Katy agreed. So did Conroy.
Rebecca wiped at her eyes. It made her want to cry, Leora saying such things about her brother.
Like shifting a mirror, just a little. You see an edge to something, an angle of vision you had not known. Such a surprise!
At school, nobody ever said a nice thing about Herschel. Only he was a fugitive from justice, wanted by the police and he’d be sent to Attica for sure where Ne-gro prisoners from Buffalo would cut him up good, himself. Get what he deserved.
The game continued. Slap-slap-slap of sticky cards. Leora offered Rebecca a sip of her ale and Rebecca declined at first then said O.K. and choked a little swallowing the strong liquid and the others laughed, but not meanly. Then Rebecca heard herself say, as if to surprise, “My pa’s some damn old drunk, I hate him.”
Rebecca expected Katy to burst into giggles as Katy always did when a girlfriend complained in harsh comic tones of her family. It was what you did! But here in the Grebs’ kitchen something was wrong, Leora stared hard at her holding an uplifted card and Rebecca knew to her shame that she’d misspoken.
Leora shifted her Chesterfield from one hand to the other, scattering ashes. Must’ve been the Black Horse ale that had provoked Rebecca to utter such words, making her want to choke and laugh at the same time.
“Your pa,” Leora said thoughtfully, “is a man hard to fathom. People say. I would not claim to fathom Joseph Schwart.”
Joseph! Leora didn’t even know Rebecca’s father’s name.
Rebecca shrank, in shame. The harsh monosyllable Schwart was stinging to hear. To know that others might utter it, might speak of her father in a way both impersonal and familiar, was shocking to her.
Yet Rebecca heard herself say, half in defiance, “You don’t have to ”fathom‘ him, I’m the one. And Ma.“
Carefully Leora said, not looking at Rebecca now, “What about your ma, Rebecca? She keeps to herself, eh?”
Rebecca laughed, a harsh mirthless sound.
Katy said, to Leora, in a whiny triumphant voice as if the two had been arguing, and this was the crushing point, “Momma, see? I told R’becca she can stay with us. If she needs to.”
Too slowly, Leora sucked on what remained of her cigarette.
“Well…”
Rebecca had been smiling. All this while, smiling. The hot sour liquid she’d swallowed was a gaseous bubble in her gut, she could feel it and worried she might vomit it back up. Her cheeks were burning as if they’d been slapped.
All this while, Conroy and Molly were fiddling with their cards, oblivious of this exchange. They had not the slightest awareness that Rebecca Schwart had betrayed her parents, nor that Katy had put it to Leora, with Rebecca as a witness, that Rebecca might come live with them, and Leora was hesitant, unwilling to agree. Not the slightest awareness! Conroy was a large-boned child with sniffles and a nasty habit of wiping his nose every few minutes on the back of his hand and the mean thought came to Rebecca If he was mine, I’d strangle him and the wish to tell this to Leora was so strong, Rebecca had to grip her cards tight.
Hearts, diamonds, clubs…Trying to make sense of what she’d been dealt.
Can a king of hearts save you? Ten of clubs? Queen-and-jack pair? Wished she had seven cards in the same suit, she’d lay them down on the table with a flourish. The Grebs would be goggle-eyed!
Wanting nothing more than to keep playing rummy forever with Katy’s family. Laughing, making wisecracks, sipping ale and when Leora invited her to stay for supper Rebecca would say with true regret Thanks but I can’t, I guess, they want me back home but instead there was Rebecca tossing down her cards suddenly, some of them falling onto the floor, Rebecca pushed her chair away from the table skidding and noisy, God damn if she was going to cry! Fuck the Grebs if they expected that.
“I hate you, too! You can all go to hell!”
Before anyone could say a word, Rebecca slammed out the screen door. Running, stumbling out to the road. Inside, the Grebs must have stared after her, astonished.
There came Katy’s voice, almost too faint to be heard, “Rebecca? Hey c’mon back, what’s wrong?”
Never. She would not.
In April, this was. The week after Gus left.
My pa’s some damn old drunk, I hate him.
She could not believe she had uttered those words. For all the Grebs to hear!
Of course they would tell everyone. Even Katy who liked Rebecca would tell everyone with ears.
At school, forever afterward Rebecca ignored Katy Greb. Would not look at Katy Greb. In the morning, her strategy was to wait until Katy and the others were out of sight walking along the road, before she followed behind them; or, she took one of her secret routes through fields and pine woods and, her favorite, along the railroad embankment that was elevated by five feet. So happy! She was a young horse galloping, her legs so springy and strong, she laughed aloud out of very happiness, she could run-run-run forever arriving reluctantly at school, nerved-up, sweaty, itching for a fight, bad as Herschel wanting somebody to look at her cross-eyed or mouth Gravedigger! or some bullshit like that, Christ she was too restless to calm down to fit into a desk! Herschel had said he’d have liked to break the damn desk, squeezing his knees under and lifting, exerting his muscles, and Rebecca felt the same way, exactly.
“Hey, R’becca-”
Go to hell. Leave me alone.
Hatred for Katy Greb and for Leora Greb and all of the Grebs and many others became a strange, potent consolation, like sucking something bitter.
Hardening her heart against dopey Katy Greb. Friendly good-natured not-too-bright girl who’d been Rebecca Schwart’s closest friend from third grade on, till Katy stared at Rebecca in hurt, in bewilderment, and finally in resentment and dislike. “Fuck you too, Schwart. Fuck you.”
A group of girls, Katy at the center. Smiling in scorn speaking of Rebecca Schwart.
Well, Rebecca had wanted this, didn’t she? Wanted them to hate her and leave her alone.
All that spring, their enmity wafted after her like the stink of smoldering rubber Gravedigger’s daughter she can go fuck herself.
25
“Ma? Ma-”
In the end she would not need to run away from home. It was her home that would expel her. Always she would recall that irony: her punishment at last.
May 11, 1949. A weekday. She’d stayed away after school for as long as she’d dared. In dread of returning home as if sensing beforehand what awaited.
She called for her mother. Her voice rose in childish terror. She was panicked stumbling to the front door that was partly open…The crude wooden door he’d painted over after the Hallowe’en vandalism in thick furious swaths of dark green paint to obscure the markings beneath that could not be obscured. “Ma…? It’s me.” Beyond a corner of the house as if in mockery of her alarm was a vision of laundry on the clothesline, frayed towels and a sheet stirring in the wind and so it was logical for Rebecca who believed in magical thinking to tell herself If Ma has hung out wash today…
…if today, laundry on the line, Ma’s washday…
Still she was short of breath. She’d been running. From the Quarry Road, she’d been running. It was hours after school had ended for the day. It was near six o’clock, and still the sun was prominent in the sky. Her heart was pounding in her chest like a deranged bell. As an animal smells fear, injured flesh, spilled blood she knew instinctively that something had happened.
At the edge of her blurred vision, in the interior of the cemetery, some distance away a car or cars were parked on the graveled lane and so she’d thought possibly there had been a funeral, and something had gone wrong, and Jacob Schwart had been blamed through no fault of his. Even as she was plunging toward the front door of the house. Even as she was hearing raised voices. With childish obstinacy not wishing to hear a woman crying, “Don’t go in there!-stop her!”