What The Dead Know Part 3

"Big whoop," Sunny muttered, chopping up her pancakes but not really eating them.

"What did you say?" her father asked, his tone dangerous.

"Nothing. I'll take Heather to the mall."

Heather was elated. Bus fare. That was an extra thirty-five cents to spend as she wanted. Not that thirty-five cents could buy that much, but it was thirty-five cents of her own she didn't have to spend and could therefore save. Heather was good at saving money. h.o.a.rding, her father called it, and he was being critical, but Heather didn't care. She had thirty-nine dollars in a metal box bound with a complicated system of elastic bands, so she could tell if anyone had tried to get inside it. But she wouldn't take her money to the mall today, because then she couldn't be tempted to spend it. No, she would compare prices and study sales, then return with her birthday money when she had made a careful decision about what she wanted. She wouldn't waste her money on an impulse as Sunny often did. Last fall Sunny had bought a poor-boy knit sweater, off-white, with a red placket. The red trim had bled on the first washing, creating twin tracks on the sweater's back. But it was the kind of sale that said no returns, and Sunny would have been out eleven dollars if their mother hadn't gone to the store and berated the salesperson, embarra.s.sing Sunny so much that she wouldn't even say thank you.

Their father put the dishes on the drain board and left the kitchen, whistling. He had been fun this morning, much more fun than usual, making pancakes with Bisquick and even throwing in chocolate chips, real ones, not the carob ones he normally used in baking. He had let Heather pick the radio station, too, and although Sunny made fun of her choice, Heather knew it was the same station that Sunny used to listen to in her room, late at night. Heather knew lots of things about Sunny and what went on in her room. She considered it her business to spy on her older sister, and it was another reason she liked her hour alone on weekdays. That's how she had come to find the bus schedule in Sunny's desk drawer yesterday, the Sat.u.r.day times for the Number 15 carefully highlighted.

Heather had been looking for her sister's diary, a miniature book of Moroccan leather with a real lock. But anyone could figure out how to jiggle it open without the key. She had found Sunny's diary only once, more than six months before, and it had been sadly boring. Reading her sister's diary, she had almost felt sorry for her. Heather's life was much more interesting. Maybe that was how it was: People with interesting lives didn't have time to write about them in diaries. But then Sunny had tricked her, drawing Heather into a conversation about one of the entries, only to point out that Heather couldn't know of the incident on the bus unless she'd read Sunny's diary. Heather had gotten into quite a bit of trouble for that, although she didn't understand why. If the family was supposed to share everything, then why was Sunny allowed to lock up her thoughts?

"Heather just admires her big sister so," their mother had told Sunny. "She wants to be like you, do everything you do. That's how little sisters grow up."

Wrong, Heather wanted to say. Sunny was the last person to whom she would look for guidance. Almost in high school, Sunny didn't even have a boyfriend, while Heather sort of did. Jamie Altman sat next to her on field trips and paired up with her whenever the teacher made them go boy-girl. He also had given her a Whitman sampler on Valentine's Day. It was the small one, only four chocolates, and none of them with nuts, but Heather was the only girl in all of sixth grade to receive chocolates from a boy other than her father, so it made quite the stir. Heather didn't need Sunny to show her how to do anything.

She picked up the Accent section and read her horoscope. In just five days, there would be a horoscope especially for her. Well, for her and the other people born on April 3. She couldn't wait to see what it said. And next week there would be a party, bowling at Westview Lanes and a bakery cake-devil's food with white icing and blue roses. Maybe she should buy something new to wear. No, not yet. But she would take her new purse to the mall, an early birthday gift from her father's store. It was actually multiple purses that b.u.t.toned to the same wooden handles, so you could match it to your outfit. She had chosen denim with red rickrack, a madras plaid, and one with a print of large orange flowers. Her father hadn't planned to stock the purses, but her mother had noticed how Heather studied the samples and pressed him to include it in the orders he made back in February. They were by far the most successful new item in his store this spring, but that just seemed to make her father grumpier.

"Faddish," he said. "You won't want to carry it a year from now."

Of course, Heather thought. Next year there would be another purse or top that was the thing to have, and her father should be glad for that. Even at eleven she had figured out that you couldn't run a successful store if people didn't keep buying things, year in and year out.

