The Burning Girl Read online

  “Or maybe he’s embarrassed”—I knew that here I was on thin ice—“that being so slight himself, he likes a larger lady?”

  Cassie snapped a dish towel at me, but I could see the thought was a relief—that his hidden perversion might just be an attraction to plumpness. She even smiled. “That is not kind to my mom,” she said. And then, “She hasn’t deserved my kindness much lately.”

  “Tell me about the Peter thing, then.”

  “Let me take this coffee in, and then we’ll go upstairs.”

  LATER, IN THE CAR on the way home, my mother was furious with me. “You girls were so rude,” she hissed. My father sighed. “I was ashamed of you both. Cassie—well, it’s none of my business, but really, Julia, you’re old enough to know better.”

  “Come on, Carole,” my father said, emasculated in the passenger seat. “You’re being a bit harsh, don’t you think? They’re kids.”

  “They laughed at him, Rich! Obviously too. So rude.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “When you came in with the coffee and stood in the doorway and rolled your eyes while he was speaking—”

  “He didn’t see,” I said, “and Bev had her back to us.”

  “That’s not the point, Julia, and you know it.”

  “He did go on a bit,” my father said. “Nothing against the guy, but he seems a little . . . almost—”

  “He’s, like, autistic or something, right?”

  Normally, my mother would have laughed. She would have been on my side. “So you’re a neurologist or a psychiatrist now? You’re diagnosing people at age twelve? Where do you get off?”

  “But Mom—”

  “And if he were on the spectrum, would that be something to titter about? If he had one leg, or if he was deaf, would you make fun of him?”

  “Of course not—but Mom—”

  “It seems to me profoundly lacking in charity, as well as good manners. I don’t like to think that’s how we’ve raised you. Shame on you.”

  “Carole, that’s a bit much.” My father put his hand on her arm, but she had her hand on the steering wheel and jerked it as she knocked him away. The car swerved on the median. Luckily there was no other traffic. “Hey babe, it’s not worth an accident!” My father’s voice was quiet, but I could tell he was shocked. “What are you so worked up about?”

  “I don’t know.” My mother’s voice was suddenly quiet too, as if she’d scared herself. “I don’t know.”

  We were silent for a minute. Then I apologized. “We didn’t mean to behave badly,” I said. “We just wanted to go upstairs, you know?”

  My mother took a deep breath. “I know, sweetie. I overreacted.” And a minute later: “There was something so not-right about it all.”

  “Doesn’t mean it was Julia’s fault. Or even Cassie’s.” My dad fiddled with the vents. “He’s an odd duck, Shute.”

  “Bev’s not exactly run-of-the-mill herself,” my mother conceded. “I’m glad for her. She’s been alone a long time.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” I said. “She has Cassie.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “You mean, better a date with Anders Shute from Maine than another secret tryst with her friends Ben & Jerry from Vermont?”

  “Rich!” She shook her head, but she wasn’t really angry anymore. “Shame on you. Now I see where our daughter gets it from.”

  We pulled into our driveway and could see everyone through the living-room window, dimly but arrestingly lit. Grandpa was slumped, asleep on the sofa, with Una rapt beside him, knees to her chest, in her candy-colored onesie pajamas, her glasses reflecting the TV’s light. Grandma knitted busily while Jake sprawled on the floor with his phone, eyes on the little screen rather than the big one. Mike and Eileen and the twins weren’t in the picture—presumably the twins were in bed—but even without them the scene looked so cozy and normal. So safe, was what I thought.

  IT’S HARD TO grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time. That fall in art class, I learned about the Spanish painter Goya—our art teacher was obsessed with him—and I ended up writing a paper about his life. Only much later, when we learned about the French Revolution in world history, did I realize Goya was getting going as a court painter in Madrid at the same time as Marie Antoinette was having her head chopped off. You’d never think it. Spain and France are right next to each other, but it was as if he were on a different planet—in the same way that he was in seventh-grade art class for me, and the French Revolution was in ninth-grade history, and who was going to make the connection?

  That’s sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.

  AFTER THANKSGIVING, Mr. Cartwright, who taught honors English, took me aside and asked if I’d like to join the speech team. It was prestigious: our middle school had been best or second-best in the state for six years running, winning awards and even competing in Washington, DC. It didn’t occur to me not to do it. I was launched into a schedule of after-school practices and tournaments and new people, and it wasn’t so easy to carpool with the Burneses. Often, my mother picked me up after dark, and I’d come out of school to see our blue Subaru wagon lonely in a corner of the lot with its headlights off, identifiable because my mother had the interior light on, and her reading glasses, and was lost in an issue of Harper’s or The New Yorker. The other parents kept the headlights on and the interior light off, listening to the radio maybe.

