Matching
Barbara and Harriet could sit on their stoops and wave to each other, because of the curve of Rutland Close.
Harriet loved the way the eight houses on Rutland Close matched: she thought of the Roses’ house as a right and the Antlers’ house as a left. Both had nearly identical entry halls when you walked in the front door, but what Ruth Rose called her front hall Anita Antler called her “foyay.” The Roses’ sun-porch was to the right of the front hall. The Antlers called the analogous room the music room and kept there an out-of-tune grand piano of which they were terribly proud. The Roses’ piano was in the living room, “where a piano belongs,” according to Harriet’s mother, who disdained the pretension of a music room.
Harriet’s bedroom window faced Barbara Antler’s bedroom window. Harriet could hardly believe that their rooms were the same size, as Barbara’s seemed somehow smaller. When Harriet stood in her own bedroom and looked across into Barbara’s, she could see through the room and out into the hallway, where a few spokes of the third-floor stair banister always seemed to glow like illuminated organ pipes, despite the general gloom of the Antlers’ dark house.
Harriet would arrange the door to her room so that it was a matching degree of openness. If one of the Antlers were to look in her window, the Roses’ organ-pipe banisters would be equally, identically visible. When is a door not a door? Harriet knew: when it’s ajar. The closet doors in these small front bedrooms had mirrors set into them. Harriet thought if she and Barbara both left their closet doors open wide at an exactly equal angle, then there would be an infinity of mirrored rooms mirrored forever. (It never happened. Harriet was always on the lookout, but Barbara, an untidy girl in so many other ways, always kept her closet door completely shut, for fear of monsters.)
The Roses’ house seemed to have more sunlight. It was partly because the Antlers had enormous rhododendron bushes in front of their house, but it was mainly because Mrs. Antler was always reminding Octavia, the housekeeper, to “draw the drapes.” Harriet knew from Gay that common people say drapes and well-bred people say draperies, or better yet, curtains.
Gay Gibson was a woman who had spent her seventy years mastering rules for others to live by, when she wasn’t publishing light and witty verse about her many marriages and divorces. She found Harriet’s reports of the Antlers’ “foy-ay” quite hilarious. “Do they by any chance have those cut-glass crescent-shaped salad plates?” she asked her granddaughter. “I do sincerely hope so. What marvelous people.” Harriet often accepted secret missions from Gay, and finding out if Anita Antler harbored such salad plates was one of many objectives she achieved with distinction. (Mrs. Antler did indeed.)
The Antler household was full of baby gates blocking free movement from one room to the next, and their living room was dark and shrouded in plastic. There were no windows in there because Mrs. Antler’s idea of decorating the room had been to install an entire wall of smoky mirror panels.
The Antlers, it turned out, had moved to New York from Philadelphia because just around the time Mr. Antler’s father had died and the older brother, Murray, was supposed to take over the family glass and mirror business, Murray had gotten into big trouble with the law. (Harriet could never figure out—could never overhear enough—to know what exactly that meant.) Murray Antler was uncooperative, whatever that meant (Harriet wondered if the word had another meaning; she knew that desperate substitute teachers applied the term to the worst children), so he wasn’t going to be around to run the business for a long time. So Albert Antler, who had been forced out of Antler Glass and Mirror in the first place by his unscrupulous brother, had sold his fence company, packed up his family, and come back to New York.
The living-room mirrors had been installed by Antler Glass workmen, who had been anxious to please their new boss. Barbara told Harriet the mirrors were “top of the line.” Harriet envisioned a thick black line on the wall, down where it met the floor, drawn by the two men she had seen delivering the panels.
The Roses’ living-room windows overlooked the Antlers’ driveway and faced the black windows blanked by Anita Antler’s mirror wall. The Roses’ windows were never covered because most of their curtains were so old and limp they had begun to shred. One curtain was in fact half-gone because it could be reached from the sofa, and for years Adam had sat on the sofa and swirled the curtain into a cocoon around his body while he sucked his thumb and caressed the satiny fabric.
Sitting on the top step of the Roses’ stoop, Harriet placed her feet in front of her, two steps down. Her palms on either side, she pressed down on them until she was nearly suspended by her arms. Soon she would have deep prints of the brick patterns in striations all over her hands. If she could run to a fortune-teller fast enough, what would her fortune be?
Barbara followed Harriet’s instructions and sat in the middle of the top step of her stoop. She was supposed to sit on the eleventh brick, but she wasn’t reliable. Harriet ran over to check, then ran back to locate herself precisely on the corresponding spot.
“Don’t move your feet! Don’t turn your head!” Harriet shouted, turning her own head to see if Barbara was doing her bidding. Barbara was younger than Harriet by a few months, and she was not always obedient.
“You moved your head!” Barbara called out.
