LAUREN SMALL
93
I helped Jeanie load her barge with leaves, but I was already tiring of
the game. I hated Jeanie. I hated her stringy brown hair, the stains on
her blouse, and the way she smelled, moist and rotted, like the compost
pile at the bottom of my father's garden. She was the kind of girl I
prided myself on never playing with at home. At home, I left girls like
her playing alone in the dirt while I hung around the playground fence
with my friends, practicing handclaps or counting off lowsies and highsies
with my Chinese jump rope. But there was no one else to play with at
my father's house. "How lucky you are," Rhoda had said when I ar–
rived, "to have a girl just your age living next door."
I kicked the hose and the tiny rivulets with their perfect clean
washed gravel turned into a smear of brown mud. Jeanie's school and
the rest of her town sank into the muck. She looked up at me, her yel–
low-brown eyes opened wide, but she knew better than to say anything.
''I'm sick of this game," I said.
Jeanie wiped her muddy hands on the back of her shorts. "We could
play berry sticks," she said.
We had a collection of berry sticks under the porch. They were
long and smooth, stripped free of bark. We threw them into the mul–
berry tree in front of my father's house and picked up the berries that
got knocked down. But I didn't feel like eating the sour-sweet mulber–
ries. I didn't feel like doing anything with Jeanie today. ''I'm going in–
side," I said.
"Wait," Jeanie said. "I'll show you something."
Jeanie had already shown me several things that summer. She took
me down the alley and showed me an abandoned shed with an old mat–
tress and a pair of men's pants in it. She showed me the best places to
find empty bottles to turn into the supermarket for nickels, and how to
scrounge for half-smoked cigarettes in the vacant lot at the end of the
block. But nothing like that appealed to me now. "Forget it," I said. I
climbed the porch steps.
Jeanie's voice came up, high and insistent, behind me. "It's in my
house."
Slowly I turned around. Ever since I arrived at my father's, I'd been
secretly watching Jeanie's house. I'd seen her mother go off to work in
the morning, with her dark red hair piled up high on the top of her
head and her tight skirts curving under her rear. And I'd seen her come
home in the evenings, with her bag slapping against the side of her leg
and a cigarette dangling between her fingers. I'd seen the way the
moonlight made their grey slate roof look slick, like it was wet, and I'd
watched their cat slinking under the porch at night.
But I'd never gonc insidc. Jeanie wouldn't let me. "I can't," was all
she'd say when I asked.