SUNNY, FRUSTRATED ALMOST to the point of tears, watched silently as her father left the kitchen. He had been so odd this morning-making pancakes, letting Heather listen to WCBM, singing along and even commenting on the songs.

"I like that one," he said of each song. "The girl-"

"Minnie Riperton," Heather said.

"Her voice sounds like birdsong, don't you think?" He attempted to imitate the cascading notes, and Heather laughed at how poorly he did it, but Sunny simply felt uncomfortable. A father wasn't supposed to know songs like "Lovin' You," much less sing along with them. Besides, her father was the biggest liar. He didn't like any of these songs. The very fact that a song was Top 40-the very fact of popularity in anything, whether it was music or movies or television or fashion-disqualified it from serious consideration in her father's life. On his headphones, in his study, he played jazz, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead, which seemed as formless and pointless as jazz to Sunny. Listening to the radio with her father and sister made Sunny feel queer, as if they were reading her diary in front of her, as if they knew what she was thinking late at night when she went to bed with her transistor radio plugged into one ear. Her tastes were changing, but she still found certain love songs irresistible: "You Are So Beautiful." "Poetry Man." "My Eyes Adored You." Twitching in her seat, cutting her pancakes into ever-smaller pieces, she had yearned to jump up and turn the radio off.

Then Ringo came on with the "No No Song" and her father did it for her, saying, "There's only so much a man can take. When I think-"

"What, Daddy?" Heather asked, playing up to him.

"Nothing. What do my girls have planned today?"

And that's when Heather said, "Sunny's going to the mall." She spoke with a lisping baby quality, a voice she had long outgrown, a voice she never really had to begin with. When Heather pet.i.tioned for a new freedom for herself-permission to ride her bike to the shopping district in Woodlawn, for example-she spoke in her regular voice. But when she was trying to show up Sunny, Heather used this little-girl tone. Even so, their mother was onto her. Sunny had heard her mother tell someone on the phone that Heather was eleven going on forty. Sunny had waited to hear what her relative age was, but it hadn't come up.

Sunny added her dish to the stack her father had left on the drain board. She tried to come up with a rationalization not to do them now, but she knew that was unfair to her mother, who would be left with a pile of sticky dishes at the end of a long workday. It never even occurred to her father to wash them, Sunny knew, although he was liberated, compared to other fathers. The kids in the neighborhood called him the "hippie," because of the shop, his hair, and his VW bus, which was a simple robin's-egg blue, not anything remotely psychedelic. But although their father cooked-when he felt like it-and said he "supported" his wife's decision to work as a real-estate agent, there were certain household ch.o.r.es he never attempted.

If he had to wash the dishes every day, Sunny thought, sc.r.a.ping the leftover pancakes into the trash, he wouldn't have been so dead set against putting in a dishwasher. She had shown him the ads for the portable models, explaining how they could roll it from the sink to the covered back porch when it wasn't in use, but her father had said the machines were wasteful, using too much water and energy. Meanwhile he was always upgrading his stereo. But his study was a place of contemplation, he reminded Sunny when she complained, the place where he conducted the sunrise and sunset rituals known as the Agnihotra, part of the Fivefold Path, which wasn't a religion but something better, according to Sunny's father.

"Have you been spying on me?" Sunny asked her sister, who was humming to herself and winding a lock of hair around her finger, lost in some secret joy. Their mother often said that their names should be switched, that Heather was always happy and bright, while Sunny was p.r.i.c.kly as a thistle. "How did you know I planned to take the bus to the mall?"

"You left the schedule out on your desk, with the departure times underlined."

"What were you doing in my room? You know you're not supposed to go in there."

"Looking for my hairbrush. You're always taking it."

"I am not."

"Anyway"-Heather gave a blithe shrug-"I saw the schedule and I guessed."

"When we get there, I go my way and you go yours. Don't be hanging around me. Okay?"

"Like I want to follow you around. The only thing you do is go to the Singer store and flip through the pattern books, when you all but flunked out of home ec at Rock Glen last year."

