Mercy Street(13)
(Why would I want to find him?)
The annual package from Sears. Claudia has tried to work out exactly how it happened. Did her mother call the man on the phone? Did she say, “This is what Claudia wants for Christmas”? Did her father even know her name?
There was no point in asking. On this subject and others, Deb was a vault. Claudia consulted various sources, reliable and unreliable, and made reasonable assumptions. She pieced together a story that seems plausible and may in fact be true.
CLAYBURN, MAINE, WAS A TOWN OF FOUR THOUSAND. THERE was a Congregational church, a gas station, a Dairy Queen, and a Hannaford supermarket. The nearest town of any note was Farmington, which had a U of M campus and was the birthplace of the guy who’d invented earmuffs. Growing up there, Claudia and her friend Justine Webster affected a snotty disdain for the place, as though they were just passing through on their way to somewhere more exciting. Claudia believed this about both of them, but especially about Justine. Never mind that Websters and Birches had served life sentences in that poor woodchuck county for many generations, the girls’ forebears so lazy or unimaginative that not one, ever, had found his way out.
How exactly you’d do that wasn’t clear. Forty percent of Claudia’s high school class went on to further education, a deliberately vague category that included shady for-profit colleges and low-end trade schools that advertised on matchbooks. Girls went to the Downeast Academy of Cosmetology or got mall jobs or got pregnant. Boys drove trucks or joined the army or worked on road crews or went to jail. Between the two of them, Justine and her husband had done most of those things, shuffling through the same sad options like a losing hand of cards.
Her best friend, her entire childhood. When they were eight and ten, Claudia saw Justine twirling a baton in her backyard, and from that moment she had to have one. That’s how it always was between them, Justine out front and Claudia two steps behind, doing as Justine did and wanting what she had. There should be a special word for it, the adoring love of a little girl for a slightly older one. Claudia has never loved anyone else in precisely this way.
Justine could toss a baton high above her head, whirl around twice, and catch it. She could spin it around her wrist in a way that defied gravity, a trick Claudia practiced for many, many hours and never managed to perfect.
Hundreds and hundreds of hours.
At college she’d meet people who knew how to do things she couldn’t imagine doing. Their childhoods had been curated by concerned adults: piano lessons, ballet class. In summer they were sent to camps, where paid instructors taught them to play tennis and ride and sail and row. And if how you spend your time is what you eventually become, baton twirling was a significant feature of her childhood, and Justine’s: the uncountable hours spent honing an entirely useless skill.
Their childhood was uncurated. On rainy summer days they made earrings out of dandelion stems. You peeled the stem into thin strips and dropped them into a puddle. Instantly, magically, they curled up in a snail-shell spiral. Later they stole real earrings from a kiosk at the mall, cheap metal hoops that turned their skin green. They stole constantly: candy bars from Hannaford’s, perfume and lipstick from Justine’s mother, who sold Avon cosmetics and kept a sample case under the bed. They swiped old shirts and sweaters from the Websters’ closets. At the time, L.L.Bean offered a lifetime guarantee on all merchandise. Anything with a Bean label, no matter how ancient, could be returned for a full refund, no questions asked.
They stole nips of bourbon from the bottles Mr. Webster hid in the basement, the toilet tank, a toolbox in the garage. Claudia can remember rolling down the hill behind Justine’s house at age ten, outrageously drunk and delighted by the motion. She remembers Justine holding her hair as she retched; their hysterical laughter as Justine’s dog Daffy, the sweetest and dumbest beagle Claudia has ever encountered, lapped up the puddle of sick.
They did what they wanted, when they wanted, and if no laws were broken and no one was injured, it was largely a matter of luck. Justine’s mother had four other kids to nag, and Claudia’s was always working. Every so often she came home—cranky and exhausted, her knees and back aching, to sprawl on the couch and watch television and complain and cough and smoke.
But that is a later version of Deb. If Claudia reaches way back, she can conjure up an earlier iteration: young Deb in denim cutoffs and a halter top, long hair in a ponytail, washing her Chevelle with a garden hose. Deb vacuuming the trailer with the radio blasting, burning strawberry incense; painting Claudia’s toenails, and Justine’s, in rainbow colors to match her own. After the funeral, sorting through a box of junk from the trailer—pay stubs, expired coupons, dead scratch-off tickets—Claudia found that girl in a photo: her mother young and impossibly slender, lying on a foil blanket in a purple bikini, her skin slick with baby oil and lobster pink from the sun.
The photo was shocking. That it had been taken at all (by whom?), that it had been kept. Most astonishing of all was the expression on Deb’s face. For as far back as Claudia could remember, her mother had despised being photographed. The few surviving family photos show her glaring at the camera, jaw clenched: Get that thing away from me! The bikini photo was different. Young Deb wore a mischievous smile, amused, playful. Incredibly, she was having fun.
On the back of the photo, in her mother’s familiar round cursive, was a date that explained everything: July 4, 1984. That was the summer of Deb’s thirtieth birthday, the summer she fell in love with Gary Cain.