“You don’t feel guilty, do you?”
Shaking my head no, I walked around the room, trying to dispel the jittery, wild excitement coursing through my veins.
“Maybe you’ll end up like Deane.”
My feet stopped moving.
June was counting out her fifty, in bills.
“I’m not like Deane. Not one bit.”
June shrugged. “Suit yourself. What are you going to keep the loot in?”
A good question. “The poodle bags?”
“Not my poodles!”
“Of course not.”
“And what about their toys?”
“Pockets.” The moment the idea came out, it sounded right. “I’m going to sew extra pockets in my red coat, and put all the toys in there.”
June took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose, not a child’s gesture. “Then why don’t you just put the money in the extra pockets and leave the poodle toys out of this?” She hated the idea, you could tell, of disrupting the ideal order of the poodle paraphernalia.
I wrinkled my nose. “Too heavy? The money would jingle and they’d catch me?” The real reason was that I had this craving to have all the toys on my person, that much safer a shield.
June tucked her fifty dollars into the five-year diary she always kept at bedside. She recorded things like which states’ license plates she’d seen and Burma Shave slogans. “Legally,” her voice was reluctant, “you’re better off putting the money in the bags. That way if they catch you, the evidence is circumstantial.”
Well, good. “Okay.” I pulled my hair back and knotted it into a rubber band. “What do you think the pockets should be made out of?”
“For ten dollars, I’ll help.”
“Never mind.” I opened my suitcase and rifled around. Actually, a couple pairs of underwear would do the trick. All you had to do was sew up the legs and gather the waistband like a pouch.
“I’ll organize the poodle stuff for free.” June was magnanimous. “You’d probably mess it up.”
“Fine.”
She began to pull poodles from the pillowcase we kept them in at night. In the daytime, of course, they were lined up against the back of the car, and they did, indeed, fit perfectly. The only problem, which irritated Stan, was that people always thought they were for sale. The two piles grew: her poodles, my poodles.
I got out my needle and thread and began to sew up the underwear.
“We need to start making their costumes,” June pointed out, once the pillowcase was empty.
“Costumes?” My index finger was bleeding already, staining the pristine white of the cotton.
“God, Fatso! For Halloween!”
That made me sit back and take pause. Halloween was my very favorite holiday, next to my birthday, and here I’d totally forgotten. How strange. Now that I knew, I didn’t even really care. Holidays, poodles, it all seemed so silly. Like I’d taken a giant step into someplace I couldn’t come back from.
“Each poodle has to have his own costume, better than last year. And we have… let’s see.” She began to count. “Where’s the photo album?”
I pulled it out of the suitcase and tossed it. The album opened splat, the pages crumbled.
“Careful!” She flipped through. “We have nine more poodles than last year.”
I started on the second pair of underwear. This was going to work. “Let’s get a package of handkerchiefs and they can go as ghosts.”
“You can act that way to your poodles, if you like. Mine are going to have real costumes.” She lined up my group and began to unwrap the drawstring bags from their necks. “First off, we’ll pin the matching pillows to their collars. That’ll save a lot of room.”
It was good to have her on my side.
An hour later, we had the whole thing set up. The money was in the bags—June had even pinned her own poodles’ pillows to their collars, to lessen suspicion and because it had occurred to her that the bags were also a great place to store clandestine candy—and the toys, strung neatly on rubber bands, with name tags, were bunched into the underwear pockets. Now I looked the part of Fatso in my red coat.
Yet, even though it made me look fat and the baggage was cumbersome, I felt majestic in my supplemented garment. Dauphine’s bag, for instance, had held a rubber eraser painted like the flag of Turkey, a tiny plastic frying pan with two little eggs, a red glass bead from one of Linwood’s favorite necklaces, which had burst one night as they were on their way out to dinner and a play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I think, a wiggle picture from the Cheerios package—Goofy and Pluto—and a slightly chipped seashell. Tying that bunch of stuff together filled me with a sense of peace, and energy, and bliss. Bag after bag of merchandise, gathered together in two big pockets… well, I felt gratified. As though this were what things were for, after all.
I hung my coat back in the niche. “Look,” I told June, “thanks a lot…”
But she was already sound asleep, her even breathing a testimony to her clear conscience.
My heart was too restless for sleep. The deep-night air blew in from the window. I crossed over and then saw that there was a kind of shallow ledge outside the sill. Gingerly, cold in my thin nightgown, I eased myself out and hunkered down.
The black of the sky was weirdly dispersed by the bright moon, which rose like a Woolworth’s pumpkin. How could you forget Halloween on a night like this? Once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, they saw the pale crescents of whitecaps far, far below.
What if you jumped? How long would it take to land? Did you die from fear before you actually touched water or craggy rock?
Or did you think you were flying? Was this the only time you could imagine yourself free?
I sighed, my breath making fog in the chill. I wasn’t going to jump, even though my wickedness was spreading like a kind of infection. Sammy was sure to find me a third time.
And this time I’d be ready.
Chapter Eight
“Don’t you girls care how your sister is?” Linwood’s voice was disappointed but not surprised.
June and I exchanged looks in the backseat. We were somewhere in Nevada or Oklahoma or the Texas Panhandle or someplace. Who could keep track? She gave me her yarney-yarney-yarney expression.
“Your sister might be joining us soon.”
Stan made that snorting sound that June had perfected. In a way, after constantly being together for almost a month, we were beginning to resemble each other. Or maybe only they were.
“Well, she might…” Linwood trailed off, lamely.
“Great,” June said. “Then she can ruin our new home for us. If we ever get a new home.”
Firm silence from the front seat.
“Florida would be a nice place to live,” Stan suggested conversationally. Out of nowhere, they had come up with the idea of Thanksgiving in Miami. That was exactly their kind of an idea.
“Florida oranges?” June sneered.
Stan and Linwood couldn’t understand that Florida was like Russia for us. The California school system indoctrinated you to resent the citrus crop, the sandy white beaches, and the tourist trade of our chief competitor.
“Where would you girls like to live?” He was trying.
“Vermont,” June said.
“Hawaii,” I said.
“Alaska,” June said.
“Paris,” I said.
“Canada,” June said.
“Paris,” Linwood agreed.
“Rio de Janeiro,” I said.
“The Riviera,” Linwood said.
“In a bank,” said Stan. “The Federal Reserve.”
“Anyplace with horses,” June said. “And cows and goats. A real farm.”