Jailbait (9 page)

Nuts. Wouldn't you know it? I was hoping Shirley would
be out at her figure salon or at the mall or playing bridge with some of her friends or something, but no such luck. Nope, I know she's definitely home since her big boat of a car is taking up our whole stupid driveway. Oh, this is great, just great. Now what am I supposed to do?

After I let myself in—remembering to shut off the burglar alarm this time—I hang up my coat and put on this big sweater I keep in the hall closet, because it's pretty chilly in here. Ever since Shirley started going through the Change she's been hot all the time so she keeps the heat on low. Before this, she was a total Ice
Queen. She complained about being cold so much that last year Mike and I bought her electric socks for her birthday, which actually worked (they ran on batteries). But now she's too hot to wear them. Figures. The one time we did anything right.

“Is that you, Andrea?” Shirley yells her usual greeting from the den.

Who does she think it is, Alice in Wonderland? “Yeah,” I yell back. “It's me.”

“Can you make me a cup of coffee, please?”

Without bothering to answer, I shuffle into the kitchen, turn on the flame under the teakettle, and dump a teaspoon of instant Maxwell House coffee into a mug. Then I tear open a pink packet of Sweet'n Low and dump that in too. After the teakettle whistles, I add the boiling water along with a little skim milk and bring Shirley's drink into the den.

“Voila,” I say with a little bow.

Shirley turns away from
General Hospital
and frowns instantly. “Andrea,” she says, “didn't you wear that outfit yesterday?”

I study the patched dungarees and black pullover I'm wearing under my floppy sweater and shrug. “Maybe.”

“Maybe? What do you mean maybe? Don't you know?”

I shrug again. “Not really.”

Shirley shakes her head and takes a sip of her coffee. “Andrea, personal hygiene is very important. I've told you that a million times. You don't think boys notice these things, but they do.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah
, I think, and I guess Shirley notices I'm not listening because she stops her tirade and asks, “How was school?”

“Fine.” I mean, what am I supposed to tell her? My classes were totally boring, I ate lunch by myself as usual, and Donald Caruso called me a Jee-mented dyke? And I'm certainly not going to tell her about my extracurricular activities. “What did you do today?” I ask, not that I really care, but it's a good way to take the focus off me.

“I played mah-jongg at Mrs. Oppenheim's house,” Shirley says, lighting a cigarette. “And she made the most interesting lunch. She used a wok—you know, that big round pan they use at Chinese restaurants—and she made her own duck sauce and…”

For someone who's constantly trying to lose weight, Shirley is sure obsessed with eating. I try not to fall asleep as she lists every ingredient Mrs. Oppenheim used in her Oriental stir-fry, but I can only take so much, so finally I blurt out while Shirley's still talking, “May I please be excused?”

Shirley's bottom lip curls and I know she's considering scolding me for my rudeness, but she just says, “All right, Andrea. There's a load of laundry in the basket sitting on the washing machine. Would you mind putting it away for me?”

“Surely, Shirley,” I say in my usual surly way so I won't sound too eager. Under normal circumstances I would mind, but today is anything but normal. And this is great—laundry patrol gives me access to the entire house, and I do have a mission to accomplish.

I get the basket of clothes from the laundry room, take it upstairs, dump it out on Fred and Shirley's bed, and start sorting. If you really think about it—and I try not to—it's gross that I have to touch the Parental Units' underwear. Thank God Shirley's a total fanatic about detergent and bleach, so everything is white as snow. But still, these pieces of cotton have been right up against certain parts of the human body that I'd prefer not to think about. Not that Fred and Shirley ever have sex anymore. Though, don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid enough to think they only did it twice and Mike and I were the result. Or three times, really, if you count my older sister.

You're probably wondering why I never mentioned my older sister before. Well, I never met her, so I don't really know what to say about her. She died before I was born. In a car crash. She was one and a half. Fred and Shirley never told me about her, but Mike did.

See, they were all living in the city then, the Units along with my sister, who was just a baby, and Mike, who was five at the time, and then one summer they rented a car to go to the Catskills for a vacation. They drove along for hours and hours and everyone was just fine until they were almost there and then for some reason my sister started bawling her head off. Shirley tried singing to her, giving her a bottle, a toy, a cookie, but nothing worked, so finally she took her from the backseat up to the front and held her on her lap. It seemed safe enough because they weren't on the highway anymore; they were driving through a bunch of dinky little towns and not going all that fast. But still, Shirley should have known better.
There's a reason why they call where she was sitting the suicide seat.