  Jodie and Jensen were my new speech team friends. They came from Georgetown, sister and brother, a year apart, sandy, wiry, and strong on the team. Jensen, the elder, in eighth grade, did political speeches mostly, and the debate side of speech; whereas Jodie, who was in my English class, preferred inspirational stuff or monologues from plays, and was really an actress. In class, she was quiet, almost mousy, which was why I hadn’t noticed her earlier; but onstage she was transformed. Her version of the “I Have a Dream” speech made me cry.

  Sometimes at the weekends when there wasn’t a tournament, Jodie and I would get together and practice our pieces, or do some homework, or hang out, checking out possible monologues on YouTube. We gossiped about our crushes—film and music stars, mostly, but sometimes guys on speech teams from other schools, glimpsed, competed against, romanticized. Sometimes with Jodie—and occasionally with Jodie and Jensen together—I’d find myself doing something I thought of distinctly as Cassie’s and mine, like baking banana bread, or browsing the stuffed animal collection at Bell’s. I’d catch my breath: did she still sleep with Hubert the pig? Did the Evil Morsel like to bake? But mostly, I was okay with seeing her sometimes at lunch—on Wednesdays, our lunch periods were the same, and Delia had a class, so Cassie and I would sit together then, especially after she broke up with Peter.

  And on the Fridays when I didn’t have speech team, we’d get picked up together, usually by my mother. Cassie always said she had to get home, even though Bev wouldn’t be there for hours yet. We’d drop her at her house, a little girl on the doorstep of the little white house with the Encroaching Forest looming behind. It made me nervous—like something out of a scary movie, especially in winter when night came in fast. But Cassie didn’t seem bothered. When I asked if she got scared, ever, in that house alone, she raised a contemptuous eyebrow.

  “We’re old enough to babysit, right? So I think I can babysit myself, don’t you?”

  I wanted to point out that when you babysat, there was another person in the house with you, if only a little person who’d be no help in a crisis. But I knew she’d mock me. If she wasn’t scared—didn’t she watch CSI too? Or Criminal Minds?—then why would I make her scared? That would have been cruel.

  But I did wonder what she did, on those afternoons—not just Fridays either, because on the days I had speech team, somebody else’s mother or father dropped her at her door. It seemed like a lot of time to be
alone. When I was by myself—and I loved being in my room on my own, reading on my bed or listening to music and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars that my father had stuck on the ceiling when I was small—I could hear my mother moving around the house, the creaky boards upstairs or the faint murmur of the radio from the kitchen, and then I could smell dinner: the onions in the pan, or the whiff of meat cooking or the delicious pastry scent of a baking tart. Even when I was alone, I liked to know that I wasn’t really entirely alone; but that wasn’t how it was for Cassie.

  All those years we’d been friends, since forever, we’d used the same words and perhaps meant different things—sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we’d never known it. As if I’d been holding an apple and thinking it was a tennis ball, all this time. Like “home”: to me, it meant our creaky old house with noisy forced-air heating and rattly windows, made small and familiar by the endless piles of magazines and folded laundry that my mother left around, by the classical music or the radio voices in the background, by the comings and goings of friends and relations, and the knowledge that even when my father was “at work,” I could open my window and throw a ball (or an apple), and practically hit him. Almost every day, my parents hugged me; and when I read in bed at night, one of them almost always came to give me a kiss before I turned out the light, a leftover from my early childhood of which I was still fond. “Home” was that feeling of falling asleep to the distant muffle of your parents’ conversation, a sound rising through the floorboards almost as a reverberation not just in your ears but in your body. It was a particular set of familiar smells—the orange-flower soap in the downstairs bathroom, or the tinge of old fire smoke in the living room even in summertime, when it rained—and patches of warm air near the vents, followed by a chill near the windows. It was the knowledge that someone was always nearby. And if not, then the Saghafis were right next door, and the whole of town, a constant little burble, right down the road. The Rite Aid, after all, stayed open till midnight. If I needed to run screaming into the street, someone would hear me.

  SOMETIMES I FELT that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theater or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn’t as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn’t ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it’s going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It’s both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter. You don’t want to end up at a party not knowing how to get home. You don’t want to end up walking down a street—especially a quiet street—by yourself at night. You don’t want to open your door to a strange man at all, really, ever, if you’re alone, even if he’s wearing a uniform. Because his uniform could be a disguise. It happens. I’ve seen it on TV.

  You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and you start to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you’ve lost them, but because you know you need to take care. Without a friend beside you, no biking on the Audubon Trail, no swimming at the quarry, no hiking in the woods. Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don’t know. And then you realize too that even men you know, or thought you knew, might not be okay.

