arm until he fel and broke his wrist. Serena Jane merely yawned and started picking at the scab on her knee, but I have to say, I was mesmerized by the way the bone protruded sideways out of his arm and his face turned the color of old washing water. When he was ten, he rode his bicycle around and around the school during a violent thunderstorm, risking electrocution, until Miss Sparrow came with a ragged, flapping umbrel a and made him go inside.

He ate worms for Serena Jane's benefit and tangled with a stray swarm of bees that left his face as juicy and plump as a plum. I enjoyed that week. For once, I could say with confidence that I wasn't the ugliest one in the cla.s.s.

When Bob Bob wasn't showing off for Serena Jane's benefit, he was thinking up novel ways to torture me. He put thumbtacks in my chair to see if I would feel them when I sat down, then looked blankly amazed when I did. He fil ed my galoshes with snow, stole my lunches, and routinely peppered my hair with tiny spit wads. The only thing I was glad about was that he left Amelia alone-maybe because she was so quiet-and Marcus, too, because he did Bob Bob's homework for him.

"We could say something to Miss Sparrow," Amelia insisted wanly, brushing flecks of spittle-soaked paper off my col ar after cla.s.s one day, but she knew as wel as I did that such a suggestion was fatal y flawed. Miss Sparrow loved Bob Bob almost as much as she hated us.

"We could concoct some kind of revenge," Marcus chimed in, rubbing his hands together, his brain already humming with the elaborate machinery of retribution.

"No," I almost shouted, startling the three of us. "That would just make it worse. Don't you think?"

"I guess." Marcus stared down at his hands, depressed by possessing the lore of a thousand comic books and being unable to act on any of it.

"Let's just let time take care of it."

"That could take forever," Marcus almost wailed.

I shrugged. "I can wait."

In the sixth grade, as his hormones kicked in, Bob Bob upped the ante in trying to impress my sister. He stole the pipe from his father's study and learned to blow smoke rings, but Serena Jane just snorted and turned up her nose. By his senior year, Bob Bob must have been getting a little desperate because he kicked up his courting a notch. For three months, he sulked and moped, begging his parents to buy him a convertible, until he hit on an ingenious strategy his father couldn't refuse. One evening at dinner, Bob Bob fanned his fork and knife across his plate like a winning hand of poker, kicked himself back on two legs of his chair, and rubbed his pointy chin with one hand.

"Don't do that with your chair," his mother said without looking up.

Dr. Morgan just glowered at his son. "You heard your mother."

Bob Bob didn't move. "You might want to hear me out." He drew the words from his mouth like a rope of taffy. "I've been doing some thinking."

His father let out a hiss of air and laid his own knife and fork across his plate. "This better not be about the d.a.m.n car. We're done discussing it."

Bob Bob let his chair fal back to the floor with a thud. "That's too bad. I guess I won't go to medical col ege, then."

"What the hel are you talking about?" Dr.

Morgan's cheeks turned puce.

"Think about it. Without a car, I won't be able to come home very easily, wil I? And I know that would break Mom's heart." Maureen fluttered her hands and turned her eyes toward her husband.

A vein in Dr. Morgan's temple began to throb. He pounded a fist on the table. "Al right. We'l buy you a d.a.m.n car. But it won't be new, understand?"

Bob Bob didn't care. He drove it up to the front of school the morning after he got it, one arm hanging out of the side, and immediately attracted a flock of gaggling girls, their knees rubbing together under their skirts, their eyelids fluttering like the tender throats of songbirds. Next to me, I heard Amelia suck a clean whistle of air through the gap in her front teeth, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. At the Dyersons', the criterion for transportation was a little different. We didn't care for transportation was a little different. We didn't care about spit polish and chrome. If it had wheels and you could push it, we took it.

"It's a ponycar," Marcus breathed on the other side of me, reminding me that he was stil a boy and p.r.o.ne to fal ing under the spel of automobiles, even if they were owned by Bob Bob.

I wrinkled my nose. "A what?"

"A 1967 Mustang. That's a 390-cubic-inch V-8 there under the hood. Mustang won the Trans-Am cup last year with this baby."

I rol ed my eyes. Marcus hadn't gotten any better as he'd gotten older. I'd just gotten used to him. There was a rustling among the girls, and then Serena Jane sashayed up to the car. I held my breath, wondering if this was it, if this was the day that she would surrender and swoon into Bob Bob's arms the way we al wanted. But what do you think she did? Nothing, that's what-or not exactly nothing.

It was a little worse than that. First she c.o.c.ked her head like a chicken puzzled by its own egg. Then she swayed up close-so close that Bob Bob could have just grabbed her if he wanted-and reached deep into her pocket and took out a lipstick. She bent over to the little rearview mirror, puckered her mouth like a sour old blackberry, and just barely touched the makeup to her lips.

