He had spat the word across the counter. But hired her anyway. And taught her enough about dogs so that now she shuddered, knowing what would come—the twitching of flesh and agonized whine, the stomach walls grinding red and merciless in the cutting green dust, the eyes pleading silently …
Lon muzzled the dog’s face and roughed it back and forth. “Quit slobbering over me, stupid.” His tail whipped the air. “Big overgrown pup!” The Dalmatian shifted paws, scrambling against the fence. “Think you’re a lap dog, I’ll bet. Hey, you lonesome, pooch? All by yourself all day long? How come other dogs don’t like you?” Pushing his face and grinning at the fake growls. “You different? Is that why? That why the other dogs don’t like you?”
She grasped his paws firmly in one hand, then shoved him away from the fence and turned before he could resume the game.
A minute later she was back in the Plymouth.
Circling the neighboring blocks, as she had done so often before in the hope of catching a glimpse of Miss Chamberlin, Lon pondered the problem of what to do with the brown, grease-stained envelope. Throw it out the window and some other dog might get it.
At the corner of San Leandro Drive and Los Altos, she stopped the car. Climbing out, looking up and down the deodar-lined street, she dropped her package into the corner mailbox. When she heard the envelope hit the metal floor with a hollow thud, she leaped back into the Plymouth and drove home.
Lon said no more than was necessary during dinner, having learned that the shrill nasal whine of her mother’s voice would eventually wither from lack of response.
Mrs. Harris held a trembling fork in her hand, recounting the day’s events. “I told the girls, not one more committee! I’m swamped now, I told them. Supervising the Sunday School is a full-time job and don’t you think I’m not going to hold my ground.”
“And stick to your guns,” Lon’s father placated. “They expect too much of you.”
Long ago, Lon had concluded that Edwin Harris had been born for no ostensible purpose except to be agreeable. She had inherited her slim, angular body from him, but had been spared the myopic eyes that blinked at accounting sheets through thick horn-rimmed glasses by day and were the scourge of the Little League in the evenings. It was rare in the years since Eddie Junior had been born that she could bear to look at her father.
“When they find a good organizer, they work her to death,” Mrs. Harris said. “I told them that right to their faces.”
“Good for you,” encouraged the man behind the glasses.
“Verna had the gall to tell me I’ll have more time with the kids out of school. Came right out and asked me if Lon didn’t help around the house. Of course, what could I tell her?” Shaky hands left the table to pat the machine-frizzled hair. And the bright dark eyes turned accusingly toward Lon.
Lon counted frozen peas. And her father poured oil on the troubled waters. “Lon’s not like Evie and Judith. We’re all different, Mother.”
“She carried all the rocks.” This was an unexpected defense from the potato-stuffed mouth of Eddie Junior. “She brang the rocks for the rock garden.”
Lon threw him a wry thank-you with her eyes, sweeping in that moment the thin, simian face, wizened, somehow, far beyond its eight years. Mention of her sisters and the sight of Eddie’s face stirred the buried recollections, the unburied resentments. Evie and Judith, married now, but in those days primping and giggling and bossing her around the house, with no Eddie in view. And Dad tousling her hair, teasing, “Counted on you to play with Brooklyn, y’little monkey!” Never really complaining because she was a girl. Joking about it that way. Playful, controlled punches in the arm, full-swinging pats on the back when she stole third or scooped a playground grounder. And proud of her, with the pride nurturing, growing inside her.
And all this was B.E.—Before Eddie, the family afterthought who squealed, bleated, kicked and raged his protest vainly, ignored in his protests by Dad, who now had a son to be buddy to. For above all that was sacred, Eddie Harris Senior believed fervently in his mission as Father, the Pal. So that After Eddie, there came to Lon the life-vital need to be more a boy, more a pitcher, more, more—until the gentle swelling under the smudged T-shirt proclaimed the odds insurmountable, the competition too heartlessly stacked against her. So that now Dad had Eddie, and L.A., not Brooklyn, had the Dodgers. And Lon had the Island, discovered in reverie between her twelfth and thirteenth years—the undetermined pin-point in the Pacific to be peopled with a painstakingly selected population. Excluding the Harrises, one and all. Except Lon.
“People are noticing the way she runs around, Dad.” Her mother’s flute-pitched lecture on the state of the beltline of Lorraine Harris’s jeans was usually channeled through a neutral source. “You’d think if she has to dress like a hooligan, she could at least recognize where God put her waistline!”
The voice-sound blended with the whine in Lon’s head. Shut up! Just shut up and let me go.
“It could be worse.” Dad apologizing for her again. “She could be painting her face like a barn and staying out late with boys. Am I right, Lonnie?”
Lon nodded yes to the milk glass. And when it was over once more, she washed and dried the dishes mechanically, then closed the door of her room behind her.
The room, like the rest of the new gingerbread-tract house, was furnished in an abortive maple—rag-rug—pepper-grinder—lampbase attempt to resurrect old New England in new Los Angeles suburbia. But the Polynesian masks Lon had whittled from fallen dried palm fronds were her own. The draped fishnet and cork floats were hers. And the papers she took reverently from the bottom desk drawer belonged to a world that none other traveled, except by invitation of the fertile mind. Carefully she chose them, the residents of this unsurveyed microcosm of her fantasy.
She passed quickly over the world map, the South Pacific circled in red crayon and marked: In This General Area. Nor was there need, this evening, to review the List of Supplies (fish-hooks, canned milk, thread, pencils, paper)—some day to be alphabetically arranged, but scrawled now in green ink. And no time for the Sacred Rites of —— (name of Island to be selected when we arrive). No interest now in the Secret Incantations, lists, charts, schedules, village layouts, codes, rules, menus, constitution, cultural and recreational plans—or the notebook devoted to Ideas on How to Get There, including:
A. Boat (Check costs)
B. Where to Sail From
C. Knowledge of Sailing (Find someone who knows about it)
With none of these details was Lon Harris concerned on this evening of the last day of school in June. From the imposing sheaf of papers she pulled the list of proposed inhabitants. For reasons she had never considered, accepting the fact as casually as she chose a gray sweatshirt over an eyelet embroidered blouse, none of the names recorded was male. Under the heading LON HARRIS, HIGH PRIESTESS was another name she had added to the roll call early in the second Junior-year semester. With a surge of something inside her that had wavered before friendly Dalmatian eyes, she picked up a ballpoint pen and traced a question mark after SECOND HIGH PRIESTESS. Then grimly, her revenge tempered by the solemn responsibility of her ritual, she drew a line through the name of Netta Chamberlin. And in that moment, the sound in her head that was not a sound abruptly stopped.
