Suicide's Girlfriend (13 page)

I
T HAD BEEN
snowing for days. The window seat in the Pierce kitchen held an evening paper all lit up with color photos testifying to the storm's extravagance: a trio of people in fluorescent caps skied off the roof of a barn and down onto the lake; a woman dug a lavender tunnel in the direction of her greenhouse; and there were cars, too, buried, their barely exposed rooftops bright and tempting as shells on a sandy beach.

Heather Pierce and I sat in the kitchen—her parents' kitchen, I would say now, but back then it was still Heather's kitchen, too—a handsome, cozy room, cram-packed with early American reproductions.

Heather and I drank vodka. To soften its blows, we kept our mouths full of lemon drops. Before discovering vodka with lemon drops, Heather and I had tried vodka mixed with Tab. Diet Rite Cola. Orange juice. Chocolate milk. Fresca. Grape soda. We were sixteen years old. Best friends, but on the skids.

“Shards
of bone,” Heather said.”
Barbed
wire.” She was uncharacteristically energetic that night. Ever since I'd arrived at the house, she had been snapping her teeth, tossing her head around like a Doberman. She rose out of her chair to bring her face close to mine as she detailed
how, the night before, a boy from our school—someone by the name of Kevin Hammersmith—this Kevin had lost control of his car on a country road, spun out across a cornfield at a high rate of speed. Heather frowned, tipped her forehead toward me. I couldn't see her eyes when she slashed her fingers across her neck, made a slippery, gurgling noise to indicate how a string of barbed wire had decapitated the boy; still, I took her gesture as meant for me in more ways than one—something threatening that had to do with my neglect of her over the last year.

I tried to deflect all that by acting weary, a little bored with her story. “Jesus, Heather,” I said, “that's enough.”

She looked up at me, then: “So you
were
listening!”

“Of course I was listening.” I looked away and toward the dark dining room, the street beyond. Outside, big snow plows roared past the house, and their revolving lights made terrible passes through the window; the lights blanched the dining room chairs, made the chairs pulse with ghostly energy—any moment now, it seemed those chairs might push themselves away from the empty table, crash on through the windowpanes in pursuit of the beams that had brought them to life.

“Merde!”
Heather cried, then grinned when I turned to her. I grinned back. Heather used to ask me to set up dates for her and I tried. The boys always objected that she was too tall, but they were idiots and they'd know it a few years down the road. Heather was lovely, with full lips and the sort of chocolate eyes that made all other colors seem faded, overexposed. Still, that night, drunk on vodka, she looked odd, her skin glassy and red and, worse, that morning, she'd dyed her caramel-colored hair to a black so strawy and bunched up on either side of the part she might as well have dropped an open dictionary on her head.

“All right.” She pressed the backs of her hands to her cheeks, the way some people do when checking their temperatures. “Listen,” she said, “something incredible has happened, Jenny.” She hurried to the base of the stairs leading to the second floor. Listening for her parents.
We were always on guard against our parents' catching us at one thing or another: Heather, because hers thought well of her; I, because mine had a tendency to hit, push, throw whatever wasn't nailed down.

Heather and I had been friends since we were nine years old and signed up for the same swim class at the YWCA. Together, we'd listened to our older siblings' recordings of the Stones and her dad's
Madama Butterfly
and
Turandot
. In each other, we'd found our ideal playmate. Heather not only liked books but she knew as well as I that when our Barbie dolls fell asleep on a picnic, our Ken dolls should take advantage of the opportunity to remove the Barbies' cute outfits and press up against their naked bodies. Together, Heather and I had prepared for romance the way some people prepare for careers as ballerinas or concert pianists. In the spring of eighth grade, in my eagerness to show Heather the Emily Dickinson poem “I cannot live with you,” I ran all of the way across town from my own junior high school so I might be at Heather's own school when it let out. And how had I felt that day, legs scissoring through the spring air? Joyful to be going to my friend.