Just from the angle of Bob Bob's jaw, you could tel he wanted to kil her, and at that moment, I think about half the girls would have jumped in to help him. The thing about Serena Jane was that she was never very good at fol owing other people's rules-especial y not the rules of a smal town, which said that the prettiest girl must belong to the luckiest boy. No matter how she felt about it, Serena Jane was supposed to be Bob Bob's, pure and simple. It was as bald a fact as her beauty, August Dyerson's bad luck, Marcus's brains, or my enormity.

I was born knowing the rules, which was why I could see what was going to happen to Serena Jane coming like a freight train on fire. My whole life, people could never understand how someone like Serena Jane had ended up with someone like me for a sister, but the answer was easy, if you thought about it. The reason the two of us were as opposite as sewage and spring water, I thought, was that pretty can't exist without ugly. Even without looking at my puddle-brown eyes first, everyone stil would have noticed that Serena Jane's eyes were the promising blue of the Atlantic in July, but I made it a sure bet. I made my sister beautiful without her even trying.

People in Aberdeen may have thought that I was better left a sight unseen, but of course they looked at me al the same. They had to. Even in my flat-soled men's shoes, I was as tal as any of the boys. Had the footbal team al owed me to, I could have blocked three of the players on the field without a second thought. My hands could have spanned the oblong pigskin with the easy grace of Vince Lombardi. Running could have been a problem, though, for in spite of my robust exterior, my innards were plagued with mysterious aches and pains.

Some mornings I woke up with a neck so stiff, turning my head was like pushing a rusty locomotive a mile down a track, and other mornings it was my heart again, skipping beats and flip-flopping in my chest as though it couldn't decide on a music station.

But no matter how bad it got, even on the days when my head thumped and the corners of my vision crimped down tight, I didn't say a word, for it always seemed to me that the Dyersons had it worse with their fal ing-down luck.

Sometimes I thought about going back into Dr. Morgan's office, remembering how kind his eyes were over the tops of his gla.s.ses, but the thought of what he might say always stopped me short. That, and the prospect of running into Bob Bob. When you were a girl like me, you stayed away from boys like him at al costs. When I looked at Bob Bob, I saw a dangerous boy with eyes too calculating for his childish nickname. He winced when the soda jerk at Hinkleman's cal ed out his order, scowled when Miss Sparrow replaced "Robert" with "Bob Bob" on the autumn roster, and glowered when his own mother addressed him. In fact, the only people in life he ever forgave the use of his name were his father and my sister-his father because Bob Bob knew he wouldn't think twice about skinning him alive and Serena Jane because she was so beautiful.

And, later, me, but that was different. I didn't real y count. I guess I was so unsightly that when I said his name, it was almost as if I hadn't uttered it at al .

Contrary to popular belief, Serena Jane was not a natural blonde. Over time, her hair faded from flaxen to a brackish brown, so that by the time Serena was fifteen, she was expert at dyeing it. No one in Aberdeen knew this about her except me-not Amanda Pickerton, who would have felt betrayed by this visible c.h.i.n.k in my sister's beauty; not Miss Sparrow, who would have felt vindicated by it; and certainly none of the other girls, who would have spent the rest of the year huddled in malicious knots, whispering evil little rumors about her. As it was, they sighed when Serena Jane drifted by, her hips lilting, her dimpled chin tilted, and the boys went gla.s.sy-eyed, but they never imagined Serena Jane at home in jeans, her regal head bowed over the sink while she combed globs of beer and mayonnaise through her hair. They never in a thousand years would have guessed that the incandescence of her curls came from a simple mixture of chamomile, lemon, and hydrogen peroxide that she put on when Amanda Pickerton was busy attending her committee meetings and Reverend Pickerton was in his parish office and the housekeeper was waxing the floors upstairs.

The only person who might have suspected would have been our father, who gave the recipe to Serena Jane in the first place, never predicting that his ten-year-old daughter would have the wits to gather together the ingredients and then never noticing when she did. Actual y, I was the one who gathered the supplies the first time, stuttering that I wanted to disinfect a cut when my father asked why I needed hydrogen peroxide, but Serena Jane was the beneficiary. Her hair came out so shiny and smooth, it was like river water. Dad looked at her a little funny that night, but after his third beer, he didn't see anything different from usual, and that was another reason I supposed Serena Jane was glad our father was dead. Now, no one would ever blurt out her secret. No one would ruin her plans for the future, and she had them al right. Plenty of them.

"I'm going to be an actress," she breathed to me in Amanda's kitchen in early March of her senior year, lighting one of the cigarettes she'd purloined from Reverend Pickerton's pockets.

"And not just any old actress, either, but a star. A Marilyn. An Ava. A Rita." I believed her. She had posters of the three of them pinned up on her bedroom wal . One G.o.ddess for each color of the hair rainbow.

"Except I'l be blonde, of course," Serena Jane continued, blowing out a lazy stream of smoke.

"Brunettes probably have more longevity, but there's just no denying a blonde. You're simply compel ed to look at them." I knew what she meant. People were always staring at Serena Jane in long, greedy gulps.