"The machines there are all torn up, from so many kids using them. The needles are always breaking." This was the excuse her mother had offered for Sunny's poor grade in home ec, and she had been happy to take it. She just wished there had been excuses for her other not-great grades. Dreaminess was the kindest reason that her parents could muster. Does not work to ability, her homeroom teacher had written. "The shift dress I made at home, with Mom's help, was perfectly good," Sunny reminded her sister.

Heather gave her a knowing look. Technically, the dress had been well made, and Sunny had executed even the tricky parts-the darts in the bodice, the cutting of the fabric so the pattern was consistent-with finesse. But Heather seemed to have been born knowing things that escaped Sunny. Heather would never have chosen the heavy, almost muslinlike material, with its motif of ears of corn in vertical rows. In hindsight the teasing that Sunny had suffered was so predictable. Corny, cornpone, corn-fed. But she had felt so pretty getting ready that morning, her hair pulled into side ponytails and tied with green ribbons, so they played off the shiny gold ears encased in green stalks. Even their mother thought she looked nice. But the moment she stepped onto the bus-even before the shouts of "Cornball!" and "Corn-fed!"-Sunny knew that the dress was yet another mistake on her part. It didn't help that the darts, while properly executed, made the bodice pull tightly across the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that she wasn't quite ready to have.

"Anyway, once we get there, you're not to tag along after me. Dad said he'd pick us up at five-thirty, outside. I'll meet you at Karmelkorn at twenty after."

"And you'll buy me one?"

"What? Sure. Karmelkorn or Baskin-Robbins, if you like. Whatever you want. In fact, I'll give you five dollars if you'll promise to leave me alone."

"Five whole dollars?" Heather loved money, money and things, but she hated to part with money in order to have things. Their parents worried about this streak in her, Sunny knew. They tried to pa.s.s it off as a joke, calling her the little magpie, saying her eye was drawn to anything shiny and new, which she then took home to her nest. But this wasn't Bethany behavior, and Sunny knew that her parents worried about Heather. "She has an eye too soon made glad," their father said gloomily, paraphrasing some poem about a d.u.c.h.ess.

"Yes, so you won't have to dip into your savings at all." And, Sunny thought, so you won't open your metal card box and see I've had to borrow money from you, so the five dollars I'm giving you is actually yours. Heather wasn't the only person who sneaked into other people's rooms and poked at things that she wasn't supposed to touch. Sunny had even figured out the pattern of the rubber bands that Heather used on the box.

Served her right, for being a spy.

CHAPTER 7.

There was a vending machine in the motel room, actually in it, not down the hall or tucked away in a breezeway. Miriam lingered in front of the machine, testing the k.n.o.bs, scooping her fingers in the change bin the way a child might. The wrappers on the candy bars looked a little faded. Given that it cost seventy-five cents to purchase a Zagnut or a Clark bar that could be had for thirty-five cents in the machine back in the lobby, cheaper still at the grocery store across the street, it had probably been a while since anyone had tried to justify the novelty of an in-room candy bar purchase. Still, how Sunny and Heather would have gloried in this machine, so many forbidden marvels crammed into one silvery box-sugary candy sold at exorbitant prices, yours for a quick yank on a handle. If they had ever stayed in such a motel-unlikely enough in itself, given Dave's preference for motor courts and campsites, "real" places, as he called them, which also had the virtue of being cheap places-the girls would have pleaded for coins to feed the machine as Dave grumped and harrumphed about the wastefulness of it. Miriam would have caved, and he would have remonstrated with her for not presenting a united front, then been cold and distant for the rest of the evening.

What else would happen on this fantasy trip to a motel not even five miles from where they lived? They would have watched television as they did at home-each girl picking one program-then turned it off and read until bedtime. If the room had a radio, Dave might have tuned it to a jazz station, or Mr. Harley's Sat.u.r.day-night show of standards. She imagined them seeking refuge here during a storm, one not unlike Hurricane Agnes three years before, when the rising creek waters a few blocks away had briefly trapped them on Algonquin Lane. The lights had gone out, but it had seemed like an adventure at the time, reading by flashlight and listening to the news reports on Dave's battery-powered radio. Miriam had almost been disappointed when the water had receded and the electricity returned.

A key turned in the lock, and Miriam started. But it was Jeff, of course, returning with the filled ice bucket.

