Karen Lee Boren

G A ∏in House N e w V o i c e g Girls in peril

a n o v e l l a

Karen Lee Boren

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Tin House Books, 2601 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

ISBN 0-9773127-2-0 First U.S. Edition 2006

Interior design by Laura Shaw Design, Inc. www.tinhouse.com For the girls

one

The summer we were in peril, Jeanne Macek’s thumb was severed from her hand. It was a use- less digit. A single, narrow bone at its center connected it to the protuberance at the base of the “real thumb” on her left hand. Its skin was as wrinkled and pink as a newborn’s. All of the girls in our group adored it. One after another, the four of us, ranging in age from eleven to thirteen, courted Jeanne’s favor for the chance to pet its tender skin. Jeanne admitted she dipped it in Vaseline each night to keep it soft, and we tried this trick with our own unexceptional thumbs, dreaming of the kind of magical transformations we read

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ about in books, but we awoke only to greasy pillowcases and sheets. With such poor results, we accepted the most we could hope for was the chance to care for Jeanne’s thumb. So when Lauren Jankowski received a bottle of Cherry Ice nail polish for her birthday, she didn’t open it but presented it to Jeanne, who rewarded Lauren by allowing her to brush the single stroke it took to coat the thumb’s eraser-size nail. The extra thumb made Jeanne’s real thumb stand out. It worked differently from ours. It even worked differently from the one on Jeanne’s right hand, whose perfection only made us love her deformed hand more. On her “bad hand,” as her mother called it, the big thumb was always bent as if Jeanne were constantly signaling the number four. She couldn’t hold things easily because of her bent thumb, but she had become deft at hooking hair bands into the crook of her stiff joint to pull back her shoulder-length, straw-colored hair. Sometimes she used the heel of her hand against her belly to fasten belt buckles or open jars. Her resourcefulness often impressed us, but we absolutely marveled when she performed more difficult tasks like tying her shoes or braid- ing her hair. Then her four fingers flew like a concert pia- nist’s, tangling and contorting, skillful and ugly. Next to hers our hands dangled like wooden spoons from our wrists. Jeanne often made us feel our ungainliness. Even with

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ her bad hand she was the best athlete. Kickball, hopscotch, four square, Jeanne excelled at anything that required coor- dination, strong legs, and balance. She was a good three inches taller than the rest of us. She swam well and ran fast. Only at grasping games did she have any trouble because of her hand, games like baseball and street hockey. So we rarely played these games and modified them for her when we did. The day Donna’s mother bought her a double-Dutch jump rope, we tied a noose on the end so Jeanne could slip it over her wrist, twine it through her fingers, and turn it to earn her jumps. It never occurred to us that modifying the jump rope—or any other game’s rules or equipment— for her was unfair, even when she beat us hands down. We always expected her to be the best, to win any game. Not because of her tiny thumb exactly, not in spite of it either, but because she expected to win. When she won, she treated her thumb like a teammate who had helped her out. That very first time we played double Dutch, Jeanne leapt for what seemed like hours. We switched turners, but eventually we gave up. We complained that our arms were rubber. Wouldn’t she please let us stop? She landed flat on both feet, shrugged okay, and did what she did after every victory—she rubbed her extra thumb over her lips, not quite kissing it but confirming its presence. At the moment her lips touched the

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ skin, we longed for our own hands to stiffen and turn bad. We contented ourselves with patting her back in congratula- tions. She accepted our offerings graciously, as she always did. Then she held out her thumb for us each to stroke. We shivered before we touched it, disgusted and thrilled. It was as if we were touching the insides of our lungs, touching a thing that was supposed to remain hidden but had refused. When our turns were over, we squealed and squeezed each other’s arms, Jeanne’s victory now a part of us.

