And after all this, she was still bugging Billy about Stevie Hennessy, insisting that he would be the most convenient friend in the world, since he lived right across the street.
“I’ve been meaning to call Mrs. Hennessy,” Nora said nearly every day, a threat that hung over Billy like a cloud.
No, not a cloud—Stevie was more like a huge, formless tornado. No matter how invisible Billy made himself, Stevie found him. He found him in the boys’ room, where he threw wet paper towels at him and aimed spitballs right between Billy’s eyes. He assured Billy that his father killed at least one person a day, and that Billy was high on his list. He somehow had the power to make Billy into a monster, even to himself. After Stevie told Marcie Writman that Billy’s parents were divorced, Marcie came over to tell Billy how sorry she was about the tragedy in his family and Billy, who had never even pushed anyone before, had hit her right in the stomach. He had felt terrible then. Marcie was smaller than he was, and a girl, and her mouth had made a strange O shape when he punched her.
Every day was torment because Billy was never certain whether or not Stevie would be waiting for him in the cafeteria. Snotboy, he would call Billy. Orphan, he would shout across the milk line. Turd-face, he’d whisper when they rushed out into the hallway to crouch along the walls for cover during an air-raid drill.
“Don’t call Mrs. Hennessy,” Billy advised his mother whenever she’d suggest it, and he’d wrap his wool blanket more tightly around himself and reach up to twirl his hair.
After school he’d look out his window and watch as Stevie and the other kids on the block played kickball. He’d see them get out their Hula Hoops at twilight. What could he say when his mother told him he needed fresh air? That he was afraid to walk down Hemlock Street by himself? He twirled his hair and told her nothing; he concentrated instead on the biography of Harry Houdini he’d taken out during library period. Houdini was everything Billy wished to be, everything his father, Roger, was not. Tricks meant nothing to Billy, clairvoyance was a burden. But Houdini’s talent was pure and true; he could fight against real boundaries, the physical bonds of ropes and chains, and escape. He could overcome water, fire, and air. He could shine like a lamp lit from within and pass right through the hemp, the metal, the tides.
One afternoon he found some old rope Mr. Olivera had left behind in the garage, and he began practicing slip knots. He’d tie his feet together and then will his ankles to contract so he could wriggle out of the knots. He’d get under his blanket, lash his wrists together, and escape from his own net of ropes. Exhausted then, he’d lie back with a pure feeling inside him, hot as if he’d faced a battle; his eyes would sting, his mouth would be dry, but he’d tie himself up all over again.
Sometimes James would push open Billy’s door and crawl into his room. He’d come over to the bed, then creep under the blanket to watch Billy practice his rope tricks. Billy always closed his eyes when he concentrated, and his neck and face would grow sweaty. While Nora fixed dinner and listened to 45s, Billy and James would lie under the blanket and just look up through the woven wool. It was quiet and dim, and Billy liked having James beside him. Picking up thoughts from James was different from the way it was with other people. Billy didn’t get words; instead he picked up sensations. The scent of warm milk, the smooth brown feathers of an owl in James’s favorite book, the thump of a rubber ball against a wooden floor, the softness of flannel pajamas against his skin, the way a teddy bear felt when you held him tight. No, he would never kick the baby out of his room, because James was also the perfect audience. Whenever Billy escaped from a knot, James solemnly clapped his hands and nodded his head.
“You’re ruining your brother’s birthday,” Nora chided through the door. She figured that would make Billy feel awful, and it did. Even before Roger had left, Billy had felt responsible for the baby; it was the way James followed him around, crawling as fast as he could to catch up.
“It’s about time,” Nora said when Billy finally gave up and came out of his room. She forced herself not to mention the blanket as they went into the kitchen.
“Where’s the cake?” Billy said when he saw the platter of Twinkies.
“This is it,” Nora said. “And don’t you dare let me hear you say one bad word about it.”
She held James up. He puffed out his cheeks and Nora and Billy helped him blow out his birthday candles.
“Twink,” James said, as Nora pulled out the candles, and it took a while for Nora and Billy to realize that the baby had said his first word.
ON THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN, STEVIE HENNESSY started the rumor that Nora was a witch when she showed up after school dressed in black with a basket of apples over her arm. They were green apples, with shiny skins, the last few from a bent old tree that grew near Dead Man’s Hill. Nora had found a recipe for deep-dish apple pie in the October issue of Good Housekeeping, which had expressly recommended fresh-picked apples. On the way to school she and James had stopped at the Hill and collected the apples, even though they looked misshapen, not at all what you’d find at the A&P.
Billy was shuffling down the hall toward the door when he heard Stevie Hennessy yell, “Cheez it. It’s a witch.” The other children screamed and scattered, and when Billy looked up, there was his mother, standing on the path in front of the school, with James right beside her.
Billy went outside and glared at his mother. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“Well, thanks a lot,” Nora said. “Thanks a million. I just thought it would be nice for me to pick you up. Mothers do that sort of thing, you know. It’s part of their job.”
Billy rolled his eyes and walked across the street to the Volkswagen.