"Gallo," he said, and she thought for a moment that it was some sort of play on "h.e.l.lo," then realized he was introducing the wine he had brought.

"It will take some time to chill," he added.

"Sure," she said, although Miriam knew a trick to speed the process. One put the bottle in a bucket of ice and then rotated it clockwise one hundred times, exactly, and voila-cold wine. It was when Miriam discovered herself rolling the neck of a bottle between her anxious palms at two o'clock in the afternoon that she decided she should get a job. Yes, they had needed the money-rather desperately, in fact-but that had been less urgent to her than the prospect of becoming a pickled, desultory housewife, boozy breath washing over her children as they ate their after-school snacks and recounted their days.

Jeff stepped closer to her, taking her chin in his hand. His hand was still cold from carrying the bucket, but she didn't flinch or pull back. Their teeth b.u.mped painfully as the kiss began, and they had to adjust their mouths, as if they'd never kissed before. Funny, they had managed to make love so gracefully in a variety of tight and inconvenient locations-a closet at the office, a restaurant bathroom, the backseat of his little sports car-and now that they had s.p.a.ce and, relative to what they were used to, time, they couldn't be clumsier.

She tried to shut down her mind, give in to her usual urgency for Jeff, and it started to work. This was, what, their seventh time, and it still amazed her how much fun it was. s.e.x with Dave had always been a little somber, as if he needed to prove his feminist credentials by making the act joyless for both of them, plying her with his endless earnest questions. Socratic s.e.x, as Miriam thought of it. How does this feel? What if I do this? Or if I vary it this way? If she had tried to explain this to her girlfriends-if, in fact, she had female friends, which Miriam did not-she knew this would sound grumpy and ungrateful. She would not be able to convey her sense that Dave, in pretending to care for nothing but her pleasure, was actually intent on making sure she didn't enjoy herself. He had always seemed to pity her, just a bit, and regard himself as a gift he had conferred on her, the dark, sheltered girl from the north.

Jeff flipped her over, planted her feet on the floor, and placed her hands on the still-made bed, locking his fingers over hers and slipping into her from behind. This wasn't new to Miriam-Dave was also a dutiful student of the Kama Sutra-but Jeff's silence and directness made everything feel novel. Physiologically, according to Dave-yes, Dave was forever explaining her own anatomy to her-she shouldn't even be able to come in this position, yet with Jeff it happened frequently. Not yet, though, not just now. With an entire afternoon to spend in a motel room, they were taking it slowly. Or trying to.

Miriam had not been thinking of an affair when she entered the work world, or even an office flirtation. She was certain of that much. s.e.x wasn't important to Miriam, or so she had reasoned when she decided to marry Dave. Her s.e.xual experience was somewhat limited, as the mores of her time had dictated. Not just the mores but the stakes-birth control was far from perfect and hard for a single girl to get. Still, Miriam was not a virgin when she met Dave. Jesus no, she was twenty-two and had once been engaged for six months, to her college sweetheart, with whom she had wonderful s.e.x. "Mind-blowing," as they said now, but Miriam's mind had blown only when her fiance decamped suddenly and without satisfactory explanation, fulfilling her mother's dire prophecies about cows and free milk.

A nervous breakdown, they called it, and Miriam thought the term quite perfect. It was as if her nervous system had ceased to function. She was spastic and off-kilter, with all the basic bodily functions-sleeping, eating, s.h.i.tting-unpredictable. One week she might sleep no more than four hours, while eating nothing at all. The next she would rise from her bed only to gorge herself on odd foods, a pregnant woman's cravings-batches of raw brownie mix, coddled eggs with ice cream, carrots and mola.s.ses. She had dropped out of school and moved back home to Ottawa, where her parents saw her problems as a direct consequence of her dalliance not with the college boyfriend, whom they had quite liked, but with the United States itself. They had not approved of Miriam's insistence on attending college in the States. Perhaps they suspected that it was the first step in a plan to leave Canada forever and, by extension, them.