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It was our love for the thumb that gathered us all on Corinne Stempke’s porch on the first Monday of freedom that summer. It had been an unusually hot June, and we had finally been allowed to shed Holy Family School’s regulation below- the-knee skirts and long-sleeve blouses in favor of light, cot- ton shorts and T-shirts or tank tops. It was awkward to see our calves and thighs so suddenly bared. Over the winter our legs had developed new curves and sprouted hair that had been hidden beneath kneesocks. We attributed the strange- ness of our bodies to months of confinement, confident that all they needed was fresh air, our mothers’ solution to so many things. As we waited for Mrs. Sobczyk to drive down the street in her navy Cadillac, we stretched our legs out onto

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ the cement so the sun could burn all of our past summers into them. Mrs. Sobczyk came without fail on the third Monday of every month. We had been planning an ambush for weeks, ever since Mrs. Sobczyk’s daughter, Elaine, had shown up at school with one of her mother’s Avon samples. Elaine was our age, but we scorned her. She refused to sully her uniform by playing kickball or monkey-bar tag during recess despite an impressive throwing arm that she displayed only during gym class when a grade was at stake. She and her group, pretty girls who giggled and brought shiny-haired dolls to school to try to impress Elaine, crowded in the corner of the playground, squealing whenever the kickball rolled into their circle. Elaine always grabbed the ball away from whichever girl picked it up. Arms extended, she refused to throw it back to the game, forcing someone to jog up to her so she could primly hand it off. But one day when we were kept inside after lunch because of rain, Elaine sashayed through the rows of desks, trailing a glossy envelope of lanolin and aloe lotion. “My mother’s got a whole bag of them,” she said when she saw our rare inter- est in her. “I can have as many as I want.” Our first thought had been to convince Elaine to bring us samples. Stacey approached her and offered to trade an old

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Barbie doll that Elaine had once liked. Elaine refused. “I don’t play with dolls anymore,” she said. So Jeanne told Lauren to take a turn. Lauren did as Jeanne directed, threatening to dump her milk on Elaine’s uniform every day until the end of the term if she didn’t bring us some of the samples. Elaine didn’t bother to respond before standing up and striding over to Sister Ruthelia to tell her that Lauren was bothering her, which landed Lauren in detention for two days. That afternoon as we waited for Lauren to be released, Jeanne decided our mistake had been not to approach Elaine as a group. Alone we were vulnerable, she argued. If we had all stood before Elaine, arms linked red-rover style, she wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss us. We nodded. We all knew we felt more comfortable as a group. We had long been known as “the neighborhood girls,” and we were proud that together we had a firmly fixed identity. Our mothers called the five of us a “set.” At school we were a “clique.” During recess or gym, we split up and played with kids outside our group only when a coach forced us, and even then we kept a close eye on each other. Teachers rou- tinely sat us at desks far away from each other to prevent us from talking, but we were experts at passing notes without being caught.

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“If we stick together,” Jeanne said, “Elaine’s mother won’t be able to turn us down.” We agreed, and when Lauren finally joined us, she agreed too. We walked home that day brushing shoulders, grasping hands, and imagining the force we would be before Elaine’s mother. We decided to gather on Corinne’s porch and lie in wait for Mrs. Sobczyk. Located at the end of the block, Corinne’s house provided the best view of the whole neighborhood— two streets joined by a curve in the road and a dozen or so nearly identical brick bungalows lined on either side, with barely an arm’s length between them. Lauren’s and Donna’s houses were directly across from Corinne’s, and Stacey’s was only two more down. Jeanne’s house sat dead center of the block, where the street curved. Next to an empty lot, her house was the standout on the block. It was big but old. Victorian in style, its dormers and roof sagged, and its brick foundation had veiny cracks that layers of repair cement had only deepened. The paint had long ago chipped off most of the clapboards and pillars. It had the biggest yard and the biggest porch, but we seldom played there. The grass was sparse and the ground harder than in our yards. There always seemed to be broken bits of tools or nails buried in the soil, ready to cut you if you fell. The hedges and trees had

˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ overgrown into grotesque shapes, and the wood of the porch steps and railing gave us splinters. There was an exhausted quality about her house that was so unlike Jeanne herself it was sometimes hard to believe she lived there. “Here she comes,” Jeanne said when the Cadillac turned the corner. She rubbed her thumb over her lips before adding, “Get ready.” Elaine’s mother passed us without waving. She simply coasted to the curb and climbed out of her sleek car, two Gimbel’s shopping bags in either hand. Even if we hadn’t been waiting, it wouldn’t have taken us long to know she was in the neighborhood. Like a skunk’s fear, the astringent scent of her perfume had permeated the neighborhood by the time she’d locked her car door. She wore stockings and a double- breasted wool jacket despite the heat. The heels of her shoes were as high as new pencils, the toes dagger sharp. When we had concocted our plan, it seemed easy. Corinne was good with words and had enthusiastically described the details of how we would surround Mrs. Sobczyk and demand all of the samples we knew she would be handing out with her Avon catalogs. We had practiced our positions: a solid wall, one girl’s foot braced against the girl’s next to her; our arms clenched around each other’s waists. We imagined ourselves a fierce gang. But when the time came to approach

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Mrs. Sobczyk, not one of us moved. We sprawled over the hot cement of Corrine’s porch, nailed there by the even click- ing of Mrs. Sobczyk’s shoes as she walked up the path to the Smolens’ house across the street. “Let’s wait until she gets closer,” Corinne said. “Not too close,” said Lauren, her nose tucked into the crook of her arm. “She stinks.” “But we’re still doing it,” insisted Jeanne. She gave Stacey a hard look, knowing Stacey was usually the first to cave if the pressure was on, but then she pointed at all of us with her extra thumb. “Everyone. It’s the only way it will work.” On sturdy legs, Mrs. Sobczyk climbed the three stairs and stepped onto the Smolens’ porch. The inner door was open, the screen door most likely latched on the inside the same way they were at our own houses. Mrs. Sobczyk didn’t ring the doorbell or shout “Hello!” through the screen as we usually did when calling for each other. She didn’t even say, “Ding-dong, Avon calling!” as the commercials implied she should. Instead she quietly slipped a plastic bag over the door’s handle and turned quickly, as if she feared connecting the voices that whispered orders into the phone for True Red lipstick or Midnight Plum nail polish with the women carry- ing armfuls of laundry or tiptoeing around sticky children or a third-shift husband stretched out on the couch.

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We watched her play the same gun-and-run game with her samples at every house on the block, except the one belong- ing to the old widower Ivan, who lived on the far side of Jeanne’s house, behind a wall of lilac bushes, and who would never buy Avon. She skipped his house, and we waited to see if she would skip Jeanne’s door too, assuming she knew, as we all did, that Jeanne’s mother could never afford to order from her. We were relieved when she climbed the Maceks’ steps. “Just in case,” we imagined her thinking. We understood then that she thought of our mothers less as customers and more as fish in a pond that had to be thrown minnows if they were ever going to be hooked. But she didn’t let her eyes linger on any spot too long, as if once she actually allowed herself to look, she wouldn’t be able to pry her gaze away from the traffic accidents she imagined our mothers’ lives to be. “Look at her,” Corinne said softly. She was impressive. The elegant whip of her full thighs and fleshy arms as she zipped up and down the porches made us aware of the boniness of our elbows and knees. She crossed the street and made her way toward us, and we shifted uncomfortably, feeling the hardness of the cement against our buttocks and the brick against our backs. She would never sit on the ground the way we were. She was

˙ 10 ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ the epitome of adulthood, both perfect and grotesque. The features of her face were flattened out by heavy pancake makeup and redrawn with streaks of red blusher, lipstick, and eyebrow pencil. Inside her wool jacket, her breasts were a mass of flesh it was inconceivable our own bodies would one day develop. By the time she reached the bottom of Corinne’s walk, we were no longer sure she was human. We half believed the tight curls of her orange-tinted hair might spring at us like snakes. Without waving or even glancing at us, she started up the walk. When she reached us, her good breeding kept her from ignoring us completely. Like a military man, she stopped before us, slid her heels and toes together, and waited for us to scramble aside, never considering stepping around us. “Hello, girls,” she said, nodding curtly, her gaze skimming over us like a pebble over the surface of Lake Michigan. We mumbled vague hellos back. With her good hand Jeanne hid her spare thumb while the rest of us shifted uneasily. Lauren’s gaze lingered on Mrs. Sobczyk’s fleshy calf, and she wrapped her fingers around her own calf as if to measure the difference. Donna and Corinne elbowed each other, sniffing giggles that they tried to hide. After an especially loud one, Stacey kicked Donna’s foot and then Corinne’s, which only made them giggle more. Mrs. Sobczyk waited silently, a sour,

