Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

She wanted to be the most popular girl in her class. With the boys or with the girls, Celia asked tartly. Both, Grace said. Are you going to let them feel you up? Maybe, Grace answered, if I feel like it.

Seeing herself as leading a double life, not unlike Philbrick in I Led Three Lives , she kept to herself at home, smiling very little, staying in her now too small and messy room. She kept the door shut. It didn’t have a lock. Grace could hear her mother outside, moving around, doing things. She talked to her dog, and waited for phone calls, or made some. You talk on the phone too much, Ruth would say angrily. And what happened to that nice girl, Marlene? It’s none of your business, Grace would say, looking for food in the refrigerator, finding only raisins. You never buy anything good to eat, she flung at her mother, returning to her room, closing the door hard behind her. Ruth was gaining weight and wearing housedresses most of the time. Grace followed her diet, and although she was thin, she thought she looked fat.

Your room’s a mess, Ruth yelled, you can’t leave it like that. Leave me alone, Grace yelled back, slamming the front door, going to meet Celia at the diner. As she walked she pulled herself together, into her other self, the popular girl she was when she wasn’t at home. Celia surprised Grace because other people simply liked her while Grace continued to feel two ways about her all the time. But she was already there, in the diner, waiting, as she had always been in Grace’s life, just there. Grace ordered a bran muffin. Bran muffins were delicate food, the right thing to eat, and not fattening. Celia and she watched who came in and who walked out and drank a lot of coffee, Little Louie’s cautionary dark circles and stature absent even from memory. Grace drank carefully and without sound. My mother tried to hit me again but I held her hand, she reported sarcastically to Celia. Grace’s face hardened. I hate her guts. Just then a cute boy walked in and Celia didn’t have to reply, while Grace’s face recomposed itself into a prettier picture. Celia didn’t know what to say anyway.

Grace watched Celia’s eyes widen and freeze, then set; she enjoyed shocking people, or scaring them. Her drive for popularity was hindered by a bluntness that bordered on meanness. Celia would tell her that some of the girls didn’t understand that she was just being honest. Girls are so critical, Grace told Celia, meaningfully. She envied Celia’s ease with friends, her girlfriends, and said, I think I like boys better, and watched Celia’s eyelids open and close like a venetian blind. Envy made Grace feel weak and sinful, and she didn’t like not feeling strong. She prided herself on being reckless.

When Grace got called down to the principal’s office to discuss her grades and her attitude, he told her she was sullen and uncooperative. My aptitude is much higher than my performance, she repeated in the coffee shop, to which one of the guys, a senior, responded, Did you ask him about his performance? Her cool face reddened as she drank in their attention with her coffee; later, the senior asked her out. Why not, she answered, as if she were thinking it over, weighing his performance neutrally. “Did you let him kiss you?” Ruth asked. “Sure,” Grace answered. “Where?” her mother asked. “Where do you think?” and Grace slammed out of the house. A gunshot of fear traveled up her mother’s body from her toes to the top of her head where it settled as wounded anger.

In high school sex was war, a conventional war about the conventions. There were skirmishes at the breast, the line below the pantie, at the thigh, and finally the assault upon the Maginot Line, the vagina. And for these advances there was the creation of an adolescent military strategy that the boys and the girls developed separately, at separate tables, and then enacted with one another, following or not following the codes of war, at parties, in cars, on their absent parents’ beds.

Just before Grace was fifteen she met a nineteen-year-old dropout who worked in a boutique not far from the coffee shop. He had full lips and slanted eyes and told risqué jokes. He did crazy things, like putting a two-way mirror in the dressing room, and Grace fell hard. He told her she was cute and gave her a lavender shirt that he stole from the store, her first present from a boyfriend. The first time he stood her up, she waited up all night in her room, not really believing that he was doing this to her, that the phone hadn’t rung, the way it hadn’t when she was in the eighth grade, or if it rang, only to torment her. He called a few days later, and made an excuse which she accepted while seeming to have difficulty remembering what the infraction had been, it had been so slight. When she saw him again Grace kissed him with abandon and an open mouth and he pushed her away. You shouldn’t kiss like that, he warned, you’re supposed to be a nice girl. And he came around less often, and when he did he brought his friends, who acted like guards in a recently neutralized corridor, the battle having ended in a stalemate. Severed slowly over time, the attachment weakened and disappeared. She didn’t want to be a nice girl. Grace liked kissing boys with abandon.

I made my bed, Grace called out as she left for school, in answer to Ruth’s question. But it was not made and Ruth saw red and dumped her daughter’s drawers once more, dumped them in a single movement, and marched out as if there were something blocking her way. She hated being lied to, by Grace, her husband, her son, anyone. She complained to her husband, Grace could make all our beds in the amount of time it takes her to put on eye makeup. Her husband pulled off his pants. He said she was bad, as if Grace’s behavior were beyond his ken, as if he were describing someone from a tribe in Asia whose customs made him sick. Is that all you can say? Ruth asked, rubbing out her cigarette with dissatisfaction. Her husband glanced at her. Something might explain the intensity of her discontent, but not seeing it he turned over on his stomach and waited to fall asleep.

On the nights that Grace couldn’t sleep, Lady kept her company. When she took a bath Lady hovered by, upset that Grace was wet, and licked her like a puppy. It occurred to Grace that Lady might lick her there, if she directed her dog the way she had once directed her fantasies and Celia. Lady’s tongue was pink, not that rough, but she didn’t teach her to do it because the idea that she needed a dog was humiliating. She remembered that when reading A Stone for Danny Fisher she used to put her finger in her vagina and rub it until small pieces of her vagina — or what she thought was her vagina — rolled into balls and stuck to her fingers. She learned that men who ran candy stores liked to see a young girl’s breasts pressed against the glass cabinet and that, if the girl did that she could get some candy, or something for free, or for very little.

Boys learn the value of a dollar by taking girls out on dates, Ruth told her, and girls have to learn the value of a dollar too. Grace was forced to baby-sit for neighborhood families. Usually she took care of older children, but one night she was hired to care for an infant, the son of a young married couple. It was a night job. She turned on the TV and heard the baby crying. She let him cry a while, then went to talk to him, but he didn’t stop. She walked out and turned up the volume. The baby kept crying. She tried to change his diapers but he wriggled out of her grip and screamed as if she were killing him. She saw red. Shut up, she yelled, but the baby yelled louder and her grip got tighter. Grace slapped his little ass very hard, leaving a white handprint. He screamed louder and she left the room. She couldn’t stand the sound. She ate all the junk food in the refrigerator, and decided that babies, like dolls, were for other girls.