Jeff pushed Miriam's entire body onto the bed. He had not said a single word since "It takes some time to chill," had barely even grunted. Now he flipped her again, as easily as if he were turning a pancake, and buried his face between her legs. Miriam was self-conscious about this act, something else she blamed on Dave. "You're Jewish, right?" Dave had asked the first time he tried that. "I mean, I know you're not observant, but that's your heritage, isn't it?" Stunned, she had been able only to nod. "Well, the mikvah has its utility. There's a lot about your religion that I don't like, but a careful cleansing after menstruation doesn't hurt anyone."

Dave had odd pockets of anti-Semitism, although he always insisted that his biases were about cla.s.s, not religion, a reaction to the rich neighborhood where he had been the only poor kid. Miriam hadn't resorted to milk baths, but she had become, briefly, the world's great consumer of sprays and douches. Then she read an article that said the whole industry was bulls.h.i.t, another manufactured solution for a problem that didn't exist. Still, she'd never gotten over the idea that she perpetually tasted of blood, rusty and metallic. If so, Jeff clearly didn't care. Jeff, who just happened to represent everything Dave hated-a rich Pikesville Jew with a country-club membership, an ostentatious house, and three indulged, bratty children. Miriam wasn't stereotyping. She'd met the children at the office, and they were hideous. But she had not chosen Jeff because he so neatly encapsulated everything that Dave loathed. She had chosen him, to the extent that such a decision could ever be called a choice, because he was there and he wanted her, and she was so pleased to be wanted that she couldn't imagine how to say no.

It was dangerous, meeting today. Their spouses weren't stupid. Well, hers wasn't. Tomorrow, when Dave read the Sunday paper, he might notice the dearth of open house notices, given that it was Easter, and wonder why Miriam had been needed at the real-estate office on a weekend when there was nothing to do. The whole affair was dangerous, because neither Miriam nor Jeff wanted to leave their marriages or disrupt their lives. Well, Jeff probably didn't. Miriam was no longer sure what she wanted, what she was doing.

Jeff was getting impatient with her. She was usually so fast, almost too fast, but today she could not still her thoughts. And Jeff, while generally polite, would abandon her eventually and pursue his own pleasure if she didn't get going. She focused on that one part of herself, syncing her movements to his mouth, aligning things better, and soon she felt it. Her o.r.g.a.s.ms with Jeff were like the trick of a soprano shattering gla.s.s; it was the resonating frequency, not the pitch, that broke her. She was useless afterward, barely able to move, but Jeff was accustomed to that. He arranged her rag-doll limbs beneath him and pushed into her rather violently until he also was done.

Now what? Usually they just pulled their clothes on, not that they had ever gotten them totally off before, and returned to work, or home, or wherever. Jeff fetched the bottle of wine from the plastic ice bucket. "No corkscrew," he said, amused by his own mistake. Casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he broke the bottle's neck on the rim of the bathroom sink and then filled the water gla.s.ses, picking out a few gla.s.s fragments that were caught when the wine flowed over the bottle's broken neck.

"I like s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g you in a bed," Jeff said.

"Our first time was in a bed," Miriam said.

"That didn't count."

Why not? she wondered, yet didn't ask. Their first time had been in a client's house, and the violation of the s.p.a.ce with which they'd been entrusted had seemed more shocking than the actual fact of adultery. When Jeff asked her to go over to see the new listing, she had known that they were going to have s.e.x, but she pretended naivete. The woman always sets the pace, her mother had told Miriam in her euphemistic way when probing for the reason behind Miriam's breakdown. Miriam liked to pretend that Jeff had controlled everything, as easily as he manipulated her body in bed. Jeff made Miriam feel wispy, featherlight, almost as if she were in her girlhood body again. She had not gained weight as she aged, but she had thickened a little, a fact that she had been able to ignore until she noticed her own daughters' bodies, so impossibly narrow and slim-hipped. Both looked as if they could be snapped in half at the waist.

"What now?" she asked.

"Now, as in here, this specific moment? Or now as in tomorrow and next week and the month after?"

She wasn't sure. "Both."

"Now, here, today, we'll have s.e.x again. Maybe twice, if we're lucky. Tomorrow, while you're in church, acknowledging Jesus's alleged resurrection-"

"I don't go to church."

"I thought-"

"He didn't ask me to convert. He just told me he didn't want the girls raised in any organized religion or exposed to anything but the more nonsecular traditions. Christmas trees, Easter baskets."

