Wildwood Read Free Page A

polio, or about anything going on in the world. There had been a war in Korea and when grown-ups weren’t talking about being “attacked” by polio they worried about the The Bomb and Communism; and it seemed to Hannah that being an adult meant being scared all the time. Hannah mostly thought about school and her friends and how she couldn’t wait to be a teenager. That was about as far ahead as her imagination carried her—though occasionally she wondered if anyone would ever want to marry her and what kind of a house she’d live in and what would it be like to “do it.” There were so many things more urgent to Hannah than polio and bombs and Communists.
    “I want you to take a couple of aspirin and nap a while,” Mrs. Whittaker said. She looked Hannah up and down.
    Hannah tried to curl her toes under.
    “You’ve been painting your toenails.”
    Hannah stared at her feet and the ten pink dots.
    “Oh, Hannah.” Her mother sighed and sat down at the kitchen table. “What am I going to do about you?”
    “It’s only polish, Mommy. I can take it off.”
    “I know you can take it off and you will, believe me, you will. That’s not the point.”
    The point, Hannah knew without listening, was that there would be a time and occasions in the future for painting her toes. When she was grown she could paint them green if she wanted to. But she was too young now. She needed to try to understand how it looked to people to see a little girl with painted toes; she should be aware of the kinds of assumptions people made just on appearances.
    “You never want anyone to think you’re not a lady, Hannah. A young lady now. A grown lady soon enough.”
    Hannah wondered if her mother would ever understand that she did not care about being a lady any more than she cared about polio and Communism. She wanted to yell out how much she hated gloves and girdles and those hats with dinky veils. But the way her mother bent her head and passed a hand over her face, the dejected slope of her shoulders, stopped her and filled her with shame. She thought about Billy Phillips lying dead on the rocks at Bluegang and about the terrible things he had said to her, and she had to believe that what her mother had said was true. She had painted her toenails and tied up her Brownie blouse and Billy Phillips . . . assumed. It was her fault. The police would say so, the judge too.
    “I’m sorry, Mommy,” she said and meant it.
    Upstairs as she lay on the bed with a washcloth across her forehead and a glass of cold water—her mother was a loving nurse—Hannah could not stop her mind from going over and over what had happened. And then she remembered her Saturday panties.
     
     
    Jeanne sat in the kitchen eating the slice of peach cobbler the school cook, Mrs. Phillips, had left for her. It felt very peculiar eating the cobbler and thinking about Mrs. Phillips making the crust and all and her son lying dead, probably. She was glad Mrs. Phillips had gone home for the day and Jeanne didn’t have to look at her face and answer her questions about what kind of a day she was having.
    She couldn’t stop thinking about the way Billy looked lying on the rocks, but instead of trying to put the image out of her mind, she went over every detail. She saw the way his legs were sprawled and the zipper down on his pants. Maybe someone would find him and think he fell when he was peeing. She had watched the boys from her parents’ school having pissing contests and could just imagine Billy Phillips arcing his pee out over the oak root saddle like a fountain. When she watched the boys, she never saw their you-knows but she’d once seen her father’s when she walked in on him in the bathroom, and he was so stewed he barely saw her. The next day she went to the library after school and looked up penis in a medical book. There were about a dozen pictures of men who had venereal disease and one had the elephant’s disease and the underneath part of his thing