˙ 11 ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ impatient expression on her face. Then one by one we moved aside to let her pass. Our breeding didn’t keep us from staring as she slid the plastic bag over the door handle and swung around, dipping her head once in good-bye and marching past us again. As she returned to her car, a balled-up tissue dropped from her sleeve, but the metronome of her heels continued uninter- rupted. We gawked at the pink tissue, as shocked as if a kid- ney or eyeball had landed on the cement. Surely a tissue from her was different than the ones we used on our own noses. Our amazement was so great, we neither picked up the tissue nor mentioned it, giving it a wide berth as we ambled across the yard to track her more closely. We watched her toss the empty Gimbel’s bags onto the passenger side of the Cadillac, then sink back into the driver’s seat, pausing just long enough for her body to slacken from heat or exhaustion or despair, we would never know which, before straightening up, starting the engine, and navigating the Cadillac around the corner. “I saw her sweat,” Donna said. “It rolled right down her neck.” We nodded, but we didn’t really believe it. It seemed impossible that such a woman could sweat the way we did when cooking or cleaning or working in the vegetable gar- dens in our backyards.

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We waited until the car was out of sight. Then, as if this had been our plan all along, Jeanne directed us to sneak up to the porches and slide the tiny sample envelopes out of the bags dangling from the screen doors. The slim packets felt smooth in our hands. The delicate violets and roses imprinted on their labels promised luxurious, womanly lives. Careful not to squeeze too tightly, we turned over all of the packets to Jeanne, who lifted her extra thumb in appreciation and promised to stash them beneath her heaviest winter sweat- ers, where her mother was unlikely to look for months.

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The fact was that no one loved her little thumb more than Jeanne herself. She fashioned tiny outfits for it—minia- ture hula skirts made from carefully beaded lawn clippings, maple leaf ponchos, and hollowed-out crab apple hats. One time she inked dark eyes and a black hank of hair. Then with the rest of her hand balled into a fist, she danced her little gypsy over the tops of boxes and stairs, accompanied by songs blaring from Corinne’s transistor radio: “Dark Lady” and “Hoochie Koo.” It was a showgirl, that thumb, a tart, and its very superflu- ousness made us love it. It would never lift a finger in work. Both it and the bent thumb lessened Jeanne’s workload

˙ 13 ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ considerably. In summer we were the extra hands around the house, made useful by our parents, whose watchful eyes darted everywhere at once, rending us from each other like sleeping puppies pulled from the litter. And it wasn’t just our own parents’ gazes we had to worry about. Any mother or father could interrupt our play and send us home for chores or dinner. They all felt free to chastise us for tossing stones against someone else’s garage door or bulleting a parked car’s hood with a tennis ball. And as if all the parents were in on it together, they ensured no girl went without a steady stream of summer jobs. We were forced to work in family stores, to clean out crawl spaces and garages, to mow lawns, and to learn to can fruit or crock pickles in case there was another real war and food was rationed. Sometimes they phoned each other to find out if we’d been spotted recently. As soon as the color and pattern of a girl’s clothing were described, eyes sharper than a gliding hawk’s shot out front and back doors. No matter where the quarry hid—crouched behind bushes, stretched out beneath a parked car, engrossed in a game of kick the can or the more vague “witches”—the girl’s name jetted through the air and struck with a force that caused groans and grumbling that our teams would be uneven, someone else would have to be “it” now.