She had broken an unwritten rule, mentioning her children, and the conversation stalled awkwardly. Miriam didn't know how to raise the topic she really wanted to discuss. How do we end this? If we're doing this just because the s.e.x is fun, will it stop being fun in a convenient and mutual way? Will I yearn for you while you move on to someone else? Or vice versa? How did affairs end?

Theirs was ending that very moment, Miriam would realize later, in ways both ba.n.a.l and cataclysmic. Maybe it had always been this way. A mushroom cloud formed over Hiroshima, and some of those who ran through the streets, stunned and burned, had been routed from beds not their own, from places they shouldn't be. Tsunamis washed over illicit lovers, adulterers were put on the train to Auschwitz, just not for that particular reason.

This was her legacy, this was her before, the moment she would return to again and again. When Miriam tried to remember the last time she was happy, all she could summon up was a warmish gla.s.s of Gallo wine with slivers of gla.s.s in it and a dusty Fifth Avenue candy bar that was, in fact, quite stale.

CHAPTER 8.

The bus shelter on Forest Park Avenue was a more-than-familiar place to Sunny, part of her school-day routine going back almost three years, but she found herself studying it that afternoon as if seeing it for the first time. Although its purpose was basic-keep bus riders from the damp, if not the cold-someone had cared enough to add a few nonessential flourishes so it might be mistaken for attractive. The roof was off-green, a shade their mother had wanted to use for the trim on their house, but their father had said it was too dark, and their father, as the artistic one, always won such arguments. The pale beige bricks had a rough texture, while the slatted bench inside the structure was the same shade as the roof.

Boys in the neighborhood, indifferent to the bus shelter's efforts, had scrawled rude graffiti on the walls in chalk and paint. Someone had come behind them and tried to remove the worst of it, but a few stubborn curses and character a.s.sa.s.sinations remained. Heather inspected these solemnly.

"Do they ever-" she began.

"No," Sunny said swiftly. "They leave me alone."

"Oh." Heather's tone sounded almost as if she felt sorry for Sunny.

"They don't like me because of the fight. The kids on the bus."

"But they don't live here," Heather said. "The graffiti is done by people who live here, right?"

"I'm the only one who goes to Rock Glen. Everyone else is older or younger, by a lot. That was the problem, remember? 'We had right, but they had might.' Majority rules."

Bored with this family story in which she had played no part, Heather sat on the bench, opened her purse, and examined its contents, humming to herself. The bus was not due for another fifteen minutes, but Sunny hadn't wanted to risk missing it.

The battle over the school bus route had been Sunny's first brush with gross unfairness, a lesson in how money can triumph over principle. Most of the students on Sunny's bus lived far up Forest Park Avenue, all the way on the other side of Garrison Boulevard. But under the city's open-enrollment plan, they could choose to attend school wherever they liked, and they had bypa.s.sed the all-black school nearest them and picked Rock Glen on the city's southwest side, which was still mostly white. A private bus service, paid for by all the parents, was set up. Sunny's stop, the little shelter on Forest Park Avenue, was the last stop every morning and the first one every afternoon. For two years this seemed a logical plan to everyone involved. And then it didn't.

Last summer the parents at the far end of the route began to grumble that their children would have a much shorter trip if the bus didn't have to stop on the lower part of Forest Park Avenue for Sunny. Or, as they called her, "Just the one." As in, "Just the one student." Or, "Why should just the one student inconvenience so many?" They threatened to find another bus service, leaving the company with "just the one," which would never cover the cost of the route. Sunny's parents were appalled, but there was nothing they could do. If they wanted to continue using the bus service-essential, given that they both worked-they had to agree to a compromise: The route would be reversed in the afternoon. So every afternoon Sunny watched her own block fly past as the bus headed to the beginning of its route and dropped students off in reverse order, backtracking to Forest Park Avenue. Given that their families had won, the other students should have been gracious, but Sunny discovered it didn't work that way. They disliked her more than ever because her parents had all but called their parents racists. "N.L.," one of the larger boys hissed at her. "You and your parents are N.L.ers." She had no idea what it meant, but it sounded terrifying.