Two years later, however, sitting in the Pierces' kitchen, watching Heather stand at the base of the stairs to listen for her parents, I knew things had changed. I had fallen in love with a boy from the local college and been neglectful of Heather. While love had me pinned to the backseat of an ancient Chevrolet, Heather acquired new friends. More and more often, I felt dispossessed in her company—like one of those old lords who had stayed away from the kingdom too long and, upon returning, found his castle gone, the stones carted off to become the walls of other people's houses, or pens for confining hogs and cattle.

Still, when Heather said, “We're safe,” and, smiling, turned away from the stairs, I felt at home. I knew where I sat: in a ladder-back chair I'd sat in hundreds of times. I knew the source of the little shadow that hung like a broken thumb on the kitchen's far wall: Mrs. Pierce's antique butter mold, single-serving, thistle design carved in its bottom. I knew where Mrs. Pierce kept her string and Elmer's glue,
and that paper bags for lining the trash basket sat at the back of the bread drawer.

Boys
, I want to say now.
Boys
. As if they explain everything, and of course they don't. But they
did
lurk behind most of our problems, didn't they?
Boys
, after all, were the silver on the mirror that gave us back our reflections, or didn't, and so, naturally, Heather and I thought boys were the most important things in the world.

Heather did a little dance that night as she came back across the kitchen toward me. “What it is,” she said, “I don't want my parents to hear, but I've found out I'm a
witch
, Jenny! Kevin Hammersmith was a techie for the play and
I
put a curse on him at the cast party. I'm the one who made him die!”

She stared hard at me. I don't know what she expected, but while she took a chair at the table, I squeezed one eye shut and, with the other, stared across the silver ring of refractions caught on the vodka bottle's lip. A witch: this struck me as not so much impossible as untenable. Yes, I had come prepared to jump through a few hoops to get back in Heather's good graces, but I didn't mean to offer obeisance, and it would have taken obeisance for me to agree to her being a witch. This being the case, I tried to put some sort of woozy amusement on my face. God knows what I came up with. The boy with the Chevrolet recently had broken my heart, and I'd hardly slept since the occasion, hardly eaten. My thoughts had acquired a queer way of tumbling forward, an almost visual sensation, something like watching a defective television.

“Well, a
witch,”
I said.

Heather stood, spread her blunt fingers on the table, pressed down on their tips for balance. “Somebody brought a Ouija board to the party, and I couldn't make a mistake, Jen. I felt my power, head to toe!” She swept her arm through the air in a broad gesture characteristic of the attorney she'd recently portrayed in the school play. “Everyone there said I was a witch, but Kevin Hammersmith laughed, and that's when I put a curse on him.”

Perhaps, I thought—bored, blue—perhaps I could bring the conversation
around to my broken heart by edging us onto the subject of telepathy. I could explain how, each night, I lay in my bed and sent messages to the little college that sat above the lake, to the dormitory housing the boy who had broken my heart, and how I pictured those messages traveling along a beam of light—

“So?” Heather said. “Do you believe I'm a witch, Jenny?”

“Sure, why not?” I answered without enthusiasm.

In our reflections on the night-backed window, both of us sat with heads canted to one side, hands supporting cheeks. A dreamy, passive look favored by certain girls and women for studio portraits, though I couldn't have imagined a girl who didn't privately understand such postures expressed a nature gone underground, constant attendance to the construction of an effect.

The alcohol, of course, had competing claims. The alcohol had pushed both Heather and me a little faster to the point in the evening where we'd always begin to lose our fashionable gloss. Somewhere along the line, Heather already had smeared one eye's makeup; and I, through thoughtless leaning, had flattened half of my carefully arranged hair.

Beyond our reflections, the Pierces' yard looked strange, all the well-known bushes and fences canceled by the moonlit snow that swept down to the lake and on to the other side, where only the dark rim of trees suggested the shore.

“Jenny,” Heather said, “I want you to drive me out there, to that cornfield where Kevin Hammersmith crashed.”

I stared out the window, sucked on my boozy mouthful of lemon drops. At first, the drops always felt rough and dusty, like the cut edge of a piece of glass, but then they went silky smooth, yielded the very best song: Sweet! Sour! Sweet!

What was I willing to do to win back Heather's friendship? What was not too much? I rebelled at the idea of driving her to the accident site, standing out in some cold cornfield as if I believed Heather were fate's own engineer.