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Unlike Mrs. Sobczyk, we couldn’t ignore what we didn’t like without risk of grounding. So we hesitated, waiting for the sought-out girl to respond to the sound of her name. But if she didn’t, someone would grudgingly call, “Time-out,” find her, and drag her toward home, promising to call for her later, after dark. Jeanne’s family was the largest, and as the only girl in her family, her workload around the house should have been so heavy that she was a mere shadow we glimpsed through the window in summer. But she carefully nursed the fiction that her bad hand made chores so difficult that in the end it meant less work for her mother to do them herself. Although Jeanne could easily tie a square knot if we were setting up a tent in one of our yards for a sleepover, soapy dishes slipped out of her bad hand and broke. If she were forced to change her little brother’s diaper, it fell to his ankles, or the safety pin sprang open and stuck him so he bawled murderous cries. Clean laundry fell into the dirt if she had to hang it on the line. Once when she was sure her mother was watching her cut vegeta- bles, she let the knife’s blade come dangerously close to her good thumb. Her mother snatched the knife away from her. “For Christ’s sake,” Jeanne’s mother exclaimed and pushed Jeanne toward the back door. “Go play in the street. At least you’ll be safe there.”

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“It’s my ticket to freedom,” Jeanne said as she ran up the block to Stacey’s, where we lay on the grass exhausted from our morning chores. She told us what she had done and dropped a kiss onto the tip of her little thumb. As she cradled it in her other arm like a baby, its mystique throbbed in our own sore hands. Still, even Jeanne couldn’t get out of all chores, and our parents’ solidarity about our workloads cemented our desire for each other. We acted en masse whenever possible. The pleasure of gathering in the woods near Lake Michigan under the cover of dark was made sweeter by the communal glare we endured during the day. The rhythms of cicadas, the humid night air, and the faint whoosh of the lake’s waves lapping the shore just beyond our houses seemed to entwine our limbs, tethering us to each other even as we slept in our separate beds. Feeling the pull, we awoke in the dark without the aid of alarm clocks and blinked into the red and gray of our dim rooms. Soundlessly we slipped into shorts and T-shirts. Stacey’s parents had suffered a fire in their first apart- ment together, so she had the easiest escape route from her bedroom. She was admirably quick at sliding up the window screen and easing herself onto the fireproofed metal stairs her father had installed. Under the burnt-out streetlight she waited for us, and together we went to collect Jeanne.

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In the daylight we had memorized the layouts of our living rooms and kitchens so we could feel our ways through in the dark. But Jeanne didn’t have it so easy. Despite bunk beds, her house was still too small to tuck all of her nine brothers into bedrooms at night. Like bums in a train sta- tion, the variously sized boys lay scattered around the living room on couches or the floor. She claimed they never slept in the same place twice, so memorization was impossible. Even her special status as the only girl in the family didn’t earn Jeanne her own room. She shared it with Jimmy, a pudgy toddler who mercifully dropped into a comalike sleep early and who, no matter how much racket surrounded him, never woke until the sun broke the horizon. Grateful for our better luck, we pressed ourselves close to the side of Jeanne’s house so we were hidden as she tottered down the rope ladder she bought off her older brother Joey with money we had pooled together from allowances and birthdays. We wondered but knew better than to ask where Joey had gotten the military-issue ladder. With his shoulder- length, feathered hair and deeply tanned skin, he was a dis- concerting figure. He was a sort of mythical beast, half adult, half kid, at once both more solid and more ephemeral than our parents. His eyes lingering on our bodies made us tum- ble into cartwheels or explode into crazy dances that would

