The Most Dangerous Thing Read online

  Yet mono never did come for Gwen. Instead, things happened as her mother had prophesied. She added three inches to her height in three months, and what had been an extra fifteen pounds became just right. Her mother let her buy new clothes, dropping her off at the mall with an allowance and no rules. Gwen bought gauzy, “ethnic” things, long and floaty. She clearly thought she looked a little bit like Stevie Nicks, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. She would have looked more like her if her mother had let her get a perm, but that was another one of those odd lines that Tally drew. She, with her long, straight hair, couldn’t bear the idea of her daughter having a curly mane.

  The rest of us never commented on the change, no matter how Gwen preened and waited for the compliments she believed she deserved. Oh, we noted her clothes, but only to mention how impractical they were. “Those blouses will get caught on tree branches,” Mickey said. Tim said he could see her underwear through the thin material of the skirt. Sean told her that she was going to slow us down in her stupid new sandals—that’s exactly what he called them, stupid new sandals.

  Only Go-Go reached a dirty hand toward her draped arm, eager to feel the material, and she let him. He rubbed it between forefinger and thumb, curious. “Kind of scratchy,” he said. Then: “Can boys wear shirts like that?” How Tim and Sean hooted at him, but Go-Go, for once, was not the naif. Lots of boys, other boys, were wearing clothes very much like Gwen’s that summer. Even Mickey’s stepfather, Rick, wore a linen shirt that made us think of medieval days, peasants toiling the land. It was off-white, with a slit that showed lots of his dark chest hair. And Rick wasn’t someone that the Halloran boys could mock. He knew how to fix engines, he had a motorcycle. He really did look like Tom Selleck.

  It was the Halloran boys who were out of step with the times, with their short hair and plain white T-shirts. Their summer clothes were what they used to wear to summer camp, but there was no summer camp for them this year. Something had happened. Mr. Halloran had lost his job, which wasn’t new. Mr. Halloran was rather famous for losing jobs. He had a temper, he liked to tell the boss what was what, as he said, and that usually ended up with him leaving. It was a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question whether Mr. Halloran was asked to leave his jobs because he told the boss what was what, or whether he sensed the end was near and decided he had nothing to lose by making such a speech. He had lost enough jobs so that he kept his workplace possessions to a minimum. The difference, in the summer of 1979, was that he was having trouble finding a new one. We didn’t talk about it and we didn’t know why we didn’t talk about it. Over time, there would be more and more subjects like that, things we didn’t talk about, for reasons we couldn’t identify. Gwen’s new appearance. Mr. Halloran’s job situation. How good-looking Rick was. Go-Go’s increasing craziness, the things he was rumored to do to cats and small animals. But that came later, when we hardly spoke to each other at all.

  Gwen and Sean, falling in love, then out. We never spoke of that. They held it close, like a secret, but the kind of secret that you were dying for others to ask you about. The rest of us refused to acknowledge it.

  Perhaps we should have spoken about that because that was what killed us, as an us. We couldn’t be we anymore, not in the face of that impenetrable twosome. We had been a we, and our mathematics teachers, different as they were—the nuns and priests of St. Lawrence and Cardinal Gibbons, the beaten-down old crone at Mickey’s public school, the love-is-all hippie type at Park—agreed that a subset of a group could not be greater than the group itself. Venn diagrams proved it. Yet Gwen and Sean were. They formed a group within the group, and it swamped us like a wave, we couldn’t escape it. All because of the damn clothes, which were the result of Gwen getting thin, which we still trace back to Chloe’s toothbrush, even if it didn’t give Gwen mono, as she had hoped. It began with the toothbrush, with moon-faced Gwen sneaking into some girl’s bathroom sucking on her red-handled Oral-B. Some girls aren’t very good at being pretty. There, it’s been said. Gwen became very pretty, very fast, and she didn’t know how to handle it. She was as destructive as Go-Go, running through the woods with a pointed stick or tossing rocks in the air, heedless of where they might land. But everyone knew to get out of Go-Go’s way when he was acting crazy. Gwen tore through us with no warning.