  A math teacher that fall at a high school in nearby New Hampshire was caught in an FBI sting with thousands of kiddie-porn images on his computer—pictures of little girls kept in cages, someone said. A rabbi in Boston was caught spying on the women of his congregation in their ritual baths. The guy who owned the diner we’d sometimes gone to on our way back from the beach, less than half an hour from our house, was accused of sexually harassing his waitresses and forcing one—or was it three? Or five? They kept coming out of the woodwork; it had gone on for years, apparently—to have sex with him. So when I remembered the harried woman in tight mom jeans who’d served us the last time—memorable for a strawberry birthmark the size of a gumball on her right cheek, and for the fact that, with her heavily outlined china-blue eyes, she was otherwise notably pretty, or had been, until life had ground her down and worn her out prematurely, furrowing her skin—I remembered her and wondered if she was one of them, if she’d been forced onto her knees in the pantry after hours, or whether the birthmark had spared her, like what Cassie had told me about the sign from God at Passover, whether her flaw had proven her blessed protection.

  You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you’re suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can’t ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.

  But just as the world is opening up, it’s closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes. Without it being said, I was treated as a kid with a bright future and Cassie, well, she wasn’t necessarily not going to have one, but her path would be different from mine. Without anybody saying so outright, I was being told that my path was the more valuable. I got that from my parents, and from Mr. Cartwright when he chose me for speech team, and from my teachers when they patted me on the back and gave me good grades, and from my grandmother, who, when she asked me about Cassie at Thanksgiving and I told her we’d been drifting apart, caressed my cheek with her shiny hand that smelled of rosewater and said, “It’s hard growing up, because each of us must follow our own star”—which was, of itself, pretty neutral, but then she added, “And some of us have brighter stars to follow than others, I’m afraid.”

  And if we were growing up, and growing up differently now, and if there was some faintly ominous sense about the adolescence and adulthood that lay before us—as if there’d inevitably be a cull along the way, and drugs, or violence, or car crashes or general misfortune, or, for the girls, the folly of careless sex or the evils of predatory men who lurked, unidentifiable as guerilla fighters, among us—then the unspoken cry that echoed from all sides was “Save yourself!” because it was clear that it was the only thing you could hope to do, and even that might be impossible.

  You couldn’t possibly try to save someone else first. Like the safety demonstration on the airplane, when they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask first. That’s what matters. You can’t help anyone if you don’t help yourself.

  Cassie wasn’t herself thinking about any of these things, as far as I know. Not then or later. It was a preoccupying riff in my own head. My mother made me stop watching crime programs on TV, and when the girl in New Hampshire, a couple of years older than Cassie and me, vanished on her way home from school, my mother stopped leaving the local paper around and turned off the news if the story came on. Around the same time, there was the young woman at college in Portland whose body was never found: they figured out that a guy she knew from her job had invited her home to hang out with him and his girlfriend, and then they’d killed her and thrown her body into the ocean. You had to wonder why they’d done it. Just because they could? And you had to wonder about that girlfriend. What was going on in her head? What kind of person was she?

  “The depravity!” my mother ranted. “It’s a self-perpetuating cycle in a sick society.” And then: “As a feminist, I’ve got to find a way for us to address this.”

  “Us?”

  “You and me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I wish this wasn’t the world,” she said. “Part of me wants to protect you from hearing it . . . but this is the world.” She shrugged. “So we have to find some way to address it.”

  Whether because of the facts, or the culture
, or my mother’s anger about it, or simply my cowardly temperament, the only result was that I was scared, some type of low-level scared all the time—in the back of my mind, but always there.

  Cassie wasn’t, or she wasn’t letting on. If I was melting into a state of near-constant anxiety, my body creating palpitations and tremors out of innocuous sounds, then Cassie was hardening, small, tight, unsparing, even her laugh turned brittle, and her little girl’s body seemed at once unfinished and withering on the vine. She told me some stuff when we were together, but always as if it were a joke, a black joke. I figured it was how she got by.

  First, Anders Shute spent more and more time at their house. Thank God for the hospital, she said, because sometimes he’d stay away several days at a stretch, on account of his rotation schedule. But then, in the New Year . . . It was after she’d really broken up with Peter Oundle—not just pretended to, for her mother’s sake. I only understood much later, from him, and to my profound surprise, that their breakup was over a big argument they’d had where he’d told her she needed to confront Bev and tell her it couldn’t work with Anders Shute, that his presence made Cassie miserable; and Cassie told Peter to mind his own fucking business, that she’d seen her mom sad and lonely all her life—all Cassie’s life, that is—and that Bev had made a thousand sacrifices for Cassie over the years, hadn’t thought of being loved by a man on account of Cassie, and had given up hope of it; and that she, Cassie, wasn’t going to be the reason her mother ended up unhappy all over again.

  It was the opposite of what I would’ve expected, but it made sense too. Cassie and Bev were like tree trunks grown together. She depended on her mother, and vice versa, and she couldn’t possibly be happy if she felt responsible for her mother’s unhappiness. But what about her own?

  Anyway, Cassie broke up with Peter, saying that he wanted too much from her. He said he got it, sort of: it wasn’t like she liked someone else. It was about her and Bev, really: her mom believed that Cassie and Peter had broken up at Halloween. It’s tiring to lie and to pretend your boyfriend isn’t someone special, when not only your mother but also this other random guy is watching your every move.