The Sugar House Read online

  Then again, what kind of adult acted this way? They smelled something crazy on her. They backed away, sneers in place, but just barely.

  “Fat pig has a dyke friend,” said the one she had knocked down. Noonie, the group’s alpha male.

  “Dyke,” the others echoed. “Ugly dyke.”

  They turned and ran, Noonie calling back over his shoulder. “Too bad for you. You have to be a boy to get the fat pig to drop her pants. Not that any boy wants her.”

  Tess didn’t bother to reply. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb from her body; she needed to concentrate so her legs wouldn’t shake too visibly. When they were out of view, she turned and walked over to Sukey. Good thing she hadn’t needed the girl to run for help. She was rooted to the spot, silent tears coursing down her bright red cheeks, her latest paperback novel held so tightly in one hand that it had started to bow.

  “What was that about?” Tess asked, then realized what a stupid question it was. What was it ever about? It was about being an adolescent, about needing to make someone else as miserable as you were.

  “They do it all the time,” Sukey said, her voice casual and grown-up, as if she were trying to deny the tears on her face. “They steal firecrackers from the rail yard, throw them in people’s yards and back porches. They don’t like me because I won’t…go with them. We’re in the same class, and I do better ’n them. That’s all.”

  Tess knew it wasn’t close to all, but she let it go.

  “Let me walk you home.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.” Sukey’s usually sweet voice was fierce.

  “Well I do. Walk me to my car?”

  Those were terms Sukey could accept. They began walking. Tess noticed the girl was studying her in a sidelong glance, trying to match her stride for stride, although her legs were so much shorter.

  “Were you scared?” Sukey asked, as they waited to cross Fort Avenue.

  “Petrified. But I was angry, too. So angry I didn’t have time to think. I shouldn’t have hit the one boy, Noonie, but I couldn’t think of anything else. It would serve me right if there was a cop on my doorstep tonight, ready to take me in for assault.”

  “It was self-defense,” Sukey said. “And everyone knows Noonie is an asshole.”

  “Strangely, being an asshole is not considered a mitigating circumstance. Besides, it’s not up to the cops to sort out whether something is self-defense. That’s why it’s a better idea not to resort to violence. Luckily”—Tess grinned—“they didn’t get my name. What are they going to do, go to the district and swear out a complaint on Tall Dyke with Braid?”

  Sukey laughed. A little shakily, but she laughed.

  “Are you a dyke? I mean—a lesbian?”

  “No. You know, someone calling you a name doesn’t make you that name.”

  Sukey’s voice was about as low as it could be and still be audible. “I’m fat. They say I’m a fat pig, and they’re right.”

  It was a test, and Tess wasn’t sure she could pass it. What did Sukey want her to say?

  “Here’s a break in the traffic. Let’s run for it.”

  They scampered across the lanes. A pickup honked, some Baltimore grit boy, grinning stupidly at them.

  “Wanna get high?” he called from his window.

  “Not with you,” Tess said, then regretted her flippancy. But if she had gone into some zero-tolerance swoon, Sukey would have fingered her for a hypocrite.

  On the other side of the street, Sukey said: “See, he asked you, not me. Because I’m fat.”

  “He didn’t ask me. He asked some girl he saw flouncing across the street. He asked an ass, he asked a pair of breasts. Not me, Sukey. My parts. When you’re a female between the ages of fifteen and fifty, life is a chop shop and you’re a Toyota Corolla.”

  Sukey would not be comforted. “Maybe they start with your parts and work up to seeing a whole you. It has to begin somewhere, somehow. But with me, all they see is a blob.”

  “You’re not a blob.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I have a pretty face, too?”

  Tess stopped walking. She wanted to touch Sukey, to pat her arm or take her hand, but she sensed the girl would recoil at any physical contact, no matter how small.

  “Do you brush your teeth every day?”

  “Huh?”

  “I asked if you brush your teeth every day.”

  “Of course I do, after every meal.”

