The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  If this is the only person who saw what happened to Sam, we are in trouble. I doubt she will ever be able to tell us anything. Suddenly I am the one made of thin, wispy cobwebs, in danger of blowing away bit by bit.

  After Dora won the Ice Classic, a lot of kids in Birch Park started getting ideas. If she could win, then maybe it was possible that other kids from our neighborhood could get a lucky break, too. Everybody wanted to grab on tight and hitch a ride on the skirts of Dora’s success. But I wasn’t fooled.

  I had been right about holding my breath and not believing when something is too good to be true. Gran found Ray’s white T-shirt and threw it in the wash, not knowing at all whose it was or what it meant. The smell of cedar was completely washed out of it by the time I heard that he was dating Della May, one of the new girls who had moved up from Outside. I had been too embarrassed to face Mrs. Stevens again, and Ray let me know pretty quickly that he wanted a girlfriend who would sleep over, not one who just talked on the telephone late at night.

  At first I told Gran that I probably had the flu, which I hoped was true. After a while I knew it couldn’t be that—I’m pretty sure she did, too, but she said nothing—not even when I stole a whole box of saltines and took them to school to keep in my locker.

  Ray would walk by sometimes and act like we’d never even met. He and Della May sounded like a bad country western song, and she always walked with her arm linked through his, as if she might suddenly end up back in Texas if she wasn’t tethered to him every second. There are worse things that could happen to you, I thought, but who was I to warn her?

  She had a funny accent, and when she said his name she’d drag the A out so long, I could hear it even after they’d turned the corner by the broken water fountain.

  Then I’d stare at the water fountain, wishing it had magical powers and would bubble up a secret potion that I could drink and my life could go back in time. I’d even settle for just as far back as that swim meet—when he flicked me on the butt with a towel and asked me to come to a party—so I could say no. But this broken fountain hadn’t even bubbled up water the entire time I’d been at this school, so obviously anything more would be asking a lot.

  Even now I had no plan for the future, except that I knew I was never going to tell Ray what was happening. I had to do this all on my own—somehow—because I wasn’t going to trust anyone else ever, ever again.

  —

  Luckily the school year ended and my secret was still small enough that I’d managed to hide it from everyone, even Selma. I spent the first part of summer break sleeping. I could almost convince myself that I was Sleeping Beauty, and if I just managed to stay unconscious for the next few months maybe I’d wake up and be a whole new person. I didn’t know it then, but in a way, that’s what was going to happen; I just didn’t realize how far from a fairy tale it was going to be.

  —

  “Are you sure you should eat all that Spam and a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and three pieces of peanut butter toast?” Lily asks one morning. “You’re getting kind of fat, Ruth.”

  “Well, that’s a nice thing to say,” I answer, shoving the whole slab of disgusting pink fake meat into my mouth and glaring at her.

  “Suit yourself. But Bunny said something about it the other day,” she goes on. “She said even Dora has noticed.”

  Well, isn’t that great? Dora, whose entire life was on display, nightgown and all, has decided it’s okay to talk about my weight? Maybe she thinks we’ve all forgotten that scene between her and her dad, now that she’s won the Ice Classic?

  I feel myself start to shake. Lately I can get worked up about nothing. But this isn’t nothing. Of all people, Dora Peters is talking about me? So, now that she has money and a nice cozy home, I suppose I’m fair game, am I? I can just picture her over at Dumpling and Bunny’s, all of them sitting around the table and Dumpling’s mother making sourdough pancakes and venison sausage; I can smell the food they eat from the merry-go-round. Actually, I can smell food from almost anywhere these days. I have never been jealous of those girls before, but I can feel it rearing its ugly green head. I wish I could be anyone but me—even Dora—which means I’ve really hit rock bottom.

  I want to jump up and yell, “Lily, you dumb shit, I’m pregnant!”

  Why not? Gran is at the sink, pretending that her ears have fallen off and she’s blind as a bat. Suddenly she can’t see anything that’s happening to me, when she used to watch me like a hawk. How ironic that the bigger I get, the more invisible I become.