  It was late July, that point on the calendar where summer has gotten a little old, boring. After two days of heavy rains, the stream was wide and fast in places. Emboldened by our friendship with Chicken George, we had been pushing deeper and deeper into the woods each day, taking sack lunches prepared by Mrs. Robison or Mrs. Halloran. We found what appeared to be a broken concrete dam, most of it submerged in the rushing brown stream, but with a few jagged pieces above the waterline. Tim insisted on crossing there. Mickey scrambled behind him, sure-footed as ever in anything that wasn’t an athletic contest.

  Go-Go went next, forever indifferent to the water, no matter how many times we had been told it was polluted and deadly, and his very indifference somehow kept him safe. Sean waited for Gwen to go. She clearly didn’t want to cross, but it was too late to argue against Tim’s plan, and she would have been shamed if she didn’t try. She lost her footing on her second or third step, and although she righted herself, the sleeve of her filmy, flimsy blouse caught on something in the water. If she had pulled back sharply, she would have been fine, but she didn’t want to tear the blouse. She reached down, determined to gently extract the material from whatever had snagged it—and that was when she fell into the water. The horrible, murky water, which we had been told countless times could kill us, the water whose merest contact required tetanus boosters.

  She didn’t come up.

  In water that brown, it would have been impossible to see blood, but Go-Go pointed, screaming in that way he had, so we couldn’t tell if he was happy or scared. “Blood! Blood!” Gwen bobbed to the surface, floated, like the Lily Maid of Astolat. Not that we knew the poem, but Gwen had read Anne of Green Gables, in which Anne has to be rescued after attempting to re-create the maiden’s fate. We knew a lot of stuff in that secondhand, watered-down way, through cartoons and books and television shows. Which, perhaps, is a way of saying we knew nothing.

  Those of us who had crossed to the other bank froze, but Sean plunged into the water. Gwen’s body kept moving away from him, almost as if it were a game. Catch me if you can. The others ran down the bank, shouting contradictory instructions. “Shut up,” Sean shouted through gritted teeth. “Shut up.” He was wading, the water up to his waist, reaching for her, but she kept slipping from his grasp. Gwen might have eluded him forever, but a stick saved her this time, catching her skirt just long enough to give Sean time to catch up to her. He gathered her up in his arms and carried her to shore, then began giving her mouth-to-mouth, which he had learned in swimming classes at the camp the Hallorans could no longer afford.

  “She’ll be brain damaged,” Mickey said. “She was unconscious too long, she took in too much water.”

  “Shut up,” Tim said.

  Go-Go jumped up and down, chanting: “Out goes the bad air, in goes the good air.” That’s how it worked in cartoons. We had all seen it ourselves on the old Captain Chesapeake show. In cartoons, the characters pushed on each other’s stomachs with great force and manipulated their arms.

  In cartoons, the people always woke up. Gwen was not waking up.

  But after what seemed an eternity, she coughed, spitting up a little water before vomiting a violent brackish stream. Sean sat back on his haunches, but he ended up catching some of it on his ankles.

  “Are you OK?”

  Tim stood over her. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Sean swatted at his leg. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Three,” Gwen said. “What happened?”

  “You fell,” Sean said. “You hit your head, you almost drowned.”

  “Drowned!” Go-Go said.

  She lifted a hand to her head, but there was no cut, there had been no
blood, no matter what Go-Go thought he saw. “I feel a bump,” she said. Sean’s fingers followed hers, probing tenderly. It was hard not to notice that the gauzy shirt, the source of all this trouble, was transparent and clinging now, her bra visible. Gwen crossed her arms over her chest.

  “The important thing,” Mickey said, “is to figure out what to tell the grown-ups.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gwen’s soaked, her shirt is torn. Her mother will see that and demand an explanation. They’ll know we had to go pretty far downstream to get to a place where the water runs this fast and deep, and we’ll be in trouble.”