  “Then you’ve looked in a mirror and you know you have a pretty face. I don’t have to tell you that. No one can tell you that. Oh, they can tell you, but they can’t make you believe it. And Sukey—”

  She had the girl’s full attention now.

  “You should know this. Whatever you weigh, whatever you look like, there are boys who are going to tell you that you’re pretty. That you’re beautiful, that they love you, that there’s no one like you. And at the moment they say it, they mean it. Boys will say anything to get what they want. It’s the moment after they have it that you have to worry about.”

  Sukey tossed her hair. “Boys. I don’t need to go with boys. Lots of older guys ask me out.”

  This, Tess suspected, was not one of her lies. Or if it was, it wouldn’t be for long.

  “Yeah, I know about those men. Guys in their twenties who come around girls your age, who seem so mature and cool. They’ve got cars and spending money. They followed me home from school, too. But the thing about a twenty-five-year-old who goes after a fifteen-year-old is that he’s already been turned down by a whole decade of women, you know what I mean? He just keeps moving down the ladder until he hits someone young enough and”—she had started to say “dumb enough” but stopped herself—“and naïve enough to buy it.”

  Sukey looked unconvinced. Tess understood. As frightening as it was to have an older man call to you from his car, it was exciting, too, and pleasurable. Sukey wasn’t ready to give up that tiny bit of fizz in her life, the consolation prize for the boys who threw firecrackers and called her names.

  “What if it’s true love?”

  “What if?” Tess wanted to tell her it was almost never true love, but Sukey’s books told her something different. It wasn’t just paperback writers who believed in love, either. The guys themselves thought it was love, at least for a minute. Strange love, perverted love, twisted love, but always love. She decided to change the subject.

  “You know, I was at the swings for a reason, Sukey. I was looking for you, thinking about Jane Doe. Are you sure she said what she said, about how she had been at a place that sounded like Domino’s, and lived in the Sugar House?”

  “It wasn’t the swings.”

  Great, the story was already changing.

  “You said—”

  “We ended up at the swings. But I met her up at Fort McHenry, on a bench overlooking the water. A bench where I go to read. She said she was supposed to meet someone there. She said it was the only place in Baltimore they both knew, where she felt safe, because you can see so far in all directions, and no one can sneak up on you.”

  Tess tried not to show her exasperation. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “You made me nervous, you didn’t give me time to tell it from beginning to end, and Brad was there, doubting every word I said. We walked down to the swings together. That’s when she told me the stuff about the Sugar House, and a place like Domino’s, only not the same. Don’t you believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you.” I believe you believe what you say, which makes you even harder to fathom. “But I haven’t been able to find any place quite like that. Not a place that knows Jane Doe. What did she look like?”

  Maybe it hadn’t even been Jane Doe, just another woman wandering through at the same time, and Sukey’s imperfect memory had dressed her in Jane Doe’s wardrobe.

  Sukey thought about this. “She looked like a painting.”

  “A painting? Any particular one?”

  “No, I mean—even though she was
dirty and her hair was tucked up in this hat, you just wanted to look at her. For a moment, I thought she might be somebody famous, because she didn’t look like anyone you see on the street, you know what I mean? It was like Julia Roberts, or some big movie star, but different. I just wanted to…look at her.” Sukey blushed. “I mean, I’m not queer, I don’t like girls, but she…I’d never seen anybody like her.”

  “So you walked down to the swings—”

  “SUKEY BREWER.” A woman’s voice, shrill and frantic, cut through them like a hard wind. Tess saw Sukey at age forty, short and round beneath a towering brunette beehive, bustling toward them.

  The older Sukey grabbed the girl by the elbow and swung her around. “I have been looking everywhere for you. I told you to come straight home this afternoon, because I needed you to watch your baby brother while I go shopping. You were supposed to be home an hour ago, not hanging out in the park, telling stories to whoever will listen.”

  The woman dragged Sukey away, with hardly a glance in Tess’s direction. Red-faced Sukey stared at the pavement, mortified, not even bothering to say goodbye.

