“Go to bed,” she told Calvin. “You’re feeling very, very sleepy.”
“Who’s English?” he wanted to know. “Who were you talking to?”
“Shred,” she said, and despised herself for saying it. Her book jackets, her sweaters, her new pointy shoes, the toes already scuffed: she couldn’t keep anything nice for longer than a minute. “He’s not English.”
“Who’s Shred?”
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Beatrice said, and moving her hands through the darkness, she found something shaped like Calvin. She guided it toward the door. In the radio’s dim light, she saw the pair of sunglasses he had added to his disguise. These, combined with the beret, gave him the appearance of a strange and chic little person, like a boy whose parents are glamorous performers, and who spends his whole childhood drinking ginger ale in nightclubs. Beatrice filled with the intoxicating feeling of her brother being unfamiliar to her.
And then the radio spoke. It said, “This song goes out to the girl who wanted to hear some Angry Samoans.”
“That’s me,” Beatrice whispered, to no one in particular.
HER OTHER NIGHTTIME ACTIVITY often enthralled her so completely that she would still be awake when Shred announced it was one o’clock in the morning. She would look up miserably at the lampstand man casting his puny reflection against the black squares of her window. Having the light on in the middle of the night was a million times gloomier than having it off. But she needed the light to see what she was doing.
This other activity involved a pair of tweezers she had found in the first aid kit beneath the sink. In a slow but gratifying way, her eyebrows were disappearing. Everything else, meanwhile, was running amok. She seemed to have passed into another country, a place where it was impossible to remain intact: you found yourself shedding crooked snowflakes of skin, leaving squiggles of short, dark hair on your sheets. You were always leaving something behind. And it scared Beatrice, the thought that some excessive bit of her might detach itself and then be discovered by a tidier person. On a bar of soap, or in the collar of a sweater she had borrowed. The tweezers were not much help, in this unpleasant new country she had crossed into unawares; it would have been easier, maybe, to empty her bathtub with an eyedropper. But she kept them close at hand, inside the drawer of her bedside table, and at night she put them to furious use.
She was busy, but so was everyone else. They all had their projects. In the rooms below, her father was pushing furniture across the floor. Her mother was snapping rubber bands around handfuls of bobby pins, loose colored pencils, rolls of pennies. They opened and closed drawers. They raised and lowered their voices. They moved things around. And even Calvin was awake sometimes, splayed across the rug in his room, creating accord among his action figures. Beatrice could hear him murmuring, she could hear the chair legs scraping, she could feel the whole house ticking with their solitary habits, so it was no wonder then that in the mornings, her family, they did not look their best.
ONE NIGHT, LATE, THE telephone rang.
“Hello?” Beatrice said.
“Hey!” a voice said, sounding pleased. “How you doing?”
“Good,” seemed the right way to respond. She said it again. “Good.”
The person chuckled. “You don’t know who this is.”
“Sure I do!” Beatrice protested. “Of course I do. So how are you?”
“Happy to hear your voice.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m happy to hear yours.”
He asked, “What are you doing right now?”
Beatrice dropped her tweezers onto the bedspread. “Nothing,” she said. She tucked them back in their drawer. “Listening to the radio.”
Her bed made a squeaking noise as she stood up, ready for the next question. He would ask, Can I talk to your dad for a minute? and she would pound down the four flights of stairs; she would get, on her way back, a fruit roll-up from the kitchen. When the bed squeaked, she wondered, did it sound like she’d farted?
She waited for the question.
“That’s funny. I’m listening to the radio, too.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe we have a psychic connection.” And he chuckled again, to show that he was kidding.
As he said this, she realized that she did not, in fact, know the person she was speaking to. But it seemed too late to tell him that. And too late to feel alarmed. He was not an obscene phone caller, that much was for certain. She had received an obscene phone call before. Waiting for her brother on the steps outside the public library, she had heard the telephone ring from inside the telephone booth. When she answered it, a voice asked, Is your pussy very hairy? and though it would never have occurred to her to use those exact words, she did think to herself, as she slowly brought the phone down on the receiver, How did you know?
The person coughed on the other end of the line. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m getting over a cold.”
The cough did not sound like it belonged to him. It sounded childlike and delicate and dry, like that of the rich little boy in The Secret Garden, who is wheeled about in a wicker chair with a blanket on his lap. He behaves peevishly until his better nature is revealed by someone poorer.
Beatrice said, “Bless you,” as if the person on the telephone had sneezed.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed by now? Don’t you have school in the morning?”
“No,” she said, without irritation. For he hadn’t asked in a mindless way. And he wasn’t looking for her father or her mother. Somehow she knew now he wasn’t going to ask for them, ever.
“No,” she repeated. “I’m not in school anymore.” She closed her eyes to the bookshelves, and the pale blue bedside table.
She said, “I’m in a band.”
“Like the Bangles?”
“No!” she shrieked; in embarrassment, in dangerous-feeling delight. He thought it was true. “Like the Butthole Surfers.”
“Haven’t heard of them,” he murmured deferentially.
“They’re obscure,” she said. “A lot of people haven’t.”
This seemed a good time to mention her fuzzbox. Like a vocabulary word, she had to use it in a sentence: “I’ve got a fuzzbox” was all she could manage, which wouldn’t have passed muster on a quiz at her school. But who was keeping score? She heard herself suddenly saying aloud a number of things that until then she had only been able to say silently, as an experiment in her head.
She also learned about a profession she hadn’t known of before: landscaping. It involved the pruning and mowing of other people’s yards. This was what he did, the person with the dainty cough on the other end of the phone. Her parents, she thought, could use a landscaper. Their own yard was wild and overgrown, and a great source of contention. Her father believed that lawns were not ecologically sound; her mother believed that this was an excuse. But Beatrice mentioned none of this. She had already created the impression that she no longer lived at home, and that she belonged to the kind of family who didn’t even own a yard.
She detected something slithering across the floor. “Can you hold on a moment?” she asked, and clamped her hand over the mouth of the telephone.
“Calvin!” she said. “Please go burgle somewhere else!”
Something slithered away from her. Her bedroom door cracked open, and then it closed.
“Sorry,” Beatrice said into the telephone.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Oh yes,” she said.
“Who’s that yelling?”
It was Beatrice’s father. He was downstairs somewhere, thundering. Most likely the house was upsetting him. They had moved in more than three years before, but still their house hadn’t ceased to surprise them: it flooded in the springtime, ushered in hosts of flying ants, attracted the attentions of feral cats and raccoons. The chimney collapsed; the pipes burst; one windy afternoon, a red Spanish tile came flying off the roof and nearly hit Calvin on the head. The house was always in need of an expensive and immediate repair, the accumulation of which had begun to deeply discourage their father. He seemed to have pictured repairs on a much smaller and more charming scale, repairs that could create camaraderie within a family. Everyone gathered together, genially refinishing a banister, not scores of heavy-booted workmen, clumping through the house like a marauding army. “This is not what I imagined!” their father would bellow, a sound both terrifying and wounded. It was a sound she imagined an elephant might make when captured, its trunk curling up toward the sky. But she couldn’t figure out what he was saying now, with four long flights of stairs between them.