  “No one said we couldn’t,” said Tim, the master of the loophole, the king of technicalities.

  “Mickey’s right,” Sean said. “No one said specifically we couldn’t go this far, but we never ask, because we know they’ll say no, and if they find out where we were, they’ll make rules against it. We have to get Gwen as dry as possible. When did you have your last tetanus shot?”

  “Last summer, after I cut myself on that rusty fence.”

  Sean said: “It’s been at least a few years for me. How long do the shots last?”

  We didn’t know. We knew the horrors of lockjaw, though. Gwen’s father had covered that for us in great detail.

  “I don’t have any cuts, though,” Sean said. “And I didn’t swallow any water. I’ll be okay.”

  We thought at the time that Sean was taking one for the team, that he was willing to forgo the tetanus shot if it meant that we could continue to roam the park with no boundaries placed on us.

  But Sean’s only concern was Gwen. He was making this heroic gesture for her because she had been unconscious during his true heroism and unable to appreciate it. Or had she been? Some of us wondered.

  “Chicken George,” Mickey said. “He’ll help us, and he won’t ask any questions.”

  “There’s no shower there,” Gwen said. “And I don’t want to wear his dirty clothes.”

  “Trust me,” Mickey said.

  We made our way back through the woods, to Chicken George’s house. He wasn’t surprised to see us. He was never surprised to see us. Although our comings and goings appeared random to us and therefore unpredictable, Chicken George seemed attuned to our movements the way he was attuned to his chickens, the seasons, the park. He was never caught off guard. He examined Gwen carefully, with those strange hands, so pink on one side, so dark on the other. He produced a Goody comb, still in its plastic wrapper, and worked it carefully through her wet, matted hair. He gave her a sheet from the line, so she knew it was clean and fresh, told her to go inside and change out of her wet clothes, wrap herself in the sheet as if it were a toga, and bring her clothes out. He actually said toga, and we were surprised he knew the word.

  “To-ga, to-ga,” Go-Go began to chant. We had not seen the movie Animal House. We were too young. But it had filtered down into the culture, and we knew the set pieces, some of the lines. It was soon to be the era of trickle-down economics, but if you asked us, we would have said that adulthood, too, was a process of trickling down, that we picked up the scraps of adult life as surely as we went behind our parents at their dinner parties and stole sips from their glasses, bites from their plates. We shook cigarettes free from open packets, took tiny swigs from the bottles in the liquor cabinet. They knew, they had to know, because we know now everything our children do, no matter how sly they think they are. The difference is that our parents approved. They preferred for us to tiptoe into adulthood through these tiny subterfuges. It’s not a rationalization, but a truth: they encouraged us to lie, to keep things from them, to protect them from what we knew. It started small. The forays into the park. Our friendship with Chicken George. Gwen’s near-drowning, the time the truck almost crushed Go-Go. It started small, and then it got so large, so fast, that it swept us all away.

  But the real problem was that Gwen and Sean fell in love. As five, we were mighty, the points on a star. Remember learning how to draw a star? When you are little, it seems impossible, out of reach. You draw lopsided, lumpy things. Then one day, someone shows you the secret. Mickey taught it to Go-Go: one line slashing down, a second shooting up in a diagonal. Straight across, diagonal down, diagonal up. A mere five lines, but when you have finished, there are six shapes within the one: five triangles clustered around a pentagon. Yes, there are even more, you can add and subtract lines, creating more shapes. But if you are true to the integrity of the lines you have drawn, there are five triangles and a pentagon. The pentagon was what grounded us, a magnetic field that held us together. Some might say the pentagon was Chicken George, but it was our talent for secrecy, our sense of ourselves as a single community. Once we five joined, truly joined, it was never boys against girls, or Hallorans against the other two families. No, it was Sean and Gwen who destroyed us. Two of our triangles cut themselves off and ran away together, and we were never whole again. Never.

