The bathtub that the girls soak in is an old claw and ball affair, deep and elongated, able to hold two easily, its feet, the talons of some gargantuan hen clutching glass apples. Muggy water threatens to spill over the sides of the tub. Air so moist the jungle would feel at home in the bathroom of Margaret Bell's farmhouse, so humid the moths and butterflies of the Amazon, the fleshy green creepers and vines that near the equator strangle each other for sunlight, could be comfortable. The window is misted over. The same mist fogs Margaret's glasses. Why doesn't she take them off, Angelique wonders.
Margaret's smile never leaves her face. "I have a secret," she says, lazily picking at a scab on her elbow. Her breasts, large for a twelve year-old, seem to float on the surface of the water. Angelique cups her hands, splashes her face, trying to cool herself, but it isn't possible because the bathwater is so strong and hazy it wants to drink her into it. Six eyes are aimed at her, the glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, and the bombshell breasts. They're in seventh grade, too old to be bathing together.
"If I tell you my secret--will you tell?" Margaret goes on, her grin lopsided now; showing her teeth, slightly buck.
"I promise," Angelique says, hoping her own smile is nothing like Margaret's, too willing, and too wanting. Like a dog begging to be petted. Does she resemble Margaret? Both are brown eyed and have moles. Margaret's mole is huge, hairy, and in the middle of her cheek, while Angelique's is tiny and dots her upper lip like Clara Bow's mole, the silent screen star her mother always brings up when she complains about her birthmark. Angelique wants to be pretty, her lips fuller than Margaret's, her eyes larger and better shaped. Like almonds. But both are farm girls and there is no washing that away.
"But will you tell?" Margaret asks again.
Angelique bites her bottom lip. A secret is the Paramount Theater with its purple velvet curtain and Charm suckers. She keeps biting, concentrating on the feel of her teeth against her lower lip. She wishes she could turn this bathtub into a raft on the sleepy Rio Negro - Amazonas, the current taking her into a deep river channel where catfish with ribbon-like chins nibble warm plankton. Someday Angelique will join an expedition, she will go far away to a place where it hardly matters if her face is plain, but until then she must read and daydream.
"Will you tell my secret?"
"I won't," Angelique says impatiently. The closeness of Margaret's body makes her giddy. Melting cherry bath oil beads spread over the surface of the water, blood-tempting piranhas.
When Margaret pulls the plug from the drain, water begins to rush away.
Angelique sighs with relief, soon the bath will be gone. But Margaret replaces the plug, running more hot water. Water steams from the faucet.
"Are you my friend?" Margaret's glasses are slipping down her nose but she doesn't seem to notice.
"Yes," Angelique says, thinking of the day she was mistaken for Margaret and a pure hate filled her.
Margaret scratches her dimpled nose. "I haven't had my period in four months." She reaches for the pink Dove, gets to her knees. Her belly surfaces in front of Angelique like rising bread, the hair beneath, rainforest, and moss dripping from tall trees. Her eyes study Angelique's face. She has asked her here for this very moment. "I'm pregnant."
"But..." Angelique stammers. Pregnant? Even the word frightens her. Pregnant is the blue veins on the back of her mother's legs, pregnant is the pucker in the middle of her mother's stomach. Angelique is a smart girl, her nose always in a book, but she's never sure when she reads they made love what is truly going on. She's seen dogs in the fields after the balers have been through, the male biting the female's neck, she doubts anyone has done that to Margaret. And the magazines filled with naked girls she found in the hayloft, those girls looked nothing like Margaret; those were the girls with necks the boys would bite.
"Who is the father?" she asks quietly. It is important not to appear shocked. Her own secret is that her periods haven't yet begun.
"Billy Newman."
The same soft hairs that mustache Margaret's upper lip grow around each nipple. Water swirls the hairs. Angelique can't stop staring. Her stomach is queasy.
Billy Newman," Angelique repeats, thinking of the Billy who is on the varsity wrestling team and resembles a timber wolf, blond hair always falling over his forehead like soft straw. He is popular. All the cheerleaders like him. Angelique knows of the junior Billy Newman who lives on the neighboring farm, but doesn't ride the school bus. He drives a red Thunderbird.
Margaret giggles, "We do it in the barn." She keeps his photograph in her top dresser drawer, the one she ripped from the Prairie Hawk's High School yearbook, all tights and muscled thighs, palms on mat. She scissored away the face of the boy pinned under him and replaced it with her own.
"He does this." Margaret pinches her breast. "And this." More giggles. She leans back, dropping her hand with the Dove between her legs, underwater.
