Sleep, page 4
“A kiss! I never get any kisses,” Elizabeth told the salesman.
“Ma’am, I find that very hard to believe.”
“Now,” Elizabeth said, “go choose two more pairs.”
“What?”
“If you want these sneakers, you also have to choose two more pairs. Nice ones. Leather ones.”
“But—why?”
“You need at least three pairs of decent shoes for the year, and I don’t want to argue about it.”
She tried anyway. She had many shoes and listed them for Elizabeth, who didn’t care. “If you want to get the sneakers, you need to select two others. Simple enough.”
She was acting playful, but she wasn’t joking. She’d made up this game, and Margaret had to play it. The salesman was in on it too, like they’d planned it out together in advance. Neal was sitting a row away with The Lord of the Rings and the same white tennis shoes their father wore in a smaller size, undergoing no psychodrama.
Margaret looked at the blue sneakers, nestled back in their box. She could refuse them. She could take her mother’s bet, face her down. She could get nothing and win. But she wanted the sneakers. Elizabeth knew how much she wanted them.
Also she didn’t want to make a scene. You had to be really, really mad to pick a fight with Elizabeth. You had to be maximally, disproportionately angry, and she knew she didn’t have that kind of fury in her.
“Better get shopping,” Elizabeth said.
Margaret looked at the shoes, rows and rows of them, square-toed pumps and two-dimensional flip-flops and running shoes as inflated as tires. There were kitten heels and funky heels and sexy heels, and boots like smooth brown amputated legs. It didn’t seem possible that all of these were meant for actual feet, for actual walking. That Margaret would choose any, would wear them on her body to walk through the dirt—absurd. She stood in her socks surrounded.
But Elizabeth was watching her, the salesman smiling along. “I can always choose for you,” Elizabeth said, waggling a loafer, black and awful with a big gold buckle.
It occurred to her then that it wasn’t a game—it was a punishment. Of course it was. Dumb, Margaret. Elizabeth had made her write an apology letter that morning: Dear Jeremy and Mrs. Ricci, I am very sorry that I did not control my temper in the pool yesterday. Elizabeth had added a PS, inviting the Ricci boys to come over whenever they liked. They had dropped it in the mailbox on their way to the mall. That was the punishment for scratching Jeremy. But this was the punishment for defying Elizabeth.
“Can’t you just hurry up?” Neal said. “I’m hungry.”
The salesman fit her three shoe boxes into two big paper bags. “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” Elizabeth said. Margaret promised herself that she would never wear the shoes. She knew she would wear the shoes.
* * *
—
Lunch was always at Café la Mer. It was the nicest restaurant at the mall, which meant that it almost felt like you weren’t at the mall. The restaurant accomplished this by being windowless and very dark. A bare minimum of light trickled out from the gold lamps on each table and the sconces on the wall and dripped onto the silverware and the tense surfaces of the water glasses. Their bags barely fit under the table. When Elizabeth went to the bathroom, Margaret said to Neal, “She’s being so intense today.”
“What was with that shoe thing?” he asked.
“Yeah, how come she didn’t make you get so many?”
“Probably because I’m not a girl,” he said.
When she’s being a little mean to me, I think she’s having fun, she thought but did not say. She wouldn’t betray Elizabeth, not even to Neal. She kicked her feet against the bags so they crinkled and the boxes inside made a hollow beaten sound.
Elizabeth came back and paid the bill. This was Margaret’s last chance to bring up the training bra, but she didn’t want to mention it in front of Neal. Besides, she was worried that her mother would make her buy ten bras, twenty bras, ones like the angels wore in the ads, with lace and matching underwear, the kind that went up your butt.
Instead of going back the way they’d come, they took the short way to the car. They walked around the corner and into an empty area. The stores must have been under construction—their windows were opaque, the insides covered with white paper. Their footsteps echoed. A column stood in the center of the hall, surrounded by big shiny ferns. It looked like it was meant to display a map, with a red dot reading You are here, but there was no map. The plain white stone made it significant, like it was the mall’s own monument. Instead of the plants she felt there should have been some kind of sacrifice there, an offering, a pyre of burning shoes. She could dump her bags out onto the floor, everything she’d wanted and everything she hadn’t. Was this the lesson of the mall? That to get what you asked for, you had to take more than you asked for? Maybe wanting was always like this: Perverted. Stuffed down your throat.
“Margaret, hurry up. Big steps.”
On the other side of the column, the mall began all over again, like an error or a joke, and suddenly they were at Claire’s, where a dozen girls were waiting for their piercings in a line outside the door.
6
Had it always been there? If it had always been there, why had she never noticed it before? But if it hadn’t always been there, when had it gotten there, and how? It was an empty square in the wall, right down by the floor, maybe eight inches tall. It was like a door for elves or fairies—some kind of passageway. Margaret was washing her hair in the shower one afternoon when she noticed it. She rinsed off her face, looked again. It was still there.
