Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

Thanks to the Bunting Institute for my Carnegie-Mellon Fellowship. And thanks to the LSU Research Program for my Summer Stipend.

June and I were lashing together poodle tepees, assembled from dried anise stalks, when we saw the saddle-oxford sheriff’s car cruise up the hill, past the lemon grove we were sitting in, and down the sweep of our driveway.

“I bet they got her.” June barely looked up from her tepee, which was considerably better constructed than mine. The tip of her tongue protruded crossways; she was concentrating like she did at the piano. Pale blue pointy glasses slid down the nose of her round face.

“I bet they didn’t.” But that was because I couldn’t imagine Deane in jail. Would they let her bring her Elvis pictures? Once she had made paper dolls of the whole family. Once she had said my hair smelled sweet as a kitten’s. Last time the police brought her back, she’d screamed at me and June: Fuck those goody-goodies . June had cried, huge mouth wailing open, but then she’d never liked Deane to begin with. Four years older than June, Deane had gotten the first horse. At nine, I was three years younger than June, seven years younger than Deane, and I hated horses. They bit your hair off.

She put the finished tepee down in its lot. This one belonged to Mimi, one of the original blue poodles. Cherie, who was mine, was not getting as elegant a domicile. Worse, I’d dropped her in the mud. Small plush dogs didn’t make the best outside toys, but we felt the poodles needed autumn homes. They were tired of being cooped up in our bedroom.

“Looks good,” I said.

It did. June had read three books on Indian design, and her composite of anise stalks, twine, and peacock feathers was elegant. Further, she’d made a little crazy-paving path from Mimi’s front door to the creek. The creek flowed regularly every afternoon: we hauled a garden hose down into the grove and ran the water for our rivers, lakes, and dams. With all the trouble over Deane, neither Stan nor Linwood had noticed.

“We better go see what happened.” June stood up, pulling down her shapeless sweater. It looked like Stan’s.

We started gathering up our stuff. If we waited until they told us what was going on, we’d never know anything. We were supposed to think, for instance, that Deane was still happily attending that grisly Catholic girls’ school they’d put her in last year—from which she habitually escaped—and we weren’t supposed to notice her furious outbursts on the weekends she visited home. We certainly weren’t supposed to know that they’d put her there because some of the people she hung around with were serious bad news, making mysterious trips down to Mexico. There was also some story around town about Deane and the football team, but even June hadn’t a clue what that meant.

Standing up, I tried to brush some of the mud off my red pedal pushers. Hopeless. My Keds were deeply crusted and so were my socks, but since we had to sneak up through the avocado grove and across the stable in order to enter the back door unseen, the dirt hardly mattered.

We gathered up the poodles, not improved from their outing, and piled them into my sweater. I tied the sleeves together and the bundle was a neat package.

The living room, I could sense as we lay bellies-down in the hallway, was heavy with concern. The sheriff was sitting closest. All you could see were a big black boot and a pair of manicured hands.

“—until she’s eighteen,” he said.

“Then what?” Stan was angry.

“You keep her. Or,” he spread his hands, “she could go to prison.”

I tried to imagine Deane, her beehive hairdo and thick eyeliner, in black-and-white-striped PJs.

“Prison!” Linwood shrieked. “You can’t send your own daughter to prison!”

Stan sighed, like Eeyore. “Nobody’s sending anybody to prison. She’s more your daughter than mine, anyway.”

“She might go,” the sheriff said. He was a big help.

Linwood started sobbing. My arms tingled, I wanted to comfort her.

“Unless she wants to talk,” he added.

“June!” Stan bellowed suddenly, appearing around the corner of the hall. His head floated above us like a furious balloon. “Take Pet and get the hell out of here! Go to your rooms and stay there!”

Two hours later and we were still sitting in June’s room. It was seven already and we usually ate around six-thirty.

“Do you think she’ll squeal?” I asked.

June shrugged. She was beading poodle bags. Each poodle had his own drawstring bag with matching pillow. Inside were their toys, whistles or miniature decks of cards, or other stuff we got from nickel vending machines. They got tons of presents on their birthdays.

I was trying to bead Pierre’s collar; beading was June’s latest discovery, but it was hard to get your fingers to sew the letters so you could read them.

“Think we’ll ever see her again?”

“If we don’t, I get Ace.”

Ace was the stallion who’d thrown Deane, when she’d gotten two broken arms and a double concussion. Her foot had gotten caught in the stirrup, and she’d been dragged a mile or so. Linwood said she hadn’t been the same person afterward.

“As if they’d let you ride him.”

“They would.” June squinted at her collar and pushed her glasses up her nose. “They don’t care what I do.”

Actually, she did pretty much as she pleased. I was more closely watched, being the youngest and all, or at least I had been until all this police business started. Now, they ignored me too.

I got up from the floor and strolled over to the felt board propped against the poodle pavilion. HAPPY HALLOWEEN, POODLES! it said, in orange and black and green. A month early, but so what? I’d made some pumpkins and ghosts and a smiling witch on a broomstick, the regular stuff but whimsical. The felt board was my specialty.

“We’re missing Dobie Gillis,” June pointed out.

I crossed over and clicked on the black-and-white portable. Stan had given it to us last Christmas. The year before was the aquarium, now residing in the garage. All the fish had died from ick in three weeks, and I didn’t have the heart to carry on. This year we were expecting our own telephone, not that June would let me use it.

I sat back on the floor and watched Maynard G. Crebbs playing the bongo drums. He was so silly, face too goofy, yet there was something about him, with that little goatee and those ragged sweatshirts. He could sit around San Francisco, reading poetry in one of those coffeehouses with the candles on the tables. Deane had told me all about beatniks. Perhaps when I grew up, I’d live in New Orleans—that’s where we’d vacationed last summer—and dance in one of those sequined G-strings. If I had breasts.

There was a loud knock on the door and Stan walked in. He looked sorry for himself. “Your mother wants to see you in the living room,” he said.

I looked at June.

“When I finish this collar,” she said.

Linwood was sitting on the gold couch, smoking a thin cigar in a long rhinestone holder. Her face was puffy. Usually I adored her, was the perfect slave, but now something about both of them irritated me. I sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace. June and Stan sat on the couch.