˙ 17 ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ make him shake his head and look away, both relieving and disappointing us. Jeanne adored her brother as much as we adored her. On Saturday mornings, Joey’s only day off from Ola’s Grocery Store, where he worked in the produce department, they sat together on the front porch, Joey strumming his Ovation guitar and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes that gave off the scent of cloves and other spicy substances. He drank black coffee from a large mug with flaming youth printed in saffron letters. Jeanne claimed he snuck her sips of the bitter liquid. And despite her bad hand, he had taught her three chords, enough to play “Smoke on the Water.” His girlfriend, Lois Worth, lived two doors down. One day, we stopped in the middle of a game of four square to watch her cross the lawns between their houses. In her halter top, cutoff jeans, and bare feet, her body made us think of a tightly coiled spring. She had small breasts, strong shoulders, and lean swimmer’s thighs that shivered when she walked. Once Lois was there, Joey ignored Jeanne. So she left them alone and joined our game of four square. Before we started up again, we watched Lois gracefully fold herself into what Jeanne swore she called her “yoga pose.” To us it looked like she sat Indian style, but her long legs and straight back made her look more poised than we did in the same posi-

˙ 18 ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ tion, and we turned to our game hoping to find some grace in our play. With five players, one of us was always sitting out. Whoever was waiting for a turn watched Lois and Joey talk and touch. After a while, Joey strummed a few chords on his guitar and Lois sang, her voice huskier than we would have thought from the bright “Hi, girls!” she often gave us. “I never heard that song before,” Stacey said. She was the most musical of us and was constantly being called home to practice her piano or flute. “She wrote it herself,” Jeanne said. She rested the ball against her hip as she waited for us to shift positions. She had been in the top square for three rounds and showed no signs of flagging. It was up to her to start the next round, but when Joey’s voice joined Lois’s, she held on to the ball, her spare thumb sliding between her lips as she listened to the rise and fall of their clean harmony. Their singing was so melodic, we were startled when Lois cut the last note short, jumped up, and dashed across the lawn. Immediately, Joey was in hot pursuit, grabbing her ankle and wrestling her to the grass. Squeals of frightened delight erupted from her as Joey held her down and tickled her. Watching them tussle, we shifted, conscious of hidden parts of our bodies we didn’t acknowledge with each other.

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We recognized their roughhousing, but the way their bodies fit together as they maneuvered from tickling to kissing was new. Our parents never wrestled this way, or kissed this way. If our parents touched at all, they pecked cheeks and scratched each other’s backs. Sometimes after mixing drinks and firing up the barbecue, one of our fathers would rub up against his wife, but she would quickly swat him away, nodding her head in our direction. On occasion they ignored us and danced to music we claimed we hated—polkas and waltzes—but we so loved the way their feet moved together, skip-hop-hopping over the carpeting as if they shared one memory of some place, some unimaginable time before we existed, that it didn’t occur to us to watch the rest of their bodies. Joey’s awareness of us, unlike our parents’, spurred him on. Still kissing Lois, he opened his eyes and lifted his gaze toward us. When he was sure we were watching, he moaned theatrically. Jeanne kept her gaze fixed on her thumb, whose tiny nail she picked, until Joey and Lois’s kissing turned back to roughhousing. Fiercer now, Joey appeared to have forgotten us. His hold on Lois was more vehement, her resistance more desperate. Eventually her screams of pleasure turned to agony. But he couldn’t seem to tell the difference, and he hung on, stretching her wrists over her head as he kneeled

˙ 20 ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ one leg across her thighs and ground the other into her thrashing torso. “Stop it!” she yelled, but he didn’t seem to hear the words, just the sounds, which must have irritated him because he leaned over and covered her mouth with his tricep. Panicked now, Lois bit his arm and in the instant of his surprise she managed to push him off her. She scrambled up like a fallen spider and fled back to her own house, tear streaked and cursing. Safely on her porch, she grabbed on to the wrought-iron railing and yelled, “You always do that, you fucking asshole!” She drooped her head over the steps and spit into the bushes. Strands of her auburn hair clung to the sweat on her forehead and cheeks, and she swatted at them before adding, “Why do you always have to go too far?” Still lying on the grass, Joey watched her crying. He shook his head in confusion and looked across the street to us for explanation. We all avoided his gaze now, pretending we’d been playing four square the whole time. Wiping her mouth, Lois jerked the screen door open and disappeared inside. Joey waited a moment, then examined his arm where she had bitten him. He used the bottom of his shirt to wipe away the blood, then bounced to his feet and sauntered toward Lois’s house as if nothing had happened.

