Dolores Claiborne(23)
I thought about it over the next few days - one thing about warshin sheets and ironin shirts and vacuumin rugs, you always have lots of time to think - and the more I thought, the less relieved I was. She hadn't been talkin about any boy, for one thing, and it wasn't ever Selena's way to be quiet about what was goin on in her life. She wasn't as open and friendly with me as she'd been before, no, but it wasn't like there was a wall of silence between us, either. Besides, I'd always thought that if Selena fell in love, she'd probably take out an ad in the paper.
The big thing - the scary thing - was the way her eyes looked to me. I've always noticed that when a girl's crazy about some boy, her eyes are apt to get so bright it's like someone turned on a flashlight behind there. When I looked for that light in Selena's eyes, it wasn't there . . . but that wasn't the bad part. The light that'd been there before had gone out of em, too - that was the bad part. Lookin into her eyes was like lookin at the windows of a house where the people have left without rememberin to pull down the shades.
Seem that was what finally opened my eyes, and I began to notice all sorts of things I should have seen earlier - would have seen earlier, I think, if I hadn't been workin so hard, and if I hadn't been so convinced Selena was mad at me for hurtin her Dad that time.
The first thing I saw was that it wasn't just me anymore - she'd drawn away from Joe, too. She'd stopped goin out to talk to him when he was workin on one of his old junks or somebody's outboard motor, and she'd quit sittin beside him on the couch at night to watch TV. If she stayed in the living room, she'd sit in the rocker way over by the stove with a piece of knittin in her lap. Most nights she didn't stay, though. She'd go in her room and shut the door. Joe didn't seem to mind, or even to notice. He just went back to his easy-chair, holdin Little Pete on his lap until it was time for Pete to go to bed.
Her hair was another thing she didn't warsh it every day like she used to. Sometimes it looked almost greasy enough to fry eggs in, and that wasn't like Selena. Her complexion was always so pretty -that nice peaches n cream skin she prob'ly got from Joe's side of the family tree - but that October pimples sprang up on her face like dandelions on the town common after Memorial Day. Her color was off, and her appetite, too.
She still went to see her two best friends, Tanya Caron and Laurie Langill, once in awhile, but not anywhere near as much as she had in junior high. That made me realize neither Tanya nor Laurie had been over to our house since school let back in, and maybe not durin the last month of the summer vacation, neither. That scared me, Andy, and it made me lean in for an even closer look at my good girl. What I saw scared me even more.
The way she'd changed her clothes, for instance. Not just one sweater for another, or a skirt for a dress; she'd changed her whole style of dressin, and all the changes were bad. You couldn't see her shape anymore, for one thing. Instead of wearin skirts or dresses to school, she was mostly wearin A-line jumpers, and they was all too big for her. They made her look fat, and she wasn't.
At home she'd wear big baggy sweaters that came halfway to her knees, and I never saw her out of her jeans and workboots. She'd put some ugly rag of a scarf around her head whenever she went out, somethin so big it'd overhang her brow and make her eyes look like two animals peerin out of a cave. She looked like a tomboy, but I thought she'd put paid to that when she said so-long to twelve. And one night, when I forgot to knock on her door before I went into her room, she just about broke her legs gettin her robe offa the closet door, and she was wearin a slip - it wasn't like she was bollicky bare-ass or nothin.
But the worst thing was that she didn't talk much anymore. Not just to me; considerin the terms we were on, I coulda understood that. She pretty much quit talkin to everybody, though. She'd sit at the supper-table with her head down and the long bangs she'd grown hangin in her eyes, and when I tried to make conversation with her, ask her how her day had gone at school and things like that, all I'd get back was 'Umkay' and 'Guesso' instead of the blue streak she used to talk. Joe Junior tried, too, and run up against the same stone wall. Once or twice he looked at me, kinda puzzled. I just shrugged. And as soon as the meal was over and the dishes was warshed, out the door or up to her room she'd go.
And, God help me, the first thing I thought of after I decided it wasn't a boy was marijuana . . and don't you give me that look, Andy, like I don't know what I'm talkin about. It was called reefer or maryjane instead of pot in those.. days, but it was the same stuff and there was plenty of people from the island willin to move it around if the price of lobsters went down. . . or even if it didn't. A lot of reefer came in through the coastal islands back then, just like it does now, and some of it stayed. There was no cocaine, which was a blessing, but if you wanted to smoke pot, you could always find some. Marky Benoit had been arrested by the Coast Guard just that summer - they found four bales of the stuff in the hold of the Maggie's Delight. Prob'ly that's what put the idear in my head, but even now, after all these years, I wonder how I ever managed to make somethin so complicated outta what was really so simple. There was the real problem, sittin right across the table from me every night, usually needin a bath and a shave, and there I was, lookin right back at him - Joe St George, Little Tall Island's biggest jack of all trades and master of none - and wonderin if my good girl was maybe out behind the high-school woodshop in the afternoons, smokin joy-sticks. And I'm the one who likes to say her mother didn't raise no fools. Gorry!