Anyway just as they got to the town they were going to, this drunk ran a red light and plowed right into Shirley's side of the car and the baby went flying and that was that. Mike didn't get hurt much, and Fred was basically okay too. Shirley was kind of cut up and bruised and I think maybe she broke something, but she wasn't in critical condition or anything. Even the guy who smashed into them didn't get hurt too badly. But the baby flew right through the window.

Her name was Melissa. Melissa Amy Kaplan. You wouldn't think she'd be a secret, but she is, I don't know why. I guess talking about her makes Shirley too sad. We don't even have any pictures of her around the house or anything; they're all tucked away in this box Shirley keeps on the top shelf of her closet. I discovered it once when I was putting away laundry like I'm doing now. That's how I found out about her. I saw all these pictures of Shirley holding a baby girl who wasn't me, so I asked Mike about it.

Thinking about all this makes me want to look at Shirley's old pictures again, so I go into her closet and take the box down from the shelf. I stay in the closet with it, though, in case Shirley decides to come upstairs.

The box smells musty and the pictures are all just thrown in, not sorted or anything. I flip through a few and then come to a close-up of Melissa sitting in her high chair. She is really cute, I have to admit, and just the opposite of me: Melissa had straight hair; mine is curly.
Melissa was pretty and petite; I am plain, not to mention pleasingly plump. According to Mike, Melissa hardly cried, and I was the original Miss Colic of Suffolk County. Melissa was always happy, I guess, and I'm not exactly the most cheerful person on the planet.

If it wasn't for the accident, I wouldn't even be here. Mike says after it happened, Shirley became a completely different person overnight. He says Shirley was always happy before, and she used to sing all the time, which is completely impossible to imagine. Though in these pictures, she does look a lot happier than I've ever seen her. Like in this one, she's smiling and holding Melissa on her lap. And here's another one with her and baby Mike, both of them laughing with their heads thrown back. There's only one or two pictures of me in here. Once I asked Shirley why she has hardly any baby pictures of me around the house and she said that with two kids to run after, there wasn't any time for photos. But clearly there was plenty of time when it was Mike and Melissa instead of Mike and me.

Anyway, Mike says Shirley got really depressed after the accident because she thought that it was all her fault since she's the one who unbuckled the baby and put her on her lap. I guess she even felt suicidal for a while, but she refused to see a shrink like Fred wanted her to. She just went to her regular doctor and got a lifetime supply of Valium, which she still takes—I've seen the vial in her purse—not that they seem to help.

So finally, the doctor said the only thing that would get Shirley undepressed would be to have another baby.
So I guess she and Fred went at it, because here I am. But—surprise, surprise—even my arrival didn't cheer old Shirley up. My theory is that somewhere deep inside Shirley's mind, she thought she and Fred were making another little Melissa. They even planned it so we'd have the same birthday and everything, and we almost do; mine's December 17 and hers was December 12. But in all other ways, I think Shirley would say I'm nothing but one great big fat disappointment.

God, this is depressing.
Snap out of it, Audi
, I tell myself.
You've got a job to do.
And I'm not talking about the wash.

I put the pictures back, slide the box up onto its shelf, and go back to sorting clothes. When everything's folded, I bring a pile of Shirley's underwear and bras over to her dresser, put it away, and then feel around for the little brown velvet box she keeps her ring in. If Shirley knew I was going to give this to Frank, she'd kill me, but she'll never miss it. It's always in the same exact spot, under this black garter belt and matching bra she never wears. At least, I don't think she ever wears them; they never show up in the wash.

When I'm done putting the clothes away, I pocket Shirley's ring and head for Mike's room. I like hanging out in here sometimes, I don't know why. Mike took most of his stuff off to college so there's hardly anything left except his bed, his empty dresser, and his desk, which has old papers like his junior high report cards and stuff crammed into the middle drawer. There's still a few things in his closet too, like this beat-up tan trench coat
and a pair of old rubber boots I'm sure Mike wouldn't be caught dead in up at college.