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Lois’s parents traveled a lot and we knew from our mothers that the Worths were in Germany for the summer, so we weren’t surprised when Joey walked right in without knocking. We waited to see if the door would reopen and together they would return to the porch and start over, singing some more and wrestling in a way that would shake off the uneasi- ness that had seeped into our muscles. We all had older sib- lings, no fewer than four, so we knew the helplessness Lois must have felt as Joey, skinny but still strong, pinned her. We knew the terror of being unable to move arms or legs, of being unable to inhale a full breath. The panic started in your chest and raced through your veins until the only thing to do was bite down on whatever your teeth could reach— a hip, hair, the loose flesh of a cheek. Any blood you drew shocked you later. We watched Lois’s door, longing to see her upright again, to see her strong arms swinging loosely, her muscular calves flex- ing as her feet hit the pavement. But her front door remained shut, and no matter how many times we casually strolled or rode our bikes past the house, we couldn’t see beyond the dim foyer. After a while we stopped trying to see inside, and instead plunged ourselves into a game of double Dutch. Jeanne was usually a flawless jumper, catching the pat- pat – pat-pat rhythm of the ropes early and lifting her knees

˙ 22 ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ nearly to shoulder height. She never seemed out of breath as she sang along to her own steps:

Not last night but the night before Twenty-four boys came knocking at my door. I asked them what they wanted and this is what they said: Spanish dancer turn a-round-round-round Spanish dancer touch the ground-ground-ground Spanish dancer get out of town.

We believed she could turn, touch the ground, and slap the pavement with the soles of her sneakers in hot pepper for- ever. Only the ripening of her pale cheeks to pink showed her effort. But this afternoon Jeanne couldn’t stay focused. Over and over her glance trailed her brother’s path from the lawn to Lois’s door. Finally, after tripping three times during the sim- ple part of “Blue Bell,” she said, “I quit,” and trotted back to her yard. “You gotta turn the rope before you can quit,” Stacey called after her, but Jeanne had already forgotten us. In her own yard, she picked up Joey’s guitar and gingerly placed it back into its black case, which was nearly as tall as she was when she stood it up. As she wrestled her way into the house

˙ 23 ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ with it, she kicked over Joey’s coffee mug, and the rest of us argued all afternoon about whether she had done it on purpose. She didn’t come out again until after supper, and when she did, she didn’t mention if she’d seen Joey although she must have been aware of how badly we wanted to know. She must have been aware too that none of us would risk being the one to ask her, at least not until we were all at the lake that night under the blanket of darkness.

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When Lois wasn’t around, Joey seemed pleased to be his only sister’s favorite, and when Jeanne told him she wanted the rope ladder, he didn’t ask why. It took him a week to get it, and he instructed her to keep it hidden at the back of her closet. Jeanne’s bedroom faced the vacant lot next to her house. The lot had a floodlight to keep out vagrants. Early on, we had nervously taken our chances that the steps dangling from her windowsill would blend in with the weathered wood on her house. But last week, during a late spring-cleaning jag, Corinne’s mother gave her the chore of swabbing the Levolor blinds, and Corinne figured out how to rig up a similar pul- ley system that collected the steps and hid them beneath the

˙ 24 ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ window’s ledge until we returned to let them down again. That night was our first opportunity to use the new system, and as Jeanne secured the nylon rope to the hook on the wall, the rest of us clapped Corinne on the back, congratulating her ingenuity. The lake was half a mile away, and the most direct route was through backyards. We managed to keep quiet as we jogged over lawns, dodging barbecue grills, plastic toys, and kiddie swimming pools. After tumbling down St. Francis Hill, we reached Lake Drive, grasped hands and ran, break- neck, a bantam chain gang, hurtling across the two-lane highway, our squeals of pleasure and fear piercing the air. We continued to hold hands as we leapt over the knee-high grass and flowering weeds in the area of Sheridan Park allowed to grow wild year-round. At the base of the woods that led to the cliffs along the lake, we had to release each other because the narrowness of the path demanded we go single file. Although we knew there was probably noone around to hear us, we once again grew quiet, concentrating on letting our hands and feet do the seeing until we could re-form into our group to slide, half sitting, down the cliff’s sand-and-clay face to the beach. In only moments we reached the shore, and we relived our journey from the neighborhood: “. . . almost slipped . . . sure