“Let me tell you something, buddy,” Nora said when she and James had gotten into the car. “You need an attitude change.”
Billy leaned his head against the window and twirled his hair.
“Are you listening to me?” Nora said. “Or am I talking to myself?”
Out of nowhere came a large stone; it fell out of the sky and landed on the hood of the Volkswagen with a thud.
“What was that?” Nora said.
“Drive home,” Billy said.
Another one hit against the fender.
“Jesus Christ,” Nora said.
Across the street was a group of boys, all with stones in their hands.
“Shit,” Nora said. She swung her car door open.
Billy reached over and grabbed her sleeve. “Don’t go out there,” he said.
Nora pulled away from him and leapt out of the car.
“Mom!” Billy called, but Nora ignored him. She walked into the middle of the street.
“What do you think you’re doing!” she shouted.
The boys in front of the school jeered at her and drew closer together.
“It’s the witch!” one of the boys at the rear called. It was Stevie Hennessy, but Nora didn’t recognize him, she didn’t have time to because another rock came tearing toward her, thrown by a fifth-grader named Warren Cook. The rock missed Nora; it fell at her feet and splintered into pieces. Nora ran across the street faster than anyone’s mother should have been able to, and she grabbed Warren Cook by the collar of his coat. His allies immediately took off, shrieking. Warren turned white as a ghost.
“If you ever do that again,” Nora said, “I’ll put a hex on you. I’ll fix it so that you’ll never be able to pee again. You know what that means?”
Warren opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“That’s right,” Nora said. “You’ll be so filled up with pee, every time you open your mouth to talk you know what will come out. We don’t want that to happen, do we?”
Warren shut his mouth and carefully shook his head.
“Good,” Nora said. “I’m glad we understand each other.”
As soon as she let go of him, Warren Cook ran down the street. Nora went back to her car, started the engine, and threw it into gear. In the passenger seat, Billy was bent o
ver, his head between his knees.
“Sit up straight,” Nora told him. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
Billy had the dry heaves; his shoulders shook and he made a thin retching noise.
“If you’re going to throw up, open the door,” Nora said. “I’ll pull over.”
When they got home neither of them made a move to get out of the car. Nora took out a cigarette and lit it; she stared through the windshield at the house. She had taped a skeleton to the front door; it had long, crinkly arms, made of folded tissue paper. Billy was crying, but Nora didn’t look at him.
“Not everyone is like that,” Nora said.
“Oh, sure,” Billy said.
“They can’t all be like that,” Nora insisted. “You wait and see.”
On Halloween Billy refused to go out trick-or-treating, and although they could hear the whoops of goblins and gypsies, no one came to their door. But later, when the children were asleep and Nora was getting ready for bed, there was a rattling sound. Nora went into the living room and listened; she could hear footsteps in the dark. She looked through the front window. There was nothing out there but the black shapes of the rhododendrons. Still, it was worth checking on. Nora slipped her coat over her nightgown, then took a flashlight and went out onto the front stoop. There wasn’t a sound on the street, not a cat, not the slightest hint of a wind, not one car passing by. Nora moved the beam of the flashlight over the lawn and the driveway. Circles of light fell across the grass and ricocheted off the lamp posts. Nora flashed the beam of light along the Volkswagen and then inside it; the car was still intact, the same crumpled cigarette packs and cookie crumbs littered the floor. But something had happened, someone had been here, there were chalky black footprints along one side of the driveway. When Nora turned back to the house she saw that the word WITCH had been scrawled across the garage door in black letters.
She turned off her flashlight and stood in the dark. She breathed in the cool air and listened to the soft hum of the parkway. Above her were Sirius and the Big Dipper. She was barely making her mortgage each month, and yesterday she had realized, after she’d halved the green apples from Dead Man’s Hill, that she might never be able to make a pie crust from scratch. She could bake almost anything, but she had never had the knack of a good pie crust. It kept crumbling on her; dough stuck to her fingers and to the tabletop. It had been months since a man had kissed her, months since someone had waited for her in bed. But she refused to think about that. Instead she concentrated on the stars. She imagined her exact position in the Milky Way, a black spot, a pinpoint on the edge of the blinding white light. Inside the house, her children were sleeping, each in his very own room, and the cat was curled up on the living-room rug.
Nora went inside and filled a bucket with warm water and Lysol. She unwrapped a package of new sponges and grabbed her rubber gloves off the rim of the sink. It wasn’t so bad after all, it was only charcoal, and it took her less than a half hour to clean the garage door. After that night, Nora loved her house no less and she continued to suggest that Billy invite friends home, but she always picked him up after school, and she made certain to park right behind the school buses, so Billy wouldn’t have to cross the street alone.
It was bad enough to be picked up by his mother, worse because she often dragged him along when she and James went to afternoon Tupperware parties. Not on Hemlock Street. Never on their own block. Everyone Nora had contacted on Hemlock Street had been much too busy, or, like Rickie Shapiro’s mother, hadn’t believed in plastic, or simply didn’t want anything to do with Nora. She’d been lucky enough to sell a few sets of Tupperware to some of the men on the block, a few of whom had come over to help when they’d seen her struggling with the huge cardboard boxes she toted around. Twice, Joe Hennessy had happened to be outside when Nora was unloading a new shipment and, as it turned out, he was a great believer in Tupperware.
