don’t care!”
Painted toenails and confession magazines and cigarettes were not important anymore. All that mattered was getting away from Bluegang and never coming back. Maybe then Hannah could forget Billy Phillips. Maybe if she lay down in the poison oak and rolled over and over, the poison on the outside would drive out the poison she felt on the inside.
At the top of the hill, Liz and Jeanne put their arms around her in an awkward hug. She wanted to believe Liz when she said, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be like it never happened.”
When Hannah got home her mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner, a pork roast with applesauce and summer squash and bowls of Jell-O chocolate pudding with sprinkles of coconut on the top.
“I’m not hungry,” Hannah said on her way across the kitchen.
“You will be by dinnertime. Have you done your chores?”
Clean the upstairs bathroom bowl, scour the sink with Bon Ami, fold the towels in the special way her mother said was the only way to fold towels.
“I will.”
“Come back here, Hannah.” Mrs. Whittaker laid her palm across Hannah’s forehead. She was a tall almost-pretty woman with soft curly hair and wary eyes. “You look flushed. Do you feel all right?”
Her mother worried about polio, all the parents did. If a kid got a fever or felt stiff or had a bad headache, the doctor made a house call that very night. Mostly it was too much sun or sugar, but sometimes it really was polio. The summer before two boys in Hannah’s class had been attacked—this was the way grown-ups always spoke of the disease, like it was an enemy soldier. One of the boys would have to live in an iron lung the rest of his life. The other was half-crippled and could never lead a normal life. That was the worst thing about polio, and another thing grown-ups always said: once you got it, you could never lead a normal life.
Hannah hardly thought about polio, or about anything going on in the world. There had been a war in Korea and when grown-ups weren’t talking about being “attacked” by polio they worried about the The Bomb and Communism; and it seemed to Hannah that being an adult meant being scared all the time. Hannah mostly thought about school and her friends and how she couldn’t wait to be a teenager. That was about as far ahead as her imagination carried her—though occasionally she wondered if anyone would ever want to marry her and what kind of a house she’d live in and what would it be like to “do it.” There were so many things more urgent to Hannah than polio and bombs and Communists.
“I want you to take a couple of aspirin and nap a while,” Mrs. Whittaker said. She looked Hannah up and down.
Hannah tried to curl her toes under.
“You’ve been painting your toenails.”
Hannah stared at her feet and the ten pink dots.
“Oh, Hannah.” Her mother sighed and sat down at the kitchen table. “What am I going to do about you?”
“It’s only polish, Mommy. I can take it off.”
“I know you can take it off and you will, believe me, you will. That’s not the point.”
The point, Hannah knew without listening, was that there would be a time and occasions in the future for painting her toes. When she was grown she could paint them green if she wanted to. But she was too young now. She needed to try to understand how it looked to people to see a little girl with painted toes; she should be aware of the kinds of assumptions people made just on appearances.
“You never want anyone to think you’re not a lady, Hannah. A young lady now. A grown lady soon enough.”
Hannah wondered if her mother would ever understand that she did not care about being a lady any more than she cared about polio and Communism. She wanted to yell out how much she hated gloves and girdles and those hats with dinky veils. But the way her mother bent her head and passed a hand over her face, the dejected slope of her shoulders, stopped her and filled her with shame. She thought about Billy Phillips lying dead on the rocks at Bluegang and about the terrible things he had said to her, and she had to believe that what her mother had said was true. She had painted her toenails and tied up her Brownie blouse and Billy Phillips . . . assumed. It was her fault. The police would say so, the judge too.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said and meant it.
Upstairs as she lay on the bed with a washcloth across her forehead and a glass of cold water—her mother was a loving nurse—Hannah could not stop her mind from going over and over what had happened. And then she remembered her Saturday panties.
Jeanne sat in the kitchen eating the slice of peach cobbler the school cook, Mrs. Phillips, had left for her. It felt very peculiar eating the cobbler and thinking about Mrs. Phillips making the crust and all and her son lying dead, probably. She was glad Mrs. Phillips had gone home for the day and Jeanne didn’t have to look at her face and answer her questions about what kind of a day she was having.
She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Billy looked lying on the rocks, but instead of trying to put the image out of her mind, she went over every detail. She saw the way his legs were sprawled and the zipper down on his pants. Maybe someone would find him and think he fell when he was peeing. She had watched the boys from her parents’ school having pissing contests and could just imagine Billy Phillips arcing his pee out over the oak root saddle like a fountain. When she watched the boys, she never saw their you-knows but she’d once seen her father’s when she walked in on him in the bathroom, and he was so stewed he barely saw her. The next day she went to the library after school and looked up penis in a medical book. There were about a dozen pictures of men who had venereal disease and one had the elephant’s disease and the underneath part of his thing had swollen up so it looked like he was sitting on a basketball. Jeanne had decided the penis was the ugliest of any body part and she was really glad she didn’t have one and that she hadn’t seen Billy Phillips’s. She finished her cobbler, washed her dish and left the dining hall. Bells rang every hour at Hilltop so she knew it was after three. Too soon to go home.
Jeanne’s mother had fallen off the water wagon again so she had a pretty good idea what awaited her at home. Mrs. Hendrickson would be sitting in the little den with a book open on her lap and a tall glass of water beside her. It wasn’t really water; it was vodka, only Jeanne wasn’t supposed to know that except one time she had sneaked a taste.
Instead of going home she walked around the far side of the rose cloister, across Casabella Road and scrambled up the hill to the flume that had until recently carried water from the reservoir in the Santa Cruz mountains to the town below. She hoisted herself up and walked along until she had a clear view of the Santa Clara Valley. The calendar in the school kitchen had a view of the valley at blossom time: from Rinconada to the San Jose foothills, nothing but prune plums and apricots in bloom. Under the picture it said, “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” In August all Jeanne could see were trees and green and a few streets and houses. In the distance—exactly eleven miles from Rinconada according to the sign at the town limits—she made out a half dozen medium-tall buildings in San Jose and beyond the little city the rolling eastern foothills the color of late summer gold.
The hills looked like breasts. Jeanne didn’t have any yet. She hadn’t started her period even. But she knew it would be soon. She had looked up puberty at the library and found out that the few hairs sprouting under her arms, which she carefully kept cut back with scissors, meant she was on the edge of, just beginning, puberty and pretty soon she would have to buy Kotex and a belt and remember to bring an extra one to school or she’d bleed all over everything like what happened to one of the girls in her class last year.
She would be glad to start her period even if it did mean she couldn’t swim or go on hikes or ride her bike for five days out of every month. The sooner she grew up the sooner she could go to Cal and get away from her parents. Her brother Michael had gone to Stanford and Jeanne didn’t think she could stand to walk where he had, maybe sit in the exact same classrooms as he.
No one ever said