Laura Lippman: Every Secret Thing

Yet it was Helen Manning who insisted that Alice play with Ronnie. Ronnie was a summertime-only friend, an in-the-neighborhood friend, the only other didn’t-go-to-camp, didn’t-have-a-pool-membership girl. During the school year, Alice had better friends, friends more like her, who read books and kept their hair neat and tried to wear the right things. Come fall, she was so happy for school to start because it meant a reunion with these real friends.

Only not this fall. Now that it was time for middle school, a lot of the girls in their class were going to private places. “Real private school,” Wendy had said-not meanly, but a little carelessly, forgetting that Alice wasn’t going with them. Alice thought St. William of York was a real private school. It was real enough that Alice ’s mother couldn’t afford it anymore. Next year, Alice would have to go to West Baltimore Middle. Ronnie would, too. Alice’s mother said it wasn’t about the money, that Alice needed to meet All Kinds of People, to be exposed to New Experiences, and, besides, if she stayed in Catholic school much longer, she Might Become a Catholic, God Forbid.

But Alice knew: It was about the money. In the end, everything was about money-in her house, in the Fuller house, even in the rich kids’ houses. Parents just had different vocabulary words for it-some fancy, some plain-and different ways of talking about it. Or not talking about it, as the case may be.

In the Fuller family, they screamed and yelled about money, even stole from each other. Earlier this summer, Ronnie had caught her youngest older brother going into her bank and tried to bite him. He had just pushed her down, then taken a hammer and smashed the bank, a Belle from Beauty and the Beast, even though she had a little plug beneath her feet. He didn’t have to break her to get what was inside. And even when the money was freed-mostly pennies and nickels but also quarters, a few of those dollar coins, from when they put the woman on the coin and nobody wanted her-Matthew had kept pounding and pounding on Belle until she was nothing but yellow powder.

Alice and her mother did not fight about money, did not even speak about it directly, not even when her grandparents visited from Connecticut and said things like: “Well, this is the life you made for yourself.” Once, Alice ’s grandfather, Da, had given her a five-dollar bill when she told him she didn’t have the kind of scrunchie that all the other girls had. It was the only time her mother had ever spanked Alice, and they both cried afterward and agreed it would never happen again. Her mother would not spank, and Alice would not make up stories to get money from Da.

That had been back in the third grade, though, when neon scrunchies were important and Alice hadn’t yet learned to be good. Now the thing to have was jellies, which is why Alice saved her allowance and bought her own, at Target. She had shown them to her school-year-best-friend Wendy, when it was time to open the presents, and Wendy must have approved, for she made room for Alice on the bench she was sharing with two other girls from their class.

Maddy’s birthday party had been set up near the baby pool, not because they were babies, but because it was behind a fence, and they needed the fence to tie the balloons. Alice found herself counting the gifts. She was always counting. Steps on the stair, lines on the highway, birds flying south for the winter. There were fourteen presents on the table, but only thirteen girls at the party. Did Maddy’s mom bring a present, too? Or did one of the girls away at camp send a gift? Fourteen presents, thirteen girls. Hers was one of the prettiest on the outside- Alice ’s mother had wrapped it in blue paper that shimmered-but the shape gave it away. The present was a book, just a book, and Maddy was not the kind of girl who would be happy to get a book. Maddy wanted one of those new T-shirts, the kind that leave your belly showing, and rubber bracelets, and the nail polish you could peel right off. Maddy was the youngest girl in the class, but she knew the most about makeup. She was always sneaking gloss, and green mascara, until the nuns caught her and sent her to the bathroom to wash it off.

Alice had expected Maddy’s mother to be pretty, too, just so. Yet Maddy’s mother was sort of plain-slender enough to wear a two-piece, but tired-looking, as if being so thin and tanned had worn her out. Even her hair looked tired, like the “before” picture in a conditioner ad. There were mainly two kinds of mothers at St. William of York, mothers who worked and mothers who didn’t. But Maddy’s mom was the Mother Who Used to Work. That’s how she had introduced herself to Alice ’s mom, when she called the other day to ask a few questions about Ronnie. Alice knew what was said because she listened in on the extension. Just sometimes.

“I’m Maddy’s mother. I used to work-at Piper, Marbury?” Alice ’s mother made an “ah” sound, as if this were a good thing. She approved of Anything Creative, as she was always telling Alice. But Alice was surprised to find out that Maddy’s mom was a piper. She thought she had been a lawyer. She imagined Maddy’s mother in a green hat with a feather, leading the children out of Hamlin, along with the rats. No, the rats came first, the piper took the children later. Besides, Maddy’s mother must have been a piper in an orchestra to draw such an “ah” sound from Helen, not someone who just played on the street or in circuses. A mother who made music must be fun.

But Maddy’s Mother Who Used to Work had looked as if she had a headache from the moment the party started. Her forehead had four creases, like two equals signs, and there was a tiny set of parentheses at the bridge of her nose. These seemed to get deeper and deeper as the day wore on, and by the time it was time to open the presents, her face looked like a very hard math problem, maybe even algebra. St. William of York didn’t have a gifted program, but Sister Elizabeth had started giving Alice extra-credit homework in math. This was a secret. Alice wasn’t sure why. She thought it might be because she didn’t have a lot of secrets from her mother, who always seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. Other times, she thought her mom would be disappointed in her for liking math, which wasn’t creative and led to making money, which Helen Manning always said really was the root of all evil-not making money, but caring about it, counting it. When she first heard about the Root of All Evil, Alice had asked: “Is that near Route 40?” And her mother had laughed until she cried, then hugged her and said: “It’s not far, I’ll grant you that.” Later, Alice had tried to make her mother laugh that same way again, telling the same joke over and over, until Helen had snapped: “Don’t be such a pleaser, Alice. You weren’t put on this planet to make other people happy. Not even me. Especially me.”

Ronnie’s present was the next-to-last to be opened. The paper was red and there were creases in the wrong places, so everyone knew it had been taken off some other present, folded into a square, and reused. It wasn’t obviously Christmas paper-no Santas, no holly, no candy canes, just red-but still, everyone knew. The girl next to Wendy whispered something, who turned to tell Alice. Wendy’s mouth was tickling Alice ’s ear when the present emerged, and then everyone fell silent, so the secret was never shared.

“Isn’t that nice,” Maddy’s mother said, as she had said twelve times already, with just the same inflection.

Ronnie’s gift was a Barbie, and no one in the fifth grade at St. William of York had played with a Barbie, not in public, for at least a year. When they did play Barbie, they played Soap Opera Barbie, in which Ken gets Barbie pregnant and they then have lots of serious talks about what to do, and whether it was wrong to have so much sex, and how they would never do it again if God would just take the baby away. The whole point of Soap Opera Barbie was the beginning, where you put Ken on top of Barbie and had them make funny noises. But that was a secret game, played in twos. In public, the only proper response to a Barbie was polite boredom, as if you couldn’t quite remember what she was for. As if you’d never seen her under Ken, going Oh! Oh! Oh!