  Less than a week after Chicken George gave Gwen a sheet and dried her clothes by his fire, he disappeared again. And this time, he seemed to be gone gone—his cupboards bare, the line empty of wash, the chickens pecking at our ankles in a newfound desperation, but we had no feed to give them. You couldn’t say the place was clean. It would never be clean. But it was neat, emptied out. Even Chicken George knew that an era had ended. The five of us stopped going to his cabin.

  But Gwen and Sean still went. All summer long, they slipped away to that cabin, never dreaming that anyone was watching them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “And he—” Giggle.

  The sentence and the giggle ends before Tim comes through the swinging door into the kitchen and confronts three sets of round, blue eyes. Round with innocence, which, he’s pretty sure, is fake. But also round with cold, if such a thing were possible, like the mass-manufactured ice found at buffets. His daughters have taken to regarding him with round, cold eyes these days, as if by widening them they could empty them of all hints, all clues to their existence and inner thoughts. However, he is pretty sure that their thoughts run something like this: boys boys boys boys shoes boys. And maybe, although he hopes not, partying, although he is unclear if partying is simply a by-product, a place to wear shoes and find boys, or if the partying is the destination, the boys and shoes the vehicles. Even the littlest one, only eight, is in on the act. They are three of a kind, thick as thieves. Identical blue eyes, long blond hair, worn straight and parted down the middle, heart-shaped and heartbreaking faces.

  “Good morning,” he says. He knows better—now—than to ask about the interrupted, overheard comment. He knows not to ask anything. Move along, nothing to see here. His daughters remind him of the salamanders he and his brother hunted at the old springhouse. Salmon pink with tiny spots, they were easy enough to see in the clear, rushing water. But to grab one—almost impossible. Only Go-Go had been quick enough, and even he could never hold on to the little buggers. Tim can observe his daughters, but he can’t hold them, not anymore.

  “Can I have the car today?” asks the oldest, Michelle. “I have to go to Mary’s.”

  “I was going to play golf.” He is careful not to say no immediately, to offer the reason before the rejection. The mere sound of that syllable, no, seems to drive his daughters insane, triggering horrible pouting rages. Instead he tries to let them work their way toward no through inference. If he has a golf date, it stands to reason he will need the car for a good chunk of the day. Certainly his daughters can figure that out.

  “Can’t one of your friends take you?” Michelle counters.

  He wants to say the same thing back to her. But, no—be Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am: “My tee time is at eleven A.M.”

  “I don’t need the car until one,” Michelle says.

  “And she could drop me at the movies, then pick me up on the way home,” says Lisa, the middle girl. He waits to see if the baby, Karen, is going to throw herself on the pile, a little pyramid of daughters he will then be forced
to knock over with his unfathomable cruelty, his desire to use his own car on his day off. How could he? He is the meanest daddy in the whole wide world. Until recently, he would have given them the car, found another way. He used to believe that if he said yes to all the easy things, the girls would be grateful and well behaved.

  Then he saw the much-too-old-for-her boy—twenty, twenty-one?—dropping Michelle off on a Saturday morning, when she was supposedly returning from a sleepover at Mary’s. Who was that? he asked, struggling to keep his voice casual. Oh, Mary’s older brother. He was nice enough to bring me home early when I said I didn’t feel good. The smell of pancakes made me want to vomit.

  He and Arlene waited until all the girls were out of the house, then tossed Michelle’s room. They found the birth control pills beneath a pile of bras, filmy insubstantial things that didn’t look up to the task of harnessing his daughter’s frighteningly developed breasts. But neither he nor Arlene was sure what to do next. Obviously, they couldn’t take the pills because Michelle would probably stop using them, possibly fulfill her unspoken ambition to be picked for MTV’s Teen Moms. Yet if they confronted her, what would they say? You can’t have sex? You can’t use birth control? You can have sex and use birth control, but we have to be part of the decision? Tim doesn’t want any part of his daughter’s sex life. He wants his daughter not to have a sex life. Is that so much to ask?