Lately, her friends had taken to drinking beer on Sat.u.r.day nights, swigging right out of the bottles like the boys. On Mondays, whispers about who had Frenched whom, who had gotten to third base or gone al the way, circled and swirled like witches in flight. But not for my sister and never for me. I didn't have any choice. I spent my weekends coc.o.o.ned in the Dyerson barn, a deck of cards slipping through my fingers, the warm breath of horses steaming in the air, but Serena Jane was just too good for everybody. Dressed in sleek trousers when the other girls wore jeans, her hair slippery but stil neatly arranged, she was as composed and removed as the Buddha. "Let the rest of the girls waste themselves on smal -town boys," she said.

"Let them sprout little roots in the ground here. I'm getting out."

I handed her a towel and watched her wind it up around her skul . "You look Egyptian," I said.

Serena Jane c.o.c.ked her neck. "I do, don't I? Liz Taylor wears turbans, and men fal at her feet. Not that she cares, of course. She real y only loves Richard Burton." Serena Jane sighed, and I could tel that she wished there were someone like that in Aberdeen-someone heroic and immensely broad-chested. Someone who could light her cigarette with one hand and keep the other one cupped delicately on her elbow. She patted her towel. "Al I get is Bob Bob, who has acne on his chin, stil drinks milk at dinner, and who's trying to grow a beard and can't."

"Why bother with him?" It was my job to ask the uncomfortable questions between us.

Serena Jane merely shrugged and averted her eyes.

Serena Jane merely shrugged and averted her eyes.

It was her job to keep her mouth shut, but this time, she didn't. Instead, she guided me over to Amanda's kitchen table and told me a story.

Two weeks ago, she said, she'd final y gone on a date with Bob Bob. She'd wanted to see Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, but Bob Bob took her to a party in Hansen instead, where drunken boys lurched up and down the porch steps and tried to grab her hips. Bob Bob punched one of them in the ribs, making the boy go purple in the face, so they'd had to leave, scampering down the sidewalk to his car like rats on the run.

He drove my sister to a diner, where he insisted she order a vanil a milkshake and watched while she drank it-slowly, because she hated vanil a, although only I knew that. When she finished, he wiped her upper lip with the corner of his napkin, as if she were a messy child, then folded her hand inside his long fingers. In the diner's lurid light, I could imagine that his eyes were shining yel ow and that his teeth and chin looked particularly pointy, giving him the semblance of a hairless wolf. If it had been me, I would have pul ed my hand away, but Serena Jane didn't get that chance because Bob Bob locked his fingers around her wrist, resting his thumb just over her pulse so their blood swam together.

Bob Bob didn't know it, but under her blouse, Serena Jane's heart was flapping like a panicked bird. Bob Bob pressed the pad of his thumb deeper into the lattice of veins on Serena Jane's wrist.

He leaned forward. "If my number came up, and I ran across the border, would you come with me?" Al over America, young men were on the move-some of them in corroded vans heading north, some of them corral ed in the steel bel ies of military planes, white-faced and waiting to be dropped into the swampy mire of war. And right there was an opening Serena Jane could have taken but didn't. I would have snapped something along the lines of preferring gunfire in the jungle to a wolf in the forest, but I suppose it's not fair to impose those standards on Serena Jane. She never had to learn to say anything ugly.

Serena Jane s.n.a.t.c.hed her wrist back, tucking it close to her body as if she had been scalded. She pushed the dregs of the milkshake away from her. "I thought you had a deferment. I thought you were safe because you were going to go to medical school."

Bob Bob studied his gla.s.s. "I am, but stil , you never know. Johnny's going. And so is Marcus."

Serena Jane lifted her watery eyes.

"Real y? Marcus?" Poor Marcus, she thought, which weren't exactly the same words I'd used when I'd found out that he'd enlisted.

"You idiot!" I'd shrieked when he told me.

"What the hel were you thinking? Do you know how dangerous it is over there? You'l last about a week."

In the past ten years, Marcus had come along in terms of his appearance. His blue eyes and hair had morphed into handsome features-but he was stil by far the tiniest student in the cla.s.s. For a joke, every Valentine's Day, Bob Bob always cornered me outside the school and wouldn't let me go until I agreed to kiss Marcus. Until just last year, he'd stil had to step on the rock in the yard to reach my lips, but recently he'd had a late growth spurt, inspiring his mother to buy him al new trousers, even though she stil had to hem them. Marcus was terribly proud of them.

"I'm sorry," I always whispered right before his mouth met mine, and he always muttered, "I'm not," before I closed my eyes and tasted the surprising salt of him. He was good-natured almost to a fault, decent, and you could always count on him to volunteer to do the right thing, which was exactly the reason he'd offered himself up to the military.

The afternoon he told me about his enlistment, we were on the road out to the Dyerson farm. He stepped closer to me and took my hand.

Ever since our last Valentine kiss, I'd been letting him walk me home, his fingers entwined with mine.

Amelia somehow always managed to go on ahead of us. That afternoon, the air had a bitter bite to it that would haunt me in years to come. "Come on, Truly.

Don't be like this. I'm strong enough. You watched me bench-press my own body weight. I've been practicing in the garage, using Dukey's old weights."