  Except that I overheard her on the telephone, making a reservation for a bus ride to Canada under my name.

  I could see how Lily might be absolutely clueless, considering she doesn’t even understand the difference between her and Bunny, but Gran? I had no idea that the silent treatment could be so much worse than public humiliation. Gran has more than one trick up her sleeve.

  When I get up and head out the door, I pause, wondering if she’ll ask me where I’m going or when I’m coming back. The only sound in the room is Gran’s yellow dish gloves squeaking as she rubs the soapy sponge across a plate. She says nothing. When I leave I make sure to slam the screen door extra hard, and still she doesn’t come out. I am officially not even worth reprimanding.

  I walk all the way to the Salvation Army without looking up, not at the river or the little white church where my parents got married, and not at Crazy Dancing Guy who is strangely silent when I pass. It’s one of those hot summer days that smells smoky from distant wildfires, and I am sticky with sweat by the time I push through the Salvation Army’s jingly door.

  I need to buy some bigger clothes. Dora’s mother is there with some of her friends, and when I pass them in the aisle, well, let’s just say they did not go to the Gran school of feigned obliviousness.

  “Someone’s got a bun in the oven,” one of them chortles.

  I don’t look up; I just push my cart slowly between them. I stop and pretend to admire a rack of long woolen underwear. A person can never have enough long underwear.

  “Remember those days, Paula?” The woman talks loudly, as if Paula is a hundred miles away instead of right next to her, holding a fuzzy toilet-seat cover that looks like it was made out of a poodle.

  “You was jealous then, girl, don’t try to lie. Alvin got his daddy’s nice station wagon for the weekend and he put that mattress back in there.”

  They are laughing so hard, I inch slowly away, trying not to get caught in between the memory of someone named Alvin and his daddy’s car.

  “I was not jealous. You coulda got frostbit back there ’cause the heater broke. You forget that?”

  “Remember you was gonna name the baby Frosty the Snowman?” Dora’s mom chimes in, and they all explode in a fit of giggles.

  I cannot imagine talking so freely about what I did with Ray. And it wasn’t in the back of some car on a freezing cold night. It had meant something.

  Right up until it didn’t. For him. I hate the feeling that this is exactly what you hear about. How nothing changes for the guy. I am a cliché and a statistic all in one. And nothing says that louder than this moment, standing in the Salvation Army completely alone, looking for clothes that six of my closest friends probably could have all fit into at once. Except I don’t have six close friends. I’m getting close to having no friends at all.

  Is Ray letting Della May sneak into his room, I wonder? Does she look out at the lake and then go home with the smell of cedar in her hair?

  I put my face into a gray hoodie with an orange basketball etched on the front and breathe in the smell of someone else. Someone named Lucy, according to the name embroidered on the front of it. Over the top of the basketball it says SHOOT FOR THE STARS, and it smells like sweat and mildew. But that’s better than cedar. If I ever smell cedar again, I will probably throw up.

  “Are you okay, young lady?”

  I look up into the face of the oldest man I’ve ever seen. And for the first time since Ray’s m
om looked at me with her sad blue eyes, I feel like someone is actually seeing me—not my face or my widening belly, but the me that I’ve become since my parents left, since Gran cut off my hair, and since I realized that my life was never going to be the same again.

  An hour later, I’m still sitting in the back room at the Salvation Army, my face puffy from crying, and George, the crinkly-faced manager, has given me a doughnut and some Swiss Miss cocoa. In between customers, he keeps coming back to check on me. He doesn’t say anything, just pats me on the shoulder or hands me a tissue, then goes back out to ring up sales.

  “Want me to call someone?” he finally says after checking on me four or five times. His voice wraps around me like a warm bath and I’m afraid I’ll start crying all over again, just when I’ve finally managed to pull myself together. “How about your friend with those big brown eyes?”

  “You remember us?” Selma and I shop here sometimes after school, but we had never really paid attention to George before. It seems rude now, after how nice he’s been to me.