Angelique focuses on biting her lip again. The cherry smell of the water sickens her. In her throat a cut opens--so rich and bloody, she can't swallow. "But when?"
There's nothing Margaret wants to talk about besides Billy, and she's sure Angelique is the right one to tell, and now that she has told, she feels happy the way hot water always makes her happy. In the tub it doesn't matter that there's no town for miles, will never be one, that she doesn't have a right to want more than she has, especially since her father has told her to be glad she doesn't have to live the way he did, a ragamuffin, a hungry barefoot boy behind a door.
"We meet in his barn. We have a signal."
"What's the signal?" Angelique asks.
"He shines his flashlight from his bedroom window. We go into the hayloft. He makes me take my shirt off."
"You don't want him to?"
Margaret slouches at her end of the tub, smiling down into the water, like it is the floor at school. "I don't mind," she says shyly. "And he kisses them. He tickles me. We do it on Saturdays after chores. Sometimes on school nights we do it fast in the chicken coop. Then he takes down his pants. I kiss his hot dog." Without clothes you're as pretty as a cheerleader, she imagines Billy saying to her in the dark of the chicken coop. Maybe he has said it, and everything she wishes is the truth.
Angelique squirms. "Does Billy know about the baby?" She feels the secret swell inside her, but wonders if Margaret is lying, and if it is a lie, is it still a secret.
"Maybe, maybe not." At last Margaret pulls the bathtub plug for real. The water drains.
"But what will you do with a baby?"
Margaret shrugs. She climbs from the tub. Angelique follows. The room cools; steam evaporates off Margaret's glasses.
"Does your mother know?"
Another shrug. Margaret sings Wooly Booly as she towels off. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. "Want me to dry your back?" she asks.
Angelique has to hold onto the sink. Her head swims. "I'm too hot." She reels to the window, resting her forehead against the pane. Cold, lovely cold. She imagines the soft head of the baby inside Margaret, its face wolfish like Billy Newman. On the other side of the glass, February stretches out endlessly. Frozen fields, bedraggled corn stalks flapping from barbed wire, sky grey as rags. If Margaret really is pregnant, does that make this late afternoon brighter? What will the coolgirls at school think? Nothing, because Angelique won't tell, no one will know anything until Margaret gets bigger.
Margaret presses the towel to Angelique's shoulder blades. "Are you hungry?"
The Bell family eats at a long wooden table in the huge kitchen that is very much like the kitchen in Angelique's farmhouse, the same high ceilings and drafts, the same gopher traps hanging from a nail. Margaret's mother is less than five feet tall and has bright black eyes. She's much younger than her mom and heaps Angelique's plate with pork chops and sauerkraut. She asks all about Angelique and gives her a whole Coke. Margaret's father eats in his chore boots, says nothing at all, and when he finishes his plate, he pushes his chair away from the table, his face like crop failure. Tom,
Margaret's older brother, wears his red-flapped cap to eat supper in. As hot as the bathroom was is how cold the kitchen is, even with the oven door open and the stove burners lit. Too cold to chew, that's Angelique's excuse as she cuts her pork chop into smaller and smaller bits. Each time she raises her fork she thinks of the pink Dove, Margaret's breasts, the nipples with mustaches. Across the table sits Margaret who eats heartily, then glances at Angelique, her eyes seeming to ask, "Will you tell?" And then adding, "Tell."
Later after the dishes are done, the girls go upstairs to Margaret's room. Before they climb into the four-poster bed, Margaret pulls back her curtains and shows Angelique how well she can see Billy's lit window. Look, right there, the farmhouse just past the stand of shagbark pines. The silvery light shines out like a frozen cow.
Once they are between the icy sheets, Margaret snuggles against Angelique who rolls onto her side. She can feel Margaret breathe on the back of her neck. "Tell, tell," her breath teases. Boys don't make babies in ugly girls with names like Margaret; boys make babies in coolgirls like Julie Hatch and Ruby Zadesky. Even their names are pretty. Angelique listens to Margaret sleep. Already the secret is burning her mouth. It wants to get out. She waits for sleep to come into her, but there are a thousand sounds. Angelique can hear the barn creaking, the cows in it tonguing filthy salt lick, chickens pecking their feeder pans, their beaks rattling the old snow. It is the same at her place, every empty and broken sound louder when the sun goes down.
Angelique's mother comes for her on Sunday afternoon and they ride home over the gravel roads in silence. "You must have had a nice time," her mother says, turning the Rambler into the lane that leads to the house, a quarter mile from the road, "to look so sour."