  Then again, for an adolescent, the mere revelation that one actually had parents, had emerged from another person’s flesh, was enough to cause acute embarrassment.

  Tess walked back to her car and wondered where Sukey had been going with her new version of the “I met Jane Doe” story. Then she wondered why she cared. As surely as Fort Avenue dead-ended at Fort McHenry, she had come to her own dead end. Nothing to do but turn the car around and go home.

  chapter 11

  THREE HOURS LATER, TESS WAS STILL IN A FUNK, A bleak, mean mood, as bad a mood as she could imagine. She went to the boxing gym in her neighborhood, where she used the weights and exercise equipment, but not even a good sweat could boil this defeated feeling out of her. Slumped at her desk, still in her workout clothes, she had an inspiration and began dialing Whitney’s various numbers. The cell phone answered.

  “What’s up?” Whitney knew it was her, she had Caller ID, which Tess kept meaning to get her number blocked for. She considered telecommunications the modern-day arms race, and she believed in constant one-upmanship.

  “Any chance of shooting tonight?”

  “Absolutely.” Whitney’s certainty about everything was always refreshing. “My parents’ place?”

  “Well, we could go to my folks’ place, but if you set up a target on a tenth of an acre in Ten Hills, the neighbors tend to get all squirrelly.”

  “Okay, meet me in an hour,” Whitney said.

  “The sun will be down by then.”

  “No problem. We’ll just shoot from the glow of the headlamps. Night training, you know.”

  Whitney’s family lived in the valley. Which valley, Tess had never been sure—Worthington or Greenspring, she got them confused. The more pressing question was valley of what. It wasn’t as if there were mountain ranges in this part of Maryland, just rolling hills. But that’s how it was known, this mix of huge old houses and farmland beyond the Baltimore Beltway. The Valley.

  It was colder in the Valley, and darker and starrier. What’s the difference between the rich and the rest of us? They have more money, and they have more stars in their night sky. Tess had known Whitney for more than a decade, but she had never gotten over feeling like a trespasser when she turned up the long drive to the Talbots’ stone farmhouse, a place so simple and well preserved that even the most cloddish social climber could see it outranked the nearby mansions. And that was before one factored in the 50 acres of prime Baltimore County real estate, just screaming out to be turned into 100, maybe 150 “executive” homes. When Whitney wanted to torment her mother, she claimed she would do just that with her inheritance.

  Whitney was full of shit. She loved her childhood home so much she wouldn’t move out, preferring to live in a small guest house rather than find her own place in the city. She had sworn, upon returning from Japan, that she was looking for a condo or a rowhouse, but she was proving to be more particular than Goldilocks.

  “I don’t know why it’s so hard,” Whitney said a little plaintively. “All I want is an old place—but with the kitchen and systems updated, of course. A water view. And a neighborhood where there are things to do, but I don’t want to worry about parking and congestion.”

  “How many real estate brokers have you gone through so far?” Tess asked her.

  “Three. Four. No, just three,” she said, pulling on a pair of boots in what she called the “great room” of the four-room guest house. Her mother had decorated it as if it were a hunting lodge, which suited Whitney. “The last one didn’t call back when I left a message about a place I saw in Federal Hill. I think my photograph may be circulating through all the offices. Who cares? No one buys a house in December, anyway. It can wait until spring.”

  “What about your privacy?”

  “Oh, they never come up here. If anything, I’m the one who’s barging in on them all the time, borrowing things, stealing food.”

  “But they can see your house from their breakfast table. If you brought someone home—”

  “Brought someone home? Tess, you know I’m a sexual camel. I can go years in-between. I had sex in Japan. I’m not due for a while.”

  “You had sex in Japan?” This was new. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “It’s not like it was the first time, I told you all about that.” So she had, in detail so clinical and detatched that it would have put an eighteen-year-old Tess off men forever, if she hadn’t ventured into the territory first. “And it wasn’t love. Just the usual, ohmigod, I’m ten thousand miles from home, there go the last of my inhibitions kind of thing. The need for distance only seems to increase. First it was college, on the Eastern Shore. Then New Haven, or New York on the weekends. Now Japan. I may have to move to New Zealand to have any sex life at all.”