The shower was on one side of the bathroom and the hole was on the other. It was the guest bathroom, technically—the one the kids used. Above it were shelves stacked with towels, the tissue box, the Q-tip jar, the cotton ball jar, the candle in a glass cup painted with white lilies. But beneath the ordinary arrangement: that empty square. She needed to go look at it, but she didn’t want to get close to it. Something could come out. A rat, maybe. Maybe lots of rats. Or something worse. Margaret didn’t want to think about it.
She turned off the shower, wrapped a towel tight around her chest. She took a step toward the hole. What would she see if she looked through it? She’d see the room on the other side of the wall, of course, the guest room with the blue quilt, and the rocking chair that Elizabeth didn’t like enough to put anywhere else, and the chest at the foot of the bed where Margaret kept the dolls she was too old to play with.
Or maybe it would be like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when the snowflakes float by the fur coats. Maybe she’d see inside the blackberry bush. Maybe she’d see nothing, just a black void forever, and the wind would whistle through it and suddenly all the bats of the attic would wake up and come winging.
But there was something in the hole. A step closer, and she could see it glinting. She thought of a jewel, of a genie’s lamp. She thought of an eye. But it was round and as still as glass. She got on her knees and put her hand in the hole and pulled it out. It was a video camera.
* * *
—
Margaret pushed the wastepaper basket in front of the hole. She hid the camera for days. She hid it in the guest room chest, at the very bottom, under the Barbies’ prom dresses. Every few hours she would close the door and fish it out and stare at it.
It read Panasonic, and it was boxy, glossy black, with a row of buttons down the top that she didn’t dare touch. She lifted it up to her eye, pulled it away. It was like finding a hole within the hole. She thought of the men she sometimes saw at intersections, with those cameras on stilts that counted how many cars went by. Maybe it was something like that, with a practical purpose that Margaret just didn’t understand. Maybe Elizabeth was planning to remodel the bathroom and the architect had asked for a video?
She touched the sides of the hole, and they were rough, more uneven than they’d looked at first. That part of the wall was thin, the wall between the guest room and the bathroom shelves. It made a hollow sound if you knocked on it. It looked solid enough, but a little saw could cut right through it, a saw like the one on a nail in the basement where her father kept his tools.
She tried to believe in these different possibilities, but it was hard, and when she caught Neal searching her bedroom, she knew. Basically, she knew.
* * *
“Why are you wearing a blazer?” Margaret asked Neal one morning a few days later over breakfast. Their dad had left for work an hour earlier. Elizabeth was paging through a fat book of upholstery swatches that she’d borrowed from the fabric store. She was thinking about redoing some armchairs. Neal looked like such a dweeb. “You look like such a dweeb,” she said.
“I’m wearing a blazer because we’re picking teams today for the final debate,” he said, “and the more professional I look, the likelier it is that I get on a successful team.”
“Just because you’re wearing a blazer doesn’t mean people will think you’re smart.”
“Margaret, don’t be obnoxious,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe you and Danny will be on the same team,” she told Neal.
“I hope not. Danny’s a nice guy and all, but he’s kind of a behavior case.”
“A behavior case?” Margaret was outraged. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look, I know you’re obsessed with Danny,” Neal said to her, “but you know he has ADHD, right?”
“So?”
“So he’s not exactly a winning asset, that’s all.”
Margaret fumbled for a comeback and came up empty. “Shut up,” she said.
“Margaret,” Elizabeth said, “if you’re going to be a bitch to your brother you can leave the table. He’s not being nasty to Danny; he’s just being honest.”
Margaret wanted to damage Neal; she wanted to scratch him, worse. “He is nasty,” she said under her breath.
“Young lady, what did you say?”
“I said, He is nasty.” She set the sentence down crisply on the table, and they looked at it there, solid as a cut of meat.
Margaret could feel Elizabeth’s anger cohering, her mind flicking through the possible punishments like they were pages in the book of swatches, flick, flick, flick. She was searching for something suitable, something that would make an impression. From Neal, nothing. He took a bite of his toast. She hadn’t scratched him at all. So she said it.
“Did you lose your camera, Neal?”
He was out of his chair, around the table. “Where is it?”
She wouldn’t shrink from him; she forced herself not to. “I hid it.”
“Where is it?” He was yelling. He couldn’t make her say. Could he?
Elizabeth’s head was turning between her two children. “Margaret, did you take your brother’s camera?” The same conversation they’d had a thousand times, ten thousand times, as brother and sister and mother. Who took whose toy. Take turns. Who hit, and why. Say sorry. The words were reflex, symbols connoting a commitment to fairness if not its actual attainment. But they didn’t apply—Elizabeth couldn’t make them apply—to this new conflict, whatever it was. She stopped, confused. “Neal…what camera?”
Margaret would show Elizabeth the video camera and what was on it, whatever was on it—herself, Margaret knew, herself in the shower was on it, her body there for anyone to see. She would show Elizabeth, and Elizabeth would understand, and then something would happen. That wasn’t Margaret’s responsibility. Her brain was moving fast now. She had to be careful; she had to be strategic.