  “I ain’t seen eyes like that since my seal-hunting days,” he says. His own eyes are the size of two tiny black apple seeds, and yet they look right through me.

  I just nod at him, but I do not want to call Selma. Who, by the way, would be thrilled to know George thinks she has eyes like a seal. Ironically, that’s what we were fighting about, on the surface anyway. Selma was going on and on about how her real mother was probably a selkie, one of those half-human, half-seal creatures that can take off their skin and walk out of the ocean during the full moon. This can’t possibly be true, but Selma loves to fantasize about anything that might give her story an air of mystery. The reality is that she never met her parents, and Abigail, her mom, doesn’t like to talk about it. Maybe she doesn’t know who Selma’s parents are, but she’s not really forthcoming with the details.

  It’s one of the things Selma and I have in common: not knowing what happened to our mothers. But I’m fed up with Selma’s ridiculous make-believe stories. It was fine when she was ten, but now it’s just childish.

  Mostly, my emotions are kind of all over the place these days. So it’s better if I just shut everyone out.

  “No thanks,” I tell George, “I don’t really want to call anyone.”

  I also cannot imagine walking out of this office. I want to stay here for a hundred years, or until I eat so many doughnuts I no longer fit through the door.

  But of course, I do walk out into the dusty June day about an hour later with a bag full of free clothes, because George refused to let me pay. I’m wearing the basketball hoodie and hoping maybe I can somehow evolve into this “Lucy” person and leave Ruth behind. Whoever she was, she wasn’t tiny, and we’ve at least got that in common.

  —

  At the little white church, I stop and sit down on the steps to watch the river meander by. It’s still pretty high after the spring melt. A statue of the Virgin Mary is off to my left, her hands folded over her blue gown. “How did you get them all to believe it was a virgin birth?” I ask her, but of course she doesn’t answer. I notice that her eyes are cast off to the side, as if to deflect questions like this from girls like me.

  My parents were married in this church, but we never went to Mass until we moved in with Gran. My parents called themselves “lapsed Catholics,” and when I was younger I thought it meant they ran laps around Catholics.

  That doesn’t even make any sense.

  I have an early memory of my mother and father whispering together when they thought I was asleep. Our house was so tiny I slept on their floor, in a makeshift bed my father built out of camping pads and thick woolen blankets. I liked to hear them talking in their secret adult language, which lulled me to sleep every night. But as I get older, the words that seemed random and foreign then have grown more recognizable. I can now string them together like a family heirloom that hangs around my neck, almost strangling me. Words like rules, suffocating, serious, guilt, and sin.

  “Thank you for saving me from that,” Mama whispered, and I realize now she meant Gran. My father saved her, but there’s nobody left to save me and Lily. I think about the baby growing inside me. If I can’t save myself, how can I ever save someone else?

  I know Gran has probably already made all the arrangements for this baby to be adopted. Will it hate me?

  I’m so lost in my own thoughts that I hardly notice Dumpling, who has come up and is now sitting on the steps next to me. I like Dumpling, but we don’t hang out or walk together or sit on the merry-go-round at Birch Park, like she and Dora do. We usually don’t sit on the steps of churches together, either. I glance over at her, because I’m sure she knows this, too, but she just shrugs and looks out at the river.

  It’s surprisingly nice. I can feel myself relaxing and soon I’m not just stealing glances at her, but really looking. She has a long black braid tied at the bottom with a red ribbon. I’m surprised at how familiar that ribbon is to me. I guess when you walk behind someone for as many years as I have, there are things you don’t even realize you’re noticing.

  I’m also struck by the way Dumpling doesn’t resemble her name at all. Maybe I’d never really looked at her properly. She is slim and beautiful, with the most amazing olive skin and almond-shaped eyes. Her black hair shines like oil in the late afternoon sun.

  Suddenly I want to tell her everything. But all I manage to say is “I’ll be getting sent away soon.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I say. “I’m a disgrace to my family.”

