Laura Lippman: Every Secret Thing

Helen had no scientific evidence, but she was sure that girls had not developed so early in her day. She wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was linked to fast food or that bovine growth hormone in milk. She had heard stories about seven-year-olds with breasts and periods. The doctors at Hopkins were trying to figure out how to arrest their puberty without turning them into midgets.

Now Helen always had very good eating habits. She wasn’t a zealot, but she had always chosen whole grains and vegetables and fresh fruits, hopeful that Alice would follow her example. Of course Alice had ended up yearning for the junkiest of junk foods, and Helen had capitulated, taking her to McDonald’s or Arby’s at least once a week, in the belief that small indulgences would keep Alice from becoming obsessive. Hunger had been the one uncontrollable urge in her otherwise obedient daughter.

Where would Alice ask to go to lunch today, after Sharon picked her up down at Middlebrook? Alice would probably want something fast and greasy, while Sharon would feel compelled to make an event out of it, a celebration-more like high school graduation than what it was.

“I know you can’t get off in the middle of the week,” Sharon had said when she called Helen about Alice ’s release date. “But I could meet her at the hearing in your place, and bring her home. Really, it’s no trouble.”

Would Helen have lied if Sharon hadn’t all but offered this out to her? She wasn’t sure. But given the assumption that she couldn’t be there, she was glad to take advantage of it. She understood, however, that she would be in Sharon ’s debt. For when Sharon said something wasn’t any trouble- really -she meant it was a lot of trouble, but she would do it anyway. Sharon had never quite let go of the Mannings, much to Helen’s dismay. Everyone else wanted to forget, move on, bury the past. Only Sharon Kerpelman seemed to glory in the memory of that summer, as if it were something of which she was proud. True, she had been aggressive in Alice ’s defense, shrewd even. But Helen couldn’t help wondering if she should have taken her parents’ offer and hired an expensive criminal attorney who might have saved Alice in spite of everything.

But no, that would have been wrong. She had decided early on that she could not rationalize away Alice ’s role by saying she was the accessory, the dupe, the unwitting follower. There was a principle at stake. Alice had to be held accountable along with Ronnie.

Alice had understood. Alice always understood. She was Helen’s confidante, her one-girl fan club, her best audience. Even when she saw through one of Helen’s white lies-and Alice, unlike Sharon, would know that Helen could have gotten today off if she really wanted to-she forgave her. She was a considerate child.

A woman, Helen reminded herself. Alice had left home a child, but she was a woman now under the law, free to vote, if not to drink. Helen remembered a song from her own grade-school days: Girl, you’re a woman now . Sung, Helen suddenly realized, by the same pop star who had told the young girl to get out of his mind. Yes, the songs of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a lovely progression. “Young Girl.” “Girl, You’re a Woman Now.” “Lady Willpower.” And then finally, inevitably, simply: “Woman Woman (Have you got cheatin’ on your mind?).” Why, it had the arc of a novel. It was goddamn Madame Bovary. Good line. She wished she knew someone who would appreciate it.

Helen had been a pretty juicy teenager herself, although she had waited until college to explore those options. The joke among her faster high school friends was that Helen couldn’t have sex in the same state as her parents. And the joke behind the joke was that it was absolutely true. She had come to Baltimore ’s Maryland Institute College of Art as an eighteen-year-old virgin and, within weeks, was the Whore of MICA. Not that anyone called her a whore, because everyone who could was doing the same thing, and people weren’t so judgmental about sex back then, especially at art school.

God, her generation had caught the wave just right. That was the golden time, the post-herpes-but-not-yet-AIDS era, when everyone had given up on free love, but sex was cheap and plentiful, like the marijuana of the day. All changed, changed utterly. People in the marijuana trade killed one another now, according to a “special report” Helen had seen on television just this past winter. Astonishing to Helen, more astonishing than any act of terror. Almost as astonishing as her own life.

She was twenty-four, halfway toward her master’s, when she got pregnant. It was like hitting a reverse lottery, a 1-in-100 shot. But even pregnancy wasn’t a big deal in those days. Abortion was an acceptable choice among her friends, backup birth control, almost a rite of passage. It didn’t even require much thought. If the stick turned blue, and it wasn’t love and wasn’t going to be, you took care of it. The noble thing was not even to mention it to the guy, unless he was a live-in, because it was a lose-lose. He either tried to eel out of the situation, in which case you had to face up to the fact that the guy you were dating was a jerk. Or, worse, he made a halfhearted proposal and there it sat between you, like a jury summons-your civic duty, sure, but everyone still tried to get out of it.

So having a baby was kind of cool. Brave, even. Especially when the father was some BG &E meter reader, Roy Durske, met at a friend’s apartment pool. They dated all summer. “Dated” being Roy ’s insistent euphemism. Helen had no problems classifying their meetings as screwing. Good the first few times, but the novelty of the whole adventure had worn off fast. Sheer enthusiasm could take a man only so far.

The bell at the Catholic church began to toll the noon hour. Helen glanced at her dashboard clock. She had used up her allotted twenty-five minutes for lunch. The early and short lunch hour was one of the antiperks that served to remind Helen how little valued her chosen profession was. She balled up the foil from her sandwich, capped her empty bottle, snapped her Tupperware, and put everything in the old metal workman’s lunchbox she’d found at a yard sale last year. People were always knocked out by Helen’s taste-“By what you get away with,” as one coworker once put it. But Helen was bored by her own originality, her irreverence. What had it gained her in the end? Twenty years of teaching art to nonartists, a life alone, and a daughter who called her bluff. Want to be daring, Mom? Want to be a true iconoclast? Try being the mother of an eleven-year-old who kills another child . And not just another child, but the granddaughter of a beloved black judge.

Then leave your mother to face the world’s judgment.

They couldn’t use Helen’s name, for that would have been the same as identifying Alice, but the local television stations had somehow rationalized showing Helen’s face as she ducked in and out of various government buildings that summer. She wore dark glasses, her hair pulled up in a way she had never worn it before and never wore it again. But people knew, of course. They knew which girls had been sent home from the pool party after what was reported as a “racial incident,” knew which children disappeared from the neighborhood, as if they had never existed. But no one ever said anything, because what would they say? Saw you on the news. Sorry your kid killed that baby. What are you doing this weekend?

Helen went inside and began setting up her next class, taping newspaper to the desks, straightening the little chairs, the style of which had not changed since she was in fifth grade. For all she knew, these chairs could have been in service during her fifth-grade year. The city system was pretty poor. She definitely remembered colors like these, seventies colors, colors that embodied the promises of the modern age. Aqua blue. Mod orange. Now these were the ironic, self-conscious shades of iMacs and junior high school fashions. She remembered an outfit, purchased for her first plane trip-an orange-, blue-, and brown-striped dress with a matching scarf, from the old Best & Co. Her mother had saved all Helen’s clothes, and Helen had taken it out of a box when Alice was the same age. But she was too big for it. Hormones. It had to be hormones.