Маргарет Миллар - The Cannibal Heart

It was one of Jessie’s new characteristics that when she was frightened she no longer ran to her mother or father to be comforted, she comforted herself. If she was badly frightened she shut herself up in her room and sobbed into her pillow. If she was only half-frightened she went into her mother’s room and dressed up in her mother’s clothes. Traces of tears were covered up with rouge, and over her own small mouth she painted a voluptuous and sophisticated pair of lips.

When Evelyn went upstairs she found her parading in the hall, wearing a pink satin nightgown and green high-heeled sandals.

“That’s my best nightgown,” Evelyn said.

“I’m not hurting it.”

“It’s dragging on the floor. The hem is dirty already. See?”

“It’s good clean dirt,” Jessie protested. “Not like tar or paint or anything.”

“Well, I think you’d better change anyway, and wash your face while you’re at it.”

“But I haven’t even had time to see myself yet. I want to see if I look eighteen.”

“Well, come on then. We’ll both see.”

She led the way into Jessie’s room, with Jessie, voluntarily crippled by the high heels, flopping and shuffling along behind her.

In the door of Jessie’s closet was a full-length mirror.

“Do I look eighteen?”

“Not quite.”

“Seventeen?”

“Just about seventeen, I guess.”

“Older than Luisa anyway,” Jessie said in bitter triumph.

She held up her arms while Evelyn pulled off the satin nightgown, revealing the soiled cotton playsuit underneath.

Jessie began to brush the twigs out of her hair. All her movements were quick and vigorous, like Mark’s, and she was beginning to look more like Mark every day. In the past year her face had lost its round babyish contours and her nose seemed larger. It was no longer an indeterminate button, it had a definite shape and character, like Mark’s nose in miniature.

“When I grow up,” Jessie said thoughtfully, “I’m going to boss Luisa around and tell her lies.”

“We won’t be here when you’re grown up.”

“I can always come back. I’ll get married and make my husband bring me back.”

Evelyn smiled, a little anxiously. “Why should you want to tell lies to anyone?”

“Because.”

Jessie put down the brush and began to rub off her lipstick with a piece of tissue. She didn’t rub very hard. There was always the faint chance that her mother would let her leave a trace of it on. Jessie didn’t know why this large mature mouth was important to her, but it was. She felt better with it on, more capable of dealing with Luisa and the secrets in the woods.

“Do you believe in devils?”

Evelyn shook her head briskly. “Of course not.”

“Neither do I,” Jessie said, without conviction.

“You’d better use some soap. Who told you about devils?”

“No one.”

“Was it Luisa?”

Mute and stubborn, Jessie fixed her gaze on a fly sitting on the mirror cleaning its legs.

“You didn’t answer my question, Jessie.”

“You ask so many questions. I can’t answer everything. I’m not a genius.”

Evelyn let out a sigh of exasperation. “You don’t have to be a genius to answer yes or no.”

Jessie moved her head so that the fly on the mirror seemed to be sitting interestingly on her left eye. Then she tried the fly on her nose and her right eye and the middle of her mouth.

“You’re getting so obstinate,” Evelyn said. “I can’t understand it. If Luisa frightened you I want to know about it, so I can make her stop. After all, she’s only fifteen, she’s got very little more sense than you have.”

Mark came in from the hall. He had been reading in the sun and he wore his khaki shorts and a towel around his shoulders where the skin was beginning to peel. He was a tall, decisive man, with handsome but slightly irregular features, and an air of controlled impatience. Though he was thirty-eight, he looked younger, partly because he wore a crew cut, a reminder of the days he’d spent in the Navy during the war.

“What’s up now?” he said. “Are you two girls arguing again?”

Jessie gave him a brief cold glance. She didn’t like her father to go around the house in shorts because he had hair on his chest which looked silky but felt like wire. To Jessie this hair was rather mysterious and secret and should be kept covered up, except when her father went in swimming. Luisa said that lots of men had hair on their chests, and that it was a sign. She wouldn’t tell Jessie what it was a sign of, but Jessie knew from Luisa’s sudden gust of giggling that it was something little girls weren’t supposed to discuss.

“I wasn’t arguing,” she said with a scowl. “I was just keeping a secret.”

“Lord, another one.” Mark rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Get the books, Evelyn?”

“Some. Not the ones you asked for. Marsalupe is hardly the most literate metropolis west of the Mississippi. You’ll save time by wiring for them.”

Still scowling, Jessie explored with her teeth the hangnail on her right thumb. She had been aware for some time now that as soon as her father came into the room there was a subtle shift of interest, away from herself. It seemed that this shift was Evelyn’s fault; when Mark was around Evelyn focused her eyes on him, steadily and intensely, as if he had just come back from a long journey and was leaving again at any moment. Jessie, left with mere sidelong glances, felt neglected. To draw Evelyn’s eyes back to herself again, she kicked the leg of the vanity, not too hard.

“Stop that,” Evelyn said. “Honestly, angel, I’ve told you — the furniture isn’t ours.”

“It’s Luisa’s, so I don’t care.”

“No, it’s not Luisa’s, either. Mark, you tell her.”

“Tell her what?”

“Not to kick the furniture.”

“Okay. Do not kick the furniture,” Mark said obligingly. “Kick Luisa, if you have to kick.”

“Mark, for heaven’s sake, don’t say things like that to her.”

“Damn it, I mean it. That girl’s driving me loco. She haunts me, she creeps out from behind trees, she...”

“Maybe she has a crush on you.”

“I’m as old as her father.”

“Even so.”

The shift of attention again; the invisible string that bound Mark and Evelyn, that Jessie could tangle but not break.

“She’d kick me back,” Jessie said, feeling around for the string, tugging at it subtly. “Hard, too. Oh, I just hate Luisa!”

“Why?” Mark asked.

“I can’t tell. Luisa said not to tell.”

“Come on, baby.”

Jessie was silent a moment. “She said there were devils in the woods. Under the boards of the swimming pool.”

Mark’s quick frown was in Evelyn’s direction. “That girl’s getting to be a damned nuisance. You’ll have to talk to her.”

“I already have.”

“Then you weren’t firm enough.”

“I tried to be,” Evelyn said, looking baffled. She hadn’t been firm, of course, but she had tried, several times and at several different levels, to make friends with Luisa. But the girl was unresponsive and Evelyn had found it impossible to talk to her. Sometimes, racing down to the beach behind Jessie to dig for clams at low tide, Luisa seemed to be a child, as wild and free as the cormorants that lived on the face of the cliff. But when she was doing her tasks, dusting or helping her mother in the kitchen, or collecting the eggs from the chicken pen, she looked as old and shrewd as Carmelita herself. Luisa’s life seemed to be a dance before mirrors, all of which were more or less distorted. No one could see the real Luisa through these mirrors, and Luisa herself could not see out.