“You shouldn’t have been able to tell! I had to, to check on you!”
Now Barbara was turning around and talking to someone else. Octavia had opened the Antlers’ front door a crack and was peering out. When she played with the Antler children, Harriet often got the crawly feeling on the back of her neck that she was being watched. Octavia kept too close an eye on things.
“What mischiefy tings are you girls gettin’ up to?” Octavia had an accent because she was “from the islands” (Harriet didn’t understand how a person could be from more than one island), so that even when she was saying mean things, it all came out in a pleasant singsong. Octavia lived in a dark room on the third floor that was strangely cluttered with medicinal-smelling dolls.
“What’s dis den?” Octavia emerged in her gleaming white uniform. She bent over to retrieve a dish towel and an empty mixing bowl that Barbara and Harriet had been using earlier in a failed experiment with caterpillars. “Where’s my switch?” Octavia hummed melodically. “I’m going to start a switching, oh, yes, I am,” she sang as she shook out the dish towel.
Octavia kept a switch in the corner of the kitchen, and the two older Antler girls got regular switchings on the backs of their legs. Rachel, the baby, was still too young to be punished this way, but Octavia had recently begun to smack her fat little hands when she made a mess with food on her high-chair tray. But Barbara waved a hand to Harriet to signal that this was only an interruption, not a serious threat to their activity, and after another moment Octavia went back inside, banging the door shut behind her.
Uppity, that was the word Carrie used for Octavia. Carrie would never say Octavia’s name. Harriet rather liked the musical quality of the name, and she knew from Barbara that Octavia was so called because she was the eighth born in a family of nine girls. Carrie spoke of her as That One and had told Harriet several times that island people were a little crazy and believed in crazy things, thought themselves better than anyone else, and were not to be trusted.
Harriet had now noticed that Barbara was wearing sandals, which spoiled everything anyway. Harriet told her to go change into her red sneakers and white socks that were like the ones Harriet was wearing. While Barbara changed, Harriet got up and measured the width of the Antlers’ stoop again. Four and a half stick lengths. Harriet measured her own stoop. It was exactly the same. Barbara came out wearing her sneakers. They were the wrong kind. Mrs. Antler bought shoes for her children without them, on sale at places where the shoes were tied together and dumped into bins and you had to rummage to find the right size, and how did you even know your right size?
Before Adam died, whenever Harriet got new shoes, it took the whole afternoon. Adam took a long time to fit because he was afraid of the music that was always playing in the shoe store. One salesman got to know the Roses and would turn off the music when he saw them coming.
In the shoe store, Adam would only sit in the fourth seat, and if someone was already sitting there, he would begin a high-pitched sound of anguish, like a noon whistle, which was generally quite effective in getting most people to move right away. Then, with the music off and the fourth seat his, Adam would only try on shoes that didn’t have any red on them. Sometimes, while the negotiations for the fourth seat and no music were under way, Harriet would scout ahead for shoes without any red in or on them, or on the box either. By the time Adam had shoes that fit him, everyone was exhausted. Then it was Harriet’s turn. She usually got the first pair of shoes that fit, no matter what.
She had gone to the shoe store with her mother several times since Adam died. The first time, two older salesmen had stared at them, and Harriet had the feeling they were talking about her and her mother when they stood murmuring, hunched over invoices behind the counter. A new salesman who hadn’t been in the store when they used to come in with Adam fitted Harriet now, and the odd calmness of those afternoons left her with the feeling that she had forgotten something, or had left an important possession behind somewhere. Every time, Harriet had picked red sneakers.
All of her shoes had a picture of a boy and a dog inside, and you could put your foot in, too. She suspected that Barbara’s shoes probably had no arch supports, whatever those were. Harriet’s red sneakers were solid and thick. Barbara’s were pointy, and the white rubber edge around the sole was already coming apart. What could Harriet do?
Harriet and Barbara sat on their stoops. From a distance of, say, the lamppost in the grassy patch in the middle of Rutland Close, you wouldn’t have noticed the difference in their sneakers. They sat very still in their identicalness. Two little girls of seven with dark hair and bangs. Striped T-shirts and red shorts. White socks, red sneakers. Matching houses. If only there could have been six more little girls. They held still, as if for a time exposure. Then a cloud passing changed the light and they were both suddenly bored, ready to do something else. Bikes.
Harriet’s mother drove into the Close, hunched behind the wheel of the Roses’ old pale blue Volkswagen. She drove in a panicky slow motion that made some pedestrians back up and look around for high ground. She rounded the Close at this out-of-control snail’s pace, and with much clashing of gears, she parked.
Harriet signaled to Barbara that she was going to get her bicycle out of the garage and silently Indian-walked up the driveway, backward. Barbara skipped away toward the Antlers’ garage. Harriet’s mother was taking grocery bags out of the front seat, where she had lashed them in place with the seat belt.
