Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Suddenly her mother caught her by the shoulders. Her face was shiny, and smelled of cold-cream; her eyes were inky black, and alien, like the eyes of a nurse shark that Harriet had seen in an aquarium on the Gulf Coast.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

Once more, Harriet found herself crushed to the front of her mother’s nightgown. Concentrate , she told herself. If she thought hard enough, she could be somewhere else.

A parallelogram of light slanted onto the front porch. The front door stood ajar. “Mama?” she heard Allison say, very faintly. “Please….”

When, at last, Harriet’s mother allowed herself to be taken by the hand and coaxed inside, Allison led her carefully to the couch, settled her down with a cushion behind her head, and turned on the television—its chatter a frank relief, the bouncy music, the unconcerned voices. She then trailed in and out bringing Kleenex, headache powders, cigarettes and an ashtray, a glass of iced tea and an ice pack their mother kept in the freezer—clear plastic, swimming-pool blue, shaped like a harlequin half-mask from Mardi Gras—which she wore over her eyes when her sinuses were bothering her or when she suffered what she called sick headaches.

Their mother accepted the Kleenex and the tea from the little heap of comforts, and, murmuring distractedly the while, pressed the aquamarine ice pack to her forehead.” What must you think of me? … I’m so ashamed of myself….” The ice mask did not escape Harriet, who sat studying her mother from the armchair opposite. She had several times seen her father, the morning after he’d been drinking, sitting stiffly at his desk with the blue ice mask tied onto his head as he made phone calls or flipped angrily through his papers. But there was no liquor on her mother’s breath. Pressed to her mother’s chest, out on the porch, she hadn’t smelled a thing. In fact, her mother didn’t drink—not the way that Harriet’s father did. Every now and then she mixed herself a bourbon and Coke, but usually she carried it around all evening until the ice melted and the paper napkin got soggy, and fell asleep before she managed to drink the whole thing.

Allison reappeared in the doorway. She glanced over at their mother, quickly, to make sure she wasn’t looking, and then, silently, mouthed the words to Harriet: It’s his birthday .

Harriet blinked. Of course: how could she have forgotten? Usually it was the anniversary of his death, in May, that set their mother off: crying fits, inexplicable panics. A few years ago, it had been so bad that she had been unable to leave the house to attend Allison’s eighth-grade graduation. But this May, the date had come and gone without incident.

Allison cleared her throat. “Mama, I’m running you a bath,” she said. Her voice was strangely crisp and adult. “You don’t have to get in if you don’t want to.”

Harriet stood to go upstairs but her mother flung out an arm in a panicky, lightning-quick gesture, as if she were about to walk in front of a car.

“Girls! My two sweet girls!” She patted the sofa on either side, and though her face was swollen from crying, in her voice was a will o’ the wisp—faint, but bright—of the sorority girl in the hall portrait.

“Harriet, why in the world didn’t you speak up?” she said. “Did you have a good time with Tatty? What did you talk about?”

Once again, Harriet found herself struck dumb in the unwelcome glare of her mother’s attention. For some reason, all she could think of was a carnival ride she had been on when she was small, with a ghost sailing placidly back and forth along a length of fishing line in the dark, and how—unexpectedly—the ghost had jumped its track and shot right in her face. Every now and then, she still woke bolt-upright from a sound sleep when the white shape flew at her out of the dark.

“What did you do at Tatty’s house?”

“Played chess.” In the silence that followed, Harriet tried to think of some funny or entertaining observation to tack on to this reply.

Her mother put an arm around Allison, to make her feel included, too. “And why didn’t you go, honey? Have you had your supper yet?”

“And now we present the ABC Movie of the Week,” said the television. “ Me, Natalie , starring Patty Duke, James Farentino, and Martin Balsam.”

During the opening credits of the movie, Harriet stood and started up to her room, only to have her mother follow her up the stairs.

“Do you hate Mother for acting so crazy?” she asked, standing forlornly in the open door of Harriet’s room. “Why don’t you come watch the movie with us? Just the three of us?”

“No, thank you,” said Harriet politely. Her mother was staring down at the rug—alarmingly close, Harriet realized, to the tarstained spot. Part of the stain was visible near the edge of the bed.

“I …” A string in her mother’s throat seemed to pop; helplessly, her glance darted over Allison’s stuffed animals, the pile of books on the window seat by Harriet’s bed. “You must hate me,” she said, in a rusty voice.

Harriet looked at the floor. She couldn’t stand it when her mother was melodramatic like this. “No, Mama,” she said. “I just don’t want to watch that movie.”

“Oh, Harriet. I had the worst dream. And it was so terrible when I woke up and you weren’t here. You know that Mother loves you, don’t you, Harriet?”

Harriet had a hard time answering. She felt slightly numbed, as if she were underwater: the long shadows, the eerie, greenish lamplight, the breeze washing in the curtains.

“Don’t you know I love you?”

“Yes,” said Harriet; but her voice sounded thin like it came from a long way off, or belonged to somebody else.

CHAPTER 4.

The Mission.

It was odd, thought Harriet, that she hadn’t come to hate Curtis despite what she now knew about his family. Far down the street—in the same spot she’d last run into him—he was stomping flat-footed and very purposefully along the curb. To and fro he swayed, his water pistol clenched in both fists and his roly-poly body swinging side to side.

From the ramshackle house he was guarding—low-rent apartments of some sort—a screen door banged. Two men stepped out onto the outside staircase, hefting between them a large box with a tarpaulin slung over it. The man facing Harriet was very young, and very awkward, and very shiny on the forehead; his hair stood on end and his eyes were round and shocked-looking as if he’d just stepped out of an explosion. The other, backing down first, fairly stumbled in his haste; and despite the weight of the box, and the narrowness of the stairs, and the precarious drape of the tarpaulin—which seemed liable to slide off and entangle them at any moment—they did not pause for even an instant but thumped down in an agonizing rush.

Curtis, with a mooing cry, wobbled and pointed the water pistol at them as they turned the box sideways, and edged with it to a pickup truck parked in the driveway. Another tarpaulin was draped across the truck’s bed. The older and heavier of the two men (white shirt, black trousers and open black vest) nudged it aside with his elbow, then lifted his end of the box over the side.

“Careful!” cried the young, wild-haired fellow as the crate toppled with a solid crash.

The other—his back still to Harriet—swiped his brow with a handkerchief. His gray hair was slicked back in an oily ducktail. Together, they replaced the tarpaulin and went back up the stairs again.