The ma.s.s-transit system, unlike Mercer Transportation, could not be bullied. If it took twenty-five minutes to get to Security Square, with stops, then it took twenty-five minutes to get home again. The MTA was egalitarian, a word that she picked up from her father and particularly liked because it reminded her of The Three Musketeers with Michael York. When Sunny started Western High School next year, the plan was for her to take the MTA, using the free coupons distributed to students in monthly packs. To prepare for this, her parents had started allowing her to take practice runs-trips downtown, to Howard Street and the big department stores. That's how she had come to reason that she could take the bus to Security Square and not tell anyone. Sunny was practically blase about taking the bus places.

But Heather, who had never taken a public bus anywhere, bounced with excitement on the wooden bench, one hand clutching her fare, the other wrapped around the handle of her new purse. Sunny also had a purse from her father's store, a macrame one, but they didn't get such things for free despite what the other kids a.s.sumed. If the item wasn't a gift, like Heather's purse, then they were expected to pay the wholesale price, because their father said his "margins" wouldn't allow for freebies. Margins always made Sunny think of her typing cla.s.s, which she was failing, although not because of margins. Her problem was that she performed horribly at the timed trials, making so many mistakes that she ended up with a negative word-per-minute score. When she wasn't being timed, she typed very well.

Sunny wondered why her parents had insisted that she take the typing elective in junior high, if they thought she was going to have to type for a living. Ever since sixth grade, when most of her friends were placed in the "enriched" track at Rock Glen, while she was merely "high regular," she couldn't help worrying that her future had been derailed while she wasn't paying attention, that she'd lost options she never knew she had. When she was little, Grandpoppa and Grandmama had given her a nurse's kit, while Heather had gotten a doctor's kit. At the time the nurse's kit was the better thing to have, because it had a pretty girl on its plastic cover and the doctor's kit had a boy. How Sunny had lorded that over Heather. "You're a boy." But maybe it would have been better to be the doctor? Or at least to have people tell you that you could be the doctor? Their father said they could be anything they wanted to be, but Sunny wasn't convinced that he really believed this.

Heather, of course, was going to be enriched when she entered Rock Glen next year, not that the placements had been announced yet. Heather would be enriched and then, most likely, in the A course at Western, which meant that she would skip the last year of junior high and enter high school in ninth grade instead of tenth. It wasn't that Heather was smarter than Sunny. Their mother said that IQ tests showed that both sisters were smart, near genius. But Heather was good at school, the way someone else might be good at track or baseball. She understood the rules, whereas Sunny seemed to trip herself up by trying too hard to be creative and different. And while those were the very values that her parents professed to cherish above straight A's and rote memorization, their expectations for Sunny had clearly flagged when she didn't make enriched. Was that why she was so angry with them all the time? Her mother laughed and called it a phase, while her father encouraged her to argue-"But rationally," a directive that only made her more irrational. Lately she had taken to challenging his politics, the thing he held most dear, but her father had remained maddeningly calm, treating her like a little girl, like Heather.

"If you want to support Gerald Ford in next year's election, then by all means do it," he told her just a few weeks ago. "All I ask is that you have reasoned positions, that you research his positions on the issues."

Sunny wasn't going to support anyone in the election. Politics was stupid. It embarra.s.sed her to think of her impa.s.sioned speeches for McGovern back in 1972, part of her sixth-grade teacher's current-events debates on Friday. Only six kids in a cla.s.s of twenty-seven had voted for McGovern when their mock Election Day came-one fewer than had voted for him in the initial poll when school started. "Sunny talked me out of it," Lyle Malone, a smugly handsome boy, said when asked if he wanted to explain his change of mind. "I figured anyone she liked that much couldn't be much good."

Yet if Heather had spoken for McGovern, then everyone in her cla.s.s would have followed her. Heather had that effect on people. People liked to look at her, make her laugh, win her approval. Even now the MTA driver, a type that usually screamed at anyone who dawdled at the open door, seem charmed by the excited girl with the denim purse held tightly to her chest. "Drop your fare here, sweetie," the bus driver said, and Sunny wanted to yell, She's not that sweet! Instead she climbed the steps, looking at her shoes, wedgies purchased just two weeks ago. The weather really wasn't right for them, but she had been dying to wear them, and today was the day.

CHAPTER 9.