Monday, Angelique sits by one of the high school girls on the school bus, and to her surprise, the tale of Margaret spills out. It is almost as if the story is telling itself, only needing her mouth and vocal cords. She hears herself say, "And guess who she says the father is?" The girl gasps, "Who?" Then Angelique lowers her voice. "Billy Newman. Can you believe it?" Angelique, the girl who dreams about going on expeditions, is gossiping, saying things her mother would call gutter talk.
When the school bus stops at the Bell farmhouse, only Tom gets on.
"Where's Margaret?" Angelique asks Tom.
"She's sick," he says.
The high school girl nudges her, "Morning sickness."
In first period Social Studies, Angelique sits next to Judy Smoker, one of the coolgirls who wears fawn-colored knee-high boots. She feels heat collect in the center of her forehead as she leans across the aisle. Judy, known to smoke pot and go to Danceland, seems impressed and throws back her head and laughs. "Billy Newman got it on with that ugly Margaret Bell? Get out of here." Judy turns in her seat to the girl who sits behind, "Hey, Hatch, did you hear about Billy Newman?"
On the way home as the bus lurches down Highway 218, stopping at the coal heated hovels where the kids of hired farm hands live, Angelique whispers into Doreen Philipson's, "Guess what?"
Doreen's eyes widen, her mouth opens, and a bead of saliva runs down her chin. "Billy Newman wouldn't touch her with a ten foot pole."
He wouldn't touch Doreen with a ten-foot pole either.
The next day Margaret gets on the school bus wearing her lopsided grin. The grin never comes off, not when she stops at her locker and then walks down the halls that have started to buzz with her name. There is something exciting about a rumor bearing your name. For the first time in her life she catches every pair of eyes. Like a homecoming queen. And there's enough to go around.
The coolgirls stop Angelique, wanting to know if the rumor is true. Billy Newman denies the story. The rest of the week swings back and forth between the glow of being a teller of a secret and the dirty feeling. Angelique can't seem to stop telling the story--the dark chicken coop, the flashlight signal. She hates the story now, can't concentrate on her Algebra. The blackboard drifts with chalk hieroglyphics, the number sets appearing pregnant. The bell rings and Mrs. Voss asks Angelique to stay behind.
"What is this story that's going around about Margaret Bell?" she asks.
Angelique pictures Margaret's silly grin, the hot water trickling from the faucet. "I don't know," she mumbles.
"You've been spreading it all week. So tell me," Mrs. Voss says, crisply. "I insist."
Angelique dreads telling Mrs. Voss the story, as if she herself is the girl who does the dirty things. This will be the last time. Why should it feel so different, so serious telling the story to a grown up? Mrs. Voss takes deep breaths, actually snorts when Angelique comes to the part where the boy takes down his pants and the girl kisses his hot dog. When Angelique finishes she feels that burning in her mouth. Angelique can't meet Mrs. Voss's eyes; instead she gazes out the window where school buses idle, the sun pale as cat piss on their windshields.
Mrs. Voss blushes. "I'm going to have to let Mr. Jennings know about this."
Maybe Mrs. Voss decides not to go to the principal because Margaret keeps coming to school, and doesn't get called to the office.
It's on everyone's lips, the twelve year old and the wrestling star. The coolgirls now nod to Angelique in the hall. She notices a pack of them in rabbit fur jackets and ratted hair hanging out around Margaret's locker. One of them leaves a bologna ring inside it. When Margaret gets on the bus, Angelique stares at her lap. They don't say hello, don't wave, they are complete strangers.
In the days that follow the smile on Margaret's face grows, looks more lopsided, and her glasses still slip down her nose. She feels like a cherry bath oil bead, like she in her hot bath singing to herself, the water cuddling her. Everyone now knows who she is, everyone wants to hear her story, and some want to hear it again and again. The story is always the same, like a sacred text, like her mouth is her hand turning on the hot water, filling the tub, the water overflowing, steaming, and then she picks up the cherry bath oil beads one by one, sucking each, breaking them with her teeth, spitting them into the water. The truth is still many months away and not important. This is her moment. Look at all her new friends.
At home Angelique buries herself in her books about the rainforest. She imagines she lives in a broken off hollow treetop. Here trees have names like goddesses and birds have girls' names. A Tayra scales a Cecropia tree to feed on fleshy fruit. A secret is fleshy fruit. She studies pictures of the King Vulture, its wings extending six feet from tip to tip, the stiff black-edged wings whip the air. The dirty feeling inside her won't go away, feels big like the King Vulture. No matter how much she reads about rubber trees, mahogany, purple velvet, about large leaves growing in the rainforest, so much vegetation that huge leaves are needed to absorb tiny bits of sunlight, the dirty feeling remains. When she sleeps she dreams the King Vulture is in pursuit of her, sailing, wind rushing noisily through his feathers. She hears heavy wing beats, sees his terrifying creamy white and pearl gray plumage, his bare scalp, neck and beak painted orange, yellow, red and black, his piercing silvery eyes. When she wakes she knows Margaret has never been touched, she is a virgin. Just another hick girl from the sticks like Angelique herself, only more desperate.