  “I wouldn’t say that at all,” she says. “Isn’t there an auntie or someone who would want to raise your baby?”

  She says “your baby” as if it’s not a horrible ugly secret but just a fact. Maybe even something sweet.

  “Do people do that?”

  “Where we come from, babies are a gift to the whole village. Everyone loves them.”

  “I can see why Lily is dying to be Athabascan,” I say.

  Dumpling just laughs. “It would be easier for Lily if she was, I guess.”

  “Really? Even though people talk about you?”

  But maybe Dumpling doesn’t know this. I look away, embarrassed at saying too much.

  “Does all this talk come from the same people who would send you away for something as silly as this?” she asks, pointing to my belly.

  She has a good point, so I shut up. For a few minutes it feels like we are standing on opposite banks of the same river.

  After a while, almost as if she is reading my mind, Dumpling asks in a quiet whisper, “Remember the flood?”

  The flood, I think, and of course I remember it. It was years ago, but I can still hear the sound of the river—too close, too fast. The skiff picking us up on the doorstep of Gran’s house, the sound of the outboard. The smell of fuel. I remember seeing a dead baby moose float past. You can’t unsee something like that once you’ve seen it, no matter how hard you try. It had deep brown eyes and huge paintbrush lashes, just like Selma’s.

  Less than an hour ago, George said Selma’s eyes reminded him of a seal, and now I’m comparing them to a moose. I would laugh if it didn’t make me suddenly miss her.

  Selma, who had been so stoic about getting shots with a humongous needle during the flood. It had impressed me. I wanted her as a friend because she was unlike anyone I’d ever met. But I don’t say any of this to Dumpling when she asks if I remember the flood. I just say, “Sort of.”

  Dumpling smiles. But she’s already back there, I can tell. And when she speaks again I can hear the sound of the river in her voice.

  It’s not civilized for a river to jump its banks. It’s like having a friend turn on you, and I see Ray’s face as I think this. I rub my belly and think about how clueless I’ve been about things like babies and floods, and all the other ways the world might turn uncivilized when you least expect it.

  “My dad put us all in the skiff,” Dumpling is saying. “We were headed t
o the high school like everyone else, but there wasn’t room for all of us in one boat. So my mom stayed behind. I waved to her as we pulled out and watched her get smaller and smaller, like a tiny planet that was suddenly a million miles away.”

  This is the most I’ve ever heard Dumpling say at one time.

  “All kinds of things floated past us: gas jugs, rubber boots, old tires. There was an entire refrigerator with its door swung open, spilling out ketchup and mustard and jars of pickles right next to the library, when it was in that old cabin on First Avenue. Do you remember that?”

  I do, but I’m thinking about the refrigerator with all of its secrets spilled out for the world to see, like the hookers who used to flash little bits of themselves just one block away. We used to go to the log cabin library on First Avenue, and like the flood, sometimes the hookers jumped their banks and strolled too far south, and we would catch a glimpse of a fishnet stocking, or the flash of a feather boa peeking out from under a parka.

  “Then we passed a red silk slip, stuck in a fence.”

  Wait. I remember this, too. “We laughed at that,” I tell her. “All of us. Gran got so mad, I thought she was going to smack us.”

  “Really?” Dumpling says. “You remember it?”

  I nod, wondering who it might have belonged to and what had happened to her. Was it one of the Second Avenue hookers? They had never seemed like real people when we were kids, just part of the scenery. Little girls stayed on First Avenue at the library, with our picture books and quiet voices, and the hookers and drunks stayed on Second, like a movie that stayed on a screen; everyone in their places.

  I can see this clearly now, from where we sit on the steps of the little white church. If you don’t follow the rules—even one single time—there might be floods and earthquakes, or worse.

  “I thought it was so fancy,” Dumpling is saying, “I pointed it out to my dad and he got this huge grin. ‘Your mother would look like a beautiful salmon in that,’ he said. My dad loves salmon.” She smiles as if the memory is a peppermint stick and she’s licking it, slowly savoring every bit.