˙ 25 ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ my mom heard . . . cut my finger on a rock . . . ” Instinctively we whispered so the waves tamped down our voices like wet sand, keeping us safe from the shadowy perils that lay beyond our vision. We had all heard stories of murderers and rapists prowling the forests and the lake bank. During the day we traded these stories the way our brothers traded baseball cards, but in the dark we didn’t need the stories to picture lithe men in catsuits, face masks, and berets. Our night fiends were the images of cartoons and late-show mov- ies, though that didn’t make them any less vivid. But even on a blinding, moonless night like tonight, as long as we stayed close enough that we could hear each other’s breath, the scratching of nails over mosquito bites, the rustling of fingers through hair, as long as we could smell each other’s scents of sweat and soap, we believed we were beyond danger. Standing on the shore, never more than an arm’s length between us, we threw stones that disappeared into the dark, dropping through the water’s surface beyond our vision. Since we couldn’t see where the stones landed, we pre- tended they had sailed beyond the breakwater a mile out, or if one felt especially good leaving our fingers, we pictured it shooting all the way across the water to the other side of the lake, which even in the daylight was so far away we couldn’t see it.

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“Do you think there are girls just like us on the opposite shore?” Donna said. “Maybe they’re us but older,” Lauren said, pitching a hand- ful of pebbles into the dark. “Y’know, us but grown-up.” We tried to picture them feeling the ground for round pebbles to throw to us, convinced someone really was out there, but all we could see was black water, our five images blurred into one as it reflected back in silhouette. We tried to contact them by blowing sharp whistles through our teeth and clapping rocks together. Arms wrapped over our chests, we listened to the echoes from the cliffs, straining for some sign from those other selves. Hearing only our own sounds, we turned from the water, reaching for one another, whom we knew so much better. We built a small bonfire of driftwood and trash, careful to keep the flames hidden from any police cars cruising the park above. By firelight we chanted, “Stiff as a board, light as a feather,” over Corinne, the smallest of us, and managed to lift her off the sand, no one admitting they had used more than two fingers. We were just about to put the fire out and head home, a trek that always felt twice as long as the way there, when Jeanne poked a stick into the embers and said, “I get to go to my Uncle Stanley’s farm. In Menosha.” She pronounced

˙ 27 ˙ ˙ ˙ Karen Lee Boren ˙ ˙ the name of the place carefully, as if having practiced it. In the fluttering light we could see her rubbing her extra thumb over her lips. “Their German shepherd had five puppies,” she added, holding up her good hand with the fingers spread wide. “My dad said I can play with them as much as I want.” The rest of us murmured mild envy and thought of the trips our own families had planned. Throughout the summer one or the other of us would be missing for a week or two at a time for family camping trips to the Dells or to rented cottages on small lakes. We brought back souve- nirs, Minnetonka moccasins, snow globes of birch-tree forests, giant pencils with maps of “Up North” stretching their length. But to each other we reported only the sketchiest details, verbal postcards of the most thrilling or bizarre hap- penings: learning to water-ski, riding ducks through watery caverns, a flat tire and a father’s temper tantrum on the trip up, or posing for a picture with Babe, the giant blue ox, at Paul Bunyan’s Pancake House. Whenever a girl returned from a family trip, we gave our attention to her stories only as long as we might linger over the pages of our mothers’ Good Housekeeping or Lady’s Circle magazines on a rainy afternoon. We listened but just long enough to assure ourselves that the outside world had

˙ 28 ˙ ˙ ˙ Girls in Peril ˙ ˙ nothing on ours, and before long we would start up a new game of bombardment or kickball, picking teams fast so the returning girl was pulled back into our swirling current and her other worlds faded like her dreams.

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