“My baby, my baby,” she murmured, “what were you thinking? What were you thinking?” And then, “Everything’s all right. There we are, everything’s all right now.”
My mother stood in the doorway watching them, drying her hands with a dish towel, and her expression struck me too: it wasn’t forgiving. As if she’d drawn a circle around Bev and Cassie in her mind, and while they stood in the middle of our house, it didn’t mean they belonged there. A look that seemed to say, You aren’t like us. Not entirely.
There was no more swimming at the Saghafis’, after that, because Cassie couldn’t get her arm wet. And for a couple of weeks, we weren’t sure if we’d be allowed back to the shelter. We had long empty days to fill, once Bev dropped Cassie off at my house before nine a.m. My mother wanted us out of her hair so she could work. She came up with a few chores—weeding the garden, sorting the books on the shelves in the TV room alphabetically by author—but she wasn’t really serious about it, and nor were we, not least because Cassie’s right hand—her writing hand—was out of commission. We couldn’t even ride our bikes. We couldn’t play tennis or basketball over at the high school, because for those things too you needed both hands.
“Really goes to show you,” Cassie said, flicking her white-blond hair with the starchy white mitt of her dressed hand, “how hard it is to have only one arm.”
“Do we know many people with only one arm?”
“Wendy’s uncle,” she said, referring to a girl in our class. “Lost it in Iraq. You’ve seen him. He works at the Lowe’s in Haverhill.”
“Then there’s Benny’s grandpa.” Benny was a few years older. “He had polio when he was young. He’s got his hand, but it’s all shriveled up and he can’t do anything with it. He holds it like this.” I mimed the way Benny’s grandpa held his arm against his middle, with the hand hanging down like an empty glove.
“Jesus,” Cassie said. “That won’t be me, will it?”
“Don’t be silly. You heard the doctor. As long as you’re a good patient . . .”
“But I’m the im-patient. I’m so bored. And this is going to go on for weeks.”
“Not weeks.”
“Whatever. Way too long. I don’t want to bake any more chocolate-chip cookies. These are our lives, here. Before you know it, we’ll be back at school, sitting in those horrible classrooms waiting for time to pass all over again. We’ve got to think up something to do.”
SO WE WENT out. My house is in town, or rather, on the way into town, at the south end. Town itself is about four long blocks in one direction, and five in the other, and then there are the two strip malls on Route 29 out to the highway, where Market Basket is, and the Dollar Store and the Fashion Bug, and Friendly’s. There are more than four square blocks to Royston, but the rest of it is winding residential streets, petering out in all directions to forest, except Route 29 in both ways, with its smattering of businesses uninterrupted southward and again right up northward to Newburyport. It’s quicker to get places on the interstate, but that way you miss the old stuff, like the Golden Lotus Palace restaurant, a vermilion temple to 1960s kitsch with a huge gilded gate and black plaster dragons outside, where the food is so spiked with MSG that you come out feeling like you’re on another planet. Or the Lucky Stars motel, which finally went belly-up a few years ago: a couple of panels have fallen off the old neon sign—it looked like something out of The Jetsons when it was whole—and they boarded up the windows to keep homeless people and animals from squatting in the shag-rug rooms. There are these echoes of old Royston along Route 29, how it was before the Boston bourgeois exiles and the artists, and even before the Henkel plant.
Cassie and I went exploring on foot, which meant downtown, mostly. Until we made our way to the quarry and the old asylum. Downtown has a row of great old buildings, redbrick Victorian style, with apartments above the shops. I always wondered who lives in them. Many of the shopfronts don’t last long—Royston is the kind of small town that people escape to from Boston or Portland, bringing their small children and their fantasies, only to find that village life isn’t as simple as they’d expected. They set up a sparkly jewelry shop or a cute café with cows painted on the walls and frilly curtains, and stick it out through a year or even two, through bitter, lean winters when nobody’s on the street; but sooner or later they shut up shop and head back where they came from. There are the long-timers too, the Adamian Pharmacy, and Mahoney’s Irish Pub, and Bell’s Dry Goods, run by crabby Mildred Bell, older than my grandmother and with a wart on her chin like a witch. Bell’s, a crazy, cluttered place, sells, among other things, Christmas sweaters embroidered with reindeers or elves. They protect their never-changing display windows with yellow-tinted cellophane. When I was little, I liked it for the toy section, which includes a line of plastic bins containing stuff I could afford with my pocket money—Japanese erasers and Hello Kitty notepads, glow-in-the-dark Super Balls and hair clips in the shape of plaster hamburgers or cupcakes. Mrs. Bell must have a weakness for stuffed animals too, because they have a big wicker bin filled with the softest ones, not just bears but owls and giraffes and a great selection of pigs in particular. Cassie and I liked to go into Bell’s that August to visit the stuffed animals, and because I felt bad about her hand and her hard time, I sneaked back on my own and bought her the littlest pig, palest pink, that she’d already named Hubert. I hid him for a surprise, but only for a day because when we were back in the shop and she saw he was missing, she wailed.
After Mrs. Bell’s shop, and the Rite Aid where we liked best the aisle of trial-sized items and the nail polishes (although Cassie wasn’t allowed to wear nail polish and I didn’t want to), there weren’t that many places in Royston for kids to go. We ambled over to the kiddie playground out Market Street past the high school, with the rainbow roundabout and the bank of swings, but that summer they were rebuilding the slide and the climbing structure, leaving only stumps, and besides, the other kids in the park were little, under five, accompanied by mothers or grandmas, and it was somehow more depressing than staying home.