Harriet rolled her bicycle down the driveway. It was green, a Huffy with a banana seat, thick tires, and foot brakes. Harriet worried that it was too much like a boy’s bicycle, but she was proud of it. Standing with her left foot on the left pedal, she pushed off with her right foot, coasted for a moment, bumped down the driveway ramp into the street, and then mounted the bicycle, swinging her right leg over the seat. If cowboys rode bicycles, this is how they would get on.
Barbara coasted down her driveway on her old Raleigh and bumped down into Rutland Close. They rode around the circle abreast, standing up on the pedals to pump as fast as possible. As they passed the Roses’ house for the second time, Harriet’s mother called out, “Harriet—please help me with these groceries before you go off.”
Harriet and Barbara rode once more around the circle, coasting without pedaling, and then Harriet steered back up her driveway ramp and hopped off the still-moving bike and parked it on its kickstand in a practiced motion.
Barbara would ride around the circle until Harriet came outside again. Sometimes, when she was alone, Harriet would ride around the circle fifty times, counting, before shooting out onto Middlemay Avenue, wound up in a knot like the double-twisted rubber-band motors of those balsa-wood airplanes. (Slide wing forward to loop-the-loop. Slide wing back for longer flights.)
Harriet lugged two brown paper bags full of cans into the kitchen and knelt down to stack them into the cabinets she called the round-and-rounds. They were revolving cupboards built into the corners of the kitchen. What fell off in back, nobody knew. There were mice.
Most of the cans were cat food. Harriet stacked them right side up, which nobody else ever bothered to do. She organized them by flavor. If she had had to, Harriet could have eaten some of the flavors, like Savory Stew. Just not the fishy ones.
“I’m going now, okay?” Harriet called up the stairs. She didn’t know what to call her mother anymore. She couldn’t say Mommy. The word just wouldn’t come out, hadn’t crossed Harriet’s lips since Adam died. Harriet could still remember being in her crib, and she could remember how quickly Ruth used to come when Harriet called out “Mommy” from her crib in the middle of the night, but it was different now, and that was a million years ago. Adam always called their mother Mommy, and Harriet was afraid to remind her mother of him. She wasn’t sure that her mother heard her just now, but it didn’t really matter.
Harriet helped herself to a drink of water from the kitchen faucet out of her cupped hands. She wiped her hands on her shorts and skipped back outside. On the sidewalk, Barbara was sitting on her bicycle, rolling back and forth over the same spot at the foot of the Roses’ brick walk.
Barbara’s rusted black English racer was too big for her. The chain was loose, and the rear tire rubbed against a bent fender and made a noise. It had belonged to her older cousin Flora, who was slightly retarded and, in the words of Ruth Rose, “overdeveloped.” At eleven, Flora had body odor, and mature breasts. She was still interested in dolls. Harriet thought that Barbara’s having Flora in her family sort of lined up with Adam’s being in the Rose family. Since Adam’s death, Harriet had been waiting for Flora to die, too.
When Adam was alive, both girls were still riding smaller bicycles with training wheels. They had called him the Lollobobby Monster (so named because of Lollipop-brand flowered underpants, the wearing of which made one immune to the Lollobobby Monster) and always rode the hell away, away from the Monster, who would make a feeble attempt to catch on to the fenders of their bikes as they flashed by, too swift, too fleet. He could never catch them. Barbara thought it was a game.
Today they rode around the Close once, twice, faster, and faster, and then out and down the block, across on Greenway North and over to the long blocks of Linden Terrace, where azaleas bloomed in every yard. People came from miles around to see the azaleas of Linden Terrace.
Harriet and Barbara reconnoitered at a corner mailbox. Harriet could hear Barbara behind her because of the squeak-squeak of the rear fender rubbing. They rode to the alley that dipped down steeply from both ends. You could pick up so much momentum if you pedaled hard on the way down one side that it would carry you right up the other side all the way to the top.
“Today we’ll do something different,” Harriet announced to Barbara. “Instead of going one at a time, we’ll both start at the same time from opposite ends. That way, we’ll pass in the exact middle at the bottom.”
“Cool,” agreed Barbara.
Harriet angled her bicycle down toward the bottom of the drop and pushed off. She pedaled furiously, leveled out at the bottom, and coasted up to the top. She rode her bicycle out into the street in a tight circle and returned to the alley entrance. She stopped her bicycle at the top of the drop and stood facing Barbara, who was waiting at the other end of the alley.
“Now!”
But Harriet’s bicycle was faster, and her side was a little bit steeper. She passed Barbara when Barbara was still coming down and Harriet was going up the other side. Harriet had been wrong about how this would work: the two sides of the alley weren’t the same at all.