  “Was he Japanese?”

  “One was.”

  “One?”

  “There was an Englishman, too.” She grabbed her fair hair and crammed it under a battered tweed hat, the kind that older, preppy men wore. “It was fun.” She said this as if it was a rather sudden revelation. “I may even try it again sometime.”

  They drove in Whitney’s new Suburban to a cleared field at the property’s edge, where Whitney had already set up two cardboard torsos. With the car running, she left the headlamps on, so they were in a small circle of light.

  “It’s colder than I thought,” Tess complained. “My hands are blocks of ice.”

  “Don’t you dare wear gloves,” Whitney decreed. “Gloves are for sissies.”

  Tess loaded the Smith & Wesson, then fired off her six rounds. She always lost count, and had to click at least once on the empty chamber to be sure the gun was empty. She hadn’t practiced for a while, and her sighting was off. It was disgraceful, really, how easy it was for someone in Maryland to buy and keep a gun, with no proof of one’s ability to use it.

  “You’re pulling to the right,” Whitney observed. “My turn.”

  Whitney, whose first gun had been a hunting rifle, preferred a Berretta for target practice, a semiautomatic with a magazine. The first time Tess had seen a magazine, she had said: “Oh, like a Pez dispenser.” Because she always had trouble loading Pez dispensers—the candy tended to snap out of the plastic column and spray all over the room—she had decided she was better off with the Smith & Wesson.

  Whitney was faster than Tess, much more expert, and her shots were neatly clustered at the center of the torso.

  “Want to try mine?” she asked.

  Tess shook her head. “I’ve tried it. Between the recoil and the casings flying out the side, it makes me a nervous wreck.”

  She took aim again with her .38. Not as good as Whitney, but better.

  “Now try it from leather,” Whitney instructed.

  “Oh really—”

  “Come on. Cops have to do it. Why not you? You think everyone who takes a shot at you is going to send you a
n engraved invitation first, so you know to have your gun handy? I’ve got a holster in the Suburban, let’s try it.”

  Tess was clumsy at this. The local gun ranges didn’t allow members to draw from leather, so she had almost no experience.

  “My turn,” Whitney sang out, as if they were playing jacks.

  The night was cold and still, sharp with the final, decadent smells of autumn. Tess had thought she couldn’t last long in such cold. But her concentration made her forget everything, except the gun in her hand and the target ahead of her. There was room for nothing else in her head. Not for Ruthie, not for Jane Doe. Not for Sukey, not for bars whose licenses listed dead owners. Not for smarmy Arnie Vasso. There was only the night and her gun.

  Before she knew it, two hours had passed.

  “You know what? I think this is better than yoga. I never feel so relaxed and smoothed out as I do after shooting.”

  “I think it’s better than sex,” Whitney said. But she was grinning in the glow of her headlamps, mocking her own cool Wasp couth.

  Back at the house, they cleaned their guns, washed their hands, built a fire in the stone fireplace, and fixed mugs of tea with brandy. Food was more problematic. Whitney’s cupboards held only a very old package of Carr’s water biscuits. The refrigerator was slightly better—a jar of olives and a bottle of vermouth. The freezer had a bottle of gin, a bottle of vodka, and a frozen dinner so encrusted with ice that Tess could make out only a few letters on the label.

  “Spinach,” Tess guessed. “Or maybe spanakopita. Whitney, what do you live on, anyway? My place isn’t that well-stocked, either, but I’m a few steps from about a dozen restaurants, not to mention Kitty’s kitchen. You can’t even get a pizza delivered out here.”

  “I eat up there,” she said, indicating her parents’ house with her chin, not at all embarrassed. “Or I get carryout from Eddie’s. Or Graul’s, or Sutton Place. I’ve been living off Eddie’s Caesar salad. And salmon cakes.”