If she moved to get the camera, Neal would get there first. He would tackle her. He was stronger. He would take the camera and crack it on the ground and she would have no proof. She felt sick but also full of a coiled-up energy, like some kind of ninja, a spy, the hero in the story. Neal whipped out of the room. She was smart, she let him go, she waited until he was in her bedroom and she could hear him searching through her drawers. And then she went up to the guest room and quietly brought down the camera.
When she handed it over to her mother, that boxy black hole of a device, she felt she would be safe. Her mother would say, That’s weird, Neal, that’s not appropriate. Would he get in big trouble? He’d probably have to go to boarding school. She hoped it wouldn’t be too terrible.
Her mother would hire a carpenter to fill in the square in the bathroom and a painter to paint it white again. Deeply shocking: that Neal had damaged Elizabeth’s house. Bad enough when they failed to hang up their jackets—it was like their mother could sense it from across the house, felt exactly when the jacket hit the floor, the disturbance in the air made by that rippling fabric. Neal had sawed through the wall, and their mother had sensed nothing. Margaret felt sorry for him then, for what was coming his way.
Elizabeth held the camera as far from her body as possible. “What is this?”
“It’s a camera. I found it in the bathroom.”
“Did Neal forget it there?”
“No. It was hidden. There’s a hole in the wall.”
“A hole? In the wall?”
“Yeah, Mom, the camera was in the hole.”
“Neal,” her mother called. “Come back down here.”
“No!” Neal would do something; he would confuse Elizabeth before she could begin to understand.
But he was already in the doorway.
“Is this yours?”
“No, it’s Jeremy’s.”
Jeremy Ricci’s? Was this payback for the scratches? But they were just scratches.
“I need to return it to him,” Neal said. “It’s his father’s, actually. Can I have it back now?”
He was so calm. How did he act so calm?
“Why did you put it in the bathroom?”
“No reason, it was just a joke.”
“A joke,” Elizabeth repeated.
“Mom,” she said. She needed to be gentle. Elizabeth was in the mud, Elizabeth was sinking, Margaret threw her facts like a rope: “I think there might be something on the camera; I think he—they—filmed something, in the bathroom.”
Elizabeth looked at Margaret, a look she didn’t understand because there was no anger in it. “Okay,” she finally said, and examined the black surface of the camera, shifting it around. “How does it work?”
Neal reached over and took it neatly out of her hands. “You just turn it on,” he said, sounding hassled, a middle-aged IT guy having to explain the obvious. He did it; he pulled the screen out and to the side and pushed play. Margaret didn’t want to but had to come closer to see.
A girl, her leg lifting higher and higher, filled the square.
It wasn’t Margaret. It was a cartoon. It was Sailor Moon in her pleated skirt, her pigtails streaming, kicking a man in the face.
Elizabeth breathed out.
“See?” Neal said. There was nothing to see. He shut the screen. He walked out with the camera and whatever was on the camera. Maybe there was nothing on it. Maybe it was two hours of Sailor Moon and only Sailor Moon. Maybe it had been a joke, ha ha. After all, the camera had been off the afternoon when she found it. Maybe she should apologize to him now, for being so crazy, for acting so rude.
And yet the camera had been waiting for her. Most days she showered in the morning. If anyone had wanted to catch her, they’d have known when to look. Most days she showered quickly, sleepily. She tried to think how long it could have been there without her noticing. Maybe morning after morning she’d been caught on that screen: Margaret naked in the shower, Margaret sitting on the toilet, pulling her shirt over her head, bending over her socks, frame after frame of her body recorded over the cartoon right up to the moment when Neal pushed play.
Elizabeth hadn’t rewound the tape, so now they would never know what was on it.
Whatever happened next, no one was going to protect her. Too late, Margaret understood what Elizabeth’s expression had meant. She had been asking for help, pleading with Margaret, just this once, for a really big favor. She’d been saying, Please don’t make me look.
7
It was very late in the afternoon and something small was in the grass. “What is that?” Biddy bent down.
“Don’t touch it.”
It was a curled tip of black fur, soft, pettable, as plush as the velveteen lovey she used to rub against her face to fall asleep at night, but fresher. It looked both strange and very familiar. Bits of dark were splattered on the grass around it.
“Oh my god,” Margaret said. “It’s Jane’s tail.”
“What do you mean, Jane’s tail?”
“Look.”
“No.”
“It is, though, isn’t it? Just the very end?” It was the exact same black. She looked around. “What if there’s a wolf?”
“We should go inside.”
“No…Jane could be hurt.” Margaret imagined the hurt cat limping, foreshortened, needing her help. Or a more horrible thought: the wolf had eaten her up and only this little bit of her was left, remnant of cat, silky pelt in the grass.
“What do we do then?”
Serial killers tortured cats. That was how they started, when they were kids. Everyone knew that. You could prove someone was a psychopath if as a boy he’d cut up cats.
Mom? Margaret thought. Elizabeth had known what to do about the goat; she would know what to do about the cat. Mom was who you asked for help. But instead she said, “Let’s get Danny.”
Danny came out and nudged the black fur bravely with a stick. It turned over, revealing a bare belly and pink hands, its snouty pink countenance. He couldn’t stop laughing. “It’s a rodent,” Danny said. “I think it’s a mole.”