“Heather,” I said, “I'm too drunk to drive.”

She laughed. “When were you ever too drunk to drive, Jenny?”

At the time, I was young enough to feel flattered by this question, and warmed, too, by the way it pointed up the duration of our friendship. Heather knew me. Knew that I sometimes ended up in a ditch or ran over things that punched holes in gas tanks and screwed-up undercarriages, but that none of that ever stopped me from putting keys in ignitions and making my drunken way down whatever road lay before me.

“Okay,” I said, “okay, I'll drive, but, Heather, you know, maybe it was just a
regular
accident.”

She shook her head, hard. From her back pants' pocket, she brought out a curl of newsprint. “Look. We were just leaving the party when I put the curse on, and twenty minutes later, he's dead! Twelve
seventeen”

I read the article through, though I'd read it that morning. Did I mean to seem interested now? Or to pretend the news hadn't even caught my eye earlier in the day? Both, and even the recognition of such contradictions seems inadequate.

According to the article, there had been a passenger in the Hammersmith car, John Arthur Gibbs, who had worn a seat belt and “suffered mild frostbite to the ears while walking to a nearby farm for assistance.”

“Poor Gibbs,” I said. “I suppose he wishes he'd lost at least a toe or something.”

Heather tapped a finger on the accompanying photo. “Recognize Kevin?”

An invulnerable-looking boy, forehead a great white knee pressing out from behind a swag of dark, slippery bangs. Out of respect for the dead I stopped myself from pointing out his clear resemblance to the young Adolf Hitler.

“Can't say he rings a bell, Heather.”

With great purpose and caution—they might have been the twin lids atop of steaming twin pots—Heather lifted her eyebrows. “I suppose you don't know who Tim Hungerford is either?” she said. “I cursed Tim Hungerford and he broke his arm.”

During our freshman year, Heather had had a terrible crush on Tim Hungerford—Airedale hair, handsome Roman nose. Of course I knew who he was. In the school library, just days before, I had watched one of Tim's friends draw breasts upon a cast on Tim's arm; I had even witnessed the way in which the friend transformed the breasts into long-lashed eyes at the approach of the school librarian.

What did Heather want? To highlight my isolation? For me to pretend that I did not remember how humiliated she had felt over her failure with that boy?

“Hungerford?”
I repeated the name as if it were so unfamiliar that I had a hard time fitting it into my mouth. What a relief, then, to hear Mr. and Mrs. Pierce on the stairs, to hiss, “Vodka, Heather,” and hop off the window seat so she could set the bottle inside with the
National Geographies
and road maps.

Heather's parents were sturdy, kind-hearted Midwesterners. In their party clothes, they looked vulnerable as little kids. “Hey,” I said, “you guys are pretty snazzy tonight!”

“Why, thank you, Jenny!” Mr. Pierce wiggled his eyebrows around—lively wiggles, like something caught on a hook. He was always doing this, as if people amused and confounded him, which I suppose makes good sense.

I hardly admitted it to myself at the time, but I thought Heather was incredibly lucky to have such parents: Mr. Pierce, who actually asked Heather and me questions at dinner; Mrs. Pierce, with her sunny approval for Heather and my plans, our clothes, the little skits we used to make up and perform in the living room. Of course, now that I'd neglected Heather, things were different. Instead of smiles, Mrs. Pierce turned something like a searchlight on me. She treated me, I suppose, the way my mother had always treated Heather.

“You think that Heather's such a good friend of yours,” my mother would say after Heather's visits, and then she'd explain how, oh, maybe, how while I was taking a shower, she'd overheard Heather
sniggering
on the phone, yes, and my mother was pretty darn sure that sniggering was about me, Jenny, Jenny the fool.

After the Pierces left that night, I asked Heather, “So, did you dye your hair black because of this . . . witch thing?”

At the moment, Heather was retrieving the vodka from the window seat, but as she straightened she snapped, “You were
staring
at it just then, weren't you? My hair?” She pulled a strand in front of her face, gave it a stern, reproving look. “Don't you think I know it's terrible?
Merde!”