would ruin her arches.
Tereza hadn’t been back to Haggerty’s since she’d climbed the drainpipe in June. (In gym, she could shinny up a rope like nobody’s business. In gym, nobody called her dumb.) Every window and door was boarded up now, including the one she’d propped open with a rock. She crowbarred the nails from the plywood covering the door—whoever put it up had done a half-assed job—then stood aside and shoved the board over the steps. It fell with a loud thud. Shit. She slunk around the side and waited. When it felt safe, she crept back, forced the lock and counted to ten before pushing open the door.
Not more than a foot away was Crazy Haggerty.
She screamed and nearly pissed her pants before realizing she was looking at a coat and a hat on a hook at the bottom of some steps. Recovering, she climbed the steps and called out, “Yoo hoo, is anybody?”—the only funny line in that hokey show Ma loved. Her shaky voice tumbled out huge in the high-ceilinged room.
She waved the flashlight around, lighting up cupboards, a bucket in the sink, a pan on the wood stove. The air reeked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon had sloshed through. The flashlight landed on a light switch. A dud. She ventured deeper into the room, whipping around each time a floorboard squeaked. She stumbled over an empty dog dish, making it rattle.
In a room off the kitchen sat six chairs and a fancy table even bigger than Linda’s. A circular staircase split the house. She shot a beam up to the landing. The darkness closed around the beam like a fist. Tomorrow, in better light, she’d climb the stairs. The flashlight guided her to a room as big as her family’s whole apartment. A picture window, shuttered from outside, reflected the flashlight. The lumpy dark furniture could’ve been Dracula’s. The air was cold and the radiators silent. At home, they’d be banging out heat, Ma moaning because only the super could control them.
She tried another light switch. Crap. It wasn’t too late to go home. Ma and Jimmy would be drinking beer and watching TV on the floor because they didn’t have a couch. Jimmy might’ve had enough beer to forget he was mad at her. She was pretty sure he was bluffing about knowing what she was doing at Tony’s.
She’d been sneaking into men’s cars a couple times a week after school for over a month. The idea came to her after she found out Linda’s old man dropped off their turd-brown Nash at Tony’s Garage in the morning when it needed work and walked to his job. Linda’s ma didn’t drive. Once the car was fixed, it would sit behind the garage with the others, where the mechanics couldn’t see, until Linda’s old man returned. Tereza cut school one day to check it out for herself. Most men leaving cars wore suits and hats and carried briefcases. They looked well off. And safe.
Tereza chose newer cars with full ashtrays. She’d have the Wonder Bread bag of tobacco in her pocketbook as she hid in the back, turning herself into a ball on the floor behind the driver’s seat. Sometimes she had to wait a leg-cramping hour or more but wondering who might turn up gave her a charge. Like buying Cracker Jacks not knowing the prize you’d get.
After a man drove a short distance away, she’d edge onto the back seat and make little waking-up sounds, scaring the bejesus out of him. He’d pull over and she’d apologize, handing him a story about not getting any shuteye because she didn’t want to disturb her dying mama lying in the only bed in the teeny room they rented. She’d tell him she was selling tobacco to pay for the doctor. She’d practiced her pitiful, naive, come-on look in the bathroom mirror for days before the first time. Some men went apeshit and ordered her out. A few forked over a couple bucks and a lecture. But there were others. She’d taken in forty-three bucks so far, none from tobacco. But if Jimmy knew, now, because Tony had found out, she was screwed.
Heavy dark drapes covered two living-room windows. Tereza yanked on one set until rod and all crashed in a dusty, coughing cloud. She blanketed herself in the drapes and sat on a couch, hugging the flashlight as a weapon to her chest, her sharp ears listening to the house stretch and yawn, burp and fart. She dragged three chairs from the dining room and stacked them against the door. Anyone trying to get in would make a racket and warn her.
Back on the couch, she closed her eyes and saw the dead giveaway plywood she’d left on the ground. To the kitchen again, to unblock the back door. No sign of other earthlings. She stepped outside, dragged the board into the kitchen, dropped it on the floor and blocked the door again. Maybe now she could sleep.
She shrugged off her shoes, made a pillow of Buddy’s spicy-smelling jacket, stretched out sideways on the scratchy couch, drew her legs to her chest and rubbed her toes back to life. Remembering a mouse in Ma’s slipper two houses ago, she tucked her shoes next to her pocketbook under her blanket of drapes.
It must have been boss when there was only her and her mother, Reenie. Just Tez, as Ma called her, and Reenie. She wasn’t quite four when Jimmy came along. She didn’t remember having Ma to herself but it must have been heaven. Ma looked younger than thirty-three and, with makeup, Tez older than thirteen. They had the same curly black hair and brown eyes. If not for Jimmy, they could’ve lived as sisters. She closed her eyes and sank into that warm thought.
• • •
“Ter-eeeeez-a!”
She woke to a room as cold and gloomy as the night before, shot up and listened but the voice didn’t call again. She must’ve dreamt it. Light splintered from the edges of the plywood covering the window. She wouldn’t have known it was already nine if not for the glow-in-the-dark watch Ma had gotten her with Green Stamps so she’d be on time once in a while.
Allen would be having Sugar Pops and grape juice in the Howdy Doody glass that used to be hers. Ma, a boiled egg and rye toast. Jimmy, three basted eggs, six bacon strips and four pancakes. Tereza did the breakfast dishes on Saturdays and, later, took Allen to the movies so Ma and Jimmy could screw. They didn’t say they were going to but, when Tereza and Allen returned, that telltale fishy odor would be in the air and Ma’s voice would be throatier.
On Saturdays Jimmy was nicer to Tereza, probably afraid she’d crap out on babysitting. She hated the full-of-himself way he doled out the money: only enough for two tickets and a puny box of Dots to share, like nothing was theirs unless he gave it to them and what Ma made was his too. Ma acted like Saturday’s Jimmy was the real one. Embarrassed to own up to marrying a jerk, probably, because what would that make her?
“Give him credit once in a while,” Ma would say, “and you’ll see how sweet he can be.”
She might as well have told Tereza to balance on one finger. Jimmy hardly ever smacked Ma and Allen. He never hit their jaws so hard they practically amputated their tongues with their teeth. That time, he’d been scared shitless the hospital would call the cops. He bought her a Dale Evans lamp and didn’t raise a hand to her for months. That was when she was eleven and keener on Dale Evans.
She played the flashlight around the room: cobwebs, purple old lady flowers on the wallpaper, a pink and beige rug clumped with dog hair, a fireplace she’d use if she wasn’t afraid the smoke would give her away, half-a-dozen candlesticks as tall as her ringing the room, a windup phonograph and stack of records on a small dark table, bookshelves so high even Haggerty would’ve had to stand on tiptoe to reach the top shelf.
She couldn’t have gotten through that many books if she gave her life to it. The kids at school rolled their eyes when she read aloud. Nobody believed the words bounced around like Mexican jumping beans and gave her a headache. Her eyes tested perfect. Teachers said she didn’t apply herself; she only wanted to clown around and distract the class. She couldn’t help it if she was funny as hell. She could belch the alphabet from A to K. Do a great Elmer Fudd, Desi Arnaz, Imogene Coca.
She had