Thursday isn't her gym day but Angelique has to stop in the locker roombecause she's forgotten her stinky gym suit that needs to go home to be washed. It's after fifth period when she pushes into the locker room where steam hits her face. She hears the showers running. There are girls voices in the steam, a group of coolgirls finished with gym, half in half out of their suits, another group loitering fully dressed. Judy Smoker in her fawn boots lights a cigarette, blows a smoke ring. Everywhere there is giggling like insects, frogs and spiders, each with their own chirps. There is so much steam that all the showers must be running full force on hot. A girl laughs from the steam, "Come on, Bell, show us what he does."
"When you're in the barn and he takes off your shirt," another girl laughs.
"Bell, prove he put a baby in you."
Angelique imagines she is in an awakening jungle, tree frogs and trumpeter birds, hunting black and white jacamars, a kingfisher stalking the undergrowth. She slips through the crowd, opens her locker, and stuffs her gym suit into a paper sack. Termites, anteaters, ocelots, jaguars, never at rest, the constant struggle between prey and predator.
"Keep it down or old lady Sykes will hear us," Judy Smoker warns, blowing another smoke ring.
Paper sack in hand, Angelique slowly pushes through the crowd of girls toward the mouth of the shower room. Five naked girls, the big basketball players, have cornered Margaret, who is also naked except for her glasses, under one of the showers. The five girls have dry hair, but Margaret's hair is dripping wet. One of the girls pulls Margaret out from the shower then shoves her back under the water. Margaret's mouth hangs open, but when her mouth closes, the silly smile is still there.
"We're not letting you go until you show us what Billy does."
Margaret is only able to grin, then slowly raises her hands to cup her breasts. Her glasses have fallen to the edge of her nose and there are water spatters on the lenses.
A stocky girl in a gym suit throws a package of hotdogs into the shower. One of the girls catches it. The package is already open and each of the five girls grabs a hot dog.
The tallest girl jabs Margaret in the stomach. "Does he have a hot dog like this?" She tries to thrust it between Margaret's tightly squeezed knees. The girls howl with laugher. "Take her glasses off. Don't give them back until she shows us."
"Come on, Margaret. Show us. Put it in your mouth. Kiss it."
For a moment the locker room goes silent. All the insects are still.
The girl in pigtails grabs Margaret's glasses. "Want your glasses back, show us."
"Pretend it's Billy Newman's hot dog. Stick it up you."
The hot water must be hurting Margaret by now, pricking her like safety pins. Angelique can see the red marks on either side of Margaret's nose, her nearsighted black eyes frightened. She is cringing, but still grinning.
"Make her kiss it," someone shouts.
The tallest girl and the pigtail girl hold out their hot dogs. "Kiss it, Margaret."
"Kiss it, kiss it," the girls chant. "Kiss it."
Margaret moves forward.
The locker room goes quiet; the hissing water is the only talk. "Margaret, don't," Angelique calls. She starts to say something else, but her knees knock. Her legs feel weak.
Margaret hesitates, looks in Angelique's direction. She recognizes the voice, but she's too nearsighted to see. She grins at the voice. Her grin seems to stick to Angelique's skin. The look says, It's all right. I meant for you to tell. I'm happy.
The locker room ceiling becomes a humid tropical sky. The King Vulture drops from it like a bolt of lightning, rockets down from the topmost branches, a roar of feathers. Wild King Vulture, he keeps his existence secret, guarded by rain forest.
Margaret's lips pucker to kiss, and then her mouth opens. It is the last time Angelique ever sees her.
Rumor has it that Margaret was expelled, that her mother withdrew her from school and sent her away to have the baby, others say she never had a baby, never was pregnant at all. Margaret doesn't get on the school bus again. Angelique hears another rumor, a darker one. This last rumor that bears Margaret's name says she swallowed all the cotton from the tops of twenty aspirin bottles, the aspirins too. Then she drowned herself in the tub. That was where they found her. A moon lily floating in a warm lake far away. The bathtub is where the school bus never comes, better than the chicken coop, the hens with their stone beaks, better than even the dark where the boys are.