I lie down on Mike's bed and stare up at the ceiling. One thing my brother couldn't take with him to college are the glow-in-the-dark stars that Fred pasted up for him. When Mike was little, he said he wanted to be an “outer-space guy” (as opposed to the spaced-out guy he turned out to be) so Fred glued all these glow-in-the-dark stars up on his ceiling in the shape of constellations like the Big Dipper and Orion. Mike also has these cool op-art posters on the wall that glow in the dark when you put his special black light on. Plus he has a beanbag chair and a Lava lamp. He wanted to get a water bed, too, but Shirley and Fred put their foot down over that one.

Anyway, lying here on Mike's bed makes me wish I could talk to him, but I'm not allowed to make any longdistance calls until after five o'clock, when the rates go down. And anyway, last time we spoke on the phone, Mike wasn't exactly coherent. I barely said hello before he started ranting and raving about this new poem he was writing called “Yowl.”

“It's just like that famous poem ‘Howl,’” Mike said.

“‘Howl’?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, ‘Howl,’ by Allen Ginsberg?”

“Allen who?”

“Allen Ginsberg? The beat poet? Only the greatest bard since Shakespeare, Squirt. Sheesh, don't they teach you anything at that school I had to mortgage my teeth to send you to?” Mike asked, which is what Fred is always
saying to him. “So listen to this, okay? Ginsberg's poem starts off, T saw the best minds of my generation…,' so my poem starts off, ‘I saw the best
spines
of my generation….’ Get it, Squirt?”

“Uh, not really.”

“Spines
, Squirt. You know, backbone. As in strength. As in standing up for what you believe in.”

“Uh, sure, Mike. Whatever.”

“Just listen,” Mike said, and then he proceeded to recite this extremely long poem that didn't exactly sound brilliant to me. I don't know if he was reading his poem or Allen Ginsberg's poem, but whichever one it was, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. In the middle of all this, I heard a click, which meant that Fred had picked up the upstairs extension like he sometimes does when Mike and I are on the phone. Sure enough, two seconds later Fred started screaming about how much this call was costing him and then we hung up.

After a while hanging out in Mike's room gets boring, so I go into my own room, sit down at my desk, and take out Shirley's ring. The box she keeps it in feels as soft as Bessie's back, and when I open the cover the hinges squeak. Inside, the box is lined with white satin and there's a little slit where the ring sits. The ring is shiny and simple, and inside it's engraved
F.K. to S.K. forever
, which was a surprise from Fred to Shirley the day they tied the knot. Though in my opinion, tied the noose is more like it.

I take the ring out of the box and slip it on my ring finger. It gets stuck above my second knuckle, so I switch
it to my pinkie, where it fits better, but still it's kind of tight. I could probably force it all the way down but I don't because what if I can't get it off?

Just as I slide the ring off my pinkie I hear footsteps coming up the stairs, so I shove the ring back in its box, close the lid, which makes this really loud crack, and jam the whole thing back in my pocket. I don't know why I'm so jumpy; it's not like Shirley ever comes in here or anything. After a few minutes I hear the toilet flushing, then Shirley's footsteps going down the stairs, and I let out my breath, which I didn't even know I was holding.
God, Audi, calm down
, I tell myself. I take a few deep breaths and then put Shirley's ring in my knapsack to bring to Frank tomorrow. I know I shouldn't do it—it
is
my own mother's wedding ring and everything—but Frank said I had to take a big risk and he's right, because look what he's risking for me:
everything.
He must really like me. I mean, really,
really
like me. I can't believe he could go to jail for making out with me. Give me a break. It's not like he put a gun to my head and forced me to do anything. Frank would never do that. And besides, I want to be with him. More than I've ever wanted anything in my whole entire life. So what else could I bring the guy to show I'm serious about him? Nothing.

Still, the whole thing makes me kind of nervous, so I check around my room to see if I can bring Frank something else instead. Nothing in my closet but clothes, most of which don't even fit. Nothing on my bookshelf but all my animal books, plus other books like
Little Women
and
Huckleberry Finn
, which we had to read for school. Nothing
on my bed but stuffed animals. Nothing too interesting in my jewelry box except a Jewish star from my grandmother which I never wear, and the gold name necklace that Fred and Shirley gave me for my thirteenth birthday, which I never wear either. And this braided leather bracelet that Ronnie gave me before she left. I gave her one too, and I wonder if she still has it. Not that I really care.