Eventually, Nora was sure, she’d be selling Tupperware in every house on Hemlock, but for now the parties she arranged were in other towns, in Valley Stream and Floral Park, in East Meadow and Levittown. The women would always beg to hold James—he was as good as a calling card—and when they were through admiring him, it was Billy’s job to keep him entertained. If you held James’s hand he would walk a bit, and Billy usually took him outside and walked him up and down the sidewalk. They’d look for ants, which James would occasionally eat. They’d tear bark off small trees and pretend they were hunters who needed to start a fire and, if Billy had been clever enough to swipe a pack of matches from his mother’s coat pocket, he would start a small fire, which they’d both stare at until it burned down to ash on the curb.
Sometimes Billy forgot about James. He would walk down the block without him, not remembering his little brother until he reached the house where the Tupperware party was being held. Billy would run back up the street and he’d always find James hysterical, his face snotty and streaked with tears. He’d be trying to follow Billy the best he could, scraping his knees on the cement. Billy always picked him up and carried him back. By the time they reached the house where the party was, James would have stopped crying, but he wouldn’t let go of Billy. He’d grab on to Billy’s neck or, if Billy managed to put him down, his pants leg. So they’d wait for Nora on the stoop, glued together. Billy would think about Harry Houdini then, how he had vowed to be the best, how he practiced night and day, how he never, ever gave away any of his secrets. He’d take the tail end of James’s shirt and wipe the baby’s face so Nora wouldn’t know he’d been crying, then clean the blood from his knees. When Nora came out of the house, her mood completely dictated by how many sets of Tupperware she’d sold, she’d eye the boys suspiciously.
“What’s going on?” she’d say when she saw the teary streaks on James’s face that Billy hadn’t been able to wipe away.
The baby and Billy would both look up at her, and in the yellow fall light they looked like rag dolls.
“Nothing,” Billy would say.
“Well, then,” Nora would say, “let’s get out of here.”
She’d be struggling with her big box of samples so that Billy would have to lift up the baby and carry him out to the car, and James would always reach his arms around Billy’s neck and put his face against Billy’s chest to listen for his heartbeat.
HENNESSY HAD BOUGHT SO MUCH TUPPERWARE that his wife began to complain. Since the least she could do was make good use of it, she took to sending him off with his lunch in Tupperware. Hennessy would find containers of macaroni salad and deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika and he’d instantly lose his appetite. He’d park on side streets along Harvey’s Turnpike and force himself to eat bites of his lunch behind the wheel. Each time he had met Nora in her driveway as she was unloading Tupperware, it had been no accident. Once he had seen her get into her car up at the beauty shop and he’d followed her home. The next time he had looked out his front window, and when he saw her pulling boxes out of her Volkswagen, he’d left the house in such a rush he’d forgotten to shut his front door. Both times he’d been so embarrassed that he wound up buying excessive amounts of Tupperware.
The fact of it was he was casing her house. He knew that her older boy spent most of his time in his room, because his bedroom light was always on and sometimes, at twilight, Hennessy would see a small, pale face at the window. He knew that Nora stayed up late and that she had no weekly wash day, because shirts and blouses and slips would appear on the line in her backyard on no particular schedule. He knew that she left for Armand’s every Saturday at a quarter to nine and was usually back by two thirty. He knew that no man, no husband, or ex-husband, or whatever he was, no boyfriend or father or uncle had visited since she had moved in. He told himself he just happened to be observant; she was a woman alone and it was his duty as a cop and a neighbor to keep an eye on the place. But of course, if that were so, he would have done something when he saw four boys in front of her house on Halloween night, and he’d done nothing at all, even though
he’d recognized his own son. He’d gone to the front window when he had that creepy feeling along the base of his neck, and he’d stood by and watched as the boys ran into the shadows. Long after Stevie had climbed back through his bedroom window and Nora had scrubbed the garage door clean, Hennessy was still watching her house.
He thought about her more often than he imagined possible. He made himself sick thinking about her; it got so that he couldn’t eat anything but old men’s food or his stomach would turn. Cottage cheese and white bread, butterscotch pudding and rice. He was trying desperately not to think about her the first Saturday in November when he ran into Jim Wineman and Sam Romero at the hardware store. They often met here, searching the aisles for lighter fluid and snow chains. Today Hennessy had come for a new saw because Ellen wanted shelves built behind the washer and dryer.
“Putting up the shelves today?” Jim Wineman said.
Hennessy realized that Jim had probably known what he was going to do this weekend before he did. Ellen had told Lynne and Lynne had told Jim, and now here Hennessy was, buying the saw and doing just what they all knew he’d be doing. For a while they stood in the auto-parts aisle, debating what was the best side-view mirror for Sam’s Studebaker, and they all stopped talking when Nora Silk walked past them with a set of screwdrivers. There was a saw, just like the one Hennessy had picked out, under her arm.
“Get a load of that,” Sam Romero said.